How to Conceptualize Ottoman Sunnitization: a Historiographical Discussion
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Derin TERZIOGLU 301 HOW TO CONCEPTUALIZE OTTOMAN SUNNITIZATION: A HISTORIOGRAPHICAL DISCUSSION All of the people of this land belong to the school of the Imam Abu Îanifa (God be pleased with him) and are firmly attached to the Sunna; there is not a Qaderi, nor a Rafidi, nor a Mu‘tazili, nor a Khariji, nor any innovator amongst them. This is a virtue by which God Most High has distinguished them, but they consume hashish and think nothing wrong in that.1 Ibn Battuta, 1332-1333 The first of the twenty good qualities [that make the Ottoman sultans superior to other dynasties] is … their never having followed the errone- ous path of the frivolous heretics, not even at the time they first became honored by the glory of Islam, and their having always belonged to the glorious and paradise-bound People of the Sunna and the Hanafis.2 Talikizade, 1593-1594 T hese two statements, separated though they are by more than 250 years, affirm in a strikingly parallel manner the Sunni and Hanafi affiliations of the people of Rum3 and the Ottomans respectively.4 Derin Terzioglu, Bogaziçi Üniversitesi, Tarih Bölümü, 34342 Bebek, Istanbul, Turquie. [email protected], [email protected] 1 The Travels, p. 416-417. 2 Ta‘liÈizade’s ≤ehname-i Hümayun, p. 116 (my translation). 3 Rum is a term of historical geography that designates the former territories of the Byzantine Empire and which later came under the rule of the Ottomans. While in early modern usage, the term usually comprised Anatolia and the Balkans, in this particular quote, it refers more specifically to Anatolia. 4 A shorter version of this article was presented at the symposium “Alevi-Bektashi Communities in the Ottoman Realm: Sources, Paradigms and Historiography,” held on Turcica, 44, 2012-2013, p. 301-338. doi: 10.2143/TURC.44.0.2988854 © 2013 Turcica. Tous droits réservés. 996295_Turcica-44_14_Terzioglu.indd6295_Turcica-44_14_Terzioglu.indd 301301 226/08/136/08/13 111:551:55 302 DERIN TERZIOGLU Or don’t they? Did the 14th-century Moroccan traveler and the late 1 6th-century Ottoman historian mean the same thing by “the people of the Sunna”? And how should we interpret the curious statement by Ibn Battuta after affirming that the people of Rum are Sunni? Did he really think that it was possible to consider the consumption of opium to be licit and to be “firmly attached to the Sunna” at the same time?5 Or, was he rather implying that the people of Rum were orthodox but not orthoprax? These questions can be multiplied, but I raise them here only to fore- ground a basic problem that confronts all studies dealing with the issue of sunnitization in the Ottoman lands: namely, the multifarious uses and significations of the term “Sunni” in different communicative situations, in different times and places, both before and after the rise of the Ottoman-Safavid conflict and the subsequent period of sunnitization in the Ottoman lands. It seems to me that despite the growing interest in Ottoman confessional politics during the early modern era, inadequate attention has been paid to the basic question of what Sunnism – or to put it in less ideological terms, Sunniness – entailed before and after the 16th century. In much of the Turkish scholarship on matters of religion in the Otto- man Empire, the problem of Ottoman sunnitization does not exist, because it is presumed that the Ottomans had always been Sunni. This is true, especially of the scholarship that has been coming out of the Turkish Schools of Theology and which tends to discuss Ottoman religious li terature with minimal attention to its historical context. Less evidently, it is also true of the historical analyses that were pioneered by M. F. Köprülü in the early 20th century and which have been continued (albeit in more schematized fashion) by such scholars as I. Mélikoff and A. Y. Ocak in recent decades.6 Central to this frame of analysis is a basic bifurcation between “high” and “low” Islam, the first corresponding to the normative, textually grounded Islam of the urban elites, and the 13-14 December 2011 at Bogaziçi University. I wish to thank Nenad Filipovic and Ayfer Karakaya-Stump for reading over the article and for making helpful suggestions. Thanks are due also to Meredith Quinn and Yusuf Ünal for helping me obtain copies of two dif- ficult-to-locate studies. I am, of course, responsible for any remaining omissions and errors. 5 On medieval Muslim attitudes towards the consumption of hashish, see Rosenthal, The Herb. 6 Key texts in this regard include Köprülü, Türk Edebiyatı’nda Ilk Mutasavvıflar (Eng.: id., Early Mystics); id., “Anadolu’da Islamiyet” (Eng.: id., Islam in Anatolia); Mélikoff, “Le problème;” id., Hadji Bektach; Ocak, Babaîler Isyanı. 996295_Turcica-44_14_Terzioglu.indd6295_Turcica-44_14_Terzioglu.indd 302302 226/08/136/08/13 111:551:55 HOW TO CONCEPTUALIZE OTTOMAN SUNNITIZATION 303 second to the syncretistic, primarily oral Islam of the rural and especially tribal populations in Anatolia and Rumeli. Scholars subscribing to this frame of analysis have no problem talking about the shiitization of some manifestations of “low” or “popular” Islam during the late 15th and the 16th century, but tend to ascribe a timeless Sunni character to the reli- gious culture of the citied elites in the same geography. Other scholars (mostly historians trained in European and American universities), nevertheless, have questioned the applicability of a rigid Sunni/Shiite dichotomy to the religious landscape of late medieval Ana- tolia. They have argued that a high degree of latitudinarianism, syncre- tism and “confessional ambiguity” characterized the religious attitudes of not just the rural and tribal populations but also, to some degree, of the Muslim learned elites of Rum during the 13th and 14th centuries.7 In an often quoted passage, C. Kafadar has proposed that the “religious history of Anatolian and Balkan Muslims living in the frontier areas of the period from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries should be concep- tualized in part in terms of a ‘metadoxy,’ a state of being beyond doxies, a combination of being doxy-naive and not being doxy-minded, as well as the absence of a state that was interested in rigorously defining and strictly enforcing an orthodoxy”8 (note the qualifying words in italics, to which I will return). Accounts of how this state of partial metadoxy eventually gave way to a state-enforced Sunni orthodoxy have tended to assign a central place to Ottoman state-building and the religious and political conflicts that it engendered. Accordingly, while the anti-Ottoman millenarian revolt of Sheikh Bedreddin in 1416 was one of the earliest religious manifestations of these conflicts,9 tensions became greater still in the aftermath of the ambitious empire-building of Mehmed II (r. 1444-1446, 1451-1481). Two particularly critical developments in this regard took place during the reign of Bayezid II (1481-1512): the rise of a new, shiitizing empire on the Ottomans’ eastern frontier, that of the Safavids, in 1501, and the 7 For a careful consideration of the problem of Shiism in late medieval Anatolia, see Cahen, “Le problème;” for a critique of the Köprülü paradigm in the context of the prac- tice of deviant Sufism by Iranian (and Rumi) urban elites, see Karamustafa, God’s Unruly Friends; for the term “confessional ambiguity,” see Woods, The Aqquyunlu, p. 2, p. 4. 8 Kafadar, Between two Worlds, p. 76. 9 For a recent representative example of the accepted narrative, see Barkey, Empire, p. 154-178; on the revolt of Sheikh Bedreddin, see Gölpınarlı, Simavna Kadısıoglu ≤eyh Bedreddin; Filipovic, Princ Musa; Balivet, Islam; Ocak, Osmanlı Toplumunda Zındıklar, p. 136-202; Yüksel, Simavna Kadısıoglu ≤eyh Bedreddin. 996295_Turcica-44_14_Terzioglu.indd6295_Turcica-44_14_Terzioglu.indd 303303 226/08/136/08/13 111:551:55 304 DERIN TERZIOGLU outbreak of a pro-Safavid millenarian revolt, that of Shah Kulı, ten years later.10 While scholars generally concur that it was only after these two developments that the defense of Sunni Islam and the extirpation of Shiite heresy became a cornerstone of the Ottoman claims to legitimacy, recent scholarship has also stressed that the true maturation of an Otto- man Sunni identity took place even later, in the second half of the reign of Süleyman I (1520-1566), as a result of the waning of the “Ottoman age of expansion” and the abandonment of more universalist projects of world dominion.11 The close interplay between imperial politics and confession-building has also been central to the recent attempts to reframe the transformation of the Ottoman religious landscape in the early modern period through the concept of “confessionalization.”12 Confessionalization is a term coined in the late 1970s by two historians of early modern Germany, Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Reinhard, to reconceptualize the role of religion in the making of modern Western society. In Schilling’s formu- lation, confessionalization refers primarily to an alliance between the religious and political authorities to produce more docile subjects through religious indoctrination and “social disciplining.” Reinhard, on the other hand, has focused less on the “confessionalization of society” and more on the “confessionalization of church,” that is to say, the crystallization of doctrinal and ritual differences between Protestants and Catholics in the form of modern “confessions.”13 T. Krstic has been the first historian to highlight the analytical poten- tial of the concept for early modern Ottoman history. While Krstic’s main interest has been the changing meaning of conversion to Islam and inter- confessional relations between the Muslim and non-Muslim Ottomans and Christian Europeans during the first four centuries of Ottoman rule, 10 On the Ottoman-Safavid conflict and its impact on Ottoman religious policies, see Sohrweide, “Der Sieg;” Beldiceanu-Steinherr, “Le règne;” Allouche, The Origins; see also the references in fn.