Assigned Readings:

Tijana Krstic, Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Stanford University Press, 2011), chapter 4.

Primary Source: Petitions sent by converts to the Sultan, and a government register of new converts. Edited and translated by Anton Minkov in Conversion to Islam in the Balkans: Kisve Bahası Petitions and Ottoman Social Life, 1670-1730 (Brill, 2004).

Seminar Questions:

• Is it best to understand conversion as a decision made by individuals or as process undergone by societies?
• How was religious identity connected to political affiliation?

Further Reading:

Selim Deringil, ​Conversion and Apostasy in the Late Ottoman Empire (Cambridge UP, 2012).

Richard Eaton, The Rise of Islam and the Bengal Frontier, 1204-1760 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) – NB this is not about the Ottoman Empire but is a wonderful study of long-term conversion processes in frontier societies.

Marc Baer, Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conquest and Conversion in Ottoman Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).

Jane Hathaway, “The Grand Vizier and the False Messiah: The Sabbatai Sevi Controversy and Ottoman Reform in Egypt,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 117 (1997).

Anton Minkov, Conversion to Islam in the Balkans: Kisve Bahası Petitions and Ottoman Social Life, 1670-1730 (Leiden: Brill, 2004).

Speros Vryonis, Jr., The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century (Berkeley: University of Califonia Press, 1986).

Antonina Zhelyazkova, “Islamization in the Balkans as an Historiographical Problem: The Southeast European Perspective,” in The Ottomans and the Balkans: A Discussion of the Historiography, ed. Fikret Adanır and Suraiya Faroqhi (Leiden: Brill, 2002).