The Safavid Threat and Juristic Authority in the Ottoman Empire During the 16th Century

Abstract

This article investigates the opinions of three senior Ottoman jurists, Sarıgörez (d. 1522), Kemalpaşazade (d. 1534), and Ebussuud (d. 1574), on the subject of the Safavids and their supporters. Historians have treated these opinions as part of the vast polemical literature uniformly intended to justify an impending Ottoman attack against their Safavid rivals. Questioning the notion that all authors shared an undifferentiated attitude, this article underlines that, unlike most polemical literature, the opinions of these three jurists focused on the religiolegal aspects of the Safavid issue and varied and evolved in line with changing historical realities, the jurists’ divergent assessments of the Safavid threat, and their preference for different jurisprudential doctrines. Based on an analysis of the opinions, I argue that these jurists assumed a high degree of autonomy as producers and interpreters of the law and thus did not necessarily feel obliged to legitimate or excuse every imperial action.

İslam Hukuk Literatürü Siyâsetin bir Tezâhürü müdür?: İstitâbe Hakkındaki Anlatı Değişimi Özelinde Bir Analiz

“…As such, the assumption that Islamic law as we know it today is a later trajectory by people who, despite initially not being legal professional jurists, worked for the Umayyad dynasty (Schacht, 1955, 72), seem to have led many, if not all (Atçıl, 2017), to analyse the later developments in the legal tradition as well as other traditions in the times of Seljukids and Ottomans as illustrated above with the pre-assumption that the body of legal literature as a whole represents the accumulation of various politics of different ruling elites in different times (Humphreys, 1988, p. 149-168, Sariyannis 2018, and Yılmaz, 2018.…”

“…These scholars seek to find any change or anything they consider extraordinary in classical scholars' beliefs, convictions, and practices, and link it to (a) material gain(s), which is something that must have led classical scholars to deviate from the norm (Watt, 1956, pp. 336-337), something which also has been challenged using three Ottoman jurists elsewhere (Atçıl, 2017). This tendency is resulted from a common mistrust to classical sources on various aspects of Islamic studies, a mistrust which presupposes that Muslim sources do not represent the "realities" of what has taken place, but rather, political interests of the ruling elites.…”