250 conclusion
and Jews, or Hindus, and even compelling some of them to become Muslim
had several audiences. These included dissident or competing members of the
ruling elite and dynasty, religious authorities, Muslim commoners, rulers of
the other Islamic empires, and western European observers. Just as the bodies
of women serve in Europe and the Middle East today as the site of contestation
over the proper role of Islam and secularism in society, in the Islamic world of
the Ottomans, Safavids, and Mughals Christians and Jews or Hindus served
as signposts of the Islamic virtues of the rulers. For most of Islamic history,
members of other religions were treated in such a way as to demonstrate the
benevolence and compassion of the shah or sultan. But in times characterized
by Islamic zeal, rulers sought to demonstrate their conviction by applying the
letter of the law, especially concerning Christians and Jews. It usually sufficed
to ensure that they were properly humbled, made distinct, and removed from
positions of power. But to oversee the conversion of visible individual Jews such
as palace physicians or the large-scale religious change of numerous Christian
or Jewish commoners, or to Islamize the landscape, was a means of acquir-
ing additional sanction for rule. This is one reason Mehmed IV was willing to
emerge from his silent aura of sacrality, to renounce the sign language he used
to communicate at court in order to speak without intermediaries and compel a
cattle drover to become a Muslim. It was worth his temporary contact with the
Christian commoner because it would strengthen his pious reputation.
Mehmed IV’s time in power also invites comparisons with those of mod-ern rulers. The reign of the last important Ottoman sultan, Abdülhamid II
(reigned 1 876– 1 909), who was also a throwback to another era, like his pre-
decessor preferring a more rustic, remote abode (Yıldız Palace, within a forest
preserve uphill from the Versailles-like Dolmabahçe Palace), provides insight
into Mehmed IV’s reign because of the surprising similarities between the
two men. Mehmed IV’s modern counterpart differed in that the tools at his
disposal—railroads, telegraphs, factories, censuses, passports, steamships,
clock towers, newspapers—that could be utilized to produce the desired prop-
agandistic effect among political opponents, the subject populace, and for-
eigners alike were far superior to those available in the seventeenth century.
Mehmed IV had to rely on public monuments such as imperial mosques and
celebrations and ceremonies to impress rivals and supporters. And to expect
Mehmed IV to share Abdülhamid II’s aims, including creating a Muslim Turk-
ish proto-citizenry and modernizing the empire, is to be anachronistic, never
mind Vani Mehmed Efendi’s claims of the superiority of the Turks. Never-
theless, both reinvigorated the symbolic language of the sultanate and forged
links of sacrality directly with the people. Mehmed IV and Abdülhamid II
encouraged a revival of piety and attempted ideological reinforcement in an