Virtual Event: Nir Shafir: How to Read in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, The Humanities Institute (UC Santa Cruz), October 8, 2020, @12-1:30pm

Nir Shafir: How to Read in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire

The Ottoman Empire (and the Islamic world at large) was a manuscript culture until the late nineteenth century. That is, many Ottoman subjects continued to copy books by hand even though they had been aware of printing in European lands for centuries. In recent years, there has been a new wave of scholarship exploring how Ottoman manuscript culture functioned in practice rather than dismissing it as a “lack” of print. Historians have been particularly interested in demonstrating that even a manuscript culture could support a large number of readers, even if many of them were only possessed a “partially literacy.”

In this talk, Professor Shafir first introduces his larger book project on “manuscript pamphlets,” what he argue to be one of the new developments in the manuscript culture of the Ottoman Empire. Manuscript pamphlets were short and polemical texts than circulated across to the empire addressing many of the controversial social and religious issues of the time. They also were often aimed at semi-educated or partially literate readers. To understand pamphlets’ significance, however, one has to explore first how Ottoman subjects read and were educated. He argues that although the notion of partial literacy has been quite helpful, it continues to hold an unexamined ideology of reading, in which all acts of reading in the Ottoman Empire are ultimately replicable and uniform. In the early modern Ottoman Empire however the process of reading differed drastically depending on a reader’s intellectual formation and schooling, the genre, and the language in which they read and wrote. The “partially literate” did not just read slowly or poorly, they read texts in an actively different way than the educated. This was especially true in regard to the auxiliary sciences of language—that is, grammar, rhetoric, logic, and disputation—that madrasa-trained scholars had made a central part of a scholar’s training. Pamphlets lay at the intersection of these different types of reading and readers.

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