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58 4 Conversion and Converts to Islam in Ottoman Historiography of the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries Tijana Krstić Although the issue of conversion to Islam was at the core of one of the earliest historiographical debates on the origins of the Ottoman state, it subsequently became a subject that is almost universally treated in the context of Muslim–non-Muslim relations in the Ottoman Empire.1 As a consequence, in current historiography conversion to Islam is framed as an issue that mattered primarily to non-Muslims, while the Ottoman Muslim community’s experience of it is rarely questioned or problematized. However, a closer look at narrative sources, beginning with the rise of Ottoman historiography in the fifteenth century, reveals not only that Muslim authors were concerned with the phenomenon of conversion to Islam but also that there were a variety of views on what the proper place and role of converts in Ottoman society should be. Not all genres were equally likely to feature discussions on conversion: especially rich sources include narratives dedicated to the striving of Muslim soldiers and holy men in encounters with “infidels,” such as epics about Ottoman warrior-saints (vilāyetnāmes), spiritual biographies of holy men (menāk ˙ ıbnāmes), accounts of military campaigns (ġazavātnāmes), and the earliest Ottoman chronicles (Tevārīh ˘ -i Āl-i ʿOs ˉ mān) that blended genre elements from all of these with stories of early Ottoman rulers and their conquests. Additionally, later histories of the dynasty, narratives written by converts themselves, and various anonymous texts preserved in the miscellanies (mecmūʿa) that are omnipresent in Ottoman library collections and associated with all social strata of the Ottoman Muslim community also occasionally feature revealing comments. Collectively , these narratives point to a dynamic and constantly shifting debate about what comprised a good Muslim and a good subject of the House of Osman, as well as who defined religious and political “orthodoxy” in the Ottoman polity. They also remind us that the phenomenon of the earliest conversions to Islam and the transformation of the Ottoman polity into an empire were contemporaneous, mutually informing processes. This study explores portrayals of conversion and converts in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Ottoman Muslim narratives in relation to the development of various religious, cultural, and political identities within the Ottoman polity during the same period. Conversion and Converts to Islam | 59 Conversion and Identificatory Practices in the Early Modern Ottoman Polity Recent historiography has brought into sharp focus the questions of whether we can discuss an “Ottoman” (ʿOs ˉ mānlı) identity in such a heterogeneous empire and who can rightfully be referred to as “Ottoman” beyond the members of the ruling dynasty and military-administrative elite. Such scholarship highlighted different Muslim identificatory practices2 that existed in the early modern Ottoman Empire, based on criteria ranging from place of origin and profession to broader geo-cultural designations, such as Rūmī, ʿArab, and ʿAcem.3 Of particular interest to this discussion is the category of Rūmī, which appears frequently in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century sources, most often as a term with which Muslims from the “Lands of Rūm” (i.e., Ottoman Rumelia and Anatolia) referred to themselves, as well as a term by which they were known to Muslims beyond this geographic area.4 These categories do not, however, exhaust the various meanings and connotations of Rūmī (henceforth Rumi), which appears to have been a relational category that was shaped by society and evolved with the changing social and political conditions within and around the Ottoman Empire. So, in addition to being used in a purely geographical sense, “Rumi” could also denote a particular segment of society—“those who spoke Turkish (preferably a refined kind of Turkish, but not necessarily as their mother tongue) and acquired their social identity within or in proximity to urban settings, professions, institutions, education and cultural preferences.”5 As a socio-cultural category, the term “Rumi” is differentiated from “Turk,” a word that had primary associations of “ethnicity-not-transcended and attachment to tribal ways and cultural codes.”6 In that sense, both “Ottoman” and “Rumi” had social and cultural implications surpassing the “Turk.” However, most frequently, the primary opposite of “Rumi” was not “Turk” but ʿAcem (another elusive category usually denoting “Persians” but with other connotations as well) and at times ʿArab (denoting any Arabic speaker, but also the Bedouin as well as other social groups).7 In his famous ode-like commentary on Rumis, the great...

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