Being Arab in 16th-Century Istanbul

Sometime in the sixteenth century, Ottoman scholarship outgrew its youthful breeches and donned the robe of empire. Whereas fifteenth-century Anatolian madrasas relied on the expertise of men trained elsewhere, by the late sixteenth century, not only foreign-born scholars, but scholars educated in other parts of the empire were all but absent in the rosters of high-level Ottoman educational institutions. This paper examines the chronology and mechanisms of this exclusion by considering the changing reception of Arab men of letters in the Ottoman capital in the sixteenth century. 

The paper will focus on the experiences of three Arab scholars who traveled to Istanbul in the 1500s, 1530s, and 1570s, respectively. Yet rather than seek the cause for their marginalization in Ottoman institutional practices, the paper posits a “soft culture” of social gatherings as one of the key means by which the scholarly arena became increasingly impenetrable. Examining the exclusionary practices through which certain learned families protected their privilege, the paper will show how etiquette and access to particular social circles increasingly helped to determine professional success. Far from isolated cases, these three interwoven stories afford a vista onto the larger transformations of Ottoman state and society in the “magnificent” sixteenth century.