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

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004385245_008

chapter 6

The “Sunna-Minded” Trend

E. Ekin Tuşalp Atiyas

This chapter follows the seventeenth-century conceptualizations of an ideal
political order based on the twin premises of the Sharia and the prophetic
Sunna. One of the events that have come to define the Ottoman seventeenth
century is the emergence of the three successive generations of “Salafist”
preachers known as the Kadızadelis.1 Recent studies on the Kadızadeli move-
ment and the reactions to it have opened up a wide arena for discussions of
the concepts of orthodoxy vs. heterodoxy, the multiple pillars of Sufism, the
boundaries of religious belief, and its early-modern regulations in the Ottoman
Empire.2 What has become evident is that the debates of the seventeenth cen-
tury cannot simply be described as the products of the antagonism between
the “Salafist orthodoxy” of the Kadızadelis and the “heterodox” reactions to it
by its Sufi targets. Concern for upholding the Sharia and “commanding right
and forbidding wrong” in the administration of the Muslim public sphere was
shared by the entire spectrum of the participants in the debates examined in
this chapter, ranging from Sufi sheikhs to Kadızadeli preachers.
This chapter will focus on placing these “Sunna-minded trends” on the his-
torical map of Ottoman political thought.3 The agendas of the first half of
the seventeenth century hardly seem political at first sight and seem to have
evolved around the tenets of correct belief and the correct performance of
religious duties. However, it will be seen that the authors examined in this

1 The term “Salafism” was coined to describe the social and ideological movements that up-
held the practices of the first three generations of Muslims (al-salaf al-salih) at the expense
of the rationalist and allegorical readings of Islamic scripture. For a recent discussion of the
term see Lauzière 2010.
2 See Ocak 1979–1983; Öztürk 1981; Zilfi 1986; Zilfi 1988, 129–181; Çavuşoğlu 1990; Clayer 1994;
Terzioğlu 1999; Le Gall 2004; Terzioğlu 2007; El-Rouayheb 2008; El-Rouayheb 2010; Curry 2010;
Terzioğlu 2010; Terzioğlu 2012; Ivanyi 2012; Sariyannis 2012; Evstatiev 2013.
3 For instance, Derin Terzioğlu concludes that although the Kadızadelis did not include ad-
ministrative matters such as taxation, appointments to public offices, and criminal law in
their writings, they might have shared their opinions on these subjects orally or in writings
that have simply been lost or overlooked. She also notes that, up until the “third stage” of
the movement in the 1660s and 70s, several unsympathetic observers also picked on the
Kadızadelis for focusing on “trivia” and for not having anything of substance to say on the
“important” problems that faced the Ottoman state. See Terzioğlu 2010, 258.