182 DESTINY DISRUPTED
least nominal affiliation with one or another of the Sufi orders and a great
many actively belonging to some brotherhood. This is not to say that all
(or very many) of the common folks in the Ottoman Empire were prac-
ticing mystics. It's more to say that Sufism, for most people, had come to
mean folklore, superstitions, shrines, amulets, remedies, spells, and the
veneration of Sufi "saints" alleged to possess supernatural abilities.
Besides, these Sufi orders were intertwined with the akhis, the associa-
tions of craftsmen and merchants I mentioned earlier. The akhi guilds had
their own autonomous status as social organizations. They set standards for
their members, licensed new businesses, collected dues, extended credit, paid
out old-age pensions, took care of funeral expenses, offered health care, op-
erated shelters and soup kitchens, gave out scholarships, and also organized
fairs, festivals, processions, and other public entertainments. Every guild had
its own masters, councils, sheikhs, and internal political processes. Members
with complaints could go to guild officials the way modern industrial work-
ers go to their union reps (where unions still exist}. If necessary, guild offi-
cials represented their members in lawsuits and petitioned the state on
members' behal£ By the same token, the state regulated the guilds, imposing
standards of its own and controlling prices in the public interest.
Every craftsman belonged to a guild, and many guild members also be-
longed to some Sufi brotherhood that might cut across guild lines. The
brotherhoods generally had lodges where members could gather to social-
ize, not just with one another, but also with merchants and other travelers
passing through, for the akhi-Sufi lodges actively served as traveler's aid so-
cieties and hospitality centers.
This glimpse into the Ottoman social clockwork does not begin to ex-
haust its fractal intricacy: look closer and deeper into Ottoman society and
you'll see the same order of complexity at every level. Everything was con-
nected to everything else and connected in many ways, which was fine
when all the connections balanced out and all of the parts were working.
Centuries later, when the empire entered its decrepitude, all the intertwin-
ing parts and intermeshing institutions became a peculiarly Ottoman lia-
bility; their intricacy meant that trouble in one place or sphere translated
mysteriously to trouble in a dozen other places or spheres-but that came
later. In the sixteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was an awesomely
well-functioning machine.