Ilyas Çelebi “Firdevsi-yi Rumi” (fl. 1512) served primarily at the courts of Sultan Bayezid II (d. 1512) and Prince Korkud (d. 1513), authoring works of narrative history, elegiac poetry, gestes, and hagiography. In this paper, I will summarize what is known of his biography and analyze his presentation of Ottoman, Turkish, and Muslim identity. Firdevsi, a litterateur with a considerable sense of self, completed more than twenty works while serving at the apex of Ottoman cultural production. While very successful at attracting patronage and support for lengthy and ornate literary works, his oeuvre was mostly lampooned by those who followed in the decades after his death. Why would a writer who was so successful in his own lifetime be so reviled within a few decades of his death? Analyzing the political content and identity positions staked out by Firdevsi provides a tentative answer – societal views changed abruptly in the first tumultuous decades of the early 16th century. Firdevsi’s use of the term “Sunni” in his Qutb-name, explanation of Turkish conversion to Islam in his Süleyman-name, and portrayal of Anatolian Sufism in his Vilayet-name each provide clues as to why subsequent literary critics found his scholarship unreliable, his poetry unspeakable, and his views objectionable.

Many scholars have noted the remarkably diverse and fluid religious scene of the frontier regions in Anatolia within which the Ottomans emerged. as one of many Turco-Muslim principalities committed to ghaza, or holy war. Islam as a proselytizing religion in the early Ottoman milieu was comparatively more tolerant and embracive, represented by an assortment of Sufi orders and itinerant dervish groups, as well as the more orthodox-minded ulema. Sectarian boundaries were porous and adaptable, with mainstream Sunnism showing a relative receptivity to Shi‘i/Alid influences. In fact, it has been argued that the hallmark of the early Ottoman religious milieu was “metadoxy” defined as “a state of being beyond doxies, a combination of being doxy-naïve and not being doxy-minded.” However, the transformation of the Ottoman regime from a ghazi principality to one with an imperial vision in tandem with its emerging claim to the leadership of the Sunni-Muslim world (following its annexation of the Mamluk territories, including the two holy cities, Mecca and Medina, and its defeat of the Shi‘i Safavids) affected a gradual change of the Ottoman religious milieu from the “metadoxy” of the earlier centuries to the strident sectarianism of the 16th Century. A pivotal figure in this process was the famous sixteenth-century Ottoman sheikh ul-Islam, Ebussu‘ud, who is best-known for his synthesis of dynastic and religious law. This paper will argue that Ebussu‘ud, through his thousands of fatwas that were issued on a wide variety of topics, was in effect defining, and spelling out the boundaries of, Islamic orthodoxy, and thereby (re)inventing what might be called “Ottoman Sunnism.” What was distinct about this new Sunni synthesis? What were the ideological and material dynamics that played into its making? What were its fault lines and internal tensions? How successful was the state in enforcing this new orthodoxy? These are the questions that the proposed paper will address.

From the reign of Bayezid II (r. 1481-1512) onwards the persecution of Anatolian Qizilbash, varying in degree and intensity, seems to run like a red thread through the history of the Ottoman Empire until well into the seventeenth century. Imperial fermans to provincial administrators ordering the execution of everybody with the “stain” of having Qizilbash tendencies and of actually being Qizilbash were common phenomena by the time of Süleyman the Magnificent (r. 1520-1566), while the persecution of the Qizilbash often appears to have amounted to well-planned massacres. Perhaps the most significant persecution, however, seems to have happened under Selim I (r. 1512-1520) before the campaign that culminated in the Battle of Çaldiran (1514), when Selim’s order to his clerks to record the names of all Qizilbash sympathizers “between seven and seventy years of age” into defters was followed by their imprisonment or their execution by the sword. Why was the persecution of so many Qizilbash in Anatolia ordered? The simple answer, according to Ottoman chroniclers, is that Selim I wanted to avoid any possibility of resistance and revolt during his expedition against Shah Ismail, especially since he was aware of the extent of the Safavid influence in Anatolia, as exemplified by the Shahqulu Rebellion in 1511. There is little doubt, however, that the severity of the Ottoman response to the Qizilbash threat was related to something more than strategic military concerns. In my presentation, I will focus on the Ottoman response to the Shahqulu Rebellion and emphasize that it was in the aftermath of this particular rebellion that the Ottomans began to perceive the Qizilbash as the most significant threat to their social and religious order and initiated proactive and preemptive policies against the spread of Shi‘i Islam, in turn establishing the boundaries of an Ottoman understanding of Sunni Islam.

Up until now, the budding research on the nature of Ottoman Sunnitization (or Sunnification) has suggested in a rather unambiguous manner that starting in the early sixteenth century—brought on by the rising religio-political challenge of Shi’a Safavids as well as certain internal developments in the Ottoman realms—and stretching all the way through the seventeenth century, Ottoman political and religious elites, but also common people, put considerable effort into defining, defending and enforcing a Sunni orthodoxy and orthopraxy. However, this process did not take place in isolation from religio-political developments in other contemporary religious communities, both in the Ottoman Empire and beyond. Rather, as I argue, the Ottoman experience of Sunnitization was part of a broader “age of confessionalization” that affected both Europe and parts of the Middle East, including the Ottoman Empire. The paper will delve into the arena of Ottoman confessionalization, of which the articulation of a Sunni orthodoxy and orthopraxy was one aspect. It will provide some preliminary evidence on the dialogic dimension of this phenomenon, namely on how in certain parts of the Ottoman Empire—in this case Ottoman Rumeli—Catholic, Protestant, and Sunni Muslim confessionalizing initiatives met, grappled and potentially influenced each other in terms of strategies and genres of confessionalization. At the heart of the paper will be the catechetical literature, the Sunni Muslim ilm-i hals in Ottoman Turkish as well as catechisms in the vernaculars (often in translation from Latin) circulated in the borderlands between the Ottomans and the Venetians and the Ottomans and Habsburgs in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries.