Who Composed The Shaykh Wafa Ruzname? Science and Sufism in Conqueror’s Istanbul

The authorship of the earliest copy of the Shaykh Wafa Ruznames, the most well-known of the Ottoman perpetual calendars, has not yet been definitively established. The earliest extant manuscript does not attribute the work to Shaykh Wafa. Moreover, the sixteenth-century biographical writer AşıkÇelebi asserts that the work was composed by another individual. Was this scientific text in fact written by Muslihiddin Mustafa, the leadingrepresentative in Istanbul of the Zayniyya order, known as Shaykh Wafa? If the ruzname was not authored by him, who might have composed it? In that case, why were these texts attributed to this Zayniyya sheikh, and how did they come to be associated with his name? Finally, what role didShaykh Wafa and his milieu play in this process of attribution? Although it remains unclear to what extent Shaykh Wafa himself contributed to the scientific work in question, the presence among his disciples of prominent astronomers and mathematicians of Fatih-era Istanbul—such as Sinan Pasha and Molla Lutfi—suggests that the ruznames were produced within the lodge (tekke) of Shaykh Wafa. This article, which argues that the first ruzname emerged from a network of relationships centered around the Shaykh Wafa lodge in Istanbul, aims to contribute to three still underexplored aspects of Ottoman scientific history: the role of sufis in Ottoman science, sufi lodges as sites of scientific production, and the problem of pseudepigraphy in scientific texts.