Introduction 5
played no small role in promoting this perspective. On a larger scale, one
can also note the influence of the more general view of “post-classical” Islam
as a period of intellectual decline, a view that has only recently begun to be
challenged.
1 What Is Ottoman Political Thought?
Strictly speaking, political thought (or philosophy) may be defined as the study
of society, state, and politics with a view to describing aspects of a legitimate
government, such as its form, function, and limits. Unlike medieval Islamic
political philosophy, however, Ottoman authors who are considered to be
political thinkers do not always fit into such a definition. True, there are
those who proposed (be it original or not) a complete and coherent system of
either moral values that should guide political decisions or historical laws that
describe human society and the function of political power. On the other hand,
writers such as Koçi Bey and other “Golden Age” advocates, and even more
so Ayn Ali and other authors of “administrative manuals”, cannot possibly be
said to have had (or, more accurately, to have expressed) a vision for state and
society or a coherent set of guiding principles. Yet a study of Ottoman political
ideas that lacks these groups of thinkers, concentrating only on political phi-
losophy or theory instead, would be only half a study. These authors may only
have offered their advice ad hoc and on specific issues, such as army discipline
or the tax system, but they undoubtedly had a general vision of what good
government is (bluntly put, in their case, the kind of government prevailing in
the early sixteenth century). Moreover, such concrete advice was considered
part of a proper “book on politics” or “book of [political] advice” (siyasetname,
nasihatname) by the Ottomans themselves. Political thought, in this respect,
should not be identified with political theory or political philosophy; what is
now called governance or statecraft was undoubtedly conceived as being a
part of politics, indeed its very core.
On the other hand, the very notion of politics (as happens also with the
notions of state or society) is a distinctly modern one: Karen Barkey defines
modernity as “the constitution of a political arena increasingly defined by a
struggle over the definition of the political”.20 Things get even more compli-
cated when we talk of cultures, such as that of the Ottomans, which are not
only pre-modern but also non-European, and thus use a very different notion
19 See e.g. Radtke 2000; El-Rouayheb 2008 and 2015; Ahmed 2016; Griffel 2017.
20 Barkey 2008, 206.