Ottoman History Podcast - Dreams in Ottoman Society, Culture, and Cosmos

Episode Date: August 13, 2012

with Aslı Niyazioğlu hosted by Chris Gratien and Nir Shafir This episode is part of an ongoing series entitled History of Science, Ottoman or Otherwise.   Download the seriesPodcast Feed | iTunes | Hipcast | Soundcloud Dreams are an essential part of the human experience but are attributed different significance in various times and places. For many Ottomans, dreams were a forum for the revelation of hidden or unseen knowledge, and dream narratives as well as their interpretations found their way into many Ottoman texts. In this podcast, Aslı Niyazioğlu explains the role of dreams within Ottoman society, focusing on dream narratives in biographical dictionaries of the early modern era, and we discuss possible changes over time in the understanding of dreams in the Ottoman world.  « Click for More »

Hello and welcome to another installment of the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Chris Grayton. And I'm Nir Shafir. Today our guest is Dr. Aslı Niyazioglu, an assistant professor of history at Koç University in Istanbul. Dr. Niyazioglu, thanks for coming on the podcast. Thanks, Chris. Great to be here. We have a really exciting topic for the listeners today, dreams. And it might sound like a topic that's kind of out there in outer space, but actually I think we're going to make the argument today that dreams play a very important role in understanding the Ottoman Empire,

both from an intellectual history perspective, but even in the realm of political history. In our previous podcast on Evliya Celebi, we actually talked about how Evliya justifies his journey with this sort of dream where he has a mandate from the prophet to have travels. And for those of you who haven't checked out that podcast, you can check it out to see about that dream. And so dreams can often play an important role in Ottoman texts. And I guess the first question I want to ask you, Dr. Niazi Olu, what is the significance of dreams as a topic of historical study?

I work on biographers, late 16th, early 17th century, and I look at the lives of the ulema, Sufisheys, and the poets they narrated. And if we were to visit Istanbul in 17th century with one of them, early 17th century, walked on the streets, we would have probably heard many dream narratives. In madrasas among students, in Sufi lords between a disciple and a Sufi sheikh, in gardens among friends. Because this was a world where dreams were precious. Not all dreams were trusted, but some were valued as divine messages. Dreams were trusted, but some were valued as divine messages.

And they were shared orally and also some circulated in written texts. So here we have dream records in chronicles, in biographical dictionaries, dream diaries, Sufi diaries. So as someone living in the 20th or 21st century now, I guess is where we are. How did you get interested in Ottoman dreams? What drew you to this topic? Biographical dictionaries are very, very precious sources for me. Because here I have the lives of the ulema, sufishe, poets, life by life, as narrated by their biographers. And I wanted to see how they narrated these lives.

What did they want to tell about their contemporaries? And one thing that appears not often, but in significant junctures of these life stories, were dreams. And we do not today, many of us, don't narrate dreams as a part of short biographical entry. So I was curious. I wanted to see why they put them here. So dreams maybe are one way of accessing mentality or sensibilities of people in that period. Of course, there are many, many different ways of working on dreams, reading dreams. But for me, what was important is why narrate a dream story when narrating a life

story? So what does this tell us about, yes, the mentalities of the people, the way they looked at the world? So what did you find? I mean, what stories emerged? What patterns came out? One of the first things that I was curious, whether there was a certain theme that occurred frequently in these texts. Historians of medieval hagiographies have shown that hagiographers did not include these dreams randomly. And interestingly, in Ottoman biographical dictionaries, most of the dreams are about careers. Should I be a qadi? Should I leave the ilmiye and become a Sufi sheikh instead? Or the dream of Evliya Çelebi, a different kind of life writing, why did I become a traveler?

Or the architect of Sultanahmet Mas complex, why didn't he become a musician but later became an architect? So many of these dreams were about career decisions. That's interesting, because we have sort of an older word for career in English, vocation, a calling, and we don't use it as much now that people have like 25 jobs in their life, new capitalist economy. But it's interesting to sort of think about it in that way. Can we, can you give us some examples? So our listeners will have a notion of what are these dreams? What did they, how did they narrate will have a notion of what are these dreams?

How did they narrate them? What kind of information did they provide? Are there one or two kind of examples that stand out to you? So these are very brief texts. In any way, they appear in five or six page entry the most. And they always tell what happened before the dream, the context of the dream. Where is that person in his life? And then the dream is introduced.

And after the dream, it tells what changed in that person's life. So usually dreams in a biographical entry both separates and joins two phases of a person's life before that career. two phases of a person's life before that career. One of them that I very much like and continue thinking about is the dream of a prominent Sufi sheikh, Hüdayi, early 17th century Istanbul. In his dream, he had it when he was a deputy judge and a müderris in Bursa, a young man, and he dreamt of hell and he saw his own professor there in hell. And that's why he left his career in the ilmiye and then sought the

Sufi faith. They do sometimes show a very darker world, very critical of their lives. And it was recorded, narrated by a Qadi biographer. So why do you think there is this emphasis on career, I mean these career dreams these career transformations? Maybe it should not be surprising I mean because when you read these biographical dictionaries you realize

how much they are about positions which position one took when, through which social networks. And that's why, actually, I wanted to work on dreams, because, you know, for us, dreams are a different world. So I wanted to see something different about their lives. And, well, surprise, surprise, dreams were also about the careers,

especially late 16th, early 17th century Istanbul and the Ottoman Empire, a time when a very bureaucratic, hierarchic world was being formed. And these men, the writers of these works, readers probably, as I understand, from very few readership records, and the subjects were integrated into a very centrally regulated system of appointments. So what is the underlying belief here about dreams? In the biographical dictionaries, it makes sense that the dreams are about careers, but that's because they're biographies, so you focus on people's careers.

More broadly, in texts that deal with dreams, what is the underlying notion? How did people think about dreams during the Ottoman period? Some Ottomans, and among them my biographers, called dreams as mirrors, mirat. And, of course, these are not mirrors like our mirrors. And for us, mirrors reveal the sensory world as accurate as possible. These are ideal mirrors. They are to reflect news messages from the hidden realm, the invisible realm, the realm which is not open to ordinary eyes that easily, the gaib. So these divine messages take their shape in the mirror of dreams.

And so for me, it's very exciting to work on dreams because I can see what was the hidden and what needed to be revealed according to the biographers. I think that's interesting. It's a little bit different than the way people think of dreams today. Of course, there's not just one way of thinking of dreams. Maybe Nir, I know you've worked a little on dreams yourself. Could you talk about sort of this transformation in the way that people think about dreams today? Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting to look at how these Ottoman intellectuals, these biographers understood the role of the dream and, you know, what they were able to extract from it. What did it reveal about the world that they were in? Today, you know, we actually have a few different uses for what a dream is. We can look at it, for instance, from the viewpoint of

psychoanalysis. Is a dream a reflection of a subdued unconscious, a repressed unconscious that's speaking out in your dreams and during your sleep? Or is it, for instance, like from a neurological viewpoint, a neuroscience viewpoint, in which the brain is attempting to go understand and memorize the events of the day to replay them out? Or is it, you know, a divinatory framework in which we have, you know, you have a dream and then you know that day you're not going to go to the bank because you feel that something bad is going to happen. And so for in our culture, we have kind of these three frameworks interacting, fighting

against each other. I mean, do we have kind of these three frameworks interacting, fighting against each other. I mean, do we have different frameworks in the Ottoman Empire? Can we get at one general mentality? I mean, how can we use dreams? Where can we go with them? What are they revealed? Thank you. We are yet to explore that.

And that will be fascinating because there's a wonderful book on early Islamic dream interpretation, which the author clearly shows different ways of dream interpretation relating to different groups in early Islamic society. And many of these manuscripts that he wrote this book on is now at Süleymaniye, including the only surviving copies. So clearly Ottomans read them. the only surviving copies. So clearly Ottomans read them. But what were the different views of looking at dreams and how it clashed? And I hope, as you know, we are a small but growing body

of historians of Ottoman dreams. I hope we will discover it soon. You mentioned earlier also readership. One source I have, which many of us do use all the time, are the writer as the reader. So when different writers rewrite the dream is the only source I have right now about the readership, because then you see different ways they read and narrated it. I mean, so I think one of the things when I was looking at, you know, the locations of dreams in the Ottoman sources

is that we actually find them all over the place in a variety of different genres, right? So we have, as you said, you've analyzed thoroughly, you know, dreams in biographical dictionaries. We also have dreams in these dream interpretation manuals. We have dreams in books like Evliya Celebi's, in which it's the start of a work, of an adventure. We have kingly dreams in which divine sanction arrives to the king,

whether it's the Ottoman sultan or the Safavid Shah or the Mughal emperor. Each of these, in a dream, gets this divine sanction. And then we have a variety of other examples like we have dream diaries in which lesser known intellectuals just write down their dreams and we have basically a whole different all these different sources of dreams and what i was wondering is you know how can we see them interact at all? For instance, one of the things that I've noticed is that we, when we look at like dream interpretation manuals, you know, we have these books that says, when you see, when you see the Sultan kissing you, it means X, Y, Z. When, you know, if you see a monkey, it means X, Y, Z. Now, what I've noticed

is that no one actually, I've never encountered in a source anyone ever having a dream and opening up a book to interpret it. So I was wondering, how do these sources interact? Do these things ever come together or not come together? Many of the dreams that I worked on are literal dreams.

So as Lea Kinberg describes them, so these are not dreams they're not symbolic dreams they're not to be interpreted of course that makes it very difficult to check the dream interpretation books and what is the relation between them

and then me too I have never seen a case that they go and check a dream interpretation book because they go to the dream interpreter and so so these texts are I think more about the social networks these people establish rather than going and checking the dream interpretation books but how do they relate to each other how do these literal dreams narrative dreams they are narrative Visual dreams relate to the symbolic dreams.

In my dreams, whenever there is a symbol, or I always check the dream interpretation books, and of course there are various different interpretations depending on the book. Sometimes I find an interpretation corresponding to how they interpreted it. Many times not. So this is another thing, a very difficult subject to find out the dream culture of the Ottomans. The interpretation process, who interpreted, how these books

circulated. But another thing you brought up is the genres and what happens to dream narrative in a different genre. Is it different when you tell a dream in a chronicle compared to a biographical dictionary, two genres which are relatively similar to each other? Sometimes they are not bounded by genres. For instance, Cornel Fleischer found an official documentation in the Venetian archive,

and in that a bureaucrat wrote down his diary in the marginalia. And the dreams, he included some dreams, and they're also about his careers. So interestingly, that dream accounts in the marginalia of an official documentation, a kind of diary, correspond to my biographical dictionaries. Unfortunately, when we're dealing with these types of periods, there's always many things happening behind the scenes that we can't make connections. And unfortunately, in the 21st century, in a positivist framework, we can't just drink 12 cups of coffee, fall asleep, and have a dream, and then make that our dissertation. But that would certainly be nice.

Actually, you mentioned these networks, and I wanted to ask you to talk a little bit more about how your study of dreams relates to your study of intellectual and social political networks. This is a very important topic in Ottoman history and a developing topic. So could you explain the relationship

between dreams and these networks? So I'm fascinated by trying to understand father-son, teacher-student, disciple-sheikh relationships or friends, adversaries. The biographical dictionaries are actually books on networks. I mean, this is what you read in these books. We don't use them that way, but first of all, they are collected lives. You know, one life takes its meaning related to the others. And in each entry, you have records of fathers, friends, teachers. So perhaps not surprisingly, dreams are also about that. And as soon as I began reading dreams in these books, I realized that sometimes the dream is only one sentence or a few sentences,

and who shared it, who listened to it, who interpreted it, is much longer, narrated more carefully, more in detail. And another thing I discovered is biographers are very selective in the kinds of networks they wanted to promote in these dream narratives. So, for instance, if a biographer writes about the ulama and Sufi shaykhs, like Tashka Przadeh, most of the dreams are ulama dreams interpreted by Sufi shaykhs. So the book unites ulama and Sufi shaykhs, the dream unites ulama and Sufi shaykhs. To go back to this issue of interpretation, I mean, do you,

so when people do turn to interpreters, I mean, is there points where they get wrong interpretations? Do they go to different people or do they just go to one person for an interpretation? Is it clear to them what the dream means? Was there a type of pluralism in the way that legally people could go to one mufti if they didn't get the right answer from

you know, did you have this sort of same kind of forum shopping? The stream of Evliya Chalabi for instance he has two interpreters they sort of say the same thing I have to look at how it interacts but the first one is a muhabir maybe a professional dream interpreter, we don't know

and then the other one is a sufi shey so sometimes maybe to get a fulfilling answer I don't know, you may find an authority we don't know about these choices they made but these stories I think they are narrated to show the correct social relations one should pursue. So maybe rather than descriptive, these stories are more prescriptive. Emine Fetvaj mentions for illustrated manuscripts that they are prescriptive rather than descriptive. so that is maybe the case for

biographical dictionaries and yes we do have cases where the dream interpreter does a bad job and it causes sometimes the life of the person can you give us an example a very interesting dream is a dream of a poet figani was executed in early 17th century Istanbul. And in his entry, Aşık Çelebi talks about a literary gathering, a party at a garden in Kabataş. This is a place owned by a bureaucrat, a high-level bureaucrat, very famous for his parties. He's a man who did not call a day a day if he did not spend it drinking and partying. After a night of one of these gatherings, the narrator finds Figani looking at the sea in gloom. Kabatash, as you know, is by the seaside.

When standing there, actually, you can see the historical peninsula so they ask what is wrong and then at the end he tells that he had a terrible dream and he narrates that dream but the patron of that gathering that's the owner of this garden he really does not like any sad stories so he just says that oh it's wonderful dream. You're going to get a great post as a bureaucrat. Here we see the career dream again. And three days later, Figani was executed because of a couplet attributed to him criticizing the Grand Vizier. So when I saw this dream story, I was like beautifully told I wanted to understand what Aşık Çelebi, the biographer, was trying to tell with it. And I looked at other dreams in the book and I realized that many of the

dreams were shared among poet friends and those were the dreams interpreted correctly. And here in the beginning of the entry of this poet, Aşık Çelebi mentions his two very close friends who went to drinking together in Galata, went to watch the promenade of beauties. And so I ask, where are these friends? I mean, why didn't he tell it with his friends? Why weren't they at the gathering? So it's clearly Aşık Çelebi is making a point about to whom you should tell your dream or which interpretation may not be. Of course, there are very different ways of interpreting these stories, reading these dreams. So mine is only one of them.

So your argument is that Aşık Çelebi, in showing Figani's unfortunate demise in this way in which incorrect interpretation by his friends was a factor in the death. He's saying something about the role of patronage in social networks in Istanbul. I believe he does. I believe these dream stories were narrated in a medium of debate. I mean, this was a milieu of debate, you know, about the Qadiz Adelis and their opponents, writers of reform treatises, and we will discover more and more different groups with competing interests in late 16th, early 17th century Istanbul. And many of these books, also chronicles we have seen from Peter Burr's work,

were written in dialogue with each other, in a kind of competition atmosphere of different ideas. And, of course, life stories fit right into here. Which life to follow or which life you should avoid, they were very much interested. And dream stories were also a part of that medium of debate, I think. I mean, speaking of changes, if I remember correctly, you've also worked on Atayi's biographical dictionary.

And so is there, I mean, are there differences between the use of dreams and like Ashik Çelebi's biographical dictionary and Atayi's biographical dictionary? Is it the same type of career dreams that are illuminated? Do we get different lessons from them? Yeah, Ashik Çelebi is a biographer of poets and he wrote in mid-16th century. He is a kadı and Atayi is an early 17th century biographer. He is also a kadı and he wrote a biographical dictionary of the ulema and sufishe. They are both amazing people and their works are very difficult to read because of the style they use, but really worth that great effort. So one thing Aşık Çelebi's book has, which Atayi does not, and we have some of these lives that

Aşık Çelebi told and Atayi retold, and Atayi had one of the copies of Ayşegül Çelebi's works so we know that he read and he even took some notes is that related to your podcast on the boys and the beauty is that Ayşegül Çelebi talks about them and in Atayi's case

the dreams of the beloved in some cases turns into dream of a Sufi şeyh so this is one of the beloved in some cases turns into dream of a Sufi Shaykh. So this is one of the differences that I saw. But of course we don't know whether this is the difference in period, in milieu, or this is the differences between the biographers or the works themselves. But it is possible, this is one wonderful thing of working dreams in biographic writing, is that you can look at the same dream written by different authors over some time,

not very long, not a hundred years, but two or three generations, so you can see what happens to a story with each generation. And I think that gets back to our larger question that will remain unresolved for now, which is how the authority of dreams and the dream sphere have changed and sort of the meanings of dreams in society, both in terms of thinking about transformations and approach to knowledge, the rise of scientific thinking, but also this interesting question of Sufi mystical religious authority versus other kinds of religious authority that come to the fore during maybe later periods of transformation and that would be a very fascinating avenue of discussion for other scholars so one of the things for instance that i've noticed from my own research is that when i looked at these works that

are we can call them taxonomies of the sciences or descriptions of the sciences, is that they actually give a rather significant portion of their descriptions to the science of dream interpretation, ilm tabir. And you can actually track how this changes over, let's say, the 15th and 16th centuries, track how this changes over, let's say, the 15th and 16th centuries, starting with, say, like someone like Abd al-Rahman al-Basthami, who takes this genre from the Arab philosophers of the 10th and 11th century and kind of greatly expands it and turns dreaming into this very important source of prophetic knowledge. And dreaming in this sense, you know, he devotes multiple chapters to dreams, to the importance of dreams,

of figuring out which dreams are correct and which are not. And, you know, and then when we jump to, let's say, a century later, we go to Tashkup Razadeh and we look at this Meftah Hasada, which is, again, this huge collection of all the sciences, all kind of descriptions of knowledge in the world, we see actually a rather radical shift in what it means, what dream interpretation can mean and what it can do. Dream interpretation, in Tashko Prezad's understanding,

has no prophetic capabilities. What you have is the point of, he actually gives three examples of what dreams are supposed to provide. One, they're basically supposed to give you moral guidance. He gives an example of a muezzin who was basically, during Ramadan, giving the morning izan too early and therefore depriving the pious believers

from a set amount of extra food they could have eaten or sleep they could have gone in. And then he has a dream in which he finds this out. And an even funnier dream, there's this man who is in the marketplace, and he has this horrible dream of oil being reinserted into an olive. And he doesn't know what to do with this, and he goes around, then he gets interpreted, and it turns out that the interpretation is the one who is underneath you, who's sleeping underneath you, is your mother.

And it turns out that he had been sleeping with his mother the whole time he had bought a slave from the market. He had bought a slave from the market, and it turned out that somehow his mother had been captured by slavers and he had bought her and had somehow

not realized until this moment of the dream. So this is a little Freudian. This is actually quite Freudian. Quite interesting. This is actually

the only Freudian example that I've had. But then again, it's not a, you know, it's not even an, well, it's unclear what's good.

He didn't kill his father. He's not trying to kill his father. I mean, the point Tashkur Pasad is trying to get across is the point of a dream is that it can make something seemingly obvious, the fact that you're sleeping with your mother, all of a sudden become clear. I mean, it's quite an odd thing, but you see the shift. And then you eventually, when you get to other people like Nevi

and other writers, you get the re people like nevi and other other writers you get the reincorporation of bistami's framework you know even just in the if we look at how people define what dream interpretation is we see actually an interesting shift across the 15th and 16th and early 17th centuries and i think it continues to develop until the 19th century something about biographical dictionaries you know when you look at the earlier dream narratives, say Ghazali's Ihya, a very famous work for the 16th century Ottomans, here you see dreams, news from the hereafter. Someone dies and comes back in a dream of a friend

and tells what happened to him. For some reason, Ottoman biographers or Ottoman authors were not that interested in these kind of accounts. They did not include them, although they were reading Ghazali's Ihya very much. Another difference in biographical dictionaries, of course, we don't know these works that well. There aren't that many studies from Arabic and Persian. But you have dreams where someone else has a dream about the subject of the biographer.

In the Ottoman biographical dictionaries, many of the dreams I work with are the dreamer is the subject. So the one sees it. So I think also this might be an important shift. But of course, we have so little work done on these sources. These are just impressions I had. Well, I hope today we've made the case that dreams are not just a marginal subject, but at the center of a lot of what's going on in at least early modern Ottoman texts.

And I think we've given a pretty interesting discussion. I hope not too many of our listeners have fallen asleep and had some kind of weird dream while we were doing this. And I want to thank you, Dr. Niazi Olu, for coming on the podcast. It was a pleasure to have you on. Thanks so much, Chris, and Nir. Yeah, I want to thank Nir. Thanks for coming and bringing your exciting new research to the table.

For those who are interested in finding out more about this topic, we're going to have a select bibliography on the website where you can also leave your comments and questions. That's all for this installment of the Adam in History podcast. Until next time, take care.