Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf

and ideology by later generations, as the empire entered a phase of
decentralization towards the end of that century.
It was also in the sixteenth century that people began to realize, or began to
deal with an earlier realization, that some of the ways of the earlier Ottomans
did not exactly conform to the norms of orthodox Islam as understood by its
learned representatives serving the Sunni state. Two glaring transgressions
among institutionalized practices were the establishment of pious endowments
with cash (cash waqf) and the recruitment of the children of non-Muslim subjects
for service as kuls of the Sublime Porte (devshirme). The former implied regular
returns for money, or in other words interest, while the latter implied forced
conversion of populations that should have been free of such interference
according to the covenant known as the dhimma that the Ottomans otherwise
upheld. The devshirme, as a crucial ingredient of the Ottoman administrative
apparatus in the classical age, does not seem to have invited more than minimal
debate. Cash waqf, on the other hand, turned out to be the subject of intense
controversy and divisiveness among the religious and legal scholars, as the
Ottoman state was trying to find the right dose of flexibility without stepping
outside orthodoxy. Even those who allowed cash endowment to continue were aware
that it was not
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practiced elsewhere in the Muslim world but was born under the peculiar
circumstances of a frontier environment.
Then, too, some voices were raised against certain holy figures of an earlier
era whom frontier folk and march principalities had idealized without much
concern for their orthodoxy. Sari Saltuk , for instance, was characterized as a
Christian ascetic by Ebussu`ud Efendi (d. 1574), Suleyman's Grand Mufti, and
legends about Ahi Evren were ridiculed by Munir Efendi of Belgrade (fl. early
17th century), who wanted artisans to follow an ideologically correct line. The
shrine of Seyyid Gazi, and the order of Haci Bektas , were now seen to have
fallen into the hands of heretics· In the end, neither the cash waqf nor the
cults of these figures were suppressed, which is due, to some extent, to the
relative lack of rigidity in Ottoman orthodoxy and also to the insufficiency of
the technologies of control available to a pre-modern state. Still, the waqf and
the cults were rendered questionable, circumscribed, and, especially in the case
of cults, marginalized vis-à-vis the political classes.
Just as fellow warriors and allied social forces of the frontier era had to be
subjugated or eliminated in order to establish the supremacy of Ottoman power,
so their legacy had to be tamed or suppressed or marginalized in order to
consolidate that power. The Ottoman state, like any of its counterparts, was
constructed not only in reality but also, thanks in part to historians, in the
imagination of people.
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Abbreviations
134