Ottoman Empire
by Prof. Shahzad Bashir
(from Fazlallah Astarabadi and the Hurufis, One World Publ. 2005)
lands, in the long run, his works found their most hospitable
home in the empire ruled by the Ottoman Turks. The area
where Fazlallah had been active during his lifetime was ruled by
Turkic dynasties such as the Timurids and the fact that he had
followers who were Turks is indicated by the example of the
poet Nesimi. The Ottoman dynasty had begun in the late
thirteenth century and had suffered a setback by being defeated
by Timur in 1402 at Ankara. The Ottomans exerted themselves
once again when Timur’s empire broke up following his death.
They expanded their domains in Anatolia and southeastern
Europe in the fifteenth century at the expense of various Turkic
Muslim principalities as well as Christian states of Greek and
Slavic origins. One of the greatest triumphs of the Ottoman state
was the capture of Constantinople from the Byzantines by Sultan
Mehmet II in 1453.
centuries. The Muslim messiah, the mahdi, was expected to conquer Constantinople during the process
of establishing a kingdom of justice on earth. This was reflected in the literature stemming from Fazlallah’
s movement as well in the special attention given to the verses that begin chapter 30, named the chapter
of Rum or Byzantium. As discussed in previous chapters, one of Fazlallah’s followers took these verses to
indicate the creation of Adam and Eve while another, who wrote after Fazlallah’s execution, saw in them
indications of Fazlallah’s second coming. Fazlallah’s major disciples ‘Ali al-A’la and Nesimi both traveled
in Anatolia in the first few decades after Fazlallah’s death partly because of their appreciation of the
region’s significance in apocalyptic discourses. The movement’s effort to recruit the Ottoman prince
Mehmet in Edirne circa 1445 before his accession to the throne was symptomatic of a larger propaganda
effort in Ottoman lands during the fifteenth century.
Within Ottoman society, Fazlallah’s works received the most hospitable reception in the Bektashi Sufi
order. Although named after Haji Bektash (d. ca. 1270) who arrived in Anatolia in the thirteenth century,
the Bektashi order was institutionalized as a significant and widespread community in the fifteenth
century under the leadership of Balim Sultan (d. 1516). The Bektashis had a somewhat contradictory
relationship with the Ottoman state, which was expanding in Anatolia at the same time as the order’s
own institutionalization. On the one hand, the order became closely associated with the Ottomans’
Janissary troops, formed of young boys taken from the empire’s Christian subjects and trained for special
loyalty to the Sultan. On the other hand, followers of the order were also involved in high-profile
rebellions against the Ottomans in Anatolia. The Bektashis also adopted a number of Shi’i ideas in the
fifteenth centuries, because of which they were suspected for sympathizing with Iranian Safavid dynasty
that rose to power in the sixteenth century and was one of the Ottomans’ most significant rivals. The
order combined a number of different ideologies and did not always represent a unified perspective. This
internal heterogeneity accounts for the contrary roles undertaken by its adherents over the course of
Ottoman history.
The Bektashis traced their connection to Fazlallah through ‘Ali al-A’la’s Anatolian activities, though there
is little historical evidence for direct contact between him and major Bektashi figures. Fazlallah’s ideology
was likely passed to them indirectly when his works becoming known in Anatolia following the
propaganda carried out by ‘Ali al-A’la and others. Whatever the root of the contact, works by Fazlallah
and his followers became a special advanced syllabus for Bektashi adepts starting in the fifteenth
century. The movement’s ideas never became the order’s common intellectual currency. They were
always deemed a special hermeneutical method learned by the order’s sophisticated followers who had
already mastered the basic ideology.
Most manuscripts of works by Fazlallah and his followers that survive to the present have Bektashi
origins. Long after Fazlallah’s original movement had become defunct, the Bektashis kept making copies
of works by him. Fazlallah’s narratives read like streams of consciousness with no obvious framework to
anchor the reader’s comprehension. This meant that, to be understood, they had to be read in
conjunction with the works of his followers who had attempted to systemize his ideas in the early part of
the fifteenth centuries. This whole tradition was in Persian, both the standard variety and the Astarabadi
dialect, and was added on to by each succeeding generation of scholars interested in the ideas.
The Bektashis for the most part retained the literature in Persian, which also shows that it was accessible
only to those who had learned the language. The few notable efforts to render the literature more readily
available by translation into Turkish include Abdülmecid Firishteoglu’s (d. 1459-60) précis of Fazlallah
Book of Eternal Life (Javidannama), entitled Ishkname-i Ilahi, and his translations of Fazlallah’s Book of
Dreams (Khwabnama) and the Book of Advice (Hidayatnama). The total amount of literature in Turkish
elaborating on Fazlallah’s views nevertheless remained very small compared to works copied and studied
in the original Persian.
The Bektashi order spread to many corners of the Ottoman empire through its association with the
Janissary corps. Adepts of the order took the literature from Fazlallah’s movement with them to all these
places. This can be seen from numerous surviving manuscripts copied in Egypt, Iraq, Albania, Bosnia,
etc. Many Bektashi authors of prose and poetry were deeply affected by Fazlallah’s ideas and wrote
works in the movement’s style. For example, a Bektashi dervish named Gül Baba (d. 1541) popularly
known as Misali, who is buried in Budapest, Hungary, authored an extensive compendium of distinctively
‘Hurufi’ ideas entitled The Key to the Unseen (Miftah al-ghayb).
As the Ottoman empire underwent large-scale military reforms in the nineteenth century, the Janissary
corps lost its privileged status in the empire’s machinery. The Bektashi order was banned in 1825 in
conjunction with this new policy and its followers took their activities underground. The order’s center of
gravity shifted from Anatolia and Istanbul to Albania following this repression. Some of the most
accomplished modern adepts of Fazlallah’s intellectual system have therefore been of Albanian
background. John Birge, who studied the Bektashi order in the early twentieth century, found Albanian
adepts of the order avid readers of Fazlallah’s works.
Some of Fazlallah’s ideas underwent further evolution in the Bektashi environment. A particularly
noticeable feature of the Bektashi assimilation of Fazlallah’s ideas is a distinctive pictorial art in which
letters of the Perso-Arabic alphabet were used to construct forms of human faces and bodies (see figure
two). Fazlallah’s ideas about the lines of hair on the human face and detailed analyses of the shapes of the
alphabet and parts of the human body have a pronounced ‘graphic’ bent. However, virtually none of the
manuscripts that contain his and his followers’ works contain any pictorial description of the movement’s
theories. One can only speculate on this somewhat counterintuitive fact. The movement’s ideology
always assigned multiple meanings to all texts and other physical realities and it may be that illustrating
the material through pictures would have led to an undesirable ‘reification’ of the symbols’ meanings.
The only pictograms to be found in the movement’s manuscripts are the special letter-like characters
used to write the name Fazlallah and the numbers twenty-eight and thirty-two (see figure one in chapter
five). This indicates that the movement’s ideologues were quite aware of the power of representing
entities in iconic forms. However, they limited their use of this technique to some prominent parts of
their ideology.
Bektashi adherents of Fazlallah’s system were not bound by the same strictures that seem to have
motivated his immediate followers. They took the correspondence between the human body and written
text quite literally and fashioned a whole variety of images that located names such as Allah,
Muhammad, ‘Ali, Hasan, Husayn, and Fazlallah on the shapes of the human face. These types of Bektashi
images do not, for the most part, attempt to exemplify Fazlallah’s ideas in pictures. Instead, they are
exemplifications of the general principle of the interchangeability of bodies and texts.
While some Bektashis scoured Fazlallah’s works in search of esoteric secrets, his name became indelibly
associated with heresy in the mainstream religious establishment of the Ottoman empire. To the degree
that they were known, Fazlallah’s messianic claim and his ideas about divine incarnation provided ample
evidence for this attitude by the empire’s Sunni scholars. The term ‘Hurufi’ was not associated solely
with Fazlallah’s followers in the Ottoman empire during the fifteenth century. For example, ‘Abd al-
Rahman al-Bistami (d. 1454), a Sunni author belonging to the normative Hanafi legal school, was known
as Hurufi due to his interest in the esoteric qualities of the alphabet. Bistami was born in Antioch and
wrote all his works in Arabic under the patronage of the Ottoman court during the first half of the
fifteenth century.
The term Hurufi acquired its negative characteristics in the Ottoman context as Fazlallah became better
known particularly through being assimilated in the Bektashi order. From the sixteenth century onward,
calling people Hurufi was a standard way for the government and mainstream scholars to discredit them
as orthodox Muslims. Historical records provide a number of examples of cases in which individuals were
tried for heresy on the charge of being Hurufis, followed by execution. There are quite a few cases of
Ottoman Sufis who were not Bektashis but were attracted to Fazlallah’s ideas. These include mystics and
authors belonging to the Mevlevi, Melami, and Hamzevi orders active in Anatolia as well as the Balkan
provinces of the Ottoman empire.
Ottoman religious authorities critical of the Bektashi order in the nineteenth century put particular
emphasis on Bektashis’ positive view of Fazlallah’s ideas. A controversy erupted in Istanbul when
Abdülmecid Firishteoglu’s Iskname, a fifteenth-century précis of Fazlallah’s thought in Turkish, was
printed in Istanbul in 1871. The work was soundly condemned by a certain Ishak Efendi two year later in
a work entitled The Revealer of Secrets and the Repudiator of Corruptions (Kashif el-esrar ve dafi’ el-
esrar). A Bektashi author named Ahmed Rifat then wrote a refutation of this work three years later,
claiming that Hurufi doctrines were separate from the essence of the Bektashi order. The acerbic tone of
this literature indicates the degree to which any association with Fazlallah’s ideas was still a highly
contentious matter in the nineteenth century. This controversy seems to have subsided in the twentieth
century with the general secularization of the public sphere after the creation of the Turkish republic in
1923. Modern Turkish Bektashis or other Sufis seem to show little inclination toward taking Fazlallah’s
theories seriously while elaborating their religious visions.