The “Golden Age” as a Political Agenda 225
regulation of fixed prices. In fact, he says, this matter is a public issue (umur-ı
külliye); if the sultan or the viziers consider it a triviality (cüz’î) and leave it to a
judge, the latter cannot regulate it by himself since it is outside his competence
as a “matter of politics” (or: of the administrative branch, emr-i siyaset). If the
prices are not regulated, only those who are of no use to the sultan’s service
and to the army benefit: they become rich and assume the position of notables
(a ’yan-ı memleket), and as a result the well-to-do honest people are impover-
ished (I248).76
To understand this passage, it must be borne in mind that, in 1691, some fif-
teen years after the composition of Telhîsü’l-beyân, there was an effort to abolish
the system of fixed prices on the ideological grounds that it was incompatible
with the Sharia (see below, chapter 6). Arguably, the use of Sharia-minded ar-
guments for financial reform was current among scribal bureaucracy at the
time Hezarfen was writing his treatise (a similar reform of taxation and land-
holding, as will be seen in the next chapter, was carried out in Crete, and the
reader may remember that Hezarfen perhaps deliberately chose to ignore it in
his text). If the “constitutionalist” argument among these milieus had already
started to shift from the binding force of the “old law” to that of the Sharia, it
is tempting to see in Hezarfen’s rearguard action a reflection of this struggle.
Reinforcing the sultan’s and the vizier’s freedom of action might be Hezarfen’s
response to the fact that “old law”-based reasoning had, by that time, lost its
strength.77
In the same context, Hezarfen’s discussion of the ulema (I196–207) is of
some interest as well. First, he states that, among the “pillars of the state”, the
ulema are the highest and most honorable, using a medical simile that he
takes from Kâtib Çelebi (this excerpt will be studied in detail in chapter 7).
Following this, he divides them into two categories: the manifest or external
ones (ulema-ı zahir) who follow “the way of the eye” (tarik-ı nazar), i.e. muftis,
judges, teachers, and so on; and the internal ones (ulema-ı batin) who follow
“the way of purification” (tarik-ı tasfiye), i.e. the dervishes (the author names
explicitly the Nakşbendis and the Halvetis). What is particularly important
here is that, as Hezarfen seeks to clarify, doctors, astrologers, and scribes of
the divan are included in the first category, under the rubric “masters of sci-
ences” (ashab-ı fünun). Thus, the scribal bureaucracy, long ago inserted into
76 An almost identical discussion of the problem can be found in Ali – Demir 2006, 56–57.
The distinction between “important matters” or külliye and “particular issues” or cüz’iyye
(also seen in Koçi Bey’s second treatise) has its parallels in Islamic philosophy and legal
theory: see below, chapter 8.
77 As will be see in chapter 7, Hezarfen also used Kâtib Çelebi’s pro-innovation arguments.