Pamphlets and Polemics in the 17th-Century Ottoman Empire

with Nir Shafir

hosted by Maryam Patton

| The seventeenth century has often been characterized as a period of disorder and religious polemics in the Ottoman Empire. In this podcast, Nir Shafir takes us inside his award-winning new book, which argues that the polemics of the early modern Ottoman world were fueled in part by changes in communication, namely the rise of short pamphlets that circulated easily in handwritten copies. Pamphlets created a new arena largely independent from the institutional centers of knowledge production where people debated everyday questions of the time about what it meant to be Muslim. In exploring the world of Ottoman pamphlets, Shafir also offers a new introduction to the nature of Ottoman education, book production, and reading practices prior to the rise of print and modern state institutions.   

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The seventeenth century has often been characterized as a period of disorder and religious polemics in the Ottoman Empire. In this podcast, Nir Shafir takes us inside his new book, which argues that the polemics of the early modern Ottoman world were fueled in part by changes in communication, namely the rise of short pamphlets that circulated easily in handwritten copies. Pamphlets created a new arena largely independent from the institutional centers of knowledge production where people debated everyday questions of the time about what it meant to be Muslim. In exploring the world of Ottoman pamphlets, Shafir also offers a new introduction to the nature of Ottoman education, book production, and reading practices prior to the rise of print and modern state institutions.  

Contributor Bios

Nir Shafir is Associate Professor of History at University of California, San Diego. His first book, The Order and Disorder of Communication: Pamphlets and Polemics in the Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Empire (Stanford, 2024), was awarded 2025 Book Prize from the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association. Shafir is also a longtime contributor to the Ottoman History Podcast, formerly serving as editor-in-chief and appearing in over 50 episodes since 2013.

Maryam Patton is Assistant Professor of History at Wesleyan University. Her research interests span the cultural and intellectual history of the late medieval and early modern Ottoman Empire, the history and theories of time and temporality, and cross-cultural transmission in the Mediterranean world, among others. She received her PhD in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University and is preparing her first book on the Ottoman conception of time.

Credits

Episode No. 576

Release Date: 6 December 2025

Sound production by Maryam Patton
Music: "Vibing Over Venus" by Kevin MacLeod

Further Listening

	Helen Pfeifer	524 3/27/22	Scholarly Salons in 16th-Century Damascus
	Carlos Grenier	520 2/4/22	The Spiritual Vernacular of the Early Ottoman Frontier
	Nir Shafir	400 2/2/19	Forging Islamic Science
	Konrad Hirschler	380 9/25/18	The Many Lives of a Medieval Library
	Harun Küçük	456 3/25/20	Science in Early Modern Istanbul
	Cemal Kafadar	464 6/29/20	Between Past and Present, Part 1

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