Vortrag von Derin Terzioğlu: Reckoning with Religious Diversity in the Ottoman Empire: A Historiographical Discussion (18.06.2024)

Referentin: Derin Terzioğlu

This talk aims to critically assess the changing paradigms in the study of the social and political history of Islam in the Ottoman Empire from circa 1500 until circa 1800. From around the 1960s until well into the 1990s, the dominant tendency among Ottomanists was to focus on the pragmatics of empire (both empire-building and empire-maintaining). Within that analytical framework, historians generally preferred to conceptualize the role of Islam in the Ottoman realms as one of (ex post facto) legitimation. In more recent decades, many Ottomanists, influenced by diverse historiographic and ideological currents, have begun to attribute greater agency to Islamic ideas as a source of normativity in the Ottoman realms. Important areas of research in this regard have been the social and political history of Islamic law and the politics of Sunni confession-building. At the same time, thanks to the surge of publications of Ottoman-era jurisprudential, theological, and devotional texts, we now have a much more layered understanding of the complex bundle of ideas and sensibilities that Islam represented to its diverse practitioners in the Ottoman realms. In this context, a major challenge is to figure out the social reach of these ideas and sensibilities, and the degree to which, and the ways in which, they and the regulatory and disciplinary practices that they inspired, informed and shaped people’s behaviour on the ground. Conversely, it is also important to understand the ways in which the everyday realities of everyday Muslims impacted and shaped these ideas and programs.

18.06.2024

18:00 – 20:00 Uhr

Hörsaal JO 1
Johannisstr. 4
48143 Münster

Veranstalter*innen: Philip Bockholt / Exzellenzcluster "Religion und Politik"