Middle East Studies Research Seminar Series
with Prof. Dr. Nir Shafir (UC – San Diego)
In the seventeenth century, Muslims in the Ottoman Empire became embroiled in a polarizing cultural war over the permissibility of everyday practices like worshipping at saints’ graves, smoking tobacco, and an odd medical procedure called “chickpea cauterization.” This talk traces this widespread religious and political polarization to the rise of a new “communication order,” focusing, in particular, on the advent of “pamphlets”: short, mobile, and polemical tracts, all copied by hand. The talk paints a new picture of the entire ecosystem of books in the manuscript culture of the early modern Ottoman Empire and how it fell into supposed disorder as middling readers stoked polemics, falsified authorship, and fashioned new reading publics.
12 December 2024 (16.00-18.00) – Room 1.2, Faculty of Arts, Rozier 44, 9000 Gent
contact: middleeast@ugent.be