The Making of Selim by Cipa H. Erdem;

Author:Cipa, H. Erdem;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2017-04-16T04:00:00+00:00

Conclusion

“THE PAST IS NEVER DEAD. It’s not even past,” wrote William Faulkner.1 For early modern Ottomans, memories of Selīm were neither dead nor part of a long-forgotten past but rather were an integral component of an “eternal present,” constructed at numerous historical junctures by literate men and women of diverse sociocultural backgrounds with disparate—and at times conflicting—political and ideological viewpoints.2

These memories were by no means uniform. Writing in the Süleymānic age, Mevlānā ʿĪsā (fl. 1530s) recalled Selīm’s reign as an era of peace, when “the sheep and the wolf strolled together without fighting [and] the mouse placed its head on the paw of the cat.”3 Yet the same era evoked painful memories for a “servant girl” (ḳul ḳızı) from the provincial town of Bergama, whose petitions are preserved in the imperial archives at Topkapı Palace. In these petitions, the writer explains that she was commissioned by Selīm to travel alone from town to town, with valuable goods in her possession, to test the orderly nature of Ottoman society (niẓām-ı ʿālem). She laments that she was assaulted, robbed, and molested by several men on a number of occasions. She states that during one of these instances an attacker knocked out one of her teeth. She complains that these acts of violence were so brutal that she suffered a miscarriage. Last but not least, she expresses grief that local authorities honored neither the sultanic writ nor the royal servant who accompanied her. Instead, they mocked her. More significantly, they mocked Selīm’s authority as embodied in his imperial prescript.4

As these two accounts demonstrate, Ottoman authors who remembered Selīm and his reign did so in their own, subjective “eternal present.” Their acts of memory-making did not necessarily belong to different historical periods. In fact, both Mevlānā ʿĪsā and the “servant girl” wrote within a decade of Selīm’s death, suggesting that the variance in their memories resulted from factors other than chronology.5 There is no doubt that each author’s “eternal present”—and, by extension, memory—was shaped by his or her individual experiences, expectations, and agendas. In turn, the genres in which Ottoman writers recorded these memories influenced the collective memory of future generations of Ottoman readers. Whereas Mevlānā ʿĪsā included his recollection of the state of affairs during Selīm’s reign in a versified historical-eschatological treatise, the “servant girl” recorded her painful personal experiences in a petition addressed to Selīm’s son, Süleymān. Whereas Mevlānā ʿĪsā remembered Selīm’s sultanate as an era of justice that ushered in the Süleymānic age, the ḳul ḳızı of Bergama recalled the pain she endured for Selīm’s experiment. Whereas Mevlānā ʿĪsā employed literary tropes—replete with sheep and wolves, cats and mice—to emphasize the enduring peace, the “servant girl” narrated with brutal honesty the blow that knocked out her tooth and the beating that caused her to suffer a miscarriage. Finally, Mevlānā ʿĪsā’s goal was to highlight the undisturbed natural order of things during the Selīmian era, as a prelude to the Süleymānic age, whereas that of the ḳul ḳızı was simply to plead for justice and compensation.

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