Download PDF | Aslihan Gurbuzel - Taming the Messiah_ The Formation of an Ottoman Political Public Sphere, 1600–1700-University of California Press (2023).
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
While an economics major at Bilkent University, my interest in Ottoman history was initially inspired by Zeynep Yiirekli’s teaching and mentorship. I was fortunate to take courses with Ozer Ergeng and Eugenia Kermeli while studying for my master’s at Bilkent. The research that resulted in this book began during my graduate studies at Harvard University. I would like to thank my PhD supervisor Cemal Kafadar for sharing his boundless passion for Ottoman cultural and intellectual history with me. Iam thankful for his long, engaging, and exquisite seminars, which I will always cherish, He taught me to approach the linguistic and cultural worlds of texts with genuine openness and humbleness, and to avoid “the enormous condescension of posterity,’ as E. P, Thompson famously remarked, when facing the intricate intellectual world of early modern Ramis.
At Harvard, I was also fortunate to study with Khaled el-Rouayheb and learned much from his approach to Islamic intellectual history. Ann Blair has been an invaluable guide in early modern cultural and intellectual history, and a generous and reliable mentor throughout. I am also grateful to Dana Sajdi for the careful reading and honest and engaged feedback she has provided on my work; she has made mea better writer and a better communicator of ideas, I cannot imagine what my graduate training would have looked like without the mentorship of the late Shahab Ahmed, who treated me as a colleague from my first day at Harvard on. He generously shared with me his projects and ideas at various stages of their development, always sprinkled with his unmatched sense of humor. I am forever grateful for the intellectual stimulation and challenge he consistently provided to me during my years at Harvard.
This book took its present shape at McGill University’s Institute of Islamic Studies, where I found a welcoming home after completing my PhD, I am grateful to all my colleagues at the Institute for providing me with an exceptionally supportive environment. I am particularly indebted to Laila Parsons and Michelle Hartman. I cannot count the number of times they offered me support, encouragement, and guidance over the past five years. In order to complete this manuscript, I took a postdoctoral fellowship at Koc University’s RCAC (Research Center for Anatolian Studies). Without this fellowship, I would not have been able to conduct brand-new research and to entirely reconceptualize my project. I thank Buket Coskuner, Chris Roosevelt, and the RCAC crew and fellows for this fellowship period. I am particularly grateful to Zeynep Aydogan, Miige Telci Ozbek, and the late Yavuz Sezer for their companionship during this year.
The ideas in this book developed in conversation with many colleagues and audiences over the past six years. I am grateful to my colleagues Baki Tezcan and Kaya Sahin for providing me with engaged and challenging feedback on parts of my argument, while being extremely supportive and encouraging throughout. I am also grateful for the many conversations I have had over the years with Selim Sirri Kuru, Ali Yaycioglu, Evren Siinnetcioglu, Akif Yerlioglu, Kameliya Atanasova, Yavuz Aykan, Jonathan Allen, and Nir Shafir. Feedback that I received from audiences at the final stages of drafting the book has been particularly crucial. For these opportunities to present my work in progress, I thank Ali Yaycioglu and the Eurasian Empires Workshop at Stanford University, Ferenc Péter Csirkés and the History Department at Sabanc1 University, Mehmet Kentel and the Istanbul Research Institute, Nir Shafir and the History Department at the University of California, San Diego, and Derin Terzioglu and the Nafi Baba Center of Sufism Studies at Bogazi¢i University. The three anonymous reviewers for the University of California Press have saved me from many errors, and gave the first draft of this book important new directions. At the University of California Press, I was also fortunate to receive the guidance of the members of the editorial board and of my editors, LeKeisha Hughes and Eric Schmidt. Jessica Stilwell’s careful editing has given my book a much better flow than it would otherwise have. An earlier version of chapter 5 was published in Brill’s Philological Encounters. I am grateful to the journal for allowing me to republish my work as part of this book.
As I conclude the project, it is a pleasure to thank my friends and family for supporting me throughout these years. I am grateful to my dear friends Aysegiil Yénet, Derya Kilic, Akif Ercihan Yerlioglu, Aytug Sasmaz, Ardeta Gjikola, and Elena Razlogova, who supported me with their company, encouragement, beliefin me, and good humor through these years. Last but not least, I thank my parents Ramazan and Keziban Giirbiizel for always taking pride in everything I do, and for supporting me in my pursuits. My sisters, Miinire and Merve, are the funniest people alive, and I cannot thank them enough for the joy they bring to my days.
Introduction
An empire is a constant dialogue between unity and diversity. So is mystical theology. Historically, proponents of empire idealized empires as safe havens of unity and harmony, overemphasizing imperial capacity and potency. At no time was the idealization of imperial power stronger than in the sixteenth century, when powerholders across the Mediterranean competed in the adoption of sacred languages of kingship that promised imperial subjects nothing short ofa “heaven on earth.” Much ink has recently been spilled on the Sufisminfused language of absolutism prevalent in the early modern Islamicate empires, which underlined the ruler’s cosmic status as the delegate of godly authority, or, in other words, as the caliph and the messiah.! The Ottomans were part of this messianic age, particularly during the long reign of Siileyman the Lawgiver (r. 1520-1566). Chroniclers, scribes, jurists, and illuminators under Siileyman worked hard to create an imperial image characterized by serenity, omnipresence, and pervasiveness.
By the early seventeenth century, however, the global age of messianism had given way to a dramatically different reality for both the Ottomans and their neighbors to the east. Decentralized governance replaced the strong centralist pull of the previous century, shifting away from ambitious universalism. Instead, the reality of fragmentation took center stage, displacing fictions of unity. The new political reality, which began to take shape as of the late sixteenth century, became undeniably visible through ritual and visual representations of power in seventeenth-century Istanbul. Whereas idealized representations of power had emphasized pomp, grandeur, and seclusion in the early sixteenth century, the theater of power was now filled with multiple new actors, Urban publics staged political spectacles; the city’s residents began to appear as rightful protesters in chronicles, while city streets finally found their way into visual depictions of the capital alongside imperial monuments.” The changing nature of imperial politics impelled the ruling elite to devise new ways of inhabiting power, inventing new rituals and political spectacles. The regular staging of political acts for the eyes of the public, such as performative executions of rebels or by rebels, was emblematic of a radical transformation of Ottoman political culture. As imperial rulers relied increasingly on public engagement for support and legitimacy, the importance of power brokers across society grew exponentially, Preachers, Sufis, and other nonofficials came to take a prominent place in what a contemporary observer called “the theater of of the city,” a forum of power that experimented with integrating the public into politics as simultaneously audience and actors.’
Taming the Messiah narrates this transformation of Ottoman political culture in the seventeenth century, which evolved to generate, foster, theorize, and negotiate with a lively public sphere. The book joins a recent historiographical effort to capture the seventeenth-century transformation of the Ottoman Empire into a decentralized polity characterized by the effective delimitation of dynastic authority. This historiography has made major strides in showing the rise of new political practices of the limitation of sultanic authority, based on analyses of social and economic developments and histories of urban rebellions. While the practice of a new form of decentralized politics has been demonstrated, therefore, the intellectual changes accompanying this grand shift have not received due attention. The main contribution that Taming the Messiah makes to this literature is to uncover the intellectual and conceptual shifts in political thought that accompanied shifting political practice. The book sets out to answer the question of how the new publics understood, legitimized, and performed their newfound political power visa-vis other contenders in an increasingly crowded public space. This space was a complex political realm where multiple forms of sovereignty coexisted to negotiate and form partnerships; political power ultimately resided in the sum total of these shifting and dynamic partnerships.
Focusing on the emergence of an Ottoman public sphere, this book explores Ottoman early modernity from the perspective of the formation of new kinds of public political agency that challenged, negotiated with, and ultimately reshaped the Ottoman social order. By uncovering the histories of these political publics and documenting the emergence of a robust public sphere, the book aims to supplement and enrich the story of Ottoman early modernity, which is often understood primarily as one of state formation through the gradual elaboration ofa complex bureaucratic apparatus, and thereby increasingly effective central governance. However, these two developments—namely, state formation and public formation—were not antithetical, On the contrary, Icontend that the formation ofan effective Ottoman political and social order was made possible by the involvement of a wide range of nonofficials in key social and political institutions, from the imperial court to the mosques and courthouses of the provinces. The public sphere was an indispensable component of early modern state formation in the Ottoman Empire, as elsewhere during this period.
Taming the Messiah studies a premodern, non-Western public sphere. The project thus challenges two common assumptions: first, that public political participation originated in the West, and, second, that civic culture was only introduced to the non-Western world with the Westernization efforts of the nineteenth century. Contrary to these assumptions, which measure the public sphere against an idealized European prototype, the book suggests a new method of studying public political life: focusing on the variety of religious visions and lifeworlds. The book thus joins a recent effort in understanding the intertwined nature of religious and political authority, and in studying religious literature in relationship to political sovereignty.’ In the early modern Ottoman world, public political participation took place through competing visions of religious and moral authority. In the changing political landscape of the seventeenth century, mystical theology, which a century earlier had been deployed to champion absolutist rule, was used to legitimate the participation of the broader society in local and imperial politics. In demonstrating the contribution of mystical theology to this new pluralist culture, the book also presents an important challenge to the recent literature on the caliphate and mysticism, which treats mystical theories of the caliphate solely as utopian images of unity and uniformity undera single divinely ordained ruler. Instead, I show that mystical theories of the caliphate could and did function to legitimize the authority claims of nonroyal political agents and serve to curb royal authority. The ideal of every man’s caliphate was thus one of the cornerstones of the early modern Ottoman public sphere.
Undeniably, the sixteenth century was a period of messianic political theology, not only for the Ottomans but also for their contemporaries in the Mediterranean, Iran, and the Mughal Empire.’ Both the Ottomans and their rivals to the east and the west coveted two related epithets of rulership: “Messiah” and “Lord of the [Auspicious] Conjunction.”° The terms combined the anticipation of the end of time with the perfection of moral and political authority, the latter to be established by the messiah right before the end of human history.’ Two factors enabled this global moment of messianic political theology. First, the approach of the 1,00oth year of the Islamic calendar, corresponding to year 1596 of the Roman calendar, sparked creative imaginations of a millenial apocalypse.® In this charged moment, a true expectation of cosmic change was palpable in both the Islamic world and Europe. Second, the emergence of imperial rivalries with the Safavids and the Habsburgs in the sixteenth century ignited the Ottoman use of messianic discourse, which “divide[d] the world into prophets and tyrants,” thereby attributing a divine mission to earthly rulers.” Messianism therefore elevated the Ottoman sultans from ordinary state-makers to cosmic warriors against evil, or against the enemies of Sunni Islam.
The apogee of Ottoman messianic political theology was the first half of the sixteenth century, specifically, the reign of Selim I (r. 1512-1520) and the first decades of Siileyman the Lawgiver (r. 1520—-1566).'° After this point, the title “messiah” lost its apocalyptic signification, yet continued to be used to signify the unification of spiritual and temporal authority. It was to join a menagerie of similar terms—suchas “renewer” (mujaddid)—that, despite their technical differences, came to be employed in the same sense as signifying the divinely ordained nature of Ottoman rule.!! The most significant of these sacralized notions of rulership was that of the caliphate. Hiiseyin Yilmaz has demonstrated that in constructing Ottoman rule as a caliphate, Ottoman authors relied heavily on Sufi thought and its theories of sainthood.!* As Azfar Moin emphasizes, the merger between these languages of authority at various levels and in related yet different realms—namely, the religious and the political—had significant repercussions, creating “a series of interrelated cultural meanings about embodied forms of sovereignty.’!? The study of early modern sovereignty, therefore, necessitates going beyond official discourses to explore everyday language about and performances of spiritual authority.
Messianic imaginations of sovereignty offered a conjunction of power and reformism couched in Sufi terminology. Recognizing this underpinning of political theology, this book reconsiders the use of Sufi terminology in not only sustaining, but also taming and circumscribing political claims to absolute authority and to authoritarian reformism.4 Of the two key ingredients of messianic political theology—namely, conceptions of authority and time, the concept of messianic authority and its relationship to Sufism has been widely studied. Yet, theories of messianic kingship were also closely linked with political theories of time and reform; the messiah’s main mission was to provide guidance to reform a world heading toward the end of time. The themes of time and reform, therefore, were key concepts of early modern political theology that remain insufficiently understood, despite their significance.” In this book, I study a progressive early modern vision of time and Islamic tradition that objected to reformist traditionalism, particularly puritanism and its discourse of eradicating innovations undiscerningly. In its puritan mode, history was but a series of corruptions after a designated golden age of moral purity. As I show in the following pages, the declinist-reformist understanding of time and tradition was far from being uncontested or predominant. A progressive understanding of time sought to redeem innovations, not as inevitable practicalities, but as the natural, even desirable unfolding of history.!°
By offering an alternative, progressive vision of history and tradition, the early modern Ottoman Sufis of this book also challenged the reformist authoritarianism to which the Ottoman center resorted throughout the seventeenth century. This reformist authoritarianism, which I call “state-religion” in this book, was marked by the instrumentialization of Islamic reformist discourse for the augmentation of central authority.'? While this early modern political move toward the identification of religion and politics has been studied, the strong criticisms of the use of religious politics for the augmentation of power (saltanat) have escaped attention.'® Therefore, studies have assumed that early modern thought simply assented to the identification of religious and political authority, thus missing the complexity of an important strand in Ottoman politics. The Sufi criticisms of state-religion and its efforts at the identification of religious and political was a key marker of the formation of the Ottoman political public sphere.
In this book, I focus on the strategies by which the Ottoman religious publics challenged the identification of religious and political authority and impeded the state's efforts to expand its reach through this identification. First and foremost, I focus on a Persianate Sufi discourse that explicitly disputed the equation of Islam with sharia. Second, I focus on the insistence on a neutral space within sharia discourse (mubah) that defined an area of practice and doctrine that was not subject to legal discipline and enforcement.!? These two modes of argument—namely, Persianate Sufi and juristic arguments against puritanism—were closely enmeshed within the Ottoman anti-puritan discourse that took shape in the early modern era. By focusing on these early modern objections to the identification of religion and sharia, I would like to underline that the early modern identification of political and religious authority was a project that was criticized consistently by a multiplicity of authors and actors. Throughout the book, I use “state-religion” to refer to the specific project of the mobilization of a sharia-centered religious discourse for the augmentation of state authority. In so doing, my aim is to differentiate this centralist-authoritarian notion of civility from a host of alternative arrangements of religion and politics that have so far remained underexplored.
This book argues that in the early modern period, Sufi thought was simultaneously used to justify the sovereignties of nonstate actors, resulting ina theory of multiple sovereignties. Sufi theories that envisioned the differentiation of, yet cooperation between, temporal and spiritual power challenged the messianic assumptions of the unity of these two forms of power. ‘This conception of politics as a partnership between multiple forms of sovereignty was highly appealing to the new political claimants of the time, such as the military elite, the secretarial bureaucracy, and the urban publics. Furthermore, the language of partnership also allowed older power magnates, who had had limited impact on imperial politics until the sixteenth century, to increase their influence from the provincial to the imperial level. The Mevlevi Sufi order, which is at the heart of this book, embodies this new language of partnership on both the practical and the ideological levels. The descendants of Celaleddin Rami (d. 1273), called ¢elebis, were the formal heads of the Mevlevi order, while Sufi sheikhs were the ordet’s spiritual leaders. The formal authority of the descendants of Rimi was a function of economic, historical, and religious factors: landholding and other economic priorities, a historical claim to partnership with the founders of the Ottoman state, and spiritual authority. Despite all of these assets that made the ¢elebis effectively yet another dynasty, they largely remained provincial power magnates until the seventeenth century, a period that this book shows to be an age of Mevlevi revival. Their rise was due to the shifting mode of imperial politics toward partnership. The Mevlevi order further developed a legitimizing framework for a novel notion of plurality of authorities. This political theology resonated with other aspirants to power, whose realities of sharing authority with the court did not find a suitable mode of legitimation in the predominantly absolutist idioms and assumptions of Ottoman political writing. The close relationships between the Mevlevis, on the one hand, and the military elite, civil bureaucracy, and urban publics, on the other, attest to the strong appeal of this novel language of multiple sovereignties for the Ottoman public sphere.
By virtue of negotiating the boundaries of state-religion and faciliating sovereignties at multiple levels, early modern Sufism allowed an expansive public sphere to establish claims to political subjecthood, that is, civility. In using “civility,” I refer to a distinctly Ottoman understanding of cultural identity that was constructed and performed through a combination of conduct, speech, learning, and social connectedness that Ottoman authors referred to as “Rami identity.’”° In contrast to ethnic or local belonging, the Rimi identity was adopted through acculturation into certain aesthetic, literary, and moral preferences through education and social formation.”! The Rami identity was closely connected with an Ottoman subject's formation of political agency. In fact, studies on Rimi identity have underlined the epithet “Rami’ as an equivalent of a supra-ethnic Ottoman identity that was shaped and expressed by the ruling elite.2? Yet, this book shows civility to be a much broader early modern phenomenon; in agreement with Cemal Kafadar, I understand Riminess as “a category shaped by the civil society.” Specifically, within the context ofthe seventeenth century, when politics became entrenched in the city rather than being limited to the imperial court, Rami identity and civility became the basis of political subjecthood for officials and nonofficials alike. Sufi networks played key roles in the dissemination of Raimi self fashioning in and beyond the elite circles; they functioned as informal institutions promoting education, intellectual formation, and upward mobility, and as such were prime venues for social and political commentary.”*
The legitimation of newcomers to the social and political realm was made possible through the Sufi injunction that every man is a caliph in his own sphere. In the words of a Mevlevi author,
Every person has a certain share of the divine caliphate in accordance with his capacity. Examples are the sultan’s management and control of his domain, every governor's administration and control of his province, a homeowner's management and control of the house and those inhabiting the house.”
This notion of every man’s caliphate (bildfet-i amme-i nas) implied each individual’s governance over a moral and political realm in accordance with his station, This striving for moral authority—more precisely, familiarity with the cultural codes surrounding moral authority—was the basis of a broadly accessible civility, Through association with Ottoman Sufi orders, new political agents—whether former elites who enjoyed an aggrandization of power, or newcomers who had recently joined the military and political elite— construed themselves as legitimate political actors, Adopting a complete language of civility through acculturation in Sufi networks, new political actors and eventually the urban public countered the elite Ottoman authors’ dismissal of their public participation as simply that of upstarts or strangers (ecnebi).”° In these networks, the Ottoman public found not only informal training in civility, but a political theology that reckoned with a plurality of authorities, rather than an insistence on the monopoly of the center on both spiritual and temporal power.
Taming the Messiah traces these new mystical trends of the seventeenth century that defended plurality and novelty against an absolutist traditionalism, from the offices of Istanbul's bureaucratic class to an exciting new social space, the coffeehouse. In these spaces, ideas and performances developed in Sufi circles were employed to create new languages for limiting political surveillance. These theories were first developed within the context of Sufi rituals, such as music or dance. In defending their arguments, Sufis developed a conception of “legal privacy,” a space of discourses and practices that were not within the purview of sharia enforcement.”” Within this space of legal privacy, communities could exercise divergent interpretations of sharia without the interference of legal institutions. While initially employed with attention to Sufi communities, arguments for the delimitation of sharia-based political surveillance were employed in other disputes in the early modern period, most notably in the coffeehouse debates. This book shows the employment of a limited notion of sharia as public law, first developed within the Sufi debates on Sufi innovations, and then employed in addressing other pressing issues in the early modern period that involved the ideals of an all-pervasive state and of the autonomy of substate communities. In other words, the Sufi notion of legal privacy was the Ottoman solution to the two conflicting, coexisting forms of early modern governmentality: effective state surveillance and communal autonomy.”® This book conceptualizes the seventeenth century as the clash of these two modes of governmentality, which created two distinct notions of citizenship and civility.
In seventeenth-century Ottoman society and politics, civility served as a powerful paradigm that relocated sovereignty and order from the person of a cosmically approved ruler to a vibrant public sphere. This shift was not without conflict and turmoil, as the dynastic state and its supporters sought to delimit the political influence of the new publics. Furthermore, in an era offering more opportunities for upward mobility and political participation than ever before, the expansion of political participation was one of the key markers of the period.”° However, it remains unclear precisely who was allowed to join the political nation, and what criteria were used to distinguish good, deserving citizens from undeserving ones. These were the main questions that the Ottoman public sought to settle in the first three quarters of the century, through contesting norms of legitimacy and civility. This book reconsiders the intense religious debates of the seventeenth century as a clash of visions of civility; in other words, as diverging Ottoman responses to the question of what constituted political and social authority.
According to the first, better-known vision of civility, sharia abidance was the litmus test of Ottoman legitimacy and citizenship—that is, whether one was a proper Rami Muslim. A puritan movement of preachers known as the Kadizadelis advocated this position vocally from the 1620s to the 1680s, occasionally finding support from the dynasty and the ruling elite. According the dynasty center stage in a moral battle against the undisciplined masses, the puritan movement's vision of religious and political authority promised to expand the central authority's control over its subjects.*° The puritan movement had two main targets, who, it claimed, had tarnished pure religion by adopting innovations: Sufi networks and urban crowds.*! However, while the motives of the puritan movement have received much scholarly attention, the responses of these two targeted groups are understudied, resulting in an unbalanced portrayal of the century as an age of puritan-minded conservatism. By focusing on Ottoman reactions to the puritan movement, whether from Sufis or from other urban groups, Iuncover asecond, equally influential vision of civility that explicitly criticized the puritan project of sharia-based moral surveillance and advocated its delimitation.
The main contribution of this book is to restore to seventeenth-century Ottoman religious debates their bilateralism. On a related note, the book establishes the broader political implications of these debates as disputes on the norms of political legitimacy and civility; in other words, on the formation of moral and political selves, In contrast to the predominant portrayal of the period as one of sharia-minded conservatism, I argue that the century saw the rise to prominence of major Sufi networks that defended Persianate conceptions of ethics and morality. The prime markers of this Persianate piety were a refusal to reduce morality to sharia, a pro-innovation dispensation, and a pluralistic vision of authority that countered the puritan push for uniformity.
The book also presents a new understanding of the concept of “Persianate.” While there is a considerable secondary literature on “Persianate,” the main focus of this literature is the movement of texts in the Persian tongue across the early modern Islamic world.” Instead, I focus on the question of what the Persianate canon meant in a given place and time: in early modern Ottoman intellectual life. I uncover an early modern understanding of the term that considered Persian and vernacular literatures that develop in connection with Persian—hence, Persianate— as a term symbolic of the constant presence and desirability of progress within the Islamic tradition. The contribution of Persian-language works to the Islamic canon was considered to be an undefeatable argument for a progressive notion of tradition, an argument similarly applicable to other recent contributions to the canon—in this case the Otto-
man contributions in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish.
THE EARLY MODERN OTTOMAN PUBLIC SPHERE? HISTORIOGRAPHICAL BACKGROUND
The story of the Ottoman state begins with a loosely organized, largely tribal ghazi (warrior) state opportunely located on the Byzantine frontier. This early warrior state quickly expanded beyond its territory, despite major challenges, such as defeat at the hands of Timur in 1402 and an ensuing interregnum. The real turning point in the transformation of this ghazi state into an empire came with Mehmed II and his conquest of Constantinople in 1453. This event marked the beginning ofan intensive and comprehensive process of Ottoman imperial centralization, complete with the elimination of potential power magnates and systematic regulation of the legal system and court procedure. This process was continued by subsequent Ottoman sultans, albeit with dif ferent approaches. By the reign of Siileyman the Lawgiver (r, 1520-1566), the Ottomans had firmly established themselves among the world’s most powerful empires, alongside their rivals to the west, the Habsburgs, and their archenemies to the east, the Safavid Empire.
In this age of global imperial rivalry, competing discourses of cosmic dominion became the dominant idioms of political ambition and aspiration across Eurasian empires. The Ottomans were no exception. Mystical theories of kingship conjured images of Ottoman rulers as the pinnacle of the entire cosmos, As recently argued by Hiiseyin Yilmaz, Ottoman political thought achieved this goal by diverging from the early Islamic meaning of “caliphate,” which denoted political leadership of the Islamic community by a deputy (literally, caliph) of the prophet Muhammad (d. 632). Before the Ottomans, caliphs of Islam had been part of a continuous chain of transmission of deputyship, required to fulfill certain formal conditions for eligibility—primarily belonging to the Prophet's tribe. Diverging from this classical interpretation of the caliphate, however, the Ottomans emphasized a mystical notion of kingship that not only eradicated the formal requirements of the caliphate, but also supplied a new language of cosmic rulership.** The mystical notion of “caliph” was based on the Sufi concept of the perfect man (insan-1 kamil), according to which every human has the capacity to reach spiritual perfection through spiritual training, At the station of spiritual perfection, one fully attains God’s qualities, and becomes “[God’s] caliph on earth.’? As Yilmaz aptly puts it, once Ottoman political authors adopted the mystical notion of “caliphate,” “God himself... became the primary model for a ruler.”*°
In early modern Ottoman political theory, therefore, the conception of kingship was inspired by the attributes of God—predominantly his oneness, but also his aloofness and omnipotence.?” However, despite distancing the ruler from the rest of society in theory, when put into practice mystical theories of rulership invited public political participation on a number of levels. First and foremost, the continued use of the title “caliph” was itself a reflection of the Muslim community's need to conceive of the rightly guided rule established by the Prophet as permanent. ‘Therefore, Ottoman messianic theories of rulership were more than a mere power strategy deployed by the state to augment its authority; they constituted a discourse designed by the state to garner public support and legitimacy.*® As a corollary to this public aspect of mystical rulership, the successful adaptation of mystical and moral languages of rule was only made possible by the cooperation of a wide range of actors. ‘This cooperation rendered the political caliphate a platform for the formation of public political agencies.
Messianic languages of rulership were crafted and sustained through negotiations between various actors. Therefore, despite their absolutist facade, these ideologies played a key role in creating platforms for broader political engagement. For instance, in a recent study of the life and political vision of the distinguished chancellor and historian Idris-i Bidlisi (d. 1520), Christopher Markiewicz underlines the role of highly mobile Persianate bureaucrats in establishing the messianic ideology of empire. Throughout his study, Markiewicz also illustrates that the theory of godly rulership (bilafat-i rabmani) was not the product of the court of Bayezid II (d. 1512) but was crafted by a highly mobile, well-connected Persianate circle of litterateurs. Significantly, these agents of political theory saw themselves not as mere servants of the state, but as critics of its actions.*? In other words, the production of discourses of the caliphate and the moral scrutiny of political authority were two sides of the same coin—namely, of self-formation as political subjects.*°
Yet another compelling case study for considering the caliphate as a joint project shaped by a large social base comes from the Indian Ocean world. In her study of Indian Ocean Sunni Muslim networks, which she labels “khutba networks,” Elizabeth Lambourn underlines the agency of Muslim merchant communities as a strong, well-connected interest group from the fall of the Abbasids well into the Ottoman era. These khutba networks expressed their identity through the ideal ofa Muslim universalism. Building on Lambourn’s insights, Giancarlo Casale argues that the adoption of the concept of the caliphate should be seen as a “proactive reinvention of the traditional khutba network,” rather than as an ideology carefully and exclusively crafted in and by the imperial capital.*! In promoting and reproducing the language of the caliphate, these networks did not selflessly serve the Ottoman state. Lambourn describes a process that she calls the “barter of khutba for cannon,” whereby the khutba networks expected their ideological cooperation to be reciprocated by Ottoman support.
In other words, upholding the ideal of God’s kingdom on earth was the shared interest of multiple actors in the early modern Ottoman world, official and nonofficial alike, who established their own political agency by participating in the imperial project. Recognizing these semiofficial and nonofficial engagements drives home the collective and public-forming aspects of Ottoman rulership. Perhaps the most significant aspect of the mystical notion of rulership was its openness to emulation; anyone could strive for spiritual perfection, as implied by the notion of every man’s caliphate cited above. As such, theories of moral purification were at the heart of Ottoman notions of civility; through adopting the worldview, language, and moral conduct advanced in these guides, one could construct oneselfas Rami, and as a moral and political agent. In the early modern Ottoman world, public political participation took place through competing visions of religious and moral authority.
Recognizing the relationship between piety and political agency is crucial, as it challenges the assumption that a public sphere necessarily relies on the ideal of the equality ofall citizens.” In the changing political landscape of the seventeenth century, it was mystical theology that was used to legitimate the participation of wider society in local and imperial politics, as well as in forming publics as units of social solidarity. In demonstrating the contribution of mystical theology to this new pluralist culture, the book also presents an important challenge to the recent literature on the caliphate and mysticism, which treats mystical theories of the caliphate as utopian expressions of unity and uniformity. Instead, this book suggests that mystical languages of rulership were sites of contested sovereignties,
The moral premise at the heart of early modern empire wedded spiritual leadership and political agency and generated a flurry of political writing in moral or divinatory idioms. The flurry of political commentary in specifically early modern guises, such as prophecy and divination, was an important channel for public opinion, as Barbara Flemming shows in her study of public opinion under Sultan Siileyman.” Despite Flemming’s early insight, however, the study of public opinion in the early modern Ottoman era remains rudimentary. There are various reasons for this deficit. In early Ottomanist historiography, Weber's theory of oriental absolutism cast a long shadow over the exploration of associational life, which was simply nonexistent in the East.** Even after direct rebuttals of this theory via the argument that Islamic social and economic institutions did in fact facilitate associational life, public political participation in the early modern age remained an unnamed phenomenon until recently. With a few exceptions, the “public sphere” is still considered a Western phenomenon, adopted by non-Western societies—and to a questionable extent—only with the onset of Westernization in the late eighteenth century.” More recently, these presumptions of absolute incompatibility between the West and the rest have been discredited by new analytical approaches. In particular, as Ottoman studies has come to be closely engaged with the framework of global early modernity, the parallels between political and societal changes in the Ottoman Empire and European states have received close attention.*®
Despite this recent shift, however, research continues to focus more on the formation of robust state institutions and practices than on the forms of public political life that these new political formations created. Yet, this preoccupation with centralization and bureaucratization results in the neglect of the complex processes of negotiation between the state and various levels of society, and of the early modern public sphere that was the result of this negotiation. In the words of Phil Withington, “The story of early modern state formation is as much about the creation of citizens defined by their capacity for public activity as it is about the centralization of functions conventionally associated with modern polities: war, taxation, and bureaucracy.”*” This book contends that the history of early modern state formation is incomplete and misleading when told without consideration of the emergence of new venues and languages of political participation.
Recent research on early modern state formation emphasizes the role of early modern states in forging representative tendencies in society. This literature has challenged the use of such blanket terms as “absolutism” for early modern polities, including states such as France that have long been closely associated with the paradigm of absolutism. A key insight emerging from these challenges is that for effective functioning, the strong absolutist courts of early modern Europe depended on cooperation with the local elites and other powerful social groups, such as nobles, clergy, guildsmen, and venal officeholders. Accounting for moments of cooperation and negotiation has transformed the conception of early modern absolutism in the last twenty-five years. In particular, analysis of the early modern French state, once considered the pinnacle of absolutism under Louis XIV, has changed drastically under this revisionist rewriting, Instead of stressing a modern state crafted by asmall elite at a single center, historians emphasize “the many weaknesses and contradictions that led Louis to create a working compromise with the elites, whose subjection owed more to the rewards on offer than it did to a policy of crushing noble power.”*8 Although political theory of the time continued to perpetuate the idea of an unrivaled, absolutist state, in practice the early modern state owed its success to social collaboration with the nobility.”
French historians’ observations regarding the enmeshed nature of early modern institutions and nonofficial networks are paralleled elsewhere. One historian highlights this recent shift in the understanding of state—society
relationships as one of the salient changes in recent historiography:
The early modern state was hardly autonomous from the larger society from which it emerged. Rather, it was a composite of both formal institutions and informal networks of kinship, personal allegiances, clientage ties, and other relationships based on social status and individual influence. ... The understanding that early modern governing institutions “reflect shifting political force fields, changes in the classes and groupings that express interests, the variable character of the interests themselves. . .and the various organizational forms that those interests assume,” has been one of the most important developments in the history of state formation
in recent decades.*°
To achieve a fuller understanding of the complex structural transformations of the early modern state, it is important to refrain from studying state discourses of power in isolation, and to consider the social negotiation of such discourse. The two pillars of the formation of the modern state, bureaucratic complexity and the local infiltration of central institutions, developed not through the superimposition of rules and institutions on society, but through alliances and networks of patronage forged through the various strata of the semiofficial and nonofficial spheres.*! This shift opens up important directions for historical analysis. First, patronage networks have begun to receive attention as mechanisms not only for social mobility, but also for the formation of political agencies within these networks. Second, and relatedly, the key roles of a variety of intermediary actors in politics, such as provincial administration, legal institutions, and security, have begun to be emphasized. These intermediaries were allies of the state in different realms of rulership; they helped the state to expand its grip on society, while augmenting their own power. Beyond their contributions to the everyday workings of governance, these intermediaries helped to shape prevalent notions of authority and the limits thereof. Therefore, a focus on varieties of intermediation and political subjecthood has replaced a sole emphasis on the court and bureaucracy, underlining the symbiotic relationship between political institutions and the broader public.”
In short, the early modern public sphere described in recent historical research did not develop outside of and against a neatly separated and reified state. On the contrary, early modern publics were enmeshed with state networks and institutions and emerged from regular interactions with them. This framework of the early modern public sphere is highly applicable to the Islamicate empires of the early modern era—namely, the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals. However, although historians have analyzed these three polities in comparable terms, they have refrained from linking these intermediary and partnering associations to the emergence of the public sphere, because of the dominance of the Western-Habermasian model.”
It is crucial to underline the rich variety of ways in which publics and states were intertwined to correct the prevalent assumption that they were necessarily opposed to one another, Public and state authority could in fact interact in a variety of ways: the former could be apart from, against, in support of, in dialogue with, in partnership with, or beyond the latter. In all of these relationships, whether in the form of opposition to the state or partnership with it, the political authority was subject to various degrees of accountability.”* In this book, I underline these different forms of coexistence between the state machinery and political publics, focusing not only on opposition and criticism, but also on cooperation and partnership.”
The public sphere of historians has little in common with the public sphere idealized by Jiirgen Habermas in his seminal Structural Transformation. Habermas describes an eighteenth-century public sphere that positioned itself strictly outside of and against the state, and was the locus of rational, deliberative thinking, This ideal public sphere, according to Habermas, was shortlived yet invaluable in terms of political aspiration. A common criticism of Habermas's portrayal of a rational and democratic eighteenth-century public sphere is that his historical account is overly idealized, intended primarily to provide a foil against which to criticize twentieth-century politics, rather than to describe an actual historical institution.*®
Historians underline that contrary to Habermas's interpretation, the ideal of a liberated public sphere accessible to all members of society was never actualized in the early modern world (or, arguably, thereafter), Barriers to entering the realm of political action were always present, particularly for women, the lower classes, and the uneducated. In many cases, those excluded from one form of political association formed alternative publics, therefore making it imperative to consider publics as a plural—rather than a singular and all-encompassing— phenomenon ata given time.” Furthermore, secular, rational discourse emphasizing the equality of all men was just one possible ideology of civic society.”* “Carnivalesque publics” in which performance, rather than discursive argumentation, prevailed were one of the important venues for public expression.”” Even more importantly, in the early modern world, public political grievances and visions were often expressed in religious language. Representing true, uncorrupted moral order was the most potent language of criticism of the political order—hence the ideological basis of a functioning public sphere.®° In other words, the presence of a program for equal public participation for all was by no means a benchmark of an early modern public sphere; the predominant justification for public political participation remained pietistic and moralistic.
Despite the aforementioned criticism of the original Habermasian model, historians of early modernity retain the terms “public” and “public sphere,” which denote concepts they regard as key markers of early modernity.°! The formation of alternative sources for the legitimacy of authority beyond a limited elite, through the channels of state formation explained above, was one of the key characteristics of the politics of early modern regimes. This political shift had significant cultural ramifications, particularly the increasing standardization of the participation of the “masses” in politics. Early modern power struggles were settled in the public eye and often through public Participation; an ever-growing portion of society was integrated into political struggles as a result of the conflicts that arose between different components of a bureaucratic structure. In other words, the mobilization of publics to garner support became a key move in factional politics, making public political participation a shared trait of early modernity.°? Another ramification was cultural, in the form of new cultures of visibility and representation. Increasingly, new groups claimed new venues and forums of visibility, therefore becoming visible in spaces, texts, and images that had previously been reserved for the representation of ideal types. This gradual shift in public visibility reached its apex in the eighteenth century, with the visibility in the cityscape of formerly unseen actors, including women and lower-class city-dwellers.© Rather than coming to fruition asa result of a natural progression, however, the new public culture of this period was the product of struggles and debates that had begun at least a century earlier.
This book argues that rather than being a fanatical exception to the otherwise open culture of Ottoman early modernity, the seventeenth century was a crucial period in which alternative visions of the political publics and their relationship with the early modern state formed and competed. In identifying early modern Ottoman political publics, I focus my analysis on the languages and practices of scrutinizing political authority, and on public discussions of the limits of political authority and surveillance. I define the Ottoman public sphere as the totality of discursive, administrative, and economic structures that allowed and sustained political life outside the structures of the court and bureaucracy, In contrast to the prevailing notion of premodern, nonWestern politics as the exclusive realm of the royal entourage and bureaucratic officeholders, this book understands early modern political authority as dependent on social negotiation, mobilization, and legitimation.
The early modern public sphere emerged from within the state machinery and exercised its political authority through the mobilization of the multiple frameworks of morality available to its members. Instead of the discourse of the equality of all men, it was the (potential) caliphate of all men that facilitated and justified political participation. In developing my own analysis, which emphasizes the connection between moral and political agencies, I rely on historiographical discussions of early modern Ottoman publics. These discussions follow two main trajectories: exploration of institutions that invited public participation, and analyses of premodern constitutional thought. First, the institutional approach focuses primarily on the legal and social structures that granted communities legal autonomy. This approach underlines the legal autonomy that Islamic tradition granted to guilds, pious endowments, scholars (“ulama), and non-Muslim communities, hence identifying the civic potential embedded in institutional practices. Important articles by Halil Inalcik and Said A. Arjomand, among others, use this approach to refute claims that Islamic institutions and legal structures were intrinsically antithetical to the formation of civic cultures. Instead, these articles highlight the structural space provided by economic and legal practices for an autonomously functioning civic culture with considerable rights to self-determination.™ Despite its conceptual significance, this approach needs to be supported by historical monographs that analyze when, where, and how such civic potential was actualized, if at all.
The institutional approach to this potential involves the study of state practices that aimed to grant the public a platform to reach the ruler, such as that of petitioning the sultan. Every Ottoman subj ecthad the right to address grievances to the imperial council (divan- hiimaydn), particularly regarding the mismanagement and abuse of office, and addressing these grievances was an important expression ofan Ottoman sultan’s commitment to justice. Studying these petitions, Suraiya Faroghi highlights their significance as channels through which the public learned, practiced, and reproduced political discourse.°° Although the right to petition was available from early on, it was only in the late sixteenth century that petitioning gained momentum—a historical shift that Faroghi attributes to the economic and social crisis at the turn of the century.°” Faroghi casts petitioning as a form of political activity from the bottom up, challenging the Weberian notion of “Oriental despotism.’® In other words, Ottoman subjects had access to institutions and governmental practices that allowed them to exercise a degree of autonomy in their economic and legal dealings.
A second approach focuses on actualization rather than potential. This approach emphasizes the study of historical events that suggest that these structural opportunities to exert political agency were in fact used to delimit Ottoman imperial power. The important turning point in this respect came in the late sixteenth century, which saw a transition toward conceptualizing the state as an impersonal entity, increasingly separated from the person of the sultan. This ideological shift was a product of changing political dynamics, whereby the dynasty became just one of multiple actors that determined the empire's political direction.© Throughout the seventeenth century, bureaucrats, the military elite, and the grandee households they formed increasingly worked to expand their autonomy, which was based on the delegation of the sultan’s power.”° Scholarly bureaucrats (‘ulama) hada special role in the empire as powerful agents who capitalized on their legal literacy and their potential to grant religious legitimacy. As such, they played important roles in the numerous public protests of the century, through which Istanbul's public intervened in significant imperial decisions, such as the making and unmaking of kings.’! Most of these urban rebellions were led by the janissaries. There were six janissary uprisings in the first half of the seventeenth century: in 1031/1622, 1042/1632, 1057—-$8/1648, 1061/1651, 1066/1655, and 1066—67/1656.’” Artisans of the capital similarly orchestrated urban protests on at least two occasions, in addition to participating in janissary-led rebellions.”? Unlike earlier urban rebellions, which had been overwhelmingly military, seventeenth-century protests featured significant civil involvement.” Perhaps the most significant outcome of this seventeenth-century political turmoil in the long term was the articulation of the constitutional rights of Ottoman subjects vis-a-vis the ruling class. The violation of these rights provided a legitimate reason to mutiny.
Ottoman historians refer to these articulations as a constitutionalist trend that came to prominence in the seventeenth century. Despite the lack of a written constitution, various groups in the empire were able to claim certain rights vis-a-vis the ruling class. The subject—ruler relationship became shaped not by the language of servitude, but by that of mutual rights and obligations.” In emphasizing the increasing prominence of a contractual relationship between the ruler and the ruled in the seventeenth century, historians do not seek to suggest that Ottoman subjects did not have rights before this period. On the contrary, providing justice to subjects had always been the cornerstone of Ottoman legitimacy. However, it was only at the turn of the sixteenth century that Ottoman subjects consistently reiterated their rights to the ruling class as the basis for making concrete demands, and developed a political culture in which the public scrutiny of the ruling class was routinized. This practice of public scrutiny was a distinct feature of early modernity that the Ottoman Empire experienced alongside their contemporaries to the east and
to the west.”
SOURCES AND METHODOLOGY
Taming the Messiah sets itself the task of understanding Sufi conceptions of authority and sovereignty along with the social worlds those conceptions create. This task requires combining two types of inquiries. First, I closely read manuscript works produced by Ottoman Sufi authors on what they saw as pressing questions of the seventeenth century. In doing this, I avoid the alltoo-common artificial separation between religious and historical sources. Until recently, this distinction has guided the study of Ottoman religiosities. An example is the use of hagiographical sources in a limited manner—as a repository of biographies—or the neglect of treatises on seemingly timeless, purely legalistic questions such as music and dance. In this book, I pay close attention to these sources as expressions of visions of community and authority, and as commentaries on the limits of state-religion. By placing these sources in conversation with other types of sources, such as chronicles, I establish their historical relevance and their intended intervention within the larger world of alternative views and projects.
The second task consists of placing these manuscripts within their social world, in order to meaningfully ask the question of what kind of sociopolitical worlds they created. As far as Sufi thought is concerned, there are two ways to approach this question. The first is to study the patronage patterns: What was the social and economic basis of the power of a given Sufi order? Were there specific professional or economic patterns among supporters ofa group? The second is to follow the reading and reception histories of the manuscripts in question. Following these paths allows me to argue that the Sufi discourses on authority and community that I discuss were not marginal matters, the relevance of which was limited to the members of a given Sufi community. To the contrary, I portray a world of favorable, even enthusiastic sympathizers, if not followers, of the Persianate Sufi worldview at the heart of this book. Bringing in the military elite and secretarial class in this manner draws the contours of the critical public, and argues for its place at the center of the Ottoman imperial order.
There is a certain irony, however, in establishing a theory of the Ottoman public sphere solely by focusing on patterns of patronage and readership. After all, these practices were predicated upon assets that were accessible only to a limited percentage of the early modern Ottoman society: wealth and literacy.”” To address this question of scope and reach, I underline throughout the book the importance of nontextual, nondiscursive performances as public-forming social practices, These performances, ranging from political protest to Sufi ritual, embody an array of broadly shared ideals. In focusing on performance, my approach closely follows Azfar Moin’s emphasis on the role of embodied, everyday practices as the main venue through which cultural and political ideals were communicated, not only for the illiterate masses, but also for court circles.’® Unlike most performance studies that focus on social processes without attention to textual traditions, my aim in this book is to underline the interconnection between text and performance. Ialso adda new dimension to performance studies by investigating the question of how early modern Ottoman authors themselves saw performance. I therefore underline, particularly through discussions of Sufi musical ritual, early modern theories that construe sharing a social habitus on a regular basis as an important venue for, and a viable alternative to, textual learning. By focusing on the communicative, publicmaking role of performance as a fixture of early modern thought, I caution against exclusively textualist conceptions of morality and
civility.
STRUCTURE OF THE ARGUMENT
Chapter 1, “Politics as Spectacle: Changing Norms of Political Participation in the Seventeenth Century,” portrays the historical background of the seventeenth-century Ottoman world based on existing scholarship and contemporary chronicles. The chapter underlines the transformations at the turn of the sixteenth century that invited publics into politics. In this period, the dynasty crafted new ceremonial traditions and spectacles for the capital’s public, demonstrating the increasing significance of Ottoman subjects to imperial politics. In this new landscape, urban crowds participated more prominently and regularly in political spectacles, whether orchestrated by the state or staged by themselves, as protesters. Chapter 1 also introduces the religious debates of the century, emphasizing the search for orderliness and uniformity at their heart. However, it also shows that this uniformity was beyond the reach of the Ottoman order, given the regime's dependence on the intermediacy of local and communal leaders.
Chapter 2, “Ottoman Anti-Puritanism: Communal Privacy and Limits to Public Authority,” studies conflicting visions of community and religiopolitical authority through the debates around the Sufi ritual of mystical concerts (samd’). In the seventeenth century, the sama’ debates served as a platform in which Sufi authorities marshaled ethical arguments in favor of communal privacy to challenge the intervention of public authority into sacred space. The pro-sama‘ authors also defended a shared social vision that considered the community, rather than the individual, as the site of virtue. This notion of communal virtue animated urban social and religious space and justified the demands of urban communities for privacy against religiopolitical surveillance, Through the study of sama‘ debates as expressions of a civic vision that scrutinized the limits of public authority, the chapter underlines the emergence of the urban public sphere via a delimitation of religious surveillance. I argue in this chapter that rather than being a mere repetition of similar debates around musical ritual, seventeenth-century debates contained specific responses to the early modern state’s efforts at heavily regulating the domain of religion. Authors who defended sama‘ challenged the increased surveillance of sacred space and the efforts to limit socialization between different confessions. In their treatises criticizing the ban on sama, these anti-puritan authors defended the privacy of their communities and the right to mixed sociabilities, Through a close study of the social vision of prosama authors, the chapter also introduces Ottoman anti-puritanism as a distinct strand of early modern thought that began to form in the seventeenth century and remained influential until the mid-eighteenth century.
Thus, chapter 2 introduces the intellectual and cultural foundations of the urban public sphere and its delimitation of state surveillance. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 further investigate this theme by focusing on one anti-puritan Sufi order, the Mevlevi order. In addition, these chapters ask the question of how the anti-puritan Sufi orders established their power to negotiate norms of political surveillance and urban sociability. The chapters respectively argue that the power of Sufi orders was a function of their economic and social resources (particularly as sustained through the endowment system), of the material support of the military class in the seventeenth century, and of the ideological support of the Ottoman secretarial class in the same period. Chapter 3, “Sufi Sovereignties in the Ottoman World: Sufi Orders as Dynasties,” introduces the shifting trajectory of the Mevlevi Sufi order as a case study of changing conceptions of sovereignty in the Ottoman realm in the late sixteenth century. While always respected as the blessed heirs of Rami, the Mevlevi order remained outside the purview of Istanbul’s ruling elite until the late sixteenth century. This respectful distance was due to the order's conception of sovereignty; the descendants of Rimi (¢elebis) considered their dynasty a partner in the caliphate. In advancing this belief, they relied not only on their genealogical and spiritual descent from Rami, but also on their historical role in the establishment of Islamic rule in Anatolia. Therefore, the Mevlevi authorities shared two fundamental tenets of the legitimacy of the House of Osman: a mystical caliphate and the guardianship of Islam in the land of Rim. Because of their unwillingness to surrender to the center's exclusive claim to caliphate, the Mevlevis were regarded as less than ideal Sufis in the early stages of Ottoman rule. However, they quickly gained status thereafter, becoming a Sufi order favored by the elite in the seventeenth century, particularly in urban centers.
Chapter 3 argues that the change in the political fate of the Mevlevi order was symptomatic of a larger change in Ottoman political theology and structure. In the rapidly decentralizing Ottoman Empire, there was now greater room for alternative sovereignties such as that of the Mevlevis, who were reincorporated into imperial ceremony and identity as partners. There was also room for the pluralistic worldview that conformed closely to the experience of Ottoman urbanites who increasingly subscribed to the order. Mevlevi identity was one way of establishing political legitimacy for the Ottoman elite, who built their political legitimacy and identity by patronizing Mevlevi lodges. Therefore, while the Mevlevi experience was exceptional in certain senses, it was in other ways simply a more pronounced articulation of the centrifugal tendencies explored in the first chapter of the book.
Chapter 4, “A New Volume for the Old Mesnevi: Reviving the Dual Caliphate in the Age of Decentralization,” goes on to explore Ottoman conceptions of plural authorities in both religion and politics, focusing on the role of this worldview in the selffashioning of Ottomans from various social strata. The chapter explores the story of Book Seven of Rimi'’s Mesnevi, a new volume that Mevlevi authorities discovered and taught in the early seventeenth century. Mevlevi authorities framed and celebrated this discovery as a divine revelation to the Mevlevi order. The book was regarded as a manifestation of the indispensability of Sufi authority for the continued expansion of Islamic tradition, in an age otherwise considered to have curbed such esoteric knowledge and Sufi authority, The Mevlevis considered this esoteric authority indispensable not only for spirituality, but also for politics; Book Seven contained political advice that contrasted the transcience of individual sultans with the permanence of an order guarded by a range of advisers. According to this vision of a plurality of authorities in religious and political realms, Ottoman rule was a matter of partnership. The language of partnership provided new modes of self-fashioning for the empire's increasingly powerful military elite, including the janissaries, thereby forging a new language of civility. As a result, despite the puritan criticism of Sufi orders, major Sufi networks such as the Mevlevi order expanded in the seventeenth century, as manifested in a rapid increase in architectural patronage. The increased interest among the military class in supporting the Mevlevi order was not simply a pious choice; through association with this order, the Ottoman elite also sought to partake in discourses and practices of civility and to publicly claim new forms of political agency.
Chapter 5, “Language and Historical Consciousness: Theories of Progress in Ottoman Early Modernity,” explores Ottoman cultural notions of multiple religiosities through the evocative imagination of the languages of heaven. In the age of sharia-based puritan criticism of all innovations in religion, Ottoman urbanites contested this drive for uniformity by citing a Persianate canon that was equally authoritative for the legal manifestation of Islam and a core tenet of belonging in the urban public sphere. The most explicit advocates of this Persianate version of Islam were Mevlevi authors of the period, whose worldview considered Rumi's Mesnevia second Quran. This Persianate Islam combated the undiscerning condemnation of innovation and drive for uniformity in the realm of spirituality and culture. This pluralist and pro-innovation notion of civility found much support among bureaucrats, especially scribes, and among upwardly mobile Sufis in the empire’s higher as well as lower registers. The pro-innovation arguments of a Persianate-Ottoman Islam further explicate the growing popularity of the Mevlevi network, emphasizing the significance of its conception of civility and conduct for the expanding urban public sphere.
Chapter 6, “Of Coffeehouse Saints: Contesting Surveillance in the Early Modern City,” explores the link between Ottoman Sufism and new forms of urban civility, moving beyond elite patrons to the urban sphere. The first Ottoman coffeehouses, established in the middle of the sixteenth century, were spaces of free association and political dissent. Their susceptibility to disobedience in the eyes of political authorities reached a peak during the turbulent seventeenth century, when a new substance, tobacco, arrived from the New World and quickly became associated with the vices (or pleasures, depending on one’s vantage point) of the coffeehouse publics. The debate surrounding smoking and coffeehouse publicity has to date been construed as a discord between secular and religious elements in Ottoman cities, the latter aiming to curb new secular sociabilities.
Chapter 6 explores smoking from a third, heretofore neglected vantage point that unsettles this religious—secular divide: that of Sufi authorities who disputed the state's religiously backed smoking bans. Critics of the state's tobacco bans made two main objections. First, the ban collapsed the distinction between public and private by creating a culture of surveillance wherein smokers were stigmatized even ifthe act of smoking took place in private. The critics of the ban intended to limit the culture and policy of undiscerning surveillance by restituting the public—private boundary, or by distinguishing between “sin” and “crime.” Second, Sufi writings helped to create new meanings through which to “indigenize” tobacco. While antismoking treatises emphasized the foreign, non-Muslim origins of tobacco, another group of Sufis and preachers produced popular and literary works that indiginized tobacco as an agent of pleasure and of spiritual elation and advancement.
The legalization and indiginization of both coffeehouses and tobacco were, this chapter argues, largely brought about by Sufi orders, who quickly adapted to coffeehouse socialization and used this new space to connect with the larger public, In defending tobacco against the encroachment of political authorities and puritan religious criticism, Sufi authors deployed Persianate theories of tradition, primarily a positive affirmation of novelty and change. Debates regarding coffeehouses and tobacco served to broadcast these discussions of change, novelty, and the limits of public and private to the wider public via popular mediums such as poetry and song. More significantly, the sin-crime distinction illuminates the political power and meaning of these discussions: delimitation of sharia-backed surveillance.
The epilogue places the analysis of the book within the long-term trajectory of Ottoman history. In the history of Ottoman early modernity, the seventeenth century has been considered an anomaly, contrasting starkly with the previous century of imperial stability and the following century of effective reforms and Western-inspired modernization projects. Instead of this vision, this book argues that the seventeenth century was a period when the formulation and dissemination of arguments in favor of a progressive Ottoman tradition were developed and tested. While developments such as decentralized rule, the opening up of urban space to new sociabilities, and the willingness to embrace new technologies and institutions have been associated with the eighteenth century, the analysis in this book suggests that the seeds of these developments were sown in the period under consideration.
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