Introduction

A FORGOTTEN PURITAN FROM ANATOLIA

      BORN in Cyprus to a Christian family, Aḥmad al-Rūmī al-Aqḥiṣārī was taken away as a child after the Ottoman conquest of the island (977/1570–981/1573) and converted to Islam. He became a Ḥanafite ‘ālim and lived in Akhisar (western Anatolia), where he is said to be buried in the Uzun Taş cemetery. He seems to have spent only a short time in Istanbul. The date of his death is not known with certainty and he is misidentified by some authors as Ḥasan Kāfī Āqḥiṣārī (d. 1024/1615), the Bosniac scholar from Prusac. Al-Aqḥiṣārī’s most famous work is The Councils of the Pious – Majālis al-abrār, a collection of one hundred religious reflections inspired by Prophetic traditions from The Lamps of the Tradition – Maṣābīḥ al-Sunna by the Afghānī Shāfi‘ite traditionist and Qur’ān commentator Abū Muḥammad al-Ḥusayn al-Baghawī, also known as Ibn al-Farrā’ (d. in Marw al-Rūdh, 516/1122?).¹

      Al-Aqḥiṣārī is sometimes said to have been a shaykh of the Sufi Khalwatiyya order, which was vehemently opposed by Qāḍīzādelis and criticised by Kātib Çelebi in The Balance of Truth – Mīzān al-Ḥaqq. Could this be due to another misidentification with some third Ḥasan, Rūmī or Āqḥiṣārī, about whom little is known and who really did belong to this important ṭarīqa? Perhaps. In any case, the milieu in which the author of the Majālis evolved was surely a very different one. First, like Ibn Taymiyya (d. 728/1328) and his disciple Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 751/1350), to whom he refers explicitly and whose texts he quotes extensively, he strongly condemns the veneration of tombs, in his Refutation of the visitors of tombs – Radd al-Qabriyya as well as in Council XVII of the Majālis.² Second, what al-Aqḥiṣārī writes in the first lines of his commentary (sharḥ) on The Unique Pearl, concerning the Recitation of the Qur’ān – al-Durr al-yatīm fī l-tajwīd by Birgivī Meḥmed Efendi (d. 981/1573) gives a clear indication of the high esteem in which he holds the spiritual father of Ottoman puritanism: “…the shaykh, the active and strong scholar (al-‘ālim al-‘āmil al-qawī) Meḥmed b. Pīr ‘Alī al-Birgivī – may God make the Garden his refuge, give him to drink a pure beverage, and quench his thirst…”¹ Third, and more intriguing still, the relatively large number of ancient manuscripts in which the Turkish texts of Birgivī’s Waṣiyyet-Nāmeh, the Epistle – Risāleh of Qāḍīzāde Meḥmed (d. 1045/1635)² and al-Aqḥiṣārī’s Creed – Risāleh fī l-‘aqā’id (or Risāleh, or Waṣiyyet-Nāmeh) are bound together in a sort of sacred trilogy leaves no doubt that, in the mind of many at the time, their religious views were both pivotal and convergent.³ This means, in other words, that the supposedly Khalwatī author of the Majālis could well have been directly linked to, or even have played a seminal role in, the reformist movement, influenced by Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim, which, during the Ottoman 10th/16th–11th/17th centuries, presages Wahhābism. Some twenty years ago, R. Peters remarked that “little is known about this tradition” of “Turkish fundamentalism” (or “revivalism”), adding that “it certainly deserves a closer study in order to find out how the essentially Ḥanbalite ideas of Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya could survive in Ḥanafite Ottoman religious culture.”¹ An exploration of the works of al-Aqḥiṣārī may provide part of the answer; hence my interest in him. Perhaps, moreover, one will eventually have to speak of those ideas as “thriving” rather than “surviving”, at various moments of the history of Turkey.

      The truth however remains that Aḥmad al-Rūmī al-Aqḥiṣārī is almost completely absent from modern studies of the Ottoman 10th/16th– 11th/17th centuries.² This is also the case for the impact of his Majālis, before and after it was translated into Urdu,³ on the genesis of contemporary Indian Islamic thought, be it Deobandi or Barelvi: it is still to be explored in detail. The fact that the Majālis is explicitly quoted, together with Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, in al-Balāgh almubīn, an anti-Hindu tract in Persian falsely attributed to Shāh Walīullāh Dihlawī (d. 1176/1762) but most probably written in India after 1831, nevertheless testifies to the centrality of its author and holds the promise of potentially surprising developments. In his study of al-Balāgh al-mubīn,⁴ Marc Gaborieau acknowledges having “no further information” on al-Aqḥiṣārī’s Majālīs. He does not therefore realize that this pre-Wahhābī Ottoman work of Ḥanafite puritanism, alongside reports of pilgrims coming back from Arabia and other forms of ideological “digestion” by Ibn ‘Abd al-Wahhāb or Muḥammad al-Shawkānī (d. 1250/1834), might have been an important channel through which reformist teachings, Taymiyyan and others, influenced the pseudo-Walīullāhan text which he calls “an Indian “Wahhābī” tract” and, more generally, the so-called Indian “Wahhābism”.¹ Whatever its appeal might be, this hypothesis will of course need to be confirmed.