Ismail Bey. Hulviyyat-i Sahi.

€ 4,500.00

The most important legal work of Ismail Bey, the last ruler of the mediaeval Candar principality, preserved in a complete manuscript copy dated Sha‘ban 1098 AH (July 1687 CE).

The Hulviyyat-i Sahi is a major compendium of fiqh in Ottoman Turkish, devoted to the fundamental obligations of Islamic worship, including prayer, fasting, alms-giving, and pilgrimage. More than a manual of religious duties, it stands as one of the final intellectual monuments of the Candar dynasty, composed by its last sovereign before the principality was incorporated into the Ottoman Empire.

The text bears particular significance for its preservation of the author’s extended titulature, “Muhammad Mustafa Abu al-Hasan ibn Ismail ibn Isfandiyar ibn Adil ibn Amir Yaqub ibn Shams al-Din Jandar”, an emphatic claim of descent from the eponymous founder of the line. The dynastic emphasis reveals how Ismail Bey’s scholarship intertwined law, education, and the memory of a ruling house whose political autonomy was soon to vanish.

Ismail Bey (r. 1443-61) governed the Candar domains centred on Kastamonu and Sinop until their annexation by Mehmed II. His choice to write in Turkish, interspersed with Qur’anic citations, reflects a didactic purpose aimed at a wider Anatolian readership, contrasting with the prevailing preference for Arabic in legal treatises. The manuscript before us, copied more than two centuries after the fall of the principality, testifies to the lasting reception of the Hulviyyat and the cultural afterlife of a provincial beylik absorbed into the Ottoman imperial framework. It is thus at once a substantial legal compendium on religious practice and a rare textual witness to the intellectual legacy of late medieval Anatolia.