The “Sunna-minded” Trend 249
On the practical level, the three successive Kadızadeli waves gave ample
opportunity for their proponents to implement this injunction in the seven-
teenth century, although the authenticity of their call and the sincerity of their
actions were always doubted by contemporaries. The chief mufti Zekeriyazade
Yahya Efendi (d. 1644) is quoted to have referred to the Kadızadelis as “hypo-
crites” (müra ’iler) who were “courageous in forbidding wrong, and respected
by the ignorant masses; so that although their hypocrisy was harmful to them-
selves, it could be expedient in respect of others”.65
No clear doctrinal take on the duty seems to have emerged in seventeenth-
century Ottoman sources either. This doctrinal lacuna partly stems from the
fact that the most famous Kadızadeli preachers to be credited with it did not
leave many written works behind, especially compared to their more prolific
Halveti counterparts. Üstüvani’s sermons were later brought together by one of
his followers in a catechistical compilation.66 Vani Mehmed Efendi expressed
his views on the danger of religious innovations and the necessity of religious
obligations in two treatises written in Arabic, Risâla f î hakk al-farz wa al-sunna
wa al-bid‘a f î ba‘z al-‘amal (“The truth of religious obligations and the practices
of Muhammad and innovation in some practices”) and Risâla f î karâhat al-
jahr bi al-zikr (“The abomination of public recitals of God’s praises”).67 Even
when it was mentioned and endorsed in the writings of the Kadızadelis or the
Halvetis, the Quranic injunction to command right and forbid wrong rarely ap-
peared as a distinct theoretical issue. Rather, the call for the implementation of
this injunction seems to have served as a rhetorical tool to support the decline
and corruption diagnosis prevalent in the seventeenth-century sources and to
legitimize the distinct policies that the authors were advocating.
So if neither the Kadızadelis nor any others were offering a brand-new theo-
ry on the injunction of commanding right and forbidding wrong in their writ-
ings, then where else one can look for the expression of Sunna-mindedness
in the Ottoman intellectual world? The answer is that, in each of the works
analyzed in this chapter, a Sharia- and Sunna-centred viewpoint emerges as
embedded in the authors’ prognoses about the decline of Ottoman politics,
society, and morals. Each author emphasized a different aspect of the Ottoman
decline. Among the most disputed dimensions of the Ottoman decline in the
writings of the seventeenth-century polemicists were disregard for the Sharia,
the pervasiveness of innovation, the absence of qualified consultation around
the sultan, the corruption of the ulema, the prevalence of bribery, the erosion
65 Cook 2000, 329.
66 Üstüvani – Yurdaydın 1963.
67 Köprülü Library: Lala İsmail 685/1, Hacı Beşir Ağa 406/3.