Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf

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My point here is not to save the reputation of Osman and his family or to
establish that they were "good Muslims" or even to make sure that they are
recognized as Muslims from the very beginning of their political career. One may
still construct an argument about the conversion of Osman in his later career,
but that argument needs to be constructed rather than hinted at. I will refer to
some evidence in chapter 3 that might in fact be used for such an argument,
though I personally feel it would be farfetched. Nor do I wish to disregard the
fact that some, perhaps most, of the early Ottoman practices may have been
unorthodox, but this is no reason to maintain that their attachment to Islam
must have been too loose or not sincere enough for them to be steeped in the
gaza ethos. For what does the gaza ethos have to do with "correct Islam" and why
should a warrior of the faith be expected to conform to it?
In this context, we should note that the observations of Lindner and others
about the attitudes of the early Ottomans toward their religion or neighbors are
not based on the discovery of new evidence. Wittek, and possibly all the writers
on early Ottoman history, were aware of the conciliatory attitude and unorthodox
practices among the early Ottomans as well as their struggles with other Muslim
emirs. Except for Arnakis, however, they did not perceive these facts to be
contradictory to the gazi spirit. As we have already seen, Arnakis had as early
as 1947 raised both of the major points of objection to Wittek: that the Bursa
inscription and Ahmedi's chronicle could be dismissed as later ideology, and
that there was a contradiction between the gaza spirit and the non-adversarial
attitude of the early Ottomans toward their Byzantine neighbors and toward
pre-Islamic cults.[67]
Why should the actions of the gazis be expected to be guided by religious
animosity, fervor, and the upholding of "untarnished Islam," however? Wittek's
description of the gazi milieux and their ethos was based on what he held to be
historical facts and not on an a priori definition of gaza. Namely, it was not a
canonical but a historical definition that took into consideration the
descriptions by medieval Islamic authors, writing much earlier than the Ottoman
chroniclers, of a particular social type called gazi and associated with the
frontier regions of Islam.
The standard depiction of the gazi as a social type was derived from W.
Barthold, the Russian Turcologist, whose work was closely followed in this
regard by both Köprülü and Wittek.[68] According to Barthold's Turkestan (which
quickly established itself as the classic treatment of the history of central
Asia and eastern Iran between the seventh and thirteenth centuries), ever since
the early reports in Islamic sources on the gazis of Khorasan from the tenth to
eleventh centuries, we are faced with
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"restless elements" that "offered their services wherever a holy war was in
progress and wherever booty might be expected."[69] Writing about an incident in
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