248 chapter 6
As will be seen, arguments for compliance with the Sharia in decisions re-
garding public administration would be used in the seventeenth century to
criticize the functioning of the economy and the state’s dealing with it. Birgivi
himself was aware of the spinoffs of corruption in the larger sphere of the
economy:62
The majority of the sales in our markets and contracts of rent are invalid,
corrupted, or reprehensible, [due to the fact that] most merchants and
craftsmen are ignorant of the law.Birgivi considered their transactions as either unlawful or reprehensible.
Unlike Münir-i Belgradi, who idealized the Ottoman past based on the glories
of its now defunct social, military, and political functionaries, Birgivi discussed
the problems of inflation and coin clipping mainly from the perspective of
their legal validity and religious permissibility.
2.3 Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong
The Quranic injunction of commanding right and forbidding wrong has come
to be seen as the backbone of Salafist theologies and their Sharia-centered po-
litical consequences. Ottoman Hanafism, however, has been regarded in gen-
eral as rooted in “the accommodationist tradition of the Samanid northeast”
and therefore not particularly concerned with the question of how to com-
mand right and forbid wrong, at least on the doctrinal level. Moreover, it has
been suggested that, even when this issue was discussed, it did not take on
the overtly political character that it had had for Abu Hanifa’s interlocutors in
the pre-Ottoman period.63 Birgivi mentions the duty in his catechistic treatise
without elaborating on it greatly, but treats it more substantially in the Tarîqat.
Apart from a section where he promotes martyrdom in the name of the act,
Birgivi’s treatment does not depart substantially from the conventional Hanafi
take on the subject.64
criticizes Ottoman administrative practices for their non-compliance with the Sharia.
Ivanyi points to a sixteenth-century fetva that is surprisingly similar to Birgivi’s in its
critique (see again chapter 3, above). In a similar vein she notes that Pargalı Ibrahim
Pasha had already attempted to “purify” the kanun by imposing, among other things, the
cizye on Vlachs and martoloses in the preamble to the Bosnian kanunname (Ivanyi 2012,
142, 143).
62 Ivanyi 2012, 199, 200.
63 Cook 2000, 316. See also chapter 1, above.
64 Cook 2000, 323- 325.