The Imperial Heyday 113
Likewise the authors of these books aforementioned permitted and
applied the name of Imâm and Khalîfa to the sultan and the wâlî and the
amîr. Our ulema ... have said, “What is meant by the Sultan is the Khalifa”,
and in another place “The Khalifa is the Imam above whom there is no
[other] imam, and he is called the Sultan”.Then Lütfi defines first the sultan as the possessor of an oath of allegiance,
a conquering power, and a power of compulsion, then the imam as one who
maintains the faith and governs with justice, and finally the caliph as he who
commands good and forbids evil (using the old precept of emr-i ma ’ruf ve nehy-
i münker). If all these qualifications apply to one person, he argues, then this
person “is a sultan who has a just claim to the application of the names of imam
and khalifa and wali and amir, without contradiction”. The need for Qurayshi
descent was a prerequisite only for the earliest times of Islam. Similarly, Lütfi
rejects the opinion that no caliph is to be recognized after the first four, show-
ing that this is a heretical opinion held by the Shi’a. After citing his sources
extensively, he arrives at the conclusion that Süleyman “is the imam of [this]
Age without dubiety”:
Then if it is asked “What is the proof of the necessity of being subject to
him?”, the answer is: ‘If he or his like were not followed, there would not
exist the regular ordering of the matters of temporal existence and the
future life among mankind ... For the majority of the people of his age are
his freedmen (‘utaqâ’) and the freedmen of his fathers and ancestors ...
since there is no possibility of banding together for the support of any
other than the ‘Otmânî, because the ‘Otmânîs are blameless in respect of
maintenance of the Faith and Equity and the Cihad. So if there is born a
child of that lineage, he will follow the way of his fathers in maintaining
the Faith and the Cihad ...As Hamilton Gibb notes, Lütfi illustrates the falasifa theory of the caliphate,
i.e. that “adopted universally by Muslim writers of the post-Abbasid age”.41 This
may look as if Lütfi is at pains to prove a matter essentially solved; however,
one must note that his very fervor in proving his point shows that the issue was
still regarded as urgent and debatable at this time. As Colin Imber remarks,
claims to universal sovereignty (always under a religious guise) were made by
both of Süleyman’s rivals, Charles V and Shah Tahmasp.42
41 Lütfî Pasha – Gibb 1962, 295.
42 Imber 1992, 179–180. On the afterlife of Ottoman claims to the caliphate cf. Gerber 2013.