Sheikh Bedreddin (1359–1420) (Ottoman Turkish: ‫ )بدرالدین شیخ‬was an influential mystic, scholar,

theologian, and revolutionary. He is most well known for his role in a 1416 revolt against the
Ottoman sultanate, in which he and his disciples posed a serious challenge to the authority of sultan
Mehmed I and the Ottoman state. His full name was Sheikh Bedreddin Mahmud Bin Israel Bin
Abdulaziz.

Many details of Bedreddin’s early life are disputed, as much of it is the subject of legend and folklore.
He was born in 1359 in the town of Simavna (Kyprinos), near Edirne. His father was the ghazi of the
town, and his mother was the daughter of a Greek Byzantine fortress commander. Notably,
Bedreddin was of mixed Muslim and Christian parentage, with a Christian mother and a Muslim
father; this contributed to his syncretic religious beliefs later in life. Turkish scholar Cemal Kafadar
argues that Bedreddin’s ghazi roots may also have contributed to his commitment to religious
coexistence.[1] In his youth he was a kadi to Ottoman warriors on the marches, which gave him
ample experience in jurisprudence, a field of study in which he would become well-versed.
Bedreddin was exposed to a variety of different cultures during his education, traveling far from his
birthplace in Thrace. He studied theology in Konya, and then in Cairo, which was the capital of the
Mamluk sultanate. After this, he traveled to Ardabil, in what is now Iranian Azerbaijan. Ardabil was
under the control of the Timurids, and was home to the mystic Safavid order. Surrounded by mystics
and far removed from the religious norms of the Ottoman Empire, Bedreddin was in an excellent
place to cultivate his unconventional religious ideology. There he found an environment sympathetic
to his pantheistic religious beliefs, and particularly the doctrine of “oneness of being”. This doctrine
condemned oppositions such as those of religion and social class as interference in the oneness of
God and the individual, and such doctrine ran contrary to increasing Ottoman efforts to establish
Sunni Islam as the state religion. By adopting it, Bedreddin further established himself as a
subversive.

During the Ottoman interregnum after the defeat of sultan Bayezid I by Tamerlane in 1402,
Bedreddin served as the kadiasker, or chief military judge, of the Ottoman prince Musa as Musa
struggled with his brothers for control of the Ottoman sultanate. Along with the frontier bey
Mihaloglu, he was a chief proponent of Musa’s revolutionary regime. While kadiasker, Bedreddin
gained the favor of many frontier ghazis by distributing timars among them. Through this he aided
these unpaid ghazis in their struggle against centralization, a clear indication of his subversive side.