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Islam Arastirmalari Dergisi, vol.2024, no.52, pp.7-24, 2024 (Scopus)
This article documents a robbery of the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina in 1707, during which a precious object, after having eventfully entered the Rawdah Treasury of the complex, was stolen. This crime, which was committed purely for material gain, was seen as a felony for the Ottoman State, as it violated the sanctity of Islam’s second-most inviolable sanctuary. The subsequent interrogation aimed at identifying, catching, and then judging the robbers was so large in scope that it necessitated a division of labor which involved the imperial court, the Hejaz authorities, the governorates of Egypt and Syria, and the Imperial Navy. The case handled in this article demonstrates how carefully the Ottoman monarchy guarded its title of Servant of the Two Sanctuaries, which it had come to use as an alternative definition of caliphal dignity after conquering Syria-Egypt and thereby gaining control of the Hejaz, and how indispensable it was to have sanction power in Mecca-Medina for the legitimacy of asserted Ottoman superiority in Islamdom.