Khaldunist Philosophy: Innovation Justified 321

and profiteers and, in the end, have nothing to show for it but committing a
great sin.
Na’ima seems somewhat reluctant to adopt this perspective. He hastens to
note that some treatises on morality consider commerce and agriculture total-
ly prohibited for rulers, viziers, governors, and administrators. Such texts argue
that occupation with such work is only for inferior people, since administra-
tors who practise them in order to amass wealth prevent others from doing
the same, thus making them oppressors. If they constantly trade to procure
indispensable luxury goods then they forget the virtues of generosity and be-
come stripped of their humanity. So, Na’ima concludes, it is much better for
magnates, after they have taken care of their household, to spend their revenue
on generous acts of piety and charity. However, it is to be noted that he gener-
ally seems positive, or at least more neutral than his predecessors, about Derviş
Mehmed Pasha’s practices (whom, at any rate, he judges rather favorably).

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If we are to summarize Na’ima’s theory, then we can say that it is an extension
of Kâtib Çelebi’s vision of the human body as a parable for the state-society
continuum combined with a fully-fledged adaptation of Ibn Khaldun’s ideas
about the laws of historical decline, on which he carefully comments while
stressing the particularities of the Ottoman case. If Kâtib Çelebi had seen the
threat to the welfare of the state in the growing power of the janissaries, leav-
ing aside the until-then dominant defense of the timar system, Na’ima in his
time had every reason to avoid such criticisms: by the end of the seventeenth
century, the janissary corps, far from being a simple military group, had en-
compassed much of the artisanal and small trader groups (either by letting
them into the janissary ranks or by the janissaries themselves taking up mar-
ket and trading activities) and was a major player in imperial politics. Writing
in the aftermath of the 1688 rebellion and on the eve of that of 1704, Na’ima
did his best to emphasize the dangers lurking in both the unlimited growth of
janissary power and too harsh and violent an effort to curb it.
It is significant that Na’ima inserts his own medical similes concerning the
peasants and the merchants in order to stress that none of them should enjoy
“excessive luxury”. This emphasis on balance between the four classes had been,
as noted previously, a constant feature of Ottoman political thought ever since
Amasi, although all Ottoman authors up to his time, without exception, had
used the notion only against the army. It was, they believed, the military that
should be checked, since its excessive growth was harmful to the other class-
es. Na’ima, therefore, was the first to use balance and the theory of the body