Hocazade Esad Efendi

Hocazade Esad Efendi was a Shaykh al-Islam of the Ottomans from AD 1615 until his death 1625, with a year-long hiccup around 1622-3. His claim to my attention is a short "sentence" - fatwa - he did against the Safavids over in Persia; against 'Abbas the shah at the time.

Ignac Goldziher in the infamous second volume of Muhammadanische Studien, 112; and the tamer Nöldeke-Schwally, 2.100; quote from the broadside. This exists in English which one Sir Paul Rycaut excerpted The History of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire (London: 1686). So, after the Efendi was dead.

In the edition I linked, the fatwa runs pp. 2.10.227f. This is what the German Orientalists quoted: You deny the verse called the covering in the Alchoran to be authentick; you reject the eighteen Verses, which are revealed to us for the sake of the holy Aische [`Âisha]. The translator sidenoted, the chapter so called; the wife of Mahomet so called. (He also thought the screed went against this shah's grandson and successor from AD 1629; but by then our Efendi would have been a revenant of some shade.)

I can certainly believe that some Muslims could not accept sura 24; as a text of law, the non-sura stoning-verse is still preferred today. I find harder to believe that the whole of sura 88 had gone missing from a Persian Qurân.

I'd love to read the screed in its original tongue - it could be Turkish, as the Safavids were Azeris who should have known it, even if the fatwa's main audience was the Ottoman elite at home. Arabic would be the common language of religious disputation however.

I suspect we're looking for Esad Efendi, Fetava-yı Müntehabe, comp. Şaranizade Hafız es-Seyyid İsmail İbn Hafız Abdülkerim, Kasecizade, nr. 277 (1218/1803).

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