ABSTRACT

Chapter 6 turns from military and administrative matters to religious and intellectual life in what was, after all, an officially Sunni Muslim society. The chapter introduces the major religious institutions and the officials who staffed them: Muslim court judges and legal experts who made up a good part of the class of Muslim scholars known as ulema. Most ulema received their training in madrasas, theological seminaries that were promoted by the Ottoman state and various provincial officials, including ayan. In this milieu, Muslim mysticism, or Sufism, might seem to have had little place, yet many ulema belonged to and even headed Sufi orders. The prominence of Sufis in the religious establishment contributed to the rise of the puritanical Kadızadeli movement, which opposed many Sufi practices, in the Ottoman central lands during the seventeenth century. Intolerant though it appeared, the Kadızadeli movement was not entirely incompatible with a new wave of rationalist inquiry that entered the Arab lands at about the same time. Taken together, all these tendencies contributed to a redefinition of Sunni orthodoxy among the ulema of the Arab lands.