How to Read Heresy in the Ottoman World
In: Historicizing Sunni Islam in the Ottoman Empire, c. 1450-c. 1750, ed. Tijana Krstić
"The topic of heresy is still rarely discussed by historians of the early modern Middle East. There remains a lingering belief that the Ottoman Empire was a particularly tolerant corner of the Mediterranean, at a remove from the sectarian struggles that characterized early modern Europe, a place in which religion only intruded upon the secular sphere of politics proper during certain paroxysms of extremism. However, the growing literature on the Sunnitization of the empire readily shows that this presumption no longer holds true. As adherence to Sunnism was equated with political loyalty, heresy became a central concept in shaping the Ottoman body politic. Yet, constructing a concept of heresy for practical and theoretical usage in the Ottoman Empire was not a straightforward matter. The confessional identity of the empire’s subjects had been of minor concern to Ottoman rulers before the ninth/fifteenth century; in the words of Cemal Kafadar, there reigned a “metadoxy,” a state of confessional ambiguity in which neither orthodoxy nor heterodoxy was ever fully articulated. While there were occasional prosecutions of heresy in the ninth/fifteenth century by the Ottoman government, only with the rebellions of the Kızılbaş followers of Shah Ismāʿīl in the early tenth/sixteenth century did this state of affairs come to be seriously challenged. In their rush to respond, Ottoman scholars aligned with the government rummaged through their conceptual toolkit to develop a working definition of heresy." (Excerpt from the article)
