Abstract:

Emerging in the seventeenth-century the Ottoman Empire, the puritan Kadızadeli movement had religious and socio-political dimensions. Ali Fuat Bilkan’s book, Fakihler ve Sofuların Kavgası 17. Yüzyılda Kadızadeliler ve Sivasiler (The Struggle of Jurists and Sufis: Kadızadelis and Sivasis), is one of the rare works examining the movement with attention to the socio-political and social context in which it emerged. Relying on a host of primary and secondary sources, Bilkan’s study fills a significant gap in the Ottoman historical scholarship. It analyses the debates between Kadızadelis, preachers who put emphasis on Islamic law (fiqh) and prioritize the external aspects of Islam over spiritual experience, and Sivasis, Sufis, who took mystical experience seriously in addition to performing external religious rituals. The author successfully shows that the Kadızadeli-Sivasi debate was one of many others that either had taken before or would emerge in the following period.

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