CEMS senior member Professor Tijana Krstic wins an ERC Consolidator grant for the project entitled "The Fashioning of a Sunni Orthodoxy and the Entangled Histories of Confession-Building in the Ottoman Empire, 15th-17th Century" (OTTOCONFESSION)

The project will explore how and why the Ottoman Empire evolved from a fourteenth-century polity where “confessional ambiguity” between Sunnism and Shiism prevailed, into an Islamic state concerned with defining and enforcing a “Sunni orthodoxy” by the early sixteenth century. The OTTOCONFESSION project is based on the premise that the evolution of Ottoman discourses on Sunni orthodoxy can be understood only in a longer perspective that spans the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries and that it was shaped by religio-political dynamics not only in the Muslim communities of the Ottoman and Safavid Empires, but also within Christian communities in the Ottoman Empire and in Europe as well. Accordingly, the project will entail team work of scholars specializing not only in Ottoman and Safavid religious politics but also in the politics of religious orthodoxy within the Greek-, Armenian-, and Slavic-speaking Christian communities as well as that promoted by the Catholic and Protestant missionaries in the Ottoman Empire. The project, which will run from 2015 to 2020, will be hosted by CEU's Center for Eastern Mediterranean Studies and will be carried out in cooperation with the Bogazici University in Istanbul.