An Ottoman Dragoman Who “Translated/Converted” Himself: Murad Bey and His Tesviyetü’t-Teveccüh ilal-Hakk

Abstract

The sixteenth-century Ottoman dragoman Murad ibn Abdullah (1509-ca. 1585) may appear, at first glance, to be one of those who, having been brought to the Ottoman Empire as war prisoners, converted to Islam in order to escape the treatment they endure as slaves. However, his lengthy treatise Tesviyetü’t-teveccüh ilal-Hakk [On Properly Submitting/Directing One’s Face to God], which I will be studying here from the perspective of translation history, suggests that Murad Bey’s attitude towards Islam may have been genuine. Tesviye is an unpublished and hence relatively unknown bilingual text in Ottoman Turkish and Latin. As the title suggests, it is a work of a theological nature, which is somewhat reminiscent of catechism manuals on the one hand, and on the other, of the confessional literature that began with Augustine’s Confessions, as an ego-document. The difference is that it treats Islam by comparing it to Christianity and reflects a perspective largely influenced by Sufism. Its author Murad Bey, born as Balázs Somlyai, was a prisoner of war of Hungarian or Transylvanian origin, who was brought to the Ottoman capital as a youth and later converted there to Islam and finally became the chief Latin translator of the court, as the autobiographical section at the end of the work informs us. The treatise is historically very important, in that apart from general information on the reception of Islam and Christianity in different periods, it offers a unique contemporary perspective on the Sunni orthodoxy of the Ottoman state, which was then newly being established, as well as to the religious divide in Europe of that time. Moreover, as a convert, Murad Bey voices unexpectedly sharp criticism of the corruption of the Ottoman bureaucratic elites. The work was completed in 1557 and translated into Latin a decade later by the author himself, who was expecting it to be widely read by Europeans, but this expectation seems to have remained unfulfilled as the work has survived in only three known manuscripts, all autographs (of which one has the complete Turkish original and its Latin translation, one an incomplete draft of the bilingual text, and one has only the Turkish original). In this study, which draws on my ongoing work for the annotated English translation of the treatise, I will be exploring Tesviye from the perspective of translation history mainly through close readings of passages from the Latin translation and the source text.