Did Muslim Mystical Traditions Have a Politics in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire?

Asking the question of whether Muslim mystical traditions had a politics raises a number of problems from the outset. For starters, the dominance of otherworldly concerns for most Muslim mystics, at least in theory, ideologically posited the concerns of this world as obstacles to the ultimate goal of experiencing the divine unity. As a result, many Ottoman Muslim hagiographies and biographical notices include stories of former jurisprudents and religious functionaries coming to recognize the pointlessness of their worldly training and activities, followed by their retreat into the service of a humble Sufi shaykh.¹ While withdrawing from their former position in the Ottoman social and institutional hierarchy, they often sold all of their possessions, viewing them as impediments to true enlightenment. Moreover, even when Muslim mystics do appear in the historical record as involved with worldly politics, their activities and concerns often have not registered with modern, post-Enlightenment historians as an animating force behind the political, military, and institutional decision-making that marks the narratives of the Ottoman Empire’s historical trajectory.

It does not help that Ottoman Muslim mystics and their hagio-biographers sought to reinforce this perception to their own audiences. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, Sufi writings had developed a carefully articulated dichotomy between the sphere of political leadership, represented by the Ottoman sultan and his court, and the sphere of religio-mystical leadership, which was preoccupied solely with obedience to God and his worldly representative, the mystical Sufi shaykh. Attempts to blur the line between these “two sultans” by representatives of one group or the other, even though they did occur, were often presented negatively by Sufi and non-Sufi observers alike.²

However, as Ottoman historians have delved deeper into the source base and begun to parse the surviving records in the manuscript archives with greater care, the political role of mystical orders in the Ottoman context has become clearer. While this short exposition cannot do justice to the full sweep of Ottoman history or the diversity of mystical orders present within its domains, I will try to sketch out a broad trajectory of the political impact that Ottoman mystics had on the empire during the early modern period.

One major political role that Ottoman Sufis played was realized through the practice of dream interpretation, which appears in the sources in a variety of forms. In fact, the foundation mythology of the Ottoman Empire was bound up with this practice. The first Ottoman ruler, Osman (d. 1324), recounted to a Sufi shaykh named Edebalı a dream he had about a great tree issuing from his navel to cover the entire world. The shaykh interpreted the dream as symbolic of Osman’s spawning of a great dynastic empire, and for good measure, agreed to Osman’s offer of marriage to his daughter, Mal Hatun, a match that Edebalı had rejected up to this point. By throwing his spiritual authority behind Osman, who was but one of many contestants for power in the early fourteenth-century world of competing Anatolian principalities, Edebalı’s action can be seen as legitimizing the very foundations of the Ottoman dynasty. While it should be noted here that the first accounts of this dream do not occur until the latter half of the fifteenth century, the key is to recognize the central role played by Sufi leaders in dynastic legitimization for the Ottoman audience at which this narrative was aimed.³

This was hardly the only example of this type of political involvement in the affairs of the Ottoman house, and dream interpretation could serve as a bridgehead for a more worldly form of politics. One well-known incident involves the succession struggle for the Ottoman throne between the future Sultan Bayezid II (d. 1512) and his brother Cem Sultan (d. 1495). Even prior to the outbreak of the conflict, a Halveti shaykh, Cemâl el-Halveti (d. 1499), took the side of Bayezid II and appears to have been influential in consolidating support for the new sultan throughout the succession struggle. This process was often recounted in hagiographical...