Zilfi, Madeline C.

The ilmiye (ʿilmiyye) was the Ottoman Empire’s official Islamic religious establishment, which comprised jurists trained in medrese s ( madrasa , religious college), especially those located in the Ottoman Turkish-speaking world and particularly, from the late tenth/sixteenth ce…

Erzurumlu Sayyid Feyzullah (Fayḍ Allāh) Efendi (1048–1115/1639–1703) was an Ottoman şeyhülislam ( shaykh al-Islām ) and muallim-i sultani ( muʿallim-i sulṭānī , imperial preceptor). He was also a nakibüleşraf ( naqīb al-ashrāf , chief of the descendants of the Prophet), and one …

Fenarizade (Fenārīzāde) was an eminent Ottoman family that took its name from the most distinguished of the line, Molla Şemseddin Mehmed b. Hamza b. Mehmed el-Fenari (Mollā Shams al-Dīn Muḥammad b. Ḥamza b. Muḥammad al-Fanārī), known as Molla Fenari (751–834/1350–1431). An Ottom…

In the early Ottoman Empire, up until the modernising reforms of the nineteenth century, and with the exception of children’s Qurʾān schools (mektep, maktab, kuttāb) , formal education for Muslims was essentially male and effectively divided between two distinct vocational expec…