Towards an Ottoman Conceptual History 443
lines. While Penah Efendi proposed the abolition of such paragons of the “old
law” as the timar system and the tapu landholding, Ratıb Efendi spoke of the
need for a renewal of the old laws but admitted that this must be made “ac-
cording to the nature of this age” (kavanin-i kadime bu asrın mizac ü tabiatına
tatbik ile tecdid). During the Nizam-i Cedid controversy, it seems that the “old
law” argument was revived by the janissary opponents of the new army. One
may discern it in their Selimian refuters: Sekbanbaşı stressed that the old law
on the janissaries has been surpassed due to the rise of prices and the constant
need for new troops, while Kuşmani found those claiming that “things must
be done as in the time of [their] forefathers” as falling into the sect of fatalism.
The very term Nizam-i Cedid (probably first coined by Müteferrika, always in
the context of military organization) shows very clearly the development; it is
quite characteristic that Ömer Faik Efendi named his rather conservative work
Nizâmü’l-atîk (“The old order”).37
The influence of Kâtib Çelebi’s Khaldunist ideas apart, another factor
that contributed to the obsolescence of the “old law” must have been the
re-emergence of the kanun vs. Sharia conflict: after being the issue of the day in
the 1550s and 1560s (as seen in Çivizade’s, Birgivi’s, and even Kınalızade’s work),
the conflict seems to have lost its centrality. Although Kadızade Mehmed İlmi
criticized judges who declared that they would rule by yasak and kanun rather
than the Sharia, the “Sunna-minded” authors of the seventeenth century, in-
cluding the Kadızadeli preachers, advocated the Sharia without showing con-
tempt for the kanun. Writing sometime between 1623 and 1638, for instance,
Üveysî accused the sultan (or his administrators) of observing neither the
Sharia nor the kanun, as he had abandoned the world to corruption by adopt-
ing unholy innovations. In another case, Hemdemi, an author whose influence
by Kâtib Çelebi is otherwise evident, complained that canonical punishments
such as the cutting off of thieves’ hands are neglected. The conflict is usually
considered as having culminated, at the other side extreme, with the financial
reforms of the early 1690s and the famous 1696 order of Mustafa II that pro-
hibited “the coupling of the [terms] noble Sharia and kanun” in favor of the
former.38 It is interesting that the Sharia-minded policy followed by
Köprülüzade Fazıl Mustafa Pasha (1689–91) seems to have been termed “new
37 On the shifting uses of the “old custom”, especially during the nineteenth century,
cf. Karateke 1999.
38 Heyd 1973, 154–155. It may not be a coincidence that, from 1687 onwards, the chief of
the descendants of the Prophet takes the primary place in the ceremony of the new
sultans’ allegiance (bey’at), while other symbolic gestures that try to emphasize the ca-
liphal features of the sultans were added in the following decade: Vatin – Veinstein 2003,
286–287, 314.