Cities and Saints: Sufism and the Transformation of Space in Medieval Anatolia.

• Author: Hathaway, Jane
• Position: Book Review

Cities and Saints: Sufism and the Transformation of Space in Medieval Anatolia. By ETHEL SARA WOLPER. Buildings, Landscapes, and Societies Series, 3. University Park, Pennsylvania: PENNSYLVANIA STATE UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2003. Pp. xviii + 134, $60.

Ethel Sara Wolper's new book is a beautiful volume, done in large format on glossy paper, with two columns of text on each page, several maps, and many black-and-white photographs. In conventional format, her text would probably run to about two hundred pages.

Wolper seeks to demonstrate that sufi architecture, particularly dervish lodges, transformed the urban landscape of Anatolia in the aftermath of the 1240 Baba Rasul revolt, in which a combination of Turcomans, sufis, and Christians rebelled against the Rum Seljuk sultan Kaykhusrau II, and the 1243 Mongol defeat of the Seljuks at Kose Dag. In a period of wrenching demographic change, she argues, the dervish lodge integrated urban populations and acclimated them to urban Muslim life. The book is divided into three main parts: "Buildings and Religious Authority in Medieval Anatolia," "Dervish Lodges and Urban Spaces," and "Audiences and Dervish Lodges." It focuses on the north-central Anatolian cities of Amasya, Tokat, and Sivas without, however, offering a compelling justification for this choice.

In the wake of the two above-noted cataclysms, architectural patronage in the three cities under study passed to an assortment of Mongol princes and former Seljuk officials, as well as an emerging local aristocracy that drew on both groups. The objects of their patronage were more and more frequently dervish lodges associated with charismatic sufi shaykhs, in part because these structures required a smaller fiscal and material outlay than did madrasas, or theological academies, in part because of the increasing influence and visibility of sufi shaykhs during times of social upheaval. While it is a commonplace that sufis preserve cultural and religious traditions in Muslim societies during such tumultuous times, Wolper insists that the buildings themselves contributed to post-1240 identity formation inasmuch as they molded the urban landscape and served as magnets for communal activity, as well as "visual markers of religious prestige" (p. 22) for the communities associated with the shaykhs for whom they were built.

Drawing on the work of Brian Stock, Wolper connects architectural with narrative and archival sources through the concept of "interpretive...