In 1556–1557 a Hungarian convert to Islam by the name of Murad b. Abdullah, otherwise serving as an imperial interpreter (dragoman, tercümān) for the Ottoman Porte, penned a polemical treatise entitled The Guide for One's Turning towards God. In it, he introduces the essentials of the Muslim faith by arguing Islam's superiority to Christianity and Judaism. In the conclusion to his work Murad states that by writing this treatise he hopes to bring about the conversion of Christians from different parts of Europe (Firengistān) and secure the salvation of their souls by bringing them to Islam. With this goal in mind, ten years after completing the text in Ottoman Turkish Murad translated it into Latin, inscribing the translation onto the margins of the Ottoman text so that Christians in the remotest parts of Firengistān could understand it and be drawn to the true faith. To this curious bilingual work he then added an autobiographical section, in both languages, describing the process of his own conversion to Islam.Footnote ¹

To a student of early modern European history this story sounds ordinary enough: polemical autobiographical narratives of conversion from one Christian denomination to another were a staple of the propaganda wars waged among states and religious factions in the era of confessional polarization that swept across Christendom in the sixteenth century.Footnote ² From the standpoint of Islamic and Ottoman history, however, Murad's account is an unusual find. Although different autobiographical narratives, such as diaries, captivity narratives, travelogues, dream books, and records of mystical visions are well attested to in Ottoman manuscript collections,Footnote ³ this is one of few autobiographical narratives of conversion to Islam (from Christianity or Judaism) in pre-modern Islamic history, and the earliest source of this kind written in Ottoman Turkish discovered so far.

What accounts for the appearance of Ottoman self-narratives of conversion starting in the second half of the sixteenth century? Several Ottomanists have already pointed to a marked surge in autobiographical narratives in Ottoman Turkish beginning in the second half of the sixteenth century and especially in the seventeenth century.Footnote ⁴ Their authors emerged from a variety of social milieus, ranging from Ottoman Sufi mystics—whose levels of literacy and time-honored tradition of self-reflection in the quest for the Divine made them the most likely adherents to this genre—to various Ottoman bureaucrats and literati. Some scholars have therefore suggested that the profound socioeconomic, political, and cultural transformation of Ottoman society during and after the reign of Sultan Süleyman (1520–1566) provided incentives for literate Ottomans to seek new genres to express their views of the world around them.Footnote ⁵ But which developments in particular influenced the emergence of the Ottoman self-narratives of conversion? Is it a coincidence that they appear at the same time when Catholics and Protestants, in the aftermath of the Council of Trent (1545–1563), resorted to polemical self-narratives by converts as principal tools of proselytization and theological dispute?

In this essay I will argue that this concurrent appearance of the Ottoman self-narratives of conversion was not accidental. I will base my analysis on five mostly unknown texts of this genre dating from the late sixteenth through the early eighteenth centuries, with a focus on the narratives authored by the above-mentioned Murad b. Abdullah, and a former Orthodox Christian student of theology and philosophy from Athens named Mehmed. A close reading of these texts reveals that some Ottoman converts readily entered the debate about the correct rituals and the most authentic, scripture-based path toward salvation, which modern scholarship often considers germane only to the post-Reformation Christendom. In their conversion narratives they promoted Islam as a veritable spiritual option and the Qur'an as the true word of God by bringing together the tradition of medieval Islamic anti-Christian polemics (the so-called reddiye) with Christian humanist sensibilities for textual criticism, the study of scriptural languages, and the return to original sources to bear on questions of the authenticity of religious scriptures and translation. As I will argue, this development was not a result of a simple transference of a post-Tridentine Christian genre to an Ottoman setting, but rather a manifestation of the Ottoman participation in the age of “confessionalization”—the era of the parallel establishment of confessional communities (such as Lutheran, Calvinist, and reformed Catholic) in the second half of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote ⁶ Contrary to the established historiography, which views this process as exclusively European, this essay argues that confessionalization encompassed the contemporary Ottoman and Safavid empires as well, where it gave rise to the formation of Sunni and Shi‘a Muslim confessional and territorial blocks.Footnote ⁷

Furthermore, this essay posits that Ottoman self-narratives of conversion in part emerged as a consequence of a trans-regional confessional polarization enhanced by competing imperialisms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, between Ottomans and Habsburgs on one hand and between Ottomans and Safavids on the other. Although the fashioning of Habsburg, Ottoman, and Safavid imperial identities and religious orthodoxies ran parallel, through dialogue with each other, and at similar pace from the early 1500s on, their more mature articulation can be traced to the second half of the sixteenth century when it became clear that neither side could decisively defeat the other or their respective internal “others.” The consequence of this imperial competition, together with the boom in long-distance trade and travel, was an intense traffic in people and ideas that made humanist vocabulary, religio-political sensibilities, and even specific genres such as conversion narratives familiar in all corners of the early modern Mediterranean world.

LOOKING FOR THE OTTOMANS IN THE “EARLY MODERN” ERA

Recent post-Orientalist scholars have attempted to integrate the Ottomans into the ambiguous category of the “early modern” on many different levels.Footnote ⁸ New studies convincingly show that the Ottomans were not passive observers but active participants and even creators of early modern political and “global” economic systems.Footnote ⁹ They also argue for the Ottomans' centrality to the Renaissance and early modern eras by looking at shared patterns of artistic patronage, exchange of art works, mutual esthetic influences, and the transmission of cartographic and geographic knowledge.Footnote ¹⁰ Even the notion of supposedly profound differences in gender regimes, honor codes, and popular culture between early modern Muslim and Christian societies has been successfully challenged in several comparative works on the topic.Footnote ¹¹ Moreover, a growing literature on converts, captives, and other cultural intermediaries has deeply eroded the Orientalist notion of clear-cut religious and cultural boundaries in the early modern Mediterranean, highlighting instead the complex processes of identity formation in the inter-confessional and inter-imperial contact zones.Footnote ¹²

Nevertheless, in order to transcend the Orientalist dichotomy of a “Muslim” versus a “Christian” world it is necessary to examine in more detail the relational and deeply intertwined nature of the political and religious conceptual frameworks that informed the processes of early modern state building and subject making across religious divides in the early modern Mediterranean and beyond. Recent studies by Cornell H. Fleischer and Sanjay Subrahmanyam on apocalyptic discourse in the early modern world, from Latin America to India, make important contributions toward trans-imperial history and recognition of the global nature of early modern religious and political culture. Fleischer focuses on the Mediterranean and argues that the millenarian expectations shared by Jews, Christians, and Muslims alike peaked in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, and induced political actors from the Ottomans and Safavids, to the Habsburgs, Venetians, the French Valois, and even various popes to aspire to establish a universal monarchy and articulate their competing imperial claims in messianic terms.Footnote ¹³ Subrahmanyam builds on Fleischer's work to argue that from Portugal to India millenarianism was a lynchpin of early modern religious and political culture. Regardless of their religious background, rulers readily manipulated messianic expectation to consolidate their power and rally the people behind their state-making projects.Footnote ¹⁴ In the context of the Ottoman and Safavid Empires, as well as Mughal India, millenarianism drew force from the fact that the last century of the Muslim millennium started in 1495 c.e. (901 h) and was to end in 1591/92 c.e. The expectations of an imminent apocalypse enhanced the imperial competition in the sixteenth century, bestowing it with soteriological significance.

These studies provide an excellent roadmap for further research into “connected histories” of the Ottoman with other contemporary polities in terms of imperial ideology and its engagement with religion. This is particularly essential for our understanding of the broader reach and implications of confessionalization for early modern polities in Europe and beyond. In recent decades European historiography has revisited the role of religion in early modern processes of state formation. Some historians have come to argue that in the context of post-Reformation Europe, the process of “confessionalization,” or the parallel establishment of Lutheranism, Calvinism, and reformed Catholicism, “played a key role in supporting the rise of the modern state, providing both the religious glue to create unified states and the disciplinary mechanisms to enhance authority.”Footnote ¹⁵ The applicability of the “confessionalization thesis” and the related concept of social disciplining to different European contexts continues to be the subject of a productive scholarly debate.Footnote ¹⁶ Nevertheless, most scholars agree that throughout Europe confessional conflict between Catholics and Protestants infused theology into the processes of state and social formation, resulting in a tendency to sacralize the authority exercised by all forms of government.

As the conversion narratives to be discussed below will demonstrate, both millenarianism and “confessionalization” were central to the Ottoman and Safavid state-building trajectories, just as they were in the contemporary European polities, although in each context they assumed distinct features.Footnote ¹⁷ By linking the state and religion in a more intimate way, confessionalization made the phenomenon of conversion to Sunni Islam central to the legitimacy of the Ottoman Sultanate. As we will see, in the sixteenth century confession building in the Ottoman Empire was a predominantly top-down process presided over by the sultan and his advisers, especially in the era of Sultan Süleyman (1520–1566). The situation changed in the seventeenth century when new initiatives for religious reform and definition of “orthodoxy” began to be articulated “from below” in reaction to profound social, political, and economic transformations the empire was undergoing.Footnote ¹⁸ In addition to functional similarities, confessionalization in the Ottoman Empire also meant participating in broader debates on the nature of political and religious authority ushered in by the Protestant Reformation. While scholarly literature on the Reformation recognizes that the Ottomans aided the Reformed cause by distracting Charles V from problems at home, it ignores the Ottomans' intellectual engagement with and contribution to contemporary religious debates.Footnote ¹⁹

CONVERSION TO ISLAM IN THE EARLY MODERN OTTOMAN EMPIRE

According to his own story, Murad b. Abdullah was captured by the Ottoman army at the Battle of Mohács in 1526 when he was seventeen years old.Footnote ²⁰ A recent study reveals that his Hungarian name was Balázs Somlyai, and that he was born in Nagybánya (today in Romania).Footnote ²¹ As he later related to Stefan Gerlach, the Lutheran chaplain to the Habsburg embassy to Constantinople, Murad had studied in Vienna before the Ottomans captured him.Footnote ²² It is unclear what turn his life and career took immediately after the Battle of Mohács—he seems to have received a solid education in Islamic faith and Ottoman Turkish language, possibly as a recruit into the janissary corps. His appointment as an imperial translator (dragoman) came only later, in the early 1550s, and followed thirty months of captivity in Transylvania, where he was sent on a diplomatic mission by Rüstem Paşa, the Ottoman grand vizier (1544–1553; 1555–1561). Rüstem Paşa ransomed Murad and brought his linguistic and diplomatic potentials to the attention of Sultan Süleyman, whose reign witnessed the expansion of Ottoman diplomatic personnel and other branches of bureaucracy.

Murad's path into Islam and Ottoman service was not unusual. From the very onset of its expansion in the late thirteenth century, the Ottoman polity proved to be remarkably open to the recruitment and integration of converts to Islam (and initially of Christians loyal to the Ottoman cause) into its military and ruling structures.Footnote ²³ While Ottoman inclusiveness brought some voluntary recruits, it did not satisfy the need for manpower generated by the growing conquest machine. This led the Ottoman rulers to introduce in the late fourteenth century what was probably the most notorious feature of their developing state system—the child levy (devşirme) among their Christian subjects in the Balkans and Anatolia. This controversial practice went against specific precepts of Islamic holy law, which protected the integrity of faith of Christian and Jewish tax paying subjects (dhimmis) living under Muslim rule. It resulted in young recruits' enslavement,Footnote ²⁴ coerced conversion to Islam, and incorporation into the sultan's extended household, where they trained for service in the elite infantry janissary corps or in the highest positions of government. Prisoners of war, like Murad, could also be recruited into the janissary corps.Footnote ²⁵ However, while devşirme recruits and voluntary converts of noble descent were central to the development of the Ottoman state in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they represented only a small number of overall converts to Islam during the Ottoman period.

Besides the phenomenon of devşirme, practices of conversion to Islam in early Ottoman society did not significantly differ from other earlier Muslim polities and (for the most part) adhered to the Qur'anic principle that “there is no compulsion in religion.” Although traditional scholarly literature views the Ottoman “state” and Sufi mystics as most important agents of conversion, recent research suggests that the initial impetus for conversion typically came from the immediate familial and social milieu of a convert-to-be.Footnote ²⁶ Similar to other Muslim contexts, the converts' commitment to their new religion or their motivation for conversion was rarely questioned by their Muslim coreligionists.Footnote ²⁷ Instead, every attempt was made to integrate converts into the community through the provision of new clothes, Muslim spouses, employment, and/or monetary donations.Footnote ²⁸

Patronage, either by the state or by individuals, was inextricably related to the phenomenon of conversion in Ottoman society, and changes in patronage patterns over time significantly affected the dynamic of conversion. The establishment of bureaucratic elites in the reign of Sultan Süleyman, both in the capital and in the provinces, was particularly important in this respect, and Murad's career, which took off and was maintained with the help of several sixteenth-century grand viziers, reflects this development. The late sixteenth century brought further transformation of the Ottoman ruling apparatus as sultans relinquished their central role in day-to-day politics to the bureaucratic elites. Contemporary Ottoman intellectuals decried this development as a sign of decline and departure from the age-old sultanic order epitomized in the prosperous reign of Süleyman. However, new research suggests that the socio-political transformation that began in the later sixteenth century was actually a direct consequence of the wide-ranging reforms that Süleyman himself introduced, thereby ushering in a new era of impersonal sultanic rule through a bureaucratic apparatus.Footnote ²⁹ The devşirme was discontinued in the early seventeenth century as the new elites, both in Istanbul and in the provinces, began to recruit voluntary converts into their own retinues and train them for various bureaucratic and military positions, supplanting the sultan's monopoly on recruitment for state functions.Footnote ³⁰ A recent study posits that these new recruitment and patronage patterns caused the rates of conversion to Islam in the Ottoman Balkans to peak over the course of the seventeenth century.Footnote ³¹ This trend, along with the new religio-political developments of the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries significantly informed the emergence of the Ottoman self-narratives of conversion.

OTTOMAN SELF-NARRATIVES OF CONVERSION

Murad b. Abdullah describes his falling captive to Ottoman forces at the Battle of Mohàcs in 1526 and the process of his acceptance of Islam in following way:

Murad understood his turning toward Islam not as a specific point in time that would resemble St. Paul's experience of sudden enlightenment, but as a process that unfolded parallel with his learning more about Islam and eventually attaining grace, in the manner of St. Augustine. He admits that at first he did not have the “courage” to accept Islam when it was “offered” to him. Sixteenth-century Western reports from Istanbul mention that captives were routinely invited to embrace Islam while still in shackles. This would not immediately result in their freedom, but in some cases it allowed for more lenient treatment and frequently a contract for eventual manumission.Footnote ³³ Nevertheless, Murad may also be referring to the period that lapsed between his formal profession of allegiance to Islam and his intellectual acceptance of Islam, since he would not normally be given the chance to receive instruction in the Muslim faith prior to being circumcised. He describes his eventual commitment to Islam as the outcome of an intense study and argues that the education he received before falling captive posed the greatest obstacle to his openness to Islam. He relates his journey to Islam as an intensely intellectual, rational experience, although his introduction to it may not have been exactly voluntary.

How unique was Murad's account of his own conversion and what, if any, precedents does the genre of autobiographical narrative of conversion to Islam have in Islamic tradition? Recent studies exploring how conversion to Islam was narrated in medieval Muslim sources argue that in contrast to conversion to Christianity, with Paul's and Augustine's accounts serving as models, conversion to Islam was a narrative non-event and that none of the stories hint at a catechetical preparation or exposure to the message of the Qur'an.Footnote ³⁴ These studies raise the question of whether we can assume that all “religions of the Book,” despite numerous shared sensibilities, actually share the understanding of religious conversion. They suggest that the verb aslama (Ar. “to surrender”), which is used to signal acceptance of Islam in the Arabic sources, can be interpreted as “to enter Islam” and that this “entrance” is only the departure point for becoming a Muslim over a period of time through participation in the rituals and social life of the Muslim community.Footnote ³⁵ While effectively denoting conversion to Islam, the Arabic term aslama carries none of the meanings traditionally associated with religious conversion as a transformation of the heart and soul—a definition that implies that conversion is a dramatic event or process that can be isolated and narrated in the manner of St. Paul or St. Augustine.Footnote ³⁶

Other scholars working on different religious and cultural contexts have also questioned the universal applicability of this conversion paradigm. They point out that it is a product of a particular historical and cultural milieu and that it represents the post-Council of Trent (1545–1563) formulation of Christian conversion that emphasizes a “sincere” intellectual commitment to one's new religion before the actual admittance into community.Footnote ³⁷ In contrast, as one prominent scholar suggests, in early Muslim sources conversion was a (narrative) non-event because “in a sense, a convert first became a member of the Muslim community and later discovered, or tried to discover, what it meant to be a Muslim.”Footnote ³⁸ However, while the expectation to find autobiographical narratives of conversion to Islam à la Paul or Augustine may be informed by specific (Christian) cultural expectations, it is equally misleading to assume that there was a “timeless” Islamic tradition of conversion narratives and that the relationship between conversion and narration in Islam did not change over time. As a recent study shows, narratives of conversion within Islam, from a less committed to a more pious lifestyle or from a legalist to a mystical understanding of Islam, constituted an important subcategory of pre-modern autobiographical literature in Arabic.Footnote ³⁹ More pertinent to this discussion, there are two full-length self-narratives of conversion to Islam in Arabic from the pre-Ottoman period that are widely known.

One of these medieval conversion narratives was Silencing the Jews (Ifhām al-Yahūd) by the twelfth-century Jewish convert to Islam named Samuel ibn Abbas ha-Ma'aravi (Samaw'al al-Maghribi). The other, which directly influenced later Ottoman narratives, was A Unique Find for the Intelligent Mind—A Treatise of Riposte to the People of the Cross (Tuhfat al-adīb fī al-radd ‘alā ahl al-salīb), an early fifteenth-century work by a former Franciscan monk from Majorca named Anselm Turmeda (Abdullah b. Abdullah Tercüman).Footnote ⁴⁰ Both Samuel and Anselm Turmeda were learned members of their communities, and their entrance to Islam was intimately related to their pursuit of higher learning. In this respect their narratives are similar to medieval and later early modern narratives of conversion to Christianity by other male intellectuals, suggesting that long-term inter-confessional contact in the Mediterranean led to similar polemical and textual sensibilities.Footnote ⁴¹ These narratives display marked influences of Muslim autobiographical, philosophical, and polemical traditions, which suggests that the Muslim autobiographical narrative of conversion developed as a genre intimately related to Muslim polemical literature.Footnote ⁴²

So how different were the Ottoman narratives from these antecedents? Like Samuel's and Anselm's accounts, all Ottoman narratives of conversion display familiarity with the Muslim anti-Christian and anti-Jewish polemical tradition, and they almost universally develop the same metaphor of learning as the path that led them to Islam. Nevertheless, in arguing for Islam's superiority and striving to present it as the best possible spiritual option, Ottoman converts espouse and seek to implement the ideals of the reform-minded sixteenth-century Christian humanists who applied their philological expertise and principles of textual and literary criticism to scripture.Footnote ⁴³ Similarly, Ottoman converts celebrated a thorough knowledge of scriptural traditions and familiarity with scriptural languages (especially Latin, Greek, and Arabic), and advocated a return to the original sources (ad fontes) as well as a systematic comparison of different scriptural traditions in their polemical writings. One of the authors to be discussed also had a thorough familiarity with Greek philosophy. The issue of translation, hotly debated among Catholics and Protestants, also figures prominently in the polemics presented by Ottoman converts. Moreover, unlike the earlier accounts, Ottoman narratives are steeped in the politics of the day, most notably in the inter-imperial rivalry with the Habsburgs, and they argue for the Ottoman sultans’ supremacy over other contemporary rulers through proving Ottoman Islam's superiority over other religions. Each of the narratives therefore inextricably binds the convert with Islam and the Ottoman sultanate—a feature that is entirely new and points to the politicization of religious discourse characteristic of the age of confessionalization.

The earliest and in many ways the most original Ottoman self-narrative of conversion was The Guide for One's Turning towards God (Kitāb-i tesviyetü't-teveccüh ilā'l hakk), noted in the introduction. Its author, Murad b. Abdullah (1509–c. 1586), is mentioned in several studies that touch upon his work as an imperial dragoman and his literary production, but his 150-folio-long polemical treatise-cum-autobiography has never received more than a cursory analysis.Footnote ⁴⁴ Murad writes that he was stimulated to write his treatise by religious disputations he had with Christians as a captive in Transylvania.Footnote ⁴⁵ Indeed, underlying Murad's entire work is the belief that conversion is a rational matter that should logically follow upon sufficient ‘proofs’ of Christianity's inferiority and falsity on the basis of its own Scriptures. Referring to his own experience of initial rejection and gradual realization of “the truth,” Murad states that his work:

Murad had commenced his studies in an intellectually turbulent era, at the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Through his education in Vienna and Hungary, Murad became aware of humanist ideas that seem to have shaped his intellectual outlook even as a Muslim. Murad engages in the ongoing humanist debate on how scriptural sources should be treated and upholds the ad fontes ideal, albeit with a personal twist. For instance, at the very beginning of the Guide Murad introduces the issue of tahrīf, the argument from Muslim polemical tradition that Christians and Jews falsified their scriptures.Footnote ⁴⁷ He consistently argues that it was the process of translation of the Old and New Testaments into numerous Christian vernaculars that is to be blamed for the corruption of Christian scriptures and omissions, such as the removal of Muhammad's name from the Gospels. While the idea of translation as a source of the Scriptures' corruption appears in the older Muslim anti-Christian and anti-Jewish polemical works, Murad recounts how he personally witnessed a mistranslation of the Bible into Hungarian and confronted the Christian interlocutor on that issue.Footnote ⁴⁸ To the rampant process of translation under way in Reformation Europe Murad juxtaposes the untranslatability of the Qur'an and insists that the Muslim scriptures are therefore the true divine message. According to Muslim tradition, the Qur'an is the word of God delivered in the sacred Arabic language and cannot be reproduced or “translated” into word of man. Any translation of the Qur'an immediately ceases to be the word of God. For this reason, the Qur'an must be memorized and recited in its original form even by those who do not understand Arabic.Footnote ⁴⁹

Murad's exposure to reformed Christian ideas did not necessarily cease with his captivity. Sixteenth-century Ottoman Istanbul teemed with European diplomats, merchants, travelers, and “renegades,” all of whom brought news about religious and political developments in Europe, and alternatively, mediated information from the Ottoman Empire to European courts and the general population. From Stefan Gerlach's diary that spans the years 1573–1578, we know that Murad was assigned to be an interpreter to the Habsburg embassy in Istanbul, where he had a chance to discuss Christian theology with Lutherans, such as Gerlach, and even anti-Trinitarians, like the infamous Adam Neuser, who fled to the Ottoman Empire, converted to Islam, and became the inspirational leader of a sizeable circle of German converts to Islam in the Ottoman capital.Footnote ⁵⁰ A comprehensive study of Murad's opus and information about the later stages of his life suggest, in fact, that he may have harbored Unitarian sympathies. This is particularly evident from the hymns celebrating unity of God, which he wrote in parallel Ottoman Turkish, Latin, and Hungarian translations.Footnote ⁵¹ It seems that Murad was aware that Christian Unitarianism, which insisted on the unity of God (and was therefore anti-Trinitarian) and the essential humanity of Jesus, was gaining followers in the second half of the sixteenth century throughout Italy, Habsburg lands, Poland, Ottoman Hungary, and Transylvania.Footnote ⁵² The compatibility of various strains of anti-Trinitarianism with Muslim beliefs on these issues, especially the doctrine of God's Oneness (tawhīd), escaped neither its adherents nor its critics at the time, and Murad, as an avowed advocate of Sufi Islam, possibly sought to extend his ecumenical vision to Christian Unitarians.

Murad's account bears testimony to the way general spiritual inclinations are translated from one religion to another in the cases of conversion, since instances of his weaving together Muslim and reformed Christian sensibilities do not stop at his comments on translation. While his ad fontes motto served to enhance his argument for the authenticity of Muslim scriptures, his exposition of Islam is informed by a mystical sensibility drawing upon personal discipline and a regime of self-examination that was revived by the late medieval Christian mysticism of devotio moderna, and was closely paralleled by Sufism in the Islamic tradition. Sufism represented Islam's spiritual reform inasmuch as it sought to bring to life religious ideals and to embody them through everyday activity.Footnote ⁵³ Its stress on the internalization and intensification of Muslim faith and practice made an indelible impression on Murad, who cites numerous Sufi authors that guided him in the process of becoming Muslim.Footnote ⁵⁴ While it was not the principal impetus for his entrance into Islam, Sufism allowed Murad to reflect upon his own reformed Christian sensibilities and implement them as a Muslim. His numerous references to himself as a sinner conform both to Sufi literary conventions of self-doubt and humility and to the disciplinary regimes of Reformed Christianity with their emphasis on self-control, inward piety, and belief in justification by faith.Footnote ⁵⁵

In addition to humanist and Reformed spiritual ideals, Murad's account echoes other developments of the era, most notably the intense inter-imperial competition. Murad refers to the Western prophecies about the demise of the Ottoman dynasty, which was supposedly going to transpire in the reign of Süleyman as the twelfth ruler of the Ottoman line.Footnote ⁵⁶ In response to Christian prophecies, Murad upholds the claim of the Ottoman sultan to be the messianic world conqueror (sāhib-kırān). Moreover, he argues that after Jesus gave the keys of heaven to Peter, the power “to bind and loose in heaven and on earth” was passed on to Muhammad as the last prophet, and then to the caliphs, and finally to the Ottoman sultans as the legitimate representatives of the Muslim community.Footnote ⁵⁷ In this way, like many other Ottoman converts to Islam writing non-autobiographical narratives in this period, Murad integrated the post-Reformation debate on legitimate spiritual authority with the imperial competition between the Habsburgs (backed by the Pope) and the Ottomans.Footnote ⁵⁸

By referring to the Ottoman sultan as the legitimate successor of the caliphs, Murad hints at the new development in Ottoman imperial ideology beginning in the 1540s. Until the early 1530s, Süleyman was engaged in an acute struggle with both the Habsburg Emperor Charles V and the Safavid Shah Ismail for the title of the prophesied messianic Last Emperor who would unite the world under the banner of single empire and single religion.Footnote ⁵⁹ When it became clear that Süleyman could not decisively defeat either of his rivals, he began to replace his messianic charisma with a ruling persona whose majesty was derived from faithful implementation of justice and Islamic law. With the help of the chief jurisprudent Ebussuud Efendi and other members of the bureaucratic elite, Süleyman began to equate the Ottoman sultanate with the institution of the caliphate—the only political formation unequivocally sanctioned by the Islamic holy law (shari‘a) that also implied universal sovereignty over the Muslim community.Footnote ⁶⁰ Although the Ottoman sultans could not trace their descent to the old caliphal dynasties and had never before dared experiment with the concept of being the “successors of the Prophet” and “vicegerents of God,” Süleyman and his image-makers believed that the regime of justice that his reign introduced bestowed caliphal sovereignty upon him. The imperial law (kanun) was now harmonized with the holy law through Ebussuud's relentless legislative activity.Footnote ⁶¹ These attempts at sacralizing the ruler were paralleled in the contemporary Habsburg and Safavid Empires. Both Charles V of Habsburg and his son Philip II believed that they ruled by divine right.Footnote ⁶² At the same time, the Safavid Shah Tahmasp (1524–1576) appointed Ali Karaki (d. 1534) as the “seal of the mujtahids,” the Shi‘a equivalent to the Ottoman chief jurisprudent, who worked to present the shah as the returned Twelfth Imam himself—the ultimate form of sacralization in the Shi‘a tradition.Footnote ⁶³

Süleyman thus brought his rule as close to being “sacralized” as it was possible in the Sunni Islamic context. This process was concomitant to the fashioning of the dynastic image for the Ottomans as protectors of Sunni Islam. Although the Ottomans did not institute an Inquisition like the Habsburgs, Süleyman dedicated special attention to the transgressions traditionally associated with Safavid Shi‘a supporters known as the kızılbaş (the red heads) and radical messianism. While prior to Süleyman's reign the Ottoman Empire was quite ecumenical when it came to the variety of Muslim beliefs, it now witnessed a boom in heresy trials and concerted efforts to define the boundaries of belief.Footnote ⁶⁴ This latter goal was achieved through different processes of social disciplining such as the promulgation of a new criminal law code that policed the boundaries of orthodoxy and public morality, the promotion of mosque worship through the imposition of new fines for irregular attendance, the construction of an unprecedented number of mosques in order to stabilize mosque congregations and monitor them easily, etc.Footnote ⁶⁵ These measures closely corresponded in spirit to those taking place in Carlo Borromeo's Milan or the Habsburg lands in the aftermath of the Council of Trent (1545–1563), aimed at establishing an “orthodox” Catholic community.Footnote ⁶⁶

A similar process also unfolded in the Safavid Empire. Although Shah Ismail officially converted Persia to Shi‘a Islam in 1501, this was a process that continued throughout the sixteenth century, and the most notable strides were made in Shah Tahmasp's reign. Ali Karaki, the seal of the mujtahids, changed the direction of prayer, appointed an imam in every village to teach Shi‘a prayer, and set out to constitute a Shi'a confessional and political community through similar disciplining and Islamicizing measures.Footnote ⁶⁷ The principle of cuius regio, eius religio was therefore upheld in the Ottoman and Safavid Empires as well, while the debates over spiritual authority in the Muslim community, correct rituals, and even original text of the Qur'an began to be debated in the language reminiscent of the Catholic-Protestant and Muslim-Christian polemics.Footnote ⁶⁸

During his service under the sultans Süleyman, Selim II (1566–1574), and Murad III (1574–1595), Murad witnessed the intensifying imperial competition, the reconfiguration of the relationship between the state and religion, and “theologization” of the political discourse. Beginning with Süleyman's reign, these developments profoundly changed the concepts of religious allegiance and conversion in the Ottoman Empire. In his advanced age Murad may have been present at the imperial circumcision festival in 1582, the most elaborate Ottoman imperial spectacle ever staged, where Sultan Murad III displayed his piety and largesse by having thousands of poor and orphaned Muslims, including voluntary converts and devşirme recruits, circumcised publicly on the same day as his son, the Ottoman prince.Footnote ⁶⁹ Deliberately staged to bolster the image of the dynasty at the time of financial and military crisis, with the war against the Safavids lasting (intermittently) since 1578, this festival featured the public conversion of members of the Safavid embassy to Ottoman Sunni Islam. One of the converts even delivered a speech in which he praised the Ottoman sultan and reviled the Safavid shah. According to the sources, this staged conversion scene was a great success and was apparently repeated a week later.Footnote ⁷⁰

An anonymous contemporary source, the Sūrnāme-yi, Hümāyūn, reports that the ambassador of the “evil-doing king of Vienna” objected to being seated next to the Safavid ambassador on the grounds that the chief Ottoman jurisprudent had issued a legal opinion (fetvā) proclaiming that the killing of one kızılbaş (i.e., a Safavid supporter) was more meritorious than killing seventy infidels.Footnote ⁷¹ The Habsburg ambassador therefore recognized the Ottoman vision of the hierarchy of “orthodoxies.” The three imperial and confessional projects converged on this occasion in the Ottoman capital to expose the fact that they all drew on the same conceptual language and acknowledged the essential link between the imperial sovereignty and religious “orthodoxy.”

Murad's account not only reflects these new anxieties surrounding religio-political orthodoxy, conversion, and public morality in the Ottoman Empire, but also illustrates a convert's ability to tap into these developments to secure much-needed financial support in the age of new patronage opportunities. It should not be forgotten that Murad first wrote his account in Ottoman Turkish and only later translated it into Latin, which suggests that the account had a dual target audience—both the Ottoman establishment and unspecified Christians in the West.Footnote ⁷² His description of the moral degeneration that supposedly beset Ottoman society late in Süleyman's reign—he criticizes the venality of the Ottoman judges and even rants against sodomy—calls to mind other political commentaries from the late sixteenth century, both the “advice for kings” (nasīhatnāme) genre and the less formal politico-religious tracts stemming from the Sufi milieu.Footnote ⁷³ But why did an otherwise humble and self-effacing Ottoman servant assume the right to criticize Ottoman society?

As a convert who comprehended the majesty of Islam and embarked on a mission to present the advantages of embracing Islam to non-Muslims, Murad insisted on being a voice of conscience for the Ottoman establishment that witnessed a new commitment to Islamic orthodoxy in this period.Footnote ⁷⁴ Murad must have been aware that in the West it was widely believed that Islamic law did not condemn sodomy and that the Turks were seen as sodomites par excellence.Footnote ⁷⁵ His vociferous critique of sodomy in Ottoman society therefore aims to show that Islam does not tolerate the “sin of Lot's people” and to rally the Ottoman dignitaries in persecution of it. At the same time, through the moral capital he accrued as a convert in this age when religion and politics were intimately intertwined, Murad was also hoping to attain patronage of a powerful statesman. Indeed, after his patron Rüstem Paşa's death (1561), Murad engaged in a perpetual search for a new protector.Footnote ⁷⁶ While in the Guide he specifically honors Sultan Murad III, in the trilingual hymns on unity of God he offers praise to the grand viziers Sokollu Mehmed Paşa and Sinan Paşa for their generous patronage.Footnote ⁷⁷

Nevertheless, this does not mean that his desire to bring about the salvation of Christians in the West was pure rhetoric. Indeed, Stefan Gerlach reports that on at least one occasion Murad was instrumental in bringing about the conversion of a Christian from Firengistān—in 1575 he took to the imperial council a servant of the French king desiring to convert and informed the Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Paşa of his intention.Footnote ⁷⁸ As his treatise survives in only one complete and one partial copy, both located in libraries outside of Turkey, it is hard to surmise what kind of audience and what impact it had.Footnote ⁷⁹ However, that he produced at least two copies of the account in his own hand suggests that Murad saw himself as the bridge between two religions, implementing the Christian belief that a convert should not be satisfied with his personal salvation but serve as an apostle to his newfound faith.

MEHMED B. ABDULLAH

Approximately three decades later, a learned Orthodox Christian convert from Athens named Mehmed penned another conversion narrative testifying to the confessional and imperial competition in which Ottoman converts increasingly began to take part. Significantly shorter than Murad's work, Mehmed's polemical treatise is nevertheless a fascinating source because it provides a direct link with the account of Anselm Turmeda and offers a glimpse into the dynamic movement of people, ideas, and texts in the Mediterranean world of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth-centuries. Although the author mysteriously dates the text to the “year 23 of the Gospel,” the context suggests that the narrative was written soon after the death of Sultan Ahmed I (1603–1617), possibly in 1623, because the author refers to him as “deceased.”Footnote ⁸⁰

In the introduction to this self-narrative of conversion cum anti-Christian polemic, the author reveals that he was born in the city of Athens, “the source of philosophical sciences” (menba‘-yi ‘ulūm-i hikemīye). Here he embarked on the study of Christian theology, which he pursued until he was middle-aged, only to turn most passionately to ancient Greek sciences (funūn-u Yunānīye).Footnote ⁸¹ As an Orthodox Greek from a provincial town under Ottoman rule, the author had limited choices for pursuing advanced education. From the 1570s, Orthodox Christians desirous of learning could choose between the Patriarchal Academy in Constantinople and the Greek College founded by Pope Gregory XIII in Rome to advance Catholic missionary activity among the Orthodox.Footnote ⁸² The author states that it was impossible for him to go to “the other side,” probably referring to Rome, and that he pursued his education in Athens. At the turn of the seventeenth century, Athens opened its own academy where the most celebrated professor, Theophilus Corydalleus, was a neo-Aristotelian educated in Padua.Footnote ⁸³ The author seems to have belonged to a small group of Orthodox Christian humanist theologians educated in Athens around this time.

Mehmed states that ancient philosophy enhanced his understanding of the Scriptures and that with this new critical apparatus he began to discern in the Old Testament, New Testament, and the Psalms verses that suggested the authenticity of Muhammad's prophetic status.Footnote ⁸⁴ He then engages in an extended argument about the line of prophecy from the Old Testament prophets onwards, which dwarfs Murad's bilingual treatise in detail and linguistic complexity as it interpolates passages in Greek (written in Arabic script), Persian, and Arabic, with occasional Latin. Among other arguments, he states that the truth about Muhammad's coming is contained in the Gospels but that it was intentionally misinterpreted by the Christians. Continuing with his conversion story, the author tells us that despite this realization, he “did not have the courage to become a lamp lit by the light of Islam” (nūr-i Islām ile efrūhte çerāğ olmağa cesāret olmayup). Instead, he embarked on a long journey around the Ottoman Balkans (Rum), going from city to city and village to village in search of knowledgeable Orthodox Christian monks and priests who might explain the verses in question differently. However, despite encounters with learned Christian monks, he was not persuaded, whilst his confusion was growing greater and his desire to pledge himself to Islam more intense. He describes his mental anguish and yearning for the divine guidance in great detail, suggestive of the post-Tridentine Christian confessional style that emphasized the believer's transparency before God and the sincerity and completeness of penitence.Footnote ⁸⁵

Finally, he was advised to go to Rome, the seat of papacy and Christian learning, where his doubts, he was promised, would be resolved. He stayed in Rome for four years, which suggests that he had ample opportunity to be exposed to the spirit and theology of Catholic renewal.Footnote ⁸⁶ Nevertheless, he says that even there everybody misinterpreted the verses of interest to him. Desperate to find someone who would confirm his understanding of the verses, he heard of an old monk who had the reputation of helping those with questions in the matters of religion, and he decided to seek him out. Upon taking a look at the verses, the old monk started to lament that the Christian community had strayed from the path of its ancestors and had transgressed the boundaries of truth through willful misinterpretation of the scriptures. This finally convinced our author to openly embrace Islam, and he sped to Istanbul, “the center of the circle of the axis of Islam and the seat of caliphs.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Here the author accepted Islam in the imperial council in the presence of Sultan Ahmed, stripped his Christian ecclesiastical robes for robes of honor bestowed upon him by the sultan, and received the name Mehmed. Since he did not know Ottoman Turkish (zebān-i Turkī), he was apparently offered to study the language and Qur'anic sciences in the imperial palace, and was later rewarded with the appropriate gifts.

Although the account bears features idiosyncratic to the author's experience as an educated Orthodox Christian from the Ottoman Empire, the narrative in question is closely modeled on the Tuhfa of Anselm Turmeda. A comparison of the two narratives reveals that the episode in Turmeda's Tuhfa, in which his teacher explains the meaning of the passages from the Scriptures as the announcement of Muhammad’s prophecy, is featured almost verbatim in Mehmed's story about the old monk.Footnote ⁸⁸ Evidence about the manuscript transmission suggests that it was entirely possible that Mehmed had access to Turmeda's account—a translation into Ottoman Turkish was commissioned in Tunis by a prominent intellectual Abu al-Gays Muhammad al-Kaşşaş, who presented it to Sultan Ahmed I on the occasion of his enthronement in 1603 with the hope that the sultan would aid the cause of the Spanish Moriscos facing expulsion for their tenacity in the Muslim faith.Footnote ⁸⁹ Once introduced to an Ottoman audience, Turmeda's account became the single most popular conversion account in the Ottoman lands, surpassing other Ottoman narratives in number of copies and renown.Footnote ⁹⁰ Mehmed's account also survives in a number of copies in former Ottoman manuscript collections, making it the second most copied Ottoman conversion narrative.Footnote ⁹¹ Interestingly, in several surviving manuscript copies these two texts are bound together with another seventeenth-century narrative that describes a similar path towards Islam through the study of scriptures, this one by a learned Ottoman Jewish convert named Yusuf b. Abu Abdüdeyyan.Footnote ⁹² Like Mehmed, Yusuf recounts his childhood education and life-long struggle to understand the meaning of certain passages in Jewish scriptures in which he is finally able to find evidence of Muhammad's prophetic status. He eventually became a Sufi, withdrew to a convent (zāviye), and authored a polemical account cum autobiographical conversion narrative.Footnote ⁹³

While these texts reiterate the same model of intellectual male conversion familiar to us since the medieval period, and draw on the Muslim anti-Christian polemical tradition, Mehmed's narrative and the commissioning of a translation of Turmeda's account testify to the new historical context in which conversion now transpired. Namely, like Murad's account, they speak about a world in which confessional polarization is enhanced by imperial competition and in which conversion is a highly public and political statement, rather than an individual, or at best, local communal affair. Mehmed's account alludes to the spiritual and scriptural inferiority of both Orthodox and Catholic Christianity compared to Islam, and refers to Rome as the “Red Apple” (Kızıl Elma), a metaphor from popular Turkish prophecies that signifies the last Ottoman earthly conquest to be followed by the Day of Judgment. At the same time, Ottoman Istanbul is referred to as the center of Islam and the seat of caliphs, the heirs of the last Prophet Muhammad. Mehmed's conversion to Islam in front of Sultan Ahmed, as well as the choice of Turmeda's conversion account as an appropriate gift for the sultan whose help against the Habsburgs was expected, suggest that conversion to Islam in the age of confessional proliferation increasingly meant allegiance to the Ottoman sultan.

By the mid-seventeenth century the ritual of conversion in the Ottoman imperial council was fully developed, with a surgeon in attendance to carry out the circumcision on the premises and with officials ready to distribute the new clothes to the converts.Footnote ⁹⁴ It seems that the institutionalization of conversion was well under way by Sultan Ahmed I's time, since the first detailed records of names and exact amounts donated to the converts date to 1018 a.h./1609.Footnote ⁹⁵ This trend continued throughout the seventeenth century as the sultans, gradually marginalized in day-to-day politics by their administrative elites, strove to project the image of pious protectors of the Muslim community in an era of numerous external and internal political challenges that intensified calls for return to strict observation of holy law.Footnote ⁹⁶

Moreover, when compared with other contemporary conversion narratives from around the Mediterranean, Mehmed's account testifies to the homogenization of conversion practices and narratives in this age of confessional and imperial competition. For instance, in 1604, just a few years before Mehmed penned his account, a member of the Safavid Shah's embassy to the courts of Europe, named Uruj Beg and also known as Don Juan of Persia, published in Valladolid his account of conversion from Shi‘a Islam to Catholicism in front of the Habsburg King of Spain Philip III and his queen. It is important to emphasize, however, that unlike Murad or Mehmed, Don Juan was not the sole author of his account—since he was not entirely fluent in Castilian he received help from the court chaplain to the king and queen, Don Alvaro de Carvajal. It is entirely possible that the wording in which Don Juan describes “an inordinate longing in [his] heart to seek and find His Divine Grace” came from de Carvajal.Footnote ⁹⁷ Regardless of its authorship, however, the account provides an interesting description of the ceremonial that surrounded the occasion of Don Juan's conversion. In addition to the circumstances that led him to embrace Christianity—most notably attending the Church services that amazed him—Don Juan and his co-author describe the new white satin clothes he was given as a convert, along with sponsorship of the Spanish majesties.Footnote ⁹⁸ At the same time, Venetian authorities were also distributing new clothes upon the conversion of Ottoman subjects to Christianity in Venice, and linking converts into patronage networks through the sponsorship of notable Venetian families and institutions.Footnote ⁹⁹ These occasions were symbolic victories in the context of the inter-imperial struggle for subjects, especially those with particular technical, theological, or political know-how.

As an educated Orthodox priest, Mehmed was not an ordinary convert. The trope of the converted priest was prominent in many other Ottoman narratives about conversion from earlier periods,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ but attains particular importance in the seventeenth-century texts. For instance, another popular self-narrative of conversion from the mid-seventeenth century, the Priest's Story (Papāsnāme), is authored by a priest turned Sufi mystic who experienced premonitions of the Ottoman dynasty's imminent collapse due to widespread bribery and a breakdown in public morality.Footnote ¹⁰¹ When he related these anxieties to his spiritual master, the latter shared with him a prophetic vision of the Ottoman dynasty's future in which seventy more sultans were destined to rule before the Day of Judgment.Footnote ¹⁰² The master then entrusted the former priest with writing down and communicating this vision to the world in order to stem rumors about the dynasty's end. He also insisted that the former priest, as a new convert, was the perfect person to do this because he had seen the Prophet Muhammad in a dream and became a Muslim after “forty-seven years of worshipping idols,” and because he had left his family, friends, and possessions to undertake a five-month journey to the Ottoman lands.Footnote ¹⁰³

This narrative, infused with mystical vocabulary and apocalyptic imagery, is a complex text that engages the real political issues plaguing the Ottoman sultanate in the early to mid-seventeenth centuries. These included the assassination of Sultan Osman II in 1622, the debate over modes of imperial succession, anxieties about the survival of the dynasty due to Sultan Ibrahim's (1640–1648) inability to produce an heir, the ongoing military rivalries with the Habsburgs and Safavids, and debates regarding what constituted Muslim orthodoxy.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ This debate was part of a broader discussion concerning “what had gone wrong” in the Ottoman sultanate that arose in the wake of multi-faceted military, financial, and political changes in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Different groups expressed anxiety over these changes in different ways, but one of the most prominent diagnoses of Ottoman “decline” blamed lax observance and “innovation” in the practice of Islam. Various social groups thus came to vie for monopoly over discourse on public piety and morality, articulating the process of confessionalization from below. Sufis, especially, came under fire from the so-called Kadizadeli “puritan” movement that peaked on several occasions during the seventeenth century, and which sultans intermittently co-opted.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The author of the Papāsnāme therefore seeks to demonstrate that in fact a Sufi mystic, rather than those accusing Sufis of impiety, is blessed with the foreknowledge of the Ottoman dynasty's future and is in charge of its well-being.

Judging from the number of surviving copies, Papāsnāme was a very popular text that circulated from Vienna to Tunisia.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ It is therefore important that a converted priest was chosen as the special emissary to relate news of an auspicious future to the Ottoman sultans in a time of crisis. Similarly, a historian from the reign of Mustafa II (1695–1703), Silahdar, reports in his Nusretnāme that in mid-April 1695 a Christian (Greek Orthodox) priest arrived to Edirne, where the sultan held his court, to announce that he had a message to deliver to the sultan. He related that he, the priest, had covertly converted to Islam because he saw a vision of the Prophet Muhammad and the late Sultan Mehmed IV, the incumbent's father, in his dream. The Prophet invited the priest to Islam, while the deceased sultan told him to go and declare his Islam to Mustafa, who would superbly reward him. Mehmed IV also entrusted the priest to tell Mustafa that his sultanate would endure for a very long period and that during his reign many an enemy domain would be conquered and recovered.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ With the Ottoman-Habsburg war having continued since 1683 (and about to be finished in 1699 with great losses for the Ottomans), this conversion story was supposed to both boost the sultan's morale and persuade the Ottoman military and bureaucratic elites in control of the government that Mustafa's active military and political leadership was indispensable. In this way, the Ottoman sultan's enterprise received legitimization and endorsement from the greatest of all authorities—its own converted enemy.

The legitimizing power of a converted priest and his relationship to the Ottoman political project is also illustrated by the career and self-narrative of conversion to Islam by İbrahim Müteferrika (1674–1724). The famous founder of the first Ottoman printing press, he hailed from the city of Kolozsvàr in Transylvania and was most likely a Unitarian.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Since his Treatise on Islam (Risāle-yi İslāmīye) was written in 1710, prior to his climbing the Ottoman honorific hierarchy to reach the title of müteferrika (member of the learned elite associated with the court), it is possible that Müteferrika saw it as a convenient means to jumpstart his career. His abundant praise of Sultan Ahmed III (1703–1730) and unequivocal endorsement of the Ottoman enterprise suggest that Müteferrika had a very specific audience in mind. The fact that this work survives in only one copy despite Müteferrika's subsequent fame may mean that it never reached a wider audience.Footnote ¹¹⁰ One could almost say that it was written for the sultan's eyes only.

Müteferrika's narrative represents the culmination of the Ottoman genre of a polemical self-narrative of conversion in that it combines the elements of all the other texts discussed so far. There is a great possibility that Müteferrika, who had access to the imperial libraries of the Ottoman capital, was familiar with these earlier Ottoman narratives. Like Anselm Turmeda, Mehmed of Athens, and Yusuf, he elaborates on his education in theology and study of scriptures in Greek and Latin, in which he finds evidence of Muhammad's prophecy.Footnote ¹¹¹ Nevertheless, like the priest turned Sufi, he gives his narrative a prophetic tone, foretelling the Ottoman dynasty's destiny to rule the known world and vanquish all enemies.Footnote ¹¹² Finally, like Murad, he engages his knowledge of contemporary European power struggles and religious politics to argue that the Ottoman rivals would collapse due to constant religious and political turmoil. He writes that in the end all the infidels will be brought to believe in the unity of God, which was also Jesus' true message before the scriptures were corrupted. For Müteferrika, who was a Unitarian-turned-Muslim and combined these sensibilities in this religio-political tract, the Ottomans were the only guarantors of purity of belief, especially against Rome—the accursed “Red Apple”—and its Habsburg agents who would succumb to the Ottomans before the Day of Judgment.