THE RELIGIOUS PIETY and propagation of Islam by Mehmed IV and his court was the culmination of spiritual trends begun a century and a half earlier. Between 1501 and 1566 the Sunni-Shi’i divide sharpened, exacerbated by the clash between the Ottomans and Safavids, which accompanied empire building and the incorporation of the religious class into the administration. Following these processes, we witness in the period from 1566 to 1683 a turn of many Ottoman Muslims to Islamic fundamentalism. Sunni Muslim religious zealotry was manifested in promotion of public piety. This came from the top down, from administrative elites and members of the dynasty, as well as from below, from popular movements culminating with the Kadızadeli reform movement in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Ottoman Empire. The Kadızadeli Muslim reformists were named after the early seventeenth-century preacher Kadızade Mehmed of Balıkesir, in northwestern Anatolia, who had begun his spiritual life as a Sufi but turned against the Sufi way. His followers promoted a return to what they considered the true faith practised by the first Muslims in seventh-century Medina, shorn of corrupting innovations. The Kadızadelis promoted a modern, rational religion pruned of magic, superstition, miracles, and mediators between humans and God. Their aim was to create a brotherhood of all believers, without distinction between those who supposedly were blessed by proximity to God and those who were not. As in the rest of contemporary Europe, pietism and political power were linked as the Kadızadelis found friends at court, at first during the reign of Murad IV, but especially during the reign of Mehmed IV.
The Kadızadeli reformist preacher movement was led by men who saw themselves as performing the Qur’anic injunction to ‘command the good and forbid evil’. They promoted Sunni Islam and condemned those Muslims, especially some groups of Sufis, they found deviating from it. They attacked the ideas of Ibn Arabi: while Sufis called him ‘the First Sheikh’, Kadızadelis deemed him ‘the Worst Sheikh’.1 They promoted a crackdown on mystics gazing at young boys and public worship, especially ceremonies accompanied by dancing and music. They were opposed to pleasure—music, dancing, consumption of addictive substances—and aimed to ensure that Muslim men conducted their prayers, lived modestly, and did not gamble. Following a large fire in Istanbul in 1633, which they considered God’s punishment for widespread immorality, the Kadızadelis convinced Murad IV to demolish the coffeehouses, where mature men met their boy lovers. According to an Iranian visitor to the city, in each coffeehouse ‘a number of delicate and pretty youths are seated who have tresses and moles that are snares, and who act as magnets to attract hearts’.2 The Kadızadelis also wanted the sultan to ban the consumption by Muslims of wine, opium, and tobacco. The reason was that Janissaries, stoked up on wine or coffee, abducted naked women from bathhouses, consumed tobacco in mosques, harassed men, bloodied a lot of noses, and, according to a contemporary Ottoman observer, ‘hastily, yet openly engaged in fornication and sodomy’ on street corners.3 Such a libertine atmosphere led to the angry backlash of these puritans.
The Kadızadelis condemned the widespread practice of payment for religious services and pious foundations to establish mosques endowed with cash, since the practice appeared to condone usury, which is forbidden in Islam. They asked why the dynasty had built a mosque with six minarets—Ahmed I’s mosque on the Hippodrome, popularly known as the Blue Mosque—the same number as possessed by the Great Mosque in Mecca, to which a seventh was added. The Kadızadeli preachers chased prostitutes and single women out of neighbourhoods, closed brothels, railed against beardless youths in general and those accompanying the Janissaries on military campaigns in particular, and ensured Muslim women did not have sexual relations with Christians and Jews.4
In this context, at noon on Friday, 28 June 1680, hundreds of thousands of people crowded into the Hippodrome to stone to death a Muslim woman accused of having committed adultery with an infidel and to witness the beheading of the Jew who was alleged to be her lover.5 They had violated the gendered social hierarchy of Ottoman society. They broke the law prohibiting Christian or Jewish men from having sex with Muslim women. These accusations guaranteed that their punishment would be administered to the body in a public spectacle. Sultan Mehmed IV attended the double execution in person, watching the spectacular sight from the veranda of Suleiman I’s grand vizier Ibrahim Pasha’s palace. Mehmed IV offered the man conversion to Islam, permitting him to die swiftly and with dignity by decapitation. The woman, the wife of a Janissary, was treated much worse, despite her proclamations of innocence. ‘Wailing and lamenting’ the accused adulteress cried, ‘They have slandered me. I am innocent and have committed no sin. For the sake of the princes, do not kill me, release me!’6 But the sultan did not allow her to be freed. She was buried in a pit up to her waist in front of an ancient spiral column with three intertwined serpent heads. After her brother cast the first stone, the crowd joined in to punish her in this cruel fashion. Her bloody corpse reminded one writer of keşkek, a stew made of wheat boiled with meat.
Along with a focus on putting women in their place, the Kadızadelis and the activist Muslim elite—including members of the dynasty and administration—promoted conversion to Islam. They were given an opportunity to do so by the messianic movement of Sabbatai Zevi in 1665, the greatest Jewish messianic movement after that of Jesus. This movement broke out in the Ottoman Empire, and Jews all over Europe would be swept up in it. Within the royal palace, Mehmed IV, his preacher Vani Mehmed, his mother Hatice Turhan, and Grand Vizier Fazıl Ahmed Pasha—who ironically died of alcoholism—all experienced a revival of their faith. This intensification of religious fervour turned belief in a purified and reformed Islam into political policy. They attempted to transform the way Muslims practised their religion, spurring the conversion of other Muslims to their puritanical interpretation of Islam. Outlawing certain Sufi orders and practices—banning public whirling ceremonies, closing their lodges, destroying their shrines, exiling their leaders, and decapitating those deemed deviant dervishes—they sought to root out what they considered illegitimate practices among Muslims.
The dynasty’s campaign to cool religious ecstasy, tear down places where euphoric spiritual exercises were performed, and eradicate what they considered illicit practices coincided with the outbreak of Sabbatai Zevi’s movement. The movement aimed to revolutionise Jewish life and convert Jews to Sabbatai Zevi’s understanding of God’s prophecy.7 Prophecies concerning the imminent arrival of the messiah, long current in Mediterranean and Ottoman Jewish circles, convinced many Jews that Sabbatai Zevi was the awaited one.8 Just as Ottoman history is part of Europe’s history, Ottoman history and Jewish history are one.
Jews had read the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople, the smiting of traditional Jewish enemies both Catholic and Byzantine, and the taking of the Land of Israel in millenarian ways—as the beginning of the end-time and the arrival of the messianic era. The speculations of Kabbalists in the Ottoman-ruled Holy Land, especially in the hilltop town of Safed in the upper Galilee, one of Judaism’s four holy cities, furthered messianic expectations among Jews. Those descended from the Jews and conversos expelled from Spain and Portugal, in particular, believed Sabbatai Zevi would dethrone the sultan and crown himself king.
Just as Sheikh Bedreddin was a Southeastern European spiritualist who was half-Greek and half-Turkish, Sabbatai Zevi was born in the Aegean port city of İzmir in 1626 to a Greek Jewish family originating in Southeastern Europe. His parents had immigrated to İzmir, the region where the disciples of Sheikh Bedreddin, Börklüce Mustafa, and Torlak Hu Kemal had preached their version of proto-communism and universal brotherhood and sisterhood at the beginning of the fifteenth century. İzmir was a relatively new city in the seventeenth century, a rough-and-tumble town of Armenians, Jews, Muslims, Orthodox Christians, English, French, and Dutch that rivalled Istanbul as an international entrepôt.9 In this bold, heterogeneous environment where Western European hope for the imminent Day of Judgement mixed with ecstatic Sufism, the charismatic Sabbatai Zevi began at the age of eighteen to lead his own group of students of Kabbalah. He behaved mercurially, passing from ecstasy to melancholy and back again. Because of his strange powers and magical and ascetic practices, he became the spiritual guide for many Jews. They believed that the messiah would appear in the year 1648.10
In that year Sabbatai Zevi pronounced the never-to-be-spoken holy name of God (the tetragrammaton) and engaged in other scandalous practices, including proclaiming himself the messiah. The rabbis of İzmir banned everyone from having contact with him. He left İzmir and travelled to Ottoman cities with large Jewish populations, including Salonica (today Thessaloniki, Greece), the only Ottoman city with a Jewish majority. Salonica at the time was one of the most important centres of Jewish learning and Kabbalah. But Sabbatai Zevi’s outrageous acts in Salonica caused him again to be banished. He travelled to Istanbul in 1658. There, too, his blasphemy, offences against tradition, strange acts, and pronouncing licit what the rabbis proclaimed illicit compelled him to flee the wrath of the rabbis. But he also attracted the attention of like-minded mystics, for he behaved like a deviant dervish. No one had forgotten Börklüce Mustafa and Torlak Hu Kemal’s insurrections in the Aegean region. The heavy suffering of the Jews during the great fire in Istanbul in 1660 allegedly pleased Sabbatai Zevi because he saw it as an act of God calling Jews to repent.11
In 1662, Sabbatai Zevi travelled to Jerusalem. There he found Jews in financial and spiritual despair because the Ottoman government had levied extraordinary taxes on them to help finance the campaign for Crete. The leaders of the community sent Sabbatai Zevi to Egypt to raise funds for their survival. While in Egypt, in 1664 he married Sarah, an orphan of the 1648–1649 massacres of tens of thousands of Jews during a Cossack and Ukrainian peasant uprising against Polish rule in Ukraine. Raised a Catholic in a Polish convent, she had become a fortune-teller and prostitute and had lived in Amsterdam as well as Livorno, Italy. Most significant, she had proclaimed she would one day marry the messiah. That day had come.
On Sabbatai Zevi’s return to Jerusalem in April 1665, he met the well-known Kabbalist Nathan of Gaza. Nathan was a miracle-working, charismatic man of God, similar to a Sufi sheikh.12 Nathan told him he had seen a revelation in which Sabbatai Zevi was enthroned as the messiah. He was the first to recognise Sabbatai Zevi’s messianic claims. He predicted that Sabbatai Zevi would peacefully take authority from the sultan and, through his hymns and prayers, all kings would submit to him. Wherever he turned to conquer, he would take the sultan with him as his ‘personal slave’.13 He expected the sultan to set his own ‘crown’ on Sabbatai Zevi’s head and give him the Land of Israel.
As a result, Sabbatai Zevi revealed himself as the messiah in May 1665 in Gaza. Nathan dispatched letters to Western European and Ottoman Jewry informing them of the acts of this allegedly miracle-working messiah. His missives led to widespread acceptance of Sabbatai Zevi’s divine role because Jews at the time were accustomed to claims of prophecy and expected no less. Sabbatai Zevi mattered not only to Jews. Some Christians and Muslims became his disciples. His movement attracted the excited attention of Christian Europe, much of which, including England, was witnessing its own spiritual upheaval.
In the cities of the Ottoman Empire, thousands of frenzied women and girls prophesied that Sabbatai Zevi was the messiah. They described visions of him enthroned in the clouds with a crown on his head, visits from Moses, or wondrous lights and angels.14 Their ecstatic prophecies, similar to those of converso women and girls in the wake of the expulsion, convinced many to believe Sabbatai Zevi’s messianic claims. By the seventeenth century, Ottoman Jewish communities were dominated by former Iberian conversos and Sephardic Jews, especially in İzmir, Sabbatai Zevi’s hometown, where he had close relations with them.
With roots in the messianism of Iberian Jews forcibly converted to Catholicism, Sabbatianism was perhaps also influenced by contemporary Christian millenarianism (Anabaptists, Mennonites, Quakers) and Bektaşi Sufism, which included women among its acolytes. All of this readied Sabbatianism for the acceptance of female prophecy and agency. Another factor was the prominent role converso women had played in secretly preserving Judaism at home in Western Europe, as public practice of Judaism, a male sphere of activity, was forbidden.15 For the first time, women became central to the observation of Judaism. The prophecies of Sabbatai Zevi’s wife Sarah, foretelling her destiny to be the messiah’s bride, also played a key role in the movement.
One of the reasons Sabbatian messianism was such a threat to Jews and Muslims alike was that it envisioned and partially realised a class and gender revolution in Judaism. It offered a radical departure in understandings of female spirituality.16 In traditional Judaism, as in Islam, Catholicism, and Orthodox Christianity, women are exempted from ritual obligations and excluded from all institutions promoting the religion’s intellectual and spiritual aims. Sabbatianism’s emphasis on faith rather than on commandments incumbent only upon men offered Jewish women their first opportunity to partake in religious life as equals, even as celibate holy virgins, for they were no longer viewed as merely material beings.
Sabbatianism offered a continuous and ever-radicalising egalitarian agenda.17 The plan began with Sabbatai Zevi’s pledge to annul the original sin and abrogate Eve’s curse—the pain of childbirth and subservience to men.18 This meant the emancipation of women. Women were liberated from physical suffering and inferiority. They were free to engage in spiritual pursuits. Teaching women and all other people the secret doctrines of Jewish mysticism and its key texts, traditionally taught only to adepts who had reached the age of forty or the appropriate spiritual readiness, was a concrete expression of this pledge.19
Sabbatianism was revolutionary, egalitarian, and libertine.20 Just like the Islam promoted for centuries by deviant dervishes, it also adopted antinomianism, the belief that faith, not adherence to moral law, is necessary for salvation. If there was no primordial sin, then all the old understandings of what was good and what was evil were also obsolete, including sexual prohibitions. Sabbatai Zevi abolished them. His movement used women’s bodies to purposely transgress tradition by violating commandments, especially those regarding sexual purity and marriage, engagement in sexual intercourse during menstruation, incest, and sexual libertinism, including ritualised orgies. Openly performing acts that Jews were forbidden to commit, which were largely centred on the body, also established parity of the sexes and gave women a central role in religious life. The promotion of previously prohibited sexual relations—especially adultery—offered women, particularly prophetesses, an active role.
Sabbatianism placed sole emphasis on personal faith in the messiah rather than compliance with Jewish ritual. It was seen by its opponents as sexual depravity and evoked a violent response that delegitimised any public display of female spirituality. Because women were seen as lacking in self-control, female spirituality was equated with unbridled sexuality and stimulated the construction of impermeable gender barriers in Orthodox Judaism.21 As in Islam, the view that every part of a woman was a private sexual part necessitated their covering.
Especially among women, Sabbatai Zevi’s following continued to surge. He received a ban from frightened rabbis in Jerusalem and was expelled from the city in May 1665. He returned to his birthplace of İzmir where, in December, he publicly showed himself while ecstatic after a period of seclusion and melancholy by storming the city’s Portuguese Synagogue with hundreds of his supporters, breaking the door down with an axe. He led a prayer service, during which he proclaimed the coming of the redeemer and messianic king.22 He called women to the reading of the Torah, an exclusively male honour, another manifestation of his promise to liberate women.23
When Sabbatai Zevi had resided in Istanbul eight years earlier, Jews had shown him little interest and Ottoman authorities paid him no attention.24 But in 1666, many Jews in Istanbul welcomed his mission with enthusiasm, and authorities treated him as a real danger. The messianic age was proclaimed in İzmir one month prior to the first Friday prayers in the New Mosque in Istanbul. The New Mosque symbolised how much the city had been transformed since Sabbatai Zevi’s leave-taking in 1659. As a result of Hatice Turhan’s building programme, it was a dramatically different city. Before 1660, one approaching Eminönü would have seen a skyline dominated by multistorey Jewish apartments. The presence of the New Mosque on the waterfront proclaimed that profound changes had occurred.
Many Jews greeted him ecstatically as a redeemer. Jews had suffered greatly over the previous five years. They lived in crowded conditions on the fringes of the city, having recently faced a horrible fire, plague, and much death, the transformation of properties that had once housed synagogues into an imperial mosque complex, the loss of ancient synagogues of diverse rites, and expulsion from the heart of the city on pain of death and prohibition of their return.25
Alerted by Jews opposed to Sabbatai Zevi, Ottoman officials became concerned when he announced himself to be king of the world, delegated the kingdoms of all empires to his followers, and declared through these actions that Ottoman rule was illegitimate.26 The Ottomans were at the time trying to subdue the last Venetian bastion in Crete. They could not tolerate instability in the empire, especially from one attempting to convert others to a competing vision of the true interpretation of God’s desire and claiming that his authority superseded that of the sultan. While Sultan Mehmed IV was urging the grand vizier to conquer the citadel in Crete as part of a jihad against accursed infidels, a Jew had appeared within the empire claiming to be a prophet and had acquired a large, potentially threatening following.27 The dynasty feared it again was facing a large-scale deviant dervish insurrection.
Because they believed that the end of days had arrived, Jews engaged in purifying rituals and special prayers to mark the age, inciting a fervent response from Jews in the lands beyond the frontiers of the Ottoman Empire and as far away as Morocco, Yemen, and Germany. Jewish businesswoman Glückel of Hameln related how the Jews of her German town were ecstatic when they received the good news from İzmir that the messiah had arrived. The Sephardi, descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain and Portugal, dressed in their finery and danced en route to their synagogue, where they read the news out loud. Straightaway, according to Glückel, ‘many sold their houses and lands and all their possessions, for any day they hoped to be redeemed’.28 Her father-in-law abandoned everything and journeyed to Hamburg, expecting to set sail for the Land of Israel, waiting for the sign that it was time to depart.
In February 1666, Sabbatai Zevi was arrested and imprisoned after his boat was intercepted by authorities en route to Istanbul.29 Jews in Istanbul flocked to the dungeon where he was held. They had no need to sell their property and pack because the messiah would replace the sultan on his throne in that city and reward them with the wealth of Christians and Muslims.30
Because large crowds gathered where Sabbatai Zevi was first incarcerated, in April he was banished to Hatice Turhan’s fortress on the European side of the Dardanelles. But the Ottoman authorities treated him leniently—perhaps because his Janissary guards were Bektaşi Sufis—allowing him to receive many pilgrims, some of whom believed him to be divine. He continued to instruct his followers from prison. He abolished the fast on the ninth of the Hebrew month of Av, the date Jews commemorate the destruction of the First and Second Temple, ordering Jews to instead celebrate a festival on that day for the dawning of the messianic age. That day would have to be deferred. Glückel of Hameln’s father-in-law waited in vain. Glückel expressed the disappointment that Jews ‘were like a woman who sits in labour and suffers mighty pangs, and thinks once her suffering is over she shall be blessed with a child; but it was only hearkening after a wind’.31
For nearly two decades, Sabbatai Zevi had built a spiritual movement that grew in fits and starts until it dramatically snowballed into a force that threatened to topple the sultan. But ultimately, in 1666, Mehmed IV, who had turned away from ecstatic Sufism towards a fundamentalist, pietist approach to Islam, cracked down on these ecstatic spiritualists and demanded to see their leader.
Perhaps incited to action by complaints from Sabbatai Zevi’s Jewish enemies, in September 1666 Mehmed IV ordered the Jewish spiritualist to be interrogated beneath his gaze in Edirne by the members of the imperial council.32 These included the sultan’s preacher, Vani Mehmed, and Grand Vizier Fazıl Ahmed Pasha’s deputy, Mustafa Pasha, a man much experienced in facilitating conversion to Islam. Also present was Sheikhulislam Minkarizade Yahya Efendi, who had issued a fatwa permitting pressured conversion to Islam. A Muslim official could say, ‘Be a Muslim’, and compel a Christian or Jew to convert.33
As messianic terminology and expectation no longer held currency at court, the sultan’s chronicler narrated instead how Jews believed Sabbatai Zevi to be a prophet, causing social corruption and disturbance of the peace.34 Sabbatai Zevi was seen as a deviant dervish, but Mehmed IV and his court stifled such radical Sufis, especially those who considered themselves prophets or messiahs. Rumours reaching the sultan’s ears included how Sabbatai Zevi allegedly performed miracles. Unlike his predecessors, Mehmed IV did not believe in miracle-working saints. There was only one way to test if the Jewish spiritualist had divine powers. The sultan’s council demanded Sabbatai Zevi remove his cloak so that imperial archers could use him as target practice with arrows tipped with fire. Sabbatai Zevi was given another choice. The Jewish messiah could become a Muslim. Mehmed IV compelled Sabbatai Zevi to change religion and become his servant at court.
He was given an honorary position in the palace, bathed in the bath of the palace pages, and given Muslim dress. The sultan’s preacher, Vani Mehmed, instructed him in Kadızadeli tenets of Islam. His wife, Sarah, who converted to Islam with him and was renamed Fatma, was given an usher position. Unlike Börklüce Mustafa—the fifteenth-century Christian convert to Islam and fellow deviant dervish who also allegedly proclaimed himself a prophet, raised a large following, and caused social disorder in the same region where Sabbatai Zevi had begun his messianic agitations—the Jewish Sufi was not crucified.
Making powerful religious figures and rebels into servants of the sultan was seen as a sign of the victory of purified, rationalised Islam over the ecstatic excesses of deviant dervishes and Jews who appeared as radical Sufis. Despite Sabbatai Zevi’s promises to make the sultan his slave, his messianic movement culminated in Jewish conversion to Islam. The Kadızadeli reform movement that promoted a rational religion preferred by the sultan prevailed over the competing ecstatic movement of the Jewish mystic. It was assumed that the converted would serve as a model of religious transformation and bring others to the sultan’s form of religiosity.35
For Mehmed IV, humbling Sabbatai Zevi by making him a Muslim and keeping him near as a reminder of his conversion would serve to remind others of the truth of Islam. If even a Jewish man who proclaimed himself a prophet could accept Muhammad as the Prophet, who could resist it? And if he was rewarded for his decision with a palace position and the most sumptuous garments forbidden to be worn by Christians and Jews, who could not see the rewards accruing to those who converted and joined what the dynasty considered the superior religion?
After his conversion, Sabbatai Zevi cruised the streets of Edirne from 1666 to 1672 with a large retinue of turban-wearing Jewish converts to Islam, preaching in synagogues to gain more converts.36 Accompanied by Vani Mehmed’s men, Sabbatai Zevi encouraged Jews to become Muslim, and the royal preacher gave out white turbans, converting them at his residence. Sabbatai Zevi invited rabbis to debate with him in the imperial audience hall in the palace in Edirne as the sultan and his preacher observed. Many Jews converted before the grand vizier.37 It appeared that the sultan had successfully transformed a force of disorder and sedition into a proselytiser for the truth.
Ostensibly a Muslim after his conversion, Sabbatai Zevi also continued to engage in practices of his own that merged Kabbalah, the Jewish mystical tradition, and Sufism. For that reason, he was banished to remote Ülgün (Ulcinj), a town on the southern Adriatic coast of Montenegro, in 1673. After his death in 1676, his followers went underground, coalescing in Ottoman Salonica, one of the only cities in the world with a Jewish majority, where they prospered for centuries.
In the view of his supporters, Mehmed IV had restored the strong sultanate by being a manly, pious gazi converting people and places across Europe. The empire had survived a great test, triumphed even, but Mehmed IV’s coming attempt to conquer Vienna would lead to disastrous consequences for himself and the pious preachers he supported.