The Formation of the Ottoman Mindset: From Interregnum to Conquest

We will host Faruk Akyıldız at the 59th session of the Specialization Talks series organized by the ISAR Research Center.

The first half of the 15th century, during which the Ottoman State evolved from a principality into an empire, was not merely a process of political recovery; it was a foundational period in which the heritage of Islamic thought was reshaped around the concepts of "hulâsa" (summary/epitome) and "zübde" (essence). In this process, the Ottoman world did not exclude the accumulation of Islamic thought; on the contrary, by "localizing" this heritage through Turkish literature, it transformed it into a new proposal that would respond to its own political and social needs.

In this talk, the formation of the Ottoman mentality in the process spanning from the turbulent climate of the Interregnum (Fetret) to the Conquest of Istanbul will be addressed through the disciplines of History, Politics, and Occult Sciences. The talk aims to examine how Turkish texts produced in the 15th century took over the accumulation within the institutionalized Persian and Arabic cultural spheres of the Islamic world, and how they built an "original proposal" by transforming this heritage.

In this session, based on Faruk Akyıldız’s doctoral dissertation titled "The Formation of the Ottoman Mentality from Interregnum to Conquest," the deep and dynamic ties that Ottoman thought established with the classical Islamic heritage will be opened to discussion—not as an imitation or repetition, but as a continuous and original proposal, a zübde.

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