Dreams and Visions in Islamic Societies

5. Dreaming Ŏṣmåns: Of History and Meaning

CHAPTER 5 Dreaming ˜Osmåns Of History and Meaning Gottfried Hagen Ottoman historical consciousness as manifested in a distinct historiography appears surprisingly late. Heroic narratives of the rise of the House of ˜Osmån appear in the late fifteenth century. They were increasingly readjusted according to Islamic concepts and to literary conventions of emerging Ottoman classicism. The initial framework of the dynastic history arranged chronologically is joined by world histories, which gain prominence from the late sixteenth century onward, whereas local or special histories remain rare. Just as the typical Ottoman historian is a scholar or an official of the Ottoman state (or both), the dynasty as the embodiment of statehood is the fundamental unit of historiography. Narratives typically progress as an additive sequence of events, with very little interpretive interference on the part of the historian.1 Dreams as intrinsically individual and personal events at first glance do not appear to have a place in the strictly state- or dynastycentered world of premodern Ottoman chroniclers. Yet, dreams were a regular, although not necessarily frequent theme in Ottoman historiography . Throughout the premodern era, and probably much longer, people in the Ottoman Empire were firmly convinced of the reality of dreams. Dreams narrated in Ottoman historiography were taken for real by the actors in the narrative, by author of the account, and finally by his audience. Yet, historians reading Ottoman chronicles, typically in search of factual information on the course of events of 99 100 Gottfried Hagen Ottoman history, have chosen to neglect the dreams as improbable at best, and more often as obvious fiction. In this chapter, I analyze selected dream accounts contained in Ottoman chronicles from the fifteenth through the seventeenth century, focusing on two in particular, and drawing on another dozen or so. My goal is to make a contribution to both the study of dreams in Islamic cultures, and to Islamic historiography. I am not concerned with the factuality of the dreams: Every dream, as soon as it is remembered, is already a construction, and its veracity is unverifiable by definition. Rather, I am interested in the fact that chroniclers and their audiences saw a place for the dream in the narration of historical events. My reading of their accounts will show how dream narrations reveal an intentional or implicit interpretive dimension of their historiographical endeavors. Dream narratives can function as historiographical devices to put forward particular understandings of events that otherwise would have remained hidden. They can reveal an unspoken “philosophy of history,” which I take with Karl Löwith as “systematic interpretation of universal history in accordance with a principle by which historical events and successions are unified and directed toward an ultimate meaning.”2 In his small but insightful book, Meaning in History. The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History, published in German as Weltgeschichte und Heilsgeschehen [“World history and the manifestation of salvation”],3 Löwith demonstrates how modern notions of universal historical teleology such as Marxism have their origins in medieval and early modern theology. Löwith contrasts this concept to that of the ancient Greeks, who saw history as a consistent recurrence of the ever same patterns. As a result, for the Greeks history had a meaning within its own horizon, whereas medieval (Christian) and modern (secular) teleologies see a goal beyond history, salvation from the evils of this world, be it in the fulfillment of the cycles of history, doom and resurrection, or by the advent of communism and the end of class differences. I argue that several theological aspects of an Islamic interpretation of history can be determined in a careful reading of Ottoman narrations of dreams in historiographical contexts. The general notion of a God-centered model for history manifests itself in three distinct complexes: 1. The concept of divine guidance of events toward a goal that can lie within the horizon of history, or beyond it. A temporal goal would be primarily sociopolitical, whereas a telos beyond history would be eschatological.4 Such a historical “plan of salvation” would not only 101 Dreaming ˜Osmåns shape universal histories as a whole, but might become apparent also in works of limited geographical and chronological scope. 2. Predestination is closely related to the previous point, in that supposedly the predetermined events are guided by a divine intention . By projecting the act of predetermination back to the time before creation, it is...