![]() He seemed to consume himself with laying out before his readers the severity of the circumstances they faced, working day and night with all his strength to open the way to a new vitality. Katip Çelebi (Mustafa bin Abdallah, known as Hajji Khalifa, born in Istanbul in 1609 and died in the same city in 1657), who shared the same space of historical time with him, wanted to hold up a mirror to the troubles to come rather than comfort readers with the glories of the past. The master prose stylist Evliya Çelebi poured all the richness of his imagination into the mold of his mythologizing narrative, striving to charm the reader with the splendors of the past. In the three great "Çelebis" of the period, we can see clearly this ambiguous state of mind, this call to glory and helplessness in the face of an inertia which had begun to be sensed at all levels of society. Although rulers, religious officials, bureaucrats and intellectuals sought comfort by invoking the former glory of the "Eternal State," almost everyone had begun, openly or secretly, to say that the Empire was like a giant plane tree rotting from within. In the words of the French intellectual Jacques Attali, it was an age when "the giant chained for a thousand years", Europe, awoke from its thousand-year sleep and galloped headlong to plunder unknown lands seized with unrestrained brutality and greed, transferring the wealth extracted to its own territory.ĭuring that long century when Western imperialism audaciously assaulted the four corners of the world, carving up the earth, not hesitating to consider all fair game for its insatiable appetite, "The Sublime Ottoman State" suffered through the blunders of incompetent sultans-through the Young Osman affair, the vain struggles of Murad IV, the incredible shenanigans of Crazy Ibrahim, Mehmed IV's obsession with hunting-and the quarrels of the Kadizades and the Sivasis, uprisings of seminary students, internal rebellions and wars with Austria, Germany, Venice and Moscow. The 17th century was an age when the Western world gathered up the fruits maturing during the Renaissance and Reformation movements and made the leap from the Middle Ages to modernity, institutionalizing modern thought in the intellectual sphere to virtually besiege creation anew. Katip Çelebi, a complete Istanbul çelebi(gentleman) in the full sense of the word, was without doubt an outstanding representative of Ottoman and Islamic science and thought in its later era. The title "Çelebi" (pronounced Chelebi) was given to distinguished, well-born, educated persons and used in Ottoman literature most often to refer to the sons of military men, to bureaucrats, learned men, palace secretaries and the Konya administrators of the Mevlevi dervish order. ![]() ![]() Four centuries later the alert that Katip Celebi sounded still holds good. Striving to show the acute consciousness Katip Çelebi had of the intellectual stagnation that was occuring in the Islamic world, in comparison with the earlier centuries of Islamic civilisation and with the then ongoing growth of science in Europe, the author depicts a faithful picture of Katip Çelebi's warning to his contemporaries. Bekir Karliga on the horizon of Katip Çelebi's thought is a tremendous analysis of the reformist efforts deployed by the renowned 17th-century Ottoman scholar Katip Çelebi Mustafa bin Abdallah, known as Haji Khalifa.
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