Ottoman History Podcast - Scholarly Salons in 16th-Century Damascus

Episode Date: March 27, 2022

with Helen Pfeifer hosted by Maryam Patton | In 1517, the Ottomans captured Cairo and with it, the Arabophone lands of the Mamluk Sultanate. Suddenly, scores of learned scholars who had been preparing and vying for positions of esteem in either the academy or the bureaucracy found themselves under new authority. How did these scholars navigate the new political and linguistic environments? As Helen Pfeifer argues in a new book, Empire of Salons: Conquest and Community in Early Modern Ottoman Lands, the answer lies in gentlemanly salons, where elite men displayed their knowledge and status. These social laboratories played a key role in negotiating Syria and Egypt’s integration into the empire. Through Pfeifer's study of the life and network of the star scholar Badr al-Din al-Ghazzi, we learn how urban elite of former Mamluk Syria and Egypt continued to exert social and political influence, rivaling powerful officials from Istanbul. The gentlemanly salons also illustrate how Ottoman culture was forged collaboratively by Arabophone and Turcophone actors. « Click for More »

In 1517, the Ottomans captured Cairo and with it the Arabophone lands of the Mamluk Sultanate. Suddenly, scores of learned scholars who had been preparing and vying for positions of esteem in either the academy or the bureaucracy found themselves under new authority. How did these scholars navigate the new political and linguistic environments? The answer, as Helen Pfeiffer argues in her new book, lies in gentlemanly salons where elite men displayed their knowledge and status. These social laboratories played a key role in negotiating Syria and Egypt's integration into the empire. By focusing on the life and network

of the star scholar, Bedrettin el-Ghazi, we learned that Arab elites could be more influential in their competition with powerful officials from Istanbul. The gentlemanly salons illustrate how Ottoman culture was forged collaboratively by Arab and Turkophone actors. actors. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Marian Patton and today I'm here with Dr. Helen Pfeiffer who is the University Associate Professor in Early Ottoman History at the University of Cambridge. Her research focuses on empire, the circulation of culture, and the management of human diversity in the early modern period. And today we'll be speaking

about her new book, Empire of Salons, Conquest and Community in Early Modern Ottoman Lands. Thank you for joining us on the podcast. Well, thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. I'm a huge fan. I thought we might just start with the salons in general, just to set the stage before we sort of dig deeper into the characters that populate your book. But I thought we would just start off with the salons themselves. For our listeners, could you just give them an introduction to what you mean by the salons, why you call them salons, since our listeners may know about the sort of more popular, more better known French salons of the early modern period? What kind of spaces were these

salons? So the whole book is really an effort to define Ottoman salons. And so each chapter takes a sort of different perspective on Ottoman salons in turn. But to give a sort of more compact definition of Ottoman salons, and the definition I give in the book is that salons were elite gatherings held for the purposes of enlightened conversation and structured by the relations between host and guest. So those are the sort of three key characteristics that I isolate in the book. And maybe I can just take those in turn and explain them here. So first of all, they were elite. So, you know, it's obvious probably that men and women of all different social classes held gatherings and met one another for the purpose of conversation and for entertainment

in the 16th century. But what I try and argue is that the salon was this sort of mode for elite, and I would add Muslim men in the 16th century, and that it became a sort of key space in which to perform that elite male status. So all aspects of the salon were really linked to this kind of the wealth of these men to their good taste, right? So the settings in which they were held men often really invested a lot of time and energy in sort of designing reception halls or pavilions in which to receive other men and to show off their sort of their wealth and their sort of aesthetic sense. So that's the first aspect. The second is enlightened

conversation. And conversation really was the key goal, the main purpose of these kinds of gatherings. And this was not just sort of the conversation that people strove for was not just idle chit-chat or sort of casual conversation. Conversation really was conceptualized by contemporaries as an art form, as something that had to be cultivated, that had to be honed, and that was a sort of product in and of itself to be enjoyed and to be valued. So this kind of conversation, it represented the sort of confluence of adab and ilm, right? So of literary and scholarly knowledge. So on the one hand, people needed to master poetry in all of its different forms. They often memorized thousands and thousands of poems to sort of deploy at the right moment in conversation.

They memorized historical anecdotes. They memorized riddles and tried to solve riddles, right? So all of this kind of literary knowledge, but also a kind of literary knowledge that was rolled out in an instant and that lived on a sort of spontaneity, wit, and ability to extemporize. So that's the sort of literary knowledge on the one hand, but also scholarly knowledge was often hugely important. So people spent evenings discussing Quranic commentary, you know, at a sort of candlelight, you know, gathering of men on a balmy summer evening. It's entirely possible that they would have discussed Quranic commentary or, you know, other disciplines within the Islamic sciences. really highly, highly demanding. And again, I think this is sort of connected with this aspect of needing to be elite. You know, you obviously had to be very, very well educated in order to

participate in these kinds of gatherings. So the last characteristic of salons, as I define them, is hospitality. So this relationship between host and guest. And I think when we hear the word salon, and in the French context, the salon really is associated with, of course, the domestic context. And, you know, as I've already suggested, the domestic sphere is really one of the main sort of cradles for this kind of sociability. But at the same time, in the Ottoman context, we find that these gatherings are held in a variety of highly public, highly visible spaces. But despite this visibility, and despite the fact that it was publicly accessible, these gatherings were still enormously exclusive. So again, as a result of the forms of conversation, as a result of the way that men were dressed, you know, it was unthinkable,

I think. It was unthinkable that any old bloke would have sort of, you know, sauntered in and settled down next to these elite men. So they still remained exclusive and they still remain sort of by invite only, right? One advantage to you calling them salons and kind of giving an umbrella label to encapsulate all these sometimes varied settings, you know, either in the mosque or in someone's home or in like a formal, like a terrike or an actual building were quite unstructured in the sense that they weren't located in any specific setting all the time, right?

So by calling them salon, you can kind of group all these disparate elements together. And one of your arguments is precisely that the space wasn't so important as it was the social relationships within them, right? It was a space for negotiating sociability, but the space itself maybe wasn't as critical to the institution of salon in general? Would that be a fair way of interpreting sort of the emphasis less on space and more on the people in the salons? Yeah, I mean, I think in some ways you're right, right? And the sort of features that I isolate or use to characterize the salon are for the the most part, features that characterize a particular type of sociability, right?

But I would say, actually, that the space, I think, is incredibly important, even though these features are found in conversations held in many different spaces. One of the key, I think, arguments of the book really is that that space actually does matter. And that that sort of spatial configurations are one of the things that animates these gatherings, and that gives them a certain sort of character. So one example that I can give is that, you know, these gatherings often take place in a sort of circular formation, right? Whether they're held in a reception hall, in a domestic space, or in a pavilion, or on a mosque floor, right?

They often bring men together in a sort of circular formation, right? And a circular formation, on first impact, it sort of seems like it generates parity among the various different participants. But in fact, once you start reading about the ways in which people discuss these gatherings, in fact, we can see that the circle is in many ways a sort of physical mapping of status and hierarchy onto physical space, right? And in some ways, that is what makes, you know, these gatherings so fraught. I don't know, maybe we'll have time to talk about the Salon of Hassan Bey, which is one of my favorite anecdotes of the book, where there's a sort of

dispute over a seating arrangement. And in fact, I've came across, you know, dozens of accounts of disputes over who sat where and, you know, who sat above who and what, you know, how dare he claim this kind of seat. And I think that really follows from the sort of physical conditions in which these gatherings take place. So I really would say that the sort of spatial constraints are very important. Okay. Now that makes sense now that you think about the physical location of bodies in the space being sort of the important aspect to pay attention to. You mentioned this Hassan Bey debate. What was that about? So Hassan Bey was a chief judge of Damascus. And he does what actually many chief judges did when they first arrived.

He holds a reception, and he invites Badr al-Din al-Razi, because they're very good friends. So Razi agrees. He accepts the invitation, despite the fact that formally he is, by that time, has gone into retreat. So he has actually retreated formally from the world of social gatherings. And it's sort of spending time in seclusion. So anyway, he agrees just this once. And so he shows up. And of course, Hassan Bey is delighted by the appearance of such an esteemed figure. And he sort of springs up and walks all the way to the fountain in the middle of the room

and, you know, and sort of in a very public way that is visible to all the other assembled men, greets Ghazi and then takes him over to be seated to his immediate right. And the position to the right of the host was, I think, universally accepted as the seat of honor. A little bit later, Ala ad-Din al-Shafi arrives. And Ala ad-Din is a very respected scholar himself. He's also a host of salons. And he and Razi go way back. And to believe Razi, this is Razi's account, I don't have Ala ad-Din's account, but to believe Razi, they broke when, in a class lesson of Razi's, Aladin suddenly started laughing hysterically and uncontrollably. And Razi, understandably, told him to stop laughing. And Aladin was so

offended and ashamed that he got up and left and never returned to Razi's class again. And since then, the two men had sort of been feuding. So what does he do? So Aladin arrives and oh my gosh, he sees Razi right next to Hassan Bey. So rather than to go sit down next to Razi, which is apparently what was sort of universally expected at this gathering, he doesn't. He goes up so the men are assembled on this sort of raised platform, and he just sits on the edge of the platform. He doesn't even take off his shoes, and he just sort of plants himself down. So Hassan Bey watches this scene, and, you know, as the host,

he sort of has to do something, right, because this is a slight of one of his guests and not just any guests. And so he calls over to Aladdin, oh, hey, Aladdin, you know, why aren't you sitting next to Razi or literally under Razi, right? Why aren't you sitting next to Razi? Razi is older than you and more learned. So this was, this was a huge, huge blow in front of the assembled company and to make matters worse ala ad-din doesn't manage to respond for whatever reason and it's actually razi who chimes in and he says oh dear hasan bey you know that's that those are our sons for you some of them are obedient and others are disobedient right so in, you know, what you could say, quite condescending sort of response. So Alaa ad-Din is, you know, horrified at this turn of events, and he does

what apparently he does, he does best. He gets up and walks out. And the sort of assembled company is aghast at this turn of events. That's the story. When we come across these kinds of stories, it's easy to say, oh, gosh, look how petty, you know, look how petty the concerns of these scholars are. But the argument that I try and make in the chapter is that, you know, this isn't petty at all, that the stakes were, in fact, incredibly high. And that contemporaries, I mean, as I've suggested before, contemporaries saw seating arrangements as expressions of social hierarchy. And don't forget, there are spectators to these salons, right? There are servants there watching. There are often women watching from off the wings, right? There are the greatest and most powerful men of a particular community.

Being seated in a position subordinate to someone else really had great consequence and had sort of could have potentially tangible results. What went into what you called enlightened conversation in the salons? Like what were the nitty gritty things that they discussed in a typical setting? So what are the sort of foundations or the pillars of enlightened conversation? One of the basic claims of the book is that that salon conversation was incredibly demanding and arduous. So, you know, previous scholars on which I, you know, relied and whose work I respect immensely have sort of portrayed the salon often as a space of entertainment. And certainly it was a space of entertainment, right, before television and radio, right?

People sat around talking and certainly there was dance sometimes, there was music sometimes. But conversation was really at the heart of the salon. That was ultimately the purpose of the salon. And people took this conversation incredibly seriously. They trained for it for years. They read books that would help them to, you know, to gather the anecdotes that they would then deploy within conversation. They memorized thousands of poems. You know, they really, I think, put us to shame. You know, I don't even know my husband's phone number anymore, right? And people would, you know, would memorize thousands and thousands of poems in order to deploy at just the right moment to sort of give a particular conversation an edge or to challenge someone else or to make someone else a compliment,

right? So contemporaries really conceptualize the salon conversation as a sort of art and, you know, one might even say as a sort of craft sort of craft to be honed and to be cultivated. And I think that this fact has incredible, very important consequences for the relationship between Turkish speakers and Arabic speakers in the wake of the 1516-17 conquest. And what it basically means is that when Rumis, right, so elite, let's say, Turkish speakers from Anatolia, when they travel to, you know, the Arab world and partake in these kinds of gatherings with elite educated Arabs, of gatherings with elite educated Arabs, it's a real challenge for them. And it sort of doesn't suffice. I mean, these men are incredibly educated, right? They all have wonderful, or many of them, let's say the ones that Ghazi has contact with, have, you know, great madrasa

educations. They are steeped in learning. They are steeped in Arabic, right? They have gone through extensive linguistic training. Many of them write in Arabic. But that is not enough in order to excel within the salon. And I think that is really what sort of defines the experience of partaking in Arabic language salons for many of these roomies and makes it in some cases so fraught that, you know, it doesn't suffice to actually know this sort of learned tradition, but you have to also speak incredibly eloquently and articulately, right? You have to speak beautifully, and you have to master this poetic and literary tradition, which, you know, Rumi's, I think, leading up to the conquest, and even in many of the decades after the conquest, showed less interest in this sort

of Arabic language poetic tradition than they did in, let's say, a Persian tradition or in a Turkish language tradition. And so when they entered those gatherings and maybe, you know, had difficulty articulating themselves in sort of a fluent, beautiful Arabic or didn't have a sort of, you know, wealth of Arabic poems from which to draw, they sort of, you know, look, I think, less educated and less authoritative than they might wish to look. And then I think in many ways, they deserve to look. So the fact that Salon Conversation was so demanding, really has real consequences for this relationship between Arabs and Rumi's in the wake of the conquest. So, you know, one of the larger ideas of the book is that the sort of context in which

encounters take place really matters, right? That the encounter between these two groups, learned Arabic speakers and Turkish speakers, looks very different within the salon context because of these, you know, because of the sort of expectations associated with this particular space than they might have looked in other contexts. That was a perfect segue into sort of the next direction I want to take the conversation. So the political context, because your book isn't just about learned conversation and poetic debates in the salon there's also a bigger story about empire and and the autumn empire particular post 1517 and autumn conquest of arab lands so i have two questions the first one being sort of related to your previous point just about how rigorous these settings were and how, you know, how it didn't

really, it sounds like it wasn't enough to just have a good methrist education. Like, what steps did the people who did very well in these salons, maybe one of the figures from your book, how did they get to that stage? What steps did they have to take? How did they, you know, who did they have to be in touch with or know, you know, a friend of a friend, things like that, to get to that status in the salons. So the best way to, of course, learn the rules of the salon and how to excel in the salon was to partake in one. And, you know, one of the things that surprised me was that, you know, for the most part, these are gatherings of sort of mature men in the prime of their lives, These are gatherings of sort of mature men in the prime of their lives.

But in sort of fragments here and there, and especially in Ottoman paintings of these kinds of gatherings, we often find that there are sort of junior members of the Salon who appear in paintings or who are occasionally mentioned in the written texts as well. And in fact, Ghazi's father, Radiy ad-Din, went out of his way to take his son with him to many of his meetings with his fellow learned men, precisely so that the young Badr ad-Din would sort of, you know, already begin to make some of these connections, right? Already begin to meet some of the important men of their era. But also that he would begin to learn, I think, what the rules of the salon were and how to sort of excel within them. Salon were and how to sort of excel within them. That being said, you know, there are plenty of, and I think, you know, if I could do the project over again, I think I would spend more time looking at the kinds of literature that in part, I think, aimed to help to prepare men for these kinds of contexts, right? So literary anthologies,

I think even, you know, the biographical dictionaries, the Tezkires, right, that we know from the Ottoman Turkish context, in many ways, those were also, and those kinds of works were also, you know, incredibly useful in preparing people for the salon. Why? Because it furnished interesting, funny, surprising anecdotes about leading figures and poetry, right? about leading figures and, and poetry, right. Um, uh, which, which are two of the sort of pillars of, of salon conversation. So you could read a book about sort of salon etiquette or, or, or furnishing these kinds of anecdotes for the salon. But of course, you know, the very best way to prepare was, was actually to, to participate in, in, in salons. So you mentioned Batrutin Al-Ghazi, who's the locus of your book, around whom many other figures are connected in various ways. And you mentioned how he was brought to these salons as a child. Let's spend the rest of the conversation talking about the sort of big picture political story

that's part of your book about basically changes in the Ottoman Empire and structures. And, you know, it's connected to shifts in the bureaucracy and the backgrounds of the scholars employed in the bureaucracy. Let's do that by sort of diving into to Béthelé Ténégazy. Who was he? What led you to choose him as the sort of central focus? And what were the changes over his life that he witnessed during this, you know, pivotal moment in autumn history when they capture the Arab peninsula and sort of the heartland of Arab lands and Islam and suddenly have authority over a much greater space with a, you know, related but different culture, right? The Arab and the Rumi culture were, you know, connected before, but not as perhaps closely as they were now. So who was who was Badr al-Din al-Razi? Well, he was

one of the foremost intellectuals of his era. And I think he hasn't really gotten, you know, the attention that he is due. He was, you know, an incredibly revered figure in Damascus, which was his home. But he was also well known, you know, across greater Syria, in Egypt, and in the Ottoman capital as well in Anatolia, where to this day, there are more than 20 copies of his works stored in various different libraries. So just briefly, who was he? Well, first and foremost, he was a mufti.

That was his sort of day job or one of his day jobs. He was a very respected mufti in the city of Damascus, so much so actually that one of his contemporaries and former students said that he couldn't possibly issue any legal, any judicial verdicts while Ghazi was alive, because, you know, nobody could match him in erudition and knowledge. Of course, Ghazi insisted that he would, and so he does, in fact, begin to issue fatwas as well. So he's a mufti. He's a teacher. He trains really generations and generations of students. And of course, he is a revered scholar. He writes more than 100 works over the course of his lifetime. Many of them are in the area of fiqh,

so of jurisprudence. But his other sort of area of expertise was tafsir, so Quranic exegesis. And the fact, you know, the fact that he was such an important intellectual was obviously, you know, one of the reasons why I studied him, both because I think that he, you know, should get his due, but also because that meant that, of course, I had a huge range of sources available on Razi. So I both, you know, I use his own writings, and some of them are sort of autobiographical. So he writes a travel account describing his trip from Damascus to Istanbul in 1534. I use the biographies of many of his students who profiled their teacher.

And I use the work of his actually better known son today, Najm al-Din al-Ghazi, who is well known for a sort of huge biographical dictionary, a Kawakadetsa'ira that he wrote in the 17th century. So, you know, these sources allow me, I think, to assemble a sort of clearer picture of Razi the man and the intellectual. Of course, the downside of the sources is that most of them are hugely partial to Razi, right? You know, they're his students, they're his son. His son sort of borders on the hagiographical often in his accounts of his father. And, you know, and in some ways, I think that's what the book offers. And that's what the book wants to be. It really is an attempt to understand the conquest

from the Arab perspective, rather than from the perspective of the Ottoman center. So I try and make the most of the sources available to give that kind of perspective. Why did I put him at the center? Well, I should say, I mean, that I really came across him by coincidence or by the intellectual generosity of a colleague. So when I, you know, this is the book of my dissertation and my dissertation proposal stated that I wanted to look at the cultural, intellectual, social consequences of the Arab conquest of the Ottoman conquest of Arab lands through the lens of the Salon. But I didn't have a sort of central figure when I when I started out. So I began my research in Istanbul at the German Orient Institute.

And Jens Peter Laut, who was on the advisory board of the Orient Institute at the time, passed through my office. And I told him what I was interested in. He said, you know, oh, do you know Badr al-Din al-Razi? You know, Ralf Elger has just written a book about him. And he wrote a travel account of his voyage from Damascus to Istanbul in the 1530s. And so I looked into this travel account. And I found that, you know, not only was it a fantastic source for looking at the relationship between Arabic speakers and Turkish speakers in the sort of zero hour of the conquest, but it also just so happened that it was all about Salon. So it was essentially, you know, he does, Ghazi does describe, you know, the sort of the arduers

of the journey, etc. But he really is mostly interested in his sort of face to face encounters with various people he met along the way, and especially of those people he met in the Ottoman capital. So I obviously felt hugely vindicated. And I thought, this is, you know, this is my man. And the more that I learned about him, the more, you know, I felt he was really a person who warranted more attention in this context. And, you know, one of the things that I think is really worth stressing is that Ghazi was 16 when the Ottoman conquest occurred. And, you know, I think, I mean, his father had sort of done everything in his power to prepare Ghazi for his career, for a successful life in the Mamluk Empire, right? So he took him to Cairo. He introduced him to, you know, his colleagues there.

He had him study with the best, you know, Egyptian scholars of the time. And just about, you know, just as Razi and his father were returning from Cairo when Razi was 16. Razi began to take students. He began to issue fatwas. He began to compose poetry, right? So he was just starting out on his career. And then, you know, the conquest occurred.

And it's worth stressing just how distressing this must have been for the young Ghazi and how much flexibility and ingenuity this required to ensure that he could sort of flourish under the new order. I mean, the best comparison that I can think of is, you know, people who were teenagers, let's say, or young adults, when the wall fell, right, in the GDR, who suddenly found themselves in a whole new sort of political, social, you know, and intellectual, I think, also situation. So, you know, this alone, I think, is fascinating. And I wanted to understand, well, how is it that Razi, you know, triumphed? How is it that despite, you know, this kind of obstacle that he encountered early on in life, how did he become such a leading intellectual and such an important figure in

Damascus and across the Ottoman Empire? And I think, you know, this really has everything to do with his father who paved the way for him, and with Ghazi himself. And, you know, it has everything to do with the Salon. I mean, that, it has everything to do with the salon. I mean, that's really one of the arguments of the book, that the salon is a sort of key space, precisely because it's informal, because there's no sort of agenda. Because it's an informal space, it meant that, you know, in the first decades after the conquest, Arabic speakers and Turkish speakers were able to come together and to sort of slowly start to get to know each other and to build relationships and to build trust in one another. And that is what Radiy ad-Din, you know, Ghazi's father does immediately after the conquest. He sort of invites everybody, you know, who passes through, all of the Ottomans who pass through Damascus, he invites them into his home. And he begins to build up good relationships with him.

He drafts poetry for them, right? And what's interesting, when he dies in 1529, Ghazi finds himself out of a job. So what does he do? He goes to the Ottoman capital, like generations of Arab scholars would do after him. He goes to the Ottoman capital in hopes of sort of, you know, getting an appointment. And what does he do when he gets there? Well, he meets with all of the men that his father had already started to establish relationships with, in some cases, decades earlier.

And what's really interesting is these people remember him, you know, they remember him and in part, they feel an obligation towards him. And so what Ghazi does, and this is what he describes in the travel account, you know, he basically meets one after the other, he meets all of the members of the Imperial Divan who eventually, you know, make the decision about appointments, right? So he meets the Kadioska of Rumeli, of Anatolia. He meets various different viziers. And the work he does in those meetings, right? You know, in this period, you don't go to an unemployment office and fill out a form and hope someone, you know, looks at your CV and calls you back, right? So what does he do in these meetings? He's sort of, you know, he's discussing literature.

He's making poetic quips. He's, you know, interpreting the Quran. And in so doing, I think in part, he's showing that he is a serious intellectual. But he's also allowing these men to get to know him. And I think to feel that, yes, this is somebody who is deserving of a position, and this is somebody who we can sort of support. So that's the sort of story that Ghazi, I think, allows me to tell. And that reflects the experience of many, many other Arabs, who didn't unfortunately leave

behind travel accounts, who I think engage in a similar sort of practice. But the third, I think, as I saw it, the third question that you posed was this question of sort of the long arc of the book and the sort of the narrative that I sort of develop over the course of the book and the changes that Razi himself saw. I think when we think of the role of Arabs in the Ottoman Empire, for the most part, I think it's easy to read the secondary literature and to come out with the idea or the sense that Arabs really only begin to play a sort of central role in the political and the cultural and the social life of the Ottoman Empire in the late 17th century and the 18th century, when, you know, famously, the Ottoman center begins to weaken and leaving room for, let's say, leaving more room for local autonomy

and participation on the part of, you know, many different provinces, but especially the Arab provinces. And so, you know, I think my book tries in some ways to revisit that or to just actually look seriously at this early period, which I think is often skipped over, right? Because the histories of the 17th and 18th century often push forward to sort of, you know, narratives of nationalism and sort of, right, the Nahda and all of these sorts of things. And so I think that early period has received less attention than it really should. And so what I tried to stress, or I think what Ghazi and, you know, his contemporaries helped me to see, is that actually in the early 16th century, you know, Arab elites, especially learned Arabs, had an immense amount of respect

and a sort of authority and maybe a sort of soft power, right, a sort of cultural cachet that allowed them, that gave them visibility in the Ottoman Empire, and that I think allowed them, that gave them visibility in the Ottoman Empire, and that I think helped them to actually participate both in some ways, I think, in the governance of the empire, but also to sort of shape the empire's, you know, social, cultural, and intellectual life. And so I think Ghazi himself really, you know, helps to make this fact visible. One of the things that really surprised me when I did this research was to find that actually many Ottoman chief judges who travel to Damascus end up actually taking their time to study with Ghazi. So these are men who are at the pinnacle of their careers. They are men who have taught themselves at a variety of, you know, as the best madrasas in Istanbul. And nonetheless, when they come to Damascus, they study, you know,

Quranic recitation, Quranic exegesis, many of them hear hadith from him. So, you know, I think this sort of surprise that I felt in discovering this led me to see, you know, the ways in which, because of the sort of cultural cachet, because of the sort of importance of late Magmaluk scholarship across, you know, for Islamic scholarship, let's say, writ large, because of the respect that Arab scholars had in the late 15th century, in the early 16th century, you know, this didn't evaporate immediately at the conquest. And Ottoman scholars certainly were, you know, I think, hugely were productive and valuable members of the sort of, let's say, international Islamic intellectual community. But they didn't have the same sort of, the scholarship they produced didn't have the same sort of currency and visibility across the Islamic world that many late Mamluk scholars did. And so that, I think, offers a sort of opening for Arabs, for learned Arabs to gain an immense amount of respect from the Ottoman scholars.

So yeah, so I think, so, you know, I think Ghazi helps to show this kind of respect that Arab scholars enjoyed at the beginning of the 16th century. If I remember correctly, one of your arguments in the book is part of this soft power, this soft influence that the Arab and Mamluk scholars of the early 16th century experience had to do with their obvious skills in Arabic more than the Ottomans, right? their obvious skills in Arabic more than the Ottomans, right? The reverence for the Arabic language had a real cultural cachet, and that was an important aspect in why, you know, the first Rumis to come to Damascus maybe weren't as skilled in Arabic and couldn't show off as well in these salons. Yeah, I mean, that's exactly right. And actually, you know, the sort of status of Arabic as a language,

you know, really has the power to shape these relations in actually a pretty surprising way, right? So I think from a contemporary perspective, we might say, well, you know, why didn't the Ottomans who traveled to Damascus simply go there and insist that salons be held in Ottoman Turkish only, right? That's what we would expect, right? The British in India, you know, and we can think of many other sort of cases in which we have this kind of pattern. And I think that does have to do with the status of Arabic. That, of course, Arabic is the language of, well, it's the language of the Quran and religion, but it's also the language of scholarship, right?

And so, you know, these Ottoman intellectuals and scholars who travel to Damascus, they cannot just ignore Arabic. They cannot say, well, Arabic, you know, I know Ottoman, Turkish and Persian, you know, and I can I can recite a bunch of poetry and and, you know, open them up to the accusation that they weren't proper Muslims, that they weren't proper ulema, men of Islamic learning. And so that fact, that cultural cachet that you've mentioned that Arabic has, really does affect the relationship between these two groups. But yeah, so maybe I'll say something about how the story ends. So, you know, I guess, sort of spoiler alert here, I can maybe give away that the book doesn't really end on a high note,

the book doesn't really end on a high note, at least as far as sort of Arab scholars are concerned. So, you know, while in this sort of early period, I think the sort of, yeah, the cultural cachet that Arabic had and that Arab scholars enjoyed gave them quite a bit of power. The vulnerability of the new Ottoman regime in the new provinces, the need for local knowledge and local expertise gave, you know, Arab elites quite a bit of power in this early period. But by the end of the 16th century, or by the last quarter of the 16th century this really begins to change and that's because you know everything is changing towards the end of the 16th century of course we have a sort of economic downturn right and with the economic downturn we suddenly have a sort of glut of qualified personnel for the positions available in the Ottoman Empire. And this means that slowly more and more groups are sort of fighting over a smaller and smaller pie,

for a portion of a smaller and smaller pie. And famously, of course, Turkish speakers, You know, famously, of course, you know, Turkish speakers, roomies from the provinces are cut out of a lot of these positions, right? And that's why we have some of these sort of disturbances and unrest in Anatolia, among other reasons. But Arabs, too, become, I think, more and more marginalized from a lot of the positions that they used to be able to occupy, even in the provinces. So there's a sort of economic and, you know, I think, administrative story that changes things. But there's also a sort of intellectual and cultural story that I think is, I probably spend even more time talking about, which is that in some ways you could say that scholars like Ghazi were sort of victims of their own success. you know, taught generations of Ottoman scholars. They had introduced them to new literary forms, to, you know, new ideas. And, you know, as a result, transforming Ottoman scholarship to a great degree. So Ottoman scholarship, which I think in the 15th century probably looked to Persia more than it looked to the Arab lands, becomes more and more suffused with the sort of Arabophone tradition.

language inheritance has been so fully incorporated into the Ottoman intellectual tradition, that there's no longer really a need for Arab scholars, you know, to sort of bring that kind of expertise, because it's really been, it's been fully incorporated into the Ottoman tradition. Razi himself, I think, died in happy old age, blissfully ignorant of these kinds of developments. But I use one of his students, Mohib al-Din al-Hamawi, and his travel account to Istanbul in the 1580s to sort of build a comparison and to contrast his experience with that of Ghazi's. So while Ghazi, you know, sort of saunters into all of these gatherings and sort of wows people in the 1530s, and, you know, is able to really meet with the leading officials of the imperial center, Hamawi has incredible difficulty

penetrating Ottoman salons. And you can't really make an argument out of silence, but the fact that he does not mention, that Hamawi does not mention salons or the salons of the Istanbul elite in his later account, I think is hugely significant. And I should say that he wrote another travel account to Cairo, where he really does focus on

precisely these kinds of salons. So the fact that they're missing from his Istanbul account, I think is really significant, and suggests that by the 1580s, learned Arabs had much more difficulty penetrating Ottoman salons and achieving visibility within them than Ghazi did in the earlier period. Well, thank you so much, Helen, for joining us. It was a real pleasure to have you. Thanks so much for inviting me. And it was really was a real pleasure to have you. Thanks so much for inviting me. And it was really nice to talk and to meet you, Miriam. And for our listeners, as always, you can find full details, bibliography, and images about Helen Pfeiffer's new book, Empire of Salons, on our website at www.ottomanhistorypodcast.com. Until next time.