24 introduction
extension its head, the sultan—at the end of the nineteenth century as “the sick
man of Europe” conceals a background of Ottoman European history when the
empire and sultan were anything but.
I have traveled a long path from my original archival research. Many oth-ers are sharing that journey now. Today researchers no longer have the thrill of
touching the original Istanbul Shariah court records in the intimate and dusty
reading room where they are kept, the fear of spilling tea on historical docu-
ments, or the gentle but not so subtle proselytization efforts of the director, who
has since retired. Saved from the proselytization efforts of the gentle memo-
rizer of the Qur’an, researchers today may be exposed to the earnest efforts
of university-age reward seekers, for all of the court records have been micro-
fi lmed and sent to the new Islamic Research Centre located on the Asian side of
the city in a nondescript suburb. Although this effort has ensured the survival
of the records (and that tea will no longer be spilled by nervous PhD candidates
on their yellowed pages), it also guarantees that today’s researcher, sitting at a
microfi lm reader in an air-conditioned library and staring at a screen, viewing
texts whose important writing in the margins has been cut off in the copying
process and whose original gold or red ink is illegible, will not have access to
the insights I gained starting a decade ago, when the subject of my research
and the subject of my life intersected. I did not become the Muslim the head of
the archive would have desired. But in the end his earnest proselytizing efforts
compelled me to write a book explaining the conversion to piety of Muslims
and the circumstances that motivated them to convert Christians and Jews and
their churches and synagogues in seventeenth-century Ottoman Europe.