Faroqhi S.N. The Cambridge History of Turkey: Volume 3, The Later Ottoman Empire, 1603-1839

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The Ottoman ulema

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The ulema in context

Generalisations about the character of the Ottoman religious and legal schol-

ars (ulema) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries call for the kind of

historiographical disclaimers that often accompany studies of early modern

institutions – the narrative sources are elitist or formulaic, the documentary

materials absent or uneven and the secondary literature thin or tendentious.

The problem of sources can be offset by limiting the scope of generalisation –

not all ulema, for example, but those who are retrievable or in some way rep-

resentative of the sources if not of society. Most ﬁndings will still reveal more

about the grand than the ordinary membership, and more about Istanbul and

other major centres than about provincial and small-town scholars.

In Ottoman usage, ‘the ulema’ constituted an ever more exclusive voca-

tional category. Until the modernising reforms of the nineteenth century,

it also denoted an increasingly more privileged social caste. The Ottomans’

unprecedented centralisation of ulema recruitment and functions, a process

well under way by the mid-sixteenth century, and the restrictive application

of the term itself, direct the historiographical gaze, now as in the Ottoman

past, onto Istanbul and the central elites. The boundaries around ‘the learned’

explain a great deal about Ottoman values and anxieties in these centuries.

Among other things, they suggest a profound investment in designating who

would – and who would not – be the standard-bearers of Ottoman Islamic

orthodoxy.

In the Ottoman Empire, as in Islamic states before it, the ulema occupied

a singular place among the exemplars of faith and pious tradition: the ulema

were viewed as the heirs of the Prophet, the repositories of the holy law. For the

Sunni community, they were the guardians of the faith in the ages following

the death of the Prophet Muhammad. Under the later Ottoman regime, they

were more than that, and less.

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The Ottoman system, like previous Islamic regimes, called for a certain inti-

macy between ruler and guardians. Ideally, the ulema should be close enough

to the centres of governance to advise the sovereign or his deputies, to ensure

that the rulings of the latter were consonant with the holy law. As head of state,

the ruler should provide for the ulema’s well-being, and as Commander of the

Faithful he should guarantee their scholarly excellence and personal probity.

Since the caliphal era of early Islam, legal scholars had served as authoritative

experts, either in ofﬁcial positions or in unofﬁcial community practice. The

early ulema’s sense of the inherent corruption of ofﬁcial appointment, espe-

cially the ofﬁce of judgeship (kadi), led many to shun ofﬁce rather than risk

contamination. Yet the magnitude of the Ottoman enterprise, and the fund of

resources assigned to its religious institutions, discouraged holdouts against

state service.

By the sixteenth century, virtually all legal scholars who presided over a

medrese classroom or a s¸eriat court in the Turkish-speaking areas of the empire,

along with imperial appointees everywhere, were ranked, graded and pen-

sioned under central state auspices. Individuals continued to assert their inde-

pendence on particular issues, especially those in which the sultan did not have

an overwhelming partisan interest. However, the possibility of a self-sustained,

independent body of ulema, near but not beholden to the wielders of state

power, had faded. State sponsorship gave the legal system formidable range

and centrality, but it also exposed the ulema to the compromising pressures

of lay ofﬁcialdom. Members of the ulema vied for inﬂuence with bureaucrats

and janissaries, among other elite sectors, and also competed among them-

selves for the honours of their particular calling. In common with other ofﬁcial

appointees, the ulema enjoyed askeri status, a privileged social and economic

positioning superior to that of the ordinary, tax-paying population. It was the

counsel of this vested body of religious ofﬁce-holders that state authorities

most consistently sought on the wider imperial stage, to advise on war, peace

and social order, and on other matters apart from law or religion as such.

Efforts by the state to rein in the ulema’s capacity for independent action,

and the religious institution’s own urge to autonomy, are recurring themes in

Ottoman history. The conﬂict between the religious and secular leaderships

was ultimately about power, but the battle lines between the two shifted after

the founding centuries. The scholarly integrity associated with the early ulema

leadership yielded in later times to an undisguised preoccupation with status

and remuneration. The voluminous biographical literature that tracked the

religious learned throughout the Ottoman era described an admired ulema

community in the earliest centuries. Many scholars were commemorated in

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their own time for their simplicity and courage: thus S¸eyh

ulislam Zenbilli Ali

(‘Ali of the Basket’) was described as standing up to Selim the Grim on matters

of life and death, or as unpretentiously placing his legal opinions in a basket

lowered to petitioners. Admittedly the ‘golden-age’ nostalgia common to his-

toriographical treatments of the pre-seventeenth-century empire whitewashed

the early judiciary along with much else. In fact, ignorant and rapacious kadis

troubled the provinces throughout the history of the empire. Nonetheless, the

biographical testimonials taken together reveal the ﬂashpoints in early ulema–

state relations. With or without homely detail, the anecdotes identify the

early struggles in the heroic terms of individual resistance. Almost invariably

these stories revolve around two possible sources of corruption: the threat of

the state’s punishments and the seductiveness of its rewards. In later times,

both had become integral features of the ulema calling, the ulema ‘career’

(tarik-i ulema), while dignity and social presence displaced personal courage in

biographical memory, and ulema notability was represented more in terms of

family and social status than in individual terms.

There were, of course, exceptions to the high standard of the early ulema

leadership at all levels of the membership. Still, public perceptions of the ﬁf-

teenth and sixteenth centuries drew heavily on the reputation of the ulema’s

most esteemed members, long admired by the sultans themselves. Yet by the

mid-seventeenth century, the ulema were increasingly seen as blind careerists,

pursuing ofﬁce more than learning. Contemporary biographical dictionaries,

many of them written by ulema, reﬂected and probably encouraged the obses-

sion with bureaucratic honours. Chronicles and histories, again many with

ulema authors, also tend to focus on bureaucratic – rather than scholarly or

religious – markers of achievement. Apart from the biographical minima of

geographical origin, paternity and death, the subjects of these works were pre-

sented in vocational terms, as the sum of their ofﬁces and ranks. Many ulema

continued in the tradition of the early exemplars, but bureaucratic careerism

often eclipsed the merits that had bound career mobility more closely to reli-

gious knowledge (ilm).

The literature of the time plays with the term ‘ofﬁcial ulema’(resmi ulema),

denoting ofﬁce-holding or state ulema, in opposition to the ‘real’ ulema (ulema-i

tarik or hakkiki ulema), thus the ulema in name versus the genuinely learned.

The biographical dictionaries make tired reference to this or that alim’s liter-

ary output: ‘He wrote poetry’; ‘He had a small collection of poems (divan)’;

‘He wrote three treatises (risales).’ Their perfunctory tone contrasts with the

compliments lavished on the relatively few whose intellectual achievements,

religious or profane, warranted biographical enthusiasm. Zekeriyazade Yahya

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(d. 1644), about whose worth there was widespread agreement, is a rarity. He

is lauded as ‘one of the most distinguished Ottoman s¸eyh

ulislams’, ‘a man

of true excellence’ who, alone of his age, ‘achieved the repute of [Sultan

uleyman’s s¸eyh

ulislam] Ebuss

uud, with his choice poetry and his justice and

integrity’.

Many others are praised in similarly expansive terms – including

several scholars in each of the Us¸akizade, Ebu

Ishakzade and Pirizade lines. But

unlike Zekeriyazade or later Mınkarizade Yahya (d. 1678) they are presented

more narrowly, as productive scholars, for example, but not particularly to

be remembered for their performance in ofﬁce. Sometimes the disconnection

between scholarship and performance is stark, as with S¸eyh

ulislam Erzurumlu

Feyzullah (d. 1703), whose scholarly standing is forever stained by his personal

failings. The nineteenth-century historian and legal scholar Ahmed Cevdet,

a formidable alim himself, singles out the eighteenth-century kadıasker and

memorialist Tatarcık Abdullah as a ‘second Taftazani’, yet Tatarcık’s early

years were marred by scandal.

From the end of the sixteenth century, the ulema as an institution – the

ilmiye as it was called – was subjected to the same economic and demographic

pressures that impelled others of the central elites to protect their privileged

status against new claimants. The intensiﬁed careerism of ofﬁce-holders was

the most conspicuous dimension of the ulema’s response in the seventeenth

and eighteenth centuries. But it was the ability of the richest among them to

command the career for the beneﬁt of their own families that subverted the

promise of the open and subsidised education system.

The ilmiye

Ottoman territory was divided into vilayets, and vilayets into sancaks. Beneath

these military-administrative layers, the Ottomans divided their empire into

districts (kazas), and assigned to them a small army of kadis, jurisconsults

uftis) and legal clerks. A comprehensive legal system, supported by an

expanding array of colleges (medreses) in a newly elaborated system for training

legal personnel, was ﬁrmly in place in the late sixteenth century.

The Ottoman kadis and m

uftis who dispensed justice in the courts, and

the teachers (m

uderrises) who instructed future generations of ulema had

1 Bab-i Mes¸ihat,

Ilmiye salnamesi (Istanbul, 1334/1915–16), p. 443; cf. Katib C¸ elebi, Fezleke-i

tarih, 2 vols. (Istanbul, 1286/1870), vol. II, pp. 231–2;M

ustakimzade S

uleyman Sadeddin,

Devhat el-mes¸ayıhmazeyl(Istanbul, 1978), pp. 47–8.

2 Ahmed Cevdet [Pas¸a], Tertib-i Cevdet ez-Tarih-i Cevdet, 12 vols. (Istanbul, 1309/1891–2),

vol. I, pp. 108–17, vol. IV, pp. 58, 256, vol. V, pp. 27, 34–9, vol. VI, pp. 227–8.

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responsibility for clarifying the meaning of religious doctrine and regulating

society accordingto the norms of the faith. Farmore than m

uftis and m

uderrises,

however, Ottoman kadis were on the front lines in the meeting between reli-

gious expectation and social practice. Their public role extended beyond the

courtroom to make them adjunct ofﬁcers of state. Kadis reported on the

conduct of the sultan’s secular administrators and supervised transactions

in the marketplace. Price-gouging, hoarding, misappropriation, dereliction,

and even impassable roads and downed bridges could fall within the kadis’

charge.

The duties of the two kadıaskers, chief justices of the army for Rumelia and

Anatolia, also combined religion and administration. These dignitaries applied

the principles of inheritance law to the estates of the deceased, administered

justice on campaign and constituted a court of appeals in the imperial divan, the

highest formal consultative body. They also had responsibility for appointing

the minor kadis in their jurisdictions – in the eighteenth century, close to 500 in

all. And as permanent members of the divan, the kadıaskers sat with the grand

vizier and the chiefs of the bureaucracy, chancery and treasury to advise on

treaties and refugees, personnel and provisioning, budget and ﬁnance, as well

as justice and morality. In the provinces, kadis performed similar roles.

The s¸eyh

ulislam, the grand m

ufti of Istanbul, was superior in rank to all

other ulema in this period. Since the late sixteenth century he had come to

be regarded as head of the ilmiye, and was thus not merely pre-eminent, but

bureaucratically responsible for the institution’s operations and the conduct

of its ofﬁce-holders.

His primary religio-legal role, to render opinions on the

s¸eriat legality of contested matters of law, served a critical function in an empire

that increasingly framed the rhetoric of legitimacy in the idiom of social order

and legalitarian Islam. Like other m

uftis, the s¸eyh

ulislam issued fetvas, non-

binding opinions on religious questions. Their responses were often gathered

together for futuregenerations and arranged into exemplary volumes, topic by

topic, from ablutions and prayer to guardianship, divorce and property law. As

grand m

ufti of the capital, however, the s¸eyh

ulislam had a special relationship

to the state and the sultan. He was the foremost religious authority in the

empire, the opinion-giver whose formal rulings were a judgement necessary

for important state policies including the dethroning of rulers. As a high ofﬁcial

whosecalling virtually monopolised the representationof learning, his counsel

3 The duties of the kadıasker varied over the course of these centuries, with the Rumelia

kadıasker, the senior of the two, also emerging with the larger judicial role.

4 Richard C. Repp, The M

ufti of Istanbul (London, 1986).

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was also routinely sought by the sultan and his ministers on general matters

of governance, whether or not legality was at issue.

The s¸eyh

ulislam’s role as jurist and statesman-administrator gave rise to

the same ambiguities that troubled the roles of kadi and kadıasker. But the

s¸eyh

ulislam’s dilemma was complicated by his unique relationship to the ruler.

While the s¸eyh

ulislam gave voice to the holy law and the sultan was subject

to the law’s provisions, it was the ruler who appointed and dismissed the

s¸eyh

ulislam. The balance between the theoretical supremacy of the law and

the sultan’s authority over the law’s practitioners was always uneasy. But the

rapid-ﬁre dismissals of s¸eyh

ulislams at the turn of the sixteenth century put an

end to any notion that the sultan’s government refrained from tampering with

the ilmiye’s moral authority. The ofﬁce of s¸eyh

ulislam lost its life tenure. By the

opening of the seventeenth century, incumbents were as vulnerable to political

whim as any a

ga or vizier. Memekzade Mustafa (d. 1656/7) served half a day.

Cafer Efendizade Sunullah’s (d. 1612) four terms averaged ﬁve months each.

Although the s¸eyh

ulislam’s time in ofﬁce could now be as brief as anyone’s, it

differed in having no set maximum. Zekeriyazade Yahya (d. 1644), Mınkarizade

Yahya (d. 1678), C¸ atalcalı Ali (d. 1692) and Yenis¸ehirli Abdullah (d. 1743) all served

ten or more unbroken years. Swift turnover and loss of the sultan’s or grand

vizier’s support, however, were by far the norm.

The limits of the legal learned

As in other eras, the men who rose to ulema status did not encompass the

entire body of religious learned, much less the entire class of the empire’s

literate ‘learned’, religious or otherwise. The religious sciences of which the

ulema were masters comprised the disciplines associated with s¸eriat law, par-

ticularly jurisprudence (fıkh) and Qur’anic commentary (tefsir). Chroniclers,

poets, biographers and other literati whose achievements lay mainly in profane

letters were excluded unless they were also scholars of the law. Other religious

specialists, if not trained in the law, were excluded by deﬁnition. Thus suﬁ

sheikhs, as well as reciters of the Qur’an or of the canonical hadith compi-

lations, were esteemed for their religious exertions, but they did not qualify

as ulema – according to regular Ottoman usage – if their credentials did not

reﬂect teaching mastery of the legal texts that underlay Sunni guardianship.

To be sure, there was ﬂuidity between these categories and vocations, since

individuals moved between pursuits in the course of a lifetime. But apart from

the sponsorship of a grandee, career movement tended to go out from rather

than into the ulema.

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The common pattern among the ulema themselves reﬂected avocational

accomplishment in several ﬁelds. Ulema of various ranks offered up poetry, his-

tories, calligraphic art and other emblems of broad cultivation. S¸eyh

ulislam

Zekeriyazade Yahya was celebrated for his poetry as much as for ilm.An

eighteenth-century successor, Pırizade Mehmed Sahib (d. 1749), translator

of Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddima, was equally well regarded. Mirzazade Salim

(d. 1743/4) was a biographer and poet and a well-known though morally dubi-

ous kadi of rank. Historians were also plentiful – S¸eyh

ulislams Kara C¸ elebizade

Abd

ulaziz (d. 1658) and C¸ elebizade

Ismail Asım (d. 1760), Kadıasker Mehmed

Ras¸id (d. 1735), the m

uderris C¸ esmizade Mustafa Res¸id (d. 1770), and the town

kadi S¸emdanizade S

uleyman (d. 1779), among others. A fair number of ulema

were also practising suﬁs, and some suﬁ sheikhs were experts in the law. But

the elaborate set of hurdles required for ulema status deterred crossovers from

other career paths, except in the case of men whom the sultan launched or

promoted without regard to professional canons.

In the vast empire, language and geography posed important barriers to

inclusion among the ulema elite. Ulema trained and employed in the Arabic-

speaking provinces received recognition as scholars, but in general they were

marginalised with respect to audiences and issues outside their home locales.

To most non-Turkish speakers, this did not much matter. They possessed

their own spheres of inﬂuence and approbation. As to the majority of Turkish

speakers, they measured success exclusively in terms of the central institu-

tions. Although talented provincials from the Arab and Balkan regions often

braved the capital – the kadıaskers Muhas¸s¸i S¸ehabeddin Ahmed of Egypt

(d. 1659), the Bosnians S¸aban (d. 1666) and S¸abanizade Mehmed (d. 1692) and

the Syrian Ebulfethzade Yusuf (d. 1647) were the most successful of their day –

the governing reaches of the imperial system in these centuries was the domain

of Ottoman Turkish speech.

The Ottomans always favoured the use of the term ulema to mean the

ofﬁcially recognised ulema, those either employed in high ofﬁcial capacity or

fully qualiﬁed as such. In the 1600s, in tandem with the sixteenth-century

expansion of the medrese system, the term was bestowed on incumbents at or

above the entry-level teaching grade of the expanded hierarchy. The hierarchy

commenced with twelve successive medrese grades, from the

Ibtida-i Haric

to the Dar

ulhadis-i S

uleymaniye, and rose through a superior pyramid of the

empire’s most important kadi posts to culminate in the s¸eyh

ulislamate (see

tables 10.1 and 10.2). Hundreds of other medreses, scattered throughout Istanbul

and the region, were also in operation in these later centuries, but they tended

to accommodate only the more elementary studies. Major Arab centres such

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Table 10.1

uderris/medrese hierarchy

(in descending grade order)

Dar

ulhadis-i S

uleymaniye

Hamis-i S

uleymaniye

Musile-i S

uleymaniye

Hareket-i Altmıs¸lı

Ibtida-i Altmıs¸lı

Sahn-i Seman

Musile-i Sahn

Hareket-i Dahil

Ibtida-i Dahil

Hareket-i Haric

Ibtida-i Haric

Table 10.2 S¸eyh

ulislamate and judgeships (in descending order)

s¸eyh

ulislam

kadıasker of Rumelia

kadıasker of Anatolia

uk mevleviyets (great mollaships)

kadi of Istanbul

kadis of the Haremeyn (Mecca and Medina)

Erbaa grade: kadis of Damascus, Cairo, Bursa, Edirne

Mahrec grade: kadis of Aleppo, Ey

up, Galata, Izmir, Jerusalem, Salonika,

Usk

udar,

Yenis¸ehir (Larisa)

as Cairo and Damascus were exceptions. As former capitals themselves, they

possessed substantial pre-Ottoman endowments and maintained their own

colleges to serve even the most advanced students. The Arab provinces also

kept alive a vigorous scholarly third ‘way’, through the continued existence of

an informal network of independent ulema, who attracted students as well as

legal petitioners.

TheIstanbul system wasthe trainingground for what can be called the impe-

rial ulema. In the seventeenth century and thereafter, a young man reaching

for a career as a hierarchy professor or judge had to pursue Istanbul’s edu-

cational track. Students ascended from grade to grade – at least theoretically

5 Judith E. Tucker, In the House of the Law: Gender and Islamic Law in Ottoman Syria and

Palestine (Berkeley, 1998).

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The Ottoman ulema

mastering the texts of each – through the ﬁrst ﬁve Istanbul grades, followed by

some seven years in the capacity of advanced students (danıs¸mend) and Haric

candidates (m

ulazim). The conﬁguration, comprising twelve grades in all, had

been capped since 1557 by the new S

uleymaniye grades (see table 10.1). The

mark of ulema status, however, was not the completion of years of study. It was

instead the receipt of the r

uus-i tedris teaching permit and, with it, appointment

to an

Ibtida-i Haric medrese (see table 10.1), for which candidates had to pass the

uus examination.

For some young men – their numbers are impossible to know – the opportu-

nity to take the r

uus examination never came, or so many years passed that they

dropped out of the running. As a r

uus candidate in 1704, the young Mehmed

Ras¸id, later imperial historian and kadıasker, had spent eleven demoralising

years – four more than the purported norm – awaiting his turn. He and the

others who were turned away, some having waited up to eighteen years, were

discouraged from continuing. ‘Be an apothecary!’ ‘Be a grocer!’ they were

told.

Even in prosperous times, most grades faced an oversupply of qualiﬁed

candidates. New m

uderrises quickly realised that the Haric bottleneck they

had just escaped was one of many to be endured. Too many m

uderrises of

the Musile-i Sahn – popularly known as ‘the bog’ (batak) – qualiﬁed for the

Sahn-i Seman, too many Altmıs¸lıs for the S

ulemaniye, too many S

uleymaniye

uderrises for entry-level judgeships, and so on. Those ulema who aspired to

permanent teaching careers were happy to halt further ofﬁce-seeking once

they reached a medrese grade of their choice. For the rest, however, available

posts and honours rarely satisﬁed the demand for advancement. Even worse,

in this period the number of candidates was increasing at virtually every level,

at a time of decreasing resources in a shrinking empire.

Despite longer examination intervals, the number of r

uus recipients trebled

between 1703 and 1839. The demand for posts was met in large part by expan-

sionism, devaluation and compensatory honoriﬁc titles. Scores of ‘quick-ﬁx’

medreses were endowed in the form of dersiyes – m

uderris stipends assigned to an

existing medrese or mosque. Dersiyes were ranked and graded like traditional,

constructed medreses, their grade depending on the status of their founder-

donor.

Adding places for kadis was more difﬁcult since new positions required

new territory or the subdividing of existing kazas. Inasmuch as the empire was

6 Mehmed Ras¸id, Tarih-i Ras¸id, 6 vols. (Istanbul, 1282/1865), vol. III, pp. 119–20.

7 Madeline C. Zilﬁ, ‘The

Ilmiye Registers and the Ottoman Medrese System Prior to the

Tanzimat’, in Contributions

a l’histoire

economique et sociale de l’Empire ottoman, ed. J.-L.

Bacqu

e-Grammont and P. Dumont (Louvain, 1983), pp. 309–27, passim.

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