264 chapter 6
4 Political Practice and Political Thought
The texts examined above at times verged on catechistic, often replicated
the preaching voices of their authors, and mostly addressed a royal audi-
ence. Above all, they emphasized the primacy of the Sharia and the Sunna
and saw the proper functioning of the imperial political order as a function of
the moral and legal underpinnings provided by those two. The question that
remains is whether one can trace the intellectual/ideological origins of the
administrative policies carried out during the second half of the seventeenth
century—policies which manifestly had strong Sharia coloring—to the ideas
promoted by the authors of these Sunna-minded political texts.103 While it is
not possible to associate every major political decision with a specific text, it
is possible to trace the social and intellectual networks through which a form
of Sharia ideology was channeled towards the chancellery and financial arms
of the Ottoman bureaucracy and the judicial corps that carried out its imple-
mentation. As will become evident below, the process of the Shariatization of
Ottoman public policy was especially increased during the grand vizierates of
the Köprülüs and their relatives and protégés.104 It is no coincidence that the
policies that created so much controversy during the second half of the seven-
teenth century had been already pronounced by our Sunna-minded authors in
the first half of it.
103 Scholars took note of this new “administrative activism” and even emphasized the move
away from the imperial kanun towards the Sharia as the underlying drive behind these
measures (Murphey 1993). On the growing importance of the Sharia within the Ottoman
legal system, see Gerber 1994; Peirce 2003; Buzov 2005.
104 The appointment of Köprülü Mehmed Pasha as the grand vizier in September 1656 marks
the beginning of the period, which in Ottoman history is called the “rule of the gran-
dees” or the “Köprülü restoration”. After Köprülü Mehmed, who held the position of grand
vizier until his death in 1661, the grand viziers were: his son Fazıl Ahmed (d. 1676); his
son-in-law Merzifonlu Kara Mustafa Pasha (d. 1683); another son-in-law Siyavuş Pasha;
his younger son Fazıl Mustafa (d. 1691); his nephew Amcazade Hüseyin Pasha (d. 1702),
and finally Numan Pasha (d. 1719), the son of Fazıl Mustafa. On the Köprülü family see
Behçeti İbrahim’s (d. c. 1738) history: Silsiletü’l-Asafiyye fi hakaniyyeti’l-devleti’l-Osmaniye,
Köprülü Kütüphanesi, Hafız Ahmed Paşa, nr. 212. This work includes the biographies of
Köprülü Mehmed Pasha, Fazıl Ahmed Pasha, Fazıl Mustafa Pasha, Amcazade Hüseyin
Pasha, Köprülüzade Numan Pasha, Köprülüzade Abdullah Pasha, and Köprülüzade
Hafız Ahmed Pasha. Behçeti compiled the information on the first five Köprülü viziers
from Naima’s and Raşid’s histories. The sections on Köprülüzade Abdullah Pasha and
Köprülüzade Hafız Ahmed Pasha contain original information. For the secondary liter-
ature on the Köprülü grand viziers, see Kunt 1971; Kunt 1973; Kunt 1994; Yılmaz 2000b;
Duman 2006; Aycibin 2011; Özkan 2006.