Illuminated by the Light of Islam and the Glory of the Ottoman Sultanate: Self-Narratives of Conversion to Islam in the Age of Confessionalization

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)

Acknowledgments:

The research for this article was made possible through the generous support of the Social Science Research Council and the American Research Institute in Turkey. I thank my colleagues David Atwill, Nina Safran, Kumkum Chatterjee, Ronnie Hsia, Ebru Turan, Natalie Rothman, Tolga Esmer, and the anonymous CSSH reviewers for their insightful comments and helpful suggestions.

 

In 1556-1557 a Hungarian convert to Islam by the name of Murad b. Abdullah, otherwise serving as an imperial interpreter (dragoman, tercüman) for the Ottoman Porte, penned a polemical treatise entitled The Guide for One's Turning towards God. In it, he introduces the essentials of the Muslim faith by arguing Islam's superiority to Christianity and Judaism. In the conclusion to his work Murad states that by writing this treatise he hopes to bring about the conversion of Christians from different parts of Europe (Firengistan) and secure the salvation of their souls by bringing them to Islam. With this goal in mind, ten years after completing the text in Ottoman Turkish Murad translated it into Latin, inscribing the translation onto the margins of the Ottoman text so that Christians in the remotest parts of Firengistan could understand it and be drawn to the true faith. To this curious bilingual work he then added an autobiographical section, in both languages, describing the process of his own conversion to Islam.¹

To a student of early modern European history this story sounds ordinary enough: polemical autobiographical narratives of conversion from one Christian denomination to another were a staple of the propaganda wars waged among states and religious factions in the era of confessional polarization that swept across Christendom in the sixteenth century.² From the standpoint of Islamic and Ottoman history, however, Murad's account is an unusual find. Although different autobiographical narratives, such as diaries, captivity narratives, travelogues, dream books, and records of mystical visions are well attested to in Ottoman manuscript collections,³ this is one of few autobiographical narratives of conversion to Islam (from Christianity or Judaism) in pre-modern Islamic history, and the earliest source of this kind written in Ottoman Turkish discovered so far.

What accounts for the appearance of Ottoman self-narratives of conversion starting in the second half of...