ABSTRACT
A marked increase in the production and dissemination of Arabic, Persian, and Turkish popular literatures took place during the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. An extremely rich body of oral popular literature (romances/epics, cycles of tales, popular hagiographies) in the three major Middle Eastern Islamic languages appear to have been recorded in writing for the first time in this period. 1 In the process, old genres were refashioned, new genres emerged, and written popular literary traditions developed side by side existing oral tales and epics. This corpus of popular literature, which preserved its vitality and continued to grow well into the modern period, is without doubt the richest mine of information on popular beliefs and habits of thinking in premodern Middle Eastern Muslim communities. The present chapter is an attempt to explore the conceptions of and knowledge about Islam that are reflected in one major exemplar from this wider corpus, the Saltuk-name.
