Man in the image of God in the image of the times: Sufi self-narratives and the diary of Niyāzī-i Miscombining dot belowrī (1618-94)

Studia Islamica

Volumn 94, Issue , 2002, Pages 139-165

  Terzioǧlu, Derin ^a  

^a KOÇ UNIVERSITY   (Turkey)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34250003603     PISSN: 05855292     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: None     Document Type: Article

References (87)

1. Cited in John Alden Williams, The Word of Islam (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994)
2. Margaret Smith, trans., Readings from the Mystics of Islam (London: Luzac, 1972), 34
3. nd ed. (Chicago, 1953), 221-293
4. The classic essay on Arabic autobiography is Franz Rosenthal, "Die Arabische Autobiographie," Studia Arabica, I (1939): 1-40
5. for the most recent collaborative study of the genre, see the Special Issue on Arabic Autobiography, ed. D.F. Reynolds in Edebiyât, 7 (1997)
6. and Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition, ed. D.F. Reynolds (Berkeley, L.A. and London: University of California Press, 2001)
7. For the autobiographies of the Mughal rulers, see Stephen Frederick Dale, "Steppe Humanism: The Autobiographical Writings of Zahir al-Din Muhammad Babur, 1483-1530," UMES 22 (1990): 37-58
8. For a survey of Ottoman first-person literature before the nineteenth century, see Cemal Kafadar, "Self and Others: The Diary of a Dervish in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul and First Person Narratives in Ottoman Literature," SI 59 (1989): 121-150
9. and Suraiya Faroqhi, Subjects of the Sultan: Culture and Daily Life in the Ottoman Empire (London and N.Y.: I.B. Tauris, 2000), 194-203
10. For a sampling of the studies that reappraise the question of individualism in early modern European autobiography, see T.C. Heller, M. Sosna and D.E Wellbery, eds., Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986)
11. P. Coleman, J. Lewis and J. Kowalik, eds : Representations of the Self from the Renaissance to Romanticism, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)
12. and Michael Mascuch, Origins of the Individualist Self: Autobiography and Self-Identity in England, 1591-1791 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996)
13. For an insightful discussion of Lacanian and Sufi notions of the self, see Katherine Pratt Ewing, Arguing Sainthood: Modernity. Psychoanalysis and Islam, (Durham and London: Duke University, 1997), esp. 1-37, 253-267
14. and "The Illusion of Wholeness: Culture, Self, and the Experience of Inconsistency," Ethos 18 (1990a): 251-78
15. For an exploration of "the subject" in Ottoman court poetry from the "post-Lacanian" perspective of Guattari and Deleuze, see Walter G. Andrews, "Singing the Alienated 'I': Guattari, Deleuze and Lyrical Decodings of the Subject in Ottoman Divan Poetry," The Yale Journal of Criticism 6, 2 (1993): 191-219
16. This trend, nevertheless, may be changing. Two recent studies that help bridge the disciplinary gap mentioned above are Carl Ernst, Eternal Garden: Mysticism, History and Politics at a South Asian Sufī Center (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992)
17. and Vincent J. Cornell, Realm of the Saint: Power and Authority in Moroccan Sufism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998)
18. In addition to the works cited in note 7, see Saints orientaux, ed. Denise Aigle (Damascus and Paris: IFEAD, 1995)
19. Jawid A. Mojeddedi, The Biographical Tradition in Sufism: The tcombining dot belowabaqāt genre from al-Sulamī to Jāmī (Richmond, Surrey: Curzon, 2001)
20. and Le saint et son milieu, ou comment lire les sources hagiographiques, ed. Rachida Chih and Denis Gril, Cahier des annales islamologiques 19 (2000)
21. and A.Y. Ocak, Kültür Tarihi Kaynaǧi Olarak Menakibnameler (Metodolojik bir Yaklaşim) (Ankara: TTK, 1992). For the secondary literature on Sufi first-person literature written outside of Ottoman lands, see footnote 25
22. For a more detailed discussion, see Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1975), 98-193
23. and Franz Rosenthal, "'I am you': Individual piety and society in Islam" In Individualism and conformity in classical Islam: Fifth Giorgio Levi Della Vida Biennial Conference, eds. Amin Banani and Speros Vryonis (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz, 1977), 33-60
24. For a recent investigation of the different genres of life writing in early modern Europe, see The Rhetorics of Life-Writing in Early Modern Europe: Forms of Biography from Cassandra Fedele to Louis XIV, eds. Thomas F. Mayer and D.R. Woolf (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1995)
25. Reynolds, ed., Interpreting the Self, 36-51; for Ottoman examples, see the Annotated Guide appended to this study
26. For a historical and literary analysis of this genre, as employed by South Asian Sufis, see Ernst, Eternal Garden: Mysticism, History and Politics, 62-84. In Ottoman literature the best example of a text that is related to this genre but is at the same time a personal diary is Hcombining breve belowüdā'ī's Kelimāt 'an al-tibr al-maslūk fī mā jāra bayna hcombining dot belowadcombining dot belowrat al-shayhcombining breve below wa bayna hadha 'l-fakcombining dot belowīr fī athnā al-sulūk (Words of gold which were exchange between this poor one and the venerable master during initiation), discussed further below
27. For the classic humanist account of the ancient Roman origins of self-examination, see Georg Misch, Geschichte der Autobiographie, pt. 1, vol. 1 ( 1907)
28. for a return to the same theme by a critic of humanism, see Michel Foucault, "Technologies of the Self." in Technologies of the Self. Seminar with Michel Foucault, eds. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1988). 16-49
29. Cemal Kafadar, "Mütereddit bir mutasavvif: Üskü p'lü Asiye Hatun'un Rüya Defteri, 1641-43," Top kapi Sarayi Müzesi Yillik 5 (1992): 168-222 (includes transcription and facsimile)
30. also published by the same historian without the facsimile and full transcription as Asiye Hatun, Rüya Mektuplari (Istanbul: Oǧlak, 1994)
31. For another interpretation of "Ascombining dot belowiye Hcombining breve belowatun's "hesitation," see Faroqhi, Subjects of the Sultan, 116
32. A modern Turkish transcription of the memoirs can be found in Mesih İbrahimhakkioǧlu, Erzurumlu İbrahim Hakki (Istanbul, 1973), 13-40
33. Ahmet Karamustafa, God's unruly friends: dervish groups in the Islamic later period, 1200-1550 (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994), especially 25-38
34. For a discussion of the genre in the twelfth century, see Carl W. Ernst Ruzbihan Baqli: Mysticism and the Rhetoric of Sainthood in Persian Sufism (Richmond: Curzon Press, 1996), 93-101
35. Also see Jonathan G. Katz, "Visionary Experience, Autobiography, and Sainthood in North African Islam," Princeton Papers in Near Eastern Studies I (1992): 85-117
36. Dreams, Sufism and Sainthood: The Visionary Career of Muhcombining dot belowammad al-Zawāwī (Leiden: E.J.Brill, 1996)
37. On shath in "classical" Sufism, see Carl Ernst, Words of Ecstasy in Sufism, (Albany: SUNY Press, 1996)
38. for a comparative approach to the same, see Michael A. Sells, Mystical Languages of Unsaying, (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1994)
39. On Tibetan spiritual autobiographies, see Janet Gyatso, Apparitions of the Self: The Secret Autobiographies of a Tibetan Visionary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998)
40. George Makdisi, "The diary in Islamic historiography: some notes," History and Theory, 25, 2 (1986): 173-185
41. For the Arabic text and English translation of one such diary, see Idem. "Autograph diary of an eleventh-century historian of Baghdad" BSOAS, 18, 1 (1956): 9-31 (part 1); 18, 2(1956): 239-260 (part 2); 19, 1 (1957): 2-48 (part 3); 19, 2(1957): 281-303 (part 4); 19, 3 (1957): 426-443 (part 5)
42. On Ottoman diaries see Kafadar, "Self and Others," 128-130
43. Madeline Zilfi, "The Diary of a Müderris: A New Source for Ottoman Biography," Journal of Turkish Studies 1 (1977): 157-173
44. An outdated but nevertheless indispensable account of the institutional history of the Sufi orders is J. Spencer Trimingham, The Sufī Orders in Islam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971 )
45. Madeline Zilfi, "The Kadizadelis: Discordant Revivalism in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul, "Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 4 (October 1986): 251-271
46. and The Politics of Piety: the Ottoman Ulema in the Postclassical Age (1600-1800) (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1988)
47. for an example from Miscombining dot belowrī's time period, see R.F. Kreutel, ed., Die Autobiographie des Dolmetschers Osman Aga aus Temeschwar (Hertford, 1980)
48. Compare with the more restrained treatments of the emotional self in medieval Arabic autobiography as well as in some examples of Ottoman Sufi literature: Kirsten Brustad, "Imposing Order: Reading the Conventions of Representation in al-Suyūtī's Autobiography," Edebiyât 7 (1997): 327-344
49. Uriel Heyd, Studies in Old Ottoman Criminal Law, ed. V.L. Ménage (Oxford : Clarendon Press, 1973), 57-8, 63, 96-7, 102
50. and Leslie Peirce, "She is trouble ... and I will divorce her"; Orality, honor, and representation in the Ottoman court of 'Aintab" in Women in the Medieval Islamic World, ed. Gavin R.G. Hambly (London: Macmillan, 1999), 269-300, especially 286-289
51. Interestingly, such anti-pederasty sentiments were expressed both by and against the Kadizadelis. For Vānī Efendi's attempts to ban Ottoman grandees from taking young boy attendants on campaigns, see Chevalier d'Arvieux, Mémoires du Chevalier d'Arvieux (Paris, 1735), vol. 4, 390-5
52. For medieval Muslim perspectives on pederasty and other sexual "irregularities," see Everett K. Rowson, "The Categorization of Gender and Sexual Irregularity in Medieval Arabic Vice Lists" in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity (New York and London: Routledge, 1991), 50-79
53. Cantemir, The History of the Growth and Decay of the Othman Empire, trans. N. Tindal (London, 1734), 15
54. Yohanan Friedmann, Prophecy Continuous: Aspects of Ahcombining dot belowmadī Religious Thought and Its Medieval Background (Berkeley, L.A. and London: University of California Press, 1989). 49-93
55. Ernst, Ruzbihan Baqli, 24-26
56. Ernst, Words of Ecstasy, 22
57. For a recent study that postulates a link between Ibn 'Arabī's teachings on sainthood and Shiite eschatology, see Gerald Elmore, Islamic Sainthood in the Fulness of Time: Ibn al-'Arabī's Book of the Fabulous Gryphon (Leiden, Boston, Köln: Brill, 1999)
58. Chodkiewicz, Seal of the Saints, 134-7
59. On "Christianizing Islam" among the Ottoman ulema and Sufis, see A.Y. Ocak, Osmanli Toplumunda Zindiklar ve Mülhidler, 228-243
60. th century English observer on a supposed secret sect of "the Chupmessahis" or "good followers of the Messiah" in the Ottoman palace and capital, see Sir Paul Rycaut, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire (London, 1668), 129. The blatant Christian bias of the latter testimony, nevertheless, calls for a cautious reading
61. On Muslim views of the Mosaic law in the medieval period, see Camilla Adang, Muslim writers on Judaism and the Hebrew Bible: from Ibn Rabbān to Ibn Hazm (Leiden, N.Y., Köln: Brill, 1996), 192-222
62. For a more general discussion of Muslim perceptions of the Jews, see Bernard Lewis, The Jews of Islam (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984)
63. The classic work on Sabbatai Zwi is Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626-1676, tr. R.J.Z. Verblowsky, Bollingen Series 93 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973)
64. For the Ottoman background and especially the involvement of Vānī Efendi in the affair, see Zilfi, Politics of Piety, 153-156
65. Jane Hathaway, "The grand vizier and the false messiah: The Sabbatai Sevi controversy and the Ottoman reform in Egypt," JAOS 4 (1997): 665-671
66. For spurious Sabbatian traditions linking Miscombining dot belowrī and Sabbatai, see Paul B. Fenton, "Shabbatai Sebi and his Muslim contemporary Muhammad an-Niyazi" in Approaches to Judaism in Medieval Times, ed. David R. Blumenthal (Atlanta, Georgia: Scholars Press, 1988), vol. 3, 81-88
67. Stephen Hirtenstein, The Unlimited Mercifier: The spiritual life and thought of Ibn 'Arabi (Oxford and Ashland, Oregon: Anqa Publishing and White Cloud Press, 1999), 118-121
68. On typological autobiographies in early modern Europe, E. Pearlman, "Typological Autobiography in Seventeenth-Century England," Biography 8, 2 (Spring 1985): 95-118
69. For an insightful discussion of the use of another highly complex typological system, astrology, as a mode of self-representation during the Renaissance, see Anthony Grafton, Cardano's Cosmos: The Worlds and Works of a Renaissance Astrologer (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999), 178-198
70. Wootton, "Lucien Febvre and the Problem of Unbelief in the Early Modern Period," Journal of Modern History 60 (1988): 695-730
71. John Edwards, "Religious Faith and Doubt in Late Medieval Spain: Soria circa 1450-1500," Past and Present 120 (1988)Ş 3-25
72. C.J. Somerville, "Debate: Religious Faith, Doubt and Atheism," and John Edwards, "Reply," Past and Present 128 (August 1990): 152-161
73. C.A. Kors, Atheism in France, 1650-1729, vol. 1: The Orthodox Sources of Disbelief (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990)
74. Hellmut Ritter, "Muslim Mystics Strife with God," Oriens 5 (1952): 1-15
75. For examples of disputatious poems by Kizilbaş-Alevi and Bektashi poets, see A. Gölpinarli, Alevî Bektaşî Nefesleri (Istanbul: İnkilap, 1992), 213
76. and İsmail Özmen, Alevi-Bektaşi Şiirleri
77. On the interconnections between different parts of the world in the early modern era, see the articles in the issue devoted to "Early Modernities" in Daedalus, 127, 3 (Summer 1998)
78. Joseph Fletcher, "Integrative History: Parallels and Interconnections in the Early Modern Period, 1500-1800," Journal of Turkish Studies 9 (1985): 37-57
79. Jack Goldstone, "East and West in the Seventeenth Century: Political Crises in Stuart England, Ottoman Turkey, and Ming China," Comparative Studies in Society and History 30 (1938): 103-142
80. Niels Steensgaard, "The Seventeenth-Century Crisis and the Unity of Eurasian History," Modern Asian Studies 24, 4 (1990): 683-697
81. and John E. Wills, 1688: A Global History (N.Y. and London: Norton, 2001)
82. On "anxiety" in early modern European culture see William J. Bouwsma, "Anxiety and the Formation of Early Modern Culture" in Barbara C. Malament, ed., After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J.H. Hexter (Philadelphia, 1980), 215-246
83. on masculinity-related anxieties in early modern Europe, see Mark Breitenberg, Anxious masculinity in early modern England (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
84. Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning From More to Shakespeare (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1980)
85. for a "literary historical" approach to the same question, see Marshall Grossman, The Story of All Things: Writing the Self in English Renaissance Narrative Poetry (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998)
86. Marcel Gauchet, The disenchantment of the world: A political history of religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997)
87. for a more nuanced exploration of the same paradigm in the context of early modern New England, see David D. Hall, Worlds of Wonder: Days of Judgment: Popular Religious Belief in Early New England (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989)