Q. & A. 711 to 1707 with solved Papers css 1971 to date

Political and Cultural History of Islam
personal authority and influence of a Sultan, the more rigidly was he held to the strict observance of traditional customs and usages.”3 The Sultan had the power of make laws on his own authority if they were not repugnant to the Shari’ah. These laws were called Qanuns. The Ulema who were the guardians of Shari’ah recognized the personal initiative of the Sultan in legislation on matters concerning TJrf or Customs.
The Ottoman State system may be divided into two parts: the Ruling Institution. The Ruling Institution, apart from the Sultan himself, included the officers of his household, the executive officers of his government, the whole body of the army, ”standing” and feudal, and the navy. In the best days of the Ottoman rule all posts in the Ruling Institution, except most of those in the feudal army and the navy, were as a rule filled by the personal slaves of the Sultan, either conscripted from the Christian population or acquired in some other manner.
The Muslim institution consisted of the ulema with the Shaikh al-Islam at its head. This was another strong and very definitely trained caste, an independent body whose primary duty was to supervise the religious and judicial affairs of the Muslim. The ulema always had existed in Muslim States. But the Turks were the only people who converted them into a regular institution and incorporated them as part of the state structure. This regimentation of the religious class had nothing to do with Islam. It was the product of the Turkish national genius, and, therefore, Islam ought not to be blamed for some of the glaring evils which resulted in later times from bureaucratising the upholders of Islamic Law and turning them into cogs of the state machinery. In the beginning, however, the ulema played a most commendable and progressive role in the state structure of the Ottoman.
They acted as a moral control over the rigid despotism of the state, because they could depose the Sultan, and no new law could be passed without their approval. They were also the only defenders of the rights of non-Muslims. In more than one instance they stood up against forcible conversion of the Christians. But for the ulema and the Shari’ah of Islam, the Ottoman rule would have been purely despotic without the least measure of democracy. This is a fact which should not be forgotten by the opponents of Islam and its
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Gibb, Vol I, Pan I PI’35-36
Shari’ah. Thus, when Saleem returned from the Eastern campaign, he proposed to have all the Christians converted by force or persuasion but Shaikh ^l-lslam, Jamal Effendi, objected and refused to sanction the proposal on grounds of Islamic teachings in regard to freedom of religion and conscience.
Early in Ottoman history, the Turkish forces had come to fall into two groups: those paid in cash from the Sultan’s treasury and those given land with the right to collect taxes and dues from its inhabitants. And though both of them seem originally to have been composed of free-born Muslims, these gradually ceased to take paid service in the army, as the employment of slaves had become more common. Thus the paid army, as distinct from feudal cavalry (which formed the majority of the landholding soldiery), came to be almost exclusively a siave corps, the personal property of the Sultans. The purchase and employment of slaves as soldiers was not peculiar to the Ottomans. The system had come into existence during the days of the later Abbasids.
The Saljuqids from whom the Ottomans had derived many of their traditions had a large feudal army and a small slave bodyguard but the Ottomans transformed this institution by introducing characteristic features of their own. As the supply of Ghazi volunteers diminished and large scale fighting in Europe ceased with the consequent fall in the number of captured slaves from the conquered, the Sultans decided to make periodical levies of the unmarried male children of their Christian subjects, taking them from their parents at the age of ten to twenty reducing them to the status of slaves and training them for the service of the state. Whereas in the earlier days the administration of the growing Empire had been conducted by free Muslims, now they were replaced almost without exception by the slaves of the Sultans, so that the Muslims of the empire found themselves excluded from the state administration.
”The selection of Christians,” says Halide Edib, ”may have been due to missionary motives, but it is equally obvious that the intention was to detach the child entirely from his environment. Each region had to provide a certain number of children. The recruiting officer went to the village or the town inscribed on his list, studied the registers, asked for the children, and made his choice according to the appearance, nflanners, physique and intelligence of the candidates. This system is called ’Devshirme’ in Turkish and ’Blood Tribute’ by the Western historians 1 hcic was no force used. On the

842 Political and Cultural History of Islam

contrary parents were over-anxious to give their children. The
Muslims, who were barred from this privilege, often bribed their
Christian neighbours to pass theirs as Christian boys. The boy who
was selected could become a commander, a governor, a Grand
wazir.4
These children came to the Palace School and underwent a very severe education. The bodily part of it was very much on the Greek or Spartan lines. The mental consisted of a training in the classics, music, Arabic, Persian and Turkish, and other subjects considered an unessential part of learning at the time. Every youth, including royal children, had to acquire proficiency in some handicraft as well”.
The use of the word ”slave” in this connection must not be misunderstood. As Gibb points out, ”their servitude carried with in scarcely any social inferiority. No distinction was made between the sons of slave women born to a free master and those whose mothers were always free. Indeed most of the Abbasid Caliphs of Baghdad, to say nothing of minor dynasts, were born of slave mothers.”5
The Christian boys thus drafted into state service nearly all accepted Islam, not because they were forced to do so, but because they could not otherwise obtain any influential position. Gibb adds”The employment of slaves in the administration as well as in the army were nothing new in Islamic history either. But never before had free Muslims been all but entirely excluded from it. No doubt the fact that they were so excluded in this case may be connected with another : namely, that the proportion of non-Muslims in the Ottoman population (particularly before the Asiatic conquests of the sixteenth century) was unprecedentedly high. For the loyalty of these infidels could be expected to be at best but grudging; so that, unloved as they were, at the same time, by so many of the Muslims under their rule, the Sultans were perhaps possessed of relatively fewer dependable subjects than any of the dynasts their predecessor. The institution of the Kapi Kullari (personal slaves of the Sultan), therefore, may be held to have corresponded to a special need. It at once served to protect the Sultans from overthrow by a subject population exceptionally liable to disaffection, and to secure to the ncr,~Muslim section of the population-though by a method well calculated to
TIP
Ottoman State System and their Decline
843
4 Halide Edib, op cit., P 20
s Gibb and Bowen, op cit, Vol I, Part I, PP 43-44
obscure the advantage of this privilege to its beneficiaries-a place in the state machine commensurate with its preponderant numbers.
The Muslims, to be sure, had another institution as their equally exclusive field-that of the ’Ulema, the students of the Sheria. But the Ottoman empire was a Muslim state in which it was paradoxical that any institution should be reserved for the infidel born. How the Muslims contrived to rebel we shall describe later. Suffice it here to say that by the eighteenth century the whole institution of a slave-manned Ruling Institution had been swept away. For Muslims had captured nearly all the posts it formerly included and with disastrous results.
The Kapi Kullars (personal slaves of the Sultan) were not allowed to marry until the age when they retired. Their sons were disqualified for membership in the Institution so that the whole system was non-hereditary. Those who gave promise of mental capacity were trained for administration. Others who showed no intellectual vigour but only physical fitness were drafted into the personal army of the Sultan. These were the famous janissaries.