Between Two Worlds Kafadar.pdf

est and not take the risk of being personally involved in physical
confrontation. He is reported to have replied "that the War for the Faith had
two supreme advantages. One was that it gave the warrior eternal merit, a
guarantee of Paradise immediately in the world to come. The other was that it
also gained for the warrior the treasures of the present world. As Timur hoped
to enjoy both advantages, so he intended to justify his claims to them."[83] We
may be skeptical about the sincerity of Timur or any other individual or even
the majority of those engaged in gaza, but as an ideological construct it dearly
recognized the role of the pursuit of riches as a legitimate incentive among the
warriors. It all depended on how one went about acquiring it and how one
disposed of it.
Among the different ways of bringing potentially contradictory goals to some
modus vivendi is the distinction made between the short and the long terms. Thus
you may in the short term compromise so that you gain allies and are stronger in
the long term, or you may for the moment have to fight against a coreligionist
in order to gain the victory for your faith in the long run. There is no reason
to assume that gazis or their supporters would be unable to order and legitimize
their affairs on the basis of such elementary prioritizing and strategizing.
If read in this light, the violent struggles between Muslim principalities do
not necessarily contradict their self-identification with the gaza ethos. If
those other fellows were foolish or misguided enough to block your way, the way
of the true gazi, surely you would want to eliminate such obstacles for the sake
of continuing your mission. Thus it is not at all surprising to observe that
Muslim sources, at least ostensibly upholding the ideals of gaza, deal with
intra-Muslim conflicts without inhibition.[84] Ibn `Arabshah , for instance, the
Arab scholar-historian who spent many years in the Ottoman realm in the early
fifteenth century, calls Bayezid I a ``stalwart champion of the faith" and on
the same page recounts the fact that that sultan "subdued the whole kingdom of
Kara-man" and those of Mentese and Saruhan and other Muslim emirates before
telling us that he also subdued "all the realms of the Christians from the
borders of the Balkan mountains to the kingdoms of Erzinjan."[85] The historian
obviously does not see any contradiction here, nor
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does he expect his readers to do so. That gazi states could turn some of their
aggressive energies to each other should indeed be expected because competitions
can be particularly bitter among those with shared values.[86]
To summarize, the culture of Anatolian Muslim frontier society allowed the
coexistence of religious syncretism and militancy, adventurism and idealism. In
this, one side of the frontier simply paralleled the other, and the Anatolian
frontier experience of Muslims and Christians as a whole paralleled the Iberian
one. The Ottomans had social and cultural ties to the rest of the ucat so that
they, too, shared its ethos. Naturally, none of this proves that the rise of the
Ottoman state was due to that ethos. The main argument up to this point has been
the impossibility of reconstructing the nature of frontier culture without
considering its own products and that such an analysis will contradict some
modem expectations of the gazis. The cultural character of the frontier
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