Download PDF | Hüseyin Yılmaz - Caliphate Redefined_ The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought-Princeton University Press (2018).
388 Pages
Introduction
The Ottomans and the Caliphate With the fall of Baghdad in 1258, the historical caliphate, embodied by the Abbasid Empire, formally ended with traumatic consequences that, in response, facilitated the rise of a new wave of self-reflection, exploration, and experimentation in all segments of Islamicate societies.1 In the absence of the imperial caliphate, along with the rise of independent regional Muslim dynasties from the fourteenth century onwards, the idea of the caliphate, reinterpreted in response to profound changes taking place in the broader Muslim community, regained its prominence in Islamic political discourse, and, with the rise of the Ottoman Empire, became the linchpin of imperial ideology in the sixteenth century. Modern studies on the question of Muslim rulership repeatedly assume that the historical caliphate, as conceived by Muslim jurists during the Abbasid period (c. 750–1258), continued to define both the concept and the institution in subsequent political thought and praxis.
This assumption confines the theoretical construction of the caliphate to jurisprudence, overlooks the impact of later historical experiences, and disregards the formative influence of broader intellectual traditions in framing the caliphate as both an institution and an ideal. The post-Abbasid caliphate, or the making of the non-Arab caliph in the Ottoman case, was reconstructed in the language of Sufism infused with indigenous traditions of rulership and shaped by defining historical experiences, rather than through the juristic canon of medieval universalism. In sixteenth-century political discourse, the Ottoman caliph was a mystic, in the sense that he was a friend and deputy of God on Earth, with sway over both temporal and spiritual realms. The House of Osman was God’s chosen dynasty commissioned to serve divinely assigned purposes, and the Ottoman rulership was the seal of the caliphate to last until the end of times. In the sixteenth century, continuous Ottoman expansionism in all directions entailed that the Ottomans counter and appropriate the legitimating apparatus of their opponents, most notably the Habsburgs, the Safavids, and the Mamluks, which helped introduce the belief in the uniqueness of the Ottoman dynasty into the mainstream of political thinking.
Through mythologizing the origins of the Ottoman state, esoteric interpretations of religious texts, and prophesies of the great spiritual men, the ruling elite perceived the Ottoman dynasty as the chosen one. Further, the triumphalist mood of the age, invigorated by seemingly incessant victories, made statesmen and intellectuals see achievements in the arts, architecture, literature, and government as further signs of Ottoman exceptionalism. In political geography, early sixteenth century Eurasia witnessed the emergence of confessional empires with claims of universal rulership that engaged in a stiff competition for ideological ascendancy. The Sufi-minded theorists of rulership, unchecked by the limits of authority set in juristic and bureaucratic traditions, provided a useful repository of symbolism and imagery to claim the superiority of the Ottoman caliphate.
The discourse on the caliphate included an extensive engagement with theories of government expounded in various disciplines and literary genres in the context of Islamic learned traditions. The full corpus of mainstream political theory was widely available to Ottoman statesmen, who appear to have been staunch collectors of such texts and patrons of scholars on statecraft. The discourse reflects competing visions of rulership, languages, concepts, norms, imageries, and styles articulated in an increasingly Islamic but versatile and vernacularizing Ottoman culture. Jurists, Sufis, and bureaucrats contested rival notions of authority and sought to formulate an imperial image that best represented their own ideological imprints, confessional convictions, group interests, and cultural idioms.
Despite their accommodating approach to rulership, jurists per se in the Ottoman Empire ceased to be the leading exponents of the theory of the caliphate because of both theoretical and practical problems they could never definitively resolve. One was the juristic fixation with the historical caliphate as a successorship to Muhammed through an established lineage from his tribe, the Quraysh, a ruling that manifestly stood at odds with that of the Ottoman dynasty. Second, although a few jurists radically altered the theory of the caliphate, the canonical formulation of the caliphate proved impervious to the demands of coercive power or even captivating esoteric visions, and remained unchanged in all the juristic and theological textbooks taught in Ottoman madrasas, creating an unresolved tension between formal Islamic training and individual opinions.
This cognitive dissonance created an irreparable rift between jurists who pursued academic careers in the Ottoman madrasas and remained loyal to the medieval ideal and those who pursued legal careers in the imperial judicial administration and tended to be pragmatic by accommodating divergent political realities. Because of this rift, the leading jurists either abstained from writing on the question of the caliphate in normative juristic language or resorted to the mystical philosophy of prominent Sufi intellectuals, such as Ibn Arabi, to reconfigure the caliphate outside the disciplinary confines of Islamic jurisprudence.
Relatively unbound by juristic doctrines, the Sufis offered a radically new understanding of the caliphate that better suited the legitimation needs of a rising Muslim empire. As Sufi orders and their leaders became increasingly involved in public life, their notions and imageries of authority permeated into dynastic visions of authority. Almost all the books on rulership that were taught to dynastic heirs between 1400 and 1600 as part of their training in statecraft were written by prominent Sufi authors. Tutors for princes were mostly renowned Sufis or Sufi-minded scholars whose teaching centered on esoteric, spiritual, and moral interpretations of rulership. Princes had little training in jurisprudence but were deeply exposed to mystical visions of rulership. The close association between the Ottoman ruling elite and prominent Sufi orders turned Sufism into the principal medium of formulating Ottoman dynastic legitimacy and inculcating a sultanic image as a spiritual leader. The Ottoman court countered the political challenges posed by powerful Sufi orders by adopting mystical visions of authority, and by depicting the Ottoman ruler as a caliph who conforms to Sufistic expectations.
In his study of kingship and sainthood in early modern Iran, Central Asia, and India, Azfar Moin perceptively noted that “the scriptural notions of the messiah (mahdi) and the renewer (mujaddid), the mystical cencepts of the pole or (qutb) and the perfect individual (insan-i kamil), and the kingly notions of divine effulgence (farr-i izadi) and the lord of conjunction (Sahib Qiran) all referred to human agents who could usher in and maintain the just religiopolitical order of a particular historica era.”2 One may easily add to this mosaic of imageries a long list of other notions and concepts that originated from various learned and indigineous traditions including those constructed with dawla (fortune), k ˙ ūt (fortune), khātam (seal), ghaws (succor), maz˙ har (manifestation), z ˙ ill (shadow), and āya (evidence). Granted that each term retained its peculiar meanings in specific contexts and usages, in various strands of Ottoman political thought, it was the caliphate that served as the anchor concept into which all these otherwise little related notions of human distinction could harmoniously be assimilated as its descriptive markers.
The caliphate, in both concept and practice, could tie the historical with the utopian, the temporal with the spiritual, the individual with the communal, and the object with the subject. It could be equally meaningful in philosophical, juristic, and Sufistic discourses, and utilized for conversation among different disciplines, world views, and social structures. Whether simply considered as “succession” of authority in historical practice or the very act of “creation” of human beings per Sufi cosmology, the term’s defining qualities remain to be “representation” and “performation.” As one Arabic text in the sixteenth century formulated, khilāfa does not materialize unless the mustakhlaf (successor) fully reflects the mustakhlif (succeeded).3 Namely, however it was conceived, the caliphate was always contingent on something else, having no significance without the signifier, no status without what it stands for, or no existence without what it manifests.
The very etymology, semantics, scriptural sanction, and historical applications of the term made it inherently suitable and infinetly flexible for political speculation and craftmenship. In Ottoman practice, envisioning the caliphate as a comprehensive cosmological position that encompasses both temporal and spiritual realms was embroidered in discursive narratives constructed by dynastic apologists and enigmatic letterists as well as mainstream scholars through literary articulation, artistic representation, and occultic revelations. This caliphal myth, as part of the central theme of the imperial ideology, entailed that the House of Osman was commissioned to rule as the “Great Caliphate” of the end of times foretold in the Qur’an, prophesied by Prophet Muhammed, envisioned by saints, and proven by discernible manifestations of divine providence. The caliphate as such was closely tied to an eschatology drawn from indigenous traditions and Abrahamic teachings conveyed via Islamic sources. The Ottoman caliphate, turned into a powerful foundational myth that was enhanced by a syncretic amalgamation of popular imageries and formal teachings of Islamic disciplines, then became the defining mantra of Ottoman imperial ideology continuously adapted to new political configurations and confessional manifestations, and reworked until the end of the empire.
The Caliphate in the Age of Süleyman This study examines the mystification of the caliphate from its post-Abbasid origins to the late sixteenth century by privileging the age of Süleyman the Lawgiver (r. 1520–1566) for a more detailed analysis during which the caliphate turned into a patently Sufistic concept. In explaining the rise of Sufi tariqas in the late medieval Islamicate world, Marshall Hodgson briefly but perceptively hinted at the newly forming mystical notion of the caliphate: The ulama never ceased to think of the ideal unity of Islam in terms of a khalifa, a Caliph ruling a human empire. The Sufis made much of a very different sort of khalifa, the human being who as perfected microcosm is the final end of, and holds limitless sway over, the world of nature and men together. He is a Muslim, and exercises his power largely upon and through Muslims (the Abdal); but there is a recognized place under his care for the believers in every faith however crude, not only peoples of the Book as in the historical Caliphate, but outright pagans. The kings who come and go are but the servants of such a saint, as many beloved anecdotes make clear; no Caliph had such power over his governors as the Sufi shayhks, and especially the supreme shaykh, the Qutb of any given time, had over the earth’s rulers.4 But Hodgson’s signpost was largely overlooked in subsequent studies.
The impact of Sufism on political thought, however, has been getting increasingly more attention in Islamic studies in the past few decades. Among others, Cornell Fleischer, Kathryn Babayan, Mercedes García-Arenal, and Azfar Moin masterfully demonstrated how rulers of the post-caliphate Islamicate world from Morocco to India constructed colorful visions of rulership by decorating themselves with mystical imageries and posing themselves as caliphs, lords of conjunction, renewers of religion, Mahdis, and saints. These studies treat the politicization of Sufism or mystification of politics within the larger framework of Islamic eschatology, messianism, millenarianism, and revivalism. While this study complements previous scholarship and furthers the inquiry, it parts ways in several directions. First, it focuses on the idea of the caliphate and treats messianic visions only to the extent they are related to it. Second, while taking the broader cultural and social context into consideration, this study mainly examines the political literature in all its diverse strains. Third, it tells the post-Abbasid story of the caliphate as a process of negotiation between Sufi groups and the Ottoman ruling establishment. Finally, it traces and explains the trajectory and transformation of the core vocabulary of political thought in Ottoman experience, or the rise of the Ottoman vernacular in political discourse. The caliphate, in its various conceptions and manifestations, became more pronounced during the age of Süleyman as displayed in the extensive political corpus, royal titles, artistic representations, and public displays. More, Süleyman appeared in Ottoman thought as the personification of the supreme universal leader of the Muslim community whose image was made to fit various notions of leadership theorized in different Islamic disciplines and proclivities. The age of Süleyman is by far the most extensively studied period in both academic as well as popular historiography because it is considered a pivotal era of Ottoman history, if not of the entire early modern world. No other period of Ottoman history has attracted such a degree of interest. Süleyman has been the subject of more biographies than all other Ottoman sultans combined to quench the thirst for understanding this archetypical ruler, ranging from the crude Orientalist inquiries into the mystique of oriental rulership to contemporary infatuation with Süleymanic enlightenment. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, more than twenty memorializing epic biographies with the title Süleymānnāme (the Book of Süleyman) were composed.5
At the height of his power, Süleyman was arguably the most commonly recognized universal ruler across Eurasia, from Sumatra to France. It is no surprise that his contemporaries called him with such titles as the second Solomon and Mahdi. As reflected in his more common epithet, “lawgiver” (k ˙ ānūnī), Süleyman was commonly perceived to be an epoch-making sultan both in Ottoman memory as well as in modern historiography.6 In this study, the Süleymanic age refers to the period that roughly corresponds to the tenth century of the Islamic calendar. It is marked by the ascendance of a new imperial elite that started to take form after the conquest of Constantinople, thrived under his reign, and carried his classicizing legacy after his death. Süleyman’s birth coincided with the beginning of the tenth century, which lent an added excitement to the brewing millenarianism of the period. The age of Süleyman thus conveniently corresponds to the millennial century of Islam, which also loosely syncs with the sixteenth century. Süleyman’s mark was already evident before his succession and remained afresh long after his death. Neither Süleyman’s succession nor his death caused any major disruption in administrative continuity. Although Süleyman was enthroned in 1520, he appeared on the Ottoman dynastic scene before 1512 during the succession struggle of his father, Selim I. By playing a crucial role in his father’s takeover of the throne, Süleyman secured his own succession as the crown prince. As the sole heir to the throne, the only such case in all of Ottoman history, he himself was well aware of his uniqueness, and his contemporaries were keen to highlight this exception as a sign of his chosenness. When he succeeded to the throne at the age of twenty-five on the sudden death of his father, he continued to rule along with the statesmen and ulema promoted by Selim I, most notably Grand Vizier Piri Paşa (d. 1532) and Sheikh ul Islam Zenbilli Ali Cemali Efendi (d. 1525).
When he died in 1566, Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Paşa (d. 1579) and Sheikh ul Islam Ebussuud (d. 1574), two major figures of his later reign, remained in office until Selim II’s death in 1574. Major intellectual figures of his reign such as Ibn Kemal (d. 1534), Taşköprizade Ahmed (d. 1561), Celalzade Mustafa (d. 1567), and Birgivi Mehmed (d. 1573), had a defining impact on later Ottoman thought. The intellectual landmarks of the political thought of Süleymanic age are Idris-i Bidlisi (d. 1520), who wrote his treatise on political philosophy, Qānūn-i Shāhanshāhī in Persian, and Kınalızade Ali (d. 1572), the author of what came to be the Ottoman canon in ethical philosophy, Ah ˘ lāk ˙ -ı ʿAlāʾī. During this time, Ottoman intellectuals displayed a burgeoning interest in writing on various aspects of rulership and government. After a long tradition of political writings in the form of translations and reworkings of previous works, as well as a few original compositions since the rise of the Ottomans, Qānūn-i Shāhanshāhī appeared to be the first major attempt at an elaborate theory of rulership following the reconfiguration of the Ottoman polity from an ambitious frontier state into a universal empire under the reigns of Mehmed II and Bayezid II. Perceived by later generations as one of the major legacies of the Süleymanic age, despite the considerable debt it owes to previously formulated theories of ethics, Ah ˘ lāk ˙ -ı ʿAlāʾī was written with a claim to surpass all other works on the same subject and conceived to be an exposition of Ottoman moral, social, and political ideals of the period.7 The period between Bidlisi and Kınalızade was a flourishing era of intellectual vigor, creativity, and curiosity among Ottoman men and women of learning. The age of Süleyman is best known in historical memory, modern scholarship, and popular imagination for its classicizing legacy in arts, literature, learning, lawmaking, and institutionalization. Yet, in originality and future effects, political thought was no less spectacular than any other achievement of the era. The most conspicuous development of this period was the emergence of an extensive corpus of political literature across various genres and disciplines with an unprecedented range of dissemination. Juristic, philosophical, ethical, sufistic, and theological views were expressed in the conventions of their respective disciplines or in the synthetic genre of mirrors for princes. The sheer number of political texts in circulation alone attests to the emergence of a broad-based interest among the reading public on questions of rulership. Accompanying this surge of interest was the gradual broadening of the field of political thought. Increased contact of Ottoman men of learning with the nonOttoman body of political writings led them to deal with issues and questions that had not appeared in pre-sixteenth century Ottoman political literature. al-Siyāsa al-sharʿiyya, for example, a field that developed during the Mamluk period, came to the attention of Ottoman scholars only toward the middle of the sixteenth century, after the conquest of Egypt. Similarly, the question of bayt al-māl or public treasury, a topic not included in previous Ottoman political writings, became an important issue in this period, largely because of the influence of the Mamluk tradition of political writing. In addition, the Ottoman experience in government posed new questions to address in the political literature. K ˙ ānūn, for example, in the sense of law, had never made its way into political theory before this period, because no pre-Ottoman polity had such a highly developed legal system characterized by k ˙ ānūn. This broadening of the spectrum of political writings did not bring all conventional issues of previous political corpus into the Ottoman context. On the contrary, except for a few issues, most of the common questions that had busied pre-Ottoman authors on rulership did not resonate among the Ottoman audience and were simply ignored. The question of required qualifications for the caliphate or imamate, for example, which preoccupied jurists and theologians for so long, fell from favor in this period, even though the Ottoman sultan always implied his superiority over all other Muslim rulers. The broader field of political thought in this period was exposed more to influences from the Turkic and Persianate east than from the Arab south. For practical reasons, Ottoman authors found political teachings formulated in the East more relevant because of the affinity of the Ottoman political system with its Eastern counterparts. This influence was facilitated by a constant influx to the Ottoman realm of eastern scholars, bureaucrats, and literati, who carried political ideas and conventions along with them. Despite the full incorporation of the Arab south, Ottoman political thought remained to be articulated mainly on the cultural plane of what Shahab Ahmed called the Balkans-toBengal complex.8 Although the Ottoman authors of this period wrote on a variety of subjects in different genres, the Sufistic language dominated the overall discourse on rulership. Besides the mystics who wrote on government, most scholars writing on the subject were either themselves affiliated with a Sufi order or were well versed in mystical teachings. Most works on rulership and ethics are imbued with teachings, imageries, and vocabulary of mostly Turko-Persianate Sufism. Advice literature, in particular, was largely under the spell of, in Dabashi’s words, Persianate literary humanism.9
The ritualistic terminology of Ottoman Sufism was largely Persian because of the popularity of Persian works on the subject as well as the dissemination of Sufi orders that originated in the East. The Sufi world view that captivated Ottoman intellectuals naturally shaped the mode of thinking and the language of writing on rulership. Among others, works of Attar (d. c. 1221), Sa’di (d. c. 1291), and Rumi (d. 1273), as repositories of Sufi wisdom on government, were among the shortlist of classics of which any rank and file Ottoman intellectual was expected to have mastered. Yet, despite the continued prestige of Arabic in normative thought and of Persian in literature, Turkish established itself as the primary language of political discourse in this period. Although the combined number of works compiled in Arabic and Persian was still much higher than those in Turkish, only Turkish texts reached a wide circulation. A large number of translations produced in this period demonstrate the existence of a growing readership in Turkish that turned this language into the principal medium of political discourse.
The availability of a large number of classical works on rulership in Turkish certainly facilitated its rise as a language of choice in writing on rulership. The spread of political texts in Turkish texts and the upsurge of interest in reading on the subject were two developments that fed each other. In terms of terminological richness, conceptual sophistication, and literary and artistic potentialities, Turkish became a more convenient language for expressing political views. While Arabic and Persian stood relatively apart, Ottoman Turkish evolved in full engagement with both languages and their cultural backdrop. For the learned who were typically well versed in three languages, Turkish evolved to become the only venue where diverse traditions represented in Persian and Arabic could be amalgamated into a single medium of expression.
The Caliphate as a Moral Paradigm In the age of Süleyman, the general tenor of political writing was set by the moralist tendency that had dominated political discourse since the rise of independent rulers in the eleventh century against the overarching rule of the Abbasid caliphate. During the high caliphate of the ninth and tenth centuries, the main quest of juristic political thought was to establish the normative principles of governance, whereas theological writings were limited to the proper definition of imamate in response to alternative claims of authority. Philosophical works, in the main, treated the political as part of their search for the best form of human association that leads to the attainment of a higher form of life. Regardless of disciplinary interests and priorities, the dominating theme of political discourse was defining the best qualified candidate to lead the Muslim community. The holy grail of political theory during the formative age of Islamic thought was to define the most perfect ruler to lead the community in the right direction towards its ideals with less regard to moral technologies of reforming the ruler-in-charge. With the decline of the central caliphate and the rise of independent rulers, the discrepancy between classical juristic theory and political practice widened. As best illustrated in a burst of mirror for princes literature, moralism replaced idealism as the central theme of political discourse.
This fledgling breed of political literature, which ultimately originated from the writings of Ibn al-Muqaffa in the eighth century but was overshadowed by the juristic discourse, shifted the focus from the qualifications of the universal caliph to the moral recuperation of the ruler in office, and from the uncompromising but abstract sharʿī principles of governance to specific instructions to turn existing administration into an efficient but just one. Because instating the best qualified candidate to the universal leadership of the Muslim community remained an unrealized utopia, the moralist tendency that aimed to turn the ruler in office into the best possible one found widespread appeal among statesmen, jurists, philosophers, and Sufis alike. Despite this shift of focus toward specific principles of rulership, the medieval fixation that the best governance could only be undertaken by the best of people survived as a noble ideal in political writing. Guided by the moralist-pietistic tendency, most Ottoman authors pursued to improve the quality of rulership while totally disregarding its form. Ideal rulership was to be achieved not by finding the best form of political authority but by improving the moral quality of ruler and his aides in government.
Thus the defining element of rulership was not its institutional sophistication but the human agent at the helm. Those moralists commonly defined rulership, in the generic sense, as the mere acquisition of sufficient executive power to rule. This ordinary rulership transforms into true rulership only when the ruler achieves personal sophistication in morality, spirituality, and piety. False rulership, also dubbed as worldly, material, and temporal, was most commonly labelled as s · ūrī (in appearance) and regarded as an imperfect form of rulership that should be turned into a superior one. True rulership, characterized by such designations as maʿnawī (in meaning), rah˙ mānī (manifesting God’s mercy), and rabbānī (manifesting God’s lordship), extends its authority over both the material and spiritual realms as a result of the ruler’s moral perfection. Morally conscious authors with these convictions did not pay much attention to the institutional features of government or the principles of governance but simply extended the teachings of ethics, piety, and Sufism into the realm of rulership. With their focus on the human agent as the benchmark of true rulership, there was virtually no difference between reforming an individual initiate in a Sufi tract and a ruler in power. For Sufi moralists, the Qur’anic concept of the caliphate, not the historical one, provided the perfect model, a moral paradigm for the perfection of rulership.
The historical caliphate, as a legal and social construct, was the political embodiment of the Muslim community’s collective responsibility to uphold and execute Islamic law and services. The Qur’anic caliphate, in Sufi idiom, was the fulfillment of the very purpose of creation par excellence, the materialization of God’s representation on Earth through human being’s manifestation of the divine by adopting God’s attributes (ah ˘ lāk ˙ ullāh) as his morality.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق