* Please note that this event has been moved from Feb. 22^nd to Feb. 15^th

 The Ottoman Empire started and ended in migration. While the movements of people that shaped the empire and its boundaries in the early part of its history were, to a large extent, voluntary, those that marked the end of the Ottoman Empire were compulsory. Multi-ethnic and multi-religious communities of the empire all around the empire were torn apart and almost the entire non-Muslim population of the empire were deported, killed, or marginalized as minorities. This presentation compares the early and later types of migration, explains the forces that brought the shift from the first to the second, and describes how these developments affected the status of  the Greek population of Anatolia
in the early decades of the 20th century.

Professor Kasaba will be signing copies of his book, A Moveable Empire: Ottoman Nomads, Migrants, and Refugees starting at 4:45pm.  This will be immediately be followed by his lecture at 5:15pm.

Reşat Kasaba is Stanley D. Golub Professor of International Studies and Director of Jackson School of International Studies at the University of Washington. His research on the Ottoman Empire and Turkey has covered economic history, state-society relations, migration, ethnicity and nationalism, and urban history with a focus on Izmir. He has also published several books and articles that shed light on different aspects of the transformation of the Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Co-sponsored with the Mediterranean Studies Forum

Why in the last ten years an increasing number of ethnic Germans have converted to Islam in Salafi mosques or, after converting elsewhere, have chosen to attend these famously conservative houses of worship? Most scholars explain the spread of Salafism in Europe primarily as a social protest engaged in by second- and third-generation immigrant Muslims who feel marginalized from mainstream society. This article argues instead that Salafism can best be understood as a fundamentalist religious movement which satisfies individuals’ spiritual, psychological, and sociological needs. It is not so different from other fundamentalisms, particularly in the attraction it holds for converts. Among the most attractive aspects for newcomers is Salafism’s anti-culturalist and anti-traditionalist bent, which allows ethnic Germans to move past their racialized assumptions about Muslims and embrace Islam without necessarily embracing immigrant Muslims. Unlike the great majority of mosques in Germany, which function as ethnic and national community centers, Salafi mosques create unique settings where piety— rather than ethnicity— defines belonging.

Esra Özyürek, is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of California – San Diego. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan. Her work focuses on how politics, religion, and social memory shape and transform each other in contemporary Turkey and Germany. Her earlier work, Nostalgia for the Modern: State Secularism and Everyday Politics in Turkey (Duke Univ. Press, 2006), focused on the transformation of state secularism as Turkey moved from from the top-down modernization project of the 1930s to market based modernization in the 1990s. Currently she is undertaking a comparative ethnographic study of conversion to religious minorities, namely converts to Islam in Germany and to Christianity in Turkey. 

Co-sponsored by The Abbasi Program in Islamic Studies.

Workshop papers are available to Stanford affiliates upon request by email to  abbasiprogram@stanford.edu.