Sanctifying Domestic Space and Domesticating Sacred Space: Reading Ziyāra and Taṣliya in Light of the Domestic in the Early Modern Ottoman World

Jonathan Parkes Allen

doi:10.3390/rel11020059

Abstract

Shrine-visitation (ziyāra) and devotion to Muḥammad (such as expressed in taṣliya, the uttering of invocations upon the Prophet), both expressed through a range of ritualized practices and material objects, were at the heart of everyday Islam for the vast majority of early modern Ottoman Muslims across the empire. While both bodies of practice had communal and domestic aspects, this article focuses on the important intersections of the domestic with both shrine-visitation and Muḥammad-centered devotion as visible in the early modern Ottoman lands, with a primary emphasis on the eighteenth century. While saints’ shrines were communal and ‘public’ in nature, a range of attitudes and practices associated with them, recoverable through surviving physical evidence, travel literature, and hagiography, reveal their construction as domestic spaces of a different sort, appearing to pious visitors as the ‘home’ of the entombed saint through such routes as wall-writing, gender-mixing, and dream encounters. Devotion to Muḥammad, on the other hand, while having many communal manifestations, was also deeply rooted in the domestic space of the household, in both prescription and practice. Through an examination of commentary literature, hagiography, and imagery and objects of devotion, particularly in the context of the famed manual of devotion Dalā’il al-khayrāt, I demonstrate the transformative effect of such devotion upon domestic space and the ways in which domestic contexts were linked to the wider early modern world, Ottoman, and beyond.

Highlights

On a verdant hill in Istanbul’s ritzy Beşiktaş district, overlooking the Bosphorus Straits, is a complex of buildings with a dome-covered saint’s shrine at its center, akin in basic form and function to Islamic saints’ shrines in diverse circumstances the world over (Mulder 2014; Petersen 2018).Underneath is buried one of the most popular Muslim saints of the city, Haz.ret-i Yah.yā Efendi (1494–1570), his tomb marked by a large cenotaph, with the smaller cenotaphs of family members and important disciples clustered around him.1 On almost any given day of the year the chamber under which he lies buried is frequented by devotees who have come to venerate the saint and to ask for his intercession with God
Dalā’il al-khayrāt, I demonstrate the transformative effect of such devotion upon domestic space and the ways in which domestic contexts were linked to the wider early modern world, Ottoman, and beyond
While a thorough analysis is beyond the scope of this article, I will return in the conclusion to a consideration of wider early modern connectivities and contexts within which Ottoman Islamic practices of shrine visitation and household devotion inhered

Summary

Introduction

On a verdant hill in Istanbul’s ritzy Beşiktaş district, overlooking the Bosphorus Straits, is a complex of buildings with a dome-covered saint’s shrine at its center, akin in basic form and function to Islamic saints’ shrines in diverse circumstances the world over (Mulder 2014; Petersen 2018). Bidding farewell to your pious host, you muse on the fact that similar households exist all across the Ottoman Empire in multiple linguistic settings, and beyond, little drops of devotion that together constitute a vast sea of early modern devotion to the Prophet.4 These two sites of Ottoman Islamic devotion—the communal space of the saint’s shrine, and the domestic space of the home of an ordinary Ottoman household—with their associated practices do not at first glance seem to have had much in common beyond their centrality within the daily religious life of Ottoman Muslims. If we wanted to isolate the most typically domestic form of Islamic religious life in the early modern world, there is little else for which as strong a case could be made as these texts, rituals, and associated materialities of devotion to Muh.ammad.. I will return in the conclusion to a consideration of wider early modern connectivities and contexts within which Ottoman Islamic practices of shrine visitation and household devotion inhered

The Saint’s Shrine as a Domestic Space

Perpetuating Presence in the House of the Saint

Finding the Prophet in Domestic Space

Bringing the Holy Home

AA miniature miniature rendering rendering of of Medina

Conclusions