SHAYKH AL-ISLĀM

SHAYKH AL-ISLĀM (Turk., şeyhülislam ) is a title associated with Islamic religious figures; it was used most commonly in the period of the Ottoman empire, when it denoted the chief jurisconsult, or muftī, of Istanbul, who was the supreme religious authority in the empire and the administrative head of the Ottoman hierarchy of religious scholars (ʿulamāʾ ). The title seems to have come into use in the Islamic east in the late tenth century. From that time it served to distinguish individuals who had achieved prominence in some branch of the faith. Although pre-Ottoman biographical literature mentions the title in connection with Ṣūfī notables, it was even then more commonly, and later almost exclusively, applied to specialists in Islamic holy law, the sharīʿah.

The transition of the term form an honorific to an actual office defies charting. However, from the tenth century certain local religious officials are known to have held office under the title (although not necessarily performing the same functions) in such disparate lands as Seljuk Iran and Anatolia, Mamluk Egypt and Syria, the Delhi sultanate of India, Safavid Iran, Timurid Transoxiana, and the Muslim regions of China. It was under the Ottomans, however, that the office achieved both its full definition and its preeminence.

According to Ottoman tradition, the first shaykh al-Islām was Şemseddin al-Fenari (d. 1431), a celebrated sharīʿah scholar and qāḍī ("judge") appointed by Sultan Murād II (1421–1451). With the conquest of Constantinople (Istanbul) in 1453, the shaykh al-Islām, always chosen from among the noted jurists of the day, thereafter resided in the capital city as its chief muftī.

Like any muftī, the shaykh al-Islām was responsible for issuing written opinions (fatwā s), based on established sharīʿah authorities, in response to legal questions submitted for his expert interpretation of the law. Such opinions were not binding. The petitioner was under no legal obligation to follow a muftī 's findings, or even those of a shaykh al-Islām. Nonetheless, a fatwā delivered by the shaykh al-Islām possessed compelling moral authority. A shaykh al-Islām presumably earned his post as much through a reputation for integrity as for scholarship. Moreover, he was the only officer in the realm entitled to pronounce on the sultan's fitness to rule. The subordination of the worldly to the spiritual was more in theory than in practice, but many shaykh al-Islām s did not hesitate to issue opinions at odds with their sovereign's wishes. In any case, for the entire span of the empire, the shaykh al-Islām 's fatwā was the emblem of legitimation, required for the deposition of the sultan as well as for the undertaking of any major imperial policy.

During the tenure of the post's most renowned incumbent, Mehmed Ebussüud (d. 1574), the shaykh al-Islām came to control the examination and appointment of the major judges and professors in the empire. As a result, the independence of the office was further compromised, and subsequent holders of the past became increasingly subject to political pressures, including summary dismissal.

With the secularizing reforms of the nineteenth century, the shaykh al-Islām, with the entire body of Ottoman ʿulamāʾ, was systematically deprived of authority and importance. In November 1922, the last shaykh al-Islām left office when the nationalist Turks under Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (d. 1938), founder of the Turkish Republic, abolished the Ottoman sultanate. The post was never reconstituted, but local officials in Muslim countries outside Turkey have occasionally used the title in the modern era.

Bibliography

The history of the important Ottoman office of shaykh al-Islām, making use of still largely unmined and untranslated Ottoman sources, remains to be written. The standard work in Turkish on the entire Ottoman religious hierarchy, Ismail Hakki Uzunçarşılı's Osmanlı Devletinin İIlmiye Teşkilâtı (Ankara, 1965), should be supplemented by relevant chapters in Halil İnalcık's The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300–1600, translated by Norman Itzkowitz and Colin Imber (New York, 1973), along with R. C. Repp's Ph.D. dissertation, "An Examination of the Origins and Development of the Office of Shaikh al-Islam in the Ottoman Empire" (Oxford University, 1966), and my own Ph.D. dissertation, "The Ottoman Ulema 1703–1839 and the Route to Great Mollaship" (University of Chicago, 1976), J. H. Kramers's "Shaikh al-Islām," in The Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden, 1913–1934), while somewhat dated, can be read alongside Richard W. Bulliet's "The Shaikh al-Islām and the Evolution of Islamic Society," Studia Islamica 35 (1972): 53–67, for the general history of the office in the Islamic world.