254 chapter 6
Hereafter.79 Kadızade advised him to employ people of good insight or correct
judgment (ehl-i furkan) who were both religious and pious, but also stated that
such people were unfortunately hard to find in every religion.80
One author who placed great emphasis on the importance of consultation
in his works was the Halveti preacher Kadızade Mehmed İlmi (d. 1631–32),
the translator of Ibn Taymiyya’s Siyasat al-shariyya. In addition to his Tacü’r-
Resail, he wrote two major nasihatnames, one of each of which were submit-
ted to grand vizier Kuyucu Murad Pasha (d. 1611) and Murad IV. Mehmed İlmi
claimed that the sermons he gave as a preacher caught the attention of some
distinguished members in the audience, who later asked him to write them
down in different nasihatname versions.81
The first work, Nushu’l-hükkâm sebebü’n-nizâm (“Counsel for rulers, grounds
for order”), seems to have been written during the early days of Murad IV’s
reign when the sultan’s infamous iron rule had not yet been established. The
second work, Mesmu’atü’n-nekayih mecmu’tü’n-nesa ’ih (“Tales for the convales-
cent, the compilation of counsels”), was written before the 1632 uprising and
its suppression by Murad IV, a turning point in his reign. Both texts heralded
the heavy-handed approach that Murad IV would take later in his reign.82 Yet
neither work treated the ills afflicting the empire as systematically as did other
contemporaneous works of the advice genre. Scriptural and historical anec-
dotes, verses directly addressing the sultan regarding virtues and vices, and
statements about different social classes seem to have been haphazardly inter-
mingled with analysis of the empire and metaphors used to validate them. In
that sense, both reflected on paper the performance of a preacher in his pulpit.
Not only their style but also the content of their counsel reveals the emphasis
placed on preaching and nasihat-giving as a means to amend the decay of the
empire. Both works placed significant emphasis on the need for the sultan to
consult with the right people.
79 Öztürk 1981, 44.
80 Öztürk 1981, 176–177.
81 Kuyucu Murad Paşa enjoyed Nushu’l-hükkam sebebü’n-nizam so much that he submitted
another copy to the grand vizier as a gift. The chief mufti Esad Efendi, after listening to
one his sermons in Ayasofya, commissioned Mehmed İlmi to write another nasihatname
to be submitted to Sultan Murad IV. Yet when the chief mufti died, İlmi did not have the
chance to write a new nasihatname and submitted the old version, with some changes
in it, to Murad IV. The second version was completed after 1625, the year of Esad Efendi’s
death. See Terzioğlu 2007, 266.
82 Terzioğlu 2007, 267. Kadızade Mehmed İlmi, Nushü’l-hükkâm sebebü’n-nizâm, Süleymaniye
Ktp. Aşir Ef. MS 327; Mesmû’atü’n-nekâyih mecmû’atü’n-nesâyih, Süleymaniye Ktp. Hüsrev
Paşa, MS 629.