Ottoman Studies

This collection of around twenty papers has its origins in a two-day seminar organised by the Association for the Study of Travel in Egypt and the Near East (ASTENE) in conjunction with the Centre for Middle Eastern Plants at the Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh (RBGE), with additional support from Cornucopia magazine and the Turkish Consulate General, Edinburgh. This multi-disciplinary event formed part of the Ottoman Horizons festival held in Edinburgh in 2017 and attracted a wide range of participants from around the world, including several from Turkey and other parts of the Middle East. This splendidly illustrated book focuses on the botanical legacy of many parts of the former Ottoman Empire -- including present-day Turkey, the Levant, Egypt, the Balkans, and the Arabian Peninsula -- as seen and described by travellers both from within and from outside the region. The papers cover a wide variety of subjects, including Ottoman garden design and architecture; the flora of the region, especially bulbs and their cultural significance; literary, pictorial and photographic depictions of the botany and horticulture of the Ottoman lands; floral and related motifs in Ottoman art; culinary and medicinal aspects of the botanical heritage; and efforts related to conservation.

The collection examines the view of holiness in the "Holy Land" through the writings of pilgrims, travelers, and missionaries. The period extends from 1517, the Ottoman conquest of Syria and Palestine, to the Franco-British treaty of Utrecht in 1713 and the consolidation of European hegemony over the Mediterranean. The writers in the collection include Christians (Orthodox, Protestant, and Catholic), Muslims, and Jews, who originate from countries such as Sweden, England, France, Holland, Russia, the Ottoman Empire, and Syria. This book is the first to juxtapose writers of different backgrounds and languages, to emphasize the holiness of the land in a number of traditions, and to ask whether holiness was inherent in geography or a product of the piety of the writers. Contributors are: Mohammad Asfour, Hasan Baktir, Richard Coyle, Judy A. Hayden, Nabil I. Matar, Joachim stlund, Michael Rotenberg-Schwartz, Julia Schleck, Mazin Tadros and Galina Yermolenko.

Otlukbeli 1473, Çaldıran 1514, Mercidabık 1516 ve Reydaniye 1517, savaşlarına bizzat tanık olmak!..Fatih Sultan Mehmed, Uzun Hasan Padişah, Elvend Sultan, Şah İsmail ve Şah Tahmasb'ı yakından görmek!..Doğu'nun heyecan verici şehirlerinde dolaşmak, tehlikelerle dolu yollarında seyahat etmek, bazen bir asker, bazen bir tüccar veya elçi olarak halkın arasında yaşamak! Taht kavgalarından korkmak, sultanların kahrına veya lütfuna mazhar olanların düştüğü zilleti görmek, eğlence ve kutlamaları takip etmek..Gördüklerini veya duyduklarını dostlarına, akrabalarına, hemşerilerine anlatmak..Onların meraklı bakışları arasında Ben de oradaydım. diyebilmek...
Otlubeli, Çaldıran ve Reydaniye savaşlarına tanık olan Giovanni Maria Angiolello, Şah İsmail'i bizzat gören adı bilinmeyen Venedikli Tüccar ve Şah Tahmasb'ın sarayında bulunan Vincenzo D'Alessandri'nin seyahatnameleri, sadece XV. ve XVI. yüzyılda yaşanan tarihi olaylardan bir kesit sunmuyor, tanık oldukları pek çok olayla ilgili, bizim bildiklerimizin dışında, bilgiler aktarıyorlar. Daha da önemlisi üçü de Ben de oradaydım diyor..

During the nineteenth century, the figure of the passive, oppressed, yet highly sexualized female of the Muslim harem became the pivotal figure of Western orientalism. Despite recent challenges to orientalist thinking, however, an enduring mystique continues to surround Western perceptions of Eastern women.In Rethinking Orientalism, Reina Lewis makes a major contribution to correcting the prevailing stereotype of the subjugated, silenced woman of the harem. Bringing together published autobiographical accounts of self-identified “Oriental” women at the turn of the twentieth century, she reveals that these women were, in fact, able to intervene in orientalist culture and manipulate cultural codes. Lewis shows how the writings of Demetra Vaka Brown, Halide Edib, Zeyneb Hanum, Melek Hanum, and Grace Ellison were part of a social and textual dialogue with Western women, and how their contentious engagement with Western feminism was an important facet of regional modernization.Exploring the complicated ways that these writers addressed topics such as seclusion, the veil, and polygamy, Lewis vividly illustrates the possibilities and limitations of resistance that women from Islamic societies have experienced and continue to work within.

Seyahatnameler, tarih araştırmalarında önemli kaynaklar arasında yer alırlar. Arşiv belgeleri, günlükler, yazışmalar ve mektuplar gibi seyahatnameler de tarihçinin algılama gücünü artıran, ikincil kaynaklardaki bilgileri karşılaştırma imkânı sunan eserlerdir. Osmanlı İmparatorluğu ile ilgili araştırmalarda geniş bir coğrafya üzerine yayılmış siyasi, kültürel ve iktisadi yapıların ele alınması, bunlarla ilgili bilgilerdeki pusun dağıtılması için kimi önyargılı ya da oryantalist bakış açılarının varlığının da farkında olarak seyahatnamelere müracaat etmek kuşkusuz önemlidir. Avrupalı Seyyahların Gözünden Osmanlı Dünyası ve İnsanları bugüne kadar çok az müracaat edilmiş seyahatname literatürünü, seyyahların gözlemlerini de karşılaştırarak ele alıyor. Gülgün Üçel-Aybet’in 1980’de tamamladığı doktora tezini esas aldığı; arşiv belgeleri, ikincil kaynaklar ve yeni araştırmalarla desteklediği, adeta yeni bir araştırma titizliği ve uzun süren bir çalışma ile hazırladığı kitap; seyyahların biyografilerinden Osmanlı toplumsal yapısına, azınlıklardan eyalet yönetimine, sosyal alışkanlıklar ve gündelik yaşam kültüründen Osmanlı şehirlerine geniş bir ufku tarayarak Osmanlı dünyası ve insanları hakkında yeni araştırmalara yol gösterecek önemli bir katkı sunuyor.

This book contributes to the body of postcolonial scholarship that explores the growth of imperial culture in the Romantic and early Victorian periods by focusing on the literary uses of the figure of the Turk and the Ottoman Empire. Filiz Turham analyzes Turkish Tales, novels, and travelogues from c. 1789-1846 to expose the three primary ways in which the Ottoman Other served as a strong counterimage of empire for both liberal and conservative writers. Through readings of such authors as Lord Byron, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley and Elizabeth Craven the authors identifies the Ottoman Empire as a particularly flexible trope that could be presented as noth familiar or foreign, Same or Other in a way that reflected back onto England its own vexed attitude toward its imperial success.

Presenting a critical, yet innovative, perspective on the cultural interactions between the "East" and the "West", this book questions the role of travel in the production of knowledge and in the construction of the idea of the "Islamic city". This volume brings together authors from various disciplines, questioning the role of Western travel writing in the production of knowledge about the East, particularly focusing on the cities of the Muslim world. Instead of concentrating on a specific era, chapters span the Medieval and Modern eras in order to present the transformation of both the idea of the "Islamic city" and also the act of traveling and travel writing. Missions to the East, whether initiated by military, religious, economic, scientific, diplomatic or touristic purposes, resulted in a continuous construction, de-construction and re-construction of the "self" and the "other". Including travel accounts, which depicted cities, extending from Europe to Asia and from Africa to Arabia, chapters epitomize the construction of the "Orient" via textual or visual representations. By examining various tools of representation such as drawings, paintings, cartography, and photography in depicting the urban landscape in constant flux, the book emphasizes the role of the mobile individual in defining city space and producing urban culture. Scrutinising the role of travellers in producing the image of the world we know today, this book is recommended for researchers, scholars and students of Middle Eastern Studies, Cultural Studies, Architecture and Urbanism.

Examining the history of the French experience of the Ottoman world and Turkey, this comparative study visits the accounts of early modern travelers for the insights they bring to the field of travel writing. The journals of contemporaries Jean-Baptiste Tavernier, Jean Thévenot, Laurent D'Arvieux, Guillaume-Joseph Grelot, Jean Chardin, and Antoine Galland reveal a rich corpus of political, social, and cultural elements relating to the Ottoman Empire at the time, enabling an appreciation of the diverse shapes that travel narratives can take at a distinct historical juncture. Longino examines how these writers construct themselves as authors, characters, and individuals in keeping with the central human project of individuation in the early modern era, also marking the differences that define each of these travelers - the shopper, the envoy, the voyeur, the arriviste, the ethnographer, the merchant. She shows how these narratives complicate and alter political and cultural paradigms in the fields of Mediterranean studies, 17th-century French studies, and cultural studies, arguing for their importance in the canon of early modern narrative forms, and specifically travel writing. The first study to examine these travel journals and writers together, this book will be of interest to a range of scholars covering travel writing, French literature, and history.

This collection of Sonja Brentjes's articles deals with travels, encounters and the exchange of knowledge in the Mediterranean and Western Asia during the 16th and 17th centuries, focusing on three historiographical concerns. The first is how we should understand the relationship between Christian and Muslim societies, in the period between the translations from Arabic into Latin (10th - 13th centuries) and before the Napoleonic invasion of Ottoman Egypt (1798). The second concern is the "Western" discourse about the decline or even disappearance of the sciences in late medieval and early modern Islamic societies and, third, the construction of Western Asian natures and cultures in Catholic and Protestant books, maps and pictures. The articles discuss institutional and personal relationships, describe how Catholic or Protestant travellers learned about and accessed Muslim scholarly literature, and uncover contradictory modes of reporting, evaluating or eradicating the visited cultures and their knowledge.