Hüseyin Yılmaz. Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. 384 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4008-8804-7. Reviewed by Christopher Markiewicz (University of Birmingham) Published on H-Ideas (December, 2018) Commissioned by Madeleine Elfenbein (Lichtenberg-Kolleg, University of Göttingen) Caliphate Redefined is a remarkable book because it is a complex and detailed work of intellectual history tied to a relatively simple and straightforward point. Modern interpretations of the caliphate still focus on how the caliph was defined by Muslim jurists as the temporal successor of the Prophet Muhammad charged with the affairs of the entire Muslim community. Many of these jurists argued that such a successor should also be a member of Muhammad’s tribe, meaning that the destruction of the Abbasid Caliphate with the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258 is widely viewed as marking the end of the historical caliphate. For decades, modern historians have debated the extent to which Ottoman sultans sought to lay claim to the caliphate on juridical grounds. In this important new book, Hüseyin Yılmaz demonstrates that Ottoman intellectuals certainly redefined the caliphate in the sixteenth century, but not in relation to Islamic jurisprudence. Instead, they offered a new conception of the caliphate as the political expression of the spiritual ideals and expectations articulated by Sufism. tive and conscientious engagement of later generations with received traditions. The first two chapters are the most chronologically oriented of the book. Chapter 1 surveys the array of political writings produced in Ottoman lands from the early fifteenth century through the late sixteenth. Yılmaz offers a periodization that defines the age of Süleyman as exceeding the reign of Süleyman (r. 1520-66 CE) himself to encompass the entire tenth Hijri century (14941591 CE). The periodization is, in part, informed by the paucity of works of political thought produced within the Ottoman domains in the fourteenth century and the explosion of political writing in the sixteenth. His book presents the evolution of Ottoman discourse on rulership through three ages and in this manner grounds his discussion of political thought in the wider political, social, and cultural contexts that informed them. The proposed periods—the Age of Angst (1402-53 CE), the Age of Excitement (1453-1517 CE), and the Age of Perfection (1517late sixteenth century)—are sensibly tied to major waterCaliphate Redefined fills a major gap because it is fully shed moments in the political trajectory of the Ottoman immersed in the wide range of mostly unstudied works sultanate, yet little space is given to articulating why the of Ottoman political thought. In undertaking this study, broader features of these ages suggest angst, excitement, Yılmaz joins a number of scholars who, in recent decades, and perfection. Instead, Yılmaz focuses his discussion on have sought to re-examine the political and intellectual those works that are particularly emblematic of the ages dimensions of post-Mongol Islamic history—that politi- he identifies. cally fragmented and culturally complex historical terA second, more fundamental, purpose of the chapter rain between the so-called classical period, ending in is to differentiate forms of political writing according to 1258, and the rise of the national historiographies in the the methodological or epistemological perspectives they nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yılmaz shows us how ideas, concepts, and political structures developed assumed. These perspectives—ethical, juridical, bureauin earlier periods took on new meanings through the ac- cratic, and Sufistic—were each grounded in particular lit1 H-Net Reviews exhibited a moralist tendency in seeking to influence the behavior of rulers by emphasizing the cultivation of ethical traits—often synonymous with the cardinal virtues— as the fundamental features of the ideal ruler. Fourth, rulers occupied the highest rank among humankind, on a par with prophets, since they assumed responsibility for the welfare of their subjects. erary traditions that informed their authors’ handling of fundamental questions of rule and its ideal expression. All of these traditions predated the Ottomans, yet the explosion of the Sufistic approach is, for Yılmaz, a unique feature of the Ottoman landscape. This mode of political thought was the most diverse, yet it was unified through its concern with situating rule within the parameters of Sufi cosmology, by means of which it examined the temporal and spiritual aspects of rulership and advocated their union in a single individual as the ideal ruler. Whereas chapter 3 deals with the most fundamental features of rulership in the abstract, chapter 4 considers how Ottoman authors conceived these features within the particular framework of the caliphate. A sultanate became a caliphate when executive power was “inspired by God’s governance and modeled after the rulership of ruler-prophets” (p. 191) in an effort to unify temporal and spiritual authority. This conception of caliphate built upon the broadly agreed-upon aspects of the sultanate (explored in chapter 3), but to these were added several significant propositions, all of which bore heavily the imprint of Sufism. The first asserted that caliphal rulership should mirror the Unity of God in his creation. The proposition drew upon Sufi cosmological doctrines that posited the human soul as the microcosm of God’s creation and asserted that an individual attained his or her purpose through the active embodiment of the divine attributes, which were reflected passively in creation. Within Sufi spiritual discourses, this active embodiment is what defined the axis mundi (qutb) or God’s vicegerent (khalifat Allah), whose spiritual perfection maintained the broader cosmic order. When applied to political discourse, the doctrine described an ideal ruler as unifying temporal and spiritual authority through the perfect implementation of God’s governance on Earth. This approach to the caliphate diverged markedly from juridical notions that emphasized the caliph as the successor to the Prophet Muhammad. Rather than focus on jurisprudence or the example of the Prophet’s life, political writers underscored the continuous succession of God’s vicegerents on Earth and so tended to focus as much on pre-Quranic prophet-rulers like Adam, David, and Solomon as on Muhammad. Chapter 2 builds on this central observation by exploring two interrelated developments of the postAbbasid period in Anatolia. The first concerns the mystical turn in the redefinition of the caliphate. Yılmaz identifies Shihab al-Din Yahya Suhrawardi (d. 1191) and his illuminationist philosophy as a key early proponent of a new vision of rule that emphasized intuitive knowledge and divine light as fundamental characteristics of the ideal ruler. For Yılmaz, thirteenth-century western Anatolia, a marginal political and cultural space within the domains of Islam, became the main theater in which the political and intellectual implications of Suhrawardi’s challenge played out among a “new breed of Sufi leaders and rulers” (p. 112). The chapter sets these broader political, social, and intellectual developments in relation to the trajectory of the Ottoman sultanate up to the midfifteenth century, a period in which Ottoman sultans cultivated ties with antinomian Sufi leaders. Beginning in the reign of Murad II (r. 1421-44, 1446-51), such relations gave way to a broader sultanic-Sufi alliance that extended to the urban and learned Sufi confraternities, the intellectual output of which refashioned Ottoman rulership in a new language. In chapters 3 and 4, Yılmaz engages most thoroughly and perceptively with the central ideas that animated political thought among Ottoman authors of the period. Chapter 3 focuses on the concept of the sultanate (saltanat), or executive power. Depending on the intellectual orientations—ethical, juristic, bureaucratic, or Sufi—of an author or work, the particular conceptions or qualifiers varied in accordance with the underlying epistemological perspective. Even so, the majority of these authors exhibited aspects of the Sufi sensibility and broadly agreed upon four key aspects of rule. First, they defended the need for political authority on the basis of certain ontological assumptions about human nature. Second, they tended to emphasize grace from God—as opposed to merit or force—as the most legitimate source of rule. Third, because divine favor could be shown to worthy and unworthy candidates alike, Ottoman writers The last chapter (chapter 5) turns toward the reception and manipulation of these ideas in both the popular imagery and elite ideology of rule during the age of Süleyman. During this period, several broader factors conditioned both popular and elite engagement with political ideas and helped reinforce the pervasiveness of mystified notions of the caliphate. Foremost among these factors was the increasing interimperial rivalry of the Ottomans with their Safavid and Habsburg neighbors, the universal imperial aspirations of which fueled increasingly expan2 H-Net Reviews ther this recent scholarship, nor his awareness of broader parallel developments across Islamic lands, nor the biographical features of his key subjects temper this important thesis of the work. The effect is somewhat distorting since it suggests Ottoman political thought developed primarily as an internal dialectic within Ottoman lands when it is clear that the geographical dimensions of these developments were much more expansive. sive claims to authority. Coupled with these rivalries, the approaching Islamic millennium (1591 CE) heightened eschatological expectations and substantiated a discourse that emphasized the role of Ottoman sultans on the grandest of cosmo-historic stages. These wider imperial and messianic contexts were equally reflected in the Sufi-inspired historical writing of the day, which Yılmaz explores through extensive summaries of sixteenthcentury works that offer creative mystical interpretations of Ottoman genealogy or describe individual sultans in the grandest of eschatological terms as the expected harbinger of End Time (mahdi). The mystical turn in defining rule was at the heart of all of these formulations and demonstrates the extent to which Sufi-inspired conceptions of the caliphate underpinned wider political discourses in Ottoman lands. Part of the reason for this emphasis on Rum may stem from Yılmaz’s explicit decision to focus primarily on political ideas and only secondarily on the broader cultural and social contexts that informed them. As a consequence, although Yılmaz notes the biographical outlines of many of his subjects, Caliphate Redefined does not explore their implications by tracing and examining the relationships that existed between political thinkers across Although Caliphate Redefined focuses on Ottoman time and especially, space. Here, too, works are set in thought in the sixteenth century, its central argument conceptual relation to one another, but less effort is made for the mystical redefinition of the caliphate in the post- to establish their historical relationship (to identify who Abbasid era demands attention from all historians work- read precisely what). In this sense, political ideas mostly ing on Islam or political thought. In synthesizing a vast remain an abstraction or are tied without much substanarray of Ottoman political writing, Yılmaz demonstrates tiation to general political, social, or cultural contexts. beyond any doubt that Ottoman authors were not conThese two minor criticisms must be set against the cerned primarily with the status of Ottoman sultans as outstanding achievements of the book as a whole, which caliphs in the juridical sense. Instead, they developed introduces specialists and generalists alike to a vast arcreative ways to grapple with fundamental ideas about ray of Ottoman political writings from a number of literthe place of humankind in the wider cosmic order, the ary genres, written in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, many nature of political authority, and the cultivation of good of which are only available as manuscripts. In surveygovernance among powerful rulers. Caliphate Redefined ing and summarizing this literature, Yılmaz offers readhighlights the rich texts that conceptualized such goverers a book that is truly encyclopedic in its coverage. At nance. the same time, he offers distillations of key political conYılmaz’s book is also fully aware of parallel develop- cepts and demonstrates how Sufi-minded Ottoman auments in political thought that unfolded outside the Ot- thors conceived of and defined the ideal ruler and detoman Empire during the period under study. For this fended a new vision of the caliphate divorced from juridireason, I was perplexed by Yılmaz’s assertion that the cal considerations. This masterly, comprehensive hanmystical features of Ottoman political thought are em- dling of the subject, coupled with a wholly persuasive blematic of a distinctly Rumi (Balkan-Anatolian) char- central argument, renders the book foundational for the acter. Such a claim largely overlooks evidence—cited history of Ottoman political thought, and one that will throughout the book—suggesting that the mystical turn remain a key resource for scholars decades from now. in political thought was, in fact, part of a much broader Note development in Islamic lands. This has, in fact, been a central thrust of recent scholarship on the political [1]. See, for example, A. Azfar Moin, The Millennial and intellectual developments of post-Abbasid Islamic Sovereign: Sacred Kingship and Sainthood in Islam (New lands.[1] To be sure, Yılmaz acknowledges these broader York: Columbia University Press, 2012); or İlker Evrim developments and recognizes the extra-Rumi origins of a Binbaş, Intellectual Networks in Timurid Iran (Cambridge: number of his key “Ottoman” intellectuals. Even so, nei- Cambridge University Press, 2016). If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-ideas 3 H-Net Reviews Citation: Christopher Markiewicz. Review of Yılmaz, Hüseyin, Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought. H-Ideas, H-Net Reviews. December, 2018. URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=53493 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoncommercialNo Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 4