Invented Tradition and the Ottoman World View

Several years ago, I was fortunate enough to be in Istanbul for the opening of an exhibit on Ottoman cartography, From Piri Reis to Katip Çelebi: The World View of the Ottomans.¹ Funded by the Turkish Ministry of Culture and Tourism, and organized in conjunction with UNESCO’s declaration of 2009 as the “Year of Katip Çelebi,” it featured a dazzling collection of maps. In keeping with the exhibit’s title, it also followed a rather predictable narrative of the Triumph of Modernity, whose central objective was to show how Ottoman map-makers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries gradually left behind the mapping traditions of their medieval Muslim predecessors in favor of Western cartography. To this end, the exhibit highlighted reproductions of maps from the standard pantheon of Ottoman cartography (Piri Reis, Ali Macar Reis, Ebubekir Behram Dimaşki, and so forth), which were placed alongside several contemporary Western maps, as well as a number of “classics” of medieval Islamic cartography by the likes of Istakhri and Mahmud al-Kashgari.

There was, however, at least one map on display, from an undated copy of Mustafa Ali’s Künhü’l-ahbār, that seemed to stubbornly resist the exhibit’s over-arching narrative (Figure 1).² Far from an example of an emergent “modern” world view, the map’s title (which the curators left untranscribed) declared it to be exactly the opposite: a self-consciously archaic representation of the world “by an ancient master, who drew the earth as a circle and divided it into seven climes” (Bu dā’ire’yi resm iden ustāz-i ḳadīm / ḳılmış yedi iḳlīme zemīni taḳsīm). Accordingly, it depicted the world as a flat disk (meaning that the Western Hemisphere was completely absent), and oriented with the south to the top (the opposite of modern maps). Within this disk, it then carefully delineated the “seven climes” of the world’s “inhabited quarter.” Finally, beyond the “seventh clime” of the highest inhabitable latitude (in other words, at the very “bottom” of the earth from the map’s perspective), it showed the “Land of Darkness” (Ẓulmāt) extending into the uncharted expanses of the north.

Figure 1.

World map from an unidentified manuscript copy of Mustafa Āli’s Künhu’l-Aẖbār.

Probable copy date: late seventeenth century.

Most strikingly, the map also included an image of an imposing tower rising from the city of Alexandria, with a caption reading: “This is the looking glass that surveys the entire world” (cam-ı cihān-nümā budur). While this was a comparatively less common feature of medieval Islamic maps, the accompanying caption clearly connected it to the mythology of the Lighthouse of Alexandria in both Persian and Arabic literature. According to several variant versions of the myth, Alexander the Great was supposed to have affixed a massive spyglass at the top of this tower, capable of surveying the entire world.

Of course, by invoking the cihān-nümā, the map also seemed to directly reference Katib Çelebi’s celebrated geographical atlas of the same name. And within the context of an exhibit commemorating the achievements of Katip Çelebi, it was therefore difficult to see this map as anything other than a kind of archaic counterpoint to Katip’s Cihān-nümā: The last gasp of a thoroughly “traditional” world view that Ottoman cartographers were busily in the process of transcending.

Yet, a closer reading indicates a great deal that is decidedly new about this apparent survival of “Islamic Tradition.” Most noticeably, Alexander’s lighthouse, which ostentatiously dominates the entire image, here assumes the unmistakable form of an Ottoman pencil minaret, the architectural symbol par excellence of the early modern Ottoman state as a bureaucratized, centralized, imperial defender of Sunni Islam. Meanwhile, a careful examination of the toponyms bordering the “Lands of Darkness” reveal the last regions of the world’s “inhabited quarter” to be the “Province of Bosnia” (Vilāyet-i Bosna) and “Hungary” (Eng...