Projects and Interests
Current Book Project
Arrangements of the Sacred: Bodies, Objects, and the Making of Ottoman Islam
My current book project explores the transformation of early modern Ottoman religio-political and religio-social thought and practice between the late 16th and early 18th century. It shows how, in this pivotal period characterized by economic, political, ecological, and law and order crises in the Ottoman Empire, an increased preoccupation with mystical-occult forms of embodied religion manifested itself at the level of the court in Istanbul, as well as at the level of broader Ottoman society in the Anatolian and Balkan provinces. Whilst until now scholars have used the state archives to shed light on the impact of “the 17th century crisis” on the Ottoman state’s policing and resource extraction efforts, this project uses mystical-occultist texts and talismanic objects to shed light on the complex religious dimensions of this period.
Article
The Olfactory Imagination of an Ottoman Traveller
Standing in as a monumental work of Ottoman first-person prose that is without precedent, the Seyāḥatnāme ("Book of Travels"), at once a travelogue as well as a literary composition, is an ideal source for conducting a sensate history of Ottoman-Islamic society in the 17th century. Using characteristic flair and imagination, its author Evliyā Çelebi relates a number of fantastical anecdotes where scent plays a key narrative purpose, once in the context of conversing with the sacred dead in a dream, and on three occasions during visits to the caves of various Islamicate religious figures from the past. This paper will analyze these anecdotes to determine the narrative functions of scent in the text and in doing so tease out how olfaction was implicated in the Ottoman religious and social imaginary.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17458927.2022.2157970
Article
The mühr-i nübüvvet in eighteenth-century Ottoman prayer book
From roughly the early to mid-seventeenth century onward, Ottoman poets, artists, and calligraphers began to develop novel modes of affective engagement with the divine. Hand-copied and illustrated prayer books and talismanic objects of all sorts proliferated in the central lands of the empire, with poetic praises of sacred bodies and images of holy relics forming key parts of their apotropaic content. A central and ubiquitous component of this emerging corpus was a talismanic device known as the seal of prophethood (Ottoman Turkish: mühr-i nübüvvet; Arabic: khātam al-nubūwwa), a supposed rendition of a physical mark that was widely believed to have existed on the Prophet Muhammad’s back and which was held to be symbolic of his status as the seal (i.e., the culmination point) of Abrahamic prophecy. While recent pioneering work has shed light on the place of talismanic designs in the material and affective life of Ottoman Islam, this physical mark on Muhammad’s body and its Ottoman iterations have yet to receive detailed scholarly treatment.3 This study is an attempt to ll this lacuna. More specifically, through productive comparisons with analogous devices and devotional objects from both Islamic and Christian contexts, it demonstrates how late Ottoman iterations of the mühr-i nübüvvet incorporated the mandorla form into their designs to operationalize it as an aperture, a cosmic access point that opened up the world to the prophet Muhammad’s intercession and blessing
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/737142
