66 chapter 2
Asia and the Persian lands, although it also produced a new influx of Sunni
scholars into Anatolia from Iran.
It is probably no coincidence that the rise of the Ottomans as a universal
empire called for an ideology more elaborate than the “mirrors for princes” or
adab-style eulogy of justice and piety (although translations or adaptations
of works by Najm al-Din Razi and al-Ghazali by no means ceased during the
sixteenth century8 and despite a philosophical background on human psychol-
ogy being evident in fifteenth-century adab-styled works, too9). An imperial
project framing Constantinople, the promised land of Islam, and the holy cities
of the Prophet, needed something more: a comprehensive theory that would
encompass all of human society, raising the moral virtues demanded of a ruler
to a universal system explaining both the individual and society at large. The
Ottomans did not have to invent such a system: they had only to revert to an
existing Persian tradition, drawn in turn from the Aristotelian concept of man,
society, and state.10 This was mainly provided by the thirteenth-century work
by Nasir al-Din Tusi (Akhlâq-e Nâsirî, or “Nasirean ethics”) and, later, his late
fifteenth-century continuator Jalal al-Din Davvani (Akhlâq-e Jalâlî, or “Jalalean
ethics”); both used al-Farabi’s tenth-century synthesis of Aristotelian and neo-
Platonic ethics and politics (together with Avicenna’s and Ibn Miskawayh’s
views on economics and morals, respectively).11 This kind of ahlak literature
claimed a comprehensive view of the world as a unity, as it was developed
in three escalating levels (individual, family, society), applying the same ana-
lytical tools (namely, the division of entities into components) in all three: i.e.,
speaking in turn of human ethics and the faculties of the soul, of household
arrangements and more generally of the economy, and of the components of
society and means of governance.
In some ways, this turn corresponds to a higher level of institutionalized
education that permitted the acquaintance of Ottoman authors with these
elaborate moral systems (after all, it was Mehmed II who established the
8 Yılmaz 2005, 24–25, notes two such translations by Ebu’l-Fazl Münşi and Kemal b. Hacı
İlyas.
9 See, for example, Toutant 2016, 13–14 on Ahmedi.
10 On the itineraries of Aristotle’s political ideas in the medieval Mediterranean and Middle
East see the studies collected in Syros 2011.
11 On Tusi, see Lambton 1956a, 141–142; Donaldson 1963, 169–182; Madelung 1985; Fakhry
1994, 131–141; Black 2011, 149–157; on Davvani see Lambton 1956a, 146; Donaldson 1963,
182–184; Rosenthal 1958, 210–223; Anay 1994; Fakhry 1994, 143ff.; Black 2011, 188–189. On
al-Farabi, see Rosenthal 1958, 113–142; al-Farabi – Walzer 1985; Fakhry 1994, 78–85; Fakhry
2000, 38–47; Black 2011, 57–74. Avicenna’s economics were in their turn influenced by the
Arabic translation of the work of a neo-Platonist author, Bryson: see the detailed edition
and study by Swain 2013. On Ibn Miskawayh’s moral theory, see Donaldson 1963, 121–133.