|
Winner, Humanities
The
City’s Pleasures: Architectural Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century
Istanbul
Shirine
Hamadeh
Massachusetts
Institute of Technology
This
dissertation examines the parameters of Ottoman architectural
sensibility in the eighteenth century, starting with the court’s
definitive return to the capital city in l703. It draws principally on
contemporary court poetry, and a wide array of Ottoman and European
literary, visual, and architectural evidence.
It
departs from the prevailing interpretation that westernization was the
chief impetus of change in this period. Instead, I contend that this was
a pivotal moment in the history of Istanbul, when social transformations
in the making since the mid-sixteenth century enacted in the city’s
fabric through the tastes, aspirations, and practices of urban society;
while the state strove to reassert its visible presence and authority.
This is demonstrated in the first part through the examination of the
sub/urban development, the phenomenal expansion of public spaces, the
emergence of new and redefinition of familiar building types, the novel
decorative vocabulary, and the social configuration of patronage.
The
second part dwells on the role of urban sensibilities in shaping the
Ottoman aesthetic horizon of expectations. It highlights the parallel
trajectories of décloisonnement of
the architectural, garden, artistic, and poetic traditions, as
symptomatic of an increasingly porous socio-cultural environment.
Drawing mainly on the flourishing
genre of rhymed building chronograms, I argue that contemporaries’
appreciation of architectural beauty was not dictated by an established
canon. It centered on the pleasures of the visual and sensory
experience, mirroring an immensely hybrid idiom that vied on sensational
effects to convey unequivocally its patrons’ magnificence to a broad
public.
Honorable
Mention, Humanities
The
Islamic Law of Rebellion: The Rise and Development of the Juristic
Discourses on Insurrection, Insurgency and Brigandage
Khaled
Medhat Abou El Fadl
UCLA
School of Law
Contemporary
scholarship has tended to describe Muslim juristic discourses on
politics as either quietist or activist-idealist or pragmatist. These
categories, however, are unhelpful in understanding the subtleties of
the legal discourses on resistance and rebellion. Furthermore, these
generalized dichotomies fail to take account of the creative and
negotiative processes of Islamic law. Muslim juristic discourses were
neither quietist nor activist, but were thoroughly technical and
legalistic. In fact, one must focus on the technical linguistic
practices and micro-discourses of a juristic culture in order to
properly evaluate the functional and moral goals espoused by the
discourse. Only by looking beyond the general exhortations and absolute
principles, and focusing on the technicalities of the linguistic
practice, can one start to understand the process through which Muslim
jurists sought to negotiate with the institutions of power. In order to
explore this issue, this discussion examines the emergence and
development of the juristic discourses on rebels and rebellion from the
secondth/eighth to the ninth/fifteenth centuries. Muslim jurists
creatively co-opted and restructured several competing historical
precedents and doctrinal sources in order to construct a highly
technical discourse on rebellion. Muslim jurists developed a conceptual
distinction between a bandit and a rebel, and conceded to rebels who
attempt to overthrow the ruler a certain degree of legitimacy. In a
sense, Muslim jurists de-criminalized the act of rebellion, and
protected rebels from the accusation of banditry. The focus of Muslim
jurists, however, was not on assessing the legitimacy of rebellion, but
on the treatment that should be afforded to rebels. In response to
certain historical contexts such as the fragmentation of the ’Abbasid
empire and the Mongol invasion, eventually, two distinct juristic trends
developed on the law of rebellion. The traditional trend continued to
repeat the inherited doctrines out of the force of legal habit, and not
necessarily conviction. On the other hand, the revisionist trend adopted
several creative and negotiative constructs, such as arguing that unjust
rulers may be treated as bandits, or that unjust rulers may not be aided
against rebels. Finally, the dissertation ties the pre-modern discourses
to some of the contemporary discourses demonstrating possible fields of
development for this field of law.
Honorable
Mention, Humanities
Dream
Interpretation in the Early Medieval Near East
John
C. Lamoreaux
Duke
University
Based mostly on unknown manuscripts, this study offers the first
analysis of the historical contours and cultural contexts of the early
Muslim tradition of dream interpretation (700 A.D.-1100 A.D.), a
divinatory technique that seeks to predict the future through an
analysis of dream symbols. In my treatment of this tradition, I am
concerned, first, to discern the cultural contexts in which works on
this subject were being produced and consumed.
Who was writing and reading them? How were they being used? How
was dream interpretation classified by early Muslims?
The
second goal of this study is to historicize and contextualize the early
Muslim tradition of dream interpretation: in short, to place it against
a broader historical backdrop and to situate it against a broader
contemporaneous framework. Toward this end, I seek to determine how
Muslims developed their own, distinct forms of dream interpretation by
appropriating pre-Islamic Hellenic sources mediated to them by
non-Muslims, and how in turn early medieval non-Muslims went about
appropriating the Muslim tradition of dream interpretation.
The history of dream interpretation in the early medieval Near East
represents a particularly well-documented instance of continuity and
change operative across cultural and religious boundaries, one wherein
pre-Islamic traditions are appropriated in diverse ways by Muslims and
Muslim traditions are appropriated in equally diverse ways by
non-Muslims. Based on the
transmission of dream lore, I thus also in this study seek to draw some
broader conclusions as to the character of cultural and religious
boundaries in the early medieval Near East.
Winner,
Social Sciences
The
Birth of a Legal Institution: The Formation of the WAQF in Third Century
A.H. Hanafi Legal Discourse
Peter
Charles Hennigan
Comell
University
The
waqf, or pious endowments is
among the most analyzed institutions in the study of Islamic history.
Not only did the waqf provide
the foundation for many of the religious, educational, municipal and
commercial structures within Islamic cities and towns, but personal
familial endowments constituted one of the major—if not the
principal—forms of inter-generational property conveyance. Although
the waqf has been studied
extensively by historians of the Middle East, no scholar has undertakes
a systematic analysis of the first major legal treatises explicating the
law of these endowments—the Ahkam
al-Waqf of Hilal al-Ra’y (d.245-249/859-863) and the Ahkam
al-Awqaf of al-Khassaif (d.261/874).
Chapter One of this dissertation provides an introduction to the legal
theory of the waqf and
addresses why these treatises came into existence at this time. Chapter
two examines the biographies of the two authors. Chapters three through
six focus on how the waqf became legitimated both within Islamic law and
Muslim society. Chapter three conducts a literary analysis of the waqf
treatises and then examines how the waqf
came to be defined and situated within existing categories of
charitable giving, the Islamic inheritance and the doctrine of
death-sickness. Chapter four focuses on how the waqf
was legitimated hermeneutically through traditions regarding the
Prophet and his Companions. This chapter also utilizes techniques of isnad
analysis recently developed by G. H. A. Juynboll. Chapter five
examines the origins of the waqf and
proposes an alternative way of understanding how this institution may
have incorporated Near Eastern and pre-Islamic elements. And lastly,
chapter six examines how the waqf
functioned to fulfill the charitable obligations imposed on all
Muslims. Three appendices conclude this dissertation: the first two list
the chapter headings to the waqf treatises
and the provides a translation of the waqf deed from the Kitab
al-Umm of al-Shafi’i.
Honorable
Mention, Social Sciences
‘Ayntab
at the End of the Seventeenth Century: A Study of Notables and Urban
Politics
S.
Hulya Canbaka
Harvard
University
This
thesis examines the power and politics of the notables in a small
Ottoman town in the latter part of the seventeenth century. It seeks to
integrate the study a macro process, the empowerment of the Ottoman
notables in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with a micro and
more structural description of the social and political prerogatives of
notability in ’Ayntab.
After a general introduction to the town of Ayntab in Part I, Part II
identifies the notables and their economic resources, and explores their
relation with the central state. In tune with recent reappraisals of the
process of decentralization, it highlights the notables’ rapprochement
with the central state, and relates their empowerment of the exigencies
of state formation. The chapters in this section focus on the changes in
the composition of the ’askeri, and explore the
incorporation/penetration of the local elite into an imperial network of
privilege and status. Imperial revenue grants, the recognition of the
claims of prophetic pedigree (seyyade) as well as the promotion of its
ethos, and the rise of a composite elite of government of officials and
local families are the major issues addressed in this context.
Part
III shifts the focus to a less-studied aspect of provincial politics:
the relationship between the notables and the common folk. In an attempt
to bring out the element of domination in these relations—which
usually gets effaced in depictions of patronage and mediation—the two
chapters in this part carry the “politics of notables” into a
non-institutional domain. Focusing on the processes of judicial and
administrative decision-making and representation, they explore the
power relations in everyday life as reflected in the legal process,
urban resource management, and the constitution of collective urban
identity by the notables. |
