The Spiritual Vernacular of the Early Ottoman Frontier: The Yaz?c?o?Lu Family

The book explores the early Ottoman popular piety through the lens of the Yaz?c?o?lu brothers, who were Sufis of the frontier city of Gelibolu and authors of the most popular religious writings in Ottoman Turkish. It reconstructs their biographies, assesses the heritage of their language and ideas, and analyzes how they adapted them to their distinct setting. It argues that Ottoman popular orthodoxy emerged as a synthesis of a cosmopolitan Islamic canon to address the needs of Turcophone Muslims of the Ottoman lands.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 256 pages
Publication date: 19 May 2023
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

The Yaz?c?o?lu brothers, among the most popular vernacular religious writers and thinkers of the early Ottoman period, are the focus of the first book-length study in English on them. Reconstructing their biographies, assessing the heritage of their language and ideas, and analyzing how these were adapted to their distinct setting, Carlos Grenier argues that Ottoman popular orthodoxy emerged as a synthesis of a cosmopolitan Islamic canon to address the needs of Turcophone Muslims of the Ottoman lands. This study contributes to the study of non-elite intellectual life of Ottoman Muslims at the dawn of an imperial age.

Mehmed Yaz?c?o?lu and Ahmed Bican, Sufis of the frontier city of Gelibolu, were the authors of the most popular religious writings in Ottoman Turkish. Carlos Grenier places their durable religious vision within their dynamic historical moment on the contested Ottoman borderlands. Examining how these non-elite writers deployed their own intellectual resources, he considers how they approached the religious sciences of the wider Islamic world. And he looks at how they created a religious synthesis appropriate for their own community, the growing Turcophone Muslim population of the Balkans and Anatolia.

Dimension: 234 x 156 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781474462280