4 introduction
The director and some of the Turkish researchers used a number of dif-ferent methods to try to convert me to Islam. The fi rst was social pressure.
Two or three times during the day, upon hearing the call to prayer from the
Suleimaniye Mosque, the director would put slippers at my feet and a towel on
my shoulder and say, “Come, Ahmed, let’s go do our ablutions before praying
in the mosque. We’re locking the archive; you might as well come with us.”
Another method was more intellectual or theological. The head of the archive
would often explain that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam all are branches of
one original monotheist religion, but that Islam—being the last revelation, the
fi nal call, and the one whose message had never been corrupted—was its truest
form. To convert from Christianity or Judaism to Islam, therefore, was to turn
back to the authentic and original form of the erroneous religious practices in
which I may have currently been engaged. One day the director, not a young
man, sprang from his chair and said, “Ahmed, look at me. I am Ibrahim [Ab-
raham]. My left arm is Ishak [Isaac]; my right is Ismail [Ishmael]. They both
spring from the same body. They are branches connected to the same trunk.
Why don’t you start using your right side?” At this moment, not being able to
humor the well-meaning man any longer and intent on fi nishing a translitera-
tion of a text in the waning afternoon light from the single window before the
archive closed, I rudely said, “Look at that Japanese researcher. He is a polythe-
ist. He is not even aware that there is only one, true God. Wouldn’t it be more
impressive to bring such an unbeliever to the true path?” Undeterred, the head
of the archive responded, “But he is hopeless. You are much closer. You are
already a monotheist. Convert,” he added, turning to an aesthetic appeal, “and
you could pray with all the other Muslim brothers in the glorious Suleimaniye
Mosque beneath its impressive, lofty dome.”
While conducting my research concerning the change of religion of sev-eral hundred Christians and Jews to Islam in late seventeenth-century Istan-
bul, I became the unwilling target of fervent proselytization. As I have slowly
realized, I gained better understanding of conversion from my daily encoun-
ters with devout Muslims in the archive than from the brief, frustratingly in-
complete narratives of conversion in Ottoman archival records. The director’s
exhortations made me realize that one of my original aims, to discover the
motivation of the convert, was misguided. I had sought to answer why Chris-
tians and Jews became Muslims in the early modern Ottoman Empire only
to discover that this was a question that I could not answer by reading the
available documentary material, as it does not inform us of the conditions of
conversion.
As I began reading seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Ottoman chron-icles, I realized that in Ottoman Europe (Rumili, Rumelia, “the land of the