Honored by the Glory of Islam. Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe

conversion to piety 115

Shah in 1671 , which he had visited, Mehmed IV issued a milder decree outlaw-

ing practices at the shrine that contradicted Islamic law (307b).

Vani Mehmed Efendi also incited Fazıl Ahmed Pasha to send the leading

Halveti sheikh of the age, Niyazi Mısri, into exile. Niyazi Mısri ( 161 8–94) was a

Sufi and a poet, the son of a Sufi of the Nakshibandi order.^38 He became a Hal-

veti, was eventually named the successor of the Halveti sheikh Ümmi Sinan,

and opened his own Sufi lodge in Bursa in 1 670. Fazıl Ahmed Pasha invited

him to Edirne, but due to the Sufi ’s persistent faith in onomancy, his host ex-

iled him to Rhodes in 1 673. He is also famous for declaring, “The name of Jesus

pleases me and I am his loyal servant.”^39 Followers of the sheikh claim that the

real reason for his exile was because when Mehmed IV invited Niyazi to travel

from Bursa to Edirne to participate in the campaign against the Commonwealth

of Poland in 1 672, the Sufi so quickly collected a large group of armed followers

that offi cials feared the man’s power, echoes of the Kadızadeli call to arms in

1 656 that predated their leaders’ exile.^40 Nine months later he was pardoned, but

again exiled to Limni between 1 676 and 1691.^41 A fi erce enemy of Vani Mehmed

Efendi and Bayrami-Melami Sufi s, he linked the two in a treatise claiming that

Vani Mehmed Efendi was the leader of atheists and the Bayrami-Melami Sufi s.

He accused Mehmed IV of being a member of the order as well.

Signaling Vani Mehmed Efendi’s importance and contributing further to

the shaping of a more Islamic landscape in the capital, in the 1 660s the sultan

gave the preacher a forest preserve on the Bosporus north of Üsküdar called

Priest’s Preserve. Vani Mehmed Efendi restored a small mosque, which still

stands although in altered form, and built a madrasa and more than a dozen

seaside mansions, most of which also still exist, including his own, in the ad-

joining village. A wealthy Jewish Hasköy vintner family was evicted from the

village, which became known as Vaniköy (Vani’s village).^42 According to the mid-

twentieth-century scholar and Sufi Abdülbaki Gölpınarlı, who was partial in his

writing toward antinomian dervishes, Vaniköy was one of only two areas in Is-

tanbul where Sufi s, especially Hamzavi Mevlevis, never set foot. They blamed

Vani Mehmed Efendi for the murder of ninety-year-old Beşir Agha and the

drowning of forty of his disciples at Kadıköy Feneri in 1 662. For this reason they

cursed him and his village and called him “Vani the Murderer” (Vani-i cani).^43

Enjoining Good and Forbidding Wrong: Razing

Taverns and Ending the Alcohol Trade

Along with members of certain Sufi orders, others, particularly those who en-

joyed the good life, had reason to curse the imperial preacher. Already by 1 665,