What is it about?
This article examines religious conversion to Islam in Ottoman Trabzon between the mid-sixteenth and late seventeenth centuries through the analysis of personal names recorded in sharia court registers. Focusing on converts (mühtedis), it explores how name choices reflected processes of identity transformation, social integration, and cultural adaptation within a multi-religious Ottoman society.
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Why is it important?
This article is important because it approaches religious conversion in the Ottoman Empire from the perspective of personal names, offering a micro-historical and archive-based analysis grounded in sharia court records. By treating conversion as both a religious and social process, it provides new insights into identity formation, cultural adaptation, and intercommunal relations in an early modern Ottoman city.
Perspectives
In this article, I show why religious conversion in Ottoman Trabzon should be understood not only as a change of faith but also as a process of social and cultural negotiation. By focusing on personal names recorded in sharia court registers, I draw attention to how converts used naming practices to signal identity, belonging, and integration into Muslim society. The study is important because it demonstrates that anthroponymic evidence allows us to access individual strategies of adaptation that remain largely invisible in other types of Ottoman sources.
Asistant Professor Aslı ÖZCAN
Karadeniz Teknik Universitesi
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: DÖNÜŞEN İSİMLER, DÖNÜŞEN İNANÇLAR: OSMANLI TRABZON’UNDA MÜHTEDİLER ÜZERİNDEN BİR KİMLİK OKUMASI, Karadeniz İncelemeleri Dergisi, November 2025, Karadeniz Incelemeleri Dergisi,
DOI: 10.18220/kid.1818935.
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