Criticism arising from disagreement is what advances debate, making scholarship progress. A critical review therefore should leave an author unperturbed—as long as it is honest and fair. Kioumars Ghereghlou's review of my book Persia in Crisis: Safavid Decline and the Fall of Isfahan is neither. Rather than engaging in a serious and substantive discussion of the book's content and argument, it offers a string of innuendo-filled swipes and tendentious statements reflecting a prickly type of modern identity politics. I thus feel compelled to respond.

Rudi Matthee's book has several key problems, which I discussed already in my review. Here I will provide evidence for two main issues that I see in the book. These issues are the limited use of Persian primary sources, and a tendency to make very broad claims based on very limited evidence.

The August 2015 issue of IJMES reviews a ten-volume compilation of 17th-century Istanbul court records, issued between 2010 and 2013 under my editorship. The review offers useful quibbles that highlight differences between the priorities of historians and those of analytical social scientists. These comments fall within the boundaries of healthy academic discourse.

Scholars are justified in complaining that Ottoman studies, from its maturation in the 1950s until today, has been far too integrated into social science disciplines. Traditionally, political and economic history has dominated the field at the expense of cultural history, literary studies, and the history of art, architecture, and material culture. The recent juncture of social science concerns and the sensitivities of the humanities is a welcome but long overdue development. Social science disciplines have long held sway over the field, but scholars of Ottoman history have always exercised rigor and meticulous care in editing and publishing historical documents and literary texts. Editors often discuss the literary, philological, and codicological problems of historical documents in great detail, the conceptual universe in which the documents exist, and their limits and possibilities. Of course, “editing” often includes textual criticism, the conscientious work of transliteration, and, sometimes, translation. Despite numerous invaluable editions of archival and nonarchival material drawn from the Ottoman centuries, we still lack substantial statistical information and data to answer major questions that historians and social scientists have long asked. In this respect, what Timur Kuran (and his team) initiated marks an important step. They published a massive compilation of ten volumes of documents selected from the two qadi courts of Istanbul during the 17th century.