4 Introduction
University Press), while a fascinating description of Ottoman political ideology
in the Süleymanic era, it does not go beyond the end of the sixteenth century.
Older overviews, published up to perhaps the beginnings of the 2000s, share
two common disadvantages. The first is that they limit themselves to the major
thinkers in much the same way that historians of early-modern European
political thought used to focus only on innovative or imposing thinkers such
as Aquinas, Thomas More, or Macchiavelli, and ignore the many others who
made the background against which innovation could be seen or, in contrast,
the foundations upon which innovation was built. As in the famous simile orig-
inally introduced by Niccolò Machiavelli,17 they described only the top of the
mountains while ignoring the valleys, thus giving a distorted view of the politi-
cal landscape. In fact, the canon of Ottoman political thought established by
most of the overviews contains almost exclusively only those works that hap-
pen to have been published. Furthermore, very few studies even mention the
ethico-political treatises of the ahlak (akhlâq) tradition or the Sunna-minded
authors of the seventeenth century, while (with the exception of specialized
studies) the eighteenth century is usually neglected.
The second disadvantage might be attributed to a “local Orientalism”:
Oriental studies in the first half of the twentieth century emphasized the inno-
vative and philosophical merits of the great medieval thinkers of the Near East,
such as al-Farabi, al-Ghazali, and Ibn Khaldun. When Arabists like Bernard
Lewis or Erwin I. J. Rosenthal turned their attention to Ottoman political
authors, they tended to see either a sterile imitation of their great Arabian
and Persian prototypes or a senseless series of concrete advice on military and
administrative matters with no relevance for political theory; this was all the
more so since the Islamic philosophers who were translated or imitated were
mostly those considered to be insignificant (with the exception of Nasireddin
Tusi, whose influence was long overlooked). The value of Ottoman political
works was usually measured against the scale of their innovation compared
to their medieval predecessors rather than the way they responded to spe-
cific problems of Ottoman society; or, in the words of Hüseyin Yılmaz, what
was sought was the “worth” rather than the “meaning” of Ottoman political
theories.18 The traditional image of the “decline” of the empire after the mid-
sixteenth century, which was virtually unchallenged until the early 1990s,
17 Machiavelli’s quote (“those who make maps of countries place themselves low down in
the plains to study the character of mountains and elevated lands, and place themselves
high up on the mountains to get a better view of the plains”) concerns the understanding
of princes and people: Machiavelli – Thomson 1910, 5–6.
18 Yılmaz 2003b, 285.