90 chapter 2
in the mid-seventeenth century; however, there were some elements of Tusian
political theory that were to be embedded in the foundations of Ottoman
social and political thought for centuries. Contrary to a widely-supported
assumption that Sunni Islamic political thought was not influenced by
Avicenna and al-Farabi’s Aristotelism, these ideas became commonplace
for almost every Ottoman author, of medrese origin or not, even if he did
not endorse the whole model of interpreting the world as a morality-driven
continuum.54
Among the implications of the Tusian model, of special importance is its
abstraction: as Gottfried Hagen remarks, in this model55
the socio-political order is divinely ordained and therefore largely beyond
human influence ... in other words, there is only one form of social order,
not different ones for different states or periods ... [S]ocial groups and
government are universal categories and in no way specific to any culture
or nation, just as cultural, ethnic, religious or other differences among
the subjects are not part of the theory, not even the distinction between
nomads and sedentary folk so pervasive in other theories.Consequently, this “world order”, based on universal categories and extra-
human arrangements, must be completely static, with the only possible dif-
ferences being those resulting from varying degrees of justice or tyranny. This
view is largely concomitant with the general aversion towards the idea of
innovation, which was current in a large part (but not all) of Ottoman ideol-
ogy until well into the seventeenth century. For most of this period, change
would be ideologically acceptable only if it were done to the standards of
another ideal form of the past—thus, again, within the same “world order”,
the only one existing and possible. While this idea may not have first entered
the Ottoman world through Tursun or Kınalızade, their systematic exposition
of such views contributed greatly to the crystallization and establishment of
this underlying notion, namely that there is a perpetual and divinely-ordained
social arrangement.
More specifically, there are three ideas that entered Ottoman political
thought with Amasi’s work and which were to be repeated by many authors
54 See Ahmed 2016, 127 and cf. ibid., 457ff. on Tusi, Davvani and some of their Ottoman con-
tinuators. On the dismissal of practical philosophy by a series of post-Classical commen-
tators, on the grounds that the Sharia had attained the ultimate perfection of this branch,
see Kaya 2014, 286–289.
55 Hagen 2013, 437.