Towards an Ottoman Conceptual History 459
encompassing not individual dynasties, as did Ibn Khaldun’s earlier work, but
the whole moral and social development of humanity.76
What parallels can we draw between these developments and the evolu-
tion of Ottoman thought? The Usuli school in Iran, and especially al-Karaki’s
collaboration with Shah Isma’il in order to legitimize the collection of taxes
from Muslims, brings to mind Ebussu’ud’s legal synthesis, predating it by
some decades;77 on the other hand, the Akhbari renaissance during the sev-
enteenth century has parallels both in time and (to a degree) content with
the Ottoman Kadızadelis. The re-emergence of Islam as a state ideology in
Mughal India under Aurangzeb, in the same period, cannot be paralleled so
easily with Ottoman or Iranian developments since there are many differences
between Akbar’s universalism and Safavid theocracy, or the kanun and siyasa
al-sultaniya of the Süleymanic era. The “connective systems of learned and
holy men”, as termed by Francis Robinson, which connected the education-
al systems of the three empires through shared texts, commentaries, and
annotations,78 can only partly explain these affinities: if Sufi or Salafist texts
and ideas did circulate from the Balkans to South Asia, the same cannot be
said for their “statist” counterparts. Neither Ebussu’ud’s fetvas, nor Usuli tracts
or Abu’l-Fazl’s history seems to have ever passed beyond the borders of each
empire; if there is indeed a connection, we have to seek it in a common trajec-
tory of the so-called “tributary empires” of the Islamicate world rather than in
the history of ideas.79 But then, is the Ottoman Empire closer to this type of
empire? Or was it closer to being an “early-modern state”, especially after the
mid-seventeenth century, and should we instead seek affinities with English
or French intellectual history? Another fruitful comparison, in this case, might
be not with trends in Persian or South Asian intellectual history, but between
Kâtib Çelebi and (for instance) Jean Bodin’s interest in non-European types
76 On Mughal political practice and thought see Alam 2004; Black 2011, 240ff.; Syros 2012a,
400–404 and 2012b (with a rich bibliography).
77 See Lambton 1981, 268–273; Mitchell 2009, 71ff.
78 Robinson 1997.
79 “Tributary empires” have recently arisen as an analytical tool in comparative history. See
the essays collected in Bang – Bayly 2011. For the Ottoman case, an example of the use of
this model is Barkey 2008. Another term, that of “gunpowder empires”, coined by Marshall
Hodgson, has the disadvantage of focusing on a probably minor factor and of leaving non-
Islamicate states (such as the Habsburgs’ or the Romanovs’ empires) outside the para-
digm; Linda Darling has tried to use the term, occasionally encompassing developments
in England or France (Darling 1998, 232ff.). In an attempt to compare the Ottoman Empire
with the Mughals and the Habsburgs, with a special emphasis on “declinist” political lit-
erature, see Subrahmanyam 2006.