About
İlker Evrim Binbaş is lecturer in Early Modern Asian Empires at Royal Holloway, University of London.
His research interests broadly embrace the historiography, political thought, and intellectual networks of the fifteenth and sixteenth century Islamic world. He is particularly interested in Timurid and Ottoman historiography, the political use of mythical narratives, epistolography and other modalities of intellectual communication, and the informal intellectual networks which, unlike the emerging Sufi orders, did not enter the process of institutionalization in the early modern period. In the course of his studies, he also developed an interest in various “secret sciences,” such as alchemy, the science of letters, and logogriphic poetry in order to understand the rhetorical devices that early modern intellectuals deployed.
Publications
Books:
- Intellectual networks in Timurid Iran: Sharaf al-Dīn ‘Alī Yazdī and an Islamicate Republic of Letters (Under contract with Cambridge University Press).
- Edited Books (Together with Nurten Kılıç-Schubel), Horizons of the World. Festschrift for Isenbike Togan. Istanbul: Ithaki Press, 2011.
- Collected Volumes and Text Editions: Ottoman Intellectuals on Judaism: A Collection of Texts from the Early Modern Period. (together with Camilla Adang, Judith Pfeiffer, and Sabine Schmidtke, in preparation for submission to Brill, Leiden, for the Islamic History and Civilization series).
Articles:
- “A Damascene Eyewitness to the Battle of Nicopolis: Shams al-Dīn ‘Ibn al-Jazarī (833/1429),” in Contact and Conflict in Frankish Greece and the Aegean 1204-1453, eds. Nikolaos G. Chrissis and Mike Carr. Reading: Ashgate, 2014.
- “Timurid Experimentation with Eschatological Absolutism: Mīrzā Iskandar, Shāh Niʻmatullāh Walī, and Sayyid Sharīf Jurjānī in 815/1412,” in Unity in Diversity: Patterns of Religious Authority in Islam, ed. Orkhan Mir-Kasimov (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 277-303.
- “Anatomy of a Regicide Attempt: Shāhrukh, the Ḥurūfīs, and the Timurid Intellectuals in 830/1426-27,” “Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society”, 23 (2013): 391-428.
- “Histories of Sharaf al-Dīn ‘Alī Yazdī: A Formal Analysis”, “Acta Orientalia”, 65 (2012): 391417.
- “Paul Wittek. A Man in Dark Times”, in Paul Wittek. The Rise of the Ottoman Empire and Other Studies, ed. Colin Heywood (London: Routledge, 2012), pp. ix-xvi.
- “Structure and Function of the Genealogical Tree in Islamic Historiography,” in Horizons of the World. Festschrift for Isenbike Togan, eds. İlker Evrim Binbaş and Nurten Kılıç-Schubel (Istanbul: Ithaki Press, 2011), pp. 465-544.
- “Music and Samā‘ of the Mavlaviyya in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries: Origins, Ritual and Formation,” in Sufism, Music and Society in Turkey and the Middle East, eds. Anders Hammarlund, Tord Olsson, Elisabeth Özdalga (Istanbul: Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, 2001), pp. 67-79.
Encyclopaedia Articles:
- “Jāmeʿ al-tavāriḵ-i ḥasani”, “Encyclopaedia Iranica” at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/jame-al-tavarik-hasani [accessed 08 April 2014].
- “Oḡuz Khan Narratives.” “Encyclopaedia Iranica” at http://www.iranicaonline.org/articles/oguz-khan-narratives [accessed 13 July 2010].
- “Oghuz, Turkish tribe”, In International Encyclopaedia for the Middle Ages-Online. A Supplement to LexMA-Online. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2005, in Brepolis Medieval Encyclopaedias <http://www.brepolis.net/bme> [Accessed 1 March 2005]
- “Türkmen, people”, In International Encyclopaedia for the Middle Ages-Online. A Supplement to LexMA-Online. Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2005, in Brepolis Medieval Encyclopaedias <http://www.brepolis.net/bme> [Accessed 3 March 2005].
