Soliman the Magnificent, Selim's heir, especially insisted upon
this. He had already promulgated a series of decrees affecting the civil
administration of his empire, which he had declared to be immutable; and
an immutability, too, in dogma he thought would still further secure the
peace and stability of his rule. Nor did he meet with aught but approval
here from the Hanefite divines.
The Turkish Ulema, ever since their first appearance in the Arabian
schools in the eleventh century, finding themselves at a disadvantage
through their ignorance of the sacred language, and being
constitutionally adverse to intellectual effort, had maintained the
proposition that mental repose was the true feature of orthodoxy, and in
their _fetwas_ had consistently relied on authority and rejected
original argument. They therefore readily seconded the Sultan in his
views. Argument on first principles was formally forbidden in the
schools; and for the interpretation of existing law two offices were
invented--the one for dogmatic, the other for practical decisions, those
of the Sheykh el Islam and the Great Mufti. This closing of doctrinal
inquiry by the Ottoman Sultans, and the removal of the seat of supreme
spiritual government from the Arabian atmosphere of Cairo to the Tartar
atmosphere of the Bosphorus, was the direct and immediate cause of the
religious stagnation which Islam suffered from so conspicuously in the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
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