96 | Ibn-i Kemal’s Confessionalism
After the Safavids launched their revolution in 1499, a decadelong drive to
consolidate power throughout Iran, the Caucasus, eastern Anatolia, and Iraq
followed. This first milestone itself reflected the culmination of a long struggle
whereby the Safavid Sufi order finally emerged victorious from the third bloody
civil war in as many generations dating back to the 1460s and converted itself
into one of the three great gunpowder empires under Shah Ismail (r. 1501–1524).
Under Safavid leadership, after several decades of state encouragement, Iran was
gradually converted from a religiously heterodox Sunni majority population in
1499 to a majority Imami Shiɇi population a century later. This transformation
was so dislocating that it instigated the flight of several notable Iranian intellec-
tuals to neighboring lands, violent suppression of nearly all rival Sufi orders in
Iran, and emigration of several prominent Lebanese Shiɇi ulema families to Iran.
The Safavids’ coming to power was equally portentous for the Ottomans, as it
led to an influx of Iranian refugees, set up an imperial rivalry that was to define
most of the next two centuries, and drove their own imperial self-definition as a
Sunni empire.
The early Ottomans exhibited no clear view on collective religious identity,
with their broad ambivalence about religion usually taken to signify a Sunni ori-
entation. If this is so, however, they appear to have meant something different
by the term “Sunni” at the turn of the sixteenth century. Uzun Firdevsī (fl. 1512),
when praising the Ottoman victory over a European alliance in 1501, referred to
all Muslims as “Sunnis,” contrasted them against the heathen Franks, praised
several historical figures identified with Shiɇism, and made no mention whatso-
ever of any Shiɇi group. Firdevsī’s use of the term “Sunni” to refer to all Muslims
within one to two years of the Safavids’ coming to power no longer rang true
once the Ottoman-Safavid rivalry came to divide the central Islamic world into
Sunni and Shiɇi camps.
A tendency toward a relatively ill-defined spiritual legitimation of Ottoman
sovereignty had tentatively begun to grow more pronounced during the reign of
Bayezid II (r. 1481–1512), who cultivated an image of personal piety and devotion,
publicly patronized the Halveti Sufi order, and was referred to in at least one
panegyric as the holder of the “throne of the caliphate.” Bayezid II’s posthumous
nickname was “Velī” (saint, friend of God), a descriptive title normally used in
reference to sacred personalities who played key roles in the foundation myths
of Sufi mystical orders. Whether this use of Velī was meant as an honorific or
a somewhat cynical nickname, its use records the regnal impression left by his
personality on the Ottoman imagination. Other famous posthumous nicknames
that demonstrate this Ottoman memorialization of regnal personalities include
“Yıldırım” (lightning bolt) for Bayezid I, “Fātiত” (conqueror) for Mehmed II,
“Yavuz” (wicked, bold) for Selim I, and “Kānūnī” (lawgiver) for Süleyman I. ҕ
While Bayezid’s officials did attempt to mobilize spiritual imagery to buttress