242 chapter 6
different subjects, ranging from his refutation of the Mevlevi sema to aspects of
Islamic law (furu), until his death sometime in the period 1620–28, in Belgrade.40
The two works that will be discussed below represent what is most inter-
esting about Münir-i Belgradi. In Silsiletü’l-mukarrebin ve menakıbü’l-muttekin
(“The chain of those who are allowed to approach God and the heroic deeds of
the pious”), which is a biographical dictionary of Sufi sheikhs, he introduced
the Ottoman audience to deep historical lore on Sufism and mostly identified
himself with the historical tradition woven around Sufi sheikhs and their mir-
acles. Nisabü-l intisâb ve adabü’l-iktisâb (“The genealogy of allegiance and the
manners of acquisition”), on the other hand, seems to have been intended for
the internal consumption of a much more restricted audience, i.e. “the fütüv-
vet ehli”, the sixteenth-century offshoots of the akhi brotherhoods organized
around craft guilds. With respect to its relevance for our study of Ottoman po-
litical thought, the Silsile shows how a Sufi alim from the Balkans perceived
his own time as a period of decline. Belgradi idealizes the troika of the sheikhs
(meşayih) who flocked to Ottoman lands in the fourteenth and fifteenth cen-
turies, the frontier warriors (gazi) who expanded it, and the people (reaya)
whose well-being represented the “good old days” of the empire. He decried
the decaying status of the meşayih, the corruption of the religious establish-
ment (ulema), and the dissolution of the aspirations for holy war (gaza). In
the Nisab, Belgradi’s main concern seems to be steering the guilds away from
what he saw as the corrupting influence of certain antinomian Sufi sects. He
engaged in a very critical reading of the textual heritage of fütüvvets and tried
to bring an internal discipline to fütüvvet culture by confirming certain textual
traditions and eliminating others. While the first work ordered and presented
the Sufi historical tradition as an antidote to the corruption of his time, the
second work problematized the current state of that very tradition and tried to
“Sunnitize” it by stripping it of the voices that were viewed as heretical by the
Ottoman religious establishment.
The work that sealed Belgradi’s status as an authority on Sufi historiogra-
phy was Silsiletü’l-mukarrebin ve menakıbü’l-muttekin. As its title suggests, it is
a biographical work that aimed to reconstruct the genealogical chains (silsile)
of the Sufi sheikhs and spiritual leaders (pir) going all the way back to Prophet
Muhammed with critical attention given to the hierarchies between disciples
and teachers, and to the stories of their miraculous deeds (menkıbe). Belgradi
began the work by exploring the Sivasiyye, Üveysiyye, Hacı Bayram, Zeyniyye,
Nakşibendi, and Baba Kemal Cundi branches, noting and correcting the inac-
curacies in these chains. The first section covers the Sufis of the pre-Ottoman
40 See Belgradi – Bitiçi 2001, 20–24.