Autobiographies and Weak Ties
Saʾin al-Din Turka's Self-Narratives
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8967421 |
|---|---|
| Authors | İlker Evrım Bınbaş (University of Bonn, corresponding author), İlker Evrim Binbaş |
| Year | 2021 |
| Volume | 53 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 309-313 |
| Publication date | 2021-05-01 |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | International Journal Middle East Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0020-7438 • E-ISSN: 1471-6380 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1017/s0020743821000362 |
| OpenAlex | W3185148472 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 3 |
As I write this essay, the forty-fourth US President Barack Obama's autobiography titled A Promised Land is the best-selling book in Germany, in both the German and the English editions. This is his second autobiographical work, following Dreams from My Father in 1995. Given Obama's prominent place in our modern political culture, this is hardly surprising, but today's publishers seem to have no specific criteria for deciding whose life and career are worthy of an autobiography. Any moderately successful individual from any walk of life can publish an autobiography today. The popularity of the genre is certainly related to the extreme glorification of individual and personal success in modern society, but it also shapes how we view premodern self-narratives: as a window into an intellectual's individuality and Bildung. This essay questions this convention and explores the opportunities that self-narratives embedded in literary and narrative sources present to historians of 15th-century Iran and Central Asia. I will argue that autobiographies and self-narratives are much more than tools for refashioning the self in the early modern period. They open a window to a much wider network of weak ties and acquaintances, a closer scrutiny of which may allow us to reconstruct transregional networks, understand the connectedness of these intellectual networks, and delineate their collective identities in the early modern period. In my discussion I will focus on a selection of 15th-century texts, most prominently the self-narratives of the Timurid intellectual Saʾin al-Dīn Turka (d. 1432)
Art · Biography · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Scrutiny · Sociology · Eurasian Exchange Networks · History · Islamic Studies and History · Law · Politics and Conflicts in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Middle East
| Highly cited | No |
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