288 chapter seven
of the clerics, Ulama"in the affairs of government. The supporters
of the separation of religion and politics had become stronger, and the
application grew wider. During the wave of secularization that engulfed
the Islamic world in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
when secularization was deemed as a twin of modernisation the argu-
ment for the separation of religion and politics became crucial. It
was only in the late twentieth century, and particularly during and
after the Iranian revolution of 1978–79, when the world had come
to notice that the heads of state in Iran appeared in turbans and
black robes, mixing politics with religion, that the world had realised
that the demarcation line between Islam and politics had become
less visible. Encouraged by the Iranian example, the support for unit-
ing Islam and government re-emerged and grew stronger in different
parts of the Muslim world.
Intellectual and Socio-Economic Impediments
Although the Ottomans have left a considerable legacy in arts, archi-
tecture, and military endeavour, their legacy of Islamic economics
literature is rather limited. This is shown below
Islamic Economics Literature under the Ottomans
Compared with other aspects of development in architecture, work
of arts and military organisation, the attention paid to economic
thinking under the Ottomans was of a marginal nature. We could
hardly witness any particular socio-economic work or cultural activity
comparable to that of Muslim thinkers in the few preceding centuries.
The work of Ibn-Khaldùn, (1332–1404) and to a far lesser degree
that of al-Maqrizi after him (1364–1441), seemed to have stamped a
seal on the last of the great socio-economic works of Muslim thinkers.
The Ottoman Empire, it seems, had left very little legacy of a
specifically socio-economic nature. This is not to say that there were
not notable achievements by the writers of the period, there were, but
these mainly involved bibliographical works, biographies, compilation
and commentary works, as shown in the following examples (Hitti,
1963).
Hajji Khalifah (d. 1657), nicknamed by the Turks, Katib Chelebi
(the young scriber), who started his career as an army clerk, pro-
duced a major bibliographic work on names and titles, Kashf al-Zunùn
in al-Asàmi w-al-Funùn (removing the doubts related to names, titles,