A subtle interaction between the human mind, muscle and matter produces music. Over the centuries, these interactions change, as instruments come and go out of favor and the role of music and musicians evolve. A well-documented tradition like Turkish art music (or Ottoman classic music) exhibits a bewildering variety of innovations over its 500 year history. Walter Feldman’s augmented and revised version of his 1996 work tracks these innovations and shows how this art form has both preserved its heritage and renewed it.
Ottomans
The core of the Ottomans’ political culture could never be replicated. Based on military slaves, forcibly recruited from non-Muslim subjects, a harem full of nubile captives hoping to become sultanas, an emperor who had to murder his brothers to secure his throne, and a pliant clergy that reconciled these extra-legal practices with religion, the “Eternal State”, devlet-e ebetmüdat, ruled over immense territories and numberless peoples for 600 years.
It’s the 16th century, and the Ottoman Empire has just defeated the Mamluk Sultanate, conquering Damascus and Cairo, important centers of Arab learning and culture. But how did these two groups—Arabs and “Rumis”, a term used to refer to those living in Anatolia—interact? How did Arabs deal with these powerful upstarts, and how did Rumis try to work with their learned, yet defeated, subjects?
Visitors from the Arab world flock to Istanbul today, enjoying the city’s cosmopolitan vibe alongside its comfortingly familiar culinary and architectural riches. Turkey’s accelerating pivot towards the Arab world has renewed old connections. Ottoman Sultan Selim the “Grim” conquered Syria and Egypt in 1517. For the next 400 years, Arabs frequented Istanbul as loyal Ottoman subjects. Helen Pfeifer’s Empire of Salons examines the first century of encounter between the Arabs and their rulers. It addresses the question of how the Ottomans managed to integrate the proud, ancient centers of Arabic civilization that were Damascus and Cairo.
The Ottoman Empire has been many things throughout its long history. One of the greatest and gravest threats to Christian Europe. A source of inspiration for Renaissance and Reformation thinkers. An exoticized realm of sultans, slaves and harems. An equal and key partner in the European system of international relations. And, near its end, “the sick man of Europe”.
The conceit of Tulip of Istanbul is that it was “found” as an 18th-century handwritten Ottoman manuscript at a stamp and rare book auction. The arrival of the novel itself is almost as serendipitous: originally published in Turkish in 2009 and then in English in 2015 (also curiously published in Turkey), it is now available to a perhaps wider English-language audience via India’s Niyogi Books.
As a counterpoint to the rich literature of Europeans discovering Asia, readers have access to many accounts by Asians about Europe. These writings hold up a mirror in front of their authors, who, unconsciously, reveal much about their own societies. Mehmed Effendi, the first Turkish ambassador to the court of Louis XV wrote in his Paradise of the Infidels that France was ruled by women, revealing an Ottoman anxiety about the power of the harem. In The Narrative of the Residence of the Persian Princes, visitors from Iran remarked on the sobriety of Britain’s King William IV, compared to the glamor of the Peacock Throne. The Qajar princes wondered how long Iran could maintain its great power status vis-a-vis William’s nation of parsimonious shop keepers.