246 chapter 6
Birgivi’s interpretation of the Sharia and Sunna informed much of the sub-
sequent debates on law, piety, and public administration in the seventeenth
century. There are two crucial aspects of his influence that have been recently
emphasized by students of the Birgivi corpus. One is that, ideologically and
intellectually, Birgivi’s thought was too complex to be simply branded as ultra-
conservative and anti-Sufi. In terms of his intellectual sources, although he
is frequently mentioned alongside Ibn Taymiyya, the textual evidence that is
thought to have brought them together has proven to be dubious at its best.52
Moreover, his relationship with Sufism was much more complicated than pre-
viously thought. On top of his brief rapprochement with the Bayramiyya in
Istanbul, in his writings he advocated a type of Sufism that focused on sobriety
and strict adherence to the law.53 Instead of outright condemnation of the Sufi
tenets of Islam, he believed in the possibility of spiritual advancement “in the
assimilation of Muhammad’s beautiful example”.54 In terms of social outreach,
Birgivi’s message reached far beyond the Kadızadeli ranks, holding many sev-
enteenth-century Sufi intellectuals in its sway.
It is not possible here to capture how concern for the primacy of the
Sharia permeated all aspects of Birgivi’s critique of contemporaneous politi-
cal practices.55 Yet Birgivi’s handling of the issue of Ottoman arrangements
regarding land tenure and taxation in the penultimate chapter of al-Tari ̂qa
al-Muhammadiyya was widely followed in seventeenth-century Ottoman poli-
cies and therefore deserves to be studied in detail here.
In the Tarîqa, Birgivi voiced his criticism of the contemporary practices of
land distribution, land ownership, and taxation.56 According to classical Hanafi
jurisprudence, ownership of land was originally vested in the individual, arising
former, he frequently cites Muhammad al-Shaybani (d. 189/804), al-Sarakhsî (d. 544/1149)
and Marghînânî (d. 593/1197) (Ivanyi 2012, 72).
52 Ivanyi argues that the spurious link between them goes back to Ahmed al-Rûmî al-
Akhisârî and his Risāla fī ziyārat al-qubūr, which was mistakenly attributed to Birgivi
(Ivanyi 2012, 81; on al-Akhisari’s relationship to Ibn Taymiyya see also Sheikh 2016). In a
similar vein, Khaled El-Rouayheb has also argued that, “it is important to stress that [other
than for the Ziyāra] Birgiwî showed little traces of being influenced by Ibn Taymiyya or
Ibn al-Qayyim”. He likewise speculates that “the views of Birgiwî and his Kadızadeli fol-
lowers may have been rooted, not in the thought of Ibn Taymiyya, but in an intolerant
current within the Ḥanafī-Māturīdī school, represented by such scholars as ‘Alā’ al-Dīn
al-Bukhārī (d. 1438), who famously declared both Ibn ‘Arabī and Ibn Taymiyya unbeliev-
ers” (El-Rouayheb 2010, 303). The same observation has been made by Terzioğlu as well
(Terzioğlu 1999, 216, fn. 61).
53 Ivanyi 2012, 92; Terzioğlu 1999, 214.
54 Ivanyi 2012, 110. For a discussion of Birgivi’s stance towards Sufism see Ivanyi 2012, 82–110.
55 Cf. above, chapter 3.
56 See Ivanyi 2012, 179.