134. Karen ArmstrongOttoman-ulama alliance, made it clear that the qadis derived
their authority from the sultan, the guardian of the Shariah,
and were therefore bound to apply the law according to his
directives. Thus the Shariah was made to endorse the system
of absolute monarchy (now more powerful than ever before)
which it had been originally designed to oppose.
The Shii ulama of Iran had broken free of the state, and
had won the support of the people. Many of the Iranian
ulama would become committed reformers and were able to
provide the people with effective leadership against despotic
shahs. A significant number would be open to the democratic
and liberal ideas of the modern period. But in the Ottoman
Empire the ulama would become emasculated; deprived of
their political edge, they became conservative and opposed
any change. After Suleiman's reign, the curriculum of the
madrasahs became narrower: the study of Falsafah was
dropped in favour of a greater concentration on fiqh. The Is-
lamic stance of the Ottoman Empire, a huge ghazi state, was
communalist and sectarian. Muslims felt that they were the
champions of orthodoxy against infidels who pressed on all
sides. The ulama and even the Sufis imbibed this ethos, and
when the empire began to show the first signs of weakness,
this tendency became even more marked. Where the court
was still open to the new ideas coming from Europe, the
madrasahs became centres of opposition to any experimenta-
tion that derived from the European infidels. The ulama op-
posed the use of printing for Islamic books, for example.
They turned away from the Christian communities in the
empire, many of whom were looking eagerly towards the
new West. The ulama's influence with the people coloured
major sectors of Ottoman society, making them resistant to
the idea of change at a time when change was inevitable. Left
behind in the old ethos, the ulama would become unable to
help the people when Western modernity hit the Muslim
world, and they would have to look elsewhere for guidance.