244 chapter 6
Belgradi gave the sultan to wake up and reclaim his hold on the affairs of his
realm (B214).
Belgradi’s Nisabü-l intisâb ve adabü’l-iktisâb is a refutation of Seyyid
Muhammed b. Seyyid Alâuddin el-Hüseyin er-Razavi’s (d. after 1514) Miftâhü’d-
dakâ’ik fi beyâni’l-fütüvveti ve’l-hakâ’ik (also known as the Fütüvvetnâme-i kebîr).42
Although Belgradi quoted Seyyid Muhammed quite often in the work and
called him a müteseyyid (a true descendant of the Prophet’s family),43 the
Nisab is a strong critique of the fütüvvetname tradition that Seyyid Muhammed
represented and which, according to Belgradi was “full of vanities, false claims,
and lies”.44 Belgradi claimed that the guild masters showed him the fütüvvet-
names they had in their hands and, when he pointed out to their errors, they
asked him to compose a work correcting all of them. His criticism of Seyyid
Muhammed targeted the nature of the latter’s sources. According to Belgradi,
Seyyid Muhammed resorted to books that were not respectable (muteber
olmayan), i.e. the books that, in Belgradi’s words, belonged to “illiterate Sufis”,
Hurufis, Batinis, and similar groups of “perversion”, among others. These did
not abide by the Sunna, and transmitted information from one another under
the rubric of marifa. Belgradi’s criticism of these sources led him to the conclu-
sion that it was wrong to ascribe the spiritual ranking of pir to fictional charac-
ters like Selman-ı Farisi, who had been elevated to this status by these sources.45
A similar historical refutation was applied to the claim that Ahi Devran was
the pir of the leather makers (debbağ). Belgradi corrected this information
and pointed out instead that he was simply a master leather maker who lived
during the age of Sultan Orhan. The claim of spiritual mastery was concocted
later during the reign of Bayezid II when a “liar” wrote a fütüvvetname for the
leather-makers.46
Belgradi’s criticisms went beyond textual analysis of the fütüvvet sources.
Scholars studying the fütüvve organizations and Ottoman guilds have demon-
strated that the close ties between the fütüvvet and the craft guilds gradually
declined, meaning that the phenomenon of ahilik died off over the course of
the second half of the fifteenth century. By the sixteenth century, fütüvvet prin-
ciples had their audience primarily in various Sufi groups instead.47 Belgradi
must have been very well aware of this, since in the Nisab he warns the fütüvvet
42 Berlin, National Bibliothek no. Lanbd. 589; İstanbul Üniversitesi Kütüphanesi, Türkçe
Yazmalar, MS 6803.
43 Sarıkaya 2010, 47.
44 Sarıkaya 2010, 54.
45 Sarıkaya 2010, 54, 55.
46 Sarıkaya 2010, 51.
47 Yıldırım 2011.