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Evliya \u00c7elebi relates a magical version of the Islamic empire.<\/p>\n
There are important reasons why we should all learn more about life during the Ottoman Empire. It was the last era in which a sultan-caliph, a sort of Islamic emperor-pope, held sway over virtually the entire Muslim geosphere. Many Islamists today explicitly yearn for the return of such a unified Muslim super-state. At the Ottoman Empire\u2019s zenith, roughly between 1600 and 1700, Sharia dominated human affairs from India to Morocco and deep into Europe, stopping just short of Vienna. That era could furnish clues to what it might be like again if the Muslim Brotherhood and its ilk gain widespread momentum. Furthermore, with Turkey\u2019s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan banging on about his party\u2019s \u201cneo-Ottoman\u201d approach to foreign policy, it behooves us to know what coherent world view, if any, he and other nostalgists are drawing on for their grand designs.<\/p>\n
The most exhaustive chronicle of the Ottoman world and environs was recorded by Evliya \u00c7elebi (b. 1611), a figure celebrated in the Muslim world as one of history\u2019s greatest travel writers, on par with Ibn Battuta and Marco Polo. A Turk born in Istanbul to a privileged court family, \u00c7elebi traveled for about 45 years, from 1640 up to the year he died in Cairo. He spent those decades crisscrossing the sultan\u2019s dominions, completing pilgrimages to Mecca and Jerusalem and even entering \u201cinfidel\u201d Vienna as an ambassador. A native Istanbullu, his intricate portrait of the costumes and conventions of his hometown remains the richest source text for historians. He wrote 10 long volumes of his Seyahatname, or travelogue, in the ornately archaic Arabic-scripted Ottoman language of his day, a language as remote to modern Turks as Latin to Italians. Turks know all about him, name parks after him, but very few read him at any length.<\/p>\n
A volume of outtakes from his work, titled An Ottoman Traveller: Selections From the Book of Travels of Evliya \u00c7elebi, was recently published to coincide with the 500th anniversary of \u00c7elebi\u2019s birth. Selected and translated by Ottoman experts Robert Dankoff and Sooyong Kim, it gives us the most accessible glimpse to date into \u00c7elebi\u2019s text, itself a window onto a highly cultivated sensibility living at a peak moment in Islamic civilization. \u00c7elebi embarked on his travels two years after the brutally efficient Sultan Murat IV reconquered Baghdad from the Persians in 1638. (The honorific title of \u00c7elebi denoted a gentleman or esquire of Sultan Murat\u2019s era, and indeed the ancestors of Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi originally came from Turkey with the sultan\u2019s invasion forces.) In various campaigns Murat had stamped out revolts in Anatolia and stabilized the empire\u2019s borders. The ensuing order made the Seyahatname possible, though Murat died the same year that \u00c7elebi set out.<\/p>\n
The book can be enjoyed on many levels\u2014for its descriptions of towns, natural wonders, and ancient monuments such as the Parthenon and the Kaaba; for its Sufi-dervish notions of \u201cmystical\u201d love; for its nutty take on history, such as the bios of Jesus and Plato; and for the pleasant company of its unreliable narrator. But one\u2019s first reaction is to marvel at the utter strangeness of the world on view. From Istanbul\u2019s guilds of lion tamers and snow procurers to sorcerers and torturers in far-flung provinces, the unfolding panorama teeming with marvels and superstitions seems closer to the world of antiquity than to our own day.<\/p>\n
via The Arab World’s Greatest Travel Writer – Newsweek<\/span>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Ottoman Empire\u2019s greatest travel writer captured a peak moment in Islamic civilization. (Page 1 of 2) ottomon-empire-melik-OV12-vl Shane McCauley \/ Gallery Stock Evliya \u00c7elebi relates a magical version of the Islamic empire. There are important reasons why we should all learn more about life during the Ottoman Empire. It was the last era in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":83,"featured_media":35720,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2939],"tags":[5079,5165],"class_list":["post-35717","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cultureart","tag-caliphate","tag-evliya-celebi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35717","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/83"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=35717"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35717\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=35717"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=35717"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.turkishnews.com\/en\/content\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=35717"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}