TURKOMANS BETWEEN TWO EMPIRES: THE ... - Bilkent University

and other danişmends as immediate counselors of the sultans and as the personages who
initiated all the institutions of the routinized state. It should also be mentioned that in the
Ottoman realm, the first madrasa, perhaps one of the most important institutes of
traditional Islamic civilization not only for producing science and knowledge but also
providing grounds of legitimacy for Islamic states, 285 was opened in Đznik in 1331 by
Orhan Beg. 286 Needless to say, madrasas, and thus the scholars that graduated from
these schools, proliferated literacy-based sunni Islam at the cost of ‘heterodox’ popular
mysticism in the Ottoman realm. 287
The accumulation of the ulemā class in the Ottoman realm did not only establish
a classical Islamic state machinery but also created a culturally ‘Persianized’ and
‘Arabized’ intellectual elite, which concomitantly produced the ‘Ottoman high culture’,
which was an extension of ‘the Middle Eastern cosmopolitan culture’ as called by
Đnalcık. 288 Indeed, this was not an original story; before Ottomans, a differentiation
between the Turkoman way of life and ‘high culture’, which was developed under the
285 The reader might consider that the history of madrasa institution traces back to the Madrasa of
Nizamiyye founded by the famous statesmen and grand vizier of Great Seljuks. The institutionalization of
education and scholarly activities under the madras system marked the Islamic ulemā’s loss of
independency against the state. Taking their salary from the state budget, from then on ulemā’s role of
legitimizing political power, which was actually developed to certain extent under Umayyad rule, gained
stress. Hence, to a certain extent, madrasas served to transform religion into a tool of politics. The
situation was equally valid in the Ottoman empire as well. According to Ocak, being a part of state
machinery, the ulemā class left aside their fundamental function of producing knowledge and but engaged
in producing bureaucrats to the administrative machinery and in legitimizing every action of the sultan.
See Ocak, Zındıklar ve Mülhidler, pp. 94, 110-11.
286 It should be noted, however, that one might regard the ulemā in the Ottoman principality at this time
rather a transition generation. Dâvud-ı Kayserî, the first mudarris of the first madrasa was a genuine
follower of Ibn Arabī, whose mystical teaching evolved around the theory of ‘oneness of the being’,
‘vahdet-i vücūd’ has always been suspected, even harshly criticized at times, among ulemā circles. On
Dâvud-ı Kayserî, see Mehmet Süreyya, Osmanlı Müellifleri, vol. 1, Đstanbul, 1332, pp. 67-9; A. Turan
Akbulut, “Dâvud-ı Kayserî”, Đslam Medeniyeti Mecmuası, 4, 1980, 61-83; Mehmet Bayraktar, “Dâvud-ı
Kayserî”, DIA, 9, 32-5. On the reception of Ibn Arabī’s teaching in the Ottoman world, see Michel
Chodkiewicz, “Đbn Arabî’nin Öğretisinin Osmanlı Dünyasında Karşılanışı”, in Osmanlı Toplumunda
Tasavvuf ve Sufiler, ed. Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, Ankara: TTK, 2005, 89-111.
287 Compare Ocak, Zındıklar ve Mülhidler, p. 82.
288 Halil Đnalcık, “The ‘Ottoman Civilization’ and Palace Patronage”, in Ottoman Civilization, I, edited by
Halil Đnalcık and Günsel Renda, Ankara: Ministry of Culture and Tourism, 2004, p. 20.
108