One Scholar, Two Disciplines: Mollā ʿAbd al-Wājid al-Kutāhī Between Astronomy and Ḥanafī Law in the Early Ottoman Empire

Islamic intellectual history offers little support for a general conflict between the religious sciences (tafsīr, ḥadīth, fiqh, and kalām) and the rational and natural sciences (mathematics, medicine, astronomy, physics, geography, and philosophy): Muslim scholars typically cultivated both, reading the created world as one of God’s signs (āyāt) alongside the revealed text, and a number of the tradition’s most celebrated figures, Ibn Sīnā, al-Fārābī, al-Ghazālī, and Ibn Rushd among them, achieved distinction in both domains at once. This article examines, through the biography and corpus of a single fifteenth-century Ottoman scholar, how religious and scientific learning were institutionally and intellectually intertwined in the early Ottoman period. Mollā ʿAbd al-Wājid al-Kutāhī (d. 838/1435) worked at a high level in both fields at once, leaving a commentary that carried Marāgha-school astronomy into Anatolia, the work for which Western scholarship has chiefly known him, and a major Ḥanafī legal commentary; his career is accordingly a direct case study of the relationship between religion and science. The study traces his two works dedicated to Sultan Murad II, the legal al-Ikhtiyārāt fī Sharḥ al-Nuqāya and the astronomical Sharḥ al-Mulakhkhaṣ fī al-Hayʾa. It proposes a two-stage draft/fair-copy (musawwada/mubayyaḍa) composition model based on a codicological analysis of twenty-four manuscripts of the legal work and a preliminary census of the four known copies of the astronomical commentary. The astronomical work is a commentary on al-Jaghmīnī’s al-Mulakhkhaṣ, the most widely used Ptolemaic textbook in Islamic education; the same base text was also glossed by Qāḋīzāde al-Rūmī from the same Fanārī milieu, linking ʿAbd al-Wājid to the Samarqand school. The article’s central contribution to debates on religion and science comes from an episode preserved in the Mawlawī hagiography Safīna-yi Nafīsa-yi Mawlawīyān: the Mawlawī shaykh Jalāl al-Dīn Ergun, in conversation with ʿAbd al-Wājid, deliberately invokes astronomy and mathematics (hayʾa, riyāḍiyyāt) to teach that these sciences ultimately belong to the category of “māsiwā” (all that is other than God) and that natural philosophy is a stepping stone toward self-knowledge and, through it, knowledge of God. This primary-source testimony documents a hierarchical, integrative model of natural philosophy within fifteenth-century Ottoman intellectual culture rather than an adversarial one, offering historical evidence against the applicability of the conflict thesis in this Ottoman-Islamic context and a regional, biographically documented instance of the broader integrative pattern that characterizes the classical and post-classical Islamic tradition of learning.