Caliphate Redefined

The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought

Hüseyin Y?lmaz

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781400888047
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

How the Ottomans refashioned and legitimated their rule through mystical imageries of authority The medieval theory of the caliphate, epitomized by the Abbasids (750–1258), was the construct of jurists who conceived it as a contractual leadership of the Muslim community in succession to the Prophet Muhammed's political authority. In this book, Hüseyin Y?lmaz traces how a new conception of the caliphate emerged under the Ottomans, who redefined the caliph as at once a ruler, a spiritual guide, and a lawmaker corresponding to the prophet's three natures.Challenging conventional narratives that portray the Ottoman caliphate as a fading relic of medieval Islamic law, Y?lmaz offers a novel interpretation of authority, sovereignty, and imperial ideology by examining how Ottoman political discourse led to the mystification of Muslim political ideals and redefined the caliphate. He illuminates how Ottoman Sufis reimagined the caliphate as a manifestation and extension of cosmic divine governance. The Ottoman Empire arose in Western Anatolia and the Balkans, where charismatic Sufi leaders were perceived to be God's deputies on earth. Y?lmaz traces how Ottoman rulers, in alliance with an increasingly powerful Sufi establishment, continuously refashioned and legitimated their rule through mystical imageries of authority, and how the caliphate itself reemerged as a moral paradigm that shaped early modern Muslim empires.A masterful work of scholarship, Caliphate Redefined is the first comprehensive study of premodern Ottoman political thought to offer an extensive analysis of a wealth of previously unstudied texts in Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish.

CHAPTER ONE

The Discourse on Rulership

IF WESTERN ASIA MINOR is taken as the broader cultural context of the early Ottoman state, then it was born into one of the most vibrant and versatile cultural milieus of the Muslim world, albeit being relatively less exposed to the broader learned traditions. The region was marked by high social mobility, indefinite political identities, frequently shifting frontiers, and nascent institutions of learning. Looking for a definitive date or a source for the beginning of Ottoman literature on political thought, much like the endless debate on the formal start date of the Ottoman state, is at best a futile effort and, more likely, a potentially misleading endeavor. It is not because we do not have enough textual knowledge of the period but because the very porousness of political boundaries and cultural affinities among the Turkoman emirates of western Asia Minor renders the characterization of any historical artifact, text, or personality from that era as “Ottoman” an arbitrary assessment, at least in the cultural sense of the word. With that caveat, the adjective “Ottoman” in this study cautiously refers to political affiliation when used in the context of the fourteenth century. In the context of the fifteenth century and afterwards, it is used in reference to both political affiliation and cultural articulation as both traits became more pronounced following the Battle of Ankara, and turned into manifest identities in the sixteenth century, especially after Selim I’s military campaigns against the Safavids and the Mamluks from 1514 to 1517.

Translations excluded, there is no known text that can safely be included in Ottoman political literature from the fourteenth century. Because of the special circumstances of their frontier principality, Ottoman statesmen of this period, if they could be so called, seem to have shown no notable interest in sophisticated political theories that had been formulated in well-developed polities. Instead, it was epics that seem to have served as the principal medium of conveying and inculcating princely virtues for good governance. Reading epics was popular both at courts and public audiences of western Asia Minor. These epics were replete with moral lessons and political advice as illustrated in the lives of heroes, therefore functioning as entertaining and dramatic media for education on rulership, well suited to the profiles of chivalrous frontier princes. They functioned to bridge courtly and public ideals of morality and leadership. If there was any interest to read on statecraft per se, the statesmen and the learned must have relied on political texts written elsewhere. What we may more confidently classify as “Ottoman” in political writing started at the turn of the fifteenth century and culminated in a broad-based discourse on rulership by the mid-sixteenth century. This chapter surveys and examines this output in three phases marked by three turning points with far-reaching consequences for all aspects of Ottoman history including visions of rulership: the Battle of Ankara in 1402, the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, and the Egyptian Campaign of 1516–1517, each initiated a new phase in political writing.

The Age of Angst: Turkish Vernacularism
and Political Expression

From the beginnings of the Ottoman state until the sixteenth century, when Turkish established itself as the principal language of administration and literary articulation, writing in Turkish had always been a contentious issue. Almost every text in Turkish from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries included an apology for the use of this language. Among others, two commonly cited reasons to justify writing in Turkish were addressing the Turkoman base in their own language and facilitating learning for students who were yet to master any one of the two conventional languages of learning, literature, and administration.¹ Otherwise, as a medium of Islamic learning Turkish was still considered a profane language and a crude one unfit for artistic expressions, a complaint voiced by even the staunchest advocates of writing in Turkish vernacular. For writing in the language of illiterate nomads one could easily become stigmatized as being unlearned or unrefined. Hoca Mesud, for example, in the mid-fourteenth century, despite writing in Turkish for its instrumental value of speaking to people in their own language, nevertheless ridiculed himself that, for doing so, he lost half of his body weight out of shame.² But the sudden change of political conditions in the early fifteenth century made Turkish the language of choice at the Ottoman court, albeit not being fully exonerated.

The utter humiliation of the Ottomans by Timur in the Battle of Ankara and the ensuing civil war not only disassembled the fledgling early Ottoman state and its delicate alliances but also unleashed a fierce competition in a chaotic theater among disempowered princes, ambitious chieftains, prestigious learned men, and charismatic Sufi leaders who emerged as leading figures vying to reestablish order per their distinctive visions of social organization and political leadership. This moment of elevated sentiments of despair and hope as well as astonishment, anxiety, and self-reflection manifested itself on the literary plane as a sudden burst of interest in writing and reading on the art of rulership by reconnecting with Arabic and Persian learned traditions. Princes turned into curious patrons of learning and the learned became advisors with books on rulership at hand. The most visible outcome of this cultural florescence was the translation of texts from all fields of learning, of which mirrors for princes were among the most prized. Political uncertainty and the struggle for consolidation made works on statecraft relevant for those who were content with reading epics as mirrors. Yet, except for a small group of scholars, the ruling elite were not well equipped to read in Arabic or Persian or, at least, they had not yet developed the courtly taste of reading or hearing in a language other than Turkish. That made translation the principal medium of training on government for Ottoman princes and statesmen. As a result, during the first half of the fifteenth century, Ottoman learned men translated and reworked a remarkably diverse list of political works for their patrons.³

Among them was Ahmed b. Hüsameddin el-Amasi, whose Mirʾātü’l-Mülūk (Mirror for Kings), despite being a translation, can cautiously be considered the first genuine work of political thought by an Ottoman author. Written as a mirror for princes, Mirʾātü’l-Mülūk provides an illustrative case for the development of early Ottoman political writing. Amasi dedicated the work in 1406 to Mehmed I (r. 1413–1421), who consolidated his rule after more than a decade of civil war (1402–1411), later dubbed as Interregnum (Fetret Devri). As suggested by his toponym, he was from Amasya and was born to a well-established local family, the Gümüşlüzades, who raised scholars, Sufis, and statesmen. The extant two copies of Mirʾātü’l-Mülūk suggest that the work did not reach a wide audience.⁴

Mirʾātü’l-Mülūk is an early example of a long-lasting pattern in which some authors opted to express their own views on rulership by extensively quoting from the canons of Islamic political thought in Arabic and Persian. Those who undertook this approach chose well-known texts and limited their discretion to making selections and organizing them in a format suitable for conveying their own convictions. Ebu’l-Fazl Münşi’s Dustūr al-Salṭana, which was based on Najm al-Din Daye’s Mirṣād al-ʿIbād, and Kemal b. Hacı Ilyas’s Ādāb al-Mulūk, a work drawn from Ghazali’s Naṣīḥat al-Mulūk, were two sixteenth century examples of this pattern. This eclecticism opened a new channel for the spread of political ideas propounded by authoritative figures of learned traditions in Persian and Arabic, thus creating a literary bond between the ideals of rulership of the Ottoman milieu with those of the broader Islamic culture. Through the works of subsequent authors who shared Amasi’s approach, political views of non-Ottoman scholars, philosophers, and Sufis, such as Mawardi and Farabi, were introduced to the Ottoman audience anonymously while their works remained untranslated into Turkish.

Mirʾātü’l-Mülūk consists of two parts. The first part derives its material from the thirteenth century philosopher Nasir al-Din Tusi’s (d. 1274) celebrated work of practical philosophy, Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī.⁵ The second part is mostly taken from Ghazali’s (d. 1055) Naṣīhat al-Mulūk, the most widely circulated work of the mirror for princes genre in the Islamic world.⁶ In Mirʾātü’l-Mülūk, Amasi does not make any reference to either of these works or their authors, and explicitly presents himself as its author.⁷ He combined the content of these two works by selective translations adding only a few modifications of his own. It seems unlikely that he intended to appropriate the content of two well-known works without this being noticed by his contemporaries. Per the authoring conventions of the time, the text may well be considered as a compilation rather than a plagiarism. Many later authors who followed the same pattern clearly stated that they composed their works through compiling and translating from authoritative works on a given topic but often avoided citing them. Authors who composed by compiling often preferred works with entertaining features and simple literary styles to convey in Turkish. The outcome was an abundance of mirrors for princes literature and a scarcity of philosophical and juridical works dealing with politics. Considering the two sources of Amasi, although there is no known translation of Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī, there were at least five different translations of Naṣīhat al-Mulūk by the end of the sixteenth century. While Amasi followed an exceptional path by partially translating Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī, he also put his work into the mainstream by combining it with Naṣīḥat al-Mulūk.

The language used in the two parts of the work differs significantly: in the first part, it is more philosophical and the terminology more scholarly; in the second part, the content is more literary whereas the terminology is closer to the Ottoman usage of Amasi’s time. Political terms such as raʿiyyet (subjects), pādişāh (ruler), and ẓulm (oppression), which are widely used in the second part, are rarely used in the first part, where more philosophical words such as abnā-i jins, malik, and javr are used instead. Excluding the works that were catered to the consumption of a wider public, the general trend among Ottoman authors was to diligently preserve the terminological framework of works composed in traditional Islamic disciplines, grammar, and philosophy. Through this literary proselytization, the once profane and mundane language of early Ottoman Turkish evolved into a sophisticated language of political discourse by the sixteenth century. The use of such an elevated language by Amasi indicates that he wrote the work for a learned audience. His compilation of a mirror for princes in Turkish by using selections from two classical works offered his audience a new text on the ethics of rulership with a refined language and a sophisticated conceptual framework.

In compiling Mirʾātü’l-Mülūk, Amasi included chapters that have more practical relevance for the ruler. He made use of only three of the eight chapters of Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī: on the need for civilization, the government of the king and the government of servants, and the manners of following kings. These subjects were commonly dealt with in the mirrors for princes literature and largely linked to the relations between rulers and their subjects. Chapters Amasi did not include were on love, divisions of societies, fidelity, and friendship, topics that are more social than political in nature. While the integrated chapters deal with a vertical relationship between the ruler and the ruled, the omitted chapters basically deal with a horizontal relationship among groups or individuals in society, and are therefore less relevant to governance. By using Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī as his source text, Amasi created an exclusive treatise on ruler-ship from a general theory of ethics.

Amasi undertook the same approach in deriving his material from Gha-zali’s Naṣīḥat al-Mulūk as well. He made Ghazali’s already practical book of mirrors more relevant to actual situations by excluding its first half, metaphorically entitled “the roots of faith,” which explained God’s attributes. By contrast, a mid-sixteenth century translator of Naṣīḥat al-Mulūk, Alayi, wrote an extensive commentary on the first part of the work while simply translating the second part that used literary devices to educate the ruler on statecraft.⁸ Writing during the height of the Ottoman–Safavid feud with its flaring theological disputes, Alayi was more concerned with the creed of the ruler than with the ruler’s education on statecraft. Amasi, however, writing at a time when the Ottoman state was just consolidating after a long civil war, was more interested in the principles of good governance. In appropriating the second part of Naṣīḥat al-Mulūk, Amasi was content with selecting stories and leaving out the moral lessons and explanations given by Ghazali. He puts the ruler in a more central position than he occupies in the original work by excluding sections that deal only indirectly with rulership. This part of the work exhorts the ruler to do justice and warn him against oppression. By incorporating only the illustrated section of Naṣīḥat al-Mulūk, with exciting stories and memorable aphorisms, Amasi turned Mirʾātü’l-Mülūk into a performative text with an added value for entertainment.

When molded into Mirʾātü’l-Mülūk, the philosophical content of Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī and the theological content of Naṣīḥat al-Mulūk received less emphasis. Philosophical abstractions and theological formulations regarding government that had little relevance to early fifteenth century Ottoman rulership were left out. A chapter of Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī, for example, that discusses characteristics of various types of associations and rulers, is not included. Likewise, from Tusi’s lengthy discussion of four different types of government, only government by a king is included in Mirʾātü’l-Mülūk.⁹ Among the readers of Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī, Amasi is not the only one who disregarded these two chapters, which displayed one of the most genuine discussions about alternative forms of political associations in Islamic political thought. More influential later figures such as Davvani (d. 1502–1503), Kashifi (d. 1504–1505), and Kınalızade (d. 1572), who wrote ethical works that also relied heavily on Akhlāq-i Nāṣirī, likewise omitted these topics. They seem to have shared Amasi’s objective of turning the general theory of ethics composed by Tusi int...