It has been claimed that there are two Islams, one which is peaceful and generously pluralistic, the true Islam, often associated with Sufism, and another Islam, one which is violent and militaristically expansionist, the false Islam. This popular caricature often spills over into discussions of how Sufis represent the gentler Islam, and how the violence of groups like ISIS do not have a basis in true, classical Islam as understood and taught in Sufism. This notion of "two Islams" is deeply flawed, misleading, and ultimately false. The present analysis demonstrating this thesis is via a response to an article written by what can fairly be called a moderate, anti-extremist Sunni Muslim, a Western convert and Shaykh, one informed by classical Sufism, who studied in Cairo and in Saudi Arabia, is currently Dean of the Cambridge Muslim College, Director of Studies at Wolfson College and the Shaykh Zayed Lecturer in Islamic Studies at Cambridge University, and who in 2012 was voted the 50th most influential Muslim in the world by the “Royal Islamic Strategic(!) Studies Centre.” (A matter of public record, feel free to look up his biographical information on Wikipedia, or a site affiliated with him: http://www.masud.co.uk/ISLAM/ahm/, and elsewhere.)
Born Timothy Winter, the second paragraph of Islamic scholar Shaykh Abdal Hakim Murad’s article, “Spiritual Life in Ottoman Turkey [the full article is appended below],” states, “The slow infiltration of Islam among the Turks from the ninth century onward replaced the ozan with the Muslim figure of the ata, who transmitted a rudimentary form of Sufism to his people. The ata also taught the virtues of the gaza, the war for God.”
From this it is clear that Sufism itself taught “war for God” which, not being pacifist, is not in and of itself a critique of Sufism. As I will show, however, Murad’s article goes further than this and affirms that the doctrine of “war for God” was waged specifically against Christianity and Christian culture as embodied in Byzantium, a "war for God" against Christendom which was taught specifically by the Sufis.
The opening lines of his article say it clearly: “the Ottoman state typically grounded its claims to legitimacy in its successful implementation of the gazi tradition of triumphant war against Byzantium.” Notice Murad's use of the word "tradition," a "tradition" of war against Christian civilization. Now, few people would say that the Ottoman Empire was not fundamentally Islamic, and so again we see how unambiguously Islam can identify itself precisely as that which wars against Christians. Now it needs to be kept in mind that Byzantium was not a generic empire (as if there is such a thing), it was “the” Christian empire for over a thousand years, populated by the “people of the Book.”
The city of Constantinople was founded by Constantine, the first Christian emperor, during the historic turn of Rome from paganism to Christianity in the fourth century. The Ottoman empire’s legitimacy, then, in its own eyes, even its very identity, was established in its being functionally anti-Christian. Murad said of the Ottoman empire that it “typically grounded its claims to legitimacy [as a specifically Muslim empire] in its successful implementation of the gazi tradition of triumphant war [of God] against [Christian] Byzantium.” It was precisely in this “war for God” against a Christian government with its Christian people that made them legitimate in their own eyes as Muslims in their own right. In other words, their self-defining characteristic was war against the Christians. In order to even be fully Muslim, they had to maintain this "war for God" against Byzantium. The Muslim empire was therefore inextricably bound up in its very ethos with a religious conquest of Christendom.
Yet Sufism did not distance Islam from this violence against Christians, for “this Sufi vision cherished by simple cavalrymen gave the Turks a military prowess whose achievements in some ways recalled the early conquests of Islam.” It is thus according to Murad precisely the “Sufi vision” which empowered even the "simple cavalrymen" to violence and “recalled the early conquests of Islam.” Yet, who did the early Islamic conquerors (seek to) defeat? Christians! One would hope that Sufism would attempt to lessen the violence against the “people of the Book,” but here we see Sufism being the very means and motive for establishing a continuity of violence with perpetual conquest stretching all the way from the earliest Islamic expansionism onward all the way to the Ottoman form. The factor that is constant is precisely this warring against Christians and Christendom.
He goes on to say, “The most prominent example was Ak Semseddin (d.1459), the physician, mystic poet and Sufi instructor (seyh) who encouraged Mehmed II to conquer Constantinople, and who preached the first Friday sermon at the former cathedral of Aya Sofya.” In other words, the Sufis were at the center, directly encouraging and advocating violence, imperialism, and triumphalism against Christians at the highest political levels. After Mehmed II defeated Constantinople, his Sufi advisor entered into one of the most famous sites of Christian worship, preaching the conquest of Islam in one of the holiest Christian cathedrals in the world, a place worshipped in by Christians for almost a thousand years: Hagia Sophia.
Oddly enough, the author is clear to show that the Ottoman ruler, who he stresses was well educated, was not acting independently, but in direct reliance on his Sufi advisor: “The power of his spiritual impact, as well as the Islamic sophistication of the ruler, are evident in much of Mehmed’s poetry, as in a lyric poem where the sultan uses the classical Sufi metaphors of spiritual drunkenness to affirm his dependence on his preceptor:” In short, "dependent on his preceptor," it was a marriage of the esoteric and the exoteric, Sufism and Imperial might, which together sought to wrest Constantinople from the Christians as an expression of a, if not the, perfectly legitimate form of Islam. The Sufis therefore helped to engineer the conquering and subjugation of the Christian empire and its peoples.
And no longer merely “unlettered Turkish nomads” with military might, no longer “men of the sword with little time either for a sophisticated contemplative mysticism or for formal scholarship,” to match their swords they now are characterized by Murad as having achieved great intellectual sophistication: “The Conqueror’s refined spiritual literacy was the product of over a century of cultural development in the Ottoman realm.” If one wanted to claim an enlightened Islam for the Ottomans, refined and spiritual, one would therefore also be forced to include systematic violence and aggressive expansionism against Christians as a necessary expression of this “enlightened Islam.”
Neither simpletons nor innovators, their war against Christianity was motivated from “a more classical Islamic piety by Sufi poets of a didactic and orthodox tendency, who wrote in the vernacular so as to be understood.” It was therefore seen at the highest levels as a classical and orthodox expression of Islam to practice Islamic conquest against Christians, and so cannot be seen merely as an aberration or an exception to the rule put forward by a few “radical fundamentalists.” Not all Islam may be "radicalized" like ISIS, but that in no way lessens its militaristic and expansionist spirit. It was a centuries long effort (Byzantine Alexandria was conquered less than ten years after Muhammad’s death, deeply wounding Byzantine economy), a Muslim tradition of conquest of Christians guided by their highest teachers and their highest Islamic principles, a religious obligation motivated to fulfill a “prophecy” of Muhammad stating that his people would conquer Christian Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine empire, and therefore the empire itself.
According to “authentic” chains of transmission (according to one source these are: Ahmad, al-Musnad 14:331 #18859 [sahih chain according to Hamza al-Zayn] al-Hakim, al-Mustadrak 4:421-422 [sahih according to him and al-Dhahabi concurred] al-Tabarani, al-Mu`jam al-Kabir 2:38 #1216 [sahih chain according to al-Haythami 6:218-219] al-Bukhari, al-Tarikh al-Kabir 2:81 and al-Saghir 1:306 Ibn `Abd al-Barr, al-Isti`ab 8:170 [hasan chain according to him] al-Suyuti, al-Jami` al-Saghir [sahih according to him]) Muhammad is said to have said, “Verily you shall conquer Constantinople. What a wonderful leader will her leader be, and what a wonderful army will that army be!” In other words, the military conqueror of the capital of Christendom is actually praised by Muhammad. If this is not an explicit religious sanction for expansionist, aggressive violence permanently enshrined at the root of the Islamic religion, and clear motive for it, then I don't know what a religious sanction for violence even could be. The mention of an army indicates clearly that it was to be violent as well. Another example of this theme in the hadith is: "As one of these signs, Imam Ahmad reports in his Musnad that Abdullah bin Amr bin Al-‘As (ra) mentioned: 'Whilst we were around the Prophet (saw) writing he was asked, ‘Which of the two cities will be opened first, Constantinople or Rome? ‘He (the Prophet Muhammad) answered, ‘The city of Heraclius [Constantinople] will be opened first!'” Muhammad thus sees Islam as totally conquering both East and West, Constantinople and Rome. Other prophecies predict the military(!) conquering of several other Christian cities and regions, including Europe, as a matter of religious prophecy in their minds, a permanent mindset to conquer, and so if the intense drive to fulfill religious martial prophecy which motivated the conquest of Constantinople through force of arms is any indication, Europe was and will be no less of a prize in the mind of even traditional, non-radicalist Muslims. For a Muslim to not advocate this would, in a very real sense, be to contradict the very utterances and intentions of the Islamic prophet.
As Murad said, the Muslim gospel included violence against their enemies, but this was not simply the expression of a single Sufi school, a decentralized grassroots movement, or an unorthodox or nontraditional school of law: “Thanks to such literary proselytising, and under the sultans’ guidance and patronage, by the time Constantinople had been won for Islam in 1453 the Ottoman state and much of the urban population had committed itself definitively to the orthoprax Hanafi school of law, the orthodox Moturidi theology, and to a variety of Sufi tarikats.” This quote also shows that it was not only one form of Sufism which was committed to this violent enterprise, but a “variety” of Sufi traditions, or “tarikats.” The Qadiris, founded by al-Qadir al-Jilani, a Sufi Order still in existence today and quite popular, numbered among its members spiritual advisors to Mehmed II, “the Conqueror.”
Murad’s article also shamefully rationalizes this subjugation of Christians and the purposeful destruction of a thousand year old Christian empire by saying: “the Ottoman system seemed to provide an opportunity for Muslims to seek perfection through the exercise of political power, and for Christians to seek perfection by renouncing it in the manner required by the Gospels.” This clearly shows how Islam sees its own perfection in political terms, terms of acquiring and exercising political hegemony, and also that it has no difficulty seeing itself as the divinely ordained martial power which “provide[s] an opportunity… for Christians to seek perfection by renouncing” political power, or rather, in truer terms, having it wrested from them by intentional, systematic, and centuries long violent expansionism performed against them in the program of Islam’s self-expression to “seek perfection through the exercise of political power.” The violent seizure of political power is therefore natural to Islam, even in the minds of its most orthodox and spiritual leaders.
A case in point concerning their spiritual triumphalism is when the author even claims that Saint Gregory Palamas, a hero of Christian Orthodoxy, who was captured by Muslims (in the last few years of his life), was himself likely to have derived some of his techniques of prayer from them, when in fact his texts concerning inner prayer were all written prior to his abduction by Muslim pirates and so long before he was delivered by them as a political prisoner to the Ottoman court. Moreover, there is a clear tradition of Christian prayer as practiced by Gregory going back centuries, as evidenced in the "Philokalia," a compendium of texts on prayer and the inner life dating from the fourth to the fifteenth century, spanning over a thousand years. If anything is more likely, it is that Islam derived its esoterism from conquered Christian peoples.
The author even goes so far as to say that the centuries long expansionist violence, which had systematically crippled the Byzantine Empire, actually helped "preserve" the Church: “The Muslim conquest had preserved the Greek Church from the threat of annihilation by the growing power of the Latin West.” How, in an effort to fulfill Muhammad's prophetic martial directives, the Muslims intentionally create severe problems for the Byzantines by critically weakening them through centuries of attempted conquest, and then translate this into “preserving” them from the Latins (who the Muslims also sought to conquer), is really a marvel of apologetics. If Islam was a “religion of peace,” then the Byzantines would not have needed to be “preserved” by Muslim subjugation in the first place, for they wouldn't have conquered so much of Byzantium to begin with. One must ask why the Muslims sought to expand with such martial fervor at all. It was not merely for food or gold, but to fulfill their prophetic injunction to "war for God" and claim the known world in the name of Islam. As such, it is in fact conceivable and arguable that the Islamic aggression and consequent economic havoc wrought on the Christians in the East and on the Christians in North Africa and Spain along the Mediterranean Sea, restricting or even ending trade and commerce across many areas, contributed to the collapse of the Roman Christian empire, the historical exigencies of this resulting, as a consequence of Islam, in the divided East and West.
In sum, Murad’s article confirms that even the most “spiritual” population of Islam, the Sufis, contributed directly to the war-mongering of the Ottoman Muslims. It shows that there is a strong religious commitment to violence against Christians motivated and maintained throughout Islamic history and at the highest levels of Muslim spiritual authority, from Muhammad’s “prophecies” to the urgings of Sufi Shaykhs. This can also shed light on why Islam seems to have so few theological checks against political violence and is so easily co-opted into the rhetoric of violence, for it is ideologically violent from its founder all the way to those who seek to realize his predictions of conquest. From the first “rightly guided caliph” to Mehmed the Conqueror, from the gates leading outside of Arabia to the northern shores of Spain, from the southern shores of the Mediterranean to the mud outside of Vienna as late as the end of the seventeenth century, Islam has sought purposely and as a matter of “prophetic” fulfillment to seek to conquer Christendom (and likely anyone else, if the Buddhists, Hindus, and Sikhs be asked) whenever and wherever possible and by means of force. For Muslims, then, political control by violence is a legitimate means of expressing one’s Islam in the eyes of even classical Islamic Sufism, and nothing intrinsic to Islam can be shown to contravene this global inheritance of violence.
Though no empire is innocent of crime in history, Murad's essay shows that the violent expansionism of Islam must be seen not as an aberration but as the natural expression of Islam itself, for there is precious little theologically in Islam to mitigate this propensity towards violence such as is found in the Christian Gospel. Though Christians have erred in their practice of government, there is within the New Testament itself a clear, categorical, and unambiguous mitigation of both violence and “this-world” politicking such that errors of Christian government can be clearly shown to be exactly that: aberrations and errors, deviations from the Gospel. Christianity inherited the Roman Empire, and once it became Christian, it did not demonstrate anywhere near the expansionist ferocity which was later to be demonstrated by Islam. In Islam, however, Muhammad himself, unlike Christ, set the agenda via his "prophecies" to practice military conquest, the "war for God" to subjugate all things non-Muslim; and even the Sufis, who have been made to seem in culture today as the “peaceful Muslims,” and no doubt there truly are many peaceful Muslims who would not so much as harm a fly, even the Sufis have been instrumental in the ideologically driven waging of war against Christendom, even taking pride in conquering the "people of the Book."
Though I am not advocating pacifism as my standard of critique of Islam, nor suggesting that there is a such thing as an “innocent empire,” the fact of violent and intentional expansionism by Muslims against Christian territories (and all other non-Muslim civilizations) from the very beginning is historically incontrovertible; and furthermore it is found to be rooted and motivated both in primary texts, such as the hadith(sayings) of their prophet, if not the Qur’an itself, and also in well-known historic precedent as exemplified by the Ottomans as well as by other Muslim empires such that it seems inescapable to conclude that Islam is inherently politically violent as a matter of both outward and inward spiritual promptings, not only as a matter of exoteric exigency but also via its esoteric motivations and deepest spiritual yearnings. Thus any theory which seeks to locate a truer, gentler Islam in the Sufis is false. Despite the reality that there are peaceful Muslims, there is no way to extricate the tradition of aggressive religious expansionism such as to say that the more violent ones are somehow less Muslim. There is only one Islam, and its false gospel necessarily includes military and political hegemony. We therefore must remember that Byzantium is part of Western history, part of the history of Western, Christian civilization, and that the conquering of Byzantium was not a conquering of the "other," but of us, and that the urge to conquer will not end in the mind of Muslims until they realize the violent dreams of their prophet. Realizing this, we may be able to learn before it is too late.
O Lord, save Thy people and bless Thine inheritance!
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The article as found is appended below, from:
Spiritual Life in Ottoman Turkey
Abdal Hakim Murad
During the first, formative centuries of its existence, the Ottoman state typically grounded its claims to legitimacy in its successful implementation of the gazitradition of triumphant war against Byzantium. Dwelling in retreats in the mountains of north-western Anatolia, from which they descended gradually to wrest control of the Bithynian plain from their Christian foes, the first Ottomans were typically men of the sword with little time either for a sophisticated contemplative mysticism or for formal scholarship.
As the rulers of villagers and nomadic pastoralists with no longstanding institutions of Islamic learning, the early Anatolian Turks practised a distinctive version of Islam nourished in part by their Central Asian roots. Those roots were ultimately shamanistic: before their conversion to Islam the Turkish religious life had centred on the ozan, the shaman who made auguries for his clan, cast spells, and presided over its collective rites. The slow infiltration of Islam among the Turks from the ninth century onwards replaced the ozan with the Muslim figure of the ata, who transmitted a rudimentary form of Sufism to his people. The ata also taught the virtues of the gaza, the war for God, which would inculcate the virtues of self-denial and chivalry, and bring to the sincere gazi the prospect of everlasting reward in Paradise.[i]
This Sufi vision cherished by simple cavalrymen gave the Turks a military prowess whose achievements in some ways recalled the early conquests of Islam. The first Ottoman sultans were urged to continue the fight for the faith by spiritual guides whose fame and sanctity had brought them into the intimate circle of the ruler, thereby adding to his charisma. The most prominent example was Ak Semseddin (d.1459), the physician, mystic poet and Sufi instructor (seyh) who encouraged Mehmed II to conquer Constantinople, and who preached the first Friday sermon at the former cathedral of Aya Sofya.[ii] The power of his spiritual impact, as well as the Islamic sophistication of the ruler, are evident in much of Mehmed’s poetry, as in a lyric poem where the sultan uses the classical Sufi metaphors of spiritual drunkenness to affirm his dependence on his preceptor:
Again, let us away, intoxicated, to the tavern of ruin,
Let us boast of our service to the wine-presser!
Let us watch as he brings from the wine-jar something for the world.
The Conqueror’s refined spiritual literacy was the product of over a century of cultural development in the Ottoman realm. Following the capture of Bursa in 1326 and the subsequent creation of a large Ottoman urban class, the unlettered Turkish nomads who migrated to the cities had been introduced to a more classical Islamic piety by Sufi poets of a didactic and orthodox tendency, who wrote in the vernacular so as to be understood. Among these masses, particularly influential were works such as the Mevlidof Süleyman Çelebi (d.1422), a great anthem for the birthday of the Prophet, which unlike most earlier attempts at creating a Turkish Islamic poetic tradition was much more than the mere translation of a Persian original. Prose works began to appear, chief among which is the Muzekki en-Nufûs of Esrefoglu Rumi of Iznik (d.1469). His declared intention of writing ‘in simple Turkish’ to attract support among ordinary people without a high Islamic education is also evident in his popular collection of mystical poems.[iv]
Thanks to such literary proselytising, and under the sultans’ guidance and patronage, by the time Constantinople had been won for Islam in 1453 the Ottoman state and much of the urban population had committed itself definitively to the orthoprax Hanafi school of law, the orthodox Moturidi theology, and to a variety of Sufi tarikats. In the complex patterns of post-conquest Ottoman society, three hierarchies came to wield spiritual power over the populace and maintained a stable ascendancy which only began to be broken with the onset of Westernising reform in the mid-nineteenth century.
Firstly, there was the ilmiyye (‘learned’) institution which provided the muftis, judges, schoolteachers and mosque imams for the empire,[v] a single hierarchy which culminated in the supreme office of the seyhülislam, who handed down authoritative doctrine and legal opinion to the entire empire. This ‘official’ Islam, which legitimised and in turn enjoyed the financial patronage of the state, provided the formal religious backbone of Ottoman Muslim society.
Secondly, there was the self-financing but officially sanctioned network of guilds (esnaf). These, which evolved more complex forms in Ottoman society than elsewhere in the Islamic world, grew from informal fraternities of young men, often bachelors known as ahis, who subscribed to the canons known collectively as fütüvvet, a principle which may lie at the source of the chivalric ideal in the West. Mutually supportive, morally upright, and devoted to the ideal model of fütüvvet that was the caliph Ali (r.a.), these groups had by the fifteenth century evolved into formal guilds which probably included almost all urban craftsmen. The governing documents of these guilds, known as fütüvvet-nâmes, detailed not only the religious and moral duties of the guild members, but also the degrees of rank which stretched from the humble grade of apprentice up to the headship of the guild. Often each apprentice (nâzil) would be allocated a ‘senior on the path’ (yol atasi) and, from among more senior apprentices, two ‘brothers’ (yol kardesleri) to assist and counsel him. The organisation of some vocations was much more hierarchically rigid than others, and the leatherworkers, in particular, came to recognise one universal ‘guide’, the Ahi Baba, whose grand lodge was at the Anatolian town of Kirsehir, and whose authority was often acknowledged by other guilds as well.[vi]
The third spiritual hierarchy in Ottoman Turkey was provided by the Sufi orders (tarikats). Many dozens of these groups appear down the six centuries of Ottoman history; but for our purposes it will suffice to summarise two broad tendencies.
The first is represented by the Sufi cults of the tribal hinterlands where the high Islamic teaching of the religious colleges (medreses) had not penetrated. These tarikats grew up around charismatic leaders who were prone to making dramatic claims to mahdistic or messianic status, and whose attitude to the orthodoxy preached by the ulema was, more often than not, somewhat contemptuous. An example was Barak Baba of Tokat, an early fourteenth century dervish whose appearance strongly recalled the Turcoman shamanistic patrimony. He wore only a red loincloth and a turban adorned with two buffalo horns. Wandering the streets with his similarly attired disciples, he would blow a horn, play a drum, and dance. While he beat soundly any of his followers who neglected the canonical prayers, he failed to keep the fast of Ramadan. His beliefs, apparently shared by many others, involved faith in reincarnation, and an extreme devotion to the caliph Ali.[vii]
Such antinomianism drove a range of other movements. One such was the loosely defined Kalendar brotherhood of ragged wanderers, often indifferent to the normative rules of Islamic practice (sari‘at), who gathered in their own lodges (kalendarhanes) where, at least according to the chroniclers, all manner of wickedness took place. The chiliastic beliefs of some of these tarikats did more than simply scandalise the orthodox: they could end in open rebellion against the authorities. The most disastrous from the Ottoman viewpoint was the Safavid tarikat, which, although founded by the orthodox Safi al-Din Ardabili (d.1334), was suddenly converted to extreme Shi’ism at the hands of his fourth successor, Seyh Cüneid (d.1460). Cüneid’s grandson Isma’il (d.1524) claimed to be both God Himself and a reincarnation of Ali.[viii] Under Isma’il, whose deputies were mainly Turcoman nomad chieftains from Anatolia, the formerly Sunni country of < w:st="on">Iran was forcibly converted to Shi’ism amid extreme scenes of massacre and religious persecution which are more reminiscent of sixteenth-century European history than of that of the Middle East.[ix]
Such examples drove the Ottomans to suppress the extreme (ghulat) Shi’i tarikats on their territory. This was partly achieved through the execution or deportation of those of their members who were in rebellion against the state, and partly through the official encouragement of other popular tarikats which contrived to combine a devotion to the figure of ‘Ali with a loyalist attitude to the Ottoman rulers.
Most significant in this category was the Bektashi order of dervishes. Its founder, Haci Bektas, was an immigrant who came to Anatolia from Khurasan at some point in the late thirteenth century. A work reliably attributed to him, the Makalat, shows him to have been a learned Sufi who recognised the necessity of adherence to the sari‘at. He describes the forty ‘stations’ of the Sufi path, ten under each of the classic heads of Sari‘at (the Law), Tarikat (the Way), Hakikat (the Truth), and Ma’rifat (Knowledge). The stations of Tarikat, for instance, are: repentance (tevbe), aspiration (iradet), dervishhood (dervislik), mortification (mücahede), service to the brethren (hidmet), fear of God (hawf), hope in Him (ümid), the special dress code and regalia of the Bektashi way, love for the absent Beloved (muhabbet) and passion upon experiencing Him (ask).[x]
Despite the seemingly mainstream origins of the Bektashis, the process which had subverted the Safavis was soon at work, and subsequent generations of rural Turks introduced the ghulat beliefs which are said to characterise the tarikat to this day. But despite the hostility of the ilmiyye institution, the staunch loyalism of the Bektashis offered the sultans a means of harnessing the Alid piety of the Turcomans in the service of the state. The Janissaries, the slave-infantry which made up the core of the Ottoman army until the early nineteenth century, were usually affiliated to this tarikat.
The second type of Ottoman Sufism is represented by a range of more solidly orthodox tarikats. Among the most conspicuous of these was the Naksibendiye, founded by Baha’ al-Din Naqshband of Bukhara. Within a century of its founder’s death in 1389, the first Naksibendi tekke (dervish lodge) had been established in Istanbul by Molla Abdullah Ilahi, an itinerant scholar from the Anatolian town of Simav who had received the Naksibendi initiation from Khwaja ‘Ubaydullah Ahrar in Samarqand. After his return to < w:st="on">Turkey, Molla Ilahi launched a large-scale mission among the Turks, calling them to orthodox Islam. His literary legacy in three languages includes works such as the Way of the Seekers (Maslak al-TalibIn), and his famous Travelling-fare of the Lovers (Zad al-Mushtaqin). A ‘second founder’ of the Naksibendi order in < w:st="on">Turkey was Mawlana Khalid Baghdadi (d.1827), a Kurd who brought the Naksibendi-Mujaddidi order from Delhi and worked to ensure its diffusion throughout the empire.[xi]
Partly because their staunch orthodoxy recommended them to the ulema, the Naksibendiye were among the most widespread and politically and socially influential Ottoman tarikats. Their impact today on many Turkish religious politicians is said to be considerable.[xii]
Other key tarikats included the Kadiriye, founded by ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Jilani of Baghdad (d.1167). The principal Turkish representative of this order, Haci Bayram Veli of Ankara (d.1430), was a pupil of the ascetic Hamiduddin Aksarayi (d.1412). While he left no literary legacy other than a couple of poems, his sanctity and the profusion of his acolytes established the Bayramiye as a noteworthy tarikat in its own right.[xiii] Two of his deputies, Ak Semseddin, the spiritual guide of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror, and Esrefoglu Rumi, have already been mentioned. A later branch of this popular tarikat, the Celvetiye, was founded by Aziz Mahmud Hudâ’i (d.1629), theorist of the incantatory properties of the Divine Names. It was expounded by the prolific Ismail Haqqi of Bursa (d.1724), whose Ruh al-Bayan, a ten-volume commentary on the Koran, is considered one of the major literary monuments of later Sufism.[xiv]
Another Bayrami saint was Dede Ömer Sikkini of Göynük (d.1475), an austere figure who revived the early Khurasani tradition of the ‘path of blame’ (melâmatiye), which seeks to achieve true sincerity by performing actions which, although not sinful, bring public contempt upon the spiritual wayfarer. The Bayramiye-Melâmatiye tarikat persisted through Ottoman history, and, while sometimes frowned upon by the ulema, spurred other tarikats to introduce elements of the melâmati philosophy.[xv]
The Suhrawardiye was another urban tarikat, founded by ‘Umar al-Suhrawardi (d.1234), whose classic Arabic manual of Sufism, ‘Awarif al-Ma’arif was translated into Turkish by Ahmet Bigâwi (d.1458). The main Anatolian branch of this tarikat was the Zeyniye, named after Zeyneddin Hafi of Khurasan (d.1438), whose two Anatolian missionaries Abdurrahman Merzifoni and Abdullatif-i Kudsi spread the order throughout the Central Anatolian towns.[xvi]
One of the most intricate stories in Ottoman Sufism is that of the Halveti tarikat, founded in Tabriz by ‘Umar Khalvati (d.1397), whose disciple Yahya Shirvani (d.1464) became the order’s missionary to Anatolia. The important Sa‘baniye branch of this order was established by Sa‘ban-i Veli of Kastamonu (d.1568), celebrated, along with Rumi, Haci Bektas and Haci Bayram, as one of the Four Pillars (aktab-i arba‘a) of Anatolian Sufism. Like the other ‘Pillars’, he was celebrated for urging the army to show courage, and for bringing Islam to many Christian regions of the empire. In this respect, the Four Pillars can be compared to the Wali Songo, the Nine Saints of Java, who brought about mass conversions to Islam in South-east Asia during the same period.
The Egypt-based Gülseniye founded by Ibrahim Gülseni (d.1533) was a Halveti sub-branch whose influence in < w:st="on">Turkey came largely via the intellectualised mystical poetry of its founder. Another branch was the Misriye, named for the talented poet Niyazi Misri (d.1694). A further branch, the Cerrahiye, was founded by Nureddin Cerrahi (d.1722), whose lodge in the Karagümrük quarter of Istanbul is today the main conservatory of the traditions and particularly the musical heritage of later Turkish Sufism.[xvii]
The Rifai order, which traced its lineage back to Ahmad al-Rifa’i of Basra (d.1182), came to Anatolia in the fourteenth century, and thence penetrated < w:st="on">Bosnia and the territories of the Volga Tatars. The Rifai seyh Abu’l-Huda of Aleppo (d.1909), in particular, was known as one of the spiritual directors of Sultan Abdülhamit II.[xviii]
The Kazeruniye tarikat, founded by Abu Ishaq al-Kazaruni of Shiraz (d.1034), which arrived in Anatolia in the fourteenth century, was famous for its proselytising zeal among non-Muslims and the enthusiasm with which its members took part in the gaza.[xix]
Better known than all these tarikats was the Mevleviye, founded by Jalal al-Din Rumi (d.1273). This was an élite tarikat, which numbered ulema, senior bureaucrats and even sultans among its members: the early Ottoman rulers and princes wore the woollen Mevlevi (‘Hurasani’) cap,[xx] while the reforming Selim III (1789-1808) was an enthusiastic member and patron of the order. A small number of disciples were authorised to perform the devrân, the famous slow turning rite on account of which European travellers styled them the ‘Whirling Dervishes.’ Intellectually and aesthetically inspired by the poetry of Rumi, the Mevlevis produced some of Turkey’s finest musicians and calligraphers, and also the Turkish language’s most sophisticated religious poet, Gâlib Dede of Galata (d.1799), whose brilliant extended poem Beauty and Love (Hüsn ü Ask) belies the stereotype of Muslim ‘cultural decline’ during that period.[xxi] Another feature of the later Mevlevis, as with many Halvetis, Bayramis, and some others, was a strong devotion to the family of the Prophet, an attitude which some of them pushed beyond the point usually reached in Sunni piety, so that pilgrimages to Karbala, commemorations of the death of Imam Hüseyin and other devotional emphases more usually associated with Shi’ism became widespread. However, this ‘devotional Shi’ism’, a characteristic of Turkish piety even outside the tarikats, almost never stepped over the dividing-line into ‘sectarian Shi’ism’. As the Mevlevi poet Esrar Dede (d.1797) expressed it:
I am the slave of the lovers of the Prophet,
Neither a Kharijite nor a misled Shi’ite am I;
I am the bondsman of Abu Bakr, ‘Umar and ‘Uthman,
All these orders, while differing very widely in their rituals, shared some important common functions within Ottoman Turkish society. The silsila, the initiatic chain which linked the living, through the dead masters of the order, to the Prophet himself, was proof of the integration of an Anatolian or Rumelian, however recent his conversion, into the mainstream of Islamic society. The tekke of each tarikat provided both a refuge from the upheavals of the outside world and a consoling context for recalling its transient status. A few Sufis, particularly the kalendars, chose the life of mendicancy, while others became hücrenisins, residing permanently in the lodges; but the great majority remained part of the wider social matrix, following the principle of khalvat dar anjuman - ‘spiritual retreat in the midst of company’. For many Turks, most aspects of life were guided by and interpreted in terms of the teachings of the seyhs, while the initiation (bay‘at) into the order formed an important rite of passage for young people. Through participating in the chants and songs handed down in the lodges, the new generation acquired a familiarity with a large body of Turkish literature; while in the Mevlevi tekkes a knowledge of Persian was also inculcated. The lodges provided, too, opportunities for organising the public virtues required of pious Muslims. Travellers, even of other tarikats, could expect to find refuge within their walls. Special meals were provided for Ramadan and the five ‘candle nights’ (kandil geceleri) of the year. Soup kitchens for the poor, medical services, public scriptoria, hostels for students or other worthy paupers, refuges for dismissed statesmen, mediation for family or tribal disputes: these and other social services were regularly dispensed by the larger dervish lodges.[xxiii]
Not infrequently a tekke would be attached to the tomb of a saint, in which case it was termed a dergâh. The Companions had visited the Prophet’s tomb in the early days of Islam, and following this precedent many mosques have included or been attached to tombs. The Umayyad Mosque in Damascus, for instance, where the jurist Ibn Taymiyya worshipped, contains the domed mausoleum of John the Baptist (Yahya). In < w:st="on">Turkey, this tradition was continued, and contemplative visits (ziyaret) to the graves (türbe) of important saints and holy warriors remain an important part of conservative religious life. The Companion of the Prophet Abu Ayyub el-Ansari has his tomb by the Golden Horn, abutting a courtyard where for centuries new sultans would be invested with the sword of office, often by the Çelebi of the Mevlevi dervishes.[xxiv]
No account of Turkish spirituality would be complete without a mention of the tekkes’ contribution to musical life. Many tarikats, particularly the Mevleviye and Halvetiye, used instrumental music as part of their ceremony (samâ‘), and over the centuries a large and highly sophisticated repertoire was evolved which provided the fertile core of Turkish music generally. Drawing from Byzantine, Islamic and Turkish-folk precedents, Ottoman sacred music in turn influenced the music of the court, the army and the secular music of society at large. The ilahi genre of hymns, often with words by the early dervish Yunus Emre or by Bektashi poets, was set to a rich variety of rhythmic patterns and melodies, helping to popularise Muslim teachings among the population.[xxv]
While the dances and errant doctrines lurking in some tekkes often drew sharp criticism from the ulema, it is nonetheless true that throughout the Ottoman period theilmiyye institution looked with favour on most of the tarikats. The best known of all Turkish müftis, Kemâlpasazâde (d.1534), had written a fatwa commending the Spanish Sufi Ibn ‘Arabi,[xxvi] while his near contemporary Tasköprüzâde, author of the definitive biographical dictionary of early Ottoman ulema, heaps praise on those scholars who were also Sufis. The life of formal mosque worship, the moral discipline of the guilds, and the emotional intimacy of the tekkes generally coexisted in a complementary relationship, providing a triple source of nourishment for the Turkish soul.
All the above relates to the Muslim majority population. But it should briefly be recalled that the Ottoman Empire was also home to large Jewish and Christian communities, which, despite some legal handicaps, found that the new dispensation generally allowed them to live and worship in faithful adherence to their laws and traditions. The Muslim conquest had preserved the Greek Church from the threat of annihilation by the growing power of the Latin West; as the Grand Duke Loukas Notaras wryly acknowledged on the eve of the conquest: ‘It would be better to see the turban of the Turks reigning over the city than the Latin mitre.’[xxvii] Moreover, it seems that these Muslim and Orthodox worlds overlapped in more than the simple geographical sense. It is probable that many of the spiritual exercises of the Hesychast movement championed by St Gregory Palamas, who had spent a year at the Ottoman court debating with Muslims, were derived from Sufi and Islamic practices.[xxviii]More generally, the Ottoman system seemed to provide an opportunity for Muslims to seek perfection through the exercise of political power, and for Christians to seek perfection by renouncing it in the manner required by the Gospels.
Such an equilibrium proved ill-equipped to survive into the modern age.
(A longer version of this article was first published in the Islamic World Report, 1/iii (1996), 32-42)
NOTES
[i] R. Sesen, ‘Eski Türklerin Dini ve Saman Kelimesi’, Tarih Enstitüsü Dergisi, X-XI (1979-80), 57-90.
[xi] H. Algar, ‘Devotional Practices of the Khalidi Naqshbandis of Ottoman < w:st="on">Turkey.’ Pp.209-227 of R. Lifchez (ed.), The Dervish Lodge: Architecture, Art, and Sufism in Ottoman < w:st="on">Turkey (Berkeley, 1992).
[xii] S. Mardin, ‘The Naksibendi Order in Turkish History’. Pp. 121-42 of R. Tapper (ed.), Islam in Modern < w:st="on">Turkey (London 1993), 134.
[xvii] S. Friedlander, ‘A Note on the Khalwatiyyah-Jarrahiyah Order’. Pp. 233-8 of S.H. Nasr (ed.), Islamic Spirituality: Manifestations (New York, 1991).
[xix] A.J. Arberry, ‘The Biography of Shaikh Abu Ishaq al-Kazaruni,’ Oriens III (1950), 163-81; Kara, Bursa’da, 18-19.
[xxi] A. Schimmel, The Triumphal Sun: A Study of the Works of Jalaloddin Rumi (2nd ed. Albany, 1993); V. Holbrooke, The Unreadable Shore of Love (Austin, 1994).
[xxiv] M. B. Tanman, ‘Settings for the Veneration of Saints’. Pp. 130-71 of Lifchez, op. cit.
[xxv] W. Feldman, ‘Musical Genres and Zikir of the Sunni Tarikats of Istanbul’. Pp. 187-202 of Lifchez, op. cit.
[xxvi] M. Saraç, Seyhülislam Kemal Pasazade: Hayaiı, Sahsiyeti, Eserleri ve Bazi siirleri (Istanbul, 1995), 66.
