Al-Tikriti|101processes, when the outcome was not yet determined, and when positions were
not as fixed as they would later become. From his position of official power and
influence, Ibn-i Kemal advocated for his own vision of what the evolving Otto-
man mentalité should look like.
In the course of his impressively productive scholarly career, Ibn-i Kemal
authored over two hundred works defending and defining an imperial vision
of religious identity. These treatises covered a broad range of topics that taken
in isolation appear to be of narrow significance. When considered altogether,
however, it becomes clear that Ibn-i Kemal devoted the better part of his career
to staking out positions on a range of religious, philosophical, and political is-
sues that reflected the view of the Ottoman court. Several such positions carried
legal weight, drove imperial practice, and adjudicated matters of life and death,
as with his arguments concerning apostasy. Lest one think his interest in shap-
ing Ottoman customs was limited to dry academic topics, Ibn-i Kemal was also
responsible for an Arabic instructional sex manual titled Returning the Old Man
to His Youthful Strength for Sex, which has remained sufficiently popular through
the centuries to be published in nineteenth-century Cairo, translated into En-
glish soon thereafter, and recently reissued. Although his overall oeuvre is not
remembered for intellectual originality, its influence on the Ottoman perspective
toward religious identity cannot be discounted.
Adjudicating Apostasy
One of the earlier treatises for which Ibn-i Kemal is famous is his Arabic “Trea-
tise on Classifying the Rafida [Deserters] as Apostates,” which he completed at ҕ
some point between 1507 and 1513. In this treatise, aimed at Kızılbaş (“redhead”) ҕ
rebels who sided with the Safavids against their Ottoman rulers, he argued that
wearing the “red turban” without compulsion was considered sufficient visible
evidence of heresy and nonbelief, which must be punished according to the stat-
utes for apostates—in other words, capital punishment. He also judged it to be
a religious obligation of every Muslim, and a requisite duty of the “Sultan of Is-
lam,” to fight this group. According to Ibn-i Kemal’s argument, it was thus a
religiously sanctioned duty to execute every captured mature male follower and
sympathizer of Shah Ismail, enslave the females and children, and treat their
property as licit war booty.
By decreeing it a religious duty to execute members of this offending group,
Ibn-i Kemal and others who argued the same position at the time forced each
individual to make a choice, since not fighting members of the offending group
meant ignoring an incumbent religious duty and therefore effectively becoming
oneself a member of that offending group. Decades later, the court historian Abū
al-Fadl Muҕ তammad Bidlīsī (d. 1579) wrote that some “40,000 Kızılbaş between ҕ
the ages of seven and seventy” were executed after their names were recorded