Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf

esentment of the gazi circles that we find reflected in the chronicles.
It is certainly sometime during the fourteenth century that the sedentary
administrative traditions of classical Islam began to enjoy influence and then
gain ascendancy in the Ottoman state. Islamic and Anatolian cultural history
shows us, however, that gaza had never been a consistently dominant political
value for sedentary Islamic states; in fact, the raiders of the frontiers were
shunned and even degraded (as `ayyarun , "scoundrels," for instance) by the
learned schoolmen and courtiers, representatives of classical Islamic
traditions. How can we suppose that migrants from this milieu brought the gaza
ideology to the Ottoman domains? Furthermore, the recorded actions of these
schoolmen contradicted the interests of the frontier warriors and drew criticism
from the spokesmen of the latter group.
This is not to say that the Muslim schoolmen opposed the gaza ideology. How
could they at a time when the Ottoman family were enlisting the gazis of other
principalities (especially renowned figures of the Karasi emirate, who held the
area right across the channel from Gelibolu) for an even more vigorous expansion
in the Balkans? The imported or appropriated gazis from other principalities who
became affiliated with the Osmanli enterprise during Orhan's reign must have
bolstered the gaza ethos at that time.
The medrese-educated intellectuals serving the Ottomans did not oppose the gaza
ideology but interpreted it differently; they gave it an orthodox coloring
somewhat removed from the frontier traditions. In their version of Ottoman
history, which retains a fascination with the quaint charm of the early
Ottomans' naivety but omits most of the blatantly critical passages, the natural
conclusion of earlier successes is the centralized Ottoman state with its
sophisticated administrative apparatus. The thread binding the narratives
written in the gazi-dervish-fakih mode, on the other hand, is the increasing
alienation of the Ottoman
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ruler from the world of the earlier and egalitarian frontier society in favor of
a sultanic rule. It is hard not to recognize the underlying sense of moral
decline, or the waning of `asabiyya (group solidarity), as Ibn Khaldun would
have said, in the anonymous chronicles and in Apz.[142] The family of Osman, the
center of these narratives (which are, after all, called Chronicles of the House
of Osman), retains its purity up to a certain point — for three generations, to
be exact — namely, until Bayezid I. Notably, cooperating with Christian
Bithynians does not tarnish this purity, but their fall from the innocent world
of struggle and solidarity is marked by the influx of the ulema.
Ménage summarizes the nature of the latter's resented influence: "in the good
old days honest ghazis were not pestered by the central government; there was no
penilk (= khums, one of the basic prescriptions of Islam) to tax private
enterprise; there were no laws compelling the surrender of an earlier sound
currency for a debased new one; and there were no nasty ic-oghlans (everyone
knows how they won favor) coming out of the Palace to lord it over free-born
Turks."[143] Obviously, all these practices were typical of or acceptable within
the sedentary states of classical Islam, but they contradicted the norms and
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