Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf

are meaningful, should not be formulated along the lines of a Sunni/Shi'i
sectarianism. On the other hand, it seems equally misleading to see "heterodoxy"
in any act or sign of belief which runs counter to the established norms of a
learned orthodoxy. No such orthodoxy was yet established from the point of view
of our protagonists, at least not with any dear-cut boundaries for them to stay
within or to step outside. Maybe the religious history of Anatolian and Balkan
Muslims living in the frontier areas of the period from the eleventh to the
fifteenth centuries should be conceptualized in part in terms of a "metadoxy," a
state of being beyond doxies, a combination of being doxy-naive and not being
doxy-minded, as well as the absence of a state that was interested in rigorously
defining and strictly enforcing an orthodoxy. None of the frontier powers seem
to have had that kind of an interest. It was much later that a debate emerged
among Ottoman scholars and statesmen with respect to the correctness of some of
the practices of their ancestors.
Wherever they stood with respect to the "right" kind of religiosity, warrior
chieftains of the principalities neighboring Bithynia were not ridden with
self-doubt as to what they stood for. A cursory glance at the epigraphic and
titulary evidence left from these emirates reveals that they had heartily
adopted the championship of the faith and related principles like gaza. Already
settled in western Anatolia in the 1270s, a beg of the Germiyan family was
called Husameddin , or "Sword of the Faith." Another member of the same family
fell captive to the Mamluks in the Battle of Elbistan (eastern Anatolia) in
1277; he was called Sihabeddin (Flame of the Faith) Gazi.[46] Muzaffereddin
Yavlak Arslan (Victor-of-the-Faith Fearsome Lion, d. 1291 ) of the Cobanoglu
family in Kasta-
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monu is addressed as nasirii'l-guzat (helper of the gazis) in a book completed
in 1285-86 and dedicated to him.[47] One of the gazis he "helped" as the beg of
the begs of the uc may well have been Osman Beg, who was based in the vicinity;
in any case, a fellow warrior of Osman's in his first recorded battle was one of
Yavlak Arslan's sons.[48] In Kütahya, the House of Germiyan's eventual seat of
power where they played the role of suzerain over the other principalities for a
while, an inscription from 1314 informs us that a medrese was built by an Umur
Beg who bore the epithet Mubarizeddin , the "Combatant of the Faith."[49] The
same epithet was donned by Aydinoglu Mehmed Beg, who had been sent to the Aegean
region as a commander in the Germiyan forces. After falling out with Sasa Beg, a
fellow warrior who was the actual conqueror of Birgi, Mehmed Beg took over that
town, where he established his own dominion and built a mosque in 1312. The
inscription of that mosque identifies him as a gazi in the path of God ( el-gazi
fi sebilillah ).[50] When Mevlana Ce1aleddin Rumi's grandson, `Arif Çelebi,
traveled from Konya to the frontier regions to establish his spiritual authority
between 1312 and 1319, he referred to the same beg as the lord of the gazis. To
the north of Bithynia, a certain Gazi Çelebi ruled Sinop until his death in
1322, when his daughter replaced him.[51]
These self-styled champions of the faith may have left a good deal to be desired
in terms of conforming to the standards of some of the faithful: an enraged
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