The ulema in context

Generalisations about the character of the Ottoman religious and legal scholars (ulema) in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries call for the kind of historiographical disclaimers that often accompany studies of early modern institutions – the narrative sources are elitist or formulaic, the documentary materials absent or uneven and the secondary literature thin or tendentious. The problem of sources can be offset by limiting the scope of generalisation – not all ulema, for example, but those who are retrievable or in some way representative of the sources if not of society. Most findings will still reveal more about the grand than the ordinary membership, and more about Istanbul and other major centres than about provincial and small-town scholars.

In Ottoman usage, ‘the ulema’ constituted an ever more exclusive vocational category. Until the modernising reforms of the nineteenth century, it also denoted an increasingly more privileged social caste. The Ottomans’ unprecedented centralisation of ulema recruitment and functions, a process well under way by the mid-sixteenth century, and the restrictive application of the term itself, direct the historiographical gaze, now as in the Ottoman past, onto Istanbul and the central elites. The boundaries around ‘the learned’ explain a great deal about Ottoman values and anxieties in these centuries. Among other things, they suggest a profound investment in designating who would – and who would not – be the standard-bearers of Ottoman Islamic orthodoxy.