The Imperial Heyday 119
in making the sultan accept his own view; however, and as Çivizade died soon
after, Ebussu’ud rallied several retired and active high-ranking ulema and
eventually had Süleyman issue an order permitting cash donations. Such foun-
dations had been in use since the first decades of the fifteenth century, and
were ratified by many famous and respected ulema during the course of the
sixteenth century, including none other than Kemalpaşazade; Çivizade’s argu-
ment was that this tradition was feeble (compared to the older Hanafi schol-
ars) and that it opened the way to usury. Seemingly there was some public
dispute on this issue, which shows that imperial policies were not accepted
without some trouble.54 In his traditionalist zeal, Çivizade seems to have even
maintained that those dying after being hit by cannon or gunfire should not be
considered martyrs.55 It is to be noted that, in his attack on Ibn Arabi’s Sufism,
he used Ibn Taymiyya’s arguments, being perhaps the first scholar to introduce
these ideas into the “conservative” milieu (and long before they were used by
Dede Cöngi to justify sultanly interference in legal matters).56
If Çivizade was a somewhat easy opponent for Ebussu’ud to fight, one can-
not say the same for Birgivi Mehmed Efendi (1523–73), a widely respected
and immensely influential scholar who vehemently challenged Ebussu’ud’s
legal strategems in favor of a strict interpretation of fikh. Birgivi was born in
Balıkesir into a family of scholars and Sufis and, after receiving his initial edu-
cation from his father, a prominent Sufi of that town, he went to Istanbul for
further studies. He began to teach and became an army judge in 1551, following
his former teacher’s appointment as the kazasker of Rumili; around the same
period he joined a Sufi fraternity, the Bayramiyye, only to leave it soon after for
a professor’s career in the small and distant town of Birgi, where he lived until
his death. His work was both voluminous and widely-read; his most popular
and influential treatises were the Vasiyyetnâme (“Testament”; also known as
Risâle-i Birgivî, “Birgivi’s treatise”), a catechism in Turkish, and its more com-
plex Arabic counterpart, al-Tarîqa al-Muhammadiyya (“The Muhammadan
way”); one should also note his legal essays dealing with issues such as the
cash-vakf or the legitimacy of paying for religious services.57 Another work
of Birgivi’s, Zuhr al-mulûk, is of a more directly “political” nature, since it is
54 Mandaville 1979, 297; Kemalpaşazade – Özcan 2000; Gel 2010, 211–230; Karataş 2010.
55 Gel 2010, 232–233. This was used as a counter-argument against Çivizade in the cash vaqf
controversy: see Mandaville 1979, 303.
56 Gel 2010, 249–273. Among the issues related to this debate, one should note the question
of Pharaoh’s religion, which, according to Kâtib Çelebi, was also one of the issues raised
by the seventeenth-century Kadızadeli movement.
57 On Birgivi’s life and work, see Zilfi 1988, 143–146; Ocak 1991, 75–76; Radtke 2002; Ivanyi
2012; Yılmaz 2005, 76–82; Kurz 2011, 56ff.