B.

Papers

Revisiting “Turkish Fatalism”;

Or, Why Ottoman Theology Matters
Ethan L. Menchinger (Manchester)1

There are certain dirty words in Ottoman history, words that make a specialist
raise an eyebrow or purse the lips. Fatalism is one such word. For most of us, the
term evokes outdated tropes of a piece with Ottoman “decline,” “despotism,”
or “sensuality.” Few would use the word at all, save in discussing Orientalism or
early modern travel literature, and even then we might add appropriate scare
quotes to disavow it.2 While this impulse is an understandable reaction against
invidious stereotypes, as is otherwise avoiding the idea or implications of “Turk-
ish fatalism,” I feel it is misguided. Both to provoke and make a point about

1 Research for this article was made under the research project “GHOST: Geographies and
Histories of the Ottoman Supernatural Tradition: Exploring Magic, the Marvelous, and the
Strange in Ottoman Mentalities” (funded by the European Research Council, CoGr2017
no. 771766).
2 E.g., E. Said, Orientalism (London 1995), 102, 345. Nükhet Varlık italicizes the phrase “Turk-
ish fatalism” in her excellent study of plague so as to isolate it as an Orientalist trope: N.
Varlık, Plague and Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean World: The Ottoman Experi-
ence, 1347–1600 (Cambridge 2015), esp. 72–88.
Copyright: © 2021 The Institute for Mediterranean Studies/FORTH and the Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed
under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, dis-
tribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.
Aca’ib: Occasional papers on the Ottoman perceptions of the supernatural is an open access journal published by the Institute for Mediter-
ranean Studies/FORTH.
Menchinger, Ethan L. 2021. “Revisiting “Turkish Fatalism”; Or, Why Ottoman Theology Matters”. Aca’ib: Occasional papers on the
Ottoman perceptions of the supernatural 2.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.26225/rnyr-ar56

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our field, namely its neglect of all things theological, I use the word in what
follows—and I use it often.3
This article revisits fatalism in the early modern Ottoman Empire. It takes
fatalism seriously as a theological issue and for what it can reveal about our sub-
jects: Muslim inhabitants of the empire, and how they saw their place as world-
ly creatures, spiritual beings, and moral agents in a larger divine order. After
outlining the issue, a dilemma over God’s foreknowledge and will and human
action, I explore how fatalism shaped views of disease and warfare, respectively,
in the 16th to 18th centuries. How far was fatalism an Orientalist trope? Were
early modern Ottoman Muslims fatalists in any meaningful sense? The answer
to these questions will depend on how we define our terms, but they lead to
some perhaps uncomfortable conclusions. Fatalism was by no means purely a
trope, I argue. And in a basic theological sense, yes, Ottoman Muslims were
fatalist—though the full reality proved quite complex. Last, I will close with re-
flections on why such insights matter, and what scholars miss by ignoring them.

The Ottoman Empire and Theological Fatalism

We should first establish what we mean by fatalism. If we take the term in a
strict sense, as a belief as a point of faith in fate or predestination, then we stand
on firm footing in applying it to our subjects. Let us call this “theological fa-
talism.” Ottoman Muslims, of course, did not believe in “fate” as an abstract
causal force, like the pre-Islamic Arab notion of dahr, but in a specific doctrine
upholding God’s divine decree and preordination of all things subsumed in the
phrase al-qaḍā wa’l-qadar (Trk. kaza vü kader).4 Nor was this doctrine novel.
The ideas one finds in the early modern empire were the fruit of centuries of
earlier debate over God’s will, knowledge, and creative power, and how these
could be balanced with our own actions and moral responsibility as created
beings.

3 Some years ago I treated freewill and predestination in early modern Ottoman politics,
showing how the theology was mobilized both to support and oppose reform. I recall that,
while preparing the article, a colleague pointedly advised me to avoid the word fatalism: E.
L. Menchinger, “Free Will, Predestination, and the Fate of the Ottoman Empire”, Journal
of the History of Ideas, 77 (2016), 445–66.
4 See EI², s.v. “Dahr” (W. M. Watt); ibid., s.v. “al-Ḳaḍā’ Wa’l-Ḳadar” (L. Gardet). See also The
Oxford Dictionary of Islam, ed. John Esposito (Oxford 2003), s.v. “Fatalism”.

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We can neatly outline the debate here. Scholars in Sunni Islam took an ear-
ly interest in the issue of predestination because it touched directly on two of
God’s attributes—power and justice. If God is almighty, an entity who wills and
creates all things, do we have any control over our own deeds? If God is omni-
scient, moreover, knowing everything that will ever occur in creation, does it
not follow that He has decreed all aspects of our lives from preeternity? Scrip-
ture itself is equivocal. While affirming that God has inscribed each person’s
fate in the so-called “Preserved Tablet” (al-lawḥ al-maḥfūẓ) in heaven—“the ar-
chetype of all things, past, present, and future”—the Quran and hadith at times
assert absolute predestination but at others insist humans can direct our behav-
ior to good or ill.5 This dilemma is not easily resolved. While Islamic scholars
agreed that God is an all-powerful creator, they also accepted that He will judge
humans, rewarding good and punishing evil. Yet reward and punishment are
arbitrary, even unjust, if we lack the power to choose. The debate thus fixes
upon a point of tension between preserving divine power, on the one hand, and
ensuring that God remains all-just on the other.
The first centuries of Islam set the contours of debate. Choosing to err on
the side of divine power, some thinkers held humans to be entirely constrained
(jabr; Trk. cebr) in their acts and subject to God’s will and decree. Opponents
called this group jabriyya or mujbira—fatalist or predestinarian. At the oth-
er extreme, and often associated with Muʿtazilī theological circles, were those
who placed justice at the fore and argued that humans must have freewill to
choose good and evil, and even to “create” their own acts. These were called qa-
dariyya. Neither view proved durable in the long run and, by the 10th century
AD, Sunni theologians began to forge a middle way. If complete jabr made hu-
mans little better than marionettes, moved by the strings of God’s decree, their
freewill to choose and “create” actions also went too far—for creative power is
limited to God alone.6

5 Quote from EI², s.v. “Lawḥ” (A. J. Wensinck and C. E. Bosworth). The tablet is also consid-
ered to be the uncreated “original” of the Quran, sent down in revelation: e.g., “Nay, but it
is a glorious Koran, in a guarded tablet (85: 22)” and “Behold, we sent it [the Quran] down
on the Night of Power (97: 1)” [(trans. A. J. Arberry, The Koran Interpreted (London 1955)].
For scripture’s equivocal statements on fate, see M. Watt, Free Will and Predestination in
Early Islam (London 1948), 12–31.
6 See M. De Cillis, Free Will and Predestination in Islamic Thought: Theoretical Compromises
in the Works of Avicenna, al-Ghazālī, and Ibn ʿArabī (London 2014), 10-16; D. Gimaret,

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A synthesis formed in time from the work of Ashʿarī and Māturīdī thinkers.
This emerging orthodoxy, first, upheld God’s omnipotence and uniqueness as
a creator by adopting an occasionalist, atomistic worldview. It maintained that
God acts continually to create and recreate the universe, joining, separating,
destroying, and recreating every atom at every instant in time. God is thus the
only true cause in the world, pervading all things. Second, while humans are
subject to divine will and have no real causal power, theologians conceded that
they still take moral responsibility for their actions by “acquiring” (kasb; Trk.
kesb) them from God.7 The famed al-Ghazālī (d. 1111) put the final touches
on these ideas by aligning them superficially with Aristotelian causality. Al-
Ghazālī sought to explain why, if God is the only true cause who wills and cre-
ates all things, the world as we observe it seems to work through independent
cause and effect. His solution was to argue that this is “God’s custom” (ʿādat
Allah; Trk. adetüllah). That is, God chooses to create through the semblance
of visible or secondary causes. God is the prime mover, “the One who makes
causes function as causes” (musabbib al-asbāb) in most worldly affairs, the con-
nections between which are only apparent rather than necessary, yet He can
just as equally intervene directly to disrupt the regular course of events. God
decrees, wills, and creates all things according to His preeternal knowledge,
then, and what small agency remains to humans is non-creative and subject to
the divine.8
Early modern Ottomans inherited this framework with minor modifica-
tions. Most notably, they cast human will in new terms. By the 16th century
AD, intellectuals in the empire had coined a novel concept—“particular will”
(irade-i cüziyye / ihtiyar-ı cüzi)—to elaborate how our volition relates to God’s
will. The idea was that people have volition in limited areas of life (“particular
events” or umur-ı cüziyye) by which they can choose to act or not, and thereby

Théories de l’acte humaine en théologie Musulmane (Paris 1980); and Watt, Free Will and
Predestination. See also Menchinger, “Free Will”, 446–47.
7 On Islamic occasionalism, see D. Perler and U. Rudolph, Occasionalismus: Theorien der
Kausalität im arabisch-islamischen und im europäischen Denken (Göttingen 2000), 23–124;
and S. Pines, Studies in Islamic Atomism, trans. M. Schwarz ( Jerusalem 1997). See also Watt,
Free Will and Predestination, 147–52; and F. Griffel, Al-Ghazali’s Philosophical Theology
(Oxford 2009), 123–33.
8 See Griffel, Al-Ghazali’s, 216–22, 276–78; and Menchinger, “Free Will”, 447–48. On mir-
acles as the “breaking of [God’s] custom,” see J. Brown, “Faithful Dissenters: Sunni Skepti-
cism about the Miracles of Saints”, Journal of Sufi Studies, 1 (2012), 123–68.

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exert influence on the world. While this concept grew during a harmonization
of Ashʿarī and Māturīdī thought in Ottoman lands, much was left to debate,
like what exactly the will is and how it operates.9 Yet the innovation did not
change the basics: human will and deeds remained subject to divine preordi-
nation. Strictly speaking, “particular will” is not freewill. God knows and wills
from time immemorial what each person will do in every situation, thinkers
held. We merely direct our particular will toward this end and—since we have
no creative power of our own—God creates the result.10
We can note other ideas of fate that seem to have held popular currency
in the empire, many of which also feature in European sources in relation to
plague and war. Apart from al-qaḍā wa’l-qadar, God’s inescapable decree and
preordination of all things, and the related verbal noun taqdīr (Trk. takdir),
we find references to individual fate. Terms like naṣīb (nasib), rizq (rızk), and

9 On the “particular will” and its scholarly milieu, see P. Bruckmayr, “The Particular Will
(al-irādat al-juzi’yya): Excavations Regarding a Latecomer in Kalām Terminology on Hu-
man Agency and its Position in Naqshbandi Discourse”, European Journal of Turkish Stud-
ies [online], 13 (2011); Idem, “The Spread and Persistence of Māturīdī Kalām and Underly-
ing Dynamics”, Iran and the Caucasus, 13 (2009), 59–92; and P. Doroll, “Māturīdī Theology
in the Ottoman Empire: Debating Human Choice and Divine Power”, in O. Demir et al
(eds), Osmanlı’da İlm-i Kelâm: Âlimler, Eserler, Meseleler (Istanbul 2016), 219-38. Ques-
tions persisted over the nature of will (irāde), intention (qaṣd), and resolution (ʿazm), for
instance. Are these “things” with external existence, and so must be created? İspirli Kadızade
(d. ca. 1717) called the will “a conceptual matter (amr iʿtibārī)” in the sense that is not. ʿAbd
al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī (d. 1731) also weighed if the will is an accident (ʿaraḍ), a state (ḥāl),
or merely arises from a state. What also is a state—does it have external existence or is it a
“quality” given to something that exists, without itself having existence or non-existence?
See their respective treatises: İspirli Kadızade, Risāla mumayyiza madhhab al-Māturīdiyya
ʿan al-madhāhib al-ghayriyya and ʿAbd al-Ghanī al-Nābulusī, Taḥqīq al-intiṣār fī ittifāq
al-Ashʿarī wa’l-Māturīdī ʿalā khalq al-ikhtiyār, ed. E. Badeen, in Sunnitische Theologie in
osmanischer Zeit (Würzburg 2008), at 67 ff., and 82 ff.
10 While not a strict rendering of irade-i cüziyye, “freewill” is more idiomatic and an estab-
lished translation. See Franciscus Meninski, Thesaurus Linguarum Orientalium Turci-
cae-Arabicae-Persicae (Vienna 1680), 1: 95, for ihtiyâr-ı cüzi’: “Liberum arbitrium. Ein freier
Will. Il libero arbitrio. Le franc arbitre. Wolność woley.” Frank Griffel (private communi-
cation, May 2018) suggests that “particular” is a misleading translation and we should read
cüzi’ as “individual”: “Irada juz’iyya is hence the individual (act of ) volition’ of a human to
perform one single act.” İspirli (Risāla mumayyiza, 70) wrote that our actions are attrib-
utable to us in a limited and locative sense and to God in an “operative sense (min ḥaythu
huwa ḥaraka).”

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qisma (kısmet) do not all derive from scripture and theological discourse but
stem from roots meaning one’s being allotted or apportioned something—in
our case, they came to mean a fortune or destiny allotted by God.11 The term
ajal (ecel) referred more narrowly to the appointed term of a person’s life and
the hour of his or her death, a time nothing could change: “No one has his life
prolonged or no one has his life cut short except (as it is written) in a book (of
God’s decrees) (35:12).”12 The belief that our fates are “written” appears to have
been widespread, as we shall see. Not only did God record all that was, is, and
ever shall be in the “Preserved Tablet,” but it was said that He also inscribed
each individual’s personal fate (or at least ajal) in invisible writing on their fore-
head. Fate in this guise was inevitable, irrevocable, and literally inscrutable.13
Last, in considering people’s responses to dangers like plague, we should ad-
dress the role of trust in God (tawakkul, Trk. tevekkül). Scripture instructs be-
lievers to trust entirely in God and submit to providence with acceptance and
pious resignation. Some earlier thinkers held trust in God to be a pillar of faith,

11 EI², s.v. “Taḳdīr” (A. Levin); ibid., s.v. “Rizḳ” (C. E. Bosworth and J. D. McAuliffe); ibid., s.v.
“Ḳisma” (C. E. Bosworth). Also Meninski, who represents 17th-century Ottoman usage:
(s.v. Takdir) “Destinatio, praedestinatio, Divinae potentiae decretum, & inevitable fatum
...taktīrĩ rebbānīde mukadder imiš. Praedestinatum à Deo erat, sic erat in fatis ...taktīrātĩ
ilāhīje. Praeordinationes divinae”; (s.v. Kaza) “Kazā wu kader. Praeordinatio Divina, fatum
...kazāĩ mūbrem ...görünmez kazā. An. inevitable fatum ...Kazā geldükte dīdeĩ dāniš kör olur
...kazāĩ wetr. Inevitabile fatum aut infortunium ...Ćiün tīrĩ kazā kemānĩ kaderden atylür
siperĩ hazer ile def' olunmaz ...Kazā üllah üzerine gelsün ...Kazā wājib olur kefāret wājib ol-
maz ...Kazāje ryzā göstermek, wirmek. Se submittere voluntati Dei ...kazāje ryzāden ghajrĩ ne
ćiāre”; (s.v. Kismet) “Fati partitio, fatum, fortuna, decretum Dei ...görelüm allah ne kysmet
wirür.” See also Mustafa b. Şemseddin Ahteri, Ahteri-i Kebir (1876), s.v. “Kaza” and “Kader”;
and Vankulu Mehmed, Lugat-ı Vankulu (Istanbul 1802/3), s.v. “Kaza” and “Kader”.
12 EI², s.v. “Adjal” (I. Goldziher and W. M. Watt); and Meninski, s.v. “Egel”: “Fatalis meta, vel
hora mortis, mors, fatum, vitae extremum, & mora concessa, seu certi temporis terminus.”
13 Meninski: (s.v. Fatum) “Taktīrĩ rebbānīde mukadder imiš ...nasybī ejle imiš ...bašine jazylmyš
idy ...egel bulmak”; (s.v. Praedestinatus) “Mukadder ...sernüvišt ...munkadir ...mevud ...baši-
na jazylmyš ...nasyjelerinde mestur.” See also Jakab Harsányi Nagy, representing 17th-cen-
tury Ottoman dialogue in Colloquia familiaria Turcico Latina, seu status Turcicus loquens
(Berlin 1672), 4 f.: “Her sej Allah elinden gielür, andan oturi kabul itmek gierek. Omnia ex
manu Dei veniunt, ideò boni consulenda ...Emma, kim Tanrgie karsi kor? (gielür). At, Quis
ausit Deo reluctari? ...Mukader olan zuhure gielür. Stat Fatum ratum inevitabile. Quod
præstatutum est, fiec. Aliter sic: jazilan gielür basina. Quod capici unius cujusque inscrip-
tum est (quod Decretum est) illud futurũ est.”

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even to the extent of abandoning one’s own volition, while others debated the
practical limits of tawakkul.14
According to most Ottoman thought, then, our deeds inhabit a middle
ground (amr bayn al-amrayn) between compulsion and freewill. One theolo-
gian likened the situation to a rider on a horse, with God as the horse and the
human the rider. Particular will is like the reins in the rider’s hands, he wrote,
whereas God’s will is the underlying horsepower. If the horse so willed, it could
carry the rider wherever it pleased but instead it chooses to follow the rider’s
direction and propel him on his way, for good or ill.15 In a similar manner, belief
in al-qaḍā wa’l-qadar remained an article of faith for Ottoman Muslims, treat-
ed in detail in catechisms. The much-read gloss of Saʿd al-Dīn al-Taftazānī (d.
1390) on Najm al-Dīn al-Nasafī’s creed (d. 1142) devotes a section to the topic.16
Birgivi Mehmed Efendi (d. 1573), whose writings on faith circulated widely in
Turkish and Arabic, also enjoined readers to attest that God is all-willing. God
decrees, wills, and creates all things, he said, both good and evil, from the be-
liever’s piety to the infidel’s unbelief and sinner’s misdeeds. Everything occurs
by God’s preordination, so that “from all eternity has He decreed both what is
and what is to come and writ it on the Preserved Tablet, and nothing shall defy
it.”17
Fatalism as a theological doctrine was uncontroversial for Ottoman believ-
ers, the general tenets of which they were called to embrace. Yet one might
object at this point: is it not better call these beliefs predestination rather than
fatalism? Apart from the latter’s pejorative connotations, for example, contem-
porary European sources often prefer to call Ottoman subjects “predestinar-

14 EI², s.v. “Tawakkul” (L. Lewisohn). Al-Ghazālī said that in the perfect degree, one trusts in
God “like a corpse in the hands of the corpse-washer.”
15 Anonymous, Risāla fī al-ikhtiyār al-juzi’, Princeton Garrett nr. 788Y, fol. 5b. İspirli said
(in Badeen, Sunnitische Theologie, 68) that “the true position is between compulsion and
freewill (fa’l-ḥaqq huwa al-tawassuṭ bayn al-jabr wa’l-qadr) and that the act is neither forced
nor delegated, but an intermediate thing (also Nābulusī in ibid., 99).
16 Taftazānī, A Commentary on the Creed of Islam, trans. Earl Edgar Elder (New York 1950),
80 ff. On catechisms in general in Ottoman lands, see T. Kristć, “You Must Know Your Faith
in Detail: Redefinition of the Role of Knowledge and Boundaries of Belief in Ottoman
Catechisms (ʿİlm-i ḥāls)”, in T. Krstić and D. Terzioğlu (eds), Historicizing Sunni Islam in
the Ottoman Empire, c. 1450-c. 1750 (Leiden 2020), 155–95.
17 Birgivî, Risale-yi Birgivî [Vasiyetname] (s.n., 1876), 18–19. The topic is also treated in his
Arabic al-Ṭarīqat al-Muḥammadiyya (Istanbul 1844).

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ians” in drawing parallels with broadly similar Christian doctrines.18 There is

good reason for us to distinguish, however. For one, predestination in Christian
sects like Calvinism typically deals with soteriology, or doctrines of salvation
and who will ultimately be saved or damned—a point some early modern trav-
elers noted.19 As we have seen, Sunni theology to the contrary joined a belief
in al-qaḍā wa’l-qadar with an occasionalist worldview in which God not only
decreed final states but was, quite literally, responsible for all events in time
down the motion of the smallest atom. Modern philosophers also apply the
term “theological fatalism” to a specific dilemma: namely, that infallible fore-
knowledge makes human acts unfree. If God knows the whole future infallibly,
as in our case, then it seems to follow that those acts must necessarily take place
whether we will it or not.20
Yet while theological fatalism was present in the empire, it only takes us so
far. Creeds and doctrine tell us what religious scholars felt people should be-
lieve, but they do not tell us much about how those people really thought or
acted. Theology can be recondite and give rise to misunderstandings; believers
will also act and think contrary to teaching. And if we take fatalism in a sense
beyond doctrine—as one of mentality, signaling resignation or indifference in

18 E.g., Jean du Mont, A New Voyage to the Levant, Containing an Account of the Most Re-
markable Curiosities in Germany, France, Italy, Malta, and Turkey (London 1696), 251;
John Covel, Early Voyages and Travels in the Levant, Hakluyt Society no. lxxxvi (London
1892), 246; Paul Rycaut, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire: containing the Maxims
of the Turkish Politie, the Most Material Points of the Mahometan Religion, their Sects and
Heresies, their Convents and Religious Votaries, their Military Discipline (London 1668), 115
ff.; Cornelis de Bruyn, Reizen van Cornelis de Bruyn door de vermaardste Deelen van Klein
Asia (Delft 1697), 69; and Edward Browne, The Travels and Adventures of Edward Browne,
formerly a Merchant of London (London 1739), 361.
19 See, for instance, Encyclopedia of Theology: the Concise Sacramentum Mundi, ed. Karl
Rahner (New York 1975), s.v. “Predestination” (H. Rondet and K. Rahner); and The New
Catholic Encyclopaedia (Washington D.C. 2003), s.v. “Fate and Fatalism”. I note some exam-
ples below.
20 E.g., The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Stanford, CA, 1997—), s.v. “Foreknowledge
and Free Will” (L. Zagzebski): “Fatalism is the thesis that human acts occur by necessity
and hence are unfree. Theological fatalism is the thesis that infallible foreknowledge of a
human act makes the act necessary and hence unfree. If there is a being who knows the
entire future infallibly, then no human act is free.” See also The Oxford Handbook of Free
Will, ed. Robert Kane (Oxford 2005), s.v. “Fatalism” (M. Bernstein) and its subsection on
“Theological Fatalism.”

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the face of events or danger—the picture becomes still more complex. Were
Ottoman Muslims fatalists in this broader sense, one scholars often dismiss as
an Orientalist trope? As we turn our focus to popular views of plague and war-
fare, both contested “particular events,” we find conflicting evidence but, yes, at
least some attitudes we can fairly describe as fatalist.

Plague and Providence

Fatalism has long been treated alongside plague and features in recent revision-
ist work on Ottoman experiences of the disease. The debate centers on claims
that Muslims in the empire did not take precautions against infection, and es-
chewed flight, due to their belief in God’s inalterable decrees. Much-quoted
traditions of the Prophet taught that God sends down plague as a form of mar-
tyrdom or punishment, so that it is not contagious and believers ought not
flee an outbreak.21 Some Ottoman sources in this sense even call the disease
“blessed” (taun-ı mübarek).22 Early modern European travelers often recorded
such behavior or related sentiments, too, noting that many people showed little
fear over contact with the dead and dying or claimed that each person’s fate
was “written on his forehead,” not to be changed. Scholars like Nükhet Varlık,
Yaron Ayalon, and Sam White tend to discount these fatalistic accounts. Such
sources deal in stereotypes, they say. They convey Orientalist tropes, describe
behavior better explained by psychology, or indeed, if read carefully, overturn
the idea that Ottomans acted largely out of “religious scruples.”23 While they

21 E.g., from Saḥīḥ al-Bukhārī, nr. 5728: “The Prophet said: if you hear of an outbreak of the
plague in a land, do not enter it; but if the plague breaks out in a place while you are in it,
do not leave that place.” Also nr. 2830 and 5732, calling death from the plague a form of
martyrdom; and nr. 5734, saying God uses plague both as a punishment and as a blessing
for the pious. See also A. Mikhail, Nature and Empire in Ottoman Egypt: an Environmental
History (Cambridge 2011), 214 n. 43.
22 E.g. Selanikî Mustafa, Tarih-i Selânikî, ed. M. İpşirli (Istanbul 1989), 1: 283.
23 Varlık tends to present fatalism as a trope, e.g. Varlık, Plague and Empire, 72–88. Ayalon
argues that “psychological” factors were more important than “religious” ones, though I am
not sure how the two can be neatly separated: Y. Ayalon, “Plague, Psychology, and Religious
Boundaries in Ottoman Anatolia”, THR, 9 (2018), 1–17. Sam White acknowledges fatalism
as a contested “scruple” yet does not go deeper into the theology, arguing that Ottoman
Muslims were largely similar to Byzantine or Western Christians: S. White, “Rethinking
Disease in Ottoman History”, IJMES, 42 (2010), 553 ff. While Alan Mikhail calls
plague “a necessary and vital part of Egyptian culture” that was feared but did not cause

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grant that some Ottomans do appear to have met the plague stoically, these
specialists seek above all to show that Ottoman Muslims took active precau-
tions. While this is welcome, as is their critical handling of sources, one senses
an aversion on their part to dig deeper, either to minimize fatalism as a triviality
of “religion” or because it is potentially embarrassing, making our subjects seem
like Orientalist caricatures—passive, illogical, unthinking. We in this way miss
out on rich complexities.24
How might early modern Ottomans have engaged with such ideas when
it came to plague? Let us consider what some European sources say. Accord-
ing to the English traveler Sir Henry Blount (d. 1682), an often-sympathetic
observer, Muslims in the empire saw predestination not only as a “matter of
Salvation, but of fortune, and success in this life, [and] they peremptory permit
to Destiny fixt, and not avoydable by any act of ours.”25 Blount noted seeing
this attitude twice. Once, when one of his ship’s crew died of plague at Rhodes,
Blount expressed shock at how others failed to keep away and even used the
dead man’s effects. Instead, “they pointed upon their foreheads, telling me it
was written there at their birth when they should dye.”26 A second episode oc-
curred on Blount’s way to Edirne, during a plague outbreak. “Wee passed by a
man of good qualitie,” he wrote, “and a Souldier, who lying along, and his Horse
by, could hardly speake so much, as to entreat us to take him into the Coach.”

[Our] Ianizary made our companion ride his Horse, taking the man in: whose brest
being open, and full of plague tokens, I would not have had him received; but he
in like manner pointing to his owne forehead, and mine, told me wee could not be
hurt, unlesse it were written there, and that then we could not avoyd it.27

flight, citing also scriptural injunctions, he does not explore fatalism further: Mikhail,
Nature and Empire, 201 ff. Miri Shefer-Mossensohn is the most sensitive to theological
concerns in Ottoman Medicine: Healing and Institutions, 1500–1700 (Albany 2010),
173 ff. Unfortunately, while preparing this article I could not access B. Bulmuş, Plague,
Quarantines, and Geopolitics in the Ottoman Empire (Edinburgh 2012).
24 Cf. Daniel Pipes’ blunt article, “Are Muslims Fatalists?”, Middle East Quarterly (2015), 1–18.
This topic is likely one of few in which Pipes and I share much common ground—and I
perhaps go further than him here in finding analytical value in fatalism as a term.
25 Henry Blount, A Voyage into the Levant: a Briefe Relation of a Iourney… (London 1636), 85.
26 Ibid., 85–86.
27 Ibid., 86.

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The man died the next day, said Blount. He also admitted that this attitude
had some redeeming merits. “I thought this opinion of fate, had usually taken
men off from all industrious care of their owne safety; but in dangers at Sea,
and other cases where diligence may evidently import, I have still found the
contrary,” he wrote. “And in such occurrence as these, where industry is not of
manifest avayle; this assurance does not so much hurt in leaving vayne care, as
good in strengthening the spirits whose decay yeelds a man up to all bad im-
pressions.”28
Thomas Smith (d. 1710), a fellow Englishman who served as embassy chap-
lain in Istanbul, agreed that this “absurd principle of fate” allowed Ottomans
to boldly meet dangers like plague. Yet Smith was hostile where Blount showed
grudging admiration. Most in the empire take no care in tending the ill or dead,
he wrote,

Their confidence being grounded upon this foolish belief, that every man’s destiny
is written in his forehead, and not to be prevented or kept off by care or Medicine,
that the term of life is fatal and peremptory, and that it is in vain to go about to
extend it beyond the set Period.29

Smith said this view was especially rife among the uneducated. Such folk “think
it a kind of Sin as well as weakness to relinquish their houses, and retire to more
wholsom air,” he wrote, and liken the disease to an arrow none can escape.30
Smith added that this argument served on the whole as a source of comfort in
distress, or in the face of death: “that it is the decree and pleasure of God, which
they are to submit to, and that all humane counsels and remedies are ineffectual
against his will (which is a great truth in itself, but very much misapplied by
them).” Such people claim they are allotted so long to live and no more, saying,
“Egel ghelmedi ...the hour of his death has not yet come.”31
The French traveler and later Baron of Carlscroon, Jean du Mont (d. 1727),
relayed similar views. Like Blount, Du Mont pointed out that predestination
for Ottoman Muslims did not just affect salvation: “they extend it even to the

28 Ibid., 86–87.
29 Thomas Smith, Remarks upon the Manners, Religion and Government of the Turks together
with a Survey of the Seven Churches of Asia, as they now lye in their Ruines, and a Brief De-
scription of Constantinople (London 1678), 108–09.
30 Ibid., 109.
31 Ibid., 112–13.

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most Indifferent Actions, yet with some Limitations and Circumstances which
’twou’d be very difficult to explain, and which they themselves do not well un-
derstand.”32 Du Mont claimed that the empire’s inhabitants took no precau-
tions against plague, or even took offense at those who did. He recounted how
a man he knew was accosted on the street while trying to avoid two “Turks”
who were carrying away the body of a plague victim. “One of the Company
ran after him, and clasp’d him in his Arms, rubbing his Body upon him several
times; after which opening his Vest, and showing him a large Plague-Sore under
his right Pap, Learn, said he, not to forsake dead and dying Men.”33 Du Mont
wrote that Ottomans denied plague arises from airborne contagion or human
physiology. Instead, they believed it proceeded from a divine cause, as a punish-
ment for sin. Du Mont explained, accordingly, that when God means to punish
immorality, he sends an army of “black angels.”

Every Angel receives of Bow and two sorts of Arrows, to inflict either Death or
Sickness, with orders to shoot their mortal Arrows at those whom they find under
the Power of Sin, and to direct the others at such who are only tainted with some
Pollution. ’Tis then that Men stand most in need of the Protection of their White
Angels, who intercede for ’em, and do what they can toward the Blows that are
aim’d against ’em, sometimes covering a Man entirely, when they perceive a great
number of Enemies ready to attack him. Yet notwithstanding all their Care, their
Assistance proves oftentimes ineffectual; and therefore ’tis the Interest of every
Man that regards his own Safety, to secure himself against the Vengeance of those
destroying Spirits, by leading a sinless Life.34

Blount, Smith, and Du Mont overgeneralize, to be sure, and at times are dis-
missive—traits they share with many European writers regarding the Ottoman
realm. Nor were they very familiar with local customs and tongues. But if we
delve deeper, we can extract some useful insights. All grant that fatalism went
beyond Christianity’s soteriological concerns and was a contested issue, for one.
We can also allow that, if some Ottomans argued for natural theories of conta-
gion and took precautions—and they notably did35—others considered God
either to be plague’s direct or ultimate cause, acting to His preordained ends.

32 Du Mont, A New Voyage to the Levant, 251.

33 Ibid., 258–59.
34 Ibid., 259–60.
35 See, for instance, Shefer-Mossensohn, Ottoman Medicine, 173 ff.

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How one reacted could thus be morally charged. Du Mont’s friend evidently
angered his assailants through his lack of charity for the dying and, perhaps
as they saw it, proper acceptance of God’s agency. His response also contrasts
with the risky, if kind, gesture of Blount’s Janissary guard, who seems to have
taken pity on the plague victim and trusted the outcome to God. While Ayalon
disregards Du Mont’s angels as “fantastic,”36 moreover, the fact that Evliya Çele-
bi (d. 1684?) tells a nearly identical story about an “army of the plague (taun
askeri)” suggests a popular circulation for such explanations. Like Du Mont,
Evliya linked plague outbreaks to such invisible forces. Their ranks feature good
spirits clad in white and wicked ones in black, he said, though in his telling they
are jinn rather than angels and do not battle each other. Instead, whoever the
white spirits strike is spared the plague, and whoever the black spirits strike will
die.37 Strikingly similar stories of spirit armies circulated in relation to warfare,
as well, as we will see.
We can find keener observations from people who lived in the empire for
years, spoke its languages, and, in some cases, were born there. Alexander Rus-
sell (d. 1768), a naturalist and doctor for the Levant Company who lived in
Aleppo for more than a decade and learned Arabic, acknowledged fatalism’s
complexity. The empire’s Muslims resign themselves to calamities and political
reverses, he said, “but it is not to be imputed to natural insensibility, nor is it
always, though it may be sometimes, merely affected.”38 Russell admitted that
belief in fate can be useful and fortifying. While the notion is “universally re-
ceived” in the abstract, however, he maintained that it had little real influence

36 Ayalon, “Plague, Psychology, and Religious Boundaries”, 5–6.

37 Evliya Çelebi, Evliya Çelebi Seyahatnâmesi, eds. R. Dankoff et al (Istanbul. 2017), 1: 184, 4:
333, on a dervish’s interaction with these spirits near Istanbul, who provided him a register
with names of all who would die in a coming plague. The dervish gave it to the sultan, who
refused to believe its contents. Plague then raged for forty days, proving the register true.
See also M. Sariyannis, “The Dead, the Spirits, and the Living: on Ottoman Ghost Stories”,
JTS, 44 (2015), 380–81; and Idem, “Of Ottoman Ghosts, Vampires, and Sorcerers: an Old
Discussion Disinterred”, ArchOtt, 30 (2013), 189. Varlık relates this story in full (Plague and
Empire, 237–38) but ties it to shifting mentalities about who might predict or heal plague,
rather than to the more obvious way it reflects beliefs about predestination. She also tells
(ibid., 224) of one Abdal Musa, who had “the soldiers of plague [taʿun askeri] under his
control,” but refers to the phrase as only a “metaphor.”
38 Alexander Russell, The Natural History of Aleppo: Containing a Description of the City, and
the Principal Natural Productions of its Neighbourhood, revised with notes by P. Russell
(London 1794 [2nd ed.]), 1: 233.

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on people’s decision-making. God’s preordination was “an article of faith sel-

dom contested,” but it is “practically called in as an auxiliary,” after the fact, as
well as a topic hotly contested by religious scholars.39 Russell granted that heed-
lessness against plague was a reality, yet suggested this behavior was due less to
“orthodox opinion” than doubts about the disease’s contagiousness. Many in
any case took preventative measures, arguing that, since God wills and creates
all things, He has created both diseases and the remedies thereof.40
Edward Lane (d. 1876), an Orientalist who also spent years in the empire’s
Arab lands and wrote the monumental Arabic-English Lexicon, agreed that, in
Egypt, belief in fatalism was by no means absolute. All Muslims must believe
in God’s preordination of all things, he said. Yet this doctrine was a point of
controversy and, in any case, “conditional.”41 Lane noted a belief that, in mid-
Shaban, God fixes each person’s fate for the next year and shakes the Lote Tree
of Paradise to determine who shall die. Maybe counter-intuitively, some on this
night prayed to God to cancel out any ill fate decreed for them on the Pre-
served Tablet. Others held that the chance to alter one’s fate fell on the “Night
of Power (or Decree)” (laylat al-qadr) at the end of Ramadan, when the gates
of heaven opened and prayers were sure to succeed.42 Yet while Lane claimed
that fatalism on the whole gave an Egyptian patience, fortitude, and serenity in
the face of affliction, it did not preclude action. “His belief in predestination
does not ...prevent him from taking any step to attain an object he may have
in view; not being perfectly absolute, or unconditional,” he wrote. Lane add-
ed that Muslims followed the Quranic injunction, “Throw yourselves not into
perdition,” and avoided danger when possible except in certain cases—one of
which was plague. Owing to sayings of the Prophet, “the lawfulness of quaran-
tine is contested; but the generality of them condemn it.”43
We might regard a final source for examination, Mouradgea D’Ohsson (d.
1807), as much Ottoman as European. Born Muradcan Tosunyan in Istanbul,

39 Ibid., 1: 233–34.
40 Ibid., 1: 234–35, 422–424; 2: 122. Note 50 (p. 235) adds that locals had a proverbial saying:
“The physic from the doctor, the cure from God!” (al-dawa’ min al-hakim al-shifa’ min
Allah).
41 Edward Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs of Modern Egyptians (London 1860),
1: 68.
42 Ibid., 1: 471–72. Cf. Smith, Remarks upon the Manners, Religion and Government, 79.
43 Lane, An Account of the Manners and Customs, 283–84.

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D’Ohsson was an Ottoman Armenian subject who knew Arabic and Turkish,
worked as an interpreter for the Swedish embassy, and gallicized his name. His
vast Tableau général de l’Empire othoman treats fatalism in fair detail. The be-
lief in God’s preordination is one of five articles of the faith, D’Ohsson wrote.
Drawing on legal works and creeds, however, he limited this belief to soteri-
ology and whether a person would be damned or saved. The doctrine of fate
only affects our spiritual state, he wrote, and even then not that of all people.
The “free-will (ikhtiyar-djuz’y)” thus acts without hindrance in civil, moral, and
political actions, to deny which is a sin, and it is only after prayer, deliberation,
and action that one can ascribe an event to God’s will.44 D’Ohsson evidently
erred in this opinion. As we have seen, the doctrine of al-qaḍā wa’l-qadar gener-
ally embraced all things and events—spiritual and temporal—in a person’s life.
D’Ohsson also hinted at sharp disagreement over its limits. He decried what
he called a “prevailing prejudice” that, despite fine points of doctrine, extended
fate to all civil and moral actions. “Nearly everyone cleaves to the principle of
an immutable destiny fixed by the decrees of heaven,” he said, written on our
forehead from birth, while the least complaint against “Takdir” or “Kissmeth”
was regarded by high and low as a gross impiety.45
Such was also the case in disasters like plague. D’Ohsson blamed outbreaks
of pestilence as well as Istanbul’s frequent fires on fatalism. Despite the example
of early caliphs and Sultan Bayezid II, who avoided plague and even retired
to the countryside, he said, and despite the “spirit of the faith” and legal and
theological literature, many Ottomans refused to take precautions. D’Ohsson
claimed that, while some tried to protect themselves or flee, “they are outdone
by the prejudices of the masses.”46 The latter held reasonable precautions to be
not only a sin but an insult against them and God, he said. Yet D’Ohsson point-
ed to contradictions. The same man who took no action in the face of plague or
fire, considering them God’s decree, would still use all the means at his disposal

44 Mouradgea D’Ohsson, Tableau général de l’Empire othoman (Paris 1788–1824), 1: 167–68.

D’Ohsson drew on al-Nasafī’s creed, the legal work of Ibrāhīm al-Ḥalabī (d. 1549), and the
fetvas of Yenişehirli Abdullah Efendi (d. 1743) for his discussions of faith and law, respec-
tively. On D’Ohsson and his work, see C. V. Findley, Enlightening Europe on Islam and the
Ottomans: Mouradgea D’Ohsson and his Masterpiece (Leiden 2019).
45 D’Ohsson, Tableau général, 1: 168–70. I have used the translation in Menchinger, “Free
Will”, 451.
46 D’Ohsson, Tableau général, 1: 170–73; and 4a: 391–93, 395.

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to repel the effects of the disaster, just as someone with a serious illness consults
a doctor.47
What are we to make of these accounts? If we take the sources seriously,
I think, we can first admit that al-qaḍā wa’l-qadar had wide purchase in the
abstract. Yet we can also see that the doctrine fed all manner of debate. As
Lane and others indicated, for instance, Ottoman religious scholars addressed
the general problem of human will as well as the specific issue of flight from
plague in treatises and legal opinions (fetva). Flight was indeed a fraught top-
ic, running against clear scriptural injunctions. Yet scholars tried to offer nu-
ance. Taşköprüzade (d. 1561), known for his learning in the sciences and author
of a treatise on predestination, argued that believers did no wrong to leave a
pest-ridden city, provided they were only seeking purer air and not fleeing the
disease itself (and hence God’s will). The prolific şeyhülislam and historian Ke-
mal Paşazade (d. 1534) along with the scribe İdris Bidlisi (d. 1520) had likewise
urged readers to flee from pestilential sites in works on the topic.48 The empire’s
most famous jurisconsult, meanwhile, Ebüssuud Efendi (d. 1574), conceded in
a series of rulings that both flight and staying put could be justified. While he
lamented the panicked flight of officials, ordering the dismissal of those who
abandoned their charges at a time of need, he also granted room for agency.
In one ruling, he allowed believers to exit “a plague-stricken city in search of a
safer place and ...precautions against the plague.”49
The survival of legal opinions on flight indicates that it was a real point of
debate, one jurists had to adjudicate and clarify. Ebüssuud also issued a ruling
on the more general problem: if God decrees and preordains everything, can
we blame our actions or inaction on divine will? Or are we morally responsible?
As the fetva poses the question (which may reflect an actual legal dispute), can
a man carouse and indulge in sin but claim that his behavior is fated—that God
compels him to act so?50 Ebüssuud followed the consensus theology to reject

47 Ibid., 4a: 396–97.

48 Shefer-Mossensohn, Ottoman Medicine, 174; and Varlık, Plague and Empire, 243–44.
49 Shefer-Mohsensson, Ottoman Medicine, 173–74; and Varlık, Plague and Empire, 244. See
also E. Düzdağ, Şeyhülislam Ebusuud Efendi Fetvaları Işığında 16. Asır Türk Hayatı (Is-
tanbul 1983), nrs. 395, 754, 888, 912, and 913.
50 Ebüssuud Mehmed, Fetva-yı Kaza vü Kader, in Princeton Firestone Library, Islamic MSS
Garrett nr. 225Y, fol. 5b: “[Zeyd] diyse kim meyhaneye gideceğüm ve anda fısk ideceğüm
ilm-i Allah’da mukadder ve levh-i mahfuz’da mesturdur lacerem benden bu fıskın sudurı
bir emr-i zaruridir…”

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this argument. If we accept that our deeds are wholly compelled, he argued,
humans cannot be morally responsible. We cannot be held to account for good
and evil, for God is just and does not place unbearable obligations (teklif-i mala
yutak) on us. Rather, while God knows from all eternity how each person will
act in life, we still choose to “acquire” our actions or not. The fact that God
knows what we will choose in all things, and then wills and creates our acts,
does not mean that God compels us. Ebüssuud likened the situation to a sculp-
tor: “A sculptor makes a statue of a horse in a particular way because that is what
a horse is like in its essence,” he wrote. “How should it be that the horse is by
essence that way because the sculptor made such a representation?”51
Ebüssuud’s fetva suggests that at least some Ottomans used fatalism oppor-
tunistically, finding in it excuses for inaction or the shirking of responsibility.
These arguments, while self-interested, had power. They drew on the theology
in a way that was hard to refute, or easy to turn into an attack on a naysayer’s
piety. For who can doubt God’s might and the wisdom of what He wills? Eu-
ropean sources at times noted such a tendency. The French diplomat and mer-
chant Laurent d’Arvieux (d. 1702) observed that, in Arab lands, people offered
fatalistic expressions to condole others on the loss of loved ones: “Providence
wou’d have it thus; Such was the Destiny which the Almighty had writ upon his
Head, and his Hour was Come.”52 John Antes (d. 1811), an American mission-
ary who spent more than ten years in Egypt, complained that similar phrases
could justify indolence or still more serious matters—in his case, a beating that
left him badly injured.53 D’Ohsson agreed that rulers especially invoked fate ex
post facto to excuse bad policy or behavior.54 Early modern Ottomans voiced
irritation at such devices, too. The anonymous author of Kitab-ı Müstetab, for
instance, a 17th century reform tract, criticized the fatalism of some of his peers
as cynical, indeed blasphemous. “The person who says, ‘It was fated for us. The

51 Ibid., fols. 6b–7a.

52 Laurent D’Arvieux, The chevalier D’Arvieux’s travels in Arabia the desart; written by himself,
and Publish’d by Mr. De la Roque: Giving a very accurate and entertaining Account of the
Religion, Rights, Customs, Diversions, &c. (London 1718), 270.
53 John Antes, Observations on the Manners and Customs of Egyptians (London 1800), 63,
where his guides invoked fate when proceeding more slowly than he wished (“Min Allah!
Mukadder!”), and 124–125, when he was bastinadoed and told by interlocutors that his
treatment had been “Min Allah, Maktub, Mukadder! that is, it is from God: it is so written
in the book of fate, which cannot be altered.”
54 D’Ohsson, Tableau général, 1: 174–75.

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Lord God ordained it thus for us—what can we do?’ is no Muslim.”55 Canikli
Ali Paşa (d. 1785), an officer who wrote a popular reform treatise in the late
18th century, had a similar view. Those who invoked fate were excuse-makers,
he said: “People blame fate whenever there is a flaw in human strategy.”56 Clear-
ly, for some Ottomans fatalism could be a rhetorical tool.
Many sources also note a distinction between the behavior of the more and
less educated, or between socio-economic groups. D’Ohsson complained that
in his day a “prejudice” led many across the empire to apply fatalism indiscrim-
inately in their everyday lives. Earlier writers like Thomas Smith, Paul Rycaut
(d. 1700), and John Covel (d. 1722) alleged that the “prejudice” was rooted es-
pecially among commoners—the wealthy or educated, including judges, jurists,
and rulers, fled the plague either because they could or because they grasped the
doctrine’s subtler points, they said. We read that it was in fact the lower classes
who most resisted precautions and, indeed, put public pressure on others to
conform, with the threat of being labeled impious or an infidel.57
Some Ottomans likely stayed put for economic reasons, lacking the means
to flee. Could others have simply misinterpreted what they had heard? Did
unlettered believers fail to grasp what authorities told them, in other words,
distorting it into more extreme forms? We should consider this possibility, too.
The formal theological debate over al-qaḍā wa’l-qadar mainly took place in Ar-
abic among scholars; the literature was erudite and made fine distinctions. Even
those who had prior knowledge could find it befuddling. The Moldovian prince
Dimitrie Cantemir (d. 1723), for instance, who spent his youth in Istanbul as a
hostage and had a wide education, including in Arabic and Turkish, evidently
asked scholarly acquaintances about human agency. Can a person ever speak or

55 Y. Yücel (ed.), Osmanlı Devlet Düzenine Ait Metinler I.: Kitâb-ı Müstetâb (Ankara 1974),
28: “bu bize mukadder imiş, Hakk Te‘âlâ hazretleri bize böyle mukadder itmiş, bizim
elimizde ne vardır dimeğe kişi İslamdan çıkar...”
56 Canikli Ali, Tedbir-i Cedid-i Nadir, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, H.O. nr. 104b, 1b:
“Tedbirde noksan oldı takdire bühtan ittiler ...”
57 See, respectively, Smith, Remarks upon the Manners, Religion and Government, 109–10; Ry-
caut, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire, 116–17; and Covel, Early Voyages and Travels,
243–44. See also Antes, Observations on the Manners and Customs, 46–47. Antes acknowl-
edges the same but blames it, condescendingly, on the lower classes “being more stupid and
superstitious”. Some scholars have pointed to a divergence along socio-economic lines, e.g.
Ayalon, “Plague, Psychology, and Religious Boundaries”, 7.

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act contrary to the divine will, and are we saved or damned from all eternity? “I
could never obtain a direct answer from them,” he wrote.

If again they are asked, how their Opinion of free-will is reconciled with this Rea-
son, they beg the Question, by saying, that all may be saved who will, but no man
is saved whom God has not destin’d to Salvation. They conclude with this Axoim,
Tacdir Tedbiri bozár, i.e. Divine Providence destroyes Human Appointments or Pur-
poses. From this Contrariety of Sentiments it is that free-will is highly valued by
some, and as little esteem’d by others.58

To be sure, fatalism and its rhetoric could be used post factum to serve ul-
terior ends—consoling the bereaved, justifying politics, excusing inaction, or
veiling poverty. In many cases, however, we may also be dealing with a different
strain of piety. If scholars like Ebüssuud upheld a pragmatic, intellectual ap-
proach to the faith, there were others who preached simpler values like belief,
trust in God, and humility. Such values were widely accessible. The texts that an
average Ottoman Muslim might hear or read focused largely on proper piety
and belief, not esoteric theological distinctions. Mehmed Birgivi warned read-
ers of his popular Ṭarīqat against fatalistic inaction. “If God is the cause of all
things,” we are tempted to think, “then who can change that which is destined
to happen?”

What if your efforts are against that which God has predestined for you? Is it not a
great sin? If He wills you to do good, it will happen regardless of your will. If any-
thing you want to happen does not meet His will, it will not happen. There is no
need to judge, for all good and bad is from Him…59

Birgivi regarded this thinking as a satanic temptation, to be rejected. Yet he also

urged readers to believe in al-qaḍā wa’l-qadar as irrevocable, God’s will, down
to the minute operations of our bodies. “Can you change the way your heart
and lungs are built? In the same way your life is also predestined, whether you

58 Dimitrie Cantemir, History of the Growth and Decay of the Ottoman Empire, trans. N. Tin-
dal (London 1757), 122 n. 18.
59 Birgivî, in The Path of Muhammad: a Book on Islamic Morals and Ethics, trans. S. T. B. al-Jer-
rahi al-Halveti (Bloomington 2005), 142. Cf. the Arabic in al-Ṭarīqat al-Muḥammadiyya,
70–71. There is no such warning in his Turkish creed, Risale-yi Birgivî [Vasiyetname].

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believe it or not,” he wrote.60 So too did Birgivi caution against ambition (tul-ı
emel) and prideful faith in our own abilities. Ambition, he said, “rests on a false
belief in our ability to deal with things unknown, and to tamper with destiny.”
Self-love, too, blinds us to the fact that we owe everything to God and that all
of our actions “are [our] destiny decided by God.” We must instead see what
happens as God’s will and that everything belongs to Him.61 Birgivi’s teachings
warn against fatalistic behavior, to be sure, but they also stress our weakness
before God and the need to submit in pious resignation to divine will. It is easy
to see how some readers might imbibe more of the latter than the former.
The preacher Fazlızade Mehmed (fl. ca. 1740) serves as a good example of
this kind of piety. We know little about Fazlızade, who appears to have been an
isolated, embittered figure in his day. Still, while they may have been unusual,
his views hint at the circulation of extreme strains of fatalistic thought, if not
behavior. Fazlızade’s views appear anti-rational, for one. He resented the intel-
lectual bent of contemporaries, considering it arrogant pride in their own abili-
ties. For him, being “reasonable” (akıllu) did not mean using unfettered human
reason. It was rather an index of piety. Fazlızade held that a “reasonable” person
would recall at all times his own frailty and so submit wholly to God’s decrees,
“following His orders without hesitation and being content with whatever fate
He had assigned for His creature.”62 In the same way, those who used intellect
for any reason other than to acknowledge God’s omnipotence were vain and
sinful; worse, those who tried to meddle in God’s affairs verged on blasphemy.63
Fazlızade’s brand of pious quietism also stressed creaturely weakness and ab-
solute trust in God. He rejected all causal systems and efforts to find patterns
in the world, taking the occasionalism of Ottoman theology to extremes, and
even went so far as to deny the idea of ʿādat Allah, as he thought it limited
God’s omnipotence.64 Fazlızade felt that people who presumed to act through
causes blasphemed, by implying they could compel God: “It is blasphemy to
think that the being or not being of a thing is both from God and another,” he
wrote.

60 Ibid., 346.
61 Ibid., 136, 165. Cf. al-Ṭarīqat al-Muḥammadiyya, 64, 80.
62 M. Kurz, Ways to Heaven, Gates to Hell: Fazlızade ‘Ali’s Struggle with the Diversity of Otto-
man Islam (Berlin 2011), 183–84.
63 Ibid., 186–87.
64 Ibid., 193–94.

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 MENCHINGER: REVISITING “TURKISH FATALISM”; OR, WHY OTTOMAN THEOLOGY MATTERS

For the only absolute creator and really independent agent is God. There is by
no means participation by the servant in creation. There is no relation with that
which is called “cause.” That is: that which will be, comes about even without any
cause; that which will not be, does not come about even if there is a cause. But if
God wishes that there should be a cause, the thing comes about through a cause.
That which He wants without a cause, comes about without a cause… In short, that
something comes about or does not come about is only from God.65

For Fazlızade, a person who sought out causes not only tried to manipulate
the Creator but also failed to place his trust where it belongs, in God, and thus
negated tawakkul. The true believer knows his limits and acknowledges God’s
power, he held. He does not try to understand why things happen or not, but
submits piously to God’s decrees.66

Fate and War

As with plague, war held an unclear status as a “particular event” and provoked
debate over fate. Warfare in the early modern empire was not only a human
affair, decided by our judgment and decision-making. God directs and decrees
all things, it was held, including battles. According to the Quran, God led early
Muslims to victory at the 624 Battle of Badr, reinforcing them with “a thousand
of the angels, rank on rank (8:9).” When the Prophet blinded the enemy with a
handful of dust as he advanced, scripture gives God agency: “Ye (Muslims) slew
them not, but God sleweth them. And thou (Muhammad) threwest not when
thou didst throw; but God threw, that He might test the believers by a fair test
(8:17).” Victory and defeat rely on God. As the Quran says, “Victory cometh
only from God (3:126, 8:10)” and “Lo! We have given thee (O Muhammad) a
signal victory (48:1).”67 The extent to which humans might contribute to the
outcome, however, remained a point of debate. Did material factors such as
tactics and discipline matter? Or must one only be pure of heart and trust in
God (mutawakkilan ‘alā Allah)?
Ottomans clearly felt that God could and did intervene in war. Gazi tradi-

65 Quoted in Ibid., 193.

66 Ibid., 192.
67 D. Thomas, “Miracles in Islam”, in G. Twelftree (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Mira-
cles (Cambridge 2011). Quranic passages are from the Pickthall translation, lightly emend-
ed.

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 ACA’IB – OCCASIONAL PAPERS ON THE OTTOMAN PERCEPTIONS OF THE SUPERNATURAL

tion in the empire held that Muslim armies typically went to battle with unseen
reinforcements, with stories of various invisible entities. Some sources cite the
active presence of angels, spirits, or long-dead martyrs from the early days of
Islam, with the Prophet himself at times in the vanguard. Other sources credit
comfort and aid to so-called “men of God” (ricalullah) or “hidden ones” (ri-
calü’l-gayb), a company of human saints, hidden in the liminal space between
this world and the next, whom God chooses to enact His will and who control
the world.68 Sinan Paşa (d. 1486), a prominent scholar and vizier of the 15th
century, described such beings in these terms:

They are the army of souls from the unseen world (bâtından ervâh çerisi olur), and
one of them is highest. They wear their (special) costume of a peaked cap; they
are clad at times in white, at times in black, and they ride horses at times bay and
at times wild… They stand against the enemy, and those who have vision for the
unseen may see them. It is the spirits who first beat the enemy; bodily battle begins
afterwards. When you have beaten your enemy, know that in fact they beat him;
and if you cannot see how they did this, it is because you lack the [proper] vision.69

Many early Ottoman chronicles reflect this worldview and tell of miracu-
lous events in battle. God might break “divine custom,” for example, by em-
powering a dervish-warrior to slay his foes with a wooden sword or allowing a
slain solider to pursue his killer and retake his severed head.70 But so too might
He send “unseen aid” (nusret-i gaybiyye). Early modern Ottomans often im-
puted victories to God’s invisible hand, at times to enhance the sacral aura of
particular rulers. For instance, a courtier named Levhî (fl. 1526) claimed that
“hidden ones” constantly attended Süleyman I and that the sultan had aid from
the Prophet and all the saints in his 1526 victory at Mohaç. Süleyman’s own
chancellor Celalzade Mustafa equally argued that, at Mohaç, the Prophet aided

68 Paul Wittek, for instance, claims it was commonly held in gazi circles that the Prophet led
Muslim warriors into battle: P. Wittek, “The Taking of Aydos Castle: a Ghazi Legend and
its Transformation”, in G. Makdisi (ed.), Arabic and Islamic Studies in Honor of Hamilton
A.R. Gibb (Leiden 1965), 669. See also TDVİA, s.v. “Ahyâr” (T. Yazıcı); s.v. “Ricâlullah” (S.
Uludağ); s.v. “Ricâlü’l-gayb” (S. Uludağ).
69 Quoted in Sariyannis, “The Dead, the Spirits, and the Living”, 379.
70 See, respectively, F. Giese (ed.), Die altosmanischen anonymen Chroniken (Breslau 1922), 1:
11; and Claire Norton on Deli Hasan’s decapitation around the 1566 capture of Szigetvár,
in “Sacred Sites, Severed Heads, and Prophetic Visions”, Anthropology of the Contemporary
Middle East and Central Eurasia, 2 (2014), 81–96.

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 MENCHINGER: REVISITING “TURKISH FATALISM”; OR, WHY OTTOMAN THEOLOGY MATTERS

the empire’s forces with “secret soldiers and sacred souls” (cunûd-ı gaybiyye ve
ervâh-ı mukaddese).71 Eyewitnesses and later authors also attributed Mehmed
III’s stunning 1596 victory at Haçova (Mezőkeresztes) to spirits, angels, “hidden
ones,” or a miracle induced by the sultan’s veneration of the Prophet’s relics.72
These authors had political motives, undoubtedly. But we should not lose sight
of the fact that their arguments and motives—associating rulers with God’s
blessings and entities acting as instruments of His will—drew power from ideas
with wide currency.
Ideas of “unseen aid” and “hidden ones” also persisted through the early
modern era, feeding a view that God actively aided the empire’s arms. From
the mid-16th century, many elites espoused a general conviction in the realm’s
uniqueness and divine blessing, the proof of which manifested itself in battle.
As Lutfi Paşa (d. 1563), Grand Vizier to Süleyman, wrote, the Ottomans would
prevail no matter how few men they took to the field. The prominent scribe
and reformist Koçi Beg (fl. 1630s) insisted at a later date on the empire’s recu-
perative ability and that even defeat posed no real long-term danger:

If the armies of Islam, taking refuge in God, were defeated ten times in battle, by
God’s grace neither the Sublime State nor the faith would suffer any harm whatso-
ever.73

European observers also noted such attitudes. The Englishman Paul Rycaut
wrote that Ottomans took victory as a sign of God’s favor. Because God de-
crees all things good and ill, they held, “whatsoever prospers hath God for the
Author.” Rycaut added that they not only applied this logic to the outcome of
civil strife, but “from the same rule they conclude much of Divine approbation

71 See C. Fleischer, “The Lawgiver as Messiah: the Making of the Imperial Image in the Reign
of Süleymân”, in G. Veinstein (ed.), Soliman le Magnifique et son temps (Paris 1992), 168–
170; on Celalzade, see Sariyannis, “The Dead, the Spirits, and the Living”, 379.
72 There are many such accounts, e.g. in the work of Mustafa Ali (d. 1600), Hasan Beyzade (d.
1636), İbrahim Peçevi (d. 1649?), and others. I am now preparing an article on this battle
and its miraculous interpretations.
73 See Lütfi Paşa, Tevârîh-i Âl-i Osmân (Istanbul 1922/23), 4–7; and Koçi Bey, Koçi Bey Ri-
salesi, ed. A. K. Aksüt (Istanbul 1939), 66. On “Ottoman exceptionalism” in general, see E.
Menchinger, “Dreams of Destiny and Omens of Greatness: Exceptionalism in Ottoman
Political and Historical Thought”, Journal of Islamic Studies, 31 (2020), 1–30.

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 ACA’IB – OCCASIONAL PAPERS ON THE OTTOMAN PERCEPTIONS OF THE SUPERNATURAL

and the truth of their Religion, from their Conquests and present Prosperity.”74
Mouradgea D’Ohsson said that such beliefs continued to animate Ottomans
to the late 1700s, “the effect of a true piety, and the conviction they share with
nearly all Muslims, that God alone, according to his eternal decrees, decides
the fate of battles and destiny of nations.” While common opinion credited
victory to God and the support of unseen “legions” of angels or spirits, led by
the Prophet himself, it framed defeat as an effect of God’s wrath—punishment
for “those iniquities committed against religion and the law.”75
At the individual level, moreover, many in the rank-and-file seem to have
expressed faith in divine providence, or in the rewards of martyrdom. Dimitrie
Cantemir wrote that, in the early 18th century, Ottoman soldiers wore no ar-
mor “in the belief that, tho’ a Man were made of Adamant, he could not evade
nor escape the law of Fate.” Each man’s destiny was fixed, following common
phrases such as:

Bashde yazilmysh olan Gelmek Vadzibdur, what is written on the forehead must neces-
sarily come to pass. Acajak can damarda durmaz, the blood that is to flow out, remains
not in the artery (that is, what God has preordain’d must be done in its time), Tacdir
tedbiri bozar, Providence overrules all human purposes.76

Many contemporary Europeans also felt that this faith bolstered Ottoman forc-
es. Thomas Smith numbered fatalism as a cause for their tenacity, in addition to
discipline, education, and, in some cases, sincere piety. “The doctrine of Predes-
tination and Fate contributes not a little to their fury,” he said,

Upon confidence of which principle they expose themselves to certain dangers, be-
lieving themselves safe in the midst of them, if God has so decreed it; which they do

74 Rycaut, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire, 115–16.

75 D’Ohsson, Tableau général, 2: 263–64. According to Evliya Çelebi (d. 1684?) (in Sariyan-
nis, “The Dead, the Spirits, and the Living”, 379), the souls of martyrs killed at Nihawand
(642) joined the 1586 Ottoman siege of Hamadan. Mustafa Naima in the early 1700s cred-
ited a number of victories to God’s aid rather than material factors, including Haçova and
Kanije: Naîmâ Mustafa Efendi, Târih-i Na‘îmâ, ed. M. İpşirli (Ankara 2007), 1: 115–120,
172, 2: 399.
76 Cantemir, History of the Growth and Decay, 42 n. 23.

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 MENCHINGER: REVISITING “TURKISH FATALISM”; OR, WHY OTTOMAN THEOLOGY MATTERS

not know, whether he has or no, but by the event; and if so, all their wariness and
endeavours to escape signifie nothing in the end.77

Others like Rycaut, D’Ohsson, and the soldier and scholar Luigi Ferdinando
Marsigli (d. 1730) concurred. All argued that popular belief in fatalism gave
Ottoman forces valor in the face of danger, or the ability to meet reverses with
equanimity.78
If Ottomans held that God decreed the outcome of war, however, they de-
bated how this decree unfolded and how far humans could shape the result.
These debates rose in intensity through the 18th century as part of controver-
sy over military and political reform, with arguments delimiting the scope of
creaturely action. Again, while we can acknowledge that these debates served
political ends, whether support for or opposition to reform, they drew force
from the theology and stayed within its parameters. Older views clearly still res-
onated with some groups. Battle for them required absolute trust in God, who,
if He willed, would grant believers aid. One late 18th-century author outlined
this logic. Victory and defeat depend on God’s will and not material factors, he
wrote. While some Christians argue that war is a “particular event” in which
God has no effect—Heaven forefend!—and so credit victory to whatever side
musters the superior means (esbab) of warfare, they err, ignorant of what scrip-
ture says: “Not the least atom is hidden from Him” and “There is no aid but

77 Smith, Remarks upon the Manners, Religion and Government, 140.

78 Rycaut, The Present State of the Ottoman Empire, 116: “it causes the Souldiery brutishly
to throw away their lives in the most desperate attempts, and to esteem no more of their
bodies, then as dirt or rubbish to fill up the trenches of the Enemy: And to speak the truth,
this received assertion hath turned the Turk as much to account, as any other of their best
and subtlest Maxims.” D’Ohsson, Tableau général, 2: 264–65: “We can perceive here both
the advantages and inconveniences of this opinion in the conduct of public affairs, since
it serves, on the one hand, to direct the people and the army according to circumstances,
and, on the other, to cover with the veil of fatalism whatever is vicious and reprehensible
in the projects of ministers as well as operations of generals.” L. F. Marsigli, Stato militare
dell’imperio Ottomano, incremento e decremento del medesimo (Amsterdam 1732), 41: “Their
courage, each to his own, in bearing reverses of fortune has no parallel among any other
nation. If one who yesterday was vizier finds himself stripped of his office and authority
today—reduced, I say, to having but two or three servants—he regards his disgrace with
an extraordinary indifference, and blames his woes only on God’s will and his own ill-fate.
And if he returns to his old post, which very often happens, he resumes his former pomp
forthwith as if he had never suffered any disgrace.”

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 ACA’IB – OCCASIONAL PAPERS ON THE OTTOMAN PERCEPTIONS OF THE SUPERNATURAL

from God the Almighty.”79 The same author offered an apt counter-example in
the battle of Haçova, when trust in God overcame numbers and disorder and
led to victory. With such cases, “how can anyone impute victory to refinement
of the means of war (tekmîl-i esbâb-ı ceng) and defeat to inadequate arms?”80
According to some Ottomans, God would unfailingly send aid—unseen armies
of angels, spirits, or “men of God”—so long as the empire showed itself worthy.
The lesson of Haçova, another source stated, was that one must not trust in
numbers or things of this world but only, and utterly, in God.81 Concern for
worldly causes was unnecessary, at best a distraction and at worst an impiety.
We can see by the 17th century an alternative perspective that underlined
battle as an event in which humans could exert “particular will,” nonetheless.
It is important to note that this viewpoint did not deny fate or the miracu-
lous, and it still upheld fatalism in strict theological terms. God’s preordination
remained the ultimate cause of all things, battle and human deeds included.
Figures like the polymath Katip Çelebi (d. 1657) now stressed the theology of
human will more firmly, however. God gave us volition and enjoined us to act
in this world through causes that we will and He creates, he argued. The failure
to do so is a sin.82 Would-be reformers adopted a similar tack in their calls to
action. İbrahim Müteferrika (d. 1745), a printer and scholar of Christian back-
ground whose interests ranged widely, encapsulated such arguments in a 1731
treatise in which he argued that a well-organized, disciplined army will most
often defeat a chaotic and untrained one. “It is secret wisdom that victory, suc-
cess, and triumph over the enemy depend always and utterly on the Lord God’s
infinite aid to believers,” he wrote.

79 Ahmed Vasıf, Mehasinü’l-Asar ve Hakaikü’l-Ahbar, ed. M. İlgürel (Istanbul 1978), 151. Vasıf
paid lip service to this view but was in fact arguing in a roundabout way for military reform.
On his ideas on warfare and reform, see E. L. Menchinger, The First of the Modern Otto-
mans: the Intellectual History of Ahmed Vasıf (Cambridge 2017), esp. 96 ff.
80 Vasıf, Mehasinü’l-Asar, 151. Vasıf used the same battle to make a similar point in another
tract: Y. Çelik, “Siyaset-Nasihat Literatürümüzde Nadir bir Tür: Mısır’ın İşgali üzerine III.
Selim’e Sunulan Tesliyet-nâme”, Türk Kültürü İncelemeleri Dergisi, 22 (2010), 121–22.
81 İbrahim Peçevi, Tarih-i Peçevî (Istanbul 1864), 2: 201–203.
82 See G. Hagen and E. Menchinger, “Ottoman Historical Thought”, in P. Duara et al (eds), A
Companion to Global Historical Thought (London 2014), 101–102; and Menchinger, “Free
Will”, 448–49. For the original text, see Kâtib Çelebi, Tuhfetü’l-Kibar fi Esfari’l-Bihar (Is-
tanbul 1911), 163–164.

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 MENCHINGER: REVISITING “TURKISH FATALISM”; OR, WHY OTTOMAN THEOLOGY MATTERS

That rule rests upon His exalted will; and that victory and defeat lie within His pre-
ordination. However, God has consigned the outward realization of every matter
to initiative through causes ...Man must operate thus.83

The point, then, was not that humans control their fate, though many re-
formers obviously hoped to imply as much. We can and must still hope for
God’s aid. As the late 18th-century historian and reformer Ahmed Vasıf said,
the empire was “succored by God until the end of time (damen-i kıyamete dek
müeyyed min-ʿindillah). If we might at times suffer defeat, there is ample proof
that we shall with God’s help immediately recover.”84 For Vasıf and like-minds,
rather, the point was that humans must not expect divine intervention passive-
ly or presumptuously. Believers should have faith as well as take action. The
proper course, said Vasıf, was “to immediately put trust and forgiveness with
God and, begging the Prophet’s intercession, to purify our intent, strive with all
effort, and spend might and main to perfect secondary causes (esbab-ı zahire)
before any time is lost.”85
The empire’s unsuccessful wars of the late 1700s, especially against Russia,
brought these arguments into stark conflict. Some in the Ottoman hierarchy
continued to insist that they could rely on divine favor and aid in battle. Material
factors, preparation, numbers—these did not matter, or at least they did not mat-
ter as much, for God always favors Muslim armies and will punish the wicked.
According to one Müftizade Ahmed (d. 1791), a high-ranking religious scholar
and şeyhülislam who favored an aggressive stance toward Russia, “the zephyr of
victory shall blow to our armies and the dynasty’s ill-wishers shall be confounded,
following the verse, ‘How many a small company has overcome a large company
by God’s will.’”86 Yet this view now faced vocal criticism. One scribe in the service
of the reformist Grand Vizier Halil Hamid Paşa (d. 1785) supplied a rebuttal. As
he put it, times had changed. “While I have no doubt that God is almighty and
powerful and will help the weak and oppressed,” he argued, “it is undeniable that
the divine custom is always to create everything through causes.”

83 Quoted in Menchinger, “Free Will”, 455.

84 Çelik, “Siyaset-Nasihat Literatürümüzde”, 122.
85 Ibid., 123.
86 Vasıf, Mehasinü’l-Asar, 39–40. See also Menchinger, “Free Will”, 463.

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 ACA’IB – OCCASIONAL PAPERS ON THE OTTOMAN PERCEPTIONS OF THE SUPERNATURAL

God alone has knowledge of the outcome of future events; therefore, to open the
gates of war with such potent enemies while secondary causes [esbab-ı zahire] are
entirely lacking, relying on unseen aid [nusret-i gaybiyye], is like taking mortal poi-
son and trusting overconfidently in the antidote’s unknown efficacy ...87

In this view, the empire could no longer simply trust in God’s intervention,
in avenging angels, or in legions of unseen soldiers. They must work through
visible, worldly means.

Conclusions—and Why Ottoman Theology Matters

By revisiting “Turkish fatalism,” I have tried to make a case in this article for
serious study of theology in the early modern empire. What does that mean?
Thinking theologically forces us to ask basic questions about reality and the
human condition, for one, such as: How does the world work? How do we
relate to that world and its Creator? What attitude ought we to take before the
divine? What values should we properly cultivate in life? The answers that early
modern Ottoman Muslims gave to these questions differed from our own, of
course, at times markedly. We can also say that, as a set of beliefs or attitudes,
fatalism supplied an interlinking, coherent framework for understanding the
place of humans in the cosmos and our relationship to God.
Fatalism was not merely an Orientalist trope, then. Ottoman Muslims were
indeed fatalists in a strict sense: by belief in God’s preordination of all things in
an occasionalistic universe. There are also grounds to think that at least some
believers took these ideas further, despite vigorous debate, into more broadly
fatalistic and quietist attitudes. Of course, I do not wish to overstate the case.
There is a difference between worldview and actual practice, and our subjects
often did flee pestilence, consult doctors, use talismans, or devise tactics for bat-
tle or proposals for reform. Yet we have also seen how the theology of fatalism
shaped responses to plague and war in the 16th to 18th centuries, and how
it could equally extend into political jockeying, gestures of consolation, and
excuse-making. Nor does affirming such strains of thought make our subjects
Orientalist caricatures, illogical or unthinking. Indeed, dismissing fatalism only

87 Vasıf, Mehasinü’l-Asar, 85. I have lightly emended the translation in Menchinger, “Free
Will”, 464.

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 MENCHINGER: REVISITING “TURKISH FATALISM”; OR, WHY OTTOMAN THEOLOGY MATTERS

leads us to a less crude form of Orientalism, by presuming that the only “prop-
er” response to adversity is human initiative and the application of reason. It is
a value judgment informed, ultimately, by secular traditions of Enlightenment
thought, and diminishes the rich theological and pietistic impulses of a theo-
centric society. Historians overlook complexities, or even actively distort our
subject matter, by ignoring these alternatives.
What, then, do we miss by ignoring Ottoman theology, and why does it
matter? I would argue that Ottoman theology matters precisely for what it tells
us about these alternative impulses—and a conceptualization of the cosmos
that differs from our own. It can reveal to us a worldview pervaded by transcen-
dent divine power, for instance, one in which God acted and intervened con-
stantly and, as Almighty Creator, could break in at any moment. A theological
concern might also bring to our attention people or groups for whom serving
God, resignation to God’s decrees, or maintaining a creaturely posture before
the divine was potentially of higher value than action, or self-realization, or
even self-preservation. Third, Ottoman theology might lay bare attitudes in our
subjects that focused less on the worldly, material, and concrete, and were more
attuned to the numinous. And last, it can limn for us a world that was thought
to bear traces everywhere of its Creator, traces that showed that same Creator’s
power and generosity and demanded our awe in return.
Ottoman theology can tell us about such things, revealing an empire in
which the divine could saturate all aspects of life. It reminds us that “religion”
was not and is not an isolatable category we can wall off from other spheres. For
our subjects, faith helped to answer basic questions of self, of reality, of polity
and politics, and much else. We would do well as historians to pay them more
mind.

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Aca’ib: Occasional papers on the Ottoman perceptions of the supernatural is an open access journal published by the Institute for Mediter-
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