456 conclusion
What the Ottomans inherited (and used) as Islamic political thought may
be said to have belonged to three main categories: first, the “philosophical”
(falasifa) or ahlak tradition, and more particularly the highly systematized and
moralistic form that Avicenna’s (Ibn Sina), Averroes’ (Ibn Rushd), and espe-
cially al-Farabi’s systems took in thirteenth- to fifteenth-century Persia within
the writings of Nasir al-Din Tusi and Jalal al-Din Davvani, combining Aristotle’s
ethics with Plato’s notion of the ideal state. Secondly, the more “down-to-
earth” and concrete adab literature, again as it emerged in Seljuk Persia with
Nizam al-Mulk and his continuators such as Najm al-Din Razi: these works
were founded upon the old idea of justice being the key aspect of success-
ful kingship, with strong Sufi overtones influenced by al-Ghazali. Thirdly, Ibn
Taymiyya’s early fourteenth-century formulation of the identification of the
secular ruler with the imam and his Sharia-based interpretation of al-Mawardi,
al-Ghazali, and other theorists of the caliphate.
As seen, the first category, that of the falasifa theorists, produced some
monumental works, culminating in the 1560s with the example of Kınalızade,
before waning, leaving behind a standard model for the description of society
(the four “pillars”) and an emphasis on the need for balance; the second catego-
ry produced several works, mostly in the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth
centuries, and contributed the “circle of justice” to the standard inventory of
Ottoman political ideas, before ceding its place to the typically Ottoman “de-
clinist” advice. As for the third, after giving some weapons to the defenders of
the Ebussuudic synthesis, it influenced the Salafist ideas recurrent in the sev-
enteenth century, from the Kadızadeli preachers and their Halveti opponents
to the late seventeenth-century bureaucrats. A fourth category, formed of a sin-
gle author, namely Ibn Khaldun, did not have a marked presence until around
a century and a half after his death through the works of Kâtib Çelebi and
his continuators, and even more so during the eighteenth century. In this con-
text, the “declinist” adab literature, from Lütfi Pasha to Koçi Bey via Mustafa
Ali, on the one hand, to Kâtib Çelebi’s emphasis on the Khaldunist idea that
different times require different measures, on the other, constituted in a way
the Ottoman contribution par excellence to Islamicate political thought, from
whose traditional formulation they depart in both form and content.
Meanwhile, what trajectories had Islamicate thought followed in the other
great empires of the region?74 The Persian lands, where most of the texts
74 Here we will skip the production of Ottoman Arab lands, which may arguably be seen as
more than just a “peripheral” Ottoman literature. Both Salafism (in its Wahhabi form) and
most of the Sufis examined in the famous “Islamic Enlightenment” debate were a prod-
uct of these lands (Schulze 1996; Hagen – Seidenstricker 1998; Radtke 2000), while recent
research shows that the rational sciences thrived in Ottoman Arabs’ works (El-Rouayheb