The Hanbali scholar TaqÄ« l-DÄ«n 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 âSunniâ 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 âdefault madhhabâ 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 Godâs 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 Taymiyyaâs rejection of a wide variety of Sufi beliefs and practices and his anathematization of the Andalusian mystic MuḥyÄ« l-DÄ«n Ibn Ê¿ArabÄ« (d. 638/1240) as âShaykh Akfarâ (the most blasphemous master) would have seemed deeply objectionable as well.3
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 YaÅar Ocak and, more recently, Yahya Michot and Mustapha Sheikh have argued that there was even an Ottoman âschool of Ibn Taymiyya,â whose adherents included the famous tenth/sixteenth century Hanafi jurist Birgili/BirgivÄ« Meḥmed Efendi (d. 981/1573) and his eleventh/seventeenth-century followers, 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 âIslamic revivalism,â or âSalafi Islam,â extending from Ibn Taymiyya to the Wahhabis.4 However, other scholars have (in my opinion, rightly) objected to this genealogy on grounds that both BirgivÄ« 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-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya fÄ« iá¹£lÄḥ al-rÄÊ¿Ä« wa-l-raÊ¿iyya (SharÊ¿Ä« governance for the betterment of the ruler and the ruled). Significantly, the Ottoman men of letters who took an interest in this text did not necessarily represent the âmore stringentâ or âmore traditionalistâ among their peers. Rather, what attracted them to this treatise was its authorization of a strong state for a stable society founded on sharÊ¿Ä« principles, for this was also how they saw, or at least wished to see, their state. Just as importantly, the notion of siyÄsa sharÊ¿iyya (governance based on the principles of Islamic law) offered a useful conceptual framework to reconcile the Ottoman dynastic law known as ḳÄnÅ«n with the universalizing norms of the sharia. Of course, Ibn Taymiyya had developed his thoughts on siyÄsa sharÊ¿iyya in the significantly 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 scholarsâ engagement with Ibn Taymiyyaâs al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya in the context of the transformation of Ottoman imperial ideology under the impact of both multifaceted changes in the political arena and growing Sunni confessionalism. While Ottoman Sunnism 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 Taymiyyaâs al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya and the broader corpus of siyÄsa sharÊ¿iyya 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 CöngÄ« (d. 975/1567) and the belle-lettrist and kadi Ê¿ÄÅıḳ Ãelebi (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 KrstiÄ, Nir Shafir, and Evren SünnetçioÄlu 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 continued in the fifth and last section, which examines the afterlives of the works of CöngÄ« and Ê¿ÄÅıḳ Ãelebi during the eleventh/seventeenth century, when the aforementioned Kadızadeli preachers became ascendant in the Ottoman capital. We shall see that notwithstanding the intensification of intra-Sunni debates and the occasional use of Ibn Taymiyyaâs name by Sufis to cast aspersion on their critics, both Ibn Taymiyyaâs al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya and its Ottoman offshoots 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 âSalafiâ (or proto-Salafi) turn among the Hanafi scholars of Rum and more to the fact that the notion of siyÄsa sharÊ¿iyya answered well the practical and ideological needs of the Ottoman ruling elites in a time of social and political transformation.
1 Ibn Taymiyya and the Development of the Idea of SiyÄsa SharÊ¿iyya 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 realities 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, relationship with the Mamluk authorities. On the one hand, he ran to their aide by preaching jihad against the sultanateâs Mongol, Christian, and Shiâite 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 Taymiyyaâs theological and juridical views that landed him in trouble with the Mamluk authorities. By contrast, no such controversy surrounded his political tract, al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya fÄ« iá¹£lÄḥ al-rÄÊ¿Ä« wa-l-raÊ¿iyya, 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 Hassan has successfully challenged this view by showing that Ibn Taymiyya continued to refer to the caliphate as both an ideal form of government and a historical 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 advocating a return to the unified religiopolitical authority and political activism of the Muslim polity in its earliest years.10 Whereas Anjum and Caterina Bori have read Ibn Taymiyya as reconceptualizing âIslamic politicsâ 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 Taymiyyaâs al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya. Even if the Hanbali scholar did not proclaim the caliphate to be moribund in his time, he still de-emphasizes it in this particular treatise, using such terms as âcaliphâ and âimamâ exceedingly rarely and omitting altogether any references to the juristic debates about the conditions 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 âthe exercise of authority for the benefit of the peopleâ (wilÄyata amr al-nÄs) as âone of the greatest religious duties,â and he identifies princes and jurists as the two primary groups of people entrusted with this responsibility.12 Ibn Taymiyyaâs authoritarian and collectivist tendencies are especially evident in his conceptualization of siyÄsa and its relationship to the sharia. A term with a range of meanings, siyÄsa connoted before the modern era: 1) statecraft and the management of the subject people (raÊ¿iyya); 2) âthe discretionary authority of the ruler and his officials, one which they exercise outside the framework of the Shariâaâ; and by extension, 3) punishment, particularly punishment that exceeds the ḥadd punishments prescribed by Islamic law.13 While some jurists had viewed siyÄsa in the second and third senses with a great deal of misgiving and even opposition, Ibn Taymiyya saw a meaningful role for the legal authority 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 fulfilling the Quranic injunction to âcommand the right and forbid the wrongâ (amr bi-l-maÊ¿rÅ«f wa-nahy Ê¿an al-munkar), he particularly supported measures that enhanced the coercive power of the state and protected the collective interests 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 siyÄsa sharÊ¿iyya was not solely the brainchild of Ibn Taymiyya. Several other Shafiâi, Maliki, and Hanbali jurists had also discussed the concept of siyÄsa from the viewpoint of âsharÊ¿Ä« normativityâ before him, but the corpus truly developed in the late seventh/thirteenth and early eighth/fourteenth centuries, when scholars such as ShihÄb al-DÄ«n al-QarÄfÄ« (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 âsymbiosisâ 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 (qÄá¸Ä« l-quá¸Ät), one from each of the four Sunni legal schools; this was a set up that allowed the legal mechanism 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 maáºÄlim or siyÄsa courts proliferated and expanded their jurisdiction to encompass such matters as marriage, 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 siyÄsa sharÊ¿iyya could not have anticipated these later developments (much less condoned 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 sharÊ¿Ä« norms. In the ninth/fifteenth century, scholars critical of the excesses of the Mamluk siyÄsa tradition sought to discredit it by associating it with the yasa of Chinggis Khan. Some, like MaqrizÄ« (d. 845/1442) and Ibn TaghrÄ«birdÄ« (d. 874/1470), even proposed that the word siyÄsa comes from the Persian word se, meaning âthree,â and the Mongol word yasa, because Chinggis Khan had divided his realms between his three sons, turning his yasa, in effect, into âse yÄsa,â or three yasas prevalent in three different realms.19 Tellingly, however, even these more critical commentators found it difficult to reject the siyÄsa tradition completely and often distinguished between âjustâ and âunjustâ siyÄsa, following a formulation first articulated by Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya and repeated in many other works afterwards.20
2 Transplanting the Notion of SiyÄsa SharÊ¿iyya to the Ottoman Context
SiyÄsa had also been a part of the Ottoman legal and administrative vocabulary from at least the ninth/fifteenth century onward. However, as Guy Burak has noted, the âOttoman siyÄsetâ did not have the same meaning as the âMamluk siyÄsa,â since the Ottomans had been, well into the tenth/sixteenth century, much more in tune with the juristic and administrative traditions of the âpost-Mongolâ East (Iran and Central Asia) than with those of Egypt and Syria under the Mamluks. In the Ottoman ḳÄnÅ«nnÄmes, or lawbooks, the term âsiyÄsaâ 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 Chinggisid yasa.21
The âOttoman siyÄsetâ did, nevertheless, have a broader meaning, that of âgovernance,â when it was used in the Ottoman ethics (ahlÄḳ) literature, which was modeled on the Persian âethico-philosophicalâ literature.22 This broader definition of siyÄset 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. 848â850/1444â1446, 855â886/1451â1481). There, citing the authority of âphilosophical worksâ (kütüb-i hikemiyye), the madrasa-trained bureaucrat distinguishes between two types of siyÄset, both of which can potentially lead to an ordered state of affairs in human society: âthat which the philosophers (ehl-i hikmet) call divine governance (siyâset-i Ä°lâhî), and which the people of sharia call sharia,â and that which is issued by rulers using their reason, like the laws of Chinggis Khan, âwhich is called royal governance and law (siyâset-i sultânî ve yasaÄ-ı padiÅâhî) and according to our custom (örf), customary law (örf).â23 It is noteworthy that Ṭursun Beg considered both the sharia and rulerâs 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 mention the Ottoman ḳÄnÅ«n 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 ḳÄnÅ«n and yasa (or yasaÄ) 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 siyÄsa literature before the tenth/sixteenth century. An important conduit of ideas in this regard would have been the students and scholars who traveled between the two realms already during the ninth/fifteenth century.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 Ê¿AlÄ l-dÄ«n Ê¿AlÄ« ṬarÄbulusÄ« (d. after 849/1445), who was a kadi of Jerusalem and one of the earliest Hanafi scholars to draw on the concept of siyÄsa sharÊ¿iyya in his manual for kadis entitled MuÊ¿Ä«n al-ḥukkÄm. ṬarÄbulusÄ« traveled to the then-Ottoman capital Edirne and presented some works to MurÄd II (r. 824â848/1421â1444, 848â855/1446â1451), but not, it seems, MuÊ¿Ä«n al-ḥukkÄm. The text, which would be much cited by later Ottoman writers, is notable by its absence from the Ottoman palace library inventory of 908â909/1502â1504.26 Another scholar whose works dealt with issues of siyÄsa and traversed the Mamluk and Ottoman realms was MuḥyÄ« l-Din ḲÄfiyeci (d. 879/1474). Interestingly, ḲÄfiyeci was Rumi in origin. Born in Bergama in western Anatolia, he had acquired his education during his travels in Anatolia, Iran, and Syria before settling in Cairo, where he gained renown as a versatile scholar and authored, among other works, two epistles, entitled Sayf al-mulÅ«k (The sword of rulers) and Sayf al-quá¸Ät (The sword of kadis). Even though ḲÄfiyeci never returned to the lands of Rum, he maintained a connection with the Ottoman court, or at least with the grand vizier MaḥmÅ«d Pasha (d. 878/1474), and dedicated to him several of his works, including Sayf al-mulÅ«k.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 siyÄsa literature in general and in Ibn Taymiyyaâs al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya in particular. This interest developed in the wake of three major developments. First, the rise of the Safavids in 906/1501 as a rival Shiâitizing 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 âheterodoxâ 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 formulate a stronger response to the âheresiesâ 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 Shafiâi, Maliki, and, to a lesser extent, Hanbali jurists alongside those of the Hanafi authorities.29
A second development that was perhaps even more consequential for the beginning of the Ottoman engagement with the siyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya corpus was the incorporation of Egypt and Syria into the Ottoman realms following the Ottoman victories against the Mamluks in 922â923/1516â1517. 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 fraternized, competed, and sometimes clashed with local scholars of different madhhab affiliations. This experience also exposed the Rumi scholars to the debates among the Syrian and Egyptian scholars about the Ottoman ḳÄnÅ«n, or as the latter scholars often preferred to call it, by way of association with the Chinggisid yasa, âthe Ottoman yasaÄ.â30 Evidence of Rumi familiarity with the anti-yasa/yasaÄ discourse of some Egyptian and Syrian scholars crops up in a variety of texts from this period. For instance, the eminent scholar KemÄlpaÅazÄde, also known as Ibn KemÄl (d. 940/1534), who, as military justice (ḳÄá¸Ä«Ê¿asker) of Anatolia, had accompanied the Ottoman sultan SelÄ«m I during his Egyptian campaign and taken part in Egyptâs first land survey, recycled the Mamluk-era pseudoetymology that derived the word siyÄsa from the âthree yasasâ of Chinggis Khanâs three sons.31 Since KemÄlpaÅazÄde mentioned this etymology in a treatise on the âArabicization of foreign wordsâ rather than in a juristic treatise, it is not clear what greater significance, if any, he assigned to this supposed etymological connection between the yasa and siyÄsa, 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 ḲınalızÄde Ê¿AlÄ« Efendi (d. 979/1572), who condemned the Chinggisid yasa unequivocally in his AhlÄḳ-ı Ê¿AlÄʾī, which he wrote circa 972/1564â1565 while serving as kadi of Damascus. Baki Tezcan has argued that ḲınalızÄdeâs strong condemnation of the yasa also bespoke his ambivalence about the Ottoman ḳÄnÅ«n, 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 ḳÄnÅ«n, 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 KitÄbu Meá¹£Äliḥüâl-MüslimÄ«n repeatedly emphasizes that ḳÄnÅ«ns are made by administrators to meet the needs of their time; they are not âfrom the time of the Prophet, hence it cannot be a sin (günÄh) to change them.â 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, yasaÄ) but also to do his utmost to enforce them âso that people will not say that the Ottoman yasaÄ lasts until the forenoonâ (Osmanlunun yasaÄı hod kuÅluÄa deÄindir dimeyeler).33
Third and last, the growing anxiety among the scholars of Rum about the compatibility of the Ottoman ḳÄnÅ«n 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 ÃivizÄde MuḥyÄ«âd-dÄ«n 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 waqfs, but met stiff resistance on the part of the Ottoman imperial establishment in this regard.34 Far more successful, in comparison, were the efforts of KemÄlpaÅazÄde and EbÅ«âs-suÊ¿Å«d (d. 982/1574), who tried to harmonize the ḳÄnÅ«n with the sharia by working 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
As we shall see below, all three of these trends were relevant to the growth of an Ottoman corpus of siyÄsa sharÊ¿iyya literature in the tenth/sixteenth century and informed the views expressed in this corpus. Still, of the first two texts to be written by Ottoman scholars on the topic, CöngÄ«âs RisÄla fÄ« l-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya (also known as SiyÄsetnÄme) was perhaps a more direct response to the challenges presented to the Ottoman officialdom by Syrian and Egyptian scholars, while Ê¿ÄÅıḳ Ãelebiâs MiÊ¿rÄcüâl-eyÄle ve minhÄcüâl-Ê¿adÄle 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 siyÄsa sharÊ¿iyya corpus.
3 Dede CöngÄ« and His RisÄla fÄ« l-SiyÄsa al-SharÊ¿iyya
The career of KemÄlüâd-dÄ«n Ä°brÄhÄ«m b. BahÅÄ« b. Ä°brÄhÄ«m, known variously as Dede Efendi, Dede HalÄ«fe, Ḳara Dede, or Dede CöngÄ« (on account of his popular 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, CöngÄ« had worked as a tanner before belatedly acquiring 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, Ä°znik, and Kefe (Caffa).36 Since in both Diyarbakır and Aleppo CöngÄ« taught in a madrasa founded by Deli Hüsrev Pasha (d. 951/1544), it is reasonable to think that this vizier of Bosnian devÅirme origin had been among his patrons.37 Another patron might have been Sultan SüleymÄnâs eldest son, Prince Muá¹£á¹afÄ (d. 960/1553), to whom CöngÄ« dedicated another treatise on fiscal matters. In other words, CöngÄ« was not just any provincial mudarris and mufti, but one with significant connections to the Ottoman military administrative elite. CöngÄ«âs commitment to the Ottoman religiopolitical order comes across clearly in the treatise he dedicated to Prince Muá¹£á¹afÄ, whom he addresses as âSultan Prince Muá¹£á¹afÄâ and as âthe inheritor of the office of caliph,â38 but it is more obliquely demonstrated in his RisÄla fÄ« l-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya for reasons that will be discussed below.
Unfortunately, we do not know at what point in his career Dede CöngÄ« penned his RisÄla fÄ« l-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya; the text provides no autobiographical information, and the earliest extant manuscript dates from 1054/1644â1645, that is to say, almost 80 years after the authorâs death.39 It is tempting to think, nevertheless, that CöngÄ« composed his text sometime during or after his stay in Aleppo (952â957/1545â1550), where he must have had many more opportunities to familiarize himself with the Mamluk-era siyÄsa literature. Besides, from an article by T.J. Fitzgerald we learn that while he was serving as mudarris and mufti in Aleppo, CöngÄ« became involved in a major dispute that had the local scholars up in arms about the legitimacy of the fiscal practices that the Ottomans had been trying to establish there. In a fatwa he issued on the dispute, CöngÄ« 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 CöngÄ«âs RisÄla fÄ« l-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya, which is about criminal law, the wider resentment about the Ottoman ḳÄnÅ«n that the controversy revealed may well have provided an important motivation behind CöngÄ«âs decision to pen this treatise.
Since CöngÄ« wrote his text in Arabic, and made little or no attempt to correlate the terms of Islamic juristic discourse with Ottoman administrative terminology, it seems safe to conclude that he was writing primarily for a scholarly audience, comprised of both Rumi and Arab scholars. If CöngÄ« intended with his text to reach out to the Syrian and Egyptian scholars in particular, his decision to frame the discussion around siyÄsa sharÊ¿iyya makes a great deal of sense: SiyÄsa sharÊ¿iyya, 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 downplayed madhhab differences in promoting siyÄsa 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 CöngÄ« 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 writers, 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 AḥkÄm al-sulá¹Äniyya by MÄwardÄ« (d. 450/1058), who was a Shafiâi, al-DhakhÄ«ra by QarÄfÄ«, 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 CöngÄ« chose a text each from the remaining Sunni madhhabs, but his reasons for choosing them might also have been simply the fact that they all dealt with the concept of siyÄsa sharÊ¿iyya.
Strangely, however, Ibn Taymiyyaâs al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya, generally assumed to have been among the sources of CöngÄ«, is actually nowhere referenced.43 Perhaps CöngÄ« found it more prudent to bypass this text because of the controversial nature of its author among the Arab and Rumi scholars he wished to reach. But it is also possible that CöngÄ« had simply not read Ibn Taymiyyaâs 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 CöngÄ«âs epistle, but these ideas were transmitted via other Mamluk-era writers who had read and utilized Ibn Taymiyya rather than through Ibn Taymiyyaâs own works directly. An important connection in this regard was Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, but even more important than him, as far as Dede CöngÄ« was concerned, was the aforementioned Hanafi jurist, ṬarÄbulusÄ«. Indeed, almost the entire introductory section of CöngÄ«âs RisÄla, in which he defines siyÄsa, distinguishes between âjustâ and âunjustâ siyÄsa, and introduces the concept of al-siyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya, was taken from the introduction to the third section of ṬarÄbulusÄ«âs MuÊ¿Ä«n al-ḥukkÄm.45
Differently from Ibn Taymiyya, and in keeping with the Hanafi tradition, in this treatise Dede CöngÄ« uses siyÄsa mainly in the narrower sense of administrative punishment. As the opening quotations from BÄbartÄ« (d. 786/1384) and ṬarÄbulusÄ« make clear, administrative punishments were understood to be harsher than the punishments prescribed by the sharia, as they were introduced with the aim of stamping out âcorruptionâ (fasÄd).46 Citing ṬarÄbulusÄ«, CöngÄ« points out that the topic of siyÄsa is complicated and that Muslims fall into three groups in their position on the topic. One group rejects siyÄsa categorically because they mistakenly believe it to be against the sharia, while another group applies it too liberally and transgresses the punishments prescribed by God (ḥudÅ«d), perpetrating âinjusticeâ (áºulm) and âblameworthy innovationsâ (bidaÊ¿). Only a third group embraces the golden mean by combining siyÄsa and sharia and practicing siyÄsa sharÊ¿iyya, defined as the kind of siyÄsa that serves âsharÊ¿Ä« endsâ (al-maqÄá¹£id al-sharÄ«Ê¿a) and safeguards public order.47
CöngÄ« next sets out to establish the legitimacy of siyÄsa sharÊ¿iyya on the grounds of evidence from the Quran and hadiths (nuṣūṣ al-sharÊ¿iyya) as well as with reference to the legislative deliberations of the four ârightly guided caliphs.â Here, CöngÄ« furnishes textual proofs for the permissibility of specific siyÄsa 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 sharÊ¿Ä« judgments in connection with the idea of the âcorruption of the timesâ (fasÄd al-zamÄn), alluding to the pessimistic view of human history that had also informed Ibn Taymiyyaâs views on siyÄsa. 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 CöngÄ« evokes is al-maá¹£Äliḥ 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 particularly important in the Maliki school of law, but its close cognate in the Hanafi legal school, maá¹£laḥa, had also been of central importance to the efforts of Ottoman jurists like EbÅ«âs-suÊ¿Å«d to legitimate controversial practices such as cash waqfs.50
While modern scholars are in consensus that Dede CöngÄ« was writing all this to legitimate Ottoman ḳÄnÅ«ns, they have struggled to explain why he chose nonetheless not to reference either the Ottomans or their ḳÄnÅ«ns. The word qÄnÅ«n and its plural qawÄnin are used several times in the text, but always in the sense of âprincipleâ or âstandardâ (as in the principle of sharia or qÄnÅ«n al-sharÊ¿), which was the prevalent meaning of the word in the Mamluk context.51 Uriel Heyd has attributed the absence of pointed references to the Ottoman context in the treatise to CöngÄ«âs authorial modesty and reluctance to go beyond the role of compiler.52 Perhaps, however, CöngÄ« wanted to write about administrative justice in the abstract language of jurisprudence, precisely 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/ḳÄnÅ«n tradition. In any case, many of the specific examples of siyÄsa justice that CöngÄ« discusses and condones in this textâfor 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 circumstantial evidence in determining guilt, âthe acceptance of the killing of a few to avert harm to the manyâ (a principle referenced in âthe ḳÄnÅ«nnÄme of Meḥmed IIâ to justify royal fratricide), the execution of âperpetrators of discord (fasÄd) on earth,â and the punishment of âsodomyâ as a capital crimeâhad their place in one fashion or another in the Ottoman ḳÄnÅ«n tradition as it had evolved until the time of SüleymÄn I (r. 926â974/1520â1566). In the Ottoman context, the criminalization of âsodomyâ was a new development, initiated in the reign of SüleymÄn, which might explain why CöngÄ« mentions it multiple times in his treatise.53 Even in those instances in which the specific siyÄsa punishment discussed was not part of the Ottoman penal code, its inclusion in the text could have contemporary relevance. For instance, considering that CöngÄ« was writing in a time of ongoing conflict with the Safavids, as well as of sporadic persecution of Anatolian âKızılbaÅ,â it must not be coincidental that the very first example of siyÄsa punishment that he gives from the beginning of Islamic history is the burning of a group of heretics (zanÄdiqa) by the fourth caliph Ê¿AlÄ« b. AbÅ« ṬÄlib (d. 40/661) on grounds that they believed him to be divine.54 It must also be significant that Dede CöngÄ« does not go into the details of what kinds of siyÄsa punishments he considered âunjustâ or âun-sharÊ¿Ä«,â as this could have brought up controversial aspects of the Ottoman penal codeâfor instance, the substitution of some of the corporal punishments with finesâas examples of âunjustâ or âun-sharÊ¿Ä«â punishments.55
After having legitimated law making by the political authorities, CöngÄ« turns in the next section of his treatise to the question of whether it is legitimate for kadis to practice siyÄsa, namely, to apply the laws and regulations introduced by rulers. This, too, was a critical question, since in the Ottoman legal system kadis were responsible for applying ḳÄnÅ«n 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 ḳÄá¸Ä«Ê¿askers) also presided, the Ottoman rulers actively promoted the kadi courts as the principal venue of justice distribution throughout their realms.56 In this context, it should not be surprising that CöngÄ« answers the question of whether kadis can practice siyÄsa 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 siyÄsa 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, CöngÄ« gives us the contrary view upheld by MÄwardÄ« and QarÄfÄ« that kadis should not meddle in siyÄsa, and he lists nine reasons why these two jurists considered military governors to be equipped with greater powers than kadis to practice siyÄsa and deliver effective justice. In the end, CöngÄ« gives his own view, based on the authority of âthe principal Hanafi sources,â that kadis have also been granted most of these powers.57 Once again, CöngÄ« was tacitly approving of the ways in which the Ottomans administered justice.
To recapitulate, CöngÄ«âs RisÄla fÄ« l-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya 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 Syrian and Egyptian, and to a lesser extent Rumi, scholars about the legitimacy of the Ottoman ḳÄnÅ«n. I have argued above that it was probably in an effort to win over his colleagues opposed to the âOttoman yasaÄâ that CöngÄ« defended the Ottoman ḳÄnÅ«n through the juristic framework of siyÄsa sharÊ¿iyya and avoided making direct references to specific Ottoman institutions. Possibly, it was also his desire to âplay safeâ and avoid unneeded controversy that led him to bypass Ibn Taymiyyaâs al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya while making his arguments. Interestingly, a second Ottoman Rumi writer to take an interest in the siyÄsa sharÊ¿iyya literature slightly later in the same century would opt for a very different strategy, translating Ibn Taymiyyaâs al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya into Turkish and adding extensive (and critical) commentary about the contemporary Ottoman context.
4 Ê¿ÄÅıḳ Ãelebi and His MiÊ¿rÄcüâl-EyÄle ve MinhÄcüâl-Ê¿AdÄle
Es-Seyyid PÄ«r Meḥmed b. Seyyid Ê¿AlÄ«, better known as Ê¿ÄÅıḳ Ãelebi, represents a rather different social and intellectual profile from his older colleague, CöngÄ«. To begin with, Ê¿ÄÅıḳ 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, Ê¿ÄÅıḳ 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 Åeyhüâl-islÄm before eventually settling for an equally frustrating career as a small-town kadi. As Ê¿ÄÅıḳ makes clear in the MiÊ¿rÄcüâl-eyÄle, he took greater pride in his accomplishments as a belle-lettrist, âa poet and a prose-stylist,â than as a kadi.58 In keeping with his penname Ê¿ÄÅıḳ (meaning, literally, lover), his literary oeuvres included a DÄ«vÄn, a ÅehrengÄ«z (âcity thrillerâ), devoted to the beautiful young men of Bursa, and several biographical dictionaries, the most famous of which is his MeÅÄÊ¿irüâÅ-ÅuÊ¿arÄ, a lively tribute to the empireâs 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
There is no indication that Ê¿ÄÅıḳ ever read CöngÄ«âs epistle, so it is impossible to say whether it was that work that first piqued his interest in the siyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya literature. Unlike CöngÄ«, Ê¿ÄÅıḳ had not spent time in the former Mamluk 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, Ê¿ÄÅıḳ describes al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya as a âbook that is small in volume but great in benefit,â and he explains that he decided to translate it to fulfill the Quranic injunction to âcommand the right and forbid the wrongâ and to petition for a more desirable post for himself. Ê¿ÄÅıḳ was writing in 977/1569â1570, one year after he had been dismissed from his office as kadi of Karatova (Kratovo, today in the Republic of North Macedonia), and he was clearly very disillusioned with his career in the Ottoman judiciary. He expresses hope that if SelÄ«m II (r. 974â982/1566â1574) 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 Ê¿ÄÅıḳ 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 SelÄ«m II, Ê¿ÄÅıḳ also addresses the grand vizier Soḳollu Meḥmed Pasha in the conclusion to his translation.62 Soḳollu, to whom Ê¿ÄÅıḳ 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 Ä°smihÄn Sultan (d. 993/1585) were ardent admirers and patrons of the Rumelian Halveti master, Muá¹£liḥuâd-dÄ«n NÅ«reâd-dÄ«nzÄde (d. 981/1574), who was (as discussed in Grigor Boykovâs paper in this volume) a vocal advocate of the state-sponsored version of Sunni Islam.63 Around the years Ê¿ÄÅıḳ translated al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya, Soḳollu had also invited to Istanbul BirgivÄ« Meḥmed Efendi, whose works would later inspire the Kadızadelis, to solicit his words of advice about âhow to eliminate injusticesâ (defÊ¿-i meáºÄlim) in the Ottoman realms.64 Given Soḳolluâs interest in a range of sharia-minded interlocutors, it is not surprising that Ê¿ÄÅıḳ Ãelebi thought the grand vizier might also be interested in his translation of Ibn Taymiyyaâs al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya.
The text that Ê¿ÄÅıḳ presented to SelÄ«m 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 different ways.65 Ê¿ÄÅıḳ claims that he translated Ibn Taymiyyaâs epistle âword for wordâ (bi-Ê¿ibâretihi) 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 Ê¿ÄÅıḳ, 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 âtranslatorâ in religious and political outlook. Even though Ê¿ÄÅıḳ was, in his personal life and cultural sensibility, quite different from the stringent Hanbali scholar, he agreed with Ibn Taymiyya that the proper functioning 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 âauthority verse,â âO you who believe, obey God and the Messenger, if you believe in God, and those in authority among youâ (Q 4: 58â59), and Ê¿ÄÅıḳ 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 Ê¿ÄÅık puts the stress more squarely on rulers as the deputies of the prophets in the post-prophetic age.67
Differently from Ibn Taymiyya, Ê¿ÄÅıḳ 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 ârightly guidedâ 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 âAbbasids, and those that were mere regional emirates or sultanates, like the Ghaznavids, Buyids, or Seljuks. The Buyids, who were Shiâites, are listed among the Muslim rulers who occupied themselves with matters of âjustice and sharia,â whereas âChinggis from among the infidels (kefereden) and Timur from among the oppressors (zalemeden)â 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 âthe office of the caliphate and the protection of the seal of prophecyâ (emr-i hilâfet ve hıfz-ı hatm-i nübüvvet).69 Ê¿ÄÅıḳ was evoking here a Sufi-inflected definition of the caliphate and casting the Ottoman rulers as âcaliphs of God,â who, like the first four caliphs, took their authority directly from God and who united in their person spiritual and temporal power.70 In clear contrast to Ibn Taymiyya, albeit in good company among his Ottoman contemporaries, Ê¿ÄÅıḳ even attributes quasi-mystical qualities to the Ottoman rulers. The recently deceased SüleymÄn I is eulogized as a ruler who had âwon 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.â71 Esoteric themes also predominate in Ê¿ÄÅıḳâs eulogy for SelÄ«m II. Possibly in order to assuage popular misgivings about SelÄ«m, who had acceded to the throne after his father had controversially ordered the execution of two of his brothers, Ê¿ÄÅıḳ writes for several folios about the esoteric properties of the name âSelÄ«mâ and (wrongly) prophesies that the latter would remain on the throne for 40 years.72
The emphasis on the Ottoman dynastic pedigree in Ê¿ÄÅıḳâs text also stands in contrast with the inconsequential place of the dynastic principle in Ibn Taymiyyaâs 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 claims to preeminence in the Islamic world, either. Notwithstanding, Ê¿ÄÅıḳ 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 âsultans of the pastâ were either Chinggisids or Circassians (a reference to the Mamluks), and even the best of them were at the end of the day descendants of Chosroes (NûÅînrevan), 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 Iranâs history as the original homeland of Zoroastrianism, Ê¿ÄÅıḳâs 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, Ê¿ÄÅıḳ does not stress the Ottoman claim to be champions 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 motivations when extolling the Ottoman military victories in general. This is interesting, because the long-standing Ottoman claim to be gÄzÄ«s, 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, Ê¿ÄÅıḳ builds his narrative 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/sixteenth century, when the Ottomans were expanding rapidly, and is thought to have died a slow death thereafter.77 Nevertheless, when Ê¿ÄÅıḳ 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 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 Ê¿ÄÅıḳ 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 âgreat churchâ in Rome.79
Ê¿ÄÅıḳâs 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, Ê¿ÄÅıḳ does not. Rather, he uses Sufi metaphors, as he eulogizes the Ottoman rulers for being the âmeeting place of the two seasâ (mecmaʿüâl-bahreyn) and for uniting the âtwo lightsâ of justice and sharia. He also praises them for having issued âwell-respected kânuns like the resm-i Osmânî.â80 All this indicates that, like the Arab jurists of the tenth/sixteenth century, Ê¿ÄÅıḳ saw the Ottoman ḳÄnÅ«n 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 Ê¿ÄÅıḳ did not actually consider the Ottoman administrative and legal system of his time either as just or as sharÊ¿Ä« as he makes them out to be in his introduction. This critical streak becomes apparent already in Ê¿ÄÅıḳâs 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 Ê¿ÄÅıḳ 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 âknowledge and understandingâ to perform their duties properly, while some others were learned, but did not act in accordance with their learning, disregarded what their âreason and religionâ dictated in return for monetary gain, and justified their unlawful decisions by saying that this is what âthe grandeesâ (ekâbir) demand. Though a kadi himself, Ê¿ÄÅıḳ mocks the false pretensions of corrupt kadis to piety with almost anticlerical overtones. He describes how kadis give themselves airs with their long gowns and unkempt beards in supposed imitation of the Prophet (who, Ê¿ÄÅıḳ assures us, looked nothing like them) and how they use this aura of respectability to have their way with male and female beloveds. In keeping with his çelebi sensibility, Ê¿ÄÅıḳ 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, Ê¿ÄÅıḳ makes the most extensive interpolations on the subject of the public treasury (beytüâl-mâl). These interpolations, which are mostly in the âsupplementsâ (ilhâkât), can be seen as serving two different, and to some degree even contradictory, purposes. On the one hand, a principal concern of Ê¿ÄÅıḳ seems to have been to demonstrate the sharÊ¿Ä« basis of the Ottoman system of land tenure and taxation, and he does so by reproducing the fatwas issued on the topic by EbÅ«âs-suÊ¿Å«d. As the latterâs one-time student and secretary, Ê¿ÄÅıḳ is profuse in his words of praise for EbÅ«âs-suÊ¿Å«d and hails the latter as âthe 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.â83 On the other hand, Ê¿ÄÅıḳ 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, Ê¿ÄÅıḳ draws on his professional experience as a midranking 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 âabusesâ he witnessed during his tenure in Rumeli.85 While some of these âabusesâ must have been the result of officials taking advantage of a monetizing economy to enrich themselves at the expense of the reâÄyÄ, as Ê¿ÄÅıḳ suggests, others were clearly connected to the central administrationâs attempt to alleviate fiscal tensions in a time of rising expenses. A recurring theme in âÄÅıḳâs criticisms is the overtaxation of the subject population. In this, the Åeyhüâl-islÄm EbÅ«âs-suÊ¿Å«d himself was complicit, having ruled all arable lands in the Ottoman Empire to be âroyal demesneâ (arâziyüâl-memleke) and having legitimated on that basis the imposition of âtithing rates higher than the customary 10â¯%.â86 Evidently, however, Ê¿ÄÅıḳ 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 dispossessing the reÊ¿ÄyÄ of their baÅtinas and by overtaxing the Christian peasants until they are forced to flee, avaricious officials are both violating sharÊ¿Ä« norms and causing damage to the public treasury, he argues.87
Another practice that Ê¿ÄÅıḳ blames on greedy officials is the sale of properties belonging to Christian ecclesiastical foundations (kilise evkÄfı). Even though Ê¿ÄÅıḳ accuses the superintendents (nâzır) who sold such waqfs of proceeding without proper authorization, actually, the practices that he criticized were also the result of state action.88 In 1568, shortly before Ê¿ÄÅıḳ penned his transadaptation, the Ottoman government, citing a number of fatwas by EbÅ«âs-suÊ¿Å«d, had declared all Christian waqfs to be null and void. Subsequently, however, after some hard negotiation with the monastic authorities, and again with EbÅ«âs-suÊ¿Å«dâs help, the government had softened its position. Christian waqfs would once again be allowed to function, but under the legal fiction that they were benefiting Christian communities rather than Christian places of worship (which the Åeyhüâl-islÄm had earlier ruled to be impermissible). Following this revised formula, churches and monasteries would also be permitted to âbuy backâ their properties, albeit at considerable cost to these foundations.89 Around the time Ê¿ÄÅıḳ was writing (977/1569â1570), the imperial authorities had already revised their stance, but in various parts of the empire the complex processes of confiscation and resale were still dragging on.90 It was probably this fluctuating state of affairs that enabled Ê¿ÄÅıḳ to present the sale of Christian waqfs as an âabuseâ by individual officials rather than as concerted state action. Even though Ê¿ÄÅıḳ would not necessarily have known of this, Ibn Taymiyya had also played a role similar to EbÅ«âs-suÊ¿Å«d in the confiscation of Christian monastic foundations in the Mamluk sultanate two and a half centuries earlier.91 Hence, there is a delicious irony in the fact that Ê¿ÄÅıḳ presents his criticism of the sale of church waqfs in a translation of a work of Ibn Taymiyyaâs as well as after praising EbÅ«âs-suÊ¿Å«d. Ê¿ÄÅıḳâs remarks on the sale of church waqfs 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, Ê¿ÄÅıḳ did not have much to add to Ibn Taymiyyaâs discussion of penal law. He does, however, make a few omissions in the original text, presumably out of consideration for the sensibility 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 âthe rights of God,â that is to say, a public crime whose punishment is incumbent on the political authorities. Even though Ê¿ÄÅıḳ 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, âIf one Muslim ruler enters the territory of another, and kills that landâs people, is it incumbent on that countryâs people to resist or should they submit?â 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 Ê¿ÄÅıḳâs overwhelmingly Hanafi audience, but more consequential was the possibility 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 Ê¿ÄÅıḳ.93
A third omission of Ê¿ÄÅıḳâs 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 Prophetâs reference to the execution of the habitual wine-drinker to be âabrogatedâ (mansÅ«kh), some other scholars consider the punishment to be still valid, and yet others hold it to be a discretionary punishment to be decided upon by the ruler (taÊ¿áºÄ«r). Ê¿ÄÅıḳ 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, Ê¿ÄÅıḳ translates Ibn Taymiyyaâs harsh prescriptions for the punishment of wine-drinkers, adulterers, and âsodomitesâ 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 sharÊ¿Ä« regulations than to break them. What is perhaps more interesting is that Ê¿ÄÅıḳ also translates faithfully Ibn Taymiyyaâs 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 âpimp.â96 It would seem that Ê¿ÄÅıḳ 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 Ê¿ÄÅıḳ 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 (bidÊ¿a). In the original passage, Ibn Taymiyya first cites the opinions of ShÄfiÊ¿i, Aḥmad, and MÄlik, that âthe initiator of innovations which are contrary to (the precepts in) the Book and the Sunna be put to deathâ; he then adds that âMÄlik and some other jurists allowed that the Qadariyya be put to death, for fear that mischief might spread in the land and not because they are apostates.â After translating this passage, Ê¿ÄÅıḳ comments, âIt is the same with the Kharijites and Revâfız (a derogatory term for Shiâites); [their persecution] is not on account of their apostasy (riddetlerinden) 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 Muslims, the chief mufti, the prop of the religion of the Prophet ⦠the remainder of the müctehids ⦠EbÅ«âs-suÊ¿Å«d, which rules it permissible to enslave the KızılbaÅ women, that the latter are murdered on account of their apostasy.â97 With this interjection, Ê¿ÄÅıḳ not only confirms that in the tenth/sixteenth century some members of the Ottoman learned establishment considered the KızılbaÅ to constitute a different category of âhereticsâ than Shiâites,98 but also that the official Ottoman position on the KızılbaÅ was even harsher than that taken by Ibn Taymiyya on other âmisbelievers.â 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, Ê¿ÄÅıḳâs 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 âstate madhhab.â99 Even though Ê¿ÄÅıḳ himself was not particularly confessionally minded,100 as a member of the Ottoman learned establishment he could hardly avoid the obligatory anti-KızılbaÅ rhetoric of his time. In fact, the reference to EbÅ«âs-suÊ¿Å«dâs fatwa is not the only instance in which Ê¿ÄÅıḳ bows down to anti-KızılbaÅ rhetoric in this text. In his âsupplements,â he also includes a letter purported to have been written by Ê¿AlÄ« b. AbÅ« ṬÄlib, in which the latter praises the second ârightly guidedâ caliph, Ê¿Umar, to critique the âKızılbaÅ,â who accept Ê¿AlÄ« to be their imam but who reject Ê¿Umar as caliph.101
Clearly, Ê¿ÄÅıḳâs MiÊ¿rÄcüâl-eyÄle was less a programmatic endorsement of Ibn Taymiyyaâs vision of siyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya than a somewhat idiosyncratic engagement with it in the early modern Ottoman context. Ultimately, Ê¿ÄÅıḳâs âconstitutionalâ views (his endorsement of a realm of justice beyond the sharia, and his more mystical conception of royal authority) were more âOttomanâ than âTaymiyyanâ; it was more in his critique of specific Ottoman practices that Ê¿ÄÅıḳ turned âTaymiyyan.â Both of these strains of Ê¿ÄÅıḳâs thought had something to do with the shifting social, political, and cultural currents in the late tenth/sixteenth century. For Ê¿ÄÅıḳ was, on the one hand, a vivacious chronicler of an âage of beloveds,â 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 Ê¿ÄÅıḳ was writing, and in the new age of âcrisis and transformation,â 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 SiyÄsa SharÊ¿iyya Texts during the Seventeenth Century
A full discussion of the Ottoman engagement with the siyÄsa sharÊ¿iyya corpus after the tenth/sixteenth century exceeds the scope of this paper. In what follows below, I will instead wrap up the previous discussion by considering the afterlives of Ê¿ÄÅıḳâs MiÊ¿rÄcüâl-eyÄle and CöngÄ«âs RisÄla fÄ« l-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya in the core lands of the Ottoman Empire during the eleventh/seventeenth and early twelfth/eighteenth centuries. This discussion is necessary, because certain changes in the social and political dynamics ended up making the siyÄsa sharÊ¿iyya 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 persistently argued for the emergence of a distinctive âschool of Ibn Taymiyyaâ in the Ottoman lands during this period. According to this scholarship, the primary carriers of Taymiyyan ideas in the Ottoman lands were the Kadızadelis, who were a group of Sunni revivalist preachers, and their followers, who were 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, nevertheless, 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 siyÄsa sharÊ¿iyya literature possibly 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 competing 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, ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde Meḥmed (d. 1045/1635), hit upon Ê¿ÄÅıḳâs transadaptation of Ibn Taymiyyaâs al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya and, after lightly reworking its introduction, submitted it as his own work to MurÄd IV (r. 1032â1049/1623â40).104
The son of a kadi, and the grandson of a devÅirme, ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde Meḥmed had received his early education from a student of the famous tenth/sixteenth-century scholar BirgivÄ« Meḥmed Efendi in Balıkesir but then continued his studies with various other scholars in Istanbul and Cairo. ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde first took up preaching during his brief stint as a disciple of the Halveti Shaykh Ê¿Ãmer 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 preacher and âadvice giverâ also allowed ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde 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 MurÄd PaÅa (d. 1020/1611) and Aḥmed I (r. 1012â1026/1603â17) and was gratified to see his text received by both with great favor.106 Later, ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde also courted Ê¿Os̱mÄn II (r. 1027â1031/1618â22) and submitted to him a tract on horses and horsemanship.107 Still, none of these engagements can compare to the persistence with which ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde courted MurÄd IV, dedicating to him a versified prayer of good wishes (duÊ¿ÄnÄme) on the occasion of his accession to the throne, a versified creed, an anti-Safavid/KızılbaÅ tract, and at least five texts of political advice.108 One of these five tracts of political advice was TÄcüâr-resÄʾil ve minhÄcüâl-vesÄʾil, an expanded translation of Ibn Taymiyyaâs al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya.
ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde Meḥmedâs TÄcüâr-resÄʾil is of particular importance to the debate about the influence of Ibn Taymiyya over the Kadızadelis, as it is the one and only âKadızadeliâ text that we know so far that explicitly references Ibn Taymiyya. The problem is, however, that as mentioned above, this was not actually ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄdeâs own translation but Ê¿ÄÅıḳâs. It could be argued that ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde must have held Ibn Taymiyya in high esteem to want to assume ownership of a translation of the latterâs text, but it should also be remembered that the text ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde appropriated was at least one-third Ê¿ÄÅıḳâs and incorporated various features that were at odds with the original Taymiyyan vision. There is no indication that ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde wanted to strip the text of these later additions; in fact, he left all the âsupplementsâ and digressions of Ê¿ÄÅıḳ intact, and he contented himself with merely changing parts of the introduction to cover up the fact that he was claiming another personâs work. Interestingly, in the process, he ended up omitting not only Ê¿ÄÅıḳâs but also Ibn Taymiyyaâs name, and instead presented himself (âShaykh Meḥmed b. Muá¹£á¹afÄ known as ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄdeâ) as the author of the text.109 Patient readers could still find out that the text was in part a translation of Ibn Taymiyyaâs al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya when they got to the part in which Ê¿ÄÅıḳ announces the end of his translation of the said work and the beginning of the âsupplements.â110
Moreover, with a single exception, discussed below, the changes that ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde introduced to his version of the text were not any more indicative of a hardcore Taymiyyan than Ê¿ÄÅıḳâs transadaptation. For instance, while ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde replaced Ê¿ÄÅıḳâs eulogy of SüleymÄn and SelÄ«m II with a eulogy of MurÄd IV, the new eulogy also played on number mysticism and the esoteric properties of the sultanâs name, just like Ê¿ÄÅıḳâs.111 More remarkable still, ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde inserted into the text a âletter of invitationâ to Islam by an Islamized Alexander the Great. Evidently, ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde was not a stranger to the eclectic universalism 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 ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde submitted to MurÄd 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 KitÄb Sirr al-asrÄr.113 It is only in the texts that he authored for ordinary Muslims that ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde restricted himself to verses from the Quran and excerpts from jurisprudential texts.114 It would seem that the socially bifurcated cultural codes of early modern Ottoman polite society also held for this early eleventh/seventeenth-century preacher: he spoke to the elites in one discursive register and to the commoners in another.
In short, ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde Meḥmed was not quite the uncompromisingly âpuritanical,â âantisyncretistic,â and âanti-elitistâ Muslim reformist that modern scholars have imagined him to be; nor was he any more Taymiyyan in his disposition than, say, Ê¿ÄÅıḳ had been. This having been said, he did insert into his revised version of the transadaptation one passage that would be of interest to scholars looking for Taymiyyan influences in the Kadizadeli milieu. The passage in question discusses the different types of idolatry (Åirk) and is taken from Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyaâs IghÄthat al-lahfÄn min maá¹£Äʾid al-shayá¹Än (Rescuing the distressed from the snares of the devil). Interestingly, ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde does not reveal his source but simply says that he took the text from works of kelÄm. 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, AbÅ« âl-Faraj Ibn al-JawzÄ« (d. 597/1201).115
The reference to Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyyaâs IghÄthat al-lahfÄn is noteworthy, because this Hanbali writer was the most important student of Ibn Taymiyya and because modern scholars who have been convinced of the Kadızadelisâ 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 IghÄthat al-lahfÄn.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 latterâs name, they preferred to give reference 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, BirgivÄ« and Aḥmed RÅ«mÄ« el-Aḳḥiá¹£ÄrÄ« (d. ca. 1041/1632), two passages that seem to be taken from Ibn Taymiyyaâs IqtidÄ l-á¹£irÄá¹ al-mustaqÄ«m (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 considered too controversial a name to be explicitly mentioned in the Rumi context also needs to be qualified: it is true that some works and ideas of Ibn 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-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya into Turkish.120 It could be argued that the Kadızadelis felt more vulnerable than other more âmainstreamâ Ottoman scholars when citing Ibn Taymiyya, because they, too, targeted such popular practices as tomb visitations as bidÊ¿ats, but it has to be said that even in the highly polarized environment of eleventh/seventeenth-century Istanbul, where their critics referred to the Kadızadelis regularly as âfanaticsâ (mutaÊ¿aṣṣıbÄ«n), âhypocritesâ (mürÄʾī), and âdeniersâ (münkirÄ«n), no one associated them with Ibn Taymiyya, except perhaps indirectly in the context of the debates on tomb visitations and the congregational performance of supererogatory prayers.121 Thirdly, Sheikhâs 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 KÄtib Ãelebi (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 âschool of Ibn Taymiyyaâ or even a distinctively âTaymiyyanâ 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 the knowledge of Ibn Taymiyyaâs al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya in the eleventh/seventeenth century. Today we know of only three manuscript copies of ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde Meḥmedâs TÄcüâr-resÄʾil anywhere, as opposed to ten manuscript copies of âÄÅıḳâs MiÊ¿rÄcüâl-eyÄle in Turkey alone.123 It was also only the latter version that was mentioned in KÄtib Ãelebiâs bibliographical compendium Kashf al-áºunÅ«n.124 It is telling, too, that TÄcüâr-resÄʾil was not copied together with other, more popular, works that were written by ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde 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 Arabic originals of Ibn Taymiyyaâs al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya in Istanbul in this period. Currently, Istanbulâs 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. Judging by the codicological evidence, most, if not all, of these copies of the Arabic 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 Åeyhüâl-islÄm FeyżullÄh Efendi (d. 1115/1703), who was a former student and son-in-law of the âthird-generation Kadızadeli leaderâ and preacher VÄnÄ« 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 850/1446â1447 to be presented to a high-placed Mamluk official.125 The grand vizier ÅehÄ«d Ê¿AlÄ« PaÅa (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 ḳuá¹b, also owned three copies of the work, one of which had been copied very early, in 780/1378â1379.126 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. 1115â1143/1703â30), dated 766/1363 and 797/1395, and four copies of the work in the library established by MaḥmÅ«d I (r. 1143â1168/1730â54); two of the copies in MaḥmÅ«dâs library also dated from the Mamluk era, from 744/1343 and 893/1488 specifically.127 The head of the scribal bureaucracy, ReâÄ«sül-küttÄb Muá¹£á¹afÄ Efendi (d. 1162/1749), too, owned a copy, which bears the endowment date of 1154/1741â1742.128
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-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya was fueled in part by their bibliophilia.129 But it cannot have been just the antiquarian appeal of the Mamluk-era SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya copies that recommended the text to the Ottoman readers. The latter must also have been interested in the subject matter, siyÄsa sharÊ¿iyya. What suggests this is the even greater popularity of Dede CöngÄ«âs RisÄla fÄ« l-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya starting slightly earlier. In fact, this decidedly more recent epistle dwarfs Ibn Taymiyyaâs famous work in terms of its popularity with eleventh/seventeenth- and twelfth/eighteenth-century readers in the Ottoman capital. My preliminary research in the database of the Süleymaniye library in Istanbul in the summer of 2019 has revealed over 60 manuscript copies of CöngÄ«âs text, as compared to 12 manuscript copies of Ibn Taymiyyaâs al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya.130 Of course, CöngÄ«âs 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 RisÄla fÄ« l-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya 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 SebzÄ« Seyyid Meḥmed Efendi (d. 1091/1680) sometime in the second half of the eleventh/seventeenth century and represented in Süleymaniyeâs database with some ten manuscript copies, the earliest of which dates from 1121/1709.132
What is interesting is that Dede CöngÄ«âs 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 1054/1644â1645, followed by two other copies, dated 1067/1657 and 1069/1658.133 These were the years when CöngÄ«âs famous progeny, MinḳÄrÄ«zÄde YaḥyÄ (d. 1088/1678), was climbing up the ranks of the Ottoman learned hierarchy to become eventually one of the longest serving Åeyhüâl-islÄms of the eleventh/seventeenth century. This raises the possibility that the text was brought to the attention of the wider public by either MinḳÄrÄ«zÄde or someone else who knew of the family connection between the two men. This possibility is also supported by the fact that the textâs first Turkish translator, SebzÄ«, introduces CöngÄ« as âthe ancestor of MinḳÄrÄ«zÄdeâ (cedd-i MinḳÄrÄ«zÄde) in the preface to his translation of the text.134
Whatever the role of MinḳÄrÄ«zÄde was behind the rise of CöngÄ«âs RisÄla fÄ« l-siyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya from obscurity to fame, there was certainly a broader context to the interest that high-level Ottomans took in the siyÄsa sharÊ¿iyya literature, and more broadly, juristic works on rulership, in this period. From the appointment 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 restless 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 âIslamicâ than earlier Ottoman practices and that allowed for private ownership of land as well as heavier rates of taxation.136 Significantly, Ottoman experimentations with âsharÊ¿Ä« governanceâ continued also in the late eleventh/seventeenth and early twelfth/eighteenth centuries. The Ottoman poll-tax reforms and the short-lived attempt to abolish price ceilings (narh), both of which were instituted by the grand vizier KöprülüzÄde Muá¹£á¹afÄ in 1102/1691, and the abolition of some taxes and fines as bidÊ¿ats in the ḳÄnÅ«nnÄme of Midilli (Mytileni) in 1121/1709 can be mentioned as some pertinent examples.137 As Ekin TuÅalp Atiyas has pointed out, the Ottoman officials did not name specific texts but rather evoked the authority of either âthe shariaâ or âthe books of Islamic jurisprudenceâ when they wanted to explain why they were breaking ways with some of the old Ottoman state traditions.138
A new disinclination to use the word ḳÄnÅ«n 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 Muá¹£á¹afÄ II in 1108/1696 that all Ottoman imperial orders from that point on reference only âthe noble shariaâ and not âcouple the [terms] noble sharia and ḳÄnÅ«n.â139 Of course, not all Ottoman men of letters and statesmen shared this aversion to the use of the word ḳÄnÅ«n, as indicated by the continued references to ḳÄnÅ«n 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 asâif not more vigorouslyâand 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 sharÊ¿Ä« norms first and foremost, and only secondarily with reference to their cumulative dynastic traditions. It was precisely this shift, I would argue, that also explains the main attraction of CöngÄ«âs modest treatise on siyÄsa sharÊ¿iyya to the later Ottomans. CöngÄ« had legitimated the Ottoman ḳÄnÅ«n under the rubric of the Mamluk siyÄsa and without so much as a reference to the Ottoman dynasty, styling it as the kind of siyÄsa that serves âsharÊ¿Ä« endsâ and safeguards public order. Even if CöngÄ«âs original concern had been to intervene in a debate centered in the empireâs 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 empireâs overwhelmingly Rumi ruling elites in the following century. It seems that this particular definition of ḳÄnÅ«n, as rulerâs law in service of the divine law, which could be adjusted to the changing 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 TerzioÄlu, Bir tercüme 247â275. The research for the present article was supported by the European Research Council under the European Unionâs Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2015â2020)/ERC Grant Agreement 648498, âThe fashioning of a Sunni orthodoxy and the entangled histories of confession-building in the Ottoman Empire, 15thâ17th centuries.â Tijana KrstiÄ, Guy Burak, Baki Tezcan, BaÅak TuÄ, Ahmet Kaylı, Ãzgün Deniz YoldaÅlar, Arif Erbil, A. Vahdi Kanatsız, and Evren SünnetçioÄlu gave valuable feedback on this paper. I am grateful to them all. Naturally, I claim sole responsibility for all errors that remain.
For a view of the Hanafi legal school as the âdefaultâ or âsemidefaultâ legal school in Ottoman Egypt, see Ibrahim, Pragmatism, esp. 139, 149â161; for a discussion of the same as the âstate madhhabâ in the Ottoman lands, see Burak, The second formation and Peters, What does it mean.
Bori, Ibn Taymiyya wa-jamÄÊ¿atuhu esp. 23â36; al-Matroudi, The ḤanbalÄ« school; Melchert, The relation of Ibn Taymiyya 146â161.
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-HaytamÄ«; for a study that has qualified this picture with new evidence for Ottoman scholarly awareness of Ibn Taymiyya, see Bori, Ibn Taymiyya (14th to 17th century) 112â120.
Ocak, XVII. Yüzyılda 208â225; ÅimÅek, Les controverses; Ãztürk, Islamic orthodoxy; ÃavuÅoÄlu, The ḲÄá¸izÄdeli, esp. 39â47, 93â100; Lekesiz, XVI. Yüzyıl; Michot, Introduction 1â4, 18â19, 37â39; Sheikh, Taymiyyan influences 1â20; Sheikh, Ottoman puritanism, 93; Sheikh, Taymiyyan taá¹£awwuf; Evstatiev, The QÄá¸Ä«zÄdeli movement and the spread 3â34; Evstatiev, The QÄá¸Ä«zÄdeli movement and the revival 213â243; Currie, Kadızadeli 1â25. Note that Michot and Sheikh reject the âSalafiâ label as anachronistic and inappropriate for both Ibn Taymiyya and the Kadızadelis.
Radtke, BirgiwÄ«s ṬarÄ«qa Muḥammadiyya, 159â174; el-Rouayheb, From Ibn Ḥajar al-HaytamÄ« 303â304; Martı, Birgivî 65â68; Ivanyi, Virtue, esp. 76â82.
Laoust, Ibn Taymiyya 951â955.
Ibid. 952.
Laoust, Essai 278â315.
Hassan, Modern interpretations 338â366; Hassan, Longing 111â115.
Anjum, Politics.
Ibid.; Belhaj, Law and order 401, 409, 420â421; Bori, One or two versions 6â7.
Ibn Taymiyya, al-SiyÄsa 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.
Bosworth, Netton and Vogel, SiyÄsa 693â696; see also Belhaj, Law and order 401â402.
For a discussion of Ibn Taymiyyaâs views on amr bi-l-maÊ¿rÅ«f and its connection to his political thought, see Cook, Commanding right 151â157.
Johansen, Signs as evidence 168â193.
On the earlier history of the corpus, see Massud, The doctrine of siyÄsa; Belhaj, Law and order 402â403. Even though siyÄsa sharÊ¿iyya as a juridical concept was given full force by Ibn Taymiyya, Belhaj points out that the concept was already being used by MuḥyÄ« l-DÄ«n Ibn Ê¿ArabÄ« a century earlier.
Lev, Symbiotic relations; Stilt, Islamic law.
Rapoport, Royal justice 71â102; Rapoport, Legal diversity 210â228; see also Nielsen, Secular justice.
Rapoport, Royal justice 95â96. For a debunking of the claim of Chinggisid influence over Mamluk siyÄsa, see Ayalon, The great yÄsa 107â156.
Rapoport, Royal justice 95â96.
Burak, Between the ḳÄnÅ«n esp. 20â23.
Sariyannis, A history 433â434.
Tursun Bey, Târîh-i Ebüâl-Feth 10â12.
For examples of the interchangeable use of ḳÄnÅ«n and yasa in the Rumi/Ottoman context, see Burak, The second formation 595â597.
For preliminary findings on scholarly mobility in the Ottoman realms, see Ãkten, Scholarly mobility; Burak, The second formation, ch. 4; Karamustafa, Saraydan 55â56; TaÅkömür, Books 395â396. On the roles played by scholars in Mamluk-Ottoman diplomatic relations, see Muslu, The Ottomans esp. 25â28.
TaÅkömür, Books 397; on ṬarÄbulusÄ«âs life and career, see Karaman, Trablusî. MuÊ¿Ä«n al-ḥukkÄm will be discussed further below as one of the primary sources of CöngÄ«âs epistle.
For a study of the life and scholarly contributions of ḲÄfiyeci and the Arabic edition and Turkish translation of his two aforementioned works, see el-Kâfiyeci, Seyfüâl-mülûk; for a discussion of these works, see also Köksal, Fıkıh ve siyaset 159â168. Sayf al-mulÅ«k must have entered the Ottoman palace library after 908â909/1502â1504, since the text does not appear in the inventory made by the librarian Hayreâd-dÄ«n Hıżır âAá¹Å«fÄ« then. On ḲÄfiyeciâs relation to MaḥmÅ«d Pasha and the works he devoted to the latter, which were also transferred to the palace library, see TaÅkömür, Books 398. In the mid-tenth/sixteenth century, ḲÄfiyeciâs ties with the Ottoman world were deemed sufficient for ṬaÅköprüzÄde to include him in his biographical dictionary of the scholars of Rum; see TaÅköprülüzâde, eÅ-Åakââiḳ 118â122.
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, Osmanische Polemik; Ãstün, Heresy; Fleischer, The Lawgiver; Dressler, Inventing; Al-Tikriti, Kalam; KrstiÄ, Illuminated; KrstiÄ, Contested conversions; KrstiÄ, From shahÄda; KrstiÄ, State and religion; TerzioÄlu, Where Ê¿ilm-i ḥÄl meets; TerzioÄlu, How to conceptualize; Burak, Faith; Åahin, Empire 205â213; Ãıpa, The making; Atçıl, The Safavid threat.
It seems that the Ottoman Åeyhüâl-islÄms KemÄlpaÅazÄde and EbÅ«âs-suÊ¿Å«d drew especially on Maliki and Shafiâi works and only secondarily on Hanbali ones in this context. On the verifiable instances of borrowing, see Ãstün, Heresy 240â268; Al-Tikriti, Kalam; for inconclusive evidence about the use of a work by Ibn Taymiyya by the Ottoman scholar and lettrist Ê¿Abduâr-raḥmÄn al Bisá¹ÄmÄ« (d. 858/1454), see Gril, Ãsotérisme 192.
On the scholarly exchanges between Rumi and Egyptian and Syrian scholars during the tenth/sixteenth century, see Winter, Society and religion 185â188; Meshal, Antagonistic sharÄ«Ê¿as; Burak, Faith, law and empire; Burak, The second formation esp. chs. 2â4; Pfeifer, Encounter; see also Pfeiferâs essay in this volume. On the anti-yasa/yasaÄ discourse of the Syrian and Egyptian scholars in this period, see Burak, Between the ḳÄnÅ«n 15â20; for a more nuanced (albeit still critical) assessment of the Ottoman legal system by the Egyptian scholar Zayn al-DÄ«n Ibn Nujaym (d. 970/1563), see Ayoub, Law, empire, and the sultan 31â63.
Interestingly, a later copyist found it appropriate to excerpt this passage right before a copy of CöngÄ«âs RisÄla fÄ« l-siyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya. The excerpt is titled, âSiyÄsa from the RisÄla al-TaÊ¿rÄ«b by Ibn KemÄlpaÅa,â in MS Süleymaniye Kütüphanesi (hereafter SK), MS Esad Efendi 924, 166a.
Tezcan, Ethics 118â120.
For the anonymous authorâs references to his participation in the Egyptian campaign, see Yücel (ed.), Osmanlı devlet, 125; for the other references to Egypt or âthe Arab landsâ (Arabistan), see Ibid., 94â95, 110, 123, 124; for the polemics against ḳÄnÅ«n-minded conservatism, see Ibid., 93â94, 111, 118, 120â121; for references to (Ottoman) yasaÄ, see Ibid., 98, 101â104, 109, 114. Note that Yücel misdates the text to ca. 1046â1050/1637â40; for the correct dating, see Tezcan, The âKânûnnâme of Mehmed IIâ 658â659. The grand vizier addressed in the treatise must have been Rüstem Pasha (d. 968/1561), Semiz Ê¿AlÄ« Pasha (d. 972/1565), or Soḳullu Meḥmed Pasha (d. 987/1579).
Gel, XVI. Yüzyılın; Mandaville, Usurious piety.
Ä°nalcık, Islamization; Akgündüz (ed.), Osmanlı kanunnâmeleri iv, 29â121; Imber, Ebuâs-suÊ¿ud esp. chs. 2 and 5; Buzov, The Lawgiver; on the relationship of ḳÄnÅ«n and sharia more generally, see also Barkan, XV ve XVIıncı asırlarda; Barkan, Kanun-nâme; Heyd, Studies; Repp, R., QÄnÅ«n and sharÄ«Ê¿a; Peirce, Morality tales; Ergene, Qanun and sharia; Peters, Crime and punishment.
On CöngÄ«âs biography, see Akgündüz, Dede CöngÄ«; Ali b. Bâlî, El-Ikdüâl-manzûm 232â235; Atâyî, Hadâik i, 503â505.
Admittedly, Hüsrev Pasha had died a year before Dede CöngÄ« was appointed mudarris in the Hüsrev PaÅa madrasa in Aleppo, but it is possible that the pashaâs family remembered 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 eventful career, it is noteworthy that his tenure as governor-general of Rumeli and then vizier (943â951/1537â1544) overlapped in time with the tenure of EbÅ«âs-suÊ¿Å«d as military justice (ḳÄá¸Ä«Ê¿asker) of Rumeli (944â952/1537â1545). On the pashaâs life, see Ãzcan, Hüsrev PaÅa, Deli.
Dede CöngÄ«, RisÄla fÄ« AmwÄli bayti-l-mÄl 1bâ2a; for a modern Turkish translation in slightly abbreviated form and the facsimile respectively, see Akgündüz (ed.), Osmanlı kanunnâmeleri iv, 217â218, 236â237. This treatise will not be discussed here, as there is no reference in it to either al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya or to any other work that draws on the latter text.
Dede CöngÄ«, SiyÄsetnÄme/RisÄla fÄ« l-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya SK, MS Esad Efendi 3610/6, 156bâ164b (copied in 1054/1644â1645). Because the author does not mention his name within the text, the attribution to CöngÄ« 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 scholars. 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-DÄ«n Ibn Nujaym (d. 970/1563). Ibn Nujaym is identified as the author of RisÄla fÄ« l-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya in three manuscripts preserved in Süleymaniye library (MS Hacı Mahmud Efendi 1097/1, 14a; MS Hüsrev PaÅa 758/3, 29a and MS, ReÅid Ef 1027/13, 128a), while in two others 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-kutubkhÄna al-Khidwiyya al-Mıṣriyya, MS Fiqh ḤanafÄ« 1160; for a description, see Dede Efendi, al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya 18â19. What makes Ibn Nujaym an intriguing possibility is the fact that he was a contemporary of CöngÄ« and had a more nuanced view of the Ottoman imperial order than some other Egyptian scholars of the period. According to Samy A. Ayoub, Ibn Nujaym accepted Ottoman rule to be legitimate, but criticized âthe corruption and abuse of power within it.â He also engaged with the concept of siyÄsa in his Baḥr al-rÄʾiq (The clear sea), albeit in a different manner from the RisÄla fÄ« l-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya. Whereas the treatment of siyÄsa in RisÄla fÄ« l-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya bears a strong imprint of the thought of the Mamluk-era Hanafi jurist ṬarÄbulusÄ« and, to a lesser extent, of the Hanbali jurist Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, Ibn Nujaym took his definition of siyÄsa from MaqrizÄ«. Ibn Nujaym also vehemently rejected the roles played by kadis in the application of siyÄsa in direct contrast to the author of the RisÄla fÄ« l-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya. On Ibn Nujaymâs views on siyÄsa and the Ottoman imperial authority, see Ayoub, Law, empire, and the sultan 54â64; for CöngÄ«âs views, see below.
Fitzgerald, Murder in Aleppo 185, 188, 195â197.
Yılmaz, Caliphate 85.
For the complete list of the sources cited by Dede CöngÄ«, see Köksal, Fıkıh ve siyaset 197â200.
Heyd, Studies in old Ottoman 199; Köksal, Fıkıh ve siyaset 225; Sariyannis, A history 105. Differently 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 sections of the treatise.
To give an idea, no copy of Ibn Taymiyyaâs al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya is mentioned in the 908â909/1502â1504 inventory of the Ottoman palace library; for the facsimile and transliteration of the inventory, see NecipoÄlu et al. (eds.), Treasures ii. Moreover, a preliminary codicological investigation of eleven of the twelve manuscript copies of Ibn Taymiyyaâs al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya 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 125â128.
Dede Efendi, al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya 74â76; cf. ṬarÄbulusÄ«, MuÊ¿Ä«n al-ḥukkÄm 138aâb.
Dede Efendi, al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya 73.
Ibid. 74â76.
Ibid. 83. On the views of Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya on fasÄd, see Belhaj, Law and order 409â412; for near contemporary Hanafi juristsâ use of the same concept to accommodate legal change, see Reinhart, When women went to mosques 119â122; TerzioÄlu, BidÊ¿at, custom; for Shafiâi examples, see Katz, The âcorruption of the times.â
Dede Efendi, al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya 84, 86.
Yılmaz, Caliphate 86; Khadduri, Maá¹£laḥa 738â740; Mandaville, Usurious piety.
Dede Efendi, al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya 75, 84, 86. On the use of âqÄnÅ«nâ in the sense of âprinciple,â or âstandard,â see Burak, Between the ḳÄnÅ«n 7â8 and Ferguson, The proper order 72â74.
Heyd, Studies 202.
Dede Efendi, al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya 77 (death by strangling), 78, 81â82 (punishment of âsodomitesâ), 90â92 (admission of circumstantial evidence), 92â94 (use of torture to force a culprit to admit crime), 103â104 (killing a few in order to avert harm to the many). For the relevant practices in the Ottoman ḳÄnÅ«nnÄmes, see Heyd, Studies 30, 64, 77â80, 102â103, 116â118; Akgündüz (ed.), Osmanlı kanunnâmeleri i, 328; iv, 296â298, 302, 369â370; for a comparison of the punishments prescribed for âsodomitesâ by jurists of different madhhabs as well as by ḳÄnÅ«n, see el-Rouayheb, Before homosexuality 118â128.
Dede Efendi, al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya 77â78. On this anti-ghulÄt report, see Anthony, The caliph and the heretic 161â194.
For a different interpretation, see Midilli, Dede Cöngiânin 241, 244â255.
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 86â125, 311â348. 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 perspective, see Ergene, Local court, ch. 9, Aykan, Rendre la justice 52â86, TuÄ, Politics of honor 185â244 and Baldwin, Islamic law, chs. 2, 3, and 5.
Dede Efendi, al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya 105â120.
ÃÅık Ãelebi, Miârâcüâl-eyâle 55â56.
In addition to Ibn Taymiyyaâs siyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya, Ê¿ÄÅıḳ Ãelebi translated into Turkish the Arabic version of AbÅ« ḤÄmid al-GhazalÄ«âs (d. 505/1111) al-Tibr al-masbÅ«k fÄ« naṣīḥat al-mulÅ«k and MuḥyÄ«âd-dÄ«n Haá¹Ä«bzÄdeâs (d. 940/1534) RawḠal-akhyÄr, which was an abridged compilation of those chapters of ZamakhsharÄ«âs (d. 538/1144) RabÄ«Ê¿ l-abrÄr that deal with rulership. Probably Ê¿ÄÅıḳ chose to translate these works because of their popularity with Ottoman readers.
His teacher, Ê¿Abd al-Raḥīm al-Ê¿AbbÄsÄ« (d. 963/1556), of the Ê¿Abbasid 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 Shafiâi school at a later point in his life. On this scholar, see Ãznurhan, Abbâsî, Abdürrrahîm 5â6 and Pfeiferâs essay in this volume; for the argument that Ê¿AbbÄsÄ« may have been the conduit by which both ÃivizÄde and Ê¿ÄÅıḳ discovered Ibn Taymiyya, see Gel, XVI. Yüzyılın 182.
ÃÅık Ãelebi, Miârâcüâl-eyâle 56â57; for the date of composition, see ibid. 203â204.
Ibid. 232. For another work Ê¿ÄÅıḳ presented to Soḳollu, see Ê¿ÄÅıḳ Ãelebi, Dhayl. For another eulogistic mention of the grand vizier, see ÃÅık Ãelebi, MeÅâʿirüâÅ-ÅuÊ¿arâ iii, 1179.
On Soḳollu and Ä°smihÄnâs patronage of NÅ«reâd-dÄ«nzÄde, see NecipoÄlu, The age 345â368 and Yürekli, A building 159â185.
Atâyî, Hadâik i, 633.
Hagen, Translations 95â134.
ÃÅık Ãelebi, Miârâcüâl-eyâle 57.
Ibn Taymiyya, al-SiyÄsa 18â19, 161/Ibn Taimiyya 12â13, 183; cf. ÃÅık Ãelebi, Miârâcüâl-eyâle 40â41, 183.
ÃÅık Ãelebi, Miârâcüâl-eyâle 41.
Ibid. 42.
On the importance of Sufi themes in tenth/sixteenth-century Ottoman political thought and culture, see Yılmaz, Caliphate.
ÃÅık Ãelebi, Miârâcüâl-eyâle 46.
Ibid. 46â55.
On the limited role of dynasticism under the Mamluks, see Ayalon, MamlÅ«k military aristocracy 205â210; Holt, The position; Levanoni, The Mamluk conception; Richards, Mamluk amirs 36â37; Yosef, Mamluks and their relatives.
ÃÅık Ãelebi, Miârâcüâl-eyâle 42. For broader perspectives on Ottoman royal genealogies in the tenth/sixteenth century, see Flemming, Political genealogies.
For a slightly later Ottoman text that mentions the Ottoman sultansâ devotion to Sunni Islam and the Hanafi madhhab as the first of the 20 qualities that made them superior to other dynasties, see TaÊ¿līḳīzÄde, TaÊ¿līḳī-zÄdeâs ÅehnÄme 116.
GazÄ does, nevertheless, surface as a theme in the treatise of advice Ê¿ÄÅıḳ 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 references to contemporary Ottoman practices. For the references to gazÄ, see ÃÅık Ãelebi, Miârâcüâl-eyâle 211, 213; for the complete treatise, see 211â231; for the original Arabic text and another Turkish translation made in the reign of Meḥmed III (1003â1012/1595â1603), see Ä°hsanoÄlu, Osmanlı askerlik literatürü ii, 686â687.
On the Ottoman aspirations for world conquest during the early part of the long reign of SüleymÄn, see Fleischer, The Lawgiver; NecipoÄlu, Süleyman the Magnificent; Turan, The sultanâs favorite; Åahin, Empire, ch. 6.
Casale, The Ottoman age, ch. 5.
ÃÅık Ãelebi, Miârâcüâl-eyâle 44.
Ibid. 42.
Ibid. 69â79.
Ibid. 84â88.
Ibid. 198â201.
Ibid. 192â198. The documents in question are 1) an âahidnâmeâ sent by the Prophet Muḥammad to the generality of Christians, 2) an âahidnâmeâ sent by the Christians of Damascus and Aleppo to Ê¿Umar b. al-Haá¹á¹Äb (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 confiscate church properties, or use them to build mosques, this document relates directly to Ê¿ÄÅıḳâs critique of the Ottoman confiscation of Christian endowments, discussed below. For differing perspectives on the âcharterâ and its authenticity, see Moritz, Beiträge; Atiya, The Arabic manuscripts; Morrow, The covenants. For other contemporary Ottoman documents that cite the âcharter,â see Acun, Osmanlı Ä°mparatorluÄuânda and FerÄ«dÅ«n Bey, MünÅeʾÄtüâs-selÄá¹Ä«n, SK, MS Ragıp PaÅa 1521, 20bâ21a. The second document included by Ê¿ÄÅıḳ is a version of the so-called âpact of Ê¿Umar.â On the complex history of this document and its multiple versions, see Cohen, What was the Pact of Ê¿Umar? As for the third document, Ê¿ÄÅıḳ says he took it from AbÅ« YÅ«sufâs (d. 182/798) KitÄb al-kharÄj, a text that would become progressively more important for the way the Ottomans understood their land regime in the eleventh/seventeenth century.
ÃÅık Ãelebi, Miârâcüâl-eyâle 201â211.
Imber, Ebuâs-suÊ¿ud 124â125; Greene, The Edinburgh 68.
ÃÅık Ãelebi, Miârâcüâl-eyâle 202â204.
Ibid. 206.
On the âcrisis of the monasteries,â see FotiÄ, The official; Alexander, The Lord giveth; Kermeli, EbÅ«âs-suÊ¿Å«dâs; Kermeli, Central administration; Kolovos, Christian vakıfs. For the fatwas issued on this issue, see EbÅ«âs-suÊ¿Å«d, Åeyhülislâm 163â164, 168â169.
Kermeli, Central administration.
Sariyannis, A history 104â105; on Ibn Taymiyyaâs fatwa on church waqfs, see Welle, The status.
This omission was first pointed out by Köksal, Fıkıh ve siyaset 171; for the original text, see Ibn Taymiyya, al-SiyÄsa 90/Ibn Taimiyya 98.
This omission was first pointed out by Köksal, Fıkıh ve siyaset 171; Ibn Taymiyya, al-SiyÄsa 93/ Ibn Taimiyya 102.
This omission was first pointed out by Furat, SelefiliÄin 221; compare Ibn Taymiyya, al-SiyÄsa 109â110/Ibn Taimiyya 120 and ÃÅık Ãelebi, Miârâcüâl-eyâle 145â146.
ÃÅık Ãelebi, Miârâcüâl-eyâle 144â149.
Ibid. 125â126; cf. Ibn Taymiyya, al-SiyÄsa 76â80/Ibn Taimiyya 79â82.
ÃÅık Ãelebi, Miârâcüâl-eyâle 150â151; cf. Ibn Taymiyya, al-SiyÄsa 119/Ibn Taimiyya 130â131. For a foray into the genealogy of the notion of âperpetrators of mischief in the landâ (sÄÊ¿Ä« bi-l-fasÄd fÄ« l-Ê¿arż), see Aykan, A legal concept.
EbÅ«âs-suÊ¿Å«d actually states this explicitly in one of his fatwas; see EbÅ«âs-suÊ¿Å«d, Åeyhülislâm 174â175. Other jurists in other contexts, however, made the Shiâite-KızılbaÅ distinction differently, as did the political authorities; see Winter, The Shiites 12â20; cf. Imber, The persecution 245.
Burak, The second formation.
Cases in point would be his views on the Buyids, discussed above, and his views on antinomian dervish poets, discussed in Anetshofer, MeÅââirüâÅ-Åuâarâ.
ÃÅık Ãelebi, Miârâcüâl-eyâle 208.
Andrews and Kalpaklı, The age of beloveds 307, 351â352.
See footnote 4. For broader perspectives on the Kadızadelis, see Zilfi, The Kadızadelis 262â265; Zilfi, Politics of piety 146â159; Baer, Honored; Sariyannis, The Kadızadeli movement; TerzioÄlu, Sunna-minded; TuÅalp Atiyas, Sunna-minded trends; Tezcan, The portrait; Shafir, Moral revolutions.
For a detailed discussion of the relationship between the two texts, see TerzioÄlu, Bir tercüme 264â268. For the correction of the identity of ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde Meḥmed who claimed the work (and several other works of political advice), see Tezcan, The portrait 215â229.
Ibid. 197â215, 241â244; for ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde Meḥmedâs Naqshbandi affiliation, see also his poem recorded in SK, MS Yazma BaÄıÅlar 5563, 47a. Until Tezcanâs article, the biography of ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde Meḥmed was based largely on the information provided by Katib Ãelebi, The balance 132â136.
ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde Meḥmed, Nuṣḥüâl-ḥükkÄm sebebüân-niáºÄm 2bâ3a.
Tezcan, The second Ottoman Empire 118â119.
ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde Meḥmed, DuÊ¿ÄnÄme 114bâ118b (written on the occasion of MurÄdâs accession to the throne in 1032/1623); Naáºm fÄ« Ê¿ilmiâl-Ê¿aḳÄʾid 4bâ67a (composed in 1037/1627â1628); NaṣīḥatnÄme 119aâ136a; PÄdiÅÄh-ı Ê¿ÄlempenÄh ḥażretlerine neá¹£Äyiḥ-i kes̱īre 140aâ145a; Naá¹£ruâl-aṣḥÄb ve ḳahruâs-sebbÄb 1aâ48b; Nuṣḥüâl-ḥükkÄm sebebüân-niáºÄm 2bâ70a (composed in 1040/1630â1631); MesmÅ«Ê¿atüâl-neḳÄyih mecmÅ«Ê¿atüân-neá¹£Äyiḥ (composed in 1041/1631â1632); TÄcüâr-resÄʾil ve minhÄcüâl-vesÄʾil. For a critical edition of the DuÊ¿ÄnÄme, see Deniz, Kadızade; for a critical edition of Naáºm fÄ« Ê¿ilmiâl-Ê¿aḳÄʾid, see Karaca, Kadızâde and Büyükkeçeci, Kadızâde; for a modern Turkish publication of another version of the ḳaṣīde, see Ãrekli, Dördüncü Murad.
ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde Meḥmed, TÄcüâr-resÄʾil 12a.
Ibid. 121a.
Ibid. 11aâb.
Ibid. 8aâb. 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; KrstiÄ, Of translation 134â136; Åen, The dream; on the Ottoman versions of the book of advice supposed to have been written by Aristotle for Alexander, see Yılmaz, Caliphate 63â64.
For excerpts from the pseudo-Aristotelian KitÄb Sırr al-asrÄr, see ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde Meḥmed, MesmÅ«Ê¿atüâl-neḳÄyih 8bâ12b.
See, for instance, ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde Meḥmed, RisÄle-i ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde Meḥmed 94bâ103a; RisÄle-i ĪmÄn ve Ä°slÄm 103bâ107b; RisÄle-i á¹¢alÄá¹ 44bâ47a. For an analysis of ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde Meḥmedâs religio-legal writings aimed at a wider audience, see Tezcan, A canon of disenchantment.
ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde Meḥmed, TÄcüâr-resÄʾil 10aâ11a; MesmÅ«Ê¿atüâl-neḳÄyih 110aâ111b; ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde Meḥmed also praises the same work in a letter he wrote to the Åeyhüâl-islÄm HocazÄde Meḥmed, see Tezcan, The portrait 207, 214.
Michot, Introduction; Sheikh, Ottoman puritanism; Sheikh, Taymiyyan influences; Sheikh, Taymiyyan taá¹£awwuf.
Sheikh, Taymiyyan influences 17â19; Ottoman puritanism 128â131.
Sheikh, Taymiyyan influences 12â17; Ottoman puritanism 118â128.
For the relevant scholarship, see footnote 6. Other than the passages identified by Sheikh, the arguments that BirgivÄ« was a crypto-Taymiyyan have been based largely on the misattribution to him of works that were authored by Aḳḥiá¹£ÄrÄ«; for the correction of these misattributions and a discussion of their implications, see Kaylı, A critical study 52â81, 119â125, 137â139, 141â142.
It seems that Sheikh is not aware of the existence of either the MiÊ¿rÄcüâl-eyÄle or TÄcüâr-resÄʾil, or for that matter, the RisÄla fÄ« l-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya, for he lists the âtheology of liberationâ that he finds in Ibn Taymiyyaâs al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya among the factors that would have made the Hanbali scholar an anathema among the Ottomans; see Sheikh, Ottoman puritanism 129â130.
For references to Ibn Taymiyya in the context of the eleventh/seventeenth-century Ottoman debate on tomb visitations, see Ê¿Abdüâl-mecÄ«d SivÄsÄ«, Dürer-i Ê¿aḳÄʾid 81aâ82a; Katib Ãelebi, The balance 93. Of these commentators, SivÄsÄ« (d. 1049/1639) was a learned Halveti shaykh, an ardent supporter of Ottoman Sunnism, and, in the last decade of his life, a vocal adversary of ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde Meḥmed, while KÄtib Ãelebi stood equidistant to both the Kadızadelis and their critics. Notwithstanding their differences, both of these writers 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 âby the generality of the ulema of Egyptâ and died in jail. It was in a very similar manner that the Celveti Sufi master Ä°smaÊ¿Ä«l ḤaḳḳīâBursevÄ« (d. 1137/1725) brought up the name of Ibn Taymiyya to delegitimate the attack against the RegÄʾib and BerÄt prayers in his own time. On this, see Cengiz, Ä°smail Hakkı Bursevî 135.
Bori, Ibn Taymiyya (14th to 17th century) 115â117; see also 112â115 for observations about knowledge of Ibn Taymiyya in other parts of the Ottoman Empire in this period.
ḲÄá¸Ä«zÄde Meḥmed, TÄcüâr-resÄʾil, SK, MS Hacı Mahmud Efendi 1926; Topkapı Sarayı Müzesi Kütüphanesi (hereafter TSMK), MS Hazine 371/1, 1aâ48a; Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, MS Diez A quart 46. This last copy bears a readerâs note dated 1047/1637â1638 (ia), indicating that the work must have been copied before that date. The other copies are undated. Cf. Ê¿ÄÅıḳ, MiÊ¿rÄcüâl-eyÄle TSMK, MS Revan 1610 (copied in 1005/1596â1597); SK, MS Reisülküttab 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, 1bâ94b (copied in 1054/1644); TSMK, MS Hazine 1768/1, 1bâ117a (copied in 1088/1677â1678); Milli Kütüphane, MS A. 8112; SK, MS Åehid Ali PaÅa 1556; SK, MS Ãelebi Abdullah Efendi 51/2, 38bâ217b; Yapı Kredi Sermet Ãifter AraÅtırma Kütüphanesi, MS Türkçe Yazmalar 466/1.
Katib Ãelebi, KeÅf el-zünun ii, 1011.
For the copy, see Ibn Taymiyya, al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya, Millet Kütüphanesi, MS Feyzullah 1290 (copied by âAlÄ« b. SüleymÄn in 850/1446â1447); the text is also listed in FeyżuâllÄhâs endowment deed; Feyzullah Efendi Vakfiyesi, Millet Kütüphanesi, MS Feyzullah 2189, 223a; on FeyżuâllÄh, see Meservey, Feyzullah; Abou-el-haj, The 1703 rebellion; Nizri, Ottoman high politics, esp. ch. 1.
Ibn Taymiyya, al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya, SK, MS Åehid Ali PaÅa 1553/1, 1â76 (copied in 780/1378â1379); SK, MS Åehid Ali PaÅa 1544 (copied by Muá¹£liḥuâd-dÄ«n EbÅ«âl-hayr Aḥmed in Istanbul in áºÄ«âl-ḥicce 1109/1698); SK MS Åehid Ali PaÅa 1543 (previously owned by a certain Ḥüseyin in 1011/1602â1603). On the first of these manuscripts, see Bori, One or two versions; on ÅehÄ«d Ê¿AlÄ« Pasha, see Ãzcan, Åehid Ali PaÅa; Gölpınarlı, Melâmîlik 165â166.
For manuscripts of Ibn Taymiyyaâs al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya 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 MaḥmÅ«d I, see SK, MS Ayasofya 2886/1 (copied in 893/ 1488); SK, MS Ayasofya 2887 (copied in 999/1591); SK, MS Ayasofya 2888; 2889 (copied in 744/1343).
Ibn Taymiyya, al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya, SK, MS Reisülküttap 528. This seems to be a twelfth/eighteenth-century manuscript. Other manuscript copies of the work preserved in Istanbul libraries are SK, MS Yahya Tevfik 270, which is undated but has an ownerâs note dated 1186/1772â1773 and Bayezid, MS 1987, which was inaccessible at the time of research for this paper.
Erünsal, Osmanlılarda kütüphaneler; Sezer, The architecture of bibliophilia.
For a partial list, see Bibliography.
For some copies of the text preserved in libraries in such cities as Cairo and Riyad, see Dede Efendi, al-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya 5â20.
For the Latinized transcription of SebzÄ« Efendiâs translation, see Açık, Dede Cöngîânin; for manuscript copies, see MS SK, Hacı Mahmud Efendi 1914; MS Millet K, A.E. Åeriyye 398 (copied in 1199/1784â1785); MS SK, Hüsrev PaÅa 639/4, 195â244; MS Milli Ktp, A 9124; MS Nuruosmaniye, 203/2; MS Beyazit Devlet K, Bayezit 4790; MS Beyazit Devlet K, Bayezit 4890 (copied in 1150/1737â1738); MS SK, Hacı Mahmud Efendi 1914; MS Nuruosmaniye 4982/1, 1bâ35b (copied in 1121/1709); MS Nuruosmaniye 4892/3, 71â105. For the translations made by Ä°smÄÊ¿Ä«l MüfÄ«d Efendi (d. 1217/1802) and by the Åeyhüâl-islÄm MeÅrebzÄde Ê¿Ärif Efendi (d. 1275/1858), see Akgündüz (ed.), Osmanlı kanunnameleri iv, 122â212; Erten, Tercüme-i Siyâsetnâmeânin tahlîli and Erel, Dede Cöngiâs.
Dede CöngÄ«, SiyÄsetnÄme/RisÄla fÄ« l-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya, SK, MS Åehid Ali PaÅa 2725/55, 254â262 (copied in áºÄ«âl-ḳaÊ¿de 1054/December 1644-January 1645); SK, MS Ragıp PaÅa 639/3, 130bâ142a (copied in 1067/1656â1657); Diyarbakır Ä°l Halk Kütüphanesi, MS 104/2, 24bâ37a (copied in 1069/1658); SK, MS Esad Efendi 924/4, 166bâ187a (copied in 1083/1672â1673).
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 CöngÄ«âs RisÄla fÄ« l-SiyÄsa al-sharÊ¿iyya; for the reference, see Açık, Dede Cöngîânin 8. A recent discovery by Ãzgün Deniz YoldaÅlar, who is currently writing his PhD thesis on MinḳÄrÄ«zÄde, has thrown up new evidence in strong support of this conclusion. The evidence in question is a note made by MinḳÄrÄ«zÄde YaḥyÄ in his copy of Dede CöngÄ«âs supercommentary on TaftÄzÄnÄ«âs commentary on Ê¿Izz al-dÄ«n al-ZanjÄnÄ«âs al-Ê¿IzzÄ« fÄ«-l-taá¹£rÄ«f, and reads: âThis is the supercommentary of the maternal ancestor of this poor slave on the commentary on ZanjÄnÄ« by SaÊ¿düâl-mille veâd-dÄ«n and I am the sinner, YaḥyÄ, son of Ê¿Ãmer (May He forgive both).â See Dede CöngÄ«, ḤÄshiyya Ê¿alÄ sharḥ al-Ê¿IzzÄ« fÄ«-l-taá¹£rÄ«f, SK, MS Murad Molla 1734, 1a. I thank YoldaÅlar for allowing me to share this important finding.
Among the measures of âsocial discipliningâ 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 devrÄn and the Mevlevi semÄÊ¿, 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 pushing the Jews and Christians residing there to the outer skirts of the city. For differing perspectives on these policies, see Baer, Honored; Thys-Åenocak, The Yeni Valide complex; Yıldız, 1660. For an aborted attempt to reform the religious beliefs and practices of Ottoman Muslims circa 1113/1702, see Abou-el-Haj, Formation 51â52, 91â97.
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 règlements fiscaux; Greene, An Islamic experiment; Greene, A shared world 25â29; Kermeli, Caught in between faith and cash; Kolovos, Beyond âclassicalâ Ottoman defterology; on the system implemented in Basra, see Khoury, Administrative practice.
On the 1102/1691 reforms, see Sariyannis, Notes on the Ottoman poll-tax reforms; TuÅalp Atiyas, The Sunna-minded trend 272â276. On KöprülüzÄde Muá¹£á¹afÄâs justification of the reforms on sharÊ¿Ä« grounds, see Defterdar Sarı Mehmed PaÅa, Zübde-i vekayiât 387â389. On the ḳÄnÅ«nnÄme of Mytileni (Midilli), see the studies cited in footnote 136.
TuÅalp Atiyas, The sunna-minded trend, esp. 238â239, 265â272.
Heyd, Studies in old Ottoman, 154â155.
Abou-El-Haj, Power and social order; Tezcan, The second Ottoman Empire esp. 49â58; Darling, A history of social justice, 146â148; Ferguson, The proper order, ch. 6; Sariyannis, A history, chs. 4â8.
On the continued relevance of ḳÄnÅ«n during the twelfth/eighteenth century, see TuÄ, Politics of honor 55â67; on the progressive incorporation of royal edicts into the fatwa texts of Ottoman ulama, see Ayoub, The sulá¹Än says. On the role of state authorities in law enforcement and social and moral regulation in the twelfth/eighteenth century, see also Ergene, Local court; Semerdjian, âOff the straight pathâ; Zarinebaf, Crime and punishment; Zilfi, Women and slavery; Aykan, Rendre le justice; Baldwin, Islamic law; BaÅaran, Selim III.
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