 Policing Morality

Crossing Gender and Communal

Boundaries in an Age of Political Crisis

and Religious Controversy

Fariba Zarinebaf

The second half of the seventeenth century in the Ottoman Empire (often

referred to as the Köprülü era) has usually been studied as a period of economic
and military reforms and administrative centralization in the hands of a series
of strong grand viziers from the Köprülü household. It was, however, also a pe-
riod of intense political, economic, social, and confessional crisis in the empire
punctuated by a long war with Venice over the island of Crete (1644–1669), the
failed siege of Vienna (1683), and the subsequent economic and political crises
that shook the foundations of the empire and were spurred by a series of Janis-
sary rebellions. Moreover, the second half of the seventeenth century witnessed
intense religious and social upheavals among Muslim and Jewish communities
within the empire, pitching the fundamentalist Kadizadeli ulema (religious schol-
ars) against popular Sufi groups (Mevlevis and Halvetis) and the followers of a
Jewish messianic movement led by Sabbatai Zevi. As a result of these turbulent
times various forces, particularly among the Ottoman imperial political and re-
ligious elite, struggled to define religious and communal identities and gender
roles according to their ideological agendas. At stake, in their minds, was the
“proper” Islamic religious identity of the empire, its ruling dynasty, and society
as a whole.
The religious and cultural tensions of the seventeenth century created a
deep conservative backlash among both Muslim and Jewish communities that
resulted in the death of a powerful valide sultan (mother of the reigning sultan,
or queen mother) and the violent policing of cross-communal sexual relations.
The regicide of the great Valide Kösem Sultan in 1651 and the death by stoning
of a Muslim woman who was accused of adultery with a Jewish man in 1680
typify this period. Notwithstanding the gap of almost thirty years between these
events, they are intimately connected and rooted in this time of cultural, social,
and political conflict. Both events took place during the reign of Sultan Mehmed