You are kindly invited to the seminar entitled “Secularizing Science to Get to Know God Intimately: İbrahim Hakkı of Erzurum and his Ma’rifetnâme (1757)” organized by the Department of History.
Date: 19 February 2026, Thursday
Time: 16.30
Avenue: A-130 Seminar Room
Title: Secularizing Science to Get to Know God Intimately: İbrahim Hakkı of Erzurum and his Ma’rifetnâme (1757)
Speaker: Baki Tezcan, UC Davis
Abstract:
In the first part of the talk, Tezcan will briefly introduce İbrahim Hakkı (d. 1780) and his Ma’rifetnâme (1757). In the second part, he will focus on İbrahim Hakkı’s coverage of astronomy in the work. In the final part, he will attempt to reconcile the seeming contradictions that one observes between the different discourses on astronomy that İbrahim Hakkı engages in. Tezcan’s reconciliation is based on an interpretation of some of the insights via the late Shahab Ahmed’s understanding of Islam “What is Islam?” [2015]) within the context of the eighteenth-century Ottoman world and adoption by İbrahim Hakkı of Katib Çelebi’s concerns with the separation of the religious and the worldly.
Bio:
Baki Tezcan is a graduate of İstanbul Erkek Lisesi (1989) and Bilkent’s Department of International Relations (“burslu, ” 1994). He received his M.A. (with thesis, 1996) and PhD (2001) in Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University. Since 2002, he has been teaching at the University of California, Davis. He is the author of “The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World” (Cambridge, 2010) and tens of articles and book chapters on early modern Ottoman cultural, intellectual, literary, political, religious, and socio-economic history, as well as others on medieval and early modern Islam and Ottoman and modern Turkish historiography.