Lecture at the Orient-Institut Istanbul, September 11, 2014
For at least a hundred years after the Turkish conquests in the 11th century, Anatolia was a remote frontier of the Muslim world, lacking most of the attributes of Islamic civilisation – mosques, madrasa, scholars and the accoutrements of urban Muslim life. In this sense it is often called mediaeval Islam’s ‘Wild West’. Yet by the fifteen century, ‘the lands of Rum’ had become a major centre of Islamic intellectual life, a place which not only attracted foreign scholars but also exported considerable numbers of its own learned class to the traditional heartlands of the Islamic, Mecca and Cairo. The lecture explores how this transformation came about. Dr Andrew Peacock is Reader in Middle Eastern Studies at the School of history, University of St Andrews. He is Principal Investigator of the research project, The Islamisation of Anatolia, c. 1100-1500, funded by the European Research Council (grant number 284076).