Caliphate Redefined: The Mystical Turn in Ottoman Political Thought

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.