Tag Archives: ottoman

Professor Kafadar on religion and the Ottoman state

19 Friday Jul 2013

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20130719-194851.jpgReligion and state at the center of the Empire: the Sultanahmet Mosque

Today I had the privilege of hearing a lecture from Professor Cemal Kafadar, one of the leading scholars of Turkish Studies. His talk ranged far and wide, but I focused on his discussion on religion in the Ottoman Empire. His primary theme: the Empire was more deeply involved in the organization of religious practice than any prior Islamic regime.

The basic roles of the professional religious were the same as in much of the Islamic world. The graduates from the madrases, the ulama, were, as they still are, religio-legal scholars. They followed three career paths: professor, mufti or qadi. Professors in the madrases, like today, would teach and write commentaries on books. Muftis were jurisconsults, very similar to rabbis giving responsa. Individual muftis’ rulings, or fatwas, would be followed to the extent these scholars were respected by their community. Thus they were not court rulings. Qadis were judges who offered binding court rulings, registered business relationships, marriages and divorces, and regulated the weights and measures in the marketplaces.

The Ottoman state revealed its influence in how it ranked the madrases in three ranks of competitiveness and quality. They also created a pyramidal hierarchy of muftis and qadis, all the way from the local level to the Sheik al-Islam. They frequently used the phrase “religion and state.” Professor Kafadar gave the example, “We must do such-and-so, for the good of religion and state.” Thus the two were explicitly tied both in practice and in rhetoric.

Professor Kafadar’s did not have time to discuss Sufism much, but I have seen much about Sufism in the Empire in my time in Turkey. I suspect that the Ottoman government’s heavy intervention in the official religion pushed those who wanted more religious flexibility into the alternative path of the mystical masters.

Visiting the Ottoman Empire

11 Thursday Jul 2013

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The Empire is gone, but if you want a taste of a wealthy hill town from the Ottoman 19th century, go to Yoruk Koya. It was first settled in the 13th century by the Yoruk, nomadic peoples from Khorasan. They people from Yoruk Koya and the better known nearby Safranbolu made a lot of money as Janissaries – as soldiers and later as bakers – in the capital. A 1929 census showed that over half the bakers in Istanbul were from these towns 250 miles from Istanbul! They brought this wealth back with them, and built beautiful multi-story wood houses. Some of the names of the people still reflect their work in the military – one last name means “armorer” for example.

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Interestingly, the Janissary Corps was not orthodox Sunni – instead it followed a set of customs called “Bektashi” after its Sufi founder Haci Bektash. “For those who have Awareness, a hint is quite enough. For the multitudes of heedless mere knowledge is useless.” Among their different traditions was a more equal relationship between men and women – in Yoruk Koya traditionally women could pass by the café without covering their faces, and men and women could drink alcohol together. (Orthodox believers sometimes exaggerated these difference to imply moral laxity.)

The area has seen layers of loss. The Bektashi were disbanded as a Sufi order along with the Janissaries in 1826, merging them with the more approved Mehlevi order. Then Ataturk made all sufi orders illegal when he sought to unify the country under a secular Turkish identity in the 1920s. Also in the 1920s Turkey and Greece agreed to a “population exchange,” and up to 20% of Greek-speaking Christians who lived in the area were moved to Greece. Still, in Yoruk Koya and Safranbolu one can see details that indicate the Bektashi heritage of their inhabitants. They followed a numerological system, and many wall paintings in the houses have the specific numbers worked into their decorations. I came across a Greek inscription from the 1840s. Some graves have carved on the top the headgear of the Sufi dervishes (leaders) buried there.

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I also experienced a more immediately physical connection with the area’s history by spending part of an afternoon in the historic Cinci hamam. Built in the 17th century, the marble-slabbed sicaklik (hot room) is capped with a traditional dome with small glass windows. Metal wrought faucets spill into bowls stamped with the name of the hamam. A massage there was both invigorating and an aesthetic experience.

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Ottoman poetry

10 Wednesday Jul 2013

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If you’d asked me the subject of Ottoman poetry, I would have told you it was God. I would not have been completely wrong, but Professor Sooyong Kim of Koc University surprised me today with some of additional possible interpretations.

First, “ghazal” poetry was love poetry, and one

    could

interpret it as referring to the writer’s love for God. It was repetitive and not supposed to be original. The poets leaned heavily on conventions – the beloved was always moon-faced, fair-skinned, black-haired, cypress slender. As Prof. Kim said, the themes were similar to country and western music: I have a beloved, the beloved ignores me, so I go drinking at the meyhane (the tavern). The poet writes in the first person in the first and second stanzas, and in the third stanza switches to the third person.

So far, ghazal poetry sounds a bit odd to modern ears but nothing too surprising. (Actually, I suppose drinking forlornly because God won’t respond to one’s entreaties could be considered a very modern attitude.) What I did not expect, however, is that Ottoman Turkish had gender neutral pronouns. Thus, ghazal poetry could be written about a beloved and one need never say if that person was a male or a female. Often, indeed, the subject was meant to be a boy. But was the writer was expressing homosexual love? Perhaps – or perhaps, says Professor Kim, the poet could have been speaking in Platonic ideal terms.

So…is a particular ghazal poem about God? about a woman? about a man? Was it meant to express physical or spiritual love? Your guess is as good as the next interpreter’s.

The tragedy of rejecting the (recent) past

20 Thursday Jun 2013

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I’ve just been reading in Donald Quataert’s The Ottoman Empire about how the successor states of the Ottoman Empire almost without exception viewed the Empire as a loser and/or an oppressor, and so sought to minimize and ignore that part of history. This gave me a strange feeling of nostalgia. It is completely understandable that groups seeking to produce a new group identity (usually nationalist) would set themselves up in opposition to the past. Still, it seems that to reject such a rich heritage, one of hundreds of years in most cases, is a powerful loss. I also never knew that “Ottoman” was a language that could be distinguished from modern Turkish, and though I did know about the shift of scripts from Arabic to Latin, I had not reflected on the daily implications. Am I right that a modern Turk could not read a book or inscription printed prior to the language reforms of 1928? How fascinating, and sad, in a way, that current Turks can be surrounded by writings less than a century old that they cannot read, and even if transliterated might not understand! I love poking around in used bookstores and stumbling upon really old printings. I once came across a fascinating book called something like “The Religion of the Hindoos,” printed in the late 19th Century (it contained a wild mix of real appreciation for the people and a clear sense of the author’s superiority as a Christian missionary). It was exciting to hold that actual book, and I recalled it when Quataert wrote that modern middle class Turks, now seeking to recapture their past, “buy Ottoman books they cannot read” (p. 198).