Ottoman Puritanism and Its Discontents ─ Ahmad Al-aqhisari and the Qadizadelis

Ottoman Puritanism and Its Discontents: Ahmad al-Aqhisari and the Qadizadelis considers the emergence of a new activist Sufism in the Muslim world from the sixteenth century onwards, which emphasized personal responsibility for putting God's guidance into practice. Mustapha Sheikh focuses specifically on developments at the centre of the Ottoman Empire, but also considers both how they might have been influenced by the wider connections and engagements of learned and holy men and how their influence might have been spread from the Ottoman Empire to South Asia in particular. The immediate focus is on the Qadizadeli movement which flourished in Istanbul from the 1620s to the 1680s and which inveighed against corrupt scholars and heterodox Sufis. Up to now this movement has been seen as proto-Wahhabi, proto-fundamentalist or otherwise retrograde. By studying the relationship between Ahmad al-Rumi al-Aqhisari's magisterial Majalis al-abrar and Qadizadeli beliefs, Sheikh places both author and the movement in an Ottoman, Hanafi, and Sufi milieu. Moreover, the study suggests that the impact of the Majalis
al-abrar on the Qadizadelis had the outcome in the second half of the seventeenth century of increasing the violence of their activists, a development which ultimately led to their downfall.

Mustapha Sheikh is Lecturer in Islamic Studies at the University of Leeds.