102 | Ibn-i Kemal’s Confessionalism
in imperial registers. While these figures were meant to satisfy norms of liter-
ary convention rather than statistical accuracy and no such archival register has
yet surfaced for this particular outbreak of state persecution, this statement does
point to mass violence carried out by the Ottoman military against the Kızılbaş ҕ
population—legally justified by Ibn-i Kemal’s treatise. Without his sanction, au-
thorities may have found it more difficult to justify such a campaign against their
own population. Lingering effects of these massacres continue to bedevil Turkish
society today. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s announcement in May
2013, the five hundredth anniversary of these massacres, that Istanbul’s third
Bosphorus bridge would be named after Yavuz Selim, the sultan who directed
the massacres, was one of the frequently cited complaints raised during the wide-
spread urban protests that broke out a month later.
By classifying certain communal acts of rebellion as signs of nonbelief, Otto-
man scholars such as Ibn-i Kemal effectively defined an entire segment of society
as apostates liable to summary capital punishment and found a way to enforce
social conformity on a wide scale. This suppression of entire populations in ac-
cordance with the premise that each member of the communities in question was
guilty of apostasy due to communal acts constituting external signs of internal
apostasy appears to have been an Ottoman innovation:
Accounts have abounded and reports have proliferated in the lands of Mus-
lims and regions of Believers that a Shiɇi sect has triumphed over numerous
territories among the lands of Sunnis until their invalid ways emerged, so that
insulting Īmām Abū Bakr, Īmām ɇUmar, and Īmām ɇUthmān (may God’s ap-
proval be upon them all together) manifested itself. They were renouncing the
caliphate of the righteous caliphs and the rightly guided imams. They dis-
dained the sharia and its people. They insulted the legal experts, with some of
them claiming that conduct in line with the legal experts’ way is not without
hardship, while conduct in line with the path of their head and leader, whose
name is Shah Ismail, is full of ease, and its result beneficial. They also claim
that whatever the Shah permits is permissible, and whatever the Shāh outlaws
is illicit. As the Shāh permitted wine, it became permissible. Altogether, in-
deed all sorts of their aforementioned apostasy have spread among us so that
what enrages is uncountable and innumerable. We have no doubt about their
apostasy and renunciation, that their abode is an abode of war, and that the
marriage of their boys and girls is invalid, such that each one of their chil-
dren is to be considered a bastard without remedy. If one of them should fall
dead, he should be considered [canonically] slaughtered. Whoever wears their
distinctive red turban without any compulsion generally possesses the taint
of apostasy, and if that one is openly among the leadership of apostasy and
heterodoxy, then their judgment is to be one of the apostates’ rulings. Should
they take over their cities, they become an abode of war, so that their pos-
sessions, women, and children become licit for Muslims. As for their men,
it becomes a duty to kill them, unless they accept Islam. A conquest renders