Islamonweb

Did the sixteenth-century Ottoman jurist and exegete Abū Saʿūd Efendi compromise scriptural integrity under state pressure, or did he continue the classical Sunni exegetical tradition in a form suited to a vast, religiously plural empire? His modern critics, some of them Salafi-inflected, have tended to charge the former. Abū Saʿūd served as Shaykh al-Islām for roughly three decades under Sultan Süleyman, and he also wrote a Qurʾān commentary that became central to Ottoman religious and intellectual life: Irshād al-ʿAql al-Salīm ilā Mazāyā al-Kitāb al-Karīm.^[1]

Reading that commentary alongside his fatwās (legal rulings) suggests that the question is framed too narrowly. Compromise and legitimate continuation are not labels for two different kinds of scholar, one captured by the state and one independent. They are two faces of a single interpretive practice. When Abū Saʿūd wrote at the deliberate pace of sustained scriptural commentary, his method shows patience and restraint. When he wrote under the immediate pressure of an occasional fatwā, the same training produced conclusions far less patient with disagreement.^[2]

Why the Office Mattered

The office of Shaykh al-Islām carried an interpretive rather than an executive form of authority. The Grand Vizier’s power rested on direct delegation from the sultan, whereas the Shaykh al-Islām stood within a scholarly tradition that predated the Ottoman dynasty itself.^[3] This structural fact explains why his endorsement mattered. A ruling in the sultan’s own name simply asserted the very authority whose legitimacy was in question. A ruling from a jurist who could lose an argument carried a kind of authority that a sultanic decree could not supply on its own.

Abū Saʿūd could indeed be contested. When he defended the legality of cash endowments (waqf al-nuqūd), the rival scholar Çivizade Efendi compiled a treatise criticising his citations of authority and persuaded the sultan to impose a temporary ban in the mid-1540s, before Abū Saʿūd’s position prevailed.^[4] Keep this in mind for what follows: the endorsement of this office was valuable precisely because it was not guaranteed in advance.

Conditional Obedience: Qurʾān 4:59

Qurʾān 4:59 commands believers to obey God, the Messenger and ulū al-amr minkum (“those vested with authority among you”), and to refer disputes back to God and the Messenger. A reader might take the phrase to mean whoever holds office. Abū Saʿūd does not. Obedience to such rulers is required, he writes, “not absolutely, but within the compass of obedience to God and His Messenger” (lā muṭlaqan bal fī ḍimni ṭāʿati Allāhi taʿālā wa-ṭāʿati rasūlihi). He identifies ulū al-amr with “the just rulers and equitable governors” (umarāʾ al-ḥaqq wa-wulāt al-ʿadl), and unjust rulers (umarāʾ al-jawr) fall outside the category of religiously mandated obedience. Justice becomes a condition of legitimate authority; office alone is not enough.^[5]

He also records the alternative view that ulū al-amr means religious scholars rather than rulers. He treats it as a genuine possibility and then rejects it on textual grounds, given the structure that links the command to obey with the instruction to refer disputes to God and the Messenger. That instruction he understands as pointing to the sources of legal judgement: the Qurʾān, the Sunnah and analogy (qiyās). By placing juristic reasoning inside the process by which disputes are resolved, he gives the religious-legal establishment a mediating role.

The verse therefore does two things at once. It legitimises political authority by affirming obedience to just rulers, and it legitimises scholarly authority by making the resolution of disputes depend on interpretation. The result is conditional legitimation through religious-legal mediation, not simple praise of the sultan. This does not prove that the verse was read to strengthen his own office, since that would require evidence beyond the text. It shows only that his exegesis corresponded with the institutional structure in which he exercised authority.

Restraint in the Commentary: Qurʾān 2:256 and 49:13

Qurʾān 2:256 declares that there is “no compulsion in religion.”^[6] For an empire governing large non-Muslim populations under a hierarchical legal order, this verse was a real test. Abū Saʿūd records three positions without forcing a conclusion. The first reads the statement as a declaration: once the truth is clear, it needs no coercion. The second reads it as a prohibition framed as a statement, and he records the view that it was abrogated by the later command concerning struggle against unbelievers and hypocrites in Qurʾān 9:73. The third keeps the principle but limits it to the People of the Book, who have “secured themselves” (ḥaṣṣanū anfusahum) through payment of the jizya.

The abrogation reading was available to him and offered the simplest route to a more coercive conception of political authority. He does not make it exclusive. Read together with his treatment of Qurʾān 9:29, the third reading yields what may be called conditional religious toleration: non-Muslims keep their religious identity, but their protection exists within a political and fiscal hierarchy.^[7] The tension is preserved, not resolved.

Qurʾān 49:13 offers a control case. The verse speaks of humanity created from a male and a female and made into peoples and tribes so that they might know one another, and it names the most noble before God as the most pious.^[8] In an empire of many languages, ethnicities and faiths, a political reading, presenting the verse as a scriptural basis for imperial unity, lay close at hand. Abū Saʿūd does not take it. His commentary stays with genealogy and ethics: common descent undermines any claim to superiority by lineage, and worth before God lies in piety. What he does not say is the most telling feature. He does not mention the empire, its diversity or the sultan.

This restraint matters methodologically. If every verse touching on society were read politically, the political character of his tafsīr could not be told apart from indiscriminate politicisation. Because he politicises selectively, where the text and its occasion of revelation invite it, the political content of his commentary appears as the product of interpretive choice and not of blanket ideological projection.

Urgency in the Fatwās

The fatwās show the same method working under different pressure. Four sets of rulings, drawn from three domains of Ottoman governance, can be set beside the commentary: the Kızılbaş fatwā (religious-political), the Cyprus and Lepanto fatwās (military and fiscal), and the cash endowment rulings together with the Egyptian kharāj controversy (economic). They share recurring techniques with the tafsīr. One is comparative fiqh that produces precise operational rulings. Another is consequentialist reasoning, in which an apparently absolute obligation, such as observing a treaty, is conditioned on the benefit (menfaʿat) of the Muslims; the Cyprus fatwā authorised war against a power with which the empire held a standing peace treaty on the ground that its observance no longer served that benefit.^[9] A third is scripture cited directly inside the legal ruling as live warrant. The fourth is takfīr, the declaration of unbelief, used to close disagreement.

That fourth technique is the most troubling. The Kızılbaş fatwā fuses rebellion (baghy) against the sultan with unbelief (kufr). Asked whether killing is permitted “solely because of rebellion, or for some other reason,” the answer is “both… and, for many reasons, unbelievers.” A later study of Ottoman cash endowments, citing Kurt (1996), reports that Abū Saʿūd regarded those who rejected the permissibility of profit from such endowments as unbelievers who needed to renew their faith. The original wording and the intended addressees of this reported statement have not been independently established. In the Lepanto fatwā on fleeing soldiers, the vocabulary is divine wrath (“cursed by the Creator”) rather than takfīr, yet it turned a question of military discipline into a religious verdict with administrative effect: Pertev Pasha’s post-battle promotions were cancelled on its authority.^[10][11]

This tension should be stated plainly. The scholar who left the meaning of Qurʾān 2:256 genuinely open is also reported, in secondary scholarship, to have treated opposition over cash-endowment practice in terms of unbelief. The tafsīr and the fatwās served the same project of defending a religious-political order, but by markedly different means.

Where the Project Fell Short: Egypt

Abū Saʿūd’s authority was not unlimited. In the early 1550s the imperial government ordered the imposition of kharāj, a land tax, on Egyptian waqf lands that had been treated as exempt, and his fatwās supplied the legal warrant. The Egyptian jurists Ibn Nujaym (Ḥanafī) and al-Ghayṭī (Shāfiʿī) objected on independent grounds in al-Tuḥfa al-Marḍiyya and al-Taʾyīdāt al-ʿAliyya respectively. Governor Semiz Ali Pasha’s settlement of 1553 sided with Abū Saʿūd in classifying Egyptian land as taxable, but with his opponents in exempting already confirmed waqf.^[12]

The outcome shows that his method did not guarantee a result. It was a shared medium in which outcomes were contested and negotiated. It also clarifies why his endorsement carried weight where it did prevail: only an authority capable of failing, at least in part, could be understood by contemporaries as independent scholarly judgement and not as the sultan’s will under another name.

One Practice, Two Registers

The evidence supports neither side of the original debate in full. The case for legitimate continuation is substantial. In the passages examined, Abū Saʿūd does not simply impose political meaning on every verse or suppress every inconvenient alternative, and qualified jurists contested his rulings on independent grounds, sometimes successfully. The case for compromise cannot be dismissed either. His choices lean consistently toward obedience, even when conditioned, and toward the continuity of Ottoman qānūn (sultanic law), on precisely the questions where the outcome served state stability. The reported use of takfīr in some disputes sits uneasily beside the patience of the commentary.^[13]

These contrasting tendencies are visible in the selected examples, depending on which register one examines. In sustained commentary on questions of only indirect political consequence, his method shows patience, engagement with alternatives and real restraint. In an occasional fatwā addressing an urgent problem of state, the same juristic training could produce conclusions less tolerant of disagreement. In both registers his approach can be read as a defence of a religious-political order that he understood correct scholarship to require defending.

Read together, his tafsīr and fatwās are neither a simple instrument of the Ottoman state nor a wholly independent exercise of classical Sunni scholarship. They record how a working jurist-exegete at the height of Ottoman power understood the relationship between the two to require no resolution at all, because for him they were never two relationships but one.

About the Author:

Mohammed Basim is a postgraduate student in the Department of Qurʾān and Related Sciences, Kulliyah of Qurʾān and Sunnah, at Darul Huda Islamic University, Kerala, India. His 2026 master’s dissertation examines the political functions of Abū Saʿūd Efendi’s tafsīr.

Reference:

[1] Abū al-Suʿūd Muḥammad ibn Muḥammad al-ʿImādī, Irshād al-ʿAql al-Salīm ilā Mazāyā al-Kitāb al-Karīm ʿAbd al-Qādir Aḥmad ʿAṭā, 5 vols. (Cairo: Maktabat al-Riyāḍ al-Ḥadītha, 1971)

[2] Mohammed Basim, “Religious Authority and State Stability: The Political Functions of Abu Saʿūd Efendi’s Tafsir” (master’s diss., Darul Huda Islamic University, 2026), Conclusion.

[3] Richard C. Repp, The Müfti of Istanbul: A Study in the Development of the Ottoman Learned Hierarchy (London: Ithaca Press, 1986); Madeline C. Zilfi, The Politics of Piety: The Ottoman Ulema in the Postclassical Age (1600–1800) (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1988).

[4] Jon E. Mandaville, “Usurious Piety: The Cash Waqf Controversy in the Ottoman Empire,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 10, no. 3 (1979): 289–308, esp. 297–304. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743800000118.

[5] Qurʾān, al-Nisāʾ: 59; Abū al-Suʿūd, Irshād, commentary on that verse. This covers the quotations and the discussion of the alternative reading and qiyās in this and the next two paragraphs.

[6] Qurʾān, al-Baqara: 256 and al-Tawba: 73; Abū al-Suʿūd, Irshād, commentary on al-Baqara: 256.

[7] Abū al-Suʿūd, Irshād, commentary on al-Tawba: 29 and al-Baqara: 256.

[8] Qurʾān, al-Ḥujurāt: 13; Abū al-Suʿūd, Irshād, commentary on that verse; compare al-Ṭabarī, Jāmiʿ al-Bayān, and al-Bayḍāwī, Anwār al-Tanzīl, on the same verse.

[9] İdris Bostan, “The Influence of Fatwa on Ottoman Administration and Society: Ebussuûd Efendi’s Fatwas Regarding Cyprus and Lepanto,” Tarih Dergisi / Turkish Journal of History, no. 76 (2022): 35–62. https://doi.org/10.26650/iutd.202203.

[10] Abū Saʿūd Efendi, Kızılbaş fatwā, translated from Süleymaniye Library, Özel Collection, no. 626, fols. 1v–3r, translation hosted by Boston University: https://sites.bu.edu/artichoke/files/2024/05/Ebussuud-Efendi-Fetva.pdf. The translation supports the conjunction of rebellion and unbelief; it does not establish that this classification was applied identically to every individual associated with the Kızılbaş.

[11] İdris Bostan, “Fetvanın Osmanlı Yönetimi ve Toplum Üzerindeki Etkisi: Ebussuûd Efendi’nin Kıbrıs ve İnebahtı Fetvaları,” Tarih Dergisi / Turkish Journal of History 76 (2022): 35–62, https://doi.org/10.26650/iutd.202203 (on the Lepanto ruling and Pertev Pasha’s appointments). For the separately reported cash-waqf accusation, see Mehmet Bulut and Cem Korkut, “The Impact of the Elite (Ulema) Class on the Ottoman Economy: The Case Study of the Cash Wāqfs,” International Journal of Economics, Management and Accounting 30, no. 1 (2022): 27–54, at 36, citing İsmail Kurt, Para Vakıfları: Nazariyat ve Tatbikat (Istanbul: Ensar Neşriyat, 1996). The wording in Kurt has not been checked against the original.

[12] Abdurrahman Atçıl and Christopher Markiewicz, “Shariʿa and Governance in Ottoman Egypt: The Waqf Controversy in the Mid-Sixteenth Century,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 56, no. 1 (2024): 55–74. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743824000278. See also Zayn al-Dīn Ibn Nujaym, al-Tuḥfa al-Marḍiyya fī al-Arāḍī al-Miṣriyya, and Shihāb al-Dīn al-Ghayṭī, al-Taʾyīdāt al-ʿAliyya.

[13] Abū al-Suʿūd, Irshād, commentary on al-Māʾida: 44–50; Basim, “Religious Authority and State Stability,” §3.3.2 and Conclusion.

Declaration on the use of AI tools: An AI assistant (Claude, by Anthropic) was used only for structural assistance and language refinement: condensing the author’s own dissertation text into article form, editing the English (UK), and checking transliteration consistency. All arguments, interpretations, Qurʾānic and primary-source references, and citations are the author’s own, taken from his dissertation, and were checked by the author against the sources.