“Our names define us...
“Our names define us. When we meet someone, we introduce ourselves with our names first. They constitute the center of our individual identities. They also help us navigate our relationships with people around us, turning random people into individuals. Naming Non-Muslims, therefore, is not simply A Guide to Reading Greek, Armenian and Jewish Male Names in Ottoman Sources as its subtitle describes it. It invites scholars (like myself), who do not read Armenian, Greek, or Hebrew and mainly work with Ottoman Turkish, to acknowledge Armenian, Greek, and Jewish Ottomans, whose names are recorded in Ottoman archival documents in Arabic letters, as unique individuals with unique lives who actually write their names in different alphabets and speak different languages that shape the ways in which they understand themselves and the world around them. Naming Non-Muslims, thus, transforms “non-Muslims,” who have mostly been defined negatively by their not-belonging to the Muslim community in Ottoman historiography, into people. By recording the shared names between Armenian, Greek, Jewish, and Muslim Ottomans, Naming Non-Muslims also invites us to consider more seriously the ties that bound these confessional communities together in Ottoman society.” (Baki Tezcan, University of California, Davis).
