Associate Professor of History and American Studies Nabil Al-Tikriti appeared on Los Angeles-based KPFK’s “Radio Uprising” program on Wednesday, April 15, to discuss the latest developments in Iraq and the region. Al-Tikriti has now appeared on this program, hosted by Sonali Kolhatkar, at least three times in the past two years.

The segment lasted just over five minutes, and can be screened via this podcast link. (Direct video link here.) In the course of this discussion, Al-Tikriti compared the current Iraqi Prime Minister to the previous officeholder, and commented on the state of the Iraqi military, as well as American media coverage of Iraq in general.

On Monday, April, 20, in his capacity as a member of the Board of Directors for MSF/Doctors Without Borders USA, Al-Tikriti represented MSF on a joint panel addressing military-humanitarian cooperation. The panel was part of the Marine Corps University’s “Nine Innings” exercise on humanitarian assistance and disaster relief at Quantico, Virginia. In the course of this panel, Al-Tikriti joined representatives from ICRC, IMC, OCHA and Islamic Relief to provide institutional perspectives on these and related concerns.

Nabil Al-Tikriti, associate professor of history and American studies,  delivered a paper, “An Ottoman View of World History: Kâtip Çelebi’s Takvîmü’t-Tevârîh,” to the 1st International Kâtip Çelebi Research Symposium on  Friday, March 28. This symposium was organized by Izmir Kâtip Çelebi University (established 2010) in Izmir, Turkey. This was an invited presentation.

In this paper,  Al-Tikriti provided historical context and analysis of Kâtip Çelebi’s Takvîmü’t-Tevârîh, a chronology, summary, and attempted reconciliation of ancient and Islamic history completed in 1649 C.E. Kâtip Çelebi (d. 1657), the namesake for this recently established Turkish state university off the Aegean coast, was a prominent 17th century Ottoman scholar who is widely considered the foremost representative of “secular” scholarship in his era. In addition to this work, Kâtip Çelebi is renowned for completing the most detailed encyclopedic catalogue of Islamicate manuscripts prior to the 20th century, the most advanced Ottoman world geography text of its time, and roughly 20 other historical, geographical, and political texts.

The work Al-Tikriti presented, Takvîmü’t-Tevârîh, was a very popular text, with at least five translations (Latin, Italian, French, Arabic, Persian), 45 known manuscript copies, and three continuations. In 1733 the first Ottoman publisher, the Müteferrika press, published over 250 copies of this text for sale throughout the empire. 

With this text, Kâtip Çelebi appears to have set out to reconcile all known calendars of the ancient world, offering a chart of five prominent calendar systems and comparing their respective dating systems. He also chronicled what he considered the most important events of the pre-Islamic world, and provided an annual calendar of events in the post-Islamic world up to his own day. After providing charts of Ottoman sultans, grand viziers, judges, prominent elites, and other figures, Kâtip Çelebi closed with his own theory of history and dynastic continuity, which bears some resemblance to the theories of the prominent pre-modern historian and sociologist, Ibn Khaldun (d. 1406).

Nabil Al-Tikriti, associate professor of history and American studies, participated in the annual Field Associative Debate (FAD) for MSF staff serving in Athens, Greece, on March 7. Al-Tikriti is board member of the United States section of  MSF/Doctors Without Borders.

The Athens team debated on issues connected to forced migration in the Mediterranean and Balkans regions — their primary programmatic focus. In the course of these debates, participants addressed questions concerning the importance of “people on the move” consisting of refugees, economic migrants, or mixed groups; the propriety of MSF providing general humanitarian relief as opposed to narrow medical assistance; the possibility of MSF providing relief in detention centers without becoming instrumentalized as part of state policy; and other issues connected to providing medical humanitarian relief to vulnerable populations on the move in the Mediterranean and Balkan regions.

Prior to this year’s FAD, Al-Tikriti went on a brief field visit to an MSF urban referral clinic in Athens, and upon his return helped the team start a FAD report, and completed a brief memo on regional operations for internal review.

On Nov. 23, 2014, Associate Professor of Middle Eastern History Nabil Al-Tikriti presented a paper at the 2014 Middle East Studies Association Conference in Washington, D.C. The paper, entitled  “Greatness Denied: Firdevsi-yi Rumi on the Cusp of Ottoman Sunnism,” was part of an Ottoman History panel, entitled “The Sunnification of the Ottoman Ideology and Polity, 16th to 17th Centuries.”

The paper abstract is as follows: “Ilyas Çelebi “Firdevsi-yi Rumi” (fl. 1512) served primarily at the courts of Sultan Bayezid II (d. 1512) and Prince Korkud (d. 1513), authoring works of narrative history, elegiac poetry, gestes, and hagiography. In this paper, I will summarize what is known of his biography and analyze his presentation of Ottoman, Turkish, and Muslim identity.

Firdevsi, a litterateur with a considerable sense of self, completed more than twenty works while serving at the apex of Ottoman cultural production. While very successful at attracting patronage and support for lengthy and ornate literary works, his oeuvre was mostly lampooned by those who followed in the decades after his death.

Why would a writer who was so successful in his own lifetime be so reviled within a few decades of his death? Analyzing the political content and identity positions staked out by Firdevsi provides a tentative answer – societal views changed abruptly in the first tumultuous decades of the early 16th century. Firdevsi’s use of the term “Sunni” in his Qutb-name, explanation of Turkish conversion to Islam in his Süleyman-name, and portrayal of Anatolian Sufism in his Vilayet-name each provide clues as to why subsequent literary critics found his scholarship unreliable, his poetry unspeakable, and his views objectionable.”

The panel abstract is as follows: “Sunni identity of the Ottoman Empire is often taken for granted. However, recent research has begun to question the nature of Ottoman Sunnism and the process by which the Ottoman state began to distance itself from ‘confessional ambiguity’ that prevailed in Central Asia, Iran and Anatolia from the mid 13th to the late 15th century, and became increasingly concerned with formulating and enforcing a Sunni orthodoxy. While it is well known that the religious ideology of the Safavid Empire, based on Shia principles and folk Islam, began to be formulated in the early 16th century, it is not commonly acknowledged that Sunni theology was simultaneously experiencing a transformation, both in reaction to the developments in the Safavid realm and as a consequence of various socio-political processes within Ottoman territories. Titled ‘Sunnification of Ottoman Ideology and Society, 16th-17th Centuries’ our roundtable will examine this historical process from the perspective of the state, other agents of Sunnification, and those who were targeted by the new measures for correcting belief and practice.”