In 1691, the Halveti master Niyazi-i Mısri divulged a secret that had been revealed to him by the archangel Gabriel: Hasan and Huseyin, the grandsons of the prophet Muhammad, were also prophets. Mısri called on all Muslims to accept the truth of his prophecy, and labeled those who refused to do so as “Yazidis,” a derogatory term used by the pro-Safavid Qızılbash poets of sixteenth-century Anatolia to refer to Sunnis. It must be emphasized that Mısri himself was neither a Shii nor harbored loosely Shiitizing tendencies, but was rather a self-professed Sunni. More remarkably still, he lived in a time period when confessional boundaries between Sunnis and Shiis had become considerably solidified as a result of the religious policies of both the Ottomans and the Safavids. Clearly, however, it was still possible, when conditions were right, for the repressed to return in the form of a rhetoric and praxis that defied the discursive boundaries of (in this case, Sunni) confessionalism.
This paper is an attempt to trace and understand the rules governing the continuing uses of this confessionally ambivalent discourse in Sufi and related milieus in the Ottoman Empire during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. To this end, a wide variety of texts will be juxtaposed and read in dialogue with one another, including but not limited to Garibi’s biographical dictionary of Rumi poets written for a Safavid audience circa 1560, Evliya Çelebi’s account of his experiences in Safavid Iran in 1646-7 and 1654-5 and the prophetic letters of Mısri dating from the early 1690s.
Derin Terzioğlu received her Ph.D. in History and Middle Eastern Studies from Harvard University in 1999. She is currently employed as an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Boğaziçi University. Her research interests lie broadly in the religious, cultural and intellectual history of the early modern Ottoman Empire. She has been particularly interested in the interplay between “high” and “low,” whether in the context of imperial festivals, practices of reading and writing, or religion. Her most recent publications have examined the diverse attempts to remold lay piety in the Ottoman Empire of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as part of a more global trend of confessionalization.