Marinos Sariyannis with a chapter by Ekin Tuşalp Atiyas OTTOMAN POLITICAL THOUGHT UP TO THE TANZIMAT: A CONCISE HISTORY Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas – Institute for Mediterranean Studies Rethymno 2015 OTTOMAN POLITICAL THOUGHT UP TO THE TANZIMAT: A CONCISE HISTORY Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas, Institute for Mediterranean Studies P.O. Box 119, 74100 Rethymno, Greece, e-mail: [email protected] tel.: +30 2831056627, fax: +30 2831025810 http://www.ims.forth.gr ISBN 978-618-81780-1-4 © 2015 Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas, Institute for Mediterranean Studies and Marinos Sariyannis ([email protected]) – Ekin Tuşalp Atiyas ([email protected]) This e-book is not for sale. This publication is protected by copyright. No part of it may be reproduced, in any form, without the prior written permission of the publishing institution. This volume is a product of the research project “OTTPOL”, carried out under the Action “Aristeia II” of the Operational Program “Education and Lifelong Learning”, 2007-2013 Greek National Strategic Reference Framework, co-financed by Greek national funds and the European Union (European Social Fund). 1 OTTOMAN POLITICAL THOUGHT UP TO THE TANZIMAT: A CONCISE HISTORY TABLE OF CONTENTS Note on this publication…………………………………………………………..3 Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………4 Note on transliteration and citations……………………………………………..6 Introduction………………………………………………………………………..7 Chapter I: From emirate to Empire……………………………………………..14 Chapter II: Ahlak literature and the falasifa tradition…………………………29 Chapter III: Imperial lawmakers, bureaucrats, ulema…………………………43 Chapter IV: Adab literature, Ottoman style……………………………………..67 Chapter V: The “old law” versus “decline”……………………………………...80 Chapter VI: The “Sunna-Minded” trend (written by Ekin Tuşalp Atiyas)…...98 Chapter VII: A new understanding of innovation and reform……………….123 Chapter VIII: Innovative traditionalists of the eighteenth century…………..137 Chapter IX: The “Westernizers”………………………………………………..154 Conclusion………………………………………………………………………...175 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………180 2 OTTOMAN POLITICAL THOUGHT UP TO THE TANZIMAT: A CONCISE HISTORY Note on this publication This volume is to be used as a supplement to the online database of the OTTPOL research project. For summaries of most of the works discussed below the reader may look up the list in the following link: http://ottpol.ims.forth.gr/?q=authors A much more extended version, containing elaborate analyses of all works, historical timelines, more extended introduction and conclusion sections (including a detailed thematic study of some central notions of the Ottoman political vocabulary), large extracts from representative works, and indices, is to be published by E. I. J. Brill editions within 2016 (in the series: Handbook of Oriental Studies, Section I: The Near and Middle East). The reader is strongly advised to consider the printed edition as definitive and to have recourse to it for further reference. 3 OTTOMAN POLITICAL THOUGHT UP TO THE TANZIMAT: A CONCISE HISTORY Acknowledgments This volume is the main product of the research project “OTTPOL: A History of Early Modern Ottoman Political Thought, 15th to Early 19th Centuries”, carried out at the Institute for Mediterranean Studies of the Foundation of Research and Technology – Hellas (Rethymno, Greece) within the Action “Aristeia II” of the Greek General Secretariat for Research and Technology, funded by Greece and the European Social Fund of the European Union under the Operational Program Education and Lifelong Learning (2007-2013 Greek National Strategic Reference Framework).1 In this project, I was lucky to have assembled an excellent team of collaborators: E. Ekin Tuşalp Atiyas, post-doctoral researcher (who also authored Chapter VI in this book), Marina Demetriadou, doctoral candidate, Michalis Georgellis, MA student, and Lemonia Argyriou, technical assistant. Words cannot be enough to describe how much I owe to their constant help and assistance; Ekin Tuşalp Atiyas, moreover, read carefully the first version of this book and had numerous and valuable remarks and additions to make. I should also thank the director of the Institute for Mediterranean Studies, Christos Hadziiossif, who constantly urged me to continue with this project ever since I began envisaging it, as well as to the administrative staff of the Institute (Georgia Papadaki, Valia Patramani) and especially its tireless accountants (Babis Flouris, Antonis Xidianos) for their support under the difficult circumstances prevailing in 2014-2015. I wish to stress that the Institute for Mediterranean Studies, my home institution, provided the most creative and friendly environment possible, continuing a tradition of research in the humanities which tends to disappear under the pressure of financial and international restraints; I do hope it will continue to resist and provide the same steady conditions for serious research. Versions of some chapters were meticulously read by Antonis Anastasopoulos, Antonis Hadjikyriacou and Ethan L. Menchinger; their remarks contributed a lot and saved me from several mistakes. My discussions with Gottfried Hagen, Güneş Işıksel, Katharina Ivanyi, Derin Terzioğlu, Baki Tezcan, Gülçin Tunalı, and Bilal Yurtoğlu were especially useful in illuminating various aspects of my subject. Several Ottoman manuscripts and a great part of modern bibliography were 1 See also the project website: http://ottpol.ims.forth.gr/ 4 OTTOMAN POLITICAL THOUGHT UP TO THE TANZIMAT: A CONCISE HISTORY made accessible to me thanks to the generosity and help of Feride Akın, Cumhur Bekar, Günhan Börekçi, Melis Cankara, Emrah Safa Gürkan, İrfan Kokdaş, Tijana Krstić, Vasileios Syros, and Özgün Deniz Yoldaşlar. I have also to thank Edith Gülçin Ambros, Tobias Heinzelmann, Elias Kolovos, Phokion Kotzageorgis, Christos Kyriakopoulos, Sophia Laiou, Andreas Lyberatos, Foivos Oikonomou, Nicolas Vatin, and Yiannis Viskadouros, for their magnanimous assistance whenever I asked for it. I cannot ommit my debt to my teachers: apart from initiating me to Ottoman history and paleography, John C. Alexander taught me to formulate all my questions in terms of social history; and apart from addicting me to her meticulous care for details, Elizabeth A. Zachariadou was the main person responsible for creating the ideal research environment where the composition of this book took place. My post-graduate students during the academic years 2013-2014 (Kostis Kanakis, Ioanna Katsara, Yiannis Polychronopoulos, Stavros Sfakiotakis) and 2014- 2015 (Petros Kastrinakis, Efthymis Machairas, Vuk Masić, Roger Meier, Rozalia Toulatou, Karmen Vourvachaki, Dimitris Yagtzoglou) contributed a lot, even without knowing. Last but not least, I have to thank my parents for their continuous support and of course my family, Despoina Moschogianni and Anna, for whom the final months of the composition of this book must have meant a quasi absence from almost every aspect of family life. * Ekin Tuşalp Atiyas would like to thank Marinos Sariyannis, Marina Demetriadou, İzak Atiyas and İlya Derin Atiyas for making Rethymno a heaven for work and fun. She would also like to thank Marinos Sariyannis and Derin Terzioğlu for their suggestions in writing Chapter VI. 5 OTTOMAN POLITICAL THOUGHT UP TO THE TANZIMAT: A CONCISE HISTORY Note on transliteration and citations Transliteration of Ottoman names and texts is always a thorny problem. For a book relying heavily on literary sources, the problem was even more difficult to solve, since its subject required the transliteration not only of Ottoman Turkish, but also of Arabic and Persian phrases and titles of works, some of which were not composed in an Ottoman environment. For reasons of consistency, we chose to use the Turkish alphabet and the generally accepted modern Turkish orthography (with as less diacritical marks as possible); for the same reasons we simplified published transliterations as well. As usual, terms that are now established in English, such as pasha for paşa, vizier for vezir or Sharia for şeriat, remained in the common form. Names of Arab or Persian authors are transliterated using the system established by the International Journal of Middle East Studies (IJMES) (http://ijmes.chass.ncsu.edu/docs/TransChart.pdf). Titles of treatises in Arabic are given following the IJMES system as well, when the works are in Arabic or Persian, and following Ottoman vocalization and transliteration, when they are in Ottoman Turkish. 6 OTTOMAN POLITICAL THOUGHT UP TO THE TANZIMAT: A CONCISE HISTORY Introduction Works on the history of Ottoman political thought have never so far attained the length and scope of a monograph. True, some of the most important texts were translated to modern languages from quite early: in the mid-nineteenth century, Walter Friedrich Adolf Behrnauer published three German translations, namely Kâtib Çelebi’s Düsturü’l-amel, Koçi Bey’s first (whose French translation by François Pétis de la Croix was already published in 1725; a French translation of İbrahim Müteferrika’s Usûlü’l-hikem had also appeared by 1769) and second Risale;2 Rudolph Tschudi published Lütfi Pasha’s Asafname in 1910, while Hasan Kâfi Akhisari’s Usûlü’l-hikem was translated into German one year later.3 However, efforts for a composition were to appear quite late: in his still authoritary 1958 book on Islamic political thought, Erwin I. J. Rosenthal used only Behrnauer’s translations to form his appendix on “some Turkish views on politics”,