In its historical and juridical forms, caliphate and divine rule have been tightly bound with the person of the ruler. The caliph, as the leader of the Islamic world, was the descendant of the prophet through a chain of rulership as well as through descent from the same family. While mystical-theological notions of the caliphate allowed Ottoman sultans to circumvent the requirement of direct descent, the emphasis on the person of the ruler as the locus of moral perfection persisted in many political treatises. An important historical shift in Ottoman political thought occurred with the increasing bureaucratization of the empire as of the late sixteenth century. This shift resulted in the re-location of sovereignty and political supremacy from the dynasty to the establishment. Increasingly, Ottoman authors referred to the institutions and legal practices of the empire as the pillar of perfect rule. Arguably, one of the most noteworthy intellectual trends brought about by this change was a two-tiered division of caliphate: formal and spiritual. This paper investigates a Sufi exposition of the two-partite idea of caliphate though the work of a widely read Mawlawi author, ?smail Ankaravi (d.1631). Ankaravi’s work interprets authority through notions of caliphate, and through various narratives of rulership. An important narrative positioned the ruler as a transient stranger who stumbled upon rule by chance, and similarly left the throne by chance, while his court remained unfazed by his comings and goings. Through these motifs, I study how ?smail Ankaravi conceptualized just rule as enduring and eternal, regardless of the person of the ruler. In addition, I analyze the readership of ?smail Ankaravi and show the prominence of the scribal class among his readers. I discuss the potential appeal of Ankaravi’s discussion of impersonal rule for his particular audience of readers.

This paper examines hagiographic literature as the principal medium of political discourse among Ottoman Sufis from the fourteenth through the sixteenth centuries. Since the inception of the Ottoman State, Sufi orders that expanded in Western Anatolia and the Balkans, whether in competion against the political order or in alliance with it, prefered to articulate their political ideals mainly in the form of hagiographic accounts of their master Sufis. These Sufi orders profiled their founding figures as patron saints, protectors, dispensors of power and authority, or even de facto rulers of the world beyond and above the Ottoman order. While some positioned themselves against the Ottoman rulership in outright defiance, some assumed a special attachment to and right over the Ottoman dynasty and the territories it ruled over. As expounded in hagiographies, Sufistic notions of authority rested on the cosmological assumption that the management of visible (material) and invisible (spiritual) worlds are inherently separate. In this dualistic view of the world, the Sufis demarcated the spiritual as their own reserve of authority, in competition with one another, with the claim that it rests above the material order. Apart from the theoretical expositions of mystical political views, hagiographies helped create an imagined reality that became part of Ottoman worldview among the ruling elite. More specifically, mystical visions of rulerships, whether framed in the vocabulary of messianism, axis mundi, or the caliphate not only transformed the way Ottoman caliphate was conceptualized but also made the rulership of spiritual space an integral part of it.

A Seventeenth-Century Melami Take on Caliphate: Sari Abdullah Efendi (d. 1660) and his Advice Manuals Sari Abdullah Efendi (d. 1660) an early seventeenth-century Ottoman chief scribe was also one of the most renowned Sufi intellectuals of his time and a famous Mesnevi commentator. This paper focuses on two works which are attributed to Sari Abdullah Efendi. The first one, "The Advice to Rulers in Anticipation of Good Ways" addressed the young Ottoman sultan Mehmed IV a year into his reign and aimed at -as the author puts it- protect statesmen from engaging in oppression and making mistakes. The other advice work includes selections from the Ibn Arabi corpus, primarily the Futuhat. In these works which can be categorized as the specimens of Ottoman advice literature, Sari Abdullah Efendi builds an ontological landscape where he tackles with various questions of belief, existence, piety, knowledge and politics. This paper first seeks to locate Sari Abdullah Efendi’s formulation of caliphate in the long genealogy of what has been recently called as “the mystical turn” in Ottoman political thought. It will also address questions as to how caliphate was envisioned in parallel ontological spheres, how different levels of spiritual knowledge and power corresponded with one another and under what kind of circumstances the requirements of caliphate were fulfilled. On this last question, the paper will emphasize Sari Abdullah Efendi’s unique conceptualizations such as reis-i melamiyye (“the melami chief”), zahir hilafet (known caliphate) and batin hilafet (esoteric caliphate). By transporting such Melami-oriented ideas and concepts dating from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, Sari Abdullah offered an alternative to the Sharia-infused vocabulary created by its highly confessionalized politics.

Ottoman conceptions of rule in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries have most frequently been cast in relation to the Ottoman sultans’ activities as preeminent warriors of the faith (gazis). This focus is entirely justified, and, no doubt, expansion of the domains of Islam constituted an important aspect of Ottoman ideology in this period. And yet, in the sixteenth century, an alternative conception concurrently emerged that emphasized the cosmically ordained status of sultans as universal sovereigns. Significantly, this new vocabulary of sovereignty was shared by all of the major Muslim empires of the sixteenth century. This presentation will examine why the Ottomans adopted this new vocabulary in the sixteenth century and what broader processes facilitated its adaptation from a wider cultural context that stretched between the Balkans and north India. Central to the adoption of this new vocabulary among the Ottomans was the appeal of skilled Persian emigre scholar-secretaries who offered their Ottoman patrons a conception of sovereignty grounded in the cosmological and Sufi-theosophical legitimating discourses that had developed in Persianate lands since the time of Timur (d. 1405). Over the course of the fifteenth century, such discourses were most frequently articulated, presented, and discussed in the appropriately florid and refined style of Persian prose historical writing and circulated broadly across Islamic lands through the movement of Persian secretaries from one court to another. In this manner, the new fifteenth-century discourses of sovereignty eventually came to be thoroughly embraced by the Ottomans in the sixteenth. This presentation considers these broader processes by focusing on the impact of emigre Persian secretaries and their work—including the histories, political treatises, and diplomatic correspondence that they composed—upon Ottoman ideological sensibilities in the first decades of the sixteenth century. While more often than not these emigres were subsequently marginalized and forgotten by their Ottoman colleagues, the political concepts they pioneered and the stylistic approach they insisted upon were taken up enthusiastically by later generations of Ottoman intellectuals and secretaries alike.

At some point between June 1509 and his death in February 1513, the Ottoman royal Sehzade Korkud completed an Arabic legal manual attempting to clarify what he considered doctrinally correct allocation of human and material plunder in a theater of war. Entitled Hall ishkal al-afkar fi hill amwal al-kuffar (A Solution for Intellectual Difficulties Concerning the Proper Disposal of Infidel Properties), the text appears to have had two primary purposes: to rationalize property allocation among victorious participants in the ghaza’ military economy, and to define licit sexual relations with concubines and captives. Korkud’s text can be read as an attempt to fit an evolving imperial law of war into older shari‘a norms of conquest administration. While the manual’s legal scholarship falls squarely within the Shafi‘i tradition of siyar (campaign rules) literature, at the time it provided a fresh synthesis of older rulings answering to particularly Ottoman concerns. One of the key claims Korkud made was the decisive role agents of the imam must play in adjudicating, taxing, and allocating both human and material plunder. Ensuring that the imam’s fifth is properly administered, implicitly by Ottoman state officials, provided a religio-political case for imperial control over the ghaza’ economy, as well as over other issues related to the laws of war and taxation. In light of caliphal titulature periodically floated during Bayezid II’s reign, Hall ishkal al-afkar predicated itself on Ottoman justifications for universal rule as the caliphal authority. Demonstrating the continuing relevance of such siyar campaign literature, in 2013 a small Istanbul press, ISAR, published a scholarly introduction, full Turkish translation, and complete facsimile of Hall ishkal al-afkar. With this paper, I shall attempt to situate this text within its broader Ottoman and Islamic context, as well as suggest possible connections between this text and recent allegations of regulated sexual slavery by Da‘sh in Iraq and Syria.