Encyclopaedia of Islam, THREE

Koca Mustafa (Qoca Muṣṭafā) Paşa b. Abdülmuin (ʿAbd al-Muʿīn) (d. 918/1512), an Ottoman official, military commander, and grand vizier during the reign of Sultan Bayezid (Bāyezīd) II (r. 886–918/1481–1512), was probably of Greek devşirme (periodic levy of male Christian children to serve in the Janissary corps or palace administration) origins. He was raised at the palace in Istanbul, and later entered the service of Prince Bayezid, who held court in Amasya (Reindl, 302). After Bayezid ascended to the throne in 886/1481, Koca Mustafa Paşa was appointed to several offices, including k…

Kochi (also Kochin, Cochin, Kerala, India, latitude N 9°58', longitude E 76°14), well known for its Jewish settlement, also has a rich Muslim heritage. 1. History The origin of the present town goes back to 741/1341, when a geological event, presumed to be an earthquake, reshaped the coastline, destroying old Cochin and causing the island of Vypin to emerge from the sea, heralding a new era, Puduvaipu, used for dates in many records. Before 741/1341, the old town by the river Kocchi was under Cranganur’s administration but was an insignificant port, ignored in the e…

Komitas (Gomitas, 1869–1935) Vardapet was an Armenian musician, composer, ethnomusicologist, and celibate priest of the Armenian Apostolic Church. Komitas was born Soghomon Soghomonian in 1869 in Kütahya, in present-day Turkey. Tragically, his mother, Takuhi Hovhanessian, a singer and carpet weaver, passed away in 1870. His father, Kevork Soghomonian, a shoemaker and song composer, died in 1880, leaving Soghomon orphaned. In 1881, the primate of the Armenian Apostolic Church in Bursa, Kevork Var…

Kong, a sleepy town of 29,190 inhabitants (2014) in northern Côte d’Ivoire, gives little indication of its former glory. As with Timbuktu, Kong fascinated nineteenth-century geographers, who mistakenly associated it with imaginary mountains. In 1888, the French officer, colonial administrator, and explorer Louis-Gustave Binger (d. 1936) was the first European to enter the city, which he described as endowed with five mosques and flat-roofed houses constructed of adobe in Sudano-Sahelian style. Kong arose as a wayside market on the long-distance routes of Jula (Dyul…

Considered the founder of Turkish national historiography, Mehmet Fuad Köprülü (1890–1968) started his career as a sociologist, poet, and student of literature. As a descendent of eleventh/seventeenth-century grand viziers, he maintained a close identification with Ottoman history while hesitantly adapting to Republican Turkey’s political and ideological requirements. Educated in Ottoman primary and secondary schools (rüşdiye and idadi), Köprülü enrolled in the law school of Istanbul University (Darülfünun), but left because of its “pedestrian” level…

Qārūn (the biblical Korah) is the protagonist of a Qurʾānic passage (Qurʾān 28:76–82) in which he is introduced as one “belonging to the people of Moses” who “became insolent to them.” God had accorded him such enormous treasures that their “very keys were too heavy a burden for a company of men” (Q 28:76). People urged him to act not with a view to this world but for the world to come, and he answered, “What I have been given is only because of a knowledge that is in me” (Q 28:78). He did not know…

The Ottoman şehzade (prince) Korkud (872 or 874–919/end of the 1460s-1513), son of Sultan Bayezid (Bāyezīd) II (r. 886–918/1481–1512), was active in diplomacy and privateering when he served as governor in Manisa and Antalya. He later struggled against his brothers for succession to his father’s throne. Korkud was also a musician, calligrapher, and poet, as well as a Shāfiʿī scholar. Korkud was in Istanbul when his grandfather, Mehmed (Meḥmed) II (r. 848–50/1444–6 and 855–86/1451–81), died on 4 Rebiülahir (Rabīʿ II) 886/3 May 1481), and he was enthroned …

Koron (Koroni in Greek, Coron in Italian, and Koron (Qorōn) in Ottoman Turkish) is a fortified town and port of the southwestern Peloponnesus, fifty-two kilometres southwest of Kalamata, the capital of Messenia. The castle, standing over the modern town, occupies the promontory Akritas, while the town looks out onto the Messeniakos Kolpos (Messenian Gulf). The town was portrayed as a very picturesque settlement by western travellers in the eighteenth century and by Evliya Çelebi (Evliyā Çelebī, …

Fahri Korutürk (1903–87) was a former commander of the Turkish navy, who served as president of Turkey between 1973 and 1980. Born in 1903, he joined the navy as a lieutenant, rising to the rank of full admiral in 1958, and becoming commander of naval forces in December 1959. In June 1960, he was appointed Turkish ambassador in Moscow by the then military government and resigned from the navy. Having also served as ambassador in Madrid, he retired in August 1965. In June 1968, he became a member of the Turkish senate, appointed by President Cevdet Sunay (1899–1982). When President Sunay’s te…

The battle of Köse Daği was a turning-point confrontation between the Saljūq sultanate of Rūm, led by Sultan Keyhüsrev (Kaykhusraw) II (r. 634–44/1237–46), and a Mongol army commanded by the noyan Baiju (d. 658–9/1260). It took place in a defile below the mountain Köse Dağı, some fifty miles northwest of Sivas, on 6 Muharrem (Muḥarram) 641/26 June 1243. Although the Saljūq forces considerably outnumbered those of the Mongols, the latter shattered Keyhüsrev’s army, and the sultan fled for safety to Antalya. The Mongols’ westward expansion towards Anatolia had deeply concerned…

Mahpeyker (Māhpeyker) Kösem Sultan (Sulṭān, d. 1061/1651), who became a favorite concubine of Ahmed (Aḥmed) I (r. 1011–26/1603–17), was the most powerful of the queen mothers exercising authority in the eleventh/seventeenth century, as well as the most controversial. Kösem’s stature and influence were facilitated by her astute grasp of Ottoman politics and the large number of children she bore. Two of her sons required her regency early in their reigns, and her daughters’ marriages to prominent sta…

Kosovo (Kosova in Turkish and Albanian) is a Balkan territory that evolved with the time, with very different borders, from a plain to a much larger administrative province in the late Ottoman period, and then to a smaller province in Socialist Yugoslavia, and an independent state in 2008. It was originally the name of a plain west of Prishtina (Kosovo Polje, “the field of blackbirds”), where a famous battle took place on 15 June 1389 according to the Julian calendar, or 28 June 1389 according t…

The first battle of Kosovo Polje, fought between the Ottomans and a Serbian and Bosnian coalition, took place five miles southwest of Priština, on “The Field of Blackbirds,” beyond the junction of the Lab and Sitnica Rivers. Following the Julian calendar, Christian sources date the event to 15 June 1389 (St. Vitus Day); according to Ottoman chroniclers, it occurred on 4 Ramazan (Ramaḍān) 791/27 August 1389. While the Ottomans defeated their opponents, both sides suffered heavy losses, and the Ottoman victory did not result in an immediate conquest of Serbia, much less Bosnia. Tentative …

Köy Enstitüleri (Village Institutes) were officially opened in Turkey on 17 April 1940 under Law 3803, which aimed to educate peasant youth and train them to become village teachers. In establishing Köy Enstitüleri, the Cumhuriyet Halk Partisi (CHP, Republican People’s Party) aimed to reach rural areas and educate peasant children in modern pedagogical methods. The single-party CHP government had previously attempted to transform village life and education in Turkish rural areas; Köy Öğretmen Oku…

The Kozanoğulları (Qozānoghlu) family ruled the region around Mount Kozan, north of the Cicilian (Çukurova) plain, in southern Anatolia, for much of the twelfth/eighteenth and thirteenth/nineteenth centuries. They were allegedly from the Varsak (or Farsak) Turcoman tribe, which presumably arrived in Cicilia from Syria with Süleyman Şah (Süleymān Shāh, d. 479/1086) in 477–8/1085, and became kethüda ( kethüdā, steward) of the tribe’s Arıklı clan. The first recognised member of the family is Derviş Ağa (Dervīş Agha), who appears in archival records as be…

Kozhikode (Calicut, Kerala, India, N 11°26′, E 75°78′) includes an old Muslim community whose long history and alliance with its powerful Hindu rajas (“Zamorin” to the Portuguese and “Sāmirī” to the Muslims, from Sanskrit sāmudri, “sea lord”) goes back at least to the seventh/thirteenth century. 1. Early History and European Trade By 742–3/1341–3, when the Moroccan traveller Ibn Baṭṭūṭa (d. 770 or 779/1368 or 1377) visited, commerce was firmly in the hands of the Arabs and Persians, and, in the early ninth/fifteenth century the Italian merchant …

Kritoboulos of Imbros, (d. c.874/1470) was a Greek Ottoman historian and official in the court of Sultan Mehmed (Meḥmed) II (r. 848–50/1444–6 and 855–86/1451–81). He was born as Michael Kritopoulos, on the island of Imbros (İmroz/Gökçeada), but later adopted the more classical-sounding Kritoboulos (Reinsch, Kritobulos, 299). Kritoboulos belonged to the circle of Patriarch Georgios-Gennadios Scholarios (d. c.878–9/1473), the first Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople after the Ottoman Conquest, and he was acquainted with the Anconitan …

Abū l-Jannāb Aḥmad b. ʿUmar Najm al-Dīn (b. c.540/1145, d. 618/1221), known as Najm al-Dīn Kubrā, founded the Kubraviyya, one of Central Asia’s three major indigenous Ṣūfī orders and the most prominent in the region during the Mongol era. A gifted polemicist and student of the exoteric Islamic sciences, such as ḥadīth and kalām, a maktab (primary school) instructor nicknamed him, in his younger days, al-Ṭāmma al-Kubrā—variously translated as “the major disaster,” “the overwhelming event,” “the greatest affliction,” or “the Day of Judgement,” in refe…

The Kubraviyya, a major Ṣūfī order indigenous to Central Asia, along with the Yasaviyya and the Naqshbandiyya, was the most prominent of the three in the region during the Mongol era (the founding of these orders has been ascribed to Aḥmad Yasavī, d. early sixth/twelfth century, and Bahāʾ al-Dīn Naqshband, d. 791/1389). 1. Najm al-Dīn Kubrā and the origins of the Kubraviyya Named after the Central Asian mystic, scholar, and author Najm al-Dīn Kubrā (d. 618/1221), who perished in the Mongol conquest of Khvārazm, the organisation garnered significant prestige in the region’s cul…

Küçük Hüseyin (Ḥüseyin) Paşa (c.1172–1218/c.1758/9–1803), an Ottoman grand admiral and vizier, was born into a Circassian or Georgian family and introduced to Sultan Mustafa (Muṣṭafā) III (r. 1171–87/1757–74) in 1181/1767–8 by the vizier Silahdar İbrahim (Silāḥdār İbrāhīm) Paşa. Following his training in the enderun ( enderūn, palace school), he served the sultan’s son, Mehmed (Meḥmed). On 11 Recep (Rajab) 1203/7 April 1789, when Sultan Selim (Selīm) III (r. 1203–22/1789–1807) ascended the throne, Hüseyin Paşa was appointed to the palace (hane-i hassa, hāne-i khāṣṣa) as mabeyin…