Content area
Full Text
Abstract
The development of Kizilbas Islam in Anatolia and the early modern Ottoman bureaucracy's role in the persecution of Kizilbas communities have been the subject of sustained scholarly interest. While scholarship from the 1960s through the 1980s explained Ottoman policies against the Kizilbas in the context of mere security concerns, revisionist historians, who have dominated the field since the 1990s, have approached the topic from new, yet problematic, angles. Not only have the new approaches reduced the relationship between the Ottomans and the Kizilbas to a policy of persecution, but they also have presented the state's creation of a Sunni "orthodox" identity for its subjects as a reason for these repressive policies. In contrast to these one-dimensional explanations for the Ottoman central authority's "never-ending struggle against rebellious heretics," I argue that a more complex relationship between Istanbul and its Kizilbas subjects led to wildly varying Ottoman state policies, ranging from financial support for the Safaviyya order and the Kizilbas subjects of the empire to execution of the same populations. A more precise examination of primary sources, focused mainly on Ottoman imperial decrees (or mühimmes), reveals three main dynamics that explain this complexity: the Ottomans' relationship with the Safavids and the issues of Kizilbas tax evasion and conversion.
Introduction
The first of two distinct groups of revisionists who since the 1990s have challenged the attribution of early modem Ottoman policies against the Kizilbas to mere security concerns,* 1 can be rightfully called "the followers of the Köprülü-Ocak tradition."2 Focused solely on the Ottoman state-building process, a key component of which was the creation of an orthodox Sunni religious identity for the Muslim subjects of the empire, these historians have assumed that the Seljuk and early Ottoman authorities adhered to a homogeneous Sunni Islam, even though they endorsed the existence of a "low" or "folk" Islam that accoimnodated pre-Islamic conceptions beneath a Sufi façade.3 Accordingly, these scholars have argued that in the sixteenth century the Shi'ite Safavids emerged as a political power from the East and attracted the loyalty of certain discontented elements among the Ottoman Muslim population, inaugurating an unbroken period of confrontation between the Ottoman and Safavid Empires, and between the Ottomans and their Kizilbas subjects. This approach, however, not only reinforces an essentialist...