Ottoman Islam

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The term Ottoman Islam was coined in Ottoman studies to describe a special Islamic school of law developed in the Ottoman Empire . A branch of Sunni Islam of the Hanafi school of law developed from the early 16th century under the rule of the Ottoman sultans into the state religion of the Ottoman Empire. Contemporary authors refer to the Ottoman legal scholars as " Rūmi ḫānāfi ( Hanafis of Rūm [= of the Ottoman Empire]), ʿulamā'-ı rūm (scholarship of Rūm) or ʿulamā 'al-dawla al-ʿUthmaniyyā (scholarship of the Ottoman Empire)".

Abu Hanifa's tomb shrine in Baghdad

Ottoman Muftis and the Şeyhülislam

After the conquest of Constantinople, Mehmed II founded Islamic universities , the sahn-ı şeman or "eight universities", in which legal scholars were trained. Since the conquest of the Egyptian Mamluk Sultanate in 1517, it has been documented how the Ottoman state went over to prefixing traditional Islamic scholars with its own hierarchy of "imperial scholars". The muftis no longer received the permission to independently find standards and to prepare legal opinions ( fetva ) from their respective teachers, as was previously the case, but were employed and paid by the state. The authority to pronounce fetvas presupposes the appointment of the sultan; In the 17th century, the chronicler al-Hamawi used the expression "sultanic mufti" (al-ifta 'al-sultani) to denote the officially appointed leadership. The Şeyhülislam in Istanbul became the supreme Islamic legal scholar and head of scholarship . Through these state-paid religious officials, the sultan was able to exert greater influence over the ʿUlamā ' , although he himself remained subject to Sharia law according to Islamic legal understanding. In the event of unwelcome decisions, the sultan could simply replace the officials with others. Even the Şeyhülislam was dependent on the Sultan; his office, like that of the muftis, is called “service” ( Turkish hizmet ) or “rank” ( Turkish rütbe or paye ) to which the candidate is appointed or raised. Occasionally the sultans took advantage of their power: in 1633 Sultan Murad IV had Şeyhülislam Ahīzāde Ḥüseyin Efendi executed, in 1656 Şeyhülislam Ḥocazāde Mesʿud Efendi was sentenced to death by Sultan Mehmed IV .

Sources from the 15th and 16th centuries

Symbolic appropriation of historical figures

Ottoman chroniclers such as Ibn Zunbul report that after the conquest of Constantinople in 1453 , Mehmed the Conqueror allegedly rediscovered the tomb of Abū Aiyūb al-Ansārī , one of the companions of the Prophet Mohammed, who died there in the 7th century while trying to conquer Constantinople . In 1516 the discovery and Ottoman occupation of the Sufi master Muhyī d-Dīn Ibn ʿArabī in Al-Salihiyya, a suburb of Damascus , was celebrated at great expense. Sultan Selim I , the conqueror of Syria and Egypt, ordered the restoration of the tomb and the construction of a mausoleum complex. In 1535, Ottoman troops under Sultan Suleyman I (r. 1520–1566) conquered Baghdad . Thus, within a period of twenty years, all the centers of the eastern parts of the Arabic-speaking world had come into Ottoman hands. The conquest of Baghdad was also of particular importance because the founder and namesake of the Hanafi school of law , Abū Hanīfa (d. 767), was buried here. Chroniclers of the 16th and 17th centuries emphasized the symbolic importance of conquering the tomb of the "Greatest Imam" (al-Imam al-A -zam) . It is reported that the sultan himself went to the tomb after taking the city and ordered it to be cleansed, because in the eyes of the Sunni Ottomans it was contaminated by the heretical Shiite Safavids . The symbolic rediscovery and Ottoman appropriation of these graves was especially important because the teachings of these three people symbolized the pillars of the Ottoman state religion: Abū Aiyūb al-Ansārī represented the ideal of the Islamic religious warrior ( Ghāzī ); Ibn ʿArabī was the most important Sufi master, and Abu Hanifa the founder of the Islamic school of law, which served the Ottoman Empire as the official school of law for the religious legitimation of its rule.

Scholarly Genealogies (Tabaḳat)

In his 2015 study on Ottoman-Hanafi Islam, Guy Burak analyzed the role of the compilations of scholars' biographies known as “scholarly ranking ” ( Arabic ṭabaqāt, Turkish tabaḳat ) from Arabic-Islamic literature with regard to the teaching and structure of Ottoman scholarship. In their entirety, the biographies resembling a modern “ Who's Who ” form a chain of students and teachers, from which the representation of a law school emerges like a mosaic. The first systematic genealogy of the Ottoman branch of the Hanafi school comes from Şeyhülislam Kemālpaşazade (d. 1534). His work Risala fi ṭabaqāt al-mujtahidiīn (“Treatise on the Ranking of the Mujtahid ”) was quoted again and again until the 18th century and occasionally also translated into other languages.

Another important work is Kınalızāde ʿAli Çelebis (d. 1572) Ṭabaqāt al-Ḥanafiyya ("Genealogy of the Hanafi school of law"). It contains 271 biographies assigned to 21 generations or ranks. The last and highest rank is awarded to Kemālpaşazade. By selecting suitable biographies, Kınalızāde creates a complete chain of transmission from Abū Hanīfa to the Ottoman Şeyhülislam Kemālpaşazade. Kınalızāde writes that his work should not only be understood as the history of the Hanafi madhhab, but expressly in order to be used in any teaching disputes within the school of law. This makes the purpose of canonizing the Hanafi understanding of law for the Ottoman imperial scholarship clear.

Maḥmud b. Süleyman Kefevi (d. 1582) continues the series of biographies into the 16th century and places them in the historical context from the creation of Adam to the prophet and his followers to the founders of the Sunni schools of law. Giving way to the Mongol storm, the focus of Islamic scholarship has shifted to the Cairene Mamluk Sultanate. When chaotic conditions prevailed there, “knowledge and skills wandered to Rūm”, where centers of Hanafi scholarship developed under the protection of the Sultan. Kefevi excludes scholars and their works from his compilation that do not correspond to the Ottoman-Hanafi understanding of law, thus emphasizing the teaching monopoly of his law school.

Biographical Lexicons (Shaqa'iq)

Simultaneously with the tabaḳat, the literary genre of biographical lexicons ( Arabic As-Shaqa'iq, Turkish Eş-şakaiku'n ) emerged, the first and most significant of which was the work Al-shaqa'iq al-nuʿmāniyya fi ʿulamā 'al-dawla al-ʿUthmaniyyā ("Anemone Garden of the [religious] scholars of the Ottoman rule") by Aḥmād b. Muṣṭafā Taşköprüzāde (d. 1561) was. The term "al-nuʿmāniyya" (literally: anemones) is to be understood as a direct allusion to the Nu'mani brotherhood, the proper name of the Hanafi madhhab in the Ottoman scholarly elite. He compiles biographies of Ottoman legal scholars and arranges them according to ṭabaqāt . In contrast to the genealogies, the ṭabaqāt are based in his work on the reigns of the Ottoman sultans. He thus connects Islamic scholarship (to emphasize this, his work is written in classical Arabic) with the geographical and political situation of the Ottoman Empire and with the history of the Ottoman ruling dynasty, "because under the shadow of their rule (" dawla " ) this work has been compiled ”.

Turkish translations were still being made during Taşköprüzāde's lifetime: in 1560 that of Belgradlı Muhtesibzade Muhammed Haki under the title Hada'iq al-Rayhan , while the translation by Aşık Çelebi was created at the same time . Further translations and extensions followed in the 16th century, for example by Muḥammad al-Madschdî in 1586.

Other scholars wrote sequels to Taşköprüzāde's work. Aşık Çelebi dedicated his "continuation" (Dhayl al-Shaqa'iq) to the Grand Vizier Sokollu Mehmed Pasha . Ali ben Bali Cevheri (1527–1584) expressly describes his work Al-ʻIqd al-Manzum fi Dhikr Afazil al-Rum ("The row of pearls of the dignitaries of Rumelia") as a continuation of Taşköprüzāde, for which he has a prominent place as the "showpiece of the chain" assigns. Ali ben Bali follows the order of the biographies given by Taşköprüzāde according to the reigns of the sultans. He, too, wrote in elegant Arabic and quotes poems and texts by the scholars presented to emphasize their position in Arabic-Islamic literature.

The kanunnāme Suleyman of the Magnificent

The development of Islam into an instrument of the raison d'être and legitimation of the rule of the Sultan is connected with Sultan Suleyman I and his Kazasker and later Şeyhülislam Mehmed Ebussuud Efendi . Ebussuud Efendi created an empire-wide code of law (kanunnāme) in which he derived Ottoman law from Islamic law according to the Hanafi school of law :

Decrees based on the legal opinions (fatwa) of Islamic legal scholars were difficult to attack and consolidated the sultan's reign. Ebussuud, for example, justified the need for state property with the preservation of property common to all Muslims, and defined the two most important Ottoman taxes, land tax (çift resmi) and tithing (aşar) according to the Hanafi terms of the charaj muwazzaf (fixed annual land tax) and the charaj muqasama (harvest tax). By equating the aşar with the charaj muqasama , the amount of which was set by the ruler, Ebussuud provided the justification for increasing taxes beyond the “tithe” and thus increasing the revenue of the state treasury.

Ottoman Caliphate

The form of government of the sultanate brought political power into the hands of rulers who relied on the military and administration. Laws passed by the Sultan were guided by the interests of the state and enforced by the political elite. In the Islamic world the question arose about the religious legitimacy of a rule that was not in the tradition of the caliphate. In the 11th century, the Islamic legal scholar al-Māwardī had solved this problem as follows: According to this, the caliph had the right to delegate military power in the outer areas of his territory to a general ( " amir " ), as well as through deputies ( " wasir " ) to rule inside. Two hundred years later, al-Ghazālī defined the role of the imam as - according to the Sunni understanding - the legitimate ruler of the umma, who delegates real power to the monarch and calls on the faithful to obey and thus maintain the unity of the umma.

In 1876 the right to the all-Islamic caliphate was officially enshrined in the constitution of the Ottoman Empire . The sultans Abdülhamid II (1876–1909) and Mehmed V (1909–1918) tried to use the title of caliphate as an Islamic factor of integration for the empire threatened by collapse.

Loss of religious legitimacy

Call for jihad by Şeyhülislam Ürgüplü Mustafa Hayri on the occasion of the declaration of war in 1914

Towards the end of the 18th century, the primacy of the Ottoman sultan in the Arabic-speaking parts of the empire was increasingly questioned. In the Hejaz , Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb developed from the stricter Hanbali legal school the demand for a return to the lost religious purity of the early days of Islam. He concluded an alliance with Muhammad ibn Saud , whose grandson Saud I ibn Abd al-Aziz occupied the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in 1803 and "cleansed" them of the "un-Islamic" buildings and decorations of the Ottomans. This was the first time in the history of the empire that he had questioned the religious legitimacy of Ottoman rule in the Islamic world. The Ottoman government responded to this challenge by emphasizing the role of the sultan as patron of holy places and pilgrims on the Hajj .

The Egyptian expedition Napoleon Bonaparte brought technical innovations from Europe to Egypt and thus to the Ottoman Empire. Printing presses distributed Napoleon's proclamations and showed the effectiveness of mass-circulated writings. A printing company was already active in Cairo around 1820. After a brief resistance, al-Azhar University also used the new technology, which made Cairo one of the centers of Islamic printing. Mecca received a printing press in 1883. The newly introduced printing press, especially the newspaper system, revolutionized the intellectual discourse within the Islamic world. The Egyptian journalist and temporary Grand Mufti of Egypt Muḥammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905) coined the term Islam , renewal and reform , in the reform debates that were now emerging .

In the First World War, Sultan Mehmed V (1909–1918) with his call for jihad , a pro-Ottoman Islamic uprising against the powers of the Entente , had little success. The Ottoman Empire had also lost its supremacy in the Islamic world.

literature

  • Guy Burak: The second formation of Islamic Law. The Hanafi School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK 2015, ISBN 978-1-107-09027-9 .
  • Colin Imber: Ebu's-Su'ud: The Islamic Legal Tradition (Jurists: Profiles in Legal Theory) . Stanford University Press, Stanford 1997, ISBN 978-0-8047-2927-7 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  • Donald Quataert: The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922 . Cambridge University Press, Series: New Approaches to European History, Vol. 34, 2000, ISBN 978-0-521-63360-4 .

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Tijana Krstić: Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire . Stanford University Press, Stanford, CA 2011, ISBN 978-0-8047-7785-8 ( limited preview in Google Book Search).
  2. ↑ Aḥmad b. Muṣṭafa Taşköprüzade: Al-Shaqā ʿ iq al-nu ʿ māniyya fi ʿ ulamā 'al-dawla al- ʿ Uthmaniyyā . Dār al-Kitāb al-ʿArabi, Beirut 1975, p. 5 .
  3. ↑ Muṣṭafa b. Fatḫ Allāh al-Ḥamawi: Fawā ʿ id al-irtiḫāl wa-natā'ij al-safar fi akhbār al-qarn al-ḥādī ʿ ashar . Dār al-Nawadīr, Beirut 2011, p. 128 . , quoted in Burak, 2015, p. 48
  4. ↑ Guy Burak: The second formation of Islamic Law. The Hanafi School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK 2015, ISBN 978-1-107-09027-9 , pp. 21-64 .
  5. ↑ Madeline C. Zilfi: The Ottoman Ulema. In: Suraiya N. Faroqhi (ed.): The Cambridge History of Turkey, Vol. 3, The Later Ottoman Empire 1603-1839 . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK 2006, ISBN 978-0-521-62095-6 , pp. 213 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  6. ↑ Guy Burak: The second formation of Islamic Law. The Hanafi School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK 2015, ISBN 978-1-107-09027-9 , pp. 47 .
  7. ↑ Eyyûbî ( transl .: Mehmet Akkuş): Menâkib-i Sultan Süleyman (Risâle-i Pâdisçâh-nâme) . Kültür Bakanlığı, Ankara 1991, ISBN 978-975-17-0757-4 ( limited preview in Google book search).
  8. ↑ Guy Burak: The second formation of Islamic Law. The Hanafi School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK 2015, ISBN 978-1-107-09027-9 .
  9. ^ A b Guy Burak: The second formation of Islamic Law. The Hanafi School in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK 2015, ISBN 978-1-107-09027-9 , pp. 65-100 .
  10. ↑ Gürzat Kami: Understanding a sixteenth-century ottoman scholar-bureaucrat: Ali b. Bali (1527–1584) and his biographical dictionary Al- ' Iqd al-Manzum fi Dhikr Afazil al-Rum. MA thesis . Graduate school of social sciences, İstanbul Şehir University, Istanbul 2015, p. 54–55 ( [1] [accessed September 11, 2016]).
  11. ↑ Gustav Flügel : The Arabic, Persian and Turkish manuscripts of the Imperial-Royal Court Library in Vienna. On behalf of the superior kk authority, ordered and described by Gustav Flügel: Vol. 2 . Printing and publishing house of the KK Hof- und Staatsdruckerei, Vienna 1865, p. 384 ( [2] [accessed September 11, 2016]). The Arabic, Persian and Turkish manuscripts of the Imperial and Royal Court Library in Vienna. On behalf of the superior kk authority, ordered and described by Gustav Flügel: Vol. 2 ( Memento of the original from September 15, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.  @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / bilder.manuscripta-mediaevalia.de
  12. ↑ Aşık Çelebi, Abdurrezzak Beretta (ed.): Dhayl al-Shaqa'iq al-Nu ' maniyya fi ' Ulama al-Dawla al- ' Uthmaniyya . Dar al-Hidaya, Kuwait 2007.
  13. ↑ Gürzat Kami: Understanding a sixteenth-century ottoman scholar-bureaucrat: Ali b. Bali (1527–1584) and his biographical dictionary Al- ' Iqd al-Manzum fi Dhikr Afazil al-Rum. MA thesis . Graduate school of social sciences, İstanbul Şehir University, Istanbul 2015, p. 62 .
  14. ^ Karen Barkey: Empire of Difference: The Ottomans in Comparative Perspective . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK 2008, ISBN 978-0-521-71533-1 .
  15. ↑ Alan Palmer: Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire. Heyne, Munich 1994 (original: London 1992), p. 23
  16. ^ Colin Imber: Government, administration and law. In: Suraiya N. Faroqhi (Ed.): The Cambridge History of Turkey, Vol. 3 . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK 2006, ISBN 978-0-521-62095-6 , pp. 205-240, here pp. 236-238 .
  17. ↑ al-Māwardī , Léon Ostrorog (transl.): Al-Aḥkām as-sulṭānīya (French transl .: Traité de droit public musulman) . Ernest Leroux, Paris 1901. Digitized translation of Paris 1901
  18. ^ Albert Hourani : Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798-1939 . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, ISBN 978-0-521-27423-4 , pp. 15-16 .
  19. ↑ Donald Quataert: The Ottoman Empire, 1700-1922 . Cambridge University Press, Series: New Approaches to European History, Vol. 34, 2000, ISBN 978-0-521-63360-4 , pp. 50-51 .
  20. ↑ George N. Atiyeh (Ed.): The book in the Islamic world. The written word and communication in the Middle East . State University of New York Press, Albany 1995 ( limited preview in Google Book search).
  21. ↑ Ahmad S. Dallal: The origins and early development of Islamic reform. In: R. Hefner (Ed.): The New Cambridge History of Islam. Vol. 6: Muslims and modernity . Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK 2010, ISBN 978-0-521-84443-7 , pp. 107-147 .