Chapter 3 Practices of Remembrance and Sites of Violence in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul: The Beheading of Şeyh İsmâil Maʾşûkî (d.1539)
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Abstract
How did seventeenth-century Istanbulites understand the past? And what did they want to write about the history of their city? My contribution addresses these questions by focusing on the case of a controversial beheading or more precisely, the revisionist discourse it generated a century later. In 1539, the Melami-Bayrami Sheikh İsmâil Maʾşûkî was executed for heresy and thrown into the sea. In the 1620s, defenders of the sheikh began to circulate written accounts of how his severed head and headless corpse moved upstream on the Bosphorus and reached Rumeli Hisarı to be buried together. Early modern martyrdom narratives, such as the case of İsmâil Maʾşûkî, I argue, are rich sources through which to observe power and dissent being displayed on the urban landscape. The story of a beheaded sheikh on the Bosphorus can show us the diverse ways in which early modern Ottomans reflected on their city’s violent imperial past, turning what had been the sultan’s assertion of power into a site of critical reflection on Ottoman history.