Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 190 - Turkish Delights - Philosophy under the Ottomans.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast, brought to you with the support of King's College London and the LMU in Munich, online at www.historyofphilosophy.net. Today's episode, Turkish Delights, Philosophy Under the Ottomans. Stop me if you'd heard this one. What's the difference between a mathematician and a philosopher? To do mathematics, you need only a pencil and an eraser, and philosophy likewise, except you don't need the eraser. It's true, philosophy doesn't require much in their way of equipment. To do this podcast on the history of philosophy, I only need some books, a microphone, and a computer. Oh, and one other very important thing, coffee. This is something we philosophers share with mathematicians, who have been called machines for turning coffee into theorems. If I were deprived of my daily dose, as a podcaster I would go from has been to has been. So, I have a lot of sympathy for the 17th century Ottoman scholar Qatib Chedebi. He supposedly died while drinking coffee, which is not a bad way to go. And he put his arguments where his mouth was. Qatib Chedebi was an impressive scholar who produced much admired works including a bibliographical dictionary and a treatise on geography. But his last work, entitled The Balance of Truth, is among other things a plea for flexibility and tolerance with respect to social and religious practices that were controversial in Qatib Chedebi's day. Among those controversial practices was the drinking of coffee. I can't entirely side with him, since Chedebi also speaks up in favor of allowing people to smoke tobacco, whereas I am one of those people who will move away and start pretending to cough if anyone lights up in my presence. Still, I have to admire his policy of pragmatism. With his moderate and open-minded approach to Islam, Chedebi was signaling his opposition to a popular movement of his day, the Khadiz Adelis. Named after the charismatic preacher Mehmed Khadizadeh, the Khadiz Adelis opposed not only the fragrant activities of coffee drinking and tobacco smoking, but anything that smelled of innovation and religion. They were even upset by such apparently innocuous novelties as shaking the hands of one fellow's worshippers in the mosque. The Khadiz Adelis' great opponents were the Sufi orders, which were influential and massively popular in the Ottoman Empire. They also became rivals to the scholars, who formed both the intelligentsia and the legal class in the Ottoman state, the ulema. The ulema had always been important as the main repository of religious learning and legal authority in Sunni Islam. But under the Ottomans, their influence and social status reached new heights. Their coziness with the Ottoman rulers and their entrenched status, with scholarly sinecures being passed down from father to son within certain fortunate families, enraged the Khadiz Adelis. So this popular movement was taking aim at not just religious innovations and the theological excesses of the Sufis, but also the corruption and complacency of the ulema. The Khadiz Adelis succeeded for a time. The Sultan Murad was persuaded to put some of their policies into practice, for instance by declaring the death penalty for anyone caught smoking. This was at best a temporary and mixed success. There are even stories of Ottoman soldiers being executed after being caught with tobacco and defiantly indulging in one last smoke while being led to their deaths. Qatib Chelebi was a hero of the moderate stance within these debates. He made a point that still has application in political and social debates today, namely that there is no point forbidding something that people are going to do no matter what. He also acknowledges the problem of corruption among the scholarly class and shares the Khadiz Adelis' alarm at the excesses of some Sufis, but he speaks up in defense of the controversial Ibn Arabi, pointing out that his theories are so hard to understand that it would be uncharitable not to give him the benefit of the doubt. Like Al-Ghazali before him, he disdainfully rejects those who propose throwing out the intellectual baby with the bathwater of corruption among the ulema. His balance of truth actually begins by insisting upon the value of such traditional scholarly disciplines as logic, mathematics, and astronomy. Without training in these sciences, how is the Muslim jurist to adjudicate in a land measurement dispute or understand Quranic references to the stations of the moon? Among the traditions that Chelebi values is philosophy. He laments that the study of more advanced philosophical topics has gone into retreat at the madrasas of his day. He himself has had to pursue it outside the standard educational curriculum, something Chelebi compares to the way that Plato learned in the marketplace at the feet of Socrates. He provides a list of the scholars he most admires, mentioning numerous names that will be familiar to us—Asharite philosopher-theologians like Al-Ghazali and Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, as well as later Mongol-era thinkers such as al-Iji and the Shirazi philosopher Dawani. Patib Chelebi's complaint about a slump in pursuit of the intellectual sciences should not be dismissed out of hand. In the next episode, I'll return to the question of whether there really was an intellectual decline in the 17th century Ottoman Empire. But more generally, Ottoman madrasa education was more or less along the lines of the curriculum taught in Persia and in Mughal India. For centuries, this education helped form the religious and legal scholars of the ulema class. Given the close relations between the ulema and the state, the curriculum was thus at the heart of the Ottoman conception of Sunni Islam, and so at the heart of the Ottoman sultans' claim to legitimacy as the defenders of the faith. The Ottomans take their name from Osman, who achieved a first famous victory for his dynasty, but certainly not the last, in a clash with the Byzantines in the year 1305. Osman and his followers were Turkic tribesmen and ghazis, or religious warriors, who rallied around the cause of Islam. Not without reason, later Ottoman intellectuals would look to Ibn Khaldun's theory of tribal solidarity to explain their own history. But their ascent to power was not exactly uninterrupted. The Ottomans had early successes in Eastern Europe from their base in Anatolia, penetrating into the Balkans and defeating a combined force of Serbs and Bosnians in a famous battle at Kosovo in 1389. If we've learned anything about the 13th and 14th centuries though, it's this. Watch out for Mongols. Legend has it that Osman's tribe first came to Anatolia as refugees from the initial Mongol invasion. But around the year 1400, the new round of Mongol conquests, led by Tamerlane, arrived at the Ottoman's doorstep. They were crushed at the Battle of Ankara, and the Ottoman leader Bayezid was taken captive and then executed. You can't keep a good empire down though. The Ottomans regrouped, took back their territory in Anatolia, and renewed their attacks against Christian forces in the Balkans. The big breakthrough came in 1453, when Mehmet II overran the city of Constantinople itself, or should I say Istanbul, and thus brought to an end a story we'll be telling in the future when we look at Byzantine philosophy. As a result, the Ottoman sultans could adopt something of the charisma of Roman emperors, a charisma augmented further when the sultan Selim defeated Mamluk forces to lay claim to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina in 1517. And still the Ottomans weren't done. Selim's successor, the famous Suleiman the Magnificent, pushed the frontiers of Ottoman territory yet further into Egypt and Iraq. The result was a mighty empire, beset by rivals on all sides yet still able to survive and indeed flourish for centuries to come. Ottoman forces clashed with a variety of European powers, including the Habsburgs, the Venetians, and the Portuguese, and they contended with the Mamluk dynasty before Selim wrested Egypt from their grasp. At least as important was their rivalry with another Muslim empire located to the east, the Safavids in Persia. As I've said, the Ottomans' legitimacy rested in large part on their claim to be the champions of Sunni Islam. They duly saw the Shiite Safavids as natural enemies, and there was frequent military conflict between the two empires. That religious context had deep consequences for the development of philosophy in the Ottoman empire. For one thing, with the rise of the Safavids, many Sunni scholars relocated from the newly Shiite Persia to the Ottoman realm. One example was Muslih Ad-Din al-Lari, who originally studied at Shiraz and thus had a deep knowledge of the works of the feuding philosophers of that city, the two dashtakis and Dawani. Lari was in fact a student of the younger dashtaki. I unfortunately haven't been able to confirm my suspicion that he had two fellow students named Mo and Curly. In one of his works, Lari says explicitly that a number of Sunnis like himself left Iran because of the Safavid's religious policies. Lari is a particularly interesting case because he at first went to India and joined the court of a Mughal ruler before coming to Aleppo and Constantinople, I mean Istanbul, in 1566. So here we have a single thinker who spent time in all three of the later Islamic empires bringing with him the ideas of the so-called school of Shiraz. Nor was Lari content simply to transmit the ideas of his teachers. He also wrote works of his own on history, logic, astronomy, and so on. In keeping with the scholarly customs of the day, many of these were in the form of commentaries and glosses on earlier works. He wrote for instance two commentaries on astronomical works by an Ottoman scientist of the 15th century by the name of Al-Ad-Din al-Kushji. Like his commentator, Lari, Al-Kushji originally hailed from further east, in his case Central Asia. He worked at the astronomical observatory founded by the Mongol ruler Uleg Beg in Samarkand. In fact, he was the son of Uleg Beg's falconer. But he soon enough spread his wings and took flight to the Ottoman realm, passing through Iran on the way to the city formerly known as Constantinople. He settled here in Istanbul and became one of the greatest scientists in Ottoman history. Though he was primarily an astronomer and not a philosopher, Al-Kushji had some interesting things to say about how these two fields relate to one another. I mentioned in a previous episode that, like logic, astronomy had become in a sense safe for Islamic religious scholars by being made autonomous from the more controversial aspects of philosophy. But there was always a worry that philosophy might sneak in through the back door. After all, Aristotelian natural philosophy tells us why the heavens are revolving and why Earth stays unmoving at the center of the universe. Earth has a natural tendency to move downwards until stopped by some obstacle and then come to rest, whereas heavenly bodies are made of a special fifth element that naturally moves in circles. But unlike Atouzi and his fellow philosopher-scientists at the Maragha Observatory, Al-Kushji had no strong commitment to the Aristotelian cosmology. For all we know, he admitted the Earth might be rotating. We can't exclude this through observation. On the other hand, he isn't particularly worried either by the Asharite theologians' insistence that God, being omnipotent and entirely free, could radically change the heavens in the blink of an eye. The mathematical astronomer is not presupposing any particular causal account of the heavens, he is just devising models on the basis of what has been observed and the only truths he needs to invoke are geometrical ones which are not open to doubt. As far as the astronomer is concerned, it simply doesn't matter whether the philosophers are right to invoke natural causes or whether the theologians are right to give all the credit to God. A scientist like Al-Kushji could afford to remain neutral in the face of the now age-old quarrel between Aristotelian philosophy and Islamic kalam, but he was lucky. The sultan never asked him for his opinion on the matter. It had been known to happen. Back in the late 15th century, the sultan Mehmed II asked two scholars to write responses to Al-Ghazali's Incoherence of the Philosophers, then as now the most famous text for the clash between philosophy and Asharite theology. This was an unusual project for both scholars, who were more accustomed to write commentaries on the standard kalam works of the Ottoman educational curriculum. But as Ayman Shihadeh dryly remarks in a study of this event, when commissioned by the sultan, scholars normally obliged. In fact this was no ordinary commission, but a kind of contest. Both authors were given a large monetary reward, but the winner also received a fabulous robe. The victor was Kojozada, the loser Al-Adin Atuzy, not to be confused with the much more famous Nasir-Adin Atuzy. Both oversaw madrasas in the Ottoman realm and so qualified as leading intellectuals. And the approach they took to writing their own versions of The Incoherence of the Philosophers is rather telling in what it says about the mindset of leading intellectuals of this period. They tackled the topics raised by Al-Ghazali, but without engaging with his text in great detail. Instead, Kojozada and Al-Adin drew freely on more recent works, such as the widely read commentary by Al-Jurjani on the great Asharite theologian Ali-Iji. So a lot of new material was brought to bear on the classic debate between Al-Ghazali and Avicenna. Also characteristic is that both Kojozada and Al-Adin were broadly happy with Al-Ghazali's approach, in that they likewise proposed criticisms of Avicenna. In fact, we find them agreeing that some of Avicenna's positions amount to apostasy from Islam. On the other hand, they aren't necessarily impressed by the actual arguments used by Al-Ghazali. A nice example is the debate over the eternity of the universe. Kojozada agrees with Al-Ghazali in rejecting Avicenna's position, that is, he too holds that the universe is created rather than eternal, but he rebuts Al-Ghazali's arguments for this conclusion. In the original Incoherence, Al-Ghazali had for instance pointed out that if Aristotle and Avicenna were right to think the universe is eternal, then an infinite number of humans must already have existed, and human souls survive the death of their bodies. Thus, there should by now be an actually infinite number of human souls hanging around, but the philosophers reject the possibility that there could be any actual infinity. Thus, they must admit that the universe cannot be eternal. Nice try, says Kojozada, but this argument won't work. The problem involved in an actual infinity is that you can't go through it in order and get to the end, like counting up through the integers and eventually reaching an infinite number. But here, there is no need to go through the infinite souls in order. They have no relationship of priority and posteriority the way that numbers do. They just all coexist as a disordered jumble and there's nothing absurd in that. Of course, we might try counting backwards through infinite past time. One year ago, two years ago, three years ago, and so on. That would give us the absurd kind of infinity, since the years do have an order going into the past. This argument too was deployed against the eternity of the world, for instance in antiquity, by John Philoponus, and in early Arabic philosophy by al-Kindi. But this won't work either, says Kojozada. The problem here is that the past years are no longer existent, so the philosophers are not stuck with an actual infinite quantity. Kojozada, therefore, proposes a different argument of his own. The infinite past times do not exist in reality, but they exist mentally. Not of course in our puny human minds, which cannot really grasp infinity, but in the mind of God all past times should still be present, since he is omniscient. And the times would have order, since he would know which times were earlier and which later. Thus, if past time were infinite, then the absurd kind of infinity would turn up in God's mind. It would have only what Kojozada calls a shadowy kind of existence, that is mental instead of concrete existence, but it would be there nonetheless. By the way, on this topic of God's knowledge, Kojozada has another interesting proposal concerning a different part of Alhazali's incoherence. Avicenna infamously held that God knows particular things only universally. For Alhazali and other critics, this claim had the unacceptable consequence that God would not know particular things at all. Not so, says Kojozada, for each individual thing is unique in the combination of universal properties it possesses. For instance, there are lots of bald people, lots of podcasters, lots of philosophers, lots of coffee drinkers, but I may be the only bald coffee drinking podcasting philosopher. If there are any others out there, let me know. The upshot is that God could know about me without knowing anything non-universal, by knowing that these universals are found together in my case, and only in my case. This example might suggest that Ottoman scholars were interested only in philosophy when it got into theological territory, but that impression is misleading. Ottomans contributed to all branches of philosophy. Take for instance ethics, which offers us a chance to glance again at the history of Jewish philosophy in Islamic lands. Many Jews fled to Ottoman territory when they were exiled from the Iberian peninsula at the end of the 15th century. As a result, texts familiar to us from our look at Andalusian thought, like Maimonides's Guide and a central Kabbalistic text, the Zohar, were read and debated by Jews living in the empire. One outstanding example is Moses Al-Mosnino, who lived in Salonika in the 16th century. He wrote commentaries on Averroes, Al-Ghazali, and the ethics of Aristotle. Al-Mosnino also drew on Latin philosophers, including Thomas Aquinas. In his commentary, he follows the sort of intellectualist position in ethics we've already seen in other Jewish thinkers like Maimonides himself. But he adds to this the Kabbalistic notion that the souls of Jews, in particular, have a spark of the divine in them, which is why the Bible says that mankind was created in God's image. If such a soul achieves intellectual perfection by subduing the body in this life, it can look forward to a reunion with God in the hereafter. In the same century, practical philosophy was also being pursued by the Muslim Ottoman philosopher Ali-Chelebi Kinalezadeh. In another case of reworking a famous text from elsewhere in the Islamic world, Kinalezadeh produced a treatise called The Exalted Ethics. It was a reworking of Dawani's treatise on ethics, which was itself a reworking of the widely read Ethics for Nasir by Nasir ad-Din Atuzi. That's the famous Atuzi again. As we saw when we looked at Atuzi, the title is slightly misleading, in that his work tackled all areas of practical philosophy, including political philosophy and household management, not just ethics. Kinalezadeh followed his lead, along the way providing a justification for the arrangement of Ottoman society. He explains that a functioning society has four main groups, the soldiers, or men of the sword, the scholars, or men of the pen, in other words the ulema, the craftsmen, and the farmers. As in Plato's Republic, the just ordering of society requires that these groups be in appropriate balance. As for the leaders, they belong to a class of their very own. Kinalezadeh praises Suleiman as a real-life philosopher-king. Kinalezadeh had good reason to do so. Suleiman was the most outstanding of the Ottoman rulers, having increased the territory held by the Ottomans to unprecedented size in Kinalezadeh's own lifetime. These were the glory days of the Ottoman realm, when madrasas were being built at a rapid pace, setting the stage for the scholarly activities I've been discussing in this episode. But nothing good lasts forever. What became of philosophy, as the Ottoman Empire lost territory and finally ended, and as its inhabitants were increasingly exposed to European culture through travel, trade, and colonization? I hope that I have dispelled the myth of post-medieval decline in the many episodes I have now devoted to philosophy in the later traditions, but as we now move ever closer to the present day, are we finally going to see the end of meaningful philosophical activity in the Islamic world? There will be a few weeks before you can find out, because I will now be taking my usual annual break, during which I plan to drink a lot of coffee and put down on paper some of the ideas that have been percolating in my mind for the forthcoming episodes on Latin medieval philosophy. I'll return in late September with several future episodes about the recent past, as I cover 19th and 20th century philosophy in the Islamic world. Later on, the history of philosophy without any gaps.