Chapter 4: Mullā Maḥmūd and Constantinople
An update about the scholarly currents just beginning to emerge in the newly founded Mataram empire. Might not be particularly exciting.
Synopsis is at the very end, in a quote box.
* * *
The Gate of Felicity, the last of the gates of the New Palace of Constantinople that Sultan Agung's envoys entered during their audience before the Ottoman sultan.
In 1624, the king of Mataram assumed the exalted title of susuhunan. It derived from the action of suwun, to join one’s hands and lift them to the face in humble reverence. A susuhunan was a man who received the honor of suwun. The very word, then, commanded obedience. It was also a word laid with religious implications; the great Muslim proselytizers of the island had all called themselves sunan, a variant of susuhunan. By taking the title susuhunan, the king was implicitly assuming a sacrosanct role as religious leader.
Yet the king had wider ambitions. Sultan, the most widely recognized honorific throughout the Abode of Islam, still eluded Mataram. Problematically, it was a foreign title closely associated with the wider Islamic world Above the Winds. It would be laughable for the king to proclaim himself sultan all on his own, would it not?
A mission was sent from Karta to Arabia in 1635, seeking to receive recognition as sultan from the Sharif of Mecca. This they achieved, but the Javanese chose to go further. They travelled from Mecca to Medina, then from there to Jerusalem and Damascus, and finally from Syria all the way to the Ottoman capital of Constantinople.
The Ottomans – “the Land of Rome,” as most Muslims knew it by – was the greatest empire on earth. Every nation large and small submitted to the Sublime Porte: Aceh and Java Below the Winds, the opulent Mughals of Hindustan, Christian kings from across Frankish Europe, even Bornu in the distant Land of the Blacks. “Great is the torch of Rome, radiant its realm, high-rising its smoke, far-reaching its pride.”
The Sultan’s capital was Constantinople, City of the World’s Desire. Almost an order of magnitude larger than Karta, it must have seemed unimaginably bustling and wondrous to the Javanese. And not just to the Javanese. With an estimated 750,000 inhabitants in 1642 of every imaginable faith and creed (less than 60% of the population was Muslim), Constantinople dwarfed every other city outside East Asia and was very possibly the largest metropolis in the world.
The New Palace, residence of the sultan, was yet something of its own. As the Javanese entered from the east, the first thing they must have seen was the massive outer castle fortress. The fortifications would in fact have been of little use in an actual siege, but the Javanese could not have known that. To them as to most observers, the castle was but the most visible proof of the idiom Devlet-i ʿAlīye muzaffer dāʿimā (“The Ottoman Empire is forever victorious”).
Then our Javanese would have crossed the First Courtyard of the New Palace (a vast square capable of holding some 30,000 people), passing by lines and lines of solemn and silent janissaries. Next was the Second Courtyard where the emissaries might have gaped with wonder at the Outer Treasury, the Ward of the Guards, or the Grand Vizier’s Council Hall. Here was the most visible reminder of the Circle of Justice that underpinned Ottoman rule. The people paid the taxes that filled the Treasury; the Treasury paid the soldiers that occupied the Wards; the soldiers protected the Council Hall’s dignitaries; the Council Hall provided the justice that allowed the people to prosper and pay taxes.
At last, there was the Gate of Felicity leading to the final Third Courtyard where the sultan resided. Nobody dared cross its threshold without the explicit permission of the Sultan of Rome.
That day, the Javanese passed the Gate and met Murad IV in the Chamber of Petitions.
We have no reliable account of what transpired between the sultan and the Javanese that day. But we do know that from that day on, the king of Mataram called himself Sultan ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad Mawlānā Mataranī – “Servant of God, Our Master Muḥammad of Mataram.” Most people, though, would come to know him as the Great Sultan: Sultan Agung in Javanese. We also know that the envoys returned to Java with most splendid gifts from the Porte: three Ottoman warships, stocked with weapons (siege cannons, muskets, and other firearms) and an assortment of expert craftsmen (shipwrights, goldsmiths, architects, weavers of both cloth and carpet, and gunpowder makers, gunsmiths, and cannon makers). Sultan Agung would make good use of both later on.
But these were not the only Ottomans to accompany the return voyage. Two critical figures in Middle Eastern intellectual circles also chose to hedge their bets on Java. One was Mullā Maḥmūd, a Kurdish philosopher who had been teaching in Damascus for about three decades. The sexagenarian, according to some accounts, was swayed by Javanese pleas that he become mentor to the sultan. Others claim that the ambassadors deceived the old man, lying to the effect that every day in Java was like a cool day of Damascene spring, just perfect for an old and retiring man. In any case, Maḥmūd packed his books one day and departed the Middle East forever. The other was Muḥammad al-ʿAbbāsī, one of the most promising novice Sufis (Muslim mystics) in all of Syria. If Maḥmūd sought personal glory in his golden years, ʿAbbāsī was a proselytizer. His mission was clear; to ensure that even the Javanese could one day attain the Station of No Station, that perfect human condition that so many Sufis vainly sought to reach.
When old Maḥmūd arrived in Java in 1637, Sultan Agung himself came to the port to offer his greetings to the Kurdish philosopher. The Javanese chronicles recount that the sultan cried out, “Oh exalted guru, impart on me your knowledge.” Maḥmūd, according to the chronicle, replied, “I refuse, Your Majesty.” Dumbfounded, the sultan asked the reason why. The Kurd said, “It would be impossible for any mortal to give you knowledge. For true knowledge comes from two things alone: God, and one’s desire to learn.”
This story is probably a later fabrication. But what is undeniable is that the story reflects the veritable revolution in scholarship that Mullā Maḥmūd brought. Every Wednesday evening, every prince and the sons of all the dignitaries at Karta came to Maḥmūd’s house to hear his lessons. (The sultan himself had irregular private sessions.) The children must have assumed that Master Maḥmūd would be just like all the others, a harsh teacher who forced his pupils to memorize the most endlessly trivial jargon, a man who claimed to have all the answers and publicly humiliated those who dared disagree. So imagine their surprise at their first Wednesday lessons! Master Maḥmūd always spoke in terms of “Perhaps this and that” or “It seems to me that this is that” or “Do you see that this can be understood like that?” Whenever he was questioned he stopped and took the time to explain his views in full depth, no matter how minor or ridiculous the inquiry.
Maḥmūd’s subjects were also new to Java. He claimed to teach all of the Nine Islamic Sciences: Quran exegesis, the study of the Prophet Muḥammad’s sayings and deeds, jurisprudence, Arabic grammar, rhetoric, metaphysics, logic, astronomy, and geometry. The old scholar was most certainly very qualified in all nine of them. But what he loved the most were rhetoric and logic, both fields very new to Javanese thought. Consider how Master Maḥmūd explained the most basic structure of proper argumentation to his younger students:
When Master Maḥmūd packed his belongings and bid Damascus farewell, he had carefully wrapped and bundled his most beloved volumes with fine Chinese silk. These tomes included Aristotle’s Organon (his six major works on logic) and Avicenna’s Eastern Philosophy. Once he arrived in Java, the master would give passionate lessons in logic to whoever in Karta cared enough to listen. “Someone who has no share in debate and logic,” he would cry out before a crowd of perplexed Javanese, “will hardly be able to understand advanced scholarly enquiries.”
Was this all obvious? Perhaps. But until now, rhetoric and logic had never been systematically classified in Java. Master Maḥmūd was no scientist, and he never claimed that he would expand the boundaries of physical knowledge. But his lessons allowed the new generation of Javanese elites to look at the world around them in very different ways. Was a senior official’s claim always true, even if the arguments seemed like circular reasoning? Was it really possible that a king’s spiritual power could be transmitted by sucking the penis of his corpse? The Javanese would once have easily responded to both questions with “yes.” But now, they began to doubt.
Mullā Maḥmūd never gave any fish to his students. But he had taught them the proper ways to fish.
(The other Ottoman immigrant, ʿAbbāsī, played a very different role in Javanese scholarship. His is a story for another day.)
* * *
The New Palace is just Topkapı.
Mullā Maḥmūd was a real Kurdish scholar in seventeenth-century Damascus. He arrived in the city in the first decade of the seventeenth century, fleeing the Safavid Persians and their persecutions of the Sunni Kurds. He taught the rational theologies and sciences for the better part of a century until his death in 1663, and virtually every seventeenth-century intellectual from Damascus was his student. A local biographer notes Maḥmūd's importance in the intellectual life of the city:
While I don't know of any direct evidence of Maḥmūd's teaching styles, Ibrahīm Kūrānī (perhaps the most important seventeenth-century Ottoman philosopher and a fellow Kurd who probably studied with Maḥmūd at some point, since he lived for some time in Damascus) is said to have taught in the following way:
The various classifications of refutations in debate come directly from a manual on dialectics by the sixteenth-century Turkish scholar Ṭāşköprīzāde. Maḥmūd's views would probably have been more developed than Ṭāşköprīzāde's, though, since Ottoman studies of rhetoric became increasingly precise in the seventeenth century.
Khaled el-Rouayheb's Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb is a pretty good, if very dense, source for all this.
ʿAbbāsī was also real; he was a popular Sufi in seventeenth-century Damascus.
Synopsis is at the very end, in a quote box.
* * *
The Gate of Felicity, the last of the gates of the New Palace of Constantinople that Sultan Agung's envoys entered during their audience before the Ottoman sultan.
In 1624, the king of Mataram assumed the exalted title of susuhunan. It derived from the action of suwun, to join one’s hands and lift them to the face in humble reverence. A susuhunan was a man who received the honor of suwun. The very word, then, commanded obedience. It was also a word laid with religious implications; the great Muslim proselytizers of the island had all called themselves sunan, a variant of susuhunan. By taking the title susuhunan, the king was implicitly assuming a sacrosanct role as religious leader.
Yet the king had wider ambitions. Sultan, the most widely recognized honorific throughout the Abode of Islam, still eluded Mataram. Problematically, it was a foreign title closely associated with the wider Islamic world Above the Winds. It would be laughable for the king to proclaim himself sultan all on his own, would it not?
A mission was sent from Karta to Arabia in 1635, seeking to receive recognition as sultan from the Sharif of Mecca. This they achieved, but the Javanese chose to go further. They travelled from Mecca to Medina, then from there to Jerusalem and Damascus, and finally from Syria all the way to the Ottoman capital of Constantinople.
The Ottomans – “the Land of Rome,” as most Muslims knew it by – was the greatest empire on earth. Every nation large and small submitted to the Sublime Porte: Aceh and Java Below the Winds, the opulent Mughals of Hindustan, Christian kings from across Frankish Europe, even Bornu in the distant Land of the Blacks. “Great is the torch of Rome, radiant its realm, high-rising its smoke, far-reaching its pride.”
The Sultan’s capital was Constantinople, City of the World’s Desire. Almost an order of magnitude larger than Karta, it must have seemed unimaginably bustling and wondrous to the Javanese. And not just to the Javanese. With an estimated 750,000 inhabitants in 1642 of every imaginable faith and creed (less than 60% of the population was Muslim), Constantinople dwarfed every other city outside East Asia and was very possibly the largest metropolis in the world.
The New Palace, residence of the sultan, was yet something of its own. As the Javanese entered from the east, the first thing they must have seen was the massive outer castle fortress. The fortifications would in fact have been of little use in an actual siege, but the Javanese could not have known that. To them as to most observers, the castle was but the most visible proof of the idiom Devlet-i ʿAlīye muzaffer dāʿimā (“The Ottoman Empire is forever victorious”).
Then our Javanese would have crossed the First Courtyard of the New Palace (a vast square capable of holding some 30,000 people), passing by lines and lines of solemn and silent janissaries. Next was the Second Courtyard where the emissaries might have gaped with wonder at the Outer Treasury, the Ward of the Guards, or the Grand Vizier’s Council Hall. Here was the most visible reminder of the Circle of Justice that underpinned Ottoman rule. The people paid the taxes that filled the Treasury; the Treasury paid the soldiers that occupied the Wards; the soldiers protected the Council Hall’s dignitaries; the Council Hall provided the justice that allowed the people to prosper and pay taxes.
At last, there was the Gate of Felicity leading to the final Third Courtyard where the sultan resided. Nobody dared cross its threshold without the explicit permission of the Sultan of Rome.
That day, the Javanese passed the Gate and met Murad IV in the Chamber of Petitions.
We have no reliable account of what transpired between the sultan and the Javanese that day. But we do know that from that day on, the king of Mataram called himself Sultan ʿAbd Allāh Muḥammad Mawlānā Mataranī – “Servant of God, Our Master Muḥammad of Mataram.” Most people, though, would come to know him as the Great Sultan: Sultan Agung in Javanese. We also know that the envoys returned to Java with most splendid gifts from the Porte: three Ottoman warships, stocked with weapons (siege cannons, muskets, and other firearms) and an assortment of expert craftsmen (shipwrights, goldsmiths, architects, weavers of both cloth and carpet, and gunpowder makers, gunsmiths, and cannon makers). Sultan Agung would make good use of both later on.
But these were not the only Ottomans to accompany the return voyage. Two critical figures in Middle Eastern intellectual circles also chose to hedge their bets on Java. One was Mullā Maḥmūd, a Kurdish philosopher who had been teaching in Damascus for about three decades. The sexagenarian, according to some accounts, was swayed by Javanese pleas that he become mentor to the sultan. Others claim that the ambassadors deceived the old man, lying to the effect that every day in Java was like a cool day of Damascene spring, just perfect for an old and retiring man. In any case, Maḥmūd packed his books one day and departed the Middle East forever. The other was Muḥammad al-ʿAbbāsī, one of the most promising novice Sufis (Muslim mystics) in all of Syria. If Maḥmūd sought personal glory in his golden years, ʿAbbāsī was a proselytizer. His mission was clear; to ensure that even the Javanese could one day attain the Station of No Station, that perfect human condition that so many Sufis vainly sought to reach.
When old Maḥmūd arrived in Java in 1637, Sultan Agung himself came to the port to offer his greetings to the Kurdish philosopher. The Javanese chronicles recount that the sultan cried out, “Oh exalted guru, impart on me your knowledge.” Maḥmūd, according to the chronicle, replied, “I refuse, Your Majesty.” Dumbfounded, the sultan asked the reason why. The Kurd said, “It would be impossible for any mortal to give you knowledge. For true knowledge comes from two things alone: God, and one’s desire to learn.”
This story is probably a later fabrication. But what is undeniable is that the story reflects the veritable revolution in scholarship that Mullā Maḥmūd brought. Every Wednesday evening, every prince and the sons of all the dignitaries at Karta came to Maḥmūd’s house to hear his lessons. (The sultan himself had irregular private sessions.) The children must have assumed that Master Maḥmūd would be just like all the others, a harsh teacher who forced his pupils to memorize the most endlessly trivial jargon, a man who claimed to have all the answers and publicly humiliated those who dared disagree. So imagine their surprise at their first Wednesday lessons! Master Maḥmūd always spoke in terms of “Perhaps this and that” or “It seems to me that this is that” or “Do you see that this can be understood like that?” Whenever he was questioned he stopped and took the time to explain his views in full depth, no matter how minor or ridiculous the inquiry.
Maḥmūd’s subjects were also new to Java. He claimed to teach all of the Nine Islamic Sciences: Quran exegesis, the study of the Prophet Muḥammad’s sayings and deeds, jurisprudence, Arabic grammar, rhetoric, metaphysics, logic, astronomy, and geometry. The old scholar was most certainly very qualified in all nine of them. But what he loved the most were rhetoric and logic, both fields very new to Javanese thought. Consider how Master Maḥmūd explained the most basic structure of proper argumentation to his younger students:
In any debate, there must be someone making a claim (the claimant) and someone who objects to said claim (the questioner). There are three ways by which the latter can challenge the former.
The first is to object to a premise or definition used in the argument. This is permissible only when the premise is not obviously true and the two parties do not concede its truth. The questioner may or may not provide support for his challenge. However, the claimant must always defend the premise with appropriate reasons.
The second is to object to the evidence or reasoning used in the argument. The questioner must always support the objection with logical reasons. To simply say “Your proof is obviously wrong” would be not only meaningless, but outright rude. The questioner’s support could be, for example, demonstrating that the claimant’s argument could also be made for a proposition that the claimant himself does not accept, or showing that the argument consists of circular reasoning and is therefore absurd.
The last is to offer an alternative interpretation of the facts that contradicts the original claim. In this case, the questioner becomes the claimant and the original claimant must now be the questioner, challenging the new claim that is being made.
The first is to object to a premise or definition used in the argument. This is permissible only when the premise is not obviously true and the two parties do not concede its truth. The questioner may or may not provide support for his challenge. However, the claimant must always defend the premise with appropriate reasons.
The second is to object to the evidence or reasoning used in the argument. The questioner must always support the objection with logical reasons. To simply say “Your proof is obviously wrong” would be not only meaningless, but outright rude. The questioner’s support could be, for example, demonstrating that the claimant’s argument could also be made for a proposition that the claimant himself does not accept, or showing that the argument consists of circular reasoning and is therefore absurd.
The last is to offer an alternative interpretation of the facts that contradicts the original claim. In this case, the questioner becomes the claimant and the original claimant must now be the questioner, challenging the new claim that is being made.
When Master Maḥmūd packed his belongings and bid Damascus farewell, he had carefully wrapped and bundled his most beloved volumes with fine Chinese silk. These tomes included Aristotle’s Organon (his six major works on logic) and Avicenna’s Eastern Philosophy. Once he arrived in Java, the master would give passionate lessons in logic to whoever in Karta cared enough to listen. “Someone who has no share in debate and logic,” he would cry out before a crowd of perplexed Javanese, “will hardly be able to understand advanced scholarly enquiries.”
Was this all obvious? Perhaps. But until now, rhetoric and logic had never been systematically classified in Java. Master Maḥmūd was no scientist, and he never claimed that he would expand the boundaries of physical knowledge. But his lessons allowed the new generation of Javanese elites to look at the world around them in very different ways. Was a senior official’s claim always true, even if the arguments seemed like circular reasoning? Was it really possible that a king’s spiritual power could be transmitted by sucking the penis of his corpse? The Javanese would once have easily responded to both questions with “yes.” But now, they began to doubt.
Mullā Maḥmūd never gave any fish to his students. But he had taught them the proper ways to fish.
(The other Ottoman immigrant, ʿAbbāsī, played a very different role in Javanese scholarship. His is a story for another day.)
* * *
The New Palace is just Topkapı.
Mullā Maḥmūd was a real Kurdish scholar in seventeenth-century Damascus. He arrived in the city in the first decade of the seventeenth century, fleeing the Safavid Persians and their persecutions of the Sunni Kurds. He taught the rational theologies and sciences for the better part of a century until his death in 1663, and virtually every seventeenth-century intellectual from Damascus was his student. A local biographer notes Maḥmūd's importance in the intellectual life of the city:
He mostly taught the books of the Persians, and he was the first to acquaint the students of Damascus with these books, and he imparted to them the ability to study and teach them. It is from him that the gate of verification in Damascus was opened. This is what we have heard our teachers say.
In other words, Maḥmūd was among the "verifying scholars" (muḥaqqiq) who rejected theological imitation and repetition in favor of critical thinking and reasoned assessment. He studied the "books of the Persians." These are works by Persian philosophers who often had sympathies with the rationalist Muʿtazilite school of early Islam, like Dawānī (who kept Islamic philosophy alive in the fifteenth century) or al-Isfarāyinī.While I don't know of any direct evidence of Maḥmūd's teaching styles, Ibrahīm Kūrānī (perhaps the most important seventeenth-century Ottoman philosopher and a fellow Kurd who probably studied with Maḥmūd at some point, since he lived for some time in Damascus) is said to have taught in the following way:
His lecture on a topic reminded one of discussion and parley, for he would say “Perhaps this and that” and “It seems that it is this” and “Do you see that this can be understood like that?” And if he was questioned on even the slightest point he would stop until the matter was established.
Of course this could be just Kūrānī's idiosyncrasies, but I choose to believe this isn't the case. Note that Maḥmūd is claimed to have imparted some sort of "ability to study and teach."The various classifications of refutations in debate come directly from a manual on dialectics by the sixteenth-century Turkish scholar Ṭāşköprīzāde. Maḥmūd's views would probably have been more developed than Ṭāşköprīzāde's, though, since Ottoman studies of rhetoric became increasingly precise in the seventeenth century.
Khaled el-Rouayheb's Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb is a pretty good, if very dense, source for all this.
ʿAbbāsī was also real; he was a popular Sufi in seventeenth-century Damascus.
