The Seljuks of Anatolia: Their History and Culture According to Local Muslim Sources.

• Author: Woods, John E.

Gary Leiser has rendered yet another service to the nonturcophone scholarly world by providing annotated English translations of two important monographs by one of the greatest modern Turkish historians, Mehmed Fuad Koprulu (d. 1966). The first appeared in 1922 as "Anadolu'da islamiyet: Turk istilasindan sonra Anadolu tarih-i dinisine bir nazar ve bu tarihin menbarlari," in several parts in Darulfunun Edebiyat Fakultesi Mecmuasi, while the second was published as a single long contribution to Belleten, the journal of the Turkish Historical Society, in 1943, as "Anadolu Selcuklulari tarihi'nin yerli kaynaklari." These studies thus span more than four decades of Koprulu's scientific activity.

Written in response to two articles published in 1921 and 1922 by the German Orientalist Franz Babinger, in Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenlandenschen Gesellschaft, Islam in Anatolia firmly places Anatolia in the context of the religious and political evolution of western and central Asia, thus avoiding the methodological and conceptual pitfalls of both ethnogenesis and nationalist historiography. Koprulu first examines the religious beliefs and customs of the early Turkish conquerors of Anatolia and the settlers that accompanied them. He then focuses on Anatolian urban life and popular religious movements during the thirteenth century. After discussing the impact of the Mongol invasions throughout the entire region, he traces complex developments in religious and social life in Anatolia, Azarbayjan, Iraq, and Iran during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Leiser has added the word Prolegomena to the title of his translation as a reminder that Koprulu unfortunately never completed the second part of his study in which he proposed to deal with the sources for these historical phenomena.

The second monograph supplies an idea of what might have been. The staggering array of sources utilized by Koprulu and the mastery with which he brought them to bear on the major themes of Islam in Anatolia adumbrate the heuristic he advocates for the study of the history of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in The Seljuks of Anatolia. In this essay, Koprulu surveys the genres of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish written sources for the history of this still little known period and discusses the scope of specific works in each category. The sections on chronicles and diplomatic sources are important, but those dealing with hagiography, historical romance, and artistic...