Re-creating image and identity: Dreams and visions as a means of Murad III's self-fashioning.

Abstract

Like modern people, sixteenth-century individuals were extremely concerned about their image and self-representation. Unlike modern people, they often employed accounts of their dreams and visions to project the image they wished others to see. The subject of this dissertation is one of these individuals, Murad III, an Ottoman sultan (r. 1574-1595). It discusses how he made use of dreams and visions to present himself to others. The dissertation is based on the <italic>Kitab-i menamat, </italic> the dream-book of Sultan Murad III, addressed to his Sufi master, Suca' Dede. The Kitab-i menamat contains the Sultan's dreams and accounts of his mystical experiences he shared with Suca' Dede. I begin with a synopsis of Murad's life through the eyes of the Ottoman historians and discuss the implications of these historical accounts in order to demonstrate how the image of Murad created by these historians still influences his perception by modern people. Next, I contextualize the Kitab-i menamat within the field of Sufi epistolary literature and provide a detailed description of the text. I argue that it is not merely a collection of dreams and mystical experiences, but is a unique text that appears to be a special kind of <italic>menak&dotbelow;ib-name, </italic> a hagiographical account, in this case, based on the accounts of dreams and other kinds of spiritual experiences. I demonstrate how an epistolary work can be used to create an auto-hagiography composed by the Sufi himself. Taking advantage of recent narratological theories in order to understand how Murad is established as a narrative agent in the text, the study elucidates how he is portrayed not only as a true Friend of God but also as a sultan divinely ordained to rule the earth on behalf of God and to unify the Islamic world. I discuss Sultan Murad's messianic claims in the context of the spiritual, social and political culture of his time, and show how he employed his dreams and waking visions to shape not only his personal image, but also his spiritual and political image in the political and psychological climate that existed at the turn of the first Islamic millennium.