Although the Qu'ran did not ban painting and sculpture explicitly, the implication that the practice of and pleasure in these arts will lead to heresy was more than clear.
In the Islamic tradition, painting and sculpture are suspect forms of art, the former because the abstract notion of God does not encourage his concrete representations, the latter because sculpture might inspire idolatry. Western architecture, painting, and sculpture presented themselves to Evliya Celebi's discerning eye to be scrutinized from a highly problematic perspective, as they were representative of a different religion, culture, and tradition. Robert Dankoff states, "The Book of Travels is a unique geographical, social, cultural, and linguistic record of the places and peoples the author encountered, and an invaluable source for many aspects of life in his time." (1) Therefore, the work has been significant for a plethora of scholars from different disciplines, such as historians, geographers, musicians, linguists, and folklorists. Seyahatname (The Book of Travels), a ten-volume, first-person narrative, is one of the few accounts of the seventeenth-century Ottoman world and its periphery from the perspective of a Muslim intellectual. Evliya Celebi, who wrote accounts of his travels that lasted over forty years (from the Aegean to the Sea of Azov, from the northern Black Sea steppe to the upper Nile), was an enlightened Ottoman sarayli, a courtier as his name celebi indicates.
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