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Born in Bursa, Mehmed Tahir spent his professional life in the Ottoman army,
working mostly as a geography teacher and administrator
in various military schools, but also acting as a commanding
officer and in the judiciary branch of the army. Like
many of his military colleagues at the time, he held
strong nationalist views as can be seen in his first
publication, The Contributions of the Turks to the Sciences
and the Arts [Türklerin Ulum ve Fünuna Hizmetleri, 1897].
From 1906 onwards he joined several organizations that
were to become the Unity and Progress Party [İttihat
ve Terakkî Cemiyeti], and served as deputy for Bursa
in the Ottoman parliament from 1908 to 1911. He retired
from military service, with the rank of lieutenant-colonel,
in 1914.
Bursalı Mehmed Tahir was a member of the Melami sufi order. This interest in
mystical Islam is easily observable in most of his published
works. Thus in 1898 he published a biography of the great
mystical figure Muhyi al-Din al-‘Arabi, and most of his
later publications focus on Islamic scholarship and the
lives of its protagonists in Anatolia.
Nevertheless, Mehmed Tahir is mostly remembered for his bio-bibliographical encyclopedia
entitled Osmanlı Müellifleri, published in three volumes
between 1915 and 1924. The product of almost thirty years
of research, this work contains the biographies of 1,691
of the most prominent Ottoman sheykhs, legal scholars,
poets, historians, medical doctors, mathematicians, and
geographers. By organizing these individuals according
to their field of activity rather than listing them in
alphabetical order, the author persuasively illustrated
the rich diversity of intellectual activity in the Ottoman
Empire. Besides mentioning more than 9,000 works by these
authors, Mehmed Tahir also provided bibliographical charts
and lists on specific topics such as “fetva collections”,
“medical texts”, and “geology.”
Osmanlı Müellifleri is not without defects. For example the bibliographical information
it provides is often incomplete, and its emphasis on
sufism and poetry, at the expense of medicine or mathematics,
might very well derive from the author’s personal interests
rather than scholarly consideration. Furthermore its
third volume, written during a period of physical and
financial hardships for Mehmed Tahir, is much less reliable
than the first two. Nevertheless, by the scope of its
ambitions and the enormous amount of research it contains,
this masterpiece of Bursalı Mehmed Tahir remains a landmark
work in its tradition, and an inspiration for those working
on the project Historians of the Ottoman Empire. |
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Born in Weiden (Bavaria), Franz Babinger showed his deep interest in the Middle
East early on: by the time he finished high school he
had learned Persian and Hebrew, begun a correspondence
with Ignaz Goldziher, and published three academic articles.
He then went on to study at Munich University and, in
1914, submitted his doctoral dissertation entitled Gottlieb
Siegfried Bauer (1694-1738): Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte
der Morgenländischen Studien im 18. Jahrhundert.
After serving in the German army in the Middle East during World War I, he went
back to his studies at Berlin’s Friedrich-Wilhelm Universität,
and in 1921 submitted his second dissertation (“Habilitation”)
on the topic of Sheykh Bedr ed-Din of Simavna. His subsequent
career was extremely productive, although the rise of
the Nazis to power forced him to retire from his professorship
at Friedrich-Wilhelm Universität in 1933. At the invitation
of the historian Nicolae Iorga, he went on to teach in
Romania until 1943. At this point he was ordered back
to Berlin and it is not until 1948 that he was able to
resume his academic activities. He retired from the University
of Munich in 1958, and died by drowning on June 23rd,
1967, in Albania.
With the possible exception of his biography of Mehmed the Conqueror (published
in 1953), Geschichtsschreiber der Osmanen und ihre Werke (“GOW”, 1927) is certainly the most important entry on
the long list of Franz Babinger’s publications. GOW was
based on Bursalı Mehmed Tahir’s Osmanlı Müellifleri as
well as extensive research in most of Western and Central
Europe’s manuscript collections and in the printed catalogues
from libraries located in Istanbul, Cairo, and the Indian
sub-continent. While important manuscript collections
could not be included in Babinger’s work -those of the
royal palace in Istanbul, of the Bibliothèque Nationale
in Paris, and of Serbia, Croatia and Slovenia- GOW managed
to overcome many of Mehmed Tahir’s shortcomings in terms
of accuracy, number of authors included, and user-friendliness.
This success explains why GOW almost instantly became
the key reference work on historical writing in the Ottoman
Empire, and is still extensively used more than 75 years
after its publication. The Historians of the Ottoman Empire project intends to carry on the work where Franz
Babinger left it.
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