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 picking boys as a levy (devşirme) from the Christian subject communities 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, including the use of firearms. Following this, they were placed in different barracks of the Janissary corps to become elite servant-soldiers.Footnote 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 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁵ Gradually the Janissary 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ¹¹ In Cairo, Tripoli, and Baghdad, some Janissaries formed regional dynasties.Footnote 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 amount of authority over the Janissaries across the empire, acting as their spokesmen, and sometimes providing surety on their behalf.Footnote 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 Janissaries 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.Footnote 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 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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.Footnote 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 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.Footnote 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’.Footnote 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).Footnote 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:

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,Footnote 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, on my feet is worship.’Footnote 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).Footnote 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’.Footnote 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:

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, 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ²⁸

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.Footnote ²⁹ On the contrary, the Ottoman elites endorsed the Bektaşis, not unlike their main competitors, the Mevlevi order.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 the founders of the Ottoman state.Footnote ³³ Although chronologically, this is highly debatable, the Bektaşi foundation myth was profoundly entangled with that of the Ottoman dynasty.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 eighteenth centuries, when the Janissary corps expanded and transformed into a massive social-military body. This association was manifested in the corps ceremonial as Bektaşi sheiks acquired fictive seats in the 94^th 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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:

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.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁴²

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 Janissary 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, 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 discrepancy 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.Footnote ⁴³

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 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁴⁹ Growing networks of merchants, scholars, and Sufis both within the Ottoman empire and between the Ottoman empire and Europe, Iran, Central Asia, and India enhanced their circulation.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 centre. They enjoyed growing military power and diplomatic contacts with the outside world, bypassing Istanbul.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁵⁵

The administrative reform agenda of the New Order was constituted of a diverse repertoire of fiscal and administrative measures proposed by the architects of the reform.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁵⁹

What Ken Adler shows for military engineering in revolutionary France is in many ways relevant to the Ottoman New Order.Footnote 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 logic, and collective discipline.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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:

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 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁷¹

Let us return to Jasper Seetzen, who visited the engineering school in Sütlüce, located on the eastern bank of Golden Horn in Istanbul 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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.Footnote 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’.Footnote 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 scientific tactics and engineered advanced weaponry. Their guide was mathematics: ‘He had the military compass handled within the environment of blood and fire.’Footnote 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.’Footnote 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 Forest de Bellidor (1698–1761).Footnote 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’.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁸² The old was slow, while the new was quick (seri‘) in loading and shooting, attacking and defending. The old 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).Footnote 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 military exercises, they also prayed harmoniously inside the mosques five times a day.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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).Footnote ⁸⁸

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).Footnote 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.’Footnote 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 and severe polarization in Istanbul.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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).Footnote 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.’Footnote 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 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.’Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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’.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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).Footnote ¹⁰³ Against Ibn Arabi's idea of the 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ During this century, hundreds of Naqshibandi-Mujaddidis travelled throughout the Muslim world, reforming a spiritual landscape of Neo-Naqshibandiyya across Eurasia, from Bengal to the Balkans.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ¹¹² Ahmad al-Banna al-Dimyati (d. 1704) and Abdurrahman b. Mustafa al-Aydarus (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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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”.’Footnote 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 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ¹²⁰

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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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 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.Footnote ¹²³ In this regard, it is worth mentioning one person: Mehmed Emin Bursevi (d. 1813).Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote 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) 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ¹³⁰ Before he came to the Ottoman lands, he had travelled in the Russian empire and Caucasia, and wrote an account of his travels.Footnote 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 official historian of the time and a keen observer of discord between the Janissaries and the New Order:

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.Footnote ¹³³ Interestingly, Ulrich Jasper Seetzen met a remarkably similar contemporary character during his stay in Istanbul:

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.Footnote 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 the renowned Mehmed Emin of Bursa.Footnote 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.Footnote 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).Footnote 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.Footnote 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.’Footnote ¹⁴⁰

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.’Footnote ¹⁴¹ Further Kuşmani explained:

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 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.’Footnote 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.Footnote 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).Footnote 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 in a gentle way, through istimalet, that is, popular invitations.Footnote 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ¹⁴⁸