İrvin Cemil Schick is an intellectual and cultural historian of Islam with a focus on the early modern Ottoman Empire. His principle areas of research are the arts of the book, gender and sexuality, space and the body, animals and the environment, and the occult sciences. Dr. Schick has a PhD in Applied Mathematics from Massachusetts Insitute of Technology and a second PhD in History from École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris. He is currently teaching at the University of Massachussets, Amherst and has previously taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard University, and Istanbul Şehir University, with brief visiting positions at Boston University, Sabancı University, and Boğaziçi University. Some of the publications Dr. Schick has authored, edited or co-edited are Calligraphy and Architecture in the Muslim World (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013); Women in the Ottoman Balkans: Gender, Culture and History (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007); The Erotic Margin: Sexuality and Spatiality in Alteritist Discourse (London: Verso, 1999); Turkey in Transition: New Perspectives (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); “Some Thoughts on an Early Depiction of the Booksellers’ Market in İstanbul,” in The András Riedlmayer Festschrift, ed. S. Smith and K. Leal (Istanbul: Isis Press, forthcoming); “On the Multivalence of Women’s Captivity Narratives,” in Slavery in the Middle East and North Africa in the 19th and 20th Centuries, E. Andreeva and K. McNeer, eds. (London: I.B. Tauris, 2024), 25–52; “Islamic Art and Visualities of War from the Ottoman Empire to the Turkish Republic,” New Perspectives on Turkey 71 (2024 [2023]), 14–42; “Between the Abstraction of Miniatures and the Literalism of Photography: Amateur Erotica in Early Twentieth-Century Turkey,” Journal of the Anthropology of the Contemporary Middle East and Central Eurasia, 5–6 (2017–2019 [2021]), 1–26; “Three Genders, Two Sexualities: the Evidence of Ottoman Erotic Terminology,” in Sex and Desire in Muslim Cultures: Beyond Norms and Transgression from the Abbasids to the Present Day, ed. A. Kreil, L. Sorbera, and S. Tolino (London: I.B. Tauris, 2020), 87-110; “Chess of the Gnostics: The Sufi Version of Snakes and Ladders in Turkey and India,” in Games and Visual Culture in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, V. Kopp and E. Lapina, eds. (Turnhout: Brepols Publishers, 2020), 173–216; “Sultan Abdülhamîd II from the Pen of his Detractors: Oriental Despotism and the Sexualization of the Ancien Régime,” Journal of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association 5, 2 (2018), 47–73; “Illustrative Traditions in the Muslim Context, 1200–1900,” in History of Illustration, ed. S. Doyle, J. Grove, and W. Sherman (New York: Fairchild Books, 2018), 54–70.

“The Prophet Muhammad is related to have said, “Whoever builds a mosque, God will build for him a similar place in Paradise.” I want to believe that the same holds for libraries—for those who build them, and for those who maintain and perpetuate them as well. In this age of computers and global connectivity, some may ask, are traditional libraries still relevant? Are high-resolution scans not enough for all but the most inveterate cellulose addict? But nothing can substitute for the materiality of an old book—the experience of holding and beholding a volume that has outlived tens of generations, particularly in the serene silence of a good reading room. The Hafız Ahmed Ağa Library stands as testimony to the persistance of human values against the cultural narrow mindedness that often rears its head on both sides of the Aegean, and I am honored to be part of the Conversation.”

İrvin Cemil Schick

* This article was originally published in Routledge Handbook on Turkish Literature ed. Didem Havlioğlu and Zeynep Uysal, Abingdon, Oxfordshire: Taylor & Francis/Routledge, 2023. Reproduced with permission of The Licensor through PLSclear.