Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Note on Transliteration and Manuscripts

Introduction

Chapter One: The Biographer Between This World and the Hereafter

Patrons and Adversaries

Sufi Sheikhs and the Very Special Dead

Father and Son

Chapter Two: Collection of Lives as a Well-Ordered Garden

Ottoman Biographers and Sufi Lives: An Overview

A Well-Ordered Garden: Empire, Decorum and Exclusivity

Gardener at Work: ‘Aṭā’ī and His Sources

Chapter Three: From This World to the Realm of Dreams

Dreams, Careers and Biographers

Nightmares on the Sufi Path

Hereafter in the Mirror of Dreams

Chapter Four: The Dead and Visits from the Hereafter

The Living and the Dead in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul

Apparitions and Embraces

Dreams and Tokens of Remembrance

Epilogue

Appendix: Sample Biographical Notice

Bibliography

Index

About the Author

Aslı Niyazioğlu is Assistant Professor of History at Koç University, Istanbul. After receiving her PhD from Harvard University in 2003, she taught at the University of Oxford and was a fellow at Wissenschaftskolleg Institute of Advanced Study at Berlin. She works on early modern Ottoman history with a special interest in the lives of poets, scholars, and Sufis of Istanbul.