Akhiya

Akhiya, or the Akhi brotherhoods, were Sufi guilds of young men dedicated to the betterment of the community, centered in Anatolia in the lands that became the Ottoman Empire. They emerged around the thirteenth century as the Seljuk Sultanate of Rum declined, rooted in the medieval Islamic futuwwa tradition, and became crucial to urban development in early Ottoman history, providing both economic infrastructure for production and trade and a social framework for townspeople. Members lived communally at lodges or hospices, and the traveler Ibn Battuta observed that in every district, town and village he visited, members of the organization were to be found. The brotherhoods stabilized towns where imperial authority was weak and at times took on functions of local governance, before losing their earlier autonomy and becoming conventional trade guilds by the end of the sixteenth century as the Ottoman state centralized power.