Zekeriyazade Yahya Efendi

He was born in Istanbul — the year is debated, some sources giving 960/1552 and others 969/1561, with the testimony of contemporaries favouring 1561 — the son of Bayramzade Zekeriya Efendi, himself Shaykh al-Islam under Murad III, and of Rukiye. His name is simply his father's: Zekeriyazade, "son of Zekeriya". After a brilliant medrese education he made the Hajj with his father in 994/1586 and climbed the learned hierarchy rung by rung: professor at the Atik Ali Pasha and Haseki Sultan medreses, then qadi of Aleppo, Damascus, Bursa and Edirne, qadi of Istanbul in 1603, kazasker of Anatolia in 1605, and kazasker of Rumelia three times.

In 1622 Mustafa I made him Shaykh al-Islam; a clash with the grand vizier Kemankes Ali Pasha cost him the post within a year. Restored in 1625 under Murad IV, he held it seven years until the revolt of February 1632, when a mob demanded his execution among seventeen names and the grand vizier Hafiz Ahmed Pasha was lynched; Yahya resigned, and the young sultan is reported to have told him, "They deposed you, but I did not — go to your farm and pray for us; when the sultan is truly sultan, you will be mufti again." In 1634 he returned for a third term, accompanied Murad IV on the Revan and Baghdad campaigns as a bringer of luck, and held the office until his death, though Cinci Hoca's hold over Sultan Ibrahim eclipsed him at the end. His three terms totalled eighteen years, two months and twenty-five days.

He died in Istanbul on 18 Dhu'l-Hijja 1053 / 27 February 1644, past eighty years old; the city's people carried his coffin on their hands, and he was buried beside his father's medrese at Sultan Selim. He never married and left no children.

Poetry made his second fame. His Divan is almost all ghazals — refined, witty and intimate in diction, with a na't, a sakiname and a tahmis at its head — and the English Turkologist Gibb placed him on the line that joins Baki to Nedim; the TEIS entry records that contemporaries such as Seyyid Riza called him "sultan of the poets of the age", and that even the savage satirist Nef'i left him alone. His scholarly works include a commentary on the inheritance treatise (Fara'iz) of Siraj al-Din al-Sajawandi, a tahmis on al-Busiri's Burda, the Nigaristan modelled on Nizami's Makhzan al-Asrar, and his collected fatwas. The Vak'a-i Sultan Osman, an account of Osman II's fall, is not his: it belongs to Bostanzade Yahya Efendi, a contemporary namesake with whom he is easily confused.

No text read for this record names a madhhab for Yahya Efendi personally. He headed the learned hierarchy of an empire whose official school was Hanafi, and the Shaykh al-Islam was its chief mufti; but office is not attestation, and the museum's rule records faith only where a text attests it for the man himself, so the data field stands as unknown and the institutional fact is stated here instead.

This page rests on the TEIS biographical entry (Türk Edebiyatı İsimler Sözlüğü, Ahmet Yesevi University) and the Turkish and German Wikipedia articles, read in full and registered as the entity's sources; Ali al-Salabi's al-Dawla al-Uthmaniyya is retained as an unread pointer. The rival birth years are preserved in the data record.