Ottoconfession

Was There An Early Modern Religious Conjuncture?

Although the process of differentiation between Sunni and Shii Muslims started in the early days of Islam, it took on much sharper theological contours in the early 16th century, roughly coinciding with the Protestant-Catholic polarisation in Europe, and triggering similar social dynamics. Historians have dismissed this as a coincidence, but was it? Researchers in the Ottoconfession project are taking a fresh look at the topic, as Dr Tijana Krstić explains The concept of

confessionalisation, relating to the convergence of theological and political ideas in the overarching rationale of rule, has long been important to the historiography of post-Reformation Europe, but it is also a valuable heuristic device for the scholars of the Ottoman Empire, argues Dr Tijana Krstić. The process of polarisation between Sunni and Shia Islam started in the seventh century CE; however, it came to be articulated in much sharper theological and territorial terms in the early 16th century with the rise of the Sunni Ottoman and Shii Safavid Empires. This roughly coincided with a process of polarisation between Protestantism and Catholicism – and later Calvinism – in Europe, and triggered similar socio-political dynamics, from the persecution of dissenters and a greater focus on catechisation and social disciplining of believers, to state building.

Yet, historians have been wary of drawing parallels. “The fact that we see similar confessionalizing initiatives in both early modern Europe and the Middle East is often dismissed as a coincidence on account of the supposedly profoundly divergent historical trajectories of Christendom and Islamdom,” says Dr Krstić. As the Principal Investigator of the Ottoconfession project, she and her team are taking a fresh look at the topic. “Our question was: what accounts for the striking parallels? Are they just a coincidence or is there more to them?” she explains.

Confessional Polarisation in Comparative and Entangled Perspectives The processes of confessional polarisation in Europe and the Turco-Iranian world resulted from different dynamics specific to the two regions. However, the subsequent initiatives at confession-building, and the evolution of discourse on religious orthodoxy in both Europe and the Ottoman Empire, specifically during the 16th and 17th centuries, were actually entangled, argues Dr Krstić. “At some point these processes converged, and they mutually affected one another,” she says. There were several reasons for this, primary among them the fact that the

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a) Profession of faith by an Armenian Patriarch from 1671; b) treatise on blasphemous utterances in Ottoman Turkish (17th century); c) Detail from an attestation of faith by a Greek Orthodox Patriarch (17th century).

Sunni Ottomans were engaged in imperial competition with the Shiite Safavids in the east and the Catholic Habsburgs in the west, which resulted in the imperial enterprise becoming closely identified with the protection of the true faith. “This

imperial competition entailed shared political theologies (of universal empire, for instance), and the authorities used their power in similar ways in order to shore up their imperial claims (to be a messainic ruler or mahdi who will renew religion). It’s not just that we as historians want to compare them, but it’s the fact that they compared themselves to each other at the time,” stresses Dr Krstić.

Comparisons were facilitated also by the ease of mobility between empires. “Some Muslim populations were contested between the Ottoman and Safavid Empires or weaved in and out of service and loyalty to them, while Ottoman Christians travelled, traded, and entered the service of the Ottoman neighbours both to the east and west,” explains Dr Krstić.

This meant that particular religious sensibilities and ideas about orthodoxy – as well as resistance to it – were shared across territorial boundaries, often through the phenomenon of religious conversion.

Another factor was the openness of the Ottoman authorities towards the activity of Christian missionaries from post-Tridentine Europe. “They were allowed to come in and proselytise among the Ottoman Christians, which was another way of disseminating specific concepts, ideas and styles of piety.

These were perhaps extraneous to the Ottoman Empire, but they then became domesticated in new ways among both Ottoman Christians and Muslims,” says Dr Krstić. “We’re trying to look at being a Sunni Muslim, an Orthodox Greek or an Apostolic Armenian not as something fixed in time or divorced from political, social and legal dynamics, but rather to capture how the boundaries of those labels and pious sensibilities were shaped through interaction of all these forces, as well as by the dialogue and polemics among the communities within an imperial and inter-imperial framework.”

Sunni and Other Orthodoxies in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire This work centres on digging deeper into the historical background to investigate how the Ottomans used the legal and theological

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resources of medieval Islam to develop their own interpretation of Sunni orthodoxy, and how that notion of orthodoxy in turn evolved over time under the impact of various contingencies the empire faced between the 1450s and the early 1700s, largely in Anatolia and the Balkans. “The Ottomans did not ‘invent’ Sunni orthodoxy – rather, they adapted various earlier legal and theological articulations of who belonged to the community of true believers to the needs of a growing empire experiencing a direct challenge to its legitimacy from a Muslim neighbour. But the discourse of Sunni orthodoxy was not uniform: in addition to the scholars and imperial administrators, many different individuals, groups, and institutions aspired to have a say in what constituted correct belief and practice, which they expressed in a variety of written genres, from legal opinions and treatises to catechisms, heresiographies and histories. Nor was it universally enforced or embraced, since different parts of the empire experienced different dynamics and many groups in particular among Sufis - resisted the imposition of strict confessional boundaries, as our Senior Researcher, Dr Derin Terzioğlu, shows in her research,” Dr Krstić explains.

OTTOCONFESSION The Fashioning of a Sunni Orthodoxy and the Entangled Histories of ConfessionBuilding in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, 15th-17th Centuries

Project Objectives

Patriarch Kyrillos Loukaris (d. 1638) sparked one of the most important episodes of confessional strife within the Greek Orthodox church with his “Calvinist” profession of faith.

Ottoman Greek Orthodox and Apostolic Armenian communities who were dealing with the challenges of Catholic, Lutheran, and Calvinist proselytization. Especially in the 17th century Istanbul became the centre for the exchange of confessional views, polemical literature and proselytizing strategies across communal boundaries,” says Dr Krstić.

We approach religious identities not as something fixed in time or divorced from political, social and legal dynamics, but rather we aim to capture how their boundaries were shaped through interaction of all these forces, as well as polemics among various communities within and beyond the Ottoman Empire The Ottoman Empire was in some ways at the peak of its power during the mid-16th century, but it experienced numerous new challenges during the early 17th century, another topic of interest to Dr Krstić and her team. “There are major social changes in the Empire in this period, primarily growing social mobility starting around the second half of the 16th century, which begins to change the social order.”

A general perception of decline, moral, military and otherwise, was quite pervasive in the Ottoman Empire during the 17th century, which also affected religious discourse. Many views were offered on how the ills of the empire should be remedied, and in many cases they entailed greater knowledge of faith and a return to the roots of religious practice.

“Debates come to be focused on what is pure tradition and what is innovation? What is bad innovation and what is good innovation? This very much echoed the contemporary debates among Christians in Europe, as well as within

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There have been many studies on how the Ottoman Empire shared in the dynamics of the early modern world, covering topics as diverse as trade, the spread of military technology and even climatic patterns, yet comparisons always stop short of considering religious politics and sensibilities. Now Dr Krstić and her colleagues aim to show that certain kinds of pious sensibilities and concepts were in fact very much comparable and mutually intelligible across the Muslim-Christian divide, focusing on the relationship between belief and unbelief, the importance of actions for faith, the attitudes towards the nature of communal boundaries, and other topics. “There are many ways in which one can draw parallels. For instance, one thing I have been working on is the genre of catechism which seems to become increasingly similar in form and organization of information, regardless of whether we are talking about Protestant, Catholic, Sunni or Shii primers from the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,” Dr Krstić explains.

The OTTOCONFESSION project examines what prompted Ottoman statesmen and literati to begin to articulate and enforce the boundaries of what they understood as a Sunni orthodoxy in the early sixteenth century, against the backdrop of what has been described as “confessional ambiguity” or even “metadoxy” in the late medieval Turco-Iranian world. The project sets this phenomenon in a dialogue with confession-building initiatives among other Muslim and Christian communities both within the Ottoman Empire and in the polities connected to it, both in Europe and in the Middle East.

Project Funding

Funded under H2020-EU.1.1. - EXCELLENT SCIENCE - European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant. Agreement number: 648498 - OTTOCONFESSION

Project Partners

OTTOCONFESSION project partner is Boğaziçi University (Istanbul, Turkey), and the team there is led by Professor Derin Terzioğlu, who is a Senior Researcher on the project.

Contact Details

Project Coordinator, Dr Tijana Krstić, PhD Central European University Nador u. 9 1051 Budapest Hungary T: +36 1 327 3000 E: krstict@ceu.edu W: https://cems.ceu.edu/ottoconfession Dr Tijana Krstić, PhD

Dr Tijana Krstić (PhD University of Michigan, 2004) is a historian of the early modern Ottoman Empire and Associate Professor in the Department of Medieval Studies at Central European University. She is the author of Contested Conversions to Islam--Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2011) and numerous articles.

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