With over a hundred works, the Sufi Ismail Hakki Bursevi (1653-1725) ranks as one of the most prolific Ottoman authors of all time. Among his writings, there are about a dozen that he composed as gifts (tuhfe) for individuals. Bursevi dedicated a significant number of these writings to high-level Ottoman officials, including the Grand Vizier Çorlulu Ali Paşa, the head of the palace school Seyyid Ahmed Vesîm Aga, the chief haseki Tûbâzâde Mehmed Aga and the governor of Damascus Receb Paşa. The form and content of the tuhfes displays a considerable diversity: the treatises include Qur’anic exegesis and hadith quotations, Ottoman, Persian, and Arabic poetry, the author’s analysis of current events, and discussions on Islamic theology and metaphysics, among others. In this talk, I will examine the ways in which Bursevi employs metaphysics across the Tuhfe-i ‘Aliye, Tuhfe-i Hasekiye, and Tuhfe-i Vesîmiye to comment indirectly on the decreasing influence of the Sultan in internal affairs, which became particularly pronounced after 1703 when a janissary revolt led to the deposition of Mustafa III in favor of Ahmet III. In the two decades following the coup, Bursevi composed several tuhfe works in which he comments on the political marginalization of the sultan through a complex metaphysical system. In particular, he portrays key positions in the Ottoman bureaucracy as the loci of manifestation of the different names of God (esma-i husna). I will examine how Bursevi employs this metaphysical system to portray the growing influence of the Grand Vizier and palace courtiers vis-à-vis the Ottoman sultan and lament the increasing decentralization of religious authority leading to what he perceives as a dangerous decline in the social and political influence of Sufis. Bursevi’s simultaneous legitimation of the growing power of Ottoman courtiers and subtle criticism of the establishment for forgoing Sufis’ guidance is an important example of the complex discursive practices that elite mystics in the early-modern period employed towards maintaining their status and privilege as the main pillars of Ottoman religious authority.

As Sufi travelers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries peregrinated about the well-protected (and, as the case often enough was, not so-well-protected!) domains of the Ottoman sultan, they encountered many different representatives of political power, encounters which they often then recorded in their travel narratives. The records of these encounters often provide excellent insights into both the performance of political power ‘on the ground’ in places central and not-so-central in the Ottoman realms, as well as the diverse ways in which Sufi shaykhs interacted with political power and performed or questioned their own identity as Ottoman subjects and political actors in their own right. My paper focuses on the interactions and self-presentation of one such traveler, the Kurdish Sufi shaykh Taha ibn Yaḥya al-Kurdī (1723-1800), who traveled extensively in his native Kurdish regions as well as in Syria, Palestine, and the Hijaz, before settling down in Damascus. Drawing primarily upon his multifaceted riḥla, with similar writings by other Sufi travelers of the period providing contextualization and contrast, I explore his encounters with various representatives of (sometimes ambiguously) Ottoman political power, focusing on the varying dynamics of these encounters and the rhetorical work Taha al-Kurdī makes of such interactions in shaping his autobiographical image. I contrast his encounters with Ottoman political actors, on the one hand, with his engagement with the saintly people he encounters on his travels, demonstrating Taha al-Kurdī’s drawing of overlapping, but sometimes uncomfortable and dangerous, geographies of Ottoman political power (and absence of power) concurrent with the geographies (physical, textual, and spiritual) of the saintly Ottoman men and women inhabiting the same or similar spaces. Finally, I argue for Taha al-Kurdī’s own performance of an ambiguous Ottoman identity, manifest in terms of linguistics, devotion, social networks, and the very physical routes he took, within an empire that was at once unitary and decentralized and precarious, tensions that Taha al-Kurdī himself felt, embodied, and textually reproduced.

The Zeyniye ?eyh in Istanbul, Müslihuddin Mustafa (d. 1491), also known as ?eyh Vef?, became an important political figure at the Ottoman imperial court in the second half of the fifteenth century. ?eyh Vef? did not only influence contemporary intellectuals, his prestige and teachings also gained him the support and respect of important statesmen, including the grand vizier Karamani Mehmed Pasha, and the sultan himself, Mehmed II. Among his many followers, Veliyüddin Ahmed Pa?a (d. 1497), scholar and court poet, composed a series of panegyrics in praise of the ?eyh and the dervishes. In this paper, I explore Ahmed Pa?a's verses as an attempt to present a normative description of the role that the Zeyniye order had at the Ottoman court as well as the importance of its ?eyh. I argue that Ahmed Pa?a used panegyric poetry as a means to negotiating political support from the ?eyh and his order. Indeed, the public act of allegiance that was the composing of a poem in praise of a contemporary polit?cal figure other than the sultan allows us to map the creation of support networks at the imperial court. To this end, I focus on the tensions between the various descriptions of the dervishes and ?eyh Vef?'s social qualities in these poems, and show how poetic composition was an active political act with the capacity of establishing networks of support between religious scholars,

Yahya Efendi was an Ottoman religious scholar, a Sufi master, and a poet during the reign of Kanûnî Sultan Süleyman and Selim II. Yahya’s father Ömer Efendi was a town judge in Trabzon where Yahya Efendi and Süleyman I were born one after another in one week in 1494. Because Yahya’s mother was Süleyman’s wet-nurse, the two established close relations from childhood. Yahya for the same reason enjoyed a connection with the Ottoman court. Yahya left Trabzon for Constantinople to continue his formal education and fulfill his traditionally-forty-day solitary retreat, or çile. Afterwards, Yahya completed his education under Zenbilli Ali Efendi’s supervision. As a teacher, Yahya went by the name “Molla Sheikhzade” at Sahn-ı Seman medrese, the highest educational facility built in 15th century. Yahya Efendi’s formal education was primarily religious. However, being Süleyman’s milk brother, he had good relations with literary circles in Constantinople. He wrote poetry and prose, and his prose included mostly instructional Sufi parables. His magnum opus, titled simply Divan, was primarily written in verse. During his lifetime, Yahya Efendi was recognized as a leading light of 16th century Ottoman society. He fell from that position, however, after criticizing Süleyman’s attitude toward his son Şehzade Mustafa’s death. Süleyman sent Yahya away on a humble pension. Yahya continued his criticism of high officials like Rüstem Pasha and Sokullu Mehmet Pasha. He spent the rest of his life in Beşiktaş, where he played a major role in the conversion of non-Muslims and giving sermons. He was buried around 1571 in Beşiktaş. Yahya Efendi underwent a significant transformation in his career as a medrese teacher to a Sufi sheikh. This paper illustrates that transformation through analysis of Yahya Efendi’s conversion narratives, social composition, and his mobility within the bounds of his patronage under Süleyman. Yahya’s transformation naturally had political aspects as well, clearly visible in how Yahya’s opinions of Ottoman bureaucracy became entirely negative. I trace these developments with a prosopographical approach and analyze the relations between Yahya Efendi, Süleyman, Şehzade Mustafa, and Selim II. This approach helps us to observe the negotiation tools that Yahya Efendi used to envision Ottoman sultans, while endorsing—or criticizing—Ottoman internal and foreign policies.