Abstract
AbstractOver the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries an immense body of morality literature emerged in the Ottoman Empire as part of a widespread turn to piety. This article draws upon the anthropology of Islamic revival and secularism to reassess this literature's importance and propose a new view of the history of political thought in the empire. It does so through a close analysis of a fundamental concept of Ottoman political life: “naṣīḥat,”or “advice.” Historians have used “advice books” to counter the presumption that the Ottoman Empire declined after the sixteenth century, but in doing so they have overlooked the concept's broader meaning as “morally corrective criticism.” I analyze two competing visions ofnaṣīḥatat the turn of the eighteenth century to reveal how the concept was deployed to politically transform the empire by reforming its subjects’ morality. One was a campaign by the chief jurist Feyżullah Efendi to educate every Muslim in the basic tenets of Islam. The other was a wildly popular “advice book” written by the poet Nābī to his son that both explicates a new moral code and declares the empire's government and institutions illegitimate. Both transformed politics by requiring that all subjects be responsible moral, and therefore political, actors. The pietistic turn, I argue, turned domestic spaces into political battlegrounds and ultimately created new, individualistic political subjectivities. This, though, requires challenging functionalist conceptions of the relationship between religion and politics and the secularist inclination among historians to relegate morality to the private sphere.
Highlights
She contended that scholars had overlooked this development because they focused on political action within the formal world of the ballot box, replicating the Enlightenment sequestration of ethics and belief into the moral/private sphere
When we look at the works explicitly labeled as “naṣīḥ at” in his notebook, he drew on a generic advice book in Turkish, and on the “naṣīḥ at” of Aristotle, Plato, and the ancient Persian king Anushirvan
Might there not have been other revolutions in morality that emerged prior to colonialism but which we have difficulty identifying given that they belonged to a culture with a different temporality and conceptual vocabulary? We might interpret Nābī’s naṣīḥ at, and his call for spaces of private belief and individual morality, as a form of secularism that creates a “distinctive relation between state law and personal morality, such that religion became essentially a meter of belief.”[131]. I draw this connection not to place the Ottoman Empire on some track to a fabled modernity, but rather to hint at ways that the politics fostered by the pietistic turn might have expressed itself, even until today
Summary
The interlinking of morality, religion, and politics may not be new, but our predisposition to separate them is. A central precept of Enlightenment thought is that religion should remain in the private sphere, sequestered from the politics of the public realm.[1] For this reason, fifty years since identifying “political Islam” as a theoretical issue, social scientists continue to puzzle over it. The answers to the question of religious revival in modern society were instrumentalist: people became religious to express economic frustration or exert “agency” in the face of an oppressive system. Saba Mahmood famously argued in The Politics of Piety that a women’s piety movement in 1990s Egypt created new political subjectivities through the cultivation of proper moral behavior.[2] She contended that scholars had overlooked this development because they focused on political action within the formal world of the ballot box, replicating the Enlightenment sequestration of ethics and belief into the moral/private sphere.
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