Pfeifer, Helen. Empire of Salons: Conquest and Community in the Early Modern Ottoman Lands. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022

Abstract

Helen Pfeifer’s Empire of Salons employs the tools of intellectual and social history to analyze the role that salons played in the integration of the Arabic-speaking lands into the Ottoman Empire. Based primarily on Arabic and Ottoman Turkish sources, Pfeifer uses the figure of the Damascus-based scholar Badr al-Dīn al-Ghazzī (1499-1577) and the members of his family and network to demonstrate that salons were of central importance to both Arabs and Rumis as they navigated the new, post-conquest realities of the 16th century.