Virtue, Piety and the Law

In Virtue, Piety and the Law Katharina Ivanyi examines Birgivi Mehmed Efendi’s (d. 981/1573) al-Tariqa al-muhammadiyya, a major work of pietist exhortation and advice, composed by the sixteenth-century Ottoman jurist, Hadith scholar and grammarian, who would articulate a style of religiosity that had considerable reformist appeal into modern times.

Linking the cultivation of individual virtue to questions of wider political, social and economic concern, Birgivi played a significant role in the negotiation and articulation of early modern Ottoman Hanafi piety. Birgivi’s deep mistrust of the passions of the human soul led him to prescribe a regime of self-surveillance and control that was only matched in rigor by his likewise exacting interpretation of the law in matters of everyday life, as much as in state practices, such as the cash waqf, Ottoman land tenure and taxation.