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Center for Global Islamic Studies

Emrah Sahin

Center for European Studies

Email:  emrahsahin@ufl.edu

Phone: (352) 294-7143

Office Location: 3326 Turlington Hall

Area of specialization: Muslim and Turkish politics and society

Emrah Sahin is a senior lecturer at the University of Florida, where he is teaching global religion, religious violence, Islam, Europe, US in the Middle East, Mediterranean world, world cities, Muslim migrations, Turkey, and the Ottoman Empire. By training, Sahin is a transnational historian focusing on how political forces relate to social exchanges taking place within and beyond national borders. Exploring how Muslims treat non-Muslims, his first project resulted in a recent book titled Faithful Encounters: Authorities and American Missionaries in the Ottoman Empire. He is currently working on globally-oriented Muslim views of ethnicity, equality, and morality. This project includes a localizing narrative of ongoing debates over secularism and a critical study of six travelers who told the Islamic world about Europe and America.

CV

Selected Publications

  • Faithful Encounters: Authorities and American Missionaries in the Ottoman Empire. Part of the McGill-Queen’s Studies in the History of Religion Series. Chicago, Kingston, London, Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2018
  • “Sultan’s America: Lessons from Ottoman Encounters with the United States.” Journal of American Studies of Turkey 39 (2014): 55-76
  • “Ottoman Society.” In Andrea Stanton et al., eds, Cultural Sociology of the Middle East, Asia, and Africa. California: SAGE, 2012, vol. I, 185-90
  • “Construction of National Identities in Early Republics: A Comparison of the American and Turkish Cases.” The Journal of the Historical Society 10 (December 2010): 507-31 (co-authored with Timothy M. Roberts)
  • “Home Away from Home: Early Turkish Migration to the United States Reflected in the Lives of Bayram Mehmet and HazimVasfi.” In Kemal Karpat and Deniz Balgamış, eds, Turkish Migration to the United States: From Ottoman Times to the Present. Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 2008, 87-101

Courses Offered

  • Global and International Focus: International Studies Perspectives || Greece, Turkey, and the World (co-taught) || Senior Research Seminar in International Studies
  • Islamic/Middle Eastern Studies: History of God (scheduled seminar) || Terror and Islam || Islam and Turkey || Contours of Ottoman History || Muslim Migrations || US in the Middle East || Money and the Bible
  • European/Turkish Area-Studies: European Experience (co-taught) || History of Turks || Turkey and Europe || European Union
  • Language and Literature Focus: Turkish Language (beginning to advanced levels) || Themes in Turkish || Ottoman Literature || A City of Two Tales: Istanbul

Research

Sahin examines the ways in which religious and cultural forces reflect and shape political and social encounters that take place within and beyond the national borders. In my research, I hope to interpret the traditional themes of religious studies through newer cross-cultural methods. I tend to adopt an interpretive approach by drawing a coherent narrative from multi-layered and thick descriptions that permeate the primary sources, and apply the multifaceted method by tracing the discourse of conflictive knowledge claims made by the parties involved.

Sahin’s first major research project is a socio-political study of how Muslim authorities and communities treat Christian foreigners. Recently published as a monograph titled, Faithful Encounters: Authorities and American Missionaries in the Ottoman Empire, it analyzes the production of an imperial-caliphate discourse on this matter. The core evidence for this book comes from imperial, provincial, and judicial records gathered from international archives. These sources also help to debunk the existing literature depicting Muslim authorities as rigid bureaucrats and Evangelical missionaries as idealistic reformers. To the current scholarly debate his findings contribute a detailed analysis of the Muslim politics along with a broader and deeper context for contemporary ethnic and religious tensions in the Middle East.

In his current and future research, Professor Sahin associates Turkic Politics and Islamic Identities with cultural, intellectual, transnational, and traditional inspirations derived from a wide range of sources. For instance, in an ongoing project titled Died Again Christians, he transcends the traditional boundaries of religion, anthropology, sociology, and global studies by way of exploring how and why a religious massacre in a remote Kurdish village of east Anatolia has recently engendered a global political discussion about Muslim ethno-religious identities. By drawing on original data, this project will offer a novel and interdisciplinary approach to why ethno-religious fanaticism tends to resurrect with poignant force in the Islamic World. This case under study involves multiple subjects including American, Arab, German, Kurdish, and Turkish nationals who are observant Muslims, Christians, or Christian converts, thus inviting oral interviews to be conducted on several sites alongside a critical look at court records and various local reports.