Ibn-i Kemal’s Confessionalism

and the Construction of an

Ottoman Islam

Nabil Al-Tikriti

The Safavid Challenge

Following several decades of intellectual ferment and ideological experimen-
tation, the Ottoman Empire faced a serious ideological challenge from an ag-
gressive and revolutionary Safavid movement around the turn of the sixteenth
century. Historians differ on the precise origin and date of this challenge, largely
because no single event has come to define it. The full story of the rise of the
Safavid movement is long, starting with a gradual and somewhat mysterious
evolution from a quiescent local Sufi order in the early fourteenth century to a
powerful revolutionary force by the middle of the fifteenth century. Two genera-
tions of Safavid-led uprisings in the 1460s and 1480s were soundly crushed by
sovereign dynasties in the Caucasus. However, by the next decade, the move-
ment rose to regional dominance as the sprawling Aqqoyunlu Empire unraveled
in the wake of several violent succession struggles. Once this revolutionary Sufi
movement took formal political power with its 1501 capture of Tabriz, Ottoman
officials were forced to take action to counter what had by then evolved into a
serious ideological threat.
While there is no consensus single event marking the culmination of this
Safavid challenge, several political tremors that most clearly marked the Otto-
man response to that challenge lie between the 1499 launching of the Safavid rev-
olution in Iran and the 1517 Ottoman conquest of Mamluk Egypt. During these
eighteen years marked by violent disruption and political instability throughout
the region, a confused, traumatized, and often displaced intelligentsia sorted
through the rubble of their common Turco-Mongol inheritance and launched
a brave new world, eventually culminating in the bitter Sunni-Shiɇi rivalry that
defined the early modern Ottoman and Safavid Empires and continues to mar
Middle Eastern politics today.

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