Bab-i Mashikhat (office of the Shaykh al-Islam)

Bab-i Mashikhat — also Shaykh al-Islam Qapisi, Bab-i Fetwa and Fetwakhane — was the name that became common in the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century for the office or department of the Shaykh al-Islam, the Chief Mufti of Istanbul. Until 1241/1826 the Chief Muftis had functioned and issued their rulings from their own residences or, if those were too distant, from rented quarters. In that year, after the destruction of the Janissaries, Sultan Mahmud II gave the former residence of the Agha of the Janissaries, near the Suleymaniyye Mosque, to the Chief Mufti, who thus acquired a permanent establishment. ¹

This step, taken together with the creation of an Inspectorate of waqf to centralise the supervision of waqf revenues, prepared the way for the bureaucratisation of the ulama. Deprived of financial and administrative autonomy, the ulama were gravely weakened against the sovereign power and could not resist successive diminutions of their competence, authority and status: in the course of the nineteenth century they lost control of education and justice to the new councils and ministries, and even the drafting of fatwas was entrusted to a committee of legal specialists in the Chief Mufti's office. The Chief Mufti himself became a government office-holder — a minister or head of department and a member of the cabinet — so that his term ended automatically with the fall of the cabinet; yet unlike the other ministers he was appointed by the Sultan, not the Grand Vizier, with whom he was theoretically equal (cf. Article 27 of the 1876 constitution). The office declined steadily, especially after the Revolution of 1908. Finally, on 3 March 1924 — the day the Caliphate was ended — the office of Shaykh al-Islam, which had lapsed with the Sultanate in 1922, was replaced by a department of religious affairs attached to the Prime Minister's office in Ankara; its head, the Diyanet Ishleri Re'isi, became the chief religious functionary of the Turkish Republic, responsible for mosques and mosque personnel but not for waqf, law or education. ²