Currents of change
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coffeehouses during the seventeenth century. Their main battleground, however, was religious space - mosques, medreses, Sufi lodges, saintly tombs, and shrines. They declaimed from the mosques, sought to rally the medreses, and censured Sufi lodges and devotional shrines. If a religious structure was to stand, it was not to house practices and practitioners in opposition to Kadlzadeli ideals. Kadlzadeli conceptions of religious and spiritual boundaries had important interfaith implications even when interfaith relations were not directly at issue. Muslim self-identity, what it meant to be a Muslim, and the straightness of the straight path were contentious matters. The Kadlzadelis' narrow religiosity drew a tight, essentially antisocial circle around what it was to be Muslim, imperiling the expansive metropolitanism of Ottoman religious policy at its best. The Kadlzadelis' righteous Muslim possessed a single-minded appetite for religious purity that overrode ties to¡ family and rejected cordiality or even civility toward those who did not subscribe to the same views. For the Kadlzadelis, strict adherence to shari'ah law, as they themselves defined the law's permissions and prohibitions, would restore right religion. Lacking it, given the popular appeal of such innovations as saint worship - especially in the form of tomb visitations and prayer - and of syncretistic Sufi tenets, the Islam of the Kadlzadeli imagination would lose its identity as a practice and as the true and supreme faith. The ecclesiastical aspect of the seventeenth-century controversy was in sharp contrast to patterns of disturbance in the eighteenth century. The streets and marketplaces that had barely seemed to register with Kadlzadeli preachers became the flash points of eighteenth-century anxieties. The authorities in the eighteenth century and the social elements on which they relied reacted against the rising tide of a newly dangerous public. Until the lanissaries were removed, political commentary was shot through with calls to renovate the military. At the same time, public opinion and the state's social concerns were also directed downward. The disciplinary gaze increasingly shifted away from ruling groups and institutions to street level and the ordinary public. Eighteenth-century policing became increasingly entangled with a seemingly recalcitrant public. Official admonitions that were heralded to the neighborhoods and markets reveal deep apprehension about the ways that social and cultural nonconfonnity - expressions of personal tastes and new group solidarities and the economic keys to such behaviors - undenmned existing structures of dominance. If the object of Kadlzadeli revivalism had been an orthopraxic Homo religiosus, the preoccupation of eighteenth-century rectifiers was social man and woman. Seventeenth-century confrontations had their roots in religious perfonnance and, except for the occasional coffeehouse or tavern, the topography of the sacred. The incendiary sites of the eighteenth century were essentially profane. They were unscripted space or, one might say, multiply scripted, by the diverse populations that crossed paths on the streets and by the forces that