372 Tijana Krstić and Derin Terzioğlu (eds.), Historicizing Sunni Islam in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1450–c. 1750. Leiden: Brill, 2021 (Islamic History and Civilization, 177). xiii, 530 pp., isbn 978-90-04-44028-9. Vefa Erginbaş (ed.), Ottoman Sunnism: New Perspectives. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019 (Edinburgh Studies on the Ottoman Empire). 272 pp., isbn 978-1-4744-4331-9. A significant body of literature has emerged over the last decade that seeks to understand Ottoman Sunnism and Sunnitisation as historical, multifarious and dynamic phenomena rooted in wider early modern trends and engaged in by a variety of state and non-state actors. Two recent edited volumes make significant contributions to this emerging body of literature. Historicizing Sunni Islam in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1450-c. 1750 is a result of Krstić and Terzioğlu’s European Research Council-supported ottocon- fession project (id 648498), and with fourteen chapters totalling over five hundred pages divided into three parts, it is indeed a monumental effort. Its historical scope extends beyond the sixteenth century that has been the dom- inant focus of past research, both backward to the medieval period and for- ward to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Following Krstić’s rich and enlightening introduction, the first, most voluminous part, entitled “Rethinking Sunni Orthodoxy in Dialogue with the Past and the Present” contains chapters by Helen Pfeifer, Nabil al-Tikriti, Derin Terzioğlu, Tijana Krstić, Nir Shafir and Guy Burak. It aims to bring together the disjointed fields of Ottoman historiog- raphy and Islamic sciences, such as law and theology. The chapters are based on a variety of sources, such as hadith collections/ijāzas, kalām texts, siyāsa sharʿiyya texts (in their responses to Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya), catechisms (ʿilm-i ḥāls), heresiographies (al-milal wa-l-niḥal texts) and prayer commentaries. They trace the Ottomans’ dynamic engagement with Sunni traditions of the past as well as the contemporaneous, such as those of the post-Mamluk Arab lands, along with present-day social concerns. The chap- ters question how the texts articulate an Ottoman Sunni scholarly tradition and assess this tradition’s uniquely Ottoman aspects, its historical pluralities and its continual transformations. Their focus on textual genres directed at the common people goes beyond the narrative of Ottoman Sunnitisation as an elite phenomenon. Part 2, entitled “Building a Pious Community: Spatial Dimensions of Sunnitization”, contains chapters by Çiğdem Kafescioğlu, Grigor Boykov, H. Evren Sünnetçioğlu and Ünver Rüstem that trace the visual and spatial aspects of Ottoman Sunnitisation via the transformation of the Ottoman ʿimāret into the mosque, the role of Halveti dervishes in relation to abdāl-affiliated book reviews Published with license by Koninklijke Brill nv | doi: 10.1163/15700607-20220020 © Zeynep Oktay, 2023 | ISSN: 0043-2539 ( print) 1570-0607 (online)