Of Cannons and Canons: Imperial Expansion and Islamic Literacy in the Ottoman Empire

The bureaucratic focus of Ottoman historiography has often cast the state as the primary architect of the Ottoman intellectual world. Although imperial appointments and foundations were powerful forces in steering the course of Ottoman scholarship, this paper examines how spaces beyond the direct control of the state shaped early modern Islamic reading practices.

Building on a variety of manuscript and printed sources, the paper investigates changes in Islamic interpretative practices following the 1516-7 Ottoman incorporation of the Mamluk Arab lands, and the role of informal scholarly gatherings in facilitating those changes. Although Anatolian and Arab scholars had always been in contact, the conquest produced an immediate and considerable intensification of encounters between the two groups. As scholars on both sides began to travel across the newly expanded empire, they met and exchanged ideas less in the formal context of the madrasa than in informal scholarly gatherings often called majālis (sing. majlis).

Structured not by imperial decrees but by an Islamic etiquette passed down over the centuries (adab), these gatherings functioned as key spaces where books and ideas were conceived, shared and discussed. As such, they influenced not only what Ottoman scholars read, but how they read; and not only what they wrote, but how they wrote. This paper examines how these gatherings left their traces in both the form and the content of genres common across 16th-century Ottoman lands. Understanding the social contexts of written texts not only helps us to better grasp their many messages, it also suggests the importance of imperial expansion for processes of canon formation and for the diffusion of early modern Islamic literacy.