B. Deniz Çalış-Kural, Şehrengiz, Urban Rituals and Deviant Sufi Mysticism in Ottoman Istanbul

Abstract

B. Deniz Calis-Kural’s Sehrengiz, Urban Rituals and Deviant Sufi Mysticism in Ottoman Istanbul is the first book-length study in English to focus on the sehrengiz, sometimes translated as “city thriller”, a genre of Ottoman poetry that flourished between the early 16th and the early 18th centuries CE and that presents poetic descriptions partly of Ottoman cities such as Istanbul, Edirne, and Bursa, but primarily of various beautiful shop boys who live and work in those cities. The book promises to show how “sehrengiz poems were talking about urban rituals performed in city spaces … as a subtext for secret gatherings” (p. ix), specifically secret gatherings by members of the heterodox Melami-Bayrami Sufi sect, which was influenced by the thought of the philosopher and mystic Ibn ‘Arabi (1165– 1240). From this basic premise, the author claims that, through sehrengiz poetry, “marginal groups … emphasized the autonomy of the individual self and aimed at reconciling orthodox and heterodox worlds and thus their spaces and inhabitants in ideal spaces of Sufi imagination and real spaces of the city” (ibid.). This is a bold and provocative claim, but unfortunately it is one that the book as a whole fails to adequately support, as will be outlined below.