The “Sunna-minded” Trend 259
among the items that would render someone an infidel. One of the examples
given by Sivasi included a judge who ignored the Sharia by disputing the
soundness of a müfti’s decision in a fetva manual. A judge who pronounced
that he would rule by yasak and kanun, not by Sharia, or who announced that
what was not allowed by the Sharia would be allowed by kanun, would auto-
matically become an infidel since these utterings amounted to ridiculing and
denying Islam, the Sharia, and the consensus of the community.86
The treatment of non-Muslim subjects constituted another item in the
agenda of the Sharia-minded reformists. The erosion of the public boundar-
ies between Muslims and non-Muslims was a concern frequently expressed
by seventeenth-century Ottomans writers. The heavy-handed measures intro-
duced by the grand viziers and other policy-makers during the second half of
the seventeenth century to deal with this concern did not come out of no-
where, and rested on at least half a century of previous discussions.
In his Letâ’if, Sivasi discussed a range of misconducts which he thought con-
taminated the Muslim public sphere. Among these were the building of new
churches and synagogues in Istanbul, Muslims frequenting zimmi bakeries,
the illegal addition of extra stories to non-Muslim houses, and the violation of
dress codes (p. 77–79). In a similar vein, Sivasi listed non-compliance with cizye
payments, adultery with Muslim women, and murdering Muslims among the
acts requiring capital punishment according to the Sharia (p. 80, 81). However,
one particular admonition that Sivasi made about Muslim and non-Muslim
relations directly concerned the functioning of the Ottoman state: the em-
ployment of Christians and Jews in running the affairs of the state. Especially
worrying for Sivasi was the employment of ehl-i zimmet as scribes in the chan-
cellery and treasury for the conduct of Muslim affairs (p. 74–80). Sivasi backed
his warning with anecdotes from early Islamic times that aimed to capture
the problems relating to trusting the affairs of the state to non-Muslims. He
even attempted to horrify the reader by claiming that Jews were so deeply en-
grossed in state affairs that they had infiltrated into the most intimate quarters
of the palace where they secretly converted the most pious of harem women
to Judaism.87
According to Sivasi, an even more direct impact of non-Muslims’ interfer-
ence in government and public administration was in matters of taxation. In
the Letaif, Sivasi condemned the taxation of wine as one of the fifteen illicit pay-
ments that God condemned in the Quran. He objected to any money gathered
86 Abdülmecid Sivasî, Letâ’ifü’l-ezhâr ve lezâ’izü’l-esmâr (Nesâyih-i Mülûk): Süleymaniye
Ktp., Laleli MS. 1613, 72–73.
87 Terzioğlu 1999, 319.