Mustapha Sheikh's Ottoman Puritanism and Its Discontents is a provocative intervention in the historiographical debates regarding the origins, motivations, and legacies of the Qadizadelis (Kadizadelis), 17th-century puritanical activists associated with the teachings of the zealous Istanbul preacher, Qadizade Mehmed (d.1635). Sheikh's point of entry is the writings of Ahmad al-Rumi al-Aqhisari (d. ca. 1632), a prolific but unacknowledged partisan in the debates over controversial religious and social practices of the time. Such practices—including supererogatory prayers, mystical (Sufi) dancing and audible meditation, visitation of graves in the expectation of divine intercession, and other usages unknown at the time of the Prophet Muhammad—were the targets of Qadizadeli polemic and, after the mid-17th century, violence. Indeed, it is Sheikh's contention that far from being irrelevant to the Qadizadelis, al-Aqhisari's views opposing religious and social innovations were central to their reformist agenda and even occasioned the Qadizadeli violence that occurred long after his death.

The book employs the label “Qadizadeli” for al-Aqhisari, although the link that Sheikh posits between al-Aqhisari and the “Qadizadelis” who show up in contemporaneous and modern-day historiography can only be speculative given the absence of positive evidence. The extent to which al-Aqhisari's writings were known and read, much less acted upon, by later generations is unknown. The fact that his relevant work was composed entirely in Arabic argues against wide popular accessibility in Istanbul and other Turkish-language locales. Nonetheless, the striking correlations between the religious programs of al-Aqhisari and the 17th-century figures expressly identified with the Qadizadeli movement point to his—and their—place in a wider and deeper puritanical current of which the politically connected Qadizadelis were merely the most dynamic and divisive protagonists.

The book comprises five chapters and an introduction. The introduction and Chapter 1, “Ottoman Puritanism,” provide an overview of religious developments in the 17th century and the role of the Qadizadelis in championing an equivalence between religious austerity and “authentic” Islam. A significant part of Sheikh's contribution here is a critique of prevailing scholarship. In Sheikh's view, others have relied too heavily and usually exclusively on a single source genre, namely contemporaneous chronicles and commentaries, thus inevitably replicating 17th-century biases and limitations. Among these latter, Sheikh decries the perception of al-Aqhisari and the Qadizadelis as broadly anti-Sufi rather than merely antagonistic to the specific practices and beliefs of specific Sufi orders. He regards the alignment of al-Aqhisari's views with tenets of the Naqshbandi order—including insistence on the authority of the shariʿa and preference for silent “commemoration” of God (Ar. dhikr; T. zikr)—as evidence of al-Aqhisari's ideological discernment in sorting through the spectrum of Sufi tenets and praxis. Whether one can ascribe the same discernment to Qadizadeli activists of the later 17th century, however, is doubtful. Even if the Qadizadelis can be said to have exempted the Naqshbandis from their “anti-Sufi” rampages and diatribes, the movement's known exponents exhibited a virulent antipathy toward practices and beliefs common to a wide—one can argue a quite representative—swath of contemporaneous Sufi adherents and defenders. Be that as it may, Sheikh is on firm ground in noting that the intricacies of religious activism in the period can be better understood in the light of internal sources, textual reflections like al-Aqhisari's Majalis al-Abrar (Assemblies of the Pious). Sheikh's painstaking analysis of the Majalis and various other treatises reveals al-Aqhisari's preoccupation with precisely those spiritual and social matters that characterized Qadizadeli outpourings, from those of Qadizade Mehmed himself to those of the likes of Ustuwani Mehmed (d.1661) in a later generation.

Chapter 2, “The Third Man,” situates al-Aqhisari and his scholarship alongside Mehmed Birgili (d.1573) and Qadizade Mehmed in an interlocked Sunni Hanafi triumvirate of like-minded puritans. In later chapters, the book's discussion of convergences among the three makes a strong case for al-Aqhisari's pivotal membership in this early modern ideological genealogy. Among the differences between them, Sheikh notes especially al-Aqhisari's endorsement of an individual obligation to “enjoin good and forbid evil.” According to Sheikh, basing his judgment on textual legacies, both Qadizade and Birgili preferred to leave the policing of un-Islamic behavior to the state, while al-Aqhisari explicitly exhorted individual Muslims to action. Indeed, for Sheikh, it was al-Aqhisari's words, not those of other known partisans, that were the actual call to action that unleashed Qadizadeli violence. Here again, though, reliance on written exposition without accounting for social behavior tends to take historical actors purely at their written word. The book thus detaches two of the fieriest mosque preachers, Qadizade Mehmed and Ustuwani Mehmed, for example, from the sermons they regularly delivered at Istanbul's most important mosques. In so doing, Sheikh discounts the reality of reception, the impact on large, and usually military-laden, male audiences of weekly incitements, however inexplicit, if they were inexplicit, with regard to violence. The Ottoman chronicles and other historical narratives should not be so easily dismissed in the search for cause and effect in the Qadizadeli turn to physicality in “forbidding evil.” Sheikh's lack of Ottoman Turkish is especially problematic in these regards and constitutes the book's most serious shortcoming.

Textual analysis in Chapter 3, “The Muhammadan Path,” and Chapter 4, “Innovation (Bidʿa),” takes the reader more deeply into al-Aqhisari's thought, with particular attention to its affinities with the doctrinal positions of Ahmad ibn Taymiyya (d.1328), his pupil Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d.1350), and Naqshbandi Sufism. Although in agreement with Ibn Taymiyya's and Ibn Qayyim's condemnations of bid ʿa, al-Aqhisari's comfort with the mysticism exemplified by the Naqshbandis establishes, in Sheikh's view, a certain distance, on this point at least, from the tradition of Ibn Qayyim. Sheikh's quest for the sources and influences animating al-Aqhisari's views on innovation results in meticulous side-by-side comparisons not only with Ibn Qayyim but between the Majalis and both Ibn Taymiyya's Iqtidaʾ Sirat al-Mustaqim and Birgili Mehmed's Tariqat al-Muhammadiyya. Students of Islamic studies, and of the Ottoman early modern era generally, will be indebted to Sheikh for his enlightening demonstration of the sources’ intertextuality.

Not everyone will agree with Sheikh's thesis of the direct connection between al-Aqhisari, the “forgotten puritan,” and the Qadizadeli movement per se. However, the book's insights regarding 17th-century Ottoman revivalism and its relationship to broader historical trends, including developments in the present day, will surely open up discussion on more productive lines and encourage scholars to explore the textual tradition of these phenomena. To do so with regard to Ottoman-era manifestations, of course, will require thoroughgoing exploration of Ottoman Turkish materials.