IslamAnatolia: The Islamisation of Anatolia, c. 1100–1500

Supervised by: Dr. Andrew Peacock (School of History, University of St. Andrews) in collaboration with Dr. Sara Nur Yıldız

Duration: 2012–2016

Sponsored by: Seventh Frontier Programs Starting Grant awarded by the European Research Council

The research project “IslamAnatolia” studies the transformation of Anatolia from a Christian to a predominantly Muslim society over the period c. 1100–1500 CE. Where previous research has concentrated almost exclusively on conversion, this study also emphasizes the importance of acculturation to Islam, and thus seeks to understand the processes through which Islamic culture took root among the recently converted Turkish as well as Christian populations. “IslamAnatolia” examines the formation of Anatolian Islamic society through the extensive but largely unstudied literary evidence it has bestowed to us in the form of numerous Arabic, Persian, and Turkish manuscripts. Despite work on individual texts, the contours of this literature as a whole are largely unknown, and many works remain unpublished. This project is creating a publicly accessible database about the extant manuscripts produced and circulated in Anatolia during the formative period of Islamisation from the twelfth to the beginning of the sixteenth century, containing information on their contents as well as details about the place and date of copying, patronage, and authorship. The codicological information of the database will be linked to mapping software, providing for the first time reliable data about the dates and places in which specific texts were circulated, illuminating the intellectual sources for the cultural and religious Islamisation of Anatolia.