Ottoman Egypt

This detailed entry provides descriptive information for the manuscript Itinerarium of Jakub Římař (1682–1755) and its significance for the history of Christian-Muslim relations. It was published in the series Christian-Muslim Relations: A Bibliographical History, vol. 14 (Leiden: Brill, 2020), pp. 159–164.
The full Latin title of Římař’s Itinerarium is Itinerarium missionum apostolicarum orientalium Aegypti, Aethiopiae, seu Abyssiniae, aliarumque regionum adjacentium, manu propria conscriptum a R(everendo) P(atre) Jacobo Ržimarž de Cremsirio, which translates as "The travels undertaken on behalf of the Oriental apostolic missions in Egypt, Ethiopia or Abyssinia, and other neighbouring countries, written down by the Reverend Father Jakub Římař of Kroměříž"

Egypt abounds in a great and unique heritage, which is rich and diverse, reflecting the various civilizations and the history it has witnessed for thousands of years. This human heritage is the most wonderful thing left to us by our ancestors over time. Those who visit the monuments of Egypt, from various epochs, locations and with their diverse architecture and embellishments, can only Praise Allah! Praise be to Allah, the Eternal! Praise be to Allah who taught Man what he did not know! Praise be to Allah when we think of the endless numbers of humans who passed by these monuments before us! Who constructed them? How? Why? There are so many questions that take us in the end back to say Praise be to Allah. This architectural and artistic heritage represents a visual history of Egyptian civilization across various epochs of prosperity and power, as well as periods of weakness, with all the moments in between. Seeing this physical heritage with one’s own eyes has a greater impact than reading the books written by historians or viewing facsimiles of manuscripts. This book is a survey of one such human architectural heritage, namely the House of Prince Ibrahim Katkhuda al-Sinnari, located only a few steps away from the Mosque of Sayeda Zeinab. In addition to the architectural and artistic value of the monument, it embodies the history of Cairo during a pivotal era of Egypt’s history, namely the end of the Ottoman Era and the advent of the Egyptian Campaign. The translation of the house-owner depicts the system of rule during that historical period, to which he himself was an essential instrument. The Sinnari House represents one of the finest examples of residential buildings, be they houses or palaces owned by princes and statesmen in the Ottoman Era. The owner and founder endowed the house by force of a
legitimate deed registered with the Sharia Court, and which is now kept in the archives of the Egyptian Ministry of Religious Endowments. The deed is a treasure of information, which is useful in various fields, such as history, archaeology, documents, language, philology, jurisprudence, Sharia and endowments. The meticulous architectural description of the house in the document is amazing, for it almost coincides with the current state of the house. In addition to its great architectural and artistic value, the house has a special historical significance, in particular in terms of its connection with Napoleon’s Egyptian Campaign (1798–1801). A number of the members of the scientific and cultural committee, mostly painters and engineers, lodged in the house. The history and the architecture of al-Sinnari House captivate all those who are interested, whetting their appetite to find out more. The best means to explore this wonderful monument is to visit it, and learn about the details of its history and architecture. This is the purpose of the book in hand. I, thus, invite you to visit al‑Sinnari House—and the other fine monuments of Egypt—in reality; for to see for oneself is a totally different experience.

This article is a study of the brief tenure, rebellion, and sultanate of Egypt’s Ottoman governor Ahmed Pasha (d.1524). It investigates the context of the rebellion, it’s aftermath and impact in Egypt and the Ottoman Empire as an event that showcases a critique of and challenge against the Ottoman imperial enterprise in the Arab lands following the region’s conquest from the Mamluks in 1517. Despite its historical significance, the rebellion has remained in the scholarly margins in sixteenth century Ottoman historical studies. This episode illuminates the theme of opposition to Ottoman imperialism with a focus on the opposition against the administrative implementation of the “Ottoman way” in Egypt following the demise of the Mamluk Sultanate. One of the goals here is to interpret the complex political context that resulted with the revolt. This context connects the empire’s “center” to its “periphery,” allowing us to revisit the socio-political dynamics of Egypt during the first decades of Ottoman rule. A case study of Ahmed Pasha’s revolt thus brings nuance to the state/”center”-oriented narratives that obfuscate the socio-political dynamics of the province/”periphery” by doing a comparative analysis of histories written in Egypt. State-centered narratives typically voice a swift and seamless transition into Ottoman rulership in former Mamluk-ruled territories. As demonstrated in this article, Ahmed Pasha presented a powerful voice of dissent and an ideological critique of, and challenge against, Ottoman sovereignty as well as the implementation of the “Ottoman way” in Egypt.

The history of Egypt under Ottoman rule is one of the least studied
chapters of the history of that country in the Muslim era. Egypt was
ruled by the Mamluk sultans for 267 years (1250–1517); it was an
Ottoman province for 281 years (from the overthrow of the Mamluk
Sultanate by Selim I in 1517 until the French invasion in 1798; formally,
Egypt remained a part of the Ottoman Empire until World War I).
Nevertheless, the Mamluk period has been more thoroughly studied
than the Ottoman period. The reasons seem obvious. In the former,
Egypt was the center of an empire; in the following three centuries, it
was a province. This change in Egypt’s status may account, at least
partially, for the wealth of historical sources—primarily chronicles and
biographical dictionaries—for the Mamluk period in comparison with
the Ottoman period. Nevertheless, the study of the history of Ottoman
Egypt is a challenging and rewarding task. For these three centuries we
have archival source materials—Turkish, Arabic and European
(primarily French)—which are almost totally absent for Mamluk times.
The travel accounts describing Ottoman Egypt written by Turkish,
North African and European visitors are superior in quantity and quality
to what is extant from the Mamluk Sultanate.

NOTE: some (many, perhaps most) aspects of this analysis have been rendered obsolete by new research published since this thesis was written in 1999-2000. I am not currently working on this topic and have posted this here primarily for archival purposes.

The notion of slavery as a system in which one human being is owned by another and is subjecæd to the absolute will of his owner does not apply fully to the situation of slaves in Islamic societies. Though Muslim religious and legal texts presuppose the existence of slavery as an institution, Islam provides a comprehensive system of laws regarding the status of slaves within society, as well as the rights and responsibilities of both slave and owner.

Though practice often differs from the theoretical framework, it can be seen through examination of slavery as it was practiced in three case studies, 'Abbãsid Iraq, Ottoman Egypt and the Sokoto Caliphate, that these legal rulings were largely respected by the slave-owning community. An examination of the theory and the practice of slavery reveals that slaves in these Islamic societies not only have certain inalienable legal rights, but also had a specific place in the societal hierarchy that challenges the traditional concepts of slavery.

Since its discovery by Battiscombe Gunn, it is believed that Saqqara's Ostrakon is able to improve our understanding of how Egyptians designed curved elements, but the geometric significance of the hieratic values is still uncertain. Indeed, in order to obtain an indisputable result, the distance between the vertical ordinates is required, and this distance is not explicitly indicated on the limestone artefact.
But since there were no algebraic formulas at the time of the Pharaohs, a simple grid-based procedure was developed such as those used by the Egyptians to reproduce the scale drawings, to try to decipher the geometric meaning of the curve drawn on the find.
To conclude, this simple process permits to understand that the five hieratic values of the Saqqara Ostrakon describe a segmental arch whose span and rise correspond to the architectural proportions of several Egyptian tombs and arches, and that the numerical sequence of the artefact could be considered the most "ancient" mathematical formula of the circle.

Journal of Arabic Literature, 44/2 (2013): 181-239

This article deals with a literary offering presented by Ibn Sulṭān (d. 1544) — a Mamluk Damascene ʿālim who eventually became the Ottoman muftī of Damascus — to Sultan Selīm I that dates back to shortly after the Ottoman conquest of Syria. Entitled al-Jawāhir al-muḍiyyah fī ayyām dawlat al-Turkiyyah, this hitherto unpublished work is here made available in a critical edition introduced by an extended literary analysis. With both inter- and contextual corroboration, my close reading of al-Jawāhir identifies an extended double entendre: while a " benevolent reading " shows praise fostered by the author's ambitions, a " malevolent reading " reveals exhorta-tion stemming from the author's anxieties, subtly conveyed through the text's modes of shifting between topics and interweaving of multiple voices of authority. My close reading thus reveals al-Jawāhir to be as much a specimen of a time-honored genre of elite communication as it is a product of its specific author and his time. By recognizing the personalized message conveyed by the author in turning to the highly conventionalized medium of the literary offering, this article adds to the ongoing reevaluation of other seemingly rigid genres, such as the mirror for princes and qaṣīdah.

Since its discovery by Battiscombe Gunn, it is believed that Saqqara's Ostrakon is able to improve our understanding of how Egyptians designed curved elements, but the geometric significance of the hieratic values is still uncertain. Indeed, in order to obtain an indisputable result, the distance between the vertical ordinates is required, and this distance is not explicitly indicated on the limestone artefact.
But since there were no algebraic formulas at the time of the Pharaohs, a simple grid-based procedure was developed such as those used by the Egyptians to reproduce the scale drawings, to try to decipher the geometric meaning of the curve drawn on the find.
To conclude, this simple process permits to understand that the five hieratic values of the Saqqara Ostrakon describe a segmental arch whose span and rise correspond to the architectural proportions of several Egyptian tombs and arches, and that the numerical sequence of the artefact could be considered the most "ancient" mathematical formula of the circle.

1517 yılında Osmanlı topraklarına katılan Mısır, İstanbul’dan yönetildiği yaklaşık
dört yüz yıl boyunca Osmanlı otoritesi ile kendine has bir ilişki kurmuştur. Siyasi
açıdan çalkantılı bir seyir izleyen bu ilişkinin sosyo-kültürel boyutu ise yoğun
bir etkileşimi bünyesinde barındırmaktadır. Bu etkileşim kendisini en çok iki
kültür arasındaki ortak kelimelerde göstermiştir. Siyasi ve askeri alanda pek çok
terim birebir Türkçe’den alınırken, Mısır’a has bazı rütbelerin de başına “baş” kelimesi
eklenerek kullanıldığı bilinmektedir. Bu türden unvan ve titrler Tolunoğullarından
Kavalalı Hanedanı’na kadar uzanan bin yılı aşkın bir süre boyunca
Mısır siyasetinde kullanılmakta ve çok geniş bir alanı kapsamaktadır. Bu çalışma
ise daha ziyade, Osmanlı kimliğinin ne derece etkilediği konusunda hala tartışmalar
bulunan sosyal, ilmi ve kültürel alanda Mısır dilinde yer etmiş kelimelere
odaklanmıştır. Cebertî’nin eserinde, giyimden kutlama ve törenlere, lakap ve
ünvanlardan deyimlere, ilmi ve kültürel hayata ilişkin pek çok Türkçe kelimenin
kullanıldığı görülmektedir. Çalışma, 18. Yüzyıl sonu ve 19. yüzyıl başlarında
Mısır’a ilişkin önemli bilgileri ihtiva eden ve vakanüvis Abdurrahman el-Cebertî
tarafından kaleme alınmış olan Acâibu’l-âsâr fî’t-terâcim ve’l-ahbâr adlı kronikte
geçen Türkçe kökenli tabirlerden hareketle Osmanlı üst-kültürünün Mısır sosyal
hayatındaki etkilerini incelemeyi hedeflemektedir.

The following maps were composite sketches I drew in early 2009 for a research project on the patterns of patronage of urban development in Cairo by Ottoman governors during the first decades after the Ottoman conquest in the 16th century. I've not looked at this material since then. I am posting these sketches online in case they are of interest and would be happy to share what notes I've retained on this topic.

Relation sur le cambriolage et le meurtre commis dans la maison de Monsieur Napollon au Caire et sur l'enquête des autorités égyptiennes pour arrêter et châtier les voleurs en janvier 1761. Transcription d'un petit manuscrit portant le n°4239 de l'inventaire de la librairie Chamonal à Paris.

While our understanding of the Gülşenīye and its Egyptian chronicler, Muḥyī-i Gülşenī, has progressed greatly, various aspects of the latter remain underexplored. This chapter seeks to rectify this by looking into two of his unpublished works. While these share their topic — an Ottoman punitive expedition against marauding Bedouins in Egypt — they are remarkably different. The first is a mesnevī that depicts the expedition in bloody detail and lauds the Ottoman troops as Firdawsian lions in pursuit of the gazel-like Bedouins. The second is a risāle, in which Muḥyī builds a legal case. Working from a tefsīr of the Āyetü’l-Ḥirābe — one strikingly similar to the “state-sanctioned” tefsīr of Ebū’s-Suʿūd Efendi — he identifies the Bedouins as Koranic brigands, thus legitimizing their execution as fully şerʿan. While these texts reveal some lesser-known dimensions of Muḥyī’s personality (his pursuance of patronage and his judicial activity) and illustrate the empire’s larger trends (institutionalization of Sufism and legal Hanafization), I argue that they also exemplify an important strand of Ottoman legitimation. Rereading the texts as the two halves of a literary “diptych”, I demonstrate how the author reifies siyāset-i şerʿīye as a particular vision of empire: a vision in which the mesnevī’s siyāset and the risāle’s şerīʿat, the ehl-i seyf and the ehl-i kalem, sultan and imam, and, indeed, the Ottoman cause and the Umma merge into one. Hence, not only do these texts demonstrate how Sufi authors performed their own identity, but also how these were instrumental in disseminating an imperial reality outward and top-down from the center.

This article examines the deposition of the Ottoman governor of Egypt by Cairo’s soldiers in 1676, and a subsequent court case, in order to illustrate the increasing importance of law and legal institutions in Ottoman politics during the seventeenth century. I show that in the court case, the soldiers sought to constrain the actions of future Ottoman governors by establishing legal limits on their authority. I argue that the soldiers displayed a constitutional sensibility: a belief that the conduct of government was bound by rules, and that courts were the place to establish and enforce these rules. This allows us to see the frequent rebellions in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire in a new light: as part of an emerging concept of the rule of law that was central to the empire’s transformation from a patrimonial monarchy into an early modern bureaucratic state.

A study of Islamic law and political power in the Ottoman Empire’s richest provincial city.

What did Islamic law mean in the early modern period, a world of great Muslim empires? Often portrayed as the quintessential jurists’ law, to a large extent it was developed by scholars outside the purview of the state. However, for the Sultans of the Ottoman Empire, justice was the ultimate duty of the monarch, and Islamic law was a tool of legitimation and governance. James E. Baldwin examines how the interplay of these two conceptions of Islamic law – religious scholarship and royal justice – undergirded legal practice in Cairo, the largest and richest city in the Ottoman provinces. Through detailed studies of the various formal and informal dispute resolution institutions and practices that formed the fabric of law in Ottoman Cairo, his book contributes to key questions concerning the relationship between the shari‘a and political power, the plurality of Islamic legal practice, and the nature of centre-periphery relations in the Ottoman Empire.

The patriarchate of Nicanor (1866-1869) was a time of internal perturbations for the Church of Alexandria. The Orthodox Communities of Egypt and foreign diplomats were key actors in the Church dramas. Playing against Nicanor, his enemies used a rumor of patriarch’s weak-mindedness as a trump card. Was Nicanor really weak-minded? We investigate this question referring to some new archive documents.

The Karaites in the Ottoman Empire were a heterogenic group that included
communities of Arabic speakers, mainly in Cairo, Damascus and Jerusalem,
and of Greek (and later Turkish) speakers, mainly in Istanbul. All Karaite
communities lived in multicultural cities, alongside Muslims, Christians
and Rabbanite Jews. The article discusses the relations between Rabbanites
and Karaites in urban spaces. In the absence of a central leadership among
Ottoman Jewry, the Karaites were not officially subjected to a Rabbanite
leader; however, a pattern of unofficial informal subjugation to Rabbanite
representatives developed due to the economic and demographic inferiority
of the Karaites compared to the Rabbanites. This hierarchy, in addition to
differences in Halakha and the Hebrew calendar, provoked conflicts between
the two groups that were settled by the Sharia court or the Ottoman governor.
Karaites and Rabbanites shared common sacred texts and values and
cooperated in associations such as the arrangements of funerals (at least in
Cairo). At the same time, they formed two separate and rival societies, which
periodically slid into disputes and conflicts. The article seeks to present a
picture of the fluid and complex view the Rabbanites held by their Karaite
co-religionists. The Rabbanites were sometimes conceptualized as brothers
and other times as enemies, as relations between the two groups shifted
depending on local circumstances and various other factors.