541

March, 2022, 250 pages.
In this dissertation, I have introduced three different Ottoman self-narratives, written
by a provincial governor, a scholar, and a calligrapher in a-hundred-year period from
the first half of the eighteenth century to the first half of the nineteenth century. These
manuscripts have been selected to scrutinize how different people from different walks
of life talked about themselves, described their lives, and recorded their innermost
feelings. Therefore, this study provides an insight into the Ottoman self-narratives and
reveals how different layers of the self were represented with all its complexities in a
variety of styles. It is also an attempt to develop a methodology on how to study
Ottoman self-narratives as opposed to the claims that they are unreliable sources and
must be used with caution. This study is designed to introduce various unknown
Ottoman self-narratives, to scrutinize the authors’ individual experiences like feelings,
expectations, actions in face of events, and to uncover their social selves embedded in
several networks of relations. By examining distinct texts written by persons with
different backgrounds, this dissertation provides insight into the private lives of
Ottoman individuals who obviously had a culture of writing about themselves.
Key Words: Self-Narrative, Ego-Document, First-Person Narrative, Ottoman
Empire, Autobiography, Diary, Dream.
iv

Bu tez, on sekizinci yüzyılın başı ile on dokuzuncu yüzyılın başı arasında geçen yüz
yıllık süreçte bir mutasarrıf, bir hattat ve bir müderris tarafından üretilmiş daha önce
bilinmeyen üç farklı Osmanlı ben-anlatısını inceleyerek, Osmanlı ben-anlatıları
literatürüne bir katkı sunmayı amaçlamaktadır. Bu çalışma, böyle metinlerin güvenilir
olmadığı ve bu sebeple de ihtiyatla kullanılması gereken kaynaklar olduğu görüşünün
aksine, Osmanlı ben-anlatılarının kaynak değerini ortaya koyma ve bu metinlerin
tarihsel çalışmalarda nasıl kullanılabileceğine ilişkin bir metodoloji geliştirme
girişimidir. Bu tezde incelenen metinler Osmanlı bireyinin dünyasına adım atmak ve
benliğin farklı katmanlarının çeşitli üslup ve şekillerde nasıl temsil edildiğini anlamak
için önemli veriler sunmaktadır. Osmanlı ben-anlatıları, yazarlarının kariyerleri,
çevreleri, yaşadıkları zorlukları, sevinç, korku ve acıları canlı bir şekilde resmetmekte
ve okuyucuları bireyin dünyasına olabildiğince yaklaştırmaktadır. Dolayısıyla bu
çalışma farklı sosyal ve kültürel çevrelerden gelen ve kendileri hakkında yazma
kültürüne sahip oldukları açık olan üç Osmanlı bireyinin sosyal ve duygusal dünyasına
bir kapı aralamaktadır. Bu tez, yazarlar kendilerinden, kariyerlerinden, yaşadıkları
çevreden ve etraflarında bulunan insanlardan nasıl bahsetmişlerdir, iç dünyalarını ne
kadar yansıtmışlardır gibi sorulara ışık tutarak Osmanlı ben-anlatıları literatürüne
önemli bir katkı sağlayacaktır.
Anahtar Kelimeler: Osmanlı Ben-Anlatıları, Benlik-Belgeleri, Birinci Ağızdan
Anlatılar, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu, Otobiyografi, Günlük, Rüya
v
CONTENTS
PREFACE ................................................................................................................................................. i
ABSTRACT .......................................................................................................................................... iii
ÖZET ...................................................................................................................................................... iv
CONTENTS ............................................................................................................................................ v
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................... 1
CHAPTER I: ON THE DREAMS OF AN OTTOMAN OFFICIAL: THE CURIOUS CASE OF
KULAKZÂDE MAHMUD PASHA ..................................................................................................... 39
1. TOWARDS CONCEPTUALIZING OTTOMAN DREAMS ...................................................... 40
1.1. A Particular Ottoman Way ..................................................................................................... 42
1.2. On the Manuscript, Author, and Motivation for Writing ....................................................... 47
2. RELATIONAL SELF: KULAKZÂDE MAHMUD PASHA’S HOUSEHOLD .......................... 52
2.1. Mahmud Pasha’s Network ..................................................................................................... 53
2.2. Sufi Connections .................................................................................................................... 61
2.3. Dreams in Public .................................................................................................................... 64
3. EXTERNAL SELF: MAHMUD PASHA’S OFFICIAL LIFE ..................................................... 66
3.1. Dreams as a Means of Self-Fashioning ................................................................................. 70
4. INNER SELF: ANXIETY AND HOPE AS REVEALED IN THE DREAMS ............................ 73
Conclusion ......................................................................................................................................... 81
CHAPTER II: INTO THE LIFE OF AN OTTOMAN CALIGRAPHER: ABDÜLKADİR HİSÂRÎ’S
SERGÜZEŞTNÂME ............................................................................................................................... 82
1. OTTOMAN SERGÜZEŞTNÂMES ............................................................................................... 82
1.1. About the Genre ..................................................................................................................... 92
1.2. About Abdülkadir bin Hasan El-Hisârî .................................................................................. 98
1.3. On the Manuscript .................................................................................................................. 99
1.4. The Motivation for Writing ................................................................................................. 101
1.5. The Issue of Accuracy ......................................................................................................... 103
2. RELATIONAL SELF: INCORPORATING INTO HOUSEHOLDS AND CREATING A
NETWORK ..................................................................................................................................... 105
3. EXTERNAL SELF OF AN OTTOMAN CALLIGRAPHER/SCRIBE ..................................... 113
4. INNER SELF: DIFFICULTIES AND PAINS IN THE PATH TO A CAREER IN SCRIBAL
SERVICE ........................................................................................................................................ 116
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 134
CHAPTER III: THE SELF BEHIND THE TEDIOUSNESS OF DAILY LIFE: THE DIARY OF
SIDKIZÂDE MUSTAFA HAMİD EFENDİ ...................................................................................... 137
vi
1. TOWARDS CONCEPTUALIZING OTTOMAN DIARY ........................................................ 138
1.6. Comparing An Ottoman Diary with Examples Outside the Ottoman Empire ..................... 143
1.1. On the Diary and Its Author ................................................................................................. 147
1.2. On the Concepts ................................................................................................................... 151
1.3. Motivation for Writing ......................................................................................................... 155
1.4. Major Themes Covered in the Diary ................................................................................... 157
1.5. The Issue of Accuracy ......................................................................................................... 159
2. RELATIONAL SELF: MUSTAFA HAMİD EFENDİ AS A MEMBER OF SIDKIZÂDE
HOUSEHOLD ................................................................................................................................. 161
Members of Sıdkızade family. .................................................................................................... 168
2.1. Creating a Network .............................................................................................................. 168
2.2. Ways of Making Money ...................................................................................................... 176
3.EXTERNAL SELF: DAILY LIFE OF THE DIARIST ............................................................... 182
3.1. Sociability: Visits and Banquets .......................................................................................... 182
3.2. The Material Self: His Use of Servants, Horses and Luxurious Items ................................ 186
3.3. Daily Routines of Getting Dressed and Hygiene ................................................................. 197
3.4. Time Consciousness: Relationship with Time ..................................................................... 198
4. INNER SELF: REFLECTION OF EMOTIONS IN WRITTEN FORM .................................... 203
Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................... 217
CONCLUSION .................................................................................................................................. 219
BIBLIOGRAPHY ................................................................................................................................ 228
1
INTRODUCTION
There has been a growing awareness among scholars in Ottoman ego-document/selfnarrative
studies in the last few years.1 A number of scientific meetings have been held
in Turkey and publications started to appear. This dissertation is written with the
intention of making a contribution to these efforts towards creating an awareness of
Ottoman self-narratives. The aim of this dissertation is not to prove that Ottoman selfnarratives
do exist, an issue that has already been proven by a number of previous
studies. However, this dissertation seeks to prove that there are far more Ottoman selfnarratives
than scholars previously believed.
This dissertation aims at providing an insight into Ottoman self-narratives and showing
how different layers of the self were represented with all their complexities in a variety
of styles. It will attempt to develop a methodology on how to study Ottoman selfnarratives
in opposition to the claims that they are unreliable sources and must be used
with caution. I have introduced three different texts, written in a hundred-year period
from the first half of the eighteenth century to the first half of the nineteenth century.
By examining distinctive texts written by persons with different backgrounds, this
study will show that we need to broaden our perspective to have a better insight into
the self in an Ottoman context. We need to benefit from the experiences of scholars
studying early modern and modern European material, but we should also have a local
perspective to create a deeper insight into the variety of forms and methods through
which the self was expressed in an Ottoman context.
The title of this dissertation was given in 2017 after I completed the primary source research. After a
while, when I started reading secondary literature, I realized that the phrase “A methodological approach
to early modern self-narratives” was used as a subtitle in a Ph.D. dissertation. Despite this, I decided to
keep the title as it is, because it was the most appropriate title for the content of the dissertation. See
Laia Hashem Abdel-Rahman El-Sayed, “Discourses on Emotions: Communities, Styles, and Selves in
Early Modern Mediterranean Travel Books” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Kent and Freie
Universität Berlin, 2016), 38.
1 I use the concepts of “self-narrative” and “ego-document” interchangeably throughout the dissertation.
2
Survey of the Literature on European Ego-documents
The Dutch historian, Jacques Presser, was the scholar who first invented the term
“egodocumenten.” Presser used it as a blanket term for autobiographies, diaries,
memoirs and personal letters in which the reader is confronted with an “I” figure.2 He
described the term as referring to “those documents in which an ego intentionally or
unintentionally discloses or hides itself.”3 According to this description the term
egodocumenten was used for “historical sources in which the user is confronted with
an ‘I’, or occasionally with a ‘he’, continuously present in the text as a writing and
describing subject.”4 The pioneering role for ego-document research was taken by
Rudolf Dekker who, in the 1980s, initiated a research project to make an inventory of
all ego-documents written/published in the Netherlands since the 1500s.5 Dekker
revived Presser’s terminology and explained the term ego-document as “a text in
which the author writes about his or her own acts, thoughts and feelings.”6 The project
looked for autobiographies, diaries, memoirs and travel journals but excluded letters
for practical reasons, although private notes which were described “as notes kept over
a short period of time” were included and particular events like family disputes focused
on. Family books were also included, provided they contained a considerable number
of personal remarks and observations.7
The Netherlands group created a website called “The Center for the Study of Egodocuments
and History” to present the results of the inventory project.8 This research
project was accompanied by important publications. Brill Publishers launched a book
series titled Ego-Documents and History under the editorship of Rudolf Dekker,
Arianne Baggerman and Michael Mascuch. Peter Burke, James Amelang and Philippe
2 Rudolf Dekker, “Jaques Presser’s Heritage: Egodocuments in the Study of History,” Memoria y
Civilización 5 (2002), 14.
3 Dekker, “Jaques Presser’s Heritage,” 14.
4 Rudolf Dekker, “Introduction,” in Egodocuments and History: Autobiographical Writing in its Context
since the Middle Ages, ed. Rudolf Dekker (Hilversum: Verloren, 2002), 7.
5 Marijke Huisman, “Life Writing in the Netherlands,” European Journal of Life Writing 4 (2015), 20,
accessed January 10, 2022, doi:10.5463/ejlw.4.171.
6 Dekker, “Jaques Presser’s Heritage,” 14.
7 Rudolf Dekker, “Egodocuments in the Netherlands from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century,” in
Envisioning Self and Status: Self Representation in the Low Countries, ed. Erin Griffey (Hull:
Association for Low Countries Studies in Great Britain and Ireland (ALCS) c/o University of Hall,
Department of Dutch Studies, 2000), 257.
8 http://www.egodocument.net/egodocument/index.html.
3
Lejeune, distinguished names of the field, are also part of the board of editors.9
Verloren Publishers issued a series titled Egodocumenten to publish autobiographical
texts written in the Dutch language. Thirty-three volumes have been produced in this
series under the editorship of Rudolf Dekker and Gert-Jan Johannes.
Peter Burke was the first scholar who used the term “ego-document” in English.10
Apart from transferring the term into English, his article is very significant in that, in
contrast to the Burckhardtian conception of the self/individual, which was believed to
have arisen in Italy during the Renaissance, he proposed the idea of taking a broader
perspective and thinking in terms of different styles of self-representation that might
be found in different cultures. Burke was the first scholar to advocate for a transcultural
perspective in the study of ego-documents. “It is better to think in terms of a variety
of categories of the person or conceptions of the self (more or less unified, bounded
and so on) in different cultures, categories and conceptions which underlie a variety of
styles of self-presentation or self- fashioning.”11 After many years of experience in
examining ego-documents, Burke began to express this idea even more strongly.
Reading the ground-breaking publications by Kafadar on Ottoman materials,12
9 A considerable amount of literature has been issued under this series, see Rudolf Dekker, Family,
Culture and Society in the Diary of Constantijn Huygens Jr, secretary to Stadholder-King William of
Orange (Leiden: Brill, 2013); Arianne Baggerman, Rudolf Dekker and Michael Mascuch, eds.,
Controlling Time and Shaping the Self: Developments in Autobiographical Writing since the Sixteenth
Century (Leiden: Brill, 2011); Arianne Baggerman and Rudolf Dekker, Child of the Enlightenment:
Revolutionary Europe Reflected in a Boyhood Diary (Leiden: Brill, 2009); Jeroen Blaak, Literacy in
Everyday Life: Reading and Writing in Early Modern Dutch Diaries (Leiden: Brill, 2009). For other
studies by Dutch scholars, see Rudolf Dekker, “Dutch Travel Journals from the Sixteenth to the Early
Nineteenth Centuries,” Lias Sources and Documents Relating to the Early Modern History of Ideas 22
(1995): 277-300. Rudolf Dekker, Childhood, Memory and Autobiography in Holland: From the Golden
Age to Romanticism (New York: St. Martin Press, 2000); Rudolf Dekker, “Sexuality, Elites, and Court
Life in the Late Seventeenth Century: The Diaries of Constantijn Huygens, Jr.” Eighteenth-century
Life 23 (1999): 94-109; Rudolf Dekker “Watches, Diary Writing, and the Search for Self-Knowledge
in the Seventeenth Century,” in Making Knowledge in Early-Modern Europe: Practices, Objects, Texts,
1400-1800, ed. Pamela H. Smith and Benjamin Schmidt (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,
2007); Arianne Baggerman, “The Moral of the Story: Children's Reading and the Catechism of Nature
Around 1800,” in Making Knowledge in Early-Modern Europe: Practices, Objects, Texts, 1400-1800,
ed. Pamela H. Smith and Benjamin Schmidt (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007); Arienne
Baggerman, “Travelers in Time: Nineteenth-Century Autobiographers and Their Fight Against
Forgetting,” in Les écrits du for privé en Europe, du Moyen Âge à l'époque contemporaine, ed. J. P.
Bardet, E. Arnoul and F. J. Ruggiu (Bordeaux: Presses Universitaires de Bordeaux, 2010).
10 Peter Burke, “Representations of the Self from Petrarch to Descartes,” in Rewriting the Self. Histories
from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1996), 21.
11 Burke, “Representations of the Self,” 28.
12 Cemal Kafadar, “Self and Others: The Diary of a Dervish in Seventeenth Century Istanbul and First-
Person Narratives in Ottoman Literature,” Studia Islamica 69 (1989): 121-150.
4
Reynolds on Arabic autobiographies13 and Wu on autobiographical writings in
traditional China,14 Peter Burke asserted that ego-documents were not confined to
Western culture only and did not just begin in Italy around the year 1600. This way of
writing certainly existed in Arabic culture, in the Ottoman Empire and in China. 15
James Amelang, another significant name in the field, studied the autobiography of
Miguel Parets, a Barcelona tanner.16 Amelang’s contribution is not confined to a single
autobiography. He found out that the case of Parets was not unique; there were other
artisan autobiographies written in Spain and other parts of Europe. He compared the
textual context of Paret’s text and other artisan autobiographies and focused on the
aspects of “writing in the first person at a specific historical time, from the fifteenth to
the eighteenth century, and from a specific social position.”17 He examined these
autobiographies as a cultural and social practice in which a wide range of social groups
participated. 18 Amelang was very beneficial in providing a checklist of artisan
autobiographies at the end of his work which opened the door to further studies.
Amelang took an active part in ego-document/selbstzeugnis projects and contributed
to publications by the Dutch, Basel and Berlin research groups.19 He criticized the easy
association of autobiography with individualism. According to Amelang, early modern
first-person writing was rarely autobiographical in the modern sense of autobiography
as a developed retroactive narrative revealing the inner development of the author in
13 Dwight Reynolds, ed., Interpreting the Self: Autobiography in the Arabic Literary Tradition
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001).
14 Pei-Yi Wu, The Confucian’s Progress: Autobiographical Writings in Traditional China (Princeton:
Princeton University Press,1990).
15 Peter Burke, “The Rhetoric of Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century,” in Touching the Past:
Studies in the Historical Sociolinguistic of Ego-Documents, ed. Marijke J. Van der Wal and Gijsbert
Rutten (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2013), 150.
16 James S. Amelang, The Flight of Icarus: Artisan Autobiography in Early Modern Europe (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1998).
17 Ibid., 6.
18 Ibid., 3.
19 Amelang contributed to volume Controlling Time and Shaping the Self: Developments in
Autobiographical Writing since the Sixteenth Century with an article on the relation between Spanish
inquisitorial interrogation and autobiography. James Amelang, “Tracing Lives: The Spanish Inquisition
and the Act of Autobiography,” in Controlling Time and Shaping the Self: Developments in
Autobiographical Writing since the Sixteenth Century, ed. Arianne Baggerman, Rudolf Dekker and
Michael Mascuch (Leiden: Brill, 2011).
5
chronological order.20 He stated that very few authors wrote in isolation from the social
milieu surrounding them.
We are often misled by the unfolding individualism with which autobiography is
inevitably associated. Not only was no man, much less an early modern craftsman, an
island into himself; very few writers even tried to write in isolation from the multiple
worlds to which they belonged.21
In his contribution to Selbstzeugnis und Person: Trunskulturelle Perspektiven,
Amelang emphasized the significance and necessity of transcultural as well as
interdisciplinary approaches to the investigation of autobiography.22 “If anything
forces us to step off our home ground, it is a transcultural focus, if we understand this
as requiring us to move beyond the original context of our texts to assess them in the
light of their presence and interpretation in other cultural contexts.”23 His ideas
contributed to the incorporation of autobiographical texts produced in several African,
Asian or Near Eastern literature into the discussion.24
In Germany Winfried Schulze was first to borrow the term.25 He wanted to emulate
the Dutch example in the study of German ego-documents but proposed to use a more
inclusive interpretation of the term. He argued that all kinds of official documents,
such as judicial records, should be regarded as ego-document.26 Schulze’s approach
was not taken up by German researchers. Kaspar von Greyerz criticized Schulze’s
approach and noted that “many historians in the field have continued to adhere to the
notion of Selbstzeugnisse, knowing full well that in many of the personal documents
studied one does not really encounter a fully recognizable self.”27
20 James S. Amelang, “The Dilemmas of Popular Autobiography,” in Von der Dargestellten zum
erinnerten Ich: Europäische Selbstzeugnisse als historische Quellen (1500-1800), ed. Kaspar von
Greyerz, Hans Medick and Patrice Veit (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2001), 435.
21 Amelang, “The Dilemmas of Popular Autobiography,” 434.
22 James S. Amelang, “Transcultural Autobiography or the Lives of Others,” in Selbstzeugnis und
Person: Transkulturelle Perspectiven, ed. Claudia Ulbrich, Hans Medick and Angelika Schaser (Köln:
Böhlau Verlag, 2012), 79.
23 Amelang, “Transcultural Autobiography,” 79.
24 Ibid.
25 Dekker, “Introduction,” 9; Winfried Schulze, ed., Egodocumente. Annäherung an den Menschen in
der Geschichte (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1996).
26 Ibid., 9.
27 Kaspar von Greyerz, “Ego-Documents: The Last Word?,” German History 28 (2010), 280.
6
In 1996 Greyerz initiated a project to create an inventory of self-narratives found in
the libraries and archives of German- speaking Switzerland.28 He found the concept of
ego-document an “unfortunate term in dealing with autobiographical text from
centuries earlier than twentieth century.”29 He regarded the term ego-document as
anachronistic and associated it with the Freudian conception of the ego which
“constantly has to mediate between the sexual and bodily drives of the id and the
conceptions of the world offered by the super-ego.”30 According to Greyerz some of
the sources provide the researcher with access to a historical personage’s ego, but the
great majority do not give anything about the essence of a historical person.31 Hence,
he opposed using the term ego-document and suggested employing the terms “selfnarrative”
and “personal-narrative” instead. He argued that these texts provide more
information about social and personal networks and groups than they do about
individuals; therefore, he proposed to look for “primarily persons in their specific
cultural, linguistic, material and, last but not least, social embeddedness.”32 The Swiss
group are working on an important project under the leadership of Kaspar von Greyerz
and Danièle Tosato-Rigo and have opened a database on Swiss personal writings.33
Greyerz also cooperated with the Berlin group of scholars who started a DFG project
called “Selbstzeugnisse in transkultureller Perspective” under the leadership of
Claudia Ulbrich. The main aim of the Berlin group was “to develop an understanding
of ego-documents as a social and cultural practice.”34 More importantly, they were the
first to have a transcultural perspective in the study of ego-documents. They wanted
“to find out about a person's own life as a topic of writing in different cultures, in
different periods and in different geographical areas.”35 Therefore, they included the
28 Claudia Ulbrich, Kaspar von Greyerz and Lorenz Heiligensetzer, “Introduction,” in Mapping the ‘I’
Research on Self-Narratives in Germany and Switzerland, ed. Claudia Ulbrich, Kaspar von Greyerz and
Lorenz Heiligensetzer (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 2.
29 Greyerz, “Ego-Documents: The Last Word?,” 275.
30 Ibid., 281.
31 Ibid.
32 Ibid.
33 https://wp.unil.ch/egodocuments/en/. For an important publication by Basel research group, see
Kaspar von Greyerz, ed., Selbstzeugnisse in der Frühen Neuzeit: Individualisierungsweisen in
interdisziplinärer Perspektive (Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2007). Suraiya Faroqhi also
contributed to this volume with an article on Seyyid Hasan’s diary.
34 Gabriele Jancke, “Selbstzeugnisse in Transkultureller Perspektive,” Zeitenblicke 1, no: 2 (2002), 6,
accessed December 13, 2021, https://www.zeitenblicke.de/2002/02/jancke/jancke.pdf.
35 Jancke, “Selbstzeugnisse in Transkultureller Perspektive,” 7.
7
studies of various scholars on texts written in Dutch, German, English, French, Latin,
Arabic, Japanese, Ottoman, Turkish, Persian, and Tataric.36 Like Greyerz, the Berlin
group also decided not to use the term ego-document. Gabriele Jancke wrote that they
“opted for using a broader term ‘Selbstzeugnisse,’ because to have a deep insight into
the autobiographical writing in all its variety seemed to be more rewarding as it was
being practiced in different geographies and historical times.”37
They wanted to take the focus away from the concept of “individuality” which was
one of the fundamental themes of the scholarship on autobiographical texts during the
1990s, even at an international level.38 According to them, applying “individualism”
as a general standard impedes considering other cultures in their own historical
contexts. They found it problematic to focus only on individualism and ignore other
concepts of the person.39 They aimed at paying attention to the different concepts of
the person rather than focusing on the individual, in other words, “to investigate the
self-thematization of one’s life as a cultural and social practice across various cultures,
periods, geographical sites and interactive contexts, and to place it in the realm of
social relationships.” 40
Within this approach, they focused more on the authors’ relationships with the outer
world. According to Jancke, such autobiographical writers were acting socially when
writing their texts. She argued that they must be seen as “social beings belonging to
certain social, professional, religious and gender groups, moving in certain social
contexts and relationships.”41 She wrote that it was impossible “telling the story of the
rise of Western individual, at least in combination with autobiographical writing.”42
The most important facet in regarding these texts as a “form of social practice” is the
36 Jancke, “Selbstzeugnisse in Transkultureller Perspektive,” 6.
37 Ibid., 5.
38 Ulbrich, Von Greyerz and Heiligensetzer, “Introduction,” 4.
39 Jancke, “Selbstzeugnisse in Transkultureller Perspektive,” 8; Also see Ulbrich, Von Greyerz and
Heiligensetzer, “Introduction,” 4-5.
40 Gabriele Jancke and Claudia Ulbrich, “From the Individual to the Person: Challenging Autobiography
Theory,” 8, accessed January 1, 2022,
https://www.academia.edu/31774251/From_the_Individual_to_the_Person_Challenging_Autobiograp
hy_Theory_by_Claudia_Ulbrich_and_Gabriele_Jancke.
41 Gabriele Jancke, “Autobiography as Social Practice in Early Modern German-Speaking Areas,” in
Autobiographical Themes in Turkish Literature: Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives, ed. Olcay
Akyıldz, Halim Kara and Börte Sagaster, vol. 6 (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2007), 70.
42 Ibid., 71.
8
argument that the autobiographical authors displayed their embeddedness in the
networks of relationships and “what shows up is no inner self but a person with many
outward elements.”43 The results of the project were published in 2012.44 Selbstzeugnis
und Person: Transkulturelle Perspektiven was the first book to emerge under the
editorship of Claudia Ulbrich, Hans Medick and Angelika Schaser.45 In accordance
with the transcultural approach, they included studies on Japanese, Ottoman, Turkish
and Colonial autobiographies. Fashioning the Self in Transcultural Settings: The Uses
and Significance of Dress in Self-Narrative, published in 2015 under the editorship of
Claudia Ulbrich and Richard Wittmann, is among the books published within the scope
of the project.46 Mapping the I: The Research on Self-Narratives in Germany and
Switzerland, published in 2014 under the editorship of Claudia Ulbrich, Kaspar von
Greyerz and Lorenz Heiligensetzer, came out as the fruit of long collaboration between
the Berlin and Basel project groups.47
In 2003 French historians François-Joseph Ruggiu and Jean-Pierre Bardet started a
research program called Les écrits du for privé en France de la fin du Moyen Âge à
1914. They aimed at creating an inventory of all types of text written in the first person
to be found in French archives. They created a website to put their inventories online.48
The French research group was attracted by the transcultural perspective offered by
the Berlin research group. To combat the prominent theory put forward by Jacob
Burckhardt, who identified Italy during the Renaissance as the key place where
43 Jancke, “Autobiography as Social Practice in Early Modern German-Speaking Areas,” 74.
44 For some other publications by German scholars, see Claudia Ulbrich, “L’usage historiographique de
l’autobiographie,” in Vies en récits: Formes littéraires et médiatiques de la biographie et de
l’autobiographie, ed. Robert Dion, Frances Fortier, Barbara Havercroft and Hans-Jürgen Lüsebrink,
(Québec: Collection Convergences, 2007); Claudia Ulbrich, Hans Medick and Angelika Schaser,
“Ecrits autobiographiques et personne: perspectives transculturelles,” Études de lettres 1, no: 2
(2016):217-42, accessed February 4, 2022, http://journals.openedition.org/edl/882; M. Fulbrook and U.
Rublack, “In Relation: The ‘Social Self’ and Ego-Documents,” German History 28/3 (2010): 263-72;
Gabriele Jancke, “Individuality, Relationships, Words About Oneself: Autobiographical Writing as a
Resource (Fifteenth-Sixteenth Centuries): Konrad Pellikan’s Autobiography,” in Forms of Individuality
and Literacy in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, ed. Franz-Josef Arlinghaus (Turnhout: Brepols
Publishers, 2015).
45 Claudia Ulbrich, Hans Medick and Angelika Schaser, eds., Selbstzeugnis und Person: transkulturelle
Perspektive (Köln: Böhlau Verlag, 2012).
46 Claudia Ulbrich and Richard Wittmann, eds., Fashioning the Self in Transcultural Settings: The Uses
and Significance of Dress in Self-Narratives (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2015).
47 Claudia Ulbrich, Kaspar von Greyerz and Lorenz Heiligensetzer, eds., Mapping the ‘I’ Research on
Self-Narratives in Germany and Switzerland (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
48 http://ecritsduforprive.huma-num.fr.
9
individuality had emerged in a way not experienced in other societies, the French
research group adopted a global perspective.49 They looked for the inscribed forms of
private, intimate, autobiographical self within African, Asian and Near Eastern
cultures for the désoccidentalisation of the concept.50 The volume, The Uses of First-
Person Writings: Africa, America, Asia, Europe, was one of the most important
contributions of the French research group. The book was the reflection of this
transcultural perspective in that they gathered together specialists on personal writings
from the Near East, Africa, Colonial America, Far Asia and Europe.51
There seems to be two central debates concerning ego-document studies. Scholars
argue about whether the scope of the term ego-document can be expanded to include
all types of documents containing some personal information, for example, judicial
records or traveler’s accounts. The second debate centers around the question of
individuality; that is, whether one can find subjective information such as feelings,
emotions, and thoughts, or only objective information revealing a person’s social
connections and relationships. Dekker, in his introduction to the book, Ego-Documents
and History: Autobiographical Writings in Its Social Context since the Middle
published in 2002, pointed to debates about the meaning of the term and elaborated
on the question of whether “it is sufficient to classify a text as an ego-document on the
sole grounds that it was written in the first person and contains personal information.”52
Dekker underlined the fact that it is a very subjective decision to call a text an egodocument
and may vary from reader to reader, referring to Lejeune’s description of
autobiography as “pact autobiographique,” that is “the reader’s assumption that the
author, the narrator and the text are one and the same person.”53 Dekker also touched
upon Schulze’s broad definition of the term ego-document, but he apparently avoided
harsh criticism of it Dekker was content to quote Benigna von Krusenstjern’s reaction
to Schulze and noted that such a wide interpretation would make the concept
unworkable.54 According to Dekker, the terms ego-document and “Selbstzeugnis” can
49 François-Joseph Ruggiu, “The Uses of First Person Writings on the Longue Durée,” in The Uses of
First Person Writings: Africa, America, Asia, Europe, ed. François-Joseph Ruggiu (Brussels: P.I.E.
Peter Lang, 2013), 14-15.
50 Ibid., 15.
51 Ibid., 16.
52 Dekker, “Introduction,” 9.
53 Philippe Lejeune, Le Pacte Autobiographique (Paris: Édition du Seuil, 1975).
54 Dekker, “Introduction,” 9.
10
be used interchangeably but in a more limited way.55 In 2016, the Dutch group of
historians were more strict about the definition of the term and wrote that, “the
expansion of the range of ego-documents was welcomed in the conference held by
Winfried Schulze, but it consequently put the “ego” into question.”56 Although most
German scholars found Selbstzeugnisse to be the historically correct term, the Dutch
group found that “the more capacious category of Ego-Dokument has also attained
currency in German historiography, and is available, for instance, in academic research
manuals like Kompass der Geschichtwissenschaft.”57
Upon the question about what kind of individuality was to be found in these texts,
Dekker underlined how these texts enabled the reader to enter into the world of their
authors. Dekker’s answer is worth quoting at length in the sense of revealing that he
did not have as much trouble with the concept of the individual as the Berlin, Basel
and French scholars.
My ideas on the question of individuality, to begin with, depend on which text I am
reading. After reading the diary of Samuel Pepys, I somehow really have the idea that
I know this man a bit. Much more so in the case of my friend, I am tempted to say,
Constantijn Huygens Jr. Maybe I know them better than living friends, none of whom
has ever given me his diary to read. Even if Pepys and Huygens have only shown some
aspects of their selves in their diaries, the same is true for persons still alive. I am never
disappointed reading an egodocument, simply because I do not believe that selves flow
from these sources like water from the tap. For the same reason, though, I can
understand that literary critics do not care for the type of information I hope to find
there.58
Ottoman Self-Narratives
Debates concerning whether European individuality had an equivalent in eastern
cultures based on the assumptions made by Burckhardt who argued that “in the middle
ages, man was conscious of himself as member of a race, people, party, family or
55 Dekker, “Introduction,” 9.
56 Michael Mascuch, Rudolf Dekker and Arianne Baggerman, “Egodocuments and History: A Short
Account of the Longue Durée,” The Historian 78, no:1 (2016),12.
57 Ibid.
58 http://www.zeitenblicke.de/2002/02/dekker/index.html.
11
corporation.”59 According to him, this consciousness, formed through membership,
evolved first in Italy and man came to recognize himself as an individual thanks to the
political conditions in the Renaissance.60 Burckhardt posited individualism as the
distinctive characteristic of Western culture in his path-finding study on the Italian
Renaissance.
It was Georg Misch who linked autobiography with individualism.61 In his sevenvolume
book, Geschichte der Autobiographie, Georg Misch devoted his efforts to
tracing the history of autobiography from antiquity to Middle Ages and to the selfpresentations
of the nineteenth century. 62 He mostly devoted his efforts to proving the
truth of arguments brought forth by Burckhardt. He not only focused on Europe but
also on other cultures. He pointed out the rich corpus of material from ancient Egypt
and other oriental cultures such as the Babylonian and Assyrian, but labeled them as
texts with no personal touch, written before the advent of a sense of individuality. He
noted that “in all this abundance of material there is an infinite poverty of individual
character … They conform to one settled pattern. Their large measure of uniformity
marks them as the product of established usages and of traditional forms of selfpresentation.”
63 Misch provided a large corpus of Oriental material in order to say that
the autobiography first came into existence in Hellenic culture. He wrote that none of
the Oriental works he examined presented the full personal life of their subject. A true
historical consideration of autobiography became possible only with the birth of
Hellenic culture.64
Burckhardt’s ideas about European individualism and Misch’s linking it with
autobiography set the tone for autobiography studies, and scholars confidently argued
that individuality and, therefore, true autobiography did not develop in cultures outside
the West. One of those scholars was Rosenthal, who produced pioneering works
59 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (Harmandsworth: Penguin Classics,
1990), 98. [Originally published in German in 1869].
60 Ibid.
61 James Amelang, “Transcultural Autobiography,” 80-81.
62 Willi Jung and Alber Wimmer “Georg Misch’s Geschichte der Autobiographie,” Annali
d'Italianistica 4 (1986): 30-44, accessed December 14, 2021, http://www.jstor.org/stable/24004417.
63 Georg Misch, A History of Autobiography in Antiquity, trans. E. W. Dickes (London: Routledge,
2014), 42. Seven volumes of Geschichte der Autobiographie first published in German between 1900
to 1965. See Jung and Wimmer, “Georg Misch’s Geschichte der Autobiographie,” 30.
64 Misch, A History of Autobiography in Antiquity, 104.
12
dealing with Arabic autobiography. He advocated that “the autobiographical tradition
in Islam is bound less to personality than to the subject matter. The experiences of the
individual, as such, do not offer the incentive for their being communicated, but rather
do so only through their generally applicable pedagogic content.”65
Rosenthal and Misch’s ideas were accepted as authoritative and repeated in subsequent
studies on Arabic autobiography.66 Scholars repeatedly wrote that individualism is a
European phenomenon and therefore his dictum that related literature, such as
autobiographies, diaries, and memoirs can only be found in European cultures had a
deep effect on debates concerning European vs Middle Eastern self-consciousness.
Grunebaum, for instance, argued that Eastern people are depersonalized. He noted that
Islam “induces the individual to cultivate as the highest aim of life the mystical
experience of complete unity with the divine essence,” hence “consciousness of any
separate personality is blotted out.”67 Therefore, this experience of complete unity
required “the stripping of the human being of all the accidents that defined him in this
world as the particular man or the particular woman.”68 In such a culture, there would
be no autobiography in the European sense. He wrote that “much of Arabic
autobiography is limited to the listing of significant dates: birth, study, public
appointments. The personality behind the events remains shrouded.”69 In “Conditions
and Limits of Autobiography,” Georges Gusdorf stated that “autobiography is not to
be found outside of our cultural area; one would say that it expresses a concern peculiar
to Western Man.”70 According to Gusdorf, autobiography is not universal; it is “limited
in time and in space.”71 It is natural for his own culture only “to turn back on one’s
own past, to recollect one’s life in order to narrate it.”72
Until a few decades ago, scholars continued to repeat the idea that autobiography is
rarely found in Eastern cultures. Marvin Zonis noted that “concepts of the individual
65 Quoted in Reynolds, Interpreting the Self, 23; Franz Rosenthal, “Die arabische Autobiographie,”
Studia Arabica 1 (1937), 15–19.
66 Reynolds, Interpreting the Self, 28.
67 Gustave E. von Grunebaum, Medieval Islam: A Study in Cultural Orientation (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1946), 221.
68 Ibid., 222.
69 Ibid., 270.
70 Georges Gusdorf, “Conditions and Limits of Autobiography,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical
and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), 29.
71 Ibid., 28.
72 Ibid., 29.
13
and individualism assume different dimensions in Middle Eastern and in Western
cultures … The centrality of the value of community over individuality and
individualism works against the production of both autobiography and biography.” 73
In those eastern cultures, according to him, communal well-being is valued over the
well-being of the individual. This in turn became the determinant factor for the lack of
autobiography because the importance of the community rather than the individuality
overcomes the necessity for the evaluation of the individual’s life. 74
Reynolds showed the existence of an important autobiographical tradition in the
Islamic world. He examined numerous Arabic autobiographical texts, disclosed
historical links among texts and identified various authorial motives for penning
autobiographies.75 He argued that the materials he examined throughout the book
represented a well-known category of Arabic literary production.76 Reynolds proved
that Arabic autobiographies are more abundant than had been believed, although they
are in the minority compared to Arabic biographical writings. He more importantly
displayed that Arabic autobiographers revealed extensively more about their inner
personal lives in their narratives, but researchers must make a close reading of the texts
by taking literary strategies and the author’s social milieu into consideration in order
to reveal such intimate information. Lastly, Reynolds argued that an autobiographical
consciousness was already firmly established in medieval Arabic literary tradition. The
authors articulated their autobiographical consciousness by addressing various
motivations for writing, referring to earlier autobiographers as examples as well as
offering religion as a reason for producing autobiographical accounts.77
Burckhardt’s ideas about individualism as a requisite for writing about oneself and
successive scholars’ assumptions about autobiographical tradition in Islamic cultures
also had deep effects on scholars of Ottoman history. It was long believed that diary,
memoir, or autobiography in which a self-conscious ego speaks about himself/herself
73 Marvin Zonis, “Autobiography and Biography in the Middle East: A Plea for Psychological Studies,”
in Middle Eastern Lives: The Practice of Biography and Self-Narrative, ed. Martin Kramer (Syracuse:
Syracuse University Press, 1991), 62-63.
74 Ibid.
75 Reynolds, Interpreting the Self, 52.
76 Ibid., 2.
77 Ibid., 30-1.
14
was very unusual in Ottoman society in the pre-Tanzimat period.78 The idea that
Middle Eastern societies did not have a sense of individuality and did not produce
autobiographical material caused such works to be disregarded. Although there were
a number of texts already known in which authors talked about themselves, these texts
were depicted as exceptions and very rarely studied.79 In her intriguing book on
Ottoman sources, Faroqhi pointed out the ideological reasons behind the long neglect
of self-narratives. “European scholars until quite recently have tended to think that
first-person narrative is linked to ‘individualism’. ‘Individualism’ and
‘enlightenment’, however, are regarded as specifically European values, which cannot
be found in and should not be attributed to non-European cultures.”80
Bernard Lewis rejected the idea that it was under Western impact that autobiographical
writing flourished after the Young Turk revolution He wrote that autobiographical
writing in Arabic and Ottoman literature went back a very long way.81 To situate selfnarratives
in a historical perspective, he listed the known autobiographical material
from Arabic and Ottoman literature as well as from ancient times to the present.
However, he concluded his arguments by saying that little of the autobiographical
material he had examined were discrete books or long enough to be separate books.82
“The great majority are brief, running from a few lines to a few pages, and obviously
written for inclusion in some larger book, either one’s own or someone else’s.”83
Although Lewis rejected the idea that Middle Easterners started to produce
autobiographical material only under Western impact, he nevertheless contributed to
the argument that these texts were rare and materials already known were not long or
deep enough to be separate books such as European historians were accustomed to.84
78 Tanzimat Edict of 1839 was accepted as the first official step towards the transformation of the
Ottoman Empire into a modern state.
79 Suraiya Faroqhi, “Ein Istanbuler Derwisch des 17. Jahrhunderts, seine Familie und seine Freunde:
Das Tagebuch des Seyyid Hasan,” in Selbstzeugnisse in der Frühen Neuzeit: Individualisierungsweisen
in interdisziplinärer Perspektive, ed. Kaspar von Greyerz (Munich: De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2016), 113.
I would like to express my thanks to Tuğba İsmailoğlu Kacır for helping me in reading this article.
80 Suraiya Faroqhi, Approaching Ottoman History: An Introduction to the Sources (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), 164.
81 Bernard Lewis, “First-Person Narrative in the Middle East,” in Middle Eastern Lives: The Practive
of Biography and Self-Narrative, ed. Martin Kramer (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1991), 21.
82 Ibid., 34.
83 Ibid.
84 Ibid.
15
Christoph Herzog and Raoul Motika likewise claimed that few Ottoman or Middle
Eastern self-narratives meet the criteria defined by Westerners for a true
autobiography, that is, autobiography should reveal a full picture of the author’s inner
psychological self.85 However, the question remains as to whether when studying
Ottoman autobiographical texts, we must adhere to the criteria defined by westerners
- that is the autobiography must disclose a personal, inner psychological self rather
than a public self -. To quote at length from Reynolds,
The answer to this question hinges both on our modern expectations of autobiography
as a genre – that it should reveal a private, psychological inner self beyond an exterior,
public self – and on our expectations of autobiography as a portrayal of an
individualized identity or personality. To what extent are these modern expectations
generalizable across cultures and literatures.86
Do Ottoman autobiographies have distinctive qualities? If they have, can’t we then
qualify them as autobiographies? In that case, what status would be given to many
Ottoman texts in which the authors wrote about themselves and gave a complete
picture of their lives? We need to produce more systematic studies to comprehend
Ottoman self-narratives, their distinctive qualities, and also their similarities to the
self-narratives produced in other cultures.
İbrahim Olgun’s article in Türk Dili is one of the earlier studies paying attention to
Ottoman autobiographical texts. He gave a short survey of existing texts and
introduced some unknown examples of autobiographical material from Sergüzeşt-i
Esîr-i Malta to Memoirs of Osman Agha of Timisoara, from Aşçı Dede’s memoires to
İntizâmi’s Tuhfetü’l-İhvân87 in his article published in 1972. 88 At a very early date,
Olgun wrote that it was impossible to agree with scholars who believed that there were
not enough works in the genre of memoirs in the Turkish literature. He argued that it
is not the paucity of such works but insufficient efforts to explore and evaluate sources
and a lack of method that caused such beliefs.89 This early awareness, however, did
85 Christoph Herzog and Raoul Motika, “Orientalism ‘alla turca’: Late 19th/Early 20th Century Ottoman
Voyages into the Muslim ‘Outback’,” Die Welt des Islams 40, no:2 (2000): 139-195.
86 Reynolds, Interpreting the Self, 73-74.
87 This sergüzeştnâme was studied by Cihan Okuyucu and Sadık Yazar, Tuhfetü’l-İhvân: XVI. Yüzyıldan
Bir Katibin Sergüzeşti (Istanbul: Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı Yayınları, 2021).
88 İbrahim Olgun, “Anı Türü ve Türk Edebiyatında Anı,” Türk Dili 25/246 (1972): 402-427.
89 Ibid., 406-7.
16
not lead to a change in the perception that autobiographical material was rare in
Ottoman literature. A study onof similar a similar scale to Reynold’s survey on Arabic
autobiographies has not yet been done for Ottoman autobiographical works.
Some well-known autobiographies like the one written by Osman Agha of Timisoara,
the autobiography of chief mufti Feyzullah Efendi (d.1703), Evliya Çelebi’s writings
revealing very intimate information on his life, as well as the works of historian
Mustafa Ali (d. 1600), who “inject[ed] personal commentary and autobiography into
even the most formal of contexts,”90 were not enough to change this idea that there
was an “actual shortage of personality” in Ottoman sources.91 Goffmann argued that
“a paucity of diaries, memoirs, letters, and similar writings has served to dampen
scholarship in this potentially tantalizing discipline.”92
Despite all these views about the paucity or lack of autobiographical writing, scholars
at times identified as Ottoman self-narratives works found either in the state archive
or manuscript libraries. However, an obstacle to studying these texts was that scholars
mostly did not know what to do with this special kind of texts which were not values
as sources for historical studies. These texts were either only transcribed and
introduced to the scholarly public without being out into a context or, at best, used to
extract facts about some larger themes like cultural or social history. One of such
studies was İsmet Parmaksızoğlu’s article written in 1953.93 Parmaksızoğlu analyzed
a captivity narrative in which Macuncuzâde Mustafa Efendi related how he was
captivated by pirates on his way to Baf (Paphos, Cyprus) and taken to Malta where he
stayed for two years between 1597 and 1599. Parmaksızoğlu underlined that this work
might be the earliest captivity narrative providing detailed information about the
conditions of Muslim prisoners in Malta. Parmaksızoğlu examined the text to make a
comparison between Muslim captives held in the prisons of Malta and Christian
captives held in Istanbul. Another study made on the same work was Fahir İz’s edition
90 Cornell H. Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The Historian Mustafa Âli
(1541-1600) (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), 8.
91 Daniel Goffmann, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2002), xiv. Also cited by Astrid Meier, “Ego-Documents in Early-Modern Ottoman
Syria? Result of a Difficult Search,” in The Uses of First Person Writings: Africa, America, Asia,
Europe, ed. François-Joseph Ruggiu (Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2013), 124.
92 Goffmann, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe, xiv.
93 İsmet Parmaksızoğlu, “Bir Türk Kadısının Esaret Hatıraları,” İstanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi
Tarih Dergisi 8 (1953): 77-84.
17
of Sergüzeşt-i Esîr-i Malta published in 1970.94 İz briefly introduced the text and the
author without giving much detailed information.
Osman Agha’s work is perhaps the most known example of Ottoman first-person
accounts. Osman Agha was born at the end of the seventeenth century in Timisoara.
He was captured in 1688 during the siege of Lipova and ended up being a servant in
the household of an aristocrat in Vienna. He wrote about the misfortunes of being a
captive in the hands of infidels. He provided a lively and amusing account of his time
in Vienna and his escape in 1699. Richard Franz Kreutel and Otto Spies first published
Osman Agha’s memoirs in German in 1954.95 Later, in 1980, a London autograph
copy was edited by Kreutel in its original Ottoman script.96 Recently, R. Aslıhan
Aksoy Sheridan published an article reading Osman Agha’s memoirs as selfnarrative.
97 Examining the form, context, and reasons for writing and the intended
functions of Osman Agha’s narrative, Aksoy Sheridan stated that his narrative not only
uncovers the emotional implications seen between the lines, but also reveals the
political situations experienced on an individual level. Self-narratives can give a vivid
picture of the actual conditions individuals lived through.98
Another well-known autobiographical work was written by the chief mufti Feyzullah
Efendi. F. Çetin Derin and Ahmet Türek translated the text from Arabic into modern
Turkish.99 His autobiography has been studied by Suraiya Faroqhi,100 Barbara Kellner-
94 Fahir İz, “Macuncuzâde Mustafa’nın Malta Anıları: Sergüzeşt-i Esîr-i Malta,” Türk Dili Araştırmaları
Yıllığı Belleten 18 (1970): 69-122.
95 Richard F. Kreutel and Otto Spies, Leben und Abenteuer des Dolmetschers Osman Ağa – Eine
türkische Autobiographie aus der Zeit der großen Kreige gegen Österreich (Bonn: Selbstverlag des
Orientalischen Seminars der Universität Bonn, 1954).
96 Richard F. Kreutel, Die Autobiographie des Dolmetschers ‘Osmān Ağa aus Temeschwar. Der Text
des Londoner Autographen in normalisierter Rechtschreibung (Cambridge: E. J. W. Gibb Memorial,
1980).
97 R. Aslıhan Aksoy Sheridan, “Nostalgia of a Frustrated Ottoman Subject: Reading Osman Agha of
Timisoara’s Memoirs as Self-Narrative,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 53 (2021): 323-
330.
98 Ibid., 329-30.
99 Ahmet Türek and F. Çetin Derin, “Feyzullah Efendi’nin Kendi Kaleminden Hal Tercümesi,” İstanbul
Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi Tarih Dergisi 24 (1970): 69-92.
100 Suraiya Faroqhi, “An Ulama Grandee and His Household,” Journal of Ottoman Studies (Osmanlı
Araştırmaları) 9 (1989): 199–208.
18
Heinkele101 and Michael Nizri102 in terms of ulama grandee households and family
politics. Lastly, Michael Nizri published a monograph on Feyzullah Efendi’s
household. He examined the formation of a powerful ulama household and the politics
arising around such an influential figure.103
Agah Sırrı Levend was the first to bring together known examples of the
sergüzeştnâme (book of memoir) genre. In his monumental work, Türk Edebiyatı
Tarihi, Levend recorded fifteen manuscripts under the title of sergüzeşnâme and
hasbıhâl.104 After briefly describing the genre of sergüzeştnâme, he added a list of the
manuscripts. Haluk Gökalp examined nineteen manuscripts in his book which was
published in 2009.105 He studied the style, form, and content of these manuscripts in
great detail and provided a complete picture of the genre for the first time. Gökalp
argued that the main motivation behind the production of sergüzeştnâmes was that the
authors give value to their lives and the events they experienced as individuals.106
Following are the some of the manuscripts examined by Gökalp: Firkatnâme,
Hecrnâme, Kitâb-ı Sergüzeşt-i Zaîfî, Makâlât-ı Varvarî Ali, Sergüzeştnâme-i Fakîr Be
‘Azîmet-i Tokat, Sergüzeştnâme-i Kâtib Osman, Sernüviştnâme-i ‘Âcizî, Sergüzeşt-i
İstolçevî.107
Researchers have also discovered new manuscripts. Two sergüzeştnâmes produced by
the same author have recently been identified by Mehmet Yaşar Ertaş and Mustafa
Demir. Mustafa Demir prepared his M.A. thesis on Sergüzşet-i Âşık Yazıcı Murtaza in
2020.108 Demir transcribed the text, which was written in verse, into modern Turkish
101 Barbara Kellner-Heinkele, “Family Politics of Ottoman Ulema. The Case of Sheykhülislam Seyyid
Feyzullah Efendi and His Descendents,” in Kinship in the Altaic World, Proceedings of the 48th
Permanent International Altaistic Conference Moscow 2005, ed. Elena V. Boikova and Rostislav B.
Rybakov (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2006).
102 Michael Nizri, “The Memoirs of Şeyhülislam Feyzullah Efendi (1638–1703): Self, Family and
Household,” in Many Ways of Speaking about the Self, ed. Yavuz Köse and Ralf Elger (Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010), 27–36.
103 Michael Nizri, Ottoman High Politics and the Ulema Household (New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2014).
104 Agah Sırrı Levend, Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 1973), 141-42.
105 Haluk Gökalp, Eski Türk Edebiyatında Manzum Sergüzeştnâmeler (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2009).
106 Ibid., 604. Also cited by Karahasanoğlu, “Ottoman Ego-Documents: State of the Art,” International
Journal of Middle East Studies 53 (2021), 301.
107 Since the literature about sergüzeştnâme genre is detailly examined in the second chapter, I am not
citing complete literature here.
108 Mustafa Demir, “Sergüzeşt-i Âşık Yazıcı Murtaza (İnceleme-Metin),” (MA thesis, Hitit University,
2020).
19
and analyzed its form and content. In the same year, Mehmet Yaşar Ertaş came up
with a lively account of Aşık Yazıcı Murtaza who also left a record of his adventures
in prose. Ertaş provided a vivid picture of the adventures of Yazıcı Murtaza’ who left
his family and homeland behind in the hope of making money. He spent years away
from his homeland and knocked around in different regions of the empire from Albania
to Basra, from Selanik to Yerevan. He was away from home and did not see his family
for ten years. He wrote the account of his life in great disappointment and with great
yearning for home.109
Ottoman intellectuals also produced autobiographical works under the title of tercemei
hâl (autobiography). They wrote their autobiographies either as separate works or
inserted their life stories into larger works like hagiographies, travelogues,
biographical dictionaries, or historical works, as well as in the prefaces of various
legal, scientific and religious works.110 One must be aware that diverse styles and
forms might be used in composing a life narrative. For instance, Taşköprüzâde
provided autobiographical details in his biographical work eş-Şakâiku’n-Nu’mâniyye
fî ‘Ulemâi’d-Devleti’l-Osmâniyye.111 Katip Çelebi inserted autobiographical
experiences into three different works of his: Süllemü’l-Vusûl ilâ Tabakâti’l-Fuhûl,
Mîzânü’l-Hakk fî İhtiyâri’l-Ehakkk and Cihânnümâ.112 Katip Çelebi defended his
preference to write an autobiography by giving reference to earlier intellectuals who
wrote their autobiographies, such as Taşköprülüzâde, Suyûtî, Şa‘rânî, İbn Hacer and
others, explaining that he wanted to express his gratitude to God in such an
endeavor.113
Jan Schmidt is another well-known researcher publishing accounts of Ottoman
autobiographical writing before the Tanzimat period. Contrary to the ideas of Georges
109 Yazıcı Murtaza, Arnavutluktan Basra’ya 18. Yüzyılda Kayserili Bir Katibin Seyahat Anıları, ed.
Mehmet Yaşar Ertaş (İstanbul: Kitabevi, 2020).
110 Derin Terzioğlu, “Autobiography in Fragments: Reading Ottoman Personal Miscellanies in the Early
Modern Era,” in Autobiographical Themes in Turkish Literature: Theoretical and Comparative
Perspectives, ed. Olcay Akyıldız, Halim Kara and Börte Sagaster (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2016), 85-
86.
111 ‘İsamu’d-Din Ebu’l- Hayr Ahmed b. Mustafa Taşköprüzâde, eş-Şakâiku’n-Nu’mâniyye fî Ulemâi’d-
Devleti’l- Osmâniyye, ed. Ahmet Suphi Furat (Istanbul: İstanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi
Yayınları,1985), 552-560.
112 Fikret Sarıcaoğlu, “Kâtib Çelebi’nin Otobiyografileri,” İstanbul Üniversitesi Edebiyat Fakültesi
Tarih Dergisi 37 (2002): 297-319.
113 Sarıcaoğlu, “Kâtib Çelebi’nin Otobiyografileri,” 298-299.
20
Gusdorf, who thought that autobiography was peculiar to Western man, Schmidt came
up with examples of manuscripts he discovered in the Oriental Collection of the Leiden
University Library. These manuscripts were “incompletely and misleadingly, even
disparagingly, catalogued and … consequently unread and unstudied.”114 Jan Schmidt
apparently experienced similar technical problems of misleading catalogues in finding
autobiographical works. Schmidt showed the existence of autobiographical passages
in diverse inexpected places and contexts.115 An obviously important discovery by
Schmidt was the autobiography by a low-ranking Ottoman soldier who called himself
Kabudlu el-Hac Mustafa Vasfi Efendi. This soldier participated in a number of military
campaigns in Anatolia and Rumelia in the early nineteenth century during the reign of
Mahmud II.116 Mustafa Vasfi Efendi served as an irregular horseman together with his
father. He kept a record of the military campaigns he participated in, together with an
account of his travels and a lively report of his adventures. He described his feelings
with great vivacity, bringing the reader close to the reality of Ottoman military life.117
Jan Schmidt translated the text into English and pointed out its value as an egodocument:
“a rare source for the life and emotions of a low-ranking Muslim inhabitant
of the pre-Modern Ottoman Empire.”118 This text was published by Ömer Koçyiğit in
2016 together with a comprehensive analysis of the life and adventures of Kabudlu
Mustafa Vasfi Efendi.119
A late nineteenth century memoir was written by a Sufi called Aşçı İbrahim Dede (d.
after 1906) under the title of Risâle-i Terceme-i Ahvâl-i Aşçı Dede-i Nakşî Mevlevî.
Aşçı İbrahim Dede was an Ottoman bureaucrat who had Sufi affiliations as can be
recognized from the title of his memoir as well as the from the title aşçı dede which
was a rank in the Mevlevî Sufi order.120 The backbone of his narrative is mostly about
114 Jan Schmidt, “Ottoman Autobiographical Texts by Lami’i and Others in the Collection of Turkish
Manuscripts at the Leiden University Library,” Türklük Bilgisi Araştırmaları: Barbara Flemming
Armağanı 26, no:2 (2002), 197.
115 Jan Schmidt, Ottoman Autobiographical Texts,” 197.
116 Jan Schmidt, “The Adventures of an Ottoman Horseman: The Autobiography of Kabudlı Mustafa
Vasfi Efendi, 1800-182,” in The Joys of Philology: Studies in Ottoman Literature, History and
Orientalism (1500-1923), vol I (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 2002), 165.
117 Schmidt, “The Adventures of an Ottoman Horseman,” 179.
118 Schmidt, “The Adventures of an Ottoman Horseman,” 181.
119 Kabudlu Mustafa Vasfi Efendi, Tevarih (Analysis-Text-Maps-Index-Facsimile), ed. Ömer Koçyiğit
(Cambridge: Harvard University, Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, 2016).
120 Yusuf Turan Günaydın, “Tasavvufî Günlükler,” Hece: Günlük Özel Sayısı 30 (2015), 71.
21
his appointments to the different regions of the Empire. He not only worked as an
officer in the different regions of the Ottoman Empire, but also joined several Sufi
orders, which were active in the cities where he worked as a bureaucrat. He joined the
Mawlawi order in Istanbul and Edirne, 121 the Khalidi order in Erzincan, and the Qadiri
order in Erzurum. He explained his reasons in the following remarks: “A true path
should include four aspects; the affection of the Qadiris, the path of Naqshbandis, the
morals of Mawlawis, and the obedience of the Bektashis.”122 For Aşçı Dede, it was
very significant to have the guidance of a sheikh, because this would lead him to the
eternal life that he was searching for.123 Aşçı Dede provided a lively account of his life
as a bureaucrat and also as a Sufi. His memoirs give valuable insight into nineteenthcentury
official duties and the Sufi way of life.
Some of the Ottoman diaries which have been studied recently in the context of selfnarratives/
ego-documents had also been discovered and introduced to the scholarly
public long ago. For instance, Niyazi Mısri’s (d.1694) diary was first introduced by
Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı in 1972.124 In the article in which he aimed at uncovering Niyazi
Mısri’s life, Sufi identity, and mentality, Gölpınarlı devoted a large space to the diary.
Likewise, the diary of Sadreddinzâde Telhisî Mustafa Efendi was first discovered by
Fazıl Işıközlü in 1973.125 In 1977, Madeline Zilfi introduced the diary of Sıdkı Mustafa
Efendi (d. 1790) covering the years between 1749-1756 and examined it as “a new
source for Ottoman biography.”126 Sıdkı Mustafa Efendi was a müderris (teacher) and,
therefore, he reserved a lot of space in his diary for recording appointments. He also
wrote about the injustices he suffered in his profession and complained about the
grievances he experienced.127 Around a decade later, Orhan Şaik Gökyay discovered
121 Aşçı İbrahim Dede, Aşçı Dede’nin Hatıraları: Çok Yönlü Bir Sufi’nin Gözüyle Son Dönem Osmanlı
Hayatı, ed. Mustafa Koç and Eyyüp Tanrıverdi, 4 volumes (İstanbul: Kitabevi, 2006). [hereafter, Aşçı
Dede I, II, III, IV].
122 Aşçı Dede III, 1469.
123 Aşçı Dede I, 333.
124 Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı, “Niyâzî-i Mısrî,” Şarkiyat Mecmuası 7 (1972):183-226.
125 Fazıl Işıközlü, “Başbakanlık Arşivi’nde Yeni Bulunmuş Olan ve Sadreddinzâde Telhîsî Mustafa
Efendi Tarafından Tutulduğu Anlaşılan H. 1123 (1711)-1148 (1735) Yıllarına Ait Bir Ceride (Jurnal)
ve Eklentisi,” in VII. Türk Tarih Kongresi: Kongreye Sunulan Bildiriler, vol. 2 (Ankara: Türk Tarih
Kurumu, 1973), 508-34.
126 Madeline Zilfi, “The Diary of a Müderris: A New Source for Ottoman Biography,” Journal of
Turkish Studies 1 (1977):157-172.
127 Ibid.
22
Sohbetnâme and, transcribing some parts of it, wrote an article to introduce this very
interesting source.128 Kemal Beydilli discovered another very interesting work, the
diary of an imam, in 2001.129 However, Beydilli used it to extract information about
imams rather than giving a voice to the writer of the diary. Diaries produced in Arabic
speaking Ottoman lands were also beginning to appear. The diary/history of Ahmed
al-Budayr was translated into Turkish by Hasan Yüksel in 1995.130 Ahmed al-Budayr
organized his diary according to the years. He recorded his entries by giving the day,
month, and year. His diary offers an extraordinary insight into the everyday life of a
small business owner who lived in seventeenth- century Ottoman Damascus. Nabil
Saleh studied the diary of an Ottoman judge living in Beirut in 1843. Abu Khalid
provided an intriguing account of his life, his work as a judge, the troubled cases he
had to deal with and his relations with others in an environment shaped by difficult
political circumstances.131 Most of these studies were descriptive, aiming to introduce
manuscripts to the scholarly public; some of them were used as sources of information
for larger subjects. Some of these sources, have long been awaiting rediscovery and
integration into ego-document/self-narrative studies in Europe.
Even though modern scholarship on the Ottoman Empire favored archival documents
and official histories revealing “factual” information, and distrusted autobiographical
narratives, still Ottoman self-narratives have attracted the attention of scholars over
the last few decades and a number of very important analytical studies have appeared
at an ever-increasing pace. Most importantly, one should mention Cemal Kafadar’s
groundbreaking study of Seyyid Hasan’s diary in 1989. Kafadar was the first scholar
to integrate an Ottoman diary into ego-document literature. Sohbetnâme, a diary
covering the period between 1661 and 1665, was penned by a Sufi called Seyyid
Hasan, head of the Sufi convent in Balat.132 In his diary, Seyyid Hasan mostly narrated
128 Orhan Şaik Gökyay, “Sohbetname,” Tarih ve Toplum 14 (1985): 56-64.
129 Kemal Beydilli, Osmanlı Döneminde İmamlar ve Bir İmamın Günlüğü (Istanbul: TATAV, 2001).
130 Hasan Yüksel, Berber Bediri’nin Günlüğü 1741-1762: Osmanlı Taşra Hayatına İlişkin Olaylar
(Ankara: Akçağ, 1995).
131 Nabil Saleh, Qadi and the Fortune Teller: The Diary of a Judge in Ottoman Beirut (1843) (London:
Quartet Books, 1996).
132 Sohbetnâme is found in Topkapı Palace Museum Library in two volumes. Seyyid Hasan,
Sohbetnâme, Topkapı Sarayı Kütüphanesi, MS Hazine 1426; Seyyid Hasan, Sohbetnâme, Topkapı
Sarayı Kütüphanesi, MS Hazine 1418.
23
mundane occurrences in his daily life; people he encountered, places he went to or the
food he ate. Kafadar suggested that literary activities common in Sufi circles, such as
writing the words or visions of one’s sheikh, provided Seyyid Hasan with the necessary
vocabulary to write about his own deeds. “It is clear that recording the worldly and
miraculous deeds, words and visions of one’s sheikh was a respected activity in Sufi
circles. Seyyid Ḥasan had in a way produced a work of that nature but inverted the
process and recorded his own deeds.”133
Kafadar associated Sohbetname with social environment of Seyyid Hasan who mostly
described his experiences as being in harmony with the group he belonged to. “If
unique personal experiences of a mystical nature are not recorded, perhaps it is because
our diarist felt the true path to the good life to lie not so much in individual experiences
as in communal harmony—a sensibility that was rather common in Sufism.”134 Indeed,
referring to Natalie Zemon Davis, Kafadar wrote that “the notion of individuality,
totally dissociated from identification with any group according to Burckhardt’s
famous depiction, now seems to have more leaks than it once did.” Like Davis,
Kafadar argued that embeddedness in group was not an obstacle to self-definition and
self-consciousness.135 What is more important for this article is that Kafadar did not
limit himself to Sohbetnâme but discussed almost all known works as well as some
unknown works in the context of ego-documents. For example, Asiye Hatun, whose
letters to her sheikh, were found and edited by Cemal Kafadar provided a curious
example of the Ottoman dream landscape.136 These dream letters give a valuable
chance for the researcher to gain insight into a woman Sufi’s life and her spiritual
pathway.
Kafadar’s students also made significant contributions to the field. Among them Derin
Terzioğlu’s study of Niyazi Mısri’s diary must be mentioned.137 Terzioğlu searched
133 Kafadar, “Self and Others,” 127-28.
134 Ibid., 147.
135 Ibid., 135. Also see Natalie Zemon Davis, “Boundaries and the Sense of Self in Sixteenth-Century
France,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought,
ed. Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna, David E. Wellbery with Arnold I. Davidson, Ann Swidler and Ian
Watt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 53-63.
136 Cemal Kafadar, “Mütereddit bir Mutasavvıf: Üsküplü Asiye Hatun’un Rüya Defteri 1641–43,”
Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Yıllık 5 (1992): 168–222; Cemal Kafadar, Rüya Mektupları: Asiye Hatun
(Istanbul: Oğlak Yayınları, 1994).
137 Derin Terzioğlu, “Man in the Image of God in the Image of the Times: Sufi Self-Narratives and the
Diary of Niyāzī-i Mıṣrī (1618-94),” Studia Islamica 94 (2002): 139-165.
24
for the circumstances in which the diary was produced, the emotional state of the
diarist when producing such a text and, above all, the modes of self-representation in
a Sufi narrative. Terzioğlu noted that Ottoman practitioners of Sufism inherited a large
corpus of life narratives from their masters and other previous Sufis in several forms
and genres.138 This, in a sense, gave them an advantage in writing about themselves.
“As writers of self-narratives, Ottoman Sufis also had an advantage over the rest of the
literate minority in that Sufism provided them with a set of highly sophisticated
concepts and vocabulary with which to write about themselves as well as with a reason
to do so.”139 Like Kafadar, Terzioğlu did not confine herself only to the genre of diary,
she examined all the known Sufi self-narratives and integrated them with ongoing
debates in European historiography. These two articles written by Kafadar and
Terzioğlu presented an amount of important material and have the potential to open
the door to new studies.
At this time, Suraiya Faroqhi included a discussion about self-narratives in her book
on Ottoman sources.140 She discussed five texts belonging to the period before the
nineteenth century, and three texts produced after the middle of the nineteenth century.
She examined these materials under the title of “Writing for a Restricted Audience:
The First Person-Narrative.” She argued that these texts were written to be read by a
restricted circle. She based her argument on the fact that such texts conveying personal
experiences were not generally copied.141 She touched upon the issue of European
individualism and the ideological reasons behind the idea that memoirs and
autobiographies in the Ottoman Empire began to appear only in the twentieth century.
She also discussed technical and ideological reasons behind the ignoring of
manuscripts written in the first person.142 Her brief discussion of this material is quite
significant in that it is the first time that these particular types of text appear in a book
on Ottoman sources revealing their value as sources for historical research. She also
contributed to a publication by Kaspar von Greyerz, the leader of Basel ego-document
group. Faroqhi offered a detailed analysis of the diary of Seyyid Hasan. The diary, as
138 Terzioğlu, “Man in the Image of God in the Image of the Times,” 143.
139 Ibid., 142.
140 Suraiya Faroqhi, Approaching Ottoman History: An Introduction to the Sources (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1999), 163-67.
141 Ibid., 164.
142 Ibid., 163-164.
25
noted before, covered the period between 1661 and 1665. Seyyid Hasan was the son
of Halveti Sünbüli, a sheikh in Istanbul. Faroqhi noted that he was financially well off
and did not have to think about working. Hence, work plays obviously a very minor
role in his diary. There is also no evidence of a career in the author’s diary. Excursions
and visits were a popular theme. The author reports in detail who went where with
whom. Eating and drinking were also important themes for Seyyid Hasan. For this
reason, Faroqhi notes that the diary can be considered as a significant - and rare -
source of nutrition for well-off city dwellers.143 She found the text particularly
interesting because the author makes so many statements about himself that one can
well imagine him as a person.144 Seyyid Hasan apparently loved socializing and
contact with friends more than anything, but also enjoyed being in the open air. Eating
and drinking coffee offered comfort and relaxation, even in the worst times of his
life.145 Faroqhi tends to believe that such a growing interest in “the culture of the
intimate” in seventeenth-century Ottoman urban society served as a sign of wider,
more complex processes. According to her, the change in mentality in the later
nineteenth century was not brought into the Ottoman Empire from outside a result of
an intensive contact with European thinking; rather it was about the local roots of
Ottoman modernism.146
Dana Sajdi must be counted among those who made important publications related to
ego-document literature. She wrote about the barber of Damascus, Shihab al-Din
Ahmad Ibn Budayr, who lived in the 18th century. Ibn Budayr was born into humble
circumstances and somehow became apprentice to a fashionable city barber who
served some of the most recognized intellectual characters of Damascus.147 Hence, Ibn
Budayr finally became a barber with a similar high-standing customer profile. More
curious than his becoming a fashionable city barber was that Ibn Budayr penned a
history book to record events occurring in his lifetime. Sajdi examined this book to
look for “the life and work, the aspirations and fears, of this remarkable eighteenth-
143 Faroqhi, “Ein Istanbuler Derwisch,” 117.
144 Ibid., 124.
145 Ibid., 125.
146 Ibid.
147 Dana Sajdi, The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth- Century Ottoman Levant
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2013), 2.
26
century Damascene craftsman.”148 To contextualize the emergence of a new kind of
literacy – “nouveau literacy” as she described it- she compared Ibn Budayr’s work to
other such commoner chronicles written “by a couple of soldiers, by a court clerk, by
Greek Orthodox and Greek Catholic priests, by a Samaritan scribe, and by a Merchant”
in the eighteenth century Levant.149 In this way, she unveiled the emergence of a new
kind of genre, that is, history- writing by unusual people. 150 She related this
phenomenon not to a rise in literacy, saying it was more specifically about a new social
phenomenon, that is, “the rise of authority in the field of history among seemingly
‘random’ individuals, who come from different backgrounds and who do not have any
connection to one another.”151 Sajdi’s work provided valuable insights into the life of
Ibn Budayr in particular, and the culture of ordinary people in general in eighteenthcentury
Ottoman Syria.
Recently, scientific meetings to discuss Ottoman self-narratives have begun to be
organized. A symposium was jointly organized in 2003 by Boğaziçi University and
the Orient Institut der DMG under the title of “Autobiographical Themes in Turkish
Literature: Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives.” In 2016, a selection of the
papers presented in the symposium was published as a book under the same name by
Olcay Akyıldız, Halim Kara and Börte Sagaster.152
An international workshop was organized in 2009 by the German Research
Foundation’s Research Group 530 on “Self-narratives in Transcultural Perspective”
(DFG-Forschergruppe 530 Selbstzeugnisse in transkultureller Perspektive) in
collaboration with Orient Institut, Istanbul. An important volume developed out of this
workshop with the title of Fashioning the Self in Transcultural Perspective: The Uses
and Significance of Dress in Self-Narratives. This included the theme of material
culture in the research on self-narratives by examining the function of dress in people’s
148 Sajdi, The Barber of Damascus, 2.
149 Ibid.
150 Steve Tamari, “The Barber of Damascus: Nouveau Literacy in the Eighteenth- Century Ottoman
Levant by Dana Sajdi,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 46, no:4 (2014): 826-828.
151 Sajdi, The Barber of Damascus, 9.
152 Olcay Akyıldız, Halim Kara and Börte Sagaster, eds., Autobiographical Themes in Turkish
Literature: Theoretical and Comparative Perspectives (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2016).
27
self-concept.153 An international research project of the Orient Institute, Istanbul called
“Istanbul Memories” was coordinated by Richard Wittmann in cooperation with
Christoph Herzog.154
Two publications focusing on the late nineteenth and early twentieth century Ottoman
life narratives appeared under the Routledge series of “Life Narratives of the Ottoman
Realm: Individual and Empire in the Near East.” Philipp Wirtz examined
autobiographies of journalists, soldiers, novelists or officials like Şevket Süreyya
Aydemir, Halide Edip Adıvar, and Ahmet Emin Yalman who were born into the
Ottoman Empire but wrote in the post-Ottoman period.155 Wirtz analyzed these
autobiographical narratives to display different images of a past world and to “examine
which attitudes authors take towards the past, whether the past is presented in a
positive or negative light, or a combination of both.”156 The second publication of the
series was edited by Christoph Herzog and Richard Wittmann entitled Istanbul-
Kushta-Constantinople: Narratives of Identity in the Ottoman Capital 1830-1930.
This offered a glimpse into the diverse life experiences in the Ottoman capital by
focusing on narratives produced by persons from various walks of life. The book’s title
bears three different usages of the city’s name -by Muslims, Jews and Christians
respectively- revealing the main aim of the editors who wanted to reconstruct the city’s
multiple pasts “to understand better the defining role that ethnic diversity played in the
shaping of the city.”157Accordingly with the stated aim of the editors, the book is
composed four parts under the titles of “European and Ottoman Women in the
Empire,” Outside Observers of Istanbul,” Jewish Communities,” and “Armenian and
Bulgarian Christian Communities.”
Ralf Elger and Yavuz Köse edited a book focusing on Middle Eastern ego-documents
in 2010 under the title of Many Ways of Speaking About the Self: Middle Eastern Ego-
Documents in Arabic, Persian and Turkish (14th-20th Century). They followed the
153 Claudia Ulbrich and Richard Wittmann, “Introduction,” in Fashioning the Self in Transcultural
Perspective: The Uses and Significance of Dress in Self-Narratives, ed. Claudia Ulbrich and Richard
Wittmann (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2016), 12.
154 http://www.istanbulmemories.org
155 Philipp Wirtz, Depicting the Late Ottoman Empire in Turkish Autobiographies: Images of a Past
World (London: Routledge, 2017), 2.
156 Ibid., 1.
157 Christoph Herzog and Richard Wittmann, eds., Istanbul-Kushta-Constantinople: Narratives of
Identity in the Ottoman Capital 1830-1930 (London: Routledge, 2019), 1.
28
ideas of Winfried Schulze and expanded the scope of the term even more, thinking
that “ego-documents could encompass all texts with an ego talking about himself.”158
They even noted that “texts without an ego speaking can be interpreted as egodocument,
since everything we write reveals something about ourselves.”159 Hence,
they included a broad spectrum of articles focusing on “all kinds of texts: stories of a
whole life, short personal notices and everything in between.”160 The book was divided
into four sections under the titles of “The Remembering Ego”, “The Travelling Ego”,
“The Fictional Ego” and “The Hidden Ego.” Some of the articles found in this volume
are as follows: Hatice Aynur contributed to the volume with an article revealing
autobiographical parts in Aşık Çelebi’s (d. 1572) dictionary of poets; Michail Nizri
wrote about Şeyhülislam Feyzullah Efendi (d. 1703)’s memoirs; Denise Klein
examined Sefâretnâme genre as ego-documents by discussing three different 18th
century examples; Jan Schmidt focused on Ottoman miscellaneous manuscripts; Aslı
Niyazioğlu contributed with a study of dreams and Ottoman biography writing in 16th
century and Yavuz Köse provided insight into Ottoman consumer behavior.
Mehmet Beşikçi has been producing important publications using ego-documents
written by Ottoman soldiers at the end of the nineteenth century.161 One of the most
significant contribution of Mehmet Beşikçi is the article in which he provided a
methodological analysis as to how to use autobiographical texts in historical
research.162 Beşikçi asserted that ego-documents are distinctive types of historical
sources and defined them as texts in which authors present a subjective experience in
writing with their own particular ways of remembering. However, that subjective
experience/truth was shaped both by the political, social, and cultural context within
which it was lived and remembered.163 There are two dimensions to evaluating egodocuments:
when it was written and when it was remembered. Hence, it is necessary
158 Ralf Elger and Yavuz Köse, “Introduction,” in Many Ways of Speaking About the Self: Middle
Eastern Ego-Documents in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish (14th-20th Century) (Wiesbaden: Otto
Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010), 8.
159 Ibid., 9.
160 Ibid., 7.
161 Mehmet Beşikçi, The Ottoman Mobilization of Manpower in the First World War: Between
Voluntarism and Resistance (Leiden: Brill, 2012).
162 Mehmet Beşikçi, “Tarih Yazımında Hatırat ve Günlükler Nasıl Kullanılmalı? Birinci Dünya
Savaşı’na Katılan Askerlerin Benlik-Belgeleri Özelinde Metodolojik Bir Analiz,” Toplum ve Bilim 144
(2018): 253-282.
163 Ibid., 278.
29
to fully understand the authors’ characteristics and problems to bring this type of
document into a more fruitful relationship with other types of documents.164 By
evaluating the model provided by Sidone Smith and Julia Watson for the study of
autobiographies, Mehmet Beşikçi provided a roadmap for those who want to use egodocuments
for historical studies.165
These studies made a significant impact, and interest in Ottoman self-narratives
gradually increased. We must talk also about Selim Karahasanoğlu who made
significant contributions to ego-document studies in Turkey. In 2013, he published a
book entitled Kadı ve Günlüğü: Sadreddinzâde Telhisî Mustafa Efendi Günlüğü (1711-
1735) Üzerine Bir İnceleme.166 Although this diary of Mustafa Efendi was first
discovered by Fazıl Işıközü in 1973, it is Karahasanoğlu who integrated the diary into
Ego-document literature. In an article entitled “Ego-documents: Potentials and
Limitations as a Source for Historical Research,” Karahasanoğlu aimed at creating an
awareness of the study of ego-documents in Turkey. He claimed that Ottoman
manuscript collections include lots of works that can be evaluated within the category
of ego-documents and these sources have the potential to add a human factor to
Ottoman historical scholarship.167 According to Karahasanoğlu, defining the term egodocument
too broadly is not helpful because such broad definition causes the term to
lose its precision.168 He thinks that any source can give some clues about its author,
even the genre of chronicle. Thus, he is “inclined to include only the material that can
be defined directly as an ego-document in the sense that the motivation of the author
is clearly to describe himself/herself.”169
In the same year, Karahasanoğlu wrote an article part under the title of Ben-Anlatıları
in a historical methodology book edited by Mehmet Yaşar Ertaş. It was the second
time, after Faroqhi’s inclusion of texts narrated in first person in her book Approaching
Ottoman History, that we saw Ottoman ego-documents analyzed as sources in a
164 Beşikçi, “Tarih Yazımında Hatırat ve Günlükler Nasıl Kullanılmalı?,” 278.
165 Ibid., 278-80.
166 Selim Karahasanoğlu, Kadı ve Günlüğü: Sadreddinzâde Telhisî Mustafa Efendi Günlüğü(1711-
1735) Üzerine Bir İnceleme (İstanbul: Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları, 2013).
167 Selim Karahasanoğlu, “Ben-Anlatıları: Tarihsel Kaynak Olarak İmkanları, Sınırları (Ego-
Documents: Potentials and Limitations as a Source for Historical Research),” Turkish History
Education Journal, 8, no:1 (2019), 213.
168 Ibid., 214.
169 Ibid., 213-14.
30
historiography book on Turkey,170 which is a very significant step in creating an
awareness of Ottoman ego-document studies. Karahasanoğlu focused on the reasons
for the neglect of these very special kind of sources. According to him, Ottoman
historiography in Turkey is generally disconnected from the wider historiographical
trends in the world. This lack of connection probably also had its effect on egodocument
studies. Most of the scholars in Turkey think that there are more “important
and serious” sources to be studied Also, working conditions in manuscript libraries
and lack of proper catalogues may also be other reasons for this neglect, since
researchers mostly prefer to study in the very professionally- organized state archives.
Finally, the tendency of Fuat Köprülü, who was the pioneer of modern historiography
in Turkey, to use narrative sources for historical study has not been followed in Turkish
historiography.171 Like Kafadar, Karahasanoğlu thought that diaries, autobiographies,
memoirs, and private letters were common and established genres in the Ottoman
world. What makes them different is the inefficiency of cataloguing in the manuscript
libraries.172
Karahasanoğlu’s effort to create an awareness for ego-document studies in Turkey
culminated with a workshop on Ottoman Ego-documents which was held by Istanbul
Medeniyet University’s Faculty of Letters and the Center for Ego-Document Studies.
A report on the workshop was published in the Review of Middle East Studies.173 Selim
Karahasanoğlu noted that this workshop was the first event in Turkey to discuss a wide
range of Ottoman ego-documents.174 This workshop was very significant in creating
an awareness in Ottoman historiography towards the study of self-narratives in that
eminent historians came together and discussed central methodological issues related
to studying Ottoman self-narratives. Also, a selection of papers presented in the
170 Selim Karahasanoğlu, “Ben-Anlatıları,” in Tarih Bilimi ve Metodolojisi, ed. M. Yaşar Ertaş (İstanbul:
İdeal Kültür Yayıncılık, 2019), 280-4.
171 Ibid., 282-83.
172 Ibid., 284.
173 Selim Karahasanoğlu, “Learning from Past Mistakes and Living a Better Life: Report on the
Workshop in Istanbul on Ottoman Ego-Documents,” Review of Middle East Studies 54, no:2 (2020):
294-302.
174 Karahasanoğlu, “Learning from Past Mistakes,” 294.
31
workshop was published in the roundtable for International Journal of Middle East
Studies in 2021.175
Looking at the several examples given above, we can say that Ottoman individuals
obviously had a culture of writing about themselves. When discussing the relative
rareness of Ottoman ego-documents from the early modern period, Karahasanoğlu
pointed out the limited availability and the cost of paper in pre-industrial times.
According to him, a lack of paper rather than a lack of self-awareness must have caused
ego documents to be relatively rare.176 Many examples provided in this dissertation
show that Ottoman individuals found their life and experiences worth telling when
they had the means and the tools to write with. Indeed, the famous French scholar
Philippe Lejeune, who is known for his studies on diary and autobiography, made a
similar observation about the rise of European diaries. He noted that “the rise of the
diary in the late Middle Ages as a form of personal expression coincided with the rise
of paper and the clock.”177
The Methodological Approach Used in this Dissertation
As noted earlier in this chapter, one of the most central ongoing debates about egodocuments
is whether these texts convey only objective information about the authors
or reveal their individuality, intimate feelings, and inner self. As can be seen from the
different perspectives adopted by Dutch, Swiss, German, and French researchers, there
are two trends in the study of ego-documents or self-narratives. One group of scholars
argue that those texts that reveal the author’s inner self, intimate feelings and emotions
can be classified as ego-documents. 178 To describe a text as an ego-document, the
175 Karahasanoğlu, “Ottoman Ego-Documents: State of the Art.”; İlker Evrim Binbaş, “Autobiographies
and Weak Ties: Sain al-Din Turka’s Self-Narrative,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 53,
no:2 (2021): 309-13; A. Tunç Şen, “The Emotional Universe of Insecure Scholars in the Eraly Modern
Ottoman Hierarchy of Learning,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 53, no:2 (2021): 315-
21; Sheridan, “Nostalgia of a Frustrated Ottoman Subject.”; Semra Çörekçi, “The Dream Diary of an
Ottoman Governor: Kulakzade Mahmud Pasha’s Düşnama,” International Journal of Middle East
Studies 53, no:2 (2021): 331-5; Suraiya Faroqhi, “Aziz Nesin about Himself and his Parents: Poor
People in Istanbul during the Late Ottoman Period,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 53,
no:2 (2021): 337-43.
176 Karahasanoğlu, “Ottoman Ego-Documents: State of the Art,” 307.
177 Philippe Lejeune, “The Continuous and the Discontinuous,” in On Diary, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and
Julie Rak (Manoa: University of Hawai Press, 2009), 185-86.
178 Nelly Hanna, “Self Narratives in Arabic Texts 1500-1800,” in The Uses of First Person Writings
Africa, America, Asia, Europe, ed. François-Joseph Ruggiu (Bruxelles: P.I.E Peter Lang, 2013), 146.
32
ego/I must be present throughout the text. On the other side of the spectrum, scholars
question the idea of the emergence of individualism in Italy during Renaissance and
argue that what can be gleaned from these texts is not the inner self but many outward
aspects of the authors’ lives. They claim that “individuality is just one among several
different concepts of person and that autobiographical texts also give evidence of a
larger variety of concepts about the person.”179 Hence, they focus on the social self of
the authors to place them in the realm of relationships. They adopt a global perspective
to counteract the great narrative created by Jacob Burckhardt.
As a researcher writing in a non-European context, I believe that it is somewhat
problematical to draw a strict boundary between these different approaches and focus
only one aspect of the self. In her article on Arabic self-narratives, Nelly Hanna
suggests that there are various texts that can be placed neither on one side or the other,
but in the middle of that wide spectrum. She further states that there are many texts
that look emotionless but actually hide profound emotions that are not verbalized.180
This approach aims to consider these texts as showing multifaceted nature of the self,
and of its complexities; as well as a person’s social surroundings; or in a more general
way, identifying the context within which the self was expressed. Self-narratives can
thus be seen as being embedded in a collective context within which the self was
expressed. These texts thus shed some light on the social relations of an individual so
this can help us to place him in the larger social environment. These self-narratives
can consequently be a source not only delve into the inner lives of the individuals but
also perceive certain dimensions that are not available in other kinds of sources.181
Nelly Hanna’s approach is quite effective in studying Ottoman self-narratives. I can
say that the texts I have studied in this dissertation find a middle ground in the wide
general spectrum. The criteria used in this dissertation to evaluate the situation are
based on this approach. I focus both on the social context of self-narratives and on
voice of the individual. I aim at studying both the relationships of individuals to
construct their networks and social environment as well as their inner emotional selves
179 Gabriele Jancke, “Individuality, Relationships, Words about Oneself: Autobiographical Writing as
a Resource (Fifteenth-Sixteenth Centuries)-Konrad Pelikan’s Autobiography,” in Forms of
Individuality and Literacy in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, ed. Franz-Joseph Arlinghaus
(Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 160.
180 Hanna, “Self Narratives in Arabic Texts 1500-1800,” 146.
181 Ibid., 153.
33
to map their way of thinking. I show that these different layers of the self are not
mutually exclusive, rather that self-narratives can provide researchers with significant
tools to reveal the multi-layered nature of the self with all its complexities.182
I first focused on the authors’ social environments and networks to place them in the
wider context of political, social and kinship relationships. The self-narratives studied
in this dissertation all reveal much about the network of the writers, from kinship ties
to political and social relationships. These texts offer valuable information on how the
success, wealth/financial security and prominence of the individual mostly depended
upon the maintenance of social and political networks as well as on kinship ties and
show how all these relationships were determinants in creating individual identity. 183
Secondly, I looked for information uncovering the external selves of the authors: daily
routines, outings, the way they dressed, official duties, artistic productions or religious
practices. In this way, I tried to uncover the daily rhythms of their lives and how they
portrayed the physical dimensions of their selves. For these discussions on relational
and external self, I used the methodological approach offered by German group,
especially the ideas of Jancke and Ulbrich.
Thirdly, Ottoman self-narratives reveal much more information about the inner
emotional worlds or private experiences of the authors than one might expect. The
authors used diverse strategies to reveal their feelings and thoughts. Some texts
possessed many features that can be identified as a direct portrayal of the inner self.
The authors wrote in an explicit manner and vividly described their grief, happiness,
or pride. Some authors allowed us to grasp their emotions through explaining their
behavior in certain situations, including interactions with family members, servants,
colleagues, and even with rivals. They recorded their dreams, referred to poems,
hadiths, and commonplaces. Hence, a close analysis of Ottoman self-narratives could
open the door to the emotional worlds of the authors. I used the method offered by
Nelly Hanna as well as Dwight Reynold’s methodology to uncover emotional worlds
of the authors.
182 Hanna, “Self Narratives in Arabic Texts 1500-1800,” 153.
183 Davis, "Boundaries and the Sense of Self in Sixteenth-Century France," 63.
34
Seeking out motifs and devices that … indicate some form or representation of inner
emotion or private experience—though they may not coincide precisely with modern
western ideas of that realm of human experience—points to two recurring features as
particularly deserving of further analysis: the narration of dreams and the use of
poetry.184
On the Concept and Its Scope
As researchers studying Ottoman texts, we are far from discussing the scope of the
term as we do not yet have an inventory of self-narratives.185 Turkish scholars studying
Ottoman material do not have a consensus about which term to use, just as in the case
of European scholars. Kafadar, in his seminal article “Self and Others”, used the term
“first-person narrative.” Kafadar had reservations similar to those of Kaspar von
Greyerz. In an interview, he said that he did not like using the term “ego-document”
because of the connotations of the word “ego.” He stated that he found it too soon to
collect all those first-person narratives under the title of ego-document.186
In the volume edited by Ralf Elger and Yavuz Köse the term ego-document was
preferred. They expanded the scope of the term to include all texts with an ego writing
about the self, such as travelogues and authorial notices in the margins of manuscripts.
They even included articles studying texts without the voice of an ego, thinking that
everything we write reveals something about ourselves.187 Mehmet Beşikçi preferred
to use the term benlik-belgeleri, the exact Turkish equivalent of the term egodocuments.
Beşikçi studied the memoirs and diaries of Ottoman soldiers who served
on the frontiers during the First World War.
Selim Karahasanoğlu used the Turkish term “ben-anlatısı” and argued that only the
material in which the author had the clear motive of describing himself/herself can be
described as an ego-document.188 According to Karahasanoğlu, enlarging the scope of
the term to include all materials having some autobiographical parts, like travelers’
184 Reynolds, Interpreting the Self, 88.
185 Quoted in Karahasanoğlu, “Ben-Anlatıları: Tarihsel Kaynak Olarak İmkanları, Sınırları,” 214.
186 Quoted in Ibid., 218.
187 Elger and Köse, “Introduction,” 8-9.
188 Karahasanoğlu, “Ben-Anlatıları: Tarihsel Kaynak Olarak İmkanları, Sınırları,”213.
35
accounts or court decisions, renders the term unworkable.189 He wanted to focus on
distinct materials written with a clear motive of describing the author’s self.190
Following Selim Karahasaoğlu’s approach, my aim is to study only the distinct texts
in which the authors’ motive was to talk about their lives. I use the terms “selfnarrative”
and “ego-document” interchangeably throughout the dissertation, because
the purpose of this dissertation is not to argue in favor of one side or other. However,
I used the term “self-narrative” in the title because the texts I examine in this
dissertation present a narrative. Secondly, these texts not only disclose s intimate
details about the authors’ ego, but also describe his/her social milieu and network of
relationships identifying the various contexts within which the self was expressed. The
authors told of their social interactions with relatives, neighbors, guests, or colleagues,
as well as everyday experiences, ambitions, joys and sufferings. In this dissertation, I
try to explore the different strategies and styles of self-representation in Ottoman selfnarratives.
Time Frame
In this dissertation, three Ottoman self-narratives written between the first half of the
eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century are examined. Although
I have discovered other manuscripts written as early as the sixteenth century, I chose
to study these three texts in that they are highly representative of Ottoman selfnarratives
and can be read in relation to each other. The manuscripts examined in this
dissertation were produced on the verge of modern times and they show that selfnarratives
were already being penned by Ottoman literati before the advent of
modernism and the blossoming of many other literary genres. These early examples
set an example and provided the vocabulary for a journey into the inner world of
Ottoman individuals living in modern times.
Outline of the Dissertation
This study consists of three main chapters. In the first chapter, I introduce Kulakzâde
Mahmud Pasha’s (d. 1745) Düşnâme (Dreambook). This is an Ottoman governor’s
189 Karahasanoğlu, “Ben-Anlatıları: Tarihsel Kaynak Olarak İmkanları, Sınırları,” 212-13.
190 Karahasanoğlu, “Learning from Past Mistakes and Living a Better Life,” 297.
36
private notebook. Mahmud Pasha lived and worked in Avlonya (Vlorë in Albania) in
the first half of the eighteenth century. The manuscript provides insight into the daily,
mundane concerns of an official who had access to pen and paper to record them. He
recorded daily not only his travels, but also his dreams. This chapter aims at
uncovering how an Ottoman bureaucrat pictured his environment, as well as how he
interpreted his dreams, considering the social context and political atmosphere in
which he lived. The first part will focus on his “relational dreams” to reveal his
network. Düşnâme shows that people had dreams about each other in accordance with
the relationship that connected them, and those dreams were narrated in social
gatherings. Hence, people were interconnected not only by their material worlds but
also by the web of their dreams. This dream narrative, therefore, gives valuable
information about the different layers of relationships that a low-ranking Ottoman
pasha created. Intermittent references in his dream diary to family, friends,
acquaintances, and also enemies permit one to reconstruct Mahmud Pasha’s relational
self. The second part will focus on dreams and provide us with scenes allowing us to
visualize how Mahmud Pasha lived. The manuscript provides a wealth of detail about
the life of a provincial governor, from appointment to dismissal, from battle scenes to
banquets in elite mansions. Mahmud Pasha was not reticent about the world around
him; this in turn enables us to understand how he spent his days. For this discussion, I
will particularly concentrate on how his daily routines were shaped by his military
identity. The third part will focus on his “professional dreams” to reveal how he was
emotionally affected by the uncertainties of life, particularly in his political status.
Linked to this, the relationship between dreams and anxiety will be examined, using
the dream narratives in which his concerns for obtaining a position were the main
subject. This chapter shows that, all things considered, dream narratives can be used
as sources for historical studies. Such self-narratives can uncover the most intimate
feelings, desires or worries of the dreamer; therefore, dreams can provide the necessary
evidence to map the mentality of a historical person and to portray the many layers of
the self.
The second chapter discusses another self-narrative written by Abdülkadir bin Hasan
el-Hisârî (d. ca. 1787/88) who was a calligrapher living in the second half of the
eighteenth century. Hisâri narrated his life, starting from his childhood until attaining
37
a position as a scribe at the age of thirty-six. I argue that this calligrapher /scribe not
only portrayed his social self, but also revealed much intimate detail about his
private/inner/emotional self as opposed to the claims that self-narratives do not reveal
an inner, emotional self. The first part focuses on his life at the courts of pashas and
the network of relationships he created to attain the scribal position he desired. The
second part reveals insights about his external self. Abdülkadir Efendi kept his
narrative at a professional level. H focused on three aspects of his external self: his
creative self as an able calligrapher, his professional self as a scribe, and his religious
self, that is, his submission to God as a Halvetî. He wrote about his talent and works
of art. He wrote about the positions he held in the courts of pashas until he secured a
place in scribal service. He also communicated the image of a person who was
beholden to God’s grace upon him, despite the sad events he lived through. The third
part elaborates on how he described his thoughts, emotional reactions, and feelings
among the many stories of appointments and the search for a benefactor.
The third chapter examines the diary of Sıdkızâde Mustafa Hamid Efendi (d. ca. 1850)
This diary was kept in the first half of the nineteenth century before the Tanzimat
period began. This chapter aims at uncovering Sıdkızâde Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s
emotional self, material circumstances and web of relations from what he writes in the
diary. The first part focuses on the relational self of the diarist. Mustafa Hamid Efendi
was the son of the chief mufti, Sıdkızâde Ahmed Reşid Efendi and therefore part of an
important ulama family. The diary reveals various features of the household of a
powerful ulama family in which a variety of activities were used to establish a
powerful web of influence: recruitment of protégés to fill important governmental
posts, the accumulation of wealth, the creation of networks to advance the political
position of the household members. The second part focuses on regular features of
Mustafa Hamid’s daily life, outings, visits, dinner parties and the material dimension
of his self as well as his concept of time. The diary is especially significant for its
descriptions of the daily and private life of its author. The third part focuses on the
question of to what extent the diaries provide us with the means to reveal the inner self
and emotions of the author. I try to uncover his inner self through the diary entries by
explaining his behavior in certain situations, including interactions with family
members, his relationships with his wife, servants, colleagues and even with his rivals.
38
All in all, this chapter is designed to be an answer to the question of “What can be
done with diaries?” 191 It aims at developing a methodological framework and provide
a model for how to use a diary for historical research.
Since the 1980s, ego-document/self-narrative studies have developed into an
established field of research in Europe. In Ottoman historiography, we do not yet have
enough systematic research to establish ego-documents/self-narratives as an academic
field. This dissertation is a humble attempt to show that Ottoman literature has
significant potential for studies in self-narrative. In contrast to the belief that existing
materials are not sufficient and do not progress beyond a dull listing of positions held,
this dissertation demonstrates that there are quite long self-narratives with a content
that reveals the authors’ personality, networks and emotions.
Earlier scholars who discovered Ottoman autobiographical materials in libraries or
archives did not know what could be done with these special texts, as modern
scholarship categorized autobiographies, memoirs or diaries as unreliable documents
and did not consider them to be a source of any value. These scholars were therefore
content to simply transcribe these texts or use them to retrieve facts about larger issues,
since they considered these materials difficult to work with.192 In this dissertation, selfnarrative
will be given a source value and used as a reflection of the self of a particular
individual. The analysis aims at examining the way life narratives were conceptualized
and composed by Ottoman individuals before the advent of modernism. We will try to
reconstruct the individual lives of Ottomans within the context of family, friends,
associates, career, physical environment, religious or political affiliations, as well as
their emotions, hopes, aspirations, anxieties, likes or dislikes. In Fleischer’s words,
“this study attempts to provide sorely needed flesh to the Ottoman skeleton, to
delineate not only bones, but organs, veins, emotions, rhythms.”193
191 Irina Paperno, “What Can Be Done with Diaries?,” The Russian Review 63 (2004): 561-73.
192 Dekker, “Egodocuments in the Netherlands,” 276.
193 Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual, 4.
39
CHAPTER I: ON THE DREAMS OF AN OTTOMAN OFFICIAL:
THE CURIOUS CASE OF KULAKZÂDE MAHMUD PASHA194
Lamoreux wrote that Muslims were not the first creating a culture for divination, they
were aware of the long history of dream interpretation.195 Muslims were influenced by
these earlier works and influenced other cultures.196 Therefore, early Islamic cultures’
great interest in dreams and their interpretation can be demonstrated by the enormous
literature on the interpretation of dreams as well as dream narratives recorded in
various historical documents.197 The Ottoman Empire was not distinctive in the sense
that it had a culture of narrating and recording dreams and produced a considerable
literature on dream interpretation as well. Unlike former studies that disregarded the
importance of dreams, studies have proliferated in the last decades thanks to the rising
inclination to value dreams as source for cultural history. Hence, dreams began to be
taken seriously. However, as Peter Burke noted, researchers must remember the fact
that “they do not have access to the dream itself but at best to a written record, modified
by the preconscious or conscious mind in the course of recollection and writing”198
Dream narratives might be recorded by the dreamer in the way s/he desired to recollect
them. The “reality” of the dream might have been altered and distorted in some sense.
Nevertheless, dreams, distorted or not, can be used for historical inquiry as they can
uncover the most cherished feelings, desires, or concerns. Such accounts can offer a
productive site to understand the beliefs, attitudes, mental world of the person, because
194 A short version of this chapter was published in 2021. See Semra Çörekçi, “The Dream Diary of an
Ottoman Governor,” 331-335.
195 John C. Lamoreaux, The Early Muslim Tradition of Dream Interpretation (Albany: SUNY Press,
2002), 7.
196 Ibid., 8.
197 Dwight Reynolds, “Symbolic Narratives of Self: Dreams in Medieval Arabic Autobiographies,” in
On Fiction and Adab in Medieval Arabic Literature, ed. Philip F. Kennedy (Wiesbaden: Harrossowitz
Verlag, 2005), 263; Kelly Bulkeley, “Reflections on the Dream Traditions of Islam,” Sleep and
Hypnosis 4, no:1 (2002), 1.
198 Peter Burke, Varieties of Cultural History (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 28.
40
“such ‘secondary elaboration’ probably reveals the character and problems of the
dreamer as clearly as the dream itself does.”199
This chapter aims at sampling the dreams that are related in Düşnâme200 by Mahmud
Pasha, a governor general operating in Vlorë in the first half of the 18th century. By
scrutinizing the methodology employed by an Ottoman official in narrating his own
dreams, I will try to divulge how he made sense of those visions, how he disclosed his
ambitions and his inner self, in other words, try to come to an understanding of dreams
as clues to the self.
When we think of the limited studies made on the Ottoman perception of dreams, there
are many questions to be examined. What did dream narratives mean for early modern
Ottomans? Was there a difference between the perspective on dreams of women
compared with that of men, between lay and elite, educated and uneducated? What
was the attitude towards dreams of statesmen, members of the ulama or of different
Sufi orders? Did they give dreams a divine authority or were they a part of their
worldly lives? On what occasions did they talk about their visionary experiences? Did
dreams create new ways of being sociable? What about the issue of interpretation?
Who were the interpreters? What terminology did they use to talk about their dreams?
Was there a difference between calling a dream a vakıa, a düş or a rüya? Although it
is not possible to answer all of these questions in one study; some of them will be
touched on here.
1. TOWARDS CONCEPTUALIZING OTTOMAN DREAMS
Although today we refer to the psychological aspects of dreams, “Medieval and
modern Muslims have considered dreams to be windows into the hidden mysteries of
both this world and the next.”201 Dreams could talk about “the world outside the
dreamer, things that could not otherwise be known …(and) each good Muslim could
expect guidance from God in dreams.”202 In Islamic context, dreams are identified with
199 Burke, Varieties of Cultural History, 28.
200 Düşnâme, Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Kütüphanesi, MS Hazine 1766. [hereafter Düşnâme].
201 Alexander D. Knysh, “Introduction,” in Dreams and Visions in Islamic Societies, ed. Özgen Felek
and Alexander D. Knysh (Albany: SUNY Press, 2012), 2.
202 Lamoreaux, The Early Muslim Tradition of Dream Interpretation, 4.
41
prophetic wisdom. Within the Qur'an itself there are actually various mentions of
dreams and their obvious influence on people’s lives. The prophet Joseph, for instance,
was a true interpreter of dreams. The dreams of Prophet Muhammad also appear in the
Qur'an. Prophet Muhammad saw a dream in which he enters the Masjid al-Haram at
Mecca. After this dream, he decided to conquer Mecca: “Indeed Allah had shown His
Messenger a true vision, according to the truth: You will surely enter the inviolable
place of worship, if Allah wills, in full security; you will have your heads shaved, your
hair shortened, and you will have nothing to fear. He knows what you do not know.
Therefore, he granted you this near victory before.”203
Likewise, there are many hadiths of Prophet Muhammad on the importance of dreams.
For instance, “A good dream of a righteous man that comes true is one of forty-six
parts of prophetism”204 is an often-cited hadith. Prophetic visions are known as rüyayı
sadıka which means ‘dreams that are sent by God’. “If anyone of you sees a dream
that he likes, then it is from Allah, and he should thank Allah for it and narrate it to
others; but if he sees something else, a dream that he dislikes, then it is from Satan,
and he should seek refuge with Allah from its evil, and he should not mention it to
anybody, for it will not harm him.”205 The true dream is worth considering and
interpreting while the bad dream (sent by Satan) should not be mentioned to anyone.
Obviously, dreams have been valued as a portent of future events and as divine
guidance. “There is a God who exercises a providential control over the events of the
world. This same God, at times, uses dreams to inform human beings about those
events.”206 Dream narratives have an important place in Islamic history. There are
numerous studies on the religious, social and political implications of dream narratives
in historical texts.207
203 The Holy Qur’an with English Translation, trans. Ali Özek, Nureddin Uzunoğlu, Tevfik R.
Topuzoğlu, Mehmet Maksudoğlu (Istanbul: İlmi Neşriyat, 1994), 513. [hereafter, The Holy Qur’an].
204 Quoted in Lamoreaux, Early Muslim Tradition of Dream Interpretation, 117.
205 Cited in Marcia Hermansen, “Dreams and Dreaming in Islam,” in Dreams: A Reader on the
Religious, Cultural and Psychological Dimensions of Dreaming, ed. Kelly Bulkeley (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan Press, 2001), 75.
206 Lamoreaux, The Early Muslim Tradition of Dream Interpretation, 81.
207 For some of the studies on Islamic understanding of dreams and their interpretation, see Gustave E.
Von Grunebaum, “The Cultural Function of the Dream as Illustrated by Classical Islam,” in The Dream
and Human Societies, ed. G. E. Von Grunebaum and Roger Caillois (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1966); Özgen Felek and Alexander D. Knysh, eds., Dreams and Visions in Islamic Societies
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2012); Jonathan Katz, Dreams, Sufism and Sainthood: The Visionary Career of
42
1.1. A Particular Ottoman Way
We can talk more of the general Muslim attitude towards dreams; however, it is hard
to talk in particular about the Ottoman perception of dreams. Available studies on the
Ottoman attitude towards dreams in different periods are rather limited. Hence, it is
necessary to study dreams in different periods and geographies of the empire as well
as examine dreams recorded by people with different social and cultural backgrounds.
Some very influential studies were made on the Ottoman understanding of dreams. In
his seminal article on Ottoman First Person Narratives, Cemal Kafadar introduced
various manuscripts on dreams: the dreams of a seventeenth century Sufi woman,
Asiye Hatun, the Kitâb-ı Menâmat of Murad III upon which a doctoral dissertation
was prepared by Özgen Felek, as well as the Düşnâme which is the subject of this
chapter.208 Kafadar published the dream letters of Asiye Hatun of Skopje who left a
record of her dreams that she sent to her sheikh.209 Suraiya Faroqhi also briefly
examined Asiye Hatun’s letters in her book on Ottoman culture and daily life.210 As
the daughter of a scholar, Asiye Hatun was probably well-educated and a successful
writer, discussing her spiritual world in compelling language.211 Asiye Hatun joined
the Halvetiyye order in the late 1630s and followed Veli Dede as her master. However,
her attachment to Veli Dede weakened after a while and she became attached to
another sheikh called Muslihiddin of Uziçe (d. 1648) about whose fame she had heard
from other Sufis. Asiye Hatun belonged to the Halvetiyye order in which dreams had
Muhammad al-Zawâwî (Leiden: Brill, 1996); Jonathan G. Katz, “Visionary Experience, Autobiography
and Sainthood in North African Islam,” Princeton Papers 1 (1992): 85-118; Jonathan G. Katz “Shaykh
Ahmad’s Dream: A 19th-Century Eschatological Vision,” Studia Islamica 70 (1994): 157-180;
Jonathan G. Katz, “An Egyptian Sufi Interprets his Dream: ‘Abd al-Wahhâb al-Sha‘raânî 1493–1565,”
Religion 27 (1997): 7-24; Louise Marlow, ed., Dreaming Across Boundaries: The Interpretation of
Dreams in Islamic Lands (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); Leah Kinberg, “Literal Dreams
and Prophetic Hadits in Classical Islam: A Comparison of Two Ways of Legitimation,” Der Islam 70
(1993): 279–300; Ibn Abi al-Dunya, Morality in the Guise of Dreams: A Critical Edition of Kitab al-
Manam with Introduction by Leah Kinberg (Leiden: Brill, 1994). Elizabeth Sirriyeh, “Dreams from
Allah,” Way-London-Society of Jesus 40, no:1 (2000): 51-59; Elizabeth Sirriyeh, “Arab Stars, Assyrian
Dogs and Greek ‘Angels’: How Islamic is Muslim Dream Interpretation?,” Journal of Islamic Studies
22, no:2 (2011): 215–233.
208 Kafadar, “Self and Others,” 129-30; Özgen Felek, “Re-Creating Image and Identity: Dreams and
Visions as a Means of Murad III’s Self-Fashioning,” (Phd. Dissertation, The University of Michigan,
2010).
209 Kafadar, “Mütereddit bir Mutasavvıf.” Also see Kafadar, Rüya Mektupları.
210 Suraiya Faroqhi, Osmanlı Kültürü ve Gündelik Yaşam: Ortaçağdan Yirminci Yüzyıla, trans. Elif Kılıç
(Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2005), 144-5.
211 Kafadar, Rüya Mektupları, 41.
43
a significant place. She sent her dreams to her master to learn about her progress and
to receive spiritual guidance. She kept copies of those letters and those copies were
compiled into a book sixty years after being written. 212 Her letters reveal her different
feelings and thoughts. Asiye Hatun was an obedient disciple but also took an active
role in discussing her own spiritual progress. She even opposed her sheikh who said
that she had reached a stage where she could use another name of God. Asiye Hatun
was indecisive about proceeding to do so. She had such self-confidence that she could
oppose the suggestions of her sheikh, contrary to the traditions of the Sufi path.213
These dream letters give researchers a valuable insight into a woman Sufi’s life and
her spiritual pathway. Kafadar’s study on Asiye Hatun’s dream letters is very
significant in that his venture opened an unprecedented vista in the academic field of
Ottoman dream studies.
Another study was published by Cornell Fleischer on the dreams of scribes of the
Ottoman Imperial Council in the second half of the 16th century. According to
Fleischer such dream accounts are helpful in that they give historians important
information with which to map the “panoramic views of the social, cultural, and
private psychic lives of individuals that can go forward telling us the ways and means
whereby they interpreted their environment.”214 Fleischer’s study showed that these
dream records are highly indicative of the increasing number of literate people and
their access to pen and paper. He also showed that it was not only Mustafa Ali or
Evliya Çelebi who had the capacity and motivation to compose personal narratives.
Less prominent Ottomans also had reasons and the means to write their own histories
and intertwine their inner and public lives.215 According to Fleischer, it was not only
the ability to remember but also the ability to write and preserve those accounts made
the historicization and contextualization of the self possible.216
Robert Dankoff, in his book, An Ottoman Mentality: The World of Evliya Çelebi,
offered a brief discussion of the dreams in Evliya Çelebi’s Seyahatnâme. He focused
212 Cemal Kafadar and Leslie Schick, trans., “Dream Letters of a Sufi Women in Skopje, 1640s,” in The
Ottoman World: A Cultural History Reader 1450-1700, ed. Hakan T. Karateke and Helga Anetshofer
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2021), 29-30.
213 Kafadar, Rüya Mektupları, 21, 45; Faroqhi, Osmanlı Kültürü ve Gündelik Yaşam, 282.
214 Fleischer, “Secretaries’ Dreams,” 84.
215 Ibid., 88.
216 Ibid.
44
on how dreams provided Evliya with comfort or counsel when he or his patron, Melek
Ahmed Pasha were in a trouble.217 Elizabeth Sirriyeh studied the perception of dreams
and dream manuals using the example of Abd-al Ghani Nablusi who lived in the late
seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Syria.218 Dror Ze’evi, in Producing Desire,
wrote a chapter on the early modern dream manuals in circulation in Ottoman territory.
Ze’evi tried to offer a glimpse into the Ottoman cultural and sexual unconscious
through the symbols seen in dreams.219 Ze’evi described Ottomans as a society having
a “dream culture” because each experience in this world was supposed to have an
equivalent in the dream world and to have a spiritual aspect. Dreams were used to
contemplate or comprehend past experiences, to predict the future, and analyze future
steps. According to her, dream tradition was a discourse, providing persons with
common experiences and connecting them.220
Lately, very significant studies scrutinized the importance of dreams in early modern
Ottoman society and culture. Aslı Niyazioğlu is a most important name in the study of
Ottoman dream narratives. She published several very illuminating articles on dreams.
Her article on Nihanî’s nightmare is one example. After experiencing a nightmare in
which he was punished in the afterlife because of the decisions he made as a judge,
Nihanî relinquished his post and returned to the Sufi way of life. Niyazioğlu argues
that his giving up the ilmiye career after a nightmare should be evaluated within the
context of the social, political and financial crises that took place in the late sixteenth
century. Nihani’s example was not unique. There were other contemporary ilmiye
members who were said to have given up their posts after similar nightmares. She
thinks that those nightmare narratives reflected the troubles experienced by the judges.
The expansion of the empire slowed down at the end of the sixteenth century and the
appointment process turned into long anxious waits as no new judicial posts were
opened. In order for judges to be appointed, the need for patronage and the giving of
bribes when necessary emerged. Niyazioğlu’s basic objective is that she wants to show
the link between such nightmare narratives and the Ottoman way of life. She underlies
217 Robert Dankoff, An Ottoman Mentality: The World of Eliya Çelebi (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 209.
218 Elizabeth Sirriyeh, Sufi Visionary of Ottoman Damascus: Abd al-Ghanî al-Nâbulusî, 1641-1731
(London: Routledge Curzon, 2005), 57-84.
219 Dror Ze’evi, Producing Desire: Changing Sexual Discourse in the Ottoman Middle East, 1500-1900
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 99.
220 Ibid., 107
45
the significance of these narratives in the study of Ottoman history and aims at freeing
them from generalization and reductionist approaches.221 Another very intriguing
article by Niyaziolu is about the nightmare of Figani (d. 1532), a poet living in 16th
century. Aşık Çelebi (d. 1572) wrote the biography of Figani thirty years after his
execution by the grand vizier İbrahim Pasha (d. 1536). The interesting side of his
biography is that Aşık Çelebi devoted almost all of the entry about Figani to a dream
foretelling his execution. According to the narrative, Figani was executed because of
a poem criticizing the grand vizier, İbrahim Pasha, who had erected three statues in
front of his palace at the Hippodrome after the Hungarian campaign in 1529. Before
his execution, Figani saw a dream which he interpreted as foretelling terror and
disgrace. Niyazioğlu argues that the dream story enabled Aşık Çelebi to debate the
dangers and benefits of relations with powerful statesmen and to criticize such
executions. She wants to show how dreams provided 16th-century biographers with a
medium to discuss the fears and desires of the poets. According to Niyazioğlu, a poet’s
life should not be studied in isolation from others and reminds us of the significance
of social ties in the lives of Ottoman poets.222 Another article by Niyazioğlu is on the
dreams of Halveti Sünbüli sheiks in 16th century. Niyazioğlu, this time, focused on the
relation between the dreams of sheikhs and biography- writing through examining a
biographical work presented to Sultan Murad III and his mother, Nurbanu Sultan,
(d.1583) by Sinaneddin Efendi, a sheikh at the Kocamustafapaşa Lodge in Istanbul.
She reveals how Sünbüli sheikhs were connected to each other through dreams as they
were interconnected in real life. Therefore, it is impossible to examine Sünbüli dreams
without taking their social life into consideration because dreams voiced the
expectations and concerns of the whole community.223 Her experience and expertise
in the field of dreams and biography writing culminated in the book, Dreams and Lives
in Ottoman Istanbul: A Seventeenth-Century Biographer’s Perspective. The book is
about the dream narratives and their function in Atâ’i’s biography writing. To this end,
she focuses on dreams cited by biographer Atâ’î (d. 1637) and displays how a
221 Aslı Niyazioglu, “On Altıncı Yüzyıl Sonunda Osmanlı’da Kadılık Kabusu ve Nihani’nin Rüyası,”
Journal of Turkish Studies – Türklük Bilgisi Araştırmaları 31, no: 2 (2007): 133-143.
222 Aslı Niyazioğlu, “How to Read an Ottoman Poet's Dream? Friends, Patrons and the Execution of
Fiġānī (d. 938/1532),” Middle Eastern Literatures: Incorporating Edebiyat (2013): 1-12.
223 Aslı Niyazioğlu, “On Altıncı Yüzyıl İstanbul’unda Halveti Sünbüli Şeyhlerinin Rüyaları ve Osmanlı
Biyografi Yazıcılığı,” Doğu Batı 53 (2010): 21-35.
46
biographer used dream narratives to create a space in which to discuss the career routes
of learned Ottomans of the Establishment. The book mainly focuses on how learned
people narrated and used dream narratives to form networks and attain positions. It
offers a glimpse into a rather complex range of relationships that define the careers
paths of learned Ottomans in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century
Istanbul.224 Aslı Niyazioğlu also contributed to the volume edited by François-Joseph
Ruggiu with her article on Ottoman Turkish biographies and dream narratives.225
Niyazioğlu’s studies show that dream narratives can be very revealing in
understanding the individual’s complex web of relations, expectations and worries in
Ottoman society.
Özgen Felek’s study on Murad III’s dream letters, Kitabü’l-Menâmât, also made a
considerable contribution to the literature. Felek focused on the ways in which these
dream narratives served the image of their authors. She examined the role of dreams
in contributing positively to the sultan’s image and identity. 226 Tunç Şen’s study on
Veysî’s Hâbnâme should also be considered among the literature on Ottoman dreams.
He aimed at putting Veysî’s dream setting in the context of Ottoman ‘Mirror for
Princes’ literature, comparing it with similar mirrors in contemporary society He
considered the political, intellectual, and cultural context within which the manuscript
was produced. More importantly for the scope of this study, Şen questioned “Why
might Veysî have created such a dream setting?” and “In what ways did this dream
apparatus enable him to express his views?”227
224 Aslı Niyazioğlu, Dreams and Lives in Ottoman Istanbul: A Seventeenth-Century Biographer’s
Perspective (London: Routledge, 2017).
225 Aslı Niyazioğlu, “Secrets of the Ottoman Lives? Ottoman Turkish Biographical Dictionaries and
Dream Narratives,” in The Uses of First Person Writings: Africa, America, Asia, Europe, ed. François-
Joseph Ruggiu (Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang, 2013).
226 Özgen Felek, “Re-creating Image and Identity: Dreams and Visions as a Means of Murad III’s Self-
Fashioning,” in Dreams and Visions in Islamic Societies, ed. Özgen Felek and Alexander D. Knysh
(Albany: SUNY Press, 2012).
227 A. Tunç Şen, “The Dream of an 17th Century Ottoman Intellectual: Veysî And His Habname,” (M.A.
thesis, Sabancı University, 2008).
47
1.2. On the Manuscript, Author, and Motivation for Writing
When I began my research on Ottoman ego documents, the first source I searched was
the catalog of manuscripts found in Topkapı Palace written by Fehmi Ethem
Karatay.228 I came across a manuscript called Düşnâme which was a notebook
belonging to a provincial official who lived in the early eighteenth century. A brief
investigation unsurprisingly revealed that Cemal Kafadar presented the text in his
1989-article, “Self and Others: The Diary of a Dervish in Seventeenth Century and
First-Person Narratives in Ottoman Literature.” He briefly introduced the content of
the daily records and dreams. 229 I preferred calling this piece a “dream diary,” as it
integrates the form of the diary with dream narratives. In fact, the manuscript presents
some very important literary features of diary genre, such as day-by-day records and
immediacy.230 Our writer recorded not only his daily activities but also visionary
experiences.
The author indicated his name in folio 28a. His signature noted that he was the
mutasarrıf (governor) of Vlorë in Albania, Mahmud Pasha.231 He inscribed the official
positions he was appointed throughout the years. He was appointed Brigadier of Vlorë
on 2 February 1716 and the Governor Genral of Vlorë on 1 February 1717. One year
later, revenues from Yanya (Janina) were allocated to Mahmud Pasha in the form of
an allowance (arpalık).232 This note was very helpful in disclosing the identity of the
author. Considering the sources on provincial administration, Mahmud Pasha seems
228 Fehmi Ethem Karatay, Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Kütüphanesi Türkçe Yazmalar Kataloğu: Din, Tarih,
Bilimler, Filoloji, Edebiyat, Mecmualar (İstanbul: Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi, 1961), 335. Karatay
described the manuscript as muhtıra defteri (a daybook, a notebook) in which the author recorded his
dreams. He noted that the author’s name is not recorded but added the information that he was appointed
to Vlorë as brigadier in 1726, and benefits of Janina were assigned to the author in 1718/19.
229 Kafadar, “Self and Others,” 129-130.
230 Steven Rendall, “On Diaries,” Diacritics 16 (1986): 57-65. Also used by Derin Terzioğlu in the same
way, Derin Terzioğlu, "Man in the Image of God in the Image of the Times: Sufi Self-Narratives and
the Diary of Niyāzī-i Mıṣrī (1618-94)," Studia Islamica 94 (2002), 152.
231 Düşnâme, 28a. The signature read as “Mahmud Paşa mutasarrıf-ı Avlonya.” The confusion in the
folio numbers suggests that the numbering was done later by different catalogers. For the sake of
simplicity, I am using my own version. I numbered the first folio in which the first dreams were recorded
1b. The signature was the first record taken on 30 Muharrem 1130 (3 January 1718), but it takes place
in the folio 28a. It is probably because the binding was made later. There are nineteen more blank folios
after folio 28a where the author affixed his signature.
232 Düşnâme, 28a. Also see Çörekçi “The Dream Diary,” 332.
48
to have been working in the Rumelia until his death in 1745.233 His family name was
Kulakzâde, he was from Belgrade.234
Mahmud Pasha’s estate inventory reveals that he passed away in Erzurum during a
visit in the month of Cemaziyelevvel 1158 (June 1745).235 The register gives clues
about his family members. The information given in the document disclose that his
father was Hüseyin Pasha. In Düşnâme, there is no information revealing his father’s
identity but there are a number of documents in the state archives about Hüseyin Pasha
who was the governor (mutasarrıf) of Vlorë before Mahmud Pasha took his turn.236
Therefore, we can think that Mahmud Pasha must have been belonged to an influential
provincial household. His wife’s name was Rabia Hanım, the daughter of certain İslam
Agha. Meryem, Ayşe and Kadire were the names of Mahmud Pasha’s daughters. We
do not have additional information revealing his daughters’ lives because Düşnâme
does not include any record about them. The names of his three sons were specified in
the document: Süleyman Beğ, Mehmed Beğ and İsmail Pasha. A record in Düşnâme
shows that Mahmud Pasha experienced a dream in which his son Derviş appeared.237
An archival document reveals that this son actually had two forenames; he was called
Derviş İsmail Pasha. The document discloses that Derviş İsmail Pasha was former
governor of Vlorë and his brother’s name was Süleyman Beğ, who was residing in
Arnavud Belgradı (Albanian Belgrade).238 This document verifies the records in
Düşnâme and in the estate inventory. The family appears to have been active in the
Vlorë region for at least three generations.239 The revenues of Vlorë and Janina in 17th
century lead one to conclude that Mahmud Pasha must have had considerable wealth
and power.240 He probably had a place in a powerful network of pashas, from which
233 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivleri (BOA), AE. SMHD. I. 185/14366, 29 Cemaziyelevvel 1158 (29 June
1745); Mehmed Süreyya, Sicill-i Osmani, ed. Nuri Akbayar, 5 vols. (İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt
Yayınları, 1996), vol. III, 927 [hereafter, Sicill-i Osmani, I-II-III-IV-V]; Fehameddin Başar, Osmanlı
Eyalet Tevcihatı (1717-1730) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1997), 38-43.
234 Sicill-i Osmani, III, 927.
235 BOA, AE. SMHD. I. 185/14366, 29 Cemaziyelevvel 1158 (29 June 1745).
236 BOA, AE. SAMD. III. 66/6671, 13 Şevval 1133 (7 August 1721).
237 Düşnâme, 12b.
238 BOA, AE. SMHD. I. 165/12515, 25 Şevval 1158 (20 November 1745).
239 See Çörekçi, “The Dream Diary,” 332.
240 The revenues of Janina and Vlorë were 515.000 and 535.000 akçes respectively see Halil İnalcık,
“Rumeli,” Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi, vol 35, 232-35. [hereafter, DİA]
49
he gained power and success in that region. However, things did not go so smoothly
all the time as after 1728 he was given some minor positions.241
He recorded his dreams in folios 1b to 26a, he titled this part Düşnâme. It is clear that
Mahmud Pasha routinely recorded his dreams and daily activities. The manuscript
offers unparalleled information about the mundane and everyday life of an Ottoman
official who had the instruments to record them.242 In folio 27a, Mahmud Pasha wrote
details of his journeys took place in March 1143 (March/April 1731). He wrote down
the places he passed through and stayed at. Intriguingly, he sometimes even recorded
the time in minutes and hours. For instance, he specified the exact time they stopped
on 1 March 1143 as being 11:35 p.m. He also recorded the zakat (almsgiving) he
distributed in Receb 1144 (December/January 1731/1732), describing the identity of
the people helped. He mostly dispensed his alms to the students of the Qur’an and Sufi
dervishes.243
The manuscript contains some one -hundred- and- seventy separate dream reports in
varying details. In the first part, dream records are quite brief, obscure and the time is
not indicated. Later, the records become more detailed and more extensive, and the
date is added whereas it is not in the first dream records. The longest of the dreams
takes place in the last part of the notebook. He not only wrote down his dream
accounts, but also occasionally described how they came true. Thus, his dreams
essentially functioned as signals of forthcoming events. The first dream record is about
Osman Pasha’s being given the seal of the vizierate.244 As Topal Osman Pasha (d.
1733) was appointed to the vizierate on 8 Rebiülevvel 1144 (10 September 1731), we
can firmly say that the first dream record was written in 1731.245 The last dream
recorded belongs to the year February/March 1735.246
241 BOA, C. DH. 290/14484, 19 Zilkade 1143 (26 May 1731).
242 Fleischer came up with similar interpretations about Ottoman secretaries’ dreams and their access to
means of writing, see Cornell H. Fleischer, “Secretaries’ Dreams,” 80, 85. I would like to thank Bilgin
Aydın for informing me about Kağıt Eminliği (Paper Trustee), which provided Ottoman officials with
paper. This shows that Mahmud Pasha had easy access to the tools of writing, facilitating the production
of his self-narrative.
243 Düşnâme, 1a; Kafadar also provided a brief description of the records in Düşnâme, Kafadar, “Self
and Others,” 129-130.
244 Ibid., 1b.
245 Abdülkadir Özcan, “Topal Osman Paşa,” DİA, vol. 41, 244-46. For the identity of Osman Pasha
mentioned in the first dream record, see the page 58 of this chapter.
246 Düşnâme, 26a; Çörekçi, “The Dream Diary,” 333.
50
The rather unstructured and obscure style of Mahmud Pasha’s first dream records
suggests that at the beginning Mahmud Pasha did not intend to create a diary of
dreams. He seems to have recorded some of his dreams about other people’s
employments and it ended up being the dream diary that foreshadow his own
appointment to Vlorë when he was going through a period of anxiety and hope
concerning this appointment. We can understand from the records on his daily
activities like travels that Mahmud Pasha had a practice of inscribing small details
concerning his personal and official life. This habit conceivably resulted in creating a
work like the Düşnâme.247
As the dreams started to get longer, Mahmut Pasha started to add the exact time of his
dreams in the same way as his recording the exact time of his official and religious
duties.248 This, in a sense, confuses the reader about distinguishing between the records
of real-life experiences and dreams. The impression is of reading about actual events
if Mahmud Pasha did not specify that he woke up at the end of some of his records.
Also, he associates the experience of dreaming with “seeing” rather than indicating
that he was talking about dreams, this situation makes it hard to draw a clear line
between nocturnal visions and real wakeful experiences.249 Some quite brief factual
accounts reinforce this idea. “We had a little bit of a fight with Ali Bey of Ergiri
(Gjirokastër).”250 “Ahmed Solak wants to kill me. I said to my men, ‘Kill this
[man]’.”251 “I saw Osman Pasha a couple of times. I also saw Mehmed Pasha.”252
These dreams were recounted as if real life experiences. There is no clue as to whether
they were lived in the real life or experienced in the dreams.
Another significant point to emphasize is author’s preference of putting the sign of
“sah ص”ح ( ) at the end of many entries.253 This sign was an indicator of reliability and
247 We do not know for sure if the title of Düşnâme was given by Mahmud Pasha himself. The title
might have been added later by another person.
248 Keeping records of dreams on a daily basis was not peculiar to Mahmud Pasha. An earlier example
which was about the dreams of Seikh Hüdâî shows that there were such manuscripts produced before.
In that manuscript, Shiekh Hüdâî’s dreams were recorded, and the date was added on each entry.
Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, MS. Kemankeş 511.
249 Mahmud Pasha mostly uses the word gördüm (I saw) or bir adam gördü ki (a man saw) rather than
rüyamda gördüm (I saw in my dream) or (a man saw in his dream).
250 Düşnâme, 7b.
251 Ibid., 23a.
252 Ibid., 22a.
253 For further information, see Mehmet İpşirli, “Sah,” DİA, vol 35, 490-1.
51
precision which generally seen in official documents as well as in manuscripts.
Redhouse’s dictionary describes it as “the paraph or official mark written on a
document when it has been examined.”254 Authors or copyists generally used this sign
to show that they had made some corrections or added some new information to the
text so that the reader would know it is accurate/reliable. What was the purpose of
Mahmud Pasha adding this mark at the end of dream records as if to verify the accuracy
of them? Did he felt a need to underline the correctness of the dreams that he narrated
or was using this sign just a habit? The captivating question is whether they were real
dreams or not. Did Mahmud Pasha use dream plot as a literary maneuver to write his
inner-most sentiments and desires?
The time between 1731 and 1735 was clearly a period of anxiety and hope, since all
the dreams were seen and written between these years. Around the time he recorded
his dreams he was not yet governor general of Vlorë.255 This point is important in that
Mahmud Pasha had lots of dreams about his aspiration to be reappointed as the
governor general of that sancak.
People dreamed about each other and shared their dreams in social gatherings.
Mahmud Pasha recorded other people’s dreams in which he took part. He also took
care to indicate the time when inscribing dreams of others. The identity of the dreamers
was occasionally specified, except for dreams seen by sheikhs and close associates.
Rather than identifying the exact name of the sheikhs, he mentioned the city where
they operated; the sheikh of Niş (Nis) and the sheikh of Leskovik (Leskoviku, Korçë
County, Albania) are two examples. When it comes to his private life, we cannot
extract any satisfying information about his family life from the accounts at hand. He
did cite some dreams in which he saw his mother, his sister, his wife and his son.
Mahmud Pasha related many dreams in which important figures of Ottoman history
played a role. He cited many names including those of Paşmakçızâde, Damadzâde,
Mahmud Pasha of Yakova, Vizier Osman Pasha, and Fatma Sultan. These dream
records give clues about the professional and personal life of an Ottoman provincial
254 James W. Redhouse, A Turkish and English Lexicon (Constantinople: A. H. Boyajian, 1890), 1168.
255 BOA, C. DH. 290/14484, 19 Zilkade 1143 (26 May 1731). According to the document, the
governorship of İlbasan was given to Mahmud Pasha in May 1731 in return for his services under
Osman Pasha.
52
governor. Persons who appeared in his dreams indicate that Mahmud Pasha had a
network that included notable people.
Dream narratives can disclose much information about the writer’s experiences,
intentions, and emotions. Kahana-Smilansky noted that dreams convey a message to
the public or the community, whether contemporary or in the future; therefore, the
explanation of a dream-account could be meaningful in the context of the dreamer’s
life-history. Dreams can reflect in their context the personality of the writer, his/her
perceptions, emotions, and beliefs.256 My aim here is not to stress whether Mahmud
Pasha’s dreams were real, but to explore how an Ottoman governor wrote the most
intimate narrative of his life by a use of dream records. In this study, I will try to
analyze the dream narratives from this point of view. I will try to see how he
comprehend the world around him and reacted against problems. What was the role of
dreams in his understanding of life? How did an 18th-century-official deploy dreams
in his dream log/cum diary? What triggered him to write down his dreams? What did
dreams represent? What function did they serve? The aim of this chapter is to uncover
a provincial governor’s different layers of self through his dream accounts.
2. RELATIONAL SELF: KULAKZÂDE MAHMUD PASHA’S HOUSEHOLD
Fulbrook and Rublack noted that self-narratives can provide insight into people’s webs
of relations and “social self.”257 Dreams had an important place in Ottoman society
bringing people together, constructing and strengthening social relations. People had
dreams about each other in accordance with the relationship that connected them, and
those dreams were narrated in social gatherings. Hence, people were interconnected
not only by their material worlds but also by a web of dreams.258 The Düşnâme gives
valuable information about the different layers of relationships created by a lowranking
Ottoman pasha. The references in his dream diary to family, friends,
acquaintances, and also enemies, permit one to reconstruct Mahmud Pasha’s relational
256 Hagar Kahana-Smilansky, “Self-Reflection and Conversion in Medieval Muslim Autobiographical
Dreams,” in Dreaming Across Boundaries: The Interpretation of Dreams in Islamic Lands, ed. Louise
Marlow (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), 102.
257 Fulbrook and Rublack, “In relation,” 268.
258 For Fleischer’s interpretation of how people were connected to each other through dreams, see
Fleischer, “Secretaries’ Dreams,” 87.
53
self. Having these in mind, we will deal with the dream records providing information
about the relational self of Mahmud Pasha.
2.1. Mahmud Pasha’s Network
The Kulakzâde family was powerful in Vlorë for at least three generations as we learnt
from archival documents concerning Mahmud Pasha. The family network was,
therefore, probably very important in maintaining and augmenting the position of its
members. Patron-client relationships were also created to fortify his position in adverse
times259 and Düşnâme gives valuable information about the different layers of
relationships Mahmud Pasha created. He was a bureaucrat of average importance
trying to gain an influence over regional politics. He had important statesmen in his
network; he had his own household with many dependents and recruited soldiers to
spread his influence; he also seems to have built some Sufi connections.
Düşnâme does not contain much information about the members of his household. He
recorded only two dreams in which he saw his sons, Derviş and Bayram. The estate
inventory of Mahmud Pasha suggests that he had three sons. Their names were İsmail
Pasha, Süleyman Bey, and Mehmed Bey. A document found in the Ottoman archives
shows that İsmail Pasha actually had two names: İsmail and Derviş. Like his father
and grandfather, İsmail Derviş ended up becoming the governor of Vlorë.260 The fact
that Bayram is not mentioned in the death registry brings to mind two possibilities.
One possibility is that Mahmud Pasha originally had four sons and Bayram had already
passed away before his father’s death in June 1745. The other possibility is that
Bayram had two names like his brother İsmail Derviş. If so, one of the two other sons
mentioned in the estate inventory must have had Bayram as a second name. There is
only one archival document about his son Bayram Pasha. According to the document,
Bayram Pasha was the son of Mahmud Pasha, the current governor of Vlorë.261
259 Antonis Anastopoulos, “Introduction,” in Provincial Elites in the Ottoman Empire, Halcyon Days in
Crete V. A Symposium Held in Rethymno, 10-12 January 2003, ed. Antonis Anastopoulos (Rethymno:
Crete University Press,2005), xxi-xxii.
260 BOA, AE. SMHD. I. 165/12515 25 Şevval 1158 (20 November 1745).
261 Çörekçi, “The Dream Diary,” 332; BOA, AE. SMHD. I. 94/6466 5 Zilhicce 1151 (16 March 1745).
The document is about bandits attacking districts and villages around Vlorë. The document also
mentions his brother İsmail Pasha.
54
Mahmud Polat? saw that my son Derviş was grown up. He came with a horse and said,
“Where are you? I went to Istanbul and settled your affairs. And now, two dervishes
will come, they will bring a white horse from the sultan for my father...262
… Those dervishes did not allow me to go, but they said that you can send your son,
Bayram. I did that and sent Bayram to Nis ...263
Mahmud Pasha’s father also served as the governor of Vlorë, but Mahmud Pasha did
not record any dreams in which he saw his father. Interestingly, however, he recorded
dreams in which he saw his mother, his wife and his sister. However, these dream
records cited below do not give satisfactory clues to the female side of his household.
He did not provide their names or any further details.
On 23 Ramadan, I saw my mother, also there were one or two women sitting on a high
place. I asked my mother, “Where do I sit?” She replied, “You will sit there, directly
go and sit there. I came there and sat between those two women.264
I arrived at Mehmed Bey’s harem [and] entered in, but I had reached a place where
there were women. I sat there for a while though I wanted to go out. I was wearing
simple white clothes. There was a turban on my head. I wanted to go out through the
door. There was a woman who died. I went outside, my wife was also with me …
while we were sitting there, lots of women came and some people also gathered there
… I said, “Come here”, they did not come. That’s why they were seated in this way. I
stood up to go. My wife was not covered, I was embarrassed. I said her, “Go and enter
in through the door.” It was the harem’s door. She went and entered in …265
… My sister was sitting in his house. As if she helped me to easily cross over. [She
said,] “Enter in from here but I am afraid.” We entered. Then I said. “If they nailed a
big piece of wood, no one would be afraid of [entering]…266
The households of provincial pashas did not include only family members but also his
entourage. The household included military, administrative and fiscal units so the
household dependents might number hundreds of people.267 We do not have enough
262 Düşnâme, 12b.
263 Ibid., 12a.
264 Ibid., 5b.
265 Ibid., 8a.
266 Ibid., 12b.
267 For household structures of viziers and grand viziers, See İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı
Devleti’nin Merkez ve Bahriye Teşkilatı (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 1948), 168-173;
Mehmet İpşirli, “Kapı Halkı,” DİA, vol. 24, 343-4.
55
information about the actual size of Mahmut Pasha’s household, but Düşnâme gives
valuable information revealing the names of some of its members. The households of
pashas (saray/konak) included personnel such as a secretary (mühürdâr) and a
chamberlain (kethüda). These persons worked as key figures in ruling over the district
and in spreading the provincial governor’s influence. Abdi Bey was one of those
important figures. He was apparently working for Mahmud Pasha, possibly as his
chamberlain. Abdi Bey and Mahmud Pasha used to share their dreams in two ways:
they saw dreams about each other and appeared in each other’s dreams. Abdi Bey
seems to have been trusted not only on account of official duties but also for his
propitious dreams.
On the 4th of Zilhicce, Abdi Bey saw in his dream that I became the imam and after
performing the prayer, I rode a horse.268
May 7, Abdi Bey saw that I became the imam, and I was sitting in a high place, I was
leading [the prayer] and I prayed. All people were crying and saying “Amen”.269
12 May, Abdi Bey saw that we arrived somewhere. We entered a new harem above
which there had previously been a mansion. He said to me, “Go and stay there.” I said
“How can I ride my horse if I go there?” I immediately took my horse and entered a
room. We went along playing [cheerfully]; our horses were also well equipped.270
The secretary (mühürdâr), düfenkçi (gunsmith), delibaşı (leader of irregular cavalry),
bayraktar (standard-bearer) are other people that figured in the dream records. These
personnel members also shared their dreams with their benefactor.
Again, the standard-bearer saw that they appointed me as the surre emini.271 We
arrived at Trabzon.272
Again, the secretary saw that a foolish man came by and said to him that they had
increased your pasha’s status. They asked how much it had increased. He answered
“Three horsetails and seven … were conferred on your pasha. May Allah make it
auspicious.”273
268 Düşnâme, 11b.
269 Ibid.,
270 Ibid.
271 Redhouse described the term as “The official into whose charge is confined the treasure sent to
Mekka and Medina.” Redhouse, A Turkish and English Lexicon, 1175.
272 Düşnâme, 12a.
273 Ibid.
56
I saw Ergirili (Gjirokastër) Ali Bey’s mother. There were clocks in front of her and
our delibaşı’s military assistant, Süleyman Kethüda, wanted to have a big clock and
arrived at the tent of delibaşı.274
Archival documents show that Mahmud Pasha achieved local prominence in the
district he ruled over. According to one document, he was dismissed from the
governorship of Vlorë after complaints by the people made around 1725/1726. Vizier
Abdullah Pasha made an inspection after which it was understood that Mahmud Pasha
had fallen victim to slander. The same document notes that Ömer Pasha who had then
become the current governor of Vlorë, was not effective in campaigning against
brigands or in collecting tax-farming revenues. Mahmud Pasha benefited from Ömer
Pasha’s failure and was once again appointed to be governor of Vlorë. Mahmud Pasha
was praised for his successful fights against bandits, his success in collecting revenues
and his general reputation in Vlorë.275 In order to administrate effectively and to spread
their influence, provincial governors recruited a great number of soldiers to serve them.
Mahmud Pasha was no exception to this as one can understand from the number of
dream records in which he talked about his men/soldiers and their battles.
There was a mortar, a piece of it was taken. While we were standing there, the infidel
fired a big cannonball. It crossed over us and hit that fractured mortar and heaved it
upwards more than the height of a man. An agha was sitting beside me. He said that
the infidel hit the mortar … I woke up.276
Mahmud Pasha’s dreams relating to his official duties also included upper-class elites.
The sultan or the chief mufti (şeyhülislam) or the viziers appeared in his dreams. But
he mostly recorded dreams about colleagues operating in the same region as himself.
Again, a man saw that I arrived at Istanbul. I fought with the people of Istanbul and
defeated them. I found the sultan and went to kiss his hand and greeted those who
were standing beside him. The sultan had a table set, I sat the table and we started to
eat.277
I saw that Osman Pasha was sitting in a big mansion. I entered and was going to sit
next to him; however, I remained standing. There was a young newly- bearded boy
274 Düşnâme, 5a.
275 Başar, Osmanlı Eyalet Tevcihatı, 42-43.
276 Düşnâme, 22b.
277 Ibid., 26a.
57
sitting just opposite.278 God knows who he was; they said he was either Paşmakçızâde
or Damadzâde … and he was the chief mufti. Osman Pasha was having a conversation
with him and they said [to Osman Pasha] “You must be mad to be talking to him in
such a way.” I was amazed by the way he was addressing the chief mufti. Then, the
sultan bowed and said, “I do not go, he can come if he wants.” Accordingly, we
refrained a little. The sultan came incognito. He entered and was seated beside him.
They consulted each other. Then Osman Pasha called Mahmud Pasha of Yakova
(Gjakovë) and [ordered that] “You will go to Yakova on business.” [Mahmud Pasha
opposed] “I will not go; I will [rather] send one of my boys.” They quarreled. In that
region, there were saddled horses … [and] lots of men … The 18th of February.279
This is the nineteenth of February and the fourth of Ramadan. I saw that I reached
Istanbul and entered the mansion of an important man. It seems he was the chief mufti.
After having a conversation and kissing each other, I complained about ruthless
people. I woke up and slept again … Again, I arrived at a palace, I entered in. It seems,
the chief mufti was inside. Just then, we again kissed each other …280
The dream records translated above mentioned, for example, the chief mufti and
Osman Pasha. Mahmud Pasha might not have known the chief mufti in person but
most probably knew those pashas who occupied space in his dreams. The person he
called Osman Pasha was probably Topal Osman Pasha who was the governor of
278 For another dream account including the figure of a beardless boy, see Düşnâme, 16a; “Another
person saw that a young (taze) boy put Mehmed Pasha into a flower garden, he fell of as soon as he
smelt.” Although we cannot know exactly if this figure of a young barely bearded boy did have any
sexual connotation, Alan Mikhail points out that “the beauty of boys is virtually the same as those for
women, a fact underlined by the extraordinary prominence of the question of the beard in homoerotic
poetry and anecdote.” See Alan Mikhail, “The Heart’s Desire: Gender, Urban Space and the Ottoman
Coffee House,” in Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and the Lifestyle in the Eighteenth Century,
ed. Dana Sajdi (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 2007), 167. For a study on young boy being a focal
point of desire, see Walter G. Andrews and Mehmed Kalpaklı, The Age of Beloveds: Love and the
Beloved in Early Modern Ottoman and European Culture and Society (Durham: Duke University Press,
2005). Quite the contrary, Dwight Reynolds states that in the medieval Arabic tradition dreams about
sex were believed to be related to one’s public life, see Reynolds, Interpreting the Self, 90; and
Reynolds, Symbolic Narratives of Self, 267.
279 Düşnâme, 3a.
280 Ibid., 4a. In this this dream record, Mahmud Pasha wrote that it was seen on the nineteenth of
February, the fourth of Ramazan. However, he did not indicate the year as in most of the dream records.
That he indicated the month both in Islamic calendar and Gregorian calendar enable us to detect the
year of writing. We know that Düşnâme was written between 1130 and 1147. Almost all the dream
records included the month of writing, but the year was indicated only two times in the dream records
and three times through all other records. Mahmud Pasha did not indicate the year until 1143 and this
dream in concern was written after 1143. The fourth of Ramadan in 1145 corresponded to the eighteenth
of February 1735. Mahmud Pasha must have indicated the day incorrectly as nineteenth of February.
Therefore, we can firmly say that this dream was seen in 1145.
58
Bosnia for many long years, having become Grand Vizier on 8 Rebiülevvel 1144 (8
September 1731), around the same time that Mahmud Pasha wrote down his dreams.281
Mahmud Pasha must have met him after he became the governor of Bosnia. Osman
Pasha was, therefore, a figure frequently seen in the dreams recorded in Düşnâme.
It was the time of feasting. When we were performing the prayer in Murad Çelebi
district, the mehterhâne (military band) started to play. We asked what happened.
They said that Osman Pasha had performed the feast prayer before us. It was his
mehterhâne playing.282
This dream record was later interpreted as being an event that “… occurred in ten days
from when he took the seal.”283 From then on, Osman Pasha was seen in many other
dreams. In the dream cited above, the way Mahmud Pasha depicted Osman Pasha’s
treatment of the chief mufti and his amazement at the Pasha’s behavior makes the
reader think that Mahmud Pasha was a favorite of Osman Pasha, or, at least, he wanted
to be in league with a powerful person like the Grand Vizier. Consequently, his dreams
about Osman Pasha were mostly positive and he was depicted as a powerful and
influential figure.
On the 10th of February, I saw Osman Pasha and they said to him, “Allow Mahmud
Pasha.” He said to some notable people that [he] would be late for one or two days. It
seemed that we were in the district of Premedi (Përmet). I said that I do not have
anything to do in other places. I will reside in the district of Përmet for a couple of
days, because these [people] are disorderly. I said that I dreamed of Kolonya
(Kolonja). I described it in such a way that I can make them orderly by sending one
man. Why do you listen to the words that are against me? How much they slandered
me. He said, “I do not listen to their words, but they come and talk” … I was telling
him that they speak ill of me and I was in tears. All the notable people present there
felt sorry for me.284
27 Ramadan, I dreamed that Osman Pasha will come from the district of Vişnice
(Višnjica), but I am afraid.285
281 Özcan, “Topal Osman Paşa,” 244-46.
282 Düşnâme, 1b.
283 Ibid.
284 Ibid., 4a.
285 Ibid., 5a.
59
On the other hand, he obviously had many rivals in a competitive relationship with
him. A large number of provincial governors used to compete to obtain appointments
to the same district. The time each remained in office, therefore, was not long.286 It
was not an easy thing to keep the post in hand, considering the rivalry between
provincial governors to obtain posts, influence and power.287 Such a competitive
environment and consequential rapid loss of office was a psychological strain on those
provincial governors. Mahmud Pasha showed this apprehension by having bad dreams
about his rivals. Dream records revealing the dreamer’s negative feelings enable the
reader to learn about his rivals. One such figure was Mehmed Pasha who belonged to
an influential family of the region, the Kurd family.288 From 1138 (1825/26) to 1145
(1732/33), the governorship of Vlorë was frequently interchanged between Mahmud
Pasha and Mehmed Pasha. From 1733 on, it was Mehmed Pasha who obtained the
district.289 The rivalry between these two pashas can be understood through the
frequency of their appointments and dismissals between these dates.
… Mahmud Pasha’s man came from Istanbul and I wish to die once I have finished
this duty. If I were given [the governorship of] Vlorë, order would come to the region.
I said that Mehmed Pasha must see [the impossibility of] sending his men; after four,
five, six, or seven days, the people would fire them.” 290
This dream record underlines Mehmed Pasha’s actual lack of success in bringing order
to the region. He might even have been fired by the people because of the delay in
sending his men. In his dream Mahmud Pasha said that, if he was given the
governorship of Vlorë, he could bring order. The critical tone directed towards
286 İ. Metin Kunt, The Sultan’s Servants: The Transformation of Ottoman Provincial Government 1550-
1650 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 70-72.
287 Ibid., 89.
288 BOA, A. DVNS. NMH. d. 135/78 20 Şaban 1140 (1 April 1728); Başar, Osmanlı Eyalet Tevcihatı,
43.
289 Başar, Osmanlı Eyalet Tevcihatı, 43; See for the years Mehmed Pasha performed as the governor,
BOA, A. DVNS. NMH. d. 135/78 20 Şaban 1140 (1 April 728); BOA, A. DVNS. NMH. d. 139/462 10
Ramazan 1145 (24 February 1733). For Mahmud Pasha’s term as the governor of Vlorë, see BOA, İE.
AS. 77/6973, 4 Safer 1142 (29 August 729); BOA, A. DVNS. NMH. d. 136/227 29 Cemaziyelahir 1143
(9 January 731). Archival documents dated between 1145 and 1147 show that Mehmed Pasha gained
the governorship against Mahmud Pasha. We do not see any mention of Mahmud Pasha as the governor
of Vlorë around that time. See BOA, İE. DH. 12/1207, 29 Zilhicce 1145 (12 June 1733); BOA, A.
DVNS. NMH. d. 139/1238, 29 Rebiulevvel 1146 (9 September 1733); BOA, AE. SMHD. I. 18/1059,
14 Safer 1147 (16 July 1734).
290 Düşnâme, 25a.
60
Mehmed Pasha actually shows the fierce competition between these two pashas and
Mahmud Pasha’s great desire to become the governor of Vlorë.
It was not only Mahmud Pasha who had bad dreams about Mehmed Pasha. Mahmud
Pasha cited the dreams of others in which Mehmed Pasha was in a bad situation.
“Another man saw that all the people of the city gathered. The governor of Vlorë,
Mehmed Pasha, had disappeared (zâyi‘ oldu), no one dreamed of his name and
reputation.”291 Interestingly this dream was cited just after a dream in which he saw
himself in his house giving an extravagant banquet for some noble people. In that
dream, the footman brought him an ivory comb and rose water. Mahmud Pasha
explained that it was the custom among viziers to comb their beards with `ivory comb
and sprinkle them with rose water.292 Whereas Mahmud Pasha likened his own
situation to that of the viziers, Mehmed Pasha was portrayed as a person who had lost
his reputation.
On Zilhicce, Polat? Hasan saw that Mehmed Pasha was in his own house and lay face
downwards. His chamberlain … was also wearing old clothes and he was weak and it
seemed that commissioners came. [He wanted to] fire [them] and I was sitting in a
high mansion and the commissioner and Mehmed Pasha stood up . The commissioner
went away and Mehmed Pasha was left behind lying down.293
On the 14th of Muharrem, Friday. Cafer saw the chamberlain of Mehmed Pasha. His
face was as black as coal. His beard and mustache were gone. He was standing bowing
his head …294
These dream records indicate that people shared not only good dreams but also the bad
dreams they dreamed about people they did not like. In a sense, dreams could bind
people together on the basis of shared negative feelings towards another person.
Scholars of Ottoman history usually pinpoint the fact that there was a culture of
narrating and interpreting dreams in social gatherings.295 Additionally, there was
probably some gain to be made from dream telling in Ottoman society as some of the
records in Düşname that we will later deal with in this chapter reveal. On this basis,
291 Düşnâme, 17a.
292 Ibid.
293 Ibid., 13a.
294 Ibid.
295 Dankoff, An Ottoman Mentality, 206.
61
the inference might be that those people who saw or pretended to see the abovementioned
dreams knew about Mahmud Pasha’s expectations of being reappointed to
the district of Vlorë and his negative feelings towards Mehmed Pasha. They might
have hoped to gain some benefit from Mahmud Pasha in return for their dreams.
The competitive relationship between Mehmed Pasha and Mahmud Pasha was also
depicted in the dreams seen by sheiks.
On the 19th of Muharrem, the sheikh of Nis dreamed on Wednesday that Mehmed
Pasha built a new mosque and I reached there. I became the imam, I led the prayer and
then a man came with a paper. He (the sheikh) asked, “What is this?” He replied that
they had given Mahmud Pasha the governorship of the district (sancak) of Vlorë.296
Mahmud Pasha obviously cited this dream for a purpose. It is noteworthy that the
documents announcing the good news came to a mosque built by Mahmud Pasha’s
rival, Mehmed Pasha. The sheikh’s dream is of benefit to Mahmud Pasha because it
indicated his superiority over Mehmed Pasha.
2.2. Sufi Connections
Düşnâme contains dreams in which Mahmud Pasha saw sheikhs and a good number
of dreams seen by sheikhs. In the light of such dream accounts, it seems that Mahmud
Pasha might have had some Sufi affiliations. On addition to that he mostly distributed
his alms to dervishes as recorded in the manuscript on hand.297 Also he named one of
his sons Derviş. Mahmud Pasha sometimes gave the exact names of the sheikh he
dreamed of. Sometimes, he only noted the region they belonged to such as the sheikh
of Nis or the sheikh of Leskoviku. This means that he personally knew those sheikhs
and was somehow connected to them.
Reşat Öngören notes that Vlorë, Berat and Delvinë had already become centers of the
Halvetî order in the seventeenth century and from there they spread their influence
further into Kosovo and Macedonia. The Halvetî order was also powerful in
Leskoviku.298 This information suggests that Mahmud Pasha had a connection with
296 Düşnâme, 14b.
297 Ibid., 1a.
298 Reşat Öngören, “Arnavutluk’taki Tasavvuf Faaliyetlerinin Karakteri,” in Balkanlar’daki İslam
Medeniyeti II. Milletlerarası Sempozyumu Tebliğleri Tiran-Arnavutluk, ed. Ali Çaksu (İstanbul:
IRCICA, 2006), 346-353.
62
the Halvetî order. Indeed, as Derin Terzioğlu notes, many of the Halvetîs like Seyyid
Hasan and Niyâzî-i Mısrî recorded in their diaries mundane occurrences such as how
they spent the day.299 Mahmud Pasha’s dream diary bears a resemblance to these
earlier examples. Like Mısrî’s diary, Mahmud Pasha’s self-account “represents an
interesting amalgam of a secular diary and a visionary account.”300 He recorded in the
same manuscript some mundane occurrences such as his journeys or the religious
duties he performed, as well as his dreams. Another Halvetî member, Hattat
Abdülkadir Hisârî, followed a similar strategy in producing his self-narrative that will
be discussed in the second chapter of this dissertation. His text was written in order to
find a heavenly explanation for the hard circumstances he experienced in his life.
Reminding one of Sufi dream narratives, Mahmud Pasha’s Düşname seems to use a
literary device in which important figures and sheikhs guide the dreamer. He may have
sent his dream reports to the sheikhs for interpretation like Asiye Hatun did. But,
contrary to Asiye Hatun, he probably sought interpretation of his dreams not to learn
about his spiritual advancement but to find out if they foretold a potential appointment.
The figure of a sheikh, therefore, stands in Düşnâme as someone who gives guidance,
not in spiritual terms, but for worldly affairs such as appointments.301 He seems to have
benefited from the narrative structure of Sufi dreams in order to integrate his material
life with that of the spiritual. The spiritual figure spoke for Mahmud Pasha and
expressed his desire for a reappointment.
The sheikh of Nis dreamed that Mehmed Pasha built a new mosque. I also went to [the
mosque]. I became imam, we prayed with the congregation. One man came with a
document . He asked, “What is this?” He said that [the governorship of] Vlorë had
been given to Mahmud Pasha. The 19th of Muharrem.302
The sheikh of Nis once saw in a lucid dream that the Friday prayers were being
performed. They brought two horses, he tied them up, and they practiced artillery
299 Terzioğlu, “Man in the Image of God in the Image of Times,” 153.
300 Ibid.
301 Özgen Felek observes that “Ottoman dream interpretations fall mainly in two categories: those
produced by and for Sufis, which tend to be more spiritual and use dreams as an educational means for
their disciples, and those tend to be more secular. In studying dreams, these two philosophies approach
dreams quite differently. The interpretations produced by and for Sufis were used to analyze at which
stage the soul was in the journey, while non-Sufi interpretations basically serve to predict the future.”
See Felek, “Re-creating Image and Identity,” 131, fn. 17.
302 Düşnâme, 14b.
63
shooting three times. He once dreamed that he was told that three papers would come
from Istanbul addressed Mahmud Pasha. He saw one of them in my hand; the other
two papers would also come. The 13th of Muharrem.303
During the month of Ramadan, the sheikh of Leskoviku came and said to me, “Do not
doubt, Vlorë will be given to you.”304
A dervish … came and greeted me. It seemed that he was afraid of coming [towards
me]. I stood up, I said “Come,” five or ten times. I heard a scream, and it was the
prophet who came. May Allah make it auspicious.305
Some dreams also display that Mahmud Pasha was very familiar with the dream
interpretation literature, considering his caution to note the color of his clothes, and
describe objects, animals and human figures.306 These dream accounts do not seem to
be recorded to share with the sheikhs whom he knew personally.
A man saw that I was wearing white clothes and riding a white horse. I climbed the
minaret and recited the call to prayer. People prayed and I went down.307
I had a stone building with a yard. There was a little tree at one side of the yard. There
was water under the tree. All the pigeons were going there and wading through the
water before entering their nests. It was evening. I looked at the water and said “The
water is so shallow. Why do they wade through the water?” I went to the pigeon’s
nest. They were frightened and flew away. Those walls and houses were full of
pigeons. All were of different colors; some were black, some white or another color.
They had diamond, emerald, and ruby rings on their fingers, and he had not seen such
expensive things in his life. The 13th of Zilhicce.308
Mufti Efendi dreamed that I and Bayram were riding a white horse. We were going
somewhere. Another man also dreamed in this way.309
303 Düşnâme, 3a.
304 Ibid., 11a.
305 Ibid., 9b.
306 Fleischer makes a similar observation for the dreams of Ottoman scribes, see Fleischer, “Secretaries’
Dreams,” 87.
307 Düşnâme, 1b.
308 Ibid., 7b.
309 Ibid., 11b.
64
2.3. Dreams in Public
Robert Dankoff states that Ottoman elites had a culture of narrating dreams and
interpreting.310 Düşname exemplifies this case and reveals that dreams were essential
parts of the public sphere as Mahmud Pasha included the dreams of others into his
private dream diary. Mahmud Pasha was incorporated into the larger political, social,
and economic, and also the spiritual network around him. People came together in
various circles in which dreams were shared, discussed, and interpreted. Interestingly,
people not only told each other about the dreams they saw, but also preferred to
inscribe and preserve other people’s dream narratives. Dreams probably provided an
opportunity for social gatherings. Düşnâme is, in Katz’s sentence, “illustrative of how
an individual’s [very intimate] experience enters the public domain and finds a
resonance.”311 The following dream report, in which Mahmud Pasha was praised for
being given a true dream, gives a clue about the tradition of dream telling.
I saw that the mount Timur was higher than it actually was. While I was looking at it,
a huge fire appeared in the threshing place. I said, “What is this sign, for Allah’s sake?”
One man said that they had probably set the haystack on fire. I thought that I saw this
incident when I was awake, but I was wrong. There were some people around. I said
them, “Muslims! I saw such a dream.” They replied, “Who would bestow such a
dream? Allah rewarded(?) you with such a dream.” May Allah make it auspicious!
The 17th of Muharrem.312
The dream account cited below is another example of how dreams interconnected
people who aspired to be gifted by messages coming from the unseen world. The
dream was seen by a person other than Mahmud Pasha. He was probably so affected
by the dream that he kept a record of it. The dream basically concerns the inclusion of
an important person, the prophet’s son-in-law, guiding the dreamer.
One man saw that his holiness Ali came and said, “Take Zülfikar, gird yourself with
it!” [but] the man refused. A big fire came from the minaret, and this told him, “Of
course, you should gird yourself with it.” The man took Zülfikar. Then, [the fire]
wanted him to get on Düldül. He said, “I cannot ride Düldül, I would abstain from
310 Dankoff, An Ottoman Mentality, 206.
311 Katz, “Shaykh Ahmad’s Dream,” 180.
312 Düşnâme, 9a.
65
riding it.” He immediately got on a horse. The fire again commanded, “Get on your
own horse!” The man said to his Holiness Ali , “I heard that you [lost?] Zülfikar, where
did you find it?” He responded, “I went and took it.” This man was later appointed to
a Dervish lodge on the Danube at Belgrade. The fire told him, “I will make your horse
stronger and faster than Düldül, go immediately to Belgrade!” The man went to
Belgrade and found the dervish lodge closed. He opened the door and entered the
lodge. He saw that the buildings were burned. He went out. He called his thirty
thousand men and again entered the lodge. A man from the castle came and said
“Forgive us! I will give you the castle key.” He took the key and protected the castle.
He sent the key to Sultan Mahmud. May Allah make it so easy.313
Dreams served to create a social milieu proving that the dreamers shared similar
interests and social backgrounds. Mahmud Pasha’s willingness to talk about other
people’s dreams as well as dreams being seen as a conversation topic reveals that those
people were actually connected to each other not only by their interests, social
background, and political networks but also by their dreams. Mahmud Pasha not only
cited other people’s dreams about himself; he also saw dreams about the appointments
of other provincial governors in his network.
I saw Mahmud Pasha of İpek (Peć) in my dream; it seemed that they gave him [the
governorship of] Elbasan.314
This network of dreams, in a sense, interconnected people’s waking and visionary
activities. To quote at length from Fleischer:
“The night experiences of … the dreamer are linked to those of others in a logic
dictated by association of objects, numbers, actors, and motifs in such a way as to
demonstrate that the concentration of such shared elements in the dreams of those with
he was closely associated possessed a larger prognosticative value; dreams were not
purely subjective experiences, but intimations of a present and future shaped by, and
through the dream medium available to, other human beings…”315
313 Düşnâme, 2b.
314 Ibid., 7a.
315 Fleischer, “Secretaries’ Dreams,” 87.
66
3. EXTERNAL SELF: MAHMUD PASHA’S OFFICIAL LIFE
As Tunalı notes, dream narratives are a useful tool that enables us to understand the
personal characteristics of Ottoman individuals. Moreover, dreams provide us with a
visual impression of scenes and surroundings of life in the past which are important
clues as to how those people lived.316 Mahmud Pasha was not reticent about the world
around him; this in turn enables us to understand how he spent his days. He reveals a
wealth of detail about the life of a provincial governor, from appointment to dismissal,
from battle scenes to banquets in elite mansions. In this part, I will concentrate on
Mahmud Pasha’s official life, and on how his daily routine was shaped by his military
identity. I will also touch on the link between dreams and the self-image of the
dreamer.
As mentioned earlier in this chapter, Mahmud Pasha affixed his signature defining
himself as the governor of Vlorë to the last part of the manuscript.317 He also wrote of
official positions he had held in previous years. The majority of the dreams recorded
in the Düşnâme were about his official life. It seems that his official life in general and
his role as the governor of Vlorë in particular were the most defining features of his
self. According to Fleischer, dream narratives are important in that they provide
“panoramic views of the social, cultural and private psychic lives of individuals that
can go far towards telling us the ways and means whereby they interpreted their
environment.”318 The fact that Mahmud Pasha’s official life and aspirations
interrelated with his spiritual life explains the abundance of “professional dreams” that
he experienced.319 He not only worked as an official but also built relations with
important personages. He was very concerned about his official appointments, his
relations with high-ranking people, and his duty as a governor. Hence, the basis to his
dreams was mainly his view on appointments and official duties.
February and again, a man dreamed that he gave me large number of soldiers and I
appointed him as headman to some villages, accompanied by ten thousand men. He
316 Gülçin Tunalı, “Üç Rüya Bir Tereke: Ankaralı Müneccim Müderriszâde Sadullah el- Ankaravi’nin
Hayatından Kesitler,” in Ayşegül Keskin Çolak’a Armağan: Tarih ve Edebiyat Yazıları, ed. Hasan
Çolak, Zeynep Kocabıyıkoğlu Çeçen, N. Işık Demirakın (Ankara: Kebikeç Yayınları, 2016), 115.
317 Düşnâme, 28a, The seal is read as “Mahmud Paşa Mutasarrıf-ı Avlonya.”
318 Fleischer, “Secretaries’ Dreams,” 77-88.
319 This concept of “professional dream” is borrowed from Fleischer.
67
reached there with some of his men … We landed on Galatopça (?) and he landed on
the other side. We were going to Delvine (Delvinë) together with our soldiers.320
Arpa Emini dreamed that I was in the castle of Nis. Mehmed Pasha sent [one of his
men] and wanted me to open the gate. I answered saying, “I cannot open it, because I
sent one of my men to Istanbul in order to bring me [an edict]. Then, an attendant
brought a sealed letter from Nemçe (Nemce). The letter said “You should be prepared
for a campaign.” I replied “I sent my man to the sultan in Istanbul, I will be ready on
hearing the news. The 6th of Muharrem.321
Again I dreamed that I was going somewhere accompanied by lots of cavalry men.322
On the 15th of Şevval, one of the scribes came and gave me an edict and a couple of
documents in a small bag. It seemed that I had been appointed to go on a campaign. I
opened the edict and read it . There was nothing in it about that . I said, “Nothing about
that is written here.” They appointed me to one place even though Gül Ahmed Ağa
had appointed me to another place. Why didn’t I go to İskenderiye? I said, “The edict
comes from the sultan, and I must obey it. However, I was very anxious, and I woke
up just as I was getting ready to go.323
Apparently, his official life and activities connected with the militia were the core of
his dream narratives. His daily life and pleasures were also shaped by his military
identity. The frequency of the dreams in which he saw himself hunting suggests that
Mahmud Pasha enjoyed hunting trips. Hunting was not only a pleasure, but it was also
related to sustaining and enhancing military skills in peacetime. In a sense, it served
as a militia training exercise. Mahmud Pasha must frequently have gone hawking in
the areas surrounding Vlorë and beyond. Seemingly he was accompanied by his
militia. In the dream records translated below, Mahmud Pasha noted that he had a
falcon. This record suggests that several types of hunting were practiced; hunting with
trained birds of prey and hunting in the chase and the drive (sürek avı).
320 Düşnâme, 2b.
321 Ibid., 13a.
322 Ibid., 5b.
323 Ibid., 23a.
68
I dreamed that we hunted together with one [or] two hundred men. All of us chased
the same prey. We each had a musket and we were on foot. We killed all the rabbits
we chased.324
I dreamed that I was holding a falcon in my hand and a couple of hunters were chasing
something in the distance. It looked like a duck, big [duck]. It passed me and fell down
… 325
The seventh of Muharrem, Friday. I dreamed that we were walking somewhere. We
had our horses and we wanted to hunt. It was close to Belgrade …326
Zilhicce, we were in Bolaç. I dreamed that we arrived at a house. We hunted down
ten rabbits. They say it brings good luck. It was our first hunt and I was riding my
dapple-grey horse.327
In the middle of February, the Sunday night. I dreamed that … I reached our farm. I
wanted to go on a hunt. I ordered the farmers to come, [and] we would go coursing.
We arrived at the [hunting] place; they had not come. I was riding a horse to take part
in chase and drive. I saw that they were coming and unfurled a flag.328
Muharrem, I dreamed that we were going hunting. I got ready and went to take my
horse. My horse was there. I arrived at that district and send a man to take my horse.
I was together with Hasan Beğ of Karaşar and Ali Beğ.329
Governors were probably accompanied by horses on many of the hunting excursions.
Mahmud Pasha must have given much importance to riding good/strong horses as such
a horse was associated with the powerful, prestigious position of the owner. In his
dreams, likewise, riding a strong, fast horse was generally interpreted as a portent of
an appointment, which is why he habitually dreamed about horses.
The 1st of Şaban, Wednesday night. I dreamed that we were going to a place for the
first time. Everyone’s horse was ready. I said, “Bring the horses and let’s mount and
go.” They brought everyone else’s horses, but my horse did not come. I said, “Hurry
up, bring my horse.” Lately, one of my horses was … They brought that horse when
Vlorë was taken, [and the horse] was not equipped. After that, I took my sword out
324 Düşnâme, 8b.
325 Ibid., 10a.
326 Ibid., 13b.
327 Ibid., 12b.
328 Ibid., 2b.
329 Ibid., 10a.
69
because the servant was late, and I hit his head a few times, holding the horse by the
bridle. I woke up. Again, we had good horses, and we made the horses gallop. May
Allah make it auspicious.330
Again, I saw that we were on top of a mountain. We were on foot, but the horses were
ready. We wanted to ride our horses. I said. “Bring the horses … “They first brought
Bayram’s horse. The horse was lame. Then they brought my horse. They rode it fast,
but it never got exhausted. The horse was the same horse which escaped from me in
my dream when I was dismissed from Vlorë.331
Other aspects of elite life that can be read through dream narratives were the wearing
of fine, expensive clothes and feasting at banquets with important personages. Such
pleasurable activities were also a usual theme of dream narratives and described in
great detail.
Again, that night, I dreamed that I had a new ermine fur, and I put it. Sarı Ahmed
Pasha became the vizier. I arrived and he made me wear a green tabard, a sable fur
and I also kissed the hem of his garment …332
On the 15th of February, Saturday, I dreamed that I was wearing a sable fur and riding
a horse, I was going to [join] the army of soldiers.333
On Wednesday night, I saw that we were in a palace. It was Ramadan. We ate the iftar
dinner, we stood up to perform the evening prayer. I entered a room, that was well
furnished for the feast and Kara Osmanoğlu Ahmed Beğ also attended that iftar dinner.
He stood up to recite the prayer, I reached that room, below which there was a big
vineyard. They said that we saw … in it. When I was going down to the courtyard, the
district of Kumburgaz appeared to me. It was Istanbul and there were houses by the
sea, I was looking at them … Büyük Mehmed was also in his home. He said. “Do not
let him see it, he does not know anything and all the horses in the courtyard were going
out. They brought my horse near to the door. I wanted to get on it, but people were
rushing to get out … there were one or two horses left, and I go out. I woke up, but
they were holding my horse and I could not find the way to reach and take [my horse].
May Allah make it auspicious.334
330 Düşnâme, 22b.
331 Ibid., 26a.
332 Ibid., 2a.
333 Ibid., 2b.
334 Ibid., 3a.
70
The dream scenes actually represent the real-life experiences in that hunting
excursions, riding good horses, wearing fine, expensive clothes or taking part in
banquets with the elites of the region must have been routine parts of Mahmud Pasha’s
daily life.
3.1. Dreams as a Means of Self-Fashioning
Reynolds notes that “dream accounts function as the displaced authority of the
authorial ‘I’: what the author cannot say on his own authority, he can support with the
testimony from an outside source through the narration of vision or dream.”335 Dream
narration is interrelated with the act of describing the aspects of one’s life.336
Therefore, there seems to be a particularly close link between dreams and the selfimage
of the dreamer.337
They put a round shot into Ali Pasha’s cannon. In ten days, his son was given the title
of …338
We were in Ergirili Ali’s room. He said “He will not eat my bread.” I escaped. He
sought for Delvinë, they dismissed me, and gave it to Mehmed Bey.339
It was the religious feast. When we were praying in the district of Murad Çelebi,
mehter music was being performed in the city. We said that “What is it?” They said t
“Osman Pasha prayed earlier, the mehter music is being performed for him.” It
occurred that ten days later he took the seal.340
As Reynolds argues with a reference to a dream that leads to Hunayn ibn Ishaq’s (d.
873 or 877) being cleared of accusations, “the dramatic moment comes not in the
interpretation of the dream … but … in the public narration of the dream.”341 This
dream report points to Mahmud Pasha’s spiritual status as the receiver of true
messages. The claim that these dreams had come true actually carried the message that
all the dreams about his reappointment to Vlorë would also turn out as desired. Indeed,
335 Reynolds, Interpreting the Self, 93.
336 Reynolds, “Symbolic Narratives of Self,” 283.
337 For a discussion on dreams’ serving to public image of the dreamer see, Felek, “Re-creating Image
and Identity,” 249-72. The title of this part is given in reference to Felek’s study.
338 Düşnâme, 1b.
339 Ibid.
340 Ibid.
341 Reynolds, Interpreting the Self, 91.
71
those records about his being a very good governor imply that he deserved to be
appointed to the position that he sought for.
I dreamed that I was in a place in the city. I went to a public bath where there were
women. I proceeded, but I was walking slowly. The sheikh of Parakalama (Parakalosë)
also came along behind me, but he could not catch me. I wanted to go to a public bath.
I reached one public bath and entered it. There were lots of people in it. There was an
agha standing on foot. He was very elegant; it seemed that he was the deputy of the
public bath’s owner. However, I was wearing very extravagant clothes that no other
person could wear. My servants had also come along with me. One of them had my
prayer rug. It was new and green … and beautiful. I rolled up the prayer rug that was
on the floor and I said “Roll out my own prayer rug!” That agha said “If you do that,
you had better kill the owner of the public bath because life would be unbearable for
him.” I said, “Very well. Bring the prayer rug of the bath owner!” However, there was
no heat in the bath. And that agha said to me, “You are Mahmud Pasha of Belgrade, I
swear to God that there is no pasha like you.” May Allah make it auspicious! 28th of
Ramadan 1147.342
He cared a lot about being portrayed as a very good governor as he was actually having
a hard time in receiving the appointment he wished for. Thus, he cited dreams to show
the image he desired others to see and appreciate.343 Likewise in many of his dreams
he saw that he became the imam (leader in worship), leading the people in prayers just
like he governed in reality. He obviously was very sensitive about demonstrating his
own worth and talents. Hence, he wanted them to be known by others as well, so that
these dreams were circulated and recorded.
On the 4th of Zilhicce, Abdi Bey saw that I became the imam and after performing the
prayer, I rode on a horse.344
May 7, Abdi Bey saw that I became the imam, and I was sitting in a high place, I was
leading [the prayer] and I prayed. All the people were crying and saying “Amen”.345
342 Düşnâme, 25b-26a.
343 Felek, “Re-creating Image and Identity,” 83-124.
344 Düşnâme, 11b.
345 Ibid.
72
A man saw that all of my clothes were white, and I took a white horse and I climbed
to the minaret and recited the call to prayer (ezan) and all the people were praying.346
On the 5th of May, Thursday, I saw that Osman Pasha and his entourage wore new
clothes and the regiment would come to a mosque. We were going to meet them, but
we could not catch up with them. The place where Osman Pasha was sitting was
narrow, they were all seated side by side. I arrived at the mihrab, the place was large,
and I started to recite the prayers.347
We also frequently observe him fighting in battle against infidels as explained in the
dream record in which the infidels are symbolized by large pigs.
Mahmud Polat? saw that my son, Derviş had grown up. He came with a horse and
said, “Where are you? I went to Istanbul and settled your affairs. And now, two
dervishes will come bringing a white horse from the sultan for my father. After he said
these words, two dervishes came holding spears. After that, other fours dervishes came
with horses. They brought the horses sent by the sultan and they brought one … We
discussed with the dervishes our outing to Nis. My son said, “Now, you cannot go to
Nis. Circumstances require this.” I said that I could go. Those dervishes did not allow
me to go, but they said, “You can send your son, Bayram. “I did that and sent Bayram
to Nis. I was about to return, and I said to five or six men, “Do not stop, move forward.”
They set off on the journey, [but] they immediately returned. I asked them, “Why did
you not go?” They replied, “There are too many pigs over there, [those pigs] do not
allow us to go.” The people are shocked by this situation. Those two dervishes who
came before said, “What will this thing be?” … They made me stand up. One dervish
climbed on one side and the other dervish climbed on the other side and they made me
ride the horse sent by the sultan. They also rode their horses. The people wanted us to
sit down. I was in the middle and the three of us made an attack on the pigs. We lunged
towards the pigs. The horses trampled the pigs in such a way that no pig could survive.
All of the pigs died. When we moved to the other side, the two dervishes speared the
pigs and raised the pigs up with their lances. The people were amazed at how the
dervishes raised and carried such big pigs up with their lances. The dervishes told us
what would happen to them and that we will go to the province.348
346 Düşnâme, 1b.
347 Ibid., 6b.
348 Ibid., 12a-12b.
73
Someone dreamed that my men arrive at a cemetery and open up a grave; they
resurrect the dead and then they depart to their own work. He said, “Then why do they
not resurrect our children if they are capable of doing it?”349
The first dream shows Mahmud Pasha in the middle of a battle with pigs. The fight
with those unpleasant animals says much about his superior military capabilities. This
scene also establishes him as the protector of the people and restorer of order.
Unsurprisingly, this dream started with a scene in which his son Derviş brought his
father a white horse sent by the sultan. Mahmud Pasha rode that horse when attacking
the pigs and displaying his extraordinary courage and strength. The second dream
attributed to Mahmud Pasha and his men had the Prophet’s ability to resuscitate the
dead.
Dreams had very strong connotations in the historical context within which he lived.
The author of the dream diary, therefore, had some sort of consciousness of his
readers/listeners. He used phrases like, “May Allah make it auspicious.” At the end of
some records, he used expressions like “I do not remember what I dreamed.” “I do not
know whether it was good or bad.” Such literary devices strengthen the idea that he
was writing for an audience. He might be preserving those dreams to share with his
associates as portents of the future. The use of dreams can therefore be seen as an effort
to control the way the dreamer’s public image is presented, as the truthful dreams of
righteous man were seen to be one of the forty-six parts of prophetising.350
4. INNER SELF: ANXIETY AND HOPE AS REVEALED IN THE DREAMS
If the interpretation of dreams is a common facet of ordinary life, why then should one
dream rather than another be deemed worthy of entering the public domain? This
question raises larger issues regarding the conceptions of the self and the individual
… What could induce the dreamer or the diarist to divulge his innermost subjective
experiences? What was to be gained by crossing the line that separated private and
public life?351
349 Düşnâme, 10a.
350 Felek, “Re-creating Image and Identity,” 267; G. E. Von Grunebaum, “Introduction: The Cultural
Function of the Dream as Illustrated by Classical Islam,” 13. Grunebaum noted that “the dream
constitutes a private prophecy.”
351 Katz, Dreams, Sufism and Sainthood, 30.
74
Researchers must consider the connection between dreams and anxiety. This
connection is very useful in contextualizing and understanding dream accounts and
putting them in the historical context in which they were created. Reynolds stated that
dreams had a remarkably important place in Arabic autobiographies and dreams
mostly appeared at critical points in the authors’ life.352 Studies made on Ottoman
dreams show that instability in professional life seems to have led to the dissemination
and circulation of dreams. Aslı Niyazoğlu’s study of Nihanî’s nightmare is a good
example of questioning the use of dreams in such insecure situations.353 Likewise,
Evliya Çelebi used dreams at critical points to overcome his anxiety. According to
Robert Dankoff, dreams “provide Evliya with comfort or counsel when he is troubled
or in a quandary.”354 Dream narratives were added to the Seyahatnâme in accordance
with the role Evliya assigned to them. Dreams mainly functioned as a means of relief
when he or his patron, Melek Ahmed Pasha, felt troubled.355 All these cases show that
dreams eased troubled experiences that the dreamer had been through as well as his
endeavor to overcome his anxiety. Mahmud Pasha was no an exception. He kept the
record of his dreams when he was given some minor sancaks as opposed to his
aspiration to regain the governor generalship of Vlorë. Probably, that situation came
at a delicate time in his life and explains his concerns of securing a mundane post
which influenced the construction of his dream narratives. Reading these accounts, one
can recognize Mahmud Pasha’s hopes of advancement.
As Reynolds noted, the deployment of dreams reflects moments of anxiety, not in the
content of the dream itself as we modern readers may assume, but at the time of its
inclusion in the text.356 “Dreams “providing ‘future portents, affirmation and
legitimation’ generally come in response to an anxiety the dreamer had experienced
before, after, or during the dream.”357 This is also evident in the dreams of Mahmud
Pasha. His dreams were related to the uncertainties of his life, mainly connected with
his political status.
352 Reynolds, “Symbolic Narratives of Self: Dreams in Medieval Arabic Autobiographies,” 262.
353 Aslı Niyazioglu, “On Altıncı Yüzyıl Sonunda Osmanlı’da Kadılık Kabusu ve Nihani’nin Rüyası,”
Journal of Turkish Studies 31, no. 2 (2007): 133–43.
354 Robert Dankoff, An Ottoman Mentality, 209.
355 Ibid.
356 Reynolds, Interpreting the Self, 90.
357 Kahana-Smilansky, “Self-Reflection and Conversion,” 100.
75
Mahmud Pasha and obviously other provincial administrators, operated on slippery
ground because dismissals and appointments frequently took place and duration in an
office was not long. Officials could be dismissed at any time of the year.358 This
ambiguous atmosphere combined rapid promotion and dismissal, personal
opportunity, and failure in a perplexing mixture. Administrators who failed to attain a
governorship in a province reacted with disappointment, anxiety, or anguish. Mahmud
Pasha’s diary of dreams is full of accounts revealing the emotional world of a
provincial governor. Over-frequent dismissals and appointments affected Mahmud
Pasha in such a way that many of his dreams revealed his desire for a reappointment
to the province of Vlorë. Dreams reveal that his emotional situation fluctuated from
certainty to fear, from anxiety to hope. He was in contact with the unseen world and
dreams basically served him to make sense of his struggle in life. The following dream
reports probably resulted from such an anxiety. He dreamed excessively about his
appointment to Vlorë as well as the appointments of other officials, because he was
fully preoccupied with dismissals and loss of jobs.
I saw that we were in some rooms found in Belgrade. About five or six hundred people
were praying and they expressed their gratitude. I asked, “What are these people
doing?” They replied, “These are the men to whom you distributed alms in Ramadan.”
“Why are they thankful? “They are thankful because you have been appointed to
Vlorë. I said to Abdi Bey, “Vlorë has not been given to me, why do you lie?” [Abdi
Bey] said “I do not know for sure.” I said, “What about Gül Ahmed Agha?” He became
the vizier’s chamberlain. He suffered so much that he will not be appointed again. The
30th of Ramadan.359
During the month of Ramadan, the sheikh of Leskoviku came and said to me ,“Do not
doubt, Vlorë will be given to you.”360
He usually saw documents sent from the capital, which were typically lengthy and
scripted in beautiful calligraphy. These documents were clearly edicts, the signs of his
upcoming promotion. It is worth pointing out that dreams were narrated like objective
358 Kunt, The Sultan’s Servants, 70-72; For governor appointments to Vlorë and duration of office, see
Başar, Osmanlı Eyalet Tevcihatı, 42-43.
359 Düşnâme, 10b.
360 Ibid., 11a.
76
realities and were attributed to have an explanatory value. In this case, the news of the
anticipated appointment first came in the dream in the form of official papers.
The sheikh of Nis once saw in a lucid dream that they were performing the Friday
prayers. They brought two horses; he tied them up , and they practiced artillery
shooting three times. He once dreamed they said to him that three official papers will
come from Istanbul addressed to Mahmud Pasha. He saw one of them in my hand; the
other two papers will also come. The 13th of Muharrem.361
[8] … A man came. He brought two letters. One of them was sent by Osman Pasha,
the other one by Selman Kethüda. Both were enveloped in the same way that Selman
Kethüda had done previously. But the document was large. It seemed to come from
Istanbul, it was not flat, it was long. This supposedly happened twice, and he brought
two documents. I opened the one sent by Selman Kethüda … The paper itself was
unquestionably large, but the writing was small and beautiful. May Allah make it
auspicious. 362
I saw that it was evening; I was having a conversation with Mustafa Agha of Delvinë.
And they brought me a sealed envelope [send] by Fatma Sultan. I took it. And one of
my men came from the capital and said, “We have Vlorë, soon they will come with an
edict.” The 15th of Ramadan.363
While I was sitting in the mansion, İsa rushed in. He gave me an edict. I thought that
it was the edict about Vlorë. When I read it, I saw that it was the charter (berat) of
Yanya. May Allah make it auspicious! The 18th of Zilka‘de.364
The sheikh of Nis dreamed that Mehmed Pasha built a new mosque. I also went to [the
mosque]. I became imam, we prayed together with the congregation. One man came
with an official paper. He asked, “What is this?” He said that [the governorship of]
Vlorë had been given to Mahmud Pasha. The 19th of Muharrem.365
Some objects seen in past dreams at significant moments have allowed the dreamer to
precisely interpret his current dreams. Horses were the animals that emerged most
often in his dreams. Riding a good horse in a dream was a significant indicator of an
upcoming appointment. Once again, he dreamed of the horse he saw when he was
361 Düşnâme, 13a.
362 Ibid., 7a.
363 Ibid., 10b.
364 Ibid., 11a.
365 Ibid., 14b.
77
dismissed from Vlorë. In that previous account, the horse ran away from Mahmud
Pasha, and this resulted in his dismissal. In the current dream, however, the horse was
coming fast towards Mahmud Pasha without any signs of exhaustion. The common
element of these two visions probably assisted him to interpret the fast coming of the
same horse as portent of his appointment back to Vlorë. Dreams elucidated the future,
the present and also the past. They have always remained significant and relevant.366
Again, I saw that we were on top of a mountain. We were on foot but the horses were
ready. We wanted to ride our horses. I said, “Bring the horses … “They first brought
Bayram’s horse. The horse was lame. Then they brought my horse. They rode it
quickly, but it never became exhausted. And this horse was the same horse which
escaped from me in my dream when I was dismissed from Vlorë.367
This was not the only dream linking the vision of a horse with the governorship of
Vlorë. On the first of Şaban, he again experienced a dream in which he dreamed of
horses. Mahmud Pasha connected the current dream experience with an earlier one in
which the same horse was brought to him when he was appointed to Vlorë. He did not
interpret this openly, but it is obvious that he found a relationship between his possible
appointment and riding that horse in his dream. The repetitive nature of these dreams
seemed to clarify their meaning, so Mahmud Pasha emphasized that the earlier vision
was related to his appointment and did not feel the need for further interpretation.
The 1st of Şaban, Wednesday night. I saw that we were going somewhere for the first
time. Everyone’s horses were ready. I said, “Bring the horses and let’s go.” They
brought everyone else’s horses, but my horse did not come. I said, “Hurry up, bring
my horse.” Lately, one of my horses was … They brought that horse when Vlorë was
taken away, [and the horse] was not equipped. Afterwards I took my sword out
because he was late, and I hit him on the head a few times holding the horse by the
bridle. I woke up. Again, we rode good horses, and we made the horses gallop. May
Allah make it auspicious.368
Mahmud Pasha was actively seeking for divine answers to find a solution for his
political status which was filled with uncertainties. The dream diary shows that he
asked sheikhs to lie down to sleep in the hope that God would send some indication in
366 Çörekçi, “Dream Diary,” 335.
367 Düşnâme, 26a.
368 Ibid., 22b.
78
dreams to his fervent hopes of advancement. Although he was not satisfied with the
experience that took place in the month of Receb, he included it in his dream diary.
The 13th of Muharrem. The sheikh of Nis once saw in a lucid dream that they were
performing the Friday prayers. They brought two horses, he tied them up, and they
practiced artillery shooting three times. He once dreamed that they told him that three
papers were to come from Istanbul addressed to Mahmud Pasha. He saw one of them
in my hand; the other two papers will also come.369
In [the month of] Receb, a tall dervish came. I gave him three hundred aspers. I also
gave him two hundred aspers more because he was not pleased. I asked him to help
me practice pious meditation. He said, “Close your eyes.” I closed my eyes, but I did
not see what I wanted.370
Some dreams reflect deeply felt emotions, such as grief. As a provincial governor
Mahmud Pasha must have faced many complaints and much hostility. Archival
documents show that governors could be investigated on account of accusations of
collecting or extracting illegal taxes, of oppressing the people or because of slanders.
Governors had a hard time clearing their names of such accusations. For instance,
Mahmud Pasha was dismissed around 1725/1726 after such an inspection. He was
cleared thanks to his reputation for fighting against brigands, his success in collecting
taxes and his general reputation in Vlorë.371 From recurrent themes of breaking down
in tears or complaining of slanderers, one can understand his emotional reactions
against accusations.
The 10th of February, I saw Osman Pasha in my dream. And they said to [Osman
Pasha], “Make allowances for Mahmud Pasha.” He said to a number of elevated men
that he would stay one or two more days. We were supposedly in the district of Përmet.
I said, “I do not have anything to do in any other place. I will stay in the district of
Përmet for two or three days, because these [people] are not ordered properly. I
dreamed of Kolonya (Kolonja). I suppressed it in such a way that [I could put them in
their proper place by sending only one man]. Why do you listen to such improper
remarks? They are slandering me. He said ,”I do not listen to their words, but they
come and talk. One may think what they say is true, but I do not listen to them for your
369 Düşnâme, 13a.
370 Ibid., 10b.
371 Başar, Osmanlı Eyalet Tevcihatı, 42-43.
79
sake. I said, “They are talking about me behind my back,” and I broke down in tears.
All the men of high office present there felt sorry for me.372
This is the nineteenth of February and the fourth day of Ramadan. I dreamed that I
arrived in Istanbul and entered the mansion of an important man. He was, I suppose,
the chief mufti. After having a conversation and kissing each other, I complained about
these ruthless people.373
He recorded these two dreams which concentrated on the same theme within a nineday
interval. These narratives described the difficulties he experienced as a result of
slanders and how he overcame them. In the same folio, in fact, among those tales of
grief, he included another dream in which a few horses were sent from Istanbul for his
use.374 The theme of a horse bestowed by a royal person (from Istanbul) received
detailed treatment in the Düşnâme. Mahmud Pasha mostly interpreted such dreams as
an affirmation of his political status. This dream in which he enjoyed a royal favor was
probably cited as supporting testimony for the eminence of his situation.
Likewise, political alignments and personal hatreds greatly affected the career of
provincial governors. The anxiety felt on account of a rival’s enmity can be understood
from the dreams in which Mahmud Pasha sometimes saw people who prevented him
from being promoted and sometimes saw animals representing the hostility of his
enemies. He experienced such stressful dreams as part of something larger; they
indicated the habitual stressful events in the careers of Ottoman officials who aspired
to gain a better position. The significance of such dreams is obviously not in their
depiction of the reality, but rather in their ability to unveil the emotional effect on the
dreamer.375
A man was a chamberlain like Selman Agha [and] Sarı Ahmed Pasha’s chamberlain
Abdurrahman Agha. He was living in a big mansion. But there were a lot of other men
there also. I arrived. All of them stood up and the one who was the chamberlain
reached out to me so that he could pull me up. The chamberlain was wearing a green
garment. He gave me his hand, but it was a trick. He was [pretending] to pull me up,
372 Düşnâme, 4a.
373 Ibid.
374 Ibid.
375 Kelly Bulkeley, Dreaming in the World’s Religions: A Comparative History (New York: New York
University Press, 2008), 197.
80
but [actually] was pulling me down so that I could not climb up. He seemed to be
joking, but I felt suffocated. I pulled my hand back from his and somehow entered the
mansion. May Allah make it auspicious.376
In the middle of the winter … I wanted to use a leech. There was a little eel there.
They said , “This [eel] also draws [blood].” I allowed [them] to put it on me. It held
on to my foot. But once it held fast it took as much as an enemy would.377
Among such many troublesome events, Mahmud Pasha recorded auspicious dreams
that predicted the good things he hoped for. These dreams were recorded as a witness
to the grace of God bestowed on the dreamer. His visions were also supported by the
concurrent dreams of acquaintances.
Again, a man dreamed that I arrived at Istanbul. I fought with the people of Istanbul
and defeated them. I found the sultan and went to kiss his hand and greeted those who
were standing beside him. The sultan had a table set., I sat at the table and we started
to eat.378
On the 11th of Zilhicce, I saw that we were standing on our feet. A cloud came. It
snowed. After that another cloud came. It rained. At that moment, the sky and the
clouds started to bubble away like boiling water. I said, “Allah will punish someone.”
We were going somewhere riding white horses. Another man also dreamed in this
way. 379
A man dreamed that there were three crescent moons in the month of Receb. While he
was looking at the sky, those three crescents turned into white pigeons and they flew
up in the sky. Another pigeon came in sight there. The one who saw [the dream] said
that they took it from the pigeons of the sky. They played and played [and] all four
pigeons landed on our house.380
The literary evidence displays that Mahmud Pasha included dream accounts as
messages from the outside world and from the divine realm that acted as augury.
Dreams are appreciated precisely because they enabled people to comprehend an outer
reality beyond their knowledge, offering believers “a royal road that led not inward
376 Düşnâme, 4b.
377 Ibid. 2a.
378 Ibid. 26a.
379 Ibid., 11b.
380 Ibid., 22a.
81
but outward, providing insight … into the hidden affairs of the world”381 The regularity
of dream records anticipating his much-craved appointment tells how, in a world so
full of competition and anxiety, he never gave way to despair.
Conclusion
This chapter on the Düşname aimed at depicting the social, political spiritual, and
mental life of an Ottoman administrator living in the eighteenth century. I tried to
uncover the way in which he comprehended and construed his environment, and how
he interpreted his dreams by taking into consideration. his network as well as political
and social context in which he lived. In the first part , I focused on Mahmud Pasha’s
relational self. People who occupied his dream narratives actually provide an
opportunity to reconstruct his relationships. An additional point was made by
examining Mahmud Pasha’s Sufi networks. When considering the fact that Mahmud
Pasha included the dreams of acquaintances in the Düşnâme, I questioned the practice
of dream-telling in Ottoman society. I tried to disclose the interconnectedness of
dreams and emphasized the power of dreams in giving good reasons for people to
gather in social spaces. The second part focused on his external self in order to
understand the personal characteristics of an Ottoman governor. For this discussion, I
used the concept of “official dreams” to uncover how his professional life and
aspirations accorded with his psychic life. I have tried to uncover details about the life
of a provincial governor such as his daily activities and pleasures. In this part, I also
attempted to demonstrate how true dreams served to enhance the public image of the
dreamer. In the last part, I tried to display the inner-most subjective experiences of the
dreamer and the connection between anxiety and dream narratives by examining the
dreams that focused on his concerns about acquiring a good position.
381 Lamoreaux, The Early Muslim Tradition of Dream Interpretation, 4. Also cited by Amira
Mittermaier, Dreams That Matter: Egyptian Landscapes of the Imagination (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2011), 14.
82
CHAPTER II: INTO THE LIFE OF AN OTTOMAN
CALIGRAPHER: ABDÜLKADİR HİSÂRÎ’S SERGÜZEŞTNÂME
In this chapter, I will introduce an eighteenth-century Ottoman self-narrative in which
a calligrapher narrated his life, starting from his childhood and proceeding until he
attained a position in the scribal service at the age of thirty-six. 382 My aim is not to
define a proper starting point for Ottoman autobiographies and not to raise an argument
about, in Terzioğlu’s words, “the creation of an ‘autobiographical mentality’ in the
early modern Ottoman Empire”383 or determine all their differences or similarities to
those of western counterparts. I will argue that this calligrapher/scribe not only
portrayed his public/external/relational self but also revealed many intimate details
about his private/inner/psychological self as opposed to the claims that self-narratives
do not reveal anything about the inner/emotional self.384 I will search for the
circumstances in which this narrative was created and try to understand how the author
categorized his text. I will try to analyze what this self-narrative meant for its writer
and potential readers.385
1. OTTOMAN SERGÜZEŞTNÂMES
Sergüzeştnâme is a literary genre in which the authors narrated their lives mostly in
verse and sometimes in prose.386 These texts mostly caught the attention of scholars in
the field of literature. They studied them mainly in terms of style, content, and form,
and aimed at defining the literary characteristics of the genre. However, these texts
need the attention of historians in that they reflect the world-view of Ottoman
individuals and offer information that cannot be found elsewhere. They reveal the way
382 Abdülkadir bin Hasan el-Hisârî, Sergüzeştnâme, Istanbul Üniversitesi nadir Eserler Kütüphanesi,
MS Türkçe 544. [hereafter, Sergüzeştnâme]
383 Terzioğlu, “Autobiography in Fragments,” 85.
384 Greyerz, “Ego-Documents: The Last Word?,” 281.
385 Terzioğlu, “Autobiography in Fragments,” 83.
386 Orhan Kemal Tavukçu, “Sergüzeştname,” DİA, vol. 36, 559-60.
83
a particular individual lived, felt, and reacted to certain situations. These texts, which
reveal invaluable information about the authors’ lives, families, networks, social
status, professions, career processes, anxieties, fears, and hopes, can, therefore, enable
historians to come closer to the lives of Ottoman individuals.
Agah Sırrı Levend was the first to gather together the known examples of the genre of
sergüzeştname and bring them to the attention of scholars. In his monumental work,
Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi, Agah Sırrı Levend recorded fifteen manuscripts under the title
of Sergüzeştnâmeler ve Hasbıhâller.387 Levend did not make a division between
sergüzeşt and hasb-i hâl. He evaluated them as a subbranch of fiction. The brief list
given by Levend is significant in that he opened a vista for future studies on the genre.
After briefly describing sergüzeştnâme, he added a list of the manuscripts.
From then on, new studies in this genre began to appear, mostly by scholars studying
in the field of Turkish literature. Günay Kut’s article on Halîlî’s Fürkatnâme (Book of
Separation) is an example of these. Fürkatnâme, written in 1471/72, was one of the
earlier examples of the genre.388 Kut stated that the whole story is told from Halîlî’s
point of view using the first-person singular. He narrates the story of a love he had
experienced in his youth. According to the narrative, Halîlî is persuaded to go to Rum
(land of Romans) by a friend’s insistence. They arrive at Iznik (Nicaea) and spend their
time travelling and working. While walking in the market one day, Halîlî sees a
beautiful girl and falls in love. He suffers pain because of the love he feels for her. He
sends a letter to his love but is rejected. Upon hearing the sad news, he becomes very
upset and decides to leave for Istanbul. However, in time his pain grows deeper. He
sends a messenger to tell his love about his suffering. Upon receiving a letter from his
love, he returns to Nicaea, but he is not well received by his beloved. Halîlî complains
about his fate and says that he will never become happy as long as he lives. Referring
to the mystical elements used in the work, Kut noted that the actual theme of the work
is divine love and categorized it as a mystical hasb-i hâl.389 Such narratives can reveal
how people in the past experienced strong emotions like love.
387 Agah Sırrı Levend, Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 1973), 141-42.
388 Günay Kut, “Fürkat-nâme,” Türk Dili Araştırmaları Yıllığı Belleten 25 (1977), 336.
389 Ibid., 353.
84
Betül Demirayak wrote her master thesis on Sergüzeştnâme-i Zihnî in 1997.390 This
work is a narrative of Zihnî’s (d. 1860) official life.391 In this he vividly describes his
life, his appointments, dismissals, and resignations. He harshly criticizes those who
behave unfairly and abuse their power. Demirayak informed us briefly about the author
and had transcribed Zihnî’s work into modern Turkish. She did not delve into the text
or give much information about the content. Zihnî’s work needs the attention of
historians who work on Ottoman self-narratives.
Zehra Toska’s article is very illuminating in that she not only examined a nineteenthcentury
sergüzeştnâme but also tried to uncover the literary features of the genre for
the first time.392 She divided sergüzeştnâmes into those covering the story of love and
those disclosing the adventures experienced by the authors. Toska noted that the first
group cannot be placed under the category of autobiography. Although the authors set
the story of their love within real events and narrate it in the first person singular, these
love stories were fictional. According to her, such sergüzeştnâmes can be seen as the
result of a search for novelty by the authors who were obliged to repeat the same stories
that had been told for hundreds of years. In their search the authors benefited from the
sergüzeştnâme genre by finding a new way to narrate these stories. By claiming to tell
a true love story, they manage to arouse more interest in such well-known love stories.
In the second group of sergüzeştnâmes, on the other hand, the authors aimed at
narrating the real events they had been through. They tell of hardships on a voyage or
unjust treatment they had faced. They want to reveal the reasons for their suffering.
The second group can therefore be put under the category of autobiographical works.
After introducing her preliminary findings of the genre, Toska examined Mehmet
Rıfat’s Efsâne-i İbret written in 1887/88. It is an autobiographical work in which
Mehmet Rıfat ( the son of Şefik Ali Pasha who worked as a high-level bureaucrat
during the reign of Sultan Abdülmecit and was dismissed forty days after the
enthronement of Sultan Abdülaziz in 1861393) relates the events of his life from his
390 Betül Demirayak Özsoy, “Sergüzeşt-nâme-i Zihnî (Bayburtlu Zihnî),” (M.A. thesis, Pamukkale
University, 1997).
391 Yunus Özger, “Bayburtlu Şair Zihnî’nin Ölümü ve Tereke Defteri,” A.Ü. Türkiyat Araştırmaları
Enstitüsü Dergisi 26 (2004): 211-225.
392 Zehra Toska, “19. Yüzyılda Yaşamış Bir Paşazadenin Sergüzeşti: Mehmet Rıfat ve Efsâne-i İbret,”
Edebiyat ve Dil Yazıları, Mustafa İsen’e Armağan, ed. Ayşenur Külahlıoğlu İslam ve Süer Eker
(Ankara: Grafiker Yayınları, 2007).
393 Ibid., 533.
85
birth to the age of forty-five.394 Although Mehmed Rıfat states that he wants his work
to be an heirloom for his children, his real motivation for writing was to relate the
difficulties he experienced after the dismissal of his father and to tell about the
injustices they suffered. He aims at presenting his work to Sultan Abdülhamid II (r.
1876-1909) in order to explain his situation, to seek refuge in the sultan’s justice and
ask for his patronage.395 Toska argued that Mehmed Rıfat’s work is the first modern
autobiography written in Turkish literature because no impersonal memory is included
in the narrative. Mehmed Rıfat does not mention any political or historical event; he
only relates his happy childhood in the distant past and the financial problems he is in
as well as the emotions he feels concerning this. If we take Toska’s explanations into
account, Abdülkadir Efendi’s work can also be considered an autobiography in the
modern sense. His main aim is to narrate the progress of his life until he finds a proper
position as a scribe in the palace bureaucracy. He reports political events only if they
are related to his life. He describes the difficulties he experiences and reveals his
emotional attitude toward these.
Ali Emre Özyıldırım analyzed the genres of hasb-i hâl and sergüzeştnâme to show the
differences or similarities between them. Özyıldırım underlined the difficulty of
making genre classifications by considering the words used by the authors to define
their works. According to him, the words hasb-i hâl and sergüzeşt were not always
used to indicate the genre of the works. Ottoman authors sometimes used those words
for the sake of explaining the content of their work. For instance, the word sergüzeşt
was used to emphasize that the content of the work was about real-life events, while
the word hasb-i hâl was used to underline the connection between those events and
the author’s psychological situation.396 Özyıldırım distinguished sergüzeştnâmes from
hasb-i hâls in terms of their subjects. According to his division, the authors of
sergüzeştnames relate real-life events, the authors of hasb-i hâls describe events that
affect their psychological situation such as love, separation, being away from the
394 Toska, “19. Yüzyılda Yaşamış Bir Paşazadenin Sergüzeşti,” 517.
395 Ibid., 540.
396 Ali Emre Özyıldırım, “Sergüzeşt-nâmeler Üzerine Hasbihâl veya Hasbihâlin Sergüzeşti,” in
Nazımdan Nesire Edebî Türler: 25 Nisan 2008 Bildiriler, ed. Hatice Aynur, Müjgan Çakır, Hanife
Koncu, Selim S. Kuru, Ali Emre Özyıldırım (Istanbul: Turkuaz Yayınları, 2009), 138.
86
homeland.397 After these explanations of the genre, he analyzed fourteen different
works to disclose their literary features.
Haluk Gökalp is an important name in studying the Sergüzeştnâme genre. In 2004 he
wrote an article on Mir Ali Rıza el-İstolçevîs’s sergüzeştnâme.398 Gökalp scrutinized
the content of the work and transcribed it into modern Turkish. Mir Ali Rıza wrote this
work in 1855/56. Apart from the introduction, the text is written in verse. In the
introduction Mir Ali Rıza reveals information about his past. According to this
information, he worked as a scribe for several statesmen. He relates his compulsory
exile in Bursa and how he returns to Istanbul after being forgiven by the sultan. He
narrates that he was affected by an eye disease and describes his time in Yenişehir
hospital. He expresses his thoughts about the medical personnel. He describes the
financial and emotional difficulties he has been through.
Gökalp published his illuminating work on Sergüzeştnâmes under the title of Eski Türk
Edebiyatında Manzum Sergüzeştnâmeler in 2009.399 This work is very important in
that he not only reveals the nineteen examples of the genre but also makes a detailed
survey of the subjects, forms, and literary styles. He provides for the first time a
complete picture of the genre. Gökalp divided sergüzeştnâmes into two on the basis of
their subjects; fictional sergüzeştnâmes and memoirs. He also divided the latter
category into two: narratives about the lives of the authors and those focusing only on
one issue in the authors’ lives such as exile, love, illness, travel. After introducing the
known examples of sergüzeştnâme genre, he made a detailed analysis of Firkatnâme,
Hecrnâme, Kitâb-ı Sergüzeşt-i Zaîfî, Makâlât-ı Varvarî Ali, Sergüzeştnâme-i Fakîr Be-
‘Azîmet-i Tokat, Sergüzeştnâme-i Kâtib Osman, Sernüviştnâme-i ‘Âcizî, Sergüzeşt-i
İstolçevî.
Gökalp also examined other genres in which authors talk about themselves to reveal
their relationship with sergüzeştnâmes. Hasb-i hâls has a close relationship with that
genre in that the authors narrate their physical and mental conditions and also reveal
397 Özyıldırım, “Sergüzeşt-nâmeler Üzerine Hasbihâl,” 138.
398 Haluk Gökalp, “Bir Osmanlı Memurunun Hâl-i Pür-Melâli: Sergüzeşt-i İstolçevi,” Çukurova
Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Enstitüsü Dergisi 13, no:1 (2004): 151-166.
399 Haluk Gökalp, Eski Türk Edebiyatında Manzum Sergüzeştnâmeler (Istanbul: Kitabevi, 2009); Also
see Haluk Gökalp, “Eski Türk Edebiyatında Manzum Sergüzeştnâmeler,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Çukurova
University, 2006).
87
their feelings through the fictional characters they create.400 Another genre in which
the authors talk about themselves is arz-ı hâls. These authors mostly produced such
texts to ask for benevolence from the sultan or other high officials after narrating their
social and financial situation. For instance, Vahid-i Mahtumî, in his work Arz-ı Hâl-i
Mahtumî Berây-ı Sultân Mahmûd Hân, narrates his years in exile and asked the sultan
for permission to return to Istanbul. Gökalp noted that arz-ı hâls were similar to
sergüzeştnâmes in that the authors talk about their feelings.401 Another widely treated
theme in sergüzeştnâmes is separation. Gökalp wrote that the genre had a connection
with firkatnâme/ firâknâme in which the authors write about being separated from the
homeland, a lover, their friends, their office, or God. He noted that it is convenient to
examine firâknâme as a sub-genre of sergüzeştnâme.402 According to Gökalp,
Sergüzeştnâme and seyahatnâme (Book of Travel) are slightly related to each other. In
some sergüzeştnâmes, the authors talk about the places to which they traveled.
However, they do not give as much detail as there is in seyahatnâmes, because they do
not aim at introducing those places to the reader. The theme of travel has only been
touched on in relation to the main subject.403 Likewise, some authors write sections of
their work under the title of nasihatnâme (Book of Advice). They relate their private
experiences to give advice to others. They benefit from the nasihatnâme genre in
giving a moral message to the reader.404
Gazavatnâme (Book of War) and Zafernâme (Book of Victory) are also connected to
this genre. The authors sometimes narrate the political events of their times when
talking about their lives. They dwell on subjects similar to those of gazavatnâme and
zafernâme. The main difference between these genres is that while the subject of
sergüzeştnâme is the authors’ lives, the sultan is at the center of the other two genres.405
Gökalp states that these authors used the literary features of other genres to enrich their
narrative and those genres were always used in relation to the main subject.406
Gökalp’s explanations show that all autobiographical narratives are intertwined and
400 Gökalp, Eski Türk Edebiyatında Manzum Sergüzeştnâmeler, 5-6.
401 Ibid., 7.
402 Ibid., 8.
403 Ibid., 9.
404 Ibid.
405 Ibid.
406 Ibid., 10.
88
share many similar literary characteristics. Hence, it is really difficult to define clearcut
boundaries and divide them into well-defined categories. Gökalp’s seminal study
has been followed by studies concentrating on single texts.
Mehmet Ali Üzümcü wrote his master thesis on Kitâb-i Sergüzeşt-i Zaifî in 2008. Like
many other master theses written by students of Turkish Literature, Üzümcü analyzed
the work in terms of content, style and form and transcribed it into modern Turkish
script.407 in 2013 Vildan Serdaroğlu Çoşkun who studied the text in more detail
published a critical edition of the manuscript together with a detailed analysis of the
sergüzeştnâme genre. 408 She wrote about Zaîfî’s life and works. She analyzed his
works in terms of form, content, and style. Coşkun also analyzed the sergüzeştnâme
genre in terms of self-narratives. She compared Ottoman sergüzeştnâmes with western
autobiographies and focused on the differences between the two. She brought three
issues to the fore:
1. While the individual was in the center of the autobiography, the public/social sphere
became prominent in sergüzeştnâme.
2. In sergüzeştnâmes, the subject’s attachment to society is at the forefront while the
authors of western autobiographies turn to their inner selves.
3. While the autobiography is a narration about the self, sergüzeştnâme aims at
emphasizing a social issue through examples from one’s own life.409
At the end of all these explanations, she concluded that it is impossible to find an
authentic individual in Ottoman literature.410 She portrayed an impersonal narrative
tradition through her comparison of western autobiographies with sergüzeştnâmes.
Although Coşkun might seem correct in that at first glance these texts look less
intimate compared to western examples, I think she ignores the fact that they abound
in more personal private details about an individual’s life than are expected. Reynold’s
observation of Arabic autobiographies is quite relevant for this discussion.
While these texts at first glance look less “personal” than modern autobiographies
(Arabic or western), they are not therefore less “individuating.” They are, in fact, each
replete precisely with the specific details of an individual life. In many cases, they
407 Mehmet Ali Üzümcü, “Kitâb-ı Sergüzeşt-i Zaîfî,” (M.A. thesis, Kocaeli University, 2008).
408 Vildan Serdaroğlu Coşkun, Zaîfî’nin Sergüzeştnâmesi (Istanbul: İSAM Yayınları, 2013).
409 Ibid., 19-20. [Translations are mine.]
410 Ibid., 18.
89
clearly communicate a strong sense of the author's personality. There may be many
ways in which the medieval and premodern texts in this corpus differ from modern
examples, but to attribute this difference to a less developed sense of “individual
identity” would certainly be neither accurate nor intellectually useful.411
Gülşah Taşkın’s article on poet Mahfi’s Arz-ı Hâl ü Sergüzeşt-ı Gilanî is another
important example. Mahfi was a Persian poet who came to Istanbul after the death of
his patron and entered the service of the sultan. He provided an account of his life
before moving to Istanbul. Mahfi thought that he was not supported by his patron
Sultan Süleyman in contrast to other poets. Consequently, he wrote a letter to submit
to Sultan Süleyman. In this he narrated his physical and psychological state and
revealed how affected he was by the events he had lived through. He expressed his
feelings of desperation and loneliness. Taşkın placed Mahfi’s work among
autobiographical sergüzeştnâmes because the subject of the work was the poet’s life.
She noted that it is also possible to describe it as a hasb-i hâl, referring the reader to
Ali Emre Özyıldırım who distinguished sergüzeştnâmes from hasb-i hâls in terms of
their subjects. According to his division, texts covering the events lived through by
the authors belong to sergüzeştnâme genre; texts covering the events that affected the
psychological situation of the authors belong to hasb-i hâl genre.412 Mahfi’s work can
also be put under the latter category as he wrote about the events that deeply affected
him and revealed his feelings and mental condition in the face of those difficult
experiences. Also, as Mahfi wrote this work to submit his requests to the sultan, it can
be put under the category of arz-ı hâl.413 Taşkın’s main aim was to show that it is quite
difficult to differentiate between the above-mentioned genres as they have many
similar features. She questioned whether it is proper to situate such narratives under
the higher category of “autobiographical narratives.”414
Ahmet Karataş was the finder of Hindî Mahmud’s sergüzeştnâme which was thought
to have been lost. In 2011 he introduced Hindî Mahmud’s work to the scholarly public
411 Reynolds, Interpreting the Self, 243.
412 Özyıldırım, “Sergüzeşt-nâmeler Üzerine Hasbihâl,” 138.
413 Gülşah Taşkın, “On Altıncı Yüzyıla Ait Otobiyografik Bir Eser: Arz u Hâl ü Sergüzeşt-i Gilanî,”
Turkish Studies International Periodical for fhe Languages, Literature and History of Turkish or Turkic
8, no:4 (2013), 1348.
414 Ibid.
90
through a very detailed article.415 Hindî Mahmud was enslaved during the battle of
Lepanto and taken to Italy in 1571. He narrated his experiences in the prisons of
Messina, Napoli, and Rome. He vividly described the conditions of prisoners and
expressed the grief he felt. The facsimile edition of Hindi Mahmud’s work was
published by Karataş in 2013.416 Karataş analyzed its content in detal and wrote a
biography of Hindî Mahmud based on the information given in his work. Karataş also
revealed Hindi Mahmud’s scholarly and religious self through information given by
the author.
Mertol Tulum published a sixteenth century sergüzeştnâme written in prose by a
certain Hacı Ahmed Efendi. It was published in 2014 together with another work of
the author, Ravzatu’t-Tevhîd. Haci Ahmed Efendi wrote a lively account of his life and
his spiritual journey through the dreams he saw. He related details of his travels to
Egypt and on his pilgrimage to Mecca. Ahmed Efendi also gave information about his
work, Ravzatu’t-Tevhîd, in terms of its organization and layers of symbolic meaning.
Mertol Tulum finds this account very important in that Ahmed Efendi gives
information about the Zeyniyye order and the sheikhs whom he had met. Ahmed
Efendi’s self-narrative deserves a more detailed study in order to reveal the author’s
self. It is important enough to be published as a separate study.417
Özkan Uz wrote his dissertation on Mehmed Dâî’s Nevhatü’l-Uşşâk, a seventeenth
century sergüzeştnâme written in verse.418 Uz aimed at making a critical edition of the
work. He mostly repeated Gökalp’s analysis of the genre and did not add anything to
the findings in previous studies. Uz analyzed the form, language structure, and content
of the work. He listed the people, places and family members that were mentioned in
the text. Referring to Gökalp’s division of the genres, Uz described this work as a
sergüzeştnâme narrating a period of the author’s life. Although Mehmed Dâî Efendi
narrated the love he felt for one of his male students while working as a teacher, Uz
415Ahmet Karataş, “Bir İnebahtı Gâzisinin Esâret Hâtıraları: Sergüzeştnâme-i Hindî Mahmûd,” Osmanlı
Araştırmaları / The Journal of Ottoman Studies 37 (2011): 17-48.
416 Ahmet Karataş, Sergüzeştnâme-i Hindî Mahmûd: İnebahtı Gazisi Hindî Mahmûd ve Esaret
Hatıraları (Istanbul: Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı, 2013).
417 Mertol Tulum, Sergüzeşt: 16. Yüzyılda Bir Otobiyografi ve Ravzatü’t-Tevhîd: Zeynilik Tarihine Işık
Tutan Sembolik Bir Eser (İnceleme-Metin- Tıpkıbasım) (Istanbul: Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu
Başkanlığı Yayınları, 2014).
418 Özkan Uz, “Nevhatü’l-Uşşak: İnceleme-Metin,” (Ph.D. dissertation, Van Yüzüncüyıl University,
2015).
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noted that the main message of the work was to attain true spiritual love; worldly love
was only a means to that end.419
Cihan Okuyucu and Sadık Yazar published Bosnalı İntizâmî’s Tuhfetü’l-İhvân in
2021.420 They wrote a long introduction in which they examined autobiographical
genres in Ottoman literature as well as the sergüzeştnâme, genre mostly with a
reference to studies made by Gökalp, Özyıldırım, and others. They disclosed their
findings about the sergüzeştnâme genre and made a comparison between
sergüzeştnâme and seyahatnâme, sefâretnâme, hasb-i hâl, captivity memoirs and
diaries. One of the most instructive things about their study is that they analyzed the
words used by İntizâmî to describe his work; sergüzeşt, hasb-ı hâl, vasf-ı hâl, menâkıb,
hisse, and kıssa.421 They analyzed the context in which these terms were used and
looked for the nuances that expressed the author’s intention to pen his own life. They
concluded that İntizâmî intended to produce a self-narrative as he used many terms
pointing to autobiographical accounts in classical Turkish literature.422 İntizâmi’s
work is invaluable in that his self is at the center of the narrative and he relates his life
experiences, travels, and historical events of his time.423 İntizâmi narrates the story of
his life in chronological order. He starts his account from his childhood years. He
relates the injustice he suffered in primary school, writes about starting to trade, how
he ended up in prison as the result of a slander, how his fabric shop burnt down, his
long years of service as a scribe, how he fell off a cliff during a trip, how he survived
the danger of drowning in the Danube River, how he wrote his famous book Surnâme
and presented it to the sultan, and his adventures during the Egri campaign of 1596.
He wrote a lively account of his youthful excitements, disappointments, bad habits,
success, failures, and also regrets.424 İntizâmî’s narrative provides necessary tools for
researchers to discover him as a person and understand the mental world of an Ottoman
individual.
419 Uz, “Nevhatü’l-Uşşak: İnceleme-Metin,” 11.
420 Cihan Okuyucu and Sadık Yazar, Tuhfetü’l-İhvân: XVI. Yüzyıldan Bir Katibin Sergüzeşti (Istanbul:
Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı Yayınları, 2021).
421 Ibid., 79-83.
422 Ibid., 307-308.
423 Ibid., 19.
424 Ibid., 309-310.
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All of these studies on the sergüzeştnâme genre indicate that these texts were mostly
studied by scholars in the field of Turkish literature. Their main aim was to publish
critical editions and analyze them in terms of form and structure. A few studies touched
upon their importance as examples of Ottoman self-narratives. These autobiographical
accounts fit well into the category of self-narratives. A systematic study is still to be
done in order to understand Ottoman individuals and “to bring a human factor to our
narrative, a dimension that is solely needed in Ottoman historical scholarship.”425
1.1. About the Genre
The word sergüzeşt is a Persian compound word that means adventure, history, the
experiences one lives through.426 Haluk Gökalp described Sergüzeştnâme as a genre
in which authors narrated their life experiences mainly in verse form. According to his
description, the authors sometimes related their life experiences and feelings directly
and sometimes enriched their narratives by adding fictional elements. Consequently,
Gökalp divided Sergüzeştnâme into two categories; fictional sergüzeştnâme and
memoirs. Then he made a further distinction and divided the latter category into two
parts; those narrating the authors’ life stories and those focusing on only one incident
or period in the authors’ lives such as love, exile, illness, or a journey.427 Abdülkadir
Efendi’s text can be put under the second category in that he related his own life
beginning from his childhood.
Abdülkadir Efendi did not give his work a title. The manuscript’s title, Sergüzeştnâmei
Abdülkadir Hisârî, was given by someone else. The title must have been given in
response to the words used by Abdülkadir Hisari to describe his work in the sebeb-i
telîf (the reason for writing) section. When explaining his reasons for writing,
Abdülkadir Efendi refers to many different words, which may lead the reader to put
the manuscript under several different genres. However, when I read the work, I
realized that the two most commonly used words were sergüzeşt and güzeşt which are
usually translated as adventure. He uses these words seven times: sergüzeşte-i
425 Selim Karahasanoğlu, “Ben-Anlatıları: Tarihsel Kaynak Olarak İmkanları, Sınırları (Ego-
Documents: Potentials and Limitations as a Source for Historical Research),” Turkish History
Education Journal 8, no:1 (2019): 213.
426 Tavukçu, “Sergüzeştname,” 559.
427 Gökalp, Eski Türk Edebiyatında Manzum Sergüzeştnâmeler, i-ii.
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mâdde,428 sergüzeştemiz,429 vekâyi‘-i güzeşte,430 sergüzeşte-i vekâyi,431 ahvâl-i
güzeşte,432 âlem-i güzeşte.433 Such frequent use of the word by the author must have
had an effect on its being given the title of Sergüzeştnâme-i Abdülkadir Hisârî and of
being put under the Sergüzeştnâme genre.
Abdülkadir Efendi made compound words using words vekâyi‘ and ahvâl together
with the term sergüzeşt. Vekâyi‘434 is the plural of vakı‘a which means an event that
took place.435 Ottoman histories written in chronological order were called
vekâyi‘nâme. Andülkadir Efendi’s use of the words vekâyi‘ and sergüzeşt together
displays his intention of writing his life events in chronological order. Ahvâl436 is the
plural of the word hâl which means a condition, a state of affairs, a mode, a manner.437
Ahvâl-i sergüzeşt, therefore, represents the portrayal of the author’s condition, his
attitude towards events, and his state as an individual. Taking into consideration the
author’s us of these words, we can say that he wanted to display his intention of
narrating not only his life in chronological order but also, in the sebeb-i telif (reasons
for writing) section, his feelings and behaviors at certain instances.
Abdülkadir Efendi also categorized his work under names such as nasihatnâme (the
Book of Advice),438 mecmû‘a-i resâ’il (miscellany of treatises),439 evrâk-ı müstetâb
(exalted/pleasant documents),440 evrâk-ı perîşân (random papers),441 cerîde-i seyyiât
(journal of the sins), ferec ba‘d eş-şidde (relief after hardship), tuhfe-i hakirâne (the
gift of the humble one). However, except for ferec ba‘d eş-şidde, all other words are
only used once when explaining his motivation for writing.
Vildan Serdaroğlu Coşkun noted that to keep the readers’ attention the authors of
Sergüzeştnâmes frequently make use of the elements of a variety of other genres such
428 Sergüzeştnâme, 7b.
429 Ibid., 8a.
430 Ibid., 8b, 9a.
431 Ibid., 9a.
432 Ibid., 30a.
433 Ibid., 47b.
434 Redhouse, A Turkish and English Lexicon, 2144.
435 Ibid., 2146.
436 Ibid., 40.
437 Ibid., 755
438 Sergüzeştnâme, 5a.
439 Ibid., 7a.
440 Ibid., 8a.
441 Ibid., 9b.
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as nasihatnâme, methiye (eulogy), hicviyye (satirical poem) and so on.442 Abdülkadir
Efendi’s reference to nasihâtnâme is compatible with Coşkun’s explanation.
Abdülkadir Efendi wished to tell of his life and to provide an example. He seems to
have tried to establish a moral ground for writing his life experience and benefited
from other genres to embellish it. He notes that he composed his book using jewel-like
words and sayings and wanted to put it within the category of nasihatnâme. He writes
that he is including complaints about the evils of this world and the deceptions of the
commanding self. He gives good moral precepts to tell the reader to beware of doing
improper things.443 The term, evrâk-ı müstetâb (exalted/pleasant documents), also
refers to his intention of giving counsel. Indeed, just after using this expression, he
notes that his book is a treasury of wisdom. It is full of exalted examples of counsel
and exemplary stories providing its readers with a feeling of contentment.444
The term, tuhfe-i hakirâne, also deserves to be mentioned in this connection. We know
that a good deal of Ottoman manuscripts were titled Tuhfe, because the authors meant
them to be gifts for either future generation or acquaintances.445 Therefore, as Yazar
and Okuyucu noted, the title tuhfe does not tell as much about the genre and the
content, as about the reasons for writing.446 All in all, we can say that Abdülkadir
Efendi’s use of the word, tuhfe, is compatible with the intention of writing a gift for
wise people who seek salvation.447 Indeed, he uses the term tuhfe just after explaining
that his sergüzeşte-i vekâyi has been written to guide clever people and for those who
observe the rules of good manners.448
Evrâk-ı perîşân is the most interesting title given by an author. As far as I know, this
term acquired a common usage about a hundred years later when Namık Kemal
published the biographies of great figures of Islamic history under the title of Evrâk-ı
Perîşân.449 Hikmet Dizdaroğlu wrote that Namık Kemal found this title suitable to
denote his scattered writings and works written in different genres.450 This explanation
442 Coşkun, Zaîfî’nin Sergüzeştnâme’si, 21. Also see Yazar and Okuyucu, Tuhfetü’l-İhvân, 33.
443 Sergüzeştnâme, 5a.
444 Ibid., 8a.
445 Yazar and Okuyucu, Tuhfetü’l-İhvân, 80.
446 Ibid.
447 Sergüzeştnâme, 9b-10a.
448 Ibid.
449 Namık Kemal, Evrâk-ı Perîşân (Istanbul: Matbaa-i Osmaniyye, 1301).
450 Hikmet Dizdaroğlu, Namık Kemal: Hayatı, Sanatı ve Eserleri (Istanbul: Varlık Yayınları, 1995), 45.
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is compatible with the literal meaning of the term, that is ‘random papers’. Still, the
question arises as to whether this term has any connotation with writing a biography
or autobiography. Its usage by Abdülkadir Efendi in the context of autobiography and
later usage by Namık Kemal in the context of biography suggest that it might have
acquired such a meaning. In Abdülkadir Efendi’s case, evrâk-ı perîşân was used in the
same folio and just before the term sergüzeşte-i vekâyî.451 Hence, he seems to have
used this term to explain the contents of his book which was written to assemble in
order the events of his life. Just after describing his book as kitab-ı evrâk-ı perîşan, he
hopes his readers will read it without seeing its flaws and not ignore it by relying on
unimportant excuses.452 By calling the narrative of his life a book of random papers
perhaps he also points to a certain level of “autobiographical anxiety,” an issue that
will be discussed later in this chapter.
Ferec ba‘d eş-şidde is another expression used throughout the manuscript. This term
must come from the anonymous fifteenth-century compilation Ferec Ba‘d eş-Şidde
which consisted of a collection of tales translated originally from Persian. Ulrich
Marzolph wrote that most of the tales narrated in Ferec Ba‘d eş-Şidde belong to the
category of’ marvelous and strange’.453 According to Marzolph, these tales were used
to show exemplary cases to teach the reader an important lesson. “They demonstrate
and teach that nothing at all is unimaginable or impossible since Almighty God
potentially allows all kinds of phenomena to exist.”454
To quote at length;
It is interesting to note that, in the same manner as the Ottoman Turkish Ferec baʿd
eş-şidde contains (not only but predominantly) tales of the marvelous (ʿajīb) and
strange (gharīb), the vaguely contemporary Arabic collection Kitāb al-ḥikāyāt al-
ʿajība wa-’l-akhbār al-gharība, whose title explicitly refers to tales of the marvelous
and strange, contains to a certain extent tales of the genre faraj baʿd al-shidda, or
“relief after hardship.” The latter genre, whose best-known representative in classical
Arabic literature is the Kitāb al-Faraj baʿd al-shidda compiled by al-Muḥassin b. ʿAlī
451 Sergüzeştnâme, 9b.
452 Ibid.
453 Ulrich Marzolph, The Relief After Hardship: The Ottoman Turkish Model for the Thousand and One
Days (Michigan: Wayne State University Press, 2017), 35.
454 Ibid., 36-17.
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al-Tanūkhī (d. 994), covers tales in which the protagonist—often, though not
necessarily, starting from a somewhat precarious situation—initially suffers a
deterioration of his situation but in the end experiences a happy resolution of his
difficulties.455
Abdülkadir Efendi, indeed, considered many of the episodes in his life to be strange
(acâyib). He generally observed the strange things that happened after spending a
period in prayer and found there a resolution for the difficulties he experienced. He
narrated his difficult times and how he obtained relief after enduring various hardships.
Hence, the context within which Abdülkadir Efendi used the term ferec ba‘d eş-şidde
was exactly compatible with Ottoman and Arabic examples of the genre.
The term ferec ba‘d eş-şidde was also used to designate some of the tales narrated in
Afife Hanım Sergüzeşti (Adventures of Lady Afife), a work from the end of the
eighteenth century. 456 Although Afife Hanım Sergüzeşti can be put under the category
of fictional Sergüzeştnâme, it illustrates our point. Indeed, the term was used to
compare a strange and marvelous tale about a herdsman to that of Vâmık ile Azrâ
(Vâmık and Azra), a tale narrated in Ferec Ba‘d eş-Şidde.457 Afife Hanım depicted her
situation as strange and marvelous like the tales narrated in Ferec Ba‘d eş-Şidde.458
This example shows that to compare Sergüzeştnâme and Ferec Ba‘d eş-Şidde was not
an exceptional occurrence.
Two other Ottoman terms used by Abdülkadir Efendi were cerîde-i seyyi’ât and
mecmû‘a-i resâ’il. Cerîde (journal) and mecmû‘a (miscellany) are perhaps two of the
terms most taken note of by researchers working in the field. As Terzioğlu notes,
cerîde and mecmû‘a were two of the descriptive titles given to Ottoman diaries.459
Sıdkızâde Mustafa Hamid Efendi called his piece a mecmû‘a. Sadreddinzâde Telhisî
Mustafa Efendi called his work a cerîde.460 Indeed, Sadık, who somehow owned
Telhisî Mustafa Efendi’s diary and recorded his own accounts in the manuscript,
455 Marzolph, The Relief After Hardship, 40.
456 Nagihan Gür, Hikayenin Hikayesi: Osmanlıda Bir Kadın Anlatısı Afife Hanım Sergüzeşti (Istanbul:
Kitabevi, 2020), 24.
457 Ibid.
458 Ibid., 23-24.
459 Terzioğlu, “Man in the Image of God in the Image of the Times,” 48.
460 Karahasanoğlu, Kadı ve Günlüğü, 34.
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referred to Mustafa Efendi’s diary as a cerîde. 461 Mehmed Efendi, who worked as the
imam of Soğanağa Mosque, also called his piece a cerîde.462 He ended most of his
entries saying işbu cerîdeye kayd olundu (registered in this cerîde). However,
Abdülkadir Efendi’s use of the term cerîde is interesting in that his piece is far from
being a diary.
In his book Selim Karahasanoğlu investigated the use of the word cerîde (journal) in
the context of self-narrative when discussing the diary of Sadreddinzâde Telhisî
Mustafa Efendi and secondary literature about this diary. He wrote that this term was
considered equal to the word ‘memoir’ by İsmail Erünsal. Erünsal used cerîde, diary,
and memoir interchangeably.463 Karahasanoğlu referred to the difference between a
memoir and a diary. While a diary communicates the immediate experiences, the
memoir includes records based on the authors’ recollections. While the diary offers a
place for “short sight,” the memoir offers a site for “long vision” and gives a lifetime
pattern.464 Karahasanoğlu, therefore, wrote that he prefers the term diary as an
equivalent for cerîde.465 In Abdülkadir Efendi’s case, however, this term seems to have
been used as being equal to memoir as he wrote about his past experiences. I think the
author used the term cerîde-ı seyyiât to emphasize that his work will be the narrative
of his own life and the difficulties experienced in it. As Karahasanoğlu noted, these
numerous references to the term by the authors of self-narratives suggest a connotation
of writing about one’s own life.466
When thinking of the word mecmua (miscellany), there is a consensus among
researchers that Ottoman miscellanies provided a unique perspective in studying
Ottoman self-narratives. Terzioğlu noted that “miscellanies offer a unique vantage
point from which to approach the question of personal narratives in the Ottoman
Empire.”467 According to her, early modern Ottomans classified many
461 Karahasanoğlu, Kadı ve Günlüğü, 34, fn. 15.
462 Beydilli, Osmanlı Döneminde İmamlar, 99, 119, 124, 202.
463 İsmail E. Erünsal, “Bir Osmanlı Efendisi’nin Günlüğü: Sadreddinzâde Telhisî Mustafa Efendi ve
Cerîdesi,” Kaynaklar 2 (1984): 77-81.
464 William Matthews, British Diaries: An Annotated Bibliography of British Diaries Written between
1442 and 1942 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1950), x. Cited in Karahasanoğlu, Kadı ve
Günlüğü, 34.
465 Karahasanoğlu, Kadı ve Günlüğü, 34.
466 Ibid.
467 Terzioğlu, “Autobiography in Fragments,” 86.
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autobiographical texts under the category of miscellany.468 Schmidt’s work also shows
that Ottoman autobiographical texts can be found under diverse categories such as
miscellanies.469 Abdülkadir Efendi supports these explanations in putting his work
under the title of mecmua. Information given by Abdülkadir Efendi in Sergüzeştnâme
also hints that he possibly had a mecmua in which he recorded some personal notes.
He said that he took a record of the dream he saw on 18 Recep 1189 (14 September
1775) in his mecmua. He recorded the dream with its date, day, and hour.470 This
information suggests that Abdülkadir Efendi may have used the notes taken in his
mecmua when writing his autobiographical account. Personal notes recorded in
miscellanies may have been used by the authors of self-narratives as the source for
their personal histories.
Ali Emre Özyıldırım argued that it is really difficult to classify Ottoman texts and
determine their genres by considering the words used by the authors. He noted that the
authors used various expressions like hasbihâl, firâknâme, or sergüzeşt to define their
works, but they did not always use those words to classify their works under welldefined
genres in the sense we think of today. They sometimes used them just for their
literal meanings.471 Keeping this in mind, I think Abülkadir Efendi’s work can be put
under the Sergüzeştnâme genre in which real-life events are narrated- a category
defined by Haluk Gökalp. All other expressions like nasihatnâme, tuhfe-i hakirâne,
ferec ba‘d eş-şidde were used in their literal meaning to reveal the content of the book.
Abdülkadir Efendi probably did not regard these expressions as literary terms
designating the genre of his work.
1.2. About Abdülkadir bin Hasan El-Hisârî
The author of the manuscript reveals his identity in folio 8a. He gives his full name as
Abdülkadir bin Hasan el-Hisari. On folio 11a, he writes that he was born at three
o’clock. on the twenty-seventh night of the sacred month of Ramadan. He was named
after the sacred night of Qadr on which he was born. This family moved to Anadolu
Hisari after his birth and lived there for many years. We do not know anything about
468 Ibid.
469 Schmidt: “The Adventures of an Ottoman Horseman,” 284.
470 Sergüzeştnâme, 86a-87a.
471 Özyıldırım, “Sergüzeştnâmeler Üzerine Hasbihal,” 139.
99
his family apart from his father being a shopkeeper in Anadolu Hisarı. He mentions
his mother’s death but does not give her name nor does he write anything about his
siblings if there were any. We know that his father wanted him to marry after the death
of his mother, but he did not provide us with any further information about his wife or
his children.
Few things are known about Abdülkadir b. Hasan el-Hisârî aside from what he wrote
about himself in his Sergüzeştnâme. Müstakimzâde Süleyman Sadeddin Efendi wrote
an entry about Abdülkadir Hisârî in his Tuhfe-i Hattâtîn (Gift of Calligraphers),
Abdülkadir Hisârî was the son of a herbalist (attar) from Anadolu Hisârî. He obtained
his master’s certificate (icazet) from a famous calligrapher of the period, Ebu Bekir
Raşid Efendi. According to the information provided by Müstakimzâde, Abdülkadir
Efendi died while he was working as a scribe at the time that Tuhfe was completed.472
Müstakimzâde started to write his work in 1173 (1759-60) and completed it in ten
years. After 1770, he made some additions to the text and recorded the years of the
death of certain calligraphers until his own death on 23 Şevval 1202 (July 23 1788).473
Using this information, Rıdvan Enes Akçatepe determined Abdülkadir Efendi’s year
of death as being 1202 (1787/88).474 Abdülkadir Hisarî’s two works are currently to
be found in Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York; they consist of a calligraphic
galleon, which was mentioned in sergüzeştnâme,475 and a book of prayers.476
1.3. On the Manuscript
The Manuscript is composed of ninety-two folios. It is written in prose. On the first
folio, which was not numbered, the identity of the author is wrongly specified as
Yakup Haseki. However, someone struck out this information and the author correctly
identified as Abdülkadir Hisârî. On the reverse side of this unnumbered folio, there is
472 Müstakimzâde Süleyman Sadeddin Efendi, Tuhfe-i Hattâtîn (Istanbul: Devlet Matbaası, 1928), 260.
473 M. Uğur Derman, “Tuhfe-i Hattâtîn,” DİA, vol. 41, 351-3.
474 Rıdvan Enes Akçatepe, “Osmanlı’da Hattatlık ve Hattatlar (XVI.-XVIII. Yıllar),” (M.A. thesis,
Hacettepe University, 2012), 110.
475https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/454611?searchField=All&sortBy=Relevanc
e&ft=%27Abd+al-Qadir+Hisari&offset=0&rpp=20&pos=1
476https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/629452?searchField=All&sortBy=Relevanc
e&ft=%27Abd+al-Qadir+Hisari&offset=0&rpp=20&pos=2
100
a note in the margin which calls it a “writing of Abdülkadir bin Hasan el-Hisârî, the
third assistant to the chief black eunuch’s secretary.”
The manuscript covers the period between the birth of the author on 27 Ramazan 1157
(3 November 1744) and his appointment as the third assistant to the chief secretary of
the chief black eunuch in Şaban 1193 (August/September 1779). Abdülkadir Efendi
may have started to write his self-narrative around this date. Another possibility is that
he may have started to write it when he was appointed to be the fourth assistant on 18
Recep 1191 (22 August 1777) as this was the appointment he described as “relief after
hardship.” This appointment may have triggered him to write his life story and to give
counsel to people struggling to achieve a proper place in their career. If this was the
case, he seems to have continued to take record of his appointments in the course of
writing his narrative. After writing about his last appointment, the manuscript ends
with a prayer. The author does not specify the date of completion. After the completion
of the work he continues to give information in the margins about appointments. The
last marginal note was written on 13 Muharrem 1194 (20 January 1780). Therefore,
we can presume that Sergüzeştnâme might have been completed before January 1780.
Abdülkadir Efendi divided his autobiography into forty chapters. There is an index of
the chapters at the beginning of the manuscript. However, some of the chapter titles
are not written on the folios indicated in the index. The author used red ink when
writing the titles, verses, poems, and some words to stress their importance. On every
folio, he wrote fifteen lines. However, he sometimes added capacious marginal notes.
The author probably did not have the chance to go over the manuscript to make any
necessary additions as he did not specify the dates of some events although he put
spaces in the sentences to insert the date.
Abdülkadir Efendi narrates his life story in chronological order. There is
“directionality among events; that is, to structure events in such a way that they move
over time in an orderly way toward a given end.”477 He starts with his birth. He writes
briefly about his childhood and education. Then, he continues writing about his
professional life. He gives a vivid description of his life in the service of pashas and
477 Kenneth J. Gergen, Mary M. Gergen, “Narratives of the Self,” in Memory, Identity and Community:
The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences, ed. Lewis P. Hinchman and Sandra Hinchman (Albany:
SUNY Press, 1997), 164.
101
finally in scribal service. He addresses an audience rather than talking intimately to
himself. He wants to provide a moral exemplum for future generations.
Abdülkadir Efendi sometimes referred to himself as “this poor one” or “this humble
one.” However, he also used possessive suffix of first-person singular -m (pederim/my
father) and the first-person plural (we). His use of the possessive suffix of first-person
singular “communicates to the reader a clear sense of the author as a person beyond
the text.”478 Sergüzeştnâme gives us a chance to get as close as possible to the inner
world of an Ottoman individual. He gives reference to verses, sayings of the prophet,
to support his arguments whenever necessary. He also includes poems and narratives
concerning wisdom to signal his feelings and emotional state Sometimes he
incorporates his dreams into the narrative. These dreams were mostly seen as portents
of the future.
1.4. The Motivation for Writing
Reynold remarks that autobiographical writers show their autobiographical anxieties
by providing a lengthy defense to prove that they are not writing for motives of deceit
or pride.479 Our author was no different in that he engaged in justifications for
producing his autobiography and showed a certain level of “autobiographical
anxiety.”480 He explained why he engaged in the act of writing about himself by saying
that he wrote with good expectations of being forgiven in the afterlife.481 He also felt
a need to defend himself from potential charges of vanity482 and called the story of his
life a treasury of wisdom.483 His autobiography was written to serve as a refuge in
times of anguish484 because it provided future generations with useful information and
guidance. He wanted it to be a reassuring exemplar to future struggling people,
particularly to those who were facing hardship in their careers. He apparently believed
that “he had good reason to assume that his life was exceptional and that this required
478 Reynolds, Interpreting the Self, 180.
479 Ibid., 66-68.
480 Ibid., 66.
481 Sergüzeştnâme, 7a.
482 Ibid.
483 Ibid., 8a.
484 Ibid., 9a.
102
a particularly stylized mode of self-representation.”485 This is also supported by his
explanation for preferring to write in the Turkish language, saying it was because he
wanted the account of his life to be truly interpreted and understood.486 His aim was to
circumvent all possible misconceptions arising from incorrect interpretations of his
work.487
Abdülkadir Efendi’s intention of providing an example for his readers is a common
theme found in the reasons for writing sections (sebeb-i telif) of many other genres of
writing produced by Ottoman intellectuals. Abdülkadir Efendi writes that he
formulated this work as a book of advice to introduce his readers to moral values and
to provide examples from his life story portraying ferec ba‘d eş-şidde (relief after
hardship). He refers to Chapter 94:5-6 of the Qur’an to strengthen what he wishes to
communicate throughout his autobiographical work: “surely every hardship is
followed by ease.”488 Whenever he had difficulty in finding a position or was subjected
to injustice, he turned to invocations (zikr) to find a solution. Each time he explained
which verse and which name of the God was invoked in order to overcome the
hardship. Thus, his life story was written to provide the key to divine help. He aimed
at guiding those who had difficulty in finding a proper position. The elements of
nasihatnâme (book of advice) genre seem to have been used as a guide for those who
were seeking relief. In other words, the author believed that reading of his own past
experiences would help future generations to “learn from past mistakes and live a
better life.”489 His autobiography, therefore, demonstrates not only the hardships but
also the blessings he received from God as well as the chronological list of the
positions he attained thanks to his patience and intellectual achievements.
The “autobiographer tends to claim individual significance by virtue of some specific
quality or accomplishment, or because he has been a witness to the affairs of the great;
485 Jürgen Schlaeger, “Self-Exploration in Early Modern English Diaries,” in Marginal Voices,
Marginal Forms: Diaries in European Literature and History, ed. Rachael Langford and Russell West
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 27.
486 We do not know for sure if he spoke another language but intensive references to persian poems
throughout the manuscript suggest that he must have been proficient at least in Persian.
487 Sergüzeştnâme, 9a.
488 The Holy Qur’an, 595.
489 Karahasanoğlu, “Learning from Past Mistakes and Living a Better Life,” 295.
103
hence the variety of motivation and subject matter in his works.”490 Abdülkadir
Hisâri’s autobiography might be resulted from his awareness of divine aid regarding
his achievement. All these above-stated motives cited as providing useful information
for future generations might be only half-truths in that he may have attempted to make
his writing look respectable or to fit the accepted traditions.491 He openly wrote that
having a career in palace service was not something granted to everyone. 492 From the
narrative that he constructed, one may suspect that the real incentive for his enterprise
was his excitement and pride in finding a place in the scribal service and his desire to
narrate the agonies he was exposed to in order to obtain such a position. His feeling
that he was distinguished from others by his achievement in being given this office
may have aroused “the autobiographical impulse.”493
1.5. The Issue of Accuracy
Abdülkadir Efendi did not provide much information about the historical events of his
time. He wrote about the appointments and dismissals of people, of the deaths, and
births, of notables, and some historical events related to the context of the narrative.
Such records allow us to check the accuracy of the information against other sources.
To illustrate, throughout the text he recorded his patron Yenişehirli Osman Efendi’s
appointments and dismissals because it affected the author’s own career. When his
patron gained prominent positions, his chance of gaining the sultan’s notice increased.
Through Osman Efendi as intermediary, he produced some calligraphic works for the
sultan and tried his luck in attaining the position he desired. Osman Efendi’s career,
therefore, had an important place in his narrative. He accurately recorded Osman
Efendi’s appointment as head of the treasury (baş defterdar) in 1773 and receiving the
rank of vizier with three horsetails in Muharrem 1188 (March/April 1774).494
He also recorded the birth of Prince Mehmed on 6 Receb 1190 (21 August 1776) and
the accession of Sultan Abüdlhamid I. He accurately recorded the death of Muhsinzâde
490 Paul Delany, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul,
1969), 108.
491 Ibid., 113.
492 Sergüzeştnâme, 88b.
493 Michael Angold, “The Autobiographical Impulse in Byzantium,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 52
(1998): 225-57.
494 Sicill-i Osmani, IV, 1300-1.
104
Mehmed Pasha. During a campaign against Russia Mehmed Pasha’s illness had
worsened when the army was in Şumnu (Shumen in Bulgaria). He died in the district
of Karinabad from where he was taken back to Edirne. He was first buried in Edirne,
but ten days later his body was moved to Istanbul.495 However, none of these records
took up much space in the narrative.
The most noticeable record that can be tested through reference to chronicles was the
dismissal of his master, Ahmed Efendi, who was the chief secretary of the chief black
eunuch. According to the narrative, he was dismissed because he engaged in an act of
bribery. The information given in Sergüzeştnâme is compatible with the chronicles of
the period. In his chronicle Ahmed Vasıf Efendi gave detailed information of the
dismissal of Ahmed Efendi. According to his account, Secretary Ahmed Efendi gained
favor with the sultan by offering him both confidential and regular services. He
accumulated enormous wealth in a short time in this way. However, he was not content
with the wealth he had accumulated and engaged in some bizarre acts to earn more.
He accused some statesmen of unfounded misconduct. He also ensured that edicts
were issued to the people he accused. For instance, he sent a letter to Abdürrezzak
Efendi, who was Reisülküttab, “the head of the chancery and record offices of the
imperial divan,”496 accusing him of accumulating wealth and inheriting a number of
unusual assets from his mother. He implied that Abdürrezzak Efendi‘s mother
accumulated those properties thanks to Abdürrezzak Efendi’s position. He accused
Defterdar Derviş Mehmed Efendi, Tahir Ağa and Selim Sırrı Efendi in the same way.
Ahmed Efendi accumulated more than one thousand purses in nine months. Eventually
he was dismissed and was replaced by Bağçevanzâde Mustafa Efendi who managed
to stay away from scandal.497
As aforementioned, Abdülkadir Efendi’s aim was not to record all the historical events
he witnessed but to narrate his own experiences in life. He therefore recorded the
events that had important impacts on his life. His facts were correct in describing what
495 Nevzat Sağlam, Ahmed Vâsıf Efendi ve Mehasinü’l-Âsâr ve Hakâikü’l-Ahbâr’ı 1166-1188/1752-
1774 (inceleme ve metin) (Ankara: TTK, 2014), 618-21.
496 Ali Akyıldız, “Reisülküttab,” in Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire, ed. Gábor Ágoston and Bruce
Alan Masters (New York: Facts on File, 2008), 486-7.
497 Ahmed Vasıf Efendi, Mehasinü’l-Âsâr ve Hakâikü’l-Ahbâr 1774-1779 (H. 1188-1193), ed. Mücteba
İlgürel (Ankara: TTK, 2014), 16-18.
105
happened and when, and his work came closer to the genre of chronicle when
describing such historical events.
2. RELATIONAL SELF: INCORPORATING INTO HOUSEHOLDS AND
CREATING A NETWORK
Compared to most modern autobiographies, these texts differ fundamentally with
respect to the basis on which they operate, and the general aims and purposes their
authors have in mind. Instead of putting a distance between the protagonist of the
autobiographical texts and society, they elaborate on a position in society that they
feel comfortable with. Instead of working on a unique result of their reflections
(individuality), they are more interested in telling a unique story about the way in
which the person achieves a certain ‘inclusion individuality.’498
Arlinghaus’ description of early-modern self-narratives is in some ways compatible
with Abdülkadir Efendi’s text. His self-narrative provides fascinating insights into the
career processes and network of a scribe. In Abdülkadir Efendi’s work, the individual
becomes visible with all his professional affiliations. He not only narrates with whom
he was affiliated but also displays the conflicts he lived through. He portrays his
relationships very vividly and tells of how placing oneself in a network worked for
him.499 Establishing a network and being affiliated to prominent people provided him
with many opportunities of bringing him to the sultan’s notice and achieving a
favorable position. However, Abdülkadir Efendi’s narrative was not told to relate how
he achieved that “inclusion individuality.” It was a way of narrating the more important
aspects of his life. He relates the story of his affiliations in order to show how he
succeeded in attaining a position as a scribe. Consequently, he seems to have created
a positive sense of self through his success in attaining a respectable position.
As I noted before Abdülkadir Efendi was born on 27 Ramazan 1157 (3 November
1744 and named after the night of Qadr on which he was born. Abdülkadir Efendi does
not give a full description of his childhood and years of education. He notes briefly
that he was not dissolute and did not misbehave like other children. He focuses rather
498 Franz-Josef Arlinghaus, “In and Out, Then and Now: The Conscious Self and Its Relation to Society
in Pre-Modern and Modern Times,” The Medieval History Journal 18, no:2 (2015): 399.
499 Ibid., 382.
106
on his education. He cites a saying of the prophet that learning is a duty for all
Muslims.500 His father must have had enough wealth to afford to have his son educated.
Abdülkadir Efendi studied Arabic grammar with Dağıstânî es-Seyyid el-Hac
Muhammed Efendi. He also read various Persian books like Şahîdî and Pend-i Attar
with this master He studied calligraphy with the famous Ebu Bekir Raşid Efendi. The
account of his childhood reveals the regular educational practices of the time. He
devoted his time to studying works with reputable teachers. He also made an effort to
improve his skill in calligraphic writing.
Before he became twenty-one, he had managed to become incorporated into the
household of the chief gatekeeper (kapıcıbaşı).501 Abdülkadir Efendi must have known
that building connections was essential to make his advancement possible. In the
household of the chief gatekeeper, he was assigned the position of private secretary.
However, in a short while, he fell into disfavor and left the household. He does not
give any details but simply writes that “Our daily bread ran out and separation
occurred.”502 One possibility is that he might have left the household on finding a more
advantageous position in another prominent household.
Immediately after informing the reader that he had left, he writes that he has entered
into service with Bostancıbaşı Agha503 who was the head of the gardeners. He was
entrusted with the preservation of order in the shorelines the Bosporus, the Golden
Horn, and the Marmara Sea. He was also inspector of forests in the vicinity of the
capital. A chief gardener could rise to even the rank of grand vizierate.504 Service to a
prominent person like this could eventually lead attendants gaining important careers
in public service and even rise to the highest levels of Ottoman administration.505
“Attaching oneself to the household of an Ottoman official even in the ambiguous
status of a ‘slave,’ must have been an acceptable way of social advancement.”506
Abdükadir Efendi, indeed, took advantage of being a servant of such a prominent
500 Sergüzeştnâme, 11b.
501 Ibid., 30b-31a.
502 Ibid., 31a.
503 Ibid., 30b.
504 Abdülkadir Özcan, “Bostancı,” DİA, vol. 6, 308-9.
505 Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual, 42.
506 Kunt, The Sultan’s Servants, 44-47. See also İ. Metin Kunt, "Sultanın Kullari," Boğaziçi Üniversitesi
Dergisi: Beşeri Bilimler 3 (1975): 27-42.
107
figure. He wrote that strange things occurred when he was in the service of that agha.507
In 1178 (1764/65), a woman claimed that she owned the estate of Beylerbeyi Palace
in Çengelköyü. She wrote a petition hoping that she would be given a payment by the
sultan.508 Abdülkadir Efendi called her hâtûn-u mübârek (blessed woman) because her
petition seems to have triggered events that were of service to Abdülkadir Efendi.
According to the story told in Sergüzeştnâme, Sultan Mustafa was angered by her
petition and ordered the chief gardener to pull the palace down.509 On receiving the
order, the chief gardener wanted Abdülkadir Efendi to write a takrîr (declaration) to
ask the sultan for details of the demolition work. Abdülkadir Efendi prepared the takrîr
in his beautiful calligraphy and the chief gardener sent it to the sultan. When Sultan
Mustafa III read the takrîr, his attention was caught by its calligraphy and remarked
that the chief gardener could not write so beautifully. He wanted to know to whom the
chief gardener had dictated the document. Upon learning that the document was
written by a servant of the chief gardener, he ordered the calligrapher to be appointed
as a junior scribe (küçük yazıcı).
The chief gardener was informed of the sultan’s order but the current junior scribe,
whose name was later verified as Yakup Haseki, heard about it. Fearful of losing his
position, he asked for some prominent people’s influence to hinder Abdülkadir
Efendi’s appointment. By putting forward the facts of Abdülkadir Efendi’s youth and
lack of experience, he managed to scupper the appointment.510 Yakup Haseki must
have had a better network than Abdülkadir Efendi as he had probably been around for
longer. Although his appointment was prevented and progress was threatened by keen
competition, Abdülkadir Efendi experienced the practical benefit of becoming
incorporated into a household and creating a network. This situation must have
cherished his dreams of attaining a career in bureaucracy because he was now aware
that his abilities would be rewarded in the future.
Abdülkadir Efendi, though disappointed, continued to look for a new position in
different households. He did not specify why he left the household of the chief
507 Sergüzeştnâme, 31a.
508 Ibid.
509 Ibid., 31b; Metin Sözen, “Beylerbeyi Sarayı,” DİA, vol. 6, 77-8.
510 Sergüzeştnâme, 32b-33b.
108
gardener, but the disappointment he experienced must have been instrumental in his
leaving the household. Immediately after giving this information, he was then
employed by Abdullah Paşazâde Hüsnü Hüseyin Bey. In a short while his patron
became Commander-in- Chief of the navy. Abdülkadir Efendi sailed for two years
with his patron and served him with his pen. When Hüsnü Hüseyin Pasha was
dismissed and appointed to a new position, he did not take Abdülkadir Efendi with
him to his new post.511 Dependent on a patron for income, Abdülkadir Efendi was now
alone. On top of that, he got news of Yakup Haseki’s rapid advancement. Yakup
Haseki had reaped the fruits of his endeavors. In 1179 (1765/66), he was appointed
first as the confidential messenger (karakulak)512 and then, a couple of months later,
he became Head of the Chamber of the Imperial Gardeners (bostancılar odabaşılığı),
513 finally becoming the chief gardener for Istanbul.514
Abdülkadir Efendi knew that an influential patron could open up his way to a
bureaucratic career. After a period of seclusion in his house, he became attached to the
household of Reisülküttap Yenişehirli Osman Efendi who was a person of
distinguished renown.515 Since Osman Efendi was appointed as reisülküttap (the head
of the scribes) on 5 November 1767 and dismissed from this post on 25 September
1768, Abdülkadir Efendi must have been affiliated to him as private secretary. between
1767 and 1768.516
According to the narrative, Osman Efendi lived in seclusion in his mansion for three
years after he was dismissed from that office. Around this time, Abdülkadir Efendi
once again turned to his prayers. His devotions did not go unrewarded, it seems, as he
511 Sergüzeştnâme, 35b.
512 Ibid., 39a; Abdülkadir Özcan, “Karakulak,” DİA, vol. EK-2, 23. Also see Sahaflarşeyhizâde Seyyid
Mehmed Esad Efendi, Vakanüvis Esad Efendi Tarihi, ed. Ziya Yılmazer (İstanbul: OSAV, 2000), 620.
[hereafter, Esad Efendi]. According to the hierarchical line, one of the hasekîs would have been
promoted as the confidential messengers (karakulak) and the previous karakulak promoted to the head
of the chamber of the imperial gardeners (bostancıbaşı).
513 Bostancılar Odabaşılığı was an office in charge of the imperial gardens. Odabaşı was one of the chief
officers of the corps of gardeners. See İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Devleti’nin Saray Teşkilatı
(Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1945), 465-87; İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, “Bostandji-Bashi,”,
in The Encyclopedia of Islam New Edition, ed. H. A. R. Gibb, J. H. Kramers, E. Lévi-Provençal and J.
Schacht, vol.1 (Leiden: Brill, 1960), 1278-9; Abdülkadir Özcan, “Bostancı,” DİA, vol. 6, 308-9.
514 Sergüzeştnâme, 39a.
515 Ibid., 41b.
516 Sicill-i Osmani, IV, 1300-1; Recep Ahıshalı, Osmanlı Devlet Teşkilatında Reisülküttaplık (XVIII.
Yüzyıl) (Istanbul: Tarih ve Edebiyat Vakfı, 2001), 42.
109
observed that strange things occurred. His patron, Osman Efendi, had close contact
with Melek Mehmed Pasha who was the deputy grand vizier, and he was reportedly in
great proximity to the sultan.517 The sultan frequently visited the household of the
deputy grand vizier and they often discussed important issues until late int the evening.
One day during such a visit, the sultan talked about his intention to build an armed
galleon. This conversation triggered the events Abdülkadir Efendi called strange.
Melek Mehmed Pasha sent preliminary sketches to Osman Efendi and entrusted him
with the task of drawing an accurate blueprint of the warship. Osman Efendi ordered
his scribe, Abdülkadir Efendi, to verify the accuracy of the sketches by obtaining
information from sailors who had participated in the war with the Venetians and to
draw a fuller design for the warship. Abdülkadir Efendi completed the task and his
calligraphic drawing of the ship was presented to the sultan. Charmed by the beauty of
the artwork, Sultan Mustafa wanted to learn about the artist.518 Encouraged by the
approval of the sultan, Abdülkadir Efendi believed that he would be rewarded for his
work. He had good reasons to expect this because his patron, Osman Efendi, had once
again become a prominence bureaucrat.519 Following this incident, the sultan asked
Abdülkadir Efendi to show his artistic skills several other times. Abdülkadir Efendi
prepared another drawing of a galleon and copied several books on the orders of the
sultan. However, the calligrapher was always disappointed in his attempts to enter on
a career as an apprentice scribe.
When his patron Osman Efendi was sent to Russia on an official duty in 1186
(1772/73), Abdülkadir Efendi wanted to stay in Istanbul. Although he tried to explain
his stay for health reasons, his actual intention was to attain a scribal position in the
Imperial Arsenal.520 Abdülkadir Efendi sent a plea to the sultan asking for that
position. However, the sultan refused his request.521
When Osman Efendi returned to the capital, he was appointed to superintend the
building of Tophane in June 1772.522 According to the information given in
517 Fatih Yeşil, “Melek Mehmed Paşa,” DİA, vol. EK-2, 244-5.
518 Sergüzeştnâme, 42b.
519 Ibid., 43a-44a.
520 Ibid., 55b.
521 Ibid., 56a-57a.
522 Sicill-i Osmani, IV, 1300-1301.
110
Sergüzeştnâme, Osman Efendi seems to have worked hard and nurtured his relations
with important personages to gain higher appointments. His efforts finally bore fruit
when he was appointed Head of the Treasury (baş defterdar) in 1773.523 Abdülkadir
Efendi reestablished his client relationship with Osman Efendi who once again had
gained a prominent position. Abdülkadir Efendi wrote that he continued to serve in the
household of Osman Efendi in the hope of attaining a scribal apprenticeship.
A short while after the enthronement of Abdülhamid I (r. 1774-1789) in 8 Zilkade
1187 (21 January 1774), Osman Efendi was appointed to high military office in
Muharrem 1188 (March/April 1774).524 and given the title of Vizier with Three Tugsor
Horsetail- these being the symbol of high office. When he was invited to join the
household of the Deputy Grand Vizier Silahdar Abdullah Pasha, Osman Efendi asked
for pardon in wishing to decline the appointment, saying he was too old for such a
position. He claimed that the newly- enthroned sultan did not know how diseased the
body of his servant was. According to Abdülkadir Efendi’s narrative, Silahdar
Abdullah Pasha warned Osman Efendi that he might get into trouble if he opposed the
decision made by the sultan.525 Apparently, he did not want to leave the capital. He
secluded himself for three days in his mansion. He refused to allow the military band
to perform as he was disappointed by being appointed to this unworthy post.526
Abdülkadir Efendi implied that his patron could not keep his position in the capital
because of factional struggles and enmities. He wrote that proximity to the sultan
brought about jealousy of both enemy and friend and that such dangerous people had
caused Osman Efendi to have been separated from the sultan. 527
A scribal post had long been Abdülkadir Efendi’s desire and yet again he decided to
use his calligraphic skills to attract the attention of the newly enthroned sultan,
Abdülhamid I. He wrote the sultan a plea asking for a position. On top of this, he drew
the sultan’s tughra (monogram) and prepared a calligraphic panel in which he wrote
the surah al-Fath. On 7 May 1774, he found an opportunity to submit the petition to
523 Sergüzeştnâme, 58b-59a.
524 Ibid., 61b-62a; Sicill-i Osmani, IV, 1300-1.
525 Sergüzeştnâme, 61b-62b.
526 Ibid., 62b.
527 Ibid., 64a-64b.
111
the sultan during a visit to Sadabad in Kağıthane.528 After reading the plea, the sultan
ordered Rikabdar Abdülkerim Agha to ensure Abdülkadir Efendi’s entrance into the
palace service as a baltacı (halberdier) and to be trained by the chief black eunuch’s
secretary, Ahmed Efendi.529 This position was not a dead-end post. A halberdier could
become Haseki agha- the lieutenant of the chief black eunuch. Moreover, the chief
black eunuch’s chief secretary (darüssaade ağası başyazıcısı) and his four assistants
were chosen from among the learned halberdiers.530 Abdülkadir Efendi had finally
managed to secure a scribal apprenticeship for himself, a position which could lead
him towards the career he had craved for years.
Rikabdar Abdülkerim Agha informed the secretary of the chief black eunuch, Ahmed
Efendi, of the sultan’s order. Although Ahmed Efendi opposed Abdülkadir Efendi’s
appointment saying that he was not suitable to become a halberdier, he could not
hinder it. Abdülkadir Efendi eventually gained his longed-for apprenticeship. As
Aksan notes, “a young person [like Abdülkadir Efendi] could enter the lower-level
scribal service as an apprentice to be educated by an experienced scribe. Promotion to
higher levels of clerical office was dependent on the furthering of writing skills.”531
Around November/December 1774, Abdülkadir Efendi’s master, Ahmed Efendi, was
dismissed from office. Abdülkadir Efendi wrote in detail about his dismissal.
According to the narrative, every evening the sultan summoned notables to the iftar
dinner. These gatherings sparked rumors. Abdülkadir Efendi wrote that dismissals
took place after these iftars. Those who were dismissed grieved while the appointees
were pleased. Ahmed Efendi started to be concerned about his situation. Although
Abdülkadir Efendi openly praised Ahmed Efendi, saying that he was ahead of his
528 Sergüzeştnâme, 66b; Banu Bilgicioğlu, “Sadabad,” DİA, vol. 35, 379-81. Bilgicioğlu noted that
Abdülhamid I took a close interest in Sadabad and a restoration work held upon the order of the sultan.
529 Sergüzeştnâme, 67b.
530 H. Bowen, “Baltadji,” The Encyclopedia of Islam New Edition, ed. H. A. R. Gibb, J. H. Kramers, E.
Lévi-Provençal and J. Schacht, vol.1 (Leiden: Brill, 1960), 1002-4. 1003-4. Also see Carter V. Findley,
Enlightening Europe on Islam and the Ottomans: Mouradgea d’Ohsson and His Masterpiece (Leiden:
Brill, 2019), 282. Findley wrote that “the term baltacı led to mistaken assumptions that they were
woodcutters. At the funerals of a sultan or other members of the imperial family or harem, they bore the
coffin. Their supervisors included a number of officials with duties pertaining more to the chief black
eunuch; these included his secretary (yazıcı efendi) who kept the accounts on the foundations supporting
the two holy cities, and the receiver (haseki başı) who collected those funds for him.”
531 Virginia H. Aksan, An Ottoman Statesman in War and Peace: Ahmed Resmi Efendi, 700-1783
(Leiden: Brill, 1995), 3.
112
counterparts in all respects, information added in the margins contradicted what he
said. Ahmed Efendi seems to have engaged in bribery. He could not see that his
undertakings would harm his reputation. He continued to receive bribes without
thinking this might harm him. However, he was dismissed. In the margins, Abdülkadir
Efendi further elaborated on the issue of bribery. He noted that some dignitaries
become wealthy through the abuse of office. They bribed those who sought
appointment; some gave horses, some gave jewelry, and other people gave coins.
Abdülkadir Efendi continued his criticisms of Ahmet Efendi after giving information
about his dismissal. He criticized those who were keen on accumulating wealth for not
being wise. It seems that Ahmed Efendi could not escape the scandal that attended the
dismissals of some greedy notables.532 As Fleischer notes, “outright gifts of money
between individuals with no other personal or professional ties were considered
abnormal.”533 Hence, Ahmed Efendi could not protect his position. He was exiled to
Smyrna because of negative reactions concerning his acts534
The question is that why Abdülkadir Efendi gave so much importance to narrating the
dismissal of Ahmed Efendi. Ahmed Efendi’s resistance to the appointment of
Abdülkadir Efendi as halberdier in the first place suggests that they could not have
built a good relationship. Abdülkadir Efendi’s individual advancement may have been
impeded by Ahmed Efendi. Although Abdülkadir Efendi did not want to portray
himself as an ambitious person, he seems to have sought rapid advancement. He might
have hoped for rapid progress after Ahmed Efendi’s dismissal.
When Bağçevanzâde was appointed as the chief secretary to the chief black eunuch,
Abdülkadir Efendi continued to serve in the same office as before.535 After a couple of
months, Bağçevanzâde was dismissed and someone called Mehmed Efendi was
appointed as secretary.536 Abdülkadir Efendi must have built a good relationship with
Mehmed Efendi in that he emphasized that his master’s opinion of him was positive
While he was hoping to be promoted to an assistantship (yazıcı halifeliği), Abdülkadir
Efendi was dismissed from the office. However, this did not affect him much. During
532 Sergüzeştnâme, 80a-82a.
533 Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual, 62.
534 Ahmed Vasıf Efendi, Mehasinü’l-Âsâr, 31.
535 For Bağçevanzâde Mustafa Efendi, see Sicill-i Osmani, IV, 1160.
536 Sergüzeştnâme, 84a.
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his service as halberdier, he must have built connections and had access to a network
of patronage in order to become scribe to Hazînedâr Nevres Kadın, the fourth consort
of Abdülhamid I and the head treasurer.537 Abdülkadir Efendi diligently worked for
about three years in her service until Receb 1191 (August 1777).
During his long years of service as halberdier under the chief black eunuch’s scribe,
Abdülkadir Efendi seems to have established a patronage tie that was to shape his life.
He managed to ingratiate himself with powerful personages which eventually gave
him an advantage in obtaining a post within the scribal service. When the abovementioned
Secretary Mehmed Efendi was dismissed from the office, the third assistant
Mehmed Efendi became the secretary. The fourth assistant moved to the third position,
and the fourth assistantship became vacant. One of the eunuchs of the harem, who was
said to be a favorite of the sultan, mediated on behalf of Abdülkadir Efendi. He told
the Chief Black Eunuch, Beşir Agha, that Abdülkadir Efendi was worthy of this
position and requested his appointment.538 Abdülkadir Efendi ultimately attained this
long-desired position on 18 Receb 1191 (22 August 1777). After two years of service
as fourth assistant, he ended up becoming third assistant to the chief black eunuch’s
chief secretary in 1191 (1779/1780).539 The story of Abdülkadir Efendi’s career
process illustrates the practical utility of becoming incorporated into the household of
important personages.540 Abdülkadir Efendi was initially attached to the household of
the chief gatekeeper, then to that of the chief gardener, of Abdullah Paşazâde Hüsnü
Hüseyin Pasha, and of Yenişehirli Osman Efendi, later making the jump from Osman
Efendi’s household to the scribal service appointment he had long craved for.
3. EXTERNAL SELF OF AN OTTOMAN CALLIGRAPHER/SCRIBE
Abdülkadir Efendi kept his narrative at a professional level. He related occurrences
that demonstrate how successful he was in his art which he expected to lead him
537 Sergüzeştnâme, 85a; Betül İpşirli Argıt, Life After the Harem: Female Palace Slaves, Patronage,
and the Imperial Ottoman Court (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020), 49-50. Betül İpşirli
Argıt noted that Nevres Kadın was the third consort of Abdlhamid I. The head treasurer was defined as
the assistant to the chief administrative officer and she was responsible for the clothes of the sultan and
the finance of the harem, as well as she accompanied the women of the palace when they went outside.
538 Sergüzeştnâme, 88b.
539 Ibid., 92b.
540 An observation made for Mustafa Ali’s career, Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual, 209.
114
towards a rewarding career in the bureaucracy. He wrote about his relation to God
when he failed to achieve the desired position. The autobiography does not say much
about his private personal habits like what he ate, where he went, or what he bought.
He focused on three aspects of his life; his creative self as an able calligrapher, his
professional self as a scribe, and his religious self that is his submission to God as a
Halvetî. Abdülkadir Efendi knew that his art would be the key to open the door for an
appointment and so he writes mostly about his talent and artwork. He lists the positions
he held in the pashas’ households up until he secures a place in the scribal service. He
also depicted the image of a person beholden to God’s grace despite the sad and hard
events he lived through. In this way he knitted the events of his life into a “coherent
sequence” and evaluated a variety of significant and exciting issues about his
professional life.541 Since all these aspects of his external self have already been
covered in two other sections, here I will touch upon them only briefly.
Obviously, Abdülkadir Efendi did not portray his life in full. Indeed, he had no such
intention. He briefly talked about his family and childhood, but these were not
particularly significant in regard to his work. The whole text was dedicated to narrating
his professional life and his struggle in that life. To quote from Jancke, the summary
of what he narrated and what he did not discloses how the author wanted to present his
“I”. 542
The calligrapher began narrating his life by presenting his education and his scholarly
connections. He did not say much about his early youth except to note the books he
recited, the calligraphy courses he undertook, and details of his teachers. He wanted to
portray a childhood in which he never misbehaved. He devoted himself to learning and
practicing calligraphy. The qualifications earned in his youth ultimately enabled him
to gain positions in the scribal service. The creation of such an organized narrative
enabled him to present his life as one of meaning and direction.543 He wanted to portray
541 Gergen and Gergen, “Narratives of the Self,” 163.
542 Gabriele Jancke, “Autobiographical Texts: Acting Within a Network: Observations on Genre and
Power Relations in the German-Speaking Regions from 1400 to 1620,” in Mapping the 'I' Research on
Self-Narratives in Germany and Switzerland, ed. Claudia Ulbrich, Kaspar von Greyerz and Lorenz
Heiligensetzer (Leiden: Brill, 2015), 130.
543 Gergen and Gergen, “Narratives of the Self,” 162.
115
himself as a skilled and hardworking person in order to show himself worthy to be
included in the scribal service.
After narrating his education, he wrote of how he entered the Halveti order after the
death of his mother. We have seen that religious practices and recitations had a
significant place in Sergüzeştnâme. His devotion to religion and prayers gave him the
strength to bear the hardness of this world and would lead him to the way of salvation.
Although he related his relief after eventually finding a suitable position as a scribe,
he did not want to portray himself as greedy or cunning. He represented himself as
someone worthy of receiving the blessings of the other world by creating an image of
a very pious person who was bent on seeking spiritual salvation. He sometimes cited
dreams in which he saw the Prophet or other wise people. Those dreams helped to
underline his devotion and spiritual status.
His becoming an able calligrapher was one of the most important aspects of his
external self. He refers to many of the works of art he had created. He highlighted his
skills in calligraphy and praised the quality of his artistic productions. In this way, he
showed his status and worth among his peers. Abdülkadir Efendi knew that it was his
talent in the art of calligraphy that enabled him to create a network and find a proper
position for himself. One striking example underlining his superior skills was the
conflict he had with Yakup Haseki, with which we will deal later in this chapter.
According to the narrative, Yakup Haseki was easily able to be appointed as the chief
gardener of Istanbul by taking on Abdülkadir Efendi’s identity and pretending to be
the talented calligrapher. Abdülkadir Efendi took all the credit for the easy rise of
Yakup Haseki and implied that Yakup Haseki could only have risen so easily by
pretending to be so talented. Amidst all these distresses, there was the urge to present
his skills and his worth. His Sergüzeştnâme is full of examples underlining his talents
in calligraphy.
His professional career culminating in the position he attained in the scribal service
was the central subjects of the self-narrative. The story was constructed around that
and the events relevant to it. All other issues are related to showing how he attained
the position he desired. Even though he wrote that he wanted to give advice and
116
provide an example for future generations, it seems that he was very proud of his
success and what he really wanted to convey was his ability in scribal matters.
4. INNER SELF: DIFFICULTIES AND PAINS IN THE PATH TO A CAREER
IN SCRIBAL SERVICE
One aspect of Abdülkadir Efendi’s autobiography is particularly noteworthy in this
discussion and that is the outburst of his feelings. Abdülkadir Efendi’s autobiography
possesses many features that can be identified as the portrayal of the inner self. He
described his thoughts, emotional reactions, and feelings in the many stories of his
search for an appointment and a benefactor.544 He expressed the difficulties and
tribulations he faced in his career and mentioned them at a very personal level. He
gave vivid descriptions of dramatic moments in his life and of how these affected him.
Rizvi’s observation of Babur’s self-narrative is also relevant for that of Abdülkadir
Efendi; he did not constrain his feelings and recorded his emotions in a way that made
them visible to the reader. Externalizing his emotions allowed the reader to perceive
the inner world of Abdülkadir Efendi that he alone had access to.545 In this way, one
may form an opinion about the experiences and deepest feelings of the author. In this
part of the dissertation, we will look for elements that can be identified as the
representations of his inner self: his emotional reactions and behaviors in certain
instances.
At the age of sixteen in 1173 (1759/60), Abdülkadir Efendi lost his mother. Although
Abdülkadir Efendi only recorded the time of his mother’s death and did not express
any emotion about it, the fact that he recorded the date as a reminder shows how much
he was affected by her death. He records that time as the beginning of a new period in
his life. After his mother’s death, his father wanted him to marry to avoid behaving in
an unsuitable manner in following his sexual desires.546 Abdülkadir Efendi did not
provide further information about his marriage or the identity of his wife. He described
at length his entrance into the Halvetî order to which he became attracted in the same
544 Reynolds, Interpreting the Self, 74.
545 Kishwar Rizvi, “Introduction: Affect, Emotion, and Subjectivity in the Early Modern Period,”
in Affect, Emotion, and Subjectivity in Early Modern Muslim Empires, ed. Kishwar Rizvi (Leiden: Brill,
2018), 9.
546 Sergüzeştnâme, 12b.
117
year his mother died.547 The interesting thing here is that he added information about
his attraction to the Sufi order just after explaining the reasons for his father’s worries
and desire for him to marry. The autobiographer probably wanted to defend himself
from the charge of committing a sin. The reader should not be deluded into thinking
that sexual desire was his motive. He emphasized how devoted and pious his feelings
were. He declares his good faith and willingness to restrain from dishonorable acts.
After this, he reported how he became involved with recitations of prayers and praises
of the Prophet, saying he continued doing this for a couple of years. He wrote that,
morning and night, that he repeated the prayers from three to five hundred times.548
He wanted his prayers to protect him from the calamities of this world to be accepted.
He experienced some astonishing things at night as a result of those sincere prayers.
However, he wanted to experience more both in this world and in the dream world. He
lamented, “Oh God, why could not I observe effect although I am so constant in my
prayers?”549 He hoped to be rewarded and expected good things to happen in his life.
He referred to the Qur’an 49:17 to explain his being favored by good faith. “They
regard it as a favor to you that they embraced Islam. Say: ‘Count not your Islam as a
favor to me. It was Allah who bestowed a favor on you, in guiding you to faith, if you
are sincere.”550 His desire came to fruition in that he saw the Prophet in his dream after
a long period filled with expectation. The Prophet patted him on the back saying,
“Abdülkadir, my son, my beloved, do not worry. On the day of judgment, I will
intercede for you.”551 This dream must have given him the solace and the strength to
bear with the grief he felt after the death of his mother. After, possibly, a period of
recitations and preparations his formal entrance into the Halvetî order took place in
1175.552
Up until folio 30a, he continued to write about the Sufi order and his experiences in
that mystical way of life. From then on, the narrative veered off in a new direction.
First he constructed a background to what he was to relate in the remaining part. This
547 Sergüzeştnâme, 12b.
548 Ibid., 12b-13a.
549 Ibid., 13b.
550 Ibid., 14b; The Holy Qur’an, 516.
551 Sergüzeştnâme, 16a;
552 Sergüzeştnâme, 24a.
118
part was devoted to his endeavors to obtain a career in bureaucracy and his story tells
of his knocking on many doors, as well as the griefs and disappointments he felt until
he succeeded in finding his desired position. His mystical life and recitations became
a security blanket in those hardest of times. He related the amount of suffering he had
undergone and took pride in his submission to God in times of grief. He narrated all
the periods of hardship he went through until he succeeded in finding a reliable
position for himself, that is, his appointment as the fourth assistant to the chief
eunuch’s chief secretary on 22 August 1777.
Abdülkadir Efendi was very eager to point out God’s mercies upon him. He
endeavored to see and narrate his life as a whole to give a moral example. However,
the autobiography discloses a character in which the deep excitement of delightful
events in his career and the angst of aggrievement sometimes dominated over his effort
to narrate his life as a whole moral exemplum.553 One can sense, as in the case of
Delany’s study of British autobiography, that the autobiographer was caught between
the effort to relate everything as a moral example and the sentimental attitude that
reflects the emotions in its immediacy.554
Disillusionment is the most apparent emotional status visible throughout Abdülkadir
Efendi’s self-narrative. Abdülkadir Efendi built his narrative upon the realities of his
professional life. His narrative, in a sense, gave a vivid account of the emotional
outcomes of a minor scribe’s career full of ups and downs. He not only noted with
whom he had been affiliated and what positions he had acquired but also noted his
desires, expectations, and disappointments. His autobiography, therefore, offers a
compiling look into the world of an individual who exhibits his feelings in written
form.
As mentioned earlier in this chapter, after becoming affiliated to the chief gardener,
Abdülkadir Efendi rapidly gained the attention of the sultan thanks to his skills in
calligraphy. When the sultan read the takrîr (declaration) sent by the Chief Gardner,
he had paid attention to its writing. The sultan was aware that the Chief Gardener was
not skilled in calligraphy and was curious as to who had written the document. When
553 Delany, British Autobiography, 125.
554 Ibid.
119
the sultan learned that the private secretary of the chief gardener had prepared the
document, he ordered the secretary’s inclusion in the Corps of Gardeners and his
appointment as the junior scribe (küçük yazıcı). However, the sultan had not learned
that the private secretary’s name was Abdülkadir. This situation would have led to a
misunderstanding that resulted in a great disappointment for Abdülkadir Efendi.
Hearing about the sultan’s admiration for his art must have puffed up Abdülkadir
Efendi ego. He wrote in detail about how he had written the document in beautiful
calligraphy and used the correct expressions.555 However, his appointment was
hindered by the current junior scribe, Yakup Haseki.556 This was not the result
Abdülkadir Efendi had hoped for. Though disappointed, he endured this assault. He
referred to a saying of the prophet to foster his patience; “Patience is the key to
salvation.” He resigned himself to his fate and found solace in the advice given by the
Prophet. He decided to stay away from such people as Yakup Haseki. He reminded
himself that it is necessary to go through such difficult stages in order to reach the level
of human perfection (insan-i kâmil) 557 He was now aware that his calligraphy skills
would bring him greater attention and rewards and, therefore, seems to have easily
shown tolerance. Around this time, the calligrapher entered into the service of
Abdullah Paşazâde Hüsnü Hüseyin Bey who became the Commander-in-Chief of the
Navy.558 The calligrapher probably changed his allegiance upon losing his chance for
a post at court.
Abdülkadir Efendi in the first place seems to have dealt with feelings of
disappointment. However, when he learned about the rapid rise of Yakup Haseki, he
devoted a section to narrate how Yakup Efendi gained those appointments under false
pretenses. That section was titled Nistem Hestem (I am not, I am).559 The title of this
section is really striking in that he not only questioned Yakup Haseki’s rapid rise but
also questioned he himself had been ignored.
Having protected his position as a junior scribe, Yakup Haseki wanted to attract the
sultan’s attention. When Yakup Haseki was working on the restoration of the walls of
555 Sergüzeştnâme, 32a.
556 Ibid., 32b-33a.
557 Ibid., 34b.
558 Ibid., 35a-35b.
559 Ibid., 35b.
120
a seaside palace damaged by an earthquake in 1179 (1765/66), a fire started in a
mansion in Rumeli Hisarı and spread to other houses. The Chief Gardener dealt with
the fire and ordered his junior scribe to inform the sultan about the situation. Yakup
Haseki was aware that this could give him a chance to attract the attention of the sultan.
Abdülkadir Efendi wrote that Yakup Haseki memorized the most eloquent expressions
to use in the presence of the sultan. Yakup Haseki wanted to make the sultan believe
that he had rhetorical skills and he used articulate language to inform the sultan that
the fire had been put out. Impressed by his skills, the sultan wanted to know the name
of the messenger who brought the news about the fire. He was informed that the
messenger was the Chief Gardener’s junior scribe. Upon learning that the messenger
was the junior scribe, the sultan said that “I remember him, he is skilled in writing, he
is a skilled calligrapher.” Silahdar Agha and others replied that “He is exactly such a
servant of yours.” According to the narrative, the sultan had confused Yakup Ağa with
Abdülkadir Efendi. When the sultan wanted to learn his name, Silahdar Agha and
others present there informed the sultan that his name was Yakup Haseki.560 According
to the information given in Sergüzeştname, the sultan did not know that Yakup Haseki
had hindered Abdülkadir Efendi’s appointment. The sultan actually supposed that the
private secretary to the Chief Gardener was Abdülkadir Efendi and had become the
junior scribe.561
The sultan was misled in thinking was the talented calligrapher he appointed as the
junior scribe.562 Yakup Haseki had reaped the fruits of his undertaking and was
appointed first as a confidential messenger (karakulak).563 A couple of months later he
became the Head of the Chamber of Imperial Gardeners (bostancılar odabaşılığı),564
and was finally appointed as the Chief Gardener of Istanbul.565 Yakup Haseki gained
those positions under false pretenses and would rapidly rise by stealing Abdülkadir
Efendi’s identity. This must have been one of the biggest losses Abdülkadir Efendi
suffered throughout his career.
560 Sergüzeştnâme, 35b-38a.
561 Ibid., 38b-39a.
562 Ibid., 38a.
563 Ibid., 39a.
564 Ibid..
565 Ibid.
121
Abdülkadir Efendi had seized a chance for rapid advancement at an early age, thanks
to his talents, but he lost this chance just as quickly. He showed strong emotions in the
face of Yakup Haseki’s rapid rise. He implied that the person to be appointed should
actually have been himself. He revealed how disturbed he was by this confusion citing
a Persian poem; derîn-i âyine aks-ı rû-yi yârem nîstem hestem. The poem can be
translated as “Is there a reflection of my love’s face in this mirror or not?” The title of
the section, Nistem Hestem (I am, I am not), was also derived from this poem. The
poem mirrored the feelings of the writer. Abdülkadir Efendi implied that Yakup
Haseki could only have obtained he sultan’s attention by stealing first Abdülkadir
Efendi’s position and then his identity. The autobiographer seems to have been
doomed to disappointment; he wrote a part titled ‘Solitude.’ He devoted himself to
prayer to endure this unpleasant situation.566
On top of that, Abdülkadir Efendi actually wanted to underline his talent and
qualifications by taking all the credit for the advancement of Yakup Haseki. He seems
to have coveted Yakup Haseki’s appointment because he thought he deserved what
Yakup Haseki had gained. We cannot know for sure if Yakup Haseki managed to rise
in such a rapid way by taking over Abdülkadir Efendi’s identity and making the sultan
believe that he was a skilled calligrapher, or by creating a network and exerting the
power of some prominent people. Abdülkadir Efendi narrated Yakup Haseki’s
appointments in such a way as to underline his own abilities and worth. His choice of
wording, organization, and use of poems to strengthen his narrative shows that he took
great pride in his skills in calligraphy. This might have been the biggest disillusionment
Abdülkadir Efendi experiendce , but not the last one.
His affiliation to Yenişehirli Osman Efendi brought him, as mentioned before, many
chances to show his skills in calligraphy and attract the attention of the sultan.
Abdülkadir Efendi’s first assignment was to draw a picture of the armed warship that
the sultan wanted to build.567 He showed his mastery over pen and brush and
completed the task. The sultan wanted to learn about the artist as he admired his
abilities. Abdülkadir Efendi stressed the fact that his name was pronounced in the
566 Sergüzeştnâme, 40b-41a.
567 Ibid., 42a-42b.
122
presence of the sultan.568 For the calligrapher, it was very important that the sultan
knew him by his name so that he would not be disappointed once again, as he had been
in the case of Yakup Haseki. After this incident, he wrote a section narrating that his
patron Osman Efendi had gained prominence and become close to the sultan.569 This
section is very remarkable in that he communicated his feelings of pride. Abdülkadir
Efendi wrote this section to show the link between his successful drawing and his
patron’s advancement. He wrote, “He (Osman Efendi) became close to the sultan
thanks to this humble being.”570 Abdülkadir Efendi implied that his patron had become
close to the sultan by virtue of his servant’s artistic skills. We cannot know for sure if
Osman Efendi’s rise to prominence resulted from Abdülkadir Efendi’s artistic abilities
as written in Sergüzeştnâme or from his close contact with so influential a figure as the
Deputy Grand Vizier Melek Mehmed Pasha.571 Osman Efendi started to join in the
meetings held in the household of the Deputy Grand Vizier and had a chance to meet
the sultan in person. In time, he got closer to the sultan and acquired fame among the
statesmen for privately discussing affairs of state with the sultan.572 The narration of
this event and his use of words proclaims the obvious pride he experienced. Abdülkadir
Efendi had an inclination to present his abilities as the reason for others’ advancement.
Encouraged by the approval of the sultan, he was now hoping for an appointment. In
a short while, glad news arrived giving Abdülkadir Efendi new hope. The sultan sent
several books to Osman Efendi and asked his secretary, Abdülkadir Efendi, to copy
them.573 Abdülkadir Efendi started to work on the task hoping to be rewarded by
entering into the scribal service as an apprentice.574 To that end, Abdülkadir Efendi
gave up his comfort and worked diligently to prepare the books.575 Awaiting the
rewards, he turned to prayer.576 However, his hopes faded. He could not even get paid
for the paper used for the books, let alone gain an appointment.577
568 Sergüzeştnâme, 42b.
569 Ibid., 43a-44a.
570 Ibid., 44a;
571 For more information on this issue, see “Relational Self” section of this chapter.
572 Sergüzeştnâme, 44b.
573 Ibid., 46a-46b.
574 Ibid., 46b-47a.
575 Ibid., 46b.
576 Ibid., 46b-47a.
577 Ibid., 47a.
123
The galleon drawn by Abdülkadir b. Hasan el-Hisârî is currently found in the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York.
He resented this situation and secluded himself for a couple of days in his home.
Seclusion was a way to deal with frustration. After a while, Osman Efendi sent one of
his men summoning Abdülkadir Efendi to his presence. Abdülkadir Efendi did not
want to go, saying he was sick. Osman Efendi insisted and ordered Abdülkadir Efendi
to come even if he was sick. Reluctantly, he went to his patron’s mansion. Osman
Efendi informed him that the sultan wanted to build another galleon. Knowing his
earlier works, the sultan wanted Abdülkadir Efendi to draw a picture of the galleon.578
578 Sergüzeştnâme, 48a-48b.
124
Osman Efendi encouraged his scribe to employ his art to the full and use this chance
to show his abilities.579
The calligrapher worked for eighteen days to prepare the drawing of the galleon.580
After completing the task, he went with his patron to present the drawing to Melek
Mehmed Pasha. Impressed by his ability, Mehmed Pasha assured Abdülkadir Efendi
that the sultan would definitely appoint him this time.581 As he had been disappointed
several times. Abdülkadir Efendi did not seem excited by the Deputy Grand Vizier’s
compliments He noted that the Deputy Grand Vizier complimented him on the drawing
but showed no generosity to this humble loyal servant of his.582 Abdülkadir Efendi was
fully aware that his patron Osman Efendi was unable to provide much intercessory
assistance for him.
Melek Mehmed Pasha and Osman Efendi then took the drawing to the sultan saying
that the sultan would show his beneficence. Although Abdülkadir Efendi wrote about
his expectations in return for his services, he did not want to be seen as greedy. He
wrote, therefore, that he intended to serve the sultan, but he would like to be rewarded
for enduring the difficulties of preparing such a work.583 Abdülkadir Efendi started to
pray for a reward knowing that the only benevolence would come from God. He wrote
that it was the harder than the fires of hell to wait expectantly. He found solace in a
saying of the Prophet; “Awaiting relief with patience is a form of worship.” However,
in the end, no benevolence was revealed to the artist.584 He again took refuge in another
saying of the prophet, “Patience is the key to relief.” 585 He wrote that he had begun to
deliberate and abandon his hopes. He showed how he felt through the medium of a
Persian poem, “Justice should be given to the sultan; justice should be done to make
the world blissful.”586 This poem must have been added to express his strong feelings
based on a state of anguish.
579 Sergüzeştnâme, 48b.
580 Ibid., 49a. One of the calligraphic galleons prepared by Abdülkadir Efendi is currently found in
Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/454611
581 Sergüzeştnâme, 49a.
582 Ibid., 49a.
583 Ibid., 49b-50a.
584 Ibid., 51a.
585 Ibid., 51a.
586 Ibid., 51a.
125
The desperate calligrapher had no alternative but to use his artistic abilities, once again,
to attract the attention of the sultan. He wrote a petition praising the Prophet (arzuhâli
peygamber ‘aleyhisselâm).587 He decorated it by adding at the top a hilye - a
calligraphy panel in which the personal appearance of the Prophet is described.
Abdülkadir Efendi wanted to present this piece to the sultan. He stressed that he did
not put his signature to it.588. When his patron, Osman Efendi, found an opportunity to
present that calligraphic piece to Sultan Mustafa, the sultan was charmed by its beauty.
He penned his signature as the slave of the sultan’. Abdülkadir Efendi noted that his
calligraphic work was put into a chest together with the holy flag – the symbol of the
Ottoman sultan as caliph when the army embarked on a campaign. Just after that the
sultan ordered Abdülkadir Efendi to prepare a new piece for his personal use.
Abdülkadir Efendi completed the task and ornamented it with an outstanding
illumination (tezhib). The sultan hung the calligraphy on the wall of his chamber and
promised Abdülkadir Efendi he would be accepted as an apprentice in the scribal
service. However, the sultan broke his promise. The calligrapher was once again
frustrated in his attempts for an appointment. 589
After all those disappointments he had been through, he probably despaired of gaining
anything from his patron and decided to try his own luck. When his patron Osman
Efendi went to Russia on an official mission in 1186, Abdülkadir Efendi stayed in the
capital on the excuse that he was sick. He noted that a Muslim could engage in jihad
in five different ways; to fight with the infidel on the battlefield, to deal with secret
infidels, to deal with hypocrites, to fight with the cravings of the flesh, and to deal with
the desires of the heart. Although he wrote that his bodily health did not allow him to
go on such a mission, he added information revealing his actual intention. He had
received news of a vacant scribal post in the Imperial Arsenal. The calligrapher
obviously wanted to obtain that position. He seems to have had a desire for gaining
the favor of the sultan. To that end, he wrote a plea to ask for that position and handed
it to the sultan when he was going in disguise to the household of the Deputy Grand
Vizier.590 The sultan remembered Abdülkadir Efendi and praised his skills. Then, he
587 Sergüzeştnâme, 51b.
588 Ibid., 52b.
589 Ibid., 54a-54b.
590 Ibid., 56a-56b.
126
said “I know you, but this clerkship is not suitable. You have done us great service,
though. You are a man of skill and deserve to be appointed.”591 The sultan advised him
to keep on with his prayers. Abdülkadir Efendi seems to have had a somewhat inflated
sense of his own importance. He was obviously a talented man, but he had little
experience. He expected to rise more rapidly than such a person as he was could
expect. Fleischer’s observation on Mustafa Âli seems to be also relevant for
Abdülkadir Efendi: “able though he was, he had an exaggerated conception of his own
worth, or at least of the rewards and respect that a talented and learned young man
with few contacts and little experience within the Ottoman system could realistically
expect to receive.”592
After this incident, Abdülkadir Efendi wrote two long pages to explain why he should
not grieve. He took refuge in the Qur’an, in ancient counsels and sayings. He noted
that if one wishes for something and acts vigorously to achieve it, he should not
continually ask for it. He must rely on God and should not deviate from the path of
submission to the will of God. He referred to the Qur’an 65:1 to assure himself that
God would give him new possibilities: “… after that Allâh may bring to pass some
new situation.”593 He reminded himself again that he should not be upset that his desire
had not been fulfilled and his efforts fruitless. He consoled himself by saying: ‘If God
wants to bestow something, it occurs. If God does not bestow something, it is unwise
to grieve in vain.’ He strengthened his ideas even further by the inclusion of a poem;594
There is no delay in the sustenance provided by God
There is no lagging behind in the division made by Allah
Do not think fancy words are elegance
There is no conduct like silence in this universe
That he wrote such long passages to convince himself not to feel sad reveals his actual
feelings. He must have felt so disappointed that he wanted to assure himself that new
possibilities would arise if he endured the pain.
591 Sergüzeştnâme, 56b-57a.
592 Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual, 40.
593 Sergüzeştnâme, 57a; The Holy Qur’an, 557.
594 Sergüzeştnâme, 57b.
127
After this futile attempt, Abdülkadir Efendi must have realized that his chance of
obtaining a scribal apprenticeship at court was minimal without the help of a
benefactor. Once again, he renewed his loyalty to his patron Osman Efendi who had
returned to the capital and become first the superintendent of the opportunity building
of Tophane in June 1772595 and later, in 1773, the Head of the Treasury.596 Abdülkadir
Efendi considered this could be an opportunity for him. He could gain entry into a
scribal career in the capital. However, it seems that his patron Osman Efendi did not
support him in obtaining such an appointment. This might have resulted from
Abdülkadir Efendi’s decision to stay in the capital while his patron went on a mission
to Russia Abdülkadir Efendi wrote that he wished to be remembered by his patron as
heretofore; however, he was grieved by his patron’s lack of benevolence and of
upbringing, and his heart was locked because of this intense sorrow (endûh-u
enbûh).597 He wrote, as always, long passages of counsel to himself. Being aware of
the possibility of this being his own fault, he referred to verses on the sinfulness of
Satan. He prayed to be protected from behaving like Satan who denied that prostrating
oneself before Adam increased sinfulness.598 Disappointed once again, Abdülkadir
Efendi continued to serve Osman Efendi until his patron was sent away from the
capital as a high-ranking military officer in March/April 1774.599 Abdülkadir Efendi
was once again left alone. His patron was sent away from the capital through the hostile
acts of envious people.600 Abdülkadir Efendi had worked hard to integrate himself into
the households of powerful personages, but once again he was alone and secluded
himself in his house, devoting himself to prayers and devotional practices.601 He wrote
that those who were not satisfied with the sustenance given by God and asked for more
because of their greediness would suffer trouble. How greedy you are is not important;
your share would suffice. Your share is fixed, and it will not change. The hardships
you experience to gain more would be useless.602
595 Sicill-i Osmani, IV, 1300-1.
596 Sergüzeştnâme, 59a.
597 Ibid., 60a.
598 Ibid., 60b-61a.
599 Sicill-i Osmani, IV, 1300-1.
600 Sergüzeştnâme, 64a-64b.
601 Sergüzeştnâme, 65b.
602 Ibid., 66a.
128
After this incident, however, Abdülkadir Efendi’s luck turned. The calligrapher began
to articulate more the feelings of gratitude, pride, and happiness and less of the feelings
of disappointment and sorrow. The structure of Sergüzeştname was indeed designed
to narrate how one could reach relief after experiencing hardship. The first half of his
narrative, therefore, devoted to the hardships and disappointments he had been through
and the second part was devoted to narrating how his persistence and patience bore
fruit.
After his patron left the capital, he resolved to try his chance and wrote a plea to submit
to the newly enthroned sultan, Abdülhamid I. To show his skills in calligraphy, he
added the tughra of the sultan and a calligraphic panel in which he wrote the surah al-
Fath. Abdülkadir Efendi emphasized that he had used his most beautiful calligraphy
and illuminated it with gold. When the sultan read the plea, he praised Abdülkadir
Efendi’s art and said that such a talented person should not be ruined in the city.603
This sentence he reported from the sultan reminds us that he actually expressed his
thoughts about his worth. The calligrapher probably thought that his skills had been
ruined as he could not find a suitable position for years.
Abdülkadir Efendi eventually became a halberdier and secured a scribal
apprenticeship. He would be trained by the chief black eunuch’s secretary, Ahmed
Efendi. According to the narrative, Ahmed Efendi at first opposed the order of the
sultan saying that Abdülkadir Efendi was not suitable to serve as a halberdier. When
the sultan was informed of this, he warned Ahmet Efendi declaring that Abdülkadir
Efendi deserved to be appointed as secretary even.604 By underlining the sultan’s
advice to Ahmed Efendi and that the sultan actually deemed him worthy of the position
of secretary, Abdülkadir Efendi emphasized that he considered himself worthy of
being appointed to this position. Afterward, the sultan ordered Ahmed Efendi to
summon his new apprentice. Abdülkadir Efendi came into his master’s presence and
offered his respects. Ahmed Efendi complimented Abdülkadir Efendi on his skills.605
We cannot know for sure if this actually happened, but his feeling of pride at being
rewarded with long-deserved promotion is seen in his writing so prominently of this
603 Sergüzeştnâme, 66b-67a.
604 Ibid., 67b.
605 Ibid., 68a.
129
incident. His sense of self-confidence is revealed in his narrative speaking openly
about his worthiness to receive a higher position.
He narrated how pleased he was and his happiness on hearing those compliments He
was now sure that he would be rewarded with oodles of blessings and benevolence.
He wrote that words were not enough to describe the joy he felt. He then felt guilty of
the feeling of delight- and, obviously, the pride- he had in his heart upon hearing all
those compliments. He wondered if these feelings arose from the nafs al-ammara (the
inciting self) or the hakikat-i rûhaniye (the essence of the soul). He seems to have
regarded the pride and the joy he felt in his heart at that moment as unpleasant emotions
and tried to regulate his feelings. He wrote that if a wide array of venal thoughts come
into the mind and give pleasure to the heart, it means that those thoughts come from
the inciting self. If those thoughts relate to the body and one cannot repulse them, it
means they come from the heart (makam-ı kalp). If such thoughts come to mind over
and over again only the ulama or saints manage to reject them. After this brief analysis,
he wrote that he was unaware of thinking about such subjects. He had supposed his
feelings/thoughts were not awakened by the inciting self.606 This was the only time
Abdülkadir Efendi questioned his thoughts and expressed feelings of guilt.
From then on, Abdülkadir Efendi lived in expectation of good things to come.
However, he wanted to climb the professional ladder quickly. It was to some extent
his hastiness that was causing him to be disappointed. Sometime after Abdülkadir
Efendi started a scribal apprenticeship, the sultan ordered a Şifa-i Şerif (a book of
prayers for good health) to be prepared. Abdülkadir Efendi was assigned to write the
book through the agency of Ahmed Efendi. Abdülkadir Efendi stressed the fact that
the whole work was the product of his efforts. The sultan was very pleased with the
result and granted him a hundred gold coins. Abdülkadir Efendi wrote that sixty gold
coins were cut (possibly by Ahmed Efendi) on the grounds that forty of them were
already zer-i mahbûb (beloved gold).607 Although Abdülkadir Efendi expected to
receive at least forty gold coins, he ended up receiving nothing. The remaining gold
606 Sergüzeştnâme, 69a-69b.
607 Ibid., 72a; J. Allan, “Zer Mahbûb,” in E. J. Brill’s First Encyclopedia of Islam, ed. M. T. Hautsma,
A. J. Wensinck, H. A. R. Gibb, W. Heffening and E. Lévi-Provençal, vol. 8 (Leiden: Brill, 1987), 1226;
İbrahim Artuk, “Zer-i Mahbub,” DİA, vol. 44, 281-2.
130
coins were given to people he did not know.608 To please the frustrated calligrapher,
Scribe Ahmed Efendi declared that he well deserved to be included in the scribal
service because he was well educated. He ordered his second assistant, İbrahim Hanif
Efendi, to register Abdülkadir Efendi as the fourth assistant, a position Abdülkadir
Efendi desired to be appointed to. However, Ahmed Efendi broke his word in just a
couple of hours, leaving Abdülkadir Efendi empty-handed.609
Abdülkadir Efendi wrote that he was grieved by what happened. He comforted himself
by thinking that a person progressing slowly would achieve his goals in the end while
a fast-progressing person in the fast track could become involved in difficulties. He
turned to prayers to seek solace for his disappointment because his worth had not been
recognized. He openly expressed his feelings about Ahmed Efendi’s action and his
chagrin that Ahmed Efendi had not acted as expected of such an honest person.610 We
do not know if Abdülkadir Efendi criticized his master to his face, but it seems that his
tempered criticisms reached Ahmed Efendi’s ears. While Abdülkadir was hoping that
his master would keep his word, Ahmed Efendi even thought of dismissing him from
the rank of apprenticeship. Abdülkadir Efendi thought that was too severe a
punishment and decided to wait patiently to see what would happen.611
He must have been very anxious in to have written at such length about this incident.
He explained what he thought and felt over and over again. Abdülkadir Efendi’s
insistence produced no positive results; quite the contrary. Ahmed Efendi seems to
have become violently angry with him. Abdülkadir Efendi expressed his feelings of
sorrow and fear that his master had ceased to remember him. According to the
calligrapher, one must show patience when angry, and keeping promises brings
salvation. These are the requirements of virtuous people. Wise men do not go back on
their word.612 However, his master forgot about the promise he had given and did not
remember having done so, thus bringing grief to Abdülkadir Efendi. Because of his
master’s negligence, he also felt embarrassed among his peers.613
608 Sergüzeştnâme, 72b-72b.
609 Ibid., 72b.
610 Ibid., 73a.
611 Ibid., 73b-74a.
612 Ibid., 74b-75a.
613 Ibid., 75b.
131
An image from a prayer book written by Abdülkadir b. Hasan el-Hisârî. This prayer book is
currently in the Metroplitan Museum of Art in New York.
He turned to the prayers to ease this troubled situation. However, being aware of the
seriousness of the situation this time he did not confine himself only to prayers. He
took concrete steps to seek forgiveness and wrote a plea to Ahmet Efendi to explain
his situation. He wrote that he his face was bowed like a broom to the dust of his noble
feet. However, his master paid no attention.614 He had no other choice but to endure.
the situation. The calligrapher was so sad, but still continued to criticize his master for
not remaining true to his word. His master got angrier with him, let alone forgiving.615
We do not know if Ahmed Efendi eventually pardoned Abdülkadir Efendi or not, as
the story of this conflict ended without informing the reader about the result.
614 Sergüzeştnâme, 76a.
615 Ibid., 76b.
132
Shortly after this incident, as mentioned before in this chapter, Ahmed Efendi was
dismissed from office in 1774.616 First Bağçevanzâde Mustafa Efendi and then, a
couple of months later, Mehmed Efendi was appointed secretary of the Chief Black
Eunuch. Although Abdülkadir Efendi wrote that he had good relations with the newly
appointed secretary, he was unexpectedly dismissed from office. He wrote that
Mehmed Efendi’s positive attitude was of no avail. He entered again on a period of
resigned acquiescence. However, his grief apparently did not last long this time. He
managed to become the scribe of Hazînedâr Nevres Kadın and worked for her for
about three years between 1188 and Recep 1191 (1774/75 and August 1777).617 For
Abdülkadir Efendi, this scribal position must have been a blessing and the fulfilment
of his ambitions. He made reference to poems and narratives of wisdom to express his
feelings. He wanted to portray the image of a modest person, stressing that it was his
patience that had brought him success. According to him, one must be truthful,
grateful for sustenance and the rank given by God, and be patient under hardship. His
success was due to his careful observance of these requirements. He referred to a poem
by Imam Şafi to explain that he was not after worldly goods. “It is nothing but a corpse,
the desire of the dogs swarming it around is to pull it to pieces.”618 By referring to this
poem he wanted to underline that he no desire to chase around after the positions and
wealth of this world. He wanted to serve the state and reach salvation.
This was not his last enjoyable experience. Unsurprisingly, the news of the longdesired
appointment came through the dream world. On the 18th night of Receb 1190
(2 September 1776), when he was already in the service of Nevres Kadın, he saw a
dream in which he was trying to get a foot inside a big white door on which there were
gold- and silver-plated ornaments, but he could not even manage to stand upright. A
wise old man told him not to hurry, but to come close to the door very slowly so that
he could enter. Abdülkadir Efendi made clear that he recorded this dream with the
date, day, and hour in the margin of his miscellany.619 The importance that he attached
to the precise recording of the dream displays that his excitement in interpreting this
616 Sergüzeştnâme, 80a-82a.
617 Ibid., 85a;
618 Ibid., 85a; Hasan Uçar, “İmam Şâfiî’nin Şâirliği ve Şiirlerinin Belâgat Açısından Tahlîli,” Ekev
Akademi Dergisi 19, no:63 (2015),147.
619 Sergüzeştnâme, 86a-87a.
133
dream as a portent of an appointment. The message of the dream was concordant with
the form in the Sergüzeştnâme where he always highlighted the importance of patience
and progressing slowly. We do not know what was happening at the time he saw this
dream, but everything was probably going well for him. He had a good position as a
scribe. He had good relations with some harem aghas and possibly with other palace
grandees.620 He had managed to build a network during those long years in the scribal
service and, conceivably, he had real expectations of gaining the position he wanted
to have. Indeed, exactly one year after he had the dream, he became fourth assistant to
the Chief Black Eunuch’s secretary on 18 Recep 1191(22 August 1777). Two years
later, he gained the position of third assistant in Şaban 1193 (August/September
1779).621
This assistantship was the position Abdülkadir Efendi had desired to obtain.
Abdülkadir Efendi wrote that the dream came true in the same way as he had seen it.622
He reiterated that the story of his life was an example of relief after hardship. All those
sufferings and hardships he had been through were to earn his living and to educate
his soul. However, the calligrapher was now sure that he left all hardships behind.
According to him, being included in the palace service and among those who are close
to the palace circles is not something granted to everyone.623 Abdülkadir Efendi had
those blessings after many hardships and endurance; therefore, he was very proud of
being granted such a position.
Abdülkadir Efendi used diverse strategies to express his feelings. He sometimes wrote
in an explicit manner. He revealed his grief, sometimes wrote down his harsh
criticisms, and at other times expressed his feelings of pride and happiness. He wrote
so vividly that he provided the reader with the tools to access to his inner world as
directly as possible. Sergüzeştnâme, therefore, provides a good example of how
emotions can be expressed unambiguously.
He sometimes referred to poems to uncover his powerful feelings. To quote at length
from Reynolds:
620 Sergüzeştnâme, 87b.
621 Ibid., 90b.
622 Ibid., 87a.
623 Ibid., 88a-88b.
134
It could also be used to express deeply felt emotions: love, grief, loneliness, anger,
yearning. All these were themes more often expressed in poetry than in prose … poetry
functioned as an acceptable code for expressing things that, if expressed in plain
language or in actions, might be culturally unacceptable. Though it might be unseemly
to lose control of one's emotions, to express those same raging feelings in verse offered
a socially satisfactory alternative.624
He frequently referred to verses, hadiths, prayers, and commonplaces to disclose how
he felt. To the modern reader, such references might seem lacking in emotion, but “for
contemporaries these were familiar and meaningful and just as evocative as the
commonplaces we use nowadays in more individualized descriptions of what we
feel.”625 He turned to prayer and recitations to seek spiritual solace. Religious practices
gave him the strength to bear the difficulties.
Sometimes he described his actions rather than explicitly saying that he felt sorry. The
need for isolation and his remaining at home for days at a time was a way of expressing
feelings of anger, sorrow, and desolation. For instance, he did not want to see his patron
when his calligraphic work went unrewarded and stayed at home for days in isolation.
Dreams were also cited whenever necessary. He included dreams in his narrative
because dreams were obviously believed to convey truthful and comforting messages
of the future. Hence, dreams occupied an important place in his self-narrative.
Conclusion
As Ruggiu suggests, “separate traditions of personal narratives exist in cultural context
very far away from those initially described by Jacob Burckhardt and his followers.”626
Ottoman sergüzeştnâmes, of which there are examples from as early as fifteenth
century, indicate the existence of a well-established self-narrative tradition in the
Ottoman Empire.
Coşkun’s observation – western autobiographies revealed details about inner self
while sergüzeştnâmes revealed attachment to the society - is actually based on our
“modern expectations of autobiography as a genre, that it should reveal a private,
624 Reynolds, Interpreting the Self, 95.
625 Erika Kuijpers, “Histories, Chronicles and Memoirs,” in Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction,
ed. Susan Broomhall (New York: Routledge, 2017), 104.
626 Ruggiu, “Uses of First Person Narratives,” 17.
135
psychological inner self beyond an exterior, public self.”627 However, such a
generalization seems problematic as, together with their public selves, the authors of
sergüzeştnâmes revealed some most intimate details about their lives and feelings in
the face of events As Amelang puts it, “autobiography was an individualized
expression of the experience of a broad range of overlapping circles, circles that began
with the past and present of the author’s family, and which quickly expanded to
embrace a wider social universe. Its purview was thus neither fully private nor fully
public.”628 Hence, we cannot say that the authors of sergüzeştnâmes did not turn their
thoughts inward or reveal nothing about their psychological inner self. The entire genre
of Sergüzeştnâmes cannot be judged as a mere reflection of social environment by
evaluating only one text. Abdülkadir Efendi’s narrative is one of the examples of a
self-conscious ego speaking about himself in the Ottoman literature of the genre. We
can say that the individual was at the center of his self-narrative. He narrated all his
social relations and network in order to give a complete picture of his struggle in life.
The social sphere was a supportive element in his narrative.
Abdülkadir Efendi might not disclose all the events in his life, all his doings and all
his feelings; however, he revealed more than one might expect to find. For instance,
he wrote about his negative feelings towards Yakup Haseki who hindered his
appointment. When his patron Osman Efendi was sent to Russia on an official duty,
Abdülkadir Efendi stayed in the capital in expectation of receiving an appointment. He
explained that there are various ways of doing jihad and his decision to stay in Istanbul
should not be interpreted wrongly. He wanted to highlight how pious and sincere he
was and at the same time how honorable his readers should perceive him to be. When
he could not get anything in return for the books he copied, he expressed his
disappointment by saying that he could not recoup even the money he spent on paper.
Serdaroğlu Coşkun also claimed that the aim of sergüzeştnâme is to emphasize a social
issue through examples from one’s own life, while the aim of the autobiography is to
narrate one’s own self.629 Her observation was based on statements made by the
authors in the sections on reasons for writing (sebeb-i telîf). Most of the Ottoman
627 Reynolds, Interpreting the Self, 74.
628 Amelang, “The Dilemmas of Studying Popular Autobiography,” 434.
629 Coşkun, Zaîfî’nin Sergüzeştnâmesi, 19-20.
136
literati used a common introductory theme when explaining their reasons for writingthat
of writing to provide a moral example for those who read it. As mentioned earlier
in this chapter, this could be a half-truth in that they might have used such themes to
justify their act of writing about themselves. There might be an aim of narrating one’s
self, one’s accomplishment or feelings behind the idea of emphasizing a social issue
through examples from one’s own life. Sergüzeştnâme writers used various techniques
and strategies “to circumvent the conventions and restrictions surrounding such
themes.”630 Abdülkadir Efendi certainly did not want to be invisible. In portraying his
life as an example for others, he wanted to show himself as a person who is talented,
honest, and guided by God. Being a scribe did not come easily. He strived hard to gain
that position. He worked in the environment of pashas and produced many works of
art to attract royal attention, but most of the time he returned empty-handed. In his
autobiography he communicated his experiences, cravings, disappointments and fears.
He also emphasized his qualifications and showed how his qualifications were
recognized and appreciated by the sultan and by his patrons. His autobiography served
as a way for him to depict himself in the image he wanted to reveal.
630 Meier, “Ego-Documents in Early-Modern Ottoman Syria,” 129.
137
CHAPTER III: THE SELF BEHIND THE TEDIOUSNESS OF
DAILY LIFE: THE DIARY OF SIDKIZÂDE MUSTAFA HAMİD
EFENDİ
An uncertain genre uneasily balanced between literary and historical writing, between
spontaneity of reportage and the reflectiveness of the crafted text, between selfhood
and events, between subjectivity and objectivity, between the private and the public ...
[it] constantly disturbs attempts to summarize its characteristics within formalized
boundaries. The diary is a misfit form of writing, inhabiting the frontiers between
many neighboring domains, often belonging simultaneously to several "genres" or
"species" and thus being condemned to exclusion from both at once.631
Scholars (literary specialists and historians) can be judged on their ability to deal
with diaries, which calls for attention to the form (or genre), context, and individual
subject simultaneously.632
The Diary is “a difficult-to-define genre.”633 Scholars mostly point out the ambiguous
situation of the diary and argue in terms of “What can be done with diaries?”634 The
diary can be described as a kind of private writing full of a “chronologically ordered
sequence of dated entries addressed to an unspecified audience.”635 Entries of the diary
are typically private/personal, unstructured, and prompt. Their defining characteristics
are sincerity and immediacy.636
The complex nature of the diary makes it hard for historians to define it. Formerly
diaries did not command the attention of scholars as sources; rather they were mostly
631 Rachael Langford and Russell West, “Introduction: Diaries and Margins” in Marginal Voices,
Marginal Forms: Diaries in European Literature and History, ed. Rachael Langford and Russell West
(Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1999), 8-9. The same passage was cited by David L. Ransel, “The Diary of a
Merchant: Insights into Eighteenth‐Century Plebeian Life,” The Russian Review 63, no:4 (2004), 595.
632 Paperno, “What Can Be Done With Diaries?” 573.
633 K. Eckhard Kuhn-Osius, “Making Loose Ends Meet: Private Journals in the Public Realm,” The
German Quarterly 54, no:2 (1981), 166.
634 Paperno, “What Can Be Done with Diaries?.”
635 Ibid., 562, fn. 9
636 Robert A. Fothergill, Private Chronicles: A study of English Diaries (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1974), 40.
138
used to retrieve information about some larger issues under discussion.637 This chapter
aims at introducing an Ottoman self-narrative, the diary of Sıdkızâde Mustafa Hamid
Efendi,638 as the main subject of study and show the way the author’s self is reflected
in it. Archival sources and chronicles will be used to back up the narrative whenever
necessary.
1. TOWARDS CONCEPTUALIZING OTTOMAN DIARY
The idea that the Ottomans did not produce diaries has already been confuted by some
important discoveries and the resulting studies. The existence of diaries in Ottoman
literature was already known as various researchers discovered Ottoman diaries
independently of each other. As mentioned in the introductory chapter to this
dissertation, Zilfi studied the diary of a scholar, Sıdkı Mustafa, who wrote about his
struggles to obtain a career in ilmiye. He wrote at length about the appointments and
dismissal of scholars.639
Kemal Beydilli published another diary produced in the beginning of the nineteenth
century.640 The diary of Mehmed Efendi, who worked as the imam of Soğanağa
Mosque, covers a four-year-period between 1810 and 1814. In it Mehmed Efendi
refers to himself as biz(im)/kendimiz (we, our, ourselves), but when he talks about his
son, for instance, he uses the word oğlum (my son) using the first person singular
possessive suffix -m.641 Mehmed Efendi kept records of political events, dismissals,
appointments, weather condition and fires, as well as what happened in his
neighborhood and in his own family. Births and deaths in the neighborhood, the
appointment of an acquaintance would be recorded in the diary. He even recorded the
concubines bought by his neighbors Hüseyin Bey and Emin Efendi. He did not forget
to add details about the skin-color and prices of those concubines.642 He recorded
637 David L. Ransel, “The Diary of a Merchant,” 599.
638 Sıdkızâde Mustafa Hamid Efendi, Millet Yazma Eserler Kütüphanesi, MS Ali Emiri Efendi Tarih
570. [hereafter, Sıdkızâde]. An edition of the diary will be published by the author of this dissertation.
639 Zilfi, “The Diary of a Müderris.”
640 Kemal Beydilli, Osmanlı Döneminde İmamlar ve Bir İmamın Günlüğü (İstanbul: TATAV, 2001).
641 Ibid., 202.
642 Ibid., 235.
139
family events: births, deaths,643 the education of his own children.644 He even noted
the day his chickens hatched.645
Scholars mostly treated Ottoman diaries as “secondary”646 sources to extract
information about some broader subject. Self-narratives were mostly used to support
information gained from “noteworthy/serious” sources. Except for a couple of studies
on Ottoman diaries, diary genre would be specified as unimportant by conventional
scholars. As Kafadar puts it, narrative sources were treated as a subsidiary by
Ottomanists who were looking for statistical data in relation to specific events.
Therefore, compared to sources retrieved from the state achieves, the value of narrative
sources as expressions of mental attitudes was largely ignored.647 Kafadar nevertheless
studied a seventeenth-century diary in his influential article published in 1989. He
opened a way to formulate “new approaches to the history of mentalities and
perception of the self.”648 He introduced the reader to a diary that offers a very lively
account of “social networks, the web of spaces and forms of sociability spun by a
dervish in seventeenth-century Istanbul and his day-to-day attitude to life.”649 The
important thing is that Kafadar situated Ottoman self-narratives in general and diaries
in particular among the studies on ego-documents/ self-narratives made in Europe and
elsewhere. His seminal study, therefore, opened the way for further research.
Following Kafadar, his student Derin Terzioğlu studied the diary of Niyazi Mısrî in
great detail. Like Kafadar, Terzioğlu did not confine herself to discussing the diary of
Niyazi Mısrî; she contextualized Ottoman Sufi self-narratives and presented a detailed
discussion of that literature. According to Terzioğlu, Ottoman Sufis had an advantage
over the other literate minority in that Sufism used a good deal of erudite vocabulary
to talk about themselves as well as giving a reason for writing about themselves, sayinf
a person could only know God if he knows himself. 650 Terzioğlu stated that Ottoman
643 Beydilli, Osmanlı Döneminde İmamlar, 221.
644 Ibid., 99.
645 Ibid., 235.
646 Kafadar discussed how narrative/literary sources (mostly found in manuscript libraries) assumed a
secondary role compared to archival sources providing concrete data on economic and social life, see
Kafadar, “Self and Others,” 122-123.
647 Kafadar, “Self and Others,” 122.
648 Ibid., 125.
649 Ibid.
650 Terzioğlu, “Man in the Image of God in the Image of Times,” 142.
140
Sufi writers were different from their medieval counterparts in that they included
information about their daily lives and family issues and wrote about their friends and
acquaintances., The signs of worldly time were very noticeable in their narratives
which in turn signaled the emergence of a literary form used by Sufis, that is the
diary.651
Niyazi Mısrî was in his early sixties when he began to compose his diary on the island
of Lemnos. He was banished first to Rhodes and then to Lemnos as he got into trouble
with the government because of the Kadızadeli controversy. He was not officially in
prison, being released from the fortress of Lemnos in 1678. However, he did not go
back to Bursa because of security concerns; instead, he lived in the Harbor Mosque in
Lemnos without leaving the courtyard even once.652 Terzioğlu wrote that unusual
features of the diary had very much to do with the unusual circumstances in which
Mısrî lived and wrote. His practice of keeping a diary was intimately connected with
his experiences in exile. He dated each entry by giving the number of days passed since
his first detention.653 Mısrî recorded in each entry how he spent his day. More
importantly he gave important insights into his emotional world. In accordance with
the central theme of the diary, that is exile/persecution, he mostly expressed his
feelings of fear, suspicion, frustration or anger. He expressed his greatest worries in a
rather striking way. He was afraid that his enemies would poison the water. If he saw
a new grave in the cemetery, he used to wonder whether that it was for him or a disciple
of his.654 Apart from his fears and suspicions, he also commented on Ottoman politics
and compared the current state of the dynasty to its past, similar to Ottoman
bureaucrats who wrote treatises on advice.655 While Mısrî’s diary can be taken as an
example of how the political, economic, and social structures of this world were
integrated into Sufi narratives, his diary is not completely oriented towards this world.
His diary negotiates between this world and the other world as the text was written
651 Terzioğlu, “Man in the Image of God in the Image of Times,” 148.
652 Ibid., 150-151.
653 Ibid., 151.
654 Ibid., 153.
655 Ibid., 155.
141
under hard conditions in this world in order to find a divine explanation for and recover
from those bad circumstances.656
Selim Karahasanoğlu studied the diary of a judge who left a record of twenty-four
years of his life between 1711 and 1735. His book on Sadreddinzâde Telhisî Mustafa
Efendi’s diary is noteworthy in that he placed the diary in a wider context using the
literature on self-narratives and took up the conceptualization of Ottoman diaries
where Kafadar and Terzioğlu left off. He used the diary as “the primary” source to
uncover the self and life of an Ottoman judge, providing a model on how to use an
Ottoman diary for historical research.657 Sadreddinzâde’s diary covers a period of
twenty-four years. Karahasanoğlu interpreted this diligence of Sadreddinzâde as being
a passion. More than that, Sadreddinzâde must have been inspired by his environment
to keep a diary and his effort must have been part of an established tradition.658
Karahasanoğlu noted that his diary must have been connected to the emergence and
spread of genres such as autobiography and memoir.659 Sadreddinzâde’s entries give
an insight into the professional, social, and private life of an Ottoman judge. He
revealed information about appointments, weather conditions, earthquakes, fires, and
travel conditions. He recorded his impressions of cities like Manisa, Diyarbakır,
Plovdiv.660 While his records during his tenure as judge provided insight into how his
life was shaped around his profession,661 his entries as a dismissed judge revealed how
he spent his days in Istanbul.662 What is striking about Sadreddinzâde’s diary is that
its blank sheets were used by someone called Sadık who not only used the diary to
record his own records but also commented on some of Sadreddinzâde’s entries. He
somehow interacted with the previous author of the diary and even quarreled with
him.663 Sadık’s using Sadreddinzâde’s diary is very significant in showing the
656 Terzioğlu, “Man in the Image of God in the Image of Times,” 165.
657 Selim Karahasanoğlu, Kadı ve Günlüğü: Sadreddinzâde Telhisî Mustafa Efendi Günlüğü. Also see
Fazıl Işıközlü, "Başbakanlık Arşivi’nde Yeni Bulunmuş Olan ve Sadreddinzâde Telhîsî Mustafa Efendi
Tarafından Tutulduğu Anlaşılan H. 1123 (1711)-1148 (1735) Yıllarına Ait Bir Ceride (Jurnal) ve
Eklentisi.”; İsmail Erünsal,"Bir Osmanli Efendisi'nin Günlüğü: Sadreddinzâde Telhisi Mustafa Efendi
ve Ceridesi," Kaynaklar 2 (1984): 77-81.
658 Karahasanoğlu, Kadı ve Günlüğü, 33.
659 Ibid., 33.
660 Ibid., 69-77.
661 Ibid., 80-82
662 Ibid., 83-119.
663 Ibid., 183-189.
142
continuity of the practice of diary keeping in Ottoman literature as well as in displaying
that keeping a diary was not an unusual practice when a person had the means and the
tools to write with.664
Having discussed the researches done on Ottoman diaries up till now, how can we
define an Ottoman diary? It is worth underlining in the beginning that the remarkable
divergence in the form and content of personal diaries clearly shows that the Ottoman
diary was not a corpus with precise features known by all Ottoman diarists. The
structure of the Ottoman diary seems to derive from some forms of record-keeping
prevalent in Ottoman literary and professional circles; the structure of the diary is
linked to mecmua, ruzname, takvim, and account book. The Ottoman diary seems to
have originated from and stood in-between these different genres and combined many
aspects of each. Thus, the boundary between them is blurred because of the hazy areas
of interaction and their obscurity.665 We need to see the Ottoman diary “as just one of
a whole matrix of possible genre classifications.”666 Amelang‘s ideas on artisan
autobiography is also valid for the diary. He notes that “there was no such thing as a
‘typical,’ much less ‘model’ … and that it would be a mistake to try to reduce such a
complex series of cultural exercises to a handful of broad rules or observations.”667
Given such a context of flexibility and the difficulty of defining the characteristics of
the Ottoman diary, we can say that the diarist infused/filled different forms with a
sense of self and consequently provided insight into the lives of Ottomans (Istanbulite,
male, and Sunni for this discussion). Accordingly, the value of using such pieces for
historical studies involves understanding the importance of how the diarists adopted
and adapted the established/conventional forms prevalent at the time and predominant
in their professional and literary circles.668 Hence, it was up to the diarist to shape the
content and form according to his background, education, and profession. The scribe,
for example, wrote his dreams into official papers,669 the governor wrote his dreams
664 For an analysis of Sadık’s diary, see Karahasanoğlu, Kadı ve Günlüğü, 190-201.
665Andrew Hassam, Writing and Reality: A Study of Modern British Diary Fiction (Westport:
Greenwood Publishing Group, 1993), 20-21.
666 Ibid., 20.
667 Amelang, The Flight of Icarus, 3.
668 Steven Stowe, “Making Sense of Letters and Diaries,” History Matters: The U.S. Survey on the Web
(2002), iii, accessed November 1, 2021, http://historymatters.gmu.edu/mse/letters/letters.pdf.
669 Fleischer, “Secretaries’ Dreams,” 80.
143
into a private notebook made from official papers,670 the teacher wrote his daily
records among many entries of appointments and dismissals.671 As Millim notes, the
diary is a cultural product of the society within which it was produced, and it “always
reflects the material circumstances of its creation.”672
Given that it is difficult to make a clear-cut definition for Ottoman diaries, it is still
important to answer the question of what it meant for an Ottoman individual to keep a
diary? What can one find in an Ottoman diary? What were the main features? The
dullness of daily life is the most noticeable characteristic of Ottoman diaries, as one
might expect. The diarists mostly gave daily accounts of getting dressed, personal
hygiene, visiting, hosting, weather report, financial reckonings, and medical formulas.
Still, such an account of monotonous daily doings may constitute the main value of
these sources, showing how people usually spent their time.673 The diary was also a
tool for the diarist to write his own version of history as the diarists sometimes gave
lively accounts of political, social, and financial events they witnessed. The
enthronement of a sultan, the assassination of a grand vizier, or high prices at the
market could be the day’s leitmotif. Sometimes diary entries were primarily shaped by
the diarist’s occupation. Expectation of being appointed to a good situation, for
instance, can be understood from numerous entries on the appointments and dismissals
of colleagues.
1.6. Comparing An Ottoman Diary with Examples Outside the Ottoman Empire
In what ways is an Ottoman diary similar to or different from the diaries produced in
Europe and elsewhere? Here, I will provide information about a series of diaries
written between seventeenth and nineteenth centuries by people from different
countries and backgrounds in order to compare these with Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s
diary.
670 For a discussion on the dreams of Kulakzâde Mahmud Paşa, see the first chapter of this dissertaion.
671 Zilfi, “The Diary of a Müderris.”
672 Anne-Marie Millim, The Victorian Diary: Authorship and Emotional Labour (London: Routledge,
2016), 5.
673 Ransel, “The Diary of a Merchant,” 600; Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale: The Life of
Martha Ballard, Based on Her Diary, 1785-1812 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1990), 9.
144
A seventeenth-century diary written by Constantijn Huygens Jr., secretary to the
Stadholder-King William of Orange covers a long period between 1649 and 1696 and
offers a special insight into the social and political life in England and Holland in the
seventeenth century.674 An important aspect of his diary is its immediacy. He kept
record of events immediately after their occurrence.675 He also had a keen interest on
watches in that he recorded several entries on the purchase or repair of clocks and
watches. Huygens kept records of every event in his professional and private life in
great detail and revealed his personal observations, thoughts and feelings in an honest
way.676 Huygens enjoyed recording gossip. He kept mainly records of gossip about
secret love affairs and sexual encounters learned from his wife and elsewhere.677 When
he was away from home, his wife Susanna sent him letters informing him about the
events in the household in Holland such as hiring a servant,678 natural events like
earthquakes,679 and sometimes warned her husband to be more careful or not to trust
one of his friends.680 Huygens had a troublesome relationship with his son, Tien.
Huygens wanted his son to have a good education and put pressure on him. However,
he could not control his son’s bad behaviors. In his diary, he described many
confrontations between father and the son.681 Servants were a significant part of the
Huygens household. The size of the household and the number of servants were an
important indication of wealth and influence. He recorded numerous details about
everyday experiences with his servants; their relationship to them, their wages, hiring
and dismissals.682 Huygens also recorded a great deal about his professional life in the
service of King William. Like every courtier, Huygens observed the king’s every
action, mood and gesture. He recorded the king’s treatment of other officials and
courtiers.683 The diarist also noted the king’s interest in him. Whenever the king asked
674 Rudolf Dekker, Family, Culture and Society in the Diary of Constantijn Huygens Jr, Secretary to
Stadholder-King William of Orange (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 3.
675 Ibid., 2.
676 Helmer Helmers, “Review of Family, Culture and Society in the Diary of Constantijn Huygens Jr,
Secretary to Stadholder-King William of Orange,” accessed November 10, 2021,
https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/1508.
677 Dekker, Family, Culture and Society, 120-1.
678 Ibid., 143.
679 Ibid., 51.
680 Ibid., 164.
681 Ibid., 151-56.
682 Ibid., 141-50.
683 Ibid., 60.
145
about his wife, son and brothers he writes it down.684 He also observed the moods of
the queen. He might record a short conversation with the queen or write a note like
“She greeted me first, laughing.”685
One of the most famous European diaries was the one written by Samuel Pepys who
lived in London and worked as the secretary to Edward Montagu, a Councilor of State
and a relative of Pepys. Pepys was well educated, but it was his affiliation with
Montagu that had served to find him a position in government. He wrote in his diary
for nine years between 1660 and 1669. His reports were very informative. He took
great care to be clear and thorough. He explained obscure references and corrected
errors, identified people and places in parenthetical notes. He did not neglect to note
his personal reflections on what he narrated; e.g. “which pleases me very well,” or “of
which I am glad.”686 He recorded all kind of public and private events. He incorporated
in his diary an outline of each day and reported the news. Developments in the office,
pleasurable activities or annoyances, his ideas, angers, or sexual attempts-anything
could find its way into his records in the diary.687 Pepys usually wrote lengthy entries
displaying his personal observations, feelings and character enabling the reader to
enter into his world.
Martha Ballard was born in the small town of Oxford in Massachusetts in 1735 and
moved to Hallowell (Maine) in 1777 with her husband Ephrahim. Martha Ballard was
a midwife and helped the birthing processes of hundreds of women. She kept a diary
covering twenty-seven years from 1785 to 1812. She was a faithful diarist. Most of her
entries were short and to the point. She dated each entry in the margins she ruled on
the left of each page.688 She recorded the births she helped with, carefully registering
each medical case. Apart from her entries on medical help, she gave information on
her daily household activities such as weaving, 689 producing yarns and textiles.690 She
consistently recorded the weather.691 The other consistent category in the diary of
684 Dekker, Family, Culture and Society, 66.
685 Ibid., 62.
686 Fothergill, Private Chronicles, 98. As in the case of Sıdkızâde Mustafa Hamid Efendi who sometimes
reflected his ideas and feelings as “I became so happy” or “I was so glad.”
687 Ibid., 99.
688 Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale, 21.
689 Ibid., 80.
690 Ibid., 87.
691 Ibid., 91. Ottoman diarists also liked recording weather reports.
146
Ballard was recording the identity of visitors or persons visited.692 Dull daily tasks and
exhausting repetition was the strength of her diary, representing the life of a midwife
in all its fullness.693
Russian merchant Ivan Tolchënov’s diary was another curious example produced in
the 18th century. Tolchënov kept his three-volume diary for forty-three years between
1769 and 1812. At the beginning, the diary was a record of the author’s travels, the
daily activities of visiting and entertaining visitors, family events and remarkable
sights.694 As time passed, politics found its way into the entries of the diary, as
Tolchenov wanted to establish himself as a powerful personage. In 1773, he married
the daughter of a merchant family from Moscow.695 Tolchenov left a dull record of his
marriage only describing major events such as signing the marriage contract and the
time of the wedding banquet.696 From then on, he became the head of his own
household.697 Ivan reported exclusively on his business activities. He described his
visits and his visitors, and also the banquets took place in his garden. He recorded his
travels and even noted the exact time of arrivals and departures.698 He noted the periods
he was away from home. He also reported on the births and the deaths in the household.
When giving such information he recorded the exact time.699 He showed not a glimpse
of emotion when recording the deaths of his children who died in a few months after
birth. However, he showed tense emotion when his eight-year-old son and the nearly
one-year-old daughter got sick. He described fully the period of sickness and finally
the death of their lovely daughter. He wrote how emotionally affected he was by the
demise of that lovely child. 700 Tolchenov left a lively account of his life, from
recording daily events to life in the family, from financial activities to religious
practices, from successes to failures.
692 Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale, 91.
693 Ibid., 9.
694 David Ransel, A Russian Merchant’s Tale: The Life and Adventures of Ivan Alekseevich Tolchënov,
Based on His Diary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), 29.
695 Ibid., 19.
696 Ibid., 19-20.
697 Ibid., 21.
698 Ibid., 78. Kulakzâde Mahmud Pasha also recorded his travels and sometimes wrote exact time of
arrivals.
699 Ibid., 78.
700 Ibid., 126-7.
147
This little survey of diaries written outside the Ottoman Empire reveal that their
similarities with Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s diary in terms of content and form. As in the
examples cited above, Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s entries were all dated. He indicated
the time at the end of the entries. Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s style resembles Ballard’s
style in that his entries were short and to the point. His longest entry was about his
marriage and his father’s appointment as the chief mufti. Like Ballard, Mustafa Hamid
Efendi was very attentive to weather conditions and also natural events.
Like Tolchenov and Huygens, he had an interest in watches. He recorded several times
that he was given valuable watches as gifts. He also showed his interest on watches
and time by giving the exact time of some important events. All these three diarists
possibly carried their pocket watches with them and recorded events immediately. As
in the case of all the diaries examined above, Mustafa Hamid Efendi revealed lots of
detail about household issues; he wrote about servants, how he hired them, for what
reasons he dismissed them, and the troubles he had with those servants. He recorded
births and deaths. As in the case of Tolchenov, he did not show any sign of emotions
after the death of a little child. He also gave lots of details about his daily life, his
excursions in the vicinity of Istanbul, the banquets he attended, his visits and his
visitors. He wrote about his official duties and appointments. He recorded some
political events if they were related to Sıdkızâde household. Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s
diary is different from these diaries cited above in that some of them were more
talkative on private issues like illicit love affairs or sexual relationships. Diarists like
Pepys and Huygens were more open about their personal observations and thoughts.
It is easier for the researchers to reach into the private world and feelings of those
diarists.
1.1. On the Diary and Its Author
Diaries can yield a wealth of information about the experiences and values of its author
and the community in which he lived. By finding shifts over time in patterns seen in
the repetitious daily accounts of visiting, hosting and observing, historians may gain
insight into the life of a community and into the social and personal identity of the
diarist and those near to him.701
701 Ransel, “The Diary of a Merchant,” 608.
148
Ulrich’s study on Martha Ballard’s diary and Ransel’s study on a merchant’s diary
opened up a view of their lives and provided a model for working with early modern
diaries. These two researchers wanted to recreate their diarists as individuals in the
social environment and the historical context in which they lived. Mustafa Hamid
Efendi, like the midwife of Ulrich’s book and the merchant of Ransel’s study, kept his
diary in the early nineteenth century and wrote about his daily experiences, activities,
emotions, and reflections that he as an individual experienced throughout a day. The
diarist wrote down his experiences because he considered them to be noteworthy and
significant. Outings, dinner parties, purchases, appointments, accepting gifts, showing
anger, or the joy of a birth- the sum of all of such experiences and the way they were
recorded in the diary gives us a chance to uncover the personal traits and character of
the diarist.
Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s diary is composed of forty-four folios covering
approximately six years between 1822 and 1828 with a long break of three years
between 1824 and 1827. After this break, he wrote very little, but those entries are very
important in that one can learn much about the diarist’s self through detailed records
of his marriage. We can say that the diary has two endings; one took place in 1824
when he wrote his last entry for that year on distributing alms (zekat). He suddenly
gave up taking notes and did not write another word until 1827 when he was on the
eve of marriage. During this long break important political events took place, such as
the abolition of the Janissary Corps in 1826. More importantly however, in the same
year he lost his daughter, Saliha Sabite, who died at the age of four on 9 Şevval 1241
(17 May 1826).702 He did not record this unfortunate event. As will be mentioned later
in this chapter, we can understand the love Mustafa Hamid Efendi felt for his little
daughter from the importance he attached to recording her birth and the rituals that
followed. The fact that there is no record of her death in the diary must be closely
related to Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s motivations for writing. He liked to record happy
events rather than depressing ones. After a while, very exciting events which happened
in his life -like the time his father was appointed as the chief mufti- must have pushed
702 Hüseyin Kutlu, Kaybolan Medeniyetimiz: Hekimoğlu Ali Paşa Haziresi’ndeki Tarihi Mezar Taşları
(Istanbul: Damla Yayınevi, 2005), 161. Saliha Sabite was four years old when she died according to the
date found on her grave stone.
149
him to start to write in his diary again. We can say that the ending that took place in
1824 was not a formal one. It was like “to be continued in the next episode.”703 The
next episode continued with his marriage with Ziynet Ziba Hatun. He had found a
motivation for writing again. After narrating the whole engagement and marriage
procedures they had been through, he once again stopped writing in 1827. After that,
he returned to his diary by fits and starts, but he only recorded some financial issues.
The blank sheets of the diary served him as a place for financial accounts.
In his diary there are some three hundred and forty entries of varying lengths. The
diary was probably numbered later. He divided his diary into months and indicated
each month on the upper part of the page beginning “this month.” He was not a faithful
diarist as he did not write every day. He turned to his diary when important events
happened; the birth of a baby, an earthquake or fire, a gift sent by an acquaintance, or
a visit from a member of the upper echelons of the palace. After giving a three-year
break, he ended up dividing his diary into monthly sequences. He started his entries
by indicating “this day” and they became very scattered. As Marilyn Himmesoëte
commented about French teenagers’ diaries, the diary had its own rhythm created by
the author. The diary writer was to decide whether to record every day or once in a
week or to keep silent for three years.704 Every month, Mustafa Hamid Efendi recorded
an average of nineteen entries. In the first month, he recorded fifty-one entries, but the
number of entries diminished every month. There is no interaction between entries.
The entries made on any day were like unplanned pictures, as Ponsonby noted,
snapshot, rough and spontaneous but such pictures catch the atmosphere that a
carefully organized photograph cannot provide.705
The name of diarist is not given in the first folios of the diary. But it was not hard to
decipher his identity as he gave the name of his brother on the very first folio, which
is not numbered.706 On the following page, he wrote a lengthy paragraph about his
703 Philippe Lejeune, “How Do Diaries End?,” in On Diary, ed. Jeremy D. Popkin and Julie Rak
(Honolulu: University of Hawai Press, 2009), 188.
704 Marilyn Himmesoëte, “Writing and Measuring Time: Nineteenth-Century French Teenagers’
Diaries,” in Controlling Time and Shaping the Self: Developments in Autobiographical Writing Since
the Sixteenth Century, ed. J. Arianne Baggerman, Rudolf M. Dekker, and Michael James Mascuch
(Leiden: Brill, 2011), 151.
705 Arthur Ponsonby, English Diaries: A Review of English Diaries from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth
Century with an Introduction on Diary Writing (London: Methuen and Co. Ltd., 1923), 33.
706 I will refer to this folio as “first (unnumbered) folio.”
150
father’s being invited to the palace by Sultan Mahmud II and his appointment as
şeyhülislam on 11 November 1823.707 According to the information given, the diarist
was the son of a şeyhülislam and brother of Mehmed Rıfat Efendi (d.1875). After brief
research in the secondary literature, the diarist’s name was deciphered. He was
Sıdkızâde Mustafa Hamid Efendi, son of Şeyhülislam Sıdkızâde Ahmed Reşid Efendi
(d. 1834).708 Mustafa Hamid Efendi wrote his name very late in folio 22a when
recording his appointment as müderris with the rank of ibtida-i altmışlı (a medrese
rank with a daily payment of sixty akçe) 709
Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s diary may not give information about his whole life, but it
discloses a very detailed account of the years that it covered. We know that he started
to keep a record in his diary just before his appointment as a teacher at İskenderpaşa
Medrese on 13 Şevval 1238 (23 June 1823) when he was climbing up the career ladder
and rising to the hierarchy with ease and comfort.710 Hence, diary depicts a burgeoning
career from its early stages. In the diary, there is no mention of his early career and
education. Being the son of a powerful member of the ulama was an important factor
for personal success. Those who were born into an ulama family usually received their
first education privately from their father and then entered the ranks of ilmiye. Mustafa
Hamid Efendi’s education was probably no exception to this. According to the
information given in the diary, he was continuing to receive education from his father
even after he was appointed as a teacher. For instance, he wrote on 7 Rebiülahir 1239
(11 December 1823) that he had begun to read the book of Halebî with his father.711
Sıdkızâde Ahmed Reşid Efendi must have continued his close observation of the
education and career of his sons. As a young müderris, therefore, Mustafa Hamid
Efendi probably benefited from his parent’s unlimited support; Ahmed Reşid Efendi
must have used his influential position in the ilmiye and his power to ensure a
707 Sıdkızâde, 1a.
708 Sicill-i Osmani, II, 600; Bursalı Mehmed Tahir, Osmanlı Müellifleri, ed. A. Fikri Yavuz and İsmail
Özen, vol. 3 (İstanbul: Meral Yayınevi, 1972), 178. [hereafter Osmanlı Müellifleri, I-II-III]
709 Sıdkızâde, 22a. For medrese ranks, see İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Devletinin İlmiye Teşkilatı
(Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Basımevi, 1965), 271-281; Ahmed Cevdet Paşa, Tarih-i Cevdet, vol. 1
(Istanbul: Üçdal Neşriyat, 1976), 157.
710 Sıdkızâde, 15a.
711 Ibid., 29b. The book of Halebî mentioned in the diary was probably İbrahim b. Muhammed Halebî’s
Mülteka’l-Ebhur. Halebi’s work was one of the main sources of Hanefi fıqh in the Ottoman Empire,
used as a reference guide by judges and professors. Şükrü Selim Has, “Halebî İbrahim b. Muhammed,”
DİA, vol. 15, 231-2; Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Devletinin İlmiye Teşkilatı, 22.
151
successful career for his sons.712 As we see, his sons rapidly progressed in their careers
After working in a number of important medreses with the respected rank of teacher,
Mustafa Hamid Efendi was appointed judge of Eyüp in 1249 (1833/34) and in 1261
(1845) as chief qadi (judge) in Egypt, residing in Cairo, Finally he became the judge
of Mecca in 1263 (1846/47).713 His brother Mehmed Rıfat Efendi was appointed to be
judge in Damascus in 1250 (1834/35) and he was given the honorary rank of Mecca
in 1262 (1845/46). Having acted as the judge of Istanbul, he moved to become he chief
military judge of Anatolia in 1272 (1855/56) and finally became the chief military
judge of Rumelia in 1278 (1861/62).
1.2. On the Concepts
Another significant question to be asked is, “What did the author think he was
writing?” Why did he write in diary form? Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s diary is to be found
in Istanbul Millet Library. It is titled “Târîhe Dair Vekâyî” in the digital catalog of the
library. This title parallels the title given by Bursalı Mehmed Tahir in Osmanlı
Müellifleri where Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s piece was titled “Târîhe Müte‘allik
Mecmua-i Ma‘ârif.”714 These later titles deserve attention because Bursalı Mehmed
Tahir was a person belonging to the Ottoman intellectual world. As Makdisi indicates
(and also Tiringly touches on this issue in her article), the medieval Arabic diaries were
named Târîh. They were basically scrapbooks in which information was recorded to
fix dates later to be used for biographical histories.715 According to Terzioğlu, the
Ottoman diary is not precisely following the medieval Arabic examples, but it still
employs the forms of various literary genres such as autobiography or annalistic
histories.716 That later titles included the word “Târîh” was compatible with its
medieval predecessors. Makdisi notes that the term had the implication of “fixing the
month,” “fixing the period of an event,” and it had to do with “fixing the beginning of
the month.”717 Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s diary supported this idea in that he was very
712 For the privileged position of the children of high-ranking ulama, see Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı
Devletinin İlmiye Teşkilatı, 71-75.
713 Sicill-i Osmani, II, 600.
714 Osmanlı Müellifleri, III, 178.
715 George Makdisi, “The Diary in Islamic Historiography: Some notes,” History and Theory 25, no:2
(1986), 175; Terzioğlu, “Man in the Image of God in the Image of Times,” 148.
716 Terzioğlu, “Man in the Image of God in the Image of Times,” 148.
717 Makdisi, “The Diary in Islamic Historiography,” 176.
152
careful to fix the beginning of each month. He divided his piece into monthly
sequences and wrote the entries accordingly. He always appended the exact date after
each entry.
The title that was given to the diary by Bursalı Mehmed Tahir also includes the word
mecmua. On the very first page, Mustafa Hamid Efendi himself also called his work
mecmua. Terzioğlu writes that the mixed character of Ottoman diaries can be
understood from the different titles given to them. Some called their works cerîde,
mecmua, yevmiye, vâkı‘ât while others used rather different titles such as sohbetnâme.
718 András J. Riedlmayer described mecmua as impromptu compiles, resembling
to commonplace books or scrapbooks, formed through drawing material from various
sources like letters, religious texts, astrological works or poems.719 Indeed, an Ottoman
mecmua can be described as a personal notebook with diverse contents. Mecmua
writers mostly compiled poems, prayers, hadiths, or letters according to their interests.
Some compilers also included personal notes on daily affairs or recorded important
events like the birth of a child, death of a loved one, or natural events like earthquakes
or storms.720 Mecmua had very rich and diverse content designed individually by its
compiler and Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s piece had certain points in common with that
genre. However, the work at hand diverges from other mecmuas as it is not a
compilation of the works of others. It was meant to be a personal notebook for writing
down important information; it turned out to be a daily record of events. According to
Terzioğlu, “segments of the Ottoman literati indulged in certain practices of reading
and writing that were conducive to autobiography in the broader sense of writing about
oneself.”721 She showed that Ottoman mecmuas provided their owner with a place for
recording personal notes and writing their autobiography.722
Steven Stowe states that personal motives and backgrounds suggest a great deal about
how the diarist made use of the knowledge and materials at hand to preserve his
718 Terzioğlu, “Man in the Image of God in the Image of Times,” 148-149.
719 András J. Riedlmayer, “Ottoman Copybooks of Correspondence and Miscellanies as a Source for
Political and Cultural History,” Acta Orientalia Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 61 (2008), 201-2.
720 For an example, see Kerima Filan, “Saraybosnalı Molla Mustafa’nın Mecmuası Işığında Bir
Osmanlının Topluma Bakışı,” in Mecmua: Osmanlı Edebiyatının Kırkambarı, ed. Hatice Aynur,
Müjgan Çakır, Hanife Koncu, Selim S. Kuru, Ali Emre Özyıldırım (Istanbul: Turkuaz Yayınları, 2012),
271-90.
721 Terzioğlu, “Autobiography in Fragments,” 85.
722 Ibid., 86.
153
innermost experiences in writing.723 Mustafa Hamid Efendi belonged to an important
ulama household. His father, Sıdkızâde Ahmed Reşid Efendi, had been working in the
ilmiye cadres for many years. The diarist himself also worked as müderris and in his
later years as qadi.724 Official duties probably obliged his father, being at the very top
of the hierarchy, to keep records of daily official activities. For example, qadis noted
court decisions in kadı sicili; the chief military judges kept records of appointments
and dismissals.725 His choice of diary form may have resulted from his familiarity with
such a daily record-keeping business which required continuity and a certain
discipline. As a member of the ilmiye he must have been aware of the official recordkeeping
methods in that the style of the diary bears a resemblance to the style of the
appointment records of müderris and qadis (mülazemet kayıtları) as well as qadi
registers. The diarist added such appointment records among the many entries of daily
concerns. Like the mülazemet registers, some of his appointment entries are very brief
without any comment or personal opinion.
The diarist was more than an ordinary literate person. As said before, he was a part of
the centuries-old ilmiye tradition and familiar with the literary works, forms, and styles
that shaped that tradition. In the diary, for instance, he gives the name of some books
he read as part of his education. One of the books he read, for instance, was İbrahim
b. Muhammed Halebî’s Mülteka’l-Ebhur. This work was one of the main sources of
the Hanefi fıqh used as a reference guide by judges and professors. The other book in
his reading list was by the famous ulama Molla Fenârî.726 He did not give the exact
title, but it must be el-Fevâ’idü’l-Fenâriyye, a book of logic widely taught in the
Ottoman medreses until the last periods.727 In the diary, he uses uncomplicated
language. His use of language does not illustrate his level of education. At the time of
writing his diary, Mustafa Hamid Efendi was at the very beginning of his career and
apparently still continuing his education. Therefore, he had a long time ahead in which
723 Stowe, “Making Sense of Letters and Diaries,” iii.
724 Sicill-i Osmani, II, 600.
725 Yunus Uğur, “Şer‘iyye Sicilleri,” DİA, vol. 39, 8-11.
726 Sıdkızâde, 34a.
727 For a survey of the books read in the medreses of Istanbul, see Bilgin Aydın and Ekrem Tak, “XVII.
Yüzyılda İstanbul Medreselerinde Okutulan Kitaplar (Tereke Kayıtları Üzerine Bir Deneme),” Dil ve
Edebiyat Araştırmaları 19 (2019): 183-236; İbrahim Hakkı Aydın, “Molla Fenârî,” DİA, vol. 30, 245-
7.
154
to achieve language of a high level of sophistication. On top of that, the cursory nature
of the diary genre might not be suitable for showing his intellectual abilities.
So far, few Ottoman diaries that were written before the Tanzimat period have been
discovered. Two of these diaries were produced by members of the same family.728
Sıdkızâde Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s grandfather, Sıdkı Mustafa Efendi, also composed
a diary when he was a young müderris.729 Sıdkı Mustafa Efendi’s diary covered a
seven-year period between 1749-1756. He mostly recorded appointments and
dismissals of colleagues and left a narrative of his early efforts to obtain a career in the
ilmiye.730 There is no clue in the diary about this earlier record-keeping activity of his
forefather; we do not know for sure, therefore, whether Sıdkızâde Mustafa Hamid
Efendi had a chance to read it or not. However, the similarity in their content and form
suggests that he might have been familiar with the diary produced by his late
grandfather around seventy years before.731 Even if he did not know about earlier
examples, he lived in an environment enabling him to share his experiences and
knowledge with earlier scholars. He chose to speak through creating an
autobiographical text.732 In brief, he was no stranger to diary form nor to other recordkeeping
practices.
728 Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s father Sıdkızâde Ahmed Reşid Efendi was the son of Sıdkı Mustafa Efendi.
See Orhan Okay, “Hatırat,” DİA, vol. 16, 445-9; 2015. Sicill-i Osmani, V, 1506; Mehmet İpşirli,
“Ahmed Reşid Efendi,” DİA, vol. 2, 122-3; Öztuna, Devletler ve Hanedanlar, 829.
729 There is a confusion in the literature about the father of Sıdkızâde Ahmed Reşid Efendi. In Sicill-i
Osmani, Mehmed Süreyya noted that Ahmed Reşid Efendi was the son of Sıdkı Efendi who was the
judge of the army. Yılmaz Öztuna, in his Devletler and Hanedanlar, gave similar information and
identified the father of Sıdkızâde Ahmed Reşid Efendi as Mustafa Sıdkı Efendi who served as the judge
of the imperial army. The information given by Mehmet İpşirli creates a confusion. He wrote that
Ahmed Reşid Efendi’s father was Mehmed Sıdkı Efendi. İpşirli gave no further information on the
identity of the father. Hence, this information leads one to suspect that Mehmed Sıdkı and Mustafa Sıdkı
were different persons. However, Orhan Okay’s article clarifies the issue. Okay noted that Ahmed Reşid
Efendi’s father was known as Mehmed (Mustafa) Sıdkı who wrote a diary. It seems that the judge of
the imperial army Sıdkı Efendi had two names. All things considered; we can say that Ahmed Reşid
Efendi’s father was Sıdkı Mustafa Efendi who kept a diary.
730 Kafadar, “Self and Others,” 129; Zilfi, “The Diary of a Müderris,” 161-2.
731 Sıdkı Mustafa Efendi, İstanbul Üniversitesi Nadir Eserler Kütüphanesi, MS Türkçe 10985; Also see
Ali Aslan, “18. Yüzyıl Osmanlı İlim Hayatından Bir Kesit: Sıdkı Mustafa Efendi’nin Günlüğü,” (M.A.
thesis, Istanbul University, 2015).
732 Jancke, "Autobiography as Social Practice,” 68.
155
1.3. Motivation for Writing
What was his motivation for writing? Why did he decide to leave a record of significant
incidents in his life and his family? Was it a practical need to keep records of his daily
activities that motivated Mustafa Hamid Efendi to keep a diary? Perhaps a need for
order motivated him for preserving his daily experiences in written form.733 When it
comes to the diary- barely studied by historians of the Ottoman Empire- questions are
easier to ask than to find answers. The reason for writing seems to be manifold. It was
related to social, political, and financial ties as well as to the character of the author.
Jancke asserts that “the sources reveal which relationships provided the decisive
impetus for each author to undertake writing her/his autobiographical text.”734
Accordingly, the diarist’s position as a member of an important ulama family might
have impelled him to produce this work. The diarist simply wrote that he initiated to
write this piece to keep a record of some necessary information. However, the diary
not only served for taking notes but also to keep in order the financial affairs of the
household. The centrality of the Sıdkızâde household in ilmiye cadres and
consequential financial benefits dominated the entries of Mustafa Hamid Efendi. It
was a period of ease, comfort, and prosperity for the family. Thirteen days after writing
his first entry on 12 Safer 1238 (29 October 1822), Sıdkızâde Ahmed Reşid Efendi
was appointed şeyhülislam.735 He wrote one of the lengthiest entries of the diary to
record his father’s being honored with the seal of fetva. His father’s prominent position
in the ilmiye hierarchy and the wealth accompanied by it perhaps aroused a need for
family accounting, as it created substantial gifts and flow of money to the family.
Mustafa Hamid Efendi used his diary to record financial matters. There are eight
entries on bohça bahası, which was an amount of money paid in return for an
appointment. There are lots of entries concerning gifts given by acquaintances. It
seems that the appointments made by Şeyhülislam Sıdkızâde Ahmed Reşid Efendi
turned out to be an important source of income for the family as the amount of money
paid for appointments was as high as five hundred kuruş. His administrative duties in
733 Similar questions were asked by Laurel Thatcher Ulrich to understand Martha Ballard’s motivation
for keeping a diary, Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale, 20.
734 Jancke, “Autobiographical Texts: Acting Within a Network,” 161.
735 Sıdkızâde, 2a.
156
several waqfs might also have prompted him to keep financial records. Inclusion of
information on appointments, bohça bahası, and gifts as well as administration of
waqfs reveals the practicality and readiness of the diary as a useful tool for Mustafa
Hamid Efendi to keep his financial affairs in order.736
Among many tedious entries on financial issues and appointments, one can find a very
lively account of an individual’s happy times. The diarist used his entries like a camera
to snapshot some joyful instants so that he could revisit and remember them.737 On 14
Safer, his brother Mehmed Rıfat Efendi’s concubine Üçnaz (Evcinaz) Kadın gave birth
to a son named Osman Nureddin (d. 1854).738 Likewise, two days after his father’s
appointment as şeyhülislam, his own daughter Saliha Sabite was born in 27 Safer 1238
(13 November 1822) at a quarter to nine.739 In this way the diary was used as a family
album. By recording many beautiful moments, he was able to revive and enjoy the
experience over and over again.
Certain things in the empire at that time were troubling everyone, regardless of
financial or social status and whether they were members of a distinguished family or
not. The diary does not provide information on those troubling political events.740 At
a time when life in Istanbul was often difficult, the diary provided a record of
considerable stability. The diarist preferred to remain silent on unfortunate events,
however. The regularity of summer excursions, the joy of visiting and welcoming
guests, delightful moments with children, recurring activities of cleansing the body,
and getting dressed provided order and calm to the life that was probably disturbed by
struggles between the elites, the violence of the janissaries, and the troubles caused by
fires or earthquakes. Adhering to a routine probably created a feeling of relief and
736 For relevant information on the connection between the diary and financial accounting, see Stuart
Sherman, Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries, and English Diurnal Form, 1660-1785 (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1996), 58-67; Paperno, “What Can Be Done with Diaries,” 562.
737 For studies on the photographic nature of diaries, see Anne-Marie Millim, The Victorian Diary:
Authorship and Emotional Labour (Surrey: Ashgate, 2013); Kathryn Carter, “Accounting for Time in
Nineteenth-Century Manuscript Diaries and Photographs.” Life-Writing 12, no:4 (2015): 417-30.
738 Sıdkızâde, first (unnumbered) folio.
739 Sıdkızâde, 1b; According to Orhan Çolak, Mustafa Hamid Efendi had two sons: Abdurrahman Münir
Efendi and another son whose name cannot be read in the inscription of his grave. See Orhan M. Çolak,
“Arşiv Belgelerinin Işığı Altında Sadrazam Hekimoğlu Ali Paşa’nın Hayatı, İcraatı ve Hayratı,” (M.A.
thesis, Istanbul University, 1997), 187.
740 For instance, although the empire faced many deaths and troubling events, the diarist did not give
any piece of information on Vak‘a-i Hayriyye, the abolitin of janissary corps in 1826. Kemal Beydilli,
“Vak‘a-i Hayriyye,” DİA, vol. 42, 454-7.
157
comfort for the diarist. In brief, the diary was written to give an order to financial issues
and to eternalize happy moments by recording them.
1.4. Major Themes Covered in the Diary
The most remarkable feature of the diary is the amalgam of different topics, from
which one can observe a highly complex portrait of Mustafa Hamid Efendi and his
environment. This is mainly because the diarist combined many roles as professor in
a medrese, administrator of several waqfs, as father, husband, and a member of an
important ulama family.
The diary opens on 12 Safer 1238 (29 October 1822) with a short entry explaining the
reason for writing it. The diarist simply states that he began to write his mecmua - as
he named this piece of writing- to keep records of necessary information.741 The first
entry was written the following day- 13 Safer 1238 (30 October 1822)- about the use
of a medicinal ointment (macun) bought from the Jew Hayim.742 It seems that the
author was having difficulties with his urinary system; there was bleeding on urination.
Mustafa Hamid Efendi seems to have been very interested in his bodily health and his
appearance as we will see later in his entries on disguisement and personal hygiene.
Indeed, he was very attentive in recording such trivial details of his daily life.
Throughout his diary he recorded details about bathing, changing his turban, having
new clothes, cutting his nails, and shaving. He must have had a high degree of
awareness of self, being very active in the social occasions held in the elite mansions
of Istanbul.
When it comes to family, he mostly recorded scenes of past pleasure. He wrote about
the births of his daughter and his brother’s son. He took note of the first activities of
his daughter; her first clothes, her first hammam, and her first encounter with her
grandfather. He showed the happiness felt on the birth of his daughter. Other family
members also became a source of pride for the diarist. He reflected with great pleasure
the pride he felt when his father became the head of the ilmiye, noting his appointment
741 Sıdkızâde, first (unnumbered) folio.
742 Ibid.
158
and rapid rise in the hierarchy. He diligently wrote about his marriage and recorded
every tiny detail as if he wanted to be constantly reminded of it.
Mustafa Hamid Efendi was a member of ilmiye and this, above all, gives the diary its
shape. The majority of the entries report the rise and fall of acquaintances in the ilmiye
cadres, payments and gifts in return for appointments. Also, he was very keen on
writing about the social events he attended. Among such events, invitations to dinner
with other ilmiye members and notables constituted the pinnacles of his social life. As
in the case of Ransel’s merchant, the language of Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s diary is
very simple, and the diary is mainly a record of such daily events as paying visits
visiting and hosting others described as: "I paid a visit to so-and-so. So-and-so visited
us.” Their conversation is never mentioned nor sometimes even the reason for the visit.
The significant thing was to simply take note of the close interaction.743 Yet this
registry of visiting and hosting visitors discloses something of interest about the elite
ulama society at this time. From such gatherings, we learn about the complex web of
relations established among ulama families and with political figures. Important
religious and political personages made up the essential part of his social life. Mustafa
Hamid Efendi’s marriage to the daughter of Topuzluzâde Mustafa Ağa (d. 1828/29)744
reveals the importance of such social occasions in building powerful intra-elite
networks.745
The flow of gifts was another dimension of being part of a powerful ulema family. The
identity of the gift senders discloses much about their networks. The chief military
judge of Anatolia, Mustafa Rakım Efendi, former şeyhülislam (chief mufti)
Zeynelabidin Efendi, Grand Vizier Ali Paşa were among the powerful elites who had
a place in the Sıdkızâde network. They also had many acquaintances in different
regions of the Empire ranging from Mecca to Salonica, from Cairo to Bursa; Mustafa
Hamid Efendi therefore recorded many valuable gifts from their acquaintances in these
cities. Likewise, the diary reveals a great deal about the materials used by Mustafa
Hamid Efendi and, to some extent, by other family members. His entries concerning
the material dimension of his daily life (clothes, textiles, horses) uncovers the
743 Ransel, “The Diary of a Merchant,” 602.
744 Sicill-i Osmani, IV, 1141.
745 Sıdkızâde, 38b. We will deal with Sıdkızâde household and their network later in this chapter.
159
economic standards necessary to operate successfully within the elite circles of
Istanbul. Entries on financial matters also constituted an integral part of the diary:
entries on boğça bahası, his administrative duties in various waqfs and his relationship
with the sarraf (money lender) Tıngıroğlu Kirkor reveal his activities in making and
investing money. Also, like many other Ottoman diarists, he provided detailed
information about the weather conditions and natural events like earthquakes. Mustafa
Hamid Efendi’s diary did not depart from the rules in that he was very interested in
keeping records of the very minute hailstorms, earthquakes, or fires began.746
1.5. The Issue of Accuracy
The diarist occasionally noted down his observations on political issues. Such entries
allow us to check the accuracy of this information against that in other sources. When
recording political events, appointments, dismissals, or executions, the diary comes
closer to the genre of chronicle. The diarist was always accurate in determining what
happened and when. He used verbs indicating certainty when reporting an event that
he knew to be true. When he recorded something debatable, he used words to denote
his uncertainty.
The most noticeable record of an event that can be tested through chronicles and
archival documents was the dismissal and execution of Halet Efendi which was
recorded with great accuracy. The diarist gave a full picture of Halet Efendi’s
downfall. He diligently recorded the dismissal of his favorites and the promotion of
his enemies. The diary, therefore, can be used to reveal different factions and to
understand the nature of court politics.
The diarist recorded that Halet Efendi was dismissed on 25 Safer 1238 (11 November
1822) and exiled first to Bursa. Because he had an influential network in Bursa, he was
later sent to Konya where he was executed on 19 Rebiülevvel 1238 (4 December
1822).747 The sequence of events regarding Halet Efendi’s exile and execution is
verified by the information given by Vakanüvis Esad Efendi who wrote in his
746 Sıdkızâde, 14a, 24a.
747 Ibid., 3a; For archival information on the same event, see BOA, HAT 496/24325, 29 Zilhicce 1238
(6 September 823); BOA, HAT. 496/24335, 29 Zilhicce 1238 (6 September 823); BOA, HAT.
496/24324, 29 Zilhicce 1238 (6 September 823); BOA, HAT. 496/24326, 29 Zilhicce 1238 (6
September 823).
160
chronicle that Halet Efendi had acted in such an immoral way to maintain his position
and power that he had gained the hatred of the public. His banishment and execution
were linked to his wicked behavior.748 The diarist, on the other hand, did not record
anything about the wicked behavior of Halet Efendi although one gets the impression
that they belonged to different factions and each side disliked the other. He just
recorded how surprised he was by the execution of such a wealthy and powerful figure.
He interpreted this situation as a just punishment from God for the evils committed.
During tenure of his office, Halet Efendi had installed his favorites in influential
positions. After his downfall, his favorites were banished from their positions.749
Among a series of dismissals, Ahmed Ağa’s exile is worth considering. According to
the records in the diary, Abdullah Paşa, who was appointed as Grand Vizier after Halet
Efendi’s demise, banished Halet Efendi’s favorite Gümrükçü Ahmed Ağa to Amasya
and confiscated his property. The record of events is again compatible with chronicles
and archival documents.750 However, when the diarist further commented on the issue,
he indicated that actually he was not certain of the truth of what he was writing as it
was only hearsay (mesmu‘umuz olmuştur). According to what the diarist had heard
Ahmed Ağa was on the verge of being killed like Halet Efendi. However, he was saved
from death and only exiled thanks to the intervention of the custodian of the Bosporus,
İbrahim Paşa.751 This additional information is not present either in the chronicles or
in the archival documents. The chronicler Esad Efendi wrote that Ahmed Ağa’s
intimacy with Halet Efendi was known by the public. Therefore, he was exiled to
Amasya two days after the banishment of his patron Halet Efendi to put an end to
rumors and to defuse tension.752 Esad Efendi did not note anything about the possible
execution of Ahmed Ağa or the intervention of İbrahim Pasha. Just as Halet’s favorites
748 Esad Efendi, 136-137; For another account of Halet Efendi’s exile and death, see Hekimbaşı Hafız
Hızır İlyas Ağa, Osmanlı Sarayında Gündelik Hayat: Letâif-i Vekâyi’-i Enderûniyye, ed. Ali Şükrü
Çoruk (İstanbul: Kitabevi, 2011), 274.
749 Christine M. Philliou, Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 56, 96; Esad Efendi, 139; BOA, HAT. 496/24332, 29
Zilhicce 1238 (6 September 823).
750 Sıdkızâde, 3b; Esad Efendi, 140-141; BOA, HAT. 279/16514, 29 Zilhicce 1238 (6 September 823).
This document notes that he was dismissed because of his adherence on Halet Efendi; BOA, HAT.
518/25328, 29 Zilhicce 1238 (6 September 823). The document notes that Halet Efendi’s favorite,
Ahmed Ağa, was banished to Amasya and his property was confiscated.
751 Sıdkızâde, 3b.
752 Esad Efendi, 140-141.
161
were banished, so his rivals were promoted to new positions. The diarist recorded his
father Ahmed Reşid Efendi’s appointment as the Chief Mufti, Hüsrev Pasha’s (d.
1855) appointment as the Admiral-in-Chief, and Abdullah Pasha’s appointment as the
Grand Vizier.753
Appointment records may also be correlated with the chronicles and archival
documents. An interesting appointment was the promotion of the Janissary Agha to
the Grand Vizierate on 19 Zilkade 1238 (28 July 1823). The diarist noted that the agha
was qualified, prudent, and successful against troublemakers. He simply summarized
this event with the sentence “Hüseyin Agha became pasha.” The accuracy of this
record can also be tested through archival documents and chronicles.754 According to
Sahaflar Şeyhizâde Mehmed Esad Efendi, Hüseyin Agha (d. 1849) was skillful and
deemed worthy of the post. He was appointed Grand Vizier at the auspicious time of
12:40 on 19 Zilkade.755
In short, the diary is very precise in giving the exact dates of events. The information
on political events is compatible with the chronicles of the period and archival
documents. The diarist used unambiguous language in recording events that he knew
for certain. When he was not sure about what exactly happened, he noted that he was
recording rumors. The accuracy of the diary in recording political events invalidates
the idea that that self-narratives/ego-documents are inferior to archival sources and
must be used with caution.
2. RELATIONAL SELF: MUSTAFA HAMİD EFENDİ AS A MEMBER OF
SIDKIZÂDE HOUSEHOLD
In the past, as now, people experience themselves in relation to a variety of groups
and norms, from family to friends, and in relation to their age, body and sexual
identity, their abilities, ethnicity, religious beliefs, and status. They are more likely to
display particular kinds of behavior in order to decide who to connect with rather than
who to detach themselves from. Yet this does not mean that people in the past were
753 Sıdkıâde, 3a-3b; Esad Efendi, 133-135.
754 Sıdkızâde, 24b. Also see BOA, C. DH. 134-6676, 29 Zilkade 1238 (7 August 1823).
755 Esad Efendi, 226; Hekimbaşı Hafız Hızır İlyas Ağa, Osmanlı Sarayında Gündelik Hayat, 302. Also
see BOA, HAT. 1562-34, 19 Zilkade 1238 (28 July 1823).
162
submerged in a collective culture. Subjectivity can in theory generally be seen as
proceeding from connection, rather than detachment.756
A diary can reveal many layers of the self. One of those layers is the social self of the
diarist, surrounded by various private and public domains such as household, family,
professional circles, and financial relationships. Rather than focusing on the self as an
autonomous individual, therefore, scholars have tended to see self-narratives as being
“embedded in a collective context.”757 As Natalie Zeamon Davis puts it, “all the
occasions for talking or writing about the self involved a relationship.” 758 She stressed
the importance of treating the self of an early modern person as part of a network of
relations; relationship with God, with a patron, with a sheikh (thinking in an Ottoman
context), and, in particular, with family/household and lineage.759 I think a modern
person should be considered in the same way. The success, wealth/financial security,
and prominence of the individual mostly depends on the maintenance of social and
political networks as well as kinship ties. All these relationships are determinants in
creating one’s identity. 760 In this sense, our diarist was no different. Throughout the
diary, Mustafa Hamid Efendi referred to the people he was in contact with and allowed
us to see how his identity was linked to them.761 One can see that his identity and sense
of self were defined by the webs of relationships he built.762 “Opening a diary for the
first time is like walking into a room full of strangers.”763 In this section, we will try
to get to know the people who occupied a place in the entries of the diary.
Operating within a strong ulama household was a very significant factor in creating a
successful person like Mustafa Hamid Efendi. The diary reveals various features of
the household of a strong ulema family in which a variety of activities led to the
establishment of a powerful web of influence: the accumulation of wealth, the creation
of networks to advance the political position of the household members. Hence, the
756 Fulbrook and Rublack, "In Relation,” 269
757 Greyerz, “Ego-Documents: The Last Word?,” 276-277.
758 Davis, "Boundaries and the Sense of Self in Sixteenth-Century France," 53.
759 Ibid.
760 Ibid., 63.
761 Ruggiu, “The Uses of First Person Writings,” 13.
762 Jeanne Braham, “A Lens of Empathy,” in Inscribig the Daily: Critical Essays on Women’s Diaries,
ed. Suzanne L. Bunkers and Cynthia A. Huff (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996).
Jeanne Braham argued that women’s identity and self are defined by connection to others.
763 Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale, 35.
163
diary discloses important aspects of an ulama household operating in nineteenthcentury
Istanbul. Mustafa Hamid Efendi was part of such an influential ulema family
and this would have allowed him to create his own network and wealth. In this part,
therefore, we will focus on the self of the diarist as embedded in his relations with
various other individuals.
The diary entries reveal that family owned a mansion (konak) in town764 and a seaside
mansion (sahilhane) in Rumelihisarı.765 The diarist probably did not have a separate
household at least during the early years of his career, but it seems that he and his
brother Mehmed Rıfat Efendi did establish their own small households within the
Sıdkızâde household. They were still dependent on their father’s power, reputation,
and wealth in order to advance. Some shreds of evidence found in the diary support
this idea. Throughout the entries, the evolution of his private family sphere within the
parental household can be observed. At the opening of the diary, he recorded the birth
of his daughter Saliha Sabite.766 He placed particular emphasis on his daughter, the
subject of many entries. The animal slaughtered on the occasion of her birth, the first
visit by the grandparent Ahmed Reşid Efendi, the first purchase of clothes; all these
happy instances and rituals he recorded with pleasure either when he was at the seaside
mansion or in town. After a long break between 1239-1243, he once again started to
keep records before his marriage to Ziynet Ziba Hatun. The marriage ceremony
seemingly took place in the mansion of the Sıdkızâde family, and the young couple
then resided with the parents.
“The home and family were traditionally associated with privacy and references to
them implied that the writer was sharing some privacy with the reader.”767 References
to family members allow us to access the intimacy of the family and the private sphere
of the household. The diary allows us to draw a vivid picture of other members of the
household and its dependents. Mustafa Hamid Efendi referred to his father, the head
of the household, as veli’n-ni‘me (benefactor), pederim efendimiz or şeyhülislam
efendimiz. He never gave the name of his father, but such references to the father
764 Sıdkızâde, 22b, 27a, 31b, 35b, 36b.
765 Ibid., 16b, 20b. Also see M. Tayyip Gökbilgin, “Boğaziçi,” DİA, vol. 6, 251-62.
766 Saliha Sabite’s mother was probably one of his concubines (câriye), as the diarist was not married
to a free born Muslim woman at the time of her birth.
767 Hanna, "Self-Narratives in Arabic Texts 1500–1800," 123-39.
164
confirm his key position in the household hierarchy. Ahmed Reşid Efendi was the
benefactor of all household personnel who were dependent on his generosity and
support. Mustafa Hamid Efendi did not give the name of his mother, either.768 He
talked about his mother on the occasion of his marriage with Ziynet Ziba Hatun and
when he purchased one of his mother’s slaves. There is no other record revealing the
activities of the female head of the household; the female part of the household is
therefore quite obscure. We do not know much about their daily lives or their role in
the household. The brother, Mehmed Rıfat Efendi, was frequently mentioned in the
diary; details of his family, the positions he occupied in the ilmiye, and his presence
on important occasions were habitually recorded in the diary. Mehmed Rıfat Efendi
evidently had an important place both in the household and in his brother’s life. Like
his brother, Mehmed Rıfat Efendi, was most probably living in the parental residence
with his wife, children, and concubines. He had his own servants and dependents. We
know from the diary that Mehmed Rıfat Efendi had a concubine named Üçnaz Kadın
and she gave birth to a son named Osman Nureddin.769 Zeliha Hanım and İffet Hanım,
whose identities remained obscure for the time being, also had their place in the diary.
The diarist recorded their first day at school.770 He also frequently mentioned a certain
Damad Efendi who must be Meşrepzâde Mehmed Arif Efendi (d. 1858),771 the
husband of his sister Naile Hanım (d. 1855/56). Mustafa Hamid Efendi frequently
visited Damad Efendi and they attended banquets (davet-i ekl) together. 772
Servants and female slaves were also recorded in the diary, often by name. Among
them, Üçnaz Kadın, Sabahat, and Feriha personify the female slaves of the household
who served as housekeepers as well as satisfiying their masters’ sexual needs.
Abdülbaki, Ahmed, and Raşid represented the male labor force in the household.
768 His mother Adilşah Hanım was the daughter of Hekimzâde Abdullah Bey see, Sicill-i Osmani, V,
1378.
769 Sıdkızâde,1b; Öztuna wrote that Osman Nureddin was born into the marriage of Mehmed Rıfat
Efendi and Fatma Hanım. However, the diary reveals that his mother was Mehmed Rıfat Efendi’s slave,
Üçnaz (Evcinaz) Kadın. See Yılmaz Öztuna, Devletler ve Hanedanlar: Türkiye (1074-1990) (Ankara:
Kültür Bakanlığı Yayınları, 1969), 850.
770 Sıdkızâde, 8a.
771 His sister’s grave is found in Toklu Dede burial area. The grave stone reveals that his sister’s name
was Naile Hanım. She was married to Meşrepzâde Mehmed Arif Efendi.
772 Sıdkızâde, 21a, 30a, 30b, 31b.
165
These servants were mostly recruited to the household at the request of a relative or an
acquaintance who had relations with the household members.
Sıdkızâde Ahmed Reşid Efendi’s grave found in Toklu Dede burial area.
166
Sıdkızâde Mehmed Rıfat Efendi’s grave found in Toklu Dede burial area.
167
Naile Hanım’s grave. She was married to Meşrepzâde Mehmed Arif Efendi.
168
Members of Sıdkızade family.
2.1. Creating a Network
Gabriele Jancke argues that “autobiographical writers were not isolated individuals but
social beings, belonging to certain social, professional, religious, and gender groups,
moving in certain social contexts and relationships.”773 Self-narratives can be useful
for uncovering “persons whose identities are shaped in relation to changing networks
773 Jancke, “Autobiography as Social Practice,” 70.
Sıdkı Mustafa Efendi
(d. 1790)
Sıdkızade Ahmed Reşid
Efendi 8D. 1834)
Married to Adilşah Hanım,
daughter of Hekimoğlu Ali
Pasha
Mustafa Hamid Efendi
(d. ca. 1850)
Married to Ziynet Ziba Hatun,
daughter of Topuzluzade
Mustafa Agha
Saliha Sabite Hanım
(d. 1826)
Abdurrahman Münir
Efendi
Mehmed Rıfat Efendi
(d. 1875)
Married to Fatma Hanım,
daughter of Şerifzâde
Mehmed Ebulhayr Efendi
Osman Nureddin Beyefendi
(d. 1854)
(According to the diary his
mother was Mehmed Rıfat
Efendi's concubine Üçnaz
Kadın)
İsmail Beyefendi (d.
1819/20)
Ayşe Hanım (d.
1831/2)
Naile Hanım (d.
1855/6)
Married to Şeyhülislam
Meşrepzade Mehmed Arif
Efendi
Sıddık Mehmed Efendi
(d. 1878)
Fatma Elmas Hanım
Hatice İffet Hanım (d.
1853/4)
169
of interpersonal relations, with the self at the intersection of different sets of roles and
expectations.”774 Thus, to contextualize a self-narrative it is necessary to look carefully
at interpersonal networks. One must contextualize the source not only in its historical
context but also consider the cultural and social context within which the author wrote
his/her text.775 Uncovering the network of the diarist; therefore, serves to uncover his
personality and conception of the world. The diary under scrutiny allows us to reveal
the people with whom Mustafa Hamid Efendi had close contact.
Kinship formed only one aspect of a social network, but links with other bureaucratic
elites were of great significance. Thus, the household within which an individual
operated enabled him to build a web of relations with powerful personages. Among
them, there would be influential members of the ulama, viziers, various pashas, and
aghas. Our diarist also had a network of people who were attached to the Sıdkızâde
household to fill ilmiye posts. Entries on appointments, visits and dinner parties, and
exchange of gifts revealed people with whom the diarist was affiliated.
Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s diary can reveal complex webs of patronage prevalent mainly
among men of learning. But the diary also divulges that the influence of the household
went beyond the members of the ulama. Various bureaucratic elites also took part in
the Sıdkızâde network. For a powerful scholar like Şeyhülislam Ahmed Reşid Efendi,
it would be easy to use his powerful position for his sons and his protégés, “because
the ulama, more than any other group in the ruling elite, had succeeded in
institutionalizing patronage over a long and gradual process that originated in the 15th
century.”776 Mustafa Hamid Efendi vigilantly recorded the examinations made during
his father’s tenure as şeyhülislam to appoint scholars (müderris) as well as recording
appointments at higher levels. Among those appointments, one can observe Mustafa
Hamid Efendi and his brother Mehmed Rıfat Efendi’s easy advancement in the ilmiye
hierarchy. In the entry written on 13 Şaban 1238 (25 April 1823), he wrote that “My
brother is appointed to Yahya Efendi Medrese at the level of mûsıla-i sahn777 although
774 Fulbrook and Rublack, “In Relation,” 268.
775 Jancke, “Autobiography as Social Practice,” 72.
776 Nizri, Ottoman High Politics, 56.
777 Musıla-i Sahn was the level before sahn-ı seman. It was originally a dahil rank, but named as mûsılai
sahn (preparoty level to the sahn) because after completing this level, scholars progressed to sahn
level. Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Devletinin İlmiye Teşkilatı,12; İpşirli, “Medrese,” DİA, vol. 28, 327-33;
170
there were thirty-eight people before him. We are appointed to İskender Paşa Medrese
at the level of mûsıla-i sahn although sixty-five people were waiting before us.”778
This entry discloses that, being the sons of the Chief Mufti, they easily had the
opportunity to progress to the upper levels without waiting long as the other scholars
did.779 Zilfi noted that the process of centralization and “unionizing” of the ilmiye
career was completed in the 17th century. By the 18th century, the ilmiye had
increasingly begun to reflect the interests of the elite ulama families with patrimonial
privileges. More and more teaching posts were concomitant with having family/blood
ties.780 In short, the invaluable patronage of their father gave them an important
advantage over their colleagues in the competition for advancement.
After a short period, we see again these two brothers’ advancement in their careers.
The entry written on 10 July 1824 reveals that Mehmed Rıfat Efendi was appointed to
the degree of bilâd-ı hamse781 and Mustafa Hamid Efendi upgraded to the level of
ibtida-i altmışlı.782 Both brothers were moving up the hierarchy very fast. The
following entry was filled with records of a series of visits to present Mustafa Hamid
Efendi’s thanks to various people including his father, the chief military judges of
Anatolia and Rumelia, as well as the members of some important ulama families like
the Dürrizâdes, the Arabzâdes, the Mekkizâdes, and the Çelebizâdes.783 Those people
he visited after his appointment reveal the extent of Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s network.
One can easily see that Mustafa Hamid Efendi and his brother benefited much from
their father’s reputation and power and built strong relationships with powerful elites.
Ercan Alan, “Kadıasker Ruznamçelerine Göre XVII. Yüzyılda Rumeli’de Kadılık Müessesi,” (Ph.D.
dissertation, Marmara Üniversitesi, 2015), 58.
778 Sıdkızâde, 15a.
779 For career patterns and appointment processes in the ilmiye system, see Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı
Devletinin İlmiye Teşkilatı, 45-173; Yasemin Beyazıt, Osmanlı İlmiye Mesleğinde İstihdam (XVI.
Yüzyıl) (Ankara: Türk Tarih Kurumu Yayınları, 2014).
780 Madeline C. Zilfi, "Elite Circulation in the Ottoman Empire: Great Mollas of the Eighteenth
Century," Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient/Journal de l'histoire economique
et sociale de l'Orient 26 (1983): 318-19.
781 Bilâd-ı hamse was one of the dignitary ranks (mevleviyet) in the scholarly hierarchy. This rank
consisted of five equal judgeships: Edirne, Bursa, Damascus, Egypt and Plovdiv. Those who were
appointed to this rank would eventually be granted the judgeships of Mecca and Medina. Fahri Unan,
“Mevleviyet,” DİA, vol. 29, 467-8; Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Devletinin İlmiye Teşkilatı, 100.
782 Sıdkızâde, 22a.
783 Sıdkızâde, 22b-23a.
171
The patronage of Ahmed Reşid Efendi, who consolidated his power by occupying the
highest position in the ilmiye hierarchy, was not limited to his sons. The Sıdkızâde
household must have enjoyed remarkable influence among the ulama and gained many
followers by allocating positions and assisting people in securing posts. In the entries
on the appointments of people in their network, the emphasis was mostly placed on
recording people who were granted important positions during his father’s tenure as
şeyhülislam. For instance, Mustafa Hamid Efendi wrote that the former judge of Izmir,
Calligrapher Mustafa Rakım Efendi (d. 1826), was granted the chief military judgeship
of Anatolia (Anadolu Kadıaskeri) replacing Abdullah Efendizâde Ahmed Reşid Efendi
who was dismissed from office on 5 Rebiülahir 1238 (20 December 1822).784
Although Mustafa Hamid Efendi talked about Mustafa Rakım Efendi as the former
judge of Izmir, his career encompassed more than that. He was appointed to the
judgeship of İzmir in 1809, he became the judge of Edirne and Mecca in 1814, and
finally, he presided as the judge of Istanbul in 1818. From there, he moved to the chief
military judgeship of Anatolia in 1823. 785 The diarist’s emphasis on Mustafa Rakım
Efendi’s judgeship of Izmir might have been related to the fact that his father Sıdkızâde
Ahmed Reşid Efendi had also served as the judge of Izmir around 1805/1806.786 They
might have known each other since then.
Mustafa Rakım Efendi had connections with the palace, being employed as the
calligraphy teacher of Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808-1839). The sultan’s respect and
admiration for his teacher was an important factor in Mustafa Rakım Efendi’s
advancement.787 Hence, both sides, that is, the Sıdkızâde family and the kadıasker,
must have benefited from building good relations with one another. As Abdurrahman
Atçıl suggests, “the chief jurist (şeyhülislam) and chief judges (kadıaskers) had a
significant role in the general administration of the empire as well as the administration
of the hierarchy, strengthening scholar-bureaucrats – especially top representatives –
within the Ottoman system.”788
784 Sıdkızâde, 5b.
785 Süleyman Berk, “Mustafa Rakım Efendi,” DİA, vol. 34, 428-9.
786 İpşirli, “Ahmed Reşid Efendi,” 122-3.
787 Berk, “Mustafa Rakım Efendi,” 428.
788 Abdurrahman Atçıl, Scholars and Sultans in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2016), 133.
172
Assigning jobs and continuous gift exchanges were significant in reinforcing relations
with key officials.789 One can observe from the diary that their relationships were
continued and reinforced by recurrent visits and gifts. The entry written on 14
Rebiülahir indicates that the newly appointed chief military judge sent five hundred
kuruş as a gift.790 Five months after being appointed, we again see Mustafa Rakım
Efendi sending gifts for the oncoming month of Ramazan on 22 Şaban 1238 (10 May
1822).791 Also, During the month of Ramazan also, Mustafa Hamid Efendi and most
probably other Sıdkızâdes got together with the chief military judge of Anatolia for an
iftar meal.792 It seems that Mustafa Rakım Efendi’s sustained relationship with the
Sıdkızâdes enabled his protégés to obtain positions for themselves. Mustafa Rakım
Efendi’s kethüda is recorded as having passed the final examination and appointed as
a müderris. Mustafa Hamid Efendi stressed that the above-mentioned kethüda became
successful during his father’s tenure although he had been unsuccessful in previous
examinations given by Zeynelabidin Efendi.793 After Sıdkızâde Ahmed Reşid Efendi’s
dismissal, we see Mustafa Hamid Efendi this time asking Mustafa Rakım Efendi to
prolong his mühürdar’s (stamp holder) term of office in the Kangrı district for two
months more.794 A couple of days later, we see Mustafa Hamid Efendi paying a visit
to the chief military judge of Anatolia to express his gratitude.795
Likewise, in the entry written on 26 Cemâziyelevvel 1238 (8 February 1823), we see
that Debbağzâde Mehmed Şerif Efendi (d. ca. 1260)796 showed gratitude for his fatherin-
law Meşrebzâde Abdurrahman Efendi’s appointment to the judgeship of Mecca. He
prepared a bowl (zevrak) upon which Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s name was engraved. It
was put next to the door of Zamzam in Kaaba for pilgrims to drink Zamzam water 797
The diarist had possibly mediated for this appointment, and for this reason, his name
was carved upon this special gift. This entry reveals that Mustafa Hamid Efendi had a
789 Nizri, Ottoman High Politics, 150.
790 Sıdkızâde, 6a.
791 Ibid., 16b.
792 Ibid., 18b.
793 Ibid., 5b. For further information, see Tahsin Özcan, “Zeynelabidin Efendi,” DİA, vol. 44, 366-7.
794 Sıdkızâde, 26b.
795 Ibid., 27b.
796 Sicill-i Osmani, V, 1587.
797 Sıdkızâde, 8a-8b.
173
say in ilmiye appointments. He most probably acted as an intermediary between those
who hoped to be appointed and his father who was at the top of the ilmiye hierarchy.
This web of influence was not restricted to the ilmiye. Intersecting patron-client
networks were created among different groups. Patronage ties between ulama and
other bureaucratic elites were very frequent so that both parties could equally
benefit.798 The Sıdkızâde household seems to have been frequently visited by some
influential palace grandees, revealing their links with powerful palace elites. For
instance, Grand Vizier Ali Paşa (d. 1829) paid recurrent visits to the Sıdkızâdes.
Mustafa Hamid Efendi first recorded that the grand vizier honored the apartment
(daire) of the şeyhülislam in the month of Receb.799 It seems that it was a private
meeting with the şeyhülislam, probably for discussing state affairs. The grand vizier’s
second appearance was for iftar in the household of the şeyhülislam. Ali Paşa graced
the Sıdkızâde household with his presence on the twenty-seventh night of Ramazan,
the sacred night of Qadr (Kadir gecesi). Mustafa Hamid Efendi and his brother
Mehmed Rıfat Efendi met him at the door and escorted him to the audience hall where
they had the iftar meal.800
In the entry written on 24 Rebiülevvel 1238 (9 December 1822), the diarist wrote that
Hüsrev Pasha had been reappointed as Commender -in-Chief of the Navy. Three days
later, on 27 Rebiülevvel 1238 (12 December 1822), he visited the Sıdkızâde household
to express his gratitude for his appointment.801 The entry reveals the connection
between Hüsrev Pasha and the Sıdkızâde household. Hüsrev Pasha’s dismissal in 1821
actually resulted from the influence of Halet Efendi (d. 1822) who seems to have been
an enemy of the Sıdkızâdes.802 After his dismissal, the pasha had been sent to Trabzon,
and there he was appointed governor. Halet Efendi’s demise created an opportunity
for his rivals to occupy top positions. This entry discloses that the chief mufti
Sıdkızâde Ahmed Reşid Efendi might have had an influence on the reappointment of
798 Sıdkızâde household resembles to the household of Şeyhülislam Feyzullah Efendi in this sense, Nizri,
Ottoman High Politics, 213.
799 Sıdkızâde,11a.
800 Ibid., 19a.
801 Ibid., 4a-4b.
802 Halil İnalcık. “Hüsrev Paşa,” DİA, vol. 19, 41-5.
174
some bureaucratic elites who had suffered from the rivalry of Halet Efendi, in just the
same way as he had reappointed the banished ulama.803
Silahdar Ali Pasha and Sıdkızâde Ahmed Reşid Efendi were appointed and dismissed
around the same time. Ahmed Reşid Efendi was appointed chief mufti on 4 December
1822, while Silahdar Ali Pasha became grand vizier on 9 March 1823. About three
months after the dismissal of the chief mufti, Grand Vizier Ali Pasha was also
dismissed from office.804 This information supports the idea that they belonged to the
same power network.
Likewise, the Sıdkızâdes arranged patronage networks in the provinces to extent their
influence and power.805 For instance, Şakir Efendi, the uncle of Damad Efendi,
presented a horse to the diarist when he again became voivode of Uşak in 9 Safer 1239
(15 October 1823).806 His association with the Sıdkızâde household might have had an
effect on his securing this position. Şakir Efendi, therefore, took care to cement his
relations with Mustafa Hamid Efendi by presenting him with gifts on various
occasions.807 It seems that the Sıdkızâdes were concerned to gain as many followers
as possible by having protégés belonging to other elite groups in addition to their own
followers from the ulama. This would enable them to reinforce their political and social
standing among the powerful elite.
2.1.2. Marriage Ties
Nizri noted that elite households used marriage ties to extend their political and social
networks. Thus, the head of the household had his daughters and sons marry members
of other important households to create new ties and strengthen existing relations. In
this way they could further extend their political and financial power. Consequently,
803 İpşirli, “Ahmed Reşid Efendi,” 122.
804 For Ali Pasha, see Sicill-i Osmani, I, 277; For Sıdkızâde Ahmed Reşid Efendi, see Sicill-i Osmani,
V, 1378.
805 For Ottoman local elites, see Ehud R. Toledano, “The Emergence of Ottoman Local Elites (1700–
1900): A Framework for Research,” in Middle Eastern Politics and Ideas, ed. Ilan Pappé and Moshe
Ma’oz (London: Tauris Academic Studies, 1997).
806 Sıdkızâde, 27b.
807 Ibid., 24a, 27b.
175
they had easy access to important positions, and enjoyed the political support of other
household members if necessary. 808
The diarist’s father, Şeyhülislam Ahmed Reşid Efendi, was married to Adilşah Hanım
(d. 1831/32), the daughter of Hekimzâde Abdullah Bey.809 Abdullah Bey was the
grandson of Hekimzâde Ali Paşa (d. 1758) who officiated as grand vizier during the
reign of Mahmud I (r. 1730-1754).810 Hekimzâde Abdullah Bey took a different path
from his grandfather and entered the ilmiye. He became the military judge of Anatolia
in June 1813.811 Ahmed Reşid Efendi’s marriage to Adilşah Hanım was probably a
significant point in his setting up a powerful household as this marriage linked him to
a vizier cum ulama household.
Mehmed Rıfat Efendi, married Fatma Hanım, the daughter of Şerifzâde Mehmed
Ebulhayr Efendi (d. 1823),812 who was the son of Şeyhülislam Şerif Mollazâde
Mehmed Efendi.813 There is no information in the diary about the marriage of Mehmed
Rıfat Efendi. He probably married Fatma Hanım long before the diary was written.
Although Yılmaz Öztuna stated that Mehmed Rıfat Efendi’s son, Osman Nureddin
was born of this marriage, Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s entry on his birth shows that
Osman Nureddin’s mother was Mehmed Rıfat Efendi’s concubine, Üçnaz Kadın.814
Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s sister Naile, whose name was unspecified in the diary, was
married to Meşrepzâde Mehmed Arif Efendi.815 Mehmed Arif Efendi’s father was
Müderris Şatırzâde Emin Efendi and his grandfather was Kadıasker Meşrepzâde Ali
Efendi. 816 The Meşrepzâdes were one of the powerful ulama families of the period.
Mehmed Arif Efendi became şeyhülislam on 21 March 1854.
Mustafa Hamid Efendi wrote a detailed entry about his marriage to Topuzluzâde
Mustafa Ağa’s daughter, Ziynet Ziba Hanım. This marriage linked Mustafa Hamid
808 Nizri, Ottoman High Politics, 61-62.
809 Sicill-i Osmani, V, 1378.
810 M. Münir Aktepe, “Hekimoğlu Ali Paşa,” DİA, vol. 17, 166-8.
811 Sicill-i Osmani, I, 59; Öztuna, Devletler ve Hanedanlar, 679.
812 For Şerifzâde Mehmed Ebülhayr Efendi, see Sicill-i Osmani, II, 438.
813 Öztuna, Devletler ve Hanedanlar, 829; Sicill-i Osmani, V, 1395.
814 Öztuna, Devletler ve Hanedanlar, 829.
815 Ibid.
816 Mehmet İpşirli, “Arif Efendi, Meşrepzâde,” DİA, vol. 3, 365; Sicill-i Osmani, I, 312. The person the
diarist called as Damad Efendi in various entries must have been his sister’s husband Meşrepzâde Arif
Efendi.
176
Efendi and other members of the Sıdkızâde family to an important elite household.
Mustafa Ağa was the ayan of Iskeçe from where the family originated. In 1825, he
was appointed mîralem,817 “the custodian of the sultan’s symbol of sovereignty… who
ceremonially presented newly appointed governors with the standard and horsetails,
symbolic of the sultan’s authority.”818
According to Nizri, the usual practice in forming alliances from the 16th to 19th
centuries was by building marriage ties between the leading ulama families. Reputable
ulama families preferred to marry among themselves to preserve the special nature of
their group and to ensure the persistence of their family lineages and powerful position.
They rarely created marriage ties with other elite families.819 The Sıdkızâdes, in this
sense, deviated from the established standards of the well-based ulama families, as
they built marriage alliances with households that did not belong to ilmiye aristocracy;
for example, their alliance with the Topuzluzâde line, also known as Mîralemzâdes,
whose members used to serve as mîralem. Moreover, their descendants had been
appointed to various governmental positions throughout the years. For instance,
Topuzluzâde Mustafa Ağa’s son, Rıfat Halil İbrahim Bey, served as a müderris and
became the judge of Eyüp in 1250. His other son, Vakıf Bey, was working in the
mektubi sadaret kalemi (Secretariat of the Minister for the Interior ).820 The marriage
of Mustafa Hamid Efendi to Ziynet Ziba Hatun must have connected the Sıdkızâdes
to important personages in Topuzluzâde Mustafa Ağa’s network, thus further
strengthening their influence.
2.2. Ways of Making Money
Accumulated wealth was an important instrument to preserve the family’s prominence
and power. The diary discloses how the family accumulated the wealth that was
necessary for building and preserving political power. Mustafa Hamid Efendi seems
to have been actively involved in financial matters. He recorded in extensive detail the
money received in return for appointments, that earned from waqfs and expensive gifts
817 Öztuna, Devletler ve Hanedanlar, 868.
818 Halil İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age 1300-1600 (London: Phoenix, 2013), xvii.
819 Nizri, Ottoman High Politics, 62.
820 Öztuna, Devletler ve Hanedanlar, 868.
177
sent by people in their network. The diary, in this sense, served to keep their financial
issues in order.
Mustafa Hamid Efendi was appointed administrator of several waqfs just after the
appointment of his father as şeyhülislam on 25 Safer 1238 (11 November 1822). His
appointment as mütevelli (administrator) to the waqfs recorded in the next entry
probably resulted from his father’s influential position. The administration of religious
endowments provided the administrator with a salary in the amount specified in the
endowment deed.821 Mustafa Hamid Efendi earned more than seventy-five aspers daily
which was equal to a daily income of a müderris who had reached the level of
mevleviyet (dignitary rank).822
This devotee was trusted with the supervision of four waqfs; the waqf of ex-Grand
Admiral Kılıç Ali Paşa at Tophane for forty-five aspers daily, and the waqf of the
mosque and imaret (public soup-kitchen) in Kaçanik of the late ex-Grand Vizier [and]
the conqueror of Yemen, Gazi Sinan Paşa, for fifteen aspers daily, and the waqf of the
late Polad Mustafa Paşa’s mosque and imaret in Siroz and İstanbul for fifteen aspers
daily, as well as the waqf of the late Beyhan Sultan, may she rest in peace ,l in Üsküp.
23 Rebiülevvel 1238,”823
As soon as Mustafa Hamid was appointed, he began work to increase the revenues of
the Kılıç Ali Paşa waqf. Two days after his appointment on 25 Rebiülevvel (10
December 1822), he borrowed a sum of three thousand kuruş from the waqf of Kaftani
İbrahim Ağa to pay the personnel salaries that had not been paid because the waqf
properties were vacant due to the ongoing Greek rebellion.824 Around one month later
on 24 Rebiülahir (8 January 1823), Yonda? Island, which was the waqf’s mukataa
(revenue source), was given to the voivode of Ayazmend El-Hac Süleyman Ağa as
iltizam (tax farming) in return for twenty thousand kuruş. According to the agreement,
Süleyman Ağa would pay six thousand kuruş in March, six thousand kuruş in
September, and eight thousand in the February of the following year .825 The mukataa
of the Gazi Sinan Paşa mosque was also handed over for tax-farming for the sum of
821 Bahaeddin Yediyıldız, “Vakıf: Tarih,” DİA, vol. 42, 479-86; Nizri, Ottoman High Politics, 178.
822 For the salaries in ilmiye hierarchy, see Beyazıt, Osmanlı İlmiyye Mesleğinde İstihdam.
823 Sıdkızâde, 4a.
824 Ibid., 4b.
825 Ibid., 7b.
178
one thousand two hundred and fifty kuruş.826 It appears that he managed to increase
the waqfs’ revenues and turn these into a money-making business.
Likewise, the author noted on 17 Şaban 1238 (29 October 1823) that he had been
appointed to the clerkship (kitabet) of the Hekimzâde Ali Paşa waqf.827 It was worth
four thousand five hundred kuruş, a fabulous sum compared to his services at the
above-mentioned waqfs. When it came to Ramazan, he recorded that a sum of four
thousand five hundred kuruş had been sent to him. He was exempted from paying the
fee required in return for obtaining the decree proving one’s duty in the waqf (berat).
He ended the entry with a prayer revealing his desire to earn more gold.828
His administrative duties gave him the possibility to intervene in employments related
to the waqfs under his supervision. For instance, the office of duagû (beadsman) in the
waqf of Kılıç Ali Paşa was given to a certain Yusuf Halife for a wage of two and a half
akçe daily.829 Also, an office of beadsman which generated twenty-five akçe daily
salary was filled by the kethüda (chamberlain) of Zeynelabidin Efendi. Mustafa Hamid
Efendi wrote that fifteen akçe were given to the newly appointed beadsman and ten
akçe to the above-mentioned chamberlain for his services.830 These administrative
duties would have enabled him to accumulate wealth, build new patronage networks,
and create a strong political and economic base for himself as well as for the household
within which he operated.
Another source of money was the payments made in return for appointments. Judges
and teachers had to pay a sum of money to şeyhülislam as a gift for every position they
were promoted to. This payment was called boğça baha.831 These payments must have
turned into a significant source of wealth for the eminent ulama who made such
appointments because the Şeyhülislam, as well as the chief military judges of Rumelia
and Anatolia, were responsible for hundreds of appointments in the ilmiye hierarchy.832
826 Sıdkızâde, 6a.
827 Ibid., 15b.
828 Ibid., 18a.
829 Ibid., 10a.
830 Ibid., 14b.
831Necdet Sakaoğlu, Tanzimat’tan Cumhuriyet’e Tarih Sözlüğü (İstanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1985), 20.
832 Nizri, Ottoman High Politics, 143.
179
Mustafa Hamid Efendi frequently recorded substantial sums of money paid as boğça
baha. For instance, Fahreddin Efendi, who was the former judge of Filibe (Plovdiv),
paid two hundred and fifty kuruş in return for his reappointment to the district of
Plovdiv. In this first entry concerning boğça baha, the diarist stated that it was
customary and paid thanks for an appointment made by his father. He also noted that
he recorded that amount in the diary after being given permission by Fahreddin
Efendi.833 Likewise, the judge of Bosnia paid three hundred kuruş,834 the judge of
Üsküdar paid two hundred kuruş,835 the judge of Cairo paid two hundred and fifty
kuruş,836 the judge of Maraş paid a hundred kuruş,837 the regent judge of Yenişehir
paid three hundred kuruş,838 and the judge of Erzurum paid five hundred kuruş839 for
their promotions. Similarly, Seyyid Mehmed Esad Efendi paid five hundred kuruş as
boğça baha for being promoted to the honorary rank of Mecca.840 Mustafa Hamid
Efendi also recorded money paid to him under different categories on 5 Şaban 1239 (5
April 1824). He was rewarded with a payment of two hundred and fifty kuruş as salary
for his duty of clerkship, fifty kuruş as boğça baha, sixteen kuruş for stationery and
another sixteen kuruş for an undefined purpose. He wrote that a sum of three hundred
and thirty-three kuruş was paid to him on one day. At the end of this last entry, he
wrote prayers for gaining more.841
According to the records, the highest amount paid as boğça baha was five hundred
kuruş while the lowest amount was fifty kuruş. Evidently, it was not a fixed amount
as there was a significant difference of as much as four hundred and fifty kuruş
between the lowest and the highest amount. The question is how the amount paid as
bohça baha was determined. Nizri says that “the higher a government official’s
position, the more was expected of him in terms of honoring his status and securing
his office by frequent gift-giving,”842 One might expect that the level of the medrese
833 Sıdkızâde, 10b.
834 Ibid., 12b.
835 Ibid., 12b.
836 Ibid., 12b.
837 Ibid., 14a.
838 Ibid., 19a.
839 Ibid., 23b.
840 Ibid., 23b.
841 Ibid., 33a.
842 Nizri, Ottoman High Politics, 149.
180
or judgeship was a determinant, but the records of Mustafa Hamid Efendi disprove this
idea because judges who were promoted to the same levels paid different amounts.
The judge of Erzurum paid five hundred kuruş while the judge of Üsküdar paid two
hundred kuruş although both judgeships were at the mevleviyet level (dignitary rank).
Judges or teachers may have paid bohça baha in accordance with their financial
situation as well as their level of intimacy with the şeyhülislam. Those who wanted to
sustain and strengthen their relations might force themselves to pay more. If the
personal relationship and the financial situation of the appointee affected the amount
paid, it means that boğça baha was negotiable.
According to the diary, fashionable, luxurious, technological devices like watches,
binoculars, and muskets as well as such things as horses and textiles, and food items
would have been the subjects of gift exchange which created and strengthened
patronage networks sustaining the financial and social well-being of both the client
and the patron. As explained before, gifts were usually sent as a result of an
appointment. Yet, many other occasions necessitated gift exchange like religious
festivals, the holy month of Ramazan, banquets, circumcision and marriage
ceremonies, as well as dismissals, were also times to present gifts to the benefactor in
order to secure a new post. Gifts were as important as money in strengthening the
financial power of the addressee because most of the gifts recorded in the diary were
highly- expensive items; such luxury objects were probably often resold and changed
into cash. Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s income was therefore supplemented by the various
gifts he received on several occasions.
Numerous people in the Sıdkızâde network secured a constant flow of gifts; this, in
turn, explains the number of entries recording the gifts accepted by Mustafa Hamid
Efendi. As in the case of the money he earned, Mustafa Hamid Efendi was also very
careful in taking note of the gifts. For instance, the diarist recorded that the chief
military judge of Anatolia, Mustafa Rakım Efendi sent him a watch as it was
customary (ber mu‘tâd) to send gifts in the month of Ramazan (ramazâniyye).843 Halil
Efendi, an officer in the army, also sent a watch as gift for celebrating the month of
Ramazan. Likewise, a pair of gold binoculars was sent by the former judge of İzmir
843 Sıdkızâde, 16b.
181
on the second night of Ramazan, and Army Chamberlain Ali Efendi sent him a gold
snuffbox on the third night of Ramazan.844 It seems to have been a very prosperous
period as some people in his network showed their generosity and commitment by
sending highly- expensive gifts to congratulate him during this very special period of
the Islamic calendar. Some gold items were added to his fortune during this period of
prosperity.
New appointments and promotions were usually followed by gifts. The voivode of
Uşak, who was the uncle of his brother-in-law, presented a horse on his
reappointment.845 Mustafa Hamid Efendi recorded his feelings of happiness on
receiving such a special gift; we know from the diary that he was very fond of horses.
Seyyid Cafer Fevzi Efendi presented a watch on the occasion of his appointment to
the judgeship of Darülhilfe.846 The head of the ayans (notables) in Izmir sent a British
watch.847 Dismissals were also times to strengthen ties with the benefactor. The former
judge of Mecca sent him several luxurious fabrics and clothes when he returned to the
capital.848 Several watches, expensive fabrics, a ram (Mihaliç koç)- these were some
of the gifts recorded in the diary. The household kitchen was also supported by gifts.
A certain el-Hac Mustafa Efendi dispatched a letter to Mustafa Hamid Efendi and sent
halvah, musk, and a six-pack of cheddar cheese. 849 Likewise, the judge of Eyüp, Emin
Beğzâde Abdülkadir Efendi, sent ten bowls of yoghurt and one plate of cream.850 It
was not only luxurious items, foods or fabrics that were sent as gift. Some unusual
objects would also have been presented. Someone whom the diarist called ‘our İsmail
Agah Efendi’ gave him a horn, known as a ‘serpent’, placed in a mother of pearl box851
when he was dismissed and returned to the capital. Likewise, certain Mısran Agha sent
four red fish that were placed in a mason jar.852
The Sıdkızâdes did not only receive gifts. It was a reciprocal process; they also had to
give gifts to preserve and strengthen existing ties as well as to create new webs of
844 Sıdkızâde, 17b.
845 Ibid., 27b.
846 Ibid., 23b.
847 Ibid., 12a.
848 Ibid., 7a.
849 Ibid., 9a.
850 Ibid., 14a.
851 Ibid., 32b.
852 Ibid., 4b.
182
relationships. After being appointed as the chief mufti, Sıdkızâde Ahmed I Efendi, for
instance, presented expensive gifts and paid considerable sums to the sultan and other
palace grandees. The diarist wrote that it was the custom for the şeyhülislam to present
gifts to the sultan to show his appreciation. His father, for example, sent a Saxonian
bowl and a plate to the sultan, while he paid a sum of four thousand five hundred kuruş
to the sons of the sultan, the chief eunuch of the harem, the chief armorer and the
treasurer. He also paid one thousand kuruş to the chamberlain.853
3.EXTERNAL SELF: DAILY LIFE OF THE DIARIST
The unremitting references to family, friends and acquaintances in his personal
chronicle permit one to reconstruct Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s social activities. He was
not reticent about the world around him which enables us to understand how and with
whom he passed his days. The diary is significant for describing the images of daily
activities and revealing much about the author’s way of life. The diary gives a wealth
of information about the ordinary experiences in daily life; from the time passed as a
member of an ulama family to the daily rituals of an individual. It also reveals a lot
about the realities of human life, from the delights of births, marriages, or
appointments to the sorrow of dismissals or fear of sickness. In my discussion of this,
I will concentrate on an Ottoman individual and his authentic experiences, focusing on
the regular features of Mustafa Hamid’s life, the outings, visits, dinner parties and the
material dimension of his self as well as his conception of time.
3.1. Sociability: Visits and Banquets
The house and the family were typically given to privacy; but the visits and banquets
that took place in the mansions of the elite allowed the diarist to socialize, build up
new relations and strengthen the existing ones. Like many other wealthy families of
Istanbul, the Sıdkızâdes had two houses: a seaside mansion in the Rumelihisarı district
and one house in the city, probably both embodying the wealth of the best elite
mansions of that time. They would spend the summer in the seaside mansion which
853 Sıdkızâde, 3b.
183
was more suitable for the warm days of summer and move to the house in the city
when the season turned cold.
The house was obviously very important as the center of everyday life. These two
mansions of the Sıdkızâdes hosted numerous guests at iftars and dinner parties,
witnessed wedding ceremonies, many births as well as the coming and going of
servants and slaves who joined or left the household. Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s
daughter, Saliha Sabite, was born in the house in the city and ceremonies regarding
her birth, like her first hammam experience or celebrations for the fortieth day after
her birth, took place there as well. His own marriage ceremony with Ziynet Ziba Hatun
was also organized in that house. This special event gathered together many important
personages in their mansion.
Visits and dinner parties were important components of elite life and the diarist called
the latter ziyâfet (banquet) rather than ta‘am (meal). Mustafa Hamid Efendi was a
popular figure at banquets organized by members of the ulama and other elites. He
recorded the meals that he attended and identified people with whom he feasted. Such
records enable us to access his network as well as to learn about his social life.
Damad Efendi was one of those frequently mentioned by the diarist. Mustafa Hamid
Efendi used to visit Damad Efendi in his seaside mansion and they often had dinner
together. These frequent records suggest that the diarist got along well with him.
Usually they were accompanied by some other elite people. On the 25th of
Cemâziyelevvel 1239 (27 January 1824), for instance, Mustafa Hamid Efendi and
Damad Efendi were accompanied by two persons, one called Cezmizâde and the other
Ahmedzâde, as well as a certain Şeyh Efendi at the dinner hosted by Damad Efendi.854
It seems that Mustafa Hamid Efendi spent the night in Damad Efendi’s mansion. The
next day, he first went to a certain Bahaeddin Efendi’s855 house from where he moved
to the mansion (konak) around eleven o’clock while Damad Efendi went to the seaside
854 Sıdkızâde, 31b.
855 Since he is carrying the title of Efendi, Bahaeddin Efendi must have been an ilmiye member in his
network. In Sicill-i Osmani, there are four persons carrying the name Bahaeddin who lived around the
same time with Mustafa Hamid Efendi. All of these four people named as Bahaeddin were belonged to
established families carrying the suffix “zâde.” Melek Paşazâde Bahaeddin Mehmed Bey, Tatarcıkzâde
Bahaeddin Mehmed Efendi, Uşşakizâde Bahaeddin Mehmed Efendi and Reiszâde Bahaeddin Mehmed
Ferid Efendi. See Sicill-i Osmani, II, 350-51. All of them served as teacher or judge in the period under
consideration.
184
mansion. Another day after eating breakfast in the city, he went to visit Zeynelabidin
Efendi (d. 1824) in Üsküdar. From there he moved to the pier at ten o’clock to take a
boat and go to the seaside mansion.856 The people mentioned in this entry by family
names using the suffix “zâde” implies that they belonged to some prominent ulama
families. On top of that, Zeynelabidin Efendi was the former şeyhülislam who was
forgiven and allowed to return to Istanbul in November 1818, ten months after his
dismissal and banishment to Bursa.857
Many other dinner parties were recorded throughout the diary. On 19 Cemâziyelevvel
1238 (1 February 1823), he attended a dinner party at the house of Cezmizâde Hasan
Efendi who served as a teacher and finally became the judge of Eyüp.858 Another feast
was hosted by Arzuhali Efendi on 29 Şaban 1238 (11 May 1823).859 The judge of the
flour market (kapan-ı dakik/un kapanı), Ali Efendi, hosted a breakfast party at his
seaside mansion on 18 Şevval 1238 (28 June 1823). After breakfast, the guests sailed
to a beautiful boatyard and from there they rode horses to the vineyard of Ali Efendi
where they had dinner. After spending the whole day together, Ali Efendi presented
Mustafa Hamid Efendi with some valuable pieces of fabric as a gift. Having completed
a busy day filled with excursions and banquets, Mustafa Hamid Efendi sailed to the
seaside mansion by moonlight.860
Such meals did not only occur in the households of elites. Mustafa Hamid Edendi went
all the way to the shrine of the prophet Joshua together with Damad Efendi and
Meşrebzâde Ali Molla Efendi for a picnic/meal held on 26 Şevval 1238 (6 July 1823).
They visited the tomb and prayed there after the meal. Prayers and petitions for
forgiveness were followed by performing the prayer. Then they drove to the pier from
where they sailed to the seaside mansion together.861 Mustafa Hamid Efendi also
attended meals in picnic areas like Kağıthane. Sometimes he spent all day visiting and
attending feasts. In the entry for 17 Şevval 1243 (2 May 1828) for instance, he recorded
856 Sıdkızâde, 31b.
857 Özcan, “Zeynelabidin Efendi,” 366-7. Zeynelabidin Efendi was dismissed by the events, known as
softalar vak’ası and mum kavgası, between students. Zeynelabidin Efendi decided to imprisonment and
banishment of those involved. Because of these events and resulting reactions, Zeynelabidin Efendi was
dismissed on 27 January 1818.
858 Sıdkızâde, 8a.
859 Ibid., 17a.
860 Ibid., 20b.
861 Ibid., 21a.
185
his day thus: “Thanks to God, today we went to the picnic area of Kağıthane riding in
a horse-drawn vehicle. After having breakfast (sabah ta’amı), we got into the vehicles
at quarter past eight and ate dinner in the mansion of the head of the Stables (mirahur
köşkü).”862
Mustafa Hamid Efendi was also in close contact with people from various occupational
groups. For instance, once he attended a dinner invitation in the lodge of Emir
Buhari.863 Another dinner invitation was hosted by Mehmed Efendi whom he wrote
about as ‘our old stamp- holder’ (bizim mühürdâr-ı sâbık).864 It seems that Mustafa
Hamid Efendi was such a favorite person at banquets that householders sometimes
begged him to attend. He recorded one such occasion in which he attended a banquet
against his inclination because of the host’s insistence. He attended the feast held by
the apprentice scribe Aziz upon his request (kemâl-ı ricâ ve niyâz istemesi). Damad
Efendi was also present at the dinner party. Although Mustafa Hamid Efendi was very
fond of such gatherings, his record about this invitation suggest he did not want to
attend. The reason for his unwillingness might result from the fact that the dinner party
was held just after Damad Efendi lost his little daughter.865
The diarist also had the opportunity to meet the sultan in person thanks to his position
as the administrator of the waqf of Kılıç Ali Paşa Mosque where the sultan
occasionally attended Friday sermons. He recorded one such occasion with pleasure
and prayers of gratitude as he had the chance to meet the sultan personally in the
mosque. In this entry, he revealed his feelings of pride and his desire to reap the
benefits of being in the presence of the sultan.
When the news has arrived that the sultan will honor Kılıç Ali Paşa Mosque in
Tophane district where I am the administrator, … after we sat with the janissary agha
in the chief of artillery’s room, after … the sultan arrived to the port side and we
greeted [him] holding an incensory-burner in hand … after [it was] brightened up by
the presence of the light- giving moon (rikâb-I kamertâb), again we stood on the stairs
facing the right way, again we went out doors holding an incense burner. After we had
taken approximately twenty steps, the imperial consent was given, saying “Let the
862 Sıdkızâde, 35a.
863 Ibid., 8a.
864 Ibid., 30a.
865 Ibid., 30b.
186
gentleman (effendi) stay here.” May God give happiness, auspiciousness and allow us
to reap the benefits (semere) of this. 14 Şaban 1238, the night of Bara‘at, Friday.866
3.2. The Material Self: His Use of Servants, Horses and Luxurious Items
Consumption was a way of expressing social status and possessions to the rest of the
group. As Yavuz Köse notes, goods were functional because of the constant needs of
the body to be fed, kept warm and sheltered, as well as being functional because they
gave the impression of being part of a group. The patterns of the consumption and use
of certain goods allowed the consumer to stir up emotions, create relationships and
observe rituals, and this, in turn, shaped their identity.867 Faroqhi and Akçetin saw
consumption as being a “language one can understand, and which one had to master
to maintain membership in the Ottoman elite club.”868
The diary gives valuable information on Sıdkızâde Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s material
circumstances, especially on his consumption of goods. His expenditures were diverse
and varied: salaries paid in return for certain services, gifts for acquaintances/elites
who were in his network. It seems he spent considerable amounts on luxury items. His
expenditures were largely allocated to buying expensive clothes, horses, and slaves.
Zilfi notes that wealthy families had both female and male slaves, as well as free
servants for doing household work.869 According to the diary, Mustafa Hamid Efendi
had many servants and female slaves in his service. He constantly recruited new
retainers for the household. There are three entries about his servants in the year 1239,
three entries in 1243 and one entry in 1244. These servants (hâdim) were mostly
recommended to him by acquaintances. For instance, a boy named Ahmed was
recommended by someone called ‘our devotee’ (bizim sofu). He added that the boy
was to come from Kütahya. Zilfi notes that “household servants were often relatives
866 Sıdkızâde, 15a-15b.
867 Yavuz Köse, “Consume Together: Some Glimpses into Ottoman Consumer Behaviour,” in Many
Ways of Speaking About the Self: Middle Eastern Ego-Documents in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish
(14th-20th Century), ed. Ralf Elger and Yavuz Köse (Wiesbaden: Otto Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010),
201.
868 Elif Akçetin and Suraiya Faroqhi, “Introduction,” in Living the Good Life: Consumption in the Qing
and Ottoman Empires of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Elif Akçetin and Suraiya Faroqhi (Leiden: Brill,
2017), 16.
869 Madeline C. Zilfi, “Servants, Slaves, and the Domestic Order in the Ottoman Middle
East,” Hawwa 2, no:1 (2004), 12.
187
or immigrant compatriots of the effective householder.870 In the case of the servant
Ahmed, this particular devotee, who apparently had a close relationship with the
Sıdkızâde household, was probably the young boy’s relative and/or compatriot. As
Zilfi further points out, “urban migrants had a better chance of surviving in the city if
compatriots or relatives could show the way.”871 In this case, the young boy Ahmed
had the good fortune of having a relative/compatriot who had close relations with a
grandee household.
Mustafa Hamid Efendi, nonetheless, seems to be unlucky in finding hard-working and
reliable servants needed to run the household. On 27 Rebiülevvel 1239 (1 December
1823), he wrote down his complaints regarding his servant Abdülbaki who was
reckless and negligent in managing his duties. Mustafa Hamid Efendi said he was a
malingerer(habis).872 Although this particular Abdülbaki was forgiven a number of
times for his misconduct, he did not receive a lesson and was finally dismissed.873 The
statement of Mustafa Hamid Efendi at the end of the entry indicates his need of a loyal
assistant. He hoped to find a trusted protégé to appoint as kethüda (chamberlain). This
very important task necessitated managing all the business of the household, both the
private and the public aspects, such as providing supplies for the household or assisting
to oversee religious endowments and presenting gifts in the name of his patron.874
Mustafa Hamid Efendi wished to fill this important position by appointing a
trustworthy and competent person, that is, he wanted to appoint his kethüda after
training him in the household.
Abdülbaki was mentioned in a number of entries about running the household,
revealing Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s desire to train him. For instance, he was entrusted
to convey one thousand, two hundred and fifty piastres to the moneylender, Tıngıroğlu
Kirkor, in the early days of the month of Recep.875 At the beginning, Abdülbaki had
evidently been trusted to fulfill important duties like transferring large amounts of
870 Zilfi, “Servants, Slaves, and the Domestic Order,” 15.
871 Ibid.
872 Sıdkızâde, 28b.
873 Ibid.
874 Nizri, Ottoman High Politics, 76-77; Michael Nizri, "The Position of Steward to the Ottoman
Provincial Governor as a Stepping-Stone to Regional Influence," International Journal of Turkish
Studies 22, no:1/2 (2016): 17-30; Mehmet Canatar, “Kethüda,” DİA, vol. 25, 332-4.
875 Sıdkızâde, 11a.
188
money. His services were rewarded by Mustafa Hamid Efendi, who bestowed on
Abdülbaki one of the gifts sent by the regent judge of Bursa, Nazif Efendi.876 However,
he fell into disgrace in a short time because of disobedience and violating the norm of
behavior expected from servants. Actually, “live-in servants were often treated as
family members, intimates of the household, nonetheless. Intimacy was precarious,
however, because unrelated servants were not, in fact, family and even relatives could
be sent away if problems arose.”877
In addition to good service, loyalty was another major requirement in recruiting
servants and other trusted persons. Loyalty did not last forever, nonetheless, as it was
“determined by the ability of the patron to provide opportunities and better prospects
for advancement.”878 Otherwise, servants could easily shift their loyalties from one
patron to another and from one household to another. Complaints regarding household
dependents were not restricted to the above-mentioned Abdülbaki. The diarist wrote
about a certain Raşid who obtained a new patronage tie with another person as soon
as Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s father was dismissed. The power and prestige of the diarist
were derived from the prominent position of his father as şeyhülislam; members of the
Sıdkızâde family could allocate some key positions to their protégés thanks to the
power of Şeyhülislam Sıdkızâde Ahmed I Efendi. Raşid was well aware of the
importance of such power networks in securing a position when he joined the
Sıdkızâde household. However, it was certainly the dismissal of the most powerful
figure of the household that prompted him to search for another patron. Eight months
after Raşid left the Sıdkızâde household, Mustafa Hamid Efendi reported that Raşid
had petitioned and begged to be taken back into the household, suggesting that he most
probably could not find what he was looking for.879
Mustafa Hamid Efendi was also concerned with buying new female slaves for his
household and selling those who were not needed anymore. According to Bernard
Lewis, young and pretty white slaves were seen as status symbols as only the richest
876 Sıdkızâde, 12a.
877 Zilfi, "Servants, Slaves, and the Domestic Order,” 15-6.
878 Nizri, Ottoman High Politics, 70.
879 Sıdkızâde, 30a.
189
elites could afford them.880 We know that being a member of an influential ulama
family, Mustafa Hamid Efendi had enough wealth to buy several slaves to serve him.
In three entries, Mustafa Hamid Efendi wrote the names of his female slaves, giving
them a certain degree of visibility in the diary. These entries were written during the
course of buying and selling. For instance, he bought a slave girl named Sabahat from
his mother and paid the sum of 1651 kuruş on 1 Rebiülahir 1238 (19 December 1822).
He renamed her Çeşm-i Felek (the eye of the sky), most probably because her eyes
were blue. The transaction was held privately within the household between mother
and son.881 The considerable amount paid for Çeşm-i Felek signals the satisfaction of
the former owner. However, she was sent to the slave market eight months after the
transaction on 25 Zilkade 1238. Mustafa Hamid Efendi did not give any detail about
the reason why he sold her in such a short time; we do not know if Çeşm-i Felek created
trouble in her new household. The diarist just recorded that he sent her to the slave
market; perhaps it was the usual practice to sell slaves who were not useful for
household work. On 4 Şevval 1243 (19 April 1828), he sent another slave, Ruşenkâver,
to Seyyid Feyzullah Efendi for sale in the slave market.882 He also added his prayers
for good customers. Although slaves were seen as a part of the household and mostly
treated as family members, they also had a nominal value in the market and were part
of the household investment. Therefore, if necessary, they were sent to the slave
bazaar.883
These female slaves were mostly used for domestic work. Indeed, in the entry
describing the wedding day of Mustafa Hamid Efendi, we see female slaves preparing
the room for the groom and his bride, serving the food and contributing to the
organization of the wedding. Female slaves were obviously charged with cooking,
laundering, removing slops and scrubbing. However, domestic work did not exclude
sexual activity; the heads of the household also had sexual relations with their female
slaves. Mustafa Hamid Efendi, in fact, called female slaves concubines (cariye). The
880 Bernard Lewis, Race and Slavery in the Middle East: An Historical Enquiry (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1990), 75, 91.
881 Zilfi, "Servants, Slaves, and the Domestic Order,” 7. Zilfi noted that white female slaves were
increasingly traded in private residences while the main places where African females were sold were
the central slave market.
882 Sıdkızâde, 35a.
883 Zilfi, "Servants, Slaves, and the Domestic Order,” 15-6.
190
term probably had sexual connotations rather than just designating a female slave,
responsible for the running of the household work in the domestic sphere. At the end
of entries concerning employing new slaves, Mustafa Hamid Efendi added his prayers
for happiness and God’s blessings. Such prayers for happiness signal the
responsibilities of female slaves as domestic workers and their duties to please the
sexual needs of their owners. Indeed Mustafa Hamid Efendi wrote an entry about the
birth of his nephew at the very beginning of the diary. His brother, Mehmed Rıfat
Efendi, had a son named Osman Nureddin on 13 Safer 1238 (30 October 1822). The
mother of the baby was Mehmed Rıfat Efendi’s concubine, Üçnaz (Evcinaz) Kadın (d.
1856).884 We do not know if he had a private harem, but it seems that Mustafa Hamid
Efendi himself was a polygamist, probably having several concubines. 885 He evidently
had a child from one of his slaves as he was not married to a free-born Muslim women
when his daughter Saliha Sabite was born on 27 Safer 1238 (13 November 1822).
Nevertheless, there is no explanation about the legal status of the childbearing slave.
We do not have any further information about Saliha’s mother. The picture is quite
blurred, and one cannot understand from the entries if she gained her freedom after
giving birth to her owner’s child.886
Mustafa Hamid Efendi had also black female slaves in the household. In the entry for
25 Zilhicce 1243 (8 July 1828), he wrote that a black slave (zenciye câriye) named
Feriha was bought for the sum of 1200 kuruş. One can infer that all other slaves
recorded in the diary were white as he did not indicate their color as he did for Feriha.
Ehud Toledano notes that Ottoman slaves were distinguished according to their race.
Essentially there were two classes of domestic slaves: white and African. Almost all
African slaves were used for household works and they could not have a chance for
884 Sıdkızâde, 1b. Üçnaz (Evcinaz) Kadın’s grave is found in Hekimoğlu Ali Pasha Mosque’s burial
area. Kutlu, Kaybolan Medeniyetimiz, 150. According to Orhan Çolak’s study, Mehmed Rıfat Efendi
was married to Fatma Hanım (d. 1855/56), the daughter of Şeyhülislam Ebulhayr Efendi. He also had
three concubines called Meleknaz Kadın (d. 1832), Emine Üçnaz (Evcinaz) Kadın (d. 1856) and Cemal
Kadınefendi (d. 1873/74). See Orhan M. Çolak, “Arşiv Belgelerinin Işığı Altında Sadrazam Hekimoğlu
Ali Paşa’nın Hayatı, İcraatı ve Hayratı,” 186.
885 Sıdkızâde, 2b. For example, the grave of one of his concubines, Nefise Nevcivan Kadın (d. 1828), is
found in Hekimoğlu Ali Pasha Mosque’s burial area, see Kutlu, Kaybolan Medeniyetimiz, 118.
886 Zilfi noted that the path for freedom was opened for those who bore the owner’s child (ümm-i veled),
see Madeline C. Zilfi, "Ottoman Slavery and Female Slaves in the Early Modern Era," in The Great
Ottoman-Turkish Civilisation: Economy and Society, Great Ottoman-Turkish Civilisation: Economy
and Society, ed. Halil İnalcık, et all, vol. 5 (Ankara: Yeni Türkiye, 2000), 716.
191
upward mobility while white slaves functioned in a broader variety of occupations and
had considerable opportunities for upward mobility, mostly through marriage to
members of the upper echelons of Ottoman society.887 We do not know exactly
whether the masters had sexual relationship with those black slaves. Toledano notes
that the attitude of the predominantly white elite was psychologically directed towards
white slaves by a feeling of “sameness.” Therefore, marriage across races was rare.888
There was a substantial difference between the market value of white and black slaves
acquired for the household; 1,651 kuruş paid for Sabahat and 1,200 kuruş for Feriha.
Mustafa Hamid Efendi paid 461 kuruş more to acquire his mother’s slave, but still this
difference might not be derived from her race but from the fact that Sabahat was
formerly his mother’s slave and satisfaction for her work was guaranteed. The
transaction for Sabahat was held within the family, while Feriha was bought from the
slave market.
Those female slaves were not the only luxury items listed in the diary. His entries
revealed that he was pleased to include other very expensive items for his use. Mustafa
Hamid Efendi had a keen interest on horses. If he went anywhere on horseback, he did
not simply write “I went somewhere” but he emphasized the fact by saying “I ride a
horse,” or “I ride in a horse-drawn vehicle.” There are lots of entries about Mustafa
Hamid Efendi’s riding a horse, sending the horses to the grassland, accepting a horse
as a gift or buying a new horse. For instance, he was very pleased by the gift of a horse
from Şakir Efendi on the occasion of becoming the voivode of Uşak on 9 Safer 1239
(15 October 1823).889 Mustafa Hamid Efendi occasionally expressed his feelings of
pleasure when recording gifts send by people in his network. He displayed his
enthusiasm for horses by registering his pleasure (gâyetü’l-gâye memnûn oldum). He
spent considerable amounts on buying new horses. He paid 325 kuruş to his brother,
Mehmed Rıfat Efendi, to buy the horse sent by the governor (beylerbeyi) to him as a
887 Ehud R. Toledano, The Ottoman Slave Trade and Its Supression (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1982), 281.
888 Toledano, The Ottoman Slave Trade, 281. Necdet Sakaoğlu, “Esir Ticareti,” in Dünden Bugüne
İstanbul Ansiklopedisi, ed. Nuri Akbayar, Ekrem Işın, Necdet Sakaoğlu, Oya Baydar, M. Baha Tanman,
M. Sabri Koz, Bülent Aksoy, Afife Batur, Yalçın Yusufoğlu, vol. 3 (Istanbul: Kültür Bakanlığı ve Tarih
Vakfı Yayınları, 1994), 200-2. Sakaoğlu noted that female white slaves were more desirable as
concubines.
889 Sıdkızâde, 27b.
192
gift on 25 Şevval 1243 (10 May 1828). Immediately after procuring the horse, he rode
it to visit Behçet Efendi by adding a prayer to ride it with ease and pleasure. 890
Buying expensive clothes consisted of a huge part of Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s
expenditures as he was very attentive to his appearance. People mostly chose their
clothes in accordance with the standards of the social environment in which they
wanted to position themselves891. Clothing itself “can be understood in terms of
communication, for it is the necessary receipt of a message by other social players.”892
In this sense, garments- like “readable texts” with their own “system of symbols”-
spoke for the wearer, indicating his wealth, status and even in certain cases revealing
the wearer’s profession.893
Tanyeli noted that Ottoman urban society in the seventeenth century mostly evaluated
luxurious consumption in terms of clothing rather than in domestic goods. The estate
inventories prove that large amounts were spent on clothing. Therefore, social status
was displayed via one’s outfit rather than by the materials used in the household. 894 In
Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s case, the house was also a very important place for meeting
people and entertaining guests; high social position was thus displayed through
luxurious domestic equipment. But still, clothing seems to have been a more defining
show of wealth and high social position. Mustafa Hamid Efendi acted in accordance
with the standards of the social network in which he took part. In his personal account,
he frequently took note of the clothes he bought from the market. Indeed, many of the
diary’s entries were about buying new clothes, changing clothes, accepting a piece of
material as a gift or explaining how he dressed on various occasions. He appeared at
events attended by the sultan and members of the elite society in Istanbul. He certainly
890 Sıdkızâde, 35a; Behçet Efendi must have been the person who was removed from his duty as chief
physician and appointed as the chief military judge. See Hekimbaşı Hafız Hızır İlyas Ağa, Osmanlı
Sarayında Gündelik Hayat, 301.
891 David Gary Shaw, “Expressing Yourself in Later Medieval England: Individuality and Social
Differentiation,” in Forms of Individuality and Literacy in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods, ed.
Franz-Joseph Arlinghaus (Turnhout: Brepols, 2015), 133.
892 Ibid.
893Cornelia Bohn, “Clothing as Medium of Communication,” 7, accessed December 3, 2020,
https://www.unilu.ch/fileadmin/fakultaeten/ksf/institute/sozsem/dok/Mitarbeitende/Bohn/Bohn_2004_
clothing-as_medium.pdf.
894 Uğur Tanyeli, “Norms of Domestic Comfort and Luxury in Ottoman Metropolises: Sixteenth to
Eighteenth Centuries,” in The Illuminated Table, The Prosperous House: Food and Shelter in Ottoman
Material Culture, ed. Suraiya Faroqhi and Christoph K. Neumann (Würzburg: Ergon Verlag, 2003),
315-6.
193
wanted to dress appropriately for every circumstance, revealing how much attention
he paid to his appearance.
Ulinka Rublack noted that clothing played an imperative role in “constituting
identities” of people.895 In the case of Mustafa Hamid Efendi, dressing appropriately
served to signify attachment to and participation in the group. It was a way of
expressing his identity and status as a member of a strong ulama household. He
articulates “his consciousness of being on show”896when he wrote that “I put on my
shawl on hearing that Şeyhülislam Yasincizâde Abdülvehhab Efendi had appeared in
the reception room (selamlık) with a shawl upon his fez and wearing a shirt.”897 This
statement of the diarist reveals how individuals express their visual identities through
specific forms of dress. The entries referring to clothes disclose his emphasis on his
attire, making us understand “the individual’s personal attitudes and feelings about his
public appearance.”898 The desire to dress properly possibly created some level of
anxiety over the need to assert his (and other Sıdkızâde’s) particular rank and place
within the ilmiye cadres as “garments as well as fabrics have a relation to the occasion
and the identity of the person who wears them.”899 Indeed, he recorded the way others,
in the higher echelons of Ottoman elite society dressed on certain occasions, and
somehow drew a comparison between his way of dressing and that of other elites.
Thanks to God, on the night of twenty-seventh Friday in this month of
Ramazan, Sadrazam, ex-Armorer (silahdar-ı esbak), Ali Paşa arrived wearing
a quilted turban (kallavi destar) and a sof tabard (ferace) at twenty-five minutes
to prayer time. And our master (efendimiz) arrived wearing his turban (destar)
and a white sof. My brother and I took his arm and guided him to the audience
hall and kissed his garment and [they] ate iftar meal and he came [again] after
changing his clothes. 27 Ramazan, the year 1238, the night of Friday.900
895 Ulinka Rublack, Dressing Up: Cultural Identity in Renaissance Europe (Oxford: Oxford University
Press. 2010), 3.
896 Rhoads Murphey, “Forms of Differentiation and Expression of Individuality in Ottoman Society,”
Turcica 34 (2002), 140.
897 Sıdkızâde, 36b.
898 Murphey, “Forms of Differentiation,” 140.
899 Bohn, “Clothing as Medium of Communication,” 6.
900 Sıdkızâde, 19a.
194
By describing the scene fully, the clothes worn, the welcoming ceremony, the iftar
table and the behavior of the diners, he recreated the events in the mind of the reader,
turning the reader into a spectator.901
The material of the clothes was important as the type of fabric used for garments had
a communicative value. Such information enables us to interpret his material world.
“Objects impart their qualities (say color, or texture) to us and we relate them
emotionally and think that they represent our tastes, values, wishes, and spirituality,
our connection with others and with the past.”902 For instance, garments made from
expensive furs were accepted as status symbols as it was mostly the elite who could
afford to buy them.903 “The basis of the universal communicative use of clothing …
are the virtually infinite possibilities of diversification in its materials. It begins with
the fabric … the part of the clothing and its system of significants.”904 The most
frequent category of goods mentioned in the diary consists of textiles and garments.
Among the fabrics, mention is made of woolens (çuka), altıparmak (striped silky
fabric) and çitari (bombazine). Some kinds of fabric are recurrently registered
throughout the text. He sometimes recorded the exact place of origins of those fabrics,
for example, Hind-kârî. The most noteworthy fabric appearing in the diary was furlynx,
sable, or ermine- which indicated Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s expensive tastes. He
owned several valuable furs and seems to have preferred lynx especially. Often, tailors
were trusted with these expensive fabrics to make clothes with. On 28 Rebiülevvel
1238 (13 December 1822), Mustafa Hamdi Efendi bought a lynx fur from a Jewish
furrier for 400 kuruş. Three days later, he received the clothes from the tailor. On the
same day, he wrote that he was wearing this newly obtained fur.905 For the upper
classes of Istanbul, ermine, white fox, sable, marten, and black squirrel had special
value; ermine was a great status symbol.906 Mustafa Hamid Efendi had some of these
expensive furs in his wardrobe; particularly ermine and sable.
901 René Nünlist, The Ancient Critic at Work: Terms and Concepts of Literary Criticism in Greek
Scholia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 153.
902 Rublack, Dressing Up, 3.
903 Filiz Karaca, “Kürk,” DİA, vol. 26, 568-70.
904 Bohn, “Clothing as Medium of Communication,” 5.
905 Sıdkızâde, 5a.
906 Markus Koller, “The Istanbul Fur Market in the Eighteenth Century,” in Living in the Ottoman
Ecumenical Community, ed. Suraiya Faroqhi (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 127.
195
In the winter, furs were generally lined to give protection from the cold. Furs were
mostly lined with lambskin and sheepskin.907 Mustafa Hamid Efendi habitually had
such clothes prepared for protection from the cold in the winter months, that is from
November to March. He did not specify the material used to line his furs, simply wrote
that he had them lined. Every time that he had one of his furs lined and put it on it, he
prayed for God’s blessing.908 “People did assert status through the goods they
consumed,” 909 including especially furs and expensive fabrics. These items were
probably of extraordinary significance to Mustafa Hamid Efendi as supreme markers
of nobility and were thus described by him so repetitively.
For women’s clothing, the list of fabrics and clothes is rather short. Items of female
clothing were represented in the diary by purchases for his daughter Saliha. Mustafa
Hamid Efendi recorded that he bought fabrics for Saliha for the first time on 5
Cemâziyelevvel 1238 (18 January1823).910 His enthusiasm for attire can be read from
this entry in which he described his first buying experience of buying material for his
little daughter. He purchased (çitari) fabric for a dress, a pair of shalwar (baggy
trousers) and a jacket (hırka) He gave the fabrics to the tailor to make up and received
the embroidered clothes six days later. Saliha wore those clothes for the first time on
11 Cemâziyelevvel 1238 (24 January 1823).911 This entry was written on the twentyfourth
of January, precisely the day when they may have experienced the lowest
temperature of the winter. The little girl’s wardrobe had been prepared in readiness for
the winter season. At different times, Mustafa Hamid Efendi wrote down everything
he purchased for Saliha, mostly dresses and shalwar.912 The only different item of
female clothing mentioned in the diary was socks. He recorded that three pairs of socks
for himself and two pairs of socks for his harem were sent as gifts by a certain Mehmed
Efendi, the regent judge of Eskişehir.913 No other mention of women’s clothing
appeared in the diary until he married Ziynet Ziba Hatun. The only female clothing
item appearing in entries on the wedding ceremony is the aigrette (sorguç) worn by
907 Koller, “The Istanbul Fur Market,” 127.
908 Sıdkızâde, 28a, 34a.
909 Akçetin and Faroqhi, “Introduction,” 32.
910 Sıdkızâde, 7a.
911 Ibid.
912 Ibid., 12b.
913 Ibid., 34b.
196
the bride.914 Unfortunately, these female clothing items do not give a clear picture of
women’s clothing preferences in their daily activities. We do not have enough
information in the diary about what Ottoman ladies wore at home or when they went
out.
Apart from clothes and horses, various expensive materials used by Mustafa Hamid
Efendi were also recorded in the diary. Fatma Müge Göçek noted that “gift exchange
emerges as the most recurrent medium within which Western goods occur.”915 Mustafa
Hamid Efendi was no an exception to this, he attained many luxurious Western
products through gift exchanges. Many luxurious European gifts were sent him by
people in his network. He listed many fashionable technological devices in the diary.
In seven entries, Mustafa Hamid Efendi mentioned clocks which were mostly sent as
gifts. Among these luxury objects a British watch which was decorated with marcasite
(İngiliz-kârî markazit sâ‘at ) and a lantern watch which cost for 150 kuruş must be
mentioned.916 The British watch was sent by Ahmed Reşid Efendi who was head of
the notables in Izmir. The lantern watch was sent by moneylender Kirkor in return for
money invested by Mustafa Hamid Efendi. Tanyeli notes that clocks and watches
defined the upper boundaries of achievable luxury mostly found in the households of
high-ranking bureaucrats. He further argues that clocks were just appealing to the eye
and functioned only as status symbols. They played practically no role in the daily
routines of the people who had them.917 Expensive clocks, such as the lantern clock,
registered in the diary definitely served to display the wealth of the Sıdkızâde
household. Nonetheless, in addition to Tanyeli’s interpretation, pocket watches must
have had a significant function in the daily activities of Mustafa Hamid Efendi even if
those luxurious clocks on display in the house did not. It is difficult to see how clocks
were used in practice; however, the fact that Mustafa Hamid Efendi attached
importance to registering the time of events indicates that clocks were not simply
ornamental.
914 Sıdkızâde, 38b.
915 Fatma Müge Göçek, Rise of Bourgeoisie, Demise of Empire: Ottoman Westernization and Social
Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 99.
916 Sıdkızâde, 12a, 34b.
917 Tanyeli, “Norms of Domestic Comfort and Luxury in Ottoman Metropolises,” 315.
197
Two other eye-catching items registered in the diary were a pair of gold binoculars and
a beautifully made British musket. The gold binoculars were sent by a certain İsmail
Efendi, a former mufti of İzmir.918 He obtained the musket from his brother in return
for the saddle blanket (gaşiye) sent by the deputy judge of Salonica.919 Binoculars were
rarely found in Ottoman estate inventories, being symbols of luxury and wealth.920 We
cannot know for sure if Mustafa Hamid Efendi ever used these gold binoculars and the
musket. These two items were mostly used for hunting purposes. However, the diary
gives no clue as to whether Mustafa Hamid Efendi had any interest in hunting. He
registered his excursions to the gardens of Kağıthane as well as other places were
recorded but no hunting trips were. He might have used the binoculars to enjoy the
beautiful view of Bosphorus from their waterside mansion in Rumelihisarı district. As
Eldem notes, such expensive materials were often resold or exchanged to allow for
new purchases.921 Therefore, another possibility is that he exchanged such luxury
items for other purchases because a gold binocular would be worth a considerable
amount. 922
3.3. Daily Routines of Getting Dressed and Hygiene
Similar to the importance he attached to his attire, the diarist was very attentive to his
personal hygiene so the routines of bathing, changing clothes, shaving and cutting his
nails became a regular subject of his diary. Such frequent mentions show that he had
a concern for the physical/external image of his body. He was a person who regularly
took part in social events, and he probably wanted his high standards to be noticed by
others.
918 Sıdkızâde, 17b.
919 Ibid., 13b.
920 Tülay Artan, “Terekeler Işığında 18. Yüzyıl Ortalarında Eyüp’te Yaşam Tarzı Standartlarına Bir
Bakış: Orta Halliliğin Aynası,” in 18. Yüzyıl Kadı Sicilleri Işığında Eyüp’te Sosyal Yaşam, ed. Tülay
Artan (Istanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 1998), 57.
921 Edhem Eldem, “An Exercise in Ottoman Sartorial Micro-History: The Many Breeches, Shoes, and
Fezzes of Mehmed Cemal Bey, 1855-1864,” in Fashioning the Self in Transcultural Settings: The Uses
and Significance of Dress in Self-Narratives, ed. Claudia Ulbrich and Richard Wittmann (Würzburg:
Ergon Verlag, 2015), 97.
922 Sıdkızâde, 13b. The entry about his brother’s musket strengthens this idea. His brother Mehmed
Rıfat Efendi exchanged his musket with a more practical item as saddle blankets (gaşiye) which were
customarily used by the members of the ilmiye. For further information on gaşiye see, Erdoğan Merçil,
“Gaşiye,” DİA, vol. 13, 398-9.
198
Going to the hammam and performing all the rituals required to cleanse the body seems
to be of significance to the diarist. When he went to the hammam, he described it as
“the entrance into the hammam and the cleansing of the body (duhul-ü hamam şod,
tathir-i beden).” The process of washing of the body was usually accompanied by
cutting the nails and shaving. He also received gifts to be used in the hammam.
Someone called Hafız Ahmed Efendi, for instance, presented him with a hammam
shirt and two towels when he came back to the capital after his dismissal from the
regentship of Yenişehir.923 Indeed, the hammam had great importance in Ottoman
society. As Miri Shefer notes, it was a place where people met and socialized while
fulfilling their need of personal hygiene. Public baths provided a set of services
including removal of bodily hair, massaging etc., but more importantly the hammam
was associated with health. Ottomans thought that going to the hammam and bathing
were beneficial to their health.924
The diarist, likewise, was attentive to his health. Indeed, the opening entry of the diary
was about his state of health. He had a problem with his urinary system about which
he saw a Jewish doctor called Hayim. He recorded when and how to use the ointment
(mâcun) prepared by the doctor.925 The other entry on his health was about leeching
(sülük). This operation was made by a Greek woman named Katerina. Seven leeches
were used to draw blood from his body. Mustafa Hamid Efendi seems displeased by
this situation in that he prayed for healing in order not to need such an operation
again.926
3.4. Time Consciousness: Relationship with Time
Time had many aspects in Ottoman society; therefore, different ways of telling time
were described in the leaves of the diary. The diarist used the rising and the setting of
the sun as a reference point to denote the precise time of some activities. Also, the
cycle of the seasons governed his activities. Time was a natural phenomenon and also
923 Sıdkızâde, 11b.
924 Miri Shefer-Mossensohn, Ottoman Medicine: Healing and Medical Institutions, 1500-1700 (Albany:
SUNY Press, 2010), 83.
925 Sıdkızâde, first (unnumbered) folio.
926 Ibid., 15b.
199
had it religious aspect. He probably organized his daily life according to the call to
prayer (ezan) recited five times a day.
In the first two years of his record-keeping activity, the diarist divided his diary into
monthly sequences. At the top of the page, he provided a title indicating the beginning
of the new month (Bu Ay Şehr-i Recebü’l-Mücerreb Sene 38). The diarist described
his experiences of “this month” in tandem with the time they occurred. He used the
blank pages to account for what he accumulated throughout the month.927 He recorded
when an important event occurred but did not write anything for a day in which nothing
happened. Therefore, his narrative consists of discontinuous incidents and instances.
The monthly division of the diary probably had something to do with accounting and
measuring the financial profits of that month, because almost every month ended with
a record of the revenues gained from the waqfs. He carefully described how he
distributed salaries to the officials working in the waqfs under his administration. The
diary enabled him to give order to his financial affairs. Beginning again after a twoyear
break, he stopped writing his entries under monthly sequences. His later entries
started with “this day.” He did not break the rule but indicated the year and the month
at the end of every entry. However, his entries became scattered and rare. He wrote no
more than three entries for each month and gave up writing with his last entry for on
23 Şaban 1244 (28 February 1829). He continued using the diary’s blank pages for
accounting purposes until 1253 (1837/38). He used a monthly measure of time means
in organizing the household’s income and accumulation of wealth.928 In most
European examples also, one can see that the diary was used for keeping a record of
expenditures and receipts. Actually, the system used for accounting is believed to form
the basis for what is known as a diary today. In her study on a midwife’s diary, for
instance, Laurel Thatcher Ulrich notes that there was a tradition of using printed
almanacs to keep record of “running accounts of receipts and expenditures” and the
midwife’s diary derived from such forms of record-keeping.929 Many other scholars
927 For Sherman’s similar observations on the diary of Pepys, see Sherman, Telling Time, 58.
928 Sherman, Telling Time, 68.
929 Ulrich, A Midwife's Tale, 8.
200
studying diaries also associate financial accounting with accounting time as mostly
almanacs were used as personal diaries. 930
Alongside financial matters, a monthly division of the diary served to keep track of
sacred times like the holy months of Receb, Şaban and Ramadan. The diarist spent
such holy periods busily, attending many iftar banquets, visiting people, gift
exchanging and, finally, taking part in religious festivals and bairam greetings. The
entries written during these months were filled with vigor and liveliness.
The passing months brought seasonal changes. The diarist kept track of these changes
in his entries, as they used to switch between their two mansions according to the
season. The family spent the warm days of summer at the seaside mansion and moved
to the city when the season turned cold. According to the diary they moved to the house
in the city between September and November according to the seasonal change.
Mustafa Hamid Efendi recorded that it was snowing on 26 November 1827, the very
day they moved to the city.931 In the following year, the snow was reported as coming
on 3 December 1828932, about two months later than their move that year. Outings and
excursions seemed to define the days of spring and summer when the diarist enjoyed
many banquets and much visiting. In the winter season, banquet were held in mansions
while in the summer season people went on excursions to Kağıthane or to the shrine
of the prophet Joshua in Beykoz.
While reports of excursion took place during spring and summer. Weather reports were
from the cold winter season when newsworthy weather events could happen. On 5
Cemaziyelevvel 1238 (18 January 1823), he reported;
In this sacred year, in the above-mentioned month, to God belongs all praise, a
severe winter occurred with heavy snow, three or four handspans and (the
water) was frozen at the fruit pier in Kağıthane. The Chief Admiral Hüsrev
Paşa had a way opened where one boat could be rowed between Kasım Paşa
and Sütlüce. This severe weather lasted for about one week or ten days. 5
930 Carter, “Accounting for Time,” 421.
931 Sıdkızâde, 33b.
932 Ibid., 36b.
201
Cemaziyelevvel, year 38, the day of Friday: this is the date the snow melted,
and the winter ended.933
In this entry, he referred to the month as a unit of time to specify and recapture such
an extreme winter season. The week also was used as a time span not to indicate a unit
of time within a month but to emphasize the length of the heavy snowfall. In the same
month of the following year, he could then refer to his diary to recall how cold winter
season had been the previous last year, how much snow the city had got and how long
the severe winter lasted. Such time records in the diary enabled the diarist to see
continuity or discrepancies throughout the years.
Time calculated by a clock or pocket watch, on the other hand, told the exact
mechanical, time. 934 However, his references to exact clock-time did not mean that he
departed from traditional methods of timing. As Avner Wishnitzer notes, by the
eighteenth century, clocks began to occupy a regular and essential part in Ottoman
time-culture, nevertheless time-telling was not detached from the nature or the
religious and astrophysical concepts that influenced it.935 The diarist owned many
watches as mentioned before; some of them were for luxury purposes to be used at
home, but he certainly had several pocket watches for daily use. The diarist was
faithful in his recording of time as he gave the exact hours and minutes of noteworthy
events. The purpose and the context of indicating time actually shows why it was
important for the diarist. He mostly used time-indications to note if a certain activity
took place at an auspicious time. He might have carried his pocket watch all the time
or at least had his watch with him when witnessing important events. For instance,
when registering the launching of the imperial boat (sandal), he wrote the exact time
to the moment as being “Friday, at one o’clock, thirty-five minutes. It is the desired
time.”936 His usage of the present continuous tense (indiriyorlar) reflects the
immediacy of the recording; revealing the concurrence between the event and the
933 Sıdkızâde, 6b.
934 Molly McCarthy, “The Diary and the Pocket Watch: Rethinking Time In Nineteenth-Century
America,” in Controlling Time and Shaping the Self: Developments in Autobiographical Writing Since
the Sixteenth Century, ed. J. Arianne Baggerman, Rudolf M. Dekker, and Michael James Mascuch
(Leiden: Brill, 2011), 129.
935 Avner Wishnitzer, Reading Clocks, Alla Turca: Time and Society in the Late Ottoman Empire
(Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 38.
936 Sıdkızâde, 13a.
202
report. He was there with his pocket-watch in his pocket to consult and perhaps his
diary in hand to note if that important activity was taking place at an auspicious time.
Another imperial boat was launched but not at the auspicious time calculated by the
astrologist. The diarist then wrote “it is delayed by mistake.”937
In many other entries, he revealed how observant he was on this issue in his personal
life too. The diarist seems to have asked the astrologer to calculate the auspicious time
for performing several significant activities such as his marriage ceremony. He
repeated various times that the ceremony took place exactly at that auspicious moment;
“it was the blessed time of Friday at two o’clock, forty-eight minutes.”938
These are not the only examples indicating Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s relation with time.
He wanted to specify the precise time by the clock of some noteworthy events. For
instance, he usually kept records of the time of birth so the baby’s course in life could
be foretold by looking at the celestial configurations at the moment of the birth.939 He
registered, for instance, the birth of his daughter as “My daughter, Saliha Sabite, was
born on Tuesday night at forty-five minutes past eight.”940
In brief, recording the exact time of events was not about timing and programming
minutes for the coordination of everyday life. The diarist certainly had a timediscipline,
but that was for the spiritual organization of his life. As Stuart Sherman
puts it, the astrological paradigm encouraged textual precision about the clock time of
events.941 The diarist’s interest in prognostic tradition and astrological practices can be
understood from the entries on the calendars sent by the chief astrologer,942 his records
indicating the exact time of significant events, and his concern for choosing the
auspicious moment to do a specific activity. The inventory of activities ranged from
private issues, like marriage and taking a bath, to imperial events like launching an
imperial boat or starting a military campaign. The auspicious moment judged by the
937 Sıdkızâde, 13b.
938 Ibid., 37b.
939 Ahmet Tunç Şen, “Astrology in the Service of the Empire: Knowledge, Prognostication, and Politics
at the Ottoman Court 1450s-1550s,” (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Chicago, 2016), 45-47.
940 Sıdkızâde, 2b.
941 Sherman, Telling Time, 55.
942 Sıdkızâde, 11a.
203
astrologist had to be observed when embarking on such activities so that it would bring
good fortune.
4. INNER SELF: REFLECTION OF EMOTIONS IN WRITTEN FORM
An important question to articulate is how far we can trace the emotions of the author
Do self-narratives provide only objective data about the writer or do they provide us
with the means to see his inner self and his emotions? As Nelly Hanna accurately notes,
some texts that seem to be without feeling can in fact reflect deep emotions between
the lines. An objective piece of information might hide emotions that are not directly
articulated.943 The records in the diary of Mustafa Hamid Efendi are terse and seems
not to show deep feelings but a detailed reading shows that actually the reverse is true.
The diary allows us to get as close as possible to the self of an Ottoman living in the
period before 1839. He wrote about outward aspects of his life such as his career and
those of his father and brother; he wrote about appointments as well as dismissals.
Behind these records of official life, one can trace the innermost feelings of the diarist
such as the pride, happiness, or disappointment he felt regarding such appointments
and dismissals. He wrote about births, his own marriage and sometimes about deaths.
He also recorded his daily business like taking a bath, purchasing new clothes,
dismissing a disobedient servant, and recruiting others, accepting gifts and the pleasure
he gained in sending gifts, or paying a visit to an acquaintance. Although he was
willing to express times of happiness more and wrote less of mishaps, he showed his
feelings of anger and of agony at some points. His entries thus enable us to explore the
reactions to what he felt, heard, or tasted as well as the ways in which he interpreted
such experiences. Although only sporadically, the diarist used emotional phrases like
“I became happy” or “I am glad.” Or sometimes, he cursed those who bothered him.
Still, diary entries do not always say candidly what the emotions of the individual are;
Mustafa Hamid Efendi mostly preferred to describe his actions in detail rather than
describe his inner feelings.944 Therefore, records describing how he behaved in certain
situations, such as his entries regarding his relationship with family members, his wife,
943 Hanna, “Self Narratives in Arabic Texts 1500-1800,” 146.
944 Reynolds, Interpreting the Self, 88.
204
servants, colleagues and even rivals, allow us to observe his emotions and inner world
beyond his social/external self. Broomhall described the household as “a social and
socializing unit” that shaped the emotional identities of the people. Hence, interactions
within the household can be a suitable unit of analysis for studying feelings providing
us with ways to understand anger, happiness, jealousy or pride within a domestic social
environment.945 In this part, I will focus on his interaction within the household as well
as his relations with other people to reveal his emotional states.
Gratitude and appreciation are two emotional status remarked on throughout the text.
The diarist often uttered prayers asking God to give him favors; he apparently had
many blessings for which to be his thankful. One of such blessings was that the
Sıdkızâde family had a very influential position, and the family members were able to
advance easily up the ilmiye hierarchy. The entries show that the diarist was proud of
the appointments of family members to important positions and the family’s influential
network.
The diarist also recorded happily that his family was expanding by marriage. The most
striking entries allowing the reader to get close to the life and self of the diarist are
those regarding his marriage. He not only wrote about the marriage ceremony but
started to take records beginning from his first attempt at asking a family to give him
their daughter as bride. He even wrote about one of his failures. He had sent a message
asking for the hand of the daughter of İrfanzâde Arif Efendi through Balçıklı Ali
Efendi on 6 Receb 1244 (12 January 1829). Happy news arrived three days later on 9
Receb (15 January). He recorded this saying, “The receiving of İrfanzâde Arif Efendi’s
message of ‘I agree to give my daughter to the gentleman if God pleases.”946 He
revealed his contentment by ending the entry with prayers for a happy and blessed
marriage. However, just after this, he recorded another entry without indicating its
date. “The above-mentioned subject ended because of her father’s execrable act. It
would not be auspicious for either side. Praise be to God. O God, open the door, open
to us the door of good fortune .”947 He seemed contented with this annulment, but his
945 Susan Broomhall, “Emotions in the Household,” in Emotions in the Household (1200-1900), ed.
Susan Broomhall (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 2.
946 Sıdkızâde, 37a.
947 Ibid.
205
prayers and his words about İrfanzâde Arif Efendi revealed his feelings of
disillusionment and anger. That he did not even write the date of the entry supports
this idea, considering Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s preoccupation with recording the time
of such important events, be it desirable or undesirable. The remarkable thing is that
the diarist was a real a participator rather than remaining distant and objective,
allowing his father to choose a bride for him.
Shortly after this failed attempt, he asked Miralem Topuzluzâde Mustafa Ağa for
permission to marry his daughter on 18 Receb 1244 (24 January 1829). Six days later,
the engagement cum civil marriage ceremony was held exactly as calculated by the
head astrologer at forty-eight minutes past two. It was apparently very important for
the diarist that the ceremony be held exactly at the desired time. He repeated three
times in the same entry that it was a sacred and auspicious time in which they got
married, obviously thinking that the time of event would have a positive effect on their
entire marriage life.
The marriage ceremony [nikah] with the daughter of Miralem Topuzluzâde Mustafa
Ağa was performed with greatness, happiness, and auspiciousness on the twentyfourth
day of this grateful month of Receb at forty-eight minutes past two in the
dawn/twilight which is the auspicious time calculated by the head astrologer, İbrahim
Efendi. The diamond engagement ring and other requirements of the ceremony were
presented except for the ağırlık.948 My brother [birader efendi], Damad Efendi and
Bahaddin Efendi acted as witnesses and the bride-price was two thousand, five
hundred kuruş. Praise be to God, [the ceremony] took place on the sacred day at the
sacred time … May God grant us his favor, may God Almighty bless us and give us
favorable offspring and affection, bestow on us peace and harmony, and grant us a
long life with dutiful children … the year 1244, 24 Receb. It is the fortunate time of
twilight, Friday at forty-eight minutes past two.949
After the ceremony, the bride seems to have stayed in her father’s house for a while
until the actual wedding. Gift exchanges occurred between the households of the bride
and groom during this time. Sending gifts served to strengthen the bond between
948 Ağırlık was the money paid to the bride before signing the marriage contract The couple would be
engaged when ağırlık was paid. See Fanny Davis, The Ottoman Lady: A Social History from 1718 to
1918 (New York: Greenwood Publishing Group, 1986), 65.
949 Sıdkızâde, 37a-37b.
206
families as well as between the newly engaged couple. On 26 Receb 1244 (1 February
1829) for example, Mustafa Hamid Efendi sent his bride sweets and various fruits and
flower, and, in return, his fiancée sent him garments on the last day of Receb. He wrote
that those gifts were sent to ask after his fiancée’s state of mind and health as well as
that of her family.950 The next month, they were busy with activities related to the
wedding celebration. The entry on 19 Şaban 1244 (24 February 1829) announced the
end of arranging the bride’s trousseau in the groom’s house (cihâz serme).951 This
ceremony heralded the movement of the bride to a new life in her new home.
Mustafa Hamid Efendi noted every minute detail regarding his marriage ceremony;
people attended, the name of the women who served during the ceremony, details
about the bridal procession, their first meal together and even their first sexual
intercourse. Most importantly, he wrote the name of the bride, Ziynet Ziba. On looking
at the length and details of the entries recorded throughout the diary, one realizes that
he expressed his feelings of excitement and happiness about an event mainly by
writing a very detailed summary of the event and by adding his heartfelt prayers at the
end; such entries were therefore longer than those that did not arouse any feeling.
Entries regarding his marriage, in this sense, are the lengthiest of all and lasted through
two folios. There are no other passages of similar length in the diary not even the
entries in which he recorded his father’s appointment as şeyhülislam or the birth of his
daughter. Mustafa Hamid Efendi there abandoned the diary form and adopted a
narrative style to give some very private details. He described the bridal procession
and the wedding night thus;
With honor, fortune and happiness, on the twenty-second day of this respected month
of Şaban, Nuri Efendi rode a horse and İsmail Efendi got in the carriage and my tutor
(lala) Hüseyin Ağa and the steward of harem and Osman Efendi and tutor Mehmed
Ağa walked alongside the carriage and yet … Hanım and … Kadın and our lady
approached the harem at twenty-five past six, and we came close by the carriage and
took our lady’s arm and guided her up the stairs and into the main room. After
welcoming her and having a short conversation we entered the banqueting hall
(divanhane) … later we entered the reception room where we talked with the
950 Sıdkızâde, 37b.
951 Ibid., 38a.
207
companions invited [for the feast]. After the isha prayer, my father, who is our
benefactor, Rahmi Bey and Meşrebzâde Efendi and other companions formed a circle
in front of the mabeyn door [and] Şeyh Osman Efendi prayed. After the invocation,
[I] kissed the graceful feet of my benefactor and kissed the hem of the garments of
Ahmed Bey and Meşrebzâde and kissed the hand of above-mentioned şeyh and the
sacred hand of my brother. And I entered by the above-mentioned door to meet with
good fortune and happiness, there … Hanım greeted us with candleholder and incense
burner and [we] entered the harem where … Hanım and elder sister (hemşir hanım)
were standing. [38b] After kissing their hands, I asked about my mother who is my
benefactor. I had the sad answer that it was not appropriate to kiss the hands of the
mother (valide hanım) among the women on the wedding night (zifaf gecesi). When I
learnt that the mother would not appear, I graciously agreed [the situation] to this
custom among women. Then the curtains of our lady were opened, and we entered
into the room reciting bismillah and saying, “O God, open the doors, open to us the
gate of good fortune.” After greeting [her], I prayed the sacred nafile namaz and
opened my hands to pray for my all wishes and aspirations. May God who is the most
munificent accept my prayers, amen! When our lady and the sister-in-law (yenge
kadın) were ready , we went t to them. Yenge kadın took the auspicious hand of [our]
lady as well as my auspicious hand, then she put our hands together and let us sit in
the corner [of the room]. She removed jewelry from the box and put it on her head.
After congratulating her, she asked her name three times, and she replied “Ziynet
Ziba.” Then, she brought us chicken, make me eat one bite and another bite for the
lady. Then, we had coffee, conversed, and drank syrup (şerbet). Afterwards, yenge
kadın closed the door and left the room. After continuing our conversation for a while,
yenge kadın came in and said, “We may take out her aigrette if you allow us.” After
getting our permission, we recited our daily portion of scripture (vird) that we could
not recite earlier [Our] lady and the elder sister came in. After having a little
conversation, she left [the room] saying “Let God give comfort.” Then, our lady came
in removing her aigrette. Concubines came in to prepare the bed and then they left [the
room]. Then, we put on our nightclothes at around six o’clock, and performed our
ablutions. Then, we invited our lady to the bed with appeals and pleadings that we
would sleep with delight. May God make it an auspicious event and grant us happiness
and bestow on us a good married life and sincere attachment. Amen! Amen a thousand
208
times! … May God give us happiness with numerous righteous descendants. Amen!952
He possibly recorded such a detailed entry in order to remember and live those blissful
minutes over and over again. His meticulous description of his marriage discloses the
importance he attached to this very special event. His portrayal of his lady did not go
beyond her bodily presence; he did not say anything about her physical appearance,
her face or her clothes, but one can sense that the diarist treated his lady with great
respect. He explained all other details about her, such as guiding her to her new house,
his conversation with her, eating their first meal together, having coffee and syrup
which was accompanied by a pleasant conversation, even her appearance in the room
after removing her aigrette. He did not openly say that they had sexual intercourse, but
he explained how they prepared themselves before going to bed by putting on their
nightclothes and performing their ablutions. He expressed his sensibilities and
gentleness towards his lady, inviting her to bed in a charming way. He did not give
any further detail about their first night together, simply wrote that they felt asleep.
However, the word münevvem that he chose to describe how they fell sleep implied
they had sexual intercourse. That word means to fall into a state of oblivion, to become
unaware, to fall into a soporific asleep, suggesting the very state of having had sex. He
portrays his inmost private feelings as being experienced in silence and unspoken.
Appointments of family members was another source of happiness and pride. The
Ottoman biographies that provide the dates of appointments and dismissals do not say
much about the emotional outcome of a career full of ups and downs. Mustafa Hamid
Efendi devoted a sizeable part of his diary to career progressions in ilmiye cadres and
to the realities of professional life. Unlike biographies, he not only noted appointments
and dismissals of family members, acquaintances, and rivals, but also commented on
some of them.
His entry on the appointment of his father as the chief mufti reveals the obvious pride
and pleasure he experienced. It is easy to see that the diarist praised his father more
than the sultan. The words used to illustrate his father’s eminence, were chosen, most
952 Sıdkızâde, 38a-38b.
209
probably, to show his gratitude towards his benefactor as well as the pride and
happiness he felt upon his father’s appointment to the very top of the ilmiye.
By good fortune … on the twenty-fifth day of this month of Safer in the year 1238,
his majesty Sultan Mahmud Han sent the head muezzin to summon my honorable
father, our lord, to the tiled pavilion located in Beşiktaş. In the afore-mentioned
assembly, he [the sultan] granted our fortunate lord the rank of fetwa and erobed him
in the white [gown] of those who were obeyed and advanced in religion. May God
help him with divine guidance and assistance.953
Entries on the appointments of the diarist and his brother reveal the emotional outcome
of a rapid and easy rise in the hierarchy. The entry written on 13 Şaban 1238 (25 April
1823) notes that his brother Mehmed Rıfat Efendi was appointed to Yahya Efendi
Medrese at the level of musıla-i sahn without a long wait. The diarist wrote that there
were thirty-eight people waiting to be appointed. The diarist himself was appointed to
İskender Paşa Medrese at the level of mûsıla-i sahn. Like his brother, he did not have
to wait long either even though sixty-five people were already waiting in line before
him.954 After a short period, we see again these two brothers’ appointments to higher
ranks. Both brothers were moving very fast up the hierarchy. Mustafa Hamid Efendi
ended this entry with a prayer expressing his feelings of gratitude to God and his
wishes for many more promotions by his father.955 The diarist seemingly had a high
opinion of himself. In these entries, he overtly disclosed their advantageous situation
in being members of a powerful household and underlined the superiority of the
Sıdkızâdes over the other members of the ilmiye. Feelings of contentment for their
appointments and pride for the powerful position of the father can be read from the
expressions used in the entries and the prayers made at the end.
Appointments and advancements were a routine part of life for Mustafa Hamid Efendi.
However, things did not run smoothly all the time. Nine months after the appointment
of his father as the chief mufti he wrote an entry informing the reader of the dismissal
of his father on 25 September 1823. This record reveals no human emotion; there is
no feeling of hatred or any attempt at vindication. But the obvious agony he felt can
953 Sıdkızâde, 2a.
954 Ibid., 15a.
955 Ibid., 22a.
210
be read in the prayers for his father’s reappointment and for his arrival at the sea-side
mansion carrying the seal of fatwa once again.
On the nineteenth day of the month of Muharrem, our lord, my father, (pederim
efendimiz) was dismissed from the office of fetwa and Mekkizâde Mustafa
Asım Efendi became şeyhülislam. … Efendi sent his kethüda and asked [my
father] to go to the seaside mansion and take a rest. Our lord arrived at the
seaside mansion at eleven o’clock. May the supreme God destine him to
occupy the office of fetwa again and to reach the seaside mansion [again as
the şeyhülislam]. Amen! Amen! a thousand times! 19 Muharrem, the year 39
(25 September 1823).956
Obviously, Mustafa Hamid Efendi did not give up hope for his father’s reappointment.
He repeated this prayer over again when he recorded important appointments. It was
nearly three months after the dismissal of his father on the 10th of Muharrem 1239 (14
December 1823), when he took record of Galip Paşa’s appointment as Grand Vizier.
The news of this appointment immediately reminded him of the removal of his father,
and he wrote “Please God, let my father, our lord, became the chief mufti for the
second time. I hope that his services for the affairs of state, and order (nizam)are
ensured.”957 This entry set forth the desires, hopes and expectations of the diarist. The
obvious sadness felt upon his father’s sudden and probably unexpected dismissal can
be understood from the tone and wording of this prayer. The word ‘order; (nizam)
implies that he wanted nizam to be ensured both for the affairs of state and for the
affairs of their household.
Although sporadic, Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s records were not reticent about his
feelings of hatred and hostility. He wrote a page-long entry on the dismissal and
execution of that famous Halet Efendi whose absence, as Philliou notes, created a
space in court politics for his rivals. Sıdkızâde Ahmed Reşid Efendi’s rise to
prominence would have been possible after the downfall of a powerful enemy like
Halet Efendi.958 According to Mustafa Hamid Efendi, Halet Efendi’s execution was a
testament to God’s justice. His preference to date the dismissal and death of Halet
956 Sıdkızâde, 27a.
957 Ibid., 29a.
958 Philliou, Biography of an Empire, 96.
211
Efendi with reference to the time of his father’s rise to the top implies his
understanding and internalizing of the events as happening according to God’s will.
God overcomes evil.
Halet Efendi who is famous among statesmen, vigilant, a man of influence, cautious
in conducting the business of people, was mobbed by a few hundred people when he
reached Üsküdar after leaving his waterside mansion on 25 Safer 1238, on the same
day when my precious, respected father was robed in the bright garment of those who
were obeyed and advanced in religion. When Abdullah Pasha was given the privy seal
[Halet Efendi] was banished to Bursa where he had influence and power, and then sent
to Konya where he was executed at a time when even minor officials were rarely
dispatched. His severed head was brought back to Istanbul and put on the rock in front
of the imperial door as a warning and deterrent to others on 19 Rebiülevvel of the same
year. It is a divine mystery that he has been executed despite such power and wealth.
Wait and see how just God is.959
The entry translated above was written on 19 Rebiülevvel 1238 (4 December 1822),
twenty-three days after the banishment of Halet Efendi on 25 Safer 1238 (11
November 1822). In the entry written on 11 November, the diarist was silent about
Halet Efendi’s dismissal and banishment; he preferred to write at length about his
father’s appointment which was a very important event for the Sıdkızâde family. After
a while (most probably on 4 December when Halet Efendi’s head was brought to the
capital), he added a piece of information about the dismissals of Salih Pasha and
Şeyhülislam Yasincizâde Abdülvehhab Efendi, in very small letters on the margin of
the entry for 11 November.960 Salih Pasha and Yasincizâde had their share in the
rivalry of Halet Efendi. The question is why the diarist did not write on the very day
that Halet Efendi was exiled, but he wrote when his severed head was brought to
Istanbul? Why did he turn back twenty-three days in his diary to note the dismissal of
Halet’s favorites? Perhaps he did not predict that such powerful and wealthy person
like Halet Efendi would be executed at the end. He noted down what, at that moment,
959 Sıdkızâde, 3a.
960 The entry was written later on the margin with very small letters and the date was not added. Salih
Pasha and Yasincizâde Abdülvehhab Efendi were dismissed on 24 Safer 1238 (10 November 1822).
While Philliou noted that Salih Pasha and Yasincizâde were favorites of Halet Efendi, Beydilli argued
that they were supporting the faction against him. See Mehmet İpşirli, “Abdülvehhab Efendi,
Yasincizâde,” DİA, vol. 1, 285-6; Kemal Beydilli, “Salih Paşa, Hacı,” DİA, vol. EK-2, 463-4;
Philliou, Biography of an Empire, 56.
212
seemed of importance to him. When he assessed the ultimate, long-range significance
of the event, he went back in time to put everything into place in accordance with
God’s will.961 The diary offered safe ground to reevaluate and make sense of events
beyond his control. He was reorganizing his diary and therefore remembering his
feelings of resentment after observing God’s justice for those who suffered from Halet
Efendi’s enmity. Thus, he was creating harmony between incidents and his spiritual
digesting of them.
The other dismissal that he seemed to be very pleased to record was the banishment of
Halet’s favorite Gümrükçü (revenue officer) Ahmed Ağa and the confiscation of his
property. Mustafa Hamid Efendi called him a swine and a traitor. Those words used to
depict Ahmed Ağa indicate that he was evidently an enemy of the Sıdkızâdes. Mustafa
Hamid Efendi likened his situation to that of Halet Efendi. According to the diary,
Ahned Ağa was on the verge of being killed but paid a lower price than Halet Efendi.
He was banished to Amasya thanks to the intervention of the custodian of Bosporus
İbrahim Paşa.962
Mustafa Hamid Efendi actually recorded only three entries including offensive words.
The first one was about İrfanzâde Arif Efendi who caused the cancelation of marriage
which was recorded as the result of his accursed act (mel‘anet eylediğinden).963 The
second was about revenue officer Ahmed Ağa and his dismissal. Mustafa Hamid
Efendi used the words “swine” (hınzır herif) and “betrayer” to depict his acts. The
third one was about his servant Abdülbaki who was called malignant (habis).
Therefore, feelings of anger sometimes emerged as a result of household members’
untoward actions.
As mentioned before in this chapter, Mustafa Hamid Efendi suffered from his servants’
misbehaviors. He wrote about his complaints regarding his servant Abdülbaki who
was reckless and negligent. Although he was forgiven a number of times, he was
finally dismissed. Mustafa Hamid Efendi expressed his sadness because he actually
wanted to find someone to train as chamberlain. The household was the primary site
961 Roy Pascal, Design and Truth in Autobiography (London: Routledge, 1960), 3. Pascal states that the
diarists keeps note of things seems significant to him and they are not concerned with the long-range
significance of the events. However, it seems quite the contrary in the case of Mustafa Hamid Efendi.
962 Sıdkızâde, 3b.
963 Ibid., 37a.
213
of daily disputes and negotiations. Unruly servants were sometimes criticized,
sometimes tolerated, and forgiven. Household members were treated as part of the
family, and it seems that they had a say in household matters. However, their right to
oppose and resist could not go beyond a certain point. Abdülbaki seems to have gone
over the limits and was dismissed upon his patron’s displeasure and anger.
The evil/malignant named Abdülbaki is the person I employed for my service.
Sometimes I tolerated his many irritating actions and sometimes he begged for
forgiveness, and he has been in my employ until this time. One day, when my guest,
Çabi Abdullah Çelebi, was in my presence, he went out fishing without asking my
permission. Then, [we also said that] when you go fishing other times when we do not
have guests, do we say anything to you? You do not consider whether it is suitable to
go fishing when we have a guest. When I said that I did not approve he complained.
“You said you would not enroll me as servant (ben seni mansıb etmem dedin). You
said you would give me a salary (akçe ile mansıb olacağım). I will bring you the
contract later, and then I will leave.” Then I decided that he would not be of any benefit
to me. I paid him in the presence of [witnesses], then asked him, “Do you owe anybody
anything?” He answered “No.” Then I said., “We allow you [to go]. They say,
“Whatever you do, you do it for yourself.” Our desire was to employ someone [to
train] and make him our chamberlain…964
Abdülbaki was not the only servant to annoy Mustafa Hamid Efendi. As mentioned
before in this chapter, he recorded that another servant, Raşid, left the Sıdkızâde
household and attached himself to another patron after Ahmed Reşid Efendi’s
dismissal. After a while, however, he wanted to return to the Sıdkızâde household and
pleaded to be re-employed. Mustafa Hamid Efendi wrote that he begged a hundred
thousand times to be taken back and they finally agreed to employ him again. In fact,
he revealed his anger at this disloyalty, saying, “Thank goodness, he became in need
of us again!”965 The diarist was obviously pleased to see this disloyal servant begging
for re-employment.
The diarist did not reveal his feeling about death. The only record regarding a death is
about Damad Efendi’s daughter. The little girl passed away during Mustafa Hamid
964 Sıdkızâde, 28b.
965 Ibid., 30a.
214
Efendi’s visit to Damad Efendi’s house. Although he witnessed the death and most
possibly the sorrow which accompanied it, the diarist showed no feeling of grief.966
He simply recorded the death and burial of the little girl. His entry on this event could
not be more unemotional. On top of that, the following entry was about an invitation
to a dinner which took place two days after the death of the little girl. Including Damad
Efendi, they were invited to a dinner party at apprentice scribe Aziz’s house and
feasted together giving the impression that they did not mourn or were not affected by
the death of the little child. That no feelings about the death of the little girl are
expressed or the dinner party were registered in detail should not be seen as coldheartedness.
Rather, it might be related to the general tone of his diary in which he
wanted to highlight mainly the more enjoyable events rather than the sad ones.
Furthermore, life expectancy for small children was not high in the period under
consideration.967 In the same entry, he noted that the little girl was buried in the same
grave as the diarist’s late brother, Abdullah Bey. The diarist did not note any further
information about his brother who most probably died at an early age. It is difficult to
assume that Mustafa Hamid Efendi formed an emotional bond with him. The
emotional impact of the death of a small child might be little. The sorrow possibly
would have been deeper if affection had developed with the growth of the child.968
As discussed before, emotions were mostly communicated through social interactions,
but objects were also significant bearers of emotional value.969 Objects obviously
displayed the financial situation of the owner, but sometimes they were more than that.
According to Katie Barclay, emotional bonds and dynamics of the family were shaped
by how the places and objects in the house were used. Also, sharing gifts and resources
were influential in forming family bonds. 970 The diary supports this idea in that some
objects registered in the entries had an emotional meaning for the diarist, and they
made him happy. This was exemplified in Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s case by the
966 Sıdkızâde, 30b.
967 Carter V. Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism and Modernity, A History 1789-2007 (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2010), 63.
968 Karahasanoğlu, Kadı ve Günlüğü, 8.
969 Päivi Räisänen-Schröder, “Books, Dress, and Emotions in the Memoirs of the Clergyman Johan
Frosterus (1720-1829),” Scandinavian Journal of History 41, no:3 (2016): 429, accessed December 10,
2021, doi:10.1080/03468755.2016.1179834.
970 Katie Barclay, “Family and Household,” in Early Modern Emotions: An Introduction, ed. Susan
Broomhall (London: Routledge, 2017), 246.
215
importance he ascribed to gifts he received from his father, from his wife-to-be as well
as from some of his companions.
Mustafa Hamid Efendi gave emphasis to recording events and objects representing his
relationship with his father who was described as the benefactor of the household
(veli’n-ni‘am). He was very pleased, for example, with a shawl given by his father. He
typically used the verb irsâl eyledi (sent) to designate the act of gift exchange. But this
time, he used the word ihsân eyledi (granted/favored/gave in kindness) to describe his
father’s act of giving.971 Mustafa Hamid Efendi displayed his feelings of contentment
when luxurious gifts like horses or furs were sent to him. A shawl was probably a small
gift compared to other luxurious items listed in the diary, but it was not about the
monetary value of the object, its significance was related to the giver.
Throughout the diary, the diarist described items related to his little daughter, Saliha
Sabite with whom he obviously formed an emotional bond. For instance, the
grandfather, Ahmed Reşid Efendi, visited the little baby and pinned an amulet
(maşallâh) on her clothing a short while after her birth. Her first encounter with the
beneficence (veli’n-ni‘me) of the household and the object (the amulet) that
represented it were given emphasis in the diary.972 In fact, he registered many other
entries regarding his daughter’s first experiences; the first hammam experience,973 the
placing of the baby into the baby bed,974 the buying of materials for the little girl,
having clothes made for her and the first-time she wore them.975 All these records of
rituals and first-time experiences indicate that the birth of the little girl had been a
source of happiness for the diarist. Objects such as jewelry, clothes, the cradle noted
in the diary obviously triggering feelings of happiness and affection. The diarist would
remember certain events through those objects to which he was emotionally attached.
971 Sıdkızâde, 6b.
972 Ibid., 6a.
973 Ibid., 2b.
974 This event probably was related to the traditional celebration party known as “beşik çıkma”. This
ritual marked the end of puerpera’s isolation which was celebrated with songs, dancing of gypsies and
feastings that would last well into the midnight. Beşik Çıkma generally took place on the sixth day after
the birth. According to the diary, Saliha Sabite’s beşik çıkma celebration was held ten days after the
birth. Sevgül Türkmenoğlu, "İbrahim Efendi Konağı’nda Eski İstanbul’un Gündelik Hayatı," Zeitschrift
für die Welt der Türken/Journal of World of Turks 7, no:1 (2015): 237-252.
975 Sıdkızâde, 7a.
216
“Objects served to strengthen family relations, express fondness or goodwill between
family members, and to keep memories of family members alive.”976
His marriage to Ziynet Ziba Hatun also formed an important turning point in his life,
ushering in a new stage. He described in detail the gifts exchanged in the period
between the engagement and the wedding ceremony. He noted that he presented a
diamond engagement ring (elmâs-ı hatem) to the bride. Flowers, sweets and fruits were
exchanged between the young couple. And finally, the bride’s trousseau was moved
to her new home. All these items signaled that he had embarked on a happy married
life. Indeed, the dairy of Mustafa Hamid Efendi ends exactly at the point when he got
married. All these events and objects registered in the diary marked the beginning of
different time of life as head of an expanding family. His diary can be read as a memoir
of how he developed from a man at the beginning of his career to a man of substance
with a promising career, a family, and children.
Some objects, on the other side, had a spiritual value. The diarist did not record much
about his religious activities. He occasionally recorded performing his prayer (namaz),
reading the Qur’an or fasting. However, an entry about a bowl revealed the importance
he attached to his connection with the Ka‘aba and the sacred city of Mecca. In the
entry written on 26 Cemâziyelevvel 1238 (8 February 1823), he described how pleased
he was by a special gift presented by Debbağzâde Mehmed Şerif Efendi. He put the
bowl, upon which Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s name was engraved, next to the door of
the zamzam spring in the Ka’aba, so that pilgrims could use it to drink the sacred
zamzam water. Moreover, two servants were entrusted by Mustafa Hamid Efendi
himself to help pilgrims use the bowl.977 This was a visible act of honoring the diarist,
creating bonds, and strengthening relationships. Mustafa Hamid Efendi recorded the
happiness he felt upon hearing this wonderful news (pek memnûn ve mesrûr oldum).
He added his prayers for the person who had prepared this special gift. That his name
was engraved on the object connected him with the prayers of pilgrims, enabling him
to create an actual physical bond with the sacred city of Mecca and the Ka‘aba.
Although he did not use that object in person, he shows how he became emotionally
976 Räisänen-Schröder, “Books, Dress, and Emotions,” 429.
977 Sıdkızâde, 8a-8b.
217
attached to it. This discloses that “objects also played a prominent role as carriers of
emotional meaning and social bonds.” 978
Likewise, the diarist kept the seed of a date (hurma) which was eaten by the sultan at
the mawlid recited in the Sultan Ahmed Mosque.979 The date has a sacred place in
Islamic societies; cited both in the Prophet’s sayings and the Qur’an. This special fruit
was believed to be a source of healing, even relieving the pain of Jesus’s mother when
giving birth.980 In the same entry, the diarist noted that the mawlid occasion took place
during his father’s tenure and there were three people before him to be appointed to an
upper echelon of medrese. It seems that he wanted to link his expected appointment to
the sacred atmosphere of the occasion. He therefore kept the seed which was eaten in
a spiritual environment by a spiritual person like the sultan. That object to which he
attributed a sacred value would probably relieve him when waiting for his next
appointment.
In conclusion, the emotions portrayed by Mustafa Hamid Efendi did not express his
feelings to any great extent. This is not surprising considering the unemotional tone of
early modern life writings. Yet it is remarkable that throughout his diary, he repeatedly
points out some emotions, though he did not elaborate on these. Evidently, he also
highlighted some feelings over others. Feelings resulting from, for example, pleasant
events were described more often than those aroused from conflicts or hostilities. The
diarist also showed his anger or relief at the downfall of an enemy, but this was rather
sporadic compared to his descriptions of positive feelings.
Conclusion
“With its punctuated, irregular, and messy appearance, the diary may not be as noble
and accomplished a form of self-presentation as the memoir, but for an understanding
of autobiographical practice it is a rich, most complex, and infinitely rewarding
source.”981 Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s work discloses that the diary is a very giving
978 Räisänen-Schröder, “Books, Dress, and Emotions,” 429.
979 Sıdkızâde, 2b.
980 Nebi Bozkurt, “Hurma,” DİA, vol. 18, 391-3.
981 Jochen Hellbeck, “The Diary between Literature and History: A Historian's Critical Response,” The
Russian Review 63, no: 4 (2004): 621-629.
218
source in terms of understanding a historical self with its all complexities. Among its
scattered entries, the diary revealed much about Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s emotional
self, daily life and routines, network, familial relations, as well as the financial base of
Sıdkızâde household. He revealed how he was emotionally affected and pleased by the
births in the household, his marriage, appointments of his father as well as his and his
brother’s easy advancement in the ilmiye hierarchy. Diary entries disclosed his bonds
with family members and with his connection to the elite society of the early nineteenth
century according to which he shaped his identity. The diary entries unveiled his tastes
as being member of a particular elite environment and lifestyle: his love for new
clothes, his fascination with the technologic devices such as binoculars and watches,
his interest in horses, his enthusiasm for banquets and excursions as well as his interest
in expensive gifts. The diary offers the kind of information about a historical self that
one cannot find anywhere else. This aspect of the diary essentially makes it an
“infinitely rewarding source” for studies on the historical selves.
219
CONCLUSION
This dissertation has sought problematization of a long-neglected subject of study,
namely, Ottoman self-narratives, texts in which authors presented their life (or an
important part of their life) retrospectively or taking immediate records. Although
specialists knew of autobiographical works like the one written by Osman Agha of
Timisoara and identified a number of new texts that fit into the category of selfnarratives/
ego-documents defined by European scholars, Ottoman autobiographical
texts in which individuals speaking about themselves were believed to be exceptions
until recently. Scholars of Ottoman Empire argued that there was no tradition of
autobiography especially before Tanzimat period. Therefore, there was almost no
academic discussion on self-narratives/ego-documents in Turkey until recent years.
The present study was designed to introduce various unknown Ottoman selfnarratives,
to scrutinize the authors’ individual experiences like feelings, expectations,
actions in face of events, and to uncover their social selves embedded in several
networks of relations. Three different manuscripts have been selected to scrutinize how
different people from different walks of life talked about themselves, described their
lives and recorded their innermost feelings. Although each text may be read in itself
as an individual exercises, it should be taken into account that they are part of a long
tradition of record keeping/dream telling/autobiographical writing.
For the first time in this dissertation, I introduced several unknown Ottoman selfnarratives
written before the Tanzimat in 1839, revealed the identity of the authors and
examined them in relation to the wider literature on ego-documents. Hence, one of the
most important contributions of this dissertation was that I showed the existence of
distinct autobiographical texts touching on very intimate matters and revealing the
personality of the author. Equally important, I showed the historical continuity of the
Ottoman self-narratives by presenting examples from the first half of the eighteenth
century to the first half of the nineteenth century. Particularly, I have showed the
220
historical continuity of Ottoman diaries as Sıdkızâde Hamid Efendi’s grandfather
Sıdkı Mustafa Efendi (d. 1790/1791) also kept a diary. We had two diaries produced
by the members of the same family. The fact that these two diaries are very similar in
form and content reminds that Sıdkızâde Mustafa Hamid Efendi must have known his
grandfather’s diary.982 This very exciting discovery displays that these texts cannot be
individual examples occasionally produced by Ottoman literati. They were not
occurring sporadically, but rather must have been part of a historical pattern. Ottoman
diaries produced before and after Tanzimat period shows that the example examined
in this dissertation is most probably representative of a genre. The Ottoman diary
literature hopefully will be taken more seriously than ever, treated as a discrete genre
and will be the subject of more detailed studies after these imperative findings.
Examples examined in this dissertation and possible further studies will also show that
historical continuity of self-narratives offers an advantage for scrutinizing the issue of
change and continuity in the ways of self-representation in Ottoman literature from
early modern to modern times.
A significant contribution of this dissertation is that it reveals much about the
characteristics of Ottoman self-narratives. It also provides an example for how to
interpret them. Ottoman self-narratives are mostly found in autograph copies. Authors
represented their selves in multiple ways and used diverse strategies to express their
worlds. The texts were generally not edited or revised at all. Authors appear in person
in the narratives. They used both plural and singular first-person pronouns (we, us,
our, I, me, my). The authors mostly belonged to educated classes with an easy access
to pen and paper. However, Ottoman self-narratives were not only written by Ottoman
literati who also produced some other literary works. Those who did not belong to
intellectual circles, like Kulakzâde mahmud Pasha, Seyyid Hasan or Asiye Hatun, also
penned self-narratives.
Ottoman self-narratives had diverse contents. The content of diaries was shaped
according to the curiosity of their authors. Some gave every detail from where he
visited, what he ate and at whose house he stayed as a guest. Some even recorded more
intimate events like the details of his wedding ceremony and the wedding night. Some
982 Karahasanoğlu, “Ottoman Ego-Documents: State of the Art,” 307.
221
take mostly record of dull details of appointments or family events like births, deaths,
and details of everyday life as well as natural events like earthquakes and weather
reports. Whatever the content, individuals made a step-in writing because they felt that
their life events and personal histories somehow worth recording. Thus, “the
individuality of the writer becomes evident by the very fact of writing.”983 The
historian can learn much about the author’s emotional reactions, thoughts, and
personality. Focusing on what the author records about his daily routine life – visits,
excursions, illnesses, marriages, deaths, births, appointments, household affairs,
financial issues - the researcher can follow how an individual’s personal, social,
emotional situation transformed over time. 984 Routine tasks of daily life represented
in the entries of the Ottoman diaries offers the historian a productive site to recreate
the diarist’s life in his social and historical context.985 The content of dream narratives
was formed in accordance with the worries or expectations of the dreamers. Sometimes
dreams could foretell about an anticipated appointment or warn the dreamer about a
possible catastrophe. There was a strong link between insecure circumstances,
unwanted situations and dream recording. Dreams were mostly seen as future portents;
thus, the authors recorded their dreams down to the smallest detail. Nocturnal visions
enabled people to clarify their present and future. Ottoman tradition of dream telling,
and recording provided historians with significant materials to interpret social cultural
and private lives of individuals. The content of autobiographies/memoirs mostly
concerned the difficult situations experienced by the authors. Some authors wrote after
being captivated in the hands of infidels and talked about unbearable situations in the
prisons and asked for help. It was sometimes about a painful love story and the author
revealed how he reached to the true love of God. Some authors related an injustice
suffered. As in the case of Abdülkadir Efendi, the content sometimes was about how
the author appointed to the desired position and reached relief after many years of
struggling and going through times of hope and anxiety.
983 Oscar Jané, “Self-Writing and Ego-Documents: Personal Memoirs in Catalonia (16th-19th
Centuries),” in Inscribed Identities: Life Writing as Self-Realization, ed. Joan Ramon Resina (London:
Routledge, 2019), 193.
984 Paperno, “What Can Be Done with Diaries?,” 570.
985 Ibid.
222
Although the Ottoman selves that we encounter in these sources did not do in-depth
psychological analysis of themselves, their emotions, ideas and social or physical
situations as in the modern examples of the genre of autobiography, they provided
many autobiographical elements and revealed much about their inner worlds by
describing sufferings in the face of unwanted events, joys, beliefs, piety and how they
acted in their social environment and interpersonal relationships. From the examples
shown in this dissertation, we can firmly say that Ottoman self-narratives divulged
significant details about the authors’ individuality, emotional worlds, and social
worlds. Early modern Ottoman individual was not much different from their early
modern European counterparts or modern individuals. They had feelings like any other
human beings and expressed/inscribed them when they had means and desire to do so.
In order to reveal such intimate information, researchers must read these texts through
a close scrutiny of social, cultural and historical contexts and must be aware of the
literary strategies by which they express their most inner feelings. Showing that one
can get very close to Ottomans who lived before the first half of the nineteenth century
and they became visible as individuals is an important discovery.
This leads us to another aspect, the question of motivation. We can say that Ottoman
writers of self-narratives had some kind of “autobiographical consciousness.” They
mostly pronounced the incentives for producing their works. Authors who wrote
retrospective accounts mostly stated their motivations in detail while diarists or those
who kept contemporaneous records either did not indicate any reasons for writing or
simply say that they wrote to keep record of important things. In such cases, the content
of the texts can be a guide in understanding the motivation for writing. The issue of
motivation is very significant in revealing and making sense of the meaning between
the lines of the texts, the personality of the authors, their emotions, concerns, and
expectations embedded in the narrative. In Ottoman literature, there were selfnarratives
concerned recording an individual’s spiritual progress like the one written
by Asiye Hatun who wanted to learn about her development through the letters she
sent to her Sufi master or Vâkı‘ât (events) by Sheikh Hüdai who took note of his
spiritual training process, dialogues with his master Üftâde Mehmed Efendi and
223
visionary experiences between 1577 and 1579.986 As can be seen from the examples
examined in this dissertation, there were also texts dealing with the authors’ worldly
concerns, expectations or achievements. None of the texts scrutinized in this
dissertation dealt with spiritual progress of the authors. They wrote to record financial
issues, mundane occurrences in daily lives, or what processes they had been through
to have an official position. Motivation behind recording was purely about how the
authors perceived themselves, their lives and environment. Mustafa Hamid Efendi
kept his diary because Sıdkızâde household rose to prominence and there was an
enormous flow of money and gifts. He kept records of financial gains as well as his
daily life in detail. We know from the two examples examined in this dissertation that
worries and expectations for an appointment or having a proper career was very
influential in creating such self-narratives. Kulakzâde Mahmud Pasha’s motivation for
writing was to rein in his anxiety because he was going through a time of uncertainty
about his career. Abdülkadir Hisârî felt he was distinguished from others by his
achievement to hold a position as a scribe in palace services. Hence, he wanted his life
story be exemplar and provide useful information for future generations. All the
authors examined in this dissertation had a habit of recording and they had the
instruments and knowledge to record them in writing.
This brings us to another significant theme explored in this dissertation, the question
of form and style. This dissertation focused on manuscripts that would have been
categorized by contemporary Ottoman literati under the titles like terceme-i hâl,
cerîde, sergüzeşt or düş/vakıat, irrespective of how modern scholarship would classify
them.987 These different headings used by Ottoman literati to delineate such texts
discloses that Ottoman individuals had a culture of writing about their lives and selves
and a wide variety of ways/forms to do this. The forms of the texts have also been
shaped by the motivations of the authors, as distinctive kinds of self-narratives
emerged from different drives to write. A need for giving order to financial issues and
the desire to record daily events to remember seems to be resulted in recording on a
daily basis in the diary form. A need to clarify the future and suppress the worries have
prompted the author to record the dreams and creating a dream diary. The intention to
986 Terzioğlu, “Man in the Image of God,” 145.
987 Reynolds, Interpreting the Self, 10.
224
leave the record of life events in the form of an organized narrative led the author to
pen an autobiography. It goes without saying that one’s social position and gender also
played a role in which form the author wrote. The only known self-narrative by an
Ottoman woman was written in letter form. Asiye Hatun sent her dream accounts to
her sheikh as letter because she probably did not have the opportunity to see him in
person. She did not live in the same city as her sheikh, but even so, she would not be
allowed to visit him in person. Thus, she used letter form to communicate with him.
Another factor affecting the texts’ form was the literary tradition to which the authors
belonged. Their writing experiences in their professional life and habits were
manifested in the forms of the texts in which they described their lives. For example,
Mahmud Pasha’s work bears the features of the form used in bureaucratic
correspondence while Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s diary resembles to qadi registers. They
applied the professional writing methods to the self-narratives.988
These various motivations for writing recall the question of audience. This dissertation
has also sought answer to following questions: did Ottoman writers of self-narratives
have an audience in mind when composing their self-narratives? If they had any, did
writing for an audience have an effect on the content? How much did the authors reveal
or hide their selves? Various dream accounts produced by Ottoman individuals
disclose that dreams were recorded, shared, and interpreted. Thus, dreams were
recorded to remember as well as to share. Mahmud Pasha, for instance, often recorded
dreams in which he was seen as a skilled governor as well as dreams foretelling his
appointment. He presented an image of a respectable governor who acted in justice.
Sıdkızâde Mustafa Hamid Efendi’s diary was probably read by others (possibly by
family members) as he stated that he wrote some of the entries with the permission of
the relevant people named in the records. Mustafa Hamid Efendi was a member of a
prominent ulama family. Therefore, he preferred to reveal his familial relations and
concentrated on his relationship with his father who was the benefactor of the
household. He also disclosed some very intimate information about his relationship
with his kids and wife as head of his own family. The authors of autobiographical
988 Torsten Wollina, “Ibn Tawq’s Ta‘liq. An Ego-Document for Mamluk Studies,” in Ubi Sumus? Quo
Vademus. Mamluk Studies- State of the Art, ed. Stephan Conermann (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and
Ruprecht, 2013), 341.
225
narratives mostly stated that they wrote to set an example for those who read.
Abdülkadir Hisârî, for example, wanted to inspire those who had difficulty in their
career paths. Thus, he preferred to reveal his efforts for a decent career, how he served
in various prominent households as secretary, and how he entered in the palace service.
He presented an image of a pious, skilled, hardworking, and humble person. Niyazî
Mısrî for instance explicitly noted that he lent his diary to one of his disciples or a
fellow Sufi master. Besides, Mısrî did not want his diary to circulate widely because
he was afraid of his enemies to expose his mistakes and embarrass him. 989 An intended
audience or the idea that someone would read them would have influenced the content.
It may have caused the authors to hide some of their behaviors or emotions while
highlighting engaging manners. Thus, it is important to consider silences and gaps
about certain situations.990 Trying to make sense of those silences and gaps can help
us reach fascinating information about their personality.
At this point, I want to talk about the problems of studying Ottoman self-narratives.
Studying self-narratives has its advantages and limitations. One and foremost is the
difficulty of making research at manuscript libraries and of identifying self-narratives.
Although we have Bursalı Mehmed Tahir’s seminal work on Ottoman authors and
manuscripts991 and also there are, as mentioned earlier, some very valuable catalogues
prepared by renowned scholars like Fehmi Ethem Karatay, İsmet Parmaksızoğlu992
and cataloging projects lead by Günay Kut,993 the researchers have been still
discouraged by “the difficulty of finding with reasonable ease and speed what precisely
reserved in the Süleymaniye Library.”994 The situation in Istanbul University’s
989 Terzioğlu, “Man in the Image of God in the Image of Times,” 152-153.
990 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography: A Guide for Interpreting Life Narratives
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); 171.
991 Although Bursalı Mehmed Tahir’s work is so old, it has still retained its value.
992 For example, see İsmet Parmaksızoğlu, İstanbul Kütüphaneleri Tarih Coğrafya Yazmaları
Katalogları: I. Türkçe Tarih Yazmaları, Umumi Tarihler (Ankara: Maarif Vekaleti, 1943).
993 For example, see Günay Kut, Hatice Aynur, Cumhure Üçer and Fatma B. Yılmaz, eds. Boğaziçi
Üniversitesi Kandilli Rasathanesi ve Deprem Araştırmaları Enstitüsü Astronomi, Astroloji, Matematik
Yazmaları Kataloğ: Kandilli Rasathanesi El Yazmaları: Türkçe Yazmalar (Istanbul: Boğaziçi
Üniversitesi Yayınevi, 2007); Günay Kut, Zehra Toska, Fatma B. Yılmaz, Tülay G. Demircioğlu, Arzu
Atik, eds. İstanbul Araştırmaları Enstitüsü Yazma Eserler Kataloğu (Istanbul: İstanbul Araştırmaları
Enstitüsü Yayınları, 2014); Günay Kut, Tercüman Gazetesi Kütüphanesi Türkçe Yazmalar Kataloğu I
(Istanbul: Tercüman Gazetesi Yayınları, 1989).
994 Eleazar Birnbaum, “Turkish Manuscripts: Cataloguing Since 1960 and Manuscripts Still
Uncatalogued, Part 5: Turkey and Cyprus,” Journal of American Oriental Society 104, no: 3 (1984):
478.
226
collection of rare books is not different. Most of the library’s holdings are in excel
documents and card catalogues. These “catalogues” contain information about the
authors, the titles, and brief physical descriptions. Manuscripts are not defined by their
contents. Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı (The Presidency of Turkish
Manuscript Institution) started a project for the preparation of catalogues of Islamic
manuscripts, but it is not yet available to researchers. The fact that cataloging projects
are not completed; researchers generally face with inaccurate titles and descriptions
rather than detailed information on the texts. Hence, the identifying of the selfnarratives
requires experience, knowledge, and a little bit of chance. It is very difficult
for the researchers to create a roadmap to discover the Ottoman self-narratives. The
researchers may use some keywords to identify the texts. For instance, one can search
for the words cerîde, jurnal or tarih and mecmua to identify diaries, sergüzeşt and
terceme-i hâl to find autobiographies, düş, rüya and vâkı‘a to find dream narratives.
These keywords are useful to a certain extent. Ottoman self-narratives do not belong
to a certain genre; therefore, the researchers will find themselves in the middle of an
ocean of manuscripts. Apart from the difficulties result from the insufficiency of
catalogues, there are also some problems arise from the nature of Ottoman
manuscripts. It is very challenging to understand if a text can be put under the category
of self-narratives, as the titles are mostly misleading. A work with a title that reminds
very different subjects may contain content that can be classified as a self-narrative.
Hence, the researchers must make detailed reading through every text to understand
their content. Notwithstanding all these difficulties, I think my individual effort shows
that many more Ottoman self-narratives will be unearthed as a result of a systematic
research project.
Second problem is that scholarly community in Turkey has approached and is still
approaching such materials with caution and skepticism. When I started to study on
Ottoman self-narratives, my initial fear was whether I will be taken seriously by the
scholarly community in Turkey even if I discovered some unknown Ottoman selfnarratives.
My fear was actually resulted from a reaction I got from a professor who
knew my interest on self-narratives. He asked me why I am interested in such
insignificant sources while there are a lot of “important” archival documents waiting
to be examined. His reaction actually was the answer to the question of why these
227
sources had been ignored so far by the scholarly community in Turkey. These materials
were attributed a lesser value, not to be preferred over “serious” archival documents.
The main problem was that individual feelings, beliefs, and actions were not
considered worthy of paying attention for historical studies. Nevertheless, recently this
perception has begun to change, and these sources have been attributed a value for
historical studies.
The third problem is the difficulty of working with these materials. We as historians
are accustomed to studying with sources revealing objective information. Going
outside the mainstreams of historical studies and giving priority to sources of very
subjective nature brings some difficulties alongside. It is hard to examine and
contextualize texts that touch upon diverse topics from political issues to social and
personal conditions, from daily life to financial issues, from personal relationships and
networks to eating habits, from professional life to emotional world. The researcher
must learn to deal with such different information and be flexible enough to move
elegantly between objectivity and subjectivity, between public and private to
reconstruct the lived experiences of the authors with its all vivacity. This dissertation
is intended to serve as an example for how self-narratives can be studied and to provide
guidance on how close one can get to the self of historical personages.
228
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