Guarding Traditions and Laws Disciplinin

Modern Asian Studies 52, 5 (2018) pp. 1542–1603.

C Cambridge University Press 2018
doi:10.1017/S0026749X1700018X
Guarding Traditions and

Laws—Disciplining Bodies and Souls:
Tradition, science, and religion in the age
of Ottoman reform∗
ALI YAYCIOGLU
Stanford University
Email: ayayciog@stanford.edu
Abstract
This article examines the religious and intellectual dynamics behind the
Ottoman military reform movement, known as the New Order, in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Conventionally, the New Order
has been examined within the framework of the Westernization of Ottoman
military and administrative institutions. The Janissary-led popular opposition
to the New Order, on the other hand, has been understood as a conservative
resistance, fashioned by Muslim anti-Westernization. This article challenges this
assumption, based on a binary between Westernization reforms versus Islamic
conservatism. It argues that the Janissary-led popular opposition, which was
consolidated long before the New Order, developed as a form of resistance by
antinomian elements blocking the top-down disciplinary policies of the central
state throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The New Order
programme, which was unleashed in 1792, was also opposed by the Janissary-led
coalition, on the basis that it would wipe out vested privileges and traditions.
Supporting the New Order, we see a coalition and different intellectual trends,
including: (i) the Euro-Ottoman military enlightenment, led by military engineers
∗
I would like to express my gratitude to Tuna Artun, Kemal Beydilli, Patricia
Blessing, Catherine Brice, Nilüfer Duygu Eriten, Elaine Fisher, Phil Hubbard, Hakan
Kırımlı, Harun Küçük, Darina Martykánová, Baki Tezcan, Andre Wink, Fatih Yeşil,
Fikret Yılmaz, Gülay Yılmaz, and Konstantina Zanou for their enriching comments
on this article. I am especially grateful to Ahmet T. Karamustafa for his corrective
comments and suggestions. I completed it while reading the late Shahab Ahmed’s
brilliant book, What is Islam? The Important of Being Islamic (Princeton, Princeton
University Press, 2015). Although our time at Harvard overlapped—I as a graduate
student, he as an assistant professor—I did not know Shahab very well. But his book
and wisdom profoundly affected my thinking while writing this article. I humbly
dedicate this study to Shahab’s memory.
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GUARDING TRADITIONS AND LAWS 1543
and scientists, which developed an agenda to reorganize and discipline the
social-military order with universal principles of military engineering and (ii)
Islamic puritan activism, which developed an agenda to rejuvenate the Muslim
order by eliminating invented traditions, and to discipline Muslim souls with the
universal principles of revelation and reason. While the Euro-Ottoman military
enlightenment participated in military reform movements in Europe, Islamic
activism was part of a trans-Islamic Naqshibandi-Mujaddidi network originating
in India. We thus witness a discursive alliance between military enlightenment
and Muslim activism, both of which had trans-Ottoman connections, against
a Janissary-led popular movement, which mobilized resistance to protect local
conventions and traditions.
Introduction
In 1791, a group of fiscal bureaucrats and military men under the

patronage of Selim III (r. 1789–1807) embarked on a programme of
military reorganization in the Ottoman empire. The reformists’ main
objective was to establish a standing army, equipped with new military
technology, in the name of the New Order (Nizam-ı Cedid). Such an
agenda would challenge the old military establishment, especially the
Janissary corps, which was not only one of the oldest (founded in the
fourteenth century) but also the largest (with hundreds of thousands
of affiliates) constituents of the Ottoman military regime. Between
1791 and 1807, therefore, the Ottoman empire underwent a process
of social-military reform, which triggered an empire-wide controversy
that eventually ended with the collapse of the New Order and the
dethroning of Selim III by means of a Janissary-led popular revolt in
May 1807.
In modern history, the clash between the Janissaries and the New
Order has long been studied as a confrontation between reactionary
groups led by the Janissaries and reform-minded, Westernized
military-administrative bureaucratic elites. According to this view,
the Janissaries and their allies, such as the ulema (Muslim religious
scholars) and the artisanal guilds, defended the military, social,
religious, and moral order against top-down changes. The New
Orderists, on the other hand, were determined to reform the military
and administrative structure of the empire by adopting new—mostly
Western—institutions, technologies, and disciplinary tools. It was
a conflict between old and new, conservatives and reformists, the
populace and the elites, localism and Westernism, as well as religious-
moral priorities and scientific-technological innovation. This article
1544 ALI YAYCIOGLU
complicates these assumptions and proposes a new perspective on the

New Order controversy.
In the following pages, I will argue that the New Order controversy
cannot be understood through the aforementioned binaries. Instead
of being a monolithic conservative block, the Janissaries, in fact,
represented complex interests and alliances in Ottoman society,
which were constantly shifting and being negotiated. They also
participated in religious networks, particularly the Bektaşi order, as
well as in the production of knowledge, based on experience, through
their artisanal orientation. In fact, the new military academies and
introduction of military sciences challenged the artisanal character
of the Janissaries. In this process, European and Ottoman engineers
and technocrats collectively produced knowledge, manufactured guns,
and built barracks. These Euro-Ottomans saw themselves as part of
the trans-imperial military enlightenment. Thus, the Janissary–New
Order controversy hinged in many ways on knowledge production—
that is, on the contrast between a type of knowledge production based
on local tradition and experience, and one based on universal and
abstract models. However, the competition between these two forms
of knowing and making cannot be understood in the format of East–
West or religion–science dichotomies. In fact, various Muslim thinkers
and activists participated in this controversy. Different revivalist
Muslims, who were linked to trans-Asian networks, were part of
it. They developed anti-traditionalist arguments based on complex
rational and revelatory methods, attacked existing social conventions,
and defended reforming the social and religious order in the interests
of religious revivalism. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries, the Mujaddidis, rooted in India and Central Asia, allied
themselves to the New Orderists’ desire to discipline social and
military life, as well as the bodies and souls of individuals.
Thus, I challenge the established assumption that the New Order
controversy was a conflict between Westernized reformers (who
wanted to change the military regime according to Western military
technology) and Muslim conservatives (who were against Westernized
reforms). I argue that the Ottoman New Order was an alliance
between various groups, two major components of which were
the Euro-Ottoman military engineers and Sharia-minded Islamic
activists, acting against the entrenched (and local) social, military
and religious order that was guarded by the Janissaries and groups
that gathered around them. Therefore, I suggest that the New Order
represented a global moment for the Ottomans, one flank of which
was in the West and the other in the East of the empire.1
At the beginning of this article, I focus on the Janissaries and how
they acted as guardians of the old order, established conventions,
and vested privileges and interests. Then, I discuss the New Order
and examine how it was, in addition to a fiscal and administrative
programme, a Euro-Ottoman military engineering project, which
came up with an agenda to discipline the social-military order
according to the principles of applied sciences, which were presented
as universal and new. Ottoman military engineering amounted to
a collective project by European engineers and mathematicians who
were employed in the Ottoman empire and Ottoman experts who were
products of Ottoman scientific, cultural, and educational institutions,
both old and new. Following that, I demonstrate how a trend in Islamic
thought, which I call ‘Islamic activism’, spread from India and Central
Asia and became a major component of the reform movement. As I
will discuss in this section, militant sheikhs and preachers of the Sunni
Sufi network, the Naqshibandi-Mujaddidi order, which originated in
Mughal India and expanded into the Ottoman lands in the eighteenth
century, developed an agenda to discipline religious and social life,
rejecting established traditions and conventions, with the help of (and
in alliance with) the state, in accordance with ‘the necessities of the time’
and the principles of the Sharia. This movement played a crucial role
in New Order politics, since several New Orderists became followers
of these sheikhs and preachers.
The Janissary order
In the fourteenth century, one of the first standing infantries under the
direct command of a central administration was formed: the Janissary
corps. They originated as a small unit constituted of war captives, who
were enslaved and transmuted into the sultan’s intimate guards. Later,
the Ottomans developed a peculiar recruitment mechanism based on
1
For similar arguments that the Ottoman New Order was at the same time an
Islamic reform programme, without an emphasis on trans-imperial and global ties,
see Uriel Heyd, ‘The Ottoman Ulema and Westernization in the Time of Selim III
and Mahmud II’, in U. Heyd (ed.), Studies in Islamic History and Civilization, Jerusalem,
Magnes Press, Hebrew University, 1961, pp. 63–96, and Kahraman Şakul, ‘Nizâm-ı
Cedid Düşüncesinde Batılılaşma ve İslamî Modernleşme’, Dîvân: İlmî Araştırmalar 19
(2005), pp. 128–29.
1546 ALI YAYCIOGLU
picking boys as a levy (devşirme) from the Christian subject communit-

ies of the empire. These levies became the main human resources for
the Ottoman elite military and administrative servants (kuls). After
being converted to Islam, the most promising of these boys entered
the imperial palace to ascend the state hierarchy as bodyguards of the
sultan, military officers, or bureaucrats. Others were reserved to be
Janissaries. The Janissary candidates were first entrusted to Muslim
households in the provinces to absorb the Turkish language, Muslim
customs, and perhaps pick up some rudimentary military training.
After their stay in the provinces, the boys were placed in a preparatory
school in Istanbul for professional training in military matters, includ-
ing the use of firearms. Following this, they were placed in different
barracks of the Janissary corps to become elite servant-soldiers.2
The Janissary recruits, like other kuls, came from various regions
mainly in the Balkans and, to a lesser extent, from Anatolia. Although
formally disconnected from their native localities, in fact many of
these young men continued to be linked to their home towns. At
the same time, the Janissaries were active participants in the political
competition between different factions within the Ottoman household
and members of the imperial elites. Rival princes, who wanted to
capture the throne, tried to secure the support of the Janissaries.
Likewise, members of different factions within the imperial elites,
including the dynastic women who led rival groups in the imperial
harem, tried to establish alliances with the corps to further their
cause. The Janissaries, along with the sultan’s mounting bodyguards,
provincial warriors, and benefice-holders, were the most important
actors during the coups that occurred within the imperial centre or
the civil wars between heirs to the throne.
After the corps was fully institutionalized, the Janissaries gradually
became one of the pillars of the Ottoman order. The barracks where
they trained and organized were called ocak, literally, ‘the hearth’. The
2
Gilles Veinstein, ‘On the Ottoman Janissaries (Fourteenth to Nineteenth
Centuries)’, in Eric-Jan Zürcher (ed.), Fighting for a Living: A Comparative Study of
Military Labour 1500–2000, Amsterdam, Amsterdam University Press, 2013, pp. 115–
34; P. Wittek, ‘Devshirme and Sharı̄‘a’, British Society of Oriental and Asian Studies, 17,
1955, pp. 271–78; V. L. Ménage, ‘Some Notes on the Devshirme’, British Society of
Oriental and Asian Studies, 29, 1966, pp. 64–78; İsmail Hakkı Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı
Devleti Teşkilatından Kapıkulu Ocakları, Vol. 1: Acemi Ocağı ve Yeniçeri Ocağı, Ankara,
Türk Tarih Kurumu, 1988, pp. 5–141. For a new study on devşirme process, see
Gülay Yılmaz, ‘Becoming a Devshirme: The Training of Conscripted Children in
the Ottoman Empire’, in Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers, and Joseph C. Miller (eds),
Children in Slavery Through the Ages, Ohio, Ohio University Press, 2009, pp. 119–34.
ocak symbolized ceremonial meals distributed by benefactor sultans to
Janissary beneficiaries, and thus cemented their intimate relationship
with the Ottoman sultan through fictive personal ties. These ties
were sometimes presented as bonds between a master and his slaves,
sometimes as those between a father and his sons. After a career on the
battlefield and in the garrison, Janissaries were retired. At this stage,
a few of them continued their careers within the state hierarchy as
high-ranking administrators; many received benefices and moved to
the countryside to manage agricultural farms; others joined artisanal
organizations and craft guilds in the cities. But they continued their
connection with the Janissary corps and, as elders, enjoyed privileges
and prestige.3
The Janissaries’ esprit de corps was fully established by the sixteenth
century, by which time they had also developed close relations with
a dervish organization, the Bektaşi order. The corps accepted Hacı
Bektaş Veli, the thirteen-century dervish leader from Anatolia and
founder of the eponymous order, as their patron saint.4 The term
‘Janissary’ (original yeni çeri) means ‘new soldiery’ in Turkish, evoking
its organizational innovation. According to legend, however, yeni also
referred to the yen (cuff or sleeve) of Hacı Bektaş Veli and signified the
corps’ close connection with this holy man.5 Gradually the Janissary
3
Cemal Kafadar, ‘Yeniçeri’, Dünden Bugüne İstanbul Ansiklopedisi, Istanbul, Tarih
Vakfı, 1993–95, Vol. 7, pp. 472–76; C. Kafadar, Kim var imiş biz burada yoğ iken: Dört
Osmanlı: Yeniçeri, tüccar, derviş ve hatun, Istanbul, Metis Yayınları, 2009, pp. 29–37;
Konstantin Mihailovic, Memoirs of a Janissary, translated by Benjamin Stolz ; historical
commentary and notes by Svat Soucek, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan, 1975;
Kemal Beydilli, Yeniçeriler ve bir yeniçerinin hayatı, Istanbul, Yitik Hazine Yayınları,
2013, pp. 7–16; Reşat Ekrem Koçu, Yeniçeriler, Istanbul, Koçu Yayınları, 1964;
Erdal Küçükyalçın, Turna’in Kalbi: Yeniçeri Yoldaşlığı ve Bektaşilik, Istanbul, Boğaziçi
University Press, 2009; Godfrey Goodwin, The Janissaries, London, Saqi Books, 1994.
4
Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Devlet Teşkilatında Kapukulu Ocakları, pp. 148–50, 566–75;
Zeynep Yürekli, Architecture and Hagiography in the Ottoman Empire: The Politics of Bektashi
Shrines in the Classical Age, Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT, Ashgate, 2012.
5
A poem evoking the connection between the Janissaries and the Bektaşi order
reads as:
Urdu devlet tacın anın başına/He [Hacı Bektaş Veli] placed the throne of the state
on his head
Kesti verdi yenlerin yoldaşına/He cut and gave his sleeves to his comrades
Dedi olsun ad sana yeniçeri/And said shall your name be Janissary [soldiers of the
sleeve]
Yani sultanın güzine askeri/Thus the sultan’s select/elite soldiery.
Şevki Koca, Öndeng Songung Gürgele: Bektaşi Kültür Argümanlarına göre Yeniçeri Ocağı ve
Devşirmeler, Istanbul, Nazenin, 2000, p. 26.
1548 ALI YAYCIOGLU
corps and the Bektaşi order were integrated. This gave the Janissaries
a distinctive socio-spiritual collective identity and ideological cohesion.
We will return to this topic shortly.
Beginning in the seventeenth century, volley fire became the
principal tactic used on the battlefield. In response, the Ottomans,
like other polities in Europe and Asia, needed to expand their
firearm-equipped infantries. Over the course of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, the Janissary corps grew from tens of thousands
of individuals to hundreds of thousands.6 The corps also became part
of a complex social and institutional metamorphosis of the Janissary
culture. As the central administration needed a larger firearms-
using infantry, new opportunities emerged for young Muslim men
to voluntarily enter the corps with the approval of the elders of
the barracks, thereby acquiring Janissary status and privileges. As
a result of the expansion of the Janissary corps through voluntary
recruits, the compulsory devşirme system gradually disappeared, and
becoming a Janissary was a military status that could be chosen by young
Muslim men.7
The transformation of the Janissary order, however, was more than
just a military matter. This process coincided with the expansion of
the urban population in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
As the cities grew, the Janissaries became an important social force
in Istanbul and other urban centres. Coffee shops proliferated in
Ottoman cities as lay public spaces boomed from the sixteenth century
onwards, and the Janissaries became the main entrepreneurial group
to invest in the coffee shop sector. The associations between coffee
shops and the Janissaries illustrate the active role they played in
urban public life.8 In addition to well-off Janissaries and wage-earning
and trained regulars, young men who moved to the cities from rural
areas sought to acquire Janissary affiliations. Rowers, porters, tanners,
water carriers, and others who worked in lower-income sectors as
6
Rhoads Murphey, Ottoman Warfare 1500–1700, London, UCL Press, 1999, pp. 16–
17.
7
Gábor Ágoston, ‘Firearms and Military Adaptation: The Ottomans and the
European Military Revolution, 1450–1800’, Journal of World History, 25, 1 (2014),
pp. 85–124.
8
Ralph S. Hattox, Coffee and Coffeehouses: The Origins of a Social Beverage in the Medieval
Near East, Seattle and London, University of Washington Press, 1985, pp. 112–30;
Dana Sajdi (ed.), Ottoman Tulips and Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth
Century, London, I. B. Tauris, 2007; Betül Başaran, Selim III, Social Order and Policing
in Istanbul at the End of the Eighteenth Century, Leiden, Brill, 2014, p. 158.
well as unemployed bachelors, often tried to link themselves to the
corps as non-salaried members in order to enjoy certain privileges
or simply to be sheltered by the solidarity mechanisms of the corps.
In Istanbul particularly, the Janissaries were guardians of the city,
responsible for keeping the gates and policing order. But at the same
time—paradoxically perhaps—some young commoners who claimed
Janissary status gathered together in amorphous paramilitary groups
and unruly gangs, and were often viewed as rowdy riffraff by other city
dwellers.9
Clearly, we should not limit our understanding of the Janissaries
in the Ottoman world to those who lived in the imperial capital. In
the provinces, one comes across diverse forms of Janissary orders. In
certain regions, such as Danubian Bulgaria, Janissaries were heavily
involved in agricultural production as entrepreneurs.10 In certain
cities in frontier regions, such as Sarajevo, Vidin, or Erzurum, and on
strategic islands such as Crete, thousands of city dwellers were granted
Janissary status.11 In Cairo, Tripoli, and Baghdad, some Janissaries
formed regional dynasties.12 Thus, from the seventeenth century
onwards, as Janissary-ship became an empire-wide status claimed by
various groups from different social and economic standings, we can
hardly speak of an empire-wide homogenous entity. Over time, diverse
local realities shaped regional Janissary cultures and institutions.
However, despite regional variations, Janissary status, with its social
prestige, was a unifying factor for many who claimed it. The Janissary
chief and Janissary elders in Istanbul continued to assert a certain
9
For the integration of the Janissaries into urban economic and public life, see
Cemal Kafadar, ‘Yeniçeri-Esnaf Relations: Solidarity and Conflict’, MA thesis, McGill
University, 1981; Kafadar, Kim var imiş biz burada yoğ iken, Istanbul, Metis Yayınları,
2009, pp. 29–37; Gülay Yılmaz, ‘Blurred Boundaries Between Soldiers and Civilians:
Artisan Janissaries in Seventeenth Century Istanbul’, in Suraiya Faroqhi (ed.), Bread
from the Lion’s Mouth: Artisans Struggling for a Livelihood in Ottoman Cities, New York, NY,
Berghahn Books, 2015, pp. 175–93.
10
Evgeni Radushev, ‘Peasant Janissaries?’, Journal of Social History, 42 (2008),
pp. 447–67.
11
For example, in Crete, most Muslim men were accepted as Janissaries.
For the social organization of the Cretan Janissaries, see Yannis Spyropoulos,
Othomanike dhioikese kai koinonia sten proepanastatike dhytike Krete: archeiakes martyries
(1817–1819), Aspasia Papadake (ed.), Rethymno, Genika Archeia tou Kratous-
Archeia N. Rethymnes, 2015, pp. 8–15, 126–41; Antonis Anastasopoulos and Yannis
Spyropoulos, ‘Soldiers on an Ottoman Island: The Janissaries of Crete, Eighteenth-
Early Nineteenth Centuries’, Turkish Historical Review, 8, 1 (2017), pp. 1–33.
12
André Raymond, Le Caire des Janissaires: l’apogée de la ville ottomane sous Àbd al-Rahmân
Katkhudâ, Paris, CNRS éditions, 1995.
1550 ALI YAYCIOGLU
amount of authority over the Janissaries across the empire, acting as

their spokesmen, and sometimes providing surety on their behalf.13
Janissaries and artisanal labour
Historians have long debated the close ties between Janissaries and
urban artisans and craftsmen (esnaf), and the diffusion of the Janissar-
ies into artisanal guilds. Throughout the seventeenth century, mixing
between the Janissaries and various artisanal groups, such as bakers
and butchers as well as coffee shop owners, became the norm, rather
than the exception. This was especially the case in Istanbul. This
process, however, was not free of tension. Some viewed these links as
a disruption of esnaf-led market control. Others saw it as corruption of
the military order. Despite these social and moral critiques, however,
Janissaries and various artisanal associations continued to exist as
integrated groups until the Janissary corps came to an end in 1826.14
Janissary-esnaf integration was only one facet of a complex picture.
The Janissary corps shared also the norms, customs, rituals, and
discourses of Ottoman artisanal culture in its esprit de corps. In fact,
we can see the Janissary corps and esnaf associations as kin work
organizations that developed within a shared institutional context.
For instance, the organizational hierarchy of the Janissaries—from
apprentices to division leaders, stewards, and notable elders—ran
parallel to that of the artisanal guilds. In both organizations, we see
similar internal mechanisms for admitting new members, expelling
old ones, and declaring collective sureties for peers. The Janissaries’
mutual funds to support needy members of the corps or to extend
credit for businesses did not differ much from the security and credit
mechanisms of artisanal groups. Sons of artisans and Janissaries
were given priority to become members of esnaf organizations or the
Janissary corps respectively. This enabled some members of the corps
or guilds to transmit membership across the generations and ensure
family continuities. The principle of celibacy for young Janissaries
differed from artisans’ conventions, but this changed over time. As
13
Ali Yaycioglu, Partners of the Empire, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2016,
p. 103.
14
Kafadar, ‘Yeniçeri-Esnaf Relations’; Kafadar, ‘Yeniçeri Nizamının Bozulması
üzerine’, in Kafadar, Kim var imiş biz burada yoğ iken, pp. 29–37; Yılmaz, ‘Blurred
Boundaries’; Eunjeong Yi, Guild Dynamics in Seventeenth-Century Istanbul: Fluidity and
Leverage, Leiden, E. J. Brill, 2004, pp. 132–43.
the Janissaries became incorporated into civil life, marriage became
a pattern, especially among the economically better-off. Another
parallel between the Janissary corps and the artisanal guilds can be
observed in the commodification of their status. Just as the rights
to receive a Janissary salary (esame) became a commodity, so did
artisanal usufruct (gedik) to manage a shop or use a tool. Like artisanal
affiliations, corps members’ affiliation was oriented through an ethos
of comradeship.15
We can also observe the affinity between the Janissary corps
and the artisanal guilds in their forms of practice and knowledge.
Both artisanal and Janissary skills (material performances, craft
production, or services) were based on what we can call artisanal
knowledge, which hinged on practical techniques transmitted
from masters to apprentices, from elders to youngsters, through
observation, imitation, and manuals.16 In both cases, the oral
transmission of knowledge, techniques, and conventions were central.
The artisanal manuals included historical, divine, and natural
references, as well as information about moral codes and rituals
around labour and production processes, rather than abstract
taxonomies and charts devised by teachers or commanders. As
expected, the Janissaries, who specialized in water-carrying or crafting
guns and military gear, acquired their knowledge in a very similar
fashion to that of artisans in other sectors. Likewise, Janissary
exercises, such as wrestling or archery, were part of their regular
training. These exercises fostered individual reputations, gained in
15
For an analysis of Janissary institutions, see Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Devlet Teşkilatında
Kapukulu Ocakları, especially pp. 144–311. For the Janissaries’ mutual funds , see Gülay
Yılmaz, ‘The Economic and Social Roles of Janissaries in a Seventeenth-Century
Ottoman City: The Case of Istanbul’, PhD thesis, McGill University, 2011, pp. 234–
41; Yannis Spyropoulos, ‘Koinoniki, dioikitiki, oikonomiki kai politiki diastasi tou
othomanikou stratou: oi genitsaroi tis Kritis, 1750–1826’, PhD thesis, University of
Crete, 2014, pp. 198–220. Perhaps one of the most original works on the Janissaries
is by Reşat Ekrem Koçu, a popular historian of Ottoman Istanbul, who based his
work not only on the basis of written sources but also on the rich oral tales and
narratives that he collected from the city streets; see Reşat Ekrem Koçu, Yeniçeriler,
Istanbul, Koçu Yayınları, 1964. For the artisanal organizations, see Yi, Guild Dynamics,
especially pp. 41–112. For Gediks, see Engin Akarlı, ‘Gedik: A Bundle of Rights and
Obligations for Istanbul Artisans and Traders, 1750–1840’, in Alain Pottage and
Martha Mundy (eds), Law, Anthropology and the Constitution of the Social: Making Persons
and Things, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2004, pp. 166–200.
16
For artisanal knowledge, see Lissa Roberts, Simon Schaffer, and Peter Dear (eds),
The Mindful Hand: Inquiry and Invention from the Late Renaissance to Early Industrialization,
Amsterdam, Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 2007.
1552 ALI YAYCIOGLU
the process of competitive performances under the supervision of

referees, within the norms and rules of the corps. Such training
through corps members participating in contests was different to
training through repetitive drills undertaken by soldiers of the New
Order, such as marching or synchronic firing, under objectified criteria
of time regulation and measurable precision. Instead the Janissary
contests can be seen as being similar to the contained competition
that took place between members of the manufacturing and marketing
craft guilds that were governed by the quality control and references
of the guild members.
Tools, labour, and nature
In both the Janissary corps and the artisanal guilds we observe moral
and cultural elements from the Islamic chivalry traditions (futuwwa)
of medieval Anatolia, with their connections to certain Sufi orders
and veneration of patron saints. Janissary-artisanal groups organized
within the Janissary corps often framed their regulations in moral
constitutions, similar to futuwwa manuals.17 These texts regulated
the relations between the comrades, elders, and minors by setting
out rituals, ceremonies, rules of conduct, and socialization (yol, adab,
erkan, and sohbet). They established principles by which to enter the
organization and rise from discipleship to mastership. At the same
time, they functioned as spiritual guidelines, since artisanal practices
and tools were associated with holy figures and divine episodes. The
Book of Water Carriers (Kitab-ı Sakka), which was codified for the water
17
Franz Taeschner, ‘Beiträge zur Geschichte der Akhis in Anatolien’, Islamica, 4
(1929), pp. 1–47; F. Taeschner, ‘Futuwwa-Studien, die Futuwwa-Bünder in der Türkei
und ihre Literatur’, Islamica, 5 (1932), pp. 285–333; Mikail Bayram, Ahi Evren ve Ahi
Teşkilatının Kuruluşu, Konya, Ömer Faruk Bayram, 1991; Ahmet Kal‘a, ‘Osmanlı
Esnafı ve Sanayisi üzerine Yapılan Çalışmalarla ilgili Genel bir Değerlendirme’,
Türkiye Araştırmaları Literatür Dergisi, 1, 1 (2003), pp. 245–66; Ahmet Yaşar Ocak,
‘Türkiye’de Ahilik Araştırmalarına Eleştirel bir Bakış’, I. Uluslararası Ahilik Kültürü
Sempozyum Bildirileri, Ankara, Kültür Bakanlığı, 1996, pp. 129–38. For two recent
studies on the medieval futuwwa tradition, see Rachel Goshgarian, ‘Futuwwa in
Thirteenth Century Rūm and Armenia: Reform Movements and the Managing of
Multiple Allegiances on the Seljuk Periphery’, in A. C. S. Peacock (ed.), The Seljuks
of Anatolia: Court and Society in the Medieval Middle East, London, I. B. Tauris, 2013,
pp. 227–62; İklil Selçuk, ‘Suggestions on the Social Meaning and Functions of Akhi
Communities and their Hospices in Medieval Anatolia’, in Patricia Blessing and
Rachel Goshgarian (eds), Architecture and Landscape in Medieval Anatolia, 1100–1500,
Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2017, pp. 95–113.
carriers of Baghdad in the late eighteenth century, is one of these
moral texts. In the early period, each Janissary division had one water
carrier to supply the barracks with water. Later, the Janissary water
carriers (sakkas) were organized as a separate division within the
Janissary corps. Gradually water carriers who collected water from the
sources and distributed it in the cities became part of the Janissary
corps in many places.18
The Book of Water Carriers stated that the aim of the text was
intended to train (ta’lim) the water carriers of Baghdad about ‘how your
predecessors lived and acted, so you would live and act accordingly’.19
The Book then introduced objects related to water carrying, such as tap,
waterskin, belt, oil lamp, vest, or whip. Each object was associated with
a holy figure: angels, the Prophet Muhammad and other prophets, Ali
and the Prophet Muhammad’s descendants, and patron saints such as
Hacı Bektaş Veli (the patron saint of the Janissaries) and Süleyman-ı
Kufi (the patron saint of the water carriers).20 The text described how
the tools were invented (icad) by these holy figures in various sacred
incidents. Subsequently, it narrated required manners associated with
the use of the tools when water was collected from nature, carried to
the people, poured into the earthenware jars, and drunk from cups:
Oh comrade, where do you obtain water and take it? Answer: I obtain it from
Kızılırmak and take [it] to the place of the holy men. [When I go there] I
recite the holy basmala and pray for the masters [of the water carriers], bend
towards my right and left sides, seal my feet, salute four gates, turn on the
tap and deliver the water.21
Transporting water from nature to the people was presented as

a fictive procession from Kızılırmak, which was associated with the
Janissaries’ patron saint Hacı Bektaş Veli,22 to the place of saints
(erenler meydanı), representing the spiritual authorities of a collectivity.
In this procession from nature to the people, the water carrier
demonstrated his bodily labour as fashioned by rituals. While the
rituals provided a performative and reparative bodily experience, parts
of the body were linked to different sacred references: ‘On my head
is the crown of felicity, in my mouth the Qur’an, in my chest is faith,
18
Adil Şen (ed.), Kitâb-ı Sakkâ: Sakalar El Kitabı, Ankara, Araştırma Yayınları, 2013.
19
Ibid., p. 95.
20
Ibid., p. 163.
21
Ibid., p. 171.
22
Kızılırmak is a river in central Anatolia which flows near the tomb of Hacı Bektaşı
Veli in Nevşehir.
1554 ALI YAYCIOGLU
on my feet is worship.’23 This quadruple reference was integrated

in different parts of text. Ultimately, these four features mimicked
the four gates or stages of mystical engagement or four different
forms of knowledge: Shari’a (exoteric path—worship on the feet),
tariqa (esoteric path—faith in the chest), haqiqa (truth—Qur’an in
the mouth), and ma’rifa (mystical knowledge—crown of felicity on the
head).24 By associating parts and functions of the body with four sacred
references, the bodily labour itself was sanctified.
Tools, labour, and body, with their divine and natural features,
constituted a unified order for the production process. This might
be based on service (carrying water) or manufacture. Although the
text was for water carriers, it includes sections on manufactured
military tools, such as the rifle, flint, gunpowder, and the hook. After
listing the inventors of these war tools, the text states that ‘these are
mentioned here because they will be necessary during the time of
war’.25 The water carriers were also warriors and part of the Janissary
corps, therefore they needed to learn martial references during their
training. The invention of the rifle by the legendry carpenter Habib
was narrated in relation to three major elements of nature: wood,
metal, and fire:
If they asked: Is animate dependent upon inanimate or inanimate upon
animate [Answer:] inanimate upon animate. Habib the Carpenter cut a tree
in order to carve a stock of a rifle. He began his carving with God’s holy
permission. Then the tree started speaking with the God’s Holy permission
and said: Just give me some time until the evening so that my roots would not
dry out. Habib the Carpenter granted that time to the tree. At night, he cut
it and carved the stock. Because of that, the stock became animate. The iron
of the rifle however was manufactured with fire, so it is not inanimate. This
illustrates [that inaminate is dependent upon animate, as iron is dependent
upon stock on a rifle].26
The production process was also based on knowledge of nature.

The artisan used his body (most often his hands) to extract a
resource from nature (water) or to manufacture an object (gun)
by crafting and attaching different natural elements. During this
process, as he interacted, sometimes even negotiated, with nature,
23
Sen (ed.), Kitâb-ı Sakkâ, p. 139.
24
For a general introduction to the stages of mystical experience, see A. Knysh,
Islamic Mysticism: A Short History, Leiden, Brill, 2000.
25
Sen (ed.), Kitâb-ı Sakkâ, p. 185.
26
Ibid., p. 205.
the natural order—nature’s inner hierarchies among its elements—
became entangled with human and divine orders.
The Janissaries, the Bektaşis, and the body
As mentioned above, the Janissary corps had close links to the

Bektaşi order and they accepted Hacı Bektaş Veli as their patron
saint.27 There are many questions that are still not fully answered
about the nature of the relationship between the corps and this Sufi
order in historiography. When was the Bektaşi-Janissary connection
established? To what extent did Bektaşism shape the spiritual world
of the Janissaries? How was the Janissary-Bektaşi link understood by
different segments of the Ottoman public, including the Janissaries
and Bektaşis, but also by imperial and religious elites?
Before discussing these questions, we have to bear in mind that the
official religious discourse of the Ottoman imperial elite was Sunni.
Sunnism was consolidated among the Ottoman elites during the long
rivalry between the Ottomans and the Safavids in Iran, champions
of Twelver Shi‘ism, in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there were hundreds of
thousands of Shi‘ite-inclined Muslims in Anatolia who were spiritually
(and often politically) loyal to the Safavid house. These communities
were accused of being heretics and persecuted by the Ottoman state.
Although the Bektaşi order was not linked to the Safavids, it shared
various elements with Safavid Shi‘ism in terms of its rituals and
doctrine. Similarly to the Safavid Twelvers, Bektaşis venerated the 12
imams (namely Ali, his sons Hasan and Husain, and their descendants)
and cursed Mu‘awiyya and Yazid (the Umayyad Caliph and his son,
who were seen as responsible for slaughtering Husain). In addition,
there were several antinomian elements in the Bektaşi tradition,
which separated them from Sunnis, such as consuming alcohol as part
of their rituals or eschewing the five daily prayers and fasting during
the holy month of Ramadan.28
27
The Janissaries’ organic ties with the Bektaşiyye were so close that the Janissary
corps was also called the ‘Bektaşi Ocağı’ (Bektaşi association) and zümre-yi (or ta’ife-yi)
Bektaşiyan (people of the Bektaşiyye). Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Devlet Teşkilatında Kapukulu
Ocakları, pp. 148–50. Colin Imber, ‘The Origin of the Janissaries’, Journal of Turkish
Studies, 26 (2002), pp. 15–19.
28
For the Bektaşi organization and their political and cultural role in Ottoman
society, see Suraiya Faroqhi, Der Bektaschi-Orden in Anatolien: (vom späten fünfzehnten
1556 ALI YAYCIOGLU
Despite the Shi‘ite-inclined and antinomian elements in Bektaşism,

however, the Ottoman state did not persecute members of the Bektaşi
order, except perhaps during the initial stages of the Ottoman-
Safavid conflict in the early sixteenth century.29 On the contrary,
the Ottoman elites endorsed the Bektaşis, not unlike their main
competitors, the Mevlevi order.30 According to some historians, the
Ottomans backed the Bektaşi order to curtail or pre-empt the threat
of Safavid Shi‘ite propaganda to Safavid-inclined communities in
Ottoman lands.31 Some historians further argue that the Ottomans
sponsored the Bektaşi order in order to contain not only the Kızılbaş
communities, but also different antinomian and unruly Sufi groups in
late medieval Anatolia, such as the Abdals, Kalenderis, and Haydaris.
These groups were gradually assimilated into the state-sponsored
Bektaşi organization and thus became tractable from the point of view
of the Ottoman state.32 From the perspective of the Bektaşi tradition,
however, Hacı Bektaş Veli was not only the patron saint of the
Janissaries, but also a holy man who spiritually guided and consecrated
Jahrhundert bis 1826), Vienna, Verlag des Institutes für Orientalistik der Universität
Wien, 1981; Alexandre Popovic and Gilles Veinstein (eds), Bektachiyya, Études sur l’ordre
mystique des Bektachis et les groupes relevant de Hadji Bektash, Istanbul, The Isis Publications,
1995, particularly Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘The Bektashis: An Historical Survey’, pp. 9–30;
Yürekli, Architecture and Hagiography. Also see Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, Geçmişten Günümüze
Alevî-Bektaşî Kültürü, Ankara, Kültür ve Turizm Bakanlığı Yayınları, 2009; A. Y. Ocak,
Alevi-Bektaşi İnançlarının İslam Öncesi Temelleri, Istanbul, İletişim, 2000; Irène Mélikoff,
Hadji Bektach: un mythe et ses avatars: genèse et évolution du soufisme populaire en Turquie,
Leiden, Brill, 1998; Suraiya Faroqhi, ‘The Tekke of Hacı Bektaş: Social Position and
Economic Actitivies’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 7 (1976), pp. 183–208.
Recent studies by Ayfer Karakaya-Stump illustrate that some of the Bektaşi groups in
eastern Anatolia and Baghdad had connections with Safavid Iran in the seventeenth
century: see Ayfer Karakaya-Stump, Vefailik, Bektaşilik, Kızılbaşlık: Alevi Kaynakalarını
Yeniden Düşünmek, Istanbul, Bilgi Üniversitesi Yayınları, 2015.
29
Perhaps an exception for Ottoman persecutions against the Bektaşis was during
a rebellion led by Kalender Çelebi, a Bektaşi sheikh in 1527. See A. Haydar Avcı, Şah
Kalender İsyanı: Alevi Tarihinden bir Kesit, Ankara, La Kitap, 2014.
30
Faroqhi, ‘Conflict, Accommodation and Long-term Survival: The Bektashi Order
and the Ottoman State’, in Popovic and Veinstein (eds), Bektachiyya, pp. 171–84. For
the competition between the Bektaşis and Mevlevis concerning who—a Bektaşi or
Mevlevi sheikh—would gird the imperial sword on the Ottoman sultan during his
coronation, see Cemal Kafadar, ‘Eyüp’te Kılıç Kuşanma Törenleri’, in Tülay Artan
(ed.), Eyüp: Dün/bugün: Sempozyum, 11–12 Aralık 1993, Istanbul, Tarih Vakfı, 1993,
p. 59.
31
Faroqhi, ‘Conflict, Accommodation and Long-term Survival’. For a recent
historiographic discussion, see Riza Yıldırım, Aleviliğin Doğuşu: Kızilbaş Sufiliğinin
Toplumsal ve Siyasal Temelleri, 1300–1501, Istanbul, İletişim, 2017, pp. 344–45.
32
Yıldırım, Aleviliğin Doğuşu, pp. 344–45.
the founders of the Ottoman state.33 Although chronologically, this
is highly debatable, the Bektaşi foundation myth was profoundly
entangled with that of the Ottoman dynasty.34
By the end of the sixteenth century, Bektaşi doctrines and ritual
forms were fully established. At the same time Bektaşi lodges had
proliferated and formed an empire-wide web, sometimes with the
sponsorship of the Ottoman elites.35 The family claiming to be
descendants of Hacı Bektaş, who resided in a central Anatolian town
(today Hacıbektaş in Nevşehir province), were recognized as the
supreme sheikhs of the order by the Ottoman state. This parallels the
Ottoman recognition of descendants of Jalal al-Din al-Rumi (d. 1273)
in Konya as the supreme sheikhs of the Mevlevi order.36 Gradually,
hundreds of Bektaşi lodges across the empire were established under
different sheikhs from notable Bektaşi families, with the financial
support of central and provincial elites, including former Janissaries.
Among many others, the Bektaşi shrines of Seyyid Gazi (near
Eskişehir), Abdal Musa (in Elmalı, Antalya), Kızıl Deli (in
Didymoteicho, today in Greece), and Kaygusuz Abdal in Cairo were
transformed into spiritual pilgrimage sites for different Bektaşi
communities across the empire. The association between the Janissary
corps and the Bektaşi order was solidified in the seventeenth and
33
This incident was fully depicted in the Vilâyetnâme, namely the hagiography of
Hacı Bektaş Veli: see Hamiye Duran (ed.), Vilâyetnâme, Ankara, Türkiye Diyanet
Vakfı, 2007, pp. 541–54; Abdülbâki Gölpınarlı (ed.), Vilâyet-nâme: Menâkıb-ı Hünkâr
Hacı Bektâş-ı Velî, Istanbul, İnkılâp Kitapevi, 1958, pp. 73–77.
34
In the formative period, Bektaşism flourished along with other dervish orders in
the complex religio-political environment of medieval Anatolia (Rum), a frontier zone
between the Byzantine empire and the decentralized post-Mongol Muslim world, in
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. During this period, while various Muslim
warriors (gazis), including the Ottomans, competed to build principalities, various
dervish groups, spinning from Khorasan to Anatolia with diverse politico-spiritual
agendas under the spiritual leaderships of different holy men, sometimes clashed or
sometimes allied themselves with these gazi principalities. Cemal Kafadar, Between
Two Worlds: The Construction of the Ottoman State, Berkeley, University of California
Press, 1995, pp. 122–37; Ahmet T. Karamustafa, God’s Unruly Friends: Dervish Groups
in the Islamic Later Middle Period, 1200–1550, Salt Lake City, University of Utah Press,
1994, pp. 51–63; Fuat Köprülü, ‘Bektaşiliğin Menşe‘leri’, Türk Yurdu, III (1341/19),
pp. 121–40; Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, Babaîler İsyanı, Istanbul, Dergah, 1980. Also see Irène
Mélikoff, Hadji Bektach: un mythe et ses avatars: genèse et évolution du soufisme populaire en
Turquie, Leiden, Brill, 1998.Yıldırım, Aleviliğin Doğuşu, pp. 344–45.
35
Yürekli, Architecture and Hagiography, pp. 25–50.
36
Faroqhi, ‘The Tekke of Hacı Bektaş’, pp. 183–208; Meral Salman Yıkmış, Hacı
Bektaş Veli’nin evlatları, ‘Yol’un mürşitleri, Ulusoy ailesi, Istanbul, İletişim, 2014, pp. 52–
71; Yürekli, Architecture and Hagiography.
1558 ALI YAYCIOGLU
eighteenth centuries, when the Janissary corps expanded and trans-

formed into a massive social-military body. This association was mani-
fested in the corps ceremonial as Bektaşi sheiks acquired fictive seats in
the 94th battalion of the corps. As the spiritual patrons of the corps they
had roles in the inauguration ceremonies for new corps chiefs, during
coronations of sultans, and at other important imperial events.37
How did the Bektaşi order influence the socio-military status of
the Janissaries in the Ottoman state and society? We have to answer
this question in the context of ‘confession-building’ in the Ottoman
empire. New debates on religious life in the Ottoman world illustrate
that, from the sixteenth century onwards, confessionalization in line
with mainstream Sunnism reoriented Ottoman society. Sunnism in
terms of creed, rituals, and practices, became the norm for Muslim
communities, first in the cities and then in rural areas and among
nomads. Sunni confession-building was sometimes projected and
enforced by top-down mechanisms from the central state, with direct
persecutions and the spread of state-sponsored catechisms, sometimes
mobilized from the bottom-up by popular religious activists. In the
seventeenth century, Sunni activism gained momentum through
Kadızadeli preachers, who spread moral criticisms of established
conventions of social and cultural life, such as coffee and tobacco
consumption, the practices of various Sufi orders, and of the lifestyles
of the state elites.38
This process of confession-building was not free from social
resistance. In various regions in the empire, communities resisted
bottom-up (mobilized by popular preachers) or top-down (state-
imposed) Sunni confessionalization in different ways. Thus, I propose
that Bektaşism can be considered to be one of these forms of resistance.
It was shielded against Sunni confession-building since the Bektaşis
were integrated within the Janissary corps. In return, Bektaşism
provided the Janissaries with a pious but nonconformist identity. In
other words, the Bektaşi order was able to survive due to its spiritual
37
Kafadar, ‘Eyüb’te Kılıç Kuşanma Törenleri’, pp. 50–61.
38
Derin Terzioğlu, ‘Where ʻİlm-i H . āl Meets Catechism: Islamic Manuals of
Religious Instruction in the Ottoman Empire in the Age of Confessionalization’,
Past & Present, 220, 1 (2013), pp. 79–114; Ead, ‘How to Conceptualize Ottoman
Sunnitization’, Turcica, 44 (2012–13), pp. 301–38; Tijana Kristić, Contested Conversions
to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire, Stanford,
Stanford University Press, 2011, pp. 12–16; Jörg Deventer, ‘“Confessionalization”:
A Useful Theoretical Concept for the Study of Religion, Politics and Society in Early
Modern East-Central Europe?’, European Review of History, 11, 3 (2004), pp. 403–25.
link with the empire’s primary army, while its antinomianism provided
the Janissaries with the social and spiritual means to be relatively
immune from top-down or bottom-up confessional disciplining.
Bektaşism enabled the Janissaries to combine military valour with
an unorthodox experience that was still accepted and respected by
the elites and the public. As we see in the Book of Water Carriers, one
of the aspects of this spiritual experience was privileging the body.
From the beginning of the corps, masculinity and masculine beauty
were major components of Janissary identity.39 The devşirmes were
picked and classified according to their physical features, sometimes
with a homoerotic gaze, as well as their mental vigour. Through
training and body-building, Janissaries learned how to use their bodies
in war, but also how to display them in ceremonies, rituals, and
everyday life. According to tradition, the Janissary headgear, which
complemented the Janissary body, was designed by Hacı Bektaş Veli
himself. Their naked chests and shaved heads and faces were seen as
expressions of devotion. Such gestures, which were common among
medieval antinomian dervishes in Anatolia in Hacı Bektaş’s time,
signified bodily sacrifice for salvation in dervish piety.40 Janissary
culture adopted some of these earlier nonconformist elements of
masculinity and transformed them into a socio-military body politic.
War activated courage as a spiritual experience, but also enabled the
Janissaries to show off their bodies. Warfare was thus understood as a
spiritual performance (vecd) in which the body (vucud) of the Janissary
was displayed as an expression of valour, but also of faith, as expressed
in the famous Janissary hymn:
Allah Allah Eyvallah,

The head is shaved,
The chest is a shield,
The eyes are red,
The heart is charred,
Many heads are cut off
Here in this place
Nobody wonders.
Our sword and ferocity
Are the fear of the enemy.
39
I would like to thank Fatih Yeşil for referencing the relationship between vecd
and vucud in Janissary culture. For a discussion on spiritual motivations in Ottoman
military culture, see Murphey, Ottoman Warfare, pp. 133–67.
40
Karamustafa, God’s Unruly Friends, pp. 18–19.
1560 ALI YAYCIOGLU
Our servitude is
The Sultan’s guarantee
Our guide, ruler and master,
The pillar of the wise
Hacı Bektaş Veli.
By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by which time the

Janissaries had become part of urban public life, the memory of the
medieval roots of the bodily antinomianism of the dervish groups had
probably been forgotten. Nevertheless, Janissaryship was expressed
in a set of physical features, such as shaved heads and faces, tattoos,
and various manifestation of bravado, which enabled members of
the corps to appear in urban spaces as a distinctive social group.
The Janissaries’ autonomy from the disciplining interventions of the
state and religious activists also signified their autonomy against the
disciplining of the body.41
We should note here that the revolt of 1807, resulting in the
dethronement of Selim III and the abolishment of the New Order,
began when Janissary affiliates (yamaks) guarding the fortress at
the Black Sea entrance of the Bosporus refused to wear the new
military uniforms and attend team drills. In many ways, the revolt was
initiated by the Janissaries’ resistance to submitting their bodies to the
discipline of the state and the new military sciences. It was recorded
that when Mahmud Efendi, a New Orderist, went to the fortress
to instruct the yamaks to wear the uniforms and start daily drills,
the yamaks declared to their captain ‘we understood that Mahmud
Efendi came from Istanbul bringing the New Order uniforms for us
and you agreed with them concerning the matter of [New Order]
clothing. Our acceptance of this is unimaginable and taking on the
appearance and the look against the norms of our corps (hilaf-ı Ocak
ziyy ü hey’etine girmek) is beyond the height of possibility.’ Soon, they
would slay Mahmud Efendi and initiate their revolt by marching to
Istanbul.42
41
Uzunçarşılı, Osmanlı Devlet Teşkilatında Kapukulu Ocakları, pp. 148–50, 566–75;
Küçükyalçın, Turna’in Kalbi, pp. 100–20; Şevki Koca, Bektaşi kültür argumanına göre
Yeniçeri ocağı ve devşirmeler: Öndeng songung gürgele, İstanbul, Nazernin, 2000; Gülağ
Öz, Yeniçeri Bektaşi İlişkileri, Ankara, Uyum, 1997; Irène Mélikoff, Uyur idik Uyardılar:
Alevîlik—Bektaşîlik Araştırmaları, Istanbul, Cem, 1994, pp. 21–49.
42
Mütercim Asım Efendi, Asım Efendi Tarihi, Ziya Yılmazer (ed.), Istanbul, Türkiye
Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı, 2015, Vol. 2, p. 779.
Guardians of traditions and laws
Despite their nonconformism, Janissaries often presented themselves

as the protectors of tradition and convention against radical change
and innovation. This traditionalism was not a form of entrenched
conservatism, more a component of their moral economy to protect
vested privileges against unpredictable shifts over time. In this respect,
I suggest viewing the Janissary corps, as it was transformed in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not only as an army aligned to
the artisanal guilds, but also as a kind of union. Members of the Janis-
sary union were knitted together through Bektaşi rituals, horizontal
comradeship, and autonomous internal hierarchies, with the collective
understanding that they could negotiate their status, salaries, and
benefits with the central ruling elite, at the same time as they fostered
their primary role as the principal army of the Ottoman military
establishment and one of the oldest pillars of the Ottoman order.
The nonconformist attitudes of the Janissaries, coloured by
Bektaşism, also enabled them to give voice to popular discontent
by freeing themselves from the social, political, and religious
disciplining that emanated from different centres of authority. This
nonconformism provided them with the flexibility to build alliances
with various segments of state and society. Sultans tried to secure the
allegiances of Janissary chiefs against rival factions through financial
and political deals. Competing groups in the central establishment—
princes, dynastic women, viziers, high-ranking bureaucrats, and
the jurists—built alliances with the corps. When Janissaries found
themselves at odds with a decision of the ruling elite because
their policies menaced the Janissaries’ collective privileges and
benefits, they established alliances with other elites within the state
establishment or with other segments in society. During these alliance-
building processes, the Janissaries benefited from a dual identity: they
were both part of the ruling establishment and in opposition to it, both
central and popular, traditional and unorthodox. Using these dual
identities, they were able to build alliances not only with state elites
but also with the commoners who were vulnerable during economic
crises or social groups whose well-being and interests were threatened
in times of change. In this regard, the Janissary corps was not only a
guild-like army and a union, but also a kind of political party with the
capacity to translate their corporate interests into the interests of a
larger public as guardians of order, laws, and traditions.
Recurring alliances between the Janissaries and the ulema (the
learned hierarchy of Islamic law) deserve examination. At first glance,
1562 ALI YAYCIOGLU
it might seem paradoxical that there would be any alliances between

the Janissaries, fashioned as they were by Bektaşism, and the ulema, as
the spokesmen of Sunni-Hanafi Islamic law. But despite the discrep-
ancy between the manifestations of piety of the Bektaşi Janissaries
and the Sunni-Hanafi ulema, such alliances endowed both parties to
gain political advantages. When the Janissaries and some members
of the ulema acted together, they could mobilize a larger coalition
constituted by different segments of the state and society. In the
course of their protests and riots, the Janissaries often called for fatwas
(legal opinions) from members of the ulema, who implicitly or explicitly
supported uprisings. These fatwas gave a legal, religious, and moral
legitimacy to the protesting groups. At the same time, they justified the
dismissal or even execution of accused bureaucrats and the elimination
of ruling factions in the administration through confiscation of their
assets. But perhaps more important was the constitutional character of
such legal opinions. The fatwas of the muftis consisted of short answers
to abstract questions. In the protests and riots, these abstract fatwas
not only established the moral and legal grounds of the Janissary
opposition, but also solidified a constitutional discourse which
surpassed the immediate episodes for which the fatwa was prepared.
Ottoman history is in many ways the history of Janissary-led popular
revolts. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
Janissary-led coalitions triggered a number of rebellions (1622, 1648,
1651, 1655, 1656, 1687, 1703, 1730, 1740, 1807, and 1808) in
Istanbul. Often these revolts resulted in the toppling the ruling
cadre and the ascent of a new one. Some of them caused sultans
to be deposed, even executed. During these episodes, the Janissaries
sometimes defended artisanal interests against the interventions of
ruling elites or against merchant networks who were responsible for
provisioning Istanbul, especially during shortages. Sometimes they
voiced the frustrations of the commoners against the debasement of
coins, or the rising prices of bread, meat, coffee, or candles. Populist
resentment against fiscal measures and shortages helped them to
build popular coalitions or enlist fresh recruits. Different groups that
developed a grudge and protested against the government for different
reasons often tried to acquire the support of the Janissaries to mobilize
the crowd. Each revolt witnessed complex political configurations,
shifting alliances, and unexpected outcomes.43
43
Cemal Kafadar, ‘Janissaries and Other Riffraff of Ottoman Istanbul: Rebels
Without a Cause?’, in Baki Tezcan and Karl K. Barbir (eds), Identity and Identity
Formation in the Ottoman World: A Volume of Essays in Honor of Norman Itzkowitz,
These revolts, either led by or in which the Janissaries participated
(beginning in 1621 when Osman II was dethroned and executed, up
to the developments of 1807–1808, summarized at the beginning of
this article), were principal moments in Ottoman political history.
Despite their differences, however, they gave birth to a script, that
is, a pattern of collective behaviours and rituals. These scripts—such
as removing cauldrons from the hearth of mass kitchens, assembling
with camps in the Hippodrome, and asking for fatwas from the muftis
and announcing them— transformed riots into political theatre and
Istanbul into a riot-scape. While producing a historical memory and
moral claim, they also enabled the riot leaders to regulate the crowds
and contain violence.
During the post-revolt settlements, the limits of the central
administration were renegotiated, old privileges were assured, and
new ones were offered. Sometimes collective pardons and guarantees
were granted to participants in the rebellion. The wealth of the toppled
elite was confiscated and redistributed among members of the new
ruling party and the agitated populace. In order to secure the support
of the general public, post-revolt settlements often guaranteed the
properties and contracts of the guilds against top-down decisions by
the state. In other words, the Janissaries played a leading role in the
post-revolt settlements, which were a negotiation between different
coalition groups and beyond for the redistribution of privileges,
benefits, goods, and wealth, as well as the reinforcing of existing ones.
The fatwa-issuing ulema framed and codified the post-revolt
settlements in legal and moral terms. Official and popular historians
narrated the revolt and its aftermath, sometimes with open
justifications, sometimes with subtle critiques. Stories were told,
poems were written, and songs were composed about the revolt and
its heroes or victims. As these stories, poems, and songs circulated,
public opinion was fashioned and refashioned. Predictably, each revolt
brought about a new reality, a new social and political balance of
power, as well as new historical narratives and moral and legal
Madison, University of Wisconsin Press, 2007, pp. 114–33. Baki Tezcan, The Second
Ottoman Empire: Political and Social Transformation in the Early Modern World, Cambridge,
Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 46–78. Niyazi Berkes, Türkiye’de Çağdaşlaşma,
Ahmet Kuyaş (ed.), Istanbul, Yapı Kredi, 2002, pp. 108–18. Rifaʻat Ali Abou-El-Haj,
The Rebellion of 1703 and the Structure of Ottoman Politics, Leiden, Nederlands Historisch-
Archaeologisch Instituut, Istanbul, 1984. Fikret Yılmaz, ‘Siyaset, İsyan ve İstanbul
(1453–1808)’, in Coşkun Yılmaz (ed.), Büyük İstanbul Tarihi: Antik Çağ’dan XXI. Yüzyıla,
Vol. 1: Siyaset ve Yönetim, Istanbul, İSAM, 2015, pp. 122–35.
1564 ALI YAYCIOGLU
formulations, and, most of the time, some new institutions. However,

the discourse of the revolts often underlined the assertion of the
old laws, privileges, and traditions. ‘New’ was presented as the
‘old’, ‘innovation’ as ‘tradition’. The diverse groups of the revolting
coalitions often negotiated and reached agreements regarding the old
and traditional order—and the imagined stability of that venerable
and experienced order—rather than replacing it with a new one, one
that was not experienced and was hypothetical, with all the inherent
unpredictability that this implied.
Towards the New Order
Despite the dramatic failure of the second Ottoman siege of Vienna

in 1683 and subsequent defeats in the late seventeenth century,
these wars also illustrate the military capacity and ability of the
Ottoman empire to mobilize massive campaigns in distant regions.
The competitiveness of the Ottoman military during the conquest
of Crete, after a long and very expensive siege in 1645–1696,
the reconquest of Morea from Venice in the 1730s, and the swift
Ottoman occupation of the Caucasus after the Safavid empire’s
collapse, deserve greater attention from historians. Janissaries and
regular and irregular provincial forces under the command of regional
governors, as well as the expanding Ottoman fleet, were far from
totally ineffective on the battlefield and the seas.44 Canon technology
based on brass had not yet been replaced by iron-cast canons with
interchangeable elements, but innovative proposals were circulating
for artillery technology and strategies by Ottoman and Ottoman-
employed European engineers and military artisans.45
Just as important was the intensification of wars during this
period, which fostered greater mobility and interactions between
the Ottoman empire and the outside world. Military experts from
44
Virginia Aksan, Ottoman Wars 1700–1870, New York: Longman, 2007, pp. 83–
128.
45
Adnan Adıvar, La science chez les Turcs ottomans, Paris, G.-P. Maisonneuve, 1939,
Chapter 7. For a set of proposals for new canon technology by an Ottoman engineer
in the eighteenth century, see Bayramoğlu Ali Ağa, Ümmü’l-gazâ: harb sanatı ve aletleri,
Salim Aydüz and Şamil Çan (eds), Istanbul, Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu, 2013,
particularly pp. 83–103; Mustafa ibn İbrahim, Fenn-i humbara: humbara ve ateşli silahlar,
prepared by Salim Aydüz and Şamil Çan under the editorship of Salim Aydüz, İstanbul,
Türkiye Yazma Eserler Kurumu Başkanlığı, 2015.
Europe found employment opportunities or positions in the Ottoman
establishment, such as the French aristocrat and military reformer
Claude Alexander Comte de Bonneval, who was known as Humbaracı
Ahmed Pasha (Ahmed Pasha the Grenadier, 1675–1747) after he
entered Ottoman service.46 The conquest of Crete, an intellectual and
scholarly centre of the Venetian empire, was an especially interesting
case. In the eighteenth century, Cretan Muslims and Greeks had
important roles in spreading new medicine and information about
natural sciences.47 The expansion of global trade and the circulation of
people, goods, information, and styles across empires impacted on the
Ottoman world, triggering new curiosity about the outside world and
challenging established knowledge. Terms signifying newness, such as
cedid (new), nev- (novel), and taze (fresh), circulated more frequently
in intellectual, political, and cultural life.48
During the social and intellectual movement, known later as the
Tulip Age (1703–1730), the imperial elite commissioned translations
into Ottoman-Turkish, while the press in Arabic script for Ottoman-
Turkish and Arabic books was institutionalized. The proliferation of
libraries coincided with the expansion of new reading and writing
cultures, both in intellectual circles and among ordinary lay men
and women in Istanbul and the provinces.49 Growing networks of
merchants, scholars, and Sufis both within the Ottoman empire and
between the Ottoman empire and Europe, Iran, Central Asia, and
46
Frédérick Hitzel, Intégration et transformation des savoirs: itinéraire de passeurs dans la
société ottomane, Istanbul, Isis, 2015, pp. 11–74.
47
There is not yet any thorough study of the Cretans in eighteenth-century
Ottoman political and intellectual life. But scattered biographical information implies
that intellectuals, statesmen, and physicians originally from Crete played important
roles in the Ottoman empire. Two examples are Hekim Başı Nuh Efendi and his
family (Hekimoğlu family), see Münir Aktepe, ‘Hekimoğlu Ali Paşa’, Diyanet Vakfı
İslam Ansiklopedisi, 17 (1998), pp. 166–68; and Ahmed Resmi Efendi (Ahmed of
Rethimnon), see Virgina Aksan, An Ottoman Statesman in War and Peace: Ahmed Resmi
Efendi, 1700–1783, Leiden, E. J. Brill, 1995.
48
Shirine Hamadeh, The City’s Pleasures: Istanbul in the Eighteenth-century, Seattle,
University of Washington Press, 2008, pp. 94–155. For a new study on the vibrant
intellectual life and reform ideas across the Muslim world in the eighteenth century,
published after this article was completed, see Ahmad S. Dallal, Islam Without Europe:
Traditions of Reform in Eighteenth-Century Islamic Thought (Chapel Hill, The University of
North Carolina Press, 2018).
49
Dana Sajdi (ed.), Ottoman Tulips, Ottoman Coffee: Leisure and Lifestyle in the Eighteenth
Century, London, New York, Tauris Academic Studies, 2007; Ismail Erünsal, Osmanlı
Vakıf Kütüphaneleri: Tarihî Gelişimi ve Organizasyonu, Ankara, Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2008;
Orlin Sabev, İbrahim Müteferrika ya da İlk Osmanlı Matbaa Serüveni, Istanbul, Yeditepe,
2013.
1566 ALI YAYCIOGLU
India enhanced their circulation.50 Ottoman-Greek intellectuals and

scholars in the Balkans and Istanbul became more connected to
Enlightenment circles in Austria, Italy, and France. However, there
is no reason to believe that the Greek intellectual movement in
the Ottoman empire, known as the Greek Enlightenment, was an
isolated phenomenon that had no contact with Muslim and Armenian
intellectual circles.51
But the Ottoman eighteenth century was more than just an
intellectually vibrant period. Internal and external shake-ups, political
crises, and long and bloody wars disturbed life in the Ottoman
world. The Janissary rebellion in 1730, which ended the Tulip Age,
was far from a reactionary rebellion against new trends. It was a
complex political incident, orchestrated by factions in the political
establishment, in which artisans, various groups within the Janissaries,
and urban dwellers participated in a political and financial crisis that
shook Istanbul and the provinces.52 Local notables in the provinces
consolidated regional dynasties as a result of changes in fiscal and
administrative institutions. The fiscal, administrative, and military
shake-ups and reforms enabled semi-private powerful and wealthy
people, some of them with Janissary status, to acquire new fiscal
and administrative offices and contracts. The centre could not control
the provinces and extract resources without the cooperation of these
provincial dynasties. As a result, these provincial actors—at least the
most powerful among them—developed new ways of challenging the
50
Butrus Abu-Manneh, ‘Sheikh Murād al-Bukhārı̄ and the Expansion of the
Naqshbandı̄-Mujaddidı̄ Order in Istanbul’, Welt des Islams, 5, 1, 2013, pp. 1–25.
51
Paschalis M. Kitromilides, Enlightenment and Revolution: The Making of Greece,
Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 2013, pp. 117–55; Harun Küçük, ‘The
Case for the Ottoman Enlightenment: Natural Philosophy and Cosmopolitanism
in Eighteenth Century Istanbul’, Perspectives on Europe, 42, 2 (2012), pp. 108–10;
Harun Küçük, ‘Natural Philosophy and Politics in the Eighteenth Century: Esad of
Ioannina and Greek Aristotelianism at the Ottoman Court’, Journal of Ottoman Studies,
41 (2013), pp. 125–59.
52
Münir Aktepe, Patrona İsyani (1730), Istanbul, Edebiyat Fakültesi Basimevi, 1958;
Robert Olson, ‘The Esnaf and the Patrona Halil Rebellion of 1730: A Realignment in
Ottoman Politics?’, Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, 17, 3 (1974),
pp. 329–44; Selim Karahasanoğlu, ‘Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda 1730 İsyanına dair
Yeni Bulgular: İsyanın Organizatörlerinden Ayasofya Vaizi İspirîzade Ahmed Efendi
ve Terekesi’, Ankara Üniversitesi Osmanlı Tarihi Araştırma ve Uygulama Merkezi Dergisi, 24
(2010), pp. 97–128; S. Karahasanoğlu, Politics and Governance in the Ottoman Empire: The
Rebellion of 1730: An Account of the Revolution that Took Place in Constantinople in the Year of
1143 of the Hegira, Cambridge, Harvard University, 2009.
centre. They enjoyed growing military power and diplomatic contacts
with the outside world, bypassing Istanbul.53
But it was the Ottoman-Russian war of 1767–1774 that had the
most devastating effect on the Ottoman fiscal and military order.
Military defeats, the loss of Crimea, and heavy war indebtedness
to Russia triggered a long military-fiscal crisis that lasted until the
early nineteenth century. The war also solidified, in the minds of
the Ottoman imperial elite and general public, the inevitability of the
military and fiscal reform agenda. The Janissaries, in many ways, were
seen as being responsible for the reformists’ military setback. Still, the
historical prestige of the corps and the fact they were integrated into
the general urban public and artisanal organizations prevented any
reformist from openly articulating the possible abolition of the corps.54
The New Order
As I briefly summarized in the introduction to this article, when Selim

III came to the throne in 1789, the military reform agenda was
reinforced, following a number of consultative assemblies attended
by a large number of military, bureaucratic, and judiciary elites.
Reform pamphlets presented to the sultan gave birth to a range
of diverse solutions—from radical to conservative—to the military
and fiscal crisis. Constant fiscal pressures pushed the central
administration to seek solutions both old and new, including direct
and indirect taxation, burdening communities with new services,
and internal borrowing. Some proposed novel regulatory measures
to discipline urban life and markets, within which the Janissaries were
integrated. By the early 1790s, the Ottoman ruling elite, under the
patronage of Selim III, unleashed a twin reform agenda to create a
new disciplined and trained army, and a new treasury to regulate
the resources that were reserved to finance this new army. Ottoman
reformists called the new army Nizam-ı Cedid, literally the ‘New Order’,
thus the name combined two terms, newness and orderliness.55
The administrative reform agenda of the New Order was constituted
of a diverse repertoire of fiscal and administrative measures
53
Yaycioglu, Partners of the Empire, pp. 65–115.
54
Ibid., pp. 38–44.
55
Ibid., pp. 40–47.
1568 ALI YAYCIOGLU
proposed by the architects of the reform.56 This included financial

tools for internal borrowing and the creation of a treasury with
new management mechanisms. These institutional programmes
were proposed and implemented, sometimes on the basis of local
experiences and at other times as the result of observations from
other polities, such as Russia, Austria, and France.57 The fiscal and
administrative reforms went hand in hand with military reforms that
resulted from developments in military sciences and engineering,
such as regular drilling, uniform clothing, synchronized shooting,
regimental organization, and impersonal discipline. These principles
flourished in the Netherlands, France, and Britain in the late
seventeenth century before spreading across the world. They were
canonized in the military academies, along with other developments in
artillery, ballistics, and cartography.58 But before the initiation of new
troops, perhaps the most important step in Ottoman military reform
was the establishment of the Imperial Academy of Naval Engineering
in 1776, which became the Imperial Academy of Military Engineering
(Mühendishane-i Berr-i Humayun) in 1793. These academies were
meeting places for European (mainly French) and Ottoman military
engineers and mathematicians.59
What Ken Adler shows for military engineering in revolutionary
France is in many ways relevant to the Ottoman New Order.60
Mathematics became a tool in military engineering academies
for disciplining pupils using new pedagogical methods. Order
and discipline in artillery classrooms at the academies and in
workshops gradually affected modes of army organization. Armies
were re-evaluated and redesigned according to new parameters for
regimentation, synchronicity, coordination, and interchangeability.
Military engineering shaped the parameters of the new army through
its regulations, drills, uniforms, internal structure, organizational
56
Ibid., pp. 38–63.
57
Fatih Yeşil, Aydınlanma Çağında bir Osmanlı Kâtibi: Ebubekir Râtıb Efendi 1750–1799,
Istanbul, Tarih Vakfı, 2011, pp. 164–95.
58
Fatih Yeşil, İhtilâller Çağında Osmanlı Ordusu, Istanbul, Tarih Vakfı, 2016, pp. 13–
54.
59
Kemal Beydilli, Türk bilim ve matbaacılık Tarihinde Mühendishâne: Mühendishâne
matbaası ve kütüphânesi, 1776–1826, Istanbul, Eren, 1995, pp. 19–94; Darina
Martykánová, Reconstructing Ottoman Engineers: Archeology of a Profession (1789–1914),
Pisa, Pisa University Press, 2010, pp. 1–17.
60
Ken Adler, Engineering the Revolution: Arms and Enlightenment in France, 1763–1815,
Princeton, Princeton University Press, 1997, p. 65.
logic, and collective discipline.61 In the New Order, the courage and
bravery of individuals were replaced by discipline and coordination.
The emphasis on the bravery of individual Janissaries was superseded
by interchangeable soldiers who belonged to an impersonal military
machine. Thus, when one soldier was killed, others were supposed
to continue with their mission, following orders and guidelines
without interruption. Soldiers’ uniforms symbolized their impersonal
role within a collective entity, which would coordinate and act
synchronically, performing according to repeated drills and taught
regulations, rather than showing personal initiative. The army
was seen as a ‘social machine’ designed and engineered using
mathematical coordination to maximize precision and punctuality.
Recruitment and promotion were not supposed to be achieved
through references from the masters and patronage by the chiefs (as
we see with the Janissaries), but rather through regulation criteria,
pedagogical training and drilling, and reports from outside authorities
(nazırs). Janissary exercises glorifying individual ability and strength,
such as wrestling and archery, were replaced with collective drills
like synchronic shooting and marching. The horizontal solidarity
mechanisms of the Janissaries, based on comradeship, were replaced
with top-down hierarchies, loyalties to commanders, and adherence to
regulations. To the greatest possible extent, soldiers in the new army
were stripped of local solidarities. Designers tried to stop soldiers
from the same region being placed in the same units. Individuals were
prohibited from using nicknames and non-official titles, apart from
their ranks. The New Order army was assembled in different regions
of the empire. Most of the New Order soldiers were drafted from
the Muslim peasants, rather than urban commoners. The Ottoman
reformist believed the young peasants to be uncorrupted and docile.62
Engineering was so central in the design of the new army that
each unit was associated with a new iron-cast canon. The canons
were entrusted to soldiers who associated themselves with it, and
canons became the technological and symbolic pillars of the unit.
Likewise, graduates of the Academy of Military Engineering were
appointed as officers in the new army. Some soldiers were also asked
61
Yeşil, İhtilâller Çağında Osmanlı Ordusu, pp. 55–113.
62
Gültekin Yıldız, Neferin Adı Yok: Zorunlu Askerliğe Geçiş Sürecinde Osmanlı Devleti’nde
Siyaset, Ordu ve Toplum (1826–1839), Istanbul, Kitapevi, 2009; Khaled Fahmy, All
the Pasha’s Men: Mehmed Ali, his Army and the Making of Modern Egypt, Cairo, American
University in Cairo Press, 2002, pp. 199–237.
1570 ALI YAYCIOGLU
to attend mathematics classes in the Academy. Artillery corps and

grenadiers were given special attention, and an examination system
was established to facilitate promotions to the artillery. Workshops
for artillery manufacturing were redesigned according to new labour
and technology regulations. The workers who manufactured iron-
cast canons were under the direct command of engineers and they
specialized in handling certain parts of a canon, which were now
constituted by interchangeable pieces, rather than one single cast.
Likewise, new military barracks were detached from unruly urban
centres and designed according to symmetrical and rectangular
grid structures, which were believed to maximize coordination
and control.63
Despite this discursive juxtaposition between the Janissaries and
the New Order, historians cannot yet fully substantiate to what extent
the social contexts of the soldiers and personnel of the New Order and
that of the Janissaries were radically different. As I mentioned, the
privates of the New Order were predominantly young men recruited
from Anatolian peasant families. In fact, such recruitment triggered
significant resentment and protests against the New Order in the
provinces, which was one of the reasons for the collapse of the project in
1807. It is probable that the officers of the New Order were able to keep
these young men confined to barracks in Istanbul and the provinces,
away from the agitated urban spaces fashioned by the Janissaries.64
The officers of the New Order had a different composition to
the rank-and-file. In addition to Ottoman-born Muslims, New Order
officers included a number of European origin, who, in one way or
another, ended up in the Ottoman lands, became Ottoman, and were
employed in the New Order. The Austrian traveller and medical doctor
Ulrich Jasper Seetzen (1767–1811) met a number of Euro-Ottoman
New Orderists during his stay in Istanbul in 1802 and 1803. He
recorded a number of vivid life stories of these men in his diary:
A couple of days ago a Pole, Count Schablinsky, who was the cavalry major of
the Polish troops under the French [in Istanbul], converted to Islam. He is a
tall, handsome man, about 30 years old. They gave him the name Mehmed.
The Reis Efendi Mahmud Ragy [Minister of Foreign Affairs Mahmud Raif
63
Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men, pp. 114–53. See also Kahraman Şakul, ‘Military
Engineering in the Ottoman Empire’, in Bruce P. Lenman (ed.), Military Engineers and
the Development of the Early-Modern European State, Dundee, Dundee University Press,
2013, pp. 179–99.
64
Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men.
Efendi] who is known for his French book [on the New Order], gave him a
shawl valued at 300 piasters as a gift so that Mehmed could roll it around
his turban. Mehmed is said to have been appointed major of the cavalry unit
[of the New Order] in Scutari, with a monthly salary of 300 piasters. He is
also said to have some receivables from the French. Baron Keil, of Hungarian
origin, had converted to Islam ten or eleven years ago, and was renamed as
Süleyman. Since he had lived as a slave in Baghdad for a while, they call him
Süleyman of Baghdad. Now he is with the governor of Egypt [Hurşit Pasha] to
supervise the drills of the [New Order] troops. A German, Baron von Linden,
the son of the finance minister of Mainz, converted to Islam five, six years
ago and got the name Ömer Efendi. Since this man studied a little medicine,
he was appointed as a medical doctor at the military barracks [of the New
Order] in Levent Çiftlik. After working [in the New Order] for a couple of
years, he fled since he was not happy in Istanbul. Nobody knows where he
went. Since many such converts have left Turkey [after working for a couple
of years], they now rarely receive gifts of cash or valuable objects, but instead
are given higher salaries.65
Seetzen met several other Euro-Ottoman officers and engineers in

Istanbul. Among these, perhaps none of them had as hectic a life as
that of an artilleryman, Ahmed, who was in his early forties when
Seetzen met him. ‘As usual, he was drunk [when we stopped by]. He
lost his mind, because of his arrogance, his addiction to alcohol, and
his wild life,’ Seetzen began in his biographical note; originally from
Hannover, Ahmed had left his birthplace 27 years before, when he
was around 12 or 13 years old. According to him, his father was a
major in the city of Worbis (in Eichsfelde) and he was the youngest
child in the family. Ahmed’s mother came from Westphalia nobility.
He was raised as a Protestant, but he converted to Catholicism and
decided to become a monk and entered a monastery. However, after a
while he decided to flee from there and joined the Prussian Army as a
cavalryman. He served Prussia for three years, then, for some reason,
he left and joined the Austrian Ferdinand Toscana infantry. There, he
ascended to the rank of lieutenant. During those years, he learned the
science of artillery and became a gunner. In the Ottoman-Austrian war
of 1787–1792, he was captured by the Ottomans, eventually became
Muslim, and took the name Ahmed. He had been in Istanbul for 15–16
years when the new barracks were built by Selim III, at which point he
joined the New Order. However, because of his ‘wild life’, he could not
65
Volkmar Enderlein (ed.), Tagebuch des Aufenthalts in Konstantinopel und der Reise
nach Aleppo 1802–1803, Hildesheim, Georg Olms Verlag, 2011–2012, p. 207. For the
Turkish translation, see Selma Türkis Noyan (trans.), İstanbul Günlükleri, 12 Aralık
1802–22 Haziran 1803, Istanbul, Kitap Yayınevi, 2017.
1572 ALI YAYCIOGLU
progress in the Army. But he fought in Egypt against Bonaparte and

there he was wounded in his arm. When he returned to Istanbul, he
was severely beaten in one of the skirmishes in which he was involved
and, as a result, he could not use his right arm. Seetzen thought that
Mehmed (Count Schablinsky) had helped Ahmed and that, probably
with his help, Ahmed had acquired an annual income from a farm in
a village around Bursa.66
Such vivid biographies suggest that the New Order provided
possibilities for all kinds of European military men serving in the
reformed armies at various ranks. The social composition of the New
Order, therefore, was diverse, and included both young peasant men
recruited from the Anatolian provinces and cosmopolitan Ottomans,
some of whom were Muslim born, while others were converts. The
biographical sketches of the New Order soldiery, however, also suggest
that the image of the reformed army as fully disciplined, impersonal,
and exceptionally orderly was just an idealized portrayal in the charts
and regulations. It seems that the New Order was not completely
isolated from the Janissaries’ Istanbul, with all its messiness and
colour. Seetzen also told the story of a Hungarian-born officer of
the New Order (whose brother was an officer in the Russian Army)
who caught several soldiers in the barracks with prostitutes. He also
noted complaints about some officers’ excessive alcohol consumption
which prevented many from rising through the ranks in the army.67
Khaled Fahmy masterfully illustrates how the peasant soldiers of
Muhammad Ali’s reformed army, which was composed around 30
years after the New Order, created their own complex sociocultural
universe.68 Likewise, despite the official discourse of the reform, the
world of the Ottoman New Order soldiers was complex, convoluted,
and not necessarily as homogenous as a socio-military organization
might be expected to be.
The most well-known of the Euro-Ottomans were the military
engineers, who came to the empire and joined the new engineering
school. In fact, the emergence of European military engineers as
mobile professionals, sometimes part of diplomatic missions or
freelance savants looking for patrons, is an important development
in eighteenth-century global intellectual history and the history of
technology. Monarchs and regional powerholders with military reform
66
Enderlein (ed.), Tagebuch, pp. 234–35.
67
Ibid., pp. 128–29.
68
Fahmy, All the Pasha’s Men, pp. 199–238.
agendas employed these technocrats not only to transfer and adopt
new technologies, but also to train specialists in their educational
institutions. Military engineering was combined with developments
in mathematics, physics, and applied sciences. Engineers in the new
weaponry workshops, who were graduates of the military academies,
developed their own ways of producing knowledge, manufacturing,
organizing the workplace, and ordering labour.69
As the military reform agenda was unleashed, the Ottoman
empire also provided various job opportunities for such technocrats.
Engineers, architects, military officers, medical doctors, and technical
workers were employed in various fields. They participated in
constructing new military barracks, fortresses, arsenals, and artillery
workshops. Most of these experts were French, followed by British
(English, Scottish, and Irish), Swedish, Austrian, Prussian, Spanish,
Italian, Russian, and Polish colleagues.70 The Engineering Academy,
from the beginning, was a platform for European (Christian)
and Ottoman (Muslim) engineers and mathematicians to interact.
French engineers, such as François Kauffer, André-Joseph Lafitte-
Clav, and Gabriel-Joseph Monnier de Courtois, who came to the
Ottoman empire as part of French diplomatic missions, were
appointed as professors at the engineering school. These men were
colleagues of Ottoman engineers and mathematicians, such as İsmail
Gelenbevi (d. 1791), who wrote broadly on grammar, theology, logic,
astronomy, mathematics, and geometry. The Academy also sponsored
translations of French military handbooks and charts, and geography,
mathematics, and geometry texts into Turkish. Some graduates of
the Academy who specialized in engineering, artillery, or fortifications
joined the new army as officers in the artillery and grenadier corps,
while others joined the academy as professors.71
Let us return to Jasper Seetzen, who visited the engineering school
in Sütlüce, located on the eastern bank of Golden Horn in Istanbul
69
Michèle Virol, ‘La circulation des savoirs des ingénieurs militaires (XVIIe –XVIIIe
siècle)’, in Pilar González Bernaldo and Liliane Hilaire-Peréz (eds), Les savoirs-mondes.
Mobilités et circulation des savoirs depuis le Moyen Âge, Rennes, Presses Universitaires
Rennes, 2015, pp. 251–59. Lenman (ed.), Military Engineers.
70
Mehmet Alaaddin Yalçınkaya, ‘Osmanlı Devleti’nin Modernleşme Sürecinde
Avrupalılar’ın İstihdam Edilmesi (1774–1807)’, in Seyfi Kenan (ed.), Osmanlılar ve
Avrupa: Seyahat, Karşılaşma ve Etkileşim, Istanbul, İSAM, 2010, p. 425.
71
Hitzel, Intégration et transformation, p. 27–44. Also see Beydilli, Türk Bilim, pp. 19–
94; Virginia Aksan, ‘Breaking the Spell of the Baron de Tott: Reframing the Question
of Military Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1760–1830’, The International History
Review, 24, 2 (2002), pp. 253–77.
1574 ALI YAYCIOGLU
on 17 March 1803. In the two-floor, European-style building, Seetzen

met students who were working on some engineering projects under
the supervision of Hüseyin Efendi (most probably Hüseyin Rıfkı
Tamanî (d. 1818)), a professor of mathematics, and his four teaching
assistants.72 Seetzen reported that there were around 100 students
at the school, all of whom were granted fellowships. Hüseyin Efendi
shared some of the books he used in his teaching with Seetzen,
including Tercüme-i Usulu’l-hendese, a translation of John Bonnycastle’s
Elements of Geometry.73 Hüseyin Efendi took Seetzen to the building’s
laboratory, where the cartographic materials and engineering
instruments were stored. Some of these instruments were imported
from Europe; others were manufactured in the Ottoman empire,
such as ‘a brass instrument to direct howitzers’. Seetzen encountered
renowned geography books of Europe on the shelves, such as the one
written by Anton Friedrich Büsching.74 The ‘heavily gilded armchair’
in the room was reserved for Selim III, the patron of the school, during
his visits. Following the tour of the premises, Seetzen chatted with the
young engineers. One of them told him: ‘We showed you everything,
we do not hide anything from you. But you [addressing Europeans] act
very differently in this regard, you don’t show anything.’ The young
Ottoman engineer complained to Seetzen that the Europeans were
hiding their technology and sciences. His translator told this young
man that he was wrong—if he came to Europe [Austria], they would
show all they had and teach him all they knew.75
Euro-Ottoman military engineers
As the young Ottoman engineer had implied during Seetzen’s

visit, the new military savants who were training at the Academy
of Engineering sought to become part of an international (inter-
imperial) and cosmopolitan network that advocated what we can
72
Ulrich Jasper Seetzen, İstanbul Günlükleri, p. 227, note 192. Also see Mahdi
Abdeljaouad, ‘Teaching European Mathematics in the Ottoman Empire During the
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries: Between Admiration and Rejection’, ZDM, 44,
4 (2012), pp. 483–98.
73
John Bonnycastle, Elements of Geometry, Containing the Principal Propositions in the First
Six, and the Eleventh and Twelfth Books of Euclid, with Notes Critical and Explanatory, London,
1789. Hüseyin and Selim Efendi, a British-born Ottoman, translated Bonnycastle’s
book.
74
Anton Friedrich Büsching, D. Anton Friderich Büschings Neue Erdbeschreibung, 5 vols,
Hamburg, J. C. Bohn, 1769, pp. 1769–73.
75
call a military enlightenment. We will turn now to examine one of
these young engineers: Seyyid Mustafa, a graduate of Istanbul’s
Academy, who wrote a pamphlet in French to introduce the progress
in Ottoman military engineering to other engineers of Europe.
The text also includes an autobiographical note.76 Seyyid Mustafa
wrote that during his childhood, he was interested in mathematics
and astronomy: he played with compasses and instruments, made
geometrical drawings, and contemplated their shapes. As a teenager,
he read Arabic translations of Euclid and frequented the intellectual
circles of mathematics masters, including that of Gelenbevi İsmail.
His growth and education as a Muslim boy in Istanbul was akin to
Rousseau’s Emile. Despite the fact that he was born into a family
with no interest or background in engineering and sciences, Mustafa
worked out how to realize his ambitions. The environment he found
in Istanbul proved helpful. The city brought together Greek and
Muslim-Turkish mathematicians to exchange ideas. Gelenbevi taught
Mustafa logarithmic calculations, which he had learned from a Greek
mathematician. Meanwhile, Mustafa was learning French, which was,
he said, ‘the universal language of science’. But he soon realized that
his real ambition was to become a military engineer. His objective
was to apply mathematical knowledge ‘to military tactic[s] and
architecture and, moreover, to acquire a certain degree of perfection
able to obtain the handling of these sciences in all mechanical fields
that are derived from them’.77 He found this opportunity when the
enlightened sultan Selim III opened the Academy on the Golden Horn.
Following this biographical note, Seyyid Mustafa gave a historical
account in which he showed that in the medieval period, Muslims
were more advanced than Europeans in science, crafts, and military
matters. But Europeans, in staving off the Ottoman invasion,
transformed their military order and gradually discovered new
76
Séid Moustapha, Diatribe sur l’état actuel de l’art militaire du génie et des sciences à
Constantinople, Istanbul, Imprimée dans la nouvelle Typographie de Scutari, 1803;
reprinted in Paris, de l’imprimerie impériale, 1807. The text was reproduced in
Seyyid Mustafa, İstanbul’da Askerlik Sanatı, Yeteneklerin ve Bilimlerin Durumu üzerine Risale,
İstanbul, Tüyap, (n.d). For a discussion about the authorship of the text and identity
of Seyyid Mustafa, see Kemal Beydilli, ‘İlk Mühendislerimizden Seyyid Mustafa ve
Nizâm-i Cedîd’e Dair Risâlesi’, Tarih Enstitüsü Dergisi, 13 (1983), pp. 387–479. For
an analysis of Séid Moustapha’s Diatribe, see Berrak Burçak, ‘Modernization, Science
and Engineering in the Early Nineteenth Century Ottoman Empire’, Middle Eastern
Studies, 44, 1 (2008), pp. 69–83; Şakul, ‘Nizâm-ı Cedid Düşüncesinde Batılılaşma ve
İslamî Modernleşme’, pp. 128–29.
77
Moustapha, Diatribe, p. 5.
1576 ALI YAYCIOGLU
scientific tactics and engineered advanced weaponry. Their guide

was mathematics: ‘He had the military compass handled within the
environment of blood and fire.’78 When mathematics became part of
Europe’s military arts, a ‘révolution éclatante dans l’art militaire’,
Mustafa argued: Europeans became superior in war. The Ottoman
military, which was once dominant, did not keep up with the European
military revolution. Instead, ignorant people saw military drills as
childish games and they resisted drafting armed soldiers from the
people. For these ‘idiots’, referring to the Janissaries and their
supporters, military art required only courage and bravery.
This changed when Selim III unleashed the New Order, wrote
Seyyid Mustafa. New military barracks were designed according to
engineering parameters. In Üsküdar (Scutari), military barracks were
turned into a new city with a square, mosque, houses for officers, public
baths, a marketplace, and a printing press. This city, which was called
Selimiye (the Selimian Town), was planned in the early 1800s, not only
according to scientific principles, but also to provide a peaceful and
orderly place in which to live and work. Mustafa also argued that the
people of Istanbul, watching its promising developments, had come
to terms with the New Order. The soldiers of the new army who had
been drafted from the provinces, together with trained artillerymen
and grenadiers, impressed the crowds during the parades with their
uniforms, discipline, and drills, as they followed the commands of the
enlightened officers (officiers éclairés). ‘It is remarkable to see,’ Mustafa
wrote, ‘that both in the capital and beyond, not only notables, but also
the lower classes no longer allow themselves to doubt the necessity of
regular armies, since a recent case (perhaps referring to the success of
the New Order against the French in Egypt) has greatly contributed
to open the crowd’s eyes.’79 Mustafa concluded his pamphlet with a
cheerful section on how the regular army had successfully suppressed
bandits in the Balkans.
Although Seyyid Mustafa never visited Europe, in his Diatribe,
written for men of science who closely followed one another’s
programmes, he joined a republic of letters comprised of cosmopolitan
military men, regardless of their religious beliefs or nationality. He
read the works of mathematicians and engineers, such as Christian
Wolff (1716–1754), Jacques Ozanam (1640–1717), and Bernard
78
Ibid. p. 17.
79
Ibid. p. 31.
Forest de Bellidor (1698–1761).80 Having studied the texts of the
masters, he believed that the military sciences had universal value,
just like mathematics and geometry. Diatribe was first published in
Istanbul but was then reprinted in Paris and became part of the
republic of letters of military scientists.
Seyyid Mustafa’s universalist discourse was shared by European
experts and engineers whom the Ottoman state employed to
carry out military reform. Writing about the New Order in
Révolutions de Constantinople, the French émigré and military engineer
Antoine Juchereau de Saint-Denys, who was hired by the Ottoman
administration for his expertise in fortifications and artillery, stated
that his loyalty was to his mission as an engineer who believed in
military reform ‘free from his political orientation’.81
The military reforms were universal and saw the collective
participation of Ottomans, Europeans, and Euro-Ottomans. This
universal and cosmopolitan discourse of reform justified itself in the
eyes of the engineers and military experts. Ottoman reformists were
also able to speak to their own publics, which remained suspicious
of military reform for a number of reasons, including high taxes to
pay for reform and recruitment campaigns. Since 1789, anti-New
Order sentiments were mainly fostered by the Janissaries or Janissary-
affiliates, who had the capacity to control popular opinion. The New
Orderists were to first ‘liberate’ the Ottoman public from the Janissary
establishment. Another text written to convince the Ottoman public
of the need for reform was Koca Sekbanbaşı Risalesi, authored by Ahmed
Vasıf Efendi (1730–1806), an Ottoman intellectual, historian, and
New Orderist. Juxtaposing the old and the new, it tried to convince
the public of the latter’s virtues.82 The old was slow, while the new was
quick (seri‘) in loading and shooting, attacking and defending. The old
80
Burçak, ‘Modernization, Science and Engineering’, pp. 73–74.
81
Antoine Juchereau de Saint-Denys, Révolutions de Constantinople en 1807 et 1808:
Précédées d’observations génerales sur l’état actuel de l’Empire ottoman, Paris, Brissot-Thivars,
1819, pp. 53–57. Also see Ali Yaycioglu, ‘Révolutions de Constantinople: France and
the Ottoman World in the Age of Revolutions’, in Patricia M. E. Lorcin and Todd
Shepard (eds), French Mediterraneans: Transnational and Imperial Histories, Lincoln, NE,
Nebraska University Press, 2016, pp. 21–51.
82
Kemal Beydilli, ‘Evraka, Evraka veya Errare Humanum Est’, İlmî Araştırmalar,
9 (2000), p. 45–66; Ethan Mechinger, The First of the Modern Ottomans: Intellectual
History of Ahmed Vasif, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017; E. Mechinger,
‘A Reformist Philosophy of History: The Case of Ahmed Vâsıf Efendi’, The Journal
of Ottoman Studies, 44 (2014), pp. 141–68; Hakan Erdem, ‘The Wise Old Man,
Propagandist and Ideologist: Koca Sekbanbaşı on the Janissaries, 1807’, in Kirsi
1578 ALI YAYCIOGLU
army was undrilled and clumsy, while the new one was robust (dinç).
The old was not uniform, and thus disorderly (karmakarışık, perakende),
while the new appeared to run like clockwork (kurulmuş sa‘at gibi).83
Universality and newness were presented as two sister notions, which
built legitimacy by challenging the local and traditional. Universality
and newness, however, were not assumed to mean anti- or non-Islamic,
nor even secular.
Muslim reformism—from Birgivi to the Kadizadelis
I have argued that, as well as being a fiscal and administrative

reorganization programme, the New Order was, above all, a project
aimed at imposing the universal discourse of applied military sciences
onto the military order. This was a challenge by the New Order to the
old social-military regime, which was based on collective negotiation,
artisanal knowledge, and the Janissaries’ horizontal solidarity. I
should clarify that this does not mean that the New Order departed
from Islamic discourse and became a non-Islamic, un-Islamic, or
anti-Islamic movement. On the contrary, the New Order was also
a new Islamic order. Islamic morals and rituals served to regulate
and spiritually discipline the New Order. While engineer officers
coordinated the soldiers’ manoeuvres and synchronicity, imams, who
were appointed to every division, oversaw the soldiers’ religious and
moral rectitude. Newly built barracks, which provided orderly social-
military spaces for members of the reformed army, served to liberate
them from the ‘disorderly’ urban centres controlled by Janissaries
and artisans. These compounds included mosques and Naqshibandi
dervish lodges (an alternative to those of the Bektaşis) and therefore
functioned as religio-military spaces that offered moral and religious
guidance. In addition to daily military drills, marching, and shooting
sessions, the new army’s regulations stipulated that five daily prayers
were to be performed inside the mosques during intervals between
drills. In much the same way that soldiers acted in unison during the
Virtanen (ed.), Individual and Ideologies and Society: Tracing the Mosaic of Mediterranean
History, Tampere, Tampere Peace Research Institute, 2001, pp. 154–77.
83
Koca Sekbanbaşı. Hulasat ül-kelam fi redd il-avam: Koca Sekban Başi’nin İdare-i Devlet
hakkında Yazdığı Layihadir. Ca. 1805, Istanbul, Hilal Matbaası, 1332 [1916]; Abdullah
Uçman (ed.), Koca Sekbanbaşı Risâlesi, Istanbul, Kervan Kitapçılık, 1974, pp. 66–72,
94–95.
military exercises, they also prayed harmoniously inside the mosques
five times a day.84
The regulations of the New Order stipulated that imams would
instruct soldiers in basic religious education based on the Risale
(Treatise) of Takyiuddin Mehmed of Birgi (d. 1573), known as Birgivi, a
sixteenth-century master of Islamic law and the Hadith. His Risale, also
known as Vasiyetname (Testament), was both a catechism detailing the
conditions of creed and rituals, and a personal testament illustrating
how to be an exemplary Muslim.85 Along with Birgivi’s Tariqat al
Muhammadiyya, his Risale was one of the most copied and commented-
on religious texts in the Turkish- speaking Ottoman world and beyond.
It was eventually printed in Istanbul in 1803 during the heyday of the
New Order.86 After a short period spent in Istanbul, Birgivi settled
in Birgi, a small town in northwestern Anatolia, and enjoyed a career
as a prolific writer and master.87 In his writings he strongly criticized
various social and religious conventions and ‘pernicious innovations’
(bid’a). He travelled to Istanbul and was well received by some imperial
notables, including the grand vizier Sokullu Mehmed Pasha. Despite
this, he was known for his polemic against the famous Ottoman grand
mufti Ebu’s-Su’ud (1490–1574), regarding the latter’s endorsement
of the cash waqfs (charitable foundations established with cash rather
than real estate or land).88
84
Yeşil, İhtilâller Cağında Osmanlı Ordusu, pp. 104–08, 334–35.
85
Yunuş Koç and Fatih Yeşil, Nizâm-ı Cedid Kanunları (1791–1800), Ankara, Türk
Tarih Kurumu, 2012, p. 120. For Birgivi Mehmed, see Emrullah Yüksel, ‘Birgivî’,
Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı İslam Ansiklopedisi, 6 (1999), pp. 191–94; Halim Saim Parladır,
‘When Folk Religion Meets Orthodoxy: The Case of Imam Birgivî’, Eskişehir Osmangazi
Üniversitesi Sosyal Bilimler Dergisi, 15, 1 (2014), pp. 65–86. For the Risale with
Kadızadeli’s commentaries, see his Birgivî vasiyetnâmesi: Kadızâde şerhi, Istanbul, Bedir,
1988. Also see Emrullah Yüksel, Mehmed Birgivi’nin (929–981/1523–1573) dinî ve siyasî
görüşleri, Ankara, Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı, 2011, pp. 52–54.
86
It is worth noting that the Risale was printed in Kazan in 1802, just
before Istanbul, illustrating its popularity in Central Asia. Ahmet Turan Arslan,
‘Vasiyetnâme’, Diyanet İslam Ansiklopedisi, 42 (2012), pp. 556–58. For the English
translation of the Risale or Vasiyetnâme, see Imam Birgivi, ‘The Last Will and
Testament’, in The Path of Muhammad: A Book of Islamic Morals and Ethics, interpreted
by Shaykh Topsun Bayrak al-Jerrahi al-Halveti, Bloomington, World Wisdom, 2005,
pp. 1–57. For a comprehensive analysis of Tariqa al-muhammadiyya, see Katharina
Ivanyi, ‘Virtue, Piety and the Law: A Study of Birgivi Mehmed Efendi’s al-Tariqa
al-muhammadiyya’, PhD thesis, Princeton University, 2012.
87
Ahmet Turan Arslan, İmam Birgivî: Hayatı, Eserleri ve Arapça Tedrisatındaki Yeri,
Istanbul, Seha Neşriyat, 1992.
88
Jon E. Mandaville, ‘Usurious Piety: The Cash Waqf Controversy in the Ottoman
Empire’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 10, 3 (1979), pp. 289–308; Katib
1580 ALI YAYCIOGLU
After his death, his followers in Birgi continued to train disciples,

one of whom was Mehmed Kadızade (d. 1582–1636). As I have already
mentioned, in the seventeenth century, the Kadızadeli (followers of
Kadızade) preachers, who were inspired by Birgivi, had a profound
impact on Ottoman society. After his training Mehmed Kadızade
settled in Istanbul and preached in the sultanic Mosque of Mehmed
II. Meanwhile, Birgivi’s son and disciple Fazlullah (d. 1623) moved to
Istanbul to become a preacher as well. Later his son İsmeti Mehmed
(d. 1665) became a professor of Islamic jurisprudence at the Imperial
College of Mehmed II and also served as a chief military judge.
From the early seventeenth century onwards the Birgivi school had
a noticeable impact on the capital. In their writings and sermons,
the Kadızadeli preachers openly denounced the ritual practices of the
popular Sufi orders—particularly the Halvetiyye and Mevleviyye—
such as seeking aid from the graves of saints, audible meditation,
mystical singing and dancing, and extra-scriptural prayer. Their
religious and moral criticisms went beyond the practices of the Sufi
orders. They also attacked social mores and forms of sociability such as
consuming coffee, tobacco, and opium in the flourishing coffee houses.
The Kadızadelis justified their activism by their robust advocacy of
the Islamic maxim ‘commending right and forbidding evil’ (al-amr bi’l-
ma’ruf wa l’nahy ’an al-munkar).89 Accordingly, they invited individuals
and communities to take action, without the authorization of the state
or the learned hierarchy. ‘What marked the Qadizadelis apart within
Ottoman society more broadly and from those in the learned hierarchy
who shared their concerns about the moral well-being of society was
that they placed responsibility for reform of the self, neighbours, and
the broader community on the shoulders of the individual.’90
In fact, the Kadızadeli preachers recruited supporters from the
imperial elite. As a result, in the reign of Murad IV (1630–40),
tobacco consumption was forbidden and the tobacco addicts were
persecuted. During the reign of Mehmed IV (1648–87), the polemics
between Halveti and Kadızadeli preachers caused social controversy
Çelebi, The Balance of Truth, G. L. Lewis (trans.), London, George Allen and Unwin,
1957, pp. 128–31. For Ebu’s-Su’ud, see Colin Imber, Ebu’su’ud: The Islamic Legal
Tradition, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1997.
89
Michael Cook, Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong in Islamic Thought,
Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000.
90
Mustapha Sheikh, Ottoman Puritanism and its Discontents: Ah.mad al-Rūmı̄ al-Āqh.is.ārı̄
and the Qād.ı̄zādelis, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016, p. 2.
and severe polarization in Istanbul.91 In the mid-seventeenth century,
the renowned Kadızadeli preacher Üstüvânî Mehmed Efendi (d.
1661) became popular in elite circles. He was protected by Mehmed
IV’s tutor and gave sermons in the Topkapı Palace. In 1651,
Üstüvânî’s supporters attacked the Halveti lodges and terrorized
the Sufi communities. Although Üstüvânî and his supporters did
not target the Bektaşis, probably because they were intimidated by
the possible reaction of the Janissaries, many of their criticisms
about rituals and practices were also applicable to the Bektaşi
order. Üstüvânî’s increasing support among the people perplexed
members of the imperial circles and the learned hierarchy. Meanwhile,
these puritanical critiques were condemned by others such as Kefevî
Hüseyin Efendi, who criticized Birigivî’s Tariqat-ı Muhammadiyyya.
Prominent Halveti and Mavlavis sheikhs and preachers, such as
Abdülmecid Sivasî, attacked the Kadızadeli preachers and denounceed
their anti-Sufi frenzy of hypocrisy and immorality.92 Üstüvânî and
his followers were sent into exile after the Janissary revolt in 1656.
Later, Katib Çelebi (1609–1657), a prominent scholar and polymath,
extended a subtle critique against the Kadizadeli challenge on the
basis of the legitimacy of common wisdom of established social
practices and conventions.93
Until recently, Ottoman historians considered the Birgivi-
Kadızadeli movement as a form of Salafi reformism. As forebears of the
Salafis or proto-Wahhabis of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
this argument goes, the Birgivi-Kadızadelis refuted innovations that
took place after the time of the Prophet and the four caliphs through an
91
Madeline Zilfi, ‘The Kadizadelis: Discordant Revivalism in Seventeenth-Century
Istanbul’, Journal of Near Eastern Studies, 45, 4 (1986), pp. 251–69; Marinos Sariyannis,
‘The Kadizadeli Movement as a Social and Political Phenomenon: The Rise of a
‘Mercantile Ethic’?’, in Antonis Anastapoulos (ed.), Political Initiatives ‘From the Bottom
Up’ in the Ottoman Empire: Halcyon Days in Crete VII. A Symposium Held in Rethymno, 9–
11 January 2009, Rethymno, Crete University Press, 2009, pp. 274–77; Marc David
Baer, Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Empire, Oxford,
Oxford University Press, 2008, pp. 63–79; Semiramis Çavuşoğlu; ‘Kadızadeliler’,
Diyanet İslam Ansiklopedisi, Istanbul, Diyanet Yayınları, 2001, Vol. 24, pp. 100–02.
92
Semiramis Çavuşoğlu, ‘The Kādı̄zādeli Movement: an Attempt of Şerı̄‘at-
Minded Reform in the Ottoman Empire’, PhD thesis, Princeton University, 1990,
pp. 170–78; Ahmet Yaşar Ocak, ‘XVII. Yüzyılda Osmanlı İmparatorluğu’nda Dinde
Tasfiye (Pürütanizm) Teşebbüslerine Bir Bakış: Kadızâdeliler Hareketi’, Türk Kültürü
Araştırmaları, 18-21, 1-2 (1983), pp. 208–23; Cengiz Gündoğdu, ‘XVII. Yüzyılda
Tekke-Medrese Münâsebetleri Açısından Sivâsîler-Kadızâdeliler Mücadelesi’, İLAM
Araştırma Dergisi, III, 1 (1998), pp. 37–72.
93
Çelebi, The Balance of Truth, pp. 47–63.
1582 ALI YAYCIOGLU
unequivocal acceptance of the exoteric meaning of the scripture and

prophetic tradition. However, recently, scholars of Islamic intellectual
history, such as Khaled el-Rouayheb and Mustapha Sheikh, have
illustrated that in fact the religious and moral critique of the Birgivi-
Kadızadeli line was much more complex. These scholars argue that
the followers of this line, such as Kadızade Mehmed (1582–1635),
Abdulmecid Sivasi (1563–1639), or Ahmed al-Akhisari (d. 1632),
developed complex rational and revelatory arguments in order to
refute religious and social conventions and traditions, which were
presented as manifestations of piety. While rejecting taqlid (the
retrogressive imitation of earlier conventions and traditions), the
Birgivi-Kadızadeli line engaged with tahqiq (the discovery of faith
through rational capacity and logic as well as textual/revelatory proof
from the Qur’an and the Hadith).94 They accepted rational sciences
(’ulum ’aqliyya), such as theology, logic, and mathematics, as necessary
(fard kifaya) for Muslims and to complement revelatory knowledge
(’ulum naqliyya). In addition, both Birgivi and the Kadızadelis developed
their arguments within the framework of the Hanafi and Maturidi-
Ash’ari frameworks, which were, respectively, the dominant school of
law and theological orientation of the Ottoman elites and the majority
of Ottoman Muslims in Anatolia and the Balkans.
In this regard, Kadızadeli revivalism could be considered a reform
movement which claimed to liberate religion from bid’a. However, the
term ‘innovation’ often referred to traditions and existing religious
and social norms and practices that were invented after the time of
the Prophet and his companions. These traditions accumulated over
time and thus people considered them as the norm. In this way, the
Birgivi and the Kadızadelis could be considered to be critical of both
tradition and innovation, since tradition was at one time innovation.
‘Deeds contrary to Sunna [deeds and sayings of the Prophet] have
been undertaken since the time immemorial and so you should be
extremely cautious of newly invented matters,’ wrote Akhisari, adding:
‘Even if the majority has agreed upon a deed, you should investigate
after the era of the Companions.’95 This investigation (tahqiq) was a
complex endeavour that used rational tools to substantiate whether
an invention was acceptable, in harmony with the scriptures and the
94
Khaled el-Rouayheb, Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly
Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press,
2015, pp. 14–28.
95
Quoted by Sheikh, Ottoman Puritanism and its Discontents, p. 138.
deeds and sayings of the Prophet, as well as the well-being of both the
public and the individual. In this process, therefore, an innovation was
not to be rejected categorically and blindly. Rather, it was necessary
to investigate (tahqiq) its origin to see if it was against the scripture
and the Hadith or in harmony with them, whether it was good or
bad for the people, and whether it was necessary or not. Only after
that investigation had taken place, was it approved or rejected. In the
words of Birgivi: ‘We are urged to investigate and carefully consider
everything in existence before we follow its example.’96
This investigation could also include using rational methods from
other fields of knowledge. For instance, in his treatise on the harms
of smoking, the same al-Akhisari developed an argument that tobacco
consumption was a bid’a not only because it damaged the social order
and economic well-being of an individual, but also because physicians
claimed that smoking harmed one’s health.97
The Birgivi-Kadızadeli movement was thus well placed within the
general ‘decline-and-reform discourse’ of the Post-Suleymanic Age,
with its different bureaucratic, religious, and popular variants.98 The
puritanical revivalism was not only intended to discipline social-
religious life, but also to foster different experiences of the Ottoman
administration in order to institute a new order according to the
revivalist agenda, as we see in Crete after the Ottoman conquest
in the 1650s; Gilles Veinstein called this an ‘expérimentation des
utopies’.99 Although the majority of the Ottoman elites did not fully
embrace the puritanical Kadızadeli arguments, they promoted Sunni-
Hanafi norms in various ways, for example by sponsoring Sunni-
Hanafi catechisms. When political authorities sought to discipline
social-religious life, especially during political upheavals, such texts
were adopted as a means of disciplining.100 I suggest that compulsory
readings from the Risale in the barracks of the New Order—an integral
part of the curriculum—complemented the social-military discipline
96
Birgivî, The Path of Muhammad, p. 122.
97
Ahmad al-Aqhisari, Against Smoking: An Ottoman Manifesto, Yahya Michot (ed. and
trans.), Oxford, Kube Publishing, 2010, pp. 49–51.
98
Cemal Kafadar, ‘The Myth of the Golden Age: Ottoman Historical Consciousness
in the Post-Suleymânic Era’, in Halil Inalcık and Cemal Kafadar (eds), Süleyman the
Second and His Time, Istanbul, ISIS, 1993, p. 42.
99
Gilles Veinstein, ‘Les reglements fiscaux ottomans de Crete’, in A.
Anastasopoulos (ed.), The Eastern Mediterranean Under Ottoman Rule: Crete, 1645–1840:
Halcyon Days in Crete VI. A Symposium Held in Rethymno, 13–15 January 2006, Rethymno,
Crete University Press, 2008, pp. 3–16.
100
Terzioğlu, ‘Where ‘İlm-i H
. āl Meets Catechism’, pp. 79–114.
1584 ALI YAYCIOGLU
of learning mathematics and applied military science. The soldiers of

the reformed army who were trained in military sciences and Sunni-
Hanafi orthodoxy were expected to become fully loyal to universal
norms of both practical rationality and religious dogma.
Naqshibandi-Mujaddidi reformism
In the eighteenth century, a related development had a dramatic effect

on the socio-religious life of the Ottoman empire: the consolidation
of the trans-imperial Naqshibandi-Mujaddidi network.101 The
Naqshibandiyya was a Sunni Sufi order, spanning India and Central
Asia to the Balkans, and organized around charismatic sheikhs,
doctrines, and rituals since the early fifteenth century.102 In the
seventeenth century, a wave of Naqshibandis, called the Mujaddidis
(or Renewers), disseminated a new message from India to the Islamic
world. This was fashioned by Ahmad al-Sirhindi (d. 1624), also
known as Mujaddid-i Alf-i Thani (Renewer of the Faith of the Second
Millennium) or Imam Rabbani, a sheikh from Sirhind in India. His
followers, the Mujaddidis, became a militant group. While advocating
an orthodox interpretation of Sharia against the religious ostentations
of other Sufi groups, they prosletized for rejuvenating and renewing
(ihya wa tajdid) religion and society (din wa millah). According to a
prominent historian of the Naqshibandiyya, Ahmad al-Sirhindi also
responded to the Mughal emperor Akbar’s syncretic search to create
a universal religion (Din-i ilahi).103 Against Ibn Arabi’s idea of the
101
For a general interpretation of trans-imperial Muslim reform movements in
the eighteenth century, see John Obert Voll, Islam: Continuity and Change in the Modern
World, Boulder, Syracuse University Press, 1994, pp. 24–82.
102
Itzchak Weismann, The Naqshibandiyya: Orthodoxy and Activism in a Worldwide Sufi
Tradition, Oxon, Routledge, 2007.
103
Aziz Ahmad, Studies in Islamic Culture in the Indian Environment, Oxford, Oxford
University Press, 1964, pp. 183–86. Also see Fazlur Rahman, Islam, Chicago,
University of Chicago Press, 1979, p. 148; David W. Damrel, ‘The Naqshibandı̄
Reaction Reconsidered’, in D. Gilmartin and B. L. Lawrence, Beyond Turk and Hindu:
Rethinking Religious Identities in Islamicate South Asia, Gainesville, University Press of
Florida, 2000, pp. 176–98. For the thinking of Sirhindi, see Yohannan Friedmann,
Shaykh Ah.mad Sirhindı̄: An Outline of His Thought and a Study of His Image in the Eyes
of Posterity, Montreal, McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1971; Abdul Haq Ansari,
‘Shakh Ah.mad Sirhindı̄’s Doctrine of ‘Wah.dat al-Shuhūd’, Islamic Studies, 37, 3 (1998),
pp. 281–313; Arthur F. Buehler, Sufi Heirs of the Prophet: The Indian Naqshibandiyya and
the Rise of the Mediating Sufi Shaykh, Columbia SC, University of South Caroline Press,
1998, pp. 66–71; Weismann, The Naqshibandiyya, pp. 55–61.
oneness of God and temporal experience as an integrated unity,
Sirhindi advocated the oneness of appearance (wahdat al-shuhud), which
separated God’s essence from temporality and was the realm of
accidents. The term coined by Aziz Ahmad, ‘Naqshibandi reaction’,
spurred Sirhindi’s challenge against syncretism in the Mughal context
(both Akbarism and Ibn Arabism), which gradually spread across the
Islamic world.104
The movement of Naqshibandi-Mujaddidi masters, pupils, and
texts through this trans-Asian Sufi network is one of the fascinating
episodes in the global history of intellectual movements in the
early modern (and modern) era.105 Naqshibandis had been well-
established and important in the Ottoman empire since the sixteenth
century. The prominent Naqshibandi sheikh Osman Bosnevi (d. 1664)
acted in alliance with the Kadızadelis in the seventeenth-century
controversy against Halveti piety in Istanbul.106 Traditionally, the
Naqshibandis advocated the silent invocation (zikr) without any
bodily gesture and movements. The Naqshibandi ritual doctrine
provided grounds for the Kadizadelis in their criticisms against the
Halvetis, Mevlevis, and Bektaşis, who performed vocal invocations,
with various bodily gestures and movements, including dancing.107
However, neither Kadızadelis nor Naqshibandis were as politically
influential as the Naqshibandi-Mujaddidis would become in the
eighteenth century among the elites circles of the empire.108
During this century, hundreds of Naqshibandi-Mujaddidis travelled
throughout the Muslim world, reforming a spiritual landscape of
104
Manneh, ‘Sheikh Murād al-Bukhārı̄’; A. Manneh, ‘Salafiyya and the Rise of
the Khālidiyya in Baghdad in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Die Welt des Islams,
43, 3 (2003), pp. 349–72; A. Manneh, ‘The Naqshbandiyya-Mujaddidiyya in the
Ottoman Lands in the Early 19th Century’, Die Welt des Islams, 22, 1–4 (1982), p.1–
36; Hamid Algar ‘The Naqshbandı̄ Order: A Preliminary Survey of its History and
Significance’, Studia Islamica, 44 (1976), pp. 123–52; H. Algar, ‘Political Aspects of the
Naqshibandî History’, in Marc Gaborieau, Alexandre Popovic, and Thierry Zarcone
(eds), Naqshbandis: cheminements et situation actuelle d’un ordre mystique musulman, Istanbul,
ISIS, 1999, pp. 117–46.
105
Nile Green, Sufism: A Global History, West Sussex, John Wiley & Sons, 2007,
pp. 125–86.
106
Dina Le Gall, ‘Kadizadelis, Nakşibendis and Intra-Sufi Diatribe in Seventeenth-
Century Istanbul’, The Turkish Studies Association Journal, 28, 1–2 (2004), pp. 1–28.
Also see D. Le Gall, A Culture of Sufism: Naqshibandı̄s in the Ottoman World, 1450–1700,
Albany, NY, Suny Press, 2005.
107
Shahzad Bashir, Sufi Bodies: Religion and Society in Medieval Islam, New York,
Columbia, University Press, 2011, pp. 68–77.
108
Le Gall, ‘Kadizadelis, Nakşibendis and Intra-Sufi Diatribe in Seventeenth-
Century Istanbul’, pp. 11–13.
1586 ALI YAYCIOGLU
Neo-Naqshibandiyya across Eurasia, from Bengal to the Balkans.109

The fall of the Safavid empire and subsequent power vacuum in Iran,
the Caucasus, and Khorasan enabled the Naqshibandi-Mujaddidis to
enhance their mission in the Caucasus, Iraq, and Anatolia, as well as
in the Hejaz, Syria, and Kurdistan. They visited prominent shrines of
dead masters and the lodges of living ones to acquire diplomas, and
eventually sought patrons from the political elite who could protect
and finance them, and perhaps help them build their own lodges.
These sheikhs, therefore, not only gathered new followers from local
communities, but also approached the power elites, trying to recruit
them as patrons.110
With the arrival of Sheikh Murad al-Bukhari (d. 1720) in Ottoman
lands, Naqshibandi-Mujaddidis spread across the empire. As the
deputy of the son of Ahmed al-Sirhindi, Muhammad Ma‘sum (d.
1668), the sheikh established a close friendship with the prominent
intellectual and religious scholar Abdu’l-Gani al-Nablusi (d. 1731) in
Damascus. In Istanbul, the Ottoman grand mufti Feyzullah Efendi
(d. 1703) helped Murad to establish his lodge and disseminate
Mujaddidism in the Ottoman capital. Later Sheikh Murad settled in
Damascus and his progeny, known as the Muradis, became one of the
notable families of the city throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries.111 Many leading Ottoman grandees, learned men, and
bureaucrats approached Sheikh Murad, accepted his guidance, and
supported the Naqshibandi-Mujaddidi mission. Soon another sheikh
Ahmad Joryani, also known as Hace Yekdest (d. 1707–8), originally
from Joryan near Bukhara, arrived in Mecca after a sojourn in
India. Well connected to the Indian Ocean world, the Hejaz was
an important region for Naqshibandi-Mujaddidi dervishes coming
from India and venturing across the Ottoman empire.112 Ahmad al-
Banna al-Dimyati (d. 1704) and Abdurrahman b. Mustafa al-Aydarus
109
For the mobility of the Naqshibandis from Central Asia to India, see Nile Green,
‘Geography, Empire and Sainthood in the Eighteenth-Century Muslim Deccan’,
Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 67, 2 (2004), pp. 207–25.
110
For a study of the journey of a Naqshibandi sheikh from Kashgar to Istanbul, see
Hamid Algar, ‘From Kashghar to Eyüp: The Lineages and Legacy of Sheikh Abdullah
Nidāi’, in Elisabeth Özdalga (ed.), Naqshbandis in Western and Central Asia, İstanbul,
Swedish Research Institute, 1999, pp. 1–15.
111
Karl K. Barbir, ‘All in the Fanily: The Muradis of Damascus’, in Heath Lowry
and Ralph S. Hattox (eds), Proceedings of the Third Congress on the Social and Economic
History of Turkey, Istanbul, ISIS, 1990, pp. 327–35.
112
Manneh, ‘The Naqshibandiyya-Mujaddidiyya and the Khālidiyya in the Early
19th Century’, pp. 1–2.
(d. 1778), who was from the prominent Yemeni Aydarus family,
spread the order in Egypt and Yemen respectively. The Aydarus
branch had close connections with the Mujaddidis in East Africa and
South Asia through family ties.113 Abdullah Kashgari, a Naqshibandi
from eastern Turkistan established his lodge in Eyüp, Istanbul, and
the lodge became an important hub for dervishes who came from
the Qing empire.114 Likewise, the renowned Naqshibandi Uzbeks’
Lodge (Özbekler Tekkesi), which was established in central Istanbul
in the late seventeenth century, enhanced relations between Central
Asian khanates and the Ottoman empire, through the dervishes who
constantly travelled between Istanbul and Bukhara.115
Mehmed Emin Tokadi (1664–1745), a student of Yekdest, was
another renowned Mujaddidi sheikh, who established close relations
with Hacı Beşir Agha (1665–1746), the chief eunuch of the imperial
harem and one of the most influential figures and patrons in
the eighteenth century. In Mehmed Emin’s hagiography, the first
encounter between Mehmed Emin and Hacı Beşir Agha was narrated
as ‘in our conversation, I [Mehmed Emin] realized that He [Beşir
Agha] is on the side of Hace Yekdest Ahmed and he was our co-
disciple. We contemplated together. After that he told me “accept
this poor as your brother in life and afterlife, we accepted you as
such”. And I said “I am too accepting you as my brother”.’116 Haci
Beşir Agha later became one of the patrons of the Mujaddidis. As
Mujaddidi sheikhs established new Sufi lodges in Ottoman cities with
the help of the imperial elite, the letters (Maktubat) of the master
Sirhindi were also circulated. The text was translated into Turkish by
a historian and dervish Müstakimzade Sa‘deddin Efendi (d. 1788), who
113
Enseng Ho, The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility Across the Indian Ocean,
California, University of California Press, 2006, p. 53; John O. Voll, Islam: Continuity
and Change in the Modern World, Boulder, Westview Press, 1982, p. 72.
114
Klaus Kreiser, ‘Kâşgarû Tekyesi—ein Istanbuler Nakşibandî-Konvent und
seiner Stifter’, in Gaborieau, Popovic, and Zarcone (eds), Naqshibandis, pp. 321–25.
Also see Algar, ‘From Kashgar to Eyüp’.
115
Lâle Can, ‘Connecting People: A Central Asian Sufi Network in the Turn-of-
the-Century Istanbul’, Modern Asian Studies, 42, 2 (2012), pp. 373–401; Ramazan
Muslu, Osmanlı toplumunda tasavvuf (I8. yüzyıl), Istanbul, İnsan, 2003, pp. 298–99;
Hür Mahmut Yücer, Osmanlı toplumunda tasavvuf (19. yüzyıl), Istanbul, İnsan Yayınları,
2003, pp. 291–92; Mustafa Kara, Buhara, Bursa, Bosna: şehirler, sûfîler, tekkeler, Istanbul,
Dergah Yayınları, 2012, pp. 184–208.
116
Halil İbrahim Şimşek, Osmanlı’da Müceddidilik: XII/XVIII Yüzyıl, Ankara, Sûf
Yayınları, 2004, p. 235; H. İ. Şimşek, Mehmed Emîn-i Tokâdî: Hayatı ve Risalesi, Istanbul,
İnsan Yayınları, 2005. For Hacı Beşir Ağa, see Jane Hathaway, Beshir Agha: Chief Eunuch
of Ottoman Imperial Harem, Oxford, Oneworld Publications, 2005.
1588 ALI YAYCIOGLU
also belonged to Ottoman learned circles in Istanbul. This made the

letters more accessible to the Ottoman reading public in the capital.
The connection between Mujaddidi sheikhs and the Ottoman imperial
elite continued throughout the eighteenth century.117 As the influence
of Mujaddidis spread in the Ottoman empire, they also established
relations with other Sufi orders and sheikhs. As Tülay Artan has
recently argued in her examination of the intellectual culture of
the Mujaddidis in the first half of the eighteenth century, it would
be misleading to consider them as an isolated group.118 They were
active participants in the intellectual life of the Ottoman elite circles.
Perhaps what made them rather distinctive was their profound trans-
imperial connections across Asia and the Indian Ocean world.
Although it is difficult to identify a coherent political doctrine
that bound Naqshibandi-Mujaddidi groups together, there were some
features of the message of a new spiritual-political order that explain
why Ottoman elites were welcoming of these men.119 In Sirhindi’s
letters, while the Mughal emperor Akbar (1556–1605) was severely
criticized for his religious syncretism, his predecessor Jahangir
(r. 1605–27) was glorified for restoring the Sharia. In one of his letters
addressing Jahangir, Sirhindi wrote that Muslims were joyful that the
Sharia had been restored in the empire and the malice (fasad) of the
last century had ended. However, the political authority should be very
careful to pick the appropriate jurists: ‘it should be known that the
reason of the malice of the last century was the evil of the bad jurists’.
The sultan should ensure that the Sharia prevail in consultation with
the appropriate jurists and discipline his people. Sirhindi pointed to
the maxim that the people should be the followers of the religion of
their ruler (al-nasu ’ala dini mulukihim). In Sirhindi’s letters we see a
strong tone supporting the restoration of the correct religion: ‘Today
there is a revolution/transformation in the state (wa lamma vaqa’a al-ana
al-inqilabu fi al-duwali)’ which refers to the restoration of the policies of
Jahangir and his viziers to end the old order and build a renewed one.120
117
Manneh, ‘Sheikh Murād al-Bukhārı̄’; Osmanzâde Hüseyin Vassâf, Sefîne-i Evliyâ,
Mehmed Akkuş and Ali Yılmaz (eds), Istanbul, Kitabevi, 2006, Vol. 2, pp. 84–102.
118
Tülay Artan, ‘El Yazmaları Işığında bir Çerçeve ve Çehre Eskizi: Kadızâdeliler,
Müceddidîler ve Damad İbrahim Paşa (1730)’, Müteferrika, 50 (2016), pp. 51–145,
see pp. 84–85.
119
David W. Damrel, ‘Spread of Naqshibandi Political Thought in the Islamic
World’, in Gaborieau, Popovic, and Zarcone (eds), Naqshibandis, pp. 261–79.
120
İmâm Rabbâni, Mektubat-ı Rabbânî (Metin ve Tercüme), Orhan Ençakar (ed.),
Istanbul, Sistem Matbaacılık, 2015, Vol. 1, p. 165, letters 194 and 195.
In his letters, Sheikh Murad both conveyed and deepened this
doctrine, developed in India, to the Ottoman lands. He formulated
the possible revival of religion and order under the leadership of the
Ottoman sultan as protector of Mecca and Medina. The Ottoman
sultan was thus a Mujaddid, the renewer of the Sharia, who would
free Muslims from precarious innovations (read traditions). It was
sultan’s (and his state’s) ultimate responsibility to take an active role
in revitalizing, restoring, and rejuvenating true religion. However,
in this reform mission the political authority was helped and guided
by the righteous scholars in this reform mission. This idea, which
reintegrated religious and political authority, was especially appealing
for reform-minded Ottoman elites. The emphasis on the Sharia,
obedience to legitimate political authority, and the projection of an
image of the sultan as a political-religious leader who was to reaffirm
religion and correct his subjects in accordance with Islamic orthodoxy,
complemented the military and fiscal reform programme of Ottoman
bureaucrats.121
At the same time, Mujaddidism became popular among Ottoman
intellectuals who were interested in practical or applied sciences
such as medicine and engineering. For instance, Yirmisekiz Mehmed
Çelebi, a diplomat and intellectual who was inclined to Mujaddidism,
argued that the highest form of knowledge was that about nature,
because it glorified God’s order and combined theory (‘ilm) with
practice (‘amel); this was more virtuous than theory (‘ilm) alone, just as
a fruit-bearing tree is more valuable than a tree without fruit.122 This
perspective is comparable to Mujaddidi ideas that belief should be
substantiated with practical activism. Likewise, the military sciences,
which resembled applied mathematics in the minds of engineers, could
be seen as part of this repertoire, in which applied science and activist
belief were integrated to discipline the military order as well as to
correct Muslims’ behaviour.
In the late eighteenth century, the influence of the Mujaddidis
was increasing in the elite circles of the New Order. Certainly, the
affinity between these two terms, both of which emphasized newness
(Mujaddidi (Muceddidi in Turkish spelling) and New Order/Nizam-ı
121
Damrel, ‘Spread of Naqshibandi Political Thought in the Islamic World’,
pp. 265–66; Manneh, ‘The Naqshibandiyya-Mujaddidiya in the Ottoman Lands in
the Early 19th Century’, pp. 12–17.
122
Harun Küçük, ‘The Compass and the Astrolabe: Empiricism in the Ottoman
Empire’, unpublished paper.
1590 ALI YAYCIOGLU
Cedid), was not an accident. As Aysel Yıldız has recently shown, many
notable characters of the New Order during the reign of Selim III
were connected to the Mujaddidiya in one way or another.123 In this
regard, it is worth mentioning one person: Mehmed Emin Bursevi
(d. 1813).124 Originally from Kirkuk in Kurdistan, he came from
a prominent family in the region, which was well connected to the
imperial elite in Istanbul. His uncle was the governor of Urfa province.
After Mehmed Emin went to Istanbul, he accepted the patronage of
the grand vizier Ragıb Pasha (in office 1757–63). Mehmed Emin,
while tutoring the sons of Istanbul’s notable families in Persian, soon
became a prominent figure as a Mujaddidi sheikh. In 1779, he left the
capital and settled in Bursa, one of the centres for Sufi orders. After
Selim III was enthroned in 1789, Mehmed Emin was ‘invited by the
learned and the notables’ of the New Order and he returned to the
capital.125 He was appointed ser-tarik, that is, chief of the Naqshibandi
order, and head of the commission to investigate other Sufi orders
with a group of office holders.126 During these investigations, which
suggested the role of the Mujaddidis in disciplining the religious life of
Istanbul in Sufi lodges, some Sufi orders were closed and their sheikhs
were exiled.127 During his second sojourn in Istanbul until the collapse
of the New Order in 1807, many leading New Orderist bureaucrats
became part of Mehmed Emin’s circle.128
The dizzying trans-imperial mobility of Naqshibandi-Mujaddidi
dervishes and sheikhs kept followers of the order connected through
the Muslim International, from Central Asia and India to the Ottoman
lands. Major handbooks, letters, and testimonies were spread by the
travelling dervishes, who also functioned as informants. Those who
came from Central Asia (particularly from Kazan and Bukhara)
123
Aysel Yıldız, Crisis and Rebellion in the Ottoman Empire: The Downfall of a Sultan in
the Age of Revolution, London, I. B. Tauris, 2017, pp. 137–42, 204–09.
124
Not to be confused with Mehmed Emin Tokadî.
125
Quoted from Yadigâr-ı Şems, in Manneh, ‘The Naqshibandiyya-Mujaddidiyya and
the Khālidiyya in the Early 19th Century’, p. 19.
126
Ibid., pp. 17–21.
127
İsmail Kara, Din ile Modernleşme arasında Çağdaş Türk Düşüncesinin Meseleleri,
Istanbul, Dergah, 2005, pp. 326–27; Muharrem Varol, ‘Osmanlı Devleti’nin
Tarikatlarları Denetleme Siyaseti ve Meclis-i Meşâyih’in Bilinen, Ancak
Bulunamayan İki Nizamnâmesi’, Türk Kültürü İncelemeleri Dergisi, 23 (2010), pp. 40–41,
note 4. For the document, see Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Hatt-ı Humayun (HAT)
1387/55088.
128
Manneh, ‘The Naqshibandiyya-Mujaddidiyya and the Khālidiyya in the Early
19th Century’, pp. 18–20; Yıldız, Crisis and Rebellion in the Ottoman Empire, pp. 141–42.
and India to centres of the Ottoman empire (Istanbul, Damascus,
Bursa, Mecca and Medina, Cairo, Sarajevo, or Skopje) conveyed news
and observations about Russian and British expansion in Muslim-
dominated lands. Growing trade between India and the Ottoman
empire facilitated traveller dervishes in enhancing their networks,
which were parallel to those of merchants. Porous boundaries between
the Ottoman and Russian empires (and Iran after the Safavid collapse)
in the Caucasus provided roaming dervishes with new opportunities
to boost their mobility in regions populated by tribal communities,
which could be welcoming for learned men from major centres. In this
respect, their trans-imperial mobility as religious activists could be
seen in the same global context as European military engineers (as
we have discussed above), who came to the Ottoman lands with new
know-how in military sciences to find patrons or job opportunities.129
Ubeydullah Kuşmani and refuting tradition
In this respect, the preacher Ubeydullah Kuşmani was exemplary.

Kuşmani came to Istanbul from the Russian empire, probably from
the Kazan region circa 1800.130 Before he came to the Ottoman
lands, he had travelled in the Russian empire and Caucasia, and
wrote an account of his travels.131 During his sojourn in Istanbul,
he became a defender of the New Order; he was quite popular among
its grandees and bureaucrats, although a controversial figure for his
harsh criticisms of the Janissaries. According to Ahmed Asım, the
129
For a recent study on Indian Sufi networks in the Ottoman empire, see Rishad
Choudhury, ‘The Hajj and the Hindi: The Ascent of the Indian Sufi Lodge in the
Ottoman Empire’, Modern Asian Studies, 50, 6 (2016), pp. 1888–1931. For the concept
of the Muslim Religious International, see Francis Robinson, ‘The Islamic World:
World System to “Religious International”’, in Abigail Green and Vincent Viaene
(eds), Religious Internationals in the Modern World, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan,
2012, pp. 111–35.
130
For the mujaddidis of the Kazan province of Russia in the late eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries, see İbrahim Maraş, Türk Dünyasında Dinî Yenileşme (1850–1917),
Istanbul, Ötüken, 2002, pp. 47–53. For a critical inquiry on intellectual movements
of Jadidism in Central Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Devin
DeWeese, ‘It was a Dark and Stagnant Night (‘til the Jadids Brought the Light):
Cliches, Biases, and False Dichotomies in the Intellectual History of Central Asia’,
Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient, 59, 1–2 (2016), pp. 37–92.
131
This has not been located. Ömer İsbilir, ‘Dihkānîzâde Ubeydullah Kuşmânî,
Diyanet İslam Ansiklopedisi, 9 (1994), pp. 290–91.
1592 ALI YAYCIOGLU
official historian of the time and a keen observer of discord between

the Janissaries and the New Order:
then a strange man from the Northern lands, known as Ubeydullah Kuşmani,
showed up in Istanbul. He was an eloquent preacher, a master of rhetoric,
supporting anything he said with revelations (nakli) and rational (‘akli) proofs,
and was enthusiastic to substantiate them with rational analogies. He was
bold and brave, tough and opinionated. He claimed that he travelled in Slavic
lands [Russia] and European countries like a detective and comprehended
the foreign lands and conventions of the infidels. He realized that fighting
and competing with them required reciprocity in kind (mukabala bi’l-misl).
To substantiate his argument, he had written a treatise, entitled Zebire, to
specifically illustrate the superiority of the trained (learned/mu‘allem) soldiers
and the necessities of [military] drills (learning/ta‘lim), and validated his
argument (idd‘ia) with many proofs.132
Asım was impressed by Kuşmani’s intellectual ability to prove his

case using both rational and revelatory methods. But he was also
critical of Kuşmani’s audience in Istanbul: ‘Some freshly graduated
but opinioned gentlemen and bureaucrats treated this man with
great respect. They invited him to speak and then they provoked
themselves [with his speeches].’ Asım ridiculed the enthusiasm of
the young bureaucrats and gentlemen for a man ‘who dressed like a
freak’ while delivering sermons in sultanic mosques and attending
reading sessions in viziers’ mansions, where he recited from his
Zebire.133 Interestingly, Ulrich Jasper Seetzen met a remarkably
similar contemporary character during his stay in Istanbul:
In one of the courtyards of this building, we met an acquaintance of our
translator’s who told him that a certain strange man about who he had told
us before was in a nearby coffeehouse. Therefore, without first visiting the
wire-drawing workshop, we went to the coffeehouse. The aforementioned
Turk was smoking his pipe. He had a long face, a large aquiline nose, a black
beard. Against the customs of the Turks, his hair was long, but he hid it
under his turban. The latter was made of a tall conical cap of yellow-black
checkered fabric, with a shawl wrapped around the lower part. In addition to
the usual undergarments, he wore a short fur. His appearance and demeanor
132
Efendi, Asım Efendi Tarihi, Vol. 2, pp. 1380–81.
133
Ibid., Vol. 2, p. 1381. Kuşmani was also seen by the authorities as an expert on
the affairs of the Caucasus, based on his knowledge of the information network in the
region. He presented a report to the imperial administration about how to mobilize
the Abkhaz, Circasians, and Kabartay communities in the region against Russia
during the Ottoman-Russian war. See Ottoman Prime Ministry Archives/Başbakanlık
Osmanlı Arşivi, HAT, Dosya 149/6274. (I thank Hakan Kırımlı for letting me know
about this document.)
were noble. I noticed that he had a stick made of steel, of about a cubit in
length, with a half-moon at the top. It had the following form. It is said to
have held a considerable position as a guardsman in the sultan’s palace. He
left it voluntarily and became a dervish. He chose a master whom he followed
across Asia all the way to India for seven years, serving him nearly naked,
only dressed in a shirt. Being actually Georgian by birth, he first returned
to his fatherland after leaving his position. There, he allied himself with a
dervish in order to gain knowledge of the world and of humans. All dervishes,
including those of higher rank, venerate him greatly. He is about 40 years
old. He does not accept that he is a dervish; he insists that he is nothing. Yet
many people visit him, seeking advice. Then he (this name is Haji Suleyman
Efendi) gives good advice in the form of parables. Our translator praises him
as an enlightened and tolerant man, who ignores [ . . . ] between religious
factions. His master lives in a convent near Bursa in Anatolia. [description
of another Sufi] When we left, Haji Suleyman had already paid for our coffee
and tobacco.134
Is Seetzen’s Suleyman Ubeydullah Kuşmani? Probably not, as the
names do not fit. However, taken together, these two examples
illustrate that such cosmopolitan trans-imperial dervishes, travelling
in the Ottoman lands, Caucasus, Central Asia, and India were part
of the everyday life of Istanbul during the time of the New Order.
These men were linked to different Sufi networks, whose masters
provided them with authorization and connections. According to
Seetzen’s report, Suleyman’s master lived in Bursa. Perhaps he was
Mehmed Emin Bursavî, who was also one of the masters of Ubeydullah
Kuşmani? Their half nudity, covered with shabby robes, and their
sticks made them idiosyncratic (Asım found Kuşmani’s style pretty
grotesque), but perhaps also strangely attractive to some of the
elite circles to whom the dervishes were invited to give sermons. In
these sermons, these cosmopolitan dervishes, with their trans-imperial
experiences, conveyed insights to the Ottoman elites about foreign
lands, about Russian imperial expansion in the Caucasus and Central
Asia, and British colonial expansion in India.
In his Zebire, Kuşmani introduced himself as a travelling dervish
who had come to the Ottoman lands during the reign of Selim III.135
He said that Kadı Abdurrahman Pasha, one of the architects of the
New Order, provided him with protection. He was also linked to the
two masters of the Nakshibandi order, Seyyid İbrahim Efendi and
134
135
Dihkânîzâde Ubeydullah Kuşmanî, Zebîre-i Kuşmânî fî taʻrîf-i nizâm-ı İlhâmî,
Nizâm-ı Cedîd’e dair bir Risâle, Ömer İşbilir (ed.), Ankara, Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2006,
p. 15.
1594 ALI YAYCIOGLU
the renowned Mehmed Emin of Bursa.136 He saw many places (in the
Russian empire) and learned the ways of Europeans during his travels.
To defend Selim III’s New Order and discredit the riffraff (read:
Janissaries), he decided to write down his thoughts. He noted that
people in different countries mocked the corrupt Janissaries and their
ineffectiveness.137 Kuşmani accused the ulema, who acted in alliance
with the Janissaries, of hiding what they knew from the public and
not daring to tell the truth. The ulema did not want to antagonize the
Janissaries, Kuşmani wrote, because they were afraid of them. Thus,
the Janissaries and the commoners, he argued, continued their bad
habits. Kuşmani wrote that although he was an ordinary dervish, he
still had a responsibility to command good and forbid wrong (emr-i
ma‘ruf ve nehy-i münker).138
In the rest of his book, Kuşmani mounted religious and moral
critiques of the Janissaries and the Bektaşis and developed a rigorous
defence of the New Order. To make his case, he included a
repertoire of quotes from the Qur’an, the Hadith, and poetry in
Turkish, Arabic, and Persian. Kuşmani’s pro-New Order and anti-
Janissary/Bektaşi argument was based on complex reasoning. First,
he argued that the Janissaries had lost their military capacity vis-à-
vis their European counterparts. Still, they rejected reform, claiming
that it was an unlawful innovation (bid’a) since many new practices
(drilling, synchronized firing, uniforms) came from infidels and would
harm established traditions. Kuşmani accused those who made this
argument of ignorance and hypocrisy. He claimed that what the
Janissaries defended as ‘rules’ and ‘laws’ were nothing but fabricated
traditions: ‘It is historically clear that nothing [that] you said is
affirmative (sizin dedikleriniz hiç kangısı bir mahalde müsbet olmadığı
mefhum-ı rumuz-aşıyan-ı tevarihattır).’ There was no reason to believe, for
example, that Hacı Bektaş Veli was in fact the patron of the Janissary
corps.139 Of the Janissaries’ refusal to wear the uniforms of the New
Order, he wrote, ‘which prophet or which religious authority invented
your dress codes? [...] The clothes that are worn today, as you know,
did not exist in the time of the prophet.’140
136
Ibid., pp. 2, 84.
137
Ibid., pp. 25–28.
138
Ibid., pp. 15–17.
139
Ibid., p. 41.
140
Ibid., pp. 25, 28.
Kuşmani went a step further by saying that established conventions
were not legitimate references simply by virtue of their age. He
explained that it was incorrect to say ‘our precursors acted like this,
[so] we should act likewise’, since good or evil deeds committed by
people in previous eras were their responsibility, not ours. Here,
Kuşmani discredited the traditionalist argument, maintaining that
all of tradition began as innovation. Second, he based his argument
on the principle of reciprocity in kind. It was clear that the new
military sciences, which included drills, synchronized firing, education,
and engineering, made European armies superior to Muslim ones.
Therefore, Muslims could not simply dismiss these innovations as the
inventions of infidels, but instead as necessities to adopt. This was a
necessity of Muslim belief, as it was substantiated in the Qur’an: ‘The
men of vision [those who see], learn from your lesson’ (59/2). Different
branches of the Ottoman Army had adopted the methods of learning
(ta‘allum), drilling (ta‘lim), order (tertib), and discipline (terbiye), but not
the Janissaries: ‘It is ignorance for an army to say that they can go to
war without drill, order and discipline.’141 Further Kuşmani explained:
The members of the artillery are able to fire a cannon eighteen times a
minute. The [trained] shooters are able to fire their rifles eight times in a
minute. The grenadiers have the capacity to shoot the hats of the infidels. If
engineers and the miners [...] and gunpowder experts, sailors, and engineers
of manufacturing workshops and other learned groups acted properly with
sultan’s generosity and care as fraternity they had the capacity to destroy the
enemy. 142
Kuşmani praised the engineers, artillery experts, trained shooters,
and sailors as exemplary members of the New Order, given their
training, technical knowledge, time-management abilities, accuracy,
and precision. If the Janissaries had accepted the same direction for
the artillery corps, sappers, and others, Kuşmani claimed, the sultan
would by now have had an army of one million trained and drilled
soldiers, and the imposition of extraordinary fiscal austerity measures
to finance the New Order would be unnecessary.
Kuşmani juxtaposed learned and trained soldiery with the unruly
Janissaries and riffraff, and reiterated the need for training, discipline,
and order through rational and revelatory (akliyye ve nakliyye) proofs.
But he went one step further, arguing that mental and physical
discipline was an obligation for all Muslims, whether they served in
141
‘Mavâ‘iz-i Kuşmânî’, MS. Millet Kütüphanesi, Ali Emiri-şer‘iyye, no. 591, p. 3b.
142
Kuşmanî, Zebîre-i Kuşmânî., p. 31.
1596 ALI YAYCIOGLU
the military or not. ‘The disciplining of the body was a necessity for
the strength of worship. A human, without being disciplined (terbiye
olmadıkça), is like an unfinished thing.’143 The Janissaries’ idleness
(tenbeliyet and tarik-i atalet) and their opposition to drilling not only
prevented them from becoming good soldiers, but also from fulfilling
their purpose as Muslims and even as human beings. Discipline was a
requirement of religion, as well as (military) sciences.
All of this, Kuşmani claimed, would be possible with the intervention
of the sultan, who held legitimate authority, adding that he should not
let the people go their own way. Kuşmani’s enlightened sultan should
intervene and change the social order according to the necessities
of the time and religion. The former was presented as grounds for
necessary innovations against malignant traditions (which were, in
fact, bid’a). As the Qur’an states: ‘You may hate a thing although it
is good for you; and you may love a thing although it is bad for you’
(2/216). By formulating sultanic and religious authority as a combined
force for disciplining the people in a top-down fashion, in line with the
needs of religion and the time, Kuşmani endorsed the Mujaddidi-
Naqshibandi position. Acting according to ‘the necessities of the time’
is substantiated by two rationales: the principle of reciprocity in kind
(mukabala bi’l-misl) and the idea of ijtihad, namely reasoning to stipulate
a rule through revelatory sources and reasoning.144 Reciprocity in kind,
namely acting with the same tools as one’s nemeses, is a necessity for
survival. But this was justified through ijtihad. He argued that there was
perhaps no mujtahid (a person who is eligible to do ijtihad) to originate
a new legal school (madhhab), since legal schools had been established
centuries ago. But in every age, a mujtahid would have to find answers
to contemporary problems (müctehid-i bi’l-mes’ele ber-mukteza-i hal).145
Kuşmani further developed this elaborate reasoning in sermons he
delivered in the mosques of Istanbul. He not only offered practical
advice for reform, but also came up with a framework for a new
social order. According to this framework, the subjects of the Ottoman
empire, taken together, should promise (ta‘ahhüd) and became surety
(kefil) to the circle of the Sharia and obey state regulations. This process
should be carried out with the help of imams and preachers. Kuşmanî
implied that people should be persuaded to support the New Order
143
Ibid., pp. 41, 64.
144
Wael Hallaq, ‘Was the Gate of Ijtihad Closed?’, International Journal of Middle East
Studies, 16, 1 (1984), pp. 3–41.
145
Kuşmanî, Zebîre-i Kuşmânî, pp. 72–75.
in a gentle way, through istimalet, that is, popular invitations.146 The
collective surety of the entire people of the empire for the Sharia and
reform reminds us of the Deed of Alliance of 1808, which was drafted
and signed by the Ottoman imperial and provincial notables to secure
the reforms.147
Kuşmani continued: in the New Order, individuals should be
employed according to their knowledge, expertise, and capacity.
Military matters, in particular, should be carried out using knowledge,
drills, and discipline. Imams and preachers should convince ordinary
people of the necessities of the technical knowledge and the sciences
(‘ulum-i nafi‘a ve fünun pür-zaruri) that were essential for warfare.
Kuşmani suggested that ordinary men could not wage war. It
was a science that required expertise and discipline. He openly
separated matters of warfare and those relevant to the general public.
In everything, technical knowledge and science were essential for
the New Order. Today, Kuşmani wrote, people of knowledge who
had expertise, and feylozofs, who thought about every matter, were
everywhere. The ruler should gather these men together and unify
them, and rule as if they were the crew of a ship and he the captain.
He envisioned an enlightened absolutism, whereby the sovereign ruled
with men of knowledge. This knowledge went beyond the bounds of
religion, it was also scientific and technical. The average person should
be convinced by imams and preachers, as well as public invitations and
collective sureties, and should not be involved in matters they did not
understand.148
Conclusion
Kuşmani wrote his Zebire and delivered his sermons during the reign
of Selim III. In May 1807, Selim’s New Order regime collapsed after
a popular Janissary revolt and he was dethroned. The New Orderists
were executed or fled Istanbul for the provinces or the Russian empire.
In August 1808, however, the New Order was reinstituted after a coup
by some New Orderists in alliance with provincial power-holders who
were loyal to Selim. In October 1808, when Kuşmani gave a pro-New
Order and anti-Janissary sermon in the Fatih Mosque, the Janissaries
146
‘Mavâ‘iz-i Kuşmânî’, pp. 2–4.
147
Yaycioglu, Partners of the Empire, pp. 203–38.
148
‘Mavâ‘iz-i Kuşmânî’, pp. 4–8.
1598 ALI YAYCIOGLU
of Istanbul came to the mosque and harassed him. He was asked

to leave the city, but it is likely that he did not obey. In November
1808, the New Order collapsed a second time, after another popular
Janissary revolt in Istanbul. Mahmud II declared that the New Order
was cursed, flattered the Janissaries, and glorified the old laws and
conventions.149 In 1812, the new sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808–1839)
decided to exile Ubeydullah Kuşmani to Cairo and sent a letter to
Mehmed Ali Pasha of Egypt, ordering him not to allow the preacher
to return to the capital.150
Leading up to the revolt, the Janissaries and their allies had
developed political and moral arguments against the New Order.
These arguments were based on old conventions and established laws.
The Janissaries had refused to wear New Order uniforms and perform
daily drills on the basis that these practices were against their ancient
conventions, everyday practices, and the way that they held and used
their bodies. New taxes that had been imposed on the provincial
communities to finance the reforms and military recruitment among
Muslim peasants were condemned as unjustifiable. Some presented
the New Order as the party of corrupt elites, who diverted public
revenues for their personal use. Others cursed it for promoting the
practices of ‘infidels’. While the ulema did not side with the Janissaries
openly or monolithically, many of its members were sceptical about
the New Orderists’ radical, top-down decisions which, in various ways,
undermined the public’s accumulated interests and the state’s old
conventions. Eventually, when the New Order fell, the Janissaries
were easily able to secure condemnation of the reform programme
from some members of the ulema for violating old laws and promoting
unlawful innovations (bid‘a).
However, the war between the New Order and the Janissaries did
not end here. Eighteen years later, in 1826, Mahmud II instituted
another ‘New Order’ after the Janissary corps was destroyed by
a popular revolt backed by the reformed artillery corps. He also
confiscated the lodges of the Bektaşi order and allocated them to
Naqshibandi and Mevlevi sheikhs. Meanwhile, the Halidiyya, another
wave of Naqshibandi-Mujaddidi activism, flourished in Kurdistan
under the spiritual leadership of a Mujaddidi master Ziyaeddin Halid
al-Baghdadi (d. 1827). The movement soon spread into the Kurdish-,
149
Yaycıoglu, Partners of the Empire, pp. 197–200.
150
Ottoman Prime Ministry Archives/Başbakanlık Osmanlı Arşivi, Cevdet Zabdiye,
Dosya 16, Gömlek 767 (September 1812).
Arabic-, and eventually Turkish-speaking lands of the Ottoman
empire. As the movement was becoming influential among provincial
elites, Sheikh Halid and his followers were able to establish a coherent
doctrine combining the requirements of an orthodox reading of the
Sharia and the power and interests of political authorities for the
renewal and rejuvenation of the true Islamic order. The impact of
the Halidiyya on administrative and military reforms during the reign
of Mahmud II was significant (although the sultan was suspicious
about this movement). At the same time, most members of the
ulema rigorously supported Mahmudian reforms.151 New regulations,
based on the Islamic principle of hisba, namely the regulatory
authority of the ruler to command good and forbid evil, were imposed
on marketplaces and artisanal organizations. Military engineers
who graduated from the Military Academy established another
‘new’ army, named Asakir-i Mansure-yi Muhammediye—the Victorious
Muhammadan Troops—evoking Birgivi’s Tariqat al-Muhammadiyya—
the Muhammadan Path.152
In this article, I discussed some aspects of reform in the Ottoman
empire. First, I examined how the Janissaries were deeply integrated
into the socio-economic order of the Ottoman empire in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, not only as an army, but also
as a social-political organization that was structured as a collective
body, akin to artisanal groups, with claims to guard the established
order, vested privileges, and interests, and which had the capacity (and
claim) to voice the frustration of the general public. I suggested that
their artisanal culture provided them with notions about their bodily
labour, as well as natural and the divine orders. Bektaşism, with its
antinomian component, provided them with a moral ground on which
they could place themselves, both as a central partner of the imperial
151
Manneh, ‘The Naqshibandiyya-Mujaddidiyya in the Ottoman Lands in the Early
19th Century’, pp. 23–29; Heyd, ‘The Ottoman Ulema and Westernization in the Time
of Selim III and Mahmud II’, pp. 89–96.
152
Yeşil, İhtilâller Cağında Osmanlı Ordusu, pp. 337–58; Yıldız, Neferin Adı Yok,
pp. 131–259; Fahri Maden, Bektaşî Tekkelerinin kapatılması (1826) ve Bektaşîliğin Yasaklı
Yılları, Ankara, Türk Tarih Kurumu, 2013, pp. 63–73, 181–92; Muharrem Varol,
Islahat, Siyaset, Tarikat: Bektaşiliğin İlgası Sonrasında Osmanlı Devleti’nin Tarikat Politikaları
(1826–1866), Istanbul, Dergah, 2013, pp. 38–80; Gülay Tulasoğlu, ‘Türk-Sünnî
Kimlik İnşâsının II. Mahmud Dönemindeki Kökenleri Üzerine’, in Yalçın Çakmak and
İmran Gürtaş (eds), Kızılbaşlık, Alevilik, Bektaşilik: Tarih-Kimlik-İnanç-Ritüel, Istanbul,
İletişilm, 2015, pp. 165–83.
1600 ALI YAYCIOGLU
establishment but also in opposition to it in times of crisis and radical

changes.
I then focused on the New Order and examined its discourse
and organizational logic in light of the new military sciences
and engineering. I suggested that since the early eighteenth
century, developments in the rational and applied sciences and the
establishment of military academies gradually dominated the reform
agenda in different parts of the world. These advancements in
military sciences fostered an international and universal notion of
military enlightenment. The Ottoman engineers participated in its
universalism, which also formed the basis for legitimating Ottoman
reforms against the claims of traditional forces.
Third, I argued that Islamic revivalism played a major role in
this process. I discussed how the Birgivi-Kadızadeli line, and later
the trans-Ottoman Naqshibandi-Mujaddidi movement, developed a
profound critique of the existing order through their disapproval of
established traditions in religious and social life. The Naqshibandi-
Mujaddidi sheikhs and preachers also fostered a politico-spiritual
agenda across the Muslim world to restore the true religion, freed from
pernicious innovations and traditions. In the late eighteenth century,
this Islamic activism was integrated into the Ottoman reform move-
ment with a rejuvenated idea of restoring the social-religious order.
A programme to discipline the army gradually evolved into a larger
movement to regulate social and religious life. In this development,
we see an alliance between fiscal-administrative reformists, military
engineers, and Muslim activists against the existing military regime
in which the Janissaries were the integral actors.
I also argued that the New Order signified a global moment
in Ottoman history. Yes, the New Order was a Europeanist or
Western-inclined movement carried out by fiscal-administrative
bureaucrats and by Ottoman and European military engineers and
experts. These Euro-Ottoman experts believed in fiscal reform and
military enlightenment, regardless of their political loyalty, and
in a universalist fashion. But, the Ottoman New Order was also
a Muslim New Order, with social and military components. It was
advocated by religious activists who were connected to a Eurasian
network of Naqshibandi-Mujaddidi dervishes. They disseminated the
Naqshibandi-Mujaddidi messages, which prioritized the role of the
state in disciplining society and conveyed the experiences of Muslim
communities during the colonial expansion of the Russian and
British empires. Therefore, for the Ottoman elites, the Naqshibandi-
Mujaddidi network opened a trans-imperial window onto Russia
and India, resembling the window onto Western Europe opened by
engineers.
These two trans-imperial (European and Eurasian) movements
formed a discursive alliance against established norms, local
conventions, and vested privileges. In other words, the New Order
controversy was not one fought by the proponents of Western-inspired
reforms for a new military order against the resistance of Janissaries
and their allies. Rather, it was a controversy between those who
supported global trends in military-fiscal reorganization, the military
sciences, and trans-imperial Muslim religious activism to carry out
an agenda to reform and discipline military, social and spiritual
life against those groups who guarded established conventions,
privileges and spiritual norms and practices. The Naqshibandi-
Mujaddidi network, in many ways the main connectors of the ‘Muslim
International’ from Central Asia and India to the Ottoman lands,
facilitated the mobility of ideas and fostered a new awareness
about European expansion and the necessity for reform. While the
reform agenda of trans-Ottoman military men and Muslim activisists
intended to correct, change, and restore the order in terms of rational,
universal norms of science and religion, the Janissary-led coalitions
guarded the historical, the traditional, the experienced, and the local.
Therefore, the controversy of the New Order should also be seen as an
opposition between two Islamic discourses: one was intent on guarding
vested rights and established conventions, while the other sought to
eliminate pernicious innovations, which became traditions, and then
renew and discipline in accordance with sound rules of religion, as well
as necessities of time. In many ways, the New Order controversy was
also a struggle within Islam about how to define and justify innovation
or tradition.
Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, these three
movements, led by the Bektaşis-Janissaries, military engineers, and
puritan preachers, would become more and more solidified. The
enlightenment of the military engineers would transform into a
larger social and political programme to change and discipline
society at every level by applying the universal rules of science
through educational institutions and state-imposed regulations.
Puritan Muslim activism would become a massive programme to
free spiritual life from pernicious traditions, antinomian practices,
heterodox beliefs, and standardize and regularize Muslim life. Often
the state’s agenda to discipline its people and the Islamic agenda
1602 ALI YAYCIOGLU
to purify and standardize religion went hand in hand. The Janissary-

Bektaşi line, once the most important social movement, with a capacity
to mobilize the public, did not disappear even if the Janissary corps
was abolished in 1824. In fact, thousands of Janissaries and Janissary
affiliates were massacred in 1826 and the period that followed.
However, many of them and many Janissary sympathizers were able
to survive, but retreated from the public arena. Many Bektaşi sheikhs
fled to the Balkans, mainly Albania, and also to Egypt.153 Some went
underground. Others tried to keep their lodges, by declaring that they
had abandoned Bektaşism and embraced Naqshibandi principles (or
those of other legitimate Sufi orders, such as Sa’diyya, Rifa’iyya, and
Kadiriyya).154
Throughout the nineteenth century, at certain moments the
Bektaşis resurfaced in public life in the Ottoman world, while
Naqshibandi-Halidi groups increased their influence in the Ottoman
provinces. During the reign of Abdulhamid (1876–1909), the
Naqshibandis were active participants in the Hamidian regime,
sometimes converting the heterodox communities in Ottoman
Anatolia and Kurdistan to Sunnism and sometimes as diplomatic
envoys of Abdülhamid’s Pan-Islamist project.155 The Bektaşis, on
the other hand, were kept under close surveillance.156 However,
different opposition groups, generally known as the Young Turks,
sympathized with Bektaşhism. In fact, the Occult and lettrist elements
in Bektaşisms attracted different intellectual circles, including the
Freemasons. The opposition to Abdülhamid’s autocracy and Pan-
Islamic revivalism was also a Bektasi renaissance.157 Just after
the revolution of 1908, which ended the Hamidian regime, the
revolutionary officers visited the Bektaşi lodge in Rumelihisari, where
the 1808 Revolution had been unleashed by the Janissaries.158
Bektaşism later became popular among some of the elites of the
153
Nathalie Clayer, L’Albanie, pays des derviches, Berlin-Wiesbaden, Harrassowitz,
1990; Fuat Köprülü, ‘Mısır’da Bektaşilik’, Türkiyat Mecmuası, 5 (1939), pp. 13–31.
154
Yılmaz Soyyer, 19. yüzyılda Bektaşîlik, Avcılar, Istanbul, Frida Yayınları, 2012.
155
Kemal Karpat, The Politization of Islam, Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and
Community in the Late Ottoman State, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001, pp. 106–
14.
156
Şükrü Hanioğlu, The Young Turks in Opposition, Oxford, Oxford University Press,
1995, p. 54.
157
Thierry Zarcone, Mystiques, philosophes, et francs-maçons en Islam: Riza Tevfik,
penseur Ottoman (1868–1949), du soufisme a la confrérie, Paris, Institut français d’études
anatoliennes d’Istanbul, 1993, pp. 88–118.
158
Hanioğlu, The Young Turks in Opposition, p. 54.
Committee of Union and Progress (1889–1919), which had strong
Balkan roots. During the Turkish War of Independence, some Bektaşi
groups in Anatolia, along with other Shi’ite-inclined (Kızılbaş-Alevi)
communities, supported the nationalist struggle.159
When secularism, as a fully fledged political and social programme,
appeared in the post-Ottoman intellectual landscape in the early
twentieth century, it was military men who first embraced it. As a
new military culture began to separate itself from Islamic activism,
the army gradually became the champion of secularism in the
late Ottoman empire and modern republican Turkey. Likewise, the
separation between science and religion developed into an agenda
for new academic institutions and the eradication of Islamic colleges.
However, neither the Naqshibandi movement nor Bektashism died
out. Although both became victims of the secularization attempts of
the 1930s and 1940s, after the 1950s, Naqshibandi and Bektashi
activism resurfaced in Cold War Turkey. Bektashism, with its deep
historical roots as a protest movement, became a major element
of the Turkish left, while Naqshibandism, with its variants, was
transformed into the most influential religio-political current of the
Turkish right.160
159
Hülya Küçük, The Role of the Bektāshı̄s in Turkey’s National Struggle, Leiden, Brill,
2002, pp. 150–210.
160
Şerif Mardin, Religion and Social Change in Modern Turkey: the Case of Bediüzzaman
Said Nursi, Albany, State University of New York, 1989; Murat Küçük, ‘Türkiye’de Sol
Düşünce ve Aleviler’, in Modern Türkiye’de Siyasi Düçünce, Vol 8: Sol, Istanbul, İletişim,
2007, pp. 896–934.

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Modern Asian Studies 52, 5 (2018) pp. 1542–1603.

Guarding Traditions and

In 1791, a group of fiscal bureaucrats and military men under the

complicates these assumptions and proposes a new perspective on the

The Janissary order

picking boys as a levy (devşirme) from the Christian subject communit-

amount of authority over the Janissaries across the empire, acting as

Janissaries and artisanal labour

the process of competitive performances under the supervision of

Tools, labour, and nature

Transporting water from nature to the people was presented as

on my feet is worship.’23 This quadruple reference was integrated

The production process was also based on knowledge of nature.

The Janissaries, the Bektaşis, and the body

As mentioned above, the Janissary corps had close links to the

Despite the Shi‘ite-inclined and antinomian elements in Bektaşism,

eighteenth centuries, when the Janissary corps expanded and trans-

Allah Allah Eyvallah,

By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, by which time the

Despite their nonconformism, Janissaries often presented themselves

it might seem paradoxical that there would be any alliances between

formulations, and, most of the time, some new institutions. However,

Towards the New Order

Despite the dramatic failure of the second Ottoman siege of Vienna

India enhanced their circulation.50 Ottoman-Greek intellectuals and

The New Order

As I briefly summarized in the introduction to this article, when Selim

proposed by the architects of the reform.56 This included financial

to attend mathematics classes in the Academy. Artillery corps and

Seetzen met several other Euro-Ottoman officers and engineers in

progress in the Army. But he fought in Egypt against Bonaparte and

on 17 March 1803. In the two-floor, European-style building, Seetzen

Euro-Ottoman military engineers

As the young Ottoman engineer had implied during Seetzen’s

scientific tactics and engineered advanced weaponry. Their guide

Muslim reformism—from Birgivi to the Kadizadelis

I have argued that, as well as being a fiscal and administrative

After his death, his followers in Birgi continued to train disciples,

unequivocal acceptance of the exoteric meaning of the scripture and

of learning mathematics and applied military science. The soldiers of

In the eighteenth century, a related development had a dramatic effect

Neo-Naqshibandiyya across Eurasia, from Bengal to the Balkans.109

also belonged to Ottoman learned circles in Istanbul. This made the

Ubeydullah Kuşmani and refuting tradition

In this respect, the preacher Ubeydullah Kuşmani was exemplary.

official historian of the time and a keen observer of discord between

Asım was impressed by Kuşmani’s intellectual ability to prove his

of Istanbul came to the mosque and harassed him. He was asked

establishment but also in opposition to it in times of crisis and radical

to purify and standardize religion went hand in hand. The Janissary-

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