enjoining good and forbidding wrong 75eastern Anatolia, or Arabs from Syria, while their opponents were from Istan-
bul and southeastern Europe.
Like rebels in the countryside who desired not autonomy but to be recog-
nized with imperial positions and made part of the elite of the military hierar-
chy, Kadızadelis sought recognition from the top and an elevated place in the
religious hierarchy. Perhaps wisely, the Kadızadelis did not target Sufi orders
affi liated with the military to achieve this purpose. They did not attack the Bek-
tashis, intimately associated with the Janissaries, who continued to play an im-
portant social and even military role during this period.^61 Because members of
the offi cial religious hierarchy were also members of Sufi orders, this was less
a confl ict between orthodoxy and Sufi sm than a clash between the proponents
of an imagined pristine Islam and their Ottoman rivals who supported cer-
tain Sufi practices, personalities, and orders while attacking others. As mosque
preachers the Kadızadelis were in a position to stir up the populace and upset
intra- and interreligious relations in society. As preachers to the sultan, they
would be able to promote the implementation of unprecedented practices con-
cerning conversion of people and places.Kadızadelis and Grand Viziers
Üstüvani Mehmed Efendi’s popularity in the palace among some of the sul-
tan’s servants ended when the movement he headed appeared uncontrollably
violent and Kadızadeli preachers were blamed for inciting rebellion. Following
the loss of Bozca and Limni islands, the sultan’s court, agreeing implicitly with
some Kadızadeli critiques, decided to offer the post of grand vizier to the sep-
tuagenarian Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, a person known for having good moral
qualities.^62 It was forgotten how Köprülü Mehmed Pasha had once sided withthe rebel turned grand vizier İpşir Mustafa Pasha. Karaçelebizade, echoed by
other contemporary writers, compares the new grand vizier to King Solomon’s
vizier, Asaf, the prototype in Islamic history writing of the perfect administra-
tor.^63 He hoped the appointment of this offi cial could serve as the answer to all
the complaints the author makes in the preceding several hundred pages of
his book, as if he is the one person (since the sultan is almost entirely absent
from the narrative following his enthronement, other than as the audience of
his sustained critique of society) who can make things right in the empire.^64
Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, who sided with the religious establishment and not
the upstart preachers, immediately exiled Üstüvani Mehmed Efendi and two
other leaders of the movement, Seyyid Mustafa Efendi and Turkish Ahmed
Efendi, to Cyprus in hopes of restoring order to the city; they had gone beyond