The biography of the Prophet Mummad (sira) of the fourteenth-century Ottoman scholar Mustafa Darir stands as the most widely read biography of Muhammad in the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman sultan Murad III (r. 1574-95) commissioned an illustrated version of this work in the late sixteenth century. With its more than 800 miniatures, the resulting illuminated manuscript is rightly considered the quintessence of Ottoman miniature art. However, not much is known about the text of this work. Darir’s sira was a re-rendering of the sira of the mysterious thirteenth-century scholar Abu Hasan al-Bakri, who was known to have Shiite sympathies. Indeed, a close reading of Darir’s work reveals a reverence for Ali almost equal to that shown for Muhammad. Why and how did the Ottoman sultan, a supposed champion of Sunnism, come to commission a work with marked Shiite sympathies, and why and how did it become so popular? In an effort to answer these questions, this paper examines the text of Darir’s sira to highlight its Alid features. In addition, I discuss the wider phenomenon of reverence for Ali and other members of the Prophet’s family – what I call ahl al-baytism –in the Ottoman intellectual world of the sixteenth century. I argue that Ottoman spiritual attitudes were characterized far more by confessional ambiguity and ahl-al-baytism than by rigid confessional boundaries.

The Safaviyya sufi order completed its crystallization from a mystical group into a religio-political movement under the banner of the Safavid state at the turn of the sixteenth century. Under the leadership of Sheikh Haydar (d. 1488), the group developed a distinctive identifier in the form of a twelve-gored crimson headpiece symbolizing the adherents’ allegiance to the Twelve Shi‘ite Imams and to the Safavid sheikhs/shahs as their spiritual leaders. This twelve-folded piece of felt, or kızıl taj/tac, gradually became a source of pride and honor, as well as a mark of religious and political loyalty among the followers and sympathizers of the Safavid movement, called Kızılbaş, most of whom were inhabitants of Ottoman Anatolia. Conventional Ottomanist scholarship has defined “Kızılbaş” within a narrow ethno-religious framework, according to which one inherited his/her Kızılbaş identity, often against his/her will. This position reflects the fact that the early modern Ottoman legal establishment assumed that each Kızılbaş mentioned in official Ottoman sources was a “heretic” and thus rationalized persecution of the empire’s largest Muslim minority. This study argues that Ottoman sources use the term “Kızılbaş” in a far more nuanced and varied fashion. For instance, while the term was used rather literally up until the late fifteenth-early sixteenth centuries, later Ottoman sources made a clear distinction between Kızılbaş-born subjects of the empire, Kızılbaş converts, and the Kızılbaş subjects of the Safavid Empire. In the following centuries, the term acquired different symbolic, geographical, and political meanings, reflecting the Ottoman central authority’s relationship with the Safavid polity and/or the issues of taxation and migration. By the nineteenth century, it had become a derogatory term for the Turkish/Kurdish-speaking Shi‘ite community in Ottoman Anatolia. For this study, I examine Ottoman Turkish government decrees, Muslim law court registers, and court chronicles produced between the 1480s and the 1750s, taking account of their rhetorical qualities and the contexts in which they were produced. Exploring these often-neglected variances in the meaning of the term “Kızılbaş” reveals that fluid cultural, religious, regional, and political identities were attached to the term in the early modern era. Awareness of this reality is essential to understanding the Ottoman state’s relationship to a key group of its subjects, and the broader question of the formation of religio-political identities and loyalties in the early modern era.

The question of whether one can define the parameters of a Sunni Muslim form of “orthodoxy” poses significant theoretical difficulties for researchers of the pre-modern world. Since the very notion of “orthodox” carries implications of power and control imposed from specific perspectives in given times and places, modern historians and social scientists rightly question whether the idea can serve any useful purpose in evaluating the historical trajectory of Muslim societies. However, intra-Muslim debates over these issues often impose themselves on scholarship regardless of these debates, both in earlier periods and the present. Ideas that might have seemed perfectly legitimate for Sunni thinkers of the late medieval and early modern world may look strange or unintelligible at best, and deviant at worst when evaluated in a more recent contemporary context. This paper aims to examine two such works and their authors, and attempt to evaluate how they fit into their own historical time and place as representative of Ottoman Sunnism. The first author, Cemal el-Halveti (d. 1499), was one of the founding figures of the Halveti order, first in its eastern frontier regions, and later in the Ottoman capital under Sultan Bayezid II. His relationship with the highest levels of political power, coupled with his descent from a well-regarded family of pious Muslim intellectuals, appear to make him an ironclad representative of the Sunni Muslim consensus of his time. Yet reading his most widely-circulated religious tract suggests that he was seeking to reinterpret basic elements of Sunni Muslim praxis along deeply esoteric and mystical lines. The second, Karabaş `Ali Veli (d. 1686), brought the Kastamonu-based Halveti branch of the Şa`baniyye order out of its provincial context and establishing it in Istanbul. But his most extensive work, a commentary on Ibn al-`Arabi entitled Kashf asrar al-fusus (“Unveiling of the secrets of the Fusus [al-hikam]”) and its abridgments, come across as almost unintelligible in a contemporary era, and there are signs that `Ali’s own followers and contemporaries questioned him as well. Ultimately, these case studies point toward a process of ongoing negotiations marked by generational changes and experimentation with different religious ideas within the context of Ottoman Sunnism.

This contribution explores the attitudes of el-Hajj Beshir Agha (term 1717-46), the most powerful Chief Harem Eunuch in Ottoman history, toward Sufism and Shi‘ism, with a view toward placing his predilections in historical context while gauging the representativeness of his attitudes and their effects on Ottoman society. The chief sources for this study are the deeds (singular, waqfiyya) of Beshir Agha’s pious endowments and select Ottoman chronicles composed during his lifetime. Beshir Agha’s affinity for “mainstream” Sufism centered on membership in a Sufi order (tarīqa) is evident from his endowments in Istanbul. His religious complex (külliye) outside Istanbul’s Topkapı Palace includes a lodge (tekke) for Sufis of the Naqshbandi order, which was well-established in the Ottoman Empire, although by the early eighteenth century, it was arguably more popular in the Ottoman Arab provinces than in the empire’s central lands. Southwest of his complex, in Istanbul’s Koca Mustafa Pasha neighborhood, Beshir Agha funded renovations to the tomb of Sünbül Efendi (d. 1529), an influential shaykh of the Khalwati (Halveti) Sufi order, which was one of the most widespread and popular in the Ottoman Empire, with branches in the capital and virtually every province. The impression of Sufi affinities is reinforced by the book catalogue from the library at Beshir Agha’s religious complex, which lists numerous mystical works. In contrast, Beshir Agha’s attitude toward Shi‘ism, particularly Twelver Shi‘ism as practiced in Safavid Iran, was uncompromisingly hostile. The endowment for a dār al-hadīth, or school for the study of sayings of the Prophet Muhammad, that he founded in Medina insists that students must be bachelors from Anatolia and stipulates that Shi‘ites – called revāfiz, or “heretics,” in the document – must not be admitted, along with Persians in general, North Africans, and Indians. This antagonism toward Iranian-style Twelver Shi‘ism appears again in accounts of Beshir Agha’s intervention in Ottoman negotiations with Nadir Shah, the Safavid revivalist who conquered parts of Ottoman Iraq in the 1740s. According to a contemporary chronicler, Beshir angrily rejected Nadir’s proposal that the Ottomans accept Twelver Shi‘ism as a fifth Sunni legal rite (madhhab). Overall, Beshir Agha’s attitudes reflect the rapprochement between tarīqa Sufism and Sunni orthodoxy that had emerged in Ottoman society by the mid-eighteenth century, as well as the ongoing polarization between Ottoman Sunnism and Iranian Shi‘ism – a polarization that was, however, more geo-political than doctrinal in nature.