The guruş (kuruş; Ott. ghuruş) was an Ottoman silver coin that was minted from 1131/1719 to 1919 and served as the monetary unit of the Ottoman currency system until the end of the empire. Long before minting the guruş, the Ottomans used the term, which derives from groschen (Ger.)/ grosso (It.), to name large European silver pieces that circulated in the empire, including esedi ( esedī) guruş for the Dutch leeuwendaalder (“lion dollar”) and riyal ( riyāl) guruş for the Spanish real de a ocho (“Spanish dollar,” or “piece of eight”). During the century-long crisis that began in the 990…

Ottoman minting responded to economic crises with reformed financial systems and new monetary units, and the history of coinage in the Ottoman Empire can be divided into three periods. The first period lasted from the beginning of the empire until the end of the eleventh/seventeenth century. The foundations of the Ottoman monetary system were laid down in this period, and the system was built on the silver akçe (aqçe) and gold sultani (sulṭāni). Problems started to arise towards the late tenth/sixteenth century and, after a century-long crisis, the Ottoman monetary …

Gurū Gobind Singh (1077–1120/1666–1708) was the tenth of ten personal Sikh Gurūs (teachers). He inaugurated the Khālsā (from Ar. khāliṣa, “pure”) order in 1111/1699; wrote compositions compiled in the Dasam Granth (“Book of the tenth (Gurū)”); and declared the specific Khālsā discipline, the rahit (“habit, manner, way of living, morals, principles, conduct,” hence, in the Khālsā context, “code” of conduct). Also, it was Gobind Singh who assigned living guruship to the principal Sikh scripture, the Gurū Granth (“The book as Gurū) before his death, ending the line of human Gurūs. As th…

The mangır ( mānqīr) was a copper coin that was typically used as small change. The first Islamic states, the Seljuks (Saljūq), and the Turkish beyliks in Anatolia also minted copper coins. Since they were not made of precious metals, such as gold or silver, mangırs circulated in the market with a nominal value that was designated by the state. The Ottoman state introduced many types of copper coin into the market, including pul (pūl) and fülus (fulūs). Some copper coins lacked the place and date of minting; some only featured designs. These designs were inspired by reli…

Nānak (873–946/1469–1539) was the first of ten personal Sikh gurūs (teachers). Gurū Nānak was born on the Panjāb frontier, where Indic and Islamicate cultures interacted intimately. Nānak’s ideas, like those of the many exponents of the nirguńa sampradaya or Sant tradition of northern India with whom Nānak is often aligned in contemporary scholarship, thus bore striking affinities to both Islamic and Hindu traditions. While Nānak was not the first whose ideas demonstrated such connections, he was the most remarkable, in that he ref…

In Indonesia, kebatinan is generally considered mysticism, in particular the spiritual approach to life in the Surakarta and Yokyakarta sultanates, the Javanese heartland. The term derives from the Arabic bāṭin, the inner or internal, particularly the mental, spiritual, and esoteric. As a practice, kebatinan is the cultivation of one’s inner being or secret self and the honing of one’s intuition (Indon., rasa) as the way to truth, to being in step with the pre-ordained order of existence, and ultimately to intuiting its presence in one’s bāṭin. This line of thought, which is at t…

The darphane ( ḍarbkhāne, mint) was one of the longest established institutions in the Ottoman Empire, founded in the early days of the state. As the empire’s boundaries expanded in Anatolia and Balkans, mints were opened in important administrative centres, near mines, in settlements on trade routes, and elsewhere. By the second half of the tenth/sixteenth century, Ottoman darphanes numbered more than fifty, and the most important was in Istanbul. During the financial crisis that began in the 990s/1580s under the effect of international monetary and m…

Ottoman credit relations were subject to the general rules of Islamic jurisprudence and complicated by the prohibition of the rate of interest. Therefore, conventional banking activities that specialised in collecting deposits from the public, transferring these funds to borrowers, and applying two different rates of interest could not emerge during the period between the eighth/fourteenth and thirteenth/nineteenth centuries. But individuals who specialised in credit transactions did exist. These were usurers and the so-called sarrafs (ṣarrāf), who provided credit des…

Akçe (aqče, akche), or “asper” in Western sources, both words having the connotation of “white,” is the small silver coin issued in the Balkans and Anatolia and the basic monetary unit of account in the Ottoman Empire until the end of the eleventh/seventeenth century. The best available numismatic evidence indicates that Orhan Bey, the second Ottoman ruler, issued the first akçe in 727/1326–7 in the northwest corner of Anatolia, just as Mongol hegemony in the region collapsed. The Ottomans borrowed from the Īlkhānids both the design of these earliest coins and the weight unit used in the ak…

Farīd is the author of a small collection of poems in early Panjābī that is preserved in the Sikh scriptures. This collection, the Ādi Grant̲h̲ (AG), was compiled in the Gurmukhi script by the fifth Sikh guru, Arjan, in 1013/1604. It comprises four short hymns (shabad) and 112 couplets (shalok) composed mostly in the common mediaeval Indian metrical form known as dohā and its close variants (AG, 488, 794, 1377–84, translated in Macauliffe, 6:391–414; Talib, 97–124). There has been some dispute about whether the traditional identification of this Farīd with the great Chishtī Ṣūfī shaykh F…

The Karaosmanoğulları were leading ayan (notables) of twelfth/eighteenth-thirteenth/nineteenth-century Anatolia founded by Kara Osman Ağa (Qara ʿOthmān Āghā, d. 1118/1706) of Yayaköy village in the Manisa region. Osman’s eldest son Hacı Mustafa (Muṣṭafā) Ağa (d. 1169/1755) was appointed mütesellim (deputy governor) of the sancak ( sancaq, division of a province) of Saruhan in 1156/1743, in recognition of various accomplishments, such as providing materiel and troops for the wars with Iran. Mustafa held this post until 1167/1754, when he w…

Nevşehirli Damad İbrahim (Dāmād İbrāhīm) Paşa (c.1073–1143/c.1662–1730) was an Ottoman grand vizier for twelve years, nine months, and ten days (1130–43/1718–30) during the reign of Sultan Ahmed (Aḥmed) III (r. 1114–42/1703–30) [Illustration 1]. He was born in the village of Muşkara, which was located in the kaza ( qaḍā, judicial district) of Ürgüp, in the sancak ( sancaq, administrative unit) of Niğde, in the eyalet ( eyālet, province) of Karaman. İbrahim Paşa later invested heavily in the village of his birth, which contributed to its transformation into the…

The Muslim community of Banten, a region in western Java, has been known for its devout observance of Islam since the tenth/sixteenth century. According to a Portuguese account, a teacher of Islam known as Falatehan, from the Muslim kingdom of Pasai, in north Sumatra, who had spent some time in Mecca, gained control of Banten between 1522 and 1527 with military assistance from the king of Demak, in north Java. Falatehan had promulgated Islam in Demak before moving on to Banten, which was under the c…

Khōja (from Persian khvāja, “lord,” “master”) is the general name for the Nizārī Ismāʿīlīs in the Indian subcontinent. Due to a lack of reliable sources, the origins of the community remain obscure. According to their own tradition, they were members of a Hindu caste in Sindh (present-day Panjāb in Pakistan), the Lohanas, who were converted in the eighth/fourteenth or early ninth/fifteenth century to Nizārī Ismāʿīlism by Pīr Ṣadr al-Dīn (d. between 770/1369 and 819/1416), a missionary (dāʿī) operating for the Nizārī imām then residing in Persia. Upon their converting, the tr…