Theo Knights
@TheoKnights
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PhD Student of early modern Ottoman history. Interested in histories of commerce, customs, and corruption in Ottoman lands.
Joined September 2018
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Pinned Tweet
Pleased to have my review of Nil Palabıyık's fascinating book, "Silent Teachers: Turkish Books and Oriental Learning in Early Modern Europe," out in
@zemin_dergi
! The book answers a problem that always confounded me while browsing the Bodleian's collection of Ottoman MSS...
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If there’s any doubt about who is disrupting UChicago’a campus here it is
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Some useful English language background on
@FatihMacoglu
the Turkish Communist Party mayor who appears to have just won Tunceli (Dersim) in the municipal elections.
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Happy to announce that the Middle East History and Theory Conference at The University of Chicago will return May 4 and 5, 2024, with keynote speaker Prof. Suraiya Faroqhi! The call for papers is now open so consider being a part of this 3 decade old tradition!
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Based on some feedback, I expanded my genealogical tree of NELC/Ottomanist scholarship and a few interesting patterns emerged. All of UChicago's recent Ottoman and Turkic historians can trace their lineage back to a single individual: Friedrich Kraelitz Edler von Greifenhorst.
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Can’t wait to spend the next 36 hours explaining to 48 visiting graduate students & faculty from across the globe who study the Middle East why a university that supposedly champions free speech is threatening violence against students protesting a genocide. Welcome to MEHAT 🤪
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@sariyannis
Its a far cry from all Ottomanists, but I made a series of genealogical trees this summer largely centered on Ottomanists affiliated with UChicago: .
A searchable pdf of the entire tree is downloadable at the bottom of the page.
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I got tired of the American Diacs keyboard not having the right shortcuts for Ottoman transcription and designed my own for mac users. It contains dedicated shortcuts for s̱ d̤ ẕ & ḳ not commonly found on other diacs keyboards. Download it here:
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Last Monday a group of us finished reading a poem composed by Celâlzâde Sâlih with Professor Fleischer, its final beyt read: "her biri eslāfıŋıŋ kim pādişāh-i ʿaṣrımış / ʿadlle meşhūrımış Allāhu mesvāhüm ʾenār"
He was without a doubt the sovereign of Ottoman Studies in our age
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Priceless interaction between the Bashkir historian Zeki Velidi Togan and Freud from his autobiography:
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This is so fucking craven from Biden when the Israeli response has murdered no less then 34,683 Palestinians
BREAKING: President Biden, warning of a rise of antisemitism, says too many people are forgetting the horrors unleashed on Israel by Hamas on Oct. 7.
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Excited to see that my review of
@civistorok
, Curry, and Leiser's herculean translation of Kâtib Çelebi's Cihânnümâ, accompanied by a really informative introduction by Gottfried Hagen, is out now in JNES.
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Glad to see so many NELC faculty take a stand on this
An open letter to
@UChicago
President Paul Alivisatos in
@ChicagoMaroon
from over 275 faculty objecting to the police raid on the peaceful student encampment last week and the use of the Kalven Report and Chicago Principles to justify this use of force:
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Uhlig ... has also been placed on leave from his role as lead editor of the J of Political Economy ... The journal will determine 'whether it would be appropriate for him to continue in that role given recent accusations of discriminatory conduct in a University classroom setting
The pro-Hamas-camp at the University of Chicago has grown and been fortified over the weekend. The main passage way has been blocked. This is not free speech. This is bullying, this is illegal. The camp needs to be removed immediately: matters are only getting worse.
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I came across this interesting Turkish statistical publication today. The commonly cited ~10% literacy rate for the late Ottoman period is present, but it also states that 41.5% of urban men were literate pre-language reform (1927)! Not something you hear as much.
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Excited to share the announcement for the 38th Annual Middle East History and Theory Conference taking place next week at UChicago! We've been working hard to revive this tradition (but especially the lamb roast) and it is sure to be great.
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Our theme this year is "The Middle East from the Margins: Geographic, Temporal, Linguistic, and Cultural Boundary Crossers." Abstracts are due by January 26th!
You can find more details here:
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He didn’t like the Ottomans
and I was fucking Kanûnî Sultan Süleyman.
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I don’t even think the young academics who [rightly] complain that tenured humanities faculty have been pulling the ladder up after themselves imagined their more well employed colleagues were cooking up something this deranged.
A few radical proposals about higher education in the US...
1. Let's move to a system where it's normal for college students to live at home with their families and go to a local school. I mean those drunken parties and drugs and hookups on Wed-Sat nights in residential life are
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Hyde Park vibes
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To be clear that’s just over 14.5% of the Turkish population...
On average 23 people per minute put under investigation in Turkey last year. One hundred and thirteen children below the age of 15 charged with insulting the president between 2015 and 2017.
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This would be funnier if I hadn’t put silsile in the name lol…
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A few months ago this modern tabaqat came to my attention and I've thinking about how cool it would be to expand and visualize it. This thread highlights my attempts to create something of a NELC genealogy. Link to a visualization of the full tabaqat at the end.
Looks like it's gone but Wayback Machine has a snapshot of it from 2016. I remember it being more comprehensive than this. Someone should get on it and make a new version.
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losing my mind at this new AI tool with which you can write the songs you always wanted to hear about various Ottoman topics:
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"Each one of those who passed before you was a sovereign of the age / famed with justice, Allah illuminate their resting place"
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Mesmerized by these illustrations of various maritime flags in a printed Ottoman calendar from 1894/5.
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Please consider applying to what is certain to be an exciting symposium
@CMES_UChicago
! Happy to attempt to answer questions via DM or email.
📢Call for Papers "Towards a Social History of Ottoman Languages", a Symposium on 10-11 May 2024 at the University of Chicago
⏳DEADLINE for Abstracts: 15 May 2023
👇Full details below
⏩Please share
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I think it is an important read both for scholars of early modern Europe (and its orientalists) and those that study the Ottoman Empire.
You can read the full review (for free!) here:
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Recently came across my grandfather’s photos of Istanbul in 1951 when the ship he was working on passed through. The first photo is supposedly of the “market square,” perhaps Eminönü / Yeni Camii?
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Excited to have my two cents on what Brunson/Khashoggi should and shouldn’t mean for future US-Turkey relations published
@NRO
today
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@Istanbultelaviv
@istanbulpride
@lgbtinewsturkey
has published an english translation of
@KaosGL
's coverage of the march for those interested in a play by play
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University funding changes really starting to feel like anti-union retribution… How does the jingle go? “It’s my money and I need it now”
@jordanr_k
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Babak’s revenge?
The helicopters carrying President Raisi crashed around the village of Uzi in east Azerbaijan province - Tasnim
No contact whatsoever has been made with the helicopter yet
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Apparently before Wikipedia you would just mail the Secretary of State to check your spelling.
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Kind of incredible that the NELC's weekly workshop continues takes place around the same table that Marshall Hodgson once confronted Arnold Toynbee about his conception of 'civilization' — SSRB 302!
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There was a thread a few months back about the recent and drastic decline in the # of early-modern and pre-modern history PhDs granted each year. Well here’s the same bias proudly reflected in the UChicago Humanities Division’s new “teaching and research map” whatever that is…
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Pleased to be (co)convening this great line-up of speakers at the Middle East History and Theory Workshop this fall! If you are around Chicago join us on campus for the first talk by Dr. Roy Marom this Thursday at 4PM.
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Okay, the webpage now has an updated installation guide which should work for most folks with newish macs.
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I for one am looking forward to our coming nomadic conquest and their superior asabbiyah
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An insane fact somewhat buried in this: “Israel has said it used 6,000 bombs in the first six days of the conflict, more than the US used in a year during its operations in Afghanistan and double what the US-led coalition used against Islamic State in Iraq and Syria in a month.”
NEW from me: Using open source imagery, forensic analysis, ground reporting and expert testimony, we pieced together what happened at the Gaza hospital that was bombed last night and claimed so many lives.
with
@_EmmaGH
@Ashley_J_Kirk
@elenaukc
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Critiquing ‘consumption norms today’ with two goods that were famously exploited before the advent of industrial capitalism…
As a communist, I do not think we will look back wistfully at our consumption norms today. Hell no. We will look back at our current diet, for example, in horror. All the coffee we can drink and chocolate we can eat pales in comparison to what we have to win!
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You can find a fuller discussion, an interactive version of the full tabaqat, and a word searchable pdf of the same here:
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A Windows version has now been added here:
Unfortunately, I can’t check the set up process but I have provided a few links to directions written by others. If it works for you please do let me know!
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@heissenstat
Because it’s relatively new and didn’t get enough coverage, Halil Karaveli’s flawed but engaging Why Turkey is Authoritarian.
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It therefore contains a clear bias towards individuals educated or working in Euro-American academic institutions, especially UChicago, and towards Ottoman historians. I've also done my best to correct mistakes introduced when scraping the html but some persist, my apologies!
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Judging by the average temperature of the Old Bod this winter some things never change:
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@Istanbultelaviv
@michaeltalbotuk
@aynurdogan
For the politics of the 70s, the Kurdish issue, or the Dersim Massacre don’t forget
@ferhatttunc
’s işkencelerde, Dersim Dört Dağ İçinde, and Dersim Yıkılmasın
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Finally, a brief note on method: The basis of the data presented here was scraped from the Modern Tabaqat Wikia and supplemented with information drawn from the University of Chicago's NELC Department website my own research into the Ottomanists at one time affiliated with it.
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Another lineage, which began by focusing on a set of late Ottoman historians trained by Prof. Holly Shissler, quickly expands to include a number of prominent names working not only in Ottoman studies, but Iranian history, early Islam, and the intellectual history of Islam.
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Notable that they only people who impeded my access to campus today were the UCPD
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Talk about vicious! During the Italo-Turkish War of 1911, the French sent the cruiser Ernest Renan to the coast of Beirut to protect Christian interests, named for a 'philosopher' who famously declared Islam an iron band around the head of Muslims that prevented rational thought
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The longest lineage in the data stretches from UChicago Ottomanists Hakan Karateke and Robert Dankoff back to two 18th century individuals: Johann David Michaelis (1717-1791) a biblical scholar and Denis Dominique Cardonne (1721-1783) one time French Dragoman at Istanbul.
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@EvrimBinbas
@VefaErginbas
@nitemkreb
@sariyannis
Thank you! Yes, I think I was a little inconsistent in the data entry at some points with the most recent generation. Varying between all faculty thanked in a dissertation’s acknowledgments section and the official advisor. I’ll have to clean it up.
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The image at the start of the thread attempts to incorporate modern track UChicago NELC faculty, past and present, working in a wider range of fields who have graduated students. This image based on the full tabaqat wikia is even more unwieldy.
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And surprise surprise not a single professor of economics...
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Some lineages are more well known like the one from Cornell Fleischer and John Woods via their shared advisor Martin Dickson to the historian, Turkologist, and Bashkir revolutionary Zeki Velidi Togan.
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If we are willing to look slightly further back we can find a common ancestor for all of the department's recent faculty working in the fields of Persian and Ottoman studies: the German semiticist Theodor Nöldeke who helped train Helmut Ritter.
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Through a careful analysis of early grammars and these MSS Palabıyık provides a much needed corrective. She demonstrates how European scholars emulated the methods of their Ottoman counterparts, relying on Turkish reading aids to explicate difficult Arabic and Persian texts...
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How I’ve felt the last couple days reading Ottoman tax documents…
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@EvrimBinbas
@VefaErginbas
@nitemkreb
@sariyannis
The visualizations are made in python using the graphviz package, which interprets an excel file containing all the nodes and edges. Part of why it gets so messy at scale is because of the lack of control you have over the way it decides to optimize the graph unfortunately.
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Thinking tonight about how Rifa’at Ali Abou-El-Haj's words remain prescient some three and a half decades later...
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@EvrimBinbas
@yucesoyhh
@sariyannis
The code itself is fairly simple and I am happy to share! The real time consuming part is collecting and organizing the data in a way it can read. Perhaps I can share an example and open a google sheet where people can submit their info or that of folks they know who are missing.
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“Korunmaz claimed his sexual organ was ‘a fountain of light’ and persuaded male and female followers to perform oral sex on him.“ Talk about taking Sufi practices of embodiment to a whole other level, my god.
Had enough Of
#S400s
#Safezones
in
#Syria
? Read about Turkish journalist who describes murky world of sheikhs, lies and video tape
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The literature on early modern European orientalists typically portrays them as uninterested in learning Ott. Turkish or reading Turkish texts. Going so far to demean it as a "workaday tongue"! Yet, European manuscript libraries are filled with Turkish manuscripts...
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I’ll be honest, I came for the Arabesk pop and
@kenan_sharpe
did not disappoint
2020 BEST OF TURKISH MUSIC [thread]
The year is almost over. The music mags have given their top 100s, we had
#SpotifyWrapped
, now it's time for my little round-up. It's been a crap year but a good year for music, so here are mini-reviews + a playlist of songs that defined 2020!
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Kraelitz, a prof at the University of Vienna, published a number of Ottoman documents from the Ragusan archive and launched the study of Ottoman diplomatics before turning to focus on Mongolian and Tatar. He is perhaps best known as the mentor of Paul Wittek.
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Happy to see
@KaosGL
will be able to continue their great work in Turkey
The Friedrich Naumann Foundation, has started funding some associations in Turkey after George Soros’s Open Society Foundation announced last week that it had ended its activities in Turkey, Turkish newspaper says
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I've updated my Ottoman diacs keyboard (for mac) based on some user feedback. Option + g now = ğ and option + b = ġ, further shift + option + i = İ while shift + i = I. This should make the keyboard particularly intuitive to Ottomanists who daily drive the legacy Turkish QWERTY
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Craven is probably too generous a word, the man is out there shilling for mass murder
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Indeed, a couple of the characters are unique enough that they require combing unicode that clearly isn't supported by twitter!
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Anyways just a reminder from another time (1555) when the cultural elite was again tsk-tsking the consumption practices of the masses. (From the Târîh-i Peçevî translated by Bernard Lewis)
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You can see the full program and register for the conference here:
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@Paul_Babinski
@sariyannis
Thank you! These suggestions are extremely helpful. I’ll add them in and update the visual.
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"[Verse - Yeniçeri Perspective]
On the field I find my kardeş
We laugh and share our dreams Together strong in Ottoman ışık
Glory in our beams"
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Hopefully the translation will provide more (useful) fuel for the recent debates that have surrounded the figure of Kâtib Çelebi .
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The
@washingtonpost
has made some distinctly poor editorial choices in the wake of Khashoggi’s murder, first Erdoğan now this... What’s next, Ayatollah Khamenei on the wonder of press freedoms in Iran?
I don’t know if I should be furious or if I should laugh hard. Houthi leader whose group forcibly disappeared & tortured dozens of journalist, some to death, is using Khashoggis murder to gain Intl sympathy to his brutal group. Thanks to the WP!
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Look idk what’s going on at Harvard but our “Middle East Studies Department” doesn’t even have a dedicated budget to support PhD student travel for archival research, so color me doubtful they’re rolling in Saudi/Iranian/Turkish money…
Harvard President Claudine Gay refused to answer my question about whether
@Harvard
received $1.5 BILLION in funding from foreign entities and governments for its Middle East Studies Department.
This is unacceptable. The American people have a right to know how foreign
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@ASchweig17
Apologies! Köprülü/İnalcık/Darling is coming. But if you would like to help me grow or correct the list, anyone can add names here:
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@NotTheFakeJayZ
@nukebarbarian
“The Ottomans and Europe” in the Handbook of European History 1400-1600 by Cemal Kafadar
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@Paul_Babinski
suggested Zeki Velidi Togan might have completed his training w/ Herbert Jansky. Looking through an article by Abdülkadir İnan & Martin Dickson, however, I found they refer to his primary advisor as Alfons Dopsch, a social and economic historian of medieval Europe.
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I think I’ll just disseminate this without editorial comment.
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@jricole
Yes, İnalcık is totally absent here because his students were so early as to not be included in the initial data I scraped from the NELC website. So by recent, I suppose I mean beginning around 1990. They merit their own tree, which I’ll get around to eventually.
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...perhaps his decision was more purposeful than previously thought.
You can find the genealogical trees in far higher resolution here: . I have also expanded Prof. Cemal Kafadar & Gülrü Necipoğlu's in the complete pdf.
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“Turkish studies...has suffered a terrible blow in the United States. Without the institute’s even modest resources—over 37 years, it spent $3.5 million—it will be difficult to train future generations of Turkey experts.” 😢
Now that Erdogan and the AKP are perceived to be weakened, former officials like
@AhmetDavutolu1
are likely to think that their time has come to lead Turkey.
@stevenacook
and I urge you in our
@politico
article, not to indulge them-it’s another false dawn!
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