Search

The present debate is a product of the tension between two widely studied disciplines at early Ottoman medreses, ḥikma (post-Avicennan philosophy) and kalām (philosophical theology), which, over the course of centuries, accumulated a great number of crossovers, valences, as well as discrepancies among various schools of thought. Each scholar present in the exchange showcases their knowledge in past positions and objections by making references to various classical and post-classical authors. The texts that they refer to during the debate reveal their expertise in rational and religious sciences, especially their background in debates involving the discrepancies between falsafa/ḥikma and kalām. The current debate, in this context, addresses how prominent Ottoman scholars can respond to the antinomies of past schools and articulate their own take through referencing other contemporaries.

Sultan Meḥmed II’s second reign (855/1451‑886/1481) signaled the beginning of a new phase in Ottoman scholarship. With an imperial program that developed a highly structured bureaucratic system, Meḥmed II’s new establishment set rigid rules that regulated the scholarly path by establishing prestigious institutions based on merit, codifying a hierarchical order, and creating opportunities for a lifetime career in academia that crossed paths with politics. The Ottoman formation of a new learned class in the fifteenth-century also coincided with (albeit not entirely shaped by) a turning point with the conquest of Constantinople/Ḳosṭanṭiniyye in 857/1453, namely the creation of a new capital distinctly imperial and universalist Muslim in character.

A Treatise on [Necessity’s Being] the Same as [God’s] Quiddity by Mollā Zeyrek (d. 903/1497‑98 [?]) [Süleymaniye, MS Giresun Yazmalar 99, ff. 120a-121b] || A Treatise on God’s Unicity by Ḫocazāde Muṣliḥuddīn Muṣṭafā (d. 893/1488) [Süleymaniye, MS Ayasofya 2206, ff. 12a-21a] || The Urtext of the Debate: Position Five, Observation Three on God’s Unicity in al-Jurjānī, Sharḥ al-mawāqif, 8: 45‑51.

This book is a reconstruction of a previously unedited fifteenth-century court debate between two prominent Ottoman scholars, Mollā Zeyrek and Ḫocazāde, on the philosophers’ formulation of God’s unicity. The debate was a celebrated court event organized around the year of 871/1466, which continued for a week in the presence of the Ottoman Sultan Meḥmed II, his grand vizier Maḥmūd Paşa, and the jurist Mollā Ḫüsrev, most probably at the Sultan’s palatine library. This study includes the first annotated edition of this debate in Arabic along with its translation, analysis, and contextual significance in post-classical Islamic intellectual history, covering a wide range of perspectives on Arabic disputation etiquette, the method of scholarly verification, Meḥmed II’s patronage and universalism, and Ottoman philosophical discussions on unicity, existence, and necessity.

According to the Ottoman biobibliographical sources, the debate between Zeyrek and Ḫocazāde continued for five days and, on the sixth, the Sultan asked the scholars to prepare copies of their responses for further evaluation on the next day. The extant texts reproduced in the Appendix include these accounts from the last day of the debate. Due to the fragmented nature of both responses, it is hard to determine which objection followed which response exactly. Given that post-classical disputations followed a standard of specific sets of objections and explanations along with rejoinders and counter-objections in reply, the analysis below intends to include a possible timeline of the debate, matching each scholar’s lemmata on a given day, and thereby showing how the debate evolved over the course of one week. The blow-by-blow reconstruction, in this sense, provides us with fresh insights about how the Ottoman scholars defended their points within the formal framework of debate etiquette and how the method of verification and referencing past scholarship were further utilized.

The philosophical theology of the fifteenth-century Ottoman world combined post-classical Avicennan philosophy (ḥikma) with (mostly Ashʿarite) philosophical theology (kalām). This trend could be observed in Ottoman medrese handbooks, since discussions related to physics, metaphysics, and theology were mostly covered in three key texts belonging to past Perso-Islamic scholars from the Il-Khanid and Timurid courts studied through their commentaries and glosses at the fifteenth-century Ottoman medreses.

The debate at hand between two prominent Ottoman scholars Zeyrek and Ḫocazāde, which was constructed through a limited number of primary source materials, concerned a hefty philosophical/theological topic regarding the validity of the philosophers’ proof of God’s unicity. In addition to the single extant copies of each scholar’s response, there are only a few extant descriptions of the actual event, compiled more than a century later.

The present study aims to contextualize a famed fifteenth-century philosophical debate that occurred between two celebrated scholars of the late fifteenth-century, by tracing their sources and arguments in past scholarship. The debate covers a wide range of subjects in the context of God’s unicity, by often employing arguments ranging from classical Arabic philosophy to post-classical philosophical theology through philological rigor and close reading.

This chapter investigates the role that fifth-column claims play in authoritarian politics. Specifically, it examines how fifth-column claims against the Gülen Movement have transformed the relationship between the Turkish state and both official (state-sanctioned) and unofficial Islamic actors in Turkey since July 2016. Erdoğan’s government reconfigured collusive claims about the alleged Gülenist fifth-column into subversive ones. In doing so, it expanded the scope of guilt-by-proximity and gave rise to loyalty-signaling dynamics within Turkey’s broader community of political Islamists. Documenting the shift from collusive to subversive fifth-column claims in this case reveals the extreme form of political pragmatism often guiding autocratic rule. Although Erdoğan’s regime has long been viewed through the prisms of de-secularization, Islamic political revival and neo-Ottoman ambition, these analytical frameworks obscure the fact that his political project is first and foremost about eliminating competing sources of domestic authority.