Historicizing Sunni Islam in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1450–c.

1750
 Islamic History and
Civilization
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Historicizing Sunni Islam
in the Ottoman Empire,
c. 1450–c. 1750

Edited by

Tijana Krstić
Derin Terzioğlu

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Title: Historicizing Sunni Islam in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1450–c. 1750 / edited by
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Contents

Acknowledgments ix
List of Figures xi
Abbreviations xiv
Note on Transliteration xv

1 Historicizing the Study of Sunni Islam in the Ottoman Empire,

c. 1450–c. 1750 1
Tijana Krstić

Part 1
Rethinking Sunni Orthodoxy in Dialogue with the Past and the
Present

2 A New Hadith Culture? Arab Scholars and Ottoman Sunnitization in the

Sixteenth Century 31
Helen Pfeifer

3 A Contrarian Voice: Şehzāde Ḳorḳud’s (d. 919/1513) Writings on Kalām

and the Early Articulation of Ottoman Sunnism 62
Nabil Al-Tikriti

4 Ibn Taymiyya, al-Siyāsa al-Sharʿiyya, and the Early Modern

Ottomans 101
Derin Terzioğlu

5 You Must Know Your Faith in Detail: Redefinition of the Role of

Knowledge and Boundaries of Belief in Ottoman Catechisms (ʿİlm-i
ḥāls) 155
Tijana Krstić

6 How to Read Heresy in the Ottoman World 196

Nir Shafir

7 Prayers, Commentaries, and the Edification of the Ottoman

Supplicant 232
Guy Burak
vi contents

Part 2
Building a Pious Community: Spatial Dimensions of
Sunnitization

8 Lives and Afterlives of an Urban Institution and Its Spaces: The Early
Ottoman ʿİmāret as Mosque 255
Çiğdem Kafescioğlu

9 Abdāl-affiliated Convents and “Sunnitizing” Halveti Dervishes in

Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Rumeli 308
Grigor Boykov

10 Attendance at the Five Daily Congregational Prayers, Imams and Their

Communities in the Jurisprudential Debates during the Ottoman Age of
Sunnitization 341
H. Evren Sünnetçioğlu

11 Piety and Presence in the Postclassical Sultanic Mosque 376

Ünver Rüstem

Part 3
Sunnis, Shi‘is and Kızılbaş: The Context- and Genre-Specific
Nature of Confessional Politics

12 Neither Victim Nor Accomplice: The Kızılbaş as Borderland Actors in

the Early Modern Ottoman Realm 423
Ayşe Baltacıoğlu-Brammer

13 Reading Ottoman Sunnism through Islamic History: Approaches toward

Yazīd b. Muʿāwiya in Ottoman Historical Writing 451
Vefa Erginbaş

14 Islamic Discourse in Ottoman-Safavid Peacetime Diplomacy after

1049/1639 479
Selim Güngörürler
contents vii

Index of Geographical Names 501

Index of Personal Names 505
Index of Quranic References 515
Index of Titles of Premodern Books 516
Index of General Terms 521
Acknowledgments

This volume has its origins in a workshop entitled “(Re)Thinking Ottoman Sun-
nitization, ca. 1450–1750,” held at Central European University in Budapest on
August 25–26, 2017. However, this was only the beginning of a conversation
that continued for three years, and the provisional conclusions of which are
presented in this collection. In the process we have all learned a lot from each
other and from colleagues involved in various ways, either as commentators at
the original workshop, as anonymous reviewers, or as interested readers pro-
viding valuable feedback.
Ahmet Kaylı, Aslıhan Gürbüzel, Ayfer Karakaya-Stump, Baki Tezcan, Devin
Stewart, Ferenc Csirkés, Rossitsa Gradeva, Sara Nur Yıldız, and Yavuz Aykan par-
ticipated in the original workshop but for various reasons were unable to con-
tribute essays to this volume. Ayşe Baltacıoğlu-Brammer, Çiğdem Kafescioğlu,
and Helen Pfeifer joined us later. We greatly benefited from the expert insights
of Cemal Kafadar, Gottfried Hagen, Gülru Necipoğlu, and M. Sait Özervarlı, who
were commentators at the workshop. We would like to thank them all.
Both the workshop and this volume are outcomes of the project entitled
“The Fashioning of a Sunni Orthodoxy and the Entangled Histories of Con-
fession-Building in the Ottoman Empire, 15th–17th Centuries” (OTTOCONFES-
SION, Project ID 648498) supported by the European Research Council, Hori-
zon 2020 Program. Our then Project Coordinator Tamas Kiss provided invalu-
able logistic support during the workshop, while Sona Grigoryan has expertly
filled that role since. As part of our research team, Günhan Börekçi has brought
many sources and secondary literature to our attention during the preparation
of this volume, while Cankat Kaplan meticulously prepared the index.
From his base at Süleymaniye Library, Ahmet Kaylı has assisted us in obtain-
ing digital copies of manuscripts and published studies. Özgün Deniz Yoldaşlar
has also helped us access crucial literature. Guy Burak shared ideas for the cover
image and helped us obtain it.
The finishing touches to this volume were put at the Wissenschaftskolleg
zu Berlin during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. There we benefited not
only from the exceptional technical and logistic support of the WIKO staff and
administration, but also from intellectually stimulating and challenging con-
versations with the Fellows. We would particularly like to thank the Rector
Barbara Stollberg-Rilinger, Ulrich Rudolph, Jeanne Kormina, Dror Wahrman,
Natasha Wheatley, Elena Esposito, Efraín Kristal, Nicole Brisch, Felix Körner,
Zaid al-Ali, Michael Karayanni and Balázs Trencsényi.
Throughout the process we have had the support of the Brill editorial team,
including Maurits van den Boogert, Teddi Dols, and Rebekah Zwanzig.
x acknowledgments

We would also like to acknowledge the encouragement, support, help,

friendship, and feedback of Başak Tuğ, Sara Nur Yıldız, Barbara Kellner-Hein-
kele, Alexandar Schunka, Yael Navaro, Hülya Canbakal, Çiğdem Kafescioğlu,
Fatma Taşkent, Emese Muntan, Cristina Corduneanu-Huci, Brett Wilson, Jan
Hennings, Robyn Radway, Natalie Rothman, Maartje van Gelder, and Nevena
Ivanović. Derin thanks Nuran, Ayşecan, Eren, Deniz, and Kıymet for being there
for her in so many ways and for filling her life with meaning. She wishes her
father Tosun was also still here. Tijana thanks Kovács Julianna and Sonia Pil-
libeit for making it possible for her to be a working mother, and Mirjana, Boško,
Sunna, Tolga and Leyla for always reminding her of what really matters.
We dedicate this volume to our students with the hope that they will con-
tinue the conversation.
Figures

2.1 The list of authorities upon which Ghazzī transmitted the Ṣaḥīḥ of
Bukhārī 50
2.2–2.3 The chain of authorities (isnād) and the hadith text (matn) for a hadith
transmitted exclusively by men called Muḥammad, followed by a hadith
transmitted by great scholars 51
8.1 Bursa, zāviye/ʿimāret and complex of Meḥmed I, the “Green Mosque,”
822/1419 257
8.2a Bursa, zāviye/ʿimāret of Meḥmed I, 822/1419, plan 258
8.2b Bursa, zāviye/ʿimāret of Meḥmed I, 822/1419, section 259
8.3 Amasya, Bāyezīd Pasha zāviye/ʿimāret, 817/1414 264
8.4 Bursa, kitchen and refectory of the Meḥmed I complex 266
8.5 Istanbul, ʿimāret and mosque of Maḥmūd Pasha, 878/1473–1474, exterior
view 267
8.6 Istanbul, ʿimāret and mosque of Maḥmūd Pasha, 878/1473–1474 268
8.7 Istanbul, complex of Meḥmed II, 867–875/1463–1470, plan 269
8.8 Istanbul, tābhāne and ʿimāret (hospice and soup kitchen) of the Meḥmed II
complex, the courtyard 271
8.9 Afyon Karahisar, ʿimāret and mosque of Gedik Aḥmed Pasha, 879/1474,
exterior view from south 279
8.10 Afyon Karahisar, ʿimāret and mosque of Gedik Aḥmed Pasha, 879/1474,
plan 280
8.11a Edirne, mosque and ʿimāret of Bāyezīd II, 893/1487–1488; plan 286
8.11b Edirne, mosque and ʿimāret of Bāyezīd II, 893/1487–1488; view of the hospice
section flanking the mosque 287
8.12a Bursa, zāviye/ʿimāret of Murād II (830/1426) converted into a congregational
mosque in the later tenth/sixteenth century: interior toward the prayer
eyvān 292
8.12b Bursa, zāviye/ʿimāret of Murād II (830/1426) converted into a congregational
mosque in the later tenth/sixteenth century: interior toward the hospice
room transformed into an eyvān 293
8.13 Bursa, zāviye/ʿimāret of Murād II (830/1426) converted into a congregational
mosque in the later 10th/sixteenth century, plan 294
8.14 Bursa, Muradiye zāviye/ʿimāret reconstitution by Sedat Emir showing the
original layout of the interior 295
8.15a Bursa, Orhan ʿimāret (740/1339–1340) converted into a congregational
mosque ca. 984/1576; plan 298
8.15b Bursa, Orhan ʿimāret (740/1339–1340) converted into a congregational
xii figures

mosque ca. 984/1576; reconstitution by Sedat Emir showing the original

layout of the interior 299
8.15c Bursa, Orhan ʿimāret (740/1339–1340) converted into a congregational
mosque ca. 984/1576; view from north, with later addition of side
entrance 300
9.1 Map of nonconformist dervish tekkes in Eastern Rumeli up to 1008/1600
(map by G. Boykov) 312
11.1 Sultan Ahmed Mosque, Istanbul, 1018–1026/1609–17, with the royal pavilion
on the left protruding from the prayer hall 378
11.2 View of the celebration of the Prophet’s nativity at the Sultan Ahmed
Mosque, with the royal prayer loge at the far-left corner. By Charles-Nicolas
Cochin and Née, 1787, from Ignatius Mouradgea d’Ohsson, Tableau général
de l’Empire Othoman, pl. 25. Engraving on paper 382
11.3 Sultan Ahmed Mosque, royal pavilion viewed toward its entrance side, with
the attached mosque on the right 386
11.4 Yeni Cami, Istanbul, 1006–1076/1597–1665, with the royal pavilion on the left
protruding from the prayer hall 389
11.5 Yeni Cami, royal pavilion viewed toward its entrance ramp, with the
attached mosque on the left 390
11.6 Yeni Valide Mosque, Üsküdar, Istanbul, 1120–1122/1708–1710 392
11.7 Nuruosmaniye Mosque, Istanbul, 1161–1169/1748–1755, aerial view, with the
Grand Bazaar in front and the Sultan Ahmed Mosque in the right
background. Photographed by ʿAlī Rıżāʾ Bey, ca. 1880s. Albumen print 394
11.8 Nuruosmaniye Mosque, interior of the prayer hall looking toward the royal
prayer loge 399
11.9 Nuruosmaniye Mosque, royal pavilion, with the attached prayer hall visible
on the far left 397
11.10 Laleli Mosque, Istanbul, 1174–1177/1760–4, qibla facade of the prayer hall,
with the royal pavilion on the right 401
11.11 Hamidiye Complex, Istanbul, 1189–1194/1775–80, with the sebīl in the right
center and the tomb partially visible on the far left. Albumen print by Basil
Kargopoulo, 1875 406
11.12 Beylerbeyi Mosque, Beylerbeyi, Istanbul, 1191–1192/1777–1778, renovated
1235–1236/1820–1821 407
11.13 Beylerbeyi Mosque, interior looking toward the entrance, with the royal
prayer loge on the right 408
11.14 View of the Beylerbeyi Mosque from the Bosphorus during a visit by
Maḥmūd II, showing the original single minaret. By Wolf after Ludwig
Fuhrmann, from Edward Raczyński, Dziennik podróży do Turcyi odbytey w
roku MDCCCXIV (Wrocław, 1821), pl. 44. Engraving on paper 409
figures xiii

11.15 Selimiye Mosque, Üsküdar, Istanbul, 1216–1220/1802–1805, view toward the

mosque’s right side, with the royal pavilion projecting toward the foreground
(the original minaret caps were conical). Albumen print by Abdullah frères,
1880–1893 411
11.16 Ortaköy Mosque (Büyük Mecidiye Mosque), Ortaköy, Istanbul, completed
1271/1854, view of a royal visit for the Friday prayer. Photographed by Pascal
Sébah, 1885. Albumen print 413
Abbreviations

EI2 Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd ed., Leiden 1954–2004

EI3 Encyclopaedia of Islam, 3rd ed., Leiden 2007–
EIr Encyclopaedia Iranica, London 1982–
IA İslâm Ansiklopedisi
TDVİA Türk Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi, Istanbul 1988–2016

AO Acta Orientalia
AO-H Acta Orientalia (Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae)
Arabica Arabica. Revue d’études arabes
BJMES British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies
BO Bibliotheca Orientalis
BSOAS Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies
Der Islam Der Islam. Zeitschrift für Geschichte und Kultur des islamischen Orients
IJMES International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies
JAOS Journal of the American Oriental Society
JESHO Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient
JIS Journal of Islamic Studies
JNES Journal of Near Eastern Studies
JOS Journal of Ottoman Studies
JQS Journal of Quranic Studies
JRAS Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society
JSAI Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam
JSS Journal of Semitic Studies
MSR Mamlūk Studies Review
MW The Muslim World
Oriens Oriens. Zeitschrift der Internationalen Gesellschaft für Orientforschung
REI Revue des études islamiques
REMMM Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée
SIr Studia Iranica
SI Studia Islamica
WI Die Welt des Islams
WO Die Welt des Orients
WZKM Wiener Zeitschrift für die Kunde des Morgenlandes
ZDMG Zeitschrift der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft
Note on Transliteration

In this book, we follow the Encyclopaedia of the Qurʾān transliteration system

for Arabic, and the International Journal of Middle East Studies transliteration
system for Ottoman Turkish. Names and terms that are common to both lan-
guages have been transliterated according to either system, depending on the
context.
Geographic designations are not transliterated. Names of well-known
groups are not transliterated (such as Hanafi, Kızılbaş, Naqshbandi, Sunnis) or
are rendered in simplified transliteration (such as Shi‘ites, Mu‘tazilites, ‘Alids).
Terms that are commonly known are given in their English form (for instance,
Sunni, kadi, mufti, sharia, madrasa) and the more technical terms among them
are italicized (for instance, masjid, waqf, tariqa).
 chapter 1

Historicizing the Study of Sunni Islam in the

Ottoman Empire, c. 1450–c. 1750

Tijana Krstić

Recent studies in anthropology have increasingly come to understand Islam

as a “set of interpretative resources and practices” accumulated over centuries
through engaging with the key sources of Islam—the Quran, hadith, and pro-
phetic custom (sunna). In this view, being a Muslim is a result of individual
and collective efforts “to grapple with those resources and shape those prac-
tices in meaningful ways,” giving their practitioners a sense of being embedded
in long chains of authenticated interpretation and transmission of a tradition.1
Tradition is here not understood as a simple replication of the past; it is not
passively received but rather actively constructed in a particular social and his-
torical setting, simultaneously affirming a “synchronic bond between actors”
in a given community and extending it into the past, into a “diachronic com-
munity” of Muslims.2 The implication of this approach, which also informs
the present volume, is that such efforts to engage with authenticating texts
and acts as well as methods of interpretation of Islam transpired throughout
history, resulting in numerous historically and contextually contingent under-
standings of what it means to be a Muslim. However, that is hardly reflected
in mainstream historiography, which has long associated dynamism and evo-
lution in Islamic traditions and their interpretation only with the so-called
classical or formative period, from the first/seventh to the seventh/thirteenth
century, while envisioning stagnation, decline, and derivativeness as the defin-
ing features of the centuries that followed. This has been particularly true for
the geographies considered marginal to what is often viewed as the “core lands”
of Islam (which for the late “formative” period typically means Syria, Egypt, and
the Hijaz).3

1 Bowen, A new anthropology 3.

2 Grieve and Weiss, Illuminating the half-life of tradition 3. See also Anjum, Islam as a discur-
sive tradition.
3 For a discussion of how this notion of “core lands” has been influencing writing about Islamic
history, see Bashir, On Islamic time.

© tijana krstić, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004440296_002

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
2 krstić

Fortunately, recent publications suggest that this trend is beginning to

change and that the “post-formative” Islamic discourses from North Africa to
India and beyond are slowly coming into a sharper focus.4 In seeking to capture
what might be special about studying post-formative Muslim communities,
Shahab Ahmed suggested that they drew on the synthesis of discursive and
institutional elements built up during the first six centuries of Islam, finding
themselves “equipped and disposed to strike out in new constructions, trajec-
tories, tenors, and expressions of what it means to be Muslim.”5 The present
volume epitomizes this growing scholarly interest in historicizing Islamic dis-
courses and practices of the post-formative era by exploring their embed-
dedness in the changing political and intellectual landscape of post-Mongol
Eurasia, which was informed by the demise of the late medieval Timurid poli-
ties and the Mamluk sultanate, and the building of the Ottoman, Safavid, and
Mughal empires. The essays focus on how Muslims within a particular polity
that emerged at this time—the Ottoman Empire—engaged not only with the
textual sources of Islam but also with what Ahmed terms the “Con-Text of Rev-
elation,” namely the body of meaning that previous generations of Muslims
produced in their hermeneutical engagement with the Revelation as to what
it means to be a Muslim in general and, within the framework of this study, a
Sunni Muslim in particular.6
As scholars of Islam have noted, the terms sunna and “Sunni” themselves
have a complicated history, although their evolution and connotations are
rarely explored beyond the fifth/eleventh century. Today, sunna is understood
to mean “generally approved standard or practice introduced by the Prophet
as well as the pious Muslims of olden days.”7 However, the term itself is of

4 See especially Bauer, Die Kultur and Ahmed, What is Islam? Important contributions to under-
standing the new intellectual trends of the period include Pourjavady, Philosophy; Moin,
The millenial sovereign; Hagen, The order of knowledge; Burak, The second formation; El-
Rouayheb, Islamic intellectual history; Binbaş, Intellectual networks; Atçıl, Scholars and sul-
tans; Yılmaz, Caliphate redefined; Markiewicz, The crisis of kingship, to name just a few recent
studies particularly relevant to the present collection.
5 Ahmed, What is Islam? 81.
6 Ahmed, What is Islam? 356–357. This body of meaning is not purely textual but includes a
whole array of emotions, practices, actions, aesthetic choices, etc. that are meaningful to their
actors in terms of Islam. Ahmed understands “Con-Text” as “the full encyclopaedia of episte-
mologies, interpretations, identities, persons and places, structures of authority, textualities
and intertextualities, motifs, symbols, values, meaningful questions and meaningful answers,
agreements and disagreements, emotions and affinities and affects, aesthetics, modes of say-
ing, doing and being, and other truth-claims and components of existential exploration and
meaning-making in terms of Islam that Muslims acting as Muslims have produced.”
7 Juynboll, Sunna.
historicizing the study of sunni islam in the ottoman empire 3

pre-Islamic origin, and as Ignaz Goldziher observed, it seems to have origi-

nally referred to a general “standard of correctitude” that was subsequently
restricted to the conduct of the Prophet and his Companions as exemplar and
norm.8 Nevertheless, during the first two and a half centuries of Islam the term
sunna retained a certain vagueness, especially when used in different construc-
tions such as aṣḥāb sunna, ahl al-sunna, or ahl al-sunna wa-l-jamāʿa (People of
the Sunna and the community), from which the term “Sunni” is derived.9 As
Marshall Hodgson noted, before the third/ninth century various groups and
factions used the term “Sunni” to define their own understanding of belief and
practice as exemplary and laudable and to dismiss opponents in the context
of political and theological discussions: “Some used it for those devoted purely
to the use of hadith reports (sunnah), without speculative discussion (kalâm).
It was used later, among those who were willing to accept kalâm discussion
at all, for the Ash‘arî or Mâturîdî schools of kalâm as against the Mu‘tazilî; it
was used by Shari‘ah-minded zealots to distinguish Shari‘ah-minded people
from the Ṣûfî mystics; and generally as the equivalent of English ‘orthodox.’”10
This early history of the term reminds us that rather than being perceived, as
it is today, primarily in contrast to Shi‘ism, belonging to the ahl al-sunna wa-l-
jamāʿa was juxtaposed to belonging to ahl al-bidaʿ—those who introduce inno-
vative dogmatic ideas.11 The stance championed by the Party of ʿAlī (Shi‘ites)
that it was ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib rather than Abū Bakr who was the rightful heir
of the Prophet, was part of the spectrum of beliefs and practices that were
identified as blameworthy innovation, and that contributed to the process of
calibration of what ahl al-sunna wa-l-jamāʿa stood for in the early centuries of
Islam.12 The early phases of this process have been better studied, and scholars
have pointed to the Miḥna, the so-called Inquisition instigated by the caliph al-
Maʾmūn (198–218/813–833), as the pivotal event in the formation of the ahl al-
sunna wa-l-jamāʿa and “crystallization of Sunnism as we known it.”13 Some have
argued that “from the 4th/10th century onwards the term sunna did not acquire
new connotations or nuances,”14 while others see a “full blown” or fully real-

8 Goldziher, Muslim studies ii, 25–26. In contrast, Juynboll notes that in the “Ḏj̱āhiliyya”
sunna denoted any type of conduct, good or bad.
9 The question was examined in detail by scholars interested in the evolution and mutual
relationship between the concepts of sunna and hadith. See, for instance, Melchert, The
piety; Nawas, The appellation ṣāḥib sunna.
10 Hodgson, The venture of Islam i, 278.
11 On the ahl al-bidaʿ in contrast to ahl al-sunna, see Juynboll, Sunna.
12 On the evolution of the Sunni creed, see Wensinck, The Muslim creed.
13 Nawas, The appellation ṣāḥib sunna 22.
14 Juynboll, Sunna.
4 krstić

ized Sunnism emerge only in the fifth/eleventh century.15 The present volume
builds on these studies, which emphasize that “Sunnism” itself has a history,
and explores what that history was beyond the “classical period” and beyond
the “core lands.”
The mid-ninth/fifteenth century witnessed a profound reconfiguration of
the Islamic world, propelling new geographical areas into a position of promi-
nence and restructuring scholarly and trade networks, with Istanbul and vari-
ous Anatolian and Balkan cities emerging as the new key nodes in the commu-
nication between and among the centers of Islamic learning, both to the south-
west and to the east.16 Recent studies on these developments highlight the fact
that the notion of the “core lands” is not a useful category in spatial terms;
however, the claim that “the core” of Islam resided in particular geographies
and scholarly genealogies associated with them certainly played an important
discursive role in the encounter among the “Arab,” “Rumi,” and “Ajam” ulama
during the era in question, especially as they embarked on the legitimation of
different competing imperial agendas.17 The present collection looks into how
various Ottoman Muslims, stemming largely from the lands of Rum (Anato-
lia and the Balkans), understood and engaged with the notions of the Sunni
tradition, to which they were exposed through various chains of transmission,
to define what it meant to be a Sunni Muslim and what constituted correct
belief and practice. The essays also explore how these notions of “orthodoxy”
and “orthopraxy” were informed by the Ottoman experiences of empire build-
ing between the late ninth/fifteenth and early twelfth/eighteenth centuries.
Students of Islam largely agree that the notion of “orthodoxy,” emerging from
the study of Christianity, is inadequate for analysis of the dynamics between
“belief” and “unbelief” in Islam. They do so on the grounds that, unlike in
Christianity, in Islam there is no clergy or ecumenical councils who would be
authorized to define “correct” belief; Islamic law is fundamentally pluralistic
and envisions different ways of doing things correctly, and there are multiple
“hermeneutical paths,” as Ahmed put it, for reaching the Truth. At the same
time, however, most scholars recognize that, for want of a better term, the

15 Barkey, The formation of Islam; Reinhart, On Sunni sectarianism.

16 The most compelling visualization of the reconfigurations of the Islamic scholarly net-
works between 1100 and 1800, including the visible shift in the late fifteenth century, can
be found in Romanov, Algorithmic analysis (for the maps see S241–243). For the intel-
lectual networks developing in this changing political landscape, see especially Binbaş,
Intellectual networks and Markiewicz, The crisis of kingship.
17 For recent studies that explore this competitive engagement see Kuru, The literature of
Rum; Pfeifer, Encounter after the conquest; Burak, The second formation 65–126; Meshal,
Sharia 69–102.
historicizing the study of sunni islam in the ottoman empire 5

notion of “orthodoxy” can be productively used if it is not viewed as a fixed

body of opinions or a particular strand of Islam but rather as a discursive pro-
cess whereby different social actors are vying to impose as authoritative their
own understanding of which beliefs should be viewed as “correct” and which do
not meet that criterion—a process contingent on the configurations of power
in a given social and historical context.18 The present volume builds on this
understanding of orthodoxy and the related notion of “orthopraxy” (concep-
tualized here as a discursive process seeking to limit what constitutes “correct”
practice), exploring their manifestations in the Ottoman context as well as the
social and institutional developments that informed them. At the same time,
the essays do not shy away from suggesting that the more concerted efforts to
limit the multiplicity of the possible paths to Truth and circumscribe, if not
eliminate, the “culture of ambiguity” that characterized medieval Islam, began
in the early modern era with the Ottomans making decisive institutional strides
in this direction, rather than being an outcome of Islam’s encounter with post-
Enlightenment Europe, as suggested by recent studies.19 The volume, thus,
approaches the notion of “orthodoxy” from both a synchronic and diachronic
perspective, as a dynamic arising from a particular historical context, but also
as an evolving mindset increasingly (although not universally) domesticated in
the post-formative Islamic discourse as a consequence of building territorial,
bureaucratic empires in the post-Mongol era. While it focuses on the Ottoman
experience, the goal of the volume is not to argue for an Ottoman Sonderweg
but rather to create the basis for a conversation about the comparable and pos-
sibly connected and entangled developments—or lack thereof—in other early
modern Islamic (and other) empires.
The attempts to better understand the nature of Islamic discourses in the
Ottoman Empire intensified over the last three decades as the field of Ottoman
Studies began to shift from an overwhelming focus on socioeconomic history to
include more concerted inquiries into cultural and intellectual developments.
Up to that point, historians of the Ottoman Empire left the study of various
communal and individual expressions of belief and practices of Islam largely
to scholars from divinity schools and Islamic Studies departments, overlook-
ing the embeddedness of these phenomena in the larger Ottoman social and
institutional history. However, by the late 1990s questions began to emerge
about how and why the Ottoman Empire evolved from what historiography had

18 Asad, The idea; Knysh, ‘Orthodoxy’ and ‘heresy’; Calder, The limits; El Shamsy, The social
construction; Ahmed, What is Islam? 273–274.
19 See Bauer, Die Kultur 192–223; also Ahmed, What is Islam?
6 krstić

characterized as a “syncretic” eighth/fourteenth-century polity, where ambigu-

ity between Sunnism and Shi‘ism (and even Islam and Christianity) prevailed,
into an Islamic state concerned with defining and enforcing a “Sunni ortho-
doxy” by the early tenth/sixteenth century. Scholars focusing on the role of
Sufis and Sufism in Ottoman society in particular took the lead in historiciz-
ing the debates concerning the nature and boundaries of Ottoman Sunnism
and how they changed from the ninth/fifteenth to the eleventh/seventeenth
centuries.20 Another important research focus—related in many ways to the
changing attitudes toward Sufism—was Ottoman scholars’ redefinition of the
notion of heresy (zandaqa) as a legal term and its employment in the heresy
trials that became common in the first half of the tenth/sixteenth century and
recurred throughout the next 200 plus years.21
Traditional scholarship maintained that the Ottomans’ closer alignment
with “Sunni orthodoxy” was the result of the Ottoman conquest of the Arab
Muslim territories of Syria and Egypt from the Mamluks in 922–923/1516–1517.
In this view, the Ottomans’ move away from a “metadox”22 to an “orthodox”
mindset in the early tenth/sixteenth century was understood as the outcome
of the “core lands” exerting their influence on the “periphery” and exporting
what was imagined as a “mature” and “stable” Sunni Islam.23 While some recent

20 Pioneering studies include Karamustafa, God’s unruly friends; Clayer, Mystiques; Ocak’s
many articles and his monograph Osmanlı toplumunda zındıklar, and Terzioğlu’s Sufi and
dissident in the Ottoman Empire. Important insights into the nature of early Ottoman
Islam and the role of dervishes were also put forward in Kafadar’s Between two worlds,
which, in turn, inspired numerous further studies on dervishes’ role in Ottoman society
and politics. Among these see especially Le Gall, A culture of sufism and Curry, The trans-
formation.
21 A pioneering work on this topic was Üstün, Heresy and legitimacy, followed by Ocak’s
Osmanlı toplumunda zındıklar. Much still remains to be elucidated not only about the
actual number of heresy trials that transpired in the early modern era but also about the
legal and theological thinking that informed them. See especially Özen, İslâm hukukuna
göre; Erünsal, XV–XVI. asır Osmanlı zendaka; Erünsal, Molla Lütfi; Al-Tikriti, Kalām in
the service; Menekşe, Osmanlı toplumunda zındıklık, etc. Nenad Filipović is also currently
working on a major study on this subject, started as a collaboration with late Shahab
Ahmed, tentatively entitled Neither heaven nor hell fire.
22 Cemal Kafadar defined metadoxy as “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.” See his Between two
worlds 76.
23 Representative of this view is Andrew Hess’s wording: “Absorption of enormous territo-
ries peopled by Orthodox Muslims then joined success in the Holy War to place Ottoman
society, still fluid in structure, more than ever under the stabilizing influence of an unchal-
lenged and revived Islamic culture. In this area the transfer of the ‘Ulema from Cairo to
historicizing the study of sunni islam in the ottoman empire 7

studies suggest that scholars and scholarship from the Mamluk lands indeed
played an important role in the development of Ottoman Sunnism—albeit
in a different way than imagined by traditional historiography—this line of
research awaits further exploration.24 Instead, in recent years scholars have
focused more on the rise of the Safavid Empire as a catalyst for the processes
that led to the Sunni-Shi‘i polarization in the post-Mongol Turco-Iranian world
and the fashioning of a Sunni orthodoxy in the Ottoman Empire. A number
of studies suggested that it was this threat to Ottoman legitimacy and aspira-
tions to the leadership of the Muslim community that prompted the leading
jurists of the Ottoman Empire to begin to more clearly delineate the beliefs
of the “People of the Sunna and the Community” in contrast to those of the
Kızılbaş, Rāfiḍī (Tr. Rāfiżī) and/or Shi‘i followers of the Safavid shah.25 At the
same time, research in the field of Safavid history has indicated that Ottoman
attempts to define and police the boundaries of Sunni belief were mirrored
by the Safavid efforts to construct a Twelver Shi‘i orthodoxy over the course of
the tenth/sixteenth century, not incidentally by employing Shi‘i jurists from the
Ottoman territory of Jabal Amil in Mt. Lebanon who were well versed in both
the four Sunni schools of law and the Shi‘i legal tradition.26 Taken together,
these strands of research point to the heretofore insufficiently explored ways
in which Rumi Muslims’ interaction and competitive encounters with their
coreligionists to the southwest and east affected both the nature of Ottoman
Sunnism and the nature of religious politics in neighboring Muslim polities.
More recently, these questions were taken up in the context of the debate on
“confessionalization” and “Sunnitization.” Some scholars—a number of them
contributors to this volume—have embraced these concepts to describe what
they perceive as a growing concern within the Muslim communities in the
“lands of Rum” with defining and enforcing the boundaries of correct belief and

Istanbul after the conquest of Egypt symbolized the final religious and social shaping of
an Ottoman state whose population was now solidly Muslim.” See Hess, The Ottoman con-
quest 70.
24 See Pfeifer, Encounter after the conquest; Al-Tikriti, Ibn-i Kemal’s confessionalism;
Kaplan, An anti-Ibn ‘Arabi; as well as articles by Pfeifer, Al-Tikriti, and Terzioğlu in this
volume.
25 See, for instance, Savaş, XVI. asırda; Al-Tikriti, Kalām in the service; Dressler, Invent-
ing orthodoxy, etc. Earlier seminal studies by Eberhard, Osmanische Polemik and Üstün,
Heresy and legitimacy, have also been “rediscovered” and integrated into the conversation.
As these studies point out, there was considerable semantic overlap in the way the terms
Kızılbaş, Rāfiżī and Shi‘i were used by early modern Ottoman authors, depending on the
genre of the sources and agendas of the authors. On this issue see Atçıl, The Safavid threat
and Baltacıoğlu-Brammer, One word, many implications.
26 Abisaab, Converting Persia; Stewart, Polemics and patronage.
8 krstić

practice, as well as the social impact of this phenomenon, beginning sometime

in the second half of the ninth/fifteenth century and continuing over the fol-
lowing centuries.27 In the late 1970s, when it was first articulated by H. Schilling
and W. Reinhard, the concept of “confessionalization” was meant to resolve the
impasse in German historiography between, on the one hand, confessionally
inflected church history that focused exclusively on dogma, and a social/eco-
nomic/Marxist approach, which excised religion from the study of history of
the German state and society, on the other. Schilling and Reinhard, building on
Ernst W. Zeeden’s concept of “confession-building,” argued that the building
of the Catholic, Lutheran, and later Calvinist confessions not only had impor-
tant conceptual parallels but also a similar social impact that reverberated
far beyond the church, making an indelible mark on anything from gender
relations, to art, culture, and early modern state formation. They termed this
phenomenon “confessionalization” and postulated that the building of con-
fessional communities entailed social disciplining that could be harnessed for
political purposes, particularly for the goal of building a territorial state.28
By engaging with the notion of confessionalization and the massive schol-
arship it generated in the context of European historiography over the last
few decades, Ottomanists working in this vein drew attention to the fact that
sectarian polarization within both early modern Christendom and Islamdom
transpired at the same time and had similar social consequences, raising the
question—which we explore in detail elsewhere—of whether this was a coin-
cidence and whether these processes were informed by some shared underly-
ing dynamic.29 More pertinent to this volume, however, by engaging with the

27 Krstić, Illuminated by the light of Islam; Krstić, Contested conversions; Terzioğlu, Sufis in
the age of state-building; Terzioğlu, Where catechism meets ʿilm-i ḥāl; Ivanyi, Virtue, piety
and the law; Burak, Faith, law and empire; etc.
28 Reinhard, Zwang zur Konfessionalisierung?; Reinhard, Reformation, Counter- Reforma-
tion; Schilling, Confessional Europe.
29 This question is at the heart of the ERC Consolidator project entitled “The Fashion-
ing of a Sunni Orthodoxy and the Entangled Histories of Confession-Building in the
Ottoman Empire, 15th–18th Centuries” (OTTOCONFESSION, Project ID: 648498) of which
the present volume is one of the outcomes. Placing the question of the Ottoman turn to
the notions of correct belief and practice and the initiatives for reform and renewal of
Islam into a broader Eurasian framework, this line of investigation opens up the possi-
bilities for exploring the entanglements and connections in the sphere of the politics of
piety across the geographical and confessional boundaries of the early modern world. It is
mindful of the fact that in the Ottoman Empire Muslims coexisted with numerous Chris-
tian and Jewish communities that were profoundly affected by the confessional debates
in early modern Europe through missionary efforts and various forms of human mobility,
and raises the question of whether and how various communal understandings of “ortho-
historicizing the study of sunni islam in the ottoman empire 9

notion of confessionalization they also highlighted its potential for generating

new inquiries into the heretofore neglected relationship between Islamic dis-
courses and Ottoman society and politics. Rather than uncritically importing or
“applying” a much criticized30 European paradigm to the study of Islamic his-
tory, they proposed to use it as a heuristic device that would inspire new ques-
tions to both well-known Ottoman sources and those traditionally explored
only by experts in Islamic law and theology, such as various creeds, theologi-
cal treatises and polemics, compendia of law, prayer and sermon collections,
heresiographies, etc.—a goal that is central to this volume. As a result, recent
research began to shed new light on the distinctly Ottoman experience of a
broader trend that entailed a growing concern with “orthodoxy” and “ortho-
praxy” across early modern Eurasia.31
In a seminal article Derin Terzioğlu termed this Ottoman turn toward ortho-
doxy and orthopraxy “Sunnitization,” which she defined as “the adoption by
the Ottoman religious and political authorities of a series of policies to modify
the behavior (and to a lesser extent the beliefs) of all their Muslim subjects in
line with the precepts of Sunni Islam, as they were understood at the time.”32
Over the last few years, this line of scholarship generated a considerable debate
among students of early modern Islam, who began to look more closely at
the nature of the phenomena in question and critically assess the terminology
used to describe them.33 Scholars also began to examine more closely how the
developments in the Ottoman context related to the late medieval post-Mongol
dynamics. It is important to briefly review their most pertinent findings before
discussing how the present volume expands this debate.
For instance, recent studies emphasize the role of Sufism and law as the
two most significant intellectual resources that informed the narratives of
sovereignty following the Mongol destruction of the caliphate in 656/1258, as
well as the Sunni-Shi‘i polarization that emerged in the Turco-Iranian world by

doxy” and strategies of enforcing it were intertwined. On the project-related research

exploring cross-confessional entanglements in the Ottoman Empire, see the forthcom-
ing volume Entangled confessionalizations? Dialogic perspectives on the politics of piety and
community building in the Ottoman Empire, 15th–18th centuries, Krstić and Terzioǧlu (eds.).
30 For a summary of criticisms accumulated over decades against the original confessional-
ization paradigm as formulated by Schilling and Reinhard, see Lotz-Heumann, The con-
cept of “confessionalization.”
31 Green, Islam in the early modern world; Parker, Reformation in global perspective.
32 Terzioğlu, How to conceptualize.
33 In addition to the studies cited previously and the present volume, another new edited
collection directly engages with the issues outlined so far: see Erginbaş (ed.), Ottoman
Sunnism.
10 krstić

the early 900s/1500s. Scholars have recently pointed to the prevalence of the
eschatological notions of the Mahdi (the guided one) and mujaddid (renewer)
as well as mystical concepts such as qutb (the pole or axis mundi) and al-
insān al-kāmil (the perfect human being) in the self-fashioning of the Ottoman,
Safavid, and Mughal rulers in the early 900s/1500s, foregrounding the role
of the Sufi discourse in the new, alternative conceptualizations of universal
authority.34 As Hüseyin Yılmaz has demonstrated, Sufis imagined a cosmic gov-
ernment where the ultimate authority rested in the most perfect human being
(a mystical axis mundi/qutb) who possesses the spiritual authority (walāya)
but is at the same time the caliph on earth. They reimagined the caliphate
within a mystical framework and disassociated it from its historicist justifica-
tions and juristic basis, enabling various Sufis as well as other individuals—
including Ottoman sultans—to potentially claim universal, caliphal authority.
But Sufis were not the only ones claiming walāya. The same type of author-
ity was associated with the Shi‘i imams, who as descendants of the Prophet
through his daughter Fāṭima and ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib claimed to embody both
spiritual and temporal rulership. This made ‘Alid genealogy a coveted trait
among political contenders and the veneration of the ahl al-bayt (the house-
hold of the Prophet) a widespread feature of piety across the late medieval
Turco-Iranian world, in some cases blurring while in others accentuating the
boundaries between Sunni and Shi‘i Islam (both of which were different at
this point in time from the modern phenomena we understand by these terms
today).35
In the early tenth/sixteenth century, the Ottoman sultan Selīm (d. 926/1520)
and his son Süleymān (d. 974/1566), who sought to “pour themselves into the
mold”36 of a messianic ruler and claim authority in this landscape dominated
by the notions of mystical sovereignty, found themselves at a distinct disad-
vantage vis-à-vis the Safavid Shah Ismāʿīl (d. 930/1524), who was not only the
spiritual leader (shaykh) of the Safavid Sufi order but was also believed by his
followers to be the reincarnation of Imam ʿAlī. When in 907/1501, upon the con-
quest of Tabriz, Shah Ismāʿīl proclaimed the conversion of heretofore Sunni
Iran to Twelver Shi‘ism—a process that would take a century to unfold—the
stage was set for the onset of confessional polarization. As Hüseyin Yılmaz and

34 Fleischer, Lawgiver as messiah; Moin, The millenial sovereign; Yılmaz, Caliphate redefined;
Melvin-Koushki, Early modern Islamicate empire.
35 McChesney, Waqf in Central Asia 268–269; Yıldırım, Sunni orthodox vs. Shi‘ite heterodox?;
Peacock, Islam, literature. On ‘Alid descent as a tool of confessional boundary-making, see
Pfeiffer, Confessional ambiguity.
36 See Moin, The millenial sovereign 54.
historicizing the study of sunni islam in the ottoman empire 11

Matthew Melvin-Koushki have noted, it was the competition over walāya, or

spiritual authority and sovereignty, that led to the exaggeration of the con-
fessional difference in the Turco-Iranian context.37 In other words, “sectarian
consciousness was not the cause of the Ottoman-Safavid conflict but its conse-
quence,” and it was only with considerable effort in the coming two centuries—
including by Sufis themselves—that the population living in these two empires
was educated about the differences between Sunnism and Shi‘ism, both of
which were also being redefined in the process.38 Interestingly, Yılmaz’s and
Elke Eberhardt’s research suggests that the primary resource the Ottomans
used to educate themselves about the differences between the teachings of the
Sunnis and Kızılbaş/Rāfiżīs/Shi‘ites, at least in the first half of the tenth/six-
teenth century, were the works of the Sunni scholars fleeing the Safavid lands
rather than the works of scholars from the Mamluk lands. However, it is likely
that further research would reveal new aspects to this issue, given that in the
Mamluk context anti-Shi‘i sentiment was already quite pronounced since the
late seventh/thirteenth century—as illustrated by various campaigns against
the Shi‘i population in Mt. Lebanon as well as a number of heresy trials—
although it never reached the level of a concerted anti-Shi‘i policy.39
In these parallel and dialogic early modern processes of “Sunnitization” and
“Shi‘itization,” which were met with acceptance, rejection, and reappropria-
tion, ‘Alid loyalty and the veneration of the ahl al-bayt became a contested
terrain that is increasingly drawing scholars’ attention and has been analyzed
under the rubric of “confessional ambiguity.”40 This research suggests that
an “age of confessional polarization” did not simply replace the “age of con-
fessional ambiguity,” but rather that the discourses of confessional polariza-
tion and resistance to it coexisted, much like in the Ilkhanid period, but in a
changed institutional and political environment that gave this dialectic a dif-
ferent social expression.41 Furthermore, there are indications that the process
of differentiation and building of confessional communities did not affect only

37 Yılmaz, Caliphate redefined 257; Melvin-Koushki, Early modern Islamicate empire 369.
38 Yılmaz, Caliphate redefined 257; on the process of defining the Kızılbaş as Rāfiżīs and/or
Shi’a, 256–266.
39 See, for instance, Winter, Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad; Wiederhold, Blasphemy; Levanoni,
Takfīr in Egypt. On the domestication of Mamluk learning in the lands of Rum, see Yıldız,
From Cairo to Ayasuluk; Kaplan, An anti-Ibn ‘Arabi; and Pfeifer’s, Al-Tikriti’s, and Terzi-
oğlu’s articles in this volume.
40 See, for instance, Erginbaş, Problematizing Ottoman Sunnism; Erginbaş, Reappraising
Ottoman religiosity; his article in this volume, and Terzioğlu, Confessional ambiguity.
41 On the coexistence of these discourses in the Ilkhanid period, see Pfeiffer, Confessional
ambiguity.
12 krstić

Sunnis and Shi‘ites but also the Kızılbaş/Alevi communities who straddled the
two empires. As recent studies suggest, the Kızılbaş/Alevi communities in the
Ottoman Empire experienced during the tenth/sixteenth century the forma-
tion of their own “path” ( yol, in Turkish), which entailed changes in their social
organization, the emergence of a spiritual hierarchy, as well as a set of rituals
and beliefs. Given that most of these communities inhabited rural areas and
shared a predominantly oral culture, the contours of this “path,” and the extent
to which its social, ritual, and doctrinal bases were systematized, is a matter of
new and ongoing inquiries, which have also been informed by the debates on
Sunnitization and confessionalization in the Ottoman context.42
In addition to Sufism, recent research has drawn attention to Islamic law as a
crucial resource for the new concepts of sovereignty and religious politics in the
post-Mongol period. Guy Burak has argued that under the influence of Chinggis
Khan’s image as a divine legislator, post-Timurid rulers sought a new relation-
ship with Islamic law, whereby different dynasties adopted a particular school
of Sunni law as their official state school, not as an act of patronage but with the
ambition of regulating the school’s structures, authorities, and doctrines.43 In
a separate monograph Burak elaborated on this development in the context of
the Ottoman adoption of the Hanafi school of law as their state madhhab, and
the institutional changes that this development both reflected and enabled.44
These changes, which have been the focus of several important recent stud-
ies, entailed: the emergence of an imperial learned hierarchy topped by the
state-appointed jurisconsult; the formation of an imperial educational system;
the emergence of an imperial jurisprudential canon; and the systematic recon-
struction of the Hanafi genealogy.45 Although the integration of the ulama into
the fabric of the state and the rulers’ aspirations to determine how law is imple-
mented is increasing observable already in Ayyubid- and Zangid-period Syria
and Egypt, and only gets stronger in the Mamluk era, as epitomized in the
appointment and function of the four chief judges, unlike judges, jurists were
not generally appointed by the ruler and were traditionally independent of the

42 On this point, see Yıldırım, Literary foundations; and Karakaya Stump, The Kizilbash-
Alevis, especially 256–319.
43 Burak, The second formation.
44 Ibid.
45 Although Imber’s study Ebu’s-su‘ud was published more than two decades ago, it found
a more concerted response only in the recent surge of studies on the imperial legal cul-
ture in Süleymān’s time. See, for instance, Buzov, The lawgiver; Atçıl, Scholars and sultans;
Burak, The second formation; Meshal, Sharia, etc. For an important study of the effects of
the imperial legal reforms on a particular locality, see Peirce, Morality tales.
historicizing the study of sunni islam in the ottoman empire 13

state in their interpretation of the law.46 In the Ottoman Empire, however, the
sultan could intervene into choices of particular opinions within the Hanafi
legal tradition through appointment of the chief jurist (known in the Ottoman
context as şeyhü’l-islām), although the power relationship between the sultans
and chief jurists could also be reversed.47 For this reason, some scholars have
argued that it was in fact the ulama who primarily profited from this arrange-
ment.48 Be it as it may, we see for the first time the rise of an “institutionally
identifiable group of jurists affiliated with the dynasty” whose rulings gener-
ally reflected the state-endorsed legal solutions, with fatwa serving as the key
mechanism of regulation within the school and the medium through which
novel legal solutions were introduced by Ottoman jurists.49
The promotion of a particular Sunni school of law into a state school of law
amounted to circumscribing the plurality of Islamic law in an unprecedented
way, while the existence of a state-affiliated, learned imperial hierarchy cre-
ated conditions conducive for a group of social actors to impose their opinion
of what constitutes correct belief and practice of Islam (i.e., the conditions for
the definition of “orthodoxy” and “orthopraxy”).50 Like in the case of the influ-
ence of Sufism on Ottoman Sunni consciousness, the role of law in Ottoman
society is better researched for the tenth/sixteenth century, with many ques-
tions still remaining open. One of those is certainly the extent to which the
Ottomans were successful in—or even intent upon—imposing a Hanafi hege-
mony throughout its domains, especially in Syria and Egypt, as well as the
extent and conditions under which they were open to embracing the solutions
from other legal schools when it was deemed expedient.51
Besides the research on Sufism and law, another field within the umbrella of
Ottoman studies that has generated significant insights for understanding the
process of Sunnitization and the rise of a confessional consciousness in the
Ottoman Empire has been architectural history. Gülru Necipoğlu’s magisterial
study of Architect Sinān’s opus and imperial ideology of the Süleymānic era
that informed it is particularly central in this respect. It inspired some of the
earliest inquiries into the role of Sunnism in Ottoman imperial self-fashioning

46 See, for instance, Lev, Symbiotic relations; Rapoport, Legal diversity.

47 See Tezcan, The second Ottoman Empire.
48 See, in particular, Buzov, The lawgiver.
49 Burak, The second formation.
50 El Shamsy, The social construction 112–115; Ahmed, What is Islam? 270.
51 On the issue of Hanafi hegemony versus legal pluralism in Ottoman Egypt, see Ibrahim,
Al-Sharani’s response; Atçıl, Memlükler’den Osmanlılar’a; on the openness to the opin-
ions of other schools, see especially recent studies on Ottoman jurists’ articulation of the
concept of heresy (zandaqa) listed in footnote 21.
14 krstić

by connecting the form and aesthetics of the tenth/sixteenth-century imperial

monuments to the contemporary social, institutional, and ideological devel-
opments, including the rivalry with the Safavids. For instance, Necipoğlu drew
attention to the spree of building mosques and masjids throughout the empire
that was initiated by Sultan Süleymān in order to highlight the centrality of
the congregational prayers in general and Friday prayers in particular to the
Ottoman Sunni imperial identity—in contrast to that of the Safavids. Neci-
poğlu raised the question of the society’s support for and participation in
this imperial vision of a Sunni community and highlighted the importance of
particular spaces—such as mosques and neighborhoods—as sites where nor-
mative behavior was enforced and where architecture, imperial ideology, and
Islamic law intersected in novel ways.52 Building on Necipoğlu’s seminal work,
Maximilian Hartmuth has drawn attention to the shift that begins sometime
in the mid- to late fifteenth century, from Ottoman cities having a single Fri-
day mosque built by the sultan to having multiple Friday mosques that could
be built by the members of the imperial elite. In addition to inquiring into
the changes this introduced to the organization of congregational prayers and
patterns of patronage, he also highlighted the accompanying changes to the
architecture of the mosques that privileged ritual space in a new way.53 The
question of how the changes in imperial ideology and politics of religion during
the ninth/fifteenth century were reflected in space—specifically, in the trans-
formation of the Ottoman “T-type” structures into mosques—is also examined
in this volume by Çiğdem Kafescioğlu. Zeynep Yürekli’s study, which situates
the choice of particular members of the Ottoman military elite—Rumeli fron-
tier lords—to patronize the shrines of the Bektashi Sufi order in Anatolia in the
broader context of Ottoman imperial and religious politics in the late ninth/fif-
teenth century, has also led to important insights into how imperial author-
ities, increasingly aware of the revolutionary potential of the Sufi discourse,
sought to Sunnitize less conformist Sufi orders and holy spaces associated with
them.54
Again, the questions of the Sunnitization of space and the spatial dimen-
sions of Sunnitization—with distinctions between “public” and “private” ar-
eas—have begun to be considered to some extent only for the early to mid-
tenth/sixteenth century, but less so (or not at all) for the later periods. Fur-

52 Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan.

53 Hartmuth, A late fifteenth-century change.
54 Yürekli, Architecture and hagiography; for important insights into the Sunnitization of
the Sufi orders and spaces associated with them, see Terzioğlu, Sufis in the age of state-
building; also Antov, The Ottoman “wild west.”
historicizing the study of sunni islam in the ottoman empire 15

thermore, the question of the extent to which these new intersections between
imperial ideology, piety, and space that scholars have begun to explore, mostly
in urban settings (which had mosques), affected vast populations living in the
villages (which in the best-case scenario—but not necessarily—had a masjid
that was often just a house designated for the purpose of communal prayer),
remains open and poses one of the most complex methodological challenges
for the researchers working in this field.55
The present volume seeks to move away from the early tenth/sixteenth cen-
tury that has until now dominated the research into Sunni-Shi‘i polarization in
the early modern era and the nature of Ottoman Sunnism by focusing on the
vicissitudes of generating an Ottoman Sunni Hanafi consciousness and resis-
tances to it in a longer perspective, looking both backward into the medieval
period and forward into the eleventh/seventeenth and twelfth/eighteenth cen-
turies.56 This approach allows authors to connect the insights from the research
on tenth/sixteenth-century developments with a cluster of existing studies
focusing on the emergence, starting in the early decades of the eleventh/seven-
teenth century, of various “sunna-minded”57 preachers, including the so-called
Kadızadelis, who were fiercely critical of their fellow Sunni Muslims’ practices
and beliefs.58 This phenomenon has heretofore been considered in isolation, as

55 This question was recently taken up by James Grehan in his Twilight of the saints, where
he points out that a vast majority of the premodern population in the Ottoman Arab
provinces lived in the villages and had no access to religious infrastructure, whether
mosques or churches. Grehan argues that in the absence of such access, countryside pop-
ulations (including the outskirts of the cities) largely adhered to an “agrarian religion,”
which did not systematically embrace any set of dogma or laws, had a strong local color-
ing, was practical and eclectic, and often hostile to any notion of orthodoxy. See Twilight
of the saints 19.
56 This volume grew out of a workshop entitled “Rethinking Ottoman Sunnitization, ca.
1450–1700” that convened at the Central European University in Budapest, 25–27 August
2017, within the framework of the OTTOCONFESSION project. The editors would like to
acknowledge the valuable contributions to the present discussion made by the partic-
ipants of the conference who, for various reasons, did not end up contributing to this
volume, especially Baki Tezcan, Sara Nur Yıldız, Devin Stewart, Aslıhan Gürbüzel, Yavuz
Aykan, Ferenc Csirkés, Ahmet Kaylı, Rossitsa Gradeva, and Ayfer Karakaya-Stump.
57 Derin Terzioğlu suggested the term “sunna-minded” in order to emphasize that a variety
of social actors from across the religious and political spectrum—not just preachers iden-
tified as the followers of Ḳaḍīzāde Meḥmed (d. 1045/1635)—used the idiom of commit-
ment to sunna and sharia in order to articulate criticism of and disappointment with the
Ottoman social, political, and spiritual order in the seventeenth century. See her Sunna-
minded Sufi preachers.
58 The seminal study on the subject that set the tone for subsequent research is Zilfi, The
Kadizadelis. See also Çavuşoğlu, The Ḳadīzādeli movement; and Baer, Honored by the glory
16 krstić

a departure from otherwise “tolerant” Ottoman ways, rather than as a manifes-

tation of the ongoing reconsiderations of what it meant to be a Sunni Muslim
in the Ottoman Empire, and a byproduct of the social and institutional changes
that maintaining an empire, whose legitimacy was tied to the protection of the
Sunni tradition, entailed. At the same time, many of the authors endeavor to
trace how particular medieval Islamic genres, both textual and nontextual—
ranging from prayer manuals, heresiographies, creeds, fatwa collections, bio-
graphical dictionaries, fiqh and kalām treatises, and historiography to tekkes,
ʿimārets, and mosques—developed and were reinterpreted in the Ottoman
period, thus consistently putting Ottomans’ understandings of the Sunni tradi-
tion into a larger historical framework. In order to do this, the authors engage
with the latest research on legal, theological, political, and architectural trends
in the late medieval and early modern Islamic world.
The essays also represent a “second wave” of scholarship informed by the
notions of “confessionalization” and “Sunnitization,” building on and learning
from the criticisms aimed at the original paradigm in the European context as
well as the shortcomings of the earlier research on the turn toward Sunni ortho-
doxy in the Ottoman context. In this respect, the volume particularly seeks to
move away from the statist bias that informs much of the earlier scholarship on
both confessionalization in Europe and Islam in the Ottoman Empire. Rather
than reifying the “state” and overemphasizing its role in the process of defining
and imposing an “orthodoxy,” the essays examine various agents of “Sunniti-
zation” and emphasize the interplay among personal, local, communal, and
imperial agendas.
In the first and most extensive part of the volume, the essays explore how
various Ottoman authors across the social and political spectrum engaged
with the classical and postclassical Sunni works on hadith, fiqh, and kalām
and processed their meaning in dialogue with the individual agendas and
broader Ottoman realities. Thus, Helen Pfeifer examines how ninth/fifteenth-
and tenth/sixteenth-century Ottoman Rumi scholars viewed and accessed the
study of hadith, arguing that their encounter with Arab scholars in the after-
math of the conquest of Syria and Egypt in 922–923/1516–1517 brought signif-
icant changes in madrasa curricula, making hadith studies more central not
only to scholarly training but to the overall project of building a Sunni con-
sciousness among the general population. Focusing on the study of kalām,
Nabil Al-Tikriti sets out to assess the nature of the Ottoman prince Ḳorḳud’s

of Islam. On the reexamination of the relationship of the Kadızadelis to various social

groups, see Terzioğlu, Sufi and dissident; Sariyannis, The Kadizadeli movement; Tuşalp
Atiyas, The “Sunna-minded” trend.
historicizing the study of sunni islam in the ottoman empire 17

(d. 919/1513) contribution to the development of Ottoman Sunnism, examining

his views on a variety of issues, from madrasa education to specific legal and
theological positions. Delving deeply into the sources of several of Ḳorḳud’s
works and his interpretation of them, Al-Tikriti demonstrates how the rap-
prochement between Ash‘ari and Maturidi theology, as well as the Hanafi and
Shafi‘i fiqh that characterized the late medieval intellectual landscape of Mam-
luk Syria, found echoes in Ḳorḳud’s oeuvre, marking him as a transitional
author who prefigures certain trajectories in Ottoman Sunnism but takes a
completely different course on others. In her contribution, Derin Terzioğlu
examines how Ottoman authors from the tenth/sixteenth and eleventh/sev-
enteenth centuries engaged with a specific fiqh work, al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, by
a controversial late medieval intellectual, Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328), exploring
how a Hanbali treatise on the nature of a ruler’s law was adopted and adapted
by Ottoman Hanafi authors and to what ends. Terzioğlu also tackles the much
debated issue of Ibn Taymiyya’s influence on the Kadızadelis and the supposed
existence of an Ottoman Hanafi Taymiyyan “school.”
Tijana Krstić and Guy Burak focus on the question of how a Sunni identity
was supposed to be interiorized as part of a comprehensive moral reform that
the project, which was embraced by a variety of social actors, entailed. Krstić
examines the changing sensibilities of the Hanafi and Maturidi scholars on the
question of what constituted sufficient knowledge for one to be considered
a true believer (mu’mīn) by tracing views expressed in the medieval Hanafi,
Maturidi, and Ash‘ari creedal texts and comparing them to the Ottoman cate-
chisms (ʿilm-i ḥāls) in Turkish for common believers from the period between
the ninth/fifteenth and eleventh/seventeenth centuries. She argues that there
was a shift to a greater emphasis on detailed knowledge of faith and its inte-
riorization in the early modern Ottoman Hanafi Maturidi tradition, echoing
wider theological trends of the age of confessional polarization. Burak’s essay
looks at the Ottoman commentaries on prayers, invocations, and supplica-
tions, including on Muḥammad ibn Sulaymān al-Jazūlī’s (d. 869/1465) Dalāʾil
al-khayrāt wa-shawāriq al-anwār, from the tenth/sixteenth to the twelfth/eigh-
teenth centuries to examine how the relationship between belief and under-
standing on the one hand and performative deeds and speech acts on the other
was perceived. He observes a shift over time from emphasis on simply reciting
an appropriate prayer in a given situation, even if one does not understand
its meaning, to understanding the essence of specific prayers and seeking to
comprehend their deeper meaning—a development that accounts for the pro-
liferation of prayer commentaries in the late eleventh/seventeenth and early
twelfth/eighteenth century. Seeking to bridge the communal and individual
aspects of building a Sunni Hanafi consciousness, Nir Shafir examines both
18 krstić

how individual Ottoman authors engaged with the medieval heresiographical

tradition in producing their own texts in the tenth/sixteenth and eleventh/sev-
enteenth century, and how the Ottoman audience of these texts engaged with
the notion of confessional difference based on the marginal notes in surviving
Ottoman manuscripts. His article eloquently demonstrates how heresiograph-
ical discourse and labels were consistently repurposed throughout medieval
and early modern Islamic history to fit the debates of the day and the changing
ideas and expressions of what it meant to be a Sunni.
Moving on from particular authors and their takes on the questions of tra-
dition and orthodoxy, the second part of the volume looks more closely at
the intersection of imperial, communal, and spatial dimensions of the “sunna-
minded” turn. Grigor Boykov outlines the process by which the tekkes of the
Abdals of Rum in Eastern Thrace were progressively converted to the more
sunna-minded Halveti convents by the mid-tenth/sixteenth century through
the partnership between particular Halveti Sufi shaykhs and their patron So-
kollu Mehmed Pasha (grand vizier, 973–986/1565–1579). Çiğdem Kafescioğlu
highlights the centrality of cooperation between the sultan and his ḳul elite in
the second half of the ninth/fifteenth century in rearticulating the architectural
language of the spaces that initially served both for various types of congrega-
tion and prayer (ʿimāret) into spaces reserved exclusively for congregational
prayer (mosque), which was in line with the new, imperial understanding of
Sunni orthopraxy and community. Ünver Rüstem takes the story of the parallel
evolution in Sunni imperial ideology and architecture all the way into the late
twelfth/eighteenth century, focusing on imperial mosques as sites at which the
sultan’s authority and leadership of the Sunni community was negotiated and
constantly redefined through interaction among the members of the dynasty,
Sufis, ulama, and the wider population of the Ottoman capital. The synergy
as well as tension between a neighborhood imam and his congregation in the
process of social disciplining and articulation of Sunni norms in the Ottoman
context is brought into sharp relief in Evren Sünnetçioğlu’s essay, which exam-
ines how the issue of the five daily congregational prayers and who could lead
them became central both to imperial ideology and to communal relations. In
addition to putting emphasis on the cooperative and negotiated nature of Sun-
nitization, these papers also stress the importance of space and understanding
the changing social relations and pious sensibilities in and through particular
spatial contexts, be it a mosque, a tekke, a neighborhood, or a region such as
Eastern Thrace.
Much of the early wave of scholarship on the fashioning of Sunni ortho-
doxy in the Ottoman Empire emphasized the punitive character of the phe-
nomenon by focusing on the Ottoman persecution of various nonconformist
historicizing the study of sunni islam in the ottoman empire 19

Sufis, heretics (zindīq) and other deviants (mulḥid), Kızılbaş, and Rāfıżīs, typ-
ically by focusing on the fatāwa and legal treatises of the leading Ottoman
jurists or the records of the important imperial affairs.59 In contrast, the essays
in the third part of the volume explore not only discursive moves toward
achieving some sort of confessional purity and clarity, but also ways in which
various social groups and individuals resisted the notion of an “orthodoxy”
or sought to maintain space for confessional difference, ambiguity, or even
unity under the umbrella of both the Ottoman state and Islam. Thus, Ayşe
Baltacioğlu-Brammer takes a closer look at the differentiation within the Kızıl-
baş community—which is too often imagined as homogenous and marginal-
ized—to recognize the variety of ways in which Kızılbaş groups and individuals
could negotiate their place, status, and privileges within the imperial system,
often based on the economic and military importance they held in a partic-
ular locale, especially in borderland areas. A different take on the space for
confessional ambiguity and difference within Ottoman Sunni ideology is taken
by Vefa Erginbaş, who examines the place of the veneration of the House of
the Prophet (what he terms “ahl al-baytism”) in early modern Ottoman Sun-
nism. He explores Ottoman historians’ views on Yazīd ibn Muʿāwiya, the sec-
ond caliph of the Umayyad dynasty, whose role in the killing of the Prophet’s
grandson Ḥusayn at the battle of Karbala made him the object of cursing by
Shi‘ites. Erginbaş shows that major Ottoman historians of the tenth/sixteenth
and eleventh/seventeenth centuries shared this resentment for Yazīd and cul-
tivated great respect for the ahl al-bayt, examining the extent to which their
views were affected by Ottoman-Safavid competition and Kadızadeli preach-
ing. Selim Güngörürler, on the other hand, highlights the discourse of “decon-
fessionalization,” so to say, in the context of a particular genre—the diplomatic
correspondence between the Ottomans and Safavids between 1048/1639 and
the 1130s/1720s.60 His essay is an interesting counterpart to the work on the
emergence of sectarian consciousness in the tenth/sixteenth century, since it
demonstrates that once the Ottoman claims to greater caliphal authority were
accepted by the Safavids and the period of peace between the empires set in
after the Treaty of Zuhab in 1048/1639, sectarian consciousness could be down-
played or even replaced by the discourse of brotherhood and unity under the
banner of Islam—at least on the platform of diplomatic relations. Altogether,
these essays drive home a crucial point, which is that different understandings

59 See, for instance Imber, The persecution; Üstün, Heresy and legitimacy; Ocak, Osmanlı
toplumunda zındıklar, etc. For an important critique of this approach see Winter, The
Shi‘ites of Lebanon.
60 For a related argument see Özervarlı, Between tension and rapprochement.
20 krstić

of Sunnism and perspectives on what it was to be a Sunni Muslim emerge from

different Ottoman administrative and narrative genres, even when they were
produced in the exact same period or by the people closely affiliated with the
state.
Given that the essays reflect a relatively new field of inquiry that is still
testing a variety of approaches and analytical terms that might best charac-
terize processes at hand, there is no attempt to homogenize the analytical
language throughout the volume. Thus, some authors have chosen to engage
with the concept of “confessionalization” and use the notion of “confession” to
index sectarian divisions within Islam; others have opted to discuss their find-
ings under the rubric of “Sunnitization” and examine and historicize various
labels associated with belonging to the Sunni community, such as “Hanafi” and
“Shafi‘i,” or “Maturidi” and “Ash‘ari,” subjecting them to contextual and rela-
tional analysis. Importantly, a number of essays explore the meaning of the
term madhhab (Tr. meẕheb) in various discursive and genric contexts, drawing
attention to the fact that this term had a much broader usage in Ottoman texts
of the period than is usually recognized in the secondary literature: rather than
only indicating a scholar belonging to a particular legal school (Hanafi, Shafi‘i,
Maliki, or Hanbali), it is also used by Ottoman authors to indicate adherence to
a particular school of kalām (Maturidi, Ash‘ari, etc.) as well as a particular sect
(or denomination) of Islam (Sunni, Shi‘i, Kızılbaş, etc.).
As an edited volume that aims to map new directions in the research on
early modern Ottoman Sunnism, the present collection does not aspire to com-
prehensiveness and inevitably leaves unaddressed various questions, sources,
and methodological approaches, and addresses some parts of the period under
discussion in greater detail than others. Perhaps most notably, it is heavily
skewed toward intellectual and cultural history, while fewer articles focus on
the social or economic aspects of the problem and examine how particular
communities’ socioeconomic niche and geographical provenance, or individu-
als’ class and gender, informed their experiences and reactions to the questions
of Sunni orthodoxy and orthopraxy. It is by no means the editors’ intention to
suggest that those perspectives or the sources they could be gleaned from, such
as population registers, court records, various individual petitions to the sul-
tan, or registers of important imperial affairs, are in any way less important.
Rather, it is a reflection of the endeavor to introduce new, heretofore largely
untapped, sources into the discussion and point to a considerable polyphony in
the Ottoman discourses on Sunnism by consulting a variety of genres that could
help us generate new questions to be posed to better-studied sources, allowing
us to understand their value in a new light and engage in multisource research.
For instance, understanding the changing attitudes toward religious instruc-
historicizing the study of sunni islam in the ottoman empire 21

tion of the commoners articulated in the ʿilm-i ḥāls and the empire-wide initia-
tives to build mosques and masjids reflected in the imperial fermans together
allow us to ask more informed questions about the fluctuation in the number of
imams and haṭībs indicated in the tenth/sixteenth- and eleventh/seventeenth-
century population registers for different regions (including villages) of the
empire or prompt us to examine whether in the Ottoman ṭabaqāt literature
preaching and preachers seem to be endowed with a different sort of social
capital compared to the medieval examples of the same genre.
Ultimately, the goal of the volume is to open up new vistas onto how beliefs
and ritual practices—as well as discourses about them—were integrated into
the daily individual, family, and communal life as well as the life of the Ottoman
Empire as a whole, allowing us to develop methodological tools for studying
these issues on micro-, meso-, and macrolevels. Rather than postulating that
the phenomenon of Sunnitization and various initiatives for imposing con-
fessional (or hermeneutical) normativity were the defining feature of early
modern Ottoman religious and social history, the volume historicizes the rea-
sons why such initiatives arose in the first place and inquires after the actors
who supported them and their discursive strategies, while also pointing to var-
ious ways in which these initiatives were subverted, tweaked, appropriated for
personal ends, rejected, or completely ignored by Muslim groups and individ-
uals. Some would perhaps be inclined to view this Ottoman dialectic between
attempts to define and impose an orthodoxy and to resist and reject it as just
another episode in a timeless dynamic present throughout Islamic history. Nev-
ertheless, as this volume suggests, by exploring how various Ottoman authors
interpreted the Sunni tradition by engaging with the views of previous gener-
ations of Muslims, early modern Ottoman context presents us with important
new institutional, legal, theological, polemical, architectural, and other devel-
opments in conceptualizing what it meant to be a Muslim in general and a
Sunni Muslim in particular. The essays, thus, highlight the importance of exam-
ining in detail various post-formative Islamic discourses in order to arrive at a
more nuanced understanding of both Islamic and global early modern history.

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 part 1
Rethinking Sunni Orthodoxy
in Dialogue with the Past
and the Present

∵
 chapter 2

A New Hadith Culture? Arab Scholars and Ottoman

Sunnitization in the Sixteenth Century

Helen Pfeifer

Ottoman Islam underwent a significant transformation over the course of the

ninth/fifteenth and tenth/sixteenth centuries. Whereas in the early period of
Ottoman rule many inhabitants of Anatolia and the Balkans had taken a lati-
tudinarian view of the Islamic faith, sampling freely from elements perceived
today as Shi‘ite or even Christian, as the empire matured, various actors began
to place a greater emphasis on what they took to be proper Sunni Islamic belief
and practice. This meant, among other things: decrees mandating that the
Muslim population not neglect their five daily prayers (as discussed by Evren
Sünnetçioğlu in this volume); the construction of congregational mosques in
every town and masjids in every village of the empire (as highlighted by Çiğ-
dem Kafescioğlu and Evren Sünnetçioğlu in their contributions); and energized
efforts to define and stamp out “heresy” and unbelief (explored by Nir Shafir
and Tijana Krstić in their essays). An earlier generation of historians usually
referred to such developments as the rise of “fanaticism”; more recently, this
has been described as a process of “confessionalization” or “Sunnitization.”1
Whatever you call it, the fact remains that there was a considerable shift in
the self-understanding and practices of Muslims in one of the most powerful
Islamic empires of the early modern period.
The difficulty has been explaining why this shift occurred. Tijana Krstić has
suggested we view the increased emphasis on Islamic orthodoxy in the con-
text of a larger, Eurasian “age of confessionalization,” contemporaneous to the
confessional polarization between Catholics and Protestants in Europe and
spurred on by the rise of the Shi‘ite Safavids in Persia. She and others have seen
the Ottoman confessionalization of the tenth/sixteenth century as a result of
interimperial rivalry and the growth of the central state, giving way to a more
bottom-up process of confession building in the eleventh/seventeenth.2

1 For “fanaticism,” see İnalcık, The Ottoman Empire, ch. 18. For the terms confessionalization
and sunnitization, see Krstić, Contested conversions; Terzioğlu, How to conceptualize, esp. 14;
Burak, Faith, law and empire; Terzioğlu, Where ʿilm-i ḥāl.
2 Krstic, Contested conversions, esp. 14. See also Dressler, Inventing orthodoxy; Necipoğlu, The
age of Sinan 47–58.

© helen pfeifer, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004440296_003

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
32 pfeifer

This analysis is enormously compelling and has many benefits. Most of all,
it has allowed historians to normalize a process previously associated with
Ottoman decline or with what has often been assumed to be the inherent
Islamic propensity for extremism. Yet the perspective also has one key draw-
back: as Europeanists have observed, the confessionalization model, at least
in its original guise, tended to privilege the actions of the state, overstating
its power and overlooking the activities of other groups.3 This article draws
attention to one such group, namely scholars based in Arab lands. After 922–
923/1516–1517, these became part of a newly incorporated subject population
and enjoyed little formal role in Ottoman governance. Still, as this article shows,
they contributed measurably to shifts in both the discourse and the practice of
Ottoman Islam in the tenth/sixteenth century.
In 922–923/1516–1517, Ottoman armies put an end to the Mamluk Empire,
incorporating the predominantly Arab provinces of Syria, Egypt, and the Ara-
bian Peninsula. This conquest was a watershed moment in many ways: it gave
the Ottomans control over the lucrative East-West trade; afforded them access
to new agricultural lands and the taxes they produced; and made them the pro-
tectors of the holy sites in Mecca and Medina. But perhaps one of the most
significant—and, until recently, understudied—aspects of this conquest was
the exposure it afforded the Ottoman elite to some of the greatest centers of
Islamic scholarship, especially Cairo and Damascus.4 Though Ottoman schol-
ars had been interacting with these centers in the centuries leading up to 922–
923/1516–1517, the conquest made exchanges with them far more frequent and
far more intense. These exchanges not only left a lasting mark on Ottoman
notions of governance, as described by Derin Terzioğlu in this volume, they also
spurred another key aspect of Sunnitization, namely new forms of engagement
with the sunna.
The Arabic word sunna, which means “conduct” or “way of life,” refers to
the normative example of the Prophet Muḥammad. Historically, the main way
the sunna has been preserved and passed on by Muslims is through accounts
of Muḥammad’s words and deeds, called ḥadīth (pl. aḥādīth).5 Although these
accounts could never vie with the status of the Quran—believed by Muslims

3 Laven, Encountering the Counter-Reformation, esp. 709–710.

4 For intellectual exchanges in the century after the conquest, see Lellouch, Les Ottomans en
Égypte; Baş, Tarih yazıcılığı; Burak, The second formation; Kaplan, Polemicist; Özen, Ottoman
ʿulamāʾ.
5 This was, however, subject to debate, especially in early centuries when many felt that the
sunna was better preserved in the ongoing practices of Muslim communities, especially in
Medina. See Hallaq, The origins, esp. ch. 5.
a new hadith culture? 33

to be the literal word of God—they were (and still are) of crucial importance to
believers, since Muḥammad instructed his followers in part through his living
example. This example was especially important since it clarified many issues
on which the Quran itself was tight-lipped or even silent, ranging from prayer
to the annual pilgrimage to taxation. As such, hadith accounts came to form
one of the key sources of Islamic law and ritual practice. At the same time,
their function was not only legal or doctrinal: over the course of the medieval
period, transmitting these accounts from one generation to the next became a
cornerstone not only of scholarly authority, but of Islamic devotional practice.
It is no small measure of the stature of the sunna that it is from this word that
the designation “Sunni” (sunnī) in fact derives.
And yet, we know little about the sunna as it gained meaning in Ottoman
lands. There is no full-length English study of Ottoman hadith scholarship, and
much research on the topic has been in the form of scattered articles on individ-
ual authors or works.6 So little is known that it is uncertain whether Ottoman
institutions of higher education called “hadith schools” (Tr. dārü’l-ḥadīs̱) were
in fact devoted to the study of hadith at all.7 This lacuna seems especially regret-
table when trying to study Sunnitization, since social movements to bring Mus-
lim societies into closer conformity with Islamic principles have so often been
formulated through the lens of the sunna.8 Was there a comparable develop-
ment in the Ottoman Empire during the “age of confessionalization”?
This article argues that there was. The evidence I have been able to com-
pile—preliminary and patchy as it is—suggests that although Ottoman schol-
ars had always relied on hadiths for questions of jurisprudence, well into the
ninth/fifteenth century, they were less active than their contemporaries in
Mamluk lands in studying them for their own sake or in transmitting them to
accrue God’s blessings. Starting gingerly in the late ninth/fifteenth century and
then accelerating in the tenth/sixteenth, Ottoman scholars began to develop
a more expansive “hadith culture,” often under the guidance of their Arab col-
leagues.
This paper takes as evidence of this process one academic license (ijāza)
issued by the Arab scholar Badr al-Dīn al-Ghazzī (d. 984/1577) to the Ottoman
chief judge of Damascus Çivizāde Meḥmed (d. 995/1587). The license, issued in

6 Most of the literature has been in Turkish. For an overview of works on Ottoman hadith stud-
ies, see İmamoğlu, Cumhuriyet dönemi. The English-language literature that does exist has
often focused on the twelfth/eighteenth century: Gran, The Islamic roots, chs. 2–3; Voll, Hadith
scholars; Voll, ʿAbdallah ibn Salim al-Basri.
7 Ayaz, Osmanlı dârulhadisleri.
8 Subtelny and Khalidov, The curriculum 212; Berkey, Tradition, innovation.
34 pfeifer

Damascus in 978/1570, permitted the judge to transmit a number of hadiths and

hadith collections. In doing so, it afforded him access not only to new sources of
knowledge and scholarly authority but also to new forms of Islamic devotional
practice.

1 Prophetic Traditions in Mamluk Lands

Accounts of the words and deeds of the Prophet Muḥammad have been around
for as long as the religion itself. However, as the Islamic community and its tra-
dition of scholarship changed and matured, so did the role of hadiths, so that
by the late medieval period, they were studied, transmitted, and discussed in
new ways.
Initially collected by people who had surrounded the Prophet, hadiths often
circulated orally in the first generations after his death. However, as the Islamic
community grew and fractured, such accounts became vulnerable to forgery, as
various groups tried to channel the Prophet’s legacy in ways that would bolster
their own theological or political positions. The result was not only an unman-
ageably large corpus of narrations—reported to have numbered over half a mil-
lion by the middle of the third/ninth century—but one riddled with accounts
that were of dubious authenticity.9 In an effort to stabilize the tradition and
sort out the legitimate from the forged accounts, scholars increasingly began
to compile collections focused on hadiths considered authentic (ṣaḥīḥ).10 The
two most important of these works were written by Muḥammad al-Bukhārī
(d. 256/870) and his student Muslim b. al-Ḥajjāj (d. 261/875); these came to
be referred to collectively as “the two authentic ones” (al-Ṣaḥīḥayn). Though it
took time for these collections to gain full acceptance, by the fifth/eleventh cen-
tury they were at the heart of a widely agreed upon Sunni hadith canon (Shi‘ite
scholars instead privileged a different set of prophetic traditions). Together
with four other hadith collections widely accepted as authoritative, many
Sunni scholars came to speak of “the six books.”11

9 This was the number of narrations (not necessarily discrete hadiths, but sometimes dif-
ferent narrations of the same account) said to have been considered by Bukhārī while he
compiled his collection. Brown, Hadith 32.
10 For the Shi‘ite tradition, see Brown, Hadith, ch. 4.
11 The exact composition of these six books could vary (and some spoke of “the five books”),
but the hard core of this canon was undisputed, consisting of Bukhārī, Muslim, Abū
Dāwūd, and Nasāʾī. Brown, Hadith 38–40.
a new hadith culture? 35

At the same time, the study of hadith was developing into a key discipline in
its own right. There were a variety of genres through which scholars examined
the sunna, including, among other things: overviews of the basic principles
for analyzing hadith (uṣūl al-ḥadīth); works clarifying hadith terminology or
difficult words or names (muṣṭalaḥ, sharḥ gharīb al-ḥadīth); analyses of those
who had transmitted hadith from one generation to the next (rijāl, ṭabaqāt);
and what was seen as an ambitious hadith scholar’s capstone project, usually
pursued at the end of his life, a full commentary on one of the six canonical
collections.12
One of the most important centers for hadith scholarship in the late me-
dieval Islamic world was the Mamluk Empire. From the seventh/thirteenth
century onward, Egypt, Syria, and the Hijaz were the leading hubs of hadith
scholarship globally, such that by the beginning of the tenth/sixteenth century,
Damascus alone had 16 operational madrasas devoted to hadith study (dār al-
ḥadīth).13 Students educated in Mamluk lands, regardless of their intellectual
interests, could be expected to receive a thorough grounding in hadith studies.
Ghazzī’s father Raḍī al-Dīn (d. 939/1529) (one of his most important teach-
ers) had studied a number of different works outlining the basic principles of
hadith as a young man.14 ʿAbd al-Raḥīm al-ʿAbbāsī (d. 963/1555), an Egyptian
scholar and family friend, had completed a full reading of Bukhārī’s Ṣaḥīḥ by
his eleventh birthday.15 Although Ghazzī himself never became a prolific writer
in the field, he, too, enjoyed a rigorous education in it, since one of his contem-
poraries mentioned that in Ghazzī’s youth, “most of his work at that time was
focused on jurisprudence [ fiqh] and hadith.”16 The generations before Ghazzī
had been especially scintillating in this arena, led by the two Cairo luminar-

12 “Commentaries attained an important station in the late 1300s, when writing one on
al-Bukhārī’s or Muslim’s Sahīh became the principal means for scholars throughout the
Sunni Muslim world to interact with the hadith tradition.” Brown, Hadith 53. See also
Blecher, Said the Prophet, intro. Türcan sees the seventh/thirteenth century as the begin-
ning of an age of hadith commentary. Türcan, Osmanlı dönemi 145.
13 Blecher, Said the Prophet 7, 49; Gökçe, Hadis çalışmaları 45.
14 This included the Alfiyya by Zayn al-Dīn al-ʿIrāqī (d. 806/1404) as well as Ibn Ḥajar’s
Nukhbat al-fikar and the scholar’s own commentary on it. Al-Ghazzī, Al-Kawākib ii, 4.
15 ʿĀşıḳ Çelebi, Dhayl 108; al-Sakhāwī, Ḍaw’ iv, 179. ʿAbbāsī refers to him as Najm al-Dīn
al-Ṣaḥrāwī, whom I take to be ʿAbd al-Ṣamad b. ʿAbd al-Raḥman al-Ṣaḥrāwī al-Harasānī
(al-Sakhāwī, Ḍaw’ iv, 209–210). It seems that Najm al-Dīn al-Ghazzī makes two people out
of this one Harasānī, saying that ʿAbbāsī studied with “Ibn al-Muʿammar al-ʿIzz al-Ṣaḥrāwī
and ʿAbd al-Ṣamad al-Harastānī [sic].” Al-Ghazzī, al-Kawākib ii, 162.
16 Ibn Ayyūb, al-Rawḍ al-ʿāṭir 240a. One of Ghazzī’s contemporaries does call him a muḥad-
dith (hadith scholar) but this designation is rather unusual. Al-Tamīmī, Al-Ṭabaqāt al-
saniyya i, 382.
36 pfeifer

ies, Ibn Ḥajar (d. 852/1449) and Badr al-Dīn al-ʿAynī (d. 855/1451).17 Although
the later scholar Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī (d. 911/1505) preferred a more concise
commentarial style compared to his predecessors, his output suggests that the
interest in hadith had not lagged by the last decades of Mamluk rule: by the
end of his life, Suyūṭī had written and compiled over 200 works on the sub-
ject.18
Alongside the scholarly study of hadiths, Mamluk-era scholars were also
committed to transmitting them from one generation to the next. In the early
generations of the tradition, oral transmission had seemed like the best way
to ensure that the legacy of Muḥammad would not be corrupted. Into the
fourth/tenth century, most scholars believed that it was necessary to hear
each individual hadith account orally in order to be able to make use of that
hadith in one’s scholarly or judicial practice. Although this had always been
tedious, with the broad acceptance of a written canon of “authentic” hadiths
in the fifth/eleventh century, it gradually also became redundant. Increasingly,
it came to suffice to ensure that your copy of Bukhārī or Muslim was cor-
rect.
And yet, as Garrett Davidson has shown, this did not mean that transmis-
sion ceased; rather, its meaning changed. On the one hand, hadith transmission
came to act as a marker of status. By the fifth/eleventh century, emphasis was
increasingly placed on being a link in a chain of transmission that was partic-
ularly short (ʿālī; literally, “elevated”), that is, having heard and been granted
permission to transmit prophetic reports with the fewest possible intermedi-
aries between oneself and Muḥammad. The same logic was applied to the six
canonical hadith collections, so that scholars began to collect chains of author-
ities that connected them not to Muḥammad but to famous compilers like
Bukhārī or Muslim.19 Since obtaining permission to transmit these narrations
often required traveling to seek out those transmitters who could grant it, and
since those scholars could grant or withhold those accounts at will, assembling
short chains of transmission became a mark of considerable capital, actual and
social.

17 “At the peak of intellectual activity in Mamluk Cairo in the fourteenth and fifteenth cen-
turies, almost every hadith scholar of note wrote a commentary on Sahīh al-Bukhārī, and
in India from the 1600s onward writing a commentary on one of the Sahīhayn was de
rigueur for accomplished Muslim scholars.” Brown, Hadith 53.
18 Saleh, Al-Suyūṭī and his works. For the transformation of commentary since the time of
Ibn Ḥajar, see Blecher, Usefulness without toil.
19 Works listing the chains of transmission for books were called fihrist or thabat. Davidson,
Carrying on the tradition 254–273 and ch. 5.
a new hadith culture? 37

On the other hand, the transmission of hadiths played an important role

in devotional practice. Transmitting prophetic traditions was increasingly cast
as a pious act, the special prerogative of the Muslim community and a way
of securing blessings from God.20 “The chain of transmission is a part of the
religion” (al-isnād min al-dīn), an oft-quoted saying went; scholars warned that
moving away from such a practice might cause the Muslim community to incur
God’s wrath.21 Transmitting hadiths also became increasingly important as a
means of establishing spiritual proximity to the Prophet Muḥammad, whose
lifetime was seeming ever more remote with each passing generation; Ibn
Ḥajar, the Cairene hadith specialist who had taught our Ghazzī’s teacher, was
one of many to cite the adage that “proximity in chain of transmission is a prox-
imity to God.”22
In Mamluk lands, hadith transmission reached a fevered pitch. Into the
eighth/fourteenth century, transmitters staged public audition sessions (sa-
māʿ) where not only scholars but women, merchants, and craftsmen could
follow along as entire books of hadith were read aloud, thus becoming autho-
rized to transmit them.23 Although this time-consuming practice subsequently
fell into disuse, the ijāza jumped in to fill the breach: increasingly, authority to
transmit hadith works could be granted without these drawn-out readings.24
Transmitters began issuing hadith licenses not only to individuals they had
never met but also to infants and even, according to some, to unborn children.
These sorts of practices allowed Ghazzī, who was six and living in Damascus
when Suyūṭī died, to transmit hadith on the great scholar’s authority.25 Scholars
like Ibn Ḥajar took to compiling entire catalogues of the names of individuals
from whom they had been permitted to transmit hadith, with special subsec-
tions (or even free-standing works) devoted to those with the shortest chains
or to those they had never personally met.26 Although many of these prac-
tices were especially important to hadith specialists, transmitting hadith was
desirable to all scholars, including those who, like Ghazzī, were not particularly
active in the field, or even, in the words of Suyūṭī, to “common people, rabble,
women, and old men.”27

20 Davidson, Carrying on the tradition, ch. 1.

21 ʿAbd Allāh Ibn al-Mubārak quoted in Davidson, Carrying on the tradition 14.
22 Ibn Ḥajar quoted in Davidson, Carrying on the tradition 31; Brown, Hadith 46–49.
23 Hirschler, Written word, esp. ch. 2.
24 Hirschler, Monument, esp. 74–89; Davidson, Carrying on the tradition, chs. 2–3.
25 Al-Ghazzī, Ijāza 232b. For these practices, see Davidson, Carrying on the tradition 138–149.
26 Davidson, Carrying on the tradition 146, 149–150.
27 Suyūṭī cited in Blecher, Usefulness without toil 185. See also Davidson, Carrying on the
tradition 153.
38 pfeifer

This general interest in and respect for prophetic hadith left a mark, not just
on textual traditions but on the sociability that underpinned scholarly and elite
practice. As Joel Blecher has shown, prophetic traditions were inseparable from
a learned culture of performance and debate. In ninth/fifteenth-century Mam-
luk lands, Bukhārī’s Ṣaḥīḥ was read aloud and commented on publicly in times
of celebration or distress.28 So, too, was hadith commentary an energetic and
interactive activity: teachers often delivered their commentaries in live ses-
sions, stopping for questions from students, and Mamluk sultans staged live
debates over the interpretation of the tradition.29 These debates demanded an
incredibly high-level engagement with the prophetic tradition: scholars were
often expected to recite hadiths with their appendant isnāds and to show famil-
iarity with, and weigh in on, the variety of ways hadiths had been read in the
commentarial tradition.30 Some scholars even memorized entire hadith com-
mentaries, the better to defend themselves when debating with other schol-
ars.31 But hadiths were also part and parcel of a broader culture of polite conver-
sation. Some scholars made herculean efforts to commit prophetic traditions
to memory, with Suyūṭī claiming to have memorized 200,000 of them.32 Not
only did this provide such scholars with an instantaneous, searchable hadith
database useful in scholarly debates, it also made for virtuosic shows of mem-
ory during garden parties.33 Ghazzī’s father and many of his ninth/fifteenth-
century contemporaries often set hadiths to a rhyme, the better to recite them
in polite company.34 Hadiths were so widespread that some scholars worried
about story-tellers relaying hadiths to commoners in ways that were misleading
or downright incorrect.35
This emphasis on hadith permeated all corners of Mamluk scholarly culture,
regardless of the school of law. Traditionally, the four legal schools had been
divided into those more and less amenable to hadith study. Together with the
Hanbalis, Shafi‘i jurists counted themselves as part of the ahl al-ḥadīth, or parti-
sans of the hadith tradition. Indeed, most of the men mentioned thus far—the
Ghazzīs, Ibn Ḥajar, Suyūṭī—were Shafi‘is. Things were a bit different within the
Hanafi (as well as Maliki) legal school, which had been heavily influenced by

28 Blecher, Said the Prophet 7.

29 Ibid., esp. chs. 3–5.
30 Ibid., ch. 5, esp. 87.
31 Ibid. 82.
32 Saleh, Al-Suyūṭī 75.
33 Blecher, Ḥadīth commentary, esp. 274–282.
34 Ghazzī recited this to a friend when they met. Al-Ghazzī, Al-maṭāliʿ al-Badriyya 187. This
had been common practice earlier as well. Blecher, Ḥadīth commentary 276.
35 Berkey, The tradition 60–62.
a new hadith culture? 39

the Mu‘tazilite rationalist tradition and applied different standards in deter-

mining which hadiths were sound enough to be used in deriving law.36 Given
the vehement disagreement between the Hanafi school’s founder Abū Ḥanīfa
and the compiler Bukhārī, it should come as no surprise that Hanafis were slow
to accept the collections otherwise considered canonical.37 Throughout much
of the late medieval period, Hanafis helped to transmit Bukhārī’s and Muslim’s
works, but rarely subjected them to close study.38
However, in the context of the widespread veneration for the hadith tra-
dition, even Hanafi scholars from Mamluk lands began to engage avidly with
it. Gradually, they began to subject it to more serious scholarship. In the sev-
enth/thirteenth century, the first Hanafi digests of Bukhārī and Muslim began
to appear, the most famous of which was the South Asian scholar Muḥam-
mad al-Ṣaghānī’s (d. 650/1252) Mashāriq al-anwār (Dawning of the light).39
By the eighth/fourteenth century, Hanafis in Cairo and Damascus had begun
using Bukhārī and Muslim to validate the hadiths used in foundational Hanafi
texts.40 Jonathan Brown has argued that this occurred in large part in response
to debates with members of other legal schools, for whom the Ṣaḥīḥayn acted
as the sources for authoritative hadiths: how could Hanafis win debates with
members of other legal schools if they could not prove that the hadiths on
which their rulings relied were widely accepted as authentic?41 In response to
such pressures, Hanafis began to devote more serious attention to the canonical
collections, especially to Bukhārī and Muslim.42 By the ninth/fifteenth century,
the Hanafi scholar ʿAynī could be the key rival to the Shafi‘i Ibn Ḥajar in aiming
to write the authoritative commentary on Bukhārī.43
Hanafis living in Mamluk lands also joined in the general effort to gather
chains of transmission that were particularly short or prestigious. Ibn Ṭūlūn
(d. 953/1546), a Hanafi scholar from Damascus, recounted hearing “the threes”

36 Brown, The canonization; Brown, Hadith. As Joseph Schacht points out, the term ahl al-
raʾy, or “the partisans of legal reasoning,” was a term of deprecation used by the ahl al-
ḥadīth against the Hanafis in particular (but also the Malikis), and never used by Hanafis
themselves. Schacht, Aṣḥāb al-raʾy.
37 Brown, The canonization 237–238.
38 Ibid. 140–141.
39 Ibid. 226. The full title of Ṣaghānī’s work, which combined the two Ṣaḥīḥs of Bukhārī and
Muslim, was Mashāriq al-anwār al-nabawiyya ʿalā Ṣiḥāḥ al-akhbār al-muṣṭafawiyya. Baal-
baki, Ṣag̲ h̲ānī.
40 Brown, The canonization 226–227, 235–239.
41 Ibid. 209–240, esp. 235–236.
42 Ibid. 235–239.
43 Blecher, Said the Prophet, esp. chs. 3–4.
40 pfeifer

(al-thulāthiyyāt)—that is, all of the hadiths that Bukhārī had transmitted with
only three links to the Prophet Muḥammad—from the four chief judges of
Mamluk Egypt during their visit to Damascus in 922/1516.44 Ibn Ṭūlūn also com-
piled a work in the genre of “geographical 40 hadith” (arbaʿūn buldāniyya),
which presented 40 hadiths he had received from 40 transmitters in 40 dif-
ferent places.45 In addition, he wrote a small-, medium-, and large-sized cata-
logue ( fihrist) of everything he had been given permission to transmit (mar-
wīyāt).46
To be sure, the Mamluk hadith tradition was itself in flux. Audition ses-
sions, as we have seen, gradually petered out, as did the sessions for dictating
hadith commentary that had garnered so much attention in the first half of
the ninth/fifteenth century.47 Still, other forms of engagement with the sunna
gained in popularity, such as the more concise commentaries of Suyūṭī or the
“40 hadith” collections (arbaʿūn ḥadīth) that had their heyday during the last
century of Mamluk rule.48 On the whole, for Shafi‘is, Hanbalis, and Hanafis
educated in Syria and Egypt before the Ottoman conquest, prophetic hadiths
remained an important field of scholarly interest, a prized sphere for seeking
blessings and proximity to the Prophet, and a vibrant arena for social interac-
tion.

2 Prophetic Traditions in Fifteenth-Century Ottoman Lands

Though the research is still preliminary, it seems that the enthusiasm of schol-
ars in Syria and Egypt for hadith scholarship did not have a counterpart in late
medieval Anatolia. Of course, Anatolian madrasa students had been studying
the traditions of the Prophet for many generations for the purposes of Islamic
jurisprudence. However, they appear to have been less interested than scholars
from Mamluk domains in studying prophetic traditions in their own right or
transmitting them for the sake of accruing blessings. This was likely due to the

44 Davidson, Carrying on the tradition 225–226. For another Hanafi scholar based in Mam-
luk lands who was considered a muḥaddith and was energetic in transmitting hadith, see
ʿUlaymī, al-Uns 346–347.
45 Davidson, Carrying on the tradition 217. He also seems to have compiled another work in
the forty hadith genre. Conermann, Ibn Ṭūlūn 123.
46 Davidson, Carrying on the tradition 274; Conermann, Ibn Ṭūlūn 125.
47 Blecher, Usefulness without toil 184–185.
48 For the former, see Blecher, Usefulness without toil; for the latter, see Karahan, Kırk hadis
70; Davidson, Carrying on the tradition ch. 5, esp. 211. For the genre more broadly, see Lucas,
Forty traditions; Karahan, Arbaʿūn ḥadīt̲h̲an.
a new hadith culture? 41

fact that scholars hailing from Anatolia were, for the most part, of a Hanafi dis-
position, as were many of the Persian and Central Asian scholars from whom
they took much of their intellectual inspiration. In the majority Hanafi con-
text of late medieval Anatolia, scholars in the growing Ottoman polity did not
come under the same pressure as scholars in Mamluk centers of learning did to
study prophetic hadith as an independent scholarly discipline. Although this
did begin to change in the ninth/fifteenth century, in the areas of scholarship,
transmission, and conversation culture, Ottoman interest in hadith remained
more muted and reliant on expertise from abroad.
The relative indifference of Ottoman scholars to in-depth hadith studies
in the ninth/fifteenth and early tenth/sixteenth centuries is reflected in edu-
cational patterns. Some scholars have pointed to the estimable number of
Ottoman hadith schools (dārü’l-ḥadīs̱) to suggest how vibrant an intellectual
field it was.49 Yet, as Kadir Ayaz has recently argued, the libraries of some of
these institutions suggest that they may have been more like normal madrasas
than places specializing in hadith.50 According to the foundation document
(waqfiyya) of the Edirne dārü’l-ḥadīs̱, which was built in 838/1435, the only
books of hadith contained in the school’s library were nine compilations (in-
cluding Bukhārī, Muslim, and Ṣaghānī, among others) and three commen-
taries; there is no mention of any works laying out the principles of hadith
(uṣūl al-ḥadīth) of the sort that Ghazzī and his father had studied in Damascus
and Cairo.51 A similar tendency is suggested by the education of the influential
Ottoman scholar Aḥmed Ṭāşköprüzāde (d. 968/1561) in the first two decades of
the tenth/sixteenth century: to judge from his own autobiographical account,
Ṭāşköprüzāde only started studying hadith seriously toward the end of his edu-
cation, when he read parts of Bukhārī’s Ṣaḥīḥ with the Tunisian-born scholar
Muḥammad al-Maghūshī (d. 947/1540).52 Although Ṭāşköprüzāde did teach

49 The first dārü’l-ḥadīs̱ madrasas were founded in Anatolia in the Seljuk period around
the same time as they became widespread in Damascus and Cairo. The first Ottoman
dārü’l-ḥadīs̱ was founded in the reign of Murād I (763–791/1362–1389) in İznik. Yardım,
Darülhadis 529–530. For a general overview of hadith education in Ottoman lands, see
Karacabey, Hadis öğretimi.
50 Ayaz, Osmanlı dârulhadisleri. Molla Gürānī founded a dārü’l-ḥadīs̱ in Istanbul as well, and
it would be interesting to see whether teaching there was more focused on hadith. Yardım,
Darülhadis 530.
51 Ayaz, Osmanlı dârulhadisleri 56–63. See also Ayaz, Zâhid el-Kevserî 65. However, as Ayaz
himself notes, more research on early library collections still need to be done. For uṣūl
al-ḥadīth, see Dickinson, Uṣūl al-ḥadīt̲h̲.
52 Taşköprüzāde, Al-Shaqāʾiq 269–270 (where it is Ghūthi), 326–327; Mecdī, Tercüme-i Şa-
42 pfeifer

quite a bit of hadith at the madrasa appointments he received from the early
930s/mid-1520s onward, much of his focus (especially at the lower madrasas)
was on works written for the jurist rather than for the hadith specialist, like
Ṣaghānī’s Mashāriq al-anwār and al-Ḥusayn al-Baghawī’s (d. 516/1122) Maṣābīḥ
al-sunna (The lamps of the sunna).53 Although Ṭāşköprüzāde did teach Bukhārī
at the more advanced madrasas, he made no mention of having ever studied, or
taught, any hadith commentaries or any uṣūl al-ḥadīth works.54 This evidence
has led Ayaz to argue that hadith training in ninth/fifteenth-century Ottoman
lands seems to have been a function of the study of jurisprudence.55
The output of Ottoman scholars in the ninth/fifteenth and early tenth/six-
teenth centuries indicates a similarly limited interest in hadith scholarship.
Of the important works Ṭāşköprüzāde highlighted in his 965/1558 biographi-
cal dictionary of Ottoman scholars, a little over a quarter were in the field of
jurisprudence ( fiqh) and another quarter treated theological matters (kalām,
ʿaqāʾid). Hadith studies instead constituted a meager two percent.56 Similar
patterns emerge from analyses of the scholarly output of professors teaching
at the Edirne dārü’l-ḥadīs̱ from its founding until the mid-tenth/sixteenth cen-
tury, of which under five percent focused on hadith.57
Early Ottoman scholars rarely drafted the sort of uṣūl al-ḥadīth works on
which students relied while training in the subject. Preliminary censes of such
works have thus far identified only two written by Ottoman authors before
the middle of the tenth/sixteenth century, a work completed in 856/1452 by

ḳāʾiḳ 524–525. Maghūshī (also Mollā Maghūsh) traveled to Constantinople, Aleppo,

Tripoli, Damascus, and Cairo, where he died. Ayaz, Osmanlı dârulhadisleri 48; Blackburn,
Journey 44n118.
53 Ṣaghānī’s work, in the words of Qasim Zaman, would have “done little to satisfy those who
saw the study of ḥadīth as more than a crucial milestone on the path to juristic training,
and who sought, rather, to anchor their scholarly endeavors, their piety and their authority
in ḥadīth itself.” Zaman, Transmitters of authority 585. Taşköprüzāde’s focus accords with
that of the palace library under Bayezid II, which placed special emphasis on Bukhārī (28
copies), Baghawī (23 copies), Muslim (8 copies), and Ṣaghānī (7–8 copies), at the expense
of other canonical works such as Tirmidhī’s al-Jāmiʿ, of which there was not a single exem-
plar. Göktaş, Hadith collection 311, 314.
54 Taşköprüzāde, Al-Shaqāʾiq 328–329; Mecdī, Tercüme-i Şaḳāʾiḳ 525–526.
55 Ayaz speculates that much hadith instruction would have taken place in the context of
lessons in uṣūl al-fiqh. Ayaz, Osmanlı dârulhadisleri 49. Al-ʿUlaymī mentions one Karīm
al-Dīn al-Qaramānī al-Rūmī who taught Baghawī and Ṣaghānī in Jerusalem. ʿUlaymī, al-
Uns 332.
56 Ayaz, Osmanlı dârulhadisleri 41.
57 Ibid. 58.
a new hadith culture? 43

Şihābe’d-dīn Sīvāsī (d. 860/1456) and a two-page treatise written by Kemāl-

paşazāde (d. 940/1534).58 Nor did Ṭaşköprüzāde mention a single such book
as a key oeuvre of the hundreds of Ottoman scholars he profiled.59 This seems
to be reflective of a broader lack of interest in the subject, if the palace library
of Bāyezīd II is any indication: it contained only a handful of uṣūl al-ḥadīth
works—not one of which had been written by an Ottoman author—and was
equally sparsely equipped with works of rijāl.60
Although hadith commentaries were comparatively more common, these
appeared toward the later ninth/fifteenth century and were rarely devoted to
the sorts of technical questions that occupied specialists in the field. Before
the conquest of 922–923/1516–1517, there were only a few commentaries writ-
ten on Bukhārī’s Ṣaḥīḥ in Ottoman lands; it is telling that the first person known
to have done so, in 874/1469, was Molla Gürānī (d. 983/1488), who had studied
hadith in Cairo under Ibn Ḥajar.61 The Ottoman-educated scholar Molla Luṭfī
(d. 900/1495) followed suit with a commentary on a few sections of Bukhārī.62
The final known Bukhārī commentary written in the Ottoman lands before the
conquest of 922–923/1516–1517 was again written by Kemālpaşazāde, though
this did not circulate widely.63 In the same period, a comparable number of
commentaries were written on the digests of Ṣaghānī and Baghawī.64 Though
I have not had the chance to review these commentaries, the fact that many
of them were written on compilations perceived as jurisprudential tools rein-
forces the belief that the Ottoman interest in hadith derived largely from a legal
perspective; indeed, a recent study of one of Kemālpaşazāde’s hadith commen-
taries found that the sources on which it relied most heavily were not other
such commentaries but rather works of Hanafi jurisprudence ( fiqh).65 Review-
ing the hadith commentaries in the palace collection in the time of Bāyezīd II,
Recep Gürkan Göktaş concludes that, on the whole, Ottoman scholars pre-

58 For the first, see Yıldırım, Hadis çalışmaları. For the second, see Cihan, Osmanlı devrinde
Türk hadisçileri 130; Özer, Şeyhu’l-islam 196.
59 Ayaz, Osmanlı dârulhadisleri 49.
60 Göktaş, Hadith collection 313–314.
61 Ayaz, Molla Gürânî’nin el-Kevseru’l-Cârî; al-Ḥaṣkafī and Ibn Ṭūlūn, Mutʿat al-adhhān ii,
120; Taşköprüzāde, Al-Shaqāʾiq 53. For an analysis of Gürānī’s commentary, see Türcan,
Osmanlı dönemi 153–160.
62 Gökyay and Özen, Molla Lütfi 257; Türcan, Osmanlı dönemi 149. Taşköprüzāde does not
mention the work. Taşköprüzāde, Al-Shaqāʾiq 170.
63 According to Kātib Çelebi, the work was not well known. Özer, Şeyhu’l-islam 194–197.
64 Türcan notes that commentaries on these works and on Bukhārī’s Ṣaḥīḥ were most com-
mon, while commentaries on the other five canonical hadith works were rare. Türcan,
Osmanlı dönemi 149–151.
65 Özer, Şeyhu’l-islam 199.
44 pfeifer

ferred shorter handbooks focused mainly on hadith content—the sort of thing

common in Persianate lands—over the more exacting, specialist works of their
neighbors to the south. “In general,” he observes, “Ottoman scholars of Anato-
lia and Rumelia seem to have had an aversion to technical aspects of hadith
scholarship.”66
In the arena of hadith transmission, it also seems that Ottoman schol-
ars were less keen than their Mamluk-based counterparts. Ottoman scholars
did grant and receive ijāzas for hadith long before the tenth/sixteenth cen-
tury. However, most of these appear to have had less the character of licenses
given specifically to transmit hadith (ijāzāt al-riwāya) than licenses to teach it
(ijāzāt al-tadrīs).67 Take, for example, an ijāza issued to the Ottoman scholar
Müʾeyyedzāde ʿAbdu’r-raḥmān (d. 922/1516) in 888/1483 after he had spent sev-
eral years in Shiraz studying with the Persian scholar Jalāl al-Dīn al-Dawānī
(d. 908/1502). Although the ijāza stated at the outset that it would license
Müʾeyyedzāde in both the rational sciences (ʿaqlī), like philosophy, and the
transmitted sciences (naqlī), of which hadith was a part, its emphasis was
clearly on the former. In the discussion of rational sciences, the ijāza traced
Dawānī’s intellectual genealogy scholar by scholar back several centuries to
“the source,” namely, the philosopher and polymath Ibn Sīnā (d. 428/1037).68 In
contrast, the ijāza traced the genealogy for Bukhārī’s Ṣaḥīḥ back only two gen-
erations, that is, to Dawānī’s teacher and his teacher’s teacher, information so
limited as to be useless for a student wishing to link himself to Bukhārī through
a concrete, and if possible short, series of intermediaries. It is not that Dawānī
did not recognize short isnāds—he mentions that one of his teachers (from
Egypt) possessed them—but he did not mention having them himself, nor did
he pass them on to Müʾeyyedzāde.69
Indeed, few of the Ottoman scholars Ṭāşköprüzāde mentioned in his bio-
graphical dictionary were described as having short chains of transmission,
and the exception proves the rule: the Cairo-educated scholar and Ghazzī fam-
ily friend ʿAbd al-Raḥīm al-ʿAbbāsī (mentioned above), who had visited Istan-
bul briefly around the turn of the tenth/sixteenth century and settled there
after the conquest.70 Another early scholar who could boast elevated chains

66 Göktaş, Hadith collection 312–313.

67 On this distinction, see Davidson, Carrying on the tradition 109–111.
68 The text of the ijāza has been published in Pfeiffer, Teaching the learned 321–322. For the
influence of Dawānī and the Persianate tradition more broadly on Ottoman scholarship,
see Nabil Al-Tikriti’s contribution in this volume.
69 Ibid. 321. The teacher in question was the Cairo-trained scholar Ibn al-Jazarī (d. 833/1429).
70 Taşköprüzāde, Al-Shaqāʾiq 246.
a new hadith culture? 45

of transmission was Saʿdī Çelebi (d. 945/1539), mufti (jurist) and chief judge of
Constantinople, who recited on the authority of three men who had studied or
worked in Arab lands.71
Finally, it seems that, in preconquest Ottoman lands, hadiths did not serve
the same role in elite or public debate. Ṭāşköprüzāde, unlike his contemporary
Arab biographers, offered few anecdotes on which Ottoman scholars discussed
hadith, though he frequently mentioned other topics of scholarly debate.72
As late as the eleventh/seventeenth century, Evliyā Çelebi noted that schol-
ars from Arab lands placed a greater emphasis on prophetic traditions than
those who were centrally trained, astounded that some of them had memo-
rized 20,000 or 30,000 hadiths.73
Given all of this, it comes at little surprise that through the early tenth/six-
teenth century much of the interest in hadith scholarship came from scholars
educated in Arab lands. Right up until the conquest, Ottoman scholars with
a particular interest in prophetic traditions often went to the Mamluk lands
for their studies, and scholars educated there often became leaders in the field
back home.74 We have already seen that the first Ottoman commentary on
Bukhārī was written by the Cairo-trained scholar Gürānī, who was considered
one of the foremost hadith experts in Anatolia.75 That such expertise contin-

71 The three scholars were: the Egyptian-born scholar Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī (d. 926/1520);
Yūsuf al-Ḥusaynī, who was probably the Shirazi born scholar who served as judge in
Baghdad and died in 921/1516; and a scholar likely from Egypt. It is not clear when Saʿdī
came into contact with these men, and since two out of three of them are thought to
have died between 1515–1520, it is clear that he received at least some of these before
the Ottoman conquest. Saʿdī explained in the ijāza that he had been licensed to trans-
mit the thulāthiyyāt of Bukhārī, that is, those hadiths that Bukhārī had transmitted with
only three links to the Prophet. Atâî, Hadaiku’l-hakaik 140–141; Repp, The müfti of Istanbul
241 and n137. Saʿdī is also known to have been influenced intellectually by the Aleppine
scholar Ibrāhīm al-Ḥalabī (d. 956/1549), who had enjoyed extensive hadith training in
Mamluk lands before settling in Istanbul around the turn of the tenth/sixteenth century.
Has, Ibrāhīm al-Ḥalabī 2–6; Kaplan, Polemicist, esp. ch. 3.
72 He did mention that Molla Luṭfī recited Bukhārī’s Ṣaḥīḥ every afternoon. Taşköprüzāde,
Al-Shaqāʾiq 171.
73 Ayaz, Osmanlı dârulhadisleri 63.
74 Türcan, Osmanlı dönemi 143–144. According to the Arab historian and hadith specialist
Muḥammad al-Sakhāwī (d. 902/1497), writing at the end of the ninth/fifteenth century,
Ibn al-Jazarī (d. 833/1429), a Damascus-based scholar who came to the court of Bāyezīd I
in the last years of the eighth/fourteenth century, was active in spreading the study of
prophetic traditions in Anatolia (although Taşköprüzāde does not highlight this). Al-
Sakhāwī, Al-Ḍawʾ al-Lāmiʿ ix, 256–257; Taşköprüzāde, Al-Shaqāʾiq 25–29.
75 For Gürānī’s influence, see Taşköprüzāde, Al-Shaqāʾiq 53.
46 pfeifer

ued to be valued into the early tenth/sixteenth century is suggested by the

experience of the aforementioned ʿAbbāsī when he visited Istanbul from his
native Syria in 906/1501. During an audience with Bāyezīd II, ʿAbbāsī presented
the sultan his newly finished commentary on Bukhārī’s Ṣahīḥ.76 The commen-
tary focused on defining uncommon words (gharīb al-ḥadīth), that is, rare or
obscure terms that appeared in the accounts Bukhārī had included.77 The sul-
tan, apparently pleased with this offering, invited ʿAbbāsī to accept an appoint-
ment to teach hadith at his newly built madrasa.78 ʿAbbāsī declined and soon
returned to the Mamluk lands, where he was hearing hadith from Suyūṭī in
908/1502–1503.79
It thus seems safe to say that on the eve of the conquest, Ottoman schol-
ars had narrower interests as far as hadith scholarship was concerned than
their counterparts from Mamluk lands. Although attention to the field had
begun to pick up in the later ninth/fifteenth century, often inspired by inter-
actions with colleagues from Mamluk Syria and Egypt, Ottoman scholars were
less committed on the whole to hadith scholarship, transmission, and conver-
sation. This certainly does not mean that the Ottoman intellectual tradition
was somehow defective or lacking. In fact, it appears that this was the norm in
much of the Sunni Islamic world: in South Asia (also predominantly Hanafi)
as well as in Persia and Central Asia, hadith studies also generated less excite-
ment than the rational sciences and Islamic law.80 Still, faced with scholars
from Mamluk lands, Hanafi and Shafi‘i alike, who viewed hadith commentary

76 It is unclear when ʿAbbāsī arrived in Constantinople, but he was there when he finished
the manuscript on 24 Shaʿbān 906/15 March 1501. ʿAbd al-Raḥīm al-ʿAbbāsī, Fayḍ al-bārī
ʿalā Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi MS Atıf Efendi 529, 315a. For more on
ʿAbbāsī and Fayḍ al-bārī, see Heinrichs ʿAbd al-Raḥīm al-ʿAbbāsī 12–21.
77 This was a popular genre of commentary in Mamluk lands, though it had earlier origins.
Blecher, Said the Prophet 5; Bonebakker, G̲ h̲ arīb.
78 This stands in great contrast to the mistrust with which Mamluk-era Arab scholars treated
Persian chains of authority. Blecher, Said the Prophet ch. 5.
79 ʿĀşık Çelebi, Dhayl al-Shaqāʾiq 109. Suyūṭī’s hadith compendia became important sources
for later Muslim scholars. Brown, Hadith 59.
80 Blecher points out that both in terms of the output of the teachers and the studies of
students, hadith scholarship in Khorasan was comparatively less well developed than in
the contemporary Mamluk lands. The renowned Timurid scholar Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī
(d. 793/1390), venerated in Ottoman lands, was not known for original hadith scholar-
ship, and when Ibn al-Jazarī was taken to Persia by Timūr, local scholars were eager to
study with him. On the comparative strength of hadith scholarship in Arab lands vis-à-
vis contemporary Persian lands, see Blecher, In the shade 64–67; Subtleny and Khalidov,
Curriculum 219; Gökçe, Hadis çalışmaları 42. For South Asia, see Zaman, Transmitters 587–
588.
a new hadith culture? 47

as an academic capstone and hadith transmission as an act of religious devo-

tion, Ottoman scholars took note.

3 Learning from the Conquered

If the seeds for the Ottoman engagement with the hadith tradition were sown
in the late ninth/fifteenth century, they flowered in the tenth/sixteenth. After
the conquest of 922–923/1516–1517, travel across the newly expanded empire
increased, and scholars, both Arab and Turcophone, were some of the most
mobile populations of all. With this, interactions between Ottoman- and Mam-
luk-educated scholars increased, making hadith more present in the lives of
Ottoman scholars.
After 922–923/1516–1517, Istanbul-trained Turcophone scholars quickly es-
tablished their supremacy within the expanded learned and judicial hierarchy.
They continued to occupy the overwhelming majority of professorships in the
imperial center, as well as key judgeships in the newly added provinces. Yet,
as I have argued elsewhere, this should not blind us to other arenas of knowl-
edge exchange, especially informal learned gatherings (majālis al-ʿilm).81 With
the growing presence of scholars from former Mamluk domains in such gath-
erings, there were increasing conversations on the subject of the sunna, with
the result that prophetic traditions became ever more visible in the Ottoman
scholarly world.
Scholars based in Arab lands continued to venerate and discuss hadith after
their incorporation into the Ottoman Empire. One of Ghazzī’s students in Dam-
ascus held an annual feast in honor of Bukhārī’s Ṣaḥīḥ.82 Ghazzī, like his father
before him, continued to pepper his speech with hadiths that he had set to a
rhyme.83 On his way to Istanbul in 936/1530, he stopped in Aleppo for a dis-
cussion with a local mufti. The mufti asked about the authenticity of a hadith
about hope and fear. Ghazzī answered by citing several different scholarly opin-
ions: although the Cairene scholar Muḥammad al-Zarkashī (d. 794/1392) had
considered it as a tradition that was widespread but without proper textual
foundation, in fact ʿAbdallah b. Aḥmad (d. 290/903) had included it in his com-
pendium Zawāʾid al-Zuhd (Supplemental material on pious excellence) on the

81 Pfeifer, Encounter after the conquest.

82 Ibn Ayyūb, al-Rawḍ 45b.
83 Al-Būrīnī, Tarājim ii, 101; al-Ghazzī, Al-Maṭāliʿ 187 (mentioned above).
48 pfeifer

authority of the Iraqi ascetic Thābit al-Bunānī (d. 120s/738–748), as Suyūṭī had
laid out in one of his books.84
Ottoman scholars trained in Istanbul were often present during such discus-
sions. In one conversation between an Ottoman chief judge and a local Arab
scholar in Damascus around the mid-960s/late 1550s, the discussion turned
to whether fasting suppressed hunger. The judge asked the local scholar, who
was famous for his knowledge of hadith, whether there were any hadiths
that touched upon the question, which the scholar duly cited.85 In the early
980s/mid-1570s, the Ottoman mufti Meḥmed Muʿīdzāde (d. 983/1576) was pres-
ent during one of Ghazzī’s learned gatherings at which debate centered on a
hadith about the permissibility of buying and selling concubines.86 Increas-
ingly, Ottoman scholars were confronted with colleagues who placed great
importance on prophetic traditions.
To finally turn our attention to Çivizāde’s ijāza, this, too, emerged out of the
context of a scholarly gathering. Çivizāde, who was from a prominent learned
family, had been appointed chief judge of Damascus at the beginning of 976/in
the summer of 1568.87 He had met with Ghazzī frequently during his time in
office.88 Now, toward the end of his tenure in Damascus and after a festive gath-
ering celebrating the end of one of Ghazzī’s courses (majlis khatm), Çivizāde
lingered a bit to speak privately with Ghazzī.89 He wanted to know: would
Ghazzī be willing to grant him an ijāza? At first, Ghazzī thought his colleague
was joking, since Çivizāde, nearly 40 years of age, was a seasoned scholar in his
own right and himself issued such licenses to others. But, having ascertained
the seriousness of the request, Ghazzī obliged.90 The transfer of knowledge and
authority that resulted was immense: a copy of the license held in the Kasta-
monu Public Library spans more than 18 pages.91 The vast majority of these
pages listed the genealogies by which Ghazzī, and henceforth Çivizāde, could
transmit hadith.

84 Al-Ghazzī, Al-Maṭāliʿ 67–68.

85 The judge in question was Ebū’s-suʿūd Efendi’s son. Ibn Ayyūb, Das Kitāb 44.
86 Al-Būrīnī, Tarājim, ii, 95–96. For Muʿīdzāde, see al-Murādī, ʿArf al-Bashām 34–35; al-
Ghazzī, Al-Kawākib 3:85.
87 There are conflicting dates as to his appointment. The local scholar Ibn Ayyūb says he
arrived at the beginning of 976/late summer 1568. Ibn Ayyūb, Dhayl Quḍāt Dimashq 330.
88 Al-Ghazzī, Ijāza 232a.
89 The final session was held in one of the side rooms of the Umayyad Mosque on 6 Jumādā I
978/6 October 1570, shortly before Çivizāde left to take up his appointment as chief judge
in Cairo. Al-Ghazzī, Ijāza 232b.
90 Ibid.
91 It ends abruptly on fol. 240b, but very likely the ijāza was nearing its end.
a new hadith culture? 49

The license did permit Çivizāde to relate Ghazzī’s larger corpus of writ-
ings, thus functioning in part as what was known as a license for nonspecified
material (ijāza muṭlaqa). As Ghazzī stated at the beginning of the license, he
permitted Çivizāde to “recite on my authority all of my writings, all that was
licensed to me, and all my [hadith] narrations [muṣannafātī wa mustajāzātī wa
marwiyātī].”92 Ghazzī listed his most important works in a number of different
scholarly fields, as well as his most important teachers, including Suyūṭī and
Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī.93 This followed the standard practice by which scholars
had come to grant licenses permitting students to transmit increasingly large
bodies of information.94
However, the great bulk of the ijāza was devoted to hadith. Of special inter-
est were the six canonical hadith collections. Much of the document—about
five pages—laid out the chains of transmission by which Ghazzī had been
licensed to transmit Bukhārī, Muslim, Abū Dāwūd, Tirmidhī, Nasāʾī, and Ibn
Māja (in that order).95 In the case of Bukhārī, Ghazzī noted that he trans-
mitted the author’s work on the authority of a variety of different teachers,
the most important of which went through Ibn Ḥajar (see figure 2.1).96 But
he also mentioned a second, particularly short, route by which he was con-
nected to Bukhārī, namely through the stone mason and star transmitter Abū
ʿAbbās al-Ḥajjār (d. 730/1329).97 This left a mere eight links between Ghazzī and
Bukhārī (nine for Çivizāde), which meant in the case of some hadiths as few
as eleven links between Ghazzī and the Prophet (twelve for Çivizāde). Ghazzī
also licensed Çivizāde in two chains of transmission for Muslim’s Ṣaḥīḥ col-
lection, one of which went through Ghazzī’s father, and the other of which
went through the chief judge Burhān al-Dīn Ibrahīm Ibn Abī Sharīf al-Maqdisī
(d. 923/1517).98 Çivizāde did not actually read all of these books with Ghazzī
before receiving the ijāza; rather, as Ghazzī explained in his text, he simply
asked Çivizāde to read the first few passages of each work (as was standard
protocol in this period).99

92 Ibid.
93 Ibid. 239a–240a.
94 Davidson, Carrying on the tradition 129–135.
95 Al-Ghazzī, Ijāza 232b–239a.
96 This was a famous isnād, and a similar one is given in an ijāza reproduced in Aḥmad, al-
Ījāzāt 38–43. Blecher, Said the Prophet 85–86, 99.
97 Al-Ghazzī, Ijāza 234a. He stops recounting the isnād at al-Hajjār, presumably because it
was so well known that it did not need specifying. See Davidson, Carrying on the tradition
163–166.
98 Al-Ghazzī, Ijāza, 234a.
99 This is to be distinguished from more rigorous forms of hadith education in which he read
and discussed these hadith collections, as he did with other students (e.g., al-Ghazzī, al-
Kawākib ii, 105).
50 pfeifer

figure 2.1
The list of authorities upon which Ghazzī
transmitted the Ṣaḥīḥ of Bukhārī
From al-Ghazzī, Ijāza, 234a, repro-
duced with the kind permis-
sion of the Kastamonu İl Halk
Kütüphanesi

In addition to offering access to chains of transmission for major hadith

collections, Ghazzī also isolated a few free-standing hadiths to transmit to
Çivizāde. Some of these helped to incorporate Çivizāde into illustrious chains
of scholarly authority. One of these was the “hadith of mercy,” which was, by
tradition, the first hadith a teacher transmitted when he took on a new student
(al-ḥadīth al-musalsal bi-l-awwaliyya). The account quoted Muḥammad as hav-
ing said, “those who are merciful are shown mercy by God; show mercy to those
on earth and He who is in the heavens will show mercy to you.”100 Ghazzī had
heard this hadith from all of his teachers but copied down the genealogy that
he owed to the most esteemed of them, Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī, who had in turn
heard it from Ibn Ḥajar.101 Similarly distinguished in its lineage was a second
free-standing hadith Ghazzī transmitted to Çivizāde, this one transmitted from
beginning to end by the most elevated scholars (al-ʿulāʾ al-aʿlām).102 This again
included Anṣārī and Ibn Ḥajar, as well as several chief judges of Cairo, a mufti,

100 For this tradition see Davidson, Carrying on the tradition 91–96 (translation from 93); Ayaz,
Zâhid el-Kevserî 69.
101 Al-Ghazzī, Ijāza 232b–233b.
102 Ibid. 237b–238a.
a new hadith culture? 51

figures 2.2–2.3 The chain of authorities (isnād) and the hadith text (matn) for a hadith
transmitted exclusively by men called Muḥammad, followed by a hadith
transmitted by great scholars
From al-Ghazzī, Ijāza, 238a–b, reproduced with the kind per-
mission of the Kastamonu İl Halk Kütüphanesi

and an imam of the Ḥaramayn, among others. Becoming a transmitter of this

no doubt coveted hadith narration meant that Çivizāde could claim to be part
of that same pantheon of great scholars.
The other two free-standing hadiths Ghazzī transmitted to Çivizāde were
valuable more for their devotional significance. The first was one of Ṣuyūṭī’s
ʿushāriyyāt, or “tens,” namely hadiths Ṣuyūṭī transmitted with only ten links
between himself and the Prophet.103 Finally, there was the hadith account
transmitted exclusively by people called Muḥammad—since both Ghazzī and
Çivizāde were named such—leading back to the Prophet himself. This greater
selectivity of the hadith chain and the connection of the transmitters to their
namesake surely amplified the sense of connection both to previous genera-
tions of scholars and to the Prophet himself, as the repeated red lettering of
the name “Muḥammad” in the Kastamonu text suggests (see figures 2.2 and
2.3). All in all, Ghazzī seems to have transmitted to Çivizāde some of his most
coveted hadith chains, since they were the very ones highlighted by some of
Ghazzī’s biographers.104 Together, they amounted to a considerable transmis-
sion of knowledge, authority, and baraka.

103 Ibid. 236b. For Suyūṭī and the ʿushāriyyāt, see Davidson, Carrying on the tradition 234–235.
104 Būrīnī mentioned some of Ghazzī’s prestigious isnāds, including those that were on the
authority of Ibn Ḥajar, Ibn Abī Sharīf al-Maqdisī (mentioned above) and his brother
Kamāl al-Dīn Ibn Abī Sharīf, Qalqashandī, Mazzī, and Suyūṭī. Al-Būrīnī, Tarājim ii, 93–
94.
52 pfeifer

Çivizāde was not alone among Turcophone scholars in seeking Ghazzī out
for his hadiths. When Ghazzī traveled to the Ottoman center in 936–937/1530–
1531, his host in Izmit heard hadiths from him. He also asked Ghazzī for an ijāza
to transmit everything that Ghazzī had been licensed to transmit—not only for
himself, but for his three sons as well.105 Others, including many mature men
at the height of their scholarly careers, heard hadiths from Ghazzī during their
trips to Damascus. This included two other chief judges of the city, Ḳınalızāde
ʿAlī (d. 979/1572)106 and Meḥmed Bostānzāde (d. 1006/1598), as well as two of its
Hanafi muftis Fevrī Efendi (d. 978/1571) and the aforementioned Muʿīdzāde.107
In at least one case, the transmission of hadith was also accompanied by more
formal lessons: Ḳınalızāde also studied hadith as a discipline (ʿilm al-ḥadīth)
with Ghazzī.108
Nor was Ghazzī alone in attracting Ottoman scholars interested in collect-
ing hadith accounts. The Tunisian scholar Maghūshī issued a license in matters
of hadith to Ṭāşköprüzāde, as we have already seen. ʿAbbāsī was one of two
Egyptian scholars known to have issued a hadith license to Çivizāde’s father,
the well-known şeyhü’l-islām Çivizāde Muḥyī’d-dīn (d. 954/1547).109 This same
ʿAbbāsī also transmitted hadith to the famous Ottoman poet and scholar ʿĀşıḳ
Çelebi (d. 979/1572), as another extant ijāza shows. The ijāza comprised the
first hadith that had been transmitted to ʿAbbāsī (al-ḥadīth al-musalsal bi-l-
awwaliyya), Bukhārī’s Ṣaḥīḥ, and everything else ʿAbbāsī had been licensed to
transmit by his teachers.110 It seems then that what before the conquest had
been a trickle became a veritable avalanche after it.

105 Al-Ghazzī, al-Maṭāliʿ 270–271.

106 Ibn Ayyūb, al-Rawḍ 203b, 204b, 241a; al-Ghazzī, Al-Kawākib iii, 6, 187. Ḳınalızāde also
received an ijāza for hadith, tafsir, Quran recitation, and maʿānī and bayān from another
Damascene scholar, Aḥmad b. al-Ṭībī. Ibn Ayyūb, al-Rawḍ 204b.
107 Al-Ghazzī, al-Kawākib iii, 6. The printed edition states Fawzī Efendi, but this is likely
instead Fevrī, who acted as mufti in Damascus and knew Ghazzī well. It also lists Ibn al-
ʿAbd, while mentioning that one manuscript refers to al-Muʿīd, which I take to be more
likely since Muʿīdzāde is mentioned in another source as having attended one of Ghazzī’s
classes (al-Būrīnī, Tarājim ii, 95–96). Ṭaşköprüzāde also mentioned that Muʿīdzāde spent
some time in Damascus in the 980s/1572–1582. Ṭaşköprüzāde, Al-Shaqāʾiq 483. Najm al-
Dīn’s later biography of Bostanzāde does not mention explicitly that he studied with
Ghazzī, though he does say that he learned from him (ḥamala ʿanhu min fawāʾidihi). Al-
Ghazzī, Luṭ f al-Samar 102–106.
108 Ibn Ayyūb, al-Rawḍ 203b.
109 Gel, XVI. yüzyılın, 182.
110 ʿĀşıḳ Çelebi, Dhayl 107–108. It has been speculated that it was this same ʿAbbāsī who intro-
duced ʿĀşıḳ Çelebi to the work of Ibn Taymiyya, as discussed in chapter four of this volume.
Gel, XVI. yüzyılın 182.
a new hadith culture? 53

There is little doubt as to the outstanding value of these ijāzas to their recip-
ients. Some copied them wholesale into other published works, as ʿĀşıḳ Çelebi
did in the case of the license he received from ʿAbbāsī.111 Others seem to have
been copied and circulated as interesting documents in their own right, as
Çivizāde’s ijāza from Ghazzī was. But what is perhaps most striking in this pat-
tern was its clear directionality: all of the men seeking the ijāzas were Ottoman-
educated scholars, while all of the men granting them were educated in the
Mamluk lands. I have not to date found an extant ijāza documenting a case
in which an Ottoman scholar transmitted hadith to a Mamluk-educated one
in the first 60 years after the conquest.112 Ghazzī’s ijāza for Çivizāde, and the
wider intellectual context of which it is a part, thus suggest the extent to which
centrally trained Ottoman scholars were interested in the scholarly legacies of
the places they conquered.

4 Hadith Culture and Confession Building

Placed within a wider context, Ghazzī’s ijāza strongly suggests a growing “ha-
dith culture” in the Ottoman Empire in the tenth/sixteenth century, one com-
prising but not limited to the scholarly sphere. There is some evidence of
this in a 973/1565 imperial rescript ( firmān) outlining a list of books that
students at the highest level of Ottoman madrasas were required to study.113
The list included an impressive number of works of hadith, many of which
stemmed from the golden era of hadith studies in Mamluk lands. This included
the commentary on Bukhārī’s Ṣaḥīḥ written by Ibn Ḥajar, who had taught
Ghazzī’s teacher Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī, on whose authority Ghazzī transmitted
a number of hadith collections to Çivizāde. It also included the commentary
on Bukhārī written by Badr al-Dīn al-ʿAynī, Ibn Ḥajar’s Hanafi competitor in
Cairo. To be sure, there were also several commentaries on Baghawī’s Maṣābīḥ
al-sunna, a compendium, which, as we saw, had played an important role

111 Ibid.
112 Ghazzī did ask Müʾeyyedzāde Ḥāccī Çelebi (d. 944/1537–1538), the brother of the afore-
mentioned Müʾeyyedzāde ʿAbdu’r-raḥmān, for an ijāza for his son, though he did not
specify for what. Al-Ghazzī, al-Maṭāliʿ 263. Likewise, in the ninth/fifteenth century, the
Cairo-educated scholar Shams al-Dīn al-Fenārī granted Ibn Ḥajar an ijāza when the for-
mer returned to Cairo for a visit, though it is again unclear in what. Taşköprüzāde, Al-
Shaqāʾiq 17. The parallels with the South Asian case are striking. Blecher, Said the Prophet,
part iii.
113 Ahmed and Filipović, The sultan’s syllabus.
54 pfeifer

in ninth/fifteenth-century Ottoman hadith studies.114 Meanwhile, Ṣaghānī’s

Mashāriq al-Anwār—the basic primer on which Kemālpaşazāde had written
a commentary at the beginning of the tenth/sixteenth century—disappeared
from the list, making way instead for a Mamluk-era item, namely the commen-
tary on another canonical hadith collection (the Ṣaḥīḥ of Muslim) written by
Yaḥyā al-Nawawī (d. 676/1277), a Shafi‘i scholar from Damascus.115 At twelve
items, in any case, hadith works made up a substantial part of the 39 titles on
the list.116
Traces of a growing hadith culture appear elsewhere as well. The tenth/six-
teenth century saw a veritable explosion of Ottoman “40 hadith” works (ar-
baʿūn ḥadīth/ḳırḳ hadīs̱), collections of narrations often assembled to accrue
blessings or instruct people in the faith.117 But a greater concern with hadith
also appears in less obvious arenas, including the emergent Ottoman tradition
of biographical dictionaries of poets (teẕkire-i şuʿarā). Over the course of the
tenth/sixteenth century, these dictionaries exhibited a growing concern with
the question of whether poetry was permissible in an Islamic context. Sehī Bey
(d. 955/1548), the first Ottoman poet to compose such a work (in 945/1538), was
not terribly bothered by the issue, stating only that the Quran was sympathetic
toward poets.118 While Laṭīfī (d. 990/1582), who wrote a first draft of his bio-
graphical dictionary in 953/1546, agreed with this basic premise, he did feel the
need to shore up this claim with a handful of prophetic hadiths.119 Such rather
perfunctory discussions turned into a full-blown scholarly defense by the time
of ʿĀşıḳ Çelebi, who, as we have seen, had been licensed by ʿAbbāsī to transmit
Bukhārī’s Ṣaḥīḥ. The introduction to his 975–976/1568–1569 dictionary devoted
over 20 manuscript pages to the question of the permissibility of poetry, refer-
ring to Quranic verses, to be sure, but much more so to a battery of prophetic
sayings, complete with the sources from which they were derived, the compan-
ions on whose authority they had first been transmitted, and, in a few cases,
variant readings of the hadiths’ meanings.120
Although ʿĀşıḳ Çelebi enlisted the sunna in the service of a more pleasure-
loving cultural sensibility, it could of course be channeled toward more restric-
tive ends as well. The scholar and preacher Birgivī Meḥmed Efendi (d. 981/1573),

114 This included his Maṣābīḥ as well as four commentaries on it. Ibid. 200–201.
115 Ibid. 201.
116 Zaman notes that it would be difficult to find an Indian madrasa with the same commit-
ment to hadith in this period. Zaman, Transmitters 603.
117 Karahan, Türk edebiyatı 471; Karahan, Kırk hadis 67, 153–196.
118 Sehī Bey, Heşt bihişt 75.
119 Laṭīfī, Teẕkire-i Laṭīfī 5–10.
120 Âşık Çelebi, Meşâʿirü’s-şu‘arâ i, 134–168.
a new hadith culture? 55

one of the most passionate proponents of a stricter adherence to Islamic

norms, was also more ardently interested in hadith than many of his Anato-
lian predecessors had been. He was one of the first Ottoman scholars to write
a widely read work of uṣūl al-ḥadīth, one that continued to be commented
on into the fourteenth/twentieth century.121 He used the sunna as his main
guide as he went about instructing his fellow Muslims about how to live a more
pious life. Nearly half of his magnum opus, al-Ṭarīqa al-Muḥammadiyya (The
Muḥammadan path), finished in 980/1572, was made up of hadith citations,
culled not just from Bukhārī and Muslim but from many other canonical col-
lections as well.122
How the hadith tradition fared in subsequent centuries remains to be better
understood. There is considerable evidence to suggest that devotion to the field
stayed strong. In contrast to the modest hadith holdings in the libraries of ear-
lier Ottoman madrasas, the collection founded by Köprülü Fāżıl Aḥmed Pasha
in 1089/1678 contained a number of different hadith works.123 Anatolian stu-
dents in that same century seem to have enjoyed a much more rigorous training
in the field, and many would go on to write works in the immensely popular
40 hadith genre.124 Finally, scholars across the empire seem to have engaged
in hadith transmission, enthusiastically pursuing what Stefan Reichmuth has
called “isnād piety.”125 And yet, there is some suggestion that such interest
was more intermittent. An ijāza from the first half of the fourteenth/twenti-
eth century has led Kadir Ayaz to argue that most of the chains of transmis-
sion circulating in central Ottoman lands in the later period had only entered
the region in the later eleventh/seventeenth century (imported predominantly
from the Arab provinces).126 When the Indian-born scholar Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī
(d. 1205/1791) began dictating hadith in Cairo in the later part of his life, men-
tioning their different narrations and lines of transmission from memory, he
was widely perceived to be reviving earlier practices.127 Was the interest of

121 This was Risāla fī uṣūl al-ḥadīth, although it is less a work on the principles of hadith
than on its key terms (muṣṭalaḥ). Ivanyi, Virtue, piety and the law 82–83; Cihan, Osmanlı
devrinde Türk hadisçileri 130–131, 134–135.
122 Ivanyi, Virtue, piety and the law 82–92.
123 Ayaz, Zâhid el-Kevserî 66.
124 For education, see the experience of Kātib Çelebī, whose teacher in the subject had him-
self trained with the Egyptian scholar Ibrahīm Laqānī (d. 1041/1631). Ayaz, Osmanlı dârul-
hadisleri 49–50. For 40 hadith works, see Karahan, Kırk hadis esp. 292–294.
125 Reichmuth, Murtaḍā az-Zabīdī, 72; Ayaz, Zâhid el-Kevserî.
126 Ayaz, Zâhid el-Kevserî.
127 Reichmuth, Murtaḍā az-Zabīdī, 79–81; Rouayheb, Islamic intellectual history, 131–133; Davi-
son, Carrying on the tradition, 96–107.
56 pfeifer

the generation of Çivizāde in hadith transmission just a flash in the pan, fol-
lowed by a general diminution of the practice in both Arab and Turcophone
lands? Until Ottoman hadith culture gets the attention it is due, it is difficult to
know.
Either way, the ijāza Ghazzī issued to Çivizāde and the context of which
it was a part does shed light on tenth/sixteenth-century histories of Ottoman
Sunnitization. In the first instance, it seems, a growing hadith culture was less
part of a top-down effort to Islamize society than a transformation within the
Ottoman learned elite itself. Though the actors involved in this process were too
privileged to qualify as constituting pressure “from below,” it is noteworthy that
it was spurred on by many Arab colleagues beneath Ottoman officials in power
and rank. The case of the sunna seems to support the idea that Sunnitization
was, at least in part, an aspect of what Derin Terzioğlu has called a growth in
“Islamic literacy,” that is, the ongoing process by which Ottoman scholars came
to engage in different aspects of the Islamic scholarly tradition.128 This process
seems to have preceded the efforts of men like Birgivī to impose this on a wider
population.
However, what was being transferred was not just a purely intellectual con-
cern. As Brown and Davidson have persuasively argued, the veneration, schol-
arly study, and transmission of hadith must be seen as part of a devotional and
spiritual practice, one offering a link to previous generations of devout Mus-
lims and above all to Muḥammad himself. In this sense, it can be thought of
as akin to the visitation of graves. In fact, after Çivizāde was transferred from
Damascus to Cairo in 978/1571, he made a point to visit the tombs of the famous
figures of the region. He visited not only that of one of the companions of the
Prophet Muḥammad and the saintly woman Sayyida Nafīsa, but also that of
Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī, the late Mamluk-era scholar on whose authority he could
now transmit hadith.129 Thanks to Ghazzī, Çivizāde’s name would now perma-
nently be connected to Anṣārī’s and to a long line of Muslims who had, link by
link, painstakingly devoted themselves to preserving the legacy of the Prophet
Muḥammad.

128 Terzioğlu, How to conceptualize 309.

129 He also visited the grave of Muḥammad al-Maghūshī, with whom Taşköprüzāde had stud-
ied. Al-Ḥamawī, Ḥādī al-Aẓʿān 62.
a new hadith culture? 57

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Joel Blecher, Susan Gunasti, M. Sait Özervarlı, Sara Nur
Yıldız, the editors of this volume, and the anonymous reviewers for their help-
ful feedback on this article.

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 chapter 3

A Contrarian Voice: Şehzāde Ḳorḳud’s (d. 919/1513)

Writings on Kalām and the Early Articulation of
Ottoman Sunnism
Nabil Al-Tikriti

What characterizes Ottoman Sunnism, and how did it come to be? The con-
ventional view is that by roughly the middle of the sixteenth century the impe-
rial elite came to adopt and promote a particular religious identity, which can
be characterized by several overlapping, interrelated, and historically defined
denominational (madhhab) affiliations, as well as a particular relationship with
the political hierarchy. The favored denominations included Hanafi legal affili-
ation and Maturidi kalām orientation, accompanied by elite support for par-
ticular aspects of mystical thought and practice, a cooperative relationship
between favored Sufi orders and the state, and advanced integration of the
ulama into a state-supported madrasa system.1 The scholarly literature on the
evolution of these markers of belonging, as well as their meaning and con-
tent in an Ottoman context, has blossomed in recent years; however, much still
remains to be clarified concerning the characteristics of this posited “Ottoman
Sunnism” and how it came to be.
The coming together of these main factors into a coherent religious out-
look evolved over approximately a century, from roughly the last quarter of
the fifteenth to the middle of the sixteenth century. Prior to that period, Ana-
tolian societies displayed a plethora of religious, spiritual, and political iden-
tities, which cannot easily be characterized as either fully Ottoman or Sunni.
As Rıza Yıldırım characterized it, the religious landscape of Anatolia prior
to the coming together of Ottoman Sunnism can best be described as “clus-
ters of faiths,” sharing both Sunni and Shi‘i elements.2 The earliest element
in the institutionalization of a comprehensive Sunni imperial identity was
likely Sultan Meḥmed II’s (d. 886/1481) construction of a fully hierarchical

1 Similarly, Necdet Tosun has argued that if one is to speak of a “Turkish Islam,” it would be
defined as Maturidi in belief, Hanafi in fiqh, and following Sufi paths such as the Naqshbandi
and Yesevi. Tosun, Mâtürîdiyye ve tasavvuf ilişkisi 54.
2 Yıldırım, Sunni orthodox vs. Shi‘ite heterodox 304.

© nabil al-tikriti, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004440296_004

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
a contrarian voice 63

madrasa system, accompanied by a unified curriculum.3 Following the estab-

lishment of the top madrasas, a synthesis between Ash‘ari and Maturidi theo-
logical approaches was embedded in the curriculum,4 along with a particularly
Ottoman take on the Hanafi tradition.5 Covering theology, logic, philosophy,
law, language, rhetoric, and other fields outside the physical sciences, this cur-
riculum was heavily influenced by an earlier Timurid example of royal patron-
age for madrasa scholarship, which has been described as a “Sunni revival”
and came to play a major role in articulating an Ottoman path of practicing
Sunni Islam.6 Concurrently, after the turn of the sixteenth century, facing an
explicitly Shi‘i Safavid challenge, which was itself evolving, this Ottoman inter-
pretation of Sunnism hardened further in the midst of an “age of confession-
alization,” which paralleled a similar (and far more extensively researched and
commented upon) age in European societies.7
Before stabilizing as an institutionally consistent madrasa course of study,
some of the curriculum’s foundational texts and pedagogical emphases re-
mained hotly debated, with one of the realms most in dispute being that
of uṣūl al-dīn, or “principles of religion.” The discipline within uṣūl al-dīn to
receive the most attention has always been ʿilm al-kalām, or just kalām, com-
monly translated as “theology.”8 The Ottoman madrasa curriculum included a
thorough study of kalām, perhaps because learning the classics of theological
disputation provided students with a solid orientation and history of Muslim
identity politics through the centuries up to that point. Likewise, by studying
kalām, students could strengthen their grasp of uṣūl al-dīn in general, logic,
and rhetorical methodology, and the factors inherent in successful theological
positions. As Ottoman religious politics underwent a shift at the turn of the six-
teenth century due to the Safavid challenge, that training proved quite useful,
as kalām provided one of the key tools for state-supported scholars to redefine
the boundaries of sanctioned belief.

3 Atçıl, Scholars and sultans.

4 Yazıcıoğlu, Le kalām; Özervarlı, Theology in the Ottoman lands.
5 Burak, Second formation; Peters, What does it mean.
6 Özervarlı, Theology in the Ottoman lands; Ahmed and Filipović, The sultan’s syllabus. On the
Timurid madrasa curriculum, see Subtelny and Khalidov, The curriculum.
7 This terminology follows that of Krstić, Illuminated by the light.
8 As Jan Thiele has pointed out, none of these terms properly map onto Western understand-
ings of “theology,” as kalām touches upon issues considered beyond theology’s purview, while
some of what is considered theological discourse in Christendom falls outside of kalām.
Due to the imprecise and constantly evolving nature of these terms, and their somewhat
inconsistent use in the literature, this submission uses them interchangeably. Thiele, Recent
scholarship 224.
64 al-tikriti

One figure whose writings reflect this coming together of Ottoman Sun-
nism at a nascent stage is Şehzāde Ḳorḳud (d. 919/1513), who argued a series
of positions on matters of religious belief, doctrinal certainty, favored groups,
and the relationship between the state and ulama. Largely because he failed
to win power in the 917–919/1511–1513 dynastic succession struggle, the prince’s
arguments left a limited mark, and several of his positions reflected a minority
viewpoint. However, at the same time, his positions highlight several relevant
intellectual influences at that time and place, point to factors contributing to
the form Ottoman Sunnism came to take, and demonstrate the range of debate
inherent in elite circles at the time.

1 Lineages of Ottoman Kalām

Kalām had evolved through several epochs by the time Ottoman scholars
entered the arena. Early Islamic doctrinal debates were contested between a
number of groups, some of the more influential consisting of: Mu‘tazili sup-
porters of full human agency, divine justice, and responsibility who accepted
rational argumentation; Hanbali traditionalists who prioritized revealed
knowledge (naql)—particularly prophetic hadith reports—over all other
forms of proofs; and Murji’i partisans, who believed individuals would face
God’s judgment only in the afterlife.
In the course of these debates, which sometimes turned violent, support-
ers of such broad sets of positions sharpened their own stance in response
to their opponents’ critiques, borrowed arguments from each other, and ulti-
mately reached a sort of consensus on certain points. Over time, as doctrinal
debates continued to evolve, the original group coherence broke down, to be
replaced by new groupings. Scholars, rarely obliged to follow consistent belief
guidelines, frequently supported positions lifted from multiple groupings. As a
result, the borders between primary belief orientations were frequently blurry,
as well as constantly shifting. For example, while many Sunni scholars and
theologians sympathized with various Mu‘tazili views, the grouping eventu-
ally became largely identified with Twelver Shi‘i philosophy, while the Murji’i
strand later became identified with latitudinarian Sufism. Similarly, in the early
centuries traditionalists persuasively portrayed both falsafa (philosophic ratio-
nalism) and kalām as doubt inducing and dangerous activities.9

9 Spannaus, Theology in Central Asia.

a contrarian voice 65

As A.I. Sabra argued, falsafa and kalām evolved in opposition to each other,
with each seeing itself as the supreme science, independent of all others. Advo-
cates for this Islamicate form of philosophic rationalism, the most notable
of which included al-Kindī (d. 259/873), al-Fārābī (d. 339/950), Ibn Sīnā/Avi-
cenna (d. 428/1038), and Ibn Rushd/Averroes (d. 595/1198), saw themselves as
searching for truth for its own sake, as contemporary representatives of ancient
sciences exemplified by demonstrative proofs, doctrinal neutrality, and gen-
uinely rational methodology.10 In response to falsafa critiques of kalām as a
pseudoscience offering little more than apologetics in defense of Islamic belief,
and recognizing the power of such critiques, prominent mutakallimūn came to
integrate philosophic method into their doctrinal arguments, while at the same
time extending the reach of kalām discourse into fields well beyond what mod-
ern scholars might recognize as “theology.”11
Several Ash‘ari scholars fleshed out kalām’s response to the falsafa cri-
tique in the fifth/eleventh to eighth/fourteenth centuries. Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī
(d. 403/1013) first supported al-Ashʿarī’s statements by pioneering a system of
intellectual premises built on an atomistic theory of the world. In response
to Aristotelian critiques of al-Bāqillānī’s atomistic premises set out by the
falāsifa (philosophers), especially by Avicenna, Imām al-Ḥaramayn al-Juwaynī
(d. 478/1085) introduced reason (ʿaql) to kalām discourse.12 Following al-Juway-
nī’s contribution, al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) argued against the purely rationalist
positions of the falāsifa as a whole, on the grounds that their methods were
inadequate to prove several of their doctrine’s main points. For this reason,
he argued that the falāsifa as a group failed to demonstrate their claim of
philosophic rationalism’s all-encompassing demonstrative consistency. As an
alternative, al-Ghazālī, and those who followed him, proposed co-opting philo-
sophic methodology and rigor to defend kalām positions.13 Within this school
of thought, Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210) perfected al-Ghazālī’s challenge
to the philosophers by combining and applying the methodology of rational-
ism (ʿaql) to confirm statements made by revealed knowledge (naql).
Once falsafa methodology and rhetoric had been thus co-opted into kalām
discourse, most scholars followed their lead, aside from falsafa rationalists
and traditionalists, who eventually grew somewhat marginalized within main-
stream Islamicate intellectual circles. In addition to marginalizing unsympa-
thetic philosophers and traditionalists, this “Avicennan turn” in response to Ibn

10 Ulrich et al., Philosophy in the Islamic world.

11 Sabra, Science and philosophy 1–15.
12 Ibid. 12–13.
13 Frank, Al-Ghazālī’s use.
66 al-tikriti

Sīnā’s critique also transformed kalām under the aegis of an all-encompassing

disciplinary approach, which came to be known as ḥikma (wisdom).14 Over
the subsequent centuries, kalām evolved into a rigorous philosophic school of
its own, which might be more accurately classified as a “religious philosophy”
or a “philosophical theology.”15 By the ninth/fifteenth century, an admixture
of rationalist philosophical methodology and rhetoric had been progressively
incorporated into the discipline, such that the postclassical (al-mutaʾakhkhi-
rūn) form of kalām came to prioritize logic, design, and strength of argumen-
tation over madhhab affiliation.16
Living in an era defined by the dual threats of the Isma‘ili daʿwa and the
doubt inducing faylasūf, al-Ghazālī also strove to ensure legal effect for one’s
doctrinal thinking. As Frank Griffel has pointed out, al-Ghazālī denied the right
of repentance (istitāba) to those found guilty of secret apostasy (zindīqs) due
to their demonstrated internal beliefs, regardless of their external statements
of faith. He also paved the way for state representatives to adjudicate the status
of one’s belief based on one’s external actions, primarily by blurring the legal
distinction between a Muslim guilty of internal unbelief (kufr) and a believer
actively professing apostasy (irtidād).17 Over time, legists and other scholars
elaborated on actions that signified such internal belief to the satisfaction of
governing authorities. One of the earlier and more celebrated victims of this
position was Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā Suhrawardī (d. 587/1191), author of the contro-
versial tract Hayākil al-nūr (Temples of light). Due to the bāṭınī (Neoplatonic,
gnostic, esoteric) nature of his ishrāqī (illuminationist) writings, which went
on to influence generations of philosophical Sufis, his views were considered
enough of a provocation by the Ayyubid authorities of his day to justify execu-
tion.18
Coinciding with an era of great intellectual, philosophical, and political
experimentation in the wake of the Mongol Irruption, in the decades and cen-
turies after Suhrawardī’s execution, several philosophically inclined scholars
strove to rehabilitate Suhrawardī’s ishrāqī thought and reconcile it with legal
strictures on bāṭınī thought. This scholarly philosophical trend has often been
referred to by modern scholars as the “Shirazi school”—which actually appears
to be two related, but somewhat distinct, intellectual clusters. Characteristic

14 Endress, Reading Avicenna 371–422.

15 Sabra, Science and philosophy 22–24.
16 Özervarlı, Theology in the Ottoman lands 568.
17 Griffel, Toleration and exclusion 344–354; Al-Tikriti, Kalām in the service 131–149.
18 For an English commentary and rendering of Hayākil al-nūr, see Suhrawardī, The shape of
light.
a contrarian voice 67

of the era, the boundaries of this “Shirazi school” were not particularly well
defined, nor were its scholars’ doctrinal identities uniformly clear. One group
was made up of predominantly Ash‘ari scholars who integrated Ibn ʿArabī’s
(d. 638/1240) metaphysics, Suhrawardī’s illuminationism, and Avicennan ideas
with post-Ghāzālī kalām. Prominent scholars in this group included ʿAḍud
al-Dīn al-Ījī (d. 756/1355), Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī (d. 793/1390), and al-Sayyid
al-Sharīf al-Jurjānī (d. 817/1413)—each of whom came to play a major role in
the Ottoman kalām curriculum.19 A parallel Shirazi cluster was characterized
by scholars who either ignored or were not remembered for engaging with
kalām but were similarly engaged with the philosophical, metaphysical, and
mystical debates of the first group. Characterized as more mystically inclined,
and usually discussed together with the evolution of Twelver Shi‘i philosophy,
such scholars included Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī (d. 673/1274), Quṭb al-Dīn Shīrāzī
(d. 710/1311), and Ṣadr al-Dīn Dashtaqī (d. 903/1497).20 Both groups commented
on the legacies of Avicenna/Ibn Sīnā, Suhrawardī, and Ibn ʿArabī. At least two
scholars were solidly entrenched in both groups, providing the tie between the
two as both scholarly commonalities and chronological bookends, with Naṣīr
al-Dīn Ṭūsī’s (d. 672/1274) Tajrīd informing philosophical discussions from the
inception and Jalāl al-Dīn Dawānī’s (d. 908/1502) Shawākil al-ḥūr providing one
of the last texts in common use in both Ottoman and Safavid circles.21
Dawānī, the last figure of mutual influence in these twinned Shirazi schools,
mentored several students who went on to successful careers as policymak-
ers and scholars in the Safavid, Ottoman, and Mughal Empires. Their common
teacher may partially explain not only why his works were studied throughout
these empires but why what has become categorized in modern scholarly liter-
ature as distinct Ottoman kalām and Twelver Shi‘i philosophy schools shared
several common scholars who wrote prior to the turn of the tenth/sixteenth
century.22 In the wake of the Safavid revolution, with new issues to confront in
a radically changed political landscape, these related schools started to go their
separate ways as distinct fields.23

19 Corbin, History of Islamic philosophy 267–272; Spannaus, Theology in Central Asia 591–
593.
20 Corbin, History of Islamic philosophy 205–218, 332–338; Nasr, Islamic philosophy 193–199;
Nasr and Aminrazavi, Anthology of philosophy iv, 1–135; v, part I.
21 For a Twelver Shi‘i commentary on Dawānī’s Shawākil al-ḥūr, see Rizvi, Mīr Ġiyāṯuddīn
104–109.
22 Özervarlı, Theology in the Ottoman lands; Pourjavady and Schmidtke, Twelver Shiʿī the-
ology 456–469.
23 Pourjavady, Philosophy in early Safavid Iran; Rizvi, Mīr Ġiyāṯuddīn 104–109; Endress, Read-
ing Avicenna 416–422.
68 al-tikriti

During the same epoch, as the Ash‘ari kalām school adopted philosophi-
cal methodology and reigned supreme throughout most of the central Islamic
lands, the rival Maturidi kalām school gradually spread from Transoxania into
Iran and Anatolia along with Turkic nomadic populations making their way
westward. In the course of this spread westward, Maturidi scholars sharpened
their arguments against Ash‘ari criticism while adopting certain Ash‘ari posi-
tions, so much so that ultimately the two schools grew quite intertwined. By
the eighth/fourteenth century, scholars such as Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī (d. 771/1370),
Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī (d. 793/1390), and al-Sayyid al-Sharīf al-Jurjānī (d. 817/
1413), among others, argued that both Ash‘ari and Maturidi belief systems
should be recognized as legitimately falling within the broader grouping of ahl
al-sunna wa-l-jamāʿa (lit. “People of the Sunna and Community,” i.e., Sunnis)—
each threatened not so much by each other as by anthropomorphist trends
(mujassima), which is how Hanbali and Karrami traditionalist arguments were
often labeled.24
The culmination of these intertwined intellectual trends meant that what
became Ottoman kalām was heavily influenced by positions and debates artic-
ulated by the following group of middle-period scholars: Najm al-Dīn ʿUmar
al-Nasafī (d. 536/1142), Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210), Sayf al-Dīn al-Āmidī
(d. 631/1233), Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Bayḍāwī (d. 685/1286), Shams al-Dīn al-Iṣfahānī
(d. 749/1348), ʿAḍud al-Dīn al-Ījī (d. 756/1355), Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī (d. 793/
1390), al-Sayyid al-Sharīf al-Jurjānī (d. 817/1413), Khayālī Aḥmad Efendi (d. 874/
1470), and Jalāl al-Dīn Dawānī (d. 908/1502).25 With the exception of al-Nasafī,
al-Taftāzānī, and Khayālī, these scholars were all Ash‘ari affiliates.26 In addi-
tion, while al-Nasafī is considered a staunch Maturidi advocate, most Ottoman
madrasa students read his ʿAqāʾid through al-Taftāzānī’s and Khayālī’s com-
mentaries on it.27 Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī played something of a mediating
role between al-Nasafī’s positions and those of his Ash‘ari colleagues, has been
said to have merged Ash‘ari and Maturidi positions in his Sharḥ al-ʿAqāʾid,
and cannot be reliably assigned to either school.28 Meanwhile, Khayālī Aḥmad
Efendi, the only Ottoman scholar Mustafa Said Yazıcıoğlu found listed in a
tenth/sixteenth-century manuscript describing the Ottoman kalām curricu-
lum, appears to have spent much of his career adjudicating famous theological

24 Berger, Interpretations 693–701.

25 Yazıcoğlu, Le kalām 54–70.
26 Gardet, ‘Ilm al-kalām.
27 Yazıcıoğlu, Le kalām 55.
28 Würtz, Islamische Theologie im 14. Jahrhundert; Spannaus, Theology in Central Asia 591–
592; Berger, Interpretations 697; Eichner, Handbooks 496; Özen, Teftâzânî 299–308.
a contrarian voice 69

debates between the aforementioned scholars, as he is credited with either

commentaries or glosses on the treatises included in the Ottoman curriculum
by al-Nasafī, al-Ījī, al-Taftāzānī, al-Jurjānī, and al-Dawānī.29 In light of his own
body of work, his position, and his lifespan, it seems likely that Khayālī may
have played a major role in defining the first standardized Ottoman madrasa
curriculum on kalām. A product of his era, Khayālī was later criticized by
the Ottoman scholar ʿUthmān Kilīsī al-ʿUryānī (d. 1167/1754) for insufficiently
emphasizing the differences between Ash‘ari and Maturidi positions—which
may have simply reflected the reality that Ottoman articulations of Maturidi
kalām had grown far more detailed and distinct from its Ash‘ari cousin by the
twelfth/eighteenth century.30 On the whole, considering how prominent, even
dominant, Ash‘ari scholars were within the madrasa theology curriculum, just
how Maturidi was Ottoman kalām in the late ninth/fifteenth century?
A generation later, in the wake of the Safavid challenge, it appears that self-
identifying as following the Maturidi school came to carry greater importance
within high Ottoman ulama circles. As if to signal this point, the powerful
chief mufti (şeyhü’l-islām) Ibn Kemāl/ Kemālpaşazāde (d. 940/1534) devoted
an entire treatise to clarifying doctrinal differences between the Maturidi and
Ash‘ari schools,31 which was one of a long line of Ottoman ulama treatises
engaging with Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī’s doctrinal poem describing Ash‘ari posi-
tions, al-Nūniyya.32 As the early Ottoman theologian Hıżır Beg (d. 863/1459)
completed an Arabic versed exposition of doctrinal belief entitled Qaṣīdat
al-nūniyya, and his student, the aforementioned Khayālī Aḥmad Efendi, com-
pleted a Turkish commentary on that work, entitled Sharḥ qaṣīdat al-nūniyya,
Kemālpaşazāde’s treatise was likely informed by all three of the aforemen-
tioned works and meant to definitively settle such debates within an Ottoman
context.33 It also appears likely that Kemālpaşazāde intended his contribution
to better delineate divergences between Ash‘ari and Maturidi belief systems
in order to more effectively promote the latter as reflecting Ottoman impe-
rial identity. The conversation between these four texts delineating doctrinal
belief suggests that one of the legacies of Ottoman Sunnism was to rescue
Maturidi distinctiveness from its earlier blurring with Ash‘ari beliefs under
what Mehmet Kalaycı has characterized as the “Rāzī framework” dominat-

29 Bebek, Hayâlî 3–5.

30 Yazıcıoğlu, Le kalām 82.
31 Dalkıran, İbn-i Kemal 77–79, citing Kemālpaşazāde, Risālat al-Ikhtilāf 57–60; Kalaycı, Eşar-
ilik ve Maturidiliği 127–129.
32 Berger, Interpretations 697; Badeen, Sunnitische Theologie 10–24.
33 Yazıcıoğlu, Le kalām 71–83; Bebek, Hayâlî 3–5; Yazıcıoğlu, Hızır Bey 413–415.
70 al-tikriti

ing ninth/fifteenth-century Ottoman letters.34 A century after Kemālpaşazāde’s

contribution, the Indian Naqshbandi Shaykh Aḥmad al-Sirhindī (d. 1034/1624)
seemingly confirmed Maturidi success by arguing that even though both doc-
trines are properly Sunni, one comes to prefer Maturidi over Ash‘ari positions
after contemplating their arguments more deeply. Although he credited al-
Ashʿarī with introducing ʿaql proofs to discussions of belief, al-Sirhindī con-
ceded that the difficulty of such contemplations had emboldened religion’s
enemies and driven them on the path to Salafism. However, in his own day,
those interested in the light of God’s prophecy followed the ahl al-ḥaqq (peo-
ple of verity)—which he associated with the Maturidi doctrine.35
Yet another middle-period trend that shaped Ottoman Sunnism was a drive
for certainty in both religious belief and the legal consequences of such belief.
Several fifth/eleventh- to eighth/fourteenth-century scholars, including Fakhr
al-Dīn al-Rāzī, Sayf al-Dīn al-Āmidī, and Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī, who also
came to play a prominent role in the Ottoman kalām curriculum, strove to
have the study of Islamic jurisprudence ( fiqh) and its sources (uṣūl al-fiqh) be
treated as science according to the standards of Aristotelian theory. Loosely
related to al-Ghazālī’s and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s integration of falsafa method-
ology into kalām discourse, these scholars treated the reconfigured kalām as
an external corroboration of the four accepted sources of Islamic jurispru-
dence. Demonstrating just how far theological disputation had progressed,
from a shunned source of doubt to a philosophically rigorous source of cer-
tainty, kalām proofs for the existence of God and accuracy of Quranic revela-
tion, the first and primary source of fiqh, were taken to subsequently ensure the
accuracy of the remaining three fiqh sources (hadith, consensus, and analogy).
In effect, by striving for certainty in legal theory via demonstrative proofs as
opposed to what they presented as the earlier reliance on taqlīd (imitation),
such scholars tried to render legal practice more “scientific,” and thus more
persuasive. Treating uṣūl al-fiqh sources as scientific proofs from which legal
assessments (aḥkām) can then be drawn, such scholars, particularly Ṣadr al-
Sharīʿa (d. 747/1346), laid the groundwork for later legists to claim religious cer-
tainty in their interpretations of beliefs and subsequent legal certainty in speci-
fied punishments for countering those beliefs.36 By the late ninth/fifteenth cen-
tury, Ottoman scholars further explored and extended the implications of this
trend by arguing that jurists’ opinions qualified as fulfilling the requirements

34 Kalaycı, Mâtürîdî-Hanefî aidiyetin 26–34.

35 Tosun, Mâtüridîyye ve tasavvuf ilişkisi 52.
36 Atçıl, Greco-Islamic philosophy 33–54.
a contrarian voice 71

of legal certainty. Not surprisingly, the culmination of this trend rendered reli-
gious belief increasingly prominent and legally relevant, additionally threat-
ening public figures who refused to conform, as well as communities whose
actions were considered to display external signs of internal unbelief (kufr).37
As Ottoman Sunnism was just taking shape, kalām had evolved well beyond
the founders’ (mutaqaddimūn) emphasis on revealed knowledge of the ear-
lier centuries, which tended to emphasize fairly straightforward interpretations
of scriptural proofs, according to madhhab affiliation. Following al-Ghazālī’s
and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s reformulation of the discipline, and the contribu-
tions of several subsequent scholars, kalām had evolved into a complex, com-
prehensive, and philosophically informed discourse, which provided doctrinal
certainty and external legal corroboration for the opinions of state-affiliated
ulama. Of course, an alternative view advocated for keeping philosophical
methodology and discourse out of kalām and concentrating purely on broader
religious doctrine (uṣūl al-dīn) verified via naql revealed proofs. Supporters of
this view included the Hanbali scholars Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) and his stu-
dent Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 751/1350), as well as the Mamluk scholar Jalāl
al-Dīn al-Suyūtī (d. 911/1505).38 While this alternative view might appear to rep-
resent a narrow-minded reliance on revelation, it might also be seen as resisting
the ongoing expansion of theological discourse into matters and disputes that
went well beyond the “original intent” of prophetic revelation.
Generally speaking, by the end of the ninth/fifteenth century, both the
Maturidi and Ash‘ari schools had mutually recognized each other’s legitimacy
as Sunni positions, the Shirazi school(s) had successfully rehabilitated mysti-
cally inclined rational philosophy, scholars continued to search for certainty
in religious belief, and some scholars articulated arguments rendering kalām
legally relevant. The integration of philosophical discourse into theology, cou-
pled with the search for certainty and the recharacterization of ahl al-sunna
as accepting both Maturidi and Ash‘ari positions while rejecting others, even-
tually led to the political use of kalām as a form of state legitimation, with
deadly consequences for some. As first Mollā Luṭfī (d. 900/1494) and later Mollā
Ḳābıż (d. 933/1527) were to discover, once state-backed scholar-bureaucrats
had moved beyond certainty in religious belief to rendering such correct belief
legally actionable, kalām became a dangerous discourse for those publicly
insisting on views considered beyond the pale.39

37 Al-Tikriti, Kalām in the service 131–149.

38 Atçıl, Greco-Islamic philosophy 51; Özervarlı, Theology in the Ottoman lands 583; Hoover,
Ḥanbalī theology 625–648.
39 Ocak, Osmanlı toplumunda zındıklar 203–250; Erünsal, Molla Lütfi 37–54.
72 al-tikriti

As the imperial madrasa infrastructure and curriculum reached its full artic-
ulation by the middle of the tenth/sixteenth century, a recognizable Ottoman
kalām branch had emerged. While this branch is usually described as simply
“Maturidi,” it might be more accurate to follow M. Sait Özervarlı’s lead in char-
acterizing this as a “new synthesis.”40 This new synthesis emerged together
with Ottoman Sunnism, maintained continuous scholarly dialogue with clas-
sic works of the Ash‘ari school while largely defending Maturidi positions,
absorbed the methodology and rhetoric of what is usually described as the
“Shirazi school” of ḥikma-driven philosophy into theological dialogue, and had
grown both legally relevant and politically powerful—at least in those areas
under Ottoman sovereignty.

2 An Engaged Participant

One emblematic participant in the small circle of imperial elites who engaged
in a broad range of political and scholarly discourse, including kalām dispu-
tation and uṣūl al-dīn commentary, and thus helped define Ottoman Sunnism,
was Şehzāde Ḳorḳud (d. 919/1513). In the popular literature on Ottoman history,
he is more commonly recalled (when remembered at all) as a complaining,
compromised, and weak prince who proved completely unable to compete
against his courageous and decisive younger half-brother, Sultan Selīm I (r. 918–
926/1512–1520). In reality, Ḳorḳud’s political biography was far more complex
than the image promoted by subsequent court historians, and his gradual era-
sure from the pantheon of Ottoman letters is itself worthy of study.41
In preparation for a long-anticipated struggle to succeed his father Bāyezīd II
(r. 886–918/1481–1512), throughout the first decade of the tenth/sixteenth cen-
tury Ḳorḳud strove to portray himself as a well-rounded candidate who was
intellectually and ethically prepared to assume the role of an ideal Ottoman
and Islamic ruler. He was not alone in such endeavors. As Christopher Markie-
wicz has demonstrated, Idrīs-i Bidlīsī (d. 926/1520), during the same decade,
strove to portray first Şehzāde Aḥmed (d. 919/1513), then Şehzāde Şehinşāh
(d. 917/1511), and finally Selīm each as respective heirs apparent to the “vicere-
gency of God” (khilāfa-yi raḥmānī).42 While each of these four surviving sons of

40 Özervarlı, Theology in the Ottoman lands 568, 576.

41 For Ḳorḳud’s life and works, see Al-Tikriti, Şehzade Ḳorḳud. For summaries of Şehzade
Ḳorḳud’s life, see Emecen, Korkut, Şehzade 205–207; Gökbilgin, Korkut 855–860; Gökbil-
gin, Ḳorḳud 269; and Uzunçarşılı, II’inci Bayezid’in oğullarından 539–601.
42 Markiewicz, A Study of Idrīs Bidlīsī 366–369. See also Sariyannis, Princely virtues 121–144.
a contrarian voice 73

Bāyezīd II could by 917/1511 count on various personal strengths and centers of

support, only Ḳorḳud is credited with authoring treatises that laid out opinions
on matters of faith, legitimacy, and correct governmental practice.
Turning the “publish or perish” mantra somewhat on its head, the largely
forgotten Ḳorḳud proved more prolific, engaged, and successful in different
realms of belles-lettres than any other Ottoman royal, ever. He has also resisted
neat classification as either amīr (commander) or ʿālim (scholar), as his other
accomplishments in the fields of poetry, musical composition, calligraphy, and
other fine arts might be considered consistent with either category. İsmail
Hakkı Uzunçarşılı treated Ḳorḳud as something of a weak prince who pursued
a side interest in Arabic legal treatises—a view largely consistent with that pro-
moted by Ottoman historians in the decades following Ḳorḳud’s death.43 More
recently, Ahmet Hamdi Furat considered Ḳorḳud a proper Shafi‘i faqīh who
happened to be an Ottoman royal, as opposed to a fully competitive prince
who nearly succeeded Bāyezīd II.44 Why did a prince in the midst of a highly
politicized and dangerous succession intrigue also engage in seemingly obtuse
questions of theological discourse? As Lutz Berger has suggested, “theological
knowledge was part and parcel of the academic credentials of scholars and
therefore their social standing.”45 Perhaps Ḳorḳud hoped to persuade poten-
tial supporters that he was the most worthy candidate to succeed his father
Bāyezīd by engaging directly in such matters as a participating ʿālim, as opposed
to merely patronizing such scholarly works as an amīr.
While Ḳorḳud’s oeuvre is impressive for a royal figure normally obliged to
follow the career track of a military sovereign, there remains a question of
authorship. His extant correspondence, poetry, calligraphy, and musical com-
positions raise no particular red flags concerning authorship, no more than
with any other historical figure living five centuries ago. However, his Arabic
treatises are another matter. He is credited with as many as seven discursive
treatises and a collection of legal opinions, four of which remain extant within
Süleymaniye Library’s Aya Sofya collection. Three of these extant texts exhibit
a high level of scholarly Arabic, free from obvious mistakes and in line with
the conventions of the time.46 One of those texts analyzed here, Daʿwat al-
nafs al-ṭāliḥa, survives in three manuscript copies. The draft version includes
a prefatory statement attributing the text to Ḳorḳud while stating that an oth-

43 Uzunçarşılı, II’inci Bayezid’in oğullarından 539–601.

44 Furat, Osmanlı hânedanında 193–212.
45 Berger, Interpretations 701.
46 However, Prof. Wadad Kadi once suggested that the Arabic of Ḳorḳud’s Da‘wa was not
native.
74 al-tikriti

erwise unknown scholar, ʿAbd al-Salām b. Muḥammad al-Anṣārī, dictated the

text, on behalf of “the sultan of scholarship and scholar of his era,” Ḳorḳud.47
The fourth extant text, Wasīlat al-aḥbāb, which the prince addressed directly
to his father as an extended and private explanation of his sudden 915/1509
departure for Mamluk Egypt, is riddled with basic Arabic grammatical errors.48
Comparison of all known copies of these texts attributed to Ḳorḳud suggests
multiple possibilities in terms of authorship. Perhaps Ḳorḳud authored all texts
attributed to him but had al-Anṣārī dictate (and edit) the draft version of al-
Daʿwa on his behalf. Alternatively, perhaps al-Anṣārī was the ghost writer of
al-Daʿwa, or perhaps it was a group effort by more than one scholar resident
at Ḳorḳud’s court working under the prince’s direction. What is certain is that
there is great discrepancy between the levels of Arabic competence displayed
in Daʿwat al-nafs al-ṭāliḥa and in Wasīlat al-aḥbāb and that all of the works were
claimed by, and credited to, Şehzāde Ḳorḳud.
Through these texts, Ḳorḳud presented his views forcefully, his argumen-
tation reflecting the worldview, expertise, and literature of Ottoman ulama
around the turn of the tenth/sixteenth century. While many of his views were
emblematic of this stage in the formulation of Ottoman religious identity, they
were not entirely consistent with what came to be adopted. Notably, Ḳorḳud
preferred the Shafi‘i madhhab, even while the Ottoman madrasa system of
his own day had already established a definitive Hanafi preference. Similarly,
he condemned Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240), whom Kemālpaşazāde (d. 940/1534)
rehabilitated after Ḳorḳud’s death, following Sultan Selīm’s public visit to and
restoration of Ibn ʿArabī’s tomb during the 922/1516 Syria campaign.49
Ḳorḳud’s intellectual journey is itself somewhat indicative of broader trends
in ninth-to-tenth/fifteenth-to-sixteenth-century intellectual thought. Educat-
ed primarily by Anatolian-based scholars who were in turn heavily influenced

47 This copy is probably the same as that said by Uzunçarşılı (II’inci Bayezid’in oğulların-
dan 596–597) to be owned by the book merchant Raif Yelkenci. Cornell Fleischer (From
Ḳorḳud to Mustafa Āli 67–77), the first modern scholar to analyze this text in depth, used
a microfilm of this copy, also said to have once been owned by the prominent Ottoman
historian M. Tayyib Gökbilgin. I am indebted to Prof. Fleischer for providing me with a
microfilm of this copy. Ḳorḳud, Daʿwat al-nafs al-ṭāliḥa, MS Gökbilgin, 423. Unless oth-
erwise indicated, all citations from this text refer to the presentation copy, Süleymaniye
Kütüphanesi, MS Aya Sofya 1763.
48 For an extensive analysis of this text and Ḳorḳud’s Egypt visit, see Al-Tikriti, The hajj 125–
146.
49 Dalkıran, İbn-i Kemal 182–184; Şeyh Mekki Efendi and Ahmed Neyli Efendi, Yavuz Sultan
Selim’in emriyle. For Ḳorḳud’s view, see Şehzāde Ḳorḳud, Daʿwat al-nafs al-ṭāliḥa 233b–
235b.
a contrarian voice 75

by Timurid and Aqqoyunlu scholarly circles, Ḳorḳud also maintained a strong

Egypt connection toward the end of his career. He requested theological advice
from the famous Cairene scholar Abū Yaḥyā Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī (d. 926/1520),50
and relied on the aforementioned Egyptian shaykh with the same family name,
ʿAbd al-Salām b. Muhammad al-Anṣārī, to both dictate the rough draft of his
magnum opus and negotiate his 1510 return from exile in Cairo.51 To bet-
ter understand Ḳorḳud’s personal journey and subsequent contribution to an
emergent Ottoman Sunnism, let us now examine his educational formation,
intellectual circles, his oeuvre as a whole, and some of the arguments contained
in two of his most prominent treatises.

3 A Palace Education

Ḳorḳud’s educational formation combined a fairly typical Anatolian educa-

tion, dominated by post-Timurid Iranian and Central Asian influences, and a
somewhat less typical current characterized by Egyptian Ash‘ari influences.52
His father Bāyezīd’s Amasya court retained teachers, calligraphers, artists, and
scholars, several with strong connections to Iran or other eastern lands. These
teachers included Mollā Ṣalāḥu’d-dīn (fl. 881/1476), Amasyalı Haṭīb Ḳāsım (d.
ca. 926/1520), Mīrim Çelebi Maḥmūd (d. 930/1524), Muʿarrifzāde, and Amasyalı
Shaykh Ḥamdullāh (d. ca. 926/1520).53 Several of those known to have been
resident at Bāyezīd’s Amasya court should have exerted influence on Ḳorḳud’s
education. However, as little was recorded about Ḳorḳud’s childhood in Amasya
per se, the only direct connection made between him and these teachers comes
from a twelfth/eighteenth-century biographical notice stating that as a child he
had studied with the Bukhara emigré and first significant Ottoman master cal-
ligrapher, Shaykh Ḥamdullāh of Amasya, who has been credited with designing
a definitively Ottoman script.54

50 His full name was Abū Yaḥyā Zakariyyā Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Anṣārī al-Shāfi‘ī. For
biographies of al-Anṣārī, see Ingalls, Recasting Qushayrī’s Risāla 93–120; Geoffroy, Le
Soufisme 517–518; Özel and Kallek, Zekeriyyâ el-Ensârî 212–215. I thank Matthew Ingalls
for clarifying certain points of al-Anṣārī’s biography.
51 Al-Tikriti, The hajj 128.
52 For other preconquest Ottoman intellectual connections with Arab lands, see Pfeifer’s and
Terzioğlu’s articles in this volume.
53 Mecdî, Hadâiku’ş-şakâik 197–198, 212–213, 338–339, 513; Kappert, Die Osmanischen Prinzen
45–67; Uzunçarşılı, İlmiye teşkilâtı 145.
54 Müstaḳīmzāde, Tuḥfe-i haṭṭāṭīn 368; Osborne, Letters of light 44–53; Sohrweide (Dichter
und Gelehrte 275–276) counted Shaykh Ḥamdullāh as one of many eastern scholars who
76 al-tikriti

There is evidence that one of Bāyezīd’s oldest and closest companions dur-
ing his posting in Amasya and throughout his life, Amasyalı Müʾeyyedzāde
ʿAbdu’r-raḥmān Çelebi (860–922/1456–1516),55 played a mentoring role for Ḳor-
ḳud. Müʾeyyedzāde was a talented scholar and litterateur who was forced to
flee Anatolia in 883/1479 following an execution order from Sultan Meḥmed,
ostensibly for supplying his son Bāyezīd with opium.56 After a brief stop in
Aleppo, Müʾeyyedzāde studied in Shiraz under the prominent Ash‘ari scholar
and Shirazi school of philosophy paragon Jalāl al-Dīn Dawānī while waiting for
events to turn more propitious in Istanbul.57 Soon after Bāyezīd rose to power,
this young scholar and boon companion followed the new sultan to Istanbul.
Although not exceptionally prolific on his own account, Müʾeyyedzāde was
a star student of Dawānī, frequented the same circles as the foremost reli-
gious scholars of his own generation, and guided many of the empire’s reli-
gious policies from the 880s/1480s right up to his execution in 922/1516, both
as Bāyezīd II’s close companion and later as first Anadolu and then Rumeli
ḳāḍīʿasker (military judge). A powerful minister and scholarly practitioner, he
boasted a personal library that was reportedly one of the largest ever seen in
Istanbul, the inventory of which continues to provide a useful source for early
modern Ottoman intellectual history.58
Müʾeyyedzāde once responded to a personal request by sending Ḳorḳud a
treatise addressing “complex issues of kalām,” accompanied by a versified Ara-
bic introduction offering exaggerated praise of the prince. As no scholar named
the treatise, it has not yet been identified and may no longer exist.59 Although
Ḳorḳud never referred to Müʾeyyedzāde directly, such personal ties, recalled in
the teẕkire literature several decades after the fact, suggest that this powerful
minister, scholar, and close friend of his father informed Ḳorḳud’s views and

greatly influenced Ottoman letters in its formative ninth-tenth/fifteenth-sixteenth cen-

turies.
55 Kemālpaşazāde (İbn Kemâl, Tevârīḫ-i Âl-i Os̱mân vi, 5–6) devoted a brief panegyric pas-
sage to Müʾeyyedzāde during his discussion of Bāyezīd’s preaccession court, demonstrat-
ing his importance and proximity to Bāyezīd, at least when Kemālpaşazāde wrote the
passage, ca. 917/1511.
56 For Bāyezīd’s response to his father, apologizing for not carrying out the execution order
and promising to refrain from future opium consumption, see TSA E6366/1. Uzunçarşılı,
Fatih Sultan Mehmed’in ölümü, 474–475.
57 See Pfeiffer, Jalāl al-Dīn al-Dawānī’s 284–331.
58 Taşköprüzade, al-Shaqā’iq 290–294; Menzel, Mu’ayyad-zāde 272.
59 Mecdî, Hadaiku’ş-şakaik 310; Taşköprüzade, al-Shaqā’iq 294; Hoca Saʿdü’d-dīn, Tāc üt-
tevārīh ii, 556; Kātib Çelebi (Kashf al-ẓunūn iii, 433, #6302) referred to the work as simply
“a treatise on kalām.”
a contrarian voice 77

scholarly positions. Similarly, Müʾeyyedzāde’s active engagement in the field of

kalām suggests an ongoing discussion within high imperial circles on matters
of theological import and their role in society.
One teacher, whose court career is at least indicative of the type of intel-
lectual influences that surrounded the young Ḳorḳud in Amasya and demon-
strates how Bāyezīd II himself engaged with scholarly Arabic kalām treatises,
was Mollā Ṣalāḥu’d-dīn (fl. 881/1476).60 Mollā Ṣalāḥu’d-dīn reportedly in-
structed prince Bāyezīd in Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī’s commentary on al-Nasafī’s
creed, Sharḥ al-ʿAqāʾid (Commentary on the tenets of faith), going so far as
to write an explanatory gloss on the text in Arabic for Bāyezīd’s benefit.61
While Ḳorḳud never cited any of Mollā Ṣalāḥu’d-dīn’s work, he also studied al-
Taftāzānī’s Sharḥ al-ʿAqāʾid at least as early as his teen years, as he was gifted
a copy of it in 890/1485.62 Proof of his later familiarity with the eminent the-
ologian came when Ḳorḳud cited Sharḥ al-ʿAqāʾid along with several other
works by al-Taftāzānī over 30 times in his own kalām engaged treatise, Ḥāfiẓ
al-insān.63
After Ḳorḳud was transferred around 884/1480 from his father’s court in
Amasya to his grandfather Meḥmed II’s court in Istanbul,64 one of his teachers
was Mollā Seyyid İbrāhīm (d. 918/1512). Like other influential figures in Ḳorḳud’s
youth, Seyyid İbrāhīm had connections to both Iran and Anatolia. A somewhat
colorful character, boasting miraculous powers, İbrāhīm’s father had been an
Iranian notable who had previously emigrated to a village near Amasya.65
While the source evidence is somewhat fragmentary for his earliest instruc-
tion, it does suggest that the young Ḳorḳud was exposed in Amasya and Istanbul
to the Iranian and Central Asian influences that were current in his day. Via
those teaching at the court, the prince should have been exposed to debates
concerning falsafa methodology, the integration of philosophy with kalām,
both Maturidi and Ash‘ari beliefs, and even miraculous events connected to
occult practice.

60 Kappert, Die Osmanischen Prinzen 46, citing Ḥüseyin Ḥüsāmeddīn, Amasya Tārīhi iii, 232.
Ḥüsāmeddīn, writing in the early twentieth century, rarely cited his sources.
61 Kappert, Die Osmanischen Prinzen 46; Taşköprüzade, al-Shaqā’iq 178–179; Mecdî, Hadâi-
ku’ş-şakâik 197–198.
62 The 1481–1487 gift register (TSA D10017) records a 1485 delivery of a copy to Ḳorḳud.
63 Ḳorḳud, Ḥāfiẓ al-insān 2a–3a, 4a–b, 8a–9b, 14a–15a, 20a–26a, 27a, 32b, 58a, 60a–61a, 62b–
65a, 82a, 89a–b, 90b–91b, 94/2a, 114b, 118b, 124a–b, 129a–b, 137a, 145b–146a, 158b, 160b,
172b–173a, 187a, 188a, 215a.
64 Gökbilgin, Korkut 856.
65 Sohrweide, Dichter und Gelehrte 276; Taşköprüzade, al-Shaqā’iq 305–309; Mecdî, Hadâi-
ku’ş-şakâik 319–323.
78 al-tikriti

Ḳorḳud also appears to have maintained a Cairo connection, both politi-

cally and intellectually. The origins of this connection remain uncertain, but
as an adult Ḳorḳud collaborated extensively with ʿAbd al-Salām b. Muḥam-
mad al-Anṣārī. Described only as an “al-Azhar Shaykh” in Wasīlat al-aḥbāb, this
scholar played a key role in Ḳorḳud’s political writings and negotiations from
at least 1508 onward.66 ʿAbd al-Salām might have been related to the celebrated
Cairene scholar and mystic Abū Yaḥyā Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī (d. 926/1520), from
whom Ḳorḳud sought a legal opinion concerning the legal status of concu-
bines.67 These relationships suggest a level of intellectual interaction between
both Ottoman and Mamluk ulama and umarāʾ, and since Egypt was famously
a stronghold of the Shafi‘i madhhab, it might also explain to some extent
Ḳorḳud’s apparent Shafi‘i affiliation.

4 Following a Curriculum, Starting a Library

The young Ḳorḳud’s strong predilection for scholarship was also confirmed
by gifts recorded as presented to him in a 890/1485 register, when he was
roughly fifteen-sixteen years old, and soon after he had been assigned to his first
provincial posting. While all the princes recorded in the gifts register, including
Ḳorḳud, were gifted falcons, concubines, and slaves, only this scholarly şehzāde
was also presented with texts covering a broad range of literary, philosoph-
ical, and legal issues.68 Of these six texts, one was Niẓāmī’s (d. ca. 605/1209)
poetry quintet,69 one was devoted to jurisprudence or governance,70 and four
were devoted to issues of philosophy and theology. Each of these texts demon-
strate the intellectual milieu to which the young prince was exposed growing

66 Al-Tikriti, The hajj 128.

67 Ḳorḳud stated in his Ḥall ishkāl (51b) that he had obtained a fatwa on this topic from
“Shaykh al-Islām al-Shaykh al-Qāḍī Zayn al-Dīn Abū Yaḥyā Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī—raḍi
Allāh ʿanhu.”
68 According to the gift register (TSA D10017, f. 2), on 13 Dhū al-Qa‘da 890/21 November 1485
the following texts were presented to Ḳorḳud’s nişāncı for personal delivery to the prince:
K. Isfarā’īnī, Sharḥ-i ʿaqāʾid, K. Sharḥ-i maṭāliʿ, K. Ḥāshiye-i maṭāliʿ, Kitāb-i mukhtaṣar, and
K. Khamsa-yı Niẓāmī.
69 TSA D10017. This was his celebrated poetry collection, the Khamsa-yi Niẓāmī (Niẓāmī’s
quintet). Comparison of these poems against his own poetry and scholarship suggests
that Ḳorḳud studied these five works intensively as part of his advanced education, and
that his later literary outputs, which lay beyond the scope of this study, were informed by
these master works. Chelkowski, Niẓāmī Gandjawī 76–81.
70 TSA D10017.
a contrarian voice 79

up, although disentangling precisely how certain texts influenced him remains
a challenge.
A text addressing either jurisprudence or governance was Kitāb al-mukhta-
ṣar (The handbook), a generic title which could refer to several works providing
the early modern equivalent of college law textbooks. In his own scholarship,
Ḳorḳud cited works with the same title by the Egyptian Hanafi jurist Abū Jaʿfar
al-Ṭaḥāwī (d. 321/933), the Baghdad Hanafi jurist al-Qudūrī (d. 428/1037), and
the Shafi‘i-influenced Maliki jurist al-Shaykh al-Khalīl b. Isḥāq (d. 775/1374).
It is equally possible that the title referred to a text recently analyzed by
Hüseyin Yılmaz, Mukhtaṣar fī l-siyāsa wa-umūr al-salṭana (Compendium of
governance and the affairs of rulership). This anonymous Arabic text was com-
pleted early in Bāyezīd II’s reign, urging him to follow the lead of his deceased
father, Meḥmed II, in promoting a devşirme class of trained professionals at
the expense of old Anatolian elites. Consistent with the Mamluk tradition of
moralistic mirrors for princes, Mukhtaṣar advocated a more juridical and hier-
archical view of correct governance than previous works found in the Ottoman
milieu, which tended to be more abstract and lean toward hagiographical pre-
sentations of ruler perfection.71 Serving as an administrative manual based on
older Islamicate examples, this work was capable of providing several of the
governance critiques Ḳorḳud later made in his Daʿwat al-nafs al-ṭāliḥa.
The first of four texts likely addressing religious belief, listed as simply
K. Isfarāʾīnī (The book of Isfarāʾīnī), could be one of several works by any of
three scholars hailing from Isfarāyīn in Khorāsān. While available evidence
does not allow full confirmation of which text the gift register referred to, the
topics in which Ḳorḳud most engaged suggest that he was likely given the
text by “al-Ustādh” Abū Isḥāq al-Isfarāʾīnī’s (d. 418/1027) al-ʿAqīda (The creed).
Covering a wide range of theological questions from an intellectual grandson
of al-ʿAshʿarī, who broke with him on several points as a rationally minded
and Mu‘tazili-leaning Ash‘ari theologian, al-ʿAqīda was one of the foundational
texts of kalām, and clearly worthy of consultation and instruction in the late
ninth/fifteenth century.72

71 Yılmaz, Caliphate redefined 37–39.

72 Ḳorḳud twice cited “al-Shaykh” Abū Ḥāmid al-Isfarāʾīnī (d. 406/1016), a jurist sometimes
referred to as a “second Shāfiʿī” due to his Taʿlīq, a fifty-plus volume commentary on
yet another Mukhtaṣar text, this time a well-known Shafi‘i legal manual by al-Muzanī
(d. 264/878). Several times Ḳorḳud also referenced arguments made by “al-Ustādh” Abū
Isḥāq al-Isfarāʾīnī in his al-ʿAqīda (The creed), Ādāb al-jadal (The art of dialectics), and
other unspecified texts. Considering that the gifts document only mentioned a single vol-
ume, and that Ḳorḳud cited Abū Isḥāq far more than Abū Ḥāmid, it is more likely that
the text he was given was one of the two Abū Isḥāq treatises. Ḳorḳud, Daʿwat al-nafs al-
80 al-tikriti

Another text, listed with the generic title Sharḥ-i ʿaqāʾid (Commentary on
the creeds), can be tentatively identified through Ḳorḳud’s own citations as
Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī’s Sharḥ al-ʿaqāʾid, a kalām classic that greatly influ-
enced Ottoman theological study.73 Credited with combining and reconciling
Ash‘ari and Maturidi kalām disputation, al-Taftāzānī’s commentary served as
an exploration, critique, and philosophical elaboration of the rather brief al-
ʿAqāʾid text by the Maturidi theologian Najm al-Dīn ʿUmar al-Nasafī.74 Finally,
while Ḳorḳud cited all of these scholars, the only Sharḥ al-ʿAqāʾid he ever quoted
by name was al-Taftāzānī’s celebrated commentary, which he referred to five
times in two of his works.75
The final two texts listed on the gift register consisted of a commentary
and a gloss on that same commentary. Listed as Sharḥ-i Maṭāliʿ and Ḥāşiye-i
maṭāliʿ, these texts were most likely the Sharḥ al-Maṭāliʿ of Quṭb al-Dīn al-
Rāzī al-Taḥtānī (d. 766/1365) and Ḥāshiyyat al-Maṭāliʿ by al-Sayyid al-Sharīf
al-Jurjānī. Consistent with the intellectual genealogies operative in the post-
Mongol era, these texts were directly related to, and expanded on, a work orig-
inally produced by an earlier philosopher. The original work in the chain was
Maṭāliʿ al-anwār (Ascensions of the illuminations) by Sirāj al-Dīn al-Urmawī
(d. 682/1283), a meditation on logic and philosophy by a highly influential and
well-traveled scholar.76 Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī produced a commentary on the
logic section of al-Urmawī’s work, entitled Lawāmiʿ al-asrār fī sharḥ maṭāliʿ
al-anwār (Luminous mysteries in a commentary on the ascensions of the illu-
minations), which became known simply as Sharḥ al-Maṭāliʿ. This text and its

ṭāliḥa 47a, 214a, 218b; Hall ishkāl al-afkār, 33b, 53b–54a; Ḥāfiẓ al-insān, 2b, 29b, 40a, 41a,
65b; Madelung, al-Isfarāyīnī 107–108; Yavuz, Isferāyīnī, Ebū Ishāk 515–516; Heffening, al-
Muzanī 822.
73 The text may also have been Khayālī Aḥmad Efendi’s (d. 874/1470) commentary on the
same al-Nasafī text, with the same title. Khayālī’s text would have been more current,
and was also to become an integral part of the Ottoman madrasa curriculum, but as it
was not nearly as well known, if it were this text, it should have carried an additional
qualifier in its title. At least two other scholars, the renowned theologian Sayyid al-Sharīf
al-Jurjānī and the relatively unknown Aḥmad Jamāl al-Dīn al-Qūnawī (d. 731/1331/2) com-
pleted works that were also entitled Sharḥ al-ʿaqāʾid. However, al-Jūrjānī’s commentary on
‘Aḍud al-Dīn al-Ījī’s al-ʿAqāʾid and al-Qūnawī’s on al-Ṭaḥāwī’s al-ʿAqāʾid were also not nearly
as widespread as al-Taftāzānī’s work. TSA D10017; Tritton, al-Djūrdjānī 602–603; van Ess,
al-Īdjī 1022; Görgün, Īcī, Adudüddin, 410–414; Gümüş, Cürcānī, Seyyid Şerif 134–136.
74 Würtz, Islamische Theologie im 14 Jahrhundert; Spannaus, Theology in Central Asia 587–
588.
75 Ḳorḳud, Daʿwat al-nafs 239b; Ḥāfiẓ al-insān 2b, 114b, 118b, 160b; Madelung, al-Taftāzānī 88–
89; Wensinck, al-Nasafī 968–969; Yavuz, Nesefī, Ebü’l-Muīn 568–570.
76 Marlow, Sirāj al-Dīn Urmavī 279–313.
a contrarian voice 81

author were sufficiently renowned that al-Jurjānī traveled from his Astarabad
home to Herat to study the text in person with the elderly al-Rāzī. Later, while in
Cairo instructing students on al-Rāzī’s Sharḥ, al-Jurjānī produced his own gloss
on that commentary, which he entitled Ḥāshiyyat ʿalā sharḥ Maṭāliʿ al-anwār
(A gloss on the commentary of the ascensions of the illuminations).77 While
Ḳorḳud chose not to cite any of these aforementioned texts by name in his
own surviving works, he listed al-Urmawī as one of the favored scholars in his
suggested “third doctrine,” quoted other works by al-Jurjānī several times, and
criticized madrasa students of his day for reading only al-Jurjānī’s Ḥāshiyya and
one other theology work—suggesting that al-Jurjānī’s text played a prominent
role in Ottoman scholarly discourse by the end of the ninth/fifteenth century.78

5 Engaging with Kalām

Turning from the prince’s intellectual formation to his own scholarly output,
Ḳorḳud contributed two lengthy texts, which extensively explored issues of
kalām disputation, uṣūl al-dīn, and their applicability to social issues of his day.
Through these texts, he exemplified the range of mainstream thought within
the Ottoman elite and left his mark on the evolution of Ottoman Sunnism.
In his voluminous 913/1508 Daʿwat al-nafs al-ṭāliḥa ilā l-aʿmāl al-ṣāliḥa, bi-
l-ayāt al-ẓāhira wa-l-bayyināt al-bāhira (An errant soul’s summons to virtuous
works, through manifest signs and splendid proofs),79 Ḳorḳud articulated spe-
cific critiques of imperial administrative practice, as well as general views of
correct ethical living. Meditating first on the inevitability of death and the
finality of the hereafter, he devoted this most ambitious of his treatises to
renouncing his candidacy to the throne while addressing various aspects of
what he considered disregard for sharʿī ethical considerations within Ottoman
domains.80 His primary thesis was that no individual could both serve as an

77 An Ottoman scholar named ʿAbdü’l-kerīm Efendi, who flourished during the reign of
Murād II (r. 824–855/1421–1451), produced another work entitled Ḥāshiyyat al-maṭāliʿ.
Since the reception of this scholar’s gloss was modest at best, it appears likely that
Ḳorḳud’s gifted work was al-Jurjānī’s text. Pourjavady, Philosophy in early Safavid Iran
2; Gümüş, Seyyid Şerif Cürcānī 86–88, 115–116, 148–149; Gümüş, Cürcānī 134–136; Ṭāhir,
Os̱mānlı Mü’ellifleri, i 352.
78 Ḳorḳud, Daʿwat al-nafs 221a.
79 Title as provided in frontispiece. This translation of the title follows Fleischer.
80 Ḳorḳud consistently used the term sharʿ, not sharīʿa, which supports Wilfred Cantwell
Smith’s argument that the term sharīʿa came into common use only in later centuries.
Smith, The concept of shari‘a 581–602.
82 al-tikriti

effective amīr (prince) in his corrupt times (or any time) and still hope to attain
a pleasant afterlife. By criticizing what he saw as critical problems in Ottoman
governance, Ḳorḳud’s al-Daʿwa implicitly provided his ideal vision for a well-
functioning society. While Daʿwat al-nafs al-ṭāliḥa can in no way be classified
as a kalām text, it provided strong arguments on the madrasa curriculum of the
time, as well as kalām’s role in protecting society from dangerous or subversive
trends and movements.
At roughly the same time that Ḳorḳud was working on al-Daʿwa, he (and
his team of scholars) was also working on Ḥāfiẓ al-insān ʿan lāfiẓ al-īmān wa
Allāh al-hādī ilā ṣirāṭ al-jinān (The individual’s protector from faith’s rejector,
as God is the guide to the heavenly paths).81 This text was never completed,
with the sole surviving copy bringing together 96 folios of a presentation draft,
16 folios repeating, in draft form, the end of the presentation draft, and a further
113 folios of draft copy, which ends in mid-thought. Since the text was referred
to in al-Da‘wa, Ḳorḳud had clearly begun working on Ḥāfiẓ al-insān by 913/1508
and failed to complete it before his death in 919/1513.
With its strident arguments justifying secular enforcement and legal expan-
sion of sharʿ-sanctioned punishments (aḥkām) for apostasy, Ḥāfiẓ al-insān
provided a comprehensive kalām justification for the legally sanctioned tak-
fīr of certain groups or individuals found guilty of exhibiting external signs of
internal absence of faith. While not solely devoted to kalām debates, most of
this text addressed kalām discourse and methodology, using the discipline as
a basis to advocate for a more engaged state policy vis-à-vis religious belief.
Together, these two texts demonstrate the rhetorical power of kalām discourse
to promote policy positions justified as strengthening dīn ü devlet (religion and
state).
Throughout Daʿwat al-nafs al-ṭāliḥa, Ḳorḳud presented arguments by which,
taken together, he intended to define the ideal characteristics of the empire’s
religious identity. He opened al-Daʿwa by first reflecting at length on the mean-
ing of the afterlife, “purchasing this world with the other one,” and the con-
cept of the “bankrupt one” (muflis). To do so, he opened with several Quranic
verses and prophetic hadiths about Judgment Day, which themselves consti-
tuted something of an argument, an abstract outline for the entire text, and a
demonstration of the persuasive power of revealed knowledge.82 Advocating

81 MS Aya Sofya 2289. Here referred to as Ḥāfiẓ al-insān. I thank Urs Göskin for his incisive
comments concerning this text.
82 Ḳorḳud, Daʿwat al-nafs 1a–4a, citing Q 3:185, 21:35, 29:57, 55:26, 28:88, 101:6–11, 99:7–8,
79:35–41, 89:27–30, 51:56, 83:4–5, 102:8, 35:5–6.
a contrarian voice 83

on behalf of the poor and oppressed, in this introductory section he signaled

a facility for naql argumentation by employing a string of revealed proofs in
his appeal for ethical rule. In addition, he pointedly used the term ahl al-sunna
wa-l-jamāʿa when countering Mu‘tazila arguments concerning the fate of the
muflis, thus demonstrating something of a “Sunni consciousness” in his rhetor-
ical selection.
Framing his resignation from ruling candidacy as an ethical imperative,
Ḳorḳud next explained how one could never simultaneously enforce the dic-
tates of both sharʿ (religious ethics) and the ʿurf (imperial legal convention) of
his time as a sovereign ruler.83 Nodding toward his political agenda, he implic-
itly promised to elevate the status of those he considered sharʿ-minded ulama,
while equally promising to purge those corrupted ulama guilty of currying favor
at court—presumably referring to those scholar-bureaucrats most responsible
for establishing the nascent madrasa curriculum that would come to define
Ottoman Sunnism.
Following the lead of the multiple Ash‘ari influences during his education,
and consistent with the near merger of Maturidi and Ash‘ari views in the course
of the ninth/fifteenth century, in Daʿwat al-nafs al-ṭāliḥa Ḳorḳud quoted over
20 pages from Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī’s (d. 771/1370) Muʿīd al-niʿam to describe how
he defined and delineated an ideal religious identity. In one section, al-Subkī
summarized how the legal madhhab factions grew hostile to each other, until
eventually the ahl al-sunna wa-l-jamāʿa grew persuaded by al-Ashʿarī’s path,
as laid out in the various ʿaqāʾid texts. After that, the Sunni groups came to
include the enlightened ones among both the Hanafi and Shafi‘i, all of the
Maliki followers, and the best of the Hanbali. Concurrently, some of the Hanafi
and Shafi‘i adherents followed the Mu‘tazila, while some of the Hanbali turned
toward the mujassima (anthropomorphists), neither of which should be con-
sidered Sunni. Tracing Mu‘tazili mistakes back to their origin during the reign of
caliph al-Maʾmūn (r. 197–218/813–833), al-Subkī rejected those who condemned
others for making false statements without care and reflection, based on sim-
plistic and preliminary external proofs. To demonstrate his point, he related an
anecdote whereby al-Maʾmūn made a series of outrageous statements, which
turned out to be truthful following clarification.84
The quoted al-Subkī passage then urged the Sunni ulama to unite and con-
tinuously oppose those whom he characterized as factionalists, defined as
those who attack Islam, oppose the two shaykhs Abū Bakr and ʿUmar, and cast

83 Ḳorḳud, Daʿwat al-nafs 4a–29a.

84 Ibid. 215b–216b, 251a–252a.
84 al-tikriti

down ʿĀʾisha. As he saw it, fighting against those who defame the Quran is a
duty, so much so that each and every believer must engage with them. In addi-
tion, they should actively engage in proselytizing among Jews and Christians,
instead of passively accepting their conversion.85
Ḳorḳud was broadly sympathetic to the postclassical (muta’akhirūn) forms
of theological disputation, which had successfully integrated falsafa method-
ology following Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s contribution. However, like many others
of the era, he was exceedingly vigilant against the threat of falāsifa’s (philoso-
phers) conclusions coming to dominate kalām discourse and, thus, undermin-
ing what he saw as correct ụsūl al-dīn doctrines. Accordingly, Ḳorḳud provided
another extended quote of al-Subkī that condemned the falāsifa, those who
had mixed kalām from the theologians with kalām from the falāsifa, Naṣīr
al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī’s branch of kalām argumentation, and the Mu‘tazili theologian
al-Zamakhsharī’s (d. 538/1144) al-Kashshāf—which Ḳorḳud claimed that many
ʿAjam (i.e., Iranians) read.86 Having specified all the areas within and between
falsafa and kalām discourses that were to be condemned, Ḳorḳud cited al-
Subkī’s validation of al-Ghazālī’s and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s earlier use of fal-
safa methodology to counter their conclusions and defend ahl al-sunna doc-
trinal integrity. In this same passage, al-Subkī spoke out directly against those
philosophically inclined scholars in his own day who referred to themselves
as the “wise ones” (ḥukamāʾ). Following al-Subkī’s lead, Ḳorḳud argued force-
fully that the only ones who should engage with the falāsifa, effectively heretics
who undermine religious belief from within the community, are those who are
fully trained in the branches of fiqh, cannot be misled by heretical (malāḥida)
beliefs, and refuse to mix kalām with falsafa in a way that privileges falāsifa
doctrinal conclusions.87
In Ḥāfiẓ al-insān Ḳorḳud similarly condemned the introduction of episte-
mological doubt due to the mixture of falsafa and kalām (at kalām’s expense),
labeling ḥikma (wisdom) the most indecent discipline afflicting Ottoman and
ʿAjamī ulama. He specifically rejected teaching al-Hidāya (The guidance) and
some of the leading commentaries on it, as these texts made students peri-
patetic and led to the removal of their beliefs, as well as their incarceration
in the prison of error. This statement likely referred to the philosophical work
Hidāyat al-ḥikma (Wisdom’s guide) by Athīr al-Dīn al-Abharī (d. 660/1262),
or the commentary on that work by the contemporary logician Mīr Ḥusayn

85 Ḳorḳud, Daʿwat al-nafs 216b–217a.

86 For more on al-Zamakhsharī, see Versteegh, al-Zamakhsharī 432–434.
87 Ḳorḳud, Daʿwat al-nafs 217a–219a.
a contrarian voice 85

al-Maybudī (d. 909/1504), a student of Dawānī whom Shah Ismāʿīl (d. 930/1524)
had executed.88 As Ḳorḳud explained in a lengthy section commenting on
Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s views on perception, only revealed knowledge (naql),
not rational speculation (ʿaql), can lead to certainty among the masses con-
cerning the nature of the divine. Since pure rationalism ultimately depends
on perception, which is inherently flawed and subjective, one must judiciously
combine the two sources of knowledge, as Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī had done.89
Taken together, in these two texts Ḳorḳud appears to have been speaking out
against what modern scholars have characterized as the “Shirazi school,” or
perhaps just the branch that was in the process of becoming the Twelver Shi‘i
offshoot of that school, when he was working on the texts between 914/1508
and 919/1513. He seems to have found their emphasis on ḥikma (wisdom) as a
ruling principle, which was a highly popular motif at that time, to rely far too
much on ʿaql at the expense of naql.
Toward the end of Ḥāfiẓ al-insān, after a passage analyzing the impediments
to certainty one might face relying exclusively on either reason or tradition,
Ḳorḳud asserted the existence of, and his advocacy for, a “third doctrine” (mad-
hhab), which accepted kalām as the methodology for reaching legal certainty
in judging kufr and in clarifying the importance of ritual acts such as prayer,
almsgiving, and pilgrimage. Those scholars and their works, which he listed as
belonging to his ideal “third madhhab,” included:

Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210), in Nihāyat al-ʿuqūl, al-Arbaʿīn, and

al-Maḥṣūl;
Sayf al-Dīn al-Āmidī (d. 631/1233), in Abkār al-afkār;
Sirāj al-Dīn al-Urmawī (d. 682/1283), in al-Taḥṣīl;
‘Aḍud al-Dīn al-Ījī (d. 756/1355), in al-Mawāqif ;
Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī (d. 771/1370), in Jamʿ al-jawāmiʿ;
Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī (d. 793/1390), in Sharḥ al-maqāṣid; and
Badr al-Dīn al-Zarkashī (d. 794/1392), in Sharḥ jamʿ al-jawāmiʿ.90

Ḳorḳud argued that these scholars all agreed on the idea that individuals’ utter-
ances convey certainty concerning the legal repercussions of scripture—and
obedience thereof. As Ḳorḳud saw it, this favored group provided the cor-
rect medial position between extremist advocates for ʿaql and naql, respec-

88 Ḳorḳud, Ḥāfiẓ al-insān 48a–b; Pourjavady, Philosophy in early Safavid Iran 35–37; [Al-
Abharī and al-Maybudī], Commentary upon guidance.
89 Ḳorḳud, Ḥāfiẓ al-insān 70b–82a.
90 Ḳorḳud, Ḥāfiẓ al-insān 186b–188b.
86 al-tikriti

tively, between those whom he believed undermine dīn from within by mixing
kalām with falsafa on one hand and the Hanbali mujassima literalists on the
other.
While all the scholars Ḳorḳud listed—all Ash‘ari affiliates—were known in
Ottoman madrasa circles, they were not all taught equally widely. Ḳorḳud’s
favored al-Subkī text Jamʿ al-jawāmiʿ, and al-Zarkashī’s commentary on it,
never found a prominent place in the Ottoman madrasa curriculum, perhaps
because Mamluk Ash‘ari works became dispensable after Kemālpaşazāde and
others more clearly delineated differences between Maturidi and Ash‘ari
thought. The inclusion of Sirāj al-Dīn al-Urmawī’s al-Taḥṣīl is something of an
odd choice, as al-Urmawī’s Maṭāliʿ al-anwār was condemned by al-Jurjānī for
marginalizing kalām as a secondary science interested only in God’s essence.91
As his al-Taḥṣīl was an abridgment of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s al-Maḥṣūl, cover-
ing the principles of jurisprudence, perhaps Ḳorḳud felt the text supported his
drive to achieve legal certainty in judging kufr.92 Similarly, Sayf al-Dīn al-Āmidī
was highly critical of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, although perhaps solely due to pro-
fessional jealousy.93 A fascinating list, this chain of supposedly like-minded
scholars excluded al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111), who was particularly known for his
arguments paving the way for rendering scripturally based opinions legally
relevant.94 It also excluded other notable figures who were studied widely in
Ottoman madrasas and considered important contributors to the movement
of taḥqīq (verification),95 such as al-Ghazālī, Imām al-Ḥaramayn al-Juwaynī
(d. 478/1085), and al-Sayyid al-Sharīf al-Jurjānī (d. 817/1413).96 While his list
did not correspond entirely with what became the Ottoman madrasa canon
in kalām, it might be seen as an early roster of muḥaqqiqūn scholars,97 who led
a movement of textual verification that coincided with what Gerhard Endress
has characterized as an Islamicate form of scholasticism.98

91 Sabra, Science and philosophy 21.

92 Marlow, Sirāj al-Dīn Urmavī 282; Endress, Reading Avicenna 304.
93 Endress, Reading Avicenna 408–410.
94 Griffel, Tolerance and exclusion 339–354.
95 For the broader significance of this trend, see Melvin-Koushki, Taḥqīq vs. taqlīd 193–249.
For its subsequent development, see El-Rouayheb, Opening the gate 263–281; and Islamic
intellectual history.
96 For a brief summary of al-Ghazālī’s, al-Juwaynī’s, and al-Jurjānī’s contributions and roles
in the early taḥqīq trend, see Cürcânî, Şerhu‘l-Mevâkıf 13–23. Ḳorḳud cited each of these
scholars numerous times in Ḥāfiẓ al-insān.
97 Ömer Türker’s introduction to his Turkish translation of Jurjānī’s Sharḥ al-Mawāqif lists
four (al-Rāzī, al-Āmidī, al-Ījī, al-Taftāzānī) of Ḳorḳud’s seven as key scholars in the taḥqīq
trend. Cürcânî, Şerhu‘l-Mevâkıf 13–23.
98 Endress, Reading Avicenna in the madrasa 392, 400.
a contrarian voice 87

6 Legally Relevant Kalām

Ḳorḳud’s main text engaging with kalām disputation and its role in society,
Ḥāfiẓ al-insān, followed a long line of Shafi‘i legal and Ash‘ari theological lit-
erature discussing the meaning of true faith and its absence.99 In al-Shāfiʿī’s
(d. 204/820) own time, Muslims guilty of internal absence of faith (kufr) were
effectively protected by the fact that internal belief was considered a private
matter between any individual and his/her God. This de facto protection of reli-
gious privacy started to devolve following al-Ghazālī, who argued quite effec-
tively that the phenomenon of zindīqs, or secret apostates, necessitated the
withdrawal of the right of repentance (tawba) from apostates, as such individ-
uals following secret professions of faith and practicing concealment of inner
belief (taqiyya) should not be extended the right to be offered repentance
(istitāba). As a result, the definition of apostasy shifted from an individual’s
public statement breaking away from Islam to the proven existence of an indi-
vidual’s inner conviction consistent with unbelief.100
Within Ottoman circles, the most significant legal progression following
al-Ghazālī’s seminal contribution proved to be the elaboration of acts con-
sidered external signs of belief or unbelief. By the early tenth/sixteenth cen-
tury, the legitimacy of considering such acts as reliable signs was fairly widely
accepted, at least among Ottoman scholar-bureaucrats. In addition, it appears
that the acts constituting such external signs had multiplied as well. According
to Ḳorḳud’s count, in his own time such acts included: wearing certain clothing
reserved for non-Muslim communities under Islamic rule, treating the Quran
or other sacred texts with disrespect, bowing down to idols or to the sun, sacri-
ficing animals in someone’s name, claiming false prophethood, and practicing
sorcery, among others.101
Arguments advanced by certain Ottoman religious scholars pushed this
legal progression further still, allowing imperial officials to claim sharʿī justi-
fication for punishment of individual apostates as legal justification for state-
sanctioned violence against entire communities. Ḳorḳud’s 913/1508 Ḥāfiẓ al-
insān argued for broadening apostate statutes to apply to whole populations
and may have played a role in the state’s growing politicization of doctrinal

99 This section summarizes a more extensive analysis I previously completed on this same
text. See Al-Tikriti, Kalām in the service 131–149.
100 For further discussion of this earlier evolution of Shafi‘i-Ash‘ari apostasy literature, see
Griffel, Toleration and exclusion 339–354.
101 Ḳorḳud, Ḥāfiẓ al-insān 191a–215b.
88 al-tikriti

affiliation.102 Guy Burak has argued that state-affiliated Ottoman ulama by

the late ninth/fifteenth century had effectively invented the punishment of
“renewal of faith” (tecdīd-i īmān) as a tactic of “temporary excommunication”
in order to discipline doctrinal conformity, punish the expression of beliefs
they defined as heretical, and assert their societal power. By utilizing this pun-
ishment, expressed solely through fatwa rulings and never articulated as part
of Hanafi substantive law, such ulama were able to selectively enforce such
conformity without having to attempt to execute every individual offending
Muslim under their power.103 Although he never advocated for any “renewal of
faith” punishment per se, via Ḥāfiẓ al-insān Ḳorḳud contributed to the scholarly
dialogue claiming sufficient doctrinal certainty to justify such takfīr protocols,
which in turn would have justified application of the tecdīd-i īmān punish-
ments.
Ḥāfiẓ al-insān’s benediction affirmed the solitary nature of God and Muḥam-
mad’s unique status, explaining that Ḳorḳud had come across a preponderance
of expressions of unbelief among the ignorant, even among those claiming to
be seekers of knowledge. To remedy that societal ill, he had decided to clar-
ify the definition of faith and unbelief according to the principles of Islamic
jurisprudence and religion, uṣūl al-fiqh and uṣūl al-dīn, informed by the other
major branches of learning.104 This opening explanation effectively laid out
Ḳorḳud’s disciplinary preferences and agenda, as he intended to demonstrate
the doctrinal certainty provided by kalām discourse, assert the legal repercus-
sions springing from that certainty, and thus argue the case for mass appli-
cation of apostasy protocols against populations displaying external signs of
apostasy, in turn justifying violent state reactions to protect religion.
Following the introductory statement, the three remaining sections pro-
vided something of a literature review of takfīr debates throughout Islamic
history up to that point. The first two sections contrasted definitions of faith
(īmān)105 and its opposite, kufr.106 The third section catalogued and described
external acts that point to internal kufr and, thus, merit verdicts of and punish-
ments for apostasy.107 By reviewing such takfīr debates through the centuries,

102 Internal references within the text to Ḳorḳud’s Daʿwat al-nafs and vice-versa confirm this
earliest possible date of authorship. Daʿwat al-nafs al-ṭāliḥa is cited three times in Ḥāfiẓ al-
insān 65a, 72a, 196b. Meanwhile, Ḥāfiẓ al-insān is cited twice in Daʿwat al-nafs 159b, 236a.
103 Burak, Faith, law, and empire 1–23.
104 Ḳorḳud, Ḥāfiẓ al-insān 1a–b.
105 Ibid. 1a–88b.
106 Ibid. 88b–161b.
107 Ibid. 161b-end.
a contrarian voice 89

Ḳorḳud was effectively summarizing a politically relevant subset of kalām dis-

course to show why state adjudication of heresy was consistent with longstand-
ing religious belief.
In the course of this text, Ḳorḳud traced the evolution of faith and unbelief
from an inner belief, which only affected one’s relationship to God, as it was
understood in the third/ninth century, to a legally relevant external expression
of religious belief, as it came to be understood in his own day. The way he pre-
sented this evolution suggested that the state, acting on behalf of the legists
( fuqahāʾ) in order to protect the status of religion within society, had the right
to enforce social conformity and punish those who refuse to conform. In addi-
tion, he argued that such external expressions of belief, which are the signs
of social conformity addressed here, remain legally material even when com-
pelled. In addition, such expressions (i.e., stating the shahāda, attending Friday
prayers) must be displayed to legists regularly, and must be genuine. Possession
of maʿrifa (gnosis) cannot provide an excuse for exempting oneself from such
ritual practice.
In the second section on unbelief, Ḳorḳud started by defining kufr as lack of
belief in Muhammad’s prophecy, expressed via a number of external acts long
recognized as signifying kufr, including scorning the Quran or dressing in cloth-
ing meant to signify one’s dhimmi status. Citing Ash‘ari scholar and Sirāj al-Dīn
al-Urmawī’s student, al-Ṣafī al-Hindī (d. 715/1315), that denial of faith can be
exhibited circumstantially, and al-Taftāzānī’s argument that jurists must ensure
legal consequences for apostasy when such denial is demonstrated, Ḳorḳud
explicitly rejected the older conclusion that an intentional statement of denial
is required to confirm kufr.108 In addition, he asserted the legitimacy of apply-
ing qānūn (sultanic law) to certain issues within the scope of sharʿ, such as
enforcing the correct interpretation of certain theological matters, since state
officials acted as sovereign representatives of the ahl al-ḥaqq (the true com-
munity of believers). Although these points seemingly contradicted arguments
Ḳorḳud made in Daʿwat al-nafs al-ṭāliḥa concerning ideal ulama primacy and
independence vis-à-vis the state, he might have believed that as long as ulama
directed such efforts, their status would not be compromised.109
In the final section, Ḳorḳud affirmed the right of local religious officials to
define apostasy locally, thus effectively asserting the right of the Ottoman state
through its ulama to define apostasy for its subjects. In addition, he asserted
that once the intended meanings of sacred texts are set, such implicit mean-

108 Ibid. 89a–b; on al-Ṣafī al-Hindī, see Marlow, Sirāj al-Dīn Urmavī 309.
109 Ḳorḳud, Ḥāfiẓ al-insān 88b–90a.
90 al-tikriti

ings can be used as a basis for customary law (ʿurf ) rulings. Theologians must
assist practitioners of ʿurf to accurately classify such acts and thus protect soci-
ety from a threat which sharʿ alone cannot address.110 To close the text, Ḳorḳud
presented acts that merited kufr judgments. The first act was abandoning com-
munal prayer. The second was mishandling the Quran, as well as related texts
of the religious sciences and respected sciences, which support the canonical
disciplines—but not falsafa and logic texts, or texts that intermix kalām and
falsafa and undermine society’s kalām, and that can therefore be abused with
no legal punishment. Other acts included making false claims of prophecy and
using sorcery to gain followers. Ḳorḳud’s final act meriting judgment of kufr
was for those donning the qalansuwat al-kuffār (nonbelievers’ headgear), who
are automatically to be treated as apostates.111 This was a clear reference to the
Kızılbaş rebel turban, which was spreading throughout Anatolia at the time of
his writing. Ḳorḳud’s generation appears to have been the first to argue that
this specific act of public dress constituted apostasy,112 thus demonstrating the
mutability of external signs of internal kufr over time, as well as the conse-
quences of linking imperial interests with accusations of apostasy. In 913/1508,
the same year that Ḳorḳud completed a draft of Ḥāfiẓ al-insān, thousands of
Safavid supporters referred to as “ḳızıl taçlu” (red crowned) were resettled by
Ottoman authorities from Hamid and Teke provinces in Western Anatolia to
the recently conquered Modon and Koron provinces in the Peloponnese penin-
sula. At the time, Ḳorḳud was the governing prince of both Hamid and Teke,
suggesting a willingness on his part to implement policies justified by his argu-
ments in Ḥāfiẓ al-insān.113
In Ḥāfiẓ al-insān, Ḳorḳud justified, according to the twin norms of uṣūl al-
dīn (religious dogma) and uṣūl al-fiqḥ (sources of Islamic jurisprudence), the
right of imperial authorities to apply apostasy verdicts under the preroga-
tives of ʿurf. As such, his contribution can be characterized as one step in a
long process reflecting a progressive extension of state hegemony over matters
of individual conscience—and toward the modern mass application of takfīr
as a justification for sectarian violence. This argument coincided in content
and conclusions—if not in direct methodology—with those of Kemālpaşazāde
and Sarı Gürz Ḥamza Efendi (fl. 920/1514).114 Ḥāfiẓ al-insān also shows ulama

110 Ibid. 163b–191a.

111 Ibid. 195a–b.
112 Earlier theologians had mentioned “girding the sash” as an external sign of kufr, thus laying
the foundation for clothing-based apostasy rulings.
113 Kayapınar, Anadolu’dan Korona 6–11.
114 Al-Tikriti, Kalām in the service 146–149.
a contrarian voice 91

views being granted pride of place by a sympathetic, knowledgeable, and semi-

sovereign prince, as well as the promotion by this same prince of an expansion
of sharʿī definitions of apostasy to fit imperial interests. On the whole, in this
text Ḳorḳud’s arguments demonstrate the hegemonic extension of imperial
control over sharʿī practice in order to harness the legitimating power of sharʿī
norms to state interests—an extension of state power quite emblematic of the
“age of confessionalization,” whether in Europe or the Islamic East.

7 Political Repercussions, Societal Observations

While issues of kalām disputation might not appear to carry strong political
repercussions, these debates did not take place in a vacuum, and the prince’s
arguments appear to have fit a political agenda. Ḳorḳud tried to appeal primar-
ily to the Ottoman ulama, who would presumably have agreed with his theolog-
ical arguments and appreciated his deference to their primacy in matters con-
cerning imperial religious identity. In his view, the interests of religion, defined
according to the priorities of those he defined as the ahl al-sunna, trumped the
interests of state, and the raison d’etre of the Ottoman state was to support reli-
gion. Due to what he perceived as the failure of state and society by the turn
of the tenth/sixteenth century, Ḳorḳud advocated a return to sharʿī principles
and a move away from a capricious ʿurf al-salāṭīn (dynastic law). In addition
to his positions regarding religious identity, in al-Da‘wa Ḳorḳud complained
a great deal about state practices that he considered improper according to
sharʿī precepts, including illicit expropriation of wealth via taxation, corrup-
tion and abuse by the umarāʾ military class, excessive bowing down before the
ruler, and extra-sharʿī punishments (al-siyāsa), particularly in the case of royal
fratricide.115
Ḳorḳud was scathing in his criticism of what he identified as widespread
intellectual laziness and corrupt practices in his own era and society. He con-
demned sectarian madhhab followers who attempted to force agreement from
others or reflexively followed the positions of their own school, providing only
the justification that such traditions come from their forefathers (taqlīd). As he
saw it, individuals must instead search for truth, objectively—another nod to
the emerging taḥqīq (verification) movement, which Tijana Krstić discusses in
this volume in the context of subsequent centuries and from the perspective

115 For a discussion of Ottoman elite attitudes toward the concept of al-siyāsa, see Derin
Terzioğlu’s article in this volume.
92 al-tikriti

of the sources known as ʿilm-i ḥāls, intended for the religious edification of the
commoners.116 Ḳorḳud complained on several levels about the madrasa grad-
uates of his own day, arguing that they were lazy, corrupt, and compromised.
He stated that they read only small portions of two classics of Hanafi fiqh, Ṣadr
al-Sharīʿa’s hadith collection and Burhān al-Dīn al-Marghīnānī’s (d. 593/1197) al-
Ḥidāya, in order to justify taking illicit funds. Implicitly criticizing the madrasa
curriculum first established by the patronage of his grandfather, Meḥmed II,
Ḳorḳud stated that the students of his day, in order to learn Quranic com-
mentary (tafsīr), only read the two glosses by al-Jurjānī and al-Taftāzānī on al-
Zamakhsharī’s (d. 538/1144) Kashshāf and what had been commented on them,
rather than reading the original work. Finally, in a complaint many university
lecturers today might sympathize with, Ḳorḳud stated that not only were stu-
dents reading too narrow a slice of the relevant tafsīr literature via these two
scholars, they were only reading a few pages.117
In order to accomplish his reform agenda, Ḳorḳud wished to elevate an
independent class of ulama, excepting those who had been transformed into
corrupt scholar-bureaucrats, worldly Sufis who were a danger to religion, and
judges susceptible to bribes. As he saw it, judges should never rule according
to dynastic ʿurf code in cases that should be adjudicated according to sharʿī
norms, and ulama who frequent palace gates were inherently compromised.
His recommendations, if enacted, would have inherently come at the expense
of both the military class and certain outsider groups, particularly rural and
nomadic Kızılbaş supporters whom Ḳorḳud and other pillars of state were just
beginning to characterize as heretics.118 In a sense, his hope was to turn back
the clock on the role of the ulama in society, to an idealized past era when he
thought they were a privileged group, with an indispensable role to lead soci-
ety and independent of the political hierarchy. While others might emphasize
the importance of the military in jihad, both previously and in his own time,
Ḳorḳud was convinced that the educational and exhortatory role of the ulama
was far more important in jihad than the military role, as only scholars can pro-
tect the very essence of religious belief.119
As with his views on the mixture of falsafa with kalām and the role of
ulama in society, Ḳorḳud railed against several types, or stereotypes, of Sufis.
For his discussion on Sufism’s role in society, Ḳorḳud supplemented al-Subkī’s
conclusions with quotes from such prominent Sufi figures as ʿAbd al-Raḥmān

116 Ḳorḳud, Daʿwat al-nafs 201a–202a.

117 Ḳorḳud, Daʿwat al-nafs 221a.
118 Karakaya-Stump, Kizilbash-Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia 256–319.
119 Ḳorḳud, Daʿwat al-nafs 114b–115b, 150b–156b.
a contrarian voice 93

al-Sulamī (d. 412/1021), Abū l-Qāsim al-Qushayrī (d. 465/1072), and Shihāb al-
Dīn Abū Ḥafs ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī (d. 631/1234). Still, for this section he relied
primarily on the Ash‘ari Sufi scholar ʿAfīf al-Dīn al-Yāfiʿī’s (d. 768/1367) mystical
commentary, Rawḍ al-rayāḥīn fī ḥikayāt al-ṣāliḥīn.120 Ḳorḳud was not against
Sufism per se, as he had supported local orders when serving as the governor of
Manisa in the 1490s. However, he advocated a restrictive approach to the role
of institutionalized mysticism in society, going so far as to accuse his own rul-
ing elite of favoring fake Sufis over real ulama. In this vein, he cited al-Subkī’s
exclusion of “Turks,” who had rejected and mocked the fuqahā (legists), from
being considered Sufis, which might be taken as an indirect reference to rebel-
lious Safavid followers of his own day. Similarly, he followed al-Yāfiʿī in rejecting
magicians, fortune tellers, charlatans, and fake astrologers as Sufis. As Ḳorḳud
saw it, any individual conjuring up extraordinary acts or miracles in order to
persuade people to do what is forbidden must not be followed.121
Weighing in on prominent examples from the past, he agreed with certain
previous scholars who had judged controversial Sufis. For example, according
to Ḳorḳud, al-Hallāj (d. 310/922), Ibn al-Fāriḍ (d. 632/1235), and Ibn ʿArabī were
each guilty of various forms of kufr, while ʿAyn al-Quḍāt Hamadānī (d. 525/1131),
who was crucified along with other Isma‘ilis, joined the Bāṭiniyya and was
thus guilty of subverting religion from within. The primary justification for
judging any of these figures for committing kufr was their lack of adherence
to sharʿī protocols concerning acceptable belief. Likewise, Ḳorḳud spoke out
against those guilty in his own day of identifying with what modern schol-
ars sometimes characterize as “latitudinarian Sufism.”122 For example, as Khiḍr
was a saint, not a prophet, he could not be used to excuse sharʿī transgres-
sions, as some had claimed. Following al-Ghazālī, Ḳorḳud argued that Sufis
claiming exemption from sharʿī rules and following material pursuits in prox-
imity to the sultan must be condemned for kufr. Likewise, following al-Qurṭubī
(d. 657/1259), all Bāṭiniyya Zanādiqa, believing that sharʿī rules do not apply
to them due to their pure souls and greater intellect, must be condemned for
kufr. Following Shihāb al-Dīn Abū Ḥafs ʿUmar al-Suhrawardī, one must dis-
tinguish between Melami groups, who hide their worship and are honorable,
and Qalandari groups, who openly try to destroy tradition. Again following al-
Suhrawardī, self-proclaimed muftis who claim to be Melami are actually ahl
al-ibāḥa who permit anything, claiming that special truths render them exempt

120 For more on these scholars, see Böwering, al-Sulamī 811–813; Halm, al-Ḳushayrī 526–527;
Hartmann, al-Suhrawardī 778–782; and Geoffrey, al-Yāfi‘ī 236.
121 Ḳorḳud, Daʿwat al-nafs 223a–248b.
122 Fleischer, From Ḳorḳud to Mustafa Āli 72.
94 al-tikriti

from sharʿī precepts. Such individuals are not Sufis and are a source of all
types of zandaqa, ilḥād (heresy), and ibʿād (estrangement). Likewise, those
who believe in the transmigration of souls must be condemned, as with the
two most famous examples of “ecstatic Sufism,” when al-Ḥallāj stated “Anā
al-ḥaqq” and Bāyezīd al-Bisṭāmī (d. ca. 260/874) stated “Ṣubḥānī.” Citing al-
Qushayrī and al-Sulamī, Ḳorḳud pointed out that the same Bāyezīd al-Bisṭāmī
had also cautioned against following one promising miracles (karāmāt) until
one knows where he stands in relation to the sharʿī limits. Here Ḳorḳud may
have been indirectly referring to his own contemporary Shah Ismāʿīl, who was
widely reported to be capable of bringing about miracles. To provide a posi-
tive example, he stated that all three of these Sufi commentators agreed that
Junayd (d. 297/910), the epitome of “sober Sufism,” was both a genuine Sufi and
a sound Shafi‘i.123
In Ḥāfiẓ al-insān, Ḳorḳud characterized contemporary opponents to his use
of scriptural revelation as the basis for secular legal pronouncements as the
“Murji’a,” who rejected the earthly legal intent of scripture and called for a suf-
ficiently narrow reading of Quranic verses and hadith accounts as to obviate
material legal conclusions.124 Another set of opponents were the “Bāṭiniyya,”
who claimed that the secret meanings within sacred texts are known only to
a guide with special knowledge. He considered those he characterized as the
Bāṭiniyya more dangerous than the Murji’a, and stated that anyone holding
such views is ipso facto a murtadd (apostate).125

8 A Mixed Legacy

Ḳorḳud’s contributions left a mixed legacy within the early articulation of an

imperial religious identity that one can refer to as “Ottoman Sunnism.” As such,
he engaged with kalām debates, critiqued the field, and commented on it and
related disciplines’ role in society, particularly in the education of Ottoman
youth. While Daʿwat al-nafs al-ṭāliḥa and Ḥāfiẓ al-insān are not, strictly speak-
ing, kalām works, through these texts Şehzāde Ḳorḳud engaged directly with
kalām, and commented on the role kalām and related disciplines were already
coming to play in the development of Ottoman Sunni identity.

123 Ḳorḳud, Daʿwat al-nafs 223a–248b.

124 Ḳorḳud, Ḥāfiẓ al-insān 130b–158b. For more on the Murji’a doctrine, see Madelung, Mur-
dji’a 605–607.
125 Ḳorḳud, Ḥāfiẓ al-insān 157b–161b.
a contrarian voice 95

Ḳorḳud’s support for Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī’s medial position between extreme
supporters of ʿaql and naql alone remained popular for years to come, even
though Ottoman kalām eventually inched ever closer to a primarily ʿaql dom-
inant perspective. Likewise, state officials agreed broadly with justifications
put forth in Ḥāfiẓ al-insān for defining, judging, and punishing apostasy, with
immediate political effect. His support for state involvement in crafting reli-
gious identity also carried the day, as court-affiliated ulama rolled out heresy
accusations against the emergent Kızılbaş challenge—none of which is sur-
prising in the broader context of a nascent “age of confessionalization.”
However, Ḳorḳud’s promotion of a specific “third madhhab,” opposition to
mixing falsafa with kalām at the latter’s expense, condemnation of Ibn ʿArabī,
and preference for Shafi‘i fiqh and Ash‘ari kalām, ultimately met with tepid
reactions within the Ottoman elite. Within a generation of Ḳorḳud’s death,
some of his favored scholars faded from view while his proposed “third mad-
hhab” was forgotten as an intellectual construct. Likewise, Ibn ʿArabī was prac-
tically enshrined as an imperial saint, the state preference for Hanafi fiqh grew
ever more institutionalized, and madrasa graduates progressively articulated a
recognizably Ottoman brand of Maturidi kalām heavily infused with falsafa
methodology and views. Just as his ruling candidacy was marginalized and
largely forgotten, several of Şehzāde Ḳorḳud’s views on religious practice came
to represent an Ottoman path not taken—as well as a proof of the spectrum of
views inherent within Ottoman Sunnism.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank the anonymous reviewer, M. Sait Özervarlı, Tijana Krstić, Derin
Terzioğlu, and Urs Gösken for their comments and criticisms offered in the
course of developing this contribution.

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 chapter 4

Ibn Taymiyya, al-Siyāsa al-Sharʿiyya, and the Early

Modern Ottomans

Derin Terzı̇oğlu

The Hanbali scholar Taqī l-Dīn Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) would not be among
the first names to come to mind when one thinks of the pre-Ottoman Muslim
scholars whose oeuvres were influential in the making of Ottoman Sunnism.
There are many reasons for this. The Hanbali legal school (madhhab) to which
Ibn Taymiyya belonged was not only the smallest of the four “Sunni” legal
schools but also arguably the furthest removed from the Hanafi legal school,
to which the vast majority of the Muslims of the lands of Rum (Anatolia and
the Balkans) belonged and which the Ottoman administration promoted as the
“default madhhab” throughout its provinces.1 Besides, Ibn Taymiyya was, both
in his own time and in later periods, a sharply divisive figure, who had provoked
controversy even among his fellow Hanbalis for deviating from the madhhab
consensus on such issues as divorce oaths.2 Outside Hanbali circles, he was also
widely condemned for his anthropomorphic interpretation of God’s attributes
and for his attacks against the visitations of the tombs of prophets and saints.
To many Rumi Muslims, whose understanding of Islam was strongly colored
by Sufism, Ibn Taymiyya’s rejection of a wide variety of Sufi beliefs and prac-
tices and his anathematization of the Andalusian mystic Muḥyī l-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī
(d. 638/1240) as “Shaykh Akfar” (the most blasphemous master) would have
seemed deeply objectionable as well.3

1 For a view of the Hanafi legal school as the “default” or “semidefault” legal school in Ottoman
Egypt, see Ibrahim, Pragmatism, esp. 139, 149–161; for a discussion of the same as the “state
madhhab” in the Ottoman lands, see Burak, The second formation and Peters, What does it
mean.
2 Bori, Ibn Taymiyya wa-jamāʿatuhu esp. 23–36; al-Matroudi, The Ḥanbalī school; Melchert, The
relation of Ibn Taymiyya 146–161.
3 For a study that has argued for the marginality of Ibn Taymiyya among non-Hanbali scholars
of the Ottoman period on the grounds summarized above, see el-Rouayheb, From Ibn Ḥajar
al-Haytamī; for a study that has qualified this picture with new evidence for Ottoman schol-
arly awareness of Ibn Taymiyya, see Bori, Ibn Taymiyya (14th to 17th century) 112–120.

© derin terzı̇o ğlu, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004440296_005

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102 terzı̇o ğlu

Notwithstanding these differences between the kind of Sunni Islam that Ibn
Taymiyya upheld and the kind of Sunni Islam to which the vast majority of
the Ottoman learned elites adhered, however, Ibn Taymiyya was not entirely
unappreciated in the Ottoman lands. In fact, since the 1980s, scholars such as
Ahmet Yaşar Ocak and, more recently, Yahya Michot and Mustapha Sheikh have
argued that there was even an Ottoman “school of Ibn Taymiyya,” whose adher-
ents included the famous tenth/sixteenth century Hanafi jurist Birgili/Birgivī
Meḥmed Efendi (d. 981/1573) and his eleventh/seventeenth-century follow-
ers, known in the secondary literature and in some Ottoman sources as the
Kadızadelis. Some of these scholars have further placed the Kadızadelis in
a specific genealogy of “Islamic revivalism,” or “Salafi Islam,” extending from
Ibn Taymiyya to the Wahhabis.4 However, other scholars have (in my opin-
ion, rightly) objected to this genealogy on grounds that both Birgivī and the
Kadızadelis were firmly rooted in the Hanafi-Maturidi tradition and that the
evidence for their use of Taymiyyan ideas is both questionable and limited.5
This paper argues that the most concrete evidence we have at hand of
Taymiyyan influences among the Ottoman men of letters in the early modern
era points to a rather different, much more imperial, context for the reception
of Taymiyyan ideas. The work of Ibn Taymiyya that most resonated with the
Ottoman learned elites from the mid-tenth/sixteenth century onward was a
juristic treatise on governance titled al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya fī iṣlāḥ al-rāʿī wa-l-
raʿiyya (Sharʿī governance for the betterment of the ruler and the ruled). Sig-
nificantly, the Ottoman men of letters who took an interest in this text did
not necessarily represent the “more stringent” or “more traditionalist” among
their peers. Rather, what attracted them to this treatise was its authorization
of a strong state for a stable society founded on sharʿī principles, for this was
also how they saw, or at least wished to see, their state. Just as importantly,
the notion of siyāsa sharʿiyya (governance based on the principles of Islamic
law) offered a useful conceptual framework to reconcile the Ottoman dynastic
law known as ḳānūn with the universalizing norms of the sharia. Of course,

4 Ocak, XVII. Yüzyılda 208–225; Şimşek, Les controverses; Öztürk, Islamic orthodoxy; Çavu-
şoğlu, The Ḳāḍizādeli, esp. 39–47, 93–100; Lekesiz, XVI. Yüzyıl; Michot, Introduction 1–4,
18–19, 37–39; Sheikh, Taymiyyan influences 1–20; Sheikh, Ottoman puritanism, 93; Sheikh,
Taymiyyan taṣawwuf ; Evstatiev, The Qāḍīzādeli movement and the spread 3–34; Evstatiev,
The Qāḍīzādeli movement and the revival 213–243; Currie, Kadızadeli 1–25. Note that Michot
and Sheikh reject the “Salafi” label as anachronistic and inappropriate for both Ibn Taymiyya
and the Kadızadelis.
5 Radtke, Birgiwīs Ṭarīqa Muḥammadiyya, 159–174; el-Rouayheb, From Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī
303–304; Martı, Birgivî 65–68; Ivanyi, Virtue, esp. 76–82.
ibn taymiyya, al-siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, and the ottomans 103

Ibn Taymiyya had developed his thoughts on siyāsa sharʿiyya in the signifi-
cantly different legal and administrative context of the Mamluk sultanate, and
in transplanting his teachings to their own context, the Ottoman writers had to
rethink aspects of those teachings in view of their own legal and administrative
practices.
In this paper, I examine the Ottoman Rumi scholars’ engagement with Ibn
Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya in the context of the transformation of Ot-
toman imperial ideology under the impact of both multifaceted changes in
the political arena and growing Sunni confessionalism. While Ottoman Sun-
nism had multiple sources of inspiration, this paper assesses in particular the
impact of a certain corpus of juristic literature that came out of the Mamluk
lands on some of the later Ottoman scholarly discussions and trends (a concern
shared with the contributions by Helen Pfeifer, Nabil Al-Tikriti, and Guy Burak
in this volume). With this aim in mind, the next two sections shall introduce
Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya and the broader corpus of siyāsa sharʿiyya
texts as they took shape in the Mamluk context and discuss how and why this
text, along with some other texts in this corpus, attracted the attention of Rumi
scholars first around the mid-tenth/sixteenth century. Then, in the third and
fourth sections, I shall examine how two rather different Rumi scholars, the
mufti and mudarris Dede Cöngī (d. 975/1567) and the belle-lettrist and kadi
ʿĀşıḳ Çelebi (d. 979/1572) engaged with the ideas expressed in this corpus. These
more textually grounded sections of the paper shall highlight not just what the
Ottoman scholars took from the earlier scholarly discussions but also what they
brought to them that was new (an emphasis shared with the papers by Tijana
Krstić, Nir Shafir, and Evren Sünnetçioğlu in this volume). At the same time,
this discussion will bring out the complexity and contradictions in the Ottoman
reflections on their own religiopolitical order and emphasize the interplay of
religious ideology and political expediency in this regard. This theme is con-
tinued in the fifth and last section, which examines the afterlives of the works
of Cöngī and ʿĀşıḳ Çelebi during the eleventh/seventeenth century, when the
aforementioned Kadızadeli preachers became ascendant in the Ottoman capi-
tal. We shall see that notwithstanding the intensification of intra-Sunni debates
and the occasional use of Ibn Taymiyya’s name by Sufis to cast aspersion on
their critics, both Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya and its Ottoman off-
shoots appealed to the Kadızadeli and non-Kadızadeli alike and found a more
enthusiastic audience than before, during the eleventh/seventeenth century. I
will argue that this was due less to a “Salafi” (or proto-Salafi) turn among the
Hanafi scholars of Rum and more to the fact that the notion of siyāsa sharʿiyya
answered well the practical and ideological needs of the Ottoman ruling elites
in a time of social and political transformation.
104 terzı̇o ğlu

1 Ibn Taymiyya and the Development of the Idea of Siyāsa Sharʿiyya

under the Mamluk Sultanate

Just as the Ottomans were one of the most successful states to be formed by
a Muslim dynasty in the aftermath of the Mongol invasion, Ibn Taymiyya was
one of the most novel Muslim thinkers to reflect upon and respond to the real-
ities of the post-Mongol era. He was born in 661/1263 to a scholarly family in
Harran, a town that had to surrender to Mongol rule a few years previously.
When Ibn Taymiyya was six years old, his family relocated to Damascus, where
they would spend the rest of their lives under the rule of the newly formed
sultanate of the Mamluks. Even though the Mamluks successfully checked the
Mongol advance, the early decades of their rule were also marked by political
instability and infighting, and a sense of crisis among the civilian elites. It was
in this environment that Ibn Taymiyya developed a close, if also fraught, rela-
tionship with the Mamluk authorities. On the one hand, he ran to their aide by
preaching jihad against the sultanate’s Mongol, Christian, and Shi‘ite enemies,
and by providing the Mamluk rulers with religious and political counsel. On
the other hand, he also angered the Mamluk officials by entering into heated
polemics with fellow scholars and was periodically imprisoned.6
It was mainly Ibn Taymiyya’s theological and juridical views that landed
him in trouble with the Mamluk authorities. By contrast, no such controversy
surrounded his political tract, al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya fī iṣlāḥ al-rāʿī wa-l-raʿiyya,
written between 711/1311 and 714/1315.7 This treatise is widely accepted to be a
milestone in the history of Islamic political thought even though the nature
of its significance has been construed differently by different scholars. In 1939,
Henri Laoust famously argued that with this treatise Ibn Taymiyya had replaced
the classical juristic discourse, centered on the institution of the caliphate, with
another, centered on the implementation of the sharia.8 Recently, Mona Has-
san has successfully challenged this view by showing that Ibn Taymiyya con-
tinued to refer to the caliphate as both an ideal form of government and a his-
torical institution in various writings.9 Ovamir Anjum, on the other hand, has
maintained that Ibn Taymiyya did indeed break with classical juristic thought
but by rejecting the formalism and quietism of the classical jurists and by advo-
cating a return to the unified religiopolitical authority and political activism of

6 Laoust, Ibn Taymiyya 951–955.

7 Ibid. 952.
8 Laoust, Essai 278–315.
9 Hassan, Modern interpretations 338–366; Hassan, Longing 111–115.
ibn taymiyya, al-siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, and the ottomans 105

the Muslim polity in its earliest years.10 Whereas Anjum and Caterina Bori have
read Ibn Taymiyya as reconceptualizing “Islamic politics” as a more inclusive
realm that was of relevance to rulers and ruled alike, Abdessamed Belhaj has
seen him instead as a social conservative whose fear of instability and disorder
led him to support an expanded role for the state.11
Arguably, there are insights to be gained from all these approaches to Ibn
Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya. Even if the Hanbali scholar did not proclaim
the caliphate to be moribund in his time, he still de-emphasizes it in this par-
ticular treatise, using such terms as “caliph” and “imam” exceedingly rarely
and omitting altogether any references to the juristic debates about the con-
ditions for accession to the office of the caliph. The sole criterion that Ibn
Taymiyya articulates for legitimate rulership is that rulers service the Muslim
community by upholding the sharia and protecting public order. He defines
“the exercise of authority for the benefit of the people” (wilāyata amr al-nās)
as “one of the greatest religious duties,” and he identifies princes and jurists
as the two primary groups of people entrusted with this responsibility.12 Ibn
Taymiyya’s authoritarian and collectivist tendencies are especially evident in
his conceptualization of siyāsa and its relationship to the sharia. A term with
a range of meanings, siyāsa connoted before the modern era: 1) statecraft and
the management of the subject people (raʿiyya); 2) “the discretionary author-
ity of the ruler and his officials, one which they exercise outside the framework
of the Shari‘a”; and by extension, 3) punishment, particularly punishment that
exceeds the ḥadd punishments prescribed by Islamic law.13 While some jurists
had viewed siyāsa in the second and third senses with a great deal of misgiving
and even opposition, Ibn Taymiyya saw a meaningful role for the legal author-
ity of the ruler as long as it did not violate the precepts of the sharia but rather
helped to reinforce them and to maintain and protect public order. Because he
regarded the exercise of authority and coercion to be indispensable for fulfill-
ing the Quranic injunction to “command the right and forbid the wrong” (amr
bi-l-maʿrūf wa-nahy ʿan al-munkar), he particularly supported measures that
enhanced the coercive power of the state and protected the collective interests

10 Anjum, Politics.
11 Ibid.; Belhaj, Law and order 401, 409, 420–421; Bori, One or two versions 6–7.
12 Ibn Taymiyya, al-Siyāsa 163; for the English translation, see Ibn Taimiyya on public 187.
Henceforth, references will be given to both versions, separated by a slash. Note that there
is also a longer version of this epistle, which remains in manuscript form, but it was far
less widely circulated and was not the one to be translated into Turkish, so it will not be
referenced here. For a discussion of the differences between the two versions, see Bori,
One or two versions.
13 Bosworth, Netton and Vogel, Siyāsa 693–696; see also Belhaj, Law and order 401–402.
106 terzı̇o ğlu

of the Muslim community.14 It was for similar reasons that he condoned the use
of judicial torture and circumstantial evidence in the conviction of suspected
criminals, something that had been opposed by the majority of earlier jurists.15
It must be pointed out that the notion of siyāsa sharʿiyya was not solely the
brainchild of Ibn Taymiyya. Several other Shafi‘i, Maliki, and Hanbali jurists
had also discussed the concept of siyāsa from the viewpoint of “sharʿī norma-
tivity” before him, but the corpus truly developed in the late seventh/thirteenth
and early eighth/fourteenth centuries, when scholars such as Shihāb al-Dīn
al-Qarāfī (d. 684/1285) as well as Ibn Taymiyya and his student Ibn Qayyim
al-Jawziyya (d. 751/1350) gave it its distinctive form.16 Significantly, all these
jurists lived in the Mamluk sultanate, where there was a high degree of “sym-
biosis” between the ulama and military officials, and where norms of fiqh and
practical considerations of governance were closely conjoined in the actual
practice of law.17 A novel feature of the Mamluk legal system was that they
appointed to each major town four chief judges (qāḍī l-quḍāt), one from each
of the four Sunni legal schools; this was a set up that allowed the legal mecha-
nism to be both predictable and flexible and enabled the political authorities
to obtain the results that they considered to be the most conducive to social
order. It was also in the Mamluk period that the maẓālim or siyāsa courts pro-
liferated and expanded their jurisdiction to encompass such matters as mar-
riage, even though the most radical developments in this regard would come
in the second half of the eighth/fourteenth and, especially, the ninth/fifteenth
centuries.18 Even if the early eighth/fourteenth-century proponents of siyāsa
sharʿiyya could not have anticipated these later developments (much less con-
doned them), they can be said to have unwittingly opened the way for them
by translating into political discourse what must have been a wider societal
demand for law and order.
However, not all Mamluk-era jurists were as positive about the expansion
of administrative justice; nor were they all convinced of its compatibility with
sharʿī norms. In the ninth/fifteenth century, scholars critical of the excesses

14 For a discussion of Ibn Taymiyya’s views on amr bi-l-maʿrūf and its connection to his polit-
ical thought, see Cook, Commanding right 151–157.
15 Johansen, Signs as evidence 168–193.
16 On the earlier history of the corpus, see Massud, The doctrine of siyāsa; Belhaj, Law and
order 402–403. Even though siyāsa sharʿiyya as a juridical concept was given full force by
Ibn Taymiyya, Belhaj points out that the concept was already being used by Muḥyī l-Dīn
Ibn ʿArabī a century earlier.
17 Lev, Symbiotic relations; Stilt, Islamic law.
18 Rapoport, Royal justice 71–102; Rapoport, Legal diversity 210–228; see also Nielsen, Secular
justice.
ibn taymiyya, al-siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, and the ottomans 107

of the Mamluk siyāsa tradition sought to discredit it by associating it with the

yasa of Chinggis Khan. Some, like Maqrizī (d. 845/1442) and Ibn Taghrībirdī
(d. 874/1470), even proposed that the word siyāsa comes from the Persian word
se, meaning “three,” and the Mongol word yasa, because Chinggis Khan had
divided his realms between his three sons, turning his yasa, in effect, into
“se yāsa,” or three yasas prevalent in three different realms.19 Tellingly, how-
ever, even these more critical commentators found it difficult to reject the
siyāsa tradition completely and often distinguished between “just” and “unjust”
siyāsa, following a formulation first articulated by Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya and
repeated in many other works afterwards.20

2 Transplanting the Notion of Siyāsa Sharʿiyya to the Ottoman

Context

Siyāsa had also been a part of the Ottoman legal and administrative vocabu-
lary from at least the ninth/fifteenth century onward. However, as Guy Burak
has noted, the “Ottoman siyāset” did not have the same meaning as the “Mam-
luk siyāsa,” since the Ottomans had been, well into the tenth/sixteenth century,
much more in tune with the juristic and administrative traditions of the “post-
Mongol” East (Iran and Central Asia) than with those of Egypt and Syria under
the Mamluks. In the Ottoman ḳānūnnāmes, or lawbooks, the term “siyāsa” was
used in the narrower sense of administrative punishment and drew its power
not just from the reigning sultan, as in the Mamluk context, but also from the
cumulative legal tradition of the Ottoman dynasty, as in the case of the Ching-
gisid yasa.21
The “Ottoman siyāset” did, nevertheless, have a broader meaning, that of
“governance,” when it was used in the Ottoman ethics (ahlāḳ) literature, which
was modeled on the Persian “ethico-philosophical” literature.22 This broader
definition of siyāset also informed the famous discursus of Ṭursun Beg (d. after
896/1491) on law and governance in the preamble to his history of Meḥmed
II (r. 848–850/1444–1446, 855–886/1451–1481). There, citing the authority of
“philosophical works” (kütüb-i hikemiyye), the madrasa-trained bureaucrat dis-
tinguishes between two types of siyāset, both of which can potentially lead to

19 Rapoport, Royal justice 95–96. For a debunking of the claim of Chinggisid influence over
Mamluk siyāsa, see Ayalon, The great yāsa 107–156.
20 Rapoport, Royal justice 95–96.
21 Burak, Between the ḳānūn esp. 20–23.
22 Sariyannis, A history 433–434.
108 terzı̇o ğlu

an ordered state of affairs in human society: “that which the philosophers (ehl-
i hikmet) call divine governance (siyâset-i İlâhî), and which the people of sharia
call sharia,” and that which is issued by rulers using their reason, like the laws
of Chinggis Khan, “which is called royal governance and law (siyâset-i sultânî
ve yasağ-ı padişâhî) and according to our custom (örf ), customary law (örf ).”23
It is noteworthy that Ṭursun Beg considered both the sharia and ruler’s law,
including the laws of Chinggis Khan, to be legitimate, even as he emphasized
the superiority of the first over the second. Interestingly, Ṭursun does not men-
tion the Ottoman ḳānūn in this passage, even though some of his readers would
probably have also thought of it in the same connection, judging by the fact
that ḳānūn and yasa (or yasağ) were sometimes used interchangeably in the
Ottoman sources of the period.24
Yet the fact that the Ottoman legal tradition had more in common with that
in other post-Mongol polities to their east does not mean that Rumi scholars
were completely unaware of the Mamluk legal and administrative traditions or
of the Mamluk siyāsa literature before the tenth/sixteenth century. An impor-
tant conduit of ideas in this regard would have been the students and scholars
who traveled between the two realms already during the ninth/fifteenth cen-
tury.25 One of the early scholars who might have been instrumental in bringing
to the lands of Rum knowledge of the juristic literature of Mamluk Syria was
ʿAlā l-dīn ʿAlī Ṭarābulusī (d. after 849/1445), who was a kadi of Jerusalem and
one of the earliest Hanafi scholars to draw on the concept of siyāsa sharʿiyya
in his manual for kadis entitled Muʿīn al-ḥukkām. Ṭarābulusī traveled to the
then-Ottoman capital Edirne and presented some works to Murād II (r. 824–
848/1421–1444, 848–855/1446–1451), but not, it seems, Muʿīn al-ḥukkām. The
text, which would be much cited by later Ottoman writers, is notable by its
absence from the Ottoman palace library inventory of 908–909/1502–1504.26
Another scholar whose works dealt with issues of siyāsa and traversed the
Mamluk and Ottoman realms was Muḥyī l-Din Ḳāfiyeci (d. 879/1474). Inter-
estingly, Ḳāfiyeci was Rumi in origin. Born in Bergama in western Anatolia, he
had acquired his education during his travels in Anatolia, Iran, and Syria before

23 Tursun Bey, Târîh-i Ebü’l-Feth 10–12.

24 For examples of the interchangeable use of ḳānūn and yasa in the Rumi/Ottoman context,
see Burak, The second formation 595–597.
25 For preliminary findings on scholarly mobility in the Ottoman realms, see Ökten, Schol-
arly mobility; Burak, The second formation, ch. 4; Karamustafa, Saraydan 55–56; Taşkömür,
Books 395–396. On the roles played by scholars in Mamluk-Ottoman diplomatic relations,
see Muslu, The Ottomans esp. 25–28.
26 Taşkömür, Books 397; on Ṭarābulusī’s life and career, see Karaman, Trablusî. Muʿīn al-
ḥukkām will be discussed further below as one of the primary sources of Cöngī’s epistle.
ibn taymiyya, al-siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, and the ottomans 109

settling in Cairo, where he gained renown as a versatile scholar and authored,

among other works, two epistles, entitled Sayf al-mulūk (The sword of rulers)
and Sayf al-quḍāt (The sword of kadis). Even though Ḳāfiyeci never returned
to the lands of Rum, he maintained a connection with the Ottoman court, or at
least with the grand vizier Maḥmūd Pasha (d. 878/1474), and dedicated to him
several of his works, including Sayf al-mulūk.27
Despite these early points of contact, nevertheless, it was not until the
tenth/sixteenth century that the Hanafi scholars who were based in Rum began
to take a greater interest in the Mamluk siyāsa literature in general and in Ibn
Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya in particular. This interest developed in the
wake of three major developments. First, the rise of the Safavids in 906/1501
as a rival Shi‘itizing dynasty and the flaring up of a full-fledged ideological
and military conflict between the Ottomans and the Safavids a decade later
infused Ottoman religious and political culture with an unprecedented degree
of Sunni confessionalism. It also impressed upon the imperial elites the need to
eradicate or at least limit the “heterodox” forms of Islam in the Ottoman lands
and to address and correct the divergences between the established Ottoman
practices and the universalizing norms of the sharia.28 In their effort to for-
mulate a stronger response to the “heresies” of their time, the overwhelmingly
Hanafi-Maturidi scholars of Rum also began to look beyond their own legal and
theological traditions and to selectively utilize the arguments of some Shafi‘i,
Maliki, and, to a lesser extent, Hanbali jurists alongside those of the Hanafi
authorities.29

27 For a study of the life and scholarly contributions of Ḳāfiyeci and the Arabic edition and
Turkish translation of his two aforementioned works, see el-Kâfiyeci, Seyfü’l-mülûk; for
a discussion of these works, see also Köksal, Fıkıh ve siyaset 159–168. Sayf al-mulūk must
have entered the Ottoman palace library after 908–909/1502–1504, since the text does not
appear in the inventory made by the librarian Hayre’d-dīn Hıżır ‘Aṭūfī then. On Ḳāfiyeci’s
relation to Maḥmūd Pasha and the works he devoted to the latter, which were also trans-
ferred to the palace library, see Taşkömür, Books 398. In the mid-tenth/sixteenth century,
Ḳāfiyeci’s ties with the Ottoman world were deemed sufficient for Ṭaşköprüzāde to include
him in his biographical dictionary of the scholars of Rum; see Taşköprülüzâde, eş-Şakâ’iḳ
118–122.
28 On the impact of the rise of the Safavids on Ottoman imperial ideology and on Ottoman
religious and political culture more generally, see Sohrweide, Der Sieg; Eberhard, Osmanis-
che Polemik; Üstün, Heresy; Fleischer, The Lawgiver; Dressler, Inventing; Al-Tikriti, Kalam;
Krstić, Illuminated; Krstić, Contested conversions; Krstić, From shahāda; Krstić, State and
religion; Terzioğlu, Where ʿilm-i ḥāl meets; Terzioğlu, How to conceptualize; Burak, Faith;
Şahin, Empire 205–213; Çıpa, The making; Atçıl, The Safavid threat.
29 It seems that the Ottoman şeyhü’l-islāms Kemālpaşazāde and Ebū’s-suʿūd drew especially
on Maliki and Shafi‘i works and only secondarily on Hanbali ones in this context. On the
110 terzı̇o ğlu

A second development that was perhaps even more consequential for the
beginning of the Ottoman engagement with the siyāsa al-sharʿiyya corpus was
the incorporation of Egypt and Syria into the Ottoman realms following the
Ottoman victories against the Mamluks in 922–923/1516–1517. In the aftermath
of the conquest, prominent Rumi scholars were appointed as kadis, mudarrises,
and surveyors to such cities as Aleppo, Damascus, and Cairo, where they frater-
nized, competed, and sometimes clashed with local scholars of different madh-
hab affiliations. This experience also exposed the Rumi scholars to the debates
among the Syrian and Egyptian scholars about the Ottoman ḳānūn, or as the
latter scholars often preferred to call it, by way of association with the Ching-
gisid yasa, “the Ottoman yasağ.”30 Evidence of Rumi familiarity with the anti-
yasa/yasağ discourse of some Egyptian and Syrian scholars crops up in a variety
of texts from this period. For instance, the eminent scholar Kemālpaşazāde,
also known as Ibn Kemāl (d. 940/1534), who, as military justice (ḳāḍīʿasker)
of Anatolia, had accompanied the Ottoman sultan Selīm I during his Egyptian
campaign and taken part in Egypt’s first land survey, recycled the Mamluk-era
pseudoetymology that derived the word siyāsa from the “three yasas” of Ching-
gis Khan’s three sons.31 Since Kemālpaşazāde mentioned this etymology in a
treatise on the “Arabicization of foreign words” rather than in a juristic trea-
tise, it is not clear what greater significance, if any, he assigned to this supposed
etymological connection between the yasa and siyāsa, but some other Rumi
scholars who had spent time in the former Mamluk lands differentiated much
more sharply between divinely originated and human-made laws and came out
clearly against the yasa. Such was, for instance, the case with Ḳınalızāde ʿAlī
Efendi (d. 979/1572), who condemned the Chinggisid yasa unequivocally in his
Ahlāḳ-ı ʿAlāʾī, which he wrote circa 972/1564–1565 while serving as kadi of Dam-

verifiable instances of borrowing, see Üstün, Heresy 240–268; Al-Tikriti, Kalam; for incon-
clusive evidence about the use of a work by Ibn Taymiyya by the Ottoman scholar and
lettrist ʿAbdu’r-raḥmān al Bisṭāmī (d. 858/1454), see Gril, Ésotérisme 192.
30 On the scholarly exchanges between Rumi and Egyptian and Syrian scholars during the
tenth/sixteenth century, see Winter, Society and religion 185–188; Meshal, Antagonistic
sharīʿas; Burak, Faith, law and empire; Burak, The second formation esp. chs. 2–4; Pfeifer,
Encounter; see also Pfeifer’s essay in this volume. On the anti-yasa/yasağ discourse of the
Syrian and Egyptian scholars in this period, see Burak, Between the ḳānūn 15–20; for a
more nuanced (albeit still critical) assessment of the Ottoman legal system by the Egyp-
tian scholar Zayn al-Dīn Ibn Nujaym (d. 970/1563), see Ayoub, Law, empire, and the sultan
31–63.
31 Interestingly, a later copyist found it appropriate to excerpt this passage right before a copy
of Cöngī’s Risāla fī l-siyāsa al-sharʿiyya. The excerpt is titled, “Siyāsa from the Risāla al-
Taʿrīb by Ibn Kemālpaşa,” in MS Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi (hereafter SK), MS Esad Efendi
924, 166a.
ibn taymiyya, al-siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, and the ottomans 111

ascus. Baki Tezcan has argued that Ḳınalızāde’s strong condemnation of the
yasa also bespoke his ambivalence about the Ottoman ḳānūn, which, however,
is not explicitly mentioned in this text.32 Another contemporary Rumi writer
who had taken part in the Ottoman conquest of Egypt and who had also spent
some time in that province and, subsequently, was more explicit in his criticism
of, if not ḳānūn, then of those who invested binding power in it. In his book of
advice, written sometime between 962/1555 and 974/1566, and addressed to the
grand vizier, the anonymous author of the Kitābu Meṣāliḥü’l-Müslimīn repeat-
edly emphasizes that ḳānūns are made by administrators to meet the needs of
their time; they are not “from the time of the Prophet, hence it cannot be a sin
(günāh) to change them.” Clearly, however, the same writer was not oblivious
to the reputation of the Ottoman laws; hence, he urged the grand vizier not
only to issue new laws ( yasak, yasağ) but also to do his utmost to enforce them
“so that people will not say that the Ottoman yasağ lasts until the forenoon”
(Osmanlunun yasağı hod kuşluğa değindir dimeyeler).33
Third and last, the growing anxiety among the scholars of Rum about the
compatibility of the Ottoman ḳānūn with the sharia during the first half of the
tenth/sixteenth century prompted efforts on the part of the leading Ottoman
jurists to try to address and reduce these points of tension. Some high-ranking
jurists, like Çivizāde Muḥyī’d-dīn Meḥmed (d. 954/1547), tried to accomplish
this by undertaking a sustained critique of those Ottoman institutions and
practices that they deemed problematic, such as cash waqf s, but met stiff resis-
tance on the part of the Ottoman imperial establishment in this regard.34 Far
more successful, in comparison, were the efforts of Kemālpaşazāde and Ebū’s-
suʿūd (d. 982/1574), who tried to harmonize the ḳānūn with the sharia by work-
ing out a comprehensive legal framework for what had been until then ad hoc
administrative and fiscal arrangements and by rearticulating the principles of
the Ottoman land regime in the language of Islamic jurisprudence.35

32 Tezcan, Ethics 118–120.

33 For the anonymous author’s references to his participation in the Egyptian campaign, see
Yücel (ed.), Osmanlı devlet, 125; for the other references to Egypt or “the Arab lands” (Ara-
bistan), see Ibid., 94–95, 110, 123, 124; for the polemics against ḳānūn-minded conservatism,
see Ibid., 93–94, 111, 118, 120–121; for references to (Ottoman) yasağ, see Ibid., 98, 101–104,
109, 114. Note that Yücel misdates the text to ca. 1046–1050/1637–40; for the correct dat-
ing, see Tezcan, The “Kânûnnâme of Mehmed II” 658–659. The grand vizier addressed in
the treatise must have been Rüstem Pasha (d. 968/1561), Semiz ʿAlī Pasha (d. 972/1565), or
Soḳullu Meḥmed Pasha (d. 987/1579).
34 Gel, XVI. Yüzyılın; Mandaville, Usurious piety.
35 İnalcık, Islamization; Akgündüz (ed.), Osmanlı kanunnâmeleri iv, 29–121; Imber, Ebu’s-
suʿud esp. chs. 2 and 5; Buzov, The Lawgiver; on the relationship of ḳānūn and sharia more
112 terzı̇o ğlu

As we shall see below, all three of these trends were relevant to the growth
of an Ottoman corpus of siyāsa sharʿiyya literature in the tenth/sixteenth cen-
tury and informed the views expressed in this corpus. Still, of the first two texts
to be written by Ottoman scholars on the topic, Cöngī’s Risāla fī l-Siyāsa al-
sharʿiyya (also known as Siyāsetnāme) was perhaps a more direct response to
the challenges presented to the Ottoman officialdom by Syrian and Egyptian
scholars, while ʿĀşıḳ Çelebi’s Miʿrācü’l-eyāle ve minhācü’l-ʿadāle was concerned
more exclusively with the debates among the Ottoman Rumi elites. In line with
their particular concerns, both also highlighted different strands of the earlier
siyāsa sharʿiyya corpus.

3 Dede Cöngī and His Risāla fī l-Siyāsa al-Sharʿiyya

The career of Kemālü’d-dīn İbrāhīm b. Bahşī b. İbrāhīm, known variously as

Dede Efendi, Dede Halīfe, Ḳara Dede, or Dede Cöngī (on account of his pop-
ular commentary on a work on Arabic grammar written in cönk form) is a
striking illustration of the high social mobility in the lands of Rum during
the heyday of Ottoman expansion. Born to a modest family in Sonusa near
Amasya in Anatolia, Cöngī had worked as a tanner before belatedly acquir-
ing a madrasa education. Despite his modest background and late start, he
subsequently had a rather successful career, serving as mudarris and mufti
in different parts of the empire, including Bursa, Tire, Merzifon, Diyarbakır,
Aleppo, İznik, and Kefe (Caffa).36 Since in both Diyarbakır and Aleppo Cöngī
taught in a madrasa founded by Deli Hüsrev Pasha (d. 951/1544), it is rea-
sonable to think that this vizier of Bosnian devşirme origin had been among
his patrons.37 Another patron might have been Sultan Süleymān’s eldest son,

generally, see also Barkan, XV ve XVIıncı asırlarda; Barkan, Kanun-nâme; Heyd, Studies;
Repp, R., Qānūn and sharīʿa; Peirce, Morality tales; Ergene, Qanun and sharia; Peters, Crime
and punishment.
36 On Cöngī’s biography, see Akgündüz, Dede Cöngī; Ali b. Bâlî, El-Ikdü’l-manzûm 232–235;
Atâyî, Hadâik i, 503–505.
37 Admittedly, Hüsrev Pasha had died a year before Dede Cöngī was appointed mudarris
in the Hüsrev Paşa madrasa in Aleppo, but it is possible that the pasha’s family remem-
bered and honored the ties of clientage that had been formed between the two men after
his death. While Hüsrev Pasha had served in numerous positions throughout his event-
ful career, it is noteworthy that his tenure as governor-general of Rumeli and then vizier
(943–951/1537–1544) overlapped in time with the tenure of Ebū’s-suʿūd as military justice
(ḳāḍīʿasker) of Rumeli (944–952/1537–1545). On the pasha’s life, see Özcan, Hüsrev Paşa,
Deli.
ibn taymiyya, al-siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, and the ottomans 113

Prince Muṣṭafā (d. 960/1553), to whom Cöngī dedicated another treatise on fis-
cal matters. In other words, Cöngī was not just any provincial mudarris and
mufti, but one with significant connections to the Ottoman military adminis-
trative elite. Cöngī’s commitment to the Ottoman religiopolitical order comes
across clearly in the treatise he dedicated to Prince Muṣṭafā, whom he ad-
dresses as “Sultan Prince Muṣṭafā” and as “the inheritor of the office of caliph,”38
but it is more obliquely demonstrated in his Risāla fī l-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya for
reasons that will be discussed below.
Unfortunately, we do not know at what point in his career Dede Cöngī
penned his Risāla fī l-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya; the text provides no autobiograph-
ical information, and the earliest extant manuscript dates from 1054/1644–
1645, that is to say, almost 80 years after the author’s death.39 It is tempt-

38 Dede Cöngī, Risāla fī Amwāli bayti-l-māl 1b–2a; for a modern Turkish translation in slightly
abbreviated form and the facsimile respectively, see Akgündüz (ed.), Osmanlı kanun-
nâmeleri iv, 217–218, 236–237. This treatise will not be discussed here, as there is no ref-
erence in it to either al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya or to any other work that draws on the latter
text.
39 Dede Cöngī, Siyāsetnāme/Risāla fī l-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya SK, MS Esad Efendi 3610/6, 156b–
164b (copied in 1054/1644–1645). Because the author does not mention his name within
the text, the attribution to Cöngī has been based on the attribution of the vast majority
of the later copyists and readers as well as the first translator of the work into Turkish.
A minority of Ottoman readers and copyists, however, ascribed the work to other schol-
ars. While most of these other attributions can be discarded as unfounded, one deserves
further investigation. This is the attribution to the Egyptian Hanafi jurist Zayn al-Dīn
Ibn Nujaym (d. 970/1563). Ibn Nujaym is identified as the author of Risāla fī l-Siyāsa al-
sharʿiyya in three manuscripts preserved in Süleymaniye library (MS Hacı Mahmud Efendi
1097/1, 14a; MS Hüsrev Paşa 758/3, 29a and MS, Reşid Ef 1027/13, 128a), while in two oth-
ers in the same library (MS Carullah 2120/2 and MS Laleli 961/4), he is identified as the
author in the online library catalogue, but not in the manuscripts themselves. None of
these manuscript copies are dated. Apparently, the text is attributed to Ibn Nujaym also
in an undated manuscript preserved in Al-kutubkhāna al-Khidwiyya al-Mıṣriyya, MS Fiqh
Ḥanafī 1160; for a description, see Dede Efendi, al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya 18–19. What makes
Ibn Nujaym an intriguing possibility is the fact that he was a contemporary of Cöngī and
had a more nuanced view of the Ottoman imperial order than some other Egyptian schol-
ars of the period. According to Samy A. Ayoub, Ibn Nujaym accepted Ottoman rule to be
legitimate, but criticized “the corruption and abuse of power within it.” He also engaged
with the concept of siyāsa in his Baḥr al-rāʾiq (The clear sea), albeit in a different manner
from the Risāla fī l-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya. Whereas the treatment of siyāsa in Risāla fī l-Siyāsa
al-sharʿiyya bears a strong imprint of the thought of the Mamluk-era Hanafi jurist Ṭarāb-
ulusī and, to a lesser extent, of the Hanbali jurist Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Ibn Nujaym
took his definition of siyāsa from Maqrizī. Ibn Nujaym also vehemently rejected the roles
played by kadis in the application of siyāsa in direct contrast to the author of the Risāla fī l-
Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya. On Ibn Nujaym’s views on siyāsa and the Ottoman imperial authority,
see Ayoub, Law, empire, and the sultan 54–64; for Cöngī’s views, see below.
114 terzı̇o ğlu

ing to think, nevertheless, that Cöngī composed his text sometime during or
after his stay in Aleppo (952–957/1545–1550), where he must have had many
more opportunities to familiarize himself with the Mamluk-era siyāsa liter-
ature. Besides, from an article by T.J. Fitzgerald we learn that while he was
serving as mudarris and mufti in Aleppo, Cöngī became involved in a major
dispute that had the local scholars up in arms about the legitimacy of the fis-
cal practices that the Ottomans had been trying to establish there. In a fatwa he
issued on the dispute, Cöngī had firmly defended the legitimacy of the Ottoman
practice, and the imperial administration had responded to the complaints
in accordance with this fatwa.40 Even though there is no direct connection
between this controversy, which was about fiscal matters, and Cöngī’s Risāla fī
l-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, which is about criminal law, the wider resentment about
the Ottoman ḳānūn that the controversy revealed may well have provided an
important motivation behind Cöngī’s decision to pen this treatise.
Since Cöngī wrote his text in Arabic, and made little or no attempt to corre-
late the terms of Islamic juristic discourse with Ottoman administrative termi-
nology, it seems safe to conclude that he was writing primarily for a scholarly
audience, comprised of both Rumi and Arab scholars. If Cöngī intended with
his text to reach out to the Syrian and Egyptian scholars in particular, his deci-
sion to frame the discussion around siyāsa sharʿiyya makes a great deal of sense:
Siyāsa sharʿiyya, after all, was a juristic concept that was well known to these
scholars; it was also a concept well suited to the madhhab plurality that still
prevailed in their circles; in fact, the proponents of the concept had down-
played madhhab differences in promoting siyāsa justice, and especially valued
the ability of the political authorities to rise above the confines of the madhhab
system.41
At the same time, however, it could also be said that Cöngī did not do enough
to reach out to the non-Hanafi Muslims. The vast majority of the sources he
cites in his treatise (a total of 42 works) are by medieval Hanafi-Maturidi writ-
ers, many of them from Transoxania.42 As for those of his non-Hanafi sources
that he identifies by name, there are no more than three. These are Aḥkām al-
sulṭāniyya by Māwardī (d. 450/1058), who was a Shafi‘i, al-Dhakhīra by Qarāfī,
who was a Maliki, and an unidentified work (probably al-Ṭuruq al-ḥukmiyya)
by Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, who was, like his teacher Ibn Taymiyya, a Hanbali.
It could of course be symbolic that Cöngī chose a text each from the remain-

40 Fitzgerald, Murder in Aleppo 185, 188, 195–197.

41 Yılmaz, Caliphate 85.
42 For the complete list of the sources cited by Dede Cöngī, see Köksal, Fıkıh ve siyaset 197–
200.
ibn taymiyya, al-siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, and the ottomans 115

ing Sunni madhhabs, but his reasons for choosing them might also have been
simply the fact that they all dealt with the concept of siyāsa sharʿiyya.
Strangely, however, Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, generally assumed
to have been among the sources of Cöngī, is actually nowhere referenced.43
Perhaps Cöngī found it more prudent to bypass this text because of the con-
troversial nature of its author among the Arab and Rumi scholars he wished
to reach. But it is also possible that Cöngī had simply not read Ibn Taymiyya’s
work, which was not as widely known in the lands of Rum at the time.44 In
either case, there is no denying the presence of Taymiyyan ideas in Cöngī’s epis-
tle, but these ideas were transmitted via other Mamluk-era writers who had
read and utilized Ibn Taymiyya rather than through Ibn Taymiyya’s own works
directly. An important connection in this regard was Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya,
but even more important than him, as far as Dede Cöngī was concerned, was
the aforementioned Hanafi jurist, Ṭarābulusī. Indeed, almost the entire intro-
ductory section of Cöngī’s Risāla, in which he defines siyāsa, distinguishes
between “just” and “unjust” siyāsa, and introduces the concept of al-siyāsa al-
sharʿiyya, was taken from the introduction to the third section of Ṭarābulusī’s
Muʿīn al-ḥukkām.45
Differently from Ibn Taymiyya, and in keeping with the Hanafi tradition, in
this treatise Dede Cöngī uses siyāsa mainly in the narrower sense of admin-
istrative punishment. As the opening quotations from Bābartī (d. 786/1384)
and Ṭarābulusī make clear, administrative punishments were understood to
be harsher than the punishments prescribed by the sharia, as they were intro-
duced with the aim of stamping out “corruption” ( fasād).46 Citing Ṭarābulusī,
Cöngī points out that the topic of siyāsa is complicated and that Muslims fall
into three groups in their position on the topic. One group rejects siyāsa cat-
egorically because they mistakenly believe it to be against the sharia, while

43 Heyd, Studies in old Ottoman 199; Köksal, Fıkıh ve siyaset 225; Sariyannis, A history 105. Dif-
ferently from the other scholars, Köksal acknowledges that Ibn Taymiyya is not mentioned
by name, but still assumes that Dede Cöngī utilized his text particularly in the early sec-
tions of the treatise.
44 To give an idea, no copy of Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya is mentioned in the 908–
909/1502–1504 inventory of the Ottoman palace library; for the facsimile and transliter-
ation of the inventory, see Necipoğlu et al. (eds.), Treasures ii. Moreover, a preliminary
codicological investigation of eleven of the twelve manuscript copies of Ibn Taymiyya’s
al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya in Istanbul libraries suggest that none of these texts had come into
the possession of Rumi readers before the mid-tenth/sixteenth century. See footnotes 125–
128.
45 Dede Efendi, al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya 74–76; cf. Ṭarābulusī, Muʿīn al-ḥukkām 138a–b.
46 Dede Efendi, al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya 73.
116 terzı̇o ğlu

another group applies it too liberally and transgresses the punishments pre-
scribed by God (ḥudūd), perpetrating “injustice” (ẓulm) and “blameworthy
innovations” (bidaʿ). Only a third group embraces the golden mean by com-
bining siyāsa and sharia and practicing siyāsa sharʿiyya, defined as the kind of
siyāsa that serves “sharʿī ends” (al-maqāṣid al-sharīʿa) and safeguards public
order.47
Cöngī next sets out to establish the legitimacy of siyāsa sharʿiyya on the
grounds of evidence from the Quran and hadiths (nuṣūṣ al-sharʿiyya) as well
as with reference to the legislative deliberations of the four “rightly guided
caliphs.” Here, Cöngī furnishes textual proofs for the permissibility of specific
siyāsa punishments. He also provides several more general explanations for
why it had been necessary for later rulers to stipulate harsher punishments
than what the sharia prescribed. He stresses in particular the mutability of
sharʿī judgments in connection with the idea of the “corruption of the times”
( fasād al-zamān), alluding to the pessimistic view of human history that had
also informed Ibn Taymiyya’s views on siyāsa. Accordingly, the further away
Muslims are from the time of the Prophet, the more corrupt they become, thus
necessitating the adoption of harsher measures to preserve public order.48 A
second general principle that Cöngī evokes is al-maṣāliḥ al-mursala, or social
benefit, that he says had guided the first four caliphs when they introduced
practices that the sharia neither permits nor prohibits, such as writing down
the Quran.49 As Hüseyin Yılmaz has pointed out, this concept was particu-
larly important in the Maliki school of law, but its close cognate in the Hanafi
legal school, maṣlaḥa, had also been of central importance to the efforts of
Ottoman jurists like Ebū’s-suʿūd to legitimate controversial practices such as
cash waqf s.50
While modern scholars are in consensus that Dede Cöngī was writing all this
to legitimate Ottoman ḳānūns, they have struggled to explain why he chose
nonetheless not to reference either the Ottomans or their ḳānūns. The word
qānūn and its plural qawānin are used several times in the text, but always in
the sense of “principle” or “standard” (as in the principle of sharia or qānūn
al-sharʿ), which was the prevalent meaning of the word in the Mamluk con-

47 Ibid. 74–76.
48 Ibid. 83. On the views of Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya on fasād, see Bel-
haj, Law and order 409–412; for near contemporary Hanafi jurists’ use of the same con-
cept to accommodate legal change, see Reinhart, When women went to mosques 119–122;
Terzioğlu, Bidʿat, custom; for Shafi‘i examples, see Katz, The “corruption of the times.”
49 Dede Efendi, al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya 84, 86.
50 Yılmaz, Caliphate 86; Khadduri, Maṣlaḥa 738–740; Mandaville, Usurious piety.
ibn taymiyya, al-siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, and the ottomans 117

text.51 Uriel Heyd has attributed the absence of pointed references to the
Ottoman context in the treatise to Cöngī’s authorial modesty and reluctance
to go beyond the role of compiler.52 Perhaps, however, Cöngī wanted to write
about administrative justice in the abstract language of jurisprudence, pre-
cisely because he thought this was a more effective way of winning over those
of his readers who remained skeptical about the legitimacy of the yasa/ḳānūn
tradition. In any case, many of the specific examples of siyāsa justice that Cöngī
discusses and condones in this text—for instance, execution by strangling, the
use of torture to extract confessions, the consideration of the criminal record
or of the social reputation of the accused as well as the admission of circum-
stantial evidence in determining guilt, “the acceptance of the killing of a few to
avert harm to the many” (a principle referenced in “the ḳānūnnāme of Meḥmed
II” to justify royal fratricide), the execution of “perpetrators of discord ( fasād)
on earth,” and the punishment of “sodomy” as a capital crime—had their place
in one fashion or another in the Ottoman ḳānūn tradition as it had evolved
until the time of Süleymān I (r. 926–974/1520–1566). In the Ottoman context,
the criminalization of “sodomy” was a new development, initiated in the reign
of Süleymān, which might explain why Cöngī mentions it multiple times in his
treatise.53 Even in those instances in which the specific siyāsa punishment dis-
cussed was not part of the Ottoman penal code, its inclusion in the text could
have contemporary relevance. For instance, considering that Cöngī was writing
in a time of ongoing conflict with the Safavids, as well as of sporadic perse-
cution of Anatolian “Kızılbaş,” it must not be coincidental that the very first
example of siyāsa punishment that he gives from the beginning of Islamic his-
tory is the burning of a group of heretics (zanādiqa) by the fourth caliph ʿAlī b.
Abū Ṭālib (d. 40/661) on grounds that they believed him to be divine.54 It must
also be significant that Dede Cöngī does not go into the details of what kinds

51 Dede Efendi, al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya 75, 84, 86. On the use of “qānūn” in the sense of “prin-
ciple,” or “standard,” see Burak, Between the ḳānūn 7–8 and Ferguson, The proper order
72–74.
52 Heyd, Studies 202.
53 Dede Efendi, al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya 77 (death by strangling), 78, 81–82 (punishment of
“sodomites”), 90–92 (admission of circumstantial evidence), 92–94 (use of torture to force
a culprit to admit crime), 103–104 (killing a few in order to avert harm to the many). For
the relevant practices in the Ottoman ḳānūnnāmes, see Heyd, Studies 30, 64, 77–80, 102–
103, 116–118; Akgündüz (ed.), Osmanlı kanunnâmeleri i, 328; iv, 296–298, 302, 369–370; for
a comparison of the punishments prescribed for “sodomites” by jurists of different madh-
habs as well as by ḳānūn, see el-Rouayheb, Before homosexuality 118–128.
54 Dede Efendi, al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya 77–78. On this anti-ghulāt report, see Anthony, The
caliph and the heretic 161–194.
118 terzı̇o ğlu

of siyāsa punishments he considered “unjust” or “un-sharʿī,” as this could have

brought up controversial aspects of the Ottoman penal code—for instance, the
substitution of some of the corporal punishments with fines—as examples of
“unjust” or “un-sharʿī” punishments.55
After having legitimated law making by the political authorities, Cöngī turns
in the next section of his treatise to the question of whether it is legitimate
for kadis to practice siyāsa, namely, to apply the laws and regulations intro-
duced by rulers. This, too, was a critical question, since in the Ottoman legal
system kadis were responsible for applying ḳānūn as well as sharia and since
notwithstanding the alternative venues of justice distribution, such as the
Imperial Court and courts of governors-general, where kadis (or ḳāḍīʿaskers)
also presided, the Ottoman rulers actively promoted the kadi courts as the prin-
cipal venue of justice distribution throughout their realms.56 In this context, it
should not be surprising that Cöngī answers the question of whether kadis can
practice siyāsa with an overwhelming yes, albeit a yes uttered by citing others.
First, he cites a passage from Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya to the effect that the sharia
has not determined limits for how siyāsa is to be practiced; because rulers will
introduce laws and regulations in response to the specific conditions of the
time, when those conditions change, so can the rules. Hence, in some periods
and places kadis may be delegated the functions of military governors, while
in other periods and places they may not. Next, Cöngī gives us the contrary
view upheld by Māwardī and Qarāfī that kadis should not meddle in siyāsa,
and he lists nine reasons why these two jurists considered military governors
to be equipped with greater powers than kadis to practice siyāsa and deliver
effective justice. In the end, Cöngī gives his own view, based on the authority of
“the principal Hanafi sources,” that kadis have also been granted most of these
powers.57 Once again, Cöngī was tacitly approving of the ways in which the
Ottomans administered justice.
To recapitulate, Cöngī’s Risāla fī l-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya was an attempt on the
part of a devoted member of the Ottoman learned establishment and a Rumi
Hanafi scholar to intervene in the debates that were ongoing among both Syr-
ian and Egyptian, and to a lesser extent Rumi, scholars about the legitimacy of

55 For a different interpretation, see Midilli, Dede Cöngi’nin 241, 244–255.

56 For a nuanced discussion of the Ottoman justice distribution and promotion of kadi
courts as its principal venue in the tenth/sixteenth century, see Peirce, Morality tales 86–
125, 311–348. On the place of kadi courts versus other venues of justice distribution in the
early modern Ottoman Empire, which reflect a different, twelfth/eighteenth-century per-
spective, see Ergene, Local court, ch. 9, Aykan, Rendre la justice 52–86, Tuğ, Politics of honor
185–244 and Baldwin, Islamic law, chs. 2, 3, and 5.
57 Dede Efendi, al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya 105–120.
ibn taymiyya, al-siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, and the ottomans 119

the Ottoman ḳānūn. I have argued above that it was probably in an effort to win
over his colleagues opposed to the “Ottoman yasağ” that Cöngī defended the
Ottoman ḳānūn through the juristic framework of siyāsa sharʿiyya and avoided
making direct references to specific Ottoman institutions. Possibly, it was also
his desire to “play safe” and avoid unneeded controversy that led him to bypass
Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya while making his arguments. Interestingly,
a second Ottoman Rumi writer to take an interest in the siyāsa sharʿiyya liter-
ature slightly later in the same century would opt for a very different strategy,
translating Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya into Turkish and adding exten-
sive (and critical) commentary about the contemporary Ottoman context.

4 ʿĀşıḳ Çelebi and His Miʿrācü’l-Eyāle ve Minhācü’l-ʿAdāle

Es-Seyyid Pīr Meḥmed b. Seyyid ʿAlī, better known as ʿĀşıḳ Çelebi, represents a
rather different social and intellectual profile from his older colleague, Cöngī.
To begin with, ʿĀşıḳ was a Rumelian, born in Prizren (in present-day Kosovo)
to a distinguished ulema and seyyid family with distant Baghdadi roots, and
received his education from the leading scholars of Istanbul. Partly because
he made his career in a time of increasing congestion in the Ottoman learned
establishment and partly because of his own circumstances, however, ʿĀşıḳ had
a rather undistinguished career, having to work for many years as a court clerk,
a trustee for pious endowments, and a secretary to the şeyhü’l-islām before
eventually settling for an equally frustrating career as a small-town kadi. As
ʿĀşıḳ makes clear in the Miʿrācü’l-eyāle, he took greater pride in his accom-
plishments as a belle-lettrist, “a poet and a prose-stylist,” than as a kadi.58 In
keeping with his penname ʿĀşıḳ (meaning, literally, lover), his literary oeuvres
included a Dīvān, a şehrengīz (“city thriller”), devoted to the beautiful young
men of Bursa, and several biographical dictionaries, the most famous of which
is his Meşāʿirü’ş-şuʿarā, a lively tribute to the empire’s poetic scene as well as to
its urban culture of predominantly male lovers and beloveds. He also translated
into Turkish a number of religious, political, and literary works from Arabic and
Persian.59

58 Âşık Çelebi, Mi‘râcü’l-eyâle 55–56.

59 In addition to Ibn Taymiyya’s siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, ʿĀşıḳ Çelebi translated into Turkish the
Arabic version of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazalī’s (d. 505/1111) al-Tibr al-masbūk fī naṣīḥat al-
mulūk and Muḥyī’d-dīn Haṭībzāde’s (d. 940/1534) Rawḍ al-akhyār, which was an abridged
compilation of those chapters of Zamakhsharī’s (d. 538/1144) Rabīʿ l-abrār that deal with
rulership. Probably ʿĀşıḳ chose to translate these works because of their popularity with
Ottoman readers.
120 terzı̇o ğlu

There is no indication that ʿĀşıḳ ever read Cöngī’s epistle, so it is impossible

to say whether it was that work that first piqued his interest in the siyāsa al-
sharʿiyya literature. Unlike Cöngī, ʿĀşıḳ had not spent time in the former Mam-
luk lands, but he had studied with at least one traditionalist scholar from Egypt,
and it has been speculated that he might have gained familiarity with the works
of Ibn Taymiyya through him.60 In the preface to his translation, ʿĀşıḳ describes
al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya as a “book that is small in volume but great in benefit,”
and he explains that he decided to translate it to fulfill the Quranic injunction
to “command the right and forbid the wrong” and to petition for a more desir-
able post for himself. ʿĀşıḳ was writing in 977/1569–1570, one year after he had
been dismissed from his office as kadi of Karatova (Kratovo, today in the Repub-
lic of North Macedonia), and he was clearly very disillusioned with his career
in the Ottoman judiciary. He expresses hope that if Selīm II (r. 974–982/1566–
1574) is pleased with his translation, he may free him from all administrative
duties to devote his time entirely to the composition of literary works, but ʿĀşıḳ
was also willing to be examined with the prospect of employment at either the
land registry or in the department for the inspection of tax farms.61 Perhaps
because he was not sure of a favorable reception by Selīm II, ʿĀşıḳ also addresses
the grand vizier Soḳollu Meḥmed Pasha in the conclusion to his translation.62
Soḳollu, to whom ʿĀşıḳ had also devoted other works, was the most powerful
Ottoman statesman at the time, as well as an active patron of literature and
the arts, and a pious Muslim, whose brand of Sunni religiosity combined a high
respect for the sharia with devotion to sharia-abiding Sufism. Soḳollu and his
royal wife İsmihān Sultan (d. 993/1585) were ardent admirers and patrons of the
Rumelian Halveti master, Muṣliḥu’d-dīn Nūre’d-dīnzāde (d. 981/1574), who was
(as discussed in Grigor Boykov’s paper in this volume) a vocal advocate of the
state-sponsored version of Sunni Islam.63 Around the years ʿĀşıḳ translated al-
Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, Soḳollu had also invited to Istanbul Birgivī Meḥmed Efendi,
whose works would later inspire the Kadızadelis, to solicit his words of advice

60 His teacher, ʿAbd al-Raḥīm al-ʿAbbāsī (d. 963/1556), of the ʿAbbasid family, was a hadith
scholar who had come to Istanbul from Cairo following the Ottoman conquest. He was,
by lineage, a Hanbali, but had switched over to the Shafi‘i school at a later point in his
life. On this scholar, see Öznurhan, Abbâsî, Abdürrrahîm 5–6 and Pfeifer’s essay in this
volume; for the argument that ʿAbbāsī may have been the conduit by which both Çivizāde
and ʿĀşıḳ discovered Ibn Taymiyya, see Gel, XVI. Yüzyılın 182.
61 Âşık Çelebi, Mi‘râcü’l-eyâle 56–57; for the date of composition, see ibid. 203–204.
62 Ibid. 232. For another work ʿĀşıḳ presented to Soḳollu, see ʿĀşıḳ Çelebi, Dhayl. For another
eulogistic mention of the grand vizier, see Âşık Çelebi, Meşâʿirü’ş-şuʿarâ iii, 1179.
63 On Soḳollu and İsmihān’s patronage of Nūre’d-dīnzāde, see Necipoğlu, The age 345–368
and Yürekli, A building 159–185.
ibn taymiyya, al-siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, and the ottomans 121

about “how to eliminate injustices” (defʿ-i meẓālim) in the Ottoman realms.64

Given Soḳollu’s interest in a range of sharia-minded interlocutors, it is not sur-
prising that ʿĀşıḳ Çelebi thought the grand vizier might also be interested in his
translation of Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya.
The text that ʿĀşıḳ presented to Selīm and Soḳollu for approval, however,
was more than a simple translation. In the early modern Ottoman world of
letters, translators played a role more akin to that of an author, replacing the
original preface, and often also the original title of the work, with one of their
own, and depending on their target audience, their own intentions, and the
conventions of the genre, they could translate the source text in markedly dif-
ferent ways.65 ʿĀşıḳ claims that he translated Ibn Taymiyya’s epistle “word for
word” (bi-ʿibâretihi) and without embellishing it with verses or rhymed prose.66
In fact, his was not a literal translation but rather a transadaptation, which
enriched the content with additional material. The sections added by ʿĀşıḳ,
including his introduction and conclusion, as well as the excursuses on kadis
and kadiship, the land regime, fiscal practices, and the art of warfare, are almost
as long as the original text, and significantly alter the overall impression of the
work.
The introduction is revealing of both similarities and differences between
the author and the “translator” in religious and political outlook. Even though
ʿĀşıḳ was, in his personal life and cultural sensibility, quite different from the
stringent Hanbali scholar, he agreed with Ibn Taymiyya that the proper func-
tioning of society required religion and law, the upholding of which in turn
required a strong state. To drive home this point, Ibn Taymiyya had begun his
treatise with the famous “authority verse,” “O you who believe, obey God and
the Messenger, if you believe in God, and those in authority among you” (Q 4:
58–59), and ʿĀşıḳ also incorporates this section into his own introduction. For
both men, figures of authority comprised both the military ruling elites and
scholars, even though in the introduction to his transadaptation ʿĀşık puts the
stress more squarely on rulers as the deputies of the prophets in the post-
prophetic age.67
Differently from Ibn Taymiyya, ʿĀşıḳ tailored his discourse to a distinctly
royal audience and devoted a good chunk of his introduction to the eulogy of
the Ottoman rulers. After praising God, the Prophet, the four “rightly guided”

64 Atâyî, Hadâik i, 633.

65 Hagen, Translations 95–134.
66 Âşık Çelebi, Mi‘râcü’l-eyâle 57.
67 Ibn Taymiyya, al-Siyāsa 18–19, 161/Ibn Taimiyya 12–13, 183; cf. Âşık Çelebi, Mi‘râcü’l-eyâle
40–41, 183.
122 terzı̇o ğlu

caliphs, and the Companions, he provides a brief account of human history

from Creation until the time of the Ottomans with the aim to highlight the
unique place of the latter within world and Islamic history. Therein the various
Muslim dynasties are listed without any distinction being made between those
that claimed the universal caliphate, such as the Umayyads and the ‘Abbasids,
and those that were mere regional emirates or sultanates, like the Ghaznavids,
Buyids, or Seljuks. The Buyids, who were Shi‘ites, are listed among the Muslim
rulers who occupied themselves with matters of “justice and sharia,” whereas
“Chinggis from among the infidels (kefereden) and Timur from among the
oppressors (zalemeden)” are mentioned separately as rulers who were sent by
God to punish the wrongdoers, but on account of whom many innocents also
suffered.68 The Ottomans are introduced as having inherited “the office of the
caliphate and the protection of the seal of prophecy” (emr-i hilâfet ve hıfz-ı
hatm-i nübüvvet).69 ʿĀşıḳ was evoking here a Sufi-inflected definition of the
caliphate and casting the Ottoman rulers as “caliphs of God,” who, like the first
four caliphs, took their authority directly from God and who united in their per-
son spiritual and temporal power.70 In clear contrast to Ibn Taymiyya, albeit
in good company among his Ottoman contemporaries, ʿĀşıḳ even attributes
quasi-mystical qualities to the Ottoman rulers. The recently deceased Süley-
mān I is eulogized as a ruler who had “won with his sword not just the sultanate
of this world but also the sultanate of the other world and in whose sainthood
(vilâyet) and ability to perform marvels (kerâmet) the people have great faith.”71
Esoteric themes also predominate in ʿĀşıḳ’s eulogy for Selīm II. Possibly in order
to assuage popular misgivings about Selīm, who had acceded to the throne after
his father had controversially ordered the execution of two of his brothers, ʿĀşıḳ
writes for several folios about the esoteric properties of the name “Selīm” and
(wrongly) prophesies that the latter would remain on the throne for 40 years.72
The emphasis on the Ottoman dynastic pedigree in ʿĀşıḳ’s text also stands
in contrast with the inconsequential place of the dynastic principle in Ibn
Taymiyya’s original epistle as well as in Mamluk political culture at large.73
Actually, genealogy was not one of the strong points of the Ottomans in their

68 Âşık Çelebi, Mi‘râcü’l-eyâle 41.

69 Ibid. 42.
70 On the importance of Sufi themes in tenth/sixteenth-century Ottoman political thought
and culture, see Yılmaz, Caliphate.
71 Âşık Çelebi, Mi‘râcü’l-eyâle 46.
72 Ibid. 46–55.
73 On the limited role of dynasticism under the Mamluks, see Ayalon, Mamlūk military aris-
tocracy 205–210; Holt, The position; Levanoni, The Mamluk conception; Richards, Mam-
luk amirs 36–37; Yosef, Mamluks and their relatives.
ibn taymiyya, al-siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, and the ottomans 123

claims to preeminence in the Islamic world, either. Notwithstanding, ʿĀşıḳ

asserts categorically, if vaguely, that the Ottomans come from a line of prophets
and do not have any fire-worshippers among their ancestors, whereas all the
other “sultans of the past” were either Chinggisids or Circassians (a refer-
ence to the Mamluks), and even the best of them were at the end of the day
descendants of Chosroes (Nûşînrevan), who was a follower of Zoroaster and
a fire-worshiper.74 The underlying message was that the Ottomans are and
have always been better, purer Muslims than other dynasties. Even though the
Safavids are not directly referenced, given their rule over Iran, and given Iran’s
history as the original homeland of Zoroastrianism, ʿĀşıḳ’s division of royal
houses into those that descended from the monotheistic prophets and those
that descended from the followers of Zoroaster and fire-worshippers must have
been colored, to a large degree, by the ongoing Ottoman-Safavid rivalry.
Otherwise, however, ʿĀşıḳ does not stress the Ottoman claim to be cham-
pions of Sunni Islam in his eulogy, or at least not as much as did some other
contemporaries.75 In fact, he downplays the importance of religious motiva-
tions when extolling the Ottoman military victories in general. This is interest-
ing, because the long-standing Ottoman claim to be gāzīs, waging war in the
name of Islam, would have fit well into a Taymiyyan framework, in which jihad
is one of the primary duties of a Muslim ruler.76 Instead, ʿĀşıḳ builds his nar-
rative around the Ottoman quest for world dominion. This ideal arguably had
its heyday somewhat earlier, in the first three to four decades of the tenth/six-
teenth century, when the Ottomans were expanding rapidly, and is thought
to have died a slow death thereafter.77 Nevertheless, when ʿĀşıḳ was writing,
the Ottomans were still actively trying to extend their influence over distant
territories by using the instruments of diplomacy and trade, and Soḳollu was

74 Âşık Çelebi, Mi‘râcü’l-eyâle 42. For broader perspectives on Ottoman royal genealogies in
the tenth/sixteenth century, see Flemming, Political genealogies.
75 For a slightly later Ottoman text that mentions the Ottoman sultans’ devotion to Sunni
Islam and the Hanafi madhhab as the first of the 20 qualities that made them superior to
other dynasties, see Taʿlīḳīzāde, Taʿlīḳī-zāde’s Şehnāme 116.
76 Gazā does, nevertheless, surface as a theme in the treatise of advice ʿĀşıḳ appended to
the very end of his supplements. This treatise, presented as a text that was written by
Aristotle for Alexander the Great, is a Turkish translation of an Arabic text with some ref-
erences to contemporary Ottoman practices. For the references to gazā, see Âşık Çelebi,
Mi‘râcü’l-eyâle 211, 213; for the complete treatise, see 211–231; for the original Arabic text
and another Turkish translation made in the reign of Meḥmed III (1003–1012/1595–1603),
see İhsanoğlu, Osmanlı askerlik literatürü ii, 686–687.
77 On the Ottoman aspirations for world conquest during the early part of the long reign of
Süleymān, see Fleischer, The Lawgiver; Necipoğlu, Süleyman the Magnificent; Turan, The
sultan’s favorite; Şahin, Empire, ch. 6.
124 terzı̇o ğlu

contemplating such ambitious projects as building a canal between the Don

and Volga Rivers and over the Suez to connect with the Muslim communities
that lived in the steppes north of the Black Sea and in the Indian Ocean.78 ʿĀşıḳ
stresses the continuing Ottoman claims to world dominion by hyperbolically
writing of the Ottoman arrows reaching as far east as Eastern Turkistan (Mâçîn)
and the Indus valley (Sind) and as far west as Rome. It is only at the end of a
long list of victories and conquests that he signals the Ottoman championship
of Islam with a reference to the (fancied) destruction of the “great church” in
Rome.79
ʿĀşıḳ’s eulogy of the Ottomans comes closer to the Taymiyyan line when he
praises the Ottomans for their devotion to justice and the sharia. Even here,
however, there is an important difference between the two writers. Whereas
Ibn Taymiyya categorically rejects the possibility of justice outside the bounds
of the sharia, ʿĀşıḳ does not. Rather, he uses Sufi metaphors, as he eulogizes
the Ottoman rulers for being the “meeting place of the two seas” (mecmaʿü’l-
bahreyn) and for uniting the “two lights” of justice and sharia. He also praises
them for having issued “well-respected kânuns like the resm-i Osmânî.”80 All
this indicates that, like the Arab jurists of the tenth/sixteenth century, ʿĀşıḳ saw
the Ottoman ḳānūn as representing a form of justice beyond the sharia, but he
differed from them in that he saw this in a positive light.
As we read the later sections of the text, however, it becomes apparent that
ʿĀşıḳ did not actually consider the Ottoman administrative and legal system of
his time either as just or as sharʿī as he makes them out to be in his introduc-
tion. This critical streak becomes apparent already in ʿĀşıḳ’s translation of the
first chapter of Ibn Taymiyya regarding the appointment of the right people
to public offices. After a fairly conventional discussion of what Hanafi jurists
have said about the permissibility of serving as kadi,81 ʿĀşıḳ provides a sharply
critical account of the Ottoman judiciary of his time. According to him, some
of the kadis of his time lacked the requisite “knowledge and understanding” to
perform their duties properly, while some others were learned, but did not act
in accordance with their learning, disregarded what their “reason and religion”
dictated in return for monetary gain, and justified their unlawful decisions by
saying that this is what “the grandees” (ekâbir) demand. Though a kadi himself,
ʿĀşıḳ mocks the false pretensions of corrupt kadis to piety with almost anti-
clerical overtones. He describes how kadis give themselves airs with their long

78 Casale, The Ottoman age, ch. 5.

79 Âşık Çelebi, Mi‘râcü’l-eyâle 44.
80 Ibid. 42.
81 Ibid. 69–79.
ibn taymiyya, al-siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, and the ottomans 125

gowns and unkempt beards in supposed imitation of the Prophet (who, ʿĀşıḳ
assures us, looked nothing like them) and how they use this aura of respectabil-
ity to have their way with male and female beloveds. In keeping with his çelebi
sensibility, ʿĀşıḳ ends this discussion on a humorous note with a couplet about
how he would like the same treatment but is always passed over because he has
a sparse beard.82
Perhaps because he was hoping to be given a job in the fiscal bureaucracy
and wanted to prove his competency, ʿĀşıḳ makes the most extensive interpo-
lations on the subject of the public treasury (beytü’l-mâl). These interpolations,
which are mostly in the “supplements” (ilhâkât), can be seen as serving two dif-
ferent, and to some degree even contradictory, purposes. On the one hand, a
principal concern of ʿĀşıḳ seems to have been to demonstrate the sharʿī basis
of the Ottoman system of land tenure and taxation, and he does so by repro-
ducing the fatwas issued on the topic by Ebū’s-suʿūd. As the latter’s one-time
student and secretary, ʿĀşıḳ is profuse in his words of praise for Ebū’s-suʿūd and
hails the latter as “the imam of our time, the chief mufti of the ulama and the
general public (âmme), the seal of the müctehids and remnant of the righteous
selef.”83 On the other hand, ʿĀşıḳ also includes in his text three documents that
he takes to be from the earliest days of Islam and that inform the critique he
provides of the actual working of the Ottoman fiscal system further down in the
text.84 In addition, ʿĀşıḳ draws on his professional experience as a midranking

82 Ibid. 84–88.
83 Ibid. 198–201.
84 Ibid. 192–198. The documents in question are 1) an “ahidnâme” sent by the Prophet
Muḥammad to the generality of Christians, 2) an “ahidnâme” sent by the Christians of
Damascus and Aleppo to ʿUmar b. al-Haṭṭāb (d. 23/644), and 3) a letter sent by the Prophet
Muḥammad to Bahraan of Yemen. The first of these documents is actually identical to
the charter that had been preserved by the monks of St. Catherine in Mt. Sinai and
which would be used by them multiple times to defend their foundations against state
encroachment. Since in the charter in question Muḥammad promises to Christians that
Muslims would not interfere with the appointments of church officials, destroy or confis-
cate church properties, or use them to build mosques, this document relates directly to
ʿĀşıḳ’s critique of the Ottoman confiscation of Christian endowments, discussed below.
For differing perspectives on the “charter” and its authenticity, see Moritz, Beiträge; Atiya,
The Arabic manuscripts; Morrow, The covenants. For other contemporary Ottoman doc-
uments that cite the “charter,” see Acun, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda and Ferīdūn Bey,
Münşeʾātü’s-selāṭīn, SK, MS Ragıp Paşa 1521, 20b–21a. The second document included by
ʿĀşıḳ is a version of the so-called “pact of ʿUmar.” On the complex history of this docu-
ment and its multiple versions, see Cohen, What was the Pact of ʿUmar? As for the third
document, ʿĀşıḳ says he took it from Abū Yūsuf’s (d. 182/798) Kitāb al-kharāj, a text that
would become progressively more important for the way the Ottomans understood their
land regime in the eleventh/seventeenth century.
126 terzı̇o ğlu

kadi in the Balkans both to explain the particularities of the complex system
of land tenure in that region and to critique a wide variety of “abuses” he wit-
nessed during his tenure in Rumeli.85 While some of these “abuses” must have
been the result of officials taking advantage of a monetizing economy to enrich
themselves at the expense of the re‘āyā, as ʿĀşıḳ suggests, others were clearly
connected to the central administration’s attempt to alleviate fiscal tensions in
a time of rising expenses. A recurring theme in ‘Āşıḳ’s criticisms is the overtax-
ation of the subject population. In this, the şeyhü’l-islām Ebū’s-suʿūd himself
was complicit, having ruled all arable lands in the Ottoman Empire to be “royal
demesne” (arâziyü’l-memleke) and having legitimated on that basis the impo-
sition of “tithing rates higher than the customary 10 %.”86 Evidently, however,
ʿĀşıḳ did not find it in himself to challenge these rulings and instead puts the
blame squarely on the tax collectors for abusing their privileges. By dispossess-
ing the reʿāyā of their baştinas and by overtaxing the Christian peasants until
they are forced to flee, avaricious officials are both violating sharʿī norms and
causing damage to the public treasury, he argues.87
Another practice that ʿĀşıḳ blames on greedy officials is the sale of prop-
erties belonging to Christian ecclesiastical foundations (kilise evkāfı). Even
though ʿĀşıḳ accuses the superintendents (nâzır) who sold such waqf s of pro-
ceeding without proper authorization, actually, the practices that he criticized
were also the result of state action.88 In 1568, shortly before ʿĀşıḳ penned his
transadaptation, the Ottoman government, citing a number of fatwas by Ebū’s-
suʿūd, had declared all Christian waqf s to be null and void. Subsequently, how-
ever, after some hard negotiation with the monastic authorities, and again with
Ebū’s-suʿūd’s help, the government had softened its position. Christian waqf s
would once again be allowed to function, but under the legal fiction that they
were benefiting Christian communities rather than Christian places of wor-
ship (which the şeyhü’l-islām had earlier ruled to be impermissible). Following
this revised formula, churches and monasteries would also be permitted to
“buy back” their properties, albeit at considerable cost to these foundations.89
Around the time ʿĀşıḳ was writing (977/1569–1570), the imperial authorities
had already revised their stance, but in various parts of the empire the complex

85 Âşık Çelebi, Mi‘râcü’l-eyâle 201–211.

86 Imber, Ebu’s-suʿud 124–125; Greene, The Edinburgh 68.
87 Âşık Çelebi, Mi‘râcü’l-eyâle 202–204.
88 Ibid. 206.
89 On the “crisis of the monasteries,” see Fotić, The official; Alexander, The Lord giveth; Ker-
meli, Ebū’s-suʿūd’s; Kermeli, Central administration; Kolovos, Christian vakıf s. For the
fatwas issued on this issue, see Ebū’s-suʿūd, Şeyhülislâm 163–164, 168–169.
ibn taymiyya, al-siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, and the ottomans 127

processes of confiscation and resale were still dragging on.90 It was probably
this fluctuating state of affairs that enabled ʿĀşıḳ to present the sale of Christian
waqf s as an “abuse” by individual officials rather than as concerted state action.
Even though ʿĀşıḳ would not necessarily have known of this, Ibn Taymiyya
had also played a role similar to Ebū’s-suʿūd in the confiscation of Christian
monastic foundations in the Mamluk sultanate two and a half centuries ear-
lier.91 Hence, there is a delicious irony in the fact that ʿĀşıḳ presents his criticism
of the sale of church waqf s in a translation of a work of Ibn Taymiyya’s as well
as after praising Ebū’s-suʿūd. ʿĀşıḳ’s remarks on the sale of church waqf s are,
nevertheless, important as a rare piece of evidence of the critique of this affair
by a Muslim.
In comparison to the matter of the public treasury, ʿĀşıḳ did not have much
to add to Ibn Taymiyya’s discussion of penal law. He does, however, make a few
omissions in the original text, presumably out of consideration for the sen-
sibility of his high-placed readers. One of the omitted passages concerns the
question of whether the murder of a sovereign ruler should be considered a
crime against “the rights of God,” that is to say, a public crime whose punish-
ment is incumbent on the political authorities. Even though ʿĀşıḳ was writing
half a century before the first instance of regicide in the Ottoman lands, he
must have found the topic too distasteful to include in a text submitted to
the Ottoman sultan.92 A second omitted paragraph deals with the question,
“If one Muslim ruler enters the territory of another, and kills that land’s people,
is it incumbent on that country’s people to resist or should they submit?” As
the question exposed the power grab behind conflicts between rival Muslim
sovereigns, even the otherwise outspoken Ibn Taymiyya had found it prudent
not to venture an answer and simply noted that Hanbali jurists have differed
on the matter. The Hanbali reference would, of course, have been irrelevant to
ʿĀşıḳ’s overwhelmingly Hanafi audience, but more consequential was the pos-
sibility of legitimate resistance to an invading Muslim power that the question
raised. Since the Ottomans had repeatedly been in the position of the invading
power in their recent history, the question was not one they would have wished
to entertain, hence the omission by ʿĀşıḳ.93

90 Kermeli, Central administration.

91 Sariyannis, A history 104–105; on Ibn Taymiyya’s fatwa on church waqf s, see Welle, The
status.
92 This omission was first pointed out by Köksal, Fıkıh ve siyaset 171; for the original text, see
Ibn Taymiyya, al-Siyāsa 90/Ibn Taimiyya 98.
93 This omission was first pointed out by Köksal, Fıkıh ve siyaset 171; Ibn Taymiyya, al-Siyāsa
93/ Ibn Taimiyya 102.
128 terzı̇o ğlu

A third omission of ʿĀşıḳ’s is seemingly minor but nevertheless illustrative

of the difference of outlook between him and Ibn Taymiyya. Ibn Taymiyya
begins the section on the punishment of wine-drinking with a hadith, which
has the Prophet say that if someone is caught drinking wine once, twice, or
three times, he should be flogged, but if he is caught drinking a fourth time,
then he should be killed. In his commentary on the hadith, Ibn Taymiyya says
that most scholars consider the Prophet’s reference to the execution of the
habitual wine-drinker to be “abrogated” (mansūkh), some other scholars con-
sider the punishment to be still valid, and yet others hold it to be a discretionary
punishment to be decided upon by the ruler (taʿẕīr). ʿĀşıḳ translates the passage
as is, except he omits the opinion of those scholars who held the punishment
of execution to be still valid. Presumably he considered this opinion to be too
extreme.94 Otherwise, however, ʿĀşıḳ translates Ibn Taymiyya’s harsh prescrip-
tions for the punishment of wine-drinkers, adulterers, and “sodomites” without
any mitigating commentary, despite the fact that he himself was an aficionado
of wine parties and beautiful youths and makes no secret of it in his literary
writings and, to some degree, even in this transadaptation.95 His reticence in
this regard is of course not surprising, since it was a far more serious crime to
question sharʿī regulations than to break them. What is perhaps more inter-
esting is that ʿĀşıḳ also translates faithfully Ibn Taymiyya’s strongly worded
condemnation of the conversion of ḥadd punishments into monetary fines,
even though this was a common practice in the Ottoman lands. In fact, where
Ibn Taymiyya likens the people who collect fines for ḥadd offenses to whores,
pimps, and fortunetellers, the Ottoman writer not only translates these insults
as they are but also volunteers both the Turkish and Arabic words for “pimp.”96
It would seem that ʿĀşıḳ translated these sections approvingly, because they
meshed well with his own dislike of the pecuniary concerns of the Ottoman
officials of his time.
There is finally one passage in which ʿĀşıḳ indicates, in a fascinating aside,
that the Hanbali scholar was not always harsher than the Ottoman learned
establishment on questions of penal law. The passage in question concerns the
punishment of the perpetrators of religious innovation (bidʿa). In the original
passage, Ibn Taymiyya first cites the opinions of Shāfiʿi, Aḥmad, and Mālik, that
“the initiator of innovations which are contrary to (the precepts in) the Book
and the Sunna be put to death”; he then adds that “Mālik and some other jurists

94 This omission was first pointed out by Furat, Selefiliğin 221; compare Ibn Taymiyya, al-
Siyāsa 109–110/Ibn Taimiyya 120 and Âşık Çelebi, Mi‘râcü’l-eyâle 145–146.
95 Âşık Çelebi, Mi‘râcü’l-eyâle 144–149.
96 Ibid. 125–126; cf. Ibn Taymiyya, al-Siyāsa 76–80/Ibn Taimiyya 79–82.
ibn taymiyya, al-siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, and the ottomans 129

allowed that the Qadariyya be put to death, for fear that mischief might spread
in the land and not because they are apostates.” After translating this passage,
ʿĀşıḳ comments, “It is the same with the Kharijites and Revâfız (a derogatory
term for Shi‘ites); [their persecution] is not on account of their apostasy (riddet-
lerinden) but because they might perpetrate mischief, but it is understood from
the fatwa issued by the current mufti of the believers, the imam of the Mus-
lims, the chief mufti, the prop of the religion of the Prophet … the remainder
of the müctehids … Ebū’s-suʿūd, which rules it permissible to enslave the Kızıl-
baş women, that the latter are murdered on account of their apostasy.”97 With
this interjection, ʿĀşıḳ not only confirms that in the tenth/sixteenth century
some members of the Ottoman learned establishment considered the Kızıl-
baş to constitute a different category of “heretics” than Shi‘ites,98 but also that
the official Ottoman position on the Kızılbaş was even harsher than that taken
by Ibn Taymiyya on other “misbelievers.” The latter point is striking, because
the Hanafi school, to which the Ottomans belonged, had previously been the
most lenient of the Sunni legal schools when it came to the persecution of
heretics and misbelievers. As such, ʿĀşıḳ’s commentary reveals how much the
Hanafi position on the matter had hardened by his time, due in part to the
polarizing effect of the Ottoman-Safavid conflict and in part to the fact that in
the Ottoman lands Hanafism had become a veritable “state madhhab.”99 Even
though ʿĀşıḳ himself was not particularly confessionally minded,100 as a mem-
ber of the Ottoman learned establishment he could hardly avoid the obligatory
anti-Kızılbaş rhetoric of his time. In fact, the reference to Ebū’s-suʿūd’s fatwa is
not the only instance in which ʿĀşıḳ bows down to anti-Kızılbaş rhetoric in this
text. In his “supplements,” he also includes a letter purported to have been writ-
ten by ʿAlī b. Abū Ṭālib, in which the latter praises the second “rightly guided”
caliph, ʿUmar, to critique the “Kızılbaş,” who accept ʿAlī to be their imam but
who reject ʿUmar as caliph.101

97 Âşık Çelebi, Mi‘râcü’l-eyâle 150–151; cf. Ibn Taymiyya, al-Siyāsa 119/Ibn Taimiyya 130–131.
For a foray into the genealogy of the notion of “perpetrators of mischief in the land” (sāʿī
bi-l-fasād fī l-ʿarż), see Aykan, A legal concept.
98 Ebū’s-suʿūd actually states this explicitly in one of his fatwas; see Ebū’s-suʿūd, Şeyhülis-
lâm 174–175. Other jurists in other contexts, however, made the Shi‘ite-Kızılbaş distinction
differently, as did the political authorities; see Winter, The Shiites 12–20; cf. Imber, The per-
secution 245.
99 Burak, The second formation.
100 Cases in point would be his views on the Buyids, discussed above, and his views on anti-
nomian dervish poets, discussed in Anetshofer, Meşâ’irü’ş-Şu’arâ.
101 Âşık Çelebi, Mi‘râcü’l-eyâle 208.
130 terzı̇o ğlu

Clearly, ʿĀşıḳ’s Miʿrācü’l-eyāle was less a programmatic endorsement of Ibn

Taymiyya’s vision of siyāsa al-sharʿiyya than a somewhat idiosyncratic engage-
ment with it in the early modern Ottoman context. Ultimately, ʿĀşıḳ’s “consti-
tutional” views (his endorsement of a realm of justice beyond the sharia, and
his more mystical conception of royal authority) were more “Ottoman” than
“Taymiyyan”; it was more in his critique of specific Ottoman practices that ʿĀşıḳ
turned “Taymiyyan.” Both of these strains of ʿĀşıḳ’s thought had something to
do with the shifting social, political, and cultural currents in the late tenth/six-
teenth century. For ʿĀşıḳ was, on the one hand, a vivacious chronicler of an “age
of beloveds,” in which the elites of an expanding Ottoman Empire embraced
the ideals of world conquest, charismatic authority, and spiritualized love, and
could transition seemingly effortlessly between the prescriptive language of
religious law and the ambiguous idiom of Neoplatonic Sufism.102 On the other
hand, this age was already slowly withering when ʿĀşıḳ was writing, and in the
new age of “crisis and transformation,” of diminishing opportunities and rising
competition, and we might add, of deepening rifts in approaches to religion
and piety, the Ottoman elites would also feel the need for a new approach to
law and governance.

5 Afterlives of the Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Siyāsa Sharʿiyya Texts

during the Seventeenth Century

A full discussion of the Ottoman engagement with the siyāsa sharʿiyya corpus
after the tenth/sixteenth century exceeds the scope of this paper. In what fol-
lows below, I will instead wrap up the previous discussion by considering the
afterlives of ʿĀşıḳ’s Miʿrācü’l-eyāle and Cöngī’s Risāla fī l-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya in
the core lands of the Ottoman Empire during the eleventh/seventeenth and
early twelfth/eighteenth centuries. This discussion is necessary, because cer-
tain changes in the social and political dynamics ended up making the siyāsa
sharʿiyya literature more relevant to the Ottomans in this period. But there is
also another reason for extending the discussion into the eleventh/seventeenth
century, and this is the need to speak to a line of scholarship that has persis-
tently argued for the emergence of a distinctive “school of Ibn Taymiyya” in
the Ottoman lands during this period. According to this scholarship, the pri-
mary carriers of Taymiyyan ideas in the Ottoman lands were the Kadızadelis,
who were a group of Sunni revivalist preachers, and their followers, who were

102 Andrews and Kalpaklı, The age of beloveds 307, 351–352.

ibn taymiyya, al-siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, and the ottomans 131

active in and around Istanbul from the early 1040s/1630s until at least the
1100s/1690s, and who wanted to restore to Ottoman Islam the purity of Islam
of the age of the Prophet and his Companions.103 As we shall see, neverthe-
less, the literature actually overestimates both the importance of Taymiyyan
ideas for the Kadızadelis and the importance of the Kadızadelis for the spread
of Taymiyyan ideas in the core Ottoman lands during the eleventh/seventeenth
century. Far more important agents in this regard were people higher up in
the imperial administration, who found in the siyāsa sharʿiyya literature possi-
bly some inspiration for, and definitely justification of, the changes they began
to introduce into the Ottoman state tradition during the second half of the
eleventh/seventeenth century.
The dynamics, nevertheless, were somewhat different in the early decades
of the eleventh/seventeenth century, when crisis seemed the order of the day,
and when literate men of different walks of life, from military administrators
to kadis and from members of the scribal service to preachers, were compet-
ing with one another to advise the rulers about how to get out of this crisis.
It was also in this context that the preacher and namesake of the Kadızadeli
movement, Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed (d. 1045/1635), hit upon ʿĀşıḳ’s transadapta-
tion of Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya and, after lightly reworking its
introduction, submitted it as his own work to Murād IV (r. 1032–1049/1623–
40).104
The son of a kadi, and the grandson of a devşirme, Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed had
received his early education from a student of the famous tenth/sixteenth-
century scholar Birgivī Meḥmed Efendi in Balıkesir but then continued his
studies with various other scholars in Istanbul and Cairo. Ḳāḍīzāde first took
up preaching during his brief stint as a disciple of the Halveti Shaykh ʿÖmer
of the Tercüman lodge and persisted in that vocation, also after switching his
tariqa affiliation from the Halveti to the Naqshbandi order.105 His position as

103 See footnote 4. For broader perspectives on the Kadızadelis, see Zilfi, The Kadızadelis
262–265; Zilfi, Politics of piety 146–159; Baer, Honored; Sariyannis, The Kadızadeli move-
ment; Terzioğlu, Sunna-minded; Tuşalp Atiyas, Sunna-minded trends; Tezcan, The por-
trait; Shafir, Moral revolutions.
104 For a detailed discussion of the relationship between the two texts, see Terzioğlu, Bir ter-
cüme 264–268. For the correction of the identity of Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed who claimed the
work (and several other works of political advice), see Tezcan, The portrait 215–229.
105 Ibid. 197–215, 241–244; for Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed’s Naqshbandi affiliation, see also his poem
recorded in SK, MS Yazma Bağışlar 5563, 47a. Until Tezcan’s article, the biography of
Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed was based largely on the information provided by Katib Çelebi, The
balance 132–136.
132 terzı̇o ğlu

preacher and “advice giver” also allowed Ḳāḍīzāde to cultivate contacts in the
Ottoman court. In one of his treatises of advice, the preacher claims that he first
wrote a treatise of advice for the grand vizier Ḳuyucu Murād Paşa (d. 1020/1611)
and Aḥmed I (r. 1012–1026/1603–17) and was gratified to see his text received
by both with great favor.106 Later, Ḳāḍīzāde also courted ʿOs̱mān II (r. 1027–
1031/1618–22) and submitted to him a tract on horses and horsemanship.107
Still, none of these engagements can compare to the persistence with which
Ḳāḍīzāde courted Murād IV, dedicating to him a versified prayer of good wishes
(duʿānāme) on the occasion of his accession to the throne, a versified creed,
an anti-Safavid/Kızılbaş tract, and at least five texts of political advice.108 One
of these five tracts of political advice was Tācü’r-resāʾil ve minhācü’l-vesāʾil, an
expanded translation of Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya.
Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed’s Tācü’r-resāʾil is of particular importance to the debate
about the influence of Ibn Taymiyya over the Kadızadelis, as it is the one
and only “Kadızadeli” text that we know so far that explicitly references Ibn
Taymiyya. The problem is, however, that as mentioned above, this was not actu-
ally Ḳāḍīzāde’s own translation but ʿĀşıḳ’s. It could be argued that Ḳāḍīzāde
must have held Ibn Taymiyya in high esteem to want to assume ownership of
a translation of the latter’s text, but it should also be remembered that the text
Ḳāḍīzāde appropriated was at least one-third ʿĀşıḳ’s and incorporated various
features that were at odds with the original Taymiyyan vision. There is no indi-
cation that Ḳāḍīzāde wanted to strip the text of these later additions; in fact, he
left all the “supplements” and digressions of ʿĀşıḳ intact, and he contented him-
self with merely changing parts of the introduction to cover up the fact that he
was claiming another person’s work. Interestingly, in the process, he ended up
omitting not only ʿĀşıḳ’s but also Ibn Taymiyya’s name, and instead presented
himself (“Shaykh Meḥmed b. Muṣṭafā known as Ḳāḍīzāde”) as the author of the
text.109 Patient readers could still find out that the text was in part a translation

106 Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed, Nuṣḥü’l-ḥükkām sebebü’n-niẓām 2b–3a.

107 Tezcan, The second Ottoman Empire 118–119.
108 Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed, Duʿānāme 114b–118b (written on the occasion of Murād’s accession to
the throne in 1032/1623); Naẓm fī ʿilmi’l-ʿaḳāʾid 4b–67a (composed in 1037/1627–1628); Naṣī-
ḥatnāme 119a–136a; Pādişāh-ı ʿālempenāh ḥażretlerine neṣāyiḥ-i kes̱īre 140a–145a; Naṣru’l-
aṣḥāb ve ḳahru’s-sebbāb 1a–48b; Nuṣḥü’l-ḥükkām sebebü’n-niẓām 2b–70a (composed in
1040/1630–1631); Mesmūʿatü’l-neḳāyih mecmūʿatü’n-neṣāyiḥ (composed in 1041/1631–1632);
Tācü’r-resāʾil ve minhācü’l-vesāʾil. For a critical edition of the Duʿānāme, see Deniz,
Kadızade; for a critical edition of Naẓm fī ʿilmi’l-ʿaḳāʾid, see Karaca, Kadızâde and Büyükke-
çeci, Kadızâde; for a modern Turkish publication of another version of the ḳaṣīde, see
Ürekli, Dördüncü Murad.
109 Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed, Tācü’r-resāʾil 12a.
ibn taymiyya, al-siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, and the ottomans 133

of Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya when they got to the part in which ʿĀşıḳ
announces the end of his translation of the said work and the beginning of the
“supplements.”110
Moreover, with a single exception, discussed below, the changes that Ḳāḍī-
zāde introduced to his version of the text were not any more indicative of a
hardcore Taymiyyan than ʿĀşıḳ’s transadaptation. For instance, while Ḳāḍīzāde
replaced ʿĀşıḳ’s eulogy of Süleymān and Selīm II with a eulogy of Murād IV,
the new eulogy also played on number mysticism and the esoteric proper-
ties of the sultan’s name, just like ʿĀşıḳ’s.111 More remarkable still, Ḳāḍīzāde
inserted into the text a “letter of invitation” to Islam by an Islamized Alexan-
der the Great. Evidently, Ḳāḍīzāde was not a stranger to the eclectic univer-
salism that had characterized the outlook of earlier generations of Ottoman
imperial elites.112 Lest we think that these are anomalies limited to this text,
it is worth pointing out that the other works Ḳāḍīzāde submitted to Murād IV
also exhibit a similar diversity of sources of inspiration, from Quranic verses
to Sufi poetry to excerpts from a Turkish rendition of the pseudo-Aristotelian
Kitāb Sirr al-asrār.113 It is only in the texts that he authored for ordinary Mus-
lims that Ḳāḍīzāde restricted himself to verses from the Quran and excerpts
from jurisprudential texts.114 It would seem that the socially bifurcated cul-
tural codes of early modern Ottoman polite society also held for this early
eleventh/seventeenth-century preacher: he spoke to the elites in one discur-
sive register and to the commoners in another.
In short, Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed was not quite the uncompromisingly “puritani-
cal,” “antisyncretistic,” and “anti-elitist” Muslim reformist that modern scholars
have imagined him to be; nor was he any more Taymiyyan in his disposition
than, say, ʿĀşıḳ had been. This having been said, he did insert into his revised

110 Ibid. 121a.

111 Ibid. 11a–b.
112 Ibid. 8a–b. Even though the Ottoman fascination with Alexander the Great has been said
to be more a phenomenon of the ninth/fifteenth and early tenth/sixteenth centuries,
there are also other eleventh/seventeenth-century Ottoman texts featuring Alexander
as an ideal ruler. For explorations of the Ottoman Alexander corpus, listed in the order
of their chronological focus, see Kastritsis, The Alexander romance; Beaudoen, Mirrors;
Krstić, Of translation 134–136; Şen, The dream; on the Ottoman versions of the book of
advice supposed to have been written by Aristotle for Alexander, see Yılmaz, Caliphate
63–64.
113 For excerpts from the pseudo-Aristotelian Kitāb Sırr al-asrār, see Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed,
Mesmūʿatü’l-neḳāyih 8b–12b.
114 See, for instance, Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed, Risāle-i Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed 94b–103a; Risāle-i Īmān
ve İslām 103b–107b; Risāle-i Ṣalāṭ 44b–47a. For an analysis of Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed’s religio-
legal writings aimed at a wider audience, see Tezcan, A canon of disenchantment.
134 terzı̇o ğlu

version of the transadaptation one passage that would be of interest to schol-

ars looking for Taymiyyan influences in the Kadizadeli milieu. The passage in
question discusses the different types of idolatry (şirk) and is taken from Ibn
Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s Ighāthat al-lahfān min maṣāʾid al-shayṭān (Rescuing the
distressed from the snares of the devil). Interestingly, Ḳāḍīzāde does not reveal
his source but simply says that he took the text from works of kelām. He does,
however, cite the same passage on idolatry in another work of political advice,
where he gives the correct title of the source but misattributes it to another
Hanbali scholar, Abū ’l-Faraj Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1201).115
The reference to Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s Ighāthat al-lahfān is noteworthy,
because this Hanbali writer was the most important student of Ibn Taymiyya
and because modern scholars who have been convinced of the Kadızadelis’
Taymiyyan convictions have rested their case in recent years mainly on the
fact that the Ottoman writers who were or who fit the profile of Kadızadelis
cited Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, and especially his Ighāthat al-lahfān.116 One of
these scholars, Sheikh, has further argued that the Kadızadelis were far more
immersed in the writings of Ibn Taymiyya than they let on, but that because
of the controversy surrounding the latter’s name, they preferred to give ref-
erence to his less controversial student, Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, instead.117
This view, however, is rather speculative and is open to critique on several
grounds. First, while Sheikh has identified in the works of two key thinkers
who inspired the Kadızadeli movement, Birgivī and Aḥmed Rūmī el-Aḳḥiṣārī
(d. ca. 1041/1632), two passages that seem to be taken from Ibn Taymiyya’s
Iqtidā l-ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm (The necessity of the straight path),118 this would
hardly suffice to identify these otherwise solidly Hanafi-Maturidi scholars as
crypto-Taymiyyans.119 Secondly, the supposition that Ibn Taymiyya was con-
sidered too controversial a name to be explicitly mentioned in the Rumi con-
text also needs to be qualified: it is true that some works and ideas of Ibn

115 Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed, Tācü’r-resāʾil 10a–11a; Mesmūʿatü’l-neḳāyih 110a–111b; Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥ-

med also praises the same work in a letter he wrote to the şeyhü’l-islām Hocazāde Meḥ-
med, see Tezcan, The portrait 207, 214.
116 Michot, Introduction; Sheikh, Ottoman puritanism; Sheikh, Taymiyyan influences;
Sheikh, Taymiyyan taṣawwuf.
117 Sheikh, Taymiyyan influences 17–19; Ottoman puritanism 128–131.
118 Sheikh, Taymiyyan influences 12–17; Ottoman puritanism 118–128.
119 For the relevant scholarship, see footnote 6. Other than the passages identified by Sheikh,
the arguments that Birgivī was a crypto-Taymiyyan have been based largely on the mis-
attribution to him of works that were authored by Aḳḥiṣārī; for the correction of these
misattributions and a discussion of their implications, see Kaylı, A critical study 52–81,
119–125, 137–139, 141–142.
ibn taymiyya, al-siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, and the ottomans 135

Taymiyya, such as his rejection of tomb visitations, were considered by some

(perhaps many) Ottoman scholars to be deeply objectionable, but some other
works and ideas were not, as evidenced by the translation(s) of his al-Siyāsa
al-sharʿiyya into Turkish.120 It could be argued that the Kadızadelis felt more
vulnerable than other more “mainstream” Ottoman scholars when citing Ibn
Taymiyya, because they, too, targeted such popular practices as tomb visita-
tions as bidʿats, but it has to be said that even in the highly polarized environ-
ment of eleventh/seventeenth-century Istanbul, where their critics referred to
the Kadızadelis regularly as “fanatics” (mutaʿaṣṣıbīn), “hypocrites” (mürāʾī), and
“deniers” (münkirīn), no one associated them with Ibn Taymiyya, except per-
haps indirectly in the context of the debates on tomb visitations and the con-
gregational performance of supererogatory prayers.121 Thirdly, Sheikh’s claim
that the Kadızadelis may have cited Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya as a safer choice
than his teacher is based on the assumption that the writings of the two men
were otherwise equally well known to eleventh/seventeenth-century Ottoman
scholars. This was not actually the case, however, since as Caterina Bori has
recently shown, even an unusually well-read bibliophile like Kātib Çelebi
(d. 1067/1657) was far more familiar with the contents of the works of Ibn
Qayyim al-Jawziyya than with those of Ibn Taymiyya.122
In short, even if the Kadızadelis were more familiar with Ibn Taymiyya
than they let on, the evidence at hand does not support the view that they
represented on the whole a “school of Ibn Taymiyya” or even a distinctively
“Taymiyyan” subcurrent of Hanafi-Maturidi Islam in the lands of Rum. Neither
is it possible to say that they played an especially significant role in spreading

120 It seems that Sheikh is not aware of the existence of either the Miʿrācü’l-eyāle or Tācü’r-
resāʾil, or for that matter, the Risāla fī l-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, for he lists the “theology of
liberation” that he finds in Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya among the factors that
would have made the Hanbali scholar an anathema among the Ottomans; see Sheikh,
Ottoman puritanism 129–130.
121 For references to Ibn Taymiyya in the context of the eleventh/seventeenth-century Otto-
man debate on tomb visitations, see ʿAbdü’l-mecīd Sivāsī, Dürer-i ʿaḳāʾid 81a–82a; Katib
Çelebi, The balance 93. Of these commentators, Sivāsī (d. 1049/1639) was a learned Hal-
veti shaykh, an ardent supporter of Ottoman Sunnism, and, in the last decade of his life,
a vocal adversary of Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed, while Kātib Çelebi stood equidistant to both
the Kadızadelis and their critics. Notwithstanding their differences, both of these writ-
ers agreed that Ibn Taymiyya had been an indisputably errant figure and had erred also in
taking a radical stance against tomb visitations. Both also discounted his views by noting
how he had been branded an unbeliever “by the generality of the ulema of Egypt” and died
in jail. It was in a very similar manner that the Celveti Sufi master İsmaʿīl Ḥaḳḳī Bursevī
(d. 1137/1725) brought up the name of Ibn Taymiyya to delegitimate the attack against the
Regāʾib and Berāt prayers in his own time. On this, see Cengiz, İsmail Hakkı Bursevî 135.
122 Bori, Ibn Taymiyya (14th to 17th century) 115–117; see also 112–115 for observations about
knowledge of Ibn Taymiyya in other parts of the Ottoman Empire in this period.
136 terzı̇o ğlu

the knowledge of Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya in the eleventh/seven-

teenth century. Today we know of only three manuscript copies of Ḳāḍīzāde
Meḥmed’s Tācü’r-resāʾil anywhere, as opposed to ten manuscript copies of
‘Āşıḳ’s Miʿrācü’l-eyāle in Turkey alone.123 It was also only the latter version
that was mentioned in Kātib Çelebi’s bibliographical compendium Kashf al-
ẓunūn.124 It is telling, too, that Tācü’r-resāʾil was not copied together with other,
more popular, works that were written by Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed for the benefit of
Muslims in general. It seems that both versions of the translation ultimately
catered to high-ranking members of the imperial administration than to either
a more exclusively scholarly or a more popular readership.
Much the same observations can be made about the circulation of the Ara-
bic originals of Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya in Istanbul in this period.
Currently, Istanbul’s manuscript libraries contain twelve manuscript copies
of the original Arabic epistle, roughly equal to the total number of copies of
both versions of the Turkish transadaptations in the same collections. Judg-
ing by the codicological evidence, most, if not all, of these copies of the Ara-
bic original had come into the possession of Istanbuli readers either in the
late eleventh/seventeenth or in the early twelfth/eighteenth centuries. In fact,
there may even have been something of a competition among the top-ranking
Ottoman grandees to obtain precious copies of this work in this period. The
şeyhü’l-islām Feyżullāh Efendi (d. 1115/1703), who was a former student and son-
in-law of the “third-generation Kadızadeli leader” and preacher Vānī Meḥmed
Efendi (d. 1096/1685), as well as one of the most well-read, most politically
active (and most controversial) scholars of his time, evidently cared enough
about the work to obtain an early and precious copy, one that had been copied
in 850/1446–1447 to be presented to a high-placed Mamluk official.125 The grand

123 Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed, Tācü’r-resāʾil, SK, MS Hacı Mahmud Efendi 1926; Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi
Kütüphanesi (hereafter TSMK), MS Hazine 371/1, 1a–48a; Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, MS
Diez A quart 46. This last copy bears a reader’s note dated 1047/1637–1638 (ia), indicating
that the work must have been copied before that date. The other copies are undated. Cf.
ʿĀşıḳ, Miʿrācü’l-eyāle TSMK, MS Revan 1610 (copied in 1005/1596–1597); SK, MS Reisülküt-
tab 1006 (copied in 1008/1600); Nuruosmaniye MS 2315 (copied in 1009/1600); SK, MS Esad
Efendi 1901 (copied in 1011/1602); SK, MS Esad Efendi 1803/1, 1b–94b (copied in 1054/1644);
TSMK, MS Hazine 1768/1, 1b–117a (copied in 1088/1677–1678); Milli Kütüphane, MS A. 8112;
SK, MS Şehid Ali Paşa 1556; SK, MS Çelebi Abdullah Efendi 51/2, 38b–217b; Yapı Kredi Ser-
met Çifter Araştırma Kütüphanesi, MS Türkçe Yazmalar 466/1.
124 Katib Çelebi, Keşf el-zünun ii, 1011.
125 For the copy, see Ibn Taymiyya, al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, Millet Kütüphanesi, MS Feyzullah
1290 (copied by ‘Alī b. Süleymān in 850/1446–1447); the text is also listed in Feyżu’llāh’s
endowment deed; Feyzullah Efendi Vakfiyesi, Millet Kütüphanesi, MS Feyzullah 2189, 223a;
on Feyżu’llāh, see Meservey, Feyzullah; Abou-el-haj, The 1703 rebellion; Nizri, Ottoman high
politics, esp. ch. 1.
ibn taymiyya, al-siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, and the ottomans 137

vizier Şehīd ʿAlī Paşa (d. 1128/1716), who was also a known bibliophile, but who
had nothing to do with the Kadızadelis and was in fact a Sufi sympathizer
and even reputed to be a Bayrami-Melami ḳuṭb, also owned three copies of
the work, one of which had been copied very early, in 780/1378–1379.126 It is
evident that the interest in the tract (and its earliest copies) continued at the
highest levels of the imperial hierarchy also in the twelfth/eighteenth century.
We find two other Mamluk-era copies of the work in the library of Aḥmed
III (r. 1115–1143/1703–30), dated 766/1363 and 797/1395, and four copies of the
work in the library established by Maḥmūd I (r. 1143–1168/1730–54); two of the
copies in Maḥmūd’s library also dated from the Mamluk era, from 744/1343
and 893/1488 specifically.127 The head of the scribal bureaucracy, Re’īsül-küttāb
Muṣṭafā Efendi (d. 1162/1749), too, owned a copy, which bears the endowment
date of 1154/1741–1742.128
Considering that all these individuals were known bibliophiles and founders
of waqf libraries, it is reasonable to think that their demand for precious copies
of al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya was fueled in part by their bibliophilia.129 But it cannot
have been just the antiquarian appeal of the Mamluk-era Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya
copies that recommended the text to the Ottoman readers. The latter must
also have been interested in the subject matter, siyāsa sharʿiyya. What suggests
this is the even greater popularity of Dede Cöngī’s Risāla fī l-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya
starting slightly earlier. In fact, this decidedly more recent epistle dwarfs Ibn
Taymiyya’s famous work in terms of its popularity with eleventh/seventeenth-
and twelfth/eighteenth-century readers in the Ottoman capital. My prelimi-

126 Ibn Taymiyya, al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, SK, MS Şehid Ali Paşa 1553/1, 1–76 (copied in 780/1378–
1379); SK, MS Şehid Ali Paşa 1544 (copied by Muṣliḥu’d-dīn Ebū’l-hayr Aḥmed in Istanbul in
Ẕī’l-ḥicce 1109/1698); SK MS Şehid Ali Paşa 1543 (previously owned by a certain Ḥüseyin in
1011/1602–1603). On the first of these manuscripts, see Bori, One or two versions; on Şehīd
ʿAlī Pasha, see Özcan, Şehid Ali Paşa; Gölpınarlı, Melâmîlik 165–166.
127 For manuscripts of Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya in the collection of Aḥmed III,
see TSMK, MS Ahmet III 1118 (copied in 797/1395) and TSMK, MS Ahmet III 117 (copied
in 766/1363), and Karatay, Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Kütüphanesi Arapça yazmalar ii, #4660,
#4661. For manuscripts of the same work in the collection of Maḥmūd I, see SK, MS Ayaso-
fya 2886/1 (copied in 893/ 1488); SK, MS Ayasofya 2887 (copied in 999/1591); SK, MS Ayasofya
2888; 2889 (copied in 744/1343).
128 Ibn Taymiyya, al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, SK, MS Reisülküttap 528. This seems to be a twelfth/
eighteenth-century manuscript. Other manuscript copies of the work preserved in Istan-
bul libraries are SK, MS Yahya Tevfik 270, which is undated but has an owner’s note dated
1186/1772–1773 and Bayezid, MS 1987, which was inaccessible at the time of research for
this paper.
129 Erünsal, Osmanlılarda kütüphaneler; Sezer, The architecture of bibliophilia.
138 terzı̇o ğlu

nary research in the database of the Süleymaniye library in Istanbul in the sum-
mer of 2019 has revealed over 60 manuscript copies of Cöngī’s text, as compared
to 12 manuscript copies of Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya.130 Of course,
Cöngī’s text did not just circulate in Istanbul but also in other intellectual and
administrative centers in the Ottoman lands, including the Arab provinces, but
my point is that the text had a particular relevance for the Turcophone Rumi
ruling cadres.131 This is also indicated by the fact that the Risāla fī l-Siyāsa al-
sharʿiyya was translated into Turkish no less than three times between the late
eleventh/seventeenth and early thirteenth/nineteenth centuries. The earliest
of these was a rather faithful translation made by Sebzī Seyyid Meḥmed Efendi
(d. 1091/1680) sometime in the second half of the eleventh/seventeenth century
and represented in Süleymaniye’s database with some ten manuscript copies,
the earliest of which dates from 1121/1709.132
What is interesting is that Dede Cöngī’s text received all this attention after
having hardly received any during the first 80 to 100 years of its existence. The
earliest known extant manuscript copy of the work is dated 1054/1644–1645,
followed by two other copies, dated 1067/1657 and 1069/1658.133 These were
the years when Cöngī’s famous progeny, Minḳārīzāde Yaḥyā (d. 1088/1678), was
climbing up the ranks of the Ottoman learned hierarchy to become eventually
one of the longest serving şeyhü’l-islāms of the eleventh/seventeenth century.
This raises the possibility that the text was brought to the attention of the wider
public by either Minḳārīzāde or someone else who knew of the family con-
nection between the two men. This possibility is also supported by the fact

130 For a partial list, see Bibliography.

131 For some copies of the text preserved in libraries in such cities as Cairo and Riyad, see
Dede Efendi, al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya 5–20.
132 For the Latinized transcription of Sebzī Efendi’s translation, see Açık, Dede Cöngî’nin; for
manuscript copies, see MS SK, Hacı Mahmud Efendi 1914; MS Millet K, A.E. Şeriyye 398
(copied in 1199/1784–1785); MS SK, Hüsrev Paşa 639/4, 195–244; MS Milli Ktp, A 9124; MS
Nuruosmaniye, 203/2; MS Beyazit Devlet K, Bayezit 4790; MS Beyazit Devlet K, Bayezit
4890 (copied in 1150/1737–1738); MS SK, Hacı Mahmud Efendi 1914; MS Nuruosmaniye
4982/1, 1b–35b (copied in 1121/1709); MS Nuruosmaniye 4892/3, 71–105. For the transla-
tions made by İsmāʿīl Müfīd Efendi (d. 1217/1802) and by the şeyhü’l-islām Meşrebzāde
ʿĀrif Efendi (d. 1275/1858), see Akgündüz (ed.), Osmanlı kanunnameleri iv, 122–212; Erten,
Tercüme-i Siyâsetnâme’nin tahlîli and Erel, Dede Cöngi’s.
133 Dede Cöngī, Siyāsetnāme/Risāla fī l-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, SK, MS Şehid Ali Paşa 2725/55,
254–262 (copied in Ẕī’l-ḳaʿde 1054/December 1644-January 1645); SK, MS Ragıp Paşa 639/3,
130b–142a (copied in 1067/1656–1657); Diyarbakır İl Halk Kütüphanesi, MS 104/2, 24b–
37a (copied in 1069/1658); SK, MS Esad Efendi 924/4, 166b–187a (copied in 1083/1672–
1673).
ibn taymiyya, al-siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, and the ottomans 139

that the text’s first Turkish translator, Sebzī, introduces Cöngī as “the ancestor
of Minḳārīzāde” (cedd-i Minḳārīzāde) in the preface to his translation of the
text.134
Whatever the role of Minḳārīzāde was behind the rise of Cöngī’s Risāla fī l-
siyāsa al-sharʿiyya from obscurity to fame, there was certainly a broader context
to the interest that high-level Ottomans took in the siyāsa sharʿiyya literature,
and more broadly, juristic works on rulership, in this period. From the appoint-
ment of Köprülü Meḥmed as grand vizier (1066/1656) to the Ottoman defeat at
Vienna (1094/1683), a succession of viziers from the Köprülü household worked
hard to restore the control of the imperial government over the myriad rest-
less power groups, both in the capital and in the provinces, and while doing so,
they leaned heavily on religiously inspired measures of social disciplining.135 It
was also in this period that they introduced to the recently conquered island of
Crete (1081/1670) and the resubdued Basra (1080/1669) a system of land tenure
and taxation that was decidedly more “Islamic” than earlier Ottoman prac-
tices and that allowed for private ownership of land as well as heavier rates of
taxation.136 Significantly, Ottoman experimentations with “sharʿī governance”

134 Until now, the main source of the claim about the family relationship between the two
men was the preface to the first Turkish translation of Cöngī’s Risāla fī l-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya;
for the reference, see Açık, Dede Cöngî’nin 8. A recent discovery by Özgün Deniz Yoldaşlar,
who is currently writing his PhD thesis on Minḳārīzāde, has thrown up new evidence in
strong support of this conclusion. The evidence in question is a note made by Minḳārīzāde
Yaḥyā in his copy of Dede Cöngī’s supercommentary on Taftāzānī’s commentary on ʿIzz al-
dīn al-Zanjānī’s al-ʿIzzī fī-l-taṣrīf, and reads: “This is the supercommentary of the maternal
ancestor of this poor slave on the commentary on Zanjānī by Saʿdü’l-mille ve’d-dīn and I
am the sinner, Yaḥyā, son of ʿÖmer (May He forgive both).” See Dede Cöngī, Ḥāshiyya ʿalā
sharḥ al-ʿIzzī fī-l-taṣrīf, SK, MS Murad Molla 1734, 1a. I thank Yoldaşlar for allowing me to
share this important finding.
135 Among the measures of “social disciplining” deployed in this period were the bans on
wine taverns, coffeehouses, and alehouses, and even on the trade in coffee and tobacco;
the prohibition of the Sufi devrān and the Mevlevi semāʿ, and the banishment of Sufi
shaykhs who did not abide by this prohibition. The Köprülüs also revived the early
eleventh/seventeenth-century project of reclaiming Eminönü for the Muslims and push-
ing the Jews and Christians residing there to the outer skirts of the city. For differing
perspectives on these policies, see Baer, Honored; Thys-Şenocak, The Yeni Valide com-
plex; Yıldız, 1660. For an aborted attempt to reform the religious beliefs and practices of
Ottoman Muslims circa 1113/1702, see Abou-el-Haj, Formation 51–52, 91–97.
136 For differing perspectives on the land tenure and taxation system implemented in Crete,
see Veinstein, On the çiftlik debate; Veinstein, Le législateur ottoman; Veinstein, Les règle-
ments fiscaux; Greene, An Islamic experiment; Greene, A shared world 25–29; Kermeli,
Caught in between faith and cash; Kolovos, Beyond “classical” Ottoman defterology; on
the system implemented in Basra, see Khoury, Administrative practice.
140 terzı̇o ğlu

continued also in the late eleventh/seventeenth and early twelfth/eighteenth

centuries. The Ottoman poll-tax reforms and the short-lived attempt to abol-
ish price ceilings (narh), both of which were instituted by the grand vizier
Köprülüzāde Muṣṭafā in 1102/1691, and the abolition of some taxes and fines as
bidʿats in the ḳānūnnāme of Midilli (Mytileni) in 1121/1709 can be mentioned
as some pertinent examples.137 As Ekin Tuşalp Atiyas has pointed out, the
Ottoman officials did not name specific texts but rather evoked the authority of
either “the sharia” or “the books of Islamic jurisprudence” when they wanted to
explain why they were breaking ways with some of the old Ottoman state tra-
ditions.138
A new disinclination to use the word ḳānūn on the part of the Ottoman
imperial administration at the turn of the eleventh/seventeenth century went
hand in hand with this development. This trend culminated in the famous
decree of Muṣṭafā II in 1108/1696 that all Ottoman imperial orders from that
point on reference only “the noble sharia” and not “couple the [terms] noble
sharia and ḳānūn.”139 Of course, not all Ottoman men of letters and statesmen
shared this aversion to the use of the word ḳānūn, as indicated by the continued
references to ḳānūn in Ottoman political and historical literature throughout
the eleventh/seventeenth century.140 Nor was the decree of 1108/1696 the end
of the legislative functions of the Ottoman sultans. Quite to the contrary, in the
twelfth/eighteenth century, the Ottoman rulers continued to make laws just
as—if not more vigorously—and Muslim jurists referenced royal edicts even
to a greater degree than before in their juridical rulings.141 However, now, the
Ottoman rulers justified their lawmaking with reference to sharʿī norms first
and foremost, and only secondarily with reference to their cumulative dynastic

137 On the 1102/1691 reforms, see Sariyannis, Notes on the Ottoman poll-tax reforms; Tuşalp
Atiyas, The Sunna-minded trend 272–276. On Köprülüzāde Muṣṭafā’s justification of the
reforms on sharʿī grounds, see Defterdar Sarı Mehmed Paşa, Zübde-i vekayiât 387–389. On
the ḳānūnnāme of Mytileni (Midilli), see the studies cited in footnote 136.
138 Tuşalp Atiyas, The sunna-minded trend, esp. 238–239, 265–272.
139 Heyd, Studies in old Ottoman, 154–155.
140 Abou-El-Haj, Power and social order; Tezcan, The second Ottoman Empire esp. 49–58; Dar-
ling, A history of social justice, 146–148; Ferguson, The proper order, ch. 6; Sariyannis, A
history, chs. 4–8.
141 On the continued relevance of ḳānūn during the twelfth/eighteenth century, see Tuğ, Pol-
itics of honor 55–67; on the progressive incorporation of royal edicts into the fatwa texts of
Ottoman ulama, see Ayoub, The sulṭān says. On the role of state authorities in law enforce-
ment and social and moral regulation in the twelfth/eighteenth century, see also Ergene,
Local court; Semerdjian, “Off the straight path”; Zarinebaf, Crime and punishment; Zilfi,
Women and slavery; Aykan, Rendre le justice; Baldwin, Islamic law; Başaran, Selim III.
ibn taymiyya, al-siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, and the ottomans 141

traditions. It was precisely this shift, I would argue, that also explains the
main attraction of Cöngī’s modest treatise on siyāsa sharʿiyya to the later
Ottomans. Cöngī had legitimated the Ottoman ḳānūn under the rubric of the
Mamluk siyāsa and without so much as a reference to the Ottoman dynasty,
styling it as the kind of siyāsa that serves “sharʿī ends” and safeguards pub-
lic order. Even if Cöngī’s original concern had been to intervene in a debate
centered in the empire’s newly annexed provinces of Egypt and Syria during
the tenth/sixteenth century, his solution to that debate turned out to be just
as relevant to the needs of the empire’s overwhelmingly Rumi ruling elites
in the following century. It seems that this particular definition of ḳānūn, as
ruler’s law in service of the divine law, which could be adjusted to the chang-
ing needs of the time, rather than as accretive dynastic custom, had won the
day.

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of a section of this article was first published in Turkish in

Terzioğlu, Bir tercüme 247–275. The research for the present article was sup-
ported by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh
Framework Programme (FP/2015–2020)/ERC Grant Agreement 648498, “The
fashioning of a Sunni orthodoxy and the entangled histories of confession-
building in the Ottoman Empire, 15th–17th centuries.” Tijana Krstić, Guy Burak,
Baki Tezcan, Başak Tuğ, Ahmet Kaylı, Özgün Deniz Yoldaşlar, Arif Erbil, A. Vahdi
Kanatsız, and Evren Sünnetçioğlu gave valuable feedback on this paper. I am
grateful to them all. Naturally, I claim sole responsibility for all errors that
remain.

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 chapter 5

You Must Know Your Faith in Detail: Redefinition of

the Role of Knowledge and Boundaries of Belief in
Ottoman Catechisms (ʿİlm-i ḥāls)
Tijana Krstić

Although still far from providing a comprehensive picture, recent research

on Islamic theology in post-fourteenth-century Central Asia as well as the
Ottoman and Safavid realms has challenged the long-established view that in
the “postclassical” era, and especially in these regions, the works on kalām
became repetitive and derivative at best, or that the discipline experienced
a complete demise, at worst.1 This view has long obfuscated new directions
and tendencies in later kalām, often articulated in neglected glosses, com-
mentaries, and supercommentaries on the works of older masters, which offer
plentiful evidence of what Khaled El-Rouayheb has identified as new “textual-
philological methodologies” through which scholars engaged with past works
and arguments, not with the purpose of blindly imitating (taqlīd) but elab-
orating and/or independently verifying them (taḥqīq).2 Reflecting on recent
efflorescence in research on early modern Islamic intellectual history, Matthew
Melvin-Khoushki observed that unlike their European contemporaries who
famously insisted on going back to and emulating the ancients, Ottoman schol-
ars were perfectly content to textually inherit ancient learning through the
“well-burnished prism” of their immediate Timurid, Turkmen, and Mamluk
scholarly predecessors. Nevertheless, both Islamic and European scholars
engaged in translating, commenting on, refining, critiquing, rejecting, subvert-
ing, and editing their intellectual patrimony—practices that Melvin-Khoushki
groups under the broad rubric of taḥqīq, or verification through independent
reasoning—which, he suggests, constituted “a new epistemic style that is dis-
tinctively early modern.”3

1 For a critical overview of this stance as well as decline narratives that converged on the
Ottoman period, see El-Rouayheb, Islamic intellectual history 173–174, 102. Other critical stud-
ies include Spannaus, Theology in Central Asia; Özervarlı, Theology in the Ottoman lands;
essays in Demir et al. (eds.), Osmanlı’da ilm-i kelâm; Badeen, Sunnitische Theologie; Yazıcıoğlu,
Le kalâm, etc.
2 El-Rouayheb, Islamic intellectual history 97–128. On commentaries and supercommentaries,
see ibid. 33; Ahmed, Post-classical; Saleh, The gloss as intellectual history.
3 Melvin-Khoushki, Taḥqīq vs. taqlīd 214 and 216.
© tijana krstić, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004440296_006
This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
156 krstić

The concept of taḥqīq—although in a different sense—was also central to

the theological debates that reached back to the early days of the Muslim com-
munity, on faith (īmān) and the necessary knowledge of Islam that qualifies
one for being considered a believer (muʾmīn), as well as the degree of the obli-
gation to “know.”4 In this context, particularly contentious was the question
of whether faith could essentially be reducible to knowledge and whether the
kind of knowledge that would allow one to verify the truthfulness of one’s
faith must be based on reasoning (naẓar) and inference (istidlāl). The epony-
mous founders of the two Sunni theological schools, Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī
(d. 333/944) and Abū al-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī (d. 324/935–936), along with their
Mu‘tazilite opponents, leaned toward the affirmative answer and questioned
the validity of faith based on the authority of others (taqlīd) that lacked any
understanding of the underlying proofs for the articles of faith. This view, how-
ever, threatened the status as a believer of the majority of common Muslims
and came to be known as al-qawl bi-kufr al-ʿāmma (i.e., the thesis that con-
demns the common people as unbelievers), generating much debate among
the theologians. The contentiousness of the question made sure that the issue
of imitative faith (al-īmān bi-l-taqlīd), as well as the accompanying problem of
how much knowledge and what kind of knowledge was required in order for
one to be considered a believer, came to be a staple topic in creeds (ʿaqāʾid) and
manuals on principles of Islam (uṣūl al-dīn) since the fourth/tenth century.
Building on recent studies on postclassical kalām as well as the research on
rearticulations of Sunni orthodoxy in the early modern Ottoman Empire, the
present paper seeks to address the issue of taḥqīq both in a general sense, as
an Islamic mode of engagement with the intellectual patrimony, and in a spe-
cific sense relevant to the theological discussions of the relationship between
faith and knowledge in creedal texts, with emphasis on the tenth/sixteenth
and eleventh/seventeenth centuries. To that end, the paper will explore how
Ottoman Rumi authors (i.e. from the Balkans and Anatolia) who wrote cate-
chetical works (Tr. ʿilm-i ḥāl) for common Muslims in Turkish engaged with the
earlier theological works to discuss the question of imitative faith (Tr. īmān-i
taḳlīdī) as well as the corollary problem of whether it is sufficient to assent (taṣ-
dīq) to faith in general terms or in detail, and consequently, whether one’s faith
should be of summary (Tr. īmān-i icmālī) or detailed kind (Tr. īmān-i tafṣīlī). In
order to shed light on the evolution of the debate, the first part of the paper
will examine the Maturidi, Ash‘ari, and to a lesser extent Mu‘tazili theologians’

4 For a background on these debates, see Izutsu, The concept, esp. 57–129; Frank, Knowledge
and taqlîd.
you must know your faith in detail 157

views that informed later Ottoman authors, whose approaches to the issue will
constitute the mainstay of the subsequent discussion. In the final part, the
paper will turn to the question of why kalām continued to be socially relevant
in a polity such as the Ottoman Empire, contextualizing this question with ref-
erence to the discussions on “Sunnitization” and confessional polarization in
the tenth/sixteenth and eleventh/seventeenth centuries.

1 The Relationship between Faith and Knowledge as Understood by

Ash‘arites and Maturidites before the Ninth/Fifteenth Century

The discussions about the kind and degree of knowledge about īmān that one
had to have both in order to be considered a Muslim and in order to qualify as
a believer and be guaranteed salvation on the Day of Judgment were triggered
by the specific historical circumstances that the growing Muslim community
faced in the first two centuries, namely how to set the boundaries of mem-
bership in the umma in the face of the growing conversions to Islam. For the
evolution of the Maturidi school of theology and the position of the Maturidi
scholars on the issue, the decisive developments took place in second/eighth-
century Transoxania, which was conquered by the Muslims in the beginning of
the century and where conversions of the local populations were on the rise.
The ensuing question of whether or not converts should be paying poll tax trig-
gered a theological debate on what kind of knowledge one should have in order
to be counted as a Muslim.5 This prompted the Murji’a—a group that had come
to define faith exclusively as a declaration by tongue and argued that deeds
(such as performance of the rites of worship) had no impact on one’s faith—
who dominated the political scene in Transoxania, to reach out to the scholars
in Kufa, in Iraq, which was the traditional stronghold of the Murji’a. Here they
found support from one of the city’s most prestigious scholars at the time,
Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 150/767), who himself was sympathetic to their views. This had
a lasting impact on Eastern Iran, whose Muslim population overwhelmingly
embraced Abū Ḥanīfa’s teachings by the early ninth century.6 Although Abū
Ḥanīfa is today remembered as the founder of one of the four Sunni schools
of law (madhhab), none of his writings on law ( fiqh) actually survive, while
the texts that can with some certainty be attributed to him or to the first gen-
eration of his students, became central to the development of Sunni kalām.

5 For background, see Madelung, The early Murjiʾa, and Rudolph, Al-Māturīdī 24–25.
6 See Rudolph, Al-Māturīdī 27; also van Ess, Theology and society i, 176–184.
158 krstić

This, in turn, means that we can speak not only of a Hanafi legal but also theo-
logical school, which later developed into the Maturidi school of theology, but
only well after Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī himself was active.7 The Hanafi and
Maturidi theological views that became dominant in Khorasan and Transox-
ania in the third/ninth century continued to dominate in this region, at least
until the eighth/fourteenth century.
How did Abū Ḥanīfa view the relationship between faith and knowledge?
Or rather, what did early Hanafi and Maturidi scholars believe were his views
on the matter? In the only text that modern scholars believe is authentically
Abū Ḥanīfa’s, which is a letter (risāla) written to ʿUthmān al-Battī, he insisted
that faith excludes deeds, that it cannot increase or decrease, that all people
and angels are equal in their īmān, and that sinners will be judged only in the
afterlife.8 However, in another text attributed to Abū Ḥanīfa, Kitāb al-ʿĀlim wa-
l-mutaʿallim, which was actually authored by one of his followers, he is cited as
mentioning other topics that will become central to the teachings of the later
Hanafis, such as the importance of knowledge (ʿilm, maʿrifa) which is equated
to assenting (taṣdīq) to the truth of the faith and achieving certainty ( yaqīn)
in belief.9 This emphasis on knowledge, as synonymous with īmān, raised the
question as to its scope and nature. Abū Ḥanīfa suggested in his Risāla that
Muḥammad asked people “to bear witness that there is no god but God alone
who has no partner, and to acknowledge what he [Muḥammad] has brought
from God.” In the Kitāb al-Fiqh al-absaṭ, one of the most important early Hanafi
sources authored by a student of Abū Ḥanīfa,10 the master is cited using the
so-called Gabriel hadith to explain what it is that Muḥammad brought from
God: a message on belief in the oneness of God, the prophethood of Muḥam-
mad, the angels, the Holy Scriptures, the earlier prophets, the Last Judgment,
and predestination. As his interpreters understood it, Abū Ḥanīfa demanded

7 On the Hanafi theological school, see Rudolph, Al-Māturīdī 29; van Ess, Theology and soci-
ety i, 219–229; Watt, Islamic philosophy 23. Although belonging to the Hanafi legal and
theological school (the latter later becoming known as Maturidism) mostly went hand
in hand, it is known that some later Muʿtazilites belonged to the Hanafi legal madhhab,
for instance. This was especially true after 230/850 when Muʿtazilism became a purely the-
ological doctrine, separate from politics and jurisprudence. See Watt, Islamic philosophy
106. On the reasons why Maturidites referred to themselves as aṣḥab Abī Ḥanīfa as late as
the fifth/eleventh century, see Rudolph, Al-Māturīdī 5–7.
8 Rudolph, Al-Māturīdī 28–36.
9 Rudolph, Al-Māturīdī 48–53; van Ess, Theology and society i, 231. This text was actually
authored by Abū Muqātil al-Samarqandī (d. 208/823).
10 Fiqh al-absaṭ was authored by Abū Muṭīʿ al-Balkhī (d. 199/814). See Rudolph, Al-Māturīdī
53–58, 65.
you must know your faith in detail 159

knowledge of God and of the Prophet, as well as acknowledgment of what

the Prophet brought from God in a summary manner ( jumlatan), without a
detailed explanation.11 Furthermore, as is elaborated in a later commentary
(probably from the late fourth/tenth-early fifth/eleventh century) on Fiqh al-
absaṭ, Abū Ḥanīfa was said to have endorsed the faith of an imitator or person
who accepts faith on authority of others (muqallid), because he viewed anyone
who acknowledges Islam in a broad and general sense, even without knowing
anything about the book, the creed, or religious duties, as a believer. However,
he also acknowledged that a faith based on inference (istidlāl) and reasoning
is a thousand times more superior and enlightened than the one based on imi-
tation.12
This last issue, of whether or not imitative faith, or faith based on what one
learns on the authority of others rather than through one’s own reasoning, was
valid or not became a polemical trope well established in kalām works by the
mid-fourth/tenth century and directly addressed by Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī,
Abū Hasan al-Ashʿarī, as well as the Mu‘tazilites. The issue was clearly of utmost
importance to al-Māturīdī, who begins his Kitāb al-Tawḥīd with a question
of epistemology and quickly comes to the issue of belief based on authority
(taqlīd), which he identifies as the cause of all error and reason for the existence
of false beliefs.13 Building on Hanafi tradition that emphasized knowledge and
the capacity of the ratio to know the truth, al-Māturīdī maintained that the
intellect was capable of proving God’s existence based on his creation. In light
of this confidence in the powers of the intellect, it is not surprising that al-
Māturīdī himself rejected the validity of imitative faith in no uncertain terms
and postulated that only faith based on inquiry (naẓar) with one’s own intel-
lect (ʿaql) and consideration of proofs (burhān) was valid.14 For al-Māturīdī,
reasoning (istidlāl) was thus a precondition for īmān.

11 Van Ess, Theology and society i, 232; Izutsu, The concept 118.
12 The commentary on Fiqh al-absaṭ was attributed to various authors, including al-Māturīdī
himself and Abū l-Layth al-Samarqandī (d. 373/983), but it is not conclusively proven who
authored it. Van Ess and Rudolph have convincingly argued that what Wensinck (in The
Muslim creed 123) thought was the Sharḥ Fiqh al-akbar I, was actually Sharḥ Fiqh al-absaṭ.
See van Ess, Theology and society i, 237–241; Rudolph, Al-Māturīdī 57. For a close analysis
of this commentary and discussion of its authorship, see also Daiber, The Islamic. For the
commentary on Abū Ḥanīfa’s view on taqlīd, see ibid., 68–75, 222–224. The metaphor of
light (nūr), likely of Sufi origin, was characteristic of the Maturidi conception of īmān that
served to offset the Murji’i insistence on equality of īmān—everyone’s īmān was the same
in essence and could not increase or decrease but it could be more or less enlightened. On
this, see also Izutsu, The concept 121–122.
13 Rudolph, Al-Māturīdī 231.
14 Ibid., 231–232. Also see Rudolph, Ratio und Überlieferung 79.
160 krstić

This, in turn, forced later Hanafi-Maturidis to try to reconcile the tension

between Abū Ḥanīfa’s position on the subject, which was largely interpreted as
an endorsement of the faith of a muqallid and reasoning in general terms as suf-
ficient for being considered a muʾmīn, and al-Māturīdī’s position that explicitly
rejected imitative faith and favored thinking in terms of particulars as a pre-
condition for having īmān. Like the commentator on Fiqh al-absaṭ, they did so
by trying to emphasize Abū Ḥanīfa’s praise for faith based on reasoning. Oth-
ers, like the later Bukharan Maturidi scholar Nūr al-Dīn Ṣābūnī (d. 580/1184)
in his al-Bidāya fī uṣūl al-dīn, reported that Abū Ḥanīfa viewed a person who
refused to engage in reasoning in order to improve their understanding of faith
as a rebel and a sinner.15 While Maturidi scholars generally agreed that the faith
of the muqallid is valid, this attempt at reconciliation of Abū Ḥanīfa’s and al-
Māturīdī’s positions may have given rise to some ambiguity in their definition
of necessary knowledge. For instance, in the foundational text of Maturidi the-
ology, Abū l-Yusr Muḥammad al-Pazdawī’s (d. 493/1099–100) Uṣūl al-dīn, the
author stated that ahl al-sunna wa-l-jamāʿa16 maintained that summary faith
(al-īmān bi-l-jumla) is necessary (wājib), while the detailed faith (al-īmān bi-l-
tafāṣīl) is not required, except when one is confused about an issue and needs
a clarification. It is sufficient to say “God is one and has no partner; Muḥam-
mad is his servant and Prophet. Everything that he brought from God is true.”
He contrasts this to the views of the Mu‘tazilites, who maintained that detailed
faith was necessary, and the Ash‘arites, who also reportedly held the same view.
At the same time, however, when expounding the view of the ahl al-sunna wa-
l-jamāʿa in more detail, Pazdawī refers to the Gabriel hadith and implies that
the Prophet’s response to the angel’s question “What is īmān?” (i.e., that īmān
is belief in God, his angels, books, prophets, resurrection after death, and that
all is owing to God) is the summary faith, which suggests that there was some
equivocation in the Maturidi stance on what that minimum knowledge of faith
was that qualified one as a believer: a simple profession of faith (shahāda) or
the articles of faith enumerated in the Gabriel hadith.17
Al-Māturīdī’s views did not greatly differ from al-Ashʿarī’s or the Mu‘tazilites’,
who also maintained that reasoning was necessary for having īmān.18 Al-

15 es-Sâbûnî, Mâtürîdiyye akaidi 181.

16 In this context, the ahl al-sunna wa-l-jamāʿa are Hanafites (and Maturidites). On the
process by which the Hanafites-Maturidites came to assume this label, see Rudolph, Al-
Māturīdī 61 n133.
17 I am using the Turkish translation of Pazdawī’s Uṣūl al-dī. See Pezdevî, Ehl-i sünnet akâidi
233–235.
18 On convergences on this issue, see Rudolph, Ratio und Überlieferung; Frank, Knowledge
you must know your faith in detail 161

Ashʿarī, himself a former Mu‘tazilite, and his followers believed that to assent
(taṣdīq) to what is reported (akhbār) by the community as truth requires some
reflective distance from the proposal itself.19 As a later Ash‘ari theologian, al-
Baghdadī (d. 429/1037), reports, al-Ashʿarī said that the person who believes the
truth on authority of others (taqlīdan) was neither a mushriq (idolater, polythe-
ist) nor a kāfir (unbeliever). When asked whether such a man was a believer
(muʾmīn), al-Ashʿarī replied that he would not call such a person a believer
unconditionally, thus leaving the issue of his views on imitative faith open to
interpretation.20 As Richard Frank showed, most Ash‘ari theologians up to the
sixth/twelfth century emphasized that reasoning is obligatory for one’s assent
to be properly founded. However, there was no unanimity among them regard-
ing the precise character of this knowledge.21
Despite these convergences between al-Māturīdī’s and al-Ashʿarī’s views, in
later medieval polemical works their followers often came to be identified with
diametrically opposing positions vis-à-vis the question of taqlīd and the issue of
kufr al-ʿāmma, although there was also some debate regarding al-Ashʿarī’s posi-
tions. For instance, the commentary on Fiqh al-absaṭ, which was very popular
with later Hanafi authors, including Ottoman ones, specifically (and mislead-
ingly) stated that both Ash‘arites and Mu‘tazilites rejected taqlīd and viewed
the common masses as infidels.22 Pazdawī, on the other hand, asserts that a
muqallid is truly a believer, and juxtaposes it to the view of the Mu‘tazilites,
who believe the opposite. He then says that reports on al-Ashʿarī’s views varied
(but then states that the correct report is that he also believed that a muqallid
is a true believer).23
Indeed, the later Ash‘ari school did not present a homogenous position on
the issue of taqlīd. Some, like the Maghrebi scholar Muḥammad b. Yūsuf al-
Sanūsī (d. 895/1490), maintained that reasoning is a condition for faith and
that a person who remains at the stage of taqlīd is not only a sinner but also
an infidel in the eyes of God.24 Others tried to temper the radical nature of
the thesis that an imitator is a sinner or an infidel or even dismiss it alto-
gether. The Ash‘ari theologians al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) and Fakhr al-Dīn al-

and taqlîd 40. On differences among Maturidi, Ash‘ari, and Mu‘tazili positions on this
issue, see Izutsu, The concept 119–130.
19 Frank, Knowledge and taqlîd 40–41.
20 Izutsu, The concept 121.
21 Frank, Knowledge and taqlîd 47.
22 See Daiber, The Islamic 222. On the problem of ascribing the kufr al-ʿāmma thesis to the
Muʿtazilites and rejection of taqlīd to Ash‘arites, see Izutsu, The concept 119–121.
23 Pezdevî, Ehl-i sünnet akâidi 235.
24 El-Rouayheb, Islamic intellectual history 178, 174–175.
162 krstić

Rāzī (d. 606/1210) rejected the accusation that Ash‘arites denied the validity
of the faith of the imitator and argued that a muqallid was neither a sinner
nor an infidel and that the knowledge of detailed proofs about faith—typically
the purview of a kalām specialist—was incumbent on the community, but
not on every individual Muslim.25 In the second book of his Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-
dīn al-Ghazālī argued that in teaching the articles of faith, the goal is first to
make a child or a novice memorize, then to understand, and finally to arrive
at certainty in order to assent to what they have learned. Through his grace,
God prepares a believer’s heart without the necessity of arguments or proofs,
and a believer accepts God’s message upon instruction (talqīn) and authority
(taqlīd). This carries the danger of straying from the truth, so in order to pre-
vent doubts and deviations, these beliefs have to be strengthened by proofs.
However, it is not necessary to learn kalām and disputation in order to do so;
rather, one should strive to deepen one’s understanding of faith through read-
ing the Quran and hadith and performing one’s religious duties. To expose a
novice to kalām would be like hitting a healthy tree with an iron bar, unneces-
sarily exposing healthy and solid belief to doubt. He likens kalām to a potent
drug—it needs to be given in doses and only when necessary.26 According to
al-Ghazālī, while the study of kalām was not a religious duty incumbent on
either individual Muslims ( farḍ al-ʿayn) or the community ( farḍ al-kifāya) in
the early days of Islam, by his time it has become a duty incumbent on the
community—as long as there are some scholars who possess such specialized
knowledge needed to defend the faith and refute opponents, the conditions
are satisfied. In his view, laid out in the first book of his Iḥyāʾ, the learning that
remains incumbent on each individual Muslim has to do with the foundations
of belief, proper performance of worship, and awareness of prohibitions.
In contrast, we do not see such diversity in the views of Maturidi authors
of later creeds that went on to gain great popularity in the Ottoman realms.
The best known among them, Najm al-Dīn al-Nasafī’s (d. 537/1142) ʿAqāʾid (or
al-ʿAqīda al-Nasafīyya), which was also included in the Ottoman madrasa cur-
riculum, does not mention either the issue of imitative faith nor the issue of
knowledge that is a precondition for one to be considered a believer. Nasafī
simply defines īmān as assent to what Muḥammad brought from Allah and the

25 Ibid. 180.
26 al-Ghazzālī, The foundations ii, Section II, available at: https://www.ghazali.org/works/gz
‑faith.htm (accessed on 19 May 2019). Al-Ghāzalī’s attacks on philosophical kalām articu-
lated in his various works induced scholars to believe that kalām was afterwards excised
from Sunnism, giving rise to the so-called Ghazālī myth. This myth has been successfully
challenged by scholars such as Frank Griffel, Khaled el-Rouayheb, and Heidrun Eichner.
you must know your faith in detail 163

verbal confession of it.27 However, in his famous commentary on Nasafī’s creed,

Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī (d. 793/1390), himself either an Ash‘ari or a Maturidi
strongly influenced by Ash‘arism, states that assent (taṣdīq) with the heart to
Allah’s message is sufficient to bring one into the category of īmān. He further
states: “The degree of this kind of īmān (al-īmān al-ijmālī) is no lower than
that of detailed īmān (al-īmān al-tafṣīlī).”28 Another Maturidi creed that later
achieved great popularity in the Ottoman lands was the didactic poem entitled
Badʾ al-amālī by ʿAlī b. ʿUthmān al-Ūshī (fl. c. 569/1173), which does not men-
tion the issue of faith in general or in detail but states that “the faith of a person
by imitating others is valid; there are clear-cut proofs favoring this opinion.”29
Similarly, the topic of summary versus detailed knowledge of faith is not explic-
itly brought up in the creed by the Maturidi scholar Abū l-Barakāt al-Nasafī
(d. 710/1310) entitled ʿUmdat al-ʿaqīda li-ahl al-sunna. On the subject of taqlīd,
he states that, contrary to what the Mu‘tazilites say, the faith of a muqallid is
valid because it entails assent (taṣdīq), even if he is a sinner for not engaging
in reasoning.30 This view is echoed also in Kitāb al-ʿAqīda al-rukniyya by ʿUbay-
dallāh b. Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al- ʿAzīz al-Samarqandī (d. 701/1301), another later
Maturidi creed in which the author endorses the faith of the muqallid because
it entails assent to God’s message without any doubt or reservation. He under-
stands the pronunciation of shahāda as assent to the divine message in general
(ijmālan), while he refers to the Gabriel hadith to enumerate the articles of faith
in detail.31

2 The Maturidi-Ash‘ari Synthesis and the Question of Īmān-i Taklīdī,

Īmān-i İcmālī, and Īmān-i Tafṣīlī in Ottoman ʿİlm-i ḥāls

While the preceding paragraphs sought to map the general development and
differences in Maturidi and Ash‘ari views on the issues of taqlīd and knowledge

27 Watt, Islamic creeds 82.

28 al-Taftāzānī, A commentary 117. For a recent study of al-Taftāzānī’s theology, see Würtz,
Islamische Theologie.
29 Al-Ūshī, Badʾ al-amālī 22.
30 See al-Nasafī, ʿUmdat al-ʿaqīda. For the relevant passage in Turkish, see en-Nesefî, Islâm
inancının 61.
31 See Bake, Ubeydallah b. Muhammed 9–10 (with facsimile of the relevant manuscript folios
on 71). Samarqandī’s text, which is recorded in the Turkish libraries under various names
(al-Akaid, Risale fi’l-akaid; Şerhü’l kelime-i şehadet, etc.) was published as es-Semerkandî,
el-ʿAkîdetü’r-rükniyye.
164 krstić

necessary for one’s faith to be considered sound, as the discussion chronolog-

ically approaches the Ottoman period, it is not only differences but also inter-
actions and convergences between the two theological schools that have to be
taken into account. Historical research on the development of both Ash‘arism
and Maturidism, especially in the so-called postclassical period, is only in its
infancy, and the existing works often uncritically replicate the rhetoric of the
sources themselves that strive to project an image of unity and homogeneity
within a particular theological tradition rather than highlighting the diversity
of opinions or interactions with other schools and traditions.32 The nature
of these interactions in the Ottoman period is only slowly being unearthed,
but new research suggests that Ottoman scholars were well disposed toward a
Maturidi-Ash‘ari synthesis33—a development that is also highlighted in Nabil
Al-Tikriti’s paper in this volume. After a period of intense infighting between
the two schools in Khorasan in the pre-Mongol era and intense rivalries in
Syria that followed the influx of the eastern Hanafi-Maturidi scholars into the
traditionally Ash‘ari terrain in the early Seljuk era, a rapprochement set in by
the seventh/thirteenth century as the Zangids, Ayyubids, and later Mamluks
sought to present a united Sunni Islamic front against the crusaders and Mon-
gols. At the same time, the Mongol and Timurid rulers were ecumenical in their
support of talented scholars regardless of their background, which allowed
scholars in Central Asia to move more freely between theological schools as
well as sectarian affiliations. Emblematic of this milieu was the rise of the
philosophically minded scholars like ʿAḍud al-Dīn al-Ījī (d. 756/1356), who fol-
lowed the Ash‘ari tradition, as well as Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī and Sayyid Sharīf
al-Jurjānī (d. 813/1413), who did not restrict themselves to ideas of only one
school.34 These combined trends toward rapprochement between theological
schools both to the east and to the southwest of the Ottoman domains directly
influenced the formation of the Ottoman scholars, both through engagement
with the texts and through personal study with the scholars involved in this
rapprochement or their students. Ottoman literati were particularly drawn
to al-Ghazālī’s synthesis of theology, Sufism, Aristotelian logic, and law, and
to the scholarship of the “post-Avicennian turn,” especially works produced
by scholars who integrated Sunni theology with different philosophical per-
spectives, including metaphysics, illuminationist philosophy, and Avicennian

32 On this point see Eichner, Handbooks 495–496; Rudolph, Al-Māturīdī 1–20.

33 See Özervarlı, Theology in the Ottoman lands 568; Badeen, Sunnitische Theologie.
34 On the process of rapprochement between Ash‘aris and Maturidis between the fifth/
eleventh and eighth/fourteenth centuries, see Berger, The interpretation 694–695.
you must know your faith in detail 165

ideas.35 The fact that this fusion between the philosophical and theological
traditions of rational exegesis and the adoption of a language of philoso-
phy and demonstration was particularly widespread among the Ash‘ari-Shafi‘i
scholars of the seventh/thirteenth and eighth/fourteenth centuries meant that
the latter’s works were often cited by the Ottoman scholars coming in their
wake.36
However, it is not the kalām of the post-Avicennian turn and the new ques-
tions it engendered that are central to the discussion at hand, but rather how
they interacted with and informed the older theological inquiries regarding
faith and knowledge. In the Ottoman polity, which by the early tenth/six-
teenth century experienced a growing rate of conversions to Islam, managed
a large non-Muslim and very diverse Muslim population, and faced the chal-
lenge of a rival Islamic polity with a different sectarian affiliation—the pro-
gressively more Shi‘ite Safavid Iran—the question of who was a believer and
what constituted knowledge of faith that would guarantee one’s salvation in
both this and the other world gradually came into a sharper focus. From the
mid-ninth/fifteenth century onward, the ulama (religious scholars), whose ser-
vices were increasingly indispensable to the expanding empire seeking to both
credibly govern and garner prestige in the Islamic world, were gradually getting
more integrated into the Ottoman administration and were both expected and
sought to have a greater say in the matters of what constituted correct faith and
practice of Islam.37 The degree to which the ulama became integrated into the
Ottoman administration has been described by historians as unprecedented
in Islamic history, creating a situation in which particular definitions of who
was and what it meant to be a Sunni could be enforced with a new degree
of authority (i.e., conditions for a formulation of “orthodoxy”).38 The conver-
gence of these developments in the late ninth/fifteenth-early tenth/ sixteenth
centuries thus led to a greater sensitization across Ottoman society to the ques-
tions of correct faith and practice.

35 Özervarlı, Theology in the Ottoman lands 568; Spannaus, Theology in Central Asia 591.
Ulrich Rudolph has studied an interesting example of how this trend extended even into
jurisprudence, which can be found in the work of celebrated Ottoman jurist Molla Hüsrev
(or Khusraw) (d. 855/1480 or 1481), who in his Mirʾāt al-uṣūl fi sharḥ Mirqāt al-wuṣūl brings
the Avicennan theory of intellect to bear on the reasoning behind defining a legal subject.
See Rudolph, Al-Ghazālī 85–88.
36 For an excellent overview of the intellectual genealogies underpinning this process see
Endress, Reading Avicenna.
37 On these developments, see Al-Tikriti, Kalam in the service of the state; Terzioğlu, How to
conceptualize; Atçıl, Scholars and sultans.
38 On the notion of orthodoxy in an Islamic context, see Ahmed, What is Islam? 270 and 297.
166 krstić

While the higher echelons of ulama sought to promulgate this agenda

through, by now, well-studied legal opinions ( fatāwā), Ottoman literati of var-
ious educational levels and provenance, both affiliated and not with the gov-
ernment, started producing didactic literature on the foundations of īmān and
Islam that would be comprehensible to common people in their own language,
which for the majority of Ottoman Muslims in Anatolia and the Balkans was
Turkish. It is in the context of these catechetical texts, which came to be known
as ʿilm-i ḥāls, that Ottoman authors weighed in on the questions of imitative as
well as general versus detailed faith. Although Ottoman ʿilm-i ḥāls drew abun-
dantly on various creeds and uṣūl al-dīn manuals, they constituted a new genre
that often succinctly combined 1) the basic teachings on īmān extracted from
creedal literature with 2) the basic rules on worship derived from fiqh and its
regulations for ritual obligations (ʿibādāt) and 3) the basic information on pro-
hibitions derived largely from collections of legal opinions ( fatāwā), in particu-
lar on utterances and actions that could render one an unbeliever (alfāẓ al-kufr;
Tr. elfāẓ-i küfr). In this respect, the overall concept of the Ottoman ʿilm-i ḥāl
appears to fit squarely into the framework for knowledge incumbent upon each
individual believer as envisioned by al-Ghazālī (see above). This framework
can be described as dogmatic in the sense that it emphasized unitary truth
underlying the articles of faith and certainty of knowledge (ʿilm) about them
based on reasoning and incontrovertible textual proofs, while shunning spec-
ulation. In an important contrast to the medieval creeds, however, Ottoman
ʿilm-i ḥāls included stipulations on worship and certain prohibitions derived
from Hanafi law, thus reinforcing the notion that the boundaries of dogma are
not only definite but circumscribable by law. As Norman Calder pointed out,
while the books of law contained expressions of creed, medieval creeds did
not contain references to law, which he, in turn, interpreted as the limits of the
genre of creed to establish the boundaries of orthodoxy.39 Discursively speak-
ing, Ottoman ʿilm-i ḥāls were thus projecting different claims than creeds, more
in line with the new understanding of “orthodoxy.”
The discussion of examples of blasphemous utterances and actions cover-
ing a wide range of issues was typically found in the sixth/twelfth-century and
later legal manuals-cum-collections of juridical opinions—such as Fatāwā l-
Qāḍīkhān (late sixth/twelfth c.), al-Fatāwā l-Tatārkhāniyya (eighth/fourteenth
c.), al-Fatāwā l-Bazzāziyya (ninth/fifteenth c.), etc.—produced by the eastern
Hanafites who seem to have had a penchant for this issue, in contrast to their
colleagues—both Hanafi and otherwise—in other parts of the Islamic world.40

39 See Calder, The limits 225.

40 Intisar Rabb argues that among the four Sunni schools of law, only in Hanafism did
you must know your faith in detail 167

At least since the mid-eighth/fourteenth century, when the Khwarazmian

Hanafi scholar Badr al-Rashīd (d. 767/1366) produced a treatise on alfāẓ al-
kufr, there were also copies of stand-alone works dedicated to the topic.41 This
eastern Hanafi penchant for the alfāẓ al-kufr tradition is important because it
appears to have served as the basis for rethinking of the boundary between
īmān and kufr in the Ottoman Hanafi school in the early 1400s. The most
emblematic indicator of this rethinking, which emerges in the Ottoman con-
text by the 1450s,42 was a legal innovation stipulating that one should renew
one’s faith (Tr. tecdīd-i īmān) upon committing an act or uttering something
deemed blasphemous by the (eastern) Hanafi jurists. This development is
traceable through the fatāwā promulgated by the muftis from the lands of
Rum (i.e., Anatolia and Rumeli) who were affiliated with the Ottoman gov-
ernment, but it is not evident in the fatāwā of the Hanafi jurists not affiliated
with the government, especially from the Arab provinces, which underscores
the existence of intra-Hanafi, interregional differences. In view of the schol-
ars from Arab provinces of the empire, this stipulation amounted to takfīr—
the act of declaring other Muslims infidels (kāfir)—which was considered
contrary to the Sunni tradition and was singled out as such in a number of
medieval Sunni creeds, including Hanafi ones.43 In another unprecedented
move, the Ottomans elevated the Hanafi school of law into a state madhhab
by the tenth/sixteenth century; however, given these regional differences and
both intra- and inter-madhhab tensions that this move caused, the question

defamation require enforcement of criminal sanction, and speech acts were perceived
as having the potential to violate public values. Because Hanafi jurists regarded public
values to be at stake in the commission of all crimes, including defamation, they likewise
regarded enforcement as a state obligation, one that could not be left to the whims of an
individual pardon. Defamation was defined as violation of one of God’s rights because it
compromised their sense of Islam’s public values. Blasphemy was one type of defamatory
crime. See Rabb, Society and propriety 447. However, it appears that a more limited cat-
egory of blasphemy, specifically against the Prophet and the Companions, also emerged
in the Shafi‘i legal thought by the eighth/fourteenth century in Mamluk Syria and Egypt,
most likely as a response to the Sunni-Shi’i tensions. Interestingly, it was Taqī al-Dīn al-
Subkī (d. 755/1355), the Shafi‘i scholar who promoted an Ash‘ari-Maturidi synthesis, that
was the main voice of this new discourse on blasphemy, partially inspired by the Hanafi
sources. See Wiederhold, Blasphemy against the Prophet.
41 See Ökten, Why ordinary utterances. I thank Ertuğrul Ökten for sharing his unpublished
article with me.
42 The earliest reference to the practice that I could trace so far can be found in Yazıcızāde
(Yazıcıoğlu) Meḥmed’s Muḥammediye, which was written in 853/1449. See Yazıcıoğlu,
Muhammediye ii, 459.
43 On this issue see Burak, Faith, law and empire. See also Meshal, Sharia, for the reaction of
the Egyptian jurists to what they perceived as the Ottoman propensity toward takfīr.
168 krstić

arises as to the nature of this Hanafism.44 Ottoman ʿilm-i ḥāl authors’ takes on
the relationship between knowledge and faith shed an important light on this
question.
The genre of ʿilm-i ḥāl crystalized only gradually from the early fifteenth
century onward and reached its heyday in the seventeenth century.45 The afore-
mentioned penchant of the Ottoman scholars for al-Ghazālī and the scholar-
ship of the post-Avicennian turn, as well as for seamlessly integrating Maturidi
and Ash‘ari views on certain questions, is on full display in the first ʿilm-i ḥāl
written by an Ottoman scholar, Ḳuṭbe’d-dīn İzniḳī’s (d. 821/1418) Muḳaddime
(Introduction). İzniḳī was a product of the early Ottoman scholarly environ-
ment in Anatolia. He was likely a Sufi but wrote on subjects that range from
tafsīr and hadith to fiqh, kalām, and Sufism.46 Like al-Ghazālī in his Iḥyāʾ, in
the preface to his work İzniḳī introduces the division between the knowledge
incumbent upon the individual and knowledge incumbent upon the commu-
nity, stating that in the Muḳaddime he set out to provide in easily understand-
able Turkish the knowledge that every Muslim needs to have and without
which his or her Islam cannot be complete. He states that one’s Islam cannot
be complete without knowing and performing the five pillars of Islam, which
serve as the organizing principle of the work—he devotes a chapter heading
(bāb) to each, followed by a discussion of virtues to which one needs to aspire
and vices one needs to avoid in order to be a true believer.47 Importantly, he
emphasizes the fact that some obligatory knowledge needs to be internalized
while some needs to be externally performed. He points out that law books
do not consider the internal aspects of obligatory knowledge because they are
concerned with whether people externally conform to the requirements of the
law. Thus, they are not interested in a person’s morality and what goes on in
their heart, which is why some scholars undertook to teach believers how to
achieve closeness to God. He gives the examples of al-Ghazālī, al-Rāghib al-
Iṣfahānī (d. 502/1108; an Ash‘ari and Shafi‘i scholar and “ethicist of the soul”),48
the famous Sufi scholar al-Qushayrī (d. 465/1072), and Abū ʿAbdallah al-Ḥārith

44 On the elevation of the Hanafi madhhab into a state madhhab, see Burak, The second for-
mation; on inter-madhhab tensions that this caused, especially in post-conquest Cairo,
Damascus and Aleppo, see Meshal, Sharia; and Fitzgerald, Murder in Aleppo.
45 On this process, see Kelepetin Arpaguş, Bir telif türü; Aynacı, Osmanlı kuruluș dönemi;
Krstić, Contested 29–35; Terzioğlu, Where ʿilm-i ḥāl.
46 Öngören, Kutbüddin İznikî, TDV IA, xxvi, 485–486; Üstünova, introduction to Kutbe’d-dîn
İznikî, Mukaddime 21–25; Kartal, Kutbuddin.
47 Kutbe’d-dîn İznikî, Mukaddime 139–141.
48 On al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī’s ethics of education and its impact on al-Ghazālī, see Mohamed,
The Ethics, and Mohamed, The virtue.
you must know your faith in detail 169

al-Muḥāsibī (d. 243/857), another eminent Sufi and rationalist theologian who
advocated constant self-examination.49 This aspiration to instruct believers on
how to cultivate both the internal forum focused on īmān and the external
forum focused on practice (ʿamel) became a template for the later Ottoman
ʿilm-i ḥāls as well.
Devoting his first chapter to īmān, İzniḳī uses the Gabriel hadith to introduce
the basic articles of faith. He states that īmān consists of six items—belief in
oneness of God, his angels, his books, his prophets, the Day of Judgment, and
predetermination—and emphasizes that it is necessary to know each of these
six items in detail (bu altı nesneyi birer tafṣīl idüp bildürmek gerek).50 Having
explained each article of faith in detail, İzniḳī anticipates hypothetical ques-
tions from his audience. Crucial for the discussion at hand, he includes the
following issue: if it is compulsory to know these six things, what happens to
those people who know nothing of God or his prophet, of īmān and Islam,
before becoming Muslims? How can this be reconciled with the hadith that
Muḥammad promised anyone who pronounces the shahāda that they would
enter Paradise? İzniḳī responds that Muḥammad indeed proclaimed that the
faith of those who pronounce the shahāda is sound because he wanted to facil-
itate people coming to faith. Shahāda epitomizes belief in those six things
(bu altı nesneyi mücmelen bilüp): by saying it, one professes belief that God
is one, that Muḥammad is his prophet, and that everything he brought from
God is true. Here, İzniḳī is trying to reconcile his view that faith should be
known in detail with the well-known hadith that assenting to faith in general
through pronouncing the shahāda is sufficient for being considered a believer
and entering Paradise.
He returns to the issue of general versus detailed knowledge in a later pas-
sage when discussing the oneness of God. He states that ulama are in disagree-
ment whether or not one should know proofs of God’s oneness in general or in
detail. He acknowledges that the Prophet himself accepted the faith of those
who were ignorant in details of faith and God’s oneness, but then he invokes
the report on Abū Ḥanīfa’s saying that those who do not know proofs of God’s
oneness (tevḥīd) are rebels (ʿāṣī). İzniḳī continues by saying that it may be that
commoners (ʿāmmī kişiler) who become Muslims at first do not understand
the proofs of tevḥīd, but they should strive to deepen their understanding by
seeking explanation—those who have the capacity to understand but do not
learn are rebels (ʿāṣī) and sinners (günāhkār). He then cites al-Ghazālī to say

49 Kutbe’d-dîn İznikî, Mukaddime 142. I thank Professor Özervarlı for clarifying the misread-
ing of al-Muḥāsibī’s name in Üstünova’s transliteration.
50 Ibid. 145.
170 krstić

that if someone becomes a Muslim, but God’s oneness and greatness is not
in his heart, he will have the benefit of such īmān only in this world. A con-
firmed believer is only the one with īmān in his heart.51 Besides al-Ghazālī, who
is clearly İzniḳī’s model, he cites also the Ash‘ari scholars Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī
and ʿAḍud al-Dīn al-Ījī’s Kitāb al-Mawāqif fī ʿilm al-kalām.52 Al-Ījī’s Mawāqif, in
particular, was a vociferous defense of rational theology (kalām), which al-Ījī
describes as the most exalted discipline of learning from which all other learn-
ing derives. Al-Ījī also extols reasoning and knowledge of kalām as a means
of climbing out of the pit of blind imitation to reach the peak of certainty in
faith.53 Even though İzniḳī is careful to maintain a balance between the vari-
ous sources, theological views (he often cites and carefully considers what he
presents as the Mu‘tazili position, along with the Ash‘ari and Maturidi ones),
and “hermeneutic resources”54 of Islam (kalām, fiqh, Sufism, etc.) on which he
is drawing in his presentation and point to the disagreement among scholars
on various issues, it is clear that he was sympathetic to the idea of demanding
greater knowledge of faith and greater commitment in performance of reli-
gious duties from common believers. One can detect the influence of Ash‘ari
views on İzniḳī’s conceptualization of the relationship between faith and prac-
tice. He states that in the view of the Sunnis (ehl-i sünnet ve’l-cemāʿat), works
do not determine whether or not one will enter Paradise or Hell; however, he
then embarks on an elaborate discussion of why it is naïve to believe that one
can do just anything, including fail to perform worship, and then repent and
enter Paradise. For İzniḳī, practice is reflective of inner belief, in which respect
he seems to be closer to the Ash‘ari than to the Hanafi-Maturidi school, which
more decisively compartmentalized īmān and ʿamel and argued against the lat-
ter affecting the former.55
Although İzniḳī emphasizes the importance of fear of God, he is more inter-
ested in inducing his audience to embrace the necessary knowledge without

51 Ibid. 165.
52 On al-Rāzi, ibid. 147; on al-Ījī, 154.
53 See van Ess, Die Erkenntnislehre 44; also Cürcâni, Şerhu’l-Mevâkıf i, 146.
54 This is Shahab Ahmed’s term. See his What is Islam?
55 Izutsu, The concept 143. According to al-Shahrastānī, al-Ashʿarī understood the “doing” of
religious duties as a kind of taṣdīq in the sense that doing was an outward indication of
one’s mental assent. Works (ʿamal) do not enter into īmān as a pillar, and the absence
of ʿamal does not turn a man immediately into a kāfir, but on the other hand, ʿamal is
not extraneous to īmān in such a way that he who neglects ʿamal may be said to deserve
no punishment and chastisement in the next world. Ibid. 161. Al-Ghazālī also maintained
that practice affects inner conviction and helps the conviction take deeper root in the
soul.
you must know your faith in detail 171

overemphasizing the danger of lapsing into küfr. The focus is on a positive defi-
nition of faith and what one can do to cultivate and grow it, as well as on which
vices to avoid in order not to weaken it. However, İzniḳī does not include an
extensive section on elfāẓ-i küfr, which will become staple in later ʿilm-i ḥāls—
he simply refers his readers to the collections of juridical opinions where they
are discussed in detail.56 He emphasizes that a believer who has committed a
sin should quickly repent and cites the prophylactic prayer one should recite
every day to protect oneself from şirk and küfr. But, he does not refer to the legal
solution that seems to have been in development during the first half of the
fifteenth century among the Ottoman legal scholars, namely that one should
both repent and renew one’s faith (tecdīd-i īmān) as a consequence of falling
into küfr. He also states that no one among the “people of the qibla” (i.e., those
praying in the direction of Mecca) should be labeled a kāfir, except when they
deny some aspect of belief or a verse of the Quran, or when they say things
that jurists consider blasphemous. In this respect, İzniḳī’s work, written in the
first half of the fifteenth century, before the onset of a more concerted politics
of defining and enforcing a Sunni orthodoxy and orthopraxy, reflects a more
relaxed, “spacious” concept of īmān in which one is not in constant danger of
transgressing the boundary with küfr, which is the sense we get from some later
Ottoman ʿilm-i ḥāls.
İzniḳī’s Muḳaddime continued to be a popular catechism well into the tenth/
sixteenth century, along with various other works in Turkish that were com-
posed or translated for the growing Ottoman Muslim community. However, a
new crop of ʿilm-i ḥāls began to be produced starting in the 1540s, in the heyday
of Sultan Süleymān’s attempts to highlight the empire’s commitment to and
defense of a Sunni orthodoxy, especially through legal discourse and elaborate
architectural projects. Multiple state and nonstate agents engaged in the pro-
cess of instilling a greater commitment to Sunnism in Ottoman Muslims while
simultaneously trying to define its content and boundaries in this particular
moment in time.57 Three texts will be of particular interest to us here: ʿİmādü’l-
İslām (The pillars of Islam) by ʿAbdu’r-raḥmān b. Yūsuf Aḳsarāyī, Lüṭfī Pasha’s
Tenbīhü’l-ʿāḳılīn ve teʾkīdü’l-gāfilīn (Cautioning of the rational ones and renewal
of request to the heedless ones), and Meḥmed b. Pīr ʿAlī Birgivī’s Vaṣiyetnāme
(Testament).
Aḳsarāyī’s ʿİmādü’l-İslām became extremely popular soon after being writ-
ten around 949/1543, to which numerous surviving tenth/sixteenth-century

56 Kutbe’d-dîn İznikî, Mukaddime 154.

57 I have discussed this phenomenon in greater detail in Krstić, State and religion.
172 krstić

copies of the text testify.58 We do not know anything about Aḳsarāyī himself,
except that he based his work on an earlier text in Persian by an ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz
Fārisī, entitled ʿUmdāt al-islām, but with extensive additions as well as omis-
sions, and the final product being presented in simple Turkish. Like İzniḳī’s
Muḳaddime, it is primarily focused on the five pillars of Islam, but in addition
to devoting chapters to faith (īmān), prayer (namāz), fasting (oruc), alms giv-
ing (ẕekāt), and pilgrimage (ḥac), it has further chapters on death, torments of
the grave, the afterlife, the rights (of parents, children, spouses, neighbors, etc.),
and etiquette (ādāb). Aḳsarāyī opens the first book, devoted to faith, by saying
that in the opinion of the legal experts, it is the detailed faith that is valid, which
is why he sees it necessary to explain what this detailed faith is. He states that
according to Taʾwilāt al-Kāshānī, a mystical-philosophical work of tafsīr written
c. 729/1329 by a Tabrizi scholar ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Kāshānī (d. c. 730/1330), a spe-
cialist in Ibn ʿArabī’s metaphysics, faith can be of two kinds: imitative (taḳlīdī)
and verified (taḥḳīḳī).59 Imitative faith can itself be of two kinds: false (bāṭıl)
and sound (ṣaḥīḥ). False taḳlīd is when someone says shahāda, thinking “here
are some words that everyone is saying, but I know nothing else besides”—such
a person cannot be considered a true believer (müʾmīn). Sound taḳlīd is when
someone understands that those who are saying the shahāda will be saved from
the poll tax (harāc) in this world and from the torments of the grave in the next
one, and he says shahāda because he desires the same. However, Aḳsarāyī pro-
ceeds to elaborate, in the Cāmiʿü’l-fetāvā it is said that the imitator’s faith is
accepted, but because he is rejecting the reasoning, he is considered a sinner
(ʿāṣī).60
He proceeds to say that verified faith (taḥḳīḳī īmān) can also be of two kinds:
based on reasoning (istidlālī) and based on perception (ẕevḳī). Drawing on al-
Ghazālī and Sharīf al-Jurjānī, he explains that the faith based on reasoning is
when one looks upon the world and sees that it is built on a sound basis and
contemplates everything that is created upon it to realize that it must not have
come into existence on its own and that there must be an excellent master
builder/creator of unparalleled power behind it. Such a person then begins
to recognize the power of this creator in all its characteristics (ṣıfaṭlar) and
that everything that exists is thanks to him. A person that comes to realize and

58 On this text, see Kelepetin Arpaguş, Osmanlı ve geleneksel İslâm 65–109. See also her article
on “İmâdü’l-islâm” in TDVİA, xxii, 172–173.
59 Aḳsarāyī, ʿİmādü’l-İslām 10a.
60 Cāmiʿü’l-fetāvā is a Hanafi legal manual-cum-collection of juridical rulings compiled by
Ḳırḳ Emre Meḥmed b. Muṣṭafā al-Ḥamīdī al-Ḳaramanī (d. 879/1475). For more details, see
Hira, Bir katalog yanıltması.
you must know your faith in detail 173

accept God’s existence and oneness and subjects to it completely in his or her
heart and soul can be said to have attained faith based on reasoning.61 As for
ẕevḳī īmān, he says that it is not very productive to discuss it with common peo-
ple (ʿavām).62
Upon introducing types of īmān, Aḳsarāyī moves into explaining its condi-
tions, using mostly fatwa collections as a source to emphasize that any Muslim
man or woman who reaches puberty and is not familiar with the basics of faith
cannot be considered a believer, and if, when asked to state the basics of faith,
they respond with “I do not know,” they are to be considered unbelievers (kāfir).
He refers to the Cāmiʿü’l-fetāvā that counsels heads of the households how to
teach their dependents about the basics of faith. “Do not ask the members
of your household questions about God’s oneness, because it is possible that
they would respond with ‘I do not know,’ which would make them unbelievers.
Rather teach them in this way: ‘This is a stipulation of God’s oneness, isn’t it?’
Then they can respond: ‘Yes.’ This is how you should teach them.”63
Before discussing the actual content of the articles of faith, Aḳsarāyī stops
to make the final distinction, between faith in general (mücmel īmān) and faith
in detail (mufaṣṣal īmān). The first one he explains as saying “I believe in God
with all his attributes and names, and I accept all his commands.” The second
one, he says, has seven pillars, each of which needs to be enumerated: “I believe
in Allah, His angels, books, prophets, the Day of Judgment, that everything—
good or bad—is from Him, and that there will be resurrection.” He writes that
according to Kashf al-asrār, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Bukhārī’s (d. 730/1330) commen-
tary on Pazdawī’s Uṣūl, some legal experts ( fuḳahā) believe that faith in general
is valid. However, according to the theologians (mutakallimūn), it is the detailed
faith that is valid, not the summary one. He refers to the Ash‘ari theologian Abū
Bakr al-Bāqillānī’s (d. 403/1013) Kitāb al-Tamhīd in which it is said that every
person should know their faith in detail.64 Consequently, Aḳsarāyī writes, he
also saw it fit to explain the faith in those terms so that everyone would learn
the basics and their faith would not be deficient. He then finally moves into the
detailed discussion of the articles of faith, within which he also includes a sec-
tion on the beliefs that distinguish Sunnis (ehl-i sünnet ve’l-cemāʿat) from other
sects, such as Kharijites and Shi‘ites (Rāfıżī).
The last part of the chapter on īmān deals in great detail with the elfāẓ-i
küfr. The examples cover a wide range of issues, from utterances—especially

61 Aḳsarāyī, ʿİmādü’l-İslām 10b–11a.

62 Ibid. 11b.
63 Ibid. 13a.
64 Ibid. 14a.
174 krstić

jokes—about the practices and beliefs of Islam, the prophets, God, and the
ulama, to utterances in social interactions between friends, spouses, etc. on var-
ious topics. For instance, if an infidel approaches someone and says, “Teach me
Islam so that I can become a Muslim” and that someone responds, “Go to such
and such scholar [so he can teach you],” the latter person is a kāfir because any-
one who allows another person to remain in unbelief any longer than necessary
is an unbeliever him/herself. Or, if someone says, “Don’t play chess, because
scholars say that those who play chess are the enemies of Allah” and another
responds, “If for this reason I am to become an enemy, so be it,” he becomes
a kāfir. Or if someone says “Bismillāh” when about to take a sip of wine, that
person is an unbeliever.65 Based on the fatwa collections he used, Aḳsarāyī stip-
ulates that anyone who has uttered blasphemous words should immediately
reject them (rücūʿ etmek) and renew their faith (tecdīd-i īmān).66
In sum, although he is using a variety of sources authored by both Hanafi
and Shafi‘i, Maturidi and Ash‘ari scholars, when it comes to the issue of īmān,
Aḳsarāyī’s ʿilm-i ḥāl emphasizes two particular ideas that are echoed in other
Ottoman ʿilm-i ḥāls of the tenth/sixteenth and eleventh/seventeenth centuries
but are not featured in the medieval Hanafi-Maturidi creeds. One of those
seems to be influenced by the Ash‘ari theological tradition: in order to be valid
in the afterlife, one’s faith should be detailed (although from the legal stand-
point general faith is sufficient to render one a Muslim). Related to this is also
Aḳsarāyī’s view that although an imitator’s faith is technically acceptable, the
latter is a sinner because he rejects reasoning, with faith based on reasoning
being extolled as ideal. The other major idea falls within the purview of the east-
ern Hanafi legal tradition and carefully circumscribes the boundaries of īmān
in a way that we do not see in the medieval creeds. It maintains that commit-
ting küfr is a clear and present danger and that identifying those who commit
it, rather than being an issue that Sunni Muslims should shun, is in fact some-
thing for which one has to be on a constant lookout within one’s own social
circle.
The same two key ideas are channeled by another mid-tenth/sixteenth cen-
tury author of a number of catechetical works in Turkish, one-time grand
vizier of Sultan Süleymān, Lüṭfī Pasha (d. 970/1563).67 In his Tenbīhü’l-ʿāḳılīn
ve teʾkīdü’l-gāfilīn, Lüṭfī Pasha comes out strongly in favor of the detailed faith,
which he defines as the knowledge of the six articles, in addition to God’s

65 Ibid. 29a–33a.
66 Ibid. 33b.
67 For a detailed discussion of Lüṭfī Pasha’s works and catechetical mission, see Krstić, A cat-
echizing.
you must know your faith in detail 175

attributes, as the only way to enter Paradise. He considers shahāda as a legal

precondition for being a Muslim but as insufficient for attaining salvation
and becoming a true believer (muʾmīn). Like Aḳsarāyī, Lüṭfī Pasha finds sup-
port for this position in the Hanafi fatwa literature, especially al-Fatāwā l-
Tatārkhāniyya, which insisted on the necessity of being able to describe the
contents of one’s faith when asked to do so, lest one becomes a kāfir.68 Lüṭfī
Pasha envisions potential situations for such questioning in a number of pas-
sages in his account, at one point referring to the Sura al-Mumtaḥana (The
woman under questioning; Q 60: 10), suggesting that the new converts coming
into the community should be questioned about their faith. Those whose faith
is found deficient should receive further instruction, while those who explicitly
say “I do not know” and thus fall into küfr should be made to renew their faith as
well as their marriage vow in the case that they were married. Seeking to define
precisely the content of the necessary knowledge he envisioned for salvation,
Lüṭfī Pasha penned a short catechism in question-and-answer format that set
out to teach in around 40 questions and succinct answers the basics of faith
and worship.69
Although he was not madrasa educated, Lüṭfī Pasha read widely, especially
in fiqh but also in kalām, although he explicitly condemns speculative kalām
along the lines already outlined in al-Ghazālī’s Iḥyāʾ as a potential source of
unbelief and heresy (zandaqa).70 A close reading of his works reveals a mind
trying to grapple with the inconsistencies in the sources and reconcile the posi-
tions of the Hanafi-Maturidis, with whom he professed affiliation as a member
of the Ottoman ruling elite, with the positions of the Ash‘ari and Shafi‘i scholars
whose works he used extensively and clearly found inspirational. For instance,
on the subject of īmān-i icmālī and īmān-i tafṣīlī, he tries to reconcile the Hanafi
position, which favors the former, with the Ash‘ari position, whose favoring of
a more detailed knowledge of faith he himself endorsed. He refers to metn-i
Pezdevī (his Uṣūl al-dīn, one of the foundational Hanafi-Maturidi texts), say-
ing that it states that īmān is based on two pillars: knowing the six articles of
faith, on the one hand, and assenting to them in one’s heart and professing
them with the tongue, on the other.71 Only such a person will be saved from
Hell. But then he refers to the Ash‘ari scholar Ibn al-Ahdal (d. 855/1451) who,

68 Lüṭfī Pasha, Tenbīhü’l-ʿāḳılīn 9b, 44b–45a.

69 On this work see Krstić, From shahāda to ʿaqīda.
70 Lüṭfī Pasha, Tenbīhü’l-ʿāḳılīn 7a.
71 Pazdawī indeed implied that īmān-i icmālī is the belief in the six articles of faith enumer-
ated in the Gabriel hadith, and stated that knowing this is sufficient, and that it is not
necessary to know further details. See Pezdevî, Ehl-i sünnet akâidi 234.
176 krstić

in his Kitāb Kashf al-ghiṭāʾ ʿan ḥaqāʾiq al-tawḥīd, stated that when one knows
one’s faith in this many details and attributes, it is called īmān-i icmāl-i mufaṣ-
ṣal, or detailed general faith. Lüṭfī Pasha proceeds to explain that in his own
work he referred to such faith as īmān-i tafṣīlī in order to distinguish it from
what the mutakallimūn of olden times labeled as īmān-i icmālī (i.e., the sha-
hāda).72
Lüṭfī Pasha’s fidelity to, yet apparent intellectual discomfort with, some
aspects of the Hanafi positions on matters of faith particularly comes through
in his discussion of the faith of the imitator, where he repeatedly extols the
importance of knowledge and reasoning for achieving certainty in faith and
condemns blind imitation, only to default to the well-known Hanafi position
that an imitator’s faith is acceptable. In fact, his discussion remains more
faithful to al-Māturīdī’s own championing of reason, which led him to con-
demn taqlīd, and Lüṭfī Pasha cites al-Māturīdī’s sayings in a number of places,
mostly based on reports of other scholars, like Abū’l-Ḥasan al-Rustughfanī (d.
ca. 350/961), one of al-Māturīdī’s students.73 Even though he duly acknowl-
edges and accepts Abū Ḥanīfa’s inclusive position on taqlīd, by consistently jux-
taposing īmān-i taḳlīdī as potentially leading to Hell with īmān-i tafṣīlī, which
he sees as leading to Paradise, Lüṭfī Pasha makes it clear that in his view the
threshold for being considered a muʾmīn is considerably higher than for some
of the earlier adherents of the Hanafi madhhab. At the same time, for all his
championing of faith based on reasoning and knowledge, he is careful not to go
to the other extreme and endorse the notion of kufr al-ʿāmma, like the slightly
younger North African Ash‘ari scholar al-Sanūsī. In fact, he explicitly rejects this
idea as Mu‘tazili and focuses on the importance of learning and instruction for
common people.74
In contrast to Aḳsarāyī’s and Lüṭfī Pasha’s views, Birgivī (or Birgili) Meḥmed
Efendi (d. 981/1573), the author of by far the most popular Ottoman catechism
in Turkish, entitled Vaṣiyetnāme (970/1562–1563), stated briefly and without
elaboration that īmān-i icmālī is sufficient (kāfīdür) and that īmān-i tafṣīlī is not
necessary. He writes that if someone knows the necessary things and believes in
them but cannot explain them in detail, their Islam is still valid (ḥükm olunur).
He also maintains that the imitator’s faith is sound, without discussing any cir-
cumstances when it may not be so.75 However, in his more elaborate catecheti-

72 Lüṭfī Pasha, Tenbīhü’l-ʿāḳılīn 21a–b.

73 Rudolph, Al-Māturīdī 140–144: Lüṭfī Pasha, Tenbīhü’l-ʿāḳılīn 43b–44a.
74 Lüṭfī Pasha, Tenbīhü’l-ʿāḳılīn 43b–45a, 15b–17a.
75 Birgili, Vasiyyet-name 104. For a detailed discussion of Birgivī’s catechetical outlook, see
also Tezcan, A canon of disenchantment. I am grateful to Baki Tezcan for sharing a draft
you must know your faith in detail 177

cal work, al-Ṭarīqa al-Muḥammadiyya, which he wrote in Arabic just before his
death to address not only the basics of faith and practice but also a variety of
other topics related to piety and moral living, Birgivī specifies that the faith of
the imitator is true but that he is a sinner if he gives up reasoning.76 Although
Birgivī does not explicitly discuss the matter of summary versus detailed faith
in this text, in the section “On Knowledge” he states that the knowledge about
what a given situation (i.e., ʿilm-i ḥāl) demands from one in terms of the law is
obligatory for every individual ( farḍ al-ʿayn), while the knowledge of the sci-
ences that allow one to reason about the underlying proofs of one’s faith, and
thus go beyond taqlīd, is obligatory for the community ( farḍ al-kifāya).77 Birgivī
clearly endorsed the idea that seeking knowledge was the duty of each Muslim,
as a popular hadith stipulated, but he apparently did not find it necessary or jus-
tified to raise the bar for being considered a true believer too high, especially
in a text like Vaṣiyetnāme, which was written for the common folk, who did not
know Arabic and lacked formal learning. Although he expressed the opinion
that those who are capable of knowing but fail to do so are worse than animals,
he was less concerned with the ignorance of the simple folk—which could
be corrected through teaching—than with the arrogance and hypocrisy of the
learned, which in his view pointed to serious moral failures and lack of piety.78
During his life, Birgivī attained prominence as a hadith teacher in a provin-
cial hadith school in Birgi and authored numerous works in the tenor of moral-
ist exhortation. Although he was well connected to the Ottoman establishment
through his patrons, he did not belong to the highest ranks of the Ottoman
ulama. But, his fame grew posthumously, and in recent years his catecheti-
cal works, especially his al-Ṭarīqa al-Muḥammadiyya, have come under close
scrutiny because he became an inspiration for various “puritan,” “sunna-mind-
ed”79 preachers in the eleventh/seventeenth century, most notably for Ḳāḍī-

of this article, which is an expanded version of the paper he presented at the conference
on “Re-thinking Ottoman Sunnitization, c. 1450–c. 1750” in Budapest, August 2017.
76 Birgivī, al-Ṭarīqah al-Muḥammadīyah 18. I thank Sona Grigoryan for translating the rele-
vant parts of the text.
77 Ibid. 23–24. See also Ivanyi, Virtue, piety and the law 183–184. The notion that ʿilm-i ḥāl
encapsulates compulsory knowledge also appears in the Vaṣiyetnāme: “farż-i ʿayn olan
ʿilimleri ki ʿilm-i ḥāldur.” See Birgili, Vasiyyet-name 118.
78 This is particularly obvious in his discussion of unbelief (kufr) in al-Ṭarīqa al-Muḥamma-
diyya. On this issue see also Ivanyi, Virtue, piety and the law.
79 This term was suggested by Derin Terzioğlu in order to capture the variety of backgrounds
and pious sensibilities displayed by various contemporary preachers who advocated for a
reform based on firm rootedness in the Prophetic custom (sunna) and divine law (sharia),
many of whom were Sufis. See Terzioğlu, Sunna-minded. For the most recent discussion
on this issue, see Tuşalp Atiyas, The “Sunna-minded” trend.
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zāde Meḥmed Efendi (d. 1045/1635) whose followers became known as the
Kadızadelis.80 Nevertheless, on the subject of summary versus detailed faith he
seems to have represented a more moderate Hanafi position compared to some
of his contemporaries and later followers, including Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed. In fact,
it may even be said, in light of the discussion above about the late medieval
creeds, that Birgivī was more faithful to the traditional Hanafi-Maturidi stance
on these issues than İzniḳī, Aḳsarāyī, Lüṭfī Pasha, or later authors who are said
to have been directly inspired by him.
Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed’s own ʿilm-i ḥāl, for instance, exudes a spirit that is less
“minimalist” when it comes to the issue of the importance of knowledge to
faith. Under his penname (mahlaṣ) “ʿİlmī,” Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed authored a pop-
ular versified catechism in 1037/1627–1628 in which he did not provide precise
definitions of īmān-i icmālī or īmān-i tafṣīlī, nor did he explicitly weigh in on
whether the former or the latter is necessary.81 However, as a whole, the work
is a vociferous endorsement of knowledge (ʿilm), which he not only adopts as
his mahlaṣ but which he repeatedly characterizes as the animating force of
one’s faith and piety.82 He states that the essence of faith is to be found in
the Quran and that it should be assented to in detail.83 He envisions a pro-
cess of learning in which professing belief in God’s word epitomized by the
Quran and assenting to it in one’s heart is a starting point in a quest for a
deeper, detailed understanding of the meaning of God’s word. He also explic-
itly encourages moving beyond imitation toward verification.84 Above all, for
Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed knowledge of faith is also essential for the cause that he
presents as the reason for writing his ʿilm-i ḥāl, namely for the defense of the

80 Most important recent studies on Birgivī are Kaylı, A Critical Study and Ivanyi, Virtue,
piety and the law. El-Rouayheb and Ivanyi see Birgivī as a representative of what they label
as a “intolerant” or “illiberal” streak in the Hanafi-Maturidi tradition that possibly stems
from postclassical, Central Asian Hanafism and is best epitomized by various postclassical
fatwa compilations. See El-Rouayheb, From Ibn Ḥajar 303–304; Ivanyi, Virtue, piety and
the law 82, 92.
81 By comparing the verses from Manzūme-i ʿaḳāʾid and verses of Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed Efendi
cited by Kātib Çelebi in his Mizānü’l-haḳḳ, Songül Karaca demonstrates that the author of
this versified catechism with the penname “ʿİlmī” is the same Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed Efendi.
See Karaca, Kadızâde Mehmed Efendi 25–27. For further evidence, see Tezcan, The por-
trait.
82 Karaca, Kadızâde Mehmed Efendi 214. “Gel imdi ilm-ile kıl dînün ihyâ/ Ki cehl-ile ne dîn
kalur ne takvâ.”
83 Ibid. 205.
84 “Hudâyâ eylegil fazlunla tevfîk/Geçür taklîdden kıl ehl-i tahkîk.” Interestingly, Karaca sug-
gests that Ḳāḍīzāde borrowed these verses from the famous Sufi Celveti master Maḥmūd
Hüdāyī (d. 1038/1628), 79–80.
you must know your faith in detail 179

true faith (that of ehl-i sünnet) against the heretics (ehl-i ḍalālet), whose igno-
rant views—especially under the guise of Sufism—are said to have proliferated
in the author’s time.85
As a more explicit contrast to Birgivī stands Aḥmed Rūmī Aḳḥiṣārī or Aḥmed
Rūmī Efendi (d. c. 1041/1632), whose Risāle was an ʿilm-i ḥāl directly modeled
on Birgivī’s Vaṣiyetnāme and achieved great popularity, frequently being copied
in miscellanies together with its model. Little is known of Aḳḥiṣārī’s life apart
from the fact that he was originally a Christian from Cyprus who was enslaved
and later converted to Islam.86 Given the criticism of Ottoman authorities that
he voiced in some of his works, he was apparently not courting dynastic patron-
age, and he seems to have spent most of his career in Akhisar in Anatolia, appar-
ently without a formal position.87 He authored a number of shorter treatises
critical of what he perceived as harmful innovations in the spheres of belief,
worship, and social life (especially tobacco and coffee).88 He may have read
and used the work of Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328), and he was familiar with the
work of the latter’s student, Ibn al-Jawziyya (d. 750/1350), which has led schol-
ars to band him together with Birgivī and the “Kadızadelis” as a representative
of “Salafi Islam” who introduced Hanbali fundamentalism to Hanafism.89 How-
ever, the picture is more complicated, as Aḳḥiṣārī’s reformist thought seems to
have been informed by multiple influences. As Khaled el-Rouayheb has estab-
lished, his treatise on taqlīd (Risāla fī l-Taqlīd) consisted almost entirely of quo-
tations from the fifteenth-century Maliki Ash‘ari scholar al-Sanūsī and argued
for the necessity of ascertaining the rational proofs for the articles of faith—
something that Hanbalis would not have agreed with.90 Plus, facile equations
with other scholars blur the particularities of each author’s intellectual outlook

85 “Zuhûr itdi nice bâtıl mezâhib/Bulup hakkı ana sen olma zâhib.” Ibid. 240, 241–247.
86 See Michot, Introduction 1. See also Sheikh, Ottoman puritanism 41–45.
87 Tezcan, A canon of disenchantment.
88 For a list of his works, see Michot, Introduction 5–9.
89 Ibid. 2–3; Sheikh, Ottoman puritanism. For a reconsideration of that view, see Terzioğlu’s
paper in this volume.
90 El-Rouayheb, Islamic intellectual history 191. As El-Rouayheb points out, this stance on
taqlīd in matters of īmān was entirely opposed to the Hanbali stance on the issue. As
for al-Sanūsī, his work is cited already by Ḥasan Kāfī Aḳḥiṣārī (Pruščak) (d. 1024/1615)
in his Rawḍat al-jannat fī uṣūl al-i’tiqādāt (1014/1605), but it becomes more popular in
the later eleventh/seventeenth century. Interestingly, in this work devoted to the nature
of īmān and drawing on both Hanafi and Shafi‘i, Maturidi, and Ash‘ari creeds (including
al-Sanūsī’s and al-Suyūtī’s), the author does not discuss the question of summary versus
detailed faith, but he affirms the validity of the imitator’s faith (with the remark that the
latter is a sinner for neglecting to comprehend his faith). See Pruščak, Džennetske bašče
16.
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and particular context in which they wrote—even though he is known to have

admired Birgivī, Aḥmed Rūmī Efendi was also ready to part with him on certain
critical issues.
After he has discussed the positive and negative attributes of God in the
beginning of his Risāle, Rūmī Efendi points out that knowing these attributes
still does not suffice for one’s faith to be sound. For that, it is necessary to know
more about the articles of faith. It is not enough to simply say the shahāda,
but one must also know of God’s oneness and of the Prophet in greater detail;
otherwise, one might learn wrongly and consider oneself a Muslim, but with-
out learning about what makes īmān sound, one will reap none of its benefits.
Indeed, one will be treated as a Muslim and spared from the poll tax, but in
the afterlife a faith like this will earn one a place in Hell.91 Rūmī Efendi goes
on to enumerate the six articles of faith, elaborating on each. Afterwards, he
emphasizes that these articles should be learned in their entirety and mem-
orized well (tamām ögrenüp hāṭıralarında perkişdüreler), rather than relying
on what one has learned from one’s parents and grandparents, which may be
wrong and may not lead to salvation in the afterlife. He emphasizes the impor-
tance of the knowledgeable ones within the ehl-i sünnet ve’l-cemāʿat teaching
those who are ignorant to preserve them from küfr. Because, those who do not
perform their worship and even commit some sins may still be allowed into
Paradise after expiating their sins. But those ignorant ones who do not know
God’s attributes and what īmān and Islam are, or who learn it wrongly, will end
up in Hell eternally, even if they performed their worship day and night.92
It is no surprise, after this exposition on īmān, that Rūmī Efendi comes down
on the opposite side of Birgivī on the issue of whether or not īmān-i icmālī is
sufficient. He points out that whoever learns the articles of faith he elaborated
on, believes in them in their heart, and professes them orally, has a detailed
faith (īmān-i tafṣīlī). If, on the other hand, someone does not know all this and
simply says “I believe that everything that Muḥammad brought from God is
true,” this is īmān-i icmālī. In truth, he says, scholars have considered this suffi-
cient, but—and here he makes the same nod as Aḳsarāyī and Lüṭfī Pasha to the
legal stipulations on küfr, but without referring to any concrete fatwas—those
who do not know the details of Islam when being asked about it and respond
with “I do not know,” become unbelievers (kāfir olur). Therefore, there is no
other solution than for one to learn what is necessary and keep refreshing it
in order to be saved from eternal torments.93 The theme of being questioned

91 Aḳḥiṣārī, Risāle-i Rūmī Efendi 87b–88b.

92 Ibid. 93b–94b.
93 Ibid. 95a.
you must know your faith in detail 181

about faith, which was mentioned in the context of Aḳsarāyī’s and Lüṭfī Pasha’s
works, also pervades Rūmī Efendi’s Risāle. Besides using it to justify the detailed
knowledge of faith, he also warns newly married men to question their wives
about faith on their wedding night, before consummating the marriage, but
in such a way that the wife is not likely to say “I do not know” because that
would necessitate annulment of the marriage.94 In the interest of brevity, Rūmī
Aḥmed states that he would not include a detailed discussion of elfāẓ-i küfr, but
he familiarizes his audience with the staple decision stipulated in the fatwa lit-
erature in the case of uttering blasphemous words (i.e., tecdīd-i īmān ve nikāh,
or renewal of faith and marriage vow).
The themes of having to know one’s faith in detail from sound sources rather
than unquestioningly accepting the word of one’s parents or grandparents,
being ready for being questioned about it, and guarding oneself from the utter-
ances and actions that may lead to küfr is most forcefully brought home in
an extraordinarily colorful catechetical work entitled Mebḥas̱-i īmān. It was
written by Muṣliḥu’d-dīn Muṣṭafā b. Ḥamza b. İbrahīm b. Veliyu’d-dīn, who
went by the penname of Nuṣḥī al-Nāṣıḥī. He was a low-ranking member of the
ulama and a Sufi, affiliated with the Naqshbandi brotherhood, who originally
came from Bolu but who lived for many years in Cairo.95 In her discussion of
this work, Derin Terzioğlu has already highlighted the extent to which Nuṣḥī
viewed the knowledge of ʿilm-i ḥāl as the antidote to all sorts of social prob-
lems and troublesome innovations he perceived in the Ottoman polity of his
own time. However, there is merit in taking a closer look at Nuṣḥī’s views on
the issues of general, detailed, and imitative faith, since his work ties together
the themes and authors discussed in the paper so far in a manner that helps us
better appreciate the evolution of a particular strand of Ottoman Sunni under-
standing of īmān. Writing around 1633–1636, Nuṣḥī already had a considerable
corpus of catechetical literature in Turkish to consult for his synthesis of neces-
sary knowledge about faith that he set out to present in his work. He informs his
readers that he consulted 40 books, most of which he lists by title. Among the
titles in Turkish, we find Birgivī’s Vaṣiyetnāme, Aḥmed Rūmī’s Risāle, Shaykh
Bālī el-Üveysī’s Hediyetü’l-Muhliṣīn,96 Süleymān b. Halīl ʿUnḳūdī’s Behcetü’l-
ʿārifīn ve ravżatü’s-sālikīn, and the Turkish translation of Shirʿat al-Islām, a
popular work by Muḥammad b. Abū Bakr al-Bukhārī, known as Imāmzāda

94 Ibid. 99a.
95 Terzioğlu, Where ʿilm-i ḥāl; on Nuṣhī al-Nāṣıḥī’s identity, see Tezcan, A portrait 228; Ter-
zioğlu, Bid‘at, custom.
96 This text is often incorrectly ascribed to Veysī (d. 1037/1628) in library catalogues and stud-
ies on Veysī.
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(d. 573/1177). A longer list in Arabic includes the staples of Hanafi creedal litera-
ture, such as Fiqh al-akbar and Waṣiyya, attributed to Abū Ḥanīfa, and unspec-
ified commentaries on both, Nasafī’s ʿAqāʾid as well as Taftāzānī’s commentary
on it and various supercommentaries on the latter, al-Ūshī’s Badʾ al-amālī (also
known as Yaqūl al-ʿAbd) and three commentaries on it, as well as a text Nuṣḥī
refers to as ʿUmdat, which is most probably Abū l-Barakāt al-Nasafī’s ʿUmdat
al-ʿaqīda li-ahl al-sunna mentioned earlier. Interestingly, Nuṣḥī also appears
to have used Lüṭfī Pasha’s compendious catechetical work in Arabic entitled
Zubdat al-masāʾil. Additionally, he also lists several works on fiqh, like Akmal
al-Dīn al-Bābartī’s (d. 786/1384–1385) sharḥ on Hidāya, and several works on
kalām, such as Hediyetü’l-mehdiyīn (or muḥtedīn) by Ahīzāde Yūsuf Çelebi (d. c.
904/1499) and Baḥr al-kalām by Abū l-Muʿīn al-Nasafī (d. 508/1114).97 Among
the last ones, he also lists al-Ghazālī’s Iḥyāʾ, which is nevertheless an impor-
tant model for the author, at least in his division (if not precise content) of
knowledge into that which is compulsory on each believer ( farż-ı ʿayn) and
that which is incumbent upon the community as a whole ( farż-ı kifāye).
In light of this list, which is heavily skewed toward classical Hanafi creedal
and legal literature, more so than the source lists of other Ottoman authors
discussed so far, it is interesting to examine how Nuṣḥī handles the issues
of imitative, general, and detailed faith. He opens his discussion on īmān by
saying that a true believer’s faith can be of three kinds: muḳalled (imitated),
muhaḳḳaḳ (certain, verified), and müstedel (deduced, inferred). He proceeds
to state that in “our meẕheb” (Ar. madhhab)—that of ehl-i sünnet ve’l-cemāʿat
(i.e., the Sunnis)—imitative faith is considered sound.98 However, because of
rejecting reasoning, an imitator is a fāsıḳ (impious, sinner; in breach of law).
They call him imitator because he learned the faith wrongly from his parents
or someone else, and his potential for being seduced by the devil is great. So,
even though he admits that his own madhhab finds imitative faith acceptable,
every time Nuṣḥī mentions imitators and their faith, he implies that such faith
must be riddled with mistakes and misunderstandings, and thus wrong. This
is a remarkable contrast with the discussion in pre-Ottoman Hanafi creedal
literature, all of which makes sure to point out that the muḳallid’s faith may
lead to certainty in belief and that such a believer may have sound faith, while

97 Nuṣḥī, Mebḥas̱-i īmān 61a–b. I thank Derin Terzioğlu for making her copy of the text avail-
able to me. It should be mentioned that various manuscripts of this work, including the
one used here, attribute it to Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed. However, by cross-referencing Nuṣḥī’s
works, Terzioğlu has demonstrated that this is not correct.
98 See below for a more detailed consideration of the usage of the term madhhab in Ottoman
ʿilm-i ḥāls.
you must know your faith in detail 183

only some authors bother to mention that if an imitator neglects to seek fur-
ther information about faith they are to be considered sinners. Nuṣḥī’s position,
however, is that such faith is by default wrong and sinful. He goes on to contrast
it to the knowledge of those who learn their articles of faith from the books and
the ulama, and who, if they have no doubts in their hearts, attain īmān-i taḥḳīḳī
or verified faith. Finally, those who seek to understand the intricacies of every
proof of God’s existence have deduced faith, but he adds that such faith is only
for the ulama and not of use for the common people for whom he is writing.99
As for the common people, they must prioritize their ʿilm-i ḥāl, which is
knowledge about faith compulsory upon each believer. He states that the
essence of faith (aṣl-i īmān) is comprised of six articles, while there are five
pillars of Islam, both sets of which he discusses in detail. Further in the text,
he includes a section that is almost verbatim from Aḥmed Rūmī’s Risāle and
emphasizes the fact that īmān consists of a number of things and that simply
saying shahāda would not do. He reminds his audience that while shahāda (as
īmān-i icmālī) may be sufficient to be considered a Muslim, if one does not
know the details about īmān and Islam when asked, one becomes a kāfir, and
Hell is waiting for them in the afterlife, so it is essential for one’s salvation to
have detailed faith.100
The knowledge of these foundations of īmān and Islam, as he emphasizes,
is not simply a vehicle for salvation and guarantee for entering Paradise; it also
has a practical social application, of stemming what Nuṣḥī perceives as an inex-
orable decline of Ottoman society starting around 950/1543–1544 due to neglect
of the obligatory, farż-ı ʿayn knowledge and favoring of the farż-ı kifaye learn-
ing. In particular, anyone with a solid knowledge of ʿilm-i ḥāl would be able,
after just a short conversation, to identify heretics who have proliferated within
the Ottoman realm and infiltrated the army and the government, according to
Nuṣḥī. Building on his passionate case for inculcation of the common believers
in the basics of faith by the knowledgeable members of the community, neigh-
borhood imams, and heads of households, Nuṣḥī goes as far as to suggest an
annual examination of all Muslim boys above the age of seven in their knowl-
edge of ʿilm-i ḥāl, recommending expulsion from the neighborhood of those
displaying ignorance or failure to learn.101
Like other authors of Ottoman ʿilm-i ḥāls, Nuṣḥī pairs his insistence on the
knowledge of the ʿilm-i ḥāl with insistence on awareness of the boundaries

99 Nuṣḥī, Mebḥas̱-i īmān 62a–b. Also, later in the text, 108b–109a.

100 Ibid. 92a–95a.
101 Ibid. 74a–75b.
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of īmān and necessity of guarding oneself from what is prohibited and cor-
rupts one’s faith. He argues that such awareness can be effectively attained by
learning the examples of elfāẓ and efʿāl-i küfr (blasphemous acts), which Nuṣḥī
catalogues in great detail at the end of his work, providing a list of the fatwa
collections that he consulted in order to compile this section. Again display-
ing a remarkable awareness of the moment and place in which he is writing,
Nuṣḥī anticipates Guy Burak’s argument articulated in his study on the ori-
gins of the legal solution of tecdīd-i īmān for cases of küfr, which highlights
differences in the practices of Rumi and Arab Hanafis (see above). Along the
same lines, Nuṣḥī explains that he gave a detailed list of sources for this sec-
tion, lest someone who lives in other parts of Ottoman or Muslim realms and
does not have access to these fatwa compilations might think he is inventing
things. Because, he continues, these fatwa compilations cannot be found in
some regions (vilāyetler), and people do not know of the words that induce küfr.
Some assert that Abū Ḥanīfa had said that one should not accuse of küfr (i.e.,
engage in takfīr) anyone who belongs to the people who pray toward Mecca
(ehl-i ḳıble). However, in the Hanafi madhhab a person who pronounces elfāẓ-i
küfr or does efʿāl-i küfr can become a kāfir, but some who hear of this reject that
this is a Hanafi tradition. For instance, it is reported that the ulama of Egypt
have not been giving fatāwā on küfr for anyone who pronounces elfāẓ-i küfr,
but this is either because they are afraid of people and try to flatter them, or
they are ignorant of these things. There is no local transmission of this kind of
fatāwā, and without tradition or precedent (ḥaml) a juridical opinion cannot
be given.102
The latter explanation is important because it highlights the diversity within
the Hanafi madhhab across the Ottoman Empire. Even in the context of the
lands of Rum, it would be wrong to suggest that by the eleventh/seventeenth
century all Ottoman ʿilm-i ḥāl writers made an 180 degree turn from the ear-
lier Hanafi-Maturidi position; rather, a variety of positions coexisted, although
with a marked tendency toward the stance that īmān-i tafṣīlī is necessary for
salvation.103 As we have seen, the debate on this issue was complicated by the

102 Ibid. 128a.

103 For instance, if we focus on the late eleventh/seventeenth century, Ebū’l-Beḳā el-Kefevī
(d. 1095/1684) in his popular ʿilm-i ḥāl entitled Tühfetü’ş-şahān, which in its ʿaḳāʾid section
draws significantly and often verbatim on Birgivī’s Vaṣiyetnāme, did not strive to close the
apparent logical gap between the idea that summary faith is sufficient to be considered a
true believer, as stated by Birgivī, and the provision, which Kefevī also refers to, that failure
to answer the question “what is faith?” in detail makes one an unbeliever and requires a
renewal of faith and marriage vow. See the transcription of the ʿaḳāʾid section of Kefevī’s
work in Tarık, Ebü’l-Bekâ el-Kefevî 591–606, esp. 602. In contrast, an anonymous volumi-
you must know your faith in detail 185

fact that various authors appear to have understood differently what “sum-
mary” and “detailed” meant as qualifiers of faith. For instance, in his popular
work on creed entitled Dürerü’l-ʿaḳāʾid, written some time before 1024/1615, the
famous Halveti Sufi shaykh and preacher ʿAbdü’l-mecīd Sivāsī (d. 1049/1639)
mounts a vocal defense of both summary/general faith and the faith of an imi-
tator, stating that both are accepted by the consensus of the Sunni community
and that an imitator, even though he may be a rebel for not understanding
the proofs, is still a believer as long as he has no doubts in faith.104 However,
Sivāsī’s definitions are interesting: he underlines that īmān-i icmālī means hav-
ing faith in general terms, such as saying that one believes in angels, and books,
and prophets. Īmān-i tafṣīlī, on the other hand, denotes detailed belief that
can distinguish between the angels by name, like Cibrāʾīl and Mihāʾīl, and the
prophets, like Mūsā and ʿĪsā, and the books, like Tevrāt and İncīl. Sivāsī empha-
sizes that while professing faith in general is sufficient (kāfī), detailed faith is
a necessary condition (şarṭ), because anyone who does not believe in or out-
right denies the singularity or multiplicity contained in a particular category
of belief is a kāfir.105 In light of the previous discussion, it appears that Sivāsī
assumes a more detailed knowledge under the category of general faith than
most Hanafi authors.
Sivāsī’s treatment of the topic raises the question of whether we may per-
haps trace a dissenting streak in ʿilm-i ḥāls and related genres authored by
prominent Sufis, a streak that pushes back against the narrowing definitions
of belief and greater demands on the believer typically associated with the
followers of Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed Efendi—who famously clashed with Sivāsī
in the late 1620s and 1630s—and various other eleventh/seventeenth-century
sunna-minded commentators.106 While a detailed consideration of this ques-
tion requires a separate study, a limited inquiry into the contents of some popu-
lar eleventh/seventeenth-century Sufi works suggests that this was not the case.
It appears that even those authors who did not explicitly embrace the necessity
of having īmān-i tafṣīlī found it important to signal its superiority over īmān-
i icmālī in no uncertain terms. For instance, Münīrī-i Belgrādī (d. 1045/1635),
a well-known Rumeli Sufi who authored an ʿilm-i ḥāl entitled Sübülü’l-Hüdā,
opens his work with a discussion of īmān, stating that faith can be general and

nous ʿilm-i ḥāl work written around 1099/1688 that draws on a variety of medieval and
Ottoman-era creedal works, stipulates (without any reference to summary faith) that the
detailed faith is obligatory (vâcibdür). See Atar (ed.), Makâlât 61.
104 Sivāsī, Dürerü’l-ʿaḳāʾid, 17b–18a.
105 Ibid. 13a–b.
106 On the clash between the two Zilfi, The Kadizadelis; Çoban, Mihnet dönemi.
186 krstić

detailed. He defines the former as professing belief that everything Muḥammad

brought from God is true and says that this is sufficient to make one a müʾmīn
and worthy of Paradise. However, he points out that whoever has detailed faith
will earn a place in Paradise that is superior to that of someone with general
faith.107 Another eleventh/seventeenth-century work on īmān, an anonymous
Risāle-i ʿamāniye [sic] that is also likely authored by a Sufi, states that upon the
consensus of the ulama, icmālī īmān entails affirmation that God is one, that
Muḥammad is his prophet, and that everything he brought from God is true.
In principle, this knowledge is sufficient, but it is compulsory on each believer
( farż-ı ʿayn) to learn the details of faith, as God has ordered that religion must
be based on comprehension (tefaḳḳuh) and prohibited ignorance.108
An intriguing illustration of the eleventh/seventeenth-century Sufi authors’
tendency to emphasize the importance of greater knowledge for sound faith
comes from the famous Halveti shaykh Niyāzī-i Mıṣrī (d. 1105/1694), who dis-
cusses this issue in his widely popular Risāle-i Esʾile ve ecvibe.109 As Mıṣrī states,
he wrote this work in order to dispel the doubts about Sufis caused by some of
the things they say, which are misinterpreted by the common people and some
ulama—an age-old problem that Sufis had to deal with but that now gained
new visibility and mobilized society in a new way. From the 1630s onward, Sufis
had borne the brunt of the Kadızadelis’ rants against the blameworthy inno-
vations in belief and practice, as well as accusations of shunning the sharia.
Mıṣrī’s goal was to show that Sufis belong to the people of God and to the Sunni
meẕheb, and more precisely, when it comes to Sufis from the lands of Rum (Rūm
vilāyeti), to the meẕhebs of Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī and Abū Ḥanīfa. Mıṣrī’s
introduction, similar to contemporary ʿilm-i ḥāls, highlights the broader usage
of the term meẕheb (Ar. madhhab, “that which is followed”; “the opinion one
adopts”)—which is typically used by modern scholars only to index belonging
to one of the schools of Islamic law—to denote sectarian (or denominational)
and theological affiliation as well. In the view of the Ottoman ʿilm-i ḥāl authors,
there was only one correct meẕheb in terms of belief (īʿtiḳād), and that was the
Sunni meẕheb.110 At the same time, although they professed affiliation with the

107 Belgrādī, Sübülü’l-hüdā 11a–b.

108 Risāle-i ʿamāniye 55a.
109 On Mıṣrī’s career and contemporary religio-political dynamics, see Terzioğlu, Sufi and dis-
sident.
110 Thus, in the context of the Ottoman ʿilm-i ḥāl literature, the madhhab of ahl al-sunna wa-
l-jamāʿa is conceptually equal to the al-firqa al-nājiyya in the heresiographical literature,
the latter typically being understood as the only sect of Islam (out of 73) that guarantees
salvation. Both the term madhhab and the term firqa are here imbued with claims to being
exclusive repositories of “truth,” and both are oriented externally, towards other groups.
you must know your faith in detail 187

Hanafi and Maturidi meẕheb, respectively, and emphasized their primacy, in

terms of legal practice and method of theological argumentation, they allowed
for plurality and regarded these largely a matter of a Muslim’s geographical
provenance.111 Altogether, however, in this era of polarization both within the
Sunni community and between Sunnis and Shi‘ites, ʿilm-i ḥāl authors accorded
considerable attention to an ever-more precise identification and classification
of Ottoman Muslims, and Mıṣrī felt obliged to provide his brethren’s “coordi-
nates” on this map, rooting them firmly in the categories of Sunni, Hanafi and
Maturidi, endorsed by the Ottoman religious establishment.
The opening question of the risāle is: what is the basis of Sufism? Mıṣrī
responds that it is faith (īmān), which has six pillars—belief in God’s exis-
tence and unity, his angels, prophets, books, the Day of Judgment, and that
both good and bad is owing to God. The second question seeks to know the dif-
ference between the common people (ʿavām) and Sufis, to which he responds
that the difference is that ʿavām’s faith in these six articles of faith is imitative
(taḳlīdī) while the Sufis’ is verified (taḥḳīḳī) and the ulama’s is reasoned (istid-
lālī). He continues to explain that imitative faith is based on authority of others
but without understanding the underlying proofs, which resembles finding a
precious stone but not knowing its value. Verified faith, on the other hand, is
one that seeks to arrive at the truth of every article of faith. He states that the
road between the “village of imitation” (taḳlīd köyü) and “city of verification”
(taḥḳīḳ şehri) is the Sufi path (ʿilm-i ṭarīḳat), and that ultimately, the difference
between the common people (ʿavām and havāṣ) and Sufis is in the degrees of
wisdom/knowledge (merātib-i maʿrifet).112
Mıṣrī’s explanation helps us understand the difference between the Sufi con-
cept of verification of faith (associated with a journey on the mystical path
toward the Truth) and the more kalām-informed notions featured in the texts

The precise meaning of these terms when translated into English is a matter of debate
among Islamicists (both are frequently translated as “sect,” while madhhab is also some-
times rendered as “denomination”), but it is safe to say that their precise connotations vary
depending on historical context, genre, and perspective of the author. For a recent debate
on the vocabulary of sectarianism in Islam, that nevertheless does not consider Ottoman
context in detail, see Sedgwick, Sects in the Islamic world.
111 The point is most clearly driven home by Birgivī who in his Vaṣiyetnāme states that in
terms of belief (iʿtiḳād) “we” are the followers of the only true and correct meẕhep, that
of the ehl-i sünnet ve’l cemāʿat, while in terms of practice (ʿamel), we are the followers of
the meẕheb of Abū Ḥanīfa, which is preferred, but others may be correct as well. The same
point is elaborated in detail by Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed Efendi in his versified ʿilm-i ḥāl. See
Karaca, Kadızâde Mehmed Efendi 226–229.
112 Mıṣrī, Risāle-i Esʾile ve ecvibe. I consulted two manuscripts of this popular work: İ.B.B. Ata-
türk Kitapliği, Bel Yz K0267, 36a–43a and Bel Yz K0502, 64a–70a.
188 krstić

discussed above. Despite these differences, however, his work highlights the
shared importance of knowledge and rejection of imitation in faith in the era
when various Muslims’ claims to have verifiable access to the divine message
came under greater scrutiny. As suggested above, by Mıṣrī’s time the opinion of
the Ottoman catechists and the larger moral community, at least in the lands
of Rum, by and large moved toward a higher threshold for sound faith than
what was envisioned by medieval Hanafi-Maturidis, putting more emphasis
on detailed knowledge, importance of reasoning, dangers of imitation, and
significance of verification. The fact that he wrote this short treatise for a pop-
ular audience in order to defend fellow Sufis from accusations of unbelief and
that he formulated his defense in terms of imitation and verification, suggests
that these were also the norms vis-à-vis which Sufis, as others, had to position
themselves and to which they were supposed to conform, at least in the public
eye, in the era of intensified debates on the nature and boundaries of Sunni
Islam.

3 Conclusion: Īmān and Küfr in the Age of Building a Sunni

Madhhab Consciousness

In a recent article, Lutz Berger remarked that in contrast to classical theol-

ogy, which was born in part as an answer to political and social issues that
emerged in the early Islamic era, there was little that kalām could offer to
address the social and political problems that the Mamluks and Ottomans were
facing. In trying to explain why, despite this, Mamluks and Ottomans opted to
largely preserve the paradigm of classical theology, Berger dismisses the idea
that the study of kalām was deemed useful because it helped scholars debate
non-Muslims or heresy within Islam and suggests that its function was largely
sociological, since education in theology was part and parcel of the scholars’
academic credentials and, by extension, their social status.113 While it is cer-
tainly true that kalām continued to be a staple of the Ottoman scholars’ edu-
cation, as this paper as well as other articles in this volume (especially Nabil
Al-Tikriti’s and Nir Shafir’s) demonstrate, theology had a broader social signifi-
cance that was directly connected to the realities of a confessionally polarized
Islamic and wider early modern world that made a detailed knowledge of one’s
faith a new imperative in the face of proliferating—but false, it is implied—
alternative paths to the salvation.

113 Berger, The interpretation 700–701.

you must know your faith in detail 189

At the same time, as Khaled El-Rouayheb has convincingly argued, we need

to revise the view that while theology in the medieval—and early modern,
I would add—Christian context served to deepen faith in the mysteries of
the creed and fortify the believers’ understanding of their faith, kalām was
an apologetic and defensive discipline that merely served to defend the creed
against heretics and infidels.114 Through his detailed study of al-Sanūsī’s work,
El-Rouayheb showed that al-Sanūsī understood kalām as a demonstrative not
dialectical science, and viewed mastery of its essentials as a religious duty
incumbent on each adult Muslim. While Ottoman Hanafi catechists did not
go as far as al-Sanūsī to reject the simple, unreasoned faith of the commoner,
most of them were sympathetic to the emphasis on the necessity of a more
detailed knowledge and more thorough instruction in proofs of God’s oneness
and of each article of faith, making this aspect of classical kalām incumbent
upon each believer.
In developing this position, Ottoman authors appear to have drawn both
on a particular strand in the postclassical eastern Hanafism, which they have
elevated to a state-endorsed orthopraxy, and on the synthesis of Maturidi
and Ash‘ari theological views that began already in the eighth/fourteenth and
ninth/fifteenth centuries and may have induced Ottoman authors to be more
open to the arguments that a detailed knowledge of faith is a prerequisite
for salvation. However, we see that it is really in the mid-tenth/sixteenth and
especially in the eleventh/seventeenth century when this perspective is more
openly embraced and when the thought of Ash‘ari theologians with an anti-
taqlīd bent becomes a welcome intellectual resource to tackle the social issues
of the day. It is in this period that the debate about the nature, content, and
boundaries of Sunnism peaked, especially in the Ottoman lands of Rum, but
also between Rumi and Arab literati of both shared and different legal mad-
hhab allegiances.115
The notions of being questioned about one’s faith and the consequences
of not knowing the correct answers—namely, the possibility of plunging into
unbelief—strongly inform those Ottoman catechisms that insist on a detailed
knowledge of faith. In a recent essay examining what might be the essence of
the phenomenon of “confessionalization” in a comparative early modern per-
spective, Cornel A. Zwierlein has suggested that confessionalization was at its
root an epistemic process of constantly asking questions about how the belief
and practice in real life compared to the theological norms and expectations,

114 El-Rouayheb, Islamic intellectual history 173.

115 On this see Shafir, The road from Damascus, esp. 87–164.
190 krstić

seeking to correct the deviations.116 It would appear that the Ottoman cate-
chisms in question display the same impulse to correct and verify and envision
the same role for theology as in a contemporary Christian context, not only as
a tool for protecting the faith from external attacks but also as a means of deep-
ening one’s understanding of its precepts. While the intellectual resources and
inspiration for the reconsideration of the boundaries of faith and the centrality
of knowledge in these Ottoman catechisms came from within the Islamic tra-
dition, they helped their authors tackle the challenges that seem to have been
shared by theologians across confessional and geographic borders of the early
modern world. Although not all Ottoman catechisms were equally insistent on
possessing a detailed knowledge of one’s faith, and there were many Muslims
who resisted the idea that the boundaries of Sunni Islam can and should be
narrowly defined, these texts demonstrate that we cannot anymore argue that
Ottoman “Sunnitization” or the process of defining and enforcing a particu-
lar definition of Sunnism was a purely political project that was content with
occasionally persecuting Shi‘ites and forcing Ottoman Sunnis to pray more reg-
ularly without any novel theological basis or genuine intension to correct their
faith.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewer as well as Derin Terzioğlu, Sona
Grigoryan, Günhan Börekçi, Guy Burak, Sait Özervarlı, Ulrich Rudolph, and
Aziz al-Azmeh for their insightful comments and suggestions while writing
this article. Research for this essay was supported by the European Research
Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant under the European Union’s Horizon 2020
research and innovation program (grant agreement No 648498).

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Ersten Buches seiner Mawāqif, Wiesbaden 1966.
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Yazıcıoğlu, M.S., Le kalâm et son rôle dans la société turco-ottomane au XVe et XVIe siècles,
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 chapter 6

How to Read Heresy in the Ottoman World

Nir Shafir

The topic of heresy is still rarely discussed by historians of the early modern
Middle East. There remains a lingering belief that the Ottoman Empire was a
particularly tolerant corner of the Mediterranean, at a remove from the sec-
tarian struggles that characterized early modern Europe, a place in which reli-
gion only intruded upon the secular sphere of politics proper during certain
paroxysms of extremism.1 However, the growing literature on the Sunnitiza-
tion of the empire readily shows that this presumption no longer holds true.2
As adherence to Sunnism was equated with political loyalty, heresy became a
central concept in shaping the Ottoman body politic. Yet, constructing a con-
cept of heresy for practical and theoretical usage in the Ottoman Empire was
not a straightforward matter.3 The confessional identity of the empire’s sub-
jects had been of minor concern to Ottoman rulers before the ninth/fifteenth
century; in the words of Cemal Kafadar, there reigned a “metadoxy,” a state of
confessional ambiguity in which neither orthodoxy nor heterodoxy was ever
fully articulated.4 While there were occasional prosecutions of heresy in the
ninth/fifteenth century by the Ottoman government, only with the rebellions
of the Kızılbaş followers of Shah Ismāʿīl in the early tenth/sixteenth century did
this state of affairs come to be seriously challenged. In their rush to respond,
Ottoman scholars aligned with the government rummaged through their con-
ceptual toolkit to develop a working definition of heresy.5

1 The belief in Ottoman tolerance is often an implicit tenet of earlier scholarship, but it is
explicitly stated in works like Barkey, Islam and toleration. There are comparatively more
works on the upsurge of “extremism” in the eleventh/seventeenth century. See Zilfi, The poli-
tics of piety; Baer, Honored by the glory of Islam; Curry, The transformation of Muslim mystical
thought 79.
2 See, for example, Krstić, Contested conversions; Terzioğlu, How to conceptualize Ottoman
Sunnitization; Terzioğlu, Where ʿilm-i ḥāl meets catechism.
3 Readers should note that a number of different concepts—kufr, bidʿa, ilḥād, zandaqa, ghu-
lūww, etc.—fall under the rubric of “heresy” today. Ottoman authors both distinguished
between these concepts and used them synonymously on different occasions. For the sake
of clarity, I have tried to point out the original usages throughout this piece.
4 On metadoxy, see Kafadar, Between two worlds 76. For an application of this concept to the
question of ‘Alid loyalty before the tenth/sixteenth century, see Yıldırım, Sunni orthodox vs
Shiʿite heterodox?; Yılmaz, Caliphate redefined 256–257.
5 Terzioğlu warns us not to take Kafadar’s concept of metadoxy to the extreme and points to

© nir shafir, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004440296_007

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
how to read heresy in the ottoman world 197

One particular theological (rather than juridical) tool they turned to was
heresiography.6 At the heart of this medieval genre—often referred to as “reli-
gions and sects” (al-milal wa-l-niḥal)—was the question of how to understand
difference within Islam. Nearly all the texts started with the notion, recalled
from a famous hadith, that the Jews were divided into 71 sects, the Christians
into 72, and the Muslims into 73. The heresiographer’s task was to identify the
72 wayward sects destined to burn in hellfire in order to distinguish the one
correct path of Islam.7
I begin this paper by demonstrating how, after a relative silence of cen-
turies, scholars affiliated with the government in the tenth/sixteenth-century
Ottoman Empire refurbished the conceptual tool of heresiography in response
to the Kızılbaş and the first war with the Safavids. The article’s main focus,
however, is on the genre’s popular florescence during a second wave of here-
siographies that began in the eleventh/seventeenth century when four schol-
ars writing independently of one another between 1024/1615 and 1050/1640
reworked medieval Arabic heresiographies into Turkish texts. Although these
heresiographies were initially spurred by the Ottoman-Safavid wars at the time,
they quickly transcended the original object of their critique—the Safavids—
and began to be used to discuss heresy among the empire’s own Muslim pop-
ulation, as myriad readers, scribes, and students in the eleventh/seventeenth
and twelfth/eighteenth centuries readily copied, read, and annotated these
works. One was even transcribed into Judeo-Turkish and separately translated
into Italian, making its way into France and the Dutch Republic by the mid-
eleventh/seventeenth century.8 By the end of the eleventh/seventeenth cen-
tury, heresiographies could function as larger statements about the division of
the world along lines of confession, in which a true Sunni core was under direct
and indirect assault by its enemies.

occasional moments of strong confessional boundary making prior to the tenth/sixteenth

century. Terzioğlu, How to conceptualize Ottoman Sunnitization 308–311. On the rise of a
definition of heresy and apostasy in response to Safavid pressures, see Eberhard, Osmanis-
che Polemik; Üstün, Heresy and legitimacy; Ocak, Osmanlı toplumunda zındıklar; Al-Tikriti,
Kalam in the service.
6 The juridical and theological bases of heresy are not always so easily distinguished on the
ground, but for a good discussion of changes to the juridical notion of heresy and its applica-
tion, see Burak, Faith, law and empire.
7 On the many usages and variations of this hadith, see Mottahedeh, Pluralism.
8 A heresiography was even integrated into the seventeeth-century English diplomat Paul
Rycaut’s description of the Ottoman Empire. He recognizes that the heresiography deals only
with earlier sects, and supplements the list with newer sects in the empire, many of which
are Sufi orders. See Rycaut, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire 300–350.
198 shafir

1 Methodological Interventions

If heresiography was a tool meant to reinvigorate the concept of heresy in the

Ottoman Empire, then it was a tool with mysterious mechanisms. While one
might expect these works to be field guides to new heretical acts or sects emerg-
ing in the Ottoman lands, this is not the case. Smoking tobacco or declaring
oneself to belong to the “religion of Abraham,” to name two acts that elicited
accusations of heresy in the eleventh/seventeenth century, never found their
way into the descriptions of the 72 errant sects.9 Even the Kızılbaş, whose rebel-
lion was largely responsible for rejuvenating the discourse of heresy, were miss-
ing from the list. The authors did not even directly associate tenth/sixteenth-
or eleventh/seventeenth-century groups with medieval heresies. Instead they
listed all the obscure groups from the medieval period, long gone by the time
of the Ottomans, and used the historical heresies to occasionally draw indirect
connections with the present. Medieval authors had written heresiographies
to highlight the verity of their particular branch of theology at the expense
of their competitors, but what function did such fixed texts serve centuries
later?
A similar problem arises in the study of Islamic law when scholars try to
conceptualize the connection between the abstracted, decontextualized, and
atemporal world of doctrinal and jurisprudential works and the very spe-
cific and locally grounded world of court records. In an attempt to formulate
Islamic law as a unified textual “formation,” Brinkley Messick has labeled these
two worlds the “archive” and the “library,” respectively. The archive (i.e., the
court records) contains texts with particular details such as names and places,
whereas the library (i.e., legal opinions like fatwas) is purposefully anonymized
and abstracted. The archive is contingent and local, while the library is cos-
mopolitan and universal.10 Heresiographies then might be considered part of
the atemporal and universalized “library” due to their continued application
of the basic divisions of heretical sects established centuries beforehand to
Ottoman social reality. Yet, if the heresiographies comprise the library, what
then might the archive be? How might we localize these texts to tell the story
of Sunnitization in the early modern Ottoman Empire?

9 Ẕikr and tobacco smoking were considered bidʿa or “innovations.” Ottoman scholars rou-
tinely distinguished between bidʿa in articles of belief, bidʿa in religious rituals and bidʿa in
social customs; it was bidʿa in articles of faith that were held to be the most grievous and
amounted to heresy, while ẕikr would belong in the second category, and smoking tobacco
in the third.
10 Messick, Sharīʿa scripts 20–26.
how to read heresy in the ottoman world 199

To understand the full impact of these heresiographies on Ottoman soci-

ety, we have to turn to the material texts themselves.11 Certainly, the tradi-
tional tools of philology can provide some of the answers. As I demonstrate
in the first half of the article, a close and comparative reading of the here-
siographies allows us to see how Ottoman authors emphasized particular sects
as a means to affiliate, indirectly, their enemies’ beliefs with medieval here-
sies and to highlight their own form of Sunnism as the most proper path. But
this is only half the story. The placement of the heresiographies within mis-
cellanies (Ar. majmūʿa / Tr. mecmūʿa), their ownership records, and copyist
statements across hundreds of copies constitute an equally important source.
While art historians and codicologists have engaged in close readings of indi-
vidual manuscripts, there is now, thanks to the accessibility granted by mass
digitization, the possibility to analyze hundreds of manuscripts and therefore
develop new methods of interpretation. In this paper, the mass analysis of the
manuscripts helps demonstrate how the Ottoman discourse of heresy, which
initially targeted the Kızılbaş and Safavids on the edges of empire, shifted its
focus to the empire’s central cities by the eleventh/seventeenth century. This in
turn helps resolve a key impasse in the historiography of confessionalization in
the Ottoman Empire, in which the phenomenon is often explained by empha-
sizing either an external impetus of the Safavids/Kızılbaş or an internal system
of disciplining Muslim religious practice.12 The connection between these two
poles is more often suggested than demonstrated, however. I argue that look-
ing at the larger manuscript record, that is, the works copied alongside these
heresiographies, reveals the conceptual traffic between the two poles.
My hope is that the secondary contribution of this essay is to develop and
demonstrate a few techniques of a relatively new methodology based on the
mass reading of manuscripts from the early modern Islamic world.13 Take, for

11 The “archival” life of heresy in general can occasionally be found in the register of official
orders dispatched (i.e., mühimme defterleri) or even in its official legal opinions (fatwas),
such as the one by Ebū’s-suʿūd I touch upon later, as the government experimented with
a vocabulary to define heresy. None of these, though, actively use the terminology of the
heresiographies and so the question of the relationship of these texts to Ottoman social
reality remains.
12 See for the example the introductory discussion in Terzioğlu, How to conceptualize
Ottoman Sunnitization; Atçıl, The Safavid threat. On the general application of the term
confessionalization, a term from European historiography, to the Ottoman context, see
Krstić, Contested conversions.
13 I developed some of my ideas on the impact of mass reading in Gratien, Polczyński and
Shafir, Digital frontiers of Ottoman studies. There is a new movement to use manuscript
200 shafir

example, our notion of reception. It currently relies on the crude metric of

“popularity,” in which a tally of extant manuscripts translates to the supposed
reach of a text. But there is much more that can be done, and what follows is an
experiment in interpreting the manuscript record. These material clues within
manuscripts are the very “archive” of the heresiographies, evidence that allows
us to situate them within the social life of the empire and change our interpre-
tation of the texts themselves.

2 Medieval Visions

An Ottoman heresiography is built upon a rather spare skeleton. The author

voices a desire to find the difference between Sunnism and deviant and way-
ward branches of Islam. The aforementioned hadith regarding the inevitable
division of the Muslim community into 73 sects—a vestige of the many trau-
matic civil wars of the early Muslim community14—is invoked before the
author delves into his particular list. These are divided into five or six main
groupings, each of which is given a chapter. The main three are Mu‘tazilis, Shi‘is,
and Kharijites, which are almost always followed by theological branches or
divisions from the third/ninth or fourth/tenth centuries, such as the Jabriyya,
Najjāriyya, and Murji’a. Upon this skeleton, authors can flesh out their text
according to the amount of detail they devote to each sect—which is often
simply an eponymous statement that “the ‘So-and-so-iyya’ are the followers
of ‘so-and-so’”—and the description and possible refutation of their heresy.
Authors differentiate their text by the particular groups they place under each
heading, which seem to differ in particular with the more marginal groups.
This shared framework explains why these texts often were simply referred to
by generic titles in mecmūʿas, bookstores, and libraries such as “Religions and
sects” (al-milal wa-l-niḥal), “Explaining different sects” (Bayān al-madhāhib al-
mukhtalifa), “Explaining deviant sects” (Bayān al-firaq al-ḍālla), or “Explaining
the difference of religions” (Bayān ikhtilāf al-milal). Finally, in the Ottoman
period, these heresiographies nearly always contained an initial or final chap-
ter that established the proper Sunni creed.
The medieval heresiographies from which the Ottoman heresiographies
drew were a byproduct of divisive debates over the nature of the Muslim com-
munity in its early centuries. Differences over issues like who belonged to the

marginalia as documentary sources. See Görke and Hirschler, Manuscript notes, and the
special issue (9:2–3) of the Journal of Islamic manuscripts from 2018.
14 Van Ess, Der Eine i, 7–82.
how to read heresy in the ottoman world 201

community, who should lead it, and what religious powers they possessed gave
rise to differing theological and political stances that eventually solidified into
discrete groups, such Kharijites and Shi‘ites. At the same time, the fluores-
cence of rational theology (kalām) in the medieval period, especially following
the introduction of the tools of Greek philosophy, introduced new intellec-
tual questions. Groups like the Mu‘tazilites held theological positions that ran
counter to those of the hadith people, and thus opened another rift in the Mus-
lim community.15 Furthermore, the students of rational theology would adopt
their teachers’ arguments and then try to develop their own, casting all those
who disagreed with them as infidels. As a consequence, multiplying branches
and subbranches of theology emerged, each of which regarded the others as
heretical and wrote heresiographies to make their point.16 The divisive intel-
lectual environment came to a close in the “Sunni revival” of the fifth/eleventh
and sixth/twelfth centuries with the rise of the much more inclusive Ash‘ari
and Maturidi theological schools that set higher standards for denouncing and
anathematizing intellectual rivals.17
If we look today at the remaining manuscript copies of these medieval here-
siographies, we would find the most popular one to be Religions and sects (al-
milal wa-l-niḥal) by Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Shahrastānī (d. 548/1153).
Like all heresiographies, it starts with a rendition of an apocryphal hadith stat-
ing that “my community will divide itself into 73 divisions and only one will
be saved.” Unlike other heresiographers, though, Shahrastānī was remarkably
latitudinarian in his descriptions of the history and stances of each theolog-
ical school, refusing to dismiss and anathematize any one sect, and instead
organized the divisions according to their views on central theological ques-
tions.18 Writing in the irenic era, his ecumenism extended even to descrip-
tions of non-Muslim unbelief: Jewish and Christian sects, Indian religions, and
various ancient Greek philosophical schools were described in detail, though
perhaps with less interest than the Muslim sects.19 For this reason, the text
has achieved some fame among Orientalists of the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries as a pioneering work of comparative religion by a medieval Muslim
scholar, a doxography rather than a heresiography.20 The heresiographical tra-

15 A basic version of this story along with its relation to the question of heresy can be found
in van Ess, The flowering.
16 El-Shamsy, The social construction 105–106.
17 El-Shamsy 106. For information on the Sunni revival in general, see Berkey, The formation
of Islam 189–202.
18 Knysh, “Orthodoxy” and “heresy” 50–51; Sourdel, La classification des sectes.
19 Lawrence, Shahrastānī on the Indian religions; Shahrastānī, Livre des religions.
20 Wasserstrom, Islamicate history of religions?
202 shafir

dition in Shahrastānī’s hands was less a call for the persecution of the infidels
and heretics of the sixth/twelfth century than a clear expression of the modus
vivendi that marked the new Sunni consensus.
Yet, it would be a mistake to assume that Shahrastānī’s work, or really any
other heresiography, was commonly read in Anatolia before the tenth/six-
teenth century. The IslamAnatolia database of 7,000 texts written in medieval
Anatolia finds no easily identifiable heresiography, for example.21 When we
look at the extant copies of Shahrastānī’s text in Istanbul’s libraries today, we
find that the dated copies are nearly all from the sixth/twelfth and seventh/thir-
teenth centuries, following its release, and from the mid-eleventh/seventeenth
century onward.22 We do not find, however, many copies made during the
ninth/fifteenth and tenth/sixteenth centuries, the foundational moment for
the development of an Ottoman concept of heresy.23 As I will suggest below,
the urge to collect and copy the heresiographies of Shahrastānī and other
medieval authors was likely a response to the heresiography’s popularity in
the eleventh/seventeenth century. In other words, there was little demand
on the part of Ottoman readers for these older heresiographies before this
time.

21 IslamAnatolia: The Islamisation of Anatolia, c. 1100–1500, available at: https://www.islam

‑anatolia.ac.uk/?page_id=333 (last accessed: 30 June 2018). Unfortunately, the database
only contains mecmūʿas that were copied in Anatolia, not books made in individual vol-
umes. While there is one short work on the Qalandars written in the period, it does not
follow the heresiography genre itself. De Nicola, The Fusṭāṭ al-ʿadāla.
22 Of the twenty or so copies of Shahrastānī’s al-Milal wa-l-niḥal in Arabic in the Süley-
maniye Library (Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi; hereafter SK) and Millet Library today, about
16 are dateable. For the old copies, often collected in the twelfth/eighteenth century, see
Millet Kütüphanesi, MS Feyzullah Efendi 1175 (copied in 589/1193); MS Feyzullah Efendi
1176 (copied in 629/1231–1232); SK, MS Laleli 2443 (written in 590/1193–1194); MS Fatih 3151
(copied in 593/1196–1197); MS Serez 1242 (copied in 595/1198–1199); MS Sehid Ali Pasa 1731
(written in 9 Jumadi I 596/26 Feb 1200); MS Turhan Valide Sultan 202 (copied in 613/1216–
1217); MS Ayasofya 2369 (copied in 620/1223–1224); MS Laleli 2444 (written in 627/1229–
1230); Harput MS 398 (copied in 729/1328–1329); MS Ayasofya 2370 (copied in 734/1333–
1334). There do not seem to be any major commentaries or extensions of Shahrastanī’s
work with the exception of the obscure and short piece to be found in the Topkapı Palace
library. See the first volume of Ghayāt al-afkār wa nihāyet al-anẓār, Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi
Kütüphanesi, MS Ahmed III 1868. The other medieval heresiographies, like Ibn Ḥazm’s,
seem to follow the same pattern but with far fewer copies.
23 Only one extant copy, SK, MS Fatih 3152 is from the beginning of the tenth/sixteenth cen-
tury (1 Muḥarram 907/17 July 1501), but the ownership statements suggest that it was
originally owned by a man from Shirvan in Azerbaijan and made its way to Istanbul in the
mid-eleventh/seventeenth century, where it was eventually owned by the primary imam
of the Sultanahmet Mosque.
how to read heresy in the ottoman world 203

During the medieval period, the notion of the “72 sects” retained its signifi-
cance, not as a list of specific heresies but as a generic marker of the stark line
between belief and unbelief. We can see this in its frequent use as a trope in
the poetry of medieval poets from Anatolia. The Anatolian poet-mystic Yūnus
Emre (d. c. 720/1320), for example, states that a seeker on the path needs to
subject himself and pay homage to the 72 sects ( yitmiş iki millet) before tran-
scending them to achieving divine unity.24 Jalāl al-Dīn al-Rūmī (d. 627/1273)
likewise used the figure frequently.25 Whereas in the Bektashi initiation cere-
mony, a guide would instruct seekers that they were slaves of the Twelve Imams,
part of the saved group (gürūh or firḳa-i nāciye), and separated from the 72
sects.26
The learned in the Ottoman Empire certainly knew about heresiographies
before the tenth/sixteenth century, but they likely read them as geographies, a
means of describing and dividing the world. The catalog of the palace library of
the Ottomans during the reign of Bāyezīd II (886–918/1481–1512) reveals valu-
able clues as to its reception in the years immediately prior to the Kızılbaş and
Safavid challenge that would change the usage of the heresiographies. The cat-
alog lists five copies of an unspecified heresiography, listed simply by its generic
title as al-milal wa-l-niḥal, some of which were likely to be Shahrastānī’s text.27
What is surprising, though, is not the texts’ presence in the library but their clas-
sification. They were grouped not under the heading of theology (kalām), as we
might assume, or even law ( fiqh), but under the capacious heading of history,
which included not only chronicles but also stories of the Prophet, descrip-
tions of wonders, and manuals on statesmanship, war etiquette, horsemanship,
and falconry.28 The cataloger lists the heresiographies after al-Birūnī’s (d. c.
440/1048) descriptions of India and before the section on horsemanship and
wonders, and the entry has a statement describing the heresiographies specif-
ically as histories (min qabli tawārikh). The library’s classification suggests that
the heresiographies were read more as books of curiosities and marvels that
revealed what madmen lived in the distant corners of the past than guides to

24 Yūnus Emre, Yûnus Emre Dîvânı ii, 51, 133, 148, 160, 187, 358, 371, 381, 387, 389.
25 Mottahedeh, Pluralism.
26 Birge, The Bektashi order 193; following the citation in van Ess, Der Eine i, 3.
27 For the catalog, see Academy of Sciences of Hungary, MS Török F. 59, 193. One undated
manuscript of Shahrastānī’s al-Milal wa-l-niḥal bears the almond-shaped stamp of Bāye-
zīd II’s library in SK, MS Turhan Valide Sultan 201.
28 There were no other recognizable heresiographies in these sections. Al-Ghazālī’s Tafriqa
bayn al-zandaqa wa-l-īmān, which discusses the nature of heresy, was found in the section
on theology and an unknown Alfāẓ al-kufr was placed under law, but neither are here-
siographies. Academy of Sciences of Hungary, MS Török F. 59, 63, 97.
204 shafir

contemporary theological heresies. When the Ottoman government revived

the genre, though, they would turn it into a theological weapon.

3 Reviving Heresy in the Tenth/Sixteenth Century

At the beginning of the tenth/sixteenth century, the Ottoman establishment

did not possess a particularly sectarian mindset, but, in just a few decades’
time, government-affiliated scholars revivified the concept of heresy and with
it the genre of heresiography. The sudden rise of the Safavids—a minor Sufi
family in Ardabil that managed to cobble together a diverse set of followers,
including many nomadic Ottoman subjects, into a formidable political and
military machine—spurred scholars like Kemālpaşazāde (d. 940/1534), Lüṭfī
Pasha (d. 970/1563), and Ebū’s-suʿūd (d. 982/1574) to utilize and even author
heresiographies. Together, they represent a concerted effort to define the basis
of Ottoman Sunnism through their legal rulings, catechisms, and heresiogra-
phies.29
When these authors sought inspiration for their works, though, it seems they
turned to a different tradition of heresiography, that of Eastern Hanafi authors
from fourth/tenth- and fifth/eleventh-century Transoxiana, like Makḥūl al-
Nasafī (d. 317/930), rather than referring to the more well-known works of
Shahrastānī and Ibn Ḥazm (d. 456/1064) found in their libraries.30 These East-
ern Hanafi heresiographies, as Keith Lewinstein has argued, “look confused
and superficial” compared to the more detailed Ash‘ari and Mu‘tazili exem-
plars of the genre because they cursorily dismiss other sects to define Hanafi
Sunnism as the most correct path.31 Kemālpaşazāde and Lüṭfī Pasha’s texts
share some of the defining features of the Eastern Hanafi heresiographies,
such as the inclusion of the Kūziyya and Shimrākhiyya groups and a ten-
dency to label all theological branches with the suffix “iyya.”32 The most likely
source text was an early sixth/twelfth-century book by a certain ʿUthmān b.
ʿAbdallāh b. al-ʿIrāqī al-Ḥanafī titled al-Firaq al-muftariqa bayn ahl al-zaygh
wa-l-zandaqa (Separating sects among the deviants and heretics).33 Ottoman

29 Krstić, From shahāda to ꜥaqīda; Krstić, State and religion; Üstün, Heresy and legitimacy.
30 The Ottomans, like the Seljuks before them, often turned to Eastern Hanafi authors for
inspiration in building a new concept of Hanafi Sunnism. See, for example, Aykan, A legal
concept in motion; Rudolph, Al-Māturīdī.
31 Lewinstein, Eastern Ḥanafite heresiography; Tan, Hanefî-Mâturîdî fırak geleneği.
32 Lewinstein, Eastern Ḥanafite heresiography 587, 590–591; Tan, Geç dönem Hanefî-Mâtu-
rîdî fırak geleneği 184–186.
33 Many of these Eastern Hanafi texts exist only in single copies today, so it is difficult to track
how to read heresy in the ottoman world 205

authors perhaps drew from this Eastern Hanafi source because it more read-
ily allowed them to declare their political enemies heretics: it championed a
particularly Hanafi Sunnism while also dismantling the latitudinarian views of
the Sunni consensus that had held sway in the past. After all, copies of Shahras-
tānī’s texts in the palace library were listed under the rubric of history rather
than theology, and a different type of text was needed to paint a bright portrait
of Ottoman Sunnism against the darkness of past heresies.
Lüṭfī Pasha’s heresiography uses his list of 72 sects to expand upon the ten
qualities he thinks that Sunnis must possess.34 The first quality is the require-
ment to pray five times a day in a congregation (about which see the paper by
H. Evren Sünnetçioğlu in this volume), the third quality is to not raise a sword
against the sultan, the fourth is to not express doubts about faith, and the sev-
enth is to not debate or argue in religious places.35 He then finds these qualities,
or the lack thereof, in his description of the deviant sects. The Maġrūriye rejects
the Friday prayer while the thirty-fifth sect, the ʿAbbāsiye, raise their swords
against the sultan.36 These groups no longer existed according to the author:
he ends every description with the words “they went astray and were destroyed
(azub helāk oldılar).” Even groups like the Shi‘ites and the Revāfiż, whom he
would presumably deem to have existed, receive this enjoinder.37 The past

their reception. Al-ʿIrāqī’s text seems like good fit, though, because of Kemālpaşazāde’s
inclusion of a number of the same non-Muslim sects. Muzaffer Tan read the inclusion of
these non-Muslim sects as a sign that Kemālpaşazāde used another heresiography as a
source, but it seems that the sects were lifted directly from al-ʿIrāqī’s work. Lewinstein,
Eastern Ḥanafite heresiography 586–587; Tan, Geç dönem Hanefî-Mâturîdî fırak geleneği
189–190; al-ʿIrāqī’s text was published over five decades ago, but the editor of the text,
Y. Kutluay, did not provide the accession number of his source. See Hanefi, Sapıklarla din-
sizlerin. I found the original copy in SK, MS Süleymaniye 791. It was copied by a ʿAlī b. Yāsīn
b. Muḥammad al-Ṭarābulusī al-Ḥanafī, a scholar of seemingly Arab origins on 9 Shawwal
904/ 20 May 1499. The timing of this only surviving copy fits well with a renewed inter-
est of the Ottoman establishment in heresiographies (i.e., right before the start of Shah
Ismāʿīl’s campaigns). Not much is known about the copyist, but his last name suggests
that he came from greater Syria. There is a collection of fatwas from him in Beyazıt Devlet
Kütüphanesi, MS Veliyüddin 1587.
34 Lüṭfī Pasha, Risāle-i Fıraḳ-i ḍālle, SK, MS Ayasofya 2195. Parts of this text, such as the list
of ten qualities, are found in his other works. The heresiography also appears under the
title Ḥayāt-i ebedī. On his role in the Sunnitization process, see Krstić, A catechizing grand
vizier.
35 Lütfi Pasha, Risāle 110a–b.
36 Ibid. 115b.
37 The only exception to this is the Wāsiliyya, the initial Mu‘tazilis, from whom Ibn Ash‘ar first
emerges only to reject them and become a Sunni again. Also, Lüṭfī Pasha does not equate
the Shi‘ites and the Revāfıż as the other heresiographers do. Lüṭfī Pasha, Risāle 112b.
206 shafir

becomes a means for Lüṭfī Pasha to indirectly reference the Kızılbaş rebellion
in his portrayal of Sunnism: true Sunnis do not rebel, spiritually or politically.
Kemālpaşazāde’s short treatise, only a few folios long and probably written
between 915–930/1510–1530, follows the same approach and begins simply as
a list of heresies sans introduction. The first part covers heresies deemed com-
pletely outside Islam, like Jews, Brahmins (barāhima), philosophers, star wor-
shippers (najamiyya), reincarnationists (ahl al-tanāsukh), the Bāṭiniyya, and
the “worshippers of the cow’s head” (ʿabadat ru’ūs al-baqar). The point of this
initial section is to cast sects like the Bāṭiniyya, which were formally Muslim,
outside the circle of Islam. One cannot accept the jizya (poll tax imposed on
non-Muslims) from these heretics nor can one accept their ritually slaughtered
meat or marry their women. Killing them is like killing an apostate, an act that
elicits neither punishment nor blood payment. In other words, these heretics
are not to be afforded even the traditional rights of protected non-Muslims. The
second part focuses more on the errant sects within the fold of Islam, which he
quickly sketches, often only with a name and a sentence.38 The sentence or two
of description comes across as an attempt to define the Sunnism in the nega-
tive. For example, the Mushabbihah allow for the killing of opposing Muslims,
marrying sisters and daughters, and drinking wine.39 Other descriptions, like
that of the Khaṭṭābiyya, read as a thinly veiled attack on the Shi‘ites (rawāfiḍ)
and the Kızılbaş: they believe that Jaʿfār al-Ṣādiq, al-Khaṭṭāb, and even ʿAlī are
gods.40
Only at the end does Kemālpaşazāde provide more specific instructions by
repeatedly stating that “the sultan must call on all [these heretics] to repent or
kill them.” Yet, he leaves a chance for heretics to enter the fold again and for this
reason, he asserts that, if they repent, they must not be barred from mosques
and can be buried in Muslim cemeteries, save for the Bāṭiniyya and Ḥulūliyya,
who are to be treated unequivocally as apostates, “whether they repent or are
killed.”41 Who are these two sects beyond the pale? He gives no information
about them whatsoever, other than calling on the sultan to force the Ḥulūliyya
in particular to repent and the Bāṭiniyya being “the most evil of all of them and

38 Kemālpaşazāde’s descriptions are so cursory that some readers filled in the margins with
more information on each sect.
39 Kemālpaşazāde, Risāla, SK, MS Reşid Efendi 1031, 279b.
40 Ibid.
41 To prove the point, he quotes the jurist Mālik that zanādiqa and Bāṭiniyya should not be
allowed to repent after being captured. Kemālpaşazāde, Risāla 280b. For an overview of
jurists’ opinions on when a heretic should not be offered a chance to repent see Griffel,
Apostasy.
how to read heresy in the ottoman world 207

the most heretical.”42 Their names, however, can give us a sense of what Kemāl-
paşazāde found so repugnant. Ḥulūliyya suggests a belief that God incarnates
within particular leaders, an indirect reference to Shah Ismāʿīl’s Kızılbaş fol-
lowers, who considered him an infallible god. In anti-Safavid treatises, the
connection was often explicitly stated: Ḥüseyin b. ʿAbdullāh el-Şirvānī, a pro-
Ottoman polemicist fleeing from the Safavids, argued that the Kızılbaş wor-
shiped Safavid leaders as deities.43 The second sect, the Bāṭiniyya, might refer
to groups accused of denying the literal meaning of sacred texts, and thus
their moral exhortations and ritual prescriptions, in favor of esoteric interpre-
tations.44 This was a common refrain about sects like the Isma‘ilis centuries
beforehand, but it gained new importance in the tenth/sixteenth-century Otto-
man Empire, where many antinomian dervish groups had turned Kızılbaş.
The emphasis on these two accusations—attributing divinity to leaders
and antinomian esotericism—is what ultimately distinguishes Ottoman here-
siographies from their medieval predecessors. First voiced by Kemālpaşazāde,
the claim is repeated in all the heresiographies and reflects a particularly
Ottoman usage of the genre. To underline the fact these heresies were alive
and well, he states that the rule of the Bākiya in Azerbaijan is Bāṭiniyya rule
(whereas the cow-worshippers are in Herat). The location of these groups
makes it clear that heresy is found outside the empire, among its enemies,
rather than within its own population. Later, he states, “if there exists in the
land a ruler from the Ghāliba or the Qadriyya or the Khawārij or the Juhmiyya
or the Najjāriyya or the Mujassima, then their rulings are invalid.”45 This state-
ment serves to define the empire as Sunni and run in partnership with legal
scholars, a point he underlines after repeating some basic theological tenets of
Sunnism, declaring that “whoever has this as his religion and belief, then he is
a Sunni, and whoever is against anything from it, then he is a heretic [lit. inno-
vator (mubtadiʿ)] and against the Sunnis and jurists.”46
In the tenth/sixteenth century, the aforementioned notion of the 72 sects
continued to function as a means of defining the line between heresy and
belief, between rebellion and obedience. This is clearly seen in the rulings of
the şeyhü’l-islām (chief jurist) Ebū’s-suʿūd, who was Kemālpaşazāde’s successor
and student, regarding the treatment of the pro-Safavid Kızılbaş. The last of the

42 Kemālpaşazāde, Risāla, 278b, 279b.

43 Yılmaz, H. İran’dan Sünni kaçısı; Yılmaz, Caliphate redefined 261. See also Şirvānī’s com-
ments on the mübāḥiye, mentioned later by another, later Şirvānī.
44 Hodgson, Bāṭiniyya.
45 Kemālpaşazāde, Risāla 281a.
46 Ibid.
208 shafir

rulings responds to a question whether the war against the Kızılbaş is justified
given that they claim to be Shi‘ites and testify that “there is no god but God.” The
inquiry forced Ebū’s-suʿūd to examine the nature of their heresy, and he states
that they were neither Shi‘ites nor even one of the 72 sects destined to burn in
hell. The Kızılbaş “take a share of evil and corruption from each of [the 72 sects].
They have added together, according to their whims, whatever heresies and
innovations they choose and invented a composite heresy and deviation.”47 He
then goes on to list their heretical actions and beliefs, which include insulting
the Quran and the sharia, burning holy books, treating scholars with contempt,
worshiping their leaders as gods, and cursing ʿĀʾisha, ʿUmar, and, indirectly, the
Prophet Muḥammad. Here, in Ebū’s-suʿūd’s ruling that turns a rebellion into a
heresy, we find the closest attempt to match the heresiographies to the social
realities of the Ottoman Empire. He recalls the heresiographies not to iden-
tify the particularities of Kızılbaş belief but to highlight their novelty, which
exceeds even the heresies of old as represented by the notion of the 72 sects.
The heresiographies serve not as a reference manual but as a generic bank of
imagery, a backdrop against which an Ottoman Sunnism would be drawn.
In the works of Kemālpaşazāde and Lüṭfī Pasha, we find for the first time in
centuries a revival of the heresiography tradition. Like their Eastern Hanafi pre-
cursors, these heresiographies are rather crude attempts to fashion tools and
concepts to fight against the Kızılbaş and the Safavids, and their revival helped
dismantle the irenic Sunni consensus that had held sway for so long. They men-
tion no current heresies because their aim was to define an Ottoman Sunnism
in the negative and project an image of the world in which a righteous Sunni
empire was constantly threatened by unbelievers at its borders.

4 Heresiographies in the Eleventh/Seventeenth Century

Less than a century later, a new wave of heresiographical works would seize the
attention of Ottoman readers and become the heresiographies predominantly
found in manuscript libraries today. The initial Ottoman heresiographies were
written by members of the highest echelons of the Ottoman government, gen-
erally in Arabic (albeit in a very simple kind), and read and used by a limited
group of government officials. The eleventh/seventeenth-century heresiogra-
phies, on the other hand, were written by respected but middling scholars who,
rather than forging a vision of heresy as state policy, sought jobs and political

47 Ebussuûd, Ma‘rûzât 98.

how to read heresy in the ottoman world 209

influence by tapping into an already strong current of popular and governmen-

tal interest in identifying and eradicating heresy. Sometimes they pushed the
government to act even more radically than it had, as we will see in Şirvānī’s
heresiography below. For this reason, the new generation of heresiographies
were all in Turkish, appealing specifically to a popular Rumi (that is, Turkish-
speaking) public that read them alongside a variety of other works. The process
began with a war and three or four authors who translated and reworked the
heresiographies between 1024–1050/1615–40.
The first to be written, and one of the most popular, was the rather blandly
titled, A treatise explaining the various sects (Risāle fi beyān meẕāhib muhte-
life).48 It was penned circa 1024/1615 by the prolific scholar Muḥammed Emīn
b. Ṣaḍre’d-dīn Mollazāde el-Şirvānī (d. 1036/1627), a refugee fleeing the brutal
Safavid persecution of Sunnis in the Caucasus who became a professor (mudar-
ris) in a number of cities around the Ottoman Empire, including Aleppo, Istan-
bul, Mecca, and Bursa.49 He likely met his particularly receptive patron, the
grand vizier Meḥmed Pasha, in the first of these cities when he served as
a mudarris there in 1024–1025/1615–6.50 His Meḥmed Pasha was most likely
(Dāmād) Öküz Meḥmed Pasha (r. 1023–1025/1614–6, 1028/1619),51 who served
two terms as grand vizier under Aḥmed I and ʿOs̱mān II and launched a
renewed campaign against the Safavids from Aleppo in the spring of 1025/1616
after spending the previous year making preparations in the city.
We should not discount the impetus provided by the second and third
set of Ottoman-Safavid Wars (1012–1027/1603–18 and 1032–1049/1623–39) for
these heresiographies. Scholars have traditionally focused on the initial battles
between Sultan Selīm I (918–926/1512–1520) and Shah Ismāʿīl I (907–930/1501–

48 A critical edition of the treatise was published in el-Şirvānī, Tercümânü’l-ümem. Fığlalı,

the editor, gave it the title Tercümânü’l-Ümem based on a title found in one of the manu-
scripts, though this does not seem to be a common title for it. Fığlalı provides a Turk-
ish translation in a subsequent article, İbn Sadru’d-Din eş-Şirvânî; van Ess claims that
this work has an Arabic original, found in SK, MS Laleli 2237, attributed to the author
Meḥmed Nūrī Şirvānī. However, a close examination of the work shows that it was copied
in 1168/1750–1751, and it is most likely a singular Arabic translation of the piece from the
twelfth/eighteenth century, Der Eine ii, 1179–1180.
49 Muḥammad Emīn b. Ṣadre’d-dīn Mollazāde el-Şirvānī, Risāle fi beyān meẕāhib muhtelife,
SK, MS Darülmesnevi 258, 74b. The earliest copy (from 5 Dhi’l-Huja 1025/14 December 1616)
I came across can be found in the Austrian National Library, MS NF 13 and 13a. The Judeo-
Turkish copy apparently dates from 1615 in Aleppo. See, Leiden University Library, MS Or
1129(g).
50 Altıntaş, Şirvânî, Sadreddinzâde 208–209.
51 On the question of his patron, see also Fığlalı, İbn Sadru’d-Din eş-Şirvânî 251–253.
210 shafir

1524) in the early tenth/sixteenth century as the main context of sectarian for-
mation. Indeed, these battles did open a space for the heresiographies, as we
have seen, but the waves of persecutions that followed the Safavid conquest of
the Caucasus under Shah ʿAbbās (996–1038/1588–1629) also catalyzed a more
extreme form of confessional polarization.52 Waves of Sunni scholars from
Shirvan and other parts of Azerbaijan arrived in Ottoman cities, often profusely
thanking the Ottoman state in their treatises for sheltering them from what
they describe as particularly barbarous attacks.53
The animus against the Safavids is most clearly seen in the heated conclu-
sion of Şirvānī’s heresiography. He calls on the sultan to “appoint to every city in
the empire a scholar well-versed in theology (ʿilm-i kelām) who knows proper
and improper belief so as to protect the creed of Islam from deviant sects
and heresies and the like and protect the domains of Islam against its inter-
nal enemies, just as the Muslim soldiers and walls preserve it from its external
enemies.”54 After castigating the sultan for disparaging scholars’ work and fail-
ing to send scholars to the major cities to educate the people, he ends with an
interesting comment as to the purpose of heresiographies. He argues that an
enemy leader might try to win through intellectual means rather than brute
force.

Now, for example, the soldiers of Islam, may God grant them victory, have
set out against the Kızılbaş. What were to happen if the Shah of Per-
sia said, “The cause of our enmity is confessional difference (muhālefet-i
meẕheb). So let the confessions be examined and whatever side the Truth
is on, let us all follow that and set aside this fight.” Shi‘a extremists (gulāt-ı
Revāfıż) would spread their corrupting doubts regarding the faith and
bring the beliefs of the commoners crashing to the ground. It is neces-
sary to defeat the enemy by having an erudite scholar who knows all the

52 See, for example, Dressler, Inventing orthodoxy; Allouche, Ottoman-Safavid conflict; For
an overview of the diplomatic developments on this front, see Küpeli, Osmanlı-Safevi
münasebetleri.
53 Refugees have been important figures in driving anti-Safavid polemics in the empire. For
earlier examples, see Eberhard, Osmanische Polemik 53–60. Besides Muhammed Emīn el-
Şirvānī, see, for example, Saʿdeddīn Şirvānī and Feyżullah Efendi, whose family fled from
Karabagh to Erzurum. For an example of treatises dedicated to the Ottomans by refugees,
see the first few folios of Nūrallah b. Muḥammad Rafīʿa b. ʿAbdurrahīm, Risālat al-Shirwānī
ilā muftī zamānihi, Egyptian National Library and Archives, MS Majāmīʿ Ṭalʿat 476, 1a–27b.
54 Şirvānī, Risāle, Ankara Üniversitesi, D.T.C.F. Kütüphanesi, Ismail Saib Sencer Koleksiyonu
MS I/3175, 15a–17a (hereafter, Şirvānī, Risāle); SK, MS Darülmesnevi 258, 83a–84a, MS Çelebi
Abdullah 195, 16a.
how to read heresy in the ottoman world 211

sects’ ideas and practices and is aware of their sources and principles so
that he can force the enemy to concede with irrefutable evidence.55

Şirvānī expresses here both an understanding that the fight with the Safavids
is at its heart a confessional battle and a deep fear of any prospect of an “exam-
ination of confessions,” as any such initiative would be a ruse to infiltrate the
empire. His fears were not necessarily misplaced. There actually was a tenta-
tive truce between the Ottomans and the Safavids between 1021–1024/1612–5,
right when Şirvānī wrote his treatise. And Nadir Shah, upon making peace with
the Ottomans in 1149/1736, did eventually propose to make Ja‘fari Shi‘ism the
fifth school of Sunnism.56 For this reason, Şirvānī argues that only a scholar
trained in theology could confront these heathens in a debate and force them to
concede (ilzām) when faced with irrefutable evidence. Şirvānī’s point, colored
by the current war against the Safavids and his own forced migration, makes
it clear that heresiography is meant to help distinguish errant belief among
other Muslims and defeat them with proper proof. Moreover, he is increasingly
worried about foreign heretics disguising themselves within Ottoman society
itself and thus uses the heresiography to push the hesitant Ottoman govern-
ment to act while conveniently providing a steady occupation for scholars like
himself.
Despite Şirvānī locating his work in actual political exigencies, his heresiog-
raphy, like the others, offers only scattered hints as to its practical application.
Comprising about ten to twenty folios, it goes through the usual motions of
listing the main sects with a cursory description of their theological beliefs.
Like its predecessors, of which he might have had some knowledge, he uses
familial resemblances to the historical sects to indirectly attack the enemies
of the Ottomans, though with a greater focus perhaps on the Safavids them-
selves instead of the Kızılbaş rebellion. As mentioned before, Kemālpaşazāde
focused on the perfidies of the Bāṭıniye and Ḥulūliye, and these groups appear
in Şirvānī’s heresiography as well. The Ḥulūliye believe that “a person, with prac-
tice and effort, can reach a stage in which he becomes one with the true Beloved
and obliterates himself in God. God then incarnates in him. Most of the Persian
wandering dervishes (ışıḳlar) are of this belief.”57 Once again, the emphasis lies
on sects that consider their rulers divine.

55 Şirvānī, Risāle, 8b–9a; 17a; SK, MS Darülmesnevi 258, 84a, MS Çelebi Abdullah 195, 16a; el-
Şirvānī, Tercümânü’l-ümem 335.
56 Tucker, Nadir Shah. See also the essay in this volume by Selim Güngörürler.
57 El-Şirvānī, Tercümânü’l-ümem 328.
212 shafir

Şirvānī groups the Ḥulūliye under the special heading of “heretical Sufism”
(melāḥidetü’l-Ṣūfiye), which also includes the Mübāḥiye, Zenādıḳa, Ḳalenderiye,
Mürā’iye, Müstahdamiye, and Mütaʿabidiye. Although these groups are rela-
tively unimportant in comparison to Şirvānī’s general attack on the Safavids,
they are rare examples of novel heresiographical categories being introduced.
These categories did not come from Ottoman social reality, but neither were
they found in Islam’s first centuries. In elaborating this new category of hereti-
cal Sufism, Şirvānī likely drew on earlier sources. For example, the Mübāḥiye—
a group of the morally apathetic that appears in the end times according
to al-Kāshifī (910/1504–1505)—was associated with the Kızılbaş in a work by
another refugee from Shirvan in the previous century.58 The antinomian Kalen-
ders (Ar. Qalandar) were present in medieval Anatolia, but largely absent by
the eleventh/seventeenth century.59 They were examples of postmedieval con-
cepts of heresy that had become sufficiently established to merit a place in
the “library” of theology. At the same time, the heading of “heretical Sufism”
provides Şirvānī the space to mention offhand that “in our time, most of the
dervishes (ışıḳlar) by the name of Mevlevis, Gülşenis, or Bektashis are her-
etics.”60 These Sufi orders, which did actively exist in the period, were not
placed within Şirvānī’s formal list of heresies.
For another example of Şirvānī’s approach, we can look at his description
of the Bāṭıniye, the sect that Kemālpaşazāde regarded as the most dangerous
of all. Unlike Kemālpaşazāde, Şirvānī does not consider them particularly vile,
but the association of the sect with the Safavids remained strong. Grouping the
Bāṭıniye under the general rubric of melāḥide (heretics), he says that they “fol-
low no religion (millet) and deny the Creator and the day of Resurrection.”61 He
then launches into a tale that makes clear his true target—the Safavid dynasty.
Şirvānī tells the story of a heretic (zındıḳ) servant named ʿAbdullāh el-Meymūn
el-Ḳaddāḥ who sets out on a trip with Muḥammad, the grandson of the Shi‘i
Imam Jaʿfār al-Ṣādiq. As the two flee to Egypt, each with their pregnant concu-
bines, Muḥammad dies and ʿAbdullāh decides to kill Muḥammad’s concubine
in order to declare his own concubine’s son as the next Shi‘i imam. The charade
is believed and the descendants of Persian kings become the false Shi‘i imam’s
staunchest partisans, spreading false belief around the world and becoming
quite successful in Iran. The lesson to be taken from Şirvānī’s anti-Safavid para-

58 Caliphate redefined, 261.

59 Karamustafa, God’s unruly friends; De Nicola, The Fusṭāṭ al-ʿadāla.
60 Şirvānī, Risāle 8b–9a; 14b; SK, MS Darülmesnevi 258, 82a; el-Şirvānī, Tercümânü’l-ümem
326.
61 El-Şirvānī, Tercümânü’l-ümem 315–316.
how to read heresy in the ottoman world 213

ble becomes clear at the end: the heretics drove the Muslim kingdoms into
disarray. Most were defeated, even those that attempted in vain to make peace
with the heretics. The Muslim world was only purified by the chance arrival of
the infidel hordes of Chinggis Khan (d. 624/1227). It is a crude story with a clear
message: never make peace with the Safavids.
Şirvānī’s main avenue of attacking the Safavids, however, comes through
in his description of a seemingly random and spurious sect known as the
Benāniye, followers of Benān bin Semʿān the Jew.62 Placing them under the
heading of “Extremists” (gulāt), whom even the other Shi‘ites consider as
heretics,63 he states that this group believes that God used to inhabit a human
form but now only his face remained. In this form

God was incarnated in ʿAlī and in the children of ʿAlī, just as Gabriel
came to the Prophet in the form of Diḥye-i Kelbī … And still today the
Revāfiż believe … that God almighty manifests himself in the form of
those heretics, the shahs. For this reason, they prostrate themselves before
him as if he were a deity … and even recognize him as God. There are no
heretics worse than this group. They are worse than the Jews and Chris-
tians and all the other infidels and it is of utmost importance to eliminate
them. No Muslim scholar has any doubts about their heresy. Their harm
to the Islamic faith is greater than that of any other infidel.64

The choice of the Benāniye as the “sect du jour” differs from that of the other
heresiographies, but the main accusation against the Safavids is the same: they
consider their kings to be gods. The Ottomans, on the other hand, rely upon
the institutions of Islam, rather than on charismatic divine leadership, as Şir-
vānī suggests when he states that the Benāniye “outright refuse to accede to the
sharia courts.”65
Şirvānī might have used the heresiography as a space to make snide attacks
against Sufis and the like, but dervishes and Sufis also wrote heresiographies.
The other two major heresiographies that emerged during this period were
written between 1030–1050/1620–40 and offered a slight alternative to Şirvānī’s

62 Benāniye is a corruption of Bayāniyya, which is a sect that appears in some of the medieval
heresiographies. Hodgson, Bayān b. Samʿān al-Tamīmī.
63 On the usage and meaning of gulāt (Ar. ghulāt, from ghuluww, exaggeration) see Babayan,
Mystics, monarchs, and messiahs; Şirvānī, Risāle 8a; el-Şirvānī, Tercümânü’l-ümem 307.
64 Şirvānī, Risāle 8b–9a; el-Şirvānī, Tercümânü’l-ümem 308–309; These claims, too, are bor-
rowed from other treatises, which specifically target the Kızılbaş. Yılmaz, Caliphate rede-
fined, 261.
65 Şirvānī, Risāle 9a; el-Şirvānī, Tercümânü’l-ümem 309.
214 shafir

screed. A man known only as Dervīş Aḥmed, and who was apparently a resident
of the Sufi lodge at the Küçük Aya Sofya complex in Istanbul, wrote the The Mir-
ror of belief (Mirʾātü’l-ʿaḳā’id).66 Before or during his tenure at this Sufi lodge, he
was closely attached to the famous shaykh, Maḥmūd Hüdā’ī (d. 1038/1628), who
owned and studied one of the few exemplars of the Eastern Hanafi heresiogra-
phy tradition, al-Firaq al-muftariḳa, the very same copy that seems to have been
the inspiration for Kemālpaşazāde’s heresiography in Arabic a century earlier.67
This work was apparently also the basis for Dervīş Aḥmed’s translation of the
work into Turkish for a wider audience.
Dervīş Aḥmed starts his heresiography with the common and compelling
point regarding the genre’s benefit: the world is full of unbelief and the true
Muslim must be prepared to deploy arguments and proof, not just simply recite
the basic tenets of belief, if they are to defend the faith, as Tijana Krstić also
emphasizes in her essay on contemporary catechisms in this volume.68 His
work is not radically different from Şirvānī’s, but he does retain some of the
categories from the older, medieval heresiographical works that Şirvānī had
discarded, such as non-Islamic groups. These, though, are primarily schools
of ancient philosophy like the Peripatetics, Elementalists (aṣḥāb al-ʿanāṣir), or
Manicheans. Nestled among this group are Jews and Christians, mentioned in
passing with no detail. His purpose was not to understand or even refute the
theological viewpoints of Muslims or non-Muslims but simply to conjure up
a world of unbelief. For this reason, Dervīş Aḥmed devotes a very long final
chapter to the proper creed and belief of Muslims in the form of questions and
answers.69
Dervīş Aḥmed’s heresiography is unique in that it did not have only one
intended patron. Instead, the author seems to have tried to dedicate the text
to four different government officials: the şeyhü’l-islām Yaḥyā Efendi (sh.i. 1031–
1032, 1034–1041, 1043–1053/1622–1623, 1625–1632, 1634–1644), two separate
grand viziers, Bayram Pasha (g. 1045–1048/1637–8) and Meḥmed Pasha (likely
Ṭayyār Meḥmed Pasha, g. 1048/1638), and even Sultan Murād IV (r. 1032–1049/
1623–1640) himself.70 The wide variety of government figures here might be

66 On this biographical tidbit, see the colophon of a copy written in 1638 of Dervīş Aḥmed,
Mirʾātü’l-ʿakā’id, SK, MS M Arif-M Murad 177, 71.
67 See the statements on the first folios of SK, MS Süleymaniye 791.
68 Dervīş Aḥmed, Mirʾātü’l-ʿakā’id, İstanbul Üniversitesi Nadir Eserler Kütüphanesi, MS
T5919, 2a.
69 Ibid. 23b–25b; İbrahim Hakkı Konyalı Kütüphanesi MS 594, 59b–64a.
70 See Dervīş Aḥmed, Mirʾātü’l-ʿaḳā’id. Those dedicated to şeyhü’l-islām Yaḥyā Efendi can
be found in SK, MS Özel 276, MS Hacı Mahmud Efendi 1514, MS Serez 3879, MS Hüdai
Efendi 879, MS İzmir 114; Nuruosmaniye Kütüphanesi, MS 2144; İbrahim Hakki Konyalı
how to read heresy in the ottoman world 215

interpreted as a sign that Dervīş Aḥmed had some difficulty in finding a sponsor
interested in his work, but it also shows how many high-level officials an enter-
prising author could appeal to for sponsorship of such material in the 1630s.
This interest would continue as one copyist noted that he copied the treatise
in the presence of Sultan Meḥmed IV (r. 1058–1099/1648–1687) and the chan-
cellor Nişāncı Meḥmed Pasha.71 The interest in these works by the highest state
officials makes sense given that the Ottomans had reignited their war with the
Safavids once again, and many of these officials were directly involved in the
reconquest of Baghdad from the Safavids in 1048/1638. Although Şirvānī was
the only writer who directly censured the Safavids, the heresiographies coin-
cide neatly with the timeline of the Ottoman-Safavid wars.
Dervīş Aḥmed’s work might have enjoyed the direct support of the high-
est echelons of the Ottoman state, but it was Nūḥ b. Muṣṭafā’s (d. 1070/1660)
book that became the authoritative, if lightly read, heresiography in the empire.
Nūḥ b. Muṣṭafā was a prolific Rumi scholar and preacher who lived primar-
ily in Cairo after serving briefly as mufti of Konya.72 A certain Yūsuf Efendi
in Cairo pushed him, sometime in the 1040s/1630s, to translate the aforemen-
tioned sixth/twelfth-century heresiography of Shahrastānī into Turkish.73 As
mentioned earlier, Shahrastānī had written one of the most canonical versions
of the genre, imbuing it with a certain latitudinarian approach, and Nūḥ b.
Muṣṭafā deeply edited it in his Translation of religions and sects (Tercüme-i milel
ü niḥal).
In many ways, Nūḥ b. Muṣṭafā’s work returns to the genre’s scholarly roots
while continuing to dismantle the irenic air found in Shahrastānī’s original.
Despite its excision of key parts of Shahrastānī’s text, it was the longest of
the Ottoman heresiographies due to its inclusion of elaborate descriptions
and refutations of the medieval theological heresies. In comparison, Dervīş

Kütüphanesi, MS 594; İstanbul Üniversitesi Nadir Eserler Kütüphanesi, MS T4000. To Sul-

tan Murād IV: SK, MS Reşid Efendi 984, MS Yazma Bağışlar 74. To Bayram Pasha: SK, MS
Şehid Ali Paşa 1723, MS Asır Efendi 183, İstanbul Üniversitesi Nadir Eserler Kütüphanesi,
MS T5919, MS T5923. To Meḥmed Pasha: SK, MS Şehid Ali Paşa 1723. With no dedication:
SK, MS M Arıf-M Murad 177.
71 SK, MS M Arıf-M Murad 177, f. 71.
72 Little research has been done on Nūḥ b. Muṣṭafā, a fascinating figure and major author of
the eleventh/seventeenth century. For basic biographic information, see Yaşaroğlu, Nûh
b. Mustafa xxxiii, 230–231.
73 14 Şaʿbān 1049/10 December 1639 is the earliest copy date of a collated copy of Nūḥ b.
Muṣṭafā’s work written by Ebu Bekr b. Halīl al-Diyārbakrī al-Ḥanafī for Muṣṭafā Kethüdā
and copied from the author’s copy. SK, MS Fatih 2913, 118b–119a.
216 shafir

Aḥmed, Şirvānī, or Kemālpaşazāde, who based their works on the Eastern

Hanafi model, were satisfied with a cursory description of each sect and its
respective heresy, paying little attention to historical accuracy. Nūḥ b. Muṣṭafā,
on the other hand, provides details. For example, his translation of Shahras-
tānī’s Religions and sects adds small bits to the original, such as longer dis-
cussions about some of the newer philosophical and theological points that
the Mu‘tazilites had originally raised, but he also inserts refutations of most of
the sect’s core ideas.74 At the same time, he excises nearly all mention of the
Iranian and Indian religions and the segments on Jews, Christians, and philoso-
phers are heavily reduced.75 In its place is a large section outlining the proper
belief of the elect sect, fırḳa-yı nāciye (i.e., Sunnism). Nūḥ b. Muṣṭafā rewrites
Shahrastānī’s opus for a new era by focusing more on Muslim heresy and proper
Sunnism than on the diversity of humanity’s beliefs. At the same time, behind
the radical edits, there remained a modicum of analytical distance in Nūḥ b.
Muṣṭafā’s approach in comparison to that of his contemporaries. For exam-
ple, his entry on the Benāniye has none of Şirvānī’s animus, and he takes out
Shahrastānī’s separate section on extremist Shi‘is (gulāt) and merges it into
the last chapter of the Shi‘ites on the ʿIsmāʿiliye. Here he mentions the Bāṭıniye,
the sect that Kemālpaşazāde so despised, yet his tone is measured. He includes
some harsh words only in the last sentence, in which he castigates them for let-
ting their esotericism lead them to reject the sharia and the other sciences due
to their fear of reading.76

5 Reading Heresy into the Ottoman World

The eleventh/seventeenth century saw the expansion of heresiographies as

a wider group of authors began writing for a reading public that was now
actively interested in the notion of heresy. But did these authors’ crude insin-
uations against the Safavids, Kızılbaş, and other religious deviants hit their
marks? What meanings might Ottoman readers have drawn from these texts
on timeless heresies? This is a question that cannot be easily answered by
only scrutinizing the ideas and intentions of the authors, and instead we have
to turn to the reception of these texts through an analysis of the manuscript

74 Nūḥ b. Muṣṭafā, Tercümetü’l-milel ve’n-nihal 15–36.

75 For a general overview of the content of the text, see Özkılıç, Sunnitization through trans-
lation 61–85.
76 Nūḥ b. Muṣṭafā, Tercümetü’l-milel ve’n-nihal 43–47. He also has an interesting section on
how the Isma’ilis convert others to their cause.
how to read heresy in the ottoman world 217

record. A brute count of remaining manuscripts provides us some hints as to

their reception, but this can often be misleading, as discussed previously with
Shahrastānī’s text. Another problem is that readers rarely ever left personal
comments or thoughts on their manuscripts, the kind that might help us as-
sociate a historical sect with a segment of Ottoman society.77 In its place, we
have to analyze scripts, collation marks, colophons, or the absence thereof for
clues as to the texts’ receptions among different groups in Ottoman society.
Most importantly, we can read patterns of associations that copyists, binders,
and readers made when they decided to group one heresiography with another
text in miscellanies (mecmūʿas) from the tenth/sixteenth to twelfth/eighteenth
centuries. This method allows us to discover texts that might otherwise be
overlooked—as was the case in my discovery of Dervīş Aḥmed’s heresiogra-
phy—and to take into consideration instances when heresiographies were not
read as full and coherent texts, but as partial pieces such as introductions or
rubrics.
This method demonstrates that the heresiographies came to be used as
much, if not more so, to identify heresy within Ottoman society itself during the
eleventh/seventeenth and twelfth/eighteenth centuries as they were to paint
the foreign Safavid enemies as heretics. Well after the Ottoman wars against the
Safavids came to a formal end in 1049/1639, the conception of heresy that the
heresiographies fomented continued to spread. As mentioned in the introduc-
tion of this essay, the historiography on the confessionalization of the Ottoman
Empire has tended to emphasize either the external threat of the Safavids or the
internal motor of Sunnitization, but an analysis of the reception of these texts
in the eleventh/seventeenth century allows us to understand where and how
these two contexts intersected. In addition, this form of analysis shows us how
Ottoman readers applied heresiographies to their daily lives and used them as
a means of categorizing the world.
An analysis of reception is possible because the works were simply much
more widely read and copied in the eleventh/seventeenth and twelfth/eigh-
teenth centuries compared to the tenth/sixteenth. In fact, the tenth/sixteenth-
century heresiographies appear to be even more marginal because they are
never referenced, read, or grouped together with the much more popular here-
siographies of the following century. Lüṭfī Pasha’s tenth/sixteenth-century trea-
tise only exists in one or possibly two copies from the late eleventh/seventeenth

77 The one exception I found is a very condensed Arabic version of Shahrastānī’s text in a late
twelfth/eighteenth-century (1194/1780) notebook in which the reader notes on the side of
one of the heresies that “this is the state of our scholars today.” SK, MS Reşid Efendi 985,
93–108.
218 shafir

and twelfth/eighteenth centuries. As for Kemālpaşazāde’s treatise, a respect-

able eight copies remain of it, but they are all in large anthologies devoted to
his work, often owned by muftis and judges, many of which were created in
967–988/1560–1580.78 The readership of the heresiographies matches Kemāl-
paşazāde’s intended audience of muftis and judges who, as his heresiography
notes, might rule on validity of jizya payments and adjudicate disputes in the
provinces. In dangerous lands full of errant beliefs, these men would cart along
the compiled treatises of the master jurist as a reference work. In contrast, in
Istanbul alone there are about 30 copies of Nūḥ b. Muṣṭafā’s translation and 20
copies each of Şirvānī’s and Dervīş Aḥmed’s work, with more found in libraries
across the world. But crude metrics reveal only part of the picture.
When we look at the manuscript miscellanies containing eleventh/seven-
teenth-century heresiographies, we notice first of all that the texts of Şirvānī,
Dervīş Aḥmed, and Nūḥ b. Muṣṭafā were often copied and bound together,
demonstrating an organic connection that Ottoman subjects forged between
the texts.79 More often, they were grouped with other treatises on relevant
topics as will be discussed below. While this might be a matter of conve-
nience or coincidence, we can read purpose into these choices by analyzing
those miscellanies that were made by the same copyist or bound together
topically. Not surprisingly, we find the heresiographical texts placed along-
side refutations of Safavids and the Kızılbaş in the miscellanies.80 The recip-
rocal connection between the Ottoman-Safavid wars and the heresiographies
is seen most clearly in one copy of Şirvānī’s heresiography copied in Bagh-
dad in the year 1035/1626, during the time of governor Ḥāfıż Aḥmed Pasha.
The timing and location are significant: the Ottomans had just reconquered

78 See, for example, SK, MS Hamidiye 186, 147–148 copied around Safar 989/March 1581;
MS Kılıç Ali Paşa 1028, 296–297 written between 985–986/1577–1578 written for a Molla
Aḥmed b. Süleymān, owned by the mufti of Kayseri. MS Pertev Paşa 653, 161a–163b has
no copy date but seems to be done by the same scribe as the previous two copies; MS
Reisülküttab 1196, 37b–38b is in a mecmūʿa copied around late 996/1587. MS Nuruosmaniye
4972, 104–106 was copied around 977/1570. I was not able to inspect the copies at Beyazıt
Devlet Kütüphanesi, MS Beyazıt 5999, 131a–133a and 8046, 101a–103a but both are in large
mecmūʿas devoted to Kemālpaşazāde.
79 E.g., SK, MS Ozel 276, MS Hüdai Efendi 879, MS Izmir 114; Nuruosmaniye Library MS 2144.
80 Anonymous, Risāle fī hurūc-i Şāh İsmāʿīl ve ṭā’ife-i Ḳızılbaş, Nuruosmaniye Kütüphanesi
MS 4976, 124–125 alongside Şirvānī, Risāle, MS 4976, 12–19, although separated in space,
the two treatises were written by the same scribe. Miscellany containing Şirvānī’s Risāle
with comments on the Kızılbaş, SK, MS Tercüman 262. See Nūḥ b. Muṣṭafā, Tercüme-i milel
ü nihal, SK, MS Ayasofya 2197, 1–153 grouped alongside Ḳāḍīzāde ʿİlmī Meḥmed b. Muṣṭafā,
Naṣru’l-aṣḥāb fī ḳahri’s-sebbāb (er-Risāle eş-şerife fī menāḳıbı’s-ṣaḥābe) MS Ayasofya 2197,
154a–181a, which is a treatise about defining religious deviations (bidʿat).
how to read heresy in the ottoman world 219

Baghdad from the Safavids as part of the third Ottoman-Safavid war (1032–
1049/1623–39). Şirvānī’s heresiography now provided a template for judging
the fidelity of their newly reconquered subjects.81 Read and copied through-
out the eleventh/seventeenth and twelfth/eighteenth centuries, the heresiog-
raphy tradition would revive whenever this particular fight reignited, such
as the fourth Ottoman-Safavid war (1142–1148/1730–5).82 In fact, the contin-
uing influence of the heresiographies might have undermined the efforts of
government-affiliated Ottoman jurists to rehabilitate the Safavids as Muslims
during peace time, as discussed by Selim Güngörürler in his contribution to
this volume.
Yet, the miscellanies reveal not only that heresiographies were read in the
context of foreign wars with the Kızılbaş and the Safavids but also alongside
polemical treatises on the burning questions of the period. One miscellany
from 1093/1682 containing Şirvānī’s heresiography was written by a certain
Muḥammed b. Ḥasan b. Süleymān, who copied in the same volume and within
the same month treatises by the firebrand Rūmī Aḥmed Aḳḥiṣārī on the abom-
inable practice of performing ẕikr and smoking tobacco.83 A heresiography
from 1068/1658, most likely copied in Egypt, was read alongside treatises on
the legality of coffee.84 Other groupings point to similar reading patterns: the
heresiographies are found alongside works by the late tenth/sixteenth-century
scholar Birgivī, more works on twirling during Sufi worship sessions (deverān),
the tract of the aforementioned Rūmī Aḥmed, şeyhü’l-islām Minḳārīzāde’s trea-
tise on whether or not Muslims may call themselves part of “the religion of
Abraham” (millet-i İbrāhīm), and more.85 Heresy now lurked behind every sip
of coffee or innocuous statement.

81 See the colophon of miscellany containing Şirvānī’s treatise along with Sivāsī’s Dürerü’l-
ʿakā’id, SK, MS Çelebi Abdullah 195.
82 See a new heresiography text, which is modeled from the discussions of Taftāzānī’s Sharḥ
al-maqāsid: Muṣṭafā al-Islāmbūlī, Risāla fī-l-farq al-Islāmiyya, Egyptian National Library
and Archives, MS Majāmīʿ Tīmūr 345, 116–162.
83 Miscellany containing Şirvānī’s Risāle and Rūmī Aḥmed Aḳḥiṣārī’s treatises on tobacco
and ẕikr, SK, MS Darülmesnevi 258, 70b–109b.
84 Khalīl b. Yūsuf al-Zubayrī al-Budhuwānī, al-Risāla al-saniyya li-maʿrifat al-madhhab al-
sawiyya, National Library of Israel, MS AP Ar. 499, 13a (unfortunately the rest of the treatise
is cut off).
85 Miscellany containing Dervīş Aḥmed’s work with Kitāb-i Rūmī Aḥmed Efendi, Birgivī’s
Terceme-i inḳāẕü’l-hālikīn, and a commentary on Fiqh akbar, SK, MS Yazma Bağışlar 3842;
miscellany containing Şirvānī’s Risāle, Birgivī’s Terceme-i inḳāẕü’l-hālikīn and Millet-i İbrā-
hīm treatises, MS Mihrişah Sultan 440; miscellany containing Şirvānī’s Risāle, Birgivī’s
various works, and deverān treatises, MS Harput 11.
220 shafir

One of the eleventh/seventeenth-century heresiographies, that of Nūḥ b.

Muṣṭafā, however, had a very different material life and readership than its
contemporaries. His translation of Shahrastānī’s Religions and sects was copied
(and eventually printed) more than any other heresiography of the period. Its
success might even have revived interest in the original Arabic text of Shahras-
tānī, with numerous twelfth/eighteenth-century libraries in Istanbul collect-
ing reliable medieval copies of the text, which were then used to make new
copies of the Arabic version.86 Yet, the numerical popularity of Nūḥ b. Muṣṭafā’s
translation is belied by the rather meager engagement of readers. It was a sim-
ilar scenario with his other major work, a tertiary commentary of al-Durar,
which elicited complaints from colleagues that it was far too long and too self-
referential.87 Whereas Şirvānī’s and Dervīş Aḥmed’s texts were often grouped
with a variety of other short, polemical treatises, copied in simple but legi-
ble hands in a relatively cheap manner by scholars who wished to read them,
Nūḥ b. Muṣṭafā’s work tended to be placed in nicely produced and calligraphic,
but starkly empty, manuscript editions. Marginalia on these works is largely
nonexistent, nor are there many collation and correction marks—a sign that
readers are actually interested in reading the content of a long work—or even
the signatures of the copyists, which suggests it was copied by professional
scribes creating display copies and sold by booksellers.88 Unlike the copies of

86 An excellent example of the later collection of medieval heresiographies is a mecmūʿa

created in 1160/1747, which contains verified and collated copies of Shahrastānī and Ibn
Ḥazm’s heresiographies from 722/1322, with a small introduction to the genre’s main
medieval representatives from Ḥājji Khalīfa (Kātib Çelebi), Kashf al-ẓunūn. SK, MS Reisül-
küttab 555. Twelfth/eighteenth-century libraries often functioned as scriptoria, collecting
reliable copies of old texts that would serve as the basis of new copies. For a list of medieval
copies collected by these libraries, see footnote 22 above. Sezer, Architecture of bib-
liophilia. Examples of late eleventh/seventeenth and twelfth/eighteenth-century copies
include SK, MS Mahmud Paşa 302 (copied in 1086/1675–1676, see notice on the first folio);
MS Laleli 2445 (copied in 1099/1687–1688); MS Reisülküttab 157 (copied in 1135/1722–1723);
MS Laleli 2165 (copied in 1160/1747). There are also summary versions of Shahrastānī’s Ara-
bic piece from the eighteenth century, like MS Reşid Efendi 985, 93–108 (from 1194/1780)
and MS Düğümlu Baba 449, 166–173 (written in 1157/1745–1746).
87 The work is Natāʾij al-nażar fi ḥāshiyyat al-Durar, which exists in ten or so copies in Istan-
bul. See Anonymous biography of Nūḥ b. Muṣṭafā, SK, MS Halet Efendi Ek 70, 107a. Interest-
ingly, the biography does not mention his heresiography as a particularly important work
of his.
88 For nice display copies, see SK, MS Hacı Mahmud Efendi 1289, MS Hacı Mahmud Efendi
1290; MS Halet Efendi 417, MS Hamdiye 720, MS Hekimoğlu 823 (this one was meant to
have illumination, but it was never completed), MS Lala Ismail 257, MS Nuruosmaniye
2100, MS Laleli 2164; Istanbul Üniversitesi Nadir Eserler Kütüphanesi, MSS T2286, T2272,
T2098. There are obviously exceptions to this, such as the two copies with collation marks
how to read heresy in the ottoman world 221

Kemālpaşazāde’s text, carried into the field by judges in large compendia, or

Şirvānī’s, which was read by pamphleteering polemicists, Nūḥ b. Muṣṭafā’s text
was a reference work meant to be positioned ostentatiously on the shelf of an
administrator or used as an academic reference work. Not surprisingly then,
the owners and patrons that commissioned these copies tended to be pashas,
fortress commanders, and janissary chiefs.89
The connection between the heresiographies and these debates on Muslim
piety was so close that there emerged in the mid- to late eleventh/seventeenth
century a pseudoepigraphical heresiography attributed to the tenth/sixteenth-
century pietist Birgivī Meḥmed.90 Much like the other heresiographies, it con-
tained a declaration of Sunni beliefs, and, in the miscellanies that it con-
tains, are grouped other works that address basic Muslim legal obligations,
like prayer, and other creeds.91 Pairing a heresiography with a creed outlining

in SK, MS Fatih 2913 and MS Esad Efendi 1149. For copies acquired by booksellers, see SK,
MS Hacı Mahmud Efendı 1516 and MS İbrahim Efendı 503.
89 See SK, MS Fatih 2913 commissioned by a Muṣṭafā Kethüdā in 14 Şaban 1049/10 Dec 1639;
MS Fatih 2912 copied by Meḥmed b. Muṣṭafā, the scribe of Zāl Maḥmūd Pasha in 15 Şaban
1134/31 May 1722; MS Hekimoğlu 823 owned by Ḥekīmoğlu ʿAlī Pasha b. Nūḥ in 1147/1734–
1735; MS İbrahim Efendi 503, copied by Meḥmed b. Velī, the Janissary scribe in the fortress
of Vidin in 17 Rabia I 1158/19 April 1745, who also seems to have copied the manuscript at MS
Laleli 2165 in 1160/1747; MS Sütlüce Dergahi 65, which was copied from the copy of Seyyid
Meḥmed Çorbacı, müstaḥfıẓān of Cairo; Istanbul Üniversitesi Nadir Eserler Kütüphanesi
MS T2286, 138b–140a, in which the scribe Ismāʿīl writes a ḳasīde upon finishing his copy in
1062/1651–1652 in praise of the patron Emīr Halīl, a mīr-livā. Sadberk Hanım Müzesi, MS 80,
copied by Ibrāhīm for Aḥmed, kethüdā-i müstaḥfiẓān of Cairo in 27 Rabia II 1140/12 Decem-
ber 1727 and later owned by Hāşim Kethüdā b. el-Ḥāc Ebūbekir Pasha.
90 Pseudo-Birgivī, Tuḥfat al-mustarshidīn fī bayān firaq al-Muslimīn. SK, MS Fatih 5344
(copied in 1188/1774–1775); MS Damad İbrahim 297, 377–384 (copied in Receb 1101/April-
May 1690); MS Yazma Bağışlar 5778, 19–38 (not dated but most likely twelfth/eighteenth
century); MS A. Tekelioglu 824ff. 93a–99 (copied in 29 Safer 1263/16 February 1847); Beyazıt
Kütüphanesi, MS 1463, 81a–90a (n.d.); Atıf Efendi Library MS Ek 1500, 149b–157a (copied
30 Muharrem 1199/13 December 1784); Tokyo University Daiber Collection, MS 32, 30a–35b
(copied in 1260/1844–1845). As noted with the dates of these works, I agree with Ahmet
Kaylı, who argues that this work is one of the many pieces falsely attributed to Birgivī in
the eleventh/seventeenth century, given the dates of extant manuscripts; A critical study
of Birgivi Mehmed Efendi’s works 134–135; van Ess claims that this heresiography was ded-
icated by Birgivī to (Ḳara) Aḥmed Pasha, who lead a campaign against Shah Tahmāsp in
the mid-tenth/sixteenth century. Van Ess’s proof, though, is a reference in Brockelmann’s
GAL (Berlin 2133/4) that he seems to have misread. It is actually the previous treatise men-
tioned by Brockelmann (Berlin 2132) that is a refutation of the Shi’ites and is dedicated by
Birgivī to a certain Aḥmed Pasha. Van Ess, Der Eine ii, 1178–1179; Brockelmann, History of
the Arabic written tradition ii, 518.
91 SK, MS Yazma Bağışlar 5778, which has the Fiqh akbar, a list of sins by Turkistānī ʿAlaed-
dīn, and variety of others. See also Beyazıt Devlet Kütüphanesi, MS 1463 and Atıf Efendi
Kütüphanesi MS Ek 1500.
222 shafir

basic beliefs of faith was a quite common practice, and we find heresiogra-
phies grouped alongside the famous creed of Nasafī or the new ones of shaykhs
like ʿAbdü’l-mecīd Sivāsī (d. 1049/1639).92 Sometimes just the segment on the
“elect sect” of Sunnism was copied out to function as a creed (ʿakāʾid).93 The
reason for these associations is simple. As the author of one anonymous here-
siography (which was copied alongside a commentary on the Fiqh akbar in
the late eleventh/seventeenth century) stated, it was a way of ferreting out
“hypocrites, those who outwardly display Islam but conceal their heresy and
infidelity deep within.”94 Together these associations demonstrate not only
how the heresiographies were used to frame fights over Muslim practice in the
eleventh/seventeenth century but also how closely tied they were to the con-
fessionalization of the empire.
Readers of heresiographies in these varied contexts might have been less
interested in the details of the sects themselves than the image these texts
conjured of an Islamic world besieged from within and without by heretics.
This motivation helps explain those instances when a reader would copy only
the introduction of one of the heresiographies, which repeated the famous
hadith that Muslims were bound to divide into 72 wayward sects and reiterated
the need to ferret out the hypocrites and dissimulators.95 An equally common
phenomenon was to reduce the heresiography to its base schema, a one-folio
table of the 72 wayward sects that simply listed their names and two or three
words of description.96 Heresiographical “modules” were likewise incorporated
in longer texts for similar purposes.97 Take, for example, a long, anonymous text
written during the time of Murād IV, and which was floridly dedicated to his
grand vizier, Meḥmed, who had established the madrasa at which the author
taught. The manuscript is currently missing its first few pages, which makes
the author and title difficult to decipher, but it is essentially a large work in

92 For Nasafī, ʿAqāʾid, see SK, MS Hacı Mahmud Efendi 1413, and for ʿAbdü’l-mecīd b. Muḥar-
rem el-Sivāsī, see Dürerü’l-ʿaḳāʾid, SK, MS Çelebi Abdullah 195, 30b–109b.
93 Al-Şirvānī, Risāle fi Beyān meẕāhib muhtelife, SK, MS Mihrişah Sultan 440, 27a–28b.
94 Anonymous, Untitled heresiography, SK, MS Hacı Ahmed Pasa 156, 193b.
95 Dervīş Aḥmed, Mirʾātü’l-ʿakā’id, SK, MS Yazma Bağışlar 3842, 57b–59b; National Library of
Israel, MS Yah. Ar. 311, 60a.
96 See, for example, the late seventeenth-century mecmūʿa of Muṣṭafā b. ʿAbdü’l-ḥalīm from
Antep, National Library of Israel, MS AP Ar. 482, 170a–171a; Atıf Efendi Kütüphanesi,
MS 2817, 67b–68a, copied in 1102/1691 from the text of a certain shaykh Ekmele’d-dīn. The
copyist, Aḥmed Ismāʿīl of the Haseki neighborhood of Istanbul, made the mecmūʿa over
the last decade of the seventeenth century (from 1103–1104/1691–3).
97 See, for example, the giant work of Najm al-Dīn al-Ghazzī from the early eleventh/seven-
teenth-century Damascus. al-Ghazzī, Ḥusn al-tanabbuh ix, 347–465. This is the rare case
of finding a heresiography in Arabic sources from the period.
how to read heresy in the ottoman world 223

quite simple Turkish explaining the perfection of the Quran, the various types
of unbelief (kufr), and general problems in dogma among the population. The
first chapter, though, is a heresiography, and introduces the core question fram-
ing the book: “what is the reason for the divisions in Islam?”98
This reading of the heresiographies as a means of imagining or organizing
the world can help us understand the curious comments on the heresiogra-
phy genre made by the eleventh/seventeenth-century bibliophile Kātib Çelebi
(d. 1067/1657). In his massive bibliography Kashf al-ẓunūn, he states that while
the genre of milal wa-l-niḥal is comprised of the medieval heresiographies of
people such as Ibn Ḥazm and Shahrastānī, and translated lately by Nūḥ b.
Muṣṭafā, there exists a popular understanding of the genre as a means of divid-
ing the world and categorizing human difference. Copying from the introduc-
tion (without attribution) of the aforementioned anonymous heresiography
dedicated to Murād IV, he states that some classify humans according to their
environment, with each of the seven climes imparting onto people different
tongues and colors. Others divided the world according to the cardinal direc-
tions, or by the major civilizational groups (umam)—Arabs, Persians, Turks
(Rūm), and Indians. Finally, some people, such as our heresiographers, split the
world according to beliefs and sects (al-ārā’ wa-l-madhāhib).99
This broader notion of heresiography as a classificatory schema for human
civilization had always been present. The medieval poet Yūnus Emre frequently
interchanged the phrase “72 sects (millet)” with “72 tongues (dil),” in which
the heretical Other became synonymous with the diversity of peoples in the
world: “He created seventy-two types of tongues / And placed the Muslim
above them all.”100 Shahrastānī’s Religions and sects likewise continued to be
used to understand the non-Muslim world. When the traveler Ibn Maʿṣūm
(d. 1120/1708) departed as a boy from Mecca to Hyderabad in 1066/1655–1656 to
join his father, he used the relevant sections on animists and water-worshippers
to briefly describe and contextualize the Hindu practices he encountered.101
This fits with the traditional role of heresiographies as a means of describing
the world at large, just as we saw with the classification of Shahrastānī’s trav-
elogues in the imperial library of Bāyezīd II. Thus, it is not surprising to find
Ottoman scholars like Kemālpaşazāde and Şirvānī mention on occasion that a

98 Egyptian National Library, MS Tawhid Turki 48, 2a. The cataloger lists the author as Yaʿḳūb
b. ʿAbdü’l-laṭīf, but it is unclear how s/he concluded this.
99 The original heresiography can be found in the Egyptian National Library, MS Tawhid Turki
48, 3b. Ḥājji Khalīfa (Kātib Çelebi), Kashf al-ẓunūn ii, 1821.
100 “Yaratdı yitmiş iki dürlü dili | arada üstün kodı müsülmânı.” Yunus Emre, Yûnus Emre Dîvânı:
tenkitli metin ii, 401. See also 197, 218, 405.
101 Ibn Maʿṣūm, Riḥlat Ibn Maʿṣūm 162.
224 shafir

certain medieval sect had followers in Georgia, Persia, Azerbaijan, or Egypt.102

Heresiographies written during the Ottoman period continued this tradition.
Not only did they cast the world as an island of proper Sunnism surrounded by
an ocean of heresy, but they also defined the world as divided first and foremost
by confessional differences.
A sectarian worldview was not a foregone conclusion, however, but a phe-
nomenon that emerged out of the particular dynamics of the Turkish-speaking
parts of the Ottoman Empire. Something about these heresiographies simply
did not move into Arabic. While Arabic readers could, of course, refer back to
the medieval originals, there is a noticeable lack of adaptations and epitomes
of heresiographies in Arabic.103 And although Nūḥ b. Muṣṭafā wrote his trans-
lation in Cairo, it was for a Turkish-speaking Rumi audience and it seemed to
make few inroads with the local Arabic-speaking scholars. In fact, these texts
seem to be much rarer outside of the core Turkish-speaking areas of the empire.
When an Egyptian copyist in 1068/1658 needed to access a shortened and more
modern version of the heresiographies, he had to avail himself of a version that
was produced in the Gujarati Sultanate in the ninth/fifteenth century, rather
than a locally available copy.104 It is important to keep this in mind because the
strongest resistance to the insistent drive to anathematize Muslims came from
the scholars of the Arab cities.105 While the imperial center continued to try to
divide the world into heretics and believers, this was not a universally accepted
aspiration for all Muslims in the empire.

102 For example, the Karrāmiye is found in Gürcistān (Georgia), Şirvānī, Risāle, SK, MS Darül-
mesnevi 258, 81a; Kemālpaşazāde, Risāla, MS Reşid Efendi 1031, 281a.
103 Van Ess, Der Eine ii, 1175–1182. Relying on Brockelmann, van Ess lists a number of here-
siographies that were written in the Arab lands during the early modern period. It should
be pointed out, however, that these seem to be nonexistent in the Turkish-speaking parts
of the empire, never copied or read with the main current of heresiographies. This point
reinforces the necessity of examining the manuscript copies themselves.
104 Khalīl b. Yūsuf al-Zubayrī al-Budhawānī, al-Risāla al-saniyya li-maʿrifat al-madhhab al-
sawiyya, National Library of Israel, MS AP Ar. 499, 12a. Although the copyist does not iden-
tify his location, you can tell it is Cairene by the Arab naskh script it employs and the fact
that it is dedicated to the Bakrī Sayyids, a powerful Sufi ruling family in eleventh/seven-
teenth-century Cairo. As mentioned earlier, the early eleventh/seventeenth-century Dam-
ascene scholar, Najm al-Dīn al-Ghazzī, included one in his encyclopedic work, but more
as an act of comprehensiveness than a central and updated part of the text, I believe. Al-
Ghazzī, Ḥusn al-tanabbuh.
105 See, for example, the work of Qāsim al-Khānī, the late eleventh/seventeenth-century
Aleppan scholar who wrote a few treatises critiquing Şirvānī’s eagerness to declare all Mus-
lims heretics. Egyptian National Library and Archives, MS Majāmīʿ Ṭaʿlat 335, 1–21. It seems
that Khānī is not responding to the heresiography but to another text of Şirvānī or possibly
his grandson, the şeyhü’l-islām, Meḥmed Ṣādıḳ Ṣadre’d-dīnzāde.
how to read heresy in the ottoman world 225

While Arab scholars were perhaps less receptive to Ottoman-style here-

siographies, the texts, and a larger conception of a world divided into heresy
and belief, found an audience beyond the borders of the empire. The most
fascinating rendition of the Ottoman heresiographies comes from an unlikely
source. They are two copies—one in Judeo-Turkish and the other in rough
Italian—of Şirvānī’s heresiography from the first decades of the eleventh/sev-
enteenth century. A Judeo-Turkish copy of Şirvānī’s heresiography, apparently
the earliest copy extant, was copied, shortly after Şirvānī wrote his treatise,
on a scribe’s defter-formatted pages.106 Although the Hebrew script used is
quite difficult to read today, it seems to be relatively faithful to the text. It
was eventually acquired by Levinus Warner (d. 1665), the Dutch consul resi-
dent in Istanbul, and made its way to Holland. Warner resided in Istanbul from
1055–1075/1645–65, so the text was not originally intended for his consumption.
Before it reached Warner’s hands, though, it likely found its way into the posses-
sion of Yahacob (Ya’acov/Jacob) Romano. On 10 July 1632, Romano presented
his translation of Şirvānī’s heresiography in a very rough and “vulgar Italian”
to the king of France and his ambassador in Constantinople where it eventu-
ally made its way into the French royal library, copied into a book of reports.107
The translation was actually one of three books he left for the French delega-
tion upon leaving Istanbul for Jerusalem.108 This sort of work was common for
Romano, who, besides attempting to establish a trilingual press (Hebrew-Latin-
Arabic) in Istanbul, was a frequent book supplier and correspondent with the
elder and younger Johannes Buxtorf, the famous Swiss Hebraicists.109
For the most part, Romano is faithful to Şirvānī’s Turkish text, displaying only
a few mistakes in his grasp of the original text while doing his best to render

106 The manuscript has some clear but oddly written Arabic (in Arabic script) on the back
thanking God for placing them in the elect sect (al-firqa al-nājiya). Şirvānī, Risāle fi Beyān
meẕāhib muhtelife ( Judeo-Turkish version), Leiden University Library, MS Or 1129(g).
107 Bibliotheque Nationale de France, Manuscrits occidentaux, Francais 16141, 348–388, espe-
cially 348. My sincere thanks to Tijana Krstić for bringing this translation to my attention.
Şirvānī, Risāle, MS Francais 16141, 348.
108 Those three books are “al-Tarjaman,” which was an Arabic-Persian-Turkish lexicon writ-
ten in 1629; Şirvānī’s “compendium of various sects which are found among the Muslims
(turchi)”; and, finally, its translation from Turkish into a crude Italian. It is suspected that
the Judeo-Turkish text found in Leiden was the piece that Jacob Romano used for the
translation. Steinschneider, Zur arabischen Literatur 841.
109 Van Ess mistakenly states that Romano was trying to print Şirvānī’s heresiography. Van Ess,
Der Eine ii, 1180. It is clear from the Hebrew, though, that Romano actually wanted to pub-
lish a trilingual edition of Maimonides Guide to the perplexed. For a list of books provided
by Romano, see Kayserling, Richelieu, Buxtorf père et fils, Jacob Roman 93.
226 shafir

the Turkish into a crude Italian.110 For example, kelām, that is, theology, is ren-
dered as “Philosophia” and ʿulemā become “vicari.” Yet hidden within Romano’s
translation is a more surprising intervention. Toward the conclusion, the word
“Catholics” starts to appear throughout the text. Romano has not changed the
substance of the text though. Instead, he has gone through and substituted
“Catholici” whenever the original work mentions (Sunni) Islam or Muslims. He
provides no explanation for this, but he begins this substitution at the end of
the treatise, that is, in the section where Şirvānī starts to describe the “elect
sect” of the “Ehlisunnet et Giemahet,” (i.e., the Sunnis). After listing Şirvānī’s six
“sects” or legal schools of Sunnism (“hanifia, Maliquia, Xafihia, hanbalia, sofinia
[sufyaniyye], sevria”), Romano states that their beliefs are far from heresy and
“the sum of these opinions of the Catholics is this,” whereupon he moves on to
the description of the basic tenets of Sunni theology and continues to use the
word Catholics to refer to Muslims.111 Romano translates Sunnism into Catholi-
cism lest his European readers believe that the “ehlisunnet et giemahet” were
just one more group of wayward heretics. Every Ottoman heresiographer had
to use his authorial prerogative to translate the past into terms comprehensible
to the reader of his day, and Romano is no different.
By making this remarkable association, our Jewish author is proposing a
new, confessionalized vision of the world. Yet, Romano’s heresiography was not
just another sectarian text decrying Islam’s heresies to a Christian audience.
Nor is he describing a world in which Islam and Christianity were battling one
another for supremacy of the Mediterranean and the world. Instead, he is sug-
gesting that the Sunni Ottoman Empire and the Counter-Reformation Catholic
kingdoms were actually united in their parallel struggles against heretics,
whether that of the Shi‘ites, Protestants, or others. It is an intriguing vision of a
world united by confessionalization rather than divided by sectarianism.
Of course, a view of the world as divided according to confessions was just
one possibility among many, but it found a ready currency among many in
the Ottoman Empire. As I have traced out in this paper, the dynasty’s rel-
ative indifference to matters of confessional fidelity in the ninth/fifteenth

110 One place where Romano mistranslates the text is the section on the Benāniye, a sect,
mentioned above, that believes that God is incarnate in the children of ʿAlī, just as the
angel Gabriel had incarnated in Dihye-i Kelbī. Romano, unfamiliar with this companion,
interprets kalb literally, stating that the angel Gabriel appeared in the form of a dog (cane).
BNF MS Francais 16141, 366v. The French copyist was also careful to fix copyist mistakes and
note where Romano had accidently repeated himself (e.g. 375v, 380r).
111 “l’opinioni di questi sonno lontane dalle Inventioni et opinioni delli Infideli et la somma
di queste opinione de i Catholici e questa,” BNF MS Francais 16141, 384v.
how to read heresy in the ottoman world 227

century was shattered by the threat of the Kızılbaş and the Safavids in the
early tenth/sixteenth century. In reaction, government-affiliated scholars set
out to (re)define heresy, and the medieval genre of the heresiography was
dusted off and retrofitted for a new era of theological rivalry, no longer a
guide to the bizarre beliefs of distant peoples but a means of anathematiz-
ing tangible enemies. However, they never added, or even mentioned, new
heretical sects to the ancient lists. Instead, they subtly and crudely alluded
to parallels between medieval groups and current opponents. These limited
writings in the tenth/sixteenth century found renewed popularity among a
wide range of authors and readers in the eleventh/seventeenth century fol-
lowing the second and third Ottoman-Safavid wars. Even after hostilities had
ceased, there remained a widespread desire to identify and root out heresy
within Ottoman society itself as readers began to read the heresiographies
alongside tracts against smoking tobacco and other controversies. In this way,
Ottoman subjects learned to read heresy both in the beliefs of the empire’s ene-
mies abroad but also at home, among their coreligionists in the same city and
town. We can only see the historicity of this genre, however, if we learn to read
the varied traces of evidence left behind on the material manuscripts them-
selves.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editors of this volume, Tijana Krstić and Derin Ter-
zioğlu, as well as the anonymous reviewers for their very insightful comments
on earlier drafts. Research for this essay was supported by the European Re-
search Council (ERC) Consolidator Grant under the European Union’s Horizon
2020 research and innovation program (grant agreement No 648498).

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 chapter 7

Prayers, Commentaries, and the Edification of the

Ottoman Supplicant

Guy Burak

In the growing scholarly corpus on Ottoman Islam remarkably little attention

has been paid to prayers, invocations, and supplications.1 But the scholarly
interest stands in inverse relation to the amount of manuscripts containing
prayers and supplications of various sorts. Even a cursory overview of library
catalogs from Turkey, the Middle East, the Balkans, Europe, and North Amer-
ica reveals a sizable and diverse textual corpus that has remained, by and
large, unexamined. Consider, for instance, the inventory of the library of Sul-
tan Bāyezīd II (d. 908/1512). The list of prayer books, invocations, amulets, and
talismanic shirts is one of the longest in the inventory (about 200 items) and
includes titles in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish.2
The lack of attention to this fairly extensive textual corpus may be attributed,
at least in part, to the texts’ formulaic and repetitive nature. However, as Tijana
Krstić and Derin Terzioğlu have shown in their respective studies of Ottoman
ʿilm-i ḥāls,3 devotional literature—prayer books and invocations included—is
theologically charged and the history of its production and circulation offers a
unique glimpse into important aspects of Ottoman Islam. In this essay, then,
I seek to illustrate the significance of the vast and diverse corpus of supplica-
tions, invocations, and prayers for gaining a better understanding of certain
sensibilities that emerged mainly, but surely not exclusively, in the core lands of
the empire from the tenth/sixteenth through the twelfth/eighteenth centuries.
Numerous terms were used to refer to different types of prayers, supplica-
tions, and invocations, although they were occasionally used somewhat incon-

1 This is the case not only in Ottomanist historiography but in Islamic studies more generally.
Katz, Prayer 29–43; Padwick, Muslim devotions; McGregor, On the literature. For the Ottoman
period, there are some exceptions: Bain, The late Ottoman En‘am-ı şerif; Gruber, A pious cure-
all.
2 Burak, The section on prayers 341–366. Likewise, Konrad Hirschler has observed that prayer
books made up a great proportion of the collection of the seventh/thirteenth-century Ash-
rafiyya Library in Damascus. Hirschler, The written word 147–149.
3 Terzioğlu, Where ʿilm-i ḥāl; Krstić, From shahāda to ʿaqīda; and Krstić’s contribution to this
volume.

© guy burak, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004440296_008

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
prayers, commentaries, and edification 233

sistently: ṣalāt (pl. ṣalāwāt, Tr. ṣalavāt), duʿā (pl. adʿiya, Tr. edʿiye), ḥizb (pl.
aḥzāb), and wird (pl. awrād, Tr. evrād). Moreover, it is not fully clear at this point
how exactly each of these compilations and genres was employed. It is possible
that some texts were considered more petitionary, intended to persuade God
to intervene on behalf of the supplicant on specific issues, while others were
more supererogatory in nature. However, it is quite difficult to draw a clear line
between different uses of the devotional and supplicatory texts as it is quite
likely that there were cases in which the same text was used for different pur-
poses.4
The Ottoman devotional corpus also included a significant number of com-
mentaries (usually referred to as sharḥ, pl. shurūḥ) on prayers, invocations, and
supplications. It is on these commentaries that I would like to concentrate in
this chapter, with the intention of exploring the relationship between recita-
tion, the understanding of the recited invocations/prayers, and piety. In par-
ticular, I would like to examine several compilations from the tenth/sixteenth
through the twelfth/eighteenth centuries that seem to have enjoyed great pop-
ularity, from the popular manual on prayers by the famous tenth/sixteenth-
century Ottoman chief mufti Ebū’s-suʿūd Efendi (d. 982/1574) to several
twelfth/eighteenth-century commentaries on Muḥammad ibn Sulaymān al-
Jazūlī’s (d. 870/1465) Dalāʾil al-khayrāt wa-shawāriq al-anwār and ʿAlī al-Qārī
al-Harawī’s (d. 1014/1606) al-Ḥizb al-aʿẓam wa al-wird al-afkham. These com-
pilations were intended to assist the supplicant to perform her supplication
properly.
The question of understanding the recited invocations and devotional texts
centers on the question of the maʿnā. In a recent and insightful study of the the-
ories of maʿnā in the fifth/eleventh century, Alexander Key has drawn attention
to the centrality of this concept in a wide range of disciplines in the Arabic
scholarly tradition, from lexicography to theology and logic. As opposed to
the more common translation of the word as “meaning,” Key has proposed
to translate maʿnā as mental content that could be accessed and expressed,
though not necessarily accurately, by language.5 In the following pages, I hope

4 As Richard McGregor has noticed for the Mamluk period, “although the terminology is incon-
sistent, with prayers referred to by more than one term, the genre as a whole is clearly identifi-
able as consisting of supererogatory petitionary prayer compositions,” Notes on the literature
201. Furthermore, it is worth reiterating, the compiler of the aforementioned inventory of the
library of Sultan Bāyezīd II recorded the invocations and prayers in the same section of the
inventory with amulets, talismanic shirts, and works on lettrism, suggesting that these texts
were used, at least in certain circles, as part of a set of occult practices.
5 Key, Language between god 38.
234 burak

to demonstrate a range of perceptions of the relationship between understand-

ing the recited text and valid/effective recitation that coexisted throughout
the core lands of the empire (and probably beyond). Some of the Ottoman
thinkers emphasized the importance of understanding the maʿnā of the recited
text, while others seem to have assumed that the effective recitation does
not require such understanding. It appears to me that the gap between lan-
guage (lafẓ) and mental content (maʿnā), which was central in the writings
of the fifth/eleventh-century (and later) thinkers, and the emphasis of certain
Ottoman commentators on understanding the maʿnā raise intriguing ques-
tions with regard to the latter’s understanding of the cognitive effect of the
recited words on the reciters.
In this short chapter, I will concentrate on a the tenth/sixteenth-century
manual by Ebū’s-suʿūd Efendi on the one hand and the twelfth/eighteenth-
century commentaries on the Dalāʾil and the Ḥizb on the other and their
respective perceptions of the relationship between understanding the devo-
tional text and effective recitation. Such a comparison suggests that commen-
tarial practices that had been fairly limited to Sufi circles became more preva-
lent among the broader segments of Ottoman society in the late eleventh/sev-
enteenth and twelfth/eighteenth centuries.
My interest in the circulation of the Dalāʾil and its commentaries in the
Ottoman lands has led me to devote special attention in what follows to intel-
lectual and devotional developments in the first half of the twelfth/eighteenth
century. This chapter, then, joins several recent studies that cast new light
on early twelfth/eighteenth-century Ottoman Islam. Most notably, Marlene
Kurz’s study has drawn attention to several Sufi thinkers, like the marginal
Sufi preacher Fażlīzāde ʿAlī (d. after 1153/1740), the focus of her study, as well
as Muḥammad Saçaḳlızāde (d. 1145/1732–1733), whom we shall meet below,
who believed that their period was suffering from religious confusion and dis-
order.6 In response to the disorder, these Sufi thinkers thought they should
guide whoever is in need of guidance on the straight path (irshād) based on
their understanding of what characterized such a path.7 As a result, Kurz has
argued, these thinkers (and others) aspired to popularize certain Sufi doctrines
and practices throughout broader segments of Ottoman society.8 Moreover, the
study of Islamic thought and practices in the this period may illustrate the par-

6 Kurz, Ways to heaven 53–54. For an overview of major intellectual trends in the core lands of
the empire in the eleventh/seventeenth and twelfth/eighteenth centuries, see Artan, Forms
and forums.
7 Kurz, Ways to heaven 133.
8 Ibid. 112.
prayers, commentaries, and edification 235

ticularities of the Ottoman confession building project of the ninth/fifteenth

through the eleventh/seventeenth centuries: despite clear continuities in terms
of texts, genres, and practices, the Ottoman dynasty and its ruling elite appear
to have played a different, perhaps somewhat less central, role by the early
twelfth/eighteenth century than the one they had played in earlier centuries
(on this issue, see also Ünver Rüstem’s paper in this volume). However, as the
commentaries I will discuss suggest, questions about spiritual wellbeing, devo-
tion, and faith continued to concern many in the Ottoman domains. In other
words, this essay seeks to draw attention to the involvement (or lack thereof)
of different actors in different registers of Ottoman Islam and in different time
periods: while the Ottoman dynasty and its learned hierarchy may have been
interested in regulating certain practices and discourses in specific contexts,
they may have been much less eager or able to do so with regard to other dis-
courses and in other time periods (and possibly in other places throughout the
empire).
Finally, this chapter also seeks to contribute to the study of devotional sen-
sibilities in the Ottoman Empire in general and in the context of the histori-
ography on confession building (or “confessionalization”) in particular. Specif-
ically, by studying the commentaries on prayers and invocations, my intention
is to draw attention to the diversity of practices and ideas that fall under the
fairly general term of “devotion.” I hope that the examination of the different
approaches to the understanding of recited texts will broaden the discussion
on perceptions of the relationship between belief/understanding and perfor-
mative deeds/speech acts that prevailed in the Ottoman lands and, perhaps,
elsewhere.

1 A Note on Prayers and Commentaries

In recent years, several studies have been devoted to the function of differ-
ent types of commentaries and commentarial practices, from Quranic exegesis
(tafsīr) to glosses (ḥāshiyya), in the Islamic tradition of the so-called “post-
classical” period.9 These studies have tried to correct an (Orientalist) view of
commentaries as “no more than stale expositions of the works of revered mas-
ters of a bygone age” and to demonstrate the commentator’s creativity and

9 See, for example, the special issue edited by Asad Q. Ahmed and Margaret Larkin on “The
Ḥāshiyya and Islamic intellectual history,” Oriens 41 (2013). See also van Lit, An Ottoman com-
mentary.
236 burak

innovation.10 However, the study of commentaries in the Islamic tradition

has tended to privilege certain textual corpora—such as hadith, fiqh, theol-
ogy, tafsīr, literature, and philosophy—while ignoring others. The focus on
these fields of knowledge may be attributed, to some extent at least, to histo-
riographical/scholarly hierarchies that consider certain Islamic sciences more
respectable than others.
In this context, Richard McGregor’s short yet groundbreaking study of Mam-
luk commentaries on the “revealed” or inspired prayer compositions of the
great Sufi masters deserves special mention. These prayer compositions be-
came fairly common after the sixth/twelfth century and were associated with
saintly figures, usually senior members of their respective Sufi networks or
even the eponymous founders of Sufi paths. The prayer cycles’ tone is often
petitionary and the content is often derived from the Quran (as the term wird
indicates) and/or the prophetic tradition (ḥadīth). As McGregor explains, “the
Qur’anic passages in these prayer texts vary in length and style, and they are
also edited in order to preserve the voice and syntax of the prayer narrative …
Used this way, the Qur’anic text is both an integral component of the prayer
text, and yet is altered to serve in its new context.”11
Within various Sufi networks, fairly complex systems of commentaries on
the prayer/ invocation compositions emerged. Commentaries have been as-
signed different terms, including tafsīr, taʿlīqa, tahdhīb, mukhtaṣar, ḥawāshī,
and taṣḥīḥ, but, as in the Ottoman period, the most commonly used term was
sharḥ. In addition to clarifying the text of prayers and invocations to mem-
bers of the network, the Mamluk commentaries sought to establish the saintly
authority of the author. It is for this reason that many commentaries include
hagiographical materials about the author and reports on miraculous events
caused by the recitation of the prayer/invocation.12
My inquiry is inspired to a considerable extent by McGregor’s examina-
tion of the Mamluk Sufi commentaries on prayers and invocations. My main
interest, however, is not in the prayer compilation that circulated within Sufi
networks but in commentaries on prayer compilations that were intended for
a broader audience. While some of the texts examined below, like al-Jazūlī’s
Dalāʾil al-khayrāt, are quite similar to the Sufi prayer compilations of the Mam-
luk and Ottoman periods, other works, such as Ebū’s-suʿūd’s Duʿānāme, are
different in structure and content. It is precisely because of the fairly broad

10 Ahmed and Larkin, The hashiya 213–214.

11 McGregor, Notes on the literature 205.
12 Ibid. 208. This practice continued in the Ottoman period. Most Ottoman commentaries
on Dalāʿil al-khayrāt include a biography of al-Jazūlī.
prayers, commentaries, and edification 237

circulation of the texts examined here that I am especially concerned with the
issues of edifying the reciter and establishing the proper relationship between
the recitation and the correct understanding of the recited text.

2 Ebū’s-suʿūd Efendi’s Duʿānāme

At some point between 968/1561 and 972/1565, the renowned şeyhü’l-islām

Ebū’s-suʿūd Efendi penned a prayer manual for the empire’s grand vizier, Semiz
ʿAlī Paşa (served as grand vizier from 968–972/1561–1565, d. 972/1565). In the fol-
lowing decades and centuries, the manual became quite popular, as the numer-
ous extant copies suggest.13 Despite the work’s honorable dedicatee, “the Asaf
of the time,” the chief mufti emphasizes in his introduction to the manual that
the prayer (duʿā) is intended to commemorate the Prophet and argues that the
supplication is an individual obligation ( farż-ı ʿayn) that both members of the
elite and the commoners are required to perform.14 It is possible that the jurist
and the grand vizier intended the work to circulate widely, and it is, perhaps,
for this reason that Ebū’s-suʿūd Efendi insisted on writing his manual in Turk-
ish: “I have [selected a] limited [number] of traditions [transmitted] from the
Prophet, and translated their commentary into Turkish, so that in moments of
prayer and worship and in auspicious times and in important [instances] offer-
ing [a prayer] would be easy and its [the prayer’s] aid would be imminent.”15
Indeed, Ebū’s-suʿūd’s list of supplicants is very comprehensive in terms of their
social rank: a just imam (imām-i ʿādil), the learned (ehl-i Ḳur’ān olan kimesne),
the pious (or Sufi, ṣāliḥ), recent converts, fathers, sons, and the sick.16
After a fairly brief discussion of the definition of duʿā, Ebū’s-suʿūd describes
the preconditions for a successful supplication: the supplicant, for example, has

13 For an incomplete list of copies of the Duʿānāme see Kaleli, Duʿā-nāme 5–14. I am grate-
ful to Evren Sünnetçioğlu for bringing this thesis to my attention. See also Demir, Devlet-i
Aliyye’nin 51. In addition, I have consulted Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, MS Laleli 1534, which
does not appear in Kaleli’s and Demir’s lists.
14 “Anı duʿāda hayırla yād eylemek kāffe-i enām, ve cümle-i havāṣṣ ü ʿavāmm üzerine farż-ı ʿayn
lāzimü’l-edā.” Kaleli, Duʿā-nāme 112.
15 “Resūlu’l-llāh ṣalla Allāhu ʿaleyhi ve sellemden rivāyet eylediklerin iktisār idüp şerḥleri Türkī
dilince tercüme eyledim ki evḳāt-i duʿā ve ʿibādātda ve ezmān-i mesāliḥa ve mühimmātda
me’ūneti ḳalīl ve maʿūneti ʿale’t-te’cīl ola.” Ibid. 113. It is worth noting that this was not the
only work ʿAlī Semiz Paşa commissioned in Turkish: while serving as the Ottoman gov-
ernor of Egypt (956–961/1549–1554), he was presented with a work on the Ottoman con-
struction projects in Mecca in “clear Turkish.” See Burak, Between Istanbul and Gujarat
315.
16 Kaleli, Duʿā-nāme 120.
238 burak

to repent, give alms (or perform a good deed), believe in the prayer he recites,
praise God at the beginning of the prayer and say “Amen” at the end of the
prayer, recite the prayer slowly, raise her hands during the prayers, and wipe
her face at the end. He then moves on to list the auspicious times during which
the prayer is more likely to be answered (evḳāt-i icābet), such as the first night of
the month of Rajab and night of the middle of Shaʿban, and the following day;
the Laylat al-Qadr (celebrated on the twenty-seventh day of Ramadan to com-
memorate the beginning of the revelation of the Quran to the Prophet) and the
following day; and Thursday nights and Fridays during Ramadan. During the
year, the time period between the khutba and the end of the ritual/canonical
prayer on Friday and the last third of the night are also special times for suppli-
cation, as are the moments after the call for prayer, after the canonical prayer,
and after the recitation of the Quran. Battles (ḳıtāl fī sebīlillāh) are also con-
sidered auspicious times. Finally, Ebū’s-suʿūd provides his reader with a sign
that God accepted her supplication (ʿalāmet-i ḳabūl): If the supplicant’s pain is
relieved, she may interpret the relief as a sign of her prayer’s acceptance.17
The body of the Duʿānāme is divided into seven sections (bāb), each of which
is devoted to a specific type of supplication. Some chapters are devoted to
prayers that need to be recited in momentous events, such as military cam-
paigns or specific dates (Laylat al-Qadr and Yawm ʿArafa/ ʿArefe Günü, the sec-
ond day of the Hajj pilgrimage). Others are dedicated to prayers that consti-
tute part of the daily routine of the believer, such as prayers before wearing
her garment or eating her meal. Some traditions relate to specific recitations,
while others deal with beneficial practices that follow in the Prophet’s foot-
steps. These practices, it should be noted, are also described as duʿās. Following
the Prophet’s example, for instance, and his wives ʿĀʾisha and Ḥafṣa, the earlier
shaykhs (meşāyih-i müteḳaddimīn) contended that one should start putting on
a kaftan with the right sleeve.18
The basic unit of the Duʿānāme are traditions (rivāyet) about or from the
Prophet that contextualize the prayer. Consider, for instance, the first rivāyet
from the Duʿānāme’s first section:

[In Turkish:] Anas ibn Mālik—may God be pleased with him—related:

“One day, while the Prophet, peace be upon him, was sitting in the
mosque, a person came [to the mosque]. He prayed and recited this
prayer:

17 “Hiffet bulsa elbetde ol kimesnenin duʿāsı ḳabūl olmuş olur.” Ibid.

18 Ibid. 133.
prayers, commentaries, and edification 239

‫اللهم أني أسئلك بان لك الحمد لا إله الا انت المنان يا خنان يا منان يا بديع السموات‬
‫والأرض يا ذا الجلال والاكرام يا حي يا قوم وصل الله على محمد وعلى ال محمد واقض‬
.‫حاجتي برحمتك يا ارحم الراحمين‬

The Prophet—peace be upon him—announced: ‘This man recited God’s

Greatest Name (Ḥaḳ Teʿālānın ism-i aʿẓamını). Whoever recites [the
name] will receive from God whatever he wants.’ ”19

This paragraph illustrates the jurist’s understanding of his Duʿānāme. The com-
mentary is an act of contextualization of prayers, supplications, and practices
within and by a Prophetic tradition, rather than an act of translation and expli-
cation of the recited text. Given the şeyhü’l-islām’s emphasis on writing the
manual in Turkish, presumably with the intention of making it more accessi-
ble to non-Arabic speakers, it is remarkable that the content of the supplication
remains in Arabic. To put it somewhat differently, once the preconditions for a
successful prayer are met, all the supplicant is required to do is to make sure
that the prayer she recites matches her goal. She is clearly not expected to
understand the words she utters.
Ebū’s-suʿūd’s Duʿānāme was not unique in its approach to recitation. Other
known, as well as anonymous, authors shared the şeyhü’l-islām’s understand-
ing of the act of recitation. The ninth/fifteenth-century scholar and chronicler
Şükrullāh (d. 868/1463–1464), for example, in his fairly extensive collection of
prayers and supplications (written in Persian), does not stress the importance
of understanding the recited prayer. He does, however, include several chapters
on the merits of prayer.20

19 Ibid. 122.
20 Şükrullāh, Jāmiʿ al-daʿwāt. A similar approach can be found in the fairly popular manual
by Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Jazarī (d. 833/ 1429). Ibn al-Jazarī, ʿUddat al-ḥiṣn al-
ḥaṣīn. Ibn al-Jazarī was quite popular in the core lands of the empire. A copy of the work
was included in Bāyezīd II’s library.
It is worth stressing that other tenth/sixteenth-century commentators held a different
view from the one found in the chief mufti’s Duʿānāme. One of Ebū’s-suʿūd’s predecessors,
the chief mufti Kemālpaşazāde (d. 940/1534), wrote a short commentary on Duʿā al-Qunūt,
a supplication in Arabic requesting guidance and protection. It is an interwoven commen-
tary (sharḥ mamzūj) in Arabic, so the text of the prayer is embedded in the commentary.
Although Kemālpaşazāde did not write an introduction to the commentary, the fact that
he chose to write in Arabic suggests that it was intended to be more exclusive (at least in
the core lands of the Ottoman Empire). Indeed, by commenting on Duʿā al-Qunūt, Kemāl-
240 burak

3 Ottoman Commentaries on Invocations and Prayers

Much like their Mamluk counterparts studied by Richard McGregor, Sufis in

the core lands of the Ottoman Empire (and well beyond) compiled numerous
commentaries on “revealed” or inspired prayers and invocations. In addition,
earlier commentaries were still copied throughout the Ottoman period. These
commentaries were often associated with a specific Sufi network, as the prayers
were “revealed” or at least compiled by senior members of the network. While
the prayer commentaries from the Ottoman period still await a more thorough
study, some commentaries from the ninth/fifteenth through the twelfth/eigh-
teenth centuries apparently sought to edify reciters who were not necessar-
ily affiliated with a specific Sufi network. But regardless of who the intended
audience was, the commentators on invocations and prayers believed that the
recited text was not transparent.
The ninth/fifteenth-century jurist and Sufi shaykh Muḥyī’d-dīn Muḥammed
b. Ḳuṭbe’d-dīn el-İznīḳī (d. 885/1480), for example, in the introduction to his
commentary on ʿAlī b. Shihāb al-Dīn b. Muḥammad al-Hamādanī’s (d. 786/
1385) al-Awrād al-fatḥiyya,21 relates that he was asked to clarify and explain
some of the complexities of the Evrād. He adds that he was hoping for an
inspiration from the masters (mashāyikh) that would assist him in understand-
ing the true or accurate mental content of the evrād (wa-mā huwa al-ḥaqq fī
taḥqīq maʿānī al-wird al-mustaṭāb). Moreover, Ḳuṭbe’d-dīnzāde explains that
the mental content (maʿ nā) of the evrād are located in multiple places, so he
had to examine (muṭālaʿa) them and select the most useful mental content
for his fellow Sufis (al-ṣulaḥā’ wa-al-fuqarā’).22 And in another commentary
on al-Awrād al-fatḥiyya, one tenth/sixteenth-century (?) Dervīş Caʿfer stresses
the importance of the commentary for revealing the veracity of the words

paşazāde became part of a long chain of scholars who commented on this supplication
(One of the most distinguished members of this tradition is the famous Timurid poet and
scholar Jāmī (d. 898/1492)). It appears that his and his colleagues’ interest in Duʿā al-Qunūt
stemmed, at least in part, from the controversy that accompanied this invocation from as
early as the second/eighth century, if not earlier, as different schools of law differed over
the text of the duʿā and the manner in which the daily prayers should be recited. It there-
fore seems that the commentaries on Duʿā al-Qunūt formed a separate genre. Katz, Prayer
32–33; Haider, The origins, ch. 4. Jāmī, Sharḥ Duʿā al-Qunūt 4b–6b.
21 Al-Ḥamadānī was a Sufi master who led an itinerant life across different parts of the
Islamic world, including Kashmir, the Hijaz, and Turkistan. al-Awrād al-fatḥiyya is his
best-known compilation. On al-Hamadānī see Stern, ʿAlī b. Shihāb al-Dīn b. Muḥammad
al-Hamadānī.
22 İznīḳī, Şerḥ-i Evrad-i Fetḥiyye 5a.
prayers, commentaries, and edification 241

(dar vaqt-i tafsīr-i īn kalimāt shavāhid va bayyināt-i ẕikr karda āyad).23 Further-
more, ʿAlī b. Aḥmad al-Gūrī, in the introduction to his Kanz al-ʿibād fī sharḥ
al-awrād, informs his reader that he consulted “the books of high repute and
the reliable sayings on the mental content of the words and rules” (min al-
kutub al-muʿtabara wa-l-aqāwīl al-muʿtamada fī bayān maʿānī al-lughāt wa-l-
aḥkām).24
The Sufi commentators’ emphasis on the mental content of the invoca-
tions (maʿnā, pl. maʿānī) and its revelation is noteworthy. As opposed to Ebū’s-
suʿūd’s Duʿānāme, the Sufi prayer commentaries expected the reciter to under-
stand the text she recites, because, as Dervīş Caʿfer writes, interpretation is an
integral part of recitation. Moreover, interpretation required reading expertise
and familiarity with the Islamic hermeneutical disciplines, as the reference
to the “books of high repute” and the allusion to ʿilm al-maʿānī, bayān, tafsīr,
and muṭālaʿa indicate. As Kātib Çelebi (d. 1068/1657) explains in the entry he
devotes in his bibliographic work to the “science of the famous awrād and the
revealed supplications” (ʿilm al-awrād al-mashhūra wa-al-adʿiya al-maʾthūra),
“this is the science of validating and fixing them [the awrād and the suppli-
cations] (taṣḥīḥihimā wa-ḍabṭihimā), validating their narration (riwāya), and
demonstrating (bayān) their unique features, the number of their repetitions,
the times of their recitation and the preconditions [of their recitations].” More-
over, he notes, the goal of this science is to guarantee that the supplications are
beneficial (li-yunāl bi-istiʿmālihimā ilā l-fawāʾid al-dīniyya wa-al-dunyawiyya).25

4 The Commentaries on ʿAlī al-Qārī’s al-Ḥizb al-aʿẓam and

Muḥammad al-Jazūlī’s Dalāʾil al-khayrāt

Over the course of the second half of the eleventh/seventeenth and the twelfth/
eighteenth centuries, two compilations of supplications gained considerable
popularity across the Ottoman domains, well beyond fairly limited Sufi circles:
Muḥammad ibn Sulaymān al-Jazūlī’s Dalāʾil al-khayrāt wa-shawāriq al-anwār,
a book of prayers on behalf of the Prophet Muḥammad, and ʿAlī ibn al-Sultān

23 Dervīş Caʿfer, Şerḥ-i Evrād-i Fetḥiyye 1b–2a. The manuscript was copied in Istanbul in
960/1552 or 53.
24 Gūrī, Kanz al-ʿibād 1b. The manuscript was copied in Istanbul in 984/1576 or 77.
25 Kātib Çelebi, Kashf al-ẓunūn i, 200. To the best of my knowledge, the category of ʿilm
al-awrād is quite rare (if not unique to the Kashf ). On the classification of prayers and
invocations in other Ottoman classifications of the sciences see Burak, The section on
prayers.
242 burak

Muḥammad Qārī al-Harawī’s al-Ḥizb al-aʿẓam wa-l-wird al-afkhām, in which he

collected supplications from the prophetic traditions.26
Muḥammad ibn Sulaymān al-Jazūlī was a ninth/fifteenth-century Maghribi
Shadhili Sufi and scholar. He apparently composed the Dalāʾil during his stay
in Fez.27 Most biographies agree that al-Jazūlī relied on collections of prayers
found in the library of the city’s Qarawiyyīn Mosque, but they disagree on when
exactly the compilation of the Dalāʾil took place. In his authoritative study of
al-Jazūlī and his order, Vincent Cornell has suggested that al-Jazūlī wrote the
Dalāʾil at some point after his participation in the defense of the city of Tang-
ier in 840/1437. According to several accounts, al-Jazūlī spent time in Medina,
where he recited aḥzāb of the Dalāʾil before the Prophet’s tomb.28 After at least
seven years in the Islamic East, during which he apparently learned about Sufi
traditions and genres that were not common in the Islamic Far West, al-Jazūlī
returned to Fez, where in 857/1453 he penned the initial draft of the Dalāʾil.
At the same time, al-Jazūlī gradually recruited a circle of disciples. In Cornell’s
words, “the cornerstone of Jazulite praxis was the daily recitation of prayers on
behalf of the Prophet Muhammad from Dalāʾil al-khayrāt and the morning and
noon recitation of al-Jazūlī’s Ḥizb al-falāḥ (Litany of good fortune).”29 Most of
the invocations in the Dalāʾil were taken from well-known hadith collections
and devotional works, such as Qūt al-qulūb by Abū Ṭālib al-Makkī.30 I intend to
devote a separate study to the arrival of Dalāʾil al-khayrāt in the Ottoman lands,
but for my purpose here, suffice it to say that by the early twelfth/eighteenth
century the Dalāʾil became extremely popular across the empire, as hundreds
(if not thousands) of copies indicate.31

26 Occasionally, the Dalāʾil and the Ḥizb were bound together in the same mecmūʿa. See, for
example, the mecmūʿa at the New York Public Library (M&A, Arab. Ms. 13); and the edition
published in Egypt in 1864 by al-Maṭbaʿa al-Kasṭaliyya.
27 On al-Jazūlī see Cornell, Realm. On Dalāʾil al-khayrāt see Witkam, Vroomheid; Barakat et
al., Dalāʾil al-khayrāt.
28 Cornell, Realm 174.
29 Ibid. 184.
30 Ibid. 212.
31 By the nineteenth century, Dalāʾil al-khayrāt became one of the most popular books in
the empire. As Şükrü Hanioğlu has shown in his analysis of the inventories of deceased
members of the ruling askerī class for the years 1164/1750–1751 and 1215/1800–1801, Dalāʾil
al-khayrāt was owned by members of the imperial ruling elite. Hanioğlu, A brief history
38–40. Similarly, Nelly Hanna argues that in Cairo “[p]rivate libraries in the eighteenth
century indicate that it [Dalāʾil al-khayrāt] was copied again and again, perhaps more
than any other book in the eighteenth century, and was found in a large number of these
libraries.” Hanna, In praise of books 95.
prayers, commentaries, and edification 243

Somewhat less popular than the Dalāʾil, though repeatedly copied, was the
compilation by ʿAlī al-Qārī, one of the most eminent and prolific scholars of
the second half of the tenth/sixteenth century. Among his teachers were the
famous Shafi‘i jurist Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī (d. 974/1566–1567) and the Gujarati
ʿAlī ibn Ḥusām al-Dīn al-Mutaqqī (d. 975/1567–1568). He was initiated into
the Naqshbandi order by Zakariyyā ibn Aḥmad al-Bihārī. ʿAlī al-Qārī was also
associated with the Bakriyya, a Sufi tradition founded by the Bakrī family in
Egypt. Throughout his career in Mecca, al-Qārī was involved in several polemics
and debates with leading Shafi‘is and the supporters of Ibn ʿArabī. Moreover,
al-Qārī claimed that he was the renovator of Islam (mujaddid) of the Hijri
eleventh century. Over the course of the eleventh/seventeenth through the
thirteenth/nineteenth centuries, al-Qārī’s eminence was widely recognized, at
least by Hanafi scholars.32 Al-Qārī wrote on a wide range of topics, including
hadith, prophetology, ethics, Quranic exegesis, fiqh, biography, and taṣawwuf.
His Ḥizb al-a‘ẓam is a collection of supplications he collected from hadith com-
pilations.33 His works, including the Ḥizb, have survived in numerous copies
and circulated across the Ottoman Empire and the Indian subcontinent.
For the purpose of this essay, it is worth noting that, in the first half of the
twelfth/eighteenth century, several commentaries were written on both the
Dalāʾil and the Ḥizb. The commentaries are interwoven (sharḥ mamzūj) in both
texts.34 An anonymous twelfth/eighteenth-century addition to Kātib Çelebi’s
Kashf al-ẓunūn mentions three commentaries on the Ḥizb, those of the Meccan
Muḥammad ibn Salāma ibn Ibrāhīm al-Mālikī (d. ca. 1144/1731–1732), Ibrāhīm
al-Sāqizī/Sāḳızī (completed in 1134/1721–1722), and Shaykh ʿUthmān al-ʿUryānī
al-Kilīsī (completed in 1144/1731–1732).35 In addition to the commentaries men-
tioned by the anonymous bibliographer,36 Muḥammad ibn Yūsuf al-İzmīrī
completed a commentary on the Ḥizb in Izmir in 1147/1735, and Muḥammad
al-Nābulusī al-Azharī completed a fifth commentary in Istanbul in 1142/1730.
They all wrote their commentaries in Arabic.
It appears that at least some of the commentators on the Ḥizb were aware of
the fact that in the century that had elapsed since ʿAlī al-Qārī had completed
his work, no commentary had been written on it. Al-Azharī, for instance, claims

32 Franke, ʿAlī al-Qārī.

33 For a comprehensive bibliography of ʿAlī al-Qārī’s work, see Shammāʿ, al-Mullā ʿAlī al-Qārī.
34 Some of these commentaries are quite detailed and lengthy, despite the commentators’
praise of brevity (ikhtiṣār) (some commentaries are several hundred folios long). For a
survey of the commentaries see Muṣlū, Dirāsāt ʿilmiyya ḥawl kitāb Dalā’il al-khayrāt.
35 Kātib Çelebi, Kashf al-ẓunūn i, 660–661.
36 On the anonymous additions to the Kashf al-ẓunūn: Burak and Riedel, Did Katip Çelebi.
244 burak

that he and his colleagues were not aware of a commentary on the Ḥizb.37
Similarly, al-Mālikī decided to write his commentary in response to questions
he had received from different parts of the Islamic lands, including Rum and
Bilad al-Sham, concerning the traditions in the Ḥizb. Other commentators also
sensed a need to interpret the Ḥizb: in the introduction to his commentary,
after singing praises to the work, Sākızī explains that it occurred to him to
write a comprehensive commentary (sharḥ) on the text so that those who seek
the knowledge (al-ṭālibīn al-rāghibīn) would benefit from it.38 “I wrote a com-
mentary,” his colleague Muḥammad ibn Yūsuf al-İzmīrī writes, “to propagate
its essence ( jawāhir) and to demonstrate its inner sides (ḍamāʾir), to clarify
its expressions, and to expose its signs.” Al-İzmīrī, too, claims to have written
the commentary in an abbreviated style (wujh al-ikhtiṣār) for those who seek
knowledge (al-ṭālibīn, al-rāghibīn).39
One of the intriguing aspects of the introductions is that the intended read-
ership of the commentaries was fairly broad. As we have seen, Sākızī intends
the commentary to be consulted by “those who seek knowledge.” Al-İzmīrī, in
addition to the seekers of knowledge, hopes that his commentary will be read
by madrasa professors and teachers (mudarris wa-muʿallim), and al-ʿUryānī
dedicated his commentary to the vizier.40
The first half of the twelfth/eighteenth century also witnessed the appear-
ance of the first Ottoman commentaries on Dalāʾil al-khayrāt. In the case of
the Dalāʾil, unlike that of the Ḥizb, an important and well-known commentary
was written in the late eleventh/seventeenth century—Muḥammad al-Fāsī’s
Maṭāliʿ al-massarāt bi-jalāʾ Dalāʾil al-khayrāt. Al-Fāsī was one of al-Jazūlī’s dis-
ciples, and his commentary, which is also a documented collation of numerous
Maghribi manuscript copies of the Dalāʾil, including the most authoritative
copy (known as al-Nuskha al-Sahliyya), left its mark on the Ottoman Dalāʾil
commentaries and was copied repeatedly in the Ottoman lands.41 The Ottoman
commentaries, however, seem to have been a response to a different set of con-
cerns and anxieties.

37 Azharī, al-Kāshif li-adʿiya 2a–b. The colleagues al-Azharī consulted were Khalīl ibn Muṣ-
ṭafā of Diyarbakr and ʿAlī al-ʿIryān.
38 Sākızī, Fayḍ al-arḥam 1b–2a.
39 İzmīrī, Fatḥ Allāh 1b–2b.
40 İzmīrī, Fatḥ Allāh 2a; ʿUryānī, Sharḥ al-Ḥizb 1b.
41 The anonymous twelfth/eighteenth-century bibliographer who added to the entry on the
Dalāʾil in Kātib Çelebi’s Kashf al-ẓunūn celebrates al-Fāsī’s commentary: “Dalāʾil al-khayrāt
wa-shawāriq al-anwār fī dhikr al-ṣalāt ʿalá al-nabī al-mukhtār … by the shaykh Abū ʿAbd
Allāh Muḥammad ibn Sulaymān ibn Abī Bakr al-Jazūlī al-Samallānī al-sharīf al-Ḥasanī,
who died in 854 [AH]. This book is one of the signs of God about the prayer upon the
prayers, commentaries, and edification 245

As opposed to the commentaries on the Ḥizb, which were written to the best
of my knowledge exclusively in Arabic, commentaries on the Dalāʾil were writ-
ten in both Ottoman Turkish and Arabic. The production of Turkish commen-
taries on the Dalāʾil attests to the immense popularity of the work throughout
the Turkish-speaking parts of the empire.42 As the early twelfth/eighteenth-
century commentator Ḳara Dāvud (d. 1170/1757?),43 whose commentary on the
Dalāʾil was probably the most popular one, states, “the numerous merits of the
Dalāʾil are well known to both commoners and the elite.”44 At the same time,
it seems that Ḳara Dāvud thought that the popularity of the Dalāʾil required an
accessible commentary. Even though he did not think that understanding the
mental content of the recited text was a prerequisite: “According to the noble
madhhab of the master of our madhhab, the Great Imam and the first magnan-
imous [scholar], Abū Ḥanīfa Nuʿmān ibn Thābit al-Kūfī, [God’s] mercy be upon
him, it is not a precondition to know the mental content [of the words] while
reciting wirds, dhikrs and supplications (evrād ve eẕkār ve edʿiyeler oḳundukta
maʿnāsını bilmek şarṭ olmayub), but there is no doubt that there are rewards
and great benefits in pronouncing [the words] correctly and without mistakes.”

Prophet. It is being repeatedly recited in the eastern and western [Islamic lands], includ-
ing in the Lands of Rum. There is an elegant interwoven commentary on [the Dalāʾil]
by the shaykh Muḥammad al-Mahdī ibn Aḥmad ibn ‘Alī ibn Yūsuf al-Fāsī al-Qaṣawī, who
died in 1052 [/1642–1643], titled Maṭāliʿ al-masarrāt bi-jalā’ Dalāʾil al-khayāt.” Kātib Çelebi,
Kashf al-ẓunūn i, 759. On al-Fāsī’s commentary and its Ottoman readers, see Burak, Col-
lating the signs of benevolent deeds. Moreover, in the first half of the twelfth/eighteenth
century, one Muḥammed Emīn el-Toḳātī penned an abridged adaptation/translation into
Ottoman Turkish of al-Fāsī’s commentary. Toḳātī, Tercüme. Moreover, a commentary by
Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Sharīf al-Jazāʾirī on al-Fāsī’s commentary (which was wrongly
attributed to Muhammad ibn Velī ibn Resūl el-Kirşehrī el-İzmirī) was copied at least three
times in the Ottoman lands in the first half of the twelfth/eighteenth century. In the intro-
duction the commentator explains that he consulted Abū ʿAbd Allāh al-ʿArabī al-Fāsī’s
ḥāshiyya on the Dalāʾil and Muḥammad al-Mahdī al-Fāsī’s sharḥ, and thought the former
was too lengthy and left many issues unclear, whereas the other “tended to spread” (māla
ilā al-basṭ). He therefore decided to write a short commentary on these works. [Jazā’irī,]
Istijlāb 1b–2a. The other copies are Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, MS Nuruosmaniye 968 and
Beyazıt Devlet Kütüphanesi, MS Veliyüddin Efendi 665.
42 Commentators from the Arabic-speaking lands of the empire wrote the commentaries in
Arabic. ʿAbd al-Muʿṭī ibn Salīm ibn ʿUmar al-Shiblī al-Simillāwī (d. 1127/1715) completed in
Egypt an Arabic commentary on the Dalāʾil. Simillāwī, Tafrīḥ. Similarly, Rīḥāwī Muḥam-
mad b. Sulaymān al-Ḥalabī wrote his commentary, titled Muntij al-barakāt ʿalā Dalāʾil
al-khayrāt (Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, MS Süleymaniye 254).
43 On Kara Dāvud, see Arpaguş, Kara Dāvud.
44 At least one member of the imperial ruling elite, the grand vizier Ḥekīmoğlu ʿAlī Pasha
(d. 1171/1758) appears to have had keen interest in the Dalāʾil, as he was the dedicatee of
Rīḥāwī Muḥammad b. Sulaymān al-Ḥalabī’s commentary.
246 burak

But, he assures his reader, “the reward is greater if [one] recites [the Dalāʾil]
while paying attention to the elegant mental content (maʿnā-i latīfī mülāḥaẓe
ile oḳunmasında ecr dahi ziyāde olub), and its benefits will be more evident and
clearer.” Therefore, he concludes, he decided to write an abbreviated (vechü’l-
ihtiṣār) commentary in Turkish.45
Another commentator, Meḥmed Şākir ibn Sunʿullāh el-Anḳaravī (d. 1172/1758
or 59?), informs his reader in the Arabic introduction to his Turkish commen-
tary that he decided to write the commentary when he saw that many seekers
of knowledge (rāghibīn) read the Dalāʾil without knowing Arabic. He was con-
cerned that for this reason they unwittingly changed the mental content of
the text and erred without noticing. Furthermore, he warns his readers, that
understanding the mental content of the recited text is crucial and that “it is
forbidden to recite phrases of which he does not know the mental content.”
He also encourages his reader to collate the manuscript he is consulting with
the copy of his teacher. To remedy this grave situation, el-Anḳaravī undertook
the writing of a “commentary in Turkish (sharḥ Turkī) to explain the structure
[of the Dalāʾil], to interpret its meaning, to elaborate on the entire [work], to
illustrate its details, and to reveal its hidden secrets.”46
To sum up, the interest of the twelfth/eighteenth-century commentators
on the Dalāʾil and the Ḥizb in making the text accessible, and their empha-
sis on understanding the mental content of the recited words is profoundly
different from the approach of Ebū’s-suʿūd Efendi and more in line with the
approach prevalent in Sufi circles concerning their respective invocations and
prayer cycles. What is more, as I have already pointed out, throughout the
eleventh/seventeenth century, the Ḥizb and, in the second half of the same
century, the Dalāʾil did not draw the attention of commentators from the
Ottoman lands, whereas the early decades of the twelfth/eighteenth century
saw the publication of a significant number of commentaries on these works.
Again, this is not to say that the approach to the prayer/invocation found in
Ebū’s-suʿūd Efendi’s Duʿānāme was completely replaced by the commentaries’
ideal of comprehending the recited text. The commentaries, however, seem
to reflect the growing popularity of the ideal of recitation that, until the late
eleventh/seventeenth century, prevailed in narrower circles. This qualitative
and quantitative change requires explanation.

45 Ḳara Dāvud, Şerḥ-i Delāʾil 5. In the same vein, in 1130/1717–1718, İbrāhīm b. Ṣāliḥ el-Ḳıbrısī
relates that he wanted to write an abbreviated and useful commentary in Turkish, so that
the reader will understand the mental content (meʿānī). Ḳıbrısī, Vesāʾilü’l-ḥasenāt 2a.
46 El-Anḳaravī, Sharḥ al-Dalāʾil 6a.
prayers, commentaries, and edification 247

5 “I Shall Turn Away from My Signs Those Who Are Unduly Arrogant
upon the Earth.” (Q 7:146)

Relatively little scholarly attention has been paid to Ottoman piety in the
late eleventh/seventeenth century, and even less in the first decades of the
twelfth/eighteenth century. In her study of Ottoman prayer manuals, Chris-
tiane Gruber has linked the appearance of numerous Ottoman devotional texts
to attempts of political and social reforms in the empire and to the “deploy-
ment of the rather malleable concept of renewal (tajdīd).”47 It is possible that
new ideas about renewal and revival encouraged scholars to compile devo-
tional texts and commentaries in an attempt to generate a new Muslim sub-
ject. Much more work, however, remains to be done to establish how exactly
twelfth/eighteenth-century notions of renewal shaped the production of devo-
tional texts and commentaries in this time period.
At the same time, it is possible that the appearance of the commentaries had
very little to do with the notions of reform and revival. The fact that the com-
mentators on the Ḥizb and the Dalāʾil do not allude to the discourse of renewal
may further question this connection. It appears that a more immediate reason
for writing commentaries in the early twelfth/eighteenth century was the grow-
ing popularity of invocations and prayer cycles and, perhaps, the circulation
of apocryphal invocations. Consider, for example, the following passage from
Tartīb al-ʿulūm (completed in 1128/1716) by the prominent scholar and Qadiri
and Naqshbandi48 Sufi Muḥammed Saçaḳlızāde:

This wretched poor [i.e., the author] says: We have witnessed several peo-
ple who are considered accomplished [reciters, yusammā bi-l-takmīl],
[but] are unable to recite the Quran [adequately] to have a proper prayer
that is legally valid. This contradicts piety (taqwā)/the most accepted
legal opinion ( fatwā).49 This [recitation] undermines piety from its foun-
dations. [This reciter] refrains from uncertainties while corrupting [his]
prayer five times a day. He takes a portion of the Quran as his daily act of
recitation [in his prayers, yattakhidhū min al-Qurʿān wirdan] while wor-
shiping God through misdeeds. Meanwhile, he is ashamed to be seen

47 Gruber, A pious cure-all 120–123 (and the bibliography therein). On the circulation of
Aḥmad Sirhindī’s notion of tajdīd in the Ottoman Empire in the late seventeenth/early
eighteenth centuries, see Pagani, Il rinnovamento.
48 Kurz, Ways to heaven 53.
49 The editor of the text believes it should be fatwā and not taqwā, as it appears in most
copies of Tartīb al-ʿulūm.
248 burak

sitting with a large turban with other ulama in front of an instructor from
those who are [allowed] to recite [the Quran, ahl al-adāʾ, that is, a real
scholar], claiming that this [the recitation] is the duty of the novices
(waẓāʾif al-mubtadiʾīn), because [he thinks] he has become one of the
most senior professors (al-mudarrisīn al-fuḍalāʾ). “Woe to you, and woe!
Then woe to you and woe!” (Q 75:34–35). He the Most High said: “I shall
turn away from My signs those who are unduly arrogant upon the earth.”
(Q 7:146).50

The passage reflects Saçaḳlızāde’s (and probably others’) concern about the
level of Arabic of many readers of the Quranic text, on which many suppli-
cations and prayers draw. The identity of the reciter who is the target of Saçaḳ-
lızāde’s accusations is unknown. It seems, however, that Saçaḳlızāde thought
this was not a problem with a specific individual but a broader phenomenon.
In any case, this accusation echoes the concerns expressed by at least some
commentators who were worried that people do not recite their invocations
properly and/or lack understanding of the texts they recite. In other words, it
appears that the popularity of both the Ḥizb and the Dalāʾil (and possibly other
devotional works) beyond the narrow scholarly/Sufi circles drove scholars to
invest considerable efforts to cultivate more responsible reciters. To this end,
they resorted to (and popularized) the fairly well-established genre of the Sufi
prayer commentary.

6 Conclusion

In this short essay I have tried to examine how different commentators per-
ceived the relationship between understanding the prayers, devotional texts
and invocations, and the recitation’s efficacy. While it is clear that these com-
mentaries/manuals offer a unique glimpse into the Ottoman religious land-
scape, it is still unclear how the devotional sensibilities these texts reveal
relate to one another. Specifically, it is still not fully clear what perception was
more prevalent in what circles. Moreover, as the academic study of Ottoman
devotional literature is in its early stages, the conventions employed in differ-
ent genres remain to be studied. At this point, I am inclined to believe that
multiple perceptions coexisted throughout the Ottoman domains. It appears

50 Sājaqlīzādah (Saçaḳlızāde), Tartīb al-ʿulūm. I am grateful to Walid Saleh for his assistance
in translating this passage.
prayers, commentaries, and edification 249

to me, however, that over the course of the eleventh/seventeenth and the
twelfth/eighteenth century, the perception that recommended, or even de-
manded, understanding of the prayer’s text became increasingly popular, at
least among the learned. The concerns about proper understanding of the text
and its mental content may be situated in a broader set of concerns about the
nature of belief and intention, which are examined in Tijana Krstić’s chapter in
this volume, and the attempts of Ottoman jurists to determine the relationship
between inner faith and its manifestations.51
Be it as it may, in the context of the historiography on confession building
in the Ottoman lands, in which the Ottoman dynasty, its administrative elite,
and learned hierarchy play a central role, the large textual corpus of prayers
and invocations draws attention to other registers of Ottoman Islam. In certain
instances, as was the case with Ebū’s-suʿūd, a member of the administrative
elite commissioned or was the dedicatee of the manual. But in many other
cases, the Ottoman dynasty and individuals who were affiliated with it were
significantly less dominant. In other words, paying attention to the enormous
textual body of prayers and invocations, much like other textual corpora from
the Ottoman lands, may enable scholars of the history of confession building
in the Ottoman domains to examine it beyond the purview of the dynasty and
its administrative elite.

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 part 2
Building a Pious Community: Spatial
Dimensions of Sunnitization

∵
 chapter 8

Lives and Afterlives of an Urban Institution and Its

Spaces: The Early Ottoman ʿİmāret as Mosque

Çiğdem Kafescı̇oğlu

Since the architect and restorer Sedat Çetintaş argued in 1955 that “the Green
Mosque and its likes are not mosques”1 the identity and functions of the build-
ings he was referring to, namely the “T-type” structures that are among the
most distinctive products of early Ottoman architectural culture, have been
matters of debate. These edifices, widely dispersed in late medieval northwest-
ern Anatolia and the Balkans and patronized in the early centuries largely by
sultans and military leaders of the frontier zones, had plural accommodative,
social, and devotional uses. They were planmned around a domed central hall,
with flanking rooms and an eyvān (Ar. īwān) across the entrance beyond the
domed hall. The eyvān, a vaulted or domed hall that opens to the central domed
space and is elevated by a few steps, was in most, but not all cases allocated to
prayer. Their foundation deeds (waqfiyya) identify them as ʿimāret or zāviye
(Ar. zāwiya), and their users as “comers and goers” (an expansive range of peo-
ple in the tempestuous worlds of medieval Anatolia and Balkans), traveling
dervishes, and the needy; in royal foundations, ulama, shaykhs, sayyids (sādāt),
Quran readers, and preachers are recounted among beneficiaries. Their waq-
fiyyas make clear that the offering and consumption of food, social and reli-
gious ritual, and shelter provided to dervishes and travelers intersected in these
buildings constructed outside the established urban cores, initially of Bithy-
nian and Thracian cities.2 The oft-cited travel narrative of the North African
scholar Ibn Baṭṭuṭa corroborates this and offers a vibrant view into the con-
viviality that formed the texture of life in Anatolian zāviyes.3 As far as modern

1 Çetintas, Yeşil Cami ve benzerleri. The booklet is the publication of a lecture the author deliv-
ered in 1955 at the Faculty of Theology of Ankara University. The reference is to the Green
Mosque in Bursa, Turkey.
2 Gökbilgin, Murad I, 225–231; Ayverdi, Yıldırım Bayezid’in, 37–46; Zengin, İlk dönem Osmanlı,
114–117.
3 Ibn Battuta, The travels, 419ff. Ibn Baṭṭuṭa’s comments on Anatolian zāviyes as communal
spaces of urban confraternities (ahī) has raised the question of the relationship between ahī
and Sufi lodges in medieval Anatolia, an issue that has not been resolved. Oya Pancaroğlu
quotes Suhrawardī’s comments on Sufi lodges being founded by rulers and futuwwat-khānas

© çiğdem kafescı̇o ğlu, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004440296_009

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
256 kafescı̇o ğlu

scholarship on these buildings is concerned, however, it has proven difficult

(if not impossible) to eliminate, or even to de-emphasize the notion that they
functioned primarily as mosques.4
The difficulty in establishing a historicized understanding of the Ottoman
“T-type” buildings is in part due to the nature of the changes in the build-
ings’ architecture, uses, and institutional designations (and the degree to which
these have, or have not, been addressed by architectural historians). Equally
significant are the connections between architectural and institutional con-
figurations to shifts in Ottoman religious politics. Starting in the 910s/1510s,
and more visibly in the middle and later decades of the tenth/sixteenth cen-
tury, the majority of Ottoman ʿimārets, which powerfully announced their
patrons’ benefaction through their offering of food, shelter, and ritual space,
were turned into congregational mosques, the primary type of religious struc-
ture sponsored by Ottoman patrons, especially through what has been regarded
their “classical age.” In other words, the larger part of Ottoman ʿimārets/zāviyes,
and among them those well-known structures built by sultans as part of presti-
gious building complexes at the edges of such cities as Bursa and Edirne, have
functioned as congregational mosques beyond about the first century and a
half (in fewer cases the first two centuries) of their lives as public edifices. As
much as Sedat Çetintaş was correct in his assertion, Yeşil Cami had been a
mosque for about 400 years at the time he made his emphatic statement on
the building’s former identity (figures 8.1, 8.2).5
The disjunction between historical and modern terminologies used to de-
note these edifices, too, captures and continues to reproduce the historio-

by masters; she also calls attention to ahīs mentioned in the waqfiyya of Bāyezīd I’s Bursa
foundation; Pancaroğlu, Devotion, hospitality. İklil Selçuk discusses the issue from the point
of view of economic activities and connections of the ahī communities and their mediation
in linking urban and rural communities; Selçuk, Suggestions on the social meaning. See also
the note on Evrenosoğlu Īsā Bey’s Skopje ʿimāret below. On urban confraternities in medieval
Anatolia, see Goshgarian, Beyond the social and the spiritual. Zāviyes have also been inter-
preted as having a role in early Ottoman colonization, Barkan, Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda;
Emir, Erken Osmanlı mimarlığında; Boykov, The T-shaped zaviye/imarets. Colonization is not
a concept I draw on in the present study.
4 Most general works on Ottoman architecture have prioritized the mosque function of the
T-type buildings. For works that have prioritized the plural uses of the ʿimāret/zāviye, see
Sedat Emir, Erken Osmanlı mimarlığında; Emir, Erken Osmanlı mimarlığında; Kuban, Osmanlı
mimarisi 81–247; Oğuz, Multi-functional buildings; Lowry, The shaping 65–106; Çağaptay,
Frontierscape; Pancaroğlu, Devotion, hospitality.
5 Çetintaş identified the T-type structures as zāviyes in his 1946 book Türk mimari anıtları; he
argued in the 1958 lecture publication that the side rooms of these buildings had official func-
tions, such as court rooms for kadis.
lives and afterlives of an urban institution and its spaces 257

figure 8.1 Bursa, zāviye/ʿimāret and complex of Meḥmed I, the “Green Mosque,” 822/1419
by permission of the Boğaziçi University Aptullah Kuran archive

graphic quandary. Inscriptions, foundation deeds, historical narratives, and

archival documents identify them with terms that connote Sufi ritual, the offer-
ing of shelter, and the daily and ritual consumption of food. Often the same
building is identified in different documents as ʿimāret, zāviye, or hānḳāh (the
latter two referring more specifically to spaces of ritual and accommodation
of Sufi groups and ahī confraternities); buḳʿa (a place, spot, or building) and
dāra hayren (place of charity) are also terms one encounters in documents
and inscriptions.6 These terms are encountered often in documents of repre-
sentational nature for the edifices in question, and the choice of terms, ʿimāret
in most inscriptions and zāviye in the greater part of foundation deeds (and
their interchangeable use with other terms), appears to be less than accidental.
Hence, the foundation of Orhan (724–763/1324–1362) in Bursa is “zāviye, known
among people as ʿimāret” in its waqf document and ʿimāret in its restoration
inscription dated 820/1417, highlighting the larger public recognition of the
buildings as ʿimāret.7 In similar fashion, Murād I’s (763–791/1362–1389) waqfiyya

6 The buildings have most frequently been termed zāviye, alongside buḳʿa, hānḳāh, or ʿimāret in
waqf documents, and ʿimāret in most foundation inscriptions. A comprehensive list and dis-
cussion of terms denoting the buildings in various documents is found in Emir, Erken Osmanlı
mimarlığında 270–272 and passim. See also Tüfekçioğlu, Erken dönem Osmanlı.
7 The original 761/1360 waqf document has not survived, but a copy dated 896/1491 is available;
see Ayverdi, Osmanlı mi‘marisinin i, 63–65.
258 kafescı̇o ğlu

figure 8.2a Bursa, zāviye/ʿimāret of Meḥmed I, 822/1419, plan

by permission of the Boğaziçi University Aptullah Kuran
archive
lives and afterlives of an urban institution and its spaces 259

figure 8.2b Bursa, zāviye/ʿimāret of Meḥmed I, 822/1419, section

by permission of the Boğaziçi University Aptullah Kuran
archive

for the building he founded in Bursa’s Çekirge suburb identifies it as “the zāviye
called Kaplıca ʿimāret;”8 Meḥmed I’s (816–824/1413–1421) Bursa foundation is
called buḳ‘a and ʿimāret in two inscriptions dating to 822/1419 and 827/1424
respectively, and zāviye in its waqf document of 822/1419.9
However divergent their interpretations of the uses, historical and geograph-
ical horizons, and formal configurations of the early Ottoman ʿimāret, many
modern scholars have formulated, or preferred to use, terms that have under-
scored these buildings’ function as prayer spaces: hence, Bursa-type mosque,
zaviye and zaviyeli cami (mosque with a zāwiya), tabhaneli cami (mosque with
hospice rooms), eyvān mosque, and futuwwa mosque.10 The term “convent-

8 BOA, Maliyeden Müdevver 162/5; Gökbilgin, Murad I 225.

9 Ayverdi, Çelebi 50.
10 The term Bursa-type mosque was suggested by Wilde in his Brussa. A pioneering study
that called attention to the social uses of the buildings is Eyice (who noted that his work
was inspired by that of Çetintaş), İlk Osmanlı Devrinin. Kuran, The mosque presented a
formal categorization and analysis of the type. Recognizing the multifunctional character
of the buildings, Kuran highlighted the masjid function of the qibla eyvān, hence proposed
260 kafescı̇o ğlu

masjid” offered by Gülru Necipoğlu for those buildings that have a masjid
eyvān—that is, an eyvān that functioned as a designated place of prayer ori-
ented toward Mecca—highlights their plural uses, while it attributes equal
weight to the masjid and convent functions of the building.11 Reviewing ter-
minological choices, one may also consider that medieval Syrian and Cairene
madrasas and hānḳāhs, and their Anatolian contemporaries, more often than
not featured a prayer space with a mihrab, and have not been termed masjid or
mosque in contemporary sources or in modern scholarship.12
This paper approaches the set of questions posed by this distinct product
of late medieval architecture from the point of view of the time of change
noted above: the period encompassing the later decades of the ninth/fifteenth
into the later decades of the tenth/sixteenth century, which turned ʿimāret and
zāviye into mosque (whether these were extant buildings that underwent pro-
cesses of conversion or newly built edifices that followed the distinguishing
conventions of the T-type edifice). Within the same time frame, the ʿimāret was
produced and reproduced as a new kind of space and in part, a new notion:
now it also denoted the soup kitchen built as an independent structure within
a larger compound. I locate the beginnings of that shift in the mid-860s/1460s
and 870s/1470s, that is, the decades of the first, and most intense phase of new
construction in Istanbul by the Ottoman elite. During these years the vast build-
ing complex founded by Meḥmed II (r. 848–850/1444–1446, 855–886/1451–1481)
in newly conquered Istanbul, followed by a set of viziers’ foundations within
the walled city—to be discussed in detail below—radically altered the uses
and meanings of the urban foundation as it had taken shape through the
eighth/fourteenth century. While they were still conceived as tools of settle-
ment and loci of symbolic representation, sultanic and elite endowments of
the imperial age were products of a newly formulated religiopolitical configu-
ration, which effected changes in terminology, in institutional practices, and in
spatial and visual configurations. The agency of the new elite of slave origins

the term “eyvān mosque.” The term “futuwwa-mosque” was suggested by Doğan, Osmanlı
Mimarisinde. For historiographic discussions, see Emir, Tipoloji; Çağaptay, Frontierscape
162–166; Yürekli, Architectural patronage 734–735. See also Ergin, Neumann and Singer,
Introduction, in Feeding people 22–28.
11 Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan 48–50. I have used this designation in Constantinopolis/Istan-
bul. In Ottoman usage, cāmiʿ (Ar. jāmiʿ) designated a congregational mosque, while masjid
denoted a small prayer space, whether free standing or attached to another building, with
no allowances for a haṭīb (Friday preacher), and by extension, for the delivery of the Friday
sermon.
12 As noted by Emir, Tipoloji 121.
lives and afterlives of an urban institution and its spaces 261

empowered by Meḥmed II to replace a former elite and to counter the power

of the frontier lords was central to this process.

1 History, Typology, and a Passage into Early Modernity

The immediate historical and methodological questions with regard to the

topic of this paper are the spatial, institutional, and architectural dimensions
of a passage: one may broadly define this as a transition from a set of medieval
religious, institutional, and spatial practices to one in tune with the workings of
an early modern polity and society. The product of an age of cultural dynamism
and fluidity, a comparatively more diffuse and fluid set of signifying practices
shaped the ʿimāret building and its institutional setup.13 The layout of the T-
type edifice, whether it was founded as and called a zāviye, an ʿimāret, a buḳʿa,
or a hānḳāh, imposed no absolute boundaries between spaces of the sacred and
the profane; likewise, their foundation documents, though with substantial
differences across geography and patronage profiles, do not stipulate distinc-
tions regarding ritual practices within. The moment of change in the histo-
ries of Ottoman ʿimāret and mosque (with implications for the larger urban
environment) can be firmly located in the final quarter of the ninth/fifteenth
century. The histories of these institutions and the changes in their architec-
ture are intricately linked to long-term religiopolitical processes that rendered
the establishment of orthodox Sunni doctrine and practice a priority: dynam-
ics that reached their powerful articulation during the reign of Süleymān (r.
926–974/1520–1566).14 As unwelcome as it might have been in the frontier envi-
ronment that gave shape to the early Ottoman ʿimāret, then, I will be bringing

13 On the early Ottoman political and cultural context, see Kafadar, Between two worlds; on
politico-religious dynamics of the lands of Rum in the late medieval era, see Krstić, Con-
tested conversions 26–74. On architectural culture of medieval Anatolia with particular
attention to fluidity of forms and identities and to practices of devotion and conviviality,
see Pancaroğlu, Devotion, hospitality. On medieval Anatolian madrasas and hānḳahs, the
closest forerunners to the early Ottoman ʿimāret, see Kuran, Anadolu medreseleri; Wolper,
Cities and saints; Emir, Erken Osmanlı i; and Pancaroğlu, Hospitality, devotion. A compa-
rable transposition between madrasa and khanqah in Mamluk Cairo has been explored in
Behrens-Abouseif, Change in function and form.
14 For explorations into Ottoman Sunnitization and within a larger framework, confession-
alization, see Terzioğlu, How to conceptualize; Terzioğlu, Where ʿilm-i ḥāl meets; Krstić,
Contested conversions; Krstić, Illuminated by the light; Krstić, From shahada to ʿaqīda. See
also Burak, Faith, law, and empire. On trends toward Sunnitization interconnected with
tenth/sixteenth-century Ottoman architectural culture, see Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan,
esp. 47–58.
262 kafescı̇o ğlu

into the picture the heavy hand of a centralizing state in the making, redefining
political hierarchies and formulating religious orthodoxy, to alter, co-opt, and
within the course of a century definitively marginalize a set of medieval spatial
practices predicated on long-nurtured and well-understood multiplicities and
ambiguities.
There is perhaps a correspondence between the early modern insistence
on transforming urban ʿimārets exclusively into mosques and the modern
insistence on a distinct name and function to be attached to these build-
ings. Granted, sixteenth-century religious politics and twentieth-century dis-
ciplinary predilections belong to distant epistemic spheres, with the desire
to establish a singular, state-sanctioned use (mosque) for edifices with mul-
tiple identities, on one hand, and the desire to nail down the specifics of their
multifunctionality, on the other. However, they do partake of a mental world
focused upon classifying and identifying difference, as Sanjay Subrahmanyam
has observed,15 connecting an early modern state’s desire to dictate norms and
regulate practices to the modern academy’s urge to categorize and define.
An exploration of the early Ottoman ʿimāret from the perspective of its after-
lives in early modern and modern times also brings forth questions regarding
typology and temporality in the study of architecture. The expansive range
of structures that architectural historians have treated as a type (regardless
of what terminology they have opted for), and the deliberate changes these
structures were subjected to, whether in the form of interventions to extant
buildings or spatio-visual alterations in the established configuration when
new buildings were designed, unveils the quandaries of working within a con-
ceptual frame determined by typology. Differences in the formal and institu-
tional configuration of ʿimārets within the Rumi space need to be considered as
well. Sharing a specific spatial and volumetric composition and interconnected
through a particular patronage profile, early Ottoman ʿimārets served a range of
functions in various loci and communicated related but distinct meanings in
frontier environments as opposed to in centers like Amasya and, into the later
eighth/fourteenth century, Bursa. Hence the T-type includes structures like the
Evrenos ʿimāret in Komotini, centered on an eyvān that opens directly onto an
exterior court with no portal or portico, Bāyezīd I’s Edirne ʿimāret, with its atyp-
ical layout and unresolved questions regarding its construction history, and the
Postinpūş Baba zāviye built by Murād I for this dervish in Yenişehir, with a single
ceremonial hall flanked by rooms, none of the three buildings having qibla ori-
entations. The differences between these buildings and others like the Bāyezīd

15 Subrahmanyam, Connected histories 761–762.

lives and afterlives of an urban institution and its spaces 263

Pasha ʿimāret in Amasya (one among a number of analogous structures), the

celebrated royal ʿimārets of Bursa with their prominent masjid eyvāns, or Rūm
Meḥmed Pasha’s Byzantinizing mosque and hospice in Üsküdar, Istanbul, high-
lights the problems of typology as a historian’s tool on the one hand, and the
particular issues connected to this “type” on the other (figure 8.3).16 The ter-
minological and historiographical problem arises, in part, from the use of the
same frame of reference to understand the initial making and later refashion-
ing and reinterpretations of the early Ottoman ʿimāret, whose functions and
symbolic associations rendered it worth reproducing and revisiting through
changing cultural contexts between the earlier eighth/fourteenth and the ear-
lier tenth/sixteenth centuries. Evidently, continued reference to the “type” also
required radical modifications.17 Mapping out the histories of the foundation,
uses, and reuses of ʿimārets boldly highlights ruptures, continuities, and trans-
formations in their identities as urban institutions, and in changing practices
of signification that invested them (and alongside them, the mosque and the
soup kitchen) with new meanings.
Foregrounding typology in the study of architectural history does pose the
risk of presenting as stable what was in fact a set of processes of change, and
this is a particularly pressing issue given the radical cultural and functional
transformation that reshaped and redefined the meanings and uses of the early
Ottoman ʿimāret. At the same time, keeping questions of typology in view may
be beneficial for this inquiry. The adherence to a “type,” that is, a particular for-
mal structure and a set of principles and choices that give shape to it, offers
subsequent users the potential of drawing on the past in specific ways, for the
choice may serve as a mode of reifying and reaffirming memory. Patrons and
designers may reshape and reinvest the type, while at the same time project-
ing architectural, and by extension, social stability and continuity through their
adherence to it.18 Typology, for this inquiry, then, is not completely without sig-
nificance: rather than the ahistorical schematization it offers, its interest lies

16 On the Evrenos ʿimāret, see Kiel, The oldest Ottoman monuments; Lowry, The shaping
80–84; Çağaptay, The road from Bithynia, where she also discusses issues of typology.
On Postinpūş Baba, and Bāyezīd I’s Edirne ʿimāret, see Ayverdi, Osmanlı mi‘marisinin i,
208–216, 484–494, Kuran, Edirne’de Yıldırım camisi; Kuban, Osmanlı mimarisi 85; on Rūm
Meḥmed Pasha, see Kafescioğlu, Constantinopolis/Istanbul, 119–122. On the Bāyezīd Pasha
ʿimāret completed in 1419, see Kuran, The mosque 82–85. On shifts in patronage profiles
and contexts of construction, see Oğuz, Multi-functional buildings.
17 Shifts in architectural meaning in connection to historical change have been addressed
in a set of diverse contexts in Arnold and Ballantyne, Architecture as experience 1–10; and
Ballantyne, Misprisions of Stonehenge.
18 Rossi, Architecture of the city 35–45; see also Koch, Changing building typologies.
264 kafescı̇o ğlu

figure 8.3 Amasya, Bāyezīd Pasha zāviye/ʿimāret, 817/1414

by permission of the Boğaziçi University Aptullah Kuran archive

in the light it may shed on the significance of the ʿimāret as a type for the
patrons, builders, and users of shifting historical, political, and religio-cultural
contexts.
In this paper I opt for using the term ʿimāret interchangeably with zāviye,
while I grant that the first term in particular poses a set of problems. Inscrip-
tions, waqf documents, and narrative sources suggest that up to the final
resolution of the transformation that turned frontier polity into centralizing
empire, the ʿimāret in the Ottoman domains was specifically the accommoda-
tive structure laid out in a reverse-T configuration around a central domed hall,
at a distance to the urban center and often outside of the inhabited area. It may
or may not be the centerpiece of a set of service structures and other build-
ings, such as a madrasa, a bath, or the founder’s tomb. As a medieval legacy of
the larger Islamic world, ʿimāret may also denote any building project of a sub-
lives and afterlives of an urban institution and its spaces 265

stantial nature, most often public, at times also private. A further dimension
of the terminological puzzle is that during the early modern era ʿimāret came
exclusively to denote two functions at once: the urban socioreligious building
compound and the soup kitchen that may be among the buildings of such a
compound.19 This semantic shift and the projection of the latter meaning back-
ward onto the eighth/fourteenth and early ninth/fifteenth centuries has led to
a degree of confusion in modern scholarship on early architectural ventures in
the Ottoman domains. The ʿimārets mentioned in waqf documents alongside
substantial kitchen expenses have been taken as evidence for the presence of
a separate building that was part of a building complex, imagined to resem-
ble later soup kitchens in the Ottoman domains.20 In a more recent body of
work, many early ʿimāret buildings have been considered exclusively as soup
kitchens.21 Evidence for the material and spatial setup of the service sections
of the early Ottoman complexes, however, is scant. That the tābhāne (hospice)
rooms located to the two sides of the ʿimāret’s main domed hall served also as
places where food would be served can be conjectured. What remains of the
kitchen, storage, and refectory spaces (and the fact that so little does remain of
the original forms of such structures anywhere within the Ottoman domains,
whether the buildings were sponsored by sultans or by frontier lords), on the
other hand, strongly suggest that these were not regarded as representational
buildings by their patrons and were rather built with less durable and less
prestigious materials and workmanship. Among the few structures whose rem-
nants survived into the twentieth century, the kitchen and (possibly) refectory
structures of Murād II’s (r.824–848/1421–1444; 850–855/1446–1451) Bursa com-
plex may be noted: situated a few meters away from the ʿimāret, rectangular
spaces of rubble masonry and timber roofs as captured by Albert Gabriel in
his Brousse, or the reconstructed kitchen and refectory of the Meḥmed I com-
plex speak to the same attitude (figure 8.4). However important food and food
related rituals were to the representational agendas of sultans and gāzīs, it was

19 Past the early decades of the tenth/sixteenth century, the foundation of a soup kitchen
became a royal prerogative of sultans and dynastic women, with few built by viziers in
provincial cities or on way stations. On changes in the meaning of ʿimāret in the Ottoman
context, see also Budak, İmaret kavramı üzerinden.
20 Hence the numerous notes in Ayverdi’s surveys of early Ottoman architecture, and other
studies often based on him, on the “absence” of the ʿimāret from many foundations at
the time he surveyed the buildings. In most of these cases, the main building denoted as
ʿimāret in the document continues its existence as a mosque, while the service buildings
connected to kitchen functions have not withstood time.
21 Singer, Imarets. See also Ergin, Neumann and Singer, Introduction; and Singer, Mapping
imarets 13–39, 43–55.
266 kafescı̇o ğlu

figure 8.4 Bursa, kitchen and refectory of the Meḥmed I complex

Photograph by the author

the multifunctional ʿimāret/zāviye building, and not the kitchen or a separate

refectory, that architecturally symbolized their acts of benefaction and their
sheltering of conviviality.22
The study of the late ninth/fifteenth- and early tenth/sixteenth-century ver-
sions of the T-type building, too, presents a set of historiographic questions.
Prompting lukewarm responses on the part of architectural historians, these
buildings have been considered as late, sometimes unusual and not com-
pletely successful examples of an established typology.23 Within the evolution-
ary narrative of Ottoman architecture, marching from the relative modesty of
its beginnings toward its stylistically unified and spatially centralized monu-
mentality, in other words toward its celebrated “classicism,” buildings such as
Maḥmūd Pasha’s (d. 878/1474) ʿimāret-and-mosque in Istanbul, alongside many

22 Gabriel, Brousse 129, figure 72. A number of kitchen (maṭbah) and refectory (me’kel) struc-
tures were rebuilt and expanded in later centuries, such as those of Orhan in 1145/1732
and Murād I in Bursa in 1045/1635, Ayverdi, Osmanlı mimarisinin i, 66, 234; Emir, Erken
Osmanlı ii, 27–29. The references to “the mosque’s lead covering and ʿimāret’s roof tiles”
in a 1082/1671 court document subsequent to the conversion of Bāyezīd I’s T-plan building
into a mosque is of note, indicating that ʿimāret at that time denoted the separate kitchen
and refectory building; Ayverdi, İlk Osmanlı i, 423.
23 See, for example, Ayverdi, Fatih devri 433–451, for his evaluation of the Maḥmūd Pasha
mosque.
lives and afterlives of an urban institution and its spaces 267

figure 8.5 Istanbul, ʿimāret and mosque of Maḥmūd Pasha, 878/1473–1474, exterior view.
Note the side entrance
Photograph from Kafescioğlu, Constantinopolis/Istanbul

others within the imperial domains, have often been regarded as transitory
structures that signified the gradual abandonment of an earlier order of par-
titioned interiors and constituted steps toward the prescribed goal of spatial
centralization. The result has been that these buildings, hospice-and-mosque
structures in and beyond Istanbul, and the politico-religious process that gave
shape to them have attracted little attention (figures 8.5 and 8.6).24
I must briefly discuss the well-known, but nevertheless most telling facet
of the shift in politico-religious orientations that informed the reshaping and
redescription of the ʿimāret: Meḥmed II’s socioreligious complex, rising during
the 860s/1460s on the hill that had previously supported the Church of the Holy
Apostles and its dependencies (figure 8.7).25 Here, rather than a royal complex

24 Emir, Erken Osmanlı mimarlığında; Kafescioğlu, Constantinopolis/Istanbul, 109–130; Neci-

poğlu, The age of Sinan, 52–55, 92–95.
25 On Meḥmed II’s mosque and complex within its broader contexts, see Necipoğlu, The age
of Sinan, 83–88; Kafescioğlu, Constantinopolis/Istanbul, 66–96.
268 kafescı̇o ğlu

figure 8.6 Istanbul, ʿimāret and mosque of Maḥmūd Pasha, 878/1473–

1474 (1. ʿimāret and mosque; 2. mausoleum)
plan from Kafescioğlu, Constantinopolis/Istanbul

centered by a zāviye that featured a prayer space, Meḥmed II founded a congre-

gational mosque with a novel design. The building was emphatically separated
from any accommodative and service functions by the huge plaza surrounding
it, measuring 200 meters to each side and referred to as meydān (square) or
ṣaḥn (court) in contemporary sources. The meydān was aligned on two sides
with the s̱emāniye madrasas, a college compound conceived and built in an
expansive scale unseen in the medieval Islamicate world, meant to educate the
ulama of the imperial polity. Beyond that plaza and its surrounding wall was
a new type of building: this is the very first royal ʿimāret of the early modern
era, a compound designed as a unit within its own walled enclosure, including
a courtyard structure that housed the soup kitchen and rooms for travelers,
a caravanserai, and a refectory for madrasa students. The rich endowment,
impressive architecture, prestigious building materials, and craftsmanship of
Meḥmed II’s ʿimāret marks a turning point in the dynasty’s architectural ven-
tures. While Meḥmed II and his architects made the Friday mosque the physical
and institutional center of the royal compound, the visual and aesthetic dis-
lives and afterlives of an urban institution and its spaces 269

figure 8.7 Istanbul, complex of Meḥmed II, 867–875/1463–1470, plan (1. mosque; 2. mau-
solea; 3. garden; 4. madrasas; 5. preparatory madrasas; 6. hospital; 7. hospice and
soup kitchen; 8. stables; 9. kitchen; 10. elementary school; 11. library; 12., 13. gates.)
Plan from Kafescioğlu, Constantinopolis/Istanbul
270 kafescı̇o ğlu

tinction of the hospice-soup kitchen powerfully highlighted the continued, and

augmented, symbolic import of this space (figure 8.8).
The foundation deed of the complex supports the view that Meḥmed II’s
hospice and soup kitchen was in institutional terms, too, a first in Ottoman
practice. Its expansive range of employees, separately recounted for the hos-
pice (ʿimāret), the soup kitchen (maṭbah al-ʿimāret), and the stables, and its
expansive kitchen expenses foresee the accommodation of a larger number
of users (identified as students, dervishes—or the poor, fuḳarā—and travel-
ers, according to the waqfiyya) compared to earlier royal or elite foundations.26
Meḥmed II’s soup kitchen and hospice compound created a new paradigm for
royal ʿimārets of the following centuries, in Istanbul and beyond.27 Sited at a
distance, the Kalenderhane, meant for those for whom the royal ʿimāret did not
seem to have space, is one of the two dervish lodges within the walled city that
was part of Meḥmed II’s foundation. The building’s name implies that it was
allocated to antinomian dervishes rather than Sufis attached to a certain path.
The waqfiyya, with its remarkably detailed stipulations regarding the dervishes
and their shaykh’s religious observances, their ẕikr performances, and Math-
nawī and poetry readings calls attention to the range of foreseen activities, and
to the role of waqf in enforcing a particular order in the endowed establish-
ment.28
That Meḥmed II succeeded in reordering the functions and meanings of the
buildings of the royal complex may be evident in the narrative of the antino-
mian dervish Otman Baba’s confrontations with figures of religious authority
in Istanbul during the 870s/1470s. Otman Baba’s Velāyetnāme portrays Meḥmed
II’s mosque as a locus of the religious establishment. The ulama confronting
the dervish for what to them were scandalous acts hailed from that mosque,
which clearly was not a place to be frequented by the baba who roamed the
streets, squares, and marketplace of Istanbul, club in his hand and dervishes

26 Öz (ed.), Zwei Stiftsurkunden, Ergin, Fatih imareti vakfiyesi. Bidlīsī describes the ʿimāret
compound and the hierarchized configuration of the refectories serving the ulama, stu-
dents, and the poor. He notes that the soup kitchen served nearly 2000 people daily. Bidlisî,
Heşt Behişt 76–77.
27 Baha Tanman (Sinan’ın mimarisi, 336–337) recognizes the prototypical role of Meḥmed
II’s hospice-soup-kitchen-caravanserai compound for later Ottoman ʿimārets. See also
Singer, Imarets. Singer has tended to focus on ʿimāret primarily as soup kitchen, and has
been less attentive to the semantic and spatial shift that took place in the Ottoman notion
of ʿimāret in the later ninth/fifteenth century.
28 Öz, Zwei Stiftsurkunden; Ergin, Fatih imareti vakfiyesi; Kafescioğlu, Constantinopolis/Istan-
bul 99–103.
lives and afterlives of an urban institution and its spaces 271

figure 8.8 Istanbul, tābhāne and ʿimāret (hospice and soup kitchen) of the Meḥmed II com-
plex, the courtyard
Photograph from Günüç, Türk kültür ve medeniyet tarihinde
Fatih Külliyesi
272 kafescı̇o ğlu

in tow.29 The confrontation between Sünbül Sinān (the shaykh of the Halveti
lodge at the Ḳoca Muṣṭafā Pasha Mosque and founder of the Sünbüliye branch
of the Halvetis, d. 936/1529) and Ṣarı Gürz Ḥamza Efendi (the kadi of Istan-
bul, d. 928/1522) on the permissibility of devrān (rhythmic bodily movements
in a circle during Sufi ritual), which took place some decades later in Meḥmed
II’s mosque and was related in the Halveti shaykh Ḥulvī’s Lemeẓāt (1621), too,
powerfully highlights the mosque as a locus of orthodoxy as articulated by the
Ottoman religious establishment.30
Two overlapping processes underlay the shift in patronage and architectural
representation: the royal patron’s changing relationship to the gāzī and dervish
milieu on one hand, and on the other, the processes of the Sunnitization of the
Ottoman polity. Architecture and institutional patronage had their share in the
long road to the final dissolution of the rapport between agents of the frontier
and the all-powerful center;31 as they did in the dynamic, shifting, and long-
term process of Ottoman Sunnitization.32
The abundance of masjid construction in the cities of Rum in the later
eighth/fourteenth and ninth/fifteenth centuries may be brought into the pic-
ture, as an aspect of the latter process. Neighborhood masjids imposed a grid of
Islamic urban markers in the developing cityscapes. Bursa, Edirne, and Istanbul
are the best documented cities in this regard, thanks to a number of more com-
plete surveys and studies. The less well-known Ayasuluk (Hagia Theodosius,
Selçuk in modern Turkey), the Aydinid center through the eighth/fourteenth
century and an intellectual node housing scholars hailing from Mamluk lands
through the patronage of ʿĪsā Bey,33 presents another striking case of seem-
ingly methodical masjid construction dispersed throughout the urban area.34
A neighborhood masjid might be solely a marker of Muslim presence and pre-

29 Küçük Abdal, Velāyetnāme 111a–112a; Kafescioğlu, Constantinopolis/Istanbul 43, 235n106.

Ḥulvī, Lemeẓāt, cited in Öngören, Osmanlılar’da tasavvuf 374–376.
30 Cited in Öngören, Osmanlılar’da tasavvuf 374–376.
31 Kafadar, Between two worlds; Çıpa, The making of Selim.
32 See footnote 14.
33 Yıldız, From Cairo to Ayasuluk. On Aydinid literary patronage at large, see Yıldız, Aydinid
court literature.
34 On masjid construction in ninth/fifteenth- and early tenth/sixteenth-century Istanbul, see
Kafescioğlu, Constantinopolis/Istanbul 178–196. Ayverdi’s surveys of early Ottoman archi-
tecture best capture the picture in Bursa and Edirne; Ayverdi, İlk Osmanlı; and Ayverdi,
Çelebi ve II. Sultan Murad Devri. Although Ayasuluk masjids present problems in identi-
fication and dating, they comprise a significant group from the later eighth/fourteenth
and early ninth/fifteenth centuries. See Uğur, Selçuk (Ayasuluk) cami ve mescidleri; on late
medieval Ayasuluk, see Foss, Ephesus.
lives and afterlives of an urban institution and its spaces 273

eminence (this, regardless of the religious identities of the area’s residents35).

Its widespread sponsorship was a product of compliance with Hanafi jurisdic-
tion and formulations of the mosque as a semiofficial node vis-à-vis political
authority.
The visible attention to masjid construction (by administrative, scholarly, or
mercantile elites), which dispersed the spaces of daily prayer within the urban
area, may also be considered in connection to a set of prescriptive texts under-
lining Muslims’ obligation to perform the requisite prayers. Among them are
Ḳuṭbe’d-dīn İzniḳī’s (d. 821/1418) Muḳaddime,36 sections of Devletoğlu Yūsuf
Balıḳesrī’s Manẓūm fıḳh (or Viḳāye tercümesi, 828/1424),37 and toward the end of
the century, İsfendiyāroğlu İsmāʿīl Bey’s Ḥulviyāt-ı şāhī.38 Authored by the Çan-
daroğlu bey of Sinop (d. 884/1479), himself the builder of several mosques in his
native Kastamonu-Sinop area and in Plovdiv, the city of his exiled governorship,
the Ḥulviyāt-ı şāhī includes lengthy sections of minute detail on every conceiv-
able aspect of prayer.39 Commanding arithmetical precision in his knowledge
of the rewards of canonical worship, İsmāʿīl Bey indicates that conducting
the prayers at the masjid would bring twice the fażl than conducting them at
home.40 İzniḳī’s long sections on the daily prayers include a recommendation
on not leaving one’s neighborhood masjid to go and pray at another maḥalle
only because the imam of the farther masjid seems to be more pious, suggest-
ing that the socio-spatial integrity and stability of the urban neighborhood, and
the religious authority’s desire to control intra-urban mobility to achieve such
stability, were concerns already in the early 800s/1400s.41 All three texts betray
the authors’ access to and compliance with Hanafi law in reference to legal
denominations of the city (mıṣr), the role of masjids and mosques vis-à-vis the
definition of mıṣr, and the legality of congregational prayer. Thus, they closely

35 Masjid construction, and denomination of neighborhoods through masjids, also in areas

where large non-Muslim communities were resident in Istanbul, presents a good case for
this. See Kafescioğlu, Constantinopolis/Istanbul; and Leal, The Balat district.
36 Kutbe’d-dîn İznikî, Mukaddime; and Krstić, Contested conversions 26–50.
37 Aktan, Devletoğlu Yusuf’un Vikaye tercümesi; and Yıldız, A Hanafi law manual.
38 İsfendiyāroğlu İsmāʿīl Bey, Ḥulviyāt-ı şāhī.
39 On İsfendiyāroğlu’s patronage of mosques, see Boykov, Anatolian emir in Rumelia. A copy
of the Ḥulviyāt-ı şāhī was endowed by the chief architect Sinān to the masjid he founded
in Istanbul, underlining the connection between earlier modes of Sunnitization and later
tenth/sixteenth-century dynamics; Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan 150.
40 İsfendiyāroğlu, Ḥulviyāt-ı şāhī 286r.
41 Kutbe’d-dîn İznikî, Mukaddime 205. The note is reflected in, and possibly adapted by,
Ebū’s-suʿūd Efendi in a fatwa on the impermissibility of praying in another neighbor-
hood’s Friday mosque, Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan 57.
274 kafescı̇o ğlu

overlap with the notions and definitions of urban settlement Baber Johansen
has traced in earlier medieval Hanafi legal texts.42
That there was an interconnection between the writings of such scholars as
İzniḳī and İsfendiyāroğlu (himself a scholar and ruler) and the political author-
ity’s will to impose practices of normative religious observance is suggested
by the creation, toward the end of Meḥmed II’s reign, of the figure of an offi-
cial namāzcı, a person who was given authority to fine regular absentees from
the five daily prayers and from the Friday congregational prayer.43 We see the
namāzcı at work in one of the early court records of Üsküdar, dated 927/1521:
here, the names of 28 individuals, one of them a janissary, are listed as those
denizens of Üsküdar neighborhoods not attending daily prayers.44 A namāz
sorucı (prayer inquirer) is present also in a Nasreddin Hodja story included in
the Pertev Naili Boratav compilation, which provides a different perspective on
the matter. This was the Hodja’s answer to the question whether he performed
his prayers: “Neither did I desire it, nor was it my lot.”45

2 Friday Congregation in the ʿİmāret: Agency of the New Elite

Built within the walled city, and at spots that would soon develop into densely
settled areas (unlike earlier ʿimārets located at urban fringes), the ʿimāret-
mosques founded by viziers in Istanbul were designed and instituted with
attention to daily prayers. The early signs of the institutional and architectural
change that turned the ʿimāret into a mosque are fairly obscure, but neverthe-
less traceable. Murād II’s Edirne ʿimāret may present the first such building;
while changes were introduced more systematically in later ninth/fifteenth-
century Istanbul.46 The early history of the foundation of Grand Vizier Maḥ-

42 Kutbe’d-dîn İznikî, Mukaddime 214–215; İsfendiyāroğlu, Ḥulviyāt-ı şāhī 242r–v; Aktan,

Devletoğlu Yusuf’un, 213–216; Johansen, The all-embracing town 144–145, 148–152.
43 Terzioğlu, How to conceptualize 313–314; see also Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan, 48, for a
953/1546 reference to the tyranny of the namāzcı figure, which rendered the practice unfa-
vorable. See also the article by H. Evren Sünnetçioğlu in this volume.
44 Yılmaz (ed.), İstanbul kadı sicilleri, Üsküdar i, 434: “Bu tafṣīl maḥallelerde olan bī-namāzı
beyān eder ki ẕikr olunur.” There are a number of such registers in the court register
archives; this is the earliest I have encountered.
45 “Ne heves etdüm, ve ne ol da bana nasib oldı,” Boratav, Nasreddin Hoca 184, no. 338; also in
Duman, Nasreddin Hoca 325, who gives the source as Ḥikāyet-i Hoca Naṣreddīn, Biblio-
thèque nationale de France, MS S.T. 1395, dated 1207/1792, 45r.
46 Ayverdi, Çelebi ve II. Sultan Murad Devri 405–415. My thanks to Gülru Necipoğlu for draw-
ing my attention to the features of the Edirne Muradiye that depart from zāviye/ʿimāret
design. For evidence regarding interventions to the building, see footnote 58.
lives and afterlives of an urban institution and its spaces 275

mūd Pasha, “absolute deputy” of Meḥmed II, a primary agent of Ottoman

expansion, imperialization, and courtly and urban patronage for two decades
before his summary execution in 878/1474, records the shift taking place.47 Con-
temporary accounts of Maḥmūd Pasha’s foundation dating to the 860s/1460s
and 870s/1470s identify the building as ʿimāret and hānḳāh; authors highlight
the founder’s generosity, the feasts that were offered there, and the presence of
travelers who were recipients of the vizier’s generosity. Muʿālī’s lengthy praise
of Maḥmūd’s charity, generosity, and pious foundations in his Hünkārnāme
(ca. 880/1475) links the foundation of the hānḳāh to the feasts offered by its
patron.48 The foundation inscription identifies the building as a house of char-
ity (dāra hayren).49 Enverī, who dedicated his Düstūrnāme to the grand vizier
in 869/1465 makes no mention of a mosque in Istanbul among Maḥmūd Pasha’s
foundations. Rather, he praises the ʿimāret (and within the same passages, also
hānḳāh), and like Muʿālī some years later, the feasts offered to scholars and men
of religion.50 The ambiguity as to the early history of the building, and its multi-
ple identifications is extended also to the visual record. Two city views from the
early 1480s feature the building: the Vavassore view depicts it without a minaret
and labels it moscha; in the view in a Buondelmonti manuscript the build-
ing is depicted with a minaret and is labeled imarat.51 Extant inscriptions of
Maḥmūd Pasha’s ʿimāret and its contemporaries (unlike that of Meḥmed’s New
Mosque) do not refer to them as mosques: Maḥmūd Pasha’s and Hāṣ Murād

47 On Maḥmūd Pasha, and his urban and cultural patronage at large, see Stavrides, The sul-
tan of viziers. The T-type structure constructed as part of the commemorative complex
at the discovered grave of Ayyūb al-Ansārī in extramural Istanbul, also in 1459, was also
likely an ʿimāret at the time of its foundation. For the Maḥmūd Pasha ʿimāret and mosque,
see Ayverdi, Fatih devri iii, 433–451; Kuran, The mosque; Emir, Erken Osmanlı 190–191;
Kafescioğlu, Constantinopolis/Istanbul 109–119. In Constantinopolis/Istanbul I argued that
the building was founded as a mosque. Having reviewed the evidence, I propose a revision
of that argument here.
48 Muʿālī, Hunkārnāme 8b–10b; for a transcription of the text, see Balata, Hunkarnāma.
49 By contrast, Meḥmed II’s mosque is denoted as cāmiʿ in its foundation inscription. In Maḥ-
mūd Pasha’s foundation, the inscriptions on the side entrances to the hospice rooms, and
the hadith and Quranic quotation both evoking a masjid, must have been put in place
alongside the restoration inscription, documenting the Os̱mān III restoration. For the
texts, see http://www.ottomaninscriptions.com/information.aspx?ref=list&bid=426&hid
=2687 [accessed 26 July 2020].
50 Enverī, Düstūrnāme 71–72.
51 For the maps, issues of their dating, and the identification of sites they represent, see
Kafescioğlu, Constantinopolis/Istanbul 143–161. It is not quite certain exactly which site
is labeled by Vavassore, but its location certainly points to Maḥmūd’s building. It has no
minaret. It should be noted, though, that the only minarets depicted in this image are
those of Meḥmed II’s mosque.
276 kafescı̇o ğlu

Pasha’s (d. 882/1477) inscriptions carry the phrase dāra hayren, Rūm Meḥmed’s
(also depicted with a minaret by the maker of the Buondelmonti view), dār al-
rafiʿ.52
Architectural evidence suggests that the Maḥmūd Pasha ʿimāret may have
gone through an intervention that remade it into a mosque. Based on his care-
ful architectural survey of the building, Sedat Emir has argued that the minaret
of the Maḥmūd Pasha ʿimāret was a later addition and not part of the origi-
nal building; the current restoration work that has revealed structural details
of this section of the building has corroborated this view.53 That it was not a
much later addition is suggested by its presence in the Istanbul view in the
Buondelmonti manuscript mentioned above. Completed in 912/1507, Idrīs-i
Bidlīsī’s Hasht Behesht leaves no doubt that Maḥmūd’s foundation functioned
as a congregational mosque at that time. Not only does he refer to the mosque
alongside the hānḳāh, ribāṭ, and madrasa (and writes on the expansive char-
ities, generosity, and hospitality of Maḥmūd and his patronage of poets and
scholars), but he also gives an account of the expenses of the foundation, which
included the allowances for a haṭīb, or deliverer of the Friday sermon.54
In view of the absence of any references to the congregational mosque by
Maḥmūd Pasha’s contemporaries, the addition of the minaret at an uncertain
date (a theme that will come up again in the following section of this paper),
and in view of documents and narratives from the following decades that refer
to it as cāmiʿ-i şerīf, I suggest that the building, founded as an ʿimāret, may have

52 Üsküdar court records up to the mid-940s/1540s have numerous references to the Rūm
Meḥmed Pasha ʿimāret. By 953/1546, and in later dealings of the sharia court with the
same foundation, the reference is always to the Meḥmed Pasha Mosque.
53 Emir demonstrated that within the northwestern corner room, 30 to 35 centimeters had
been scraped off from the western corner of the wall separating the portico from the inte-
rior, from the ground level up, the scraped part ending in a console at the point it reaches
the top of the minaret door on the western wall. He argued that this was done in order
to allow for the opening of an entrance to the minaret, and he took this as evidence that
the minaret was a later addition; Emir, Erken Osmanlı 216–217, photographs 582, 583. As
the building has been closed for restoration, I have not been able to conduct an on-site
examination. Baha Tanman, the adviser for the current restoration project (disrupted due
to the Covid-19 pandemic) has corroborated that the structural details of the minaret’s
connection to the main building suggests a later intervention; personal communication,
22 April 2020.
54 A wage of 25 aḳçes for the haṭīb and 15 for the imam are recorded by Bidlīsī, who also notes
that the daily expenses of the Maḥmūd Pasha ʿimāret was close to 1,000 aḳçes, Heşt Behişt
91. The original waqfiyya of the Maḥmūd Pasha foundation has not surfaced. The waqfiyya
summary recorded in 1546 has the date as 878/1474, the year the vizier was executed. The
summary records a 15 aḳçe wage for the haṭīb; Barkan and Ayverdi, İstanbul vakıfları 42–
45.
lives and afterlives of an urban institution and its spaces 277

been converted into a congregational mosque with additions to and alterations

of its waqf. Two possible dates for this intervention would be the completion
of Meḥmed II’s mosque in 1470 and Maḥmūd Pasha’s execution in 878/1474,
after which his expansive endowment was confiscated into the royal treasury.55
If, on the other hand, the main building of Maḥmūd Pasha’s foundation was
from the start instituted as a congregational mosque-and-hospice, housing the
Friday prayer and sermon as well as accommodative functions, the narrative
sources discussed earlier suggest that this novel arrangement was lost on the
grand vizier’s contemporaries.
The spatial configuration of buildings founded by Maḥmūd Pasha and his
contemporaries in the upper echelons of Ottoman rule in Istanbul and beyond
present a search for a middle ground that would bespeak the emphasis on
congregational prayer and, at the same time, highlight the builders’ charity
through offerings of hospitality.56 The hospice rooms of Maḥmūd’s and other
viziers’ buildings in Istanbul were clearly used for purposes of accommoda-
tion and socializing, as their fireplaces (or traces thereof) and their storage
niches indicate. Rather than isolating the provision of accommodation and
food to areas beyond courtyards and walls as in the royal complex, the archi-
tects intervened in the spatial configuration and circulation patterns within the
established conventions of zāviye/ʿimāret design. Hence, the Maḥmūd Pasha
mosque, with its corridor separating the hospice rooms from its main prayer
space, a design that may have been inspired by late Byzantine church building
in Constantinople.57 The central domed hall of the building, in earlier ʿimārets
a central space giving way to the prayer eyvān and to guest rooms, was now
part of a larger prayer space along the entrance axis.58 Unlike earlier T-type

55 The Maḥmūd Pasha waqf was to be partly restored during the reign of Bāyezīd II. The
changes in the Maḥmūd Pasha foundation following his execution, and during the reign
of Bāyezīd II, are discussed in Kafescioğlu, Constantinopolis/Istanbul 117–118, 247n185, and
248n186; and in greater detail in Kafescioğlu, The Ottoman capital, 180–182.
56 For discussions of the architectural and spatial shift in late ninth/fifteenth-century T-plan
buildings, see Kuran, Early Ottoman; on hospice functions of T-plan convent-mosques,
see Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan 94–95; Kafescioğlu, The Ottoman capital 165–169, 194–
196; Kafescioğlu, Constantinopolis 110–114, 131–132. Sussan Babaie’s discussion of notions
of conviviality as articulated by the ruling body in the Safavid context may offer perspec-
tives on the uses of royal and elite ʿimārets and mosque-and-hospice buildings in the early
Ottoman cultural milieu, see Babaie, Isfahan 1–30.
57 The layout with a corridor separating the main prayer hall from hospice rooms, and its pos-
sible connection to late Byzantine church construction in Constantinople, is discussed in
greater detail in Kafescioğlu, Constantinopolis/Istanbul 112–114.
58 The Edirne ʿimāret of Murād II, with a waqfiyya dated 830/1426–1427, appears at first
sight to be an earlier example of such a configuration, as the prayer eyvān here has the
278 kafescı̇o ğlu

buildings where the central hall was covered with a more prominent dome
with an oculus, here the two successive domes covering the prayer hall were
of equal size and height. Separate side entrances to the hospice rooms, a new
feature of T-type buildings of these decades, ensured that the users of the hos-
pice rooms (āyende u revende) did not intervene with the prayer space, which
would be entered through the arcaded portico and the principal portal. Such
side entrances would be opened in many earlier ʿimāret buildings as they were
converted into mosques, a topic the final section of this paper will turn to.
The particular spatial and volumetric composition that shaped the exterior
configuration of the urban ʿimāret, a hallmark of the T-plan building as a “type,”
must have had a role in its continued use. This easily recognizable composition
rendered the building with its multiple functions and accommodative spaces
immediately recognizable.59 The visual configuration of the early ʿimārets, eas-
ily identifiable signposts of sultans’ and emirs’ hospitality, and centerpieces
of expansive foundations that connected the cities to the hinterland where
founders were patrons of entrenched networks of property and production,
lived on in the ʿimāret-and-mosque of the later ninth/fifteenth century.60

same elevation as the central hall. However, Aptullah Kuran has noted that excavations
revealed the original floor of the central hall, which was at a lower level than the eyvāns.
The accounting book of its foundation, from 1488 and 1489, has expenses for a haṭīb,
pointing to its use as a congregational mosque at that time. The Edirne historian ʿAbdu’r-
raḥmān Hibrī notes that it was founded as a Mevlevi lodge, and was later converted into
a mosque; this is corroborated by Evliyā Çelebi, who attributes the conversion to the
founder, Murād II. Evliyā’s mention of Murād II replacing the wooden floor of the cer-
emonial hall with marble during the conversion, too, may explain the unusual contiguous
space under the mihrab dome and the central dome. Evliyâ Çelebi seyahatnâmesi iii, 228.
As noted separately by Kuran and Emir, the side rooms were most likely converted into
eyvāns later, by opening arches into the partition walls between the central space and
the rooms. Kuran observed the narrowness of the arches giving way to the side spaces;
Emir observed that the original doors opening to the side rooms remain but have been
converted into closets. It may be fruitful to consider the possibility of two different inter-
ventions to the building. For a survey of the building and relevant documents, see Ayverdi,
Çelebi ve II. Sultan Murad 405–415. For arguments regarding interventions to its fabric dur-
ing its conversion into a mosque and observations regarding the hospice rooms, see Kuran,
The mosque 124–125, 132; Emir, Erken Osmanlı 212–213, photographs 561–564.
59 The ʿimārets of Murād I, Bāyezīd I and Meḥmed I in Bursa diverge from the predomi-
nant volumetric composition and side facade arrangement of majority of T-type buildings:
their original layouts feature three eyvāns, with two at the sides, between the hospice
rooms. The hospice rooms are not pronounced in the exterior volumetric configuration,
rather they are rendered part of the prismatic mass of the main building. However, the
domical arrangement and protruding mihrab eyvān are recognizable exterior features of
the type. See also footnote 100.
60 Kayhan, 16. ve 17. yüzyıllarda; York, Imarets, Islamization.
lives and afterlives of an urban institution and its spaces 279

figure 8.9 Afyon Karahisar, ʿimāret and mosque of Gedik Aḥmed Pasha, 879/1474, exterior
view from south
By permission of the Boğaziçi University Aptullah Kuran archive

None of the original waqfiyyas of the elite foundations in Istanbul have sur-
faced. The Afyon foundation of Gedik Aḥmed Pasha, whose waqfiyya copy
carries the date 879/1475, and indicates the completion date of the same year,
captures the architectural and institutional shift that I hope to highlight in
this paper with more clarity (figures 8.9 and 8.10).61 Completed within the
same years as two other viziers’ foundations in Istanbul and Üsküdar (those
of the pashas Hāṣ Murād and Rūm Meḥmed), the Afyon building presents an
elaborate response to the new use as congregational mosque that the long-
established type was now put to. As in the Istanbul buildings of Maḥmūd Pasha
and Hāṣ Murād Pasha, the two successive domed units beyond the entrance
constituted the prayer space and were not differentiated by their height or
by the elevation of the mihrab eyvān. Its side eyvāns, centering the lateral
facades and providing entry into the hospice rooms, freed the main space
of the mosque from circulation between its main entrance and the hospice
rooms. Solving a use and circulation problem presented by the use of the T-
plan for a congregational mosque, this new layout at the same time imparted
a monumental aspect to the hospice sections. The rooms centered by arched

61 Vakıflar Genel Müdürlüğü Arşivi, 2088.

280 kafescı̇o ğlu

figure 8.10 Afyon Karahisar, ʿimāret and mosque of Gedik Aḥmed

Pasha, 879/1474, plan
By permission of the Boğaziçi University
Aptullah Kuran archive

eyvāns claim an equal status for the hospice with respect to the porticoed main
entrance of the building. The Afyon building’s side facades in fact bear a sem-
blance to the layout and entrance façade of the ʿimāret of Gāzī Evrenos in
Komotini, which features a monumental eyvān (with no prayer space opening
onto it) and two side rooms; a resemblance that may not be accidental.62 One
could read this as a duality in the Afyon building’s visual language—the side
eyvāns flanked by hospice rooms associated with a former architectural lan-

62 On the architecture of Evrenos ʿimāret in Komotini (completed before 785/1383), see Kiel,
The oldest Ottoman monuments; Çağaptay, The road from Bithynia.
lives and afterlives of an urban institution and its spaces 281

guage of gāzī patronage and prestige, and the arcaded portico of the entrance
façade, featuring an aesthetic articulated in royal buildings of Bursa, Edirne,
and Istanbul, bespeaking a connection to the political center.
Gedik Aḥmed Pasha’s endowment for a congregational mosque-and-ʿimāret
is repeatedly referred to as cāmiʿ-i şerīf (or, mescid-i cāmiʿ) ve ʿimāret in the
879/1475 waqfiyya. The building and the waqfiyya present a short-lived duality
in the appointments of an ʿimāret’s leading personnel: a shaykh for the ʿimāret-
i cāmiʿ is appointed, while the well supplied and staffed soup kitchen (ʿimāret
in the document), has its own shaykh; both men were expected to be modest,
noncovetous, and abstinent. The mosque-hospice, with a haṭīb and a shaykh,
the latter a subordinate to the former, captures the transformation of the insti-
tution well. The document stipulates a ten dirhem wage for a haṭīb (who should
be a scholar knowledgeable in Arabic and in control of his speech), an imam
with the same wage and knowledgeable in conducting daily prayers, and two
muezzins. Allowances for 15 Quran readers and ten tehlīlhān (chanting the pro-
fession of God’s unity), who would read for the founder’s soul following each
of the five daily prayers, suggest an intense atmosphere of devotional read-
ing and chanting in the mosque.63 The building’s local name, “ʿimāret camiʿ,”
too, in place at least since Evliyā passed through Karahisar, points to the same
configuration of expanded use, as congregational mosque, as hospice, possibly
also as dining hall of the soup kitchen. Gedik Aḥmed’s foundation deed sug-
gests that the earliest documents of ʿimāret-mosques founded in Istanbul in
the 870s/1470s, preserved in the waqf survey of 953/1546, may reflect the allot-
ments of the time of their composition. If Maḥmūd Pasha’s ʿimāret had in fact
been converted into a congregational mosque subsequent to its construction,
this may have taken place during these years. This was also when the viziers
Hāṣ Murād and Rūm Meḥmed created their foundations, in Aksaray within the
walled city of Istanbul and in Üsküdar across the Bosphorus.
The viziers’ constructions endowed intramural Istanbul with multiple Fri-
day mosques. This was not a novelty either in the larger Islamic world or in
the Ottoman domains.64 As far as Ottoman practice was concerned, the spon-
sorship of multiple Friday mosques in a town had been more of a representa-
tional affair (rather than one of implementing and hosting multiple congrega-
tional communities within a town), as implied by Edirne’s Eski and Üç Şerefeli

63 Oil and mats for the mosque were provided for, as were allowances for a leather worker
employed in the mosque and the ʿimāret, a doorkeeper, two sweepers for the ʿimāret and
the stables, four bakers and their assistants, four cooks and their helpers, a dishwasher, a
wheat grinder, a repairer of buildings, and four revenue collectors.
64 Johansen, The all-embracing town; Grabar, The architecture of the Middle Eastern city.
282 kafescı̇o ğlu

mosques, both at the city center and the latter built a stone’s throw from the
former. As much as the new mosque construction in Istanbul during the early
decades under Ottoman rule answered the need to remake the city’s image
through Muslim monuments, they also present something of a blueprint of
the Hanafi classification and hierarchy of mosques. Friday mosques and neigh-
borhood masjids created the physical nodes for multiple congregations and
a quasi-parochial organization, foreseen and imposed (if sometimes only as
far as state authority and bureaucracy were concerned) on the urban area.65
Hanafi law and Ottoman practice continued to hold that the construction of
a Friday mosque was to be ordained by sultanic authority; in earlier Ottoman
practice this was a sultan’s prerogative.66 Mosque-hospices founded by the new
elite in Istanbul, Gedik Aḥmed’s Afyon foundation, alongside Maḥmūd Pasha’s
Sofia mosque, a multidomed hall modeled after Bursa’s Ulu Cami and Edirne’s
Eski Cami, expanded what was until then the royal prerogative of founding Fri-
day mosques to subroyal builders.67
The change in the architecture and the institutional framework of the
ʿimāret was brought on by agents of the newly consolidated center, as revealed
by a look at ʿimārets other patrons built in other places. The ʿĪsā Bey ʿimāret in
Skopje, contemporaneous with the Afyon building, and two mosque-hospices
built by viziers in Istanbul is a case in point. The founder was a descendant of
Paşa Yiğit and therefore a member of a well-entrenched, powerful, and wealthy
frontier dynasty, himself a frontier lord and an agent of Meḥmed II’s military
exploits in the Balkans. He was also the founder of infrastructure and charities
that directed income from his expansive possessions into projects in Skopje,
Sarajevo (where his palace gave its name to the city), and elsewhere in Bosnia.
ʿĪsā Bey’s Skopje building, which is identified as a hānḳāh in its 874/1469 waq-
fiyya and as ʿimāret in its inscription dated 880/1475–1476,68 presents a conven-
tional interpretation of the T-type building: it features a central hall followed
by a prayer eyvān on the entrance axis, both domed, and hospice rooms to the

65 Johansen, The all-embracing. That this matrix was imposed on Istanbul has been dis-
cussed in Kafescioğlu, Constantinopolis/Istanbul 180–184.
66 ʿĪsā Bey’s Sarajevo Friday mosque was built in 862/1458 and was dedicated to Meḥmed II:
Kemūrāzāde Seyfeddīn, Sarāybosnada ebniyye-i hayriyyenin, 3; Pelidija and Emecen, Îsâ
Bey. On the construction of Friday mosques through sultanic consent, see Necipoğlu, The
age of Sinan 47–48.
67 See also Hartmuth, A late ninth/fifteenth-century change, which locates the establish-
ment of plural congregational mosques in Balkan cities, and by subroyal patrons, in the
reign of Bāyezīd II.
68 The waqfiyya is dated 874 AH and indicates the foundation date as 871AH; Ayverdi, Fatih
devri iv, 868.
lives and afterlives of an urban institution and its spaces 283

sides.69 The foundation deed entrusts the operation of the hospice to an ahī
(unlike the majority of foundation deeds that have been preserved, which have
allowances for a shaykh) implying a direct connection to the artisanal commu-
nity of the city and patronage extended to its members.70
Where the institutional patronage by frontier lords and the old elite of the
Ottoman domains is concerned, ʿĪsā Bey’s Skopje foundation is not exceptional.
ʿImārets founded during the reign of Meḥmed II by patrons of different back-
ground and standing, who were not part of the new slave (ḳūl) elite, all follow
earlier spatial and institutional configurations: they are foundations whose
primary aim was providing food and shelter to a range of users.71 While the
greatest expenses within their endowments are directed toward the distribu-
tion of food, their endowment deeds also highlight their functions as places
for daily prayers, and allowances were set aside for prayers and Quran read-
ings for the soul of the founder. The functions of the ʿimāret as registered in
İsḥāḳ Pasha’s Inegöl building, founded in his town of origin in 873/1468, cap-
tures this well: the ʿimāret with its rooms, courtyard (muḥavvaṭa), kitchen,
storage places, stables and other dependencies was intended as a residence
and a place for dervishes ( fuḳarā and mesākin), a halting place and a refuge
for those who came and went, and for Muslims whether they were traveling or
resident. The introductory passages of the waqfiyya, on the other hand, con-
tain the hadith “Whoever builds a masjid for God, God will build for him a
house like it in paradise.”72 This emphasis on the masjid in an ʿimāret’s waq-
fiyya may be novel: it is not present, for example, in the introduction sections
of Murād I’s and Bāyezīd I’s endowment deeds of their Bursa foundations, dated
787/1385 and 802/1399–1400 respectively.73 It has been noted that a third of the
ʿimārets built up to the early decades of the ninth/fifteenth century did not orig-
inally feature a mihrab,74 also an indication that the function of the elevated

69 On this building in the context of İsḥāḳ Bey’s and ʿĪsā Bey’s architectural patronage in
Skopje, see Hartmuth, Building the Ottoman city.
70 ʿĪsā Beg’s Sarajevo foundation of 866 /1462, too, is for a zāviye directed to the use of stu-
dents, Sufis, gāzis and seyyids, alongside a public bath and a bridge over the river Miljacka;
Ayverdi, Fatih devri iv, 847.
71 Such as those of Ḥamza Bey in Bursa, Hıżır Pasha in Amasya, Çandarlı İbrahīm Pasha in
Edirne (858/1454), Sinān b. Elvān in Geyve, Ayverdi, Fatih Devri iii, 27–30, 89–98, 209–210,
275–277.
72 Tamer, İshak Pasa Vakıfları, waqfiyya facsimile.
73 For the endowment deed of Murād I see, Gökbilgin, Murad I. This is the facsimile of the
802/1400 waqfiyya, which is a copy of an earlier foundation deed dated 787/1385. For the
foundation deed of Bāyezīd I, see Ayverdi, Yıldırım Bayezid’in Bursa vakfiyesi.
74 Emir, Erken Osmanlı mimarlığında 231–232.
284 kafescı̇o ğlu

eyvān on the entrance axis as a masjid, in those buildings that did have a qibla
orientation, came to be accentuated through the course of the ninth/fifteenth
century.

3 Spatial Rearrangements and a Broader Range of Builders

Some two decades after founding the Inegöl building, in 896/1490–1491, İsḥāḳ
Pasha founded another ʿimāret in Salonica. It was similar in most details of
its allocations, with the exception that this ʿimāret had allowances for a Fri-
day preacher, and hence, like Gedik Aḥmed’s Afyon building, was to function
also as Friday mosque.75 A few years earlier (in 891/1486) the city of Amasya
had become home to an ʿimāret founded and constructed as a hospice and
Friday mosque. The foundation of Meḥmed Pasha, member of the powerful
Amasya family of Yörgüç Pasha, features a single dome flanked by hospice
rooms in an arrangement akin to the reverse-T. However, it attaches sets of two
hospice rooms aligned with the entrance to the two sides of a single domed
mosque, whereby the rooms could be accessed from the mosque as well as via
the entrance arcade of the building.76 Founded in the princely capital that had
been a site where the Halvetiye was established in the lands of Rum, Meḥmed
Pasha’s lodge was founded specifically for Halveti dervishes.77
İsḥāḳ Pasha’s Salonica foundation, and that of Meḥmed Pasha in Amasya,
take us into the 890s/1480s, when a new configuration of the ʿimāret space
was set in stone first in Istanbul. The Grand Vizier Dāvud Pasha’s foundation
(890/1485) is a single domed mosque with hospice rooms to the sides, with
separate entrances that are reminiscent of the side portal arrangements of
Gedik Aḥmed’s Afyon ʿimāret-mosque. With rooms now attached to a unitary
prayer space, it bespeaks the continued importance of the ideals of hospital-
ity.
In the aftermath of the partial reconciliation with agents of the earlier order,
following Meḥmed II’s demise (which involved the restoration of some of the
endowments and freehold property appropriated by Meḥmed II, the welcom-
ing to the capital city of Sunni-oriented Sufi groups, among them Halvetis

75 The building continued to be denoted as ʿimāret, unlike most others from this period.
Evliyā described it as Alaca ʿİmāret Cāmiʿ, Evliyâ, Seyahatnâme viii, 66.
76 Like Gedik Aḥmed Pasha’s foundation in Afyon, this is one of the few ʿimārets of the period
where an original minbar is preserved, bearing witness to the institutional status of the
building as Friday mosque and lodge. Yüksel, II. Bayezid 39–43.
77 On Amasya lodges and the Halvetiye, see Karataş, The city as historical actor.
lives and afterlives of an urban institution and its spaces 285

of Amasya and Naqshbandis in particular), Bāyezīd II (r. 886–918/1481–1512)

and his architects revisited the middle ground formulated by the designers
of late ninth/fifteenth-century ʿimāret-and-mosque buildings. These included
Gedik Aḥmed and, later, Dāvud Pasha foundations that had sought to combine
Friday mosque and ʿimāret under the same roof, and to keep them separate
from each other. Three royal buildings founded by Bāyezīd II and Süleymān I
between the 1480s and 1520s, which departed from Meḥmed II’s innovation
in mosque design, call attention to the dialogue and reciprocity between non-
royal and royal foundations. Hence, the layout of prayer hall and guest rooms
with separate entrances attached to it that gave shape to Bāyezīd II’s mosques
in Edirne (889–893/1484–1487) and Istanbul (906–911/1501–1505) and, later,
to the commemorative mosque built by Süleymān for Selīm I (929/1522). To
the single-domed mosques of Bāyezīd in Edirne and Selīm in Istanbul, and
to the Hagia Sophia-inspired design of Bāyezīd’s mosque in Istanbul were
added hospice sections that were laid out in a novel, palatial design. They
feature four-eyvān cross-axial arrangements with central, lanterned domes
that transpose the central halls of early ʿimārets into this separate hospice
space attached to the mosque, giving way to four rooms at the corners. The
layouts of these hospice sections carry reminiscences of the royal ʿimārets
of Bursa with their cross-axial arrangements and multiple eyvāns, suggest-
ing that they carry deliberate references to these earlier structures.78 Visiting
these buildings in the later tenth/sixteenth century, the geographer and trav-
eler ʿĀşıḳ Meḥmed described the Bāyezīd hospice as a dārü’ż-żiyāfe (banquet
hall) composed of connected rooms. He separately mentioned the kitchen
(maṭbah-ı ṭaʿām) and refectory (meʾkel-i ṭaʿām) for the poor and the needy from
among Muslim men and women. He thereby suggested a difference of status
between those guests who ate and were offered hospitality at the mosque’s
dārü’ż-żiyāfe79 and those offered food and lodging in the soup kitchen, hos-
pice, and caravanserai complex beyond the outer enclosure of the mosque.
Describing Selīm I’s mosque, ʿĀşıḳ Meḥmed recounted the same units again:
a dārü’ż-żiyāfe that adjoined the mosque for travelers (misāfirīn) and a kitchen
and refectory for the poor and the poor among the madrasa’s students (fig-
ure 8.11).

78 See footnotes 59 and 100.

79 ʿĀşıḳ Meḥmed twice mentions the dārü’ż-żiyāfe for travelers (misāfirīn) and indicates that
the refectory (meʾkel) was for the poor students and for the poor and the needy Mus-
lims: fukarā-yı ṭalebe-yi ‘ulūm; fuḳarā ve zu’afā-yi muslimīn ve muslimāt; Aşık Mehmed,
Menâzirü’l-avâlim 1089–1090.
286 kafescı̇o ğlu

figure 8.11a Edirne, mosque and ʿimāret of Bāyezīd II, 893/1487–1488;

plan
by permission of the Boğaziçi University
Aptullah Kuran archive

During these decades, when former codes of hospitality and former connec-
tions between spaces of religious observance and spaces of accommodation
were being redefined, the patronage profile of the structures that housed
dervishes and “those who came and went” also shifted. Bāyezīd II and Süley-
mān were patrons of several Sufi lodges in Istanbul and other cities of the
realm, often in particularly prescribed manners: Bāyezīd established a lodge
for the Naqshbandi shaykh Aḥmed Buhārī in Istanbul.80 Members of his for-
mer household in Amasya and his imperial council and court in Istanbul, Ḳoca
Muṣṭafā Pasha (d. 918/1512) and Ḳapu Ağası Ḥüseyin Ağa (fl. c. 894/1489), were
founders of Halveti lodges centered around Friday mosques in Istanbul, the

80 Yüksel, II. Bayezid 247–248, Le Gall, A culture of Sufism 35–62.

lives and afterlives of an urban institution and its spaces 287

figure 8.11b Edirne, mosque and ʿimāret of Bāyezīd II, 893/1487–1488; view of the hospice
section flanking the mosque
photograph by the author

former established for prominent figures of the order who had hailed from
Amasya.81 While earlier waqf documents made explicit references to dervishes’
accommodations in urban ʿimārets and zāviyes, those comers and goers asso-
ciated with the more nebulous networks and practices of what Ahmet Kara-
mustafa has termed dervish piety fell outside the patronage net of Ottoman
elite patrons of the later ninth/fifteenth century.82
The shift in gāzī constructions during these same decades also underlines
the changing semiotics of patronage. Unlike Gāzī Mihāl, who founded an
ʿimāret at the edge of Edirne in 825/1421–1422, later Mihāloğlus such as ʿAlī and
Aḥmed Beys turned to sponsor saints’ shrines deep in the forested countryside
of the Eastern Balkans. Among these shrines, built in the Mihāloğlus’ immedi-
ate area of influence, are the complex of Otman Baba in southern Bulgaria and
that of Demir Baba in the Deliorman, each centered around the mausoleum of

81 On the political context, see Karataş, The city as historical actor, 103–118; Curry, The trans-
formation, 273–276; on the foundations, Yürekli, Between public and private; Kafescioğlu,
Constantinopolis/Istanbul 220–225.
82 Karamustafa, Origins of Anatolian, 84ff.; and Karamustafa, Antinomian Sufis; Terzioğlu,
Sufis in the age of.
288 kafescı̇o ğlu

an abdāl of Rum. Mihāloğlu expanded their benefaction of dervish piety into

Anatolia, and sponsored constructions in the shrine complexes of Seyyid Gāzī
and Ḥāccı̄ Bektaş, exactly at the time when the Ottoman center had begun pro-
nounced efforts to control and to co-opt dervish groups, connected to various
cults of saints and discontented both with the emerging Ottoman configura-
tion of power and its religious politics, into the fold of Bektashism in the mak-
ing.83 Members of another notable frontier dynasty, the sons of Evrenos Gāzī,
seem to have followed trends of the imperial center more closely. They founded
a Friday mosque in Iannitsa in 1498, the dynasty’s stronghold, and extended an
invitation to and hosted the Naqshbandi shaykh and scholar ʿAbdullāh-ı İlāhī
here and at nearby Naoussa.84

4 “Question: If an Imam Declares Devrān in the Mosque Lawful”

The early years of Süleymān’s rule brought Kemālpaşazāde Şemsüddīn Aḥmed

(also known as Ibn Kemāl), a prolific scholar and prominent member of the
religious hierarchy, to the post of chief mufti, a position he held from 932/1526
until his passing in 940/1534.85 Within the corpus of works Kemālpaşazāde
published through a long scholarly career are also treatises that delineate his
views on religious identities and practices that fell outside the fold of Sunni
Islam and of the Hanafi creed, including those on Sufi notions and practices
that he found nonconforming to the sharia.86 Changes in Kemālpaşazāde’s rela-
tionship to Sufi orders and their masters in Istanbul have been noted, his earlier
hostility evolving into intimate connections to figures like Sünbül Sinān and
İbrahīm Gülşenī.87 His corpus of fatwas, which grant considerable space to
Sufism and Sufi ritual, nevertheless document a set of austere views on the
topic. Of particular importance to this paper are those involving ritual space
and the identities of the Sufis.88

83 Yürekli, Architecture and hagiography; Kiprovska, The Mihaloğlu family; Tanman, Demir
Baba; Antov, The Ottoman “wild west” 71–93.
84 Umur, Reconstructing Yenice-i Vardar 112–125.
85 On Kemālpaşazāde, see Turan et al., Kemalpaşazade. On his career and role as chief mufti,
see also Repp, The mufti of Istanbul; Atçıl, The Safavid threat 301–304; İnanır, İbn Kemal’in
fetvaları.
86 References in İnanır, İbn Kemal’in fetvaları 67, fn 227.
87 Öngören, Osmanlılar’da tasavvuf 344–348.
88 Öngören, Osmanlılar’da tasavvuf 369–380; İnanır, Ibn Kemal’in fetvaları 67–75. In at least
one collection of his fatwas, opinions regarding Sufi ritual have been collected under a
separate heading; Kemālpaşazāde, Fetāvā-yı İbn Kemāl 78b: “Sūfīlerin ẕikr ve devrānına
müteʿalliḳ ṣorular.”
lives and afterlives of an urban institution and its spaces 289

Among the body of Kemālpaşazāde’s opinions that address questions of Sufi

ẕikr, semāʿ, and devrān are numerous fatwas that take issue with prayer leaders
who condoned practices of ẕikr. Fatwas state that such an imam would not be
considered legitimate and that prayers performed with his leadership would
be null.89 That Sufi ritual in mosques was a weighty issue is suggested by one
fatwa that mentions Zeyd climbing the pulpit in a mosque to preach on the
erstwhile and continued lawfulness of dance (raḳṣ). Kemālpaşazāde’s opinion:
the Muslims who are present should take the impostor down the pulpit and
out of the mosque.90 Plural practices in the masjid (and possibly, the masjid
section of an ʿimāret) were no more admissible: Sufis loudly performing ẕikr
while Quran reading and interpretation continued in the masjid were to be
warned and stopped.91 In all, Kemālpaşazāde’s fatwas make clear that Sufi rit-
ual in mosques and masjids was now deemed unacceptable and that mosque
imams were expected to conform to the new demarcation of their roles.92 One
must also consider that the chief mufti issued these fatwas in an Istanbul that
housed Halveti mosque-lodges that used the monumental domed naves of con-
verted Byzantine churches as ritual and congregation spaces, among them the
Ḳoca Muṣṭafā Paşa (S. Andrei in Kriesei) and Küçük Ayasofya (SS. Sergius and
Bacchus).
The Sufi’s body and voice were objects of stern supervision and control in
Kemālpaşazāde’s reordering of devotional practice. His fatwas often equate
moving in a circle (devrān) and dance (raḳṣ) and provide a number of dic-
tionary-like definitions for raḳṣ: “ẕikr through moving in a circle (devrān), bend-
ing one’s head and waist, moving one’s hands and feet.” Raḳṣ during Sufi ritual
appears to be perceived as a problem specifically in urban contexts; Kemāl-
paşazāde repeatedly asked for those who insisted on practicing ẕikr in the form
of dance to be subjected to fierce punishment, deemed unbelievers (kāfir), and
deported from the city.93 A Sufi was expected, he ruled, to perform ẕikr as if he
was in the presence of sultans, sitting in dignified quietude and with perfect
manners.94 The mufti took issue with giving alms to those who claimed devrān
to be lawful, suggesting that the objects of this particular fatwa (and perhaps

89 Kemālpaşazāde, Fetāvā-yı İbn Kemāl 79b; Kemālpaşazāde, Mecmūʿatü’l-fetāvā 6a.

90 Kemālpaşazāde, Fetāvā-yı İbn Kemāl 79a.
91 Kemālpaşazāde, Mecmūʿatü’l-Fetāvā 7a.
92 The fatwas resonate in Ebū’s-suʿūd’s fatwas discussed by Necipoğlu with some differ-
ences, one striking divergence being Ebū’s-suʿūd’s inclination to stipulate the execution
as heretics of those Sufis practicing unacceptable forms of ẕikr.
93 Kemālpaşazāde, Fetāvā-yı İbn Kemāl 79b, 80a; Kemālpaşazāde, Mecmūʿatü’l-fetāvā 6a.
94 Kemālpaşazāde, Mecmūʿatü’l-fetāvā 6a. Turan, quoting from ʿAṭāʾī, notes that Kemāl-
paşazāde also had a fatwa that condoned devrān; Turan, Kemalpaşazade.
290 kafescı̇o ğlu

some of the others) were mendicant dervishes rather than Sufis connected to
an established order and therefore beneficiaries of a network of endowments.
Numerous temporal phrases and comparisons in the fatwas betray a conscious-
ness of the past and present of religious praxis. One fatwa possibly referred to
ʿAlī Cemālī Efendi (d. 932/1525–1526) who occupied the post of chief mufti prior
to him, and who, with intimate personal and familial ties to the Halvetiye, was
expressly more permissive in his writings and opinions regarding the bodily
dimension of Sufi ritual. Kemālpaşazāde ruled that his current opinions regard-
ing devrān in mosques would override those of the former mufti.95 At issue was
a passage, where devotional practices and their sites were concerned, from an
earlier to a novel corporeal and spatial regime.96
Süleymān the Lawgiver and Sinān his chief architect took permanent care of
the matter (at least as far as the physical spaces of worship were concerned) and
in the following decades buried multifunctional buildings that sheltered plu-
ral ritual and devotional practices in early Ottoman memory. With the excep-
tion of the Aleppo mosque of Hüsrev Pasha (953/1546–1547), none of the 100
plus mosques for which Sinān claimed authorship feature attached hospice
rooms.97 Süleymān’s Istanbul complex was in significant ways modeled after
that built by Meḥmed II in the 860s/1460s and duplicated the firm separation
of its mosque from its accommodative spaces. This arrangement was to be fol-
lowed by all dynastic and elite mosque builders of the Ottoman realm through
the early modern era. During these decades Ebū’s-suʿūd Efendi (d. 982/1574),
Kemālpaşazāde’s former student and his successor in the post of chief mufti,
issued numerous fatwas prohibiting Sufi ritual in mosque spaces and in the
masjids of zāviyes. Enforcing stricter confessional segregation in devotional
spaces was also an issue: one decree from the center banned non-Muslims
from using hospice rooms attached to a mosque.98 During these decades also,
orders from Istanbul decreed the remodeling of Bursa’s royal zāviyes so that

95 Fetāvā-yı Kemālpaşazāde 6a. On ʿAlī Cemālī Efendi, see Küçükdağ, II Bayezid 51–81; Görkaş,
Zenbilli Ali Efendi’nin. ʿAlī Cemālī Efendi, Mecmū‘a-i fetāvā.
96 Regulating the use of space in mosques did not concern Sufi practices only: one manu-
script of the Ḥulviyāt-ı şāhī includes a fatwa stating that commoners should not form
circles in Friday mosques to recite battle epics and stories; İsfendiyāroğlu, Ḥulviyāt-ı şāhī,
İstanbul Üniversitesi Kütüphanesi MS T 5849, 275v, cited in Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan
52–53.
97 On Hüsrev Pasha’s Aleppo foundation, see Kafescioğlu, In the image of Rūm 71, 83–86;
Watenpaugh, The image of an Ottoman city 60–77; Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan 472–475.
On departures from earlier mosque and hospice construction during Süleymān’s reign,
see ibid., 52–57. Ünver Rüstem’s chapter in the present volume explores post tenth/six-
teenth century reformulations in the architecture and symbolism of the sultanic mosque.
98 On Ebū’s-suʿūd’s fatwas regarding Sufi ritual in mosques, and on a court edict banning
lives and afterlives of an urban institution and its spaces 291

those coming and going (āyende u revende) would not disturb the space now
allocated only to normative religious practice. Çelebi Meḥmed’s royal zāviye in
Bursa was now and hereafter the Green Mosque.
The textual and architectural evidence on the conversion of ʿimārets into
congregational mosques reveals a century-long sequence of institutional and
architectural interventions, which changed these buildings in ways that have
continued to shape our modern perceptions of them. Conversion of an ʿimāret
into a mosque was effected at the institutional level by the appointment of
a haṭīb, a reader of the Friday sermon, which remained a prerogative of the
imperial center. The installation of a minbar would follow the appointment of
a haṭīb. Other spatial interventions were often more complex and have unfor-
tunately attracted relatively little attention, which continues to hinder a full
understanding of the original layouts and uses of many of the ʿimārets, and
aspects of their afterlives as mosques. Aptullah Kuran’s, and later, Sedat Emir’s
careful on-site examinations have revealed that many buildings underwent a
radical restructuring of their interior spaces, in numerous cases involving the
taking down of partition walls separating the ʿimāret’s main domed hall from
the hospice rooms.99 These works have revealed that many ʿimārets, including
iconic examples of the “type,” such as those of Orhan and Murād II in Bursa,
underwent interventions that incorporated side rooms into the main space by
turning them into eyvāns, and giving the buildings their present three-eyvān
schemes that are frequently reproduced in scholarship (figures 8.12, 8.13, and
8.14).100 The function of the main domed hall, too, was altered in the process

non-Muslims using hospice rooms of a convent-mosque in the town of Çorlu and direct-
ing them to a distant caravanserai, see Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan 52–53.
99 Kuran, The mosque 124–125, 132–133; Emir, Erken Osmanlı mimarlığında; Emir, Erken
Osmanlı mimarlığında ii, 18–50; Emir, Reconstructing an early Ottoman building; Emir,
Bursa Ali Paşa zaviyesi; Emir, Edirne Mihal Bey zaviyesi.
100 Kuran observed that seven out of the ten structures he classified as “cross-axial eyvān
mosques” (those buildings that incorporated side eyvāns in addition to the prayer eyvān),
present structural evidence for this type of intervention; Kuran, ibid. (These are the Orhan
Mosque in Bursa, Mezid Bey in Edirne, Muradiye in Edirne and in Bursa, İshak Pasha in
İnegöl, and Ḥamza Bey in Bursa); Kuran, The mosque 132–136. This leaves four sultanic
ʿimārets of the later eighth/fourteenth century and the turn of the ninth/fifteenth, built by
Murād I, Bāyezīd I, and Meḥmed I in Bursa and in Edirne, as a special group of royal patron-
age incorporating a three-eyvān scheme. Instances whereby the interior was “expanded”
through tearing down walls separating the main hall from side rooms are discussed in
detail in Emir, who provides additional structural details that betray interventions to the
building fabrics, Erken Osmanlı mimarlığında 147–156. Gabriel in 1958, and Eyice in 1964,
too, observed, based on their respective surveys of the Murād II ʿimāret, that the curtain
walls separating hospice rooms from the main hall had been taken down during a later
intervention; Gabriel, Brousse 108; Eyice, İlk Osmanlı devrinin 38.
292 kafescı̇o ğlu

figure 8.12a Bursa, zāviye/ʿimāret of Murād II (830/1426) converted into a congregational

mosque in the later tenth/sixteenth century: interior toward the prayer eyvān
Photograph by the author

of conversion, becoming part of the prayer space as was the case of newly built
mosque-hospices sponsored by the new ḳūl elite, rather than a central hall that
was the circulation node within the building whether one headed to the prayer
hall or to one of the tābhāne rooms furnished with fireplace and cupboards.
As was the case in newly built mosque-hospices, circulation directed to the
rooms was an issue. In ʿimārets converted into mosques, new side entrances
that connected the hospice rooms directly to the building’s exterior, some
enlarged from extant windows, were a novel feature that assured that dervishes
and travelers no longer trespassed the mosque space to reach their private
quarters. A court record of 958/1552 on the conversion of the Yeşil ʿimāret cap-
tures with remarkable precision the nature of the intervention that was envi-
sioned, recording a petition by the waqf superintendent for arrangements in
the mosque space and its gates of entry. The central pool and fountain in Çelebi
Meḥmed’s (now) exalted mosque needed to be carried outside of the building,
as used water overflowed to the area around it and created a state of pollution,
which prevented the worshippers from praying here (i.e., in what was once the
zāviye’s lantern-domed central hall). Since the mosque is in a densely inhabited
area, the petition reads, the Friday congregation is large. If the said pool is trans-
lives and afterlives of an urban institution and its spaces 293

figure 8.12b Bursa, zāviye/ʿimāret of Murād II (830/1426) converted into a congrega-

tional mosque in the later tenth/sixteenth century: interior toward the
hospice room transformed into an eyvān
Photograph by the author
294 kafescı̇o ğlu

figure 8.13 Bursa, zāviye/ʿimāret of Murād II (830/1426) converted into a congregational

mosque in the later tenth/sixteenth century, plan
By permission of the Boğaziçi University Aptullah Kuran
archive
lives and afterlives of an urban institution and its spaces 295

figure 8.14 Bursa, Muradiye zāviye/ʿimāret reconstitution by Sedat Emir

showing the original layout of the interior
from Sedat Emir, Erken Osmanlı by permission of the
author
296 kafescı̇o ğlu

ported to the outside courtyard of the mosque, which was newly constructed
in the style of [the courtyards of] other sultanic mosques, and if new gates to
the hospice rooms are opened directly to the exterior of the building, the inte-
rior of the exalted mosque will not be a passageway for those who come and
go; moreover, the space will be clean and therefore appropriate for Muslims to
pray in.101 The proposed changes were not fully implemented, and Yeşil Cami
did not undergo the interventions that many converted ʿimārets were subjected
to: the fountain under its main dome remains in place; and if, as Ayverdi sug-
gested, one of the windows was enlarged to be used as a lateral entrance, the
alteration was later reversed to restore the integrity of the building’s skillfully
designed and ornamented side facades.
The pronounced attention to distinctly delineating the spatial boundaries
of requisite prayer, in line with the newly formulated requirements of ortho-
praxy, paralleled the need for new congregational spaces for the Muslims in
growing urban populations.102 A record of 984/1576 documents the demands
for the enlargement (tevsīʿ) of the prayer hall of “Sultan Orhan’s exalted mosque
in Bursa,” as the congregation was not fitting in the prayer space, a hindrance
particularly on cold winter days.103 The petition for the enlargement of the
mosque space is in line with Kuran’s and Emir’s analyses of the building: sepa-
rately, they have observed that the current side eyvāns were originally hospice
rooms that were incorporated into the main space at a later date, through the
destruction of the partition walls separating the domed main hall from the

101 Bursa court records, A58/63, 5a, cited in Ayverdi, Çelebi ve II. Sultan Murad 50; and tran-
scribed in Emir, Erken Osmanlı mimarlığında 230–231. The record notes that 10,000 aḳçes
were allotted for the projected interventions. Ayverdi suggests that the window of the
northeastern room was enlarged to function as a door and later restored to its original.
102 Emir has suggested that population growth was the primary reason behind conversions
of ʿimārets into mosques; Necipoğlu underlines issues of Sunnitization, alongside rising
urban populations, in connection to the boom in Friday mosque construction and con-
versions of extant structures; Emir, Erken Osmanlı mimarlığında 289–291 and passim;
Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan 52–57.
103 BOA, Mühimme defteri 28, 165, published in Dağlıoğlu, 16. asırda Bursa; and Emir, Erken
Osmanlı mimarlığında ii, 22. The building underwent an earlier restoration, as indicated
by its inscription (820/1417). Ayverdi has discussed this intervention due to the damage
the building suffered during the Karamanid invasion of Bursa in 816/1413. According to
Ayverdi, architectural evidence suggests that the 820/1417 restoration did not result in a
significant alteration in the building’s layout; Ayverdi, Osmanlı mimarisinin 80–82. Kuran
argues that the building originally featured vaulted spaces as in Orhan’s İznik foundation
and was covered with a domed superstructure during the 820/1417 renovation. He also sug-
gests that the partition walls of the hospice rooms may have been torn down at that date.
While the dating is not correct, Kuran’s observation agrees with the intervention men-
tioned in the Mühimme document dated 984/1576; Kuran, The mosque 98–100, 132–133.
lives and afterlives of an urban institution and its spaces 297

side rooms. (fig. 8.15)104 That these documents recording interventions to two
of Bursa’s royal ʿimārets already refer to the buildings as cāmiʿ-i şerīf (exalted
mosque) suggests that at the time the architectural changes were implemented,
the appointment of a Friday sermon reader, and the building’s change of sta-
tus from ʿimāret into mosque had already taken place. A minaret was added to
Murād II’s ʿimāret-turned-mosque in 1002/1594. This was at least four, or pos-
sibly more, years after the building’s conversion into a congregational mosque,
which also involved the transformation of two of its hospice rooms to side
eyvāns opening onto the central hall.105 The construction of a minaret gave an
unambiguous architectural form to the new denomination, altering the visual
identity of the zāviye /ʿimāret.
Between the conversion and “enlargement” of Skopje’s İsḥāḳ Bey zāviye,
on or before 925/1519, and the conversion of Bursa’s Ḥamza Bey ʿimāret in
1023/1614, in order to provide the neighborhood with a space for Friday prayer
“in line with the jurisdiction of the Hanafi imams,”106 the majority of T-type
ʿimārets in the Ottoman domains (whether they had originally incorporated
a prayer hall with a mihrab or not, and whether their endowments included
allowances for masjid personnel or not), were converted into congregational
mosques.107 The story of the early Ottoman ʿimāret through the long tenth/six-
teenth century captures in full light the spatial, social, and institutional dimen-
sions of processes of confession building, in particular measures directed at
consolidating Hanafi-Sunni praxis in cities. This involved excluding the devo-
tional practices of those groups who located themselves outside of Sunni Islam
as state religion. Measures aimed to reshape the spatial and corporeal regimes
of city dwellers, and sought to create and keep intact congregational commu-
nities attached to particular nodes, whether masjids or Friday mosques. Derin
Terzioğlu has noted that acts toward Sunnitization and confessionalization in

104 Kuran, The mosque 132–133; Emir, Erken Osmanlı mimarlığında ii, 39–43.
105 Emir, Erken Osmanlı mimarlığında 147. A Yorgaki Kalfa was summoned to Istanbul in rela-
tion to the minaret project. He is not referred to as hāṣṣa miʿmārı, suggesting that a local
architect was entrusted with the construction, rather than one sent from Istanbul.
106 “Eimme-i ḥanefiyye’nin ḳavli üzere,” Bursa court records, no. 227, f. 125, no. 225, f. 13, cited in
Ayverdi, Fatih devri iii, 89. The records also site the difficulty experienced by maḥalle resi-
dents in reaching the Friday mosque, which was at a distance. Ḥamza Bey died in 866/1462
at the hands of Hunyadi Janos; the undated building was likely completed prior to that
date, during or before the reign of Meḥmed II.
107 At the time Evliyā Çelebi visited Dimetoka (Didymoteichon), he noted several zāviyes that
were “suitable for conversion into mosques” (câmiʿ olmağa müstaʿid zâviyeler), suggesting
that the process continued; Evliyâ Çelebi, Seyahatnâme viii, 30. On mosque construction
and conversions in Rumelia in through the tenth/sixteenth century, see the chapter by
Grigor Boykov in this volume.
298 kafescı̇o ğlu

figure 8.15a Bursa, Orhan ʿi̇māret (740/1339–1340) converted into a congregational mosque
ca. 984/1576; plan
by permission of the Boğaziçi University Aptullah Kuran
archive
lives and afterlives of an urban institution and its spaces 299

figure 8.15b Bursa, Orhan ʿi̇māret (740/1339–1340) converted into a congregational mosque
ca. 984/1576; reconstitution by Sedat Emir showing the original layout of the interior
from Sedat Emir, Erken Osmanlı, by permission of the author
300 kafescı̇o ğlu

figure 8.15c Bursa, Orhan ʿi̇māret (740/1339–1340) converted into a congregational mosque
ca. 984/1576; view from north, with later addition of side entrance
photograph by the author

the Ottoman domains were directed toward Sunnis as much as toward non-
Sunni communities.108 The evidence presented in this paper with regard to the
afterlives of the early Ottoman ʿimāret and largely concerning the central and
western areas of the lands of Rum supports this view.
The institutional and spatial interventions to spaces of devotion and the dis-
ciplinary measures that accompanied them were directed at the corporeal and
spatial regimes of city dwellers. Architecture conformed to the religiopolitical
vision of the Ottoman center; the multifunctional ʿimāret that offered no clear
demarcation between sacred and profane, and between normative religious
practice and Sufi ritual, was rendered a thing of the past. Did the ʿimāret con-
verted into mosque and the new architecture of the congregational mosque
with its unified space (a powerful Ottoman legacy into the twenty-first cen-
tury) alongside the plethora of prescriptive texts that sought to define usage of
mosques succeed in creating a public that conformed to the disciplinary mea-
sures of the center? Not completely, if we are to consider how central issues of
Sufi ritual and ritual in mosques were to the Kadızadelis and their opponents in
the eleventh/seventeenth century, or if we were to attend Niyāzi-i Mıṣrī in the

108 Terzioğlu, How to conceptualize, 320–321.

lives and afterlives of an urban institution and its spaces 301

Bursa of the 1080s/1670s, where he held ẕikr circles in a neighborhood masjid,

and also, clashes with the imam notwithstanding, in the celebrated Ulucami.109

Zāviye and the mosque-hospice remained buried in the early Ottoman past
until a modern evocation of a now idealized era of Ottoman beginnings ush-
ered them into the representational spaces of late empire. Ironically perhaps
(at a moment when the aesthetics of Bursa and particularly of the Yeşil com-
plex were all the rage), it was not the zāviye but the mosque with the hospice
rooms that was recreated in ʿAbdü’l-ḥamīd II’s Hamidiye Mosque attached to
the Yıldız Palace in 1886, a building that has been described by Ahmet Ersoy as
“a tribute to the long abandoned archetype of the T-plan building, an excep-
tional product of pure historicist reflection.”110 A republican, and infinitely
more solemn, revival when compared to the Yıldız Hamidiye Mosque, has
recently been on view at Salt Galata: an unrealized project by the architect
and restorer Ali Saim Ülgen (d. 1963). His is a proposal dating to the 1950s for a
mosque in Ankara’s Yenişehir district, modeled after royal mosques with hos-
pice rooms, such as those of Bāyezīd II in Edirne and Selīm I in Istanbul.111 It
captures a modern imagining of the Ottoman past at a time when architects
and scholars were engaged in debate regarding the original functions of the
T-plan ʿimārets with hospice rooms and the intentions of their builders. As in
scholarly pursuits, in architectural practice of the later nineteenth and twen-
tieth centuries, too, the mosque, it seems, overshadowed the ʿimāret/zāviye.
Architectural and written archives remain and bear witness to the plural and
layered histories of these buildings and their spatial and conceptual afterlives
within the wider geography of Rum, and through different temporalities.

Acknowledgments

My sincere thanks to Derin Terzioğlu, Tijana Krstić, and Gülru Necipoğlu for
the insightful comments and observations they have offered on this article. I
would also like to thank the organizers, Maximilian Hartmuth, Zeynep Oğuz,
and Marianne Boqvist, and participants of the workshop “Revisiting the T-
shaped ‘zaviye/‘imaret’: buildings and institutions in early Ottoman architec-
ture,” which was held at the Swedish Research Institute, Istanbul in 2013, and
where I presented a shorter version of this paper.

109 Terzioğlu, Sufi and dissident 117. Terzioğlu notes that a lodge was later built for Mıṣrī.
110 Ersoy, Aykırı binanın 110.
111 Modern Türkiye’nin Osmanlı mirasını keşfi: Ali Saim Ülgen arşivi, Exhibition at Salt, Istan-
bul, 8 February–24 March 2013; Salt Araştırma, cat. no TASUPA0540001.
302 kafescı̇o ğlu

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 chapter 9

Abdāl-affiliated Convents and “Sunnitizing” Halveti

Dervishes in Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Rumeli

Grigor Boykov

As recent research suggests, Ottoman “Sunnitization” entailed much more than

a number of state-led measures directed against the non-Sunni Muslim com-
munities in the empire. It was an uneven, complex, and long-term process that
was driven not solely by religiopolitical concerns centered on the rising Safavid
threat during the late ninth/fifteenth and early tenth/sixteenth centuries, but
by deeper social, political, cultural, and even regional dynamics both before
and after this period. Moreover, recent scholarship has demonstrated that even
in the tenth/sixteenth century, when the process of state-enforced Sunni ortho-
doxy intensified mainly due to the Shi‘ite Safavid challenge, it was not only the
Ottoman authorities but a mixture of multiple agents with their own religious
and political agendas who played a crucial role in and shaped the process of
Ottoman Sunnitization.1
These agents, as persuasively argued by Derin Terzioğlu, included various
Sunna-minded Sufis who sought to negotiate their own place and role in the
religious and political dynamics of the time, when Sufi groups themselves were
experiencing concurrent institutionalization and confessionalization in the
Ottoman Empire.2 The latter processes went hand in hand with an increased
pressure on nonconformist dervish groups both in Anatolia and the Balkans,
who were denounced for their “innovations” in practices and beliefs, and even
persecuted as “heretics” during the tenth/sixteenth century, as revealed by
Ottoman archival sources.3 The deep involvement of the Halveti (Ar. Khal-
wati) shaykhs who acted as agents of Sunnitization, especially the network
constituted by adepts of Ṣofyalı Bālī Efendi (d. 960/1553), has been convinc-
ingly demonstrated by Nathalie Clayer, who shed light on the complexity of
the tenth/sixteenth-century developments that led to the gradual Sunnitiza-

1 Terzioğlu, How to conceptualize 301–308; Krstić, State and religion.

2 Terzioğlu, Sufis in the age of state-building 86–102; Terzioğlu, Sunna-minded Sufi preachers
241–321.
3 Refik, On altıncı asırda.

© grigor boykov, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004440296_010

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
abdāl-affiliated convents and “sunnitizing” halveti dervishes 309

tion of Muslim populations in Rumeli.4 Some Halveti shaykhs enjoyed partic-

ularly close relations with the Ottoman political elite and ulama circles, and
functioned as a clientage network that on the one hand secured their firm
position in the Sufi convents both in the capital and throughout the imperial
provinces, and eased the reach of the Sunnitizing and centralizing efforts by
the Ottoman authorities to the farthest regions of the empire, on the other.
At the same time, however, as John Curry has shown, Halvetis constructed dif-
ferent chains of mystical authority (silsile), all of which originate with ʿAlī ibn
Abū Ṭālib and pass through his sons Ḥasan and Ḥusayn—which was common
among other Sufi orders as well—but some of which also include “the major
Shi‘î imams,” Zayn al-ʿĀbidīn (d. 95/713), Muḥammad al-Bāqir (d. 114/732), and
Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (d. 148/765).5 The fact that the order was steeped in the ‘Alid tra-
dition and the veneration of the Household of the Prophet (ahl al-bayt)—a
phenomenon widespread among Ottoman Sunnis, as discussed in this volume
by Vefa Erginbaş—likely made Halvetis a particularly useful partner for the
Ottoman authorities in their efforts to negotiate the boundaries of Ottoman
Sunnism and bring nonconformist Sufi orders with pronounced ‘Alid loyalties
under control.
Despite the increasingly nuanced scholarly understanding of the Halvetis’
role in Sunni propaganda, much is still unknown about their strategies of either
resistance to or implementation of Sunnitizing policies at a provincial and
local level. Focusing on the latter, what is especially missing is some sense of
how local nonconformist groups reacted toward the Sunnitizing efforts of the
Halveti preachers, as well as a better idea of the characteristics peculiar to
the individuals or groups who were targeted in particular regions or locales.
Were the targets of the Sunnitizing Halveti preachers undifferentiated groups
of “heretics” or did Halvetis find particular social groups or religious allegiances
particularly “attractive”? Did Halvetis single out their targets purely for the lat-
ter’s nonconformist religious views or did their choices have certain political
overtones as well? What can we discern about the Halveti leaders’ own patron-
client networks and how they informed the policies of Sunnitization in partic-
ular contexts?
The present paper aims at elucidating these questions with respect to the
broader region of the eastern Balkans. This region is particularly worth exam-
ining because it was a zone of interaction between various antinomian Sufi
groups collectively known as abdāls, military retinues of several Rumeli frontier

4 Clayer, Des agents du pouvoir 21–30; Clayer, Mystiques, état et société.

5 Curry, The transformation 25, 45n9.
310 boykov

commander (uc begleri) families, as well as nomadic or seminomadic popula-

tions, which by the 850s/1450s seem to have formed an informal alliance that
came to resist first the centralizing initiatives of the Ottoman authorities and
subsequently their Sunnitizing policies as well. It was also the region where
some of the most influential Halveti leaders chose to settle and set up their
own Sufi hospices as bases for their preaching. It is therefore an area where the
examination of the local agents of Sunnitization and their targets can reveal
much about the broader dynamics of the process and how it was informed
by the networks that bound the capital and the provincial locales. The paper
will focus in particular on the clientage network of the Ottoman Grand Vizier
Ṣoḳollu Meḥmed Pasha (in office 972–987/1565–1579) that included some of
the most influential Halveti shaykhs of the period. Together, they sought to
overcome the bitter opposition of the nonconformist Balkan frontier comman-
ders’ families and their patronage network, which included the antinomian
dervishes in the region. Thus, the paper will offer a preliminary picture regard-
ing how the process of the Sunnitization of nonconformist religious commu-
nities, and specifically abdāl groups, transpired in the eastern Balkans in the
tenth/sixteenth century, with the hope of outlining a research agenda and incit-
ing further studies. It makes a contribution to the topic by highlighting the
importance of geography and approaching the multiple clientage networks in
the region and their interrelations in a spatial perspective.

1 The Establishment of Nonconformist Religious Communities in

the Eastern Balkans in the Fifteenth Century: An Entangled
Network of Border Society

The establishment of the Kızılbaş-Alevi communities and antinomian Sufi

groups in the eastern Balkans is closely intertwined with the historical forma-
tion of the sizable Muslim communities in the area. The two regions with the
most compact Muslim population—Thrace and the eastern Rhodope Moun-
tains in the southeast, and Deliorman, Gerlovo, and Dobrudja in the north-
east—were regions that witnessed significant Turcoman colonization (through
voluntary or forced migration) in the course of the Ottoman conquest, begin-
ning in the second half of the eighth/fourteenth century and continuing with
growing intensity until the mid-tenth/sixteenth century.6 Adherents of var-

6 Recent studies, examining this process and providing abundant bibliographical references
on the matter, include Boykov, The human cost of warfare 103–166; Antov, The Ottoman “wild
west” 30–40, 98–157. Antov, Ottoman Dobrudja 72–94.
abdāl-affiliated convents and “sunnitizing” halveti dervishes 311

ious antinomian Sufi groups also migrated or were deported to these very
territories, which are today home to the bulk of the Kızılbaş-Alevi and Bek-
tashi communities in the Balkans.7 The close link between Turcoman colo-
nization and Sufi groups in the eastern Balkans is also clearly attested by their
numerous convents built in the area under consideration during the first two
and a half centuries of Ottoman rule.8 Moreover, the Ottoman archival evi-
dence demonstrates that the crescent-shaped territory that links Dobrudja and
Thrace had the highest concentration of seminomadic Turcomans ( yürük),
who were among the most vigorous supporters of different itinerant dervish
groups.9 When one maps out the available data for the convents of antinomian
dervishes in the region, which predate 1008/1600, it becomes apparent that the
two groups were very closely linked and depended on one another. The tekkes
of nonconformist dervishes that I was able to identify as existent in the period
in question were all commissioned and built in territories that were heavily col-
onized by Anatolian yürük settlers in the course of the eighth/fourteenth and
ninth/fifteenth centuries. The map appended to this study (figure 9.1) displays
those 47 identifiable convents in eastern Rumeli that exercised a significant
influence over the local Muslims in the first centuries of Ottoman rule in the
region.10
The antinomian dervish groups in the eastern Balkans were largely iden-
tified with the appellation abdāls, an umbrella term that broadly described
the nonconformist itinerant dervish collectivity in the late eighth/fourteenth

7 De Jong, The Kızılbaş sect 21–25; De Jong, Notes on Islamic 303–308; Mélikoff, La commu-
nauté Kizilbaš 401–409; Zarcone, Nouvelles perspectives 1–11; Gramatikova, Non-orthodox
Islam in Bulgarian lands; Yıldırım, Bektaşi kime derler? 23–58.
8 Barkan, Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda bir iskân 279–386; De Jong, The Kızılbaş sect 21–25;
De Jong, Notes on Islamic 303–308; Mélikoff, La communauté Kizilbaš 401–409; Zarcone,
Nouvelles perspectives 1–11; Gramatikova, Non-orthodox Islam in Bulgarian lands 411–557;
Kayapınar, Dobruca 85–102.
9 Gökbilgin, Rumeli’de Yürükler, Tatarlar; Yeni, Osmanlı Rumelisi’nde Yörük teşkilatı 187–
205; Altunan, XVI. ve XVII. yüzyıllarda Rumeli’de 189–200; Altunan, XVI. yüzyılda Balkan-
lar’da Naldöken Yürükleri 11–34.
10 Data for building the map were extracted from a variety of sources, such as Ottoman taxa-
tion registers, velāyetnāme texts, and a number of secondary publications. Data reliability
for each of the 47 mapped out convents has been analyzed individually, and their exact
location has been displayed on the map to the best of author’s capabilities. In cases when
buildings from these convents or their ruins are still extant, the map visualizes their GPS
coordinates. Certainly, for many of the convents that are no longer extant, the map merely
displays a tentative location, based on the toponymy on the 1:5000 modern Bulgarian map
that often indicates the former location of the convents. Some convents that do appear in
the secondary literature, but whose existence or correct identification is uncertain, are
not visualized on the map.
312 boykov

figure 9.1 Map of nonconformist dervish tekkes in Eastern Rumeli up to 1008/1600 (map by
G. Boykov)

and ninth/fifteenth centuries, which in the course of the following centuries

merged with the Bektashi order.11 The abdāls were an integral component of the
sociocultural landscape of the then-frontier zones in Rumeli, which comprised
antinomian dervishes, yürüks, and military leaders and their retinues (known
as gāzīs) who were active in the conquest and colonization of the Balkans. The
hagiographic works produced by the abdāl milieu resemble examples of the

11 Köprülü, Abdal 21–56; Ocak, La Révolte de Baba Resul 117–134; Ocak, Osmanlı İmparator-
luğu’nda marjinal 85–93; Karamustafa, God’s unruly friends 46–49, 70–78; Karamustafa,
Ḳalenders, Abdāls, Ḥayderīs 121–129; Gramatikova, Non-orthodox Islam in Bulgarian lands
133–141; Antov, The Ottoman “wild west” 49–61; Popovic and Veinstein, Bektachiyya.
abdāl-affiliated convents and “sunnitizing” halveti dervishes 313

gazāvatnāme literature, embracing the values and ethos of the frontier zone
with an emphasis on frontier warfare, in which a leading role is ascribed to
the wandering dervishes and the gāzīs. Textualized at the end of the ninth/fif-
teenth and the early tenth/sixteenth century, velāyetnāmes of Ḳızıl Deli and
Otman Baba, for example, should also be seen as an attempt to legitimize these
groups’ existence within the sociopolitical order affected by the centralizing
and bureaucratizing Ottoman empire, in which all the protagonists of the fron-
tier culture were increasingly becoming marginalized.12
The centralizing policies of Meḥmed II (r. 848–850/1444–1446 and 855–
886/1451–1481) affected the social, religious, and ethnic base of the frontier
society while also manifesting first signs of a centrally supported program of
gradual Sunnitization.13 These policies targeted the relative autonomy of the
Balkan frontier lords who effectively assimilated into the imperial military-
administrative structure, as they were granted offices as provincial governors
of different border provinces on a rotating basis.14 The seminomadic yürüks,
who constituted the bulk of raider (aḳıncı) troops and were the strongest sym-
pathizers and supporters of the itinerant abdāls in Anatolia and Rumeli, were
also subjected to heavy obligations and forced to gradually adopt a sedentary
lifestyle through regular registration and taxation.15
The dissatisfaction of these groups with the centralizing Ottoman policies
brought them into conflict with the Ottoman dynasty’s impulse for establish-
ing and ruling over a much more solidly—politically and socially—integrated
polity. Hagiographical works that were written by and about the abdāls in this
period articulate their discontent with the changing sociopolitical order (for
a similar dissatisfaction on the other side of the empire, in eastern Anato-
lia, see Ayşe Baltacıoğlu-Brammer’s article in this volume). The frontier lords,
who were these dervishes’ natural allies, on the other hand, not only sought
the latter’s support and blessing, but also became vigorous patrons of their
associated convents in the Balkans.16 Moreover, in the late ninth/fifteenth and
early tenth/sixteenth century the Balkan frontier lords’ dynasties began an
ambitious program for endowing the principal gathering places of the itin-

12 Kafadar, Between two worlds; Yürekli, Architecture and hagiography; İnalcık, Dervish and
sultan; Yıldırım, Rumeli’nin fethinde; Krstić, The ambiguous politics 247–262; Krstić, Con-
tested conversions 45–48.
13 Terzioğlu, How to conceptualize 309–314; see Çiğdem Kafescioğlu’s paper in this volume.
14 Kiprovska, The military organization; Kiprovska, Mihaloğlu family 173–202.
15 İnalcık, The Yürüks 97–136; Yeni, The utilization of mobile groups 183–205; Yıldırım,
‘Heresy’ as a voice 22–46.
16 İnalcık, Dervish and sultan; Beldiceanu-Steinherr, Le règne de Selim I 34–48; Beldiceanu-
Steinherr, Seyyid ‘Ali Sultan 45–66; Yıldırım, Rumeli’nin fethinde; Kiprovska, Shaping the
Ottoman borderland 185–220.
314 boykov

erant abdāls in Anatolia.17 Thus, the Seyyid Baṭṭāl Gāzī convent near Eskişe-
hir was completely rebuilt in two generations by the Plevne branch of the
Miḥāloğlu family,18 while the nearby Şücāʿe’d-dīn Velī zāviye and, in all like-
lihood, the smaller Üryān Baba shrine were patronized by a member of the
İhtiman branch of the same family.19 The important Ḥāccī Bektaş Veli com-
plex, located even further east in Anatolia, near Kırşehir, was patronized by
the Evrenosoğlu and Malḳoçoğlu families.20 Malḳoçoğlu Bālī Beg alone com-
missioned and built three convents in Rumeli, namely the ones of Pīrzāde in
Tatar Pazarı, of Bāyezīd Baba near Yenice-i Vardar (Giannitsa), and of Ḥasan
Baba v. Yağmur at the foot of the Rhodope Mountains.21 Yaḥyāpaşaoğlu Bālī
Beg built two convents frequented by the antinomian dervishes—the zāviye
in the Deliorman village of Lomtsi22 and the zāviye of Kütüklü Baba, located
east of the once important Ottoman town of Karasu Yenicesi (Genisea) in
Greece.23 The patronage of the Balkan warlords in Anatolia proclaimed a polit-
ical message linking the Anatolian gāzī tradition to their actions in Rumeli,
thereby claiming legitimacy.24 In the Balkans, however, where the raider fami-
lies established their powerbases, they seem to have been more cautious about
displaying their affiliation to the antinomian abdāls. Recent studies on the four
principal Bektashi-turned convents of the eastern Balkans, namely those of
Otman Baba, Ḳıdemli Baba, Aḳyazılı Baba, and Demir Baba, all spiritually con-
nected to the Seyyid Baṭṭāl Gāzī and Şücāʿe’d-dīn Velī complexes, demonstrate
that while distinct politically and confessionally nonconformist symbols were
included in the architectural layout of these buildings, the patrons from the

17 Yürekli, Architecture and hagiography.

18 Ibid. 126–128.
19 I owe this information to Mariya Kiprovska. Unlike Zeynep Yürekli, who ascribes the
patronage of Şücāʿe’d-dīn Velī’s complex to a member of the Malḳoçoğlu family, Kiprovska
maintains that its patron was a member of the Miḥāloğlu family, who possessed lands in
the ancestral domains in the region of Harmankaya. Kiprovska, Byzantine renegade 245–
269.
20 Yürekli, Architecture and hagiography 100–113.
21 Boykov, Tatar Pazardzik 39–40; Kayapınar, Malkoçoğlu Bali Bey vakfı 105–115; Barkan,
Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda bir iskân 341.
22 The convent stood until 1829, when it was demolished by an invading Russian military
force. Local lore considers the current chapel of St. Elias (xy coordinates—43.429053-
23.354372) a replacement of the convent. Barkan, Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda bir iskân
342.
23 The magnificent tomb of the patron saint, Ḥāccī Baba/Kütüklü Baba still stands in a field
by Lake Vistonida, xy coordinates—41.075583-25.058267. BOA, TD 311, 39. Lowry, The shap-
ing of the Ottoman Balkans 49–50.
24 Yürekli, Architecture and hagiography passim.
abdāl-affiliated convents and “sunnitizing” halveti dervishes 315

Miḥāloğlu family were careful not to manifest explicitly their affiliation to the
convents.25 They seem to have found, however, a roundabout way to show their
devotion to the ethos of the frontier milieu in general and abdāl mysticism in
particular.
The case in point is the mausoleum (türbe) of Binbiroḳlu Aḥmed Baba in the
vicinity of Pınarhisar in Thrace (a private domain of the Miḥāloğulları), which
was commissioned for a Miḥāloğlu family member. Aḥmed Beg’s mausoleum
later became known under the name Aḥmed Baba and became a focal point
of the dervish convent that developed around it.26 Similar must have been the
story behind the development of another hospice in Thrace, the one of Hıżır
Baba veled-i Timurṭaş Beg, whose name indicates that it was built for a son
of Timurṭaş Beg, another frontier warrior of the eighth/fourteenth and early
ninth/fifteenth century.27 The latter two cases in which the frontier warlords
erected dervish hospices in their own name identifying themselves as abdāl
leaders (baba) not only exemplify the religious and political alliance between
the gāzīs and the itinerant dervishes but bespeak of a shared or similar sociopo-
litical background. These two examples of sanctification of historical figures
from the gāzī milieu of the raider commanders in the Ottoman Balkans makes
Irène Beldiceanu’s suggestion that the popular dervish Ḳızıl Deli was identical
with Ḥāccī İlbegi, the Karasi warlord, known from the early Ottoman chronicles
for his incursions and conquests in Thrace, even more plausible.28 Hence, one
can see prominent figures from the frontier lords’ dynasties, whose relationship
with the centralizing Ottomans was probably never too smooth, at the center
of a network of political figures as well as social and religious groups with anti-
centralizing (i.e., anti-Ottoman) sentiments.29

25 Yürekli, 79–133; Kiprovska, The Mihaloğlu family.

26 Kiprovska, Legend and historicity 29–45.
27 Gramatikova, Non-orthodox Islam in Bulgarian lands 544–545. The archival documents
show that Timurṭaş’s son Hıżır Baba passed on this hospice to his own son Shaykh Şücāʿ.
Barkan, Osmanlı İmparatorluğunda bir iskân 338, 347. The location of this zāviye was not
established in the literature to date, because the Ottoman archival sources place it in the
region of Çirmen (Ormenio in Greece) without any further indication of its exact location.
In my opinion, the evidence, even if it is circumstantial, strongly suggests an identification
of the convent of Hıżır Baba v. Timurṭaş with the now standing tomb of Hıżır Baba (xy
coordinates—41.989557-26.025702) in the village of Bogomil in Bulgaria. The tomb that
must have been part of a larger complex is studied by Mikov, Muslim tomb in Bogomil
113–121.
28 Beldiceanu-Steinherr, Le règne de Selim I 44–45. Cf. Yıldırım, History beneath clouds of
legend 21–57.
29 Çıpa, Yavuz’un kavgası 130–135; Kiprovska, Ferocious invasion or smooth incorporation
93–102.
316 boykov

The Ottoman rulers seem to have been fully aware of the immediate threat
to the centralized order posed by the hostility of the frontier warlords and
their Turcoman seminomadic supporters who manned their armies, on the one
hand, and the abdāls, who held religious authority among these groups, on the
other. Yet, in the Ottoman imperial setting the frontier warlords were an essen-
tial element who were not only at the vanguard of the Ottoman incursions
in the West, but were also major landed magnates in control of vast territo-
ries in the Balkans. The members of the Ottoman dynasty, therefore, had to
apply carefully calibrated measures against them in order to diminish their
power. It is with this perspective in mind that one needs to consider the rever-
sal of Meḥmed II’s confiscation measures by his son and successor Bāyezīd II (r.
886–918/1481–1512) who returned the appropriated properties to the gāzīs and
the dervish communities.30 Bāyezīd II appeared as a keen patron of dervish
convents himself; his patronage of the shrine of Ṣarı Ṣaltuḳ in Dobrudja in
all likelihood demonstrates his conciliatory approach toward those Sufis and
gāzīs in Rumeli who were dissatisfied with the harsh centralization policy of
his father. It was also during his reign that the Balkan frontier warlords rebuilt
the Seyyid Baṭṭāl Gāzī and Ḥāccī Bektaş convents—an investment and con-
struction on such a scale could not have gone unnoticed and therefore must
have received the sultan’s sanction.31 Nevertheless, these conciliatory policies
toward the Balkan gāzīs and different antinomian dervish groups went hand in
hand with the introduction of fines and penalties in the Ottoman penal code
for the absentees at the five daily prayers.32 In moments of serious threats to the
central power, Bāyezīd II did not hesitate to order preemptive strikes on those
groups in the Balkans who were suspected of tacitly embracing any claimant
who could promise relief from the gradually increasing centralization and turn
to Sunni orthopraxy.
A few decades later, when the “Kızılbaş threat” became one of the main
themes on the Ottoman political agenda, the sultans hardened their approach.
It appears that in the viewpoint of the Ottoman rulers the distinction between
the nonconformist Sufis and “Kızılbaş” was very vague, if it existed at all,
which led the Ottoman authorities to the idea, probably not completely ill
founded, that the Safavids were using the antinomian dervishes to focus pop-

30 On Meḥmed II’s confiscations, known as “land reform,” see Beldiceanu, Recherches sur
la réforme 27–39; Cvetkova, Sur certaines réformes 104–120; Özel, Limits of the almighty
226–246; İnalcık, Autonomous enclaves 112–134.
31 Yürekli, Architecture and hagiography.
32 Terzioğlu, How to conceptualize 313–314. See the contributions of Çiğdem Kafescioğlu and
H. Evren Sünnetçioğlu in this volume.
abdāl-affiliated convents and “sunnitizing” halveti dervishes 317

ular discontent against the rule of the Ottoman sultan.33 Furthermore, with
regard to active Safavid propaganda, the central power perhaps feared that the
close cooperation between the abdāls and the frontier lords might embolden
the Balkan raider commanders to challenge the preeminence of the Ottoman
dynasty in Rumeli.

2 Pressures to Conform in the Early Sixteenth Century

Without denying the transformative effects of the persecution of the Kızılbaş

communities during the reign of Selīm I (r. 918–926/1512–1520), it seems that it
was during the reign of Süleymān I (r. 926–974/1520–1566) that an empire-wide
and centrally coordinated effort was made to strengthen Sunni Islam by imple-
menting a number of “positive measures” that had a long-lasting effect. As
Gülru Necipoğlu has demonstrated, the period inaugurated an unprecedented
spree of mosque building in the cities, facilitating access to ritual worship
and allowing imams to better monitor attendance at prayer.34 Additionally, in
944/1537–1538 Süleymān promulgated an imperial decree ordering that every
village where Muslims resided must have a place of worship (masjid)—studied
in this volume from the legal perspective by Evren Sünnetçioğlu. At the present
state of research, it is very difficult to tell how successful this enterprise was and
whether in fact the Imperial Treasury, the Ottoman officials who had private
funds, and the local Muslim communities managed to marshal the enormous
financial resources that were needed for construction on such a scale.
A general survey of Rumeli from the 930s/1530s can provide quantitative
data for the religious infrastructure that existed in the province during the first
decades of the rule of Süleymān I. According to the document, at that time the
Ottoman province of Rumeli, roughly the territory of the Balkan Peninsula, had
242 towns and 25,210 villages. The document also meticulously indicates aggre-
gated figures for revenues, individuals on a state payroll, and other important
details about provincial affairs, including an inventory of the public buildings.
The survey shows that in the early years of Süleymān I’s reign Rumeli had some
241 mosques, 992 masjids, 45 ʿimārets, 45 colleges (madrasas), and 196 dervish
convents (zāviye).35 If data are scaled down to the district level, the initiative to

33 Minorsky, Shaykh Bālī-Efendi 437–450; Imber, The persecution of the Ottoman Shi’ites
245–273; Baltacıoğlu-Brammer, The formation of Kızılbaş communities 21–48; Karakaya-
Stump, Kizilbash-Alevis in Ottoman Anatolia 220–245.
34 Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan 47–56.
35 İ.B.B. Atatürk Kitaplığı, MC. Evr. 37/7, fol. 2v.
318 boykov

furnish Muslim villages with masjids in the course of the tenth/sixteenth cen-
tury can be better observed in qualitative terms. The ḳażā of Eski Zagra (mod.
Stara Zagora) in Thrace, which had almost an exclusively Muslim population,
can serve as a good example. In 921/1516 only 30% of the villages in the district
had an imam, thus supposedly a functioning masjid too.36 In 977/1570, more
than three decades after the promulgation of Süleymān’s decree ordering the
mass construction of village masjids, the share of settlements with a masjid in
the Eski Zagra district rose to 42%.37 It was only toward the end of the century,
in 1004/1596, when the majority of the villages (80 %) are recorded to have an
imam and a masjid.38 One should bear in mind that the increase in the number
of imams in the ḳażā was accompanied by a substantial growth of the Muslim
population, which between 921/1516 and 1004/1596 more than doubled; there-
fore, the higher number of imams is also a reflection of the growing Muslim
community. Nevertheless, the efforts of the central authorities to encourage
Sunni orthodoxy and orthopraxy in the rural areas are attested in the changing
ratio of the number of imams to the size of the congregation—while in 921/1516
it was one imam to 229 residents, in 977/1570 it dropped down to one to 136.
Furthermore, it is also telling that it was during Süleymān’s reign that the mul-
tifunctional buildings (T-shaped zāviye/ʿimārets), which previously combined
accommodation for Sufis and travelers while serving as sites for the perfor-
mance of the congregational Friday prayer, and which had been a symbol of
the gāzī milieu in the previous centuries, ceased to be constructed.39 As Çiğ-
dem Kafescioğlu demonstrates in her paper in this volume, these T-shaped
zāviye/ʿimārets were transformed into Friday mosques by undergoing certain
structural transformations. The flanking guestrooms were detached from the
body of the building functioning as a mosque, and a minbar and a minaret
were added too. Alongside imams, muezzins and Friday preachers were also
appointed for the regular performance of the prayers.40
All of the state-initiated Sunnitizing measures went along with another pro-
cess that intensified in the course of the tenth/sixteenth century, namely the
institutionalization of the Sufi orders, and more particularly, the growing influ-
ence of the Sufis with a more pronounced sunna consciousness. During that
period some shaykhs from Sufi orders, such as the Naqshbandi and Halveti,
enjoyed particularly close relations with the Sunni ulama and were appointed

36 BOA, TD 77.
37 BOA, TD 494 and TD 498.
38 BOA, TD 470 and TD 1001.
39 Eyice, İlk Osmanlı devrinin 3–80; Yürekli, Architectural patronage 733–754.
40 Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan, 49–55.
abdāl-affiliated convents and “sunnitizing” halveti dervishes 319

as preachers both in the imperial mosques in the largest Ottoman cities and
in the dervish convents in the provinces, acting as agents of state-inspired
centralization and Sunnitization.41 Royal and grandee patronage of a multi-
branched network of clients originating from the Sunni Sufi circles also allowed
a smoother implementation of the central power’s ruling concept, which, along
with reaffirming the Ottoman dynastic myth, clearly aimed at increasing cen-
tralization and gradual Sunnitization.42
Returning to the territory of the eastern Balkans, one of the most impor-
tant features that needs to be underlined is the very low population density of
the region before the Ottoman conquest, which led to a mass settlement of the
Anatolian Turkish population, both sedentary and seminomadic, to this region
during the first two centuries of Ottoman rule.43 It seems that this process was
partly the result of the transfer of deportees by sultanic decree, and partly spon-
taneous, or orchestrated by the powerful Balkan frontier lords.44 The develop-
ment of the two principal urban centers in the region of Upper Thrace, namely
Filibe (Plovdiv) and Tatar Pazarı (Pazardzhik), provides an excellent illustra-
tion of this dynamic. While the much larger metropolis of the region, Filibe,
attracted the patronage of the ruling dynasty and the high-ranking Ottoman
officials who commissioned and built all the principal religious and commer-
cial infrastructure there, its smaller counterpart, Tatar Pazarı, was created from
scratch and developed into a provincial town by the members of the frontier
society.45 The patronage of several of the great families of raider commanders,
those of Malḳoçoğlu, Evrenosoğlu, and Miḥāloğlu not only promoted the newly
founded settlement to a ḳaṣaba in a very short period, but also in the course
of the second half of the ninth/fifteenth century their seemingly coordinated
effort turned Tatar Pazarı into an attractive spot, which gave shelter to a wide

41 Terzioğlu, Sufis in the age of state-building 96.

42 Karateke and Reinkowski, Legitimizing the order; Clayer, Des agents du pouvoir; Clayer,
Mystiques, état et société 63–112; Karamustafa, God’s unruly friends 65–84; Terzioğlu, Sufis
in the age of state-building.
43 Kiel, Incorporation of the Balkans 142–154. In spite of the mass migration of the Anatolian
population to the region by 936/1530, it still remained very sparsely populated. Thrace had
a population density of roughly 4.8 p/km2, while the eastern Danubian part of Bulgaria,
approximately Deliorman, Dobrudja, and the Black Sea coast—6.9 p/km2; Boykov, The
human cost of warfare 136.
44 Barkan attributes to the Ottoman rulers a decisive role in revitalizing Thrace and other
parts of the Balkans. See Barkan, Quelques observations 289–311. Recent studies, however,
demonstrate that the marcher lords (uc begleri) also played a significant role in the pro-
cess. See Lowry, The shaping of the Ottoman Balkans; Lowry, The Evrenos family.
45 For a study of these cities, see Boykov, Mastering the conquered space.
320 boykov

network of political and religious figures as well as social groups that did not
share the centralizing and Sunnitizing policies of the Ottoman government.
These developments coincided with the peak of influence of the highly pop-
ular abdāl Otman Baba who was closely associated with the Miḥāloğlu family
and was one of the outspoken critics of Meḥmed II’s rule.46 Evidence about
the visible presence of followers of Otman Baba in the region can be derived
from both the literary and archival sources. Thus, for instance, his velāyetnāme
insists that two convents in Filibe, namely the Hıżırlık tekke and the Ḥasan Baba
zāviye recognized the authority of the renowned Baba.47 Even if we cannot be
sure of the existence of these convents on the basis of this statement alone,
the presence of Rum abdāls in Filibe is also attested in Corneille de Schepper’s
travel account. De Schepper, who traveled through the city in the summer of
939/1533, witnessed there a group of naked dervishes and attended their ritual
of song and dance in a garden near Filibe. The Flemish traveler’s description of
the dervishes, whom he called “dervitz” or “ischnicqz,” strongly suggests that he
was depicting a gathering of itinerant abdāls.48 Possibly the abdāls described
by Corneille de Schepper were followers of Otman Baba who are mentioned
in the velāyetnāme. The presence of itinerant abdāls is also ostensible in the
nearby town of Tatar Pazarı, which is hardly surprising given the seminomadic
background of many of the town dwellers and the vigorous support of the
Balkan aḳıncı families. A good portion of the personal names of the residents
in the town, encountered in the tax registers from the late ninth/fifteenth and
early tenth/sixteenth centuries, belong to the pantheon of the Anatolian Sufi
brotherhoods.49 There is not much information about the convent of Pīrzāde,

46 İnalcık, Dervish and sultan 28–32.

47 Ocak, Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda marjinal 191; Gramatikova, Non-orthodox Islam in Bul-
garian lands 539.
48 “En ce jardin y avoit ung lieu où se retiroyent ordinairement les dervitz ou ischnicqz,
c’ est-à-dire les numbdes, à raison qu’ ilz disent avoir fuy le monde, et sont quasy toutz
nudts et très-mal en ordre. Ils s’ assembloyent environ la nuict, et au chant d’ung, les
aultres respondoyent, chantantz assez barbarement, en caste substance: Sicha Sahestem
va Hussem, selon qu’ on est accoustumez en nostre quartier de faire aux danses … Les sus-
dictz dervi[c]tz usent des susdictes chansons, à raison que personne n’est parfaict en leur
ordre, ne soit qu’ elle ayt visité les sépulchres de ces deux, Sahuestem et Hussem; et quand
ilz entreprendent ledict ordre, ilz font serment d’ aller visiter les dictz sépulchres. Les dictz
dervictz sont abhorrez, et grandement hayz des Turcqz en horreur et hayne, à raison qu’ilz
n’ ayment que Hasdrith, c’ est-à-dire le magnifique Haly. Et après qu’ilz eussent longtemps
chanté de ceste sorte, ilz commencèrent à danser, et finablement se misrent à resposer.”
De Schepper, Missions diplomatiques 191–192.
49 For instance names like “Bektaş,” “Mūsā Baba,” “Baraḳ Baba,” “Ẕūlfikār, v. Baba ʿAcem,” etc.
are encountered among the taxpayers in the town.
abdāl-affiliated convents and “sunnitizing” halveti dervishes 321

built near the town by the prominent marcher lord Malḳoçoğlu Bālī Beg, but yet
again the personal names of the dervishes—İsḥāḳ, Hınzīr Ḳulu, and Ḳaygusuz
Abdāl—recorded in the register as residents in the convent, suggest their direct
connection to the nonconformist dervishes.50 The rural surroundings of the
two towns had a mixed Christian and Muslim population, but the fact that the
area lies a few kilometers east of one of the Miḥāloğlus’s ancestral powerbases
(the town of İhtiman) and that four other convents, namely those of Ḥüseyin
Dede, Umur Baba, Kürekçi Baba, and Ṭurnacı Baba, were located in the imme-
diate vicinity bespeaks of a considerable presence of antinomian abdāls in the
rural areas too.
The turning point, when the central power began targeting in a more sys-
tematic manner the unruly, disobedient social groups in the eastern Balkans,
seems to have come during the 930s/1530s. It seems that along with the sultan-
initiated empire-wide project of Sunnitization, multiple agents of the Sunni-
tizing policies also converged on the provincial level. An illustrative example
of this is the evolution of the city of Hezargrad in the Deliorman region, which
developed into an outpost of Sunni Islam within a predominantly heterodox
religious landscape marked by the influx of a religiously nonconformist popu-
lation as a result of the pro-Safavid rebellions of Shah Ḳūlu, Shaykh Celāl, and
Ḳalender Shah in the first half of the tenth/sixteenth century.51 The foundation
of the town is associated with the establishment of the mosque and the pious
endowment of the grand vizier İbrāhīm Pasha in 939/1533, who intentionally
exchanged his private estates in other parts of the empire with landed prop-
erties in the Deliorman region in order to raise enough local revenues for the
pious foundation, established to support his newly created town and its build-
ings.52 The endowment deed of İbrāhīm Pasha indicates that the mosque was
part of a complex that also included a school (dārü’t-taʿlīm), a public bath, and
a 50-room inn for the travelers. It also lists the stipends of the personnel that
included an imam, a Friday preacher (haṭīb), muezzins, Quran reciters, and pri-
mary school teachers (muʿallims) and their assistants, along with other service
personnel.53 A tax register from 957/1550 suggests that the school of İbrāhīm
Pasha was soon elevated to a madrasa, while a convent (zāviye) appears to have

50 Boykov, Tatar Pazardzik 154.

51 Antov, The Ottoman “wild west” 165–178.
52 Kiel, Hrâzgrad-Hezargrad-Razgrad 495–569.
53 The endowment deed (waqfiyya) of İbrāhīm Pasha was first published by Mikov, The
mosque of Ibrahim pasha 35–67 and later also analyzed by Antov, The Ottoman “wild west”
168–172.
322 boykov

been added to this complex also.54 In the mid-tenth/sixteenth century the rank
of the madrasa in Hezargrad was ḳırḳlı, while later in the course of the century it
was elevated to ellili.55 The town, centered around the Friday mosque complex
of the Ottoman grandee, soon became a seat of a judge (ḳażā) and within sev-
eral decades grew into a major regional urban center. Forming a new separate
administrative unit, centered on Hezargrad, not only changed the administra-
tive division of the Ottoman northeast province but also helped bring it under
centralized state control.56
About the same time, the town of Tatar Pazarı, a token of the marcher lords’
cooperation, was also promoted to a ḳażā center by creating a new administra-
tive unit that lay between the metropolis Filibe and Miḥāloğlus’s family domain
in İhtiman. Naturally, a single administrative act, such as the appointment of a
kadi, in places dominated by the borderland forces could hardly have changed
the social and religious atmosphere. In subsequent years, a sophisticated net-
work that included high-ranking Ottoman officials and prominent Halveti
preachers, possibly approved or at least encouraged by the sultan, began to
converge on the city, apparently in order to bind the region closer to Sunni
Islam and the Ottoman state. It is difficult to reconstruct the exact chronology
of the events that followed or to discern the ties among all of the participants
in the network, but members of the Ṣoḳollu household, their clients, and the
Halveti shaykhs Ṣofyalı Bālī Efendi, Muṣliḥu’d-dīn Nūre’d-dīnzāde (d. 980/1573),
and Ḳurd Efendi (d. 996/1588) were certainly part of it.

3 Sunnitizing Measures of the Ṣoḳollu and Halveti Networks

The beginnings of the cooperation between the Ṣoḳollus and the Halvetis must
be linked to the appointment of Ṣoḳollu Meḥmed Pasha as governor-general
(beglerbegi) of Rumeli in 956/1549 and his transfer to Sofia.57 This period coin-
cided with the peak in the popularity of the Strumica-born Bālī Efendi, who
upon receiving education in Istanbul and becoming a disciple of Shaykh Ḳāsım
Efendi, returned to his native region. He settled near Sofia, established a zāviye
and gathered a large number of disciples.58 The sources do not contain explicit

54 BOA, TD 382, 847; Antov, The Ottoman “wild west” 172.

55 Baltacı, XV–XVI asırlar Osmanlı medreseleri 257–258.
56 Kiel, Hrâzgrad-Hezargrad-Razgrad; Antov, The Ottoman “wild west” 165–178.
57 Samardžić, Meḥmed Sokolovitch 39–40; Dakić, Sokollu Family clan 39.
58 Clayer, Mystiques, état et société 70–71; Belgrādī, Silsiletü’l-muḳarrebīn 119b. The vita of
Bālī Efendi Baḥr’ül-velāye (Sea of sainthood) was written by the thirteenth/nineteenth-
abdāl-affiliated convents and “sunnitizing” halveti dervishes 323

evidence that Bālī Efendi and Ṣoḳollu Meḥmed Pasha were in direct contact,
but the fact that they resided in the same provincial town strongly suggests so,
especially if Bālī Efendi indeed held the post of kadi of Sofia as suggested by
Tietze.59 In any case, the letters sent by Bālī Efendi to the then grand vizier
Rüstem Pasha (in office 951–960/1544–1553 and 962–968/1555–1561) in which
he expresses his ideas about the Kızılbaş heresy,60 and to the sultan advising
severe punishments for the followers of Shaykh Bedre’d-dīn in the Deliorman
and Dobrudja region,61 were written during Ṣoḳollu Meḥmed Pasha’s tenure in
Sofia.
There is a great chance that it was also in Sofia that Ṣoḳollu Meḥmed Pasha
first met Muṣliḥu’d-dīn Nūre’d-dīnzāde, who was to be his life-long confidant
and a highly influential Halveti Sufi preacher. Being a native of the region,
Nūre’d-dīnzāde had become one of the numerous followers of Bālī Efendi after
receiving a madrasa education in Edirne in the second decade of the tenth/six-
teenth century.62 Halveti hagiographic tradition maintains that Bālī Efendi
recommended that, as one of his most talented disciples, Muṣliḥu’d-dīn Nūre’d-
dīnzāde leave Sofia and establish a Halveti convent in Tatar Pazarı in order to
“guide the believers” and fight against the heretics.63 Nūre’d-dīnzāde’s sojourn
in Tatar Pazarı and the surrounding region in the 940s/1540s and 950s/1550s is
shrouded in obscurity, but his preaching must have targeted the abdāls at the
convent of Pīrzāde (mentioned above) built by Malḳoçoğlu Bālī Beg near the
town at the end of the ninth/fifteenth century. These dervishes seemed to have
been the natural target in the joint efforts of the central power and the Hal-
vetis in introducing a closer observation of Sunni Islam and the strengthening
of the central rule, which requested the personal involvement of a character
of the magnitude of Nūre’d-dīnzāde. That Nūre’d-dīnzāde was successful in his

century scholar Süleymān Köstendilī. See Kalicin and Mutafova, Halveti Shaykh Bali
Efendi 339–353. Bālī Efendi was buried in a mausoleum in his convent, which grew into
a village of the same name. The türbe of the shaykh was rebuilt in the thirteenth/nine-
teenth century by the son of the famous brigand leader Ḳara Feyżī (I am indebted for this
information to Dr. Tolga Esmer). The mosque of the convent was replaced by the St. Elias
church built in the post-Ottoman period. The partially preserved tombstone of Bālī Efendi
is published by Kmetova and Mikov, Bali Efendi 41–44.
59 Tietze, Sheykh Bālī Efendi’s report 115. Kalicin and Mutafova (Historical accounts 127)
point out that they could not find a confirmation of Tietze’s statement.
60 Minorsky, Shaykh Bālī-Efendi on the Safavids.
61 Tietze, Sheykh Bālī Efendi’s report.
62 Belgrādī, Silsiletü’l-muḳarrebīn 113a. Based on the information of ʿAṭāʾī, Nathalie Clayer
proves that Nūre’d-dīnzāde was born in the village of Anbarlı (mod. Žitnitsa) located thirty
kilometers north of Filibe.
63 Clayer, Mystiques, état et société 83; Belgrādī, Silsiletü’l-muḳarrebīn 114a.
324 boykov

mission and likely had the support and sanction of the Ottoman authorities is
suggested by the fact that a tax register from 936/1530 is the last documentary
evidence attesting to the existence of the Pīrzāde convent in Tatar Pazarı. It
would appear that after this date the convent ceased to exist.64
Nūre’d-dīnzāde was given a regular daily stipend derived from the surplus
of Şihābe’d-dīn Pasha’s waqf in Filibe. It is not known when Nūre’d-dīnzāde
moved to Filibe, but a sultanic order from 963/1556 shows that he was already
residing in the city at that time.65 Later in the 950s/1550s Nūre’d-dīnzāde came
to Istanbul in order to defend his master Ṣofyalı Bālī against accusations of
heresy. His acute comment and interpretation of a passage of the Quran con-
vinced the şeyhü’l-islām Ebū’s-suʿūd Efendi (d. 981/1574) that the accusations
were false and Nūre’d-dīnzāde was offered the convent of Küçük Aya Sofya in
the Ottoman capital.66 This marked the beginning of a successful career for
Nūre’d-dīnzāde in Istanbul during which he enjoyed the patronage of the sultan
and the grand vizier Meḥmed Pasha who, together with his spouse, the princess
İsmiḥān, commissioned and built for him the Kadırga Limanı complex.67
Returning to Nūre’d-dīnzāde’s Filibe period, one discovers that he founded a
Halveti zāviye in this city too. The available information about Nūre’d-dīnzāde’s
convent in Filibe is extremely scarce, but archival documents show that he
established a pious foundation for its support, endowing a lump sum of cash
(vaḳf-i nuḳūd). Supporting his establishment with a cash waqf might have
been a purposeful decision. The foundation was created only a few years after
the height of the so-called cash waqf debate in the Ottoman learned circles.
Keeping in mind that Nūre’d-dīnzāde was a disciple and a vigorous supporter
of Ṣofyalı Bālī, who had been one of the vocal proponents of cash waqf s, it
might not be coincidental that Nūre’d-dīnzāde established a cash waqf in sup-
port of his convent in Filibe.68 In Bālī Efendi’s view, expressed in his letter
to the sultan, cash endowments were a crucially important mechanism that
supported the establishment of Islam in Rumeli. Snježana Buzov’s brief, but

64 The geomancer of Süleymān I, Remmāl Ḥaydar must have also been present in the town in
this period, but it is unclear whether he played any role in the process. Fleischer, Shadow
of shadows 60.
65 BOA, A.DVN.MHM 2, 45/409. The record in the mühimme register is very brief, stating that
upon sultanic order a daily salary of three aḳçes was allocated to the shaykh from the sur-
plus of Şihābe’d-dīn Pasha’s waqf.
66 Yürekli, A building between the public 163.
67 Yürekli, A building between the public; Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan 331–345.
68 On the cash waqfs and Bālī Efendi’s involvement in the debate, see Mandaville, Usurious
piety 289–308; Keskioğlu, Bulgaristan’da Türk vakıfları 81–94; Özcan, Sofya Bâlî Efendi’nin
125–155; Karataş, The cash waqfs debate 45–66.
abdāl-affiliated convents and “sunnitizing” halveti dervishes 325

insightful, analysis of the Sofian Halveti shaykh’s involvement in the cash waqf
debate demonstrates that he not only propagated the cash endowments as
one of the pillars supporting and encouraging Sunni orthodoxy in the hetero-
geneous atmosphere of Rumeli, but he was also inclined to mislead his high
addressee by twisting the facts and claiming that cash waqf s constituted the
only support of many mosques, responsible for the “settling of Islam” in the
province.69
In light of this, it is highly likely that his disciple Nūre’d-dīnzāde also per-
ceived the cash endowments as one of the important instruments for encour-
aging Sunni Islam in Rumeli and therefore opted to found a cash waqf to
support the zāviye he established in Filibe. A document dating to 1004/1596,
drawn up by the administrator of the cash waqf of Nūre’d-dīnzāde, a certain
ʿAbdullāh, presents a brief accounting balance of the foundation, established
with a lump sum of 70,000 aḳçes, lent at 10% annual interest.70 The document
reveals some details about the zāviye itself. It had a public soup kitchen, since
the foundation spent annually 4,900 aḳçes for the food cooked there. Appoint-
ments of personnel, registered in a later hurūfāt defteri, show that the zāviye of
Nūre’d-dīnzāde must have been a rather spacious complex, since except for the
dervish convent and the public kitchens it had a mosque served by at least one
imam and one muezzin.71 Another ḥurūfāt register, though containing much
less detailed information, provides an important clue about the exact location
of Nūre’d-dīnzāde’s zāviye in Filibe. It specifies that a certain Muṣṭafā received
a berāt for his appointment as imam to the mosque of Nūre’d-dīnzāde, which
is located near the bank of the river Meriç.72 Additional information from the
earlier ḥurūfāt register, showing that the zāviye and the mosque of Nūre’d-
dīnzāde were built in the quarter of Ḥāccī ʿÖmer, allows one to establish with
a great degree of certainty the location of Nūre’d-dīnzāde’s convent in Filibe. It
was built in a place that in the mid-tenth/sixteenth century was quite distant
and isolated from the commercial part of the city. The zāviye and the mosque
stood by the river on the northwestern edge of Filibe in a zone that must
have been uninhabited at that time. Even in the thirteenth/nineteenth-century
photographs the district appears empty. It is unknown when the convent was
abandoned or demolished. Undoubtedly the zāviye was still functioning in
the mid-twelfth/eighteenth century, because after sultan Muṣṭafā III (r. 1171–

69 Buzov, The Lawgiver and his lawmakers 254–256.

70 BOA, TSMA d. 4319. The document is wrongly dated in the catalogue to 1020/1611.
71 VGMA, D. 1180, ff. 225, 228, 239, 242, 248. In 1176/1763 the imam was entitled to a daily salary
of two aḳçes.
72 Çal, Hurufat defterine göre Bulgaristan 258.
326 boykov

1187/1757–74) occupied the Ottoman throne, he issued a berāt that reaffirmed

the post held by a certain Shaykh Muṣṭafā as zāviyedār of the Nūre’d-dīnzāde
Muṣliḥu’d-dīn lodge.73
Recalling de Schepper’s account of the naked dervishes dancing in a gar-
den by the river from 939/1533, it is possible that Nūre’d-dīnzāde’s convent
simply replaced a preexisting lodge, which had once accommodated the fol-
lowers of Otman Baba. The replacement was not an isolated case, and there
is little doubt that the pressure on the nonconformist dervishes in the eastern
Balkans and Anatolia was instigated by the central power and Sufi circles close
to it. Numerous imperial orders compiled during the second grand vizierate of
Rüstem Pasha testify that the abdāls were targeted by the Sunnitization poli-
cies supported at a highest level. In the late 950s/1550s, the primary gathering
place of the Anatolian and Balkan abdāls, the Seyyid Baṭṭāl Gāzī convent, was
handed over to a Naqshbandi shaykh, and a madrasa was established within
the complex, while its dervishes were chased away.74 The convent had been
built and patronized by the Miḥāloğlus; therefore, expelling the original resi-
dents of the tekke and their replacement with Naqshbandis clearly aimed not
only to Sunnitize this important convent but also to undermine and diminish
the influence of the family there. The pressure on the convents patronized by
Miḥāloğlus was by no means restricted to Anatolia. Another zāviye in the east-
ern Balkans, built and patronized by the Miḥāloğlus and which “was provided
by the frontier begs with slave servants,” that of Aḳyazılı Baba near Balçık on the
Black Sea coast, was also heavily pressured by the central power in 967/1559.75
The same applies to the nearby convent of Ṣarı Ṣaltuḳ in Kaliakra, whose resi-
dent dervishes were also subjected to investigation and persecution following
a sultanic order issued upon a report of the local kadi.76
The mission of Nūre’d-dīnzāde in Rumeli was taken up by another highly
influential Halveti figure, Shaykh Meḥmed b. Ḥelvacı ʿÖmer, more popularly
known as Ḳurd Efendi. Being also a native of the region, born in the town of
Tatar Pazarı itself and known for his profound commitment to Sunni Islam
and animosity toward antinomian dervish groups, Ḳurd replaced his tutor
Bālī Efendi in Sofia in 960/1553 upon the latter’s death.77 At this date, Ṣoḳollu
Meḥmed Pasha was still beglerbegi of Rumeli and the events that followed

73 BOA, C.EV. dosya 569, gömlek 28746.

74 Faroqhi, Seyyid Gazi revisited 90–122; Faroqhi, The tekke of Hacı Bektaş 183–208; Yürekli,
Architecture and hagiography 42–45.
75 Refik, On altıncı asırda 19.
76 Ibid. 17–19.
77 Clayer, Mystiques, état et société 94.
abdāl-affiliated convents and “sunnitizing” halveti dervishes 327

clearly show that these two men came into closer contact at this early stage,
if not even earlier when Bālī Efendi was still alive. Ḳurd Efendi’s subsequent
actions and career path reveal that he belonged to the client network of Ṣoḳollu
Meḥmed Pasha. In 973/1566 Ḳurd Efendi left Sofia, and marched with the impe-
rial army to Hungary in the company of Nūre’d-dīnzāde and the grand vizier
Ṣoḳollu Meḥmed Pasha. The available sources do not specify whether the two
Halveti shaykhs were involved in the execution of Arslan Pasha, the beglerbegi
of Buda, in 973/1566, but the fact that his post was taken by Ṣoḳollu Muṣṭafā
Pasha, a nephew of the grand vizier Ṣoḳollu Meḥmed Pasha, and that Ḳurd
Efendi remained in Buda after the campaign and served as the new beglerbegi’s
counselor for several years before returning to his convent in Sofia, strongly sug-
gests so.78 In any case, the execution of Arslan Pasha was a major blow for the
frontier society as it removed one of the last remnants of real political power
held by the marcher lords and transferred it to the centrally supported network
of the Ṣoḳollu family.79 The executed Arslan Pasha descended from the illus-
trious family of uc begleri known as the Yaḥyālı (in Serb. Jahjapašići), named
after the founder of the dynasty, the Rumeli beglerbegi and vizier of Sultan
Bāyezīd II, Yaḥyā Pasha, who established the family in the western Balkans.80
Yaḥyā Pasha married a daughter of Bāyezīd II and left behind seven sons, who
reaffirmed the family position as the leaders of the frontier society in Rumeli.
Members of the family were frequently governors of sancaḳs in Bosnia, Alba-
nia, Serbia, and Croatia, while the post of beglerbegi of Buda was held almost
on a hereditary basis by the family members until 973/1566.81 The removal from
the post and the subsequent execution of Yaḥyālı Arslan Pasha can probably
be regarded as a sign of cooperation between the Ṣoḳollu clan and the Halveti
preachers, directed against the political and military leadership of the frontier
society and its nonconformist dervish supporters.82 It might have been for this
reason that Ḳurd Efendi remained for several years in Hungary, enjoying the
patronage of the Ṣoḳollu clan and spreading the influence of Sunni orthodoxy
in the frontier regions. Ḳurd Efendi’s popularity in the Ottoman ruling circles
and the Halveti order must have been growing because in 981/1574, prior to his
death, Nūre’d-dīnzāde designated Ḳurd Efendi as a fellow-in-lineage (pīrdāş)

78 Ibid; Römer and Vatin, The lion that was only cat; Dakić, The Sokollu family clan 52–57;
Káldy-Nagy, Budin beylerbeyi Mustafa Paşa 649–663; Vatin, Ferîdûn Bey 90–91.
79 Fodor, Wolf on the border.
80 Reindl, Männer um Bayezid 336–345.
81 Fotić, Yahyapaşa-Oğlu Mehmed Pasha 437–452; Bojanić, Požarevac u XVI veku 49–75;
Altaylı, Budin beylerbeyi Arslan Paşa 33–51.
82 Işıksel, Ottoman power holders in the Balkans 92–96.
328 boykov

who was to replace him in the Kadırga Limanı convent in Istanbul and soon
after Ḳurd Efendi moved to Istanbul.83 He died in 996/1588 in his native Tatar
Pazarı during one of his journeys outside the capital.84
Documentary evidence demonstrates that Ḳurd Efendi was a faithful con-
tinuator of Nūre’d-dīnzāde’s policy of exerting firm pressure on the antino-
mian dervishes because in 983/1576 he was involved in the resolution of a case,
which in all likelihood was initiated earlier by Nūre’d-dīnzāde himself. In the
period of Ṣoḳollu Meḥmed Pasha’s grand vizierate (972–987/1565–1579), the
influence of Nūre’d-dīnzāde at the Ottoman court reached a peak. Except for
enjoying the patronage of the mighty grand vizier and his spouse, the Ottoman
princess İsmiḥān, Nūre’d-dīnzāde became one of the sultan’s confidants and his
advice was offered at the highest level.85 In the early 970s/1570s Nūre’d-dīnzāde
was heavily involved in the Ṣoḳollu administration’s persecutions of influential
Sufis who were deemed heretical. He played a decisive role in the accusations
against the Melami-Bayrami shaykh Ḥamza Bālī, his pursuit in Bosnia, and sub-
sequent execution in Istanbul in 980/1573 after interrogations orchestrated by
Nūre’d-dīnzāde.86
Moreover, official orders demonstrate that in the same period the antino-
mian dervishes in the convent of Seyyid Baṭṭāl Gāzī in Anatolia were once more
subjected to persecutions since they failed to abandon the unorthodox prac-
tices, allowed the mosque to fall into disrepair, and disrupted the functioning of
the madrasa in the complex.87 The Ottoman documents do not explicitly indi-
cate the involvement of Nūre’d-dīnzāde in the persecutions of the dervishes
in the Seyyid Baṭṭāl Gāzī convent, but the concurrent processes in Rumeli
strongly suggest so. A sultanic command from 979/1572 ordered the kadis of
Filibe and Tatar Pazarı to launch an investigation against a certain ʿĪsā Halīfe
and ʿOs̱mān Halīfe from the village of Umur obası in the region of Filibe and of
a certain Muṣṭafā Işıḳ from a village named Manend(lü) in the district of Tatar
Pazarı.88 The men in question were suspected of being Hurufis and/or followers
of Shaykh Bedre’d-dīn (“Simav şeyhi”) and therefore “heretics” who misguided
the local Muslims and corrupted their faith. The kadis were urged to investigate
the case, and if these individuals were found guilty of heresy, they were to be
executed. The yürük village of Umur obası is no longer extant, but its precise

83 Yürekli, A building between the public 163.

84 Clayer, Mystiques, état et société 94.
85 Fleischer, Bureaucrat and intellectual 57–58.
86 Clayer, Mystiques, état et société 86–90.
87 Yürekli, Architectural patronage 45.
88 Refik, On altıncı asırda 31–32.
abdāl-affiliated convents and “sunnitizing” halveti dervishes 329

former location can be identified thanks to detailed historical maps.89 It was

situated to the northeast of Filibe in close proximity to the convents of Umur
Baba and Ṭurnacı Baba, who are mentioned in the velāyetnāme of Otman Baba
as his followers. A tax register, compiled two years before the sultan’s order for
investigation, in 977/1570, shows that the village had 67 Muslim households and
several of the taxpayers served as raiders (aḳıncı). In the next census, conducted
in 1004/1596, the village population dropped to 40 households, thus losing one-
third of its residents in the interim years.90 It is difficult to tell whether this
sudden population drop was a consequence of the sultanic order in question
or whether it was caused by natural processes, but the fact that local residents
were persecuted suggests a possible involvement of the Ottoman authorities in
local demographic processes.
The other village mentioned in the Ottoman documents as being investi-
gated, Manend(lü),91 is located northwest of Tatar Pazarı, on the way to İhtiman
and Sofia. Manend(lü) is also only six kilometers away from the convent of
Ḥüseyin Dede, built near the village of Semçine (mod. Semchinovo).92 The
fields near the village regularly served as one of the stations of the Ottoman
imperial army marching toward Central Europe, especially during the cam-
paigns led by Süleymān I. This could be the reason why the Ottoman authorities
were particularly interested in subduing those deemed “heretical” in this par-
ticular locality.93 By 977/1570 the village had 37 Muslim households and was reg-
istered together with the nearby village, named Akıncı (mod. Akandzhievo).94
The Ottoman registers specify that Manend(lü) had an imam, who in 977/1570
also served as aḳıncı. This individual must have been quite young in 977/1570,
because in 1004/1596 he still appears among the village residents, but it seems

89 The village is marked on the Russian 1:126 000 (3-vest) Military map, drawn up in 1877–
1879. XY coordinates of the vanished settlement are 42.310105-25.171454.
90 Borisov, Gazetteer of Upper Thrace 303.
91 The modern village of Menenkyovo in the region of Pazardzhik, Bulgaria.
92 The Ḥüseyin Dede or Ḥüseyin Baba convent and its waqf are first registered in the early
tenth/sixteenth-century registers, BOA TD 77, 825 from 922/1516 and BOA, MAD 519, 271
from 931/1525. After 936/1530 the convent and its endowment disappear from the Ottoman
documents.
93 Several campaign itineraries show that the Ottoman army regularly stopped near the vil-
lage, which strongly suggests that this was a specifically designated camping spot before
the army moved west through the difficult pass of Trojan’s gate and descended to the
plane of Ihtiman. These were, for instance, the campaigns of 927/1521, 932/1526, 935/1529,
938/1532, and 973/1566. See Yerasimos, Les voyageurs 148, 158, 167, 175; Erdoğru, Kanuni
Sultan Süleyman’ın 167–187; Vatin, Ferîdûn Bey 30; Arslantürk and Börekçi (eds.), Nüzhet-i
esrârü’l-ahyâr 217.
94 Borisov, Gazetteer of Upper Thrace 199–200.
330 boykov

that in the interim years between the registrations he was stripped of his post
as village imam and was recorded solely as a raider.95
As stated above, none of the documents mentions explicitly Nūre’d-dīn-
zāde’s involvement in the persecutions of those deemed “heretics” in Thrace
in the early 970s/1570s. Nevertheless, considering the fact that he was closely
linked with this region and that his close associate Ḳurd Efendi resided in
Sofia at the time, it is highly likely that the active communication between
the Halveti shaykhs about provincial developments and the influence that
Nūre’d-dīnzāde exercised through his patron Ṣoḳollu Meḥmed Pasha were the
decisive factors that instigated the imperial order for investigation. As a fur-
ther indication of that, when the case was resolved in 984/1576, the document
explicitly specifies that the sultanic order was handed to one of the subordi-
nates of Ḳurd Efendi, who had already occupied the place of Nūre’d-dīnzāde
in the convent in Kadırga Limanı in Istanbul built by Ṣoḳollu.96 Another disci-
ple of Nūre’d-dīnzāde, İbrāhīm-i Ḳırımī (d. 1001/1593), known as “Tatar Shaykh,”
continued the established tradition of Halveti shaykhs’ involvement in perse-
cutions of nonconformist dervishes at the highest political level. After spend-
ing some time fighting against the misbelievers in Baba (i.e., Babadağ) Ḳırımī
received the post of the shaykh of the convent of Küçük Ayasofya in Istanbul
and became an important factor in the capital’s highest Sufi and political cir-
cles, reaching the position of sultan’s shaykh.97 In a series of letters addressed
to Murād III (r. 982–1003/1574–1595), Ḳırımī advised the sultan to take deci-
sive actions against the followers of Shaykh Bedre’d-dīn and the Kızılbaş in
Dobrudja, where he spent an unspecified period of time.98 The rhetoric of these
letters and the social groups targeted in them are greatly reminiscent of the let-
ters authored by Bālī Efendi of Sofya. Ḳırımī himself may have been the person
who orchestrated the Halveti takeover of the zāviye of Ṣarı Ṣaltuḳ in Babadağ
and the subsequent dispersal of the resident dervishes. A sultanic order to the
kadi of Baba, asking for an inspection, attests that in 991/1584 a halvethāne
existed there.99
Clearly, the persecutions of the antinomian dervishes during the 970–980s/
1570–1580s targeted places in Anatolia and especially in the eastern Balkans

95 Ibid. 199.
96 Refik, On altıncı asırda 36–37.
97 On Ḳırımī’s biography, see Terzioğlu, Power, patronage, and confessionalism 157–163.
98 The letters are widely known in modern scholarship but were erroneously attributed to
Maḥmūd Hüdāyī (d. 1037/1628). For the correction and analysis, see Terzioğlu, Power,
patronage, and confessionalism 154–164. I am grateful to Derin Terzioğlu for bringing her
recent publication to my attention.
99 The order was handed to a certain Meḥmed Sufi. Refik, On altıncı asırda 41.
abdāl-affiliated convents and “sunnitizing” halveti dervishes 331

that were also closely associated with the Balkan frontier lords. Archival
sources demonstrate that both of the villages in the Filibe region that were sup-
posedly home to “Hurufis” and “Bedreddinis” had aḳıncıs among the residents
and were situated very close to convents established by abdāls originating from
the circle of Otman Baba and his followers. Moreover, the territory was very
close to the Miḥāloğlu family ancestral domain in İhtiman and had been in the
sphere of influence of the mighty family for nearly two centuries. The Sunni-
tizing efforts of the Ottoman government, which were tacitly embraced if not
induced by the Halveti shaykhs also aimed at marginalizing the influence of
the frontier lords’ families on a provincial level. It is difficult to tell whether
the convents, built in towns that constituted part of the family domains of the
marcher lords, such as Plevne or İhtiman of the Miḥāloğlus, were also subjected
to systematic pressure to implement policies that assured the local population’s
adherence to Sunni orthodoxy. Circumstantial evidence, however, suggests that
this might have indeed been the case. For instance, in 985/1578, the haṭīb of the
zāviye of Miḥāloğlu Maḥmūd Beg in İhtiman, a certain convert to Islam named
İbrāhīm b. ʿAbdullāh, copied the text of ʿİmādü’l-İslām (written c. 949/1543) by
ʿAbdu’r-raḥmān b. Yūsuf Aḳsarāyī, a popular ʿilm-i ḥāl in Turkish that aimed to
instill the principles of Sunni orthodoxy and orthopraxy into its readers. This
suggests that by the second half of the tenth/sixteenth century a greater aware-
ness of what it meant to be a Sunni must have reached the family estates of the
frontier lords too.100 Further studies can reveal more details that will demon-
strate the pace of Sunnitization and its penetration within the domains of the
other families of marcher lords in the Balkans and test whether the Cemaliye
branch of the Halveti order, and especially the descendants of Bālī Efendi,
had any involvement in the process as well. The appointment of the Halveti
shaykh Sinān, a disciple of Ḳırımī, as Quran commentator at the mosque of
Turaḥānoğlu ʿÖmer Beg in Tırhala, is very indicative and demonstrates that
further research in this direction might be very useful.101 Furthermore, a little-
known zāviye, built by Gāzī Evrenos Beg in Yanya (Ioannina) and supported by
his pious foundation, appears in later sources as the “Halveti tekke of Shaykh
Hāşim.”102 The power base of the Evrenos family, the town of Yenice-i Vardar,
had a convent directed by a certain shaykh ʿAlī Efendi, who was one of the dis-

100 The manuscript of İmādü’l-İslām by ʿAbdu’r-raḥmān b. Yūsuf Aḳsarāyī is kept in the Bul-
garian National Library in Sofia, Department of Oriental Collections, Op. 828. It treats the
five pillars of Islam. For more on this text, see the article by Tijana Krstić in this volume.
101 Clayer, Mystiques, état et société 103.
102 Umur, Reconstructing Yenice-Vardar 83. Terzioğlu, Power, patronage, and confessionalism
173.
332 boykov

ciples of Ümmī Sinān (d. 976/1568), who gave his name to the Sinaniye branch
of the Halvetiye. This suggests that the Halveti takeover of convents previously
supported by marcher lords could have been part of a systematic effort of which
we currently know very little.103
The cases examined in the paper show that the provincial perspective in
the process of Sunnitizing Rumeli is worth exploring. The complex dynamics
at a local level demonstrate multifaceted connections that bound provincial
affairs and the highest levels of the Ottoman government through the policies
of spreading and enforcing Sunni Islam in the empire. The map appended to
this study presents the spatial spread of the convents of antinomian dervishes
in the eastern Balkans, which offers a glimpse, but not much more, into the rich
and dynamic processes in this region and it might be indicative of the increased
interest of the Ottoman ruling elite in this region in the tenth/sixteenth cen-
tury. The map suffers, however, from a complete lack of temporal dimension
since it is apparent that these convents evolved, functioned, and many of them
disappeared within a time span that spreads over at least two centuries. There-
fore, as any static map, it fails to illustrate the changes that took place over
time. Nevertheless, it demonstrates quite clearly that most of these convents
were built in a crescent-shaped territory, which is enclosed by the large landed
estates of the Miḥāloğlu family in İhtiman, Plevne, and Pınar Hisarı. The same
territory became a new home for many Anatolian settlers, among which were
at least 600 ocaks of seminomadic yürüks who arrived to the region in the
course of the ninth/fifteenth and tenth/sixteenth centuries. Recent studies on
the recruitment of raiders (aḳıncı) show convincingly that a large portion of the
manpower that filled the raiding parties organized by the marcher lords came
from exactly the same area.104 Thus, if yürük settlements, places of recruit-
ment of raiders, and the convents of the nonconformist dervishes in the eastern
Balkans are placed onto a single map, one can easily notice an overlap between
the three within a territory flanked by the possessions of the Miḥāloğlu fam-
ily. Therefore, it is scarcely surprising that the Ottoman archival documents
referred to this area as the “Mīḥāllu wing” of the aḳıncı corps.
The cooperation between the groups who shared an anticentrist sentiment
and opposed the Sunni orthodoxy was not restricted either to the Miḥāloğlu

103 Clayer, Mystiques, état et société 173.

104 The registers and the maps displaying the places of recruitment of raiders (aḳıncı) by the
Miḥāloğlu family, published recently by Kayapınar and Özünlü, show significant overlap
between the territories with high yürük concentration and the location of the principal
convents of the antinomian dervishes in Rumeli. See Kayapınar and Erdoğan Özünlü,
Mihaloğulları’na ait; Erdoğan Özünlü and Kayapınar, 1472 ve 1560 tarihli akıncı defterleri.
abdāl-affiliated convents and “sunnitizing” halveti dervishes 333

family, or to the region of the eastern Balkans. On the contrary, the architec-
tural patronage of the shrine of Ḥāccī Bektaş by the Evrenosoğlu, and later
in the mid-tenth/sixteenth century by the Malḳoçoğlu family, demonstrates
the deeply rooted connection between the Balkan marcher lords’ families and
the Anatolian abdāl tradition. In the Rumeli context, the attempts to intro-
duce closer compliance with Sunni orthodoxy appear to have gone hand in
hand with attempts to marginalize the influence of the marcher lords who
constituted the political, but also the military, embodiment of the antiestab-
lishment sentiments of a large group of subjects of the sultans. The compre-
hensive understanding of the process thus requires a more detailed research
into the local power relationships. At the present state of research, very little
is known about the dynamics taking place in the territories under the influ-
ence of the Evrenosoğlu family, which stretches from western Thrace through
Aegean Macedonia to the Adriatic coast, or in Thessaly, dominated by the Tura-
ḥānoğlus, or in the zone between Skopje and Sarajevo that was under the con-
trol of the İsḥāḳoğlus, later replaced by the Yaḥyālı and Malḳoçoğlu families,
etc. The present study focuses primarily on the eastern parts of the Balkans
where the Miḥāloğlu and Malḳoçoğlu families appear to have been the chief
local players in the power struggle, but hopefully it constitutes the first step
toward a more detailed exploration of provincial power dynamics and their
role in the process of Sunnitization of Rumeli.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editors of this volume Tijana Krstić and Derin Terzio-
ğlu for their meticulous reading of the text and for their extremely helpful
critical comments. The responsibility for failing to implement some of the edi-
tors’ insightful suggestions and for all the mistakes rests with me.

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 chapter 10

Attendance at the Five Daily Congregational

Prayers, Imams and Their Communities in the
Jurisprudential Debates during the Ottoman Age of
Sunnitization

H. Evren Sünnetçı̇oğlu

1 Introduction

On 25 Receb 1000/7 May 1592, imam Receb and his congregation from the
Ḥasan Ağa neighborhood of Üsküdar went to the court. They notified the judge
of Üsküdar that a certain resident by the name of Ḥasan does not attend the
masjid for prayers, nor does he pray at all. Upon listening, the judge decided to
record Ḥasan into the court register.1 It is not clear whether this entry served
as a prelude for an investigation against Ḥasan. The judge seemed to be cau-
tious, as evident in his choice to qualify the allegation as haber (Ar. khabar),
which signals that he treated it as information that can be either true (ṣidq)
or false (kidhb).2 However, Ḥasan’s reputation was now formally jeopardized
because his social infamy for disregarding the five daily prayers entered the offi-
cial record. If the allegations had been proven as true, Ḥasan could have been

1 “Zikr olunan imâm ve cemâ‘at bâ‘isü’l-hurûf Hasan nâm kimesneyi namaza gelmez ve bî-namaz-
dır deyu haber verdikleri kayd olundu. Şuhûdü’l-hâl: es-Sâbikūn.” See İstanbul kadı sicilleri Üskü-
dar Mahkemesi 84 numaralı sicil 247. For the name of the imam and the neighborhood, see
the preceding entry on the same page. It is worth emphasizing that the neighbors of Ḥasan
did not just claim that he neglects the five daily congregational prayers (namaza gelmez; lit.
“he does not come to prayer”). They also denounced Ḥasan for not observing the five daily
prayers at all (ve bî-namazdır; i.e. “and he does not pray”), implying that he does not perform
his prayers even in the privacy of his home. On the boundary between “public” and “private”
in the Ottoman neighborhoods during the tenth/sixteenth century, see Yılmaz, XVI. yüzyıl
Osmanlı toplumunda 92–110. On similar examples of denouncement from other places of
the Empire, see Ergenç, Osmanlı şehrindeki “mahalle”nin 74; Kıvrım, Osmanlı Mahallesinde
233; Yılmaz, XVI. yüzyıl Osmanlı toplumunda 96–97.
2 Jurisprudentially speaking, haber (Ar. khabar) can be true (ṣidq) or false (kidhb) as opposed
to proof (al-ḥujja huwā al-khabar al-ṣidq). See Mollā Hüsrev, Durar al-ḥukkām ii, 270. On the
question of proof standards in the proceedings of criminal cases, see Johansen, Zum Prozess-
recht der ʿUqūbāt 421–433.

© h. evren sünnetçı̇o ğlu, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004440296_011

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
342 sünnetçı̇o ğlu

liable for a punishment. At the very least, both the complaint by the congrega-
tion and the judge’s decision to record Ḥasan indicates the growing emphasis
on Ottoman Muslims’ attendance at the five daily congregational prayers that
was increasingly perceptible by the mid-tenth/sixteenth century.
This paper focuses on the debates among the leading Hanafi jurists that
informed this growing sensitivity to and moral surveillance surrounding the
performance of the congregational prayers, as well as the judge’s decision to
record Ḥasan’s alleged misconduct. Based on differences of opinion (ikhtilāf )
among some of the earliest authorities of the Hanafi school (madhhab), the
debates specifically revolved around two major questions that long predated
the Ottoman era: the normative value of the five daily congregational prayers
and the ability and qualifications of imams to lead the prayer. I explore how
Hanafi jurists of Rum (Anatolia and the Balkans) received and intervened into
this debate, arguing that their particular interpretation provided the Ottoman
authorities with a legal and moral idiom to discipline their male Muslim sub-
jects by enforcing the congregational performance of the five daily prayers. This
is famously reflected in the decree promulgated by Sultan Süleymān in 944/
1537–1538, which obliged each and every Muslim-populated village in the em-
pire to have a designated place of prayer (masjid) in order to ensure the obser-
vance of the five daily prayers in congregation throughout the sultan’s domains.
In what follows, I examine how Ottoman jurists received the aforemen-
tioned debates and engaged with them before and after the promulgation of
this imperial decree, suggesting that the decree was a product of negotiation
between the jurists and the sultan on the latter’s role in the everyday piety of his
subjects and the enforcement of the divine law within the Ottoman domains. I
argue that by the turn of the tenth/sixteenth century the jurists and the sultan
had arrived at a consensus on the normative value of the five daily congrega-
tional prayers by rendering the sultan responsible for promoting masjid atten-
dance among his male Muslim subjects. Thus, the Ottoman reception of this
age-old but virtually unexplored jurisprudential debate became central to the
processes of confession-building and imperial consolidation from the ninth/fif-
teenth to the eleventh/seventeenth centuries.
In the second part of the paper, I demonstrate how the jurists navigated
the debates on the ritual and moral duties of imams that had a bearing on
attendance itself, with a particular attention to the question of whether prayer
behind a sinful imam is permissible. This question came into sharper focus due
to the growing expectations of moral leadership and communal surveillance in
the mid-tenth/sixteenth century. I demonstrate that the Ottoman jurists nav-
igated through the differences of opinion both within and beyond the Hanafi
school to define their own orthodoxy on this matter, treading carefully to con-
tain dissenting voices from Muslim congregations across the empire.
attendance at the five daily congregational prayers 343

2 The Decree of 944/1537–1538 in the Context of Ottoman

“Sunnitization”

The imperial decree of 944/1537–1538 ordering the construction of masjids in

Muslim-populated villages to enforce the regular performance of the five daily
prayers in congregation has been at the center of the discussions on Ottoman
“Sunnitization.”3 Although the original text of the decree is still missing, our
knowledge of its content comes from a fatwa issued by the chief jurist (şeyhü’l-
islām) Ebū’s-suʿūd:

Question: If some Muslims have no masjid at all in their villages, and if

the people do not perform the prayers in congregation, is it necessary for
the judge of the law to force them to build a masjid and to inflict discre-
tionary punishment?
Answer: Yes. The governors of the protected domains had been sent a
noble decree in 944 in order to force the people of such villages to build
a masjid and to make them attend the congregational prayers. It is neces-
sary to abide by what the decree requires.4

As the fatwa makes it clear, the decree was issued in 944/1537–1538 by Sultan
Süleymān (r. 926–974/1520–1566) before Ebū’s-suʿūd was appointed chief jurist
(952–982/1545–1574). It concerned the Muslim peasants who neither observed
the five daily congregational prayers, nor did they even have a masjid. In order
to deal with this matter, Süleymān stipulated punitive measures. The governors
and judges of the empire had to force the villages in question to construct a
masjid. Also, they were authorized to inflict discretionary punishment (taʿẕir)
in order to prevent nonattendance at prayers. These punitive measures were
confined to Muslim men since Muslim women had by then been banished from

3 For the discussion of the term “Sunnitization,” see Terzioǧlu, How to conceptualize 301–338.
4 “Mesʾele: Baʿżı Müslümānlar, ḳaryelerinde aṣlā mescid olmayub ahālīsī cemāʿatle namāz ḳıl-
masalar ḥākimü’ş-şerʿ mezbūrlara cebr ile mescid binā etdürüb namāz ḳılmakdan ihmāl eden-
leri taʿẕir lāzım olur mu? El-cevāb: Olur. Öyle olan ḳurāʾnın ahālīsine cebr ile mescid binā etdürüb
ṣalāta müdāvemet etdürmek içūn vülāt-ı Memālik-i Maḥmiye’ye sene-i erbaʿīn ve tisʿamiʾe tā-
rīhinde müʾekked aḥkām-ı şerīfe vārid olmuşdur. Mūcebince ʿamel olunmak lāzımdır. Ketebehu
Ebū’s-suʿūd ʿufiya ʿanhu.” Ebū Su‘ūd, Zur Anwendung 24. This is my transliteration of the fatwa
from Ebū’s-suʿūd’s Maʿrūḍāt, which P. Horster edited in Arabic script. I use this edition in the
paper when discussing the fatwa because it includes Ebū’s-suʿūd’s annotations, which are
omitted from the more recent edition by P. Düzenli (Ebussuûd, Ma’rûzât). I use the latter edi-
tion when I discuss the preface of the Maʿrūḍāt, because Düzenli bases his edition on many
more manuscript copies than Horster.
344 sünnetçı̇o ğlu

attending the congregational prayers.5 The decree, Ebū’s-suʿūd affirms, is still

valid: “it is necessary to abide by what the decree requires.”
In recent years, historians have pointed to this decree as an example of how
Ottoman authorities’ understanding of Sunni Islam changed toward the mid-
dle of the tenth/sixteenth century. The primary purpose of the decree was to
enforce the congregational performance of the five daily prayers in the villages
since it took issue with the lack of masjids in the villages and not the Friday
mosques in cities and towns. As a rule, the jurists of the Hanafi school, and
by extension the Ottoman Rumi Hanafi jurists, excluded Friday mosques from
villages, since they held that the Friday noon prayer was valid only in urban
regions (misr jāmiʿ; misr), not in the countryside.6 However, apart from the
construction boom of masjids across the empire, the decree was also followed
by the proliferation of Friday mosques in cities and towns.7 Gülru Necipoğlu
has suggested that this general emphasis on the places of prayer in congrega-
tion was due to the religious climate at the time, which was informed by the
Ottoman authorities’ attempt to draw clear distinctions with the Shi‘ite Safavid
Empire, its principal ideological rival.8 Indeed, the very legitimacy of holding
the Friday prayer was then under debate among the Twelver Shi‘ite scholars.9
As such, the decree was part of broader policies aiming to establish the markers
of Ottoman Sunni orthodoxy as the empire sought to internally consolidate and
demarcate boundaries with its imperial rivals both to the east (the Safavids)
and to the west (the Habsburgs).10
Derin Terzioğlu has pushed the discussion further in a historiographical
essay that challenges the view of Sunnitization as a mere political reaction pro-
voked by the rise of the Shi‘ite Safavid Empire (r. 906–1134/1501–1722). Instead,
she emphasized the need to study Ottoman Sunnitization in its own right as
part of the history of Sunni Islam with an eye to continuities and ruptures
between the religious policies of the pre-Ottoman and Ottoman eras.11 Taking

5 See Katz, The “corruption of the times” 171–185; Reinhart, When women went to mosques
116–128.
6 Johansen, The all-embracing town, esp. 144; Calder, Friday prayer 35–36; Holmes Katz,
Prayer 130–131; Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan 56.
7 Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan 48; see also Terzioğlu, How to conceptualize 314. On the
numbers of masjids and Friday mosques constructed in Rumeli by the 1530s, see Grigor
Boykov’s article in this volume.
8 Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan 47–58.
9 Stewart, Polemics and patronage 425–457.
10 Necipoğlu, Süleyman the Magnificent 401–427; Krstić, Contested conversions 75–97;
Greene, The Edinburgh history 57–86, especially 59.
11 Terzioğlu, How to conceptualize 305, 313, 315, 318–319.
attendance at the five daily congregational prayers 345

this historical approach is significant from the standpoint of the decree under
discussion: while the decree of 944/1537–1538 was unprecedented in scope, it
was not unique in kind—a similar order was issued in 717/1317 under the Mam-
luk sultanate that ordered Nusayris in the Tripoli district to construct masjids
in their villages.12
In the context of Ottoman history, Terzioğlu situates the decree at the inter-
section of architectural, administrative, and legal historiography with the fol-
lowing question in mind: how did the Ottoman legal and political authorities
conceive of the neighborhoods and villages along with religious, penal, and fis-
cal rights and liabilities?13 Although the decree of 944/1537–1538 heightened
the significance of mosques and masjids in the neighborhoods and villages,
Terzioğlu notes that evidence from the reigns of Meḥmed II (r. 848–850/1444–
1446; 855–886/1451–1481) and Bāyezīd II (r. 886–917/1481–1512) indicates that
enforcing the five daily congregational prayers was a religious policy already
before the onset of the rivalry between the Sunni Ottoman and Shi‘ite Safavid
Empires. At this juncture, Terzioğlu puts forth several “agents of Sunnitiza-
tion,” who had greater responsibilities in the neighborhood and village contexts
(such as the imam, muezzin, and judge) or were new figures (such as the prayer
enforcer, i.e., namāzcı) in the history of Sunni Islam, as worthy of further inves-
tigation. While Ottoman authorities particularly authorized namāzcıs, imams,
and muezzins to monitor male Muslims to make sure they attended the daily
prayers, they also coupled these new measures with “empowering the judge”
and “mobilizing the local populace to provide community surveillance” in
order to compensate for the limits of the state in terms of its access and control
over the daily life of neighborhoods and villages. To this end, Terzioğlu invites
comparisons with relatively more institutional, parish-based mechanisms of
social disciplining in early modern Europe.14
Building on Terzioğlu’s insights on how to conceptualize Ottoman Sunni-
tization, Tijana Krstić demonstrated that Ottoman catechisms (ʿilm-i ḥāl) as
well underscored the significance of attendance at the congregational prayers
in their discussions of what it entailed to be a Sunni Muslim. Written during the
reign of Sultan Süleymān by Hanafi authors with and without ties to the state,
within and beyond the circles of madrasa-trained scholars, these widely circu-
lated catechisms tailored the medieval attributes of “the people of the Sunna
and the Community” (ehl-i sünnet ve’l-cemāʿat, Ar. ahl al-sunna wa-l-jamāʿa) to

12 Tsugitaka, State and rural society 171–172.

13 Terzioğlu, How to conceptualize 313–315.
14 Ibid. 313–315, 322.
346 sünnetçı̇o ğlu

highlight the differences between Sunnis and Shi‘ites on the matters of creed
and piety.15 As such, they espoused the discourse implicit in Süleymān’s decree
through emphasizing the importance of performing the five daily prayers with
the congregation (Lüṭfī Pasha) or praying behind imams regardless of whether
they are sinful or not (ʿAbdu’r-raḥmān bin Yūsuf Aḳsarāyī, Birgivī Meḥmed, and
Lüṭfī Pasha).
Given the central place that the question of attending the five daily con-
gregational prayers at the local masjids occupied in the religious policies and
catechisms, it is all the more pressing to understand how the debates of the
leading Ottoman jurists informed this concern. In the following section, I will
demonstrate that the decree of 944/1537–1538 was not an arbitrary decision.
Rather, it was a product of a consensus reached among the jurists on an age-
old debate as to the normative value of the five daily congregational prayers. By
doing so, I will shed light on the moral and legal registers that jurists invoked
in arguing for the duty of adult male Muslims to observe and the duty of the
sultan to enforce attendance at the masjids.

3 Traces of a Jurisprudential Debate: Normative Value of the Five

Daily Congregational Prayers and the Question of Attendance

In his Ghunyat al-mutamallī, written as a handbook for students, Ibrāhīm al-

Ḥalabī (d. 956/1549), a Hanafi scholar educated in Mamluk Aleppo, Damascus,
and Cairo who migrated to Ottoman Istanbul around 906/1500 and became a
prominent jurist there, offers a curious prelude to his discussion on a centuries-
old jurisprudential debate regarding the normative value of the five daily con-
gregational prayers.16 Starting with a succinct survey of the different opinions
held by various jurists from the formative period of the Sunni schools of law,
al-Ḥalabī introduces the question in a way that encapsulates the central point
of contention among the Ottoman Hanafi jurists of Rum that underpins Sul-
tan Süleymān’s decree: Are the adult male Muslims under a duty to observe
the five daily congregational prayers? If so, under what circumstances should
the sultan implement the penal sanctions to ensure that they do not aban-
don the prayers? The jurists debated this issue throughout the ninth/fifteenth
and the early tenth/sixteenth century, effectively arriving at a consensus by

15 See Krstić, State and religion 65–91.

16 On Ibrāhīm al-Ḥalabī, see Has, A study.
attendance at the five daily congregational prayers 347

the time the decree was issued in 944/1537–1538: “In al-Aṣl, Muḥammad [b. al-
Ḥasan al-Shaybānī (d. 189/805)] said: ‘Know that prayer in congregation is a
confirmed sunna. Abandoning it is not authorized except for illness or other
valid excuses.’17 The former statement signifies the exemplary model of the
Prophet (sunna) and the latter signifies duty (wujūb).”18
Here, al-Ḥalabī highlights a seeming paradox inherent in the opinion deliv-
ered by al-Aṣl, a foundational text of the Hanafi school composed by Muḥam-
mad b. al-Ḥasan al-Shaybānī: “the former statement signifies the exemplary
model of the Prophet (sunna),” while “the latter signifies duty (wujūb).” Indeed,
these technical terms—sunna and wujūb—appear incompatible when one
looks at a famous reference book on the definitions of key terms from vari-
ous sciences that was sought after among the students of Rum: “words, deeds,
and attitudes of the Prophet as well as the things that the Prophet habitually
did without obligation” (sunna) versus “[an act] whose abandonment entails
rebuke and punishment” (al-wujūb al-sharʿī).19 While sunna is by definition not
obligatory, wujūb requires sanctions, such as rebuke and punishment.
Al-Ḥalabī devoted an entire section to explaining that in his opinion sunna
and wujūb were not necessarily incompatible when it comes to the normative
value of the five daily congregational prayers and the penal sanctions to deter
nonattendance.20 Without delving into how this incompatibility had found
expression as well as resolution among the leading Ottoman Hanafi jurists
of Rum, the significance of the decree of 944/1537–1538 for imperial gover-
nance and religious politics cannot be fully appreciated. In order to shed light
on this process, I will start by examining the discussions on the subject by
two prominent Hanafi jurists from the lands of Rum: Bedre’d-dīn Maḥmūd
(d. 823/1420), a celebrated jurist who served briefly as the Ottoman military
justice (ḳāḍīʿasker)21 during the civil war among the Ottoman princes (804–
816/1402–1413),22 and Mollā Fenārī (d. 834/1431), who was remembered as the

17 Al-Ḥalabī does not give a citation for this quote. I was able to locate the same passage in
Khulāṣat al-fatāwā of Iftikhār al-Dīn Ṭāhir b. Aḥmad al-Bukhārī (d. 542/1147). See Iftikhār
al-Dīn, Khulāṣat al-fatāwā 40b.
18 “Qāla Muḥammad fī’l-Aṣl ‘Iʿlam anna al-jamāʿa sunna muʾakkada. Lā yarkhuṣu al-tark fī-hā
illā bi-ʿudhri maraḍ aw ghayrihi.’ Wa-awwal hādhā l-kalām yufīdu al-sunniya wa-akharihu
yufīdu al-wujūb.” Al-Ḥalabī, Ghunyat al-mutamallī 508.
19 Al-Jurjānī, Taʿrīfāt 195, 345.
20 Al-Ḥalabī, Ghunyat al-mutamallī 508–510.
21 On Bedre’d-dīn Maḥmūd, known also as Shaykh Bedre’d-dīn, whose jurisprudential career
is overshadowed by his reputation as a leader of a messianic rebellion, see Balivet, Islam
mystique; and Ocak, Zındıklar ve mülhidler 136–202. For a recent reassessment of this rep-
utation, see Binbaş, Intellectual networks 129–132.
22 For a detailed analysis on the conflicts, see Kastritsis, The sons of Bayezid.
348 sünnetçı̇o ğlu

first chief jurist of the Ottoman Empire by the later early modern biographi-
cal tradition.23 Thereafter, I will demonstrate how the Ottoman jurists resolved
the debate in the tenth/sixteenth century through reaching a consensus before
Sultan Süleymān issued the decree in 944/1537–1538.
The problem of the incompatibility between sunna and wujūb is traceable
from the tension between Bedre’d-dīn and Fenārī on the normative value of
the five daily congregational prayers. While Bedre’d-dīn considered the five
daily congregational prayers as confirmed sunna,24 Fenārī thought that they are
“akin to duty” (shibh al-wujūb).25 As we have seen in al-Ḥalabī, this distinction
had ramifications for the consideration of penal sanctions. Bedre’d-dīn dwelled
upon the question from the standpoint of the call to prayer. He did so by
reflecting on the difference of opinions between Abū Yūsuf Yaʿqūb b. Ibrāhīm
al-Anṣārī (d. 182/798) and Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Shaybānī (d. 189/805), the
two prominent successors to the Hanafi school’s eponymous founder, Nuʿmān
bin Thābit, known as Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 150/767). For Abū Yūsuf, Bedre’d-dīn wrote,
the call to prayer corresponds to a confirmed sunna rather than a duty. Accord-
ing to this stance, the ruler is bound to enforce an act if the act is a duty
rather than a confirmed sunna (al-qitāl innamā yakūn ʿalā tark al-wājib dūna al-
sunna). In contrast, for Muḥammad al-Shaybānī, Bedre’d-dīn noted, the call to
prayer (and the five daily congregational prayers) was a duty26—this, as I will
show below, was historically the majority opinion within the Hanafi school.
The reasoning behind Muḥammad al-Shaybānī’s opinion is that abandoning
the call to prayer (and the five daily congregational prayers) connotes a disdain
of Islam. Bedre’d-dīn maintained that the opinion that takes precedence is the
one attributed to Abū Yūsuf unless the five daily congregational prayers are col-
lectively and persistently abandoned.27 Although Fenārī agreed with Bedre’d-
dīn on the ruler’s duty to inflict punishment in cases of collective and persistent
abandonment, he also demanded sanctions for any male Muslim individual
who did not attend the masjid.28 In line with Muḥammad al-Shaybānī’s moral
justification, Fenārī maintained that the five daily congregational prayers are
“from among the distinguishing marks of the religion” (min aʿlām al-dīn).29

23 On Mollā Fenārī see Repp, The müfti 73–97.

24 Bedre’d-dīn, al-Tashīl i, 75–76, 97.
25 Mollā Fenārī, Fuṣūl al-badāʾiʿ i, 242.
26 Bedre’d-dīn, al-Tashīl i, 75–76, 97.
27 Ibid. 76, 97.
28 Mollā Fenārī, Fuṣūl al-badāʾiʿ i, 242.
29 Ibid. 243.
attendance at the five daily congregational prayers 349

By the turn of the tenth/sixteenth century, the Ottoman Hanafi jurists of

Rum had resolved this conundrum and arrived at a consensus that paved the
way for the decree of 944/1537–1538. This is traceable from the reading notes
of Saʿdī Çelebi (d. 945/1539),30 who was the chief jurist (940–945/1534–1539)
when Sultan Süleymān issued the decree in question. While reading the dis-
cussion on the normative value of the five daily congregational prayers from
Akmal al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Bābartī’s (d. 786/1384) authoritative commen-
tary on a major Hanafi jurisprudential manual, Burhān al-Dīn al-Farghānī al-
Marghinānī’s (d. 593/1197) al-Hidāya, Saʿdī Çelebi recorded his emphatic con-
sent to al-Bābartī’s opinion that the five daily congregational prayers constitute
“one of the characteristics of the religion” (min khaṣā’iṣ al-dīn) and attendance
is a duty.31 When discussing al-Marghinānī’s opinion that the five daily congre-
gational prayers constituted sunna al-hudā (i.e., confirmed sunna), al-Bābartī, a
well-known Hanafi scholar who taught in Mamluk Cairo, argued that that the
terms sunna and wujūb overlap in meaning in the context of this discussion.
The tension between al-Marghinānī and al-Bābartī was based on the question
of how the Prophet Muḥammad’s words should be interpreted: “the congre-
gation is a sunna from among the sunan al-hudā (pl. of sunna al-hudā; i.e.,
confirmed sunna), which are not given up except by the hypocrite (munāfiq).”32
Al-Bābartī maintained that the term sunna al-hudā33 in the hadith is defined
as an act of worship whose “observance provides guidance, [and] its abandon-
ment leads to going astray.”34 By drawing on this definition, al-Bābartī main-
tained that when reading the hadith, the word “hypocrite” (munāfiq) should be
conceived as a “rebellious sinner” (ʿāṣī).35 Al-Bābartī’s interpretation of “hyp-
ocrite” as “rebellious sinner” brings out the question of penal sanctions because
“rebellious sinner” constitutes a status that a Muslim is assigned for the failure
to observe an act that corresponds to a duty.36 In this way, an act of confirmed
sunna becomes a duty whose noncompliance leads to penal sanctions.

30 On Saʿdī Çelebi, see Repp, The müfti 240–244.

31 Saʿdī Çelebi wrote, “yes, but I say that as the majority of our masters maintain, it signifies
a duty” (Aqūlu naʿam lākin yufīd al-wujūb kamā dhahaba ilayhi ʿāmma mashayikhinā). See
Saʿdī Çelebi, Ḥāshiyya 346. Although Saʿdī Çelebi’s note starts with “yes, but I say,” he in fact
did not mean to oppose al-Bābartī. To the contrary, Saʿdī Çelebi gave an emphatic consent
in the sense of “not just yes, but yes, indeed” to al-Bābartī’s assessment of al-Marghinānī’s
opinion.
32 Al-Bābartī, al-ʿInāya 284.
33 The terms sunna al-hudā (sunna of guidance) and sunna al-muʾakkada (confirmed sunna)
are interchangeable. See al-Jurjānī, Taʿrīfāt 195.
34 Al-Bābartī, al-ʿInāya 284.
35 Ibid.
36 Reinhart, Like the difference 216.
350 sünnetçı̇o ğlu

Within the Hanafi school, there were other opinions that conceived the five
daily congregational prayers as an obligation without the need to illustrate how
the confirmed sunna and duty are compatible in the context of the five daily
congregational prayers. It would have been arguably more straightforward to
simply adopt the opinion that classified attendance at masjids as an obliga-
tory act ( farḍ).37 While it may sound trivial, the difference between a duty and
an obligatory act was an epistemological distinction exclusive to the Hanafi
school. In the eyes of Hanafi jurists, the evidential basis of a duty conveyed
probability rather than definite knowledge, while that of an obligatory act was
established through definitive indications from the sources of law that left no
room for doubt. This distinction manifested itself in the ramifications on the
status of a Muslim who fails to comply with what was required. While failure to
observe an obligatory act placed a Muslim outside of the community of believ-
ers (which could lead to execution in the extreme cases), failure to observe a
duty did not lead to such exclusion but instead rendered a Muslim a “rebellious
sinner.”38
The Ottoman Hanafi jurists of Rum explicitly preferred the status of “rebel-
lious sinner” in legal as well as moral terms. As part of the discussion to which
Saʿdī Çelebi gave consent, al-Bābartī had also made the legal point that the
duty to perform the five daily prayers in congregation is established by khabar
wāḥid [hadiths reported by transmitter(s) varying from one to few people],
which convey probability rather than definite knowledge. Thus, noncompli-
ance can only lead to the status of “rebellious sinner” rather than “unbelief”
(kufr).39 The moral justification of the Ottoman jurists regarding attendance at
the masjids for the five daily congregational prayers arguably shows that they
sought to exhort the sultan’s male Muslim subjects to observe the five daily
congregational prayers rather than apply more extreme (and more unrealistic)
sanctions.40
As we have seen, the question of penal sanctions for individual worshippers
was precisely the difference between Bedre’d-dīn’s and Fenārī’s views in the

37 Al-Bābartī’s contemporary and opponent Ibn Abī al-ʿIzz (d. 792/1390) was one of the
Hanafi jurists who considered the performance of the five daily congregational prayers as
an obligatory act ( farḍ). See Ibn Abī al-ʿIzz, al-Tanbīh esp. 599–601. On a debate between
al-Bābartī and Ibn Abī al-ʿIzz regarding the methods of rule formulation within the Hanafi
school, see İnanır, İbn Ebi’l-İzz’in 225–260.
38 Reinhardt, Like the difference, esp. 207–212, 215–216.
39 Al-Bābartī, al-ʿInāya 284.
40 This is comparable to the question of why the leading Ottoman Hanafi jurists addressed
and resolved the issue of blasphemous phrases and deeds through recourse to “renewal of
faith and marriage.” Burak, Faith, law and empire 1–23, esp. 10–11.
attendance at the five daily congregational prayers 351

ninth/fifteenth century. Bedre’d-dīn may not have seen it as necessary to elabo-

rate on the question of penal sanctions for the nonattendance of individuals at
congregational prayers at the particular time that he wrote, which was one of
the greatest political turmoil. However, as suggested by Çiğdem Kafescioğlu in
this volume, over the second half of the ninth/fifteenth century, the question
of clearly demarcated places of prayer became more central to Ottoman gover-
nance. This was reflected in the gradual separation of masjid from spaces with
other accommodative and social functions within the ʿimārets as well as the
gradual transformation of the ʿimārets into congregational mosques starting
in the 1510s. This growing emphasis on the places of prayer as sites of com-
munity building might have been one of the motives behind the chief jurist
Saʿdī Çelebi’s concern with the reconciliation between sunna and wujūb, thus
opening the door for disciplining male Muslim subjects if they abandoned
the five daily congregational prayers individually and collectively. Saʿdī Çelebi’s
reading note on al-Bābartī’s discussion espoused his opinion by stating “as the
majority of our masters maintain, it signifies a duty,” which indicates that Saʿdī
Çelebi saw this reconciliation as reflective of a consensus among the leading
Ottoman jurists. Here, “the majority of our masters” did not only signify that
conceiving of the five daily congregational prayer as a duty was the majority
opinion within the history of Hanafi school.41 It also signified the stance of
the leading jurists within the Ottoman Empire who were on board with this
majority opinion throughout the late ninth/fifteenth and the tenth/sixteenth
centuries. Indeed, apart from Saʿdī Çelebi, established jurists such as Mollā
Hüsrev (d. 885/1480),42 Çivizāde (d. 954/1547),43 al-Ḥalabī (d. 956/1549),44 Bir-
givī Meḥmed (d. 981/1573),45 and Ebū’s-suʿūd (d. 982/1574),46 whose opinions
had on occasion provoked controversies on important jurisprudential issues,47
all agreed that the five daily congregational prayers constituted a duty.
The consensus that underlined the decree of 944/1537–1538 was the result of
tremendous political, religious, and institutional changes that took place in the
lands of Rum from the late eighth/fourteenth to the early tenth/sixteenth cen-

41 Saʿdī Çelebi is not the only Rumi jurist who acknowledged the presence of this majority
opinion within the history of the Hanafi school. See Ibn Melek, Sharḥ majmaʿ al-baḥrayn
31a; Chiwīzāde, al-Īthār 174. See also al-Ḥalabī, Ghunyat al-mutamallī 508.
42 Mollā Hüsrev, Mirqāt al-wuṣūl 278.
43 Chiwīzāde, al-Īthār 173.
44 Al-Ḥalabī Ghunyat al-mutamallī 508–510.
45 Birgivī Meḥmed, Jalāʾ al-qulūb 63.
46 Ebū Su‘ūd, Zur Anwendung 24–25.
47 See Özen, Molla Hüsrev’in velâ meselesi 321–394; Mandaville, Usurious piety 289–308;
Terzioğlu, Bid’at, custom, and the mutability (forthcoming).
352 sünnetçı̇o ğlu

turies. By the time Saʿdī Çelebi was appointed as the chief jurist in 940/1534,
the Ottoman dynasty had already established political control over much of
the Balkans and the Middle East. However, the dynasty was confronted by the
crisis of legitimacy along with this territorial expansion. Between 917/1511 and
944/1537–1538, central and southern Anatolia was swept by messianic and anti-
nomian revolts in the countryside, some of which were inspired by the rise
of the Shi‘ite Safavid Empire in Iran.48 While experimenting with messianic
discourses in an attempt to reconceptualize the notion of the caliphate,49 the
Ottoman sultans and their advisers also drew on the legal and moral idiom that
a new class of scholars and jurists under their patronage provided to enhance
the coercive function of the state to discipline Muslim subjects in line with the
changing understanding of the requirements for belonging to the Sunni Mus-
lim community.50
In contrast to the consolidation of Ottoman power in the tenth/sixteenth
century, the climate in which Mollā Fenārī and Bedre’d-dīn lived was markedly
different. The lands of Rum were fragmented and ruled by various dynasties
that competed against each other not only through warfare and diplomacy
but also by extending patronage to scholars and jurists from different parts of
Islamdom.51 Despite these efforts, the lands of Rum were still peripheral to the
eminent centers of Islamic learning in Syria, Egypt, and Central Asia. Like many
Rumis at the time, Fenārī and Bedre’d-dīn had to seek jurisprudential educa-
tion in Mamluk Cairo, where they were taught by none other than al-Bābartī.52
Unlike the tenth/sixteenth century when the Ottoman dynasty had a concen-
trated network of high-level scholars and well-funded royal madrasas,53 the
relationship of jurists with the dynasties of Rum were relatively fluid in the
late eighth/fourteenth and the early ninth/fifteenth centuries. Mollā Fenārī,
who was remembered as the first Ottoman chief jurist, spent an important

48 See Sohrweide, Der Sieg der Safaviden, especially 145–186; Ocak Idéologie 185–192.
49 See Yılmaz, Caliphate redefined. On Ottoman messianism as well as its cultural and intel-
lectual references, see Fleischer, The lawgiver as Messiah 159–177; Fleischer, Learning and
sovereignty 155–160. See also Flemming, Sāḥib-ḳırān 43–62.
50 See Burak, Faith, law and empire 1–23; Aykan, A legal concept in motion 1–19. See also
Derin Terzioğlu’s article in this volume.
51 See Peacock and Yıldız, Introduction 19–42, esp. 23–28.
52 See Ökten, Scholars and mobility 55–70; Atçıl, Mobility of scholars 315–332; Yıldız, From
Cairo to Ayasuluk 263–297, for a discussion on al-Bābartī and his Rumi students, see
esp. 266–268.
53 With respect to the institutional history of the Ottoman learned class, studies have demon-
strated the formation, bureaucratization, and hierarchization of the learned establish-
ment into a single central system with fairly standardized and graded training and career
tracks across the empire by the mid-sixteenth century. For the most recent monograph on
this process, see Atçıl, Scholars and sultans.
attendance at the five daily congregational prayers 353

part of his career under the patronage of the Karamanid dynasty in central
Anatolia.54 Bedre’d-dīn for his part wrote a sizable commentary on his own
jurisprudential book while in exile following the murder of Ottoman prince
Mūsā Çelebi (d. 816/1413) and completed it after the outbreak of the messianic
rebellion against the Ottoman dynasty in which he himself would be impli-
cated.55 When Sultan Süleymān issued the decree in 944/1537–1538, however,
Saʿdī Çelebi was presiding over a class of scholars and jurists who were embed-
ded within an imperial system for the production of knowledge and authority
and who readily provided the language and legitimacy to the political exigen-
cies of the time.56
It appears that the Ottoman authorities punished collective and persis-
tent abandonment of the five daily congregational prayers even before Sultan
Süleymān’s decree signaled the reconciliation of sunna and wujūb to sanc-
tion punishment for individuals and communities who did not attend the
masjids. For example, the chief jurist Kemālpaşazāde, also known as Ibn Kemāl
(d. 940/1534), who held the office of chief jurist between 932/1526 and 940/1534,
was asked “what punishment is required by law for the people of a neigh-
borhood or a village who do not attend the daily congregational prayers even
though they are healthy and fit.”57 Moreover, as the fatwa makes it clear, the
people in question remained recalcitrant in the face of repeated exhortations
on the part of imam and muezzin (imām ve müʾez̲z̲in tenbīh eyleseler), to which
Kemālpaşazāde prescribed severe discretionary punishment.58 The fatwa fea-
tures a confrontation in which imams and muezzins approach the people who
refuse to attend the masjid. This was the kind of collective and persistent aban-
donment that Bedre’d-dīn and Fenārī had in mind for which both of them
thought that the penal sanctions were justifiably applicable.
At the heart of the issue is the lack of a valid excuse for the failure to per-
form the prayers collectively as the fatwa stresses that the people who are
supposed to attend the masjids are “healthy and fit” (ṣağ ve sālim) Muslims. As

54 On the mobility of scholars and Sufis between the Ottoman and Karamanid realms in the
ninth/fifteenth century, see Karataş, Onbeşinci yüzyılda Karamânî 283–298, on Fenārī, see
esp. 284–285, footnote 6; see also Atçıl, Scholars and sultans 42.
55 Binbaş, Intellectual networks 131.
56 On the relationship between the institutionalization of the Ottoman learned establish-
ment and the emergence of the Ottoman branch of the Hanafi school, see Burak, The
second formation.
57 For variant copies of the fatwa, see İbn Kemāl, Fetāvā, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, MS
Darülmesnevi 118, 32b; and MS Hacı Mahmud Efendi 1224, 152b; The fatwas are also cited
in İbn Kemal, Şeyhülislam İbn Kemal 154.
58 Ibid.
354 sünnetçı̇o ğlu

such, the fatwa’s reasoning rests on the relationship between law and exemp-
tion (rukhṣa) in legal theory (uṣūl al-fiqh). Accordingly, people were granted
exemption from a responsibility only when they suffered from a hardship rec-
ognized by law. Otherwise, law retained its force (ʿazīma).59 Seen in this light,
for Kemālpaşazāde, it was legally unacceptable not to attend the masjids for
the community of able-bodied male Muslims without a valid excuse.
As this convergence between Mollā Fenārī, Bedre’d-dīn, and Kemālpaşazāde
shows, the opinion that upholds punishment for collective and persistent aban-
donment had been circulating earlier than the tenth/sixteenth century. In fact,
it is possible to trace the initial experiments with an official punishment policy
before the tenth/sixteenth century not only for the cases of collective and per-
sistent abandonment but also for the cases in which each and every settled,
able-bodied, adult male Muslim habitually neglect performing the five dai-
ly prayers with the congregations. As Derin Terzioğlu points out, the office of
prayer-enforcer (namāzcı) had been established around the last years of Meḥ-
med II’s reign and its job description was to fine the habitual absentees from the
five daily congregational prayers. Moreover, Terzioğlu notes, the sultanic law
code of Bāyezīd II indicates a continuity given that the monetary punishment
upon the absentees was put in a set of clauses.60 One can, thus, argue that the
opinion that underpins Süleymān’s decree had already acquired footing in the
decisions of the political authority within the second half of the ninth/fifteenth
century, half a century earlier than the rise of the Shi‘ite Safavid Empire. How-
ever, over the course of the first half of the tenth/sixteenth century, the author-
ities’ attention to the attendance at congregational prayers and spaces where
they were to be performed increased significantly in tandem with the growing
concern for building a Sunni community and monitoring its boundaries.
The legal consensus expressed by Saʿdī Çelebi found political confirmation
not only through the decree of 944/1537–1538 but also through Ebū’s-suʿūd’s
fatwa in which he confirms that the decree is still valid. We can demonstrate
this based on an annotation found within Maʿrūḍāt, a posthumously compiled
book of Ebū’s-suʿūd’s fatwas with bibliographical annotations in Arabic that
reveal preferred opinions on the jurisprudential questions, which were con-
firmed by Sultan Süleymān.61 By quoting from Khizānat al-muftīn—a com-

59 Katz, ʿAzīma and rukhṣa 188–189. It is precisely with reference to this very distinction
between the original rule (aṣl) and the valid excuse (ʿudhr) under which Mollā Fenārī had
expressed his opinion that the five daily congregational prayers were tantamount to duty
(li-mutaʿalliqi al-ḥukm bi-iʿtibār al-ʿudhr al-makhraj ʿan aṣlihi). See Mollā Fenārī, Fuṣūl al-
badāʾiʿ i, 240.
60 Terzioğlu, How to conceptualize 313–314. For further insights on this point, see Çiğdem
Kafescioğlu’s article in this volume.
61 Ebū Su‘ūd, Zur Anwendung 24–25.
attendance at the five daily congregational prayers 355

pendium of jurisprudential opinions composed in 740/1398 by a Hanafi jurist

Ḥusayn b. Muḥammad al-Samʿānī—the annotation provides the reader with a
moral justification for the continuing validity of the decree:

The call to prayer is one of the manifest signs of Islam (shaʿāʾir al-islām),62
thus, if the people of a city or a village or a neighborhood refrain from
it, the ruler coerces them. If they do not abide, he fights against them
with arms. And, if the people of a city abandon the call to prayer (adhān)
and the call to perform prayer (iqāma)63 and the five daily congregational
prayers ( jamāʿa), then the ruler fights against them, since they are of the
religion’s landmarks and its manifest signs. Khizānat al-muftīn.64

As we have seen, this justification echoes al-Bābartī’s opinion through which

the chief jurist Saʿdī Çelebi expressed his endorsement of the view that the five
daily congregational prayers constituted a duty. The annotation of Ebū’s-suʿūd’s
fatwa makes this endorsement enforceable by stating that one of the major
duties of the ruler was to safeguard the five daily congregational prayers from
negligence. If they are not observed, the ruler must have recourse to coercion
(ajbarahum). If they are persistently abandoned, the ruler must have recourse
to violence (qātalahum; qātalahum biʾl-silāḥ). It is not a coincidence that both
found expression in the decree: while coercion was to be employed in enforce-
ment of building a masjid (cebr ile mescid binā etdürüb), violence was implicit
in stipulating discretionary punishment (taʿẕir) for habitual absentees. The jus-
tification is imbued with concerns over confessional boundaries: “they are of
the religion’s landmarks and its manifest signs,” meaning they are distinct and
specific to Islam, and thus, the ruler has to make sure his male Muslim subjects
distinguish themselves in daily life through observing these acts of worship
that are inherently public and communal.65 In this respect, Ebū’s-suʿūd’s fatwa

62 On the various meanings of shiʿār (pl., shaʿāʾir), see Fahd, Shiʿār 424; Özervarlı, Şiâr 123–124.
63 The difference between adhān and iqāma is that iqāma serves to let those who have con-
gregated know that the prayer is about to commence, be it the five daily congregational
prayers or the Friday noon prayer. After repeating the words of the adhān, the muezzin
adds “qad qāmati al-ṣalāt,” that is “now begins the prayer.” See Juynboll, Iḳāma 1057; Akyüz,
İkāmet 16–17.
64 “Inna al-adhān min shaʿāʾir al-islām ḥattā law imtinaʿ ahl miṣrin aw qaryatin aw maḥallatin
ajbarahum al-imām fa-in lam yafʿalū qātalahum biʾl-silāḥ. Wa law anna ahla miṣrin taraka
al-adhāna wa al-iqāma wa al-jamāʿa qātalahum al-imām li-annahu min maʿālim al-dīn wa
shaʿāʾirihi. Khizānat al-muftīn.” Ebū Su‘ūd, Zur Anwendung 24–25 (my transliteration).
65 This normative Sunni discourse on religion (dīn) vis-à-vis the call to prayer, call to perform
prayer, and the five daily congregational prayers had highly divisive as well as unifying
overtones. It is plausible to suggest that this discourse informed some of the policies
356 sünnetçı̇o ğlu

reflects the success of the consensus in which both the leading Hanafi jurists
and the sultan saw a desirable idiom to formulate the scope of sultanic author-
ity in enforcing the divine laws on earth.
Not only did the presence of the consensus within the Maʿrūḍāt render the
sultan responsible, but it also provided the institutional framework for the
Ottoman dynasty to become directly involved in the religious lives of male Mus-
lims in public by enforcing the congregational performance of the five daily
prayers in the masjids. The governors and judges of the empire were required
to comply with the opinions espoused in the Maʿrūḍāt even after Süleymān’s
reign. As expressed in the preface66 of the Maʿrūḍāt, throughout his career, the
chief jurist Ebū’s-suʿūd submitted his fatwas to Sultan Süleymān with an aim to
clarify many disputed jurisprudential issues and express his conviction to abide
by them.67 By doing so, the preface notes, Ebū’s-suʿūd selectively engaged with
the erstwhile authorities from age-old jurisprudential traditions for the neces-
sity to attain order in religion and state as well as regularity in the realm’s state
of affairs. In his turn, Sultan Süleymān promulgated decrees in accordance with
Ebū’s-suʿūd’s fatwas. Although the governors and the judges were accustomed
to abide by the opinions, the preface continues, some of them were resubmit-
ted in order to dispel doubts as to how to resolve the jurisprudential issues
after the renewal of the regal power with the succession of new sultans from

towards the Kızılbaş-Alevis in the Ottoman Empire during the tenth/sixteenth century.
For a very brief but insightful discussion on a call for a demanding task to historicize Mus-
lim conceptions of dīn that were marginalized by the traditions of scholarly Islam, see
Karamustafa, Islamic dīn 167–168. For some of the recent contributions on the Kızılbaş-
Alevis and the religious policies of the Ottoman authorities toward these communities,
see Baltacıoğlu-Brammer, The formation 21–48; Karakaya-Stump, The Kizilbash-Alevis;
Yıldırım, Turcomans between.
66 “Sultanım hazretleri arz-ı dâ‘i-i bî-minnetleri oldur ki; bundan akdem merhûm Şeyhülis-
lâm Müftî’l-enâm Allâme-i zamân Fehhâme-i evân Efdalü’l-mevcûd Mevlânâ Ebussuûd-
yesserallâhu’l-makâme’l-mahmûd Sultân-ı zemîn u zemân Halîfe-i Rabbi’l-âlemîn cennet-
mekân hümâ-yı kuds-âşiyân Ebu’l-feth en-nasr es-Sultân Süleyman Hân aleyhi’r-rahmetü
ve’r-rıdvân hazretlerine nizâm-ı dîn u devlet ve intizâm-ı ahvâl-i memleket iktizâ etmeğin
ba‘zı mesâilde eimme-i dinden ba‘zı müctehidin rıdvânullâhi teâlâ ecma‘în kavilleri üzere
amel eylemek münâsib olduğun arz buyurub ol minvâl üzre amel olunmağa ferman-ı sultânî
ve hükm-i cihân-bânî sâdır olub vülât-ı İslam ve kuzât-ı hükkâm ol vechile amele mu‘tad-
larıdır hâlen serîr-i saltanat ve pâye-i hilâfet tecdîd-i sânî ile mücedded olub hadîka-i saltanat
tâze behcet ve riyâz-ı hilâfet cedîd nusret bulıcak emr-i sultânî ve hükm-i hâkânî zikr olu-
nan mesâilde ne minvâl üzre idiğine iştibâh olmağın ahvâl müşkil olub keşf u beyân ve emr-i
Pâdişâhî ıyân buyurulmak recâsına vâki olam mevâddın ba‘zı arz olundu. Bâkî fermân men
lehu’l-emrindir. Halledellâhu sübhânehû ve teâlâ ve bi fazlihi.” See Ebussuûd, Ma‘rûzât 44.
67 For the significance of the Maʿrūḍāt, see Imber, Süleyman as caliph 180–182; Ayoub, “The
sulṭān says” 239–278.
attendance at the five daily congregational prayers 357

the Ottoman dynasty.68 Yet, it is important to keep in mind that when Sultan
Süleymān issued the decree in 944/1537–1538, the chief jurist was Saʿdī Çelebi
and the function of Ebū’s-suʿūd’s fatwa was just to affirm its continuing valid-
ity.
As the governors and judges were expected to follow the Maʿrūḍāt, the
consensus on the normative value of attending the five daily congregational
prayers retained its force in the eleventh/seventeenth century at the individual
and communal level. The work by Mevḳūfātī Meḥmed of Lesbos (d. 1065/1654)
provides an illustrative example of this continuity. While elaborating on the
compactly formulated opinion that the “five daily congregational prayers con-
stitute a confirmed sunna” (al-jamāʿa sunna muʾakkada) in Ibrāhīm al-Ḥalabī’s
Multaqā al-abḥur, Mevḳūfātī’s commentary seamlessly relates sunna to duty.
Unlike al-Ḥalabī’s long discussion on the subject in a separate book (Ghunyat
al-mutamallī), Mevḳūfātī clarifies the consensus in a laconic way: “[perform-
ing] five daily prayers in congregation constitutes a sunna that is tantamount
to a duty” (ḳuvvetde vācib mes̱ābesindedir).69 Gone are the rather lengthy jus-
tifications for resolving the incompatibility between sunna and duty from the
previous century.

4 Who Can Lead the Prayer? Imams as Models of Correct Practice

The Ottoman Hanafi jurists of Rum were not just concerned about the atten-
dance at the five daily congregational prayers. They were also preoccupied with
different ritual and moral duties related to imams that had a bearing on the
prayer itself. In his memorably pessimistic monologue on human experiences
across various strata of Ottoman society, the celebrated polymath Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī
(d. 1008/1600) described the challenges of imams in the following way:

Listen, O you who know the truth of things!

This speech will purify you in the way gold is purified. […]
The fight for one’s living is a universal calamity;
In it there is no exception for any individual. […]
Let us suppose you were an imam or a preacher. […]
Many have performed their ritual prayers behind you.
A wondrous self-conceitedness has appeared in you.

68 Ebussuûd, Ma‘rûzât 44.

69 Mevḳūfātī Meḥmed, Şerḥü’l-Mevḳūfātī i, 79. See also, Dāmād Efendi, Majmūʿa al-anḥur i,
161.
358 sünnetçı̇o ğlu

If you lack in regular attendance to your duty,

The judge will at once reprimand you.
If you commit an error contrary to Divine Law,
The civil administrators will sentence you to the punishment of the
whip.
If during the ritual prayer you break wind, […]
Then, the congregation that worshipped behind you
Will become the cause of your punishment.70

According to Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī, being an imam meant being under the watchful
eyes—and ears—of his neighborhood. Surely, to “break wind” may sound a
rather petty misdeed for the congregation that worshiped behind the imam
to “become the cause of his punishment” compared to “lack in regular atten-
dance,” or “an error contrary to shari‘a.” However, the misdeed in question does
not merely signify the imam’s ritual impurity (ḥadath) that risks the validity of
his congregation’s prayer. The additional layer of meaning is also reflected in
a common proverb, equally famous back then, as the Leṭāʾif of Lāmiʿī Çelebi
(d. 938/1532) suggests: “When the imam breaks wind—as this is to the people
a proverb well beknown—, then no wonder if the rest of the community shits,”
which might have inspired Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī’s choice of words.71 At stake is the com-
promised image of an imam (muḳtedā) as a model (ḳıdve) his neighborhood
should follow (iḳtidā).72 To serve as an imam was not confined to meeting the
ritual requirements. An imam had to display moral behavior. Practical skills in
leading the prayer as well as proper conduct in daily life had a bearing on an
imam’s career.
In their respective discussions on the evolving notions of Sunni orthodoxy
and orthopraxy among the Ottoman authorities between the mid-ninth/mid-
fifteenth and mid-tenth/mid-sixteenth centuries, Gülru Necipoğlu and Derin
Terzioğlu have suggested that the neighborhoods became the sites of social
disciplining and community monitoring.73 Necipoğlu emphasized that neigh-
borhoods (maḥalle) were reorganized in the tenth/sixteenth century around
the local masjids and represented by their imams and muezzins. They were
appointed by the royal diploma (berāt) based on the recommendation of the

70 Tietze, The poet 145, 156 (translated by Tietze).

71 Lāmiʿī Çelebi, Letāʾif 257b.
72 Ahterî, Ahterî-yi kebir 99, 750, 89.
73 Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan 47; Terzioğlu, How to conceptualize 315; Terzioğlu, Where ʿilm-
i ḥāl meets catechism 101.
attendance at the five daily congregational prayers 359

local community and paid from the masjid’s endowment.74 Necipoğlu and
Terzioğlu have also pointed to Ebū’s-suʿūd’s fatwas that discouraged atten-
dance at congregational prayers outside of one’s own neighborhood, which in
turn enabled imams, muezzins as well as the pious Sunni Muslims to moni-
tor regular attendance.75 However, while imams sought to enforce and sustain
piety as official intermediaries between the state authorities and the neighbor-
hoods, the communities, too, kept an eye on their imams. The neighbors could
also resist or even denounce the imams to the authorities. This mutual moral
surveillance upheld by the Hanafi school76 drew on a particular liturgical bond
between the imams and their congregations.
In terms of ritual requirements, in the Hanafi school the validity of the
prayers of the entire congregation depends on the validity of the imam’s prayer,
which in turn makes the imam liable to his congregants.77 This Hanafi opin-
ion is traceable among the scholars in the Ottoman lands of Rum as early as
the ninth/fifteenth century. Bedre’d-dīn adduces this opinion through a hadith:
“the imam constitutes the warrantor of the congregation’s prayer.”78 With ref-
erence to this hadith, Bedre’d-dīn formulates the legally binding norm as fol-
lows: “whether the congregation’s prayer is valid or void hinges on whether the
imam’s prayer is valid or void.”79 The responsibility of imams as “warrantor”
(ḍāmin) stands out as an important marker of difference for the Hanafi school
as Bedre’d-dīn explicitly contrasts it with the Shafi‘i opinion, which maintains
that praying behind an imam means praying in conformity with him and noth-
ing more and that the validity of his prayer is independent from the validity of
the congregation’s prayer.80 Bedre’d-dīn mentions that the basis of the Shafi‘i
opinion is a different hadith: “indeed, the imam is appointed just to be followed
[by those praying behind him].”81

74 Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan 47. It goes without saying that imams and muezzins were not
the only representatives of Muslim neighborhoods, nor were the neigborhoods strictly
divided as Muslim and non-Muslim neighborhoods. For an overview, see Ergenç, Osmanlı
şehrindeki “mahalle”nin 69–78.
75 Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan 49; Terzioğlu, How to conceptualize 315; Terzioğlu, Where ʿilm-
i ḥāl meets catechism 101.
76 The phenomenon of moral surveillance was an extension of the collective responsibility
(and liability) of a community that was bound together based on spatial proximity in the
form of a neighborhood or a village. On an essay as to the jurisprudential roots of collec-
tive responsibility and its development within the Ottoman period, see Canbakal, Some
questions 131–138. On the moral discourses of neighborly relations in the early modern
Ottoman history, see Tamdoğan-Abel, Les relations de voisinage 167–177.
77 Katz, Prayer 138, footnote 50.
78 Bedre’d-dīn, al-Tashīl i, 100.
79 Ibid.
80 Ibid. 101–102.
81 Ibid.
360 sünnetçı̇o ğlu

This difference of opinion between the two legal schools did not prevent
certain Hanafi congregations from praying behind Shafi‘i imams. The reason
appears to have been related to a chronic shortage of male Muslims capable
of leading the prayer in the Hanafi way. Judging from the questions posed to
the chief jurists from the tenth/sixteenth and the eleventh/seventeenth cen-
turies, the view that the imam is the “warrantor” to the validity of his congre-
gation’s prayer exercised a degree of influence in such circumstances, but at no
point was the opinion fully enforced in order to avoid discouraging attendance
at the daily congregational prayers. When a Hanafi congregation wondered
whether it is permissible to pray behind a Shafi‘i imam, for instance, Ebū’s-
suʿūd allowed the Shafi‘i imam to lead the Hanafi congregation, but with one
caveat: “it is permissible, if the Hanafi congregation feels convinced that the
Shafi‘i imam preserved his ritual purity throughout the act of worship (ābdes-
tinde ḥalel yok idüğüne ʿitiḳād edecek, olur).”82 Here, Ebū’s-suʿūd espouses the
Hanafi opinion about the imam being the “warrantor” in its rudimentary form,
while also recognizing the legitimacy of ritual differences between the Shafi‘i
imam and the Hanafi congregation at the same time.83 He does so by expect-
ing the Hanafi congregation to be attentive to the Shafi‘i imam’s ritual purity
rather than requiring the Shafi‘i imam to abide by the Hanafi way of leading
the prayer. In the same spirit, when Esʿad Efendi (d. 1034/1625) assents to the
court’s dismissal of a Shafi‘i imam on the grounds that the Hanafi congrega-
tion managed to find a Hanafi imam, he does so tactfully by avoiding the word
“dismissal” (ʿazl) in his answer: “it is appropriate for the judge to replace [the
imam].”84 Esʿad Efendi’s reasoning appears to be on a par with Ebū’s-suʿūd’s:
there is essentially no harm in prayer behind a Shafi‘i imam, an opinion of the
famous Transoxanian jurist Qādī Khān (d. 592/1196) that is indicated through
an annotation as a marginal note within the compilation of Esʿad Efendi’s fat-
was.85
Moreover, in line with the Hanafi school, Ottoman Rumi Hanafi jurists
thought that jurisprudential knowledge and recitation of the Quran consti-
tuted the two foremost qualities of a competent imam as both were inte-

82 Ebū’s-suʿūd, Fetāvā-yı Ebū’s-suʿūd 12b.

83 On the question of prayer behind an imam of another legal school, see Katz, Prayer 150–
155.
84 “Mesʾele: Bir mescid-i şerīfin cemāʿati cümle Ḥanefīü’l-mezheb iken mescid-i şerīfin imāmı
Şāʿfīü’l-meẕheb olsa cemāʿati imām-ı merkūmu imāmetinden ʿazl etdirüb Ḥanefiü’l-meẕheb-
i imāmı naṣb etdirmeğe ḳādir olurlar mı? El-cevāb: Ḥākime münāsib olan tebdīl etmekdir.”
See Esʿad Efendi, Fetāvā-yı müntehab 6a.
85 Ibid.
attendance at the five daily congregational prayers 361

gral to leading the prayer.86 Imams of such caliber certainly did exist. They
embodied the juristic ideal to maintain the correct performance of prayer as
painstakingly as physicians maintained the well-being of a human, a simile
drawn by the Ottoman scholar Ṭāşköprüzāde (d. 968/1561).87 Yet they were
by no means a norm and sources suggest that in some parts of the empire
capable imams were difficult to find, thus raising the question of the valid-
ity of many a congregation’s prayers.88 At times, the chief jurists had to cer-
tify the imams whose physical challenges would potentially disrupt the prayer
(e.g., inguinal hernia,89 deafness,90 epilepsy,91 senility,92 lameness,93 amputee-
ness,94 incontinence,95 blindness96). The reasoning is predictable—necessity
(żarūret)—since no other person knew how to perform the duty in the com-
munity.
Certainly, some places were more fortunate than others in having a pool of
qualified candidates. Take the case of Istanbul. The famous poet Ẕātī (d. 953/
1546), for instance, was rejected by his neighbors, when the imam of his neigh-
borhood decided to set out on a pilgrimage and thought Ẕātī worthy of tem-
porarily taking his place.97 It apparently made no difference that Ẕātī felt con-
fident enough in his knowledge of Islamic jurisprudence to even consider him-
self fit for a deputy-judgeship of Edirne, Bursa, and Istanbul.98 Judging from
Ẕātī’s background, however, his neighbors may have had good reasons for not
considering him as worthy of serving as an imam. Ẕātī came from a humble
artisan background rather than a family of jurists and had no known formal
training. Even though his gift in poetry opened the doors of powerful men from
the grand viziers to established scholars and even the sultan, he was not consid-
ered fit for this position.99 His poor hearing may have also played a role in being

86 Bedre’d-dīn, al-Tashīl i, 98; Mollā Hüsrev, Durar al-ḥukkām i, 68.

87 Ṭāşköprüzāde, Miftāḥ al-saʿāda 182.
88 At the turn of the tenth/sixteenth century, Prince Ḳorḳud (d. 919/1513) complained to his
father Sultan Bāyezīd II by noting that in the countryside Muslims are religiously illiterate
and the daily prayers are neglected. See Fleischer, From Şeyhzade Korkud 71.
89 Ebū’s-suʿūd, Fetāvā-yı Ebū’s-suʿūd 19a.
90 Esʿad Efendi, Fetāvā-yı müntehab 6a.
91 Zekerīyāzāde Yaḥyā, Fetāvā-yı Yaḥyā Çelebī 3a.
92 Ibid. 2a.
93 Minḳārīzāde Yaḥyā, Fetāvā-yı ʿAṭāʾullāh 6a.
94 Çatalcalı Ali, Açıklamalı i, 20.
95 Feyzullah Efendi, Fetâvâ-yı Feyziyye 9.
96 Yenişehirli Abdullah, Behcetü’l-fetâvâ 35.
97 Çavuşoğlu, Zâtî’nin letâyifi 44.
98 Ibid. 41.
99 Kim, The last of an age 31–49; Çavuşoğlu, Zâtî’nin letâyifi 41.
362 sünnetçı̇o ğlu

rejected (“Ẕātī, your hardness of hearing makes an office impossible for you,”
he was told by the court officials100) since ability to hear well was important
for imams to lead the prayers as well as to fulfill administrative responsibilities
of a neighborhood.
At one level, the qualifications expected from an imam to lead a formally
correct prayer overlapped with the qualifications that were desirable for his
moral duty to guide Muslims to live a pious and law-abiding life. As Mollā
Fenārī tellingly puts in his discussion on the concept of forbidding (al-nahy),
vices (qubuḥ) are of two kinds: those (qubuḥ li-ʿaynihi) that one can discern
merely by physical senses (ʿan al-ḥissiyāt) “such as drinking wine, fornication,
or homicide,” and those (qubuḥ li-ghayrihi) that one can fully grasp by recourse
to sharia (ʿan al-sharīʿāt) in matters “such as prayer, sale, marriage, or rent.”101
Even when they met these standards, some imams did not know enough Ara-
bic to even recite a verse from the Quran without distorting its meaning,102 let
alone being able to read texts on the matters of law and piety. Seen in this light,
lacking the qualifications that the jurists expected from imams could at times
become a barrier to upholding law and religion of sharia in the neighborhoods
or villages no less than leading the prayer in a correct manner. This juncture
between the knowledge necessary for leading the prayer and offering moral
guidance may be compared, as Terzioğlu suggests, with Protestant and Catholic
parishes of Europe, which were similarly faced with lack of qualified person-
nel for the religious and social disciplining of local communities throughout
the early modern period.103
This convergence between the ritual and moral aspects of serving as an
imam brought to the fore another debate rooted in the history of Islamic
jurisprudence: the question of whether or not congregational prayer behind a
sinful imam is permissible. The basic contours of the debate, including both
legal and moral points of view, are traceable to the medieval period. As a
renowned Andalusian Maliki jurist Ibn Rushd (Averroes, d. 595/1198) notes in
his book on differences of opinion, the question is a matter of debate among
the Sunni schools of law. At one end of the spectrum, some held that the ability
to lead the congregation correctly was the sole criterion, an opinion that flows
from a legal rationale. At the other end of the spectrum, others viewed sinful
imams through a moral lens. By drawing on an analogy (qiyās) with witnessing,
they held that an imam must be a person of probity (ʿadl). Accordingly, just as

100 Kim, The last of an age 37.

101 Mollā Fenārī, Fuṣūl al-badāʾiʿ ii, 41.
102 Minḳārīzāde Yaḥyā, Fetāvā-yı ʿAṭāʾullāh 8a.
103 Terzioğlu, How to conceptualize 322.
attendance at the five daily congregational prayers 363

one must trust a witness to tell the truth, one must trust an imam to perform
a valid prayer behind him. Thus, the unreliability of an imam would invalidate
the prayer.104
Tijana Krstić traced the echoes of this debate in Ottoman catechisms from
the latter part of Sultan Süleymān’s reign, which were written to instruct
Turkish-speaking Rumi Muslims in the basics of creed and piety. She observes
that authors like ʿAbdu’r-raḥmān bin Yūsuf Aḳsarāyī, Birgivī Meḥmed, and Lüṭfī
Pasha emphasized that one of the key attributes of belonging to “the people
of the Sunna [True Path] and the Community” was following imams in con-
gregational prayers regardless of whether they are sinful Muslims or not.105
Krstić suggests that this jurisprudential view was implicitly connected with
how Ottoman Sunni Hanafis envisaged imamate vis-à-vis sin in contrast to the
Safavid Shi‘ites. As Krstić suggests, it is not a coincidence that ʿAbdu’r-raḥmān
bin Yūsuf Aḳsarāyī discusses the question of prayer behind a sinful imam in the
context of a summary of the Sunni creed.106 She maintains that Aḳsarāyī here
contrasts the Sunni view that “imams are not expected to be infallible or with-
out sin,” with the Shi‘ite belief that the imam was immaculate. Some of the
opponents of the Friday congregational prayer in the Safavid Empire argued
that in the absence of the immaculate imam, who was in occultation, or of his
designated representative, the Friday prayer was in abeyance and the shah did
not have the right to convene it.107
While in the Sunni tradition the question of the infallibility of the imam
as a political leader may seem a separate matter from the question of a sin-
ful imam as a prayer leader, the two were in fact linked. The link between the
imām al-kubrā (greater imam, i.e., ruler) and imām al-ṣughrā (lesser imam, i.e.,
prayer leader) persisted within the Sunni tradition. It was due to this link that
the Ottoman Rumi Hanafi jurists also had the “greater imam” in mind while
discussing the jurisprudential question of prayer behind a sinful imam. This
link finds expression in Mollā Hüsrev’s (d. 885/1480) discussion on the anal-
ogy drawn between a witness and an imam. Although Mollā Hüsrev himself
thought that prayer behind a sinful imam is permissible,108 he did not fail to
explain the basis of opposing moral opinion within the Hanafi school. As I dis-
cussed above, the necessity for an imam to be a person of probity was based

104 Katz, Prayer 142.

105 Krstić, State and religion 72, 74, 75.
106 Ibid. 72.
107 Ibid. On different arguments in the Safavid debate regarding the Friday prayer, see Stewart,
Polemics and patronage, esp. 428.
108 Mollā Hüsrev, Durar al-ḥukkām i, 68.
364 sünnetçı̇o ğlu

on an analogy with the question of who deserves to be a witness. Analogy with

a witness, Mollā Hüsrev noted, is not confined to prayer leaders (al-imāma),
but also includes the guardians (al-wilāya), the judges (al-qaḍāʾ), and the rulers
(al-salṭana).109 In light of Mollā Hüsrev’s explanation, it makes sense why, as
Krstić notes, ʿAbdu’r-raḥmān bin Yūsuf Aḳsarāyī wrote “imams are not expected
to be infallible or without sin,” while maintaining that prayer behind a sinful
imam is permissible.110 What he meant was that in the Sunni tradition, imams
were not expected to be infallible, whether they were prayer leaders or rulers.
By doing so, ʿAbdu’r-raḥmān bin Yūsuf Aḳsarāyī implicitly highlighted the link
between the ruler and the prayer leader in order to contrast it with the Shi‘ite
tradition.
Nevertheless, as far as jurisprudence goes, the question of “prayer behind a
sinful imam” was more complex than the pithy language of catechisms would
have us believe. In the rest of the section, I discuss how Ottoman Hanafi jurists
of Rum allowed room for invoking one Hanafi opinion (prayer behind a sin-
ful imam is permissible) over the other (imam must be a person of probity). I
contend that this was a matter of weighing conflicting norms and values inher-
ent in the difference of opinion between Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 150/767) and Abū
Yūsuf (d. 182/798): on the one hand, praying behind a sinful imam was a legally
binding norm. Demanding an unwavering moral compass from an imam was
conducive to inviting social unrest. On the other hand, failure to hold a “sin-
ful imam” accountable could corrode religious values. In order to demonstrate
how the Ottoman jurists assessed the applicability of these two opinions, I
focus on two fatwas issued by the chief jurist Ebū’s-suʿūd with reference to
the discussions of Ottoman Rumi Hanafi jurists from the ninth/fifteenth to
the eleventh/seventeenth centuries. By doing so, I discuss how the question
of prayer behind a sinful imam betrays the dual authority of muftis, be they
the chief jurist or provincial muftis. As a legal authority, the mufti declared the
legally binding norms to the courts. But, as a religious authority, he explained
the moral dimensions of law. This dual phenomenon is also noteworthy for his-
toricizing the normative discourses of Sunni Islam with an eye to distinguish
its legal and moral aspects.111
The first fatwa centers on a famous hadith that encapsulates the mainstream
Sunni position regarding the permissibility of prayer behind a sinful imam. The
hadith constitutes the basis of the opinion attributed to Abū Ḥanīfa and urges

109 Ibid. ii, 270.

110 Krstić, State and religion 72.
111 See Johansen, Die sündige 246–282.
attendance at the five daily congregational prayers 365

the congregations to pray behind imams, be they virtuous Muslims or not.112

The fatwa answers the question of whether the hadith can legitimately be acted
upon:

Question: “Pray behind every virtuous and sinful person.” Is this hadith
sound? Is it permissible to abide by it?
Answer: Yes. Follow your official. Do not breach and foment civil distur-
bance because he commits sins. That is what it means.113

As evident from the answer, Ebū’s-suʿūd does not only confirm that the hadith
is applicable, but also explains how his contemporaries should interpret it. “Fol-
low your official,” Ebū’s-suʿūd notes, to signify a legally binding norm derived
from the hadith that deters Muslims from confronting an imam through a
refusal to congregate behind him for prayer. The moral condition of imams as
state officials (ehl-i berāt)114 does not provide a legitimate basis for the con-
gregations abandoning their masjids. Quite to the contrary, this collective act
means a “breach” that invites “civil disturbance” in daily life.
In legal terms, Ebū’s-suʿūd considers both a sinful and a virtuous Muslim
equally suitable to serve as a prayer leader.115 By doing so, he censures recourse
to unrest as a means of forbidding wrong. At stake is not merely the duty of
regular attendance at the five daily prayers and the Friday noon prayer, but also
the preservation of stability in everyday life, which are concerns that Ottoman
Rumi Hanafi jurists shared before and after Ebū’s-suʿūd. From the ninth/fif-
teenth century, even Bedre’d-dīn, who was convicted by the Ottoman govern-
ment as one of the leading figures behind a massive rebellion, invoked the same
hadith to convey his opinion that mirrors Ebū’s-suʿūd’s.116 As Bedre’d-dīn puts
it, from a moral point of view, a person who commits sins cannot be both-
ered to observe religious matters (lā yahtammu bi-amr dīnihi); nevertheless,
even though it is reprehensible, it is legally permissible to pray behind a sinful

112 Wensick, The Muslim creed 220–221; Katz, Prayer 147–148.

113 “Mes’ele: Ṣallū khalfa kulli barrin wa fājirin hadisi sahih olup anın ile ‘amel câiz olur mu?
Elcevab: Câizdir. ‘Emîrinize ittiba’ edin, fâcirdir diye hulf edip, isâre-i fitne etmen’ demektir.”
See Ebussuud, Şeyhülislam 177.
114 İnalcık, Osmanlılar’da raiyyet rüsûmu 596–597, 598.
115 Based on her discussion of Kemālpaşazāde’s fatwas on Sufi rituals in the context of the
conversion of ʿimārets/zāviyes into mosques, Çiğdem Kafescioğlu’s article in this volume
shows that if the words and deeds of imams signified unbelief, prayers performed behind
imams were considered null and void. By doing so, Kafescioğlu highlights that Kemāl-
paşazāde’s fatwas resonate with Ebū’s-suʿūd’s.
116 See also Chiwīzāde, al-Īthār 176.
366 sünnetçı̇o ğlu

imam because of the hadith.117 In the eleventh/seventeenth century, Mevḳū-

fātī Meḥmed makes a similar case for the permissibility while acknowledging
its reprehensibility (emr-i dīnde ihtimāmı olmadığıçūn). He even goes a step
further and evokes the topos of historia magistra vitae by invoking an exem-
plum from a politically volatile period of Umayyad history in order to stress
the necessity of peace by congregating behind an imam regardless of his sins.
Many of the Prophet Muḥammad’s Companions and their immediate succes-
sors (ṣaḥābe ve tābiʿūndan çoḳ kimesne) continued to pray behind the notorious
governor al-Ḥajjāj bin Yūsuf al-Thaqafī (d. 95/714), whom Mevḳūfātī describes
as the tyrant Ḥajjāj (Ḥaccāc-ı ẓālim).118 Clearly, the act of renouncing the prayer
behind sinful imams was understood to have subversive connotations.
Despite the legal opinion that enjoined Muslims to pray behind a sinful
imam, we do know that just like judges,119 imams could also be dismissed,120
although how the Ottoman jurists discussed the practice of dismissals has not
been explored.121 Ebū’s-suʿūd’s other fatwa demonstrates how it was possible,
if not always achievable, for the congregations to hold a “sinful imam” account-
able to the standards of probity, in cases when they had recourse to legitimate
means of forbidding wrong:

Question: If the people of a neighborhood say “We are aware that the
imam-preacher Zeyd does not refrain from interacting with unrelated
women, committing forbidden acts, and lying, but we cannot prove it. We
are loath to pray behind him” about the imam-preacher of their mosque,
can they have him dismissed?
Answer: Yes, as long as those who are loath to pray are the righteous of
the neighborhood.122

117 Bedre’d-dīn, al-Tashīl i, 98.

118 Mevḳūfātī Meḥmed, Şerḥü’l-Mevḳūfātī i, 80. See also, Dāmād Efendī, Majmūʿa al-anḥur i,
163.
119 İnalcık, Adâletnâmeler 75–79, especially 78.
120 Jennings, Limitations of the judicial powers 177–178; Majer, Ulema 111; Beydilli, Osmanlı
döneminde imamlar 6–7; Özcan, Osmanlı mahallesi 138–140.
121 This does not mean that there was no distinction between the court-binding norms
and religious-ethical norms. See Johansen, Die sündige 246–282. For a recent article that
underscores the necessity to incorporate jurisprudential debates into our analyses of court
cases, see Aykan, Property between life and death 211–228; See also, Ibid., Rendre la justice
à Amid, especially, 162–226.
122 “Mes’ele: Bir câmi’in mahallesi halkı imam hatib olan Zeydin ‘nâ-mahrem avret ile mu’âme-
lesin ve haramdan ve kizbden ictinâb etmediğine bizim ıttılâ’ımız oldu, amma isbâta kâdir
değiliz, istikrah ettik iktidâ etmeziz’ deseler azl ettirmeğe kâdir olurlar mı? Elcevāb: Olurlar,
mahallenin eslehâsı istikrah edicek.” See Ebussuud, Şeyhülislam 68.
attendance at the five daily congregational prayers 367

Here, the “people of neighborhood” raise the question of prayer behind a

sinful imam. Differing from the previous fatwa, civil disturbance is not nec-
essarily a matter of concern as the neighborhood disputes the imam through
legal channels. “We are loath to pray behind him,” the neighborhood declares
and demands dismissal because in their eyes Zeyd fails to live up to the religious
and moral codes by “interacting with unrelated women, committing forbidden
acts, and lying.”
As far as the evidentiary circumstances are concerned, however, the neigh-
borhood faces challenges.123 They resort to an expression “we are aware of it,
but cannot prove it,” whereby they admit the conjectural basis of their alle-
gations. Moreover, their lack of evidence is compounded by the imam’s higher
status in the social hierarchy and the fact that contemporary sultanic lawbooks
(ḳānūnnāmes) envisioned different punishments for different social strata. The
lawbooks stipulated that the discretionary punishment for culpable imams was
admonition instead of the usual more severe sanctions.124 Against these odds,
the neighborhood resorted to witnessing en masse in order to bypass the strict
evidentiary requirements. This strategy was “one of the most convincing indi-
cators of the collective competency of the community in the use of the judicial
process to advance its own interests,” as Boğaç Ergene observes in similar cases
where the defendant was an official or a member of the elite.125 Ebū’s-suʿūd’s
answer clearly shows the effectiveness of collective witnessing. He rules that
the imam could indeed be dismissed “as long as those who are loath to pray are
the righteous of the neighborhood.” By this caveat, he refers to a court proce-
dure through which social credibility, honesty, and ability of witnesses to testify
before the judge was established.126
The point Ebū’s-suʿūd makes is that to say “we are loath to pray behind
him” cannot lead to an imam’s dismissal if its association with a feeling of
dislike is arbitrary. This opinion carried its influence well into the eleventh/
seventeenth century. In other words, while the permissibility of prayer behind
a sinful imam was still the norm, the moral opinion that the imam should be a

123 Interestingly, when it comes to the judges, within advice-to-sultans literature, Hans Georg
Majer shows that a number of Ottoman authors from Lüṭfī Pasha (d. 970/1563) to Ṣarı
Meḥmed Pasha (d. 1129/1717) emphasized the necessity to dismiss them after recurring
violations rather than one or two complaints or as a result of an investigation based on
sound proof. See Majer, Die Kritik an den Ulema 147, 149–150.
124 Akgündüz (ed.), Kanûni devri kanunnâmeleri iv/i, 318; Ibid. vi/ii, 487; Akgündüz (ed.), Selim
devri kanunnâmeleri vii/ii, 356.
125 Ergene, Local court 151.
126 This procedure was called “witness reliability verification” (tezkīye). See Coşgel and
Ergene, The economics of Ottoman justice 72–73, 226–231.
368 sünnetçı̇o ğlu

man of probity remained legitimate as long as the demands for dismissals were
not arbitrary. For instance, the chief jurist Minḳārīzāde Yaḥyā (d. 1088/1678) was
asked:

Question: If some people harbor animosity towards imam Zeyd, but if his
state of affairs does not necessitate dismissal in any way, can they have
him dismissed by the judge with an appeal “we do not want Zeyd”?
Answer: No.127

The fatwa makes it clear that if the reasons do not ring true with any “condition
that necessitates dismissal,” appeals against an imam are bound to be rejected.
As Minḳārīzāde Yaḥyā’s naysay indicates, the chief jurists did not authorize the
dismissal of an imam just because the congregation disliked him. In support
of his fatwa, Minḳārīzāde cites an authoritative text of the Hanafi school, al-
Fatāwā l-Tātārkhāniya. From this citation, we learn that the fatwa’s genealogy
goes as far back as one of the three founding scholars of Hanafi school, Abū
Yūsuf, and his own discussion of prayer behind a sinful imam. For Abū Yūsuf,
the people of a neighborhood cannot render an imam unwanted “unless he is
sinful” (illā ʿan yakūna fāsiqan),128 where a “sinful person” denotes a status that
is the exact opposite of a person of probity.129 As such, Minḳārīzāde’s fatwa ulti-
mately hinges on Abū Yūsuf’s opinion which not only underscores the moral
duty of imams to be persons of probity but also safeguards imams from unjus-
tifiable dismissals by the standard that probity itself imposes. In this respect,
Ebū’s-suʿūd’s two different answers for the question of prayer behind a sin-
ful imam suggests a weighing of opposing Hanafi opinions with an eye to the
circumstances of a case, and especially its bearing on community order and
morality.

5 Conclusion

This paper has discussed how the leading Hanafi jurists provided the Ottoman
dynasty with a legal and moral idiom to discipline its male Muslim subjects by

127 “Mesʾele: Bir maḥallede vāḳiʿ mescidde imām olan Zeyd’in bir vechile ʿazlin icāb ider ḥāli yok
iken cemāʿatden baʿżī kimesneler Zeyd’e garaż ve taʿaṣṣub idüb ḥākime Zeyd’i istemeziz deyu
ʿazl etdirmeğe ḳādir olurlar mı? El-cevāb: Olmazlar.” Minḳārīzāde Yaḥyā, Fetāvā-yı ʿAṭāʾullāh
7b.
128 Ibid.
129 Gardet, Fāsık 834.
attendance at the five daily congregational prayers 369

enforcing the congregational performance of the five daily prayers. By contex-

tualizing the famous decree on the construction of masjids in Muslim villages
with reference to imperial rivalries and religious politics in the long tenth/six-
teenth century, the paper highlights the Ottoman reception of two age-old
debates that shaped the history of Sunni Islam: the normative value of the five
daily congregational prayers and prayer behind a sinful imam. The cases dis-
cussed here illustrate that by carefully examining how the Ottoman political
and legal authorities inherited and participated in the long-standing jurispru-
dential questions like these, we can see how they understood the Hanafi and
Sunni tradition as well as its relationship to political authority and its increas-
ing aspirations to regulate the moral well-being of the Muslim subjects.
When it comes to the normative value of the five daily congregational
prayers, the paper demonstrates that the decree was informed by the decision
of the leading jurists and the sultan to promote the coercive function of the
state in order to respond to the challenges of religious pluralism and legiti-
macy which were especially intensified by imperial rivalries after the turn of the
tenth/sixteenth century. Central to the imperial policy of coercing the atten-
dance was the question of prayer behind a sinful imam. As opposed to the
question of whether the five daily congregational prayers constituted a duty
for the adult male Muslims to observe and for the sultan to enforce, where
the jurists opted for a more top-down, interventionist solution, prayer behind a
sinful imam remained a thorny question that was receptive to the moral reser-
vations arising from the Muslim congregations. On the one hand, this pressure
from “below” was part of a long-established dynamic of governance. One the
other, however, this was the time of evolving Sunni sensibilities among the
common Muslims due to attempts to increase their understanding of what con-
stitutes correct practice and belief through preaching and closer attention to
public expressions of piety, especially in the cities. The paper, thus, suggests
that Ottoman Sunnitization was a multidirectional process that negotiated var-
ious legal and moral registers of Islam that were themselves constantly evolving
in pace with the developing Ottoman polity.

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the editors Tijana Krstić and Derin Terzioğlu, as well as
Yavuz Aykan, Aslıhan Gürbüzel, Cemal Kafadar, Ana Sekulić, and the anony-
mous reviewers for their feedback. The research for this article was supported
by the OTTOCONFESSION project and the Gerda Henkel Foundation. All trans-
lations are mine unless otherwise stated.
370 sünnetçı̇o ğlu

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 chapter 11

Piety and Presence in the Postclassical Sultanic

Mosque

Ünver Rüstem

When, in 989/1581, the Ottoman historian Gelibolulu Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī (d. 1008/
1600) wrote that only those sultans who had successfully waged holy war
should build religious foundations, he was spelling out an attitude that must
have been widely shared at the time, and that continues to inform modern per-
ceptions of Ottoman architecture.1 The idea that even the sovereign should be
bound by codes of decorum was well enough accepted that ʿĀlī’s dictum—a
passage from his famous Counsel for sultans (Nüṣḥatü’s-selāṭīn)—was intended
for no less a reader than Murād III (r. 982–1003/1574–1595), who himself re-
frained from erecting a mosque in Istanbul because of his relatively humble
military achievements. Underscoring the association between empire build-
ing and imperial building were the numerous mosques that Murād’s more
successful predecessors had added to the Ottoman capital since its conquest.
This series of monuments culminated in 964/1557 with the completion of the
mighty hilltop complex of Süleymān the Magnificent (r. 926–974/1520–1566),
whose transformative intervention in the cityscape was to remain unrivaled
until the early eleventh/seventeenth century, when the young Aḥmed I (r. 1012–
1026/1603–1617) decided to flout convention and build a great mosque despite
having no significant victories to his name.2
Aḥmed’s apparent disregard for the rules has helped to make his mosque
a turning point in modern art-historical accounts, which have tended to view
the building as an overblown vanity project that ushered in not only aesthetic
decline, but also semiotic attenuation. After the tenth/sixteenth century, the
story goes, the imperial mosque ceased to be a convincing emblem of the
state’s gāzī (holy warrior) ideology, and scholars have often treated later exam-
ples of the genre as if they were conceived and viewed outside the codified

1 ʿĀlī, Counsel i, 54, 146, quoted and discussed in Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan 60.
2 Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan 207–222, 256–257, 511; Rüstem, The spectacle. For an overview of
the sultanic mosque and its symbolism, see Crane, Ottoman sultan’s mosques. For an analy-
sis of the “rule” described by Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī and the strategies developed in response to it, see
Budak, “The temple of the incredulous.”

© ünver rüstem, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004440296_012

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
piety and presence in the postclassical sultanic mosque 377

religiopolitical framework that we take for granted in relation to earlier cen-

turies.3 My aim here is to challenge this interpretation by demonstrating the
ways in which notions of religious—and specifically Sunni—propriety and
triumphalism remained key to the postclassical sultanic mosque, even as the
empire’s expansion slowed and eventually stopped. Far from overturning the
standards that made such architecture meaningful, the later mosques renegoti-
ated them in response to changing circumstances, engendering new visual, cer-
emonial, and discursive strategies by which to maintain the sultanate’s image as
the spearhead of Islamic orthodoxy. Above all, the reformulation of the impe-
rial mosque was underpinned by, and itself contributed to, a new model of king-
ship that increasingly emphasized the ruler’s auspicious presence in the capital
as a benevolent steward over his subjects. This development, which spanned
the eleventh/seventeenth and twelfth/eighteenth centuries, is exemplified by
three monuments that will punctuate my discussion: the aforementioned Sul-
tan Ahmed Mosque (1018–1026/1609–1617), the Nuruosmaniye Mosque (1161–
1169/1748–1755), and the Beylerbeyi Mosque (1191–1192/1777–1778).4 Each mark-
ing a pivotal juncture in the imperial mosque’s adaptive evolution, these build-
ings testify to the resourcefulness with which the sultans, together with their
architects and advisers, continued to profit from the legitimating force of this
building type, whose status at the apex of the Ottoman architectural hier-
archy endured precisely because of such readiness to depart from classical
norms.

1 Victory without Conquest: The Sultan Ahmed Mosque and Devout

Display

Notwithstanding the declinist terms in which they have sometimes seen it,
scholars are justified in identifying the Sultan Ahmed Mosque as a break from
established practice (figure 11.1).5 The monument caused quite the stir in its
own time, for Aḥmed’s decision to build it was from the outset understood as
problematic. The issue was twofold: having conquered no enemy territories,
the sultan possessed neither the prestige for such self-commemoration nor the

3 For an extreme instance of this view, see Lewis, What went wrong? 137.
4 This discussion draws heavily on Rüstem, The spectacle, and Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque.
5 For the mosque, see Fetvacı, Music, light and flowers; Goodwin, A history of Ottoman archi-
tecture 342–349; Kuban, Ottoman architecture 361–369; Nayır, Osmanlı mimarlığında Sultan
Ahmet Külliyesi 35–133; Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan 514–518.
378 rüstem

figure 11.1 Sultan Ahmed Mosque, Istanbul, 1018–1026/1609–1617, with the royal pavilion
on the left protruding from the prayer hall
© Arnstein Rønning / Wikimedia Commons

war booty with which to fund it. His clerics urged him to direct his resources
instead toward the invasion of Christian lands, especially Crete, and the grand
mufti added that the mosque’s intended site next to the Hippodrome was not
populated enough to necessitate a new house of worship.6 But Aḥmed pushed
on regardless, and though, according to the French traveler Guillaume-Joseph
Grelot (d. after 1680), the mosque was initially dubbed “Imansis Gianisi” (īmān-
sız cāmiʿsi)—Mosque of the Faithless—by its detractors,7 it soon won general
acceptance and even acclaim, with various contemporary and later observers
extolling its superlative beauty.
The ultimately positive response to Aḥmed’s transgression was facilitated
by numerous sympathetic voices who found ways to vindicate the project. The
sultan’s own imam, Muṣṭafā Ṣāfī (d. 1025/1616), authored a eulogistic chronicle
in which Aḥmed is recast as a successful champion of Sunnism, particularly

6 Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan 514–515; Rüstem, The spectacle 254–256; Sâfî, Zübdetü’t-tevârîh i,
51; Fetvacı, Music, light and flowers 234.
7 Grelot, A late voyage 212 (where the historical English translation is “Temple of the Incredu-
lous”); Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan 515.
piety and presence in the postclassical sultanic mosque 379

with regard to his suppression in 1017/1608 of the rebellious Celalis, who were
often branded Kızılbaş—that is, Shi‘is—by their opponents.8 Implicit in Ṣāfī’s
defense is the view that the sultan’s victory over heterodox rebels already qual-
ified him as a gāzī entitled to build, an opinion also recorded in a dispatch
written by the English ambassador Thomas Glover (d. 1625) in late 1609, when
the foundations were being dug:

[T]he Gran Sig:r in respecte of his victorie againste the [Celali] Rebells
in Asia, or in that he hath, contrarie to all mens expectations, soe sud-
daynlie subdued and whollie rooted them out, hath comaunded to pull
downe many goodlie and sumptuous pallaces, belonginge to some of his
vizereis or vizereis sonnes (payinge them well for it) and insteade therof
to be builte a verie sumptuous church or Meskite, which shall be big-
ger then any as yet in Constant:ple and to be named by his name, Sultan
Achomat.9

As if to confirm the mosque’s connection to his anti-Shi‘i zeal, Aḥmed declared

war on the Safavids shortly after the foundations were laid.
But not everyone can have been convinced that Aḥmed had done enough
to deserve such a monument. Glover himself gives a quite different reason for
the construction in a dispatch written only a few months later, linking the
project to a dangerous ailment of the throat that was causing the sultan to
choke on his food. Because it was “iudged by the wiseste, that this happeneth,
rather by the permition of the Allmightie, then otherwise,” Aḥmed felt com-
pelled

to betake himselfe to an extraordynarie devotion, and whollie to have

his conversation amongste Sofies [Sufis], and Dervishes, as much to saye,
purytans … and it is reported that this accident is the onlie cause of the
buildinge of the sumptuous Meschit … thinkinge that therby he shall, not
onlie obtayne salvation of his soule, but that the Allmightie will with-
drawe this dreadfull infirmitie from him, beinge therto counselled and
assured, by all his above named Sofies, and his cheefe ministers, and
inpticuller his Muftie; whoe sayeth to have seene a vision, or a dreame,

8 Sâfî, Zübdetü’t-tevârîh i, 48. On the Ottoman authorities’ attempts to smear the Celalis as
heretics, see Olson, The siege of Mosul 36n82; Zarinebaf, Qızılbash “heresy.”
9 Dispatch dated 22 October 1609, The National Archives, UK (henceforth TNA), SP 97/6, 139a,
quoted in Rüstem, The spectacle 257. See also Avcıoğlu, Ahmed I 219.
380 rüstem

that unlesse this be performed wth. a good will and harte, without any
sparinge of gould or sylver, or any mans laboure, (allsoe with contynu-
all prayers to theire divill Mahoma, or Mahemet) the Gran Sigr. is like to
incurre a verie speedie danger of his life.10

Although Glover’s account seems at first to contradict the more usual claims
that the ulama advised against the mosque, the situation he describes is no
less tense, with the clerics using the project almost to reprove the frightened
sultan. Glover adds that these clerics assured Aḥmed that, as well as curing his
condition, the mosque would bring “greate and incredible victories, againste
all the Gran Sig:rs enemies, whersoever he shall please to wage any warre.” Even
according to this account, then, the building’s legitimacy was predicated on the
idea that Aḥmed would at least retroactively fulfill the expectation of a suitable
martial victory. The conquest of Crete remained the favorite hope, but the sul-
tan’s apparent willingness to take up the challenge bore no fruit, and even the
war he had launched against the Safavids came to nothing.11
If Aḥmed’s military credentials were undeniably lacking, he and his backers
were savvy to other means by which to promote the mosque, with ceremonial
emerging as a major component of this campaign. It was already customary
to mark constructional milestones when putting up a new imperial mosque,
and much was made in particular of the foundation-laying and inauguration,
which were typically celebrated with processions, thanksgiving prayers, sacri-
fices, and the distribution of gifts.12 With the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, however,
this traditional pageantry was taken to unprecedented heights. The building
was thus heralded by two foundation ceremonies, during the first of which the
sultan personally dug the ground with a silver mattock. This direct and unusual
act of participation not only signaled his humble devotion to the endeavor, but
also alluded to a future Cretan invasion by harking back to a ninth/fifteenth-
century practice whereby the sultan would lay the first stone of his mosque
before setting off on campaign.13 Aḥmed’s viziers and janissaries by turns fol-
lowed him in the act of digging, prolonging the ceremony by a week. The

10 Dispatch dated 27 January 1610 (1609 old style), TNA, SP 97/6, 150a–b, copied also on 151a–
b. Quoted in Rüstem, The spectacle 256.
11 Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan 514, 516; Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire 188–189.
12 For examples over the centuries, see Barkan, Süleymaniye Cami ve İmareti 48, 58–59; Bates,
The patronage of Süleyman 67, 70; Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan 60, 143; Neftçi, Nuruos-
maniye Camii açılış töreni; Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque 123–124, 132–133; Rüstem, Victory
102–104, 112n44.
13 Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan 60, 516; Rüstem, The spectacle 266–267.
piety and presence in the postclassical sultanic mosque 381

public, meanwhile, was gratified with gifts of sacrificial meat, so that all levels
of society were implicated in the project from the moment of its commence-
ment.14
Other ceremonies soon followed, including the celebration of the Prophet
Ṃuhammad’s nativity, the Mevlid, in 1019/1610, when the building site was
installed with cushioned sofas for the men of state and religion. In 1023/1614,
while the walls were still being raised, the mosque began to host the Mevlid on
an annual basis, introducing a more inclusive ceremony in which refreshments
were offered to high and low alike (figure 11.2).15 The mosque’s association with
the Mevlid, which continues to this day, swiftly secured it a distinctive ritual
profile, no mean feat in a city already teeming with religious monuments. Such
use of the site also capitalized on Aḥmed’s reputation for uncommon piety, a
trait repeatedly hailed in Muṣṭafā Ṣāfī’s chronicle and other sources.16
But the most spectacular episode in the mosque’s ceremonial life occurred
in Jumādā II 1026/June 1617, when a grand celebration took place to mark the
closing of the central dome. Held only a few months before the official open-
ing, the dome-closing ceremony allowed Aḥmed to announce the completion
of his monument with far greater fanfare than afforded by the more formalized
protocol of an inauguration proper. Basic details of the ceremony have long
been known from the standard chronicles, where it is usually confused with the
opening itself, but I was fortunate enough to stumble upon and publish an oth-
erwise overlooked manuscript that provides a thorough monographic account
of the event written within a few months of its occurrence by an anonymous
author.17 While the ceremony included such expected elements as lavish gift-
giving and a splendid cavalcade from and back to the Topkapı Palace, it was in
other ways a highly distinctive affair. Its ostensible raison d’ être—the closing of
the dome—was staged to great effect in clear view of the Hippodrome, where
thousands of onlookers were treated to the sight of the dome being crowned
with a symbolic capstone and a gilt crescent finial. The moment was spiritually
overseen by a party of clerics and grandees whom the sultan, the manuscript
tells us, had instructed to “climb and close [bağla-] the lofty dome with prayer
and eulogy.”18 Chief among them was the revered Sufi shaykh Maḥmūd Hüdāyī

14 Rüstem, The spectacle 266–267.

15 Fetvacı, Music, light and flowers 237–239; Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan 516; Rüstem, The
spectacle 267–270.
16 See, for example, Sâfî, Zübdetü’t-tevârîh i, esp. lxxx, 24–48; Hammer-Purgstall, Geschichte
iv, 492–493; Rüstem, The spectacle 285–286.
17 Rüstem, The spectacle, where the manuscript is discussed, transliterated, translated, and
reproduced.
18 Rüstem, The spectacle 267, 328, 337–338.
382 rüstem

figure 11.2 View of the celebration of the Prophet’s nativity at the Sultan Ahmed Mosque,
with the royal prayer loge at the far-left corner. By Charles-Nicolas Cochin and
Née, 1787, from Ignatius Mouradgea d’ Ohsson, Tableau général de l’Empire
Othoman, pl. 25. Engraving on paper
Courtesy of the Houghton Library, Harvard University

(d. 1038/1628), a religious adviser to Aḥmed who had already played a leading
role in earlier ceremonies at the site.19 It is unclear whether this party ascended
all the way to the dome’s exterior or, as is perhaps likelier, went only as far as the
catwalks and galleries of the mosque’s interior, which was also filled with spec-
tators. However the episode played out, the dome’s capping and consecration
must have made a remarkable spectacle.

19 Ibid. 256, 266, 267, 268, 272–276. For his life and career, see Yılmaz, Aziz Mahmûd Hüdâyî.
piety and presence in the postclassical sultanic mosque 383

Another unusual aspect of the ceremony, and one scarcely less eye-catching,
was the presence of tents for the sultan and his courtiers in the mosque’s court-
yard (probably the outer court, but the sources do not specify). Although tents
were often used for Ottoman festivals, I know of no other ceremony in which
a mosque precinct was turned into an encampment, and it is impossible not
to read this atypical feature as a reference to warfare. Such martial symbol-
ism defied Aḥmed’s critics head-on by presenting him as a victor within his
own capital, and to underscore the point, his enemies too were among the cer-
emony’s cast. As our manuscript explains,

The sultan was watched that day by the ruthless [foreign] ambassadors
who were present at the assembly, and when they—despite having not
a trace of faith in their hardened hearts—saw the selfless favor that the
magnanimous sultan conferred on the people of the world, together with
the good works and pious deeds done in the path of God … countless infi-
dels could not help but come to Islam … And even the remaining wicked
infidels could not help but say countless prayers for the life and state of
the sultan … and whether the ambassador of the reprobate Kızılbaş or
whether Venetian, Fleming, or Frank—they are one scourge alike—all of
them were frustrated and confounded.20

This dense narrative requires some clarification. Though conflated with the ref-
erence to foreign ambassadors, the mention of infidels adopting Islam must
pertain to Ottoman non-Muslims who may have converted during the cere-
mony, as we know happened at other public festivals.21 As for the “Kızılbaş”
ambassador, he was, of course, the Safavid representative, who is treated as no
less of an unbeliever than his Christian counterparts.22 This equation builds on
the idea that Aḥmed’s fight against Shi‘ism—epitomized by his quashing of the
Celalis—merited the same approbation as a war against a Christian foe.
Without explicitly telling us, the manuscript gives the impression that the
ambassadors were not merely present but officially accommodated at the cer-
emony, and this is confirmed by a dispatch written by the Venetian bailo
Almorò Nani (d. 1633), who was among the representatives. We learn from his

20 Rüstem, The spectacle 286, 330, 339–340 (quoted with minor orthographic changes).
21 For examples of this phenomenon, see Terzioğlu, The imperial circumcision festival 85;
Baer, Honored by the glory 179–203, 293n31. It is significant to note that Aḥmed’s reign saw
the development of a special kind of conversion ritual at the Imperial Council: see Krstić,
Illuminated 58.
22 Cf. Terzioğlu, The imperial circumcision festival 85–87.
384 rüstem

account that he and the English, Dutch, French, and Habsburg ambassadors
were invited to attend the ceremony and provided with their own specially built
viewing loggia opposite the mosque on the other side of the Hippodrome.23
Nani says nothing of the Safavid envoy, who may have been permitted a spot
within the mosque precinct despite his “reprobate” status. As for the European
ambassadors, their orchestrated presence at the event appears to have been
extremely unusual by the standards of other Ottoman mosque ceremonies
and was clearly vital to the event’s meaning. In the context of so much reli-
giously charged display, the vastly outnumbered Christian dignitaries served as
the event’s symbolic antagonists, subjugated by all that was happening around
them. This “us-and-them” setup no doubt hinted at the possibility of future war-
fare, but the ceremony’s real success lay in its glorification of the mosque itself
as an achievement already equal to any Muslim conquest, one that could, as
the manuscript asserts, overwhelm the “hardened hearts” even of foreign infi-
dels. Invoking Aḥmed’s widely lauded religiosity, the conceit would have been
verbalized after the blessing of the dome by Maḥmūd Hüdāyī, who Nani tells us
gave a sermon “praising the sultan’s goodness and then reproving the general
injustice and rapacity of [his] enemies.”24
The most vivid proof of this goodness was, of course, the mosque itself,
whose undeniable splendor gave convincing form to the rhetorical and cere-
monial claims being made for it (figure 11.1). Although criticized by modern
art historians as an ostentatious reiteration of the classical Ottoman man-
ner,25 the Sultan Ahmed was in its own time widely praised. Evliyā Çelebi
(d. 1095/1684?), for instance, tells us that “the graciousness of its architectural
style is unknown in the mosques of other countries,”26 a sentiment echoed
by Grelot, who deemed the mosque “the most beautiful in Constantinople, if
not in all the East.”27 The monument’s architect, Ṣedefkār Meḥmed Agha (d.

23 Dispatch dated 13 June 1617, State Archives of Venice, Senato, Dispacci Costantinopoli, filza
83, 15/II, 211a–221b, translated and transliterated in Rüstem, The spectacle 286–287, 297–
298n162.
24 Rüstem, The spectacle 287.
25 Goodwin, A history of Ottoman architecture 344.
26 Evliyâ, Seyahatnâme i, 87, quoted and translated in Necipoğlu, Challenging the past 177;
Fetvacı, Music, light and flowers 224. Despite this high praise, the claim that Evliyā
describes the Sultan Ahmed as “the most beautiful of all the sultanic mosques in Istanbul”
is an erroneous one that, as Robert Dankoff and Semih Tezcan have pointed out, is based
on a misleading late thirteenth/nineteenth-century transcription of the original text. The
mistake regrettably appears in my own article on the dome-closing ceremony. See Dankoff
and Tezcan, Evliya Çelebi bibliography 4; Rüstem, The spectacle 260.
27 Grelot, A late voyage 211–212.
piety and presence in the postclassical sultanic mosque 385

ca. 1031/1622), was a student of the famous Sinān (d. 996/1588), whose Süley-
maniye Mosque was the Sultan Ahmed’s immediate forerunner.28 As Emine
Fetvacı has discussed, Meḥmed Agha skillfully adapted his master’s manner
to create something that referred to the empire’s Süleymanic heyday even as
it spoke to eleventh/seventeenth-century tastes.29 With its elephantine piers,
four semidomes, six minarets, and lavish tilework, the Sultan Ahmed eschews
the more restrained grandeur of the Süleymaniye in favor of unbridled pomp.
This approach also allows the mosque to hold its own against the Hagia Sophia,
which faces it from across an open square. While much smaller than the erst-
while cathedral, the mosque outdoes it in terms of aesthetic coherence and
elegance, thus earning its place in this most central and privileged of locations.
Few among the sultan’s Muslim subjects can have failed to see the monument
as a magnificent sign of God’s favor.
The multipronged effort that went into selling Aḥmed’s enterprise shows
how mindful he and his advisers were of established codes even as they were
redefining them. After all, the justifications put forward for the mosque still
centered on the idea that the sultan had won the right to build by advancing
the cause of Islam. The earlier tactic—that of treating the defeat of (supposedly
Kızılbaş) Celali insurgents as tantamount to a victory over infidels—reflected
what Derin Terzioğlu has characterized as a “greater expectation of confes-
sional exactitude in matters of [Ottoman Sunni] doctrine and ritual as well as a
heightened concern with social discipline” during the sixteenth and early sev-
enteenth centuries, when the Ottomans were busy fighting their (Shi‘i) Safavid
neighbors.30 But it was ultimately Aḥmed’s own exemplary Sunnism that was
weaponized as his chief credential, further widening the traditional concep-
tion of “campaigns of the Faith” to include even nonmilitary deeds.31 Built for
the glory of the religion, the mosque in a sense became its own vindication,
and thereby the sultan’s too.
Such spin was part of a broader shift in the ruler’s image that began around
these years. In contrast to their more aloof predecessors, Aḥmed and the sul-
tans who followed him generally tended toward a less remote style of kingship,
making themselves more visible and—notionally, at least—accessible to their

28 For an architectural treatise centered on Meḥmed Agha’s career and written during the
construction of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque, see Caʿfer, Risāle. On Aḥmed’s identification
with Süleymān, see Avcıoğlu, Ahmed I, esp. 218–220.
29 Fetvacı, Music, light and flowers.
30 Terzioğlu, How to conceptualize 318.
31 The term “campaigns of the Faith” (ġanāyim-i cihād) is borrowed from Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī: see
ʿĀlī, Counsel i, 54, 146, quoted in Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan 60.
386 rüstem

figure 11.3 Sultan Ahmed Mosque, royal pavilion viewed toward its entrance side, with
the attached mosque on the right
Photo courtesy of Güven Erten

subjects.32 The desire to raise the sovereign’s profile in this way must have been
spurred in part by the diminishment of his once invincible military aura, but
the result was far from defeatist. On the contrary, the Ottoman state succeeded
in cultivating a new kind of reputation for the sultan that foregrounded his
benevolent presence among his people as God’s shadow on earth. The vibrant
ceremonial activity surrounding the Sultan Ahmed Mosque was very much part
of this new manner of kingly conduct, and the monument also introduced a
more concrete means of facilitating the sultan’s self-display: a pavilion attached
to the mosque’s eastern corner (figures 11.1 and 11.3).
Entered by a ramp and containing an elevated suite of rooms, this L-shaped
structure gives access to the sultanic loge inside the neighboring prayer hall
(figure 11.2).33 It is the first example of a building type that would come to
be known as the ḳaṣr-ı hümāyūn (hünkâr kasrı in modern Turkish), or royal

32 Hamadeh, The city’s pleasures 50–52; Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan 516; Rüstem, Ottoman
Baroque 126–128, 133–137.
33 For this structure, see Kuban, Ottoman architecture 365–369; Nayır, Osmanlı mimarlığında
Sultan Ahmet Külliyesi 78–79; Rüstem, The spectacle 262–268.
piety and presence in the postclassical sultanic mosque 387

pavilion, a name that accurately captures its function as a miniaturized palace

designed to host Aḥmed and his successors before and after their visits to the
mosque.34 Its brick-and-stone walls and hipped roofs are at once a mark of its
status—they follow the norms of palatial architecture—and a decorous con-
cession to the adjacent mosque, whose domes, ashlar walls, and scale make the
far smaller pavilion seem almost like a latterly added afterthought. Contrary to
this impression, the pavilion had its origins in a structure erected at the very
start of the project to accommodate Aḥmed whenever we came to view the
building site.35 As the prayer hall took shape, certain parties must have real-
ized the long-term potential of turning this structure into a permanent pavilion
for use during royal visits, and especially the Friday parade, when the sultan
would set out from the Topkapı Palace in stately procession to attend the mid-
day prayer in one of the city’s imperial mosques. These regular public outings
afforded the populace not only sight of their ruler, but also, in theory, recourse
to his protection, as the sultan’s guards would collect petitions from the watch-
ing crowds.36 The Friday parade thus brought the splendor of the court and the
justice of the Imperial Divan—another venue for petitioners—out into the city
itself, connecting palace and mosque in a powerful statement of the sultan’s
God-given authority. Even with the procession’s longstanding grandeur, how-
ever, sultans before the eleventh/seventeenth century would reach their prayer
loges through nothing more than a discreet private entrance. The pavilion at
the Sultan Ahmed Mosque redressed this deficiency by providing the parade
with its own architectural climax, one that gave solid expression to the idea
of the ceremony as a nexus between the courtly, public, and spiritual spheres.
What made this symbolism all the more potent was that it endured long after
the impact of the royal visits themselves had subsided, implying the sultan’s
presence even in his absence. So effective was the feature that all subsequent
imperial mosques would include it, a tangible demonstration of the sultan’s
increasingly public face.

34 For the history of this feature, see Kuran, The evolution of the sultan’s pavilion; Rüstem,
Ottoman Baroque 125–129; Tanman, Kasr-ı hümâyun. For an alternative view of its origins,
see Thys-Şenocak, The Yeni Valide Mosque (as discussed in footnote 45 below).
35 Gontaut-Biron, Ambassade ii, 372; Sâfî, Zübdetü’t-tevârîh i, 52; Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan
516.
36 Boyar and Fleet, A social history of Ottoman Istanbul, 31, 37–39; İpşirli, Osmanlılarda Cuma
selâmlığı 463–466.
388 rüstem

2 New Approaches for Changing Times: The Emergence and Impact

of the Nuruosmaniye Mosque

Despite Aḥmed’s personal achievement in overcoming the traditional restric-

tions, his successors trod rather more carefully, and it would take over a cen-
tury for a sultan to build another mosque in the capital. This apparent ret-
icence suggests a return to a more normative understanding of the sultanic
mosque’s significance, with glorious victory in holy war reasserting itself as a
prerequisite—or at least desideratum—for royal self-commemoration. But if
Aḥmed had failed to amend earlier codes, his project seems nonetheless to
have encouraged the pursuit of further alternative strategies in its wake. One
such strategy was for the grandest level of patronage to be taken up by the
vālide sulṭāns, queen mothers, who, as well as being exempt from any expec-
tation of martial valor, were also growing in power during this period. And so
it was Hadīce Turhān (d. 1094/1683), mother of Meḥmed IV (r. 1058–1099/1648–
1687, d. 1104/1693), who erected Istanbul’s other great eleventh/seventeenth-
century foundation, the Yeni Cami in the busy shoreline district of Eminönü
(figure 11.4).37 Inaugurated in 1076/1665, the mosque had in fact been initiated
as far back as 1006/1597 by another queen mother, Ṣāfiye Sultan (d. 1028/1619),
but was abandoned when she lost her rank upon the accession of her grand-
son Aḥmed. The walls of Ṣāfiye’s mosque reached only as high as the lower
windows when work was halted, and the site soon became covered over with
houses and debris.38 It was not until the great fire of 1070/1660 destroyed these
dwellings that construction resumed under the patronage of Hadīce Turhān
Sultan, who is said to have been touring the district with the aim of helping its
people when she first noticed the mosque’s aborted walls.39 Where Ṣāfiye had
faced strong criticism for her legally dubious expropriation of the site, Hadīce
Turhān was praised for making good the enterprise and piously regenerating
Eminönü, such that—to use Evliyā Çelebi’s terms—a mosque of oppression
(ẓulmiyye) was turned into one of justice (ʿadliyye).40

37 For this mosque, see Ateş, İstanbul Yeni Cami; Nayır, Osmanlı mimarlığında Sultan Ahmet
Külliyesi 137, 135–168; Thys-Şenocak, Ottoman women builders 186–257, 272–274; Thys-
Şenocak, The Yeni Valide Mosque.
38 Nayır, Osmanlı mimarlığında Sultan Ahmet Külliyesi 136–137; Thys-Şenocak, The Yeni
Valide Mosque at Eminönü 63–64.
39 Nayır, Osmanlı mimarlığında Sultan Ahmet Külliyesi 137; Thys-Şenocak, The Yeni Valide
Mosque complex at Eminönü 66.
40 Thys-Şenocak, The Yeni Valide Mosque complex at Eminönü 63–68. For Evliyā’s account
of the mosque, see Evliyâ, Seyahatnâme i, 302, as quoted and discussed in Thys-Şenocak,
The Yeni Valide Mosque complex at Eminönü 68, 70n48.
piety and presence in the postclassical sultanic mosque 389

figure 11.4 Yeni Cami, Istanbul, 1006–1076/1597–1665, with the royal pavilion on the left
protruding from the prayer hall
© Jean-Pierre Bazard / Wikimedia Commons

This narrative of redemption was fueled by the fact that most of the inhabi-
tants of the site had been Jewish, which allowed the Islamization of Eminönü
to be regarded as a sort of conquest in its own right. Already operative dur-
ing the initial phase under Ṣāfiye,41 the anti-Jewish sentiment surrounding
the project would have intensified in the sociopolitical climate of the mid-
eleventh/seventeenth century, when the zealous and puritanical Kadızadeli
movement exercised considerable influence in Istanbul, including in Hadīce
Turhān’s own circle.42 Something of the Kadızadelis’ hostility toward the
dhimmi communities may be reflected in a later account by the chronicler
Silāḥdār Meḥmed Agha (d. 1139/1726–1727), who, with reference to Emi-
nönü’s demographics and general dilapidation, wrote, “The abominable con-
dition of the area was an affront to the religion and the state; the comple-

41 Thys-Şenocak, The Yeni Valide Mosque complex at Eminönü 61–63, 64.

42 Ibid. 66–68. For the Kadızadeli context, see Zilfi, The politics of piety 129–181.
390 rüstem

figure 11.5 Yeni Cami, royal pavilion viewed toward its entrance ramp, with the attached
mosque on the left
Photo from İbrahİm Ateş, İstanbul Yenİ Camİ ve Hünkar Kasrı
[Istanbul, 1977?], fig. 39

tion of the mosque would guarantee prayers for the valide until the time of the
Resurrection.”43
Like the Sultan Ahmed, Hadīce Turhān’s mosque is (from the perspective
of eleventh/seventeenth-century audiences) a modernized reworking of the
classical manner, its central dome loftier in profile than its tenth/sixteenth-
century counterparts and its interior more lavishly tiled. Here, the royal pavil-
ion has grown into a truly substantial brick-and-stone building entered by a
monumental ramp that the sultana is said to have ascended by means of a
palanquin (figure 11.5). The rooms to which the ramp leads survive with much
of their palatial splendor intact.44 Lucienne Thys-Şenocak has linked the scale
and arrangement of the pavilion to Hadīce Turhān’s status as a female patron:
as well as providing a venue for her entourage, the building would have given
her visual access to, and symbolic dominance over, parts of the complex that a

43 Quoted in Thys-Şenocak, The Yeni Valide Mosque complex at Eminönü 66.

44 For the pavilion, see Ateş, İstanbul Yeni Cami 17–46; Kuran, The evolution of the sul-
tan’s pavilion 281–282; Nayır, Osmanlı mimarlığında Sultan Ahmet Külliyesi 157–159; Thys-
Şenocak, Ottoman women builders 220–237; Thys-Şenocak, The Yeni Valide Mosque; Yücel,
Yeni Cami hünkâr kasrı.
piety and presence in the postclassical sultanic mosque 391

royal woman could not enter.45 She is, moreover, recorded as having used the
pavilion as a vantage point from which to survey the building work, recalling
Aḥmed’s visits to his pavilion earlier in the century.46 The structure thus stood
as a conspicuous testament to the queen’s munificent supervision.
But as much as the Yeni Cami became Hadīce Turhān’s gift to the city, it was
also designed to be used by her son, Meḥmed, and it is he rather than the queen
mother who is eulogized in a poem that decorates the pavilion’s interior. The
verse hails Meḥmed as the sultan “who has subdued all” and whose “rule is
full of conquests from the beginning to the end,” likening him to Süleymān the
Magnificent and the legendary hero Rustam.47 Meḥmed’s military record had,
in reality, been a mixed bag up to this point, though his reign would soon see a
number of impressive Ottoman victories—including the conquest of Crete—
that brought the empire to its greatest territorial extent in Europe.48 Even so,
Meḥmed could not yet confidently claim a gāzī’s prerogative when the Yeni
Cami was resumed, and the mosque must to some extent have been intended
as a workaround, with the mother using her own wealth and entitlement to
build something that might also serve as a monument to her son.49 Although
the seeds of this solution had been sown long before by Ṣāfiye,50 the likelihood
of its success had grown by the mid-eleventh/seventeenth century in tandem
with the stature of the queen mother herself. Hadīce Turhān in particular often
acted as her son’s proxy, representing him in the capital during his frequent
retreats to Edirne.51 A physical outcome of this arrangement, the Yeni Cami
likewise assumed the role of a substitute for what the sultan had left unper-
formed.
A still stronger conflation of mother and son would occur with the mosque
of another vālide sulṭān, Emetu’llāh Rābiʿa Gülnūş (d. 1127/1715) (figure 11.6).
Located in Üsküdar and completed in 1122/1710, the Yeni Valide Mosque has

45 Thys-Şenocak, The Yeni Valide Mosque, esp. 74–77. I do not agree with Thys-Şenocak’s
assertion that the early eleventh/seventeenth century witnessed no significant ceremo-
nial changes to explain the advent of the royal pavilion at the Sultan Ahmed Mosque and
that the feature may therefore have originated as a gendered space in the Yeni Cami’s orig-
inal design. As I have discussed above, the Sultan Ahmed Mosque was from the outset
associated with highly augmented ceremonial practices that provide a logical context for
the pavilion’s introduction there.
46 Goodwin, A history of Ottoman architecture 357; Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan 512.
47 Translated by Hakan Karateke in Thys-Şenocak, Ottoman women builders 220–222.
48 Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire 209–213; Thys-Şenocak, Ottoman women builders 218.
49 Thys-Şenocak, Ottoman women builders 218, 222–224.
50 Thys-Şenocak, The Yeni Valide Mosque 64.
51 Thys-Şenocak, Ottoman women builders 104–106, 269–270.
392 rüstem

figure 11.6 Yeni Valide Mosque, Üsküdar, Istanbul, 1120–1122/1708–1710

Photo courtesy of Walter B. Denny

since the late twelfth/eighteenth century been misattributed to Gülnūş’s son

Sultan Aḥmed III (r. 1115–1143/1703–1730, d. 1149/1736), who is said to have built it
in her honor.52 But the period’s official chronicler, Rāşid, as well as the mosque’s
own inscriptions leave us in no doubt that Gülnūş herself was the patron, even
if the building was meant to stand in for her son too.53 Installed on the throne
through a revolution in 1115/1703, Aḥmed III is famous for presiding over Istan-
bul’s reinvigoration following a long absence by the court, which had been
based in Edirne for much of the preceding half century.54 He fared less well on
the international stage, however. His reign followed on from the aftermath of
the disastrous Ottoman defeat at Vienna in 1094/1683, which spelled an end to

52 For the mosque, see Ayvansarāyī, The garden of the mosques 493–494; Goodwin, A history
of Ottoman architecture 365–366; Haskan, Yüzyıllar boyunca Üsküdar i, 379–391; Kuban,
Ottoman architecture 384–386; Özgüleş, The women who built 157–184. Of these authors, all
but Haskan and Özgüleş erroneously credit the mosque to Aḥmed III, as too does Crane
(The Ottoman sultan’s mosques 189).
53 Râşid and Âṣım, Târih-i Râşid ii, 797, 848–849; Haskan, Yüzyıllar boyunca Üsküdar i, 380–
382, 387–388.
54 For the architectural boom that that followed the court’s return in 1115/1703, see Artan,
Architecture as a theatre of life; Artan, Istanbul; Hamadeh, The city’s pleasures, esp. 17–75;
Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque 20–55.
piety and presence in the postclassical sultanic mosque 393

the empire’s expansion, and though his armies were able to recover certain ter-
ritories from the Venetians, he was compelled to cede Serbia to the Habsburgs
in 1130/1718.55 Little wonder, then, that an imperial mosque was not among the
numerous architectural works that Aḥmed bestowed upon Istanbul after the
court’s return, and it was once again through the surrogacy of a queen mother
that such a foundation came to be built.
That Aḥmed was able to profit so fully from his mother’s mosque—even to
the point of being latterly credited with it—was in part because of its loca-
tion. Being outside the walled peninsula, and on the Asian side to boot, Üskü-
dar was not part of Istanbul strictly defined, and this points to another fac-
tor determining the decorousness of sultanic construction. Although Muṣṭafā
ʿĀlī does not qualify his advice geographically, it seems that the conditions
he outlines were felt to apply above all to the capital. Murād III may have
stopped short of erecting a mosque in Istanbul, but he did not hesitate to have
Sinān construct one in Manisa (991–994/1583–1586), replacing an earlier—and
smaller—mosque he had built while a prince in that city.56 Even Sinān’s cele-
brated masterpiece, the Selimiye (976–982/1568–1574), may have been affected
by locational concerns: despite presiding over a number of Ottoman victo-
ries, Selīm II (r. 974–982/1566–1574) did not personally lead the army as his
father, Süleymān, had done, and this, as Gülru Necipoğlu has suggested, may
partly explain why his foundation was built in Edirne rather than Istanbul.57 As
we are about to see, the limiting of the regulation to the capital—that is, the
walled city—seems to have become codified by the twelfth/eighteenth century,
and it was perhaps partly out of regard for this opinion that Gülnūş, know-
ing her mosque would be identified with her son, chose to build it in Üskü-
dar.
A more forthright approach could be taken by Aḥmed’s immediate succes-
sor, Maḥmūd I (r. 1143–1168/1730–1754), whose now rather unremarkable rep-
utation belies the high esteem in which he was held during the twelfth/eigh-
teenth century. Following a shaky start, Maḥmūd emerged as a capable ruler
both domestically and in the international arena. His standing was secured in
1152/1739 when his army, following years of war with both the Austrians and the
Russians, defeated the former in Belgrade, winning back Serbia. The ensuing
peace treaty with the Habsburgs compelled Russia to sign a treaty of its own,
ending the war in the Ottomans’ favor. An unprecedented thirty years of peace

55 Finkel, Osman’s dream 253–333.

56 Necipoğlu, The age of Sinan 256–265.
57 Ibid. 65–66.
394 rüstem

figure 11.7 Nuruosmaniye Mosque, Istanbul, 1161–1169/1748–1755, aerial view, with the
Grand Bazaar in front and the Sultan Ahmed Mosque in the right background.
Photographed by ʿAlī Rıżāʾ Bey, ca. 1880s. Albumen print
Library of Congress, Washington, DC. Prints and Photographs
Division, Abdul Hamid II Collection [LC-USZ62–78322]

would follow between the empire and its Christian neighbors.58 Having already
shown himself to be a keen patron of the arts,59 Maḥmūd wished to mark his
empire’s good fortune by building a new royal mosque complex in the capi-
tal, the first to be established by a sultan since the Sultan Ahmed. Work on
the monument began in 1161/1748 and reached completion in 1169/1755, shortly
after Maḥmūd’s death and a year into the reign of his brother ʿOs̱mān III
(r. 1168–1171/1754–1757), who claimed the building as his own and named it
Nuruosmaniye—both “Light of the Ottomans” and “Light of ʿOs̱mān”—in dual
reference to himself and the dynasty (figure 11.7).60

58 For overviews of these events, see Finkel, Osman’s dream 355–371; Aksan, Ottoman wars
102–128.
59 Keskiner, Rüstem and Stanley, Armed and splendorous; Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque 60–63,
68–82, 97–103.
60 For the mosque, see Goodwin, A history of Ottoman architecture 382–387; Hochhut, Die
Moschee Nûruosmâniye; Kuban, Ottoman architecture 526–536; Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque
111–169; Sav, Nuruosmaniye Camii; Suman, Questioning an “icon of change.”
piety and presence in the postclassical sultanic mosque 395

As we shall see, Maḥmūd’s decision to bring the imperial mosque back to life
would rejuvenate the genre as whole, sparking a new boom in the sultans’ own
patronage of religious foundation for the next century and a half.61 This revival
has received surprisingly little attention in the scholarship, which has tended
to discuss late Ottoman architecture with reference to secular works that both
reflect and reaffirm the notion that the postclassical period witnessed a decline
in the sultanic mosque’s cachet. Consistent as this view may seem with the
many institutional and cultural changes that indeed transformed the empire
in its final two centuries, the Nuruosmaniye and its heirs demonstrate that
even the most traditional of building categories could flourish hand in hand
with artistic novelty and broader processes of institutional modernization.62
Not only did the sultanic mosque remain meaningful in this shifting context,
but it managed to reassert its preeminence in ways that continued to invoke—
albeit differently from before—the ruler’s status as defender and promoter of
Islam.
The religiously and politically charged circumstances in which the Nuruos-
maniye came into being are explained in a letter by Claude-Charles de Peysson-
nel (d. 1790), a French consul and long-time resident of the Ottoman Empire:
“The Sultan, before he can build a Temple, within the walls of Constantino-
ple, must have gained some victory over the enemies of the Empire, or have
extended the Ottomans possessions, and thereby merited the surname of Gazi,
or Conqueror. Sultan Mahmoud, who had legally acquired this right, by gain-
ing the battle of Grosca [Grocka], against the Germans, and taking Belgrade,
never thought of building a Mosque at Scutari, but erected a very beautiful
one within the capital.”63 Written by someone well acquainted with Ottoman
custom, these words prove not only that the codes inherited from earlier cen-
turies still carried considerable weight, but that they had been further refined
to explicitly address the issue of location. Crowning Istanbul’s second hill and
situated in a prime spot next to the Grand Bazar, the Nuruosmaniye replaced a
smaller nonroyal mosque that had fallen into disrepair, and so claimed the last

61 For an overview of these later mosques, see Crane, The Ottoman sultan’s mosques 189–
191. For this boom as it played out in the twelfth/eighteenth century, see Rüstem, Ottoman
Baroque.
62 Indeed, my book on the architectural transformation of twelfth/eighteenth-century Istan-
bul centers on these mosques precisely because of their value as case studies. See Rüstem,
Ottoman Baroque, esp. 1–4, 13.
63 Peyssonnel, Strictures and remarks 194–195. For Peyssonnel’s biography, see Depincé,
Compte i, 158–162. His letter (“to the Marquis de N.”) appears as a lengthy corrective
appendix to the second edition of the memoirs of François de Tott (d. 1793), a French
aristocrat of Hungarian origin who served as a military adviser to the Ottomans.
396 rüstem

available spot on Istanbul’s intramural skyline.64 Much buzz surrounded the

building, and the project’s financial secretary, a certain Aḥmed Efendi, penned
a rare and lengthy account of its construction, the History of the noble mosque
of Nuruosmaniye (Tārīh-i cāmiʿ-i şerīf-i Nūr-ı ʿOs̱mānī).65 Throughout the text,
Aḥmed Efendi emphasizes Maḥmūd’s divinely inspired purpose in building
the mosque, even referring to a chance encounter with a sage who supposedly
inspired the sultan to enlarge the scheme.66 He does not, however, mention
the Ottomans’ success at Belgrade as a reason for the project, and while this
may seem to undermine Peyssonnel’s explanation, it should be borne in mind
that the text was written under Sultan ʿOs̱mān, who could take no credit for
the conquest and who tried in other ways to disassociate the mosque from his
brother.67 Notwithstanding the silence of the official discourse, then, Peysson-
nel’s account surely reflects a wider interpretation of the mosque as Maḥmūd’s
victory monument.
The Nuruosmaniye’s triumphal message was redoubled by its novel appear-
ance (figure 11.7). Although its construction harked back to historical prece-
dent, the mosque looks quite unlike any of its forerunners. Its single dome, set
high on four enormous arches, stands in contrast to the pyramidal vaulting typ-
ical of earlier mosques, and the semielliptical rather than quadrangular shape
of its courtyard is a yet bolder departure from tradition. Even the choice of
architect—an unconverted Greek named Simeon Kalfa—broke with custom.68
Confirming the sense of newness is the mosque’s exuberantly carved decora-
tion, which is a highly original and distinctive interpretation of the Baroque
(see figure 11.8). In spite of the modern tendency to view the style as a mark
of the empire’s decadence in the face of Western hegemony, the Ottoman
Baroque sprang forth in the mid-1150s/early 1740s, on the back of the peace
treaties of 1152/1739. It was, in other words, a manner born under favorable con-
ditions, and its blatant engagement with Western models takes on a pointed
significance when considered in light of the Ottomans’ recent success at Bel-

64 On the location, see Peker, Return of the sultan.

65 This account is known from a single manuscript copy that is now in the İstanbul Üni-
versitesi Nadir Eserler Kütüphanesi (MS. Türkçe Yazmalar 386). For an imperfect early
twentieth-century print edition, see Aḥmed Efendi, Tārīh. For a full transliteration and
translation, see Aḥmed Efendi, Ahmed Efendi’s Tārīh. For an alternative transliteration,
see Aḥmed Efendi, Tarih. For analysis of the text, see Hochhut, Die Moschee Nûruosmâniye;
Kuban, Tarih, imperfectly translated into English as Kuban, Notes; Rüstem, Ottoman
Baroque 119–123, 132–133, 137–138, 147–148, 150–154.
66 Aḥmed Efendi, Ahmed Efendi’s Tārīh 385–386, 447–448.
67 Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque 111–112.
68 Ibid. 120, 147–148.
piety and presence in the postclassical sultanic mosque 397

figure 11.8 Nuruosmaniye Mosque, interior of the prayer hall looking toward the royal
prayer loge
Author’s photo
398 rüstem

grade, where the Habsburgs had left a number of new Baroque buildings.69
Foreign and local audiences were deeply impressed by the style, and numer-
ous commentators of the time opined that the Nuruosmaniye—the first truly
monumental deployment of the Ottoman Baroque—was the finest mosque in
Istanbul.70 There is nothing in these assessments to indicate that the monu-
ment’s innovative design was felt to compromise the seriousness of its function
as an imperial mosque; on the contrary, the building’s stylistic freshness made
its meaning more current in the eyes of contemporary observers, for whom the
more sober classical mode had lost appeal.
The Nuruosmaniye was not, however, a statement of gāzī expansionism of
the type propounded in earlier centuries. Enough time had passed since the
downturn in Ottoman military fortunes that even the retaking of a former pos-
session might now be presented as a significant conquest. Not everyone, to be
sure, can have deemed it such: in a dour social commentary written in about
1153/1740, the moralistic Sufi Fażlızāde ʿAlī dismisses the Treaty of Belgrade as
a trifling gain that would ultimately fuel the empire’s complacent descent into
decline.71 Nevertheless, the view recorded by Peyssonnel shows that some, at
least, were prepared to accept the revised threshold for victory. Another dif-
ference from the past was that this victory brought no new expectations of
conquest: having secured peace with Christendom, the Ottomans were content
to set themselves on a more diplomatic course with their traditional enemies
and pursue a more amicable position in the European balance of power. Their
appropriation of the Baroque was in part a reflection of this realignment, which
also entailed a sustained effort to update the empire’s institutions with selec-
tive reference to Western military and technological models.72
Self-assured though it was, then, the Nuruosmaniye celebrated the sultan
less as a warrior on campaign—no sultan after Muṣṭafā II (r. 1106–1115/1695–
1703) personally led his troops73—than as a magnanimous presence on home
turf. This image is richly expressed by the mosque’s royal pavilion, which is here
more fully integrated into the overall ensemble (figure 11.9). While still clearly
an ancillary to the prayer hall, the pavilion is now clad in stone like the rest

69 Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque, esp. 70, 92, 154–169. For other assessments of the Ottoman
Baroque, see Kuban, Türk barok; Goodwin, A history of Ottoman architecture 380–419;
Hamadeh, Ottoman expressions; Hamadeh, Westernization.
70 Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque 1, 154–157.
71 Kurz, Ways to heaven 28–30.
72 For aspects of this wider context, see Ágoston, Military transformation; Aksan, Ottoman
statesman, esp. 42–46; Berridge, Diplomatic integration; Eldem, 18. yüzyıl, esp. 195–197;
Naff, Ottoman diplomatic relations; Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque 164.
73 Özcan, Mustafa II 279.
piety and presence in the postclassical sultanic mosque 399

figure 11.9 Nuruosmaniye Mosque, royal pavilion, with the attached prayer hall visible on
the far left
Photo courtesy of Walter B. Denny

of the monument. It has, moreover, lost much of its residential appearance:

the suite of rooms has been reduced to a single salon, with the majority of
the pavilion composed of fenestrated arcades that form a grand ramp and ele-
vated gallery leading to the sultan’s prayer loge. The resultant L-shaped struc-
ture helps to delineate a secondary courtyard around the back and side of the
mosque, where the gates into the complex are located. This open area set the
stage for the sultan’s visits, and what the pavilion had lost in its palatial air, it
more than made up for by furnishing the Friday parade with a statelier culmi-
nation.74
Accounts of ʿOs̱mān’s inaugural visit to the mosque reveal how well the
reconfigured pavilion complemented his ceremonial movements. Upon arriv-
ing at the precinct with a multitudinous cavalcade, ʿOs̱mān dismounted his
horse and, with a select entourage, entered the pavilion, whose generously
sized arches rendered it a semiopen showcase for his passage. After a period of
repose in the salon at the corner of the L, ʿOs̱mān moved to the elevated gallery
and watched as his grand vizier distributed robes of honor outside the ramp.

74 For the pavilion, see Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque 129–132.

400 rüstem

He then continued along the route into his loge within the mosque proper (fig-
ure 11.8). The highpoint of the ceremony came when the screens of the loge
were momentarily opened to reveal the sultan to the congregation below, who
prostrated themselves in salutation before proceeding to pray.75
What made the Nuruosmaniye’s pavilion so effective was its ability not only
to flaunt sultanic spectacle, but also to prolong its impact. With every stage of
the ceremony made architecturally manifest, the pavilion stood as a perpet-
ual reminder of such occasions, accruing in symbolism with each subsequent
royal visit. The increasingly theatrical approach to framing and memorializing
the sultan’s presence during the twelfth/eighteenth century reflected a further
rise in the importance of royal visibility. The sultan’s movements were watched
with ever more interest by his subjects, a growing number of whom were them-
selves engaging in such outdoor activities as picnicking and promenading.76
Whereas in previous centuries, the Friday parade was apt to be skipped every
so often, nothing less than a weekly performance would now do, and any fail-
ure to undertake the procession caused real alarm. Public appetite to see the
sultan could even have fatal results: after an outcry by his subjects, Maḥmūd
was forced to attend prayer while so gravely ill that he died riding back to the
palace.77 It was also in this period that the sultan was expected to make morale-
boosting appearances near the sites of great fires and other disasters.78 Far from
betraying overcompensation for waning power, this heightened culture of dis-
play was a hallmark of Eurasian (early) modernity, tied to the burgeoning of
public space, social and physical mobility, and leisure.79 The sultans took full
advantage of these new opportunities for self-advertisement, presenting them-
selves ever more insistently to their subjects’ eager gaze.
While martial prowess was no longer as important to the royal image in
this postclassical climate, a sultan who ignored the criterion still risked cen-
sure. The Nuruosmaniye had engendered a conundrum: its construction revi-
talized a dormant practice that other sultans wished to capitalize on, but there
were few new victories to justify further building work. ʿOs̱mān III’s succes-
sor, Muṣṭafā III (r. 1171–1187/1757–1774), was not to be put off, however. Hav-
ing already built the small but stately Ayazma Mosque (1171–1174/1758–1761) in

75 Neftçi, Nuruosmaniye Camii açılış töreni; Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque 132–133.

76 Hamadeh, Public spaces; Hamadeh, The city’s pleasures, 2008, 48–75, 110–138.
77 Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque 135.
78 The practice seems to have originated in the tenth/sixteenth century but did not become
common until the twelfth/eighteenth. See Cezar, Osmanlı devrinde; Karateke, Opium 114–
115. Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque 134, 232.
79 For examples in other regions, see Duindam, Vienna and Versailles; Ledoux-Prouzeau, Les
fêtes; Melo, Respect; Naquin and Rawski, Chinese society 83–90; Tierney, Urban festival.
piety and presence in the postclassical sultanic mosque 401

figure 11.10 Laleli Mosque, Istanbul, 1174–1177/1760–1764, qibla façade of the prayer hall,
with the royal pavilion on the right
Author’s photo

Üsküdar in memory of his mother and brother,80 the sultan embarked on

his own foundation in the walled city, even as the empire was at peace. This
mosque, the Laleli, was completed in 1177/1764, its largely Baroque form infused
with prominent Byzantine references that make it one of the most distinc-
tive of Istanbul’s monuments (fig. 11.10).81 While its pavilion again takes the
form of a dramatic ramped and arcaded passageway, the Laleli is smaller than
the Nuruosmaniye and was originally built with a single minaret,82 perhaps to
deflect the charge of unmerited extravagance. Muṣṭafā was evidently aware of
the issue, for after being reluctantly drawn into war with Russia in 1182/1768, he

80 For this mosque, see Bilge, Üsküdar Ayazma Camii; Goodwin, A history of Ottoman archi-
tecture, 387; Haskan, Yüzyıllar boyunca Üsküdar i, 79–89; Kuban, Ottoman architecture, 543;
Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque 172–182.
81 For this mosque, see Goodwin, A history of Ottoman architecture 388–391; Neftçi, Lâleli
Külliyesi; Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque 182–198, 210–211; Tanyeli, Laleli Külliyesi.
82 Ayvansarāyī, The garden of the mosques 25.
402 rüstem

seized upon the opportunity to claim gāzī status. He made known his desire for
the title in Ramaḍān 1182/February 1769 and was granted it in Muḥarram/May
following some early victories. Muṣṭafā’s mosque could thus be retroactively
legitimated, and it is telling that the second minaret—a royal prerogative—
was added not long afterward.83
But the war did not go well for the empire, and when, in Shawwāl 1184/Febru-
ary 1771, Muṣṭafā was hailed as a gāzī while attending Friday prayers at the
Hagia Sophia, two members of the congregation—a Mevlevi dervish and his
Arab companion—shouted, “It is a lie! He is no gāzī!” ( yalandır, gāzī değildir).
The event was noteworthy enough that even the European press reported it.84
Only when reconstructing the mosque of Meḥmed the Conqueror, which had
been badly damaged in the earthquake of 1180/1766, was Muṣṭafā able to build
without fear of criticism.85 A stylistic throwback to the classical age, the new
Fatih Mosque (1181–1185/1767–1771) is far grander than the Laleli, demonstrating
that the latter, for all the questions it raised, was still conceived with traditional
restrictions in mind. That the Laleli came to be known after its district rather
than by the name of its founder may be another indication that Muṣṭafā was
understood to be skirting the rules and that a surer means of following in the
Nuruosmaniye’s footsteps had yet to be hit upon.86

3 Hearts and Minds: The Beylerbeyi Mosque and the Rhetoric of

Beneficence

The Laleli was the last mosque to be built in the walled city by a sultan,87
though far from the last to be built in greater Istanbul. Utilizing the locational
loophole, the rulers who came after Muṣṭafā erected their foundations instead
along the Bosphorus, and in so doing embraced a tactic that was both beyond
reproach and more enduringly suited to the empire’s new realities. The pat-
tern was set by Muṣṭafā’s half-brother and successor, ʿAbdü’l-ḥamīd I (r. 1187–
1203/1774–1789), whose reign was itself marked by momentous developments

83 Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque 182, 185. For the military background, see Aksan, Ottoman wars
149–151.
84 Göksu, Müellifi mechûl bir rûznâme 17; Hoey’s Dublin Mercury, Intelligence.
85 For this mosque, see Goodwin, A history of Ottoman architecture 394–395; Kuban, Ottoman
architecture 538–540; Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque 212–219.
86 Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque 182–183.
87 To be sure, royal patronage of mosques within the intramural city continued on a limited
basis, though no new sultan’s foundations were established: see Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque
288n29.
piety and presence in the postclassical sultanic mosque 403

in Ottoman sultanic identity. ʿAbdü’l-ḥamīd had inherited a beleaguered realm

still at war with Russia, and though he quickly brought the conflict to an end
in 1188/1774, the peace treaty signed at Küçük Kaynarca forced the empire to
relinquish control of the Crimea, only for war to resume in 1201/1787 after Rus-
sia invaded the peninsula.88 The sultan’s inability to present himself as a victor
in battle was counterbalanced, however, by a more convincing claim to power:
having already been recognized in the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca as the reli-
gious leader of the Crimean Muslims, he was formally invested as caliph in
1204/1779.89
The move to strengthen the Ottoman caliphate’s legal framework contin-
ued a trend that can be traced back to the mid-eleventh/seventeenth century
and that accelerated in the 1130s–1140s/1720s, when the Ottoman ulama—
rebuffing the claims of the Afghan ruler Shah Ashraf Hotak (r. 1137–1142/1725–
1729, d. 1142/1730) to a localized caliphate—formulated new juridical argu-
ments in favor of the sultan’s unique position over all the world’s Muslims.90 A
member of the Sunni Hotaki dynasty, which had wrested control of Iran from
the Safavids in 1135/1722, Ashraf was in turn ousted in 1142/1729 by Nādir Afshār
(r. 1148–1160/1736–1747), a military commander who restored the Safavids to
power before putting himself on the throne in 1148/1736. (The Ottomans them-
selves had tried to grab a chunk of Iran in the wake of the Safavids’ initial fall,
though their gains were short lived.) The newly ascendant Nādir Shah, whose
successors would rule Iran until 1210/1796, was eager to improve relations with
the Ottomans by declaring Shi‘ism a fifth school—the Ja‘fari madhhab—of
orthodox Islam, a step that entailed disallowing such provocative practices
as the cursing of the first three “Rightly Guided” caliphs.91 Although Nādir’s
request for recognition of the Ja‘fari school was ultimately rejected by the
Ottomans, and war between the two states would continue intermittently
into the thirteenth/nineteenth century, the fall of the Safavids had, by the
1140s/1730s, essentially removed the specter of Shi‘ism both as a practical threat
and as an ideological foil, and some degree of rapprochement between Iran and

88 Aksan, Ottoman wars 157–170.

89 On the significance of the caliphate to ʿAbdü’l-ḥamīd, see Sarıcaoğlu, Kendi kaleminden
211–225. The investiture is briefly recorded with the words “Investiture Califale: enfin con-
somée” in a summary of a French diplomatic dispatch dated 3 December 1779. I was not
able to find the letter summarized by this entry, nor any further information on this event.
See Centre des archives diplomatiques de Nantes, 166PO/A/55, 227b.
90 Akbulut, The scramble 135–159; Tucker, Peace negotiations 20–22. For the eleventh/seven-
teenth-century background to this development, see Emecen, Hilâfetin devri 562; and the
chapter by Selim Güngörürler in the present volume.
91 Tucker, Nadir Shah; Tucker, Peace negotiations, esp. 25–32.
404 rüstem

the Ottomans ensued.92 This new relationship, which built on earlier attempts
at ecumenical dialogue with the Safavids that are analyzed by Selim Gün-
görürler in the present volume, meant that confessionalization as defined with
reference to a Shi‘i other was no longer an especially relevant concern for the
Ottomans. In these altered circumstances, a different mode of Sunnitization—
one designed to augment the sultan’s religious and social leadership—came
increasingly to the fore.
As Madeline Zilfi has discussed, both Muṣṭafā and ʿAbdü’l-ḥamīd formal-
ized existing notions of the sultan as “scholar-master” by establishing the cus-
tom of the ḥużūr-ı hümāyūn dersleri (Imperial Command Lectures) held at
the palace during Ramadan. These annual events, which began in 1172/1759
and continued until 1340/1922, involved multiple sessions attended by various
members of the ulama, who would gather in the sultan’s presence as lecturers
and respondents to debate the Quranic commentary of the medieval Hanafi
jurist ʿAbdallāh ibn ʿUmar al-Bayḍāwī (d. 691/1291?).93 Besides being staged for
the benefit of a courtly audience, including female spectators screened off by
curtains, the lectures had a public dimension: each was preceded by a grand
cavalcade that broadcast the sultan’s diligence in mingling with and nourishing
his empire’s clerics, whose status had more generally risen over the course of
the twelfth/eighteenth century.94 Concurrent with—and related to—Muṣṭafā
and ʿAbdü’l-ḥamīd’s sponsorship of the lectures was a tightening of social reg-
ulations, aimed in particular at curbing the perceived transgressions of women
and non-Muslims.95 Two sides of the same coin, the spiritual fervor and moral-
istic agenda of these years belonged to what Zilfi has characterized as a series
of “calculated responses” by which the sultans addressed “the gradual trans-
formation of an authority derived from war to an authority based on social
stability.”96
These multipronged responses—already operative by the middle decades
of the twelfth/eighteenth century—paved the way for the more overt invoca-

92 Özervarlı, Between tension and rapprochement; Tucker, The peace negotiations, esp. 33–
36.
93 Zilfi, A medrese. On the longer history of the Ottoman sultans as patrons of Hanafi doc-
trine and overseers of piety, see Burak, The second formation; and the chapter by Evren
Sünnetçioğlu in the present volume.
94 Zilfi, A medrese 188. On the rising status of the ulama, see Zilfi, The politics of piety 43–80,
183–235.
95 Zilfi, A medrese 189. For such regulation more generally in the twelfth/eighteenth-century
Ottoman context, see Başaran, Selim III; Tuğ, Politics of honor; Zarinebaf, Crime 125–140;
Zilfi, Women 45–95.
96 Zilfi, A medrese 190–191.
piety and presence in the postclassical sultanic mosque 405

tions of religious stewardship that would follow Küçük Kaynarca. The resultant
boost to the Ottoman caliphate’s significance was felt both within and without
the empire,97 and it was also in these years that the legend arose concern-
ing the Abbasids’ supposed transfer of caliphal power to the Ottomans after
the conquest of Mamluk Egypt.98 Such elaborations of the sultan’s spiritual
role further bolstered the idea that his ability to serve Islam was not contin-
gent on his conquering foreign territories or defeating “infidel” foes. Through
good works, unstinting care for his subjects, and the protection of his exist-
ing dominions—which included the holy cities of Mecca and Medina—the
sultan might continue to assert himself as an influential agent of the divine
will.99
The concept of sultanic superintendence found a fitting vehicle in the re-
cently reenergized category of religious architecture, as ʿAbdü’l-ḥamīd demon-
strated with two major projects that he undertook in tandem with each other:
the Beylerbeyi Mosque, built on the Asian shore between 1191/1777 and 1192/
1778,100 and the Hamidiye, a mosque-less complex constructed in the vicinity
of the Yeni Cami between 1189/1775 and 1194/1780.101 The inception of the latter
undertaking is recounted by the court chronicler Enverī, who tells us that the
sultan wished to “build an exalted mosque and lustrous ʿimāret [public soup
kitchen102] for the sake of God Almighty in his sublime caliphal seat, and so he
immediately expressed his kingly resolve to realize this good work. But most
of the selected places already had mosques and masjids, and it came to his
pure mind that the noble mosque of Her Majesty the late Vālide Sulṭān—may
she rest in peace—was in need of an ʿimāret.”103 Delicately sidestepping the

97 Arnold, The caliphate 163–183; Deringil, The well-protected domains 46–50; Karpat, The
politicization 68–89.
98 Arnold, The caliphate 142–147; Deringil, The well-protected domains 46–47.
99 On the role of such religiosity in legitimating the Ottomans sultans, see Crane, The
Ottoman sultan’s mosques 193–201; Karateke, Opium.
100 For the Beylerbeyi Mosque, see Baraz, Teşrifat meraklısı i, 110–118; Batur, Beylerbeyi Camii;
Goodwin, A history of Ottoman architecture 397–399; Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque 234–
250.
101 For the Hamidiye complex, see Alpay, I. Sultan Abdülhamid Külliyesi; Bülbül, IV. Vakıf
Han’ın; Cunbur, I. Abdülhamid vakfiyesi; Eyice, Hamidiye Külliyesi; Rüstem, Ottoman
Baroque 222–234.
102 This definition of ʿimāret became standard in the early modern period and displaced the
word’s earlier use as a term for the distinctive multifuctional T-type buildings (later con-
verted into mosques) that are characteristic of early Ottoman architecture. See the chapter
by Çiğdem Kafescioğlu in the present volume.
103 “Öteden-berü Halīfe-i kerāmet-ās̱ār ve Hāḳān-ı maʿdelet-kār ḥażretleriniñ ṭabʿ-ı hümāyūn-ı
hıdīvāneleri teks̱īr-i hayrāt ve tevfīr-i meberrāta maʿṭūf olmaġın Dārü’l-hilāfeti’l-ʿaliyyeler-
406 rüstem

figure 11.11 Hamidiye Complex, Istanbul, 1189–1194/1775–1780, with the sebīl in the right
center and the tomb partially visible on the far left. Albumen print by Basil
Kargopoulo, 1875
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Pierre de Gigord Col-
lection [96.R.14 (A11.V2.F12b)]

obstacles that ʿAbdü’l-ḥamīd would have faced had he attempted a more ambi-
tious intramural scheme, this account emphasizes his pious purpose in enlarg-
ing the preexisting Yeni Cami complex. What he created was nonetheless a
substantial complex in its own right, comprising not only a soup kitchen, but
also a madrasa, library, primary school, sebīl (fountain kiosk), and his own even-
tual tomb (figure 11.11). (The soup kitchen and primary school are no longer
extant, while the sebīl has been relocated.) Rather than being walled off, the
buildings making up the complex hugged the busy street that passed through
it and—through its exuberant Baroque stonework—appealed directly to the

inde li-vechi’llāhi teʿālā bu es̱nāda bir cāmiʿ-i muʿallā ile bir ʿimāret-i zībende binā ṭarḥ
u inşā olunması żamīr-i münīr-i şehriyānelerine ilhām ve derʿaḳab ol kār-ı hayrıñ ḳuvve-
den fiʿle getirilmesin ʿuhde-i mülūkānelerine iltizām buyurup lākin ihtiyār olunacaḳ maḥal-
leriñ eks̱eri cevāmiʿ ü mesācidden ʿibāret ve cennetmekān Vālide Sulṭān—ṭābete s̱erāhā—
ḥażretleriniñ cāmiʿ-i şerīfleri bir ʿimārete muḥtāc olduġu ʿaḳs-endāz-ı hāṭır-ı ṣāf-serīretleri
olmaġla.” Enverī, Tārīh 477b.
piety and presence in the postclassical sultanic mosque 407

figure 11.12 Beylerbeyi Mosque, Beylerbeyi, Istanbul, 1191–1192/1777–1778, renovated 1235–

1236/1820–1821
Photo courtesy of Andy Teach

people, generously serving them while emphatically identifying their benefac-

tor, whose domed tomb was the stateliest element of the ensemble.
While ʿAbdü’l-ḥamīd refrained from incorporating a mosque into the
Hamidiye Complex, the rather distant Beylerbeyi was from the outset under-
stood as a related and complementary enterprise, with contemporary sources
discussing them together (figure 11.12).104 The sultan could make a virtue of
the mosque’s decorous location, which affirmed the reach of his patronage
by linking both continents of the city together. Like the Hamidiye, the Beyler-
beyi is architecturally extroverted, its otherwise humble form enlivened by an
eye-catchingly novel frontispiece: the royal pavilion, which, instead of being a
dependency attached to the corner, has here been fused with the prayer hall’s
entrance porch, replacing the courtyard and giving the mosque an entirely
original kind of façade.105 This reconfiguration was probably a result of the
mosque’s placement on the Asian shore, which left its entrance facing the
water. The unknown architect (traditionally held to be Meḥmed Ṭāhir Agha

104 Ayvansarāyī, The garden of the mosques 480–486; Cunbur, I. Abdülhamid vakfiyesi 37;
Enverī, Tārīh, 569a.
105 Kuran, The evolution of the sultan’s pavilion 282.
408 rüstem

figure 11.13 Beylerbeyi Mosque, interior looking toward the entrance, with the royal prayer
loge on the right
Author’s photo

(d. after 1202/1788)) took advantage of this topographical good fortune to build
a mosque that could evoke a waterfront palace, thereby returning the pavil-
ion to its formerly residential character. Inside, the scheme entailed moving
the lattice-screened royal loge from its usual position near the qibla wall to
the back of the prayer hall, so that the sultan now overlooked the congrega-
tion below (figure 11.13). Conceptually collapsing the distance between ruler
and ruled, this fusion of palace and mosque recalls the spatial arrangement of
the Imperial Divan, where any Ottoman subject could seek justice from the sul-
tan’s representatives under a grilled window from which the sovereign himself
might be watching.106

106 A domed structure located in the second court of the Topkapı Palace, the Imperial Coun-
cil (Dīvān-ı Hümāyūn) was constructed in the tenth/sixteenth century and redecorated
in the Baroque style in 1207/1792, see Necipoğlu, Architecture, ceremonial, and power 58–
61; Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque 243–244, 261–262. Başaran and Başak Tuğ argue that the
Imperial Council was no longer used for the hearing of petitions by the twelfth/eighteenth
century, when the grand vizier held his own assemblies at the Sublime Porte. The sources,
however, reveal that the council continued to convene at the Divan and hear petitioners’
piety and presence in the postclassical sultanic mosque 409

figure 11.14 View of the Beylerbeyi Mosque from the Bosphorus during a visit by Maḥ-
mūd II, showing the original single minaret. By Wolf after Ludwig Fuhrmann,
from Edward Raczyński, Dziennik podróży do Turcyi odbytey w roku MDCCCXIV
(Wrocław, 1821), pl. 44. Engraving on paper
Courtesy of the Ossoliński National Institute, Wrocław [13.737]

Although seemingly an ad hoc experiment inspired by a particular setting,

the Beylerbeyi’s arrangement proved a far-reaching success, establishing a new
paradigm that almost all subsequent imperial mosques would follow. Its pop-
ularity is not difficult to explain. The foregrounding of the pavilion yielded an
aesthetically and symbolically cohesive design that proclaimed the mosque’s
royal status without the expense of a courtyard, even in the absence of monu-
mental scale. As we can see from an engraving of Beylerbeyi during a visit by
ʿAbdü’l-ḥamīd’s son Maḥmūd II (r. 1223–1255/1808–1839) in 1229/1814, the pavil-
ion frontage also served as an impressive backdrop to processions by water,
which the sultans were undertaking with growing frequency when attending
Friday prayers (figure 11.14).107 This same image shows the mosque with its origi-

complaints on a regular, if less frequent, basis. Başaran, Selim III 184–185; Tuğ, Politics of
honor 75–78; Mouradgea d’ Ohsson, Tableau général vii, 213–220; Watkins, Travels ii, 224,
226 (this corrects an erroneous reference in my book); Pertusier, Promenades ii, 277–278.
107 The engraving, made after a drawing by the artist Ludwig Fuhrmann, appears together
with another scene of the visit in Raczyński, Dziennik podróży, plates 43–44, reproduced
and discussed in Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque 245–247.
410 rüstem

nally single minaret; the two that stand today were added in between 1235/1820
and 1236/1820–1821 by Maḥmūd, who enhanced the building to reflect the
unanticipated prestige it had come to enjoy.
The creation and impact of the Beylerbeyi were embedded in a larger phe-
nomenon of shoreline development that had begun with the court’s return
to Istanbul in 1115/1703. In a process analyzed by Tülay Artan and Shirine
Hamadeh, the Bosphorus was transformed during the twelfth/eighteenth cen-
tury into a ceremonial thoroughfare dotted with sultanic and elite resi-
dences.108 The addition of the mansion-like Beylerbeyi to this avenue con-
solidated the royal presence in explicitly religious terms, and this model was
perpetuated well into the thirteenth/nineteenth century by a series of mosques
that, as well as emulating the Beylerbeyi’s plan, were likewise located along or
close to the water.109 The wholesale shifting of imperial mosque patronage to
the shoreline suburbs represented a notable break from earlier norms, and one
that was a wise move in several regards. Besides providing an elegant solution
to the rule described by Peyssonnel, the suburbs offered the sultans fertile new
ground to extend their largesse beyond the crowded walled city by building
up the areas around their mosques, which typically came with public drinking
fountains and in some cases more extensive dependencies.
The potential of this approach was fully recognized by ʿAbdü’l-ḥamīd’s
nephew and successor, the reformist Selīm III (r. 1203–1222/1789–1807, d. 1223/
1808), whose self-named Selimiye Mosque in Üsküdar was the centerpiece of
an entire new neighborhood complete with gridded streets, shops, and fac-
tories (figure 11.15).110 Erected between 1216/1802 and 1220/1805, the hilltop
mosque was a careful fusion of earlier Ottoman Baroque experiments, com-
bining the Beylerbeyi’s pavilion-fronted arrangement with the elegance and
loftiness of the Nuruosmaniye. Among the other buildings of Selīm’s new dis-
trict were barracks for his famous Niẓām-ı Cedīd (New Order) army—a modern
infantry trained on Western models111—and a dervish lodge for the Naqsh-

108 Artan, Architecture as a theatre of life; Artan, Istanbul 305–308; Hamadeh, The city’s plea-
sures 17–47.
109 For a survey of these mosques, see Berberoğlu, Boğazın incileri. For their architecture, see
Wharton, The architects.
110 For the mosque and its district, see Batur, Selimiye Camii; Goodwin, A history of Ottoman
architecture 413; Kuban, Ottoman architecture 545; Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque 256–265.
For the Selimiye’s formal and symbolic impact on Maḥmūd II’s Nusretiye Mosque (1238–
1241/1823–1826), see Rüstem, Victory, esp. 101–102.
111 For the barracks, see Batur, Selimiye Kışlası; Kuban, Ottoman architecture 555. For the
political and military background, see Aksan, Ottoman wars 180–258; Finkel, Osman’s
dream, 389–422; Shaw, Between old and new; Yaycioglu, Partners 38–63.
piety and presence in the postclassical sultanic mosque 411

figure 11.15 Selimiye Mosque, Üsküdar, Istanbul, 1216–1220/1802–1805, view toward the
mosque’s right side, with the royal pavilion projecting toward the foreground
(the original minaret caps were conical). Albumen print by Abdullah frères,
1880–1893
Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Prints and Photographs
Division, Abdul Hamid II Collection [LC-USZ62–81873]
412 rüstem

bandi order, who, together with the Mevlevi, were enthusiastic advocates of
Selīm’s reforms.112 The support that Selim enjoyed from these unimpeachably
orthodox Sufi groups shows once again how central Sunnism remained to the
Ottoman royal brand in this late period, even if certain quarters of the ulama
joined with the janissaries in opposing the New Order.113 As if to accentuate
the message, the Selimiye’s Naqshbandi lodge was built opposite the famous
shrine of the eighth/fourteenth-century saint Ḳaraca Aḥmed, who was ven-
erated by the janissary-affiliated Bektashi order. The confrontational juxtapo-
sition of state-backed (and state-backing) orthodox Sufis and their question-
able “heterodox” rivals emblematized the Selimiye’s commitment to righteous
modernization.114 Clearly visible from across the Bosphorous, this striking new
socioreligious complex announced to the wider city that Selīm’s reforms were
being undertaken for the well-being of the state, and hence of Islam itself.
The Selimiye’s visual and topographical impact points to another reason
behind the growing preference for such suburban patronage. Away from the
massive landmarks and dense fabric of the walled city, the later mosques
faced less competition and could continue to impress despite being smaller
than their intramural forerunners. Revised traditions of architectural decorum
further secured the mosques’ legibility as imperial works: the recently intro-
duced pavilion façade entrenched itself as an unmistakable sultanic marker,
and even the use of a domed prayer hall—previously commonplace in non-
royal commissions—became rare at other levels of patronage after the mid-
twelfth/eighteenth century, at least as far as Istanbul was concerned. And so
while numerous servants of the state and other well-to-do individuals joined
the ruler in erecting new mosques in the expanding capital, their contributions
generally made use of hipped roofs that posed no real challenge to their domed
sultanic counterparts, which thus rose as beacons of kingly munificence along
the city’s mushrooming shoreline suburbs.115 The reduced scale of these later
sultanic mosques might even bolster their credibility as symbols of the gener-

112 For the lodge, which was rebuilt between 1250/1834 and 1251/1835–1836 and is today known
as the Küçük Selimiye Çiçekçi Mosque, see Haskan, Yüzyıllar boyunca Üsküdar i, 142–157;
Tanman, Selimiye Tekkesi. For Selīm’s Sufi backers, see Heyd, The Ottoman ʿulemā, esp. 33;
Weismann, Naqshbandiyya 77–78; Yaycioglu, Janissaires; Yaycioglu, Partners 50, 58–61.
113 Heyd, The Ottoman ʿulemā 33.
114 For Ḳaraca Aḥmed’s shrine, which is part of an eponymous cemetery, see İşli, Karacaah-
met Mezarlığı. On the reformists’ hostility toward the janissaries and Bektashis, see Heyd,
The Ottoman ʿulemā 41–42. On the role of the Sufis in backing the Ottoman sultanate (and
caliphate) in earlier periods, see Yılmaz, Caliphate.
115 Rüstem, Ottoman Baroque 293n10. For Istanbul’s thirteenth/nineteenth-century expan-
sion, see Çelik, The remaking.
piety and presence in the postclassical sultanic mosque 413

figure 11.16 Ortaköy Mosque (Büyük Mecidiye Mosque), Ortaköy, Istanbul, completed
1271/1854, view of a royal visit for the Friday prayer. Photographed by Pascal
Sébah, 1885. Albumen print
Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles. Pierre de Gigord Col-
lection [96.R.14 (A9.F24b)]

ous but commanding hold of their founders: with the prayer hall diminished
in size as the pavilion acquired greater prominence, these spaces assumed the
nature of royal chapels where worshippers were permitted the honor of pray-
ing under the sovereign’s auspices.116
The conceit of sultanic attentiveness was underscored by the lavish visits
that regularly enlivened these monuments, which constituted new destina-
tions in an already busy ceremonial roster (figure 11.16). Crisscrossing the water-
ways, the multiplied processional routes associated with this building activity
formed a citywide network that spoke of the sultan’s comprehensive and benef-
icent dominance, an idea physically substantiated by the mosques themselves.
Indeed, more than any other kind of Ottoman imperial foundation, the post-

116 The comparison to chapels is made (although framed almost as a deficiency) also in Crane,
The Ottoman sultan’s mosque 190, 193, 205.
414 rüstem

Beylerbeyi model treats the royal presence as a precondition of its design: the
pavilion stands front and center always ready to receive the sultan, forever
concretizing his position among—and over—his subjects. It is their promise
of perpetual access to the ruler that renders the later mosques such effective
encapsulations of the state’s religiopolitical ideology. Wielding the concept of
royal piety in terms that built on Aḥmed I’s daring experiment, the imperial
mosque in its final form absolved the sultan from the obligations of a holy
warrior. To serve the Sublime State as God’s chosen representative was, these
monuments declared, victory enough.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank Tijana Krstić and Derin Terzioğlu for inviting me to partici-
pate in the workshop out of which this article grew. They and the anonymous
reviewer offered extremely helpful feedback on earlier drafts.

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 part 3
Sunnis, Shi‘is, and Kızılbaş:
The Context- and Genre-Specific
Nature of Confessional Politics

∵
 chapter 12

Neither Victim Nor Accomplice: The Kızılbaş as

Borderland Actors in the Early Modern Ottoman
Realm
Ayşe Baltacıoğlu-Brammer

The leaders of the Safaviyya order with its center in Ardabil, a relatively small
city in northwestern Iran, put immense efforts into recruiting followers from
among Turkoman (and Kurdish) tribesmen in Anatolia beginning in the mid-
eighth/fourteenth century. By the second half of the ninth/fifteenth century, as
the movement completed its transformation into a Shi‘i military-cum-political
group under the leadership of Junayd (d. 869/1460) and his son Ḥaydar (d. 893/
1488), Safavid efforts consequently evolved from mostly uncoordinated endeav-
ors aiming to gain followers for the order to a series of semiofficial and pro-
grammatic policies of recruiting full-fledged adherents to their cause. These
adherents were called Kızılbaş, meaning “read head” in Turkish, due to a crim-
son twelve-gored headpiece that they wore, which signified their devotion to
the Twelve Shi‘i Imams, as well as to the leaders of the Safavid movement.1
This new type of loyalty under the Safavid banner often times meant send-
ing money to the Safavid state via its agents, serving as soldiers in the shah’s
army, and in many cases migrating to the Safavid realm. The relatively small
number of Kızılbaş in greater Iran, where most of the population were either
nominally Sunni or politically distant from the movement, made Anatolia (and
to a lesser extent Iraq and Syria) even more attractive for the Safavid lead-
ers in their attempts to find a loyal base.2 The Safavid leaders, continuing

1 For a detailed discussion on the gradual crystallization of the Safavid Sufi order into a Shi‘i
religiopolitical movement under the Safavid banner, see Baltacıoğlu-Brammer, The emer-
gence of the Safavids; Mazzaoui, The origins of the Safavids; Abbaslı, Safevilerin kökenine
dair; Anooshahr, Turkestan and the rise of Eurasian empires 56–83; Musalı, Şeyh İbrahim
Safevi döneminde Erdebil Tekkesi; Pourahmadi-Amlashi and Zeylabpour, Sheikh Ibrahim Safavi
Morshid-e Ghomnam; Hinz, Uzun Hasan ve Şeyh Cüneyd; Sümer, Safevi devleti’nin kuruluşu.
2 Sultan Yaʿqūb (d. 896/1490), the ruler of the Aq Quyunlu state, in his letter to Sultan Bāyezīd II
(d. 918/1512) specifically mentions Ḥaydar’s brutality against the locals including “nursing
babies, women, and elderly” to explain Safavids’ unpopularity in Azerbaijan. Ferīdūn Beg,
Münşeʾātü’s-selāṭīn i, 302–304. One should also mention the linguistic connection between
the Turkish-speaking Safavid leaders and most of the inhabitants of Anatolia as a reason for
this affinity.

© ayşe baltacıoğlu-brammer, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004440296_013

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
424 baltacıoğlu-brammer

with Shah Ismāʿīl (r. 907–930/1501–1524) and Shah Tahmāsb (r. 930–984/1524–
1576), primarily strengthened their position by addressing certain vulnerabili-
ties and sensibilities of the inhabitants of the region stemming from various
sociopolitical and financial grievances, as well as millenarian anxieties,3 by
offering a communal identity, a sense of security, and a series of possibilities
for advancement. The end result was that by the mid-tenth/sixteenth century,
if one is to believe some of the Ottoman, Safavid, and European sources, the
Kızılbaş constituted the majority of the population in Anatolia with a heavy
presence not only in rural areas but also in urban centers, including Istan-
bul.4
Modern historiography’s initial attempts to tackle the Kızılbaş question was,
however, inconsistent, if not problematic. At the outset, according to the Turk-
ish historians-cum-politicians of the early twentieth century, whose staunch
nationalist agenda shaped the nature of history writing in the first decades of
the newly founded Turkish republic, the existence of the Kızılbaş population in
the early modern Ottoman realm was never more than an “aberration” because,
according to them, Shi‘ism and “Turkishness” have been historically incompati-
ble with each other.5 On the other hand, a number of scholars in the second half
of the century, while recognizing the existence of a substantial Kızılbaş com-
munity in early modern Anatolia, have overemphasized either the influence
of pre-Islamic beliefs and traditions, the ignorance of local populations, or the
intensity and permanence of the Sunni Ottoman administration’s persecution
of its non-Sunni (in this case, the Kızılbaş) subjects of the empire.6 Conse-
quently, the Ottoman Kızılbaş existed in these foundational works mostly as
the passive followers of the Safavid court against whom Istanbul’s “keen sword”
swung ceaselessly.

3 For detailed discussions on millenarian anxieties in the early modern period, see Subrah-
manyam, Turning the stones; Fleischer, The Lawgiver; Özel, Population changes; Babayan,
Mystics, monarchs, and messiahs; Bashir, Deciphering the cosmos; Bashir, Messianic hopes;
Ocak, Syncrétisme et esprit messianique.
4 Minorsky, Shaykh Bali-Efendi 438, n. 4; Baha Said Bey, Türkiye’de Alevi zümreleri 404–406; Baş-
tav (trans. and ed.), 16. asırda yazılmış 178–180.
5 Köprülü, Türk edebiyatı’nda ilk mutasavvıflar; Günaltay, Türk-İslam tarihine eleştirel bir yak-
laşım, and for a later era example of this approach, see Saray, Türk: İran münâsebetlerinde. The
so-called “Köprülü paradigm” has been widely criticized by several scholars. See, for instance,
Karamustafa, Origins of Anatolian Sufism; Dressler, Writing religion; Karakaya-Stump, The
Kizilbash-Alevis.
6 Bardakçı, Alevilik; Ocak, Babailer isyanı; Ocak, Alevi ve Bektaşi inançlarının; Ocak, Din ve
düşünce; Mélikoff, Uyur idik uyandırdılar; Arjomand, The shadow of God 79; Cahen, Le prob-
lème du Shî’isme 120; Eröz, Türkiye’de Alevilik Bektaşilik; Roemer, The Qizilbash Turcomans;
Imber, The persecution; Kütükoğlu, Osmanlı-Iran siyasi münasebetleri.
neither victim nor accomplice 425

The revisionist historiographical wave of the late twentieth and the early
twenty-first century has rightfully criticized these previous approaches and
broadened our horizon not only about the early modern Kızılbaş movement,
but also about the nature of the Ottoman state and society in general.7 With
a new set of concepts, debates, and perspectives to evaluate the past, recent
studies have (re)contextualized the sociopolitical and religious undercurrents
of the era to meaningfully evaluate the early modern Ottoman state and its
involvement in the creation and dissemination of religious narratives and poli-
cies. Drawing on the studies examining the efforts taken by the state authorities
in early modern Europe toward confessional uniformity, several historians of
the eastern Mediterranean have recently proposed to reassess the Ottoman
state’s increasing emphasis on sectarian standardization in the early modern
era under the rubric of “confessionalization.” While Marcus Dressler has char-
acterized these efforts of the Ottoman state as “inventing orthodoxy,”8 Tijana
Krstić has convincingly argued that the Ottoman central authority’s efforts at
confession building in fact aimed “higher” than simply defining a confessional
identity for its subjects, because a “tendency to sacralize authority exercised by
the ruler” was also a way of maintaining social discipline.9 The Ottoman state’s
increasing emphasis on Sunnism in the highest political and scholarly circles
was also noted by Hüseyin Yılmaz, who pointed to a sharp increase in the num-
ber of Ottoman polemical and nonpolemical accounts written during and/or
right after Istanbul’s military engagements with the Safavids, which depicted
the Ottoman dynasty as the one chosen by God.10 At the same time, however,
Derin Terzioğlu has argued that Ottoman Sunnitization was a “continuation of
pre-existing trends” with multifaceted causes rather than “simply a politically
minded response to the rise of the Safavids,” and that a wider set of issues must
be considered in order to get a better understanding of the phenomenon.11
Although these scholars established that the Ottoman-Safavid rivalry radi-
cally changed the Ottoman imperial and scholarly language, their works’ heavy
emphasis on confession building has perpetuated—as an unintended conse-
quence, I would say—the dichotomy between the Sunni Ottoman rulers and
their non-Sunni/Kızılbaş subjects. As a response, this article, while building
upon recent studies that have reevaluated Ottoman religious politics, inte-

7 See the scholarship produced by Yıldırım, Karakaya-Stump, and Zarinebaf listed in the
bibliography.
8 Dressler, Inventing orthodoxy 141.
9 Krstić, Contested conversions 14.
10 Yılmaz, Caliphate redefined 218–228.
11 Terzioğlu, How to conceptualize 305.
426 baltacıoğlu-brammer

grates a new set of questions into the picture to challenge the long-held view
that the relationship between the Sunni rulers and their Kızılbaş subjects was
irreconcilable and characterized by the state’s perpetual persecution of the
“defenseless” and/or “powerless” confessional nonconformists.12 This is only
possible with an in-depth examination and synthesis of the Ottoman imperial
sources which reveals that, as a unique population situated in between the two
mighty empires, the Ottoman Kızılbaş were neither the passive followers of the
Safavid court nor the defenseless victims of the “never-ending” Ottoman perse-
cution. On the contrary, even though Istanbul from time to time pursued poli-
cies targeting the Kızılbaş en masse, the same community embodied regional,
socioeconomic, and political heterogeneity, and shaped the nature of the rela-
tionship between the Ottoman and Safavid courts. The Kızılbaş also indirectly
influenced the formation and development of sectarian identities at both the
state and the individual levels in the early modern era, from Ottoman Sunnism
to Safavid Shi‘ism and everything in between. While acknowledging possible
limitations of relying on the sources written by the “ruler,” not by the “ruled,” I
should note that this is an intentional approach as the goal here is to reexamine
the status of the Kızılbaş and the power that they wielded vis-à-vis the political
establishments of the region (i.e., the Ottoman and Safavid states) by scruti-
nizing the mundane-looking and often straight-forward state documents and
narratives, which on the surface are heavily informed by sectarian language.13
The voice of the Kızılbaş as a substantial power holder of the era manifests

12 Several historians have recently challenged this dichotomy from different angles. Vefa
Erginbaş has successfully demonstrated the heterogenous nature of Sunnism in the
Ottoman domains. See Erginbaş, Problematizing Ottoman Sunnism; Erginbaş, Reading
Ottoman Sunnism. Stefan Winter brought further nuance to this picture by demonstrat-
ing the importance of pragmatism as the leading—yet often times neglected—factor
that determined Istanbul’s approach toward its Shi‘i population, rather than confessional
zealotry. Winter, Shiites of Lebanon. For a nuanced take on the ambiguities between Sun-
nism and Shi‘ism in the context of medieval Anatolia, see Yıldırım, Sunni orthodoxy vs.
Shiʿite heterodoxy?
13 The limited number of existing and available Kızılbaş sources provide us with certain
clues on the sociopolitical and fiscal authority that the Ottoman Kızılbaş retained. See
Karakaya-Stump, Kızılbaş; Bektaşi, Safevi ilişkilerine dair. However, one should mention
that Kızılbaş sources carry their own limitations, since they mostly discuss the rules, reg-
ulations, and teachings of the Kızılbaş/Shi‘i faith, religious and/or heroic poetry, or the
pedigree of certain Kızılbaş families. The recent growing corpus on the Kızılbaş sources in
general include Kaplan, Yazılı kaynaklara göre Alevilik; Kaplan, Şeyh Safi buyruğu; Ayyıldız,
Buyruk; Birdoğan, Alevi kaynakları; Musalı, Şeyh Safi Velâyetnâmesi; Karakaya-Stump,
Documents and buyruk manuscripts; Birdoğan, Anadolu ve Balkanlar’da Alevi yerleşim-
leri; Yaman, Buyruk; Taşğın, Bisâtî, Şeyh Sâfî Buyruğu; Yıldırım, Geleneksel Alevilik.
neither victim nor accomplice 427

itself in these sources via the practices of conversion and reconversion, as well
as the acts of negotiation, tax evasion, migration, and ultimately rebellion.14
Within this context, this chapter also problematizes the clear-cut bound-
aries between the sectarian camps in the early modern Middle East (i.e., Sunni
Ottomans vs. Shi‘i Safavids), as well as the depiction of the Kızılbaş popula-
tion as caught in the middle, by elucidating the latter’s vigorous and dynamic
interactions with both sides based on individual and communal interests. To
do so, I employ two broad frameworks. To begin with, I utilize the concept
of “social conversion,” which was coined by Richard Bulliet in his attempt to
examine the Islamization, and later Shi’itization, of Iran.15 I use this concept
to encapsulate the complexities of forming and shifting religious identities as
behaviors with multifaceted thought processes, particularly in the early mod-
ern context denoting, in many cases, relocation “from one religiously defined
social community to another” with nonreligious motivations playing a signifi-
cant role in the process. Bulliet’s approach, based on the argument that “leaving
aside ecstatic converts, no one willingly converts from one religion to another
if by virtue of conversion he markedly lowers his social status,”16 serves here
as a significant tool for understanding the practice of political and religious
conversion in the early modern Ottoman context, in which the members of
the Kızılbaş community were active participants and negotiators rather than
oblivious followers or the powerless victims of the imperial powers in play.17
The second framework that I employ in this article involves the notions of
frontier, border, and borderland authority. As significant historical points of
reference, borderlands in the early modern era revealed different state-society
dynamics. These broadly defined “end territories,” Palmira Brummet rightfully
argues, were places “where one empire flowed into (and out of) another …
wars were fought, garrisons built, and allegiances tested.”18 While the borders

14 A similar approach has been recently taken by several scholars in their attempts to scruti-
nize the Ottoman court’s interaction with Kurdish tribes and tribal leaders. For instance,
Baki Tezcan mentions an imperial document dating from the 930s/1530s giving privileges
of hereditary rule to various Kurdish emirs in return for their loyalty to the Ottoman
sultan, not the Safavid shah. See Tezcan, The Development. In a similar vein, Nelida Fuc-
caro examines the complexity of the Kurdish frontier between the Ottoman and Safavid
Empires. See Fuccaro, The Ottoman frontier in Kurdistan.
15 Bulliet, Conversion to Islam; Radushev, The spread of Islam 363–384.
16 Bulliet, Conversion to Islam 34, 41.
17 This approach can be criticized as being reductionist with its heavy emphasis on sociopo-
litical factors. While seeing this point, this study aims to strike a balance between the
existing literature, in which the Kızılbaş have no power, and historical reality where, I
argue, their power manifested itself via various forms and behaviors.
18 Brummet, Mapping the Ottomans 84.
428 baltacıoğlu-brammer

of the Ottoman Empire with its western neighbors have been a popular topic
among historians, the eastern Ottoman borders in the early modern era have
not received comparable attention.19 A close reading of the sources reveals that
in this context the Kızılbaş were an integral party in negotiating and maintain-
ing the border between the Ottoman and Safavid empires, although by that I
do not necessarily mean the conventional borders resulting from peace treaties
but borders demarcated by sphere of influence that could sometimes be lim-
ited in one’s own but extend deep into the other polity’s territory. I call this
type of demarcation of power and legitimacy as “domestic” or “inner” borders.
Therefore, every Ottoman sultan and Safavid shah, being fully aware of the
importance and the volatility of their borders, both in the sense of conven-
tional and inner borders, had to (re)negotiate their position not only with the
high-ranking members of their court and the provincial elites but also with the
population(s) of the borderland regions, in this case the Kızılbaş, Kızılbaş-to-
be, or former Kızılbaş. In return, these subjects amassed a significant degree of
power as: the cultivators of the land and the providers of tax revenues; foot sol-
diers; the de facto intermediaries; defenders of the active border zones; and as
the subjects who recognized one or the other state authority and thus played a
key legitimating role. In other words, the three major participants in the polit-
ical landscape of Anatolia (i.e., the Ottomans, the Safavids, and the Kızılbaş)
were concerned either with the expansion of their empire and the uphold-
ing of their legitimacy (in the case of Ottoman and Safavid courts), or with
the protection of their status and way of life (in the case of ordinary subjects
and community/tribal leaders alike). These motivations and concerns resulted
in the cultivation of certain practices that often times crossed the presumed
boundaries of sectarian adherences both by the state and its subjects.
Last, but not least, it is also important to emphasize that the term Kızılbaş
always carried multilayered social, political, and fiscal meanings for individuals
and institutions within the Ottoman and Safavid realms. As I have shown else-
where, the Ottoman central authority began to refer to the sympathizers (both
Ottoman and non-Ottoman) of the Safavid court as “Kızılbaş” only immediately
prior to the reign of Sultan Selīm I (r. 918–926/1512–1520), who changed the
nature of the relationship between Istanbul and the Safavid court with open
military engagements and fiscal sanctions. In this context, the term “Kızılbaş”

19 Recent works on the topic of borders between the Ottoman Empire and its neighbors
include Peacock (ed.), The frontiers of the Ottoman world; Heywood, The frontier in Otto-
man history; Ágoston, A flexible empire; Kołodziejczyk, Between universalistic claims and
reality; Zarinebaf, Rebels and renegades; Schwarz, Writing in the margins of empire; Ateş,
Ottoman-Iranian borderlands.
neither victim nor accomplice 429

provided the negative labeling that the Ottoman central authority required to
identify and pursue the enemy of the “religion and state” (dīn-ü devlet), given
that the geopolitical legitimacy of Istanbul was at stake with the rapid emer-
gence and expansion of the Safavid state on its eastern frontier.20 As Guy Burak
has cogently argued, this period also corresponds with the Ottomans’ adop-
tion of the Hanafi madhhab as the official school of law under the aegis of the
office of the chief mufti (or şeyhü’l-islām), bridging the gap between the Islamic
(sharia) and sultanic (ḳānūn) law.21 Therefore, Ottoman policy makers, more
often than not, disguised their nonreligious concerns with an increasingly sec-
tarian rhetoric provided by various influential members of the same religious
elite group. In the wake of this foundational period, the Ottoman court, start-
ing with Süleymān the Magnificent (r. 926–974/1520–1566) and continuing for
over a century, embraced a more complex approach toward both its Kızılbaş
subjects and its rival, the Safavids, whereby the term Kızılbaş carried notably
different, and in many cases conflicting, meanings depending on the context,
as well as the genre of the documents in which such references were made.22
Driven by the objective to emphasize the importance of fluidity and multi-
causality behind the actions and loyalties, as well as the necessity to reconcep-
tualize the importance of religion and religious belonging in the early modern
Middle Eastern context, the following pages will focus on specific sources of the
Kızılbaş authority and power: ability to migrate to the enemy territory and stop
paying taxes and providing military services to the current ruler. It is my firm
belief that the (re)formation of sectarian identities and their politicization in
the early modern Middle East can only be fully grasped with this approach that
reevaluates the position of the Kızılbaş within the Ottoman state and society
by paying attention to the group’s intrinsic diversity, their economic interests
and political grievances, as well as the complexity of the relationships that they
forged with Istanbul and its regional representatives.

20 Baltacıoğlu-Brammer, One word, many implications.

21 Burak, The second formation of Islamic law.
22 Baltacıoğlu-Brammer, One word, many implications. For instance, Ottoman imperial doc-
uments often times labeled subjects (mainly, but not limited to the Shi‘ites of Greater
Syria) as Kızılbaş as a legal device in order to justify official violence in situations of brig-
andage and tax evasion, rather than on account of heretical beliefs. In the eyes of the
Ottoman authorities, the Kızılbaş who sent money (and valuable gifts) to the Safavid shahs
and sought to migrate to Safavid Iran represented the loss of a critical part of the empire’s
revenue-producing work force and various orders were sent to the provinces to closely
watch these subjects of the empire.
430 baltacıoğlu-brammer

1 Ottoman-Safavid Rivalry, Its Frontiers, and Pecuniary Reasons of

Religiopolitical Loyalty

According to Gábor Ágoston, “a common feature of the frontiers [of the Otto-
man Empire] were the condominium, that is the joint rule, of the former power
elite and the Ottoman authorities.”23 This understanding is commonly used
among scholars to contextualize the western borders of the empire, where
Istanbul established and maintained tributary systems with various non-Mus-
lim local power holders. A similar structure, however, existed on the empire’s
eastern frontier(s) as well, even though the time frame of the expansion and
the manner in which it came to be established differed significantly.24 During
the initial era of the Ottoman and Safavid interaction in southern and eastern
Anatolia as well as in northern Iraq (between roughly the 880s and 950s/1480s
and 1550s), many local tribes, communities, and individuals positioned them-
selves strategically between the two political entities, contingent upon obtain-
ing material and territorial gains and privileges, as well as spiritual salvation
(particularly in the case of loyalty and subjugation to the Safavids). This gave
the inhabitants of this porous territory a rationale for supporting or fighting
against either the Ottomans or the Safavids in their expansionist endeavors
with various degrees of power of negotiation in hand. Accordingly, a high level
of fluidity in the political allegiances of the local populations prevailed in the
region.
Personal interests and intratribal frictions factored notably into the decision
to switch sides when tribes in the regions between the two empires became
aware of their ability to play the two imperial authorities off against each other.
For instance, when Muḥammad Khan (d. 935/1528–1529), the Safavid gover-
nor of Baghdad, left the city and escaped to Basra after he learned that his
tribe was collaborating against him with the Ottoman authorities, the Safavid
shah Tahmāsb I offered him a better position in Basra.25 In response, the
Ottoman authorities countered by offering the rank of bey to three signifi-

23 Ágoston, A flexible empire 22.

24 Heywood, The frontier in Ottoman history 234–240; İnalcık, Ottoman methods of con-
quest 103–129. Erzurum and Diyarbekir were two of the few provinces in the region where
the tīmār system was implemented. For the rest of the region, especially those parts inhab-
ited by the Kurds, Istanbul implemented other systems, mainly yurtluḳ-ocaḳlıḳ, in which
landholdings were typically transmitted from father to son. The holders of yurtluḳ-ocaḳlıḳ
would keep the tax revenues of their landholdings while providing military services to the
state. Ateş, Ottoman-Iranian borderlands 37–40; Agoston, A flexible empire 20–25; Kılıç,
Yurtluk-Ocaklık.
25 Eberhard, Osmanische Polemik 51.
neither victim nor accomplice 431

cant members of Muḥammad Khan’s family in the region.26 Contemporary

sources also mention the frontier districts as the scenes of ongoing competi-
tion between the Ottomans and Safavids, as well as among the local elites and
tribal leaders, who switched allegiance depending on personal and tribal inter-
ests. The story of Sulṭān Tekelu, an Ottoman sipāhī who “turned Kızılbaş” and
defected to the Safavids with many members of his tribe during the Şah Ḳūlu
Rebellion in Anatolia in 917/1511–1512, is a noteworthy case. The Safavid court
rewarded Sulṭān Tekelu’s defection with high-level political/military positions
in the regions of Tabriz, Shirvan, and Baku.27 The Tekelu tribe, however, was
politically weakened as a result of conflicts among various Kızılbaş tribes for
dominance in Azerbaijan, and following the death of Shah Ismāʿīl in 930/1524,
Sulṭān Tekelu this time marched against the new shah’s forces. Defeated, he
fled to the Ottoman fortress of Van to seek refuge in 940–941/1534.28 He was
later appointed lālā, or tutor, to the Safavid prince Alqāṣ Mīrzā, who also sought
refuge at the Ottoman court.29
The military and political career of the Bidlīsī family, Kurdish overlords of
the southeastern Anatolian province of Bitlis, further demonstrates how a fron-
tier family played the Ottomans and Safavids against each other during much
of the tenth/sixteenth century, specifically after the rise of the Safavids as the
Ottomans’ main geopolitical and religious rival in the east. Beginning with
Sharaf Beg, grandfather of Sharaf al-Dīn, the author of the famous Sharafnāma,
the Bidlīsī family made tactical shifts of allegiance to avoid being trapped
between the two regional powers.30 While Sharaf Beg supplied the Ottomans
with detailed intelligence reports on events in Safavid territory,31 his son, Shams
al-Dīn, migrated to Safavid Iran after Süleyman I appointed ʿUlamāʾ Beg, a Kızıl-
baş from Safavid Iran who had switched sides, the governor of Bitlis following
the Ottoman campaign to Iraq in 939–940/1533–1534. Shams al-Dīn, along with
the members of his tribe, was welcomed by Shah Tahmāsb I and honored with
the title khan and the governorship of various districts in Safavid Iran. His son

26 Interestingly enough, Muḥammad Khan decided to work for the Ottomans again when
Sharaf Khan changed sides and collaborated with the Safavids. Savaş, XVI. asırda Anado-
lu’da Alevilik 21.
27 Bidlisi, The Sharafnâma 145–146.
28 Riyāḥi, Sefāratnāmehā-i Irān 28; Monshī, History of Shah ‘Abbas i, 80–83.
29 Solak-zâde, Solak-zâde Tarihi ii, 214.
30 For a comprehensive discussion on the Bidlīsī family, particularly Idris Bidlīsī, and their
intricate interactions with the political authorities of the time, see Markiewicz, The crisis
of kingship.
31 Glassen, Bedlīsī, Šaraf-al-Dīn Khan.
432 baltacıoğlu-brammer

Sharaf al-Dīn, however, moved back to his hometown, Bitlis, after a series of
meetings with the Ottoman general Hüsrev Pasha in 985–986/1578; as a reward,
he was appointed governor.32
Even though the contemporary accounts do not specify whether the mem-
bers of the Bidlīsī family (or the above-mentioned Tekelu tribe) explicitly
changed their sectarian affiliations whenever they changed their geopolitical
allegiance, it is noteworthy that Sharaf al-Dīn’s overt ‘Alid loyalty33 is quite vis-
ible in his chronicle, which he wrote as the Prince of Bitlis under the Ottoman
rule. While narrating the events of 803/1401, for instance, he writes, “[Timur]
opened the grave of Yazīd the cursed (melʿūn), the son of Muʿāwiya,” who
ordered the killing of the third Imam Ḥusayn and his family, and burned
his bones.34 In another passage, while narrating the Timurid ruler Shahrūkh’s
(d. 850/1447) pilgrimage to Mashhad, Sharaf al-Dīn states that Shahrūkh left
Herat to visit “our dear Imam and his splendorous and heaven-scented tomb.”35
The persistence of ‘Alid loyalty among the Sunnis of the Ottoman Empire—the
phenomenon highlighted by Vefa Erginbaş in this volume and elsewhere—
must have facilitated the fluidity of the political and religious sympathies
among both common people and the tribal elites in the Ottoman-Safavid bor-
derlands. Furthermore, these and many other examples show that while con-
fessional affiliation played a significant role in shaping political allegiances,
practical benefits were at least as—or more—important than the message of
salvation.
The dynamic nature of the interactions between the Kızılbaş and the Otto-
man and Safavid courts continued to exist after the Treaty of Amasya (962/
1555), which designated a set of zones as the border between the two empires.36
Following this treaty, the essential factor motivating the locals (both at the indi-
vidual and communal levels) to side with either polity (or in some cases to stay
relatively neutral) remained relatively the same, this time with heavier empha-
sis on receiving prestigious posts, titles, or money from the Ottoman and/or

32 Even when the level of Anatolian participation in the Safavid cause was at its peak,
Ottoman counterpropaganda did not cease and often met with relative success. Accord-
ing to Sharaf Khan Bidlīsī, for instance, in 1535, around 3,000 Kızılbaş decided to defect to
the Ottoman side after Süleyman I promised to make them rulers of Azerbaijan. Bidlisi,
The Sharafnâma 184.
33 On the notion of confesional ambiguity see Woods, The Aqquyunlu 1–24; Pfeiffer, Con-
fessional ambiguity vs. confessional polarization. Also see Vefa Erginbaş’s article in this
volume, Reading Ottoman Sunnism.
34 Bidlisi, The Sharafnâma 184.
35 Ibid. 86.
36 Ebel, Representation of the frontier.
neither victim nor accomplice 433

Safavid capitals. This was particularly the case when the “new faith is perceived
to be tied to a larger and more bountiful political economy.”37 Therefore, the
allocation of money, land, and titles, as well as marriage alliances with key
members of the courts and the provincial elites served as successful strategies.
According to Fariba Zarinebaf, the main consequence of this mentality was
local border communities that were “divided, short of strong leadership, and
lacking in effective resistance.”38 While this was the case in certain situations,
the local actors’ attempts to insert themselves into ongoing political (and reli-
gious) struggles and/or negotiations between the Ottoman and Safavid courts
as active participants culminated in both short and long term material (and
also strategical) gains for the individuals and the communities in the region
alike.
Following the Treaty of Amasya, the Safavid leaders, while retaining their
overall goal of creating and maintaining a strong base in Ottoman Anatolia,
shifted their attention from recruiting large tribal populations to the Safavid
cause, encouraging them to migrate to Safavid Iran, to targeting individuals
and small groups, whose loyalty to the Safavid court manifested itself in mul-
tifarious ways. Particularly during the last decades of the tenth/sixteenth and
early eleventh/seventeenth century, which saw serious domestic unrest within
the Ottoman Empire, the religiopolitical loyalties of small groups and indi-
viduals were used to justify political actions, financial moves, and in some
cases migrations. This situation is evident in Ottoman imperial documents
as individuals with their names and religious/regional affiliations within the
context of the Ottoman-Safavid rivalry began to appear more often after the
mid-tenth/sixteenth century. For instance, Istanbul often utilized money and
valuables to prevent individuals and groups from “becoming Kızılbaş.” In an
imperial order from 982/1574, the governor of Diyarbekir was asked to honor a
certain Shaykh Ebū’l-hayr Sālif Efendi with ten aḳçes for not becoming Kızıl-
baş (Ḳızılbaş meẕhebine girmeyib).39 At the same time, the Ottoman central
authority remained highly skeptical of tribes and large groups of people in the
border regions who returned to the Ottoman realm (tekrār ʿavdet eyleyen) after
“becoming Kızılbaş” and migrating to Safavid territory. Several imperial orders
sent to frontier towns in Anatolia and Iraq in 980/1573 repeatedly warned the
local authorities to capture those who came back from Yuḳarı Cānib, or the
“upper side,” meaning mountainous Safavid territory, and to exile them imme-

37 Hefner, World building 29.

38 Zarinebaf, Rebels and renegades.
39 BOA, MD, Vol. 25, No. 1627 (17 Ṣefer 982/7 June 1574).
434 baltacıoğlu-brammer

diately to remote parts of the empire, above all newly conquered Cyprus.40 In
other cases, an order sent to the governor of Şehrizor (Kirkuk) in 986/1578 men-
tioned the commander of a frontier fortress, Ḥasan, to whom the fortress was
given with the condition of giving up his ḳızıl tac (i.e., the red headgear symbol-
izing loyalty to the Safavid shah). The order, after making a comparison with a
certain Iskender, who—unlike Ḥasan—sent his tac to Istanbul to keep his san-
jak (or district), accuses Ḥasan of not being reliable and asks the governor not
to trust him again, to remove him from his official position, and to confiscate
the tac.41
Moreover, an increasing number of Kızılbaş subjects of the Ottoman Empire
made a payment, called neẕir (or nüẕūr), to the Safavid religious and/or polit-
ical authorities as a sign of sympathy and a source of support.42 Ottoman
imperial documents show that as the intensity of the flow of money to the
Safavid court increased, Istanbul became further concerned about possible rev-
enue losses and its subjects’ loyalties, particularly in the Anatolian countryside.
Because the Ottoman central authority measured its own legitimacy in terms
of tax collection, land cultivation, and battle-ready subjects, its struggle with
the Safavids escalated as it attempted to secure its revenue sources and man-
power.43 This concern with tax evasion and loss of manpower can be seen as
early as the correspondence between Sultan Bāyezīd II (886–918/1481–1512) and
Shah Ismāʿīl I. When Shah Ismāʿīl asked Sultan Bāyezīd to let the followers of
the Safavid order visit the order’s center in Ardabil, the sultan responded that
the Anatolian Kızılbaş could not be allowed to leave the Ottoman realm since
they would not come back. Later, Bāyezīd expressed a willingness to allow his
subjects to travel to Ardabil only if they made a commitment not to settle per-
manently in Safavid Iran.44 On the other hand, relative acceptance was shown

40 BOA, MD, Vol. 21, No. 652 (22 Ẕilhicce 980/25 April 1573). It should also be noted that the
Ottoman state was trying to repopulate the island. For further details on early modern
Ottoman Cyprus, see Jennings, Christians and Muslims in Ottoman Cyprus.
41 BOA, MD, Vol. 35, No. 816 (26 Şaʿbān 986/28 October 1578).
42 For instance, an official letter sent to Erzurum in 960/1553 asks the governor to collabo-
rate with the governors of Karaman and Anadolu to calculate the amount of neẕir sent
from the region of Sivas to the öteki ṭaraf (literally, “the other side,” i.e., the Safavids)
by the mülāḥide and rāfiża. BOA, Cevdet Tasnifi, Document No. 922–39839 (20 Ramażān
960/30 August 1553).
43 According to the mainstream Turkish historiography, however, Istanbul perceived this as
the Safavids’ exploitation of Ottoman subjects and thus would not allow it. Saray, Türk-
İran münâsebetlerinde Şiiliğin rolü 31.
44 Ferīdūn Beg, Münşeʾātü’s-selāṭīn i, 328–329. Shah Ismāʿīl’s second request, sent in 1502–
1503, was, however, not accepted by the sultan. Solak-zâde, Solak-zâde Tarihi 429; Sümer,
Safevi devletinin kuruluşu 26.
neither victim nor accomplice 435

toward the “heretical” practices of particular Kızılbaş communities as long as

the sultan could rely on local notables and tribal and religious leaders to guar-
antee the communities’ taxes. As Winter shows, among the first of Greater
Syria’s tribal leaders to pledge loyalty to Selīm I on his conquest of the region
in 922/1516 was the Kızılbaş family of Baalbek.45
Furthermore, in the following decades, Ottoman sultans tried to differen-
tiate between “fiscally loyal” and “fiscally disloyal” Kızılbaş populations under
their rule. As Stefan Winter notes in the case of the Kızılbaş families in Syria,
Ottoman policy makers labeled Shi‘ites as Kızılbaş not on account of hereti-
cal beliefs but to justify official violence in the cases of brigandage and tax
evasion.46 Furthermore, in the Anatolian and Iraqi provinces, if a Kızılbaş indi-
vidual or group remained peaceful and remitted their taxes, they were labeled
only “Kızılbaş,” whereas if they rebelled and/or refused to remit their taxes,
additional pejorative labels were attached to them, such as mülḥiḍ, Rāfiżī, ehl-
i fesād, bī-namāz or bed-meẕheb.47 In a similar vein, Istanbul managed fiscal
appointments in many parts of Anatolia in a way that the Kızılbaş who were
in close contact with the Safavid court were punished more severely than the
Kızılbaş who were not. An order from 977/1570, for instance, asked the gover-
nor of Baghdad not to assign muḳāṭaʿas, a type of tax farm, to Burç ʿAlī and
his peers in Mosul since they had been active on the frontier as Shi‘i disci-
ples (Rāfiżī serdār halīfeleri).48 Another decree sent to the governor of Divriği
district (sancaḳ), Meḥmed Bey, in Ṣafer 976/August 1568 mentioned three hal-
īfes who were collecting money and goods for the Safavid shah. While one
of them was caught and executed, the other two escaped to Safavid Iran.49
The anxiety of the Ottoman capital toward the financial power that the Kızıl-
baş subjects possessed is also manifested in other ways. For instance, 17 of
the 33 mühimme orders from 978/1570–1571 that mention Kızılbaş individuals
or groups detail Selīm II’s orders to local authorities to catch anyone provid-
ing financial support either to the shah’s court or to the center of the order

45 Winter, The Kızılbaş of Syria 46.

46 For further examples of Ottoman financial support for various Kızılbaş subjects, Ibid.;
Öz, Alevilik ile İlgili 147. For further information on the Shi‘ites of Greater Syria under the
Ottoman rule, see Abu Husayn, The Shiites in Lebanon.
47 BOA, MD, Vol. 14, No. 311 (14 Safer 978/18 July 1570); MD, Vol. 14, No. 488 (12 Ramażān
978/7 February 1571).
48 MD, Vol. 9, No. 79 (29 Ramażān 977/7 March 1570).
49 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, 7 Numaralı mühimme iii, 13–14, No. 1988 (10 Ṣafer 976/4 Au-
gust 1568). The order pointed out that allowing them access to the public treasury, beyt’ül-
māl, was unlawful (cāʾiz olmaya) and, therefore, should be absolutely prevented (ḳaṭʿī
ṣūrette).
436 baltacıoğlu-brammer

in Ardabil. In addition, local authorities were told to confiscate money and

valuables that were being sent to the shah.50 In many other cases, the flow of
money was in the reverse, from the Safavid court to the Ottoman subjects, and
Istanbul was equally anxious about it. An order from 987/1579 details Istan-
bul’s concern over a transaction of 500 filori (Venetian ducats) between the
Safavid state and Manṣūr Halīfe of Tokat. The Kadis of nearby Zile and Artık-
abad were sent to investigate this transaction and confiscate the money for the
treasury.51
Ottoman central authority still applied the strategy of redistributing posts
and benefits and granting privileged status to Safavid subjects who “turned”
Sunni and/or moved to the Ottoman realm. However, these were fewer in num-
ber and mostly symbolic in Istanbul’s counterpropaganda activities to win the
“war of legitimacy” against the Safavid shahs. In one of the two noteworthy
cases, Meḥmed Sulṭān, the Kızılbaş governor of Qahqaha (Alamut) in north-
ern Iran, took refuge in Istanbul in 995/1587, during the Ottoman-Safavid War
of 986–999/1578–1590. In return for his loyalty to the Ottoman sultan and his
help in conquering Ardabil, Meḥmed Sulṭān and his immediate family were
promised high official positions.52 Changing sides (more than once in cer-
tain cases) between the Ottomans and Safavids was relatively common among
Kızılbaş emirs of the frontier regions.53 Meḥmed Sulṭān’s migration to the
Ottoman lands, however, was a sign of increasing Ottoman influence among
the Kızılbaş emirs from the inner parts of Iran and left no choice for Shah

50 In an order from 978/1571, the Ottoman central authority asked the governor of Baghdad
to inquire into the nature of the communication between its Ottoman Kızılbaş subjects
and the Safavid Kızılbaş who came to the Ottoman realm to collect alms and to confiscate
these alms: “Yuḳarı Cānibden varanlara ne maḳūle kimesneler ihtilāṭ edip ve ne söyleşirler
nuẕūr (neẕir) ve ṣadaḳāt gibi nesne götürürler mi götüren ne aṣıl kimesnelerdir ve Yuḳarı
Cānib adamları ne aṣıl kimesnelere mektūblar ve armağan götürmüşlerdir ve bi’l-cümle cemi
aḥvāllerine vāḳıf ve muṭṭaliʿ olub ṣıḥḥati ile defter eyleyüb sana teslīm eyledikden ṣonra sen
dahī teʾhīr eylemeyüb Südde-i Saʿādetime gönderesün.” BOA, MD, Vol. 14, No. 376 (9 Ramażān
978/4 February 4, 1571).
51 BOA, MD, Vol. 40, No. 479 (28 Şaʿbān 987/20 October 1579).
52 BOA, MD, Vol. 63, Nos. 59 and 60 (2 Ṣefer 995/11 January 1587). Mühimme records mention
other Kızılbaş emirs and their families who moved to the Ottoman Empire in response to
the ongoing Ottoman counterpropaganda. For example, see MD, Vol. 65, No. 444 (3 Ṣefer
998/11 December 1589); Kırzıoğlu, Osmanlılar’ın Kafkas 378–379.
53 Monshī, however, singles out the Kurdish emirs for this behavior: “As in the custom of
landowners in frontier areas, these men [“seditious Kurds”], as occasion demanded, from
time to time attached themselves to the saddle straps of one of the rulers in the area and
claimed to be his retainers, but their real motive was to stir up trouble and achieve their
own ends in the ensuing confusion.” Monshī, History of Shah ‘Abbas 347.
neither victim nor accomplice 437

ʿAbbās but to sign a peace treaty with Istanbul in 998/1590.54 In a second

case, an official decree from Aḥmed I (r. 1012–1026/1603–17) granted the post
of ḳapıcıbaşı, or chief doorkeeper, an honorary position typically given to con-
verts, to a musician from the shah’s court upon his conversion to Sunni Islam.55
Murād III (r. 982–1003/1574–1595) observed several staged conversions of Kızıl-
baş Iranians to Sunni Islam in the official circumcision ceremonies organized
for his sons in 990/1582. The miniatures of the court historian, or şehnāmeci,
Seyyid Loḳmān’s Şehnāme-i Selīm Hān56 and Şehnāme-i Murād-i Sālis, as well
as İntiẓāmī’s Sūrnāme-i Hümāyūn, written for this occasion, depict the pub-
lic conversion of many Kızılbaş during the festival. In one of the paintings, an
Ottoman subject is depicted throwing off his Kızılbaş turban in an attempt to
gain the favor of the sultan, who is observing the scene from the balcony of the
İbrahim Pasha Palace.57

2 Ottoman Alienation of the Anatolian Population and the Issue of

Migration

The gradual integration of Anatolia into the Ottoman Empire was followed by
tensions emerging between the Ottoman central authority and the nomadic
and seminomadic populations, including small beylicates of the peninsula,
largely because of the Ottoman policies of centralization, taxation, seden-
tarization, and displacement which caused long-lasting problems, including

54 “The presence of the Ottomans and the successful revolt of the Kurds encouraged others
to rebel: among them was a tribe which had long enjoyed the favor of the Safavid royal
house, and which resided in the Solduz and Mianduab districts of Maraga [an ethnically
Turkish town in northwest Iran].” Ibid. 348–349.
55 BOA, Ali Emiri Tasnifi, I. Ahmed, File no. 7, Document no. 678 (1025/1616). Hülya Can-
bakal has analyzed the Ottoman registers of seyyids, or descendants of the Prophet, and
suggested a link between the central authority’s attempts to regulate the allotment of
seyyid-hood and its policies of containment of the Kızılbaş, for whom descent from the
Prophet was particularly important. Canbakal, Society and politics in an Ottoman town 1–
19, 61–90; Canbakal, The Ottoman state and descendants.
56 For a detailed study on the production process of Şehnāme-i Selīm Hān, see Fetvaci, The
production.
57 Atasoy, 1582 Sūrnāme-i hümāyūn 111. For further details on Murād III’s circumcision cer-
emony, see Zarinebaf-Shahr, Rebels and renegades; and Terzioğlu, The imperial festival.
According to Muṣṭafa Ālī, the narrator of the festivities in the Sūrnāme-i hümāyūn, the
Safavid convert was a hānzāde, the son of a prince, who was rewarded with an office fol-
lowing his conversion to Sunni Islam. Terzioğlu, The imperial festival 86.
438 baltacıoğlu-brammer

inflation, brigandage, and demographic fluctuations.58 Turcoman and Kurdish

tribes were the main disadvantaged parties in this process, and as a result they
came to distrust the Ottoman administration. Tension between the tribes and
the Ottoman state was especially pronounced in eastern and southeastern Ana-
tolia on account of relatively recent imposition of Ottoman control over the
region, and the higher level of tribal influence and power compared to other
parts of the peninsula. Furthermore, the state presence was closely associated
with constant military struggles, shifting borders, and spying activities,59 which
caused unrest among the dissatisfied and poorly organized rural populations
who bore the bulk of the tax burden. The Celali Rebellions are often under-
stood as a consequence of the tension between the tax-collecting state and the
tax-paying subjects that accumulated in many parts of the peninsula and shook
the state’s authority for over a century.60
This tension, however, did not always culminate in outright rebellion, par-
ticularly when the disgruntled taxpayers had other options available. In fact,
many locals, from both urban and rural environments, reacted to centraliza-
tion and overtaxation by migrating to the Safavid realm either individually or as
members of tribal groups, because of the Safavids’ assurance of greater auton-
omy for them. In general, Safavids consistently promoted its subjecthood as a
legitimate alternative to Ottoman taxpayer status. Imperial orders preserved
in the mühimme registers reveal that the Anatolian tribes (and individuals)
became more interested in relocating to the Safavid realm as they faced increas-
ing financial pressure from the Ottoman capital, primarily after the turn of
the tenth/sixteenth century, which corresponded with the emergence of the
Safavid Empire as a powerful religiopolitical actor in the region.
Immediate responses of the Kızılbaş toward the adverse effects of the Otto-
man centralization policies and their contribution to the success of pro-Safavid
efforts in Anatolia can be clearly seen with the “tīmār system,” which was imple-
mented in the early ninth/fifteenth century in much of the Balkans (see Grigor
Boykov’s paper in this volume on the reactions toward Ottoman centraliza-

58 Faroqhi, Politics and socio-economic change 95. For further information on the tensions
between the early Ottomans and various Anatolia beylicates, see Emecen, İlk Osmanlılar;
Karadeniz, Osmanlılar ile beylikler arasında; Kafadar, Between two worlds 90–117; Terzioğlu,
Sufis in the age of state-building 89.
59 For more information on the Ottoman tribal policy and the tribes in the eastern frontier
zone, see Sinclair, The Ottoman arrangements.
60 For details on these rebellions, see Akdağ, Celali isyanları; Griswold, The great Anatolian
rebellion; Tekindağ, Şahkulu Baba Tekeli isyanı; Şahin, Empire and power. The conventional
scholarship has regarded these rebellions as the result of Safavid instigation. Uzunçarşılı,
Osmanlı tarihi ii, 345–347; Saray, Türk-İran münâsebetlerinde.
neither victim nor accomplice 439

tion policies in this region and their impact on religious dynamics) and in
many parts of the Anatolian peninsula.61 While in principle tīmārs were allo-
cated based on merit rather than family connections and prestige, the quasi-
hereditary nobility of certain tribes and families was able to dominate the sys-
tem from its inception.62 In many instances, Istanbul used the distribution of
tīmār assignments as a tool to establish strong ties with local elites and “give
them a stake in the Ottoman system”63 so that they would not become dis-
loyal to the Ottoman government. However, during the tenth/sixteenth and
eleventh/seventeenth centuries, control of tīmārs shifted from the entrenched
tribal elite of the countryside, who had ties to the local population, to the
urban elite. This process, combined with the increasingly oppressive behavior
of the tīmār assessors, led to a sharp increase in dissidence among the rural
population.64 Complaints concerning tīmār assignments begin to appear in
primary sources as early as the 1510s. According to an official document from
this period, the main reason for the Kızılbaş rebellion of Shah Ḳūlu in 916–
917/1511 was the unfair allocation of tīmārs to people from the inner circle of
the palace and to local rulers, instead of meritorious cavalrymen.65 In a sim-
ilar vein, the tenth/sixteenth-century Ottoman statesman Celālzāde Muṣṭafa
Çelebi (d. 975/1567) points out that Anatolians fled to the Safavid side in droves
simply because of Bāyezīd II’s negligence of his rural subjects, who were heavily
oppressed by local authorities.66
The situation continued during the second half of the tenth/sixteenth cen-
tury as well.67 As certain elite urban families monopolized tīmār allocations, a

61 A tīmār was a land grant, the revenue from which enabled the holder to outfit and sup-
port a number of cavalry forces and additional number of armed retainers (cebelü) for the
Ottoman armies depending on the value and size of the land grant. Faroqhi, Politics and
socio-economic change in the Ottoman Empire 94.
62 Haldon, The Ottoman state 55, 62–63.
63 Ibid. 55.
64 Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı tarihi ii, 333. Tribal leaders were not the only disgruntled group
whose dissatisfaction with the system culminated in serious unrest. Beginning in the
early ninth/fifteenth century, frontier warriors (gāzīs) and the Sufis connected to them
were similarly victimized by Ottoman centralization efforts. The Sufis voiced their dis-
satisfaction with the ulama, the “agents, allies and beneficiaries of a centralizing state
… [filling] the medreses at an unprecedented rate” and, in some cases, sided with the
Safavids. Kafadar, Between two worlds 90–117; Terzioğlu, Sufis in the age of state-building
89.
65 Cited in Uluçay, Yavuz Sultan 53–90.
66 Celâlzade, Selim-nâme 48b–51a.
67 Only ten percent of tīmārs were assigned to provincial cavalry soldiers in 1600. Tezcan,
The second Ottoman empire 22.
440 baltacıoğlu-brammer

divide grew between them, on the one hand, and tribal leaders and other mem-
bers of the rural elite, on the other, who lacked the connections to acquire such
grants and therefore felt betrayed by and alienated from the state. Celālzāde
Muṣṭafa mentions Anatolian tribes whose members migrated to Safavid Iran
when they lost their privileged status and tīmārs in the 910s/1510s and 920s/
1520s.68 Peçevī similarly explains how the disenfranchisement of certain tribes
led them to join regional rebellions.69
In the following decades, as more disgruntled tīmār-holders and tribal lead-
ers, both of whom Kaya Şahin aptly describes as “the perennial malcontents of
Ottoman history,”70 as well as individuals seeking material gain and spiritual
fulfillment, relocated to the Safavid realm, Istanbul began to pay increasing
attention to these migrations. The Ottoman court frequently regarded these
migrants as ignorant, lazy, or disloyal subjects who opposed the state for illegit-
imate reasons. In describing the influence of Safavid disciples in Anatolia, the
Ottoman chronicler Kemālpaşazāde asserts that unemployed people who “had
not achieved anything in their entire lives and who had no tīmārs” left their
villages to join the halīfes with the false hope of becoming district governors
on the Safavid side.71 Although Kemālpaşazāde is obviously biased against the
Kızılbaş subjects of the Ottoman Empire and antagonistic toward the Safavids,
he correctly points out that the oppressive tīmār policies of the Ottoman cen-
tral authority and the lack of tīmār assignments to nonelites contributed sig-
nificantly to the success of pro-Safavid efforts in early modern Anatolia.
In addition to witnessing “tremendous political and economic dynamism, a
pervasive pragmatism, and an important level of social mobility and mobiliza-
tion,”72 the sixteenth century also marked the monetization of the Ottoman
economy even further with the large-scale transformation from the tīmār sys-
tem to tax farming. In response to these socioeconomic transformations,
“money, which had always constituted the sinews of government, acquired an
unprecedented significance for the Ottoman administrative military appara-
tus, which seemed to need it more than ever.”73 The central administration’s
dire need for cash and, as a result of advances in military technology, declin-
ing need for cavalry resulted in a sharp decline in tīmār assignments and a

68 Savaş, XVI. Asırda Anadolu’da Alevilik 59, 156.

69 Peçevī, Peçevi Tarihi i, 94.
70 Şahin, Empire and power 125.
71 Kemālpaşazāde, Tevārih-i Āl-i Osmān ix, Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi, MS Fatih 4221, 198a,
cited in Uğur, The reign of Sultan Selīm I 43.
72 Şahin, Empire and power 10.
73 Tezcan, The second Ottoman empire 11.
neither victim nor accomplice 441

corresponding increase in tax farms (iltizām). Many Kızılbaş Anatolians felt

cheated by this transformation on account of corruption and overtaxation.
They also suffered from the effects of the general late tenth/sixteenth-century
crisis, notably population pressure and climate change.74
Both empires were fully aware of the fiscal power of the Kızılbaş, and this
concern became manifested in the peace treaties signed between the two cap-
itals. Istanbul reciprocated Safavid efforts at keeping the peace treaties intact
by enforcing their articles, particularly in the frontier regions. For instance,
while Sunni Iranians were not allowed to migrate to the Ottoman realm, offi-
cial orders sent from Istanbul called for the investigation and punishment of
Ottoman individuals or groups who violated the agreement between the two
empires as well.75 A series of imperial orders, likewise, warn the governor of Van
to pay utmost attention to and prevent any type of infringement of the Amasya
Peace Treaty following rumors of Ottoman subjects attacking the Safavids and
plundering their land and property. These orders ultimately asked the gover-
nor to find and to punish severely the violators harming the Safavid frontier
tribes of Brados and Lityan, after mentioning that the Safavids have been fulfill-
ing their responsibilities.76 Furthermore, countless imperial orders requested
the Ottoman authorities in central and eastern Anatolia to stop these migra-
tions. A series of orders from the 960s/1560s, for instance, demanded from the
rulers of Amasya, Tokat, and Çorum, heavily Kızılbaş towns in north central
Anatolia, to investigate the large numbers of migrants, some of whom had
been stopped in Erzurum in northeastern Anatolia and barred from entering

74 Ibid. 17. Sam White convincingly argues that the suitable ecological environment of the
first half of the tenth/sixteenth century allowed the Ottoman central authority to pursue
expansionist policies, to create an Ottoman elite class, and to forge ahead with state for-
mation. However, as the state apparatus grew, “Ottoman systems of provisioning and set-
tlement faced mounting problems. Just as the Ottomans proved especially precocious at
building these systems, so they became particularly dependent on their stability and sus-
ceptible to their failures,” particularly during the critical periods of “population pressure,
inflation, and diminishing returns from agriculture” from the 970s/1570s to the 990s/1590s.
White, The climate of rebellion 19.
75 For examples, see Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, 3 Numaralı mühimme 517–518, No. 1168
(966–968/1558–1560); Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, 5 Numaralı mühimme 270, No. 1721 (10
Ẕilḳaʿde 973/29 May 1566).
76 “Mādām ki ol cānibden ṣulḥ ve ṣalāḥa mugāyir vażʿ ṣādır olmağa bu cānibden bir ferde
ṣulḥ ve emāna muhālif iş eylemekten iḥtiyāṭ eyleyib ṣulḥ ve ṣalāḥ umūrun gereği gibi riʿāyet
eyleyüb.” BOA, MD, Vol. 14, No. 756 (28 Cemāziyülāhır 978/27 November 1570). The same
order, however, asks the governor to keep sending “useful and civilized” ( yārār ve müte-
meddin) spies to Safavid Iran. See also BOA, MD, Vol. 18, No. 57 (29 Ramażān 979/14 February
1572).
442 baltacıoğlu-brammer

the Safavid realm.77 In another order from the late 1560s, the ruler of Trab-
zon was cautioned about the increasing risk of the entire Kızılbaş population
migrating to Safavid Iran if their relations with the Safavid court were not cut
off immediately.78 While many of these orders do not specify individuals and
their attempts to migrate to Safavid Iran, others address specific local elites and
tribes, whose migration had a greater impact on both sides. For instance, Istan-
bul repeatedly warned the governor of Erzurum about the Turcoman Batlu
tribe from Ardahan, whose leader fled to the “other side,” ordering him to stop
the tribe’s members from following their leader and to find and execute the
leader himself.79 The leader of the Kurdish Belilhānoğulları tribe from the Van/
Tabriz region, for instance, migrated to the Safavid side and sought help from
Shah ʿAbbās I in 1010–1011/1602. The Ottoman governor of Tabriz, ʿAlī Pasha,
responded by provoking a military conflict between the two sides that resulted
in the occupation of Tabriz by the Safavids in 1012/1603.80
As Robert Hefner asserts, early modern communities “burdened with a sense
of oppression and powerlessness [were] in need of … social redemption, that
is, a state that provides relief from an intolerable situation through new moral-
ity and social relations.”81 As mentioned above, the emergence of the Safavid
Empire right next door to Anatolia and the formation of a new religiopolit-
ical identity around the Safavid Sufi order provided Anatolians with a legiti-
mate political and territorial alternative. Celālzāde Muṣṭafa, in his Ṭabaḳātü’l-
memālik ve derecātü’l-mesālik, describes this period, with his typically strong
anti-Safavid prejudice, as one in which “a band of naked dervishes, runaway
Turkish peasants, and heretics” (bir bölük çıplak ışıḳlar, çiftbozan Türkler, münā-
fıḳlar) attacked sharia and ḳānūn and killed Sunnis under the influence of
the “sharia-abrogating and sedition-filled East” (şarḳ-ı şer-farḳ ve fitne-garḳ).82
Despite his gross generalization and open hostility against the Safavids and
their Anatolian sympathizers, the Kızılbaş, indeed, became not only an object
of the Ottoman-Safavid competition but also an active participant and con-
tributor to it.83 On occasion, various Safavid actors, disguised as merchants or
travelers, orchestrated these migrations. For instance, Istanbul warned the gov-
ernor of Baghdad in 980/1573 about a certain Sohrāb who had entered Ottoman

77 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, 3 Numaralı mühimme 630, No. 1422 (Ẕilḳaʿde 967/August
1560).
78 Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, 5 Numaralı mühimme 221, No. 1401 (973/1565).
79 BOA, MD, Vol. 21, No. 110 (19 Ramażān 980/23 January 1573).
80 Saray, Türk-İran Münâsebetlerinde 38.
81 Hefner, World building 29.
82 Cited in Şahin, Empire and power 69–71, 90–91.
83 Dressler, Inventing orthodoxy 153.
neither victim nor accomplice 443

territory allegedly to fetch the daughter of a Safavid regional ruler but instead
took many members of a local tribe back to Iran with him.84 As another precau-
tion against this type of migration, Istanbul several times asked local author-
ities not to let the Safavid Iranians mingle with the locals when they visited
their towns for trade or pilgrimage.85 Within a short period, however, thou-
sands whose dissatisfaction stemmed from financial devastation, the lack of
sustainable revenues, and overtaxation decided to relocate as the Safavid realm
promised less taxation, more autonomy, and salvation through allegiance to a
messianic ruler. According to Rudi Matthee, the Safavid shahs from the begin-
ning attempted to build a state on the notions of “shared religion, a long legacy
of strong personalized authority, and a governmental tradition centering on
royal justice and commercial activism.”86
These migrations meant not only the loss of population, but also the loss
of income and goods, which in many cases were more crucial for the Ottoman
court, which led to a flurry of imperial orders attempting to stop the outflow.87
In one order from 982/1574, the sultan asked the governor of Van to stop the
migration of the Haledi tribe, who had been paying their dues and taxes (ḥuḳūḳ
ve rüsūmları) to the Ottomans, to the Safavid territory. In many instances, Istan-
bul also asked the Safavid court to send back Ottoman subjects who had already
migrated.88 Istanbul justified these requests by invoking the Peace of Amasya,
which banned migrations from one side to the other.89 For instance, in an order
from 1574, the sultan told the governor-general of Baghdad to accept those who
had moved to Safavid Iran and come back following the peace, regardless of
their sect (madhhab).90

84 BOA, MD, Vol. 21, No. 697 (29 Ẕilhicce 980/2 May 1573).
85 BOA, MD, Vol. 23, No. 430 (29 Ẕilhicce 981/21 April 1574); MD, Vol. 24, No, 124 (29 Zilkade 981
/23 March 1574).
86 However, decentralizing forces (“formidable mountain regions, fearsome deserts, a harsh
climate, long distances, and a thinly spread and largely nomadic population,” as well as
“the lack of an effective infrastructural state power”), prevented a strong state from mate-
rializing. Matthee, The politics of trade 232.
87 For an earlier discussion on this topic, see Allouche, The origins and development. Allouche
rightfully emphasized the importance of trade for both the Ottoman and Safavid courts
and the consecutive attempts to secure them with various policies that included signing
agreements and dispatching envoys on the one hand and closely monitoring trade-related
activities and punishing those who acted against the rules and regulations on the other.
88 BOA, MD, Vol. 26, No. 496 (10 Cemāziyelevvel 982/27 August 1574).
89 BOA, MD, Vol. 26, No. 78 (28 Ṣefer 982/18 June 1574).
90 BOA, MD, Vol. 26, No. 958 (14 Şaʿbān 982/28 November 1574). The following orders warn
the governor-general of Baghdad not to send the returnees back to Iran even if the Safavid
court requests it. For an example, see BOA, MD, Vol. 26, No. 974 (15 Şaʿbān 982/29 November
1574).
444 baltacıoğlu-brammer

3 Conclusion

As the Ottoman-Safavid rivalry turned into a conflict shaped by sectarian nar-

ratives, the religious and political identities of the subjects between the two
emerging empires became closely intertwined. The increasing sympathy for
the Safavids among the Ottoman subjects, however, did not stem solely from
confessional priorities of those seeking salvation through becoming the follow-
ers of the shah. The regions from which the largest number of people converted
to Kızılbaşism and\or migrated to Safavid Iran were usually those experiencing
economic problems or political disturbances, mostly deriving from the policies
of the Ottoman central authority. In other words, various worldly concerns—
sociopolitical and fiscal pressures or enticements, the loss or prospect of posts
and pensions—constituted significant motives behind becoming or remaining
a Kızılbaş in the early modern Ottoman realm. This dynamic created a hori-
zontal power relation between the Ottoman imperial center and its subjects,
in which the power holder status of the Kızılbaş manifested itself as a com-
bination of multifarious decisions taken against (or for) the central authority
and its representatives in the provinces. In these interactions, many Kızılbaş
individuals and groups acted as mediators, negotiators, facilitators, and also as
rebels.
This article has also demonstrated the complexity of the interactions among
the three major participants in this specific geopolitical environment (i.e., the
Ottoman and Safavid courts and the Kızılbaş) that went beyond the conven-
tional Sunni-Shi‘i division. The cases provided here, as a small sample from
a larger pool, provide us with strong indicators of the nature of the relation-
ship between the Ottoman central authority vis-à-vis its Kızılbaş subjects, as
well as the constant efforts made by both the Ottomans and Safavids to retain
this population’s loyalty. By contextualizing and historicizing the actions taken
by the Kızılbaş, these cases display the enmeshment of sectarian policies with
the oft-neglected issues of political, religious, and fiscal motivations in inter-
confessional and interimperial contact zones. From this angle, one can see
the utility of approaching this history “laterally” as opposed to top-down or
bottom-up approaches that imagine the relations between the ruler and the
ruled in terms of vertical relations of power. Last but not least, the increase
in punitive actions and persecutions that the Ottoman central authority took
against the Kızılbaş subjects of the empire should be scrutinized within this
context. In other words, in the eyes of Istanbul, the conversion, tax evasion, and
migration of its subjects to Safavid Iran represented the loss of a critical part of
the empire’s work force, and the Kızılbaş population(s) was fully aware of this.
While the Ottoman central and provincial authorities dealt with them through
neither victim nor accomplice 445

multifaceted policies (from offering new titles, land autonomy, and tax exemp-
tion on the one end, to heavy persecution on the other), fiscally and politically
motivated conversions and/or migrations to and from Safavid Iran constituted
a significant aspect of the early modern era and continued until the beginning
of the twelfth/eighteenth century, albeit with decreasing intensity.91

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 chapter 13

Reading Ottoman Sunnism through Islamic

History: Approaches toward Yazīd b. Muʿāwiya in
Ottoman Historical Writing
Vefa Erginbaş

Yazīd b. Muʿāwiya (r. 61–64/680–683), the second caliph of the Umayyad dynas-
ty, has been a major bone of contention in the sectarian rift between Sunnis and
Shi‘ites to the present day. Conflicting views about Yazīd are not the product of
the modern age of sectarian disputes but are reflections of a historical debate
among the Muslim historians and religious scholars regarding Yazīd’s persona
and his actions, and whether one is to love, tolerate, or curse him. There are
three major factions on this issue: on the one side, there are those who accept
Yazīd as a Muslim king who deserved obedience from his people. In a famous
verse in the Quran (4: 59), God asks believers to obey “those in authority” (ūlū
l-amr). This verse was used by various rulers throughout the Islamic world
to suppress opposition and quell rebellions. According to this view, Muḥam-
mad’s grandson Ḥusayn’s (d. 61/680) opposition to Yazīd made him a rebel.
These people see Yazīd as a Muslim for better or worse and discourage any-
one from cursing him based on a hadith of the Prophet Muḥammad, which
prohibited Muslims from cursing their brethren. On the other side stand those
who find in Yazīd’s life clear evidence of unbelief as well as debauchery. They
emphasize Yazīd’s direct involvement in the killing of Ḥusayn and members
of the family of Muḥammad at Karbala.1 In between these two groups, there
are those who agree on the “wicked” character of Yazīd but see him as a legiti-
mate ruler devoid of religious authority. In this camp are also those who accept
Yazīd’s questionable character and allow cursing him because they believe his

1 The earliest source of this episode is Kitāb Maqtal al-Ḥusayn of Abū Mikhnaf (d. 157/774). Abū
Mikhnaf’s original work is not extant. His work is preserved to a large extent by his transmit-
ter Hishām b. al-Kalbī (d. 204/819). Abū Mikhnaf, Maqtal al-Ḥusayn. In a more recent revision
and translation of this work, the editor and translator of Abū Mikhnāf’s work argue that this
widely circulated version of the Maqtal is unreliable. They suggest using their edition. See
Abū Mikhnaf, The event of Taff. This version indeed provides critical comparison with other
sources that describe the events at Karbala. Al-Ṭabarī also based his section about Yazīd’s
caliphate mostly on Abū Mikhnaf. Al-Ṭabarī, The history xix.

© vefa erginbaş, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004440296_014

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
452 erginbaş

actions made him an unbeliever. Although one could be tempted to identify

the first of these groups as Sunnis, and the opposing group as Shi‘ites, and label
everybody in between as people of fluid confessional identity, the historical
evidence makes it difficult to pinpoint rigid boundaries among these groups.
The Sunni-Shi‘ite dispute originated in the first civil war in the history of
Islam when ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib (r. 35–40/656–661) and Muʿāwiya (r. 40–60/661–
680) clashed with each other. Even though neither Sunnism nor Shi‘ism was
firmly established until after the fourth/tenth century, the murder of Ḥusayn
and many of Muḥammad’s descendants at Karbala in the hands of Yazīd b.
Muʿāwiya’s governor ʿUbayd Allāh b. Ziyād (d. 67/686) became a cornerstone
of Shi‘ite grievances from the very early days of the formation of Shi‘ism. The
Shi‘ites, after the sixth imam, Jaʿfar ibn Muḥammad al-Ṣādiq (d. 148/765), opted
for dissimulation (taqiyya) in regards to the first three caliphs since ‘Alids were
not strong enough to establish an independent state. On the other hand, the
Umayyads, beginning with Muʿāwiya, demanded public cursing of ʿAlī from the
pulpits, especially during the Friday prayers. This practice is believed to have
continued until the end of Umayyad rule except for a short period when the
Umayyad caliph ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (r. 99–101/717–720) banned it.2 Even
though the cursing of the first three caliphs existed among some branches of
Shi‘ism, it seems that public cursing was initiated and heavily sponsored by the
Safavid Shah Ismāʿīl I (r. 907–930/1501–1524) under the influence of his ghulāt
(extreme Shi‘i) followers. Cursing Yazīd and denigrating the first three caliphs
became significant markers of Safavid Shi‘ism. Ismāʿīl conveniently used the
practice to subdue the Sunni population of Iran.3 His successor, Shah Tahmāsb
(r. 930–984/1524–1576), is said to have institutionalized this practice, which
became a major point of contention in the Ottoman-Safavid struggle.4 In the
famous Treaty of Amasya (962/1555), the Safavids promised to end the ritual
cursing of the first three caliphs, the Prophet’s wife ʿĀʾisha (d. 58/678), and
the Prophet’s Companions.5 This was a promise that they never kept as the
tabarrāʾiyān continued to flourish under the following Safavid shahs, except
during the brief reign of Ismāʿīl II (r. 984–985/1576–1577), who purportedly
attempted to revert Iran to Sunnism, with little success.6
This chapter looks into the differing approaches toward Yazīd b. Muʿāwiya
as they are reflected in select Ottoman historical sources from the ninth/fif-

2 Al-Ṭabarī, The history xviii, 122–125.

3 Algar, Caliphs and caliphate.
4 On this Safavid invention (tabarrāʾiyān), see Stanfield-Johnson, The tabarra’iyyan 47–71.
5 Newman, Safavid Iran.
6 For an excellent treatment of this episode, see Stewart, The lost biography 177–205.
reading ottoman sunnism through islamic history 453

teenth until the mid-eleventh/seventeenth century to reveal the nuances of

Ottoman Sunnism. It argues that, in its intellectual and cultural manifestations,
Ottoman Sunnism had a strong “ahl al-baytist” bent, meaning that it incorpo-
rated a strong tradition of love and reverence toward Muḥammad’s family and
descendants (ahl al-bayt).
One cannot, in fact, talk about Yazīd in limbo; to understand Ottoman atti-
tudes toward him and his actions, we should locate him in his historical con-
text, as a member of the Umayyad dynasty. The Umayyads get a critical treat-
ment in the classical Islamic historiography mostly due to the ‘Abbasid-era
historians’ stance toward them.7 One can safely argue that the Ottoman intel-
lectuals borrowed similar views from these ‘Abbasid historians. It is important
to remember, however, that a countertradition to the ‘Abbasid one developed,
especially in Syria in the third/ninth century, a tradition which espoused the
Umayyads, and among them especially Muʿāwiya and Yazīd. Charles Pellat
aptly calls this tradition “the Muʿāwiya cult.”8 In a similar vein, the incredibly
prolific and influential medieval historian Ibn ʿAsākir (d. 571/1175) painstakingly
worked to rehabilitate the image of Yazīd as a pious man, who deserved the
caliphate and who was not personally responsible for the events at Karbala.9
Similarly, in the fifth/eleventh century, a Hanbali theologian ʿAbd al-Mughith
b. Zuhayr al-Harrī (d. 483–484/1091) published a book entitled Fī faḍāʾil Yazīd
(On Yazīd’s Virtues).10 In the following pages I will examine how the Ottoman-
era historians positioned themselves vis-à-vis the accounts of Yazīd.

7 See Blankenship, The end of the jihad state; Robinson, Islamic historiography; El-Hibri,
Reinterpreting Islamic historiography.
8 Pellat, Le culte de Mu‘āwiya 53–66. I would like to thank Devin J. Stewart for directing me
to this study.
9 Lindsay, Caliphal and moral exemplar? 250–278. Also see Khalek, Early Islamic history
reimagined 431–451. Ibn ʿAsākir’s approach seems to be influenced by his almost “extreme”
love for Syria and particularly Damascus, to an extent that Damascus emerges from his
Tārīkh as a more important Islamic city than Mecca and Medina. Today, such an approach
would be associated with some sort of a “local nationalism,” which obviously tainted Ibn
ʿAsākir’s view of the Umayyad caliphate and its contributions to the Islamic history. This
work also includes many hadiths of dubious authenticity which foretell the glorious future
of Syria as well as the Syrians. For more detail on this and his Tārīkh, see Baş, İbn Asâkir
ve Târihu 691–706.
10 Goldziher, Muslim studies 96.
454 erginbaş

1 Between Confessional Ambiguity and Refashioned Sunnism:

Perspectives from the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries

It is hard to pinpoint Ottoman religious identity in the first century of the

empire. It is even harder to tell if there really was a religious policy. As Cemal
Kafadar rightly argued, early Ottomans were doxy-naïve and not doxy-minded,
living in what he calls the state of “metadoxy.”11 Popular Sufi tariqas, which
were just forming and presenting a quiet “fluid and untidy” view,12 as well as a
nonstringent religious landscape, dominated the lands of Rum. These religious
figures, who presented quite an eclectic world view, propelled the Ottoman
expansion into the Balkans. On the other hand, with the territorial expan-
sion in the ninth/fifteenth century came also the institutions such as madrasas
and mosques, and a more concerted effort toward defining orthodoxy. One
could argue that especially after Meḥmed II’s reign (r. 848–850/1444–1446, 855–
886/1451–1481), under various şeyhü’l-islāms, Ottoman religiosity began to be
shaped by the religious policies of the Ottoman dynasty. Even though one
can clearly talk about a gradual Sunnitization process steered by the Ottoman
dynasts and their ulama, there is not enough evidence showing that their
efforts successfully transformed the religious feelings and associations of large
segments of the society. On the contrary, various heresy trials toward the end
of the ninth/fifteenth century,13 as well as the popularity of antinomian move-
ments display the resilience on the part of society.
How did the early Ottoman sources treat the succession struggle in early
Islam? What can we learn from their treatments about Ottoman Sunnism in
its formative stage? What immediately follows answers these questions based
on four of the Ottoman writers from the eighth/fourteenth and ninth/fifteenth
centuries: Aḥmedī (d. 815/1413), Yazıcıoğlu Meḥmed (d. 855/1451), Şükrullāh (d.
after 868/1464), and Enverī. Granted, the first three are poets with clear Sufi
associations while Şükrullāh is a historian and statesman, and their works do
not fit neatly into one genre. For this reason, the following analysis will focus
on what these works have to say on the topic at hand, without taking into close
consideration the specifics of their genres.
Aḥmedī’s most significant work, İskendernāme, is a poetic rendition of the
Alexander romance, which was a popular genre in the medieval period, com-
bined with a universal history.14 Born around 735/1334, Aḥmedī in middle age

11 Kafadar, Between two worlds 76.

12 Kara, Origins of Anatolian Sufism 90.
13 Ocak, Zındıklar ve mülhidler.
14 A detailed study of this text can be found in Sawyer, Alexander, history, and piety.
reading ottoman sunnism through islamic history 455

enjoyed the patronage of Süleymān Beg of the central Anatolian Germiyanoğlu

dynasty (r. 768–788/1367–1386).15 He probably started writing his İskender-
nāme when he was under Süleymān Beg’s patronage. Aḥmedī switched alle-
giances according to the fortunes of the Anatolian beyliks during the tumul-
tuous eighth/fourteenth century; after leaving the service of the Germiyanoğul-
ları, he attached himself to the Aydınoğulları dynasty of southwestern Anatolia,
and finally to the House of ʿOs̱mān, which was still a largely unknown entity
among intellectuals of the age. In an ironic twist of fate, he ended up pre-
senting his İskendernāme to another Süleymān, Süleymān Çelebi, one of the
sons of Bāyezīd I (r. 791–804/1389–1402) and an ultimately unsuccessful con-
tender for the Ottoman throne during the interregnum (804–816/1402–1413)
following Bāyezīd’s defeat by Tamerlane.16 The latter part of Aḥmedī’s account,
which covers the history of the House of ʿOs̱mān, stands as the earliest writ-
ten account of the early Ottoman polity, on which almost all later historians
relied for their versions of early Ottoman history.17 Most of the universal his-
tory, however, is devoted to the rise of Islam and the history of the Umayyads
and the ‘Abbasids.
It is hard to call Aḥmedī an Ottoman per se; he was more of a Rumi (i.e., an
educated Muslim from Anatolia), like most other literary figures of this century,
as his career illustrates. Nonetheless, Aḥmedī’s section on the history of Islam
is still instructive: How did the earliest known historian of the House of ʿOs̱mān
treat the early history of Islam and the early Muslim dynasties? Aḥmedī’s
account of the Prophet’s life and mission does not seem to differ significantly
from other Sunni accounts, even down to the historical inaccuracies.18 He
depicts Muʿāwiya very negatively: Muʿāwiya was appointed by the Prophet as
a scribe to record his revelations from God, but he betrayed Muḥammad’s
trust and was exiled. When ʿUthmān became caliph, he appointed Muʿāwiya
to an important post, and that was why, according to Aḥmedī, ʿUthmān was
killed. (In reality, Muʿāwiya was appointed by ʿUmar). Muʿāwiya was indeed a
recorder of revelations (waḥy), at least according to most sirāṭs. However, ear-
lier accounts do not mention his betrayal. Aḥmedī, to dramatize Muʿāwiya’s
actions or, under the influence of the philo-‘Alid sentiments of the time or,
more speculatively, under the influence of a Shi‘ite source, makes him a villain,
even during the lifetime of the Prophet Muḥammad.

15 For Aḥmedī’s biography see Ünver, İskendernāme.

16 Ünver, İskendernāme 5–7.
17 İnalcık, The rise of Ottoman historiography 161.
18 The following folio numbers refer to the copy of the İskendernāme preserved in the Istan-
bul Üniversitesi Nadir Eserler Kütüphanesi, Türkçe Yazmalar, MS 921. This text is reprinted
in a facsimile in Aḥmedī, İskendernāme.
456 erginbaş

Aḥmedī describes ʿAlī’s rule in the context of Muʿāwiya’s attempts to insti-

gate rebellion against him. He accuses Muʿāwiya of being untrustworthy be-
cause he broke his covenant with ʿAlī’s elder son Ḥasan, whom he allegedly
poisoned. Aḥmedī is terse on Muʿāwiya’s caliphate. He does not refer to any of
Muʿāwiya’s achievements or conquests and depicts him as a usurper with no
legitimate claim to the leadership of the Islamic community: “Muʿāwiya took
the caliphate from ʿAlī with ‘a thousand sorceries’ and betrayed religion.” He is
called a mütegallibe, someone who became a king by force and without legit-
imate right (istiḥḳāḳsuz).19 Aḥmedī’s negative treatment of the descendants
of Abī Sufyān continues with Yazīd b. Muʿāwiya, who, according to the poet,
has “no share in religion.” He depicts him as a tyrant who harmed the public.
“Although people say there should be no cursing of him,” Aḥmedī avers, “may
God’s curse be upon him from beginning to end.”20 However, he praises Yazīd’s
son Muʿāwiya II (r. 64/683–684) for abdicating the caliphate; this, Aḥmedī feels,
is the act of a wise ruler who admits that his family usurped the leadership from
ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib.
A near contemporary of Aḥmedī, Yazıcıoğlu Meḥmed’s famous mathnawi
Risāletü’l-Muḥammediye is another significant source on Rumi Muslim reli-
giosity in the early centuries of the Ottoman Empire. This work, known sim-
ply as the Muḥammediye, enjoyed immense popularity over the centuries.
Manuscripts can be found in libraries all over the world, as well as in the
private collections of numerous Turkish families who held it sacred like the
Quran.21 Yazıcıoğlu Meḥmed belonged to an erudite family as both he and his
brother Aḥmed (Bicān) (d. after 870/1466) became well-known scholars. As
he mentions in his work, he was educated by two great scholars of his age:
Zeynü’l-ʿArab22 and Ḥaydar-ı Hafī.23 Yazıcıoğlu was also a pupil of the age’s
great Sufi master, Ḥācı Bayrām-ı Velī of Ankara (d. 834/1430). Yazıcıoğlu became
acquainted with Velī on the latter’s way to Edirne when Velī was summoned

19 Ibid. 57b–58a.
20 Ibid. 58a.
21 The work’s popularity outside the Ottoman domains attests to its wider impact: the
Muḥammediye was also known among Crimean and Central Asian Turkish populations
later in the ninth/fifteenth century. Köprülü, Divan edebiyatı antolojisi 68, cited in
Yazıcıoğlu, Muḥammediye i, 85; and Bombaci, Histoire de la littérature turque 259. On the
reception of the Muḥammediye corpus, see the magisterial study by Heinzelmann, Pop-
uläre religiöse Literatur. Most recently, Krstić argued that this work should be counted
among the ʿilm-i ḥāl works in terms of authorial intent. Krstić, From shahāda to ʿaqīda
299.
22 Yazıcıoğlu, Muḥammediye ii, 603, couplet 8973.
23 Ibid., couplet 8974.
reading ottoman sunnism through islamic history 457

by Sultan Murād II (r. 824–855/1421–1451), based on allegations that he was

causing trouble in Ankara and gathering rowdy pupils around him.24 After
this initial encounter, he submitted himself to Ḥācı Bayrām-ı Velī and became
his pupil and eventually one of his adepts. Muḥammediye indeed showcases
greatly Yazıcıoğlu’s Sufi inclinations.
Events following the death of Muḥammad are covered rather succinctly in
Muḥammediye. As for ʿAlī, Yazıcıoğlu cites the hadith in which Muḥammad
likens his relationship with ʿAlī to Moses’s relationship with Aaron. However,
Yazıcıoğlu observes, Muʿāwiya and his followers did not see that ʿAlī was a mir-
ror to God, and so they opposed his caliphate and caused him to suffer. Like
most authors discussed in this study, Yazıcıoğlu reports a hadith in which the
Prophet predicts that the caliphate would last for 30 years after his death but
would be followed by kingship (mülk).25 Ottoman historians used this hadith to
make sense of the end of the line of the Rightly Guided (Rāshidūn) caliphs and
what all of them regard as the Umayyad usurpation of the caliphate. Yazıcıoğlu
adopts the widespread popular practice of cursing Yazīd because of his destruc-
tion of the Prophet’s grandsons Ḥasan and Ḥusayn. He explains that cursing
Yazīd had been prohibited among the Sunnis in the past but that it has recently
come back into vogue. In betraying the family of the Prophet, in any case, Yazīd
had fallen into heresy (ilḥād) and thus deserved to be cursed.26
A few decades later, Şükrullāh also treated early Islamic history in his famous
work Bahjat al-tavārīkh. Unlike most other Ottoman historians, he does not
speak ill of Muʿāwiya b. Abī Sufyān except to point out that he conspicuously
consumed luxuries. He is also reticent about the conflict between him and ʿAlī
b. Abī Ṭālib. However, he includes a summary of the events of Karbala, mostly
in line with Abū Mikhnaf and al-Ṭabarī, a source he frequently refers to along
with Qūt al-arwāḥ of Ḥasan b. ʿAlī b. Hammād. He does, however, condemn
Muʿāwiya’s son Yazīd for the massacre of Ḥusayn and his family at Karbala
in 680. He calls Yazīd “dirty and damned” and points to his wicked character.
He heavily criticizes him for drinking openly, introducing castration in Islam,
and destroying God’s house (Kaba) and the cities of Mecca and Medina. He
says that Yazīd’s demonic and damned body went straight to the lowest level
of hell (esfel-i sāfilīn).27 He calls Yazīd’s followers Yezīdīs and condemns them
with heavy curses for supporting Yazīd and being instrumental in the murder

24 Şapolyo, Mezhepler ve tarikatlar 133.

25 Yazıcıoğlu, Muḥammediye ii, 303–304, couplets 4635–4645.
26 Ibid. 305, couplets 4667–4669.
27 Almaz, Şükrullah 311–313.
458 erginbaş

of Ḥusayn.28 Apart from a few figures, such as the famously pious ʿUmar b.
ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz (r. 99–101/717–720), who is widely praised for his devoutness and
benevolent treatment of the family of the Prophet, and Hishām b. ʿAbd al-Mālik
(r. 105–125/723–43), who honored the fifth Shi‘ite imam, Muḥammad al-Bāqir
(d. 114/732), he unflatteringly describes the Umayyads as gluttonous, arrogant,
lustful, dull, insensitive, violent, and irreligious.
A contemporary of Şükrullāh, Enverī’s famous mathnawi Düstūrnāme also
has a few lines on early Islamic history.29 Enverī tells us that he dealt with
early Islamic history in his now lost Teferrücnāme. He briefly summarizes ʿAlī’s
conflict with ʿĀʾisha and her allies, Ṭalḥa and Zubayr, and Muʿāwiya’s call for
arbitration of his struggle with ʿAlī. He affirms that Muʿāwiya won over the
caliphate with a trick and calls him s̱aḳīl, which means both overweight and
oppressive (Muʿāwiya was known for his overeating). With regards to Ḥusayn’s
killing, he again refers his readers to Teferrücnāme.30 For Yazīd, he says “he was
drowned in the pool of crime.”31
How should we assess this apparent animosity toward the Umayyads and
especially Yazīd among the early Ottoman writers? The history of the Umayyads
was written by ‘Abbasid-era historians such as al-Ṭabarī. Therefore, most histo-
ries of the Umayyad era are tinged with a strong ‘Abbasid bias and sympathy for
ʿAlī. One could easily argue that early Ottoman intellectuals’ view of the early
Islamic history is similarly tinged due to their sources. However, their sources
were scanty and often incomplete. What shaped their views more than their
sources was a tradition that the Ottoman intellectuals cherished. This tradi-
tion, which openly venerates ahl al-bayt, first manifested itself in the futuwwa32

28 As a matter of fact, historical Yazidis are perhaps one of the most scourged groups in the
Sunni world up to today. They were subjected to a genocide by the so-called Islamic State
in 2014. Even though they have a history that goes back earlier than the establishment of
the Umayyad caliphate, some of their significant figures are of Umayyad descent. The term
Yazīdī as used by the Ottoman historians may not necessarily correspond to the historical
Yazidis but rather should be understood as a theoretical group of staunch defenders of the
Umayyad caliph Yazīd’s caliphate as well as his persona.
29 Mélikoff-Sayar, Le destān d’Umûr Pacha. An earlier edition is [Enverī], Düsturnamei Enveri
edited by M.H. Yinanç. For a more recent one, see Öztürk, Fatih devri kaynaklarından.
None of the above editions include pre-Islamic sections of the Düstūrnāme. Complete
work can be found in İzmir Milli Kütüphane, MS 16114-22/401.
30 “Maktelin okımağa kılsuŋ heves/ bul teferrücname ibret saŋa bes.” Enveri, Düsturnāme 37b.
31 “Suç havuzunda boğulur gör nider.” Ibid. 37b.
32 ʿAlī b. Abi Ṭālib was seen as the spiritual leader of the futuwwa (urban fraternities) and
styled as the ideal youth, or fatā. Various fütüvvetnāmes carry a very strong Shi‘ite influ-
ence. See Breebaart, The Fütüvvet-nāme-i kebīr 203–215; Loewen, Proper conduct (adab)
is everything 543–570; also see Yıldırım, Shī‘itization of the futuwwa. Note, however,
reading ottoman sunnism through islamic history 459

networks and various Sufi groups.33 The historians of the Mongols and succes-
sor states, such as the Ilkhanids, agree that after the Mongol invasions of the
seventh/thirteenth century, confessional ambiguity characterized the religious
attitudes of both the political leaders and some of the religious communities.34
“To cite only one example, some of the coins of the Timurid ruler Abū al-Qāsim
Bābur (r. 853–861/1449–1457) bear Shi‘i formulas on one side and Sunni legends
on the other.”35 In this environment, a moderate inclination toward Shi‘ism
made great strides in Sunni communities. The veneration of not only ʿAlī b. Abī
Ṭālib, his wife Fāṭima, and his sons Ḥasan and Ḥusayn, but also the entirety
of the Shi‘ite imams had spread in the dominantly Sunni communities.36 This
process paved the way for the inextricable linkage of Sufism and Shi‘ism in
Iran, finally resulting in the birth of the Safavid dynasty. In the remainder of
the Sunni lands, on the other hand, it led to a profound veneration for the ahl
al-bayt. Many Sunni states capitalized on that sentiment by projecting them-
selves as sponsors and protectors of Shi‘ite shrines in Egypt, Iraq, and Syria.37
I believe R.D. McChesney captures this phenomenon best in his study of an
‘Alid waqf in Central Asia.38 McChesney calls this deep veneration for ahl al-
bayt among the Sunnis “ahl al-baytism.” I argue that this is a useful concept
to address strong ‘Alid loyalty in predominantly Sunni geographies such as the

that ʿAlī was not always central to the futuwwa tradition but became more so in the late
medieval period; Yıldırım sees the ninth/fifteenth century as a critical turning point, while
Lloyd Ridgeon points to some earlier developments as well. See Ridgeon, Morals and mys-
ticism.
33 B.G. Martin argued more than 40 years ago that had Halvetis not been forced by the
Ottoman ulama to adopt a Sunni attitude, they could have easily ended up being a Shi‘ite
tariqa given their early attachment to Shi‘ism. Martin, A short history 284. In a recent
appraisal of the Halvetis order in the Ottoman Empire, John Curry opposes Martin’s argu-
ment: “In the end, the inclusion of the six imams of the Shi‘ite tradition in the constructed
identity of the Halvetī silsile need not be taken as decisive proof of crypto-Shi‘ism.” Curry,
The transformation 25. For an excellent treatment of the relationship between Shi‘ism and
Sufism, see Nasr, Shi‘ism and Sufism.
34 For this phenomenon, which is also called “confessional ambiguity,” see Woods, The
Aqquyunlu 4–5; Amoretti, Religion in the Timurid 610–655.
35 Woods, The Aqquyunlu 4.
36 See various studies by Rıza Yıldırım on eighth/fourteenth- and ninth/fifteenth-century
Anatolia for the impact of Shi‘ism on the Sunni communities and the interactions between
the two: Yıldırım, Beylikler dünyasında; Yıldırım, Abdallar, akıncılar, Bektaşilik; Yıldırım,
Anadolu’da İslamiyet; Yıldırım, Sunni orthodoxy vs. Shi‘ite heterodoxy.
37 For a recent study of the shrines in Syria, see Mulder, The shrines of the ʿAlīds 16–47. For
the importance of the cult of ‘Alid saints, especially in Fatimid Cairo, see Williams, The
cult of ʿAlid saints i, 39–60; ii, 37–52.
38 McChesney, Waqf in Central Asia 33–34, 268.
460 erginbaş

Ottoman Empire. Even though McChesney limits ahl al-baytism to ʿAlī and his
immediate descendants, I include in this concept all of the Twelve Imams. The
poets mentioned above, Aḥmedī, Enverī, and Yazıcıoğlu, also exhibited ahl al-
baytism, especially in their criticisms of Yazīd and the Umayyads. It seems that,
in pre-Safavid Anatolia, Shi‘ite-tinged readings of early Islamic history were
common among intellectual circles. It is also worth noting that all of these
writers had Sufi affiliations. Just like it changed the religious landscape in the
medieval Islamic world, Sufism also helped shape Ottoman Sunnism by carry-
ing over Sufism’s strong ‘Alid stance. One could argue, based on Cemal Kafadar’s
previously mentioned concept of metadoxy, that what I described above is per-
haps not surprising. What follows in the next section testifies to the fact that
this trend continued unabated despite the sectarian milieu of the tenth/six-
teenth century.

2 Sunnism and Islamic History in the Age of Ottoman-Safavid

Conflict: Perspectives from the Sixteenth Century39

The tenth/sixteenth century has been considered a watershed moment for

Ottoman Sunnism. Selīm I’s (r. 918–926/1512–1520) anti-Kızılbaş campaigns in
Anatolia and his rivalry with the nascent Safavid state, as well as Ottoman
jurists’ continuous efforts to redefine Sunni orthodoxy, are considered clear
testaments to that effect. In a recent study, Derin Terzioğlu sketches the his-
tory of Ottoman Sunnism and suggests that Ottoman Sunnitization began con-
siderably earlier than the tenth/sixteenth century: “This process (Sunnitiza-
tion) was a continuation of pre-existing trends, and had complex and multiple
causes rather than being simply a politically-minded response to the rise of the
Safavids and their adoption of Shi‘ism.”40 Pioneering works of a new generation
of scholars, namely Tijana Krstić, Derin Terzioğlu, and Guy Burak, have placed
Ottoman efforts at Sunnitization, beginning in the tenth/sixteenth century,
within the context of the broader early modern phenomenon of confession-
building and confessionalization that they see spanning Europe and the Mid-
dle East.41 In its original formulation, “confessionalization” refers to the social
effects of confession-building projects after the Reformation in Europe and

39 This section is mostly a reiteration of the relevant sections from my article Problematizing
Ottoman Sunnism 614–646.
40 Terzioğlu, How to conceptualize 305.
41 Krstić, Contested conversions; Terzioğlu, How to conceptualize; Terzioğlu, Where ʿilm-i ḥāl;
Burak, The second formation; Burak, Faith, law and empire.
reading ottoman sunnism through islamic history 461

gradual rapprochement between the state and the church. Even though there is
a great value in integrating Ottoman (and Safavid) religious landscapes into the
broader Eurasian trends, the term confessionalization carries the potential to
overemphasize the role of the state and the ulama (the only group that to some
extent resembles clergy in Islamic societies) in the formation of religious con-
fessions.42 However, it would be incorrect to argue that Sunnitization (or any
religious process for that matter) was primarily a state-enforced and state-led
policy. I particularly value here the multiplicity of agents and processes argu-
ment brought forth by Terzioğlu and expanded by Krstić.43
When one considers Ottoman Sunnism, a state-centered religious approach
often dominates the narrative. Besides what the state and jurists tell us about
Sunnism, what can we learn from the Ottoman historians and intellectuals
who penned works on these subjects in the tenth/sixteenth century? Since a
rehabilitation of the images of Yazīd and Muʿāwiya was already in place in the
seventh/thirteenth century, probably as a reaction to the increasing ‘Alidism in
Sunni circles, did the Ottoman historians, in their treatments of the succession
struggle in early Islamic history, show a pro-Umayyad stance? To address this
question, this section will investigate the works of two of the prominent intel-
lectuals of the tenth/sixteenth century: Muṣṭafā Cenābī (d. 999/1590–1591) and
Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī (d. 1008/1600).44
Muṣṭafā Cenābī is the lesser known of the two, even though his work, Aylām
al-ẓāhir, had a substantial impact on a future generation of historians, such as
Qaramānī (d. 1019/1611), Kātib Çelebi (d. 1067/1657), and Müneccimbaşı Aḥmed
(d. 1113/1702).45 Cenābī was himself a sayyid, a descendant of Muḥammad, and
had great love for the ahl al-bayt. Cenābī’s work includes an extensive treat-
ment of the Twelve Imams. His account of the Shi‘ite imams, as well as his
narrative of the different sects of Shi‘ism, is clearly inspired by al-Shahrastānī’s
(d. 548/1153) famous compilation of various religious beliefs, philosophies, and
doctrines known as al-Milal wa-l-niḥal.46 In addition to the Isma‘ili-inflected
work of al-Shahrastānī,47 Cenābī bases this section on Twelver, or Imami, Shi‘ite

42 For a study that emphasizes the role of the Ottoman, state see Krstić, Illuminated by the
light.
43 Terzioğlu, How to conceptualize 320. See also the recent study on ʿaqāʾid works by Krstić,
where she argues for a similar point of view. Krstić, From shahāda to ‘aqīda 296–314.
44 For more detail on the tenth/sixteenth century, see Erginbaş, The appropriation of Islamic
history.
45 Cenābī, Aylām al-ẓāhir (the manuscript I am using records the title as al-Ḥāfil al-wasīṭ
wa-l-aylām al-ẓāhir al-muḥīṭ, which is one of the known variants). The primary study on
Muṣṭafā Cenābī is Canatar, Müverrih Cenābī Muṣṭafā.
46 Al-Shahrastānī, Kitāb al-Milal.
47 For details, see Erginbaş, Problematizing.
462 erginbaş

sources where these are available to him, such as Kitāb al-irshād of the Twelver
theologian, jurist, and polemicist al-Mufīd (d. 413/1022)48 and Iʿlām al-warā bi-
aʿlām al-hudā of the Twelver scholar and theologian Abū ʿAlī al-Faḍl b. al-Ḥasan
al-Ṭabrisī (d. 548/1153). Cenābī also makes extensive use of Sunni sources on the
imams that are known for their sympathies for the ahl al-bayt, so much so that
their authors have been dubbed as “Twelver Sunnis” by some modern schol-
ars.49 One of these authors, Ibn Ṭalḥa wrote his work in Damascus in 649/1252;
it became notorious among the Sunni authors of the seventh/thirteenth cen-
tury since it not only defended the Twelve Imams but also supported the idea
that the Twelfth Imam was indeed the eschatological Mahdi.50 Cenābī’s care-
ful use of both Shi‘ite and “ahl al-baytist” Sunni sources shows the extent of his
knowledge of the Shi‘ite imams and their history, as well as his preference for
such sources that support an ‘Alid interpretation of early Islamic history.
Cenābī regards the founder of the Umayyad dynasty, Muʿāwiya b. Abī Sufyān,
as a mutaghallib, or usurper, and lists a few of his achievements with little com-
ment. He briefly describes his bad temper and weaknesses, such as wearing
expensive clothing and riding expensive horses. His only redeeming feature
was his skill at politics. He is harder on Yazīd, who was responsible for the
killing of Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭalīb, arguing that he was an infidel because of
his poems praising drinking and because of the derisive words that he uttered
when Ḥusayn was martyred.51 Cenābī’s Umayyad section seems to be a very
concise précis of al-Ṭabarī’s (d. 310/923) account.
Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī is possibly the best known of the tenth/sixteenth-century Otto-
man intellectuals. His account of the reign of Muʿāwiya b. Abī Sufyān, in
his Künhü’l-ahbār,52 is far superior to other accounts under study here. The
author’s attitude toward Muʿāwiya appears empathetic at first, but as the nar-
rative continues, a critical stance emerges. Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī asserts that Muʿāwiya
converted to Islam many years before the Muslim conquest of Mecca in 8/630
but concealed his belief out of fear. He was one of the Companions of the
Prophet, for whom the latter prayed for both this world and the hereafter, and
on whose authority hadith were transmitted. ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz famously
defended him. He reportedly saw Muʿāwiya in a dream in which the latter told

48 For al-Mufīd and his importance in the Shi‘ite revival of the Buyid age, see Kraemer,
Humanism in the Renaissance 67–68.
49 These works are Al-Fuṣūl al-muhimma fī maʿrifat aḥwāl al-aʾimma of the Maliki scholar ʿAlī
ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Ṣabbāgh and Maṭālib al-suʿūl fī manāqib Āl al-Rasūl of the Shafi‘i
author Kamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Ṭalḥa al-ʿAdawī al-Niṣībīnīʾ.
50 Madelung, al-Mahdi.
51 Cenābī, Aylām al-ẓāhir 353b.
52 ʿĀlī, Künhü’l-ahbār.
reading ottoman sunnism through islamic history 463

him that God forgave him for opposing ʿAlī. In other dreams reported by anony-
mous mystics, Muʿāwiya sits next to the Prophet Muḥammad like the other true
companions. Sunni mystics and scholars alike, including the great legist Aḥmad
b. Ḥanbal (d. 241/855), saw in their dreams that the Prophet Muḥammad con-
demned people who disparage Muʿāwiya. Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī reports a tradition of
Jarīr ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd, one of the teachers of Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal, that Muʿāwiya
was disconsolate when the news of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭalīb’s martyrdom reached him.
Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī also refers to Muʿāwiya with honorific titles. Although Muṣṭafā
ʿĀlī duly reports on the caliph’s vices, such as his love for jewelry and food, for
which the Prophet condemned him, as well as his actions against the Prophet’s
descendants, he also praises him for his raids against the Byzantines, for serv-
ing as a scribe to the Prophet, for his generosity, especially toward ʿAlī’s sons
Ḥasan and Ḥusayn, the Prophet’s grandchildren, and the Prophet’s wife ʿĀʾisha,
and for his skill in politics and military strategy.
On the other hand, he also provides a critical perspective on Muʿāwiya. In
Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī’s narrative, Muʿāwiya acknowledges more than once that ʿAlī b.
Abī Ṭalīb is superior to him and that he did not want to be caliph until after his
cousin ʿUthmān b. ʿAffān was killed. Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī also includes a critical report
of the famous mystic Ḥasan al-Baṣrī (d. 110/728) to the effect that there are
four of Muʿāwiya’s actions that are impossible to justify: his role in ʿAlī b. Abī
Ṭalīb’s murder, his killing of one of the Prophet’s companions, his favoritism
toward his own family, and his appointment of his son Yazīd as his succes-
sor. We also see ʿĀʾisha, the Prophet’s favorite wife, rationalizing Muʿāwiya’s
caliphate by pointing out that God sometimes bestows power on unbelievers
or sinners; after all, He allowed the pharaohs to rule Egypt for centuries. On
the conflict between Muʿāwiya and ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭalīb, Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī argues that
one should assess it within the context of fate and God’s will. However, given
the hadith in which the Prophet advises everyone to follow ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭalīb,
Muʿāwiya should have acknowledged his caliphate. Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī asserts that he
cannot understand those who do not comprehend the truths revealed by this
hadith and adds that it is impossible to forget that many companions of the
Prophet were killed at the battle of Siffin while fighting on the side of ʿAlī b. Abī
Ṭalīb.
Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī’s rather ambivalent account of Muʿāwiya b. Abī Sufyān contrasts
with his even-handed account of Yazīd b. Muʿāwiya, who is usually regarded in
a far more negative light than his father. Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī distances himself from
narratives praising or disparaging Yazīd and acknowledges that he is aware
of hadiths of dubious authenticity in support of both positions. He relates a
somewhat positive tradition that in later life Yazīd distanced himself from his
protégé, ʿUbayd Allāh b. Ziyād, because of the latter’s role in the massacre of
464 erginbaş

Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī. Another hadith that Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī cites, in contrast, insists that
Yazīd was purely one of the denizens of hell. Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī indicates his own
position by using derogatory terms for Yazīd such as “damned and dirty.” He also
argues that Yazīd’s attacks against the people of Mecca and Medina, as well as
his brutal treatment of the Prophet’s descendants, above all Ḥusayn, are signs of
a lack of belief and submission to Islam. Commensurate with his even-handed
approach, he also points out Yazīd’s good qualities, such as his generosity and
intelligence. As in the case of Muʿāwiya b. Abī Sufyān, certain mystics reported
dreams in which Yazīd told them that God had forgiven him. Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī does
not find these reports credible because of Yazīd’s actions, which, according to
the author, surely proved otherwise. Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī also argues that because of
Yazīd’s atrocities against the descendants of the Prophet, none of his children
lived long enough to enjoy this world, although there were among them some
righteous people, such as his son Muʿāwiya II.
Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī’s account of Ḥusayn ibn ʿAlī’s life and martyrdom at Karbala is
one of the most exhaustive and vibrant sections of Künhü’l-ahbār.53 Muṣṭafā
ʿĀlī composed elegies for Ḥusayn and the other eleven imams. His Sübhatü’l-
abdāl, completed in 1000/1593–1594, collects elegies on ʿAshūrāʾ, the day of
Ḥusayn’s martyrdom.54 To show his devotion to Ḥusayn, he endowed a foun-
tain in Karbala while serving as interim governor of Baghdad in 993/1586.55
Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī acknowledges that some of the reports of the extreme Shi‘ites con-
cerning blood flowing from stones on the site and the sun bearing a bloodstain
on the day of the massacre are not true. On the other hand, he argues that Ibn
Athīr is wrong to discourage lamentations for Ḥusayn that go beyond those for
the other imams. Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī justifies the lamentations because, he argues, on
no other occasion when an imam was victimized was the Prophet’s lineage so
gravely endangered.
Cenābī and Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī glowingly portray the Shi‘ite imams. The latter
explicitly states that the descendants of the Prophet Muḥammad had a right
to the caliphate. He regards the ‘Alids as far superior to the Umayyads and
evinces a deep devotion to the martyred Ḥusayn.56 In its cultural and intel-
lectual representation, Ottoman Sunnism did not show hostility toward the
‘Alids and their political cause. The image of Ottoman Sunnism that we have in

53 Ālī, Künhü’l-ahbār iii, 353–385.

54 Fleischer, Bureaucrat and intellectual 148.
55 Ibid. 124.
56 In his later work known as Curious bits of wisdom, he apparently goes so far as to offer
a solution to the Sunni-Shi‘i division. Fleischer, Muṣṭafā ʿAlī’s Curious 103–109. Unfortu-
nately, I do not have access to the text of Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī’s work.
reading ottoman sunnism through islamic history 465

our mind is mostly epitomized by Selīm I’s anti-Kızılbaş campaigns in Anatolia

and strong anti-Safavid rhetoric evident in the writings of the Ottoman jurists
such as Kemālpaşazāde (d. 940/1534) and Ebū’s-suʿūd (d. 982/1574). However,
one has to also remember that Ottoman Sunnism in the most general sense was
also imbued with ahl al-baytism and sympathy toward the ‘Alid political cause.
Both Cenābī’s and ʿĀlī’s works show that despite the ever-growing Safavid influ-
ence in Anatolia and Iraq in the late tenth/sixteenth century, and despite a state
of open warfare between the Ottoman and Safavid empires, Ottoman intel-
lectuals did not necessarily adopt a rigid Sunnism that legitimized the results
of the early succession struggle in Islam. Rather, reverence for the ahl al-bayt
remained quite strong among them. Ottoman Sunnism by no means entailed
disowning the Shi‘ite imams or their legacy; in some cases, it did not even entail
rejecting the Shi‘ite eschatological doctrine.57 The contributions of these two
authors point to the strong ahl al-baytist bent in Ottoman Sunnism among the
intellectuals in the tenth/sixteenth century.

3 A More Visible Sunnism or Sunnitization “From Below”:

Perspectives from the Seventeenth Century

While the discussion of religiosity in the tenth/sixteenth-century Ottoman

Empire revolves around the state-sponsored Sunnization efforts, the Kadızade-
li controversy overshadows the eleventh/seventeenth century. One could argue
that the puritanical movement of the Kadızadelis represents the peak in a pro-
cess that Krstić called “confessionalization from below.” However, the mere
existence of this controversy shows that this Sunnitization process was neither
seamless nor universally accepted. In what follows, this section investigates
how three intellectuals who wrote sections on Islamic history in their universal
histories in the first half of the eleventh/seventeenth century approached the
succession issue.
The universal history written in Arabic by Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. Yūsuf b.
Aḥmad b. Sinān al-Qaramānī al-Dimashqī, famously known as al-Qaramānī, is
entitled Akhbār al-duwal wa-athār al-uwal fī l-tārīkh, and was composed right
at the turn of the eleventh/seventeenth century.58 Kātib Çelebi and many oth-
ers after him describe Akhbār al-duwal as a summary of Cenābī’s history with
few additions. While it is true that Qaramānī reproduces a great deal of Cenā-

57 See Erginbaş, Problematizing.

58 Al-Qaramānī, Akhbār al-duwal.
466 erginbaş

bī’s material, his work is not a verbatim copy of the latter’s history. In fact,
his omissions and additions shed a good deal of light on how he and Cenābī
differed in their scholarship and their attitudes toward early Islamic history.
Although Qaramānī’s work features some of the ahl al-baytist notions of his
predecessors, his work strikes one as more Sunni-oriented than Cenābī’s work.
For instance, he acknowledges at the very beginning of Abū Bakr’s reign that
he was the best created being after Muḥammad according to the Sunnis (ahl
al-sunna wa-l-jamāʿa), followed by ʿUmar, ʿUthmān, and ʿAlī. He also praises
the greatness of Abū Bakr’s ʿilm, or esoteric knowledge, in contrast to other
works, which stress Abū Bakr’s closeness and loyalty to the Prophet and not
his esoteric knowledge.59 It is to ʿAlī that ʿilm is usually attributed. In keeping
with his overall approach, Qaramānī refrains from including much detail on the
political aspects of the reigns of the Rāshidūn caliphs, preferring to emphasize
their personalities. His aversion to political narrative continues in his treatment
of ʿUmar’s reign; hadiths concerning the caliph’s virtues and quasi-miraculous
deeds are of greater concern to Qaramānī.60 In summarizing ʿUthmān’s reign,
he asserts that he was killed by “oppressors” and acknowledges that he favored
the old-guard Quraysh, who were recent converts to Islam, as opposed to ʿUmar,
who was harsh toward them. He acquits ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭalīb of any complicity in
ʿUthmān’s murder based on a report recorded in Ibn ʿAsākir’s history. He pro-
vides additional circumstantial details that tend to exonerate ʿAlī: ʿAlī beat his
children because ʿUthmān was killed while they were guarding the door to his
house; ʿAlī sent water to ʿUthmān while he was under siege. He also includes
a glowing report of ʿAlī’s virtues. He narrates ʿAlī’s murder based on al-Suyūṭī’s
(d. 911/1505) and Ibn ʿAsākir’s histories and adds a report of ʿAlī asserting that
he did not see anyone better fit than he was to assume the caliphate when
the Prophet died.61 Following his account of ʿAlī, he presents a narrative of the
lives of the twelve imams; from this point on, his history closely parallels that
of Cenābī.62 Like Cenābī, Qaramānī presents the imams as epitomes of righ-
teousness, justice, and true faith. He focuses on the characters of Ḥasan and
Ḥusayn while avoiding comment on the explosive political issues surrounding
their careers.
Qaramānī adopts a more conventional Sunni position regarding Muʿāwiya b.
Abī Sufyān. He emphasizes Muʿāwiya’s generosity and gentleness. He refrains
from taking a stand on his dispute with ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭalīb, insisting that what hap-

59 Ibid. 91–95.
60 Ibid. 95–98.
61 Ibid. 102–104.
62 Ibid. 105–118.
reading ottoman sunnism through islamic history 467

pened between them should be assessed according to their independent rea-

soning (ijtihād). For the rest of the Umayyads, Qaramānī is critical. He praises
only a few of the Umayyad caliphs, and then only the ones who, in his esti-
mation, followed the “righteous” paths of the four rightly-guided caliphs. The
author explicitly states that Yazīd was responsible for the murder of Ḥusayn.63
At first, he does not openly curse Yazīd but instead curses “Shamir” (Shimr),
who actually killed Ḥusayn. Cursing Yazīd, in the manner of most of the Otto-
man historians we have studied, would become a bone of contention between
the puritanical Kadızadelis and their opponents in the first half of the eleventh/
seventeenth century. Although Qaramānī lived before this debate emerged, he
does comment on the appropriateness of cursing Yazīd in his section on Yazīd’s
caliphate. He notes that three of the four purported founders of the Sunni legal
rites, Abū Ḥanīfa, Mālik b. Anas, and Aḥmad b. Ḥanbal, agreed on cursing him
directly (taṣrīh) or indirectly (talwīh). For his own part, Qaramānī prefers curs-
ing Yazīd directly because of his actions, such as hunting cheetahs, playing
chess, and drinking and praising alcohol, because he believes these made him
an unbeliever. To underline his antipathy toward Yazīd, Qaramānī cites a tradi-
tion that the later Umayyad caliph ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz punished a man with
twenty lashes because he called Yazīd amīr al-muʾminīn (commander of the
faithful), a title that should be used only by legitimate caliphs; as well as a tra-
dition of the Prophet claiming that the first man who will alter his sunna, or cus-
tom, will be an Umayyad named Yazīd. Yet to balance his account, he includes
a counter-opinion of the great theologian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111),
who did not permit the cursing of Yazīd because even though he was a sinner,
he was still a Muslim, and it is incumbent upon all Muslims not to curse anyone
who submits to God. Al-Ghazālī also maintained that Yazīd did not order the
murder of Ḥusayn.64 Even though he joined the choir in cursing Yazīd, Qara-
mānī relied more on mainstream Sunni interpretations of history than Cenābī
did. A case in point is the ‘Alid claimants to the caliphate. Although he follows
Cenābī in his account of the early ‘Abbasid caliphs, Qaramānī ignores a num-
ber of ‘Alid claimants whose efforts to attain the caliphate Cenābī describes in
some detail.
A near contemporary of Qaramānī is Meḥmed b. Meḥmed, famously known
as Edirnevī. His history Nuhbetü’t-tevārīh also includes details on early Islamic
history.65 Edirnevī’s work is reminiscent of Lārī’s famous history Mirʾāt al-

63 Ibid. 107.
64 Ibid. 130–131. See also McDonald, The life of al-Ghazzālī 71–72.
65 Meḥmed b. Meḥmed, Nuhbetü’t-tevārīh.
468 erginbaş

adwār.66 Since Edirnevī used Lārī’s work as his model, his opinions, and his
reverence for ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭalīb bear a close resemblance to those of Lārī. Edirnevī
asserts that ʿAlī’s virtues are beyond human comprehension as he is the gate
of learning whose every word warrants a book. Edirnevī vehemently insists
that ʿAlī refrained from shedding the blood of his brothers in faith and showed
respect to all the companions of the Prophet Muḥammad; he acquits ʿAlī of
ʿUthmān’s murder. He narrates Ḥasan’s and Ḥusayn’s lives in summary form by
listing their virtues. He calls Ḥusayn’s murderers oppressors. Edirnevī refrains
from commenting on Muʿāwiya while portraying Yazīd very negatively. He
condemns Yazīd and his men because of their oppression of the people of
Mecca and Medina and explicitly blames Yazīd for Ḥusayn’s murder, calling
him damned (laʿīn) and filthy (palīd). He also prays that Yazīd gets what he
deserves.
The towering intellectual of the eleventh/seventeenth century was Kātib
Çelebi. Kātib Çelebi’s universal history in Arabic, Fadhlaka,67 is composed
of many works but mostly follows Cenābī’s history. In his treatment of the
Rāshidūn, Kātib Çelebi shortens some parts of Cenābī’s narrative and expands
others. He also makes occasional references to Qaramānī’s Akhbār al-duwal.
Abū Bakr’s and ‘Umar’s reigns are briefly summarized.68 In his coverage of ʿUth-
mān’s reign, Kātib Çelebi rejects as unreliable a report by Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyab
to the effect that since ʿUthmān favored his relatives, those who disdain him
should be excused; Cenābī uses this report to neutralize ʿUthmān’s murder.69
Although relatively detailed, Kātib Çelebi’s account of ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭalīb’s reign
is likewise a précis of the relevant section in Cenābī’s chronicle. Like Cenābī,
Kātib Çelebi emphasizes ʿAlī’s virtues. At the end of this section, he raises the
question of whether Sunnis consider ʿAlī or ʿUthmān more virtuous. Drawing
on the scholar and Sufi al-Yāfiʿī (d. 768/1367), he concludes that there are some
Sunnis who regard ʿAlī as superior to ʿUthmān; among them are the authorita-
tive sīra author Muḥammad b. Isḥāq (d. 150/770) and the famous mystic Sufyān
al-Thawrī (d. 161/778). Kātib Çelebi does not clarify in Fadhlaka the ranking
among the first four caliphs; in Mīzānü’l-haḳḳ, however, he advises his readers
to follow the path of ahl al-sunna wa-l-jamāʿa. According to the mainstream
Sunni position, which was defended by, for example, the sixteenth-century
Ottoman scholar Birgivī (Birgili) Meḥmed Efendi (d. 981/1573), the ranking

66 Lārī, Mirʾāt al-advār. For more details about Lārī and his work see Erginbaş, The appropri-
ation of Islamic history 111–127.
67 Kātib Çelebi, Fadhlaka.
68 Ibid. 65a–69a.
69 Ibid. 71a.
reading ottoman sunnism through islamic history 469

among the early caliphs follows the historical sequence, that is, Abū Bakr comes
first, followed by ʿUmar, ʿUthmān, and ʿAlī. After them in virtuousness come the
rest of the Prophet’s companions, then the companions’ followers, then the fol-
lowers of the followers.70
Kātib Çelebi renders Ḥasan’s and Ḥusayn’s biographies briefly, without com-
menting on their distinctive virtues. Unlike the earlier Ottoman historians,
apart from Qaramānī, he does not provide biographies of the remaining Shi‘ite
imams. The ahl al-baytist narrative, which was very much present in Cen-
ābī’s history, turns into a dry summary of events in Kātib Çelebi’s work. Like
Qaramānī but unlike Cenābī, Kātib Çelebi often weeds out ‘Alid rivals to the
Umayyads’ and ‘Abbasids’ rule. Although he might have opted for this method
to keep his work short, Kātib Çelebi seems to have been heavily influenced by
the conflicts between the Kadızadelis and the Sufis. His choice of a more con-
ventionally Sunni view of events was a consequence of how he approached this
conflict.71
Since Kātib Çelebi uses Ibn Khaldūn’s (d. 808/1406) work extensively, it is
appropriate here to discuss how Ibn Khaldūn interprets the succession prob-
lem in early Islamic history and whether his interpretation differs from Kātib
Çelebi’s. Ibn Khaldūn’s view of the issue of succession to Muḥammad reflects
what might be called a conventional Sunni position. He favors the Umayyads
because they represented group feeling (ʿaṣabiyya) at the time, the only thing
that prevented the splitting of the Muslim community. He acknowledges the
wickedness of Yazīd b. Muʿāwiya, who is accused of the murder of Ḥusayn b.
ʿAlī, the Prophet’s grandson. However, he finds Ḥusayn faulty in his judgment
(although he considers him a martyr because of his good intentions) because
he opposed the group feeling that was strong among the Umayyads.72 Kātib
Çelebi adopts a similar outlook on this matter although he does not agree that
Ḥusayn erred in his judgment. He does not openly criticize and curse Yazīd, but
he does not refrain from discussing his wickedness. He acknowledges that there
is a controversy over cursing Yazīd. He adds that the Prophet banned Muslims
from cursing fellow Muslims who pray five times a day; Yazīd was known to be
a Muslim who prayed. He also mentions alternative views, such as that of the
mystic Ibn ʿArabī (d. 638/1240), who allowed such cursing based on the fact that
Yazīd’s acts cannot be considered the acts of a true Muslim.
In an interesting section at the end of his Fadhlaka, Kātib Çelebi includes
Yazīd in a list of history’s notorious debauchers and oppressors; however, he

70 Imam Birgivi, The path of Muhammad 87.

71 Kâtip Çelebi, Mîzanü’l-hakk 61–64.
72 Ibn Khaldûn, The Muqaddimah 425–438.
470 erginbaş

does not comment on this elsewhere in the work. In his famous treatise Mīzā-
nü’l-haḳḳ, however, he explains the issue in some detail. This book discusses 21
issues that were controversial in Kātib Çelebi’s lifetime, such as the propriety
of Sufi lodges, singing and whirling in Sufi rituals, using tobacco and coffee, the
faith of the Prophet’s parents, and Ibn ʿArabī’s concept of the “unity of being.”
After discussing each of these issues, Kātib Çelebi reveals his own position. He
wrote his book in an attempt to curb the hostilities between the Kadızadelis
and the followers of the Halveti Sufi leader ʿAbdü’l-mecīd Sivāsī Efendi (d.
1049/1639). The Kadızadelis took their name from Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed Efendi (d.
1045/1635), a onetime teacher of Kātib Çelebi, who, as a young man admired his
preaching. Ḳāḍīzāde is said to have been an eloquent preacher who attracted a
huge following. (The Kadızadelis adopted a shorter, more basic work by Birgivī,
known simply as the Risāle, as a sort of proof text.) Both authors were known
as being rigid followers of the Sunni path who did not criticize Sufi practices
that were in conformity with the ones of the Prophet but opposed innovations
to Islamic practice at the time of the Prophet Muḥammad. Like the Damascene
jurist Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) and similar early traditionalist figures,73 they
came into conflict with certain Sufi orders of whose religious practices they
vehemently disapproved.
During Kātib Çelebi’s lifetime and in the second half of the eleventh/sev-
enteenth century, the Kadızadelis’ struggle against particular Sufi orders fre-
quently took the form of physical conflict, which created turmoil in the Otto-
man capital. A particular target of Kadızadeli preaching and activism were the
followers of the aforementioned ʿAbdü’l-mecīd Sivāsī Efendi, a Halveti shaykh
who also enjoyed a large following, including many members of the imperial
court. Like Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed, he was a Friday preacher in one of the biggest
mosques in Istanbul. As opposed to Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed’s literal reading of the
Quran and other religious texts, Sivāsī argued that there was an esoteric path
to knowledge of God that could be attained only by a select few who chose to
follow the Sufi path. Although both groups considered themselves followers of

73 It has long been thought that Birgivī used Ibn Taymiyya’s work extensively in his treatises;
however, a growing number of recent studies argue that this was not the case. Yüksel,
Mehmed Birgivi 148; Ivanyi, Virtue, piety and the law 39, 81–82; El-Rouayheb, From Ibn
Ḥajar al-Haytamī 303; Terzioğlu, Bir tercüme ve intihal; Radtke, Birgiwī’s Ṭarīqa Muḥam-
madiyya 159–174. For a contrary perspective, see Sheikh, Ottoman puritanism. For an exten-
sive treatment of Ibn Taymiyya in the Ottoman context as well as an analysis of his impact
on the Kadızadelis, see Derin Terzioğlu’s article in this volume. Terzioğlu argues that there
is insufficient evidence to claim that Kadızadelis were significantly influenced by Ibn
Taymiyya.
reading ottoman sunnism through islamic history 471

the Sunni path, Sivāsī’s view was more lax in matters concerning religion and
society.74 In later life, Kātib Çelebi distanced himself from Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed,
especially because he did not approve of the Kadızadelis’ opposition to the
rational sciences and philosophy, which Kātib Çelebi believed were essential.
According to Kātib Çelebi, both the Kadızadelis and the followers of Sivāsī ben-
efited from the controversy and encouraged it to fuel their notoriety.
One of the issues that split the Kadızadelis and the Sufis was cursing Yazīd
ibn Muʿāwiya. The very fact that such a controversy existed suggests that many
Ottoman subjects had adopted the practice of cursing.75 The Kadızadelis’ spir-
itual guide, Birgivī Meḥmed, disapproved of such cursing in general because
it is not permissible to curse someone who did not die as an infidel; he lists
many hadiths forbidding this practice. He does not, however, specify whether
Muslims can curse Yazīd.76 In Mīzānü’l-haḳḳ, Kātib Çelebi summarizes this
controversy and cites different views. He categorically forbids Muslims from
cursing Muʿāwiya because he was a companion of the Prophet, and a mujtahid.
Any disagreement among them is a matter of ijtihād (independent reason-
ing); a companion who is proven wrong in his reasoning receives a reward
in the afterlife for his intention, whereas one who is proven right receives
twice the reward. Although ʿAlī was right and Muʿāwiya wrong in the dis-
pute between them, they both deserve credit because they were both com-
panions of Muḥammad. This is the same position that Kātib Çelebi takes in
Fadhlaka.77 As for Yazīd, Kātib Çelebi notes that there are conflicting views.
Shi‘ites and some Sunnis, such as the Shafi‘i jurist Muḥammad al-Kiya al-
Harrāsī (d. 504/1111) and Saʿad al-Dīn Taftāzānī (d. 792/1389) allow cursing
him. But the majority of Sunnis, including al-Ghazālī, do not approve of curs-
ing Yazīd. (He also includes this report of al-Ghazālī in Fadhlaka.) Accord-
ing to Kātib Çelebi, most people curse Yazīd not because they revere ʿAlī or
abhor Muʿāwiya but because they imitate other people who curse; he points
out that using Yazīd’s name in vulgar curses has become a popular practice.
A matter such as this, which has been around for a millennium, should be
put to rest; people who follow the middle path, which Kātib Çelebi clearly
believes is the correct path, should heed al-Ghazālī’s warnings and stay out

74 On the Kadızadeli movement, see Zilfi, The politics of piety 129–183; Zilfi, The Kadızadelis
251–269; Çavuşoğlu, The Ḳāḍīzādeli movement; Baer, Honored by the glory 62–77; Baer,
Death in the hippodrome 77–80; Le Gall, Ḳāḍīzādelis, Nakşbendis, and intra-Sufi diatribe
1–5.
75 Niyāzī-i Mıṣrī (d. 1105/1694), who was also a Halveti, was one of those Sufis who in his
treatises allowed the cursing of Yazīd. Çavuşoğlu, The Ḳāḍīzādeli movement 282–283.
76 Imam Birgivi, The path of Muhammad 246–248.
77 Kātib Çelebi, Fadhlaka 76a–b.
472 erginbaş

of the affair. These ideas reflect Kātib Çelebi’s overall attitude toward the
conflicts in the early Islamic community. In Fadhlaka and other works, he
adopts a conciliatory attitude toward matters such as this and encourages his
readers to stay away from controversy and public dispute, which he deems
futile.
One can observe Kātib Çelebi’s “middle path” policy in his section on the
Umayyad caliphs. Since Cenābī disapproved of the Umayyads and summarized
their reigns only very briefly, Kātib Çelebi relies on Qaramānī’s Akhbār al-duwal
in this section, although he does not quote it extensively. Unlike Ottoman
historians of the previous century discussed in this study, he is not very crit-
ical of the Umayyads. Of course, rulers who were upright and devout, such
as ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz or Yazīd b. al-Walīd, are given special treatment, as
they are in earlier histories. The remaining Umayyads, however, are not dispar-
aged.
Although the historians of the first half of the eleventh/seventeenth century
relied on their predecessors for much of their coverage, they were selective in
adopting their predecessors’ interpretations and analysis. For example, since
Edirnevī relied on Lārī’s work, he adopted Lārī’s ahl al-baytist attitude. Qara-
mānī, on the other hand, adopted a more visibly Sunni outlook toward matters
in early Islamic history while still honoring some of the ahl al-baytist notions
of his main source, Cenābī. Kātib Çelebi, in contrast, stripped Cenābī’s account
of its pronounced ahl al-baytism and presented a more conventional Sunni
reading of early Islamic history. A close reading of these eleventh/seventeenth-
century historians’ takes on early Islamic history reveals the complexity of
Ottoman Sunnism. One could argue that in the eleventh/seventeenth century
a more visibly Sunni outlook, which was more sympathetic toward Muʿāwiya
and Yazīd, was apparent in the works of Ottoman intellectuals if one is to judge
it from the evidence presented here.

4 Conclusion

This chapter argues that when one studies Ottoman Sunnism, one must pay
close attention to the phenomenon of ahl al-baytism. In the period discussed
here, we can define ahl al-baytism as a belief in the spiritual superiority of ahl
al-bayt as well as a clear preference for the ‘Alids over the Umayyads in polit-
ical authority. An often-made critique against this argument is the fact that
Sunnism has always included love for the ahl al-bayt. Although Sunni attitudes
toward ʿAlī and his descendants varied across time and space, there existed a
strong current within Sunnism that continued to honor the ranking of the first
reading ottoman sunnism through islamic history 473

four caliphs and argued that Abū Bakr is the worthiest of all, followed by ʿUmar,
ʿUthmān, and ʿAlī. What is more, Sunni apologists, such as al-Ghazālī and Ibn
ʿAsākir, among others, found ways to justify Umayyad rule or problematic fig-
ures like Muʿāwiya and Yazīd.
The majority of the Ottoman historians studied here shared a visceral dis-
taste for the Umayyads and upheld the ‘Alid lineage’s right to rule. They de-
scribed the Twelve Imams no differently than most Shi‘ites, even though they
rejected some of the extraordinary deeds or qualities attributed to them by
the extreme Shi‘ites. Some among them, such as Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī, mostly under
the influence of the so-called “Twelver Sunni” intellectuals of the seventh/thir-
teenth century, argued that the twelfth imam is indeed the expected Mahdi,
who would eventually come back and restore justice in the world. There were
a wide variety of opinions on the early succession problem; some Ottoman
historians openly criticized Muʿāwiya for opposing ʿAlī, whereas some hesi-
tated. They argued that Muʿāwiya was a companion of Muḥammad, and it
would be wrong for a Muslim to criticize one of the companions of Muḥam-
mad. Almost all of them cursed Yazīd and found him unjust and oppressive,
and they questioned his sincerity. Some, however, like Kātib Çelebi discouraged
people from cursing. One can presume from the given historical evidence that
the Ottomans were aware of both ahl-al-baytist and Damascene traditions, par-
ticularly the one that Ibn ʿAsākir promoted about Muʿāwiya that emerged out
of the medieval period. The Ottoman historians selectively used these sources
to support the views that they found most befitting their ‘Alid or pro-Muʿāwiya
positions; and most were clearly ‘Alid-tinged. From the chronological evidence,
one could argue that ahl al-baytism was strong in the first two centuries of the
Ottoman rule, and this continued in the tenth/sixteenth century without inter-
ruption despite the sectarian milieu created by the Ottoman-Safavid conflict.
One could argue that the eleventh/seventeenth-century historians were more
divided on the issue; whether this was due to the Kadızadeli influence, or a
selective emphasis given to some of their sources, remains to be seen until
more studies like this one are undertaken. All the evidence presented here,
however, points to the strong ahl al-baytist bent in the broader framework of
Ottoman Sunnism, if one takes the Ottoman historians’ interpretation of early
Islamic succession struggle between the ‘Alids and the Umayyads as a measur-
ing test.
474 erginbaş

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 chapter 14

Islamic Discourse in Ottoman-Safavid Peacetime

Diplomacy after 1049/1639

Selim Güngörürler

Ottoman-Safavid relations in the period between the late ninth/fifteenth cen-

tury and early seventeenth centuries are relatively well studied. Because this
period was marked by warfare with only brief interruptions, scholars have
largely focused on the confrontational, exclusionary, and sectarian discourses.
In this context, fatwas on unbelief (kufr), polemical treatises, and based on
these, accusations, war declarations, and persecutions have attracted a good
deal of scholarly attention.,1 For the most part, studies on this subject have
approached religion either as a driving factor of the conflict or as one subordi-
nate to politics. This is only natural, because in the successive wars during the
one and a half centuries, the Ottoman Empire legitimized its hostility against
Safavid Iran by referring to religious dogma and declaring the faith of the
Safavids’ militant followers, the Kızılbaş, a heresy—the phenomenon which is
discussed in this volume from various angles by Nabil Al-Tikriti, Nir Shafir, and
Ayşe Baltacıoğlu-Brammer.
However, a study of the bilateral relations between the two monarchies from
the peace of Zuhab in 1049/1639 until the overthrow of the Safavid dynasty in
1135/1722 requires a different approach. During this period, political principles,
along with the religious terminology that informed them, were reshaped into a
new diplomatic discourse. The initiators of this new discourse were exclusively
dignitaries and bureaucrats, rather than theologians and jurists. In this role,
they ceased to employ religious terminology and legal concepts for the aggra-
vation of hostilities, exploring instead how they could use religious concepts
to articulate a unifying, inclusive, and nonsectarian agenda. In order for this to
materialize, both parties selected new Islamic themes that were conducive to
achieving the newly desired end.

1 See, for instance, Murphey, Süleyman’s eastern policy; Diyanet, İlk Osmanlı-İran anlaşması;
Dressler, Inventing orthodoxy; Küpeli, Osmanlı-Safevi münasebetleri; Sohrweide, Der Sieg
der Safawiden; Kütükoğlu, Osmanlı-İran münasebetleri. See footnote 36 below for further
titles.

© selim güngörürler, 2021 | doi:10.1163/9789004440296_015

This is an open access chapter distributed under the terms of the CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license.
480 güngörürler

First of all, this required that the ulama’s—especially the chief mufti’s
(şeyhü’l-islām)—involvement in diplomacy with the Safavids, in which the
ulama traditionally played an active role, be discontinued, for the ulama’s doc-
trinal position was too entrenched in sectarian, polarizing discourse to accom-
modate the state’s new reconciliatory approach.2 Rather than drawing on the
ulama input, the political authority and bureaucracy now took over the role
of articulating legal concepts and phrases referencing the Quran and hadith
for use in diplomacy in order to make Islamic tradition foster, not delegit-
imize, the revised goals. In the field of diplomacy, both parties emphasized
Islam’s inclusivity, took accusations of heresy off the agenda, and adopted a
purposeful, almost absolute silence in the matter of Shi‘ite-Sunni sectarian
discord. They revisited the concept of the caliphate, and through it, articu-
lated in Islamic terms the early modern principle of Ottoman supremacy. In
this context, concepts novel to the diplomacy between the Houses of ʿOs̱mān
and Ṣafī, such as “brotherhood-in-religion,” prayer exchange, “partnership in
heavenly remuneration,” and “binding contract before God,” gained currency,
albeit for a short period of time. Therefore, the use of Islamic discourse as
a means to legitimize political goals in Ottoman-Safavid relations continued
after 1049/1639; however, it now served policies of convergence rather than con-
frontation.

1 Documentary Evidence

The sultan and his grand vizier on the one hand, and the shah and his chief
vizier on the other, exchanged many letters after 1049/1639. Their extant copies
are kept in imperial epistle registers (nāme-i hümāyūn defteri) and letter collec-
tions (münşeʾāt mecmūʿası), and, to a certain extent, chronicles (veḳayīʿnāme,
tārīh). This diplomatic correspondence illustrates the redefined role of Islamic
themes in Ottoman-Safavid relations. The first Ottoman mission (1049–1051/
1639–1641) sent to Isfahan to ratify the peace of Zuhab is a telling example of
how earnestly the Safavids took the Sublime Porte’s recognition of their Mus-
limness. At the behest of Shah Ṣafī, as the very first official event at court,

2 The chief mufti could also play a role in diplomacy with European states, see White, Fetva
diplomacy. For the regulation of international relations by the Islamic canon, see Krüger,
Fatwa und Siyar. For the extant fatwas from the period in question, see the survey in Özen,
Osmanlı döneminde fetva literatürü. However, in diplomacy with Iranian states, the chief
mufti’s role was not limited to issuing fatwas but included direct and state-sponsored corre-
spondence with his Iranian counterpart as well.
islamic discourse in ottoman-safavid peacetime diplomacy 481

the sultan’s envoy was taken to the new Grand Mosque of Isfahan to per-
form the Friday prayer together with the gathered congregation and digni-
taries,3 indicating the importance attached to leaving the impression of being
good Muslims on Ottoman visitors. This is particularly important in light of
the early modern controversy among the Shi‘ite ulama on whether the Fri-
day prayer was obligatory in the absence of the Imam, and the Sunni ulama’s
engagement therewith (as discussed in Evren Sünnetçioğlu’s paper in this vol-
ume).
The next piece of evidence comes from the first extant correspondence fol-
lowing the treaty of Zuhab and showcases the attempt to normalize relations
after more than 15 years of warfare. Shah ʿAbbās II’s letters from 1050/1641 and
1052/1642 acknowledged the Ottomans’ exclusive claim to the caliphate and
primacy in Islamdom. The royal chancery glorified the sultan as the “exempli-
fication of the beneficence and mercy of the Lord of the worlds,” referred to
his dignity of being the “servant of the Two Illustrious Sanctuaries,” and paid
homage to his supreme caliphal position by calling him “God’s shadow (ẓıllul-
lāh).”4
In his answer sent in 1053/1643, Sultan İbrāhīm relates his condolences to
ʿAbbās II for the passing of his father, Shah Ṣafī, for “whose absolution” (ʿaleyh
el-gufrān) from worldly deeds he prayed—a prayer reserved for those who
passed away as Muslims. In the following sentence, the Sublime Porte empha-
sized the empire’s continuous preoccupation with the cause of Islam and the
expectation that the Safavids would abstain from any aggression that would
hinder Ottoman activities in this respect: “so long as there arises no situation
that is contrary to the pact and that will cause our legions to occupy themselves
[away] from the obligatory jihad,” peace should prevail. Grand Vizier Kemānkeş
Muṣṭafā Pasha’s parallel letter to ʿAbbās II placed even more emphasis on the
concepts above. After wishing the “mercy of God upon Shah Ṣafī” (ʿaleyhi raḥ-
metullāh), and thus acknowledging the House of Ṣafī to be among the believers,
the grand vizier set out to underline the Ottoman monarch’s superior posi-
tion in Islam in the following terms: “God’s shadow in both worlds (ẓıllullāh
fī-l-ʿālemeyn), helper of Islam and the Muslims, servant of the House of God,
confirmed by God.” Additionally, by declaring the “jihad against infidels [to be]
the seal-ring of the [Ottoman] dynasty,” Kemānkeş Muṣṭafā Pasha stressed the
distinction of the Ottomans as the foremost wagers of holy war.5

3 Qazvīnī, Khuld-i Barīn 301.

4 Evoğlu, Mecmaʿ 283a–b; Cevrī İbrāhīm and Ṣarı ʿAbdullāh, Düstūrü’l-İnşā entry: “Şehinşāh Sul-
ṭān İbrāhīm Hān ṭarafına Şāh ʿAbbās-ı S̱ānī cānibinden gelen nāmedir.”
5 Cevrī İbrāhīm and Ṣarı ʿAbdullāh, Düstūrü’l-İnşā, the untitled entry following the section
482 güngörürler

In the following decade, the relations between Constantinople and Isfa-

han deteriorated due to the contentions and proxy war over in Basra. In his
1066/1656 epistle sent to disown his past attempts to intervene in Iraq, ʿAbbās
II hailed İbrāhīm’s successor, Meḥmed IV, as the “refuge of Islam,”6 while in his
follow-up epistle the next year, the shah lauded the sultan’s distinction in God’s
service by calling him the “sharpness of ghazā and jihad, [and the] ornamentor
of religion,” in addition to remarking that Mecca and Medina belonged to the
Ottoman Empire.7
Meḥmed IV’s epistle on the conquest of Crete addressed to the shah in
1080/1669 opened with a thanksgiving to God for “making the caliphal [Otto-
man] dynasty distinguish itself among the monarchs of the age by giving [it]
accomplishment in the exaltation of the proclamation of God’s Oneness (i’lā-
yı kelime-i tevḥīd) and revival of the Prophet’s sharia.” The ultimate conquest
of Crete from the Venetian alliance was declared to have confirmed that the
Ottoman dynasty had indeed lived up to God’s glad tidings “We made you
vicegerent [caliph] on Earth [Q 38:26], God shall help you with a precious victory
[Q 48:3], a victory-help from God and imminent conquest [Q 61:13].” Meḥmed
IV depicted the Cretan war as the continuation of holy war (ghazā), which
his “caliphal” person, who was the “refuge of religion” (dīn-penāh), had been
“individually obligated” ( farż-ı ʿayn) to wage, like each of his forefathers. In obe-
dience to the divine command “and strive duly in the way of God for endeavor
[Q 22:78],” said the sultan, he embarked on a holy quest and converted churches
into mosques. The glad tidings conveyed in this “caliphal epistle” of Meḥmed
IV were to make all Muslims rejoice, and upon its arrival, the shah was “to com-
mand celebrations, and spread around the glad tidings.”8
The parallel grand vizierial letter described the “best-possible deeds of mo-
narchs, who are the pillars of the religion and the [Muslim] nation,” to be the
“exaltation of the word of God [and] jihad.” Because of this, stated Köprülüzāde
Fāżıl Aḥmed Pasha, his lord Meḥmed IV, as the “aider of Islam and the Muslims
(gıyās̱ü’l-İslām ve’l-Müslimīn), patron of Islam (ḥāmī-yi Müselmānī), sovereign
of the ghāzīs and jihad-wagers, the confirmed one before God” had “person-
ally departed for this greater ghazā,” and performed the narrated exploits with

titled “bu cānibden Şāh Abbās-ı S̱ānī ṭarafına gönderilmek için sābıḳan reīsülküttāb olan
ʿAbdullāh Efendi müsvedde ettiği nāmedir, lākin bu mektūb gönderilmeyip baʿdehu yazılan
gönderilmiştir.”
6 Navāī, Asnād 1038–1105 206.
7 Navāī, Asnād 1038–1105 209.
8 Navāī, Asnād 1038–1105 250. On Meḥmed IV’s conversion of churches and synagogues to
mosques, see Baer, The great fire of 1660.
islamic discourse in ottoman-safavid peacetime diplomacy 483

his army, the “jihad-strivers [in the path] of Islam,” on the island of Crete, the
“cemetery of jihad.” This letter accompanied the above-mentioned imperial
epistle in announcing the materialization of God’s glad tidings “Muslims will
cheer up with the God-helped victory [Q 30:4–5].”9
In 1099/1688, apparently motivated by the shocking losses during the disas-
trous first half of the Great Turkish War against the Holy League of German
states, Poland, Russia, Venice, and the Papacy, the Sublime Porte composed
the imperial epistle that would be a game changer in that the Safavids became
explicitly included in the community of Islam. First, Sultan Süleymān II defined
the Islamic dimension of his reign as such: “[God] the Possessor of the reg-
num brightens a sunshine of caliphate in every era to reform the subjects; and
as it is the tradition of [God] the Almighty to exalt the religion and affirm
the sharia, He has crowned Our person with [His revelation] We made you
vicegerent [caliph] on Earth [Q 38:26], and enthroned [Us] to the universal
caliphate (hilāfet-i cihānbānī). It is necessary that [the news of Our] over-
whelming caliphate reach Your Kingly ears.”
After this emphasis on the caliphal dignity of his “jihad-associated dynasty,”
the sultan qualified the empire’s ongoing war against the Christian Holy League
as the Muslims’ endeavor in the way of God and the Prophet. Following this, he
called, “with complete union-in-religion” (kemāl-i ittiḥād-ı dīnī), on the shah
“to exercise diligence in [upholding] the concord and fervor of the luminous
Muslim community” ( yek-cihetī ve gayret-keşī-yi millet-i beyżā).10
In the imperial epistles of 1080/1669 and 1099/1688, the Ottoman state made
its most explicit claim to the caliphate in its relations with the Safavid state
since the reestablishment of peace in 1049/1639. Besides, the Ottomans, instead
of making references to the Safavids’ Muslimness in passing, directly and ex-
plicitly addressed it in the 1099/1688 epistle, stating that both parties were of
one and the same religion, which necessitated solidarity. This is crucial in the
sense that it constituted the first and concrete step taken by the Ottomans
toward acknowledging the Islamic legitimacy and thus the permanence of the
Safavid rule in Iran.
Shah Süleymān’s reply composed in 1102/1691 confirmed this rapproche-
ment by means of addressing the sultan—then Aḥmed II—as the possessor
of the “greater caliphate (hilāfet-i kübrā), enkindler of the divine light, estab-
lisher of the foundation of Islam (müʾessis-i bünyānü’l-İslām), servant of the
Two Illustrious Sanctuaries, [and] breaker of the heads of the infidels.” After

9 Navāī, Asnād 1038–1105 258.

10 Nāme-i hümāyūn v, entry 29.
484 güngörürler

paying such a clear homage to Ottoman claims, the shah then declared the
“attachment-in-religion” (teveddüd-i dīn) between the parties and depicted the
Ottoman campaigns against the Holy League as an “august march to eradicate
the alliance of idol-worshippers.” “For the currency of the resplendent sharia,”
declared the shah, “a prayer from this [Safavid] caliphal family (hānevāde-i
hilāfet) of the progeny of the Prophet’s dynasty was required.” Accordingly, he
stated, to have “commanded with heart and soul that in mosques, temples,
venues, and habitations, the seyyids, the ulama, the ascetics, and the pious
raise the hands to the [Divine] Court in complete servility, [and pray] that
the [Ottomans’] army of the Faith (cünūd-ı ehl-i īmān) conquer, and [com-
manded] that they [i.e., Iranians] set themselves to praying for the celestial-
victory of the [Ottoman] troops in the path of God’s oneness and appeal
for the toppling of the irreligious opponents.” This express prayer concluded
with the shah’s expressing his “honest hope” that the “[Ottoman] jihad-wagers
attain their portion from the divine-remuneration (müs̱evvebāt) of ghazā and
jihad.”11
Thereby, the Safavids recognized the Ottomans’ official position on the ca-
liphate, not for the first time but, more strongly than before. In doing so, they
referred to the distinction between the “greater” and the “lesser” versions of this
office that had been introduced in the late Middle Ages, according to which the
former was caliphate proper as in the monarchy of an Islamic world empire,
and the latter was the caliphal authority a monarch enjoyed strictly within
his own sovereign territory while paying titular homage to the hierarchically
superior “greater caliph.”12 The Safavids also acknowledged and advanced the
Ottoman position on coreligionism. Instead of rephrasing his commitment
to Islamic solidarity in abstract terms, the shah introduced yet another nov-
elty by devoting mass prayers from his House and various circles in Iran to
the Ottomans so that the latter succeed in their holy endeavor. The Safavid
acknowledgment of Ottoman superiority in hierarchy and in accomplishment
as expressed through the Islamic concepts of caliphate and jihad increased in
precision. On the other hand, the House of Ṣafī also re-internationalized its
longstanding claim to descend from Prophet Muḥammad’s cousin and hus-
band of his daughter Fāṭima, ʿAlī b. Abu Ṭālib.
In 1103/1692, Aḥmed II sent his reply, whereby the Sublime Porte acknowl-
edged the House of Ṣafī as “the [Muḥammedan] Muṣṭafavid dynasty.” Then, by
citing the verse “fulfill the oath, indeed there is responsibility in oath [Q 17:34]”

11 Nāme-i hümāyūn v, ent.63.

12 See Kennedy, The caliphate 281–289, 341–346.
islamic discourse in ottoman-safavid peacetime diplomacy 485

and Muḥammad’s saying “the goodness of oath [arises] from faith,” it also
declared that adherence to the current Ottoman-Safavid treaty was a religious
obligation. Further emphasis on the same point was made with the hadith “the
faithful are like [parts of ] a structure, each upholds the other,” and the verse
“hold firmly to the rope of God all together, and do not separate. And remember
the favor of God upon you, when you were enemies, He reconciled your hearts,
and you became, by His favor, brothers [Q 3:103].” Besides, the reason for the
delay in the issuance of the reply was stated to be Aḥmed II’s preoccupa-
tion with the endeavor against the infidels. In this regard, he wrote to the
shah: “it is [Our] expectation from his royal highness that he have his share
of the [heavenly] remuneration for ghazā; and that as required by the [revela-
tion] cooperate in righteousness and piety [Q 5:2], the elders and worshippers
and the righteous and ascetics in those [Iranian] abodes of straightforward-
foundation, who strive in the way of [God], succor with prayers the ghāzīs
who are the patrons of the noble sharia and guardians of the luminous Mus-
lim community (millet-i Ḥanīfiye-yi beyżā), and the celestially-victorious army
of Islam.”13
The exchanges between 1099/1688 and 1102/1691 offer the first evidence that
direct citations from the Quran could serve to support not only a party’s unilat-
eral assertion but also a mutually agreed status quo. Now, the 1103/1692 imperial
epistle, in a new step, represented the upholding of the Ottoman-Safavid peace
as a religious obligation with direct, express, and multiple references to the
word of God and the Prophet. Using a Quranic verse, it even references the
concept of brotherhood in religion, going beyond the principle of theoreti-
cal solidarity between coreligionists. Such buttressing of the Ottoman-Safavid
contractual relationship through the divine word was the second and thus far
the firmest step taken toward the Ottoman dynasty’s acknowledgment that the
Safavid state was a legitimate and lawful Islamic monarchy, and that peace with
it had now become everlasting.
It is no coincidence that, in response to Shah Süleymān’s previous statement,
Sultan Aḥmed II called on him again to have the Iranians pray for their Ottoman
coreligionists waging holy war, as a result of which the Safavids would receive
a share of the heavenly benefit from the Ottoman-led struggle. The introduc-
tion of this concept of partnership in divine remuneration for good deeds was
no less a revolution in the relations between the foremost Shi‘ite and Sunni
polities of the age than citing the Quran in order to qualify bilateral relations
as brotherly. Last but not least, although the House of Ṣafī’s aspiration toward

13 Nāme-i hümāyūn v, ent.70.

486 güngörürler

the lesser caliphate was left hanging in the air, the nominal recognition of its
claim to descend from the Prophetic House (ahl al-bayt) should be seen as the
consequence of the accord reached in greater matters. Indeed, as Vefa Ergin-
baş’s paper in this volume demonstrates, the veneration of the ahl al-bayt was
an important aspect of Ottoman piety and constituted a major arena of sym-
bolic and discursive competition between the Ottomans and Safavids, in light
of which this recognition of the Safavid claims was a major concession.
In his 1107/1696 letter, Shah Ḥusayn fully honored the newly established
Islamic status quo between the two states. By qualifying Sultan Muṣṭafā II
as being “the Muḥammedan (Muḥammedī-meẕheb) keeper of the frontier of
Islam and the Faith, heir to the service of the Two Illustrious Sanctuaries, pro-
tector of Islam, and keeper of the sharia,” the shah emphasized the sultan’s
Muslimness much more than even the Sublime Porte itself did, as an exten-
sion of the Safavids’ internalization of the principle of Ottoman supremacy
on all platforms. In the same vein, Shah Ḥusayn also called Muṣṭafā II the
“world-bestower via whom the religion triumphed, the Bountiful Monarch of
the manifest verse, and Greater Caliph.”14
Next year, Muṣṭafā II sent his reply. By referring to the shah’s ancestry of
“immaculateness (ṭahāret) [and] seyyidhood,” the Sublime Porte affirmed its
recognition of the House of Ṣafī’s claim to prophetic lineage. The text, adorned
with many Quranic verses, features a lengthy narration of the ongoing war
against the Christian Holy League, “the enemies of religion,” and then asserts
the position of the House of ʿOs̱mān as the hereditary and rightful flag-bearer of
Islam in the struggle against unbelief due to the dynasty’s “sublime caliphate”
girded by God, which also came with the responsibilities of safeguarding the
Islamic community. For this reason, stressed Muṣṭafā II, his “caliphal High-
ness” himself engaged in jihad, following the example of his “jihad-accustomed
stock.”
Muṣṭafā II also referred to himself and the shah as “affectionate [toward each
other] through God.” Then, he repeated his predecessor’s statement regarding
the obligatory nature of the Ottoman-Safavid contractual relationship by citing
the verse “and fulfill the oath [to God] when you pledge it [Q 16:91]”—in evo-
cation of Shah Ṣafī’s deed of oath given to Murād IV during the ratification
of the peace of Zuhab in 1049/1639—and added: “it is considered impossible
for contracts concluded at the behest of [the mentioned verse] to be broken.”
Along the same lines, Muṣṭafā II described the nature of bilateral relations with
reference to the verse “the faithful are but brothers [Q 49:10].” As the padishah

14 Nāme-i hümāyūn v, ent.99.

islamic discourse in ottoman-safavid peacetime diplomacy 487

concluded his letter, he expressed his “hope that his Highness [the shah], would
as a declaration of faith, also become a co-rider [in the sultanic troops’ holy
endeavor] with [an] army of prayers.”15
In his own reply to the shah, the grand vizier additionally underscored the
sultan’s dignity through titles coined from Islamic concepts, such as the “aider
of Islam and the Muslims, collector of the signs of religiosity (cāmi‘-i āyāt-ı dīn-
dārī), upholder of Muḥammed’s sharia, refuge of Islam.” As had happened in
the previous round of correspondence, the grand vizier announced: “as there
is the intention of jihad this year, it is demanded that You make Your [God-
]answered prayer for the army striving in the path of God’s oneness, and not
spare Your diligence towards partaking in the divine remuneration of ghazā
via gathering prayers from the ulama, the elders, the righteous, and the pious
who are at ease in Your extensive domains.”16
By this correspondence, beyond the consolidation of the previously intro-
duced concepts, the Sublime Porte for the first time defined with Quranic
verses not only the formation of a contractual relationship with the Safavids
but also its due continuation, thus implying the obligatory nature of adhering
to it and referring to the perpetuation of the peace between these Shi‘ite and
Sunni monarchies.
In his 1109/1698 epistle, Shah Ḥusayn called the Ottoman pādishāh the
“refuge of religion, victory-bringer to Islam and the Muslims, suppresser of the
infidels, servant of the Two Illustrious Sanctuaries, redoubled shadow (ẓıll-ı
ẓalīl) of [God] the Merciful.” Then, the shah once again designated the Ottoman
war against the Christian Holy League as “ghazā against the infidels,” and the
subjects of both Iran and the Ottoman Empire collectively as the “community
of Islam.”17
In his reply, Muṣṭafā II did not refer to the Islamic qualifications of his
Safavid correspondent, as in the previous imperial missives, but he still cited
the verse “you became, by His favor, brothers [Q 3:103].”18 In his parallel letter to
the shah, Köprülü Amcazāde Ḥüseyin Pasha greeted his addressee as the “light
of the garden of [Muḥammad] Muṣṭafā, the befitting one to [ʿAlī] the gem of
Najaf.” Yet, he referred to the “caliphal [Ottoman] hearth” and to Muṣṭafā II as
the “servant of the Two Illustrious Sanctuaries, aider of Islam and the Muslims,
victory-bringer of the jihad-strivers, refuge of Islam, greater shadow of God.”
Regarding the Safavids’ active cooperation in restituting Basra to the Ottomans,

15 Nāme-i hümāyūn v, ent.100.

16 Nāme-i hümāyūn v, ent.112.
17 Nāme-i hümāyūn v, ent.120.
18 Nāme-i hümāyūn v, ent.121.
488 güngörürler

after it had been under rebel rule for several years, the grand vizier wrote that
this act by the shah was meant to aid the Ottoman struggle against the Holy
League—i.e., an “aid-of-victory to religion.”19 In his separate letter to the Iranian
chief vizier, Köprülü Amcazāde Ḥüseyin Pasha additionally called the sultan
“God’s shadow in both worlds” as opposed to which he styled the shah as the
“shadow of the clemency of the God” (sāye-i re’fet-i Yezdān).20
In 1111/1699, the Safavid court sent its counter replies. In the royal epistle to
Muṣṭafā II, the sultan was again hailed for his “piety.” The moment of the impe-
rial epistle’s arrival was depicted in a narration richly embellished with Quranic
verses. The goal of the Ottoman army in the ongoing struggle against the Chris-
tian Holy League was underscored to be the “exaltation of the word of God,
notification of the express religion, [and] endeavor against the infidels.” The
“expediencies of the manifest religion (dīn-i mübīn) and the order of the affairs
of the Muslims” were highlighted to be the desire of both parties.21 In a sep-
arate royal epistle to the grand vizier, the shah distinguished the padishah as
the “helper of Islam, greater shadow of [God] the Merciful.”22 The Iranian chief
vizier’s reply to Köprülü Amcazāde Ḥüseyin Pasha qualified the grand vizier
as the “arm of the manifest caliphate (hilāfetü’l-müstebīn), [and] mast of the
[Muslim] nation and religion,” while revering the sultan as the “greater shadow
of God [and] refuge of Islam.”23 The grand vizier’s follow-up letter to the chief
vizier in 1112/1700 conformed to the by-now established precedents and titled
the padishah, among other things, as “God’s shadow in both worlds” and the
shah as the “shadow of the clemency of the Deity.”24
The 1109–1112/1698–1700 correspondence between Adrianople, where the
imperial court then resided, and Isfahan constituted the zenith of the frater-
nization between the Shi‘ite Safavids claiming to rule in the absence of the
Twelfth Imam and the Sunni Ottomans claiming to possess God’s vicegerency
on earth. In line with the recent revival of the distinctions in the concept of
caliphate, the Sublime Porte styled itself with the by-now established refer-
ences to the greater caliphate. However, it also made a novel allusion to the
Safavids’ lesser caliphate through a reference to the shah’s being the shadow not
of God himself but of an attribute of God (i.e., his clemency; re’fet). Other than
rhetorical diversification, this round of correspondence featured a repeated,

19 Nāme-i hümāyūn v, ent.125.

20 Nāme-i hümāyūn v, ent.126.
21 Nāme-i hümāyūn v, ent.155.
22 Nāme-i hümāyūn v, ent.157.
23 Nāme-i hümāyūn v, ent.156.
24 Nāme-i hümāyūn v, ent.180.
islamic discourse in ottoman-safavid peacetime diplomacy 489

consolidated, and full adherence to the rest of the established concepts rep-
resenting the recent Islamic rapprochement. Never had these polities cham-
pioning Shi‘ism on the one hand and Sunnism on the other interacted more
harmoniously under the banner of Islam.
This leniency of the Ottomans, however, came to an end once their war
against the four great powers and their lesser allies was concluded by the
Treaty of Karlowitz in 1111/1699. The Safavid chief vizier’s letter to the Ottoman
grand vizier in 1114/1702 referred to the latter as the “reliance of the supreme
caliphate,” and to the sultan as the “refuge of Islam, shadow of God,” while it
qualified the shah’s dignity as the “[lesser] caliphal throne.”25 The grand vizier’s
reply fell visibly short of satisfying Safavid expectations, for it contained none
of the explicit references to the Islamic attributes of the Safavids that the Sub-
lime Porte had formulated and used in their correspondence over the previous
decade. Yet, the grand vizier did not fail to describe the sultan with supreme
Islamic titles such as the “patron of the religion, aider of Islam, [celestially-
]victorious with the help of [God] the best of the victory-aiders, shadow of God,
[and] refuge of Islam.”26
As it happened, in the interval between 1099/1688 and 1103/1692, the initia-
tive to alter the Islamic status quo between the parties came from the Ottoman
state. In response to the Iranian chief vizier’s letter that was antagonizing in
content but compliant in form, the grand vizier retaliated with double the
hostility received and stripped the Safavid side of nearly all of their recently rec-
ognized Islamic qualifications. The shah no longer enjoyed a territorial caliphal
dignity, prophetic lineage, coreligionist solidarity, or even the full honors of a
Muslim sovereign monarch. The undoing of the post-1099/1688 achievements
had begun.27
The deterioration in relations was yet to reach its peak. In Shah Ḥusayn’s
epistle of 1117/1705 to Sultan Aḥmed III, apart from the traditional reference
to the padishah’s safeguarding of Mecca and Medina, no title describing his
Islamic leadership was inserted. Nevertheless, the text included passages men-
tioning the Ottomans’ “breaking the reinforcement of the infidels,” and thus
enjoying God’s glad tidings “He shall recompense those who do good with the best
[award] [Q 53:31],” and “indeed, the Earth belongs to the God, He bequeaths it to
whom[ever] He wishes [Q 7:128].” Upon receiving this good news from Aḥmed

25 Nāme-i hümāyūn v, ent.218.

26 Nāme-i hümāyūn v, ent.220.
27 For the historical background of this case and all other cases discussed in this essay, see
Güngörürler, Diplomacy and political relations; Güngörürler, Fundamentals of Ottoman-
Safavid; Güngörürler, Brotherhood, perpetual peace.
490 güngörürler

III, the “sharia-cherisher [and] the pursuer of the road of the Prophet,” the shah,
addressing the sultan, gave “thanks to God that standard of Islam became ele-
vated due to the stroke of your sharp blade.”28
The imperial epistle sent in response opened with an imperious reminder:

[God], by [His] verdict of whom[ever] He wishes and whom[ever] He wills,

authorizes an entity to the seat of caliphate for the order of the world,
[and by His word] indeed, the Earth belongs to the God, He bequeaths
it to whom[ever] He wishes of his servitors [Q 7:128], He bestows [upon
this caliph] the monarchy, world-keeping, rulership, and sovereignty, and
when His [i.e., God’s] pre-eternal providence conjoins his [i.e., this ca-
liph’s] height to the zenith of the sky, no one of the connoisseurs of plot-
ting and jealousy can reject. And it is He who has made you vicegerents [i.e.
caliphs] on Earth and has raised some of you above the others [Q 6:165].

The epistle’s inscriptio included no Islamic honorific other than the reference
to Shah Ḥusayn’s being the “good successor of the dynasty of [ʿAlī] the shah of
Najaf.” In the expositio, one comes across, probably for the first time in decades,
the reference to the “coverage of the Sunni community” (şeml-i ehl-i sünnet ve’l-
cemā‘at) as one in the set of causes that the Ottoman dynasty championed,
alongside the more conventional ones like the “majesty of Islam, symbols of
the Muḥammedan religion, [and] the sharia.” The Sublime Porte concluded its
message as follows: “it is [by] the practice of Our great forefathers, that partic-
ularly those who are single-hearted with [and] honest towards Islamic rulers
have always been [held in] esteem.”29
It is noteworthy that in the grand vizier’s reply to the shah’s chief vizier,
the Sublime Porte briefly referred to the shah as “of caliphal station” (hilāfet-
mertebet), but in return, prayed for the sultan that “God may immortalize his
caliphate,” and also decorated him with the usual titles emphasizing his patron-
age of Islam.30
Within the scope of the 1117–1118/1705–6 exchange, the Safavids chose to
escalate the tensions that had arisen during the previous several years. They
alluded to Ottoman dignity in Islamic terms only by referring to the Ottomans’
conformity to the divine commandments and distinguished accomplishments
in the path of God. Yet, none of these praises concealed the fact that explicit ref-
erences to the greater caliphate and the set of associated titles denoting Islamic

28 Nāme-i hümāyūn vi, ent.61.

29 Nāme-i hümāyūn vi, ent.66.
30 Rāmī Meḥmed, Münşeʾāt 25a–26a.
islamic discourse in ottoman-safavid peacetime diplomacy 491

primacy were omitted, except for the possibility that an accompanying and by-
now nonextant chief vizierial letter might have included them.
This matter claimed the Ottomans’ entire attention. In the response epis-
tle, apart from a nominal recognition of prophetic lineage, the Sublime Porte
omitted the entire set of references to the House of Ṣafī’s Muslimness, broth-
erhood in Islam, or the prayer exchanges and partnership arising from core-
ligionism, save for a single mention of the concept of the lesser caliphate.
Moreover, it emphasized the God-designated nature, exclusiveness, and indis-
putability of the Ottoman universal caliphate posited above all other rulers.
While these points were mutually and constructively cited in the previous
exchanges, now the Sublime Porte chose to patronizingly evoke them in the
face of an unfriendly omission by the Safavids. In order to leave no room for
doubt that this assertion was not an untargeted or general declaration but a
direct retaliation, the imperial chancery inserted into the composition of the
reply the very concepts and Quranic verses found in the royal epistle that initi-
ated the exchange, employing them, however, to the detriment of the original
citer. Furthermore, the Sublime Porte briefly touched upon the issue of sectari-
anism with a mention of Sunni orthodoxy in a diplomatic letter to the Safavids
for the first time after at least 67 years. By means of this reference to Sunnism
as the correct path of Islam, it insinuated that it indeed regarded the Shi‘ites
as unorthodox if not heretical, that it could revive the age-old controversy if
the Safavid side was not to conform to the status quo by recognizing Ottoman
supremacy, and that the nonmention of sectarian discord in the diplomatic
correspondence between the parties for almost seven decades was for the sake
of political expediency, which the Safavids better observe for their own good.
Consequently, the reminder about how to enjoy esteem in Islamdom led by the
Ottomans carried an admonishing rather than an encouraging tone.
Correspondence between monarchs resumed after a ten-year break. In its
manner of imposing the Ottoman universal caliphate, the epistle of the con-
quest of the Peloponnese in 1128/1716 partially resembled the one from 1118/
1706: “The Creator, by His pre-eternal grace and [His revelation] We made you
vicar [caliph] on Earth [Q 38:26], certified Our caliphal Highness to uphold
the frontiers of Islam hereditarily and rightfully. And Our caliphal Highness,
not regarding the might of monarchy as a tool for self-advancement or boon-
enjoyment, devoted time to secure the borders [of Islam] with ghazā and jihad,
and the localities of infidelity became illuminated with symbols of Islam.”
This was followed by a lengthy narration of the campaigns of the Ottoman-
Venetian War, interspersed with multiple Quranic verses on jihad and refer-
ences to the Ottomans’ single-handedly waging it in the name of God as the
army of Islam against the unbelievers. Eventually, the sultan declared that the
492 güngörürler

motive for the sending out of the epistles of conquest, among the receivers of
which was the shah of Iran, was that “the proclamation of this sublime [victory]
procession [would] cause the hearts of the people of Islam to relax.”31
The parallel letter sent to Shah Ḥusayn by the grand vizier, after a prologue
on jihad, mentioned some of the Islamic titles of the sultan as “enhancer of
the Muḥammedan sharia, infidel-melter, champion of ghazā and jihad, mir-
ror of the religion, honor of the Muslim community, essence of the Ottoman
caliphal dynasty, refuge of Islam, greater shadow of God, immortalized shall
his caliphate be until the day of resurrection.”
In the rest of the narrative, the grand vizier associated the Quranic verses
on jihad and Muḥammad’s sayings on God-given victory with the person of his
lord Aḥmed III. Dāmād (Şehīd) ʿAlī Pasha and concluded: “it is always expected
from Your royal efforts that Your prayers for [celestial-] victory and confirma-
tion of the [Ottoman] army, and [thus] [Your] obtainment of a share from the
shares of [our] ghazā, be vouchsafed.”32
Shah Ḥusayn’s reply to Aḥmed III stated that by conquering territory from
the Republic of Venice, the sultan, just as his forefathers had traditionally done,
merited God’s promise that the ghāzīs would prevail against enemy armies and
rejoice in heaven as remuneration. After honoring his addressee as the “patron
of Islam [and] the Muslims,” the shah renarrated the stages of the war as he had
read them from the Ottoman correspondence, but with even more Islamic ref-
erences than featured in the original, inter alia extolling his addressee for con-
verting churches to mosques and rings of bells to prayer calls. Ḥusayn claimed
that the Safavids had contributed to the Ottomans’ celestial-victory; for he, with
the “most sublime effort, [had] truly asked for succor” that God materialize his
promise—“indeed, We have given you a clear conquest [Q 48:1]”—and help the
Ottomans triumph. The shah added that, motivated by orators from the pul-
pits of the mosques, congregations of all social backgrounds in Iran prayed and
would keep praying in thanksgiving for this boon by God as well as for the per-
petuation and continuation of such conquests through ages.33
In this case of an epistle of conquest narrating a major victory portrayed
as jihad, the Sublime Porte again chose to assert the sultan’s hereditary, right-
ful, God-given, supreme caliphate and universal leadership of Islam, maybe
without directing the assertion negatively toward the person of the shah, but
still in a correspondence addressed to him. Yet, the descriptions used and the
discourse constructed therefore, while not resembling the constructive tone

31 Nāme-i hümāyūn vi, ent.221.

32 Nāme-i hümāyūn vi, ent.222.
33 Nāme-i hümāyūn vi, ent.246.
islamic discourse in ottoman-safavid peacetime diplomacy 493

dominant during the period between 1099/1688 and 1112/1700, was not as over-
bearing as in 1118/1706 either, indicating a relative relaxation of tensions. The
reintroduction of the concepts of prayer exchange and partnership in divine
remuneration is even more noteworthy and tangible evidence of this, with the
exception that there was no mention or even implication of the lesser caliphate
for the House of Ṣafī. Nevertheless, the long-ignored and sensitive issue of sec-
tarian discord, which had been brought up once in 1118/1706 in the manner of
an implicit warning in the midst of mounting tensions, was again shelved.
In his reply, the shah did not fail to honor the Ottomans’ Islamic dignity, as
he underscored that the House of ʿOs̱mān had been and still was the manifesta-
tion of God’s promise for those who strive in His way. Plus, though not directly
citing the caliphate itself, the Safavids nonetheless restored their recognition
of the Ottomans’ supremacy by mentioning the padishah’s patronage of Islam
and the Muslims—a description, if not identification, of the caliphate. They
also returned the Ottoman gesture of good will by stating that the Iranians
did and would pray to God for Ottoman victory, which they indeed regarded
as the triumph of Islam. Thus, the 1128/1716 correspondence halted the loss of
the common ground between the Shi‘ite Safavids and Sunni Ottomans. There
was even a relative restoration of the previous achievements on the diplomatic
platform, but certainly not up to the level of the last decade of the seventeenth
century.
The final round of diplomatic correspondence between the two parties took
place between 1132/1720 and 1135/1722. Briefly stated, the Sublime Porte once
again reasserted the God-given nature, exclusiveness, and universality of the
Ottoman monarchy and caliphate through Quranic references. On the other
hand, it continued to recognize the prophetic lineage of the House of Ṣafī and
its brotherhood in religion with the House of ʿOs̱mān. In return, the Safavids
renewed their recognition of the Ottomans’ patronage of Islam and supreme
caliphate.34

2 Evaluation

One of the most important concepts that come to the fore in the context of
the post-Zuhab Ottoman-Safavid correspondence is the caliphate. As a stan-
dard practice during the examined period, the Safavid court acknowledged the
Ottomans’ greater caliphal dignity by inserting the relevant descriptors into the

34 Nāme-i hümāyūn vi, ent.278–280; Navāī, Asnād 1105–1135 165, 170, 172.
494 güngörürler

sultans’ inscriptio, such as “God’s shadow,” “refuge of Islam/religion,” “servant of

the Two Illustrious Sanctuaries,” and “victory-bringer/patron of Islam.” These
were reinforced by a strong emphasis on the Ottomans’ successfully leading
the armies of Islam against the unbelievers. Even without the explicit men-
tion of “caliphate,” the references to leading the jihad, patronizing Islam as
well as the Muslim community, and organizing the pilgrimage (hajj) constitute
firm evidence of this acknowledgment, for these concepts were directly associ-
ated with caliphal prerogatives. In times of extraordinary rapprochement, the
Safavid state took this acknowledgment to a higher level by directly referring
to the Ottoman “greater caliphate” in phrases such as “[extended] shadow of
God,” and complementary honorifics such as “establisher of the foundation
of Islam” and “sign of God.” The correspondence in the examined period thus
shows that the Safavids made abundant references, both direct and indirect, to
the Ottomans’ caliphal supremacy, leaving no room for ambiguity.
For its own part, in diplomatic correspondence with the Safavids, the Sub-
lime Porte consistently made claims to the [greater] caliphate through sultanic
titulature. However, it did not try to act upon the universal, extraterritorial
dimension of this office (i.e., it did not attempt to revive the practice of issu-
ing caliphal investiture diplomas for monarchs and princes whose territory of
rule lay outside the Ottoman Empire). The fact that the Ottoman sultans did
not adopt the title “commander of the faithful” (emīrü’l-müminīn), one of the
attributes of the early universal caliphate, must be because the validity of their
caliphal dignity in the eyes of other sovereign states was only a matter of prece-
dence and supremacy in rank, not of subordination in a chain of command. Yet,
the Sublime Porte did expect, and mostly receive, nominal recognition of the
theoretical universality of the Ottoman sultan’s divine mandate, because the
caliphal dignity had blended into the imperial rank, where it lived on as a set
of titles. Rare instances of the Safavids’ failure to honor in writing this (greater)
caliphal dimension of the Ottomans’ supreme monarchy resulted in the Sub-
lime Porte’s effectively imposing the claim to the God-designated, universal,
and exclusive nature of the sultan’s hereditary caliphate in the next outgoing
correspondence.35
As seen above, when the nature of the Ottoman-Safavid contractual rela-
tionship became Islamicized, its observance was formalized through refer-
ences to the Quran. This was the result of the Ottoman acknowledgment of the

35 See Farooqi, Mughal-Ottoman relations 295, 326–329, 332, 334–337 for the discussion of
the concept of caliphate in Mughal-Ottoman diplomacy. Also see Moudden, The idea of
the caliphate 103–112.
islamic discourse in ottoman-safavid peacetime diplomacy 495

legitimacy of Safavid rule in Iran, and in turn gave it a further boost. The Sub-
lime Porte’s recognition of the Safavid shahs as territorial caliphs (i.e., as fully
independent, legitimate, Muslim, and sovereign monarchs who were inferior to
the greater caliph only in terms of titulature and hierarchical precedence) was
the ultimate manifestation of this novel Islamic legitimacy in Ottoman-Safavid
relations. However, this diplomatic recognition did not entail a doctrinal rec-
onciliation between the Shi‘ite and Sunni theologians; it was constructed on a
separate discursive plane.
Beyond the caliphate, the two most prominent aspects of this diplomatic
discourse that enabled peace to last for 84 years were, first, that the Sunni
Ottomans neither declared the Shi‘ite Safavids as “infidels” nor hinted at it,
and second, that the Safavids unreservedly recognized the Ottomans’ supreme
position as greater caliphs at the top of the hierarchy of rulers in Islamdom.
This phenomenon must be the outcome of two separate but concurrent devel-
opments. On the one hand, it seems that the Ottomans came to recognize
the eventual Shi‘itization of the originally Kızılbaş Safavid polity. In the eyes
of the Sunni establishment of the age, Kızılbaşism was a heresy that violated
the founding principles of Islam and thus rendered its adherents non-Muslim,
while Shi‘ism was a deviation from the orthodox belief yet still within the cir-
cle of Islam.36 On the other hand, an uninterrupted peace of 84 years enabled
the parties, but again primarily the Ottomans, to maintain this status quo with-
out resorting to a renewed fatwa on unbelief or polemical treatise. It is likely
that the Ottoman recognition of the Safavids’ Muslimness was the product of
a belated Ottoman realization of the post-936/1530 gradual Shi‘itization within
the Safavid establishment, while the continuity of this recognition in the diplo-
matic discourse for almost nine decades was made possible by the uninter-
rupted peace. Enjoying Islamic legitimacy in the eyes of the Ottomans mattered
much to the Safavids. The shah’s court made the due effort to convince the
Ottoman State of the Safavids’ orthodox Shi‘ite, if not Sunni, Muslimness, and
thus, by implication, their disassociation from the Kızılbaş faith.

36 For the Kızılbaş-Shi‘ite distinction, see Tekindağ, Yeni kaynak 54–55; Düzdağ, Ebussu’ûd
Efendi’nin fetvaları 135–137; Eberhard, Osmanische Polemik 71–75, 85–88, 99, 101, 117, 130;
Fığlalı, Eş-Şirvani ve risalesi 260–265; Ocak, Türk sufiliğine bakışlar 237–238, 245–249;
Emecen, Zamânın İskenderi 90; Bilge, Yavuz Selim ve Şah İsmail 311; Arjomand, The shadow
of God 81, 110, 179; Savaş, XVI. asırda Alevilik 166, 213; Abisaab, Converting Persia 8–12,
24; Pārsādūst, Shāh Tahmāsb 607–613, 809–816, 850–853; Posch, Osmanisch-safavidische
Beziehungen 172–176. I discussed these and other sources on the mentioned topic in my
paper “Die Frage der Abgrenzung zwischen offiziellen Sekten: das Osmanische Reich und
safawidisches Persien in der Frühneuzeit” presented in Forschungskolloquium Lehrstuhl
Aserbaidschans at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin in 2016.
496 güngörürler

On the other hand, one does not need to look for the traces of such rethink-
ing on the part of Safavid Iran, for it, despite the sectarian discord, had recog-
nized from almost the very beginning not only the Ottomans’ Muslimness but
also their leadership in and of Islamdom.37 This simply continued throughout
the studied period.
Any variation on the religious platform took place within the parameters of
this framework. Unless the political situation necessitated it, the Sublime Porte
contented itself with referring only rarely and in passing to a Safavid monarch
in a manner reserved for Muslim addressees. Only when the international
conjuncture urged closer coordination with the Safavids did the Ottomans, of
their own accord, promote the common ground under the banner of Islam.
In bilateral relations, the concept of brotherhood in religion, the exchange of
prayers, partnership in divine remuneration for good deeds, and recognition
of the House of Ṣafī’s claim to prophetic lineage and the lesser caliphate that
emerged after 1097/1686 were part of a greater diplomatic initiative of the Sub-
lime Porte to secure Safavid neutrality and cooperation in the empire’s ongoing
war against the alliance of the German states, Poland, Russia, and Venice, which
necessitated the full mobilization of the empire’s deployable power away from
the Iranian frontier. Likewise, the introduction of these novel Islamic concepts
in Ottoman-Safavid diplomacy went hand in hand with diplomatic concessions
that the House of ʿOs̱mān made to the House of Ṣafī. Later, as this practical
urgency disappeared, so did the Sublime Porte’s incentives to uphold these
recently granted, Islamically inclusive honors for the Safavids. From 1114/1702
onward, the Ottomans at times cut down on their formulations referring to
these concepts, and at times completely refrained from mentioning them (i.e.,
withheld the recognition). Yet, it is remarkable that these achievements on
a common Islamic platform resurfaced when the circumstances of the time
allowed, such as during the last decade of relations.
Despite their active participation in imperial consultative assemblies and
some policy formulation initiatives in the later eleventh/seventeenth and
twelfth/eighteenth centuries, the Sunni ulama of the Ottoman Empire do not
seem to have played any role in the Sublime Porte’s briefly declaring the Safavid
shahs as brothers in religion and lesser caliphs, calling for the Safavids to pray
for Ottoman victory, offering them in return partnership in the remuneration
accruing from the Ottomans’ deeds in the way of championing Islam, and hon-
oring the House of Ṣafī’s claim to descend from ʿAlī. This agreement was appar-
ently the work of dignitaries and bureaucrats, not the ulama. The mentioned

37 See the titulature in Çiftçi, Osmanlı-Safevi İlişkilerinin 147–149; Cantemir, The history 169.
islamic discourse in ottoman-safavid peacetime diplomacy 497

development, however, is not linked to the bureaucratization and seculariza-

tion or Islamicization of the Ottoman state apparatus, and should accordingly
be understood as a case-specific phenomenon that arose due to the interstate
conjuncture. In short, the ulama’s being kept out of the post-1049/1639 Safavid
relations was the result of the acknowledgment, both in the empire and in Iran,
that only the prioritization of the Realpolitik over doctrinal matters could bring
about a mutually beneficial status quo. As a matter of fact, under altered cir-
cumstances after 1135/1722, the ulama would be re-allowed to assume a role
in Iranian-Ottoman diplomacy; however, exactly as in the previous period, the
peace would be reestablished on practical foundations and without reaching
an agreement on the religious matters of contention.
The Safavids were not in a position to reply in kind to these Ottoman con-
cessions because they had been honoring these and similar qualities of the
Ottomans from the outset. Yet, in order to duly respond to the Sublime Porte’s
friendly step taken toward them, the Safavids placed extraordinary emphasis
on the House of ʿOs̱mān’s exclusive and God-given caliphate, Islamic primacy,
universal patronage of the Muslims, and international leadership in champi-
oning the religion. It is noteworthy that the phrases with which the Safavids
chose to elaborate on these attributes of the Ottomans mostly matched and
occasionally even surpassed in extolment those formulated by the Sublime
Porte itself.
As the religion of Islam was now construed as the common ground, the
issue of the sectarian discord between Shi‘ism and Sunnism barely surfaced in
interstate diplomacy. Except in one isolated case that occurred when relations
were at their nadir, the parties did not refer to their sectarian/denominational
identity, let alone bring up their conflicting views on orthodoxy. Sectarian dif-
ferences had been used for justifying hostilities in the pre-Zuhab period, but
in relations based on peaceful coexistence after 1639, there was no place for
such references. Had the ulama been involved, the almost-one-millennium-old
doctrinal positions rejecting each other would have inevitably come up and
informed the drafting of the diplomatic correspondence, which would have
been contrary to the desired goals. In light of these goals, the governments,
opting to benefit from Islam as a unifying force in the service of Realpolitik
rather than as an inexhaustible repository from which to extract religious jus-
tifications for conflict, stayed clear from a polemic on orthodoxy and hetero-
doxy.
The fall of the Safavid state in 1135/1722 upset overnight the status quo of
84 years, and thus the Shi‘ite-Sunni political conciliation. In the Ottomans’
engagements with the Hōtakī Afghans, the Safavid claimants, and ultimately
the polity of Nādir Afshār until the mid-twelfth/eighteenth century, religious
498 güngörürler

and sectarian matters would assume a place at the top of the agenda, in form
as well as in content.38 Hence, the intersectarian harmony brought about by
political will would be undone, again by the altered political situation.

Acknowledgments

Research for this essay was supported by the European Research Council (ERC)
Consolidator Grant under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and
innovation programme (grant agreement No 648498).

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Index of Geographical Names

Adrianople see Edirne Eastern Balkans 287, 309, 310, 311, 314,
Adriatic 333 319, 321, 326, 330, 332, 333
Afyon 279, 280, 281, 282, 283, 284 Western Balkans 327
Akıncı (Akandzhievo) 329 Balıkesir 131
Aksaray 281 Basra 139, 139n, 430, 482, 487
Alamut (Qahqaha) 436 Belgrade 393, 395, 396
Albania 327 Bergama 108
Aleppo 42n, 47, 76, 110, 112, 112n, 114, 125n, Bithynia 255
168n, 209, 224n, 290, 290n, 346 Bitlis 431, 432
Amasya 75, 76, 77, 112, 262, 263, 283n, 284, Black Sea 124, 319n, 326
284n, 285, 286, 287, 441 Bogomil 315n
Anatolia 4, 14, 31, 40, 41, 41n, 45, 46, 55, 62, Bolu 181
68, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 90, 101, 108, 110, Bosnia 112, 282, 327, 328
112, 117, 156, 166, 167, 168, 179, 202, 202n, Bosphorus 281, 402, 410
203, 212, 255, 256n, 260, 261n, 288, 308, Buda 327
311, 313, 314, 319, 319n, 320, 326, 328, Bukhara 75, 160
330, 332, 333, 342, 352, 353, 423, 423n, Bulgaria 287, 311n, 315n, 319n, 329n, 331n
424, 424n, 426n, 428, 430, 431, 432n, Bursa 112, 119, 209, 255n, 256, 256n, 257,
433, 434, 434n, 435, 437, 438, 439, 440, 258, 259, 259n, 262, 263, 265, 266, 272,
441, 442, 454, 455, 459n, 460, 465 278n, 281, 282, 283, 283n, 285, 290, 291,
Anbarlı (Žitnitsa) 323n 291n, 292, 293, 294, 295, 296, 296n101,
Andalusia 101, 362 296n103, 297, 297n, 298, 299, 300, 301,
Ankara 301, 456, 457 361
Antep 222n
Ardabil 204, 423, 434, 436 Cairo 6n, 32, 35, 36n, 39, 41, 41n, 42n, 43, 44,
Ardahan 442 44n, 45, 48n, 51, 53, 53n, 55, 56, 75, 78,
Artıkabad 436 81, 109, 110, 120n, 131, 138n, 168n, 181,
Asia 379, 393, 405, 407 215, 221n, 224, 224n, 242n, 261n, 346,
Central Asia 41, 46, 75, 77, 107, 155, 164, 349, 352, 459n
178n, 352, 456n, 459 Caffa (Kefe) 112
Eurasia 2, 8n, 9, 31, 400, 461 Caucasus 209, 210
South Asia 39, 46, 46n, 53n Constantinople (Istanbul) 4, 7n, 41n, 42n,
Astarabad 81 44, 45, 46, 46n, 47, 48, 71n, 76, 77, 115n,
Ayasuluk (Hagia Theodosius, Selçuk) 272, 119, 120, 120n, 131, 135, 136, 137n, 138,
272n 202, 202n, 209, 214, 218, 220, 220n,
Azerbaijan 202n, 207, 210, 224, 423n, 431, 432n 222n, 225, 241n23, 241n24, 243, 260,
263, 266, 267, 270, 272, 272n, 273n35,
Baba (Babadağ) 330 273n39, 274, 275, 275n, 276, 277, 277n,
Baghdad 45n, 79, 119, 215, 218, 219, 430, 435, 279, 281, 282, 282n, 284, 285, 286, 288,
436n, 442, 443, 443n, 464 289, 290, 297n, 301, 322, 324, 328, 330,
Baku 431 346, 361, 376, 384, 384n, 388, 389, 392,
Balçık 326 393, 395, 395n, 396, 398, 401, 402, 410,
Balkans 4, 31, 101, 126, 156, 166, 232, 255, 282, 412, 412n, 424, 425, 426, 426n, 428, 429,
282n, 308, 310, 311, 312, 313, 314, 315, 316, 430, 430n, 433, 434, 434n, 435, 436, 437,
317, 319, 320, 326, 327n, 331, 333, 342, 439, 440, 441, 442, 443, 444, 470, 482
352, 438, 454 Crete 139, 380, 391, 482
502 index of geographical names

Crimea 403, 456n Greece 314, 315n

Croatia 327 Gujarat 224, 243
Cyprus 179, 434, 434n
Hagia Theodosius see Ayasuluk
Çekirge 259 Hamid 90
Çirmen (Ormenio) 315n Harmankaya 314n
Çorlu 291n Ḥaramayn 51
Çorum 441 Harran 104
Herat 81, 207, 432
Damascus (Sham) 32, 33, 34, 35, 37, 39, 40, Hezargrad 321, 322
41, 41n, 42n, 45n, 47, 48, 52, 52n, 54, 56, Hijaz 1, 35, 240n
104, 110, 125n, 168n, 222n, 232n, 244, Holland 225
346, 453n, 462 Hungary 327
Danubia 319n Hyderabad 223
Deliorman 287, 310, 314, 319n, 321, 323
Dimetoka 297n Iannitsa 288
Divriği 435 India 2, 36n, 54n, 55, 70, 201, 203, 216, 223,
Diyarbakır 112, 430n, 433 243
Dobrudja 310, 311, 316, 319n, 323, 330 Indian Ocean 124
Don River 124 Indus valley 124
Inegöl 283, 284, 291n
Edirne (Adrianople) 41, 42, 108, 256, 262, Ioannina (Yanya) 331
263n, 272, 272n, 274, 274n, 277n, 281, Iran (also see Persia) 7, 9, 10, 11, 68, 75, 77,
282, 283n, 285, 286, 287, 291n, 301, 323, 84, 107, 108, 123, 157, 165, 212, 216, 352,
361, 391, 392, 393, 456, 488 403, 423, 427, 429n, 431, 433, 434, 435,
Egypt 1, 6, 7n, 12, 13, 13n, 16, 32, 35, 40, 44, 436, 437, 437n, 440, 441, 441n, 442, 443,
45n, 46, 52, 55n, 74, 74n, 75, 78, 79, 101n, 443n, 444, 445, 452, 459, 479, 480n, 483,
107, 110, 110n, 111, 111n, 112, 113n, 114, 118, 484, 485, 487, 488, 489, 492, 493, 495,
120, 135n, 141, 167n40, 167n43, 184, 212, 496, 497
219, 224, 237n, 242n, 243, 245n, 352, Iraq 48, 157, 423, 430, 431, 433, 435, 459, 465,
405, 459, 463 482
Eminönü 139n, 388, 389 Isfahan 480, 481, 482, 488
Erzurum 210n, 430n, 434n, 441, 442 Isfarāyīn 79
Eskişehir 314 Istanbul see Constantinople
Eski Zagra (Stara Zagora) 318 Izmir 243
Europe 5, 8n, 16, 31, 63, 91, 155, 196, 226, 232, Izmit 52
329, 345, 362, 384, 391, 398, 402, 424,
425, 460, 480n İhtiman 314, 321, 322, 329, 331, 332
İznik 41n, 112
Fez 242
Filibe (Plovdiv) 273, 319, 320, 322, 324, 325, Jabal Amil 7
328, 329, 331, 323n Jahjapašići (Yaḥyālı) 327
France 197, 225 Jerusalem 42n, 108, 225

Genisea (Karasu Yenicesi) 314 Kaba 457

Georgia 224 Kadırga 324, 328, 330
Gerlovo 310 Kaliakra 326
Geyve 283n Kaplıca 259
Giannitsa (Yenice-i Vardar) 314, 331 Karabagh 210n
index of geographical names 503

Karahisar 279, 280, 281 Ormenio see Çirmen

Karaman 296n, 353, 353n, 434n
Karatova (Kratovo) 120 Peloponnese 90, 491
Karasi 315 Persia (also see Iran) 31, 41, 44, 44n, 46,
Karasu Yenicesi see Genisea 46n78, 46n80, 107, 119, 172, 210, 211,
Karbala 19, 451, 451n, 452, 453, 457, 464 212, 223, 224, 225
Kashmir 240n Pınarhisar 315, 332
Kastamonu 48, 50, 51, 273 Plevne 314, 331, 332
Kefe see Caffa Plovdiv see Filibe
Khorasan 46n, 79, 158, 164 Poland 483, 496
Khwarazm 167 Prizren 119
Kirkuk (Şehrizor) 434
Komotini 262, 280, 280n Qahqaha see Alamut
Konya 215
Koron 90 Rhodope Mountains 310, 314
Kosovo 119 Rome 124
Kufa 157 Rum (lands of) 4, 7, 11n, 16, 18, 101, 103, 108,
Küçük Kaynarca 403, 405 108n, 109, 109n, 110, 110n, 111, 112, 114,
115, 115n, 118, 119, 134, 135, 138, 141, 156,
Lake Vistonida 314n 167, 184, 186, 188, 189, 209, 215, 224, 244,
Lebanon 7, 11 245n, 261n, 262, 272, 284, 288, 300, 301,
Lesbos 357 320, 342, 344, 346, 347, 349, 350, 351,
Lomtsi 314 351n, 352, 352n, 357, 359, 360, 363, 364,
365, 454, 455, 456
Macedonia 120, 333 Rumeli 14, 44, 76, 112n, 119, 120, 126, 167, 185,
Mâçîn 124 273n, 297n, 308, 309, 311, 312, 313, 314,
Maghreb (Maghrib) 161, 242, 244 316, 317, 322, 324, 325, 326, 327, 328, 332,
Manend(lü) (Menenkyovo) 328, 329, 329n 332n, 333, 344n
Manisa 93, 393 Russia 314n, 329n, 393, 401, 403, 483, 496
Mashhad 432
Mecca 32, 171, 184, 209, 223, 237n, 243, 260, Salonica 284
405, 453n, 457, 462, 464, 468, 482, Sarajevo 282, 282n, 283n, 333
489 Selçuk see Ayasuluk
Medina 32, 32n, 242, 405, 453n, 457, 464, Semçine (Semchinovo) 329
468, 482, 489 Serbia 327, 393
Mediterranean 196, 226, 425 Sham see Damascus
Meriç 325 Shiraz 44, 45n, 66, 67, 71, 72, 76, 85
Merzifon 112 Shirvan 202n, 210, 212, 431
Middle East 196, 232, 352, 427, 429, 460 Sinai 125n
Midilli (Mytileni) 140, 140n Sind 124
Miljacka River 283n Sinop 273
Modon 90 Sivas 434n
Mosul 435 Skopje 256n, 282, 283, 283n, 297, 333
Sofia 282, 322, 323, 325, 326, 327, 329, 330,
Najaf 487, 490 331n
Naoussa 288 Sonusa 112
North Africa 2, 176, 255 Stara Zagora see Eski Zagra
North America 232 Strumica 322
Suez 124
504 index of geographical names

Syria 1, 6, 12, 13, 16, 17, 32, 35, 40, 46, 74, 107, Turkey 136, 232, 272
108, 110, 110n, 112, 114, 118, 141, 164, 167n, Turkistan 124, 240n
205n, 260, 352, 423, 429n, 435, 435n,
453, 453n, 459, 459n Umur obası 328

Şehrizor see Kirkuk Üsküdar 263, 274, 276n, 279, 281, 341, 391,
392, 393, 401, 410, 411
Tabriz 10, 172, 431, 442
Tangier 242 Van 431, 441, 442, 443
Tatar Pazarı (Pazardzhik) 314, 319, 320, 322, Venice 483, 492, 496
323, 324, 326, 328, 329, 329n Vidin 221n
Teke 90 Vienna 139, 392
Thessaly 333 Volga River 124
Thrace 18, 310, 311, 315, 318, 319, 319n43,
319n44, 330, 333 Yaḥyālı see Jahjapašići
Tırhala 331 Yanya see Ioannina
Tire 112 Yemen 125n
Tokat 436, 441 Yenice-i Vardar see Giannitsa
Trabzon 442 Yenişehir 262, 301
Transoxania 68, 114, 157, 158, 360
Tripoli 42n, 345 Zile 436
Tunisia 41, 52 Žitnitsa see Anbarlı
Index of Personal Names

Aaron 457 Abū Bakr 3, 83, 466, 468, 469, 473

al-ʿAbbāsī, ʿAbd al-Raḥīm 35, 35n, 44, 46, Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī 65, 173
46n, 52–54, 120n Abū Dāwūd 49
ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Bukhārī 173 Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazalī (see al-Ghazalī, Abū
ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Fārisī 172 Ḥāmid)
ʿAbdallāh b. Aḥmad 3 Abū Ḥanīfa 39, 157–159, 159n12, 160, 169,
ʿAbd al-Mughith b. Zuhayr al-Harrī 453 176, 182, 184, 186, 187n, 245, 348, 364,
ʿAbd al-Muʿṭī ibn Salīm ibn ʿUmar al-Shiblī 467
al-Simillāwī 245 Abū Isḥāq al-Isfarāʾīnī 79
ʿAbd al-Raḥīm al-ʿAbbāsī (see al-ʿAbbāsī, ʿAbd Abū Jaʿfar al-Ṭaḥāwī 79, 80n
al-Raḥīm) Abū l Barakāt al-Nasafī 163, 182
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Sulamī (see al-Sulamī, Abū l-Faraj Ibn al-Jawzī 134
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān) Abū l-Ḥasan al-Rustughfanī 176
ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Kāshānī 172 Abū l-Layth al-Samarqandī (see al-Samar-
ʿAbd al-Salām b. Muḥammad al-Anṣārī (see qandī, Abū l-Layth)
al-Anṣārī, ʿAbd al-Salām b. Muḥammad) Abū l-Yusr Muḥammad al-Pazdawī (see al-
ʿAbdullāh el-Meymūn el-Ḳaddāḥ 212 Pazdawī, Abū l-Yusr Muḥammad)
ʿAbdallāh ibn ʿUmar al-Bayḍāwī (see al- Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī (see al-Māturīdī,
Bayḍāwī, ʿAbdallāh ibn ʿUmar) Abū Manṣūr)
ʿAbdullāh-ı İlāhī 288 Abū Mikhnaf 451n, 457
ʿAbdu’r-raḥmān al-Bisṭāmī 110n Abū Muqātil al-Samarqandī (see al-
ʿAbdu’r-raḥmān Hibrī 278n Samarqandī, Abū Muqātil)
ʿAbdü’l-ḥamīd I 402–403, 403n, 404–407, Abū Muṭīʿ al-Balkhī 158n
409, 410 Abū Ṭālib al-Makkī 242
ʿAbdü’l-kerīm Efendi 81n Abū Yaḥyā Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī (see al-Anṣārī,
ʿAbdü’l-mecīd Sivāsī (see Sivāsī, ʿAbdü’l- Abū Yaḥyā Zakariyyā)
mecīd) Abū Yūsuf 125n84, 348, 368
ʿAbdu’r-raḥmān b. Yūsuf Aḳsarāyī (see ʿAḍud al-Dīn al-Ījī (see al-Ījī, ʿAḍud al-Dīn)
Aḳsarāyī, ʿAbdu’r-raḥmān b. Yūsuf) ʿAfīf al-Dīn al-Yāfiʿī (see al-Yāfiʿī, ʿAfīf al-Dīn)
al-Abharī, Athīr al-Dīn 84 Ahīzāde Yūsuf Çelebi 182
Abī Sufyān (descendants of) 456, 457, 462, Aḥmad al-Sirhindī 70, 247n
464, 466 Aḥmad ibn Ḥanbal 463, 467
Abraham (Prophet) 198, 219 Aḥmad Jamāl al-Dīn al-Qūnawī 67, 80n
Abū ʿAbbās al-Ḥajjār 49 Aḥmed I 132, 209, 376–387, 388, 390, 391,
Abū ʿAbdallah al-Ḥārith al-Muḥāsibī 168– 414, 437
169, 169n Aḥmed II 483–485
Abū l-ʿAbbās Aḥmad b. Yūsuf b. Ahmad b. Aḥmed III 137, 392, 392n, 393, 489, 492
Sinān al-Qaramānī al-Dimashqī (see al- Aḥmed Beg (Mihāloğlu) 315
Qaramānī) Aḥmed Bicān 456
Abū l-Ḥasan al-Ashʿarī (see al-Ashʿarī, Abū Aḥmed Buhārī 286
al-Ḥasan) Aḥmedī 454–456, 460
Abū ʿAlī al-Faḍl b. al-Ḥasan al-Ṭabrisī 462 Aḥmed Rūmī el-Aḳḥiṣārī (see el-Aḳḥiṣārī,
Abū l-Muʿīn al-Nasafī 182 Aḥmed Rūmī)
Abū l-Qāsim al-Qushayrī (see al-Qushayrī, ʿĀʾisha 84, 208, 238, 452, 458, 463
Abū al-Qāsim) el-Aḳḥiṣārī, Aḥmed Rūmī 134, 179–181, 183,
Abū l-Qāsim Bābur 459 219
506 index of personal names

Aḳḥiṣārī, Ḥasan Kāfī 179n90 al-Azharī, Muḥammad al-Nābulusī 243,

Aḳsarāyī, ʿAbdu’r-raḥmān b. Yūsuf 171–175, 244n
176, 178, 180, 181, 331, 331n, 346, 363, 364
Aḳyazılı Baba 314, 326 Baalbek family 435
ʿAlā l-dīn ʿAlī Ṭarābulusī (see Ṭarābulusī, ʿAlā al-Bābartī, Akmal al-Dīn 349–352, 355
l-dīn) Badr al-Dīn al-ʿAynī (see al-ʿAynī, Badr al-
Alexander the Great 123n, 133 Dīn)
ʿAlī al-Qārī al-Harawī (see al-Qārī, ʿAlī al- Badr al-Dīn al-Ghazzī (see al-Ghazzī, Badr
Harawī) al-Dīn)
ʿAlī b. Abī Ṭālib 3, 10, 117, 129, 206, 213, 226n, Badr al-Dīn Muḥammad al-Zarkashī (see al-
309, 452, 456, 457, 458, 459, 460, 463, Zarkashī, Badr al-Dīn Muḥammad)
466, 468, 471, 472, 473, 484, 487, 490, 496 Badr al-Rashīd 167
ʿAlī b. Aḥmad al-Gūrī 241 al-Baghawī, al-Ḥusayn 42, 42n53, 42n55, 43,
ʿAlī b. Shihāb al-Dīn b. Muḥammad al- 53
Hamādanī 240 al-Baghdadī 161
ʿAlī b. ʿUthmān al-Ūshī (see al-Ūshī, ʿAlī b. Balıḳesrī, Devletoğlu Yūsuf 273
ʿUthmān) Bālī Efendi, Ṣofyalı (see Ṣofyalı Bālī Efendi)
ʿAlī b. Yāsīn b. Muḥammad al-Ṭarābulusī al- al-Balkhī, Abū Muṭīʿ 158n
Ḥanafī 205n al-Bāqillānī, Abū Bakr 65, 173
ʿAlī Cemālī Efendi 290 Batlu tribe 442
ʿAlī Efendi 331 Baṭṭāl Gāzī 288, 314, 316, 326, 328
ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad ibn al-Ṣabbāgh 462n al-Battī, ʿUthmān 158
ʿAlī ibn Ḥusām al-Dīn al-Mutaqqī 243 al-Bayḍāwī, ʿAbdallāh ibn ʿUmar 404
ʿAlī Pasha (Governor of Tabriz) 442 al-Bayḍāwī, Nāṣir al-Dīn 68
Alqāṣ Mīrzā 431 Bāyezīd Pasha 263n, 264
Amasyalı Haṭīb Ḳāsım 75 Bayrām Pasha 214
Amasyalı Shaykh Ḥamdullāh 75 Bāyezīd I 45n, 256n, 262, 263n, 266n, 278n,
al-Āmidī, Sayf al-Dīn 68, 70, 85, 86, 86n 283, 283n, 291n, 455
Anas ibn Mālik 238 Bāyezīd II 42n, 43, 46, 72, 73, 75–77, 79, 203,
el-Anḳaravī, Meḥmed Şākir ibn Sunʿullāh 222, 239n, 277n, 282n, 285, 286, 287,
246 301, 316, 327, 345, 354, 361n, 424n, 434
al-Anṣārī, ʿAbd al-Salām b. Muḥammad 74, Bāyezīd al-Bisṭāmī 94
75, 78 Bāyezīd Baba 314
al-Anṣārī, Abū Yaḥyā Zakariyyā 45n, 49, 50, Bedre’d-dīn Maḥmūd (Shaykh Bedre’d-dīn)
53, 56, 75, 78, 78n 323, 328, 330, 347, 348, 350–354, 359,
Aristotle 65, 70, 123n, 133n, 164 365
Arslan Pasha, Yaḥyālı 327 Belgrādī, Münīrī-i 185
al-Ashʿarī, Abū al-Ḥasan 65, 70, 83, 156, 159– Belilhānoğulları 442
161, 170n Benān bin Semʿān 213
ʿĀşıḳ Çelebi 35n, 52, 52n, 53, 54, 103, 112, Bidlīsī, Idrīs-i 72, 270n, 276, 431n
119–133, 142 Bidlīsī, Shams al-Dīn 431
ʿĀşıḳ Meḥmed 285 Bidlīsī, Sharaf al-Dīn 431–432
Athīr al-Dīn al-Abharī 84 Bidlīsī, Sharaf Beg 431
‘Aṭūfī, Hayre’d-dīn Hıżır 109n al-Bihārī, Zakariyyā b. Aḥmad 243
Averroes (Ibn Rushd) 65, 362 Binbiroḳlu Aḥmed Baba 315
Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā) 65, 67, 165n Birgivī (Birgili) Meḥmed Efendi 54, 56, 102,
ʿAyn al-Quḍāt Hamadānī 93 120, 131, 134, 171, 176–180, 181, 184n, 187n,
al-ʿAynī, Badr al-Dīn 36, 39, 53 219, 219n, 221, 221n, 346, 351, 363, 468,
Ayyūb al-Ansārī 275n 470, 471
index of personal names 507

al-Birūnī 203 Ebū’s-suʿūd 48n, 109n, 112n, 116, 125, 126,

al-Bisṭāmī, ʿAbdu’r-raḥmān 110n 127, 129, 199n, 204, 207, 208, 233, 234,
al-Bisṭāmī, Bāyezīd 94 236, 237–239, 246, 249, 273n, 289n, 290,
Buhārī, Aḥmed 286 290n, 324, 343, 344, 351, 354–357, 359,
al-Bukhārī, Muhammad 34, 34n, 35–36, 360, 364–368, 465
36n, 38, 39, 39n, 40–41, 42, 42n, 43, 44, Ebū’l-Beḳā el-Kefevī 184n
46, 46n, 47, 49, 52–55 Edirnevī (Meḥmed ibn Meḥmed) 467, 468,
al-Bukhārī, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz 173 472
al-Bukhārī, Iftikhār al-dīn Ṭāhir b. Aḥmad Emir Halīl 221n
347n Emetu’llāh Rābiʿa Gülnūş 391
al-Bukhārī, Muḥammad b. Abū Bakr Enverī 275, 454, 458, 460
(Imāmzāda) 181 Enverī Saʿdu’llāh Efendi 405
al-Bunānī, Thābit 48 Esʿad Efendī 360
Burç ʿAlī 435 Evliyā Çelebi 45, 278n, 281, 284n, 297n, 384,
Burhān al-Dīn al-Marghīnānī (see al- 384n, 388
Marghīnānī, Burhān al-Dīn) Evrenos Gāzī 262, 280, 288, 331
Burhān al-Dīn Ibrahīm Ibn Abī Sharīf al- Evrenosoğlu 314, 319, 333
Maqdisī 49 Evrenosoğlu Īsā Beg 256
Al-Būrīnī 51n
Buxtorf, Johannes 225 Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (see al-Rāzī, Fakhr al-
Dīn)
Celālzāde Muṣṭafa Çelebi 439, 440, 442 al-Fārābī 65
Cenābī, Muṣṭafā 461, 462, 464, 465, 466, Fārisī, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz 172
468, 469, 472 al-Fāsī, Muḥammad 244, 245n
Chinggis Khan 12, 107, 108, 110, 122, 123, 213 Fāṭima 10, 459, 484
Chosroes (Nûşînrevan) 123 Fażlīzāde ʿAlī 234, 398
Cibrāʾīl (Gabriel) 158, 160, 169, 185, 213, 226n al-Fenārī, Shams al-Dīn 53n, 347, 348, 350,
352, 353, 354, 362
Çandarlı İbrahīm Pasha 283n Fevrī Efendi 52
Çelebi Meḥmed 291, 292 Feyżullāh Efendi 136, 210n
Çivizāde Meḥmed 33, 48–53, 56
Çivizāde Muḥyī’d-dīn Meḥmed 52, 111, 120n, Gabriel (see Cibrā’īl)
351 Gāzī Evrenos 262, 280, 288, 331
Gāzī Mihāl 287
Dāmād Öküz Meḥmed Pasha 209 Gedik Aḥmed Pasha 279, 280, 281, 282, 284,
Dashtaqī, Ṣadr al-Dīn 67 285
Dāvud Pasha 284, 285 al-Ghazālī, Abū Ḥāmid 65, 66, 70, 71, 84, 86,
Dawānī, Jalāl al-Dīn 44, 67, 68, 69, 76, 85 87, 93, 119n, 161, 162, 164, 166, 168, 170,
Dede Cöngī 103, 110, 112–119, 120, 130, 137, 170n, 172, 175, 182, 467, 471, 473
138, 139, 141 al-Ghazzī, Badr al-Dīn 33, 35, 37, 38, 41, 44,
Deli Hüsrev Pasha 112, 290 47–53, 56
Demir Baba 287, 314 al-Ghazzī, Najm al-Dīn 35n, 224n
Dervīş Aḥmed 214, 215, 217, 218, 220 Glover, Thomas 379, 380
Dervīş Caʿfer 240, 241 Grelot, Guillaume-Joseph 378, 384
Devletoğlu Yūsuf Balıḳesrī 273 al-Gūrī, ʿAlī b. Aḥmad 241
Diḥye-i Kelbī 213
al-Dimashqī, Abū al-ʿAbbās Aḥmad ibn Yūsuf Ḥāccī Baba (Kütüklü Baba) 314, 314n
al-Qaramānī 461, 465–469, 472 Ḥāccī Bektaş Velī 228, 288, 314, 316, 333
Ḥāccī İlbegi 315
508 index of personal names

Ḥāccī ʿÖmer 325 Ḥusayn b. Muḥammad al-Samʿānī 355

Ḥāccī Bayrām-ı Velī 456, 457 al-Ḥusaynī, Yūsuf 45n
Hadīce Turhān 388–391 Hüdāyī, Maḥmūd 178n, 330n, 381, 384
Ḥāfıż Aḥmed Pasha 218 Ḥüseyin b. ʿAbdullāh el-Şirvānī (see el-
Ḥafṣa 238 Şirvānī, Ḥüseyin b. ʿAbdullāh)
al-Ḥajjāj bin Yūsuf al-Thaqafī 366 Ḥüseyin Dede (Baba) 321, 329
Ḥājji Khalīfa (see Kātib Çelebi)
al-Ḥalabī, Ibrāhīm 45n, 346, 347, 347n, 348, Ibn Abī l-ʿIzz 350n
351, 357 Ibn al-Ahdal 175
al-Ḥalabī, Rīḥāwī Muḥammad b. Sulaymān Ibn ʿArabī 67, 74, 93, 95, 101, 106n, 172, 243,
245n 469, 470
al-Hallāj 93, 94 Ibn al-Fāriḍ 93
al-Hamadānī, ʿAlī b. Shihāb al-Dīn b. Muḥam- Ibn ʿAsākir 453, 466, 473
mad 240 Ibn Athīr 464
Hamadānī, ʿAyn al-Quḍāt 93 Ibn Ayyūb 48n
Ḥamdullāh, Amasyalı 75 Ibn Baṭṭuṭa 255
Ḥamza Bālī 328 Ibn Ḥajar al-Asqalanī 36, 37, 38, 43, 49, 50,
Ḥamza Beg 283n, 297 51n, 53
al-Ḥanafī, ʿUthmān b. ʿAbdullah b. al-ʿIrāqī Ibn Ḥajar al-Haytamī 243
204 Ibn Ḥazm 202n, 204, 220n, 223
al-Harrāsī, Muḥammad al-Kiya 471 Ibn al-Jazarī, Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad
al-Harrī, ʿAbd al-Mughith b. Zuhayr 453 44n, 45n, 46n, 239n
Hāṣ Murād Pasha 275, 279, 281 Ibn Kemāl (see Kemālpaşazāde)
Ḥasan (b. ʿAlī) 309, 456, 457, 459, 463, 466, Ibn Khaldūn 469
468, 469 Ibn Māja 49
Ḥasan al-Baṣrī 463 Ibn Maʿṣūm 223
Ḥasan Baba v. Yağmur 314, 320 Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (see al-Jawziyya, Ibn
Ḥasan Kāfī Aḳḥiṣārī 179n Qayyim)
Hāşim Kethüda b. el-Ḥāc Ebūbekir Pasha Ibn Rushd (Averroes) 65, 362
221 Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna) 65, 67
Haṭīb Ḳāsım, Amasyalı 75 Ibn Taghrībirdī 107
Ḥaydar (of Safavids) 423 Ibn Ṭalḥa 458, 462
Ḥaydar-ı Hafī 456 Ibn Taymiyya 17, 71, 101–106, 109, 114–116,
Ḥekīmoğlu ʿAli Pasha b. Nūḥ 221n, 245n 119–122, 123, 124, 127, 128, 129, 130–138,
Hınzīr Ḳulu 321 179, 470, 470n
Hıżır Baba veled-i Timurṭaş Beg 315 Ibn Ṭūlūn 39, 40
Hıżır Beg 69 Ibrāhīm al-Ḥalabī (see al-Ḥalabī, Ibrāhīm)
Hıżır Pasha 283n Ibrāhīm Laqānī 55n
Hibrī, ʿAbdu’r-raḥmān 278n Idrīs-i Bidlīsī (see Bidlīsī, Idrīs-i)
al-Hindī, al-Ṣafī 89 Iftikhār al-Dīn Ṭāhir b. Aḥmad al-Bukhārī
Hishām ibn al-Kalbī (see al-Kalbī, Hishām) 347n
Hishām b. ʿAbd al-Malik 458 al-Ījī, ʿAḍud al-Dīn 67, 68, 69, 85, 86n, 164,
Hocazāde Meḥmed 134n 170
Ḥulvī (Halveti Sheikh) 272 Imām al-Ḥaramayn al-Juwaynī (see al-
Hunyadi Janos 297n106 Juwaynī, Imām al-Ḥaramayn)
Ḥusayn (b. ʿAlī) 19, 309, 432, 451, 452, 457– Imāmzāda (Muḥammad b. Abū Bakr al-
459, 462–464, 466, 467, 468, 469 Bukhārī) 181
al-Ḥusayn al-Baghawī (see al-Baghawī, al- al-ʿIrāqī, Zayn al-Dīn 35n
Ḥusayn) ʿĪsā (Prophet) 185
index of personal names 509

ʿĪsā Bey 272, 282, 283, 283n el-Ḳaddāḥ, ʿAbdullah el-Meymūn 212
ʿĪsā Halīfe 328 Ḳaḍīzāde Meḥmed (ʿİlmī) 15n, 131–134,
al-Iṣfahānī, al-Rāghib 168 135n, 136, 178, 182n, 187n, 218n, 470,
al-Iṣfahānī, Shams al-Dīn 68 471
al-Isfarāʾīnī, Abū Isḥāq 79 al-Kalbī, Hishām ibn 451n
al-Islāmbūlī, Muṣṭafā 219n Ḳalender Shah 321
Ismāʿīl II 452 Kamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Ṭalḥa al-ʿAdawī
ʿIzz al-Dīn al-Zanjānī 139n al-Niṣībīnī 462n
Ḳapu Ağası Ḥüseyin Ağa 286
İbrāhīm (Ottoman Sultan) 481–482 Ḳara Aḥmed Pasha 221n
İbrāhīm b. ʿAbdullāh 331 Ḳara Dāvud 245
İbrāhīm b. Ṣāliḥ el-Ḳıbrısī 246n Ḳaraca Aḥmed 412
İbrāhīm Gülşenī 288 Karīm al-Dīn al-Qaramānī al-Rūmī 42n
İbrāhīm-i Ḳırımī 330–331 al-Kāshānī, ʿAbd al-Razzāq 172
İbrāhīm Pasha 321, 437 al-Kāshifī 212
İbrāhīm al-Sāqizī/Sāḳızī 243 Kātib Çelebi (Ḥājji Khalīfa) 43n, 55n, 76n,
ʿİlmī (see Ḳaḍīzāde Meḥmed) 131n, 135, 135n, 136, 178n, 220n, 223, 241,
İntiẓāmī 437 243, 244n, 461, 465, 468–473
İsfendiyāroğlu İsmāʿīl Beg 273, 274 Ḳaygusuz Abdāl 321
İsḥāḳ Pasha 283, 284, 291n el-Kefevī, Ebū’l-Beḳā 184n
İsḥāḳoğlus 333 Kelbī, Diḥye-i 213
İsmāʿīl Müfīd Efendi 138n Kamāl al-Dīn Ibn Abī Sharīf 51n
İsmihān Sultan 120, 324, 328 Kemālpaşazāde (Ibn Kemāl) 43, 54, 69,
el-İzmirī, Muhammad ibn Velī ibn Resūl el- 70, 74, 76n, 86, 90, 109n, 110, 111, 204,
Kırşehrī 245n 205n, 206, 207, 208, 211, 212, 214, 216,
al-İzmīrī, Muḥammad ibn Yūsuf 243, 244 218, 221, 239n, 288, 289, 290, 353, 354,
İzniḳī, Ḳuṭbe’d-dīn 168–172, 178, 273, 274 440, 465
el-İznīḳī, Muḥyī’d-dīn Muḥammed b. Kemālü’d-dīn İbrāhīm b. Bahşī b. İbrāhīm
Ḳuṭbe’d-dīn 240 (see Dede Cöngī)
Kemānkeş Muṣṭafā Pasha 481
Jaʿfār al-Ṣādiq 206, 212, 309, 452 al-Khānī, Qāsim 224n
Jalāl al-Dīn Dawānī (see Dawānī, Jalāl al-Dīn) al-Khaṭṭāb 206
Jalāl al-Dīn al-Rūmī 203 Khayālī Aḥmad Efendi 68–69, 80n
Jalāl al-Dīn al-Suyūṭī (see al-Suyūṭī, Jalāl al- Khiḍr 93
Dīn) el-Ḳıbrısī, İbrāhīm b. Ṣāliḥ 246n
Jāmī 240n Ḳıdemli Baba 314
Janos, Hunyadi 297n Ḳınalızāde ʿAlī Efendi 52, 110, 111
Jarīr ibn ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd 463 Ḳırımī, İbrahim-i 330–331
al-Jawziyya, Ibn Qayyim 71, 106, 107, 113n, Ḳırḳ Emre Meḥmed b. Muṣṭafā al-Ḥamīdī
114, 115, 118, 134, 135, 179 al-Ḳaramānī 172n
al-Jazāʾirī, Muḥammad ibn Aḥmad al-Sharīf Ḳızıl Deli 313, 315
245n al-Kilīsī, Shaykh ʿUthmān al-ʿUryānī 69, 243
al-Jazūlī, Muḥammad ibn Sulaymān 17, 233, al-Kindī 65
236, 241, 242, 244 Ḳoca Muṣṭafā Pasha 272, 286, 289
Junayd 94 Ḳorḳud (Ottoman prince) 16–17, 62, 64, 72–
al-Jurjānī, al-Sayyid al-Sharīf 67, 68, 69, 80, 95, 361n
81, 86, 92, 164, 172 Köprülü Amcazāde Ḥüseyin Pasha 487–
al-Juwaynī, Imām al-Ḥaramayn 65, 86 488
Köprülü Fāżıl Aḥmed Pasha 55, 482
510 index of personal names

Köprülü Meḥmed 139 Meḥmed Bostānzāde 52

Köprülüzāde Muṣṭafā 140 Meḥmed b. Velī 221n
Ḳurd Efendi 322, 326–328, 330 Meḥmed Efendi, Birgivī (Birgili) (see Birgivī
Ḳuṭbe’d-dīn İzniḳī (see İzniḳī, Ḳuṭbe’d-dīn) Meḥmed Efendi)
Ḳuyucu Murād Paşa 132 Meḥmed b. Meḥmed (Edirnevī) 467, 468,
Kürekçi Baba 321 472
Kütüklü Baba (Ḥāccī Baba) 314 Meḥmed Muʿīdzāde 48, 52, 52n
Meḥmed Pasha, Ṣoḳollu (see Ṣoḳollu
Lāmiʿī Çelebi 358 Meḥmed Pasha)
Laqānī, Ibrāhīm 55n Meḥmed Ṣādıḳ Ṣadre’d-dīnzāde 224n
Lārī, Muṣliḥ al-Dīn 467, 468, 472 Meḥmed Sulṭān (governor of Qahqaha (Ala-
Laṭīfī 54 mut)) 436
Lüṭfī Pasha 171, 174–176, 178, 180, 181, 182, Meḥmed Ṭāhir Agha 407
204–206, 208, 217, 346, 363 Meḥmed Şākir ibn Ṣunʿullāh el-Anḳaravī
246
al-Maghūshī, Muḥammad 41, 42n, 52, Meşrebzāde ʿĀrif Efendi 138n
56n Mevḳūfātī Meḥmed 357, 366
Maḥmūd I 137, 393 Mıṣrī, Niyāzī-i 186–188, 300, 471n
Maḥmūd II 409, 410n Miḥāloğlu (family) 287, 288, 314, 315, 319,
Maḥmūd Hüdāyī (see Hüdāyī, Maḥmūd) 320, 321, 322, 326, 331–333
Maḥmūd Pasha (Ottoman grand vizier) Mihāʾīl 185
109, 266, 267, 268, 275–278, 282 Sinān (Mimar) 13, 273n, 290, 385, 393
Makḥūl al-Nasafī 204 Minḳārīzāde Yaḥyā 138–139, 219, 368
al-Makkī, Abū Ṭālib 242 Mīr Ḥusayn al-Maybudī 84–85
Mālik b. Anas 467 Mīrim Çelebi Maḥmūd 75
al-Mālikī, Muḥammad ibn Salāma ibn Molla Aḥmed b. Süleymān 218n
Ibrāhīm 243, 244 Mollā Fenārī (see al-Fenārī, Shams al-Dīn)
Malḳoçoğlu Bālī Beg 314, 321, 323 Mollā Gürānī 41n, 43, 43n, 45, 45n
al-Maʾmūn (Caliph) 3 Mollā Hüsrev (Khusraw) 135n, 341n, 351,
Manṣūr Halīfe 436 363, 364
al-Maqdisī, Burhān al-Dīn Ibrahīm b. Abī Mollā Luṭfī 43, 45n, 71
Sharīf 49, 51n Mollā Ḳābıż 71
Maqrizī 107, 113n Mollā Ṣalāḥu’d-dīn 75, 77
al-Marghīnānī, Burhān al-Dīn 92, 349 Mollā Seyyid İbrāhīm 77
al-Māturīdī, Abū Manṣūr 156, 158–161, 176, Muʿālī 275
186 Muʿarrifzāde 75
Māwardī 114, 118 Muʿāwiya II 456, 464
al-Maybudī, Mīr Ḥusayn 85 Muʿāwiya b. Abī Sufyān 452, 453, 455–457,
Mazzī 51n 458, 461–464, 466, 468, 471–473
Meḥmed I 257, 258, 259, 265, 266, 278n, al-Mufīd 462
291n Muḥammad (or the Prophet) 2, 3, 10, 19,
Meḥmed II 62, 77, 79, 92, 107, 111n, 117, 260, 32, 33, 34, 36, 37, 40, 49, 50, 51, 56, 88,
261, 267–272, 274, 275, 275n49, 275n51, 89, 111, 116, 121, 125, 125n84, 128, 129, 131,
277, 282, 283, 284, 285, 290, 313, 316, 158–160, 162, 169, 180, 186, 203, 208, 213,
320, 345, 354, 454 237–239, 241, 242, 309, 347, 349, 366,
Meḥmed III 123n 381, (family of) 451–453, 455, 457, 458,
Meḥmed IV 215, 388, 482 461–464, 466–471, 473, 482–487, 490,
Meḥmed Beg (Governor of Divriği district) 492
435 Muḥammad al-Bāqir 309, 458
index of personal names 511

Muḥammad al-Bukhārī (see al-Bukhārī, Muḥyī’d-dīn Muḥammed b. Ḳuṭbe’d-dīn el-

Muḥammad) İznīḳī 240
Muḥammad al-Fāsī 244, 245n Muḥyī l-Dīn Ḳāfiyeci 108, 109, 109n
Muḥammad al-Kiya al-Harrāsī 471 Murād I 41n, 257, 262, 266n, 278n, 283, 283n,
Muḥammad al-Maghūshī (see al-Maghūshī, 291n
Muḥammad) Murād II 81n, 108, 265, 274, 278n, 291, 292–
Muḥammad al-Nābulusī al-Azharī (see al- 294, 297, 456
Azharī, Muḥammad al-Nābulusī) Murād III 330, 376, 393, 437, 437n
Muḥammad al-Ṣaghānī (see al-Ṣaghānī, Murād IV 131, 132, 133, 214, 222, 223, 486
Muḥammad) Murtaḍā al-Zabīdī 55
Muḥammad al-Sakhāwī (see al-Sakhāwī, Mūsā (Prophet Moses) 185
Muḥammad) Mūsā Baba 320n
Muḥammad al-Zarkashī (see al-Zarkashī, Mūsā Çelebi 353
Badr al-Dīn Muḥammad) Muṣliḥ al-Dīn Lārī (see Lārī, Muṣliḥ al-Dīn)
Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Karīm al-Shahrastānī Muṣliḥu’d-dīn Muṣṭafā b. Ḥamza b. İbrāhīm
(see al-Shahrastānī, Muḥammad b. ʿAbd b. Veliyu’d-dīn (see Nuṣḥī al-Nāṣıḥī)
al-Karīm) Muṣliḥu’d-dīn Nūre’d-dīnzāde 120, 120n,
Muḥammad b. Abū Bakr al-Bukhārī 322–328, 330
(Imāmzāda) 181 Muslim b. al-Ḥajjāj 34, 34n, 35n, 36, 39, 41,
Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al-Shaybānī (see al- 42n, 49, 55
Shaybānī, Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan) Muṣṭafā (Ottoman Prince) 113
Muḥammad b. Yūsuf al-Sanūsī (see al Sanūsī, Muṣṭafā II 140, 398, 486, 487, 488
Muḥammad b. Yūsuf) Muṣṭafā III 325, 400
Muḥammed Emīn b. Ṣaḍre’d-dīn Mollazāde Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī 357, 358, 376, 385n, 393, 461,
el-Şirvānī (see el-Şirvānī, Muḥammed 462, 463, 464, 473
Emīn b. Ṣaḍre’d-dīn Mollazāde) Muṣṭafā al-Islāmbūlī 219n
Muḥammed Emīn el-Toḳātī 245n Muṣṭafā b. ʿAbdu’l-ḥalīm 222n
Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al-Sharīf al-Jazāʾirī Muṣṭafā Cenābī (see Cenābī, Muṣṭafā)
(see al-Jazāʾirī, Muḥammad b. Aḥmad al- Muṣṭafā Efendi (Re’īsül-küttāb) 137
Sharīf) Muṣṭafā Işıḳ 328
Muḥammad b. Isḥāq 468 Muṣṭafā Kethüda 215n, 221n
Muḥammad b. Muḥammad b. al-Jazarī (see Muṣṭafā Ṣāfī (see Ṣāfī, Muṣṭafā)
Ibn al-Jazarī, Muḥammad ibn Muḥam- al-Mutaqqī, ʿAlī ibn Ḥusām al-Dīn 243
mad) al-Muzanī 79n
Muḥammad b. Salāma b. Ibrāhīm al-Mālikī Müʾeyyedzāde ʿAbdu’r-raḥmān Çelebi 44,
(see al-Mālikī, Muḥammad ibn Salāma 76, 77
ibn Ibrāhīm) Müʾeyyedzāde Ḥāccī Çelebi 44n
Muḥammad b. Sulaymān al-Jazūlī (see al- Müneccimbaşı Aḥmed 461
Jazūlī, Muḥammad ibn Sulaymān) Münīrī-i Belgrādī 185
Muhammad b. Velī b. Resūl el-Kırşehrī el-
İzmirī 245n Nādir Shah 211, 403
Muḥammad b. Yūsuf al-İzmīrī 243, 244 Najm al-Dīn al-Ghazzī (see al-Ghazzī, Najm
Muḥammad Khan 430–431, 431n26 al-Dīn)
Muḥammed Saçaḳlızāde (see Saçaḳlızāde, Najm al-Dīn al-Saḥrāwī 35n
Muḥammed) Najm al-Dīn ʿUmar al-Nasafī (see al-Nasafī,
Muḥammed b. Ḥasan b. Süleymān 219 Najm al-Dīn ʿUmar)
al-Muḥāsibī, Abū ʿAbdallah al-Ḥārith 169, Nani, Almorò 383, 384
169n Nasāʾī 34n, 49
Muḥyī’d-dīn Haṭībzāde 219n al-Nasafī, Abū l-Muʿīn 182
512 index of personal names

al-Nasafī, Abū l-Barakāt 163, 182 al-Qushayrī, Abū al-Qāsim 93, 94, 168
al-Nasafī, Najm al-Dīn ʿUmar 68, 69, 77, 80, Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī al-Taḥtānī 80
80n, 162, 163, 182, 222 Quṭb al-Dīn Shīrāzī 67
Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Bayḍāwī (see al-Bayḍāwī,
Nāṣir al-Dīn) al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī 168
Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī (see Ṭūsī, Naṣīr al-Dīn) Rāşid (chronicler) 392
Naṣreddīn Hodja 274 al-Rāzī, Fakhr al-Dīn 65, 68, 69, 70, 71, 84,
al-Nawawī, Yaḥyā 54 85, 86, 86n, 95, 162, 170
al-Niṣībīnī, Kamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Remmal Ḥaydar 324n
Ṭalḥa al-ʿAdawī 462n Rīḥāwī Muḥammad b. Sulaymān al-Ḥalabī
Nişāncı Meḥmed Pasha 215 245n, 245n44
Niyāzī-i Mıṣrī (see Mıṣrī, Niyāzī-i) Romano, Yahacob (Ya’acov/Jacob) 225,
Niẓāmī 78 225n107, 225n108, 226, 226n
Nūḥ b. Muṣṭafā 215–216, 218, 220, 221, 223, Rūm Meḥmed Pasha 263, 276, 276n, 279,
224 281
Nuʿmān bin Thābit (see Abū Ḥanīfa) al-Rūmī, Jalāl al-Dīn 203
Nūr al-Dīn Ṣābūnī 160 al-Rūmī, Karīm al-Dīn al-Qaramānī 42n
Nuṣḥī el-Nāṣıḥī 181–184 Rüstem Pasha 111n, 323, 326
Nûşînrevan/Chosroes 123 al-Rustughfanī, Abū l-Ḥasan 176

Orhān (Ottoman sultan) 257, 266n, 291, Ṣābūnī, Nūr al-Dīn 160
291n, 296n, 298, 300 Saçaḳlızāde, Muḥammad 234, 247, 248
ʿOs̱mān II 132 Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī (see al-Taftāzānī, Saʿd
ʿOs̱mān III 275n, 394, 396, 399, 400 al-Dīn)
ʿOs̱mān Halīfe 328 Saʿdī Çelebi 45, 349, 349n, 350, 351, 351n,
Otman Baba 270, 287, 313, 314, 320, 326, 329, 352–355, 357
331 Ṣadr al-Dīn Dashtaqī 67
Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī (see al-Qūnawī, Ṣadr
Paşa Yiğit 282 al-Dīn)
al-Pazdawī, Abū l-Yusr Muḥammad 160, Ṣadr al-Sharīʿa 70, 92
161, 173, 175n Ṣāfī, Muṣṭafā 378, 379, 381
Peçevī 440 al-Ṣafī al-Hindī 89
de Peyssonnel, Claude-Charles 395, 395n, Ṣāfiye Sultan 388–389, 391
396, 398, 410 al-Ṣaghānī, Muḥammad (Raḍī al-Dīn) 39,
Pīrzāde 314, 320, 323, 324 39n, 41, 42, 42n53, 42n55, 43, 54
Postinpūş Baba 262, 263n al-Saḥrāwī, Najm al-Dīn 35n
Saʿīd ibn al-Musayyab 468
Qāḍī Khān 166, 360 al-Sakhāwī, Muḥammad 45n
Qalqashandī 51n al-Samʿānī, Ḥusayn b. Muḥammad 355
al-Qarāfī, Shihāb al-Dīn 106, 114, 118 al-Samarqandī, Abū l-Layth 159n
al-Qaramānī, Abū l-ʿAbbās Aḥmad ibn Yūsuf al-Samarqandī, Abū Muqātil 158n
ibn Aḥmad ibn Sinān al-Dimashqī, 461, al-Samarqandī, ʿUbaydallāh b. Muḥammad b.
465–468, 469, 472 ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz 163
al-Qārī, ʿAlī al-Harawī 233, 241, 243 al-Sanūsī, Muḥammad b. Yūsuf 161, 176, 179,
Qāsim al-Khānī 224n 179n, 189
al-Qudūrī 79 al-Sāqizī/Sāḳızī, Ibrāhīm 243
al-Qūnawī, Aḥmad Jamāl al-Dīn 80n Ṣarı Meḥmed Pasha 140n, 367n
al-Qūnawī, Ṣadr al-Dīn 67 Ṣarı Gürz Ḥamza Efendi 90, 272
al-Qurṭubī 93 Ṣarı Ṣaltuḳ 316, 326, 330
index of personal names 513

Sayf al-Dīn al-Āmidī (see al-Āmidī, Sayf al- Shihāb al-Dīn al-Qarāfī (see al-Qarāfī, Shihāb
Dīn) al-Dīn)
al-Sayyid al-Sharīf al-Jurjānī (see al-Jurjānī, Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā Suhrawardī (see
al-Sayyid al-Sharīf) Suhrawardī, Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā)
Sayyida Nafīsa 56 Shīrāzī, Quṭb al-Dīn 67
de Schepper, Corneille 320, 326 Silāḥdār Meḥmed Agha 389
Sebzī Seyyid Meḥmed Efendi 138, 139 Simeon Kalfa 396
Ṣedefkār Meḥmed Agha 384, 385, 385n al-Simillāwī, ʿAbd al-Muʿṭī ibn Salīm ibn
Sehī Bey 54 ʿUmar al-Shiblī 245n
Selīm I 10, 72, 74, 110, 209, 285, 301, 317, 428, Sinān bin Elvan 283n
435, 437, 460, 465 Sirāj al-Dīn al-Urmawī (see al-Urmawī, Sirāj
Selīm II 120, 121, 122, 133, 393 al-Dīn)
Selīm III 410, 412, 412n al-Sirhindī, Aḥmad 70, 247n
Semiz ʿAlī Paşa 237 Sivāsī, ʿAbdü’l-mecīd 135n, 185, 222, 470–471
Seyyid Loḳmān 437 Sīvāsī, Şihābe’d-dīn 43
Seyyid Meḥmed Çorbacı 221n Ṣofyalı Bālī Efendi 308, 322–324, 326, 327,
al-Shāfiʿī 79n, 87, 128 330, 331
Shah ʿAbbās I 210, 437, 442 Ṣoḳollu Mehmed Pasha 111n, 120, 121, 123,
Shah ʿAbbās II 481, 482 310, 322, 323, 327, 328, 330
Shah Ashraf Hotak 403 St. Catherine 125n
Shah Ḥusayn (of Safavids) 486, 487, 489, al-Subkī, Tāj al-Dīn 68, 69, 83–86, 92, 93
490, 492 al-Subkī, Taqī al-Dīn 167n
Shah Ismāʿīl 10, 85, 94, 196, 207, 209, 424, Sufyān al-Thawrī 468
431, 434, 434n, 452 Suhrawardī, Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā 66–67
Shah Ḳūlu 321, 439 al-Suhrawardī, Shihāb al-Dīn Abū Ḥafs ʿUmar
al-Shahrastānī, Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-Karīm 93
201–204, 205, 215–217, 220, 223, 461 al-Sulamī, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān 92–93, 93n, 94
Shahrūkh 432 Sulṭān Tekelu 431
Shah Ṣafī 480, 481, 486 Sultan Yaʿqūb 423n2
Shah Süleymān 483, 485 al-Suyūtī, Jalāl al-Dīn 36–38, 40, 46, 48–49,
Shah Tahmāsp 221n89 51, 71, 179n, 466
Shams al-Dīn al-Fenārī (see al-Fenārī, Shams Süleymān I 10, 13, 14, 112, 117, 122, 133, 171,
al-Dīn) 174, 261, 285, 286, 288, 290, 317, 318, 329,
Shams al-Dīn al-Iṣfahānī (see al-Iṣfahānī, 342, 343, 345, 346, 348, 349, 353, 354,
Shams al-Dīn) 356, 357, 363, 376, 385, 391, 393, 429, 431
Shams al-Dīn Bidlīsī 431 Süleymān II 483
Sharaf al-Dīn Bidlīsī 432 Süleymān Beg (of Anatolian Germiyanoğlu
Sharaf Beg Bidlīsī 431 dynasty) 455
al-Shaybānī, Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan 347– Süleymān Çelebi 455
348 Süleymān b. Halīl ʿUnḳūdī 181
al-Shaykh al-Khalīl b. Isḥāq 79 Sünbül Sinān 272, 288
Shaykh Bedre’d-dīn (see Bedre’d-dīn Maḥ-
mūd) Şehīd ʿAlī Paşa (Dāmād [Şehīd] ʿAlī Pasha)
Shaykh Celāl 321 137
Shaykh Ebū’l-hayr Sālif Efendi 433 Şehzāde Aḥmed 72
Shaykh Ḳāsım Efendi 322 Şehzāde Şehinşāh 72
Shaykh Meḥmed b. Ḥelvacı ʿÖmer (see Ḳurd Şihābe’d-dīn Pasha 324
Efendi) Şihābe’d-dīn Sīvāsī (see Sīvāsī, Şihābe’d-dīn)
Shaykh ʿÖmer (Halveti) 131 el-Şirvānī, Ḥüseyin b. ʿAbdullah 207
514 index of personal names

el-Şirvānī, Muḥammed Emīn b. Ṣaḍre’d-dīn al-Urmawī, Sirāj al-Dīn 80, 81, 85

Mollazāde 209–216, 218, 219, 220, 221, al-ʿUryānī, ʿUthmān Kilīsī 69, 243
224n, 225, 225n, 226 al-Ūshī, ʿAlī b. ʿUthmān 163, 182
Şücāʿe’d-dīn Velī 314 ʿUthmān b. ʿAffān 455, 463, 466, 468, 469,
Şükrullāh ibn Şihābe’d-dīn Aḥmed 239, 473
454, 457, 458 ʿUthmān al-Battī 158
ʿUthmān b. ʿAbdallāh b. al-ʿIrāqī al-Ḥanafī
al-Ṭabarī 451n1, 457, 458, 462 204
al-Ṭabrisī, Abū ʿAlī al-Faḍl b. al-Ḥasan 462 ʿUthmān Kilīsī al-ʿUryānī (see al-ʿUryānī,
al-Taftāzānī, Saʿd al-Dīn 46n80, 67, 68, 69, ʿUthmān Kilīsī)
70, 77, 80, 80n, 85, 86n, 89, 92, 139n,
163, 164, 182, 219n, 471 Ümmī Sinān 332
al-Ṭaḥāwī, Abū Jaʿfar 79, 80n Üryān Baba 314
al-Taḥtānī, Quṭb al-Dīn al-Rāzī 80 el-Üveysī, Bālī 181
Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī (see al-Subkī, Tāj al-Dīn)
Taʿlīḳīzāde 123n Vānī Meḥmed Efendi 136
Tamerlane (Timur) 122, 432, 455 Veysī 181n
al-Tamīmī, Bayān b. Samʿān 213, 213n
Taqī al-Dīn al-Subkī (see al-Subkī, Taqī al- Warner, Levinus 225
Dīn)
al-Ṭarābulusī, ʿAlā l-dīn ʿAlī 108, 108n, 113n, al-Yāfiʿī, ʿAfīf al-Dīn 93, 468
115 Yaḥyā al-Nawawī (see al-Nawawī, Yaḥyā)
al-Ṭarābulusī, ʿAlī b. Yāsīn b. Muḥammad Yaḥyā Efendi 214, 214n
205 Yaḥyā Pasha 327
Ṭāşköprüzāde, Aḥmed 41–45, 52, 109n, 361 Yaḥyālı Arslan Pasha 327
Ṭayyār Meḥmed Pasha 214 Yaḥyāpaşaoğlu Bālī Beg 314
Thābit al-Bunānī 48 Yaʿḳūb b. ʿAbdü’l-laṭīf 223n
al-Thaqafī, al-Ḥajjāj bin Yūsuf 366 Yazıcıoğlu (Yazıcızāde) Meḥmed 167n, 454,
al-Thawrī, Sufyān 468 456n, 457, 460
Timur (see Tamerlane) Yazīd b. al-Walīd 472
Timurṭaş Beg 315 Yazīd b. Muʿāwiya 19, 432, 451–453, 456–
Tirmidhī 49 458, 460–464, 467–469, 471–473
el-Toḳātī, Muḥammed Emīn 245n Yörgüç Pasha 284
Turaḥānoğlu ʿÖmer Beg 331 Yūnus Emre 203, 223
Turaḥānoğlus 333 Yūsuf al-Ḥusaynī 45n
Ṭurnacı Baba 321, 329
Ṭursun Beg 107, 108 al-Zabīdī, Murtaḍā 55
Ṭūsī, Naṣīr al-Dīn 67, 84 Zakariyyā al-Anṣārī (see al-Anṣārī, Zakariyyā)
Zakariyyā ibn Aḥmad al-Bihārī (see al-Bihārī,
ʿUbaydallāh b. Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Zakariyyā b. Aḥmad)
al-Samarqandī (see al-Samarqandī, ʿUbay- Zāl Maḥmūd Pasha 221n
dallāh b. Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz) al-Zamakhsharī 84
ʿUbayd Allāh b. Ziyād 452, 463 al-Zanjānī, ‘İzz al-dīn 139n
ʿUlamāʾ Beg 431 al-Zarkashī, Badr al-Dīn Muḥammad 47,
ʿUmar b. al-Haṭṭāb 125n 85, 86
ʿUmar b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz 458, 467, 472 Ẕātī 361–362
Umur Baba 321, 329 Zayn al-Dīn al-ʿIrāqī 35n
ʿUnḳūdī, Süleymān b. Halīl 181 Zeynü’l-ʿArab 456
Index of Quranic References

Sura al-Al-i Imran/103 [3: 103] 485, 487 Sura al-Maide/2 [5: 2] 485
Sura al-Anam/165 [6: 165] 490 Sura al-Mumtahina/10 [60: 10] 175
Sura al-A’raf/128 [7: 128] 489, 490
Sura al-A’raf/146 [7: 146] 247, 248 Sura al-Nahl/91 [16: 91] 486
Sura al-Najm/31 [53: 31] 489
Sura al-Fath/3 [48: 3] 482
Sura al-Fath/1 [48: 1] 492 Al-Qiyamah/34–35 [75: 34–35] 248

Sura al-Hajj/78 [22: 78] 482 Sura al-Rum/4–5 [30: 4–5] 483
Sura al-Hujurat/10 [49: 10] 486
Sura al-Saf/13 [61: 13] 482
Sura al-Isra/34 [17: 34] 484 Sura al-Sad/26 [38: 26] 482, 483, 491
Index of Titles of Premodern Books

Abkār al-afkār (of Sayf al-Dīn al-Āmidī) 85 Duʿānāme (of Ebū’s-suʿūd) 236–239, 241,
Adab al-jadal (of Abū Isḥāq al-Isfarāʾīnī) 79 246
Aḥkām al-sulṭāniyya (of Māwardī) 114 Duʿānāme (of Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed) 132
Ahlāḳ-ı ʿAlāʾī (of Ḳınalızāde ʿAlī Efendi) 110 Dürer-i ʿaḳāʾid (or Dürerü’l-ʿaḳāʾid of ʿAbdü’l-
Akhbār al-duwal wa-athār al-uwal fī l-tārīkh mecīd Sivāsī) 135, 185, 219n
(of Abū l-ʿAbbās Aḥmad ibn Yūsuf Düstūrnāme (of Enverī) 275, 458
ibn Ahmad ibn Sinān al-Qaramānī al-
Dimashqī) 465–468, 472 Fadhlaka (of Kātib Çelebi) 468–469, 471–
Alfiyya (of Zayn al-Dīn al-ʿIrāqī) 35 472
ʿAqāʾid (or Al-ʿaqīda al-Nasafīyya, of Abū al-Fatāwā l-Bazzāziyya 166
Ḥafṣ Najm al-Dīn ʿUmar al-Nasafī) 68, Fatāwā l-Qāḍīkhān 166
77, 80, 162–163, 182 al-Fatāwā l-Tatārkhāniyya 166, 175
al-ʿAqāʾid (of Abū Jaʿfar al-Ṭaḥāwī) 80n Fatḥ Allāh (of Muḥammad ibn Yūsuf al-
al-ʿAqāʾid (of ʿAḍud al-Dīn al-Ījī) 80n İzmīrī) 244n
al-ʿAqīda (of Abū Isḥāq al-Isfarāʾīnī) 79 Fayḍ al-arḥam (of İbrāhīm al-Sāqizī/Sāḳızī)
al-Arbaʿīn (of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī) 85 244n
al-Aṣl (of Muḥammad b. al-Ḥasan al- Fayḍ al-bārī ʿalā Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī (of ʿAbd
Shaybānī) 347 al-Raḥīm al-ʿAbbāsī) 46n
al-Awrād al-fatḥiyya (of ʿAlī b. Shihāb al-Dīn Fī faḍāʾil Yazīd (of ʿAbd al-Mughith b. Zuhayr
b. Muḥammad al-Hamadānī) 240 al-Harrī) 453
Aylām al-ẓāhir (of Muṣṭafā Cenābī) 461– Fiqh al-akbar (of Abū Ḥanīfa) 182, 219n,
462 221n, 222
al-Firaq al-muftariqa bayn ahl al-zaygh wa-
Badʾ al-amālī (of ʿAlī b. ʿUthmān al-Ūshī) l-zandaqa (of ʿUthmān b. ʿAbdallāh b.
163, 182 al-ʿIrāqī al-Ḥanafī) 204, 214
Bahjat al-tavārīkh (of Şükrullāh) 457–458 al-Fuṣūl al-muhimma fī maʿrifat aḥwāl al-
Baḥr al-kalām (of Abū l-Muʿīn al-Nasafī) aʾimma (of ʿAlī ibn Muḥammad ibn
182 al-Ṣabbāgh) 462n
Behcetü’l-ʿārifīn ve ravżatü’s-sālikīn (of Süley-
mān b. Halīl ʿUnḳūdī) 181 Ghayāt al-afkār wa nihāyet al-anẓār 202n
al-Bidāya fī uṣūl al-dīn (of Nūr al-Dīn Ṣābūnī) Ghunyat al-mutamallī (of İbrāhīm al-Ḥalabī)
160 346–348, 351, 357

Cāmiʿü’l-fetāvā (of Ḳırḳ Emre Meḥmed b. Ḥāfiẓ al-insān ʿan lāfiẓ al-īmān wa-Allāh al-
Muṣṭafā al-Hamīdī al-Ḳaramanī) 172– hādī ilā ṣirāṭ al-jinān (Ḥāfiẓ al-insān) (of
173 the Ottoman Prince Ḳorḳud) 77, 80, 82,
84–90, 94–96
Dalāʾil al-khayrāt wa-shawāriq al-anwār (of Ḥall ishkāl (of the Ottoman Prince Ḳorḳud)
Muḥammad ibn Sulaymān al-Jazūlī) 17, 78n, 80n
233–234, 236, 241–248 Ḥāshiyyat ʿalā sharḥ maṭāliʿ al-anwār (also
Daʿwat al-nafs al-ṭāliḥa ilā l-aʿmāl al-ṣāliḥa, Ḥāshiyyat al-maṭāliʿ or Ḥāshiye-i maṭāliʿ)
bi-l-ayāt al-ẓāhira wa-l-bayyināt al-bāhira (of al-Sayyid al-Sharīf al-Jurjānī) 80–81
(Daʿwat al-nafs al-ṭāliḥa) (of the Ottoman Ḥāshiyyat al-maṭāliʿ (of ʿAbdü’l-kerīm
Prince Ḳorḳud) 73–74, 79–84, 88n, 89, Efendi) 81n
93–94 Hayākil al-nūr (of Shihāb al-Dīn Yaḥyā
al-Dhakhīra (of Qarāfī) 114 Suhrawardī) 66
index of titles of premodern books 517

Hediyetü’l-mehdiyyīn (or Hediyetü’l-mühtedīn al-Kāshif li-adʿiya (of Muḥammad al-

of Ahīzāde Yūsuf Çelebi) 182 Nābulusī al-Azharī) 244n
Hediyetü’l-muhliṣīn (of Shaykh Bālī el-Üveysī) Khamsa-yi Niẓāmī (Niẓāmī’s Quintet) (of
181 Niẓāmī) 78n
Hasht Behesht (of Idrīs-i Bidlīsī) 276 Kanz al-ʿibād fī sharḥ al-awrād (of ʿAlī b.
al-Hidāya (of Burhān al-Dīn al-Marghīnānī) Aḥmad al-Gūrī) 241
92, 349 al-Kashshāf (of al-Zamakhsharī) 84
Hidāyat al-ḥikma (of Athīr al-Dīn al-Abharī) Khizānat al-muftīn (of Ḥusayn b. Muḥammad
84–85 al-Samʿānī) 354–355
al-Ḥizb al-aʿẓam wa-l-wird al-afkham (of ʿAlī Khulāṣat al-fatāwā (of Iftikhār al-Dīn Ṭāhir b.
al-Qārī al-Harawī) 233–234, 241– Aḥmad al-Bukhārī) 347n
248 Kitāb al-ʿĀlim wa-l-mutaʿallim (of Abū
Ḥizb al-falāḥ (of Muḥammad ibn Sulaymān Muqātil al-Samarqandī) 158
al-Jazūlī) 242 Kitāb al-ʿAqīda al-rukniyya (of ʿUbaydal-
Ḥulviyāt-ı şāhī (of İsfendiyāroğlu İsmāʿīl Bey) lāh b. Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-
273–274, 290 Samarqandī) 163
Ḥusn al-tanabbuh (of Najm al-Dīn al-Ghazzī) Kitāb al-Fiqh al-absaṭ (of Abū Muṭīʿ al-
222n, 224n Balkhī) 158
Hünkārnāme (of Muʿālī) 275 Kitāb al-Irshād (of al-Mufīd) 462
Kitāb al-Kharāj (of Abū Yūsuf) 125n
Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn (of al-Ghazālī) 162, 168, Kitāb al-Tamhīd (of Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī)
175, 182 173
Ighāthat al-lahfān min maṣāʾid al-shayṭān (of Kitāb al-Tawḥīd (of Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī)
Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya) 134 159
Iʿlām al-warā bi-aʿlām al-hudā (of Abū ʿAlī Kitāb Kashf al-ghiṭāʾ ʿan ḥaqāʾiq al-tawḥīd (of
al-Faḍl b. al-Ḥasan al-Ṭabrisī) 462 Ibn al-Ahdal) 176
al-ʿInāya sharḥ al-Hidāya (of Akmal al-Dīn Kitāb Maqtal al-Ḥusayn (of Abū Mikhnāf)
al-Bābartī) 182, 349 451n
Iqtidā al-ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm (of Ibn Taymiyya) Kitāb Sirr al-asrār (pseudo-Aristotelian)
134 133
Isfarā’īnī (of Abū Isḥāq al-Isfarāʾīnī) 78n Kitābu Meṣāliḥü’l-Müslimīn (anonymous)
al-ʿIzzī fī-l-taṣrīf (of ʿİzz al-dīn al-Zanjānī) 111
139n Künhü’l ahbār (of Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī) 462–465

ʿİmādü’l-İslām (of ʿAbdu’r-raḥmān b. Yūsuf Lawāmiʿ al-asrār fī sharḥ maṭāliʿ al-anwār (of
Aḳsarāyī) 171–174, 331 Sirāj al-Dīn al-Urmawī) 80
İncīl 185 Lemeẓāt (of Halveti Shaykh Ḥulvī) 272
İskendernāme (of Aḥmedī) 454–456 Leṭāʾif (of Lāmiʿī Çelebi) 358

Jamʿ al-jawāmiʿ (of Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī) 85– al-Maḥṣūl (of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī) 85–
86 86
al-Jāmiʿ (of Tirmidhī) 42n Manẓūm fıḳh (or Viḳāye tercümesi) (of Devle-
Jāmiʿ al-daʿwāt (of Şükrullāh ibn Şihābe’d-dīn toğlu Yūsuf Balıḳesrī) 273
Aḥmed) 239n Maʿrūḍāt (posthumously compiled book of
Ebū’s-suʿūd’s fatwas) 343, 354–357
Kashf al-asrār (of ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Bukhārī) Maṣābīḥ al-sunna (of al-Ḥusayn al-Baghawī)
173 42, 53
Kashf al-ẓunūn (of Kātib Çelebi) 76n, 136, Mashāriq al-anwār (of Muḥammad al-
220n, 223, 229, 241, 243–245 Ṣaghānī) 39, 54
518 index of titles of premodern books

Maṭāliʿ al-anwār (of Sirāj al-Dīn al-Urmawī) Natāʾij al-nażar fī ḥāshiyyat al-Durar (of Nūḥ
80, 86 b. Muṣṭafā?) 220n
Maṭāliʿ al-massarāt bi-jalāʾ Dalāʾil al-khayrāt Naẓm fī ʿilmi’l-ʿaḳāʾid (of Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed)
(of Muḥammad al-Fāsī) 244 132
Maṭālib al-suʿūl fī manāqib āl al-Rasūl (of Nihāyat al-ʿuqūl (of Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī)
Kamāl al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Ṭalḥa al- 85
ʿAdawī al-Niṣībīnī) 462 Nuhbetü’t-tevārīh (of Edirnevī) 467–468
Mathnawī (of Mavlānā Jalāl al-Dīn Rūmī) Nukhbat al-fikar (of Ibn Ḥajar al-ʿAsqalānī)
270 35n
al-Mawāqif fī ʿilm al-kalām (of ‘Aḍud al-Dīn al-Nūniyya (of Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī) 69
al-Ījī) 85, 170 Nuṣḥü’l-ḥükkām sebebü’n-niẓām (of Ḳāḍīzāde
Mebḥas̱-i īmān (of Muṣliḥu’d-dīn Muṣṭafa b. Meḥmed) 132
Hamza b. İbrahīm b. Velīyu’d-dīn, alias Nüṣḥatü’s-selāṭīn (of Gelibolulu Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī)
Nuṣḥī el-Nāṣıḥī) 181–184 376
Mesmūʿatü’l-neḳāyih mecmūʿatü’n-neṣāyiḥ (of
Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed) 132n, 134n Pādişāh-ı ʿālempenāh ḥażretlerine neṣāyiḥ-i
Meşāʿirü’ş-şuʿarā (of ʿĀşıḳ Çelebi) 119–120 kes̱īre (of Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed) 132n
al-Milal wa-l-niḥal (of Muḥammad b. ʿAbd
al-Karīm al-Shahrastānī) 201–203, 461 Qaṣīdat al-nūniyya (of Hıżır Beg) 69
Miʿrācü’l-eyāle ve minhācü’l-ʿadāle (of ʿĀşıḳ Qūt al-arwāh (of Ḥasan bin ʿAlī bin Ham-
Çelebi) 112, 119–130, 135–136 mad) 457
Mirʾāt al-uṣūl fī sharḥ Mirqāt al-wuṣūl (of Qūt al-qulūb (of Abū Ṭālib al-Makkī) 242
Molla Hüsrev) 165n
Mirʾātü’l-ʿaḳā’id (of Dervīş Aḥmed) 214, Rabīʿ l-abrār (of Zamakhsharī) 119n
222n Rawḍ al-akhyār (of Muḥyī’d-dīn Haṭībzāde)
Mirʾāt al-advār (of Muṣliḥu’d-dīn Lārī) 119n
467–468 al-Rawḍ al-āṭir fī mā tayassara min akhbār
Mīzānü’l-ḥaḳḳ (of Kātib Çelebi) 468–471 ahl al-qarn al-sābiʿ ilā khitām al-qarn al-
Muḥammediye (of Yazıcızāde Meḥmed) ʿāshar (of Ibn Ayyūb) 35n, 47n
[Risāletü’l-Muḥammediye] 167n, 456– Rawḍ al-rayāḥīn fī ḥikayāt al-ṣāliḥīn (of ʿAfīf
457 al-Dīn al-Yāfiʿī) 93
Muʿīd al-niʿam (of Tāj al-Dīn al-Subkī) 83 Rawḍat al-jannat fī uṣūl al-iʿtiqādāt (of Ḥasan
Muʿīn al-ḥukkām (of ʿAlā l-dīn ʿAlī Ṭarābulusī) Kāfī Aḳḥiṣārī) 179n
108, 115 Risāla (of Kemālpaşazāde) 206–207, 224n
Muḳaddime (of Ḳuṭbe’d-dīn İzniḳī) 168–172, al-Risālat al-Saniyya li-maʿrifat al-madhhab
273–274 al-sawiyya (of Khalīl b. Yūsuf al-Zubayri
Mukhtaṣar fī l-siyāsa wa-umūr al-salṭana al-Budhuwanī) 219n, 224n
(Kitāb-i mukhtaṣar) (anonymous) 79 Risāla fī-l-Farq al-Islāmiyya (of Muṣṭafā al-
Multaqā al-abḥur (of Ibrāhīm al-Ḥalabī) Islāmbūlī) 219n
357 Risāla fī l-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya (of Dede Cöngī)
Muntij al-barakāt ʿalā Dalāʾil al-khayrāt 110n, 112–119, 130, 135n, 137–139, 141–
(of Rīḥāwī Muḥammad b. Sulaymān al- 142
Ḥalabī) 245 Risāla fī l-Taqlīd (of Aḥmed Rūmī el-
Münşeʾātü’s-selāṭīn (of Ferīdūn Beg) 125n, Aḳḥiṣārī) 179
423n, 434n Risāla fī Uṣūl al-ḥadīth (of Birgivī Meḥmed
Efendi) 55n
Naṣīḥatnāme (of Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed) 132n Risālat al-Ikhtilāf (of Kemālpaşazāde) 69
Naṣru’l-aṣḥāb ve ḳahru’s-sebbāb (of Ḳāḍīzāde Risāle fī Hurūc-i Şāh İsmāʿīl ve ṭā’ife-i Ḳızılbaş
Meḥmed) 132n, 218n (Anonymous) 218n
index of titles of premodern books 519

Risāle fī Beyān meẕāhib muhtelife (of Muḥam- al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya (of Ibn Taymiyya) 17,
mad Emīn b. Ṣadre’d-dīn Mollazāde 101–106, 109, 115, 121, 127–129, 131, 133,
el-Şirvānī) 209–211, 222n, 225n 136–138
Risāle-i ʿAmāniye (Anonymous) 186 Sūrnāme-i Hümāyūn (of İntiẓāmī) 437
Risāle-i Esʾile ve ecvibe (of Niyāzī-i Mıṣrī) Sübülü’l-Hüdā (of Münīrī-i Belgrādī) 185–
186–188 186
Risāle-i Fıraḳ-i ḍālle (of Lüṭfī Pasha) 205– Sübhatü’l-abdāl (of Muṣṭafā ʿĀlī) 464
206
Risāle-i Īmān ve İslām (of Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed) Şehnāme (of Taʿlīḳīzāde) 123n
133n Şehnāme-i Murād-i S̱ālis̱ (of Seyyid Loḳmān)
Risāle-i Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed (of Ḳāḍīzāde 437
Meḥmed) 133n Şehnāme-i Selīm Hān (of Seyyid Loḳmān)
Risāle-i Rūmī Efendi (of Aḥmed Rūmī Efendi) 437
179–181 Şerḥ-i Evrād-i Fetḥiyye (of Dervīş Caʿfer) 241
Şerḥ-i Delāʾil (of Ḳara Dāvud) 245–246
Ṣaḥīḥ al-Bukhārī (of Muḥammad al-Bukhārī)
34–36, 50, 52–54 Ṭabaḳātü’l-memālik ve derecātü’l-mesālik (of
Ṣaḥīḥ [al-Jāmiʿ al-ṣaḥīḥ] (of Muslim b. al- Celālzāde Muṣṭafa) 442
Ḥajjāj) 49, 54 Tācü’r-resāʾil ve minhācü’l-vesāʾil (of Ḳāḍīzāde
Sayf al-mulūk (of Muḥyī l-Din Ḳāfiyeci) 109 Meḥmed) 132–134, 136
Sayf al-quḍāt (of Muḥyī l-Din Ḳāfiyeci) 109 Tafrīḥ (of ʿAbd al-Muʿṭī ibn Salīm ibn ʿUmar
Sharafnāma (of Sharaf al-Dīn Bidlīsī) 431– al-Shiblī al-Simillāwī) 245n
432 Tafriqa bayn al-zandaqa wa-l-īmān (of al-
Sharḥ al-ʿAqāʾid (of Aḥmad Jamāl al-Dīn al- Ghazālī) 203n
Qūnawī) 80n al-Taḥṣīl (of Sirāj al-Dīn al-Urmawī) 85–
Sharḥ al-ʿAqāʾid (of Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī) 86
68, 77, 80 Tajrīd (of Naṣīr al-Dīn Ṭūsī) 67
Sharḥ al-ʿAqāʾid (of Sayyid al-Sharīf al- Taʿlīq (of Abū Ḥāmid al-Isfarāʾīnī) 79
Jurjānī) 80n al-Tanbīh (of Ibn Abī al-ʿIzz) 350
Sharḥ al-Dalāʾil (of Meḥmed Şākir ibn Tārīh-i cāmiʿ-i şerīf-i Nūr-ı ʿOs̱mānī (of
Sunʿullāh el-Anḳaravī) 246 Aḥmed Efendi) 396
Sharḥ al-Ḥizb (of Shaykh ʿUthmān al-ʿUryānī al-Ṭarīqa al-Muḥammadiyya (of Birgivī
al-Kilīsī) 244 Meḥmed Efendi) 55, 177, 476
Sharḥ al-Maṭāliʿ (Sharḥ-i Maṭāliʿ) (of Quṭb Tartīb al-ʿulūm (of Muḥammed Sāçaḳlızāde)
al-Dīn al-Rāzī al-Taḥtānī) 80 247–248
Sharḥ al-Maqāṣid (of Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī) Tāʾwilāt al-Kāshānī (of ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-
85, 219n Kāshānī) 172
Sharḥ al-Mawāqif (of Sayyid al-Sharīf al- Teferrücnāme (of Enverī) 458
Jurjānī) 86n Tenbīhü’l-ʿāḳılīn ve teʾkīdü’l-gāfilīn (of Lüṭfī
Sharḥ Duʿā al-Qunūt (of Jāmī) 240 Pasha) 171, 174–176
Sharḥ-i ʿAqāʾid 78, 80 Tercüme-i Milel u Niḥal (of Nūḥ b. Muṣṭafā)
Sharḥ Jamʿ al-jawāmiʿ (of Badr al-Dīn al- 215–216, 218
Zarkashī) 85 Tevrāt 185
Sharḥ Qaṣīdat al-nūniyya (of Khayālī Aḥmad al-Tibr al-masbūk fī naṣīḥat al-mulūk (of Abū
Efendi) 69 Ḥāmid al-Ghazalī) 119
Shawākil al-ḥūr (of Jalāl al-Dīn Dawānī) al-Ṭuruq al-ḥukmiyya (of Ibn Qayyim al-
67 Jawziyya) 114
Shirʿat al-Islām (of Muḥammad b. Abū Bakr Tuḥfat al-mustarshidīn fī bayān firaq al-
al-Bukhārī/ Imāmzāda) 181–182 muslimīn (Pseudo-Birgivī) 221
520 index of titles of premodern books

Tuhfetü’ş-şahān (of Ebū’l-Beḳā el-Kefevī) Vesāʾilü’l-ḥasenāt (of İbrāhīm b. Ṣāliḥ el-

184 Ḳıbrısī) 246

ʿUddat al-ḥiṣn al-ḥaṣīn (of Ibn al-Jazarī) 239 Wasīlat al-aḥbāb (of the Ottoman Prince
ʿUmdat al-ʿaqīda li-ahl al-sunna (of Abū l- Ḳorḳud) 74, 78
Barakāt al-Nasafī) 163, 182
ʿUmdāt al-Islām (of ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Fārisī) 172 Zawāʾid al-zuhd (of ʿAbdallāh b. Aḥmad)
Uṣūl al-dīn (of Abū l-Yusr Muḥammad al- 47–48
Pazdawī) 175 Zubdat al-masāʾil (of Lüṭfī Pasha) 182
Zübde-i vekayiât (of Defterdār Ṣarı Meḥmed
Vaṣiyetnāme (of Meḥmed b. Pīr ʿAlī Birgivī) Paşa) 140
171, 176–177, 179, 181, 184, 187 Zübdetü’t-tevârîh (of Muṣṭafā Ṣāfī) 378–379,
Velāyetnāme-i Otman Baba 270, 302, 313, 381, 387
320, 329
Index of General Terms

‘Abbasid 120n, 122, 405, 453, 455, 458, 467, Ash‘ari 3, 17, 20, 63, 65, 67–72, 75–80, 83,
469 86, 87, 87n, 89, 93, 95, 156, 157, 160–165,
abdāl 308–317, 320, 321, 323, 326, 331, 333 168, 170, 173–176, 179, 179n, 189, 201, 204
abdāls of Rum 18, 288, 320 ʿāṣī 169, 172, 349
ʿadl 362, 388 Avicennian 65, 67, 164, 165, 165n, 168
ahī 255n, 257, 283 Aydinid 272, 272n
aḥkām 70, 82, 114, 241, 343n Ayyubid 12, 66, 164
ahl al-bayt 10, 11, 19, 309, 453, 458, 459, 461,
462, 465, 472, 486 bāṭinī, bāṭiniyya 66, 93, 94, 206, 206n, 207
ahl al-baytism 19, 453, 459, 460, 462, 465, bayān 52n, 200, 241
466, 469, 472, 473 Bektashi 14, 203, 212, 288, 311, 312, 314, 412,
ahl al-bidʿa 3, 3n 412n
ahl al-ḥadīth 38, 39n belief 3, 4, 5, 7, 8n, 9, 12, 13, 15, 17, 21, 31, 43,
ahl al-sunna wa-l-jamāʿa (Tr. ehl-i sünnet ve’l 62n, 63–66, 68–71, 77, 79, 82, 84, 87–89,
cemāʿat) 3, 3n, 68, 71, 83, 84, 91, 160, 92, 93, 101, 139n, 155, 158–160, 162, 169–
160n, 163, 170, 173, 179, 180, 182, 186n, 174, 175n, 178, 179, 182, 185–188, 189, 196,
187n, 345, 466, 468, 490 196n, 198n, 199, 203, 207, 208, 210–212,
ahlāq (Tr. ahlāḳ) (see ethics and morality) 214, 216, 218, 221, 223, 225, 226, 227, 235,
107 249, 308, 363, 369, 424, 429, 429n, 435,
ʿAjamī 4, 84 461, 462, 464, 472, 495
Alevi 12, 310, 311, 355n berāt 325, 326, 358, 365
alfāẓ al-kufr (Tr. elfāẓ-i küfr) 166, 167, 171, bidʿa, pl. bidaʿ (see also mubtadiʿ) 3, 116,
173, 181, 184, 203n 116n, 128, 135, 140, 196n, 198n, 218n
‘Alid loyalty (see also ahl al-baytism) 11, biographical dictionary (see also teẕkire and
196n, 309, 432, 459 ṭabaqāt) 16, 42, 44, 64, 109n, 119, 348
ʿamel 169, 170, 187n, 343 borderland 19, 322, 423, 427, 428, 432
amr bi-l-maʿrūf wa-nahy ʿan al-munkar 105,
106n caliph 3, 10, 19, 83, 105, 113, 116, 117, 122, 129,
antinomian 109n, 207, 212, 270, 309–312, 403, 451, 452, 455, 457, 458n, 463, 466–
314, 316, 321, 326, 328, 330, 332, 332n, 469, 472, 473, 482, 483, 484, 486, 490,
352, 454 491, 495, 496
apostasy (see also irtidād) 66, 82, 87–91, 95, caliphate (Ar. khilāfa, Tr. hilāfet) 9, 10, 19,
129, 197n 72, 104, 105, 122, 352, 403, 403n, 405,
ʿaqīda, pl. ʿaqāʾid 68, 77, 79, 79n, 80, 83, 156, 405n, 412n, 451n, 453, 453n, 456–458,
162, 163, 182, 461n 463, 464, 466, 467, 480–484, 486–497
ʿaql 44, 65, 70, 85, 95, 159 cami, cāmiʿ (see also mosque) 256, 275n,
architect 13, 255, 268, 273n, 277, 285, 290, 276, 259, 260n, 281, 282, 284n, 296, 297,
297n, 301, 377, 384, 396, 407 301, 378, 388–391, 391n, 396, 405, 406,
architecture 13, 14, 16, 18, 21, 171, 255, 256, 406n
256n, 260–263, 265, 265n, 266, 268, canon 12, 34, 34n, 35, 36, 39, 41n, 42n, 43n,
272, 272n, 274, 276, 277n, 279, 280, 49, 54, 55, 86, 90, 215, 238, 273, 480n
280n, 281n, 282, 283n, 290n, 291, 296n, cash waqf 111, 116, 324, 324n, 325
297, 300, 301, 314, 333, 345, 376, 377, catechism (see also ʿilm-i ḥāl) 17, 155, 171,
384, 385n, 387, 392n, 393, 395, 395n, 175, 176, 178, 178n, 189, 190, 204, 214, 345,
400, 405, 405n, 407, 410n, 412 346, 363, 364
Aristotelian 65, 70, 133, 133n, 164 Catholic(s) 8, 31, 226, 362
522 index of general terms

Celali 379, 379n, 383, 385, 438 confessional ambiguity 11, 19, 196, 452, 454,
centralization 267, 316, 319, 437, 438, 439n 459, 459n
ceremony 203, 380, 381, 382, 383, 384, 384n, confessionalization 7–9, 9n, 10n, 12, 13, 16,
387, 400, 437, 437n 20, 31–33, 91, 95, 103, 109, 189, 197n, 199,
ceremonial 262, 278n, 377, 380, 381, 384, 199n, 217, 222, 224, 226, 235, 261n, 290,
386, 391n, 399, 410, 413 297, 308, 355, 385, 404, 425, 432, 444,
charity 257, 275, 277 460, 461, 465
chief mufti (see also şeyhü’l-islām) 69, 125, confessional polarization 10, 11, 17, 31, 157,
129, 233, 237, 239n, 288, 288n, 289, 290, 188, 210, 211
429, 480, 480n congregation(al) 14, 18, 31, 205, 256, 260n,
Christianity 4, 6, 226 268, 273, 274, 276, 277, 278n, 279, 281,
Christians 8n, 31, 84, 104, 125n, 126, 127, 282, 282n, 289, 291, 292, 294, 296–300,
139n, 179, 189, 190, 197, 201, 214, 216, 226, 318, 341–351, 353–363, 365, 366, 368,
321, 378, 383, 384, 394, 483, 486, 487, 369, 400, 402, 408, 481, 492
488 consensus 64, 70, 101, 116, 185, 186, 202, 205,
church waqf 127, 127n, 267 208, 342, 346, 348, 349, 351, 354, 356,
city 4, 14, 15n, 52, 110, 119, 138n, 139n, 157, 187, 357
199, 209, 210, 224, 227, 242, 255, 256, conversion 10, 84, 128, 157, 165, 260, 266n,
260, 265n, 270, 272–275, 278, 281–284, 278n, 291, 292, 296n, 297, 297n,
286, 289, 297, 300, 317, 319–322, 324, 365n, 383n, 427, 437, 437n, 444, 445,
325, 344, 355, 369, 376, 381, 387, 391, 482n
393, 401, 402, 402n, 405, 405n, 407, 410, copyist 110n, 113n, 199, 205n, 215, 217, 218,
412, 413, 423, 430, 453n, 457 220, 222n, 224, 224n, 226n
classical 1, 4, 16, 104, 139n, 182, 188, 189, 256, Counter-Reformation 226
377, 384, 390, 398, 402, 453 court 20, 45n, 72, 74, 75, 76n, 77, 83, 95,
classicism 266 109, 118, 118n, 119, 132, 198, 213, 256n,
clientage network 309, 310, 319, 327 262, 266n, 268, 271, 272n, 274, 274n,
coffee 139n, 179, 219, 470 275, 276n, 277, 283, 286, 290n, 292,
commentary 17, 35, 35n, 36, 36n, 38–43, 293, 328, 341, 360, 362, 364, 366n, 367,
43n, 45–47, 53–55, 66n, 67, 67n, 69, 368, 383, 387, 392, 392n, 393, 396, 399,
72, 77, 79n, 80, 80n, 81, 84, 85, 86, 92, 404, 405, 407, 408n, 409, 410, 424, 426,
93, 94, 107, 112, 119, 128, 129, 135n, 139n, 427n, 428, 429, 431–437, 440, 442, 443,
155, 155n, 159, 159n, 160, 161, 163, 173, 443n86, 443n89, 444, 445n, 470, 480,
182, 185, 202n, 219n, 220, 222, 232–237, 484, 488, 493, 495
239n, 240, 240n, 241, 243–248, 349, 353, creed 3n, 9, 16, 17, 77, 79, 79n, 80, 132, 156,
357, 398, 404, 468 159, 162, 163, 166, 167, 174, 178, 179n, 182,
community 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 8, 8n, 11, 12, 14–21, 185, 185n, 189, 200, 210, 214, 221, 222,
32n, 34, 37, 68, 71, 84, 87, 105, 106, 124, 288, 346, 363
126, 157, 161, 162, 168, 171, 175, 177, 182, crime 106, 117, 127, 128, 167n, 341n, 458
183, 185, 187, 188, 200, 201, 255n, 256n, criminal law 114
273n, 281, 283, 297, 300, 310, 311, 316, cursing 19, 208, 403, 451, 452, 456, 457, 467,
317, 318, 341, 342, 345, 350, 352–356, 469, 471, 471n, 473
358, 359, 359n, 362, 363, 367, 368, 389,
424, 426, 427, 428, 430, 432, 433, 435, dār al-ḥadīth (Tr. dārü’l-ḥadīs̱) 33, 35, 41,
442, 456, 459, 459n, 469, 472, 483, 485, 41n49, 41n50, 42
486, 487, 490, 492, 494 dervish 6n, 129n, 207, 211–213, 256, 262, 270,
companions 3, 54, 56, 76, 122, 131, 167n, 272, 283, 284, 286–290, 292, 308, 310–
226n, 366, 402, 452, 462, 463, 468, 469, 317, 319, 320, 321, 323, 325–328, 330, 332,
471, 473 332n, 379, 402, 410, 442
index of general terms 523

devrān, deverān 139n, 219, 219n, 272, 288– 205n, 247, 273n, 288–290, 343, 343n,
290 353–357, 359, 364–368, 479, 480n, 495
devşirme 79, 112, 131 fiqh 16, 17, 35, 42, 43, 70, 84, 92, 95, 106, 157–
dhikr (Tr. ẕikr) 198n, 219, 219n, 245, 270, 161, 166, 168, 170, 175, 182, 203, 219n,
288n, 289, 289n, 301 221n, 222, 236, 243
dhimmi 89, 389 firḳa-i nāciye 203, 216
dīn 37, 86, 241, 348, 355n64, 355n65, 356n, frontier commanders 255, 261, 265, 272, 282,
365n, 366, 482, 483, 487, 488 283, 288, 309, 310, 313, 315–317, 319, 326,
dīn ü devlet 82, 429 327, 331, 434
dīvān 387, 408, 408n futuwwa 255n, 259, 260n, 458, 458n
diplomacy 123, 352, 479, 480, 480n, 494n,
496, 497 gāzī, gazā (Ar. ghazā) 123, 123n, 265, 272,
doctrine 12, 65, 70, 71, 81, 84, 85, 94n, 158n, 280, 281, 287, 288, 213, 312, 313, 314, 315,
234, 261, 385, 404n, 461, 465 316, 318, 326, 328, 331, 376, 379, 391, 395,
duʿā 132, 233, 236–239, 241, 246 398, 402, 439, 482, 484, 485, 487, 491,
dynasty 13, 18, 19, 104, 107, 109, 141, 212, 226, 492
235, 249, 268, 282, 288, 313, 316, 317, 319, genre 7n, 16, 19, 20, 21, 35, 40, 40n45, 40n48,
327, 352, 353, 356, 357, 368, 394, 403, 46n, 55, 121, 166, 168, 185, 187n, 197,
425, 453–455, 459, 462, 479, 481–486, 202n, 204, 207, 214, 215, 220n, 223,
490, 492 233n, 227, 233, 235, 240n, 242, 248, 376,
395, 429, 454
Eastern Hanafi 164, 166, 167, 174, 189, 204, ghulūww 196n, 213n
204n29, 204n32, 205, 208, 214, 216 gulāt (Ar. ghulāt) 117n, 210, 213, 213n, 216,
endowment (see also waqf ) 119, 125n, 136n, 452
137, 260, 268, 277, 281, 283, 283n, 284, governance 32, 73, 78, 79, 82, 90, 93, 102,
290, 297, 321, 321n, 324, 325, 329n, 359 106, 107, 108, 130, 139, 165, 347, 351, 369,
eschatology, eschatological 10, 462, 465 431
ethics (see also ahlāq and morality) 83, 107, government 10, 66, 104, 112n, 118, 126, 139,
168n, 243 166, 167, 183, 196, 197, 199n, 204, 208,
eyvān (Ar. īwān) 255, 259, 259n, 260, 262, 209, 211, 214, 215, 218, 219, 227, 237n,
263, 277–280, 282, 284, 285, 291–293, 273, 313, 320, 322, 327, 331, 332, 343, 356,
296, 297 357, 365, 366, 430–436, 439–443, 452,
464, 497
faith 17, 31, 54, 62, 66, 73, 77, 82, 87–89, 122, grand vizier 18, 109, 111, 111n, 120, 120n, 121,
128, 138, 155–190, 197n, 198n, 205, 210, 132, 136, 139, 140, 174, 209, 214, 222, 237,
213, 214, 221, 225, 235, 249, 328, 350n, 245n, 274, 275, 277, 284, 310, 321, 323,
378, 383, 385, 385n, 426n, 433, 466, 467, 324, 326, 327, 328, 361, 399, 408n, 480–
468, 470, 479, 484–487, 494, 495 482, 487–490, 492
falsafa 64, 65, 70, 77, 84, 86, 90, 92, 95 Greek 201, 396
farḍ (Tr. farż) 350, 350n Gülşeni 212, 288
farḍ al-ʿayn (Tr. farż-ı ʿayn) 162, 177, 177n,
182, 183, 186, 237, 237n, 482 Habsburgs 344, 384, 393, 398
farḍ al-kifāya (Tr. farż-ı kifāye) 162, 177, 182, ḥadd, pl. ḥudūd 105, 116, 128
183 hadith 1, 3, 3n, 16, 31, 33–56, 64, 70, 82, 92,
fasād al-zamān 116 94, 116, 120n, 128, 158, 160, 162, 163, 168,
fāsiq (see also sinful) 368 169, 175n, 177, 197, 197n, 200, 201, 222,
fatwa, pl. fatāwā 13, 16, 78n, 88, 114, 125, 126, 236, 242, 243, 275n, 283, 349, 350, 359,
126n, 127n, 129, 129n, 140n, 166, 167, 173, 364–366, 451, 453n, 457, 463, 464, 466,
174, 175, 178n, 180, 181, 184, 198, 199n, 471, 480, 485
524 index of general terms

hadith transmission 34–38, 40, 40n, 44, 46, hypocrite (see also munāfiq) 135, 222, 349
47, 48, 50–56, 350, 462
hajj 238, 494 ijāza 33, 37, 44, 44n, 45n, 48, 48n, 49, 49n,
halīfe 112, 328, 356n, 405n, 435, 436, 440 50–53, 55, 56
Halveti 18, 120, 131, 135n, 185, 186, 272, 284, ijtihād 467, 471
284n, 286, 289, 290, 308–310, 318, 322– ikhtilāf 69n, 200, 342
327, 330–332, 459n, 470, 471n ilḥād (see also mulḥid) 19, 94, 196n, 457
Hanafi 12, 13, 13n, 15, 17, 20, 38, 39, 39n, 40, Ilkhanid 11, 11n, 459
40n, 41, 43, 46, 52, 53, 62, 62n, 63, 74, ʿilm 47, 52, 63, 158, 166, 178, 178n, 187, 210,
79, 83, 88, 92, 95, 101, 101n, 102, 103, 108, 241, 241n, 466
109, 113n, 114, 115, 116, 116n, 118, 123n, ʿilm-i ḥāl (see also catechism) 17, 21, 92, 155,
124, 127, 129, 134, 135, 158–161, 166–168, 156, 163, 166, 168, 169, 171, 174, 177–179,
170, 172n, 174–176, 178–179, 182, 184, 185, 181–187, 232, 331, 345, 456n
187–189, 204, 204n, 205, 243, 273, 274, imam 10, 18, 21, 51, 105, 125, 129, 183, 202n,
282, 288, 297, 342, 344–351, 353n, 354, 212, 237, 245, 273, 276n, 281, 288, 289,
356–360, 363–365, 368, 369, 404, 404n, 297, 301, 317, 318, 321, 325, 325n, 329,
429 330, 341, 341n, 342, 345, 346, 353, 357–
Hanbali 17, 20, 38, 40, 64, 68, 71, 83, 86, 101, 369, 378, 432, 464, 481
101n, 105, 106, 109, 109n, 113n, 114, 120n, īmān (see also belief) 82, 88, 156–160, 162,
121, 127, 128, 134, 135n, 179, 179n, 226, 453 163, 166–167, 169–176, 178–188, 203n,
hānḳāh 257, 257n, 260, 261, 275, 276, 282 378, 484
ḥāshiyya 80, 81, 81n, 220n, 235, 235n, 245n ʿimāret 16, 18, 255–268, 270–271, 274–287,
haṭīb 21, 75, 260n, 276, 276n, 278n, 281, 291, 289, 291–301, 317, 318, 351, 365n, 405,
321, 331, 366n 405n, 406n
heresy 6, 6n, 11, 13n, 31, 89, 94, 95, 109, 175, infidel (see also kāfir) 122, 161, 162, 167, 174,
188, 196–200, 201n, 202–210, 212, 213, 189, 201, 202, 213, 222, 226n, 383–385,
215–217, 217n, 219, 222, 224–227, 323, 405, 462, 471, 481, 483, 485, 487–489,
324, 328, 454, 457, 479, 480, 495 491–492, 495
heresiography 9, 16, 18, 186n, 197–205, 207– irtidād (see also apostasy) 66
227 Islamic revivalism 102
heresiographer 197, 201, 223, 226 Ismaʻili 66, 93, 207, 216, 216n, 461
heretic 19, 84, 88, 92, 117, 126, 179, 183, 189, isnād 37, 38, 44, 44n, 49n, 51, 51n, 55
198, 201, 202, 204–208, 211, 212, 213, 217, istidlāl 156, 159, 172, 187
222–224, 224n, 226, 227, 289n, 308, 309, istitāba 66, 87
323, 328–330, 379n, 429n, 435, 442, 491 ışıḳ 211, 212, 442
heterodoxy 196, 426n, 459n, 497
ḥikma 66, 72, 84, 85 Ja‘fari madhhab 211, 403
historiography 1, 5, 7, 8, 16, 199, 217, 232, 249, Jews 8n, 84, 139n, 197, 201, 206, 213, 214, 216,
345, 424, 434, 451, 453 226, 389
ḥizb, pl. aḥzāb 233, 234, 241–248 Judaism 197, 209n, 225, 225n
hospice (see also ʿimāret and tābhāne) 259, jihad 92, 104, 123, 481, 482, 483, 484, 486,
263, 265, 267, 269–271, 275n, 277–287, 487, 491, 492, 494
290–293, 296, 296n, 297, 301, 310, 315, judge (see also kadi) 12, 33, 34, 40, 45, 45n,
315n 47–49, 51, 52, 76, 92, 93, 106, 218, 221,
hospitality 276–278, 284–286 322, 341–343, 345, 356, 357, 358, 360,
House of ʿOs̱mān 455, 480, 486, 493, 496, 361, 364, 366, 367, 367n
497 jurisprudence 33, 35, 40, 42, 43, 70, 78, 79,
Ḥulūliyya 206, 207, 211, 212 86, 88, 90, 111, 117, 140, 158n, 165n, 361,
Hurufi 328, 331 362, 364
index of general terms 525

justice 64, 106, 110, 112n, 114, 117, 118, 118n, lands of Rum 4, 7, 11n, 101, 108, 109, 112, 115,
122, 124, 130, 347, 387, 388, 408, 443, 135, 167, 184, 186, 188, 189, 244, 245n,
466, 473 261n, 272, 284, 300, 301, 347, 351, 352,
359, 454
kadi (see also judge) 103, 108, 109, 110, 113n, legitimacy 7, 16, 68, 71, 73, 87, 89, 91, 105,
118, 118n, 119, 120, 121, 124, 126, 131, 256, 108, 114, 116–118, 126, 127, 289, 314, 344,
272, 322, 323, 326, 328, 330, 345, 436 352, 353, 360, 365, 366, 368, 369, 428,
ḳāḍīʿasker 76, 110, 112n, 118, 347 429, 434, 436, 438, 440, 442, 451, 456,
Kadızadeli 15, 16n, 17, 19, 102, 102n, 103, 120, 467, 483, 485, 495
130–132, 134–137, 178, 179, 186, 300, 389, legitimization 4, 34, 71, 116, 118, 141, 313, 377,
389n, 465, 467, 469–471, 473 380, 402, 405n, 428, 465, 479, 480
kāfir (see also infidel) 161, 167, 170n, 171, lodge 131, 214, 255n, 270, 272, 278n, 284,
173–175, 180, 183–185, 289 284n, 286, 289, 301n, 326, 410, 412, 412n,
ḳānūn (Ar. qānūn) 89, 102, 107, 108, 108n, 470
110, 111, 111n33, 111n35, 114, 116–119, 124,
140–141, 429, 442 madhhab (Tr. meẕheb) 12, 20, 62, 66, 71, 74,
ḳānūnnāme 107, 117, 117n, 140, 140n, 367 78, 83, 85, 91, 95, 101, 101n, 110, 114, 115,
kalām (Tr. kelām) 16, 20, 42, 62–72, 76–82, 123n, 129, 157, 158n, 167, 168n, 176, 182,
84–92, 94, 95, 134, 155–157, 159, 162, 165, 182n, 184, 186–189, 210, 245, 342, 360n,
168, 170, 175, 182, 187–189, 201, 203, 210, 403, 429, 433, 435, 443, 486
226, 347n madrasa 16, 35, 40, 41, 41n, 42, 46, 53, 54n,
Kalender (Ar. Qalandar) 93, 202n, 212, 270 55, 62, 63, 63n, 68, 69, 72, 74, 80n, 81–
Kharijites 129, 173, 200, 201 83, 86, 92, 95, 107, 112, 112n, 162, 175, 222,
khutba 238 244, 260, 261n, 264, 268, 269, 276, 285,
Kızılbaş 7, 7n, 11, 11n, 12, 19, 20, 90, 92, 95, 317, 321–323, 326, 328, 345, 352, 406,
117, 129, 129n, 132, 196–199, 203, 206– 454
208, 210–212, 213n, 216, 218, 218n, 219, maḥalle (see also neighborhood) 273, 274n,
227, 310, 311, 316, 317, 323, 330, 379, 383, 297n, 358, 368n, 406n
385, 423–429, 429n, 431–442, 444, 460, Mahdi 10, 462, 473
465, 479, 495, 495n majmūʿa (Tr. mecmūʿa) (see also miscellany)
knowledge 17, 34, 47, 48, 51, 64, 65, 71, 73, 124, 199, 200, 202n, 217, 218n, 220n,
82, 85, 88, 91, 94, 108, 124, 135, 135n, 155, 222n, 242n, 480
156, 157, 158, 159, 160–163, 165, 166, 168– Maliki 20, 38, 39n, 79, 83, 106, 109, 109n, 114,
170, 174–178, 180–183, 185–190, 211, 236, 116, 179, 362, 462n
244–246, 273, 281, 243, 350, 353, 360– Mamluk 2, 6, 7, 11, 11n, 12, 17, 32–41, 44–47,
362, 462, 466, 470 53, 54, 56, 71, 74, 78, 79, 86, 103, 104,
kufr (Tr. küfr) 66, 71, 85–90, 90n, 93, 156, 161, 106–110, 113n, 114–116, 120, 122, 122n,
161n, 166, 167, 171, 173–176, 177n, 180, 181, 123, 127, 136, 137, 141, 155, 164, 167n, 188,
184, 188, 196, 203n, 233, 350, 479 233n, 236, 240, 261n, 272, 345, 346, 349,
Kurd 423, 427n, 430n, 431, 436n, 437n, 438, 352, 405
442 maʿnā 2, 2n, 16, 17, 33, 36, 54, 87, 89, 94, 107,
178, 207, 216, 233, 234, 241, 245, 246,
law 4, 7, 9, 12, 13, 14, 15n, 17, 31, 33, 38, 39, 46, 265, 270, 349, 358, 428, 429
63, 79, 80, 85, 88–91, 102, 105–108, 110, Manichean 214
111, 114, 116, 118, 121, 124, 127, 128, 130, 140, manuscript 18, 46n, 52n, 54, 68, 73, 105n,
140n, 141, 157, 164, 166–168, 177, 177n, 113, 113n, 115, 136, 137n, 138, 138n, 163n,
182, 186, 198, 203, 203n, 240n, 273, 282, 182n, 187n, 199, 199n, 200, 201, 203n,
288–290, 342, 343, 346, 350, 353, 354, 208, 214, 216–218, 220, 221n88, 221n89,
356, 359, 362, 364, 367, 429, 435n, 485 222, 224n, 225n, 227, 232, 241n23,
526 index of general terms

manuscript (cont.) 241n24, 244, 246, 275, muezzin 281, 318, 321, 325, 345, 353, 355n,
276, 331n, 343n, 381, 381n, 383, 384, 358, 359n
396n, 426n, 456, 461n mufti 45, 47, 48, 51, 52, 52n, 93, 103, 112–114,
martyrdom 463, 464 129, 167, 215, 218, 218n, 289, 290, 364,
martyr 462, 464, 469 378, 379
masjid 14, 15, 21, 31, 259n, 260, 260n, 263, Mughal 2, 10, 67, 494n
272, 272n, 273, 273n35, 273n39, 275n, mujaddid 10, 243
282–284, 289, 290, 297, 301, 317, 318, Mujassima 68, 83, 86, 207
341–346, 348, 350, 351, 353–356, 358, mujtahid (Tr. müctehid) 125, 129, 356n, 471
359, 365, 369, 405 mulḥid, pl. malāḥida (Tr. mülḥid) 19, 84, 435
maṣlaḥa 116 muʾmīn 156, 160, 161, 175, 176, 467
al-maṣāliḥ al-mursala 116 munāfiq (see also hypocrite) 349
Maturidi 3, 17, 20, 62, 62n, 63, 68–72, 77, 80, muqallid (Tr. muḳallid) 159, 160–163, 182
83, 86, 95, 102, 109, 114, 134, 135, 156–164, Murji’i 64, 94, 94n, 157, 159n, 200
164n, 167n, 168, 170, 174, 175, 178, 178n, murtadd (see also apostate) 94
179n, 184, 187–189, 201 mutaʾakhkhirūn 66
maẓālim court 106 muṭālaʿa 240, 241
messianic, messianism 10, 347n, 352, 352n, mutaqaddimūn 71
353, 443 Mu‘tazili 3, 39, 64, 79, 83, 84, 156, 158n, 159,
Mevlid 381 160, 161, 161n, 163, 170, 176, 200, 201, 204,
metadox(y) 6, 6n, 196, 196n4, 196n5, 454, 205n, 316
460
Mevlevi 139n, 212, 278n, 402, 412 namāz 172, 274, 341n, 343n, 435
Miḥna 3 namāzcı, namāz sorucı 274, 274n, 345, 354
al-milal wa-l-niḥal 197, 200–203, 203n, 461 naql 44, 64, 65, 71, 83, 85, 95
millet 203, 212, 223, 483, 485 Naqshbandi 62n, 70, 131, 131n, 181, 243, 247,
millet-i İbrāhīm 219 285, 286, 288, 318, 326, 410, 412
miscellany (see also majmūʿa) 218n, 219, neighborhood (see also maḥalle) 14, 18, 183,
219n80, 219n82, 219n84 222n, 272–274, 282, 297, 301, 341, 341n,
Mongol 2, 5, 7, 9, 12, 66, 80, 104, 107, 108, 345, 353, 355, 358, 359, 359n74, 359n76,
164, 459 361, 362, 366–368, 385, 386, 394, 410
moral, morality (see also ethics and ahlāq) network 4, 4n, 236, 240, 278, 287, 290, 308,
17, 79, 140n, 168, 177, 188, 207, 212, 342, 310, 315, 320, 322, 327, 352, 413, 459
346, 348, 350, 352, 355, 357–359, 359n, neẕir 434, 434n, 436n
362–369, 398, 400, 404, 442 nonconformist 18, 308–312, 314, 316, 321,
mosque (see also cāmiʿ) 14, 15, 15n, 16, 326, 327, 330, 332, 426
18, 21, 31, 48n, 116n, 125n, 202n, 206, norms 3, 18, 46, 55, 90–92, 102, 106, 109, 126,
238, 242, 255, 255n, 256, 256n, 257, 140, 188, 189, 262, 359, 361, 364–367,
259–263, 265n, 266–270, 272–282, 377, 387, 410
284–294, 296–301, 317–319, 321, 322, normative 21, 32, 106, 274, 291, 300, 342, 346,
323n, 325, 328, 331, 344, 344n5, 344n7, 348, 349, 355n, 357, 359n, 364, 369, 388
345, 351, 365n, 366, 376–388, 388n, Nusayri 345
390–402, 405, 405n99, 405n101, 407–
414, 454, 470, 481, 482, 482n, 484, orthodoxy 3–6, 6n22, 6n23, 7, 8n, 9, 13,
492 15n, 16, 18–21, 31, 156, 165, 165n, 166,
muʿallim 244, 321 171, 196, 261, 262, 272, 308, 318, 325,
mubtadiʿ (see also bidʿa) 207, 248 327, 328, 331–333, 342, 344, 358, 377,
mudarris 103, 110, 112, 112n, 113, 114, 209, 244, 403, 412, 425, 426n, 454, 460, 491, 495,
248 497
index of general terms 527

orthopraxy 4, 5, 9, 13, 18, 20, 171, 189, 296, public space 14, 283n, 317, 321, 325, 341n,
316, 318, 331, 358 342, 387, 400, 405
puritan 133, 177, 389, 465, 467
patron 18, 112, 120, 177, 209, 209n, 221, 221n,
256, 263–265, 272, 275, 278, 282, 282n, qāḍī al-quḍāt 106
283, 286, 287, 309, 313, 314, 314n, 316, Quran 1, 32, 33, 52n, 54, 70, 82, 84, 87, 89,
330, 390, 392, 394, 404n, 482, 485, 489, 90, 92, 94, 105, 116, 120, 133, 162, 171, 178,
492, 494 208, 222, 235, 236, 238, 243, 247, 248,
patronage 12, 14, 63, 73, 92, 120n, 179, 214, 255, 275n, 281, 283, 289, 321, 324, 331,
255, 261, 262, 263n, 272, 272n, 273n, 275, 360, 362, 404, 451, 456, 470, 480, 485–
275n, 276, 281, 283, 283n, 286, 287, 291n, 488, 491–494
310, 314, 314n, 316, 319, 324, 326, 327,
328, 333, 352, 353, 388, 395, 402n, 407, Rāfiḍī, pl. Rawāfiḍ (Tr. Rāfiżī) 7, 7n, 11, 11n,
410, 412, 454, 455, 490, 493, 494, 497 19, 173, 206, 435
philosophy 44, 63, 64, 66, 67, 71, 72, 76, 77, raḳs 289
78, 80, 164, 201, 214, 226, 236, 471 readers 108, 113n, 115n, 117, 119n, 127, 132, 136,
piety 8n, 10, 15, 42n, 55, 124, 130, 177, 178, 221, 137, 171, 181, 197, 202, 206n, 208, 216, 217,
233, 247, 287, 288, 342, 346, 359, 362, 218, 220, 223, 224, 226, 227, 245n, 246,
363, 369, 376, 381, 404n, 414, 454n, 485, 248, 255, 281, 331, 458, 468, 472
486, 488 rebellion 196, 198, 206, 207, 208, 211, 321,
poetry 54, 73, 78, 78n, 133, 203, 270, 361, 426 347n, 353, 365, 427, 431, 438, 438n, 439,
polemics, polemicist 9, 21, 104, 111n, 159, 161, 440, 451, 456
207, 210n, 219–221, 243, 425, 462, 479, reception 81n, 102, 120, 200, 203, 205n, 216,
495, 497 217, 342, 369
postclassical 16, 66, 84, 155, 156, 164, 178n, recitation 52n, 233, 234, 236–239, 241, 242,
189, 235, 376, 377, 395, 400 246, 247, 248, 360
post-formative 2, 5, 21 Reformation 8–9, 460
prayer 9, 14–18, 31, 33, 85, 89, 90, 132, 171, 172, religion 8, 14, 15n, 34, 37, 63, 70, 82, 88, 89,
205, 221, 232, 232n, 233, 233n, 235–242, 91, 92, 93, 121, 124, 129, 130, 186, 196, 197,
244n, 246–249, 255, 259, 260, 260n, 198, 200, 201, 207, 212, 215, 216, 219, 220,
268, 273, 274, 277–285, 289, 291n, 292, 223, 227, 275, 297, 348, 355, 355n, 356,
296, 297, 316–318, 341–351, 353–369, 362, 381, 385, 389, 427, 429, 443, 456,
378, 380–383, 386–390, 397–402, 407– 471, 479, 480, 482–494, 496–497
409, 412, 413, 452, 480, 481, 484, 485, revelation 2, 70, 71, 94, 238, 241, 455, 483,
487, 491–493, 496 485, 491
preacher 15, 15n, 21, 54, 103, 130–133, 136, 177, ritual 12, 14, 21, 33, 85, 89, 166, 198n, 206,
177n, 185, 215, 234, 255, 260n, 284, 309, 207, 238, 255–257, 261, 265, 272, 288–
318, 319, 321–323, 327, 357, 366, 470 290, 300, 317, 320, 342, 357–360, 362,
procession 380, 387, 400, 409, 413, 492 365n, 381, 383n, 385, 452, 470
Prophet 1, 2, 3, 10, 19, 32, 34, 36–38, 40, 41, royal pavilion 378, 386, 387, 387n, 389, 390,
45, 45n71, 45n74, 47–49, 51, 54, 56, 64, 391, 391n, 398, 399, 399n, 400, 401, 407,
71, 82, 87, 93, 101, 111, 116, 121, 123, 125, 408, 409, 410, 411, 412, 413, 414
125n, 128, 129, 131, 158–160, 167n, 169, Rumi 4, 7, 16, 101, 103, 108, 108n, 110–112, 114,
173, 174, 177n, 180, 185–187, 203, 208, 115, 115n, 118, 119, 134, 138, 141, 156, 184,
213, 236–239, 241–243, 245n, 309, 347, 189, 209, 215, 224, 262, 344, 351n, 352,
349, 366, 381, 382, 437n, 451, 452, 455, 352n, 360, 363–365, 455, 456
457, 458, 462–464, 466–471, 482–486, rural 12, 92, 256n, 318, 321, 424, 438, 439,
489–491, 493, 496 440
Protestant(s) 31, 226, 362
528 index of general terms

Safavid 2, 7, 10, 11, 14, 19, 31, 63, 67, 69, 81, 426n, 429, 435, 435n, 452, 455, 458–462,
90, 93, 109, 109n, 117, 123, 129, 132, 155, 462n, 464, 465, 469, 473, 481, 491, 495,
165, 197, 197n, 199, 203, 204, 207–213, 495n
215–219, 227, 277n, 308, 316, 317, 321, Shi‘i-Sunni relations 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15, 62,
344, 345, 352, 354, 363, 363n, 379, 380, 187, 345, 346, 385, 403, 426n, 427, 444,
383–385, 403, 404, 423–445, 452, 452n, 451, 452, 459, 459n, 464n, 471, 480, 485,
459–461, 465, 473, 479, 480, 481, 483– 487–489, 493, 495, 497
497 Shi‘itization 11, 109, 495
salaf (Tr. selef ) 125 “Shirazi school” 66, 67, 71, 72, 76, 85
Salafi 70, 102, 102n, 103, 179 shrine 14, 287, 288, 314, 316, 333, 412, 412n,
ṣalāṭ 233, 244n, 343n, 355n 459, 459n
samāʿ 37 sin, sinner 111, 139n, 158, 160–163, 169, 171,
scribe 197, 218n77, 218n79, 220, 221n, 225, 172, 174, 177, 179n, 180, 182, 183, 221n,
455, 463 349, 350, 363–366, 463, 467
sect 20, 173, 186n, 187n, 197–201, 201n, 203– sinful (see also fāsiq) 183, 342, 346, 362–
213, 213n, 215–217, 220, 222–224, 225n, 369
226–227, 443, 461 siyāsa 91, 91n, 105–110, 113n, 114–118, 141
sectarianism 8, 11, 19, 20, 90, 91, 164, 165, siyāsa sharʿiyya 17, 101–104, 106–108, 110, 112,
186, 187n, 204, 210, 224, 226, 425–429, 114–116, 119, 120, 130, 131, 137, 139, 141
432, 444, 451, 460, 473, 479, 480, 491, slave (ḳūl) elite 260, 283
496–498 social disciplining 8, 18, 139, 139n, 345, 351,
Seljuk 41n, 122, 164, 204n 358, 362
sermon 9, 260n, 276, 277, 291, 297, 384 soup kitchen (see also ʿimāret) 260, 263,
seyyid 77, 119, 138, 283n, 288, 314, 316, 326, 265, 265n, 268–271, 281, 285, 325, 405,
328, 437, 437n, 484, 486 406
Shafi‘i 17, 20, 38–40, 46, 54, 73, 74, 78, 79, space 14, 14n, 15, 18, 19, 210, 212, 213, 218n,
79n, 83, 87, 87n, 94, 95, 106, 109, 109n, 255–257, 259, 260–262, 265, 268, 270,
114, 116n, 120n, 165, 167n, 168, 174, 175, 273, 277–280, 284–286, 288–292, 296,
179n, 243, 359, 360, 462n, 471 296n, 297, 300, 301, 351, 354, 391n, 400,
shahada 89, 160, 169, 172, 175, 180, 183 413, 472
sharḥ (see also commentary) 35, 233, 236, student 4, 9, 34, 35, 38, 40, 42, 44, 46n, 47,
239n, 243, 244, 246 49, 49n, 50, 53, 55, 63, 67–69, 71, 76,
sharia 3, 15n, 81–83, 87, 89–94, 101–112, 81, 84, 85, 89, 92, 106, 108, 125, 131, 134,
114–116, 118, 120–122, 124–126, 128, 139– 136, 157, 158, 164, 176, 179, 197, 201, 207,
141, 177n, 186, 208, 213, 216, 276n, 288, 268, 270, 285, 285n, 290, 346, 347, 352n,
347, 358, 362, 429, 442, 482–487, 490, 385
492 Sufi 6, 10, 11, 14, 14n, 18, 19, 62, 62n, 66, 92–
shaykh 10, 18, 70, 75, 75n, 78, 78n, 79, 79n, 94, 101, 103, 122, 122n, 124, 133, 137, 139n,
83, 101, 102, 131, 132, 134, 134n, 135, 135n, 159n, 168, 169, 177n, 178n, 181, 185–188,
139n, 181, 185, 186, 214, 222, 222n, 238, 204, 212–214, 219, 224n, 234, 236, 237,
240, 243, 244n, 245n, 255, 270, 272, 281, 240–243, 246–248, 255n, 257, 270, 272,
283, 286, 288, 308–310, 315n, 317, 318, 283n, 284, 286, 288–290, 300, 308–311,
321–328, 330, 331, 347n, 349, 381, 433, 316, 318–320, 323, 326, 328, 330, 330n,
470 353n, 365n, 379, 381, 398, 412, 412n111,
Shi‘i 3, 7, 7n, 10, 11, 19, 20, 31, 34, 34n, 63, 412n113, 423n, 439n, 442, 454, 456, 457,
104, 122, 129, 129n, 165, 173, 190, 200, 459, 460, 468–471, 471n
201, 205, 205n, 206, 208, 211–213, 216, Sufism 6, 9, 12, 13, 64, 92–94, 101, 120, 130,
226, 308, 309, 344, 352, 354, 363, 364, 164, 168, 170, 179, 187, 212, 459, 459n,
379, 383, 403, 404, 423, 423n, 424, 426, 460
index of general terms 529

sultanic 89, 260, 282, 282n, 290n, 291n, 296, tawba 87

319, 324, 324n, 326, 328, 329, 330, 354, tajdīd al-īmān (Tr. tecdīd-i īmān) 88, 167,
356, 367, 376, 376n, 377, 384n, 386, 388, 171, 174, 181, 184
393, 395, 400, 403, 405, 410, 412, 413, taṣawwuf (see also Sufism) 102n, 134n, 243
429, 487, 494 taʿẕīr 128
sunna 1, 2, 3, 3n8, 3n9, 7, 15n, 32, 32n, 33, 35, teacher (see also muʿallim and mudarris)
35n, 40, 42, 47, 54–56, 68, 71, 84, 91, 128, 35, 37, 38, 44, 44n, 46n, 49, 50, 52, 53,
160, 160n, 163, 177n, 182, 186n, 318, 345, 55n, 67, 75, 77, 114, 120n, 135, 177, 201,
347–351, 353, 357, 363, 466–468 243, 244, 246, 321, 463, 470
sunna-minded 15, 15n, 18, 177, 185, 308 tekke 16, 18, 311, 312, 320, 326, 326n, 331,
Sunni revival 63, 130, 201, 201n 412n, 423n
Sunnism 3, 4, 6, 7, 11, 13, 15, 17, 19, 20, 62– teẕkire 54, 76
64, 69–72, 75, 81, 83, 94, 95, 101, 103, 135, theology 9, 17, 63, 63n, 65, 66, 69, 71, 78, 81,
162n, 171, 189, 190, 196, 199, 200, 204– 135n, 155, 157, 158, 160, 163n, 164, 170,
208, 211, 216, 222, 224, 226, 309, 378, 188–190, 198, 201, 203, 203n, 205, 210–
385, 412, 425, 426, 426n, 451–454, 460, 212, 226, 233, 236
461, 464, 465, 472, 473, 489, 491, 497 tobacco 139n, 179, 198, 198n, 219, 219n, 227,
Sunnitization 7, 9, 11–14, 14n, 16, 18, 20, 21, 470
31, 31n, 32, 33, 56, 157, 190, 196, 198, town 31, 104, 106, 119, 227, 281, 283, 291n, 314,
205n, 217, 261n, 272, 273n, 296n, 297, 317, 319–323, 324n, 326, 331, 344, 432,
308–310, 313, 318–322, 326, 331–333, 341, 433, 437n, 441, 443
343–345, 369, 404, 425, 454, 460, 461, tradition 1, 4, 6, 7, 9, 12, 13, 16–18, 21, 34, 34n,
465 35n, 36–40, 44n, 45–48, 50, 50n, 54–56,
syncretism/syncretic/syncretistic 6, 133 63, 64, 65, 68, 79, 85, 91, 93, 102, 107–
109, 115, 117, 120, 131, 140, 141, 157, 159,
şeyhü’l-islām (see also chief mufti) 13, 52, 164, 165, 167, 174, 178, 178n, 184, 190, 199,
69, 109n, 119, 126, 134n, 136, 138, 138n, 201, 204, 208, 214, 219, 223, 224, 233,
207, 214, 214n, 219, 224n, 237, 239, 324, 235, 236–239, 240n, 242–244, 309, 314,
343, 356n, 429, 454, 480 323, 330, 333, 348, 356, 356n, 363, 364,
369, 385, 388, 395, 396, 398, 402, 407,
T-type building 256n, 266, 277, 278, 278n, 412, 424, 443, 453, 458, 459n, 463, 467,
282, 405n 470, 473, 480, 483, 489, 492
ṭabaqāt 21, 35, 35n traditionalist 64, 65, 68, 102, 120, 470
tabarrāʾiyān 452, 452n translation 50n, 81n, 86n, 105n, 109n, 113n,
tābhāne 259, 265, 271, 292 120, 121, 121n, 123n, 124, 127, 132, 133,
tafsīr 52n, 92, 168, 172, 235, 236, 241 133n, 135, 136, 138, 138n, 139, 139n, 181,
taḥqīq (Tr. taḥḳīḳ) 86, 86n95, 86n96, 86n97, 209n, 214, 216, 216n, 218, 220, 224, 225,
91, 155, 155n, 156, 172, 178n, 183, 187, 240, 225n, 226, 233, 239, 245n, 369, 378n,
498n 396n, 451n
tajdīd (Tr. tecdīd) 88, 167, 171, 174, 181, 184, travelogue 223
247, 247n, 251n, 356n Treaty of Amasya 432, 433, 452
takfīr 11n, 82, 88, 90, 167, 167n, 184 Treaty of Belgrade 398
tanāsukh 206 Treaty of Karlowitz 489
taqiyya 87, 452 Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca 403, 405
taqlīd (Tr. taḳlīd) 70, 86n, 91, 155, 155n, 156, Treaty of Zuhab, also Peace of Zuhab 19,
156n, 159, 159n, 161–163, 176–179, 179n, 479–481, 486, 493, 497
187, 189 Tribe 427n, 430–433, 437n, 438, 438n, 439–
taqwā 247, 247n 443
tariqa 131, 177n, 454, 459n, 470n Turcoman 310, 311, 316, 356n, 424, 438, 442
530 index of general terms

typology 261–263, 263n, 266 walāya, wilāya (Tr. vilāyet) 10, 11, 105, 122,
Twelve Imams 10, 129, 203, 309, 423, 432, 184, 186, 272, 364
452, 458–462, 464–466, 469, 473, 488 Wahhabi 102
Twelver Shi‘i 7, 10, 64, 67, 67n, 85, 344 waqf (see also endowment) 10n, 111, 116,
126, 127, 127n, 137, 257, 257n6, 257n7,
uc begleri (see also frontier commanders) 259, 264, 265, 270, 277, 277n, 281, 287,
310, 319n, 327 292, 324, 324n65, 324n68, 325, 329n,
ulama 4, 12, 13, 18, 32n, 62, 64, 69, 71, 74, 78, 459
83, 84, 88–95, 106, 125, 140n, 165, 166, waqfiyya 41, 255, 256n, 257, 270, 277n, 278n,
169, 174, 177, 181, 183, 184, 186, 187, 248, 279, 281, 282, 282n, 283
255, 286, 270, 270n, 309, 318, 380, 403, war 6n, 123, 197, 203, 208, 209, 211, 215, 219,
404, 404n, 412, 431, 439n, 454, 459, 461, 347, 376, 378, 379, 380, 383, 388, 393,
480, 481, 484, 487, 496, 497 401, 402, 403, 404, 436, 452, 479, 482,
Umayyad 19, 48n, 122, 366, 451–453, 453n, 483, 486, 487, 489, 492, 496
455, 457, 458, 458n, 460–462, 464, 467, wird (Tr. vird); pl. awrād (Tr. evrād) 233,
469, 472, 473 236, 240, 241, 241n, 245
unbelief (see also kufr) 4, 31, 66, 71, 87–89, worship 93, 123, 126, 157, 162, 166, 170, 175,
174, 175, 177n, 188, 189, 201, 203, 214, 223, 179, 180, 206–208, 219, 223, 237, 247,
350, 365n, 451, 479, 486, 495 273, 290, 292, 317, 349, 350, 355, 358,
urban 15, 119, 255, 255n, 256n, 260–265, 360, 378, 413, 484, 485
272–275, 275n, 278, 282, 287, 289, 296, wujūb 347, 347n, 348, 349, 349n, 351, 353
296n, 319, 322, 344, 400n, 424, 438, 439,
458n yaqīn 158
ʿurf (Tr. ʿörf ) 83, 90, 91, 92, 108 yasa, yasağ 107, 107n, 108, 108n, 110, 110n,
uṣūl al-dīn 63, 71, 72, 81, 84, 88, 90, 156, 160, 111, 111n, 117, 119
166, 175 yürük 311, 311n, 312, 313, 313n, 328, 332, 332n
uṣūl al-fiqh 42n, 62n, 70, 88, 90, 354
uṣūl al-ḥadīth 35, 41, 41n, 42, 43, 55 zāviye 255–262, 264, 266, 268, 274n, 277,
283n, 287, 290–295, 297, 297n, 301, 314,
village 15, 15n, 21, 31, 77, 187, 314, 315n, 317, 315n, 317, 318, 320–326, 330, 331, 365n
318, 323n, 323n62, 328–331, 342–345, Zangid 12, 164
353, 355, 359n, 362, 369, 440 zindīq (Tr. zındīḳ) 19, 66, 87
zandaqa 6, 13, 94, 175, 196, 203, 204
wājib 160 ẓulm 116, 388