Marife Turkish Journal of Religious Studies

Abstract

One of the primary functions of education is to raise virtuous individuals who are familiar with the values of their society, live up to them and make them part of their lives. One of the most effective ways to teach values is to introduce the important cultural elements that exist in the tradition of the society to the next generations, presenting them in a practicable format. In this context, the culture of charitable foundations, which has performed a leading function in social and economic life in the Islamic world for centuries, holds an important position. In this context, in the Ottoman society, wealthy and benevolent people, especially the sultans, launched charitable foundations in order to contribute to the social and economic life of the society and to sustain educational and medical services.
Since any attempt to deal with all the charitable foundation services performed in the Ottoman Empire would exceed the limits of this study, we shall focus on the most common charitable foundation services in the Ottoman society such as bird houses, caravanserais, the zimem notebooks, alms basins, and soup kitchens are discussed in terms of values education. In the Ottoman, not only human beings but also all living things were valued and various charitable foundations were established in this regard, to the extent some of them were set up for the care and needs of animals such as birds, cats, and dogs. The bird houses that were built into the walls of buildings such as mosques, mansions, tombs, and water fountains are just few of the reflections of the culture of charitable foundations.
The caravanserais are one of the most important charitable foundation services, which contain the best examples of the high value that Islamic civilization has attached to human beings and all living things. The caravanserais, which offered free accommodation and shelter to people without making any discrimination amongst Muslims, non-Muslims, freemen, slaves, the rich and the poor, were built on important road routes, offering a free accommodation to passengers as well as their mounts.
It is possible to see one of the best examples of solidarity, cooperation and sharing in the Ottoman society in the zimem notebooks which kept record of a client’s debts. Under the conditions of that day, people did their shopping from the grocery store, greengrocer or butcher, and if they had no cash at that time, they let their debts be written down in the zimem notebook. Benevolent people visited the shop where the zimem notebook was located at a suitable time, and had a certain amount of debt written off from the zimem notebook according to their economic power without letting anyone notice. The crucial point in this practice is that neither the benevolent knows whose debt he has paid off, nor is the debtor aware of who has paid off his debt.
One of the concrete examples of this is the alms basins in the Ottoman society, which attaches a great importance to the human being and human dignity, especially when helping needy people in all areas of life. So, alms basins are a form of cooperation in which the giver and the recipient do not see each other and no one’s dignity is damaged. As one of the institutions that made important contributions to the solidarity and cohesion in Ottoman society for many years, the soup kitchens (imarets) provided food for the poor and travelers, especially the students in madrasahs. Soup kitchen is one of the charitable organizations that were established only for the sake of God.
The purpose of this study, is to discuss some foundation services in the Ottoman Empire in terms of values education. In addition, it is to evaluate the possibility of the emergence and development of some values in students by including some of the foundation services in the education system, and to make some suggestions on this subject at the same time. In order to realize this aim, the case study design, one of the qualitative research methods, was adopted in the study and document analysis method was used in data collection. According to the data obtained as a result of this study, the functions performed by the charitable foundations in the Ottoman society contained such values as mercy, compassion, generosity, kindness, self-sacrifice, modesty, sensitivity, aesthetics, grace, fidelity, sincerity, friendship, responsibility, cooperation, solidarity, sharing, and altruism.
It seems that these values are related to the root values included in the curriculum and expected to be internalized by the students For this reason, it is thought that giving an effective position in the curriculum to the services provided by the charitable foundations, which served as the basis of solidarity, cohesion, unity and solidarity in Ottoman society for hundreds of years, will play an important role in teaching students many values such as love, respect and compassion.