Gottfried Hagen
· Interim Chair, Professor of Turkish StudiesVerifiedUniversity of Michigan · Middle Eastern Studies
Active 1953–2024
About
Gottfried Hagen is a Professor of Turkish Studies and serves as the interim Chair at the University of Michigan's Middle East Studies department. He earned his Ph.D. in Turkish Studies from Freie Universität Berlin in 1996 and his M.A. in Islamic Studies, Semitic Languages, Medieval and Modern History from Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg in 1989. His teaching encompasses a broad range of courses on Turkish, Ottoman, and Islamicate culture, history, and literature, including Ottoman language, heritage, and food as culture. In his research, Hagen investigates how Ottoman culture constructed concepts of the globe, universe, space, time, self, and others, analyzing societal implications through patronage and strategies of meaning making. He has a particular focus on Ottoman Islam, especially the narrative representation of the Prophet Muhammad. His scholarly work includes publications on geographical literature, maps and mapmaking, historiography, hagiography, and political thinking. His notable monograph on the Ottoman polymath Kātib Çelebi, published in 2003, explores his worldview and geographical thought, with a Turkish translation released in 2017. Hagen is also the co-editor of 'An Ottoman Cosmography. Translation of Cihānnümā' (2021), which makes a significant Ottoman geographical text accessible in English for the first time. Currently, he is working on a monograph centered on Ottoman Islamic religiosity and the Prophet Muhammad. He is serving as the director of the Center for Armenian Studies from 2022 to 2025, contributing to the academic exploration of Ottoman and Turkish culture, Islam, and Middle Eastern studies.
Research topics
- Computer Science
- History
- Philosophy
- Library science
- Archaeology
- Classics
- Mathematics
Selected publications
Der Islam · 2024-04-01
articleOpen access2024-12-26 · 1 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract This chapter draws attention to political ritual as a medium for the enunciation of the sacred character of kingship, focusing on the preservation, veneration, and display of the relics of the Prophet Muḥammad that the Ottomans acquired in the sixteenth century. It is widely accepted that in the Ottoman political imaginary the king or sultan possessed qualities that set him apart from normal human beings. Max Weber would have described this quality as charisma; more recently historians have adopted the term “sacred kingship” to describe this phenomenon. So far, however, such arguments have mostly rested on discursive textual sources and as a result have been primarily concerned with Ottoman claims to the caliphate. The cult of the relics, by contrast, has not been theorized in Ottoman religio-political writing, yet emerges as a crucial venue to articulate ideas of kingship and government. Specifically, it helped the Ottoman kings to assert “cosmic kingship” in order to extricate themselves from the encroachment of the scripturalist elite onto their domain. None of this, however, happened as part of a long-term strategic design; nor was the outcome a clear ideological pronouncement. Instead, the cult of the rituals added new contradictions and complications to the history of Ottoman political thought and mentality.
The Practical Aspects of Ottoman Maps
Routledge eBooks · 2023
1st authorCorresponding- Computer Science
- History
- Computer Science
The Ottoman Empire was heir to the rich cartographic tradition of premodern Islamicate societies, and from the 16th century onward also became familiar with the Mediterranean genre of portolan charts, and with the mathematical cartography of Ptolemy, carried on by the Italian and Dutch atlases. This chapter argues that despite this wealth, and despite the connectivity and similarity in historical experience, the Ottomans, and the Ottoman state in particular, deployed the cartography of mapping primarily as a symbolic or narrative statement. The use of cartography as a planning tool occurred haphazardly. Only in the 18th century, and mainly driven by the military conflicts in the Black Sea theater, were maps increasingly introduced to planning purposes.
Der Islam · 2023
- Philosophy
Der Islam · 2023-04-01
articleOpen accessCromohs - Cyber Review of Modern Historiography · 2022-06-08
articleOpen access1st authorCorrespondingReview of
 Thomas Bauer, A Culture of Ambituity: An Alternative History of Islam (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021)
 reviewed by Gottfried Hagen
Kātib Çelebi, Muṣṭafā b. ʿAbdallāh
2022-01-01
other1st authorCorrespondingText of the article Kātib Çelebi, Muṣṭafā b. ʿAbdallāhIntroduction Muṣṭafā b. ʿAbdallāh (Kātib Çelebi), the most famous polymath of the Ottoman Empire, introduces himself in one of his works thus: (Sarıcaoğlu, 2002: 318) This poor sinner Muṣṭafā Ibn ʿAbdullāh, born and raised in Constantinople, of t
Ptolemaeus Triumphans, or: Maps, Knowledge, and Ottoman Patronage
2022-12-23 · 1 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingDer Islam · 2021
1st authorCorresponding- Computer Science
- History
- Classics
Article Yossef Rapoport, Islamic Maps, Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2020, 192 pp., ISBN: 9781851244928 [Distribution in the US by University of Chicago Press]. was published on April 1, 2021 in the journal Der Islam (volume 98, issue 1).
2021-11-10 · 1 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThe Ottoman dynasty had a special relation to the Prophet Muḥammad. Other dyn-asties claimed descent from the Prophet, such as the Fāṭimids in Egypt, the sharīfs of Morocco, or the Hashemites of Jordan, but the Ottomans adopted the Prophet as a kind of patron saint in the course of the sixteenth century. They patronised new forms of visual representation of the Prophet; they made the commemoration of his birthday an imperial celebration; and they acquired a unique collection of objects connected to his life, most prominently his mantle, his sword, and his banner, around which important dynastic and public rituals were formed. In this chapter, the author proposes to call this set of connections between the Prophet and the House of Osman "pietas Ottomanica", drawing attention to the implicit theology of this cult of the Prophet and its significance for the sultan and his household, and for his subjects. Concepts of charisma, piety, authority, and salvation are all bound up in the "pietas Ottomanica" that deserves to be analysed not simply as serving Otto-man legitimacy, but as a historically contingent and specific form of Islam.
Frequent coauthors
- 158 shared
Suraiya Cook
Advisory Board Company (United States)
- 158 shared
Stefan Heidemann
Universität Hamburg
- 158 shared
Maribel Faroqhi
University of Michigan–Ann Arbor
- 158 shared
Geoffrey Jerusalem
Walter de Gruyter (Germany)
- 158 shared
Rudi Matthee
University of Delaware
- 158 shared
Benjamin Hanna
DNV (Norway)
- 158 shared
Benjamin Jokisch
Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München
- 158 shared
Carl Becker
Walter de Gruyter (Germany)
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