Şehrengiz, Urban Rituals and Deviant Sufi Mysticism in Ottoman

Year 2016, , 443 - 448, 01.04.2016

Michael D. Sheridan

https://doi.org/10.18589/oa.583252

Cited By: 1

Abstract

B. Deniz Çalış-Kural’s Şehrengiz, Urban Rituals and Deviant Sufi Mysticism in
Ottoman Istanbul is the first book-length study in English to focus on the şehrengiz,
sometimes translated as “city thriller”, a genre of Ottoman poetry that flourished
between the early 16th and the early 18th centuries CE and that presents poetic
descriptions partly of Ottoman cities such as Istanbul, Edirne, and Bursa, but
primarily of various beautiful shop boys who live and work in those cities. The
book promises to show how “şehrengiz poems were talking about urban rituals
performed in city spaces … as a subtext for secret gatherings” (p. ix), specifically
secret gatherings by members of the heterodox Melami-Bayrami Sufi sect, which
was influenced by the thought of the philosopher and mystic Ibn ‘Arabi (1165–
1240). From this basic premise, the author claims that, through şehrengiz poetry,
“marginal groups … emphasized the autonomy of the individual self and aimed at
reconciling orthodox and heterodox worlds and thus their spaces and inhabitants
in ideal spaces of Sufi imagination and real spaces of the city” (ibid.). This is a
bold and provocative claim, but unfortunately it is one that the book as a whole
fails to adequately support, as will be outlined below.

Keywords

B. Deniz Çalış-Kural, Şehrengiz, Urban Rituals

References

• B. Deniz Çalış-Kural, Şehrengiz, Urban Rituals and Deviant Sufi Mysticism in Ottoman Istanbul, Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014, xiii + 276 pp., ISBN 978-147-2427-09-0.