The Mediterranean Odyssey of a Polemical Text: Abdallah Tarjuman’s Tuhfa (1420) and Its Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Cousins
Date:
Wednesday, November 28, 2012 - 5:30pm to 7:00pm
This public lecture is held in the framework of the Faculty Research Seminar.
In 1420, Abdallah b. Abdallah Tarjuman completed his treatise entitled Tuhfat al-Adīb fī al-radd ‛alā ahl al-salīb (Gift of the Lettered One for the Refutation of the People of the Cross) in which he recounted the story of his conversion to Islam and transformation from a Franciscan priest born in Mallorca as Anselm Turmeda into the official interpreter (tarjuman) of the Hafsid sultan of Tunis. In addition to Anselm’s conversion story, the Tuhfa also features a lengthy polemic against Christianity based on Christian scriptures. This interesting text remained unknown to Muslims around the Mediterranean for almost two centuries until in 1604 a charismatic Sufi şeyh from Tunis known as a great protector of Morisco refugees from Spain had it translated from Arabic into Ottoman Turkish thinking it would be a fitting motivational gift for the Ottoman Sultan Ahmed I (1603-17) to help the Morisco cause. The lecture will explore the circumstances of commission and transmission of this manuscript to the Ottoman Empire as well as its impact on the Ottoman reading public and society that was experiencing a “turn to piety” at this very time. The talk will address the social life of this text, the form and content of the Ottoman works it inspired, and networks of people who determined its destiny in becoming one of the most popular Muslim anti-Christian polemical texts of all times.
Tijana Krstić is a historian of the early modern Ottoman Empire but her research interests extend into the social, cultural and religious history of the early modern Mediterranean, Southeast and Central Europe as well. In her work she focuses on circulation of texts, people and religio-political concepts across imperial, cultural and confessional boundaries. Her book entitled Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change and Communal Politics in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2011) explored how various Ottoman Muslim and Christian authors narrated the phenomenon of conversion to Islam in the empire's formative period, between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Currently, she is working on a project related to the migration of the Morisco refugees from Iberia to the Ottoman Empire in the context of Ottoman-Habsburg relations and broader religio-political developments in the early modern Mediterranean.
In 1420, Abdallah b. Abdallah Tarjuman completed his treatise entitled Tuhfat al-Adīb fī al-radd ‛alā ahl al-salīb (Gift of the Lettered One for the Refutation of the People of the Cross) in which he recounted the story of his conversion to Islam and transformation from a Franciscan priest born in Mallorca as Anselm Turmeda into the official interpreter (tarjuman) of the Hafsid sultan of Tunis. In addition to Anselm’s conversion story, the Tuhfa also features a lengthy polemic against Christianity based on Christian scriptures. This interesting text remained unknown to Muslims around the Mediterranean for almost two centuries until in 1604 a charismatic Sufi şeyh from Tunis known as a great protector of Morisco refugees from Spain had it translated from Arabic into Ottoman Turkish thinking it would be a fitting motivational gift for the Ottoman Sultan Ahmed I (1603-17) to help the Morisco cause. The lecture will explore the circumstances of commission and transmission of this manuscript to the Ottoman Empire as well as its impact on the Ottoman reading public and society that was experiencing a “turn to piety” at this very time. The talk will address the social life of this text, the form and content of the Ottoman works it inspired, and networks of people who determined its destiny in becoming one of the most popular Muslim anti-Christian polemical texts of all times.
Tijana Krstić is a historian of the early modern Ottoman Empire but her research interests extend into the social, cultural and religious history of the early modern Mediterranean, Southeast and Central Europe as well. In her work she focuses on circulation of texts, people and religio-political concepts across imperial, cultural and confessional boundaries. Her book entitled Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change and Communal Politics in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2011) explored how various Ottoman Muslim and Christian authors narrated the phenomenon of conversion to Islam in the empire's formative period, between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Currently, she is working on a project related to the migration of the Morisco refugees from Iberia to the Ottoman Empire in the context of Ottoman-Habsburg relations and broader religio-political developments in the early modern Mediterranean.
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