Conversion to Islam as reflected in kisve bahasi petitions : an aspect of Ottoman social life in the Balkans, 1670-1730
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Conversion to Islam in the Ottoman Balkans initially followed a pattern similar to the one established by Bulliet for the regions incorporated in the course of the seventh and eighth centuries into the Islamic realm. By the early eighteenth century, close to forty percent of the Balkan population belonged to the Muslim community. However, Islamization came to a sudden halt in most of the Balkan lands in the second quarter of the eighteenth century. I have sought an explanation for this phenomenon in kisve bahasi petitions, which reflect the unique economic and social conditions in the Ottoman Empire during the period 1670s--1730s. The transformation from religious syncretism to religious conservatism in the second part of the seventeenth century changed the nature of conversion by introducing ceremonies and documentation of conversion. I argue that the practice of granting kisve bahasi evolved into an institution of conversion, which substituted to a certain extent for the devsirme institution. For the socially weak, the kisve bahasi institution served as a form of social welfare. Conversion to Islam for the new Muslims converted through the kisve bahasi institution was, therefore, primarily a pragmatic rather than spiritual affair. I also argue that the process of conversion in the Balkans was cut short by a premature "laggards" stage in the period 1670s--1730s. This development, which points to the uniqueness of the process of conversion in the Balkans, may have been due to the rise of a more prosperous class of non-Muslims as a result of the Ottoman Empire's integration into the world economy.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".