Birgivi Mehmed Efendi

Birgivi Mehmed Efendi was a sixteenth-century Ottoman scholar of Hanafi law (one of the four Sunni legal schools) and hadith (reports of the Prophet Muhammad's words and deeds), remembered above all as a moralist and reformer. He was born in 929 AH (1523 CE) in Balikesir, in western Anatolia, where his father Pir Ali was a madrasa teacher, and he completed his higher studies in Istanbul. He served for a time as a kassam-i askeri, a judge handling the estates of deceased soldiers, in Edirne under Sultan Suleyman. Tradition holds that, troubled by what he saw as worldly compromise, he gave up this post, returned monies he judged improperly taken, and withdrew in Istanbul into the Bayrami Sufi order under Sheikh Abdullah Karamani. At his teacher's urging he resumed instruction, taking up a madrasa professorship in the town of Birgi endowed by Atatullah Efendi, tutor of Selim II; from this town he takes the name "Birgivi." He died there in 981 AH (1573 CE), reportedly of plague, around age fifty. His best-known work, al-Tariqa al-Muhammadiyya ("The Muhammadan Way"), is a manual of ethics and self-discipline that became widely influential. He is also remembered for a sharp critique of the cash-endowment (cash waqf), opposing the chief jurist Ebussuud Efendi. Later generations of the puritanical Kadizadeli movement drew heavily on his writings, though that movement arose decades after his death.