Via H-Net, we have the following
call for applications:
Postdoctoral Fellowship focusing on Confessional Dynamics in Islamic Legal Thought and Practice in the Ottoman Empire, 15th-18th centuries, at Bogazici University
Starting date: September 01, 2016
Application deadline: January 30, 2016
Duration: Two years
While the study of Islamic law in the early modern Ottoman Empire
has long been an important avenue of scholarly investigation, the field
has gained a new dynamism in recent years with the publication of
several studies that combine the perspectives of legal, religious and
more broadly, intellectual history with those of social and political
history. These studies have made it clear that both the interpretation
and the practice of Islamic law in the Ottoman lands underwent some
significant transformations in the early modern period. It has also
become evident that these transformations in legal thought and practice
were closely related to the processes of state-building,
territorialization and confession-building in the same period. However,
it still remains to be examined in what ways confessional polarization
and the crystallization of confessional boundaries between Muslims, Jews
and Christians of various denominations impacted and were impacted by
the various developments in legal theory and practice in the Ottoman
Empire between the late fifteenth and eighteenth centuries.
With the goal of building on the existing scholarship and opening it
up to new questions related to confession-building, we invite proposals
for a two-year postdoctoral project exploring some
aspect of Islamic law in connection with the confessional politics of
the early modern Ottoman Empire. We are especially interested in
studies that trace how the boundaries between belief and unbelief were
drawn and redrawn, and how normative Sunni identity was defined and
redefined in terms of beliefs, practices and code of conduct in the
legal manuals and fetva collections as well as other relevant
sources, from the late fifteenth through the early eighteenth centuries.
Topics that could be discussed under this broad rubric include but are
not limited to: legal debates on canonical and non-canonical forms of
worship; Sufi and popular religious beliefs and practices;
non-conformist Muslim communities; religio-legal norms regarding
relations between Muslims and non-Muslims in everyday life as well as in
more specific issues such as inter-faith and inter-confessional
marriage and commercial partnerships; changing understandings and
practices of conversion to (Sunni) Islam and the status of converts,
etc. Because of the research priorities of our larger project, we would
prefer studies that focus on the confessional dynamics of legal culture
in Rumeli and Anatolia, where the Hanefi legal school predominated.
However, we also welcome projects that would examine intra-madhhab and inter-madhhab
plurality in other parts of the empire provided that they also
incorporate into their analysis relations with the Ottoman Hanefi
establishment.
More information is available
here.
