Book review: Aslıhan Gürbüzel, Taming the Messiah: The Formation of an Ottoman Political Public Sphere, 1600-1700, Oakland: University of California Press 2023

Journal of Islamic Studies (2024) pp. 1 of 4 BOOK REVIEW Far from being the lacuna in our knowledge of times Ottoman that it was some thirty years ago, the seventeenth century has proven to be a fascinating period of change, intense political dynamics, and violent ideological battles. Among others, the late Rifaat Abou-el-Haj’s contributions on the early modern Ottoman state together with Cemal Kafadar, Donald Quataert, and Baki Tezcan’s study of the janissary revolts and movements as a widening of the ‘political nation’ led to a reconsideration of the participation of the urban masses in imperial politics. In adeli movement has been incesanother path, the scholarly interest in the Ḳadız� sant ever since Madeline Zilfi’s article and the unpublished theses by Necati € urk and Semiramis C¸avuşo�glu: various studies have focused on the social Ozt€ and political background of the movement, its relationship with Sufi brotherhoods, or its theological and juristic context. Aslıhan G€ urb€ uzel’s fascinating book offers a synthesis of the developments in these two fields, the political and the ideological, using, more particularly, the case of the Mevlev�ı order to illuminate the emergence of what she calls the early modern public sphere in seventeenthcentury Ottoman society. G€ urb€ uzel’s main thesis is that, during the seventeenth century, the conflict between Mevlev�ı and Ḫalvet�ı Sufis, on the one hand, and Ḳadız� adeli preachers, on the other, gave rise to an anti-puritan strand which in fact expressed the successful resistance against the sixteenth-century imperial tendency for a state fully regulating society. In this struggle, G€ urb€ uzel argues, the Sufis and especially the Mevlev�ıs developed a notion of Ottoman civility which emphasized Persianate models of urban culture and a pluralistic view of religion and which defended a private space against imperial surveillance. G€ urb€ uzel’s argument is arranged over six chapters, which lead the reader from the political field and the defence of privacy in the public sphere to the rejection of state surveillance, passing through a study of the seventeenth-century Sufi brotherhoods, especially the Mevlev�ıs, and the ideological debates they led in this period. The first chapter deals with the rise of the urban crowd as an actor in imperial politics; contesting visibility in public space through memorialized places, rituals or festivities went in parallel with rebellions, in which civil crowds were participating more and more. In these developments, both the imperial government and bottom-up movements claimed power through public spectacles. The apex of this rise of a new civic sphere was the Ḳadız�adeli conflict, in which the limits of the state–religion complex were tested: G€ urb€ uzel maintains that the Ḳadız�adelis, although often in conflict with the state authorities, were in # The Author(s) (2024). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jis/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jis/etae029/7691297 by University of Crete user on 08 July 2024 Taming the Messiah: The Formation of an Ottoman Political Public Sphere, 1600–1700 By ASLIHAN GU€ RBU€ ZEL (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2023), xii 318 pp. Price HB £80.00. EAN 978–0520388215. 2 of 4 JOURNAL OF ISLAMIC STUDIES, 2024, VOL. 00, NO. 0 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jis/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jis/etae029/7691297 by University of Crete user on 08 July 2024 essence advocating the same centralizing goal of state control over religious and social life. The reaction to this goal, termed anti-puritanism by G€ urb€ uzel, is the subject of the second chapter, which focuses on the debates around the sam�a˓, the ritual mystical concerts performed by the Mevlev�ıs and other Sufis. The literature defending public performances of sam� a˓ uses the concept of peaceful accommodation (s: ulh: ) to ask for communal privacy, i.e., for a delimitation of state interference in religious practices. G€ urb€ uzel shows that communal privacy was a notion strong in the early modern Ottoman city, from practices of civic solidarity to conflict resolution, and that the fierce ideological (and also activist) struggles around the legitimacy of public sam� a˓ rituals were an expression of the struggle for the legitimacy of diversity and the delimitation of state-religion. The protagonists in this struggle were the Mevlev�ıs, and they are the focus of the next three chapters. The third chapter surveys the social history of the Mevlev�ı order and its becoming a powerful actor in imperial politics: G€ urb€ uzel describes the formation and functioning of the çelebis as a dynasty that, through its networks and alliances, constituted a power broker that successfully moved from a rural environment, empowered through endowments and popular support, to an urban organism that had to be seen by the Ottoman state as an ally, rather than an antagonist. Significantly, this Mevlev�ı hierarchy saw itself as an alternative sovereign, on a par with the sultan’s dynasty, and a legitimate partner in Ottoman social and political order. With the fourth chapter, we move to the ideological level, as G€ urb€ uzel explores the exciting story of the discovery of a new volume of R� um�ı’s Masnevī, namely Book Seven, which allegedly was found in the beginnings of the seventeenth century. As expected, its authenticity was a˓�ıl Ank: arav�ı (d. 1631) was the main commentator who heavily contested; Ism� adamantly advocated that it indeed came from R� um�ı’s pen and did his best to popularize it. G€ urb€ uzel does not stop at the authenticity of the volume: she rightly argues that what is important is how and why it could be considered authentic in the seventeenth century. She convincingly argues that this was due to its political advice, defending Sufi authority as an esoteric power indispensable for ideal rulership. Furthermore, considering the Masnevī as a product of divine revelation enhanced this esoteric authority, offering alternate ways to religious discourse. These political and religious complexities of Mevlev�ı configuration are further explored in the fifth chapter, dealing with another debate, that on the position of the Persian language in Ottoman religious identity. The Mevlev�ı order, based on the Persian text of the Masnevī, promoted a Persianate version of civility characterized by a pro-innovation, pluralist stance in matters religious and social. By defending the Persian language (considered by some of their Ḳadız�adeli opponents as the language of hell), the Mevlev�ıs argued for a conception of the religious sphere that had space for diverse practices and credos, challenging the monopoly of state and the imposition of a rigid orthodoxy in favour of the communal privacy and of a public space that allowed innovation and diversity. In the sixth and final chapter, G€ urb€ uzel extends this argument to explain the heated debates on the use of coffee and tobacco during the seventeenth century: whereas these debates are by now well-known in scholarship, she illuminates the role Sufi Persianate attitudes of privacy and plurality played in the anti-ban literature. This literature effectively expressed the resistance to policies BOOK REVIEW 3 of 4 Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jis/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jis/etae029/7691297 by University of Crete user on 08 July 2024 of moral surveillance that were advocated by the state authorities and the adeli preachers; in this way, the Sufi orders became the protagonists of Ḳadız� the imposition of a communal, non-disciplinary, diversified public sphere, open to social innovation and centred around the coffee-house and the dervish lodge. The epilogue recapitulates these conclusions, arguing that the seventeenth century was a period of new sociabilities, prone to innovations and capable of defending a pluralist public sphere, that led to further developments and changes over the longue dur�ee. G€ urb€ uzel thus presents with clarity a coherent argument that revisits the ideological battles of the Ottoman seventeenth century in a convincing and intriguing way. Using a wide array of primary sources and secondary literature, she demonstrates how the Sufis eventually managed, at the ideological and social level, to tame sultanic authority, at least as much as did the janissaries in the political field. Whereas part of the recent scholarship, including the present reviewer, sought to explain the paradox of a Salafist/fundamentalist movement such as adelis actually advocating a democraticizing, egalitarian vision of socithe Ḳadız� ety and a disenchanted view of the world (through the rejection of Sufi miracles and the primacy of piety over the presence of the supernatural in everyday life), G€ urb€ uzel returns to the more traditional view of the movement as a quasitotalitarian strand trying to impose uniformity and control of private life—and she does so in a genuinely innovative way, connecting the Ḳadız�adelis’ opponents with features of a modern, pluralist vision of diversification and communal privacy. One might debate the degree to which the Ḳadız�adelis’ vision was identified with the point of view of the state (and, in a minor issue, on whether the scribal bureaucracy was influenced by them, as indicated for instance by the late seventeenth-century fiscal reforms, or, as G€ urb€ uzel maintains, by the Mevlev�ıs and their allies). The real issue here would be (as she notes herself in endnote 110 of ch. 1, p. 226) whether uniformity vs diversity or hierarchy vs egalitarianism formed the ‘guiding tension’ in early modern Ottoman society. G€ urb€ uzel favours adelis nor the Mevlev�ıs had any the first option, arguing that neither the Ḳadız� egalitarian tendencies. One might also argue that the Ḳadız�adelis were proponents of ‘moral authority [placed] in the urban public sphere rather than the official bureaucracy’ (p. 66), with their emphasis on the injunction of ‘commanding right and forbidding wrong’ (amr bi-l-ma˓r� uf wa-l-nahī ˓ani l-munkar) upon every member of the community. Another objection might concern the author’s focus on the Mevlev�ı order, in sharp contrast with contemporaneous and modern scholars who stressed the Ḫalvet�ı opposition: whereas she is quite convincing on the Mevlev�ıs’ major role in the anti-puritan opposition, it remains puzzling that all Ottoman chroniclers of the Ḳadız� adeli conflict focus on the role of the Ḫalvet�ıs as their main opponents. In all, the present reviewer would like to see a more solid social context, i.e., reflection on the social background of these different strands (G€ urb€ uzel mentions a relevant discussion in endnote 118 of ch. 1, p. 227, only to dismiss it quite briefly). In my view, the state/society dichotomy somehow ignores the stratification of society; G€ urb€ uzel does expand on the relationship of the military with the Mevlev�ı networks, yet I think that the relationship of the Ḳadız� adelis with the state apparatus begs for more elaboration. 4 of 4 JOURNAL OF ISLAMIC STUDIES, 2024, VOL. 00, NO. 0 Marinos Sariyannis FORTH/Institute for Mediterranean Studies E-mail: sariyannis@ims.forth.gr https://doi.org/10.1093/jis/etae029 # The Author(s) (2024). Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com Journal of Islamic Studies, 2024, 00, 1–4 https://doi.org/10.1093/jis/etae029 Book Review Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jis/advance-article/doi/10.1093/jis/etae029/7691297 by University of Crete user on 08 July 2024 These remarks are to be taken as an agenda for future research, rather than as criticism: G€ urb€ uzel’s book is a superb description of the political and ideological landscape of the Ottoman seventeenth century and one that opens new roads for our understanding of the complex relation between state, society, and alternate actors and networks of power. As such, the book is at the crossroads of various strands of Ottomanist research and provides a very useful vantage point to observe the social and cultural transformations that led to the eighteenth-century developments. G€ urb€ uzel moves with remarkable agility from theoretical discussions on the public sphere to concrete examples from Ottoman religious and historiographical literature to prove her point, and she offers inspiring insights on the forefront of Ottoman cultural history. Undoubtedly, Taming the Messiah will become a classic and a reference for all future research on the Ḳadız�adeli movement and the creation of an urban public sphere in this period. (Some typos to be corrected in a future impression: p. 221 n. 5 ‘ignominius’, p. 25 ‘indiginize’, p. 47 ‘t-amasha’, p. 86 ‘reportoire’.)