Chapter 12 In Search of the Ancient Law or Kānûn-i Kadîm: Some Notes on Seventeenth-Century Ottoman Political Thought
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Abstract
In the second half of the sixteenth century, people, including members of the ulema, statesmen and poets, started to complain of corruption in Ottoman society. Ottoman classical political thought, inherited mainly from previous Islamic and Turco-Islamic states, relied on principles like daire-i adliye (circle of equity), and erkân-ı erbaa (four pillars). Nonetheless, the Ottoman state entered a period of disorder around the middle of Süleyman the Magnificent’s reign. Many factors account for this, but the focus in this chapter is on the framework of their understanding and interpretation. It is apparent that contemporary Ottoman political thought failed to address all the dimensions of what occurred at the turn of the sixteenth century onwards, but seems to have concentrated basically on administrative measures. Although most writers of reform treatises held the so-called kānûn-i kadîm in great esteem and seemed to have yearned for the ‘golden age’ of the earlier sultans, almost all of them adopted a practical and pragmatic approach in their proposals regarding the rectification of the disorders of their time, not to mention those openly criticizing the established sultanic laws or the kānûn-i kadîm.