This dissertation examines the various constructions of Muslim womanhood in early modern Ottoman society. Centering the discussion around the transformation of Islam and using the confessionalization paradigm as a heuristic tool, this dissertation argues that in the seventeenth century particular manuscript pieces found in mecmuas (religious compilations; The Story: This Story Declares the Rights of Men Over Women, These Hadiths Proclaim the Conditions/States of Women, The Testament of the Prophet for Fâtıma and a sermon/testament [vasiyyet] of Kadızade Mehmed Efendi) propagated a husband-centric and domestically oriented Islam for women. These manuscript pieces are numerous and found in various libraries in Turkey and Bosnia. This discourse created greater intolerance, a punitive character, and restricted practices for Muslim women, which is strikingly different from the idealized image of Muslim womanhood constructed in pre-sixteenth-century epic religious narratives (Epic of the Girl, Epic of the Woman, and Epic of Fâtıma) written in Old Anatolian Turkish. By comparing pre-sixteenth-century religious texts with those from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and discussing a book about Sufi woman written for Hatice Turhan Sultan (A Sultanic Gift), this dissertation shows the shifts that happened over time in the construction of idealized Muslim womanhood in religious texts. Since it is crucial to acknowledge that religious texts were not the only medium constructing womanhood, this study also incorporates diverse literary and visual sources produced in the late medieval and early modern periods to illustrate the multifaceted constructions of womanhood in Ottoman society, which offers a more in-depth and nuanced understanding of the topic. By gendering the transformation of Ottoman Islam, this research addresses a significant gap in existing literature and provides a nuanced comprehension of the construction of womanhood in early modern Ottoman society.

This thesis explores Ottoman-Iranian relations in the period between 1722 and 1747, with a focus on the interplay between religion and politics in the foreign policy of the Ottoman Empire. It also investigates the Ottoman claim to universal caliphate in the early modern era. The thesis aims to contribute to scholarly understanding of the complex dynamics of Ottoman decision-making with regard to three regimes in Persia in four different periods: the Shiite Safavids (1501-1722), the Sunni Afghans (1722-29), the Shiite Safavids (1729-36), and Nadir Shah, who was a self-proclaimed Sunni with the Ja‘fari legal sect (1736-47). As the Russians were actively involved in the Iranian question during that period, Russo-Ottoman relations are investigated in most of the chapters. Through a close study of primary sources, this thesis claims that the Ottomans supported the Shiite Safavids against the Sunni Afghans and Nadir Shah in their aim to reestablish the Safavid dynasty in Iran. The main argument is that the Ottoman political claim to the universal Sunni caliphate, which secured the Ottoman dynasty’s legitimacy in their vast domains, led them to adopt anti-Sunni policies in Persia. A Sunni power in Iran created a major legitimacy crisis for the sultan, whose political title of Caliph could be challenged by virtue of their new neighbors’ shared religious identity. Against them, therefore, the Porte supported the Safavids, who posed a wall at the border, protecting the sultan’s legitimacy. My study thus challenges two established views in Ottoman historiography, which suggest that (1) the sultans used their caliphal title in a political sense only in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, and (2) sectarian differences were inherent sources of conflict in the Ottoman-Iranian axis. In terms of international relations, this thesis shows that the Porte followed a rational foreign policy in the first half of the eighteenth century in a continuity with early modern era, as particularly exemplified in the Russo-Ottoman relations, as well as in relations with other political powers in the wider Eurasian region.

The “military” farms (“askeri” çiftlikler), uprooted landless peasants, and different forms of labor found in the seventeenth-century tax surveys constitute the points of departure of this study. I argue that these çiftliks were the agents of change in early modern agrarian transformation processes and property relations in the seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire. Although these private estates did not mark an absolute and radical break with the miri land regime in legal terms, they paved the way for new social and economic relations, specifically in Thessaloniki and Kütahya provinces, within the conditions of the seventeenth-century crisis. In this regard, the seventeenth-century agrarian social and economic structure was significantly different from the sixteenth-century rural order, in which independent peasant households and the timar system were the main elements. This new agrarian social structure emerged within the conditions of the seventeenth-century crisis. The complex amalgamation of long-term demographic, economic, social, political, and climatic factors and, most importantly, conscious actions of people created the new class relations in this context. The establishment of privately owned estates engaged in commercial agriculture and specialized in grain production went hand in hand with the expropriation of certain segments of the peasantry. While the dispossessed peasants became farmhands and sharecroppers in these estates, the new rural landed gentry came into being with a distinctive class disposition. Additionally, different from the case of Kütahya, the dispossessed peasants were mostly Christians in the Thessaloniki countryside, while most of the new landlords were Muslim. Therefore, different class positions overlapped with different confessional identities in the case of Thessaloniki.