Roots of Ottoman Scholars in Mamlūk Cairo

The eminent figures of early Ottoman scholarship, al-Sayyid al-Sharīf al-Jurjānī (d. 816/1413), Molla Fenārī (d. 834/1431), Shaykh Bedreddīn (d. 823/1420), and Ḥaci Paşa (d. 827/1424), were educated in the special atmosphere of al-Shaykhūniyya Madrasa-khānqāh in Cairo. This institution overwhelmingly embraced students and scholars coming from Anatolia and Persia and gave them a suitable environment to specialise in rational sciences and Sufism. The education they received from Mubārakshāh al-Manṭiqī (d. 775/1373) and Akmal al-Dīn al-Bābartī (d. 786/1384) determined the shaping of the early Ottoman scholarly milieu. Emphasising the special place of this institution in Mamlūk Cairo, this group is entitled in this work, the al-Shaykhūniyya Network, as a part of a larger scholarly atmosphere. However, Shāfiʿī-muḥaddith scholar-historians’ exclusionary interpretation of biographical accounts of figures al-Shaykhūniyya reveals the bias against stranger scholars in Cairo. This atmosphere provided the emergence of âlim-Sufi scholar typology: Anatolian or Persian-origin, adhering to the Ḥanafī madhhab, and mostly interested in the rational sciences according to the al-Rāzī School and tasawwuf according to the İbn ʿArabī School. This typology was going to be seen in the Ottoman province, exactly, via scholars of the al-Shaykhūniyya Network. Discovering a special Ḥanafī milieu of Cairo gives a new approach to the two questions of how the early Ottoman scholarly milieu was based on the al-Rāzī School and why it had a wide tolerance for Ibn ʿArabī’s (d. 638/1240) doctrine, unlike the dominant atmosphere in Cairo and Greater Syria at that time.