Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe.

• Author: Wilkins, Charles L.
• Position: Book review

By Marc David Baer. Oxford: Oxford University press, 2008. Pp. x + 332. $55.

In Ottoman historiography the seventeenth century has often been represented merely as a transitional period between the "classical" sixteenth century and the period of so-called decline beginning conventionally in the eighteenth century. As such the century has lacked an independent narrative of its own. All the more remarkable, then, that we have Baer's book put front and center the drama of Ottoman politics, organized around the career of Mehmed IV (r. 1648-87).

The central concept, as the title indicates, is the process of religious conversion, but with two important qualifications. First, religious conversion is considered from only one perspective, that of the mediator of conversion, not that of the converted person. As such, the study focuses on the mindset and strategy of the converters, in this case members of the Ottoman imperial family and their retinue, as agents of religious transformation. This inter-religious conversion is closely linked with, and in this story preceded by, the intra-religious conversion of Muslims themselves, namely, the intensification of their own piety. Second, Baer broadens the scope of religious conversion to include not only the process by which the imperial household facilitated the conversion of non-Muslim persons, who in the Arabic phrase were "honored by the glory of Islam," but also the ways in which they transformed non-Muslim space (churches, residential quarters, etc.) into Muslim space.

The book is divided into eleven chapters, with a separate introduction, conclusion, and postscript. While the chapters follow a roughly chronological order, there is a fair amount of overlap in the treatment of events, personalities, arguments, and themes. Chapters one and two set the stage by establishing the conditions of crisis to which the intra-religious conversion, which Baer calls the "conversion of self," was a natural response. The first chapter, entitled "Inauspicious Enthronement," describes in vivid terms the tumultuous accession of Mehmed IV, and the second chapter, entitled "A Decade of Crisis," narrates the first decade of Mehmed's rule, during which the empire was confronted with a set of interrelated challenges: the recurring and violent power struggles between palace factions, growing financial deficits, a continuing pattern of rebellion in the provinces, and a prolonged and debilitating war with Venice. In these...