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LEZIONI SULLA
LEGGE ISLAMICA |
▹Il Corano.
Corano e dhimmi. Corano e jihad. La shari’a.
▹Religione islamica. Dervisci.
Guerra santa. Sciiti.
▹Sharia. Amministrazione della
giustizia.
▹jima (consensus) e ijtihad
(independent reasoning) come fonti legali
▹Il Corano. Corano e dhimmi. Corano e jihad.
La shari’a.
The
muslim lunar calendar begins with the year of the Hijra (migration) in 622 d.C.
when the Prophet moved from Mecca to Yatrib (Medina)
The
strictly monotheistic religion preached
by the Prophet included Jewish,
Christian, and traditional Arabic elements together with some original
additions. Islam, while morally and
ethically lofty, is theologically much simpler than other monotheistic creeds.
Therefore, it was perfectly suited for the people to whom the prophet addressed
his message. It was equally well suited then as it is now, for peoples who had
reached a stage in civilization demanding a higher level of religious and
metaphysical beliefs as well as a moral code regulating the activities of
society, but who were not yet ready to cope with the theological difficulties
and complications of either Judaism or Christianity. The Turks were such a
people.
Mohammad
recognized the common bond of monotheism between the religioin he preached and
Christianity and Judaism. Vere 62, sura 2 of the Koran clearly links all
monotheists in a common fate until and including the Day of the Last judgement:
“Lo! those who believe (in that which is revealed unto thee Muhammad), and
thowe who are Jews, and Christians, and Sabaeans – whoever believeth in Allah
and the Last Day and doeth right – surely their reward is with the Lord, and
there shall no fear come upon them neither shall they grieve”.
This
recognition went beyond more statements. Muhammad was willing to use Christian
and Jewish tribes as allies, and when his realm expanded he incorporated them
in his Islamic state without demanding their conversion. We have several
treaties dating from the time of his rule that spell this out quite clearly.
One treaty with the city of Najran in Yemen, dating from 631, lists the
obligations and taxes of the city and then states that “Najran and their
followers have the protection of God and the dhimmah of Muhammad the prophet, the Messenger of God, for
themselves, their community, their land, and their goods… and for their
churches and services protection of God and dhimmah
of the Prophet for ever, until God comes with his command, if they are loyal
and perform their obligations well, not being burdened by wrong”. Il trattato
dice ancora: “If any of them asks for a right, justice is among them (i.e. in
their own hands) not doing wrong and not suffering wrong; it belongs to
Najran”.
Invece i pagani non appartenenti ai popoli del
libro “theoretically had to convert or die” Quindi la tolleranza religiosa era
solo nei confronti di quasi-musulmani: gli altri dovevano addirittura morire.
Maometto intendeva usare ebrei e cristiani come
tribù alleate nelle sue conquiste.
The
Koran is considered to contain not the words of the prophet, but those of
Allah. Therefore, it is neither subject to intepretation nor translatable
because translations distort god’s meaning. The Koran contains everything a man
must know to live righteously and save his soul.
It
soon became clear that additional legislation was needed when the small
muslim-arab community grew into a world-wide empire. First the community turned
to the traditional sayings of the prophet, then to those of his immediate
successors, and finally to the utterances of the first caliphs. Those
statements that were considered genuine were collected and codified in the Hadiths (traditions). The Hadiths, together with the consensus of
the learned (ijma’) and their rulings
based on analogy (qijas), and
naturally the Koran formed the Muslim law code, the shari’a.
The
sharia also regulated marriages, divorces, inheritances – in general all
relationships within the family and community
The
splits that occurred in the muslim community stemmed from diverging views
concerning the acceptability of certain Hadiths, but the great majority of
muslims followed the four so-called orthodox legal schools and were jointly
known as the Sunnis. The Ottoman were
sunnis and followed the shari’a.
The
shari’a was not the only law. The
second excerpt from the Najiran Treaty indicates quite clearly that local laws
and customs were respected and even reconfirmed. Later, local laws were
confirmed in ottoman-ruled part of Southeastern europe at the time of conquest.
In addition c’erano i kanuns issued
by the sultans for use in their provinces.
By
definition inferior to the shari’a
additional laws were based on urf,
which is best translated as customary law. According to early jurisconsults
this was the law that princes were to follow in regulating the affairs of the
country. Closely related to urf was amme, general or public law, which
regulated state-to-state and state-citizen relationships. After the turkish
element became dominant in the eleventh century, the old Turkish principle of törü was added, which recognized the rights of the ruler
to issue decrees. Because toru was
closely related to the islamic urf concept,
it was easily absorbed into the muslim legal tradition. These principles were
the legal basis for the issuing of the numerous kanuns that became very important for the european people under
ottoman rule. Most kanuns were
nothing else but the old laws of any given region which the Ottomans confirmed
in areas they conquered.
“Five
pillars of Faith” (basic duties of a Muslim): Prayer, Almsgiving, Fasting,
Pilgrimage, Profession of Faith.
▸ Espressioni coraniche che sono alla base della Jihad
(versi
190-93)
▸ Fight in the way of Allah against
those who fight against you, but begin not hostilities. Lo! Allah loveth no
aggressors
▸ And slay they wherever ye find
them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for
persecution is worse than slaughter. And fight not with them at the Inviolable
Place of Worship until they first attack you there, but if they attack you
(there) then slay them. Such is the reward of disbelievers
▸ But if they desist, then lo! Allah
is Forgiving, Merciful
▸ And fight them until persecution
is no more, and religion is for Allah. But if they desist, then let ghere be no
hostility except against wrongdoers
Literally,
these lines speak of defensive war, condemn aggression, and appear to address
themselves to a religious group subject to persecutions. Only one line, “fight
until persecution is no more, and religion is for Allah”, can conceivably be
read to mean the spreading of the word of God by the sword. Yet, on these lines
was based the concept of jihad, holy
war, against unbelievers. In its ottoman version, gaza, jihad became the
official raison d’etre of the Ottoman
Empire.
The
extension of the realm of the dar
al-Islam (the domain of Islam) at the expense of the dar al-harb (the domain of war, the domain of those who fought the
islam) was the Ottomans’ duty. When the empire ceased to expand and especially
when it began to shrink, the ottomans began to feel that they had failed in
their divinely ordered mission.
▹Religione islamica. Dervisci. Guerra
santa. Sciiti.
▸ Formula di
ammissione all’Islam
Anyone
within the Muslim community who has professed to be a Muslim remains one. All
that is required to become a Muslim is to say, with a sound mind and under no
compulsion, three times, in front of witnesses, “I testify that there is no god
but God and Muhammad is the Prophet of God”.
▸ Takfir
Takfir
is the act of declaring that a muslim has, by his or her actions, become an infidel
or unbeliever (kafir). This is an extreme step because historically, anyone
within the Muslim community who has professed to be a Muslim remains one. All
that is required to become a Muslim is to say, with a sound mind and under no
compulsion, three times, in front of witnesses, “I testify that there is no god
but God and Muhammad is the Prophet of God”. Since admission to the community
of believers is a matter of individual conscience, there has also traditionally
been a reluctance on the part fo the muslim community to censure individuals
for their beliefs, and the community typically leaves it to God to punish
anyone who has sinned. This attitude emerged as a response to the murder of Ali
in 661 c.e. by a member of a muslim splinter group, called their opponents the
Kharijiyya, or “those who break away”. Having broken away from the larger
muslim community, the Kharijiyya held that they could judge who was a good
muslim and claimed the right to kill anyone they judged to be an unbeliever for
having strayed from the principles of Islam as they defined them. Because
mainstream muslims feared the result of this extremist position, there were
very few cases in the first centuries of Islam in which people were punished
for what they wrote or said.
This
reluctance to condemn a fellow muslim was challenged by Ahmad Taymiyya, who
lived in Damascus in the early 14th century. He affirmed that it
was the duty of pious muslims to
identify those who by their actions did not uphold islam and to declare them
infidels. Because he stated that the rulers of the Mamluk Empire represented
just this sort of “infidel”, ibn Taymiyya became one of the few Muslims up to
that time to ben imprisoned for what he wrote. After his death in prison in
1327, the muslim scholarly community largely ignored ibn Taymiyya’s radical
ideas. In the 18th century, however, another radical interpreter of
Islam, Muhammad ibn abd al-Wahhab, revived the practice of takfir. He wrote
that muslims who venerated Ali, worshipped Sufi saints, or claimed to be sultan
but did not rule in strict accordance with islamic law, were all to be
considered infidels by believing Muslims. According to ibn abd al-Wahhab, it
was therefore legal for true muslims, as defined by him, to kill the
unfaithful. This principle became the legal justification for the devastating
1801 attack on the Shii shrine city of Karbala by those who accepted the
teaching of ibn abd al-Wahhab, commonly called Wahhabis. This group also
justified their later occupation of Mecca and Medina based on the same
principle.
▹Movimento Salafiyya
In
the 21st century, Salafiyya is the name of an Islamic political
ideology that seeks to impose a strict interpretation of Islamic law in Muslim
societies and that views Western cultures with suspicion. But in its origins at
the end of the 19th century, the movement sought to reform islam so
that muslim societies could modernize by adopting the knowledge and
institutions of the West.
▸ Ordine Naqshbandiyya
Il più conservatore e sunnita delle varie
tradizioni sufi che fiorirono nell’Impero ottomano.
It
was also one of the most politicized orders, as often took a leading role in
organizing resistance to what they reagarded as western imperialist ventures in
the muslim world.
Il fondatore Baha al-Din Naqshband visse
nell’Asia Centrale nel 14° secolo. Essi asserivano però che il vero fondatore
fu Abubakr, il primo successore di Maometto. Questo sancisce
una identificazione con l’islam sunnita, and distinguishes it from most of the
other sufi orders, many of which cite
Ali, the Prophet’s son-in-law, as their ultimate inspiration and see Abu Bakr
as a usurper.
A differenza delle sette sufi essi recitano il dhikr silenziosamente, e ammettono
l’ingresso di tutte le persone che si sentono spiritualmente pronte.
The
Naqshbandi tradition received a major
boost from the teaching and writings of Sheikh Diya al-Din Khalid (d. 1827).
▸ Gerusalemme come città santa islamica
For
Sunni Muslims, Jerusalem was the third holiest site after Mecca and Medina as it housed the
al-Aqsa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, the city’s most important mosque complex and the site from which the
Prophet Muhammad is said to have ascended to heaven on his Night Journey.
▸ Ghaza,
ghazi
In
recent times, the word ghaza has been understood in the west as meaning “Holy
War against the infidels” and as referring to religiously inspired military
actions taken by the early ottomansagainst their Christian neighbors. Despite
being commonly used in this way, however, the meaning of this term has come to
be widely contested by scholars. The early ottoman military activity described
as ghaza is now thought to have been a much more fluid undertaking, sometimes
referring to actions that were nothing more than raids, sometimes meaning a
deliberate holy war, but most often combining a mixture of these elements.
L’interpretazione
tradizionale del termine venne da Wittek, The
rise of the ottoman empire (1938), che dà credito al cronista Ahmedi (fine
1300), che definisce e spiegò ghaza according to the sharia and transformed the
early raiders, known in contemporary sources as akincis, into ghazis, or
holy warriors, deploring all those who pursued ghaza for booty. By the reign of
Bayezid II (1481-1512) Ahmedi’s view had become the official version of the
early ottoman raids and campaigns
Other
ottoman chroniclers present a rather different view of the terms. Aşikpaşazade (1484) and Oruç (1500) who in
the latter part of the 15th century lived among the akincis or frontier
warriors of otoman europe, also portayed the early ottoman sultans as
ghazi-heroes. However, in their works,the arabic ghaza (holy war) and the
turkish akin (raid, without any
religious connotation) appear as interchangeable terms. These texts not only
reflect the reality along the empire’s 15th century european
frontiers, they are also closer to the nature of the early ottoman military
ventures which were often no more than pure raids without any religious
motivation.
Recent
scholarship also shows that many of the early ghazas of the ottomans were in
fact predatory raids, directed against both muslim and non-muslim neighbors. In
these raids muslims and christians often
joined forces and shared in the booty. Indeed, the history of conflicts
in western anatolia and the balkans in the early decades of the 14th
century offers numerous examples of temporary alliances and joint military undertakings between the various
muslim-turkic principalities of beyliks and their christian adversaries
(Catalans, Byzantines, Genoese). Between 1303 and 1307 catholic catalan
mercenaries, who iriginally arrived in Asia Minor to fight against various
Rurkic forces, fought both against and alongside muslim turks and habitually
raided the frontier of the rival orthodoxchristian byzantine empire. In fact it
was in 1305 that hrks from asia minor first crossed to europe as auxiliary
forces in catalan service. Also in 1305 a detachment of catalan mercenaries
joined the ottomans.
Similarly,
as has been pointed out by historian Heath Lowry, the closest comrades and
fellow-fighters of the first two ottoman rulers Osman I (d. 1324) and Orhan
Ghazi (1324-62), included several orthodox
christian greeks and recent christian converts to Islam. Köse Mihal first fought at the side of Osman ghazi as a
greek christian, later converted to Islam, and in 1326 as an ottoman commander
negotiated the surrender of Byzantine Bursa with the Byzantine emperor’s chief
minister, Saroz (who after the surrender also sided with the Ottomans). Ghazi
Evrenos Bey, another famous Ottoman commander, was a converted Muslim of
perhaps aragonese of catalan origin. The descendants of Köse Mihal and Ghazi
Evrenos, the Mihaloğullari and Evrenosoğullari represent the two
best-known families of the 15th century ottoman frontier warrior
nobility.
However,
this does not mean the the Turks of western Anatolia did not go willingly to
war against their christian neighbors to seek booty and glory alike. A 14th
century cext on the meaning and ways of ghaza (Hikayet-i Ghazi), probably composed n the Karasi principality in
northwestern Anatolia, demonstrates that the spirit of the holy war was very
much alive on the Turco-byzantine frontier. Located in the vicinity of
Byzantium, the capital of the Byzantine empire and the seat of eastern
christianity, the ottoman turks were stategically positioned to wage war
against the christian “infidels” and the ottoman principality served as a
magnet for the mighty warriors of the neighboring Turco-muslim emirates.
However, the nature of these early raids and campaigns was complex, and the
ideology of the ghaza was only one
factor.
The
14th century also witnessed ottoman campaigns against fellow turks
and muslims, as well as the subjugation
and annexation of the neighboring Turkic emirates (Karasi, Saruhan,
Garmiyan, Hamid) by the Ottomans. In accordance with their portrayal of the
early ottomans as ghazi warriors, 15th century ottoman chroniclers
often ignored these conflicts (along with the ottomans’ alliances with
Christians), claiming that the Ottomans acquired the territories of the
neighboring Turkic principalities through peaceful means (purchase and/or
marriage). When they did mention the
wars between the Ottomans and their Turkic and Muslim neighbors, Ottoman
chroniclers tried to legitimize these conquests by claiming that the Ottomans
either acted in self-defense or were forced to fight because the hostile
policies of these Turkic principalities hindered the Ottomans’ holy wars
against the infidels.
▹Hajj (pellegrinaggio alla Mecca)
Un musulmano che ne aveva i mezzi doveva fare il
pellegrinaggio alla Mecca almeno una volta nella vita. Il pellegrinaggio era
una importante fonte di legittimazione politica per i sorani ottomani, che
mancavano di un lignaggio legato al Profeta. Loro costante preoccupazione era
il buon andamento del pellegrinaggio annuale e la salvaguardia delle carovane
dagli onnipresenti attacchi dei beduini. I pellegrini provenienti da ovest
erano riuniti a Damasco o al Cairo da dove iniziava la carovana di 40 giorni
nel deserto. Alla Mecca c’erano molti acquisti e vendite, e pure l’economia di
Damasco era florida per la presenza di 10-20.000 pellegrini che comperavano di
tutto e tornavano per scambiare beni indiani e caffè.
Fino al 17° secolo le carovane dal Cairo e
Damasco per la Mecca non erano particolarmente molestate, ma nel 17° secolo gli
ufficiali locali ottomani trascurarono di coltivare la pace con le tribù beduine
e tribù più bellicose (Beduini Anaza e Shammar) emigrarono dall’Arabia
cominciando ad occupare il deserto siriano. Non avevano scrupoli ad attaccare
le carovane da Damasco. Raids became increasingly frequent i the second half of
the 17th century. In response, the ottoman sultans shifted the responsibilities of the
official designated to ensure the safety of the pilgrims (called the amir
al-hajj or commander of the hajj) from a local military officer to the governor
of Damascus, as it was felt a man with greater economic and military resources
was needed. La famiglia al-Azm
divenne importante in Damasco in questo ruolo. Ma anche così, nel 1757 i
beduini distrussero la carovana da Damasco uccidendo 20.000 pellegrini
The
plural of the arabic word alim (“man
of knowledge”) in the ottoman empire the term ulema referred to those who were
trained in the islamic religious sciences (such as the Quran, the traditions of
the Prophet Muhammad, and islamic jurisprudence), and were members of the
ottoman religious establishment, the ilmiye
hierarchy. The ottomans divided their society into two main groups: the
taxpaying subjects or reaya, and the
privileged askeri class. Wthin the latter, they distinguished
the “men of the sword” (soldiers) , eht “men of the pen” (bureaucrats), and the
“men of the ilm” (religious
sciences/knowledge), that is,members of the religious establishment.
Religious
sciences were taught in madrasas, or colleges. Between the 14th and
the 16th centuries the ottomans established some 350 madrasas, more
than half of them (189) in the 16th century. In addition, especially
in the early period of the ottoman state, theulema of the empire were trained
in the major centers of Islamic learning. Those who wanted to study quranic
exegesist (tafsir) or jurisprudence (fiqh), for example, went to Etypt or
Iran.
The
most important part of islamic education was the teacher (müderris) and not the institution. It was his expertise
that detrmined, in accordance with the founder’s intent (expressed in the
foundation document of the madrasa), the subjects and books that were taught in
the madrasa. Nonetheless, there was a strict hierarchy of madrasas, the
highest-ranking being those in the capital, Istanbul: the Fatih madrasas – that
is, the colleges built by Fatih (the Conqueror) Mehmed II (1444-46; 1451-81),
also known as the Sahn.i Seman (Eifht Courtyards) or Semaniye madrasas – and
the Süleymaniye madrasas established by Süleyman I (1520-66). While Islamic
religious sciences (tafsir, fiqh, or hadith, that is, the traditions of the
Prophet Muhammad) dominated the curriculum, medicine and astronomy also were
taught. Upon mastering a given subject or tet, the student received an icazet
(ijaza), or certificate, from his teacher. This both confirmed the pupul’s
mastery of the specified text of rubject and authorized him to teach it to
others. In addition to the necessary training in the religious
sciences,thepatronage (intisab) of influential persons in and around the
government was also essential for a career within the ulema.
The
graduates of the main istanbul madrasas had two career choices. They either
pursued a life as professors or became
judges (kadi) and jurisconsults (mufti), and thus members of the ottoman
administration. In the Ottoman empire there was a firm hierarchy within the
ulema and strict rules regulated promotion. Madrasa graduates seeking
employment with the state either as teachers or as judges were reigistered in the
government day-books of state appointees and waited until a position became
available for which their education qualified them. For instance, a müderrises of lower-level madrasas and graduates of the
Semaniye madrasas were eligible for judgeships in smaller towns, earning
between 50 t0 150 akçes per day, whereas
the Janissaries earned 5 to 6 akçes per
day). Holders of seniro judgeships earned 300 akçes or more daily and could
become defterdars (finance ministers) of the imperial Council. The müderrises
of the Smainye madrasas could also become judges in Istanbul and, later,
kadiaskers (military of chief judges). This shows that the career paths to the
secular bureaucracy were also open to the ulema, many of whom became viziers or
even grand viziers, that is, the sultans’ deputies and heads of the government.
The
head of the ottoman ulema was the Şeyhülislam
or chief mufti of the capital, appointed by the sultan from among the most
distinguished scholars of the religious sciences. Unlike the kadiaskers, the
şeyhülislam was not a member of the imperial council. However, when the
two kadiaskers of Anatolia and Rumelia who represented the ulema in the
imperial concil, disagreed or sought a religious opinion, it was the
şeyhulislam’s written legal opinion (fatwa) that helped them decide the
matter. His fatwas were also crucial in legitimizing disputed sultanic
decisions, such as campaigns against Muslim neighbors. Since the seyhulislam
represented islamic sacred law, the sharia, in principle, he was not part of
the government. However, when, under sultan suleyman I, he was givern the right
and obligation to appoint judges, who were arms of the executive branch of the
government,the independence of the seyhulislam ended. Indeed,
theinstitutionalization of the ottoman ulema and its close association with the
government was unprecedented in other islamic polities. In the long run, this
significantly reduced their ability to act as mediators between the ruler and
the ruled and as guardians of islamic sacred law, functions that had
traditionally been associated with the ulema.
In
history books on the ottomans, the ottoman ulema from the mid-16th
century on is often portrayed as a reactionary force that rejected the reforms
needed to strengthen the empire in the face of western encroachment. While it
is true that the coalition of the ulema and the Janissaries opposed the
military reforms of Sultan Selim III
(1789-1807) and led to the sultan’s deposition, the ulema of the 18th
century was not homogeneous, and several members of the ilmiye hierarchy in
fact supported the sultan to legitimize the reforms.
Karbala è la seconda città sacra dell’iraq per
gli sciiti, dove fu martirizzato nel 1680 l’imam husayn, figlio dell’imam ali.
The
differences between sunni islam and shia islam are largely products of
historical developments. In terms of docrinal belief and practice, there are
few disagreement between these two dominant interpretations of Islam. The
schism between the two arose over who should properly lead the community of
believers. The sunnis believe that a caliph should lead the islamic community
and that this caliphate should have political authority as “Commandef of the
Faithful”, but that religious authority should be left to the consensus of the
community of religious scholars or Ulema. In contrast, the Shia believe that
the head of the community is also rightly the imam, a leader with both
religious and secular authority and to whom the obedience is due. Sunnis accept
that tiela as well, but by imam they mean that the caliph is the leader of the
community in prayer and on the hajj,
or annual pilgrimage. For the Shia, the imamate is more. They believe it can
only be held by a man descended from the Prophet Muhammad’s lineage through his
daughter Fatima and her husband Ali. For the Shia, theposition of imam is more
than a political office as they hold that he has the infallible ability to
interpret religious doctrine as well.
Although
sunni islam as intrpreted by the Hanafi
Shool of law, was the state religion of the Ottoman Empire, there were sizeable
Shii minorities in several of the Ottoman arab provinces, most notably in what
wre today the countries of Iraw, Lebanon and Yemen. IN the first two, the Shia
followed the Imami tradition. The dominant form of Islam in Iran todey, the
Imami tradition is known to sone western scholars as “Twelver Shiism” as its
believers hold that the 12th imam, who vanished in the ninth century
c.e. will return at some future time to institute a reign of absolute justice
on earth. IN Lebanon, the adherents of this community were known as the
Mitwallis in the ottoman period, although it is not a name they use today to
refer to themselves. Both the Imami
tradition and the Zaydi tradition followed by the Shia of Yemen trace the
descent of their imams from the line of the sixth imam, Jaafar al-Sadiq
(702-65), but the Imami trace their tradition through Sadiq’s son Musa al-Kazim
while the Zaydi trace their tradition through his son Muhammad. In addition,
the Alawis of Syria and the Alevis of
eatern anatolia also claim to be Shia although the shii clerty in Iran did not
accept the Alawi claim until the 20th century.
Before
the 16th century, the ottomans were relatively uninterested in the differences bwtween Shii and Sunni
Islam. The sufi orders which put Ali and the prophet descendants at the center
of their devotions, were much more
popular in the earl ottoman empire. But in 1501 Shah Ismail I (1501-24) made
Imami Shiism the religion of his court in Iran and began to persecute Sunni
muslims in his realm. In addition, the Turkoman tribes of eastern anatolia rose
in rebellion against the ottomans, proclaiming Shah Ismail to be the
long-awaited imam who would restore
justice to the world. These rebels were known as the Kizilbas in Ottoman texts
and were ruled as heretics by the ottoman sunni legal establishment, making it
legally permissible for the ottoman army to kill them. The shii rebellion
against the ottomans was termporarily ended by the battle of Caldiran in 1512.
But the continued presence of a hostile shii iran played a significant role in
bolstering the ottoman attachment to sunni islam. Ⓟ With the hostile
“heretic” shia on their eastern borders and the ongoing anti-muslim challenges
from the christian world, the ottoman
sultans were increasingly motivated to present themselves as the hpholders and
defenders of what they regarded as the true faith of sunni islam.
The
embrace of sunni orthodoxy by the ottomanpolitical and legal elite did not
translate, however, into the persecution of those shiis in the empire who
accepted ottoman rule peacefully, even if they held the view that such rule was
illicit in the absence of the imam. This tolerance was especially was espcially manifested in the ottoman treatment of the shia of Iraw. When suleyman
I (1520-66) conquered baghdad in 1535 or instance, he endowed shii shrines as
well as sunni ones and hosted shii clergy along with their sunni counterparts.
Subsequent ottoman governors extended this strategy of tolerance and even
provided patronage to shii shrines and clergy. In part. This was due to a
realization that it was best not to alienate the shii subjects of the sultan in
iraq. But it also seems to have arisen out of a more general cultural practice
of tolerance that the sultans extended to both non-sunnis and non-muslims.
Ironically,
despite the ottoman dunasty’s devotion to sunni islam, the iraqu provinces of
baghdad and basra became much kore dominated by shia islam during the centuries
of ottoman rule than they had been at the time of their conquest. The province
of baghdad contained many of shia islam’s holiest sites: ali’s tomb is in
Najaf; his son Husayn was martyred and buried in Karbala; and the seventh imam,
Musa al-Kazim is buried in Kazimiyya, to the north of Baghdad. Najaf and
Karbala were established centers of shii learning before the ottoman period,
but hoth centers grew substantially from 1732 to 1763, the period during which the sunni nadir shah ruled in
Iran. Nadir shah sought revenge on the shii clergy for their persecution of his
sunni brethren during the rule of the safavid shahs; as a result of this
persecution man of the leading shii clergy of traditionally shii iran fled to
the relative safaty of the ottoman empire. In addition, with the rise of the
shia-dominated principality of Oudh in northern India in the 18th
century, students, pilgrims and money from there arrived in the two iraqu holy
cities.
While
the ottomans practiced religious tolerance, however,many groups within the
empire decried such movement in Arabia viewed the veneration of the imams’
tombs as especially un-islamic and in 1801, Wahhabi tribesmen captured the town
of Karbala and destroyed the tomb of Imam Husayn. Regarded as an outrage by the
Shii clerics in Najaf and Karbala, these religious leaders cultivated the
Badouin tribes of Iraq as a defense atainst future Wahhabi attacks, a policy
that worked, since 1806. As the shii clergy increased their missionary work
among the tribes, many of the badouins inabiting baghdad and Basra provinces
declared their allegiance to the shii interpretation of Islam. This led to a
greater presence of arabic-speakers in the religious schools of iraq and these
gradually displaced most of the persians who had dominated shii religious
offices in the holy cities in the 18th century.
The
success in winning theonce nominally sunni besouins to shia islam created a
concern locally among sunni clergy and ottoman officials stationed in iraq. But
it was not until 1895 that the ottoman government opened sunni religious
schools in baghdad pcrovince in an attempt to train sunni clergy who could
countr the very active mission of the Shia. The fear of Shia Ialam that
startled the regime of Abdulhamid II (r. 1876-1909) into this action seeimngly
dissipated after the Young Turks revolution in 1908 as sunni and shii clergy in
iraq increasingly worked together to resist British colonial ambitions in Iraq.
In
Lebanon, the Shii communities dominated ghe Jabal Amil region in what is today
the south of the countrh and the Bekaa Valley in the east. In both regions,
peasant farmers made up the majority of the shii community, although those in Jabal Amil produced some religious
scholars of note. Some of these scholars went to Iran in the 16th
century to help guide the implementation of shia islam as the religion of state
under the rule of the safavid synasty of shahs. The shii harfush clan
controlled the political fate of the Baka Valley from the ottoman conquest of
the region in 1516 until the early 19th century, but elsewhere Shii
clans were under the control of their more powerful druze or sunni neighbors
and their had to seek political alliances with them.
All
muslim practice either sunni or Shia islam. Approximately 85% of the world’s
muslims are sunni and the rest are shiis. The origins of the two sects lie in the early division
over who would lead the community after the death of the Prophet Muhammad in
632. Some felt that it should be Ali, the Prophet’s cousin and son–in-law andd
the father of his only surviving grandchildren. But the majority chose Abu Bakr
as the Prophet’s successor or caliph. Abu Bakr was an earlyconvert to Islam, a
close confidant of the Prophet, and his Father-in-law. He was also much older
than Ali and the majority of the community felt that his maturity would be
necessary to help steer the new community after the unexpected death of the
Prophet. The rift caused by this decision was not healed, however, and when a
group of disgruntled soldiers murdered the third caliph, Uthman, in 656, the
rift opened into civil war. Following
these hostilities, the majority of the community chose Ali as caliph but
Uthman’s kinsmen (parenti), the clan of the Bany Umayya (Umayyads), rejected
Ali’s leadership as they said his hands were stained with Uthman’s blood.
The
two sides prepared for battle in 661 but Ali, who did not want to plunge the
community into further violence, agreed to arbitration of the dispute. A
splinter group (gruppo scissionista) of his supporters, angry at his attempt at
compromise, assassinated Ali in the same year and civil war ensued. In 680 the
forces of the Banu Umayya slaughtered Ali’s son Husayn at Karbala, in
present-day Iraq. This action created the historical basis for the cleavage of
the two sects of Islam, the Shia maintaining that the caliphate rightly
belonged to Ali’s descendants while the Sunnis accepted the leadership of the
Banu Umayya, under caliph Yazid (d. 683) and later the abbasid caliphate
(750-1528)
The
name Sunni derives from the phrase “ahl al-sunna” which refers to the people
who follow he righteous path established by the Prophet Muhammad. In truth, there
is very little doctrinal difference between the Sunni and the Shia. But over
time the Shia developed a hierarchy in the ranks of their clergy that was
noticeably absent in the Sunni tradition until the Ottoman Empire. They also
believed in the eventual return of the “hidden imam”, the 12th imama
who vanished in the ninth century but whose return will bring a reign of
absolute justice. In contrast, the Sunnis emphasized the legal training of
their clerics, creating a system wherein the quality of training and
scholarship determined prestige. There was no single religious authority that
all Sunni clergy were compelled to bey.
While the Shia rejected the political authority of the caliphs after
Ali, the Sunni clergy worked within the system as the caliph’s advisers. This
compromise was fully articulated during the Abbasid Caliphate when the
caliphsagreed to let the Sunni clergy administer the law of their state in
return for the clergy’s acknowledgement of the caliphs’ sovereignty over
political affairs.
In
the 11th century, Shia dynasties seemed on the verge of ruling most
of the muslim world as they seized political control of Egypt, most of north
africa and iran. These were all areas that had previously been under the rule
of the sunni abbasid. In Baghdad, however the turkish seljuk family sponsored a
revival of sunni islam through the establishment of religious schools and the
sponsorship of religious scholars, thus establishing a link between sunni islam
and the various thrkish dynasties that emerged in the middle east from the 11th
through the 14th centuries during the period of the crusades.
Although devotion to Ali and his descendants was strong among the Turks in
Anatolia, almost all of them were niminally Sunni Muslims who followed the
Hanafi school of legal interpretation. The Hanafi school was one of four in
sunni islam; the others are the shafii, Maliki, and the Hanbali. As the Hanafi
school had developed in the caliph’s court in Baghdad during the abbasid
period, it was particularly attuned to the political needs of a muslim state.
▸ The
Hanafi school
Starting
with sultan Orhan (r. 1324-62) ottoman sultans promoted the Hanafi version of
sunni islam, although they did not make it mandatory. In egypt, the shafii
school continued to dominate in nonofficial life, and the Maliki school persisted
in north africa. However, the chief judges appointed to any of the ottoman
provincial capitals had to be graduates of the ottoman legal schools, the
madrasas, and administer the law according th Hanafi interpretations. The
sultans lavishly supported thelegal schools; after the conquest of
constantinople in 1453, they established an imperial hierarchy for the clergy.
Direct state control over the training and licensing of the clergy was an
ottoman innovation, as no other sunni state had attempted to enter so directly
into their subjects’ spiritual lives. The Ottoman state treasury also paid all
the leading clergy’s salaries. At the top of the clerical hierarchy was the Şeyhülislam, or chief judge of the empire, who
approved the appointments of the judges to the provincial centers and who,
along with his immediate subordinates,the chief judge of Rumelia (european
provinces) and the chief judge of Anatolia (Asian provinces), sat with the
sultan when he conducted the imperial council (Divan-i Hümayun).
▸ The
Ottomans and Sunni Islam
The
connection between the ottoman ruling house and Sunni Islam intensified in the
16th century after the revolt of the Shia Kizilbaş. This group regarded Shah Ismail I (r.
1501-1524) of Iran as the long-awaited imam who the Shia believed would restore
justice to the world, and they supported his uprising against the Ottomans. For
the next three centuries the Iranian shahs espoused Shia Islam as the state
religion and did not permit other forms of worship in their territories, including
that belonging to the Sunni tradition. While the Ottoman sultans promoted Sunni
Islam as the empire’s official faith, they did not retaliate against the
Iranian shahs by taking any action against the peaceful Shia in their realm,
whose freedom of worship was allowed to continue. At the same time, the ottoman
adherence to Sunni Islam became one of the legitimating factors for the regime
in the eyes of the sultan’s sunni subjects.
In
the 17th century, a sunni reform movement known as the Kadizadeler
gained strength in the empire. It promoted the teachings of Birgili Mehmed (d.
1573) and his disciple Kadizade Mehmed (d. 1635). Their doctrines were very
strict and rigid, resembling those of
the later Wahhabis. IN particular, the kadizadeler movement opposed sufism and
the prominent role that the ottoman state played in training the sunni clergy
and providing them with salaries. In short, whey saw as sinful anyghing they
considered an innovation from the practice of the Muslim community at the time
of the Prophet’s death. Among the things they considered sins were singing,
dancing, illustrated manuscripts and miniature paintings, the drinking of
coffee, and the smoking of tobacco. Sultan Murad IV (1623-40) sought to placate
the movement by banning alcohol, coffee and tobacco in Istanbul, inaugurating
an era of extreme religious purity. After his death, the movement lost much of
its appeal, but it remained an intellectual current present in religious
debates among the empire’s sunnis through the start of the 20th
century.
▸ Sultans
as Caliphs
Sultan
Abdülhamid II (1876-1909) promoted the
idea that the sultan of the ottoman empire was rightfully the caliph of all
sunni muslims. Although some muslim scholars challenged the legitimacy of that
claim because the sultans were not descended from the family of the Prophet
Muhammad, others, especially those in India and the Dutch East Indies
(present-day Indonesia), saw that claim as a potential weapon against the
Europeans who ruled their homelands. Jama, al-Din al-Afghani, who was perhaps
the most influential muslim intellectual in the late 19th century,
was an ardent promoter of this claim becaue it bolstered his belief that the
ottomanempire remained the last hope of the muslim world reetaining its
independence in the face of european imperial ambitions. When World War I broke
out in 1914, Ottoman sultan Mehmed V (1909-1918), claiming to be caliph, called
all athe world’s muslims to holy war (iuhad) against the wetern allied Powers,
but few muslims outside the ottoman empire took the call seriously.
Western
scholars refer to the mystical traditions in Islam, known in arabic as tasawwuf as sufism. Both the arabic and
english terms are derived from the arabic sufi,
meaning “mystic”. In ottoman turkish, the more commonly used word for a mystic
was derviş or dervish. A wide array of traditions come under the
umbrella of Sufism, but they all agree
on two basic tenets: to understand Islam requires an experiential relationship
with God, amd thie can only be achieved through the guidance of a master who
has already had such an experiene. Simply put, religious truth cannot be
learned by study alone; it has to be experienced.
There
is much debate over the origins of sufism. Western scholars have suggested that
it represents either indian influences or traditions arising from the gnostic
Christianity that existed in the Middle East at the time when Ialam emerged as
a new religion. Muslims cite the Quran as the source of sufism, and many sufi
traditionis attribute their traditions to Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet
Muammad. Jesus, whom Muslims believe to have been a prophet, also figures in
many Sufi traditionis as an originator of the sufi way.
In
the earliest sufi writings of the eighth century c.e. the emphasis was on
turning away from wordly pleasures, living simply, and devoting oneself to
prayer and contemplation. The arabic word for wool is suf, and many muslim scholars claim that the name for the movement
comes from the simple woolen garments its early adberents wore. Many of the
early sufis were ascetics and some remained celibate, even though the Quran
explicitly warns muslims not to imitate the practices of Christian monks in
that regard. By the tenth century c.e., Sufis were beginning to profess that
they could actually achieve a union with God wherein they lost any awareness of
their own separate consciusness. They called this fana or “annihilation” and to experience it was to be in an altered
state of consciousness, or hal. That
experience of losing one’s self-consciousness while in God’s presence led some
to make extreme claims that in those moments they had, in fact,become God. The
Sufi saint al-Hallaj was executed in Baghdad in 922 for having said, “I am the
Truth” which was one of God’s names. Orthodox Muslim theologians condemned such
claims and viewed most Sufis with suspicion.
Such
attitudes began to change with the circulation of the spiritual autobiography
of Muhammad al-Ghazzali, who died in 1111. Al-Ghazzali was a teacher at the
prestigious Nizamiyya school in Baghdad and was acknowledged as one of the
leading Muslim scholars of his time, but he suffered a crisis of faith and left
teaching. Through the practice of Sufism, however, he came to believe that
Islam was the true faith ordained by God and that the Quran was the word of
God, and he returned to teaching. His spiritual autobiography represented a
great synthesis of the legal and the mystical traditions. AL-Ghazzali stated
that one could not know that the Quran and sharia were true without the inner
certainty that one gains from the Sufi path. But once having gained that
wisdom, one must follow the path of orthodoxy in Islam. After al-Ghazzali, most
muslim scholars accepted the principle that Sufism was permissible, and even
desirable, for muslims, as long as sufi practices conformed outwardly to the
letter of Muslim law.
In
the centuries following al-Ghazzali, a number of individuals offered differing
approaches to the goal of mystical union with God and out of their teachings
different Sufi orders emerged. Almost all of these had a program consisting of
a linear path of specific steps that must be followed by the seeker, guidd by a
teacher. As such, the orders were called
tariwas, the arabic word for
“path” that is also a pun on the word for Islamic law, sharia, which also means
“path” or “way”. Some of the tariqas were scrupulously orthodox, following the
lead of al-Ghazzali. But others, takiing as their guide the ecstatic approach
of al-Hallaj, claimed that the knowledge they had gained through the Sufi quest
negated the strict codes imposed by Islamic law.
These
contrary Sufi traditions had already developed before the rise of the Ottomans
in the 14th century and were present as alternative voices for the
duration of the empire. The Turks were widely influenced by various strains of
Sufi practice as Sufi missionaries converted their ancestors to Islam in
Central Asia by blending islamic beliefs and practices with the Turks’
shamanism. Mystic poets such as Yunus Emre and Hajji Bektaş composed their work in the vernacular turkish
of those who were settling in Anatolia in the 13th century. They made Sufi
beliefs accessible to large numbers of people in the form of songs that were
passed from village to village by Sufi minstrel bards. Sufis also blended
elements of Christianity into their practice, which appealed to Greek and
Armenians peasants, thereby hastening their acceptance of Islam through the
medium of the turkish language and culture.
The
early ottoman sultans felt no apparent contradiction in practicing anislam that
contained both orghodox and heterodox elements. Indeed, the foundation myth of
the empire had Osman Gazi being ordained as a world conqueror by a Sufi sheikh
whose daughter he then married. Once they had established their empire, the
ottoman sultans had close relations to two sufi groups, the Mevlevi order and
the baktaşi order, although these two
could not be more different in their
religious outlook. The mevlevi order, founded by the son of the 13th century poet Rumi, was the order of ottoman intellectuals and attracted
poets, musicians, and calligraphers. The order established convents or hostels
(tekke) in various ottoman cities and
these served as centers for the teaching of art and music as well as being
places of spiritual retreat. The Baktasi order, by contrast, was the order of
the Janissaries and its traditions were oral rather than literary. Although
many of its practices were unorghodox, such as the drinking of wine, it too
received official recognition from the sultans as a way of keeping the troops
happy. The sultans and their families supported both orders financially by
establishing some of their convents and bestowing lavish gifts on the orders’
sheikhs.
Despite
sultanic support of some Sufi orders, Sufis also sometimes challenged the
sultans’ authority by claiming they had access to a truth that could never be
known by those who had not embarked on the pato of mysticism. In the aftermath
of the defeat of sultan Bayezid I (r. 1389-1402) at Ankara in 1402, the Sufi
Sheikh Bedrettin preached in favor of a social movement that sought to tear
down the differences between classes and religions. His movement gained great
popularity among the ordinary people of all religions and his disciple, Börlüce Mustafa, started a revolt against the Ottoman
in 1416. The rebels had some initial success but the Ottoman army was finally
able to defeat them and Bedrettin and thousands of his followers were executed.
The Ottomans also faced other revolts led by radical Sufis in the 15th
and 16th centuries. Indeed, one of the greatest challenges to the
ottoman throne came from Shah Ismail, who headed an extremist Sufi order that
believed him to be the long-awaited hidden imam.
Although
ottoman legal scholars condemned popular sufi movements as heretical, they were
generally tolerant of the intellectual Sufi orders that outwardly followed
Islamic law. The exception to this was the Kadizadeli movement that emerged in
the 17th century among ghe students of Birgivi Mehmed, a
fundamentalist muslim scholar and preacher who died in 1573. This group
condemned anything that it considered an innovation on the Islam practiced by
the Prophet Muhammad and the first generation of Muslims, and it held that
Sufism was such an innovation. IN this, the Kadizadelisforeshadowed the
Wahhabis of the 18th century, a group that also refused to tolerate
anything regarded as a deviation from the strictest adherence to foundational
Islam.
In
the second half of the 18th century a more austere and rigorous Sifu
order, the Nawshandiyya order, answered some of the objections raised by the
muslim fundamentalists to Sufism. The naqshbandis believe in a strict adherence
to sharia and reject the notion of sainthood found in many other sufi orders,
but they still hold that the understanding of God that can only be gained from
a mystical experience is a vital, necessary part of Islam. The sober
interpretation of mysticism offered by the Naqshbandiyya Order was popular
among intellectuals within the Ottoman Empire
in the 18th and 19th centuries as it offered a
compromise between mysticism and the interpretations of Islam that
fundamentalists such as the Wahhabis were preaching. However, critics of Sufism
still did not accept the Nawshbandiyya as being rooted in a proper
understandinf of Islam.
Despite
the Kadizadeli movement’s criticism of Sufi beliefs and practices, Sufism
remained a vibrant part of Islam as it was practiced in the Ottoman Empire
through Worod War I. IN the aftermath of the war, Mustafa Kemal, better known
as Ataturk, opened an aggressive campaign against Sufism which he considered a
superstition that impeded modernity and westernization. IN 1925 ataturk
banned the Sufi orders, and their
property in Turkey was confiscated. Sufism continued to be practiced in the
former arab provinces of the empire but it suffered attacks from the Salafiyya,
another group that strictly interprets Islamic Law and from theologians
influenced by the Wahhabi tradition.
▹Rifaiyya order
The
Rifaiyya order of sufism was one of the more unconventional sufi orders.
Western travelers to the ottoman empire dubbed the order the “howling
dervishes” due to the loud and boisterous dhikr,
or prayer ceremony, they employed. Members fo the Rifaiyya Order further drew
attention with public displays of eating glass dancing with snakes andpassing
skewers (spiedi) throfugh their cheeks. The order claimed Ahmad al-Rafai, a
mystic who lived in Iraq in the 12th century, as its foudner. The order
was very opular in Egypt in the Mankuk Empire period, and after the ottoman
conquest of Egypt in 1517, Rifaiyya disciples spread the order to Anatolia. In
the moder period the Rifaiyya order’s practices included the public act of dawsa, or “trampling”, therein the
sheikh of the order would ride his horse over the prostrate bodies of his
followers. Such practices proved an embarrassment to modernizers in Egypt.
Muhammad Abduh declared the order’s practices un-Islamic and Khedive Tawfiq
banned the order altogether. Nell’impero ottomano
invece sopravvisse, almeno fino all’inizio del Novecento.
▸ Shadhliyya
order
The
s. order of sufis was often termed the protestant order by western visitors to
the ottoman empire because of the absence fo anyu formal ritual associated with
s. practice. The order also avoided the elevation of individuals to sainthood
and decried the visiting of sufi shrines as an ostentatious display that
detracted from true spiritual life. Gthe
shadhliyya was an elite order that produced poets and commentators on religious
texts, whose work had wide circulation in the arabic-speaking provinces of the
empire, yet it was also one of the most popular sfi orders in egypt throughout
the ottoman period. The founder of the order was Abu al-Hasan al-Shadhili, a 13th
century moroccan mystic. Si stabilì ad Alessandria. The s. although not traditionally
popular in anatolia, came to wider attention toward the end of the ottoman
empire when sultan abdulhamid II (1876-1909) joined the order.
Unlike
some other sufi orders, the s. held that asceticism and poverty were not a
requirement, as god intended his creatures to live in this world and to take
pleasure from his creation. The order tolerated the music and dancing
considered illicit by many orthodox muslims, but otherwise kept its practice of
ths sufi way within the boundaries set by conventional islam. Nevertheless, by
the 18th century, the sunni religious establishment in cairo accused
offshoots of the order of veering toward interpretations of the sufi state of hal, or communion with god which
bordered on pantheism, and the order became suspect. In north africa and west
africa the order was prominent in organizing muslim opposition to western
colonialism.
Le
hadith sono le oral traditions of the Prophet.
Death
was not an end but rather the beginning of another form of life; the dead
waited in the grave until the resurrection of judgment day when souls would be
subjected to the final test and sent either to paradise or to hell.
One
important principle was that of total submission to death, seen as the
irrevocable will of god.
In
the political theory prevalent in muslim lands before the 19th
century, muslim rulers were believed to be under an injunction from the Quran
to wage holy war (ghaza) against non-muslim rulers until their territories were
conquered or they acknowledged their vassalage to a muslim overlord. For this
reason, those parts of the world that were not under direct muslim rule were
termed by muslim legal scholars as dar al-harb, meaning “house of war”.
During
the ottoman period, sunni religious scholars at the sultan’s court ruled that
Shii rulers such as the Safavid shahs were also in the “house of war” as they
had strayed from muslim orthodoxy and had become rafidi (renegades) or Khariji
(muslim extremists). The sultans therefore considered themselves justified in
waging war against these groups until they
returned to sunni islam, the mainstream
or conventional form of the faith.
According
to islamic legal theory, no true peace (salam) could be established between a
muslim state and one in the “house of war”. But a truce (sulh) which was
understood to be of limited duration, was permitted between the ottoman sultan
and a non-muslim monarch. The territory of such a ruler was considered to be in
the “house of truce” (dar al-sulh) and his subjects were allowed to visit,
trade with, and even reside in the ottoman empire with a status known as
istiman. This legal status provided the framework for the capitulations, which
allowed european merchants to reside in the empire and provided the framework
for diplomatic relations between the ottoman empire and various european
powers.
In
islamic legal theory as it was developed in the first enturies of muslim rule,
territories governed in the first centuries of Muslim rule, territories
governed by muslim rulers and where islamic law is in force constitute one
monolithic entity known as the “house of Islam”, as differences between secular
muslim rulers are not recognized as legally valid. This category invokes a
historical time when there was a universal caliphate that ruled all muslims. A desire for its return is in implicit in the
discussions of the dar al-Islamby muslim legal scholars.
Even
when a peace treaty with a non-muslim state does exist, other muslim states do
not have to honor that treaty and the muslim state that entered into the treaty
can abrogate it at any time.
When
the ottoman sultans went to war against sunni rulers, such as the mamluk empire
that ruled egypt and Ayria the 16th century, or against the 18th century
iranian ruler Nadir Shah, in Istanbul jurists generally issued legal
justifications for such actions, whatever their personal views of the legality
of the campaigns, that stated that the war was necessary to secure the ottoman
sultans’ position as the protectors of the Holy Places in Arabia and to defend
Islam against its non-muslim enemies.
Away from the capital, muslim jurists were openly ambivalent about
whether the sultans could transform regions that properly belonged in the dar
al-islam into arenas of the dar al-harb.
The
religious traditions of Muslims encouraged
beneficence to the weak and the poor. Giving alms (zakat) is required of all muslims who possess more than the minimum
necessary for subsistence, and the Quran repeatedly reminds believers that
prayer and almsgiving are fundamental aspects of belief. Alms are due from
money earned in order to remove the taint ofprofit from the sum remaining. In
addition, voluntary giving (sadawah)
is recommended emphatically as a way for believers to approach God and to atone
(espiare) for transgressions in the hopes of reaching Paradise after death.
Traditions about the Prophet Muhammad (hadith)
make it clear that anuone, even the poor, can give charity, if only by offering
a blessing.
“Caliphate” (Enc. Ott. Emp.)
“Caliph” viene dall’espressione “Khalifat Rasul
Allah”, “successore del Profeta di Dio”, che fu usato a preferenza di titoli
come re o sheikh
The
function and succession of teh caliph led to a split within islam and the rival
traditions of sunni islam and shia islam. The sunni tradition held that any
male member of the prophet’s tribe, the Quraysh, could rightfully be caliph if
he were of sound mind and body. They held that the caliph’s only religious
function was leading the Friday prayer,
and that the articulation and implementation of islamic law, sharia, shoud
beleft to the religious scholars, or ulema. The shii tradition held the view
that the caliph must have special insight into Holy Law and its interpretation
that they called ilm, literally “knowledge”, but by which they meant a specialized
esoteric knowledge that only the descendants of Ali possessed. Therefore, for
them, the caliph had to be one of those descendants, whom they called the imam,
a title used by sunnis to mean the person who led the community in its Friday
prayers.
Although
the Muslim theory of government held that all Muslims had to owe their
political allegiance to the caliph, over time independent muslim states
arose. The muslim legal scholars ruled
that these were legal as long as they minted coins in the reigning caliph’s
name and read his name aloud during the Friday prayers. With this diminution of
the office the caliph had become the symbolic, rather than actual, head of the
muslim community. Even this function was deemed unnecessary, however, with the
murder of the last universally recognized caliph of the abbasid line,
al-Mustasim, at the hands of the Mongols in 1258.
The
question of the caliphate re-emerged with the ottoman dynasty. According to
ottoman court historians of the 17th century, sultan Selim I (1512-20) received the cloak of the
caliphate – a symbol of the authority of the office in much the same way a
crown symbolized the monarchy in Europe – from the last descendant of the
Abbasids when he conquered Cairo in 1517. Before the 17th
century the sultans had simply stated
that their legitimacy rested on their adherence to the Holy Law, their
continuation of the jihad against Europe, and their role as protector of the
Hajj and Arabia’s two holy cities, Mecca and Medina.
The
appropriation of the title of caliph by the Ottomans was bitterly rejected by
most sunni legal scholars outside istanbul, as the ottomans were not descended
from the prophet’s tribe, the Quraysh. For Sunnis, this qualification remained
an absolute requirement if a political ruler was to claim the title of caliph.
Their opposition did not present a problem until 1876. Arab-spiaking muslim
scholars almost universally rejected that claim.
Although
in islam all believers are held to be equal before god, those believers who can
trace their descent back to the prophet (called ashraf) are given special recognition. Diritto di portare un turbante verde, titoli onorifici prima
del nome etc.
▹Il
wahhabismo
I Wahhabis
erano una confederazione di tribù beduine che seguivano una forma estremista di
Islam. Questa confederazione conferì il ruolo di leader politico alla famiglia
che poteva far risalire la sua genealogia ad uno dei fondatori della confederazione,
Muhammad ibn abd al-saud.
Nel 1803 i Wahhabis occupied Mecca. They allowed the
pilgrimage to continue under their control but required proper dress and
behaviour. Il pellegrinaggio
divenne difficile per gli ottomani e impossibile per gli sciiti. Nel 1812-13 il
governatore dell’Egitto, su richiesta del sultano, riprese Mecca e Medina,
anche se il potere della famiglia ibn Saud, che guidava la confederazione
Wahhabi was not completely broken by the Egyptian expedition.
▸ I Bektaşi
Setta sufi popolare tra i contadini
dell’Anatolia e nei balcani. Ancor oggi ha simpatizzanti tra i musulmani albanesi. The order, however
had little appeal for muslim intellectuals and other urban sunnis who viewed it
as a religion for peasants with beliefs verging on heresy.
La sua interpretazione dell’Islam fu abbracciata
dai giannizzeri.
Fondato da Hajji Bektaş in
Anatolia nel 13° secolo, la sua cosmologia e pratiche fondevano elementi
dell’Islam con sciamanismo turco. I
Bektaşi credevano che all living things, human, animal or vegetable, share
a common soul and can be communicated with by shamans.
In
the late 14th century members of the order began serving as
chaplains and spiritual guides to the Janissary corps, and by the 16th
century it was established practice that all members of those elite military
unitss were induucted into the order as the founder of the order, Hajji Bektaş, was viewed as the guiding spirit of the
Janissaries, not unlike a patron saint in Christian belief. So while not all adherents to Bektaşi Sufism were
Janissaries, all Janissaries were expected to take vows of obedience to the
Bektaşi sheiks, or spiritual guides. Questo durò fino alla soppressione dei Giannizzeri nel 1826
The
Bektaşi order also has practices
that resemble those of Christianity. They offer communion of bread and wine in
their religious services and encourage celibacy for those men and women who
reside in their lodges. Historians have suggested that just as the Bektaşis blended
shamanistic practices to appeal to the Turkoman tribesmen, these elements were
added to appeal Christian peasants in Anatolia and the Balkans. In point of
fact, these Bektaşi practices did have wide appeal to christians in the
empire and scholars credit the conversion of many christians in the Balkans to
Islam to the missionary work of the Bektaşis. The order provided former
christians with the political benefits of becoming muslim while allowing them
to participate in religious ceremonies that seemed similar to those of their
former faith.
Probabilmente i Bektaşi non
sarebbero sopravvissuti se non si fossero legati al potente corpo dei
Giannizzeri
▹Sharia. Amministrazione della giustizia.
Many
of the early sufis were ascetics and some remained celibate, even though the
Quran explicitly warns muslims not to imitate the practices of Christian monks
in that regard.
In
the centuries following al-Ghazzali, a number of individuals offered differing
approaches to the goal of mystical union with God and out of their teachings
different Sufi orders emerged. Almost all of these had a program consisting of
a linear path of specific steps that must be followed by the seeker, guidd by a
teacher. As such, the orders were called
tariwas, the arabic word for
“path” that is also a pun on the word for Islamic law, sharia, which also means
“path” or “way”. Some of the tariqas
Islamic
law, or sharia (şeriat in ottoman turkish),
does not consist of a code of rules that are immutable or even fully written
down. Rather, it is an organic system that is grounded in two sources, the
Quran and the sunna. The Quran is the
primary scripture of Islam, which for Muslims is God’s word unmediated by human
intervention. As such, any rule that is
explicitly articulated in the Quran is accepted by all schools of Muslim legal
thought as binding on believers. The sunna,
literally translated as “the path”, refers to the reported tradition of the
Prophet Muhammad’swords and actions and serves as a model for other muslims. IN
terms of sharia, however, the sunna is a
more problematic source than the Quran, as some legal scholars held that it was
the precedents of behavior, both religious ans secular, set by the original
muslim community, while others held that the normative examples must be linked
to the Prophet Muhammad himself. Either way, in the centuries following the
Prophet’s death in 632 c.e. muslims collected sayings attributed to Muhammad
and his close asociates about various issues not covered by Quranic
injunctions. The collected stories and sayings, or hadith, became the written embodiment of the sunna. Even so, there is no consensus as to which sayings are
binding and which are not, or even as to which collection of such sayings is
authentic. Rather, there is consensus within each islamic school about the
validity of certain sayings, leaving the interpretation of the finer points of
the sharia to trained jurista, the faqihs.
Within
sunni islam, there are four principal schools of legal interpretation, each
named after a leading jurist whose formulation of the law provides the basis of
his school’s approach to legal interpretation. These are the Shafii, Hanafi,
Maliki and Hanbali schools. All four were founded between the eighth and ninth
centuries c.e. The differences between the schools are relatively slight,
however, and adherents of all four recognize the others as valid ways to
interpret the law. The fonder of the school of law for Shia Islam was Jaafar
al-Sadiq and his school is called the Jaafari school. Generally, Sunni scholars
do not accept it as a legitimate approach to the sharia, as it is heavily
influenced by sayings attributed to Imam Ali, the son-in-law of the Prophet
Muhammad and the father of the Prophets’ only grandsons.
The
official school of the ottoman state was that of the hanafi sunni and all the
judges appointed by the sultan to the
courts in his provincial centers belonged to that school. Local judges
representing the other schools were also present at court, however, in places
where an alternate school of law was preferred. This was especially true in
Egypt and Kurdistan where local loyalties continued to lie with the Shafii
school. At first, jurists in Syria also followed that school, but by the end of
the 17th century most legal scholars there had switched their
allegiance to the Hanafi interpretation of the law favored by the sultan.
As
sharia is not a clearly established code written into a set of texts, the role
of legal scholars was crucial for its articulation. Besides the judges who
dealt with everyday cases, the system also included more senior scholars known
as muftis who had the authority to issue fatwas, or judicial rulings on
theoretical questions. In the ottoman empire, there were official muftis who had received their training at the
state-financed and state-monitored religious schools, the madrasas,. These men
were usually appointed to major provincial centers and were ultilately
responsible to the chief kufti of the Ottoman Empire, the seyhulislam. In
addition, religious scholars in provincial centers away from the capital local
might recognize local scholars as muftis and accept their rulings as valid.
This was especially true in the arabic-speaking provinces where local
traditions sometimes clashed with interpretations of the sharia as articulated
in Istanbul.
According
to the sharia, non-muslims did not have to use muslim courts unless they were
involved in cases with muslims, or if all parties in a dispute agreed to
approach a muslim judge for his intervention. Nevertheless, the records of the
sharia courts show that christians and Jews frequently appealed to the muslim
courts for justice. Western europeans living in the ottoman empire were initially
required to use the muslim courts. But as they perceived them to be unjust and
biased against them as non-muslims, they lobbied their governments to extend
the capitulations, or agreements govenring the conditions under which europeans
could live and work in the ottoman empire, so that they were free from the
jurisdiction of muslim courts in most cased.
In
the 21st century, Salafiyya is the name of an Islamic political
ideology that seeks to impose a strict interpretation of Islamic law in Muslim
societies and that views western cultures with suspicion. But in its origins at
the end of the 19th century, the movement sought to reform islam so
that muslim socieies could modernize by adopting the knowledge and institutions
of the West. The reformers who spearheaded this movement felt that, over time,
islamic scholars had obscured the true spirit and meaning of the Quran and the
Sunna, or traditions of the Prophet Muhammad, with superstition and
irrelevancies. The reformers believed that Muslims needed to return to the
sources of their religion and to understand them in the context of the society
that had existed when the Prophet revealed God’s message.
For
the reformers, the key to the rebirth of Islam lay in the revival of the legal
practice known as ijtihad. Early
muslim legal scholars had argued that the foundations of Islamic law, or
Sharia, were the Quran and the Sunna. Additionally, if the community as a whole
agreed on a practice, known as ijma
or consensus, then that too was binding on the believers. Beyond that,
qualified scholars could apply their independent reasoning (ijtihad) to those two sources to
interpret what Muslims sholud properly do in cases where there was no clear
guidance. The principle behind the use of ijtihad
is not unlike the one that guides members of the U.S. Supreme Court, who use
the text of the U.S. Constitution as a guideline to deal with problems that are
not directly addressed by it. For american constitutional scholars the central
question is “What did the original framers of the constitution mean?” The
question for Muslim legal scholars is, “What was intended by a particular
passage of the Quran?”.
The
use of ijthad allowed for flexibility
in framing laws that would govern the vast community into which Islam had grown
in the centuries following the prophet’s death in 632 c.e. But by the 13th
century, Sunni Muslim legal scholars had become uneasy with what they felt were
too liberal uses of independent reasoning by scholars and many called for the
abandonment of the practice. The community of scholars gradually agreed with
the dissenters and in the following centuries, Sunnis abandoned the use of ijtihad in making religious decisions.
It remained an option, however, for Shii
clergy with the rank or mujtahis,
that is, a cleric recognized by his
peers as having adequate training in sharia and its sources to allow him to
exercise independent judicial reasoning in a specific case.
The
reformers of the late 19th century were not the first to call for
the return of ijtihad. The writings
of Ahmad ibn Taymiyya, a muslim religious scholar who died in prison in
Damascus in 1328, were the inspiration for many. Inb Taymiyya had castigated
Sufism and the study of philosophy, both popular, as being un-islamic. He
called upon the Muslim community to return to the spritual purity it had known
in the days of the original muslims (salaf).
If muslims understood Islam as well as did those original musims, he reasoned,
there would be no danger of error should their scholars usa ijtihad.
Further
inspiration for the Salafi reformers of the late 19th century was to
be found in the writings of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab. Deriving inspiration
from ibn Taymiyya, ibn Abd al-Wahhab wrote in the 18th century that
Islam had become a religion of superstition and unbelief, by which he meant
that Muslims were practicing an Islam
that was clearly not sanctioned by the Quran. As a corrective, he advocated a
return to the Quran as the sole source for Islamic law.
▹jima
(consensus) e ijtihad (independent
reasoning) come fonti legali
For
the reformers, the key to the rebirth of Islam lay in the revival of the legal
practice known as ijtihad. Early
muslim legal scholars had argued that the foundations of Islamic law, or
Sharia, were the Quran and the Sunna. Additionally, if the community as a whole
agreed on a practice, known as ijma
or consensus, then that too was binding on the believers. Beyond that, qualified
scholars could apply their independent reasoning (ijtihad) to those two sources to interpret what Muslims sholud
properly do in cases where there was no clear guidance. The principle behind
the use of ijtihad is not unlike the
one that guides members of the U.S. Supreme Court, who use the text of the U.S.
Constitution as a guideline to deal with problems that are not directly
addressed by it. For american constitutional scholars the central question is
“What did the original framers of the constitution mean?” The question for
Muslim legal scholars is, “What was intended by a particular passage of the
Quran?”.
The
use of ijthad allowed for flexibility
in framing laws that would govern the vast community into which Islam had grown
in the centuries following the prophet’s death in 632 c.e. But by the 13th
century, Sunni Muslim legal scholars had become uneasy with what they felt were
too liberal uses of independent reasoning by scholars and many called for the
abandonment of the practice. The community of scholars gradually agreed with
the dissenters and in the following centuries, Sunnis abandoned the use of ijtihad in making religious decisions.
It remained an option, however, for Shii
clergy with the rank or mujtahis,
that is, a cleric recognized by his
peers as having adequate training in sharia and its sources to allow him to
exercise independent judicial reasoning in a specific case.
fetva in ottoman turkish refers to the issuing of a
judicial ruling by a muslim religious scholar. In theory, any muslim scholarmay
issue a fatwa on a hypotetical question that has been put to him by a
plaintiff, but in practice, a fatwa is only issued by those religious scholars
recognized by their peers as legal authorities or appointed by the sultan to
the post of mufti. A fatwa ruling is based on the scholar’s understanding of
islamic law, although the author of the ruling may cite the sources he used to
reach his ruling. In the ottoman empire the most important fatwas were those
issued by the seyhülislam, or chief justice of the
empire. Such rulings were issued in response to specific legal queries that
could be submitted by anyone in the empire. Once a ruling had been delivered,
it could be entered as evidence in a court case upon which it had bearing and
could serve as a legal precedent for future cases.
Typically,
a plaintiff would construct the question so as to elicit a favorable response.
The judge at the court where the case was being heard did not have to accept
the fatwa of the şeyhülislam as definitive, but
it was a rare judge who would risk incurring the wrath of the chief justice by
ignoring his opinion. This was especially true in regions that were within the
effective control of the state and where the judges were graduates of the
imperial madrasas. Further afield – in Syria, Palestine and Egypt – the fatwas
of the seyhulislam in Istanbul were not given the same regard. However, in the
provincial courts local muftis were equally important in shaping the character
of the law as practiced. The fatwas issued by prominent jurists were frequently
copied and could be found in the personal libraries of religious scholars and
members of the empire’s judiciary
Ebussuud
Efendi (d. 1574) who served Suleyman I and Selim II between 1545 and 1574 was
undoubtedly the most notable seyhulislam. Questo era
in parte dovuto al fatto che l’età di solimano era vista come un’età di
giustizia with Ebussuud regarded as the most judicious of men. Even centuries after his
death, his fatwas continued to influence ottoman jurisprudence and the
collection of his rulings helped to establish definitive opinions for the
ottoman legal establishment.
The
term seyhulislam, which emerged in
the abbasid caliphate in the second half of the 10th century c.e.,
was a title of honor given to members of the religious establishment (ulema)
who solved controversial legal problems arising among islamic jurists. After
the foundation of the ottoman state around 1300 the title continued to be used
as an honorific similar to that of mufti, a jurisconsult authorized to issue a
written legal opinion or fatwa, based on islamic sacred law or sharia. While
the ottoman ulema performed the duty of issuing fatwa (turkish fetwa) without
an official affiliation to the state apparatus, the titles of mufti and
seyhulislam began to be used as official titles after the reign of Sultan Murad
II (1421-44, 1446-51). Moreover, the mufti of the capital held the title of seyhulislam,
with authority over all other muftis in the empire.
In
the first half of the 16th century, some other duties were also
given to the seyhulislam. He held a professorship in the madrasa of sultan
bayezid II (1481-1512) and supervised the sultan’s religious endowments, or
waqfs. In the late 16th century the seyhuislam was also assigned to
appoint and dismiss supreme judges (kadiaskers), high ranking college
professors (miderris), judges (kadis), and heads of sufi orders. In the times
of prestigious seyhulislams such as Zenbilli Ali Cemali Efendi (1445-1526),
Ibn-i Kemal (Kemalpasazade) (1468-1533), and Ebussuud Efendi (1491-1574), the
influence of the seyhulislam and his office reached its peak, with the office
of the seyhulislam not only having authority over the ulema and their
institutions but also widening its area of responsibility and employing a
considerably increased staff.
The
kadi was trained in an imperial madrasa.
Although
it was possible to appeal a judgment there was no regular multi-staged court
structure. In practice, however, the Divan, the Friday Court, the court of
Kadiasker (the top judicial official in the empire) accepted and discussed
appeals.
Ottoman judicial opinions were the sole purview
(testo di legge, portata di una legge; intento, scopo; ambito, campo d’azione,
limite) although they had assistants. The most important assistant was the clerk (katib).
Another assistant the naib assisted
the kadi in judging, took depositions during investigations out of court, and
judged in the kadi’s stead if he was absent. In some courts, a vice-kadi (kassam) was in charge of the dividing up
of inheritances. Kadis made decisions in their court regardles of the views of
jurisconsults of muftis. Although the ottoman court system provided for trial
observers, they merely watched the trial and did not give any opinions. Because
they did not participate in the judging process their role should not be
confused with that played by the jury in some western judicial systems.
In
small settlements courthouses were not distinct structures. The judge presided
either in a part of his house or in the mosque. Judgments were usually reached
after one hearing, although certain trials required further investigation and a
second hearing.
The ottoman court also expanded its role
depending on the need of the individual community. Where notary publics and
municipalities did not exist, some transactions of purchases or marriages were
finalized in court. Municipal duties – such as giving zoning permits,
protecting the environment, the administration of religious foundations, and
the protection of orphans and infants – were also sometimes handled by the
court. All the works and transactions performed by the courts were recorded in
court records or registers (sicil).
These inventories help to illuminate the activities of the ottoman courts and
contain valuable information regarding the social life, gender relations, and
other aspects of the communities under the court’s jurisdiction.