The First of the Modern Ottomans: The Intellectual History of Ahmed Vasıf By Ethan L. Menchinger

Ottomanists have had much to cheer about of late, with the many exceptional monographs appearing since the turn of the century. Quality and quantity have been especially striking for the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, as individual authors have scoured diverse archives to move beyond the single-source soundings of much previous scholarship. The paucity of subjective documents, though, continues to stand in the way of biographical narratives, not just for those centuries, of course, but for the pre-modern Islamic Middle East in general. It takes intellectual boldness as well as a promising enough historical subject for a successful biographical study, given the realities of tight-lipped Ottoman sources and readers’ high expectations conditioned on European and U.S. biography. With Ahmed Vâsıf Efendi (d. 1806), Ethan Menchinger has found a way into the thought world of an eighteenth-century Ottoman intellectual. As a biographical exercise, however, the result is not as revelatory as one would wish, though through no fault of Menchinger’s. All of the problems of source absences and limitations are in play here, thus Vâsıf’s story emerges as a substantial rendering of the public man rather than a reconstruction of a fully lived life. However, Vâsıf’s was quite a public life, and Menchinger’s treatment is masterful, robust and nuanced.