Aqquyunlu

Imperial grimoires—that is, manuals on various forms of magic and divination written for or commissioned by royal readers—proliferated across the early modern Persianate world, more than paralleling the grimoire boom in Renaissance Europe. In extreme contrast to their contemporary Latin or English cognates, however, far less imperial in tenor, these Persian occult-scientific manuals have been left almost wholly unstudied. This programmatic article diagnoses the colonialist-orientalist causes for this wild imbalance in comparative early modern Western intellectual and imperial historiography and outlines a philological way forward. Far from being evidence for “the superstition of the Moslem natives,” such manuals are an indispensable aperture onto precisely those processes—common to Islamdom and Christendom alike—by which we define Western early modernity: textualization, canonization, standardization, confessionalization, centralization, imperialization, bureaucratization, democratization and mathematization. Yet they also record the religiocultural and institutional divergences that so distinguish the Islamicate and especially Persianate experience of early modernity from the Latin Christianate. Historians of books, of science and of empire must therefore finally overcome the eurocentrism and occultophobia still endemic in these fields, and cease judging Islamicate imperial occultism by Christianate standards, or simply writing it out of history altogether.

This collection of thirteen essays addresses the intellectual, religious and literary culture of medieval Anatolia and the early Ottoman realm of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, focusing on texts written in Arabic, Persian and Old Anatolian Turkish as case studies. The introductory chapter surveys the beylik (Turkish principalities) period and the emergence of Anatolian Turkish as a vernacular literary language in the fourteenth century. The subsequent chapters present a wide range of topics, ranging from proto-Bektashi poetry and the Vefa'iyye to the emergence of the Ottoman scholarly system. These scholarly essays aim not only to move beyond Köprülü’s nationalist paradigm of Anatolian cultural life with new approaches, but also to provide background for further research and point to new avenues of inquiry in this relatively neglected field of study.
The volume may be purchased through the Ergon Publisher's website: http://www.ergon-verlag.de/en/orientalistik/istanbuler-texte-und-studien/band-34.php

The imperial ideologies developed in the post-Mongol Persianate world represent both a break with Islamic precedent and a realization of the millenarian universalism inherent in Islam itself.  Early modern Muslim dynasts—styling themselves saint-philosopher-kings, millennial sovereigns and divine cosmocrators—combined Chinggisid, Persian and Islamic symbols of religiopolitical legitimacy in their quest for world domination, emblematized by Alexander the Great, Chinggis Khan and Amir Temür.  During this profoundly messianic era, sultans and saints thus competed for sacral power (walaya); securing access to this power became a driving concern of ruling and scholarly elites, whether by way of sufism, occultism or Alidism, and often eclectic combinations of all three.  The present chapter surveys these new strategies of religiopolitical legitimation pursued between the 14th-17th centuries by the Timurid, Aqquyunlu, Safavid, Uzbek, Mughal and Ottoman Empires, constituent members of the vast Persian cosmopolis stretching from the Balkans and Anatolia in the west to China and India in the east.

This study presents and intellectual- and literary-historically contextualizes a remarkable but as yet unpublished treatise by Ibn Turka (d. 1432), foremost occult philosopher of Timurid Iran:  the Munāẓara-yi Bazm u Razm.  As its title indicates, this ornate Persian work, written in 1426 in Herat for the Timurid prince-calligrapher Bāysunghur (d. 1433), takes the form of a literary debate, a venerable Arabo-Persian genre that exploded in popularity in the post-Mongol period.  Yet it triply transgresses the bounds of its genre, and doubly marries Arabic-Mamluk literary and imperial culture to Persian-Timurid.  For here Ibn Turka recasts the munāẓara as philosophical romance and the philosophical romance as mirror for princes, imperializing the razm u bazm and sword vs. pen tropes within an expressly lettrist framework, making explicit the logic of the coincidentia oppositorum (majmaʿ al-aḍdād) long implicit in the genre in order to ideologically weaponize it.  For the first time in the centuries-old Arabo-Persian munāẓara tradition, that is, wherein such debates were often rhetorically but never theoretically resolved, Ibn Turka marries multiple opposites in a manner clearly meant to be instructive to his Timurid royal patron:  he is to perform the role of Emperor Love (sulṭān ʿishq), transcendent of all political-legal dualities, avatar of the divine names the Manifest (al-ẓāhir) and the Occult (al-bāṭin).  This lettrist mirror for Timurid princes is thus not simply unprecedented in Persian or indeed Arabic literature, a typical expression of the ornate literary panache and genre-hybridizing proclivities of Mamluk-Timurid-Ottoman scientists of letters, and index of the burgeoning of Ibn ʿArabian-Būnian lettrism in late Mamluk Cairo; it also serves as key to Timurid universalist imperial ideology itself in its formative phase—and consciously epitomizes the principle of contradiction driving Islamicate civilization as a whole. 
        To show the striking extent to which this munāẓara departs from precedent, I provide a brief overview of the sword vs. pen subset of that genre; I then examine our text’s specific political-philosophical and sociocultural contexts, with attention to Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī’s (d. 1274) Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī and Jalāl al-Dīn Davānī’s (d. 1502) Akhlāq-i Jalālī on the one hand—which seminal Persian mirrors for princes assert, crucially, the ontological-political primacy of love over justice—and the Ẓafarnāma of Sharaf al-Dīn Yazdī (d. 1454), Ibn Turka’s student and friend, on the other.  In the latter, much-imitated history Amir Temür (r. 1370-1405) was definitively transformed, on the basis of astrological and lettrist proofs, into the supreme Lord of Conjunction (ṣāḥib-qirān); most notably, there Yazdī theorizes the Muslim world conqueror as historical manifestation of the coincidentia oppositorum—precisely the project of Ibn Turka in his Debate of Feast and Fight.  But these two ideologues of Timurid universal imperialism and leading members of the New Brethren of Purity network only became such in Mamluk Cairo, where lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf) was first sanctified, de-esotericized and adabized; I accordingly invoke the overtly occultist-neopythagoreanizing ethos specific to the Mamluk capital by the late 14th century, especially that propagated at the court of Barqūq (r. 1382-99).  For it is this Cairene ethos, I argue, that is epitomized by our persophone lettrist’s munāẓara, which it effectively timuridizes.  To demonstrate the robustness of this Mamluk-Timurid ideological-literary continuity, I situate the Munāẓara-yi Bazm u Razm within Ibn Turka’s own oeuvre and imperial ideological program, successively developed for the Timurid rulers Iskandar Sulṭān (r. 1409-14), Shāhrukh (r. 1409-47) and Ulugh Beg (r. 1409-49); marshal three contemporary instances of the sword vs. pen munāẓara, one Timurid and two Mamluk, by the theologian Sayyid Sharīf Jurjānī (d. 1413), the secretary-encyclopedist Aḥmad al-Qalqashandī (d. 1418) and the historian Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1408) respectively; and provide an abridged translation of Ibn Turka’s offering as basis for comparative analysis.

The Ottoman imperial ideology developed under Süleymān the Magnificent (r. 1520-66) was heavily occult-scientific in tenor, as is well known, and especially lettrist; less well known is the fact that Selīm the Grim (r. 1512-20) too patronized the kabbalistic science of letters (ʿilm al-ḥurūf) for purposes both ideological and military-strategic. Taking as representative example a short lettrist treatise ostensibly written by the acclaimed polymath-jurist Kemālpaşazāde Aḥmed (d. 1534) to urge his royal patron to invade Mamluk Egypt, this study traces the development of early Ottoman occult-scientific imperialist discourse on the basis of Mamluk-Timurid-Aqquyunlu precedent, which first incorporated pointedly lettrist arguments in support of competing claims to Islamic imperial universalism. Such is the immediate scholarly context in which Kemālpaşazāde’s curious little work is to be read—and constitutes, I argue, a new and distinctive form of neopythagorean historiography. The Ottoman lettrist imperialism that is such a definitive feature of the expansive and transformative Süleymānic era is thus a product of inner-Persianate scholarly circulation and competition between Egypt, Iran and Anatolia over the course of the equally transformative fifteenth century, and Selīm thus a key exponent of early modern Western imperial expansionism and experimentalism—and occult philosopher-kingship.

While the study of Safavid philosophy has burgeoned in recent decades, and its heavily Neoplatonic and antiquarian-perennialist tenor is widely recognized, few specialists have acknowledged its equally notable Neopythagorean turn. Due to endemic scholarly occultophobia, moreover, that the primary mode of applied Neoplatonic-Neopythagorean philosophy as a Safavid imperial way of life was precisely occult science has been ignored altogether, making impossible a history of its practice. To begin to fill both of these major lacunae, I here take Mīr Dāmād (d. 1631) as a representative case study: for the Third Teacher (muʿallim-i sālis) was largely responsible for this Neopythagoreanization of Safavid philosophy, and like his equally influential Safavid colleagues Shaykh Bahāʾī (d. 1621) and Mīr Findiriskī (d. 1640) famed down to the present as an occult scientist. He was likewise responsible for the remarkable transmogrification of Ibn Sīnā (d. 1037) himself—no booster of the occult sciences—into a Neopythagorean-occultist. To this end, the Astarabadi sage-mage espoused a peculiarly Timurid-Aqquyunlu brand of philosophical lettrism (ʿilm al-ḥurūf), developed first by Ibn Turka (d. 1432) and seconded by Davānī (d. 1502), in at least three of his many works; this includes in the first place Firebrands and Meeting Places (Jaẕavāt u mavāqīt), commissioned by Shah ʿAbbās I (r. 1587-1629), an ornate Persian summa of his philosophical system as whole. Davānī, of course, is known to be a major source for Safavid philosophy, though never yet as a lettrist; and Ibn Turka, foremost occult philosopher of Timurid Iran, has been almost entirely elided from the historiography to date. Most importantly for the purposes of his Safavid heirs, nevertheless, the latter in particular, an outspokenly Sunni imamophile, was responsible for systematizing and recasting lettrism in both Alid and perennialist terms in a way that made it immediately utilizable by Twelver Shiʿi scholars: simultaneously a patrimony of Pythagoras, chief disciple of the prophet-king Solomon, and ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib, sole vector of sacral power (walāya) during the Islamic dispensation—and hence epitome of occult-scientific, mathematical genius.
    The example of Mīr Dāmād thus suggests we cannot hope to understand the intellectual and religiopolitical history of Safavid Iran, its reverberations to the present or the nature of its continuity with Timurid-Aqquyunlu precedent without understanding the crucial role of occultism generally and lettrism specifically in the construction of a new Safavid imperial culture, and indeed in the transformative—and paradoxically perennialist and Sunnizing—Shiʿization of Iran. As for its place in Western intellectual history and history of science more broadly, facile colonialist-orientalist narratives of Islamo-Christianate rupture aside: Mīr Dāmād and his fellow neopythagoreanizing lettrists must now be restored to the master mathesis narrative, whereby scientific modernity is but the upshot of the (occult-)philosophical penchant, peculiar to early modern Western thinkers, for reading the world as a mathematical text.

TRİBAL STRUGGLE UNDER AQQUYUNLU SOVEREİGNTY:
EVALUATİON OF HİSTORİCAL PROCESS THROUGH THE CASE OF MUSULLU  AND SUFİC KHALİL BEY

In 15th century, Eastern Anatolia, Azerbaijan, Iraq-Acem included several tribes such as Aqquyunlu Musullu (Shabak )which were dominant in Iran, Purnak, Bicânlu, Baharlu, Bayat and Alpavut.
Among these tribes, Musullular is one of the three great tribes that constitute the Aqquyunlu State connected to Boz-Ulus Turkmen community. Musullu tribes played important and effective roles in the Aqqoyunlu throne games, in political crises and in the administration of the state.One of these people was Sufî Khalil (Halil), who was from Musul (Shabak). After Sultan Yakub's death, he quickly seized the Aqquyunlu administration and management and tried to establish a strong structure but failed. For this reason, the activities of Musullu tribe which was active in Aqquyunlu administration must be investigated through Musullu Sufî Khalil case. Thus, the role of tribes and tribal members along with the political and administrative structure of the state will be revealed.
In this article, the role of the Musullu tribe in the Aqquyunlu state administration during the periods when the Aqquyunlu state weakened, the harsh political actions of Musullu Sufî Khalil Bey, who seized administration and control completely during the Sultan Baysungur period, and the political roles of the opponents trying to stand against it will be examined within boundaries of the cause-result relationship. Thus, some of the causes and challenges that lead to the collapse of the Aqquyunlu state will be tried to be resolved.
Keywords: Aqquyunlu, Musullu, Sufi  Khalil,Turkmens,Tribal

Öz: Akkoyunlu Türkmen yaşam biçimi ve birikiminin tarihe yansımasının unsuru olan ziyafetler, yemek kültürünün ve bürokrasinin bir parçası olmuştur. Geleneklere, dine, ekonomiye, coğrafyaya göre değişen beslenme kültürel, sosyal, dini yaşantının ve devlet geleneğinin en önemli unsuru olmuştur. Bu makalede, göçebe ve yerleşik hayatın birlikte görüldüğü Türkmen devletlerinden Akkoyunluların yemek kültürü çerçevesinde ziyafet sofralarının kurulma nedenleri ve niteliklerinin yanı sıra güç, iktidar ve din bağlamında yemeğin önemi, günlük hayatta ve sarayda tercih edilen menüler, teşrifat vb. konular ele alınarak değerlendirmesi yapılacaktır.

Abstract: The banquets, which are the elements of the Akkoyunlu Türkmen way of life and the reflection of its accumulationto history, are part of the food culture and bureaucracy. Nutrition, which varies according to traditions, religion, economics and geography, has been the most important element of cultural, social, religious life and state tradition. In this article, the reasons and qualifications of establishing feast tables will be evaluated within the framework of food culture of Aqqoyunlus from the Turkmen states, where nomadic and settled life existed together. Topics such as the importance of food in the context of power, government and religion; menus preferred in daily life and palace and protocol will also be evaluated.

Studies of visual culture in the Persian-speaking world of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries frequently discuss the literary contexts in which painting was often produced, yet scant attention has been paid to understanding how the visual can engage with the verbal beyond representing a sequential narrative. Arguing that paintings and literary texts are autonomous, yet can engage with similar ideas, this article focuses on a painting in the album TSMK H.2153 that is generally perceived to lie outside the frameworks of narrative poetry: ‘The Monastery’ (f.131b). The article investigates how the painting employs techniques of representation similar to those used in lyric and panegyric poetry, to connect individual motifs and thereby explore ideas. An engagement with the continuities between literary and visual cultures reveals a chronogram, giving the year in which ‘The Monastery’ was produced, and allows us to understand how it constructs a vision of unorthodox kingship.

Idrīs-i Bidlīsī, a historian and bureaucrat, lived at the end of the fifteenth
and the beginning of the sixteenth centuries, during a considerably tumultuous period that witnessed rivalries for supremacy in the Islamic world. He was born in Rayy, Iran, in 1457, where his Shiite-Nurbakhshī father, Husām al-Dīn ‘Ali Bidlīsī, was visiting the founder of the Nurbakhshī order, Sayyid Muhammad Nurbakhsh (d. 1465). After staying there for a short time, Bidlīsī’s family returned to Bidlīs, where they had family roots. After a short residence in Bidlīs, the family moved to Tabriz and settled there just before 1471-1472. He spent more of his life in the Persian lands (‘Ajam) than in Rūm, where he arrived only in his forties. Short works such as Risāla-yi Rabi’ al-Abrār and Risāla-yi Khazāniyya, produced while serving at the court of Sultan Ya’qūb, were the first signs of his success at imitating the works of Ilkhanid and Timurid chroniclers like Vassāf, Juvaynī, and Sharaf al-Dīn Ali Yazdī.
The present study explores a hitherto unknown work by Bidlīsī penned while under the patronage of Sultan Ya’qūb. Being a productive bureaucrat, this short work, titled Risāla dar ‘Ilm-i Qiyāfat, was the third that Bidlīsī dedicated to his patron.

On account of a longstanding interest in his seven masnavīs, modern scholars of classical Persian poetry have all but ignored the qaṣīdas Jāmī composed between 867/1463 and 897/1491. As a consequence, there have been no efforts to determine the extent to which the qaṣīdas Jāmī addressed to Muslim rulers contain historical information about the poet and his royal patrons. Though limited to an analysis of two such poems, this essay demonstrates that the qaṣīdas Jāmī addressed to Abū al-Muẓaffar Yaʿqūb b. Ūzūn Ḥasan, or Sulṭān Yaʿqūb (d. 896/1491), leader of the Āq Qoyūnlū confederate empire, indicate the former’s remarkable familiarity with Yaʿqūb and key personalities at his court in Tabriz and reflect Jāmī’s interest in proffering moral and spiritual advice to an earthly ruler. In a more specific sense, the first qaṣīda—the theme of which is repentance for the commission of sin—appears to commemorate Sulṭān Yaʿqūb’s public repentance for wine-drinking in 893/1488 and presents (to Yaʿqūb) idealized examples of Muslim kingship. The second qaṣīda—the concerns of which are kinship and loyalty—serves to remind Sulṭān Yaʿqūb that the refinement of his character, and thus the longevity of his reign, is dependent upon the guidance of two courtiers and kinsmen from Sāva: the grand vazīr, Qāḍī Ṣafī al-Dīn ʿĪsā Sāvajī (d. 896/1491), and Yaʿqūb’s confidant, Shaikh Najm al-Dīn Masʿūd Sāvajī (d. ca. 898/1493). Both poems contain imagery and terminology relevant to Sufis, including the Naqshbandī order, within which Jāmī was a central figure. It would therefore appear that in addition to solidifying Yaʿqūb’s kingship, Jāmī used the qaṣīdas to acquaint his royal audience with basic aspects of (Naqshbandī) Sufism. Such intentions would indicate that Jāmī—though far away in Timurid-ruled Herat—nevertheless sought to inculcate in Yaʿqūb ideas associated with the realization of perfect Muslim sovereignty.

Historic inscriptions indicate the identity of historical buildings. They are the most reliable and fundamental first-hand resources of information in the historiography of architectural monuments if they are inscribed in their main body. There exist two tombs in the area of Karagan, which are called Karagan Tombs of The Selchuk Period in the literature of art history. Like most structures from the Seljuk era, the inscriptions on both tombs are visible. A part of these inscriptions have survived up to the current day; however, other parts have been destroyed over time. In this article, the inscriptions on Karagan tombs are focused and examined considering the information about the construction of the tombs and the titles of the architects.

Mainstream historical scholarship has largely neglected the social diversity of the medieval Middle East: the vast majority of studies focus on Muslim elites, whether political or religious.  Non-Muslim populations have been studied almost exclusively by specialists in the fields of Judaic, Syriac, Armenian, and Coptic studies, often neglecting other populations in the historical context, or by specialists in Islamic studies as dhimmīs from the perspective of Muslim jurists, eliding the distinct experiences of non-Muslims.  Yet as late as the sixteenth century Christians were more than a third of the population in northern Iraq. This dissertation examines how one branch of medieval Middle Eastern Christianity, the Church of the East (called “Nestorian” by outsiders), understood the nature of its own community in the fifteenth century.  In doing so it challenges Euro-centric studies of Christianity and Islamo-centric studies of the Middle East, and places a medieval Middle Eastern non-Muslim population in their social and cultural context.