ABSTRACT
Owing to the scarcity of contemporary sources, we have but an incomplete knowledge of the forms and patterns of Islam as practiced amongst the masses of medieval Anatolia during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Modern scholarship on the era has relied largely on later Ottoman historical writing produced in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, works written in conjunction with and in the context of the development of an Ottoman imperial culture. Thus our view of the earlier period has been shaped by later Ottoman biases, back-projections and anachronistic distortions inherent in official court-centred Ottoman historiography. 1 Our understanding of medieval Anatolia likewise suffers from distortions resulting from modern nationalistic historiography, the frameworks and perspectives of which developed as part of the Turkish state-building process during the Republican era.
