Islam, Literature and Society in Mongol Anatolia

From a Christian, Greek- and Armenian-speaking land to a predominantly

Muslim and Turkish speaking one, the Islamisation of medieval Anatolia
would lay the groundwork for the emergence of the Ottoman Empire as a
world power and ultimately the modern Republic of Turkey. Bringing
together previously unpublished sources in Arabic, Persian and Turkish,
Peacock offers a new understanding of the crucial but neglected period in
Anatolian history, that of Mongol domination, between circa 1240 and
1380. This represents a decisive phase in the process of Islamisation, with
the popularisation of Sufism and the development of new forms of litera-
ture to spread Islam. This book integrates the study of Anatolia with that of
the broader Islamic world, shedding new light on this crucial turning point
in the history of the Middle East.

A. C. S. Peacock is Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic History at the

University of St Andrews. He is the author of The Great Seljuk Empire
(2015), and co-editor of Medieval Central Asia and the Persianate World
(2015), and The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval
Middle East (2013).
Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization

Editorial Board
Chase F. Robinson, Freer|Sackler, Smithsonian Institution (general editor)

Michael Cook, Princeton University

Maribel Fierro, Spanish National Research Council
Alan Mikhail, Yale University
David O. Morgan, Professor Emeritus, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Intisar Rabb, Harvard University
Muhammad Qasim Zaman, Princeton University

Other titles in the series are listed at the back of the book.
Islam, Literature and Society
in Mongol Anatolia

A. C. S. PEACOCK
University of St Andrews, UK
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DOI: 10.1017/9781108582124
© A. C. S. Peacock 2019
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Peacock, A. C. S. (Andrew C. S.), author.
Title: Islam, literature and society in Mongol Anatolia / A.C.S. Peacock.
Other titles: Cambridge studies in Islamic civilization.
Description: Cambridge, United Kingdom : Cambridge University Press, 2019. | Series: Cambridge studies in
Islamic civilization | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: From a Christian, Greek- and
Armenian-speaking land to a predominantly Muslim and Turkish speaking one, the Islamisation of medieval
Anatolia would lay the groundwork for the emergence of the Ottoman Empire as a world power and ultimately
the modern Republic of Turkey. Bringing together previously unpublished sources in Arabic, Persian and
Turkish, Peacock offers a new understanding of the crucial but neglected period in Anatolian history, that of
Mongol domination, between c. 1240 and 1380. This represents a decisive phase in the process of Islamisation,
with the popularisation of Sufism and the development of new forms of literature to spread Islam. This book
integrates the study of Anatolia with that of the broader Islamic world, shedding new light on this crucial
turning point in the history of the Middle East.
Identifiers: LCCN 2019008223 | ISBN 9781108499361 (hardback : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781108713481
(pbk. : alk. paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Mongols–Turkey. | Turkey–History–To 1453. | Turkey–Politics and government. |
Islam–Turkey. | Islam and politics–Turkey. | Sufism–Turkey. | Islamic literature, Turkish–History and
criticism. | Turkish literature–History and criticism.
Classification: LCC DR481 .P37 2019 | DDC 956.1/014–dc235
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019008223

ISBN 978-1-108-49936-1 Hardback

Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy
of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Contents

List of Illustrations page viii

Acknowledgements xi
A Note on the Transliteration and Translation xiii
List of Abbreviations xiv

Introduction 1
PART I RELIGION, POLITICS AND SOCIETY 29
1 The Formation of Islamic Anatolia: Crises of Legitimacy
and the Struggle against Unbelief 31
2 Sufism and Political Power 75
3 Sufism in Society: Futuwwa in Seljuq and Mongol
Anatolia 117
PART II LITERATURE AND RELIGIOUS CHANGE 145
4 The Emergence of Literary Turkish 147
5 Vernacular Religious Literature: Tales of Conversion,
Eschatology and Unbelief 188
6 Apocalyptic Thought and the Political Elite 218
Conclusion 252
Bibliography 260
Index 287
The plate section is found between pages 146 and 147

vii
 Illustrations

Colour Plates
1 The earliest Islamic manuscript from Anatolia: al-Akhawayn al-Bukhari,
Hidayat al-Muta‘allimin fi’l-Tibb. Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu
Başkanlığı, Süleymaniye Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, MS Fatih 3646,
showing on Plate 1a) the dedication to the Saltukid ruler and Plate 1b)
the table of contents.
2 Yusuf b. Sa‘d al-Sijistani’s Munyat al-Mufti, copied at Sivas in 638/1240–1; an
autograph manuscript. Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı,
Süleymaniye Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, MS Şehid Ali Paşa 1083, showing
Plate 2a) the opening folio and Plate 2b) the end of the work with the
colophon attesting it is an autograph manuscript at the bottom left.
3a and b The taqwīm made for the Eretnid ‘Ala’ al-Din in 772–3/1372–3.
Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı, Nurusomaniye 2782.
4 Qazwini’s Arba‘un Majalis, dedicated to the Pervane. Türkiye Yazma
Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı, Süleymaniye Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, MS
Carullah 410M.
5a The lavish copy of Sultan Walad’s Mathnawis made for the amir Sati
Beg al-mawlawi, showing the dedication to the amir. Vienna, National
Library of Austria, Cod. Mixt. 1594, fol. 1a; Plate 5b, showing the
names of God, fol. 1b; Plate 5c. The opening folio of Sultan Walad’s
Intihanama, fol. 78b. Plate 5d, the colophon, showing the date of
copying of 767/1365–6.
6a The table of contents of Ali b. Dustkhuda al-Anqari’s collection of Sufi
treatises showing its inclusion of various works by Suharwardi, including

viii
 List of Illustrations ix

the Partawnama. Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı, Süleymaniye

Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, MS Fatih 5426, fol. Ib–IIa and Plate 6b) the
opening of Ghazali’s Hamaqat Ahl al-Ibaha in MS Fatih 5426, showing
the name of the copyist and owner, ‘Ali b. Dustkhuda b. Khwaja b.
al-Hajj Qumari al-Rifa‘i al-Anqari.
7 An early Kırşehir manuscript, Sharh Jami‘ al-Kabir, Süleymaniye, MS
Fatih 1545.
8 The colophon of Ibn al-Jawzi’s universal history, al-Muntazam fi’l-Ta’rikh,
Süleymaniye, MS Fazıl Ahmed Paşa 1174, fol. 118a, copied in Kayseri
in 714/1314 showing the copyist’s Sufi affiliations.
9a Ibn al-Athir’s al-Kamil fi’l-Tarikh copied by Yusuf b. al-Sabbal
al-Baghdadi. Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı, Süleymaniye
Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, MS Ayasofya 3068, showing the dedication to
Fakhr al-Din ‘Ali. Plate 9b) the opening folio showing the high quality
calligraphy and a later endowment by the Ottoman sultan Mahmud
I (d. 1754).
10 Diwan of Ibn Farid, a copy from the library of the minister Fakhr
al-Din ‘Ali, copied by Isma‘il b. Yusuf. Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu
Başkanlığı, Süleymaniye Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, MS Ayasofya 3879,
showing Plate 10a) the ex libris of Fakhr al-Din ‘Ali and Plate 10b)
the opening of the diwan, showing the fine calligraphy and gold
illumination.
11 Nasiri Sijistani, treatises on the occult. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale
de France, MS persan 174, fol. 110b. Plate 11a) An illustration of the
astrological lion and sun motif that also seems to have denoted sovereignty
(see Leiser ‘Observations on the “Lion and Sun”’). Plate 11b). Nasiri
Sijistani, treatises on the occult. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale
de France, MS persan 174, fol. 133b. The opening verses of the
Mu’nis al-‘Awarif.
12 Ibn Barrajan, Tanbih, copy belonging to the mustawf ī Majd al-Din
Muhammad b. al-Hasan. MS Süleymaniye, Reisülküttab 30.

Figures
1.1 Shams al-Din Juwayni’s Çifte Minareli Medrese at Sivas. Photograph
by Peter J. Lu, courtesy of Special Collections, Fine Arts Library,
Harvard University page 47
x List of Illustrations

1.2 The inscription on Mubariz al-Din Umur b. Savji’s Vacidiye Medrese

in Kütahya, dated 714/1314, proclaiming it was built from the jizya
of the town of Alaşehir. Author photograph 73
2.1 The mausoleum of Aşık Paşa at Kırşehir. Photograph by Tevfik Teker,
source Wikimedia Commons 114
3.1 The unique manuscript of Khartbirdi’s Tuhfat al-Wasaya, a part of the
major Anatolian manuscript collection of futuwwa treatises. Türkiye
Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı, Süleymaniye Yazma Eser
Kütüphanesi, MS Ayasofya 2049. 135
4.1 Nazm al-Khilafiyyat. Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı,
Konya Yusuf Ağa Kütüphanesi, MS No. 7470, copied in Kırşehir
in 663/1264–5 by ‘Umar b. Mustafa b. Mahmud al-Arzan al-Rumi. 160
4.2 The Taş Vakfiye in Kütahya. Author photograph 169
4.3 al-Saghani’s Mashariq al-Anwar, copied in İznik in the madrasa of
Orhan. Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı, Süleymaniye
Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, MS Mahmud Paşa 140. 177
4.4 Eretna’s Uighur script coinage. A coin struck in Erzincan in 751/1351,
American Numismatic Society collection inv. no. 1927.179.1.
Courtesy of the American Numismatic Society 182
5.1 Siraj al-Qulub, Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı, Kütahya
Vahid Ali Paşa Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, MS 1415. 193
6.1 Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi, Risala fi Amr al-Mahdi, Türkiye Yazma Eserler
Kurumu Başkanlığı, Süleymaniye Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, MS
Ayasofya 4849. 227
6.2 Ibn Barrajan, Idah al-Hikma. Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu
Başkanlığı, Süleymaniye Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, MS Murad
Molla 35 (fols. 186a–188a). 231
6.3 Ibn Barrajan, Tanbih, copy endowed as waqf by Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi.
Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı, Konya Yusuf Ağa
Kütüphanesi, MS No. 4744. 234

Maps
Map 1 The Mongol Empire, c. 1260 5
Map 2 The Ilkhanate 7
Map 3 Anatolia in the early thirteenth century 39
Map 4 Anatolia in the late fourteenth century, showing major beyliks 55
 Acknowledgements

The research leading to this book has received funding from the European
Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme
(FP/2007-2013) / ERC Grant Agreement n. 208476, ‘The Islamisation of
Anatolia, c. 1100–1500’. I thank the European Research Council for its financial
support, which enabled the extensive research in libraries in Turkey and elsewhere
on which it is based. In addition, I am grateful to the Royal Society of Edinburgh
for providing a grant to cover the costs of publication of colour images.
I would also like to record my thanks to the Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu
Başkanlığı for allowing access to the various collections under its authority, and
generously permitting reproduction of many of the manuscripts they contain.
I am especially grateful to the staff of the Süleymaniye Library in Istanbul for their
assistance over many years. Other libraries such as the Österreichische National-
bibliothek and the Bibliothèque nationale de France have also been generous in
granting access and providing images.
Small portions of Chapter 2 and Chapter 5 were previously published in a
different form as ‘Sufis and the Seljuk Court: Politics and Patronage in the Works
of Jalal al-Din Rumi and Sultan Walad’, in A. C. S. Peacock and Sara Nur Yıldız
(eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East
(London: I.B.Tauris, 2013), pp. 206–26 and ‘Islamisation in Anatolia and the
Golden Horde: Some Notes on Travelling Scholars and Texts’, Revue des mondes
musulmans et de la Méditerranée 143 (2018): 151–64 respectively. I thank the
publishers for permission to reuse these passages.
Numerous colleagues have contributed, wittingly or unwittingly, to this book,
although none should be held responsible for the mistakes it doubtless contains.
At St Andrews, Timothy Greenwood, Angus Stewart, Ilse Sturkenboom and
Dimitris Kastristis have generously tolerated numerous questions in their areas

xi
xii Acknowledgements

of expertise. In Istanbul, I am especially grateful to Sara Nur Yıldız and Zeynep

Oktay for discussion, assistance with obtaining copies of manuscripts and
answering queries on Old Anatolian Turkish; Zeynep Oktay also kindly checked
the translations from Old Anatolian Turkish, while Sara Nur Yıldız generously
read and commented on a draft of this book. I am also indebted to numerous
other colleagues for assistance on individual questions at various points over the
long period this book has been in preparation: Evrim Binbaş, Jonathan Brack,
Michael Brett, Bruno De Nicola, Devin DeWeese, Cailah Jackson, Robert
Hillenbrand, Christian Lange, Timothy May, Charles Melville, Matthew
Melvin-Koushki, Scott Redford and Rustam Shukurov. I am also indebted to
the Press’ two anonymous reviewers for useful comments and corrections.
I apologise to any others whose names I have inadvertently omitted and of course
I absolve them all for responsibility for the errors that inevitably remain.
As ever, I am grateful to my family for their support and encouragement, and
especially to my wife, Liz. This book is for her.
 A Note on the Transliteration and Translation

This book draws on sources in Arabic, Persian and Old Anatolian Turkish. All
have incompatible systems of transliterating the same word; for reasons of simpli-
city, for terms common to all three languages I have therefore adopted an
Arabising transliteration throughout. Thus I spell consistently futuwwa, not
fütüvvet or fotovvat, mathnawi not mesnevi and qasīda not kaside, irrespective of
_
the language of the source under discussion. Diacritics are only used in quota-
tions. Regrettably, standards for transliterating from Old Anatolian Turkish vary
considerably. When citing from published texts, the transliteration of the original
editor is respected and no attempt has been made to impose uniformity. For
reasons of space, quotations from texts in the original have only been provided
when the text is especially obscure or the original choice of vocabulary particularly
important. Unless indicated otherwise, all translations are my own.

xiii
 Abbreviations

EI2 Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn (Leiden,

1954–2005).
EI3 Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd edn (Leiden, 2007–).
EIr Encyclopedia Iranica, www.iranicaonline.com
Ibn Bibi, al-Awamir Ibn-i Bibi, El-Evâmir’ül-‘Alâ’iye fî’l-Umûri’l-‘Alâ’iye,
al-‘Ala’iyya (Ankara) facsimile ed. A. S. Erzi (Ankara, 1956).
Ibn Bibi, al-Awamir Ibn Bibi al-Munajjima, al-‘Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya fi’l-
al-‘Ala’iyya (Tehran) Umur al-‘Ala’iyya, ed. Zhalah Mutahaddin
(Tehran, 1390).
Q. Qur’an, standard Egyptian edition.
Süleymaniye Süleymaniye Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, Istanbul
(Süleymaniye Manuscript Library, Istanbul).
TDVİA Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi (Istanbul,
1988–2013, www.islamansiklopedisi.info/).

xiv
 Introduction

In around the year 732/1332, the Moroccan traveller Ibn Battuta visited Anatolia,
or Rum, as it was known to Muslims after its Romano-Byzantine heritage. It was,
Ibn Battuta said, ‘the finest region of the world, where God has gathered diverse
fair points; its people are the most handsome in appearance, the cleanest in
clothes, their food is the most delicious and they are the most solicitous of God’s
people’. The Maghrebi was particularly impressed by the Islamic piety he found
there, despite the substantial Christian population he also noted:
All the people of this land follow the lawschool of the imam Abu Hanifa, may God be
pleased with him, and uphold the sunna. There is no Qadari, Shi‘i (rāfid ī), Mu‘tazili,
_
Khariji or innovator (mubtadi‘ ) among them, and that is a virtue with which God has
singled them out; however, they do consume hashish without considering anything wrong
with it.1

This impression of Anatolian Muslims’ unwavering devotion to Sunnism is

reinforced by an anecdote Ibn Battuta recounts concerning his visit to Sinop on
the Black Sea coast. When the locals saw him pray with hands downturned, not
realising this was also a custom of the Sunni Maliki law school that predominated
in Ibn Battuta’s homeland, they accused him of Shiism, whose adherents some of

1
Ibn Battuta, Rihla, ed. Kamal al-Bustani (Beirut, 1992), 283–4; translations are my own, but see also
the English translation by Gibb: The Travels of Ibn Bat tūta A.D. 1325–1354, Translated with
__ _
Revisions and Notes from the Arabic Text Edited by C. Defrémery and B. R. Sanguinetti by H. A.
R. Gibb (Cambridge, 1962), II, 416–17 (henceforth, trans. Gibb). Ibn Battuta refers to the early
Islamic groups whose names became synonymous with heresy in the eyes of later Sunnis: the Qadaris
asserted human free will and rejected predestination; the Mu‘tazilis were rationalists who upheld the
created nature of the Qur’an and the Kharijis rejected the arbitration between ‘Ali b. Abi Talib and
his Umayyad opponents after the battle of Siffin in 657.

1
2 Introduction

them had witnessed praying in the same fashion in Iraq and the Hijaz. Ibn Battuta
was only saved from the accusation when the local sultan tested him by sending
him a rabbit, forbidden to Shiites, which the Maghrebi traveller devoured,
satisfying the doubters of his orthodoxy.2 Allusions to this commitment of rulers
in Anatolia to upholding Sunni piety recur frequently in his account of his travels,
which, owing to the region’s highly politically fragmented environment in this
period, took Ibn Battuta into the presence of numerous different sultans, amirs,
and governors. These are regularly depicted as enjoying a close relationship with
the various religious officials who frequented their courts, such as faqīhs (special-
ists in Islamic jurisprudence), khatībs (preachers) and qurrā’ (Qur’an reciters).3
_
Ibn Battuta was a learned qadi, and his account of his travels was doubtless
influenced by his own pious agenda of seeking out the blessings of holy men and
spiritual benefits, in common with most travellers from the pre-modern Islamic
world who have left written records.4 Nonetheless, even if influenced by this pious
perspective, his account stands in striking contrast to the consensus of modern
scholarship, which has often seen medieval Anatolia as a barely Islamised frontier
region, a ‘Wild West’,5 characterised, in the words of one scholar, by ‘the absence
of a state that was interested in rigorously defining and strictly enforcing an
orthodoxy’.6 Islam in medieval Anatolia is often described as ‘syncretic’ or
‘heterodox’, and even the Sunni piety that Ibn Battuta identified is often argued
to represent a considerably broader tent than it became at a later date, incorpor-
ating elements redolent of Shiism or indeed ‘heterodoxy’.7 Certainly, Anatolia was
distinguished from other parts of the Middle East by its late incorporation into the
Muslim world, which was effected only in the wake of the invasions of the Turks

2
Ibn Battuta, Rihla, 320; trans. Gibb, 468.
3
In Eğirdir and Birgi, the sultans had a faqīh sitting at his side when he received Ibn Battuta (Rihla,
288, 301; trans. Gibb, 423, 441); in Ladhiq (Denizli), the sultan sends the wā‘iz as his emissary to
meet Ibn Battuta (Rihla, 291; trans. Gibb, 427); in Milas and Kastamonu the sultan _ is described as
having faqīhs as his companions at the majlis (Rihla, 293, 317; trans. Gibb, 429, 463). In Girdebolu,
he met an immigrant scholar from Damascus who served as the local sultan’s ‘faqīh and khatīb’
(Rihla, 310; trans. Gibb, 460). _
4
On the role of piety in Ibn Battuta’s travels see David Waines, The Odyssey of Ibn Battuta:
Uncommon Tales of a Medieval Adventurer (London, 2012); Ian Richard Netton, ‘Myth, Miracle
and Magic in the Rihla of Ibn Battuta’, Journal of Semitic Studies 29 (1984): 131–40.
5 _
For the notion of Anatolia as a ‘Wild West’ see, with further references, Charles Melville, ‘Anatolia
under the Mongols’, in The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 1: Byzantium to Turkey, ed. Kate Fleet
(Cambridge, 2009), 52.
6
Cemal Kafadar, Between Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State (Berkeley, 1995), 76.
7
Claude Cahen, ‘Le problème du Shī‘isme dans l’Asie Mineure turque préottomane’, in Le Shī‘isme
Imamite: Colloque de Strasbourg (6–9 mai 1968) (Paris, 1970), 115–29; Rıza Yıldırım, ‘Sunni
Orthodox vs Shi‘ite Heterodox? A Reappraisal of Islamic Piety in Medieval Anatolia’, in A. C.
S. Peacock, Bruno De Nicola and Sara Nur Yıldız (eds), Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia
(Farnham, 2015), 287–307.
 Introduction 3

in the eleventh century, after which a number of Muslim Turkish states emerged
in the peninsula, most prominently the Seljuqs of Rum (r. 463/1071–708/1308).
Yet despite the advent of Muslim rulers, it is likely that even in Ibn Battuta’s time
Christians made up a much larger proportion of the population of Anatolia than
most other parts of the Middle East, notwithstanding the survival of substantial
Christian communities in Egypt and Syria. Although we have no reliable statis-
tical information, such are the hints given by contemporary sources. Travelling
through Anatolia in 1253, shortly after the region had come under the control of
the Mongols who had recently invaded much of the Middle East, the friar
William of Rubruck, an emissary to the Great Khan Möngke, calculated that
only one in ten of the population was Muslim.8 Indeed, even at the end of the
fourteenth century, there were some Christians who abandoned Byzantine terri-
tory to take refuge in Muslim-ruled Anatolia.9 Nonetheless, there is much
evidence that by the time Ibn Battuta visited in the fourteenth century, Christians
were increasingly converting to Islam or otherwise fleeing Muslim rule.10 While
recent scholarship has affirmed that the Orthodox Church in Muslim Anatolia
remained vital, albeit in difficult circumstances and perforce in collaboration with
the new Turkish rulers, this does not change the fact that a wealth of evidence
attests the decline in numbers of its adherents.11 Conversion is often explained by
the activities of Sufi holy men, who, operating outside the framework of formal
religion, are said to have been able to appeal both to Anatolia’s Turkish nomadic
population and to its Christians by providing forms of syncretism between Islam
and their previous beliefs while claiming to offer direct communication with the

8
The Mission of Friar William of Rubruck: His Journey to the Court of the Great Khan Möngke,
1253–1255, trans. Peter Jackson (London, 1990), 276.
9
Elizabeth Zachariadou, ‘Notes sur la population de l’Asie Mineure turque au XIV siècle’, Byzanti-
nische Forschungen 12 (1987): 221–31, esp. 229–31.
10
Mehmed Fuad Köprülü, Islam in Anatolia after the Turkish Invasion (Salt Lake City, 1993), 31;
Speros Vryonis, The Decline of Medieval Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization from
the Eleventh through the Fifteenth Century (Berkeley, 1971), 288–350, esp. 291; Speros Vryonis,
‘Nomadization and Islamization in Asia Minor’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 29 (1975): 64–5. Dimitri
Korobeinikov, ‘Orthodox Communities in Eastern Anatolia in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth
Centuries, I. The Two Patriarchates: Constantinople and Antioch’, al-Masāq 15 (2003): 197–214;
Dimitri Korobeinikov, ‘Orthodox Communities in Eastern Anatolia in the Thirteenth and Four-
teenth Centuries, Part 2.The Time of Troubles’, al-Masāq 17 (2005): 1–29; A. C. S. Peacock,
‘Islamisation in Medieval Anatolia’, in A. C. S. Peacock (ed.), Islamisation: Comparative Perspectives
from History (Edinburgh, 2017), 134–55, with further references.
11
Johannes Pahlitzsch, ‘The Greek Orthodox Communities of Nicaea and Ephesus under Turkish
Rule in the Fourteenth Century: A New Reading of Old Sources’, in Peacock, De Nicola and
Yıldız (eds), Islam and Christianity, 147–64; Tom Papademetriou, Render Unto the Sultan: Power,
Authority, and the Greek Orthodox Church in the Early Ottoman Centuries (Oxford, 2015),
chapter 2.
4 Introduction

divine, in contrast to the legalistic religiosity of the educated ‘ulama’.12 Ibn

Battuta’s reference to hashish may allude to such Sufis, some of whom regularly
used the drug in their rituals.13
To what then were Christians converting? To an almost unimpeachable
‘orthodox’ Sunnism, as described by Ibn Battuta, or to the ‘heterodox’ and
‘syncretic’ Islam propounded by much modern scholarship? As we shall discuss,
recent research has underlined that all of these categories are problematic. The
task of this book is to attain a more sophisticated understanding of the character-
istics of Islam in Anatolia during the crucial period of the thirteenth to fourteenth
centuries, when not only were increasing numbers of Christians embracing Islam,
but Islamic society and culture in the peninsula were themselves undergoing
profound changes. The invasions of the pagan Mongols in the early to mid-
thirteenth century precipitated political, social and religious transformation across
the Middle East and Central Asia. Lands that had long been Muslim for the first
time came under the control of a non-Muslim empire, the centre of which was
located thousands of miles to the east at the imperial capital of Qaraqorum in
Mongolia, and in which Muslims initially lost the privileged status to which they
had been accustomed (Map 1).
These developments are generally regarded as having strengthened the hand of
non-Muslims and Shiites, the former in the short and the latter in the long
term.14 The Mongols’ capture of Baghdad in 656/1258 and killing of the
Abbasid Caliph is thought to have created a void of political legitimacy in the
Islamic world. In the absence of the divinely ordained institution of the Caliphate
as the ultimate, if theoretical, source of political authority, Sunni Muslims had to
find new ways of structuring society and politics. This may account for the
increasing importance of Sufism, which offered a hierarchy of authority that
could, in part, fill the void left by the disappearance of the Caliphal order, and

12
See for example Vryonis, Decline, 363–96; Michel Balivet, Romanie byzantine et Pays de Rûm turc
(Istanbul, 1994), 21–5, 147–8. On Sufism in general useful introductions are Ahmet Karamustafa,
Sufism: The Formative Period (Edinburgh, 2006); Nile Green, Sufism: A Global History
(Oxford, 2012).
13
In general on hashish in the pre-modern Islamic world see Franz Rosenthal, The Herb: Hashish
versus Medieval Muslim Society (Leiden, 1971), esp.182–9, and for a medieval Anatolian polemic
against its use see Bruno De Nicola, ‘The Fustāt al-ʿAdāla: A Unique Manuscript on the Religious
Landscape of Medieval Anatolia’, in A. C. S. _Peacock
_ and Sara Nur Yıldız (eds), Islamic Literature
and Intellectual Life in Fourteenth- and Fifteenth-Century Anatolia (Würzburg, 2016), 58, 63–4.
14
A. Bausani, ‘Religion under the Mongols’, in The Cambridge History of Iran, vol. 5, ed. J. A. Boyle,
The Saljuq and Mongol Periods (Cambridge, 1968), 538–44; Marshall S. Hodgson, The Venture of
Islam, vol. II, The Expansion of Islam in the Middle Periods (Chicago, 1974), 437–500.
 DA JOCHID ULUS
SH Lake Baikal
T- (GOLDEN HORDE)
I QI
PC
HA
Q

MONGOLIA
Aral Sea
Black Sea KHWARAZM YUAN EMPIRE
CHAGHATAYID (KHANATE OF Sea of
ANATOLIA Caspian Japan
KHANATE GREAT KHAN)
Sea
Yellow
Mediterranean Sea Sea
TIBET
ILK
HA
NA
MAMLUK TE
SULTANATE

PACIFIC OCEAN
SULTANATE
Arabian Sea OF DELHI

South China
Bay of Bengal Sea

INDIAN OCEAN

0 2500km

MAP 1 The Mongol Empire, c. 1260

6 Introduction

Sufis came to play an increasingly important political role.15 These dislocations,

while especially intense within the Ilkhanid lands, were by no means restricted to
them, and a comparable search for new forms of political legitimacy and societal
order can be observed in the Ilkhans’ great rivals, the Mamluk sultanate of Egypt
and Syria.16
In around 1260, the Mongol empire ceased to be a unitary state controlled by
a single ruler, the Great Khan, from Qaraqorum, and instead was divided into
four principal successor states, the Yüan dynasty in China and Mongolia, the
Chaghatayids in Central Asia, the Golden Horde in the South Russian steppe and
the Ilkhanate of Iran.17 It was this latter state, founded by Hülegü, grandson of
Chinggis Khan, and taking its name from the title īlkhān assumed by its rulers,
that dominated Anatolia for most of the period (Map 2).
To assert their legitimacy, the rulers of all these Mongol successor states
stressed their descent from Chinggis Khan, the great conqueror who was regarded
by Mongols (and some non-Mongols) as possessing more or less divine status.
A distinctive political culture developed in the Ilkhanate. The Ilkhans came to
view themselves as inheritors not just of the legacy of Chinggis but also that of
ancient Iran,18 while after converting to Islam in 694/1295, the Ilkhan Ghazan
started to employ simultaneously a vocabulary of Islamic kingship, describing
himself as pādshāh-i Islām, ‘king of Islam’.19 This model of political legitimacy
that drew on steppe, Iranian and, from the end of the thirteenth century, Islamic
elements accrued prestige to the Ilkhans, which enabled them to exert a broader
cultural and political influence.
Anatolia was certainly affected by the broader developments in Middle Eastern
society and politics precipitated by Mongol domination, which was established in

15
See the references in n. 14 and Lawrence G. Potter, ‘Sufis and Sultans in Post-Mongol Iran’, Iranian
Studies 27 (1994): 77–102; Ovamir Anjum, ‘Mystical Authority and Governmentality in Islam’, in
John Curry and Eric Ohlander (eds), Sufism and Society: Arrangements of the Mystical in the Muslim
World (London, 2011), 71–93.
16
For a study of some of the political aspects of this search for legitimacy see Anne Broadbridge,
Kingship and Ideology in the Islamic and Mongol Worlds (Cambridge, 2008); for an introduction to
scholarship on the religious environment in the Mamluk lands see Richard McGregor, ‘The
Problem of Sufism’, Mamluk Studies Review 13 (2009): 69–83.
17
On this process see Peter Jackson, ‘The Dissolution of the Mongol Empire’, Central Asiatic Journal
22 (1978): 186–244; David Morgan, ‘The Decline and Fall of the Mongol Empire’, Journal of the
Royal Asiatic Society 3rd series, 19 (2009): 427–37.
18
Bert Fragner, ‘Ilkhanid Rule and Its Contribution to Iranian Political Culture’, in Linda Komaroff
(ed.), Beyond the Legacy of Gengis Khan (Leiden, 2006), 68–80.
19
Charles Melville, ‘Padshah-i Islam: The Conversion of Sultan Mahmud Ghazan Khan’, Pembroke
Papers 1 (1990): 159–77; for a recent study of the political implications of the conversion see
Jonathan Brack, ‘Mediating Sacred Kingship: Conversion and Sovereignty in Mongol Iran’,
unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2016.
 Irty
sh
JOCHIDS
(GOLDEN
Vo HORDE)
l ga
Lake Balkhash

Sy MOGHULISTAN
rD
Aral ar CHAGHATAYIDS
ya
Sea (J
ax
ar
TRANSOXIANA te
Black Sea s )
KHWARAZM
Caspian
GEORGIA Sea Urgench Issyk Kul
Tiblisi
Constantinople
Trebizond ARMENIA Bukhara
AnkaraSivas Am Kashghar
Lake Mughan u Samarkand
SULTANATE Kayseri Da
OF RUM Van ry
a
Konya Tabriz (O
xu
Maragha Merv s)
CILICIA Aleppo KHU
Mosul Sultaniyya MAZANDARAN RAS
AN Balkh
Antioch Tehran Nishapur Kabul Ind

Tigr
ILKHANATE us

is
Tripoli
Mediterranean Sea Eu Herat
Damascus ph
ra Baghdad Ghazni
tes Isfahan
Jerusalem Hilla SULTANATE
OF DELHI
MAMLUK
SULTANATE FARS SISTAN
Cairo
Zaranj
Shiraz
s
du
In

Nil
e
EGYPT Persian
Gulf
Arabian
Red
Sea
Sea

MAP 2 The Ilkhanate

8 Introduction

the peninsula after the Seljuqs’ defeat at the Battle of Kösedağ near Sivas in 641/
1243. However, it also experienced some distinct consequences. Mongol hegem-
ony opened the way for a new political dispensation in Anatolia, even if the
Seljuqs nominally retained the position of sultan until the early fourteenth
century, although without being able to exercise effective power. The Mongols
asserted suzerainty over all the Seljuq lands (as they did, in theory, over the entire
world). In practice, this claim was contested by the numerous Turkmen lords,
such as those encountered by Ibn Battuta, who first emerged as major political
forces in the Mongol period, and who, with the decline of the Ilkhanate in the
1330s, became ever more powerful. The most successful of these Turkmen lords
were the Ottomans, who expanded from a small base in north-western Anatolia to
establish a great empire that absorbed its Turkmen rivals and both Christian and
Muslim neighbours, lasting, in one form or another, until the First World War.
These political changes were accompanied by equally dramatic cultural ones.
Towards the end of the thirteenth century, Turkish emerged as a literary medium,
supplementing and eventually superseding Persian as the main literary and textual
vehicle of Anatolian Muslims. This facilitated the composition and circulation of
basic manuals of the faith as well as a pious literature that addressed the concerns
of a recently converted or converting population, in contrast to the situation at the
height of Seljuq rule in the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries when almost
all literary works seem to have been destined for a limited courtly or elite
audience. From the mid-thirteenth century the religious, social and literary
landscape was transformed by the spread of Sufism, which penetrated society
from artisans’ guilds to the ruling elites, and introduced novel ways of conceptual-
ising not just man’s relationship to God but also temporal power and authority,
which became increasingly intertwined with Sufis’ spiritual claims. Konya, the old
Seljuq capital, was fast becoming a major scholarly centre to which men migrated
from other parts of the Islamic world to study Sufi thought, as well as to seek
professional advancement. It was under Mongol rule that figures such as the major
Sufi writers Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 672/1273), his son Sultan Walad (d. 712/1312)
and the leading interpreter of Ibn ‘Arabi, Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi (d. 672/1273),
were active, as well as some of the earliest Turkish poets in Anatolia, such as
Gülşehri (d. after 718/1318) and Aşık Paşa (d. 732/1332). Mongol domination
thus facilitated the integration of Anatolia into the broader Muslim world,
through the activities of migrant scholars, Sufis and litterateurs, all of whose
presence becomes increasingly marked from the second half of the thirteenth
century.
One of the aims of this book is to demonstrate how Mongol domination thus
played an integral part in the process of Islamisation in Anatolia, but one which
has not yet received due attention from scholarship. By Islamisation I mean not
 Introduction 9

simply conversion to Islam, but the processes by which Islam permeated politics,
society and culture more generally.20 In most other regions of the Middle East,
this process had taken place at a much earlier date, primarily the Umayyad and
early Abbasid periods, and is thus often attested only by later Islamic sources. In
Anatolia, however, we have a large body of contemporary texts in Arabic, Persian
and Turkish. To date, this literature has been little studied and remains mainly
unpublished, as will be discussed at more length in due course, but it can serve as a
valuable first-hand source for understanding these religious and cultural trans-
formations, forming a unique window into the process of Islamisation as it
happened. Beyond the intrinsic interest of deepening our understanding of the
evolution of Muslim society in Anatolia, this book thus also aims to enhance our
understanding more generally both of processes of Islamisation and the conse-
quences of Mongol hegemony in the Middle East.21 I hope also to address some
of the issues highlighted by Ibn Battuta’s account, shedding light on the relation-
ship between political power and religion, and assessing the effect of the political
convulsions of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries on the social and religious
structures of the Muslim community in Anatolia. I concentrate on the crucial
period of cultural transformation and Mongol political and cultural dominance
from c. 641/1243 to 783/1381, the former date marking the Mongol victory over
the Seljuqs at the Battle of Kösedaǧ, which established their dominance over
Anatolia, and the latter marking the demise of the last Mongol successor state in
the peninsula, the Eretnids (c. 735/1335–783/1381). However, these dates offer
only a rough framework: the pace of cultural and religious change, while certainly
connected to broader political developments, is necessarily slower, so we will have
cause on occasion both to look back and forward beyond these dates. This book
will give particular attention to Central Anatolia. Its towns such as Konya, Kayseri
and Sivas had been the cultural centre of Muslim Anatolia since the coming of the
Turks and remained the heartland of the Seljuq sultans, the Ilkhanid governors of
Anatolia and the Eretnids. It is also by far the best attested region in the historical

20
For a discussion of Islamisation as a concept see A. C. S. Peacock, ‘Introduction: Comparative
Perspectives on Islamisation’, in Peacock (ed.), Islamisation: Comparative Perspectives, 1–22.
21
The term Middle East of course a neologism, invented in the nineteenth century; no comparable
term is found in pre-modern sources, which merely differentiate between the dār al-harb (the abode
of war, the non-Muslim world) and the dār al-Islām (the Muslim world). Nonetheless, _ by the
period covered by this book the Islamic world encompassed a vast geographical area stretching from
Mali to Sumatra, much of which had no contact with Anatolia. For this reason, although rejected
by some modern scholarship, it seems useful to retain the term Middle East to describe the
neighbouring, mainly Muslim-dominated regions with which Anatolia was in close contact, such
as Egypt, Syria and Iran.
10 Introduction

sources, most of which were produced there, a fact reflected in the coverage of this
book too. Beyond, in the peripheries and coastal areas, the courts of the Turkmen
chiefs produced no chronicles in our period, and our understanding of these
polities is often limited; nonetheless, some played an important role in the
patronage of literary texts and thus the broader cultural transformations of the
period. Of course, this is not to say that literary texts are the sole possible source
for interpreting the transformations of the Mongol period. Art history, epigraphy
and material culture might all serve the historian, but this book deliberately limits
itself largely to the textual sources as these are perhaps the least exploited, and, in
tracing the changes in intellectual and literary history that are the book’s focus, the
most relevant. Nonetheless, occasionally I will refer to epigraphic and architectural
evidence where this seems relevant to my argument, but limitations of space have
constrained me from exploiting such sources more fully.
The significance of the book’s argument that Mongol role played a crucial role in
the Islamisation of Anatolia is severalfold. First, it draws attention to the importance
of this era in the history of Anatolia, which has received very little scholarly
attention, and brings a new understanding to the consequences of the Mongol
conquests in a specific region. Secondly, it sheds light on the development and
spread of Islam in this region against the broader political and intellectual back-
ground, based on contemporary Muslim sources. Thirdly, it obliges us to revise the
scholarly consensus, discussed further later, that it was the high Ottoman period of
the sixteenth century that saw the initiation of a process described as ‘Sunnitisation’
whereby, backed by the might of the state, a distinctively Sunni religiosity was
increasingly propagated. Rather, we can see that many elements of this Sunnitisa-
tion must be traced back to the consequences of Mongol rule.

HISTORIOGRAPHY AND SOURCES ON ANATOLIA

IN THE PERIOD OF MONGOL DOMINATION

Until recently, scholarship both inside and outside Turkey has tended to view
Anatolian history as a neat sequence of Turkish dynasties leading from the Seljuqs
(r. 463/1071–708/1308) to the Ottomans (r. 699/1299–1923) and thus ultimately
to the Turkish Republic.22 Lately, however, aspects of medieval Anatolia have
attracted increasingly scholarly attention in their own right rather than as merely a

22
Two well-known examples that illustrate this tendency in their titles are the standard surveys of the
period in Turkish and English: Osman Turan, Selçuklular Zamanında Türkiye: Siyâsi tarih Alp
Arslan’dan Osman Gazi’ye (1071–1318) (Istanbul, 1971); Claude Cahen, Pre-Ottoman Turkey:
General Survey of the Material and Spiritual Culture and History c. 1071–1330 (London, 1968),
revised version published as Claude Cahen, La Turquie pré-ottomane (Istanbul, 1988).
 Introduction 11

precursor to the Ottomans, and this research has underlined the political and cultural
complexity of the region.23 Nonetheless, it is hard to escape entirely from the
influence of the earlier approach and the underlying assumptions of its basic vocabu-
lary. Even the word Anatolia, commonly used in modern scholarship as an equivalent
for the classical Islamic term Rum, was first popularised by Turkish nationalist
scholars in the early twentieth century, and especially after the establishment of the
Republic in 1923, as part of a state-building effort that equated Anatolia with modern
Turkey. Yet in reality, many of the south-easternmost parts of modern Turkey, such
as Antakya, Urfa, Diyarbakır and Mardin, had a distinct history from the westerly and
central regions, having been incorporated into the Islamic world at the time of the
Umayyad conquests. Some of these areas were (especially in Ottoman times) con-
sidered part of the lands of Rum; but others would traditionally be categorised as part
of other regions such as the Jazira or al-Sham.24
No less nebulous than Anatolia is the Arabic, Persian and Turkish term Rum,
and its adjective Rumi. Derived from Rhomaioi, the Greek term for Byzantine or
Roman, Rum and Rumi could refer to the Byzantine Empire, to inhabitants of
the lands of Asia Minor who were either Muslim or Christian, or at times
specifically to Christians, and at times specifically to Muslims. The multiplicity
of usages underlines the fluidity of identity in the period, the way in which it was
possible for individuals to slip between ethnic and religious barriers.25 In our
period, Rum could thus apply equally to the Muslim-ruled territories of central,
southern and eastern Anatolia, and to those areas that were still under Christian
control. The Byzantine empire, although much diminished after the sack of
Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade (1204), continued to control substantial
territories in western Anatolia, although these were increasingly being encroached
on by the Muslims from the late thirteenth century.26 On the eastern Black Sea

23
For a sampling of some recent scholarship see A. C. S. Peacock and Sara Nur Yıldız (eds), The
Seljuks of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East (London, 2013); Peacock, De
Nicola and Yıldız (eds), Islam and Christianity; Patricia Blessing and Rachel Goshgarian (eds),
Architecture and Landscape in Medieval Anatolia, 1100–1500 (Edinburgh, 2017).
24
A useful discussion is Cemal Kafadar, ‘A Rome of One’s Own: Reflections on Cultural Geography
and Identity in the Lands of Rum’, Muqarnas 24 (2007): 7–25, and see for example ibid., 15 for the
identification of parts of the southeast as ‘Rum’; also on Anatolia in the nation-building project see
Scott Redford, ‘“What Have You Done for Anatolia Today?” Islamic Archaeology in the Early Years
of the Turkish Republic’, Muqarnas 24 (2007): 243–52.
25
Cf. Rustam Shukurov, The Byzantine Turks, 1204–1461 (Leiden, 2016).
26
On the meaning of Rum in the twelfth to thirteenth centuries see Rustam Shukurov, ‘Turkmen and
Byzantine Self-Identity. Some Reflections on the Logic of the Title-Making in Twelfth- and
Thirteenth-Century Anatolia’, in Antony Eastmond (ed.), Eastern Approaches to Byzantium (Alder-
shot, 2001), 255–72; Dimitri Korobeinikov, ‘“The King of the East and the West”: The Seljuk
Dynastic Concept and Titles in the Muslim and Christian Sources’, in Peacock and Yıldız (eds),
The Seljuks of Anatolia, 68–90.
12 Introduction

coast the Greek state of Trebizond (1204–1461) survived as a Mongol tributary,

and the shores of the eastern Mediterranean were controlled by another Mongol
ally, the Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia (1198–1375). The population of all these
areas might be considered Rumi for some purposes.
In this book, Rum and Anatolia are used interchangeably to refer to the parts
of the peninsula that either came under Muslim control after the Turkish
conquest or remained under Christian rule until the final Turkish conquest of
the last Greek outpost of Trebizond in 1461. Broadly speaking, the south-
easternmost regions of modern Turkey that were incorporated into the dār al-
islām in the seventh century are excluded because of their separate history and the
quite different progress of Islamisation in these areas. Even when limiting our-
selves to the regions under consideration here which are defined as Rum/Anatolia
we must be careful to avoid falling into the trap of conceptualising them as the
direct ‘ancestor’ of modern Turkey. The neat teleogy of Seljuq, Ottoman and
Republican rule and an antithesis between Muslim and Christian Anatolia dis-
guises a distinctly more complex situation. In the twelfth and early thirteenth
centuries, generally considered the height of the ‘Seljuq’ period, different parts of
Anatolia were ruled by a variety of fractious Turkish dynasties, such as the
Mengücekids (Erzincan and Divriği in Eastern Anatolia), the Saltukids (Erzurum)
and the Danishmendids (Kayseri and Malatya, central and south-eastern Anatolia)
in addition to the Seljuqs. The latter, moreover, themselves splintered with the
emergence of a rival Seljuq line in Erzurum that replaced the Saltukids. Both
ethnic and religious fault lines were rather more blurred than older scholarship
might suggest. The Danishmendids struck coins in Greek, representing figures
such as Jesus Christ and St George,27 while in the Seljuq case the sultans regularly
intermarried with Christian (largely Byzantine and Georgian) princesses, who did
not necessarily convert to Islam. Their offspring, the future sultans, were often
brought up speaking Greek and were sometimes baptised (although it is not
clear the ceremony would have had anything more than an apotropaic
meaning). Churches were found even in Seljuq palaces.28 Moreover, a substantial
Turkish population was also found in lands under Byzantine control,29 while
Islamic culture exercised a strong influence on literature and socio-political

27
Rustam Shukurov, ‘Christian Elements in the Identity of the Anatolian Turkmen (12th–13th
centuries)’, in Cristiantità d’Occidente e Cristiantità d’Oriente (Spoleto, 2004), 707–59.
28
Rustam Shukurov, ‘Harem Christianity: The Byzantine Identity of Seljuk Princes’, in Peacock and
Yıldız (eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia, 115–50.
29
See Shukurov, The Byzantine Turks for a detailed discussion of this phenomenon.
 Introduction 13

institutions in Christian societies (above all Armenian and Georgian, to a much

lesser extent in Greek).30
This inadequacy of periodisation by dynastic names to capture the complexity
of the period is also suggested by the fact that the Seljuqs were themselves
tributary to the Mongols from 634/1236, while from 653/1255 to c. 735/1335
Anatolia was a province of the Ilkhanate. The Christian polities of Cilicia and
Trebizond were also bound as tributaries to the Ilkhanate, with which Byzantium
also enjoyed cordial relations that were cemented through imperial marriage
alliances.31 The fact of the dominant role of the Ilkhanate in Anatolia in this
period is swept under the carpet by much scholarship, especially, though not
exclusively, in Turkey. Rather than the ‘Mongol’ or ‘Ilkhanid’ period, late
thirteenth- to fourteenth-century Anatolia is generally known in scholarship as
the beylik period, after the term for the small principalities ruled over by Turkmen
(and occasionally Mongol) chiefs, although as we shall see the notion of a beylik is
distinctly problematic.32
With the benefit of hindsight, the most important of these beyliks was that of
the descendants of the Turkmen chief Osman. Thus, the overwhelming bulk of
scholarship concentrates on the emergence of the Ottoman state in the north-west
of the peninsula, which has been the subject of scholarly research for a good
century. Some scholars, such as Paul Wittek, writing in 1938, whose ideas remain
influential even today, have seen the emergence of the Ottomans as propelled by
their ‘ghazi ethos’, in which the commitment to holy war served as a means of
acquiring legitimacy for an upstart nomad dynasty that possessed no antece-
dents.33 Others have seen the early Ottoman state as something akin to a joint

30
On Islamic influences in Armenian and Georgian literature and societies, see S. Peter Cowe,
‘Patterns of Armeno-Muslim Interchange on the Armenian Plateau in the Interstices between
Byzatine and Ottoman Hegemony’, in Peacock, De Nicola and Yıldız (eds), Islam and Christianity,
77–106; A. C. S. Peacock, ‘Identity, Culture and Religion on Medieval Islam’s Caucasian Frontier’,
Bulletin of the Royal Institute for Interfaith Studies 13 (2011): 69–90; for the Byzantine/Greek case
see Rustam Shukurov, ‘Byzantine Appropriation of the Orient: Notes on its Principles and
Patterns’, in Peacock, De Nicola and Yıldız, Islam and Christianity, 167–82; also in general see
Michel Balivet, Romanie byzantine et Pays de Rûm turc (Istanbul, 1994).
31
See Bruce Lippart, ‘The Mongols and Byzantium, 1243–1341’, unpublished PhD dissertation,
University of Indiana, 1984 for a survey, as well as Dimitri Korobeinikov, Byzantium and the Turks
in the Thirteenth Century (Oxford, 2014), esp. chapter 5.
32
See the discussion in Chapter 1.
33
For the ghazi thesis see Paul Wittek, The Rise of the Ottoman Empire: Studies in the History of Turkey,
Thirteenth–Fifteenth Centuries, ed. Colin Heywood (London, 2013). This edition also contains a
useful overview of debates. For responses to Wittek see the work of Lowry (n. 34); Kafadar, Between
Two Worlds; Rudi Paul Lindner, Nomads and Ottomans in Medieval Anatolia (Bloomington, 1983);
Linda T. Darling, ‘Reformulating the Gazi Narrative: When Was the Ottoman State a Gazi State?,’
Turcica 43 (2011): 13–53.
14 Introduction

Christian/Muslim enterprise, with unconverted Christians playing a formative

role. In this view, the Ottoman empire was itself in many ways a continuation of
Byzantium by other means, witnessed by the eventual adoption of Constantinople
as the imperial capital after its conquest in 1453.34 The conquest of parts of the
Balkans with their Christian populations, starting from the early fourteenth
century, most probably gave the early Ottoman state a character quite distinct
from the beyliks of Anatolia that existed on or on the peripheries of lands subject
to Muslim rule for over two centuries. Yet the nature of the early Ottoman state
remains opaque, in no small part owing to the lack of sources for the period before
c. 1400. Contemporary chronicles from the Ottomans and other beyliks do not
survive, nor is there much indication that other chronicles that have not come
down to us were written, although there are traces of an earlier oral Ottoman
historiographical tradition, which is partly preserved in histories that reached their
current form at the end of the fifteenth century.35 Nor are significant archival
records extant from this period, and there is very little evidence of any literary
activity in the early Ottoman beylik, which represented something of a cultural
backwater compared to Central Anatolia. As a result, research has focused on a
very limited source base: the extensive debates on Wittek’s famous ghazi thesis
have revolved around a single inscription, a brief passage from a poem by the
Turkish writer Ahmedi (d. 816/1413) and supplementary material from Ottoman
chronicles of the fifteenth century.
Scholarly interest in the early Ottoman state has rarely extended to the rest of
Muslim-ruled Anatolia in the period, a handful of studies seeking to understand
the Mongol influence on Ottoman institutions notwithstanding.36 Individual

34
Heath Lowry, The Nature of the Early Ottoman State (Albany, NY, 2003).
35
For an attempt to reconstruct the history of the early Ottoman state using a wide range of available
sources see Colin Imber, The Ottoman Empire, 1300–1481 (Istanbul, 1990). For a recent transla-
tion of an early Ottoman history from the fifteenth century see Dimitri J. Kastritsis (trans.), An
Early Ottoman History: The Oxford Anonymous Chronicle (Bodleian Library Ms Marsh 313) (Liver-
pool, 2017), and the comments on the early Ottoman historiographical tradition at ibid., 3–6, with
further references.
36
Joseph Fletcher, ‘Turco-Mongol Monarchical Tradition in the Ottoman Empire,’ Harvard Ukrain-
ian Studies 3 (1979–80): 236–51; Abdülkadir Yuvalı, ‘Osmanlı Müesseseleri Üzerindeki İlhanlı
Tesirleri’, Sosyal Bililmer Enstitüsü Dergisi 6 (1995): 249–54; Abdülkadir Yuvalı, ‘Influence des
Ilkhanats sur les institutions de l’Empire ottoman’, in Daniel Panzac (ed.), Histoire économique et
sociale de I’Empire ottoman et de la Turquie, (1326–1960): actes du sixième congrès international tenu
à Aix-en-Provence du ler au 4 juillet 1992 (Paris, 1995), 751–4; Nejat Göyünç, ‘Osmanlı Mal-
iyesinde İlhanlı Tesirleri’, in Amy Singer and Amnon Cohen (eds), Aspects of Ottoman History,
Papers from CIÉPO IX (Jerusalem, 1994), 162–6; Rudi Paul Lindner, ‘How Mongol Were the Early
Ottomans?’, in Reuven Amitai-Preiss and David Morgan (eds), The Mongol Empire and Its Legacy
(Leiden, 2000), 282–9; Cornell Fleischer, Bureaucrat and Intellectual in the Ottoman Empire: The
Historian Mustafa Ali, 1541–1600 (Princeton, 1968), 173–292; Darling, ‘Persianate Sources’ is
another useful preliminary attempt to understand the Ottomans against the Mongol background.
 Introduction 15

beyliks have often received monograph treatment in Turkish (very rarely in any
Western language), outlining their political history and principal monuments, but
these are seldom integrated into a broader study of Anatolia, meaning each beylik
is seen in isolation from the others.37 In more popular works, the Mongols are
routinely ignored. Despite the fact that some of the most iconic medieval
monuments of Anatolia were constructed by Ilkhanid patrons, such as the Çifte
Minareli Medrese at Sivas, in Turkish scholarship the Ilkhanid connection tends
to be played down and such monuments are subsumed under the catch-all terms
Seljuq or beylik, even if in reality they have little or no connection with either.38
Meanwhile, historians of the Mongols have generally given little attention to
Anatolia, despite a recent boom in studies of the Mongol empire, and the
Ilkhanate in particular.39 As a result, with a few notable exceptions, the period
of Mongol domination in Anatolia as a whole has been neglected in scholarship.40

See also on the Mongols in Ottoman historical writing: Baki Tezcan, ‘The Memory of the Mongols
in Early Ottoman Historiography’, in H. Erdem Çıpa and Emine Fetvacı (eds), Writing History at
the Ottoman Court: Editing the Past, Fashioning the Future (Bloomington, 2013), 23–38; Hiroyuki
Ogasawara, ‘Enter the Mongols: A Study of the Ottoman Historiography in the 15th and 16th
Centuries’, Osmanlı Araştırmaları 51 (2019): 1-28.
37
İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Anadolu Beylikleri ve Akkoyunlu, Karakoyunlu Devletleri (Ankara, 1937)
remains a standard survey; for studies of some of the major beyliks see for example Himmet Akın,
Aydınoğullari Tarihi hakkında bir Araştırma (Ankara, 1946); Mustafa Çetin Varlık, Germiyan-
oğulları Tarihi (1300–1429) (Ankara, 1974); Kemal Göde, Eratnalılar (1327–1381) (Ankara,
1994); a rare but pioneering work in a Western language is Paul Wittek, Das Fürstentum Mentesche,
Studie zur Geschichte Westkleinasiens im 13.–15. Jh (Istanbul, 1934); the studies of Elizabeth
Zachariadou are also useful: Trade and Crusade, Venetian Crete and the Emirates of Menteshe and
Aydin (1300–1415) (Venice, 1983), and her collected articles, Studies in Pre-Ottoman Turkey and
the Ottomans (Ashgate Variorum, 2007). In English an overview that emphasises the Ottoman role
is Rudi Paul Lindner, ‘Anatolia, 1300–1451’, in The Cambridge History of Turkey, vol. 1: Byzantium
to Turkey, ed. Kate Fleet (Cambridge, 2009), 102–37.
38
On Mongol-era architecture see Ethel Sara Wolper, Cities and Saints: Sufism and the Transformation
of Urban Space in Medieval Anatolia (University Park, PA, 2003); Patricia Blessing, Rebuilding
Anatolia after the Mongol Conquest: Islamic Architecture in the Lands of Rūm, 1240–1330
(Farnham, 2014).
39
Cf. the comments on scholarship in Melville, ‘Anatolia under the Mongols’, 51–2, and also
A. C. S. Peacock and Sara Nur Yıldız, ‘Introduction’, in Peacock and Yıldız (eds), The Seljuks of
Anatolia, 2–3. For samples of some of the recent scholarship on the Mongols see David Morgan,
The Mongols (London, 2007, 2nd ed.); Denise Aigle, The Mongol Empire between Myth and Reality:
Studies in Anthropological History (Leiden, 2015); Bruno De Nicola and Charles Melville (eds), The
Mongols’ Middle East: Continuity and Transformation in Ilkhanid Iran (Leiden, 2017); Peter
Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion (New Haven, 2017);
Timothy May, The Mongol Empire (Edinburgh, 2018).
40
The main studies are: Cahen, Pre-Ottoman Turkey, revised version published as Cahen, La Turquie
pré-ottomane, 227–347; Linda Darling, ‘Persianate Sources on Anatolia and the Early History of the
Ottomans’, Studies on Persianate Societies 2 (2004): 126–44; Muammer Gül, Doğu ve Güneydoğu
Anadolu’da Moğol Hakimiyeti (Istanbul, 2005); Ruqiyya Yusufi Halwa’i, Rawabit-i Siyasi-yi
16 Introduction

Given the focus of existing scholarship, it may seem perverse that Mongol-
controlled Central Anatolia is in fact by far the best attested region of the
peninsula in contemporary sources, much better than any beylik, including the
Ottomans. All our extant chronicles from before the fifteenth century come from
Central Anatolia and are in some way connected to Mongol rule. All too are in
Persian. In chronological order, they are: Ibn Bibi’s al-Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya, a
chronicle of the Seljuq dynasty in Anatolia written for the Ilkhanid bureaucrat
‘Ala’ al-Din Juwayni in or after 681/1282; a chronicle of Mongol rule in Anatolia,
the Musamarat al-Akhbar, written by the bureaucrat Aqsara’i for the Ilkhanid
governor Timurtash in 723/1323; a brief anonymous history of the Seljuqs,
compiled in Konya by various hands between the end of the thirteenth and the
mid-fourteenth century, one of the compilers of which was probably a member of
the retinue of the Ilkhan Geikhatu; and the biography of the ruler of Sivas and
successor to the Eretnid principality, Burhan al-Din Ahmad, the Bazm u Razm, by
‘Aziz b. Ardashir Astarabadi (d. 800/1398), which also gives much information
about the later Eretnids. Mention should also be made of an encyclopaedic work
produced by the qadi of the Central Anatolian town of Niğde in 733/1333, al-
Walad al-Shafiq, which contains historical information. This historiographical
tradition is well known to scholars, although only recently have efforts been made
to treat these works as more than mines of historical data, dates and facts, and to
understand the underlying political and legitimatory aims of their authors.41
The coverage provided by these chronicles is thus uneven, and the period
between the end of Aqsara’i’s Musamarat al-Akhbar in 723/1323 and the collapse
of the Eretnid state in 783/1381 is especially poorly documented. Their focus is

Salajiqa-yi Rum ba Ilkhanan (Tehran, 1381); Korobeinikov, Byzantium and the Turks, 170–216;
Melville, ‘Anatolia under the Mongols’; Faruk Sümer, ‘Anadolu’da Moğollar,’ Selçuklu Araştırma-
ları Dergisi 1 (1969): 1–147; Osman Turan, Selçuklular Zamanında Türkiye: Siyâsi tarih Alp
Arslan’dan Osman Gazi’ye (1071–1318) (Istanbul, 1971); Sara Nur Yıldız, ‘Mongol Rule in
Thirteenth Century Seljuk Anatolia: The Politics of Conquest and History Writing’, PhD thesis,
University of Chicago, 2006. An alternative approach to the period, which however largely avoids
political history, is Nicolas Trépanier, Foodways and Daily Life in Medieval Anatolia: A New Social
History (Austin, 2014).
41
See for example Charles Melville, ‘The Early Persian Historiography of Anatolia’, in Judith Pfeiffer
and Sholeh A. Quinn (eds), History and Historiography of Post-Mongol Central Asia and the Middle
East. Studies in Honor of John E. Woods (Wiesbaden, 2006), 135–66; A. C. S. Peacock, ‘Ahmad of
_
Niğde’s al-Walad al-Shafīq and the Seljuk Past’, Anatolian Studies 54 (2004): 95–107; Şevket
Küçükhüseyin, Selbst- und Fremdwahrnehmung im Prozess kultureller Transformation. Anatolische
Quellen über Muslime, Christen und Türken (13.–15. Jahrhundert) (Vienna, 2011); Yıldız, ‘Mongol
Rule in Thirteenth Century Seljuk Anatolia’; for an overview of historiographical works see Osman
G. Özgüdenli, ‘XII–XIV. Yüzyıllarda Anadolu’da Tarih Yazıcılığı’, in E. Uyumaz, A. Usta,
M. Kesik and C. Piyadeoğlu (eds), Prof. Dr. Erdoğan Merçil’e Armağan (75. Doğum Yılı) (İstanbul,
2013), 258–84.
 Introduction 17

almost exclusively on political history, meaning that the insights they offer into
broader processes of social change are limited. However, two Arabic sources by
outsiders provide valuable portraits of Anatolia in the mid-fourteenth century: the
relevant sections in the travel account of Ibn Battuta (d. 770/1368 or 779/1377)
previously mentioned and the work of an Egyptian chancery official, al-‘Umari
(d. 749/1349), the Masalik al-Absar, a vast encyclopaedia that includes a substan-
tial description of contemporary Anatolia based on reports of travellers.42 These
Arabic sources are especially important for the impression they give of the broader
organisation of society beyond the immediate political and military concerns of
the elite that form the focus of the Persian chronicles.
Despite the still substantial Christian population of Anatolia in our period,
there seems to have been little textual production in Greek within the Muslim-
ruled territories, perhaps because Greek literature was closely connected to court
patronage.43 Armenian and Syriac, on the other hand, continued to be widely
used as vehicles of literature, and indeed one of the most important historical
sources not just for Anatolia but for the region more broadly in the period is the
chronicle of the Syriac patriarch Bar Hebraeus (d. 1286), a native of Melitene/
Malatya, which, together with its continuation, is a valuable first-hand source for
the Mongol invasions and their aftermath.44 Texts were also produced in Arme-
nian, and both original works and the colophons of copies of manuscripts made in
the period can serve as valuable historical sources.45 Yet they are less useful for
understanding the internal dynamics of Muslim society, which form the subject of
this book; the same is true of the rich Greek literary tradition that continued to be
composed by Constantinople-based authors. Christian views of Muslims have
been studied by previous scholars, and their work will not be duplicated here.46

42
On these see A. Miquel, ‘Ibn Battūta’, EI2; K. S. Salibi, ‘al-‘Umarī’, EI2.
43 __ _
The topic of Greek manuscript production in Muslim-ruled Anatolia has not, it seems, received
much scholarly attention. See for now Sofia Kotzabassi, Βυζαντινά χειρόγραφα από τα μοναστήρια
της Μικράς Ασίας (Athens, 2004). I am grateful to Rustam Shukurov for this reference and for
discussion of this point.
44
Bar Hebraeus, The Chronography of Gregory Abu’l-Faraj . . . Known as Bar Hebraeus, trans. E. A.
Wallis Budge (London, 1936), and on the author see (listed under the Arabic version of his name),
J. B. Segal, ‘Ibn al-‘Ibrī’, EI2.
45
For an impression of Armenian cultural life see Cowe, ‘Patterns of Armeno-Muslim Interchange’;
for Armenian manuscripts and their colophons see Avedis K. Sanjian, Colophons of Armenian
Manuscripts, 1301–1480: A Source for Middle Eastern History (Cambridge, MA, 1969).
46
A useful reference point for such works that also extends far beyond Anatolia is David Thomas
(ed.), Christian–Muslim Relations. A Bibliographical History. Volume 4 (1200–1350) (Leiden, 2012);
for Christian views of Muslims in Anatolia see Balivet, Romanie byzantine; Alexander
D. Beihammer, ‘Christian Views of Islam in Early Seljuq Anatolia: Perceptions and Reactions’,
in Peacock, De Nicola and Yıldız, Islam and Christianity in Medieval Anatolia, 51–75; Roderick
18 Introduction

ISLAMIC RELIGIOUS AND INTELLECTUAL HISTORY

IN MEDIEVAL ANATOLIA

While several previous studies have attempted to address the vexed question of
Christian conversion to Islam in this period, and the broader Islamisation of
Anatolia, these have largely been undertaken on the basis of the Christian sources
by scholars of Byzantium. The seminal work on the process of Islamisation
remains the great if problematic study by Speros Vryonis, first published in
1971, The Decline of Hellenism in Asia Minor and the Process of Islamization.
Vryonis’s work represents a highly ambitious attempt to understand the entire
period from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, yet Vryonis relied predomin-
antly on Christian sources and the relatively few Islamic ones available to him in
translations into modern Turkish or Western languages. The book does what its
title proclaims: the process of Islamisation is seen through the prism of the end of
Greek civilisation in Anatolia, and destruction, violence and forced conversion
feature prominently in its account of the transformations of the period. As a
result, while providing a wealth of information, it presents a perspective deter-
mined by this lamentation for a lost Greek Christian Anatolia.
Much less attention has been devoted to the profound changes in Muslim
society and culture during the same period, and in 2009 the leading Turkish
scholar of Anatolian Sufism, Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, remarked that almost no new
research has been carried out on the history of Islam in Anatolia since the famous
article by the pioneering Turkish nationalist scholar Mehmet Fuat Köprülü,
‘Islam in Anatolia after the Turkish conquest’, first published in 1922.47 While
this is something of an exaggeration, Ocak himself having provided some valuable
studies of aspects of Sufism in the period, the broad picture remains correct, for
the field is still dominated by many of Köprülü’s ideas. Alongside the aforemen-
tioned 1922 article, Köprülü’s Early Mystics in Turkish Literature, which came out
in 1918, shaped perceptions of the development of Islam in the region through-
out the twentieth century. In both these works, Köprülü argued that the study of
Islam in Anatolia must concentrate on the authentically Turkish elements that he
believed could be detected among the Turkmen (i.e. the nomadic Turks), who
‘constitute the most important object of study in the religious history of Anatolia’.
Köprülü saw the Turkmen babas (Sufi leaders) as ‘Islamized versions of the old
Turkish kam/ozan [shaman]’ who ‘directed the religious life of the active and

Grierson, ‘“We Believe in Your Prophet”; Rumi, Palamas, and the Conversion of Anatolia’,
Mawlana Rumi Review 2 (2011): 96–124.
47
Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, ‘Social, Cultural and Intellectual Life, 1071–1453’, in The Cambridge History of
Turkey, vol. 1: Byzantium to Turkey, ed. Kate Fleet (Cambridge, 2009), 380.
 Introduction 19

warlike Turkmen’ and were ‘preoccupied with holy war’.48 Köprülü contrasts
these heroic and militant Turkmen babas who ‘spread Islam in the lands of
unbelief’ with the ‘Arab and Persian Sufis, who spent quiet and contemplative
lives secluded in lodges’. In places, Köprülü seems strongly to disapprove of this
‘Arab and Persian’ Sufism, which he viewed as tantamount to Shiism.49 The idea
of Turkish Sufis playing a crucial role in the formation of a Turkish identity
expressed in the Turkish language, an identity that was translated from the Turks’
place of origin in Central Asia to Anatolia, was developed at greater length in his
Early Mystics, which also emphasised the role of this literature in the spread of
Islam. At the same time, Köprülü argued that Turkish Sufi literature, inspired by
the eleventh- or twelfth-century Central Asian poet-saint Ahmad Yasavi to whom
he attributed a crucial role in the original conversion of the Turks, ‘is so
characteristically Turkish that nothing like it is found among the Arabs and
Persians’.50 These Central Asian and shamanistic elements, he argued, underlie
Alevism/Bektashism, the form of Sufism infused with Shiite elements that
Köprülü saw as the main form of a ‘popular’ and ‘Turkish’ Islam in Anatolia.51
Köprülü’s emphasis on a distinction between a ‘popular’ religiosity and a
Persianate one of the towns was adopted by much subsequent scholarship,
including the works of Ahmet Yaşar Ocak,52 and Irène Mélikoff,53 albeit without
the nationalist undertones, and it remains prominent in some contemporary
scholarship, especially that of Ahmet Karamustafa, who has investigated what he
calls ‘vernacular Islam’ in medieval Anatolia.54 Köprülü’s description of the
militant Turkmen babas also brings to mind Paul Wittek’s formulation a few
years later of the ghazi ethos of the early Ottoman state, which was similarly based

48
Köprülü, Islam in Anatolia after the Turkish Conquest, 6, 27 ‘the Sufi movement’s introduction of
the spirit of Shiism. . .’
49
Ibid., 6.
50
Mehmet Fuat Köprülü, Early Mystics in Turkish Literature, trans. Gary Leiser and Robert Dankoff
(London, 2006), liii.
51
Mehmet Fuat Köprülü, ‘Bektaşiliǧin Menşeleri’, Türk Yurdu 16/2, May 1925, 131–6; repr. 9,
2001, 68–76, cited and discussed in Ayfer Karakaya-Stump, ‘The Wafā‘iyya, the Bektashiyye and
Genealogies of “Heterodox” Islam in Anatolia: Rethinking the Köprülü Paradigm’, Turcica 44
(2012–13): 280ff.
52
For example A. Yaşar Ocak, La Revolte de Baba Resūl, ou la formation de l’heterodoxie musulmane en
Anatolie au XIIIe siècle (Ankara, 1989).
53
See for example Irène Mélikoff, Hadji Bektach, un mythe et ses avatars: genèse et évolution du soufisme
populaire en Turquie (Leiden, 1998), and her essays collected in Sur les traces du soufisme turc:
recherches sur l’Islam populaire en Anatolie (Istanbul, 1992).
54
Ahmet Karamustafa, ‘Kaygusuz Abdal: A Medieval Turkish Saint and the Formation of Vernacular
Islam in Anatolia’, in Orkhan Mir-Kasimov (ed.), Unity in Diversity: Mysticism, Messianism and the
Construction of Religious Authority in Islam (Leiden, 2014), 330–1.
20 Introduction

on ideas of ethnically determined militarism.55 Vryonis concurred that the

militant proselytization of Sufis played a crucial role in the process of Islamisa-
tion.56 Likewise, Köprülü’s argument that the incorporation of pre-Islamic modes
of religiosity played an essential part in the Turkmen’s own Islamisation was also
influential in the widespread conceptualisation of Islam in Anatolia as highly
syncretic, and was reinforced by the research of F. W. Hasluck that appeared in
the same period, emphasising the shared shrines and popular religious beliefs of
Muslims and Christians in medieval Anatolia.57 Syncretism could thus account
for both the pagan Turks’ embrace of a militant Islam based on holy war, and at
the same time the emergence of a society characterised by intercommunal har-
mony. Cemal Kafadar attempted to square this circle in his study of debates
around the emergence of the Ottoman state, Between Two Worlds, arguing that
The people of the marches did not see a contradiction between striving to expand their
faith and engaging in conciliatory (not necessarily insincere) gestures towards members of
the other faith . . . Very probably they were aware of the wonders that syncretism could
work.58

Many of Köprülü’s ideas have been challenged of late.59 Ahmet Karamustafa and
Ayfer Karakaya-Stump have criticised the idea of a Central Asian origin of
Anatolian Sufism,60 while Devin DeWeese has reassessed Ahmad Yasavi’s own
role in the Islamisation of the Turks, demolishing one of Köprülü’s major
assumptions.61 The idea of a dichotomy between urban and rural, popular and
elite religiosity has been argued to be simplistic by some scholars, and it should in
fairness be noted that Köprülü did himself underline that one of the main heroes

55
On the relationship between these two scholars, see Rudi Paul Lindner, ‘Wittek and Köprülü’,
Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 26 (2016): 333–40.
56
Vryonis, Decline, 363–96.
57
F. W. Hasluck, Islam and Christianity under the Sultans (Oxford, 1929); and see the critique of this
by Tijana Krstić, ‘The Ambiguous Politics of “Ambiguous Sanctuaries”: F. Hasluck and Historiog-
raphy on Syncretism and Conversion to Islam in 15th- and 16th-century Ottoman Rumeli’, in
David Shankland (ed.), Archaeology, Anthropology and Heritage in the Balkans and Anatolia: The Life
and Times of F. W. Hasluck (Istanbul, 2013), III, 245–62. For another example of the prominence
of syncretism in contemporary scholarship see the essays collected in Gilles Veinstein (ed.),
Syncrétismes et héresies dans l’Orient seljoukide et ottoman (XIVe–XVIIIe siècle) (Turnhout, 2005).
58
Kafadar, Between Two Worlds, 72.
59
For an overview of responses see A. C. S. Peacock, Bruno De Nicola and Sara Nur Yıldız,
‘Introduction’, in Peacock, De Nicola and Sara Nur Yıldız (eds), Islam and Christianity, 1–20.
60
Karakaya-Stump, ‘The Wafā‘iyya, the Bektashiyye and Genealogies of “Heterodox” Islam in
Anatolia’; Ahmet T. Karamustafa, ‘Origins of Anatolian Sufism’, in Ahmet Yaşar Ocak (ed.), Sufis
and Sufism in Ottoman Society (Ankara, 2005), 78–84.
61
Devin DeWeese, ‘Khwaja Ahmad Yasavi as an Islamising Saint: Rethinking the Role of Sufis in the
Islamisation of the Turks of Central Asia’, in Peacock (ed.), Islamisation: Comparative Perspectives,
336–52.
 Introduction 21

of Early Mystics, the (probably) fourteenth-century Turkish poet Yunus Emre, was
also influenced by the Persianate Sufi culture around him, in particular Jalal
al-Din Rumi.62 Syncretism, too, has been challenged as an explanatory device
by a number of scholars from different perspectives. Reuven Amitai has argued on
the basis of studies of other parts of the Mongol empire that there was in fact little
similarity between the Sufi saint and the shaman (the latter itself a problematic
category),63 and Tijana Krstić, who has studied the process of Islamisation in
fifteenth- to sixteenth-century Anatolia and the Balkans, has argued that ideas of
syncretism or heterodoxy are misleading. In fact, Krstić sees shared religious
spaces as places of religious negotiation and dispute, not necessarily conciliation,
and argues that historians need to take account of the ‘politics’ of religious
synthesis and that many medieval Turkish texts demonstrate ‘ideological invest-
ment in a firm upholding of religious boundaries’.64 Nonetheless, syncretism
remains a dominant idea in studies of medieval Anatolia, and underlies the highly
influential analysis propounded by Kafadar, which it is worth quoting in full,
standing in sharp contrast as it does to Ibn Battuta’s perception of the ‘orthodoxy’
of Anatolia:
The religious picture of Anatolia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries appears to be
much more complex than the neat categorizations of a simple Sunni/Shi‘i dichotomy
would allow. In this context even if one were able to identify some particular item of faith
as heterodox, this would not necessarily imply “Shi‘i” as it is usually assumed; questions of
orthodoxy and heterodoxy, even if they are meaningful, should not be formulated along the
lines of a Sunni/Shi‘i sectarianism . . . Maybe the religious history of Anatolian and Balkan
Muslims living in the frontier areas of the period from the eleventh to the fifteenth
centuries should be conceptualized in part in terms of a ‘metadoxy,’ a state of being beyond
doxies, a combination of being doxy-naive and not being doxy-minded, as well as the
absence of a state that was interested in rigorously defining and strictly enforcing an
orthodoxy.65

In recent years, some scholars have become increasingly uncomfortable in framing

the debate in such terms. The whole notion of ‘orthodoxy’ is problematic in
Islam, given the lack of an authority to define or enforce it, and the lack of a single
lexical equivalent in Arabic or other languages used by pre-modern Muslims. It

62
Köprülü, Early Mystics, 309–12, 305, 320. For the dates of Yunus Emre, see p. 158 below.
63
Reuven Amitai-Preiss, ‘Sufis and Shamans: Some Remarks on the Islamization of the Mongols in
the Ilkhanate’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 42 (1999): 27–46.
64
Krstić, ‘Ambiguous Politics’, 256; another useful critique of syncretism and heterodoxy is given in
Ines Aščerić-Todd, Dervishes and Islam in Bosnia: Sufi Dimensions to the Formation of Bosnian
Muslim Society (Leiden, 2015), 23ff.
65
Kafadar, Between Two Worlds, 76.
22 Introduction

has even been argued that Islam only prescribes practice, not belief.66 In its place,
in studies of Anatolia the term ‘Sunnitisation’ or even ‘confessionalisation’ is
sometimes preferred, although these processes are commonly argued only to set
in with an increasing willingness on the part of the Ottoman empire to define and
prescribe religious beliefs in the sixteenth century, a phenomenon which is argued
to parallel the Reformation in Europe.67 Nonetheless, if orthodoxy may be in the
eye of the beholder, Ibn Battuta’s response to the religious environment in
medieval Anatolia suggests that at least in the view of this contemporary there
was a clear distinction between both right and wrong belief and practice, and such
concerns were shared by Anatolian rulers and people.
A recent discussion has suggested that ‘the Sunni enthusiasts encountered by
Ibn Battuta were acting more out of an uninformed zeal than out of sound
knowledge of Sunni Islam’.68 While, as noted above, Ibn Battuta’s perceptions
were doubtless in some way influenced by his pious agenda and religious back-
ground, such a statement, for the moment, remains unproven, for we lack
sufficient research on the history of Islam in Anatolia to even start to hypothesise
about the characteristics of the faith in the peninsula. Such studies as do exist are
often determined by an emphasis on the Ottomans and Turkish sources, and a
narrow focus on Anatolia that often fails to take account of the broader Middle
Eastern and Islamic environment in which the peninsula was located. Even
beyond the strictly political field, studies often take as their starting point the
emergence of the Ottoman state in c. 1300 and remain resolutely focused on
the Ottoman context, such as a recent (and valuable) examination of the rise of
the ulama.69 Yet religious, cultural and political change did not necessarily occur
in synchrony, and taking c. 1300 as a starting point can obscure the nature of
developments outside the political arena. Furthermore, despite their undoubted

66
See the discussion in McGregor, ‘The Problem of Sufism’, with further references; also Yıldırım,
‘Sunni Orthodox vs Shi‘ite Heterodox?’.
67
See the discussion in Derin Terzioğlu, ‘How to Conceptualize Ottoman Sunnitization:
A Historiographical Discussion’, Turcica 44 (2012–13): 301–38; also Derin Terzioğlu, ‘Where
ʻİlm-i Ḥāl Meets Catechism: Islamic Manuals of Religious Instruction in the Ottoman Empire in
the Age of Confessionalization’, Past and Present 220 (2013): 79–114, for example p. 112: ‘This
turn to a more shariah-grounded, this-world-oriented and austere Islamic piety among the Ottoman
Muslim urbanites after the sixteenth century can be profitably compared with certain aspects of the
transformation of Christian religiosity in Western Europe. In particular, the shift from a more
‘magical’ to a more rules-and-regulations-oriented mode of religiosity among early modern Western
Christians would seem to have had a close parallel among their Ottoman neighbours.’
68
Terzioğlu, ‘How to Conceptualize Ottoman Sunnitization’, 308.
69
Abdurrahman Atçıl, Scholars and Sultans in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Cambridge, 2016).
The Ottomanocentrism can be observed in some other important works dealing with the topic, e.g.
Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Marjinal Sufilik: Kalenderiler (XIV–XVII. Yüzyıllar)
(Ankara, 1992).
 Introduction 23

importance, the relatively few studies that have sought to address the religious
situation in Anatolia in the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries – predominantly the
works of Ocak, Mélikoff, Şevket Küçükhüseyin and Rıza Yıldırım – tend to rely
on a small corpus of sources, usually in Turkish, mainly later hagiographies of
earlier Sufis and popular romances such as the Battalname, written down in its
current form in the fifteenth century.70 The utility of such sources for our period
is questionable. For instance, according to tradition, Hacı Bektaş, the founder of
the Bektashi order, and a crucial figure in the development of Alevism, lived in the
period, dying, according to the conventional date, in 1271.71 However, we
actually possess no references to him of the period beyond passing allusions in
works of the hagiographer Aflaki (d. 761/1360) and his contemporary Elvan
Çelebi, which do at least affirm his historicity. The reports of his activities in
the fifteenth-century Vilayetname, the main hagiography, reflect the preoccupa-
tions of a later age and offer a mythologised presentation of the saint, which
cannot be balanced against any contemporary evidence. Such cases could be
multiplied, for there is a tendency to overemphasise this Turkish language
material of later date at the expense of contemporary Arabic and Persian materials,
aside from the published chronicles and Aflaki’s well-known hagiography of Rumi
and his descendants, the Manaqib al-‘Arifin. This is understandable, as much
more Turkish material has been published, albeit largely for its philological
interest, while the bulk of the contemporary Arabic and Persian material remains
in manuscript, scattered across different libraries and inadequately documented in
their catalogues and other reference works. Yet relying on the distorting lens of
later texts may detract from our understanding of the period. In addition, owing
to the excessive interest in detecting ‘heterodoxy’, scholarship has concentrated on
rather marginal groups such as radically antinomian Sufis who rejected the need to
adhere to the external forms of sharia.72 Both the importance and the ‘heterodoxy’
of such groups has sometimes been exaggerated.73
Another problematic facet of existing scholarship is the tendency to conceptu-
alise Islam in Anatolia in our period in terms that emphasise its distinctiveness
from that of the surrounding region, as is suggested by the quote from Kafadar

70
See nn. 49–50 above and Küçükhüseyin, Selbst- und Fremdwahrnehmung; Yıldırım, ‘Sunni Ortho-
dox vs Shi‘ite Heterodox?’.
71
On him see Irène Mélikoff, Hadji Bektach, un mythe et ses avatars: genèse et évolution du soufisme
populaire en Turquie (Leiden, 1998).
72
Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Marjinal Sufilik: Kalenderiler (XIV–XVII. Yüzyıllar)
(Ankara, 1992); Ahmet T. Karamustafa, God’s Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups in the Islamic Later
Middle Period, 1200–1550 (Salt Lake City, 1992).
73
For comments on the overemphasis on the importance of the Qalandars see Karamustafa,
‘Origins’, 88.
24 Introduction

given above. In reality some of the blurred boundaries he identifies are to be found
more generally in Islam in this period. For instance, the tendency of certain
Sunnis to sympathise with Shiite practices and even beliefs (known as tashayyu‘
hasan) is a feature of Islam in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries that can be
_
observed elsewhere in Iran, Central Asia and the Levant. Figures key to Shiism
such as the imams ‘Ali b. Abi Talib and Ja‘far al-Sadiq played a role in all circles of
Muslim believers as gates to the ‘unseen world’(‘ālam al-ghayb), the supernatural
world belief in which was almost universal.74 Whether or not this deserves to be
labelled tashayyu‘ of any kind seems doubtful; but there is certainly firm evidence
of the enduring attachment to these figures that some modern scholarship
associates with Shiism long after the so-called Ottoman ‘Sunnitisation’ had set
in during the sixteenth century.75 At the same time, as we shall discuss in
Chapter 4, there seems to be evidence of a distinct Shiite presence in medieval
Anatolia that was, to contemporary Sunnis, a theologically deviant path quite
separate from such popular manifestations of Alid piety that could be accommo-
dated within Sunnism.
The growing role of Sufism was also far from being a specifically Anatolian
phenomenon; as Nile Green has observed, Sufism was more or less Islam in the
medieval period.76 Although certainly Sufism possesses a rich textual tradition, its
essence is a believer’s search for personal contact with the divine mediated through
the intercession of a holy man. As Azfar Moin has explained, it was through the
sacred presences of holy men, ‘whether alive in physical form, active in enshrined
graves, apparent in dreams, or resurrected in blood descendants and anointed
ancestors’ that Islam was experienced by most believers.77 The major social,
political and religious role played by Sufism in medieval Anatolia thus suggests
the region’s integration into the broader Islamic world, where the same phenom-
enon was equally widespread. Even the radically antinomian Sufis who have
attracted much comment were far from being an exclusively Anatolian
phenomenon.

74
See for example Ja‘far al-Sadiq quoted as a source in an astrological calendar made for the Eretnid
court in Sivas in 772/1373: Süleymaniye, MS Nuruosmaniye 2782, fol. 25. On ‘Ali b. Abi Talib
see Mohammad Masad, ‘The Medieval Islamic Apocalyptic Tradition: Divination, Prophecy and
the End of Time in the 13th Century Eastern Mediterranean’, Unpublished PhD dissertation,
University of Washington, 2008, 118–46.
75
Vefa Erginbaş, ‘Problematizing Ottoman Sunnitization: Appropriation of Islamic History and Ahl
al-Baytism in Ottoman Literary and Historical Writing in the Sixteenth Century’, Journal of the
Economic and Social History of the Orient 70 (2016): 614–46.
76
Green, Sufism, 126.
77
A. Azfar Moin, The Millennial Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (New York,
2012), 10.
 Introduction 25

Where Anatolia may appear to differ from the neighbouring Muslim world in
the paltry evidence for a class of ‘ulama’, the religious scholars who constituted the
backbone of society and intellectual life in centres such as Damascus, Cairo and
Tabriz.78 As Claude Cahen commented, the ‘ālim in Anatolia generally died
unnoticed by his peers, whereas the lives of his counterparts in the centres of
the Muslim world were lovingly documented in detailed biographies and obituar-
ies either as independent works (tabaqāt) or inserted into chronicles.79 For
_
Anatolia, there is no attempt to chronicle the lives of the ‘ulama’ before the
biographical dictionary of Taşköprizade (d. 968/1561), al-Shaqa’iq al-Nu‘ma-
niyya, produced at the height of the Ottoman imperial age, and which attempts
to associate early scholars with the founders of the Ottoman imperial venture.80
Nonetheless, Taşköprizade’s coverage of the fourteenth century is very scanty, in
part doubtless owing to the lack of earlier sources on which he could draw. Yet it
is questionable whether the lack of this specific type of textual source can really
lead us to assert the complete absence of a class of ‘ulama’. Ṭabaqāt seems to have
emerged as a means of distinguishing between those scholars ‘who had the
necessary qualifications to be authoritative, and those who did not. The motiv-
ation behind tabaqāt works was the empowerment of certain groups of scholars to
_
the exclusion of others.’81 It has also been argued that these biographical diction-
aries served as a sort of ‘social capital’ through which the intellectual elites of, for
example, Damascus asserted their status.82 The absence, then, of biographical
dictionaries of scholars from Anatolia may not reflect so much the complete lack
of such scholars, as Cahen and others have believed, but rather the different social
structures in which competition for rank, position and authority were articulated
in different ways, for example through the conflicts between rival Sufi groups that
are well attested in our sources, as will be discussed in Chapters 2 and 3. Certainly,
provincial ‘ulama’ from Central Anatolia are attested through some of the literary
works they have left us, such as the Persian encyclopaedia by Qadi Ahmad of
Niğde, or the jurist Muhsin al-Qaysari who composed several Arabic works on

78
See for example Terzioğlu, ‘How to Conceptualize Ottoman Sunnitization’, 308: Islam ‘was
initially represented more by antinomian wandering dervishes than by madrasa-trained scholars’;
also Atçıl, Scholars and Sultans, chapter 1.
79
Cahen, La Turquie, 211.
80
On the author see Yusuf Şevki Yavuz, ‘Taşköprizade Ahmed Efendi’, TDVİA 40, 149–50.
81
George Makdisi, ‘“Ṭabaqāt” Biography: Law and Authority in Classical Islam’, Islamic Studies 32/4
(1992): 392; also on the biographical dictionaries, noting their revival in other regions in the
Mongol period see R. Kevin Jaques, Authority, Conflict, and the Transmission of Diversity in
Medieval Islamic Law (Leiden, 2006), esp. 17–22.
82
Michael Chamberlain, Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190–1350 (Cam-
bridge, 1994), esp. 18–20.
26 Introduction

inheritance law in early fourteenth-century Kayseri.83 However, rather than

looking for the ‘ulama’, about whom the sources are so reticent, it makes more
sense to focus on the texts themselves that have survived from our period, of
which an enormous number in Arabic, Persian and Turkish have come down to
us.84 These can help us understand the relationship of Islam in Anatolia to
broader trends in the Islamic world as well as in its own right.
Apart from the handful of chronicles discussed above, which represent a rare
form of secular courtly literature, the surviving texts that can be securely dated to
our period comprise a predominantly religious literature dealing with diverse
topics such as eschatology, stories of saints, hadith, belief (‘aqā’id) and Sufi texts,
quite apart from the well-known hagiographies such as Aflaki’s Manaqib. Most of
these works are didactic in intent, but it would be erroneous to exclude such
works from a definition of pre-modern literature, which I use here to mean all
texts composed without an immediate documentary or administrative purpose
(such as tax documents or royal decrees). Much of this remains unpublished in
manuscript form, with a handful of notable exceptions such as the works of Jalal
al-Din Rumi and his son Sultan Walad, Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi, or Yunus
Emre.85 Even studies of these figures, who are of major importance in the history
of Islamic literature and thought, tend to lack adequate historical contextual-
isation in the light of texts produced by their contemporaries, and thus our
understanding of the broader religious and literary environment of the region
remains limited. In this book, therefore, I make use of selections from this vast
and barely known corpus of lesser-known texts that can be reasonably securely
dated to our period and which itself constitutes a vital source for the religious and
intellectual history of Anatolia. As Norman Calder has argued, the corpus of

83
See p. 00.
84
For a survey of scholarship on the literature of the period see A. C. S. Peacock and Sara Nur Yıldız,
‘Introduction: Literature, Language and History in Late Medieval Anatolia’, in Peacock and Yıldız
(eds), Islamic Literature and Intellectual Life, 19–45. There is no adequate survey of Arabic literary
production in medieval Anatolia. For Persian, a useful if far from complete introduction is
Muhammad Amin Riyahi, Zaban wa Adabiyat-i Farsi dar Qalamraw-i ‘Uthmani (Tehran, 1990);
Turkish trans. Osmanlı Topraklarında Fars Dili ve Edebiyat (Istanbul, 1995); see also Ahmed Ateş,
‘Hicri VI.–VIII. Asırlarda Anadolu’da Farsça Eserler’, Türkiyat Mecmuası 7–8 (1945): 94–135. For
Turkish a useful introduction is Gönül Tekin, ‘Turkish Literature: Thirteenth to Fifteenth
Centuries’, in H. İnalcık and G. Renda (eds), Ottoman Civilization, vol. 2 (Istanbul 2003),
496–567. A database of texts in all three languages produced during the period can be consulted
at http://www.islam-anatolia.ac.uk.
85
There is a huge literature on Rumi, very little of which takes serious account of the Anatolian
context. The best starting place remains Franklin D. Lewis, Rumi, Past and Present, East and West
(Oxford, 2007, 2nd ed.); for al-Qunawi see Richard Todd, The Sufi Doctrine of Man: The
Metaphysical Anthropology of Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi (Leiden, 2014); on Yunus Emre see Abdülbaki
Gölpınarlı, Yunus Emre ve Tasavvuf (Istanbul 1992 [2nd ed.]).
 Introduction 27

religious texts dealing with themes such as qisas al-anbiyā’, hadith, Qur’an, tafsir
_ _
and kalām is itself the pre-eminent repository of what it means to be ‘orthodox’.86
Without necessarily subscribing completely to Calder’s definition of the Sunni
literary corpus that defines orthodoxy, which I believe underestimates the import-
ance of Sufism at least for our place and period and perhaps gives undue
prominence to kalām, or indeed to the notion of ‘orthodoxy’ itself in an Islamic
context, it is clear that without examining what people were actually reading and
writing, rather than later depictions in hagiographies, any attempt to assess the
nature of Islam in Anatolia is flawed.
Such literature of course presents problems of interpretation, but also oppor-
tunities. Treatises on topics such as sainthood or jihad present an ideal, not a
reality, but their contents can give an insight into the changing roles and
representations of Sufis. From the fourteenth century, for instance, motifs of
conversion become widespread in Sufi literature, as we can observe in the vita of
Rumi by Aflaki.87 To what extent this actually reflects an active role by these
saints in promoting conversion to Islam is another question, for Rumi’s own
works do not indicate this was a particular concern of his; but they certainly do
reflect an atmosphere in which conversion to Islam was become increasingly
widespread, and a role in conversion narratives served as a symbolic proof of the
validity of a saint’s claims. Similarly, as will be discussed in Chapter 5, the
eschatological literature, discussing what the believer needs to do to enter paradise,
shows a distinct evolution over time, the bar being set increasingly high and thus
reflecting greater expectations of the knowledge of Islam on the part of the average
Muslim. This religious literature thus both contributed to and reflects the process
of Islamisation, as well as the broader religious environment. Sufism will play a
substantial part in this discussion, as Sufi texts represent some of the most widely
circulated forms of literature in medieval Anatolia, and Sufis play an active role in
all parts of social and political life, as we shall see. Despite Sufis’ prominence here,
this is not a book about the theories of Sufism per se but rather the ways in which
politics, religion, society and textual production were interlinked, and how
developments in one area could affect the others.
The book comprises two parts. Part One, ‘Religion, Politics and Society’,
examines the ways in politics and religion were intertwined in medieval Anatolia.
Chapter 1, after laying out the political and intellectual background to the

86
Norman Calder, ‘The Limits of Islamic Orthodoxy’, in Farhad Daftary (ed.), Intellectual Traditions
in Islam (London, 2000), 66–86.
87
Vryonis, Decline, 384–92; Küçükhüseyin, Selbst- und Fremdwahrnehmung, 340–2; John Dechant,
‘Depictions of the Islamization of the Mongols in the Manāqib al-‘ārifīn and the Foundation of the
Mawlawī Community‘, Mawlana Rumi Review 2 (2011): 135–64.
28 Introduction

formation of Islamic culture and society in Anatolia up to the fourteenth century,

focuses on the ways in which both Mongols and Turkmen chiefs faced a crisis of
political legitimacy with the fall of the Seljuqs, and argues that one major response
was the adoption of a newly aggressive religious stance, centred around a rhetoric
of unbelief, which was absent in earlier times. The following two chapters discuss
the ways in which political elites sought to shore up their authority by patronising
both elite and popular Sufism. Chapter 2 explores how Sufism and political power
were closely linked by examining the relationship with rulers of prominent Sufis
such as Jalal al-Din Rumi, his son Sultan Walad and the descendants of Baba
İlyas, the thirteenth-century rebel who some sources claim sought the sultanate for
himself. The chapter shows how Sufism could both support and challenge
political elites. Chapter 3 studies one of the most influential forms of religious
expression that rise to prominence in Mongol Anatolia, Sufi brotherhoods known
as futuwwa. The chapter argues that these brotherhoods were nurtured by political
elites, including the Mongols, for whom their leaders acted as de facto local
governors. At the same time the growing political and economic importance of
futuwwa won it further adherents, and seems to have sparked both imitations
among Anatolia’s Christian communities and to have acted as an incentive to
convert.
The rise of Sufism as a social force is reflected in the production of a large
number of Sufi texts, which, from the Mongol period, become increasingly
written in Turkish, the new vernacular literary language of Anatolia that emerged
at this time. Part Two examines the new literary production of Mongol Anatolia
and the ways in which it reflects the religious and political changes of the period.
Chapter 4 considers the emergence of Turkish as a literary language over the late
thirteenth to fourteenth centuries in its political and social context; this process
allowed the emergence of a vernacular literature that inculcated the basics of Islam
and in particular stimulated a cultural environment that was hostile to unbelief
and promoted a culture of jihad, as is argued in Chapter 5. Chapter 6 considers
the impact of the rising interest in apocalypticism among Muslims in Mongol
Anatolia, arguing that this should not, as has generally been done, be viewed as an
expression of a popular Shiite religiosity, but rather as an expression of an elite
Sunnism. Apocalypticism, which highlighted the requirement for true sharia law
to be imposed as one of the signs of the approaching end, further promoted a
Sunni religiosity that was hostile to non-Muslims. In short, I hope to show how
Mongol domination unleashed a complex sequence of reactions in various areas of
society – language, literature and religion – that contributed towards Anatolia
becoming a distinctly less welcoming place for its Christian population, precipi-
tating a much deeper degree of Islamisation of the peninsula than had been the
case under Seljuq rule.
Part I

Religion, Politics and Society

 1

The Formation of Islamic Anatolia

Crises of Legitimacy and the Struggle against Unbelief

Over the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, Anatolia, previously a peripheral and
isolated part of the dār al-Islām, started to resemble more closely its Muslim
neighbours, as its Muslim population grew and its infrastructure of buildings such
as mosques, madrasas and zāwiyas (Sufi lodges) developed. Although the founda-
tions for this development were laid under the Seljuqs, paradoxically, this process of
Islamisation in Anatolia was deepened and extended under non-Muslim rule. With
the hegemony of the pagan Mongols, many of the architectural and literary
achievements that subsequently came to represent the apogee of Seljuq rule were
undertaken, and investments by members of the Mongol bureaucracy and army as
well as their allies in the puppet Seljuq administration transformed the face of
Anatolian cities. Simultaneously, the Mongols were themselves subject to a parallel
process of Islamisation, as Islam spread among the Mongol soldiery and upwards,
until the Ilkhan Ghazan himself converted at the end of the thirteenth century.
Precisely at this juncture, Anatolia began to become detached from the political
orbit of the Ilkhanate, although culturally and economically it remained closely
bound up with it, and the domination of Central Anatolia by a dynasty founded by
a former Mongol commander, Eretna, continued until 783/1381. Towards the end
of the fourteenth century, Anatolia’s political landscape changed as the Ottomans
made substantial advances into Central Anatolia, even if these were temporarily set
back by their defeat by the Central Asian conqueror Timur at the Battle of Ankara
in 804/1402. In this chapter I offer an overview of the Mongol impact on Anatolia,
paying particular attention to two developments that were to be decisive in shaping
the intellectual landscape of the fourteenth century – the crisis of political legitimacy
that Mongol rule precipitated and the introduction of a new political vocabulary
based around the jihad against unbelief, which seems to have emerged in the
context of Mongol rule. To assess the transformative impact of Mongol rule, it is

31
32 Religion, Politics and Society

vital to understand what was there beforehand. I therefore start with a brief overview
of political and intellectual life in Anatolia in the pre-Mongol period.

ANATOLIA UNDER THE SELJUQS: THE EMERGENCE

OF AN ISLAMIC SOCIETY

The beginnings of Muslim rule in Anatolia are conventionally dated to the Battle
of Manzikert in 463/1071 at which the forces of the Great Seljuq sultan Alp
Arslan, ruler of Iran, Iraq and Central Asia, defeated the Byzantine Emperor
Romanus IV Diogenes.1 For decades before the conquest, however, Turkish
nomads originating from Central Asia had been penetrating and raiding far into
Anatolia, which provided them with an ecology particularly suitable for their
pastoralist lifestyle, in contrast to the aridity of much of the rest of the Middle
East. This process of westwards migration by the Turks, which is scarcely
documented in the sources, was gradual, and into the Mongol period the Turkish
population of Anatolia was being augmented with new arrivals from the East.2
Over the late eleventh and early twelfth centuries various Turkish-ruled polities
emerged in Anatolia, such as the Danishmendid dynasty that dominated north-
central and south-eastern Anatolia, the Saltukids, based in Erzurum in north-
eastern Anatolia, and the Mengücekids of Erzincan and Divriği. The most
important were the Seljuqs of Anatolia, the foundation of whose state is dated
to the capture of the Byzantine city of Nicaea in the west of the peninsula – not
far from the region that would also be the birthplace of the Ottoman state – by
Sulayman b. Qutlumush, a cousin of Alp Arslan, in 1081. Forced from Nicaea by
the First Crusade in 1096, the Seljuqs then established themselves in Konya
(Byzantine Iconium), located in south-central Anatolia. Konya would become the
leading political and cultural centre of Muslim Anatolia and had a special
importance for the Seljuqs as their dynastic burial ground.3 The archaeological

1
For surveys of the emergence of Muslim Anatolia in this period see Claude Cahen, La Turquie pré-
ottomane (Istanbul, 1988), a revised and updated version of Claude Cahen, Pre-Ottoman Turkey:
General Survey of the Material and Spiritual Culture and History c. 1071–1330 (London, 1968);
Osman Turan, Selçuklular Zamanında Türkiye: Siyâsi tarih Alp Arslan’dan Osman Gazi’ye
(1071–1318) (Istanbul, 1971); A. C. S. Peacock, ‘Saljuqs. iii of Rum’, EIr. For the early period
see now Alexander Beihammer, Byzantium and the Emergence of Turkish-Muslim Anatolia, ca.
1040–1130 (London, 2017).
2
In general on these population movements see Thomas Allsen, ‘Population Movements in Mongol
Eurasia’, in Reuven Amitai and Michal Biran (eds), Nomads as Agents of Cultural Change: The
Mongols and Their Eurasian Predecessors (Honolulu, 2015), 119–51.
3
A. C. S. Peacock, ‘Court and Nomadic Life in Saljuq Anatolia’, in David Durand-Guédy (ed.),
Turko-Mongol Rulers, Cities and City Life (Leiden, 2013), 198–9.
 The Formation of Islamic Anatolia 33

record, which has admittedly only been inadequately exploited to date for this
period, suggests that there was little widespread disruption; there is no consistent
and unambiguous evidence for the large-scale destruction of settlements for
instance.4 The disruption was, at least at first, political rather than social or
economic.
Initially, the Turks probably comprised a minor element in the population,
constituting the ruling elite along with their accompanying nomadic followers.
The sources point to a gradual separation between the nomadic Turks, or
Turkmen, and the Seljuq rulers, who had themselves originally been nomadic
chiefs, even if the dynasty maintained some connection to the nomads well into
the thirteenth century.5 Urban Iranian immigrants seem to have accompanied the
invaders from the start, according to inscriptions from late eleventh-century
Nicaea.6 Yet our knowledge of this period is poor. From the early period of Islam
in Anatolia we have no local Arabic or Persian texts at all, nor even the names of
lost works, and our knowledge of the eleventh and twelfth centuries is based
almost entirely on sources produced by Christians in Greek, Armenian and Syriac.
It might be reasonable to assume then that Muslim intellectual life was negligible
or non-existent, but the situation differed in Anatolia’s eastern peripheries. Our
oldest Islamic manuscript from Anatolia, al-Akhawayn al-Bukhari’s Hidayat al-
Muta‘allimin fi’l-Tibb, a Persian textbook on medicine, comes from the Saltukid
principality of Erzurum, and the manuscript was dedicated to the Saltukid ruler
Diya al-Din in 510/1116 (Plate 1).7 The Saltukid land was not just in close
proximity to the Caucasian amirates, which, after Central Asia, were one of the
birthplaces of New Persian literature,8 but was itself tributary to the Seljuq
sultanate of Iraq, whose sultans’ names were mentioned on its coins in recognition
of his suzerainty.9 Erzurum, then, may be in a rather different category from the
Danishmendid and Seljuq states in Anatolia, which were not tributary to the
Seljuq sultanate of Iraq – indeed, relations between the Anatolian Seljuqs and
their cousins were distinctly frosty. Although the Danishmendids are claimed to

4
See Philipp Niewöhner (ed.), The Archaeology of Byzantine Anatolia: From the End of Late Antiquity
until the Coming of the Turks (New York, 2017).
5
Peacock, ‘Court and Nomadic Society’.
6
Clive Foss, ‘Byzantine Responses to Turkish Attack: Some Sites of Asia Minor’, in Ihor Ševčenko
and Irmgard Hutter (eds), AETOΣ: Studies in Honor of Cyril Mango (Stuttgart, 1998), 154–71.
7
Süleymaniye, MS Fatih 3646.
8
The poet Asadi of Tus composed his epic Garshaspnama in Nakhjiwan in 458/1065, while Qatran
was an important eleventh-century Persian poet based in Tabriz. See Dj. Khaleghi-Motalgh, ‘Asadi
Tusi’, EIr; François de Blois, Persian Literature: A Bio-Bibliographical Survey, V, Poetry of the Pre-
Mongol Period (Abingdon, 2004), 186.
9
On the Saltukids see Faruk Sümer, Selçuklular Devrinde Doğu Anadolu’da Türk Beylikleri (Ankara,
1990), 15–45.
34 Religion, Politics and Society

have founded the first madrasas in Niksar and Tokat, in the absence of epigraphic
or textual support such a claim remains highly speculative.10
From the middle of the twelfth century, Islamic culture started to develop in
the Seljuq lands, in particular during the reign of Kılıç Arslan II (r. 551/
1156–588/1192). Fragments of a palace in Konya from this period survive, while
construction began on the town’s congregational mosque, the Ulu Cami.11 It is in
the later twelfth century that we have our first evidence for original literary activity
in Anatolia. At the court of Kılıç Arslan, a certain Hubaysh-i Tiflisi (d. c. 600/
1204), whose nisba suggests he was an immigrant from Tbilisi, composed several
works, mostly in Persian – on dream interpretation, medicine, a Persian-Arabic
dictionary, the Qanun al-Adab and a Qur’anic commentary.12 He also composed
works dealing with the Qur’anic sciences, the Kitab Talkhis ‘ilal al-Qur’an,13 and
the Persian Kitab Wujuh al-Qur’an, based on earlier tafsīrs by Tha‘alibi and
Muqatil b. Sulayman, which survives in a single autograph copy made in Konya
in 558/1163.14 Meanwhile, Ankara, which was the appanage of Kılıç Arslan’s son
Muhyi al-Din, was home to a circle of Persian poets, a handful of whose rubā‘iyyāt
have come down to us.15
The intellectual centre of Anatolia in this period, to judge by extant works and
manuscripts, was not Konya but further east.16 Perhaps the earliest extant work
from Anatolia, an Arabic compendium on materia medica entitled Taqwim al-
‘Adwiya, was composed by a Maghrebi scholar, Ibrahim b. Abi Sa‘id al-Maghribi
al-‘Ala’i and dedicated to a minor Danishmendid prince, Dhu’l-Qarnayn b. ‘Ayn
al-Dawla (d. 557/1162), suggesting a probable place of composition of Malatya or
Elbistan, the main centres of this branch of the dynasty.17 This work soon became

10
Aptullah Kuran, Anadolu Medreseleri (Ankara, 1969), 11–18.
11
Peacock, ‘Court and Nomadic Life’, 195–6.
12
On him see Tahsin Yazıcı, ‘Hobayš b. Ebrāhim b. Mohammad Teflisi’, EIr.
13
Süleymaniye, MS Laleli 69, fols 85b–87b; this appears to _ be a surviving fragment of a much larger
work, written in Arabic, unlike Tiflisi’s other works.
14
Süleymaniye, MS Atıf Efendi Eki 1316, see Osman Gazi Özgüdenli, ‘İstanbul Kütüphanelerinde
Bulunan Farsça Yazmaların Öyküsü: Bir Giriş’, Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi
Tarih Araştırmaları Dergisi, XXVII/43 (2008): 1–75 at p. 7.
15
Ahmed Ateş, ‘Hicri VI.–VIII. Asırlarda Anadolu’da Farsça Eserler’, Türkiyat Mecmuası 7–8 (1945):
94–135.
16
Mikail Bayram has claimed that the Kashf al-‘Aqaba, a cosmological treatise, was composed for the
Danishmendid ruler Malik Ahmad Ghazi. It is true that the text does seem to have been composed
at the behest of a ruler; the latter’s titles, but not names, are given by the author, a certain Ilyas
b. Ahmad al-Qaysari, but there is no indication as to date, and nothing to definitively associate this
work with a Danishmendid patron. See MS Fatih 4562, fols 244a–261b; also published in
facsimile: Mikail Bayram, Anadolu’da Te’lif edilen ilk eser Keşf el-Akabe (Konya, 1981).
17
H. P. J. Renaud, ‘Un problème de bibliographie arabe: Le Taqwîm al-Adwiya d’al-‘Ala’i’, Hespéris
16 (1933): 79–81.
 The Formation of Islamic Anatolia 35

very popular in the broader Muslim world.18 Slightly later, the Mengücekid
principality of Erzincan seems to have become a centre of intellectual activity.
A copy of Bal‘ami’s tenth-century Persian translation of al-Tabari’s Arabic classic,
the Ta’rikh al-Rusul wa’l-Muluk (‘History of Prophets and Kings’) was made for
the library of the Mengücekid ruler Bahramshah b. Da’ud in 586/1190–1, while
the great Persian poet Nizami (d. 605/1209) dedicated his Makhzan al-Asrar to
Bahramshah, and the philosopher ‘Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi spent a considerable
amount of time in Erzincan.19 In the Saltukid domains a mathnawī attributed to
Khaqani (d. 595/1199),20 Khatm al-Gara’ib, was copied for Nasir al-Din
Muhammad b. Saltuk in 593/1197.21 Thus both classic and contemporary
literature and scholarship in Arabic and Persian was patronised by the Muslim
courts of eastern Anatolia in the late twelfth century.
Over the later twelfth century, the Seljuqs gradually absorbed the
Danishmendids, but otherwise their attentions were mainly directed at their
western neighbour, Byzantium. Sultan Ghiyath al-Din Kaykhusraw I managed
to capture Antalya and waged war on the western frontier region along the
Maeander Valley. This may reflect the interests of the nomadic Turks for whom
the valley formed an important winter pasture, but the area had also attained a
new importance after the foundation of the Byzantine successor state of the
empire of Nicaea in the wake of the Fourth Crusade’s conquest of Constantinople
in 1204. Ghiyath al-Din’s death in battle outside Alaşehir (Philadelphia) in 607/
1210 brought a halt to large-scale Seljuq interventions in this region, and despite
periodic clashes with the Turkmen, the frontier settled on the Maeander river
until the second half of the thirteenth century. As in most Turkish Islamic states,
there was no fixed rule determining the sultan’s successor, and on Ghiyath al-
Din’s death his two sons, ‘Ala’ al-Din Kayqubad and ‘Izz al-Din Kayka’us, fought
a bitter war for the throne. With ‘Izz al-Din’s victory, expansion continued, with
regular campaigns launched against the Cilician kingdom of Armenia and on the

18
For mss see ibid., 71–2.
19
For all the mss discussed here see Özgüdenli, ‘İstanbul Kütüphanelerinde Bulunan Farsça Yazma-
ların Öyküsü’. On Baghdadi see Shawkat Toowara, ‘Travel in the Medieval Islamic World: The
Importance of Patronage as Illustrated by ‘Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi’, in Rosamund Allen (ed.),
Eastward Bound: Travel and Travellers 1050–1550 (Manchester, 2004), 57–70.
20
A mathnawī (Turkish mesnevi) is a long poem in rhyming couplets. When spelt with an initial
capital, Mathnawi, it refers to the famous poem also known as the Mathnawi-yi Ma‘nawi by Jalal al-
Din Rumi.
21
The suggestion found in some literature (Özgüdenli, ‘İstanbul Kütüphanelerinde Bulunan Farsça
Yazmaların Öyküsü’, 9, n. 35 ) that another text destined for a Saltukid dedicatee was a collection of
excerpts from the Shahnama seems to be erroneous, as the description of the text indicates it was
written for the Great Seljuq Malikshah II b. Muhammad. See Wilhelm Pertsch, Die orientalischen
Handschriften der Herzoglichen Bibliothek zu Gotha (Gotha, 1859), I, no. 48.
36 Religion, Politics and Society

Syrian frontier with the Ayyubids. The greatest success was the conquest of the
Black Sea port of Sinop in 611/1214, meaning that the Seljuq state gained control
of the cross-Anatolian trade routes for the first time. New silver mines in Anatolia
opened, silver being a metal in short supply in the rest of the eastern
Mediterranean in the period, and the production of silver coinage in thirteenth-
century Anatolia far exceeded that of any previous period.22 Taken together, these
two developments meant that the Seljuqs now commanded much greater
resources than before.
Another factor in the emergence of Seljuq Anatolia as a major power in the
period was the collapse of the remnants of the Seljuq sultanate of Iraq with the
death of Sultan Tughril III in 590/1194. Now only the dynasty in Konya could
claim the prestigious mantle of being the heirs to the Great Seljuq empire of Iran
and Central Asia, and this seems to have engendered a new confidence in a court
that explicitly sought to adopt sophisticated Persian cultural models, as signified
by the sultans’ use of regal names redolent of ancient Iranian legend as recorded in
Firdawsi’s Shahnama, such as Kaykhusraw, Kayka’us and Kayqubad. In the same
period, Muhammad b. Ghazi of Malatya composed two edifying works for the
court based on Iranian antecedents. His Rawdat al-‘Uqul, a rewriting of the
collection of edifying fables known as the Marzubannama, was composed in an
elaborate Persian prose and dedicated to Sultan Ghiyath al-Din Kaykhusraw
shortly after 597/1201. A few years later Malatyawi wrote the Barid al-Sa‘ada, a
collection of enlightening stories for ‘Izz al-Din Kayka’us I, for whom he seems to
have acted as tutor. Both these works represent attempts to adapt prestigious
Iranian models for the Seljuq court in Rum, a trend continued by Rawandi, a
Persian bureaucrat who had written a work of advice literature for the last Seljuq
of Iran, Tughril III, the Rahat al-Sudur. Rawandi rededicated the work to Sultan
Ghiyath al-Din Kaykhusraw I in 607/1210, claiming that in him the hopes of all
the supporters of the Seljuq dynasty were fixed, although the work may also have
been intended as a sort of job application for the post of nadīm or boon
companion, with the promise that Rawandi could acculturate the sultan to the
ways of his distinguished relatives in Iran.23
The new ambitions of the Seljuq court were symbolised by Sultan ‘Izz al-Din
sending an embassy to Baghdad in the wake of his capture of Sinop to proclaim
the victory and request formal investiture with rule of Rum from the Caliph,

22
Rudi Paul Lindner, Explorations in Ottoman Prehistory (Ann Arbor, 2007), 88–9.
23
A. C. S. Peacock, ‘Advice for the Sultans of Rum: The “Mirrors for Princes” of Early Thirteenth
Century Anatolia’, in Gary Leiser and Bill Hickman (eds), Turkish Language, Literature and History:
Travelers’ Tales, Sultans and Scholars since the Eighth Century (London, 2016), 276–307; Sara Nur
Yıldız, ‘A Nadīm for the Sultan: Rāwandī and the Anatolian Seljuks’, in Peacock and Yıldız (eds),
The Seljuks of Anatolia, 91–111.
 The Formation of Islamic Anatolia 37

which he duly received. On ‘Izz al-Din’s death, his brother and erstwhile rival,
‘Ala’ al-Din Kayqubad I (r. 616/1219–634/1237), acceded; he was recognised by
posterity as the greatest of Seljuq sultans. His armies captured ‘Ala’iyya (Alanya)
on the Mediterranean coast, and absorbed most of the Mengücekid territories,
although the latter dynasty held out in the remote outpost of Divriği at least into
the middle of the thirteenth century. A further success was the defeat of the
invading Khwarazmians under Jalal al-Din Khwarazmshah, the last ruler of the
short-lived Khwarazmshah empire, at the Battle of Yassı Çimen near Erzincan in
627/1230. ‘Ala’ al-Din’s reign marked a period of centralisation, as the sultan
sought to limit the power in the amirs who had played such an important role in
the fighting over the succession. ‘Ala’ al-Din also invested in palace-building,
creating the new palace-town of Kubadabad by the shores of Lake Beyşehir, and
the Seljuq court became famous for its wealth and luxury. For later authors, ‘Ala’
al-Din Kayqubad’s reign represented an ideal of good governance in the Perso-
Islamic model. Ibn Bibi compared him to the Ghaznavid sultan Mahmud
(d. 421/1030), a hero of Islamic legend, and the ruler-moralist Qabus
b. Vushmgir (d. 402/1012), while he also praised the sultan’s reading of classics
of religion and statecraft by Ghazzali and the famous Great Seljuq vizier Nizam
al-Mulk:
[Kayqubad] spoke of the sultans of old with the most complete reverence and respect. He
believed in the Islamic kings of the past, Sultan Yamin al-Dawla Amin al-Milla
b. Sebüktegin (i.e. Mahmud of Ghazna) and Amir Shams al-Ma‘ali Qabus b. Vushmgir.
He imitated their virtues and never affixed his signature [to a document] without perform-
ing ritual ablutions. He constantly read the Kimya-yi Sa‘adat [of Ghazzali] and the Siyar al-
Muluk of Nizam al-Mulk.24

Over the early thirteenth century, increasing numbers of immigrants from the rest
of the Muslim world made their way to Anatolia either in search of their fortune,
attracted by the opportunities afforded by the ambitions of the court, or else
fleeing the disruptions elsewhere in the Islamic world precipitated by the collapse
of the Seljuqs of Iraq and the subsequent rise of the Khwarazmians and the
Mongols. Bureaucrats, artisans and architects migrated to Konya and other cities
that were developing under Seljuq rule, as did men of letters. The poet Qani‘i
from Tus in Khurasan composed a large verse Saljuqnama for Kayqubad that is
now lost to us, one of the few indications we have of a tradition of historical and
panegyric literature in pre-Mongol Seljuq Anatolia.25

24
Ibn Bibi, al-Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya (Ankara), 228; (Tehran), 217.
25
On Qani‘i see Dhabihallah Safa, Tarikh-i Adabiyat dar Iran (Tehran, 1382), vol. 3/1, 487–506;
Charles Melville, ‘The Early Persian Historiography of Anatolia’, 144; Mehmed Fuad Köprülü, The
Seljuks of Anatolia: Their History and Culture According to Local Muslim Sources (Salt Lake City,
38 Religion, Politics and Society

Among these migrants were several famous Sufis who made Anatolia their
home in this period, such as Ibn ‘Arabi, Najm al-Din Razi and Baha’ al-Din
Walad, father of Jalal al-Din Rumi. Ibn ‘Arabi (d. 638/1240) had close links with
the Seljuq sultans, writing an epistle of advice to Sultan ‘Izz al-Din Kayka’us, for
whom Ibn ‘Arabi’s son-in-law Majd al-Din Ishaq had served as ambassador to the
Caliph.26 Although Anatolia was just one of the many locations throughout the
Middle East in which the peripatetic Ibn ‘Arabi resided for a while, his Anatolian
connection had a particularly profound influence through his disciple Sadr al-Din
al-Qunawi, Majd al-Din’s son. Al-Qunawi, as his name suggests, was a resident of
Konya, who wrote in both Arabic and Persian and was the leading exponent of
Ibn ‘Arabi’s ideas to subsequent generations.27 Another influential Sufi who made
his way to Konya in this period was Abu Hafs ‘Umar Suhrawardi (d. 632/11234),
who inducted Kayqubad into the Sufi order of futuwwa that was being supported
by the Baghdad Caliph al-Nasir as a way to build links with regional rulers and
enhance his own authority, as we will discuss further in Chapter 3.
The activities of such migrants, whether their stay in Anatolia was short term
(as for Suhrawardi) or permanent (as for Baha’ al-Din Walad) serve to enhance
Anatolia’s integration into the broader Islamic world. Yet not every immigrant
met with success, as can be seen from the fate of the Khurasani Najm al-Din Razi
(d. 654/1256).28 Razi first sought his fortune at ‘Ala’ al-Din Kayqubad’s court,
where he had been encouraged to direct himself by Suhrawardi, whom he had met
en route. It seems from Najm al-Din’s own account that his Mirsad al-‘Ibad, a
book of Sufi advice for rulers, did not find favour with the sultan. The reasons for
this are opaque, and Razi subsequently wrote a more traditional ‘mirror for
princes’ for the Mengücekid Bahramshah. The latter survives only in a single
manuscript, as is typical of the limited circulation of many works destined for a
court audience. Indeed, the Mirsad al-‘Ibad circulated most widely not in the
version dedicated to Kayqubad, but in an earlier recension dedicated to ‘a group of
Sufis’; it was in this form that it subsequently became one of the most widely read
and influential works on Sufism in medieval Anatolia, and was translated in
Turkish in the fifteenth century.29

1992), 15–18. There was also a now lost epic poem written by a Nizam al-Din Ahmad Arzinjani,
whom Ibn Bibi praises as second only to Firdawsi. Ibn Bibi, al-Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya (Ankara), 202;
(Tehran), 194.
26
On this see Sara Nur Yıldız and Haşim Sahin, ‘In the Proximity of Sultans: Majd al-Din Ishāq, Ibn
‘Arabi and the Seljuk Court’, in Peacock and Yıldız (eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia, 173–205.
27
Richard Todd, The Sufi Doctrine of Man: The Metaphysical Anthropology of Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi
(Leiden, 2014).
28
See Mohammad-Amin Riahi, ‘Daya, Najm al-Din Razi’, EIr.
29
Peacock, ‘Advice for the Sultans of Rum’, 289–95.
MAP 3 Anatolia in the early thirteenth century
40 Religion, Politics and Society

The fate of Razi’s Mirsad suggests the emergence of groups beyond the court
who were an audience for textual production. In addition to those interested in
Sufism, there seems to have been a growing audience of men who needed a
grounding in the principles of Islamic law and had enough Arabic to read texts in
them. Two works by eastern émigrés became especially popular, the compendia of
fiqh by Yusuf b. Sa‘d al-Sijistani (fl. 638/1240) and al-Ghazmini (d. 658/1260).30
Al-Sijistani’s Munyat al-Mufti (Plate 2), composed in Sivas in 638/1240, was
intended as a travelling compendium for jurists to allow them to dispense with
carrying lots of books, suggesting the spread of Islamic law in Anatolia. In
addition, works from Central Asia became increasingly popular, such as the Sharh
Adab al-Qadi of al-Sadr al-Shahid, a manual of fiqh. Easterners played an espe-
cially important role in the production of texts in Anatolia, as one important
factor that it shared with these regions, but which distinguished it from Iran and
the Levant, was an adherence to Hanafism, the prevalent legal school of Central
Asia.31 Nonetheless, relatively few manuscripts even of these works that in later
times were widely disseminated survive from before the mid-thirteenth century.32
By the fourth decade of the thirteenth century, the main cities of Anatolia
must have started to look increasingly familiar to visitors from elsewhere in the
Islamic world. Ornamented with mosques and madrasas, there was an infrastruc-
ture of qadis and ‘ulama’, and a literate elite that was interested in Sufism. Persian
would have been the principal means of written, and in many urban areas also
oral, communication (see Chapter 4, pp. 172–3), while the cosmopolitan as well
as Islamic character of Anatolia was reinforced by the numerous migrants to
whom the region gave shelter. Yet despite ‘Ala’ al-Din’s tremendous reputation
in later times, the first signs of trouble were already apparent. His defeat of the
Khwarazmians presaged several problems that would plague Anatolia after Kay-
qubad’s death. While the Seljuqs attempted to absorb Jalal al-Din’s defeated
soldiers into their state, they only had limited success, and disaffected
Khwarazmian soldiery played a major role in the Baba’i rebellion that shook the
sultanate under ‘Ala’ al-Din’s successor Ghiyath al-Din Kaykhusraw II. Moreover,
towards the end of ‘Ala’ al-Din’s reign, in 634/1236, the first Mongol emissaries

30
For al-Sijistani see Carl Brockelmann, Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur (Leiden, 1897–1937),
Supplementband, I, 653; On al-Ghazmini see Şükrü Özen, ‘Zâhidî’, TDVİA, vol. 44: 81–5.
31
Wilferd Madelung, ‘The Migration of Hanafi Scholars Westward from Central Asia in the 11th to
13th Centuries’, Ankara Üniversitesi İlahiyat Fakültesi Dergisi 43 (2002): 41–55.
32
Some examples: al-Sadr al-Shahid’s Sharh Adab al-Qadi, copied in Amasya in 638/1240–1 by
Muhammad b. Ahmad b. Abi al-Rashid al-Hamadani, Süleymaniye, MS Şehid Ali Pasa 687; Ibn
Habal’s al-Mukhtar fi’l-Tibb al-Jamali, copied at Sivas in 610/1213–14 (Süleymaniye, MS Fatih
3632); Yusuf b. Sa‘d al-Sijistani’s Munyat al-Mufti, copied at Sivas in 638/1240–1 (an autograph
manuscript, Süleymaniye, MS Şehid Ali Paşa 1083).
 The Formation of Islamic Anatolia 41

arrived in Anatolia, demanding Seljuq submission. Kayqubad consented to accept

il or subject status, doubtless mindful of the fate of those who opposed the
Mongols, but died before his embassy to present his allegiance the Great Khan
Ögödei could set off.33
The sources are notably hostile towards Ghiyath al-Din Kaykhusraw II, who
acceded the Seljuq throne in 634/1237, and is accused of having poisoned his
father. Mongol raids continued on the peripheries of Anatolia, in northern Iraq
and the Caucasus,34 but the Seljuqs do not seem to have felt especially threatened,
concentrating their efforts on expanding towards Syria at the expense of their
Ayyubid rivals. The first disaster of Ghiyath al-Din’s ill-fated reign was the
massive rebellion in 638/1240 of a religious leader, Baba İlyas, himself another
migrant from Khurasan, which is discussed in more detail in Chapter 6. This
revolt, attracting support from the Turkmen, was eventually crushed, but severely
destabilised the Seljuq state. In 639/1242 a raid led by the general Baiju, sent by
Batu Khan of the Golden Horde, the Mongol state that controlled the northern
Black Sea steppes, briefly seized Erzurum; although Baiju retreated, the weak-
nesses in Seljuq defences must have been apparent. The next year Baiju was back,
with a larger army. At Kösedağ near Sivas, Baiju inflicted a humiliating defeat on
the Seljuq army, and Ghiyath al-Din fled the field to save his skin.35 This time the
Mongols stayed.

ANATOLIA UNDER MONGOL RULE

With Ghiyath al-Din’s retreat, it was left to his officials to make what terms they
could. Anatolia was required to pay a hefty tribute to Batu Khan, who otherwise
largely left the region to its own devices. Despite the heavy financial burden,
Anatolia still appeared admirably prosperous to outside observers; evidently the
damage done by Baiju’s invasion was limited.36 The Seljuq dynasty was main-
tained in office, although real power now lay with their officials who had
picked up the pieces abandoned by Ghiyath al-Din and collaborated with the

33
Yıldız, ‘Mongol Rule’, 166–71; Turan, Selçuklular Zamanında Türkiye, 384–9; Korobeinikov,
Byzantium and the Turks, 173–4.
34
Yıldız, ‘Mongol Rule’, 173; Turan, Selçuklular Zamanında Türkiye, 427–31; Korobeinikov, Byzan-
tium and the Turks, 174–5.
35
On the Mongol takeover see Yıldız, ‘Mongol Rule’, 166–90; Turan, Selçuklular Zamanında
Türkiye, 427–57; Korobeinikov, Byzantium and the Turks, 170–7; also Timothy May, ‘Mongol
Conquest Strategy in the Middle East’, in De Nicola and Melville (eds), The Mongols’ Middle East,
13–37.
36
See the remarks of Simon de Saint-Quentin, cited in A. C. S. Peacock and Sara Nur Yıldız,
‘Introduction’, in Peacock and Yıldız (eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia, 1–2.
42 Religion, Politics and Society

Mongol regime. From Kösedağ until the 1270s, the most influential men in
Anatolia were these men who were nominally Seljuq officials, but who owed their
positions to their alliances with the Mongols – Shams al-Din Isfahani, Jalal al-Din
Karatay, Fakhr al-Din ‘Ali and Mu‘in al-Din Sulayman the Pervane. Struggling
with one another for authority, they sought the backing of rival factions at the
Mongol ordu, the court-camp that was the source of real power,37 and they
promoted rival candidates for the position of Seljuq sultan of Anatolia, with the
result that at one stage no fewer than three members of the dynasty claimed to be
sultan. Numismatic evidence suggests on occasion considerable confusion as to
who the Seljuq sultan actually was. It was these powerful officials who became the
main patrons of architecture, underlining the broad irrelevance of the sultans.38
As Baiju had been dispatched by Batu, Anatolia originally formed part of the
Golden Horde, the descendants of Chinggis’s son Jochi, whose territories
stretched across the Black Sea steppe as far as Transoxiana.39 Although both the
western and south-eastern extremities of the Horde’s territories were subsequently
lost to rivals within the Chinggisid house, with most of Central Asia reverting to
the descendants of Chinggis Khan’s son Chaghatay and Anatolia being taken over
by the Ilkhans, Anatolia retained enduring cultural links with the Horde and
Central Asia, as part of a common Turkish-speaking world that adhered to the
Hanafi legal school.40 Anatolia’s Mongol overlords changed after the Great Khan
Möngke appointed his brother Hülegü as ruler in the west at a quriltai in 1251.
Hülegü did not set out from Mongolia until 1253, accompanied by a vast army,
and in 1255 Batu Khan died. Batu’s successor, Berke, found himself at odds with
Hülegü, who established a new de facto state based in Iran, the Ilkhanate. One of
Hülegü’s first acts was to order Baiju to reconquer Anatolia, this time in his own
name.41 Hülegü’s immense forces also required Baiju’s traditional pasturelands in
the Caucasus for their own use, forcing him to seek new ones in Anatolia. Baiju
was thus accompanied by a mass migration of his followers, and for the first time a
substantial Mongol presence was established in Anatolia, although it is unclear in
what numbers they remained after Baiju’s demise.42

37
Yıldız, ‘Mongol Rule’, 190–210.
38
Ibid., 244–6; Howard Crane, ‘Notes on Saldjuq Architectural Patronage in Thirteenth Century
Anatolia’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 36 (1993): 1–57.
39
Turan, Selçuklular Zamanında Türkiye, 478–85; Melville, ‘Anatolia under the Mongols’, 54–8;
Korobeinikov, Byzantium and the Turks, 176–84.
40
See A. C. S. Peacock, ‘Islamisation in the Golden Horde and Anatolia: Some Remarks on Travelling
Scholars and Texts’, Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée 143 (2018): 151–64.
41
Yıldız, ‘Mongol Rule’, 260–83; Korobeinikov, Byzantium and the Turks, 184–92.
42
Melville, ‘Anatolia under the Mongols’, 59, 61–2; cf. Reuven Amitai-Preiss, Mongols and Mamluks:
The Mamluk-Ilkhanid War, 1260–1281 (Cambridge, 1995), 160, n. 15.
 The Formation of Islamic Anatolia 43

Anatolia obtained a new importance as a crucial frontier region between the

Ilkhanate and their great enemies, the Mamluks of Syria and Egypt; the Golden
Horde, did not, however, completely relinquish an interest in Anatolian affairs,
urging their Mamluk allies to support the Seljuq sultan ‘Izz al-Din Kayka’us II,
who eventually fled Anatolia and took refuge in first Byzantium, then Crimea,
which was subject to the Horde.43 ‘Izz al-Din’s brother, Rukn al-Din Kılıç Arslan
IV, who became sultan in 659/1261, seems to have been more closely associated
with the Ilkhanid camp that actually controlled Anatolia, and his installation as
ruler has been described as marking the end of the Seljuq sultanate’s aspirations
for independence.44 In 664/1266 he was deposed by the Pervane, Mu‘in al-Din
Sulayman, who exercised effective power in the period from 659/1261 to 676/
1277, and replaced by the infant Ghiyath al-Din Kaykhusraw III. Although in
theory the Pervane was responsible for approving the text of firmāns (the orders of
the sultan), in the Ilkhanid system he functioned as a Mongol agent, representing
Ilkhanid interests at the Seljuq court and thus wielding great power.45 In addition,
the Mongols operated a parallel Mongol military administration in Anatolia.
In the midst of the collapse of the Seljuq sultanate as a serious political force,
the Turkmen chief Muhammad Beg of Denizli sought to establish an independ-
ent principality, the first of the so called beyliks, as the Mamluk chronicler Baybars
al-Mansuri recounts:
[In 659/1261] . . . Sultan ‘Izz al-Din fled in defeat [at the hands of the Mongols] to
Constantinople . . . and his brother inherited his kingdom except for the frontiers, moun-
tains and coastline which were in the hands of the Turkmen. The latter resisted giving
allegiance to sultan Rukn al-Din [IV]; their leaders (kubarā’uhum) were Muhammad Beg
and his brother Ilyas Beg and his relative by marriage ‘Ali Beg and his kinsman Sevinj. They
sent to Hülegü offering him obedience, and tribute, and asking from him to send a banner
[sanjaq] and a decree [firmān] with their investment, as well as a shihna to reside with them.
_
He agreed to this, and sent them a shihna named Qulshar, and wrote for them a decree
_
investing them with the land they controlled, which was Denizli, Honaz, Ṭalamani
(Dalaman), and their surroundings . . . [In 660/1262] Hülegü sent to Muhammad Beg
the chief [amīr] of the Turkmen in Anatolia, summoning him to the ordu. [Muhammad
Beg] refused and did not go. Hülegü then sent an order to Sultan Rukn al-Din and the
Mongols in Anatolia to go and fight Muhammad Beg and the Turkmen who were with
_
him. His relative ‘Ali Beg betrayed him, and went to Sultan Rukn al-Din and strengthened
the latter’s resolve to fight the Turkmen. He showed him their weak points and the entry
points to their country . . . [the Turkmen under Muhammad Beg are defeated] . . . and ‘Ali

43
On Golden Horde backing for ‘Izz al-Din see Amitai-Preiss, Mongols and Mamluks, 159.
44
Melville, ‘Anatolia under the Mongols’, 59; cf. Cahen, La Turquie, 249–50.
45
The most detailed study remains Nejat Kaymaz, Pervane Muinüddin Süleyman (Ankara, 1970); also
Turan, Selçuklular Zamanında Türkiye, 505–57.
44 Religion, Politics and Society

Beg was established as chief over the Turkmen [amīran ‘alā l-Turkmān] and the Mongols
ruled those border lands up to the extremity of Istanbul.46

As Baybars al-Mansuri makes clear, the Mongols enjoyed an ambiguous relation-

ship with the Turkmen. While Muhammad Beg evidently sought independence
from the Seljuqs, he also required recognition of his authority from the Ilkhan and
even the posting of an Ilkhanid agent (shihna) to legitimise his rule. Meanwhile,
_
the Mongols sought to use their Seljuq henchmen to manage this frontier area,
which was not, however, completely devoid of Mongol authority. In many
frontier towns such as Eskişehir, Mongol or Seljuq officials invested heavily in
building pious constructions, and in fact in this period these formerly peripheral
regions became ever more closely integrated into Muslim Anatolia.47 At the same
time, Mongol rule evidently provoked large scale dislocations of the nomadic
Turkmen population.48
Despite the political convulsions, intellectual life continued to flourish at least
in Konya, where Jalal al-Din Karatay and Fakhr al-Din ‘Ali (known to later
generations as Sahib Ata) built madrasas, and Shams al-Din Isfahani patronised
literature. A far greater number of manuscripts from Anatolia survive from the
second half of the thirteenth century than the first. Despite the diminished
importance of the Seljuq court, it continued to attract men of learning from
abroad. The famous logician Siraj al-Din Urmawi, who had been working for the
Ayyubids, found employment at the court of ‘Izz al-Din in 655/1257, serving as
qadi and occasional ambassador, and dedicating a Persian ‘mirror for princes’, the
Latayif al-Hikma, to the sultan.49 A wider literary and cultural circle also began to
form outside the auspices of the court, in connection with Sufism. Sadr al-Din

46
Baybars al-Mansuri, Zubdat al-Fikra fi Ta’rikh al-Hijra, ed. D. S. Richards (Beirut, 1998), 73, 76.
See also Korobeinikov, Byzantium and the Turks, 222–4.
47
A. C. S. Peacock, ‘The Seljuk Sultanate of Rum and the Turkmen of the Byzantine frontier,
1206–1279’, al-Masāq 27 (2014): 267–87; Judith Pfeiffer, ‘Protecting Private Property vs. Negoti-
ating Political Authority: Nur al-Din b. Jaja and his Endowments in Thirteenth-Century Anatolia’,
in Robert Hillenbrand, A. C. S. Peacock and Firuza Abdullaeva (eds), Ferdowsi, the Mongols and the
History of Iran: Art, Literature and Culture from Early Islam to Qajar Persia (London, 2013),
147–65; Judith Pfeiffer, ‘Mevlevi-Bektashi Rivalries and the Islamisation of the Public Space in
Late Seljuq Anatolia’, in Peacock, De Nicola and Yıldız (eds), Islam and Christianity, 311–27. See
also the discussion of Erzurum in Blessing, Rebuilding Anatolia, 124–63; cf. Darling, ‘Persianate
Sources’, 139, for the early fourteenth century.
48
See Rustam Shukurov, ‘Two Waves of Nomadic Migration in the Pontos in the Thirteenth–
Fourteenth Centuries’, International Journal of Black Sea Studies 1 (2006): 29–44; Dimitri Kor-
obeinikov, ‘The Formation of Turkish Principalities in the Boundary Zone: From the Emirate of
Denzli to the Beylik of Menteşe (1256–1302)’, in Adnan Çevik and Murat Keçiş (eds), Men-
teseoğulları Tarihi (Ankara, 2016), 65–76.
49 _
Louise Marlow, ‘A Thirteenth Century Scholar in the Eastern Mediterranean: Sirāj al-Dīn Urmavī,
Jurist, Logician, Diplomat’, al-Masaq 22/3 (2010): 279–313.
 The Formation of Islamic Anatolia 45

al-Qunawi, as Ibn ‘Arabi’s leading disciple and interpreter, attracted scholars from
across the Middle East to study with him in Konya, including the Persian poets
Sa‘id al-Din Farghani and Fakhr al-Din ‘Iraqi.50 Al-Qunawi also maintained a
correspondence with the leading Ilkhanid intellectual, Nasir al-Din Tusi. At the
same time, Jalal al-Din Rumi was active in Konya, composing his Mathnawi, the
great verse collection of moralistic and edifying Sufi stories. These Sufis were also
intimately connected to political life, and Rumi’s letters show how he relied on
the Pervane and other leading figures for financial support for himself and his
followers.51 Even Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi is reported to have played a role in
politics, mediating between the rival Seljuq sultans ‘Izz al-Din Kayka’us and Rukn
al-Din.52 Intellectual life and politics were thus intertwined even when literary
figures were not reliant on patronage.
This period was remembered by the fourteenth-century historian of Mongol
Anatolia, Aqsara’i, as the zenith of Seljuq intellectual life. When in 672/1273 both
Jalal al-Din Rumi and Nasir al-Din Tusi died, ‘the benefits of his correspondence
and compositions were cut off from Anatolia and other parts of the world’; the
following year, 673/1274, al-Qunawi also passed away.53 Aqsara’i links the loss of
these leading intellectuals to the political disasters that beset Anatolia in the next
few years.
When the affairs of Rum were about to change, first heavenly decree removed by their
death the blessing of the ‘ulama’ and shaykhs whose knowledge and ritual practice was
rooted in true belief, and expunged the legend ‘blessings are with your elders’ from the page
of Islam. After that [Rum] was beset by disasters and calamities.

The main reason for the ominous atmosphere was the intensification of Mongol
interest in Anatolia. After 669/1271, Samaghar was joined by a member of the
Ilkhanid family itself, the Ilkhan Abaqa’s younger brother Eijei, who acted as the
Ilkhan’s personal representative. The tensions between the Pervane and this
parallel administration seem to have been one of the factors that pushed Mu‘in
al-Din Sulayman to enter into a treacherous correspondence with the Mamluk
sultan Baybars.54 In 675/1277 Baybars invaded, briefly occupying Kayseri, while
simultaneously his Turkmen allies in south-central Anatolia, the Karamanids,

50
Aqsara’i, Musamarat al-Akhbar, ed. Osman Turan (Ankara, 1944), 91, 120.
51
Discussed further in Chapter 2.
52
Cahen La Turquie, 238–9; Ibn Bibi, al-Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya (Ankara), 613; (Tehran), 533.
53
Aqsara’i, Musamarat al-Akhbar, 119–20.
54
Cahen, La Turquie, 271–4; Yıldız, ‘Mongol Rule’, 376–7; Amitai-Preiss, Mongols and Mamluks,
157–78; a useful survey of these events drawing primarily on Ilkhanid sources is Judith Kolbas,
Timothy May and Vlastimil Novák, Anatolian Early 14th Century Coin Hoard (Prague, 2011),
15–20.
46 Religion, Politics and Society

rebelled. The Karamanids seized Konya in support of an individual named Jimri

whom they put on the throne, claiming him to be a member of the Seljuq
dynasty. The Ilkhan Abaqa responded by invading Anatolia, and Mongol control
of the region was restored and tightened.55 The minister Shams al-Din Muham-
mad Juwayni (d. 683/1284) was appointed to regulate the affairs of the pro-
vince.56 Juwayni seems to have been responsible for increasing the Iranian
influences in the administration of Rum, which were reinforced by his successor
in charge of the civilian bureaucracy there, Fakhr al-Din Qazwini, who appointed
‘innumerable Tabrizis, Hamadanis, ‘Iraqis, Khushkanis, Khurasanis, Georgians,
Alans, Marandis, Nakhjawanis, Tiflisis and Arranis’.57 As a result, Anatolia was
drawn more closely into contact with Iranian intellectual and literary life. The
Anatolian poet Sayf al-Din Farghani addressed numerous poems to his famous
contemporary Sa‘di of Shiraz,58 and it was most likely Juwayni who appointed a
friend, the noted scholar and astronomer Qutb al-Din Shirazi (d. 710/1310), to
the office of qadi in Sivas at around this date; Shirazi had already spent time in
Anatolia studying with Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi.59 Juwayni was a major literary
patron, and brought with him in his entourage the well-known poet Humam-i
Tabrizi, to whom he granted a pension out of the revenues of Rum.60 The well-
known Sufi poet Fakhr al-Din ‘Iraqi also received Juwayni’s patronage.61
Anatolia’s importance was connected not just to its strategic position as a
borderland with the Mamluks, and its provision of the pastures vital for the
Mongol military machine, but also its immense wealth. A third of vizier Rashid al-
Din’s personal property was in Anatolia, Erzincan formed part of the personal
property of Abaqa Khan,62 while the powerful Juwayni brothers also had major
investments in the province, as exemplified by the Çifte Minareli Medrese in Sivas
built on Shams al-Din’s orders, one of the most architecturally important build-
ings of medieval Anatolia to survive (Fig. 1.1).

55
Turan, Selçuklular Zamanında Türkiye, 549–54; Melville, ‘Anatolia under the Mongols’, 66–7, 70.
56
On him see Esther Ravalde, ‘Shams al-Din Juwayni, Vizier and Patron: Mediation Between Ruler
and Ruled in the Ilkhanate’, in De Nicola and Melville (eds), The Mongols’ Middle East,55–78; also
George Lane, Early Mongol Rule in Thirteenth-Century Iran: A Persian Renaissance (London, 2003).
57
Aqsara’i, Musamarat al-Akhbar, 148–9.
58
Sayf al-Din Farghani, Diwan, ed. Dhabihallah Safa (Tehran, 1341).
59
John Tuthill Walbridge, ‘The Philosophy of Qutb al-Din Shirazi: A Study in the Integration of
Islamic Philosophy’, PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1983, 21–3.
60
Diwan-i Humam-i Tabrizi, ed. Rahid ‘Iwadi (Tehran, 1351), chihil u sih-chihil u panj, chihil u
haft-chihil u hasht.
61
Lane, Mongol Rule, 201, and see pp. 143–4 below.
62
Patrick Wing, The Jalayirids: Dynastic State Formation in the Mongol Middle East (Edinburgh,
2016), 54, 70.
 The Formation of Islamic Anatolia 47

Shams al-Din Juwayni’s Çifte Minareli Medrese at Sivas.

FIG. 1.1
Photograph by Peter J. Lu, courtesy of Special Collections, Fine Arts Library, Harvard
University

Trade played a major part in the region’s prosperity, and the main Ilkhanid
imperial highway stretched from Tabriz through Erzurum, Erzincan and Konya to
the Mediterranean,63 while Anatolia was also, as mentioned above, home to rich
silver mines. It is against this background that we can understand the keen interest
in the geography of Anatolia shown by Arghun, Abaqa’s successor, as the Ilkhanid
historian Rashid al-Din describes:

63
Ibid., 54. For a somewhat dated survey of the economic situation, although one which has yet to be
superseded entirely, see Zeki Validi Togan, ‘Economic Conditions in Anatolia in the Mongol
Period’, trans. Gary Leiser, Annales Islamologiques 25 (1991): 203–40; on trade see also Blessing,
Rebuilding Anatolia, 173–9; Trépanier, Foodways and Daily Life, 46–8.
48 Religion, Politics and Society

Qutb al-Din Shirazi arrived [in the khan’s presence] and showed him a map of the western
sea, its gulfs and the coasts that comprise most of the western province. The sultan very
much enjoyed talking with him when he explained the province of Rum; meanwhile, the
eye of the sultan fell on Amorium, which is in Rum, and he ordered Shirazi to describe it.64

Arghun built a palace at Aladağ to the north of lake Van, where he would spend
most of the summer, and which was later used by the Ilkhan Geikhatu.65 Thus
Ilkhans regularly passed in close proximity to Anatolia on their itineraries and
were intimately involved in its affairs, belying the province’s alleged status as the
Mongols’ ‘Wild West’. Arghun even married a Seljuq princess, the daughter of
Sultan Rukn al-Din Kılıç Arslan.66
Emblematic of this growing entanglement of Ilkhanids and Anatolia is the
main chronicle of Seljuq Anatolia, Ibn Bibi’s al-Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya fi’l-Awamir al-
‘Ala’iyya, dedicated to ‘Ala’ al-Din ‘Ata’ Malik Juwayni, governor of Baghdad and
brother of Shams al-Din. Purporting to be a chronicle of the Seljuqs, in fact the
work idolises ‘Ala’ al-Din Kayqubad I, presenting him as an exemplary ruler; but
at the same time the work may also have been intended to present the argument
for preserving the Seljuq sultanate, now viewed by many Ilkhanid officials as a
breeding ground of trouble in the wake of the rebellions of 675/1277.67 Yet the
real problems for the post-675/1277 Ilkhanid administration of Anatolia came
not from the Seljuq court, but from the peripheries, where many Turkmen
remained in a more or less permanent state of rebellion against Ilkhanid rule.
The Ilkhans’ most significant enemies were the Karamanids of south-central
Anatolia, who posed a constant threat to the old Seljuq capital of Konya. The
chaos was compounded by the incompetence of the Mongol civil governor of
Anatolia, Fakhr al-Din Qazwini, but the posting of Arghun’s brother Geikhatu to
Anatolia in 1284 eventually restored some stability. Geikhatu regarded Anatolia as
a personal power base, but he also seems to have been genuinely popular there.
Yet when Geikhatu became Ilkhan on Arghun’s death in 690/1291, this relation-
ship with Anatolia was a destabilising factor. Factions within the Ilkhanate
resented the prominence of Anatolians in the Ilkhan’s entourage, while the
eruption of further Turkmen rebellions in the province meant Geikhatu was
immediately forced to return and wage a brutal but ultimately futile campaign
to suppress them.68

64
Rashid al-Din, Jami‘ al-Tawarikh, ed. Muhammad Rawshan and Mustafa Musawi (Tehran, 1373),
II, 1178.
65
Hamdallah Mustawfi, Nuzhat al-Qulub, ed. Muhammad Dabir Siyaqi (Tehran, 1388), 154;
Aqsara’i, Musamarat al-Akhbar, 168.
66
Rashid al-Din, Jami‘ al-Tawarikh, II, 1152.
67
Yıldız, ‘Mongol rule’, 441–3, 473–81.
68
Melville, ‘Anatolia under the Mongols’, 78–9.
 The Formation of Islamic Anatolia 49

The accession of Ghazan in 694/1295 marks a definitive change in the nature

of the Ilkhanate. His path to power having been supported by prominent
Muslims in the Mongol military, Ghazan himself converted to Islam and the
Ilkhanate became a Muslim state. This is also generally regarded as a period of
centralisation and consolidation of Ilkhanid control, yet in Anatolia chaos pre-
vailed. Melville, following Faruk Sümer, argues that Ghazan’s reign marks the
nadir of Ilkhanid rule in Anatolia, as Mongol commanders started to see it as ‘a
place to make or restore their fortunes’.69 Many had long-standing family and
personal connections to Anatolia, and they may have increasingly identified
themselves as Anatolian.70 The Seljuq sultan Mas‘ud, implicated in the revolt of
the amir Baltu of the Mongol Jalayir tribe, was deposed in 697/1297 and replaced
by his nephew ‘Ala’ al-Din Kayqubad III.71 A more serious threat to Ilkhanid
authority was the rebellion in 698/1298 of Baiju’s Muslim grandson and governor
of Rum, Sülemish, who sought and received recognition from the Mamluks as
their vassal.72 The leading Mongol amir Chopan was sent to defeat Sülemish, but
the process of Anatolia’s gradual detachment from Ilkhanid control continued.
The increasing weakness of Mongol authority is also suggested by the proliferation
of mints in the year 699/1299, which may represent Ghazan’s attempt to buy
Turkmen support by sharing the profits of silver coinage with them.73 At the same
time, the value of Anatolian coins diverged from that of Iranian issues, indicating
the continuing lack of integration of Anatolia in the Ilkhanate.74
The defeat of Sülemish was followed by a lull in the cycle of revolt, and as a
result the early years of the fourteenth century are poorly documented; Wing
believes that Chopan continued to rule Anatolia ‘almost as an autonomous
principality’.75 This collapse in central authority seems to be reflected in the
proliferation of imitation coins in this period.76 The Seljuq sultanate was

69
Ibid., 81.
70
Cahen, La Turquie, 293; Darling, ‘Persianate Sources’, 134–5.
71
Rashid al-Din, Jami‘ al-Tawarikh, II, 1281.
72
On the revolt see Aqsara’i, Musamarat al-Akhbar, 239–41, 244–6; Rashid al-Din, Jami‘ al-
Tawarikh, II, 1282–4; Baybars al-Mansuri, Zubdat al-Fikra, 319; Anne Broadbridge, Kingship
and Ideology in the Islamic and Mongol Worlds (Cambridge, 2008), 70–2; for the possible involve-
ment of the Ottomans see Tezcan, ‘The Memory of the Mongols’, 26–8. For the text of the letter
issued by the Mamluk chancery appointing Sülemish ruler of Rum on the Mamluks’ behalf see al-
‘Umari, Masalik al-Absar wa-Mamlik al-Amsar, ed. Kamil Salman al-Juburi (Beirut, 2010), III,
235–7.
73
Lindner, Explorations, 93–9; also on this proliferation see Kolbas, May and Novák, Anatolian Early
14th Century Coin Hoard, 98.
74
Kolbas, May and Novák, Anatolian Early 14th Century Coin Hoard, 98–9.
75
Wing, Jalayirids, 57.
76
Kolbas, May and Novák, Anatolian Early 14th Century Coin Hoard, 101–2.
50 Religion, Politics and Society

increasingly irrelevant even as a form of political legitimacy, and when the last
sultan, Ghiyath al-Din Mas‘ud II, died in 708/1308, the Mongols seem simply to
have decided not to replace him. This was in keeping with the policy of
centralisation that obtained across the Ilkhanate: local dynasties in Iran also
disappear around this time. Yet the problem of the Turkmen was never resolved.
At the slightest sign of weakness, the Karamanids were able to capture Konya,
which they did repeatedly. In 714/1314, the Ilkhan Öljeitü dispatched Chopan to
reimpose Ilkhanid authority, suggesting that its assertion after the Sülemish revolt
had been short lived. Chopan managed to summon the leading Turkmen chiefs to
offer allegiance; Aqsara’i lists as the chiefs who attended Chopan at Karanbük and
showed their obedience Falak al-Din Dündar from Burghlu (Uluborlu), the
Eshrefids from Gorgorum (Beyşehir), the grandsons of the Seljuq vizier Fakhr
al-Din who controlled Karahisar Develi (Afyonkarahisar), the Germiyanids of
Kütahya and the Candarid Süleyman Pasha from Kastamonu, none of whom had
previously recognised Ilkhanid authority. The striking absence of the Ottomans
from this list suggests that they were considered too insignificant to count.
According to Aqsara’i, only the Karamanids refused to attend, but were chastened
by Chopan’s forces; however, as soon as Chopan left, the Karamanids recaptured
Konya, suggesting the enduring limitations of Ilkhanid authority.77
With the accession of the infant Abu Sa‘id as Ilkhan in 716/1316, Chopan
became the strongman of the Ilkhanate, and appointed his son Timurtash as
governor of Anatolia. Timurtash would follow in the trajectory of so many
other Mongol amirs, rebelling in 723/1323. Nonetheless, the weakness of the
Ilkhan’s hand and the leading role of Chopan was such that Timurtash had
to be forgiven, and reinstated. Timurtash prosecuted vigorous but ulti-
mately unsuccessful campaigns against the Turkmen, but on the fall of his
protector, his father, in 727/1327, he fled to the Mamluk sultanate where he
was initially received as an honoured guest. Yet, suspected of having designs on
the Mamluk sultanate itself, Timurtash was soon murdered at the Mamluk
sultan’s behest.78

THE AGE OF ERETNA AND THE BEYLIKS

The exile and death of Timurtash marks a growing dissociation of Anatolia from
Iran. Although power shifted back to Abu Sa‘id after Chopan’s death, in Anatolia

77
Aqsara’i, Musamarat al-Akhbar, 311-312; Sümer, ‘Anadolu’da Moğollar’, 81–2.
78
Broadbridge, Kingship and Ideology, 117–25.
 The Formation of Islamic Anatolia 51

the Ilkhan’s influence continued to weaken. Shaykh Hasan Jalayir, a member of

the Mongol tribe of the Jalayirids and a cousin of Abu Sa‘id as well as Chopan’s
son in law, replaced Timurtash as governor of Anatolia, where he set about
establishing a power base. However, Shaykh Hasan was soon deeply immersed
in politics in Iran, and he deputed the governorship to one of Timurtash’s officers,
Eretna.79 Initially Eretna was thus an Ilkhanid governor, but as the Ilkhanate
collapsed with the death of Abu Sa‘id in 736/1335, he established himself as an
effectively independent ruler, who, with his descendants, dominated Central
Anatolia in the mid-fourteenth century, holding sway over Kayseri, Niğde, Sivas,
Ankara and at times Erzincan.80 Although Eretna is identified as a Uighur, he
seems to have emphasised his continuity with Mongol traditions of governance
and to have relied for support on the substantial nomadic Mongol population of
Central Anatolia.81 Mongols, referred to as the Qara Tatars in the sources,
retained a distinctive identity in Anatolia until at least the end of the fourteenth
century.82 One source describes these Mongols as comprising in the late four-
teenth century a ‘huge, all-encompassing number’ (al-jamm al-ghafīr), and other
sources give the figures of them having between 30,000, 60,000 or even 100,000
tents.83 If we use the conventional estimate that on average each tent would
have housed five people, this gives a Mongol population of Central Anatolia of
between 150,000 to half a million at the end of the fourteenth century.84
When Timur invaded, he sought to gain the loyalty of Anatolia’s Mongols by
reminding them of their presently reduced status since the death of Eretna, ‘the
last of your kings’, again suggesting Eretna’s close identification with the Mongols
whatever his own ethnic origins.85 Nonetheless, other sources point to acute
tensions between Eretna and his successors on the one hand and the Mongol
chiefs within their territories on the other, persisting until the end of the

79
Wing, Jalayirids, 79.
80
On Eretna and his successors see Kemal Göde, Eratnalılar (1327–1381) (Ankara, 1994); Claude
Cahen, ‘Eretna’, EI2; on the later Eretnid state see especially Jürgen Paul, ‘Mongol Aristocrats and
Beyliks in Anatolia: A Study of Astarābādī’s Bazm va Razm’, Eurasian Studies 9 (2011): 105–58.
81
Paul, ‘Mongol Aristocrats’, esp. 112, 119, 125, 152–3.
82
Sümer, ‘Anadolu’da Moğollar’, 115; Gül, Doğu ve Güneydoğu Anadolu’da Moğol Hakimiyeti, 170–1,
and see the discussion of the Qara Tatars at the time of Timur’s invasion in Sharaf al-Din ‘Ali Yazdi,
Zafarnama, ed. Mahmud ‘Abbasi (Tehran, 1336), II, 357–9.
83
Sümer, ‘Anadolu’da Moğollar’, 115; Ibn ‘Arabshah, ‘Aja’ib al-Maqdur fi Nawa’ib Timur, ed.
Ahmad Fayiz al-Himsi (Beirut, 1986), 183.
84
Cf. Gül, Doğu ve Güneydoğu Anadolu’da Moğol Hakimiyeti, 171, and for the size of nomad
households see Anatoly M. Khazanov, Nomads and the Outside World (Madison, 1994), 29–30,
126–30.
85
Ibn Arabshah, Aja’ib al-Maqdur, 321.
52 Religion, Politics and Society

dynasty.86 Eventually, the Qara Tatars seem to have been deported to

Transoxiana by Timur.87
The Diyarbakır region was also heavily populated by the Oirat Mongol tribe,
and was ruled by another Mongol family, the Sutayids, until the 750s/1350s, after
which some of their supporters accepted Turkmen rule and others joined the
Eretnids.88 Parts of Eastern Anatolia were under the control of the Jalayirids, a
third Mongol family, but after the 1330s they were relatively rarely involved in
Central Anatolian affairs. In the west and on the coasts, most regions were under
the control of various Turkmen beyliks, although in Cilicia and Trebizond
Christian kingdoms remained: the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia survived to
1375, while Trebizond outlasted Byzantium, falling to the Turks only in 866/
1461. Byzantium gradually lost its outposts in Bithynia to the Ottomans in the
early fourteenth century, with Bursa falling in 726/1326, but Philadelphia, near
the Aegean, remained under Greek control until 1390.
Fourteenth-century Anatolia thus presents an extremely politically fragmented
picture, so much so that even contemporaries were confused. The Mamluk author
al-‘Umari, who got his information about Anatolia from two different informants,
one Anatolian and the other a Genoese merchant who had done business there,
variously reported that there were eleven and sixteen different Turkmen king-
doms.89 One standard modern reference source enumerates twenty different
beyliks;90 but in fact the question of what should be counted is a ‘beylik’ – a
modern term not found in the primary sources – is far from clear. For instance,
although the Sutayids of Diyarbakır are rarely counted as a ‘beylik’, there is little to
distinguish them from the other polities. Meanwhile, within the Eretnid territor-
ies, Kayseri was ruled by a chief named Junayd who was reliant on Mongol
soldiery, although it is unclear whether he himself was a Mongol, and has thus
been described as a ‘Mongol beylik’. Indeed, the area that the Eretnid ‘state’
covered comprised at least ten other mini-‘beyliks’.91 Such a situation obtained

86
See for example the almanac (taqwīm) produced for the last Eretnid of Sivas, ‘Ala’ al-Din ‘Ali, MS
Nuruosmaniye 2782, published in Osman Turan, İstanbul’un Fethinden önce Yazılmış Tarihî
Takvimler (Ankara, 1954), 64–73; for a discussion of the taqwīm see A. C. S. Peacock, ‘Two Royal
Almanacs from Late Fourteenth-Century Anatolia’, in Ali Ansari and Melanie Gibson (eds), Fruit of
Knowledge, Wheel of Fate (London, forthcoming). Eretnid-Mongol tensions are also documented in
detail in Şikari, Karamannâme (Zamanın kahramanı Karamaniler’in tarihi), ed. Metin Sözen and
Necdet Sakaoğlu (Karaman, 2005).
87
Yazdi, Zafarnama, II, 358–9.
88
Sümer, ‘Anadolu’da Moğollar’, 108; Gül, Doğu ve Güneydoğu Anadolu’da Moğol Hakimiyeti, 143.
89
Al-‘Umari, Masalik, III, 231, 242.
90
C. E. Bosworth, The New Islamic Dynasties: A Chronological and Genealogical Manual (Edinburgh,
1996), 219–39, noted in Paul, ‘Mongol Aristocrats’, 108.
91
Paul, ‘Mongol Aristocrats’, 152.
 The Formation of Islamic Anatolia 53

even on the peripheries still under Greek control. Byzantine-controlled

Philadelphia in south-western Anatolia has been described as a ‘Greek emirate’,92
while the complex situation in the fourteenth-century empire of Trebizond,
which was subject to large-scale seasonal Turkmen migrations, has been charac-
terised as follows:
Two states (or rather the empire of Trebizond and a nest of emirates) could coexist on the
same territory . . . in the absence of any major Turkmen leader or confederacy, the Grand
Komnenos [the ruler of Trebizond] himself could assume a double role. At times, it is no
exaggeration to say that he was simultaneously a Byzantine emperor and a Turkmen melik
of a group of small emirates which he had a hand in creating. It is difficult to suggest how
this situation can be depicted in a historical atlas, for Trapezuntines and Turkmens were
doing different things on the same land, which they could equally claim.93

The major Turkmen beyliks were, other than the Karamanids (c. 654/1256–880/
1475) in south-central Anatolia, the Aydınids (708/1308-829/1426) on the
Aegean coastal region, the Chobanids (prob. 680s/1280s–708/1309) and
Candarids (691/1292–866/1462) in northern Anatolia, and the Germiyanids
(c. 699/1299–832/1428) in western Anatolia.94 On the peripheries were the
Ottomans, who first emerge into the light of history in the early fourteenth
century, but whose early years are attested only by much later sources, with the
exception of brief mentions in Ibn Battuta and al-‘Umari and occasional refer-
ences in Greek sources. Despite the concentration in modern historiography on
the Ottomans, the latter were far from being seen as the most important beylik
even in the mid-fourteenth century. Al-‘Umari recounts that ‘The ruler of
Germiyan is the greatest of the rulers of the Turks, and has control over all the
others’,95 although admittedly, Ibn Battuta describes the second Ottoman ruler
Orhan (r. 724/1324–761/1360) as ‘the greatest of the Turkmen kings, the richest
and possessing of the most land and armies’.96 Even in the second half of the
fourteenth century Germiyan, and to a lesser extent Aydın, were home to the
most impressive courts where the early masters of Turkish literature wrote. It was
only under Murad I (761/1360–791/1389) and especially the reign of Bayezid I
(791/1389–804/1402) that the Ottomans began to expand substantially into

92
Michel Balivet, Romanie byzantine et Pays de Rûm turc (Istanbul, 1994), 103–9.
93
Anthony Bryer, ‘Greeks and Turkmens: The Pontic Exception’, Dumbarton Oaks Papers 29 (1975):
127; further on nomadic migrations in Trebizond see Shukurov, ‘Two Waves of Nomadic
Migration in the Pontos’.
94
I have largely drawn these dates from Bosworth, The New Islamic Dynasties, but it should be noted
that the foundation dates are often very tendentious.
95
Al-‘Umari, Masalik, III, 244.
96
Ibn Battuta, Rihla, 308; trans. Gibb, 451–2.
54 Religion, Politics and Society

Anatolia, an expansion that was halted by Bayezid’s defeat at the Battle of Ankara
by Timur in 804/1402.97 Although Timur briefly reconstituted some of the
beyliks that Bayezid had abolished, such as Karaman, he had no interest in
permanently occupying Anatolia, and the Ottomans were able to revive their
power during the early fifteenth century with astonishing success, culminating in
Mehmed the Conqueror’s conquest of Constantinople in 857/1453. The Otto-
mans had some competition in the east from the Aqquyunlu (798/1396–914/
1508),98 another minor beylik that by the late fourteenth century had turned into
a major power, then an empire, and from the Safavids, who traced their origins to
a Mongol-era Sufi order based in Ardabil in Iran that intermarried with the
Aqquyunlu and by the late fifteenth century were themselves seeking worldly
power. By the early sixteenth century the Ottomans had absorbed or vanquished
their rivals, even if they did not command the unquestioning support of all their
subjects.
In short, throughout Anatolia, local lords, some of Turkmen, some of Mongol
descent, and occasionally Greeks and Armenians, controlled varying amounts of
often overlapping and sometimes seasonally changing territory. Although geog-
raphy, environment and demography gave different regions of Anatolia distinct
characteristics, some features can be discerned across the peninsula. Throughout
Anatolia, the Turkmen seasonally migrated between pastures irrespective of the
nominal political power, just as they had in the thirteenth century, and on
occasion our sources allude to clashes over grazing rights resulting from these
migrations.99 In the main towns, Islam was playing an ever more important part
in occupying the public space, as both begs and members of the Mongol elite
adorned towns with zāwiyas, their favoured form of architectural patronage.100
Guild-like fraternities known as futuwwa played a major role in social, economic
and religious life across Muslim Anatolia, as we will discuss further in Chapter 3.

97
On Timur’s invasion and its consequences see Tillman Nagel, Timur der Eroberer und die
islamische Welt des späten Mittelalters (Munich, 1993).
98
On the Aqquyunlu see John E. Woods, The Aqquyunlu: Clan, Confederation, Empire (Salt Lake,
City, 1999 [2nd ed.]).
99
See for example Bar Hebraeus, The Chronography of Gregory Abu’l-Faraj . . . Known as Bar
Hebraeus, trans. E. A. Wallis Budge (London, 1936), 597–8 (a group of Oirats fled to Mamluk
lands in 1296 after losing out in a clash over pastures with Turkmen). In general see on nomads,
Peacock, ‘The Seljuk Sultanate of Rum and the Turkmen of the Byzantine Frontier’; Lindner,
Nomads and Ottomans; Lindner, Explorations; Bryer, ‘Greeks and Turkmen’.
100
On the architecture in the period see Patricia Blessing, ‘All Quiet on the Eastern Frontier? The
Contemporaries of Early Ottoman Architecture in Eastern Anatolia’, in Patricia Blessing and
Rachel Goshgarian (eds), Architecture and Landscape in Medieval Anatolia, 1100–1500 (Edin-
burgh, 2017), 200–23.
 RUMELI BLACK SEA
(Ottoman)

BYZANTIUM Sinop

Adrianople Kastamonu
Iznik Samsun
Constantinople Trebizond
CANDARIDS
Amasya EMPIRE OF TREBIZOND
Bolu Niksar
OTTOMANS k Çorum
Sakarya ır ma Tokat
KARESIDS Bursa Ankara zıl Erzurum
Eskişehir Kı Yozgat Sivas Erzincan
Balıkesir
AQQUYUNLU
Kütahya Kırşehir
ERETNIDS
Hacıbektaş
SARUHANIDS
GERMIYANIDS Lake Van
Akşehir Kayseri Malatya
Birgi IA Elbistan
AYDINIDS Aksaray C
Konya A DO
Tire PP Diyarbakır
Izmir S
CA NID DULKADIRIDS
Selçuk Ereğli ZA ARTUQIDS
MA
KARAMANIDS RA Mardin
Miletus MENTEŞIDS Ayntab
Karaman Tarsus
Ti

Antalya Urfa
g
ris

Bodrum Alanya Silifke Ayas Aleppo

Antioch
RHODES
Eu

TEKEOĞULLARI
ph

MAMLUKS
rat

CRETE
es

CYPRUS

0 250km
MEDITERRANEAN SEA

MAP 4 Anatolia in the late fourteenth century, showing major beyliks

56 Religion, Politics and Society

The countryside was dominated by fortresses, whose lords frequently switched

allegiance.101 Trade passed freely across Anatolia, even between Mongol-
controlled parts and their Mamluk rivals. The settlement of Gümüş, for instance,
famous for the mines from which it took its name, was frequented by merchants
from both Ilkhanid Iraq and Mamluk Syria even though it was in the Ilkhanid
zone.102 Economically, Anatolia maintained an important role on the trade routes
as one of the main conduits between the Mamluk lands and the Dasht-i Qipchaq
(the northern Black Sea steppe) from which the supplies of slaves on which the
Mamluks relied came; horses were also exported to Egypt via Kastamonu.103
It seems that the beyliks were reliant above all for their prosperity from trade
with the east, the Ilkhanid lands.104 The silk trade probably formed a major part
of this; in Izmir, Ibn Battuta recounts that he was bestowed silk robes by the local
Aydınid ruler that were manufactured in Baghdad, Tabriz, Nishapur and China,
indicating the extent of Anatolia’s international trade connections;105 while he
also mentions that carpets from Aksaray were exported to Syria, Egypt, Iraq,
India, China and ‘the lands of the Turks’, meaning Central Asia.106 At the same
time, routes for European merchants to the heart of the Mongol world lay
through Anatolia too: the Genoese merchant Pegolotti describes a route from
Cilician Armenia through Anatolia to Tabriz. Anatolia, despite its political frag-
mentation, thus served as a bridge between Europe, the Middle East and Central
Asia.107 Nonetheless, not all was rosy. Several towns are mentioned by Ibn
Battuta as ruined: Izmir, for example,108 and Ilkhanid-controlled Erzurum, much
of which he describes as having been destroyed in fighting between rival groups of
Turkmen.109 The Ilkhanid bureaucrat Hamdallah Mustawfi, writing in the
1330s, complains that the revenue from Rum had declined from 1050 tomans
under the Seljuqs to 33 tomans in his own day,110 and there is some reason to

101
Jürgen Paul, ‘A Landscape of Fortresses: Central Anatolia in Astarābādī’s Bazm va Razm’, in David
Durand-Guédy (ed.), Turko-Mongol Rulers, Cities and City Life (Leiden, 2013), 317–345; cf. Ibn
Battuta, Rihla, 308, trans. Gibb, 452, who describes Orhan as possessing nearly one hundred forts
(hisn).
102 _ _ Battuta, Rihla, 294 ; trans. Gibb, 436–7; Al-‘Umari, Masalik, III, 231.
Ibn
103
Al-‘Umari, Masalik, III, 225; A. C. S. Peacock, ‘Sinop: A Frontier City in Seljuq and Mongol
Anatolia’, Ancient Civilizations from Scythia to Siberia 16 (2010): 117–18.
104
Philip N. Remler, ‘Ottoman, Isfandiyarid and Eretnid Coinage: A Currency Community in
Fourteenth-Century Anatolia’, Museum Notes: American Numismatic Society 25 (1980): 186–8.
105
Ibn Battuta, Rihla, 304; trans. Gibb, 446.
106
Ibn Battuta, Rihla, 295; trans. Gibb, 433.
107
For a discussion of trade routes in the period see Blessing, Rebuilding Anatolia, 173–9.
108
Ibn Battuta, Rihla, 304; trans. Gibb, 445.
109
Ibn Battuta, Rihla, 298; trans. Gibb, 437.
110
Mustawfi, Nuzhat al-Qulub, 145. See also the discussion in Togan, ‘Economic Conditions’,
229–31, and also on these figures Paul, ‘Mongol Aristocrats’, 146, n. 153.
 The Formation of Islamic Anatolia 57

suspect that economic decline may have set in around the end of the thirteenth
century.111 Nonetheless, in the mid-fourteenth century al-‘Umari still noted the
region’s prosperity, commenting that ‘Food and prices are both cheap for a variety
of reasons, the lack of uncanonical taxes (mukūs), the multitude of available
pasture, the extent of potential for trade, and the area being surrounded by the
sea’.112
If trade and people could pass freely, so too could scholars and texts. As we
have seen, Anatolians sought their fortune in Iran, and Iranians in Anatolia, and it
was possible, indeed easy, to serve both beyliks and Ilkhans. For instance, the
astronomer and philosopher Qutb al-Din Shirazi wrote not just for his main
patron, Shams al-Din Juwayni, but also dedicated various works on astronomy to
the amir Muhammad b. Taj al-Din Mu‘tazz b. Tahir and to the ruler of the
Chobanid dynasty Muzaffar al-Din Yavlak Arslan.113 Ahmad of Niğde, an author
from central Anatolia writing in Persian in the 1330s, dedicated his encyclopaedia
of useful knowledge to Anatolia’s suzerain, the Ilkhan Abu Sa‘id; but he also
included lavish praise for the Ilkhan’s rivals, the Golden Horde ruler Özbek and
the Mamluk sultan al-Nasir, reflecting the cultural and the political world of
Anatolia in the period.114 Muhammad al-Tustari, who wrote an Arabic philo-
sophical work, al-Fusul al-Ashrafiyya, for the Eshrefid Turkmen ruler of Beyşehir,
Mubariz al-Din Muhammad b. Sulayman (r. 702/1302–721/1320), also dedi-
cated a work to the Mamluk sultan al-Nasir Muhammad, and is said to have been
a close confident of the Ilkhan Öljeitü.115 The political fragmentation of Anatolia
had little impact on its shared intellectual and literary culture.
The Ilkhanate’s legacy could be felt across fourteenth-century Anatolia, far
beyond the Eretnid heartland, and bequeathed a common monetary, adminis-
trative and, to some degree, cultural system. Coins produced in Turkmen beyliks
emulated Ilkhanid typologies.116 There are copies in Turkish libraries of Ilkhanid

111
Darling, ‘Persianate Sources’, 131–2; cf. Blessing, Rebuilding Anatolia, 179, 183. In contrast,
Togan, ‘Economic Conditions’, believes there was continuous economic development throughout
the Ilkhanid period.
112
Al-‘Umari, Masalik, III, 230.
113
Walbridge, ‘The Philosophy of Qutb al-Din Shirazi’, 245–53.
114
See Peacock, ‘Ahmad of Nigde’s al-Walad al-Shafiq’.
115
On him see Hajji Khalifa, Kashf al-Zunun ‘an Asami al-Kutub wa’l-Funun, ed. Şeferettin Yaltkaya
(Istanbul, 1941), no. 540. Al-Fusul al-Ashrafiyya, dealing with metaphysics and cosmology, is
preserved in an unpublished autograph, Süleymaniye, MS Ayasofya 2445; Tustari’s Sharh Manazil
al-Sa’irin was dedicated to al-Nasir Muhammad, Süleymaniye, MS Fatih 2707.
116
Remler, ‘Ottoman, Isfandiyarid and Eretnid Coinage’, 186–8; Lindner, Explorations, 96–7;
Darling, ‘Persianate Sources’, 140. If this was indeed the case it would suggest a divergence from
the height of Ilkhanid power under Ghazan when Anatolian coinage was significantly different
metrologically from that of Iran, and Anatolia also enjoyed the unusual distinction of its vassal
58 Religion, Politics and Society

administrative manuals such as the Sa‘adatnama and the Jami‘ al-Hisab, and these
were used as models in Anatolian beyliks, most notably the Ottomans.117 Such
manuals show that the Ilkhanids perceived all of Anatolia as being subject to their
sway, at least in theory. The Risala-yi Falakiyya, another mid-fourteenth-century
accounting manual, divides Rum into al-Wustaniyya, the directly administered
Ilkhanid province stretching from the region of Lake Van to Akşehir,
Afyonkarahisar and Gümüshbazar in the west, and the al-ūjāt, i.e. the frontier,
the regions of which are listed according to either the names of the principal towns
or the names of its rulers or dynasties: Karaman, the Hamidoğulları, the Aydınid
Umur Beg, Germiyan, the Ottoman Orhan, and the towns of Denizli, Gerede,
Bolu, Kastamonu, Eğirdir and Sinop.118 Similarly, Hamdallah Mustawfi’s Nuzhat
al-Qulub, composed no later than 741/1340, which offers a conspectus of
revenue-producing areas, includes income from areas such as the Karamanid town
of Ermenek, Candarid Kastamonu and Amorium.119 In neither case can we
regard these entries as reflecting mid-fourteenth-century reality, but rather Ilkha-
nid aspirations of an earlier period to exert hegemony over all of Anatolia.
Nonetheless, the fiction of Ilkhanid suzerainty was maintained in some beyliks,
however distant or even hostile their relations with the Ilkhanate might have been
in practice. In Candarid Kastamonu, Ilkhanid coins were minted until Abu Sa‘id’s
reign; early Ottoman coins likewise were simply local Ilkhanid issues until 727/
1327, and it is only after Timurtash’s rebellion that coins appear mentioning the
names of Ottoman rulers.120 Even in a beylik known for its political hostility to
the Ilkhans, Karaman, clear Ilkhanid influences can be detected in its court’s
literary culture into the late fourteenth century, some four decades after the
disappearance of effective Ilkhanid power in the peninsula.121

sultans continuing to issue their own distinct coinage in their own names. See Kolbas, May and
Novák, Anatolian Early 14th Century Coin Hoard, 98–9.
117
Darling, ‘Persianate Sources’, 141; Abdülkadir Yuvalı, ‘Osmanlı Müesseseleri Üzerindeki İlhanlı
Tesirleri’, Sosyal Bililmer Enstitüsü Dergisi 6 (1995) : 249–54; Abdülkadir Yuvalı, ‘Influence des
Ilkhanats sur les institutions de l’Empire ottoman’ in Daniel Panzac (ed.), Histoire économique et
sociale de I’Empire ottoman et de la Turquie, (1326–1960): actes du sixième congrès international tenu
à Aix-en-Provence du ler au 4 juillet 1992 (Paris, 1995), 751–4; Nejat Göyünç, ‘Osmanlı
Maliyesinde İlhanlı Tesirleri’, in Amy Singer and Amnon Cohen (eds) Aspects of Ottoman History,
Papers from CIÉPO IX (Jerusalem, 1994), 162–6.
118
Abdullah Püser Mohammed Bin Kiya el-Mazanderani, Risale-i Fekekiyye (Kitab-us Siyakat), trans.
Ismail Otrar (Istanbul, 2013), 104, facsimile fols 93a–b.
119
Hamdallah Mustawfi, Nuzhat al-Qulub, 146–52.
120
Remler, ‘Ottoman, Isfandiyarid and Eretnid Coinage’, 177; Darling, ‘Persianate Sources’, 140.
121
See Peacock, ‘Two Royal Almanacs’, discussing the taqwīm made for the Karamanid beg ‘Ala’ al-
Din (Leiden University Library, MS Or. 563).
 The Formation of Islamic Anatolia 59

THE SEARCH FOR LEGITIMACY IN MONGOL

AND BEYLIK ANATOLIA

All Anatolian rulers shared the problem of how to justify their rule. As discussed
above, the Mongol invasions are often thought to have engendered a political crisis
throughout the Muslim world by killing the Caliph, and the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries saw considerable experimentation with new forms of political
legitimacy. The Ilkhans justified their rule with reference to their Chinggisid
descent and increasingly, after their conversion to Islam, their role as defenders of
Islam, perhaps even laying claim to the legacy of the Abbasid Caliphate.122
Although Mongol claims to legitimacy were never unequivocally accepted in
Anatolia, it was also hard for the other political actors in the region to justify their
own right to rule.123 The Anatolian Seljuqs had enjoyed the twin blessing of their
prestigious name, which they had commemorated in works such as Qani‘i’s now
lost Saljuqnama and recognition by the Caliph. In the absence of a Caliph, the last
one having been killed in Hülegü’s conquest of Baghdad, the Seljuq name itself
became an important source of legitimacy. The Karamanids thus portrayed them-
selves as Seljuq servants, and on seating the pretender Jimri on the throne in Konya,
the Karamanid Mehmed Beg claimed to be acting merely as Jimri’s vizier. In
numerous beyliks, the rulers purported to be themselves of Seljuq descent, while
in fourteenth-century Anatolia neo-Seljuq names such as Kılıç Aslan became
popular.124 Even for an established outside dynasty, the Seljuq heritage had a
certain allure. On the Mamluk sultan Baybars’ brief occupation of Kayseri in
675/1277, he seems to have done his best to portray himself as a legitimate Seljuq
monarch. According to Ibn ‘Abd al-Zahir, who accompanied the invaders and left
an account preserved by al-‘Umari, Baybars made a point of establishing his camp
in the same place where the Seljuq sultan had encamped outside Kayseri, where he
had the ceremonial drum roll performed in according to custom (d uribat nawbat
_
banī Saljūq . . . ‘alā al-‘āda); he had the ceremonial parasol of the Seljuqs set up
(nusiba jatr banī saljūq) and when he entered Kayseri he sat on the Seljuq throne.125
_

122
For the most recent discussion see Jonathan Brack, ‘Mediating Sacred Kingship: Conversion and
Sovereignty in Mongol Iran’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2016; also
Jonathan Brack, ‘Theologies of Auspicious Kingship: the Islamization of Chinggisid Sacral
Kingship in the Islamic World’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 60 (2018): 1143–71.
123
See on the crisis of legitimacy in Anatolia Yıldız, ‘Mongol rule’, 599–601; on Ghazan’s aspirations
to replace the Caliph see Michael Hope, Power, Politics and Tradition in the Mongol Empire and the
Ilkhānate of Iran (Oxford, 2016), 178–81.
124
See ‘Aziz b. Ardashir Astarabadi, Bazm u Razm, ed. Kilisli Rifaat (Istanbul, 1948), index sv Qilij
Arslan; A. C. S. Peacock, ‘Seljuq Legitimacy in Islamic History’, in Christian Lange and Songul
Mecit (eds), The Seljuqs: Politics, Society and Culture (Edinburgh, 2011), 79–95.
125
Al-‘Umari, Masalik, III, 224–5.
60 Religion, Politics and Society

Rulers and rebels continued to use the Seljuq past as a source of legitimacy into
the fourteenth century and beyond, and the claim to have been granted the
symbols of rulership by the Seljuq sultan ‘Ala’ al-Din formed a crucial part of
what has been called the Ottoman ‘dynastic myth’.126 Yet it was evidently a not
wholly satisfactory solution. Why is unclear; possibly the sheer array of claimants
to Seljuq descent, many of whom were evidently politically impotent, such as the
otherwise unattested ‘Ala’ al-Din b. Saljuq who is mentioned in a chronicle of
Konya in the 1360s, devalued the currency of kinship to some degree.127 At any
rate, political elites also looked beyond Anatolia to validate their claims to rule.
We can see this even in one of the earliest beyliks, that founded at Denizli by
Muhammad the Turkmen (pp. 43–4 above). Similarly, when Sülemish rebelled,
he was keen to bestow symbols of authority on his Turkmen allies:
He summoned an army from the peripheries of Syria and the frontiers (uj), and gained the
allegiance of the soldiers stationed in the Danishmendid province, in the plain of Kazova.
He gathered countless ruffians (runūd u awbāsh), and gave the province’s wealth and lands
to the army so that nearly 50,000 cavalry joined him, and the Syrians came with reinforce-
ments 20,000 strong. He nominated amirs over them, to whom he gave the flag (sanjaq)
and kettle-drum (naqqāra).128

Alternatively, the beys might seek legitimacy through connecting themselves to

the Mamluk rulers of Egypt, as al-‘Umari describes:
The Mongols got control [of Anatolia], the kingship of the Seljuq dynasty declined until it
fell from them, and groups of Turks there gained control over much of that country, except
for a remnant, the east of which the Mongols have preserved, and have kept hold of its final
vestiges. The groups of Turks surround the Mongol kings on account of what the latter
have conquered. Some of the former still enter into obedience [of the Mongols] on
condition they do not have to give anything up when they submit. This situation of
obedience and rebellion, [the exchange of] tokens of friendship and forgetting [loyalty]
continued until time drew on, and the tent of Chinggis Khan’s state collapsed or some of its
pillars weakened. At that time [the Turks’] feet stood firm, and their days prospered. Since
they gained control of Anatolia they have corresponded with the kings of Egypt, whom
they have adopted as a form of assistance and whom they count as a provision against
vicissitudes. If one of them desires a decree of appointment (taqlīd) to be written [appoint-
ing him] viceroy of the lands he holds, it is written for him, and standards, flags banners,
full honours, a bejewelled sword, and a mounted horse are prepared for him. These people

126
Colin Imber, ‘The Ottoman Dynastic Myth’, Turcica 19 (1987): 7–27; Peacock, ‘Seljuq
Legitimacy’.
127
Peacock, ‘Seljuq Legitimacy’, 84–6.
128
Rashid al-Din, Jami‘ al-Tawarikh, II, 1287. Cf. Angus Stewart, The Armenian Kingdom and the
Mamluks: War and Diplomacy during the Reigns of Het’um II (1289–1307) (Leiden 2001), 130.
 The Formation of Islamic Anatolia 61

are still in the present day friendly, pure, trustworthy and loyal. Due to the great number of
them who have frequented [these lands], there are those who have adopted Egypt and Syria
as a home and have taken positions of command and land grants there and have become
subject to the [Mamluk] government. Their ambassadors until this day are never absent
from Egypt and Syria, and letters and presents go back and forth.129

For the Karamanids in particular this Mamluk connection was important, as they
were always reluctant to recognise even nominal Mongol suzerainty (even if, in
practice, they may have done so on occasion).
It was not merely the upstart Turkmen rulers who sought Mamluk recogni-
tion, but even Mongol rebels such as Timurtash and Sülemish. The coinage of
Eretna, who was by no means a rebel, offers a good illustration of the fluctuating
tendencies in the search for legitimacy by local rulers in Anatolia. Initially,
Eretna’s coins are standard Ilkhanid issues, very similar to those issued in Iran.130
However, after the collapse of the Ilkhanate, in 738/1337–8, Eretna sought
Mamluk suzerainty of his own volition, not because he was compelled to by
military force. As al-‘Umari puts it, ‘he sought an appointment from [the Mamluk
sultan] al-Nasir as viceroy of Anatolia’.131 Al-‘Umari recounts how the qadi of
Kayseri, Siraj al-Din, father of the later ruler of that town, Qadi Burhan al-Din,
brokered the agreement with the Mamluks by which Sultan al-Nasir
Muhammad’s name was mentioned in the khutba and struck on the coins.132
_
This seems to have been implemented the following year, when we have a coin
struck in Sivas in al-Nasir Muhammad’s name. Coins continued to be issued in
the Mamluk sultan’s name until 741/1341, when al-Nasir died.133 There are
nonetheless some indications that even before this Eretna had dropped al-Nasir’s
name from the khutba and sikka in some places, prompting Mamluk reprisals,134
_
and interestingly, in the same year that he first issued Mamluk coinage, 739/1339,
Eretna also minted coins in Erzincan in the name of Tughay-Timur, a non-
Chinggisid claimant to the Ilkhanate who ruled in Khurasan and had no control
over Anatolia.135 Finally, from 742/1341–2 onwards, Eretna ceased mentioning
an overlord and issued coins in his own name, proclaiming himself ‘the just
sultan’; many of these employed Uighur script to emphasise his Mongol heritage.
On his building inscriptions, Eretna proclaimed himself to be ‘the great sultan’

129
Al-‘Umari, Masalik, III, 215.
130
Remler, ‘Ottoman, Isfandiyarid and Eretnid Coinage’, 169–71.
131
Al-Umari, Masalik, III, 238, talaba Aratna taqlīdan nāsiriyyan bi-niyābat al-Rūm.
132 _
Ibid., III, 238; Sümer, ‘Anadolu’da _ Haluk Perk and Husnu Öztürk, Eretna,
Moğollar’, 104–5; cf.
Kadı Burhanettin ve Erzincan (Mutahhaten) Emirliği Sikkeleri (Istanbul, 2008), 94–6.
133
Perk and Öztürk, Eretna, Kadı Burhanettin ve Erzincan, 156–7, 466–7.
134
Göde, Eratnalılar, 49–50; Sümer, ‘Anadolu’da Moğollar’, 104.
135
Remler, ‘Ottoman, Isfandiyarid and Eretnid Coinage’, 171–2; Paul, ‘Mongol Aristocrats’, 118–19.
62 Religion, Politics and Society

from this date.136 This innovation can be seen as replicating the more general
breakdown in the concept of Chinggisid legitimacy in the 1340s; rulers who had
till then had sheltered behind the pretence they were ruling on behalf of a
Chinggisid now sought other forms of legitimacy.137 Eretna’s repudiation of
Mamluk sovereignty suggests that he felt he no longer had a need to seek external
justification for his rule.
Eretna’s coinage reflects the complicated and uncertain position of rulers of
medieval Anatolia, who experimented with different forms of legitimacy in a
period when established modes, even the much vaunted concept of Chinggisid
legitimacy, seem to have broken down. It cannot be said that Eretna’s methods
were entirely successful. Although his immediate descendants adopted a similar
strategy of calling themselves sultan, they were eventually overthrown by Qadi
Burhan al-Din, the aforementioned Siraj al-Din’s son, who proclaimed his Seljuq
descent on his mother’s side.138 This does not mean his own ascent to power was
uncontroversial. Burhan al-Din still relied on the support of the various Mongol
chiefs, many of whom evidently would have preferred an Eretnid on the
throne.139
It is perhaps surprising, given the importance political legitimacy evidently
held, that it was rarely expressed, as in other parts of the Islamic world, in
patronage of texts, despite the wealth of literary production in the period.
Although Ibn Battuta tells us that Eretna knew Arabic fluently,140 there are very
few texts that can be associated with the patronage of either Eretna or his
successors. The only significant literary work dedicated to an Eretnid to be
identified to date is a brief Persian work on tafsīr, the al-As’ila wa’l-Ajwiba, by
Jamal al-Din al-Aqsara’i, which was commissioned by the Eretnid amir of
Amasya, Sayf al-Din Şadgeldi (d. 783/1381).141 There is also a taqwīm, an
astrological almanac, composed for the last Eretnid ruler of Sivas, ‘Ala’ al-Din
‘Ali, in 772–3/1371–2, but despite the elaborate decoration of this text, with
extensive gold illumination (Plate 3), suggesting a willingness on the part of the
Eretnid court to invest in at least some types of book art, little other evidence has
yet come to light of Eretnid literary patronage.142 On occasion works may be

136
Göde, Eratnalılar, 64, and on the Uighur coinage see Chapter 4, p. 184.
137
Wing, Jalayirids, 74.
138
Astarabadi, Bazm u Razm, 41–7.
139
On Qadi Burhan al-Din see Paul, ‘Mongol Aristocrats’, and Nagel, Timur der Eroberer, 233–68.
140
Ibn Battuta, Rihla, 297; trans. Gibb, 435.
141
See for example Süleymaniye, MS Ayasofya 71.
142
MS Nurusomaniye 2782, discussed in Peacock, ‘Two Royal Almanacs’. One further text may be
the history of Chinggis Khan composed possibly for a female Eretnid, but her identity is uncertain.
See Charles Melville, ‘Genealogy and Exemplary Rulership in the Tarikh-i Chingiz Khan’, in Yasir
 The Formation of Islamic Anatolia 63

dedicated to individuals bearing magnificent titles who are otherwise unattested in

the historical record. One example is a poetic anthology entitled the Anis al-
Khalwa wa Jalis al-Salwa compiled by Musafir b. Nasir al-Malatawi. It is dedi-
cated to a certain amir Jalal al-Din and his son, but who they were is unknown.
Only the quotation in the text of a qasida by a vizier of Eretna, Sayyid Abu Talib,
dated 759/760, suggests it may have been compiled within the Eretnid lands for
some Eretnid lord, otherwise unknown to us.143 Similarly, although expensive
illuminated manuscripts were produced in late thirteenth- to fourteenth-century
Anatolia, especially Konya, their patrons are usually not identified or not
known.144 In the Turkmen periphery the picture was slightly more varied, with
substantial literary centres in the Aydınid and later Germiyanid states, as will be
discussed in Chapter 4, but, on the whole, while occasional pieces may be found
dedicated to one ruler or another, precisely one of the reasons for the difficulty of
understanding this period is the lack of patrons interested in sponsoring the kind
of historiographical or even poetic productions composed in contemporary Iran or
the Mamluk lands. In the case of Eretna, his lack of literary patronage may be
connected to the fact that ultimately his main concern was not the opinion of a
courtly audience, versed in Arabic and Persian, but rather that of the Mongol
amirs on whose loyalty he still needed to rely. This would explain why most of
Eretna’s independent coinage uses Uighur script, which is not otherwise attested
in Anatolian numismatics.145

ISLAM AND UNBELIEF IN MONGOL ANATOLIA

Mongol rule thus eviscerated Anatolia’s traditional political system, and it had an
equally severe impact on religious life, infusing religious discourse with an
obsession with unbelief and jihad.146 This presents a striking contrast to the
pre-Mongol situation, when the textual evidence presents surprisingly little indi-
cation of any interest in themes of either conversion or unbelief, despite Anatolia’s
substantial Christian population and the adoption of a vocabulary of jihad in

Suleiman (ed.), Living Islamic History: Studies in Honour of Carole Hillenbrand (Edinburgh, 2010),
129–50, and p. 101 below.
143
Ateş, ‘Hicri VI.–VIII. Asırlarda Anadolu’da Farsça Eserler’, 128–31; Süleymaniye, MS
Ayasofya 1670.
144
Cailah Jackson, ‘An Illuminated Manuscript of Early Fourteenth-Century Konya? Anīs al-Qulūb
(MS Ayasofya 2984, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, Istanbul)’, Journal of Islamic Manuscripts 8 (2017):
esp. 92, 109–10.
145
Perk and Öztürk, Eretna, Kadı Burhanettin ve Erzincan, 26–30.
146
See also the remarks in Ali Anooshahr, The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of Islam: A Comparative
Study of the Late Medieval and Early Modern Periods (London, 2009), 128–36.
64 Religion, Politics and Society

Seljuq sultanic titulature. The interest does not on the whole seem to have gone
any further than stylised titles proclaiming the sultan to be a mujāhid or warrior
against infidels.147 Sultan Kılıç Arslan II was taunted by his rival, the Syrian ruler
Nur al-Din b. Zangi, for being soft on Christians.148 Such rhetoric of course
cannot be taken at face value, for Nur al-Din was attempting to burnish his own
Islamic credentials and legitimacy; nonetheless, there are hints from sources
originating in Anatolia that give a degree of credence to it. While Ibn ‘Arabi
composed a treatise dedicated to Sultan ‘Izz al-Din Kayka’us I urging him to
implement the shurūt ‘Umar, the restrictions on non-Muslims attributed to the
_
Caliph ‘Umar b. al-Khattab, the very existence of the treatise suggests that they
were not rigorously applied.149 A Persian epic poem on the history of the
prophets, Burhan al-Din al-Anawi’s Anis al-Qulub, also dedicated to ‘Izz al-Din,
does contain religious polemic against Armenians, but this seems to have been
related to the specific historical circumstances of tensions with Armenian Cilicia,
and other Christian denominations were explicitly excluded.150 The construction
of religious buildings – such as mosques and madrasas – was only rarely under-
taken by the Seljuq sultans, whose patronage of architecture concentrated on
palaces, caravanserais and fortifications.151 Promoting conversion was not a
priority for the Seljuqs, it seems.
The Mongol rulers did not, at least initially, directly seek to interfere with
Islam in Anatolia, although Christianity prospered under the early Ilkhans, at least
in Iran, where for the first time Muslims had to endure equality with non-
Muslims.152 On the whole the official Mongol attitude was to tolerate all
religions, and to seek their blessings.153 In Anatolia the impact is hard to measure,
but Aqsara’i notes that under Fakhr al-Din Qazwini the jizya was no longer levied
in Anatolia; his point seems to be that Qazwini’s Iranian administrators were so
incompetent that they did not realise this was the most important revenue source
in the province, rather than it being specifically rescinded for religious reasons.154
At the same time, significant numbers of Mongols were starting to convert to

147
For examples of such titles see the inscriptions collected in Etienne Combe, Jean Sauvaget and
Gaston Wiet, Repertoire chronologique d’épigraphie arabe (Cairo, 1931–).
148
Balivet, Romanie byzantine, 84.
149
Giuseppe Scattolin, ‘Sufism and Law in Islam: A Text of Ibn ‘Arabi (560/1165-638/1240) on the
“Protected People”’, Islamochristiana 24 (1998): 37–55.
150
A. C. S. Peacock, ‘An Interfaith Polemic of Medieval Anatolia: Qadi Burhan al-Din al-Anawi on
the Armenians and their Heresies’, in Peacock, De Nicola and Yıldız (eds), Islam and Christianity,
233–61.
151
Crane, ‘Notes’; Peacock, ‘Islamisation in Medieval Anatolia’.
152
Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World, 312–18.
153
Ibid., 312–15, 338.
154
Aqsara’i, Musamarat al-Akhbar, 153.
 The Formation of Islamic Anatolia 65

Islam, and some of the earliest evidence for this process in the Middle East
pertains to Mongol soldiers stationed in Anatolia.155 The reasons for conversion
are poorly understood, but given that it started with the common soldiery and
then subsequently spread to higher echelons, a variety of factors must have been at
work, including the Mongols’ sense of alienation in unfamiliar lands, and the
concurrent process by which they were Turkicised and thus also Islamised
through the influence of Turks serving in the Mongol armies.156 At any rate, it
is clear there were acute tensions between the pagan and converted Mongols. Ibn
Shaddad relates of two Mongol amirs from Anatolia, Sögedei and Ja’urchi, that
They had a pagan brother who came to them with a group of relatives and others, and
demanded money from them saying, ‘You live in ease in urban dwellings and we suffer
hardship in constant fighting, so give us money to help us, or come to the ordu so that
Abaqa can decide between us.’157

The two Muslim brothers consulted the Pervane on what to do, and were told to
acquiesce and pay the money. When the pagan brother and his companions left,
the Pervane feared they were nonetheless heading for Abaqa, ‘and we cannot be
sure whether they may claim we behaved unjustly or whether he [Abaqa] will
destroy [us]’. As a result, the Muslim brothers caught up with their pagan sibling
and killed him and his party. These events are portrayed by Ibn Shaddad as one of
the precursors to the Pervane’s involvement in the great revolt of 675/1277. This
brief reference also indicates that the embrace of Islam might be associated not
just with changing religion, but with sedentarisation, as suggested by the pagan
sibling’s criticism of his brothers for ‘living in ease in urban dwellings’. It was
doubtless among the Mongols who retained their nomadic lifestyle that pagan
habits lived longest, even if the deficiencies in the sources, who are rarely
interested in nomadic society, make this harder to appreciate. Also, however, as
this case suggests, conversion could have implications for political allegiances:
evidently the Mongol converts felt the Muslim Pervane of Rum was in a sense
their advisor and protector, even though he was himself a Mongol ally, while their
pagan sibling trusted in the traditional Mongol justice of the as yet unconverted
ordu.
The role of the local religious elite in conversion is reflected in Astarabadi’s
Bazm u Razm. Discussing Qadi Burhan al-Din’s grandfather, Qadi Husam al-Din

155
Judith Pfeiffer, ‘Reflections on a “Double Rapprochement”: Conversion to Islam among the
Mongol Elite during the Early Ilkhanate’, in Linda Komaroff (ed.), Beyond the Legacy of Genghis
Khan (Leiden, 2006), esp. 372–3.
156
Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World, 337–9.
157
Ibn Shaddad, Ta’rikh al-Malik al-Zahir, ed. Ahmad Hoteit (Beirut, 1983), 153; cf. Jackson, The
Mongols and the Islamic World, 338–9.
66 Religion, Politics and Society

of Kayseri, who must have lived in the late thirteenth to the early fourteenth
century. Astarabadi remarks that ‘some of the greatest Mongol amirs, who were
destitute of the ornament of Islam, became Muslim at his hand and found the
glory of belief’.158 It is unknown exactly how conversion occurred, but it is
possible that a formal ceremony in front of the qadi was required, as is suggested
by this passage. This is also indicated by the works copied in a personal manu-
script compilation (majmū‘a) put together by the famous Ilkhanid intellectual,
Qutb al-Din Shirazi, the astronomer and philosopher, who held several senior
posts as qadi in Anatolia where he composed several of his works. The majmū‘a,
held today in the Iranian city of Qum, was copied by Shirazi in Konya in 685/
1286 and contains several philosophical works by the Jewish thinker Ibn
Kammuna. In addition, Shirazi copied a famous denunciation of his former faith
by an eleventh-century Jewish convert to Islam, Samaw’al al-Maghribi, the Ifham
al-Yahud or ‘Silencing of the Jews’.159 Shirazi’s copy of this text was apparently
made from an autograph manuscript, suggesting the importance Shirazi gave it,
and Shirazi also included a copy of a letter from an anonymous accuser who
doubted the sincerity of Samaw’al’s conversion, as well as Samaw’al’s reply.160
The question of the madhhab to which the convert belonged was identified by the
accuser as a key pointer to the authenticity of the conversion, although Samaw’al
in his reply argued that accepting any of the established madhhabs was acceptable.
That Shirazi and subsequent copyists of his majmū‘a in the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries found this debate sufficiently important to be worth recopying,
even divorced from the other contents of the manuscript,161 is testimony to the
enduring relevance of its core question: how could one verify the veracity of
conversion? Shirazi’s interest in Samaw’al’s work may reflect the sort of questions
regarding the status of converts and the veracity of their adherence to given

158
Astarabadi, Bazm u Razm, 45.
159
Reza Pourjavady and Sabine Schmidtke, ‘The Qutb al-Din al-Shirazi (d. 710/1310) codex (MS
Marashi 12868)’, Studia Iranica 36 (2007): 279–301. For the treatise by Maghribi see ibid.,
293–7.
160
Ibid., 297–8. These texts were recopied in several later collections of Shirazi’s works. The treatise
on dealing with the infidel attributed to Shirazi by Wallbridge and preserved in the Asiatic Society
of Bengal, MS PCC 875 (fols 88a-89b) in fact represents a fifteenth-century copy of Shirazi’s copy
of the letter of Samaw’al’s accuser and its reply. See Wallbridge, ‘The Philosophy of Qutb al-Din
Shirazi’, 274, and for a description of the complete MS, albeit one that misidentifies this treatise,
see Wladimir Ivanow, Concise Descriptive Catalogue of the Persian Manuscripts in the Collections of
the Asiatic Society of Bengal, First Supplement (Calcutta, 1927), 85–90.
161
In Calcutta, Asiatic Society of Bengal, MS PCC 875, although the source is specifically referred to
as Shirazi’s copy made in Konya in 685, none of the Ibn Kammuna texts are included: indeed just
Shirazi’s copy of the Samaw’al questions along with a brief one page treatise by him have been
excerpted and inserted into a completely different majmū‘a. See the description in Ivanow, Concise
Descriptive Catalogue, 85–90.
 The Formation of Islamic Anatolia 67

madhhabs that Shirazi was obliged to confront on a frequent basis as qadi in the
religiously mixed environment of Anatolia, even if he served a pagan ruler.
The conversion of Ghazan in the year of his accession, 694/1295, while
prompted by the prevalence of Islam among the Mongol soldiery, doubtless also
contributed to the spread of the faith. Bar Hebraeus’s continuator, writing of
events around this dates states that,
at this time the MONGOLS, both the nobles and the inferior folk in their entirety, had
become HAGARENES (i.e., MUSLIMS), and had already been circumcised, and had been
well instructed in ablutions, and prayers, and the special customs and observances of the
MUSLIMS.162

Yet there were probably some residual pagans, perhaps in rather greater quantity
than our sources admit, and certainly there is plenty of evidence for the continu-
ation of non-Muslim practices among the nominally converted Mongols.163
Ghazan’s great rival, the short-lived sixth Ilkhan Baidu, was less sympathetic to
Muslims, and is described by Aqsara’i as having turned zāwiyas into the abode of
bakhshis (Buddhist priests) and mosques into idol temples.164 It is unlikely that
Ghazan’s supporters all became Muslim overnight, and an Ilkhanid court docu-
ment dated 699/1299 mentions the conversion that very year of an eighty-year-
old Mongol named Murulay.165 This confirms that conversion was an ongoing
process that continued for some time after Ghazan embraced Islam. Moreover,
the Oirats who defected to the Mamluk sultanate around this date were still
pagans, and Baybars al-Mansuri disapprovingly comments that they should have
converted before being rewarded.166 Tensions between Mongols who enthusias-
tically embraced the new faith and those who held to their traditional forms of
legitimacy and culture that were threatened by Islamisation are evident in Iran
even in the 1330s,167 and the Ilkhan Arpa Ke’ün (r. 736/1335–6) initiated a
return to traditional Mongol ways and is said by one source not to have been a
Muslim.168 The memory of these infidel Mongols persisted long. The Turkish

162
Bar Hebraeus, Chronography, 593. See also Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World, 331–42,
362–80.
163
Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World, 339–42; Cf. Darling, ‘Persianate Sources’, 134, who
claims that a number of the leading Mongols in Anatolia at this time were pagan, although she
does not provide a source.
164
Aqsara’i, Musamarat al-Akhbar, 185–6.
165
Baybars al-Mansuri, Zubdat al-Fikra, 335.
166
Ibid., 309.
167
Charles Melville, ‘The End of the Ilkhanate and After: Observations on the Collapse of the
Mongol World Empire’, in De Nicola and Melville (eds), The Mongols’ Middle East, 322, 324,
326, 328–30; Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World, 339–42.
168
Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World, 329; P. Jackson, ‘Arpa Khan’, EIr.
68 Religion, Politics and Society

prose epic the Battalname, written down in the fifteenth century, recalls an
‘apostate (mürtedd) Haluq-i Tatari and an apostate Yalaman-i Turki’ who were
attached to the ‘great infidel lords’ (ulu kafir begleri), while the fifteenth-century
Vilayetname, the account of the deeds of the thirteenth-century saint Hacı Bektaş,
also recalls the pagan Mongols.169 We also know that the most unislamic of
Mongol taxes, the hated qubchur, which was felt to resemble a sort of jizya
imposed on Muslims, was only abolished in Ankara in 730/1330, and was still
being collected in Niğde into the fifteenth century under Karamanid rule.170
It may well be the presence of such unislamic practices as much as non-
Muslims that prompted the poet Sayf al-Din Farghani, a resident of Anatolia,
to write a qasīda to Ghazan even after the Ilkhan’s conversion, lamenting the
_
prevalence of unbelief.
O east wind, if one day you blow to Tabriz, take news from me to the court of the
just king
If you see the king of the age, Ghazan, tell him “O all your days are more fortunate
than the day of victory,
The line of Chinggis Khan has not [previously] given birth to one of pure religion
like you; the kingdom of sultans has not seen a just king like you. . .
But in these days Oh khaqan, Chosroe of justice, in Rum there is the oppression of
Hajjaj not the justice of ‘Umar
You have become a Muslim, but our rulers are not Muslim; there does not remain a
trace of Islam in this land
Sufis are without shelter or clothes, the learned are without bread or water; the
khānqāh is without furnishings, the roof and madrasa are without roof and
door.171

On one level, Farghani complains of the disappointment that, despite the

Mongols’ conversion, Anatolia still suffered the oppression of pagan Mongol
governors. More specifically, he complains of the neglect of the Sufis and the
‘ulama’. At the same time, Farghani, whose name suggests his origins in Central
Asia, is alluding in this poem to a famous original, Anwari’s ‘Tears of Khurasan’
qasīda, written after the Turkish Ghuzz nomads had destroyed the Seljuq state
_
and ravaged Khurasan in 1155. The pagan Mongols, who did away with the
Seljuq state in Anatolia, are thus implicitly compared to barbarous Ghuzz
nomads.172 At the same time this unflattering comparison also points to the

169
Küc̜ükhüseyin, Selbst- und Fremdwarnehmung, 282–3; Vryonis, Decline, 375.
170
Togan, ‘Economic Conditions’, 222; on the qubchur see Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic
World, 111–13, 301–3, 365–6.
171
Sayf al-Din Farghani, Diwan, I, 179, 180–1.
172
For the circumstances of the original qasīda by Anwari see A. C. S. Peacock, The Great Seljuk
Empire (London, 2015), 113–15. _
 The Formation of Islamic Anatolia 69

deep-rooted links between Anatolian and Iranian literary traditions. Thus if

Farghani’s qasīda is in part a rhetorical conceit rather than historical evidence of
_
enduring paganism, it also points to a crucial dynamic in Mongol Anatolia, the
tension between unbelief and Islam, which we find repeated throughout our texts.
Ghazan’s conversion brought about an increasingly tense religious atmosphere,
with campaigns, albeit sporadic, of persecution of non-Muslims, Christians and
Jews as well as pagan or Buddhist Mongols and their bakhshis. Armenian scribes,
who often alluded to contemporary historical events in the colophons of manu-
scripts they copied, directly associated the conversion of the Mongols with their
persecution of Christians:173
The Ishmaelites [Muslims] became so powerful that they succeeded in converting to their
vain hope the entire nation of archers [the Mongols], so that none among them remained
who did not confess their fallacious and false faith [Islam], which will lead them directly
into perdition. They harass all the Christians to convert to their false hope; some they
molest, some they torture, some they kill, and they confiscate the possessions of all others.
Not contented with all these, they also levied taxes upon all the Christians and made them
wear symbols of opprobrium, a black linen over their shoulders, so that whoever saw them
would recognise that they are Christians and would curse them; and they make every effort
to efface Christianity from the earth.174

Similar complaints can be found in colophons throughout the fourteenth century,

while we know that in 1322–3, the Mongol governor Timurtash launched a
major campaign of persecution, as is discussed in Chapter 6. Such events also
seem to have affected the Greek Orthodox communities as well as the better-
documented Armenian ones. The research of Dimitri Korobeinikov has con-
firmed that our period was a key one for the decline of Greek Orthodox, Christian
communities in Anatolia, and this was most pronounced in the cities of central
and eastern Anatolia such as Kayseri, Sivas and Erzincan – precisely the areas
under Mongol and Eretnid control.175 Korobeinikov connects this decline with
the sedentarisation of the Turks, the political instability of the period and the
constant fighting between warlords.176 However, it is clear that the Mongol-
sponsored persecutions would also have contributed to these dynamics, although
it would be unwise to attempt to limit conversion to a single cause.

173
Stewart, Armenian Kingdom, 182; Avedis K. Sanjian, Colophons of Armenian Manuscripts,
1301–1480: A Source for Middle Eastern History (Cambridge, MA, 1969), 50 (dated 1306), and
52 (1307).
174
Sanjian, Colophons, 52–3.
175
Dimitri Korobeinikov, ‘Orthodox Communities in Eastern Anatolia in the Thirteenth to Four-
teenth Centuries. Part 2: The Time of Troubles’, al-Masāq 17 (2005): 1–29.
176
Ibid., 18.
70 Religion, Politics and Society

Some Christian authors had a positive view of Ghazan, continuing to regard

him as pro-Christian perhaps because of his continuing war against the
Mamluks.177 Nonetheless, the Ilkhanid-Mamluk hostilities further fuelled the
use by both sides of a political vocabulary that emphasised the war against
unbelief. One example of this is the Mamluk decree (taqlīd) appointing Sülemish
over Anatolia.178 Although Sülemish was already a Muslim, the decree repeatedly
links his embrace of Mamluk overlordship to conversion to Islam. He has been
appointed over ‘weighty affairs which cannot be implemented except by a sultan
in whose heart God has implanted faith and has led him to the faith of Islam . . .
and has led him from the part of Satan to His [God’s] party’. God has ‘taken him,
by the light of his guidance, from the ranks of his enemies’ and Sülemish has, by
asking to join the Mamluk armies, ‘joined the party of Islam’. The Ilkhans
responded in kind. In a firmān issued to commanders of Syrian forts shortly after
Sülemish’s rebellion, Ghazan remarks that ‘in our time have appeared polytheists
and pagans (al-mushrikūn wa-‘abdat al-awthān)’. The Ilkhan describes how he has
converted ‘not at [someone else’s] instigation but because the light of God’s
guidance appeared . . . God entrusted us with jihad in killing polytheists, pagans
and enemies and destroying the houses of idols, repelling the evil of oppressors
and commanding right and forbidding wrong.’179 Ghazan has expended money
‘for the benefit of the armies of Islam fighting in God’s path’ (‘inda al-mujāhada fi
sabīl allāh), and (inaccurately) points to his own name as being derived from the
Arabic ghazw, holy war. The Mongol invasion is a response to the Mamluks’
mistreatment of the Muslims of Syria and Egypt, and Sülemish’s rebellion
therefore is nothing less than an assault on Islam:
Sülemish rebelled against us and joined the rebels and proceeded to harm the Muslims in
part of the land of Rum, destroying their houses, looting their possessions and fleeing from
our victorious army to that land.180

The Mamluks, as Muslims, should have sent Sülemish in chains back to the
Ilkhanate but instead they have sent him back at the head of a mass of Turkmen
‘so that there will be fighting between our Mongol soldiers and the inhabitants of
the land of Rum; perchance they [the Mamluks] have not heard that all our army,

177
Korobeinikov, Byzantium and the Turks, 206–9; cf. Sanjian, Colophons, 48–9.
178
Al-‘Umari, Masalik, III, 235–7; For a discussion of Sülemish’s rebellion see Broadbridge, Kingship
and Ideology, 70–2; Stewart, Armenian Kingdom, 128–35.
179
Baybars al-Mansuri, Zubdat al-Fikra, 334; see also the discussion in Broadbridge, Kingship and
Ideology, 77–8; Denise Aigle, The Mongol Empire Between Myth and Reality: Studies in Anthropo-
logical History (Leiden, 2015), 255–75.
180
Baybars al-Mansuri, Zubdat al-Fikra, 335.
 The Formation of Islamic Anatolia 71

Moghul, Uighur, Qipchaq, Khita’i, Bakhshi and adherents of all different beliefs
have all without exception sincerely converted to Islam’.181
Religious tensions seem to have intensified under Öljeitü (704/1304–716/
1316), the Ilkhan who famously converted from Buddhism to Sunnism to Shiism
and back to Sunnism. Colophons of Armenian manuscripts from the reign of
Öljeitü record his persecution of Christians and his enforcement of sumptuary
restrictions.182 Yet these tensions may also have been the result of the actions of
enthusiastic Mongol converts on the ground as much as any centralised policy.
A suggestive case is the clash between the king of Cilician Armenia, Het‘um, and
the local Mongol governor Bularghu. In 707/1307 Bularghu, inspired by fervour
for Islam, was intending to build a madrasa in Adana with a minaret, an idea
which displeased Het‘um, who presumably saw it as an unwelcome Muslim
intrusion on his borders. Het‘um attempted to complain to Öljeitü, accusing
Bularghu of being in cahoots with the Mamluks; Bularghu was informed by his
allies at the ordu of this, and tried to pin the same charge on Het‘um, whom he
murdered. Öljeitü eventually executed Bularghu for this offence.183 The details of
the affair are somewhat murky, but for our purposes the interesting point is that it
was the religious enthusiasm of a Mongol Muslim that disrupted the equilibrium
between Cilicia and her Muslim neighbours.
Thus both before and after Ghazan’s conversion, the Mongol soldiery in
Anatolia played a crucial role in promoting a tense religious atmosphere. The
battle between believers and unbelievers, suggested by the clash between Sögedei,
Ja’urchi and their pagan brother, subsequently spilled over more broadly, intro-
ducing an anti-Christian (or at least, anti-kāfir) note into political discourse
largely absent in Seljuq times. Anatolia was not the sole region to be affected
in this way. The Mongol presence in Syria and the ongoing wars with the
Mamluks seems to have led to an increasingly religiously tense atmosphere there,
with Mamluk rulers seeking to prove their Islamic credentials in their competi-
tion with the Mongols through promoting the Islamisation of the regions none
Muslims.184 Indeed, the Mongol period more broadly witnessed a marked
advance in the spread of Islam across Eurasia, in regions as distant as China

181
Ibid., 335.
182
Sanjian, Colophons, 45–100.
183
Baybars al-Mansuri, Zubdat al-Fikra, 394–5. For a detailed analysis of these events see Stewart,
Armenian Kingdom, 171–80.
184
Reuven Amitai, ‘The Impact of the Mongols on the History of Syria: Politics, History and
Culture’, in Reuven Amitai and Michal Biran (eds), Nomads as Agents of Cultural Change: The
Mongols and Their Eurasian Predecessors (Honolulu, 2015), 228–51.
72 Religion, Politics and Society

and Central Asia, although the reasons for this are complex and need further
investigation.185 Similarly, in Anatolia, the Mongol impact can be observed
beyond the immediate Mongol sphere, in both epigraphic and literary evidence.
The inscriptions on the mosques and madrasas erected at the expense of the vizier
Fakhr al-Din ‘Ali in the 1270s in Konya and Sivas are decorated with an
inscriptional programme celebrating the vanquishing of unbelievers.186 On the
western frontiers of Anatolia, in Kütahya, the capital of the Germiyanid princi-
pality, the ruler Mubariz al-Din Umur b. Savji had an inscription placed on the
madrasa he built there in 714/1314 announcing its construction was funded
from the jizya of the Christian population of Alaşehir (Fig. 1.2). There is no
precedent for such an inscription in Anatolia, which is evidently intended to
assert publicly the supremacy of Islam.
The Arba‘un Majalis, a collection of hadith made for the Pervane Mu‘in al-Din
Sulayman, gives prominence to themes of unbelief (Plate 4). The author, ‘Abd al-
Rahman b. ‘Amr b. Ahmad al-Karaji al-Qazwini, another migrant from Iran,
related hadith on the authority of his father. The collection begins with a famous
hadith related from Abu Bakr, who recounts how, when fleeing Mecca with the
Prophet, he hid in the cave with Muhammad, fearful of being caught by the
unbelievers. The Prophet admonishes him for his fearfulness and assures him of
God’s presence.187 The second chapter (majlis) opens with a hadith concerning
the Prophet’s confronting the vastly superior army of polytheists (mushrikūn) at
the battle of Badr. When he sees his opponents’ numbers, Muhammad prays, ‘Oh
God, fulfil what you have promised; if you let this group of the people of Islam be
destroyed, you will not ever be worshipped on this earth!’188 God, of course,
fulfils his promise and gives Muhammad victory. The significance of the emphasis
on the fight against unbelief in such prominent parts of a text dedicated to the
Pervane, the servant of the pagan Mongols who also seems to have played a role in
encouraging converts to Islam, is obvious.

185
Devin DeWeese, ‘Islamization in the Mongol Empire’ in Nicola Di Cosmo, Allen J. Frank, Peter
B. Golden (eds), The Cambridge History of Inner Asia: The Chinggisid Age (Cambridge, 2015),
120–34.
186
Scott Redford, ‘Minaret meets Portal in Medieval Anatolia’, in Robert Hillenbrand (ed.), The
Architecture of the Iranian World 1000–1250 (Edinburgh, forthcoming). Redford associates this
inscriptional rhetoric with an anti-Mongol agenda on the part of the patron, Fakhr al-Din ‘Ali; at
the same time, the written sources on Fakhr al-Din indicate he remained a loyal servant of the
Ilkhanate, and was able to establish his descendants in the hereditary appanage of Akyonkarahisar.
It is of course possible that the insriptions could have a dual meaning, depending on the audience,
but from our point of view they offer important confirmation of the ways in which this sort of
rhetoric centered around unbelief was entering public discourse, whoever the target.
187
Süleymaniye, MS Carullah 410M, fols 2a–b.
188
Süleymaniye, MS Carullah 410M, fols 10a–b.
 The Formation of Islamic Anatolia 73

The inscription on Mubariz al-Din Umur b. Savji’s Vacidiye Medrese in Kütahya,

FIG. 1.2
dated 714/1314, proclaiming it was built from the jizya of the town of Alaşehir.
Author photograph

Similar concerns can be detected in the religious culture of the Candarid beylik
in north-central Anatolia in the early fourteenth century. Ibn Battuta tells us that
Sultan Süleyman of Kastamonu would attend the mosque every Friday in the
company of the leading men of the state, the fuqahā’, the qadi, the soldiers and
members of the royal family, and the Qur’an reciters would ‘read out the surat al-
Kahf with fine voices and repeat the verses with an amazing arrangement (tartīb
‘ajīb)’.189 The choice of al-Kahf is a particularly telling one, for the sura starts off
with a condemnation of Christianity:
Praise be to God who has sent down upon His servant the Book and has not assigned unto
it any crookedness; right, to warn of the great violence from Him, and to give Good tidings
unto the believers, who do good works, that theirs shall be a goodly wage therein to abide
for ever, and to warn those who say, ‘God has taken unto Himself a son’, they have no
knowledge of it, they nor their fathers, a monstrous word it is, issuing out of their mouths
they say nothing but a lie.190

189
Ibn Battuta, Rihla, 317; trans. Gibb, 464.
190
Trans from A. J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted (Oxford, 1955), 288.
74 Religion, Politics and Society

Al-Kahf was said by traditional Muslim exegetes to have been sent down in
response to the Jews questioning of the truth of Muhammad’s Prophethood,
and as we shall see this was an important theme of fourteenth-century Anatolian
religious literature (Chapter 5, p. 192).191 The sura has also been interpreted as
apocalyptic, presaging the coming of the Antichrist, a major concern of Anatolian
elites, as discussed in Chapter 6; it also recounts the story of Alexander the Great
(Dhu’l-Qarnayn)’s encounter with Gog and Magog ‘doing corruption in the
earth’ whom Alexander confines behind a barrier. It is perhaps significant that
the Mongols too were commonly identified variously with the Antichrist, and
Gog and Magog,192 and al-Kahf ends by resuming its polemic against unbelievers,
relating how they will be condemned to hell while the believers will be saved. The
Candarid court’s interest in this sura suggests how the new religious and political
discourse on unbelief that emerged in the wake of the Mongol invasions and
conversion penetrated areas not directly subject to Ilkhanid rule. However, al-
Kahf was also a crucial sura for Sufis, telling of how Moses was brought to occult
knowledge of the divine by an unnamed individual identified by the exegetes as
Khidr. The story of Khidr and Moses became the classic metaphor for the search
for knowledge of the divine through a spiritual guide, the purpose of Sufism.193
The interest in al-Kahf may also signify the growing concern of Anatolian courts
with Sufism, and the complex relationship between power and Sufism that
developed over the Mongol period, as we shall explore in Chapter 2.

191
On al-Kahf see Sidney Griffith, ‘Christian Lore and the Arabic Qur’ān: The “Companions of the
Cave” in Sūrat al-Kahf and in Syriac Christian Tradition’, in Gabriel Reynolds (ed.) The Qur’ān in
Its Historical Context (London, 2008), 108–27; Peter G. Riddell, Malay Court Religion, Culture
and Language: Interpreting the Qur’an in 17th Century Aceh (Leiden, 2017), 51–8.
192
See Chapter 6, pp. 219–20.
193
See further Chapter 2, p. 95.
 2

Sufism and Political Power

Since early Seljuq times in the eleventh century individual Sufis had developed
close relations with political elites,1 but this phenomenon greatly intensified in the
thirteenth to fourteenth centuries. Sufis’ status was enhanced by the influential
theories of Ibn ‘Arabi, who asserted that the awliyā’ (sing. walī, the Friends of
God, or Sufi saints), were no less than the means by which Prophecy was
continued after Muhammad,2 and by the formation of tarīqas, the Sufi orders,
_
generally known after their putative founder. These tarīqas became increasingly
_
prominent and well organised, giving Sufism an institutional structure and
hierarchy that facilitated its propagation. The process of the emergence of tarīqas
_
is obscure, but by the late thirteenth century they possessed features such as
characteristic ceremonies, physical structures and distinctive clothes worn by their
adherents.3 The relationship between the Sufi guide (called the murshid, pīr or
shaykh) and the disciple (the murīd) was constituted by a formal oath and often
governed thereafter by strict rules. The principal physical structure was the Sufi
lodge (known variously in Anatolia as khānqāh, zāwiya or tekke), which might
serve as accommodation for adepts as well as a place for the performance of the
tarīqa’s rituals such as its specific style of dhikr (chanting the name of God) or
_
samā‘ (mystical dancing). The most notable tarīqa in medieval Anatolia was the
_
Mevlevi order, headed by the descendants of Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 672/1273),

1
Omid Safi, The Politics of Knowledge in Premodern Islam: Negotiating Ideology and Religious Enquiry
(Chapel Hill, 2006); Peacock, The Great Seljuk Empire, chapter 5; Green, Sufism, 94–8.
2
See B. Radke, ‘Walī’, EI2, and on Ibn ‘Arabi’s claims, Michel Chodkiewicz, Seal of the Saints:
Prophethood and Sainthood in the Doctrine of Ibn ʻArabī (Cambridge, 1993); Gerald T. Elmore,
Islamic Sainthood in the Fullness of Time: Ibn al-’Arabi’s Book of the Fabulous Gryphon (Leiden,
1999), esp. 109–62.
3
See Green, Sufism, 81–91 for an overview.

75
76 Religion, Politics and Society

who was known as Mawlana or in Turkish Mevlana (‘our lord’). The Mevlevis
enjoyed not just wide popularity but also produced a mass of literature, predomin-
antly in Persian, which makes them by far the best attested tarīqa of medieval
_
Anatolia.4 The Mevlevis became so tightly intertwined with power that in later
times many Ottoman sultans and viziers themselves became Mevlevi murīds, and
the Mevlevi tarīqa has been described as constituting virtually an Ottoman ‘state
_
institution’ from the seventeenth century.5 Indeed, a genealogical table of the
Ottoman family, probably composed in the sixteenth century, names Jalal al-Din
Rumi among the dynastic ancestors.6
Elites of the Mongol period evinced a similar enthusiasm for the company of
Sufis. The Ilkhanid vizier and historian Rashid al-Din depicts the Ilkhan Ghazan
as isolating himself for the forty-day-Sufi retreat (chilla),7 while in his letter
demanding the obedience of Syrian garrisons in 699/1299, the Ilkhan remarks
that ‘we have adopted the company of qadis, ‘ulama’, righteous men, shaykhs,
sayyids, and faqīhs, being guided by them to the blessed burial places of saints
[mashāhid al-awliyā’] and the resting places of prophets [mawāqif al-anbiyā’]’.8
The Ilkhanid viziers Sadr al-Din Zanjani and Ghiyath al-Din Muhammad pat-
ronised works by Sufis such as Mu’ayyid al-Din Jandi and Da’ud al-Qaysari, two
influential members of Ibn ‘Arabi’s school from Anatolia who were active in the
late thirteenth to early fourteenth centuries.9 Members of the Anatolian political
elite did likewise, as is suggested by a few prominent examples. Ibn ‘Arabi himself
had been received at the court of the Seljuq Sultan ‘Izz al-Din Kayka’us I, to
whom he wrote an epistle of advice,10 while Rumi’s correspondence reveals his
close links to numerous influential figures, such as the Seljuq sultan and the
Pervane Mu‘in al-Din Sulayman, as we will discuss further in due course. The
qadi-sultan of Sivas, Burhan al-Din, who succeeded the last Eretnids in 783/1381,

4
See Lewis, Rumi, Past and Present, on Rumi, the Mevlevis and their textual production, and
Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı, Mevlana’dan Sonra Mevlevilik (Istanbul, 1953), esp. 3–13, 441–54.
5
‘âdeta bir devlet müessesesidir’: Gölpınarlı, Mevlana’dan Sonra Mevlevilik, 248, and see in general
ibid., 267–78; for an overview in English of the Mevlevi role in the Ottoman state, based largely on
Turkish literature, can be found in Bruce McGowan, ‘On Mevlevi Organization’, Osmanlı
Araştırmaları 40 (2012): 295–325. On the important role played by Sufis in formulating Ottoman
political discourse and supporting the dynasty’s legitimacy see Hüseyin Yılmaz, Caliphate Redefined:
The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought (Princeton, 2018).
6
Edinburgh University Library, MS Or 676.
7
Rashid al-Din, Jami‘ al-Tawarikh, III, 1318; for a more sceptical reading of Ghazan’s interest in
Sufism, Amitai, ‘Sufis and Shamans’, 34.
8
Baybars al-Mansuri, Zubdat al-Fikra, 337.
9
See A. C. S. Peacock, ‘Two Sufis of Ilkhanid Anatolia and Their Patrons: Notes on the Works of
Mu’ayyid al-Din Jandi and Da’ud al-Qaysari’, in Filiz Çaǧman and Suzan Yalman (eds), Meeting-
place of Cultures: The Ilkhanids in Anatolia (Ankara, 2019).
10
Scattolin, ‘Sufism and Law in Islam’, and see further Yıldız and Şahin, ‘In the Proximity of Sultans’.
 Sufism and Political Power 77

was also a committed follower of Rumi and the school of Ibn ‘Arabi, who and
wrote both legal and Sufi texts to bolster his claim to power.11 Political patronage
of Sufism was expressed both through financial grants and tax breaks given to
Sufis, and the construction of dedicated buildings such as the khānqāh.
While figures such as Ibn ‘Arabi and Rumi are famous to a modern Western
audience for representing a spiritual, ecumenical religiosity, hagiographies make it
clear there was nothing cuddly about awliyā’. They were imbued with knowledge
of the future, endowed with personal communication with God; and hagiograph-
ical texts are full of tales of worldly kingship being brought to a premature end by
a ruler’s failure to recognise their claims. This was not merely a literary topos.
Ilkhanid historians record attempts by Sufis to place a favoured candidate on the
throne: Rashid al-Din tells us that Sufis in Tabriz, motivated by ‘love of position
and money’ (hubb-i jāh u māl), promised the prince Ala Fireng that they would
_
make him king in Ghazan’s place.12 In Anatolia, too, there are hints of such
ambitions. One source on the great rebellion of 675/1277 against the Mongols,
for which the Seljuq pretender Jimri was a figurehead, claims that the latter was
himself a dervish gone amok:
In recent times there was a man who always purported to be a dervish
His custom was always silence, he was righteous, a follower of the [Sufi] path, a
wearer of the khirqa [the robe worn by Sufis]
People all liked him, and grew believing and trusting in him.
They all saw him as a Bayazid [Bistami],13 a group became his disciples
Despite his pure religion and his wholesome life, his heart was not satisfied with
these inner truths.
He suddenly went out of his mind, and his tongue pronounced erroneous words.
He claimed that ‘I am the sultan of Rum, O disciples. Henceforth know for sure
that I am the sultan.’
A group spread this news and became convinced that he was sultan
They called him Jimri and proclaimed him to be sultan of the earth.14

Although the veracity of this account is doubtful, it is intriguing that it is found in

a text, the verse Khamushnama of Yusufi, composed in 699/1299, which was
written to inculcate Sufi virtues. Yusufi’s tale points to the fact that by the end of
the thirteenth century some Sufis were intimately associated with political power

11
Discussed in Peacock, ‘Rulership and Metaphysics’.
12
Rashid al-Din, Jami‘ al-Tawarikh, II, 1318. See also the discussion in Brack, ‘Mediating Sacred
Kingship’, 60ff.
13
Bayazid Bistami, a famous Iranian Sufi of the ninth century.
14
Yusufi, Khamushnama, in Turgay Şafak, ‘Anadolu’da Farsça Yazɪlmış Bir Eser: Hamuşname’,
Şarkiyat Mecmuası 26 (2015): 121.
78 Religion, Politics and Society

as much as piety, and that there was suspicion of the motives of such men even in
Sufi circles.15
Leaving aside the dubious case of Jimri, no other Sufi succeeded in seizing
political power in Anatolia during the Mongol period; yet there were others who
tried, such as the holy man Baba İlyas, who led the great revolt of 638/1240 that
shook the Seljuq sultanate on the eve of the Mongol invasions. Thus as well as
supporting worldly authority, Sufis could represent a challenge to it, and this
chapter focuses on two families of Sufis, those of Jalal al-Din Rumi and of Baba
İlyas, who illustrate the different aspects of this relationship. Evidence for Rumi
and the early Mevlevis is provided not just by the fourteenth-century Persian
hagiography by the Mevlevi disciple Aflaki (d. 761/1360), the Manaqib al-‘Arifin,
but also Rumi’s own works, especially his surviving letters, as well as the poetry of
Rumi’s son Sultan Walad.16 These contemporary or near-contemporary sources
allow us a unique insight into a family of awliyā’ who succeeded in establishing
themselves as the pre-eminent figures in Anatolian Sufism. We also examine the
formation of the very different line of awliyā’ descended from Baba İlyas, as
illustrated by his great-grandson’s verse hagiography in Turkish, the Menakıbu’l-
Kudsiyye by Elvan Çelebi, completed in 760/1358–9, which reflects some of the
same politico-religious ideas that are attested in Mevlevi circles. This allows us to
understand how, despite the defeat of Baba İlyas’s military challenge to the Seljuq
state, his descendants were able to harness the charismatic power of his memory to
assert their own position in Central Anatolia, despite the lack of a formally
organised tarīqa (or at least, one that is recognised as such today).
_
It should be noted that these were not the only Sufi organisations in medieval
Anatolia. In addition, there were holy men who adopted a path of extreme renunci-
ation and asceticism, rejecting the conventions of society. Known as muwallahs or
Qalandars, this movement seems to have originated in the early thirteenth century
Levant and, believing that social conventions put a barrier between them and God,
its adherents thus deliberately engaged in outrageous behaviour, including, in some

15
For further examples of the divisions within Sufis, who criticised each other for hypocrisy, see
Zeynep Oktay, ‘Layers of Mystical Meaning and Social Context in the Works of Kaygusuz Abdal’,
in Peacock and Yıldız (eds), Islamic Literature and Intellectual Life, 73–99; Ahmet T. Karamustafa,
‘Kaygusuz Abdal: A Medieval Turkish Saint and the Formation of Vernacular Islam in Anatolia’, in
Orkhan Mir Kasimov (ed.), Unity in Diversity: Mysticism, Messianism and Construction of Religious
Authority in Islam (Leiden, 2014), 329–42.
16
For a study of Aflaki see Küçükhüseyin, Selbst- und Fremandwahrnehmung, 313–48; for Rumi’s
letters see in more detail, A. C. S. Peacock, ‘Sufis and the Seljuk Court: Politics and Patronage in
the Works of Jalal al-Din Rumi and Sultan Walad’, in Peacock and Yıldız (eds), The Seljuks of
Anatolia, 206–26.
 Sufism and Political Power 79

cases, rejecting the divine law itself.17 As a result, they attracted considerable
criticism from some quarters,18 but there were many Qalandars who were also
Mevlevis.19 The boundaries between the groups were fluid, as is suggested by a vast
mathnawi composed by a Mevlevi disciple, Abu Bakr Rumi, the Qalandarnama,
which advocates the way of the Qalandar within a Mevlevi framework.20 In
addition, other, more formally organised tarīqas spread to Anatolia from elsewhere
_
in the Middle East: by the mid-thirteenth century the Rifa‘iyya tarīqa of Iraqi origin
_
was present in the Amasya region, and slightly later in Konya and Kayseri.21 Najm
al-Din Razi, whose works circulated widely in Anatolia, was an adherent of the
Central Asian Kubrawi order, but his presence in the peninsula does not seem to
have been accompanied by any wider diffusion of the Kubrawiyya.22 Indeed, apart
from the Mevlevis, most tarīqas are extremely poorly attested in Mongol-era
_
Anatolia. For instance the Wafa’iyya, followers of the eleventh-century Iraqi saint
Sayyid Abu’l-Wafa, are claimed by some modern scholars to have been an import-
ant tarīqa in medieval Anatolia but in fact there is little evidence for their activities
_
before the fifteenth century;23 the same is true of the Kazaruniyya from Iran.24 It
seems that some tarīqas spread west from Central Asia in the wake of the disloca-
_
tions of Timur’s rule in the late fourteenth century.25 Thus by the fifteenth century

17
See Karamustafa, God’s Unruly Friends, for a discussion of these groups, esp. pp. 61–3 for Anatolia;
also Ocak, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Marjinal Sufilik: Kalenderiler.
18
See for instance, for an Anatolian polemic against these groups, Osman Turan, ‘Selçuk Türkiyesi
Din Tarihine Dair Bir Kaynak: Fustāt ul-‘adāle fî k·avā‘id is-saltana’, in 60. Doğum Yılı Münase-
betiyle Fuad Köprülü Armağanı/Mélanges _ _ Fuad Köprülü (Ankara, 1953),
_ 531–64, and the analysis in
Bruno De Nicola, ‘The Fustāt al-ʿAdāla: A Unique Manuscript on the Religious Landscape of
Medieval Anatolia’, in Peacock _ _ and Yıldız (eds), Islamic Literature and Intellectual Life, 49–72; also
Karamustafa, God’s Unruly Friends, 5–6.
19
Bruno De Nicola, ‘The Fustāt al-ʿAdāla’, 59–60; 82; cf. Tor, Violent Order, 234–5, Lewis, Rumi,
_ _
Past and Present, 440, 446; Trépanier, Foodways and Daily Life, 107–8. See also Chapter 3, p. 125.
20
For a survey of this work see Devin DeWeese, ‘A Persian Sufi Work from the Golden Horde: The
Qalandar-nama of Abu Bakr Rumi’, in Benedek Péri and Ferenc Csirkes (eds), Turko-Persian
Cultural Contacts in the Eurasian Steppe: Festschrift in Honour of Professor István Vásáry (Leiden,
forthcoming); also Milyausha Shamsimukhametova, ‘The Qalandarnāma by Abū Bakr Rūmī’,
Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée 143 (2018): 285–96.
21
Mustafa Tahralı, ‘Rifâiye’, TDVİA, vol. 35, 99–103; the best contemporary source for the Rifa‘iyya
in the region is Ibn Sarraj’s Tuffah al-Arwah, which, however, concentrates on the Kurdish awliyā’
of the Jazira. See the study by Eyüp Öztürk, Velilik ile Delilik Arasında: Ibnu’s-Serrac’ın Gözünden
Muvelleh Dervişler (Istanbul, 2013).
22
Hamid Algar, ‘Kobrawiya.ii. The Order’, EIr.
23
Jonathan Brack, ‘Was Ede Bali a Wafā’ī Shaykh? Sufis, Sayyids and Genealogical Creativity in the
Early Ottoman World’, in Peacock and Yıldız (eds), Islamic Literature and Intellectual Life, 333–60.
24
Hamid Algar, ‘Kâzeruniyye’, TDVİA, vol. 25, 146–8.
25
John Curry, The Transformation of Muslim Mystical Thought in the Ottoman Empire: The Rise of the
Halveti Order, 1350–1650 (Edinburgh, 2010), 39–44; Dina Le Gall, A Culture of Sufism: Naqsh-
bandis in the Ottoman World, 1450–1700 (Albany, NY, 2005), 13–23.
80 Religion, Politics and Society

a rich array of tarīqas and other less formally organised Sufi groups was present in
_
Anatolia. It would be mistaken, however, to project the variety of later times back to
the Mongol period, when, even if other tarīqas were present in limited numbers,
_
the Mevlevis enjoyed a position of dominance in the peninsula, even if this was
challenged by other individual Sufis.
As a result, Anatolian Sufism of the Mongol period is largely a home-grown
phenomenon, although as we shall see that does not mean it existed in isolation
from wider currents. The reasons for Mevlevi dominance are complex, but one
reason for their appeal, as I shall argue, is that the Mevlevi tarīqa offered rulers not
_
just their saints’ baraka (blessings),26 but also provided a theoretical justification
to ideas of sacral kingship that were emerging in this period. Although scholarship
has drawn attention to the importance of these ideas for the Ilkhanids as well as
later empires such as the Timurids, Safavids and Ottomans,27 the ways in which
they were developed in medieval Anatolia have not previously been adequately
studied and as a result the early history of their diffusion is obscure. This chapter
sheds light on these processes, and shows that ideas of sacral kingship could appeal
to provincial audiences of minor rulers and amirs far beyond the imperial centres
on which scholarship has concentrated to date.

RUMI, HIS SUCCESSORS AND THE POLITICAL ELITE

SEEN THROUGH MEVLEVI SOURCES

Although some Sufis rejected the corrupting associations of worldly power,28 Sufi
texts frequently acknowledge the existence of a relationship between holy men
and the Mongols. They do so for their own reasons rather than simply to record
factual information. In Sufi literature of the thirteenth and fourteenth century,
not just in Anatolia, but also in other areas affected by the Mongol invasions such
as India and Khurasan, the emergence of the Mongols from their weakness and

26
E.g. Green, Sufism, 96.
27
In particular, for the Ilkhanids, Brack, ‘Mediating Sacral Kingship’ and Brack, ‘Theologies of
Auspicious Kingship’; for later periods see Evrim Binbaş, Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran.
Sharaf al-Dīn ‘Alī Yazdī and the Islamicate Republic of Letters (Cambridge, 2016); Moin, The
Millennial Sovereign; Yılmaz, Caliphate Redefined.
28
On Sufis eschewing association with rulers, see Pfeiffer, ‘Reflections on a “Double Rapproche-
ment”’, 381. In general on the political elite and Sufis in the Ilkhanate see Monike Gronke,
Derwische im Vorhof der Macht: Sozial und Wirtschaftsgeschichte Nordwestirans im 13. Und 14.
Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1990); Jamal J. Elias, The Throne-Carrier of God; The Life and Thought of
‘Ala’ ad-Dawla as-Simnani (Albany, NY, 1995); Amitai-Preiss, ‘Sufis and Shamans’; Potter, ‘Sufis
and Sultans in Post-Mongol Iran’.
 Sufism and Political Power 81

destitution to become a major power is attributed to divine favour, and the

Mongols and Sufis are seen as allies.29 As Devin DeWeese has pointed out,
the motif of the Sufi alliance with the Mongols functions in a variety of ways.
The notion of the Mongol conquests as a punishment from God is common in
the Muslim (and non-Muslim) literature of the period, and the willingness of
Sufis to imagine themselves as participating in them may reflect both Sufi views of
the worthlessness of material existence as well as the actual alienation of some
Sufis from the mainstream of the Islamic community, in the destruction of which
they remembered themselves as complicit. On another level, such tales ensure that
God’s providence is seen as having been effected not simply through the agent of a
bloodthirsty foreign tyrant, but also through the means of one of God’s Friends,
thus asserting the position of the awliyā’. We can see these features in the
Qalandarnama, the long Persian mathnawī composed in Crimea in the middle
of the fourteenth century for the region’s Golden Horde governors, by the
Anatolian author Abu Bakr Rumi. The poem relates that it was a Sufi holy man
who led Chinggis Khan to the great Central Asian city of Marw, which the
Mongols then destroyed.30 Abu Bakr makes no bones about the fact that Chinggis
killed innumerable ‘ulama’, muftis, ascetics (zāhidān) and servants of god (‘ābi-
dān).31 Chinggis was a sign of God’s wrath (mazhar-i qahr-i khudā), but it was in
_
the works of his descendants that God’s will could be seen at work:
Some of his sons were believers; they were good, pious kings.
They were both a refuge and a way for the Holy Law, they made their wealth and
kingship a means for the faith.
In regions they rule in this way, and destroy the unbelievers.
This purpose (ma‘ānī) did God inaugurate, when he showed the way to Chinggis
Khan.
Every king who has paid attention to pirs, must have the door of truth opened for
him in this way.32

29
Devin DeWeese, ‘Stuck in the Throat of Chingiz Khan: Envisioning Mongol Conquest in Some
Sufi Accounts of the Fourteenth to the Seventeenth Centuries’, in Judith Pfeiffer and Sholeh
A. Quinn (eds), History and Historiography of Post-Mongol Central Asia and the Middle East: Studies
in Honor of John E. Woods (Wiesbaden, 2006), 48, 52–3; cf. Dechant ‘Depictions of the Islamiza-
tion of the Mongols’.
30
Devin DeWeese, ‘Khāns and Amīrs in the Qalandarnāma of Abū Bakr Rūmī: Praise of the
Islamizing Jochid Elite in a Persian Sufi Work from the Fourteenth-Century Crimea’, Archivum
Eurasiae Medii Aevi 21 (2014–15): 55–7.
31
Abu Bakr Rumi, Qalandarnama, Tashkent, Beruniy Institute of Manuscripts, MS 11668, fols
193a–b. Praise of Uzbek Khan at fol. 193b. A facsimile of the manuscript has also been published:
Qalandar-name, prepared by Ilnur M. Mirgaleev (Kazan’, 2015) (non vidi).
32
Abu Bakr Rumi, Qalandarnama, fol. 193b; Persian text given in DeWeese, ‘Khāns and Amīrs’, 56.
82 Religion, Politics and Society

Similarly, an anecdote in Aflaki’s Manaqib attributed to Rumi states that Hülegü

had successfully conquered Baghdad in 656/1258 because he and his men had
fasted and prayed for three days beforehand, whereas the caliph’s arrogance led to
his downfall.33 Thus the Mongols, even if not technically Muslims, are depicted
as acting in a more muslim way (in the sense of showing their innate religiosity and
submission to God) than the leader of the umma, justifying their victory. If
Mongol rule could ultimately be seen as divinely ordained, then this was doubtless
to the advantage of Sufis who, like Abu Bakr Rumi himself, were dependent on
the patronage of Chinggis Khan’s descendants and their deputies.34
These Sufi texts thus portray an intimate relationship with the political elite,
and the Mongols in particular, as part of a strategy of emphasising Sufis’ enduring
importance in the divine plan. A more complex picture emerges from Rumi’s
correspondence,35 which addresses sultans, amirs and viziers – the network
attached to the Seljuq court through which the Mongols ruled Anatolia up to
the 1270s. Rumi is on occasion deeply critical of the Mongols. Thus, for example,
a letter to Mu‘in al-Din Sulayman, the Pervane, complains bitterly of the
Mongols, with their incessant demands for loans and camels.36 A missive to Amin
al-Din Mika’il (d. 676/1277), who held the senior posts of nā’ib al-saltana and
_
malik al-umarā’ wa’l-nuwwāb, is even stronger; Rumi writes that ‘since this group
[i.e. the Mongols) have gained power over us, fear has prevailed; if it has abated for
a moment, it is like a viper reposing in a house, sleeping in a corner.’37 The letter
then goes on to allude to the security problems in Konya in the absence of Amin
al-Din Mika’il, which were presumably caused by the Mongol soldiery: houses
were broken into in the night, women and children killed and property stolen.
Rumours swept the town, for every day a new piece of bad news came and people
were slaughtered like cattle. Both this letter and that to the Pervane constitute

33
Shams al-Din Aflaki, Manaqib al-‘Arifin, ed. Tahsin Yazıcı (Ankara, 1976–80); I, 3:113,
pp. 204–5; trans. John O’Kane as Shams al-Din Ahmad-e Aflaki, The Feats of the Knowers of
God (Manaqeb al-arefin) (Leiden, 2002), 140–1 (hereafter, Feats).
34
For a similar claim for the divinely decreed nature of the Mongol invasions see Elvan Çelebi,
Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye fi Menasıbi’l-Ünsiyye (Baba İlyas-ı Horasânî ve Sülâlesinin Menkabevî Tarihi),
ed. İsmail E. Erunsal and Ahmet Yaşar Ocak (Ankara, 2014), l. 1845ff. Such views were not
restricted to hagiography: for a discussion of the historian Aqsara’i’s treatment of the infidel
Mongols as more pious than the Muslims see Anooshahr, The Ghazi Sultans and the Frontiers of
Islam, 130–1.
35
The original text of the letters has been published twice: Maktubat-i Mawlana Jalal al-Din/
Mevlânânın Mektubları, ed. Ahmed Remzi Akyürek (Istanbul, 1937) and Maktubat-i Mawlana
Jalal al-Din Rumi, ed. Tawfiq H. Subhani (Tehran, 1371). Reference here is made to the more
accessible Tehran edition (henceforth: Jalal al-Din Rumi, Maktubat).
36
Jalal al-Din Rumi, Maktubat, 113, no. 42.
37
Ibid., 139, no. 61.
 Sufism and Political Power 83

pleas for help and protection from the Mongols. Elsewhere, in Fihi ma Fihi, Rumi
directly criticises the Pervane for his links with the Mongols.38
Nonetheless, Rumi’s correspondence offers clear testimony to his reliance on
Ilkhanid allies such as the Pervane, Amin al-Din Mika’il and Fakhr al-Din ‘Ali,
who was amīr-dād, malik al-umarā’ and nā’ib al-saltana, and who acted as vizier
_
from 659/1260 until his death in 688/1288. Rumi interceded with this political
elite to secure worldly advancement for relatives and associates. A letter to the
Pervane’s father, Muhadhdhab al-Din, who had been Ghiyath al-Din Kaykhus-
raw II’s chief minister and was responsible for the surrender to Baiju, requests
employment for one Shams al-Din.39 Letters to the Pervane also beg him to find a
job for Shams al-Din because, as Rumi puts it, ‘he desires, one way or another, to
be honoured by serving this court’.40 Rumi’s intercessions also frequently aimed
to secure the forgiveness of various associates of his, some of whom seem to have
been embroiled in political disputes. A letter to Fakhr al-Din ‘Ali raises the case of
Najm al-Din b. Khurram b. Chawush, imprisoned for some kind of involvement
in civil disturbances (ātish-i fitna).41 Rumi writes to the Pervane relaying the
gratitude of the sons of one Sayf al-Din, whose pardoning had allowed them to
start a new life.42 A certain Karim al-Din Mahmud had been accused on account
of greed for, presumably, some unspecified financial offence; the Pervane is asked
to issue a decree (yarlıgh) exonerating him.43
Perhaps the majority of letters are essentially those of recommendation: Rumi
starts with a formulaic expression of desire to see the addressee, who is usually
given his full titles. After Rumi’s greetings, the candidate for patronage is intro-
duced, with comments as to how deserving and pious he is; then the specific
request is made. The letter concludes with a reminder to the addressee of the
eternal rewards his generosity will bring. Many of the requests are for stipends or
loans,44 but others are direct appeals for commercial or financial privileges for
members of Rumi’s circle. One letter to the Pervane introduces fakhr al-tujjār,
‘the glory of the merchants’, Shihab al-Din, who was apparently engaged in trade
with Sivas and for whom Rumi asks for an exemption from customs tolls (bāj).45

38
Mawlana Jalal al-Din Muhammad, Kitab-i Fihi Ma Fihi, ed. Badi‘ al-Zaman Furuzanfar (Tehran,
1387, 3rd edition), 19–20; Signs of the Unseen: The Discourses of Jalaluddin Rūmī, trans. W. M.
Thackston (Boston, MA, 1994), 5.
39
Jalal al-Din Rumi, Maktubat, 203–4, no. 113.
40
Ibid., 187, no. 101: ‘arzū-yi ān ast kih bih wasīla az wasā’il bih khidmatī-yi ān bārgāh musharraf
shawad’.
41
Ibid., 76, no 10.
42
Ibid., 81, no. 16.
43
Ibid., 126, no. 51.
44
Ibid., 78, no. 12; p. 98, no. 29; pp. 141–2, no. 63; pp. 196–7, no. 108.
45
Ibid., 95, no. 26.
84 Religion, Politics and Society

Another letter, to Fakhr al-Din ‘Ali, refers to the exemption of a number of

Rumi’s associates from government levies (mutālabāt and musādarāt) and requests
_ _
the privilege be extended to others of his circle.46 Various letters request the
investigation of cases of musādara, or state expropriation of property,47 and on
_
one occasion Rumi asks the Pervane to assist Husam al-Din who overspent on
rebuilding the wall of an abandoned garden.48 In another, the Pervane is asked to
assist the heirs of Salah al-Din, who had purchased a garden for 500 dirhams but
fallen into arrears with the payments.49
Rumi emerges from his correspondence as the pivot of a system of patronage
whereby his followers benefited from the protection and favour of the elite,
including worldly benefits, such as tax breaks and positions at court. Rumi’s
behaviour was not atypical of at least some Sufi saints. For instance, the corpus of
letters of the fifteenth-century Central Asian Naqshbandi Khwaja ‘Ubaydallah
Ahrar and his associates bears many similarities to Rumi’s. Consisting largely of
petitions, the Khwaja Ahrar correspondence demonstrates the crucial role this
saint played in mediating patronage relationships between his followers and the
Timurid court, on which they relied for material support, protection, appoint-
ment to office, tax relief, waqf and property. Indeed, saints also played a more
general role mediating between society and its lords.50
Rumi’s behaviour was emulated by his son and eventual successor, Sultan
Walad, who continued to enjoy the patronage of some of the same patrons, judging
by the dedicatees of poems in his Persian Diwan. This contains a qasīda addressed
_
to the Pervane,51 one to Fakhr al-Din ‘Ali,52 and one to Majd al-Din Muhammad,
who served as mustawfī, or chief financial official.53 The Seljuq family itself features
prominently among the dedicatees, with several poems addressed to Ghiyath al-Din
Mas‘ud II (d. 708/1308), the last Seljuq sultan.54 Sultan Walad’s closeness to the
Seljuq court is illustrated by a qasīda written to commemorate the entry of the
_
sultan into Konya on 25 Rabi’ II 680/13 August 1281. It was perhaps composed on
the occasion of Ghiyath al-Din Mas‘ud’s accession to the throne, and extravagantly
praises the sultan and the leading amirs of Konya. The stock epithets of panegyric

46
Ibid., 104–5, no. 36.
47
Ibid., 91, no. 23; p. 231, no. 135.
48
Ibid., 80, no. 15.
49
Ibid., 165–6, no. 83.
50
See Jo Ann Gross and Asom Urubayev, The Letters of Khwāja ‘Ubayd Allāh Ahrār and his Associates
(Leiden, 2002), especially 23–56. Also on this phenomenon see Moin, The _Millennial Sovereign,
99–100, 104–5.
51
Divanı Sultan Veled, ed. F. Nafız Uzluk (Istanbul, 1941), 201.
52
Ibid., 182.
53
Ibid., 143.
54
Ibid., 131–3, 144, 247, 466–8.
 Sufism and Political Power 85

are pulled out in order to praise him: the sultan resembles Rustam in his courage,
Anushirwan in justice, the amirs are like stars and the sultan like the moon.55
Another poem addressed to the sultan requests aid for Sultan Walad’s followers:
You are the pivot of life and the world, O dear being; you were the purpose of the
creation of the whole world,
Life, were it even in heaven, would be hell if you were not present
...
I have two requirements of your Majesty, that you should do what is customary for
your family [to do].
A pension was settled on us by your grandfather and father; such a son as you
should give a hundred such [pensions].
Fourteen of our lord [Rumi]’s disciples (‘āshiqān) were exempted and relieved of
government tax by that generous king.
In your epoch, O king, it should be so, such that everyone profits without loss from
your generosity.
Instruct the sāhib [-dīwān] to do this, so that everyone may sincerely say his heart is
_ _
at rest . . .56

Other poems address royal Seljuq women, such as Rukn al-Din Kılıç Arslan IV’s
wife Gumaj Khatun and his daughter Saljuq Khatun.57 The princess Gurji
Khatun, said by Aflaki to have been a devotee of Rumi’s,58 is also mentioned
warmly in a poem addressed to one Husam al-Din, a notable of Kayseri where she
was apparently living.59 A poem to Taj al-Din, the za‘īm al-jaysh (commander of
the army) requests this amir’s assistance in restoring to Sultan Walad and his
followers a waqf that had been unjustly taken from them. After an introduction
comparing Taj al-Din to stock heroes of Perso-Islamic culture (in beauty like
Joseph, chivalry [jawānmardī] like Hatim Tayyi, bravery like ‘Ali b. Abi Talib and
justice like Anushirwan), Sultan Walad begs:
I pray to you every evening and morning to bestow on me that village called Kara
Arslan.60
It is certain, there is no doubt, that Badr al-Din Gawhartash made it a waqf for this
group who pray for him (bikarda būd waqf ānrā barīn jam‘-i du‘ā gūyān).61

55
Ibid., 224–6.
56
Ibid., 131–2.
57
Ibid., 251, 253. Gumaj Khatun is also mentioned as a disciple of Rumi by Aflaki, Manaqib, I,
3:285, p. 335; Feats, 232.
58
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 3:171, pp. 262–3; 3:371, pp. 425–6; Feats, 182, 292.
59
Divanı Sultan Veled, 453.
60
Identified by Uzluk, Divanı Sultan Veled, Introduction, 63 as a village near Konya.
61
Badr al-Din Gawhartash was a senior amir who had been lala (atabeg) to ‘Ala’ al-Din Kayqubad
I. See Turan, Selçuklular Zamanında Türkiye, 325, 520.
86 Religion, Politics and Society

Najib seized it from him [to finance] fighting on the frontier (barā-yi jang-i sīnūrī),
but just two days later he saw his recompense from God for that.
O lord, protect the religious scholars (faqīhān) in this respect: make flourishing a
charitable donation that was destroyed by his oppression. . .62

Sultan Walad also seems to have had links with the Germiyanid dynasty of
Kütahya. The story related by a much later Mevlevi writer, Esrar Dede
(d. 1796), that Sultan Walad’s daughter Muttahara Khatun married the Germiya-
nid Süleymanşah and gave birth to a daughter, Dawlat Khatun, who herself
married the Ottoman sultan Yıldırım Bayezid,63 is probably a fiction, although
it is itself instructive that even after so many generations authors were still seeking
to link rulers and Sufi lineages. Clearer evidence of some kind of association
between Sultan Walad and the Germiyanids comes in the form of a poem in the
Diwan praising Kütahya’s natural beauty, its gardens and rivers, and its strong
fortress,64 while Aflaki also records that a gift of a basin of white marble was sent
to Sultan Walad from Kütahya.65 Aflaki also records the close relationship
between Sultan Walad and another Turkmen lord, the Aydınid Muhammad
Beg.66
The Mongols themselves also became the subject of the holy men’s attentions,
at least according to the hagiographies. Aflaki depicts Sultan Walad as instrumen-
tal in converting to Islam the Mongol commander in Anatolia, Irenjin Noyan,
and of exerting great influence over Ghazan’s deputy, Oposhgha Noyan, who
became a disciple.67 The conversion of Mongols is doubtless intended to be read
as a miracle, affirming Sultan Walad’s credentials as his father’s successor, but
some confirmation of this picture is afforded by Sultan Walad’s Diwan, which
contains a poem dedicated to Samaghar Noyan, Mongol military governor of
Anatolia from between roughly 1271 and 1296,68 his wife Qultaq, his son ‘Arab
and his daughter Nawuqi. Although the Mongol names of Samaghar’s family
differ from those given in the Manaqib al-‘Arifin, the poem does at least confirm

62
Divanı Sultan Veled, 226. Samaghar is also praised by Aqsara’i for his justice; see Musamarat al-
akhbar, 104.
63
Esrar Dede, Tezkire-i Şuarâ-yı Mevleviyye, ed. İlhan Genç (Ankara, 2000), 137, 325–6; Varlık,
Germiyan-oğulları Tarihi, 64.
64
Divanı Sultan Veled, 550. Also on the Mevlevis’ links with the Germiyanids see Feridun Nafiz
Uzluk, ‘Germiyanoğlu Yakub II. Bey’in Vakfiyesi’, Vakıflar Dergisi 8 (1969): 71–111.
65
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 8:52, p. 906; Feats, 633.
66
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 8 :82, pp. 948–9; Feats, 663–4.
67
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 7:12, p. 797; 7: 29, pp. 818–19; Feats, 556–8, 571.
68
On Samaghar, mentioned as one of the witnesses of Nur al-Din b. Jaja’s waqfiyya at Kırşehir, see
Ahmet Temir, Kırşehir Emiri Nur el-Din’in 1272 Tarihli Arapça-Moğolca Vakfiyesi (Ankara, 1959),
206–8; Ahmet Temir, ‘Anadolu İlhanli Valilerinden Samağar Noyan’, in 60. Doğum Yılı Münase-
betiyle Fuad Köprülü Armağan/ Mélanges Fuad Köprülü (Istanbul, 1953), 495–500.
 Sufism and Political Power 87

that Aflaki’s tale of Sultan Walad’s links with senior Mongols is correct. Sultan
Walad’s dependence on the Mongol order is strikingly suggested by the poem’s
radīf (refrain) in Turkish, the language of the Mongol armies, beǧimiz bizi
unutma, ‘our lord, do not forget us’.69
After Sultan Walad’s death we are largely reliant on Aflaki’s Manaqib al-‘Arifin,
the great hagiography of Rumi and his descendants, for information about the
relations between Sufis and elites. Such a source clearly has its own agenda, as with
the Sufi writings described above. Nonetheless it is worth drawing out some of the
main elements of the relations between awliyā’ and ruling elites as these form such
an important part of Aflaki’s theme.70 I mean not to suggest that these stories are
literally true – although certainly some may reflect reality to a degree – but they
show how the topic of Sufi influence on these elites became an important part of
Sufis’ understanding of their own social and religious role.
According to Aflaki, the intimate relationship between power and Sufis con-
tinued under Ulu ‘Arif Çelebi, Sultan Walad’s son, although Ulu ‘Arif Çelebi’s
extant Diwan contains no examples of panegyric comparable with those com-
posed by Sultan Walad.71 Aflaki gives special attention to Ulu ‘Arif Çelebi, who
was his own murshid (spiritual guide), devoting more space to him than any other
member of Rumi’s family apart from Mawlana himself. Aflaki relates that when
Ghazan acceded to the Sultanate, Ulu Arif Çelebi ‘felt a desire to see the kingdoms
of Persian Iraq and to meet the notables of that land. Having decided to make for
the ordu with a fortunate company, we set off.’72 On the road to Erzurum, they
encountered a group of falconers attached to the Ilkhanid court, led by a certain
Tuman-Beg son of Qalawuz, chief huntsman to Ghazan (amīr-shikār-i khān) and
in charge of all other falconers. Tuman-Beg is described in terms that suggest that
he is already inclined to Sufism (bi-ghāyat mu‘taqid wa sādiq wa ‘ārif) and
_
asceticism (amīr-i faqīr-nihād) as well as being a Seljuq prince (az amīr-zādagān-
i sultān-i rūm). The chief huntsman immediately shows his respect for Ulu ‘Arif
_
Çelebi going out, falcon perched on his arm, to greet the holy man and kiss hands.
Yet Ulu ‘Arif Çelebi seizes the falcon and releases it into the sky. Fearful for his
fate at the hands of the khan for losing this valuable bird, Tuman-Beg begs Çelebi
to get it back, which, by invoking Rumi, he does, and the falcon comes to land on

69
Divanı Sultan Veled, 306. ‘Arab Noyan son of Samaghar is identified by Aflaki as governor of Sivas
and a devoted disciple of Ҫelebi Amir ‘Arif (Manaqib, II, 8:23, p. 855; Feats, 597). Further on the
place of the Turkish in the Mongol armies see Chapter 4.
70
See also the discussion in Yılmaz, Caliphate Redefined, 112–19, which focuses on Aflaki’s depiction
of Rumi’s father Baha’ al-Din Walad.
71
Ulu Arif Çelebi, Divanı: Tenkitli Metin ve Tercüme, ed. İbrahim Kunt and Mehmet Vanlıoǧlu
(Konya, 2013).
72
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 8:19 p. 844; Feats, 589.
88 Religion, Politics and Society

Çelebi’s hat. Aflaki relates that ‘The son of Qalawuz [Tuman-beg], like one out of
his senses, bowed his head and became a murīd, and bestowed a gift of three fine
horses and two thousand dinars in cash’ on Ulu ‘Arif Çelebi. The huntsman’s
devotion to the saint met a material reward on his arrival in Tabriz, where Ghazan
was so delighted with the bird that he immediately granted Tuman-Beg thirty
horses and 60,000 dinars, gave him his own drink to drink as a sign of his favour
and gifted him several villages in the Danishmendid province (North Central
Anatolia). Aflaki concludes that Tuman-Beg ‘sacrificed everything for the lord
Çelebi, sending him a pension and rendering service until the end of his life’.73
Thus Aflaki shows how the combined supernatural powers of Ulu Arif Çelebi
and Rumi not merely rescue Tuman-Beg’s falcon, but ensure that he receives a
generous present from Ghazan; devotion to saints is not merely spiritually but also
financially rewarding. In the next anecdote, Aflaki recounts how Tuman-Beg told
the tale of Ulu ‘Arif Çelebi’s miracle with the falcon at court; ‘the khan greatly
desired to see Çelebi, and ordered, “If you can, seize him and bring him”’. Yet
Çelebi would not consent to go to see the khan however much Tuman-Beg
insisted, saying, ‘It is in his interests that we do not see him, and that we pray for
the continuation of the fortune of the just sultan (du‘ā-yi dawlat-i Sultān-i ‘ādil)
_
from afar, for “the swiftest prayer to be answered is the prayer of the brother for
his brother from the unseen” and we should be preoccupied with our poverty
(darwīshī)’.74 Iltermish Khatun, the queen, devised a plan to satisfy the khan’s
desire by inviting Çelebi to a session of samā‘, the ritual dance of the Sufis (and
especially Mevlevis). To this Çelebi consented, and at the samā‘ session, held in
the tent of Queen Iltermish, the khan
became a devotee (muhibb) of that sultan [Ulu ‘Arif Çelebi]; he observed him from afar and
_
was greatly amazed. In the end, Iltermish Khatun ordered many gifts and honours [to be
given] and became herself a disciple (murīd) . . . The pādshāh-i Islām [Ghazan], having
conceived a great desire for the dynasty of Mawlana because of his love for them, awoke
[spiritually]. He would constantly ask Qutb al-Din Shirazi, Humam al-Din Tabrizi,
Khwaja Rashid al-Din and the great shaykhs of that land, as well as shining Baraq the
rider of Buraq [i.e. the holy man Baraq Baba], may God have mercy on them, about
Mawlana, and asked for an explanation of his verses. When the late leader of khalīfas, Majd
al-Din Atabak-i Mawlawi, came to the sultan’s court and explained the greatness of
Mawlana’s proximity [to God] and revelations, he showed proofs, and made the khan’s
heart in its entirety thirsty for Mawlana.75

73
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 8:19, p. 846; Feats, 591.
74
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 8:20, p. 847; Feats, 591.
75
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 8:20, p. 848; Feats, 592.
 Sufism and Political Power 89

Aflaki shows not merely the intensity of Ghazan’s devotion to Mawlana (not,
incidentally, attested in any other sources), but also affirms the unique ability of
Mevlevis to interpret the master’s work and thus reveal the divine truths contained
therein. The leading intellectuals of the Ilkhanid state, the philosopher Qutb al-
Din Shirazi, the poet Humam al-Din Tabrizi and the vizier Rashid al-Din
himself, as well as the Anatolian Qalandar Baraq Baba, are all apparently stumped;
it is only when the Mevlevi khalīfa (deputy, discussed on pp. 103–4) Majd al-Din
appears that Ghazan is able to understand properly. According to Aflaki, Ghazan
was so delighted with Majd al-Din’s explanation of one of Mawlana’s ghazals that
he had it embroidered on a mantle. The poem started:
When I bring a cup of manliness from the beloved’s vat, I put out of action two
worlds and the hidden.
You fear the Tatars [Mongols] because you do not know God, but I will bring two
hundred banners of faith to the Tatars.

Aflaki quotes Ghazan as connecting this poem to his conversion:

When [Ghazan] sat on the throne, he wore [this cloak with the ghazal embroidered on it]
and he was proud to say, ‘Mawlana of Rum composed this ghazal for me, for I spread the
banner of faith now among the Mongols, and they have now become Muslims.’76

Clearly, we are not meant to take this statement literally, for Rumi died a good
twenty years before Ghazan converted, and there is no other evidence for any
association of Ghazan with the Mevlevis, who are rarely mentioned in Ilkhanid
sources from the court in Iran.77 Aflaki’s aim is to assert the role of the Mevlevis in
bringing Ghazan to true Islam through the teachings of Rumi’s successors, Ulu
‘Arif Çelebi and Majd al-Din, and thereby to validate the claims of the Mevlevis to
spiritual dominion. Aflaki claims Ulu ‘Arif Çelebi’s influence continued under
Ghazan’s successors, and says that he himself accompanied Ulu ‘Arif Çelebi on
another journey to the Ilkhanid heartland in Azerbaijan, this time to Sultaniyya,
the Ilkhan Öljeitü’s capital. According to Aflaki, this journey was ordered by
Sultan Walad, who was furious that preachers in Anatolia had been forbidden
from mentioning the names of the Companions of the Prophet after Öljeitü’s
embrace of Shiism. Ulu ‘Arif Çelebi was charged with travelling to the ordu to
convert Öljeitü back from Shiism, although the sultan died while he was en
route – an event foretold by Çelebi. Nonetheless, the party continued to

76
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 8:20, p. 849, Feats, 593.
77
I am grateful to Jonathan Brack for this point; for Ghazan’s association with the Kubrawiyya Sufi
order, which seems more factually based, see Stefan Kamola, ‘Rashīd al-Dīn and the Making of
History in Mongol Iran’, PhD dissertation, University of Washington, 2013, 180.
90 Religion, Politics and Society

Sultaniyya, where, Aflaki claims, they were greeted with every respect by the
leading figures of the Ilkhanid state.78 This visit is dated to Dhu’l-Hijja 715/
February–March 1316, but two years later, in Dhu’l-Hijja 717/February 1318,
Aflaki again records being present in Sultaniyya in the company of Ulu ‘Arif
Çelebi.79 It is not clear whether this refers to the same visit, suggesting it was
greatly extended, or another journey – Aflaki mentions Ulu ‘Arif Çelebi’s regular
travels.80 On two other occasions, Aflaki mentions travelling to Tabriz with
Çelebi, where samā‘ sessions were held with numerous prominent men in attend-
ance,81 in addition to Sultaniyya.82
As well as underlining Ulu ‘Arif Çelebi’s purportedly close relationship with
the Ilkhanid house, Aflaki discusses his influence on leading figures in Anatolia.
Several anecdotes mention Ulu ‘Arif Çelebi’s presence at court drinking parties.83
Aflaki even sought to claim for the Mevlevis credit for the installation of the
Seljuq sultan ‘Ala’ al-Din Kayqubad III b. Faramarz (r. 697/1297–701/1301). He
alludes to the grant of the position by the Ilkhan, writing that the aforementioned
Majd al-Din
having procured the sultanate of Rum for sultan ‘Ala’ al-Din son of Faramarz, himself
became his atabeg and subdued the entire kingdom of Rum. He sat [‘Ala’ al-Din] on the
throne of Konya, the abode of kingship. Out of gratitude for this, [‘Ala’ al-Din] showed his
devotion in various ways to Sultan Walad, Çelebi ‘Arif and their noble disciples.84

In addition, Aflaki claims that the ruler of the Turkmen principality of Menteşe in
western Anatolia, Mas‘ud Beg (r. c. 695/1296–717/1319), was one of the
devotees of Mawlana’s family (az jumla-yi muhibbān-i khāndān būd). He describes
_
how Ulu ‘Arif Çelebi travelled to Menteşe where Mas‘ud Beg arranged a samā‘
session for him. After Çelebi saw off a challenge from a rival Turkish shaykh, the
people of the province became his disciples, and Mas‘ud Beg presented him with
splendid presents – slaves, horses, cloaks and cash.85 Similarly, the Eshrefid ruler
of Beyşehir, Mubariz al-Din Çelebi Muhammad Beg, patronised Ulu ‘Arif Çel-
ebi.86 The Aydınid ruler Mubariz al-Din Muhammad Beg (r. 708/1308–734/
1334), and the Germiyanid Yakub I ((c. 699/1299–c. 727/1327) are also

78
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 8.20, pp. 858–862, Feats, 600–2.
79
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 8:47, p. 896; Feats, 627.
80
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 8:34, p. 873; Feats, 611.
81
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 8:45, p. 894; Feats, 625–6.
82
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 8:76, p. 932; Feats, 652.
83
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 8:38, p. 885, 8: 40, 887; Feats, 619, 620–1.
84
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 8:20, p. 849; Feats, 593.
85
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 8:22, pp. 851–2; Feats, 595.
86
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 8:20, pp. 924–5, 8: 85, pp. 944–5; Feats, 647, 661.
 Sufism and Political Power 91

mentioned among his devotees,87 as is Shuja‘ al-Din Inanj Beg (fl. c. 714/1314–734/
1334), the ruler of Ladhiq/Denizli.88 Aflaki often emphasises the hereditary nature of
these loyalties. Sons of disciples of Mawlana become in turn devotees of Ulu ‘Arif
Çelebi. ‘Arab Noyan, the Mongol governor of Sivas and son of Samaghar, the
Mongol governor who was Sultan Walad’s disciple, is himself described as a disciple
(murīd-i mukhlis) of Ulu ‘Arif Çelebi.89 The son of Nur al-Din b. Jaja, Mongol
_
commander of Kırşehir, Pulad Beg, was both a courtier of Ghazan and a devotee of
the family of Mawlana.90 Likewise, ‘Ayn al-Hayat, daughter of Gurji Khatun, a
devotee of Mawlana, was herself a disciple of Ulu ‘Arif Çelebi.91
Aflaki also associates the line of Mawlana with the conquests of Umur Beg, the
second Aydınid ruler (r. 734/1334–749/1348), famous for his exploits against the
Christians, commemorated by the Ottoman poet Enveri and also mentioned by Ibn
Battuta.92 Aflaki gives Umur suitably heroic epithets, immortalising his role as a
warrior for the faith: ‘the king of amirs, the model of the heroes, the second Hamza,
the divine ghazi’.93 Aflaki records that on several occasions when the emir was in
distress at sea, Mawlana appeared to Umur and saved him. Likewise, when waging
war against the Christians, on several occasions Ulu ‘Arif Çelebi appeared to him:
Several times when fighting against the infidel [Umur Beg] saw that Çelebi Arif was
fighting too. [The infidel] hung their heads in shame and their defeat became apparent.
That unique man [Umur Pasha], because of his faith, strove to fight until the final moment
when he attained the rank of martyr and became one of the people of felicity. They say that
one night he saw Çelebi in a dream, saying this verse to him,
‘Whoever has our patent of protection in the hem of his cloak, is bold and respected if he
travels on land and sea.’
And so it was that he decided to conqueror the island of Chios, from which they brought
back more mastic than can be said. He imposed tribute94 and made the island his private
estate (khās sa).95
__

87
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 8:86, pp. 945–7; Feats, 661–3. The Germiyanid is referred to only as ‘son of
‘Alishir’, but is evidently meant to be the Germiyanid Beg; of the several different sons of Alishir
mentioned in the sources, Yakub is firmly epigraphically attested in this period. See Varlık,
Germiyan-oğulları Tarihi, 23–4, 31.
88
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 8:30, 81 pp. 864, 939; Feats, 604–5, 657.
89
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 8:23, p. 855; Feats, 597.
90
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 8:38, p. 885; Feats, 619.
91
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 8:62, pp. 915–16; Feats, 640–1.
92
Ibn Battuta, Rihla, 304; trans. Gibb, 446; Irène Mélikoff, Le Destan d’Umur Pacha (Düsturname-i
Enverî) (Paris, 1954).
93
Aflaki Manaqib, II, 8:89, p. 949; Feats, 664.
94
Kharāj, an ambiguous term that, by the Ottoman period, could be synonymous with jizya, the poll-
tax on non-Muslims, or tribute paid by non-Muslim vassals; it seems this is what is intended rather
than its Abbasid meaning of land-tax. See Cengiz Orhonlu, ‘Kharādj’, EI2.
95
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 8:89, p. 949–50; Feats, 664–5.
92 Religion, Politics and Society

Thus the blessing-power of Mawlana and Ulu ‘Arif Çelebi are portrayed as
efficacious long after their deaths. Umur Beg’s devotion to the house of Mawlana
ensures that at critical moments its leading members step in to save him from
disaster at sea and ensure his victory over unbelievers.
Aflaki is quite open about Ulu ‘Arif Çelebi’s alliance with the Mongols,
reflecting the Sufi tendency to identify the Mongol invasions as a sign of divine
will discussed above, writing that:
In the time of the Karamanids when the city of Konya was in their hands, and because
Çelebi was a supporter of the Mongol army (khwāhān-i lashkar-i Mughūl), the [former]
group [i.e. the Karamanids] were annoyed. They continually protested, saying, ‘You do not
desire us who are your neighbours, and devotees of Mawlana, but you desire the foreign
Mongols.’ He answered, ‘We are dervishes, we look to see whom the will of God desires,
and to whomsoever he bestows his kingdom, we are on his side and we want him . . . Now
God exalted does not want you but wants the army of the Mongols, and He has taken the
kingdom from the hands of the Seljuqs and entrusted it to the descendants of Chinggis
Khan, “for God gives rule to whomsoever he desires” (Q. 2:248). We also want what God
wants.’ The Karamanids, even though they were sincere devotees and disciples were
offended, and were wary of Çelebi.96

Under Ulu Arif Çelebi’s successor, Çelebi ‘Abid, the relationship between
Mongols and the line of Mawlana continued. When the Mongol governor (and
self-proclaimed messiah; see Chapter 6) Timurtash reconquered Konya from the
Karamanids in 722/1322–3, he sought an association with Çelebi ‘Abid: ‘In
absolute love Timurtash very much wished that Çelebi ‘Abid and all the family’s
offspring would enter the train of that company [those who swore allegiance to
him] as well and would attend on him in circumstances of hardship and ease, at
home and abroad.’ However, Çelebi ‘Abid consented only to ‘display affection a
distance’.97 Aflaki may be seeking to express disapproval of Timurtash’s messianic
pretensions. Indeed, Aflaki records that Eretna sought to use Çelebi ‘Abid as an
intermediary with the commanders of the ūj, the Turkmen-populated peripheral
regions, who had not yet submitted to Timurtash. Çelebi ‘Abid apparently asked
Aflaki himself to dissuade Eretna from imposing this task on him. Although
Aflaki’s account is somewhat ambiguous – doubtless deliberately – it seems that
despite his protests Çelebi did undertake this task, for Aflaki refers to travelling to
the ūj in his company. Similarly, Aflaki records a visit by Çelebi ‘Abid to the
imperial ordu in Tabriz.98 This visit, it seems, was less successful, for the vizier,
Rashid al-Din’s son, Shams al-Din amir Muhammad, failed to show the dervishes

96
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 8:70, pp. 925–6; Feats, 647–8.
97
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 9:2, p. 976–7; Feats, 685, translation adapted from O’Kane.
98
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 9:3, 9:9, pp. 978–9, 990; Feats, 686, 694.
 Sufism and Political Power 93

the respect they were due – resulting, Aflaki hints, in the collapse of Abu
Sa‘id’s realm.
Aflaki’s extensive treatment of the close relations between the Mevlevis’ leaders
on the one hand and Turkmen and Mongol rulers on the other is evidently
intended to establish the credentials of Rumi’s descendants as men whose writ
extended over the earthly domain as well the spiritual, a gift granted to them by
their proximity to God that was also demonstrated by the miracles they per-
formed. This saintly power could thus be used in ways both positive or negative,
assisting Umur Beg in his jihad against the unbelievers and handing ‘Ala’ al-Din
b. Faramarz the throne, or bringing down the very kingdom of the Ilkhan. This
latter assertion in particular may seem little more than the extravagant literary
conceit of a Mevlevi anxious to assert the authority of his order. Yet to contem-
poraries, who generally accepted the claims made for saints’ power (at least on a
general level, even if specific instances were debatable), Aflaki’s statement may not
have seemed so tendentious, especially against the background of a world from
which the Ilkhanate’s power had disappeared on Abu Sa‘id’s death with a rapidity
that defies ready explanation even today.99 As Azfar Moin has put it of a rather
later period, ‘the cadences of social and political life were linked to the rhythms of
a cosmos kept in balance by the efforts of holy men’.100 Successful engagement
with the awliyā’ was essential for upholding a ruler’s reputation, rather than
directly bestowing legitimacy through association, as is sometimes argued in
modern scholarship;101 Rumi and his circle, for instance, seem from his letters
to have been considerably less widely popular than Aflaki would have us
believe.102 Moreover, rulers both Ilkhanid and Turkmen patronised the muwallah
or Qalandar holy men who were regarded by many with disapproval for their
rejection of societal and juridical norms. Sources record the devotion of Ghazan
and Öljeitü to Baraq Baba (d. 707/1307–8) from Tokat, who was famed for feats
of taming tigers as well as for his outlandish appearance, filthy and naked.103
Similarly, Ibn Battuta recounts how the Aydınid amir of Izmir, Umur Beg,
patronised muwallah dervishes.104 Given the Ilkhanids’ well-attested patronage
of holy men, it is entirely possible that contemporaries could be persuaded that a
rift with the latter explained the former’s demise.

99
See Melville, ‘The End of the Ilkhanate and After’.
100
Moin, The Millennial Sovereign, 100.
101
Cf. Moin, The Millennial Sovereign, 54–5.
102
Peacock, ‘Sufis and the Seljuk Court’, 214–15.
103
Hamid Algar, ‘Barāq Bābā’, EIr; Amitai, ‘Sufis and Shamans’, 35; Karamustafa, God’s Unruly
Friends, 62–4; Öztürk, Velilik ile Delilik Arasında, 140–1, esp. n. 89.
104
Ibn Battuta, Rihla, 304; trans. Gibb, 445.
94 Religion, Politics and Society

POLITICS AND THE PATRONAGE OF SUFISM

Although rulers’ interest in Sufism was complex and cannot be reduced to a single
cause, Mevlevi texts offer reasons both practical and theoretical why the saints
deserve elite patronage. Rumi himself at several places in his letters argues that his
patrons should support him in return for receiving du‘ā-yi dawlat, a phrase that
crops up in almost every letter, and which we may roughly translate as meaning
‘praying for your prosperity’. To give one extreme example, Rumi requests a tax
exemption for some dervishes ‘because they have been preoccupied with praying
[for your prosperity] which has kept them from earning a living’.105 A request to
Majd al-Din asking for Kamal al-Din’s exemption from taxes is explained by the
fact that Kamal al-Din had become too preoccupied with the afterlife, which had
resulted in his financial problems; if these were solved then he could devote
himself to ‘praying for your prosperity’.106 Fakhr al-Din ‘Ali, asked to extend
the tax privileges he has already granted, is assured that ‘our disciples (jamā‘at-i
yārān-i mā), since they have been freed from concern about taxes and expropri-
ations in these difficult days by your efforts, have been preoccupied with praying
for you’.107 Nor were these prayers always bland supplications for the soul of the
patron. An unnamed amir is recommended one Baha’ al-Din as the object of his
patronage. If he granted him a madrasa, people would pray for the amir, which
would be ‘a reason for the continuation of your prosperity, happiness and the
crushing of your enemies’.108 A letter to an amir named Nizam al-Mulk even
more explicitly links the patron’s charity, the resulting prayers and worldly
success: Nizam al-Mulk had taken such good care of dervishes and the poor, it
was said, that their prayers had been accepted by God, which gave Nizam al-Mulk
the victory on the occasion when this congratulatory letter was written.109
In addition to these material benefits, the claims of awliyā’ to authority little
less than that of prophets (anbiyā’) demanded the attention of rulers. While the
relationship between the awliyā’ and anbiyā’ had been debated since the origins of
Sufism, most of the classical Sufi thinkers such as Tirmidhi in the ninth century
put the awliyā’ one step below the Prophets.110 However, in the thirteenth
century, this changed with Ibn ‘Arabi’s vastly influential claim that the awliyā’
were no less in rank than the Prophets. Ibn ‘Arabi himself claimed to be the Seal

105
Rumi, Maktubat, 169, no. 87.
106
Ibid., 82, no. 17.
107
Ibid., 104–5, no. 36.
108
Ibid., 112, no. 41.
109
Ibid., 240, no. 144.
110
Chodkiewicz, Seal of the Saints, esp. 114–15.
 Sufism and Political Power 95

of the awliyā’, much as Muhammad had been the Seal of the anbiyā’.111 In the
wake of Ibn ‘Arabi’s teachings, other saintly families started to assert a similar
status for themselves; thus comparable claims were made in the fourteenth century
by the leaders of the Wafa’iyya Sufi order in Egypt, Muhammad Wafa’ and his
son ‘Ali.112 The idea of sainthood expounded by Sultan Walad in his works seems
to owe much to the reformulation of Ibn ‘Arabi in which sainthood and prophecy
merge, even if Sultan Walad, like his father, avoids much of Ibn ‘Arabi’s technical
vocabulary and abstruse phraseology.113 The status of the awliyā’ is the principal
concern of Sultan Walad’s three Persian mathnawis, the Ibtidanama, Rababnama
and Intihanama, and in all of them the awliyā’ are equated with prophets. At the
beginning of the Ibtidanama, composed in 690/1291,114 a prose heading
announces ‘an explanation of how the anbiyā’ and awliyā’ are of one breath and
one light, both speaking from one God and both having from him the mercy of
being released from existence’.115 Sultan Walad also offers an extended discussion
of the story of Moses and Khidr,116 the verses in the sura of al-Kahf that since Ibn
‘Arabi had been used by Sufi writers to elucidate the relationship between
prophecy and sainthood, with Moses representing prophecy and Khidr saint-
hood.117 For Sultan Walad, the story also functions as a metaphor for the
relationship between Mawlana and his controversial murshid Shams-i Tabriz, with

111
Ibid., 134; Elmore, Islamic Sainthood, 143–62, 182–4, 190.
112
McGregor, Sanctity and Mysticism, 145–55.
113
On the connections between Ibn ‘Arabi and Rumi, see Omid Safi, ‘Did the Two Oceans Meet?
Historical Connections and Disconnections between Ibn ‘Arabi and Rumi’, Journal of the
Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society 26 (1999): 55–88. Regrettably there a few serious studies of Sultan
Walad’s thought, so these remarks remain preliminary observations on what is a vast poetic corpus
comprising not just Sultan Walad’s Diwan but also his three long Mathnawis, the Ibtidanama, the
Rababnama and the Intihnama. For other studies of Sultan Walad, although not touching on the
points made here, see Hülya Küçük, ‘Sultān Walad’s Understanding of Sufism: Between Populism
and Theosophy’, Asian Journal of Social Science 38 (2010): 60–78; Franklin D. Lewis, ‘Soltan
Valad and the Poetical Order: Framing the Ethos and Practice of Poetry in the Mevlevi Tradition
after Rumi’, in Kamran Talattof (ed.), Persian Language, Literature and Culture: New Leaves, Fresh
Looks (London, 2015). One example of the adoption of Ibn ‘Arabi’s concepts can be seen in Sultan
Walad’s reference to Husam al-Din as the sarwar-i abdāl, which may refer to Ibn ‘Arabi’s theory of
abdāl (Sultan Walad, Ibtidanama, 377).
114
Sultan Walad, Ibtidanama, ed. Muhammad ‘Ali Muwahhad and ‘Ali Rida Haydari (Tehran,
1389), 382: begun Rabi I 690, completed in Jumada II.
115
Ibid., 37; cf., ibid., 54.
116
Ibid., 37–40, 51–3.
117
Elmore, Islamic Sainthood, 132–3; cf. McGregor, Sanctity and Mysticism, 133–42. In general on
the figure of Khidr, see Patrick Franke, Begegnung mit Khidr: Quellenstudien zum Imaginären im
Traditionallen Islam (Beirut, 2000), and specifically in Anatolia, see Sibel Kocaer, ‘The Notion of
Erenler in the Divan-ı Şeyh Mehmed Çelebi (Hızırname)’, in Lloyd Ridgeon (ed.), Javanmardi: The
Ethics and Practice of Persianate Perfection (London, 2018), 133–62.
96 Religion, Politics and Society

Mawlana acting as Moses (recognised in the Qur’an as a nabī) to Shams’s Khidr or

walī.118 Although he does not explicitly apply the term nabī to Mawlana, Sultan
Walad exalts ‘unequalled, peerless’ Rumi above any other walī: ‘His relationship
to the noble awliyā’ is like that of the elite to the common people; they are all like
children before him . . .’. The distinction between the anbiyā’ and the awliyā’,
Sultan Walad suggests, is that ‘the mission (da‘wat) of the anbiyā’ is for everyone,
just like a shepherd who is the guardian of his flock, they summon to God both
elite and ordinary people (khawās s wa ‘awāmm) out of nobility (karam)’. In
__
contrast, the walī ‘seeks a lover drunk like himself so that he can say the secret
of his heart; his summoning is for the elite of God . . . he has not a word for the
ordinary people’.119 In the concluding sections of the Ibtidanama, Sultan Walad
returns to this theme, discussing how ‘God’s friend is the Noah of his time’, whose
miracle (mu‘jiza) is speech.120 The Prophet Muhammad is quoted as describing
his inheritors as the awliyā’; ‘they can intercede among people, and the shaykh
among his people his like the prophet in his community’ (wa-lahum shafā‘a fi’l-nās
wa’l-shaykh fī qawmihi ka’l-nabī fi ummatihi).121 The Rababnama also mentions
the relationship between awliyā’ and anbiyā’, claiming that both are a ‘manifest-
ation of God’ (mazhar-i haqq),122 and that the awliyā’ fulfil the task of guiding the
_ _
people to the truth and law previously undertaken by the anbiyā’.123
Sultan Walad suggests the prophets and saints differ in the audience to whom
their actions are directed, but prophecy is continuous and its current vehicle is the
awliyā’ – Rumi, and by implication Sultan Walad himself. When Sultan Walad
discusses his own installation as head of the Mevlevis and the reasons for the start
of his proselytising, he writes:
This is the constant practice of God, in every epoch he sends a messenger (rasūl)
For not everyone has the strength to bear God’s mercy without a prophet (nabī). . .
Every prophet became a means that His advice and warnings are brought forth.124

The context in which this description of continuous prophecy is expounded, that

of the foundation of the Mevlevi mission by Sultan Walad, leaves little room for
doubt that these prophets are to be found among the Mevlevis.125

118
Sultan Walad, Ibtidanama, 53–4.
119
Ibid., 37.
120
Ibid., 326.
121
Ibid., 358; cf. ibid., 158–60.
122
Sultan Walad, Rababnama, ed. ‘Ali Sultani Gird Faramarzi (Tehran, 1980), 134–5.
123
Ibid., 261–5.
124
Sultan Walad, Intihanama, ed. Muhammad ‘Ali Khazanadarlu (Tehran, 1376), 159.
125
Cf. Javid Mojaddedi, Beyond Dogma: Rumi’s Teachings on Friendship with God and Other Sufi
Theories (Oxford, 2012), 72–4.
 Sufism and Political Power 97

If prophecy is real and present in the world, it is unsurprising that the awliyā’
share many of the characteristics of the anbiyā’, first and foremost the receipt of
direct revelation from God. Rumi believed his Mathnawi was a form of divine
revelation, an idea supported by Sultan Walad who alludes to his father’s works
and his own as ‘sent down’ (nazzalnā), a word usually used of the Qur’an
(Q. 15:9).126 Indeed, Sultan Walad explicitly claims in the Intihanama that the
‘poetry of the saints is the explanation (tafsīr) of the Qur’an’.127A further quality
of the anbiyā’ that is shared by the awliyā’ is the ability to prophesy;128 both the
Manaqib al-’Arifin and Elvan Çelebi’s Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye are replete with
examples of the holy man foretelling the end of a dynasty or the death of a
political leader;129 and as we have seen, the awliyā’ can also perform miracles.
Sultan Walad’s concept of the role of the awliyā’ had plenty to attract rulers
beyond admiration for their Prophet-like status. In his Rababnama, Sultan Walad
acknowledges the criticisms that were made of his close relationship with power,
but explained how temporal rulers could actually hold the status of qutbs, the
_
heads of the hierarchy of saints:
One of [our] believers who was an amir came to visit me. He had previously given money
and favours, and I had at that time praised him excessively [dar madh-i ū ān dam mubālagha
_
kardam]. A disciple [murīd] said, ‘These praises are fitting for prophets and qutbs, for they
_
are pure souls [rūh-i mahd ] and the light of God. How can it be right to be so excessive
_ __
about a corporeal being?’ I replied, ‘As my gaze perceives that light which God placed in
that amir, for “He created man in darkness then sprinkled his light upon him” (khalaqa al-
khalq fi zulma. . .) and the truth of man is that light (haqīqat-i adamī khwud ān nūr ast),
_ _
and the saints always perceive that light, all their praise of created beings is in reality praise
of the creator. Every veneration which they offer, when the object is God, is not an
excess . . . Another interpretation is that that amir may be one of the qutbs and the perfect
_
[az qutbān wa kāmilān].’130
_
Sultan Walad elaborates this argument in verse:
Know that in every community is a chosen man who is the intimate and trusted of
God [khās s u amīn]
__
He appears in different clothes, although all are one before God
Mostly he sows obedience [to God] in the world in the form of piety and law.

126
Lewis, Rumi, Past and Present, 239; Sultan Walad, Rababnama, 472; cf. ibid., introduction, 2.
127
Sultan Walad, Intihanama, 206–8. See further on this point Mojaddedi, Beyond Dogma, 63–74.
128
Sultan Walad, Rababnama, 86, 380; Lewis, Rumi, Past and Present, 239.
129
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 8:27; Feats, 601, Amir ‘Arif foretells the death of Öljeitü; Manaqib, II, 8:70,
Feats, 647: Amir ‘Arif Çelebi foretells ruins of Eshrefid dynasty of Beyşehir; cf. Elvan Çelebi,
Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye, ll. 502–53: Baba İlyas foretells the end of the Seljuqs.
130
Sultan Walad, Rababnama, 35–6.
98 Religion, Politics and Society

In contrast, one may have his external appearance dark in wrongdoing, but his inner
self is light itself
Just like a sultan who travels the land in lowly clothes to remain hidden,
He is hidden from bad and good, elite and common people just like the moon in
the clouds.
God makes his creation hidden out of jealousy [zi ghayrat] in lowly clothes and
great men.
‘My saints are in my domes [awliyā’ ī f ī qibābī] said God,131 Understand, oh man
of the [Sufi] path, what the dome is.
He places a disagreeable characteristic [khuslat-i makrūh] in a king, so that king
_
escapes from the ordinary people
No one except the saint [walī] recognises him, because he is God’s inviolable secret.
When [the saints] see, they do not look on his external appearance, but their eyes
falls on his pure secret.
The ignorant people, if they deny that, will all go to hell.
Because of their blindness they do not see what is visible, out of ignorance they
remain behind that leader.
In the first explanation was a general secret, that the saint sees God in everything all
the time. . .
In the second explanation is a more special [khās star] secret which I have explained
__
so you know
God puts a hidden good in an evil form so that it is hidden from the people of the
world.132

Thus Sultan Walad’s conception of sainthood provides for a special relationship

between walī and ruler. It is the walī’s unique knowledge that allows him to
realise that the ruler may himself be one of the qutbs, a term adopted from Ibn
_
‘Arabi that we shall explore further. Sultan Walad’s theory of sainthood offered a
solution to the crisis of legitimacy of the Mongol period. If the ruler himself could
be the leader of the spiritual hierarchy, albeit hidden from plain sight, except to
the awliyā’, then further justification for rule was hardly required; and if his harsh
behaviour made his identification as a spiritual leader unlikely, this too was part of
the divine design. Moreover, the awliyā’ are given a privileged status as the only
ones privy to divine plan and the ruler’s place in it.
The merging of the interests and identities of awliyā’ and rulers had started to
permeate Anatolian Sufi writing and political practice even before Sultan Walad.
As noted, the earliest antecedents seem to be the works of Ibn ‘Arabi, who

131
See Chad Lingwood, Politics, Poetry and Sufism in Medieval Iran: New Perspectives on Jami’s Salman
va Absal (Leiden, 2013), 108 for this, and Annemarie Schimmel, Mystical Dimensions of Islam
(Chapel Hill, 1975), 202–3.
132
Sultan Walad, Rababnama, 37–8.
 Sufism and Political Power 99

developed a theory of man as the vicegerent (khilāfa) of God; the man who is a
vicegerent is the perfect man (al-insān al-kāmil), endowed with divine knowledge
modelled on the Prophet Muhammad himself. The perfect man or vicegerent was
also identical with the qutb, the leader of the saintly hierarchy. Although in own
_
Ibn ‘Arabi’s conception the perfect man or vicegerent seems to have been
identified with the Prophet Muhammad or qutb, in works of his school a broader
_
definition is found. The status of vicegerency can theoretically be attained by
through justice, restraint, courage and wisdom, and as in Sultan Walad’s argu-
ment, this vicegerent might be unknown even to those around him.133 This idea
of vicegerency was not specifically political in its original formulation. However,
Najm al-Din Razi’s Mirsad al-‘Ibad, which was dedicated to ‘Ala’ al-Din Kayqu-
bad in 620/1223, and also influenced writers at Ghazan’s court as well as
circulating among the begs of fourteenth-century Anatolia, draws on the idea of
khilāfa to express a theory of sacral kingship:
Kingship (saltanat) is the vicegerency (khilāfat) and deputyhood of God Almighty on
_
earth . . . God Almighty showed how kingship over men may be joined to the station and
degree of prophethood (nubuwwat), so that the king both fulfils his duties of rule and
conquest, of diffusing justice and caring for his subjects, and also travels with care the path
of religion and the observance of the law, observing all the custom of sainthood (marāsim-i
wilāyat) and the conditions of prophethood (sharāyit-i nubuwwat).134
_
Najm al-Din Razi thus gives expression to the idea of the unity of prophethood
and kingship.
Similar ideas were propagated by the Ilkhanid vizier Rashid al-Din, writing at
the beginning of the fourteenth century, who in his Kitab al-Sultaniyya argued
that the Ilkhan Öljeitü was endowed with sainthood (wilāyat).135 It is unclear
whether Rashid al-Din was aware of Sultan Walad’s work, which certainly goes a
step further than Rashid al-Din by making the ruler not merely a saint but the

133
For discussions of this idea of vicegerency in Ibn ‘Arabi and his school see William C. Chittick,
The Sufi Path of Knowledge : Ibn Al-ʿArabi’s Metaphysics of Imagination (Albany, NY, 1989), 4–30;
Markiewicz, ‘Crisis of Rule’, 347–9; Masataka Takeshita, ‘The Theory of the Perfect Man in Ibn
‘Arabi’s Fusus al-Hikam’, Orient 29 (1983): 87–102.
134
Adapted from Najm al-Din Razi, The Path of God’s Bondsman from Origin to Return, trans. Hamid
Algar (North Haledon, 1980), 395, 399; for the original see Najm al-Din Razi, Mirsad al-’Ibad,
ed. Muhammad Amin Riyahi (Tehran, 1389), 411, 416–17; also on Razi’s theories of sacral
kingship and their influence on the Ilkhanid authors Qashani and Rashid al-Din see Kamola,
‘Rashid al-Din’, 178–84; Brack, ‘Mediating Sacral Kingship’, 165–9; Brack, ‘Theologies of
Auspicious Kingship’, 1155–6; Yılmaz, Caliphate Redefined, 109–10; for the text’s later circulation
in Anatolia see Chapter 4, n. 108.
135
Brack, ‘Mediating Sacral Kingship’, 205–17; see also Brack, ‘Theologies of Auspicious Kingship’,
esp. 1153. The Rababnama was composed in 700/1301; the Kitab al-Sultaniyya was composed in
706/1307, shortly after the Ilkhan’s accession.
100 Religion, Politics and Society

head of the whole hierarchy of saints. Most probably both authors reflect theories
that were circulating more widely in the Ilkhanid territories as intellectuals and
political elites sought to make sense of, and profit from, the new order established
by Ghazan’s conversion. Some Muslim sources indicate that Chinggis Khan
himself was regarded as a prophet by the Mongols,136 and the Persian chronicler
Shabankara’i (d. 759/1358) also comes close to accepting such claims, writing that
‘God bestowed on this man’s [Chinggis’s] soul a quality of divine favour and
inexhaustible beneficence. If he had acquired the honour of Islam [i.e. converted],
it could be said that he had a share of Prophecy.’137 Shabankara’i also describes
Chinggis as enjoying a special friendship with God (bā had rat-i īzad sidqī
_ _
dāsht).138 Similarly, Ghazan seems to have laid claim to unmediated divine
knowledge, much as the Prophet Muhammad had.139 It is perhaps in this context
that we should understand Shabankara’i’s statement that Eretna himself was
popularly known as the ‘beardless prophet’ (köse payghambar) owing to his reign
of justice.140 According to Aflaki, Oposhgha Noyan, one of Ghazan’s governors of
Anatolia, and a disciple of Sultan Walad, was known by the same title;141 the
baldness doubtless referring to the Mongols’ lack of hair. If the pagan Chinggis
could not quite be considered a prophet, his descendants’ converted deputies in
Anatolia could.
The political elite took such ideas seriously. Jalal al-Din Karatay, the amir who
was effective ruler of Anatolia in around 1249–54, was renowned for his piety,
and is proclaimed on his waqfiyya to be ‘one who establishes the Sufi path, the
source of truth, who imitates the awliyā’ (wād ih al-tarīqa, manba‘ al-haqīqa,
_ _ _ _
muqtadī al-awliyā’).142 Moreover, Karatay’s signature on official documents pro-
claimed him to be no less than God’s walī on earth (walī allāh fī’l-ard ).143
_

136
Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World, 376–7; Michal Biran, Chinggis Khan (Oxford, 2007),
119–21; also the discussion in Brack, ‘Mediating Sacral Kingship’, 100ff; Brack, ‘Theologies of
Auspicious Kingship’, 1154–5, 1164–5.
137
Muhammad b. ‘Ali Shabankara’i, Majma‘ al-Ansab, ed. Mir Hashim Muhaddith (Tehran,
1376), 223.
138
Ibid., 227. See also the discussion in Judith Pfeiffer, ‘Confessional Ambiguity vs. Confessional
Polarization: Politics and the Negotiation of Religious Boundaries in the Ilkhanate’, in Judith
Pfeiffer (ed.), Politics, Patronage and the Production of Knowledge in 13th–15th Century Tabriz
(Leiden, 2014), 156–8; Brack, ‘Theologies of Auspicious Kingship’, 1165.
139
Hope, Politics, Power and Tradition, 174–5, 179; Kamola, ‘Rashid al-Din’, 185–6.
140
Shabankara’i, Majma’ al-Ansab, 314; Göde, Eratnalılar, 82.
141
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 7:29, p. 818; Feats, 571.
142
Osman Turan, ‘Selçuklu Devri Vakfiyeleri III: Celâleddin Karatay, Vakıfları ve Vakfiyeleri’,
Belleten 12 (1948), 17–171, reprinted in Osman Turan, Selçuklu Tarihi Araştırmaları (Ankara,
2014), 495, 497.
143
Ibn Bibi, al-Awamir al-‘Ala‘iyya (Ankara), 569; (Tehran), 496; Tarikh-i Al-i Saljuq dar Anatuli, ed.
Nadira Jalali (Tehran, 1999), 96; Aqsara’i, Musamarat, 38.
 Sufism and Political Power 101

Evidence that Karatay’s claim met with some acceptance by Sufis is provided by
Elvan Çelebi, who also calls him veli (i.e. walī); Elvan credits him with saving the
defeated supporters of Baba İlyas from Sultan Ghiyath al-Din’s vengeance, which
may account for his positive view.144 Elite interest in Sultan Walad’s works in
which he propagated these theories is suggested by the extant manuscripts. Sharaf
al-Din Sati, who was both a Mevlevi and an amir from Erzincan, probably of
Mongol origins, commissioned a luxury edition of the Rababnama and the
Intihanama, elaborately covered in gold and completed in 767/1365 (MS Vienna
Cod. Mixt. 1594) (Plates 5a–d).145 The lavish illumination of this expensive
manuscript indicates the book’s importance to its patron; it is itself a statement of
Sati’s commitment to the ideas expressed by the author. Sati was also the patron of
illuminated manuscripts of Rumi’s Diwan and his Mathnawi, and was himself the
author of a history of Chinggis Khan, a highly abridged version of Rashid al-Din’s
chronicle, which was intended to act as a sort of mirror for princes for its dedicatee
Islamshah Khatun, who, it has been suggested, was probably a female member of
the Eretnid dynasty of Chinggisid descent.146 Sati’s work and dedicatee, con-
sidered alongside the Mevlevi manuscripts dedicated to him, suggest the conver-
gence between the interests in Sufism, especially Mevlevism, and Mongol rule.
Another work, composed at around the same time, is even more explicit in this
connection. Abu Bakr’s Qalandarnama, the imitation of earlier Mevlevi mathna-
wīs composed in fourteenth-century Crimea by a personal acquaintance of Sultan
Walad,147 contains extensive praise of the Golden Horde rulers Özbek Khan and
Jani Bek, whose justice and piety is mentioned. Less formulaic are the sections
lauding the Golden Horde amirs of the Crimea where the work was composed,
Tülük-Timur and Qutlugh-Timur. Tülük-Timur is praised for his knowledge of
the sharia and his own devotion to the Sufi path:
That amir knew the sharia, he was an unequalled traveller (sālik) on the mystical
path (tarīqat)
_
In higher truths (haqīqat) he knew God and was a spiritual guide (murshid). . .148
_

144
Elvan Çelebi, Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye, l. 636.
145
For discussions of his patronage of Mevlevi manuscripts Zeren Tanındı, ‘Seçkin bir Mevlevi’nin
Tezhipli Kitapları’, in Irvin Cemil Schick (ed.), M. Uğur Derman 65 Yaş Armağanı (Istanbul,
2001), 513–36; Cailah Jackson, ‘Patrons and Artists at the Crossroads: The Islamic Arts of the
Book in the Lands of Rum, 1270s–1370s’, DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 2017, I, Chapter 4,
which also contains a fuller discussion of Sati’s background and descendants. My assumption that
he may have been a Mongol is based purely on his name Sati, which is Mongol rather than
Turkish; this may, however, be misleading.
146
See Melville, ‘Genealogy and Exemplary Rulership’, 136–9.
147
For his relationship with Sultan Walad see Chapter 3, p. 125.
148
Abu Bakr Rumi, Qalandarnama, fol. 362b.
102 Religion, Politics and Society

Tülük-Timur was martyred in circumstances that are unclear, and the second
amir, Qutlugh-Timur, was most probably his son and successor. He too is
described as a knower of the sharia, a traveller on the tarīqat and a devotee of
_
the haqīqat – the traditional tripartite Sufi division of knowledge.149 The
_
Qalandarnama thus confirms the appeal of Mevlevi ideas, as interpreted by Sultan
Walad, to a Mongol political elite.
Alongside manuscripts, Anatolian rulers also patronised buildings for Sufis, in
particular the zāwiya or dervish lodge, which seems to have been the main form of
monumental architecture in Mongol Anatolia. Research on the Central Anatolian
cities of Sivas, Tokat, and Amasya between c. 1250 and 1350 has drawn attention
to the transformation of urban space through these constructions, which seem to
have largely replaced madrasas as the primary form of religious building in this
period. It has been proposed by Wolper that dervish lodges ‘provide[d] an
alternative space for many of the same services as provided by the madrasas . . .
the increase in the number of dervish lodges relevant to madrasas reflects in part
the incorporation of diverse religious elements into urban life and in part the
parallel increase in the isolation of people and practices associated with the
madrasas’.150 The motives of the patrons are argued by Wolper to have been
practical: zāwiyas, which were relatively cheap to build, offered a means by which
patrons could protect their own property by endowing it as waqf for the zāwiya
they founded.151 Similarly, Judith Pfeiffer has argued that the Mongol com-
mander (and Mevlevi devotee) Nur al-Din b. Jaja, who founded a zāwiya and
other religious building in Kırşehir in the 1270s, was motivated by the desire to
establish waqfs that would keep his property in his family, circumventing Islamic
inheritance law.152 Doubtless such practical motives should not be dismissed, but
the appeal of Sufism as a means of justifying and asserting political authority
should also be taken into account when assessing the motives of patrons, which, in
the absence of unambiguous evidence, will always be subject to speculation. It
might be equally possible to associate the rise of the zāwiya with the patronage of
elites to whom links with Sufi organisations were both spiritually and politically
rewarding. Certainly, the patronage of lavish books such as those of Sati Beg
attests that practical considerations such as waqf were not the sole motivation.
Moreover, on occasion we know that zāwiyas were the places of copying of
treatises that promoted the conjunction between Sufi and political interests.

149
Deweese, ‘Khāns and Amīrs’, 63–5.
150
Wolper, Cities and Saints, 69.
151
Ibid., 66–9; Blessing, Rebuilding Anatolia, 183, but see also ibid., 31–2 for comments on Wolper.
152
Pfeiffer, ‘Protecting Private Property vs Negotiating Political Authority’, esp. 156.
 Sufism and Political Power 103

Working in a zāwiya, perhaps in Ankara,153 the copyist ‘Ali b. Dustkhuda

b. Khwaja b. al-Hajj Qumari al-Anqari, whose grandfather was from Ahlat and
who seems to have been a member of the Rifa‘i tarīqa, compiled in 726–7/1327 a
_
majmū‘a of treatises dealing largely with Sufism (Süleymaniye, MS Fatih 5426), in
which he included several works by the Neoplatonic Illuminationist philosopher
Shihab al-Din Yahya b. Habash al-Suhrawardi (d. 587/1191) (Plate 6). One of
these was Suhrawardi’s Partawnama, a rare work existing in only one other
manuscript, which portrays the ideal ruler as endowed with universal cosmic
and mystical knowledge.154 The other copy of this work is in majmū‘a put
together by Yar Ali Divriki (d. 814/1415), an author in the tradition of al-
Qunawi, and close friend of the successor to the Eretnid kingdom, the qadi-
sultan Burhan al-Din Ahmad.155 The copying of these texts in these different
environments, the former by an otherwise unknown Sufi scholar working in a
zāwiya, the latter by a prominent member of the political and religious elite,
suggests the appeal of the idea of the conjunction between Sufism and worldly
rule in both zāwiya and courtly circles.

THE SPREAD OF MEVLEVISM

The Mevlevis exercised a broad appeal beyond the ruling circles. While offering
the supreme status of qutb to rulers, Sultan Walad also held that association with
_
awliyā’ was enough to make anyone a walī, while a moment in the company of a
walī was better than a hundred years’ worth of prayer and fasting.156 The spread
of the Mevlevis, and doubtless the ideas they propagated, was also facilitated by a
deliberate policy of proselytisation, for which Sultan Walad (referring to himself
in the third person) claims responsibility:
When he [Sultan Walad] sat on the throne of the father, he gave each [follower]
gold treasure [of Sufi knowledge], the lowest in intelligence became wise and
knowledgeable.

153
This is attested by ‘Ali b. Dustkhuda’s copy of Najm al-Din Razi’s Mirsad al-‘Ibad, Süleymaniye,
MS Serez 1497, copied in 722/1322.
154
Süleymaniye, MS Fatih 5426, fols 53a–80a. For a discussion of the importance of Illuminationist
philosophy in Ilkhanid political culture see Kamola, ‘Rashid al-Din’,176–86; see also Yılmaz,
Caliphate Redefined, 109–12, and with regard to the Seljuqs of Anatolia, Suzan Yalman, ‘‘Ala’ al-
Din Kayqubad Illuminated: A Rum Seljuq Sultan as Cosmic Ruler’, Muqarnas 29 (2012):
151–86.
155
Bursa, İnebey Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, MS Hüseyin Çelebi 1138, fols 26b–48a, discussed further
in Peacock, ‘Metaphysics and Rulership’, 128–30.
156
Sultan Walad, Rababnama, 130, 132–3.
104 Religion, Politics and Society

Countless men and women became murīds, each one becoming unique in skill
(hunar)
He made khalīfas in the way of his father, he appointed a leader in each place,
because people of each city far and wide were thirsty for this river [of knowledge]
...
It was necessary that a khalīfa of ours went from here to every place
So that the thirsty for meeting did not remain parched and lacking the water of such
a sea
Rum was filled with khalīfas so that no one should be deprived of us
Not just Rum, but the whole world was filled; a drop from this ocean became a
pearl.
The world caught the light of this sun, everyone who breathes could see it.157

This would date the formation of a coherent Mevlevi organisation to 1282, the date
when Sultan Walad succeeded to the leadership; the order was based around Sultan
Walad himself in Konya, with his deputies spreading the faith throughout Rum and
beyond. As Sultan Walad indicates, the key to Mevlevi proselytisation was the
appointments of khalīfas, deputies. The head of the order, who bore the title Çelebi,
and in later times was known as the pust-nīshīn, remained based in Konya.
The establishment of the Mevlevi hierarchy was beset by disputes. Rumi had
himself appointed Salah al-Din Zarkub, the illiterate artisan, to be his successor,
and the latter was succeeded by Husam al-Din Çelebi, neither of them blood
relatives of Rumi. The early sources suggests some sort of dispute or confusion as
to the succession at this point. While Aflaki has Sultan Walad as Husam al-Din’s
successor, according to Sultan Walad’s own testimony, a certain Karim al-Din
preceded Husam al-Din.158 In the Ibtidanama, Husam al-Din appears after his
death to Sultan Walad in a dream, warning him of the numerous enemies with
which he will have to contend, as Husam al-Din himself has (parda-yi mā zi
dushmanī bidurand). He compares these sufferings to those of Joseph, of Cain and
Abel, to the prophets rejected by the Qur’anic people of ‘Ad and Thamud, to the
sufferings of Jesus and Muhammad’s rejection by the Meccan polytheist leader
Abu Jahl.159 It seems likely that this actually refers to disputes within the Mevlevi
community. Sultan Walad’s account of his accession after Husam al-Din’s death
merely indicates he acceded to popular demand that the community needed a
leader. However, it is easy to imagine that in fact this genealogical connection to

157
Sultan Walad, Ibtidanama, 158.
158
Alberto Fabio Ambrosio, ‘“The Son Is the Secret of the Father”: Rumi, Sultan Veled and the
Strategy of Family Feelings’, in Mayeur-Jaouen and Papas (eds), Family Portraits with Saints,
316–17; Lewis, Rumi, Past and Present, 225–34.
159
Sultan Walad, Ibtidanama, 131–2.
 Sufism and Political Power 105

Rumi was one of the reasons, if not the main one, for his promotion, for it seems
Mawlana during his lifetime had conspicuously avoided giving Sultan Walad this
position.160
Sultan Walad’s Ibtidanama ends with an extraordinary dream description
where one of the Mevlevi disciples, Siraj al-Din ‘the mathnawī-reciter’, sees
Husam al-Din Çelebi dancing on Rumi’s grave chanting verses from the Ibtida-
nama (mathnawī-yi Walad), which he declares to be ‘the way of the faith’ (rāh-i
dīn). Sultan Walad proclaims that the fact of such a pure disciple having had this
dream as proof of its qualities:
O Walad, your mathnawī became a leader, your name is exalted over the
firmament.161

Sultan Walad thus uses the device of the mathnawī-reciter’s dream to assert his
own superiority over his father, and uses his predecessor Husam al-Din, in whose
favour he had been passed over for leadership of the order, as a device to do this.
This represented not merely a way of rewriting the doubtless embarrassing history
of Rumi’s attitude to his son, but also a clear assertion of Sultan Walad’s own
status as divinely inspired.
Henceforth, the leadership of the Mevlevi community was largely restricted to
Sultan Walad’s – and hence Rumi’s – descendants. Aflaki stresses the intimate
relationship between Mawlana and his bloodline, and portrays Sultan Walad’s life
and acts as mirroring those of his father.162 He describes how Sultan Walad was
even suckled by Rumi, an anecdote intended to denote the physical transmission
of spiritual power from father to his son, and to show that Sultan Walad was
destined to be his father’s successor.163 Aflaki is at particular pains to describe how
Mawlana recognised that his infant grandson Ulu ‘Arif Çelebi possessed his ‘light’
(nūr), and how Mawlana taught him to say Allah Allah in the cradle, which
Mawlana declared meant ‘From today onwards our ‘Arif will be a true shaykh and
is worthy to be head and leader, and he will proceed in perfection from the cradle
to the grave.’164
Yet the Mevlevi community was not yet at ease. Aflaki’s account of the careers
of Ulu ‘Arif Çelebi and ‘Abid Çelebi is replete with tales of them defeating false
claimants to Rumi’s legacy:

160
Lewis, Rumi, Past and Present, 227.
161
Sultan Walad, Ibtidanama, 376–7.
162
Ambrosio, ‘“The Son Is the Secret of the Father”’, 312–15.
163
Ibid., 311–12 for an analysis.
164
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 8:6, 830; Feats, 580. Cited from the translation by O’Kane.
106 Religion, Politics and Society

The noble [disciples] relate that one day a great dispute arose between Ulu ‘Arif Çelebi and
Çelebi ‘Ala’ al-Din Qirshahri. ‘Ala’ al-Din the kinsman said, ‘I too am of the line of
Mawlana, why do you see me as a stranger and do not pay attention to me, nor do you
recognise my authority? The sin of the father is no reason to ignore the due of the son.’ Ulu
‘Arif Ҫelebi replied, ‘You have absolutely no connection to Mawlana, and you are like a
dead member of this family, and your branch has been broken from that tree of fortune and
abandoned. The Qur’anic verse, “he is not of your people, for his works are not right-
eous”. . . ‘Ala’ al-Din said, ‘Who are you to lecture me and to seek precedence over me?’165

Notwithstanding numerous disputes within the Mevlevi community, the order’s

headship, and with it saintliness itself, had come to be regarded as hereditary by
Aflaki’s time.166 Although little else is known of the Mevlevi leaders in the
decades after ‘Abid Çelebi, it seems they were infants. Nonetheless the insti-
tutional structures of khalīfas Sultan Walad claims to have created must have been
strong enough to sustain the order even in this period, for it was precisely then
that Mevlevism started to expand far beyond Anatolia. By the early decades of the
fourteenth century migrant Rumis were bringing Mevlevism to distant parts of
the Islamic world. One of these was Abu Bakr Rumi, whose activities in Golden
Horde-controlled Crimea have already been mentioned. From his own account,
he seems to have been joined by others, for he recounts how at the court of the
martyred amir Tülük-Timur
Anatolians (rūmiyān) were elevated by his good fortune, each one was like an amir
here and there.
The Rumi, the Syrian, the man of the steppe: renown opened up for them all
because of him.167

Ahmad-i Rumi, of whom we know little more than his name and that he was
active in roughly the same period, also composed long mathnawīs modelled on
Rumi’s. His travels took him as far as India where he is said to have been offered
the patronage of the king of Awadh.168 Like Abu Bakr Rumi, despite his role in
spreading Mevlevi teachings, he remained largely unknown in Anatolia, where
very few copies of his major work the Daqa’iq al-Haqa’iq (also known as Haqa’iq

165
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 8:59, 912–13; Feats, 638.
166
On the hereditary nature of sanctity, see in general Catherine Mayeur-Jaouen and Alexandre Papas
(eds), Family Portraits with Saints: Hagiography, Sanctity and Family in the Muslim World
(Berlin, 2015).
167
Abu Bakr Rumi, Qalandarnama, fol. 362b, trans from DeWeese, ‘Khāns and Amīrs’, 63.
168
Alphons C. M. Hamer, ‘An Unknown Mavlawi-Poet: Ahmad-i Rumi’, Studia Iranica 3 (1974):
229–49.
 Sufism and Political Power 107

al-Daqa’iq) are attested.169 The works of Mawlana, however, circulated widely in

India, presumably thanks to the activities of men such as Ahmad-i Rumi.170
Indeed, Mevlevism became in many ways the major export of fourteenth-century
Anatolia.

RESISTANCE AND REVOLT: THE DESCENDANTS OF BABA İLYAS

The story of Baba İlyas’s descendants provides an instructive example of a

different trajectory that a politically active Sufi family could take, and an alterna-
tive means by which Sufism was spread. We are fortunate to have the evidence of
Elvan Çelebi’s Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye, a Turkish mathnawī of some 2,000 lines
treating the deeds of the poet’s ancestors. The Menakıb was composed in 760/
1358–9, making it roughly contemporary with Aflaki’s work, and portrays the
struggle of Baba İlyas and his descendants against the Seljuq rulers. We will
discuss elsewhere (Chapter 6) Elvan’s account of Baba İlyas and the latter’s role
in the rebellion against the Seljuq Sultan Ghiyath al-Din Kaykhusraw II of 638/
1240, which is at least partially attested in other sources. Here we will concentrate
on how the descendants of Baba İlyas succeeded in positioning themselves as
politically and religiously relevant without giving rise to an organised tarīqa on the
_
model of the Mevlevis, relying on Elvan Çelebi’s testimony in the Menakıbu’l-
Kudsiyye.
Elvan’s story is often allusive and hard to follow, couched as it is in often
obscure verse and aimed at an audience, probably devotees of his family, who
enjoyed a background understanding and assumptions to which we have little
access. Elvan’s main theme is the continuing persecution of the followers of his
great-grandfather Baba İlyas by Sultan Ghiyath al-Din after the rebellion had been
crushed, and the role of the saint’s halifes (i.e. khalīfas) or appointed deputies in
ensuring the survival of the saint’s legacy. Baba İlyas had himself been the murīd
of a certain Dede Garkın, and each had 400 disciples (hadim, halife),171 but in
each generation four seem to have to have been singled out for a special status.
Dede Garkin had chosen four halifes, ‘Ayn Dövle, Ulu Hacı, Mihman and Baba
İlyas. İlyas’s halifes were his sons ‘Ömer Paşa, Mahmud Paşa, Yahya Paşa and

169
One rare such copy is Istanbul University Library, Farsça Yazmalar 942 (probably 17th–18th
century). The text has been published: Shaykh Ahmad-i Rumi, Daqayiq al-Haqayiq, ed. Muham-
mad Rida Jalali Na’ini and Muhammad Shirwani (Tehran, 1354).
170
For preliminary surveys see Lewis, Rumi, Past and Present, 468–70; Anna Suvorova, ‘The Indian-
Turkish Connections in the Field of Sufism’, in Nuri Şimşekler (ed.), III. Uluslararası Mevlana
Kongresi (Konya, 2004), 125–8.
171
Elvan Çelebi, Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye, ll. 234, 1643.
108 Religion, Politics and Society

Muhlis, all of whom Elvan describes as the ‘axis of sainthood and centre of
chivalry’ (medar-i velayat ve merkez-i fütüvvet).172 Thus just as İlyas rose from
being the halife to being a shaykh, so too did Muhlis, whom Elvan seems to
indicate headed the group after İlyas’s demise. Although he gives many pious
epithets and praises to his uncles, it is far from clear what role they actually played.
Of the first generation of halifes, we are told only of the fate of Ayn Dövle, who
was imprisoned in Tokat and finally publicly flayed alive by Ghiyath al-Din’s
men.173
Much more detail is given about Muhlis, Elvan’s grandfather. Elvan claims
that after the zāwiya at Çat near Amasya that had been Baba İlyas’s base had
burned down in fighting with the forces of the Seljuq Sultan Ghiyath al-Din
Kaykhusraw, his grandfather, still a child, was brought up in the household of
none other than the Qadi Köre, who had been Baba İlyas’s great opponent. After
seven years he moved to Egypt, where he was afforded the protection of the
Mamluk Sultan al-Malik al-Zahir (Baybars) and lived in the royal palace.
Although recognised for his great learning, his true identity was secret. Eventually
he was ordered by Khidr to return to Anatolia, saying, ‘Do not stay, go to Rum
and conquer it. Call [to the true faith] that malign group.’174
When Muhlis reached Rum, he found it full of oppression, for ‘that despicable
sultan Ghiyath al-Din was khan of all of Rum; in the dār al-Islām his name was
sultan, but he lived the religious life of a Satan’.175 When Muhlis reached Konya,
he found the city in a state of civil strife (fitna), its citizens fighting with one
another. When Muhlis revealed himself, the fitna ceased and ‘Man and woman,
the great and the lowly, master and servant all accepted his kingship and shaykh-
dom’.176 The people compared him to a ‘second Joseph’ and accepted him as
their ruler. When Sultan Ghiyath al-Din learned of these events, he ordered
Muhlis to be thrown in prison in Gevele castle outside Konya, deprived of food
and water. However, Khidr and İlyas assisted Muhlis, and in the end Ghiyath al-
Din was forced to negotiate with the holy man, saying:

172
Ibid., ll. 298–312.
173
Ibid., ll. 1643–730.
174
Ibid., l. 830. Some scholarship has identified Muhlis with an individual sent by Sülemish to seek
Mamluk aid; however, given Baybars died in 675/1277, twenty-two years before the revolt of
Sülemish, this seems to be a chronological impossibility, although it is possible that such stories
reflect a vague memory of some association between the Mongols and Muhlis. See, with references,
Tezcan, ‘The Memory of the Mongols’, 36, n. 30.
175
Elvan Çelebi, Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye, ll. 849–50.
176
Ibid., l. 872.
 Sufism and Political Power 109

What is this tasbīh, dhikr and prostration? Give them up, be free from them. I will give you
_
a province, a town and wealth, and whatever else is missing I will see to it . . .
A chiefdomship [beylik] would be suitable for you, you look like a chief.177

Muhlis then installs himself in the royal palace in Konya:

The shaykh [Muhlis] for six whole months made his residence in the sultan’s palace. . . It
was 672 hijri, the same year that Jalal al-Din went on his way [died].178

Elvan’s narrative is not supported by any other sources, with the exception of
Ottoman historian Oruç, writing in 908/1502, who offers a short summary of
these events explicitly based on Elvan’s Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye. Oruç goes on to add
one detail not mentioned elsewhere. He claims that a certain Nureddin Sufi, who
was active in İç-il (south-central Anatolia), was halife of both Baba İlyas and
Muhlis. Nureddin had a five-year-old son called Karaman, and Oruç tells us that
‘Muhlis Paşa raised that boy called Karaman to the throne with his own hand and
made him king in the year 679 of the hijra. And Muhlis Paşa said, “May his
descendants hold this land and be kings”.’179 Nureddin is attested in other sources
as the ancestor of the Karamanid dynasty, but nowhere else is he associated with
Baba İlyas and Muhlis.180
The modern Turkish scholar Ocak, following Oruç, interprets this peculiar
story literally, suggesting that Elvan Çelebi is claiming his grandfather Muhlis had
actually seized power from the Seljuqs, just as his great-grandfather İlyas had
challenged them, and traces the origins of the Karamanid dynasty to this revolt. It
is true that these sections of the Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye are suffused with the
vocabulary of kingship, with Muhlis repeatedly referred to as sultan, padişah and
şah. Yet the use of such vocabulary was very widespread in Sufi circles, with Sufi
‘kingship’ of the esoteric realm paralleling secular kingship in this world.181 Aflaki
calls Mawlana khudāwandigar, Mawlana’s son is Sultan Walad and terms such as
mīr, pādshāh and sultān are repeatedly used by Aflaki to describe the leaders of the
_
Mevlevi community.
The account in the Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye of Muhlis’s contest with Sultan
Ghiyath al-Din is evidently meant to parallel İlyas’s struggles. However, it seems

177
Ibid., ll. 962–3, 966. Tasbīh is a form of dhikr, the ritual recitation of God’s name.
178
Ibid., ll. 991, 993. _
179
Oruç Beğ Tarihi, ed. Necdet Öztürk (Istanbul, 2008), 10–11. ‘Muhlis Paşa ol Karaman adlu oglanı
kendü eliyle tahta geçürüp pâdişâh itdi, hicretün sene 679. Ve Muhlis Paşa nefs idüp eyitdi,
“Bunuñ nesli bu vilâyeti duta, pâdişâh ola” didi.’
180
For example, see the dynastic history of the Karamanids preserved by a sixteenth-century Ottoman
author, Şikari, who claims that Nureddin was a Turkmen chief. Şikari, Karamanname, ed. Metin
Sözen and Necdet Sakaoğlu (Karaman, 2005), fol. 103b.
181
Cf. Green, Sufism, 99; Yılmaz, Caliphate Redefined, 123.
110 Religion, Politics and Society

unlikely that Elvan wanted to portray his grandfather as seeking secular power.
Ghiyath al-Din’s blandishments of the offer of a beylik and a province in return
for Muhlis abandoning his Sufi ways are clearly meant to suggest the corruption of
worldly kingship, a temptation which Muhlis rejects. Although the tale of
Muhlis’s six-month occupation of Konya may contain a distant reminiscence
of Jimri’s anti-Mongol rebellion, of much greater significance is the year in which
Elvan states it occurred – 672/1273, which, as Elvan points out, the year of
Rumi’s death. One cannot escape the suspicion that, for all Elvan’s praise of
Mawlana,182 the intention is in fact to establish that Muhlis is his true successor –
not through being a khalīfa, but in the sense of being the leading holy man of
Rum. The passage mentioning Mawlana and his death is immediately followed by
much more lavish praise of Muhlis.183 Elvan’s aim, then, rather than to portray
Muhlis’s seizure of worldly power is to assert his hold on spiritual power.
Nonetheless, Oruç’s story of the Karamanids’ connection to the line of Baba
İlyas represents an intriguing comment on the ways in which these two types of
power were seen as being closely linked.
Eventually, Elvan tells us, Muhlis retreated to the zāwiya of his father’s halife
Osman-i Kırşehri. Osman seems to have been appointed as successor by Muh-
lis,184 and was given the title seyyidü’l-hülefa, or chief deputy. After ten years,
Osman sent ten of his devotees to Arapgir, taking with them Muhlis’s son Aşık
Paşa, to whom Şeyh Osman married his daughter. It was from this marriage that
Elvan was born. It seems that the move to Arapgir is likely to have been for the
safety of the family; after eleven years Aşık Paşa returned to Kırşehir,185 where he
probably spent the rest of life, composing one of the first great works of Sufi
literature in Turkish, the Garibname (discussed in more depth in Chapter 4).
Elvan praises Aşık Paşa’s morals in extravagant terms,186 but there is little concrete
information that can be gathered from the Menakıb at this point.187
Elvan makes ambitious claims for Aşık Paşa’s status. He points to the efficacy
of Aşık’s prayers,188 and also to his God-given ability to explain (tefsir) religious
knowledge, which, Elvan claims, attracted to him ‘‘ulama’, leading men, and

182
Elvan Çelebi, Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye, ll. 994–6.
183
Ibid., ll. 1012–66.
184
Ibid., ll. 1129–31.
185
Ibid., l. 1175.
186
Ibid., ll. 1415–517.
187
For the careers of Aşık Paşa and Elvan, the best source is now Ethem Erkoç, Aşık Pasa ve oğlu Elvan
Çelebi (Çorum, 2005).
188
Elvan Çelebi, Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye, ll.1480–4, e.g. l. 1483: ‘Indeed, his prayers are answered, who
is indeed Aşık and truthful’ (Müstecabü’d-du‘ā olan bayık·/kim ola bellü aşık· u sādık· ). There is a
play on the word aşık· , signifying both a Sufi devotee and the saint’s name. _
 Sufism and Political Power 111

scholars’.189 This confirms the impression given by the register and vocabulary of
the Garibname that Aşık Paşa was aiming above all to appeal to an educated
audience, rather than his work being a popularisation aimed at the uneducated.190
However, Elvan’s praise of his father goes beyond his virtues as a shaykh. The
ninth and tenth chapters of the praise of Aşık are devoted to his heavenly
ascension (mi‘rāj) and his book (kitāb), which emulate those of the Prophet
Muhammad:
This [mi‘rāj] was the very thing that God Almighty granted to Muhammed
That is, praise be to Him who made [his servant Muhammad] travel by night [to
heaven], in truth he granted this to this soul [Aşık Paşa]
He showed him that place by Him, that proximity to God, up to the highest parts
of paradise
The All-Knowing God showed him the skies and gave him knowledge of them one
by one, name by name
Kawthar, Salsabil, Tasnim191 – He gave him knowledge of them, and showed him
their inner nature.
He clarified the outer and inner truths, and in the end revealed Himself.
In this form did he perform the mi‘rāj; to some it is a mi‘rāj, to some a method [of
life, minhāj].192

Aşık Paşa also brings a ‘great book’ (kitab-ı ‘azim), by which the Garibname is
meant, although the term is redolent of the Qur’an, brought by Muhammad.
Elvan praises the Garibname’s division into ten chapters, each with ten sub-
chapters, containing both esoteric and exoteric (zāhir and bātin) truths, stating
_ _
‘It contains the secrets of knowledge and the lights of knowledge.’193 Like Sultan
Walad, Elvan emphasises the claims of the awliyā’ to equality with Prophets: ‘The
awliyā’ are sentient prophets (evliya enbiya-durur huş-dar).’194 The account of
Aşık’s mi‘rāj and ‘great book’ is intended to establish a parallel if not an equiva-
lence between the Anatolian holy man and the Prophet Muhammad.

189
Ibid., l. 1488: ‘ulema vü fuhūl u danişmend/Buldılar anda daniş u pend.
190
Cf. Chapter 4 pp. 160–2. _
191
These are the names of springs and rivers in Paradise.
192
Elvan Çelebi, Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye, ll. 1497–1503:
Şoldur kim Müheymin ü Subhān/Şol ki k· ıldı Muhammed’e ihsān
Ya‘nī subhāne’lleẕī esrā/Ma‘nīde rūzī k·ıldı bu cāna_ _
_
Ol mak· ām-ı denā vü k·urb-ı yak·īn/Cümle gösterdi tā be-illiyīn
Gökleri cüz ü cüz ü nām be-nām/Gösterüp bildürüp-durur ‘Allām
Kevs̱er u Selsebīl ü Tesnīmi/Bildürür ‘ilmi gösterür ‘aynı
Z ̣āhiren bātinen beyān eyler/Ākibet kendüyi ‘ayān eyler
Uşbu sūret_bu sūrete mi ‘rāc/Kime mi‘rācdur kime minhāc.
193 _
Ibid., l. 1511. _
194
Ibid., l. 762
112 Religion, Politics and Society

The praises of Aşık finish with a section on his death in Safar 733/1333,
describing how he was universally lamented:
All his companions, the great and the lowly, elites and commoners, dervishes,
shaykhs and youths,
Armenians, Jews and Christians, lamented crying ‘Where is our Shaykh?
Where is that light of faith, that lamp of fidelity? Where is that candle of the soul,
that world of purity?. . .
Where is he who brings the unbeliever to the path [of faith]? Where is he who leads
the lost to the path?
Where is that mine of knowledge, that mine of the unseen? Where is that soul of
discernment, that rose garden of the unseen?
Townsman and countryman, Turk and Mongol burned and burn mind, soul and
heart.’195

This lamentation went on for three years, says Elvan, until he was persuaded by all
Aşık Paşa’s deputies (hülefa) that he was the only true successor.
The appeal to non-Muslims is not a sign of the ecumenical nature of Sufism,
but rather of the charisma of the holy man that is so strong it can pass over
religious and ethnic barriers. Indeed, conversion narratives play a role in estab-
lishing Aşık’s credentials; Elvan suggests how his eloquence caused unbelievers to
convert:
Who is there like him in Rum, Syria, Iraq and the world? An [unbeliever] who hears his
words will cut the zunnar [belt worn by non-Muslims] and tie to his waist [the belt of]
belief.196

Conversion need not necessarily be from Christianity, for belief in the holy family
of awliyā’ descended from İlyas is repeated conflated with true belief. Elsewhere,
Elvan Çelebi describes how a certain Sufi shaykh came to Rum and was ‘con-
verted’ at the hands of Baba İlyas. It is clear that the Sufi is a learned Muslim,
being described as ‘like an Abu Hanifa of Kufa’, expert in knowledge, asceticism
and fasting. He travels round Rum with his forty disciples, being warmly received
by the locals and visiting holy men. Yet when the Sufi came to the tekke of Baba
İlyas, the latter’s disciples ripped up his khirqa and jubba, the Sufi’s characteristic
cloak, Baba İlyas declares ‘He is an infidel, this is not the custom of Sufis.’ The
Sufi repented and removed his cloak (‘aba). The Persian heading to the section

195
Ibid., ll. 1545–7, 1541–53. ‘Şehrī vü ecnebī vü Türk ü Mog·ul/Yandı yandur[ur] ‘ak·l u cān [u]
gönül.’
196
Ibid., ll 1494–5.
Rūm u Şām u ‘Irāk· u ‘ālemde/aña benzer kim ola ādemde.
Kim sözin işiden kişi zünnār/kesdi bag·landı biline ik· rār.
 Sufism and Political Power 113

affirms the Sufi’s essential non-Muslimness, ‘he ripped off his zunnār [a belt worn
by non-Muslims] and became a Muslim at the hands of the shaykh [Baba
İlyas]’.197 In other words although dressed in the garments of a Sufi, at heart he
is an infidel, for until coming to Baba İlyas he has not yet understood the higher
truth. The parallels with Aflaki’s account of Ghazan’s ‘conversion’ at the hands of
the Mevlevis are obvious.
A similar motif appears towards the end of the Menakıb, where Elvan alludes
again to the aftermath of the great rebellion of 638/1240.
When people talked of the army, fighting, war and bloodshed, it was like a stone
[i.e. very serious]
After this, foolish deniers, plotters, ill-doers full of [false] claims
Had seen so many evident things, that you would suppose them not to be believers
but infidel [for not believing]
Is someone who denies the truth/God a Muslim? Is there belief in someone who
refuses to call God God?198

It is clear from the context that the unbelievers are those who denied the validity
of Baba İlyas’s claims, and those of his descendants. Belief in God is inextricably
linked to belief in his holy men, without which true Islam is not attained. Thus
there can be only the harshest of punishments for unbelievers. Just as in the
Manaqib al-‘Arifin, Abu Sa‘id’s state collapsed when his minister failed to render
due respect to Ulu ‘Arif Çelebi, so in the Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye does the Seljuq state
collapse as a result of sultan Ghiyath al-Din’s treatment of Baba İlyas.
Apart from the Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye, some architectural remains and the
accounts of some later travellers constitute our main external evidence for the
fate of İlyas’s line. Aşık Paşa is commemorated in a magnificent, marble-fronted
mausoleum at Kırşehir that was built some time shortly after his death (Fig. 2.1).
The inscription on Aşık Paşa’s tomb gives his dates of birth (670) and death
(733), his ancestry back to İlyas and describes him as ‘the possessor of divine
knowledge, the unique pole (qutb), the man of God’.199 We know almost
_
nothing of Elvan’s career, but he built a modest zāwiya complex at Mecitözü just

197
Ibid., ll. 270–97.
198
Ibid., ll. 1617–20.
Leşker ü k· atl ü harb u ḫ ūn-rīziş/Ḥalk· diline çü düşdü taşdı bu iş
_
Ba‘d ez-ān munkirān-ı bī-ma’nā/Mudbirān mufsidān-ı pür-da‘vā
Bu k·adar nesne gördiler zāhir/Sanasın ehl-i dīn degül kāfir
Ḥak· a bātıl diyen müsülman_ mı/Ḥaka hak dimeyende īmān mı.
· ·
199
Erkoç, Aşık_ Pasa, 66: sāhib-i ‘ilm-i ladun_ qutb-i yakāna, mard-i haqq/shaykh Pāshā b. Mukhlis
b. shaykh Ilyās dān/āmad _ _ andar kh.’ bi-’ālam _ bāz shud andar dh.l.j/sīzdah
_ māh-i S ̣afar rūz-i sih_
shanba ay fulān. A legend related by the notoriously unreliable nineteenth-century historian
Hüseyin Hüsameddin suggests that both Aşık’s and Elvan’s tomb were erected by the Eretnid
114 Religion, Politics and Society

The mausoleum of Aşık Paşa at Kırşehir.

FIG. 2.1
Photograph by Tevfik Teker, source Wikimedia Commons

outside Çorum, in the village that today bears his name, and where he was himself
buried.200 An inscription put up after his death (which probably occurred in 770/
1368) is dated 780/1380.201 Both the mausoleum of Aşık Paşa and Elvan’s zāwiya
seem, according to the epigraphic evidence, to have been erected without the
support of any patron. Yet while the family of İlyas did not attract the patronage
of elites in the same way that that of Rumi did, it was nonetheless able to dispose
of significant resources. If Elvan’s zāwiya-mausoleum is architecturally less
impressive than Aşık Paşa’s, it is clear that lands accrued to Elvan, who was able
to turn substantial landholdings into waqf on his death, comprising seven villages
and three farms. The revenues were to support the zāwiya, but also Elvan’s
descendants, who had the rights of use (tasarruf) of the endowment.202 Thus
_
even without becoming a formal tarīqa, a saintly family could rise to a position of
_
considerable local power, presumably supported by donations from their
followers.
We know little of Elvan’s descendants, but by the end of the fifteenth century
one of them, Aşık Paşa’s great-grandson Aşık Paşazade, who had probably been
born in Mecitözü in 798/1398, had decided to make peace with worldly power.

vizier ‘Ala’ al-Din ‘Ali Shah, who was also Elvan’s maternal uncle. See M. F. Köprülü, ‘Aşık Pasa’,
İslam Ansiklopedisi, I, 702–3.
200
Benjamin Anderson, ‘The Complex of Elvan Çelebi: Problems in Fourteenth-Century Architec-
ture’, Muqarnas 31 (2014): 73–97, esp. 85.
201
Ibid., 83, suggests the reading of the date is unclear, but it is evident from the photo published by
Anderson that it says 780.
202
Adnan Gürbüz, ‘Elvan Çelebi Zaviyesi’nin Vakıfları’, Vakıf Dergisi 23 (1994): 25–30.
 Sufism and Political Power 115

At the start of his history of the Ottoman dynasty, Aşık Paşazade tries to link the
fortunes of his ancestors with those of the Ottomans:
My lineage and genealogy were born with this family [the Ottomans]; each one of
us who was born witnessed this family.
We pray openly and in secret [for the Ottomans]; we are saved by service to them.
The Ottoman house call my lineage and genealogy Aşıki and grant favours
Of old we are Aşıks who pray; known that [our] our prayer is a cure for sins
First let us pray for this house, then let us mention their virtues.203

With these verses, Aşık Paşazade seeks to offer exactly the same bargain to the
Ottomans as Rumi had his Seljuq patrons: prayer (du‘a), the baraka brought by
his saintliness, in Aşık Paşazade’s case reinforced explicitly by his lineage, in return
for material favours (ihsan). To a degree, he may have achieved this: it has been
suggested that Aşık Paşazade’s very presence in the army of the Ottoman sultan
Murad II ‘was believed to be a support for his cause’ owing to Aşık Paşazade’s
distinguished lineage.204 However, in his history, Aşık Paşazade went further and
tried to show how one of Baba İlyas’ halifes, Shaykh Edebali, who is briefly
mentioned in the Menakıb, had played a major part in the establishment of the
Ottoman state. He claims Edebali gave his daughter in marriage to Osman Ghazi,
the founder of the Ottoman dynasty, while Osman used to consult Edebali on
matters of Islamic law. He also states that Orhan Beg sought the blessing of
Geyikli Baba, another halife of Baba İlyas.205 Thus while Aşık Paşazade may have
conferred a modicum of baraka on the sultan’s armies, at the same time, his
history, which is addressed to a dervish audience, uses this supposed association of
the Ottomans with the halifes of Baba İlyas to magnify the status of his ancestors.
This strategy may not have been wholly successful. There is no evidence of
significant sultanic patronage of the zāwiya at Mecitözü, although it certainly
continued to prosper into the sixteenth century and beyond, when travellers
record the devotion of villagers to Elvan Çelebi, remembered as a special friend
of Khidr, the embodiment of being a walī.206
Despite the intimate involvement of both the lines of Rumi and Baba İlyas
with political life, even in the fragmented political environment of fourteenth-
century Anatolia, these saintly families never actually seized temporal power,
unlike some of the small religious dynasties that emerged in Iran in roughly this

203
Aşık Paşazade, Osmanoğulları’nın Tarihi, ed. Kemal Yavuz and M. A. Yekta Savaş (Istanbul, 2003),
chapter 1.
204
Halil İnalcık, ‘How to Read Ashık Pasha-Zade’s History’, in Halil İnalcık, Essays in Ottoman
History (Istanbul, 1998), 32–3.
205
İnalcık, ‘How to Read Ashık Pasha-Zade’s History’, 40–6.
206
Anderson, ‘The Complex of Elvan Çelebi’, 73–5, 92.
116 Religion, Politics and Society

period, such as the Sarbadars of Khurasan. Yet the successor to the Eretnid state,
the qadi-sultan Burhan al-Din Ahmad of Sivas, did just that. Steeped in the
philosophy of Ibn ‘Arabi and Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi, on which he wrote his own
exegesis, the Iksir al-Sa‘adat, Burhan al-Din claimed to embody Ibn ‘Arabi’s ideal
of sainthood and of the ‘perfect man’. Yet it seems this was not enough. Nearly a
century after the demise of the dynasty, the qadi-sultan also emphasised his own
Seljuq ancestry on his mother’s side.207 Royal lineage was also claimed by Shaykh
Bedreddin, who led a revolt against the Ottomans in 819/1416. It is far from clear
what exactly Shaykh Bedreddin was seeking to achieve, but it seems he too
asserted he was both a walī and a nabī; according to his grandson Halil Hafiz,
he was also a descendant of both Jalal al-Din Rumi and the Seljuq Sultan ‘Ala’ al-
Din Kayqubad.208 For all the claims of the awliyā’, and the undoubted interest
that they provoked from the political elites, the power of sanctity, it seems, could
only effectively be harnessed for political gain when linked to both the prestigious
figure of Mawlana and the lustre of the dynastic name of the Seljuqs.

207
Peacock, ‘Metaphysics and Rulership’, 102, 103.
208
Abdülbâki Gölpınarlı, Simavna Kadısıoğlu Seyh Bedreddin ve Manâkıbı (Istanbul, 2008 [1967]),
237–8; İlker Binbaş, Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran, 123–40; also on Bedreddin see
Dimitris Kastrisis, ‘The Şeyh Bedreddin Uprising in the Context of the Ottoman Civil War of
1402–13’, in Antonis Anastasopoulos (ed.), Halcyon Days in Crete VII. Political Initiatives ‘From
the Bottom Up’ in the Ottoman Empire (Rethymo, 2012), 233–50.
 3

Sufism in Society
Futuwwa in Seljuq and Mongol Anatolia

Sufism spread not only through the activities of holy families and their khalīfas.
Perhaps the most important way in which it permeated Muslim, and non-Muslim
society was as an organised form known as futuwwa. Some of our most detailed
descriptions of the practice of futuwwa are provided by the Moroccan Ibn Battuta,
who encountered it during his travels in Anatolia. Futuwwa evidently being an
organisation unfamiliar to him, Ibn Battuta gives some detail of its adherents,
known as fityān (sing. fatā, lit., ‘youth, young man’), and its leaders, called akhīs, a
word probably derived from the Turkish for ‘generous’, although it bears a close
resemblance to the Arabic for ‘brother’ (akh).1 Ibn Battuta describes them in the
following terms:
The singular of akhiyya is akhī, pronounced like the word for brother (akh) with the first
person [Arabic akhī = my brother]. They are in all of the Turkmen, Rumi land, in every town,
city and village. There is no one in the world like them for great kindness to strangers, nor
anyone quicker to offer food and satisfy [the traveller’s] needs, or to admonish the oppressors,
kill the police and their evil accomplices. The akhī among them is a man whom artisans and
other unmarried, single young men make their leader. This is also [called] ‘futuwwa’. He
builds a lodge [zāwiya] and places there furnishing and lamps and other necessary equipment.
He serves his companions during the day while they seek their living, and in the afternoon
they bring him what they earned and buy with it fruit and food and other such things which
are used in the zāwiya. If a traveller comes that day to a city, they put him up with them,
which is their [form of] hospitality, and they do not leave him till he departs. If no one comes,
they gather together over food, and they eat, sing and dance, and leave to do their trades the

1
See Sir Gerard Clauson, An Etymological Dictionary of Pre-Thirteenth-Century Turkish (Oxford,
1972), 71, 86 s.v. akı:, akı:lık.

117
118 Religion, Politics and Society

next day. In the afternoon they bring their leader what they have earned. They are called the
fityān, and their leader is called the akhī, as we mentioned.2

Fityān communities were also marked out by their emphasis on hierarchy, their
elaborate initiation rituals, their use of distinctive ceremonial clothes (the libās al-
futuwwa, in particular a belt and trousers),3 and, as Ibn Battuta notes, their
propensity to violence. Futuwwa constituted a dominant force in Anatolian urban
life from the late thirteenth century, with akhīs on occasion acting as the effective
rulers of cities: as Ibn Battuta puts it, ‘It is one of the customs of this land that in
places that do not have a sultan, the akhī is the ruler.’4 Turkish scholars have even
described Ankara as an ‘akhī republic’.5 That is a contention based on little
evidence, but contemporary sources do describe the wealth and power of some
akhīs in terms redolent of kingship. The Diwan of Sultan Walad contains
numerous poems dedicated to the akhīs who are depicted as virtually monarchs
in their own right. One, addressed to a certain Akhi Muhammad, starts each of its
twelve lines with the refrain ‘Akhi Muhammad is the king’ [shāh-ast]:6
Akhi Muhammad is the king, famous and happy; there is no great man like him in
the land
Akhi Muhammad is the king alone in this age, he is great among the fityān like the
moon among the stars.
Akhi Muhammad is the king, magnificent thanks to God.

Ibn Battuta’s unfamiliarity with the organisation suggests that futuwwa was
unique to Anatolia. However, there are a few hints that elsewhere in the Ilkhanid
territories, something resembling Anatolian futuwwa may have existed. For
instance, the south Iranian fortress of Bam in the early fourteenth century was
governed by a certain Akhi Shuja‘ Shah,7 and Ibn Battuta mentions a futuwwa-
type organisation in Isfahan, although he does not give it that name.8 In

2
Ibn Battuta, Rihla, 285–6; trans. Gibb, 418–20.
3
On Sufi and futuwwa clothing see Lloyd Ridgeon, Morals and Mysticism in Persian Sufism: A History
of Sufi-Futuwwat in Iran (London, 2010), 77–80.
4
Ibn Battuta, Rihla, 296; trans. Gibb, 434.
5
See discussion by Paul Wittek, ‘Zur Geschichte Angoras im Mittelalter’, Festschrift für Georg Jacob
(Leipzig, 1932), 329–54.
6
Divanı Sultan Veled, ed. F. Nafız Uzluk (Konya, 1941), 150.
7
Mihran Afshari and Mahdi Madayini, Chahardah Risala dar Bab-i Futuwwat wa Asnaf (Tehran,
1381), 20–1.
8
Ibn Battuta, Rihla, 200; trans. Gibb, 295–6: ‘the artisans of every craft appoint as their leader one of
their senior members, whom they call kulo; likewise the other city notables who are not artisans.
They form a group of unmarried young men, and the groups vie with each other in pride and
showing off with as much hospitality to each other as they can, holding great parties with food and so
on’ (my translation).
 Sufism in Society 119

fourteenth century Hilla in southern Iraq a futuwwa group is recorded, the

leadership of which traced their lineage back to ‘Ali b. Abi Talib, whom adherents
of futuwwa claimed as its founder.9 The very fact these groups are such a shadowy
presence in our sources suggests that even if inspired by the same ideals as the
Anatolian fityān and perhaps possessing comparable institutional organisation,
they did not play same sort of role in political and social life. There are also
references to fityān and futuwwa in late thirteenth- and early fourteenth-century
Egypt, but these mainly seem to have been the dregs of the community of
immigrants of Oirat Mongols who had fled the Ilkhanate; here the term had
connotations of gangsterism.10 Various treatises composed in Mamluk Syria and
Egypt suggest the existence of futuwwa,11 usually criticising it, but again its
limited attestation in the copious Mamluk historical sources suggests it was a
comparatively marginal aspect of urban life. In later times, futuwwa organisations
are widely attested in Iran and the Ottoman empire.12 In other words, if in the
medieval period futuwwa did have certain parallels elsewhere and as an ideal was
espoused by a broad range of Sufis, as we shall see, it was only in Anatolia that it
attained such an important social and political role.
Unsurprisingly, then, the akhīs of Anatolia have attracted considerable schol-
arly attention in Turkey ever since Muallim Cevdet prepared his ‘appendix’ to Ibn
Battuta in 1932, outlining the supplementary evidence for futuwwa.13 Scholars
such as Claude Cahen, Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı, Franz Taeschner and more recently
Lloyd Ridgeon have analysed the literary evidence, which was also the subject of a
useful doctoral dissertation by Breebaart,14 while some research addresses the

9
Kazuo Morimoto, ‘Sayyid Ibn ‘Abd al-Hamid: An ‘Iraqi Shi’i Genealogist at the Court of Özbek
Khan’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 59 (2016): 689.
10
Robert Irwin, ‘Futuwwa: Chivalry and Gangsterism in Medieval Cairo’, Muqarnas 21 (2004):
161–70.
11
Ibid.; Deodaat Anne Breebaart, ‘The Development and Structure of the Turkish Futuwah Guilds’,
Unpublished PhD dissertation, Princeton University, 1961, 104–8.
12
For a discussion of the Ottoman case see İklil Selçuk, ‘Suggestions on the Social Meaning, Structure
and Functions of Akhi Communities and their Hospices in Medieval Anatolia’, in Patricia Blessing
and Rachel Goshgarian (eds), Architecture and Landscape in Medieval Anatolia, 1100–1500 (Edin-
burgh, 2017), 95–113; Breebaart, ‘Development and Structure’. In general see also the essays in
Lloyd Ridgeon (ed.), Javanmardi: The Ethics and Practice of Persianate Perfection (London: Gingko/
British Institute of Persian Studies, 2018).
13
Muallim Cevdet, İslam Fütüvveti ve Türk Ahiliği: İbn-i Battuta’ya Zeyl, trans. Cezair Yarar (Istanbul,
2008). The work was originally published in Arabic. In fact interest in futuwwa had an even older
pedigree, stretching back to 1913 when the Committee for Union and Progress commissioned a
study of it. See Yusuf Turan Günaydın, Ahilik Araştırmaları 1913–1932 (Ankara, 2015). However,
Cevdet’s was the first full-length monograph, and the most serious early study.
14
Franz Taeschner, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte der Achis in Anatolien (14.–15. Jht.) auf Grund neuer
Quellen’, Islamica 4/1 (1929): 1–47; Claude Cahen, ‘Sur les traces des premiers akhis’, in 60.
Yıldönümü münasebetiyle Fuad Köprülü Armağanı (Istanbul, 1953), 81–91; Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı,
120 Religion, Politics and Society

architectural remains of akhī lodges.15 Nonetheless, these studies have concen-

trated largely on a small number of normative manuals of futuwwa
(futuwwatnāmas), which describe its rituals and hierarchy. While these give us a
clear picture of how akhīs were supposed to act, little work has addressed their
social and political role in medieval Anatolia more generally. In Turkey, scholar-
ship’s emphasis on the akhīs as an authentically ‘Turkish’ group has stressed that
they played a pivotal role in opposing the Mongols, taking on the role of a defunct
Seljuq state as the authentic representatives of an Anatolian Turkish identity.16
Western scholars agree that the rise of futuwwa organisations is a consequence of
‘political confusion’ or an absence of strong local power structures,17 and futuwwa
is often seen as part of a more general trend in the later medieval Islamic period
towards the emergence of localised centres of power and authority after the
collapse of the Abbasid Caliphate.18 In contrast, I shall argue in this chapter that,
at least in Anatolia, futuwwa did not emerge as a political force so much as in a
power vacuum but in close connection to the ruling elites, firstly Seljuq, later
Mongol.
Futuwwa was not just a socio-political but also an intellectual phenomenon.
The ideals of futuwwa, discussed further later in the chapter, influenced a wide
range of literature produced in Anatolia in Arabic, Persian and Turkish. Manuals
known as futuwwatnāmas exist in all three languages detailing the practice of
futuwwa. The best known of the Anatolian futuwwatnāmas are one written in
Arabic by Ahmad b. Ilyas Naqqash of Harput shortly after 611/1215 entitled the
Tuhfat al-Wasaya; one in Persian verse by Nasiri, probably active in the Tokat-
Sivas area, composed in around 689/1290; and a Turkish futuwwatnāma by

‘İslam ve Türk İllerinde Fütüvvet Teşkilatı’, İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası 11 (1949–50): 6–354;
Breebaart, ‘Development and Structure’.
15
Oya Pancaroğlu, ‘Devotion, Hospitality and Architecture in Medieval Anatolia’, Studia Islamica
108 (2013): 48–81; Wolper, Cities and Saints; Selçuk, ‘Suggestions on the Social Meaning’.
16
Neşet Çağatay, Bir Türk Kurumu olan Ahilik (Ankara, 1974); Mikail Bayram, Sosyal ve Siyasi
Boyutlarıyla Ahi Evren-Mevlânâ Mücadelesi (Konya, 2005).
17
Cahen, La Turquie, 316; Rachel Goshgarian, ‘Social Graces and Urban Spaces: Brotherhood and
Ambiguities of Masculinity and Religious Practice in Late Medieval Anatolia’, in Patricia Blessing
and Rachel Goshgarian (eds), Architecture and Landscape in Medieval Anatolia, 1100–1500 (Edin-
burgh, 2017), 129, and most recently Rıza Yıldırım, ‘From Naserian Courtly-Fotovvat to Akhi-
Fotovvat: Transformation of the Fotovvat Doctrine and Communality in Late Medieval Anatolia’, in
Lloyd Ridgeon (ed.), Javanmardi: The Ethics and Practice of Persianate Perfection (London: Gingko/
British Institute of Persian Studies, 2018), 69.
18
See for example Eric S. Ohlander, ‘Inner-Worldly Religiosity, Social Structuring and Fraternal
Incorporation in a Time of Uncertainty: The Futuwwat-nāma of Najm al-Dīn Zarkūb of Tabriz’,
British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 40 (2013): 14–35.
 Sufism in Society 121

Burghazi, which seems to have been written in Antalya after c. 1365.19 Two
treatises on futuwwa by Abu Hafs ‘Umar Suhrawardi (539/1145–632/1234)
composed in the early thirteenth century were also probably destined for an
Anatolian audience.20 Two other fourteenth-century poetical works, Gülşehri’s
Turkish Mantıku’t-Tayr (718/1318) and Abu Bakr Rumi’s Persian Qalandarnama
(c. 1360), contain significant passages expounding futuwwa. Indeed, despite Ibn
Battuta’s characterisation of futuwwa as an artisans’ association, it also appealed to
royal courts. The ideals of futuwwa are advertised in an occult text written in 670/
1272 by Nasiri Sijistani for the Seljuq sultan Ghiyath al-Din Kaykhusraw III, the
Daqa’iq al-Haqa’iq,21 while an author in Erzincan, Ahmad b. Muhammad
b. Muhammad al-Tusi, composed a treatise on futuwwa for the dignitary Sa‘d
al-Din, who is addressed in terms that suggest he was already one of its adher-
ents.22 To understand futuwwa’s widespread appeal, we must first analyse its
relationship to Sufism and its place in the religious and intellectual landscape of
medieval Anatolia, suggesting how futuwwa contributed to the process of the
social and religious transformation of Anatolia during this period. I will then
examine futuwwa as a political and social phenomenon, exploring the complex
relationship between the fityān and the existing political order.

THE THEORY OF FUTUWWA

In a treatise probably composed for an Anatolian audience, in Konya, in the early

thirteenth century, Abu Hafs ‘Umar Suhrawardi explains the nature of futuwwa:
Futuwwat is the essence of these four roads [of Holy Law (shari‘a), the Way (tarīqa), the
_
Reality (haqīqa), and Gnosis, and in truth not everyone can follow it. However, the Arab,
_
Persian, Turk and Tajik, and the common people, the soldier, the tradesman, [in fact]

19
Breebaart, ‘Development and Structure’, 90, 116. These treatises have been published as follows:
Ahmad b. Ilyas’s Tuhfat al-Wasaya is available in Turkish translation with a facsimile of the Arabic
text in Gölpınarlı, ‘İslam ve Türk İllerinde Fütüvvet Teşkilatı’, 121–32, 205–31; Nasiri has been
published with an edition of the Persian text and a German translation in Franz Taeschner, Der
anatolische Dichter Nāsirī (um 1300) und sein Futuvvetnāme (Leipzig, 1944); Burgazi is published
by Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı,_ ‘Burgazi ve Fütüvvetnamesi’, İktisat Fakültesi Mecmuası 15 (1953–4):
163–251.
20
Eric J. Ohlander, Sufism in an Age of Transition: ‘Umar al-Suhrawardī and the Rise of the Islamic
Mystical Brotherhoods (Leiden, 2008), 272, 281–2.
21
Nasiri Sijistani, Daqa’iq al-Haqa’iq, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS persan 174, fol. 89a.
Further on this manuscript see Chapter 6, pp. 235–7.
22
Ahmad b. Muhammad b. Muhammad al-Tusi, Al-Hadiyya al-sa‘diyya fī ma‘ani al-wajdiyya,
Süleymaniye, MS Ayasofya 2049, fol. 241a: he is described as sadr-i muhtaram wa akhī-yi
mukarram sāhib-i dil sāhib-i safā sāhib-i muruwwa sāhib-i wafā – all _typical akhi
_ virtues. His title
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
sadr could suggest he was a senior figure in either the religious or bureaucratic hierarchy.
_
122 Religion, Politics and Society

everyone can follow the form of this road [of futuwwa], but no one can follow the reality of
futuwwa. The perfection of futuwwa, which is the right of the Truth (haqiyyat-i haqq), is
_ _
for God Most High, and for the elect of God Mustafa [i.e. the Prophet Muhammad].23

Nonetheless, the nature of futuwwa is extremely elusive, as the term can describe
several related but distinct concepts. The idea of futuwwa had been espoused as
early as the tenth century by the leading Khurasani Sufi theorist al-Sulami, and
means essentially the ideal conduct of the Sufi: generosity, humility, loyalty and
turning a blind eye to others’ faults. Al-Sulami does not seem to have envisaged
futuwwa as providing any kind of institutional framework for living; that seems to
have come much later, in the twelfth or even thirteenth century. Al-Sulami’s
ideals were also all advocated by the futuwwa manuals that describe the institu-
tionalised form of futuwwa; our major collection of futuwwa texts from medieval
Anatolia, a manuscript probably of the late thirteenth century, contains both
practical treatises prescribing the nature and organisation of the futuwwa insti-
tution and those dealing with the theory of the Sufi ideal of futuwwa such as the
works of al-Sulami.24
The defining feature of futuwwa – theoretically – was altruism and generosity.
When Ibn Battuta travelled across Anatolia, he was a recipient of the sometimes
overwhelming hospitality of akhī groups that vied with one another to demon-
strate their generosity.25 Showing hospitality was thus a way of demonstrating
one’s credentials to be an akhī. As Nasiri writes at the beginning of his
futuwwatnāma:
When the Prophet and friend of God ordained that in futuwwa ‘there is no fatā except ‘Ali,’
generosity [sakhā’ ] was bestowed on ‘Ali [b. Abi Talib]. Know that paradise is the Abode of
the generous [dār al-askhiyā’ ].26

The ideal of service and generosity is emphasised in Nasiri’s accounts of the early
Sufi teachers of futuwwa:
One possessor of futuwwa was Harith [al-Muhasibi, a prominent ninth century Sufi], who
encourages generosity and liberality [jūd wa sakhāwat].
He said, ‘Do you know what futuwwa is, and who is a person who possesses futuwwa? It
is he who has bound himself firmly to service, who exercises justice of his own accord and
seeks nothing from anyone.’27

23
Trans. Ridgeon in Jawanmardi, 47, with minor alterations.
24
Süleymaniye, MS Ayasofya 2049 contains the works by Sulami and Suhrawardi on futuwwa, as well
as the Anatolian futuwwatnāmas by Khartbirdi, Nasiri and Tusi.
25
Ibn Battuta, Rihla, 285–331; trans. Gibb, 418–63.
26
Taeschner, Der anatolische Dichter Nāsirī, Persian text, p. 6, ll. 14–15.
27
Ibid., 8, ll. 39–41. _
 Sufism in Society 123

The same point is repeated at the beginning of Nasiri’s description of the

fatā leader:
In both worlds [this and the next] the akhī should be the sort of person who with his heart
and soul is generous. For a wrongdoer who is generous may enter heaven, but an ascetic
who is mean is an evil thing.28

Similarly, in Abu Bakr Rumi’s story of Akhi Evren, the tanner from Kırşehir
traditionally alleged to be the founder of futuwwa in Anatolia,29 the first point he
emphasises is his generosity:
There was in Rum an akhī who was more generous than anyone else. . .
He was a good akhī; a generous friend (walī) was he too. He loved the way of ‘Ali in
futuwwa.
From what he earned, he offered people a table (sufra) for the sake of God.30

For Suhrawardi, one of the great early theorists of futuwwa, and a major figure in
the establishment of an institutionally based Sufism, futuwwa was essentially a
parallel structure to the tarīqa. In his most famous work, the ‘Awarif al-Ma‘arif,
_
Suhrawardi sought to regularise and ritualise the relationships between the Sufis
who in many parts of the Middle East were already living communally in insti-
tutions known variously as khānqāhs, zāwiyas or ribāts.31 Meanwhile, the hier-
_
archy of initiate, apprentice and master that he describes in the ribāt is mirrored
_
by that of the futuwwa lodge.32 Yet Sufi ribāt regulations often left a considerable
_
part of the day free, and if resident Sufis did not earn a living this was because they
had no need to, receiving generous stipends as determined by the waqfiyya –
making them the butt of criticism on occasion.33 In contrast, the requirement for
the fatā to perform a trade was a crucial part not just of the practice of futuwwa, as

28
Ibid., 14, ll. 127–8.
29
Akhi Evren has been the subject of much speculation in Turkish scholarship, in particular in the
works of Mikail Bayram, which have attempted to ascribe to his authorship some of the most
significant works of Arabic and Persian philosophical and theological literature. These ascriptions
are usually demonstrably inaccurate, and the name of Akhi Evren does not appear on a single
manuscript text known to me. See Mikail Bayram, Ahi Evren ve Ahi Teşkilatı’nın Kuruluşu
(Konya, 1991). It is the view of the present author that the existing Turkish scholarship on Akhi
Evren constitutes a large red herring. Nothing certain is known of his life beyond the fact he was
probably an older contemporary of Gülşehri’s (see n. 133) and the references in Abu Bakr
Rumi’s work.
30
Abu Bakr Rumi, Qalandarnama, Tashkent, Beruniy Institute of Manuscripts, MS 11668, fol. 24a.
31
Ridgeon, Jawanmmardi, 5; for a further description of the duties of a khānqāh-resident Sufi see
Emil Homerin, ‘Saving Muslim Souls: The Khanqah and Sufi Duty in Mamluk Lands’, Mamluk
Studies Review 3 (1999): 71–2; Nathan Hofer, The Popularisation of Sufism in Ayyubid and Mamluk
Egypt, 1173–1325 (Edinburgh, 2015), 79–80.
32
Ohlander, Sufism in an Age of Transition, 286–7.
33
Homerin, ‘Saving Muslim Souls’, 69, 76; Hofer, Popularisation, 79.
124 Religion, Politics and Society

described by Ibn Battuta, but also its theory. Suhrawardi conceives of futuwwa is a
body of knowledge and behaviour bequeathed by Adam’s son Seth, the first
human to practise a trade.34 This idea of the importance of conducting a trade
is reflected in subsequent futuwwa manuals.
Futuwwa is often seen as a simplified or ‘less arduous’ version of Sufism
designed to appeal to those who did not have the stamina to adopt the full Sufi
path,35 and in Suhrawardi’s theory the fityān were excused from the more rigorous
requirements of the tarīqa. Lloyd Ridgeon has observed that while
_
futuwwatnāmas share many common points with Sufi treatises, they lack the
theological and philosophical passages dealing with the unity of God (tawhīd).36
_
Ridgeon argues that ‘this belief that futuwwat was a less arduous form of Sufism is
supported by the lack of anything intellectually taxing, philosophically or theo-
logically’.37 However, this is only true of futuwwatnāmas, which are intended to
prescribe how a futuwwa group should function, who is entitled to join, the stages
of training they should go through, the ritual of initiation and the duties of the
trainee (tarbiya), the full member of the order (fatā) and its master (akhī). Other
Anatolian texts dealing with futuwwa certainly have an intellectual dimension.
Nasiri, the author of the Persian verse futuwwatnāma, also composed a verse Sufi
treatise entitled Ishraqat. The work’s title recalls the Illuminationist philosophy of
Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi maqtūl (d. 587/1191), while its contents show the
influence of Jalal al-Din Rumi, Sultan Walad and Ibn ‘Arabi.38 Gülşehri’s free
adaptation of ‘Attar’s Mantiq al-Tayr, which evinces a strong interest in futuwwa,
and was written in part to guide would-be akhīs on the true path, is, like the
original Persian, a philosophically minded Sufi allegory. Part of the point of the
allegory is precisely to demonstrate tawhīd, as the thirty birds of the story turn out
_
to be identical with the Simurgh they seek.39 In Gülşehri’s Keramat-i Ahi Evren,
he refers the reader back to his highly theoretical verse treatise the Falaknama,
suggesting he expected the readers of his Turkish-language account of this famous
Akhi’s miracles to be conversant with his much more elaborate Persian work.40
Likewise, Abu Bakr Rumi’s Qalandarnama, a work also profoundly concerned

34
Ohlander, Sufism in an Age of Transition, 284.
35
Ibid., 284–5, 289–90; Ridgeon, Morals and Mysticism, 102; Ridgeon, Jawanmardi, 5–6. See also
the discussion in Goshgarian, ‘Social Graces’, 114–31.
36
Ridgeon, Jawanmardi, 4; Ridgeon, Morals and Mysticism, 101–3.
37
Ridgeon, Morals and Mysticism, 102.
38
Taeschner, Der anatolische Dichter Nasiri, 84–7.
39
Gülşehri’nin Mantiku’t-Tayrı (Gülşen-name). Metin ve Günümüz Türkçesine Aktarma, ed. Kemal
Yavuz (Ankara, 2007), ll. 428–4316.
40
Franz Taeschner, Gülschehris Mesnevi aus Achi Evran, den Heilgen von Kırschehir und Patron der
türkischen Zünfte (Wiesbaden, 1955), 34–5, l. 159.
 Sufism in Society 125

with futuwwa, starts each of its book with a section entitled ‘tawhīd ’ in praise of
_
God’s unity.41
Thus the absence of discussions of tawhīd or other philosophical speculation
_
from futuwwatnāmas suggests that this is a function of the genre, not a reflection
of the nature of futuwwa or, necessarily, the interests of its adherents. There was a
considerable overlap between adherents of Rumi and fityān, who evidently shared
the same spaces and rituals such as samā‘,42 while Rumi counted akhīs among his
disciples.43 Similarly, Abu Bakr Rumi’s Qalandarnama advocates both the way of
the Qalandar and futuwwa, while its author considered himself to be a devotee of
Jalal al-Din Rumi, and Abu Bakr tells us at length of his personal relationship with
Sultan Walad whom he regards as the great inspiration for his work.44 A good
example of how these various ideals could be combined in one individual is Fakhr
al-Din ‘Iraqi (d. 688/1289), the famous Persian poet who spent some time in
Anatolia, where he received the patronage of the Pervane as well as Shams al-Din
Juwayni. The Ilkhanid biographer Ibn al-Fuwati describes ‘Iraqi as a fatā – one of
the ‘literary fityān’ (min udabā’ al-fityān);45 he was also a Qalandar, noted for his
uncouth behaviour, and one of the leading exponents of the ideas of Ibn ‘Arabi as
interpreted by Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi. ‘Iraqi’s major work, the Lama‘at, was
inspired by al-Qunawi’s lectures on Ibn ‘Arabi.46 Thus, rather than differentiating
between sharia-compliant Sufism as represented by Jalal al-Din Rumi and Sultan
Walad, Qalandari-style renunciant Sufism and futuwwa, we should see them as
different articulations of the same phenomenon, as overlapping, sometimes
mutually inclusive categories, not binary opposites.47 This is also suggested by
architectural and epigraphic evidence, which indicates the close relationship
between Sufis, fityān and commercial activity.48 Even if futuwwa did not require
its adherents to travel to the furthest stages on the spiritual journey such as the
final stage described by Suhrawardi in which ‘the fully-actualized Sufi comes to

41
Abu Bakr Rumi, Qalandarnama, e.g. fols 1b–2a, 26b–27a.
42
For samā‘ in futuwwa ceremonies see for example Taeschner, Der anatolische Dichter Nasiri, Persian
text, 52–3.
43
Jalal al-Din Rumi, Maktubat, 184–6.
44
Abu Bakr Rumi, Qalandarnama, fol. 95a, section entitled dar sitāyish-i awsāf-i Sultān Walad rahmat
Allāh ‘alayhi and the following section on fol. 95b entitled dar bayān-i _ ānk _Shaykh Abū _Bakr
Qalandar-i Rūmī-yi Ummī bi-had rat-i Sultān Walad rahmat Allāh ‘alayhi dar shahr-i Qūnya chūn
_ _
birasīd wa nazar-i ‘ināyat daryāft. _ _
45 _
Ibn al-Fuwati, Majma‘ al-Adab fi Mu‘jam al-Alqab, ed. Muhammad al-Kazim (Tehran, 1995),
No. 2208.
46
William C. Chittick, ‘Fakr al-Din ‘Eraqi’, EIr.
47
A point made by Hofer with regard to the Qalandariyya, see Hofer, Popularisation, 252.
48
Wolper, Cities and Saints, 75–8.
126 Religion, Politics and Society

resemble the Prophet’,49 neither did it preclude an interest in intellectually

challenging Sufism, which it is quite clear many of its adherents did indeed share.
Another Sufi text of the period to treat futuwwa along with metaphysical topics
is Ibn al-Sarraj’s Tashwiq al-Arwah. Ibn al-Sarraj, an early fourteenth-century
author active in the Jazira, Syria and in Konya,50 strongly defends futuwwa against
its detractors. Arguing that the Prophet Abraham himself donned the sarāwīl, the
ritual trousers of the fatā, he justifies futuwwa in the following terms, saying that
even if it is not found in the compilations of the muhaddiths,
_
It is not an innovation (bid‘a); and even if it is something new, it is not an error (d allāla).
_
The concept of it is correct. They began with teaching virtues and rejecting vices, and they
called that ‘futuwwa’. There is no difference in the meaning. The Prophet and his
Companions, the peace and blessings of God be upon them, used to speak of it, encourage
adherence to it. It is the correct religion (al-dīn al-qawīm) and the straight path, and a large
group of the notable figures of Islam and religious authorities of the human race (ahbār al-
_
anām) have established that . . . this futuwwa affirms brotherhood (ukhuwwa); the Prophet
treated his Companions like brothers (ākhā . . . al-sahāba) and adopted ‘Ali as his
_ _
brother . . . All this is a search for affection (ulfa), love (mawadda) and the ties of the
beauty of companionship. From this result great benefits which cannot be obtained from
what we or others know of the science of fiqh or usūl al-dīn or similar sciences.51
_
Rather than representing an alternative form of Sufism, futuwwa was a part of
Sufism, fulfilling the same function of offering an alternative to the legalistic
religiosity of the fuqahā’.
Futuwwa could also appeal to a non-Muslim audience. Although Nasiri’s
futuwwatnāma specifically excluded Christians from membership and even from
entering futuwwa buildings,52 and a similar prohibition is made by Burghazi,53
the fact these prohibitions are emphasised – in both cases standing at the
beginning of the treatise after the disquisition on the origins of futuwwa – itself
suggests the very popularity of futuwwa among non-Muslims. An inscription
from Konya mentions a Greek akhī,54 while Aflaki records the existence of
Armenian fityān.55 The Armenian priest Hovhannes Pluz (d. 1293) from
Erzincan in north-eastern Anatolia composed two treatises in Armenian modelled

49
Ohlander, Sufism in an Age of Transition, 183.
50
On Ibn al-Sarraj see the study by Öztürk, Velilik ile Delilik Arasında.
51
Ibn al-Sarraj, Tashwiq al-Arwah, Süleymaniye, MS Amcazade Hüseyin 271, fol. 212a.
52
Taeschner, Der anatolische Dichter, Persian text, p. 10, ll. 85–6.
53
Gölpınarlı, ‘Burgazi ve Futuvvetnamesi’, 121.
54
Taeschner, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte der Achis in Anatolien’, 20; Vryonis, Decline of Hellenism, 401.
55
Aflaki, Manāḳib al-‘Ārifīn, I, 3:463, p. 489; trans. O’Kane, Feats, 337 (the fityān are here described
with their alternative, and less complimentary, name, runūd).
 Sufism in Society 127

on Islamic futuwwa-manuals.56 Ibn Mi‘mar (d. 642/1244), who wrote the first
futuwwa manual in Baghdad, envisages that non-Muslims should be allowed to
‘mix with the fityān; perhaps they will convert, and that [mixing] will be the reason
for their hearts’ becoming inclined [to Islam].’57 The true fatā, however, had to be a
Muslim. Other futuwwa manuals, citing the hadith ‘respect the guest even though he
is an unbeliever’, left open the doors of futuwwa to non-Muslims.58 One might
interpret Hovhannes Pluz’s treatises as an attempt to establish a Christian alternative
to this Islamic institution at a time when the latter was attracting increasing numbers
of adherents and thus ultimately converts, in line with Ibn Mi‘mar’s intention. On
the other hand, some futuwwa manuals suggest a relationship between futuwwa,
conversion and coercion. In the futuwwa manual of Najm al-Din Zarkub of Tabriz
(d. 713/1313), three categories of initiates into the futuwwa are described, one of
which is described as the sayfi, ‘of the sword’: ‘the sayfi adherents of futuwwa are those
people whom the sword has brought to Islam, become Muslim; in the end they get a
taste for Islam, serve the commander of the faithful ‘Ali, may God honour him. They
become ghazis (ahl-i ghazā) and fight with the unbelievers outwardly, and fight with
themselves inwardly.’59 It has been suggested that a group of converts from
Christianity to Islam associated with the Ottoman ruler Orhan were in fact akhīs.
In 1354, they debated religion with the bishop Palamas, who left an account of his
encounter with these mysterious chiones, as he calls them.60 However, it must be said
that the identity of this group is far from certain.
Futuwwa, then, could be many different things to different people, and it is
against this background that some of the controversies surrounding it should be
understood. Among the opponents of futuwwa were the Mamluk scholars Ibn
Taymiyya and his pupil Ibn Bidqin, who wrote treatises on the subject.61 Ibn
Taymiyya accepted the ideals of futuwwa behaviour as incumbent on all Muslims,
but rejected precisely the symbols and institutions that made futuwwa a distinct-
ive organisation, such as the libās al-futuwwa and the shurb al-futuwwa, the ritual

56
Rachel Goshgarian, ‘Futuwwa in Thirteenth-Century Rum and Armenia: Reform Movements and
the Managing of Multiple Allegiances on the Seljuk Periphery’, in Peacock and Yıldız (eds), The
Seljuks of Anatolia, 227–63, and for a translation of these texts see Rachel Goshgarian, ‘Late
Medieval Armenian Texts on Fotovvat: Translations in Context’, in Lloyd Ridgeon (ed.), Javan-
mardi: The Ethics and Practice of Persianate Perfection (London: Gingko/British Institute of Persian
Studies, 2018), 182–214.
57
Ibn Mi‘mar al-Baghdadi, Kitab al-Futuwwa, ed. Mustafa Jawwad et al. (London and Beirut,
2012), 161.
58
See Ridgeon, Javanmardi, 141–6.
59
Gölpınarlı, ‘İslâm ve Türk İllerinde Fütüvvet Teşkilâtı ve Kaynakları’, p. 246, fol. 226a.
60
Roderick Grierson, ‘“We believe in Your Prophet”; Rumi, Palamas, and the Conversion of
Anatolia’, Mawlana Rumi Review 2 (2011): 96–124, esp. 111–18.
61
Discussed in Breebaart, ‘Development and Structure’, 102–7.
128 Religion, Politics and Society

drink at initiation and the oath of loyalty to futuwwa. Ibn Bidqin went even
further and condemned futuwwa as a bid‘a, innovation, accusing its adherents of
sodomy.62 Clearly, in assessing the views of such scholars we must also take
account of Ibn al-Sarraj’s explicit statement that futuwwa offered benefits that
could not be obtained from the traditional legal and religious sciences. It is, then,
perhaps unsurprising that the fuqahā’ should have had limited sympathy for it. Yet
there is evidence even from texts sympathetic to futuwwa that the fityān did not
always live up to their ideals, and the fityān are commonly referred to as runūd,
meaning roughly ‘thugs’. Aflaki repeatedly points to a tension between some akhīs
and Rumi’s followers. In one instance, Aflaki reports how the amir Taj al-Din
Mu‘tazz decided to appoint Mawlana’s disciple Husam al-Din Çelebi as shaykh,
and obtained a royal decree (firmān-i humāyūn) to that effect. However, when
Mawlana and his circle attempted to enter the khānqāh to bestow the gift of a new
prayer rug, they were confronted by an angry akhī:
Akhi Ahmad who was one of the tyrants of the age and the head of the register of runūds of
the prison was present at that occasion. From excess of hatred, chauvinism (ta‘as sub) and
__
envy, he did not want Çelebi to become shaykh of that khānqāh. He suddenly arose and
folded the prayer rug, giving it to someone else, saying, ‘We cannot accept him as our
shaykh here.’ Immediately the people of the world were thrown into confusion. Notable
akhīs who were attached to the house of the fathers and grandfathers of Akhi Turk and
Akhi Bishara, like Akhi Qaysar, Akhi Chupan and Akhi Muhammad Sayyidwari and others
put their hand on their swords and knives, and the commanders who were murīds sought to
kill the rebellious runūd. Strife burst out and on account of the situation many of the heart-
wounded dervishes said, ‘Strife is sleeping, may God curse whoever awakes it’, and,
according to the saying ‘strife is worse than killing’, a tumult broke out.63

While futuwwa treatises emphasise the virtues of avoiding gossip and of khāmūshī,
of being silent about others’ faults, in practice rivalry between akhī groups often
resulted in public disturbances. Ibn Battuta notes how rival akhī groups in
Ladhiq/Denizli came to blows over which of them was to have the honour of
hosting him,64 and how the akhīs and fityān all bore weapons in public.65
Gülşehri in his Mantıku’t-Tayr also alludes to these problems in the chapter
(not paralleled in ‘Attar) entitled ‘A questioner asks the hoopoe about the correct
behaviour on the [Sufi] way and futuwwa’.66 Gülşehri describes the three

62
Ibid.; also Irwin, ‘Futuwwa’, 164–5.
63
Aflaki, Manaqib al-‘Arifin, ed. Yazıcı, II, 6:12, p. 755; Feats, 527.
64
Ibn Battuta, Rihla, 290; trans. Gibb, 426.
65
Ibn Battuta, Rihla, 291; trans. Gibb, 427.
66
This passage is discussed in Ahmet Kartal, ‘Gülşehri’nin Mantıku’t-Tayr’ında Yer Alan Fütüvvetle
İlgili Manzumesi’, in Ahmet Kartal, Şiraz’dan İstanbul’a: Turk-Fars Kültür Coğrafyası Üzerine
Araştırmalar (Istanbul, 2011), 793–802. Kartal identifies Gülşehri’s source as the Qabusnama of
 Sufism in Society 129

conditions necessary to be an akhī: one should be blameless, ‘shining like the sun
on the earth’, and one’s table and door should both be open – i.e. one should be
generous and hospitable; but the opening verses of this chapter go on to suggest
that not all akhīs adhered to these precepts:
Someone asks, ‘What is futuwwa, and what do these akhīs do?
What should one do to be a possessor of futuwwa, what should one do to be
successful on this path?
Other than the table [i.e. offering hospitality], is there any other condition? Explain
to us the difference between the true version and the false.
Does one avoid saying bad things about others; or does being an akhī mean
fighting, rioting and evil?
Can someone who has torn the veil [of secrecy] from another’s [misdeeds] ever
become an akhī?67

Gülşehri aims to show who a true akhī is and what being an akhī (ahilik)
comprises. After his passage explaining futuwwa, Gülşehri then introduces
another story not found in ‘Attar, that of Bishr of Hamadan, a man in search of
knowledge and love. Gülşehri relates Bishr’s efforts to find a woman he fell saw
passing by, her face suddenly unveiled by the wind. After many travels and
travails, including falling in with a would-be philosopher woman, Yamliha, whose
arrogant belief in the superiority of her knowledge causes her death, Bishr
embraces the way of the akhīs and becomes a merchant, settling down and
marrying Yamliha’s serving girl, whom on marrying he discovers to be the woman
he sought. Thus it is only with the embrace of ahilik that Bishr is able to abandon
his vain wanderings and find his heart’s true desire. At the end of the story of
Bishr, Gülşehri gives the moral:
Akhi Bishr is one of those who is aware of ahilik; whoever calls you an akhī is
stupid.
He through being an akhī went to God; your work is all tricks and hypocrisy
As you have not cleaned manliness’s lake [mürüvvet gölini], what do you know of
the way of futuwwa?
There, they eat the stew of any cock; in vain do they call you akhī. . .
There everyone seeks his own way; strange it is that they call you akhī.
Your true words are all lies; to call you an akhī is a lie
What sort of a person are you to be an akhī, or even to be the slave of akhīs?
If you know the Futuwwatnama and read and explain it,

Kayka’us b. Iskandar, a well-known Persian mirror for princes of the eleventh century that became
popular in fourteenth-century Anatolia.
67
Gülşehri, Mantıku’t-Tayr, ll. 2676–80, p. 398.
130 Religion, Politics and Society

Then, my friend, you know that in ahilik you are not even a night-watchman
[i.e someone who can tell well from bad in the dark].68

Beyond the ideals, then, many fityān were involved in violence, and debates raged
as to who a true akhī was, which are reflected in Gülşehri. While theorists such as
Suhrawardi insisted that futuwwa meant renouncing violence, in reality the
opposite was often the case. It is to this more murky side of futuwwa that we
now turn.

THE SPREAD OF FUTUWWA FROM BAGHDAD TO ANATOLIA

By the tenth century, there were groups in Baghdad and other cities of the Islamic
east that identified themselves as fityān, or in another term ‘ayyārs; in the
jaundiced view of the ‘ulama’ who wrote most of our historical sources for these
cities, they are portrayed as thugs and ne’er-do-wells. Despite the involvement of
many ‘ayyārs/fityān in activities such as highway robbery and theft, it does seem
that some also espoused a code of chivalric conduct that overlapped with the Sufi
ideals of al-Sulami.69 Indeed, it has been argued that the association of fityān with
violence is far from being as contradictory as it might appear, for early Sufis had
played a prominent role in jihad on the frontiers. A ribāt could thus mean both a
_
frontier fortress and a Sufi lodge.70 While chronicles condemn ‘ayyārs as bandits,
jawānmardī/futuwwa is praised as the highest form of chivalry in courtly sources,
such as the Qabusnama, an eleventh-century work of advice literature from the
Southern Caspian hinterland written by the Ziyarid prince Kayka’us b. Iskandar
to advise his son and heir.71 These ‘ayyārs play an increasingly important role in
urban life in the twelfth century as a sort of paramilitary or auxiliary force. Our
sources on Baghdad mention them frequently, and there are sporadic references to
them in the other great cities of the Islamic east, such as Nishapur; they seem to
have been entirely an eastern phenomenon. There is no evidence of their existence
in, say, Fatimid Egypt or Syria.72 Among these groups, futuwwa took on an
increasingly institutional form, with its own hierarchy and rituals.

68
Ibid., l. 2990–3000, pp. 444–5.
69
On the origins of futuwwa groups see Breebaart, ‘Development and Structure’, 31–51; for examples
of fityān see Deborah G. Tor, Violent Order: Religious Warfare, Chivalry and the ‘Ayyar Phenomenon
in the Medieval Islamic World (Würzburg, 2007), esp. 255, 264ff.
70
Tor, Violent Order, 234–41. See also Harry Neale, Jihad in Premodern Sufi Writings (Basingstoke,
2017), which underlines that Sufis were interested in jihad not just as the ‘greater jihad’ against the
self, but also the lesser jihad of warfare.
71
Tor, Violent Order, 246–8.
72
Breebaart, ‘Development and Structure’, 45; cf. Tor, Violent Order, which is based exclusively on
evidence from the eastern Islamic world.
 Sufism in Society 131

The contested nature of futuwwa that Gülşehri identifies is thus not an

aberration but a long-standing feature. However, thanks to the efforts of the
Abbasid caliph al-Nasir li-Din Allah (r. 575/1180–622/1225), a new synthesis of
Sufi, chivalric and institutional forms of futuwwa emerged as part of the Caliph’s
efforts to reassert Abbasid authority both in Iraq and beyond.73 Futuwwa was to
be harnessed to the Caliph’s own ends. Al-Nasir took the existing institutions of
the futuwwa, its initiation rights and ceremonies, and tried to weld them into a
form whereby the Caliph himself would be the focus of loyalty, arrogating to
himself the prerogative of investing new members of the futuwwa – the leading
princes of the Middle East. Ayyubid, Ghurid, Zangid and ultimately Anatolian
Seljuq rulers were all initiated.74 In 1207 he issued a decree abolishing all other
forms of futuwwa, signalling his aim to concentrate authority in his own hands.
Thereafter futuwwa largely disappears as a popular social phenomenon in
Baghdad. One of al-Nasir’s allies in this project of reform was the leading Sufi
theorist Abu Hafs ‘Umar al-Suhrawardi, although it has been suggested that his
agenda was rather different from al-Nasir’s, seeking to assert the authority as heirs
to the Prophet of the group of Sufis for which he was the self-appointed
spokesman.75
In its exported form, it was this court-centred chivalry that first took hold in
Anatolia, which sources trace back to the aftermath of sultan ‘Izz al-Din Kay-
ka’us’s capture of the Black Sea stronghold of Sinop from its Greek defenders in
611/1214. ‘Izz al-Din sent an emissary to Baghdad to announce his triumph,
bearing rich presents of textiles, slaves and horses. The ambassador was Majd al-
Din Ishaq of Malatya, a distinguished scholar, adviser to the Seljuq sultan and
previously his father, and friend of Ibn ‘Arabi.76 According to Ibn Bibi, along with
announcing the victory over the infidel, the embassy was to ask for ‘Izz al-Din to
be invested into futuwwa. In response, the Caliph sent Kayka’us a letter inducting
him into the futuwwa, as is also recorded by a poet at Kayka’us’s court, Qadi
Burhan al-Din al-Anawi, himself a former ambassador to Baghdad.77 Ibn Bibi

73
On this project see Ohlander, Sufism in an Age of Transition, 19–27, 271–2; Angelika Hartmann,
an-Nāsir li-Dīn Allāh (1180–1225) (Berlin, 1975), 92–107, 111–21; Yıldırım, ‘From Naserian
_
Courtly-Fotovvat to Akhi-Fotovvat’, 70–3.
74
Breebaart, ‘Development and Structure’, 53–4; Hartmann, an-Nāsir, 98–9; Ohlander, Sufism in an
Age of Transition, 94–6. _
75
Ohlander, Sufism in an Age of Transition, 140–2, 271; Ridgeon, Morals and Mysticism, 64–6.
76
See Sara Nur Yıldız and Haşim Şahin, ‘In the Proximity of Sultans: Majd al-Din Ishāq, Ibn ‘Arabi
and the Seljuk Court’, in Peacock and Yıldız (eds), The Seljuks of Anatolia, 180–3; Ibn Bibi, al-
Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya (Ankara), 154–5; (Tehran), 153–4.
77
Mehmet Fuat Köprülü, ‘Anadolu Selçukluları Tarihi’nin Yerli Kaynakları: I. Anis al Kulûb’, Belleten
7 (1943): 518. He had served as ambassador to Baghdad for the Shah-i Arman dynasty of Akhlat.
On this text and its author see also Peacock, ‘An Interfaith Polemic’.
132 Religion, Politics and Society

includes the Arabic text of this letter in his chronicle. In it, the Caliph describes
the lineage of futuwwa from ‘Ali b. Abi Talib,
who asked from his excellency the Prophet for the honour of brotherhood (ukhuwwa) and
was singled out apart from other people by the glories of futuwwa. [The angel] Gabriel,
peace be upon him, announced the excellence God had given him: ‘There is no fatā except
Ali and no sword except Dhu’l-Faqar.’78

Rather than an innovation, al-Nasir’s promotion of the order is described as the

Caliph ‘reviving, through the example of his sacred behaviour, the effaced struc-
tures of futuwwa’ (jaddada bi-marāshid sīratihi al-muqaddasa hayākil al-futuwwa
al-tawāmis). The idea that futuwwa had a long tradition dating back to the time of
_
the Prophet was frequently employed by later writers defending the institution
against detractors. The letter goes on to describe how ‘Izz al-Din Kayka’us, as a
sign of his loyalty to the Caliph, had requested ‘to be granted of the honour of
futuwwa and to be armed with its glorious garments, and its long, loose trousers’.
This honour, the letters notes, ‘is only granted to one whose loyalty is deeply
rooted’. The grant of these garments (the libās al-futuwwa) was more than just a
signal honour to a loyal vassal. In al-Nasir’s letter, it is claimed that wearing them
will act as ‘protection from the torment of hellfire’ (junnatan wāqiyyatan min
‘adhāb al-nār). This courtly futuwwa also had a more practical appeal for rulers,
for hunting – ever the favoured sport of pre-modern elites – was ritualised and
incorporated into the requirements of courtly futuwwa. The hunting of certain
birds with a crossbow – a weapon for which al-Nasir had a particular enthusiasm –
was to be done in the name of the Caliph.79
Some years later, ‘Izz al-Din’s successor sultan ‘Ala’ al-Din Kayqubad I also
sought Caliphal recognition of his rule. Al-Nasir sent Suhrawardi to Konya along
with symbols of legitimate rule such as the decree recognising ‘Ala’ al-Din as
Sultan of Rum and deputy of the Caliph there (manshūr-i saltanat wa niyābat-i
_
hukūmat-i mamālik-i rūm). On the basis of the presumed Anatolian provenance of
_
the extant manuscripts, it has been suggested that the two futuwwatnāmas he
wrote were composed for the benefit of the fityān of Konya,80 but they clearly
circulated more widely and were known to later authors in Iran.81 Although it

78
Ibn Bibi, al-Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya (Ankara), 156–7; (Tehran), 154–6; see also the discussion in
Yıldırım, ‘From Naserian Courtly-Fotovvat to Akhi-Fotovvat’, 77–9. Curiously the letter is dated to
Ramadan 608, when Ghiyath al-Din Kaykhusraw was still alive, although ‘Izz al-Din is clearly
mentioned as recipient. For a possible explanation see Yıldız and Şahin, ‘In the Proximity of
Sultans’, 180–3; alternatively one might posit an error in copying the date.
79
Breebaart, ‘Development and Structure’, 58–9; cf. Irwin, ‘Futuwwa’, 166.
80
Ohlander, Sufism in an Age of Transition, 282–3.
81
Ridgeon, Jawanmardi, 74; Ohlander, ‘Social Structuring’, 18.
 Sufism in Society 133

remains unclear to what extent he was pursuing his own or the Caliph’s agenda,
Suhrawardi met a rapturous response in Anatolia, according to Ibn Bibi, who
devotes a whole chapter of al-Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya to the shaykh’s visit to Konya.82
Ibn Bibi indicates a particular interest on the part of the political elite in
Suhrawardi, specifically mentioning the great amir Jalal al-Din Karatay’s role in
the welcoming ceremony for the shaykh. Ibn Bibi alludes to Karatay participating
in what might be a ceremony initiating the sultan into the futuwwa,83 or perhaps
some sort of murshid–murīd relationship with Suhrawardi.
Widely praised in the sources for his piety, Karatay is also said to have paid for
the construction of Suhrawardi’s tomb in Baghdad.84 The amir’s interest in the
shaykh is confirmed by a Persian translation of Suhrawardi’s treatise Risala fi’l-
Faqr which was made for Karatay, preserved in an unpublished manuscript.85 In
contrast to the grandiose titles usually given to senior Seljuq amirs, in the
translation of the Risala fi’l-Faqr Karatay is entitled simply the amīr-i faqīr-sīrat,
qāyid-i dīn u dawlat – ‘the amir with the dervish’s life-style, the leader of faith and
state’. Renouncing worldly goods by becoming a dervish (faqīr) is portrayed in the
text as the sole path to salvation. The inscriptional programme on the madrasa he
built is further indication of Sufi interests.86 Karatay also built a zāwiya, the
waqfiyya of which survives. Although the term zāwiya can have a variety of
nuances and does not necessarily imply a lodging places for fityān, it is notable
that the titles Karatay is given in this document (and only this document – they
do not appear in the same form in his endowments of a caravanserai and madrasa
that also survive) attribute to him the typically futuwwa virtue of generosity. He is
described as nāhil al-sakhāyā, wāhib al-‘atāyā (‘the bestower of gifts’), and men-
_
tion is made of taking care of passing travellers who will stay at the zāwiya
(masālih al-wāridīn wa’l-nāzilīn bi’l-zāwiya), reminding one of the fatā’s duty of
_ _

82
Ibn Bibi, al-Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya (Ankara), 229–35; (Tehran), 219–24; discussed in Ohlander,
Sufism in an Age of Transition, 273–83.
83
Ibn Bibi, al-Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya (Ankara), 233; (Tehran), 222; Ohlander, Sufism in an Age of
Transition, 277.
84
Tarikh-i Al-i Saljuq dar Anatuli, ed. Nadira Jalali (Tehran, 1999), 96.
85
Süleymaniye, MS Fatih 4526, fols 229b–335a.
86
Scott Redford, ‘Intercession and Succession, Enlightenment and Reflection: The Inscriptional and
Decorative Program of the Qarātāy Madrasa, Konya’, in Anthony Eastmond (ed.), Viewing Inscrip-
tions in the Late Antique and _Medieval World (Cambridge, 2015), 148–69. The inscriptional
programme contains direct and indirect references to Solomon and David, regarded as the embodi-
ments of esoteric knowledge, but also seen by futuwwa-writers as adherents of futuwwa because they
had their own occupations to earn a living, David as a weapon smith and Solomon as a basket
weaver; cf. Taeschner, Der anatolische Dichter, 12–13; Breebaart, ‘Development and
Structure’, 122.
134 Religion, Politics and Society

generosity to strangers.87 The appeal of futuwwa to the elite of the Seljuq realm is
also suggested by an early waqfiyya from Antalya, where one of the witnesses, all of
whom were apparently senior officials and amirs, describes himself as ‘Akhi Amin
al-Din Mahmud b. Yusuf al-Qaysari’.88
There was, then, a close interest in the ideals of poverty and renunciation that
Suhrawardi expounded among the highest echelons of the Seljuq state. Ibn Bibi
tells us that Kayqubad hastened to see the shaykh in person ‘because he had
shown the late sultans the way from the threshold (barzakh) of the day of
judgement and made possible their return to the Abode of Eternity’.89 We should
not dismiss the possibility that such motives did indeed play a part in Kayqubad’s
thinking, as they seem to have for Karatay, and as al-Nasir’s letter to ‘Izz al-Din
Kayka’us also stresses. Studies of the Seljuqs’ contemporaries, the Ayyubid and
Mamluk dynasties of Egypt and Syria, have emphasised how these rulers showed
great concern for the fate of their souls, which was an important reason for their
patronage of Sufism.90 From a slightly later period, the letters of Jalal al-Din Rumi
reveal that for the political elite of Anatolia, having prayers said for them by Rumi
and his fellow dervishes (‘du‘ā-yi dawlat’) was motive in their patronage, as was
discussed in Chapter 2. The genuine conviction that the intercession of holy men
might bear direct spiritual and even material reward cannot be underestimated.91
The earliest Anatolian futuwwa manual, composed around the time of Suhra-
wardi’s visit, suggests that futuwwa had already begun to appeal beyond court
circles. The Tuhfat al-Wasaya was written by Ahmad b. Ilyas al-Naqqash al-
Khartbirdi, of whom we know nothing other than the information provided by
his name: the descriptor ‘al-naqqāsh’ suggests he was a painter, while the nisba
Khartbirdi indicates that the author was a native of Harput, the largely Armenian
town on the northern peripheries of the Artuqid state in south-east Anatolia. The
Tuhfat al-Wasaya, according to Khartbirdi’s introduction, was in fact itself an
abridgement of a work written by the Caliph al-Nasir’s son ‘Ali, entitled the ‘Umdat
al-Wasila.92 Khartbirdi describes futuwwa ceremonies: when the fityān are gathered
in their meeting place known as the daskara, their leader (naqīb) should pronounce

87
Osman Turan, ‘Selçuklu Devri Vakfiyeleri III: Celâleddin Karatay, Vakıfları ve Vakfiyeleri’, Belleten
12 (1948), 17–171, reprinted in Osman Turan, Selçuklu Tarihi Araştırmaları (Ankara, 2014),
495, 497.
88
Osman Turan, ‘Selçuklu Devri Vakfiyeleri II: Mübarizeddin Ertokuş ve Vakfiyesi’, Belleten 11
(1947): 427, reprint in Turan, Selçuklu Tarihi Araştırmaları, 343. Noted by Cahen, ‘Sur les
traces’, 83.
89
Ibn Bibi, al-Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya (Ankara), 231; (Tehran), 220.
90
Hofer, Popularisation, 49–50.
91
See Chapter 2.
92
For a discussion of this text see Breebaart, ‘Development and Structure’, 90–101.
 Sufism in Society 135

The unique manuscript of Khartbirdi’s Tuhfat al-Wasaya, a part of the major

FIG. 3.1
Anatolian manuscript collection of futuwwa treatises. Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu
Başkanlığı, Süleymaniye Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, MS Ayasofya 2049.

the basmala and give a sermon (khutba) on futuwwa. The text also gives infor-
_
mation about the initiation ceremony for a new fatā; by this point, then, futuwwa
organisations possessed buildings and hierarchy, and Breebaart suggests that it was
intended as a practical guide for fityān groups.93 Nonetheless, the fact of the work
being written in Arabic would have limited its circulation among the largely
Persian-speaking artisans of central Anatolia, and the fact that it is based on the
‘Umdat al-Wasila by al-Nasir’s son suggests its proximity to the court-centred
futuwwa the Caliph promoted. The Tuhfat al-Wasaya formed the basis of
Burghazi’s Turkish futuwwatnāma, written sometime after 1365. Breebaart suggests
that Burghazi acquired his copy of the Tuhfat al-Wasaya from the Franks who had
plundered Alexandria, from whom he mentions buying a number of books.94
However, the work is found in a major manuscript collection of futuwwatnāmas,
MS Ayasofya 2049 (Fig. 3.1), which is evidently of Anatolian provenance.95

93
Ibid., 96.
94
Ibid., 116, n. 19, 130–1.
95
See n. 24 above, p. 122.
136 Religion, Politics and Society

In sum, the reigns of ‘Izz al-Din Kayka’us I and ‘Ala’ al-Din Kayqubad I saw
the penetration of al-Nasir’s court-centred futuwwa, which was accompanied by a
growing interest on the part of the elite in ideas of renunciation and the compos-
ition of the first Anatolia futuwwa treatises. There is very little evidence of any
other kind of futuwwa activity in Anatolia at a more popular level. It is striking
that the waqfiyya of 1205 from Konya, which presents a very detailed picture of
land ownership in the city, listing at length all the merchants and small business-
men who are later typically members of futuwwa groups, contains not a single
mention of an akhī or fatā.96 It is true that Ibn Bibi does list akhīs among the
groups commanded by Kayqubad to show their respects to Suhrawardi in 1220.
He writes that ‘the qadis, imams, Sufis, shaykhs, Sufis, notables, akhīs and fityān
(ikhwān wa fityān) of Konya’ were ordered to receive the shaykh.97 Yet it does not
sound as if these groups were craftsmen. Rather they are ranked alongside the elite
of Konya society. It is only with the coming of the Mongols that we have clearer
evidence for the growth of futuwwa at a more popular level.98

FUTUWWA AND POLITICS UNDER THE MONGOLS

While the akhīs and fityān of pre-Mongol Anatolia are a shadowy presence, barely
discernible beyond Ibn Bibi’s account of ‘Izz al-Din’s induction into the Nasirian
futuwwa, after the Battle of Kösedağ they start to emerge into the light of history.
By the mid-thirteenth century, Anatolian futuwwa had been transformed from
the elitist, courtly version propagated by al-Nasir, to a popular movement embra-
cing relatively humble professions, with strong connotations of thuggery. The
pious yet worldly Jalal al-Din Karatay, who carefully navigated the treacherous
waters of Seljuq and Mongol politics to be one of the rather few leading political
figures of this period to die of natural causes, played a crucial role in this
transformation.
As we have noted above, the textual evidence suggests Karatay’s interest in
Suhrawardi and futuwwa, but the fityān were also Karatay’s close allies, and played
a crucial part in supporting his political aims. Our major source is Ibn Bibi, who
relates how fityān were employed by Karatay as hired assassins. As ever, Ibn Bibi is
vague about the chronology, but the events described must have happened shortly
after the death of Ghiyath al-Din Kaykhusraw II, in or around 644/1246. During

96
For the text see Osman Turan, ‘Selçuklu Devri Vakfiyeleri I: Şemsüddin Altun Aba, Vakfiyesi ve
Hayatı’, Belleten 11 (1947): 197–235.
97
Ibn Bibi, al-Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya (Ankara), 230; (Tehran), 220. The point that these groups were
ordered by the sultan (sultān farmān dād) is missing from Ohlander’s translation of this passage.
98
Cf. Cahen, ‘Sur les traces’,_ 83.
 Sufism in Society 137

these first years of Mongol dominion in Anatolia, the Horde’s hegemony was light
and distant, but the sultanate’s loss of authority and power meant that rival
political factions in Anatolia fought for supremacy.99 Slowly, the Sahib-Diwan
Shams al-Din al-Isfahani and his ally Jalal al-Din Karatay sought to consolidate
power in their hands. The runūd of Akşehir and Abgarm were employed to
murder Shams al-Din Khass Oghuz and Asad al-Din Ruzbah, two powerful
amirs, in Isfahani’s palace.100 The cry of one of the victims, recorded by Ibn
Bibi, reveals the identity of the runūd. Khass Oghuz cried out, ‘Lord, this
profession is not that of men of loyalty and futuwwa and is not the way (tarīqat)
_
of those possessing honour and muruwwa.’101 Muruwwa was paired with futuwwa
in futuwwatnāmas as a parallel virtue, and the two words were almost synonyms.
Thus the assassins are accused of letting down the standards of the futuwwa
organisation to which their victim recognised them as belonging.
Shortly after this, Isfahani and Karatay sought to destroy the orchestrator of
these murders, their former ally Fakhr al-Din Abu Bakr the Pervane. The latter
tried to seek the assistance of the akhīs of Konya:
In secret he summoned the akhīs and the chiefs of the fityān of Konya who are the source of
strife [fitna] and immorality, and who from time to time assist in suppressing the rabble of
evil-doers by their ardour. He asked them for help in rebelling against the sultan, after he
had made them dependable with promises and expending money. They replied, ‘The sāhib-
_ _
dīwān [Shams al-Din al-Isfahani] is ruler of the kingdom by the bequest of sultan Ghiyath
al-Din, and he is the administrator of the affairs of sultan ‘Izz al-Din. Thus he has complete
control of affairs of faith and state, and the sultan, who is the possessor of the kingdom, is in
his hands. We cannot rebel against the sultan because the dust of hostility has been stirred
up between the two of you, nor can we show disloyalty (kufrān-ni‘mat) to our lord.102

Isfahani appointed as commander of Konya Shams al-Din Yavtash, who was

warmly welcomed by the ikhwān and a‘yān (i.e. the akhīs and the notables),
and organised the murder of the Pervane Fakhr al-Din.103 The major beneficiary
of the removal of this rival was Karatay, who was appointed to further senior
positions under Isfahani’s dictatorship.104 In 646/1248, however, a rival claimant
to the sultanate, Rukn al-Din Kılıç Arslan IV, came to Konya with a yarlıgh from

99
For the situation see Turan, Selçuklular Zamanında Türkiye, 458–61; Yıldız, ‘Mongol Rule’,
190–223.
100
Ibn Bibi al-Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya (Ankara), 553–7; (Tehran), 484–7; see also Tarikh-i Al-i Saljuq,
94–5.
101
Ibn Bibi al-Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya (Ankara), 555; (Tehran), 486.
102
Ibn Bibi al-Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya (Ankara), 563; (Tehran), 491–2.
103
Ibn Bibi al-Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya (Ankara), 563–4; (Tehran), 492.
104
Ibn Bibi al-Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya (Ankara), ibid., 572; (Tehran), 499.
138 Religion, Politics and Society

Güyük Khan announcing his appointment as sultan and Isfahani’s execution.105

Karatay attempted to warn Isfahani of the danger, and his ally Najm al-Din pisar-i
Tusi called on the fityān to protect the vizier:
Najm al-Din son of Tusi the za‘īm al-dār summoned the akhīs of Konya. He ordered that
with their fityān they should arm themselves, and together with a detachment of cavalry
[mafārida] and ghulāms from the sultan’s guard, they should stand watch over the door to
the house of the sāhib [Isfahani] and his servants.106
_ _
Shams al-Din al-Isfahani was duly killed, but Rukn al-Din did not win the
unambiguous victory he was expecting owing to Güyük’s death. Rather Karatay
managed to manipulate the situation to his own advantage and from 647/1249
until his death in 652/1254 was the effective ruler of the Seljuq lands on behalf of
the triumvirate of Seljuq child-sultans who nominally held office.107 We hear
little of the fityān in the historical sources for this period, but it is clear enough
that throughout the crisis of 1246–9 they operated as an armed group in the
service of Shams al-Din al-Isfahani and his ally Karatay. It seems that Karatay’s
patronage was a crucial factor in the emergence of a popular futuwwa. Alongside
its elevated ideals, futuwwa could also have practical uses for its patron.
Nothing is known about the identity and background of these early fityān. We
cannot say for sure whether their depiction as low-life thugs, runūd, is accurate or
a literary fiction on the part of that notoriously partial historian Ibn Bibi. Our first
indications as to the identity of the Anatolian fityān come from the biographical
dictionary of Ibn al-Fuwati, written in the early fourteenth century. He records
that in 660/1261,108 a certain fatā and butcher (qassāb) from Tabriz, Karim al-
__
Din Abu ‘Ali, was witness (min shuhūd al-sijill) to the record on the register made
by the Qadi of Konya, Siraj al-Din Urmawi, for the chief akhī (fatā al-fityān),
Shams al-Din Muhammad al-Sarwi. Both Karim al-Din Abu ‘Ali the witness and
Shams al-Din Muhammad the chief akhī are specified to be immigrants to
Anatolia (nazīl al-Rūm).109 The latter also had links with Tabriz, where Ibn al-
Fuwati met him when he came to buy books in 675/1276–7. Shams al-Din is
further described as ‘a leading religious authority’ (min al-sudūr al-kubbār).
_
These brief references are intriguing. First, both fityān are described as immi-
grants to Anatolia from Iran, and are closely connected to Tabriz. We know from
the Altun-aba waqfiyya written in 1205 that several of the merchants and small

105
See Yıldız, ‘Mongol Rule’, 206–9; also on these events Turan, Selçuklu Zamanında Türkiye,
463–9; Cahen, La Turquie, 230–5.
106
Ibn Bibi, al-Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya (Ankara), 585; (Tehran), 510.
107
Turan, Selçuklu Zamanında Türkiye, 466–72; Cahen, La Turquie, 235–41.
108
Ibn al-Fuwati, Majma‘ al-Adab fi Majma‘ al-Alqab, No. 3338.
109
Ibid., No 3434.
 Sufism in Society 139

tradesmen of Konya were immigrants from Iran, especially Tabriz,110 and the
evidence of Ibn al-Fuwati suggests that half a century later the same processes were
in operation, with a presumably relatively humble profession such as butcher still
being occupied by migrants. This suggests that the pattern detected by Robert
Irwin in Cairo,111 where the fityān were immigrants from the Ilkhanid lands, may
obtain for Anatolia too. Such an impression is confirmed by a source that
originates from a futuwwa milieu, the genealogical chart of an akhī family from
Ankara dating probably to the mid-fourteenth century. According to this docu-
ment, the ancestors of the prominent Ankara akhī Muhammad b. Akhi Husam al-
Din al-Husayni had lived in the Iranian town of Khuy before migrating to
Anatolia in the time of Kılıç Arslan.112 Thus studies that consider the akhīs and
fityān to be specifically ‘Turkish’ are wide of the mark. Nonetheless, whereas
external sources emphasise the relatively humble occupations in which the fityān
engaged, in the genealogy this akhī family remembered its ancestors as noble
warriors, as befits descendants of ‘Ali b Abi Talib, which they believed themselves
to be literally (while all fityān see themselves as spiritually connected to ‘Ali).113
However, it provides no concrete information about the occupations of members
of the family since their migration to Anatolia.
Ibn al-Fuwati’s remarks also give us some insight into the operation of
futuwwa groups, offering a rather different picture from the normative
futuwwatnāmas. It is intriguing that Karim al-Din Abu ‘Ali is specified to be a
butcher, because that profession was excluded from membership of futuwwa by
futuwwatnāmas such as that of Nasiri,114 suggesting the danger of making claims
about practice on the basis of normative sources. Secondly, Ibn al-Fuwati indi-
cates that the fityān had formal structures such as a register (of membership?)
which were validated by state-appointed officials such as the qadi. Moreover, such
events were sufficiently noteworthy to make it into a chronicle composed in
distant Iran. All this suggests a close relationship between fityān and the Ilkhanid
regime.
Another view of the fityān is given by the anonymous history of the Seljuqs
composed in Konya in the mid-fourteenth century, referred to henceforth as the

110
See the discussion in Peacock, ‘Islamisation in Medieval Anatolia’, 143–4; also Chapter 4,
p. 156–7.
111
Irwin, ‘Futuwwa’.
112
Irène Mélikoff, ‘Un document akhi du XIIIe siècle’, in Raoul Curiel and Rika Gyselen (eds),
Itineraires d’Orient: Hommages à Claude Cahen (Res Orientales VI) (Bures-sur-Yvettes, 1994),
263–76.
113
Ibid., 265–7.
114
Taeschner, Der anatolische Dichter Nāsirī, Persian text, p. 12, ll. 102–3; cf. Breebaart, ‘Develop-
ment and Structure’, 122–3. _
140 Religion, Politics and Society

Anonymous Chronicle.115 The author (or possibly one of the authors, as it may be
the work of more than one hand) seems to have been closely associated with the
akhīs, as well as having had a close relationship with the Mongols – Melville
suggests he may have been part of the retinue of Khwaja Nasir al-Din Mustawfi,
the deputy (nā’ib) of Geikhatu, the Mongol prince who was governor of Anatolia at
the end of the thirteenth century before becoming Ilkhan (r. 690/1291–694/
1295).116 The second half of the text deals with the Seljuq sultanate in Anatolia.
Its treatment of the first sultans is brief and schematic, but it gains in depth toward
the end of the thirteenth century, treating Mongol rule in some detail, while
narrowing its focus from the Seljuq dynasty to deal with events in Konya. Indeed,
the final fifteen or so pages of the printed text basically represent a city history of
Konya, which, at the time of the work’s composition, would have been under the
control of the Karamanid dynasty, to whom the author or authors evince a distinct
hostility. The Anonymous Chronicle generally portrays the Seljuqs in positive terms,
but the author’s attitude towards the Mongols is also quite nuanced. Geikhatu is
lavishly praised for his good works. Throughout, though, the atrāk, or ‘Turks’ as the
Karamanids are contemptuously called, are portrayed as circling the city, ever ready
to pounce as soon as the Mongols’ backs are turned. The author delights in telling
us how the heads of Karamanids are brought back by Mongol and Seljuq armies
from campaigns and hung from the city walls.117 Alongside the fityān, another
powerful urban group, the iğdiş (Arabic pl. akādisha), is mentioned, although
exactly who or what they are is completely unclear.118
The akhīs first appear in the Anonymous Chronicle in 676/1277–8, in the wake
of the Pervane’s failed revolt when they are mentioned alongside other notables
and the amīr al-akādisha of the city urging the nā’ib Amin al-Din to make war on
the Turkmen of Karaman, Eşref and Menteşe who were besieging the city.119 As
the city was abandoned by the Seljuq sultan and administration, the akhīs and
akādisha seized control of its defences, warding off the Turkmen attack.120
Eventually, Seljuq/Mongol authority was restored, but power seems to have
passed from the akādisha. The historian notes of Fakhr al-Din, the ra’īs al-
akādisha, that when he died in 678/1279 ‘he was the last ra’īs of Konya’, leaving
a power vacuum filled by chaos.121

115
See Melville, ‘The Early Persian Historiography of Anatolia’, 135–66 for a discussion.
116
Ibid., 151. For Anonymous’s praise of Nasir al-Din see Tarikh-i Al-i Saljuq dar Anatuli, 120–2.
117
Tarikh-i Al-i Saljuq, 115–16.
118
For a discussion see Tuncer Baykara, ‘Selçuklular Devrinde İğdişlik ve Kurumu’, Belleten 60,
no. 229 (1996): 681–93.
119
Tarikh-i Al-i Saljuq, 104.
120
Ibid., 105–6.
121
Ibid., 106.
 Sufism in Society 141

For the next ten years we hear little of the fityān. Then in 688/1289, a group of
runūd (also referred to as jawānān, the Persian equivalent of fityān) are recorded as
causing chaos in Konya. Other akhīs and fityān (akhīyān wa jawānān) came to the
rescue and were rewarded by the sultan for aiding him.122 The runūd are
mentioned again after Geikhatu’s departure from Konya, rioting in the city again,
and allying themselves with sultan Mas‘ud’s brother to attempt to overthrow the
sultan.123 These runūd appear to have been allied to the Karamanid Turkmen: we
are told that their rebellion intensified when they learned of the Karamanid
capture of Beyşehir, and no one would leave their house ‘for fear of the Turkmen
and runūd (i.e. fityān)’.124
From the rioting of 688/1289 onwards, akhīs feature prominently in the
Anonymous Chronicle. Their leader Akhi Ahmad Shah is depicted as interceding
for the townsmen with the tyrannical Ilkhanid viceroy, Fakhr al-Din Qazwini,
who preceded Geikhatu and Nasir al-Din,125 and chasing out another unjust
Mongol envoy.126 The text includes stories of Akhi Ahmad Shah’s generosity,
while hinting at his rivalry with other akhī leaders.127 On the death of his brother
in Muharram 691/December 1291–January 1292, 15,000 men are said to have
bared their heads in sorrow and the shops did not open for forty days in
mourning.128 Akhi Ahmad Shah’s power is confirmed by Aflaki, who describes
him as ‘the king of the fityān, the rarity of the age, the late Akhi Ahmad Shah, who
was commander of the futuwwat-dārs [holders of futuwwa] of the abode of
kingship, Konya, possessor of ease and wealth, with so many thousand soldiers
and runūd under his command’.129 Akhi Ahmad is portrayed as the leader of the
party that received Geikhatu when he besieged the city – although in Aflaki’s
account, while Akhi Ahmad did the negotiating, it was the intervention of Rumi
from beyond the grave that saved the city through terrifying the Ilkhan in his
dreams. Despite Akhi Ahmad’s exalted role, there are still suggestions of the akhīs
continuing their old role as hit men. As the Anonymous Chronicle records:
‘Monday 6 Muharram 698 [October 1298]: killing of the sharābsālār [chief wine
steward of the court] by the order of sultan ‘Ala’ al-Din Faramarz by the hand of
Akhi Jaruq, with the agreement of the notables of the city of Konya.’130

122
Ibid., 116.
123
Ibid., 124: az bīm-i atrāk u runūd.
124
Ibid., 124, 125.
125
Ibid., 118–19.
126
Ibid., 132.
127
Ibid., 130.
128
Ibid., 131.
129
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 610.
130
Tarikh–i Al-i Saljuq, 132.
142 Religion, Politics and Society

The evidence of the Anonymous Chronicle thus indicates that the akhīs’ rise to
political prominence coincided with the collapse of the Seljuq state after the
disaster of the Pervane’s failed revolt. There was a power vacuum, and while such
figures as the Seljuq sultan and the rest of the Ilkhanid administration in Konya
made themselves scarce as the Turkmen marauded at the gates of the city, it was
the akhīs and the akādisha who led the defence. Henceforth, it is the akhīs that in
this sympathetic account speak to power, representing the populace of the town.
This literary picture of the growing importance of fityān in the late thirteenth
century is confirmed by epigraphic evidence. The earliest inscription to mention
the fityān comes from Ankara, recording that in 689/1290 a local akhī leader
constructed the mosque of Akhi Sharaf al-Din.131 However, the view that the
akhīs filled a power vacuum left by the collapse of other authority does not find
universal confirmation in the other sources; possibly it was a situation specific to
Konya, or possibly the depiction of the situation there is determined by the
agenda of the anonymous authors with their pro-akhī sympathies.
It is important to remember that the akhīs did not represent a single unified
group with common interests. Clearly there were groups of fityān of whom the
anonymous author did not approve, calling them runūd, and some of these seem
to have favoured the Karamanids, while others collaborated with the Mongols.
Some, such as Akhi Ahmad Shah and Akhi Muhammad, the object of Sultan
Walad’s panegyric, were figures of immense power, wealth and influence, virtual
rulers within their domain, but not all akhīs possessed political power or wealth.
The most famous fatā of the late thirteenth century was the dyer (dabbāgh) from
Kırşehir, Akhi Evren, who was regarded as a sort of ‘patron saint’ of Turkish
guilds and crafts132 and was the subject of a brief Turkish mathnawī by his deputy
(halife) Gülşehri.133 At least some akhīs, then, continued to adhere to the ideal
promoted by the futuwwatnāmas.
A similarly varied picture is given by Ibn Battuta, writing of the 1330s. In
Konya, he stayed in the zāwiya of the qadi, Ibn Qalamshah, ‘who was one of the

131
Et. Combe, J. Sauvaget and G. Wiet (eds), Repertoire chronologique d’epigraphie arabe (Cairo,
1931–56), vol. 13, p. 90, AH 689, no 4933: ‘amara al-jāmi‘ . . . bi-tawfīq rabb al-anām al-ikhwān
sāhib al-futuwwa wa-l-muruwwa.
132 _See
_ İlhan Şahin, ‘Ahi Evran’, TDVİA, vol. I, 529–30.
133
Gulschehris Mesnevi auf Achi Evran. Some doubts have been raised by Turkish scholars about the
attribution of the Keramat-ı Ahi Evran to Gülşehri, even though the latter’s name appears in the
text (l. 150, 158). Given the mention of Gülşehri’s Falaknama (l. 159, see p. 163) and the interest
in futuwwa and ahilik shared with Gülşehri’s Mantıku’t-Tayr, the attribution seems credible. See
also the discussion and revised edition of the text in Ahmet Kartal, ‘Keramat-ı Ahi Evran Üzerine
Notlar’, in Ahmet Kartal, Şiraz’dan İstanbul’a: Türk-Fars Kültür Coğrafyası Üzerine Araştırmalar
(Istanbul, 2011), 759–79.
 Sufism in Society 143

fityān, and his was one of the greatest zāwiyas’,134 confirming the relationship
between the governing elite and the futuwwa. Elsewhere, in Antalya and Sivas, the
fityān appear more as tradesmen.135 Ibn Battuta indicates that the akhīs’ power
was especially strong in the directly Ilkhanid-controlled territories of Anatolia.
Fityān appear throughout his account, but in the Turkmen periphery – the
nascent Ottoman state in Bursa, Aydın and Karaman – the rulers are the
Turkmen chiefs. In Aksaray, however, the Ilkhanid governor was himself one of
the fityān:
We stayed there [in Aksaray] in the zāwiya of Sharif Husayn, the deputy of the amir Eretna.
This latter is the deputy of the king of Iraq [the Ilkhan] in the parts of Rum he controls.
This Sharif is one of the fityān, and has a large following.136

It was the same story in Niğde, where Ibn Battuta stayed in ‘the zāwiya of the fatā
Akhi Jaruq who was the amir there, and honoured us according to the custom
of fityān’.137 In Kayseri, the capital of Eretna where the Ilkhanid military forces
were based (bihā ‘askar ahl al-‘irāq), Ibn Battuta again stayed in a zāwiya, this time
that of
the fatā Akhi amir ‘Ali, who is a great amir of the leading akhīs in this land, and his
followers comprise the notables and elite of the town (wujūh al-madīna wa-kubāruhā) . . . It
is one of the customs of this land that in places that do not have a sultan, the akhī is the
ruler. It is he who gives a mount to the incoming traveller, gives him clothes of honour and
is good to him as far as he is able. In commanding and forbidding and riding, he is like a
sultan.138

Far from being an anti-Mongol force, the fityān thus appear as a key part of the
Ilkhanid governing structures. Indeed, futuwwa’s links with the Mongols seem to
have even outlasted the Ilkhanate, as is suggested by a telling anecdote in Yazdi’s
Zafarnama discussing Timur’s dealings with the leaders of the Mongol nomads of
Anatolia, the Qara Tatars. Timur is depicted as negotiating with two Qara Tatar
leaders who bear the names Akhi Tabarruk and Muruwwat, names that are
redolent of futuwwa.139 Moreover, the alliance between fityān and Mongol power
also extended to the more intellectual wings of futuwwa. The poet ‘Iraqi, for
instance, received patronage from the Pervane Mu‘in al-Din Sulayman who is said
to have built him a khānqāh in Tokat. According to Ibn al-Fuwati the Ilkhanid

134
Ibn Battuta, Rihla, 293; trans. Gibb, 430.
135
Ibn Battuta, Rihla, 285–6, 296–7; trans. Gibb, 420, 435.
136
Ibn Battuta, Rihla, 295; trans. Gibb, 433.
137
Ibn Battuta, Rihla, 296; trans. Gibb, 433.
138
Ibid., 434.
139
Yazdi, Zafarnama, II, 359; cf. Paul, ‘Mongol Aristocrats’, 125 for the identity of these individuals.
144 Religion, Politics and Society

chief minister, the Sahib Diwan Shams al-Din Juwayni brought ‘Iraqi from Rum
in 666/1267–8 to serve as his nadīm or boon companion.140 One further piece of
evidence for fityān attitudes towards the Mongols is provided by the short Persian
mathnawi by Yusufi, composed in 699/1299, entitled the Khamushnama,141
which is preserved in a manuscript (MS Fazıl Ahmed Paşa 1597, fols 100b–
106b) concerned with Sufism and futuwwa, and containing the text of Nasiri’s
Futuwwatnama. ‘Ali b. Abi Talib is mentioned at the start of the Khamushnama
along with his sword Dhu’l-Faqar, highly symbolic of futuwwa, and is praised as
an intercessor; the theme of the poem, on the virtues of silence, suggests the self-
control of the tongue required of fityān. Much of the poem consists of fairly
conventional tales and stories exhorting the necessity of silence and condemning
the tongue (dar malāmat-i zabān). In the final sections of the work Yusufi turns to
contemporary politics. He denounces the false Seljuq claimant Jimri, around
whom the great anti-Mongol revolt 675/1277 had coalesced; he condemns too
the Hatiroğulları, the governors of Niǧde who had sided with the Karamanids
during the revolt; loyalty to the ruler is praised. Conventional though they are,
these sentiments mirror those of the anonymous historian of Konya, with his
vehement hostility to the Karamanids and enthusiasm for at least certain aspects
of Mongol rule. Many fityān evidently cooperated enthusiastically with Ilkhanid
authorities – indeed, sometimes were themselves those very authorities.
Futuwwa, then, represented an important means by which Sufism penetrated
the Muslim population beyond the elite, even if not all its adherents lived up to its
lofty ideals. Given the power and status that some fityān attained, it is hardly
surprising that non-Muslims should have sought to join them, and one can
assume that futuwwa did, as its proponents intended, act as a vehicle for
conversion. At the same time, while the rise of fityān as a political force may have
been encouraged by the collapse of Seljuq authority, it was subsequently fostered
as part of a deliberate strategy through which the Ilkhanid rulers of Anatolia
sought to govern, drawing on the presence of immigrant fityān from Tabriz and
Iran, as well as the precedent set by Karatay for employing them in political
enterprises.

140
Ibn al-Fuwati, Majma‘ al-Ansab, no. 2208.
141
Persian text published in Şafak, ‘Anadolu’da Farsça Yazɪlmış Bir Eser: Hamuşname’; see also
Chapter 2, p. 77.
Part II

Literature and Religious Change

 4

The Emergence of Literary Turkish

In the year 675/1277, in the midst of the massive revolt against the Mongols, the
Turkmen warlord Mehmed Beg, founder of the Karamanid beylik, rode into the
old Seljuq capital, Konya. After seizing the various insignia of authority, Mehmed
Beg issued a startling decree, according to the contemporary historian Ibn Bibi:
After today no one in the government administration (dīwān) the court (dārgāh u bārgāh),
the assembly or in public (maydān) shall speak anything but Turkish.1

Mehmed Beg’s decree has been much celebrated in modern Turkey as marking
the first establishment of Turkish as an official language, replacing Persian.2 Since
1961 Mehmed Beg’s home town of Karaman has commemorated it with an
annual Dil Bayramı or language festival, an event that has become intimately
bound up with contemporary Turkish politics.3 The local Council has recently
decided to celebrate Karaman’s status as the ‘capital of the Turkish language’ by
erecting rather incongruously in the main square a replica of the earliest surviving
monument of written Turkish, the runic Orhon inscriptions from eighth-century
Mongolia. Although this is doubtless intended to signal the continuity of Turkish
literature, the development of Arabic-script Turkish in the Islamic lands has little
to do with these pre-Islamic precedents.
In reality, the Karamanid ruled territories, as far as we can judge on the present
evidence, were one of the last areas of Anatolia to adopt Turkish as a literary

1
Ibn Bibi, al-Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya (Ankara), 696; (Tehran), 597.
2
See for instance Köprülü, Early Mystics in Turkish Literature, 208.
3
On this see Sara Nur Yıldız, ‘Karamanoğlu Mehmed Bey: Medieval Anatolian Warlord or Kemalist
Language Reformer? Nationalist Historiography, Language Politics and the Celebration of the
Language Festival in Karaman, Turkey, 1961–2008’, in Jorgen Nielsen (ed.), Religion, Ethnicity
and Contested Nationhood in the Former Ottoman Space (Leiden, 2012), 147–70.

147
148 Literature and Religious Change

medium, probably towards the middle of the fifteenth century. Rather than
reflecting a decisive moment in the history of Turkish, the story of Mehmed
Beg owes more to Ibn Bibi’s desire to depict the Karamanid rebels in negative
terms, emphasising their barbarity through their abolition of the language of
culture and civilisation, Persian, in favour of Turkish, a language with little
literary pedigree or prestige in the thirteenth-century Middle East. Yet, if not
literally true, Ibn Bibi’s story of the decree reflected a more general situation that
made the accusations against Mehmed Beg credible. The late thirteenth century is
exactly the period when Turkish appeared as a written language in Anatolia, above
all although not exclusively as a vehicle for religiously inspired texts. It was not
completely without precedents: a handful of Turkish literary texts were produced
in or by authors from eleventh- and twelfth-century Central Asia, but these do not
seem to have been known in Anatolia, and their influence over the later formation
of Turkish there is thought to have been negligible.4 The language that emerged
in Anatolia in the thirteenth century is known as Old Anatolian Turkish, from
which Ottoman developed in the fifteenth century.5 The dividing line between
the two is not always clear, but in general Old Anatolian Turkish is distinguished
by its orthographic conventions, a tendency to use a higher proportion of Turkish
vocabulary as opposed to Arabic or Persian, a greater lexical and sometimes
grammatical influence from Eastern Turkish dialects, and above all by the fact
that its earliest centres of literary production lay outside the Ottoman realm; to
use Ottoman for this earlier period of the language is thus anachronistic.
Although a good number of Turkish texts from the fourteenth century have
been edited, they have usually attracted attention from the point of view only of
grammar and philology; rarely has there been much study of the broader historical
or literary context. Modern studies of the rise of Turkish, usually written by
Turkish scholars espousing a nationalist perspective, tend to be full of tendentious
claims, taking Mehmed Beg’s proclamation at face value and failing to problem-
atize why and how Turkish suddenly emerged. It is often asserted early Turkish
works were composed out of linguistic necessity for an uneducated audience, a

4
On this see Robert Dankoff, ‘Qarakhanid Literature and the Beginnings of Turco-Islamic Culture’,
in H. Paksoy (ed.), Central Asian Monuments (Istanbul, 1992), 58–66.
5
Useful overviews of the language of the period are Győrgy Hazai, ‘La place du XIVe siècle dans
l’évolution de la langue turque’, in Elizabeth Zachariadou (ed.), The Ottoman Emirate (1300–1389)
(Rethymon, 1993), 61–6; István Vásáry, ‘The Beginnings of Western Turkic Literacy in Anatolia
and Iran (13th–14th Centuries)’ in Eva M. Jeremiás (ed.), Irano-Turkic Cultural Contacts in the
11th–17th Centuries (Piliscsaba, 2003), 245–53. See also Linda T. Darling, ‘Ottoman Turkish:
Written Language and Scribal Practice, 13th to 20th centuries’, in Brian Spooner and William
L. Hanaway (eds), Literacy in the Persianate World: Writing and the Social Order (Philadelphia,
2012), 171–95.
 The Emergence of Literary Turkish 149

claim that sits uneasily with the complex and sophisticated contents of many of
the early works.6 One rare exception is a short article by Uli Schamiloglu that
attempts to relate the rise of Turkish to the Black Death which struck Anatolia in
around 1347–8. Schamiloglu argues that the Black Death had both political and
cultural consequences, weakening Byzantium and leading to the rise of the
Ottomans, and also resulting in an increase in religiosity that prompted the
development of Turkish as a literary language. Although Schamiloglu acknow-
ledges the existence of Turkish texts from earlier in the century, he argues that
there was a shift towards Turkish after 1347.7
Certainly, it was in the later fourteenth to early fifteenth centuries that the
writers today considered the early classics of Turkish literature flourished, such as
the poets Ahmedi and Şeyhi, both working at the Germiyanid and then Ottoman
courts, and Qadi Burhan al-Din, the ruler of Sivas, who left us a Turkish Divan
alongside Arabic legal and Sufi works. Whether this literary upsurge can be linked
to the plague is more doubtful. Most of these authors were active in a court
environment and their works represent less a new religiosity than a Turkicisation
of the forms of courtly Persian literature, whether the ghazal, as in the case of
Burhan al-Din, or verse universal history, as in the case of Ahmedi’s masterpiece
the İskendername. Indeed, for an event that is said to have had such dramatic
consequences, there is a striking absence of references to the Black Death in the
contemporary Anatolian sources.8 Whatever the causes of the increase in literary
production in Turkish in the later fourteenth century, which certainly need
further research, the plague thesis does not address the emergence of a Turkish
literary language in the first place.
Anatolia was not the only region where Turkish developed as a literary
language in this period. Turkish was also used for official and literary purposes
in the Golden Horde from the thirteenth century, while from the late fourteenth
century the Mamluk courts of Egypt and Syria offered patronage to Turkish
language writers from both Anatolia and the Golden Horde. Although these
developments have been inadequately studied, it is clear that they also had an
impact on Anatolian Turkish, as will be discussed below. At the same time, the
rise of Turkish can also be seen in the context of what Sheldon Pollock has

6
Cf. the comments by Selim Kuru, ‘Gülşehri the Seventh Sheikh of the Universe: Authorly Passions
in 14th Century Anatolia’, Journal of Turkish Studies 40 (2013): 281–2; Zeynep Oktay Uslu, ‘The
Şathiyye of Yūnus Emre and Kayg·usuz Abdāl: The Creation of a Vernacular Islamic Tradition in
__
Turkish’, Turcica 50 (2019): 18–27.
7
Uli Schamiloglu, ‘The Rise of the Ottoman Empire: The Black Death in Medieval Anatolia and Its
Impact on Turkish Civilization’, in Neguin Yavari, Lawrence G. Potter and Jean-Marc Oppenheim
(eds), Views from the Edge: Essays in Honor of Richard W. Bulliet (New York, 2004), 255–79.
8
See further the discussion in Chapter 6, pp. 239–40.
150 Literature and Religious Change

described as the ‘vernacular millennium’ – the rise of vernaculars that occurred in

both South Asia and Europe in approximately the same period.9 Pollock sees these
vernaculars, which supplemented and eventually supplanted cosmopolitan lan-
guages such as Latin and Sanskrit, as constituting a discourse of power, part of a
process in which writers deliberately chose a more limited local idiom for political
reasons. The case of Turkish offers interesting parallels to, as well as substantial
divergences from, the process of vernacularisation described by Pollock, which has
become widely influential.10 It is worth briefly pointing to how the case of
Anatolian Turkish diverges from his scheme.
First, Turkish supplemented a language that was simultaneously both cosmo-
politan and vernacular – Persian, which, as we will see, was both a spoken
language in medieval Anatolia as well as the language of what could be termed
the greater Persian cosmopolis embracing the entire eastern Islamic world from
Anatolia to Central Asia and India.11 Secondly, Pollock insists on the role of
‘increasingly powerful royal courts’ in the growth of the vernacular, but in
Anatolia we seem to have the opposite phenomenon, the rise of Turkish coincid-
ing with a time of intense political fragmentation.12 Much early Turkish literature
seems to have been written without any obvious patrons at all. Thirdly, Pollock
describes the process of the emergence of the vernacular as a three-stage process
comprising literisation (the emergence of a written language for documentary and
practical purposes), which is followed, often only after a long gap, by literarisation
(the emergence of a literary language in which poetry and literature is composed)
and by the final phase superimposition, when the vernacular becomes the domin-
ant form of discourse. Superimposition can be observed after our period, in the
fifteenth and even more the sixteenth centuries, as Ottoman becomes the domin-
ant, but never the only, literary and administrative language of that dynasty’s
lands. However, it is curious that there is no evidence at all for a preliminary stage
of literisation; rather Anatolian Turkish seems to emerge as a literary, not a
documentary language. There are no texts, inscriptions or fragments or even
passing references in texts indicating the written use of Turkish in Anatolia for
practical purposes before its emergence as a literary language, which considerably
pre-dates its first use for administrative and documentary purposes. This might, of
course, reflect the disappearance of evidence, although that is less likely in the case

9
Sheldon Pollock, The Language of the Gods in the World of Men: Sanskrit, Culture and Power in
Premodern India (Berkeley, 2006), esp. 283ff.
10
See for example Rebecca Gould, ‘How Newness Enters the World: The Methodology of Sheldon
Pollock’, Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 28 (2008): 533–57.
11
On this see Bert Fragner, Die “Persophonie”. Regionalität, Identität und Sprachkontakt in der
Geschichte Asiens (Berlin, 1999).
12
Pollock, The Language of the Gods, 460, 468ff.
 The Emergence of Literary Turkish 151

of epigraphy; more probably it is a result of its absence in an environment where

Persian remained both cosmopolitan and vernacular.
To investigate these problems, I will first address the question of when Turkish
did emerge in Anatolia. I will then consider the nature of the literary production
that emerged, and the question of patronage and audience for Turkish texts.
Finally, I consider the question of the relationship between Turkish literary
production in Anatolia and that of the Golden Horde and the Mamluk sultanate.

EARLY TURKISH TEXTS FROM ANATOLIA AND

THE PROBLEM OF DATING

Scholarship on the date of the emergence of Turkish emerges as a literary medium

in Anatolia is fraught with difficulties. While many scholars, especially in Turkey,
have enthusiastically dated Turkish texts to the first half of the thirteenth century
or even earlier,13 most works only survive in much later manuscripts and their
dates can only be estimated on the basis of their linguistic characteristics –
something that it is, of course, hard to establish definitively without securely
dated texts. As so often, the tendency can be traced back to Köprülü, who wrote
that ‘after the establishment of the Seljuq state in Anatolia, Turkish became a
written language, but we cannot determine when’. This initial note of caution is
abandoned a couple of sentences later, as Köprülü continues: ‘It is quite natural,
therefore, that Turkish works began to be written down from the earliest period of
the Seljuqs, but it is true they were very few in number and quite elementary in
scope.’14 Köprülü believed such works comprised ‘simple religious tracts’ and
popular stories such as the legend of Battal Ghazi, the Arab frontier warrior of
early Islamic times said to be buried in western Anatolia. Köprülü goes on to
pinpoint the thirteenth century as the date for the emergence of a broader Turkish
literature, encompassing poetry and Sufi orientated works.15 A similar claim was
made by Mecdut Mansuroğlu, who describes thirteenth-century Turkish litera-
ture as ‘quite rich’.16 More recently, Ahmed Yaşar Ocak has suggested that a mass

13
See also the comments and references in Sara Nur Yıldız, ‘Battling Kufr (Unbelief ) in the Land of
the Infidels: Gülşehri’s Turkish Adaption of ‘Attar’s Mantiq al-Tayr’, in Peacock, De Nicola and
Yıldız (eds), Islam and Christianity, 330–1, n. 9. See also Alessio Bombaci, La letteratura turca
(Florence, 1969), 270, 286–7.
14
Köprülü, Early Mystics, 207.
15
Ibid., 208.
16
Mecdut Mansuroğlu, ‘The Rise and Development of Written Turkish in Anatolia’, Oriens 7/2
(1954): 250–64, esp. p. 252.
152 Literature and Religious Change

of older Turkish literature in Anatolia was destroyed by the Mongols,17 while the
attribution of early Turkish poetic and Sufi works to the thirteenth century has
been repeated by Gönül Tekin.18
The evidence for such claims is extremely tenuous. Köprülü and Mansuroğlu
named the poets Ahmed Fakih, Şeyyad Hamza and Dehhani as the major
thirteenth-century authors whose works have come down to us.19 More recent
research has put all these authors firmly into the fourteenth century, if not later.
Ahmed Fakih’s Çarhname, a poem on fate and the last judgement, has now been
dated on linguistic grounds to the second half of the fourteenth century or even
the fifteenth century; similarly his mathnawī on the hajj, Evsafü’l-Mesacid, cannot
be earlier than the fourteenth century.20 Şeyyad Hamza, author of the poem Yusuf
u Züleyha, must have died after 749/1348–9, for that date is mentioned in one of
his poems; and since the recent discovery of a previously unknown copy of his
Divan in Medina, Dehhani can now be securely dated to the late fourteenth or
early fifteenth centuries, a contemporary of Ahmedi to whose poems he wrote
nazires (verse imitations or replies).21 Later scholars identified other texts and
authors as belonging to the thirteenth century on flimsy grounds.22 The

17
Ahmed Yaşar Ocak, ‘Social, Cultural and Intellectual Life, 1071–1453’, in Fleet, Cambridge History
of Turkey, vol. 1, 408–9.
18
Gönül Tekin, ‘Turkish Literature: Thirteenth to Fifteenth Centuries’, in H. İnalcık and G. Renda
(eds), Ottoman Civilization, vol. 2 (Istanbul 2003), 497–8. Cf. further references in Marcel Erdal,
‘Explaining the Olga-Bolga Dili’, in Bill Hickman and Gary Leiser (eds), Turkish Language,
Literature and History: Travelers’ Tales, Sultans, and Scholars since the Eighth Century (London,
2016), 139.
19
M. Fuad Köprülü, Türk Edebiyatı Tarihi (Istanbul, 1981 [1926]), 261–2, 271–2; Mansuroğlu,
‘The Rise and Development’, 253–4. For a similar position, more recently, see Mustafa Özkan,
‘Türkçenin Anadolu’da Yazı Dili Olarak Gelişmesi’, Türkiyat Mecmuası 24/1 (2014): 53–73.
20
For Ahmed Fakih and his works: Osman F. Sertkaya, ‘Ahmed Fakih’, TDVİA, vol. 1, 65–7; Turhan
Ganjei, ‘Notes on the Attribution and Date of the Çarhname’, Studi Preottomani e Ottomani, Atti
del Convegno di Napoli (24–26 Settembre 1974) (Naples 1976), 101–4; Semih Tezcan, ‘Anadolu
Türk Yazının Başlangıç Döneminde bir Yazar ve Çarh-name’nin Tarihlendirilmesi Üzerine’, Türk
Dilleri Araştırmaları 4 (1994): 74–88.
21
For Şeyyad Hamza see Orhan Kemal Tavukçu, ‘Şeyyad Hamza’, TDVİA, vol. 39, 104–5; Tezcan,
‘Anadolu Türk Yazının Başlangıç Döneminde bir Yazar’, 82–6; Tezcan had already expressed
doubts about Dehhani’s dates, suggesting a confusion with the Persian poet Qani‘i is behind his
erroneous dating to the thirteenth century, see ibid., 83–5. For an edition of the recently discovered
Divan together with a facsimile of the Medina manuscript see Hoca Dehhânî Divanı, ed. Ersen
Ersoy and Ümran Ay (Ankara, 2017).
22
In his classic study of early Turkish mathnawīs, based on his doctoral thesis and published
posthumously, Amil Çelebioğlu listed a number of works as thirteenth century: Ahmed Fakih’s
Evsafu’l-Mesacid; Şeyyad Hamza’s Yusuf u Zuleyha and his Dasitan-ı Sultan Mahmud and Şeyyad
İsa’s Ahval-ı Kıyamet. However, his handwritten annotations to the thesis that are noted by the
book’s editors indicate that he actually considered them (or came to consider them) as fourteenth
century. He may have dated them earlier in the thesis to avoid being seen to disagree with
 The Emergence of Literary Turkish 153

Salsalname, a Turkish epic on the battles of ‘Ali b. Abi Talib against a giant named
Salsal, has been dated rather precisely to 643/1245; but this date seems to be
simply wishful thinking, and is not supported by any evidence in the sole
manuscript that has come to light.23 The text as it stands represents an undated
reworking by an Ibn Yusuf of an earlier tale by Şeyyad İsa, whom Ibn Yusuf
criticises for its poor style, and is preserved in a seventeenth- or eighteenth-century
manuscript.24 If the author of the Salsalname was Şeyyad İsa, he must have been
active no earlier than the fourteenth century, for we have another work by him,
the Ahval-ı Kıyamet, which mentions Rumi’s son Sultan Walad (d. 712/1312)
and grandsons Ulu Arif Çelebi and ‘Abid Çelebi (d. 739/1338).25
The Turkish prose epics of the Battalname and Danişmendname, which both
recount tales of frontier life and the Muslim struggle against unbelievers, have also
been given early dates by some scholars. Legends of Battal Ghazi certainly did
circulate on the frontier with Byzantium in the thirteenth century, and elsewhere
in the Middle East,26 but that is not to say the epic was written down in Turkish
then. The oldest extant manuscript dates to 840/1436–7, and was evidently a
copy of an earlier version, but it is not possible to be sure how much earlier.27 The
Danişmendname is claimed to have its roots in the Seljuq period, recounting the
exploits of the hero Danişmend, identified as the founder of the Danishmendid
dynasty that ruled central Anatolia in the twelfth century. The extant text of the
Danişmendname purports to be a modernisation of a version that was found in a
‘confused manuscript’ (müşevveş yazu), ‘so difficult to read that if anyone who saw
it, he would say “this isn’t Turkish”’.28 In two places, the author of the work,
whose name seems to have been Ibn ‘Ala,29 states that stories were recited (rivayet

Köprülü or other greats. See Amil Çelebioğlu, Türk Edebiyatı’nda Mesnevi (XV.yy’a kadar)
(Istanbul, 1999), 34–40.
23
On the Salsal-name see Aldo Gallotta, ‘Il S ̣alsal-name’, Turcica 23 (1991): 175–90. The extant
manuscript is Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, MS_ Supplement Turc 1207.
24
Gallotta, ‘Il S ̣alsal-name’, 177–9.
25
For this work see _ Cem Dilçin, ‘XIII Yuzyıl Metinlerinden Yeni Bir Yapıt: Ahval-ı Kıyamet’, in
Mustafa Canpolat et al. (eds), Ömer Asım Aksoy Armağanı (Ankara, 1978), 49–75, with the text at
p. 71.
26
Peacock, ‘The Seljuq Sultanate of Rum and the Turkmen of the Byzantine Frontier’, 274–5, 279.
27
Yorgos Dedes, Battalname: Introduction, English Translation, Turkish Transcription, Commentary
and Facsimile (Harvard University, 1996), vol. 1, 13–14, 85–6. For a study of the text see also
Küçükhüseyin, Selbst- und Fremdwahrnehmung, 248–318; for its popularity in an Arabic version in
Egypt see Hirschler, The Written Word in the Arabic Lands, 165–74.
28
Danişmend-name: Critical Edition, Turkish translation, Linguistic Analysis, Glossary, Facsimile, ed.
Necati Demir (Harvard, 2002), vol. 1, 214. On the composition of the Danişmendname see also
Irène Mélikoff, La Geste de Melik Dānişmend: Étude critique du Dānişmendnāme (Paris, 1960),
vol. 1, 53–70.
29
His name is mentioned just once: Danişmend-name, ed. Demir, vol. 1, 110.
154 Literature and Religious Change

ederler/kılurlar) in front of Shah ‘Izz al-Din, and on one occasion it is specifically

mentioned that they were later written down (bu k· ıssayı andan yazup yādigar
k· odılar).30 This ruler is presumed by modern scholars to be the Seljuq sultan ‘Izz
al-Din Kayka’us II, although given the tendency of later sources to bandy around
the regnal titles of Seljuq sultans fairly freely,31 we can hardly be sure that it
represents a real individual. According to the sixteenth-century author Gelibolulu
Mustafa Ali, who wrote an adaptation of the text, the Mirkâtü’l-Cihâd, Ibn ‘Ala
composed the Danişmendname in 642/1244–5.32 However, it is far from clear
that Mustafa Ali is a trustworthy source.33 While Ibn ‘Ala may have composed an
epic on Melik Danişmend, perhaps even putting it into writing for ‘Izz al-Din, the
text might also mean simply that individual stories were circulated and written
down at the Seljuq court, not the whole composition. Either way, there is no
reason to think they were originally written in Turkish. In fact, the earliest version
of the text is explicitly stated by Mustafa Ali to have been written in Persian,
which was then adapted into Turkish by Ala Beg Munshi (possibly identical with
the Ibn ‘Ala of the Danişmendname’s text). Ala Beg’s version was then updated by
a certain Arif Ali, garrison commander (dizdar) of Tokat in 762/1361 on the
orders of Ottoman Sultan Murad I.34 Similarly, the early fourteenth-century poet
Gülşehri, who wrote in both Persian and Turkish, mentions in his Turkish poem
Mantıku’t-Tayr that he had taken one of the stories from an earlier Ḳıssa-i Şeyh
Sanan. As with the previous two texts, Gülşehri emphasises the poor style and
linguistic difficulties of his exemplar, but it is not clear that it was written in
Turkish.35 It is possible that rather than reflecting the genuine preservation of
much earlier works (although this cannot be ruled out), authors employed the

30
Danişmend-name, ed. Demir, vol. 1, 102, 137.
31
See Peacock, ‘Seljuq Legitimacy in Islamic History’.
32
Mélikoff, La Geste de Melik Dānişmend, vol. 1, 56; Gelibolulu Mustafa ‘Âli, Mirkâtü’l-Cihâd, ed.
Ali Akar (Ankara, 2016), 60–1.
33
On the problems of Ali’s testimony see Mélikoff, La Geste de Melik Dānişmend, vol. 1, 62–3.
34
Gelibolulu Mustafa ‘Âli, Mirkâtü’l-Cihâd, 60; Danişmend-name, ed. Demir, vol. 3, 2 (citing
Mustafa Ali, Kunhu’l-Ahbar): ‘Sultan Murâd Hân’uñ emri ile Melik Ahmed-i Danişmend fütühâ-
tını bir manzum kitab eylemiş. Alâ Beg Münşi lisân-ı Fürs-i kadim üzre yazdugı kitabdan hikayatını
ahz itmiş’.
35
Gülşehri tells us that ‘someone made this story, but said it in a way that was very difficult to
understand’ (bir kişi bu dâsitanı eylemiş/illa lafzın key çepürdük söylemiş; see Mantıku’t-Tayr,
vol. 1, p. 110, l. 748); therefore Gülşehri has beautified it and put in the correct metre. However
Gülşehri does not say that his model was written in Turkish (or indeed written at all; it could
equally have been an orally transmitted legend he heard). On earlier versions of the story of Shaykh
San’an see Yıldız, ‘Battling Kufr,’ 341–2, and ibid., 341 n. 75 for the reading of çepürdük in place of
çöpürdek in Yavuz’s edition, and for a full translation of the verses see Köprülü, Early Mystics,
251–2.
 The Emergence of Literary Turkish 155

topos of an earlier text that they were rewriting for a modern audience to lend
authenticity and the respectability of age to the topics they were treating.
The only poets cited by Köprülü and Mansuroğlu who can be securely placed in
the thirteenth century are Jalal al-Din Rumi (d. 672/1273) and Sultan Walad
(d. 712/1312). Both are considered as early Turkish writers on the basis of the
presence of Turkish phrases and verses in their works.36 Indeed, Mansuroğlu even
extracted the Turkish lines from Sultan Walad’s works, and published them as his
Turkish poems.37 Yet the use of Turkish with Rumi is restricted to individual words
or lines, or else short blocks of lines inserted in the Persian poems, not stand-alone
poems, and on occasion Rumi indicates his comparative ignorance of Turkish.38
With Sultan Walad, there are a few complete short poems, but Turkish mainly
occurs inserted into the midst of his long Persian mathnawīs. Sultan Walad also
emphasises his inability to compose in Turkish.39 In addition to Turkish, both
Rumi’s and Sultan Walad’s works contain Greek and Arabic verses, and Sultan
Walad has a complete poem in Greek and several in Arabic.40 Thus Rumi and
Sultan Walad are no more or less Turkish poets than they are Greek ones. However,
the choice of language was not necessarily inspired simply by a desire to communi-
cate. Rather, the use of Arabic, Turkish and Greek in addition to Persian forms part
of the poetic design, with different languages being used to unveil different stages of

36
For Turkish in Rumi see M. Şerefettin [Yaltkaya], ‘Mevlana’da Türkçe Kelimeler ve Türkçe Şiirler’,
Türkiyat Mecmuası 4 (1934): 111–68, which is based on editions of Rumi that have now been
superseded and a rather unsystematic use of manuscripts available to the author; as was admitted by
even Mansuroğlu, ever anxious to find early examples of Turkish verse that he was, some of the
verses attributed by Yaltkaya to Rumi cannot be by him. See Mecdut Mansuroğlu, ‘Mevlana
Celaleddin Rumi’de Türkçe Beyit ve İbareler’, Türk Dili Araştırmaları Yıllığı (1954): 207–20; see
also the discussion in Lars Johanson, ‘Rumi and the Birth of Turkish Poetry’, Journal of Turkology 1,
no. 1 (1993): 23–37. Johanson does not discuss the presence of Turkish verses in Rumi’s works,
but remarks of Sultan Walad that his works ‘comprise the earliest important specimen of Turkish
poetry’.
37
Mecdut Mansuroğlu (ed.), Sultan Veled’in Türkçe Manzumeleri (Istanbul, 1958).
38
Johanson, ‘Rumi and the Birth of Turkish Poetry’, 24.
39
Franklin Lewis, ‘Soltan Valad and the Poetical Order: Framing the Ethos and Practice of Poetry in
the Mevlevi Tradition after Rumi’, in Kamran Talattof (ed.), Persian Language, Literature and
Culture: New Leaves, Fresh Looks (London, 2015), 26–30.
40
On the Greek verses in Rumi see R. Burguière and R. Mantran, ‘Quelques vers grecs du XIIIe siècle
en caractères arabes’, Byzantion 22 (1952): 62–80, and in Sultan Walad see Matthias Kappler, ‘Die
griechischen Verse aus dem Ibtida-name von Sultan Valad’, in M. Kappler, M. Kirchner and
P. Zieme (eds), Trans Turkic Studies: Festschrift in honour of Marcel Erdal (Istanbul, 2010), 379–97.
On the Arabic verses and more generally on the use of multiple languages in Rumi’s works see
Nargis Virani, ‘“I am the Nightingale of the Merciful”: Macaronic or Upside-Down? The Mulam-
ma‘āt of Jalal al-Din Rumi’, PhD thesis, Harvard University, 1999, esp. 159–60. Further useful
references to work on the Greek and Turkish elements in both poets may be found in Lewis, ‘Soltan
Valad and the Poetical Order’, 41, n. 28.
156 Literature and Religious Change

Sufi knowledge.41 Ultimately, the comparatively small quantities of their verse in

the Anatolian vernaculars do not form part of a project to communicate Sufi
knowledge to those who would otherwise fail to understand it, but rather serve a
symbolic purpose within a hierarchy of knowledge.
Thus the traditional dating of Turkish works to the thirteenth century is
generally uncertain, and in many cases improbable. In fact, the fragments in
Rumi and Sultan Walad apart, our earliest credibly dated Turkish work from
Anatolia is not one of the well-known epics, but rather an obscure and still
unpublished religious text, the Behcetü’l-Hadayik.42 This manual of the basic
elements of the Muslim faith is preserved in several manuscripts, one of which
states that it was compiled in the late thirteenth century:
I saw many brothers, who desired this science of preaching, and studied it, but preferred
Turkish to Persian. They asked me to write a book on this science in their tongue, and that
I should compose it with subtle points and fine parallelisms so that their wish would be
accepted. I saw their desire for this science, I accepted their wish and made this book,
I named it the Behcetü’l-Hadayik fi Mev‘izetü’l-Halayik . . . I started to write it in Karahisar
Develi, in 669[/1270–1], finishing it in 685[/1286–7]; may God forgive [me], Fakhr al-
Din b. Mahmud b. al-Husayn b. Mahmud al-Tabrizi, my parents, and all the believers. . .43

The manuscript containing this passage with the name of the author is rather
later, dating to 930/1524; confirmation that the text was circulating in the period
comes from the Bursa manuscript dated 703/1303, written in Eastern Turkish,
but which omits reference to the translator al-Tabrizi.44
The translator’s name al-Tabrizi suggests his association with the Ilkhanid capital.
Tabriz had long been a principal conduit of Islam into Anatolia. In the early
thirteenth century Tabrizi merchants and artisans had played a prominent role in
the pious bourgeoisie of Konya who promoted the Islamisation of the city through
the construction of mosques and caravanserais, while in the mid-thirteenth century
we find Tabriz artisans participating in Konya’s futuwwa organisations, which

41
See Virani, ‘“I am the Nightingale of the Merciful”,’ Chapter 7.
42
On the work in general see Mustafa Erkan, ‘Behcetü’l-Hadȃik,’ TDVİA, vol. 5, 346–8, and on the
date see Mustafa Koç, ‘Anadolu’da İlk Türkçe Telif Eser’, Bilig 57 (2011): 159–74.
43
Ve bir nice karındaşlar gördüm, bu va’z ilmi içinde ragbet ve aña yavlak talibleri ammâ Pârsî
dilinden Türk diline râgıblarını. Ve benden dilediler kim bularuñ dilince bu fen içre bir kitâb
eyleyem, nükte ve nezâyir birle söyleyem kim bularuñ dilegi kabûl ola. Ve ben dahı bularuñ bu ilm
içinde ragbet[in] gördüm, dileklerin kabûl kıldum, bu kitâbı eyledüm, Behcetü’l-hadâyık ve
Mev’ize’l-halâyık diyü ad virdüm . . . İbtidâ Karahisâr Develü’de yazdum, târîh sene tis’a ve sittîne
ve sitte-mi’edeyidi tâ der-sene hamse semânîne ve sitte-mi’e bolanca ki Fahrüddîn bin Mahmûd
ibni’l-Hüseyn ibni Mahmûd et-Tebrîzî gaferallâhu lehû ve li-vâlideyhi ve li’l-mü’minîne ve’l-
mü’minâti. Transcription from Koç, ‘Anadolu’da ilk Türkçe Telif Eser’, 167.
44
Bursa, İnebey Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, MS Kurşunluoğlu 99.
 The Emergence of Literary Turkish 157

functioned as another means by which Islam spread.45 There is, then, nothing
especially surprising about a Tabrizi playing such a role in spreading Islam in
Anatolia, but his location in Karahisar Develi is intriguing. Far from the traditional
political and cultural centres of Anatolia, Karahisar Develi (modern Afyonkarahisar)
was a fort on the western frontier, incorporated into the Seljuq state only at the
beginning of the thirteenth century.46 During the 1270s, the surrounding region had
been convulsed by fighting between Mongols and the Turkmen rebels who sup-
ported Jimri, while the Seljuqs’ Germiyanid allies had settled in the vicinity. Yet there
was also development in the region as a result of the investment of various members of
Ilkhanid Anatolia’s political elite. Karahisar’s Ulu Cami was only built in 1272,
during the period when the Behcetü’l-Hadayik was being composed, and the vizier
Fakhr al-Din ‘Ali and his descendants, whose appanage it was, sponsored other
building works there. Moreover, Nur al-Din b. Jaja, the Mongol governor of Kırşehir
in central Anatolia owned agricultural estates on the western frontier region and had
invested in caravanserais in nearby Eskişehir.47 The Behcetü’l-Hadayik, our earliest
known Anatolian text, thus points to two factors that were important in the
development of Anatolian Turkish, which we will see reflected in other works: the
formation of new cultural centres in obscure, hitherto peripheral locations, and
the background of Ilkhanid political domination.

EARLY FOURTEENTH-CENTURY TURKISH LITERARY

CENTRES AND PATRONS

The early fourteenth century witnessed the emergence of a substantial Turkish

literary tradition. One of its most famous representatives, the wandering minstrel

45
Chapter 3, pp. 138–9; Peacock, ‘Islamisation in Medieval Anatolia’, 143–4.
46
Feridun Emecen, ‘Afyonkarahisar’, TDVİA, vol. 1, 443–6. Karahisar Develi was identified by Koç
(‘Anadolu’da ilk Türkçe Telif Eser’, 167) with a town that bore that name in Ottoman times
outside Kayseri. However, it is clear from Ibn Bibi that in the thirteenth century by Karahisar
Develi modern Afyonkarahisar is meant. See Ibn Bibi, al-Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya (Ankara), 657;
(Tehran), 567, where Karahisar Develi is mentioned as a town in the region of Honaz and
Ladhiq; also ibid., 599, 625; see also Aqsara’i, Musamarat al-Akhbar, 311, where Karahisar Develi
is mentioned as the appanage of the sons of Fakhr al-Din ‘Ali, which we know to have been at
Afyonkarahisar.
47
For building at Afyonkarahisar see Emecen, ‘Afyonkarahisar’. For the development of the western
frontier see Peacock, ‘The Seljuqs of Rum and the Turkmen of the Byzantine Frontier’, 278–81; for
Nur al-Din b. Jaja and his building activities see Judith Pfeiffer, ‘Protecting Private Property vs.
Negotiating Political Authority: Nur al-Din b. Jaja and His Endowments in Thirteenth Century
Anatolia’, in Robert Hillenbrand, A. C. S. Peacock and Firuza Abdullaeva (eds), Ferdowsi, the
Mongols and the History of Iran: Art, Literature and Culture from Early Islam to Qajar Persia
(London, 2013), 147–65.
158 Literature and Religious Change

Yunus Emre, is also associated with the western frontier region in the early
fourteenth century, in particular the area around Eskişehir or Bolu. Yunus Emre’s
poems were orally transmitted, the earliest manuscript dating to the mid-fifteenth
century,48 and our main sources for his life are Bektashi traditions about him that
formed only in the fifteenth century. Indeed, his dates are far from certain. While
some Ottomans in the sixteenth century remembered him as an early fourteenth-
century poet,49 Taşköprizade, the sixteenth-century biographer, made him a
contemporary of Bayezid I, putting him in the late fourteenth century.50 The
aim of these later authors was to associate prestigious figures from Anatolia’s
literary and intellectual history with the early Ottoman state, making any dates
they give highly suspect.51 Nor is it clear how much of the extensive corpus of
poetry attributed to Yunus Emre is actually by him. Rather than seeing the poems
as the work of a single individual, his Divan may represent more a sort of popular
collection of Sufi poetry dating to broadly the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
It is similarly hard to date or place Kaygusuz Abdal, another of the early Turkish
poets, although he was probably active in the late fourteenth to early fifteenth
centuries, and although the attribution of the substantial corpus in his name is less
problematic, it unquestionably also reflects elements of oral transmission.52
We are on firmer ground with the written literary tradition that certainly did
emerge in the early fourteenth century, and was concentrated in two regions,
Kırşehir and Aydın. Kırşehir, located in the semi-steppe of central Anatolia, was

48
Most early manuscripts are undated, but none appear earlier than the fifteenth century. Staatsbi-
bliothek zu Berlin, MS Or. Oct. 2575 probably represents one of the earliest manuscripts.
49
In his article on a majmū‘a in his personal collection dating between 911/1505 and 926/1520,
Şinasi Tekin remarks on a marginal note that gives a date of 708/1308 for Yunus’s Diwan: ‘Yunus
Emre fermayud Divanı tarihidur 708’. However, given the late date of this manuscript, it cannot be
regarded as a reliable source for Yunus’s dates. See Şinasi Tekin, ‘İkinci Beyazid Devrine Ait Bir
Mecmua: Farsça Mektuplar; Kenzü’l-Beliga, İkinci Murad’a Sunulan Bir Mesnevi: Tarikatname,
Yunus Emre’nin Şiirleri’, Journal of Turkish Studies/Türklük Bilgisi Araştırmaları Dergisi 3 (1979):
254. Otherwise, the main evidence for an early dating of Yunus Emre is a note in a majmū‘a dating
to the late sixteenth century, which contains a series of chronological including the statement: ‘the
death of Yunus Emre, year 720, age 82’ (published by Adnan Sadık Erzi, ‘Türkiye Kütüphaneler-
inden Notlar ve Vesikalar: Yunus Emre’nin Hayatı Hakkında Bir Vesika’, Belleten XIV, Sayı 53
(1950): 85–105). For reflections on the problems of the corpus see Barbara Flemming, ‘Yunus
Emre’nin Eserlerinin Metinsel Tarihinin Bazı Yönleri’, Uluslararası Yunus Emre Sempozyumu
Bildirileri (Ankara, 1995), 355–62; for another recently discovered early manuscript see Zeynep
Oktay Uslu, ‘Yunus Emre Şiirleri ve Kemal Ümmî’nin Kırk Armağan’ının 15. Yüzyıla Ait
Bilinmeyen Bir Yazması Üzerine,’ Journal of Turkish Studies 50 (2018): 388–98.
50
Taşköprizade, al-Shaqa’iq al-Nu‘maniyya, ed. Muhammad Tabataba’i Bihbahani (Tehran,
2010). 54.
51
Cf. Peacock, ‘Two Sufis of Ilkhanid Anatolia and their Patrons’.
52
See Oktay, ‘Layers of Mystical Meaning’; Karamustafa, ‘Kaygusuz Abdal’.
 The Emergence of Literary Turkish 159

home to the poets Gülşehri53 and Aşık Paşa, who both composed long mathnawīs
on Sufi themes in Turkish (and in Gülşehri’s case in Persian as well), while in
Aydın, Turkish translations of Arabic and Persian religious texts were sponsored
by the local Turkmen dynasty. We will examine the formation of Turkish
literature in each of these regions in turn.
Prior to the emergence of Turkish textual production in Kırşehir, there is some
evidence of literary activity in the town under Ilkhanid rule (but no earlier) in the
form of the copying of texts. A number of Arabic manuscripts have colophons
stating they were copied in Kırşehir, including fiqh texts such as the introductory
work on jurisprudence by the well-known Transoxianan jurist al-Sadr al-Shahid,
Sharh al-Jami‘ al-Saghir (copied 671/1272 for a faqīh from Akşehir) (Plate 7),54
and a work on the differences between madhhabs (dated 663/1264-5)
(Fig. 4.1).55
The latter is a particularly finely written manuscript by a scribe from Erzurum;
this suggests that Kırşehir was becoming a cultural centre that could attract talent
from elsewhere in the region. Persian is less well attested, but we do have a
manuscript of Zawzani’s Masadir al-Lugha, a work in Persian on Arabic vocabu-
lary, copied in Kırşehir in 707/1307–8.56 Interestingly, this manuscript has a few
interlinear and marginal translations in Turkish as well, although they are less easy
to date and were clearly added by a second hand. It seems likely that other Persian
literary texts circulated in Kırşehir, as Gülşehri and Aşık Paşa were influenced by
Persian originals and in 701/1301–2 Gülşehri composed a long Persian math-
nawī, the Falaknama, which deals with Sufi themes and was dedicated to the
Ilkhan Ghazan.57
The earliest datable original work from Kırşehir is Gülşehri’s Turkish Mantı-
ku’t-Tayr, composed 717/1317, which is loosely based on Attar’s Persian Sufi
mathnawī of the same title, but so many alterations are made by Gülşehri that his

53
Gülşehir, which the poet’s nisba suggests was his home town, is now a village in the region, but in
the middle ages it also seems to have been used near-synonymously for Kırşehir. See Elvan Çelebi,
Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye, l. 1175; Cevat Hakkı Tarım, Tarihte Kırşehri-Gülşehri ve Babailer-Ahiler-
Bektaşiler (Istanbul, 1948), 18–19.
54
Süleymaniye, MS Fatih 1545. This work was copied by Abu’l-Hasan Nu‘man b. Mursal al-Rifqi for
the library of al-mawlā al-sadr al-kabīr al-imām b. al-imām malik al-fuqahā’ mafkhar al-‘ulamā’
majma‘ al-fad ā’il Abī’l-‘Alā _Mahmūd b. Ghāzī al-Aqshahrī. Despite his grandiose titles, this work is
copied in an_ unattractive cursive
_ naskh.
55
Konya, Yusuf Ağa Kütüphanesi, MS 7470, Nazm al-Khilafiyyat copied in Kırşehir in 663/1264–5
by ‘Umar b. Mustafa b. Mahmud al-Arzan al-Rumi.
56
Süleymaniye, MS Çelebi Abdullah 380, copied by Musa b. al-Khalil.
57
On this work see Selim Kuru, ‘Portrait of a Shaykh as Author in Fourteenth-Century Anatolia:
Gülşehri and His Falaknāma’, in Peacock and Yıldız (eds), Islamic Literature and Intellectual Life,
173–96.
160 Literature and Religious Change

Nazm al-Khilafiyyat. Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı, Konya Yusuf Ağa
FIG. 4.1
Kütüphanesi, MS No. 7470, copied in Kırşehir in 663/1264–5 by ‘Umar b. Mustafa
b. Mahmud al-Arzan al-Rumi.

poem must be considered more than simply a translation. Only nine of the thirty-
one tales are directly derived from the Persian original, with most of the rest
drawing on stories in the works of Sana’i, Rumi, Nizami and Sa‘di.58 Gülşehri’s
authorial voice is ever present, reminding his audience of his claims to be
considered a classic poet, an equal to these Persian-language predecessors, and a
great shaykh in his own right. Nor is there a single obvious model for Aşık Paşa’s
Garibname (composed 730/1330); while doubtless the idea of writing a long Sufi
poem is inspired by Rumi’s great work, in contrast to the diffuseness of the
Persian Mathnawi, with its profusion of stories, both pious and ribald, and lack of
apparent organisation, the Garibname is tightly structured into ten sections each
subdivided into ten subchapters, which are generally arranged around ethical
advice that is delivered direct without the sugaring of anecdotes.
Contrary to the arguments of those who would propose a long tradition of
Turkish written literature, our early fourteenth-century writers vigorously assert

58
Kuru, ‘Gülşehri, the Seventh Sheikh’, 282.
 The Emergence of Literary Turkish 161

that they are doing something new. Appealing to his audience not to criticise him
for writing in Turkish, Aşık Paşa writes:
Although this book has been composed in Turkish, the stages of the innermost
meanings (ma‘ni menzili) have become known.
For you should know the stages of the road (yol menzilleri). Do not criticise the
languages of the Turk and Tajik.
Every language had its own rules and principles; all minds were concentrated on them.
Previously no one paid attention to the Turkish language, no one ever had affection
for the Turks.
The Turks did not know those languages, nor the narrow path and the great stages.
This Garibname was composed so that people of this language would also know the
innermost meanings,
So that they would find the innermost meanings in Turkish, and so that Turk and
Tajik would become travelling companions.
‘For we have not sent a prophet save with the tongue of his people’ [Q.14.4]
So that they do not criticise each other on the way, and looking at the language
[alone] disapprove of the meaning.
So that Turks should no longer be deprived, they should understand God through
the Turkish language.59

Thus Aşık Paşa’s project is to make Sufi knowledge accessible to those previously
deprived of it, revealing the yol menzilleri, the stages of the road (tarīqa), in other
_
words the stages on the Sufi journey to union with the divine. As he puts it in the
prose introduction to the Garibname:
Know that in our time, most of the people do not understand the innermost meanings as
they should and cannot pick a rose from the garden of knowledge, nor can they hear the
song of the nightingale in the rose garden. Necessity obliged that a book be composed in
Turkish and arranged in verse, so that it benefit both the ordinary people and the elite
(‘amm u hass). Verse:
Although it was composed in Turkish, nonetheless the stages of innermost meaning have
become known;
In order that you know the stages of the way, do not criticise the
Turk and Tajik (Persian) languages.60

At the same time Aşık Paşa should not be taken completely at face value, for he
had been preceded by Gülşehri, whose Mantıku’t-Tayr was composed in the same
place some thirteen years previously. Despite Aşık Paşa’s insistence on the use of
Turkish, his vocabulary is often highly Arabised, and the text is furnished with

59
Aşık Paşa, Garib-name: Tıpkıbasım, Karşılaştırmalı Metin, ve Aktarma, ed. Kemal Yavuz (Ankara,
2000), II/2, p. 952–5, ll. 10558–10566.
60
Ibid., I/i, pp. 6–7.
162 Literature and Religious Change

numerous Qur’anic quotations that are often left untranslated. This is, then, not
simply a question of linguistic necessity, for the work would only have been
comprehensible to an audience with sufficient education to understand at least the
Qur’an and the numerous Sufi technical terms. Gülşehri is rather less forthcoming
about his reasons for choosing to write in Turkish, although he claims it to be
superior even to Arabic.61 In neither case is there evidence of any patron for these
works, which raises the question of the intended audience. Although this is at no
point made absolutely explicit by our texts, the contemporary social setting in
Kırşehir is suggestive.
Prior to the Mongol period, Kırşehir had been a place of little to no signifi-
cance, first appearing in the historical record among the estates given to the
deposed Mengücekid ruler Bahram Shah in 1228.62 Otherwise, the sources are
largely silent over its history in the first half of the thirteenth century, and it
certainly played no role as a cultural or literary centre. After the Mongol invasions,
Kırşehir’s surrounding steppe-lands provided a winter pastureland for the Mongol
armies, which were posted there in large numbers,63 and as a result this previously
insignificant town rose to a status of some importance. The economic develop-
ment of Kırşehir was encouraged by the Ilkhanid governor, Nur al-Din b. Jaja, a
devotee of Rumi who endowed religious buildings in the town.64 These are
attested by his famous waqfiyya, which concludes with a Mongolian-language
summary, probably written to deter Mongol soldiers who might try to seize parts
of the waqf.65 Kırşehir’s prosperity continued well after Ibn Jaja’s death; writing in
740/1340, Hamdallah Mustawfi described it as ‘a large town with great buildings
and an excellent climate’.66
Islam spread rapidly among the Mongol soldiery, many of whom embraced
Islam long before the Ilkhans themselves,67 and the Mongol military’s role in the
process of Islamisation is also suggested by Nur al-Din’s pious activities

61
Gülşehri, Mantiku’t-Tayr, vol. 2, 654-7, ll. 4409–4421.
62
On the history of Kırşehir see Franz Taeschner, ‘Kırşehir, ein altes Kulturzentrum aus Spät- und
Nachseldschukischer Zeit’, in Necati Lugal Armağanı (Ankara, 1968), 577–92, and İlhan Şahin,
‘Kırşehir’, TDVİA, vol. 25, 481–5; the work by Tarım, Tarihte Kırşehri-Gülşehri remains occasion-
ally useful for our period.
63
On Kırşehir as a qishlāq see Aqsara’i, Musamarat, 113; also Pfeiffer, ‘Reflections’, 376, n. 36 for the
memory of this in a much later source.
64
On Ibn Jaja’s affiliation to Rumi see Aflaki, Manaqib, I, pp. 495–6; on his building activities see
Judith Pfeiffer, ‘Mevlevi-Bektashi Rivalries and the Islamisation of Public Space in Late Seljuq
Anatolia’, in A. C. S. Peacock, Bruno De Nicola and Sara Nur Yıldız (eds), Islam and Christianity in
Medieval Anatolia (Farnham, 2015), esp. 310–12, 326–7.
65
Temir, Kırşehir Emiri Nur el-Din’in 1272 Tarihli Arapça-Moğolca Vakfiyesi.
66
Hamdallah Mustawfi, Nuzhat al-Qulub, ed. Muhammad Dabir-siyaqi (Tehran, 1381), 151.
67
See Peter Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World: From Conquest to Conversion (New Haven,
2017), 337–42.
 The Emergence of Literary Turkish 163

patronising religious buildings in this previously insignificant and remote region.

Given that Turkish was the lingua franca of the Mongol armies, it is possible
soldiers based in the Kırşehir region may have constituted part of the audience for
these early Turkish works.68 This might explain Aşık Paşa’s insistence on martial
values such as heroism (alplık), where the true Sufi is enjoined to be an alp,69 and
both Turks and Mongols are mentioned among the groups who mourned Aşık
Paşa’s death by his son Elvan Çelebi.70 Gülşehri’s dedication of his Persian
Falaknama to Ghazan also suggests the positive relationship between local Sufis
and Mongol authorities.71
A further audience may have been futuwwa groups, of which Kırşehir was also
one of the main centres. Akhi Evren, patron-saint of the fityān, was from Kırşehir;
we have little verifiable historical information about him beyond this, other than
the reputation he left in the memories of later generations. Gülşehri, his disciple
who spent fifty years in the saint’s presence, dedicated a mathnawī to his vita, and
the fityān are clearly a major component, if not the major component, of
Gülşehri’s audience in the Mantıku’t-Tayr (see Chapter 3). Futuwwa circles,
which particularly valued multilingual communication, may well have been
attracted to this new literary use of Turkish. Suhrawardi, for instance, remarks
in his futuwwa-manual that
the man of futuwwa should endeavour to learn different words in different languages such
as Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Greek, Hindi and other languages because the wise men have
taken into account all human languages, and this is worthwhile knowledge. It happens
many times that a man needs to know a single word, and he gets much benefit if he knows
and understands [the meaning] of that word. And there are many occasions that through a
single word he is able to save his soul from the hands of a tyrant or an impure person. But if
he does not know that word then he may be in danger and [he may] lose his life.72

68
On Turkish as a lingua franca in the Mongol armies see John Masson Smith, ‘Mongol Manpower
and Persian Population’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 18/iii (1975):
295–6; A. P. Martinez, ‘Changes in Chancellery Languages and Language Changes in General in
the Middle East, with Particular Reference to Iran in the Arab and Mongol Period’, Archivum
Eurasiae Medii Aevi 7 (1987–91): 144, 149–50; Sümer, ‘Anadolu’da Mog·ollar’, 21–5; Gül, Doğu ve
Güneydoğu Anadolu’da, 176–81; Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World, 394–5; see also Paul
D. Buell, ‘The Mongol Empire and Turkicization: The Evidence of Food and Foodways’, in
Reuven Amitai and David O. Morgan (eds), The Mongol Empire and Its Legacy (Leiden, 2000), esp.
200–3; on conversion among the Mongol military see Chapter 1.
69
Aşık Paşa, Garib-name, II/2, p. 549ff, also 573.
70
Elvan Çelebi, Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye, l. 1553 ‘Şehrī vu ecnebī vü Türk ü Mog·ul/Yandı yandur[ur]
‘ak·l u cān [u] gönül.’ Also on Mongols in the Kırşehir region see Sümer, ‘Anadolu’da Moğollar’, 67,
116, 129–30.
71
Kuru, ‘Portrait of a Shaykh as Author’, 182–3, 188–90.
72
Suhrawardi, Kitab fi’l-futuwwat, trans. in Lloyd Ridgeon, Jawanmardi: A Sufi Code of Honour
(Edinburgh, 2011), 81.
164 Literature and Religious Change

Choice of language was also closely connected to the claims of Sufis. Rumi, like
earlier mystics, had argued that divine revelation was a continuous process, and
that God remained in direct communication with his Friends on earth in a variety
of languages.73 Rumi challenged the traditional primacy of Arabic, although the
idea that God’s communication with this world had not come to end with
Muhammad but continued was widespread (if contested) among earlier Sufis.
Rumi’s Mathnawi, which is evidently intended to represent part of this continu-
ous communication from God, merely draws this argument to its logical conclu-
sion through being written in Persian, the colloquial language of Konya, and thus
was intended to be a ‘Qur’an in Persian’.74 Rumi’s influence on both Gülşehri
and Aşık Paşa is clear. Gülşehri invokes Rumi and Sultan Walad as his inspiration
among the six great shaykhs beside whom he aspires to be counted, along with
‘Attar, Nizami, Sana’i, and Sa‘di.75 Some stories in both his Persian Falaknama
and his Turkish Mantıku’t-Tayr are adapted from Rumi’s Mathnawi.76 Aşık Paşa
was also strongly influenced by Rumi,77 and some verses have been identified as
more or less direct translations of lines from Rumi’s Mathnawi.78 The Garibname
is written in the same metre as the Mathnawi, ramal musaddas.79 Thus the use of
Turkish by Aşık Paşa and Gülşehri can be seen as simply an extension of Rumi’s
argument for the continuity of divine revelation in the vernacular. Aşık Paşa
quotes exactly the same Qur’anic verse as Rumi to justify his use of the vernacular:
‘God has not sent a prophet but with the tongue of his people.’ Similarly, in the
work by Aşık Paşa’s son, Elvan Çelebi’s Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye, composed in 758/
1360, the poet’s great-uncle, the saint Halis Paşa, is praised as ‘knowing the
language of the peoples of this world, giving guidance to the people of the
world’.80 Elvan even quotes the prophet Abraham [Khalil] as talking in Turkish.81
The use of Turkish was thus consistent with a long-standing train of thought
in Sufism, and Mevlevism and futuwwa in particular. It is not merely – or even

73
On this subject see, with detailed quotations from the Mathnawi and other texts by Rumi and his
circle, Javid Mojaddedi, Beyond Dogma: Rumi’s Teachings on Friendship with God and Other Sufi
Theories (Oxford, 2012), 63–90.
74
See further Chapter 2.
75
Gülşehri, Mantiku’t-Tayr, vol. 2, pp. 378–9, ll. 2532–5, pp. 384–7, l. 2579–87.
76
Ibid., vol. 1, pp. xxii–xxv; Aziz Merhan, ‘Gülşehri’nin Mantıku’t-Tayr (Kuş Dili) Mesnevisinde
Mevlana Etkisi’, Türk Kültürü, Edebiyatı ve Sanatında Mevlâna ve Mevlevîlik – Bildiriler (Konya,
2007), pp. 101–10.
77
Fuad Köprülü, ‘Aşık Pasa’, İslam Ansiklopedisi, vol. 1, 701–6, at p. 704.
78
Aşık Paşa, Garib-name, vol. I/1, pp. li–lii.
79
Köprülü, ‘Aşık Paşa’, 704.
80
Elvan Çelebi, Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye, l. 742 ‘Bu cihāñ ḫ alk· ınuñ bilen dilini/Ol cihān ḫ alk· ınuñ viren
yolını’.
81
Ibid., p. 110, and p. 114, ll. 1315, 1328.
 The Emergence of Literary Turkish 165

necessarily mainly – a tool of communication with a local audience, but rather the
author’s means of testifying to his own unique relationship with God as a channel
of his communication – to be, in Gülşehri’s words, an ‘alem şeyhi (world shaykh)
not simply a şar şeyhi (town shaykh).82 Thus even in the lack of any patronage, the
choice of a vernacular can serve a role in discourses of power – indeed, in asserting
the most important form of power of all, religious power.
Simultaneously with the development of this Sufi vernacular literature, else-
where in Anatolia Turkish started to be patronised by Turkmen rulers. The most
significant of these early patrons of Turkish was the beylik of Aydın in south-
western Anatolia.83 The first Muslim ruler of Aydın, Mubariz al-Din Mehmed
Beg (r. 708/1308–734/1334), originated from the western frontier region, having
served the Germiyanids – roughly the area where the Behcetü’l-Hadayik was
written. In around 1308, Mehmed Beg seized Ayasuluk (modern Selçuk) from
its Turkish ruler Sasa Beg, who had himself only recently captured it from the
Byzantines, in 1304. Mehmed Beg himself ruled from the town of Birgi, but
Ayasuluk remained an important city under Aydınid rule, especially in the later
fourteenth century. By the second decade of the fourteenth century, Aydın had
emerged as a significant power in the region. Its close commercial ties with the
Mediterranean and Aegean world did not stop its rulers from representing
themselves as ghāzīs, warriors for the faith. They also patronised the production
of literary works in Turkish, above all translations.
Given its very recent incorporation into the dār al-Islām, there is no earlier
evidence for copying or literary activity in Aydın before the translation of Abu
Ishaq al-Thaʿalabi’s (d. 427/1035) ʿAraʾis al-Majalis fi Qisas al-Anbiyaʾ, a collec-
tion of stories of the Prophets, composed in around 712/1312–719/1319.84
Several more works were commissioned by Mehmed Beg’s son and successor
Umur Beg (r. 734/1334–748/1348). A Turkish version of ‘Attar’s stories of Sufi
saints, the Tezkiretü’l-Evliya, was translated for Umur Beg, who, like his father,
was a devotee of Rumi.85 These works resemble in theme the Sufi literature of
north-western Anatolia, but other works produced under Aydınid patronage are
quite distinctive and reflect the court milieu in which they were composed.
A medical treatise, the Tühfe-i Mübarizi, which summarised Galenic-Avicennan
medicine, was translated from the Arabic by a certain Hekim Bereket and
dedicated to Mehmed Beg, and may thus be considered an early representative

82
See Kuru, ‘Gülşehri, Seventh Sheikh’, and Chapter 4.
83
For a discussion of literary patronage in Aydın see Sara Nur Yıldız, ‘Aydınid Court Literature and
the Formation of an Islamic Identity in Fourteenth-Century Western Anatolia’, in Peacock and
Yıldız (eds), Islamic Literature and Intellectual Life, 197–241.
84
Ibid., 201–2.
85
Ibid., 202–3; see also Chapter 2, p. 00.
166 Literature and Religious Change

of an emergent Turkish-language courtly literature.86 Umur Beg evinced similar

interests, and a translation of Ibn Baytar’s compendium of pharmacological-
botanical information, the Müfredat, was compiled for him.87 A Turkish transla-
tion of the moralistic fables of Kalila wa Dimna, which often served as a mirror for
princes, was dedicated to Umur Beg. Under one of Umur Beg’s successors, İsa
Beg (r. 760/1360–792/1390), another such work of courtly literature, Nizami’s
Persian poem Khusraw u Shirin, was adapted into Turkish by the poet Fahri in
768/1367.88
Some evidence of the circumstances under which the Aydınid Turkish works
were composed is given by Ibn Battuta, who visited the Aydınid court at Birgi in
the 1330s. He portrays Mehmed Beg as profoundly pious, and recalls how he was
called on to explain hadith for the ruler, who immediately commissioned a
translation:
[Mehmed Beg the ruler] came to us one day in the afternoon, and the faqīh sat at the centre
of the majlis, and I to his left, and the sultan to the right of the faqīh. This was because of
the esteem of the faqīh among the Turks, and he asked me to write for him some Prophetic
hadith. I wrote them for him, and the faqīh showed them to him immediately. [Mehmed
Beg] ordered him to write a commentary [sharh] on them in Turkish.89
_
It is interesting that the commentary is written, not simply orally explained,
reflecting the general enthusiasm for translation in Aydın. The beylik’s links across
the Mediterranean, especially with Mamluk Egypt, must have encouraged and
facilitated the adoption and adaptation of classics of Islamic literature in Aydın.
There seems to have been strong Mamluk influence on local culture, both in
terms of architecture and also scholarship. One local scholar, educated in Cairo,
was Hacı Paşa, who in the late fourteenth century returned to Aydın from the
Mamluk realm and composed a rich array of scholarly treatises on medicine, logic
and kalām in both Arabic and Turkish.90
That this translation movement was about more than simply making know-
ledge accessible is indicated by the fact that throughout the Aydınid period we
know works continued to be composed in Persian and Arabic, both for the court
and beyond.91 For instance, Yusuf b. Muhammad b. Ibrahim al-Nuri, author of a

86
Ibid., 206–10.
87
Ibid., 210–12.
88
Ibid., 205.
89
Ibn Battuta, Rihla, 301; trans. Gibb, 441.
90
Yıldız, ‘Aydınid Court Literature,’ 213–17; Sara Nur Yıldız, ‘From Cairo to Ayasuluk: Hacı Paşa
and the Transmission of Islamic Learning to Western Anatolia in the Late Fourteenth Century’,
Journal of Islamic Studies 25 (2014): 263–97.
91
Yıldız, ‘Aydınid Court Literature’, passim.
 The Emergence of Literary Turkish 167

work entitled Kashf al-Asrar ‘ala Lisan al-Tuyur, tells us that he translated it from
Arabic into Persian at the request of the Aydınid İsa Beg.92 Similarly, a court poet,
‘Imad b. Mas‘ud al-Samarqandi, composed panegyrics in Arabic and Persian for
İsa Beg that draw on models from the Injuid successor state to the Ilkhans. Al-
Samarqandi’s poems are collected in a majmū‘a destined for İsa Beg’s attention
(MS Tire Necipoǧlu Kütüphanesi DV 812, late fourteenth century), which also
contains extracts of prose works of interest to the Aydınid court, such as the
sayings of ‘Ali b. Abi Talib, Sufi and medical texts. Although there are a handful of
Turkish glosses, Persian predominates as the language of explanation, and the
Arabic verses are accompanied by Persian interlinear translations.93 Persian thus
remained the principal literary language of the Aydınid court even in the late
fourteenth century.
With the exception of the translation of Ibn Baytar’s Müfredat, all these
Aydınid texts, whether in Arabic, Persian or Turkish, exist in very few manuscript
copies, indicating they were never destined for a wide audience, but rather were
restricted to the court, in contrast to the Kırşehir works that were widely copied,
especially Aşık Paşa’s Garibname, which survives in over 100 manuscripts.94 Thus
the choice to commission Turkish translations was not simply about making
knowledge comprehensible, otherwise the same rulers would not have also com-
missioned Persian versions of some texts. However, there does seem to be a
difference in the type of text selected for translation or composition in each
language. While the Turkish works from the Aydınid court were all translations
or adaptations of classics of Persian and Arabic literature, the Persian compositions
tend to be extremely obscure, little-known texts. Al-Nuri’s Kashf al-Asrar, men-
tioned above, is a work describing how the tongues of animals recognise the unity
of God, and thus is distinctly Sufi in inspiration. Yet if the text does have an
Arabic original as al-Nuri claims, and this is not simply a literary fiction, it must
be a little-known, largely forgotten text. Samarqandi’s own poems are unknown
from any source other than the sole extant majmū‘a, apparently in his own hand,
that preserves them. Although none of the Turkish works gives much detail as to
the circumstances of its composition, it seems clear that what we have here is a
conscious attempt to appropriate knowledge, to put a Turkish and Aydınid stamp
on Persian and Arabic literary classics and thus to signify the Aydınid rulers’
participation in and support for mainstream Islamic civilisation and literary

92
Istanbul, Beyazit Devlet Kütüphanesi, MS Veliyuddin 1630, fol. 65a; Ateş, ‘Hicri VI.–VIII. (XII.–
XIV.) Asırlarda Anadolu’da Farsça Eserler’, 127–8.
93
Yıldız, ‘Aydınid Court Literature’, 218–30.
94
The Garibname survives in at least 116 copies, see Aşık Paşa, Garib-name, vol. I/1, lvi.
168 Literature and Religious Change

culture. The composition of the Turkish works in this instance thus seems to
support Pollock’s argument that vernacularisation was a conscious political choice.
Elsewhere in the courts of early fourteenth-century Anatolia, the use of
Turkish seems to have been sparse. Just to the north of the Aydınid realm,
Yakub b. Yahşi Beg, of the Karasi dynasty that controlled Bergama, commis-
sioned a work on the basic elements of Islam in Turkish in around 1328–42.95
Possibly the employment of Turkish here may reflect a practical desire for an
accessible version of a religious work. There is rather little evidence for Turkish
literature at the early Ottoman court. A certain Tursun Fakih, whom the
fifteenth-century writer Aşık Paşazade describes as a contemporary of the first
Ottoman ruler Osman (r. c. 699/1300–724/1324), and was thus active in the
first years of the fourteenth century, penned Turkish mathnawīs orientated
towards a jihad theme, which are discussed in Chapter 5, although their precise
dating and attribution remains uncertain. It is not until the second half of the
fourteenth century that the courts of beyliks elsewhere in Anatolia regularly
started to patronise Turkish. One of the earliest of these works was written in
762/1362, a Maktel-i Hüseyin, a mathnawī dealing with the death of the
Prophet’s grandson Husayn, for Bayezid Şah, ruler of the Candarid beylik of
Kastamonu in north-central Anatolia.96 Slightly later the Germiyanid beylik
became a centre of a literary production, patronising writers such as Şeyhoğlu
(742/1341–1409), who translated the Qabusnama into Turkish, and Ahmedi.97
It was here too that that we have the first unambiguous evidence for the use of
Turkish as an administrative language.

THE EMERGENCE OF TURKISH AS AN ADMINISTRATIVE LANGUAGE

AND THE RESILIENCE OF PERSIAN AND ARABIC

Two Germiyanid inscriptions are the earliest ones to employ Turkish in Anatolia.
One is the so called Taş Vakfiye, a thirty-line inscription dated 817/1417
recording the Germiyanid bey Yakub II’s endowment of a Külliye in Kütahya
(Fig. 4.2).98 More recently, a second, earlier inscription has come to light, also
from the Germiyanid territories. This is also a waqfiyya, albeit highly abridged,

95
Şinasi Tekin, ‘XIVüncü Yuzyıla ait bir İlm-i Hal: Risaletü’l-İslam’, Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde
des Morgenlandes 76, Festschrift Andreas Tietze zum 70. Geburtstag gewidmet von seinen Freunden
und Schülern (1986): 279–92.
96
Further on this text see Chapter 5, p. 210.
97
On early literary life under the Germiyanids see Mustafa Çetin Varlık, Germiyan-oğulları Tarihi
(1300–1429) (Ankara, 1974), 121–34; Rumeysa Kocadere, ‘Germiyanoğulları Beyliği’nde Edebi
Kültür ve Hayat’, Yüksek Lisans Tezi, Eskişehir University, 2014.
98
Varlık, Germiyan-ogulları Tarihi, 111, 147–9.
 The Emergence of Literary Turkish 169

The Taş Vakfiye in Kütahya.

FIG. 4.2
Author photograph

consisting of only eight lines, recording the endowment by Kurd Abdal, son of the
Germiyanid bey Süleyman Şah, of lands to the shrine at Seyitgazi, the cult centre
of Battal Ghazi. Dated 770/1369, this appears to be not only the oldest Turkish
inscription in Anatolia, but also the oldest inscription in Arabic-script Turkish
170 Literature and Religious Change

anywhere.99 It is striking that both Germiyanid documents are waqfiyyas, a type

of legal document that would normally be composed in Arabic, not Turkish, as it was
to the end of the Ottoman empire. In addition to later Arabic copies of other
Germiyanid waqfiyyas, we also have an original manuscript Arabic waqfiyya by Yakub
dating to 825/1422, suggesting that the epigraphic use of Turkish may have been an
exception to normal Germiyanid practice.100 A roughly contemporary waqfiyya from
Ottoman Bursa is also in Arabic.101 The use of Turkish for a type of document that
would conventionally be written in Arabic (or occasionally in Persian) is a striking
assertion of Turkish’s claims to now be a full equal of the classical Islamic languages,
as well as a deliberate appropriation by the Germiyanids of the classical Islamic idiom.
Turkish also started to be used in the Ottoman beylik as an administrative
language, although not for waqfiyyas. Here, however, problems of dating the
extant documents complicate matters. The earliest dated document from the
Ottoman beylik is a waqfiyya in Persian of 724/1324.102 We do have a Turkish
language document, a mülkname issued by Orhan Beg, dated 749/1348. If
authentic this would be the oldest use of Turkish for administrative purposes to
survive from Anatolia, but it is preserved only a later copy, clearly influenced by
the language of later times, and there are doubts about its authenticity.103 Other
Turkish-language documents purportedly from the early Ottoman period pre-
served by the sixteenth-century Feridun Beg seem to be translations or adaptations
from the famous Khwarazmshah chancery manual, al-Tawassul ila’l-Tarassul, and
are thus not authentic fourteenth-century Ottoman documents.104 More convin-
cing in terms of their authenticity, although again transmitted to us only in later
copies, are Ottoman documents (nişans) issued by Orhan in 754/1353 and 759/
1358,105 and a decree issued by Bayezid I dated 793/1390.106 Thus by the middle
of the fourteenth century, the Ottomans were using Turkish for at least some

99
Mehmet Tütüncü, ‘Türkiye’de en Eski Türkçe Kitabesi Eskişehir Seyitgazi Ilçesinde Bulunudu’,
Düşünce ve Tarih (May 2015), 16–23.
100
Feridun Nafiz Uzluk, ‘Germiyanoğlu Yakub II. Bey’in Vakfiyesi’, Vakıflar Dergisi 8 (1969):
71–111.
101
M. Tayyib Gökbilgin, ‘Murat I. Tesisleri ve Bursa İmareti Vakfiyesi’, Türkiyat Mecmuası (1953):
217–34, with a reproduction of the document, dated 787/1385, surviving in a copy from c. 1400.
102
İ. H. Uzunçarşılı, ‘Gazi Orhan Bey Vakfiyesi’, Belleten 5/19 (1941): 277–89; Lowry, The Nature of
the Early Ottoman State, 55–7.
103
For discussions see I. Beldiceanu-Steinherr, Recherches sur les actes des règnes des sultans Osman,
Orkhan et Murad I (Budapest, 1967), 106–10; Feridun M. Emecen, İlk Osmanlılar ve Batı
Anadolu Beylikler Dunyası (Istanbul, 2003), 187–92. On Feridun see Beldiceanu-Steinherr,
Recherches, 43–4, 59–60.
104
Beldiceanu-Steinherr, Recherches, 43–4, 59–60.
105
Paul Wittek, ‘Zu einigen fruhosmanischen Urkunden’, Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des
Morgenlandes 53 (1957): 300–13.
106
Lowry, The Nature of the Early Ottoman State, 62–3.
 The Emergence of Literary Turkish 171

administrative purposes. In short, by the second half of the fourteenth century,

Turkish was sometimes employed as an administrative language in the Ottoman
and Germiyanid beyliks in the far west of Anatolia; whether it was used for such
practical purposes elsewhere, such as Aydın, is unknown, as is the regularity with
which documents were written in it in the west.
In all cases, the use of Turkish up to the late fourteenth century was restricted to
these previously peripheral areas of Anatolia, places which in one way or another had
suddenly risen to prominence as a result of the Mongol invasions. In central Anatolia,
Persian remained the main literary language, with Arabic reserved for more scholarly
theological, legal or philosophical works. This was the case even in the Turkmen
principalities of central Anatolia; for example, the wandering Ilkhanid litterateur
Muhammad al-Tustari in 710/1310 dedicated an Arabic synopsis of cosmology and
philosophy, Al-Fusul al-Ashrafiyya fi l‘-Qawa‘id al-Burhaniyya to the Eşrefid ruler of
Beyşehir, Mubariz al-Din Muhammad b. Sulayman (r. 702/1302–721/1320).107
Equally, the petty amirs of the Hamidid beylik in south-central Anatolia commis-
sioned magnificent copies of Najm al-Din Razi’s Persian Sufi guide Mirsad al-‘Ibad.108
Persian (and to a lesser extent Arabic) dominated even, if not especially, in the
Karamanid territories. When an anonymous citizen of Karamanid-controlled Konya,
in the mid-fourteenth century, compiled notes on his town’s history, he did so in
Persian.109 Even at the Karamanid court, an astrological almanac produced in 771/
1369–70 was written in Persian,110 and other works copied in Konya and Karaman
are all in Arabic or Persian until the fifteenth century.111 Although one well-known
Turkish writer, Erzumulu Darir, was resident in Karaman for four years, in around
1391–5, he did not compose any works there: in fact all his patrons were at the
Mamluk courts of Syria and Egypt.112 Thus even at the end of the fourteenth
century, evidently a Turkish language writer still had difficulty establishing any
interest in his work in Karaman, the alleged heartland of the Turkish language; the
only exception may be a single qasīda by Dehhani that seems to be dedicated to the
_
Karamanid ‘Ala’ al-Din (r. 762/1361-8001398).113 The first substantial work in
Turkish dedicated to a Karamanid is Hatiboğlu Mehmed’s (c. 777/1375–after

107
The manuscript survives in an autograph: Ayasofya 2445.
108
Peacock, ‘The “Mirrors for Princes”’, 290; Jackson, ‘Patrons and Artists’, I, 183–204; for further
examples of Persian texts from the period see Ateş, ‘Hicri VI.–VIII. (XII.–XIV.)’.
109
Tarikh-i Al-i Saljuq dar Anatoli, ed. Nadira Jalali (Tehran, 1999).
110
Leiden Or 563.
111
This is represented by the standard corpus of legal texts, e.g. al-Bazdawi, Kanz al-Wusul ila Ma’rifat
al-Usul, copied in Larende in 733 by Harun b. Rumba b. Siraj b. Ya’qub al-Gurgurumi
(Süleymaniye, MS Fatih 1219).
112
On Darir’s works see Leyla Karahan, Erzurumlu Darir (Istanbul, 1995), and on his residence in
Karaman, ibid., 9.
113
Hoca Dehhânî Divanı, ed. Ersen Ersoy and Ümran Ay (Ankara, 2017), 26, 68.
172 Literature and Religious Change

838/1435) Ferahname, composed in 829/1426, some versions of which mention the

Karamanid İbrahim Beg as patron, but the author seems to have been born in the
Germiyanid lands.114 The earliest Turkish writer known from Karaman seems to be
the poet Karamanlı Ayni, born in Konya in around 839/1435 to 844/1440,115 long
after the emergence of Turkish at the courts of the Aydınids and Germiyanids.
There are few exceptions to this dominance of Persian in central Anatolia.
A Mevlevi writer, Yusuf-ı Meddah, composed a Turkish religious epic, Varka ve
Gülşah, which according to one eighteenth-century manuscript was composed or
copied in Sivas in 743/1342; however, the date of 770/1368 is given in other
manuscripts, which do not all mention any place, and one of which gives Bursa
instead of Sivas.116 Although it is clear that Yusuf-ı Meddah was active in the mid-
to late fourteenth century, the location of his activities must be regarded as
uncertain. The only other significant evidence for composition in Turkish in
central Anatolia are the poems of the ruler of Sivas and Kayseri, Qadi Burhan al-
Din Ahmad. Qadi Burhan al-Din’s Turkish Divan survives in a single manuscript,
despite his modern fame, although it seems his Arabic writings on Sufi philosophy
and fiqh were more widely circulated.117 It is telling that while his biographer
Astarabadi lavishly praises Qadi Burhan al-Din’s writings in Arabic and Persian
(the latter now lost to us), he makes no mention at all of his compositions in
Turkish. Moreover, even Qadi Burhan al-Din’s Turkish poetic works do not
represent simply an attempt to compose in the colloquial language of the region.
In fact two distinct dialects are used in his Divan, the tuyuǧs (quatrains) being
written in a distinctly more Eastern Turkish-influenced dialect.118
As late as the closing years of the fourteenth century, after roughly 100 years of
Turkish literary production, Astarabadi explained at the end of his biography of
Burhan al-Din Ahmad why he had composed the work in Persian:
Since the people of the country of Rum prefer the Persian language (zabān-i fārsī) and like
it, and all the inhabitants of this land speak Dari (darī qāyil wa nātiq), and all the proverbs,
_
orders, correspondence, accounting, registers, laws and so on are in this language. . .119

114
Hatice Şahin, ‘Hatiboğlu Ferah-name (Dil özellikleri, Metin, Söz dizini)’, PhD dissertation, İnönü
University, 1993; Mustafa Erkan, ‘Ferahname’, TDVİA, vol. 12, 359–60; J. Németh, ‘Das Ferah-
name des Ibn Hatib, Ein Osmanisches Gedicht aus dem XV Jahrhundert’, Monde Orientale 13
(1919):145–84.
115
On him see A. Azmi Bilgi, ‘Karamanlı Nizami’, TDVİA, vol. 24, 453–4.
116
Yusuf-ı Meddah, Varka ve Gülşah, ed. Kazım Köktekin (Ankara, 2007), 7–8, 17–18, 295, ll.
1736–8. On the eighteenth-century date of the manuscript used by Köktekin see E. Blochet,
Catalogue des Manuscripts Turcs, II (Paris, 1883), no. 646.
117
See Peacock, ‘Metaphysics and Rulership’, 102–7.
118
Ibid., 127–8; Astarabadi, Bazm u Razm, 488–9, 531–2.
119
Astarabadi, Bazm u Razm, 537.
 The Emergence of Literary Turkish 173

The persistence of Persian was thus thanks to more than simply its status as a
prestige language in central Anatolia, although that aspect cannot be neglected:
Turkmen amirs such as the Hamidid or Karamanid rulers doubtless did patronise
works in Persian because they wished to associate themselves with the language of
Islamic culture. The crucial difference between central Anatolia and the newly
conquered frontier regions such as Aydın was that Persian seems to have actually
been the spoken language in many core areas of the old Seljuq state, just as
Astarabadi indicates. This should not surprise us, for there is clear evidence that
much of the Muslim bourgeoisie of towns such as Konya in the early thirteenth
century was Persian-speaking, being themselves recent immigrants from Iran.120
A manuscript dated to 723/1323 indicates that in a madrasa in Antalya the Arabic
poetry of Ibn al-Farid was being explained in Persian, not in Turkish.121 Ibn Battuta
also indicates that Turkish and Persian were both spoken. He recounts encountering
a faqīh who claimed to know Arabic, and who explained his inability to communi-
cate with Ibn Battuta to his friend in Persian, suggesting that was his colloquial
language.122 Persian shared space as a spoken language alongside others – Greek,
Turkish and Armenian – and how long its status as an Anatolian lingua franca
survived is in need of further research. Devletoǧlu, a Turkish language author
writing at the court of Murad I in 1424, indicates that texts were being explained
in Turkish in madrasas in his day.123 Yet even in the early sixteenth century, Selim
I sent a Persian-language decree, which was read out to the citizens of Bursa at Friday
prayers.124 The pace of change was doubtless uneven, but Persian clearly remained a
spoken, or at least an understood, language for a long time in some areas.
Arabic never enjoyed the status of a spoken lingua franca that Persian had in
Anatolia; Ibn Battuta’s account of his journey is replete with references to his
linguistic misadventures as an Arabic-speaking outsider, and the late thirteenth to
fourteenth century witnessed an increasing number of translations of scholarly
works from Arabic into Persian in fields such as astrology, medicine and
Sufism.125 Nonetheless, it is clear that among scholarly circles, in particular the
more advanced Sufis as well as the ‘ulama’ (who were often of course one and the

120
See pp. 138–9.
121
In Ateş, ‘Hicri VI.–VIII. (XII.–XIV.), 125, 135.
122
Ibn Battuta, Rihla, 310–11; trans. Gibb, 455.
123
Sara Nur Yıldız, ‘A Hanafi Law-Manual in the Vernacular: Devletoglu Yusuf Balıkesri’s Turkish
Verse Adaptation of the Hidāya-Wiqāya Textual Tradition for the Ottoman Sultan Murad II (824/
1424)’, Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 80 (2017): 300–1.
124
Chris Markiewicz, ‘The Crisis of Rule in Late Medieval Islam: A Study of Idrīs Bidlīsī (861–926/
1457–1520) and Kingship at the Turn of the Sixteenth Century’, Ph.D. dissertation, University of
Chicago, 2015, 62.
125
For astrology note Nasir al-Din Tusi’s Persian translation of pseudo-Ptolemy’s Kitab al-Thamara
(e.g. Leiden University Library, MS Or 96; Süleymaniye, MS Ayasofya 2695; also the Persian
174 Literature and Religious Change

same), Arabic was widely understood. Arabic works aimed at advanced students of
Sufism that originated both from Anatolia and beyond, such as those by Ibn
‘Arabi and Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi, were widely copied and recopied.126 Especially
popular was the Diwan of the Egyptian Sufi poet Ibn Farid, of which the earliest
manuscript, which had been in Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi’s possession, is preserved
in Konya,127 while a luxury copy was made for the library of the vizier Fakhr al-
Din ‘Ali (Plate 10).128 Ibn Farid’s mystical khamriyyas (wine poems) were the
subject of several commentaries by Anatolian authors, of which the best known
was by Da’ud al-Qaysari, who composed his works exclusively in Arabic. Despite
Da’ud’s Anatolian origin, he seems to have spent his career largely at Sawa and
Tabriz in Iran, in the retinue of various Ilkhanid viziers, most notably Ghiyath al-
Din b. Fadlallah.129 Even if Da’ud al-Qaysari did not in reality spend much or
any of his working career in Anatolia, despite efforts by sixteenth-century scholars
such as Taşköprizade to associate this prestigious ‘ālim with the early Ottoman
venture, his works certainly circulated widely in Anatolia, showing the enduring
appetite for Arabic works among an educated audience. In addition, the classical
Islamic scholarly literature from outside Anatolia dealing with subjects such as
medicine, philosophy and astronomy continued to circulate in Arabic throughout
our period, as attested by copies that have come down to us.130 Colophons
indicate that madrasas, in particular the Nizamiyya madrasa in Konya, were one
of the main places in which such Arabic works were copied, even when they
covered fields such as philosophy that lay outside the normal madrasa
curriculum.131

translation of Abu Ma‘shar al-Balkhi’s famous Arabic work on historical astrology, Süleymaniye,
MS Fazıl Ahmed Paşa 1624 (copy dated 735/1334–5).
126
Some impression of the early circulation of Arabic texts by Ibn ‘Arabi and others can be obtained
from Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi’s list of the books he studied. See the analysis in Gerald Elmore, ‘S ̣adr
al-Dīn al-Qūnawī’s Personal Study-List of Books by Ibn al-ʿArabī’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies
56 (1997): 161–81.
127
Giuseppe Scattolin, ‘The Oldest Text of Ibn Farid’s Diwan? A Manuscript of Yusufağa Kütüpha-
nesi of Konya’, Quaderni di Studi Arabi 16 (1998): 143–63.
128
Süleymaniye, MS Ayasofya 3879; identified in A. Süheyl Ünver, ‘Anadolu Selçukluları Zamanında
Umumî ve Hususî Kütüphaneler’, in Atatürk Konferansları (1964–1968) (Ankara, 1970), 10; for
another example of a Sufi manuscript, a Mathnawi, connected with the circle of Fakhr al-Din ‘Ali,
see Jackson, ‘Patrons and Artists’, I, 89, 92, 97.
129
On Da’ud al-Qaysari and his Ilkhanid connections see Peacock, ‘Two Sufis of Ilkhanid Anatolia
and their Patrons’.
130
E.g. for medicine see Ibn Sina’s al-Qanun fi’l-Tibb, Süleymaniye, MS Fatih 3602, copied in Konya
in 691; for philosophy see n. 131.
131
E.g. Ibn Kammuna’s Sharh al-Talwihat, Süleymaniye, MS Şehid Ali Paşa 1740, copied in the
[Konya] Nizamiyya in 686/1287; al-Raghib al-Isfahani’s Dhari‘a ila Makarim al-Shari‘a, copied at
the Konya Nizamiyya in Safar 711/1311, copyist Muhammad al-Tustari, probably identical with
 The Emergence of Literary Turkish 175

Arabic works composed in Anatolia rarely attracted the patronage of rulers

from the second half of the thirteenth century onwards, with a couple of excep-
tions such as the philosophical encyclopaedia al-Fusul al-Ashrafiyya dedicated to
the Eshrefid ruler Mubariz al-Din or Qazwini’s hadith collection composed for
the Pervane (discussed earlier, p. 72). Even a scholar such as Qutb al-Din Shirazi
who chose to write on technical subjects, for example astronomy, would change to
Persian when dedicating his work to a royal patron, as he did with his Ikhtiyarat-i
Muzaffari written for the Candarid amir Muzaffar al-Din Alpyürek. A similar
trend existed in Sufism. The famous student of Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi, Sa‘id al-
Din Farghani (d. 699/1300), wrote a Persian commentary on the poems of Ibn
Farid, the Mashariq al-Darari, which was dedicated to the Pervane Mu‘in al-Din
Sulayman; however, his expanded version of the Mashariq, which he wrote in
Arabic and gave the title Muntaha al-Madarik has no dedicatee, suggesting it was
perhaps intended for the eyes of advanced students of Sufism only.132 Similarly,
another disciple of al-Qunawi, Mu’ayyid al-Din Jandi, wrote in Persian for a local
audience of political leaders, as well as Arabic, which he used in his more technical
exegesis of Ibn ‘Arabi.133 The same trend prevailed in other fields of knowledge.
The late fourteenth-century scholar Jamal al-Din al-Aqsara’i was capable of
writing in Persian, as he did with his al-As’ila wa’l-Ajwiba, a summary of basic
problems of Qur’anic interpretation (tafsīr) and fiqh composed at the request of
the Eretnid emir of Amasya, Şadgeldi. Jamal al-Din’s other compositions, which
are of a more technical character and do not mention any patron, were written in
Arabic, such as his book on rhetoric, Sharh al-Idah fi’l-Bayan wa’l-Ma‘ani, which
was based on the famous works by al-Jurjani and al-Sakkaki in this field,134 and
his Hall al-Mujaz, a super-commentary on Ibn al-Nafis’s commentary on Ibn
Sina’s famous medical encyclopaedia, al-Qanun fi’l-Tibb.135 Nonetheless, it is
intriguing to note the distinct absence of panegyric poetry (madh) in any lan-
_
guage, despite this being the major genre in court literary life in both the
Persianate and Arabophone worlds. It is not until Ahmedi that we have any
significant panegyric qasidas in Turkish, and those in Persian and Arabic are
almost non-existent, with the exception of the handful in each language composed

the author of al-Fusul al-Ashrafiyya. On the Konya Nizamiyya, erected in 670/1271, see Özgü-
denli, ‘İstanbul Kütüphanelerinde Bulunan Farsça Yazmaların Öyküsü’, 9.
132
On Farghani see Mahmut Kaya and Sâmî Şelhub, ‘Fergânî, Saîdüddin’, TDVİA, vol. 12, 378–82.
An early manuscript of the Muntaha al-Madarik, copied in Konya in 724/1324, has extensive
Persian marginalia at the beginning, underlining the fact that the two languages coexisted and
complemented each other. See Süleymaniye, MS Fatih 3966.
133
On Jandi and his patrons see Peacock, ‘Two Sufis of Ilkhanid Anatolia’.
134
For the autograph manuscript see Süleymaniye, MS Damad İbrahim 1020, dated 776.
135
Süleymaniye, MS Ayasofya 3666.
176 Literature and Religious Change

by ‘Imad al-Din b. Mas‘ud al-Samarqandi and dedicated to the Aydınid beg.136

Anatolian patrons, it seems, were interested in localisations, translations or popu-
larisations of classical Islamic works but not original panegyrics.
Despite the growing translation movement, the supremacy of Arabic remained
unchallenged for legal purposes, and both copies of classic fiqh works and original
compositions from Anatolia circulated widely. Perhaps the most important Ana-
tolian fiqh author in our period, after the success of Yusuf al-Sijistani in the early
thirteenth century, was Muhsin al-Qaysari. Muhsin, a Hanafi faqīh from Kayseri,
composed in 736/1335 an Arabic verse summary of al-Sajawandi’s famous
textbook of Hanafi law, al-Fara’id al-Sirajiyya, to which he gave the title Jami‘
al-Durar.137 Muhsin also composed commentaries on literary works, such as the
poems of the Great Seljuq poet Abiwardi (d. 507/1113), under the title Sharh al-
Najdiyyat, and the well-known work on prosody by Abu Jaysh al-Andalusi. In his
introduction, Muhsin explains that mastery of Arabic can only be attained
through practice of the ‘rules of literature’ (mumārasat qawānīn al-adab) and
study of the dīwāns of its poets.138 The aim, then, behind these literary commen-
taries is practical, to raise the standards of knowledge of the Arabic language, as
would be useful to a faqīh.
A similar purpose lies behind the popular hadith commentary by the early
fourteenth-century ‘ālim from Erzincan, Wajih al-Din al-Arzinjani, who was
active around 713/1313 to 717/1317.139 Al-Arzinjani’s best-known work was
his Hada’iq al-Azhar fi Sharh Mashariq al-Anwar, a commentary on the Indian
scholar al-Saghani’s (d. 650/1252) abridgement of the hadith collections of
Bukhari and Muslim.140 Al-Saghani, born in Lahore, had resided in Baghdad,
whence his work had been transmitted widely over the Middle East – it was also
popular in Mamluk Egypt.141 As in India and Egypt, the Mashariq became a
standard part of the medieval Anatolian madrasa curriculum. According to the
colophon of one early manuscript of the Mashariq, it was copied in the madrasa of
the Ottoman sultan Orhan in İznik (Fig. 4.3),142 while a copy of al-Arzinjani’s

136
Yıldız, ‘Aydınid Court Literature’, 218–25.
137
See Recep Cici, ‘Muhsin-i Kayseri’, TDVİA, vol. 31, 48.
138
Muhsin al-Qaysari, Sharh al-Najdiyyat, Süleymaniye, MS Reisülküttab 856, fol. IIb.
139
The colophon of his Mukhtasar al-Mukhtar fi Manaqib al-Akhyar tells us the work was completed
in Erzincan on 15 Sha‘ban 713 (Süleymaniye, MS Carullah 1623); he was apparently still alive in
Jumada I 717, for he is named in an ijāza written in that year with epithets indicating he was living
(Süleymaniye, Fatih 119, fol. 156a).
140
On al-Saghani’s Mashariq, a work also very popular in medieval India, see Annemarie Schimmel,
Islam in the Indian Subcontinent (Leiden, 1980), 15; see also Ramzi Baalbaki, ‘al-S ̣aghānī’, EI2.
141
On al-Saghani in Egypt see the comments of al-Subki cited in Jonathan Berkey, The Transmission
of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic Education (Princeton, 1992), 187.
142
Süleymaniye, MS Mahmud Paşa 140.
 The Emergence of Literary Turkish 177

FIG. 4.3 al-Saghani’s Mashariq al-Anwar, copied in İznik in the madrasa of Orhan. Türkiye
Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı, Süleymaniye Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, MS Mahmud
Paşa 140.

commentary dated 769/1367–8 states it was copied in ‘the town of İznik, the
gathering place of students and great imams in the province of Orhan Khan, the
fighter of the infidel’.143
Al-Saghani’s Mashariq comprised a linguistic commentary on 2,225 hadith, and
al-Arzinjani’s Hada’iq concentrated on linguistic and grammatical elucidation of the
Mashariq. Doubtless its appeal to madrasa teachers in both Anatolia and India derived
from this combination of hadith with grammar, thus allowing the text to serve a dual
purpose of inculcating both religion and the Arabic language – especially useful in
those regions in the process of conversion where Arabic was less widely spoken.

143
Süleymaniye, MS Fatih 985.
178 Literature and Religious Change

The Arabic texts circulating in Anatolia were not limited to those of purely
practical or technical use, and other works by al-Arzinjani suggest that there was
an audience for works in Arabic outside the formal madrasa curriculum. He wrote
two abridgements of popular Arabic works, a hagiography of Abu Hanifa, his
students and followers (Mukhtasar fi Manaqib Imam al-Muslimin . . . Abi
Hanifa)144 and al-Jazari’s biography of Sufis, entitled the Mukhtasar Kitab al-
Mukhtar fi Manaqib al-Akhyar.145 Both works are written in a fluent Arabic, without
any kind of grammatical commentary, although the abridgement of al-Jazari is lightly
vocalised. The Manaqib Abi Hanifa contains extensive selections of Arabic poetry in
praise of Abu Hanifa (fols 8a–9b, end), and the Mukhtasar Kitab al-Mukhtar also
contains frequent poetic citations (e.g. fols 65a, 280b). These were works for reading,
or listening to, not for madrasa teaching, nor were they aimed at the scholarly elite,
their abridged form suggesting they are popularisations. They indicate the existence
of a pious Muslim public in Erzincan (where we know from its colophon that the
Mukhtasar Kitab al-Mukhtar was composed, and most probably the other works too)
that was sufficiently acquainted with Arabic to appreciate them.
Other Arabic texts circulated that had no obvious local or pious interest. In
Jumada II 714/September 1314, a volume of the chronicle of the Baghdad
historian Ibn al-Jawzi (d. 597/1201), al-Muntazam fi’l-Tarikh (Plate 8) was
copied in the Aminiyya khānqāh in Kayseri.146 The extant volume covers the
years 257–334 hijri, and although theoretically the Muntazam surveys the whole
Islamic world, in practice it is very much Baghdad-centred, usually only giving
scant coverage to events outside Iraq. Ibn al-Jawzi’s chronicle, which focuses on
the deeds of the political elite and death-notices of notables, has little obvious
relevance to a Sufi audience, despite the fact that the copyist goes to considerable
lengths to emphasise his Sufi affiliation, giving his name as ‘the servant of the
people of the heart, dust beneath the feet of the Sufis, Ibrahim b. Yusuf b. ‘Abd al-
Samad, the aspirant Sufi, whose father is from Shirwan’.147 The manuscript
suggests the broader role of the khānqāh, like the madrasa, the functions of which
it in many ways replicated, as an educational centre, library and scriptorium, the
intellectual horizons of which could extend beyond Sufism.148 Another classic
Arabic historical work that circulated in Anatolia was Ibn al-Athir’s al-Kamil fi’l-

144
Süleymaniye, MS Ayasofya 1938.
145
Süleymaniye, MS Carullah 1623.
146
Süleymaniye, MS Fazıl Ahmed Paşa, 1174.
147
Süleymaniye, MS Fazıl Ahmed Paşa, 1174, fol. 118a: khādim ahl al-qulūb, turāb ahl al-tasawwuf,
Ibrāhīm b. Yūsuf b. ‘Abd al-S ̣amad al-mutasawwif al-shirwānī abūhu. _
148 _
For schools, libraries and manuscripts associated with Sufi lodges in Egypt and Syria in this period
see Konrad Hirschler, The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands: A Social and Cultural
History of Reading Practices (Edinburgh, 2012), esp. 66, 88, 100, 104–6.
 The Emergence of Literary Turkish 179

Ta’rikh, of which a luxury copy was made for the library of Fakhr al-Din ‘Ali by a
copyist whose nisba links him to Baghdad, ‘Ali b. al-Sabbal al-Hanafi al-Baghdadi.
(Plate 9).149 The range of Arabic and Persian texts circulating in Anatolia
emphasises the peninsula’s integration with the broader intellectual culture of
the Islamic world. These transregional connections are also reflected in the
Turkish textual production of the period.

A COSMOPOLITAN TURCOPHONE WORLD

Anatolian Turkish did not develop in isolation. From the 1280s Turkish also
started to be used for official purposes on the opposite side of the Black Sea in the
Golden Horde.150 The dialect used, however, was distinct from that employed in
Anatolia, reflecting a Central Asian or Eastern variety of Turkish, known to
modern Turkology as Khwarazmian. This probably reflects less the spoken
language of the Horde (which would have probably been Qipchaq),151 but rather
the fact that to administer their vast empire the Mongols employed Uighur
secretaries and scribes (bakhshi and bitiqchi), who introduced the Uighur script
and the Eastern Turkish literary language.152 Indeed, the association between the
Mongols and Turkish was such that on occasion Eastern Turkish was called Tatar
dili, ‘the language of the Tatars (i.e. Mongols)’.153 No early original document
survives from the Golden Horde, although the medieval translations of letters into
Russian and other languages has enabled their diplomatics and main linguistic
features to be reconstructed.154
The rise of Turkish in the Golden Horde reflected the dual processes of
Turkicisation and Islamisation, with the Mongols elite intermarrying with the
local Qipchaq population and adopting their language, and both gradually con-
verting to Islam. Our earliest surviving evidence comprises outlines of Muslim
faith and practice, as well as works dedicated to members of the Mongol ruling

149
Süleymaniye, MS Ayasofya 3068, identified by Ünver, ‘Anadolu Selçukluları Zamanında Umumî
ve Hususî Kütüphaneler’, 10. The extant volume is the fourth, covering the Umayyad period.
150
On the languages of the Golden Horde and the role of Turkish see M. A. Usmanov, Zhalovannye
Akty Dzhuchieva Ulusa XIV–XVI VV (Kazan’, 1979), 94–110.
151
I. Vásáry, ‘Oriental Languages of the Codex Cumanicus: Persian and Cuman as Linguae Francae
in the Black Sea Region (13th–14th Centuries)’, in Felicitas Schmieder and Peter Schreiner (eds),
Il Codice Cumanico e il suo mondo (Rome, 2005), 105–24.
152
I. Vásáry, ‘The Role and Function of Mongolian and Turkic in Ilkhanid Iran’, in Éva Á. Csató,
Lars Johanson, András Róna-Tas and Bo Utas (eds), Turks and Iranians: Interactions in Language
and History (Wiesbaden, 2016), 141–53.
153
Kitâb-ı Güzide: Akâidü’l-Islam, ed. Serhat Küçük (Istanbul, 2014), 65. On the text and its eastern
Turkish version see the references in n. 174 below.
154
Usmanov, Zhalovannye Akty, passim.
180 Literature and Religious Change

family. Destined for a steppe audience who needed to be inculcated with the
rudiments of Islam were primers on Islam, the Mu‘in al-Murid, probably com-
posed in Khwarazm in 709/1309,155 and an adaptation of the Qur’anic Joseph
story, Yusuf u Züleyha by Kul Ali, which is perhaps our earliest literary text from the
Golden Horde, which we know was used in later times to promote conversion to
Islam.156 Another such text was very likely Rabghuzi’s Turkish Qisas al-Anbiya,
composed in 710/1310 and dedicated to the Jochid ruler Tok Bugha. The simple
poems that summarise the contents of the prose narrative may have helped new
Muslims memorise the tales of Prophets.157 In 761/1360 the Nehcü’l-Feradis was
composed by Mahmud b. ‘Ali, being an Eastern Turkish collection of hadith aimed
at inculcating the main tenets of Islam. Towards the mid-fourteenth century, a
courtly literature in Turkish started to emerge, patronised by members of the Jochid
house, of which the outstanding remains are Qutb’s eastern Turkish adaptation of
Nizami’s Khusraw and Shirin, composed c. 1341–2, and Khwarazmi’s bilingual
Persian-Eastern Turkish mathnawī, the Muhabbatname, written in 1353.158
The scholars and literary culture of the Golden Horde had a profound influence
in Anatolia, and both regions shared commercial as well as linguistic, cultural and
political ties, Anatolia having briefly formed part of the Golden Horde’s territories
in the 1240s.159 The Crimea, one of the main cultural and political centres of the
Golden Horde, was a short sea voyage from the Black Sea Coast of Anatolia, and
considerable trade in slaves, grain and horses linked the two.160 Cultural links

155
On this work see Bodrogligeti, ‘On the Authorship’; despite alternative arguments for the
authorship of this work, discussed by Bodrogligeti, his attribution seems entirely convincing.
The unique manuscript of the Mu‘in al-Murid is preserved in Bursa, but there is no evidence that
the text ever circulated in Anatolia in our period. Other works in the codex all seem to have been
copied in Central Asia, and were probably brought to Anatolia in the late fifteenth century or later.
The west Turkish annotations to the text of the Mu‘in al-Murid were probably added at this point.
156
The text itself states it was composed in 630/1234, but a manuscript variant gives a different date
(609AH), meaning it is hard to have much confidence in this. See Ali Cin, Turk Edebiyatının İlk
Yusuf ve Zuleyha Hikayesi: Ali’nin Kıssa-yı Yusuf ’u (Ankara, 2011), 59–60, 410, l. 1243. There is
no information about place of composition, but given that many surviving manuscripts seem to be
associated with the Kazan’ region (ibid., 60–2), it is possible that it was compiled there. On the use
of the story in the nineteenth-century Kazan’ region see Agnès Nilüfer Kefeli, Becoming Muslim in
Imperial Russia: Conversion, Apostasy, and Literacy (Ithaca, 2014), 65–7.
157
Kefeli, Becoming Muslim, 68.
158
Uli Schamiloglu, ‘The Islamic High Culture of the Golden Horde’, in András J. E. Bodrogligeti
(ed.), The Golden Cycle: Proceedings of the John D. Soper Commemorative Conference on the Cultural
Heritage of Central Asia (Sahibqiran, 2002), 200–15.
159
See Chapter 1.
160
For more detail see A. C. S. Peacock, ‘Islamisation in the Golden Horde and Anatolia: Some
Remarks on Travelling Scholars and Texts’, Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée 143
(2018): 151–64; see also Kolbas, May and Novák, Anatolian Early 14th Century Coin Hoard, 89,
for the circulation of Anatolian coinage in the Dasht-i Qipchaq.
 The Emergence of Literary Turkish 181

between the two regions are suggested by the strong similarities in the architecture
of Golden Horde-controlled Crimea and Mongol-ruled Anatolia.161 It is thus
natural that numerous scholars from the Golden Horde also made their way to
Anatolia, and the shared Hanafi law school that prevailed in both regions seems to
have been an important factor in these migrations. Several generations of scholars
from the Hanafi East had sought their fortunes in the Middle East, where Anatolia
was the main Hanafi region,162 and this process seems only to have intensified
under Mongol rule. Khwarazm, one the main strongholds of Hanafi learning in
Central Asia, formed part of the Horde’s territories, and its scholars had a particular
renown. As Ibn Battuta recounts, men from Khwarazm enjoyed a particularly
honoured place at the courts of the Turkmen principalities of south-west Anatolia:
The sultan of Milas is Shuja‘ al-Din b. Orhan Beg b. Menteshe, who is the best of kings,
with fine features and behaviour. His companions are fuqahā’, who are held in great esteem
by him, and there is a group of them at his court, among them the faqīh al-Khwarazmi,
who knows [various] sciences and us excellent. When I met him, the sultan was angry with
him because he had travelled to the town of Ayasuluk [modern Selçuk, the Aydınid capital]
and reached its sultan from whom he accepted gifts.163

Khwarazmi, the poet of the Eastern Turkish Muhabbatname, refers at the end of
his poem to having travelled the length and breadth of Rum (zi sar ta pāy mulk-i
Rūm gashtam),164 and the connections between the two regions are also suggested
by the numerous manuscripts in Turkish collections originating in the Golden
Horde.165
The most famous of these eastern scholars to move to Anatolia was Hafiz al-
Din Muhammad b. Shihab al-Kardari al-Khwarazmi al-Bazzazi (d. 827/1424)
from Khwarazm, author of a famous work on Hanafi fiqh al-Fatawa al-Bazza-
ziyya. Al-Bazzazi was educated in the Golden Horde capital of Saray, and settled
in Crimea before coming to Anatolia, where he debated with the famous
Ottoman scholar Molla Fenari. His Fatawa, completed in 812/1410 shortly
before his move to Anatolia, became immediately massively popular there with
over ninety manuscripts in the Süleymaniye library in Istanbul alone, most dating
to the fifteenth century, and his vita of Abu Hanifa, Manaqib al-Imam al-A‘zam

161
Nicole Kançal-Ferrari, ‘Contextualising the Decorum of Golden Horde-Period Mosques in
Crimea: Artistic Interactions as Reflected in Patronage and Material Culture’, Revue des mondes
musulmans et de la Méditerranée 143 (2018): 191–214.
162
Wilferd Madelung, ‘The Migration of Hanafi Scholars Westward from Central Asia in the 11th to
13th Centuries’, Ankara Üniversitesi İlahiyat Fakültesi Dergisi 43 (2002): 41–55, esp. pp. 52–5.
163
Ibn Battuta, Rihla, 293; trans. Gibb, 429.
164
Khorezmi, Mukhabbat-name, ed. E. N. Nadzhip (Moscow, 1961), 49.
165
Peacock, ‘Islamisation in the Golden Horde and Anatolia’; Cevat İzgi, ‘Cani Bek Devrinde
(1342–1357) Altınordu Hanlığında Bilim Hayatı’, Divan 2 (1996): 147–71, esp. p. 162.
182 Literature and Religious Change

Eretna’s Uighur script coinage. A coin struck in Erzincan in 751/1351, American

FIG. 4.4
Numsimatic Society collection inv. no. 1927.179.1. Courtesy of the American
Numismatic Society

Abi Hanifa was translated into Turkish for the benefit of the Ottoman sultan
Murad II in the early fifteenth century.166
The path of these eastern scholars was doubtless eased by their common
Turkish language, for the eastern variety of Turkish started to be used for
composing works in Anatolia. For instance, the Qalandar Baraq Baba (d. 707/
1307–8), who was from Tokat in central Anatolia and never set foot in the
Dasht-i Qipchaq, used Qipchaq for writing his shat hiyya [ecstatic utterances].167
__
The orthography of Old Anatolian Turkish, for instance its tendency to write
vowels plene unlike later Ottoman, also suggests a strong Eastern Turkish influ-
ence.168 A few fragments of evidence suggest that on occasion the eastern Uighur
script was used in Anatolia. Many of the coins of Eretna are inscribed sultan adil
in Uighur (Fig. 4.4),169 doubtless because of its prestige as the script used also for
Mongolian, the language of Chinggis Khan, and served to assert Eretna’s legitim-
acy to the substantial Mongol population of central Anatolia.170

166
On him see Ahmet Ozel, ‘Bezzazi’, TDVİA, vol. 6, 113–14; Taşköprizade, al-Shaqa’iq al-Nu‘ma-
niyya, ed. Muhammad Tabataba’i Bihbahani (Tehran, 2010), 31.
167
See Gölpınarlı, Yunus Emre ve Tasavvuf, 252–72, 455–72 and ‘Baraq Baba’, EIr.
168
Schamiloglu, ‘Rise of the Ottoman Empire’, 268–69.
169
Halûk Perk and Hüsnü Öztürk, Eretna, Kadı Burhanettin ve Erzincan (Mutahhaten) Emirliği
Sikkeleri (Istanbul, 2008), 26–30.
170
For examples of the Uighur script in Anatolia mainly from the time of Mehmed the Conqueror
but also with reference to some earlier instances, see Osman Sertkaya, ‘Some New Documents
 The Emergence of Literary Turkish 183

Verses in Uighur-script Eastern Turkish, as well as Mongolian, Arabic and

Persian, were appended to an older manuscript of the great history of the Mongols
by ‘Ata Malik Juwayni, the Tarikh-i Jahan-gushay, at Mardin in 724/1324.171
One emir, Şerefeddin Çakırca, in 726/1326 established a waqf in Sivas in which
the endowment was not only written in Eastern Turkish but was even composed
in Uighur script.172 Doubtless its use was more widespread than these few
examples that have come down to us. Eastern Turkish elements are also found
in many works written in Anatolian Turkish – the so called ‘olga-bolga dili’ mixed
language.173
Although the Eastern and Anatolian dialects thus seem to have been mutually
comprehensible, there was also demand for Anatolian Turkish recensions of
Eastern Turkish works. For instance the Güzide, a work on the basics of religion
by a scholar named Abu Nasr b. Muhammad al-Sarakhsi, written in Eastern
Turkish, was transmitted to Anatolia and then later in the fourteenth century
translated into Anatolian Turkish by Muhammed b. Bali.174 An Anatolian
Turkish version of Kerderli Mahmud b. ‘Ali’s hadith collection, the Nehcü’l-
Feradis, was also made.175 Other works inculcating the basics of religion exist in
both western and eastern Turkish versions, such as the Behcetü’l-Hadayik; in this
case the oldest extant manuscript, dating to 702/1302, is written in Eastern
Turkish. It is possible that later manuscripts reflect a reworking of the text into
Anatolian Turkish, or that the work circulated in both varieties of Turkish. Other
examples of texts with both western and eastern Turkish versions are the Siraj al-
Qulub, a Turkish version of a Persian manual of responses to challenges to the

Written in Uighur Script in Anatolia’, Central Asiatic Journal 18 (1974): 180–92. On the prestige
of the Uighur script and its use in the Golden Horde see Usmanov, Zhalovannye Akty, 111–15.
171
Igor de Rachewiltz, ‘The Mongolian Poem of Muhammad al-Samarqandi’, Central Asiatic Journal
12 (1969): 280–5; T. Gandjeï, ‘Was Muhammad al-Samarqandï a Polyglot Poet?’, Türk Dili ve
Edebiyati Dergisi 18 (1970): 53–6.
172
Ahmet Temir, ‘Die arabisch-uigurische Vaqf-Urkunde von 1326 des Emirs S ̣erefe l-Din Ahmed
bin Çakirca von Sivas’, Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes 56 (1960): 232–40.
173
See Erdal, ‘Explaining the Olga-Bolga Dili’; Şinasi Tekin, ‘1343 Tarihli Bir Eski Anadolu Türkçesi
Metni ve Türk Dili Tarihinde “Olga-bolga” Sorunu’, Türk Dili Araştırmaları Yıllığı Belleten
(1973–4): 59–133.
174
For the text see Kitâb-ı Güzide, 65; see also Şinasi Tekin, ‘Mehemmed bin Bali’nin Anadolu
Türkçesine Aktardığı “Güzide” Adlı Eserin Harezm Türkçesi’ndeki Aslı ve ‘ola-bolga’ Meselesi
Hakkında’, Journal of Turkish Studies/ Türklük Bilgisi Araştırmaları Dergisi 15 (1991): 405–20.
175
Ergün Acar (ed.), Eski Anadolu Türkçesi Dönemine Ait Bir Nehcü’l-Ferādis (Giriş-Metin-Tıpkıba-
sım) (Ankara, 2018). The manuscript of the Anatolian Turkish version, which has recently come to
light in a private collection in Kastamonu, bears the completion date of 869/1465, but it is unclear
whether this refers to the composition or the copying of the text.
184 Literature and Religious Change

Prophethood of Muhammad,176 and the Cümcümename, a narrative poem

offering a parable to encourage conversion, the Qipchaq original of which was
composed in 770/1368.177
In both Anatolia and the Golden Horde, the story of Joseph seems to have
been massively popular. With its tale of the infidel Zulaykha embracing Islam and
Joseph’s vanquishing of the idols, it seems to have been widespread in a broad
range of Muslim societies undergoing Islamisation in all periods. It plays a
prominent role in the Behcetü’l-Hadayik, and there are at least five other versions
of the story known to have circulated in fourteenth-century Anatolia, quite apart
from references and sections that appear in numerous other works. The author of
one of these versions of the Joseph story tells us that he translated it into Anatolian
Turkish from the ‘deşt dili’, the language of the steppes, in which it had been
written by a certain Kırımlı Mahmud, Mahmud of the Crimea:
The translator of this book, who got rid of its Crimean language
And turned it into Turkish, exerting much effort
Is Haliloğlu Ali, author of seven divans
He fixed the Turkish, translating it from the language of the steppe.178

The cultural influence of Anatolia also extended in the opposite direction, across
the Dasht-i Qipchaq. Here it is harder to trace the role of Turkish texts, but
scholars from Anatolia played a part in forming the intellectual culture of the
Golden Horde. For instance, ‘Ala’ al-Din Muhammad b. Ahmad b. Muhammad
al-Sarayi, a Golden Horde scholar who was a student of the leading Shams al-
A’imma, tells us that for his hadith compilation, the Siraj al-‘Abidin fi Sharh al-
‘Abidin, itself based on al-Saghani’s famous Mashariq al-Anwar, his principal
source was an Anatolian work, Wajih al-Din al-Arzinjani’s commentary on al-
Saghani, the Hada’iq al-Azhar fi Sharh Mashariq al-Anwar.179 In the Crimea, the
poet Abu Bakr Rumi from the central Anatolian city of Aksaray composed his vast

176
For the text of the Anatolian Turkish version see Sirâcü l-Kulub: Gönüllerin Işığ̱ı, ed. Yakub
Karasoy (Ankara, 2013), with information about the Eastern Turkish versions on pp. 17–18. See
further the discussion in Chapter 5.
177
On this text and its Anatolian Turkish translations see F. A. Tansel, ‘Cümcüme Sultān: Ottoman
Translations of the Fourteenth Century Kipchak Turkish Story’, Archivum Ottomanicum _ 2 (1970):
252–69. Another variant of this story is the Kesikbaş Hikayesi attributed to Kirdeci Ali, which also
exists in east and west Turkish versions.
178
Ismail Hikmet Ertaylan (ed.), Yusuf ile Züleyha (Istanbul, 1960), pp. 13, 16:
Bu kitabı döndüren, Kırım dilin gideren
Türki dile götüren, çok zahmet görme diyü
Ol Haliloglu Ali yedi divandur eli
Ol düzdi Türki dili deşt dilinden dönderü.
179
Süleymaniye, MS Bağdatlı Vehbi 285-M, fols 124b–125a.
 The Emergence of Literary Turkish 185

Qalandarnama commemorating the lives of Anatolian saints and promoting the

Sufism of the Qalandars, which he dedicated to some leading amirs in the Golden
Horde.180
Scholars and litterateurs from the Golden Horde were also active in the third
main region of literary production in Turkish, the Mamluk empire of Egypt and
Syria. Although the population spoke Arabic, the Mamluk rulers were by origins
slaves from the Dasht-i Qipchaq – the Golden Horde lands. In addition, politics
linked them closely to the Golden Horde, with whom they formed an alliance
against the Ilkhans. Although Arabic remained the language of the Mamluk realm
for official purposes, it is clear that many of its Turkish rulers were uncomfortable
in it. Works in both Eastern and Anatolian Turkish were read at the Mamluk
court, and from the late fourteenth century original works started to be composed
in Egypt in Turkish, largely in Qipchaq.181 The study of Turkish literature in the
Mamluk realm is in its infancy, and here we can only make some general points
regarding its relationship to the literary production of Anatolia.
The earliest phase of this literature in the first half of the fourteenth century
was the composition of Turkish-Arabic dictionaries.182 One of these, a Turkish-
Arabic and Mongolian-Arabic dictionary composed for a qadi of Cairo in the
1340s, was written by an Anatolian from Konya – it is interesting that although it
is a handbook of Qipchaq Turkish, an Anatolian author is responsible, again
suggesting that the dialect boundaries erected by modern scholarship were much
weaker in the fourteenth century.183 The appearance of literary works in Turkish
is a development of the late fourteenth century, patronised particularly by Sultan
Barquq (r. 784/1382–791/1389 and 792/1390–801/1399) and his circle.184
Literary men from far afield migrated to Egypt to seek their fortune there, such
as the Golden Horde poet Seyfi of Saray, who composed in 793/1391 a transla-
tion of Sa‘di’s Gulistan for Barquq’s minister, the hājjb al-hujjāb Batkhas al-
_ _
Suduni.185 As well as the commissioning of original works, Turkish literary

180
See Chapter 2, pp. 81, 101–2.
181
J. Eckmann, ‘Die kiptschakische Litteratur’, Philologiae Turcicae Fundamenta, II (Wiesbaden
1965), 275–304.
182
In general see Robert J. Ermers, Arabic Grammars of Turkic: The Arabic Linguistic Model Applied to
Foreign Languages & Translation of ʼAbū Ḥayyān Al-ʼAndalusī’s Kitāb Al-ʼidrāk Li-lisān Al-ʼAtrāk
(Leiden, 1999).
183
On this work see Barbara Flemming, ‘Ein alter Irrtum bei der chronologischen Einordnung der
Tarğumān turkī wa ağamī wa mug· alī’, Der Islam 44 (1968): 226–9; Ermers, Arabic Grammars of
Turkic.
184
See Eckmann, ‘Die kiptschakische Literatur’; Ulrich Haarmann, ‘Arabic in Speech, Turkish in
Lineage: Mamluks and their Sons in the Intellectual Life of Fourteenth-Century Egypt and Syria’,
Journal of Semitic Studies 33 (1988): 81–114, esp. 89–90.
185
A Fourteenth Century Translation of Sa‘dī’s Gulistān, ed. A. Bodrogligeti (Budapest 1969).
186 Literature and Religious Change

classics from the east were also copied in Egypt. Many of the manuscripts of our
Turkish literary monuments from the Golden Horde were written in Egypt,
although some were re-exported to Anatolia, Istanbul or the Dasht-i Qipchaq at
various points, and of course a good number were taken wholesale to Istanbul
after the Ottoman conquest. Some poems by Seyfi, for instance, were the subject
of nazires by the Germiyanid poet Ahmed-i Da‘i.186 Moreover, Anatolian authors
also made their fortune at the Mamluk court. Darir, for example, the Erzurum
litterateur who had failed to find patronage in Karaman, composed his Siyer-i
Nebi and a translation of the Futuh al-Sham for Barquq.187 The wealth and
facilities of Cairo also attracted Anatolian scholars such as Hacı Paşa who studied
there before returning to Rum, capitalising on the expertise in Islamic sciences
they had acquired there to find patrons, for example the Aydınids. Some never
returned, and a sizeable community of Rumi students developed in Cairo.188
By the later fifteenth century the dynamic had started to change. This interest
in Turkish literature continued among the Mamluk elite into the fifteenth
century, but gradually the Anatolian dialect came to supplant Qipchaq in Egypt
and Syria. Mamluk sultans such as Qayitbay and Qansuh al-Ghawri composed
poetry in Anatolian Turkish; again linguistic necessity was not an issue, for they
also wrote in Arabic. A Turkish translation of Firdawsi’s Shahnama by the poet
Şerifi of Amid was dedicated to Qansuh al-Ghawri and significantly, it was done
in Anatolian Turkish, not an eastern dialect.189 Meanwhile, the Turcophone
Mamluk elite started to evince an interest in some of the early-fourteenth-century
Anatolian Turkish classics. A luxury copy of Aşık Paşa’s Garibname was produced
for the Mamluk amir Yashbak min Mahdi in Syria in around 1477;190 and a
collection of poems made for the Mamluk sultan Qayitbay includes Gülşehri’s
verses.191 The library of Qayitbay also contained a collection of the poems of
Yunus Emre and another fourteenth-century Anatolian Sufi, Kaygusuz Abdal.192

186
İzgi, ‘Cani Bek Devrinde (1342–1357) Altınordu Hanlığında Bilim Hayatı’, 162.
187
See Zeren Tanındı, ‘Two Bibliophile Mamluk Emirs: Qansuh the Master of the Stables and
Yashbak the Secretary’, in Doris Behrens-Abouseif (ed.), The Arts of the Mamluks in Egypt and
Syria: Evolution and Impact (Bonn, 2012), 267–81, esp. 267–8.
188
Yıldız, ‘From Cairo to Ayasuluk’, 265–9.
189
See K. D’Hulster, ‘“Sitting with Ottomans and Standing with Persians”: The Shahnama-yi Turki
as a Highlight of Mamluk Court Culture’, in U. Vermeulen and K. D’Hulster (eds), Egypt in the
Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk Eras, IV: Proceedings of the 14th and 15th International Colloquium
Organized at the Katholieke Universiteit Leiden in May 2005 and May 2006 (Leuven, 2010),
229–55.
190
Tanındı, ‘Two Bibliophile Mamluk Emirs’, 268–74.
191
Ibid., 275; also noted by Kuru, ‘Gülşehri, Seventh Sheikh’, 281.
192
Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi, MS Koğuşlar 950, dated to 895/1490. This has been published in
transcription and facsimile as ‘Alī bin Ahmed bin Emīr ‘Alī, Mecmū‘a-i Latīfe ve Dili. Giriş-
_
İnceleme-Metin-Sözlük-Tıpkıbasım, ed. Mustafa Demirel (Istanbul, 2005). _
 The Emergence of Literary Turkish 187

The shift from Qipchaq to Anatolian Turkish as the Mamluk courtly language
probably reflects shifting power dynamics, with the rise of the Ottoman empire in
the period bringing a greater prestige to the previously reviled Anatolian dialect.
Yet the choice to write in Turkish was not simply a question of authors deliber-
ately settling for a limited, provincial audience. While the horizons of the
Turcophone literary world were of course narrower than those of the dār al-Islām
itself, they still encompassed a vast geography stretching from Khwarazm to Cairo.
Texts such as Behcetü’l-Hadayik or Sarakhsi’s Güzide, translated or composed for
the purposes of communicating knowledge, above all religious knowledge, to an
audience who did not have access to it, were often transmitted across large parts of
the Turcophone world. However, the majority of the examples discussed in this
chapter suggest that rather than linguistic necessity, the employment of Turkish
was a deliberate strategy motivated by political and religious reasons, above all the
assertion of new forms of authority. In the case of the translations made for the
Aydınid amirs, cultural appropriation as a form of political legitimation seems
likely to be at work, while with the Germiyanids’ employment of Turkish for
epigraphic and legal purposes we have an even more radical attempt to assert
publicly the adaptation of conventional forms of Islamic discourse into a local
idiom. Similarly, the Sufi works of Gülşehri and Aşık Paşa, while inspired by Sufi
and especially Mevlevi ideas of multilingual communication, represent attempts
by the authors to assert their status as shaykhs and their personal access to divine
knowledge as well as to communicate to a local Turcophone audience. At the
same time, the use of Turkish for such purposes, whether in support of dynastic
legitimacy or Sufi claims to sainthood, was possible only in frontier areas of
Anatolia where the conventions of Islamic civilisation as understood in Konya
did not apply. In this sense, the rise of Turkish is a direct consequence of the
Mongol invasions, for it was only with the collapse of traditional forms of political
legitimacy in central Anatolia that places such as Aydın, the Germiyanid lands and
Kırşehir started to emerge as alternative centres of power, whose rulers or leaders
required a new vocabulary and language in which to assert their authority and
legitimacy.
 5

Vernacular Religious Literature

Tales of Conversion, Eschatology and Unbelief

The rise of Turkish as an Anatolian literary language was accompanied by the

emergence of new types of religious literature. Dealing with subjects such as the
basic requirements of Islam and popular religious tales of the heroes of early Islam,
especially the deeds of ‘Ali b. Abi Talib, these works were written in a simple,
accessible style in the two main vernaculars of Muslim Anatolia, Persian and
Turkish. One such work is the earliest Anatolian Turkish vernacular text that can
be credibly dated, the Behcetü’l-Hadayik, discussed in Chapter 4, which opens
with a section on tawhīd, the unity of God, explaining the basic Muslim
_
catechism, the shahāda, emphasising that ‘saying lā ilāh illā allāh is the key to
heaven’.1 Subsequent sections use narratives of the careers of the Prophet and his
family, as well as the story of Joseph, to teach the elements of Islam, but overall
the emphasis is more on right practice rather than belief. This emphasis charac-
terises much of this new, popular religious literature, but at the same time the
texts show a particular interest in stories of conversion and battling unbelief, and a
decidedly polemical tone largely absent in the earlier thirteenth-century literature
seems to emerge.
These popular religious texts circulated in a variety of genres, which are
examined in this chapter – catechisms, eschatological works and epics in both
prose and verse. Information about the audience, and often the authorship, of
these various works can only be inferred from their content. By describing them as
‘popular’ it should not be inferred that they were necessarily aimed at a certain
social class, for the distinction between an elite and non-elite culture could be
highly fluid in the pre-modern Islamic world. For example, philosophically

1
Süleymaniye, MS Yazma Bağışlar 4040, fol. 6a.

188
 Vernacular Religious Literature 189

complex ideas permeated into widely circulated poetry, above all via Sufism.2
Similarly, while the cult of saints is often taken as a typical expression of
‘popular’ Islam,3 it occupies a crucial place in the highly complex systems of
thinkers such as Ibn ‘Arabi, which were explicitly aimed at a limited elite
audience. However, medieval Muslim texts also draw attention to the sway
held over the masses by popular preachers (wu‘‘āz, qus sās), of whom a hallmark
_ __ _
was their interest in eschatology;4 the common concern with this theme shared
by the works under consideration here suggests they belong to this tradition.
They are popular in that they were written in a simple, accessible language, and
were aimed at a wider audience than the Anatolian religious textual production
of the late twelfth and early thirteenth centuries when works in Arabic or
Persian were composed either for limited circles of educated, philosophically
inclined Sufis, such as the works of Ibn ‘Arabi, or at the behest of the ruler,
such as Anawi’s verse qisas al-anbiyā’ the Anis al-Qulub, and the compositions
_ _
of Hubaysh-i Tiflisi. In contrast, the vernacular works under consideration
here seem to have been widely circulated. Many of our popular vernacular texts
exist in different versions, often with substantial differences and frequently in
different languages too, with the same or closely related works circulating in
Persian, Eastern Turkish and Anatolian Turkish. The plethora of variant
versions may suggest the existence of orally transmitted works, which were
subsequently put into writing. It is suggestive, for instance, that the Behcetü’l-
Hadayik is arranged into divisions called meclis (‘sitting, assembly’), indicating
that each section may have been read aloud, although this subject needs further
research.5
The wide transmission of the vernacular works considered here, at least in
contrast to the court works, is testimony to their influence on the development of
Islam in Anatolia. They cannot, however, be wholly dissociated from the learned
tradition of religious literary production. The name of one author of medieval
Anatolian epic, Tursun Fakih, indicates that he himself was one of the ‘ulama’, a
jurisprudent (faqīh), while several of our authors, texts and manuscripts are
associated with Sufism, especially Mevlevism. Evidence from the Mamluk lands

2
See Boaz Shoshan, ‘High Culture and Popular Culture in Islam’, Studia Islamica 73 (1991): 67–107;
Hirschler, The Written Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands, 22–29; Shahab Ahmed, What Is Islam?
The Importance of Being Islamic (Princeton, 2016), 333–8.
3
E.g. Shoshan, ‘High Culture and Popular Culture in Islam’, 83.
4
Ibid., 83–5; Jonathan P. Berkey, Popular Preaching and Religious Authority in the Medieval Islamic
Near East (Seattle, 2001), 22–35, 46–8.
5
For a preliminary survey of the relationship between written texts and orality in medieval Anatolia
see Dedes, Battalname, vol. 1, 51–84; in general see also Hirschler, The Written Word in the Medieval
Arabic Lands, 12–17.
190 Literature and Religious Change

indicates that popular preachers performed in formal locations such as mosques

and madrasas as well as in informal settings such as cemeteries.6 Although we have
little specific information about the circumstances in which popular preaching
was undertaken in Anatolia, it is likely that a similar range of locations was used,
including, in all probability, Sufi zāwiyas, given the association of several of these
texts with such an environment.
Although written in the vernacular, it is important to distinguish these works
from the ‘vernacular Islam’ that some scholars, in particular Ahmet Karamustafa,
have identified in medieval Anatolia. Expressed predominantly in Turkish,
rejecting the formal urban traditions of sharia-minded piety, ‘vernacular Islam’
is characterised as both ‘latitudinarian’ and ‘provincial’, and is said to form the
basis for Alevism.7 The existence or otherwise of such a ‘vernacular Islam’ and
what its attributes might be is a controversial subject, and the idea of a rural–
urban split in religiosity has been criticised.8 Research on Ottoman Syria has
argued that in fact the distinction between urban and popular religion is unsatis-
factory, but instead has pointed to the existence of ‘agrarian religion’ – a common
core of popular belief, distinct from the piety of the learned ‘ulama’ who
constituted only a tiny proportion of the population. Agrarian religion tran-
scended sectarian divisions and was shared by townsmen too, for towns were
not isolated from the surrounding countryside but rather were ‘sunk in an
essentially agrarian milieu’ upon which they relied for both labour and produce.9
This was doubtless true of medieval Anatolia too, with its small towns and large
Christian population which certainly shared elements of belief and practice with
Muslims.10
In both formulations, ‘vernacular’ and ‘agrarian’ religion are conceived as in
some sense opposed to the religion of the learned. Yet the texts considered here are
entirely compatible with the faith of the ‘ulama’, who on occasion were their
authors; they reveal little evidence of either syncretism or rejection of sharia-based

6
See Berkey, Popular Preaching and Religious Authority, 15–17, 36–52; cf. Hirschler, The Written
Word in the Medieval Arabic Lands, 170.
7
Karamustafa, ‘Kaygusuz Abdal’, 330–1; see also the discussion in Rıza Yıldırım, ‘Sunni Orthodox vs
Shi‘ite Heterodox? A Reappraisal of Islamic Piety in Medieval Anatolia’, in Peacock, De Nicola and
Yıldız (eds), Islam and Christianity, 289–90.
8
Yıldırım, ‘Sunni Orthodox vs Shi‘ite Heterodox’; Oktay Uslu, ‘The Şathiyye of Yūnus Emre and
Kayg·usuz Abdāl’. __
9
James Grehan, Twilight of the Saints: Everyday Religion in Ottoman Syria and Palestine (New York,
2016), 14–17, esp. 15.
10
See for example Antony Eastmond, ‘Other Encounters: Popular Belief and Cultural Convergence in
Anatolia and the Caucasus’, in Peacock, De Nicola and Yıldız (eds), Islam and Christianity,
183–213; Michel Balivet, Romanie Byzantine et Pays de Rum Turc: Histoire d’un espace d’imbrication
gréco-turque (Istanbul, 1994), esp. 111–78; Trépanier, Foodways and Daily Life, 105–20.
 Vernacular Religious Literature 191

piety, even if the latter does not constitute their main concern. This is not to
dismiss the possibility of the existence of either ‘vernacular’ or ‘agrarian’ religiosity
in medieval Anatolia. However, the popular texts examined here, which have
rarely been discussed by the existing scholarship on medieval Anatolian Islam,11
suggest the spread of a piety based on a sense of sectarian distinctiveness, both of
Muslims defined in opposition to Christians, and increasingly of Sunnis in
contrast to Shiites. We can see this across the three main genres considered here.
First, I examine catechisms, known to later authors as ‘ilm-i hāl,12 in which the
_
elements of belief are inculcated by a question and answer format; this is closely
connected to the second type of literature I study, works dealing with eschatology,
in which the dead are examined on their faith by angels to determine whether they
enter heaven or hell. Thirdly, I look at some of the popular religious epics of
fourteenth-century Anatolia, which exhibit a particular interest in the battle
against unbelief. Finally, I consider the extent to which this new religious
atmosphere can be associated with the changed political situation in Mongol-
ruled Anatolia.

A MEDIEVAL ANATOLIAN CATECHISM: THE SIRAJ AL-QULUB

The Siraj al-Qulub is the title of a set of texts in Persian and both Eastern and
Anatolian Turkish that circulated in Iran, Anatolia and probably the Golden
Horde lands in the fourteenth to fifteenth centuries,13 and is said to represent a

11
The only significant study known to me to make use of comparable sources is Tijana Krstić,
Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire
(Stanford, 2011), which concentrates on the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries.
12
On ‘ilm-i hâl literature see Krstić, Contested Conversions, 26–30; Terzioğlu, ‘Where ʻİlm-i Ḥāl
_
Meets Catechism’.
13
For information on the various Siraj al-Qulub manuscripts see Sirâcü’l-Kulûb: Gönüllerin Işıǧı, ed.
Yakub Karasoy (Ankara, 2013), 17–20. In addition, on the Budapest manuscript not discussed in
this publication see Yakub Karasoy, ‘Sirâcü’l-Kulûb’un Budapeşte Nushası’, Gazi Türkiyat Mecmuası
18 (2016): 51–9. According to Karasoy, much of the text of the Budapest manuscript is common to
that of the Konya Koyunoğlu manuscript published in his earlier edition. Hajji Khalifa refers to three
different texts bearing the title Siraj al-Qulub, the first of which is described as a Persian text of
questions and answers, which may be the same as the one under consideration here. The second is an
Arabic work by Qaraqush al-Mansuri, apparently related to the famous anthology al-‘Iqd al-Farid,
and the third is the Arabic ethical work by al-Tabrizi discussed in n. 14 below (mushtamal ‘alā
maqāmāt al-khawāss wa’l-‘awwām). See Katip Çelebi, Kashf al-Zunun, ed. S. Yaltkaya, vol. I, p. 983.
__ Siraj al-Qulub attributed to Abu Nasr al-Sa‘id b. Muhammad Abi’l-Qasim al-
A Persian text entitled
Ghaznawi is preserved in two Istanbul manuscripts (Istanbul University Library, Farsça Yazmalar
203 and Beyazıt Devlet Kütüphanesi, MS No. 3703). This is based on the question and answer
format representing Muhammad’s responses to the Jews’ questions, and is divided into a varying
number of chapters, twenty in the University MS, forty in the Beyazıt one. However, the text
appears quite distinct from the Kütahya manuscripts examined here, and the manuscripts are rather
192 Literature and Religious Change

translation of an Arabic original.14 Although the substantial variations between

the various Persian and Turkish versions make it hard to pin down a single
prototype, the inspiration was evidently the Arabic Book of a Thousand Questions.
This widely circulated text, composed no later than the tenth century and
translated into languages as diverse as Latin, Urdu, Tamil, Malay and Javanese,
deals with the story of a conversion to Islam at the hands of Muhammad.15After
the Prophet’s hijra, the Jewish community of Medina, led by ‘Abdallah b. Salam,
posed Muhammad questions designed to show the falsity of his pretensions to
Prophethood. Muslim tradition asserted that his ability to answer the Jews’
questions proved the veracity of his claim, and this was also the occasion on
which al-Kahf, the sura recited on Fridays in Candarid Kastamonu, was revealed
(see pp. 73–4). On one level, the Thousand Questions thus asserts the truth of
Muhammad’s mission and of Islam itself, but on another it serves as a primer of
the basic beliefs of a Muslim. The Thousand Questions seems to have been
intended to inculcate the basics of Islam, to provide believers with a ready primer
of responses to challenges from non-Muslims and to demonstrate the superiority
of Islam over other faiths. It thus addressed not just newly converted Muslims,
but also could affirm the Islam of established Muslim communities. As Ronit
Ricci, who has studied the transmission of the text in South and South East Asia,
puts it,

late, the University copy dating to Ramadan 1083/December 1683–January 1684 while Beyazıt
3703 dates to Rabi’ I 985/1577. For that reason, it is excluded from consideration here although its
relationship to the other Siraj al-Qulub texts would merit further examination.
14
This is explicitly stated in the Eastern Turkish Moscow manuscript (Sirâcü’l-Kulûb, ed. Karasoy,
21), and the work has been identified with a Siraj al-Qulub by a certain Abu’l-Mahamid Ahmad
b. Muhammad b. ‘Abd al-Malik al-Ash‘ari al-Tabrizi of which manuscripts survive in Istanbul,
Vienna and Manisa. See Ayşegül Sertkaya, ‘Horezm Türkçesi ile yazılan Sirâcü’l-kulub ve dil
özellikleri’, VI. Uluslararası Türk Dili Kurultayı, 20–25 Ekim 2008, Bildiriler (Ankara, 2012),
3865–75, at p. 3856; G. W. Flugel, Die arabischen, persischen und türkischen Handschriften der
Kaiserlich-Königlichen Hofbibliothek zu Wien (Vienna, 1865), pp. 374–5; Manisa Yazma Eser
Kütüphanesi, MS 1168, fols 15a–25a. Istanbul manuscripts include: Süleymaniye: Yazma Bağışlar
3952/1, Aşir Efendi 443/12, Carullah 1084/7, Carullah 2061/42, H. Hüsnü Paşa 631/2, Hacı
Mahmud Efendi 2758/2, Hacı Mahmud Efendi 2249/1, İ. İsmail Hakkı 1189/2, Kasidecizade
685/4, Laleli 3648/4, Laleli 3680/5, Tahir Ağa Tekke 84/1, Hüdai Efendi 485/3, Kemankeş 245,
Kemankeş 36/4, Hacı Ahmed Paşa 329/16; in addition four more manuscripts are recorded in the
Beyazıt Devlet Kütüphanesi, Istanbul: Beyazıt MSS 3703, 3541, 7937 and Veliyüddin Efendi
1889; see also Istanbul University Library, Arapça Yazmalar 3145. The text consists of forty-one
chapters (bāb), mostly only a few lines long, on pious topics, with a distinctly Sufi flavour:
repentance (tawba), jihad, modesty (hayā’), for example, while more detail is given to sainthood
(wilāya). However, the work by Tabrizi seems to diverge too far from the Persian and Turkish Siraj
al-Qulub texts to be related, lacking their question and answer format; in addition, all manuscripts
I have been able to examine are fairly late, seventeenth or eighteenth century.
15
For a study of this text see Ronit Ricci, Islam Translated: Literature, Conversion, and the Arabic
Cosmopolis of South and Southeast Asia (Chicago, 2011), esp. 34–41.
 Vernacular Religious Literature 193

FIG. 5.1 Siraj al-Qulub, Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı, Kütahya Vahid Ali Paşa
Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, MS 1415.

[The Book of a Thousand Questions] offered guidance, restated the justifications for
becoming or remaining a practicing Muslim, and propagated a model of embracing Islam
by persuasion; it addition it enhanced community building by supplying a complex web of
intertextual sources in the local language to which local people could relate, and which tied
them to the broader cosmopolis in their part of the world and beyond it, to the universal
umma. All these roles - effected and enhanced by the translation of this and similar texts –
contributed to a process of ongoing Islamization.16

The Persian and Turkish versions of the Thousand Questions, the Siraj
al-Qulub, offer similar insights into the process of Islamisation. The earliest
surviving copy of the Siraj al-Qulub is a Persian version, held in the Vahid Ali
Paşa Library in Kütahya as MS 1415, copied in Sha‘ban 731/May–June 1331
(Fig. 5.1).17

16
Ibid., 214.
17
The Vahid Ali Paşa library in Kütahya holds one other version of the Persian text, which differs
considerably, Vahid Ali Paşa, MS 1465; this was copied in Astarabad at an unknown date so is
excluded from consideration here. See M. Toker, ‘Furâtî Sirâcü’l-Kulûb’unun Yeni Bir Nüshası
Üzerine’, 2007 Unesco Mevlâna Yılında Uluslararası VII. Dil, Yazın, Deyişbilim Sempozyumu (2–5
Mayıs 2007) Bildiri Kitabı I (Konya, 2007), 545–56, at p. 547.
194 Literature and Religious Change

The next earliest manuscript of the text, held in the Topkapı Palace as MS
Koğuşlar 1057, is dated 763/1362, and is written in Eastern Turkish;18 two other
Eastern Turkish versions survive, the best-known one in Uighur script written in
Yazd in 835/1431,19 while a Moscow manuscript dates to 961/1554, although
this text has been attributed on linguistic grounds to the late thirteenth or early
fourteenth century.20 Six Anatolian Turkish versions are also attested, although
the whereabouts of one of these, formerly in the possession of the well-known
Istanbul bookseller and bibliophile Raif Yelkenci, is currently unknown. Unfor-
tunately, none of the Anatolian Turkish versions of the text is dated, and the most
that can be said for sure is that they were composed between the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries. While a more detailed study of these texts is required, it is clear
that they exhibit substantial differences. The number of questions varies greatly in
the texts, in the various Turkish versions from as few as nineteen up to forty-one,
while the Persian text contains many more, most of which are given only very
brief treatment. Almost every Siraj al-Qulub manuscript thus seems to represent
an independent ‘translation’ of the putative Arabic original, as the editor of one
version remarks: ‘Each of the extant manuscripts of the Siraj al-Qulub was
translated by a separate translator.’21 Yet a comparison of passages from the oldest
Eastern Turkish manuscript and an Anatolian version held in Konya, the manu-
script of which probably dates to the fifteenth century, indicates that this is exactly
the same text, written in two different dialects, with only minimal differences of
phraseology between them.22 The relationship between the various manuscripts
needs further work, as does the connection of the Siraj al-Qulub to another widely
circulated text, the Turkish Kırk Su’al of the sixteenth century.23 Most probably,
we are dealing with a free adaptation rather than a literal translation of an Arabic
prototype.
The Kütahya Persian version is worth lingering on, as it gives us a securely
dated text from Anatolia. The copyist gives his name as Shadi b. Khwajaki, and he

18
See Fehmi Edhem Karatay, Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Türkçe Yazmalar Kataloğu (Istanbul, 1961), II,
p. 390, no 3081; see ibid., I, 129, no. 380 (MS H. 323) for another copy of an Anatolia Turkish
version, dated 1160/1747.
19
British Library MS Or 8193 discussed in G. L. M. Clauson, ‘A Hitherto Unknown Turkish
Manuscript in “Uighur” Characters’, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 1 (Jan., 1928): 99–130.
20
Sertkaya, ‘Horezm Türkçesi ile Yazılan Sirâcü’l-kulub,’ 3855.
21
Sirâcü’l-Kulûb, ed. Karasoy, 12.
22
See the passage in Sertkaya, ‘Horezm Türkçesi ile Yazılan Sirâcü’l-kulub’, 3864–5, and compare it
with the parallel passage in Sirâcü’l-Kulûb, ed. Karasoy, 39–40.
23
See Toker, ‘Furâtî Sirâcü’l-Kulûb’unun Yeni Bir Nüshası Üzerine’, 547; also Tijana Krstić, ‘From
Shahāda to ‘Aqīda: Conversion to Islam, Catechisation and Sunnitisation in Sixteenth-Century
Ottoman Rumeli’, in A. C. S. Peacock (ed.), Islamisation: Comparative Perspectives from History
(Edinburgh, 2017), 301–2.
 Vernacular Religious Literature 195

is known to us from copies of other Persian works held in the Vahid Ali Paşa
Library, the Persian dictionary by ‘Abd al-Mu’min al-Khu’i and a Persian fiqh
work to be discussed below.24 All three manuscripts were bequeathed by Ahmad-i
Khass, who describes himself as ‘one of the descendants of Mawlana’ (min awlād
mawlānā), to the Mevlevi khānqāh in Kütahya named after Rumi’s descendant
Celaleddin Ergun Çelebi (d. 775/1373), a native of the town.25 Like the other
works copied by Shadi b. Khwajaki, the initial folio of the text contains annota-
tions in Eastern Turkish, most likely reflecting the prestige status of that dialect in
early fourteenth-century Anatolia. Although none of Shadi b. Khwajaki’s manu-
scripts contain information about the place of copying, the fact that all are found
in the Vahid Ali Paşa Library in Kütahya, and are associated with the Erguniyye
Mevlevihane, suggests that they were copied in Kütahya, then capital of the
Germiyanid beylik.
There is no direct relationship between the Persian and Turkish texts, as can be
seen from a comparison of the Kütahya manuscript with the Konya Turkish
version published by Karasoy. The Persian text opens with a long passage setting
out the background to the questions, which is entirely absent from the Konya
text. It starts:
They relate from Hasan al-Basri, who said that it is related from the Prophet that when he
made the hijra from Mecca to Medina and summoned the people of Medina [to Islam], the
people of Medina became Muslim, responding favourably to the Prophet and accepting the
religion of truth, repenting of unbelief. Thus did the Prophet summon to the religion of
truth; but the Jews of Medina did not reply favourably for a while. As much as they
recognised the Prophet [text missing] and saw his signs and miracles and his Prophethood
was proved to them, they nonetheless denied him.

As the Kütahya manuscript goes on to explain, the Jews of Medina then sent to
their co-religionists in Khaybar, who advised them to consult ‘Abdallah b. Salam,
‘the most learned of the Jews’, so that he ‘debates and fights with Muhammad and
breaks and shames him so that we and you and all the Jews of the world will be
rescued from him’.26 At this juncture God revealed to the Prophet the Qur’anic
verse (Q.3:67) ‘Abraham was not a Jew or a Christian but a monotheist Muslim’
(mā kāna Ibrāhīm yahūdiyyan wa lā nasrāniyyan wa-lākin kāna hanīfan musliman).
_ _
God warns Muhammad of the Jews’ plan and assures him He is with him.
‘Abdallah b. Salam comes before the Prophet claiming that,

24
‘Abd al-Mu’min al-Khu’i, Nasib al-Fityan, Kütahya, Vahid Ali Paşa Kütüphanesi, MS no. 1416,
copied in Safar 732/November 1331; Vahid Ali Paşa, MS no. 1414.
25
On this institution, founded in the late fourteenth century, see Sevgi Parlak and Ş. Barihüda
Tanrıkorur, ‘Kütahya Mevlevihanesi’, TDVİA, vol. 27, 1–3.
26
Siraj al-Qulub, Kütahya, Vahid Ali Paşa Kütüphanesi, MS 1415, fols 1b–3a (unfoliated).
196 Literature and Religious Change

I am the most knowledgeable of the Jews of the world of the Torah; I am trusted by them,
and I read all the Torah and give its interpretation (tafsīr). I have come before you as a
messenger of the Jews. I shall ask you 1400 questions, if you give the right answer I will
enter your religion, all the Jews of the world will believe you, and strife will disappear.27

The Konya Turkish text, in contrast, contains none of this, but rather starts:
This book mentions the tales and stories of by-gone people, and why the heaven and earth
were created; it also mentions the wonders and marvels that there are on earth and in the
heavens, so that readers and listeners take a lesson from them. This is mentioned in seventy
questions and answers. We arranged the literary composition of this book in the form of
questions and answers and we have made difficult questions clear. The circumstances of
one these questions are that the Jews consulted the Torah, and our Prophet answered them.
We selected these words and made it into a book which we called the Siraj al-Qulub.28

While the questions in the Kütahya text start with ‘Abdallah b. Salam asking Muham-
mad what sort of prophet he is (a nabī or a rasūl), in the Konya text the opening
question is ‘In how many days did God create the world?’. The Konya text contains far
fewer questions, but its answers tend to be much more extensive, whereas in the
Kütahya manuscript the Prophet’s answers are often extremely brief; for example:
Question: ‘Inform me what Islam is?’ Answer: The Prophet said, ‘Believing in the oneness
of God, his prophets, the Day of Resurrection, and everything God has created.’ He said,
‘You spoke the truth, Muhammad.’29

Indeed, in places the answers are but a single word, reading more like the answers
to a riddle than a theological work:
Question: ‘What is stronger than iron?’ Answer: he said, ‘Fire.’ Question: ‘What is stronger
than fire?’ Answer: He said, ‘Water.’. . . Question: ‘Why do they call Adam Adam?’ Answer:
he said, ‘Because Adam was created from the skin (adīm) of the earth.’ . . . Question, ‘What
is that thing which is small and will never get big?’ Answer: ‘Stone.’ He said, ‘You spoke the
truth Muhammad.’30

Yet on other questions the Kütahya manuscript offers quite detailed answers,
some which may have been of direct relevance to the religiously mixed environ-
ment of western Anatolia. For instance, both sides of a full folio are devoted to the
question of the fate in the hereafter of the children of unbelievers.31 The text also

27
Ibid., fols 5a–b.
28
Sirâcü’l-Kulûb, ed. Karasoy, 25.
29
Siraj al-Qulub, Kütahya, Vahid Ali Paşa Kütüphanesi, MS 1415, fols 6b–7a.
30
Ibid., fols 25b–26a, 31a.
31
Ibid., fols 33b–34b. For a similar concern see Niğdeli Kadı Ahmed, El-Veledü’ş-Şefik ve’l-Hâfidü’l-
Halîk, ed. Ali Ertuğrul (Ankara 2015), I, 472, according to whom they go to heaven.
 Vernacular Religious Literature 197

exhibits an interest in basic questions of cosmology, such as how many stars there
are,32 and the breadth of the heavens.33 The question of where Noah’s ark came
to rest is also addressed (the answer given is at the Ka‘ba) and what happened to
Jerusalem during the flood (the angel Gabriel picked it up and took it to heaven,
where the angels perambulated around it and it formed the basis of the Ka‘ba).34
Beneath the earth there is said to be a great fish called Bahluth, whose head is in
the east and tail in the west, while one section discusses briefly God’s throne
(‘arsh), the Tablet on which God’s decrees are preserved (lawh) and the Divine
_
pen (qalam), Qur’anically derived concepts that all played an important role in
Sufi cosmology. The final sections of the work describe heaven and hell and the
35

Day of Resurrection, the text concluding with the observation that ‘believers go to
heaven and unbelievers go to hell; one party is in heaven, one party is in hell’.36
Much more detail is given in the Konya Turkish text, with its twenty-five
questions and answers.37 The first theme to be dealt with the Konya text is
creation – in how many days God created the world and what he created before
the world. It then discusses the names of God’s creation – the name of the seven
heavens that comprise the firmament and of their angels and of the seven earths;
the questions of why God created heaven and hell and where they are located; of
why God created the throne (‘arsh and kursī) and what its attributes are. The next
set of questions in the text move on to the topic of the angel of death and the Day
of Judgement, emphasising that only the believer will enter heaven. Alongside the
repeated injunctions against unbelief, much of the Konya Turkish text emphasises
popular belief with a series of riddle-like questions: ‘Inform me Oh Muhammad!
Which grave moved and travelled with a person inside it?’ (The answer is the
whale that carried Jonah.) The moral of the story is summed up as ‘Oh beloved
and faithful people (‘aşıklar ve sadıklar), do you desire that God save you too from
what you fear? The proclamation of God’s unity lā ilāh illā allāh should be always
on your tongue.’38 While this story may be seen as an opportunity to reinforce the
message of the shahāda, a point that is stressed elsewhere in the Konya version of
the Siraj al-Qulub, including its end, other riddles and their responses have a less
obvious message. For instance, the longest single response in the Konya text
replies to the question: ‘Inform me, Oh Muhammad, what is that creature who
once gave advice to a man; the creature was not man, angel or fairy?’ The answer is

32
Siraj al-Qulub, Kütahya Vahid Ali Paşa Kütüphanesi, MS 1415, fols 21a–b.
33
Ibid., fols 23b–24a.
34
Ibid., fols 32b–33a.
35
Ibid., fols 38a–b.
36
Ibid., fol. 62a.
37
Sirâcü’l-Kulûb, ed. Karasoy, 25–55.
38
Ibid., 41.
198 Literature and Religious Change

the ant; in the Qur’an (Surat al-Naml), Solomon is said to have nearly crushed an
ant who warned his fellow ants to escape back to their homes; the Qur’an
concludes that ‘Solomon smiled at [the ant’s] speech’. But while the Konya text
gives an elaborate description of Solomon’s court, its points to quite a different
moral:
The ant said, ‘Oh prophet of God! Do you not know why they call you Solomon
(Süleyman)?’ Solomon said, ‘I don’t know.’ The ant said, ‘Although your heart was sound
(selim) and you know the circumstances of the next world, you have accepted the few
pleasures of this world and have been deceived by its possessions and kingship; therefore
you are called Solomon.’ The ant went on: ‘Do you know why God has subdued this
wind?’ ‘I don’t know,’ said Solomon. The ant said, ‘He has subdued it for this reason: that
which you have accepted is nothing. Just as the wind passes, the world’s wealth and
kingship pass too. In other words, it is a sign to you that while you were a prophet in this
world you were deceived by something that perishes.’39

The ant’s wisdom is something emphasised by the scholarly tafsīr tradition, but is
not part of the Qur’an itself. The exegetes Fakhr al-Din al-Razi and al-Qurtubi
particularly emphasised the wisdom of the ant, whom they elevated to the level of
an exemplar for humans to follow.40 The passage suggests how it is erroneous to
make a hard and fast division between a ‘popular’ Islam and a ‘scholarly’ tradition:
the Konya text harnesses aspects of the learned exegetical tradition to teach what is
ultimately a simple moral about the vanity of this world.
Despite the Konya Turkish text’s ability to draw on these learned traditions,
neither it nor the Persian Kütahya version evinces much concern for the practice
of the formal requirements of Islam: beside the emphasis on heaven and hell, there
is little direct exhortation to conduct prayer or fast in Ramadan, for instance.
However, other versions of the text took a different approach. We can see this in
another manuscript copied by Shadi b. Khwajaki in 731/1330–1, Vahid Ali Paşa
Library, MS 1414. The initial folios of this Persian manuscript are missing so we
do not know how much of the text has been lost, but it is clear from the first
couple of folios that it contained another Persian Siraj al-Qulub manuscript, albeit
one of very different contents and presentation. The same question–answer
format is maintained, but the questions are first given in Arabic, then in Persian,
with, as before, the questioner recognising the rectitude of the Prophet’s answer
(rāst guftī/sadaqta). The questions seem to have been calculated to elicit the
_
opportunity to teach not just doctrine (‘aqīda) but also practice. For example,
the question ‘What is Islam?’ (mā al-islām) is interpreted in its Persian translation

39
Ibid., 46.
40
Sarra Tlili, Animals in the Qur’an (Cambridge, 2012), 184–91.
 Vernacular Religious Literature 199

as ‘What is the basis of Islam?’ (qā‘ida-yi islām chīst), which is then used as an
opportunity to introduce the five pillars of Islam – saying the shahāda, prayer,
charity, fasting and the hajj - the basics of practice that a Muslim should observe,
which are so absent from the versions of the Siraj al-Qulub discussed above. From
fol. 4b onwards the work becomes an abridged Persian synopsis of fiqh according
to the Shafi‘i law school. The text states,
I shall briefly explain these five pillars, by God’s grace, in accordance with the Sunnis and
the Shafi‘i madhhab; that which is an obligation incumbent on every Muslim I will bring
[forth], so that everyone who reads this book and knows, will be clear-sighted in the faith
and ritual practice (‘ibādat) he performs.41

In contrast to almost all fiqh manuals, which are written in Arabic for legal
specialists, this one is written in Persian, suggesting a more popular audience.
The use of what seems to be the Siraj al-Qulub as a sort of framing device to
introduce this primer on Muslim practice suggests the wide applicability of
various versions of this text to introducing Islam to the newly converted, or the
only nominally Muslim. Ultimately, then, the great variation in the texts of the
Siraj al-Qulub suggests that it was the very flexibility of the theme of the Prophet’s
defeat of ‘Abdallah b. Salam that gave it its great appeal. The question–answer
format it embodied could be used in a variety of different circumstances, from
reminding the Muslim of his obligations, to asserting the superiority of Islam in
debate, from outlining the essential practices of Islam to asserting the truth of
Muslim cosmology. However, the fact that Vahid Ali Paşa MS 1415 and the
Konya Turkish text actually put very little emphasis on practice, and in terms of
belief tend to stress what we might be tempted to dismiss as the inessential
elements of Islam – the names of the angels, the ordering of the heavens – is
suggestive of a religious environment in which belief was tested and demonstrated
through one’s understanding of God’s creation and the names one used to
describe it rather than any sort of rigid creed expressed through a catechism based
on the acceptance or rejection of given theological concepts. It was less the
common belief in theological concepts then this shared body of cosmology that
gave shape to the religious identity of fourteenth-century Islamic Anatolia.

ESCHATOLOGY AND ISLAMISATION

The requirements to be considered a Muslim are illustrated by a key theme in

eschatological literature, the interrogation of the dead by the two angels Munkar

41
Kütahya, Vahid Ali Paşa Kütüphanesi, MS 1414, fol. 4a.
200 Literature and Religious Change

and Nakir. Tijana Krstić suggests that the bar was raised increasingly high over
time, noting that in the mid-fourteenth-century Turkish text Risaletü’l-Islam,
probably from Karasi, converts are allowed to go to paradise without having to
answer any questions at all,42 whereas in the fifteenth-century ‘ilm-i hāl by
_
Kutbeddin İzniki a believer was required to pronounce the six articles of faith
(belief in one God, God’s angels, in divinely revealed books, prophets, the day of
Resurrection and that all things are lawful because of God), to believe from the
heart and to perform the obligatory duties (hajj, fasting, almsgiving, prayer and
saying the shahāda). In the sixteenth century, these obligations were elaborated
further.43
Our texts support this conclusion. Vahid Ali Paşa Library MS 1415, despite its
extensive discussion of heaven and hell, does not raise the topic of what one has to
do to get there or Munkar and Nakir at all, merely noting that ‘unbelievers, Jews,
innovators, and those of ill belief’ will go to hell.44 The definition of Islam is
simply ‘bearing witness to the oneness of God, belief (īmān) in his Prophet, the
Day of Resurrection, and everything He created’.45 The Konya Turkish version of
the Siraj al-Qulub does discuss Munkar and Nakir at some length, but is scarcely
more demanding:
The two angels enter the tomb; they sit up [the dead] as if he is alive and say, ‘Who is your
God, what is your religion?’ The person should reply, ‘My God is Allah, my religion is the
religion of Islam and the person God Exalted has given us is Muhammad Mustafa.’ Then
they say, ‘What is your knowledge?’ And that servant [of God] replies, ‘The Qur’an’. Then
a call comes from God, ‘O my angels! Put down my servant and open one of the gates of
heaven before his grave so that the peace of heaven reaches him.’46

It would be wrong to consider this simply a difference between a folk religiosity

and a sophisticated urban one. The qadi Ahmad of Niğde, a descendant of a
distinguished line of scholars,47 does discuss Munkar and Nakir’s questioning of
the dead, but is equally undemanding. According to him, the two angels ask,
‘Who is your creator, which is your prophet and what is your religion?’, and to get

42
See the text published in part by Şinasi Tekin, ‘XIV. Yüzyılda Yazılmış Gazilik Tarikası Gaziliğin
Yolları adlı bir Eski Anadolu Türkçesi Metni ve Gaza/Cihad Kavramları Hakkında’, Journal of
Turkish Studies 13 (1989): 139–204 at p. 148.
43
Krstić, Contested Conversions, 29–31.
44
Siraj al-Qulub, Kütahya Vahid Ali Paşa Kütüphanesi, MS 1415, fols 56b–57a.
45
Ibid., fol. 6a.
46
Sirâcü’l-Kulûb, ed. Karasoy, 36.
47
On the author and his education and descent see Peacock, ‘Ahmad of Niğde’s al-Walad al-Shafīq’,
99–100. _
 Vernacular Religious Literature 201

into heaven all the dead need do is to affirm belief in ‘the creator of man, the
name of the religion of Islam, and the prophecy of Muhammad’.48
Ultimately the division that these texts stress is less between sinner and
righteous, but between the believer who will go to heaven and the unbeliever
who is condemned to hell, a division that is if anything underlined by the claim
that the unbeliever’s pre-pubescent children will be saved. However, these
eschatological themes may have served not just to promote conversion, but also
moral renewal among the Muslims through an emphasis on the punishments of
hell and the rewards of heaven. For example, the third volume of Ahmad of
Niğde’s encyclopaedic al-Walad al-Shafiq is divided into two ‘branches’ (far‘); the
first deals with cosmology at length, starting with a description of the physical
world, then the heavens, the Antichrist, Mahdi and the Day of Resurrection.49
The second far‘ is devoted to death, heaven and hell, but inserted in between these
two far‘ is a long diatribe against the evils of people of Qadi Ahmad’s age ‘and the
people of Niğde, the place of composition of this book in particular’. These
comprise both failure to adhere to the precepts of Islam in terms of performing
prayers correctly, and also more general wrongdoing – lying, accepting bribes,
shedding blood, or as Qadi Ahmad puts it, ‘choosing the perishing world over the
enduring end’.50 Qadi Ahmad portrays a society in which ‘everyone is settled on
his own religion and faith, and the righteous have fled with their religion from
towns and cities and have established themselves on mountains ravines and the
bottoms of valleys . . . Only the name of being Muslim [muslumānī] is heard, and
despite the Qur’an being much studied, the meaning of it has gone to obliv-
ion.’51The following second ‘branch’ on death and the afterlife thus serves as a
warning to the wrongdoers of the present age as to the fate that will await them, as
well as the rewards for the believers.
The idea that eschatology might form part of a more general programme of
moral renewal, of strengthening Islam’s identity in Anatolia, is reinforced by the
fact that both the Kütahya Persian Siraj al-Qulub and Ahmad of Niğde stress the
connection of Anatolia with paradise. Ahmad relates how Kawthar, the river of
Paradise, watered six earthly rivers, four of which he connects explicitly to Rum:
the Mihran, the Jayhun, the Euphrates and the Tigris.52 The relationship is made
even more explicit in the Kütahya text, where ‘Abdallah b. Salam asks:

48
Niğdeli Kadı Ahmed, El-Veledü’ş-Şefik ve’l-Hâfidü’l-Halîk, II, 443.
49
Ibid., 385–435.
50
Ibid., 436–7.
51
Ibid., 468.
52
Ibid., 464.
202 Literature and Religious Change

‘Which are those four countries that tomorrow will be in paradise?’ [The Prophet] replied,
‘One is Rum, the second is Egypt, the third is Qiban [Qitban?] and the fourth Qali
[Erzurum?].’53 He asked, ‘What are those four cities which belong to heaven?’ [The
Prophet] replied, ‘One is Bab al-Abwab [Derbent], the second is ‘Abbadan, the third
Qayrawan, and the fourth Valashkird.’ He asked, ‘What are those four cities which belong
to hell?’ [The Prophet] replied, ‘One is Constantinople, the second is Antioch, the third
Ahwaz and the fourth Medina.’54

The idea that this world and the next are intertwined is a common theme of
eschatological literature.55 ‘Abbadan, in Khuzistan, is called one of the two ‘open
gates of Paradise’ in a hadith, while Qayrawan was considered to have a sacred
character, and the association of Medina with hell as well as heaven was common
in the eschatological literature.56 Both Bab al-Abwab and Valashkird were frontier
fortresses, famous for their role in jihad, which explains their association with
Paradise;57 the same may be true of the more local reference to Erzurum, on the
frontier with both Georgia to the east and the Christian Kingdom of Trebizond to
its north. Similarly, Antioch and Constantinople, cities associated with unbelief,
are placed in hell.58 The Siraj al-Qulub thus reflects a general tendency in Muslim
eschatological literature to associate certain earthly places with heaven and hell,
but gives it a local twist by introducing Anatolian localities and Rum itself.
Promoting a view of Muslim Rum as intertwined with heaven served to stress
the region’s Islamic character and define it in opposition to hellish infidel lands
such as Constantinople.
The interest of these Anatolian texts in heaven and hell is also reminiscent of
the approach of some of the eighth-century hadith collectors interested in
eschatology, who, as Christian Lange has pointed out, were often active in frontier
areas of the dār al-islām, ‘places where the interaction with the eschatological
thought of other religious communities may have been more open-ended, while

53
The Qiban of the text is hard to identify; it might be an error for Qitban, near Aden, perhaps
playing on the similarity between Aden and Eden, which are identical in Arabic script; for Qali as an
abbreviation of Qaliqala, the Arabic name for Erzurum, see Zakariyya b. Mahmud b. Muhammad
al-Qazwini, Athar al-Bilad wa-Akhbar al-’Ibad (Beirut, 1998), 551.
54
Siraj al-Qulub, Kütahya, Vahid Ali Paşa Kütüphanesi, MS 1415, fols 40a–b.
55
Christian Lange, Paradise and Hell in Islamic Traditions (Cambridge, 2016), 3–10.
56
Ibid., 248–50, 253, n. 43. Alexander D. Knysh, ‘‘Abbādān’, EI3; M. Talbi, ‘Ḳayrawān’, EI2.
57
On Bab al-Abwab as a centre of jihad see al-Qazwini, Athar al-Bilad, 506–7. On Valashgird see
Yaqut, Mu‘jam al-Buldan (Beirut, 1957), vol. 5, 383 s.v. Walāshjird. There are several locations
bearing this name, the most relevant to us being probably the Valashgird, described as ‘a place in the
region of Balkh where the Muslims undertook raids; it is a frontier fortress (thaghr)’. However, there
is also a Valashgird near Akhlat in Anatolia, and it is possible that the Siraj al-Qulub reflects an
attempt to transfer the fame of the former Valashgird to the latter. On Anatolian Valashgird see also
Hamdallah Mustawfi, Nuzhat al-Qulub, 155.
58
Lange, Paradise and Hell, 255.
 Vernacular Religious Literature 203

the frontier situation made war, death and the afterlife a daily pre-occupation’.59
Themes of eschatology and conversion mingle in the two related tales of Cümcüme
Sultan and Kesikbaş, which became popular in Anatolia from the fourteenth
century. The legend of Cümcüme was widely read across the Muslim world from
the thirteenth century onwards, circulating in Arabic, Persian and, at least from the
fourteenth century, Turkish versions.60 Although the earliest extant version of the
text is attributed to ‘Attar, it has been argued that it ultimately derives from a
Central Asian version that may date back to pre-Islamic times.61 The tale recounts
how one day Jesus came across a skull, which came back to life. This skull started to
talk, and related how when alive he had been a powerful infidel king who possessed
great wealth and was called Cümcüme Sultan. He suddenly died and the Angel of
Death came to take his soul, and Munkar and Nakir interrogated him about his
faith. As an unbeliever, the king was condemned to hell, which the skull then
graphically describes. Then the skull was allowed by God to emerge from hell and
return to earth, where, after the encounter with Jesus and the restoration of life, the
newly embodied skull converts to Islam and lives out his days as a Muslim.62
The oldest securely dated Turkish version of the text was composed in Eastern
Turkish by Hüsam Katib in 770/1368, and we know that there was a copy in the
Uighur script in the library of the sixteenth-century Crimean Khan Sahib Giray.
Fuad Köprülü assumed that the original was composed under or even for the
Golden Horde rulers, who were Sahib Giray’s ancestors.63 The work also circu-
lated in an Anatolian Turkish version by a poet named Hasan (which still exhibits
Eastern dialect features), which has been published by F. Tansel.64 Although the
work is undated, the presence of the mixed Eastern and Anatolian language is
characteristic of fourteenth-century texts.65 Thus the tale of Cümcüme Sultan was

59
Ibid., 80.
60
On the Arabic and Persian versions see Roberto Totolli, ‘The Story of Jesus and the Skull in Arabic
Literature: The Emergence and Growth of a Religious Tradition’, Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and
Islam 28 (2003): 225–9.
61
Michele Bernardini, ‘Peregrinazioni letterarie turco-iraniche della leggenda del Sultano Jomjome’,
in Antonio Pioletti and Francesca Rizzo Nervo (eds), Medioevo romanzo e oriental: Il viaggio dei tesi/
III Colloqio Internazionale, Venezia, 10–13 ottobre 1996 (Venice, 1999), 97–115.
62
For summaries, see Totolli, ‘The Story of Jesus and the Skull’, 242–3; Michele Bernardini, ‘Soltan
Jomjome et Jesus le Paraclet’, in Benjamin Lellouch and Stephane Yerasimos (eds), Les traditions
apocalyptiques au tournant de la chute de Constantinople (Paris, 1999), 35–53, at 40–3.
63
Köprülü, Early Mystics, 185, n. 20.
64
F. Tansel, ‘Cümcüme Sultan: Ottoman Translations of the Fourteenth-Century Kipchak Turkic
story’, Archivum Ottomanicum 2 (1970): 252–69.
65
For an Anatolian Turkish prose version see Özkan Daşdemir, ‘Düzyazı Şeklinde Yeniden Yazılan
Anonim Bir Cümcüme Hikâyesi’, Selçuk Üniversitesi Türkiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi 37 (2015):
387–414.
204 Literature and Religious Change

one of those texts that circulated in various versions, both prose and verse, on both
sides of the Black Sea, in the Golden Horde as well as Anatolia, in this period.
A closely related story also circulated in both Anatolian and Eastern Turkish
variants, known as the Kesikbaş Destanı or ‘Tale of the severed head’. The author
identifies himself as Kirdeci Ali, a devotee of Mawlana (Mevlana kulı) from Konya,
and the same name is found in some (but not all) of the Eastern Turkish manuscripts,
which do, however, all allude to the author’s Mevlevism.66 As with so many of these
authors of popular literature, we know nothing of Kirdeci Ali from other sources, and
his dates are guesswork based on linguistic evidence; the consensus view is that he
wrote in the fourteenth or at any rate no later than the early fifteenth century. In the
Kesikbaş Destanı, the severed head of a believer meets ‘Ali b. Abi Talib, not Jesus. The
head describes how he was severed from his body by a demon (dev) who also killed his
son and seized his wife. ‘Ali then goes on a journey to the underworld in search of the
infidel demon, whom he finds has not just captured the head’s wife, but also 500 Sunni
Muslim ghazis. Deciding it would be cowardice to confront the sleeping demon, the
heroic ‘Ali wakes it up, ‘Ali declaring to it his intention to kill it. The demon replies:
‘I will eat you, I will not leave a Sunni Muslim in the world,
I will rid the world of your name, I will leave neither learned man nor qadi
I will go out and destroy your mosque, and tear down your home leaving it deserted
I will leave neither you nor your Prophet, I will destroy the towns of Mecca and
Medina!’67

Naturally, ‘Ali kills the demon, rescues the captive Muslims, restores the severed
head to life and gives him back his wife, and also resurrects the child eaten by the
demon. With the victory of what is described as ‘Ali’s ghaza against unbelief the
story concludes. The tales of Cümcüme and Kesikbaş thus use eschatological
legends to promote conversion and the battle against the unbelievers. Perhaps
equally telling of the religious environment is the use of Sunni as a synonym for
Muslim, a tendency that can also be identified in Abu Bakr Rumi’s
Qalandarnama.68 This intra-Muslim sectarian antagonism can also be identified
as a component of some texts that ostensibly focus on the battle against unbelief.

THE BATTLE AGAINST UNBELIEF

Similar themes were adopted in different forms in the extensive Turkish-language

verse literature that targeted unbelief and unbelievers and urged the audience to

66
For a discussion see Kirdeci Ali, Kesikbaş Destanı, ed. Mustafa Argunşah (Ankara, 2002), 5–9.
67
Ibid., 77–9, ll. 112–15.
68
Abu Bakr specifies that Chinggis Khan killed Sunnis (sunnīān): Qalandarnama, fol. 193a.
 Vernacular Religious Literature 205

abandon ‘idol-worship’. The earliest example of this trend is Gülşehri’s Mantıku’t-

Tayr, his adaptation of ‘Attar composed in the early years of the fourteenth
century. ‘Attar’s original presents an allegory of the journey of the soul toward
divine union through its narrative of the quest of the birds for the mysterious
Simurgh bird. In Gülşehri’s adaptation, material is rearranged and added to
emphasise themes of conversion, the battle against unbelief and the destruction
of unbelievers’ idols. For instance, in the introductory parts of the poem, in the
conventional section dealing with praise of the Prophet that tends to preface
almost all mathnawīs in Persian and Turkish, Gülşehri inserts a long passage
dealing with the conversion of Safwan b. Umayya.69 Safwan had been one of the
Prophet’s most vehement opponents, a vigorous defender of idol-worship and
pagan belief. When Muhammad started destroying the idols of Mecca, Safwan set
out to kill him; but when he finally saw Muhammad for the first time, Safwan was
immediately enraptured by his appearance and recognised him as the true
Prophet. Although Muhammad’s uncle, the notorious Abu Lahab, who died an
infidel, tried to persuade his former ally Safwan that the Prophet was but a
sorcerer, Safwan remained resolute:
Trembling, [Safwan] entered the Prophet’s presence, declaring, ‘Oh messenger of
God, I have made a mistake.
Unknowingly, I came to hunt you, but I became your prey; I do not have the
strength to go [from you].’
He bowed his head, saying, ‘I believe in you and your religion.’
Mustafa said, ‘Go, stay in your land, bring faith in me into your heart.
When the way of being a Muslim is secured, then believers will defeat infidels in
this game.
Then the chief who becomes a Muslim will become in faith one of the people of
belief.
You will be the one who arranges the way of holy war [gaza], go to your native land
and await us!’70

The passage concludes by mentioning the glories of paradise, which are ‘the
reward of those who do good works’ (ni‘ma ajr al-‘āmilīn, Q. 3:136, 29:58).
The narrative of Safwan’s conversion is in fact the second longest story in
Gülşehri’s Mantıku’t-Tayr, and its positioning right at the start of the poem
suggests its importance. It is also interesting that the role of the converted infidel
in waging ghaza, holy war, is mentioned; as Yıldız points out, these themes must
have had an obvious relevance in contemporary Anatolia.71

69
Yıldız, ‘Battling Kufr’, 338–340.
70
Gülşehri, Mantıku’t-Tayr, I, 32–3, ll. 211–17.
71
Yıldız, ‘Battling Kufr’, 339.
206 Literature and Religious Change

Gülşehri’s narrative then leads immediately on to another conversion-related

story, the longest in both ‘Attar’s poem and the Turkish translation, the story of
Shaykh San‘an and his love for a Christian girl.72 Although the story is present in
‘Attar, Gülşehri asserts that in fact his source is an unreadably corrupt text, which
he has rewritten to allow its beauty to be appreciated.73 While ‘Attar’s story
describes how shaykh San‘an (probably based on the historical figure of the
famous muhaddith ‘Abd al-Razzaq al-San‘ani, d. 211/827) is driven mad by his
_
love for the Christian girl, Gülşehri adapts the story to emphasise the conversion
theme and to explicitly situate the story against an Anatolian backdrop, which is
absent from ‘Attar. In Gülşehri’s version, the learned shaykh falls in love not just
with any old Christian girl, but a Rumi one, of whom he has a vision while in
Mecca. He travels to Rum, where, besotted with the girl, he himself converts to
Christianity, abandoning his mystic’s cloak (khirqa) and burning his Qur’an.
Horrified, Shaykh San‘an’s disciples retreat to a cave to devote themselves to
prayer, to which God ultimately responds. He restores the shaykh to his senses,
and the latter renounces his apostasy and returns to Islam. At the end of the story,
even the Rumi Christian herself has a deathbed conversion to Islam before Shaykh
San‘an:
She uttered the shahāda before the shaykh, the shaykh lay her on his knees for some
time.
God gave the Christian girl faith, she prostrated herself before God and died
The shaykh and his disciples all wept in grief at this strange affair
Together they said their prayers and understood the faithlessness of the world
When they had arranged everything they placed her in the grave and departed. . .

When her family learned this secret, seventy houses all became Muslim
A Muslim became an infidel one day so that a girl would suddenly
become a Muslim.
A great light descended upon her grave for the All-Munificent had mercy upon this
girl.74

Thus ultimately the Christian girl’s bewitchment of Shaykh San‘an is seen as part
of a divine plan that leads to her own conversion and that of her people, and the
extension of God’s mercy upon these erstwhile infidels. In this instance, the
explicitly Rumi/Anatolian backdrop that Gülşehri gave the story can only have
reinforced its message to his audience: while infidels may abound in the land of
Rum, their conversion was inevitable.

72
Gülşehri’nin Mantıku’t-Tayr’ı, vol. I, 48–113, ll. 319–755.
73
Ibid., 110–33, ll. 748–53. See Chapter 4, p. 00.
74
Ibid., 110–11, ll. 737–46.
 Vernacular Religious Literature 207

In Gülşehri’s narrative, the battle against kufr only forms one part of a broader
adaptation and rewriting of ‘Attar’s Sufi allegory, which, as discussed in Chapter 3,
also focuses on futuwwa. However, Sufis elsewhere in Anatolia were evidently
preoccupied by kufr. This is suggested by an anonymous Persian treatise copied in
730/1330, possibly in Tire in the Aydınid beylik, the Jihadnama.75 This work is
included in a collection of various Sufi treatises, including works by Najm al-Din
Kubra and Shihab al-Din Suhrawardi maqtūl. The text conveys the Sufi interest in
al-jihād al-akbar, the greater jihad against the self, but it is also deeply concerned
with the battle against kufr and turning to Islam. Here kufr is depicted as immoral
behaviour, but the fact that the turn to the Sufi life is depicted in terms redolent of
an infidel’s conversion to Islam is strongly suggestive of both the Sufis’ view of
themselves and the attitudes of the age.
A concern with kufr can also be observed in numerous other poetic works of
the period. One example of this is the poem Yusuf u Züleyha by Şeyyad Hamza, an
early fourteenth-century poet from Akşehir. This is the most famous of the several
poems dealing with the story of Joseph that circulated in fourteenth-century
Anatolia. The story, with its tale of Joseph’s vanquishing of the idols and conver-
sion of the beautiful infidel princess Zulaykha, has appealed to numerous Muslim
communities and is known in versions in every major Islamic language. Yet
Şeyyad Hamza adds the occasional additional detail to reinforce the message to
his audience: Zulaykha’s father, the infidel Pharaoh, for instance, is explicitly (if
ahistorically) described as a Christian who ‘wasted his life for nothing at all’ in
worshipping the cross.76
The most striking demonstration of this growing popularity of these anti-
Christian themes in popular texts is the emergence of a literature specifically
devoted to glorifying holy war and conversion of infidels/Christians to Islam. One
such work was the Hamzaname, the epic of the Prophet’s uncle Hamza
b. ‘Abdallah, who distinguished himself in battle against the Jews and polytheists.
Hamza had originally been a staunch opponent of Islam, but on his conversion he
became one of its doughtiest champions. Epics based around his legendary
exploits, including his battles in Rum, India and other such frontier regions,77
became popular across the Muslim world, but had an obvious relevance in
particular to areas undergoing processes of conversion and Islamisation, and were
certainly circulating in Anatolia. Ahmad of Niğde tells us of the ‘invented fables’

75
Jihadnama, Süleymaniye, MS Ayasofya 4819, fols 42a–55b.
76
The Story of Joseph: A Fourteenth-Century Turkish Morality Play by Sheyyad Hamza, trans. Bill
Hickman (Syracuse, NY, 2014), 20; Şeyyad Hamza, Yusuf u Zelıhā, ed. Ümit Özgür Demirel and
Şenol Korkmaz (Istanbul, 2008), l. 328.
77
On Hamza and the epic cycle see G. Meredith-Owens, ‘Ḥamza b. ‘Abdallāh’, EI2.
208 Literature and Religious Change

that were attached to Hamza b. ‘Abd al-Muttalib and ‘Ali b. Abi Talib, which
were so popular in his hometown that ‘if the master of this town of ours, the lord
Badr al-Din, the divine imam, may God perpetuate his virtue, were to deny the
truth of a single line of these lies before the ordinary people, the ignorant ones
would consider trying to kill him licit’.78 Ibn Taymiyya, writing in the same
period, also refers to the popularity of tales of Hamza’s battles (maghāzī) among
the Turkmen.79 Although libraries in Turkey contain a enormous number of
manuscripts of Turkish Hamzanames, few are earlier than the eighteenth century
and no single complete copy survives of this vast and as yet largely unstudied
work.80 The earliest Anatolian author attributed with a Hamzaname, in this case
in twenty-four volumes, is Hamzavi (d.815/1412–13), brother of the more
famous Ahmedi, but it is far from certain whether any of the surviving texts is
actually by him. Thus although it is clear from Ahmad of Niğde’s evidence that
this text was popular in Mongol Anatolia, we do not have a reliable text from the
period that we can examine. Themes of holy war, the battle against unbelief and
the presence of crypto-Christians are also present in the well-known Turkish prose
epics the Battalname and the Danişmendname, although the uncertainty of their
dates, as well as the fact that they are already well known, makes it unnecessary to
discuss them here.81
We are on somewhat surer ground with the tales of the exploits of ‘Ali b. Abi
Talib referred to by Ahmad of Niğde, which served a similar function. A whole
genre of works called Cenkname, books of ‘Ali’s battles, circulated widely in
Anatolia. If we discount the extremely dubious if not impossible dating of the
Salsalname to the mid-thirteenth century,82 the earliest such work in Anatolia that
we can date with some precision is in Persian, not in Turkish. This is the ‘Alinama
of an eleventh-century Khurasani poet named Rabi‘, which was copied, probably
in Konya, most likely in 702/1302,83 by a certain Muhammad Mahmud
b. Mas‘ud al-muqaddam al-Tustari, and is today preserved in a unique manuscript

78
Ahmad of Niğde, al-Walad al-Shafiq, vol. I, 11.
79
Ibn Taymiyya, Minhaj al-Sunna al-Nabawiyya fi Naqd Kalam al-Shi ‘a wa’l-Qadariyya (Cairo,
1321), IV, 12: yazunnu tā’ifa min al-turkmān anna Ḥamza lahu maghāzin ‘azīma wa yanqulūnuhā
baynahum. _ _ _
80
Lutfi Sezen, Halk Edebiyatında Hamzanameler (Ankara, 1991), 27 claims to have examined
seventy-two different Hamzaname manuscripts in Turkish libraries. See also Dedes, Battalname,
vol. 1, 77–8.
81
For the dates, see Chapter 4, pp. 153–4; also on the battle against unbelief in these texts, see
Mélikoff, La Geste, I, 139–40, 167–70; Küçükhuseyin, Selbst- und Fremdwahrnemung, 293–9.
82
See the discussion in Chapter 4.
83
The colophon reads simply Thursday 7 Ramadan, which must correspond to either 702 or 795 hijri
(see Rabi’, ‘Ali-nama: Manzuma-yi Kuhan, ed. Rida Bayat and Abu’l-Fadl Ghulami (Tehran, 2010),
introduction, 40). However, the script would seem to suggest the earlier date.
 Vernacular Religious Literature 209

in the Mevlana Museum in Konya as MS 2562.84 The focus of Rabi‘’s ‘Alinama is

on the Battle of Siffin; unbelievers feature relatively rarely, although Rumis (i.e.
Byzantines) are identified as the allies of ‘Ali’s enemy Mu‘awiya, with whom they
have made a compact ‘to destroy Islam’.85 Interestingly, the passage describing the
Rumis’ alliance with Mu‘awiya, which originally occurs roughly in the middle of
the text, is repeated almost word for word right at its end.
[Mu‘awiya] sent men to Rum to seek help from that accursed, low infidel. . .
When [Mu‘awiya] son of Sufiyan sought help from the Rumis,
The Christians destroyed forty Muslim towns by their power
Every town was adorned, they gave over all the possessions to pillage
When the lion of God [‘Ali] heard of this, he sprang up from his place like flashing
lightning.
With so many horsemen of the faith, he emptied the land of those Rumis.86

The repetition of this passage at the end of the poem does not sit easily with its
narrative contents. The preceding passage describes ‘Ali’s preaching in Kufa after
Siffin, and his installation of perfect Islamic rule (hamī kard ābād bunyād-i dīn);87
the topic of his death is avoided entirely, although the text following the Rumi
passage briefly alludes to his great victories over the Kharijites, the rebels who in
fact killed him.88 It is thus probable, although impossible to prove in the absence
of other manuscripts, that this awkward repetition of the Rumi passage reflects
not Rabi‘’s original text but an interpolation by a copyist who was particularly
keen on emphasising the association of the Rumis with war against Islam, with
enmity to ‘Ali and thus to the true faith of Islam. It therefore seems likely to have
been introduced into the text in Anatolia and suggests, perhaps, a degree of
discomfort felt by the copyist – most likely a migrant from Iran given his nisba –
at the predominantly Sunni environment in which he found himself. Certainly
the Ilkhans, especially around the beginning of the fourteenth century when this
text was copied, showed an increasing interest in experimenting with Shiism as a
mains of supporting dynastic legitimacy,89 which may form another part of the
background to this manuscript’s copying.

84
A facsimile has been published in addition to the edition: ‘Ali-nama (Manzuma-yi Kuhan), suruda
bih sal 482 hijri az surayandayi mutakhallus bih Rabi‘, introduced by Muhammad Rida Shafi‘i
Kadkani and Mahmud Umidsalar (Tehran 1388).
85
Rabi‘, ‘Ali-nama, ed. Bayat and Ghulami, ll. 10688–92.
86
Ibid., ll. 11192–8.
87
Ibid., l. 11188.
88
Ibid., ll. 11201–3.
89
Judith Pfeiffer, ‘Confessional Ambiguity vs. Confessional Polarization: Politics and the Negotiation
of Religious Boundaries in the Ilkhanate’, in Judith Pfeiffer (ed.), Politics, Patronage and the
Production of Knowledge in 13th-15th Century Tabriz (Leiden, 2014), 129–68.
210 Literature and Religious Change

These sectarian tensions are also reflected in the religious literature of the
Ilkhanid period. A compilation of predominantly Sufi texts made, possibly in
Ankara, in 726–7/1327 by an copyist of Akhlati origins, ‘Ali b. Dustkhuda,
whom we encountered in Chapter 2 (p. 103), contains two treatises that are
intended to defend Sunni beliefs, both written in Persian – which suggests they
were aimed at a wider audience than religious scholars.90 The first, the ‘Aqayid-i
Ahl-i Sunna, was compiled by an author who visited Anatolia and professed to be
horrified at the waywardness of its people and their inclination towards astrology
(‘ilm-i nujūm); however, the target of his treatise is predominantly Mu‘tazili
doctrines such as the createdness of the Qur’an.91 Given the common association
of Mu‘tazilism with Shiism, it is possible that the latter is his real target. The
second short treatise, the I‘tiqad-i Ahl-i Sunnat wa Jama‘at,92 also singles out for
attack the beliefs of the Mu‘tazila and the rawāfid , the common term given to
_
Shiites by their enemies.93
Further indications of these religious tensions come from a verse work com-
posed in 763/1362 in Kastamonu by the poet Şadi Meddah, possibly at the
Candarid court. His Turkish Maktel-i Hüseyin is in some ways comparable with
the ‘Alinama. The poem takes as its theme the Umayyad Caliph Yazid’s cruel
suppression of the ‘Alids. The poem is in many ways a diatribe against unbelief,
for the audience is repeated told that Yazid is lower than an infidel, a Jew or a
Christian for his treatment of the Prophet’s family:94 at one point he is explicitly
accused of apostasy when the Imam Zayn al-’Abidin addresses him saying, ‘You
learned faith and religion from our grandfather [the Prophet Muhammad]; then
you apostatised and became opposed.’95 Moreover, the allies of the ‘Alids are
explicitly described as martial heroes (pehlivan).96 Here, then, a pro-’Alid stance
also seems to have a distinctly anti-Sunni tinge. It is perhaps not coincidental that
around this period Shiite doctrines can also be detected in the more popular
literature. For instance, the works of Kaygusuz Abdal, a Sufi poet who wrote in
Turkish and probably lived in the late fourteenth or early fifteenth century, refer

90
Süleymaniye, MS Fatih 4426.
91
Süleymaniye, MS Fatih 4426, fols 182b–192b.
92
Süleymaniye, MS Fatih 4426, fols 291a–297b.
93
Süleymaniye, MS Fatih 4426, fols 296b, 297a.
94
E.g. Şâdî Meddah, Maktel-i Hüseyin: Kerbelâ Hadisesi (Istanbul, 2015), p. 426, l. 2836 p. 440,
l. 2942, p. 458, l. 3074, 3076. For a discussion of this text see Riza Yıldırım, ‘Beylikler Dunyasında
Kerbela Kültürü ve Ehl-i Beyt Sevgisi: 1362 Yılında Kastamonu’da Yazılan Bir Maktelin Düşün-
dürdükleri’, in Halil Çetin (ed.), Kuzey Anadolu’da Beylikler Dönemi Sempozumu (Çankırı, 2012),
344–72.
95
Şâdî Meddah, Maktel-i Hüseyin, p. 460, l. 3080.
96
Ibid., p. 64, l. 179, p. 80, l. 297, p. 82, l. 311, p. 100 l. 437, etc.
 Vernacular Religious Literature 211

to the Shiite doctrines of the Twelve Imams and tabarra’, dissociation from ‘Ali’s
enemies.97 It is true that such beliefs could exist in the broad confines of Sunnism
in this period, but the polemical rhetoric employed in both literary and religious
works suggests an atmosphere of sectarian tension. The early history of Shiism in
Anatolia cannot at present be traced with any certainty, but it seems that
something more than a generally pro-’Alid stratum or tashayyu‘ hasan existed.98
_
The ambiguities of the situation are reflected in the genealogical chart (shajara) of
an Akhi family of Iranian origins from Ankara, which reached its present form in
around the mid-fourteenth century.99 Here the Four Rightly Guided Caliphs are
briefly acknowledged, but much more attention is devoted to ‘Ali, his descendants
and specifically the Twelve Imams. As Mélikoff notes, the shajara is a Shiite
document and the Akhi family is a Shiite family, whose ancestors are explicitly
identified as such, but after their migration to Anatolia they are no longer
described as Shiites.100 This is perhaps testimony less to a process of Sunnitisation
than of sectarian tension, as suggested by our texts, whereby a Shiite identity
remained important but is less publicly acknowledged.
However, pro-‘Alid literature by no means necessarily reflects Shiite sympa-
thies, as can be seen if we consider the Turkish Cenknames, the earliest of which
can be dated with any probability to the fourteenth century, although further
work is needed to confirm this.101 Whereas the Persian ‘Alinama is based loosely
around broadly historical events, the Turkish Cenknames deal with entirely
legendary battles. One of the earliest Cenkname writers, if we accept the dating
given by Ottoman sources, was Tursun Fakih, who is said by the fifteenth-century
historian Aşık Paşazade to have served the Ottomans in the later thirteenth and
early fourteenth centuries.102 Aşık Paşazade recounts how Tursun Fakih was
appointed imam of the frontier town of Karacahisar after its conquest by Osman
Gazi in 699/1299–1300:

97
Zeynep Oktay Uslu, ‘L’Homme Parfait dans le bektachisme et l’alevisme: Le Kitāb-ı Mag· lata de
Ḳayg·usuz Abdāl’, PhD thesis, École Pratique des Hautes Études, Paris, 2017, 9.3. _
98
For surveys that do emphasise the tashayyu‘ hasan aspect see Cahen, ‘Le problème du Shī‘isme’;
_
Ahmet T. Karamustafa, ‘Anadolu’nun İslamlaşması Bağlamında Aleviliğin Oluşumu’, in İmran
Gürtaş and Yalçın Çakmak (eds), Kızılbaşlık, Alevilik, Bektaşilik: Tarih, Kimlik, İnanç, Ritüel
(Istanbul, 2015), 43–54; Yıldırım, ‘Sunni Orthodox vs Shi‘ite Heterodox?’.
99
Irène Mélikoff, ‘Un document akhi du XIIIe siècle’, in Raoul Curiel and Rika Gyselen (eds),
Itineraires d’Orient: Hommages à Claude Cahen (Res Orientales VI) (Bures-sur-Yvettes, 1994),
263–76.
100
Ibid., 268.
101
İsmet Çetin, Türk Edebiyatında Hz. Alî Cenknâmeleri (Ankara, 1997).
102
Cf. Taşköprizade, al-Shaqa’iq al-Nu‘maniyya, 6. For a study see İsmet Çetin, Tursun Fakih: Hayatı
ve Edebi Şahsiyeti (Ankara, 2008).
212 Literature and Religious Change

When [Osman] captured Karahisar, its houses were empty, and many people came from
the province of Germiyan, asking Osman Gazi for houses. Osman Gazi gave the incomers
empty houses and in a short time the town’s houses were filled and the town flourished.
They made the churches into mosques and built a market. And the townspeople agreed
that they should perform the Friday prayer and ask for a qadi. There was a holy man called
Tursun Fakih who was prayer leader [imam] to these people. . .103

In Aşık Paşazade’s narrative, Tursun Fakih’s appointment is emblematic of

Osman’s declaration of independence. When Tursun asks for a decree from the
Seljuq authorising his appointment, Osman replies by asserting that
‘I have taken this town with my own sword; your sultan has nothing to do with it that
I should seek permission from him. God who gave him the sultanate has given me the
khanate through holy war [gaza] . . . If he says he is from the House of Seljuq, [then]
I myself am the son of Gök Alp [a legendary Turkish hero]. If he says he came to this land
before me, my ancestor Sulayman Shah in fact came before him.’104

Tursun Fakih accepts Osman’s arguments and proclaims the khutba in his name,
_
signifying the assertion of sovereignty.
Despite the importance of Tursun Fakih in the Ottoman historical imagin-
ation, as well as to modern nationalist scholars such as Köprülü, a measure of
scepticism must be applied to his authorship of the four poems attributed to him.
These are a Cenkname on the Prophet and ‘Ali’s battles (referred to variously as
the Gazavat-i Resulallah and the Kıssa-ı Mukaffa), the account of ‘Ali’s wars
against infidels in the Indian Ocean (the Kıssa-ı Umman or Cumhurname) and a
poem on the heroic deeds of ‘Ali’s son Muhammad Hanafi. A further short
mathnawī deals with the Prophet’s struggle with the unbeliever Abu Jahl, one of
his principal Qurashi opponents.105 While the closing lines of the poems refer to
Tursun Fakih’s authorship (except in the case of the Cumhurname), it is entirely
possible the attribution was made to enhance their reputation and circulation, a
suspicion that is strengthened by the fact Tursun Fakih is not mentioned in two
of the four manuscripts of the Cumhurname.106 The Cumhurname manuscripts
are also very varied in length, one having 1,111 verses, another 1,366 and one 646
verses.107 The significant textual variants may suggest a corpus of orally transmit-
ted texts that later were attached to the name of Tursun Fakih, although caution is

103
Aşık Paşazade, Osmanoğulları’nın Tarihi, ed. Kemal Yavuz and M. A. Yekta Savaş (Istanbul, 2003),
chapter 15, p. 339.
104
Ibid., 339–40.
105
Çelebioǧlu, Türk Edebiyatı’nda Mesnevi, 72–6, 102.
106
Neslihan Yazıcı, ‘Tursun Fakı’nin (sic) Cumhûr-nâme Adlı Eserinin Metni ve İncelemesi’, PhD
dissertation, Istanbul Marmara Üniversitesi, 2005.
107
Ibid., 39–40.
 Vernacular Religious Literature 213

necessary on this point. Substantial textual differences may also exist in works that
are thought to have been circulated pre-eminently in manuscript form.108
Be this is as it may, the works attributed to Tursun Fakih reflect a preoccupa-
tion with the wars of ‘Ali (and, to a lesser extent Muhammad) that the testimony
of Ahmad of Niğde allows us to characterise as typical of the early fourteenth
century, and which certainly may have circulated in the early Ottoman territories.
The central theme of all these stories is the battles of the believers, led by ‘Ali,
against the infidel, and the defeat and conversion to Islam of the latter.109 The
works are also rich in exotic, legendary motifs such as talking animals. For
example, in the Kıssa-ı Mukaffa the anti-hero, the pagan Muqaffa‘, summons
his lion to fight against Ali, the lion of God. ‘Ali, however, takes both Muqaffa‘
and his lion captive and brings them before the Prophet:
‘Ali the friend of God took the lion and the man and brought them before the
Prophet
They both stood before the Prophet, who cried out to the lion,
‘Who am I oh lion, say! Confess my prophethood!’
God gave the lion a fluent tongue, he said right away just like a human,
‘You are the Prophet and the Beloved of God, Oh Muhammad b. ‘Abdallah.’
The Prophet said, ‘Oh lion, were you not ashamed? Did you not think of God’s
fire?
You attack ‘Ali, that cousin of mine who is God’s friend.
He is God’s lion, you are just a mountain dog! You did not show reverence,
uncouth beast.’
The lion immediately put his head on the floor and begged the Prophet’s
forgiveness.
Muqaffa‘ heard that speech and was greatly astonished.
He said, ‘This lion was in the mountains, I found him abandoned in his mother’s
nest.
I fed him till today. Oh Muhammad, how did he know you?’110

Predictably, Muqaffa‘ is so impressed by the lion’s recognition of the Prophethood

of Muhammad that he too converts to Islam, while his people also embrace the
true faith on his death.
Similar themes are covered in the narrative poems of Beypazarılı Maazoğlu Hasan,
who has also been dated to the fourteenth century.111 One of these, treating ‘Ali b.

108
See A. C. S. Peacock, Mediaeval Islamic Historiography and Political Legitimacy: Bal‘amī’s Tārīkh-
nāma (London, 2007).
109
Cf. Çetin, Tursun Fakih, 118–21.
110
Tursun Fakih, Gazavat-ı Resulûllah, ed. Numan Kulekci (Istanbul, 2002), 106–7, ll. 570–81.
111
As is almost always the case with fourteenth-century Old Anatolian Turkish verse, the manuscript
is of much later date, perhaps eighteenth or nineteenth century.
214 Literature and Religious Change

Abi Talib’s conquest of the ‘Castle of the Chains’ (Kal‘e-i Selasil) in Iraq, and another
detailing with his assault on the castle of Cenadil,112 are preserved in the same
manuscript as Tursun Fakih’s Kıssa-ı Mukaffa (Istanbul Millet Library, MS Ali Emiri
Manzum 1222). The language and orthography of Maazoğlu’s works suggest an early
date of composition. In both numerous infidels are killed, while others accept the true
faith, but there are fewer exotic elements than in Tursun Fakih’s works. In the
account of Selasil, the Muslims are portrayed as threatened by the unbelieving idol-
worshipping king of Iraq, while the ‘Muslims’ are consistently identified as Sunnis.
The emphasis on the role of ‘Ali thus has no Shiite implications:
The three hundred thousand strong Sunni army advanced; when the unbelievers
saw them they fell to pieces [lit. melted]
Unbeliever and believer mixed [in the fighting] at that time; the Sunnis do not give
quarter to the unbelievers!
Mustafa [Muhammad] cried out, ‘Destroy these unbelievers,
Give them no quarter, destroy them!’ The Prophet’s friends heard him and
Killed thirty thousand unbelievers. . .113

The theme of conversion is as well as victory over unbelievers is emphasised in

Maazoğlu’s Cenadil Kalesi. The action is placed in the lifetime of the Prophet, but
military operations are directed by ‘Ali; eventually the conquest of the castle is
achieved by the aid of the angel Gabriel. At the end of the poem, Maazoğlu
recounts how
‘Ali inspired such awe that all the unbelievers lost their minds and fell to the
ground.
When they heard ‘Ali’s shout, they said in their hearts seven times over ‘it is
wonderful’.
‘Ali called out, saying, ‘Come to the faith! Do not begrudge saying the praises of
Mustafa [Muhammad]
If not I’ll turn you upside down, I’ll send the lot of you to Hell.’
A hundred thousand infidel soldiers all sought safe conduct, they decided to enter
the faith.
Falling to their knees all became Muslim, before ‘Ali they entered into belief
They opened the gate of the castle completely, the imam [‘Ali] entered
accompanied by three thousand warriors of the faith.114

112
On Maazoğlu see Çelebioǧlu, Türk Edebiyatı’nda Mesnevi, 86–7.
113
İ. Güven Kaya, ‘Baypazarılı Maazoğlu Hasan’ın “Feth-i Kale-i Selasil” Hikayesi’, Atatürk Üni-
versitesi Türkiyat Araştırmaları Dergisi 9 (1998): 89–116, p. 110, ll. 469–73.
114
Millet Library, Ali Emiri Manzum 1222, fol. 33a:
Heybetinden ‘Alī’nüñ kāfir kamu/‘akl gidüp yere düşdiler ‘amu
_ _
‘Alī’nüñ na‘rasını işitdiler/yedi kat göñülde tahsīn itdiler
· _
‘Alī çagırdı didi gelüñ dīne/Mustafā tahammüde _ tutmañ kīne
__ _ _
 Vernacular Religious Literature 215

It seems, as far as can be judged from our current state of knowledge, that the
works of Tursun Fakih and Maazoğlu Hasan represent original Anatolian com-
positions, rather than adaptations of popular Arabic narratives, although further
research may alter this view. These poems, which must have been publicly
performed by professional storytellers,115 served a ritual function by ‘invoking
the past to endow the present with meaning’.116 Gottfried Hagen regards such
works as a form of epic, writing that, ‘The performance of pseudo-historical epics,
the chronicles, and hagiographies, on the other hand, clearly advocates a specific
ideology, perceived as their form of Islam, against an enemy who does not have a
share in it.’117 Hagen notes that in this Anatolian epic literature centralised power
is absent or else depicted negatively, and argues that this was a result of the
political fragmentation of Anatolia in the period. It is true that Anatolian literature
lacks a royal epic such as the Shahnama and the heroes are largely figures from
early Islam, or, from the fourteenth century, holy men (awliyā’). One exception is
the famous Book of Dede Korkut, the tales based around the eponymous hero’s
exploits in north-eastern Anatolia, which may have reached its current form at the
Aqquyunlu court in the fifteenth century.118 It is also possible that an epic cycle
devoted to the Seljuq family may have existed, for the poet Qani‘i who served
Ghiyath al-Din Kaykhusraw II refers to his own massive composition, and there is
evidence for other Saljuqnamas devoted to the deeds of the dynasty that are now
lost to us.119 The limited circulation and loss of these texts indicates they had little
purchase on the popular imagination, and this may reflect not just the political
but also the religious background. The ‘Alinama singles out Firdawsi’s Shahnama
as exactly the sort of work one should avoid reading, claiming it was forged by the
Karramites to divert people from the true faith. Rabi’ writes:
If you want more news of heroes [mardān] read the story of the battle of Siffin
Do not boast of reading the Shahnama, but look at the deeds of the noble.
Thus don’t speak of Rustam and Tus, don’t run after these chanters of vain tales.

Yoksa altın üstine döndürem/kamuñuzı Sengiye gönderem

Yüz_ biñ er kāfir kamu amān diler/dīne
_ gelmege dişin biler
_
Tiz çöküp kamu Müsülmān oldı[lar]/‘Alī öñinde īmāna geldiler
_
Açdılar kal‘e kapusın tamām/üç biñ er g·āzīyle girdi imām.
_ _
115
Hagen, ‘Heroes and Saints’, 355.
116
Ibid., 356.
117
Ibid., 357.
118
A useful overview of theories on the date and provenance of this text remains Faruk Sümer,
‘Oğuzlara Ait Destanî Mahiyette Eserler’, Ankara Üniversitesi Dil ve Tarih-Coğrafya Fakültesi
Dergisi 17 (1959): 359–456, esp. 395ff; see also the discussion of the text in Bombaci, La
Letteratura turca, 219–35, and Woods, The Aqquyunlu, 173–82.
119
Mehmed Fuad Köprülü, The Seljuks of Anatolia: Their History and Culture according to Local
Muslim Sources, trans. Gary Leiser (Salt Lake City, 1992), 15–21.
216 Literature and Religious Change

Reading the pagan book [mugh-nāma] is no virtue, but reading the book of ‘Ali
[‘Ali-nāma] is pride and glory
Desire not the way of heroes of old [pahlawānān], but turn your face from the road
of unbelief [bī-dīn]. . .120

The heroic age in fourteenth-century Anatolia was thus not so much one of the
Turkish heroes of Dede Korkut, but of the family of the Prophet and particular
‘Ali and his progeny, who led the battle against the ever-present unbelief. Such
poems would have been publicly declaimed, as the terms Meddah and Şeyyad
attached to two of our authors suggest; a şeyyad had been defined as ‘a public teller
of tales who spoke or narrated in a loud voice’,121 while a meddah also means a
public storyteller.122 Indeed, Şeyyad Hamza’s poem has been described as ‘a
Turkish morality play’ and translated in dramatic dialogue form.123 Similarly,
we can suppose that the simple verses of poets such as Tursun Fakih, Maazoğlu
Hasan and Şadi Meddah were intended for public performance,124 to which the
dialogue format of the various Siraj al-Qulub texts would also have lent themselves
equally well. With the exception of Şadi Meddah’s Maktel-i Hüseyin, there is no
evidence for court patronage of any of these works. The public performance of
such works with their consistently anti-Christian tone, and the obsession with
conversion and holy war they exhibit, must have combined to make life as a
Christian among Muslim neighbours increasingly uncomfortable. The adapta-
tions of these tales to an Anatolian background must have made the argument yet
more pointed. At the same time, the low bar set on the requirements for
conversion, as demonstrated by the Siraj al-Qulub texts, may have made the
simple step of embracing Islam an increasingly attractive option to many. Yet
Christians were not the sole target. In addition to the anti-Christian tenor, an
increasingly sectarian one can be identified too.125 In Maazoğlu Hasan’s work and
Kirdeci Ali’s the Muslims are consistently qualified as Sunnis; in contrast, in the
Maktel-i Hüseyin, the Sunni Muslims are the allies of the despicable Yazid. The
growth of the heroic cult of ‘Ali, revered by all Muslims, did not prevent the tone
of sectarian tension that is increasingly evident in these works.
The texts’ lauding of violence against unbelievers and promotion of the
conversion of the infidel might be read as reflecting a ghazi mentality, as has

120
Rabi’, Ali-nama, ed. Bayat and Ghulami, 135, ll. 2977–2980.
121
The Story of Joseph, trans Hickman, 7.
122
For a discussion of the term meddah see Dedes, Battalname, vol. 1, 54–61.
123
The Story of Joseph, trans Hickman, 7.
124
On the public performance of poetry, drawing almost entirely on post-sixteenth-century evidence
owing to the lack of any for earlier periods, see Dedes, Battalname, vol. 1, 61–8.
125
Cf. Trépanier, Foodways and Daily Life, 120.
 Vernacular Religious Literature 217

famously (if controversially) been associated with the early Ottoman state.126
However, questions of conversion and the battle against kufr remained a central
concern of intellectuals in the Ilkhanid heartland of central Anatolia, such as
Gülşehri. Ghaza, then, was not a specifically or even largely Ottoman concern,
but rather was part of a broader phenomenon, enthusiastically espoused by Sufis.
This should not surprise us. The hagiographical sources repeatedly emphasise the
role of Sufis in conversion, and although this may be a topos, an indication to the
contrary comes in some of the dicta of the Anatolian Qalandar – and associate of
Ghazan – Baraq Baba that have come down to us. These Qipchaq Turkish
statements were elaborated with a Persian commentary in 756/1355 by a certain
Qutb al-’Alawi, who took Baraq’s terse and obscure proclamations and interpreted
them with reference to classics such as the Shahnama, Rumi, the Qur’an and
hadith. Yet some of Baraq’s utterances also suggest not simply a Sufi piety but also
an anti-Christian agenda. He declares, ‘Strengthen your religion, soothe your
donkey, kill the rulers of Istanbul and Trebizond, throw them into the sea, put
their youths in the army. Blessings upon Muhammad.’127 Like the epics discussed
here, such dicta fostered a sense of a distinct Muslim identity defined against
unbelief, and both contributed to and are products of the Islamisation of Anatolia
more generally rather than a particular frontier region.

126
For a discussion see Paul Wittek, The Rise of the Ottoman Empire: Studies in the History of Turkey,
13th–15th Centuries, ed. Colin Heywood (London, 2012), and see further the Introduction to this
volume, pp. 13–14.
127
Text in Abdülbaki Golpınarlı, Yunus Emre ve Tasavvuf (Istanbul, 1992 [2nd ed.]), 271, 467;
Süleymaniye, MS Ayasofya 3135, fols 192b–200a.
 6

Apocalyptic Thought and the Political Elite

Since the beginnings of Islam, parts of the Muslim community had been con-
vinced that the end of the world was imminent, including, in all likelihood, the
Prophet himself, to whom hadith attribute the statement that his followers would
themselves witness it.1 Such apocalyptic expectations were equally prevalent in
medieval Anatolia. The thirteenth-century Syriac chronicler Bar Hebraeus
recounts how in 1186 the Seljuq sultan Kılıç Arslan II sought to escape from
the predicted end:
[A]ll the astronomers predicted that a universal flood and a mighty whirlwind would take
place in the world, and that all mankind would perish, even like that which took place in
the days of Noah, through the approach of the Sign of the Zodiac of the Fishes, and that all
the waters would swallow up the whole earth. Now Ḳelej Arslan, the Sultan of Iconium
[Konya], more than any man believed this silly talk. And he spent large sums of money
wastefully, and made excavations in the ground, and built strong houses in the depths
thereof.2

The failure of the astrologers’ prediction on this occasion does not seem to have
reduced their popularity in the long run. Apocalyptic and astrological interests are
evident from some our earliest works from Anatolia. Hubaysh-i Tiflisi, who wrote
a work on astrology for Kılıç Arslan II, referred to visions of the Antichrist (dajjāl)
in his book on oneiromancy, Kamil al-Ta‘bir, suggesting that such apocalyptic
dreams were widespread.3 Tiflisi also composed a Malhamat Daniyal,4 an account

1
David Cook, Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic (Princeton, 2002), 4.
2
Bar Hebraeus, Chronography, trans. Ernest A. Wallis Budge (Oxford, 1932), vol. I, 320.
3
Tiflisi interprets dreams of the antichrist (dajjāl) as symbolising fitna, strife: Kamal al-Din Abu’l-Fadl
Hubaysh-i Tiflisi, Kamil al-Ta‘bir-i Tiflisi, ed. Sayyid Husayn Radawi Buqra ‘i (Tehran, 1388), 170.
4
Süleymaniye, MS Ayasofya 2706.

218
 Apocalyptic Thought and the Political Elite 219

of the apocalyptic prophecies of the Prophet Daniel. Such works circulated

amongst both Muslims and Christians, as the Lombard envoy to Constantinople,
Liudprand of Cremona, remarked as early as the tenth century, and perhaps to
some degree reflect the tensions of a frontier society.5 Yet apocalypticism was not
restricted to Anatolia, or Islam. Several Jewish Messiahs emerged in the twelfth
century proclaiming the imminent end, while both Shiite and Sunni communities
across the Middle East were also prone to outbreaks of Mahdism – claims of
individuals to be the messiah (mahdī) sent at the end of time. In Muslim tradition,
the Mahdi will defeat the Antichrist (dajjāl) in the wars at the end of time,
vanquish religions other than Islam and initiate a reign of perfect justice and Islam
that will precede the last hour and the resurrection of the dead (qiyāma). The
Nizari Ismaili state of north-east Iran proclaimed in 559/1164 the coming of the
qiyāma.6
Such apocalyptic concerns intensified during the thirteenth century. A long
tradition in Muslim thought dating back to at least the mid-eighth century
associated the ‘Turks’ (a term that could be generally used for any steppe people)
with invasions that would be one of the portents of the Final Hour,7 and in the
thirteenth century these traditions were readily associated with the Khwarazmians,
and above all Mongols.8 In Syria, Ibn Talha, a religious scholar and briefly a vizier
who served both the Ayyubids and the Artuqids, wrote a famous book on jafr
(divination of the future) that predicted the imminent coming of the Last Hour,
which seems to have been prompted by the Khwarazmian invasions.9 Ibn Talha’s
text on jafr was to be massively influential, being adapted and updated by the
famous and highly influential early Ottoman occultist ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Bistami
(d. 858/1454) and transmitted from him into the popular Turkish piety-minded

5
Liudprand of Cremona, The Embassy to Constantinople and other writings, trans. F. A. Wright, ed.
John Julius Norwich (London, 1993), chapters 39–40.
6
For a survey of some of these apocalyptic and mahdist tendencies in the twelfth century see
Peacock, The Great Seljuk Empire, 264, 275–9.
7
Cook, Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic, 84–91.
8
David Cook, ‘Apocalyptic Incidents during the Mongol Invasions’, in Wolfram Brandes and
Felicitas Schmieder (eds), Endzeiten: Eschatologie in den monotheistischen Weltreligionen (Berlin,
2008), 293–312 at pp. 300–3; Denise Aigle, The Mongol Empire between Myth and Reality: Studies
in Anthropological History (Leiden, 2015), 238–43; David Cook, ‘The Image of the Turk in
Classical and Modern Muslim Apocalyptic Literature’, in Wolfram Brandes, Felucitas Schmeider
and Rebekka Voß (eds), Peoples of the Apocalypse: Eschatological Beliefs and Political Statements
(Berlin, 2016), 225–35.
9
Mohammad Masad, ‘The Medieval Islamic Apocalyptic Tradition: Divination, Prophecy and the
End of Time in the 13th Century Eastern Mediterranean’, Unpublished PhD dissertation,
University of Washington, 2008, 93–5; A. C. S. Peacock, ‘Politics, Religion and the Occult in
the Works of Kamal al-Din Ibn Talha, a Vizier, ‘ālim and Author in Thirteenth-Century Syria’, in
Carole Hillenbrand (ed.), Syria in Crusader Times: Conflict and Co-Existence (Edinburgh, 2019).
220 Literature and Religious Change

text, the Dürr-i Meknun of Ahmed Bican (d. 870/1466). From India to Spain,
thirteenth-century ‘ulama’ such as Juzjani (d. after 658/1259), al-Sulami (d. 660/
1261) and al-Qurtubi (d. 671/1272) composed apocalyptic works that give a
prominent role to the ‘Turks’, suggesting an intimate connection between the
nomadic invasions of the period and the rise of apocalypticism.10
Nature itself seemed to confirm that the end was nigh. Islamic tradition had
long associated the coming of the Mahdi with the portent of comets,11 and the
thirteenth century witnessed especially intense planetary action. Halley’s Comet
appeared in 1222, just as the first Mongol armies advanced through Iran,12 while
in 1264 a great comet, observed in Europe, the Middle East and even China and
apparently one of the brightest ever sighted, lingered in the skies for some three
months, spreading consternation among many. In Europe it was held to presage
disasters such as the death of Pope Urban, who sickened with its appearance and
died when it disappeared.13 Chronicles also record the sighting of a comet from
Egypt or Syria the following year, 1265, as well as earlier in 1202, 1205, 1223
(perhaps actually Halley’s Comet of 1222) and 1233, as well as 1285 and 1299.14
A preoccupation with this planetary activity may be reflected in the widespread
astrological imagery that appears on coins and other objects produced in the
thirteenth century.15 Coins struck by Ghiyath al-Din Kaykhusraw II even con-
tained the astrological lion and sun image, which was probably a reference to the
sultan’s own horoscope as well as alluding to his sovereignty (see also Plate 11a).16
Apocalypticism could be intensely political. In Islamic tradition, the Mahdi
will establish God’s law and a reign of justice as one of the final acts before the
Hour, and apocalypticism could thus be used by religious and political reformers.
In North Africa, the claims of Ibn Tumart (d. c. 524/1128) to be the Mahdi
facilitated his establishment of the Almohad dynasty; likewise, in late fifteenth-/
early sixteenth-century Anatolia and Iran, the Safavid Shah Ismail (907/

10
Cf. Cook, ‘Apocalyptic Incidents’, 305–9; Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World, 39, 53–4.
11
David Cook, ‘Messianism and Astronomical Events during the First Four Centuries of Islam’,
Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée 91–4 (2000): 29–52.
12
Cook, ‘Apocalyptic Incidents’, 295.
13
David Cook, ‘A Survey of Muslim Materials on Meteors and Comets’, Journal for the History of
Astronomy 30 (1999): 147.
14
Ibid.
15
See for instance the astrological imagery in William F. Spengler and Wayne G. Sayles, The
Turkoman Figural Bronze Coins and Their Iconography (Lodi, WI, 1992); see further the discussion
in A. C. S. Peacock, ‘A Seljuq Occult Manuscript and its World: MS. Paris Persan 174’, in
S. Canby, D. Beyazit and M. Rugiadi (ed.), The Seljuqs and Their Successors: Art, Culture and
History (Edinburgh, forthcoming).
16
For a discussion of this coinage see Gary Leiser, ‘Observations on the “Lion and Sun” Coinage of
Ghiyath al-Din Kaykhusraw’, Mésogeios 2 (1998): 96–114.
 Apocalyptic Thought and the Political Elite 221

1487–930/1524) portrayed himself as a Mahdi, while similar claims circulated at

the Ottoman court in the same period.17 The messianic self-identification of the
political leader could serve to justify not only religious reform but also dynastic
change. Ibn Tumart used his status as Mahdi to overthrow the Almoravid
dynasty, whose religious orthodoxy he questioned, while Shah Ismail’s identifica-
tion as Mahdi seems to have appealed particularly to the Turkmen that formed
the backbone of the movement that swept away the Aqquyunlu, installed the
Safavid dynasty and ultimately resulted in the conversion of Iran to Shiism. On a
smaller scale of change, Ghazan’s accession represented a challenge to the trad-
itional patterns of seniority among the descendants of Chinggis Khan and was
contested by his relatives. As Jonathan Brack has outlined, historians such as
Qashani and Rashid al-Din responded by depicting Ghazan as a mujaddid, a
renewer of Islam, and Brack argues that Qashani drew on an adapted version of
Najm al-Din Razi’s apocalyptic descriptions of the Mongol invasions to present a
new image of the Ilkhan as Mahdi. Ultimately, Ghazan’s identification as the
mujaddid-Mahdi was intended to consolidate his precarious political position.18
There is also evidence that Ghazan’s messianic claims were recognised in Anatolia.
In his ‘Tears of Rum’ qasīda, the Anatolian Persian poet Sayf al-Din Farghani
_
alludes to the imminent apocalyptic expectations of the return of Jesus to earth at
the end of time (a common trope of Muslim apocalyptic) and the Ilkhan’s
messianic status: ‘Because the descent of Jesus may occur in our age, the justice
of Ghazan is for us like the awaited Mahdi.’19
Mahdism is argued by the leading contemporary Turkish scholar of religion in
medieval Anatolia, Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, to have been the moving force behind a
whole series of rebellions that occurred in Anatolia over the thirteenth to sixteenth
centuries, in particular the Baba’i revolt against the Seljuqs of 638/1240 and
Shaykh Bedreddin’s revolt against the Ottomans in 819/1416.20 In Ocak’s view,
these Mahdist revolts are intimately bound up with Shiism, and the Baba’i
rebellion, named after its leader, Baba İlyas (also known as Baba Rasul), has been

17
See Cornell Fleischer, ‘A Mediterranean Apocalypse: Prophecies of Empire in the Fifteenth and
Sixteenth Centuries’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 61 (2018): 18–90.
18
Brack, ‘Mediating Sacred Kingship’, 38–69, 170–9; Brack, ‘Theologies of Auspicious
Kingship’, 11559.
19
Sayf al-Din Farghani, Diwan, I, 182.
20
Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, ‘Syncrétisme et esprit messianique: le concept de qotb et les chefs des mouve-
ments messianiques aux époques seldjoukide et ottomane (XIIIe–XVIIe siècles)’, in Gilles Veinstein
(ed.), Syncrétismes et Hérésies dans l’Orient seldjoukide et ottoman (XIV–XVIIIe siècle) (Paris, 2005),
249–58 ; A. Yaşar Ocak, La Révolte de Baba Resul, ou la formation de l’heterodoxie musulmane en
Anatolie au XIIIe siècle (Ankara, 1989), 76; Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, Osmanlı Toplumunda Zındıklar ve
Mulhidler 15–17. Yüzyıllar (Istanbul, 2013 [1998]), 197–210. For a debunking of the idea that
Bedreddin was associated with Mahdism see Binbaş, Intellectual Networks, 129–32.
222 Literature and Religious Change

seen as a crucial moment in the formation of Alevism, the branch of Shiism that
accounts for around 15–20 million of modern Turkey’s population. Ocak com-
pleted his doctorate on the Baba’i rebellion at the University of Strasbourg,21 and
the Turkish version of his thesis, which has been reprinted many times in revised
and expanded form, has remained the seminal work on the subject; its perspective
is indicated by its subtitle: ‘The Historical Foundation of Alevism or the Forma-
tion of Islamic-Turkish Heterodoxy in Anatolia’.22 According to Ocak, Baba
İlyas’s claims to be the Mahdi gave the revolt its appeal to the Turkmen, who
were already attracted to Shiite ideas, of which the Mahdi was a key one.23
Mahdism is thus inextricably linked in much contemporary scholarship on
Anatolia to both a form of Shiism and to ‘popular’ forms of belief – a sort of
‘folk Islam’ in which the simple-minded nomad was likely to be convinced by the
claims of a messianic figure, perhaps partly because of his enduring shamanic
heritage, which demanded a direct interlocutor between God and man. As Ocak
puts it:
En tenant compte des éléments shiites et des substrats chamaniques, on peut aisément
comprendre la croyance en l’idée de mahdi des Turcomanes, partisans de Baba Resūl, qui
savait que ses préténsions seraient acceptées sans hésitation.24

Assessing the beliefs of the nomads is clearly problematic, given the lack of
evidence; Kafadar has argued that the Baba’is’ appeal to the nomads was based
on their supposed openness to syncretism, although the evidence he presents of
this is tenuous.25 Whatever their beliefs, the idea that the Turkmen were so dim
that they would willingly accept pretty much anyone’s claim to be a Mahdi
‘without hesitation’ is problematic.26 Moreover, while Ocak claims antecedents
for such rebellions among the Iranian revolts of the early Abbasid period in which

21
Published as Ocak, La Révolte de Baba Resul.
22
Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, Babailer İsyanı: Aleviliğin Tarihsel Altyapısı Yahut Anadolu’da İslam-Türk
Heterodoksisinin Teşekkülü (Ankara, 2016).
23
Ocak, La Révolte de Baba Resul, 76, 78.
24
Ibid., 78. Ocak is basing this on Ibn Bibi, al-Awamir (Ankara), 498, (Tehran), 440: bih andak
tamwīhī kih az faqīhī-yi safīh wa muftī-yi mufattan istimā‘kunand az sar-i i‘tiqād-i bī shāyibah i‘tirād
musallam dārand. _
25
Kafadar, Between Two Worlds, 74. Kafadar’s evidence for the Baba’is’ ‘syncretism’ consists of Elvan’s
reference to Christians mourning his father Aşık Paşa’s death (see Chapter 2, p. 112), and the
identification of Elvan Çelebi as the special friend of St George reported by a sixteenth-century
German traveller. The former is a common motif in hagiographies, while the latter is evidently an
allusion to Elvan’s claim to an intimate relationship with Khidr, a major figure in the Sufi concept
of sainthood (see Chapter 2).
26
Cf. Devin DeWeese, ‘Khwaja Ahmad Yasavi as an Islamising Saint: Rethinking the Role of Sufis in
the Islamisation of Central Asia’, in A. C. S. Peacock (ed.), Comparative Perspectives from History
(Edinburgh, 2017), 336–52, esp. 337–8.
 Apocalyptic Thought and the Political Elite 223

he believes Turks participated,27 in reality, as Cemal Kafadar has pointed out, his
vision of Mahdi-obsessed Anatolian nomads seems to have much more in
common with the Safavid Shah Isma‘il’s movement, projecting the circumstances
of the late fifteenth century onto thirteenth-century Anatolia.28 Yet Kafadar too
remarks of the Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye’s account of the revolt that ‘it contains motifs
that fall beyond the purview of Sunni orthodoxy and are part of the Alevi/Shi‘i
worldview’,29 although he does not say what they are. Although Ocak’s ideas have
been criticised by certain Turkish scholars, these too have been very obviously
motivated by their own sectarian agendas, and have essentially sought to affirm
that the Baba’is were Sunnis with equally little evidence.30
The assumption that Mahdism and Shiism are necessarily associated is fraught
with difficulties. Although some modern scholarship tends to emphasise the Shiite
associations of Mahdism,31 as we have seen there was no shortage of Sunni
Mahdis. In itself, an interest in these themes points categorically neither to Shiism
nor to Sunnism, as both Sunni and Shiite apocalypticism emerged out of the same
early Islamic corpus of traditions.32 Secondly, the idea that either Mahdism or
Shiism were closer to some sort of putative ‘folk Islam’ that appealed to the
Turkmen needs questioning, for as has been discussed in Chapter 5 there is little
textual support for this in the vernacular works examined there. Instead, in this
chapter I will present the hitherto neglected evidence for a courtly, elite and Sunni
interest in Mahdism and apocalypticism in thirteenth- and fourteenth-century
Anatolia, linked intellectually to the legacy of Ibn ‘Arabi and a Maghrebi Sunni
tradition of Mahdism, as well as politically to reactions to the Mongol invasion
and occupation. I reconsider the revolt of Baba Rasul/Baba İlyas in the light of
this evidence, and also examine two mahdist revolts of the Mongol period, that of
a certain Musa in Kurdistan and the messianic claims of the rebel Mongol
governor Timurtash.

MAHDISM IN MEDIEVAL ANATOLIAN TEXTS

Although the twelfth-century author Hubaysh-i Tiflisi showed a distinct interest

in apocalypticism, perhaps in accordance with the preoccupations of his patron,

27
Ocak, La Révolte de Baba Resul, 77–8.
28
Kafadar, Between Two Worlds, 75.
29
Ibid., 75.
30
See ibid., 171–2, nn. 42–3.
31
For example, Abbas Amanat, Apocalyptic Islam and Iranian Shi‘ism (London, 2009); see the well-
founded critique of this position in Fleischer, ‘A Mediterranean Apocalypse’, 41–2.
32
Cook, Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic, 192.
224 Literature and Religious Change

Kılıç Arslan, he does not discuss the Mahdi. The earliest references to the Mahdi
in texts produced in Anatolia can be found in the works of the Sufi Najm al-Din
Razi, a refugee to Anatolia from the depredations of the Mongols, in the face of
whose advance Razi had lost most of his family. In his best-known work, the
Mirsad al-‘Ibad, a collection of Sufi advice originally dedicated to Sultan ‘Ala’ al-
Din Kayqubad, he warns that the Mongol invasions ‘resemble only the catas-
trophes that shall ensue at the end of time, foretold by the Prophet’, and goes on
to quote the well-known traditions that associate the Turks with the end of time.
The Mirsad calls on the rulers of the age to unite to ‘sacrifice their lives, their
riches and their kingdoms to repel this catastrophe, [otherwise] one must fear that
Islam will be totally destroyed’.33 Razi is even more explicit in associating the
current situation with the end days in his Mirror for Princes written for the
Mengücekid ruler of Erzincan, Da’ud b. Bahramshah. He writes:
Now, let us begin with other Signs of the strife of the End of Time (fitnahā-yi ākhir-
zamānī) most of which have appeared (zāhir shuda ast). Just as the Prophet – Peace be upon
_
him – through the light of Prophethood discerned these realities (ma‘ānī) and heralded
them; this reality is a miracle (mu‘jiza) that after one hundred years shall become
apparent . . . Just as at the beginning of Time the Arabs went to Turkestan and brought
back slaves, and the extent of the sea of Islam turned back from Turkestan, now these
Turks come and seize the Arabs as prisoners they take to Turkestan. This is one of the Signs
of the resurrection and the Strife of the End of Time which the Prophet – Peace and
Blessings upon him – foresaw.34

Further hadith describe these Turks: they fight the Muslims, they have faces like
shields coated with leather, they have small eyes, snub noses, and long hair – the
common stereotypes of the steppe peoples in Islamic apocalyptic literature. Razi
reiterates that most of these signs have now appeared; all that remains is for the
appearance of the Antichrist (dajjāl) and Jesus who will defeat him, resurrect the
dead and bring about a final reign of justice.
Other Sufis such as Ibn ‘Arabi and his followers also discussed the Mahdi. Ibn
‘Arabi had written of his coming, associating him with the idea of the vicegerency
of God (discussed in Chapter 2, p. 99):
Know – may God support us! – that God has a vicegerent (khalīfa) who will come forth
when the earth has become filled with injustice and oppression, and will then fill it with
justice and equity. Even if there were only one day left for this world, God would lengthen
it so that he (i.e., the Mahdi) could rule . . . He will wipe out injustice and its people and

33
Najm al-Din Razi, Mirsad al-‘Ibad, 17; The Path of God’s Bondsman, trans. Algar, 39–40; cf. Brack,
‘Mediating Sacred Kingship’, 164–8.
34
Najm al-Din Razi, Marmuzat-i Asadi dar Mazmurat-i Daudi, ed. Muhammad Rida Shafi ‘i Kadkani
(Tehran, 1381), 145; cf. Peacock, ‘Advice for the Sultans of Rum’, 294.
 Apocalyptic Thought and the Political Elite 225

uphold Religion (al-Din), and he will breathe the spirit back into Islam . . . He will . . . call
(mankind) to God with the sword, so that whoever refuses will be killed, and whoever
opposes him will be forsaken. He will manifest Religion as it (really) is in Itself, the Religion
by which the Messenger of God would judge and rule if he were there. He will eliminate
the different schools (of religious law) so that only the Pure Religion (Q. 39:3) remains and
his enemies will be those who follow blindly the ‘ulama’, the people of ijtihad, because they
will see the Mahdi judging differently from the way followed by their imams (i.e., the
historical founders of the schools of Islamic law). So they will only accept the Mahdi’s
authority grudgingly and against their will, because of their fear of his sword and his
strength and because they covet (the power and wealth) that he possesses. But the common
people of the Muslims and the greater part of the elite among them will rejoice in him,
while the true Knowers of God among the People of the (spiritual) Realities will pledge
allegiance to him because of God’s directly informing them (of the Mahdi’s true nature and
mission), through (inner) unveiling and immediate witness. . .35

This passage reflects a vision of a clash between the official ulama, and the true
Sufis who are acquainted with the truth of the appearance of the Mahdi. This is
not though, a fissure between popular and formal religion; Ibn ‘Arabi is hardly a
popular writer. Rather it reflects a dispute over who is the true guardian of sharia
and religion.
The precise meaning of Ibn ‘Arabi’s concept of the Mahdi is debatable, given
the allusive and difficult nature of his writings. It is entirely possible that he did
not envisage the Mahdi as a political-military leader at the end of time, but rather
used the concept to try to express a type of internal spiritual development.36 On
the other hand, Ibn ‘Arabi may have identified himself with the eschatological
figure of the fabulous gryphon arising from the west who has the characteristics of
the Mahdi and was the theme of Ibn ‘Arabi’s enigmatic work ‘Anqa Mughrib.37
There is evidence that at least some of Ibn ‘Arabi’s followers did see the Mahdi in
conventional terms as the hero of the apocalypse, and thought that the end of days
was already nigh. The Matali‘ al-Iman, a Sufi treatise possibly by al-Qunawi, Ibn
‘Arabi’s leading disciple, but more probably a certain Nasir al-Din Khu’i, which
was copied at Ladhiq (Denizli) in 660/1262, makes this point in its introduction:
With the remoteness of the era of prophecy, God’s carpet was rolled up and the foundation
of religion was destroyed. Hence the sun of faith turned toward eclipse . . . The fog of error
filled every direction and the darkness of innovation and sectarian caprice spread to all the

35
Translated by James Morris in James Morris and William Chittick, Ibn ‘Arabi, The Meccan
Revelations (New York, 2002).
36
James Morris, ‘Ibn ‘Arabi’s Messianic Secret: From “The Mahdi” to the Imamate of Every Soul’,
Journal of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society 30 (2001): 1–18.
37
Elmore, Islamic Sainthood in the Fullness of Time, 85–9, 189ff.
226 Literature and Religious Change

regions of East and West. A cry from the unseen voiced the situation with the words,
Corruption has appeared in the land and the sea (Q.30:41)

If you want enemies, Mahdi

Come down from the sky
If you want helpers, antichrist,
Show yourself at once!38

The Matali‘ shows a strong interest in eschatology, and is a learned work showing
the strong influence of Ibn Sina and Ibn ‘Arabi.39 This sense of an imminent
apocalypse is even clearer in a contemporary Arabic work, the Risala fi Amr al-
Mahdi, a short Arabic treatise on the Mahdi attributed to Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi.
The attribution has been questioned and must be regarded as unresolved, but the
vocabulary and contents of the work certainly do have affinities with al-Qunawi’s
other works and those of Ibn ‘Arabi.40 These can be clearly seen in the short
passages discussing how the Mahdi’s spirit (rūhāniyya) comes into communication
with individuals, and in the discussion of the _Mahdi’s viziers, even if some of the
details differ.41 At any rate, the early date of one of the surviving manuscripts,
Ayasofya 4849, which is most likely thirteenth century, confirms the text’s
circulation in this period.42
The treatise deals less with Ibn ‘Arabi’s spiritual Mahdi but rather with a
saviour whose coming is imminent. It starts by describing how the Mahdi is a son
of Fatima, from the line of al-Husayn, who will be the seal of the Hashimite
Muhammadan caliphs (khatam al-khulafā’ al-muhammadiyyīn al-hāshimiyyīn),
_
but denies the Shiite claim that he is the son of the Eleventh Imam. There follows
a detailed description of the physical characteristics of the Mahdi, who, it is
predicted, will emerge in disguise in the furthest reaches of the Maghreb, on
the Atlantic coast near Salé. Now the tense suddenly shifts to the past, and it is
stated that the Mahdi has already emerged three years earlier on 7 Safar 654/

38
Matali‘al-Iman trans. in William C. Chittick, Faith and Practice of Islam: Three Thirteenth Century
Sufi Texts (Albany, NY, 1992), 35. The text is preserved in Süleymaniye, MS Halet Efendi Ek 92.
39
See Chittick, Faith and Practice, 25–33, 256–7 for a discussion.
40
Todd, The Sufi Doctrine of Man, 181–2. However, the attribution is clear in the manuscript
tradition (Süleymaniye, MS Ayasofya 4849, fol. 1a: risāla fi amr al-mahdī lil-shaykh S ̣adr al-Dīn; the
title folio of the text itself is missing; and Süleymaniye, MS Hacı Mahmud Efendi 2415, fol. 161a:
hādhā risālat al-mahdī li-S ̣adr al-Dīn al-Qunawī b. Muhyi al-Dīn al-‘Arabī).
41
Todd, The Sufi Doctrine of Man, 181–2; Ayasofya 4849, _ fols 172a–173b.
42
The manuscript is undated, but can be given this early date on palaeographic grounds. An
ownership mark on fol. 1 a connects it to Aleppo (bi-Ḥalab al-mahrūsa sanat arba‘ wa-sittīn).
The manuscript consists mainly of a collection of Ibn Sina’s treatises. _ A second manuscript is
Süleymaniye, MS Hacı Mahmud Efendi 2415, fols 161a–163b. This manuscript is much later,
perhaps nineteenth century, and is a collection of various works largely by Ibn ‘Arabi.
 Apocalyptic Thought and the Political Elite 227

Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi, Risala fi Amr al-Mahdi, Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu
FIG. 6.1
Başkanlığı, Süleymaniye Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, MS Ayasofya 4849.

8 June 1247, giving us a date for the work’s composition of c. 1250.43 The
Mahdi, who remains in disguise, is accompanied by a few followers ‘who know
now where he is and how much time remains until his complete appearance’.44 In
other words, although the Mahdi has reappeared the world must wait for his
‘complete appearance’ (zuhūruhu al-kāmil). This, however, is also expected to be
_
nigh. The text describes how he will receive allegiance (bay‘a) in Mecca, but the
king of Syria will hear of him and send an army against him. In the margins, at
this point the copyist has written the words 2 Safar 660/27 December 1261,
followed by another, somewhat unclear word, the most likely reading of which
seems to be jā’anā: ‘he has come to us’ (Fig. 6.1). The Mahdi will emerge

43
I follow here the account in Süleymaniye, MS Ayasofya 4898; the other manuscript, Hacı Mahmud
Efendi 2415, fols 161a–163b, contains gaps where the dates are in Ayasofya, suggesting they were
omitted from the manuscript tradition after the non-appearance of the Mahdi in the thirteenth
century. This is further evidence for the antiquity of Ayasofya 4849.
44
Süleymaniye, MS Ayasofya 4849, fol. 169a.
228 Literature and Religious Change

victorious conquering all the lands up to Constantinople, but at the same time he
will also unify the umma by getting rid of madhhabs and eliminating the
differences between fuqahā’. Finally, he will conquer not just the Christians but
also Gog and Magog, installing his reign of justice.
The conclusion of the Risala suggests that for its author the appearance of the
Mahdi was imminent, a mere decade away:
Between our present time and 683[/1284–5], which is when Jesus will appear, but before
that, there will appear the portents of the Mahdi as God wills. We have only mentioned the
portents of Jesus, blessings be upon him, most of which will come after that. As for the
precise time of the appearance of the Mahdi, it is known but cannot be openly declared.
However, in 666[/1267–8] there will appear a great sign (āya ‘azīma) which will cause most
_
of those who deny the resurrection and what we have mentioned of the portents of the
Mahdi to believe. Also in the year 666 will the people see signs that they did not recognise
and they will realise the presence and appearance of the Mahdi, and other signs which are
announced by the tongue of prophecy and verification.45

Most of the elements of the Risala fi Amr al-Mahdi resemble those found in the
extensive apocalyptic literature produced by both Shiites and Sunnis. In two
respects it seems to be exceptional. First, the discussion of the imminence of
the apocalypse is unusual. The main contemporary author dealing with apocalyp-
tic themes, the Syrian Ibn Talha, writing shortly after 644/1246, dates the coming
of the Mahdi to a safe distance in the future, at some point after year 718/
1318–19.46 The Risala fi Amr al-Mahdi, however, strongly suggests that its
readership can expect to witness the signs of the Mahdi themselves, and thus by
implication the wars of the end of time and the apocalypse itself are nigh. The
second respect in which the Risala is distinctive is in its emphasis on the Maghrebi
origins of the Mahdi, which runs counter to classical Islamic apocalyptic, where
the Mahdi is described either as originating in the East or in the Hijaz.47 The
Maghrebi origins of the Risala’s Mahdi strongly suggests a western inspiration for
the text, or at least parts of it. Mahdist claimants commonly appeared in the
Maghreb, perhaps most spectacularly in the twelfth century with Ibn Tumart’s
rebellion, and a rich vein of literature produced in the Muslim West elaborated
the classical apocalyptic traditions to tailor them to Maghrebi audiences.48

45
Ibid., fols 178b–179a.
46
See the discussion in Peacock, ‘Politics, Religion and the Occult in the Works of Kamal al-Din Ibn
Talha’.
47
See Cook, Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic, 137ff.
48
See in general Mercedes García-Arenal, Messianism and Puritanical Reform: Mahdis of the Muslim
West (Leiden, 2006); also Anna Akasoy, ‘The muhaqqiq as Mahdi? Ibn Sab‘in and Mahdism among
Anadulsian mystics in the 12th/13th centuries’, in _ Wofram Brandes and Fecilitas Schmeider (eds),
Endzeiten: Eschatologie in den monotheistischen Weltreligionen (Berlin, 2008), 313–37.
 Apocalyptic Thought and the Political Elite 229

However, the Risala fi Amr al-Mahdi differs from the best known of these
traditions in locating the place of emergence of the Mahdi as the Salé region;
normally the Maghrebi tradition associated him with Massa, far to the south near
Agadir.49 Whatever the precise origins of these Maghrebi messianic legends, it
seems likely that that their transmission to Anatolia can be associated with
associated with the West’s most famous émigré, Ibn ‘Arabi. Their origin was
certainly recognised in medieval Anatolia, for the lettrist ‘Abd al-Rahman al-
Bistami, active at the court of Murad II, specifically identified the Maghrebi
tradition of occult thought as a major source.50

IBN BARRAJAN AND HIS TAFSĪRS

The influence of this Maghrebi tradition of apocalyptic in thirteenth-century

Anatolia can be seen in the works of the celebrated Andalusian Qur’an commen-
tator Ibn Barrajan of Seville (d. 563/1141), which circulated in Anatolia, includ-
ing among the Seljuq elite. Ibn Barrajan, who exercised an influence on Ibn
‘Arabi, was according to later sources himself executed for his part in a mahdist
uprising against the Almohads.51 Although the historicity of this claim is dubious,
and the evidence of his own writings and early sources suggests he eschewed
political involvement, he developed an esoteric interpretation of the Qur’an based
on astrology that predicted the future and saw the coming of the Mahdi as
imminent. Ibn Barrajan’s work immediately became extremely influential. The
contemporary Egyptian author ‘Abd al-Rahman b. Najir al-Sadid claimed that if
one understood Ibn Barrajan’s tafsīr accurately, one could predict the future up to
the day of resurrection.52 For some, then, Ibn Barrajan’s work offered more than
just a Qur’anic commentary, and the famous fifteenth-century occultist ‘Abd al-
Rahman al-Bistami also cites Ibn Barrajan as one of his main sources for occult

49
García-Arenal, Messianism and Puritanical Reform, 202–8. The appearance of a Mahdi from Salé
does not appear to be a mainstream Maghrebi tradition. Michael Brett (personal communication,
28 December 2016) suggests that the reference may be to Ribat al-Fath, across the river from Salé,
built by Ibn Tumart’s successor ‘Abd al-Mu’min (d. 1198).
50
Masad, ‘The Medieval Islamic Apocalyptic Tradition’, 108–9, 113.
51
On him see Jose Bellver, ‘“Al-Ghazali of al-Andalus”: Ibn Barrajan, Mahdism, and the Emergence
of Learned Sufism on the Iberian Peninsula’, Journal of the American Oriental Society 133 (2013):
659–81; Yousef Casewit, The Mystics of al-Andalus: Ibn Barrajan and Islamic Thought in the Twelfth
Century (Cambridge, 2017).
52
A Qur’an Commentary by Ibn Barrajan of Seville, d. 536/1141. Īdāh al-Ḥikma bi-Ahkām al-‘Ibra,
Wisdom Deciphered, The Unseen Discovered, ed. Gerhard Böwering _ _ and Yousef Casewit
_
(Leiden,
2015), 27.
230 Literature and Religious Change

knowledge, especially that of hurūf, the secrets encoded by the numerical values of
_
the letters of the Arabic script.53
Ibn Barrajan was the author of two Qur’an commentaries, the Idah al-Hikma
and the better-known Tanbih al-Afham (often mistitled al-Irshad),54 but his fame
derived from his commentary on the sura of al-Rum (Q.30) in which he was later
claimed to have accurately predicted the date of Saladin’s recapture of Jerusalem.
Ibn Barrajan’s interpretation is given both in the Tanbih and also, more briefly, in
the Idah.55 The commentary focuses on the phrase ‘ghulibat al-rūm fi adnā al-ard
_
wa-hum min ba‘d ghalabihim sayaghlibūna fī bi‘d sinīn’, ‘The Rum are defeated in
_
the lower part of the earth and after the victory over them, they will be victorious in
a few years’. Whereas most exegetes took these verses as referring to the Byzantine-
Sasanian wars of the early seventh century, Ibn Barrajan insisted they contained a
prognostication of the future, and discussed the alternative vocalisation of the last
verb as ‘sayughlabūna’, giving the meaning ‘they will be defeated’.56 These verses
with their allusions to a victory of or over ‘al-Rum’ (depending on one’s interpret-
ation) were to exercise a lasting attraction for political propagandists in Anatolia.
Writing of Timur’s victory over the Ottomans at Ankara in 1402, the Timurid
chronicler Nizam al-Din Shami gleefully quoted them, associating the vanquished
Ottomans with the defeated al-Rum,57 while later in the late fifteenth century the
Aqquyunlu ruler Uzun Hasan claimed the verse presaged his victory over his
Qaraquyunlu rival Jahanshah at Muş in 872/1467 – the numerical value of the
letters of bid ‘ sinīn, the last two words of the verse, adding up to 872, the hijri year
_
of the battle.58 Ibn Barrajan’s commentary on Surat al-Rum also attracted the
attention of Ibn ‘Arabi, who discussed it at length in his al-Futuhat al-Makiyya.59
The significance of Ibn Barrajan’s commentary on al-Rum for a thirteenth-century
audience is indicated by its special treatment in a manuscript of the Idah al-Hikma,
MS Murad Molla 35 (fols 186a–188a) (Fig. 6.2). Here the commentary on the
sura, this sura alone, is surrounded by an additional commentary in red ink taken

53
Masad, ‘The Medieval Islamic Apocalyptic Tradition’, 114.
54
For a survey of his works see Casewit, The Mystics of al-Andalus, 128–70.
55
For an English translation see Jose Bellver, ‘Ibn Barraǧān and Ibn ʿArabī on the Prediction of the
Capture of Jerusalem in 583/1187 by Saladin’, Arabica 61 (2014): 274–83; Casewit, The Mystics of
al-Andalus, 302–6.
56
Jose Bellver, ‘Ibn Barraǧān and Ibn ʿArabī on the Prediction of the Capture of Jerusalem in 583/
1187 by Saladin’, Arabica 61 (2014): 252–86.
57
Cited by Kafadar in ‘A Rome of One’s Own’, 7, 21, n. 1.
58
Woods, The Aqquyunlu, 102; Matthew Melvin-Koushki, ‘The Delicate Art of Aggression: Uzun
Hasan’s fathnama to Qaytbay of 1469’, Iranian Studies 44/ii (2011): 211.
59
Translated by Bellver, ‘Ibn Barraǧān and Ibn ʿArabī’, 283–6.
FIG. 6.2 Ibn Barrajan, Idah al-Hikma. Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı, Süleymaniye Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, MS
Murad Molla 35 (fols. 186a–188a)
232 Literature and Religious Change

from the Tanbih al-Afham, highlighting its importance above all other suras for the
reader/copyist.60
While the political and historical implications of Ibn Barrajan’s commentary
on Surat al-Rum have attracted much attention, the extant texts of his commen-
taries are actually rather imprecise. However, it seems clear that he saw the famous
verses 2–4 of the sura as presaging the coming of the Mahdi and referring to the
Christian-Muslim wars at the end of time. Ibn Barrajan regarded history as
determined by cyclical spheres of predestination (dawā’ir al-taqdīr) to which
God has provided clues in the Qur’an. As he writes:
So the One who makes evolve (yudabbiru) the cyclical spheres causing the determination of
the succession of night and day, the succession of times and the reception in creation of
changes in the states such as the transference of power, increase and decrease can bestow to
a few knowledge of that. What is obtained thereof is one of the most useful benefits [to
attain] certainty in the accomplishment of the time limits, the fulfilment of the appointed
times, the unavoidable manifestation of the last day, the verification of the knowledge
regarding the resurrection, the promised rewards and menaces, and so forth.61

Although Ibn Barrajan’s text was later read as predicting the recapture of Jerusalem,
this is not explicitly mentioned. Ibn Barrajan rather is seeking to pinpoint the time
left to the world before the end of time and the appearance of the Mahdi; a victory
over al-Rum will be one of the signs of this. Ibn Barrajan views time as made up of
seven thousand-month cycles, the last of which he hints will come to end in 583/
1187 – some sixty years after he was writing – when he seems to suggest (although
does not explicitly state) that the signs of the Mahdi will become evident.62
Ibn Barrajan’s works became far more popular in the eastern Mediterranean
region than in al-Andalus and the Maghreb: just one single manuscript of his
Tanbih al-Afham is preserved in the Maghreb today, in Rabat, and his other works
not at all.63 The overwhelming majority of extant manuscripts of Ibn Barrajan’s
works are held in Turkish libraries and are associated with either Anatolia or north
Syria. Of the twenty-one manuscripts of Ibn Barrajan’s various works held in the
Süleymaniye Library, eleven can be securely dated to the thirteenth to fourteenth
centuries,64 underlining its popularity during our period. It seems likely that the

60
The text of the marginal commentary is published in A Qur’an Commentary, ed. Böwering and
Casewit, 906–13.
61
Bellver, ‘Ibn Barraǧān and Ibn ʿArabī’, 280–1.
62
Ibid., 265–6. Ibn Barrajan repeats his ideas of the dawā’ir al-taqdīr and the seven cycles more briefly
in the Idah, see A Qur’an Commentary, ed. Böwering and Casewit, 558–9.
63
Ibn Barraŷān, Šarh Asmā’ Allāh al-Ḥusná (Comentario sobre los nombres mas bellos de Dios), ed.
_
Purificacion de la Torre (Madrid, 2000), 79.
64
The following early manuscripts of Ibn Barrajan’s works in Istanbul collections are known to me:
Sharh al-Asma’ al-Husna: Şehid Ali Paşa 426 (copied in Aleppo, 598); Ayasofya 1869 (copied
 Apocalyptic Thought and the Political Elite 233

circulation of Ibn Barrajan’s works in Anatolia and the east is connected to his
influence on Ibn ‘Arabi, a long-time resident of Anatolia, and there survives to this
day in Konya a finely written three-volume copy of the Tanbih al-Afham that was
bequeathed as waqf by Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi, Ibn ‘Arabi’s disciple (Fig. 6.3).65
We also know that Ibn Barrajan’s tafsīr was consulted at the highest levels of
the Anatolian political elite. One surviving copy of Ibn Barrajan’s Tanbih al-
Afham, dated Ramadan 667/May 1269, comes from the library of a senior official
in the Ilkhanid administration of Anatolia, Majd al-Din Muhammad b. al-Hasan,
a mustawf ī (revenue official) who became vizier after Fakhr al-Din ‘Ali was
deposed (Plate 12).66 According to a note beside the colophon, the copy was
collated with the autograph (qūbila bi’l-asl), as was Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi’s copy.
_
It seems, then, that an autograph copy of the Tanbih was circulating in thirteenth-
century Anatolia, probably in Konya. At any rate the existence of a copy in Majd
al-Din Muhammad’s personal library suggests the interest in Ibn Barrajan among
members of the political elite of late thirteenth-century Anatolia, and the copy
bequeathed by al-Qunawi confirms his tafsīr’s importance for members of the
circle of Ibn ‘Arabi.

Dhu’l-Qi’da 608); Nuruosmaniye 2876 (copied 732); Nuruosmaniye 2877 (copied 733); Carullah
1023 (copied 795); Tanbih al-Afham: Reisülkuttab 30 (copied 667/1269); Damad Ibrahim 25
(copied 677); Carullah 53M (copied 738); Darulmesnevi 42 (undated but clearly 13th–14th
century); Idah al-Hikma bi-Ahkam al-‘Ibra: Mahmud Paşa 3–4 (copied 596/1200) and Murat
Molla 35 (copied 612/1217). For a description of the two manuscripts of the Idah al-Hikma see
Böwering and Casewit, A Qur’an Commentary, 29–33. Of course, the mere presence of the
manuscripts in Istanbul libraries does not prove they were copied in Anatolia, and most lack
colophons, but nonetheless the presence of such a number of early manuscripts in the Istanbul
collections does suggest Ibn Barrajan’s popularity in the region, and all are in eastern, rather than
Maghribi hands. In the case of Reisulkuttab 30 and Konya Yusuf Ağa 4744–6, discussed below, we
have unambiguous evidence connecting them to Anatolia. A similar pattern of diffusion can be
observed with Ibn Barrajan’s Sharh al-Asma’ al-Husna. Of the fourteen extant manuscripts of this
work, nine are held in Istanbul libraries, with one each in London, Paris, Berlin, Konya and
Medina. See Ibn Barraŷān, Šarh Asmā’ Allāh al-Ḥusná, 77–9.
65
Konya, Yusuf Aǧa Kütüphanesi,_ MSS 4744, 4745, 4746.
66
Süleymaniye, MS Reisülkuttab 30. The inscription on the shamsa reads: bi-rasm khizānat kutub al-
mawlā al-sāhib/makhzan al-makārim wa’l-faďā’il malik al-sudūr wa’l-afādil/dhī’l-makārim wa’l-
_ _
ma’āthir wa’l-ma‘ālī wa’l-mafākhir Majd al-Dawla wa’l-Dīn/sharaf al-islām wa’l-muslimīn ‘uddat
al-mulūk wa’l-salātīn/Abī’l-ma‘ālī Muhammad b. al-Ḥasan adāma Allāh fad lahu wa-zillahu wa-a‘lā
fī dhurwat al-‘ulā_ maqāmahu wa-ma_hallahu wa-asbagha ‘alayhi wa-abbada _ ihsānahu
_ wa-tallahu
āmīn. He is mentioned by Ibn Bibi,_ who calls _him sadr-i kabīr wa amīr-i_ jalīl Majd _al-Din
Abu’l-Mahamid Muhammad-i al-Hasan al-mustawfi al-Arzinjani _ (Ibn Bibi, al-Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya
(Ankara), 656; (Tehran), 566). Aqsara’i gives his name as Majd al-Din Muhammad b. al-Husayn
and records how he became mustawfi under Rukn al-Din Qilij Arslan IV and Ghiyath al-Din
Kaykhusraw, before becoming vizier after Fakhr al-Din ‘Ali’s fall (Aqsara’i, Musamarat, 73, 89, 93)
Although sacked as vizier on the instructions of the ordu in 672/1273–4 to make way for the return
of Fakhr al-Din ‘Ali, he was given the title of atabak as a consolation prize, and Aqsara’i praises his
abilities highly. He died in 676/1277–8 (ibid., 95, 100. 102, 116).
234 Literature and Religious Change

Ibn Barrajan, Tanbih, copy endowed as waqf by Sadr al-Din al-Qunawi. Türkiye
FIG. 6.3
Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı, Konya Yusuf Ağa Kütüphanesi, MS No. 4744.
 Apocalyptic Thought and the Political Elite 235

THE MAHDI AS SELJUQ SULTAN: THE EVIDENCE OF SIJISTANI’S

MU’NIS AL-‘AWARIF

Further evidence for apocalyptic interests at the very summit of the Seljuq court
comes from a work by the émigré occultist, Nasir al-Din Muhammad b. Ibrahim
al-Sijistani, known by his pen name of Nasiri (not to be confused with the writer
on futuwwa). Nasiri has left us a compilation of several Persian works on magic
and astrology, preserved in a single manuscript (probably the autograph), in the
Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, MS persan 174 (Plate 11), composed in
Kayseri and Aksaray around the years 670/1273 and 671/1273.67 Most of these
magical works are incomplete and the manuscript has suffered damage from both
a botched rebinding and water, but two are preserved more or less intact, the
Daqa’iq al-Haqa’iq (which was, however, never completed) and the Mu’nis al-
‘Awarif. It is the latter work, a long poetic composition written in Kayseri in 671/
1273, that is relevant to our investigation of Mahdism.
Nasiri appears to have been the court geomancer. Although he complains in
the Mu’nis al-‘Awarif of his wretched situation,68 a short mathnawī earlier in the
majmū‘a makes it clear he was well connected at court. In it he addresses his
‘friends in Aksaray’, the military commanders ‘Izz al-Din Fakhr al-Din Ahmad
‘shīr-dil’ (lion-heart) and some scholars whom he asks to convey his greetings to
the sultan.69 The richly illustrated nature of the manuscript (although not the
Mu’nis al-‘Awarif sections) also suggests that it was produced for a court milieu
(Plate 11a).70
The Mu’nis al-‘Awarif is an eclectic collection of poems of different metres and
rhyme schemes (Plate 11b). After invoking God, the first section deals with the
theme of the Day of Judgement and Resurrection (andar hashr wa ahwāl-i rūz-i
_ _
qiyām wa ahwāl-i mardum dar. . .).71 Reflecting on the vanity of this world, the
_
poet urges himself to abandon it for he too is due to die (Nasīrī ba‘d az īn tark-i
_
jahān kun/tā ‘umr-i tū rasad rūzī bi-pāyān), and then embarks on an ubi sunt
lament: where are the sages of old like Daniel, kings like Kaykhusraw and his wise

67
For an overview of this manuscript see Peacock, ‘A Seljuq Occult Manuscript and its World’.
68
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS persan 174, fol. 142b.
69
Ibid., fol. 129a.
70
Many of the illustrations were dated much later in one of the few studies of this important
manuscript: Marianne Baruccand, ‘The Miniatures of the Daqa’iq al- haqa’iq (Bibliothèque
nationale, pers. 174): A Testimony to the Cultural Diversity of Medieval Anatolia’, Islamic Art 4
(1991): 113–42. However, consideration of the manuscript by a group of art historians at a
workshop held at St Andrews in 2017 and Paris in 2018 threw into doubt Barrucand’s datings,
with several scholars suggesting that most illustrations were in fact contemporary with the text.
Further research on this manuscript is ongoing.
71
Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS persan 174, fol. 134a.
236 Literature and Religious Change

men (pīrān-i ‘āqil) or rulers like Sanjar?72 The following section discusses the six
signs of the end of time (ākhir-i zamān) on the basis of hadith.73 The manuscript
is somewhat damaged at this point, but these signs comprise oppressive rulers, ahl-
i hikam (?), the abandoning of asceticism (zuhd) and of holy war (ghazā), seeking
_
positions from the unbelievers, women acting without shame and lewd behaviour
(fisq) being done openly. A further sign is that unbelievers will seize the whole
world, but a man will arise from Rum with a great army and do battle with the
Franks. In addition, during these latter days the wolf and the sheep will lie
together, one of the numerous unnatural portents that other writers commonly
identified as apocalyptic.
Two chapters then describe the Mahdi, who is identified with none other than
the Seljuq sultan Ghiyath al-Din Kaykhusraw.74 The first is entitled Praise of the
Great Sultan, the Pride of the Seljuq Dynasty, Ghiyath al-Dunya wa’l-Din
Kaykhusraw . . . and the Rule of the Mahdi and its Signs (madh-i sultān-i a‘zam
_ _ _
iftikhār-i Āl Saljūq Ghiyāth al-Dunyā wa’l-Dīn Kaykhusraw . . . wa hukm-i Mahdī
_
wa rumūz-i ān dar īn bāb wa allāh a‘lam). The second is more explicit: The Rules
of the Mahdi and his being named the King of Time, Ghiyath al-Dunya wa’l-Din,
may God lengthen his life (ahkām-i Mahdī wa takhallus bi-padishāh-i waqt
_ _
Ghiyāth al-Dunyā wa’l-Dīn atāla allāh baqā’ahu). The text is somewhat damaged
_
on these folios, but enough is clear to confirm the identification of the child king
Ghiyath al-Din with the Mahdi and to situate the apocalyptic vision of the author
formerly in the context of Mongol-dominated late Seljuq Anatolia, where the
Seljuqs are Mongols are identified with the sheep and wolf of the earlier apoca-
lyptic prophecy:
‘This very king is the Mahdi oh wise one!
He will seize the world by God’s command,
The Mongols are the wolf and we are the sheep’.
Thus said the Ustad Shams-i Khujand.
Another said ‘Realise the Mongols are the antichrist
Curses be upon him for eternity!’
It is correct that the Mahdi is that very king,
who ascended to the throne from his cradle.75

72
Ibid., fol. 135a.
73
Ibid., fol. 135b.
74
Ibid., fols 137a–b.
75
Ibid., fol. 137b:
Hamīn shāh mahdīst ay nīk-rāy, bigīrad jahān-rā bi-amr-i khudāy
būd gurg tātār u mā gusfand, chunīn guft ustād-i Shams-i Khujand
digar guft dajjāl tātār dān, la‘nat bar-ū bād tā jāwidān
chū mahdī hamīn shāh bāshad durust, ki az mahd bāshad bi takhtash nishast.
 Apocalyptic Thought and the Political Elite 237

Thus in Nasiri’s pun, Ghiyath al-Din’s minority, in which he ascended from the
cradle (mahd), is one of the proofs that he is indeed the Mahdi.
Nasiri’s comparison of the Seljuq ruler to the Mahdi is not unique. In mid- to
late twelfth-century Iraq both Caliph and Seljuq sultans were occasionally
branded by their court poets as Mahdis,76 as was the Ilkhan Ghazan, as discussed
earlier. In the early fifteenth century, the poet Abdülvasi‘ Çelebi described the
Ottoman Sultan Mehmed I as a Mahdi,77 and the tradition continued in the
sixteenth century with Süleyman the Magnificent.78 Nasiri’s description of
Ghiyath al-Din as the Mahdi was perhaps less shocking for a contemporary
audience than it might seem today, although given our almost total lack of other
panegyric poetry from Seljuq Anatolia it is hard to be sure. Nonetheless, Nasiri’s
Mu’nis al-‘Awarif confirms that apocalypticism attracted the Seljuq court, offering
a means of justifying its present circumstances (after all, if servitude to the
Mongols was ordained in the divine plan for the end of days it was hardly the
Seljuqs’ fault) and hope for the future in the form of the Seljuq sultan who would
ultimately defeat the Antichrist to install the Mahdi’s reign of justice.

FOURTEENTH-CENTURY ANATOLIAN APOCALYPTIC

Interest in apocalyptic themes can also be seen in works originating in pious

circles in the fourteenth century. An apocalyptic appendix occurs in the colophon
of a manuscript of al-Saghani’s hadith collection, the Mashariq al-Anwar (Süley-
maniye, MS Fatih 1159), which was transmitted by the Erzincan scholar Wajih
al-Din al-Arzinjani, who appended some short works of his own to it, copied in
716/1316, followed by an Arabic text dealing with the circumstances of the Day
of Resurrection – no author is specified but it is in the same hand as Arzinjani’s
works and is probably an autograph. This day is felt to be imminent, with signs
such as the emergence of the army of the ‘Turks’ as a sign of God’s wrath,
suggesting the Mongols, who were often conflated with Turks in the apocalyptic
literature. The text describes the battles between the dajjāl (Antichrist) and Jesus
at the end of time, followed by the reign of justice Jesus will initiate. Jesus’s reign
of justice is strikingly anti-Christian. ‘He will be a just judge, an imam dispensing
justice and will crush the cross, kill the pigs, impose the jizya . . . the earth will fill

76
Peacock, Great Seljuk Empire, 278.
77
Dimitris Kastritsis, The Sons of Bayezid: Empire Building and Representation in the Ottoman Civil
War of 1402–13 (Leiden, 2007), 217–18, 223.
78
Barbara Flemming, ‘Sâhib-kirân und Mahdi: Türkische Endzeiterwartungen im ersten Jahrzehnt
der Regierung Süleymâns’, in Győrgy Kara (ed.) Between the Danube and the Caucasus (Budapest,
1987), 43–62; Fleischer, ‘A Mediterranean Apocalypse’.
238 Literature and Religious Change

with Islam and the unbelievers will depose their king and there will be no king but
Islam.’ Interestingly, despite its apocalyptic tendencies, the text nowhere mentions
the Mahdi.
Early Turkish works of the period, presumably destined for a more popular
audience, also indicate some interest in apocalypticism, usually in the context of a
more general concern with eschatology (as discussed in Chapter 5). The Saatname
of the Sufi shaykh Hibetullah b. Ibrahim, a massively popular Turkish text
surviving in numerous manuscripts that may date to the fourteenth century,79
describes what the believer must do at each hour (saat) so as to ensure a place in
paradise at the final hour (saat) of judgement. Although Hibetullah’s work is thus
preoccupied with the kiyamet, Day of Judgement, it offers no indication of when
this will occur.80 More apocalyptic in tone is a poem dealing with the Day of
Judgement composed by a certain Şeyyad İsa, who was evidently associated with
the Mevlevis, for he invokes Sultan Walad, ‘Arif Çelebi and ‘Abid Çelebi.81 At the
start of his poem, the 344-line Ahval-i Kiyamet, Şeyyad İsa declares that:
Because in the end the world is impermanent, say your prayers and save your soul
from hell.
Listen to the story of the day of mustering (mahşer) when the time of final evil has
come
Let me tell you what day the day of Guidance (yevmu’l-huda) will be, it will be the
festival of the hajjis, O wise man!
On the Friday the signs (‘alamet) will become clear, listen to how the Day of
Judgement (kıyamet) will happen!82

Although Şeyyad İsa gives no precise indication of when the last hour is to be
expected, his audience is evidently intended to understand it will not be too far
off. An apocalyptic atmosphere is also reflected in the roughly contemporary
Çarhname by Ahmed Fakih:
Come to your senses, know the resurrection is near, when you will come face to face
with the Creator!. . .
The sky and earth will be destroyed, everything will be entirely ruined

79
For the date see Krstić, Contested Conversions, 35–7 with a description of this work.
80
See Hibetullah ibni İbrahim, Sā‘atnāme, ed. Ahmet Buran (Ankara, 2011), fol. 4a, and see kiyamet
in index. Although in places the text refers to the Day of Judgement as taking place yarın it seems
this means ‘in the future’ rather than ‘tomorrow’ as in modern Turkish.
81
Cem Dilçin, ‘XIII Yüzyıl Metinlerinden Yeni Bir Yapıt: Ahval-ı Kıyamet’, in Mustafa Canpolat
et al. (eds), Ömer Asım Aksoy Armağanı (Ankara, 1978), 49–75, for its dates see Chapter 4, p. 153.
Dilçin’s dating of the poem to the thirteenth century is not acceptable.
82
Ibid., p. 51, ll. 6–12.
 Apocalyptic Thought and the Political Elite 239

The day will come when the mountains will break from the earth, mountain and
countryside will become completely flat. . .
Everything created shall die, only the unique Merciful one will remain!83

One reason for the interest in apocalypticism shown by these Turkish works,
evidently aimed at a wider audience than the Arabic and Persian thirteenth-
century texts discussed above, may have been the Black Death, the swift spread
of which to the Middle East and Europe is often attributed to the Mongol
Empire. Şeyyad Hamza, best known to us as the author of a verse Yusuf u Züleyha,
also wrote an apocalyptic poem dated 749/1348 in which he refers to the plague.
The poem starts:
Muslims, it seems it is the end of time; will doomsday come, what will its sign be?
The signs have become clear one by one. Come let us repent, for it is the time. . .

One of these signs is the plague:

Today, the seventy two sects [of the Muslim community] are in pain and suffering. What
can be done about death, for it is divine decree? What can be done about the plague, for it
is ordained by the heavens? Some rend their clothes and lament for their son; some bewail
their brothers; some weep for their fathers; some are separated from their little daughters.84

The impact of the plague on Anatolia has only recently become the focus of
scholarly attention, but it is clear enough that from 1347 many Anatolian towns
were badly affected by it, including Trebizond, Karaman and Kayseri.85 It has
been argued that Christian areas, in particular Armenian Cilicia and
Constantinople itself, were especially badly affected, whereas nomadic areas such
as the Ottoman polity remained largely unaffected, leading to Byzantium’s
ultimate fall and the rise of the Ottomans.86 It has also recently been proposed
that the plague may have contributed to a decline in the production of luxury
manuscripts in Anatolia, as well as possibly the rise of Turkish literature,87 but as
yet the radical claims made for its impact remain unproven. If the impact of the
Black Death was so severe, one might expect to find rather more mention of it in
our substantial literary corpus from the period, but with the exception of Şeyyad

83
Ahmed Fakih, Çarhname, ed. Mecdet Mansuroǧlu (Istanbul, 1956), pp. 5–6, ll. 25, 29–30, 32.
84
Metin Akar, ‘Şeyyad Hamza Hakkında Yeni Bilgiler’, Türklük Araştırmalar Dergisi 2 (1986): 3.
85
Schamiloglu, ‘The Rise of the Ottoman Empire’; also Yaron Ayalon, Natural Disasters in the
Ottoman Empire: Plague, Famine and Other Misfortunes (Cambridge, 2015) 48–53, who is mainly
reliant on Schamiloglu for this period.
86
This argument, put forward by Schamiloglu, is followed by Ayalon with a handful of additional
references. However, the case is not yet compelling, largely owing to the lack of evidence.
87
For manuscript production and the plague see Jackson, ‘Patrons and Artists’, I, 208–10; for Turkish
literature see Chapter 4, p. 149.
240 Literature and Religious Change

Hamza’s poem it seems largely to have been ignored.88 Nonetheless, it may well
have contributed to the general atmosphere of apocalyptic expectation, and, if the
plague did affect Christian communities more severely than Muslim ones, this
may have provided an incentive for conversion.
The language and form of these fourteenth-century Turkish works suggests
they were intended for a popular, uneducated audience, although the apocalyptic
manuscript notes appended to Wajih al-Din al-Arzinjani’s works indicated that
members of the learned ‘ulama’ classes also retained an interest in the theme.
These works do not, however, go much beyond a conventional pious interest in
eschatology based on the Qur’an – that the Muslim must prepare himself for the
Final Hour, the time of which was unknown or even imminent, was and is an
entirely conventional Muslim belief. It is striking that, although discussed in the
Arabic notes to al-Arzinjani, the Turkish works are uniformly silent on the dramas
of the end of time, the battle between the dajjāl and the Mahdi. Indeed, the
Mahdi does not feature at all in these fourteenth-century Turkish works. It is not
until the fifteenth century that we find extensive discussions of the Mahdi and
dajjāl in Turkish, in the Dürr-i Meknun of Ahmed Bican (d. c. 870/1466).89
Bican’s account is explicitly based on the Arabic works on jafr of ‘Abd al-Rahman
Bistami, who himself drew on the thirteenth-century Ayyubid author Ibn Talha
and thus is derived from the elite intellectual tradition of apocalypticism. Some
scholars have argued that Ahmed Bican incorporated this material into this
Turkish encyclopaedia out of a sense of apocalypticism prompted by the political
and social disorders of the early fifteenth century and the conquest of
Constantinople in 1453, seen by some as an apocalyptic event.90 More recent

88
The evidence for the impact of the plague on the Middle East comes almost entirely from Mamluk
sources, especially chronicles. See further Ayalon, Natural Disasters, 21–30, with references. Ayalon,
however, argues that the plague was considered ‘just another natural occurrence’ in Muslim
societies, ‘an event people expected and were trained to deal with’ (ibid., 46). This may explain
the relative dearth of evidence from Muslim Anatolia. Apart from Şeyyad Hamza’s poem, I am
aware of two references to the plague in near-contemporary Anatolian sources: Turan, Tarihi
Takvimler, 70–1 citing the Eretnid taqwīm from Sivas of 772/1371–2 (MS Nuruosmaniye
2782), and Aşık Paşazade, Osmanoğulları Tarihi, 372 (chapter 37), mentioning the death of the
lord of Karasi from the plague. I am grateful to Dimitris Kastritsis for alerting me to this last
reference.
89
Discussed with an English translation of excerpts in Laban Kaptein, Apocalypse and the Antichrist in
Islam: Ahmed Bijan’s Eschatology Revisited (Leiden, 2011).
90
Stephane Yerasimos, Légendes d’empire: La foundation de Constantinople et de Sainte Sophie dans les
traditions turques (Paris 1990); see also the discussion in Irène Beldiceanu, ‘Péchés, calamités et salut
par le triomphe de l’Islam. Le discours apocalyptique rélatif à l’Anatolie (fin XIIIe–fin XVe siècle)’,
in Benjamin Lellouch and Stéphane Yerasimos (eds), Les traditions apocalyptiques au tournant de la
chute de Constantinople: actes de la Table ronde d’Istanbul, 13–14 avril 1996 (Istanbul and Paris,
2000), 19–34.
 Apocalyptic Thought and the Political Elite 241

research by Laban Kaptein has suggested that Bican was averse to speculating
about the end of times. Kaptein argues that the eschatological and apocalyptic
materials in his Dürr-i Meknun ‘are so general, timeless and interchangeable that
there is no basis for the view that an anxious Bican wrote this text in response to a
supposed decaying society in the first half of the 15th century’.91 The same could
be said of most of our Turkish texts from the fourteenth century. Judging by the
literary remains that have come down to us, while eschatology was of broad
interest, apocalypticism and the associated Antichrist and Mahdi were more a
concern of courtly and intellectual elites, influenced by the ideas of Ibn Barrajan
and Ibn ‘Arabi, than of popular religiosity.

MAHDISM AND REVOLT

To what extent did the elite tradition of apocalypticism outlined above translate
into practical political consequences? Laban Kaptein has rightly cautioned against
the tendency among some scholars of Islamic and Ottoman history to view
persons and events ‘through apocalypse-coloured spectacles’. In almost any era
of pre-modern Islamic history both revolt and apocalypticism can be observed,
but it is dangerous to assume a connection without sufficient evidence,92 even if
the examples of Ibn Tumart and Shah Ismail show that such a connection
certainly could exist, with momentous consequences. Only careful analysis will
allow us to trace the existence of any relationship between apocalypticism and
revolt. Yet the evidence for the three allegedly mahdist-inspired revolts that
occurred in or near Anatolia in our period has not yet been studied in sufficient
depth. Ocak, as we have seen, identified the 638/1240 Baba’i revolt as the first in
a series of mahdist and Shiite-influenced revolts that led ultimately to the Safavid
revolution, but it is not in fact directly associated with Mahdism by the sources.
Curiously, however, at no point in his voluminous works does Ocak discuss two
subsequent revolts that the sources do represent as having espoused Mahdism.
These are the Kurdish rebellion against the Mongols of 707/1307-8, and the
revolt of Timurtash in 722/1322–3. It is to the task of understanding these three
revolts that we now turn.
The 638/1240 Baba’i revolt broke out in Kafarsud, in south-eastern Anatolia,
shortly after Seljuq forces conquered the region from the Ayyubids in one of their
great successes in their long-term policy of expanding the sultanate towards Syria
and the Jazira. The importance of the revolt is reflected in the relatively numerous,

91
Kaptein, Antichrist and Apocalypse, 138.
92
Ibid., 46–57, esp. 46.
242 Literature and Religious Change

if all too brief, references in the sources of the late thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries. The Syriac chronicler Bar Hebraeus, the Persian chronicler of the Seljuq
dynasty Ibn Bibi and the Latin chronicler Simon de St Quentin all mention the
rebellion, and the most detailed account is given in the Turkish verse hagiography
composed in 758/1360 by one of the rebels’ descendants, Elvan Çelebi, the
Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye fi Menasibi’l-Ünsiyye.
Despite its attestation in numerous sources, these are confused even over the
question of the identity of the leader of the revolt. It seems that there was a leader
in south-eastern Anatolia named Baba Ishaq, who was a Turkmen; when the
revolt subsequently spread to the Amasya region, its leader became Baba Rasul,
whom Baba Ishaq seems to have recognised as his spiritual guide.93 This Baba
Rasul, as most of the thirteenth-century sources call him, was identical with the
Khurasani shaykh and immigrant to Anatolia Baba İlyas, who was Elvan Çelebi’s
great-grandfather.94 The details of the relationship between Baba İlyas/Baba Rasul
on the one hand and Baba Ishaq on the other, and of the revolt itself, are hard to
discern from the limited sources, and the motives of the rebels are equally opaque.
Simon de St Quentin depicts Baba Rasul’s aim as to become sultan himself, and
there are even some indications that this was how the revolt was perceived by the
Seljuq authorities, according to the Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye.95 However, Elvan Çel-
ebi portrays the revolt as a struggle between his saintly ancestor and the evil official
‘ulama’ of the Seljuq state, led by the Qadi Köre of Çat, near Amasya, who felt
threatened by Baba İlyas who had built his zāwiya in the vicinity. The qadi
therefore told lies to the sultan, claiming that Baba İlyas and his followers were
planning to revolt.96 Ghiyath al-Din’s inadequacies as sultan are seen as presaging
the demise of the dynasty at the hands of the Mongols, which Baba İlyas predicts:
They shall take the sultan’s name from the khutba, and read the name of the khan there
_
instead. A people will come and seize this kingdom, of the kingdom but a sign of evil will
be left to you. They will mount your horse and wear your robes, seize your kingdom and
exile you. . .97

Elvan Çelebi also alludes to the rumours that Sultan Ghiyath al-Din had come to
power by poisoning his father,98 the great Sultan ‘Ala’ al-Din, represented as a

93
Ibn Bibi, al-‘Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya (Ankara), 498–504; (Tehran), 440–3; Bar Hebraeus, Chronogra-
phy, 405. For a full discussion of the sources and details of the revolt see Ocak, La Révolte de Baba
Resul, 1–17, 58–72.
94
This identification was first made by Ocak, La Révolte de Baba Resul, 47–51.
95
Elvan Çelebi, Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye, ll. 486–9: the Seljuq sultan Ghiyath al-Din says of Baba Ilyas:
tahtuma tacuma nazar kılmış, ‘you have envied my throne and crown’.
96
Ibid., ll. 359–70, 477–84.
97
Ibid., l. 521–3.
98
Ibid., l. 356.
 Apocalyptic Thought and the Political Elite 243

pious sultan who provided Baba İlyas with the respect he was due, in contrast to
his son.99
In Elvan’s narrative, Ishaq is İlyas’s halife, and revolts immediately after the
confrontation between İlyas and the sultan were precipitated by the Qadi Köre’s
meddling. The revolt is thus seen as provoked by the evil qadi and by Ghiyath al-
Din’s loss of legitimacy. In reality it may also have been connected with the
destabilising presence of the Khwarazmian military, who had taken refuge in Rum
after the collapse of the short-lived empire of Sultan Jalal al-Din Khwarazmshah in
the face of the Mongol advance. The heartland of the revolt around Kafarsud had
been settled by leaders of the invading Khwarazmians, left leaderless after the
death of Jalal al-Din Khwarazmshah, and Baba Ishaq sent missionaries to the
Khwarazmians persuading them to join the rebellion.100 They would have needed
little encouragement: one of Sultan Ghiyath al-Din’s first acts on becoming sultan
had been to arrest their chiefs, fearing they would revolt. However, all but one
escaped,101 leaving a resentful and powerful military force on a sensitive frontier
region. It seems unlikely that without Khwarazmian support the revolt would
have caused such difficulties for the Seljuq state.
Even if the Khwarazmians’ role was motivated simply by a desire for revenge
against a political enemy, the revolt evidently also had a religious motive. What
exactly this was is harder to discern. Ocak states that ‘all the sources are unani-
mous on the fact that he [Baba Rasul] was proclaimed prophet (or Mahdi)’,102
and on the assumption that Mahdism is distinctively Shiite attributes to the revolt
both its Shiite character and its significance in the formation of Alevism.103 Yet
the term Mahdi is not applied directly to Baba İlyas (aka Baba Rasul) by any of the
primary sources. Ibn Bibi remarks that his followers claimed that ‘the Baba is the
messenger of God’ (bābā rasūl allāh).104 The clearest statement of Baba Rasul/
Baba İlyas’s claim comes from the contemporary Syrian chronicler Sibt b. al-
Jawzi, who writes:

99
Ibid., ll. 338–53.
100
Ibn Bibi, al-Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya (Ankara), 499; (Tehran), 441.
101
Ibn Bibi, al-Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya (Ankara), 485-7; (Tehran), 430–4; Bar Hebraeus, Chronography,
403; see the discussion in Sara Nur Yıldız, ‘The Rise and Fall of a Tyrant in Seljuk Anatolia: Sa‘d
al-Din Köpek’s Reign of Terror, 1237–8’, in Robert Hillenbrand, A. C. S. Peacock and Firuza
Abdullaeva (eds), Ferdowsi, the Mongols and the History of Iran. Art Literature and Culture from
Early Islam to Qajar Persia (London, 2013), 94–5, 97–8.
102
Ocak, La Révolte de Baba Resul, 74.
103
Ocak writes (La Révolte de Baba Resul, 75) that the Mahdi ‘est une idée qui convient, en Islam,
beaucoup mieux aux croyances shiites que sunnites’.
104
Ibn Bibi, al-Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya (Ankara), 502; (Tehran), 443.
244 Literature and Religious Change

There appeared in Anatolia a Turkmen man called Baba, who claimed prophecy
(nubuwwa) and used to say, ‘Say there is no God but God, Baba is the friend of God
(walī allāh)’. A great group of people joined him, and the ruler of Anatolia sent an army
against him. They met and 4000 of them were killed; they also killed the Baba.105

A different slant is given by Bar Hebraeus, who describes how ‘[Baba Rasul] called
himself “rasul” that is to say “One who is sent” (i.e. Apostle), for he said that he
was the Apostle of God in truth, and that Mahamad [Muhammad] was a liar, and
not the Apostle [of God]’.106 According to Bar Hebraeus, the rebels executed
anyone ‘who did not confess with his tongue that the Baba was a divine Apostle
and Prophet’. Elvan Çelebi himself never directly calls his ancestor a prophet,
although he comes close. He does use the term in describing how Baba İlyas’s arch
enemy, the Qadi Köre of Çat, composed a petition to the sultan describing how
There has come a man in this form, whom people call a prophet. Everyone prays in his
name, man and fairy, plain and mountain. Strife (fitna) has arisen, people have turned to
him. He has got control over us, he is making for you. His army is innumerable. . .107

Elvan also hints at Baba İlyas’s superior status:

Whether he is one of the resolute (ulu’l-‘azm, i.e. a prophet), a prophet (nebi) or a saint
(veli), know the reason for his coming and going.108

The term ulu’l-‘azm refers to the five (or in some versions six) great prophets who
brought divine law recognised by Islam: Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus and
Muhammad. Shiite tradition compares the Mahdi to these prophets,109 while for
Sunnis one of these ulu’l-‘azm prophets, Jesus, will serve as vizier to the Mahdi at
the end of time.110 The suggestion that Baba İlyas might have been an ulu’l-‘azm
prophet is certainly a bold one, and it is possible that apocalyptic significance was
attached to it, although this not directly evident from Elvan’s account.
There are a few other allusions in Elvan that might be perceived as apocalyptic.
Baba İlyas is repeatedly referred to as ‘the possessor of the grey horse’ (boz atlu). It is

105
Sibt b. al-Jawzi, Mir’at al-Zaman fi ta’rikh al-A ‘yan, ed. Kamil Salman al-Juburi (Beirut, 2013),
vol. 15, 116.
106
Bar Hebraeus, Chronography, I, 405.
107
Elvan Çelebi, Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye, l. 461–4:
Kim gelüpdür bu sūrete bir er/Kim ḫ alāyık dir aña peyg·āmber
S ̣alavāt adına virür_ enbūh/Ādemī vü perī çü deşt ü çü kūh
Fitne oldı bu ḫ alk· döndi aña/Bizi başardı k· asd k· ıldı saña
Leşkeri bī-hisāb-dur cengī. . . _
_ ll. 490ff.
See also ibid.,
108
Ibid., l. 320: ger ulu’l-‘azm ger nebī vü velī/Gelmegi gitmegi bilün sebebi.
109 _
Cook, Studies in Muslim Apocalyptic, 198–200.
110
Discussed in Elmore, Islamic Sainthood, 542.
 Apocalyptic Thought and the Political Elite 245

on this horse that Baba İlyas escapes from prison in Amasya, when ‘the promise of
God to us is fulfilled; we reach [him], farewell to you’.111 Various traditions
associated the Mahdi with a grey horse. Bar Hebraeus, writing in the thirteenth
century, recorded that the eighth-century Central Asian pseudo-Prophet Muqanna
believed he would return as a messiah, embodied as a ‘grizzled-haired man riding on
a grey horse’.112 However, the implications of the grey horse in our case are
extremely unclear, for Elvan claims that not only Baba İlyas, but also the latter’s
spiritual guide Dede Garkın and son Muhlis Paşa were boz atlu (possessing a grey
horse).113 Possession of the grey horse was also one of the attributes at Khidr,114 so
the motif may therefore in some way signify continuity of sanctity without
necessarily having apocalyptic implications, although this needs further research.
Even if Baba Rasul/Baba İlyas did not claim to be a Mahdi, it is not impossible
that some at the time and subsequently interpreted the revolt in an apocalyptic
framework as Elvan Çelebi may occasionally hint. The outbreak of the revolt in
south-eastern Anatolia, which is described as Syria (Şam) by Elvan Çelebi and its
leader as İshak-ı Şami, may have been seen by some to have had an apocalyptic
significance.115 Syria/al-Sham was traditionally closely associated with apocalypse,
the land in which some of its key events would unfold. These traditions were
emphasised in texts that circulated in Anatolia such as Ibn Barrajan’s Qur’an
commentary and the Risala fi Amr al-Mahdi. Moreover, such a rebellion might
even have been interpreted as a sign of the imminent apocalypse by those who did
not accept the claims of the Baba. The Risala fi Amr al-Mahdi attributed to al-
Qunawi stresses that one of the signs of the appearance of the Mahdi will be the
emergence of false claimants to this status; this idea derives from the hadith that
thirty dajjāls will appear before the last hour, each claiming to be a prophet.116
The Risala describes how shortly before the apocalypse a man will emerge in the
al-Zab region near Mosul, claiming to be a Mahdi and attracting the allegiance of
a great multitude of supporters. He is lying, but this lie is compared to a ‘false
dawn’.117 Other sources also attest the existence of false prophets and Mahdis, as
we can see in a text written in 629/1232 for al-Malik al-Mas‘ud Mawdud b. Salih

111
Elvan Çelebi, Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye, l. 665.
112
On Muqanna‘’s mahdist claims see Patricia Crone, The Nativist Prophets of Early Islamic Iran:
Rural Revolt and Local Zoroastrianism (Cambridge, 2012), 128–35.
113
Elvan Çelebi, Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye, l. 110, 809–10.
114
Kocaer, ‘The Notion of the Erenler’, 149; Mehmet Necmettin Bardakçı (ed.), Eğirdir Zeynî
Zâviyesi ve Şeyh Mehmed Çelebi Divanı (Hızırnâme) (Isparta-Eğirdir, 2008), 58, 169.
115
Elvan Çelebi, Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye, pp. 145, 146, 148, 150.
116
Wim Raven, ‘Ibn Sayyad as an Islamic “Antichrist”’, in Wofram Brandes and Felicitas Schmieder
(eds), Endzeiten: Eschatologie in den monotheistischen Weltreligionen (Berlin, 2008), 261–91, at 265.
117
Süleymaniye, MS Ayasofya 4849, fol. 172b.
246 Literature and Religious Change

Nasir al-Din, the Artuqid ruler of Amid and Hisn Kayfa – very close to the region
in which Baba Ishaq started his revolt. The book, al-Jawbari’s al-Mukhtar fi Kashf
al-Asrar wa Hatk al-Astar, deals generally with imposters, but its very first chapters
are devoted to false prophets.118 Most of these examples come from earlier Islamic
history, but in his second chapter, on false shaykhs, al-Jawbari mentions a recent
occurrence in the reign of the Ayyubid al-Malik al-‘Adil: in Damascus there had
appeared a man named ‘lost’ (al-mafqūd) ‘claiming to be a prophet and Jesus son
of Mary, who attracted a group of leading men of the town’.119 Given Jesus’s
association with the apocalypse in Islamic thought, this may well have constituted
a messianic or at least apocalyptic claim.
Thus we cannot totally dismiss the possibility that Baba Rasul/Baba İlyas’s
revolt may have been perceived by some as having an apocalyptic significance,
even by those who did not believe his claims, and even so they would fit into a
general pattern of apocalyptic activity in the region. However, it is striking that
none of our contemporary sources attributes a messianic claim to Baba Rasul/İlyas
or Baba Ishaq. Rather, as Sibt b. al-Jawzi, Ibn Bibi and Bar Hebraeus stress, Baba
Rasul/İlyas claimed to be either a walī, a friend of God, or a rasūl, or prophet, two
ideas which were closely linked.120 As we saw in Chapter 2, Sufis had a long-
standing tradition of claiming the saints (awliyā’) were not just the heirs of the
prophets, but that sainthood (being a walī) was tantamount to prophecy, or the
‘inner dimension and guarantor of prophecy’.121 Elvan’s studied ambiguity in
referring to his grandfather as ‘one of the resolute (ulu’l-‘azm), a prophet (nebi) or
a saint (veli)’, noted earlier, may reflect the idea that he was both simultaneously a
walī and a nabī, as does Sibt ibn al-Jawzi’s information that the Baba claimed
nubuwwa and was called walī allāh. It is possible, then, that Baba Rasul/İlyas’s
claim to prophethood was rather less radical at the time than it appears with
hindsight.
A few shreds of additional information are given by Ibn Bibi, who tells us that
the Baba won over the Turkmen by his expertise in sorcery,122 and that he gained
support from the people of Amasya by his life of piety and asceticism (tawarru‘wa
tazahhud) and his successful role in resolving their marital disputes.123 Given the

118
al-Jawbari, al-Mukhtar fi Kashf al-Asrar wa-Hatk al-Astar, ed. Mundhir al-Hayik (Damascus,
2014), pp. 41–52.
119
Ibid., 52–3.
120
It does not seem that by this point there is a significant difference in meaning between the two
Arabic words for Prophet, nabī and rasūl. See A. J. Wensick, ‘Rasūl’, EI2.
121
Karamustafa, God’s Unruly Friends, 47.
122
Ibn Bibi, al-Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya (Ankara), 499; (Tehran), 440: dar san‘at-i shu‘abda wa nayranjāt
chashm-bandī-yi chābuk wa girih-gushāyī nādir būd. _
123
Ibn Bibi, al-Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya (Ankara), 499–500; (Tehran), 441.
 Apocalyptic Thought and the Political Elite 247

implacable hostility of all these sources to the Baba, one would expect that if he
had claimed to be the Mahdi they would mention it. A conspiracy by three
independent sources in different languages to affirm the Baba’s claim to be a
prophet, but hide that of Mahdism, seems unlikely. Even if Baba Rasul/İlyas had
claimed to be the Mahdi, it does not follow that he was a Shiite. Rather, in the
context of the information we have about Mahdism in medieval Anatolia from the
texts, it would suggest he would be more likely to be a follower of Ibn ‘Arabi or his
school. Evidence for the revolt’s Sunni character is strengthened by Ibn Bibi, who
remarks that Baba Ishaq sought to persuade the Khwarazmians to participate by
claiming Sultan Ghiyath al-Din had departed from the path of orthodoxy by
drinking wine, ‘deviating from God’s path and following the Rashidun Caliphs’
(inhirāf-i ū az jādda-yi rabb-i ‘ālamīn wa iqtidā-yi khulafā-yi rāshidīn).124 It is
_
inconceivable that a Shiite revolt would have employed a slogan advocating
following the Rashidun Caliphs, who are recognised only by Sunnis.
There is one final piece of evidence adduced by Ocak that needs to be
addressed, as it is key to his argument. Ocak notes that Aflaki claim that Baba
Rasul had a special deputy (khalīfa-yi khās s), Hacı Bektaş.125 Later tradition
__
credits Hacı Bektaş with being the founder of Alevi/Bektashism, suggesting the
revolt’s Shiite connection. Yet we have no reliable contemporary or near-
contemporary detail as to what Hacı Bektaş actually believed; only passing
references such as that in Aflaki allow us to be reasonably confident of the
existence of such an individual in the thirteenth century. Although Aflaki criticises
Hacı Bektaş for his lack of adherence to sharia, it is far from clear that actually
implies Shiism, or can be taken at face value, given the competition between rival
Sufi groups reflected in the Manaqib al-‘Arifin. Moreover, Elvan Çelebi, writing at
around the same time as Aflaki, is none too keen on Hacı Bektaş despite the
latter’s supposed close relationship to Baba Rasul/İlyas. Elvan remarks on Hacı
Bektaş’s ignorance of the esoteric secrets (Hacı Bektaş sırrını bilmez).126 Hacı
Bektaş’s own relationship with Alevism is thus itself a considerable problem that
has scarcely been broached by scholarship.127
As discussed in Chapter 2, Baba İlyas’s legacy was perpetuated most directly by
his descendants the poets Aşık Paşa and Elvan Çelebi. In their works there is little
trace of Shiism, but rather a Sunni esoteric religiosity. The Baba’i revolt does not
therefore represent popular apocalypticism, Mahdism or Shiism. If anything, it
suggests the enduring appeal of a religiosity based on the power of prophecy and

124
Ibn Bibi, al-Awamir al-‘Ala’iyya (Ankara), 499–500; (Tehran), 441.
125
Aflaki, Manaqib, I, 381; Feats, 263–4.
126
Elvan Çelebi, Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye, l. 2003.
127
See also the remarks in Yıldırım, ‘Sunni Orthodox vs Shi‘ite Heterodox?’, 295–6.
248 Literature and Religious Change

the sunna of the Prophet and the first Caliphs. It was only in the Mongol period
that appeals to sunna and apocalypticism were harnessed to a political revolt of a
different character.

MAHDIST REVOLTS UNDER MONGOL RULE

Mongol rule witnessed a number of messianic revolts in territories as far apart as

Bukhara and Iraq, although it is hard to be sure whether their quantity and nature
represents much departure from the numerous messianic incidents that proliferated
in earlier and later periods.128 The Sufi author Mu’ayyid al-Din Jandi, a member of
al-Qunawi’s circle who spent much of his career in Anatolia, gives us an impression
of quite how widespread Mahdist claims were when recounting his stay in Baghdad:
A person entered the house and claimed he was the Mahdi, and asked me to bear witness to
the claim. I said, ‘Before God, I bear witness that you are not the Mahdi and you are a liar.’
He became hostile and aggressive with me, and gathered a group off heretics and Nusayris
and instructed them to harm me.129

In this instance the reference to Nusayris may suggest the interest of extremist
Shiites in messianism, but it was certainly not restricted to them. Our first
evidence in the period for a popular mahdist revolt in our region comes from
the Ilkhanid chronicler Qashani who records how in the year 707/130–8:
One of the events of this year was the appearance of an individual named Musa who emerged
from the mountain of Kurdistan, and asserted a claim to be the Mahdi. Thirty thousand men
of the misguided Kurdish soldiery joined with him, and from an excess of ignorance and
misguidedness swiftly accepted his meaningless claim, so that during the year 707[/1307–8]
his mission appeared and spread among the people and the fame of his claim reached far and
near, Turk and Persian. When a group of Mongol amirs who were living in that district heard
of this outbreak of strife (fitna) and corruption, they mobilised to fend off his evil.130

Qashani goes on to describe how the Mongol army succeeded in suppressing the
revolt, executing Musa and sending his head to the ordu. Qashani’s account ends
with exactly the same verses quoted in the Matali‘ al-Iman:
If you want enemies, Mahdi
Come down from the sky
If you want helpers, antichrist,
Show yourself at once!

128
See Jackson, The Mongols and the Islamic World, 322–3.
129
Jami, Nafahat al-Uns min Hadrat al-Quds, ed. Mahmud ‘Abidi (Tehran, 1390), 557.
130
Qashani, Tarikh-i Uljaytu, ed. Mahin Haambly (Tehran, 1384), 76.
 Apocalyptic Thought and the Political Elite 249

So little information survives about this revolt that its interpretation is extremely
difficult. It cannot even be said for sure that Musa was a Muslim, or where exactly
his revolt originated. It is possible that he was a member of a sect such as the
Yazidis who inhabited the Kurdistan mountains. Moreover, it is possible that
Qashani’s narrative of a false messiah from the provinces should be read in the
context of the increasing interest in Mahdism at the Ilkhanid court where Qashani
was writing in the wake of Ghazan’s conversion.131 The verses shared with the
Matali ‘may be intended to suggest that in an age of false Mahdis such as this, a
true one – the Ilkhan – is required to crush them.
The second and most dramatic of these mahdist revolts in the period was that
of Timurtash, the Ilkhanid governor of Anatolia in the reign of Abu Sa‘id, as the
Ilkhanid historian Hafiz-i Abru relates:
In the year 722[/1322], the amir Timurtash son of amir Chopan rebelled in the kingdom
of Rum. He had the khutba and the sikka done in his own name, and called himself the
Mahdi of the end of time (Mahdī-yi ākhir-i zamān).132

The Anatolian historian Aqsara’i, whose Musamarat al-Akhbar was dedicated to

Timurtash, confirms this. In the opening dedication of his work he gives Timur-
tash the title (among others) of mahdī-yi zamān.133 Later, in his discussion of
Timurtash’s rule, he also alludes to his claim, writing that:
he strengthened Islam and the protection of Muslims so much that as a result of his charity,
his prevention of injustice and hostility, his suppression of aggressors and rebels, the deeds
and conditions of the Mahdi appeared.134

One of the signs of the appearance of the Mahdi was his banning of alcohol,
which Timurtash undertook with alacrity, Aqsara’i tells us, forbidding not just
Muslims but also non-Muslims from its consumption.135
Timurtash’s rebellion against Ilkhanid authority and his self-proclamation as
Mahdi were doubtless bound up with practical political concerns. Timurtash
fought ferociously against the various Turkmen beyliks to consolidate his control
over Anatolia, in particular battling the Karamanids, Eshrefids and the Hamido-
ğulları. At the same time, his quest for unfettered power led him to negotiate with
the Ilkhans’ arch-enemies the Mamluks.136 His embrace of the title of Mahdi may

131
Brack, ‘Mediating Sacred Kingship’, 276–8.
132
Hafiz-i Abru, Dhayl-i Jami‘-i Tawarikh, ed. Khanbaba Bayani (Tehran, 1350), 160.
133
Aqsara’i, Musamarat al-Akhbar, 4.
134
Ibid., 325.
135
Ibid., 326.
136
On Timurtash’s career and rebellion see Melville, ‘Anatolia under the Mongols’, 90–2; İ. Hakkı
Uzunçarşılı, ‘Emir Çoban Soldoz ve Demirtaş’, Belleten 31 (124) (1967): 601–46.
250 Literature and Religious Change

have seemed a useful way of asserting authority and legitimacy. While the
Turkmen begs emphasised their connections to the Seljuq house or their appoint-
ment by the Mamluks to support their claims to rule,137 Timurtash had no such
expedient, and he lacked a lineage to allow him to assert legitimacy as a Chinggisid
ruler, despite Aqsara’i giving him the title of shahriyār (king).138 Mahdiship thus
offered an alternative vocabulary of legitimate kingship. Such claims, however,
had to backed up by actions, and Timurtash sought to assert his mahdiship
through the rigorous implementation of the sharia. Not only was alcohol banned,
but according to Aqsara’i the sumptuary laws restricting Christians’ dress were
also imposed on the ‘Jews and Christians who had previously been accustomed to
dressing in the clothes of Muslims’.139 Indeed, Aqsara’i implicitly compares
Timurtash favourably to the Seljuq Sultan ‘Izz al-Din Kayka’us I, quoting Ibn
‘Arabi’s letter to the latter criticising him for failing to impose the shurūt ‘Umar,
_
the restrictions on non-Muslims attributed to the Caliph ‘Umar.140 It is on this
note, with a substantial quotation from Ibn ‘Arabi’s letter demanding the restric-
tion of Christian practices, that the Musamarat al-Akhbar ends.141 That these
were not purely rhetorical claims is confirmed by an Armenian source, the
account of the martyrdom of St Gregory Karninci, Bishop of Erzurum, which
documents Timurtash’s assaults on Christians across the region – his attack on
Armenian Cilicia, his burning down of churches in Edjmiadzin and Kayseri,
culminating in the forced conversion and circumcision of the bishop of Erzu-
rum.142 Colophons of Armenian manuscripts from the period confirm this
picture of persecution, as do decrees of the Orthodox Patriarchate.143
It seems that Timurtash’s strategy succeeded in ingratiating himself with the
elites of Anatolia. Aflaki recounts how Timurtash asserted his mahdiship in 723/
1322–3 in the wake of his capture of Konya from the Karamanids:
He proclaimed, ‘I am the Lord of the Conjunction, indeed I am the Mahdi of the age [man
sāhib qirān-am, balkih Mahdī-yi zamānam].’ As he had no equal in the amount of money
_ _
he spent, and was a second Anushirwan in justice, he was a truly pious and pure-hearted
youth, all the leading ulama, elders, amirs, notables and army chiefs of Rum, and others,
gave him their allegiance and were obedient to him. They formed an alliance with him, and

137
See Chapter 1 pp. 59–61.
138
Aqsara’i, Musamarat al-Akhbar, 4.
139
Ibid., 327.
140
On this letter see Giuseppe Scattolini, ‘Sufism and Law in Islam: A Text of Ibn ‘Arabi (560/
1165–638/1240) on the “Protected People”’, Islamochristiana 24 (1998): 37–55.
141
Aqsara’i, Musamarat al-Akhbar, 327–8.
142
Hayoc’ norvkanere [New Armenian Martyrs] (1155–1843), ed. Y. Manandean and H. Ačarean
(Ejmiacin, 1903), 121–8, cited in Brack, ‘Mediating Sacred Kingship’, 290–1.
143
Brack, ‘Mediating Sacred Kingship’, 292.
 Apocalyptic Thought and the Political Elite 251

a group of the leading men of the age, like our lord Najm al-Din Tashti, shaykhzada-yi
Tuqati, the late Zahir al-Din khatīb of Kayseri, shaykh Nasir-i Sufi, our lord Amir Hasan-i
_
tabib, the qadi Shihab of Niğde, the chief military qadi [qād ī-lashkar] Vighani, and the
_
preacher [wā‘iz] Husam-i Yarjanlaghi, and the other qadis and ulama from every town
_
followed him and approved of him, and exaggerating in praising him in order for him to
achieve his objectives. They got others to pledge their allegiance to him.144

Far from appealing to the marginalised of society, Timurtash’s mahdist claims

were evidently designed to assert his legitimacy among the elite of Ilkhanid
Anatolia. Most of the figures named by Aflaki cannot be identified beyond the
references in his text, but Najm al-Din Tashti is known to have been chief qadi of
Rum (qadi-yi qudat-i Rum), an associate of Qutb al-Din Shirazi and a man who
enjoyed such close links to the Ilkhanid court that he was employed by them as an
envoy to the Chagatayid rebel Yasawur.145 Evidently the others were senior
members of the religious classes.
Both the literary and the historical evidence thus indicates that apocalypticism
was overwhelmingly the concern of the Sunni intellectual and courtly elite. It
resonated with those steeped in the influential philosophy of Ibn ‘Arabi, which
drew on a tradition of Maghrebi apocalypticism, as well as Sufi authors such as
Najm al-Din Razi who wrote for courtly audiences. In Nasiri’s Mu’nis al-‘Awarif
we have seen how the Seljuq sultan’s claims to be the Mahdi could justify the
political impotence of the sultanate under Mongol hegemony, while Mahdism
also served as a tool for the Mongol court as the Ilkhan Ghazan sought to establish
a new basis for the legitimacy of his dynasty. This is not to say that apocalypticism
and Mahdism were purely a political tool. The Risala fi Amr al-Mahdi suggests
that some believed that the apocalypse was imminent, or even had already started.
What is doubtful is the extent to which apocalyptic beliefs were widespread. With
the exception of the rebellion of the Kurdish chief Musa in 707/1307, about
which we know too little to comment further, apocalypticism and Mahdism do
not seem to have formed a major concern of popular religiosity, in so far as we can
judge from the extant Turkish texts, which exhibit a pious interest in eschatology
but little sense that the Turkish-speaking masses were credulously waiting for a
Mahdi. In the long term, though, this elite apocalypticism may have had a broader
social impact by the actions of Timurtash in attempting to create the Mahdi’s
perfect Muslim society on earth by persecuting Christians.

144
Aflaki, Manaqib, II, 977; trans. O’Kane, Feats, 684–5.
145
Brack, ‘Mediating Sacred Kingship’, 287–8.
 Conclusion

The Mongol invasions coincided with a process of Islamisation that had been
gathering speed in Anatolia since the second half of the twelfth century. This was
accelerated both directly, if not necessarily always intentionally, by Mongol
policies and indirectly by the changes Mongol rule wrought on Muslim society.
Mongol rule redrew the political landscape of Anatolia, with the collapse of Seljuq
authority leading to the emergence of new powers such as the beyliks. From the
1270s, Anatolia became increasingly integrated into the Ilkhanid empire, both
through the Mongol military presence there but also the residence of scholars,
bureaucrats and even relatively humble artisans such as members of futuwwa
organisations from Iran. The marginalisation and eventual abolition of the trad-
itional source of political authority in Anatolia, the Seljuq sultanate, in addition to
the broader crisis of authority brought about by the end of the Abbasid Caliphate,
forced Anatolia’s new rulers, both Turkmen and Mongol, to seek alternative
means to justify their rule. A political rhetoric centred on belief and unbelief took
hold, and with the Mongol conversion to Islam its use only increased. Incidents of
persecution of non-Muslims, although not systematic, begin to be attested in the
sources as the Mongols sought to assert their adherence to the new faith and
justify their rule in Islamic terms.
Sufism offered a further means of resolving the crisis of legitimacy, in particular
through the theories of sainthood propagated by Ibn ‘Arabi on the eve of the
Mongol invasions, which formed the basis for the concepts popularised in
Anatolia through the works of Najm al-Din Razi, Jalal al-Din Rumi and Sultan
Walad. The awliyā’ offered rulers not merely spiritual benefits through their
prayers (du‘ā-yi dawlat), but also potentially a place in the new spiritual hierarchy.
Sultan Walad legitimised even harsh rule not simply by explaining it as divine
will, but by identifying the ruler himself as a potential qutb, the pinnacle of the
_

252
 Conclusion 253

hierarchy of beings endowed with knowledge of God. Sufism, especially the

Mevlevi order, became increasingly associated with members of the political elite,
who patronised lavish manuscripts of Sufi works as well as Sufi lodges.
Developments in the Mongol period laid the ground for the emergence in the
early modern period of forms of Muslim sacral kingship. The Iksir al-Sa‘adat, a
text composed the end of the fourteenth century by the qadi-sultan of Sivas, Qadi
Burhan al-Din Ahmad, who had overthrown the Mongols’ Eretnid governors and
seized power for himself, sought to promote an image of the sultan as a perfect
man (i.e. a qutb) and a holy warrior in a jihad that aimed to utterly ruin
_
Christians.1 Such concepts of the identification of the qutb with the ruler were
_
to have a long trajectory. Timur’s soldiers are said to have considered him as the
qutb,2 suggesting the popular penetration of the idea, which survived into the
_
high Ottoman period. In the sixteenth century, Mevlana İsa, a poet-historian at
the court of the Ottoman Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent, identified the sultan,
endowed with saintliness (velayet) as not just qutb, but also mujaddid and Mahdi,
_
the renewer of the age and the saviour.3 The popularisation of this idea was no
doubt one result of the successful spread and proselytisation of Mevlevism, and it
is a striking testimony to the Mevlevis’ influence in later times and outside
Anatolia that Ibn Bazzaz, the hagiographer of Shaykh Safi (d. 735/1334), founder
of the Safavid line, starts his account by claiming that the emergence of Shaykh
Safi had been foretold and ordained by none other than Jalal al-Din Rumi.4
In these ways, the Anatolian awliyā’ continued to exert a political influence
long after their deaths. It is, however, significant that such ideas of sacral kingship
exercised such an appeal beyond the great imperial centres such as Ilkhanid
Tabriz, to provincials such as the Mevlevi Mongol amir Sati Beg and copyists
such as ‘Ali b. Dustkhuda, of whose careers we know little. Beyond justifying
imperial rule, these theories of sacral kingship evidently helped members of lower
social echelons make sense of the post-Abbasid order and their place in it. At the
same time, the revolution in Islamic political thought that the Mongols precipi-
tated was also of profound relevance to the local lords of Anatolia who needed to
find a new idiom of rulership, one based to some degree on their relationship with
the holy men that Ilkhans and Turkmen begs alike patronised.
Political power and Sufism also conjoined in the most widespread popular
articulation of Sufism, futuwwa, which in Mongol Anatolia developed in a

1
See Peacock, ‘Rulership and Metaphysics’.
2
Moin, The Millennial Sovereign, 34.
3
See Fleischer, ‘A Mediterranean Apocalypse’, 65.
4
Ibn Bazzaz, Safwat al-Safa dar Tarjuma-yi Ahwal wa Aqwal wa Karamat-i Shaykh Safi al-Din Ishaq
Ardabili, ed. Ghulamrida Tabataba’i Majd (Tehran, 1376), 62–4.
254 Literature and Religious Change

distinctive form. Futuwwa encompassed both the theoretical embrace of Sufi

ideals and the practice of violence. The latter aspect endowed the fityān with a
considerable political importance, and futuwwa formed a crucial part of the
Ilkhanid strategy for controlling Anatolia, with akhīs effectively delegated respon-
sibility for governing towns that lacked a Mongol garrison. Thus while the
weakening of earlier structures of authority certainly created the space in which
the fityān could emerge as a force, the growth of politically active futuwwa seems
to have been if anything a development encouraged by the Mongols and their
local allies such as Karatay rather than the wholly autonomous, ethnically
Turkish, anti-Mongol force envisaged by much scholarship to date.
Together both the saintly and futuwwa manifestations of Sufism contributed
to an environment that was increasingly conducive to conversion, even if exact
details of the processes are hazy. The association of both articulations of Sufism –
despite their theoretical (and sometimes practical) insistence on the virtues of
poverty – with political and even financial success was doubtless a major attrac-
tion. This is suggested particularly by the appeal of futuwwa to non-Muslim
communities, which becomes evident in the Mongol period. These developments
also affected Turkmen-ruled areas too. The nexus between the ruling elites, fityān,
Sufi piety and conversion on the Turkmen periphery is suggested by Ibn Battuta’s
account of his sojourn in Bursa, which had just been incorporated into the
Ottoman realm in 1326, a few years before the Moroccan’s visit:
There is a zāwiya to accommodate travellers who are given food for the length of their stay,
which is three days, which was built by one of the Turkmen kings [i.e. the Ottoman ruler
Orhan]. We stayed in the zāwiya of the fityān leader Akhi Shams al-Din, and our stay
coincided with ‘Ashura’.5 [Akhi Shams al-Din] made a great feast to which he invited the
leading soldiers (wujūh al-‘askar) and the people of the city that night, and they broke their
fast with him. The Qur’an reciters recited with fine voices, and the faqīh Majd al-Din al-
Qunawi, who was a preacher (wā‘iz), was also present. He preached and admonished very
_
well, and then everyone started the samā‘ and dance. Marvellous was that night. The preacher
[Majd al-Din] was one of the righteous, he continually fasted and only ate every three days.
[When he did so], he ate only what he himself obtained by the toil of his hand and did not
eat anyone else’s food. He had no dwelling place or possessions except the clothes that
covered him, and he slept only in cemeteries. He preached in assembles (majālis) and
admonished, and numerous people repented (yatūbu) before him in every assembly.6

Ibn Battuta shows how the infrastructure for Majd al-Din’s preaching, the zāwiya,
is provided by the ruler, and his audience comprises in part the military elite.

5
Although today the celebration of ‘Ashura’, 10 Muharram, is sometimes associated with Shiism, in the
medieval period it was widely commemorated in Sunni circles too. See A. J. Wensick, ‘Āshurā’, EI2.
6
Ibn Battuta, Rihla, 307; trans. Gibb, 450.
 Conclusion 255

Majd al-Din is evidently a muwallah or Qalandar Sufi, shunning society to reside

in the cemeteries, but he is at the same time described as a faqīh, a specialist in
religious law. Ibn Battuta thus underlines how the two categories of ‘ālim and Sufi
could overlap and complement one another, even if there could also be tensions
between them, as suggested by Elvan Çelebi’s account of the struggle between
Baba İlyas and Qadi Köre.
The repentance (tawba) which Majd al-Din inspired could refer to Muslims’
inner turning from their sins, and their embrace of Sufism; but in the environ-
ment of Bursa, presumably still overwhelmingly Christian some six years after the
conquest, it might also suggest the repentance of unbelievers from unbelief and
their embrace of Islam.7 Quantifying this process of conversion remains challen-
ging in the face of the body of evidence largely comprising such indirect hints.
When exactly Anatolia became majority Muslim is unknown. Although some
estimates suggest that by the sixteenth century Anatolia was some 90–5 per cent
Muslim, these rely on a rather more optimistic view of the reliability of figures
provided by Ottoman archival documents than is fashionable today. The evidence
adduced by scholars of Byzantium strongly points to the late thirteenth to
fourteenth centuries as a turning point, the date by which the Orthodox Church
in Anatolia had gone into decline, coinciding with the period of Mongol rule.8
This point corresponds to a new interest on the part of rulers in Muslim Anatolia
in propagating Islam through sponsoring an infrastructure of zāwiyas and patron-
ising Sufis such as Majd al-Din. The immediate effect of these policies was not
mass conversions, as far as we can tell, but rather the creation of an atmosphere in
which it was simply more uncomfortable not to be Muslim, an atmosphere where
a rhetoric centred on unbelief was propagated not just by rulers and Sufis but by
popular preachers and storytellers, many of whom were themselves also Sufis. The
insistence in futuwwa manuals on excluding Christians from their buildings must
have also contributed to this unwelcoming environment to non-Muslims, creating
a further incentive to conversion. If Mongol rule did accelerate the process of
Islamisation – both in terms of the absolute number of converts and Muslims and
the increasing cultural dominance of Islam – this was probably not the conse-
quence of a deliberate policy, the persecutions of Ghazan and Timurtash aside, or

7
For a discussion of the concept of tawba see Ida Zilio-Grande, ‘Return, Repentance, Amendment,
Reform, Reconversion. A Contribution to the Study of tawba in the Context of Islamic Ethics’,
Islamochristiana 39 (2013): 71–91; for tawba and conversion see especially Atif Khalil, ‘A Note on
Interior Conversion in Early Sufism and Ibrahim b. Adham’s Entry into the Way’, Journal of Sufi
Studies 5 (2016): 189–98.
8
See the discussion in Peacock, ‘Islamisation in Medieval Anatolia’, and for scholarship on the decline
of Christianity see the Introduction, p. 3.
256 Literature and Religious Change

even the work of individual proselytisers, but rather the combination of factors
that created this new atmosphere.
A crucial tool for the propagation of Islam was the new literary language that
emerged in our period. It is clear that the development of Old Anatolian Turkish
was indebted to models pioneered in the Golden Horde that underwent a parallel
if distinct process of Islamisation in the same period. Much further work is
necessary to understand the circulation of scholars and texts between the Horde,
Anatolia and Egypt, the three main regions where Turkish developed as a literary
language over the thirteenth to fourteenth centuries. At least in the Anatolian case,
it seems that the new literature in Turkish emerged partly through the aim of Sufis
to assert their own status as unique intermediaries with the divine through
multilingual communication. In addition, a courtly literature of much more
limited circulation came into existence in principalities such as those of the
Aydınids and the Germiyanids, where it seems to have served to support those
nascent dynasties’ credentials as patrons of Islamic scholarship and civilisation.
Nonetheless, in all cases the emergence of the new literary language of Turkish
again seems to reflect the breakdown of traditional models of authority: it is far
from coincidental that its initial centres in Anatolia are previously marginal areas
such as Kırşehir on the semi-steppe and the Turkmen periphery.
Whatever the reasons for vernacularisation, by the early fourteenth century
popular texts such as the Siraj al-Qulub and the Behcetü’l-Hadayik circulated
widely in both Persian and Turkish, in contrast to the court-centred literature
of Seljuq times, which is attested in few manuscripts. These writings offer a
window into the possible preachings of men such as Majd al-Din. Heterodoxy
or syncretism are hardly reflected in the vernacular literature of Mongol Anatolia,
which rather emphasises the common core of belief to which Muslims were
expected to adhere, in particular through its emphasis on eschatology. This
literature consistently returns to themes of belief and unbelief, which sometimes
becomes increasingly defined in sectarian terms as texts identify true believers as
Sunnis rather than simply Muslims. If the texts studied here do not show a
detailed knowledge of the works of Sunni theologians, that is perhaps as much a
function of their genre and their purpose as the intellectual level of their authors.
As in the case of the Konya Siraj al-Qulub text, there are indications this literature
was not composed in isolation from learned exegetical and textual traditions.
Indeed, the wide circulation of works such as Ibn Barrajan’s tafsīrs is testimony
to the fact that thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Anatolians had access to
learned Islamic texts from distant parts of the Islamic world, and doubtless future
work on the largely unexplored mass of medieval Anatolian manuscripts can
further elucidate this picture. Even from the inevitably limited corpus of material
examined in this book, it should be clear that Anatolians read a wide range of
 Conclusion 257

literature in Arabic and Persian. Standard legal texts such as those by al-Sadr al-
Shahid circulated, and indeed even before the coming of the Mongols there were
convenient local legal manuals such as al-Sijistani’s Munyat al-Mufti. There were
commentaries on classical Arabic works by authors such as Muhsin al-Qaysari
designed to improve Anatolian Muslims’ knowledge of Arabic, and locally pro-
duced works on hadith such as al-Arzinjani’s commentary on al-Saghani, which
was evidently also known in the Golden Horde. More literary works such as
histories by Ibn al-Athir and Ibn al-Jawzi and the poems of Ibn Farid were read
and copied in madrasas, khānqāhs and at court. Patrons such as Sati Beg and
Fakhr al-Din ‘Ali were prepared to invest large sums in lavishly illuminated
manuscripts, while the upstart Turkmen rulers also commissioned Turkish ver-
sions of Arabic and Persian classics to show their participation in Islamic culture.
Far from being an isolated Wild West, Anatolia was integrated into literary and
intellectual networks that stretched both east and west from Central Asia to Spain.
If the ‘ulama’ have featured rather rarely per se in our account, that was not
because they were absent, as some scholarship has assumed,9 but rather because
they are often identified first and foremost under other categories in the sources
such as Sufis or even fityān, as with Majd al-Din.10 However, their existence
cannot be doubted, given the evidence of much textual production that was
evidently designed to meet their needs and interests.
In many ways, then, Anatolia was not so very different from surrounding
Muslim societies in the Mongol period, at least in terms of its intellectual life. To
be sure it had certain peculiarities, such as a larger Christian population and
apparently an absence of patrons interested in listening to panegyrics. Yet it
evidently provided an environment where migrant scholars could make a career,
such as the Khwaramian we encountered in Ayasuluk, and locals such as Hacı
Paşa could return from studies in Cairo confident of a warm reception at court.
One element of this common Islamic tradition was the espousal of philo-‘Alidism
or tashayyu‘ hasan, which was quite separate from Shiism and was shared by many
_
Sunnis of the period, as is shown by the enthusiasm for epics relating to ‘Ali, such
as those composed by Beypazarılı Maazoğlu and indeed the celebration of ‘Ashura’
in Bursa noted in Ibn Battuta’s account mentioned earlier. Yet although some
hints do exist of the presence of Shiite beliefs in futuwwa and Sufi circles, the main
form in which Shiism is generally thought to have been manifested in this period,
messianism, can be seen on closer examination to be a reflection more of Sunni
apocalypticism, influenced in Anatolia by Maghrebi models in particular. With

9
See the discussion in the Introduction, pp. 25–6.
10
See Chapter 3, e.g. the examples of the fityān-‘ulama’ Muhammad al-Sarwi and Ibn Qalamshah on
p. 138.
258 Literature and Religious Change

Ghazan’s conversion, ideas of the ruler as Mahdi, ever present in the Muslim
polity, and already current at the Seljuq court in Anatolia, became influential in
the Ilkhanate. The power of such claims is suggested by the ability of Timurtash,
the Mongol governor of Anatolia, to mobilise support around his claim to be the
messiah, which evidently met with enthusiastic acceptance on the part of
members of the religious elite as well as bureaucrats such as Aqsara’i. These
messianic claims were further accompanied by acts of persecution of non-Muslims
in keeping with the Mahdi’s task of installing perfect Islamic rule before the end
of days.
A good illustration of the piety–minded Islamic environment that prevailed
not just in the Mongol centre, but also at Turkmen courts on the periphery, is
provided by Ibn Battuta’s account of the Turkmen ruler of Eğirdir:
The sultan of Eğirdir, Abu Ishaq Beg b. Dündar Beg, is one of the great sultans of that land
[Anatolia]. He dwelt in the land of Egypt in the time of his father and undertook the hajj.
He has a praiseworthy lifestyle, and one of his customs is to come every day to afternoon
prayer (salāt al-‘asr) in the congregational mosque. When prayer is over, he leans against the
_ _
qibla-facing wall, with one of the Qur’an readers before him seated on a high wooden
bench. They read suras al-Fath and al-Mulk, and their fine voices have such an effect on the
soul that people’s hearts are afraid and they shudder and weep. Then [the sultan] departs to
his palace. We spent the month of Ramadan with him, and every night he sat on a carpet
that was fixed directly to the floor, without a throne, and rested against a great cushion
while the faqīh Muslih al-Din sat to one side and I sat next to the faqīh, the courtiers and
palace amirs behind us. Food was served, and the first dish that was taken to break the fast
was soup in a small bowl, on which were lentils in fat and sugar. The soup was presented as
a form of blessing, for they said, ‘The Prophet, peace and blessings be upon him, preferred
it to all other food, so we begin with it because of the Prophet’s preference for it.’ Only after
that is the rest of the food brought. That is their custom in the month of Ramadan.11

A hajji, brought up in Egypt, who recites the Qur’an and consciously emulates the
behaviour of the Prophet Muhammad, Abu Ishaq Beg is a ruler who represents
perhaps the antithesis of the ‘state that was [not] interested in rigorously defining
and strictly enforcing an orthodoxy’ that Kafadar has identified as characteristic of
medieval Anatolia.12 We should perhaps drop the problematic term orthodoxy,
but across Anatolia rulers, Turkmen and Mongol alike, were certainly concerned
with promoting a piety- and sharia-minded Muslim religiosity, as were Sufis. Of
course, there were no doubt other forms of piety: the intense interest in magic
evinced by Nasiri Sijistani, who dedicated his majmū‘a of works on the topic to
the by now marginalised and politically irrelevant court of the child-sultan

11
Ibn Battuta, Rihla, 288; trans. Gibb, 423.
12
Cf. Introduction, p. 21; Kafadar, Between Two Worlds, 76.
 Conclusion 259

Ghiyath al-Din Kaykhusraw III,13 reminds us that the Mongol period also
produced losers who sought alternative means of calling on divine support. The
alienated doubtless provided a ready constituency for the self-proclaimed prophets
and messiahs who frequently emerged, ranging from the obscure who are recorded
only in passing references in chronicles to Baba İlyas, who was remembered by his
descendants for his role in bringing down the Seljuq state. Yet the texts examined
here suggest that it was the Sunni pietism of men such as Timurtash and Abu
Ishaq, even if framed sometimes in messianic terms, that became the dominant
religious discourse by the early fourteenth century. Even according to their
enemies, the Baba’is framed their revolt as a call for a return to the ways of the
Rashidun Caliphs, recognised by Sunnis but rejected by Shiites. The Ottomans,
then, did not suddenly discover or invent Sunnitisation in the sixteenth century in
response to their new imperial destiny, as sometimes argued,14 but rather it was
the dominant feature of the religious landscape in which the Ottomans themselves
emerged.
Yet to assess the significance of the Mongol period in Anatolia only through
the lens of its implications for Ottoman history would be misleading. Not only
did Anatolia become more integrated into the broader Islamic world, as attested
by the circulation of texts and scholars from places as diverse as Khwarazm and the
Maghreb, and rulers such as Abu Ishaq Beg performing the hajj, but its scholars
and litterateurs started to exert a broader influence beyond the confines of the
peninsula. While some of the texts considered here had a limited, probably purely
local, circulation in Anatolia, others became international bestsellers across the
Islamic world. Most famous in this respect were the works of Rumi, and Mevlevi
texts were by the fourteenth century being exported to regions such as the Golden
Horde lands and even distant India. Future research must paint a more detailed
picture of these exchanges and their influence, but the general pattern is clear.
Anatolia, then, should not be considered the passive recipient of external influ-
ences, but from the Mongol period onwards, through exports such as its religious
traditions and the Turkish language, it started to play its own role in shaping the
broader intellectual culture of the Islamic world.

13
Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS persan 174, discussed pp. 235–7.
14
Yıldırım, ‘Sunni Orthodox vs Shi‘ite Heterodox?’, esp. 305–7; see the discussion, with references, in
Terzioğlu, ‘How to Conceptualize Ottoman Sunnitization’, 311–18.
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 Index

Abaqa, 45–7, 65 Aladağ, 48

Abbasids, 4, 9, 59, 91, 120, 131, 222, 252–3 al-Akhawayn al-Bukhari, 33
Abiwardi, 176 ‘Ala’ al-Din ‘Ali, 52, 62
‘Abd al-Latif al-Baghdadi, 35 ‘Ala’ al-Din Kayqubad I, 35, 48, 224
‘Abd al-Mu’min al-Khu’i, 195 ‘Ala’ al-Din Kayqubad III, 49, 90
‘Abd al-Rahman b. ‘Amr b. Ahmad al-Karaji ‘Ala’iyya (Alanya), 37
al-Qazwini, 72 Alaşehir, 35, 72, See Philadelphia
‘Abd al-Razzaq al-San‘ani, 206 Alexander the Great, 74
‘Abdallah b. Salam, 192, 195–6, 199, 201 ‘Ali b. Abi Talib, 1, 24, 85, 119, 132, 144, 153,
Abu Bakr Rumi, 79, 81–2, 106, 121, 123, 125, 167, 188, 204, 208, 214
184, 204 ‘Ali b. Dustkhuda, 103, 210, 253
Abu Hanifa, 1, 112, 178, 181 ‘Alinama, 208, 210–11, 215
Abu Ishaq al-Thaʿalabi, 165 Alp Arslan, 10, 32
Abu Nasr b. Muhammad al-Sarakhsi, 183 Amasya, 40, 62, 79, 102, 108, 175, 242, 245–6
Abu Sa‘id, 50, 57–8, 93, 113, 249 Amin al-Din Mika’il, 82
Aegean, 52–3, 165 Amorium, 48, 58
Aflaki, 23, 26–7, 78, 82, 85–93, 100, 104–7, Ankara, 15, 31, 34, 51, 54, 68, 103, 118, 120,
109, 113, 126, 128, 141, 247, 250–1, 131, 139, 142, 168, 210–11, 230, 262,
262 265–6, 274, 278
Afyonkarahisar, 50, 58, 157 Antalya, 35, 121, 134, 143, 173
Ahmad b. Ilyas Naqqash, 120 Antichrist, 74, 201, 218, 224, 237, 281
Ahmad of Niğde, 25, 57, 200–1, Antioch, 202
207–8, 213 Anwari, 68
Ahmad Yasavi, 19–20 apocalypticism, 74, 218, 221, 223–4, 228–9,
Ahmad-i Rumi, 106 235–7, 240, 244–6, 251
Ahmed Bican, 220, 240 apocalyptic literature, 237–41
Ahmed Fakih, 152, 238 Aqquyunlu, 54, 215, 221, 230
Ahmedi, 14, 149, 152, 168, 175, 208 Aqsara’i, Karim al-Din b. Mahmud, 16, 45, 50,
Ahmed-i Da‘i, 186 64, 67, 86, 175, 233, 249–50, 258
Ahval-ı Kıyamet, 153 ‘Arab Noyan, 87, 91
Akhi Evren, 123, 142, 163 Arabic language and texts, 9, 11, 17, 21, 23,
Aksaray, 56, 143, 184, 235 25–6, 33–4, 38, 40, 57, 62, 70, 117,
Akşehir, 58, 137, 159, 207 120–1, 123, 132, 135, 140, 147–9, 153,

287
288 Index

155, 159, 162–3, 165–7, 172–9, 182, Berke, 42

185–6, 189, 191–2, 194, 198, 202–3, 205, beylik, 13–16, 43, 50, 52–3, 55–60, 73, 109–10,
215, 226, 230, 237, 239–40, 257, 261 147, 165–6, 168, 170–1, 195, 207, 249,
Arghun, 47–8 252
Armenian, 12–13, 17, 33, 52, 64, 69, 71, 126, Beypazarılı Maazoğlu Hasan, 213
134, 173, 239, 250 Beyşehir, 50, 57, 90, 141, 171
Armenian Kingdom of Cilicia, 12 al-Bistami, ‘Abd al-Rahman, 219, 229
Aşık Paşa, 8, 110–14, 159–64, 167, 186–7, 222, Bithynia, 52
247 Black Death, 149, 239–40
Aşık Paşazade, 115, 168, 211–12 Black Sea, 1, 11, 36, 41–2, 56, 131, 179–80,
Astarabadi, 65, 172–3 204
Astarabadi, ‘Aziz b. Ardashir, 16 Bolu, 58, 158
astrology, 173, 210, 218, 229, 235 Buddhists, 67, 69
‘Attar, 124, 128–9, 164–5, 203, 205–7 Burghazi, 121, 126, 135
awliyā’, 75–9, 81, 87, 93–4, 96, 100, 103, Burhan al-Din Ahmad, Qadi, 16, 103, 115, 172,
111–12, 116, 215, 246, 252–3, See saints 253
Ayasuluk, 165, 181, 257 Burhan al-Din al-Anawi, 64, 131
Aydın, 53, 143, 158, 165–6, 171, 173, 187 Bursa, 52, 143, 156, 170, 172–3, 180, 254–5,
Aydınids, 53, 172, 186, 256 257, 264
Ayyubids, 41, 123, 131, 134, 240, 246 Byzantine Empire, 11
Byzantium, 13–14, 18, 35, 43, 52, 149,
Baba İlyas, 28, 41, 78, 97, 101, 107–10, 153, 239, 255, 275, See Byzantine
112–13, 115, 221, 223, 242–7, 255, Empire
259
Baba Rasul, see Baba İlyas Cahen, Claude, 25, 119
Baba’i revolt, 107–10, 248 Cairo, 25, 139, 142, 166, 185, 187, 257,
Badr, 72, 85, 208 268–9
Baghdad, 4, 36, 38, 48, 56, 59, 82, 127, 130–1, Caliph, 4, 36, 38, 59, 64, 131–2, 134, 210, 237,
133, 176, 178, 248 250
Baha’ al-Din Walad, 38, 87 Caliphate, 4, 59, 120, 252
Bahramshah b. Da’ud, 35 Candarids, 53
Baiju, 41–2, 49, 83 Çarhname, 152, 238
bakhshis, 67, 69 catechisms, 188, 191; see also ‘ilm-i hal
Balkans, 14, 21, 275 Çelebi ‘Abid, 92
Baltu, 49 Cemal Kafadar, 20, 223
Bar Hebraeus, 17, 67, 218, 242, 244–6 Cenkname, 208, 211–12
Baraq Baba, 88, 93, 182, 217 Central Anatolia, 9, 14, 16, 25, 31, 51, 78, 88,
Barquq Sultan, 185 172
Battal Ghazi, 151, 153 Central Asia, 4, 6, 19–20, 24, 31–3, 36, 40, 42,
Battalname, 23, 68, 153, 208 56, 68, 79, 81, 84, 148, 150, 179–81, 203,
Batu Khan, 41–2 245, 257
Baybars al-Mansuri, 43–4, 67 Chaghatay, 42
Bayezid I, 53, 158, 170 Chaghatayids, 6
Bayezid Şah, 168 China, 6, 56, 220
Bazm u Razm, 16, 65, 262 Chinggis Khan, 6, 42, 60, 62, 68, 81–2, 92,
al-Bazzazi, Hafiz al-Din Muhammad b. Shihab 100–1, 204, 221
al-Kardari al-Khwarazmi, 181 Chinggisids, 42, 59, 61–2, 101, 250
Bedreddin, Shaykh, 116, 221 Chobanids, 53, 57
Behcetü’l-Hadayik, 156–7, 165, 183–4, 187–9, Chopan, 49–50, 249
256 Christianity, 64, 69, 73, 112, 127, 206, 255,
Bergama, 168 267, 269, 279
 Index 289

Christians, 3–4, 11, 14, 20, 33, 64, 69, 71, 91, eschatology, 26, 189, 191, 201–2, 204, 226,
112, 126, 191, 207, 209, 216, 219, 222, 238, 240, 251, 256
228, 250–1, 253, 255, See Christianity Eshrefids, 57, 90, 97, 175
chronicles, 16 Eskişehir, 44, 157–8
Çifte Minareli Medrese, 15, 46 Esrar Dede, 86
Cilicia, 13, 52, 64, 71, 239, 250
coinage, 36, 49, 57, 61–3, 180, 182, 220 Fakhr al-Din ‘Ali, 42, 44, 72, 83–4, 94, 157,
coins, 12, 33, 49, 58, 61, 182, 220; see also 174, 179, 233, 257
numismatics Fakhr al-Din ‘Iraqi, 45–6, 125
colophons, 17, 69, 159, 250 Fakhr al-Din Qazwini, 46, 48, 64, 141
Constantinople, 11, 14, 17, 35, 43, 54, 202–3, Falak al-Din Dündar, 50
219, 228, 239–40, 268 Farghani, Sa‘id al-Din, 45, 175
conversion, 9, 18–19, 27, 59, 63–72, 74, 86, 89, Farghani, Sayf al-Din, 46, 68, 221
100, 112–13, 127, 144, 163, 177, 180, Feridun Beg, 170
184, 188, 192, 201–8, 213–14, 216, 221, fiqh, 40, 126, 159, 172, 175–6, 181,
240, 249–50, 252, 254–5, 258, See 195, 199
Islamisation Firdawsi, 36, 38, 186, 215
Crimea, 43, 81, 101, 106, 180–1, 184, fityān, 117–19, 121, 124–6, 128, 130, 132–4,
270 136–9, 141–4, 163, 254, 257
Cümcüme Sultan, 203 Futuh al-Sham, 186
futuwwa, 28, 38, 54, 119, 121–2, 125–6,
Da’ud al-Qaysari, 76, 174 131–3, 136–8, 141–3, 156, 163–4, 207,
Dalaman, 43 235, 252–5, 257
Damascus, 2, 25, 246 and Ilkhanids, 139, 144
Danishmendids, 12, 32–4, 35, 60, 88, 153 in Konya, 140–2
Danişmendname, 153, 208 spread of, 130–6
Darir, Erzurumlu, 171, 186 theory of, 121–30
Dasht-i Qipchaq, 56, 180, 182, 184–6 See also fityān
Dede Garkın, 107, 245 futuwwatnāmas, 120, 122, 124–5, 132, 135,
Dehhani, 152, 171 137, 139, 142
Denizli, 2, 43, 58, 60, 91, 128, 225
DeWeese, Devin, 20, 81 Geikhatu, 16, 48, 140–1
Dhu’l-Qarnayn b. ‘Ayn al-Dawla, 34 Gelibolulu Mustafa Ali, 154
Divriği, 12, 32, 37 Georgian, 12
Diyarbakır, 11, 52 Germiyanids, 50, 53, 86, 165, 168, 170, 172,
187, 256
Eastern Turkish, 148, 156, 172, 179–84, 192, Ghazan, 6, 31, 49, 57, 59, 67–71, 76–7, 86–9,
194–5, 203–4 91, 93, 99–100, 113, 159, 163, 217, 221,
Edebali, Shaykh, 115 237, 249, 251, 255, 258
Eğridir, 2, 58, 258 al-Ghazmini, 40
Egypt, 3, 6, 9, 43, 56, 60, 70, 95, 108, 119, 123, al-Ghazzali, 37
130, 134, 149, 153, 166, 171, 176, 178, Ghiyath al-Din Kaykhusraw I, 35–6
185–6, 202, 220, 256, 258, 270 Ghiyath al-Din Kaykhusraw II, 40, 83, 107, 136,
Elvan Çelebi, 23, 78, 97, 101, 107, 109, 112, 215, 220
115, 163–4, 242, 244–5, 247, 255 Ghiyath al-Din Kaykhusraw III, 43, 121, 259
Eretna, 31, 50–1, 61–2, 92, 100, 143, 182 Ghiyath al-Din Mas‘ud II, 50, 84
Eretnids, 9, 16, 52, 76 Golden Horde, 6, 41–3, 57, 81, 101, 106, 149,
Erzincan, 12, 32, 35, 37, 46, 51, 61, 69, 101, 151, 179–81, 184–5, 191, 203, 256–7,
121, 126, 176, 178, 182, 224, 237 259
Erzurum, 12, 32–3, 41, 44, 47, 56, 87, 159, Gölpınarlı, Abdülbaki, 119
186, 202, 250 Great Seljuqs, 35–7, 176
290 Index

Greek, 11–12, 17–18, 33, 52–3, 69, 126, 155, Ibn Tumart, 220, 228, 241
163, 173 Ibrahim b. Abi Sa‘id al-Maghribi al-‘Ala’i, 34
Green, Nile, 24 Ibtidanama, 95, 104–5
Gülşehri, 8, 121, 123–4, 128, 130–1, 142, 154, Ilkhanate, 6, 8, 13, 15, 31, 42, 48, 50–1, 57, 61,
159, 161–5, 167, 186–7, 204–7, 216 70, 80, 93, 119, 143, 258, 277
Gurji Khatun, 85, 91 Ilkhans, 6, 42, 48, 57–8, 64, 70, 162, 167, 185,
209, 249, 253, See Ilkhanate
Hacı Bektaş, 23, 68, 247 Illuminationist philosophy, 103, 124
Hacı Paşa, 166, 186, 257 ilm-i hāl, 191, 200
hadith, 26, 72, 127, 166, 175–7, 180, 183–4, _ Khatun, 88
Iltermish
202, 217–18, 236–7, 245, 257 India, 56, 80, 106, 150, 176–7, 207, 220,
Hafiz-i Abru, 249 259
hagiographies, 23, 26, 77, 86, 215 Iran, 6, 9, 24, 32, 36, 40, 42, 50, 54, 57, 61,
Haliloğlu Ali, 184 63–4, 67, 72, 79, 89, 115, 119, 132,
Hamdallah Mustawfi, 56, 58, 162 138–9, 144, 173–4, 191, 209, 219–20,
Hanafis, 42, 176, 179, 181, 212 252, 270, 273
Hanafism. See Abu Hanifa Iraq, 2, 32–3, 36, 41, 56, 87, 112, 119, 131,
Hasluck, F.W., 20 143, 178, 214, 237, 248
Hatiboğlu Mehmed, 171 Irenjin Noyan, 86
Het‘um, 71 İsa Beg, 166–7
Hibetullah b. Ibrahim, 238 Isfahan, 118
Hilla, 119 Islamisation, 8, 10, 12, 18–22, 27–8, 31, 67,
Hovhannes Pluz, 126 162, 179, 184, 193, 199, 207, 217, 252,
Hubaysh-i Tiflisi, 34, 189, 218, 223 255
Hülegü, 6, 42–3, 59, 81 Istanbul. See Constantinople
Humam al-Din Tabrizi, 88 Izmir, 56, 93
Husam al-Din Çelebi, 104–5, 128 ‘Izz al-din Kayka’us I, 64
‘Izz al-Din Kayka’us II, 43, 154
Ibn ‘Abd al-Zahir, 59
Ibn ‘Ala, 153 Jalal al-Din Karatay, 42, 44, 100, 133,
Ibn ‘Arabi, 8, 38, 45, 64, 75–7, 94, 98, 115, 136–7
124–5, 131, 174–5, 189, 223–6, 229–30, Jalal al-Din Khwarazmshah, 37, 243
233, 241, 247, 250–2, 277 Jalayirids, 51–2, 285
Ibn al-Athir, 178, 257 Jamal al-Din al-Aqsara’i, 62
Ibn al-Fuwati, 125, 138–9, 143 Jani Bek, 101
Ibn al-Jawzi, 178, 257 Jesus, 12, 104, 203–4, 221, 224, 228, 237, 244,
Ibn al-Sarraj, 126, 128 246
Ibn Barrajan, 229–35 Jews, 66, 69, 74, 112, 191–2, 195–6, 200, 207,
Ibn Battuta, 1–2, 4, 8–9, 17, 21–2, 53, 56, 62, 250
73, 91, 93, 117–19, 121–2, 124, 128, jihad, 27–8, 31, 63, 70, 93, 130, 168, 192, 202,
142–3, 166, 173, 181, 254, 257–8 207, 253
Ibn Baytar, 166–7 Jimri, 46, 59, 77–8, 110, 144, 157
Ibn Bibi, 16, 37–8, 48, 131, 133–4, 136, 138, jizya, 64, 68, 72, 91, 237
147–8, 157, 233, 242–3, 246 Jochid, 180, See Golden Horde
Ibn Bidqin, 127 Joseph, 85, 104, 108, 180, 184, 188, 207, 266
Ibn Farid, 174–5, 257 al-Jurjani, 175
Ibn Kammuna, 66, 174 Juwayni, ‘Ala’ al-Din ‘Ata’ Malik, 183
Ibn Shaddad, 65 Juwayni, Shams al-Din Muhammad, 46
Ibn Sina, 174–5, 226
Ibn Talha, 219, 228, 240 Kafadar, Cemal, 21, 23, 222, 258
Ibn Taymiyya, 127, 208 Kafarsud, 241, 243
 Index 291

kalām, 27, 166 Ladhiq, 2, 91, 128, 157, 225, See Denizli
Karahisar Develi, 50, 156–7, See Afyonkarahisar Lahore, 176
Karaman, 54, 58, 109, 140, 143, 147, 171, 186, Lake Beyşehir, 37
239 Lake Van, 58
Karamanids, 45, 48, 50, 53, 58–9, 61, 68, 92,
109–10, 140–2, 144, 147, 171, 173, madrasas, 31, 34, 40, 44, 64, 72, 102, 173–4,
249–50 190, 257
Karamanlı Ayni, 172 Maghreb, 226, 228, 232, 259
Karamustafa Ahmet, 19–20, 190 Mahdi, 201, 219–29, 232, 235–8, 240, 244,
Karasi, 168, 200 247, 251, 253, 258, 261
Kastamonu, 2, 50, 56, 58, 73, 168, 183, 192, mahdism, 221, 223, 241, 247, 249, 251
210 Mahmud of Ghazna, 37
Kaygusuz Abdal, 158, 186, 210 Majd al-Din Ishaq, 38, 131
Kayseri, 9, 12, 26, 45, 51–2, 59, 61, 66, 69, 79, Malatya, 12, 17, 34, 36, 131
85, 143, 157, 172, 176, 178, 235, 239, 250 Mamluk sultanate, 6, 50, 67, 151
Kerderli Mahmud b. ‘Ali, 183 Mamluks, 43, 46, 49, 56, 60–1, 70, 249
Kesikbaş, 184, 203–4, 265 Manaqib al-‘Arifin, 78, 87, 97
khānqāh, 68, 75, 77, 128, 143, 178, 195 Manzikert, 32
Khaqani, 35 Mardin, 11, 183
Kharijites, 209 Marw, 81
Khidr, 74, 95, 108, 115, 245 Mathnawi, 35, 45, 97, 101, 160, 164, 174
khilāfa, 99 Mawlana, 87–8, 90–2, 105–7, 109–10, 116,
Khurasan, 37, 41, 61, 68, 80, 116 195, 204, 263, See Rumi, Jalal al-Din
Khusraw and Shirin, 180 Mecca, 72, 195, 204–6, 227
Khwaja ‘Ubaydallah Ahrar, 84 medicine, 33–4, 165–6, 173
Khwarazm, 180–1, 187, 259 Medina, 152, 192, 195, 202, 204, 233
Khwarazmi, 180–1 Mediterranean, 12, 36–7, 47, 165–6, 232
Khwarazmian, 40, 179, 219, 243 Mehmed Beg, 43–4, 59, 147–8, 166
Khwarazmians, 37, 40, 219, 243, 247 Mélikoff, Irène, 19
Kılıç Arslan II, 34, 64, 139, 218, 224 Menakıbu’l-Kudsiyye fi Menasibi’l-Ünsiyye, 78,
Kılıç Arslan IV, Rukn al-Din, 43, 48, 85, 137 97, 107, 109, 113, 164, 223, 241–8
Kirdeci Ali, 184, 204, 216 Mengücekids, 12, 32
Kırk Su’al, 194 Menteşe, 90, 140
Kırşehir, 86, 91, 102, 110, 113–14, 123, 142, Mevlevis, 76, 78–80, 86, 89, 93–4, 96, 101–2,
157–9, 162–3, 167, 187, 256 104–6, 109, 172, 187, 195, 253, 259
Ḳıssa-i Şeyh Sanan, 154 Mevlevism, 76, 82–107, 164, 189, 204,
Konya, 8–9, 16, 32, 34, 36–8, 44, 46–8, 50, 253
59–60, 63, 66, 72, 79, 82, 84–5, 90, 92, Milas, 2, 181
104, 108–10, 121, 123, 126, 132, 136–42, Moin, Azfar, 24, 93
144, 147, 156, 160, 164, 171, 173–5, 185, Molla Fenari, 181
187, 191, 194–200, 204, 208, 218, 233–4, Möngke, 3, 42
250, 256, 264, 267 Mongolia, 4, 6, 42, 147
Köprülü, Mehmet Fuat, 18–20, 86, 151–3, 155, Mongolian, 162, 182, 185, 281
203, 212 Mongols, 3–8, 10–13, 15, 28, 31, 37, 41–4, 48,
Kösedağ, 8, 42, 136 51, 60, 64–5, 67–9, 72, 74, 77, 89, 92,
Kubadabad, 37 100, 108, 119–20, 136, 140, 142–3, 147,
Kubrawis, 79 152, 157, 163, 179, 183, 219, 224, 236–7,
kufr, 207, 216 241–2, 252–4, 257, 266, 270, 273
Kul Ali, 180 and futuwwa, 125–31
Kütahya, 50, 72–3, 86, 168, 191, 193–6, 198, and Sufism, 82, 86–90, 98–103
201, 279 Moses, 74, 95, 244
292 Index

Mu‘in al-Din Sulayman, 42–3, 45, 72, 76, 82, Ottomans, 8, 10–14, 16, 19, 22, 24–5, 31–2,
143, 175, See Pervane 49–50, 52–3, 58, 60, 76, 80, 86, 91, 109,
Mu‘in al-Murid, 180 115–16, 119, 127, 143, 149–50, 154,
Mu‘tazilism, 210 157–8, 168, 170, 174, 176, 181–2, 186–7,
Mu’ayyid al-Din Jandi, 76, 175, 248 190, 211–13, 217, 219, 221, 230, 237,
Mubariz al-Din Mehmed Beg, 90 239, 241, 253–5, 259, 271, 276
Muhabbatname, 180–1 Özbek Khan, 101
Muhadhdhab al-Din, 83
Muhammad b. Ghazi, 36 panegyric, 37, 84, 87, 142, 175, 237
Muhammad b. Taj al-Din Mu‘tazz b. Tahir, 57 paradise, 27, 111, 122, 200–2, 205, 238
Muhsin al-Qaysari, 25, 176, 257 Partawnama, 103
Murad I, 53, 154, 173 Pegolotti, 56
Murad II, 115, 182, 229 Persian language and texts, 8–9, 11, 16–17, 19,
murīd, 75, 88, 91, 97, 107, 133 23, 25–6, 33–8, 40, 44, 57, 62, 64, 76, 78,
Musafir b. Nasir al-Malatawi, 63 81, 84, 87, 95, 100, 112, 120–1, 123–5,
Muzaffar al-Din Yavlak Arslan, 57 133, 135, 141, 144, 147–50, 152, 154–6,
159, 161, 163, 166–7, 170–3, 175,
Najm al-Din Razi, 38, 79, 99, 103, 171, 221, 179–80, 182–3, 188–9, 191–9, 201, 203,
251–2 205, 207–8, 210–11, 217, 221, 235, 239,
Najm al-Din Zarkub, 127 242, 248, 256–7
Nasir al-Din Mustawfi, 140 Pervane, 42–3, 45, 65, 72, 82–4, 125, 140, 142,
al-Nasir li-Din Allah, 131, 136 175
al-Nasir Muhammad, 57, 61 Pfeiffer, Judith, 102
Nasiri, 120, 122, 124, 126, 139, 144, 235, 237, Philadelphia, 35, 52–3
251 Pollock, Sheldon, 149, 272
Nasiri Sijistani, 121, 235–7, 258 popular preaching, 190
Nehcü’l-Feradis, 180, 183 prophecy, 94–100
Nicaea, 32–3, 35, See Iznik Prophet Muhammad, the, 72, 89, 99–100, 111,
Niğde, 16, 51, 68, 143, 201, 208 122, 126, 131–2, 168, 188, 192, 195–6,
Niksar, 34 198–9, 205, 207, 210, 212–14, 216,
Nishapur, 56, 130 218–19, 224, 248, 258
Nizam al-Mulk, 37, 94 prophets, 64, 76, 94, 96–7, 104, 111, 196, 200,
Nizami, 35, 160, 164, 166, 180 244–6, 259
Numismatics, 42, 56, 182; see also coinage, coins
Nur al-Din b. Jaja, 86, 91, 102, 157, Qabus b. Vushmgir, 37
162 Qabusnama, 128, 130, 168
Qadi Burhan al-Din, 61–2, 65, 149, 253
Ocak, Ahmet Yaşar, 18, 23, 109, 221–2, 241, Qalandars, 79, 89, 93, 125, 182, 217, 255,
243, 247, 278 263
Ögödei, 41 Qalandarnama, 79, 81, 101–2, 121, 123–5, 185,
Oirats, 54 204
Old Anatolian Turkish, 148, 182 Qani‘i, 37, 59, 152, 215
olga-bolga language, 183 Qansuh al-Ghawri, 186
Öljeitü, 50, 57, 71, 89, 93, 97, 99 Qara Tatars, 51, 143
Oposhgha Noyan, 86, 100 Qaraqorum, 4, 6
ordu, 42–3, 65, 71, 87, 89, 92, 233, 248 Qashani, 99, 221, 248
Orhan Beg, 53, 56, 58, 115, 127, 170, 176, 254 Qayitbay, 186
Orthodox Church, 3, 255, See also Christianity Qipchaq, 70, 179, 182, 184–7, 217
Oruç, 109–10 Qunawi, Sadr al-Din 24, 26, 38, 45, 103,
Osman, 13, 110, 115, 168, 211–12, 262, 278, 125, 174–5, 225–6, 233, 245, 248,
282 254
 Index 293

Qur’an, 1–2, 27, 34, 73, 96–7, 111, 162, 164, 142, 144, 147, 151, 153, 157, 173,
198, 200–1, 206, 210, 217, 229–30, 232, 212, 215, 218, 221, 229, 235–7,
240, 245, 254, 258, 260 241–3, 250–2, 256, 258–9; see also Great
and surat al-Kahf, 230 Seljuqs
and surat al-Rum, 230 Seljuqs of Iraq, 37
qutb, 46, 57, 66, 88, 180, 280 Şerefeddin Çakırca, 183
_ al-‘Alawi, 217
Qutb Şerifi of Amid, 186
Qutlugh-Timur, 101–2 Seyfi, 185
Şeyhi, 149
Rababnama, 95, 97, 99, 101 Şeyhoğlu, 168
Rabghuzi, 180 Seyitgazi, 169
Rashid al-Din, 46–7, 76–7, 88, 92, 99, 101, 221 Şeyyad Hamza, 152, 207, 216, 239–40
Rawandi, 36 Şeyyad İsa, 153, 238
Rifa‘is, 103 Shabankara’i, 100
Rum, 8, 21, 26, 28, 35, 38, 45, 75–6, 78, 81, Shadi b. Khwajaki, 194, 198
94–6, 104–5, 116, 124–5, 128, 134, 155, Shah Ismail, 220, 241
252–3, 263 Shams al-Din Isfahani, 42, 44
Rumi, Jalal al-Din, 11, 23, 26–7, 45, 85, 87–9, Sharaf al-Din Sati, 101
93, 95–6, 101, 105–6, 110, 114–15, shat hiyya, 182
123–4, 141, 153, 155–6, 160, 162, 164–5, _ _ 1–2, 19, 24, 71, 89, 209, 221, 223, 247,
Shiism,
195, 206, 217, 259, 277 257
Shiites, 2, 4, 191, 210, 228, 248, 259
Sa‘di, 46, 160, 164, 185 Shirazi, Qutb al-Din, 46, 48, 57, 66, 88, 175,
sacral kingship, 80, 99, 253 251
Şadi Meddah, 210, 216 Shuja‘ al-Din Inanj Beg, 91
Sadr al-Din Zanjani, 76 Shuja‘ al-Din b. Orhan Beg b. Menteshe, 181
al-Sadr al-Shahid, 40, 159, 257 Şikari, 109
Safavids, 54, 80 silver mines, 36, 47
al-Saghani, 176–7, 184, 237, 257 Sinop, 1, 36, 58, 131
Sahib Giray, 203 Siraj al-Din Urmawi, 44, 138
sainthood, 27, 95, 98–9, 108, 116, 187, 192, Siraj al-Qulub, 183, 191–9, 202, 216, 256, 264
246, 252 Sivas, 8–9, 15–16, 24, 40–1, 46, 51–2, 61–2,
saints, 26–7, 75–6, 80, 84, 88, 93–4, 96–8, 100, 69, 72, 76, 83, 87, 91, 102, 115, 120, 143,
165, 185, 189, 246; see also awliyā’ 149, 172, 183, 253
al-Sakkaki, 175 Sufis, 4, 6, 8, 19–20, 23–4, 27–8, 38, 45, 68,
Salah al-Din Zarkub, 104 74–8, 80, 82, 87–8, 101–2, 112, 119, 123,
Salsalname, 153, 208 125, 130–1, 136, 163–4, 173, 178, 189,
Saltukids, 12, 32 207, 217, 224–5, 246, 255–8, 279
Samaghar, 45, 86–7, 91 Sufism, 4, 8, 18, 20, 24, 27–8, 38, 40, 44,
al-Samarqandi, ‘Imad b. Mas‘ud, 167 74–117, 121, 123–6, 134, 144, 164, 173,
Samaw’al al-Maghribi, 66 175, 178, 185, 189, 252–5; see also
Sana’i, 160, 164 futuwwa
Saray, 181, 185 Suhrawardi, Shihab al-Din Yayha b. Habash,
al-Sarayi, ‘Ala’ al-Din Muhammad b. Ahmad 103
b. Muhammad, 46, 68, 221 Suhrawardi, Abu Hafs ‘Umar, 38, 121
Sayf al-Din Şadgeldi, 62 al-Sulami, 122, 130, 220
Schamiloglu, Uli, 149 Sülemish, 49, 60–1, 70, 108
Seljuqs of Rum, 3, 8–10, 12–13, 15–16, 28, Süleyman Pasha, 50
31–50, 56, 59–60, 62, 64, 68, 71, 75–8, Sultan Walad, 8, 26, 28, 78, 84–7, 89–90, 95–9,
82, 84–5, 87, 90, 92, 97, 103, 107–9, 113, 101–6, 109, 111, 118, 124–5, 142, 153,
115–16, 120–1, 131, 133–4, 136, 138–40, 155–6, 164, 238, 252
294 Index

Sultaniyya, 89, 99 Turkmen, 8, 10, 13, 18–19, 28, 33, 35, 41,
Sunnis, 24, 191, 199, 204, 214, 216, 223, 228, 43–5, 48–50, 52–61, 63, 70, 86, 90, 92–3,
244, 247, 256–7, 259 109, 117, 140, 142–3, 147, 157, 159, 165,
Sunnism, 1, 4, 24, 28, 71, 211, 223 171, 173, 181, 208, 221, 223, 242, 244,
Sunnitisation, 10, 22, 24, 211 246, 249, 252–4, 256–8
Sutayids, 52 Tursun Fakih, 168, 189, 211–16
syncretism, 3, 20–1, 190, 222, 256 Tusi, Nasir al-Din, 45, 173
Syria, 3, 6, 9, 41, 43, 56, 60–1, 70, 112, 119, al-Tustari, Muhammad, 171, 174
126, 130, 134, 149, 171, 178, 185–6, 190,
219–20, 227, 232, 241, 245 Uighur, 51, 61, 63, 71, 179, 182, 194, 203
Syriac, 17, 33, 218, 242 ‘ulama’, 4, 25, 40, 45, 81, 110, 130, 173,
189–90, 220, 225, 242, 257
tabaqāt, 25 Ulu ‘Arif Çelebi, 88, 105, 113
_al-Tabari, 35 Ulu ‘Arif Çelebi, 87–92
Tabriz, 25, 33, 47, 56, 68, 77, 88, 90, 92, 95, Uluborlu, 50
127, 138, 144, 156, 174, 253 al-‘Umari, 17, 52–3, 57, 59–61, 262
tafsīr, 97, 175, 196, 198, 233 Umur Beg, 58, 91–3, 165
Taj al-Din Mu‘tazz, 57, 128 Urfa, 11
tarīqa, 75, 78–80, 100, 103, 107, 114, 121,
_ 123–4, 161 Vahid Ali Paşa Library, 193, 195, 198, 200
Taş Vakfiye, 168 vernacular Islam, 19, 190
Taşköprizade, 25, 158, 174 vernacularisation, 149–51, 168, 188–93, 256
al-Tawassul ila’l-Tarassul, 170 vernaculars, 150, 156, 188
tawhīd, 124–5, 188 Vilayetname, 23, 68
_ 31, 51, 54, 79, 102, 106, 143, 230, 253,
Timur, Vryonis, Speros, 18
277
Timurids, 80 Wafa’iyya, 79, 95
Timurtash, 16, 50, 58, 61, 69, 92, 223, 241, Wajih al-Din al-Arzinjani, 176, 184, 237,
249–51, 255, 258–9 240
al-Tirmidhi, 94 waqf, 84–5, 102, 114, 162, 183, 233
Tok Bugha, 180 waqfiyya, 86, 100, 123, 133, 136, 138, 162,
Tokat, 34, 93, 102, 108, 120, 143, 154, 182 168, 170
translations, 159, 164–8, 170, 173, 176, 179, wilāyat. See sainthood; awliyā’
187 William of Rubruck, 3
Transoxiana, 42, 52 Wittek, Paul, 13, 19
Trebizond, 12–13, 52–3, 202, 217, 239
Tughay-Timur, 61 Yar Ali Divriki, 103
Tughril III, 36 Yashbak min Mahdi, 186
Tühfe-i Mübarizi, 165 Yassı Çimen, 37
Tülük-Timur, 101 Yunus Emre, 21, 26, 158, 186, 264
Tuman-Beg, 87–8 Yusuf b. Sa‘d al-Sijistani, 40
Turkicisation, 149, 179 Yusufi, 77, 144
Turkish language and texts, 3, 8–12, 14, 18, Yusuf-ı Meddah, 172
21–2, 26, 28, 32, 35, 38, 42, 53, 57, 67–8,
78, 87, 90, 107, 110, 117, 120–1, 124, Zangids, 131
135, 142, 147–73, 175, 179–200, 203–4, zāwiya, 75, 102, 108, 110, 113, 115, 117, 133,
208, 211–17, 219, 221, 232, 239, 242, 142–3, 242, 254
251, 254, 256–7, 259, 266 Zawzani, 159, 264
 Other Titles in the Series

Agricultural Innovation in the Early Islamic World: The Diffusion of Crops and Farming
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Muslim Tradition: Studies in Chronology, Provenance and Authorship of Early Hadith,
G. H. A. Juynboll
Social History of Timbuktu: The Role of Muslim Scholars and Notables 1400–1900, Elias N.
Saad
Sex and Society in Islam: Birth Control before the Nineteenth Century, B. F. Musallam
Towns and Townsmen of Ottoman Anatolia: Trade, Crafts and Food Production in an Urban
Setting 1520–1650, Suraiya Faroqhi
Unlawful Gain and Legitimate Profit in Islamic Law: Riba, Gharar and Islamic Banking,
Nabil A. Saleh
Men of Modest Substance: House Owners and House Property in Seventeenth-Century Ankara
and Kayseri, Suraiya Faroqhi
Roman, Provincial and Islamic Law: The Origins of the Islamic Patronate, Patricia Crone
Economic Life in Ottoman Jerusalem, Amnon Cohen
Mannerism in Arabic Poetry: A Structural Analysis of Selected Texts (3rd Century AH/9th
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The Rise and Rule of Tamerlane, Beatrice Forbes Manz
Popular Culture in Medieval Cairo, Boaz Shoshan
Early Philosophical Shiism: The Ismaili Neoplatonism of Abu Yaʿqub Al-Sijistani, Paul E.
Walker
Indian Merchants and Eurasian Trade, 1600–1750, Stephen Frederic Dale
Palestinian Peasants and Ottoman Officials: Rural Administration around Sixteenth-Century
Jerusalem, Amy Singer
Arabic Historical Thought in the Classical Period, Tarif Khalidi
Mongols and Mamluks: The Mamluk-Ilkhanid War, 1260–1281, Reuven Amitai-Preiss
Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 1190–1350, Michael Chamberlain
The Politics of Households in Ottoman Egypt: The Rise of the Qazdağlis, Jane Hathaway
Hierarchy and Egalitarianism in Islamic Thought, Louise Marlow
Commodity and Exchange in the Mongol Empire: A Cultural History of Islamic Textiles,
Thomas T. Allsen
State and Provincial Society in the Ottoman Empire: Mosul, 1540–1834, Dina Rizk Khoury
The Mamluks in Egyptian Politics and Society, Thomas Philipp and Ulrich Haarmann (eds)
The Delhi Sultanate: A Political and Military History, Peter Jackson
European and Islamic Trade in the Early Ottoman State: The Merchants of Genoa and Turkey,
Kate Fleet
The Ottoman City between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir, and Istanbul, Edhem Eldem,
Daniel Goffman and Bruce Masters
The Politics of Trade in Safavid Iran: Silk for Silver, 1600–1730, Rudolph P. Matthee
The Idea of Idolatry and the Emergence of Islam: From Polemic to History, G. R. Hawting
A Monetary History of the Ottoman Empire, Şevket Pamuk
Classical Arabic Biography: The Heirs of the Prophets in the Age of Al-Ma’mun, Michael
Cooperson
Empire and Elites after the Muslim Conquest: The Transformation of Northern Mesopotamia,
Chase F. Robinson
Poverty and Charity in Medieval Islam: Mamluk Egypt, 1250–1517, Adam Sabra
Culture and Conquest in Mongol Eurasia, Thomas T. Allsen
Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World: The Roots of Sectarianism, Bruce Masters
Arabic Administration in Norman Sicily: The Royal Diwan, Jeremy Johns
Law, Society and Culture in the Maghrib, 1300–1500, David S. Powers
Revival and Reform in Islam: The Legacy of Muhammad al-Shawkani, Bernard Haykel
Tolerance and Coercion in Islam: Interfaith Relations in the Muslim Tradition, Yohanan
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Guns for the Sultan: Military Power and the Weapons Industry in the Ottoman Empire, Gábor
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Marriage, Money and Divorce in Medieval Islamic Society, Yossef Rapoport
The Empire of the Qara Khitai in Eurasian History: Between China and the Islamic World,
Michal Biran
Domesticity and Power in the Early Mughal World, Ruby Lal
Power, Politics and Religion in Timurid Iran, Beatrice Forbes Manz
Postal Systems in the Pre-Modern Islamic World, Adam J. Silverstein
Kingship and Ideology in the Islamic and Mongol Worlds, Anne F. Broadbridge
Justice, Punishment and the Medieval Muslim Imagination, Christian Lange
The Shiites of Lebanon under Ottoman Rule, 1516–1788, Stefan Winter
Women and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire, Madeline Zilfi
The Second Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World,
Baki Tezcan
The Legendary Biographies of Tamerlane: Islam and Heroic Apocrypha in Central Asia, Ron
Sela
Non-Muslims in the Early Islamic Empire: From Surrender to Coexistence, Milka Levy-Rubin
The Origins of the Shi‘a: Identity, Ritual, and Sacred Space in Eighth-Century Kufa, Najam
Haider
Politics, Law, and Community in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment, Ovamir Anjum
The Power of Oratory in the Medieval Muslim World, Linda G. Jones
Animals in the Qur‘an, Sarra Tlili
The Logic of Law Making in Islam: Women and Prayer in the Legal Tradition, Behnam
Sadeghi
Empire and Power in the Reign of Süleyman: Narrating the Sixteenth-Century Ottoman
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Law and Piety in Medieval Islam, Megan H. Reid
Women and the Transmission of Religious Knowledge in Islam, Asma Sayeed
The New Muslims of Post-Conquest Iran: Tradition, Memory, and Conversion, Sarah Bowen
Savant
The Mamluk City in the Middle East: History, Culture, and the Urban Landscape, Nimrod
Luz
Disability in the Ottoman Arab World, 1500–1800, Sara Scalenghe
The Holy City of Medina: Sacred Space in Early Islamic Arabia, Harry Munt
Muslim Midwives: The Craft of Birthing in the Premodern Middle East, Avner Giladi
Doubt in Islamic Law: A History of Legal Maxims, Interpretation, and Islamic Criminal Law,
Intisar A. Rabb
The Second Formation of Islamic Law: The Hanafi School in the Early Modern Ottoman
Empire, Guy Burak
Sexual Violation in Islamic Law: Substance, Evidence, and Procedure, Hina Azam
Gender Hierarchy in the Qur‘an: Medieval Interpretations, Modern Responses, Karen Bauer
Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran: Sharaf al-Din ‘Ali Yazdi and the Islamicate Republic of
Letters, Ilker Evrim Binbaş
Authority and Identity in Medieval Islamic Historiography: Persian Histories from the Periph-
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The Economics of Ottoman Justice: Settlement and Trial in the Sharia Courts, Metin Coşgel
and Boğaç Ergene
The Mystics of al-Andalus: Ibn Barrajan and Islamic Thought in the Twelfth Century, Yousef
Casewit
Muhammad’s Heirs: The Rise of Muslim Scholarly Communities, 622–950, Jonathan E.
Brockopp
The First of the Modern Ottomans: The Intellectual History of Ahmed Vasif, Ethan
Menchinger
Non-Muslim Provinces under Early Islam: Islamic Rule and Iranian Legitimacy in Armenia
and Caucasian Albania, Alison Vacca
Women and the Making of the Mongol Empire, Anne F. Broadbridge
Slavery and Empire in Central Asia, Jeff Eden
Christianity in Fifteenth-Century Iraq, Thomas A. Carlson
Child Custody in Islamic Law: Theory and Practice in Egypt since the Sixteenth Century,
Ahmed Fekry Ibrahim
Ibadi Muslims of North Africa: Manuscripts, Mobilization and the Making of a Written
Tradition, Paul M. Love Jr
Islamic Law of the Sea: Freedom of Navigation and Passage Rights in Islamic Thought, Hassan
S. Khalilieh
Law and Politics under the Abassids: An Intellectual Portrait of al-Juwayni, Sohaira Z. M.
Siddiqui
Friends of the Emir: Non-Muslim State Officials in Premodern Islamic Thought, Luke B.
Yarbrough
The Crisis of Kingship in Late Medieval Islam: Persian Emigres and the Making of Ottoman
Sovereignty, Christopher Markiewicz
Islam, Literature and Society in Mongol Anatolia, A. C. S. Peacock
1 The earliest Islamic manuscript from Anatolia: al-Akhawayn al-Bukhari, Hidayat al-
Muta‘allimin fi’l-Tibb. Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı, Süleymaniye Yazma
Eser Kütüphanesi, MS Fatih 3646, showing on Plate 1a) the dedication to the Saltukid
ruler and Plate 1b) the table of contents.
2 Yusuf b. Sa‘d al-Sijistani’s Munyat al-Mufti, copied at Sivas in 638/1240–1; an autograph
manuscript. Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı, Süleymaniye Yazma Eser Kütü-
phanesi, MS Şehid Ali Paşa 1083, showing Plate 2a) the opening folio and Plate 2b) the
end of the work with the colophon attesting it is an autograph manuscript at the
bottom left.
3aand b The taqwīm made for the Eretnid ‘Ala’ al-Din in 772–3/1372–3. Türkiye Yazma
Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı, Nurusomaniye 2782.
4Qazwini’s Arba‘un Majalis, dedicated to the Pervane. Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu
Başkanlığı, Süleymaniye Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, MS Carullah 410M.

5a The lavish copy of Sultan Walad’s Mathnawis made for the amir Sati Beg al-mawlawi,
showing the dedication to the amir. Vienna, National Library of Austria, Cod. Mixt. 1594,
fol. 1a; Plate 5b, showing the names of God, fol. 1b; Plate 5c. The opening folio of Sultan
Walad’s Intihanama, fol. 78b. Plate 5d, the colophon, showing the date of copying of 767/
1365–6.
5 (cont.)
6a The table of contents of Ali b. Dustkhuda al-Anqari’s collection of Sufi treatises
showing its inclusion of various works by Suharwardi, including the Partawnama. Türkiye
Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı, Süleymaniye Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, MS Fatih 5426,
fol. Ib–IIa and Plate 6b) the opening of Ghazali’s Hamaqat Ahl al-Ibaha in MS Fatih 5426,
showing the name of the copyist and owner, ‘Ali b. Dustkhuda b. Khwaja b. al-Hajj
Qumari al-Rifa‘i al-Anqari.
7 An early Kırşehir manuscript, Sharh Jami‘ al-Kabir, Süleymaniye, MS Fatih 1545.

8The colophon of Ibn al-Jawzi’s universal history, al-Muntazam fi’l-Ta’rikh, Süleymaniye,

MS Fazıl Ahmed Paşa 1174, fol. 118a, copied in Kayseri in 714/1314 showing the copyist’s
Sufi affiliations.
9a Ibn al-Athir’s al-Kamil fi’l-Tarikh copied by Yusuf b. al-Sabbal al-Baghdadi. Türkiye
Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı, Süleymaniye Yazma Eser Kütüphanesi, MS Ayasofya
3068, showing the dedication to Fakhr al-Din ‘Ali. Plate 9b) the opening folio showing the
high quality calligraphy and a later endowment by the Ottoman sultan Mahmud
I (d. 1754).
10 Diwan of Ibn Farid, a copy from the library of the minister Fakhr al-Din ‘Ali, copied by
Isma‘il b. Yusuf. Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı, Süleymaniye Yazma Eser
Kütüphanesi, MS Ayasofya 3879, showing Plate 10a) the ex libris of Fakhr al-Din ‘Ali and
Plate 10b) the opening of the diwan, showing the fine calligraphy and gold illumination.
10 (cont.)

11 Nasiri Sijistani, treatises on the occult. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS

persan 174, fol. 110b. Plate 11a) An illustration of the astrological lion and sun motif that
also seems to have denoted sovereignty (see Leiser ‘Observations on the “Lion and Sun”’).
Plate 11b). Nasiri Sijistani, treatises on the occult. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France,
MS persan 174, fol. 133b. The opening verses of the Mu’nis al-‘Awarif.
11 (cont.)
12 Ibn Barrajan, Tanbih, copy belonging to the mustawf ī Majd al-Din Muhammad b. al-
Hasan. MS Süleymaniye, Reisülküttab 30.