Political literacy and the politics of eloquence: Ottoman scribal community in the seventeenth century

In 1703, the chief scribe (reisu'l-kuttab) Rami Mehmed Efendi (d. 1708) was appointed as the grand vizier in the Ottoman Empire. In scholarship, Rami Mehmed epitomizes the transition in the political cadres from the people of the sword/seyfiye to the people of the pen/kalemiye as the first chief scribe to be appointed as the grand vizier. While this transition has long been accepted as a crucial aspect of eighteenth-century Ottoman history, the cultural and intellectual formation of "the people of the pen" as a distinct community before this period has not been adequately examined. The grand vizierate of Rami Mehmed provided an opportunity for the Ottoman scribes to define themselves for the first time as an intellectual and political community. My dissertation studies the Ottoman scribal discourses in the latter part of the seventeenth century through two literary genres: Munazara (literary duels or flytings) and kaside (panegyric poetry). I argue that the basic concepts of Perso-Arabic literary criticism, eloquence (belagat) and subtlety of meaning (fasahat) became the basis on which scribes declared themselves as a community vital for the maintenance of political and intellectual life of the Empire.