1 The Relationship between Faith and Knowledge as Understood by Ash‘arites and Maturidites before the Ninth/Fifteenth Century

The discussions about the kind and degree of knowledge about īmān that one had to have both in order to be considered a Muslim and in order to qualify as a believer and be guaranteed salvation on the Day of Judgment were triggered by the specific historical circumstances that the growing Muslim community faced in the first two centuries, namely how to set the boundaries of membership in the umma in the face of the growing conversions to Islam. For the evolution of the Maturidi school of theology and the position of the Maturidi scholars on the issue, the decisive developments took place in second/eighth-century Transoxania, which was conquered by the Muslims in the beginning of the century and where conversions of the local populations were on the rise. The ensuing question of whether or not converts should be paying poll tax triggered a theological debate on what kind of knowledge one should have in order to be counted as a Muslim.⁵ This prompted the Murji’a—a group that had come to define faith exclusively as a declaration by tongue and argued that deeds (such as performance of the rites of worship) had no impact on one’s faith—who dominated the political scene in Transoxania, to reach out to the scholars in Kufa, in Iraq, which was the traditional stronghold of the Murji’a. Here they found support from one of the city’s most prestigious scholars at the time, Abū Ḥanīfa (d. 150/767), who himself was sympathetic to their views. This had a lasting impact on Eastern Iran, whose Muslim population overwhelmingly embraced Abū Ḥanīfa’s teachings by the early ninth century.⁶ Although Abū Ḥanīfa is today remembered as the founder of one of the four Sunni schools of law (madhhab), none of his writings on law (fiqh) actually survive, while the texts that can with some certainty be attributed to him or to the first generation of his students, became central to the development of Sunni kalām. This, in turn, means that we can speak not only of a Hanafi legal but also theological school, which later developed into the Maturidi school of theology, but only well after Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī himself was active.⁷ The Hanafi and Maturidi theological views that became dominant in Khorasan and Transoxania in the third/ninth century continued to dominate in this region, at least until the eighth/fourteenth century.

How did Abū Ḥanīfa view the relationship between faith and knowledge? Or rather, what did early Hanafi and Maturidi scholars believe were his views on the matter? In the only text that modern scholars believe is authentically Abū Ḥanīfa’s, which is a letter (risāla) written to ʿUthmān al-Battī, he insisted that faith excludes deeds, that it cannot increase or decrease, that all people and angels are equal in their īmān, and that sinners will be judged only in the afterlife.⁸ However, in another text attributed to Abū Ḥanīfa, Kitāb al-ʿĀlim wa-l-mutaʿallim, which was actually authored by one of his followers, he is cited as mentioning other topics that will become central to the teachings of the later Hanafis, such as the importance of knowledge (ʿilm, maʿrifa) which is equated to assenting (taṣdīq) to the truth of the faith and achieving certainty (yaqīn) in belief.⁹ This emphasis on knowledge, as synonymous with īmān, raised the question as to its scope and nature. Abū Ḥanīfa suggested in his Risāla that Muḥammad asked people “to bear witness that there is no god but God alone who has no partner, and to acknowledge what he [Muḥammad] has brought from God.” In the Kitāb al-Fiqh al-absaṭ, one of the most important early Hanafi sources authored by a student of Abū Ḥanīfa,¹⁰ the master is cited using the so-called Gabriel hadith to explain what it is that Muḥammad brought from God: a message on belief in the oneness of God, the prophethood of Muḥammad, the angels, the Holy Scriptures, the earlier prophets, the Last Judgment, and predestination. As his interpreters understood it, Abū Ḥanīfa demanded knowledge of God and of the Prophet, as well as acknowledgment of what the Prophet brought from God in a summary manner (jumlatan), without a detailed explanation.¹¹ Furthermore, as is elaborated in a later commentary (probably from the late fourth/tenth-early fifth/eleventh century) on Fiqh al-absaṭ, Abū Ḥanīfa was said to have endorsed the faith of an imitator or person who accepts faith on authority of others (muqallid), because he viewed anyone who acknowledges Islam in a broad and general sense, even without knowing anything about the book, the creed, or religious duties, as a believer. However, he also acknowledged that a faith based on inference (istidlāl) and reasoning is a thousand times more superior and enlightened than the one based on imitation.¹²

This last issue, of whether or not imitative faith, or faith based on what one learns on the authority of others rather than through one’s own reasoning, was valid or not became a polemical trope well established in kalām works by the mid-fourth/tenth century and directly addressed by Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī, Abū Hasan al-Ashʿarī, as well as the Mu‘tazilites. The issue was clearly of utmost importance to al-Māturīdī, who begins his Kitāb al-Tawḥīd with a question of epistemology and quickly comes to the issue of belief based on authority (taqlīd), which he identifies as the cause of all error and reason for the existence of false beliefs.¹³ Building on Hanafi tradition that emphasized knowledge and the capacity of the ratio to know the truth, al-Māturīdī maintained that the intellect was capable of proving God’s existence based on his creation. In light of this confidence in the powers of the intellect, it is not surprising that al-Māturīdī himself rejected the validity of imitative faith in no uncertain terms and postulated that only faith based on inquiry (naẓar) with one’s own intellect (ʿaql) and consideration of proofs (burhān) was valid.¹⁴ For al-Māturīdī, reasoning (istidlāl) was thus a precondition for īmān.

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

Al-Māturīdī’s views did not greatly differ from al-Ashʿarī’s or the Mu‘tazilites’, who also maintained that reasoning was necessary for having īmān.¹⁸ Al-Ashʿarī, himself a former Mu‘tazilite, and his followers believed that to assent (taṣdīq) to what is reported (akhbār) by the community as truth requires some reflective distance from the proposal itself.¹⁹ As a later Ash‘ari theologian, al-Baghdadī (d. 429/1037), reports, al-Ashʿarī said that the person who believes the truth on authority of others (taqlīdan) was neither a mushriq (idolater, polytheist) nor a kāfir (unbeliever). When asked whether such a man was a believer (muʾmīn), al-Ashʿarī replied that he would not call such a person a believer unconditionally, thus leaving the issue of his views on imitative faith open to interpretation.²⁰ As Richard Frank showed, most Ash‘ari theologians up to the sixth/twelfth century emphasized that reasoning is obligatory for one’s assent to be properly founded. However, there was no unanimity among them regarding the precise character of this knowledge.²¹

Despite these convergences between al-Māturīdī’s and al-Ashʿarī’s views, in later medieval polemical works their followers often came to be identified with diametrically opposing positions vis-à-vis the question of taqlīd and the issue of kufr al-ʿāmma, although there was also some debate regarding al-Ashʿarī’s positions. For instance, the commentary on Fiqh al-absaṭ, which was very popular with later Hanafi authors, including Ottoman ones, specifically (and misleadingly) stated that both Ash‘arites and Mu‘tazilites rejected taqlīd and viewed the common masses as infidels.²² Pazdawī, on the other hand, asserts that a muqallid is truly a believer, and juxtaposes it to the view of the Mu‘tazilites, who believe the opposite. He then says that reports on al-Ashʿarī’s views varied (but then states that the correct report is that he also believed that a muqallid is a true believer).²³

Indeed, the later Ash‘ari school did not present a homogenous position on the issue of taqlīd. Some, like the Maghrebi scholar Muḥammad b. Yūsuf al-Sanūsī (d. 895/1490), maintained that reasoning is a condition for faith and that a person who remains at the stage of taqlīd is not only a sinner but also an infidel in the eyes of God.²⁴ Others tried to temper the radical nature of the thesis that an imitator is a sinner or an infidel or even dismiss it altogether. The Ash‘ari theologians al-Ghazālī (d. 505/1111) and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 606/1210) rejected the accusation that Ash‘arites denied the validity of the faith of the imitator and argued that a muqallid was neither a sinner nor an infidel and that the knowledge of detailed proofs about faith—typically the purview of a kalām specialist—was incumbent on the community, but not on every individual Muslim.²⁵ In the second book of his Iḥyāʾ ʿulūm al-dīn al-Ghazālī argued that in teaching the articles of faith, the goal is first to make a child or a novice memorize, then to understand, and finally to arrive at certainty in order to assent to what they have learned. Through his grace, God prepares a believer’s heart without the necessity of arguments or proofs, and a believer accepts God’s message upon instruction (talqīn) and authority (taqlīd). This carries the danger of straying from the truth, so in order to prevent doubts and deviations, these beliefs have to be strengthened by proofs. However, it is not necessary to learn kalām and disputation in order to do so; rather, one should strive to deepen one’s understanding of faith through reading the Quran and hadith and performing one’s religious duties. To expose a novice to kalām would be like hitting a healthy tree with an iron bar, unnecessarily exposing healthy and solid belief to doubt. He likens kalām to a potent drug—it needs to be given in doses and only when necessary.²⁶ According to al-Ghazālī, while the study of kalām was not a religious duty incumbent on either individual Muslims (farḍ al-ʿayn) or the community (farḍ al-kifāya) in the early days of Islam, by his time it has become a duty incumbent on the community—as long as there are some scholars who possess such specialized knowledge needed to defend the faith and refute opponents, the conditions are satisfied. In his view, laid out in the first book of his Iḥyāʾ, the learning that remains incumbent on each individual Muslim has to do with the foundations of belief, proper performance of worship, and awareness of prohibitions.

In contrast, we do not see such diversity in the views of Maturidi authors of later creeds that went on to gain great popularity in the Ottoman realms. The best known among them, Najm al-Dīn al-Nasafī’s (d. 537/1142) ʿAqāʾid (or al-ʿAqīda al-Nasafīyya), which was also included in the Ottoman madrasa curriculum, does not mention either the issue of imitative faith nor the issue of knowledge that is a precondition for one to be considered a believer. Nasafī simply defines īmān as assent to what Muḥammad brought from Allah and the verbal confession of it.²⁷ However, in his famous commentary on Nasafī’s creed, Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī (d. 793/1390), himself either an Ash‘ari or a Maturidi strongly influenced by Ash‘arism, states that assent (taṣdīq) with the heart to Allah’s message is sufficient to bring one into the category of īmān. He further states: “The degree of this kind of īmān (al-īmān al-ijmālī) is no lower than that of detailed īmān (al-īmān al-tafṣīlī).”²⁸ Another Maturidi creed that later achieved great popularity in the Ottoman lands was the didactic poem entitled Badʾ al-amālī by ʿAlī b. ʿUthmān al-Ūshī (fl. c. 569/1173), which does not mention the issue of faith in general or in detail but states that “the faith of a person by imitating others is valid; there are clear-cut proofs favoring this opinion.”²⁹ Similarly, the topic of summary versus detailed knowledge of faith is not explicitly brought up in the creed by the Maturidi scholar Abū l-Barakāt al-Nasafī (d. 710/1310) entitled ʿUmdat al-ʿaqīda li-ahl al-sunna. On the subject of taqlīd, he states that, contrary to what the Mu‘tazilites say, the faith of a muqallid is valid because it entails assent (taṣdīq), even if he is a sinner for not engaging in reasoning.³⁰ This view is echoed also in Kitāb al-ʿAqīda al-rukniyya by ʿUbaydallāh b. Muḥammad b. ʿAbd al- ʿAzīz al-Samarqandī (d. 701/1301), another later Maturidi creed in which the author endorses the faith of the muqallid because it entails assent to God’s message without any doubt or reservation. He understands the pronunciation of shahāda as assent to the divine message in general (ijmālan), while he refers to the Gabriel hadith to enumerate the articles of faith in detail.³¹

2 The Maturidi-Ash‘ari Synthesis and the Question of Īmān-i Taklīdī, Īmān-i İcmālī, and Īmān-i Tafṣīlī in Ottoman ʿİlm-i ḥāls

While the preceding paragraphs sought to map the general development and differences in Maturidi and Ash‘ari views on the issues of taqlīd and knowledge necessary for one’s faith to be considered sound, as the discussion chronologically approaches the Ottoman period, it is not only differences but also interactions and convergences between the two theological schools that have to be taken into account. Historical research on the development of both Ash‘arism and Maturidism, especially in the so-called postclassical period, is only in its infancy, and the existing works often uncritically replicate the rhetoric of the sources themselves that strive to project an image of unity and homogeneity within a particular theological tradition rather than highlighting the diversity of opinions or interactions with other schools and traditions.³² The nature of these interactions in the Ottoman period is only slowly being unearthed, but new research suggests that Ottoman scholars were well disposed toward a Maturidi-Ash‘ari synthesis³³—a development that is also highlighted in Nabil Al-Tikriti’s paper in this volume. After a period of intense infighting between the two schools in Khorasan in the pre-Mongol era and intense rivalries in Syria that followed the influx of the eastern Hanafi-Maturidi scholars into the traditionally Ash‘ari terrain in the early Seljuk era, a rapprochement set in by the seventh/thirteenth century as the Zangids, Ayyubids, and later Mamluks sought to present a united Sunni Islamic front against the crusaders and Mongols. At the same time, the Mongol and Timurid rulers were ecumenical in their support of talented scholars regardless of their background, which allowed scholars in Central Asia to move more freely between theological schools as well as sectarian affiliations. Emblematic of this milieu was the rise of the philosophically minded scholars like ʿAḍud al-Dīn al-Ījī (d. 756/1356), who followed the Ash‘ari tradition, as well as Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftāzānī and Sayyid Sharīf al-Jurjānī (d. 813/1413), who did not restrict themselves to ideas of only one school.³⁴ These combined trends toward rapprochement between theological schools both to the east and to the southwest of the Ottoman domains directly influenced the formation of the Ottoman scholars, both through engagement with the texts and through personal study with the scholars involved in this rapprochement or their students. Ottoman literati were particularly drawn to al-Ghazālī’s synthesis of theology, Sufism, Aristotelian logic, and law, and to the scholarship of the “post-Avicennian turn,” especially works produced by scholars who integrated Sunni theology with different philosophical perspectives, including metaphysics, illuminationist philosophy, and Avicennian ideas.³⁵ The fact that this fusion between the philosophical and theological traditions of rational exegesis and the adoption of a language of philosophy and demonstration was particularly widespread among the Ash‘ari-Shafi‘i scholars of the seventh/thirteenth and eighth/fourteenth centuries meant that the latter’s works were often cited by the Ottoman scholars coming in their wake.³⁶

However, it is not the kalām of the post-Avicennian turn and the new questions it engendered that are central to the discussion at hand, but rather how they interacted with and informed the older theological inquiries regarding faith and knowledge. In the Ottoman polity, which by the early tenth/sixteenth century experienced a growing rate of conversions to Islam, managed a large non-Muslim and very diverse Muslim population, and faced the challenge of a rival Islamic polity with a different sectarian affiliation—the progressively more Shi‘ite Safavid Iran—the question of who was a believer and what constituted knowledge of faith that would guarantee one’s salvation in both this and the other world gradually came into a sharper focus. From the mid-ninth/fifteenth century onward, the ulama (religious scholars), whose services were increasingly indispensable to the expanding empire seeking to both credibly govern and garner prestige in the Islamic world, were gradually getting more integrated into the Ottoman administration and were both expected and sought to have a greater say in the matters of what constituted correct faith and practice of Islam.³⁷ The degree to which the ulama became integrated into the Ottoman administration has been described by historians as unprecedented in Islamic history, creating a situation in which particular definitions of who was and what it meant to be a Sunni could be enforced with a new degree of authority (i.e., conditions for a formulation of “orthodoxy”).³⁸ The convergence of these developments in the late ninth/fifteenth-early tenth/ sixteenth centuries thus led to a greater sensitization across Ottoman society to the questions of correct faith and practice.

While the higher echelons of ulama sought to promulgate this agenda through, by now, well-studied legal opinions (fatāwā), Ottoman literati of various educational levels and provenance, both affiliated and not with the government, started producing didactic literature on the foundations of īmān and Islam that would be comprehensible to common people in their own language, which for the majority of Ottoman Muslims in Anatolia and the Balkans was Turkish. It is in the context of these catechetical texts, which came to be known as ʿilm-i ḥāls, that Ottoman authors weighed in on the questions of imitative as well as general versus detailed faith. Although Ottoman ʿilm-i ḥāls drew abundantly on various creeds and uṣūl al-dīn manuals, they constituted a new genre that often succinctly combined 1) the basic teachings on īmān extracted from creedal literature with 2) the basic rules on worship derived from fiqh and its regulations for ritual obligations (ʿibādāt) and 3) the basic information on prohibitions derived largely from collections of legal opinions (fatāwā), in particular on utterances and actions that could render one an unbeliever (alfāẓ al-kufr; Tr. elfāẓ-i küfr). In this respect, the overall concept of the Ottoman ʿilm-i ḥāl appears to fit squarely into the framework for knowledge incumbent upon each individual believer as envisioned by al-Ghazālī (see above). This framework can be described as dogmatic in the sense that it emphasized unitary truth underlying the articles of faith and certainty of knowledge (ʿilm) about them based on reasoning and incontrovertible textual proofs, while shunning speculation. In an important contrast to the medieval creeds, however, Ottoman ʿilm-i ḥāls included stipulations on worship and certain prohibitions derived from Hanafi law, thus reinforcing the notion that the boundaries of dogma are not only definite but circumscribable by law. As Norman Calder pointed out, while the books of law contained expressions of creed, medieval creeds did not contain references to law, which he, in turn, interpreted as the limits of the genre of creed to establish the boundaries of orthodoxy.³⁹ Discursively speaking, Ottoman ʿilm-i ḥāls were thus projecting different claims than creeds, more in line with the new understanding of “orthodoxy.”

The discussion of examples of blasphemous utterances and actions covering a wide range of issues was typically found in the sixth/twelfth-century and later legal manuals-cum-collections of juridical opinions—such as Fatāwā l-Qāḍīkhān (late sixth/twelfth c.), al-Fatāwā l-Tatārkhāniyya (eighth/fourteenth c.), al-Fatāwā l-Bazzāziyya (ninth/fifteenth c.), etc.—produced by the eastern Hanafites who seem to have had a penchant for this issue, in contrast to their colleagues—both Hanafi and otherwise—in other parts of the Islamic world.⁴⁰ At least since the mid-eighth/fourteenth century, when the Khwarazmian Hanafi scholar Badr al-Rashīd (d. 767/1366) produced a treatise on alfāẓ al-kufr, there were also copies of stand-alone works dedicated to the topic.⁴¹ This eastern Hanafi penchant for the alfāẓ al-kufr tradition is important because it appears to have served as the basis for rethinking of the boundary between īmān and kufr in the Ottoman Hanafi school in the early 1400s. The most emblematic indicator of this rethinking, which emerges in the Ottoman context by the 1450s,⁴² was a legal innovation stipulating that one should renew one’s faith (Tr. tecdīd-i īmān) upon committing an act or uttering something deemed blasphemous by the (eastern) Hanafi jurists. This development is traceable through the fatāwā promulgated by the muftis from the lands of Rum (i.e., Anatolia and Rumeli) who were affiliated with the Ottoman government, but it is not evident in the fatāwā of the Hanafi jurists not affiliated with the government, especially from the Arab provinces, which underscores the existence of intra-Hanafi, interregional differences. In view of the scholars from Arab provinces of the empire, this stipulation amounted to takfīr—the act of declaring other Muslims infidels (kāfir)—which was considered contrary to the Sunni tradition and was singled out as such in a number of medieval Sunni creeds, including Hanafi ones.⁴³ In another unprecedented move, the Ottomans elevated the Hanafi school of law into a state madhhab by the tenth/sixteenth century; however, given these regional differences and both intra- and inter-madhhab tensions that this move caused, the question arises as to the nature of this Hanafism.⁴⁴ Ottoman ʿilm-i ḥāl authors’ takes on the relationship between knowledge and faith shed an important light on this question.

The genre of ʿilm-i ḥāl crystalized only gradually from the early fifteenth century onward and reached its heyday in the seventeenth century.⁴⁵ The aforementioned penchant of the Ottoman scholars for al-Ghazālī and the scholarship of the post-Avicennian turn, as well as for seamlessly integrating Maturidi and Ash‘ari views on certain questions, is on full display in the first ʿilm-i ḥāl written by an Ottoman scholar, Ḳuṭbe’d-dīn İzniḳī’s (d. 821/1418) Muḳaddime (Introduction). İzniḳī was a product of the early Ottoman scholarly environment in Anatolia. He was likely a Sufi but wrote on subjects that range from tafsīr and hadith to fiqh, kalām, and Sufism.⁴⁶ Like al-Ghazālī in his Iḥyāʾ, in the preface to his work İzniḳī introduces the division between the knowledge incumbent upon the individual and knowledge incumbent upon the community, stating that in the Muḳaddime he set out to provide in easily understandable Turkish the knowledge that every Muslim needs to have and without which his or her Islam cannot be complete. He states that one’s Islam cannot be complete without knowing and performing the five pillars of Islam, which serve as the organizing principle of the work—he devotes a chapter heading (bāb) to each, followed by a discussion of virtues to which one needs to aspire and vices one needs to avoid in order to be a true believer.⁴⁷ Importantly, he emphasizes the fact that some obligatory knowledge needs to be internalized while some needs to be externally performed. He points out that law books do not consider the internal aspects of obligatory knowledge because they are concerned with whether people externally conform to the requirements of the law. Thus, they are not interested in a person’s morality and what goes on in their heart, which is why some scholars undertook to teach believers how to achieve closeness to God. He gives the examples of al-Ghazālī, al-Rāghib al-Iṣfahānī (d. 502/1108; an Ash‘ari and Shafi‘i scholar and “ethicist of the soul”),⁴⁸ the famous Sufi scholar al-Qushayrī (d. 465/1072), and Abū ʿAbdallah al-Ḥārith al-Muḥāsibī (d. 243/857), another eminent Sufi and rationalist theologian who advocated constant self-examination.⁴⁹ This aspiration to instruct believers on how to cultivate both the internal forum focused on īmān and the external forum focused on practice (ʿamel) became a template for the later Ottoman ʿilm-i ḥāls as well.

Devoting his first chapter to īmān, İzniḳī uses the Gabriel hadith to introduce the basic articles of faith. He states that īmān consists of six items—belief in oneness of God, his angels, his books, his prophets, the Day of Judgment, and predetermination—and emphasizes that it is necessary to know each of these six items in detail (bu altı nesneyi birer tafṣīl idüp bildürmek gerek).⁵⁰ Having explained each article of faith in detail, İzniḳī anticipates hypothetical questions from his audience. Crucial for the discussion at hand, he includes the following issue: if it is compulsory to know these six things, what happens to those people who know nothing of God or his prophet, of īmān and Islam, before becoming Muslims? How can this be reconciled with the hadith that Muḥammad promised anyone who pronounces the shahāda that they would enter Paradise? İzniḳī responds that Muḥammad indeed proclaimed that the faith of those who pronounce the shahāda is sound because he wanted to facilitate people coming to faith. Shahāda epitomizes belief in those six things (bu altı nesneyi mücmelen bilüp): by saying it, one professes belief that God is one, that Muḥammad is his prophet, and that everything he brought from God is true. Here, İzniḳī is trying to reconcile his view that faith should be known in detail with the well-known hadith that assenting to faith in general through pronouncing the shahāda is sufficient for being considered a believer and entering Paradise.

He returns to the issue of general versus detailed knowledge in a later passage when discussing the oneness of God. He states that ulama are in disagreement whether or not one should know proofs of God’s oneness in general or in detail. He acknowledges that the Prophet himself accepted the faith of those who were ignorant in details of faith and God’s oneness, but then he invokes the report on Abū Ḥanīfa’s saying that those who do not know proofs of God’s oneness (tevḥīd) are rebels (ʿāṣī). İzniḳī continues by saying that it may be that commoners (ʿāmmī kişiler) who become Muslims at first do not understand the proofs of tevḥīd, but they should strive to deepen their understanding by seeking explanation—those who have the capacity to understand but do not learn are rebels (ʿāṣī) and sinners (günāhkār). He then cites al-Ghazālī to say that if someone becomes a Muslim, but God’s oneness and greatness is not in his heart, he will have the benefit of such īmān only in this world. A confirmed believer is only the one with īmān in his heart.⁵¹ Besides al-Ghazālī, who is clearly İzniḳī’s model, he cites also the Ash‘ari scholars Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī and ʿAḍud al-Dīn al-Ījī’s Kitāb al-Mawāqif fī ʿilm al-kalām.⁵² Al-Ījī’s Mawāqif, in particular, was a vociferous defense of rational theology (kalām), which al-Ījī describes as the most exalted discipline of learning from which all other learning derives. Al-Ījī also extols reasoning and knowledge of kalām as a means of climbing out of the pit of blind imitation to reach the peak of certainty in faith.⁵³ Even though İzniḳī is careful to maintain a balance between the various sources, theological views (he often cites and carefully considers what he presents as the Mu‘tazili position, along with the Ash‘ari and Maturidi ones), and “hermeneutic resources”⁵⁴ of Islam (kalām, fiqh, Sufism, etc.) on which he is drawing in his presentation and point to the disagreement among scholars on various issues, it is clear that he was sympathetic to the idea of demanding greater knowledge of faith and greater commitment in performance of religious duties from common believers. One can detect the influence of Ash‘ari views on İzniḳī’s conceptualization of the relationship between faith and practice. He states that in the view of the Sunnis (ehl-i sünnet ve’l-cemāʿat), works do not determine whether or not one will enter Paradise or Hell; however, he then embarks on an elaborate discussion of why it is naïve to believe that one can do just anything, including fail to perform worship, and then repent and enter Paradise. For İzniḳī, practice is reflective of inner belief, in which respect he seems to be closer to the Ash‘ari than to the Hanafi-Maturidi school, which more decisively compartmentalized īmān and ʿamel and argued against the latter affecting the former.⁵⁵

Although İzniḳī emphasizes the importance of fear of God, he is more interested in inducing his audience to embrace the necessary knowledge without overemphasizing the danger of lapsing into küfr. The focus is on a positive definition of faith and what one can do to cultivate and grow it, as well as on which vices to avoid in order not to weaken it. However, İzniḳī does not include an extensive section on elfāẓ-i küfr, which will become staple in later ʿilm-i ḥāls—he simply refers his readers to the collections of juridical opinions where they are discussed in detail.⁵⁶ He emphasizes that a believer who has committed a sin should quickly repent and cites the prophylactic prayer one should recite every day to protect oneself from şirk and küfr. But, he does not refer to the legal solution that seems to have been in development during the first half of the fifteenth century among the Ottoman legal scholars, namely that one should both repent and renew one’s faith (tecdīd-i īmān) as a consequence of falling into küfr. He also states that no one among the “people of the qibla” (i.e., those praying in the direction of Mecca) should be labeled a kāfir, except when they deny some aspect of belief or a verse of the Quran, or when they say things that jurists consider blasphemous. In this respect, İzniḳī’s work, written in the first half of the fifteenth century, before the onset of a more concerted politics of defining and enforcing a Sunni orthodoxy and orthopraxy, reflects a more relaxed, “spacious” concept of īmān in which one is not in constant danger of transgressing the boundary with küfr, which is the sense we get from some later Ottoman ʿilm-i ḥāls.

İzniḳī’s Muḳaddime continued to be a popular catechism well into the tenth/sixteenth century, along with various other works in Turkish that were composed or translated for the growing Ottoman Muslim community. However, a new crop of ʿilm-i ḥāls began to be produced starting in the 1540s, in the heyday of Sultan Süleymān’s attempts to highlight the empire’s commitment to and defense of a Sunni orthodoxy, especially through legal discourse and elaborate architectural projects. Multiple state and nonstate agents engaged in the process of instilling a greater commitment to Sunnism in Ottoman Muslims while simultaneously trying to define its content and boundaries in this particular moment in time.⁵⁷ Three texts will be of particular interest to us here: ʿİmādü’l-İslām (The pillars of Islam) by ʿAbdu’r-raḥmān b. Yūsuf Aḳsarāyī, Lüṭfī Pasha’s Tenbīhü’l-ʿāḳılīn ve teʾkīdü’l-gāfilīn (Cautioning of the rational ones and renewal of request to the heedless ones), and Meḥmed b. Pīr ʿAlī Birgivī’s Vaṣiyetnāme (Testament).

Aḳsarāyī’s ʿİmādü’l-İslām became extremely popular soon after being written around 949/1543, to which numerous surviving tenth/sixteenth-century copies of the text testify.⁵⁸ We do not know anything about Aḳsarāyī himself, except that he based his work on an earlier text in Persian by an ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz Fārisī, entitled ʿUmdāt al-islām, but with extensive additions as well as omissions, and the final product being presented in simple Turkish. Like İzniḳī’s Muḳaddime, it is primarily focused on the five pillars of Islam, but in addition to devoting chapters to faith (īmān), prayer (namāz), fasting (oruc), alms giving (ẕekāt), and pilgrimage (ḥac), it has further chapters on death, torments of the grave, the afterlife, the rights (of parents, children, spouses, neighbors, etc.), and etiquette (ādāb). Aḳsarāyī opens the first book, devoted to faith, by saying that in the opinion of the legal experts, it is the detailed faith that is valid, which is why he sees it necessary to explain what this detailed faith is. He states that according to Taʾwilāt al-Kāshānī, a mystical-philosophical work of tafsīr written c. 729/1329 by a Tabrizi scholar ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Kāshānī (d. c. 730/1330), a specialist in Ibn ʿArabī’s metaphysics, faith can be of two kinds: imitative (taḳlīdī) and verified (taḥḳīḳī).⁵⁹ Imitative faith can itself be of two kinds: false (bāṭıl) and sound (ṣaḥīḥ). False taḳlīd is when someone says shahāda, thinking “here are some words that everyone is saying, but I know nothing else besides”—such a person cannot be considered a true believer (müʾmīn). Sound taḳlīd is when someone understands that those who are saying the shahāda will be saved from the poll tax (harāc) in this world and from the torments of the grave in the next one, and he says shahāda because he desires the same. However, Aḳsarāyī proceeds to elaborate, in the Cāmiʿü’l-fetāvā it is said that the imitator’s faith is accepted, but because he is rejecting the reasoning, he is considered a sinner (ʿāṣī).⁶⁰

He proceeds to say that verified faith (taḥḳīḳī īmān) can also be of two kinds: based on reasoning (istidlālī) and based on perception (ẕevḳī). Drawing on al-Ghazālī and Sharīf al-Jurjānī, he explains that the faith based on reasoning is when one looks upon the world and sees that it is built on a sound basis and contemplates everything that is created upon it to realize that it must not have come into existence on its own and that there must be an excellent master builder/creator of unparalleled power behind it. Such a person then begins to recognize the power of this creator in all its characteristics (ṣıfaṭlar) and that everything that exists is thanks to him. A person that comes to realize and accept God’s existence and oneness and subjects to it completely in his or her heart and soul can be said to have attained faith based on reasoning.⁶¹ As for ẕevḳī īmān, he says that it is not very productive to discuss it with common people (ʿavām).⁶²

Upon introducing types of īmān, Aḳsarāyī moves into explaining its conditions, using mostly fatwa collections as a source to emphasize that any Muslim man or woman who reaches puberty and is not familiar with the basics of faith cannot be considered a believer, and if, when asked to state the basics of faith, they respond with “I do not know,” they are to be considered unbelievers (kāfir). He refers to the Cāmiʿü’l-fetāvā that counsels heads of the households how to teach their dependents about the basics of faith. “Do not ask the members of your household questions about God’s oneness, because it is possible that they would respond with ‘I do not know,’ which would make them unbelievers. Rather teach them in this way: ‘This is a stipulation of God’s oneness, isn’t it?’ Then they can respond: ‘Yes.’ This is how you should teach them.”⁶³

Before discussing the actual content of the articles of faith, Aḳsarāyī stops to make the final distinction, between faith in general (mücmel īmān) and faith in detail (mufaṣṣal īmān). The first one he explains as saying “I believe in God with all his attributes and names, and I accept all his commands.” The second one, he says, has seven pillars, each of which needs to be enumerated: “I believe in Allah, His angels, books, prophets, the Day of Judgment, that everything—good or bad—is from Him, and that there will be resurrection.” He writes that according to Kashf al-asrār, ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz al-Bukhārī’s (d. 730/1330) commentary on Pazdawī’s Uṣūl, some legal experts (fuḳahā) believe that faith in general is valid. However, according to the theologians (mutakallimūn), it is the detailed faith that is valid, not the summary one. He refers to the Ash‘ari theologian Abū Bakr al-Bāqillānī’s (d. 403/1013) Kitāb al-Tamhīd in which it is said that every person should know their faith in detail.⁶⁴ Consequently, Aḳsarāyī writes, he also saw it fit to explain the faith in those terms so that everyone would learn the basics and their faith would not be deficient. He then finally moves into the detailed discussion of the articles of faith, within which he also includes a section on the beliefs that distinguish Sunnis (ehl-i sünnet ve’l-cemāʿat) from other sects, such as Kharijites and Shi‘ites (Rāfıżī).

The last part of the chapter on īmān deals in great detail with the elfāẓ-i küfr. The examples cover a wide range of issues, from utterances—especially jokes—about the practices and beliefs of Islam, the prophets, God, and the ulama, to utterances in social interactions between friends, spouses, etc. on various topics. For instance, if an infidel approaches someone and says, “Teach me Islam so that I can become a Muslim” and that someone responds, “Go to such and such scholar [so he can teach you],” the latter person is a kāfir because anyone who allows another person to remain in unbelief any longer than necessary is an unbeliever him/herself. Or, if someone says, “Don’t play chess, because scholars say that those who play chess are the enemies of Allah” and another responds, “If for this reason I am to become an enemy, so be it,” he becomes a kāfir. Or if someone says “Bismillāh” when about to take a sip of wine, that person is an unbeliever.⁶⁵ Based on the fatwa collections he used, Aḳsarāyī stipulates that anyone who has uttered blasphemous words should immediately reject them (rücūʿ etmek) and renew their faith (tecdīd-i īmān).⁶⁶

In sum, although he is using a variety of sources authored by both Hanafi and Shafi‘i, Maturidi and Ash‘ari scholars, when it comes to the issue of īmān, Aḳsarāyī’s ʿilm-i ḥāl emphasizes two particular ideas that are echoed in other Ottoman ʿilm-i ḥāls of the tenth/sixteenth and eleventh/seventeenth centuries but are not featured in the medieval Hanafi-Maturidi creeds. One of those seems to be influenced by the Ash‘ari theological tradition: in order to be valid in the afterlife, one’s faith should be detailed (although from the legal standpoint general faith is sufficient to render one a Muslim). Related to this is also Aḳsarāyī’s view that although an imitator’s faith is technically acceptable, the latter is a sinner because he rejects reasoning, with faith based on reasoning being extolled as ideal. The other major idea falls within the purview of the eastern Hanafi legal tradition and carefully circumscribes the boundaries of īmān in a way that we do not see in the medieval creeds. It maintains that committing küfr is a clear and present danger and that identifying those who commit it, rather than being an issue that Sunni Muslims should shun, is in fact something for which one has to be on a constant lookout within one’s own social circle.

The same two key ideas are channeled by another mid-tenth/sixteenth century author of a number of catechetical works in Turkish, one-time grand vizier of Sultan Süleymān, Lüṭfī Pasha (d. 970/1563).⁶⁷ In his Tenbīhü’l-ʿāḳılīn ve teʾkīdü’l-gāfilīn, Lüṭfī Pasha comes out strongly in favor of the detailed faith, which he defines as the knowledge of the six articles, in addition to God’s attributes, as the only way to enter Paradise. He considers shahāda as a legal precondition for being a Muslim but as insufficient for attaining salvation and becoming a true believer (muʾmīn). Like Aḳsarāyī, Lüṭfī Pasha finds support for this position in the Hanafi fatwa literature, especially al-Fatāwā l-Tatārkhāniyya, which insisted on the necessity of being able to describe the contents of one’s faith when asked to do so, lest one becomes a kāfir.⁶⁸ Lüṭfī Pasha envisions potential situations for such questioning in a number of passages in his account, at one point referring to the Sura al-Mumtaḥana (The woman under questioning; Q 60: 10), suggesting that the new converts coming into the community should be questioned about their faith. Those whose faith is found deficient should receive further instruction, while those who explicitly say “I do not know” and thus fall into küfr should be made to renew their faith as well as their marriage vow in the case that they were married. Seeking to define precisely the content of the necessary knowledge he envisioned for salvation, Lüṭfī Pasha penned a short catechism in question-and-answer format that set out to teach in around 40 questions and succinct answers the basics of faith and worship.⁶⁹

Although he was not madrasa educated, Lüṭfī Pasha read widely, especially in fiqh but also in kalām, although he explicitly condemns speculative kalām along the lines already outlined in al-Ghazālī’s Iḥyāʾ as a potential source of unbelief and heresy (zandaqa).⁷⁰ A close reading of his works reveals a mind trying to grapple with the inconsistencies in the sources and reconcile the positions of the Hanafi-Maturidis, with whom he professed affiliation as a member of the Ottoman ruling elite, with the positions of the Ash‘ari and Shafi‘i scholars whose works he used extensively and clearly found inspirational. For instance, on the subject of īmān-i icmālī and īmān-i tafṣīlī, he tries to reconcile the Hanafi position, which favors the former, with the Ash‘ari position, whose favoring of a more detailed knowledge of faith he himself endorsed. He refers to metn-i Pezdevī (his Uṣūl al-dīn, one of the foundational Hanafi-Maturidi texts), saying that it states that īmān is based on two pillars: knowing the six articles of faith, on the one hand, and assenting to them in one’s heart and professing them with the tongue, on the other.⁷¹ Only such a person will be saved from Hell. But then he refers to the Ash‘ari scholar Ibn al-Ahdal (d. 855/1451) who, in his Kitāb Kashf al-ghiṭāʾ ʿan ḥaqāʾiq al-tawḥīd, stated that when one knows one’s faith in this many details and attributes, it is called īmān-i icmāl-i mufaṣṣal, or detailed general faith. Lüṭfī Pasha proceeds to explain that in his own work he referred to such faith as īmān-i tafṣīlī in order to distinguish it from what the mutakallimūn of olden times labeled as īmān-i icmālī (i.e., the shahāda).⁷²

Lüṭfī Pasha’s fidelity to, yet apparent intellectual discomfort with, some aspects of the Hanafi positions on matters of faith particularly comes through in his discussion of the faith of the imitator, where he repeatedly extols the importance of knowledge and reasoning for achieving certainty in faith and condemns blind imitation, only to default to the well-known Hanafi position that an imitator’s faith is acceptable. In fact, his discussion remains more faithful to al-Māturīdī’s own championing of reason, which led him to condemn taqlīd, and Lüṭfī Pasha cites al-Māturīdī’s sayings in a number of places, mostly based on reports of other scholars, like Abū’l-Ḥasan al-Rustughfanī (d. ca. 350/961), one of al-Māturīdī’s students.⁷³ Even though he duly acknowledges and accepts Abū Ḥanīfa’s inclusive position on taqlīd, by consistently juxtaposing īmān-i taḳlīdī as potentially leading to Hell with īmān-i tafṣīlī, which he sees as leading to Paradise, Lüṭfī Pasha makes it clear that in his view the threshold for being considered a muʾmīn is considerably higher than for some of the earlier adherents of the Hanafi madhhab. At the same time, for all his championing of faith based on reasoning and knowledge, he is careful not to go to the other extreme and endorse the notion of kufr al-ʿāmma, like the slightly younger North African Ash‘ari scholar al-Sanūsī. In fact, he explicitly rejects this idea as Mu‘tazili and focuses on the importance of learning and instruction for common people.⁷⁴

In contrast to Aḳsarāyī’s and Lüṭfī Pasha’s views, Birgivī (or Birgili) Meḥmed Efendi (d. 981/1573), the author of by far the most popular Ottoman catechism in Turkish, entitled Vaṣiyetnāme (970/1562–1563), stated briefly and without elaboration that īmān-i icmālī is sufficient (kāfīdür) and that īmān-i tafṣīlī is not necessary. He writes that if someone knows the necessary things and believes in them but cannot explain them in detail, their Islam is still valid (ḥükm olunur). He also maintains that the imitator’s faith is sound, without discussing any circumstances when it may not be so.⁷⁵ However, in his more elaborate catechetical work, al-Ṭarīqa al-Muḥammadiyya, which he wrote in Arabic just before his death to address not only the basics of faith and practice but also a variety of other topics related to piety and moral living, Birgivī specifies that the faith of the imitator is true but that he is a sinner if he gives up reasoning.⁷⁶ Although Birgivī does not explicitly discuss the matter of summary versus detailed faith in this text, in the section “On Knowledge” he states that the knowledge about what a given situation (i.e., ʿilm-i ḥāl) demands from one in terms of the law is obligatory for every individual (farḍ al-ʿayn), while the knowledge of the sciences that allow one to reason about the underlying proofs of one’s faith, and thus go beyond taqlīd, is obligatory for the community (farḍ al-kifāya).⁷⁷ Birgivī clearly endorsed the idea that seeking knowledge was the duty of each Muslim, as a popular hadith stipulated, but he apparently did not find it necessary or justified to raise the bar for being considered a true believer too high, especially in a text like Vaṣiyetnāme, which was written for the common folk, who did not know Arabic and lacked formal learning. Although he expressed the opinion that those who are capable of knowing but fail to do so are worse than animals, he was less concerned with the ignorance of the simple folk—which could be corrected through teaching—than with the arrogance and hypocrisy of the learned, which in his view pointed to serious moral failures and lack of piety.⁷⁸

During his life, Birgivī attained prominence as a hadith teacher in a provincial hadith school in Birgi and authored numerous works in the tenor of moralist exhortation. Although he was well connected to the Ottoman establishment through his patrons, he did not belong to the highest ranks of the Ottoman ulama. But, his fame grew posthumously, and in recent years his catechetical works, especially his al-Ṭarīqa al-Muḥammadiyya, have come under close scrutiny because he became an inspiration for various “puritan,” “sunna-minded”⁷⁹ preachers in the eleventh/seventeenth century, most notably for Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed Efendi (d. 1045/1635) whose followers became known as the Kadızadelis.⁸⁰ Nevertheless, on the subject of summary versus detailed faith he seems to have represented a more moderate Hanafi position compared to some of his contemporaries and later followers, including Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed. In fact, it may even be said, in light of the discussion above about the late medieval creeds, that Birgivī was more faithful to the traditional Hanafi-Maturidi stance on these issues than İzniḳī, Aḳsarāyī, Lüṭfī Pasha, or later authors who are said to have been directly inspired by him.

Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed’s own ʿilm-i ḥāl, for instance, exudes a spirit that is less “minimalist” when it comes to the issue of the importance of knowledge to faith. Under his penname (mahlaṣ) “ʿİlmī,” Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed authored a popular versified catechism in 1037/1627–1628 in which he did not provide precise definitions of īmān-i icmālī or īmān-i tafṣīlī, nor did he explicitly weigh in on whether the former or the latter is necessary.⁸¹ However, as a whole, the work is a vociferous endorsement of knowledge (ʿilm), which he not only adopts as his mahlaṣ but which he repeatedly characterizes as the animating force of one’s faith and piety.⁸² He states that the essence of faith is to be found in the Quran and that it should be assented to in detail.⁸³ He envisions a process of learning in which professing belief in God’s word epitomized by the Quran and assenting to it in one’s heart is a starting point in a quest for a deeper, detailed understanding of the meaning of God’s word. He also explicitly encourages moving beyond imitation toward verification.⁸⁴ Above all, for Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed knowledge of faith is also essential for the cause that he presents as the reason for writing his ʿilm-i ḥāl, namely for the defense of the true faith (that of ehl-i sünnet) against the heretics (ehl-i ḍalālet), whose ignorant views—especially under the guise of Sufism—are said to have proliferated in the author’s time.⁸⁵

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

After he has discussed the positive and negative attributes of God in the beginning of his Risāle, Rūmī Efendi points out that knowing these attributes still does not suffice for one’s faith to be sound. For that, it is necessary to know more about the articles of faith. It is not enough to simply say the shahāda, but one must also know of God’s oneness and of the Prophet in greater detail; otherwise, one might learn wrongly and consider oneself a Muslim, but without learning about what makes īmān sound, one will reap none of its benefits. Indeed, one will be treated as a Muslim and spared from the poll tax, but in the afterlife a faith like this will earn one a place in Hell.⁹¹ Rūmī Efendi goes on to enumerate the six articles of faith, elaborating on each. Afterwards, he emphasizes that these articles should be learned in their entirety and memorized well (tamām ögrenüp hāṭıralarında perkişdüreler), rather than relying on what one has learned from one’s parents and grandparents, which may be wrong and may not lead to salvation in the afterlife. He emphasizes the importance of the knowledgeable ones within the ehl-i sünnet ve’l-cemāʿat teaching those who are ignorant to preserve them from küfr. Because, those who do not perform their worship and even commit some sins may still be allowed into Paradise after expiating their sins. But those ignorant ones who do not know God’s attributes and what īmān and Islam are, or who learn it wrongly, will end up in Hell eternally, even if they performed their worship day and night.⁹²

It is no surprise, after this exposition on īmān, that Rūmī Efendi comes down on the opposite side of Birgivī on the issue of whether or not īmān-i icmālī is sufficient. He points out that whoever learns the articles of faith he elaborated on, believes in them in their heart, and professes them orally, has a detailed faith (īmān-i tafṣīlī). If, on the other hand, someone does not know all this and simply says “I believe that everything that Muḥammad brought from God is true,” this is īmān-i icmālī. In truth, he says, scholars have considered this sufficient, but—and here he makes the same nod as Aḳsarāyī and Lüṭfī Pasha to the legal stipulations on küfr, but without referring to any concrete fatwas—those who do not know the details of Islam when being asked about it and respond with “I do not know,” become unbelievers (kāfir olur). Therefore, there is no other solution than for one to learn what is necessary and keep refreshing it in order to be saved from eternal torments.⁹³ The theme of being questioned about faith, which was mentioned in the context of Aḳsarāyī’s and Lüṭfī Pasha’s works, also pervades Rūmī Efendi’s Risāle. Besides using it to justify the detailed knowledge of faith, he also warns newly married men to question their wives about faith on their wedding night, before consummating the marriage, but in such a way that the wife is not likely to say “I do not know” because that would necessitate annulment of the marriage.⁹⁴ In the interest of brevity, Rūmī Aḥmed states that he would not include a detailed discussion of elfāẓ-i küfr, but he familiarizes his audience with the staple decision stipulated in the fatwa literature in the case of uttering blasphemous words (i.e., tecdīd-i īmān ve nikāh, or renewal of faith and marriage vow).

The themes of having to know one’s faith in detail from sound sources rather than unquestioningly accepting the word of one’s parents or grandparents, being ready for being questioned about it, and guarding oneself from the utterances and actions that may lead to küfr is most forcefully brought home in an extraordinarily colorful catechetical work entitled Mebḥas̱-i īmān. It was written by Muṣliḥu’d-dīn Muṣṭafā b. Ḥamza b. İbrahīm b. Veliyu’d-dīn, who went by the penname of Nuṣḥī al-Nāṣıḥī. He was a low-ranking member of the ulama and a Sufi, affiliated with the Naqshbandi brotherhood, who originally came from Bolu but who lived for many years in Cairo.⁹⁵ In her discussion of this work, Derin Terzioğlu has already highlighted the extent to which Nuṣḥī viewed the knowledge of ʿilm-i ḥāl as the antidote to all sorts of social problems and troublesome innovations he perceived in the Ottoman polity of his own time. However, there is merit in taking a closer look at Nuṣḥī’s views on the issues of general, detailed, and imitative faith, since his work ties together the themes and authors discussed in the paper so far in a manner that helps us better appreciate the evolution of a particular strand of Ottoman Sunni understanding of īmān. Writing around 1633–1636, Nuṣḥī already had a considerable corpus of catechetical literature in Turkish to consult for his synthesis of necessary knowledge about faith that he set out to present in his work. He informs his readers that he consulted 40 books, most of which he lists by title. Among the titles in Turkish, we find Birgivī’s Vaṣiyetnāme, Aḥmed Rūmī’s Risāle, Shaykh Bālī el-Üveysī’s Hediyetü’l-Muhliṣīn,⁹⁶ Süleymān b. Halīl ʿUnḳūdī’s Behcetü’l-ʿārifīn ve ravżatü’s-sālikīn, and the Turkish translation of Shirʿat al-Islām, a popular work by Muḥammad b. Abū Bakr al-Bukhārī, known as Imāmzāda (d. 573/1177). A longer list in Arabic includes the staples of Hanafi creedal literature, such as Fiqh al-akbar and Waṣiyya, attributed to Abū Ḥanīfa, and unspecified commentaries on both, Nasafī’s ʿAqāʾid as well as Taftāzānī’s commentary on it and various supercommentaries on the latter, al-Ūshī’s Badʾ al-amālī (also known as Yaqūl al-ʿAbd) and three commentaries on it, as well as a text Nuṣḥī refers to as ʿUmdat, which is most probably Abū l-Barakāt al-Nasafī’s ʿUmdat al-ʿaqīda li-ahl al-sunna mentioned earlier. Interestingly, Nuṣḥī also appears to have used Lüṭfī Pasha’s compendious catechetical work in Arabic entitled Zubdat al-masāʾil. Additionally, he also lists several works on fiqh, like Akmal al-Dīn al-Bābartī’s (d. 786/1384–1385) sharḥ on Hidāya, and several works on kalām, such as Hediyetü’l-mehdiyīn (or muḥtedīn) by Ahīzāde Yūsuf Çelebi (d. c. 904/1499) and Baḥr al-kalām by Abū l-Muʿīn al-Nasafī (d. 508/1114).⁹⁷ Among the last ones, he also lists al-Ghazālī’s Iḥyāʾ, which is nevertheless an important model for the author, at least in his division (if not precise content) of knowledge into that which is compulsory on each believer (farż-ı ʿayn) and that which is incumbent upon the community as a whole (farż-ı kifāye).

In light of this list, which is heavily skewed toward classical Hanafi creedal and legal literature, more so than the source lists of other Ottoman authors discussed so far, it is interesting to examine how Nuṣḥī handles the issues of imitative, general, and detailed faith. He opens his discussion on īmān by saying that a true believer’s faith can be of three kinds: muḳalled (imitated), muhaḳḳaḳ (certain, verified), and müstedel (deduced, inferred). He proceeds to state that in “our meẕheb” (Ar. madhhab)—that of ehl-i sünnet ve’l-cemāʿat (i.e., the Sunnis)—imitative faith is considered sound.⁹⁸ However, because of rejecting reasoning, an imitator is a fāsıḳ (impious, sinner; in breach of law). They call him imitator because he learned the faith wrongly from his parents or someone else, and his potential for being seduced by the devil is great. So, even though he admits that his own madhhab finds imitative faith acceptable, every time Nuṣḥī mentions imitators and their faith, he implies that such faith must be riddled with mistakes and misunderstandings, and thus wrong. This is a remarkable contrast with the discussion in pre-Ottoman Hanafi creedal literature, all of which makes sure to point out that the muḳallid’s faith may lead to certainty in belief and that such a believer may have sound faith, while only some authors bother to mention that if an imitator neglects to seek further information about faith they are to be considered sinners. Nuṣḥī’s position, however, is that such faith is by default wrong and sinful. He goes on to contrast it to the knowledge of those who learn their articles of faith from the books and the ulama, and who, if they have no doubts in their hearts, attain īmān-i taḥḳīḳī or verified faith. Finally, those who seek to understand the intricacies of every proof of God’s existence have deduced faith, but he adds that such faith is only for the ulama and not of use for the common people for whom he is writing.⁹⁹

As for the common people, they must prioritize their ʿilm-i ḥāl, which is knowledge about faith compulsory upon each believer. He states that the essence of faith (aṣl-i īmān) is comprised of six articles, while there are five pillars of Islam, both sets of which he discusses in detail. Further in the text, he includes a section that is almost verbatim from Aḥmed Rūmī’s Risāle and emphasizes the fact that īmān consists of a number of things and that simply saying shahāda would not do. He reminds his audience that while shahāda (as īmān-i icmālī) may be sufficient to be considered a Muslim, if one does not know the details about īmān and Islam when asked, one becomes a kāfir, and Hell is waiting for them in the afterlife, so it is essential for one’s salvation to have detailed faith.¹⁰⁰

The knowledge of these foundations of īmān and Islam, as he emphasizes, is not simply a vehicle for salvation and guarantee for entering Paradise; it also has a practical social application, of stemming what Nuṣḥī perceives as an inexorable decline of Ottoman society starting around 950/1543–1544 due to neglect of the obligatory, farż-ı ʿayn knowledge and favoring of the farż-ı kifaye learning. In particular, anyone with a solid knowledge of ʿilm-i ḥāl would be able, after just a short conversation, to identify heretics who have proliferated within the Ottoman realm and infiltrated the army and the government, according to Nuṣḥī. Building on his passionate case for inculcation of the common believers in the basics of faith by the knowledgeable members of the community, neighborhood imams, and heads of households, Nuṣḥī goes as far as to suggest an annual examination of all Muslim boys above the age of seven in their knowledge of ʿilm-i ḥāl, recommending expulsion from the neighborhood of those displaying ignorance or failure to learn.¹⁰¹

Like other authors of Ottoman ʿilm-i ḥāls, Nuṣḥī pairs his insistence on the knowledge of the ʿilm-i ḥāl with insistence on awareness of the boundaries of īmān and necessity of guarding oneself from what is prohibited and corrupts one’s faith. He argues that such awareness can be effectively attained by learning the examples of elfāẓ and efʿāl-i küfr (blasphemous acts), which Nuṣḥī catalogues in great detail at the end of his work, providing a list of the fatwa collections that he consulted in order to compile this section. Again displaying a remarkable awareness of the moment and place in which he is writing, Nuṣḥī anticipates Guy Burak’s argument articulated in his study on the origins of the legal solution of tecdīd-i īmān for cases of küfr, which highlights differences in the practices of Rumi and Arab Hanafis (see above). Along the same lines, Nuṣḥī explains that he gave a detailed list of sources for this section, lest someone who lives in other parts of Ottoman or Muslim realms and does not have access to these fatwa compilations might think he is inventing things. Because, he continues, these fatwa compilations cannot be found in some regions (vilāyetler), and people do not know of the words that induce küfr. Some assert that Abū Ḥanīfa had said that one should not accuse of küfr (i.e., engage in takfīr) anyone who belongs to the people who pray toward Mecca (ehl-i ḳıble). However, in the Hanafi madhhab a person who pronounces elfāẓ-i küfr or does efʿāl-i küfr can become a kāfir, but some who hear of this reject that this is a Hanafi tradition. For instance, it is reported that the ulama of Egypt have not been giving fatāwā on küfr for anyone who pronounces elfāẓ-i küfr, but this is either because they are afraid of people and try to flatter them, or they are ignorant of these things. There is no local transmission of this kind of fatāwā, and without tradition or precedent (ḥaml) a juridical opinion cannot be given.¹⁰²

The latter explanation is important because it highlights the diversity within the Hanafi madhhab across the Ottoman Empire. Even in the context of the lands of Rum, it would be wrong to suggest that by the eleventh/seventeenth century all Ottoman ʿilm-i ḥāl writers made an 180 degree turn from the earlier Hanafi-Maturidi position; rather, a variety of positions coexisted, although with a marked tendency toward the stance that īmān-i tafṣīlī is necessary for salvation.¹⁰³ As we have seen, the debate on this issue was complicated by the fact that various authors appear to have understood differently what “summary” and “detailed” meant as qualifiers of faith. For instance, in his popular work on creed entitled Dürerü’l-ʿaḳāʾid, written some time before 1024/1615, the famous Halveti Sufi shaykh and preacher ʿAbdü’l-mecīd Sivāsī (d. 1049/1639) mounts a vocal defense of both summary/general faith and the faith of an imitator, stating that both are accepted by the consensus of the Sunni community and that an imitator, even though he may be a rebel for not understanding the proofs, is still a believer as long as he has no doubts in faith.¹⁰⁴ However, Sivāsī’s definitions are interesting: he underlines that īmān-i icmālī means having faith in general terms, such as saying that one believes in angels, and books, and prophets. Īmān-i tafṣīlī, on the other hand, denotes detailed belief that can distinguish between the angels by name, like Cibrāʾīl and Mihāʾīl, and the prophets, like Mūsā and ʿĪsā, and the books, like Tevrāt and İncīl. Sivāsī emphasizes that while professing faith in general is sufficient (kāfī), detailed faith is a necessary condition (şarṭ), because anyone who does not believe in or outright denies the singularity or multiplicity contained in a particular category of belief is a kāfir.¹⁰⁵ In light of the previous discussion, it appears that Sivāsī assumes a more detailed knowledge under the category of general faith than most Hanafi authors.

Sivāsī’s treatment of the topic raises the question of whether we may perhaps trace a dissenting streak in ʿilm-i ḥāls and related genres authored by prominent Sufis, a streak that pushes back against the narrowing definitions of belief and greater demands on the believer typically associated with the followers of Ḳāḍīzāde Meḥmed Efendi—who famously clashed with Sivāsī in the late 1620s and 1630s—and various other eleventh/seventeenth-century sunna-minded commentators.¹⁰⁶ While a detailed consideration of this question requires a separate study, a limited inquiry into the contents of some popular eleventh/seventeenth-century Sufi works suggests that this was not the case. It appears that even those authors who did not explicitly embrace the necessity of having īmān-i tafṣīlī found it important to signal its superiority over īmān-i icmālī in no uncertain terms. For instance, Münīrī-i Belgrādī (d. 1045/1635), a well-known Rumeli Sufi who authored an ʿilm-i ḥāl entitled Sübülü’l-Hüdā, opens his work with a discussion of īmān, stating that faith can be general and detailed. He defines the former as professing belief that everything Muḥammad brought from God is true and says that this is sufficient to make one a müʾmīn and worthy of Paradise. However, he points out that whoever has detailed faith will earn a place in Paradise that is superior to that of someone with general faith.¹⁰⁷ Another eleventh/seventeenth-century work on īmān, an anonymous Risāle-i ʿamāniye [sic] that is also likely authored by a Sufi, states that upon the consensus of the ulama, icmālī īmān entails affirmation that God is one, that Muḥammad is his prophet, and that everything he brought from God is true. In principle, this knowledge is sufficient, but it is compulsory on each believer (farż-ı ʿayn) to learn the details of faith, as God has ordered that religion must be based on comprehension (tefaḳḳuh) and prohibited ignorance.¹⁰⁸

An intriguing illustration of the eleventh/seventeenth-century Sufi authors’ tendency to emphasize the importance of greater knowledge for sound faith comes from the famous Halveti shaykh Niyāzī-i Mıṣrī (d. 1105/1694), who discusses this issue in his widely popular Risāle-i Esʾile ve ecvibe.¹⁰⁹ As Mıṣrī states, he wrote this work in order to dispel the doubts about Sufis caused by some of the things they say, which are misinterpreted by the common people and some ulama—an age-old problem that Sufis had to deal with but that now gained new visibility and mobilized society in a new way. From the 1630s onward, Sufis had borne the brunt of the Kadızadelis’ rants against the blameworthy innovations in belief and practice, as well as accusations of shunning the sharia. Mıṣrī’s goal was to show that Sufis belong to the people of God and to the Sunni meẕheb, and more precisely, when it comes to Sufis from the lands of Rum (Rūm vilāyeti), to the meẕhebs of Abū Manṣūr al-Māturīdī and Abū Ḥanīfa. Mıṣrī’s introduction, similar to contemporary ʿilm-i ḥāls, highlights the broader usage of the term meẕheb (Ar. madhhab, “that which is followed”; “the opinion one adopts”)—which is typically used by modern scholars only to index belonging to one of the schools of Islamic law—to denote sectarian (or denominational) and theological affiliation as well. In the view of the Ottoman ʿilm-i ḥāl authors, there was only one correct meẕheb in terms of belief (īʿtiḳād), and that was the Sunni meẕheb.¹¹⁰ At the same time, although they professed affiliation with the Hanafi and Maturidi meẕheb, respectively, and emphasized their primacy, in terms of legal practice and method of theological argumentation, they allowed for plurality and regarded these largely a matter of a Muslim’s geographical provenance.¹¹¹ Altogether, however, in this era of polarization both within the Sunni community and between Sunnis and Shi‘ites, ʿilm-i ḥāl authors accorded considerable attention to an ever-more precise identification and classification of Ottoman Muslims, and Mıṣrī felt obliged to provide his brethren’s “coordinates” on this map, rooting them firmly in the categories of Sunni, Hanafi and Maturidi, endorsed by the Ottoman religious establishment.

The opening question of the risāle is: what is the basis of Sufism? Mıṣrī responds that it is faith (īmān), which has six pillars—belief in God’s existence and unity, his angels, prophets, books, the Day of Judgment, and that both good and bad is owing to God. The second question seeks to know the difference between the common people (ʿavām) and Sufis, to which he responds that the difference is that ʿavām’s faith in these six articles of faith is imitative (taḳlīdī) while the Sufis’ is verified (taḥḳīḳī) and the ulama’s is reasoned (istidlālī). He continues to explain that imitative faith is based on authority of others but without understanding the underlying proofs, which resembles finding a precious stone but not knowing its value. Verified faith, on the other hand, is one that seeks to arrive at the truth of every article of faith. He states that the road between the “village of imitation” (taḳlīd köyü) and “city of verification” (taḥḳīḳ şehri) is the Sufi path (ʿilm-i ṭarīḳat), and that ultimately, the difference between the common people (ʿavām and havāṣ) and Sufis is in the degrees of wisdom/knowledge (merātib-i maʿrifet).¹¹²

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

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

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

At the same time, as Khaled El-Rouayheb has convincingly argued, we need to revise the view that while theology in the medieval—and early modern, I would add—Christian context served to deepen faith in the mysteries of the creed and fortify the believers’ understanding of their faith, kalām was an apologetic and defensive discipline that merely served to defend the creed against heretics and infidels.¹¹⁴ Through his detailed study of al-Sanūsī’s work, El-Rouayheb showed that al-Sanūsī understood kalām as a demonstrative not dialectical science, and viewed mastery of its essentials as a religious duty incumbent on each adult Muslim. While Ottoman Hanafi catechists did not go as far as al-Sanūsī to reject the simple, unreasoned faith of the commoner, most of them were sympathetic to the emphasis on the necessity of a more detailed knowledge and more thorough instruction in proofs of God’s oneness and of each article of faith, making this aspect of classical kalām incumbent upon each believer.

In developing this position, Ottoman authors appear to have drawn both on a particular strand in the postclassical eastern Hanafism, which they have elevated to a state-endorsed orthopraxy, and on the synthesis of Maturidi and Ash‘ari theological views that began already in the eighth/fourteenth and ninth/fifteenth centuries and may have induced Ottoman authors to be more open to the arguments that a detailed knowledge of faith is a prerequisite for salvation. However, we see that it is really in the mid-tenth/sixteenth and especially in the eleventh/seventeenth century when this perspective is more openly embraced and when the thought of Ash‘ari theologians with an anti-taqlīd bent becomes a welcome intellectual resource to tackle the social issues of the day. It is in this period that the debate about the nature, content, and boundaries of Sunnism peaked, especially in the Ottoman lands of Rum, but also between Rumi and Arab literati of both shared and different legal madhhab allegiances.¹¹⁵

The notions of being questioned about one’s faith and the consequences of not knowing the correct answers—namely, the possibility of plunging into unbelief—strongly inform those Ottoman catechisms that insist on a detailed knowledge of faith. In a recent essay examining what might be the essence of the phenomenon of “confessionalization” in a comparative early modern perspective, Cornel A. Zwierlein has suggested that confessionalization was at its root an epistemic process of constantly asking questions about how the belief and practice in real life compared to the theological norms and expectations, seeking to correct the deviations.¹¹⁶ It would appear that the Ottoman catechisms in question display the same impulse to correct and verify and envision the same role for theology as in a contemporary Christian context, not only as a tool for protecting the faith from external attacks but also as a means of deepening one’s understanding of its precepts. While the intellectual resources and inspiration for the reconsideration of the boundaries of faith and the centrality of knowledge in these Ottoman catechisms came from within the Islamic tradition, they helped their authors tackle the challenges that seem to have been shared by theologians across confessional and geographic borders of the early modern world. Although not all Ottoman catechisms were equally insistent on possessing a detailed knowledge of one’s faith, and there were many Muslims who resisted the idea that the boundaries of Sunni Islam can and should be narrowly defined, these texts demonstrate that we cannot anymore argue that Ottoman “Sunnitization” or the process of defining and enforcing a particular definition of Sunnism was a purely political project that was content with occasionally persecuting Shi‘ites and forcing Ottoman Sunnis to pray more regularly without any novel theological basis or genuine intension to correct their faith.

Acknowledgments

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