Recently, Ottomanists have applied the confessionalization paradigm to the Ottoman sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and argued that the Ottoman Empire partook in the European confessionalization as the Ottoman court increasingly succumbed to an exclusive and aggressive interpretation of Sunni Islam. Accordingly, important developments of the period are interpreted as religiously motivated undertakings. Most recently, for instance, a historian called the Vienna campaign of 1683 the “failed final jihad.” The comparative use of the confessionalization paradigm in Ottoman historical context is welcome, but certain qualifications are in order. First, confessionalization is a well-documented theme in early modern Europe. Propaganda through written texts and hymns, preaching, censorship, and architecture were common across Europe during the age of confessionalization; together they reached to the effect of a widespread social phenomenon. In the Ottoman context, however, several narratives of conversion and catechisms, notwithstanding their significance, simply do not amount to a confessional age. Historians need many more and diverse evidences from across the empire to articulate an Ottoman confessionalization. Second, once such evidence is demonstrated, causal links have to be detected between decision-making processes and purported confessional movements. In confessional Europe hundreds of individuals affiliated with different denominations were actively involved in confessional policies of monarchs. In addition, in mainstream European historiography the age of confessionalization—along with absolutism and Enlightenment—are believed to have set the stage for the emergence of modern state. Accordingly, early modern states and churches have cooperated in strict observation of social and economic behaviors such as obedience to religious rules or payment of taxes. Over centuries, the ‘European master narrative’ continues, these obligations have gained fully secular character and sidelined divine duties, resulting in the emergence of centralized states. Thus, the confessionalization paradigm is one of the building-blocks of progressive European narrative. In Ottoman historical context, however, the concept has so far conveyed a pejorative tone. Negating its explicative origins, it is used to present the Ottoman Empire almost as a malevolent fanatical project. My paper is based on several seventeenth-century pamphlets and authoritative German and English publications on confessional Europe which are ignored by the proponents of Ottoman confessionalization. I emphasize historiographical problems arising from the direct transfer of confessionalization paradigm to the Ottoman historiography. I argue that the current use of the concept carries the risk of reorienting Ottoman historiography into another declinist and ‘neo-orientalist’ pattern.

There is a rooted understanding among historians that Ottoman Sunnism took its definitive shape as a result of the Empire’s confrontation with the non-Sunni Safavid dynasty as the latter emerged to be the ruling house in Persia. The problem of interpretation begins exactly at this point. A few specialists aside, İsmail Safevi’s Tabriz declaration of 1501 is regarded as Persia’ becoming, at least at the state level, Shiite. It is also taken for granted that Ottoman officials and clergy did not differentiate between Qizilbashism and Shiism. In this assumption, there are two serious mistakes that have come to be repeated over and over again, which I will address in my paper. The first one is that, despite İsmail’s declaring Twelver Shiism as the official sect, Persia as a state – including the Shah himself - remained unmistakably Qizilbash and not Shiite. The dynasty would turn to orthodox Twelver Shiism only with Shah Tahmasp during the 1530s, and to mark the clear difference between the two sects, Tahmasp would publicly repent from practices that the Qizilbash deemed licit. The Iranian state apparatus dominated by the Turkish military aristocracy, however, persisted in Qizilbashism and would become distinctly Shiite only during the seventeenth century. In the meanwhile, the Safavids’ Arab Shiite clergy imported from Ottoman Lebanon would systematically propagandize and publish against Qizilbashism, to the point that they would declare it as unbelief. The Ottomans, no less aware about the obvious difference between Qizilbashism and Shiism, reflected this awareness in the records they left behind. The anti-Safavid fatwas, treatises, and official correspondence are witnesses to this fact, as well as some valuable studies that are not as much referred to as they should be. Unlike what the historians came to take for granted, neither was the early Safavid state the Shiite polity it would come to be after the 1610s, nor did the Ottomans fail to mark this particularity. For the Sunni-Ottoman jurisprudents, Shiism was unorthodox but still within the circle of Islam, while Qizilbashism was not. Not a mere nuance, this classification had vital consequences in the realm of religion, law, and international relations. The revisions I offer to these assumptions by correcting an essential misunderstanding based on which the Ottomanists have deduced their interpretations will contribute to our understanding of Ottoman Sunnism.

Yazid b. Muawiyah is infamously known as the person behind the killing of Prophet Muhammad’s grandson Husayn and more than seventy accompanying people, most of whom were Muhammad’s descendants in 680. The succession conflict between Husayn’s father ‘Ali and Yazid’s father Muawiyah decisively divided the Muslim community along Sunni and Shiite sectarian lines. The murder of Husayn was the single most traumatic event in the history of Islamic sectarianism and is commemorated each year by the Shiites by extensive mourning rituals. Cursing Yazid had become a widespread practice since Husayn’s murder and a feature that showed one’s devotion to Shiism. Cursing was widespread among the Shiites and not unknown among the Sunnis throughout the medieval period. However, the medieval giant of Sunni thought, al-Ghazzali, who is said to revive the traditional teaching of Islam, discouraged Muslims from cursing Yazid, arguing that he was a practicing Muslim. Ghazzali and like-minded scholars saw Yazid only as a sinner, but still a true Muslim. As the upholders of Sunni orthopraxy, the Ottoman juriconsults such as Ebussuud also discouraged Muslims from this practice. Yet, were they successful in their attempts? How common was cursing Yazid among the Ottomans and what does it tell us about Ottoman Sunnism? In this paper, based on various historical and literary sources from the empire’s early years to mid-seventeenth century, through the lenses of conflicting readings of Yazid’s persona and acts, an attempt will be made to show multi-faceted, ambivalent, and often contradictory nature of Ottoman Sunnism. Rather than reducing Ottoman Sunnism to a narrow and unilateral interpretation, as has been conventionally done, this paper will point out to the strength and resilience of pro-Alid sentiments in the Ottoman Empire despite the continuous efforts of champions of Ottoman Sunni ideology.

Even though the literature on Ottoman religious culture has expanded and become more sophisticated lately,certain key assumptions remain. Foremost among these is the assumption that the more the society is penetrated by literate ‘ulama, the more bookish and neatly “Sunnitized” the community becomes. The positive correlation between religious literacy and standardized orthopraxy is more of a logical extrapolation than a historical reality. In this paper, I will illustrate how scholars and preachers perpetrated and defended an understanding of the ‘umma based not only on religious practice and doctrine, but on community. That is, the scholarly culture of religion allowed for deviations from legal formalities of Islam so long as the perpetrator of such deviation belonged to recognizable communities. Based on biographical and historical evidence, I will illustrate this less recognized approach to defining the Islamic community, hence drawing lines of inclusion and exclusion within the realm of orthodoxy. My aim is to call for a more complex understanding of social and religious norms and boundaries in the early modern age, and to emphasize their versatility.

In the sixteenth-century Ottoman Empire, a combination of Sunni piety and fiscal exigency led Şeyh ül-Islam Ebussuud Efendi to proclaim that he had reconciled the Ottoman kanun with sharia. As Colin Imber has shown, Ebussuud claimed an important legislative role for Sultan Suleyman by virtue of his claim to the caliphate. However, Imber and other scholars generally believe that the importance of kanun as a legal genre thereafter declined, and that Suleyman’s successors in the office of sultan did not perpetuate his claims of extensive legislative authority. One frequently cited reason for these developments is that the dynasty increasingly sought to project an image of orthodox Sunni piety, and that promulgating kanun was not consistent with an orthodox Sunni sensibility. My paper maintains that many of Suleyman’s successors claimed equal or even greater authority as legislators, and surprisingly, a number of jurists supported and facilitated their claims. Previous scholarship has shown that the Ottomans debated whether the kanun was a law that should be preserved as it had been set down by previous sultans, or whether the reigning sultan had the authority to change it. My research shows that a number of post-Suleyman sultans (and bureaucrats who served them) maintained that the sultan had the latter authority, at least where the land tenure law was concerned. A number of high-ranking jurists within the ilmiye supported this claim, as did some prominent jurists in the provinces. Rather than seeing the sultan’s legal powers as a threat to the practice of orthodox jurisprudence, these jurists extended the authority of the kanun by finding theoretical justifications for integrating land tenure kanun more coherently into the body of Hanafi fiqh. By integrating the sultan’s law into their fetvas, the jurists created an expectation that the sultan’s law was to be enforced by the ulema as vigilantly as the law they learned from books of fiqh. The paper supports the position that the Sunnism (and Hanifism) that the Ottomans practiced in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was increasingly penetrable to the temporal power of the sultan. The Islamic law that was practiced in the empire in these centuries built an increasingly institutionalized space for the sultan as legislator, creating a bridge with legal reform of the 19th century. While the Ottomans proclaimed their dedication to Sunnism in the early modern period, they also made significant changes to Sunni legal thought and practice in these centuries.