Historical Writing and the State: Sultans in the Biographical Writing of 16th and 17th Century Historians of Bilād al-Shām

Abstract

By the 1970’s, the history of the Arab lands under Ottoman rule had been finally seen as elusive and yet to be thoroughly explored by scholars who had grown increasingly dissatisfied with the nationalist interpretations of the Ottoman past. This thesis follows on this approach of revisiting Arab-Ottoman history through the sources that we have left of the four-centuries long Ottoman rule in the Arab world. Particularly, it aims at examining the early modern attitude of Arab religious scholars of Bilād al-Shām towards the figure they were subject to, the sultan. It shifts the focus from studying the relationships of the Arabs with the provincial governments towards examining the relationship with the central government through the particular lens of determining attitudes of ulema of Bilād al-Shām towards the Ottoman ruling figure. Biographical dictionaries covering the 16th and until the mid-17th century, and which have entries on Ottoman sultans, were utilized in this research. These works were authored by the learned elite of the society of Bilād al-Shām and reflect their own dispositions, and perhaps to a lesser degree, that of the general public. Their evaluation of the Ottoman sultans is uniformly positive, founded on the conformity of the basis of the Ottoman sultans’ rule and general conduct on one hand with the defining aspects of legitimacy in Islamic legal and political theory on the other. The thesis touches upon the topic of uniform social and political standards across the regions of Bilād al-Shām and Anatolia, highlighting that broadly similar pillars of legitimation are shared between Ottoman Turkish scholars and their counterparts in Bilād al-Shām, based on a shared Islamic social fabric