Ottoman History

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Browsing Ottoman History by Author "Marinos Sariyannis"
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    A Tale of Two Cities: Jābarṣā/Jābalqā and Their Metamorphoses
    (De Gruyter, 2024) Marinos Sariyannis
    Although the twin cities at the west and east edges of the world, Jābarṣā (Jābarṣ, Jābalṣā, Jāburṣā) and Jābalqā (Jābalq, Jābarqā), are somehow commonplace in Islamicate cosmographies throughout the medieval period, surprisingly little research exists on them. The main lines of the legend, as formulated by the medieval traditionalists and cosmographers, are as follows: there are two cities at the uttermost east and west parts of the inhabited world, where the sun rises and sets. The inhabitants suffer from the extreme heat and the noise made by the sun in its rising and setting; they have to hide in caves and make their own noise to be protected. In the various versions of the story, some elements lack or differ; the cities are often connected with other legends related to the edge of the world, such as Dhū l-Qarnayn, the Gog and Magog/Yājūj and Mājūj, Muḥammad’s night journey, the remnants of the ʿĀd tribe, and so forth. The paper traces the origins of the legend, its formation and various formulations during the Islamic Middle Ages, the significant change it underwent in the late medieval Illuminationist (ishrāqī) philosophy, and finally its survival and fading away to a status of folktale utopia in Ottoman literature and scholarship.
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    «Nous étions tous stupéfaits et effrayés» : Émotions ottomanes face au surnaturel.
    (Peeters, 2022) Marinos Sariyannis
    Ottoman literature, from descriptions of the earth and from biographies of the great Sufi sheikhs to Evliya Çelebi’s narrative and from realistic novels to first-person narratives, is full of supernatural apparitions: ghosts and jinn, but mostly emissaries from the invisible world or ghayb appear often not only in fiction, but also in accounts purportedly relating faithfully real facts. Based on a sample of texts covering a large time span, this paper proposes a classification of the emotions described by Ottoman authors vis-à-vis the supernatural experience and suggests some hypotheses on what we can deduce regarding Ottoman attitudes toward the world and the Hereafter.
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    The limits of going global: The case of “Ottoman Enlightenment(s)”
    (Wiley, 2020) Marinos Sariyannis
    The paper seeks to summarize the discussions of the lasttwo decades on the existence of a phenomenon that can benamed “Ottoman Enlightenment.” It discusses the Germandebates on Reinhardt Schulze's suggestion of an “IslamicEnlightenment,” as well as more recent studies on theemergence of a different view of the nature and the worldin Istanbul during the first decades of the 18th century.These debates are analyzed in the context of differentdefinitions of “Enlightenment,” as well as of the relationsbetween different ethnolinguistic groups within theOttoman Empire. The paper emphasizes the axes of a“democratization of knowledge” or the “massive diffusionof individual reasoning as a legitimate source of truth,” onthe one hand, and the procedure of a “disenchantment ofthe world” as it is connected with the Enlightenment phe-nomenon, on the other. It suggests that, whereas we maytrace certain parallels of such procedures between theOttoman and the Western and Central European model, thelack of integration of such ideas in the curriculum of institu-tional education in the Ottoman Empire might have beenthe most important obstacle that kept these ideas frombeing transformed into a real “Ottoman Enlightenment."