Ibrahim-i Gulseni (ca. 1442-1534): Itinerant saint and Cairene ruler

This dissertation is an in depth investigation and reevaluation of the life of Ibrahim-i Gulseni, the famous and controversial founder of the Gulseni order of dervishes in Egypt and the Cairene Ottoman saint, with a specific focus on the Mamluk and Ottoman Egypt years of his life between 1507/10-1534.Gulseni's pre-1517 life is analyzed as the prelude to his Egypt years. In this period, he formed a doctrinal background, and matured his political activism. He traversed a wide socio-political terrain which included not only Iran but Anatolia and the Arab lands. During this period he accumulated an extensive array of personal experience and knowledge in religious scholarship, mysticism, administration, diplomacy and court politics-not to mention the skills of political activism through personal charisma as a Sufi sheyh. So far, despite all the warring ideas, little of who he was, what he tried to achieve and how he impacted the larger political and social scene in Anatolia and Egypt, under the Mamluks and Ottomans, is understood and investigated.The Egypt years of Gulseni's life serve as a multi layered kadeiscope to unravel ideological, political, and religious breaks and continuities between the Mamluk and Ottoman rules. Egypt was conquered by Sultan Selim but its Ottomanization was a long process which was initiated primarily by the 1525 Law Code, which was communicated to the people of Egypt through a different discourse and language. Egypt became the Ottoman province that the modern literature today refers to during Sultan Suleyman's reign.Gulseni was a first hand witness in this process. Considering the unassuming beginnings of his career as a Turkmen layperson with Sufi affiliations from Diyarbakir, Tebriz and Anatolia, who had ambitions in seeking a career in religious sciences and education, Gulseni's path in politics took a long time to mature. It was the Egypt years that this phase came to full manifestation. Gulseni was known as the shah, Sufi and saint of Egypt by his followers. He was also a dissident figure with a large following. He was representative of a larger constituency of Sufis, in the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, who defined themselves with an anti-Ottoman sentiment and who sought to challenge the Ottoman dynastic legitimacy and sultanic authority, representing alternative centers of socio-political authority that were based on spirituality, and received legitimacy through sacrality in an environment of messianic expectations. Gulseni is a common product of this larger socio-political and religious environment which was scarred with the emergence of the Shiite Safavids, and the discontented Turkmen populations of Ottoman Anatolia who held shifting loyalties and Alid sympathies.