The “Sunna-minded” Trend 247
from recognition by the imam of those who possessed the lands at the time of
their conquest. The religious status of the owners in the time of conquest de-
fined the nature of the tax that had to be paid: ‘ushr in the case of Muslims;
kharaj in the case of non-Muslims. The status of kharaj lands remained fixed,
however, even when the owners later converted to Islam or when the lands
were sold to Muslims. Thus, from a relatively early stage, the initial connection
between the legal status of the owner and the land was severed. In any case,
the basic understanding remained one of individual ownership, not owner-
ship by the state.57 The Ottomans, however, would usually designate the new
lands they conquered as miri (i.e. “of the ruler”). Yet these lands also continued
to remain in the hands of the unbelievers who had owned them before and
would continue treating it as if it were their own property, renting and even
selling it. According to Birgivi, since those who cultivated the land were tech-
nically not its owners, the kharaj could actually not be demanded of them. As
seen in chapter 3, one of the legal stratagems that Ottoman jurists employed
to adapt this new situation into a Sharia framework was to reformulate the
relationship between cultivators and the treasury as rent (ijara) that the cul-
tivators were paying to the ruler, one equal to the value of the kharaj. Yet even
with this new formulation, Birgivi ruled out the application of common legal
transactions pertaining to property, such as “sale”, “inheritance”, and “the right
to pre-emption”.58
The clearest repercussion of the insistence on the private property status of
the newly-conquered lands was in the Cretan kanunname of 1670, something
which was in line with “classical” Hanafi legal theory and rejected the conven-
tional Ottoman interpretation of the land as miri (“of the ruler”).59 In fact,
the Cretan kanunname is seen as one of the products of the Kadızadeli influ-
ence on late seventeenth-century administrative decisions.60 In the following
pages, we will discuss the tenacity of the links between Birgivi, the Kadızadelis,
and the policies implemented in the latter part of the seventeenth century.
Suffice it to say here that the Sharia-minded approach to public administration
in Ottoman lands did not begin with Birgivi since it was not only followed in
the seventeenth century by the Kadızadelis.61
57 Ivanyi 2012, 115–117.
58 Ivanyi 2012, 279–280.
59 Kolovos 2007; Ivanyi 2012, 140.
60 Greene 1996; Gülsoy 2001; Veinstein 2004; Kermeli 2008.
61 Birgivi was not the first Ottoman thinker to emphasize the primacy of the Sharia as an
important tenet of the ideal Muslim rulership and society. As seen in chapter 3, Şehzade
Korkud (d. 1513), the eldest son of Sultan Bayezid II and brother of Selim II “the Grim”,
introduced a strong Sharia stance in his Da ‘wat al-nafs al-tâliha ilâ al-a‘mâl al-sâliha and