The Ottoman Empire
was an Islamic polity that originated in early-fourteenth-century
Anatolia.
Islam had been established in Anatolia before the emergence of the
empire, but between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries the
religion spread with Ottoman conquest to the Balkan Peninsula and
central Hungary. This does not mean that the population was uniformly
Muslim. In many parts of the Ottoman Empire, most notably in the
Balkan Peninsula, Christians formed a majority of the population, and
even in areas where Muslims formed a majority there was usually also
a minority of non-Muslim inhabitants. Unlike some of the rulers of
western Europe, the Ottoman sultans never attempted to impose
religious uniformity. Islam was, however, the dominant religion, and
the political structure of the empire reflected this fact. The
dynasty itself was Muslim and, before the reforms of the nineteenth
century, with rare exceptions, non-Muslims could not hold regular
political office or military command. Christians and Jews were able
to participate in the maintenance of the empire by serving as tax
farmers or contractors supplying, for example, cloth for Janissary
uniforms or materials to the naval arsenals, but they could not serve
as viziers, provincial governors, or army commanders. In the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries a few Christian fief holders in
the Balkans retained their positions in the years immediately after
the Ottoman conquest but, as their descendants converted to Islam,
this phenomenon disappeared within a generation. In the Balkans, too,
some Christian groups served as military auxiliaries into the
sixteenth century. More important in the dayto-day lives of the
sultan's subjects, the system of law courts also reflected the
dominant position of Islam. The Christian and Jewish communities
maintained their own courts for regulating intracommunal affairs, but
only the network of Muslim courts covered the entire empire, and only
Muslim courts were open to all the sultan's subjects, irrespective
of religion. Any cases involving Muslims or a Muslim and a non-Muslim
had to be heard in the Muslim court and, in principle, a non-Muslim
could not testify against a Muslim. The exclusion, therefore, of
non-Muslims from political office and the supremacy
of Islamic law guaranteed the hegemonic position of Islam within the
Ottoman Empire. At the same time, the imposition
of jizya,
a poll tax on adult non-Muslim males, and the occasional short-lived
imposition of dress restrictions on non-Muslims, symbolized the
inferior position of Christians and Jews.
Forms
of Islam
By the time of the
emergence of the Ottoman Empire in the fourteenth century, Islam was
fully formed as a system of belief with its associated intellectual,
legal, and cultural attributes. The central concept of the religion
was "knowledge," or ˓ilm,
meaning specifically the knowledge of God through revelation. God had
revealed himself to mankind through the missions of the prophets,
among whom Abraham (Ibrahim), the monotheistic founder of the Ka˓ba
at Mecca, Moses (Musa), and Jesus (˓Isa) held especially revered
positions. The recognition of Abraham, Moses, and Jesus as prophets
before the final revelation of Islam justified the tolerated but
subordinate positions of Jews and Christians within the Ottoman
Empire and other Islamic polities. God's final and most perfect
revelation was through the prophet Muhammad, "the Seal of the
Prophets." The primary text of revelation is the Koran. This is
regarded by Muslims as the literal word of God transmitted to mankind
through the medium of the Prophet. The record of the sayings and
actions—the hadith—of the Prophet, as an exemplar
to mankind, form the second text of the revelation. It is through the
Koran and hadith,
therefore, that man can know God and, in principle, these form the
foundation of knowledge, or ˓ilm.
A seeker
after knowledge had first to study Arabic, the language of revelation
and the language of science, which acquired a role in the Ottoman
Empire and in the Islamic world as the universal language of
religion, somewhat similar to the role of Latin in western
Christendom. The study of the sacred texts and the sciences in
general also required a grounding in logic and rhetoric. With these
tools at his disposal, a scholar could embark on any of the
specialized branches of ˓ilm,
which developed as discrete, though interrelated genres: the
interpretation of the Koran (tafsir),
the study of hadith, theology (kalam),
dogma ( ˓aqa˒id)
or law (fiqh). These
were the sciences through which one acquired a knowledge of God, and
which therefore formed the central curriculum of Ottoman and other
Islamic colleges. Subsidiary sciences—for example, the life of the
Prophet (sira),
history (ta˒rikh),
the vitae of saints or scholars by generation (tabaqat)—served
to strengthen sectarian
or dynastic identity, and all came to form genres of Ottoman
literature. Of the sciences, it was the study of law (fiqh)
that enjoyed the greatest prestige and made the greatest impact on
communal and individual lives. It represented not exactly God's
commands to mankind, as these are ultimately unknowable,
but the best that humankind
can achieve in its efforts to discover God's law. It regulated not
only secular affairs, notably in the sphere of family law, but also
rituals such as ablution,
prayer, fasting, and forbidden foods. The basics of the law,
popularized as the "five pillars of Islam"—the profession
of faith, prayer five times daily, charity, fasting during Ramadan,
and the pilgrimage to Mecca—are something that every Muslim must
know. In many respects, therefore, it was the adoption of Islamic
law—the shar˓
or shari˓a—that
gave Ottoman, and other Islamic societies, their distinctive form.
A person who had
studied ˓ilm was an ˓alim ('one who knows [God]') and
enjoyed great prestige. The plural of ˓alim is ˓ulama,
and the ulema came to form a respected class within all Muslim
societies, often, as in the Ottoman Empire, wielding political as
well as legal and spiritual power.
˓Ilm
was not, however, the only route to knowing God. Already in the early
centuries of Islam some claimed to know God through direct
revelation, a condition exemplified by the saying of al-Sarraj (d.
988): "There is no ˓ilm
that is known and nothing that is understood except what exists in
the Book of God, or is transmitted from the Messenger of God, or in
what is revealed in the hearts of saints." In order to
distinguish the knowledge of God acquired by direct revelation "in
the hearts of saints," its adepts, the Sufis, referred to it not
as ˓alm,
but as ˓urf or ma˒rifa,
both words having the sense of "knowledge." This doctrine
had revolutionary potential, since a person claiming knowledge via
direct divine inspiration could claim to be above the divine law as
professed by the ulema. Indeed some Sufis, notably al-Hallaj (d.
909), who reputedly
suffered death for declaring "I am God," did emerge, in the
Ottoman Empire and elsewhere, as opponents of the religious and
political order. What is more remarkable, however, is how tasawwuf,
the faith of the Sufis—radically different from the religion of the
ulema—came to form a branch of orthodox Islam.
In principle, ˓ilm
and ˓urf are antagonistic in their fundamental beliefs. In
orthodox belief, God created the world ex nihilo; he revealed himself
through his prophets; the world will end with the Resurrection and
the Judgment, where individuals will be judged and assigned in
eternity to Heaven or Hell. In Sufi belief, all creation was
originally one with God. God created mankind and the universe because
"He was a hidden treasure and wished that He should be known."
Since this separation from the Creator, all Creation has yearned to
return to its Maker. The Sufi therefore yearns to be reunited with
God, as the lover yearns for union with the beloved. In orthodox
Islam, knowledge of God comes through written revelation whose
interpretation is the preserve of the ulema. In Sufi belief,
knowledge of God is acquired through direct experience, or "taste"
of God.
There has at all
times been antagonism
between some of the orthodox ulema and the Sufis. For example, in the
Ottoman Empire of the mid-sixteenth century, the jurist Ibrahim of
Aleppo
(d. 1549) and the Ottoman chief mufti,
Çivizade Mehmed
(d. 1542), adopted anti-Sufi positions, while the Sufis for their
part conducted a literary polemic
against these orthodox opponents. The poet Khayali (d. 1556/57)
compared the orthodox ulema who could not recognize that God was in
the world around them to "fish who are in the sea, but do not
know what the sea is." Nonetheless, opponents of the Sufis
remained a minority and tasawwuf
in practice became an
important strand of mainstream Islam in the Ottoman Empire.
Tasawwuf
grew in importance through doctrinal development. In the developed
Sufi theory of knowledge, the first rule that a Sufi must follow is
obedience
to the shari˓a.
This precept brought tasawwuf
within the bounds of orthodoxy.
Second, the spiritual goal of most Sufis was not to declare "I
am God," but to seek "annihilation
of the self in God": the Sufi's soul became like "a drop of
wine in the ocean of God's love." In other words, tasawwuf
became quietist rather
than activist. At the same time, tasawwuf
became institutionalized.
Different orders of Sufis formed around the memories of Sufi saints,
and these organizations acquired properties and endowments, to
preserve which they had to remain acceptable to orthodox Islamic
regimes. Finally, the favorable opinions of al-Ghazali (d. 1111),
perhaps the most influential Islamic thinker, made tasawwuf
acceptable to most orthodox opinion. Some orders, it is true,
remained unacceptable.
In the Ottoman Empire, an offshoot
of the Bayrami order of Sufis, which formed after 1450, adopted the
activist belief that God is manifest in the human form, thus putting
men—or at least their members—above the dictates of the shari˓a.
These Sufis constituted an underground and ineffective,
though persecuted, opposition to orthodox Islam and the Ottoman
sultanate.
The
Political Structure of Ottoman Islam
Although tasawwuf
may have been the strongest influence on the beliefs of many, if not
most, Ottoman Muslims and permeated Ottoman literature, music, and
visual art, it was the Islam of the ulema that was significant in
determining the structures of the empire. A few surviving literary
fragments suggest that in the fourteenth century, the level of
Islamic learning in the Ottoman Empire was very low. Persons wishing
for an advanced Islamic education at this period traveled to the old
Islamic world, especially to Damascus or Cairo, and it was largely
these returning scholars who transferred Islamic doctrine and law to
the Ottoman realms and trained the early generations of Ottoman
ulema. By the mid-fifteenth century, with the establishment of a
system of colleges within the empire and the formation of a learned
class, there was no further need for such learning journeys.
The religious
colleges (madrasas) attached to mosques throughout the empire,
established on the model of the madrasas in the old Islamic world,
were the institutions that trained the ulema. The most prestigious
colleges were royal foundations, with the Eight Colleges of Mehmed
II
(1451–1481) and the colleges attached to the mosque of Suleiman
I
(1520–1566), completed in 1557, enjoying the highest rank, and the
foundations of senior statesmen occupying the second tier. Each
college was an independent institution with a separate endowment. In
the sixteenth century, however, Suleiman I and later Mehmed III
(1595–1603) made efforts to formalize the hierarchy of colleges
and, to a degree, to control the curriculum, which remained firmly
based on the medieval Islamic classics. By the seventeenth century
there seems to have been a well-recognized hierarchy, based on the
wealth of the endowment and the level of the curriculum. From the
late seventeenth century, when the empire began to lose territories,
some colleges suffered as the lands that provided their endowments
passed into foreign hands.
It was the colleges
that maintained the level of Islamic learning in the empire. A
graduate might find a position as imam in an important mosque; he
might stay in the system as a teacher (mudarris); or he might
choose a career as a judge (qadi). However, if he opted for a
legal career immediately on graduating, he would, at least between
the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, find his career confined to
the judgeships of small towns. Judgeships of the great cities,
especially of Istanbul, Edirne, and Bursa, were reserved for
mudarrises from the Eight Colleges or other high-ranking
madrasas. Furthermore, between the sixteenth and the eighteenth
centuries, a few ulema families monopolized these prestigious
teaching positions and judgeships. It was also from the judges of the
great cities that the sultan chose the two military judges
(kadiaskers), the senior judges of the empire, who sat
on the Imperial Council. Below the level of the great cities,
however, most of the judges and religious officials tended to be
local men, who from the sixteenth century would normally have
received part of their education in Istanbul.
The judges, at all
levels, administered Islamic law, and in continuing to exercise this
function at all times, including times of crisis, they played the
major role in ensuring the stability and continuity of Ottoman
government. Of the four schools of law within Sunni Islam—the
Shafi˓i, Maliki, Hanbali, and Hanafi—the Ottomans adopted the
Hanafi school, presumably because this is the school that was already
established in pre-Ottoman Anatolia. As the Hanafi jurists typically
offer more than one acceptable solution to each legal problem, the
Hanafi was perhaps the most flexible of the schools and, for this
reason, the most suitable to form the basis of a working legal
system. After their formative period in the early Islamic centuries,
the four schools remained mutually exclusive. According to Hanafi
theorists, for example, a person could have recourse
to a Shafi˓i judge only in the two cases for which the Hanafi school
offered no solution: the dissolution of an oath or when a deserted
wife seeks a dissolution of marriage. The Ottomans endorsed this
exclusivity, although among the general population in the Arab lands
there was some movement between schools.
Judges in the
Ottoman Empire as elsewhere put the law into effect by virtue of the
delegation to them of sultanic power. Above the judges stood the
muftis. A mufti is a religious authority with the competence to issue
fatwas,
authoritative
opinions on any religious-legal problems that questioners may ask. A
fatwa
is not an executive command: it requires a judge's or sovereign's
decree to put it into effect. It also differs from a judge's decree,
in that the judge's decree is valid only for the case in hand, while
the fatwa
has a universal validity. Ottoman fatwas
reflect this understanding by reformulating each question so as to
conceal
the identity of the questioner, even if the questioner was the sultan
himself, to remove specific details of the case such as time,
locality, or personal identities, and to eliminate details not
relevant to the case in question. Between the sixteenth and
eighteenth centuries, Ottoman fatwas
in their content, format, and anonymity came increasingly to resemble
the classical juristic texts which were the source of their
authority.
The mufti in theory
remained above and apart from the secular power, a concept embodied
from the sixteenth century in Ottoman ceremonial, where the sultan
stands in the presence of the chief mufti. His authority derived from
his role as interpreter of the Holy Law in its application to mundane
realities, including the realities of political power. In much of the
Islamic world, muftis acquired their role through public recognition
rather than official appointment, and really did stand apart from the
secular power. In the Ottoman Empire, however, the muftis were
effectively part of the government. The chief mufti, or sheikh
al-islam as he came to be
known by the seventeenth century, was the senior figure in the
religious-legal establishment, and usually achieved the position by
serving first as a senior judge and then as a military judge; like
these offices, the chief muftiship after the mid-sixteenth century
came to be the preserve of a very few ulema families. The chief mufti
owed his exalted
position partly to the Islamic view that accorded greater dignity to
muftis than to judges, but also to the prestige of two
sixteenth-century holders of the office, Kemal Pashazade (1525–1534)
and Ebu˒s-su˓ud Mehmed (1545–1574). Ebu˒s-su˓ud in particular
systematized the chief mufti's major function of issuing fatwas,
ensuring that his office was able to undertake a great volume of work
to a high standard. The system that he established remained in its
essentials intact until the end of the empire. The chief mufti came
to have an important, if informal, role in the Ottoman government.
Outside the capital, muftis were sometimes official appointees, but
did not enjoy high status of the chief mufti, and their function
could often be fulfilled by the mudarris
of a local college.
Tasawwuf
in the Ottoman Empire
By the time of the
establishment of the Ottoman Empire, tasawwuf
was well established in the Islamic world and accepted, within
limits, as a form of orthodox Islam. Groups of Sufis had established
and continued to establish their own orders (tariqas)
throughout the Islamic
world, each with its own saints and distinctive beliefs and rituals.
Many of the orders that originated outside the empire found disciples
in Ottoman territories. For example, the Khalveti order, named after
the eponymous saint ˓Umar al-Khalwati, originated in
late-fourteenth-century Azerbaijan. During the fifteenth century the
disciples of the Khalveti sheikh Yahya al-Shirvani (d. c. 1463)
brought the order to Anatolia. When he was governor of Amasya,
the future sultan Bayezid
II
(1480–1512) was initiated as a Khalveti and established the order
in Istanbul after he became sultan. Later, Murad III (1574–1595)
was also initiated. Other orders originated within the Ottoman Empire
itself. For example, the Bayrami order was the creation of Hajji
Bayram (d. 1429/30), who established the fraternity originally among
the craftsmen of Ankara. His successor Ak Shemseddin (d. 1459) became
a spiritual mentor to Mehmed II.
Once established,
Sufi orders sometimes split into smaller groups, the Khalvetis, for
example, giving birth to ten or more subgroups during the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries. The Bayramis, too, split into two groups
after 1450, the orthodox group following Ak Shemseddin, the
"heretical"
group, the Melamis, coming under the leadership of ˓Ömer the Cutler
(d. 1475/6). This group became particularly active in Bosnia. By the
late seventeenth century, however, the Melamis had reemerged as an
orthodox order, although distinct from the original Bayramis.
Conversely, different groups could merge. The Bektashi order, which
took its name from a fourteenth century saint, Hajji Bektash, formed
as a coherent
order under the leadership of Balim Sultan about 1500, and absorbed
and syncretized a wide range of Sufi and other popular beliefs. The
Bektashis became particularly well established in Albania.
Many Muslims in the
Ottoman Empire belonged to a Sufi order, giving these an essential
role not only in disseminating popular faith but also in establishing
networks and social solidarity among members. In some orders
membership included women, giving them a role not available in
orthodox Islam. The orders could also acquire charitable functions,
the rural lodges of the Bektashis,
for example, providing accommodation for travelers. Above all, they
influenced the cultural life of the empire. Each order had its own
liturgy
and ceremonies, usually involving music, recitation, singing, and
sometimes dancing, and to preserve their traditions the orders had to
train adepts in these arts, many of whom acquired fame beyond the
confines of the organization. The Mevlevi order—the socalled
whirling dervishes—had a particular educational role. The sacred
text of the order, the lengthy mystical poem known as the Mesnevi, by
its eponymous saint, Mevlana Celaleddin Rumi (d. 1273), is written in
Persian, a language that Mevlevis therefore had to learn. Since
Persian was not taught in Ottoman madrasas, it was above all the
Mevlevi lodges that provided instruction and were instrumental in
maintaining the enormous prestige of Persian culture in the Ottoman
Empire. They also acted as musical and literary academies. The most
celebrated Ottoman composers and many Ottoman poets from the
seventeenth to the nineteenth century were Mevlevis. While the
Mevlevi order was a repository
of Ottoman high culture, the Bektashis played a similar role in
transmitting popular culture, for example in preserving and adding to
the corpus of Turkish religious poetry attributed to the
semi-mythical Sufi of the thirteenth or fourteenth century, Yunus
Emre.
Orthodoxy
and Heterodoxy
Although tasawwuf
had an intellectual tradition and a structure of "knowledge"
that imitated ˓ilm, its
primary appeal was aesthetic rather than intellectual. The liturgies
of the orders, which aimed to produce a state of ecstasy in
participants as they "became drunk with the wine of God's love,"
offered a religious and theatrical experience that was not available
in the impressive but austere
ceremonies in the mosques. What was equally important is that the
orders, and particularly those with a popular following,
institutionalized popular piety,
with its appetite
for saints and miracles. The hagiographies of Sufi saints, such as
Enisi's early sixteenth-century vita of the Bayrami Ak Shemseddin,
formed a branch of popular literature that provided entertainment,
edification,
and a focal point for people's loyalties as adherents to a particular
Sufi order. At the same time the shrines of saints, whether or not
they had an association with a particular order, became sites of
pilgrimage, offering cures for diseases or other of life's problems.
It was at this level that beliefs of Ottoman Muslims and Christians
often became indistinguishable,
with formerly Christian shrines, such as the Sufi lodge at Seyyid
Gazi in Anatolia, becoming sites of Muslim veneration. Other sites
attracted both Muslim and Christian pilgrims. An example of this was
the shrine of St. George on the island of Levitha near Patmos, which
became a site of Greek Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim pilgrimages,
St. George also acquiring the Turkish name Koç Baba.
Popular practices,
notably visiting saints' tombs and the liturgical use of music and
dancing, always aroused the opposition of a section of the ulema.
Hostility to these practices became particularly intense in
mid-seventeenth-century Istanbul, when Mehmed Kadizade (d. 1635) and
his followers, disciples of the fundamentalist
scholar Mehmed of Birgi (d. 1575), preached against them in public,
attacking in particular the rituals of the Khalvetis. Such attacks,
however, never had a lasting effect, and most of the many fatwas
issued on the subject of the Sufi orders are in fact tolerant of
their practices, the higher ulema on the whole espousing a
latitudinarian
understanding of Islam. The affiliation of several sultans and many
members of the political elite with the orders ensured that, in
general, they enjoyed political protection. Furthermore, popular
belief was ineradicable,
and permeated
even the sultan's palace. As examples of this, the sultans provided
employment for makers of talismans, and in 1640, the advice writer
Kochi Bey urged the new sultan Ibrahim I (1640–1648) to carefully
preserve a loaf
of bread whose grain revealed the name Allah.
Nonetheless, despite
the latitude of tolerated belief and practice, an official definition
of heresy
did emerge and became a matter of concern especially during the
sixteenth century. This development was closely linked to the claims
of the Ottoman dynasty, which drew on Islamic themes to legitimize
its rule. Until about 1500, these legitimizing elements came
primarily from folk religion. Through dreams, God had promised
sovereignty to the first sultan Osman
and his father; the dynasty had gained a spiritual descent from
Osman's marriage to the daughter of a saint; saints led the sultan's
warriors in battle. In the sixteenth century, however, the dynasty
came to derive its legitimacy
from orthodox Islamic tradition. This was partly a consequence of the
increasing influence of classically trained ulema in the empire, but
partly also a consequence of external events. In 1516/17, the
conquest of the Mamluk empire made Selim
I
(1512–1520) and his successors lords of Mecca and Medina, the holy
cities of Islam. This gave the Ottoman sultan the prestigious title
of "Servitor of the Two Holy Places," and also the
responsibility for the safety of the pilgrimage routes to Mecca. He
could now, as the upholder of the religion, claim primacy
among Islamic sovereigns. At the same time, the rise to power in Iran
of the Safavid
dynasty,
which claimed spiritual power as leaders of the Safavid Sufi order,
and whose Shi˓ism contrasted with the Sunnism of the Ottomans,
presented a religious and political threat to the Ottoman Empire,
especially since the Safavids found many adherents to their order
among the sultan's subjects in Anatolia. The Ottomans countered
Safavid
propaganda by declaring the Safavids and their followers to be worse
than infidels, and by presenting the Ottoman dynasty as the only
defenders of Sunni Islam against this mortal danger. By the
mid-century, Suleiman I was declaring himself to be "the one who
makes smooth the path for the precepts of the shari˓a"
and the one "who makes manifest the Exalted Word of God"
and who "expounds the signs of the luminous shari˓a."
He was also the first Ottoman sultan to assume the title of caliph,
implying the leadership of the entire Islamic world. With these
developments the dynasty identified itself so closely with orthodox
Sunni Islam that disloyalty
to one implied disloyalty to the other.
It was particularly
during Suleiman's reign, and partly as a result of his claim to be
the defender of the faith, that heresy acquired a clear definition.
In identifying heresy, the ulema were not concerned with a person's
inner belief or private actions. These are matters between the
individual and God. Their concern was with stated belief, certain
tenets
of the Holy Law or Sunni dogma providing the test. If, for example, a
Sufi declared that the ceremonies of his order constituted an act of
worship (˓ibada),
a term which in the shari˓a
refers only to the obligatory
purification, prayer, fasting, and alms-giving, then he was a
heretic,
because in claiming the ceremonies to be "obligatory" he
was claiming an authority in prescribing ritual that only the shari˓a
possessed. It was this test that the sultan used to execute the
Melami Oğlan Şeyh and his followers in 1528. Provided, however, the
Sufi did not declare his practices to be an act of worship, he
remained within the bounds of orthodoxy. Since the shari˓a
forbids Muslims to drink wine, if a Muslim declares wine to be licit,
he has abjured the shari˓a,
and become liable
to death. If, however, he drinks wine without believing it to be
licit he is not a heretic. In Ottoman religious "trials"
the key to identifying heresy was the accused's statements on what is
canonically forbidden, permitted, and obligatory. A heretic was
someone whose stated beliefs did not conform with the shari˓a.
However, in the more merciless
pursuit of Safavid sympathizers within the Ottoman realms a key
indicator was whether or not the accused cursed the Orthodox caliphs,
the denunciation
of the first three successors to the prophet Muhammad being a tenet
in Shi˓ite belief. Public behavior could also indicate heresy. It
was for this reason that Suleiman I decreed in 1537 that the
authorities should build mosques in all villages that lacked one and
note who failed to attend the obligatory congregational prayers. In
this way the sultan not only enforced Sunni ritual, in his capacity
as protector of the faith, but could also, by their refusal to
perform obligatory prayers, identify heretics.
Since by this time the sultan identified his own legitimacy with
Sunni orthodoxy, disavowal of the commands of the shari˓a
was also identified as an act of rebellion against the dynasty.
In practice,
therefore, the definition of heresy served to identify political
opponents of the dynasty, and with changing political circumstances
certain heretical beliefs became more acceptable. The persecution of
Ottoman Shi˓ites, for example, seems to have stopped when, from the
mid-seventeenth century, the Safavids of Iran no longer presented a
political and ideological danger. Furthermore, since the Ottoman
government demanded of Muslims no more than verbal adherence to
certain tenets of the shari˓a
and the outward performance of its obligatory rituals, and did not
examine inward
faith, a huge variety of beliefs and practices were able to flourish
unmolested
within Ottoman Islam.
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IMBER