Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf

more "pagan" than the other epics so far mentioned in terms of the presence of
various elements of pre-Islamic lore; there is even a brief episode with a
flying prayer-rug. Even more importantly, there are numerous instances where
Saltuk gains converts among Byzantines by a display of empathy toward their
Christian culture. He participates in numerous battles slaying infidels, but he
can also stand by the altar in the Church of Hagia Sophia, when Constantinople
is still Byzantine of course, and recite the Bible with such emotion that the
Orthodox congregation dissolves into tears.
These holy figures are in fact trained for such cross-cultural exercises. Both
Melik Danismend and Saltuk , according to their hagiographers, were taught in
their youth the "four books and seventy-two languages."[30] And what is the main
purpose of Saltuk's activities? To gain converts, to expand the hold of Islam
over ever-more hearts and lands. Like the Europeans in the New World who
"insinuate[d] themselves into the
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preexisting political, religious, even psychic, structures of the natives... to
turn those structures to their advantage", the Muslim conquerors [of not just
Asia Minor] were well aware that if one wanted to achieve victory over a rival
or alternative system of meanings and values, one needed to enter into that
system, turn it into "a manipulable fiction," and thus subvert and appropriate
it.[31] Empathy, conciliation, and improvisation can be seen in some measure as
a proselytizer's tools of trade. We should be cautious, however, about reducing
the ideological rivalry and exchange to semiotic gamesmanship in the service of
power. Positivist cynicism may prevent us from seeing that exchange with and
absorption of other truths may have been the main concern of many actors
involved who might still believe in the superiority of their own side and wish
to achieve its supremacy, though not necessarily in an exclusivistic sense.
Obviously, then, the people of the marches did not see a contradiction between
striving to expand their faith and engaging in conciliatory (not necessarily
insincere) gestures toward members of the other faith. One insight gained from
the hagiographies of dervishes like Sari Saltuk is that an atmosphere of
"tolerance" and symbiosis (of some departure from orthodoxy), or "improvisation"
in Greenblatt's vocabulary, does not preclude a desire to gain converts.[32] In
fact, is it not more intelligent to be conciliatory, whenever possible, in
gaining the hearts and minds of others? Why deny this insight to the people of
the marches, who had been faced for centuries with the dilemma of "the other
faith"? Very probably, they were acutely aware of the wonders syncretism could
work, and that is precisely the insight reflected in these hagiographies, which,
like the warrior epics, operate on the basis of a dualism of us against them
while recognizing that the boundaries of those two spheres are constantly being
redrawn. For the self-confident proselytizer, after all, the world is not
divided into "us" and "them" but into "us" and "those who are not yet us" or
"those who may someday be among us."
Why should we suppose that the gazis or dervishes would wish to repel the
Byzantine peasants when they could appeal to them? At any rate, the Saltukname
provides ample proof that a call for conversion coexisted with latitudinarian
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