Zenbilli Ali Cemâlî Efendi was a scholar who held the office of mufti of Istanbul, that is, shaykh al-Islam, for more than twenty years under Bayezid II, Selim I (Selim the Grim) and Süleyman the Magnificent. His share in turning the office of fatwa into an institution of state, and his habit of receiving fatwa questions in a basket (zenbil) lowered from his window, made him well known among the people. His legacy as an author, however, is small: a collection of fatwas, an abridgement of a work of jurisprudence and a short treatise of counsel. To these are added a treatise on the devran attributed to him whose authorship is doubtful, and a fatwa in verse transmitted by report. This page deals with his works and his relationship with Amasya.

He descended from Cemâleddin Aksarâyî, who is held to have been of the line of Fakhr al-Din al-Razi, and so, like his family, he is known by the name "Cemâlî". His birthplace is disputed: Hüseyin Hüsameddin holds that he was born in the Eslem Hatun quarter of Amasya, while the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi states that this information should be treated with suspicion and that the family was of Aksaray origin. He taught at madrasas in Edirne under Mehmed II, twice became mufti of Amasya under Bayezid II and took up the professorship of the Sultan Bayezid Madrasa in Amasya. In 1503 he was appointed mufti of Istanbul, remained in office until his death, and died in Istanbul in 1526; his grave is in Zeyrek. His life is told in detail in the biography Zenbilli Ali Efendi.

Works

The sources say that Zenbilli Ali Efendi was regarded as an authority in jurisprudence, legal theory, literature, lexicography, grammar, Qur'anic exegesis and hadith, and that he was very fond of books and had them brought from various places. Considering his long life and high rank, he wrote little. One reason may be that an office such as that of shaykh al-Islam, which required answering hundreds of questions every day, left no time for writing; this is our guess.

Muhtârât mine'l-Fetâvâ

Type and language: A collection of fatwas on Hanafi jurisprudence. It is also known as Fetâvâ-yı Ali Efendi. Contents: The title means "selections from the fatwas". The TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi presents the work as an original book of jurisprudence. Ahmet İnanır points out that it is striking that this collection contains no fatwa at all on the devran and the sufi dance, one of the most debated questions of the time, and uses this as evidence against the attribution to him of the treatise on the devran. Manuscripts: In the Süleymaniye Library, Âşir Efendi no. 138, Esad Efendi no. 644, Fatih nos. 2387, 2388 and 2389, and Lâleli no. 1154. No published edition has been found.

Muhtasarü'l-Hidâye

This is an abridged form of al-Hidaya by Burhan al-Din al-Marghinani, one of the basic books of Hanafi jurisprudence. Al-Hidaya was among the main textbooks for teaching jurisprudence in Ottoman madrasas; the abridgement was most probably prepared as a teaching and reference book. The TDV article mentions the work by its title alone and gives no information on its copies or contents.

Treatise of Counsel (Nasihat Risalesi)

Type: A short treatise on ethics and Sufism. Its title is thought to derive from the hadith "Religion is sincere counsel". Edition: Mahmut Kaplan and Sümeyye Yıldız published the treatise in 2013 in the Uluslararası Sosyal Araştırmalar Dergisi under the title "Zenbilli Ali Cemalî Efendi'nin Risale-i Nasihat'i".

Contents: According to Ramazan Ata's summary, after the opening praise of God and blessings on the Prophet the treatise begins by expressing gratitude to the mujtahid imams who saved the Muslims from error and brought them to sound faith. It then turns to the soul and the self and discusses who is to be called a believer, a hypocrite or an unbeliever. It holds that the spirit and the self are one but that their attributes differ. It dwells insistently on hypocrisy and writes that one whose mind and heart are on worldly affairs while praying cannot escape hypocrisy. It says that man can reach divine love by turning away from love of the world, and that this degree is gained by inner state, "not by the cloak and the shawl". In explaining that everyone needs a perfect spiritual guide, it uses this comparison: the eye is in the face, yet cannot see the face; so too the self needs a mirror, that is, a perfect man, in order to know itself. One of the striking passages of the treatise is its statement that a man taken captive by the enemy who appears to have adopted their religion and dresses like them does not harm his faith thereby, because God looks not at outward forms but at hearts and intentions.

Ata compares the treatise with the Tefsir Risalesi of the Khalwati sheikh Cemâl-i Halvetî (Çelebi Halife), who is held to have been Zenbilli's cousin. He notes that both works were written to counsel people, dervishes above all, that their subjects are explained with Qur'anic verses, hadiths and maxims, and that both interpret verses and hadiths by the allusive (işârî) method. In his view it is as though one had been abridged from the other; it shows a shaykh al-Islam and a Sufi sheikh drawing on the same source. Ata also notes that both scholars use certain hadiths now known to be fabricated.

His Fatwa in Verse

The only verse attributed to Zenbilli Ali Efendi is a fatwa. According to the report given by Ramazan Ata, Süleyman the Magnificent asked in verse about the ants damaging the trees in the palace garden, "Dırahtı sarmış olsa eğer karınca / Zarar var mı karıncayı kırınca", and the shaykh al-Islam answered in the same metre and rhyme: "Yarın divanına hakkın varınca / Süleyman'dan hakkın alır karınca". Ata gives no source for this report; we have been unable to find an early record of the anecdote. The couplet is given separately, with its original text, a modern rendering and commentary, on the page Zenbilli Ali Efendi, Couplet 1.

Works of Disputed Attribution and Works Wrongly Attributed

Risâle fî hakkı'd-devrân ve'r-raks: This treatise, which defends the devran and dance performed by Sufis for the purpose of remembrance (zikr) as not forbidden, is recorded as surviving in two versions, one in prose and one in verse; the copy registered in the Süleymaniye Library, Hacı Mahmud Efendi no. 3093/2, under the title Risâle fî cevâzi devrâni's-sûfiyye is in Arabic prose. In his study of 2010 Ahmet İnanır shows that the author is named at the beginning and end of the treatise as "Müftî Ali Çelebi", that some copies have "el-Muğnî" instead of "Müftî", and that there were many scholars of that name at the time. He also points out that Zenbilli's contemporary İbn Bahâeddin, in a refutation he wrote of Ali Çelebi's treatise, clearly treats Ali Çelebi and Ali Cemâlî as different people. According to İnanır, the views of the treatise contradict those of both earlier and later jurists, and Zenbilli's own fatwa collection has no fatwa on the subject; it is therefore highly likely that the treatise is not his. The treatise has also been attributed to Kınalızâde Ali Çelebi and to Alâeddin Ali Çelebi b. Salih Filibevî.

Âdâbü'l-evsiyâ: This book of jurisprudence, which examines various questions of transactions, above all testamentary bequests, in thirty-five chapters, has been attributed to Zenbilli, but according to the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi it has been established that it was written by his son Fudayl Çelebi.

Amasya in His Works

It is not known where any of Zenbilli Ali Efendi's works was written, and we have found no passage in his texts that mentions Amasya. His link with the city is made through his offices rather than his works. According to Hüsameddin's records, in 888 (1483) the office of fatwa of Amasya was given to "Cemâlîzâde Zenbilli Alî Çelebi"; according to the TDV, when the Sultan Bayezid Madrasa in Amasya was completed in 1486 he came to the city again as its professor and also took on the office of mufti. It is related that at the circumcision feast of Prince Ahmed's sons in 1491 he was offended when the prince placed his own teacher, Birgivîzâde Mustafa Efendi, above the scholars of Amasya, and that he left his post and returned to Istanbul. These years may be thought of as the period in which he first accumulated the habit of issuing fatwas, and the material of his fatwa collection, in a provincial capital; but we have found no information on which years the fatwas in the collection belong to.

Hüsameddin counts him among the great scholars produced by Amasya and records the traces of his family in Amasya lineage by lineage. Describing the Eslem quarter, known among the people as the İslâm quarter, he writes that Eslem Hatun, who gave her name to the quarter and was the aunt of the famous calligrapher Şeyh Hamdullah, married Cemâlî Mehmed Çelebi, and that Zenbilli's father Kemal Çelebi was born of this marriage. According to this record Zenbilli Ali Efendi was the grandson of Şeyh Hamdullah's aunt. Hüsameddin concludes:

Bu mahalleden müşârün-ileyh "Zenbilli Ali Efendi" gibi şeyhülislâm ve "Pîrî Mehmed Paşa" gibi sadr-ı a'zam zuhûr etmişdir.

In English: From this quarter came a shaykh al-Islam such as the said Zenbilli Ali Efendi and a grand vizier such as Pîrî Mehmed Pasha. As the TDV also reminds us, Hüsameddin's claim should be read together with his tendency to present many well-known figures as natives of Amasya. Ramazan Ata, for his part, writes that the path of almost every member of the Aksaray-born Cemâlî family passed through Amasya, and that this began with Cemâleddin Aksarâyî spending some twenty years in Amasya at the invitation of Hacı Şadgeldi Pasha. Seen in this light, Zenbilli's link with Amasya, even leaving aside the debate over his birthplace, is part of a family's relationship with Amasya that lasted for generations.

Influence and Assessment in the Sources

Zenbilli's real influence lies less in what he wrote than in what he did in the office of fatwa. According to the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, the first important steps by which the office of mufti of Istanbul became an institution like the grand vizierate were taken during his tenure, and with him the professorship of the Beyazıt Madrasa in Istanbul and the supervision of Bayezid II's endowments were attached to the muftis of Istanbul. In the TDV's words, it is highly probable that the reports of his resistance to Selim I were also meant to emphasise the importance of the office of shaykh al-Islam as it was taking institutional shape.

Ramazan Ata regards him as a jurist influential in the drafting of the law codes of Süleyman's reign, one who limited the almost unlimited powers of the sultans by the religious conception of justice, and an important representative of the idea of "nizâm-ı âlem" (world order). Ahmet İnanır, for his part, counts him among the shaykhs al-Islam who took a positive view of Sufism, but thinks that in method and sources of fatwa he probably stood close to Kemalpaşazâde and Ebussuûd. The biography reports that at the end of the sixteenth century the shaykh al-Islam Çivizâde Mehmed Efendi also wrote that the treatise was not his and that the attribution had been made deliberately by Sufis.

The authorship of his sons shows that the family's scholarly tradition continued: Muhyiddin Mehmed Şah Efendi (Molla Çelebi) wrote a Târîh-i Âl-i Osmân, Rûhî Çelebi another Tevârîh-i Âl-i Osmân; Fudayl Çelebi was a scholar with various works in verse and prose.

Bibliography

Primary sources

Academic studies

Online sources