Ottoman History Podcast - The Spiritual Vernacular of the Early Ottoman Frontier

Episode Date: February 4, 2022

with Carlos Grenier hosted by Maryam Patton | How did one learn to be a good Muslim in the early 15th century? In newly conquered Ottoman lands where Christians and converts lived side by side, how would one go about learning the proper rites and beliefs to hold? This conversation with Carlos Grenier explores the lives and ideas of two brothers, Mehmed Yazıcıoğlu and Ahmed Bican, Sufis of the frontier city of Gelibolu who grappled with this very question. Their response was to craft a synthesis, an Ottoman Islam so to speak, in the form of Turkish texts that guided their communities on the proper way to be a Muslim. They reached an enormous readership and rank as some of the most popular books to ever be produced in Ottoman Turkish. And as Grenier explains, the Yazıcıoğlus articulated a new Ottoman spiritual vernacular forged in the balance between two worlds of the Balkan and Mediterranean frontiers and the Islamic intellectual sphere. « Click for More »

How did one learn to be a good Muslim in the early 15th century? In newly conquered Ottoman lands, where Christians and converts lived side by side, how would one go about learning the proper rights and beliefs to hold? What if you didn't know Arabic? Today's episode explores the lives and ideas of two brothers, Mehmed Yazjoglu and Ahmed Biycan, Sufis of the frontier city of Gelibolu, who grappled with these very questions. Their response was to craft a synthesis, an Ottoman Islam so to speak, in the form of Turkish texts that guided their communities on the proper way to be a Muslim.

These texts reached an enormous readership and rank as some of the most popular books to ever be produced in Ottoman Turkish. The Yazdula brothers expressed, for the first time, an Ottoman spiritual vernacular forged in the balance between the two worlds of the Balkan and Mediterranean frontiers and the Islamic intellectual sphere. Hello and welcome to another episode here at the Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Marian Patton, and today we have Carlos Grenier. Thank you for joining us on the podcast. Thank you so much for having me. Carlos is Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at Florida International University.

His research focuses on religion and politics in the late medieval and early modern Islamic worlds. focuses on religion and politics in the late medieval and early modern Islamic worlds. Today we'll be discussing his new book, The Spiritual Vernacular of the Early Ottoman Frontier, the Yazidju'ullah Family, which is a kind of intellectual history of the Yazidju'ullah brothers Mehmed and Ahmed Bijan, who were some of the most popular religious writers and thinkers of the 15th century. So I thought for the benefit of our listeners, we would just sort of get started with an introduction to Mehmet and Ahmed Bijan themselves. Like, who were they? Why are they important for understanding anything about popular religion in this time? I chose to study Mehmet and Ahmed Bijan, or Mehmet Yazid Jolu and Ahmed Bijan,

because as I began my dissertation process, the process of finding out what I wanted to work on, I was chiefly motivated by two major questions that had just kind of always occupied me since, you know, the beginning of my career in graduate school. I mean, the first was, what exactly was popular religious life in the 15th century in particular? I mean, I saw the 15th century as being a particularly dynamic time period, not only in the lands that would become the heartlands of the Ottoman Empire, but in the Islamic world as a whole. So if we look specifically in Anatolia and Rumelia, we see at the beginning of this century a tremendously open landscape, religiously speaking. We have movements like the movement

of Sheikh Bedreddin. We have the complex ideology and politics of the Ottoman Civil War. We do not have an established ulema hierarchy generating common religious norms across the Ottoman lands, let alone in the rest of Anatolia. If we look at the end of the century, however, we have a kind of much more structured and oriented religious landscape. We have the Ottoman state sort of coalescing into what we today recognize as sort of classical Ottoman Sunni forms. We have to the east, you know, we have the beginning of the Safavid state, right, which had its own specific structured religious norms. But in between, in the 15th century, we must have a transformation happening.

I felt that this transformation was inadequately understood. There's a large gap in our knowledge as to what ordinary Ottomans thought and believed in the 15th century. And this is general. It also applies to the Iranian world as well. So that's one major question. The other thing that I was struck by in this century is that many of the important historical processes seem to be generated from below, in a sense. There was a close interface between the growing structures of state power and popular religious ideas. Again, the example of Sheikh Bedreddin at the beginning of the century, and all of the different sort of what we call heterodox movements that constantly challenged state power and actually forced states to adapt to them.

The gradual sort of incorporation of sort of Sufi imagery and motifs into ruling ideology. All of this, I felt, was very important in defining what the 15th century religious landscape of the Ottoman world was. 15th century religious landscape of the Ottoman world was. So as I tried to investigate this question, I kept running across Ahmed and Mehmed Yazajolu. These were sort of provincial religious figures who lived and worked and spent almost their entire lives in the frontier city of Ghalibolu, occupying the Dardanelles. They were the authors of a set of tremendously popular religious manuals. So Muhammadiyah, a verse, history of the prophet essentially, and Vahd al-Lashikin, which was a kind of another sort of catechistic work, and several other works. These works were tremendously successful. So successful that they were copied more than I think almost any other works written

in Ottoman Turkish. They were printed in the 19th century as far as Kazan and Kashgar. They were translated to Hungarian in the 17th century. They were read by almost everybody. So I sort of realized that if I wanted to study what popular religious dynamics were in the 15th century Ottoman world, these individuals who succeeded in creating a popular civic piety were good places to look. What kinds of texts exactly were the Muhammadiya by Mehmet Yazjoglu and the Anbar al-Ashqeen? Were these like manuals, kind of like the Ilmihal genre?

Or should we understand them as separate from that? They are essentially proto-Ilmihals, I think it would be fair to say. The older brother, Mehmet, wrote the Muhammadiya. It begins essentially as a history with creation, the stories of the prophets, culminating in the story of the Prophet Muhammad. And then following up on that is various discussion of virtues, of the requirements of prayer, discussion of angels, kind of a grab bag of kind of basic

religious principles and ideas and features that every Muslim should know. And that it ends with the narrative of the apocalypse. Broadly speaking, it's structured historically in the sense that it begins with creation and ends with apocalypse. But in between are all kinds of sundry topics about how to be a good believer. In Vu l-Ashakin by the younger brother Ahmed is essentially a prose rendition of this very same text, of the Muhammadiya, with a different tone. I mean, partly because it's prose, it can afford to kind of have these academic,

what would today call a critical apparatus, right? It gives esnads and discusses, you know, his own citations and how he adapted his own sources. But by and large, it's the same content. So these two texts were tremendously successful because they were written in simple Turkish. They were tremendously broad in their subject matter, right? They covered everything from the, you know, Moses on Mount Sinai to how to pray to the history of the prophet to the end times and many places in between. They were intended, according to Ahmed's own words, to provide the people of his land,

and he uses this term, the people of his land with a kind of religious roadmap and thereby kind of orient Rumelian Muslims towards the features of their faith, to which many of them were new, and give them a kind of core set of religious ideas upon which to structure their own identities. So that's, I think, one reason why they were quite successful. I mean, these texts were aimed at creating a Rumelian Muslim people, essentially. And nothing like this had been written before? Or what was the situation like in which the Yazdula brothers were living that sort of led to them crafting these two, what sounds like, basic texts, yet very successful. Yeah, so in this environment, we have had other texts that were somewhat similar written in Turkish. We have the

Mukaddime by Izniki, which in the words of the author was something aimed at instruction for very young people, for boys and girls, on things like how to pray. However, the Yazıcı Olu's seem to be aiming at a little bit of a different social stratum with their writings. They are aiming for people who actually want to know not only how to practice and how to sort of pray and fast and do all that stuff, but also what to believe, what to consider God as, how to orient themselves towards history rather than just towards daily practice. orient themselves towards history rather than just towards daily practice. I mean, they're not by any means kind of highbrow philosophical texts, but they do try to present ideas that move beyond simply basic questions of practice. And in this regard, they were, I think, pretty novel. And I think this is one thing that accounts for their success. The Yazidoglu's were among the

first to successfully transmute all of this kind of Arabic religious sciences that they had been reading into a simple Turkish that was genuinely accessible to ordinary people. You mentioned already the content sort of, you know, emphasizing practice, but when it came to the more philosophical things, like what you said about how to understand God, for example, where did those ideas come from? I mean, were they just sort of translating Arabic texts or was there actual synthesis and sort of creative, like original composition? Can you tell us a bit more about that aspect? Yeah, that's a very important question because one of the major aspects of this investigation of the Yazidul was to figure out how much was local and how much was sort of international and part of this, you know, global early modern or late medieval

Islamicate culture, right? How much was about Gelibolu and the Ottoman frontier and how much was from as far as field as Khorasan or Egypt? It's not so easy to simplify this, Khorasan or Egypt. It's not so easy to simplify this, the answer that I found here. The Yazid Joulous by and large acquired and were familiar with a relatively small library of sources. It's likely that Mehmed Yazid Joulou, the older brother, studied in Edirne for a time with intellectuals who were migrants from Khorasan, from the Timurid centers of Central Asia. There he seems to have learned, or at least been introduced to, very classical texts and religious sciences.

He learned Arabic there, for instance, that much is certain. And he learned about the tafsir of al-Zamakhshari, the tafsir of al-Baghawi, these kind of classical Hanafi and Shafi'i sources that he then wrote on first, because he did write an Arabic text called Magharibu Zaman, and then seems to have translated these or adapted these into Turkish in his Muhammadiya. Now, this adaptation is not simply a translation, right? Only in a few passages does he simply just copy and paste texts, and he does this from Ghazali and a few other sources. But it is more of an anthology.

So rather, he kind of compiles them, compiles them artfully, compiles them with a certain amount of artistic or rhetorical flair, right? He puts them together in a kind of interesting way, but he does not really reform them or even try to resolve contradictions between them. I don't think that's really his interest. The interest of both brothers is not to create a radically new philosophy for the townsmen of Gelibolu on the Ottoman frontier, but to create a kind of broad civic faith that is inclusive of the various perspectives of the various different theological currents that he had been a party to, without really creating a radically new original viewpoint.

It's a pretty canonical stuff, nothing to rock the boat. Yeah, that's right. Yeah, that's right. What you would find in the Yazidullah's library is really everything you would kind of expect to find a 15th century Turkish provincial scholar to have in their own library. They were taught certain canonical texts from their teachers in Edirne and transmitted these into their writings. And it's worth saying that if you look 100 years later at the sultanic syllabus that's been written recently, well, not that recently, by Shahab Ahmed and Nenad Filipovich, it's pretty similar to the sources that the Yazidi Ulus are using. The Yazidi Ulus did not really draw anything out from left field. There are a couple small exceptions to this.

For instance, Ahmed Bijan uses a preacher's manual by al-Saksini that is strongly Shia-tinged. And this is a little bit of an unusual text. It was not a rare text, but it is a little bit out of place considering the predominance of Shafi'i and especially Hanafi sources in the rest of the corpus. If I remember correctly from your book, one of the other points you make, which I just bring up because maybe not common knowledge to our listeners, but that this core of texts like these canonical texts that you mentioned sort of form the basis for the Muhammadiyah and the Anmar al-Ashqin were Persianate, post-Tumorid intellectual spheres, right? Not the Hijaz direction, but rather the Eastern direction. Yeah. So in terms of the kind of geographical orientation of these texts, they came from the East, most of them did. So they came directly to them from the East. As to where the original authors were from or writing, that varies. I mean, some of them are significantly older than others, right? So on the newer end, they're using Taftazani and Georgiani who were, you know, had only died a couple generations ago. On the newer end, they're using Taftazani and Georgiani who had only died a couple generations ago.

On the earlier end, they're using sources like al-Baghawi or al-Qasai who died a few hundred years before. And where they come from also varies. But the point that I was making is that the early Ottoman intellectual heritage, such as the Yazidjol is represented, is coming from Khorasan. It's coming from the Timurid centers. There is some transit of texts, I think, directly from Egypt and Syria, particularly the Shafi'i angle to it, but most of them are Hanafi and most of them are coming from the Timurid centers. And specifically, this is actualized in terms of the Yazid Joul's teachers themselves. So Mehmed Yazidoglu's own teacher was Haidar Heravi, who was a migrant from Samarkand, I believe. In that sense,

the world of the Yazidoglu's was kind of a Timurid world. The intellectual heritage of the Yazidoglu's was this Timurid environment. I'm sorry, I just had in mind a thought with how it relates to the natural sciences as well, because you find the same thing. And just like Medrus education as well, early Ottoman scholars and alims, you know, had to go east to get trained because there wasn't anywhere to study

the materials they wanted to study in Anatolia. Yeah. Except it seems when we get to the time period for your book, there are a few more places. We have Ankara and Glebul, like you said. So maybe now we can talk about sort of that nascent intellectual tradition in Anatolia where now, okay, we have these texts. They're not yet in Turkish. That's where the Yazdula brothers come in.

But you can study in Ankara with Vedret and Vedret. You can study in Edirne or Gelebul, right? Yeah. Ankara with Vedr-et-Dinver. You can study in Edirne or Gedebul, right? Yeah. So this, I guess, leads into another question I had, which is your book being an intellectual history for the Ottoman Empire, one might expect to hear more about Istanbul and the Ottoman capital, except we don't. It's pretty absent. So I thought maybe you could expand a bit on the role or the lack thereof of the Ottoman capital behind all this intellectual formation. So one point I try to make in the book is that the Yazidoglu's were relatively distant

from state power. This is part of my overall thesis that the piety they represented was sort of a bottom-up piety, that they were sort of responding to the religious needs of their immediate community and not responding to dictates from the state. They spent most of their lives in Gelibolu. I believe that Ahmed and Mehmed briefly went to Ankara to work with Haji Bayram Veli, and Mehmed went to Edirne to study with the sheikhs in the capital. But they are local people. Thus, their horizons are really delimited by what is important to the people of Thrace, of Gelibolu and of its hinterland. The networks that they could plug into in terms of the networks of Ulema were mainly in

Edirne and maybe Bursa. But we have to remember that up until the end of the last couple decades of Ahmed's life, the last 15 years or so of Ahmed's life, Istanbul was not an Ottoman city yet. So Istanbul was this kind of, you know, this Byzantine city that was a presence certainly in their imagination. I mean, it must have been. They lived on the other straits on the other side of the Marmara. In a certain way, Gelibolu and Istanbul were paired, but they do not talk about Istanbul at all in their works. And they do not talk about Istanbul at all in their works. And they do not directly talk even about Edirne in their works, but we just know because of, you know, people that they mentioned that lived and worked in Edirne. So in terms of

religious hierarchies that they were aware of and thought about, really there was just Edirne, which was a few schools that were being developed by Murad II and, you know, largely staffed by these migrant scholars that I mentioned earlier. And, you know, there was stuff going on in Bursa, of course. And then there was the Sufi network of Hajj Bairamveli in Ankara. So this is quite important to the brothers, but it's also very difficult to talk about because Sufism is always one of those mysteries where it seems to be absolutely central to the way things unfolded. But the real heart of Sufism as a social phenomenon is always kind of left in the realm of oral tradition. So they studied with Haji Bayram Veli in Ankara, and this is the person whom they dedicate all of their works to.

And they consider this to be kind of the central relationship in their lives, was their relationship with Haji Bayram Veli, who's the leader of this very sort of Anatolian Sufi trend, Sufi tariqa, that was rooted in Ankara and then spread throughout Anatolia and Rumelia. And also occasionally in some of the writings of Haji Bayram's successors, also uses Turkish in a vernacular form. So to return to the point of Gilibolu and how we are not talking about, you know, this imperial capital in the background sort of emanating outward into the borderlands in terms of sort of basically what I'm getting at is your book argues something different from the scholarship up to now on the whole idea of this Ottoman age of confessionalization and sort of, you know, very top down.

Like you said, diktat of these are the approved texts. This is what you should study. This is what it means to be a Sunni Muslim. Instead, we are looking at these conversations emerging from, is it fair to say, the borderland, the frontier of what's considered Ottoman? Yeah, I mean, I'd like to think of Gelibolu as a frontier place. It was, you know, constantly, even throughout the lifetime of the Yazidullah brothers, the site of battles between the Venetians and the Ottomans, between the Byzantines, it was, you know, briefly occupied by these powers within the lifetime of the Yazidullahs. So it was this contested city. It was, you know, briefly occupied by these powers within the lifetime of

the Yazidoglu. So it was this contested city. And it was a heavily, it was a militarized city as well. It was the major Ottoman naval base. So in order to understand what the Yazidoglu were doing, I think it can't really be separated from this notion of Gelibolu as a military and frontier city and one of the things I mean by this is that Ahmed Bijan and Mehmed Yazidululu are clearly trying to define what it means to be Muslim right they're trying to define in a basic sense what makes Islam different from Christianity they're talking about how Muhammad is more important than Jesus, how Jesus foretells Muhammad, how venerating, how being confused as to whether you're Muslim or Christian is in fact a sin.

You need to kind of get clear on whether you are Muslim or Christian, what the differences between those are. This is one of the major themes of Invadu al-Ash'akin. That seems to be a major concern of theirs. And the fact that they live in this environment that is structured by the politics and the economy of what is conventionally termed Gaza or holy war, it must not be a coincidence, right? The Yazidul seem to be invested in defining the boundaries between the Muslim community and non-Muslim powers like Venice or the Byzantines, with whom the Ottoman state was constantly fighting

wars. So it's implicated in this ideology of Gaza. The fact that Galibolu is a frontier city facing these hostile powers, and the fact that Ahmadinejad is trying to define an ideology of Gaza, these are not unrelated. I do not believe, however, that this is something that is coming from the state itself. This is coming from local pressures. It's coming from the townspeople of Gelibolu, trying to understand what this war was about, what these wars with Venice were about

and these wars with the Byzantines were about, and trying to come to a better understanding about what made them different, what made their orientation towards the great questions of communal identity different from the non-Muslims that were around them. So these two questions are closely connected. Did you find that there was a sense that this kind of literature was necessary because you

had Muslims who maybe were believing certain things that wouldn't today or wouldn't then be considered orthodox? You bring up Bursa, right? The city where there are imams who don't necessarily consider Jesus or Muhammad superior to Jesus, right? These kinds of concerns were on the minds of locals. I think if I've understood you correctly, you're suggesting that the Azjala brothers were an example of two figures who saw this happening around them and wanted to do something about it, so to speak, right? To correct the risk that Muslims, in the absence of good text to teach them what they should believe and do,

might veer a little too close to their Greek neighbors, so to speak. One important aspect is that there were many conversations about interconfessionality, right? There were many conversations between Muslims andessionality, right? There were many conversations between Muslims and Jews, you know, beginning with, let's say, I mean, Muslims and Christians, beginning with, let's say, the dialogue between Archbishop Gregory Palamas of Thessaloniki and Ottoman captors in the 1350s, in which Muslims and Christians kind of alternately expressed the idea that, hey, maybe our religions are pretty similar. Maybe we can value Jesus as much as we value Muhammad.

So in Bursa in, I think, 1409, although I don't remember the exact year, there was a famous incident memorialized in the Mevlid that a preacher came in Bursa and in the Bursa Grand Mosque in the Ulu Jami and was preaching that Jesus was superior to Muhammad and the congregation agreed with this and felt it was fine to say this. There were various other moments like this that we can find scattered across these decades. The Yazid Joulous were right in the middle of this and their work has no trace of this kind of inter-confessional ambiguity. The Yazid Js are saying Muhammad is in fact the purpose of creation. Jesus is a prophet who has many functions,

but one of his functions was to simply warn of the future coming of Muhammad. There is no ambiguity between Muslim and Christian in this case. So they occupied a position of reaction. between Muslim and Christian in this case. So they occupied a position of reaction. They were trying to sort of draw a bright line between the different confessional communities of the Marmara region in particular. And maybe also, and this is a slightly separate aim of theirs,

maybe appeal to Christians also by showing that the prophet also had this kind of, this sort of transcendent salvific power to him, not just Jesus. You could find what you loved out in your former community of Greek Christians, for instance, you could find that in the patterns of Islamic veneration as well. So this might be a tactic of theirs as well. It's certainly the case that the Muhammadiya is a devotional text, right? So it's trying to create a feeling among its readers, a feeling of devotion and of veneration for specifically the Prophet himself, perhaps as a counterpart to, you know, this,

the Christian environment that the Yazduls were in. The largely Christian city of Galibolu, which was still probably vast majority Christian during the time they were growing up in. To continue this thread of sort of interactions between Christians or non-Muslims and the Ottoman Muslims, I had in mind this issue of vernacular, in and of itself, like what it means to be vernacular. Because in Western scholarship and in scholarship on the history of early modern Europe, for example, while we've had texts in the vernacular languages like French or Italian since the 13th, 14th centuries, they really didn't explode until the 16th century, sort of the same age of confessionalization that we used to discuss the same Ottoman period,

especially when we get to post-Reformation Germany and then the spread of German religious texts. But there, the conversation is about how the explosion of vernacular writings is to the detriment of a pan-European Christian identity. Suddenly you have your vernacular being associated with your local identity, your national identity, more so necessarily than the broader Latin community, the broader Latin identity of being a Christian. Can we understand this role of vernacular Turkish in a similar way in the 15th century? Do you think it's something different entirely, given the relationship Turkish has had with sort of Arabic and Persian in this world,

this broader world? Yeah, that's a very interesting question. I don't think the Yazidoglus and their Turkish writing was in any way taking away from the energy of Arabic and Persian writing at the same time, right? So if you go to the academies of Edirne, they're all writing in Arabic. And even, you know, the Sufi peers of theid Joulous and a small group of other writers were writing in Turkish. But this is not to take away from the fact that what they were doing as vernacular writers was, I think, pretty innovative and pretty important. They were trying effectively for the first time to transmit or to transform various genres of writing that had never entered vernacular form into a vernacular language.

By the way, the question of whether Persian is vernacular or was vernacular at some point is something I'm not going to get into now. The Unvarola Şekin and Muhammadiye were doing things like translating large portions of Ghazali into Turkish, which is itself pretty innovative and pretty interesting. Now, this was not totally new. Andrew Peacock documents lots of earlier Turkish writing from the period of Mongol rule. Then the next question that arises is, were these Turkish texts read and treated differently than Arabic and Persian texts on similar subjects? And I think here the answer is definitely yes. I mean, there is clearly a reason why Muhammadiyah and Vahd al-Lashikin were copied and transmitted all around the empire within a relatively short amount of time. It seems like we have to take Afan B. John's statement

that the people of his land, his words, were asking for a writing in Turkish that reproduces Arabic and Persian knowledge. We have to really believe that. I think he's really expressing, when he introduces his work, saying that his people came and asked for him to produce a text in Turkish, transmitting the knowledge that was in came and asked for him to produce a text in Turkish, transmitting the knowledge that was in Arabic and Persian beforehand. This is really at the core of why their work was popular. And it exploded in popularity very quickly afterwards. This gets to something you stated sort of a few minutes ago, really, but along with this idea of what it means to be a Turkish vernacular relative to Arabic or Persian, there's also this idea that

popular religion or folk religion is not quite orthodox, right? At least in sort of other scholarship, for example, just because you mentioned, you know, the idea of these ideas coming from below, I had in mind Carlo Ginsburg's cheese and the worms and this idea of popular religion there being really strange compared to the accepted orthodox, like it's not considered correct, especially by the authorities who then sort of you know have him burned but in this instance you don't suggest that you argue no no it's it's all it's not the kind of it's not folk religion where local traditions that wouldn't have been accepted as or as as as canon seep in right that's not vernacular in that sense. Yeah, this is not that at all. This is

an attempt by two sort of minor provincial intellectuals to translate in a vernacular form what they learned of in their, I guess, relatively orthodox educations, to translate all that into ordinary Turkish for the popular people to enjoy. So it's an attempt to make the people of Gelibolu more orthodox than they would otherwise be. I call it popular religion because it was in fact popular, and we have to trust Ahmad B. John when he says he was writing this because the people around him were asking for it. You know, the people around him wanted to be connected to the centers of Islam. They wanted to be connected to sort of the normative heart of what Islam represented. We have to try to get

ourselves into the mindset of the new Muslims of Ghalibut. So maybe their parents or their grandparents were Greek, or maybe they still speak Greek. And they, for whatever personal reason, try to identify with this new Turkish-speaking Muslim cultural presence, which in some respects might not be different from their Greek neighbors, but in other crucial respects, like religion, it is different. And these new Muslims will try to understand what that meant and want to get closer

to the heart of what Islam is. And so they ask these local Sufi sheikhs, the Yazidi Ulu brothers, can you tell us more? Can you make it, can you bring us closer to what the center,

what Islam really means? You know, asking them sincerely. And the Yazidullah brothers respond with these works that give them sort of as close as they can the outlines of what normative Islam is. So in this respect, the Yazidullahs are probably not conversant with whatever folk religious beliefs were going on among Muslims of, say, Western Anatolia or

Rumelia. That was kind of not their social element. What they were conversant with was what their education had given them, which, as I said, was an education that had given them things from as far as Khorasan in Egypt. I mean, it was a kind of cosmopolitan Islamic education. Egypt. I mean, it was a kind of cosmopolitan Islamic education. And this is what they were trying to sort of simplify and boil down to its essence and give to the people around them. And here I might be misremembering, I need to remind myself. I know that the cosmological sort of astrological stuff that we find that in Salih Yazidj's Shemsiyyah, but is there any of that in the brothers' work as well? This kind of prognostication? That sort of is where my mind goes sometimes when I think of folk religion or

popular religion. So I couldn't recall if there was any of that in the brothers' writings. Yeah. So the two brothers don't really have much of that. What they do have is, well, Ahmed has written an adaptation of Abu Zakaria Kazbbini's Aja'ib al-Makhlukat, you know, this very important earlier medieval work of cosmology and geography. There's not too much prognostication in that, you know, there's a lot of geography and a lot of, you know, lore about plants and animals. However, Ahmed B. John also did write a short poem about jewels and gemstones and their talismanic powers. So there is a bit of that magical stuff. But I wouldn't connect that with... I mean, I wouldn't say that that is the essence of popular religion for them. For him, that all comes from Biruni and these well-respected classical right? It doesn't come out of any sort of dialogue with folklore. Sort of, sorry, to go back a little to the debate over what is orthodox and, you know, what is considered correct belief. We haven't spoken much about the role of sort of the Sunni

versus Shi'i debate. Is that, is it possible to talk about that in this period? Or is that something that only develops later? And, you know, it's not really accurate to think of this sort of orthodoxy debate for this period? Yeah, that's a really good question. And that's, that's one of my, my motivations for this, for doing this work, actually, I had hoped and wanted to find a lot of evidence of this kind of confessional ambiguity in which, you know, traditionally Sunni symbols would be used at the same time as many traditionally Shi'i symbols. I thought I would see things like veneration of the 12 imams, for instance, which we, you know, do see in a lot of traditionally, a lot of so-called Sunni context,

for instance, in the Timurid lands, you'll have the 12 Imams venerated in one breath and then the four Rashidun venerated at the same time. I was looking for things like that. I thought it would be interesting because it would help subvert notions of Ottoman ideology being consistently Sunni the whole time. And I think that's kind of an important

intervention to make because, you know, Ottoman Sunnism is evolving, right? And what, you know, was evolving through the course of the 15th century. However, when I looked at the Yazid works, I did not find a lot of Shi'i symbols. What I found was, number one, on the one hand, Shi'i symbols. What I found was, on the one hand, the use of classically Sunni formula. So the four Rashidun, the Ashiret al-Mubashiret, the Ten Promised Paradise, these things that Shi'is or Imami Shi'is would never say or would never talk about. They don't use the word Ehli Sunnat wa Jama'at. They don't use that term very much, but by and large we see these Sunni symbols predominating, and of course the body of hadith and the body of lore that the Yazidi Ullas draw from is almost entirely strictly Sunni. However, at the same time, you do see various moments in these texts that show, that have a strongly Shi'i flavor.

So there's one instance in which, and this is again taken from the preacher's manual I mentioned earlier, in which Adam at the beginning of time was given a sort of tour of heaven and sees this beautiful luminous figure, and he forgets all about Eve because it's so beautiful, this beautiful luminous figure, and he forgets all about Eve because it's so beautiful. And he asks who this is, and the angel Gabriel tells him it was Fatima. And Fatima has jewelry on her arms and on her head, and each of these, the two bracelets and the crown represent Ali and Hasan al-Hussein, and behind each of them is a door, and the door represents the gate to God, and each of them corresponds to Ali, Hasan, and Hussein.

Clearly, this proceeds from Shi', Hasan, and Husayn. Clearly this proceeds from Shi'i lore and indeed it does. It goes back to the earliest Shi'i hadith compilations through this intermediary source. So you have elements like that. You also have praise of occasional praise of the, I think it happens once, praise of the 12 imams and lamentation of Karbala. And you're explicitly told it is okay to curse Yazid. So you have a mix, right? So you have a mix of primarily Sunni elements, but occasionally these Shi'i things or things we attribute, we think of as Shi'i today thrown in. So where does this leave you?

It leaves me with the conviction that they really didn't care much about Shi'i Sunni divide, right? They didn't really think of it as a real divide. It wasn't something that was on their minds much. You know, there was no kind of political valence to the Shi'i Sunni divide the way there would be after the Safavids arose at the beginning of the 16th century. So it's not really an important thing for them. They seem to be, as I said earlier, very concerned with the divide between Islam and Christianity and making sure that is clear. When in places where it will be vague, it has to be clear. But the divide between Shia and Sunni is not really a live concern for them.

They seem to be concerned simply with identifying what Islam is and defining that for the readership. So even though there isn't much of the Sunni-Shi'i debate or divide, one thing that there's plenty of, it seems, is Sufi ideas, right? Well, sorry, some of these texts from the brothers are right commentaries on Ibn Arabi, for example. And you mentioned the importance of the insan al-qami, the perfect man, and its anthropocentric view of the cosmos. Normally, I mean, maybe this is just my own perception of things, but typically, Sufi mysticism is kind of seen as a very esoteric thing, not like popular religion, right? It's not for the common man necessarily. But that doesn't

seem to be the case for these manuals. They're very much entrenched in that Sufi mysticism. Yeah, I'm glad you identified that question. Sufism is for the Yazidulus a very accessible thing. On one end of the Yazidulus corpus, for instance, in the Muntehau, which is Ahmed B. John's last work, last major work, there's a lot of technical Sufi discussion, right, about the nature of the polarity of God's emanations and this difficult stuff. Most of the time, the Sufism, at least that you encounter in Vardalashikin, is essentially trying to present to its audience a sort of simple set of equations. One is the idea of watata wujud, the unity of beings.

This is one of Ibn Arabi's famous ideas, essentially that all of being or all of existence is a single sort of divine self-expression, an expression of the self-disclosure of God, to use Chittick's term. Yes, it's a theologically, it can potentially be a theologically subtle idea, but I think the Yazidul has tried to express this in a pretty simple way. And they used a lot of hadith to bring this up, to defend it, things that the prophet had said, various Quranic verses, the light verse, for instance, you know, God is the light of the heavens and earth, to try to convince its readers that unity of existence was one of the best ways of understanding the message of the Quran.

I mean, a large part of Invar al-Ashqeen, for instance, are Prophet stories, versions of these medieval Qisas al-Inbiya tales. In the more explicitly Sufi work that comes later in Ahmed B. John's life, the Kitab al-Muntaha, these prophet stories are fused with Ibn Arabi's Fusus al-Hikam. So they're kind of each given a kind of Sufi message.

And sometimes this gets very difficult as anybody who's tried to read Ibn Arabi's Fusus al-Hikam has realized, to understand precisely the message that Ibn Arabi is trying to convey through each prophet's story is difficult. The Yazid Ulus generally simplify it down, and if Ibn Arabi's version of the story is too complicated, then the Yazidullahs will kind of flatten it down into a basic prophet story. So there's always care taken to make these Sufi ideas sort of accessible. And my feeling is that they were successful in this. We know from later accounts that the Sufi community that the Yazidjoulos led was in fact living and thriving decades and even a century hence.

We know also that the kind of Sufi aura, let's say, the sense that they each had a certain barakah, was intact for a very long time afterwards. each had a certain barakah, was intact for a very long time afterwards. Evliya Celebi, you know, made pilgrimages to, you know, to Gelibolu, and a flame erupted from the text, from the book of the, from a page of the book of the Muhammadiyah and startled him, you know, because it was still so powerful to him. So I really do think that this kind of, that their attempt at making Ibn Arabi-style Sufism popular was successful and enduring. Whether it's, you know,

faithful or sophisticated in the eyes of, you know, other scholars of Ibn Arabi, that I can't really say. But it certainly seems to have hit home for its audience. The Yazid Joulous, you know, present this popular faith and, you know, present it in accessible terms and in as clear a way as they can without deviating from orthodoxy. So the environment that they were living in was an environment in which there was constant war and plague and constant temptation to heterodoxy and constant temptation to leave Islam and all of these other things. The faith that they presented then was pretty forgiving. I mean, it was essentially oriented around the idea of sevabs, of sort of units of divine mercy. And it was very easy to get them. You could simply, you know, pronounce the Shahada sincerely,

you could pray once every so often, you could read the Invaru'l-Ash-Shakin, could pray once every so often, you could read the Envato La Shekin, and this would really be enough to ensure your entry into heaven. So I think it's important to frame their work as, you know, dealing with this environment of political turmoil, plagues. I mean, I'm saying that a lot because there were many plagues that happened during this time. And, you know, this presence of death, right? And as you read the text, you do get the feeling that, you know, this was, they were trying to make people not afraid of death. There was, it's kind of an atmosphere that you can feel if you read their works, right? Like the angel of death appears constantly at the end of every prophet's story, right? He's described in detail and then, you know, it's always every prophet's story, right? He's described in detail,

and then, you know, it's always described as a mercy, right? So people were dying, plague was happening, wars were happening, and they had to try to understand, and they had to try to make sure that their congregation was not sort of disheartened and demoralized by all of this. So that's, I think, an important part of what they were trying to do. No, that makes sense and kind of ties in with what you said earlier about making Islam easier in light of the fact that they're around lots of non-Muslims for whom, you know, in their religion, maybe forgiveness is more of a, it seems more amply given, right? There's less sort of the idea that, oh christians don't have to do as much to like be granted into into heaven compared to muslims exactly they were making they were

trying to make it just as easy well thank you very much carlos i'm afraid that that's all we've got time for to discuss this time around but for our listeners we will have the full write-up on our page as always with bibliography and links to learn more and i just want to thank you again for your time and having this conversation with me thank you so much mario