The interlinking of morality, religion, and politics may not be new, but our predisposition to separate them is. A central precept of Enlightenment thought is that religion should remain in the private sphere, sequestered from the politics of the public realm.Footnote 1 For this reason, fifty years since identifying “political Islam” as a theoretical issue, social scientists continue to puzzle over it. Early on, the answers to the question of religious revival in modern society were instrumentalist: people became religious to express economic frustration or exert “agency” in the face of an oppressive system. Anthropologists then turned to the question of understanding the political import of Islamic revival in its own terms. For example, Saba Mahmood famously argued in The Politics of Piety that a women's piety movement in 1990s Egypt created new political subjectivities through the cultivation of proper moral behavior.Footnote 2 She contended that scholars had overlooked this development because they focused on political action within the formal world of the ballot box, replicating the Enlightenment sequestration of ethics and belief into the moral/private sphere. In other words, the question was not so much why religion had returned to public life, but how we had decided it was absent in the first place. The answer to that question is secularism, a political project born out of the modern and colonial state. Far from being a benign desacralization, Mahmood and likeminded anthropologists argue that secularism “entails fundamental shifts in conceptions of self, time, space, ethics, and morality, as well as a reorganization of social, political, and religious life,” which in turn shapes our very analyses and categories.Footnote 3
The insights of anthropologists regarding contemporary Islamic revival, and secularism, can help us redefine political practice and thought in the premodern Ottoman Empire, I believe.Footnote 4 Works like the poet Nābī’s Ḫayriyye—a book of advice to his son written in 1701 and the text at the core of this essay—deserve as central a position in the formation of Ottoman political thought as that which Rousseau's Emile holds in European history. Texts like Nābī’s were part of an immense body of morality literature, of which scholars have only begun to scratch the surface, that emerged as part of a widespread pietistic turn over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Yet, historians have failed to see the broader political implications of this turn because, like earlier scholars of contemporary Islamic revival, we have viewed it as simply moralistic and religious and presumed that it belongs to a private rather than political world.
Furthermore, the still reigning narrative of the religious revival in the early modern Ottoman Empire, the so-called Kadizadeli movement, emerged in tandem with social scientists’ initial explorations of the causes of the Islamic Revival in the 1980s. In a book coincidentally also titled The Politics of Piety, Madeline Zilfi first introduced the foundational narrative of Ottoman religious revival: in the seventeenth century, preachers professing an intolerant and orthodox Islam found popular support among unemployed provincial scholars and with this mandate made their way to power by beguiling the sultans.Footnote 5 This upsurge of religiosity supposedly ended with the dismissal of the preachers following a disastrous Ottoman campaign to conquer Vienna. In Zilfi's narrative, the Kadizadelis were a paroxysmal hiccup of fundamentalism, short-lived and ultimately inconsequential. Like the social scientists who analyzed the Iranian Revolution, she provides a functionalist reading of their turn to religion as a means of exerting their agency in the face of economic dissatisfaction. Moreover, the Kadizadeli narrative pushes a relationship between religion and politics as separate entities, in which preachers corrupt what ought to be politics by bringing religion into the discussion.Footnote 6 It is this presumption that continues today and which the anthropology of Islamic revival and secularism can help remedy.Footnote 7 Along the way, such an engagement should inspire both historians and anthropologists to imagine political regimes of morality, concepts of “the social,” and even formations of the secular, which emerged in the Middle East outside of the contexts of liberalism and colonial modernity.
Today we can understand a broader “turn to piety” in Ottoman society, well beyond the contours of the Kadizadeli movement, thanks to a new narrative of religious history crafted over the past ten years.Footnote 8 We know now that in the early empire confessional identity was initially an afterthought, but over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries both the state and its subjects increasingly emphasized the centrality of Islamic practice and belief, as defined by Islamic law, to imperial ideology.Footnote 9 Geopolitically, imperial rivalries with the Habsburgs and the Safavids, in particular, pushed the formation of an intensely Sunni identity while, locally, congregational mosques were set up in each town and major neighborhood, becoming centers of urban life, but also social surveillance.Footnote 10 Ottoman subjects redefined the boundaries of piety and Islamic practice while also becoming increasingly concerned with defining and uprooting heresy.Footnote 11 This process—which Tijana Krstić has described as “confessionalization,” in a borrowing from European history—cemented a tight relationship between the public face of the empire as a Sunni polity and personal religiosity.Footnote 12 This scholarship has reframed the pietistic turn in the Ottoman Empire within a longer-term and deeper religious transformation, but we have yet to examine its effects on political practice and thought. In less skilled hands, the politics of confessionalization is limited to the state's capacity to define and enforce the boundaries of religion, and for this reason I choose the broader term of “pietism” to include religious movements and changes that operate both within and without the state. And to understand the deeper shifts in political subjectivity that the pietistic transformation entailed we can look to the more recent anthropology of Islamic revival.
I argue in this essay that the pietistic turn over the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire created a new political regime of morality. It did so by insisting that all the empire's Muslim subjects, not just the sultan and elites, had the responsibility to be virtuous moral and political actors. This was an important shift in Ottoman political thought, which previously aimed only at the moral reformation of the sultan, and the result was a new political subjectivity centered on individual morality. Familial and private life became important spaces of political authority, disciplinary power, and private resistance and built the basis for the expanded, mass politics of the seventeenth century. This moral revolution touched many of the currents of Ottoman thought; pietistic reformers and jurists initiated the change, but Sufis and bureaucrats quickly followed, each envisioning a different political future stemming from a need to make ordinary subjects moral and political actors.
What follows is a demonstration of the political import of the pietistic transformation of the empire through a reinterpretation of the core political concept of naṣīḥat. Literally meaning “advice,” the long-standing concept and practice entailed exhorting fellow Muslims to lead moral lives. The stuff of politics was deciding what a moral life meant, who was supposed to lead one, and how. A ruler might exert naṣīḥat by ensuring that his subjects behave morally, often through the standards of the sharia, but a subject might also censure the ruler himself. Likewise, in extreme circumstances, like those I describe below, subjects or subordinates were free to reject the naṣīḥat completely and rebel. This particular blend of moral exhortations and political sanctions makes naṣīḥat difficult if not impossible to translate, but it also led Talal Asad to find in naṣīḥat (in contemporary Saudi Arabia) both an analogue and an alternative to the Enlightenment notion of public reason and critique, a foundation of the modern liberal society.Footnote 13
Naṣīḥat also happens to be a central concept for historians in overturning the presumption that the Ottoman Empire declined over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Footnote 14 The genre traditionally known as the naṣīḥat-nāme, or “advice book,” were the texts that Ottoman bureaucrats began writing in the late sixteenth century, in which they decried the corruption and malfeasance that had beset the empire. Initially, their complaints were read literally as objective statements of decline and corruption, but more recent interpretations have recast these texts as ideological representations written by state functionaries attempting to champion one political faction over another as the empire underwent radical structural shifts. The authors of these treatises, by comparing the current situation to an idealized golden age, often identified as the rule of Suleyman (r. 1520–1566), suggested reforms to remedy what they believed to be debilitating corruption and misrule.
Historians today may have misinterpreted the notion of naṣīḥat in their search for a refutation of the narrative of Ottoman decline. Much like scholars of contemporary Islamist movements, a general secularist bent has led us to focus too narrowly on the overtly political dimensions of naṣīḥat, understanding it as a “mirror for princes” but not as “morally corrective criticism.”Footnote 15 It is this latter meaning that has always predominated, before and after the seventeenth century. Meninski, in his dictionary of 1680, defines naṣīḥat as both “conseil,” and “sermon,” whereas Naẓmīzāde's dictionary from the same period simply defines it as “a sermon and guidance toward good.”Footnote 16 By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, advice books known as naṣīḥatnāmes or pendnāmes (pend being Persian for advice) had become exceptionally popular among the empire's inhabitants. They counseled people on how to lead morally correct lives, but often with only distant political connection. It is in these texts that we can see the true transformation of politics in the Middle East. On the other hand, the texts that historians today label “naṣīḥatnāmes,” with their specific recommendations as to the proper structure of governance, were only a small and perhaps even marginal part of the field of naṣīḥat.
A moment of deep political crisis at the turn of the eighteenth century provides the best vantage point from which to observe naṣīḥat in action. In a collective act of rebellion, the different classes of Istanbul gathered and took control of the city in 1703. The imperial government in Edirne issued a final act of “advice and exhortation (nuṣḥ u pend),” but the swelling crowd rejected the sultan's words of advice—his “naṣīḥatnāme”—and deposed him.Footnote 17 Yet the sultan's naṣīḥat was not the only one on offer in the marketplace of advice. In the preceding years, two men, one a şeyhülislam (the chief jurist) and the other a poet, both close to the seat of imperial power in the late seventeenth century, proffered radically different visions of naṣīḥat. In the wake of the 1703 rebellion, one would be declared a heretic and have his body desecrated, while the other went on to become one of the eighteenth century's most popular authors.
In the fates of these two men, Feyżullah Efendi (d. 1703) and Yūsuf Nābī (d. 1712), we can see two intertwined but distinct understandings of the relationship between religion and politics that emerged from the pietistic turn. In 1702, Feyżullah Efendi, the şeyhülislam and de facto ruler of the Ottoman Empire, set out to reform and save the empire by restoring its moral order through an imperial edict that called for the mass and compulsory education in the basics of Sunni Islam of the entire population, from nomads in the countryside to merchants in the city. Echoing a well-known ḥadīth, he declared that “naṣīḥat is religion! (al-din al-naṣīḥa),”Footnote 18 and provided instructions for ensuring that proper morals were taught in all schools, from the simplest children's schools to the most prestigious madrasas. The poet Yūsuf Nābī, on the other hand, in 1701 penned the Ḫayriyye or Ḫayrināme, a book of advice addressed to his eponymous seven-year old son, Ebu'l-Ḫayr. It quickly became one of the most popular books in the empire, and its position in the canon of Ottoman literature is attested by its early translation into French in the 1840s.Footnote 19 In this text, Nābī counsels his son how to lead a moral life as a man, while simultaneously presenting a radical and systematic critique of Ottoman society that declares all of its institutions and classes corrupt and the government illegitimate.
Most studies of Ottoman pietistic movements have focused on the disciplinary mechanisms the state employed to enforce confessional identity, whether imposed from the top down, like Feyżullah's project, or enacted in response to the cries of those below. Nābī’s formal attack against the government allows us to draw out the political import of naṣīḥat as moral critique, but it also reveals the ways the pietistic turn was grounded in the cultivation of the self.Footnote 20 My primary focus here will be Nābī’s oft-overlooked approach to naṣīḥat. To elucidate its importance, I first examine the role of morality in Ottoman political thought in the preceding centuries. I then sketch out the new vision of politics embedded in the pietistic turn, and compare Feyżullah and Nābī’s competing projects therein. My conclusion reflects on how this premodern Ottoman case can contribute to our understanding of secularism in the Middle East.
MORALITY AND GOVERNANCE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
Naṣīḥat was not purely a product of the early modern pietistic turn. It existed long before as a Quranic injunction and in the words of medieval preachers and philosophers. Nor was it limited to one genre. It flourished whenever moral and political thought found themselves aligned, whether in traditional “mirror for the princes” works like the Qābūsnāma or in the genre of adab (belles-lettres), or in the especially important field of moral philosophy, akhlāq. Footnote 21 What did change was the specific alignment between morality and politics embedded in naṣīḥat, when, around the seventeenth century, politics began to revolve around the moral reformation not of the sultan but of everyday individuals.
In his thorough study of political thought, Hüseyin Yılmaz has argued that between the eleventh to sixteenth centuries a new moralistic conception of rulership took hold in the Islamic world. In a post-Abbasid epoch, the mantle of rulership could potentially fall upon any ruler rather than on a caliph who fulfilled very specific requirements. In response to these open-ended possibilities, the predominantly Sufi writers that Yılmaz studies aimed to “endow the ruler with noble traits by changing his character for the better.”Footnote 22 Therefore, in the sixteenth century, “one of the central questions of political theory during the age of Sūleymān” was how “to reform the ruler for moral and spiritual worthiness of God-given rulership.”Footnote 23 In other words, political theory centered not on the construction of ideal institutions but on molding the ruler into an ideal person. These discussions, in turn, created a set of values and expectations of a ruler's moral constitution that underlay all conceptions of legitimate rule by circulating among a broader reading public.
Ensuring the moral perfection of the sultan was important because his role was to mediate conflict between his subjects. As Cemal Kafadar explains, “in Ottoman political thought, sultanic authority has to be the absolute arbiter of all social conflict. The pursuit of self- or group-interest is only to be expected of the subjects, but the ideal ruler is one who would steer the course of [the] state in adherence to certain absolute principles above and beyond the muddy waters of worldly interest.…”Footnote 24 In the naṣīḥatnāme literature upon which historians have traditionally focused, authors divided society into different estates or status groups (military, scribal, clerical, etc.) and advised the sultan on how to remedy the transgressions and usurpation of estate by individuals. The calls for reform may have differed from one work to another, but the sultan's morality remained the overall locus for these authors in their attempts to change society.
It is important to note, though, that in this earlier period the capacity for human disposition to be trained and molded was not universal but rather restricted to an elite.Footnote 25 For the rest, there was the law (sharia), which operated as a system to ensure moral behavior from those who were incapable of changing their nature. This hierarchal system underlay all the moral philosophies. As Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Ṭūsī, the founder of the genre, stated in his Ethics, “Thus, some men are good by nature, while others are good by religious legislation. The instruction of this latter class in the Religious Law is like administering water to a person who has a morsel stuck in his throat: if they be not disciplined in accordance with the Religious Law, then like that person they will surely perish, for no stratagem is effective in reforming them.”Footnote 26 The superior position of the morally trained in regard to the law-abiding explains why this elite often partook in acts, like wine drinking, that were strictly forbidden by the religious law (sharia).Footnote 27 It also explains why Ottoman princes until the seventeenth century received little training in the jurisprudence of Islamic law.Footnote 28
The line between elites and non-elites was difficult if not impossible to cross. Justice was conceived as stability within the hierarchy, with each segment of the population remaining within its position.Footnote 29 The moral education of the lower classes, who were incapable of changing their natures, was regarded as waste of time and even dangerous. The Gulistān of Saʿdī, a medieval Persian collection of parables read by nearly everyone with even the most basic education, is replete with tales of such failures. A vizier educates a bandit boy as his own son, teaching him all the arts and graces of elite society, only to have the boy murder him and his sons, steal his wealth, and run off to join the bandits again. The king quips, “How can anyone make a good sword out of bad iron? A nobody will not become a somebody through education.”Footnote 30
In this rough sketch we can see that during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries morality literature was always present, but it focused on the figure of the sultan as the vessel through which proper morality was to be enacted in the society. This morality, however, was not necessarily equated with the sharia, which was regarded primarily as a path for those beyond education. This point is doubly important because, as Shahab Ahmed and others have observed, law—that is the sharia—only became the primary means of being Muslim in the modern period. Thus, the impact of the pietistic turn was two-fold. It decisively changed the object of moral reform by insisting that all Muslims could become objects of moral edification and reform, and it centered this moral education on the sharia. Over the course of the seventeenth century a new conception of naṣīḥat, one focused on the moral responsibility of individuals, would create political actors out of ordinary subjects in the empire.
THE POLITICAL IMPLICATIONS OF THE PIETISTIC TURN
The pietistic transformation of the empire over the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to a greater scrutiny of ordinary subjects’ morality in all aspects of life, which made the ruler the champion of this new moral order but also subject to its rules. As noted earlier, much of the new scrutiny came from the disciplinary state as it started to enforce confessional boundaries and change the religious environment. Seventeenth-century writers often talked about the need to be wary of the “hidden, internal enemies” of Islam, who superficially resembled law-abiding Muslims but secretly harbored heretical beliefs.Footnote 31 One could root out the heretic from the faithful only by dissecting their actions, which, more clearly than their words, revealed their true intentions. This novel understanding of heresy is precisely what şeyhülislam Minḳārīzāde (d. 1678) tried to formalize legally when he argued that heresy could be established not only, as traditionally, through the act of publicly denying the Prophet Muhammad and God, but also through a person's quotidian actions.Footnote 32
The increased scrutiny of public morality was performed under a new spotlight and on a new stage: the burgeoning urban centers of the Ottoman Empire. Streets, coffeehouses, mosques, and bathhouses provided expanded spaces in which to display the newfound wealth of those members of Ottoman society who had wormed their way into the state. New goods like coffee and tobacco provided a ready visual vocabulary of heresy and unbelief and small luxuries like cheap furs and silks a space for individualization.Footnote 33 These spaces of display were also spaces for public debates of these same topics, incited by preachers, who were often called the “people of naṣīḥat.” One typical but anonymous moralist and author, detailed in a formative article of Derin Terzioğlu, went by the simple, telling sobriquet of Nuṣḥī, Advice-Giver or Preacher.Footnote 34
A preacher's spoken exhortations were one obvious vector of naṣīḥat, but written works moved just as quickly through the streets, mosques, and coffeehouses. Given the need to define and debate which practices were heretical, it is no surprise that morality handbooks flourished as a genre, read privately or aloud. They quickly informed readers and listeners as to proper Islamic behavior. These myriad texts, copied as full books or onto the margins or extra leaves of manuscripts, had various generic titles: hundreds are simply known as naṣīḥat or pend, while others were referred to as vaṣiyet (advice, commands), or ʿaḳā’id (creed), or some other combination thereof. Together, they comprised a mass of morality literature that ranged from brief, simple poems in Turkish denigrating tobacco smoking, to complex and heady academic discussions on the nature of naṣīḥat.
When the morality manuals that initiated the pietistic shift in the sixteenth century first appeared, they focused largely on ensuring that Muslims followed basic ritual actions such as daily ablutions and prayers, and in doing so prioritized law as the primary approach to Islam.Footnote 35 Yet, by the seventeenth century, their scope expanded to focus on all aspects of life. Hamza Efendi, the author of highly popular catechistic text explained that he wrote it because pietists like the famous Birgivī Meḥmed (d. 1573) had written plenty on proper belief and prayers, but had neglected all the other aspects of daily life, such as how to buy and sell goods ethically.Footnote 36 Another writer, Ebu'l-Beḳā el-Kefevī (d. 1684), better known today for his dictionary of philosophical and academic terminology than for his moralistic works, rendered compilations of legal rulings into easily actionable statements on topics like inheritance, childbirth, or medical procedures.Footnote 37
These morality manuals implicitly, and at times explicitly, propagated an image of imperial governance as a hierarchical family. Obedience was owed first to God and the prophets, then to the sultan, and after that to the preachers and shaykhs who exhorted the masses and instructed fathers, who then disciplined their wives and consorts, who in turn raised the children.Footnote 38 The aforementioned Nuṣḥī, or “Advisor,” regarded the household as the key space of instruction and societal order, in which wives and children, slaves and servants, were to be instructed in the proper path.Footnote 39 This particularly gendered vision of imperial and domestic order went further than a simple familial metaphor and often entailed telling listeners how they should structure their very families.Footnote 40 Kefevī, mentioned earlier, proposed a vision of an ideal nuclear family by telling men to limit themselves to only one wife and not take any others or even a concubine. Women, in turn, needed to be kept out of crowds or any places where they might see attractive youths.Footnote 41 Much of this naṣīḥat extended itself beyond regulating public behavior and into private thoughts and conversations. In Kefevī’s vision of naṣīḥat, women had to be stopped from consulting “skeptical old hags who knew nothing about religion and piety,” on important matters, or even gossiping with other women about their secrets.Footnote 42 Like other providers of naṣīḥat, he even advised what types of books were acceptable and unacceptable;Footnote 43 women in particular needed to be “kept away from reading or listening to romances and comedies.”Footnote 44 Maintaining order within the family became the key to maintaining order within the empire, since only a proper family could raise proper (Muslim) political subjects.
In this hierarchical vision of empire as family, the sultan was owed obedience but was also largely expected to be a pious exemplar himself, both championing the religious law—sharia—and following its prescriptions. Many of the morality and advice manuals, even when they focused on imparting morality to all of society's members, had a section of advice aimed at the sultan. Consider the work of şeyhülislam Debbāğzāde Meḥmed Efendi (r. 1687–1690). In his rather academic treatise on naṣī ḥ at, which aimed to buttress the concept with classical examples derived from ḥadīth, he advised the sultan that he must avoid companions of poor morals, since “it is impossible to reform your subjects while you are with the corrupted.” Doing so would be like “trying to get the body to stand without a sound head.”Footnote 45 The political failures of the empire could be corrected only if everyone maintained a proper morality. Minḳārī ʿAlī Ḫalīfe, a palace employee who seems to have specialized in explaining religious matters to children and women, presented his masterwork, The Remedy of the Faithful, to the eleven-year-old Sultan Mehmed IV.Footnote 46 This work of naṣīḥat—which proved quite popular and came with the endorsement of the şeyhülislam, the former chief judge of Istanbul, and the sultan's imam—was a giant array of quotations from Arabic and Persian jurisprudential sources, translated into Turkish, and arranged according to matters such as prayer, marriage, and more. The introduction makes the clear case to the boy sultan that he needs to depart from past princes’ ignorance and become knowledgeable in sharia.Footnote 47 This was no longer something that concerned only the masses, because his legitimacy as a sultan rested on his personal knowledge and application of the sharia.Footnote 48
The flood of naṣīḥat in the above examples may appear to be the sole prerogative of reformers who argued for the primacy of the sharia, and indeed they were most likely the swiftest stream, but n aṣīḥat as correct moral action came together from many different branches of Ottoman culture. Literati at the upper echelons of society who wanted pearls of advice demonstrated through classical Arabic literature could turn to The Book of Distinction by Ibn Maʿn, the former Ottoman ambassador to the Mughal Empire (and the son of the notorious Druze rebel).Footnote 49 Others could also look to Ḥıfẓī Meḥmed's huge compilation The Virtues of Pious Deeds. Completed around 1677 after a grueling seven years of work, it details over two long volumes, in the simplest Turkish, how to lead a life of moral action. Drawing upon examples from the lives of the prophets and quoting heavily from Muhammad's pious companions like Abu Hurayra, he not only guided readers through the basics of prayer but also addressed questions of sexual preference (he came out against sleeping with men) and family life. While this might strike us as a supposedly sharia-minded work, based solely on jurists’ law, another picture emerges from his two surviving notebooks, which detail the many texts he read as he prepared his magnum opus.Footnote 50 He immersed himself in the work of medieval Sufi poets like Ibn Fāriḍ, but also in treatises of notable seventeenth-century Sufi scholars such as Sivāsī, Hüdaī, and a variety of slightly less famous ones. Many of these treatises explained not only how to be a disciple but also offered advice, that is naṣīḥat, to kings and Sufis alike. When we look at the works explicitly labeled as “naṣīḥat” in his notebook, he drew on a generic advice book in Turkish (labeled simply “pendnāme”), but also on the “naṣīḥat” of Aristotle, Plato, and the ancient Persian king Anushirvan. These varied sources of naṣīḥat attest to the concept's pull among many segments of Ottoman society and how authors drew upon different traditions of moral betterment.
The overwhelming numbers of naṣīḥatnāmes, morality guides, and catechisms that proliferated in the seventeenth century were united by their emphasis on the cultivation of an individual morality, but they also competed for readers’ attentions. One of the most popular was the Persian text known as the Pendnāme (tr.) / Pandnāma (pr.) (Book of Advice), falsely attributed to the famous thirteenth-century Persian poet Attar. First becoming popular in the Ottoman Empire in the mid- to late sixteenth-century, it instructed its readers, as did all the morality manuals, in how to eat, pray, and love (to use our contemporary parlance). It is important because it inspired myriad translations, commentaries, and additions over the next three centuries.Footnote 51 In the boisterous market of naṣīḥat, however, the Pandnāma and its many imitators were seen as competitors by preachers, who pursued a naṣīḥat centered on law. The aforementioned Nuṣḥī singled out the entire genre of pendnāmes as a particularly distracting menace.Footnote 52 This might be because these texts developed a model of moral and ethical behavior that drew from sources other than the religious law and targeted an audience with more Sufistic sympathies. Likewise, they never explicitly called upon the state to enforce a moral code upon the people through its disciplinary power. Throughout the seventeenth century there was a constant tension between the desire to cultivate morality in the self and have the state impose it from above.
Regardless of their approach, these advice manuals marked a departure from the relationship between morality and rulership of earlier centuries. They no longer focused on ensuring the sultan's moral perfection and instead established a moral axis that extended from the private homes of ordinary people to the sultan's palace, bypassing the gossiping salons of drunken poets and bureaucrats. Moreover, in this vision, all were equally responsible to behave ethically and be individually responsible for their moral burdens. It dismantled the distinction between moral philosophy for the elite and the law for the uneducated masses; sultans were now subject to the sharia, too, while townspeople needed to scrutinize their behavior. The self-reflection inherent in these pietistic and moralistic texts advanced an egalitarian individualization of moral and political subjectivity. In this ground Feyżullah and Nābī planted their visions for the political reform of the empire.
FEYẒULLAH'S NAṢĪḤAT
At the height of his power, Feyżullah Efendi turned the office of şeyhülislam (chief jurist) into a vehicle for ruling the empire in all but name. One of his most ambitious orders, a decree that set out to rebuild the empire, was the mass application of naṣīḥat in 1702. He ordered that every Muslim subject of the empire, from the highest noble to the lowliest nomad, in every province, town, and village, be drilled in the basics of Islamic practice and thought. The endeavor was not to last, however, for a bit over a year later a revolt erupted that resulted in the deposition of Sultan Mustafa II and the brutal death of Feyżullah. After being tortured for days, Feyżullah was paraded through the square backward on a draft horse as the crowd heckled him, until he was finally called a heretic and unceremoniously beheaded. The soldiers then tied ropes to the feet of his headless corpse and forced Greek priests in full ceremonial garb to drag it around the city as they wafted incense and muttered the Christian rites over the body, before finally tossing it into the river.Footnote 53
How did Feyżullah climb to the peak of piety as leader of the believers, only to fall as a debased heretic? He first entered the stage of Istanbul in 1661 as a twenty-four-year-old provincial scholar summoned by his mentor, teacher, and future father-in-law, Vānī Meḥmed Efendi. Vānī Efendi, now often referred to as the last of the so-called Kadizadeli preachers, met the young scholar when he was teaching in Erzurum and brought him along when the elder became the sultan's personal preacher. Feyżullah's family, who were well-regarded Sufi shaykhs and scholars renowned for their miracles and scholarship, had only migrated to Erzurum a few decades before from Karabagh, whence they had fled the vicious sectarian persecution of the Safavids in the early 1600s.Footnote 54 Once established in Istanbul as a muderris (professor), Feyẓullah quickly gained entrance to the palace as the tutor of the young princes, the future sultans Mustafa II and Ahmed III. He became şeyhülislam for a brief sixteen days in 1688 in the wake of the revolts that unseated Mehmed IV, but was quickly dismissed and expelled to his hometown of Erzurum. Only when his former pupil, Mustafa II, was enthroned was he brought back to the capital and reinstated as şeyhülislam.Footnote 55
Upon becoming şeyhülislam for a second time in 1695, he quickly moved to consolidate his power, placing his sons in key positions, isolating the grand vizier, and making himself the true center of the government by 1700. The chroniclers, embedded within the palace circles, stress the extraordinary heights of Feyżullah's nepotism and his monopolization of all the posts and benefits of government for his own household, a position that continues to be reflected in understandings of the revolt as the “Edirne Incident” in scholarship today.Footnote 56 While that portrayal might certainly be true, the revolt of 1703 was unique in that it united the entire population of the empire against Feyżullah. The spark of the armorers’ corps’ protest set fire to the city of Istanbul as soldiers and artisans, scholars and students, merchants and riff-raff joined together to take over the city and bring down the government. How did he manage to alienate such a large swathe of the population? Why did Janissaries poets, Armenian chroniclers, and foreign diplomats all refer to him as a “heretic mufti (ḳızılbāş müfti)?” From these sources a more contentious image emerges: heretic and infidel (ḳızılbāş, kāfir), the “son of a Shi'a (Acem ferzendi)” who “transformed our faith and religion.”Footnote 57 Claims such as these suggest that the case against Feyżullah involved more than mere palace intrigues and addressed his grander ambitions to transform Ottoman society.
The mass application of naṣīḥat was one of these ambitions. Feyżullah had many others, such as a possible restructuring of Ottoman legal reasoning, but let us focus on his usage of naṣīḥat.Footnote 58 The plan seems to have been executed in stages, applied in one area and then the next. The first order, sent around the beginning of March of 1702, seems to have been directed at the Muslims of Bosnia, who were perceived to be particularly impious. A month later, the same exact orders were sent out to the ten or so provinces of greater Albania. In these initial orders, the problem was quite explicit: people in the towns and villages were destroying (helāk) the empire by “abandoning and ignoring” the sharia and sunna and this necessitated a campaign of reeducation through specially assigned teams of missionaries to “forbid the wrong and enjoin the good.” These religious shock troops were supposed to teach the basic catechism (ʿilm-i ḥāl) such as prayers, fasts, pilgrimages, and more to the entire population in “villages and towns, near and far,” focusing especially on the “semi-literate and commoners (ümmī ve ʿāmme).”Footnote 59 Yet we know that Feyżullah also believed that even the highest elites should receive such training. Upon becoming şeyhülislam in February of 1696, he officially endorsed the aforementioned Minḳārī ʿAli Ḫalīfe's book of naṣīḥat that insisted the sultan himself should be fully literate in fiqh and sharia.Footnote 60
A month later, the experiment was expanded to cover the rest of the empire and a month after that an order specifically targeting Istanbul was dispatched.Footnote 61 City folk and nomads (eṣḥāb-i aḫbiye), elders and schoolchildren were to be taught and made to maintain the pillars of Islamic practice such as prayer, fasting, and pilgrimage. A madrasa graduate was assigned to live among rural and nomadic communities to insist that they build schools and mosques and then ensure that they were attended. This idea followed naturally from the order's particular attention to children's schools and their curricula. The rather elaborate plan obviously required a capable and willing cadre of instructors, so the initial parts of the order called for the testing and, if necessary, replacement of all preachers, professors, schoolteachers, and minders who possessed limited or partial knowledge in these fields. They were told to exhort the population to follow the right path without inciting hatred (bağżā), rancor (şaḥnā), or fanaticism (taʿaṣṣub) by employing only respectable sources—fiqh, ḥadīth, and the like—rather than embellish tales and spurious facts. A plan of such ambition no doubt suffered in its execution across the far-flung empire. But it was implemented nonetheless, albeit with much hesitation on the part of local commanders. Half a year on, the Grand Vizier Rāmī Meḥmed Paşa found himself writing letters to a catechism teacher in Bosnia, in a not so gentle tone, requesting that he please implement Feyżullah's plan of an empire-wide Islamic education.Footnote 62 Similarly, a year after the initial order, Feyżullah continued directing the project by issuing the same order for the towns and villages at the ends of the military roads in the Balkans, on the Crimean frontier (Özü), and around Plovdiv and instructed his missionary teams to move on from Bosnia and toward Belgrade and Euboea.Footnote 63 Two months later the project came to an early end when the mobs deposed the sultan and defiled Feyżullah's lifeless body.Footnote 64
Feyżullah Efendi's plan to guarantee the Islamic knowledge of all the empire's inhabitants was not without precedent or parallel. The project was the culmination of an idea that had been circulating for decades in the advice and morality manuals of others.Footnote 65 He even simultaneously initiated a parallel project of naṣīḥat for the empire's Christians by appointing his client, Awetikʿ, to the position of Armenian patriarch for the express purpose of instilling “naṣīḥat” to combat the ‘heretical beliefs’ that Catholic missionaries were spreading among the Armenian and Syriac populations.Footnote 66 His disciplinary project was the culmination of a century of discourse around morality that emphasized the need for all of the empire's subjects to be responsible moral actors who reflected on their individual actions. Ensuring the moral certitude of the empire, both among Muslims and non-Muslims, was seen to be the only way to restore its grandeur and legitimize the sultan as the personal champion of the sharia. And yet, it is important to remember that this overambitious project failed and may have been one reason for the extreme animus he faced at the hands of the people. Perhaps his true sin was in going so far as to sideline even the sultan and make the office of şeyhülislam the primary upholder of the empire's morality. Or perhaps it was his vision of naṣīḥat that the empire's subjects were simply unwilling to accept.
NĀBĪ’S NAṢĪḤAT
If Feyżullah Efendi attempted to inculcate his naṣīḥat through a campaign of mass education, then the poet Nābī (1642–1712) whispered his naṣīḥat into his listeners’ ears as they lay alone reading his books. It provides a radical political vision, but one tied to a private moral transformation. His popular verse book of naṣīḥat, which often went simply by the name of naṣīḥatnāme but was formally titled Ḫayriyye, was one of the most popular works of Ottoman Turkish literature ever written and its overwhelming approval ensured Nābī’s immense stature in the following centuries.Footnote 67 Rare is the manuscript library that does not carry multiple copies of the Ḫayriyye today, with copy dates for its 1660 couplets ranging from shortly after it was written to the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote 68
Nābī wrote the Ḫayriyye around 1701, the year before Feyżullah embarked on his campaign of naṣīḥat qua mass education. At the time Nābī was fifty-seven and his son, to whom he dedicated the manual, was seven.Footnote 69 Like Feyżullah. Nābī was a provincial boy who made good in the capital, coming from the Arabic and Turkish-speaking town of Ruha (today's Urfa) to become a successful poet and kātib (secretary) in Istanbul and Edirne, where he had attached himself to the households of various grandees. The death of his chief patron, Muṣāḥib Mustafa Pasha, in 1686 propelled him to find employment as a secretary in the imperial chancellery of Mehmed IV, but his success was short-lived since he lost the job following the deposition of the sultan in 1688.Footnote 70 Like Feyżullah, whom he personally knew,Footnote 71 he was unable to gain a foothold in the new political milieu and was forced to leave Istanbul and work as a tax collector in Aleppo.Footnote 72
While we might view this move as a simple loss of position, and it might well have been, Nābī cast it as an act of self-made exile that allowed him to push a radical critique of society and state. He describes his transition to Aleppo by saying, “No longer preoccupied with estate | I've fallen into the corner of solitude.”Footnote 73 This “corner of solitude (künc-i ʿuzlet),” though, had a second meaning of a “treasure (genc) of solitude,” a sentiment he repeats to his son later on: “Don't leave the house, for that is paradise | in the corner of the house is the treasure of solitude.”Footnote 74 It was a common enough act in his time. ʿUzlet, or withdrawal, was frequently used by intellectuals to present a deep critique of a society. Nābī would have known of Niyāz-i Miṣrī, who for much of the 1680s purposefully stayed in self-imposed exile on Limni Island as he publicly circulated a private diary that decried the legitimacy of the dynasty and issued prophetic and messianic claims, and of ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, who retreated into his house in Damascus only a few years before Nābī in purposeful rejection of the corrupt society and government of his time.Footnote 75 All of these men, including Nābī, emerged from their exile with empire-wide fame and following. ʿUzlet was the practice of espousing a biting written critique of the public world through private reflection and withdrawal into the self.
The critique that Nābī developed in his solitude was frighteningly clear: the reigning institutions of Ottoman society were totally illegitimate. Yet this is only part of his naṣīḥat. The other part, so often overlooked but inseparable, is its moral exhortations on how to lead an ethical life within a corrupt society.Footnote 76 Nābī moves between these two spaces, intertwining chapters that “forbid” an evil trait or class of society and “enjoin” good qualities until he slowly builds a screed damning the whole of Ottoman society.Footnote 77
Nābī addressed his damning critique not to the sultan, as had been common in Ottoman advice literature, but to his own son, Ebu'l-Ḫayr. The choice is significant given that he would eventually declare the government illegitimate, and a play on a common classical framing of the king addressing his son, the prince.Footnote 78 Yet, his fatherly advice was also meant to inculcate virtue in its original Latin sense of virtus, the qualities of being a man, vir. While any piece of advice addressed to a son may be burdened with metaphors of masculinity, Nābī’s work possesses a deep sense that manhood is fragile, constantly threatened by a myriad of immoral acts in which any misstep can transform a man into an animal or a woman.Footnote 79 Ever the poet, he plays by expounding on the connection between morality and manhood in his very first chapter on the importance of prayer. He stresses that no one is exempt from the obligations of Islam, no matter what their status or qualities may be or what esoteric or philosophical knowledge they possess. Not only is it doubtful whether anyone who abandons prayer can truly be a man but, he explains to his son, the three gestures of prayer are represented in the very shape of the letters that spell out the word “man (adam)”: Standing (أ), sitting (د), and prostrating (م).”Footnote 80
Nābī expands his naṣīḥat to all aspects of life, often as a means of criticizing the social life of the new ruling classes whose success is fueled by debt and greed. Not only are silk and gold clothes frowned upon, but sumptuous garments in general. In place of sable, the belly fur of a fox will suffice. Satins, silks, and brocades are putrid; colorful clothes are unnecessary and one should wear plain fabrics and dress like one's peers.Footnote 81 Nābī quips, “He who adorns his body with silk | whoever sees him says, “What is this?!”Footnote 82 The debts incurred to pay for these luxuries turn the lion-hearted into women and sages into dolts.Footnote 83 Almost anything can leave one penniless: luxurious clothes, alchemy, gambling, or the quest for position. Even when giving charity there is no need for ostentation; rather than repairing a mosque or erecting a building it is better to feed the hungry.Footnote 84 More than anything, debt is the primary motor of Nābī’s analysis of society and the foundation of his advice.Footnote 85 For this reason, he constantly tells his son to be happy with what little he has since the most humiliating thing possible is to ask another for financial help or a position.Footnote 86
Much of Nābī’s critique can be understood as a reorientation of the traditional social spaces of Ottoman governance. In particular, the meclis—the Islamic adaptation of the Greek symposium and the social foundation of intellectual and political life—is kept at arm's length.Footnote 87 For this reason, Nābī devotes a chapter each to the sins of hypocrisy, lying, gossip, and the like.Footnote 88 The extreme denunciation of gossip (naḳl) in the meclis is telling because in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries it would have been regarded in a more positive light as “anecdotes (leṭā’if),” the verbal glue, detailed in the biographical dictionaries, that made the relatively limited intellectual elite cohere. By the late seventeenth century, however, with a much larger intellectual public, these anecdotes came to be regarded as vicious and destructive, and the antithesis of naṣīḥat.Footnote 89 Similarly, drinking and drug use, requisite for any scholarly gathering (meclis) or banquet (bezm), are strictly forbidden. There is nothing worse than being an addict, Nābī tells his son.Footnote 90 Games of chance, such as backgammon, are a trap created by Satan since they turn one into an irresponsible addict who stays up all night while his family goes hungry.Footnote 91 Participating in the meclis might be inevitable, but wine, games, and other vices are all good excuses with which to escape this den of gossips and hypocrites.
For Nābī, like many seventeenth-century moralists, the family had become the new site of virtue and power. Nābī, of course, addressed his reading public through the figure of his biological son, but there are other signs as well. In contrast, again, to the male homosociability of the meclis, Nābī restricts the act of intercourse to women. Sex with young boys, not to mention men, is strictly forbidden since to have sex with a man is to waste one's sperm, an act that destroys life. A woman's womb is the proper location for this vital fluid.Footnote 92 Yet, he cautions his son not to run out and marry solely for bodily pleasure. A marriage in haste can result in a wife of poor moral quality. Sexual needs should be sated with concubines, not boys, though even with them one had to be selective:
A Circassian concubine will be a disaster
Abaza girls are without chastity
Russian and Austrian and Frank and Hungarian
All of them incurable traitors
Not one of them will become a Muslim
Not one will enter the state of the true faithFootnote 93
By arguing that certain ethnicities could never truly be Muslim, or lacked the proper morality, Nābī is suggesting not only that adherence to Islam is the only true measure of virtue, but also that even slaves are integral family members whose morality must be cultivated and monitored.
At first, Nābī’s moral exhortations seem to strike a chord with those other more law-obsessed pietists of the seventeenth century, but what differentiates him is that in his view naṣīḥat is an individual affair directed at oneself and not a societal prescription to be directed at others. Not only is he open to the intellectual and spiritual benefits of somewhat controversial pastimes like music, chess, and gazing upon beautiful boys,Footnote 94 but he insists that one should not reproach others who do wrong. For example, he explicitly tells his son not to rebuke those whom he finds drinking. It is best to not become involved in their affairs in the first place. Rather than casting the first stone, one should inspect one's own actions, because one is never free of sin.Footnote 95 He reinforces this advice by saying that one should never reproach someone in public or treat another with disrespect.Footnote 96 In other words, Nābī’s approach, while part and parcel of the pietistic turn, is a far cry from the naṣīḥat of Feyżullah and his forbearers, who attempted to enforce the classic edict of “commanding right and forbidding wrong” to create a moral society.Footnote 97
Nābī’s belief that one can only change oneself goes hand in hand with his championship of ʿuzlet, a retreat from society to focus on one's private self. He tells his son,
Nābī’s resolution is to seal oneself within one's house with one's books and reject the corrupt world outside.Footnote 99 He even prescribes a proper way for his son to receive his naṣīḥat, in a symposium of one, as he prepared for bed with a candle: “Every evening, may he light a beeswax candle | so that the smoke of sloth not enter his meclis.”Footnote 100 Like his discourse on the family, politics and morality emerged from, and ideally stayed within, the bedroom.
Nābī’s new morality was only needed because he considered Ottoman society and government completely corrupt. His critique, though, is not explicit in the beginning of the Ḫayriyye. Instead, it builds slowly as he details the various occupational paths that the son could follow, presenting a dark mirror of other works of naṣīḥat that survey the different classes of the realm and that culminate with the role of the king, a chapter that he omits. This same structure becomes a means to expound on the moral bankruptcy of almost all of Ottoman society—the grandees (ʿayān),Footnote 101 the holy men and saints, the military men (pāşa), the jurists and the judges, and even the sultan. The crippling financial cost of participating in the political system drives anyone with ambitions of high position to take bribes and oppress the people to recoup those costs. The suffering of the common people (ḥalḳ) bearing the burden of this constant oppression is a frequent refrain. For this reason, Nābī immediately tells his son to abandon dreams of attaining the position of a grandee and be content being a middling person. “Watch out, don't you ever desire to be a grandee | be the most middling person, that estate is enough for you.”Footnote 102 The grandees—rapacious and greedy men who place no value in learning—are the antithesis of Nābī’s new man, but even pashas and judges would sacrifice the people in their quest for position.Footnote 103 Those who attempt to become pashas march straight into Hell, destroying the house of religion lest they risk not having their orders followed.Footnote 104
As if the rapaciousness of the grandees and pashas were not enough, the poor also must suffer the charlatans claiming to be saints and holy men. In a chapter titled “On forbidding the pollution of lies and untruths,” Nābī lets out a furious critique of charlatan shaykhs and saints living lavishly from the meager donations of the poor. The shaykhs of the Sufi orders are incredibly lazy and falsify dreams in order to proclaim their sanctity.Footnote 105 All the accoutrements of Sufism—the cloak, the beads, and so forth—are simply a means to make money, a veil obstructing us from seeing the true saints.Footnote 106 Now every pickpocket and laborer becomes a saint, Nābī claims.Footnote 107 The time of true saints has passed, with everyone today simply a pale imitation. Rather than search for a perfect guide, a book will do.Footnote 108 The seyyids, those who claim descent from the Prophet Muhammad, are just as bad.Footnote 109 If there are true saints in the world, they are to be found among the poor, working toward divine union yet refusing riches.Footnote 110
Nābī then shifts from a biting but general critique of the ills of society to a more systematic mode: no matter what his natural disposition or moral leanings, a pasha will be forced by the system to become a tyrant. He may at first be a cultured scholar who knows well both religious and worldly affairs and is magnanimous and pure-hearted. He may even aid the poor and be aware of their problems and state that he does not desire riches. Yet everyone is eventually corrupted. Fear of death, or the need to have one's orders followed, or the debts acquired from running a political household compel one to become an oppressor.Footnote 111 There is no way, in Nābī’s eyes, to escape this inevitable corruption even if one wishes to be virtuous.Footnote 112
Nābī then shifts from this systematic critique to declaring the illegitimacy of the government altogether. He first says that this massive injustice is only limited to the Ottomans and cannot be found in the lands of the Uzbeks, Indians (read Mughals), Christians, and Persians.Footnote 113 He continually brings up topoi of injustice—the lands lie fallow, the cities are turned into ruins, and brigands stalk every path—until he finally states, “The order of the world has surely been corrupted.”Footnote 114 Nābī then posits a series of ideals of justice based on the following formula: if only the law, the sharia, were present then there would be no oppression, no insecurity, no sudden dismissal, no brigandry, and no rebellion by the subjects. All this would disappear if only the empire were run in accordance with the law.Footnote 115 Since Nābī has spent the preceding thousand or so lines outlining that all these injustices do exist in plentitude and that the circle of justice has been shattered, he has for all intents and purposes declared the government illegitimate.
Lest Nābī’s readers think that he is simply repeating the traditional critique of the political/military segments of the government in an attempt to promote the position of the religious scholars, he spends the next chapter declaring the judges and jurists to be completely corrupt as well. Starting with a critique of those jurists (muftis) who corrupt and adulterate the fetvas (legal opinions), he quickly moves on to his real target: the judges. Nābī declares the judicial system completely illegitimate due to the constant acceptance of bribes. Those who cannot pay receive no justice. The judges spend their bribes on tobacco (which was banned for periods) and rule on its permissibility happily.Footnote 116 He excoriates the judges and the muftis, saying it would be better to be a highway robber than to ravage the law (sharīʿa also literally means road) as a judge or jurist.Footnote 117 He ends the chapter damning them all for selling out the sharia.Footnote 118 Even low-level bureaucrats (emīn) and charitable foundation (vaḳif) managers become an object of Nābī’s scorn. The former position is suitable only for the tame (ehli) who enjoy being ordered about. As for the latter, the pay is low and it is difficult to make a foundation successful; one inevitably begins pilfering the foundation's proceeds and damns oneself to Hell.Footnote 119 In the end, the judges and jurists are just like the pashas and the soldiery and the rest of the corrupt society.Footnote 120
By this point, it seems that no segment of society is innocent save the poor and exploited farmer.Footnote 121 The professor (muderris) seems to contribute the least evil to the world, but that is a difficult path to follow. Echoing the complaints of academics today, Nābī decries the lack of jobs and the need to move constantly to new positions with family in tow so as to move up the ladder. A man might succeed and climb the ranks, but along the way he will accumulate many enemies and much debt. And a few months after reaching the top he is summarily dismissed and sent to Rhodes where he will surely be taken prisoner by pirates. All this for a measly forty aspers.Footnote 122 One could easily believe that Nābī’s only solution is to abandon society altogether, to return to the aforementioned ʿuzlet, as he exhorts his son to avoid the courts and divans, refuse to speak to judges and pashas, and not to go outside.Footnote 123
In a completely corrupt society, Nābī argues, one can only act morally as an individual, not as a member of a social group. Yet there is one exception to his dismal view. The only truly virtuous men in Nābī’s world are the senior secretaries of the Imperial Chancellery, the ḫacegān-i dīvān. Only they possess the moral qualities of Nābī’s new man, “knowledgeable, learned, and meek, cultured, mild and patient,” gaining their fame honorably and well paid to boot.Footnote 124 Perhaps not surprisingly, Nābī’s protégé, Rāmī Meḥmed Paşa (d. 1704), had just become the grand vizier, the first of many chancellors to take up the post, and who may or may not have initiated the rebellion of 1703.Footnote 125 In the absence of the sultan, and given Nābī’s biting critique of all Ottoman institutions, Nābī may have been insinuating that these men were the ones with the true right to rule, that they best possessed the proper moral constitution for governing the empire.
CONCLUSION
This story comes to an end in the summer of 1703 with the deposition of a sultan and Feyżullah brutish death. Nābī, still in Aleppo, penned the following chronogram in Persian to commemorate the revolt:
Following that villainous and corrupt mufti [Feyżullah]
When the people of Istanbul went mad and rebelled
I heard a line of a chronogram from the unseen
It said, “What is heard is not what was seen” (1703).Footnote 126
What precisely is Nābī suggesting that we have failed to see? What is the ultimate moral of this tale? I have argued over the course of this article that Feyżullah and Nābī’s intertwined story is more than an intriguing anecdote, but a means of writing anew the history of political thought in the early modern Middle East by focusing on their contending notions of naṣīḥat, or “advice.” Naṣīḥat here is not the one commonly found in the secularized version of Ottoman political thought, but rather a field in which political power was expressed through the cultivation, exhortation, and enforcement of morality upon commoners and elites alike. While there were many competing visions of naṣīḥat on offer during the seventeenth century, they all developed from the values and experiments of the pietistic turn that emphasized that all the empire's subjects had the potential and responsibility to be moral—and thus political—actors, and to be so as individuals. In other words, these thinkers advanced a new political subjectivity, one based on the reorganization of politics around domesticity and private spaces. Here lies one major point of difference between Nābī’s naṣīḥat and that of Feyżullah: while the clerics attempted to increasingly discipline and control private belief and even familial relations, Nābī cultivated and protected these private spaces as sites of political critique and resistance. As I stated in the introduction, we can only see this particular political regime of morality by adopting the insights of anthropologists of Islamic revival and secularism.
Anthropologists themselves might benefit, in turn, from a historical perspective derived from the Ottoman Empire. In their search for new understandings of Islamic revival, they logically have come to critique the very concept of secularism, which they connect to stronger European influence in the nineteenth century. European influence for the anthropologists is not the desacralizing influence of science, as earlier modernization theorists believed,Footnote 127 but instead the transformative power of the colonial state which, the story goes, introduced a divide between the “secular” and the “religious,” making the former a foundation for politics and consigning the latter to private life. Talal Asad, for example, identifies the emergence of secularism as a political project with the introduction of European legal codes in nineteenth-century Egypt and the relegation of the sharia to the sphere of family law, a space from which the state could bring the individual into being as a new political actor and insert itself into modern ethics.Footnote 128 While there were “formations of the secular” throughout human history, secularism as a political project did not exist prior to European colonialism because neither Arabic nor Turkish possessed words for “secularism” or the closely related concept of “society” until the late nineteenth century.Footnote 129
Anthropologists’ heavy focus on the past two centuries stems from their desire to critique the latent workings of contemporary secular liberalism. In the past few years, though, secularism and liberalism's hold on our society has grown more tenuous. Not only do critiques of secularism seem increasingly extraneous, but there has now emerged an unvoiced anxiety by some that questioning secularism (and therefore politically redeeming Islamist pietism) risks weakening democracy itself and inadvertently supporting autocratic regimes.Footnote 130 Perhaps one way to break out of this entrapping dichotomy is to explore secularism's multiple histories in the Middle East, to imagine it beyond the confines of the liberal nation-state. Might there not have been other revolutions in morality that emerged prior to colonialism but which we have difficulty identifying given that they belonged to a culture with a different temporality and conceptual vocabulary? We might interpret Nābī’s naṣīḥat, and specifically his call for spaces of private belief and individual morality, as a form of secularism that creates a “distinctive relation between state law and personal morality, such that religion became essentially a meter of (private) belief.”Footnote 131 I draw this connection not to place the Ottoman Empire on some track to a fabled modernity, but rather to hint at ways that the politics fostered by the pietistic turn might have expressed itself, even until today.
It happens that in the months preceding and following Feyżullah's demise the city of Istanbul initiated an experiment of self-rule. The crowds gathered and took control of the city, and rejected the imperial government's naṣīḥat.Footnote 132 They also, however, rejected Nābī’s former protégé, the grand vizier Rāmī Meḥmed Paşa, whom the Janissaries singled out for invective after Feyżullah.Footnote 133 The city's inhabitants instead chose to follow their own path: “ignoring four hundred years of dynastic rule,” the city's provisional leader, Çalık Ahmed, “tried to cultivate in the public (ortalığı) the false belief” that “the state should be run by mass gathering and assembly (cumhûr-ı cemʿiyyeti ve tecemmuʿ-ı devleti).”Footnote 134 Did this aborted proto-democratic uprising emerge from new understandings of naṣīḥat circulating in the seventeenth century? Chroniclers like Naima, who wrote the above passage after the new sultan, Ahmed III, had established himself, dismiss the uprising as opportunistic anarchism and the event was eventually erased from the pages of history. Historians today have likewise suggested that it was a foiled attempt to establish a Janissary oligarchy.Footnote 135 For the moment, we can only speculate about the cultural origins and significance of this political experiment. Nābī himself, though, urges us to take a second look at this forgotten revolution and understand that “what is heard is not what was seen.”
Open access
