Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf

instance, to have existed during the emergence of the Safavids as a political
power as well.[64] This is the historical reality of the marches to be
explained; it cannot be dismissed as a contradiction on the basis of an
ahistorical definition of gaza as what it ought to have been.
The conduct of Geyikli Baba, for instance, a dervish of early Ottoman Bithynia,
may have appeared un-Islamic to a hyperorthodox scholar but there is no doubt
that Geyikli Baba considered himself a Muslim and
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was thus recognized by many others. Taskoprizade , an eminent Sunni scholar of
the sixteenth century, was probably much more conscious of the distinction
between orthodoxy and heterodoxy than his fourteenth-century Ottoman forebears
and much more stringent in the application of relevant criteria, but he does not
question Geyikli Baba's belief when respectfully recording the latter's
"miraculous deeds."[65] It is well known that many Sunni and `Alevi Turks still
believe in similar legends and tell them to their children as part of a
religious upbringing; naturally, that does not render these parents "shamanist
educators."
In fact, there is a serious problem with this use of "shamanism." First, in
lumping together all that seems to be a "survival" from pre-Islamic Turkic
beliefs under the category of shamanism, Lindner is simply following the
precedent of Köprülü and other earlier Turcologists. But now that the
comparative study of religious has advanced to a much more rigorous
understanding of shamanism and particularly in the light of Lindner's own
concern with discarding sedentary dispositions in dealing with nomads, it would
be much more appropriate to take the early Ottomans' unorthodox beliefs and
practices seriously. What does "ritual human sacrifice," assuming that some
Ottomans indeed practiced it, as Vryonis and Lindner argue, or belief in the
execution of posthumous deeds by holy figures have to do with shamanism?[66]
Second, even if the early Ottoman practices contained some traces of shamanism,
that would not make them shamanists, let alone warriors of shamanism. Lindner's
comments on the "interesting possibility" of early Ottoman "shamanism" appear
like a reformulation of Gibbons's thesis: that Os-man was not a Muslim until a
later stage of his career. That position naturally requires more evidence than
pointing to some examples of lingering pre-Islamic practices.
Besides, there is an obvious contradiction in the line of argumentation followed
by Wittek's critics. If the later chroniclers are characterized as ideologues
who attempt to whitewash the pagan founders of the state from a Sunni point of
view, how can one explain their inclusion of these "un-Islamic" legends in their
narratives? `Asikpasazade (ca. 1400-90; hereafter abbreviated Apz), for
instance, perhaps the best known of these chroniclers, does not merely record
such incidents but tells us that he can personally assure us of their truth. If
the deeds of the early Ottomans, because of their "pagan" characteristics, were
contradictory to Apz's notion of Islam, why does he not suppress them or record
them merely as traditions? On the contrary, he emphasizes his own belief in
those legends. Was he a "shamanist" as well? In late-fifteenth-century Istanbul,
where he wrote?
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