THE BATTLE OF THE PROPHECIES AND THE SECRET ALPHABET OF POWER

Meanwhile, in the Arab world, a strong intellectual and emotional attraction to all things Turkish was taking shape, a trend later described as ‘Ottomanophilia’. The victories of Mehmed IIiSultan Mehmed II (reigned 1444–1446, 1451–1481), known as ‘the Conqueror’, was the Ottoman ruler who captured Constantinople in 1453, ending the Byzantine Empire and transforming the city into the imperial capital of Istanbul. became living proof of the Prophet Muhammad’s words about the ‘illustrious army’ that would take Constantinople. Since the first prophecy had been fulfilled, it seemed that the Ottoman dynasty was destined to continue leading the Sunnis against all enemies of Islam, primarily the Christian West and the Shiite East.

In various trading ports, Ottoman manifestos proclaiming the ‘defense of the Prophet’s law against the Portuguese cross’ were read aloud, while in the cloth shops, people echoed the sentiment that only the Turks could bring the Iranian ‘renegades’, or the QizilbashiThe word Qizilbash means ‘red-headed’ and was used to refer to Shia Muslims. to heel. Against the backdrop of Mamluk failures, the image of Istanbul became the ideal compromise between the sword of a gazi (a warrior fighting in the name of Islam) and the piety of a Sufi.

The mounting external pressure combined with a deep sense of fatigue within Mamluk society created the perfect conditions for an explosive rise in mystical sentiments. Their central message was unmistakable: the public’s present hardships were the consequence of the sins of their rulers. Prophetic rhetoric gave ordinary city dwellers a framework in which they could convert fear into hope and hope into a new political orientation. As a result, the intellectual crisis of the Mamluks turned into an ideological victory for the Ottomans even before the first shot was fired on the field of Dabiq.

For centuries, Constantinople, the ancient capital of the Byzantine Empire, was regarded as a key element in Muslim apocalyptic prophecy. Numerous hadiths foretold that before the Day of Judgment, the decisive battle between the armies of Islam and the forces of RumiRum (from 'Rome') was the term used in the Islamic world, particularly by the Ottomans, to refer to the territories of the former Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, most notably Anatolia, and later became a name for the Ottoman Empire itself., the Christian world, was destined to take place on its soil. Some traditions held that Muslims would enter the city without a fight; others linked the fall of Constantinople to the inevitable coming of the Dajjal, the Muslim equivalent of the Antichrist, followed by the arrival of the Mahdi, the messianic figure in Islamic eschatology who heralds the end times.

The Musnad written by Ahmad ibn HanbaliAhmad ibn Hanbal (d. 855) was the founder of the Hanbali school, one of the four major schools of Sunni Islamic jurisprudence. contains a hadith that reads: ‘You will surely conquer Constantinople. What an illustrious leader and what an illustrious army!’ Immediately after the fall of the city, many Ottoman scholars and writers, especially those in the ruler’s court, interpreted the event as the fulfillment of this prophecy. Sultan Mehmed II was recognized as that ‘illustrious leader’ and his army as the ‘illustrious army’. It is, therefore, unsurprising that in history he became known by the epithet ‘Fatih’, or ‘the Conqueror’.

As the Turkish historian Feridun Emecen notes, apocalyptic expectations and ominous omens surrounding Istanbul were widespread among people of the time. Constantinople itself had become a symbol of the end of days, and any military action within its walls took on a metaphysical significance. Its destruction or complete devastation could be perceived as a trigger for the coming catastrophe.

However, the Ottoman sultans, and especially Mehmed II, sought to change this narrative. Mehmed did not intend to let the city fall into ruin; instead, he presented himself as the fulfiller of an ancient prophecy. By conquering Constantinople, he did not hasten the arrival of the Day of Judgment. On the contrary, he had delayed it and given the city a new purpose and destiny. After the conquest, Istanbul was declared the new residence of the Ottoman sultan and transformed into the imperial capital.

Mehmed II sent two victory letters out, one to the sultan of Mamluk Egypt and the other to the Shiite ruler of the Kara-Koyunlu stateiThe Kara-Koyunlu (or the 'Black Sheep' Turkomans) were a Shiite Turkoman tribal confederation that ruled over parts of eastern Anatolia, Azerbaijan, Iraq, and western Iran from 1375 to 1468 before being overthrown by their rivals, the Ak Koyunlu (or the 'White Sheep' Turkomans)., which included carefully selected hadiths concerning the Apocalypse. Mehmed quoted these traditions only in part, shaping them to support his own political aims and to recast the prophecies for a new historical moment. The first quotation from the hadiths read:

The next quotation was an abbreviated version of the first:

The responses to these letters regarding the conquest were highly remarkable. Although the Mamluk sultan’s message contained no direct references to the hadiths, his phrase ‘to humble the Banu Asfar—enemies of the Messenger of God, casting them down’ was significant. In Islamic tradition, the term ‘Banu al-Asfar’ (literally ‘sons of yellow’) referred to the Christians, one of the archetypal opponents of Muslims in apocalyptic prophecies. Thus, even without explicit mention of prophecy, the Mamluk ruler confirmed the sacred significance of the Ottoman victory over Constantinople, the ‘city of the enemies of Islam’.

A special place in understanding the Ottoman conquests belongs to works grounded in jafr, a tradition that seeks hidden meanings in letters and numbers to decode divine signs and future events. In the cosmographic treatise Durr-i Meknun (The Hidden Pearl)iDurr-i Meknun (The Hidden Pearl) is a fifteenth-century Ottoman Turkish prose work by Ahmed Bican that presents an encyclopedic compilation of Islamic cosmology, legend, and moral instruction, popular for its esoteric and apocalyptic themes., composed in the 1470s, a prophecy states: ‘To those who will rule Rum, there will come a beardless youth … In his name are two mīms: one at the beginning, the other in the middle.’

Here, mīms is an Arabic letter, which indeed does appear twice in Sultan Mehmed’s name. The authors of the treatise did not hide that they saw in him an ‘apocalyptic emperor’, a new Caesar (Qaysar in Arabic) signified by the letter ‘qāf’ (the first letter of Qaysar), whose reign would usher in the final epoch before the end of times.

The same text also contains another prophecy: ‘The Hour will not come until a man named Jahandjah rules.’ However, the author also gives readers a key to the puzzle. Using complex calculations in the abjad system—a method that assigns numerical values to Arabic letters—he ultimately concludes that the word should be read as ‘shahanshah’, the ancient Iranian title meaning ‘king of kings’. Once taken together, it followed that the Ottoman sultans not only detached Istanbul from ominous apocalyptic associations but seemingly postponed the end of times by establishing an Islamic world order.

Even the sultan’s political opponents were incorporated into this apocalyptic framework. For example, the Durr-i Meknun makes mention of the ‘evil sīn’—another letter of the Arabic alphabet used symbolically—which the authors associated with the first Turkoman sultan, Uzun Hasan (Hasan the Tall) of the Ak-Koyunlui1453–1478 Turkoman confederation, who formed a significant political and military alliance with Christian powers against the Ottoman Empire. He was depicted as a destroyer, almost capable of annihilating the Ottomans. The Battle of Otlukbeli in 1473, where Mehmed II achieved a decisive victory over ‘Tall’ Hasan, was thus reinterpreted as a cosmic struggle between good and evil, after which Islam was saved and the triumph prolonged the world’s lifespan until the coming of the Mahdi.

Thus, in fifteenth-century texts, the conquest of Constantinople was far more than a victory of one army over another: it was perceived as a miracle, as a direct sign from the divine realm. In their eyes, the Ottomans had stepped into a prophetic vision of the world, in which every name, every letter, and every sign in the sky reminded observers that the course of history was merely the fulfillment of a long-written script.

Meanwhile, in Mamluk Egypt, Ottomanophilic sentiments took the form of mystical-political prophecies embedded in the Sufi tradition. One of the most significant texts of this trend was the apocalyptic treatise Shajarat al-Numaniyah (The Tree of Numaan), attributed to the eminent mystic Ibn Arabi (circa 1165–1240), an influential Andalusian Muslim mystic, philosopher, and poet, best known for his doctrine of the ‘oneness of being’ (wahdat al-wujud), which had a profound impact on Sufism and Islamic thought. His name was symbolically linked to the fate of Syria and the entire Muslim world.

In another revelation from the treatise, it is said:

‘Selim’ (or ‘Salim’) means ‘healthy’ in Arabic, and in the abjad system, the numerical value of its two key letters—yā (10) and rā (200)—totals 210. When this number is added to 668—the year in the Islamic calendar in which the Ottoman dynasty is traditionally said to have been founded—the total becomes 878, which corresponds to 1473 in the Gregorian calendar. And it was in this year that Sultan Mehmed II achieved a landmark victory over Uzun Hasan at Otlukbeli. Such numerological interpretations reflect a broader Ottoman fascination with the hidden powers of letters and numbers, where names and dates were believed to signal political destiny.

The phrase ‘qāf ʿala qāf’ (literally ‘qāf upon qāf’) is another example of this symbolic thinking. It apparently symbolizes the confrontation between the ‘Caesar (Qaysar)—the title of the Byzantine emperor assumed by Mehmed II after the conquest of Constantinople—and the Mamluk Sultan Qait BeyiSultan Qait Bey (reigned 1468–1496) was the most renowned Mamluk sultan of Egypt and Syria, celebrated for his stable rule and military defense against the Ottomans and Portuguese., whose name also begins with this letter. The ‘two sanctuaries’ undoubtedly refer to Mecca and Medina, which indeed came under Ottoman control following Selim’s Syrian campaign. Together, such interpretations highlight how the Ottomans combined symbolic authority with practical power.

At the same time, the Ottomans were strengthening their real-world power across the Islamic world. By the end of the fifteenth century, foreign Mamluk warriors controlled Egypt, Syria, Mecca, and Medina, and yet their ‘custodianship of the two holy sites’ was gradually declining. Egypt had lost the ability to protect pilgrimage caravans from the Portuguese in the Indian Ocean and the Red Sea. The Egyptian sultans also failed to stop the Shiite expansion in Syria and Iraq. Meanwhile, the Ottoman Empire, drawing on the Turkic military tradition of Rum (Asia Minor) and the Sufi ideal of a just ruler, offered the world a far more compelling vision.

The Ottomans deliberately fashioned the sultan’s image as that of a ‘divinely appointed’ ruler. After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, every Ottoman advance within the Islamic world was presented as both the fulfillment of ancient prophecies and a defense of the Islamic faith.

The Mamluks responded by invoking their own status as ‘Servants of the Two Holy Sites’iKhadim al-Haramayn al-Sharifayn, translating to ‘Servant of the Two Noble Sanctuaries’, is a historic and prestigious royal title. It was first used by the Mamluk Sultan Qait Bey and later most famously adopted by the Ottoman sultans, claiming custodianship of the holy mosques in Mecca and Medina., seeking to rally the Sunni majority against the Ottomans. Yet, their religious-political rhetoric had long lagged behind societal expectations. Egyptian chroniclers noted the moral decay of the sultanate. Instead of the promised lawful order, corruption and capricious rule prevailed, and increasingly, hungry peasants looked north—to the ‘just’ Turks.

And it all began in the Ottoman capital of Edirne, where the heir to Sultan Murad IIireigned 1421–1444 and 1446–1451, Mehmed II, began systematically accumulating symbolic capital. In his genealogy, he included not only the Seljuks but also those legendary fighters for the faith: the ghazis. These frontier warriors in the medieval Islamic world fought for faith and booty, particularly along the borders of kingdoms with non-Muslim territories, playing a crucial role in the military expansion of states like the early Ottoman Empire.

Thus, Mehmed emphasized that the Ottomans were destined to play the role of the ‘sword of Islam’. The Hungarian master Urban cast ‘miracle cannons’ for him, while the Janissary regiments mastered firearms and became a living symbol of victorious faith. In the eyes of both his subjects and neighbors, the sultan embodied the very ‘magic of power’ that Toynbee described—a charisma that made even technological innovations seem like proof of divine favor.

And so, by the early sixteenth century, ideological supremacy rested with Istanbul. The Ottomans skillfully combined the cult of the ‘miracle-working monarch’ with the legal authority of the Hanafi schooli The Hanafi school is the oldest and most widespread of the four major Sunni schools of Islamic jurisprudence (madhhab), founded by Abu Hanifa (d. 767). and the mystical prophecy of the conquest of Constantinople. Mamluk Egypt, by contrast, remained trapped in a defensive discourse and failed to offer the world either a fresh ideology or a compelling vision of the future. That is why the decisive clash between the Mamluks and Ottomans at Marj Dabiq was not only one of military but also a symbolic one: two images of power collided, and the side whose ‘magic’ proved more persuasive emerged victorious.