26 Introduction
The debates of the seventeenth century cannot be simply described as the
products of the antagonism between the Salafist legalism of the Kadızadelis
and the heterodox reactions from its Sufi targets. A concern to uphold the
Sharia was seen across the whole spectrum of the participants in these public
debates, from the Halveti sheikhs to the Kadızadeli preachers. The chapter’s
main focus will be on whether there existed a distinct political and economic
agenda parallel to these Sunna-minded tendencies. Based on such writings,
this chapter seeks to investigate the boundaries of the incumbent political
authorities promulgated by these authors, the standards of Sunna-abiding
political conduct, the parameters of public administration and, more specifi-
cally, ideas surrounding relations between Muslims and non-Muslim, taxa-
tion, and the laws pertaining to ownership of land. With these priorities in
mind, the chapter will first examine the writings of sixteenth-century figures
such as Birgivi (d. 1573) and Münir-i Belgradi (d. 1620) before moving on to
relevant treatises, correspondence, and panegyrics written by famous and not-
so-famous preachers and sheikhs from both sides of the debate. These include
such luminaries as Abdülmecid Sivasi (d. 1639), Kadızade Mehmed Efendi
(d. 1636), Üstüvani Efendi (d. 1661), Abdülahad Nuri (d. 1648), Kadızade
Mehmed İlmi (d. 1631–2), and Vani Efendi (d. 1687). Finally, the chapter will
examine the echoes of the Sunna-based debates in the latter part of the seven-
teenth century. This is especially important because, while the Kadızadelis fiz-
zled as a socially conservative movement and ceased to steer dynastic politics
towards the end of the seventeenth century, the equally conservative political
and economic mentality that they championed was preserved by a new gen-
eration of the Ottoman political elite that engaged in a series of administrative
reforms that were unmistakably Sharia-based.
In the seventh chapter, the re-emergence of a more general and “philosophi-
cal” view of society from the mid-seventeenth century onwards will be exam-
ined. Some evidence of Ibn Khaldun’s work can be discerned in Kınalızade’s
mid-sixteenth-century Nasirean masterpiece; from the mid-seventeenth cen-
tury onwards, however, Ibn Khaldun’s vision of rising and falling dynasties and
general historical laws started to permeate Ottoman political thought increas-
ingly intensely. First we will focus on Kâtib Çelebi’s political and historical
works, in which he uses a novel medical simile for human society (with the
four classes compared to the four humors of the body rather than the four ele-
ments, thereby facilitating the view of society as a developing organism), a pio-
neering definition of the state (which he saw as inseparable from society), and
the first systematic introduction of Ibn Khaldun’s notion of the “state-stages”
into the Ottoman philosophy of history. What was perhaps more important
was Kâtib Çelebi’s sense of innovation; more particularly, his admission that