engleski

The Image of the 'Others' in the Zenan-name

In recent years, the research interest of Ottoman scholars have turned to the study of ethnicity, with special respect to the study of the Ottomans' policies toward their non-Muslim subjects. While many of these studies explore the issue from legal, political, theological, and social perspectives, there is a lack of studies dealing with the image of non-Muslim 'Other' in the Ottoman literary texts. This paper proposes to examine the representations of various 'Others' in the guise of the non-Ottoman and the non-Muslim as presented in the Zenân-nâme (The Book of Women), a poem written in the late eighteenth century by Enderunlu Fazıl Bey (1757- 1810), Ottoman poet who was brought up in the Palace School. The Zenân-nâme is a mathnawî describing women of various ethnicities (both from within the Ottoman Empire and from Europe and the 'New World'), and is exceptionally rich in the representation of their national characteristics. Through a close examination of these literary images, the paper will try to explore to which extent these representations are determined by historical or ideological circumstances (the imperial ideology and the promotion of the millet system), as well as by cultural, literary or discursive conventions of the classical Divan literature. The purpose of this analysis is to shed some light on the attitude of the Ottomans towards the 'Other', be it with respect to religion, gender, nation and ethnicity.

Ottoman literature, imagology, image of the 'Other', women, ethnicity

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