1 Ibn Taymiyya and the Development of the Idea of Siyāsa Sharʿiyya under the Mamluk Sultanate

Just as the Ottomans were one of the most successful states to be formed by a Muslim dynasty in the aftermath of the Mongol invasion, Ibn Taymiyya was one of the most novel Muslim thinkers to reflect upon and respond to the 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 sultanate’s Mongol, Christian, and Shi‘ite enemies, and by providing the Mamluk rulers with religious and political counsel. On the other hand, he also angered the Mamluk officials by entering into heated polemics with fellow scholars and was periodically imprisoned.⁶

It was mainly Ibn Taymiyya’s theological and juridical views that landed him in trouble with the Mamluk authorities. By contrast, no such controversy surrounded his political tract, al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya fī iṣlāḥ al-rāʿī wa-l-raʿiyya, written between 711/1311 and 714/1315.⁷ This treatise is widely accepted to be a milestone in the history of Islamic political thought even though the nature of its significance has been construed differently by different scholars. In 1939, Henri Laoust famously argued that with this treatise Ibn Taymiyya had replaced the classical juristic discourse, centered on the institution of the caliphate, with another, centered on the implementation of the sharia.⁸ Recently, Mona 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 “Islamic politics” as a more inclusive realm that was of relevance to rulers and ruled alike, Abdessamed Belhaj has seen him instead as a social conservative whose fear of instability and disorder led him to support an expanded role for the state.¹¹

Arguably, there are insights to be gained from all these approaches to Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya. Even if the Hanbali scholar did not proclaim the caliphate to be moribund in his time, he still de-emphasizes it in this particular treatise, using such terms as “caliph” and “imam” 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 “the exercise of authority for the benefit of the people” (wilāyata amr al-nās) as “one of the greatest religious duties,” and he identifies princes and jurists as the two primary groups of people entrusted with this responsibility.¹² Ibn Taymiyya’s authoritarian and collectivist tendencies are especially evident in his conceptualization of siyāsa and its relationship to the sharia. A term with a range of meanings, siyāsa connoted before the modern era: 1) statecraft and the management of the subject people (raʿiyya); 2) “the discretionary authority of the ruler and his officials, one which they exercise outside the framework of the Shari‘a”; and by extension, 3) punishment, particularly punishment that exceeds the ḥadd punishments prescribed by Islamic law.¹³ While some jurists had viewed siyāsa in the second and third senses with a great deal of misgiving and even opposition, Ibn Taymiyya saw a meaningful role for the legal 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 “command the right and forbid the wrong” (amr bi-l-maʿrūf wa-nahy ʿan al-munkar), he particularly supported measures that enhanced the coercive power of the state and protected the collective interests of the Muslim community.¹⁴ It was for similar reasons that he condoned the use of judicial torture and circumstantial evidence in the conviction of suspected criminals, something that had been opposed by the majority of earlier jurists.¹⁵

It must be pointed out that the notion of siyāsa sharʿiyya was not solely the brainchild of Ibn Taymiyya. Several other Shafi‘i, Maliki, and Hanbali jurists had also discussed the concept of siyāsa from the viewpoint of “sharʿī normativity” before him, but the corpus truly developed in the late seventh/thirteenth and early eighth/fourteenth centuries, when scholars such as Shihāb al-Dīn al-Qarāfī (d. 684/1285) as well as Ibn Taymiyya and his student Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 751/1350) gave it its distinctive form.¹⁶ Significantly, all these jurists lived in the Mamluk sultanate, where there was a high degree of “symbiosis” between the ulama and military officials, and where norms of fiqh and practical considerations of governance were closely conjoined in the actual practice of law.¹⁷ A novel feature of the Mamluk legal system was that they appointed to each major town four chief judges (qāḍī l-quḍāt), one from each of the four Sunni legal schools; this was a set up that allowed the legal 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 maẓālim or siyāsa 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 siyāsa sharʿiyya 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 sharʿī norms. In the ninth/fifteenth century, scholars critical of the excesses of the Mamluk siyāsa tradition sought to discredit it by associating it with the yasa of Chinggis Khan. Some, like Maqrizī (d. 845/1442) and Ibn Taghrībirdī (d. 874/1470), even proposed that the word siyāsa comes from the Persian word se, meaning “three,” and the Mongol word yasa, because Chinggis Khan had divided his realms between his three sons, turning his yasa, in effect, into “se yāsa,” or three yasas prevalent in three different realms.¹⁹ Tellingly, however, even these more critical commentators found it difficult to reject the siyāsa tradition completely and often distinguished between “just” and “unjust” siyāsa, following a formulation first articulated by Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya and repeated in many other works afterwards.²⁰

2 Transplanting the Notion of Siyāsa Sharʿiyya to the Ottoman Context

Siyāsa had also been a part of the Ottoman legal and administrative vocabulary from at least the ninth/fifteenth century onward. However, as Guy Burak has noted, the “Ottoman siyāset” did not have the same meaning as the “Mamluk siyāsa,” since the Ottomans had been, well into the tenth/sixteenth century, much more in tune with the juristic and administrative traditions of the “post-Mongol” East (Iran and Central Asia) than with those of Egypt and Syria under the Mamluks. In the Ottoman ḳānūnnāmes, or lawbooks, the term “siyāsa” was used in the narrower sense of administrative punishment and drew its power not just from the reigning sultan, as in the Mamluk context, but also from the cumulative legal tradition of the Ottoman dynasty, as in the case of the Chinggisid yasa.²¹

The “Ottoman siyāset” did, nevertheless, have a broader meaning, that of “governance,” when it was used in the Ottoman ethics (ahlāḳ) literature, which was modeled on the Persian “ethico-philosophical” literature.²² This broader definition of siyāset also informed the famous discursus of Ṭursun Beg (d. after 896/1491) on law and governance in the preamble to his history of Meḥmed II (r. 848–850/1444–1446, 855–886/1451–1481). There, citing the authority of “philosophical works” (kütüb-i hikemiyye), the madrasa-trained bureaucrat distinguishes between two types of siyāset, both of which can potentially lead to an ordered state of affairs in human society: “that which the philosophers (ehl-i hikmet) call divine governance (siyâset-i İlâhî), and which the people of sharia call sharia,” and that which is issued by rulers using their reason, like the laws of Chinggis Khan, “which is called royal governance and law (siyâset-i sultânî ve yasağ-ı padişâhî) and according to our custom (örf), customary law (örf).”²³ It is noteworthy that Ṭursun Beg considered both the sharia and ruler’s law, including the laws of Chinggis Khan, to be legitimate, even as he emphasized the superiority of the first over the second. Interestingly, Ṭursun does not mention the Ottoman ḳānūn in this passage, even though some of his readers would probably have also thought of it in the same connection, judging by the fact that ḳānūn and yasa (or yasağ) were sometimes used interchangeably in the Ottoman sources of the period.²⁴

Yet the fact that the Ottoman legal tradition had more in common with that in other post-Mongol polities to their east does not mean that Rumi scholars were completely unaware of the Mamluk legal and administrative traditions or of the Mamluk siyāsa literature before the tenth/sixteenth century. An 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 ʿAlā l-dīn ʿAlī Ṭarābulusī (d. after 849/1445), who was a kadi of Jerusalem and one of the earliest Hanafi scholars to draw on the concept of siyāsa sharʿiyya in his manual for kadis entitled Muʿīn al-ḥukkām. Ṭarābulusī traveled to the then-Ottoman capital Edirne and presented some works to Murād II (r. 824–848/1421–1444, 848–855/1446–1451), but not, it seems, Muʿīn al-ḥukkām. The text, which would be much cited by later Ottoman writers, is notable by its absence from the Ottoman palace library inventory of 908–909/1502–1504.²⁶ Another scholar whose works dealt with issues of siyāsa and traversed the Mamluk and Ottoman realms was Muḥyī l-Din Ḳāfiyeci (d. 879/1474). Interestingly, Ḳāfiyeci was Rumi in origin. Born in Bergama in western Anatolia, he had acquired his education during his travels in Anatolia, Iran, and Syria before settling in Cairo, where he gained renown as a versatile scholar and authored, among other works, two epistles, entitled Sayf al-mulūk (The sword of rulers) and Sayf al-quḍāt (The sword of kadis). Even though Ḳāfiyeci never returned to the lands of Rum, he maintained a connection with the Ottoman court, or at least with the grand vizier Maḥmūd Pasha (d. 878/1474), and dedicated to him several of his works, including Sayf al-mulūk.²⁷

Despite these early points of contact, nevertheless, it was not until the tenth/sixteenth century that the Hanafi scholars who were based in Rum began to take a greater interest in the Mamluk siyāsa literature in general and in Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya in particular. This interest developed in the wake of three major developments. First, the rise of the Safavids in 906/1501 as a rival Shi‘itizing dynasty and the flaring up of a full-fledged ideological and military conflict between the Ottomans and the Safavids a decade later infused Ottoman religious and political culture with an unprecedented degree of Sunni confessionalism. It also impressed upon the imperial elites the need to eradicate or at least limit the “heterodox” forms of Islam in the Ottoman lands and to address and correct the divergences between the established Ottoman practices and the universalizing norms of the sharia.²⁸ In their effort to formulate a stronger response to the “heresies” of their time, the overwhelmingly Hanafi-Maturidi scholars of Rum also began to look beyond their own legal and theological traditions and to selectively utilize the arguments of some Shafi‘i, Maliki, and, to a lesser extent, Hanbali jurists alongside those of the Hanafi authorities.²⁹

A second development that was perhaps even more consequential for the beginning of the Ottoman engagement with the siyāsa al-sharʿiyya corpus was the incorporation of Egypt and Syria into the Ottoman realms following the Ottoman victories against the Mamluks in 922–923/1516–1517. In the aftermath of the conquest, prominent Rumi scholars were appointed as kadis, mudarrises, and surveyors to such cities as Aleppo, Damascus, and Cairo, where they 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 ḳānūn, or as the latter scholars often preferred to call it, by way of association with the Chinggisid yasa, “the Ottoman yasağ.”³⁰ Evidence of Rumi familiarity with the anti-yasa/yasağ discourse of some Egyptian and Syrian scholars crops up in a variety of texts from this period. For instance, the eminent scholar Kemālpaşazāde, also known as Ibn Kemāl (d. 940/1534), who, as military justice (ḳāḍīʿasker) of Anatolia, had accompanied the Ottoman sultan Selīm I during his Egyptian campaign and taken part in Egypt’s first land survey, recycled the Mamluk-era pseudoetymology that derived the word siyāsa from the “three yasas” of Chinggis Khan’s three sons.³¹ Since Kemālpaşazāde mentioned this etymology in a treatise on the “Arabicization of foreign words” 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 siyāsa, but some other Rumi scholars who had spent time in the former Mamluk lands differentiated much more sharply between divinely originated and human-made laws and came out clearly against the yasa. Such was, for instance, the case with Ḳınalızāde ʿAlī Efendi (d. 979/1572), who condemned the Chinggisid yasa unequivocally in his Ahlāḳ-ı ʿAlāʾī, which he wrote circa 972/1564–1565 while serving as kadi of Damascus. Baki Tezcan has argued that Ḳınalızāde’s strong condemnation of the yasa also bespoke his ambivalence about the Ottoman ḳānūn, which, however, is not explicitly mentioned in this text.³² Another contemporary Rumi writer who had taken part in the Ottoman conquest of Egypt and who had also spent some time in that province and, subsequently, was more explicit in his criticism of, if not ḳānūn, then of those who invested binding power in it. In his book of advice, written sometime between 962/1555 and 974/1566, and addressed to the grand vizier, the anonymous author of the Kitābu Meṣāliḥü’l-Müslimīn repeatedly emphasizes that ḳānūns are made by administrators to meet the needs of their time; they are not “from the time of the Prophet, hence it cannot be a sin (günāh) to change them.” Clearly, however, the same writer was not oblivious to the reputation of the Ottoman laws; hence, he urged the grand vizier not only to issue new laws (yasak, yasağ) but also to do his utmost to enforce them “so that people will not say that the Ottoman yasağ lasts until the forenoon” (Osmanlunun yasağı hod kuşluğa değindir dimeyeler).³³

Third and last, the growing anxiety among the scholars of Rum about the compatibility of the Ottoman ḳānūn with the sharia during the first half of the tenth/sixteenth century prompted efforts on the part of the leading Ottoman jurists to try to address and reduce these points of tension. Some high-ranking jurists, like Çivizāde Muḥyī’d-dīn Meḥmed (d. 954/1547), tried to accomplish this by undertaking a sustained critique of those Ottoman institutions and practices that they deemed problematic, such as cash 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 Kemālpaşazāde and Ebū’s-suʿūd (d. 982/1574), who tried to harmonize the ḳānūn 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 siyāsa sharʿiyya 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, Cöngī’s Risāla fī l-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya (also known as Siyāsetnāme) was perhaps a more direct response to the challenges presented to the Ottoman officialdom by Syrian and Egyptian scholars, while ʿĀşıḳ Çelebi’s Miʿrācü’l-eyāle ve minhācü’l-ʿadāle was concerned more exclusively with the debates among the Ottoman Rumi elites. In line with their particular concerns, both also highlighted different strands of the earlier siyāsa sharʿiyya corpus.

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

The career of Kemālü’d-dīn İbrāhīm b. Bahşī b. İbrāhīm, known variously as Dede Efendi, Dede Halīfe, Ḳara Dede, or Dede Cöngī (on account of his 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, Cöngī 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, İznik, and Kefe (Caffa).³⁶ Since in both Diyarbakır and Aleppo Cöngī taught in a madrasa founded by Deli Hüsrev Pasha (d. 951/1544), it is reasonable to think that this vizier of Bosnian devşirme origin had been among his patrons.³⁷ Another patron might have been Sultan Süleymān’s eldest son, Prince Muṣṭafā (d. 960/1553), to whom Cöngī dedicated another treatise on fiscal matters. In other words, Cöngī was not just any provincial mudarris and mufti, but one with significant connections to the Ottoman military administrative elite. Cöngī’s commitment to the Ottoman religiopolitical order comes across clearly in the treatise he dedicated to Prince Muṣṭafā, whom he addresses as “Sultan Prince Muṣṭafā” and as “the inheritor of the office of caliph,”³⁸ but it is more obliquely demonstrated in his Risāla fī l-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya for reasons that will be discussed below.

Unfortunately, we do not know at what point in his career Dede Cöngī penned his Risāla fī l-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya; the text provides no autobiographical information, and the earliest extant manuscript dates from 1054/1644–1645, that is to say, almost 80 years after the author’s death.³⁹ It is tempting to think, nevertheless, that Cöngī composed his text sometime during or after his stay in Aleppo (952–957/1545–1550), where he must have had many more opportunities to familiarize himself with the Mamluk-era siyāsa literature. Besides, from an article by T.J. Fitzgerald we learn that while he was serving as mudarris and mufti in Aleppo, Cöngī became involved in a major dispute that had the local scholars up in arms about the legitimacy of the fiscal practices that the Ottomans had been trying to establish there. In a fatwa he issued on the dispute, Cöngī had firmly defended the legitimacy of the Ottoman practice, and the imperial administration had responded to the complaints in accordance with this fatwa.⁴⁰ Even though there is no direct connection between this controversy, which was about fiscal matters, and Cöngī’s Risāla fī l-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, which is about criminal law, the wider resentment about the Ottoman ḳānūn that the controversy revealed may well have provided an important motivation behind Cöngī’s decision to pen this treatise.

Since Cöngī wrote his text in Arabic, and made little or no attempt to 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 Cöngī intended with his text to reach out to the Syrian and Egyptian scholars in particular, his decision to frame the discussion around siyāsa sharʿiyya makes a great deal of sense: Siyāsa sharʿiyya, after all, was a juristic concept that was well known to these scholars; it was also a concept well suited to the madhhab plurality that still prevailed in their circles; in fact, the proponents of the concept had downplayed madhhab differences in promoting siyāsa justice, and especially valued the ability of the political authorities to rise above the confines of the madhhab system.⁴¹

At the same time, however, it could also be said that Cöngī did not do enough to reach out to the non-Hanafi Muslims. The vast majority of the sources he cites in his treatise (a total of 42 works) are by medieval Hanafi-Maturidi 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 Aḥkām al-sulṭāniyya by Māwardī (d. 450/1058), who was a Shafi‘i, al-Dhakhīra by Qarāfī, who was a Maliki, and an unidentified work (probably al-Ṭuruq al-ḥukmiyya) by Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, who was, like his teacher Ibn Taymiyya, a Hanbali. It could of course be symbolic that Cöngī chose a text each from the remaining Sunni madhhabs, but his reasons for choosing them might also have been simply the fact that they all dealt with the concept of siyāsa sharʿiyya.

Strangely, however, Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, generally assumed to have been among the sources of Cöngī, is actually nowhere referenced.⁴³ Perhaps Cöngī found it more prudent to bypass this text because of the controversial nature of its author among the Arab and Rumi scholars he wished to reach. But it is also possible that Cöngī had simply not read Ibn Taymiyya’s work, which was not as widely known in the lands of Rum at the time.⁴⁴ In either case, there is no denying the presence of Taymiyyan ideas in Cöngī’s epistle, but these ideas were transmitted via other Mamluk-era writers who had read and utilized Ibn Taymiyya rather than through Ibn Taymiyya’s own works directly. An important connection in this regard was Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, but even more important than him, as far as Dede Cöngī was concerned, was the aforementioned Hanafi jurist, Ṭarābulusī. Indeed, almost the entire introductory section of Cöngī’s Risāla, in which he defines siyāsa, distinguishes between “just” and “unjust” siyāsa, and introduces the concept of al-siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, was taken from the introduction to the third section of Ṭarābulusī’s Muʿīn al-ḥukkām.⁴⁵

Differently from Ibn Taymiyya, and in keeping with the Hanafi tradition, in this treatise Dede Cöngī uses siyāsa mainly in the narrower sense of administrative punishment. As the opening quotations from Bābartī (d. 786/1384) and Ṭarābulusī make clear, administrative punishments were understood to be harsher than the punishments prescribed by the sharia, as they were introduced with the aim of stamping out “corruption” (fasād).⁴⁶ Citing Ṭarābulusī, Cöngī points out that the topic of siyāsa is complicated and that Muslims fall into three groups in their position on the topic. One group rejects siyāsa 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 (ḥudūd), perpetrating “injustice” (ẓulm) and “blameworthy innovations” (bidaʿ). Only a third group embraces the golden mean by combining siyāsa and sharia and practicing siyāsa sharʿiyya, defined as the kind of siyāsa that serves “sharʿī ends” (al-maqāṣid al-sharīʿa) and safeguards public order.⁴⁷

Cöngī next sets out to establish the legitimacy of siyāsa sharʿiyya on the grounds of evidence from the Quran and hadiths (nuṣūṣ al-sharʿiyya) as well as with reference to the legislative deliberations of the four “rightly guided caliphs.” Here, Cöngī furnishes textual proofs for the permissibility of specific siyāsa punishments. He also provides several more general explanations for why it had been necessary for later rulers to stipulate harsher punishments than what the sharia prescribed. He stresses in particular the mutability of sharʿī judgments in connection with the idea of the “corruption of the times” (fasād al-zamān), alluding to the pessimistic view of human history that had also informed Ibn Taymiyya’s views on siyāsa. Accordingly, the further away Muslims are from the time of the Prophet, the more corrupt they become, thus necessitating the adoption of harsher measures to preserve public order.⁴⁸ A second general principle that Cöngī evokes is al-maṣāliḥ al-mursala, or social benefit, that he says had guided the first four caliphs when they introduced practices that the sharia neither permits nor prohibits, such as writing down the Quran.⁴⁹ As Hüseyin Yılmaz has pointed out, this concept was particularly important in the Maliki school of law, but its close cognate in the Hanafi legal school, maṣlaḥa, had also been of central importance to the efforts of Ottoman jurists like Ebū’s-suʿūd to legitimate controversial practices such as cash waqfs.⁵⁰

While modern scholars are in consensus that Dede Cöngī was writing all this to legitimate Ottoman ḳānūns, they have struggled to explain why he chose nonetheless not to reference either the Ottomans or their ḳānūns. The word qānūn and its plural qawānin are used several times in the text, but always in the sense of “principle” or “standard” (as in the principle of sharia or qānūn al-sharʿ), which was the prevalent meaning of the word in the Mamluk context.⁵¹ Uriel Heyd has attributed the absence of pointed references to the Ottoman context in the treatise to Cöngī’s authorial modesty and reluctance to go beyond the role of compiler.⁵² Perhaps, however, Cöngī wanted to write about administrative justice in the abstract language of jurisprudence, 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/ḳānūn tradition. In any case, many of the specific examples of siyāsa justice that Cöngī discusses and condones in this text—for instance, execution by strangling, the use of torture to extract confessions, the consideration of the criminal record or of the social reputation of the accused as well as the admission of circumstantial evidence in determining guilt, “the acceptance of the killing of a few to avert harm to the many” (a principle referenced in “the ḳānūnnāme of Meḥmed II” to justify royal fratricide), the execution of “perpetrators of discord (fasād) on earth,” and the punishment of “sodomy” as a capital crime—had their place in one fashion or another in the Ottoman ḳānūn tradition as it had evolved until the time of Süleymān I (r. 926–974/1520–1566). In the Ottoman context, the criminalization of “sodomy” was a new development, initiated in the reign of Süleymān, which might explain why Cöngī mentions it multiple times in his treatise.⁵³ Even in those instances in which the specific siyāsa punishment discussed was not part of the Ottoman penal code, its inclusion in the text could have contemporary relevance. For instance, considering that Cöngī was writing in a time of ongoing conflict with the Safavids, as well as of sporadic persecution of Anatolian “Kızılbaş,” it must not be coincidental that the very first example of siyāsa punishment that he gives from the beginning of Islamic history is the burning of a group of heretics (zanādiqa) by the fourth caliph ʿAlī b. Abū Ṭālib (d. 40/661) on grounds that they believed him to be divine.⁵⁴ It must also be significant that Dede Cöngī does not go into the details of what kinds of siyāsa punishments he considered “unjust” or “un-sharʿī,” as this could have brought up controversial aspects of the Ottoman penal code—for instance, the substitution of some of the corporal punishments with fines—as examples of “unjust” or “un-sharʿī” punishments.⁵⁵

After having legitimated law making by the political authorities, Cöngī turns in the next section of his treatise to the question of whether it is legitimate for kadis to practice siyāsa, namely, to apply the laws and regulations introduced by rulers. This, too, was a critical question, since in the Ottoman legal system kadis were responsible for applying ḳānūn as well as sharia and since notwithstanding the alternative venues of justice distribution, such as the Imperial Court and courts of governors-general, where kadis (or ḳāḍīʿaskers) also presided, the Ottoman rulers actively promoted the kadi courts as the principal venue of justice distribution throughout their realms.⁵⁶ In this context, it should not be surprising that Cöngī answers the question of whether kadis can practice siyāsa with an overwhelming yes, albeit a yes uttered by citing others. First, he cites a passage from Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya to the effect that the sharia has not determined limits for how siyāsa is to be practiced; because rulers will introduce laws and regulations in response to the specific conditions of the time, when those conditions change, so can the rules. Hence, in some periods and places kadis may be delegated the functions of military governors, while in other periods and places they may not. Next, Cöngī gives us the contrary view upheld by Māwardī and Qarāfī that kadis should not meddle in siyāsa, and he lists nine reasons why these two jurists considered military governors to be equipped with greater powers than kadis to practice siyāsa and deliver effective justice. In the end, Cöngī gives his own view, based on the authority of “the principal Hanafi sources,” that kadis have also been granted most of these powers.⁵⁷ Once again, Cöngī was tacitly approving of the ways in which the Ottomans administered justice.

To recapitulate, Cöngī’s Risāla fī l-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya was an attempt on the part of a devoted member of the Ottoman learned establishment and a Rumi Hanafi scholar to intervene in the debates that were ongoing among both Syrian and Egyptian, and to a lesser extent Rumi, scholars about the legitimacy of the Ottoman ḳānūn. I have argued above that it was probably in an effort to win over his colleagues opposed to the “Ottoman yasağ” that Cöngī defended the Ottoman ḳānūn through the juristic framework of siyāsa sharʿiyya and avoided making direct references to specific Ottoman institutions. Possibly, it was also his desire to “play safe” and avoid unneeded controversy that led him to bypass Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya while making his arguments. Interestingly, a second Ottoman Rumi writer to take an interest in the siyāsa sharʿiyya literature slightly later in the same century would opt for a very different strategy, translating Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya into Turkish and adding extensive (and critical) commentary about the contemporary Ottoman context.

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

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

There is no indication that ʿĀşıḳ ever read Cöngī’s epistle, so it is impossible to say whether it was that work that first piqued his interest in the siyāsa al-sharʿiyya literature. Unlike Cöngī, ʿĀşıḳ had not spent time in the former 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, ʿĀşıḳ describes al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya as a “book that is small in volume but great in benefit,” and he explains that he decided to translate it to fulfill the Quranic injunction to “command the right and forbid the wrong” and to petition for a more desirable post for himself. ʿĀşıḳ was writing in 977/1569–1570, one year after he had been dismissed from his office as kadi of Karatova (Kratovo, today in the Republic of North Macedonia), and he was clearly very disillusioned with his career in the Ottoman judiciary. He expresses hope that if Selīm II (r. 974–982/1566–1574) is pleased with his translation, he may free him from all administrative duties to devote his time entirely to the composition of literary works, but ʿĀşıḳ was also willing to be examined with the prospect of employment at either the land registry or in the department for the inspection of tax farms.⁶¹ Perhaps because he was not sure of a favorable reception by Selīm II, ʿĀşıḳ also addresses the grand vizier Soḳollu Meḥmed Pasha in the conclusion to his translation.⁶² Soḳollu, to whom ʿĀşıḳ had also devoted other works, was the most powerful Ottoman statesman at the time, as well as an active patron of literature and the arts, and a pious Muslim, whose brand of Sunni religiosity combined a high respect for the sharia with devotion to sharia-abiding Sufism. Soḳollu and his royal wife İsmihān Sultan (d. 993/1585) were ardent admirers and patrons of the Rumelian Halveti master, Muṣliḥu’d-dīn Nūre’d-dīnzāde (d. 981/1574), who was (as discussed in Grigor Boykov’s paper in this volume) a vocal advocate of the state-sponsored version of Sunni Islam.⁶³ Around the years ʿĀşıḳ translated al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, Soḳollu had also invited to Istanbul Birgivī Meḥmed Efendi, whose works would later inspire the Kadızadelis, to solicit his words of advice about “how to eliminate injustices” (defʿ-i meẓālim) in the Ottoman realms.⁶⁴ Given Soḳollu’s interest in a range of sharia-minded interlocutors, it is not surprising that ʿĀşıḳ Çelebi thought the grand vizier might also be interested in his translation of Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya.

The text that ʿĀşıḳ presented to Selīm and Soḳollu for approval, however, was more than a simple translation. In the early modern Ottoman world of letters, translators played a role more akin to that of an author, replacing the original preface, and often also the original title of the work, with one of their own, and depending on their target audience, their own intentions, and the conventions of the genre, they could translate the source text in markedly different ways.⁶⁵ ʿĀşıḳ claims that he translated Ibn Taymiyya’s epistle “word for word” (bi-ʿibâretihi) and without embellishing it with verses or rhymed prose.⁶⁶ In fact, his was not a literal translation but rather a transadaptation, which enriched the content with additional material. The sections added by ʿĀşıḳ, including his introduction and conclusion, as well as the excursuses on kadis and kadiship, the land regime, fiscal practices, and the art of warfare, are almost as long as the original text, and significantly alter the overall impression of the work.

The introduction is revealing of both similarities and differences between the author and the “translator” in religious and political outlook. Even though ʿĀşıḳ was, in his personal life and cultural sensibility, quite different from the stringent Hanbali scholar, he agreed with Ibn Taymiyya that the proper 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 “authority verse,” “O you who believe, obey God and the Messenger, if you believe in God, and those in authority among you” (Q 4: 58–59), and ʿĀşıḳ also incorporates this section into his own introduction. For both men, figures of authority comprised both the military ruling elites and scholars, even though in the introduction to his transadaptation ʿĀşık puts the stress more squarely on rulers as the deputies of the prophets in the post-prophetic age.⁶⁷

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

The emphasis on the Ottoman dynastic pedigree in ʿĀşıḳ’s text also stands in contrast with the inconsequential place of the dynastic principle in Ibn Taymiyya’s original epistle as well as in Mamluk political culture at large.⁷³ Actually, genealogy was not one of the strong points of the Ottomans in their claims to preeminence in the Islamic world, either. Notwithstanding, ʿĀşıḳ asserts categorically, if vaguely, that the Ottomans come from a line of prophets and do not have any fire-worshippers among their ancestors, whereas all the other “sultans of the past” were either Chinggisids or Circassians (a reference to the Mamluks), and even the best of them were at the end of the day descendants of Chosroes (Nûşînrevan), who was a follower of Zoroaster and a fire-worshiper.⁷⁴ The underlying message was that the Ottomans are and have always been better, purer Muslims than other dynasties. Even though the Safavids are not directly referenced, given their rule over Iran, and given Iran’s history as the original homeland of Zoroastrianism, ʿĀşıḳ’s division of royal houses into those that descended from the monotheistic prophets and those that descended from the followers of Zoroaster and fire-worshippers must have been colored, to a large degree, by the ongoing Ottoman-Safavid rivalry.

Otherwise, however, ʿĀşıḳ does not stress the Ottoman claim to be 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 gāzīs, waging war in the name of Islam, would have fit well into a Taymiyyan framework, in which jihad is one of the primary duties of a Muslim ruler.⁷⁶ Instead, ʿĀşıḳ builds his 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 ʿĀşıḳ was writing, the Ottomans were still actively trying to extend their influence over distant territories by using the instruments of diplomacy and trade, and Soḳollu was contemplating such ambitious projects as building a canal between the Don and Volga Rivers and over the Suez to connect with the Muslim communities that lived in the steppes north of the Black Sea and in the Indian Ocean.⁷⁸ ʿĀşıḳ stresses the continuing Ottoman claims to world dominion by hyperbolically writing of the Ottoman arrows reaching as far east as Eastern Turkistan (Mâçîn) and the Indus valley (Sind) and as far west as Rome. It is only at the end of a long list of victories and conquests that he signals the Ottoman championship of Islam with a reference to the (fancied) destruction of the “great church” in Rome.⁷⁹

ʿĀşıḳ’s eulogy of the Ottomans comes closer to the Taymiyyan line when he praises the Ottomans for their devotion to justice and the sharia. Even here, however, there is an important difference between the two writers. Whereas Ibn Taymiyya categorically rejects the possibility of justice outside the bounds of the sharia, ʿĀşıḳ does not. Rather, he uses Sufi metaphors, as he eulogizes the Ottoman rulers for being the “meeting place of the two seas” (mecmaʿü’l-bahreyn) and for uniting the “two lights” of justice and sharia. He also praises them for having issued “well-respected kânuns like the resm-i Osmânî.”⁸⁰ All this indicates that, like the Arab jurists of the tenth/sixteenth century, ʿĀşıḳ saw the Ottoman ḳānūn as representing a form of justice beyond the sharia, but he differed from them in that he saw this in a positive light.

As we read the later sections of the text, however, it becomes apparent that ʿĀşıḳ did not actually consider the Ottoman administrative and legal system of his time either as just or as sharʿī as he makes them out to be in his introduction. This critical streak becomes apparent already in ʿĀşıḳ’s translation of the first chapter of Ibn Taymiyya regarding the appointment of the right people to public offices. After a fairly conventional discussion of what Hanafi jurists have said about the permissibility of serving as kadi,⁸¹ ʿĀşıḳ provides a sharply critical account of the Ottoman judiciary of his time. According to him, some of the kadis of his time lacked the requisite “knowledge and understanding” to perform their duties properly, while some others were learned, but did not act in accordance with their learning, disregarded what their “reason and religion” dictated in return for monetary gain, and justified their unlawful decisions by saying that this is what “the grandees” (ekâbir) demand. Though a kadi himself, ʿĀşıḳ mocks the false pretensions of corrupt kadis to piety with almost anticlerical overtones. He describes how kadis give themselves airs with their long gowns and unkempt beards in supposed imitation of the Prophet (who, ʿĀşıḳ assures us, looked nothing like them) and how they use this aura of respectability to have their way with male and female beloveds. In keeping with his çelebi sensibility, ʿĀşıḳ ends this discussion on a humorous note with a couplet about how he would like the same treatment but is always passed over because he has a sparse beard.⁸²

Perhaps because he was hoping to be given a job in the fiscal bureaucracy and wanted to prove his competency, ʿĀşıḳ makes the most extensive interpolations on the subject of the public treasury (beytü’l-mâl). These interpolations, which are mostly in the “supplements” (ilhâkât), can be seen as serving two different, and to some degree even contradictory, purposes. On the one hand, a principal concern of ʿĀşıḳ seems to have been to demonstrate the sharʿī basis of the Ottoman system of land tenure and taxation, and he does so by reproducing the fatwas issued on the topic by Ebū’s-suʿūd. As the latter’s one-time student and secretary, ʿĀşıḳ is profuse in his words of praise for Ebū’s-suʿūd and hails the latter as “the imam of our time, the chief mufti of the ulama and the general public (âmme), the seal of the müctehids and remnant of the righteous selef.”⁸³ On the other hand, ʿĀşıḳ also includes in his text three documents that he takes to be from the earliest days of Islam and that inform the critique he provides of the actual working of the Ottoman fiscal system further down in the text.⁸⁴ In addition, ʿĀşıḳ draws on his professional experience as a midranking kadi in the Balkans both to explain the particularities of the complex system of land tenure in that region and to critique a wide variety of “abuses” he witnessed during his tenure in Rumeli.⁸⁵ While some of these “abuses” must have been the result of officials taking advantage of a monetizing economy to enrich themselves at the expense of the re‘āyā, as ʿĀşıḳ suggests, others were clearly connected to the central administration’s attempt to alleviate fiscal tensions in a time of rising expenses. A recurring theme in ‘Āşıḳ’s criticisms is the overtaxation of the subject population. In this, the şeyhü’l-islām Ebū’s-suʿūd himself was complicit, having ruled all arable lands in the Ottoman Empire to be “royal demesne” (arâziyü’l-memleke) and having legitimated on that basis the imposition of “tithing rates higher than the customary 10 %.”⁸⁶ Evidently, however, ʿĀşıḳ did not find it in himself to challenge these rulings and instead puts the blame squarely on the tax collectors for abusing their privileges. By dispossessing the reʿāyā of their baştinas and by overtaxing the Christian peasants until they are forced to flee, avaricious officials are both violating sharʿī norms and causing damage to the public treasury, he argues.⁸⁷

Another practice that ʿĀşıḳ blames on greedy officials is the sale of properties belonging to Christian ecclesiastical foundations (kilise evkāfı). Even though ʿĀşıḳ 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 ʿĀşıḳ penned his transadaptation, the Ottoman government, citing a number of fatwas by Ebū’s-suʿūd, had declared all Christian waqfs to be null and void. Subsequently, however, after some hard negotiation with the monastic authorities, and again with Ebū’s-suʿūd’s 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 şeyhü’l-islām had earlier ruled to be impermissible). Following this revised formula, churches and monasteries would also be permitted to “buy back” their properties, albeit at considerable cost to these foundations.⁸⁹ Around the time ʿĀşıḳ was writing (977/1569–1570), the imperial authorities had already revised their stance, but in various parts of the empire the complex processes of confiscation and resale were still dragging on.⁹⁰ It was probably this fluctuating state of affairs that enabled ʿĀşıḳ to present the sale of Christian waqfs as an “abuse” by individual officials rather than as concerted state action. Even though ʿĀşıḳ would not necessarily have known of this, Ibn Taymiyya had also played a role similar to Ebū’s-suʿūd in the confiscation of Christian monastic foundations in the Mamluk sultanate two and a half centuries earlier.⁹¹ Hence, there is a delicious irony in the fact that ʿĀşıḳ presents his criticism of the sale of church waqfs in a translation of a work of Ibn Taymiyya’s as well as after praising Ebū’s-suʿūd. ʿĀşıḳ’s remarks on the sale of church 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, ʿĀşıḳ did not have much to add to Ibn Taymiyya’s discussion of penal law. He does, however, make a few omissions in the original text, presumably out of consideration for the 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 “the rights of God,” that is to say, a public crime whose punishment is incumbent on the political authorities. Even though ʿĀşıḳ was writing half a century before the first instance of regicide in the Ottoman lands, he must have found the topic too distasteful to include in a text submitted to the Ottoman sultan.⁹² A second omitted paragraph deals with the question, “If one Muslim ruler enters the territory of another, and kills that land’s people, is it incumbent on that country’s people to resist or should they submit?” As the question exposed the power grab behind conflicts between rival Muslim sovereigns, even the otherwise outspoken Ibn Taymiyya had found it prudent not to venture an answer and simply noted that Hanbali jurists have differed on the matter. The Hanbali reference would, of course, have been irrelevant to ʿĀşıḳ’s overwhelmingly Hanafi audience, but more consequential was the 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 ʿĀşıḳ.⁹³

A third omission of ʿĀşıḳ’s is seemingly minor but nevertheless illustrative of the difference of outlook between him and Ibn Taymiyya. Ibn Taymiyya begins the section on the punishment of wine-drinking with a hadith, which has the Prophet say that if someone is caught drinking wine once, twice, or three times, he should be flogged, but if he is caught drinking a fourth time, then he should be killed. In his commentary on the hadith, Ibn Taymiyya says that most scholars consider the Prophet’s reference to the execution of the habitual wine-drinker to be “abrogated” (mansūkh), some other scholars consider the punishment to be still valid, and yet others hold it to be a discretionary punishment to be decided upon by the ruler (taʿẕīr). ʿĀşıḳ translates the passage as is, except he omits the opinion of those scholars who held the punishment of execution to be still valid. Presumably he considered this opinion to be too extreme.⁹⁴ Otherwise, however, ʿĀşıḳ translates Ibn Taymiyya’s harsh prescriptions for the punishment of wine-drinkers, adulterers, and “sodomites” without any mitigating commentary, despite the fact that he himself was an aficionado of wine parties and beautiful youths and makes no secret of it in his literary writings and, to some degree, even in this transadaptation.⁹⁵ His reticence in this regard is of course not surprising, since it was a far more serious crime to question sharʿī regulations than to break them. What is perhaps more interesting is that ʿĀşıḳ also translates faithfully Ibn Taymiyya’s strongly worded condemnation of the conversion of ḥadd punishments into monetary fines, even though this was a common practice in the Ottoman lands. In fact, where Ibn Taymiyya likens the people who collect fines for ḥadd offenses to whores, pimps, and fortunetellers, the Ottoman writer not only translates these insults as they are but also volunteers both the Turkish and Arabic words for “pimp.”⁹⁶ It would seem that ʿĀşıḳ translated these sections approvingly, because they meshed well with his own dislike of the pecuniary concerns of the Ottoman officials of his time.

There is finally one passage in which ʿĀşıḳ indicates, in a fascinating aside, that the Hanbali scholar was not always harsher than the Ottoman learned establishment on questions of penal law. The passage in question concerns the punishment of the perpetrators of religious innovation (bidʿa). In the original passage, Ibn Taymiyya first cites the opinions of Shāfiʿi, Aḥmad, and Mālik, that “the initiator of innovations which are contrary to (the precepts in) the Book and the Sunna be put to death”; he then adds that “Mālik and some other jurists allowed that the Qadariyya be put to death, for fear that mischief might spread in the land and not because they are apostates.” After translating this passage, ʿĀşıḳ comments, “It is the same with the Kharijites and Revâfız (a derogatory term for Shi‘ites); [their persecution] is not on account of their apostasy (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 … Ebū’s-suʿūd, which rules it permissible to enslave the Kızılbaş women, that the latter are murdered on account of their apostasy.”⁹⁷ With this interjection, ʿĀşıḳ not only confirms that in the tenth/sixteenth century some members of the Ottoman learned establishment considered the Kızılbaş to constitute a different category of “heretics” than Shi‘ites,⁹⁸ but also that the official Ottoman position on the Kızılbaş was even harsher than that taken by Ibn Taymiyya on other “misbelievers.” The latter point is striking, because the Hanafi school, to which the Ottomans belonged, had previously been the most lenient of the Sunni legal schools when it came to the persecution of heretics and misbelievers. As such, ʿĀşıḳ’s commentary reveals how much the Hanafi position on the matter had hardened by his time, due in part to the polarizing effect of the Ottoman-Safavid conflict and in part to the fact that in the Ottoman lands Hanafism had become a veritable “state madhhab.”⁹⁹ Even though ʿĀşıḳ himself was not particularly confessionally minded,¹⁰⁰ as a member of the Ottoman learned establishment he could hardly avoid the obligatory anti-Kızılbaş rhetoric of his time. In fact, the reference to Ebū’s-suʿūd’s fatwa is not the only instance in which ʿĀşıḳ bows down to anti-Kızılbaş rhetoric in this text. In his “supplements,” he also includes a letter purported to have been written by ʿAlī b. Abū Ṭālib, in which the latter praises the second “rightly guided” caliph, ʿUmar, to critique the “Kızılbaş,” who accept ʿAlī to be their imam but who reject ʿUmar as caliph.¹⁰¹

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

5 Afterlives of the Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Siyāsa Sharʿiyya Texts during the Seventeenth Century

A full discussion of the Ottoman engagement with the siyāsa sharʿiyya corpus after the tenth/sixteenth century exceeds the scope of this paper. In what follows below, I will instead wrap up the previous discussion by considering the afterlives of ʿĀşıḳ’s Miʿrācü’l-eyāle and Cöngī’s Risāla fī l-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya in the core lands of the Ottoman Empire during the eleventh/seventeenth and early twelfth/eighteenth centuries. This discussion is necessary, because certain changes in the social and political dynamics ended up making the siyāsa sharʿiyya literature more relevant to the Ottomans in this period. But there is also another reason for extending the discussion into the eleventh/seventeenth century, and this is the need to speak to a line of scholarship that has persistently argued for the emergence of a distinctive “school of Ibn Taymiyya” 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 siyāsa sharʿiyya 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, Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed (d. 1045/1635), hit upon ʿĀşıḳ’s transadaptation of Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya and, after lightly reworking its introduction, submitted it as his own work to Murād IV (r. 1032–1049/1623–40).¹⁰⁴

The son of a kadi, and the grandson of a devşirme, Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed had received his early education from a student of the famous tenth/sixteenth-century scholar Birgivī Meḥmed Efendi in Balıkesir but then continued his studies with various other scholars in Istanbul and Cairo. Ḳāḍīzāde first took up preaching during his brief stint as a disciple of the Halveti Shaykh ʿÖmer of the Tercüman lodge and persisted in that vocation, also after switching his tariqa affiliation from the Halveti to the Naqshbandi order.¹⁰⁵ His position as preacher and “advice giver” also allowed Ḳāḍīzāde to cultivate contacts in the Ottoman court. In one of his treatises of advice, the preacher claims that he first wrote a treatise of advice for the grand vizier Ḳuyucu Murād Paşa (d. 1020/1611) and Aḥmed I (r. 1012–1026/1603–17) and was gratified to see his text received by both with great favor.¹⁰⁶ Later, Ḳāḍīzāde also courted ʿOs̱mān II (r. 1027–1031/1618–22) and submitted to him a tract on horses and horsemanship.¹⁰⁷ Still, none of these engagements can compare to the persistence with which Ḳāḍīzāde courted Murād IV, dedicating to him a versified prayer of good wishes (duʿānāme) on the occasion of his accession to the throne, a versified creed, an anti-Safavid/Kızılbaş tract, and at least five texts of political advice.¹⁰⁸ One of these five tracts of political advice was Tācü’r-resāʾil ve minhācü’l-vesāʾil, an expanded translation of Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya.

Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed’s Tācü’r-resāʾil is of particular importance to the debate about the influence of Ibn Taymiyya over the Kadızadelis, as it is the one and only “Kadızadeli” text that we know so far that explicitly references Ibn Taymiyya. The problem is, however, that as mentioned above, this was not actually Ḳāḍīzāde’s own translation but ʿĀşıḳ’s. It could be argued that Ḳāḍīzāde must have held Ibn Taymiyya in high esteem to want to assume ownership of a translation of the latter’s text, but it should also be remembered that the text Ḳāḍīzāde appropriated was at least one-third ʿĀşıḳ’s and incorporated various features that were at odds with the original Taymiyyan vision. There is no indication that Ḳāḍīzāde wanted to strip the text of these later additions; in fact, he left all the “supplements” and digressions of ʿĀşıḳ intact, and he contented himself with merely changing parts of the introduction to cover up the fact that he was claiming another person’s work. Interestingly, in the process, he ended up omitting not only ʿĀşıḳ’s but also Ibn Taymiyya’s name, and instead presented himself (“Shaykh Meḥmed b. Muṣṭafā known as Ḳāḍīzāde”) as the author of the text.¹⁰⁹ Patient readers could still find out that the text was in part a translation of Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya when they got to the part in which ʿĀşıḳ announces the end of his translation of the said work and the beginning of the “supplements.”¹¹⁰

Moreover, with a single exception, discussed below, the changes that Ḳāḍīzāde introduced to his version of the text were not any more indicative of a hardcore Taymiyyan than ʿĀşıḳ’s transadaptation. For instance, while Ḳāḍīzāde replaced ʿĀşıḳ’s eulogy of Süleymān and Selīm II with a eulogy of Murād IV, the new eulogy also played on number mysticism and the esoteric properties of the sultan’s name, just like ʿĀşıḳ’s.¹¹¹ More remarkable still, Ḳāḍīzāde inserted into the text a “letter of invitation” to Islam by an Islamized Alexander the Great. Evidently, Ḳāḍīzāde 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 Ḳāḍīzāde submitted to Murād IV also exhibit a similar diversity of sources of inspiration, from Quranic verses to Sufi poetry to excerpts from a Turkish rendition of the pseudo-Aristotelian Kitāb Sirr al-asrār.¹¹³ It is only in the texts that he authored for ordinary Muslims that Ḳāḍīzāde 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, Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed was not quite the uncompromisingly “puritanical,” “antisyncretistic,” and “anti-elitist” Muslim reformist that modern scholars have imagined him to be; nor was he any more Taymiyyan in his disposition than, say, ʿĀşıḳ had been. This having been said, he did insert into his revised 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 (şirk) and is taken from Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s Ighāthat al-lahfān min maṣāʾid al-shayṭān (Rescuing the distressed from the snares of the devil). Interestingly, Ḳāḍīzāde does not reveal his source but simply says that he took the text from works of kelām. He does, however, cite the same passage on idolatry in another work of political advice, where he gives the correct title of the source but misattributes it to another Hanbali scholar, Abū ’l-Faraj Ibn al-Jawzī (d. 597/1201).¹¹⁵

The reference to Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya’s Ighāthat al-lahfān is noteworthy, because this Hanbali writer was the most important student of Ibn Taymiyya and because modern scholars who have been convinced of the Kadızadelis’ Taymiyyan convictions have rested their case in recent years mainly on the fact that the Ottoman writers who were or who fit the profile of Kadızadelis cited Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, and especially his Ighāthat al-lahfān.¹¹⁶ One of these scholars, Sheikh, has further argued that the Kadızadelis were far more immersed in the writings of Ibn Taymiyya than they let on, but that because of the controversy surrounding the latter’s name, they preferred to give 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, Birgivī and Aḥmed Rūmī el-Aḳḥiṣārī (d. ca. 1041/1632), two passages that seem to be taken from Ibn Taymiyya’s Iqtidā l-ṣirāṭ al-mustaqīm (The necessity of the straight path),¹¹⁸ this would hardly suffice to identify these otherwise solidly Hanafi-Maturidi scholars as crypto-Taymiyyans.¹¹⁹ Secondly, the supposition that Ibn Taymiyya was 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-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya into Turkish.¹²⁰ It could be argued that the Kadızadelis felt more vulnerable than other more “mainstream” Ottoman scholars when citing Ibn Taymiyya, because they, too, targeted such popular practices as tomb visitations as bidʿats, 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 “fanatics” (mutaʿaṣṣıbīn), “hypocrites” (mürāʾī), and “deniers” (münkirīn), 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, Sheikh’s claim that the Kadızadelis may have cited Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya as a safer choice than his teacher is based on the assumption that the writings of the two men were otherwise equally well known to eleventh/seventeenth-century Ottoman scholars. This was not actually the case, however, since as Caterina Bori has recently shown, even an unusually well-read bibliophile like Kātib Çelebi (d. 1067/1657) was far more familiar with the contents of the works of Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya than with those of Ibn Taymiyya.¹²²

In short, even if the Kadızadelis were more familiar with Ibn Taymiyya than they let on, the evidence at hand does not support the view that they represented on the whole a “school of Ibn Taymiyya” or even a distinctively “Taymiyyan” subcurrent of Hanafi-Maturidi Islam in the lands of Rum. Neither is it possible to say that they played an especially significant role in spreading the knowledge of Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya in the eleventh/seventeenth century. Today we know of only three manuscript copies of Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed’s Tācü’r-resāʾil anywhere, as opposed to ten manuscript copies of ‘Āşıḳ’s Miʿrācü’l-eyāle in Turkey alone.¹²³ It was also only the latter version that was mentioned in Kātib Çelebi’s bibliographical compendium Kashf al-ẓunūn.¹²⁴ It is telling, too, that Tācü’r-resāʾil was not copied together with other, more popular, works that were written by Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed for the benefit of Muslims in general. It seems that both versions of the translation ultimately catered to high-ranking members of the imperial administration than to either a more exclusively scholarly or a more popular readership.

Much the same observations can be made about the circulation of the Arabic originals of Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya in Istanbul in this period. Currently, Istanbul’s manuscript libraries contain twelve manuscript copies of the original Arabic epistle, roughly equal to the total number of copies of both versions of the Turkish transadaptations in the same collections. 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 şeyhü’l-islām Feyżullāh Efendi (d. 1115/1703), who was a former student and son-in-law of the “third-generation Kadızadeli leader” and preacher Vānī Meḥmed Efendi (d. 1096/1685), as well as one of the most well-read, most politically active (and most controversial) scholars of his time, evidently cared enough about the work to obtain an early and precious copy, one that had been copied in 850/1446–1447 to be presented to a high-placed Mamluk official.¹²⁵ The grand vizier Şehīd ʿAlī Paşa (d. 1128/1716), who was also a known bibliophile, but who had nothing to do with the Kadızadelis and was in fact a Sufi sympathizer and even reputed to be a Bayrami-Melami ḳuṭb, also owned three copies of the work, one of which had been copied very early, in 780/1378–1379.¹²⁶ It is evident that the interest in the tract (and its earliest copies) continued at the highest levels of the imperial hierarchy also in the twelfth/eighteenth century. We find two other Mamluk-era copies of the work in the library of Aḥmed III (r. 1115–1143/1703–30), dated 766/1363 and 797/1395, and four copies of the work in the library established by Maḥmūd I (r. 1143–1168/1730–54); two of the copies in Maḥmūd’s library also dated from the Mamluk era, from 744/1343 and 893/1488 specifically.¹²⁷ The head of the scribal bureaucracy, Re’īsül-küttāb Muṣṭafā Efendi (d. 1162/1749), too, owned a copy, which bears the endowment date of 1154/1741–1742.¹²⁸

Considering that all these individuals were known bibliophiles and founders of waqf libraries, it is reasonable to think that their demand for precious copies of al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya was fueled in part by their bibliophilia.¹²⁹ But it cannot have been just the antiquarian appeal of the Mamluk-era Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya copies that recommended the text to the Ottoman readers. The latter must also have been interested in the subject matter, siyāsa sharʿiyya. What suggests this is the even greater popularity of Dede Cöngī’s Risāla fī l-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya starting slightly earlier. In fact, this decidedly more recent epistle dwarfs Ibn Taymiyya’s famous work in terms of its popularity with eleventh/seventeenth- and twelfth/eighteenth-century readers in the Ottoman capital. My preliminary research in the database of the Süleymaniye library in Istanbul in the summer of 2019 has revealed over 60 manuscript copies of Cöngī’s text, as compared to 12 manuscript copies of Ibn Taymiyya’s al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya.¹³⁰ Of course, Cöngī’s text did not just circulate in Istanbul but also in other intellectual and administrative centers in the Ottoman lands, including the Arab provinces, but my point is that the text had a particular relevance for the Turcophone Rumi ruling cadres.¹³¹ This is also indicated by the fact that the Risāla fī l-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya was translated into Turkish no less than three times between the late eleventh/seventeenth and early thirteenth/nineteenth centuries. The earliest of these was a rather faithful translation made by Sebzī Seyyid Meḥmed Efendi (d. 1091/1680) sometime in the second half of the eleventh/seventeenth century and represented in Süleymaniye’s database with some ten manuscript copies, the earliest of which dates from 1121/1709.¹³²

What is interesting is that Dede Cöngī’s text received all this attention after having hardly received any during the first 80 to 100 years of its existence. The earliest known extant manuscript copy of the work is dated 1054/1644–1645, followed by two other copies, dated 1067/1657 and 1069/1658.¹³³ These were the years when Cöngī’s famous progeny, Minḳārīzāde Yaḥyā (d. 1088/1678), was climbing up the ranks of the Ottoman learned hierarchy to become eventually one of the longest serving şeyhü’l-islāms of the eleventh/seventeenth century. This raises the possibility that the text was brought to the attention of the wider public by either Minḳārīzāde or someone else who knew of the family connection between the two men. This possibility is also supported by the fact that the text’s first Turkish translator, Sebzī, introduces Cöngī as “the ancestor of Minḳārīzāde” (cedd-i Minḳārīzāde) in the preface to his translation of the text.¹³⁴

Whatever the role of Minḳārīzāde was behind the rise of Cöngī’s Risāla fī l-siyāsa al-sharʿiyya from obscurity to fame, there was certainly a broader context to the interest that high-level Ottomans took in the siyāsa sharʿiyya literature, and more broadly, juristic works on rulership, in this period. From the 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 “Islamic” than earlier Ottoman practices and that allowed for private ownership of land as well as heavier rates of taxation.¹³⁶ Significantly, Ottoman experimentations with “sharʿī governance” 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 Köprülüzāde Muṣṭafā in 1102/1691, and the abolition of some taxes and fines as bidʿats in the ḳānūnnāme of Midilli (Mytileni) in 1121/1709 can be mentioned as some pertinent examples.¹³⁷ As Ekin Tuşalp Atiyas has pointed out, the Ottoman officials did not name specific texts but rather evoked the authority of either “the sharia” or “the books of Islamic jurisprudence” when they wanted to explain why they were breaking ways with some of the old Ottoman state traditions.¹³⁸

A new disinclination to use the word ḳānūn on the part of the Ottoman imperial administration at the turn of the eleventh/seventeenth century went hand in hand with this development. This trend culminated in the famous decree of Muṣṭafā II in 1108/1696 that all Ottoman imperial orders from that point on reference only “the noble sharia” and not “couple the [terms] noble sharia and ḳānūn.”¹³⁹ Of course, not all Ottoman men of letters and statesmen shared this aversion to the use of the word ḳānūn, as indicated by the continued references to ḳānūn in Ottoman political and historical literature throughout the eleventh/seventeenth century.¹⁴⁰ Nor was the decree of 1108/1696 the end of the legislative functions of the Ottoman sultans. Quite to the contrary, in the twelfth/eighteenth century, the Ottoman rulers continued to make laws just as—if not more vigorously—and Muslim jurists referenced royal edicts even to a greater degree than before in their juridical rulings.¹⁴¹ However, now, the Ottoman rulers justified their lawmaking with reference to sharʿī norms first and foremost, and only secondarily with reference to their cumulative dynastic traditions. It was precisely this shift, I would argue, that also explains the main attraction of Cöngī’s modest treatise on siyāsa sharʿiyya to the later Ottomans. Cöngī had legitimated the Ottoman ḳānūn under the rubric of the Mamluk siyāsa and without so much as a reference to the Ottoman dynasty, styling it as the kind of siyāsa that serves “sharʿī ends” and safeguards public order. Even if Cöngī’s original concern had been to intervene in a debate centered in the empire’s newly annexed provinces of Egypt and Syria during the tenth/sixteenth century, his solution to that debate turned out to be just as relevant to the needs of the empire’s overwhelmingly Rumi ruling elites in the following century. It seems that this particular definition of ḳānūn, as ruler’s law in service of the divine law, which could be adjusted to the 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 Terzioğlu, Bir tercüme 247–275. The research for the present article was supported by the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP/2015–2020)/ERC Grant Agreement 648498, “The fashioning of a Sunni orthodoxy and the entangled histories of confession-building in the Ottoman Empire, 15th–17th centuries.” Tijana Krstić, Guy Burak, Baki Tezcan, Başak Tuğ, Ahmet Kaylı, Özgün Deniz Yoldaşlar, Arif Erbil, A. Vahdi Kanatsız, and Evren Sünnetçioğlu gave valuable feedback on this paper. I am grateful to them all. Naturally, I claim sole responsibility for all errors that remain.