Acknowledgments
This monograph is based on my doctoral dissertation, which I defended at Princeton University in September 2012. I would like to thank my advisors, Professor Michael Cook and Professor Qasim Zaman, for their scholarly guidance and support throughout. Thanks are also due to Professors Bernard Haykel and Snejzana Buzov, who served as members of the dissertation committee at the time. I am, moreover, immensely grateful to Professor Boğaç Ergene for encouraging me to submit the manuscript to Brill’s The Ottoman Empire and its Heritage series, as well as to Professor Suraiya Faroqhi and the two anonymous reviewers for their feedback and suggestions for improvement.