Rumi Authors and Their Use of al-Dawla al- al-ʿUthmaniyya

In the second half of the 16th century, several Rumi authors, that is, authors from the core, predominantly Turkish-speaking re-gions of the Empire, engaged in writing works in Arabic. Being Rumi, it should be emphasised, was not simply a matter of geog-raphy. In the context of an expanding empire, it was also a matter of political affiliation with the Ottoman dynasty. These Rumi au-thors who were writing in Arabic were astutely aware of the

con-ventions of the Arabic historiographical tradition. In fact, the en-counter of what was now the core lands of the Ottoman empire, and of Anatolia more generally, with historical writings in Arabic long predated the Ottoman conquest. Indeed, the inventory of the library of Bayezid II includes historiographical essays and chron-icles in Arabic, some of which were even sent directly to members of his close retinue from the Mamluk capital (Markiewicz 2017, 236–40). What is intriguing about the second half of the 16th century is the Rumi authors’ experiment with, participation in, and response to the Arabic historiographical tradition.

Perhaps the most extreme example of this engagement is the probably early 17th-century compilation of a text that was falsely attributed to the renowned 13th-century mystic Muḥyī al-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1241), titled al-Shajara al-nuʿmāniyya fī al-dawla al-ʿUthmāniyya (‘the Tree of Nuʿmān on the Ottoman Rule/Good Fortune’). In this short and popular text, Ibn ʿArabī allegedly foresaw the Ottoman conquest of the Arab lands. As Ahmed Zildzic, who studied in great detail the Shajara and its commentaries, has noted (Zildzic 2012, 85)

[t]he oldest existent copy of al-Shajara comes from the first half of the XVII century, and if we accept that the date is not a later interpolation, we can conclude the text of al-Shajara as it reached us originated more than a century later than the events it discusses. What is evident, how-ever, is the universal acceptance of the work in the Otto-man cultural and intellectual context.

For our purpose here, the important point is that the late anonymous author used the term al-Dawla al-ʿUthmāniyya in the title of the treatise to indicate that it originated in the early 13th

century in the Arabic-speaking lands. Indeed, one could argue that the invocation of the term was quite antiquarian.

As I have already suggested above, Taşköprüzade was in-terested in writing an Arabic biographical dictionary that would commemorate the names and deeds of jurists and Sufi masters who were affiliated with the Ottoman dynasty. Clearly, he sought to be part of the Arabic historiographical tradition. Fittingly, the work is replete with references to that tradition and the conven-tions of the genre of the biographical dictionary. He even decides to call the Ottoman political project al-Dawla al-ʿUthmāniyya.

Several decades later, during the reign of Murad III (r.

1574–1595), a third author, Mustafa Cenabi (d. 1590/1591), chose to pen a work in Arabic, a universal history from the crea-tion of the world to the Ottoman dynasty. Cenabi devoted chap-ters to the various dynasties who ruled the world, from the an-cient Persian kings to his patrons, the Ottomans. Throughout, Cenabi (Cenabi Tarihi) selectively employs the term dawla: the Ḥasanī dawla of Mecca, the Hāshimīi dawla of Medina, the Cir-cassian dawla (the Mamluks), the ʿAlawī/Ḥasanī dawla of Tabaristan and Jurjan, the Samanid dawla, the dawla of Chinggis Khan, the Uzbek dawla, the dawla of the Ak Koyunlu and the Ot-toman dawla. Indeed, this list of dawlas seems to reflect the

“trans-regional hierarchy of (West-Asian or even wider) legiti-mate political leadership” (Steenbergen 2016, 55) that one finds in Mamluk sources and the sense that dawla can be divided among rulers and dynasties.

4.0. Conclusion

The macaronic nature of the language that is commonly referred to as ‘Ottoman Turkish’ is quite well known and frequently men-tioned in handbooks for students of the language. Students of ‘Ot-toman Turkish’ are encouraged to study Arabic, Persian, and Modern Turkish/Turkic language and, based on this knowledge, to understand the logic of ‘Ottoman Turkish’. This is, of course, an anachronistic perception of languages in general and of ‘Otto-man Turkish’ in particular, as it assumes fairly well-defined lin-guistic traditions or languages which are macaronically inter-twined. But both Persian and Turkic languages have accumulated over the centuries numerous words that are morphologically Ar-abic. In many cases, the words retained their ‘original’ Arabic lexicographical meaning. But this has not always been the case.

This linguistic entanglement raises an intriguing question: Where does ‘Arabic’ end and ‘Ottoman Turkish’ begin?

This short essay is an attempt to explore these complex dy-namics between ‘Arabic’ and ‘Turkish’ in the Ottoman lands. My goal is not, to paraphrase Nile Green’s (2019, 2) comment on Persian in the introduction to the recent volume on the Persian-ate world, “to promote Arabic […], but rather to analyze Arabic as a field of sociolinguistic contact, and in doing so recognise the roles of hegemony and competition […].” Indeed, as Murat Umut Inan (2019, 88) argues in his essay on Persian in the Ottoman world in the same volume, the history of Persian—and, one may add, of Arabic—in the Ottoman context is “intertwined with mul-tiple histories of the empire.” Much like Persian, Arabic afforded

Rumi writers a range of possibilities to promote political and in-tellectual claims, but also engendered anxiety and envy. The manner in which Rumi writers employed the terms Dawla al-ʿUthmāniyya and the anecdote with which I opened this essay capture these possibilities and anxieties.

Furthermore, the tension between devlet and dawla, which draws on the distinction between different linguistic/historio-graphical traditions, poses a translation challenge: how should one translate al-Dawla al-ʿUthmāniyya into, say, English? This translation challenge is what got me interested in exploring the relationship between devlet and dawla in the first place. Moreo-ver, as I have argued elsewhere (Burak 2015, 94–98), in his al-Shaqāʾiq al-nuʿmāniyya, Taşköprüzade employed Mamluk (and Arabic) historiographical conventions to legitimise and record the history of the Ottoman learned hierarchy and the Sufi masters that were associated with the Ottoman domains. Accordingly, the narrative arc of the Shaqāʾiq diverges in terms of its historio-graphical and, indeed, political assumptions from those of Mam-luk biographical dictionaries. Most notably, the Ottoman dynasty is the organising principle of Taşköprüzade’s work. Further, when Taşkörüzade’s Shaqāʾiq was translated by Mehmed Mecdi Efendi (d. 1591) into ‘Ottoman Turkish’, al-Dawla al-ʿUthmāniyya en-tered ‘Ottoman Turkish’ historiography. This Turkified expres-sion raises yet another, though related, translation question: how should one translate the 16th-century expression Devlet-i ʿOs-maniyye into English?

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