Bibliographic Essay

Traditional historiography of the Ottoman Empire assumed that the Ottomans simply inherited the Islamic tradition of earlier centuries. It is only in the last several years that Ottoman historians, basing themselves on meticulous research in both the documentary record and in manuscripts, have made the case that the Ottomans had their own programme of ‘Sunnitisation’.

Karen Barkey’s widely read Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) is the most recent attempt to provide an overall narrative of the Ottoman Empire, with religious diversity as a major theme. Barkey, too, offers a more nuanced conceptualisation of Ottoman toleration, although in other ways her approach is quite traditional. She argues for an empire that was latitudinarian in its earlier centuries, only to become more orthodox and rigid later on, with a consequent deterioration in intercommunal relations. M. Baer’s Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), by contrast, is a study of the Ottoman Empire during the reign of just one sultan - Mehmet IV - and is interesting to read alongside Barkey’s more general narrative.

Elizabeth Zachariadou’s article, ‘The Neo-Martyr’s Message’, Δελτιο Κέντρου Μικρασιατικόν Σπουδών (Bulletin of the Centre for Asia Minor Studies) 8 (1990-1), 51-63 provides an excellent sense of the ideological stakes at play in the phenomenon of the neo-martyrs.

Debates over sectarianism loom very large among historians of the modern Arab world. Most of the interest falls on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but several studies do consider earlier periods and how Ottoman governance did or did not contribute to the sectarian struggles that developed later on. Bruce Masters’s Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World: The Roots of Sectarianism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001) and Ussama Makdisi’s The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Lebanon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000) are both valuable in this regard. See James Grehan’s Twilight of the Saints: Everyday Religion in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) for a rather different approach to the religious culture of Ottoman Arab provinces, and to intercommunal relations. Among other things, Grehan develops the concept of ‘agrarian religion’.