ABSTRACT
The founder of the Gülşeniye order of dervishes in Egypt, İbrāhīm-i Gülşeni (d. 940/1534), is an increasingly well known yet still understudied Sufi master in modern Ottoman historical and religious scholarship.1 Contemporary perceptions of Gülşeni portray him as a popular, charismatic and controversial tenth/sixteenthcentury Sunni Ottoman saint who, after escaping persecution in Anatolia by the Shiite Safavids following the collapse of Akkoyunlu rule, took refuge and settled in Mamluk Egypt.2 However, Gülşeni’s Akkoyunlu origins, along with the fi rst six decades of his life in Iran and eastern Anatolia, are not analyzed extensively in the secondary literature. Rather, his life and times in Ottoman Egypt has received the bulk of scholarly attention.3
