The “Sunna-minded” Trend 273
God keeps, grants, expends, and sets prices, and I should like to find my-
self before my Lord without any of you complaining that he had been
wronged by me whether in his blood or in his money.Muhammad is also said to have stated that “prices depend upon the will of
Allah, it is he who raises and lowers them.”143 Of course, this anecdote gave a
strong ground to the Sunni jurists who categorically opposed price controls
in markets. Nevertheless, there were always “cases” in which jurists condoned
state intervention in market mechanisms, such as underselling and, especially,
hoarding, which many authors studied above abhorred. Departing from the
Hanafi doctrine they otherwise remained loyal to, the Ottomans were engaged
in complex narh practices from the very beginning.144 Additionally, the one
legal authority whom one would assume could influence the Shariatization
of the discourses on public administration the most actually offered the
most flexible and permissive views concerning the application of narh. In his
al-Hisbat fi al-Islam, Ibn Taymiyya condemned tas’ir but refused to make this
condemnation an absolute principle by systematic reference to the categorical
decision of the Prophet. Unlike the legal writers, who simply quoted the hadith
of Muhammad, Ibn Taymiyya devoted considerable energy to exploring the
context within which the Prophet’s decision was made, examining the condi-
tions that existed and had to be understood regarding that decision.145
At this point, attention should also be paid to the fact that the link between
Fazıl Mustafa’s action and his Sharia sensitivities was only made by contem-
porary historians, such as Defterdar Sarı Mehmed, who did not approve of the
policy. Moreover, the seventeenth-century texts did not offer any explicit doc-
trinal or moral stand concerning the application of narh. Kadızade Mehmed,
whom one may expect would take a strict stand against it, in fact condemned
the esnaf-turned janissaries who did not want any price controls.146 It was a
well-known Sufi intellectual from the turn of the century, İsmail Hakkı Bursevi
(1653–1724), who alone provided an argument on the issue. While initially he
seems to have objected to official price-fixing, he later justified it by referring
to the inequitable nature of the people of his time that made it necessary for
the authorities to intervene.147 The absence of any references to the Sharia as
grounds for Fazıl Mustafa’s elimination of narh, apart from in the accounts
143 Essid 1995, 152.
144 For narh regulations during the classical period see Kafadar 1986, 115–132.
145 Essid 1995, 165–167.
146 Öztürk 1981, 43.
147 Kafadar 1986, 136.