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The Politics of Piety in the Ottoman Empire Reimagined

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The Politics of Piety in the Ottoman Empire Reimagined Comparative Studies in Society and History 2019;61(3):595–623. 0010-4175/19 # Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2019. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/ by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi:10.1017/S0010417519000185 Moral Revolutions: The Politics of Piety in the Ottoman Empire Reimagined NIR SHAFIR University of California, San Diego The interlinking of morality, religion, and politics may not be new, but our pre- disposition to separate them is. A central precept of Enlightenment thought is that religion should remain in the private sphere, sequestered from the politics of the public realm.1 For this reason, fifty years since identifying “political Islam” as a theoretical issue, social scientists continue to puzzle over it. Early on, the answers to the question of religious revival in modern society were instrumentalist: people became religious to express economic frustration or exert “agency” in the face of an oppressive system. Anthropologists then turned to the question of understanding the political import of Islamic revival in its own terms. For example, Saba Mahmood famously argued in The Politics of Piety that a women’s piety movement in 1990s Egypt created new political subjectivities through the cultivation of proper moral behavior.2 She contended that scholars had overlooked this development because they focused on political action within the formal world of the ballot box, replicating the Enlightenment sequestration of ethics and belief into the moral/private sphere. In other words, the question was not so much why religion had returned to public life, but how we had decided it was absent in the first place. The answer to that question Acknowledgments: I would like to thank the late Shahab Ahmed, Elisabetta Benigni, Susanna Ferguson, Matthew Ghazarian, Matthew Keegan, Tijana Krstic, Alp Eren Topal, the anonymous CSSH reviewers, and many, many others for their insightful feed- back on the numerous iterations of this essay. This project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’sHorizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement No 648498-OTTOCONFESSION). 1 Much literature exists on this topic, but the main points were summarized by Talal Asad in Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 204–8. 2 Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2005). 595 Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 194.94.134.248, on 29 Jun 2019 at 14:47:41, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417519000185 596 NIR SHAFIR is secularism, a political project born out of the modern and colonial state. Far from being a benign desacralization, Mahmood and likeminded anthropologists argue that secularism “entails fundamental shifts in conceptions of self, time, space, ethics, and morality, as well as a reorganization of social, political, and religious life,” which in turn shapes our very analyses and categories.3 The insights of anthropologists regarding contemporary Islamic revival, and secularism, can help us redefine political practice and thought in the pre- modern Ottoman Empire, I believe.4 Works like the poet Nābī’s Ḫayriyye—a book of advice to his son written in 1701 and the text at the core of this essay—deserve as central a position in the formation of Ottoman political thought as that which Rousseau’s Emile holds in European history. Texts like Nābī’s were part of an immense body of morality literature, of which scholars have only begun to scratch the surface, that emerged as part of a widespread pietistic turn over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet, historians have failed to see the broader political implications of this turn because, like earlier scholars of contemporary Islamic revival, we have viewed it as simply moralistic and religious and presumed that it belongs to a private rather than political world. Furthermore, the still reigning narrative of the religious revival in the early modern Ottoman Empire, the so-called Kadizadeli movement, emerged in tandem with social scientists’ initial explorations of the causes of the Islamic Revival in the 1980s. In a book coincidentally also titled The Politics of Piety, Madeline Zilfi first introduced the foundational narrative of Ottoman reli- gious revival: in the seventeenth century, preachers professing an intolerant and orthodox Islam found popular support among unemployed provincial scholars and with this mandate made their way to power by beguiling the sultans.5 This upsurge of religiosity supposedly ended with the dismissal of the preach- ers following a disastrous Ottoman campaign to conquer Vienna. In Zilfi’s narrative, the Kadizadelis were a paroxysmal hiccup of fundamentalism, short- lived and ultimately inconsequential. Like the social scientists who analyzed the Iranian Revolution, she provides a functionalist reading of their turn 3 Saba Mahmood, Religious Difference in a Secular Age: A Minority Report (Princeton: Prince- ton University Press, 2016), 3. 4 The foundational essays of the anthropological critique belong to Talal Asad, as in Genealo- gies, 200–36; and Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). Alongside Mahmood, we can also point to Charles Hirschkind, The Ethical Soundscape: Cassette Sermons and Islamic Counterpublics (New York: Columbia Univer- sity Press, 2006); and Hussein Ali Agrama, Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012). For an overview of the literature on secularism, see Fenella Cannell, “The Anthropology of Secularism,” Annual Review of Anthropology 39 (2010): 85–100. 5 Madeline Zilfi, The Politics of Piety: The Ottoman Ulema in the Postclassical Age (1600– 1800) (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1988); and “The Kadizadelis: Discordant Revivalism in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul,” Journal of Near Eastern Studies 45, 4 (1986): 251–69. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 194.94.134.248, on 29 Jun 2019 at 14:47:41, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417519000185 MORAL REVOLUTIONS 597 to religion as a means of exerting their agency in the face of economic dissat- isfaction. Moreover, the Kadizadeli narrative pushes a relationship between religion and politics as separate entities, in which preachers corrupt what ought to be politics by bringing religion into the discussion.6 It is this presump- tion that continues today and which the anthropology of Islamic revival and secularism can help remedy.7 Along the way, such an engagement should inspire both historians and anthropologists to imagine political regimes of morality, concepts of “the social,” and even formations of the secular, which emerged in the Middle East outside of the contexts of liberalism and colonial modernity. Today we can understand a broader “turn to piety” in Ottoman society, well beyond the contours of the Kadizadeli movement, thanks to a new narra- tive of religious history crafted over the past ten years.8 We know now that in the early empire confessional identity was initially an afterthought, but over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries both the state and its subjects increasingly emphasized the centrality of Islamic practice and belief, as defined by Islamic law, to imperial ideology.9 Geopolitically, imperial rivalries with the Habsburgs and the Safavids, in particular, pushed the formation of an intensely Sunni iden- tity while, locally, congregational mosques were set up in each town and major neighborhood, becoming centers of urban life, but also social surveillance.10 Ottoman subjects redefined the boundaries of piety and Islamic practice while also becoming increasingly concerned with defining and uprooting 6 Cemal Kafadar wrote the clearest exposition of the political vision of sixteenth-century pietists like Birgivī Meḥmed, but even here there is a presumption of that pietists’ politics is ultimately an escape or diversion from politics proper. Cemal Kafadar, “The Myth of the Golden Age: Ottoman Historical Consciousness in the Post Süleymânic Era,” in Halil Inalcik and Cemal Kafadar, eds., Suleyman the Second and His Time (Istanbul: Isis Press, 1993), 37–48; Tuşalp Atiyas, E. Ekin, “The ‘Sunna-Minded’ Trend,” in Marinos Sariyannis, A History of Ottoman Political Thought up to the Early Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2019), 233–78. 7 Some recent works that continue to use the Kadizadeli framework are Marc Baer, Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008); Simeon Evstatiev, “The Qāḍīzādeli Movement and the Revival of Takfir in the Ottoman Age,” in Camilla Adang et al., eds., Accusations of Unbelief in Islam: A Diachronic Per- spective on Takfir (Leiden: Brill, 2016), 213–43; Mustapha Sheikh, Ottoman Puritanism and Its Discontents: Ahmad al-Rumi al-Aqhisari and the Qadizadelis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016); Cengiz Şişman, The Burden of Silence: Sabbatai Sevi
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