Review of Helen Pfeifer, Empire of Salons: Conquest and Community in the Early Modern Ottoman Lands (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2022), xiv, 297 pp., $42.00, ISBN: 978-0691195230.

Abstract

Helen Pfeifer’s Empire of Salons employs the tools of intellectual and social history to analyze the role that salons played in the integration of the Arabic-speaking lands into the Ottoman Empire. Based primarily on Arabic and Ottoman Turkish sources, Pfeifer uses the figure of the Damascus-based scholars Badr al-Dīn al-Ghazzī (1499-1577) and the members of his family and network to demonstrate that salons were of central importance to both Arabs and Rumis as they navigated the new, post-conquest realities of the 16th century.