What is crucial from the point of view of intraneighborhood relationships is not that many of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century deeds of trust stipulated that, as an appointed trustee, the imam was to receive a small fee for his services, or that he or the müezzin of the mosque, if any, were to pay
no rent when occupying a house donated to the local vakıf. These houses were called meœruta, imam meœrutası, or müezzin meœrutası, for they were to be occupied free of charge on the strict condition that the occupant be the imam or the müezzin of the local mosque. Otherwise rent would have to be charged to the occupant by the trustee. That was only fair enough, as the imams or müezzins had no regular salaries.
What is much more important is that a number of houses and other real estate property situated within the neighborhood, as well as the revenues accruing from them, were directly under the imam’s control. Alongside his moral authority over the inhabitants of the mahalle, this certainly gave him
considerable economic power especially when, as in Kasap ƒlyas, the neighborhood itself was neither too populous nor too big, but there existed nevertheless a relatively large number of local vakıfs.
For instance, it was the imam who decided if and when and to whom a house, a garden, or a plot of land belonging to a local vakıf were to be rented, and what the amount of the rent and its mode of payment were to be. Who would have to pay for the repair work of houses belonging to the vakıf? The
owner, or the tenant? Would the tenant, for instance, be allowed to build a house on an empty piece of land belonging to the local vakıf? If yes, who would this new house then belong to? To the builder or to the owner of the land? Would this decision have an appreciable effect on the amount of the
rent? These were matters over which the imam, being the trustee, had an absolute right of say.
Indeed, in many instances in the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle, the respective rights of use and of property had to be clearly specified in the vakıf documents. “Whatever is built belongs to the holy vakıf”8 is a note we often came across in the documents. In that case, simple repair work done by the tenant to the house owned by the vakıf could be “deductible from his ordinary rent.”9 In other cases, however, the tenant of the vakıf plot of land was allowed to own the house that was built on it.10 In that case, all repair work was paid by the tenant. In any event, that was a matter for the trustee of the pious foundation to decide.
More generally, any new use to which the vakıf property was to be put first had to be approved by the imam. Whether the endowed property could be subdivided into a number of parts to be let to different persons, whether that property could be used for a different purpose than its initial destiny, as set down by the founder, or whether the right of usufruct of the vakıf property could be, either by right of inheritance or by donation, transferred by the tenant to another person, were dependent on the imam’s approval. Whether the tenant would be allowed to use his right of usufruct of the vakıf property for a commercial operation (e.g., for a mortgage, or as a collateral to a loan), was also a matter to be approved by the trustee of the vakıf before any official step could be taken. Besides, before many of these transactions were concluded and put on record, a “donation” was made to the vakıf, payed in cash and recorded with the transaction itself. This “donation” constituted a
nonnegligible portion of the imam’s income.
The imam of the Kasap ƒlyas mosque was obviously not left totally to his own devices. He had to abide by the Islamic law on pious foundations and he was supposed to use the property that was under his trusteeship in conformity with the wishes of the initial founder of the vakıf. Besides, the
balance sheets of the vakıfs could, from time to time come under the examination of controllers (nâzırs) appointed by the higher religious authorities.11
It remains that, in a (population-wise) relatively small neighborhood like Kasap ƒlyas, where, nevertheless, local vakıfs were relatively numerous, the imam came to wield considerable local power and authority. Take the case of Hâfız Mehmet Efendi, who officiated as imam of the Kasap ƒlyas mosque between 1784 and 1799. At the beginning of his priesthood, he acted as trustee for seven different local vakıfs. In their endowments there were four houses, a “garden” (most probably a rather large “vegetable garden,” a bostan),
and a shop. Two new vakıfs were founded in the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle in the 1790s, and a house and another “garden” were added to the real estate property under his control. As to Hacı Aziz Mahmud Efendi, imam between 1822 and 1844, in the early 1820s he had the control of, and the incomes accruing from, three houses, two “gardens,” and a shop in the mahalle.
The total number of houses in the Kasap ƒlyas mahalle could not have much exceeded 50 or 60, during the whole period going from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. Any residential Istanbul mahalle containing more than 100 houses would have been considered as a very large one. The number of houses in Kasap ƒlyas will reach 150 only toward the very end of the nineteenth century, after a prolonged period of steady population growth for the city as a whole. Given the size of our small neighborhood, then, a nonnegligible portion of the local wealth was under the imam’s control. This added a crucial element of economic power and influence to his moral authority over his congregation. We shall see to what use Aziz Mahmud Efendi, one of the prominent imams of Kasap ƒlyas, chose to put it.
Some mosques of traditional Istanbul were nicknamed “the mosque with the forty keys,” and the imam thereof “the imam with the forty keys.” This was how the “bottom up” view of the local economic power wielded by the imam reflected itself in the popular parlance of the imperial city. The quantity of real estate property governed and managed by a single imam must have strongly impressed the man in the street. The expression “forty keys”—with its obvious numerical exaggeration—suggests a mixture of respect and apprehension, perhaps a fairly good description of how ordinary people really felt about the imam of their neighborhood mosque. The “forty” keys are of course those of the “forty” houses and shops that popular imagination construed the imam to “possess.” To these “forty” houses and shops, so it must have been feared, the imam must always have had access with his key ring. Perhaps this potential access was perceived by the poor locals as auguring an unhappy occurrence such as an eviction from their lodgings, a distraint on their goods,
or a rise in rents. There always was, in the least, the danger of intrusion into their privacy.
The Kasap ƒlyas mosque, although situated, as we know, in a rather peripheral, not particularly opulent, and not densely populated mahalle, was until recently one of those “mosques with forty keys.” This almost magical power of numbers was even heightened by its present-day imam who, with
a bit of regret and a good amount of nostalgia, mentioned the glorious past of his mosque and called its imams “the imams with seventy keys,” and the Kasap ƒlyas mosque itself “the mosque with seventy keys.”