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for the Salafist movements that emerged in the seventeenth century. Even in
those cases where their influence was most visible, they were not confined to
the Salafism of the Kadızadelis but captivated a wider audience, including the
Halvetis. As for the Ottoman Sufis, again recent scholarship has dismantled the
image of a united Sufi front and exposed the dynamics that differentiated Sufi
communities from one another. The way Münir-i Belgradi shaped his works
and his criticisms according to different audiences is the clearest proof of the
diversity of ideological options available to Ottoman writers in the late six-
teenth century. Amidst this diversity, as in the case of the relationship between
Birgivi and his Kadızadeli successors, one cannot speak of a single ideologi-
cal core that was passed from Belgradi to the seventeenth-century Halvetis.
For one thing, the ideological production of the seventeenth-century Sunna-
minded authors was much different in both form and content when compared
to Birgivi and Belgradi. Birgivi and Belgradi’s works exhibited a different type
of knowledge, one which was built on meticulous analysis of legal traditions
in the former’s case and textual criticism in the latter’s, whereas seventeenth-
century Sunna-mindedness was first seen in the preachings of the Kadızadelis
and Halvetis and was later transferred onto the pages of the advice works they
authored. Therefore, Sunna-minded trends did not pose the same theoreti-
cal challenge as did the older genres of Ottoman political thought but instead
served as a discursive field that covered as many issues as possible, ranging
from promiscuity to the corruption of judges. Another characteristic of the
seventeenth-century Sunna-centered writings is that their preachers-turned-
authors did not belong solely to the high-ranking clerical and political elite but
came from a variety of social backgrounds and addressed an audience equally
diverse in social composition.