CALL TEXT
"It is not those who live within cities, but those who lie beneath them, that make cities what they are." For Konya, this saying holds truer than for perhaps any other city. Indeed, Konya was a center of learning and spiritual wisdom long before it became the Seljuk capital, and it preserved this character for seven centuries after that capital status was lost.
The legacy of spiritual wisdom that Sultân al-'Ulamâ Bahâeddin Veled brought from Balkh took root in this city, and with Hoca Ahmet Fakih's Çarhnâme, the first shoots of Anatolian Turkish sprouted in Konya. Mevlânâ Celâleddîn-i Rûmî dictated his Mesnevî to Çelebi Hüsâmeddin here, while Sadreddîn Konevî transformed the metaphysics of Ibn al-'Arabî into a systematic, theoretical Sufism within this city. The place where Şems-i Tebrîzî lodged on his first day in Konya was the inn of Şeker Furûş, a confectioner; even this small detail reveals the cultural fabric of the city — Sufism, commerce, learning, and art breathing side by side on the same street.
The spiritual and intellectual architects of Konya were not solely people of the Sufi path. Beyhekim Ekmeleddin Nahcuvânî wrote a commentary on Ibn Sînâ's Qānūn and served as chief physician at the Seljuk court. Celâleddin Karatay and Sâhib Ata Fahreddin Ali united statesmanship with scholarship in the service of pious foundations, leaving behind medreses and complexes that still stand today. Kadı Sirâcüddîn Urmevî became the foremost authority of his age in logic and theology. Ahi Evran was the spiritual pioneer of the guild organization, while Dursun Fakih became the first judge (kadı) of the Ottoman state.
This lineage continued without interruption into the Ottoman period: the office of Şeyhülislâm held by Zenbilli Ali Cemâlî Efendi, the grand vizierate of Pîrî Mehmed Paşa, the great center of learning that Hâdimî established in Hadim, the torch that Memiş Efendi kindled in Bozkır, Mehmed Vehbi's Hulâsatü'l-Beyân commentary on the Qur'an, and Veled Çelebi İzbudak, the last postnishin of the Mevlevî order — all of these are different faces of the same lineage.
Mevlânâ says, "The city is a treasury in which secrets are hidden." To reopen this treasury of Konya through the lives of those who built it, and to pass it on to new generations, we invite all esteemed scholars to our symposium.
Unlike previous urban-history studies devoted to Konya, this symposium aspires to be the first international scholarly gathering to place at its center the figures who shaped the city's memory.