2026/05/05 by Hüseyin Göcen · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Diverse Musicological Studies #Islamic Studies and History #Turkey's Politics and Society
paper · doi:10.1163/27732142-bja00025
openalex publication_date 2026/05/05 · openalex created_date 2026/05/07 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
Abstract This study focuses on the relationship between Muslim and Christian communities in the Ottoman Empire between 1600 and 1800, analyzing the multifaceted nature of intercommunal contacts and interactions by examining selected provincial jurisconsults’ fatwas from Skopje, Akkirman, İzmir, Erzurum, and Kayseri. Rather than depicting the relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in an exclusively positive or negative light, which fails to capture the complex reality of social, cultural, and religious life, I argue that the commoners in local contexts had multiple forms of interactions, encounters, and entanglements that portray a nuanced, vibrant and intricate landscape at the grassroots level. Drawing upon a corpus of 16 fatwas in total, this paper focuses on several cases from a selection of fatwa collections, which constitutes the basis of my dissertation. This study does not claim to provide an exhaustive list of all Turkish fatwa collections from this period, but it aims to offer a comprehensive overview from different corners of the empire from different periods, which is one of the central reasons for selecting multiple fatwa collections. These fatwas provide multiple cases from different contexts and show the ways in which the members of different religious and confessional groups lived conflictual as well as harmonious lives. To examine this complex nature of relations and illustrate select examples, this paper attempts to show the complexity of daily lives and social interactions between Muslims and non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire in this period, ranging from neighborly coexistence to hostile attitudes and conflicts. The concept of Ottoman Sunnitization is scrutinized and debated through discussion of different cases as well, which demonstrate that although there were people who had uncompromising attitudes towards peaceful relations between Muslims and non-Muslims prior to the formation of the Ottoman Empire, the vigilance of the parties supporting the transformation of the religious and social domain in light of crystallized Sunni creed made those contacts more visible to critical and disapproving eyes.