Ottomans and the Supernatural

Nature and the Limits of Knowledge in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire

Sariyannis, Marinos

In recent years, supernatural beliefs systems in medieval and modern Islamicate cultures have been the subject of sustained scholarly attention. But we know very little about these concepts and practices in an Ottoman context.
Marinos Sariyannis proposes here to rectify this with a comprehensive exploration of Ottoman-era magic and occult sciences. Employing a unique methodology that involves close readings of a very wide range of textual sources taken from across four centuries - including geographical and cosmographical treatises, treatises focusing on philosophy, theology, and medicine, literary works, non-literary narratives, such as historiography, travelogues and biographies, and administrative documents - he analyses events and ideas that were classified as "miraculous", "strange", or "extraordinary" by their authors. This enables him to build a detailed and coherent picture of how different sociocultural groups in Ottoman society understood nature and its counterpart, the supernatural - and how this related to and influenced broader systems of thought and knowledge.
In so doing, Ottomans and the Supernatural demonstrates the extent to which these intellectual and popular foundations differed from the (better-studied) notions of the "supernatural" used by European Christian and Enlightenment thinkers. Such a thorough and contextualised understanding of the topic has important implications for all those interested in the history of science and knowledge in the Ottoman Empire, and as a first step towards situating the Ottoman case into the broader historiography on magic and the occult across world history.