Tag Archives: Ottoman Empire

Along the bulwarks of Christiandom

06 Tuesday Aug 2013

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20130806-114458.jpgVenetian arch into Zadar

Ljubljana, Lake Bled Castle, Zadar, Sibinik, Split, Korcula, and more to come…as one travels in Slovenia and Croatia one hears the same story repeated about the castles and city walls. “These were built in the fifteenth century to defend against the ‘Turks’.” The Venetians funded many of these defenses – they controlled many of these Dalmatian towns at that time. From their point of view, it seems, they were fighting their primary enemy. From the Ottoman view, however, this was one of many fronts. They were simultaneously pursuing the Arabs, the Russians, the Poles-Hungarians, and they were looking toward the Persians.

The Croatian walls were a primary seed of the concept of “antemurale Christianitatis” – that Croatia (or another area, like Austria-Hungary later) is the bulwark against the non-Christians. Some scholars consider this the “antemurale myth” – that a certain nation serves the special purpose of defending against the infidel.

This idea, interestingly, can co-exist with another idea I have encountered as still alive in this region: the habit of one people to define the people just to their east as the beginning of the East. Thus the Italians would see the Slavic (though Catholic) Croats as the East, and themselves as antemurale Christianitatis. The Croats would see the Orthodox Serbs as the East, and the Serbs would see the Turks as the East. Professor Milica Bakić-Hayden of the University of Pittsburgh defines this tendency as “nesting orientalisms,” working off of Edward Said’s concept of orientalism. I have heard Croats explain that they are more Western in their attitudes, and the Serbs more eastern – so this idea is alive and well.

Small-time Sufi master

30 Sunday Jun 2013

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I just got the chance to read “Hagiography As A Source For Womens’ History In The Ottoman Empire: The Curious Case Of Unsi Hasan” by John Curry for my Ottoman Cultures course – specifically, the religion study group. I offered said group the quick summary/review below.

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Sainthood, and indeed mysticism in general, has a problematic status in Islam. Because of Islam’s powerful emphasis on monotheism, the claim that some people might be closer to God than others makes mainstream Muslims suspect heresy. The Sufi masters, as mystics, offered a more personal connection to the religion, but simultaneously risked undermining the total separation of God from human, and thus God’s complete transcendance.

John Curry, now a professor at UNLV, was a grad student at OSU in 2003 when he came across the biography of an obscure Sufi master from the late 17th century. Curry describes the master, Hasan, as a “failed saint,” and uses his example as a window into the world of popular religiosity in the Ottoman Empire at that time. Indeed, popularity was essential for mystics to gain the status of saints. Curry notes that since there is not any single hierarchy in Islam as there is in the Catholic Church, there is no Muslim process of canonization. Thus the status of saint emerged organically from the community. In the case of this “failed saint,” the hagiography Curry highlights stands as the only source of information about Hasan. If more followers had written Hasan’s biography, or if this biography was more persuasive, his reputaion might have sustained itself more powerfully through the centuries.

We learn about the presence of women among Hasan’s devotees. Both men and women were followers of Sufi masters (as Quataert also mentioned) and some Sufi masters were women. Hasan is portrayed as an extremely strict master, perhaps even arbitrarily so. He is, however, slightly less stern with women. We also learn that Sufi shaykhs were presumed to have supernatural powers; Hasan’s punishment of one female follower was to haunt her dreams. At the same time, Hasan is portrayed as quite humanly flawed; he regrets his decision to marry and takes out his resentment on his daughter, who he alienates so thoroughly she is driven to choose the shameful occupation of bathhouse masseuse.

Hasan, the small-time Sufi master whose story comes to us through a largely overlooked account, thus gives us a sense of the gender, power and theological issues surrounding mystics in the 17th century Ottoman Empire.