Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf

which some "three hundred men who had been engaged in theft and robbery" were
collected and executed by the ruler of Samarqand in the eleventh century,
Barthold adds that these measures were "taken against that class of the
population from which at another epoch the so-called 'volunteers' were
drawn."[70]
The gazis appear as one manifestation of the still ambiguous social phenomenon
of quasi-corporate male organizations in medieval Islamic history. Just like the
`ayyarun (lit., scoundrels), a word used by some medieval Muslim authors
interchangeably with the word gaziyan , the gazis represented potential
troublemakers from the point of view of established states, which attempted with
only partial success to channel the energies of these social forces toward
targets other than the present order. Gaziyan was the corporate name given to
such associations (though the level of cohesion or organization is not precisely
known) that functioned in the frontier areas obviously because there they would
be able to undertake ghazwa (raids) into the dar al-harb (abode of war).[71]
From the point of view of the central authorities, it was one way of keeping
undesirable elements away from the regular flow of settled life, while it is
only natural that in the religion-based worldview of the times such raiders
would be ready to see and to present themselves as fighting for a religious
cause. The gazis, then, were viewed by Barthold and by many Orientalists who
relied on his work, not necessarily as the result of a compulsion to fight for
religion, but as a socially unstable element finding itself a niche, a
legitimation, and a chance for mobility through military activity in the
frontier regions sanctioned and rendered meaningful within the framework of a
higher cause.
Even then, such legitimization on the basis of religion was not necessarily
suited to the ideals of the Islamic central states. Unorthodox, syncretistic, or
even heretical ideas did find more-fertile ground in the unstable frontier
areas, where the authority of central governments and their versions of Islam
could hardly be enforced. Moreover, as Wittek often pointed out, a similar
sociocultural situation pervaded the other side of the "border." In the
Anatolian case, the gazis and the akritai had for centuries been living in
closer proximity to each other, mentally as well as geographically, than to the
central authorities.
To argue against this definition, one would need to reinterpret the sources that
describe the activities of the gazis. The critics of the gazi thesis, on the
other hand, assume that modern lexicographic definitions
― 57 ―
of gaza provide us with sufficient criteria to determine who was a gazi and who
was not. "Fervor for the Holy War" (and this would be an incomplete definition
even for a canonical work, as we shall see in the next chapter) is a sufficient
definition for them in describing the ethos of a social phenomenon that
manifested itself in as wide a geographic expanse as from Khorasan to the
Balkans and as long a temporal stretch as from the tenth to at least the
sixteenth century. This attitude is no less ahistorical than defining the
bourgeoisie as "town dwellers" and then trying to determine anyone's relation to
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