Reading Abdallāh b. Abdallāh al-Tarjumān’s Tuḥfa (1420) in the Ottoman Empire: Muslim-Christian Polemics and Intertextuality in the Age of “Confessionalization”

Abstract

In 1604, a charismatic Sufi sheikh from Tunis commissioned the translation into Ottoman Turkish of Abdallāh b. Abdallāh al-Tarjumān’s polemical text entitled Tuḥfat al-Adīb fī alradd ʿalā ahl al-ṣalīb (1420), with the intention of presenting it to Ottoman Sultan Ahmed I. Soon after, this text became one of the most widely known and disseminated anti-Christian polemical texts in the Islamic world, and by the late ninteenth century, in Europe as well. The article examines the circumstances of Tuḥfa’s translation from Arabic into Ottoman Turkish, the actors involved, the narrative’s trajectory from Tunis to Istanbul, its reception by the Ottoman reading public, as well as impact on the development of an Ottoman polemical genre of self-narrative of conversion to Islam. Transcription and translation of such an Ottoman narrative, which appears to have been directly influenced by Tuḥfa, is featured in the article’s appendix. By focusing on the trajectory of a single text belonging to the genre of religious polemics, the article bridges the traditionally disconnected academic discussions pertaining to the early modern Iberian, North African and Ottoman history and demonstrates their inherent connectivity in the age of confessional polarization (16th-17th centuries).