Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought

Year 2020, Issue: 43, 220 - 223, 01.01.2020

Arif Erbil

https://doi.org/10.26570/isad.650340

Abstract

Hüseyin
Yılmaz’s Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought,
the product of many years of research, is a seminal work in the history of
Ottoman political thought. The book focuses on Ottoman political thought during
the reign of Süleyman I (1520-1566) but connects this period more broadly with
the rise of mystical conceptions of political authority in the post-Abbasid
era. To do this, the author creatively and uniquely examines and engages in
many different genres and texts that were “limited to Rumi expositions
of political thought that include Ottoman authors who either dedicated their
works to the sultan or lived in the core provinces of Asia Minor and the
Balkans” (p. 10). Moreover, the author takes the intellectual exchanges between
this cultural geography and the wider cultural geographical expanse that has
been recently dubbed the “Balkans-to-Bengal Complex” and argues that the
mystical turn, which mainly indicates a Sufistic tone in the post-Abbasid era,
gave shape to Ottoman political thought from the very beginning of the state to
the end of the sixteenth century. 

Keywords

caliphate, Ottoman

References

• Kâtip Çelebi, Keşfü’z-zunûn an esâmi’l-kütübi ve’l-fünün, ed. Rüştü Balcı, İstanbul: Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları, 2007, I, 202; Emir Ca’fer Tugrâ’î, “Enîsü’l-Arifîn Tercümesi” 06 Mil Yz A 3816, fols. 4a-5a.
• Shahab Ahmed, What is Islam: The Importance of Being Islamic, Princeton University Press, 2016.