A History of Ottoman Political Thought Up to the Early Nineteenth Century

(Ben Green) #1

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004385245_


Introduction


One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.
G. K. Chesterton, “The Hammer of God”


The idea for this book was first conceived back in the early 2000s, when I was
translating Quentin Skinner’s seminal Foundations of Modern Political Thought
into Greek1 while writing my doctoral thesis on marginal groups and criminal-
ity in seventeenth-century Istanbul. In the context of the latter I had already
studied some of the major Ottoman political thinkers, seeking to explore their
views on public order, the social “classes” and those who escaped from them,
the rich vs. the poor, and so on. It struck me then that no-one had attempted to
compose a comprehensive and detailed history of Ottoman political thought
in the same way that Skinner (or even his predecessors) did decades ago for
Western Europe; from that moment, I dreamt of being bold enough to take up
the task of doing so.
Works on the history of Ottoman political thought have never, thus far,
reached the length and scope of a monograph. True, some of the most impor-
tant Ottoman texts were translated into modern languages fairly early: in the
mid-nineteenth century, Walter Friedrich Adolf Behrnauer published three
German translations, namely of Kâtib Çelebi’s Düstûrü’l-amel and of Koçi
Bey’s first (whose French translation by François Pétis de la Croix had been
published in 1725; a French translation of İbrahim Müteferrika’s Usûlü’l-hikem
had also appeared by 1769) and second Risâle;2 Rudolph Tschudi published
Lütfi Pasha’s Âsafnâme in 1910, while Hasan Kâfi Akhisari’s Usûlü’l-hikem was
translated into German by Imre von Karácson and Ludwig von Thalláczy a
year later.3 However, the first attempts to study the subject as a whole were to
appear comparatively late: in his still authoritative 1958 book on Islamic
political thought, Erwin I. J. Rosenthal only used Behrnauer’s translations as


1 Skinner 1978.
2 Kâtib Çelebi – Behrnauer 1857; Koçi Bey – Behrnauer 1861; Koçi Bey – Behrnauer 1864
(Behrnauer published Koçi Bey’s second treatise as an “anonymous book of advice”).
3 Lütfî Pasha – Tschudi 1910; Akhisari – Karácson 1911. Cf. Howard 2007, 142–143 on the
European interest in Ottoman nasihatname literature.

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