conversion to piety 109
leaves, and on the fi rst line of the nineteenth leaf was the verse from the Chapter
of Mary ( 1 9:7). Our felicitous sultan recited and chanted the verse as is proper
and said to me ‘what is the noble meaning, the gracious import of this Qur’anic
verse, and what does it indicate?’ ” Kurdish Preacher Mustafa explained that the
prophet Zachariah was childless, and he and his wife old and ailing. They were
horrifi ed at the thought of the line of the prophet ending after them, so they
fervently prayed to God that they would have a son eminent in prophecy and
unique in devotion to God. God answered their prayers and gave them a son.
Turning from prophetic times to his own era, Kurdish Preacher Mustafa relates
that the verse means that God would bestow upon the sultan an intelligent son.
In fact, nineteen days later, as he predicted, Prince Mustafa was born.^8
Contemporary writers also noted that Mehmed IV had exerted himself andpersevered in his studies, reaching perfection in reading and writing and all the
sciences taught to sultans (92b). In the midst of devoting space to the sultan’s
piety, Abdi Pasha was careful to depict Mehmed IV as intelligent, and even
skeptical. When an astrologer gave an overly optimistic reading, the sultan, by
then in his early twenties, asked, “I wonder if he interpreted the alignment of
the stars in that way considering that he was to appear before me and acquire
some gold?” ( 1 64a). We can imagine Mehmed IV taking the advice of his Chi-
nese contemporary, Qing Emperor K’ang-hsi ( 1661 – 1 722), that “the emperor
has to withstand the praise that showers upon him and fi lls his ears, for it is
of no more use to him than so-called ‘restorative medicine’; these banalities
and evasions have all the sustenance of dainty pastries, and one grows sick of
them.” The same emperor claimed that his diviners “have often been tempted
to pass over bad auguries, but I have double-checked their calculations and
warned them to not distort the truth.”^9
Vani Mehmed Efendi, Infl uential Mediator
of Religious Conversion
At the same time that Abdi Pasha begins to note the sultan’s piousness in the
early to mid- 1 660s, the third major Kadızadeli leader and preacher, Mehmed
son of Bistam of Van, known as Vani Mehmed Efendi, also begins to play a
substantial role in the narrative. If the sultan was wise enough to understand
that some of those around him would say whatever they thought he wanted to
hear, surely he was discerning enough to judge whether preachers were trying
to use him for their interests. The sultan commanded Abdi Pasha to dine twice
a week with Vani Mehmed Efendi in 1 669, and it is likely that the preacher
also infl uenced what went into the chronicle (287b). Vani Mehmed Efendi’s