شيخ الإسلام
After the Fall of Constantinople in 1453, the leaders and subjects of the Ottoman Empire became increasingly aware of its role as a great power of its time. This new self-awareness was associated with the idea to legitimise the new political role by linking the religious scholarship to the political system: Ottoman historians of the 15th and 16th century like Ibn Zunbul or Eyyûbî, described the deeds of the Ottoman sultans in terms of idealised Islamic ghazi warriors. According to Burak (2015), the Ottoman literature genres of the "rank order" ( and the "biografic lexicon" () compiled the biographies of scholars in such ways as to create a concise and coherent tradition of the doctrine and structure of the Ottoman imperial scholarship. During the 16th century, scholars like the Shaykh al-Islām Kemālpaşazade (d. 1534), Aḥmād b. Muṣṭafā Taşköprüzāde (1494–1561), Kınalızāde ʿAli Çelebi (d. 1572) and Ali ben Bali (1527–1584) established a seamless chain of tradition from Abu Hanifa to their own time. Explicitly, some authors stated that their work must not only be understood as the historiography of the Hanafi madhhab, but that it should be consulted in case of eventual disagreements within the school of law. This exemplifies their purpose to establish a canon of Hanafi law within the Ottoman imperial scholarship. which modern Ottomanists termed the "Ottoman Islam".