Melis Taner, Caught in a Whirlwind: A Cultural History of Ottoman Baghdad as Reflected in its Illustrated Manuscripts

Abstract

Reviewed by: Caught in a Whirlwind: A Cultural History of Ottoman Baghdad as Reflected in Its Illustrated Manuscripts by Melis Taner Guy Burak Melis Taner, Caught in a Whirlwind: A Cultural History of Ottoman Baghdad as Reflected in Its Illustrated Manuscripts. Leiden: Brill, 2019. 210 pp. Hardback, $154. ISBN: 978-90-04-41269-9. Remarkably little attention has been paid to the history of the Ottoman frontier province of Baghdad from its conquest in 1534 through the eighteenth century. This historiographical gap is intriguing. It may be attributed, at least in part, to the difficulty in classifying this province in the historiographical scheme that has shaped specialization within Ottoman studies. In the very rough classification of the Ottoman Empire's provinces, which to a large extent follows the modern nationalist categories, the province of Baghdad is typically described as one of the Arab provinces. Ottoman sources, too, often refer to it as Arab Iraq rather than "Persian Iraq" (ʿIraḳ-i ʿacem). However, this classification of Baghdad as Arab fails to account for the multiple connections that shaped the province's history. Over the course of the sixteenth and the first half of the seventeenth centuries, Baghdad changed hands between the Ottomans and the Safavids, a situation Evliya Çelebi compared to a person caught in a whirlwind. The province was also connected to the Indian Ocean, the Levant, and Anatolia. Additionally, the province was home to a large Shiʿi population and famous for numerous important Shi'i and Sunni shrines. Melis Taner's richly documented and nuanced Caught in a Whirlwind: A Cultural History of Ottoman Baghdad as Reflected in Its Illustrated Manuscripts successfully fills a major historiographical gap in the history of pre-modern Baghdad by examining an idiosyncratic body of mostly Turkish and Persian manuscripts that were compiled and illustrated in the province in the decade that followed the 1590 Treaty of Constantinople between the [End Page 338] Ottomans and the Safavids. Several scholars have noticed and analyzed the corpus's distinctive visual idiom (occasionally referred to as the "Baghdad school"). While building on these scholars' work, Taner elegantly uses these manuscripts to narrate the cultural history of the province and, indeed, the Ottoman and the Safavid empires in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This unique textual and artistic production in the province of Baghdad overlapped with the emergence of a market for these manuscripts and single-page illustrations. The position of the province between the Ottoman and the Safavid empires created fairly unique opportunities for governors and local power brokers to amass political power and wealth, both crucial to the patronage of scholars, poets, and illustrators as well as architectural projects in the province and elsewhere. Moreover, certain governors and local chieftains took advantage of the distance from the imperial centers of Istanbul and Isfahan to promote their political claims. The texts they commissioned helped them articulate these claims at the provincial and imperial levels. The liminal position of the province is also reflected in the visual idiom of the manuscripts, which is in conversation with—but also distinct from—those evolving in the Ottoman and Safavid imperial capitals. Caught in a Whirlwind meticulously explores the dynamics between the Ottoman imperial center, the province of Baghdad, and the Safavid court across different works and genres. A universal history, titled Cāmiʿü's-Siyer, which was composed for the Ottoman governor of Baghdad, Sokulluzade Hasan Paşa, is a case in point. Hasan Paşa employed an Ottoman courtly genre to highlight his lineage and vizierial role. While emphatically engaging with an imperial genre, the work also served the governor to legitimize his rule and acts in the province. Other works, such as Fuzuli of Baghdad's Ḥadā'iḳü's-Süʿedā, a popular work on the Karbala tragedy, or the hagiographical works devoted to Sufi masters and Jalal al-Din al-Rumi, were primarily read by local Bektashi and Mevlevi circles in the province (although copies of these works found their way to Istanbul and other provinces as well). In other instances, compilations produced in Baghdad, such as the genealogical treatise (silsilanāma) studied in the book's fifth chapter, were made for Safavid patrons...