Towards an Ottoman Conceptual History 447
One of the most important consequences of this notion was that small conces-
sions could be made as long as the general idea, i.e. the sultan’s power (and,
in some cases, the dynasty) was preserved: this is seen in the famous motto
“a specific damage is better than a general one” (zarar-ı ammdan zarar-ı hass
yeğdir), found in quite a few political tracts as well as in chronicles (it is the
usual phrase with which a sultan condescends to give the rebels the heads that
they are asking for). One of its first instances may be the justification of frat-
ricide by Neşri; significantly, the person to whom the phrase is attributed, on
the occasion of the execution of Murad II’s brother, notes that this is “an old
custom” (adet-i kadime), and it is exactly the “world order” that formed the
main argument for the legal justification of fratricide.46 In the same vein, the
fetvas that were related to the execution of the deposed Ibrahim in 1648 stress
both the need to keep the world order and the preference for specific damage
to a general one.47 From another point of view, this is the principle behind is-
tihsan, the fikh principle of juristic preference that involved a choice between
the lesser of two evils.48
Gottfried Hagen explored the development of the term “world order” be-
tween the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries and found that it had strong over-
tones of social hierarchies, while it was also conceived of being as something
that “can be disrupted but not changed”, with the alternative being “not a dif-
ferent order, but chaos” (the latter might take even natural forms, i.e. famine,
flood, and other disasters); moreover, as seen in chapter 2, he also showed how
the ahlak vision of society entailed a static, ahistoric, and universal model of
this order, one in which the human agent had only very limited influence.49
Ahlak literature, represented in Ottoman Turkish by Amasi and Kınalızade,
seems to have compared the order of the world to the order of one’s spiritual
life, and its necessary prerequisite, balance between the four classes, to the
balance between the various faculties of the soul; and, as moral balance ema-
nates from man’s domination over the faculties of his soul, so does social order
depend on the ruler’s domination and sovereignty.50 In al-Ghazali’s early work,
justice is seen as keeping a hierarchical order (tartib) among the elements of
a city, similar to that governing the elements of the soul.51 Thus, hierarchy is
46 Neşri – Unat – Köymen 1987, II:573. Cf. Vatin – Veinstein 2003, 149–170; Vatin (forthcoming).
47 Vatin – Veinstein 2003, 203.
48 Cf. Menchinger 2014a, 133.
49 Hagen 2005, 62; Hagen 2013, 437. On the dichotomy of order vs. chaos as a thematic motif
with deep roots in Middle Eastern antiquity see Howard 2007, 161–164.
50 Tezcan 1996, 123; Tezcan 2001.
51 Laoust 1970, 74–75. Al-Ghazali proceeds in a partition of the human classes, but which
did not find many imitators: those who are served but do not serve themselves, those who