Introduction

This book is a study of religious thought in an age of radical thinking. It looks specifically at three Late Ottoman thinkers – two of them ulema (Ar. ʿulamaʾ),Footnote ¹ or scholars of the established forms of Muslim knowledge, and one a poet among the class of devout Muslim intellectualsFootnote ² of the era – whose active period of work was marked by two political events in the countries they moved between, namely the rise to power of the Young Turk movement in Istanbul in 1908 and of the Free Officers in Egypt in 1952.Footnote ³ These three figures are Mustafa Sabri Efendi (1869–1954), the last major sheikh ül-Islam (Ar. shaykh al-Islam; chief mufti) of the Ottoman state; Mehmed Zahid Kevseri (1879–1952), Sabri’s deputy for education (ders vekili) in the Ottoman religious bureaucracy known as the İlmiye; and Mehmed Akif Ersoy (1873–1936),Footnote ⁴ public intellectual and the poet who wrote the words to Turkey’s national anthem. Disaffected with the republic and its adoption of radical European positivist and materialist philosophies,Footnote ⁵ they each found themselves drawn to Egypt as a place of refuge from the nationalist movement of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881–1938).

Although in exile, they were able to engage with their Egyptian counterparts regarding the iconoclastic ideas of the era impacting Islamic political, legal, and theological culture. Nationalist historiography, through ordering knowledge as variously Egyptian, Arab, or Turkish, has served to conceal this kind of transnational collaboration in the post-Ottoman intellectual world by which thinkers could still operate across national-linguistic lines. For example, a pervasive theme in scholarship regarding republican Turkey has been that Said Nursi (1877–1960), the celebrated ʿālim (religious scholar) who remained in Turkey during the early republic, single-handedly carried the torch of Ottoman Islam through his writing while enduring persecution at the hands of the Kemalist state. Yet this misses the role of the Cairo exiles in formulating the first systematic response to secular Turkey and establishing a blueprint for an Islamic Turkish nationalism that in the fullness of time was to win out against its rivals. It was easy to focus attention on Nursi because he shifted from using the Arabic of the ulema class to Turkish at a critical point in the trajectory of the modern state, while Sabri and Kevseri were equally deliberate in choosing to stick with Arabic. Turkish in its Late Ottoman form was essential to Akif’s art and message, and his reception in Turkey and the Islamic world was impacted in turn by that fact. These were thinkers then who presented different challenges to the political and cultural categories that dominated following the demise of the Ottoman milieu.

The study examines a corpus of printed materials, including books, articles, and letters, written in Arabic, Ottoman, and Turkish by the three Muslim thinkers in question, tracing the transformation of concepts and terminologies across linguistic and discursive fields, from the Late Ottoman period to their post-Ottoman years in Cairo. Key works include Sabri’s Mawqif al-ʿAql wa-l-ʿIlm wa-l-ʿĀlam min Rabb al-ʿĀlamīn wa-Rusulihi (The Position of Reason, Knowledge, and the World on God and His Messengers, 1949), the collection of Kevseri’s writings published as Maqālāt al-Kawtharī (Kevseri’s Articles, 1953), Akif’s poetry collection Safahat (Ṣafaḥāt, meaning phases or pages), and the journals Sırat-ı Müstakim/SebilürreşadFootnote ⁶ and Beyanülhak (Statement of Truth/God). The research takes in many other Ottoman and Arabic works by intellectuals who contributed to the modernist and Salafi discourse (which I take as distinct categories) of the period and who engaged, often directly, with Akif, Sabri, and Kevseri, including Muḥammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905), Mūsā Jārullāh Bigiev (1874–1949), Muḥammad Iqbāl (1877–1938), Sayyid Quṭb (1906–66), Abū al-Aʿlā Mawdūdī (1903–79), and Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Albānī (1914–99), as well as an array of Turkish-, Arabic-, and English-language secondary literature.

The introductory chapter (Chapter 1) looks at historiographical problems in both Islamic history and the intellectual history of the Late Ottoman period.Footnote ⁷ Chapter 2 gives in-depth profiles of Akif, Sabri, and Kevseri and considers how they have been treated in different fields of scholarship. Chapter 3 examines Sabri’s response to the liberal Islamic trend he found dominating public space in the Egypt of the 1930s and 1940s, which had imbibed Europe’s secular humanistic understanding of religion, and contrasts this with Akif’s work in centering Late Ottoman Islamism around the ideas of ʿAbduh, the leading figure of this school of self-described reformist Islam. Chapter 4 looks at Zahid Kevseri’s problematisation of the concept of the terms salafī and salafiyya, his attempt to withhold the legitimating potential inherent in the ‘Salafi’ label from the trend (distinct from that of ʿAbduh) that framed its iconoclastic approach to the Islamic legal and theological tradition in those terms. Chapter 5 looks at the three thinkers’ views on the modern state as a universal model received from Europe, specifically, Akif’s compromise with Turkish nationalism and Sabri’s theorising on faith in a post-shariʿa society. The concluding chapter (Chapter 6) considers their impact on the ideological trend created by the conditions of modernity known as ‘political Islam’ (al-islām al-siyāsī), making use of interviews with Islamist figures active in the early period of transnational collaboration.

The Construction of Islam as a World Religion

Enlightenment ideas and their universalisation through European colonial expansion engendered new ways of thinking about religion, rooted in Europe’s experience of religious institutions as an oppressive force in political and social life. European scholars and politicians came to objectify Islam as a category of world religion, as historian Wilfred Cantwell Smith theorised in his book The Meaning and End of Religion (1962). In the Islamic case this process of what Smith called reification entailed the production of the term Islam itself by Europeans, and then through apologetic osmosis by Muslims themselves, in unfamiliar contexts and senses. This approach to the Islamic tradition located in the conceptual framework of European thought I term modernist. One line of Muslim modernism – defined by its highly political and activist nature – would subsequently develop a theory of Islam as a complete system of life, which had implications for not only the individual but the state, expressed through innovative use of words such as niẓām,Footnote ⁸ while another strand within Muslim modernism – mimicking secular humanism – would be comfortable with the Enlightenment’s individualist notion of religion as, in anthropologist Talal Asad’s description, ‘anchored in personal experience, expressible as belief-statements, dependent on private institutions, and practised in one’s spare-time’, on which basis various versions of secularism would develop.Footnote ⁹ In Orientalism (1978) Edward Said would re-frame this Islam-made-in-Europe through the prism of his discursive framework of ‘Orientalism’, which for him was a term that not only described scholars who studied ‘the East’ but the paradigm of thought made possible by European power and by which Europeans conceived of outside cultural groupings in a manner that stressed difference and need for reform.

Scholars across numerous fields of the humanities have examined how Muslim intellectual, cultural, historical, and moral understandings of the world were systematically described, deconstructed, and denigrated as unfit for what European intellectuals considered to be a new stage of social organisation.Footnote ¹⁰ The German philosopher Hegel (1770–1831) was one of the first prominent voices to present a systematic theory of Islam (‘Mohametanism’) as a civilisation that had run out of steam. In his series of lectures on the philosophy of history, first delivered in 1822, Hegel said Islam reflected an Arab obsession with the abstract that made for poetry good enough to fire the imagination of Goethe and science and philosophy useful to medieval Europe. But now that the north Europeans were marching to glory through the ‘all-enlightening sun’ (die Alles verklärende Sonne) of the Reformation, Islam had ‘vanished from the stage of history’ and ‘retreated into Oriental ease and repose’, he declared.Footnote ¹¹ French historian and politician Francois Guizot’s Histoire générale de la civilisation en Europe (General History of Civilisation in Europe, 1828) also posited the Reformation as the great event that unleashed Europe’s creative powers and facilitated its civilisational advance (‘une insurrection de l’esprit humain contre le pouvoir absolu dans l’ordre spirituel’),Footnote ¹² while Arab-Islamic civilisation was in a state of stagnation (état stationnaire) because of its ‘confusion of moral and material authority’Footnote ¹³ – a theme of modernist reform discourse that was to echo throughout the century as European entanglement with Muslim societies increased.

In Islam in Liberalism Joseph Massad identifies a second impulse for negative depictions of Islam. He examines the manner with which nineteenth-century European liberalism projected anxiety over the injustices of Europe’s incomplete project of progress – the mass violence of colonialism, the dark Satanic mills of industrialisation, political and economic marginalisation of subaltern groups – onto an Oriental exterior. This procedure allowed for a proliferation of phenomena understood as Islamic, including history, peoples, philosophy, sexual practices, cuisine, sartorial standards, and culture,Footnote ¹⁴ while Christian traditions were the template for thinking of kalām (rationalist discussion of Islamic doctrine) and ʿaqīda (dogma, belief, tenet) as theology, shariʿa as law, or ṣalāh as prayer. The breadth of terms deployed in Ottoman Turkish texts for Islam – İslam, İslamiyet, İslamlık, Müslümanlık, İslam dini – gives some indication of how jarring this reductive, homogenising construction of Islam must have been. Turkish republican historiography tended to parallel British and French scholarship in presenting Islamic institutions and belief systems as an impediment to progress.Footnote ¹⁵

A third motivation behind the production of this Europeanised Islam was, as Said established, the tying of its fortunes to the colonial project.Footnote ¹⁶ Progress in other societies would come through the civilising mission of their ideas, whether delivered through colonialism or otherwise, but Islam was viewed as a dangerous creedal force commanding fanatical impulses of potential resistance to European power in the many colonies where Britain and France ruled over Muslim-majority populations. It was in this context that the term pan-Islamism was produced in British and French policy debate.Footnote ¹⁷ In the late nineteenth century Britain was troubled by the Ottoman state’s use of Islamic motifs because of a perceived potential to stoke resistance to British power in Egypt and India.Footnote ¹⁸ This fed a tendency to stress division between putative national Islams. Wilfred Scawen Blunt, a British diplomat then writer, outlined a blueprint for an Arab caliphate in the Hijaz with symbolic spiritual powers that would engender an Islamic reformation outside ‘the incubus of Turkish scholasticism’ and disabused of the ‘dream of empire’.Footnote ¹⁹ Even those Muslim intellectuals who grasped instinctively that European knowledge could not be disassociated from the physical control Europe exerted over their societies – that this knowledge was tainted by its serving imperial interests – were susceptible to the notion that Islam as the Europeans had constructed it was fundamental to their failure to maintain a pace of civilisational advance that would have kept European interventions at bay. In other words, European criticisms of Islam, however much they were repudiated, succeeded in problematising aspects of belief and practice in the minds of thinkers across Muslim societies who operated within a paradigm of reform derived terminologically from the Arabic tajdīd (renewal).Footnote ²⁰

European modernity’s view of religion as irrational and a bar to civilisational progress brought with it a specific compartmentalisation of pre-modern time. With Europe’s self-awareness of itself in the eighteenth century as experiencing what was termed an age of Enlightenment (die Aufklärung; le siècle des Lumières), new thinking conceptualised history as a discipline demarcating time via a tripartite division of ancient, medieval, and modern.Footnote ²¹ From the 1980s post-colonial studies began to push back against this taxonomy as an inaccurate, colonial imposition and to experiment with the notion of the pre-modern, which would fit somewhere between the late medieval period and the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century. The pre-modern also served the purpose of restoring agency to non-European cultural groups in the Western story of what came in the late nineteenth century to be called modernity.Footnote ²² It has allowed scholars to develop the notion of multiple modernities,Footnote ²³ or nineteenth-century global history in which non-European peoples are integrated into a comprehensive narrative of a world system in formation.Footnote ²⁴ This new terminology opened space for efforts to uncover modern temporality in India in response to British colonial scholars who developed the trope of the ‘Hindu mind’ that lacked a concept of historical timeFootnote ²⁵ and to discover early modern practices in diverse contexts such as eighteenth-century Japan, thirteenth-century China, and eleventh-century Java.

The field has not been without its critics,Footnote ²⁶ but it is striking how long disinterest in writing Muslims into the category of pre-modernity has persistedFootnote ²⁷ – a consequence, it would appear, of the pervasive theory of decline among both Orientalist and Muslim scholars in the nineteenth century.Footnote ²⁸ Indeed, the ancient/medieval/modern arrangement of historical time meshes remarkably well with their classificatory framework – of the classical period of the early Islamic era with its imperial expansion and construction of a vast legal-theological edifice (posited as ending with the Mongol destruction of Baghdad in 1258 and/or the rise of the Ottomans), followed by a post-classical decline (inḥiṭāṭ) in Muslim political power and the vitality of the Islamic system of knowledge, before recovering through the paradigm shifts of renaissance (nahḍa) and revival (tajdīd) from the nineteenth century (for modernists) or from the Wahhabi movement in the eighteenth century (for Salafis).

The Modernist View of Decline

Decline has been a powerful and persistent paradigm for understanding the trajectory of Islamic societies before the colonial encounter.Footnote ²⁹ Halil İnalcık’s The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300–1600, which has gone through numerous imprints since its publication in 1973, claims to find the beginnings of failure to meet the nineteenth-century challenge of Europe in a sixteenth-century ‘triumph of fanaticism’,Footnote ³⁰ by which he means the juridical culture of the shariʿa schools and the rise of the Kadızadelis (Ḳāżīzādelī), the puritan movement that took up the anti-Sufi ideas of theologian Birgivi Mehmed (d. 1573). Writing firmly within the discursive framework of European Orientalism and the Muslim modernists, İnalcık depicts the shariʿa tradition of compilation, annotation, and commentary of foundational legal texts as hindering later jurists’ ability to innovateFootnote ³¹ and he sees the Janissaries’ storming of the Galata observatory in 1580 after the Ottoman ulema condemned astronomy and astrologyFootnote ³² as an example of the zealotry that came to dominate. A professor at Chicago University who published mainly in English, İnalcık was typical of a tradition of republican historiography that fell under the influence of Orientalist problematisation of Islam.Footnote ³³ There are few fields in Late Ottoman history that the discourse of decline has not touched. E. J. W. Gibb could describe the Turks in racialist terms in his A History of Ottoman Poetry (1900–9) as a people who, after the wholesale adoption of Persian culture, were unable to produce an original literature of their own since their true genius ‘lies in action, not in speculation’.Footnote ³⁴ Laurent Mignon argues that this rejection of the Ottoman past was internalised in two stages: via the writings of poet, playwright, and Ottoman bureaucrat Namık Kemal (1840–8), who derided the literature as nothing more than ‘old wives tales’ (kocakarı masalı), and the work of the theorist of Turkish nationalism Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924), who described the Ottoman ruling class and their literary output as foreign, even colonial, in that its overlay of Arabic and Persian language and multi-ethnic authorship did not reflect a Turkish aesthetic or interest.Footnote ³⁵ Indeed, in the republican era the Late Ottoman novel was for long regarded as a failure because it did not conform to European conventions.Footnote ³⁶

ʿAbduh was also susceptible to the trope of decline as both an Arab and an Islamic phenomenon through the influence of European intellectuals he read such as Guizot, liberal Protestant theologian David Strauss, and positivists such as Herbert Spencer, whom he met during a trip to Britain.Footnote ³⁷ Guizot was cited in al-Radd ʿalā al-Dahriyyīn (Refutation of the Materialists, 1886), the Arabic translation of Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī’s (1838–97) attack on Indian positivism, Haqīqat-i Maẕhab-i Naycharī, which ʿAbduh translated with al-Afghānī’s assistant ʿĀrif Efendi: al-Afghānī, ʿAbduh’s early mentor, suggesting that Islam required the kind of Protestant revolution that Guizot had outlined in his history.Footnote ³⁸ ʿAbduh gave lectures on Guizot’s book to Azharīs at the Dār al-ʿUlūm teacher training school in Cairo,Footnote ³⁹ and his biographer Mark Sedgwick surmises that his lost work Falsafat al-Ijtimāʿ wa-l-Tārīkh (Philosophy of Society and History) applied Guizot’s model of rising and falling civilisations to Arab history as a typology.Footnote ⁴⁰ But its influence can be felt in ʿAbduh’s theological statement Risālat al-Tawḥīd (Treatise on Unicity, 1897), which unlike a typical work of the genre placed Islam within a wider framework of societal evolution in human history. In his lecture on ‘Islam and Science’ delivered at the Sorbonne in 1883, two years after France added Tunisia to its North African possessions, Ernest Renan expounded further on the theme of Islamic decline but with an important shift from the earlier era of Orientalism: Now it was because of the Arabs themselves that Islam remained hostile to science,Footnote ⁴¹ despite Napoleon’s 1798 expedition to Egypt opening up new vistas for Islam’s rationalism manqué.Footnote ⁴² The response of Ottoman statesman and man of letters Namık Kemal in his Renan Müdafaanamesi (Refutation of Renan, 1910) was one of the strongest of the time, assailing Renan’s linguistic mistakes and projection of Europe’s history of religious intolerance onto an exogenous tradition.Footnote ⁴³ As Mignon points out, Kemal used Renan’s lecture as the occasion for one of the earliest attacks on Orientalist scholarship’s claims to expertise,Footnote ⁴⁴ and with Kemal we can see an early articulation of Said’s theory that Europe’s Islam was a discursive prop to its exercise of unprecedented political and economic power over Muslim peoples.Footnote ⁴⁵

This new European focus on racial themes accompanied Darwin’s theories on evolution and served imperial interests in the late nineteenth-century scramble for colonies. Britain and France feared the rallying power of Islam as a religious system whose hold over the believer was in general unimpaired by enlightenment and scientism. The discursive fragmentation of the Islamicate into ethnic constituent parts functioned as one way of managing this perceived challenge to imperial power in India and Africa. Problematisation of ‘the Arabs’ and ‘the Turks’ engendered in the colonial subject a heightened sense of historic duty to meet the challenge of civilisational responsibility set by Europe through delinking. Turkish, Egyptian, and Levantine intellectuals were particularly influenced by Gustave Le Bon (1841–1931). Many of his works were translated into Arabic including La psychologie des foules (The Psychology of Crowds, 1885), Les lois psychologiques de l’évolution des peuples (Psychological Laws of the Evolution of Peoples, 1894), the third part of Les premières civilisations (The First Civilisations, 1889), and La civilisation des Arabes (The Civilisation of the Arabs, 1884), which concluded with the statement that ‘peu de races se sont élevées plus haut, mais peu de races sont descendues plus bas’ (few nations rose so high then fell so low).Footnote ⁴⁶ Timothy Mitchell argues that Le Bon had the most impact of all among the European political writers on turn-of-the-century Egypt, effecting the ‘steady penetration of Orientalist themes into the writings of the Middle East’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Le Bon was also an important source for Jurjī Zaydān, a Lebanese Christian living in post-1882 Egypt who authored decline-themed histories and novels. The government commissioned him to produce two school textbooks, Tāʾrīkh Miṣr al-Ḥadīth (Modern History of Egypt, 1889) and al-Tāʾrīkh al-ʿĀmm (Universal History, 1890), and his five-volume Tāʾrīkh al-Tamaddun al-Islāmī (History of Islamic Civilisation, 1901–6) cites a number of European works including La civilisation des Arabes in advancing the paradigm of rise and fall.Footnote ⁴⁸ Guizot’s état stationnaire and Renan and Le Bon’s décadence are reproduced in the language of ʿAbduh’s generation as jumūd (stagnation)Footnote ⁴⁹ and inḥiṭāṭ (decline).Footnote ⁵⁰ By contrast it was the elitism of Le Bon’s abhorrence of the masses, privileging of the military caste, and racial supremacism that appealed to Ottoman elites, including the Young Turks in opposition, their Committee for Union and Progress (İttihad ve Terakki Cemiyeti, or CUP) once in power, and Mustafa Kemal’s early republic.Footnote ⁵¹

During this period ʿAbduh shifted position to viewing colonial Britain as too strong a power to resist, becoming a confidante of first Blunt and later Britain’s post-invasion colonial administrator Lord Cromer.Footnote ⁵² Indian thinker Sayyid Aḥmad Khān (1817–98), founder of the modernist Aligarh school, had already reached similar conclusions regarding how to manage European power following the crushing of the anti-British revolt of 1857.Footnote ⁵³ In British India colonial interventions had already gone much further than abstract argument and polemics, engaging directly in remodelling Islamic juridical and education systems.Footnote ⁵⁴ Reforms began in 1790 with the abolition of blood money for murder and the introduction of hard labour to replace extreme punishments such as cutting off of limbs; specification of crimes for which a judge could impose discretionary punishments in 1803; codification of lashes and jail as the punishment for adultery in 1817; the end of the universal applicability of Muslim criminal law to non-Muslims in 1832; and the introduction of English trial by jury and revival of Hindu institutions such as the village assembly (panchayat). Khān sought justification within the Islamic tradition for positions that conformed with European norms. He defended eating non-halal meat in a treatise on eating with People of the Book,Footnote ⁵⁵ presaging ʿAbduh’s famous Transvaal fatwa in 1903 regarding consumption of meat slaughtered by Christians and the wearing of European hats.Footnote ⁵⁶ Similar dynamics were at play in Muslim Central Asia: Kazan Tatars established themselves in the 1850s and 1860s as the pioneers of new modes of education that would integrate Muslims into liberalising Russian imperial culture and society.Footnote ⁵⁷

The Salafi View of Decline

Decline was central to the thinking of those engaged in an internal critique of the Islamic tradition, one that challenged systematic adherence to the methodologies of the four Sunni legal traditions (taqlīd) for reasons related to their communal contexts. Shāh Walīullāh (d. 1762) was a Ḥanafī hadith scholar from India who upheld the monistic theosophy of Ibn ʿArabī (d. 1240) as well as the theological positions – associated with the Abbasid-era hadith movement – of the Ḥanbalī jurist and theologian of Damascus Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328). He was driven by a concern over syncretic approaches prevalent in Mughal India, where Muslim elites were politically dominant but Muslim practice co-existed with diverse non-Muslim traditions.Footnote ⁵⁸ Yemeni Zaydī scholar Muḥammad al-Shawkānī (d. 1834), on the other hand, sought to stabilise the political underpinnings of the Zaydī imamate through denuding the Zaydī imam of his role as a mujtahid and forbidding rebellion against the imam.Footnote ⁵⁹ Both Walīullāh and al-Shawkānī attacked taqlīd and emphasised the study of hadith independently of the methodologies of the legal schools. Walīullāh inspired the Ahl-i Hadis movement in India, while al-Shawkānī was influential for nineteenth-century scholars in Ottoman Baghdad and Damascus who articulated similar ideas around the organising motif of a return to the ways of the salaf (the early Muslims) with as little mediation of the elite scholastic culture of the madhāhib as possible.Footnote ⁶⁰

Modernist ʿulamaʾ and intellectuals, on the other hand, deployed these ideas in the service of their rationalist project, which though couched in Islamic terminologies and historical references was impacted by the European categories of reformation and enlightenment. Rather than traditionist disdain for post-classical legal and theological output, reformers upholding the scriptural authority of the Qurʾan could have the Lutheran model in mind to engender European-style progress.Footnote ⁶¹ Indeed, historian Reinhard Schulze sees a calque on the West European classicism of the era in the discourse around the salaf developed by late nineteenth-century modernist reformers.Footnote ⁶² ʿAbduh reworked al-Shawkānī’s ideas on ijmāʿ (consensus) among jurists and used ijtihād (legal reasoning that engages directly with basic sources of Qurʾan and hadith) freed of the requirement to follow the legal reasoning of authoritative jurisprudents to arrive at desired conclusions in which the methodology of uṣūl al-fiqh was a secondary concern.Footnote ⁶³ In this manner shariʿa was adapted to fit an understanding of modernity which, through codification in British India, the Ottoman Mecelle, the Turkish republic’s civil code of 1926, and the changes introduced in Egypt and Arab states from the time of ʿAbduh to the work of ʿAbd al-Razzāq al-Sanhūrī in drafting Egypt’s 1948 civil code, ‘closed the open text of shariʿa jurisprudence’.Footnote ⁶⁴ In Risālat al-Tawḥīd ʿAbduh went even further in generalising taqlīd as the antithesis of human progress; in other words taqlīd represents decline itself.Footnote ⁶⁵

In his study of al-Shawkānī, Bernard Haykel argues that while the jurist was aware of Napoleon’s occupation of Egypt in 1798, which played a foundational role in subsequent Arab nationalist, Muslim reformist, and Western scholarship of the region, he conveyed no sense that his writings on ijtihād and taqlīd could be considered a form of response to Europe. ‘In formulating these ideas, Shawkānī was unaware of the European enlightenment and perceived no intellectual threat to the world of Islam from Europe … For him, the sources of Muslim weakness were intrinsic insofar as they were to be found in the erroneous beliefs and practices of Muslims themselves,’ Haykel writes.Footnote ⁶⁶ Similarly, ʿAzīz Aḥmad notes of Walīullāh’s opposition to taqlīd that it was a breakthrough ‘absolutely unconnected with any western influences’, inspired by spiritual and historical forces specific to Islamic society in the early eighteenth century and centred on the idea of decline in Mughal and Ottoman intellectual traditions.Footnote ⁶⁷ There have been few attempts to argue that the eighteenth-century religious movement founded by Muḥammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhāb (1703–1892) in central Arabia, commonly known as Wahhabism, was in any meaningful way inspired by Europe.Footnote ⁶⁸ So there is reason to resist the tempting assertion that it was European expansion alone that stimulated the notion of Muslim decline and the search for inspiration in earliest Islam.Footnote ⁶⁹

In Arabic writing in the early twentieth century the term salafiyya (Salafism) was coined to describe these revivalist movements, despite the diametrically opposed motivations of these two broad groups subsumed under its umbrella. In time the divergence in intellectual genealogies would find semantic expression in the use of the term salafiyya for only the second group, while derivatives of tajdīd came more to denote the first in recognition of its Europe-facing nature. This definitional vagueness over tajdīd and salafiyya is a salient feature in the writing of Islamic intellectual history in the modern period. A third group who could be termed the conservatives, or traditionalists,Footnote ⁷⁰ opposed the reform agenda of both parties. Mustafa Sabri and Zahid Kevseri belong to this set of defenders of the tradition, while Akif we can consider a modernist reformer in the mould of ʿAbduh. In Late Ottoman Istanbul the modernist reformers were by far the loudest voice among the ulema and devout intellectuals because they engaged more forcefully with the dominant ideological trend of the period, that of the nationalists who, deeply influenced by European positivist and materialist philosophy, harboured inimical views of religion’s place in public life.

Challenging decline has been easier within historical geographies stripped of their Islamic framing, such as the ‘Ottoman empire’, ‘Ottoman Egypt’, or ‘early modern Egypt’. Baki Tezcan has been able to argue that Ottoman absolutism was gradually diluted by the socio-political power of the military institution (the Janissaries) and the juridical powers of the ulema, creating what he calls a process of proto-democratisation among the Muslim element of the populace (reaya) – a system disrupted by the autocratic reformations of the Tanzimat era.Footnote ⁷¹ However, a growing body of work is pushing back against tropes of Islamic decline which for long influenced analysis across a variety of socio-historical fields within what Marshall Hodgson called Islamicate society.Footnote ⁷² In a study of seventeenth-century intellectual currents in the Ottoman empire and non-Ottoman North Africa Khaled El-Rouayheb has questioned decline theory as the product of a legalistic outlook shared by both Orientalist scholars and different wings of Muslim reformism in its broadest sense. A default position took hold in twentieth-century Islamic and Western scholarship that placed law rather than the practice of theological reasoning at the heart of Islam,Footnote ⁷³ imagining kalām as an apologetic practice that since its late Umayyad beginnings placed loyalty to Greek intellectual paradigms above the requirements of Islamic revelation.Footnote ⁷⁴ El-Rouayheb points to two basic problems: this approach ignores other fields of knowledge such as philosophy, logic, astronomy, grammar, and theosophical Sufi thought, and it fails to explain what is inherently irrational or inflexible in a legal system that obliges jurists to consider its precedents, which is what the term taqlīd, often misleadingly translated as ‘imitation’, expresses.Footnote ⁷⁵ Kalām was a practice that developed skills in logic and disputation, and it was this process of taḥqīq (verification of truth) that early modern Ottoman and North African scholars contrasted with taqlīd, not ijtihād.Footnote ⁷⁶ Although kalām and its associated disciplines evolved and retained its vitality, the post-classical pre-modern period became a ‘forgotten chapter in Islamic religious history’,Footnote ⁷⁷ El-Rouayheb says, partly because Ottomanists tend to look past ulema material since it was mainly written in Arabic, while Arabic-centred historical fields tend to consider Ottoman history in turn as a discipline unto itself.Footnote ⁷⁸ Both El-Rouayheb and Madeline Zilfi reject the idea of the Kadızadeli movement as emblematic of an Ottoman decay rooted in religion.Footnote ⁷⁹

Late Ottoman Debate over Islam

Ottoman ulema became the subject of heightened contestation in the decades following the Tanzimat reforms of 1839. Although they continued with their Arabic-language output, the main theatre of their public engagement became the emerging Ottoman Turkish press.Footnote ⁸⁰ The rule of Abdülhamid (from 1876 to 1909, but effectively ending in 1908) served ultimately to diminish their status through their implication in the retrenchment of sultanic absolutism. The Hamidian regime began with the promulgation of the first Ottoman constitution in 1876 but two years later it suspended parliament as territorial losses mounted and proceeded to deploy the İlmiye and Sufi orders in extending the writ of the state and fending off the Western missionary challenge, particularly in the domain of education in the empire’s Arab and Kurdish peripheries.Footnote ⁸¹ This increased the Young Turk opposition movement in its conviction that the ulema and religion in general were an obstacle to the political, economic, juridical, and educational transformations required by scientific modernity. Public discourse objectified the scholars of the pre-modern order and their knowledge as a problem to a greater degree than in Egypt, but this only became consequential following the revolution of 1908 that brought back the constitutional order and freed public space for discussion of previously suppressed questions of religion and state.Footnote ⁸²

With the rise to power of the CUP, the İlmiye institution came under pressure to promote a reformist Islam, which for the CUP meant loosening the hold of the Meşihat (sheikh ül-Islam’s office) over education and the judiciary.Footnote ⁸³ This, one of the biggest questions in Ottoman public life of the time, was debated through the lively publications scene that arose from 1908: mainly, the Muslim modernist journal Sırat-ı Müstakim (1908–25, published as Sebilürreşad from March 1912), co-edited by Akif; the conservative religious newspaper Beyanülhak (1908–12), edited by Sabri; and journals that reframed Islam in fashionable Turkist terms such as the CUP-funded İslam Mecmuası (1914–18) and Türk Yurdu which were major outlets for nationalist ideologue Ziya Gökalp. In one of the earliest scholarly examinations of this debate, Ahmed Muhiddin used German social science theory to define the modernists as advocates of Islamic Reformation, dubbing them a ‘Reformation trend’ (Reformasyon akımı) whose positions reflected a European view of the path to modernity: access to scripture without priestly mediation, secular approaches to law that dilute the writ of shariʿa courts, creed that stresses human agency and rejects fatalism.Footnote ⁸⁴ In this Kulturbewegung they stood in opposition to what Muhiddin called the ‘historical Islam’ (tarihî İslam) of the conservatives who upheld the juridical and theological framework of the Muslim polity in which they were the key functionaries.Footnote ⁸⁵ The Arab reform trend taking Ibn Taymiyya as its cultic hero and intersecting with the Turkish modernists in its critique of Sufism and some aspects of received creed had only limited currency in Istanbul because of its association with the anti-Ottoman Wahhabi movement, its objection to the Ḥanafī-Māturīdī legal-theological system of the Turkish seminaries, and its chauvinistic Arabist undertones.Footnote ⁸⁶ Devout intellectual İsmail Hakkı (1869–1946) was one of the first to integrate the new Arabic usages of salaf in his Yeni İlm-i Kelam (New Theology, 1920). In describing the Ahl al-Ḥadīth scholars who asserted the primacy of hadith in legal and doctrinal questions, Hakkı used the established term eseriyye (Ar. athariyya, in reference to athar, a report), but he was also innovative in referring to them in Turkish as Selefiyye (the spelling given in recent Latin script versions).Footnote ⁸⁷

It is in this intellectual milieu that the term ‘Islamist’ first appears. In 1904 Tatar intellectual Yūsuf Akçura (1876–1935) published an article in the Cairo-based journal Türk that outlined the three ideological schools competing to define the direction of a reformed Ottoman state: multi-ethnic, multi-confessional Ottomanism (Osmanlılık, Osmanlı milliyeti); ethnic Turkish unity (Türklük, Türk milliyeti, Türk birliği); pan-Islamic unity (Müslümanlık, İslam birliği, İslamiyet politikası). He concluded with the question: which will be the most beneficial and viable for the Ottoman state, Müslümanlık or Türklük?Footnote ⁸⁸ As public debate expanded from 1908 these positions began to harden into opposed ideological camps.Footnote ⁸⁹ In a series of eight articles published in Türk Yurdu in 1913, titled collectively ‘Üç Cereyan’ and the basis of his book Türkleşmek, İslamlaşmak, Muasırlaşmak (To Become Turkish, To Become Pan-Islamic, To Become Modern, 1918), Ziya Gökalp used the neologism İslamcılık alongside İslamlık, intending them as parallels to Türkçülük and Türklük in his discussion of the question of pan-Islamic action and identity.Footnote ⁹⁰ Gökalp never used the term İslamcı, which would equate to the English Islamist in modern Turkish, but he did invent the terms İslam ümmetçisi and İslam milliyetçisi: only the former is acceptable, he said, because it understands an Islamic identity without the state project overtones of Islamic union in the latter.Footnote ⁹¹ In other words, a Turkist could feel at home talking in abstract terms of the international ümmet but milliyet should be reserved for ethnic nationalism alone.

The response of Akif’s colleague Ahmed Naim (1872–1934) was a series of articles published in 1914 and as a book under the same name, İslam’da Dava-ı Kavmiyet (The Question of Nationalism in Islam), in which he argued that the Turkists were reviving the partisan tribalism that the Islamic revolution explicitly rejected in its earliest period. Naim took up the terms Türkçü and İslamcı, without apparently realising that Gökalp had talked only of Islamism (İslamcılık), not Islamists.Footnote ⁹²

Naim sensed that this terminology was intended as a polemical device to preserve the Turkists as believing Muslims in the face of ulema and devout intellectuals who openly charged them with atheism through use of the word dinsiz (‘without religion’).Footnote ⁹⁴ Gökalp never recognised himself in these terms; indeed, their atheistic implication explains the republic’s preference for the neologisms laiklik and sekülarizm.Footnote ⁹⁵ He did use the Arabic-origin word lā-dīnī (‘non-religious’) but as a translation of the French laïque when advocating stripping the Ottoman religious establishment of its juridical powers to leave them authority only in matters of personal piety.Footnote ⁹⁶

By islamlaşmak Gökalp had meant an identitarian understanding of the state as a transnational representative of Muslims, with obligations beyond its borders that transcended race and language. In another work published first as a series of articles in Sebilürreşad and then as a book in 1918 under the title of İslamlaşmak,Footnote ⁹⁷ former prime minister Said Halim Paşa (1865–1921) took the debate in a new direction, appropriating Gökalp’s term for a theory of Islam as a total system governing the life of the individual and determining the shape of the modern state. ‘Islam [İslamiyet] is the most perfect human religion [din] in that it possesses its own beliefs, ethics based on those beliefs, social values arising from those ethics, and politics springing from its social values,’ he wrote. ‘The totality of these basic factors is such that they manage the lives of men and though separate they act together to create a homogenous, perfect and indivisible whole [bir küll] which encompasses the idealist and positivist schools, like the moral individual who has religion [dini bulunduğu şahs-ı manevide olduğu gibi].’Footnote ⁹⁸ This was one of the earliest articulations of the notion of Islam as a comprehensive personal, social, legal, and political system and expressed by the term ‘Islamism’, taking the reified religion identified by Smith beyond the realm of law and theology and into that of ideology, or the political, in a process of ideologisation.Footnote ⁹⁹ Writing just after his exit from the Ottoman war cabinet, Said Halim also wrote that the current era was characterised by a ‘distancing from Islam’ (İslam’dan uzaklaşma) due to educational and legal innovations of French origin which had led in his view to moral chaos. The implication was that society could not become truly Muslim (islamlaşmak) if its citizens did not lead the life of believers, thus a process of re-Islamisation is in order. Said Halim’s thesis received less attention in republican Turkey than Gökalp’s writing, since the devout intellectuals lost out in the early reckoning with nationalism,Footnote ¹⁰⁰ but ideologised religion would become a major feature of twentieth-century Islamic thought in the hands of figures such as Ḥasan al-Bannā, Abū al-Aʿlā Mawdūdī, and Sayyid Quṭb.Footnote ¹⁰¹

The intense ideological conflict unleashed by the 1908 revolution came to a head in the period 1918–22 as two separate political authorities developed in the context of post-war occupation – the sultanate based in Istanbul which co-operated with the British authorities and the Turkish national parliament (Türkiye büyük millet meclisi) established in Ankara in 1920. The ulema and devout intellectuals were faced with tough choices. Akif, Nursi, and a number of other religious figures moved to Ankara in 1920 in the belief that Ankara’s victory over invading Greek forces and the political plans of the European Allied powers would lead to a harmonisation of nationalist and religious doctrine in whatever political arrangement emerged in the end. When Britain acquiesced to Ankara’s forces taking control of government in Istanbul following the defeat of the Greek armies, Sabri and Kevseri fled abroad, not only because their support of the sultan’s government meant likely prosecution and even death, but because they understood it as the final victory of a broadly secular nationalist worldview underpinned by positivism after years of bitter contestation. For Akif and Nursi the choice became co-option in the new educational and religious structures of the Turkish republic, declared in November 1923, or retreat from public life in the face of revolutionary tribunals and harassment of journalists. The death of Ali Kemal Bey, a writer and minister in one of the sultan’s cabinets, at the hands of a mob in November 1922 was an indication of what was to come. Sabri, Kevseri, and Akif chose Egypt; Said Nursi remained.

Akif is a figure of enormous controversy. The leading advocate of ʿAbduh’s ideas in Turkish-language debate and a gifted poet, Akif agreed to produce a Turkish translation of the Qurʾan for the religious affairs administration known as Diyanet established in 1924.Footnote ¹⁰² Though he returned to Istanbul to die in 1936, Akif never delivered the text out of concern that it would be misused by Kemalist radicals at the height of their influence in the 1930s to institutionalise a Turkish Islam severed from its Arabic base after their success in imposing the call to prayer in Turkish.Footnote ¹⁰³ It has emerged in recent studies that Akif had completed his Turkish Qurʾan in several copies, at least two of which he entrusted to Mehmed İhsan Efendi (1902–61), a religious scholar who also left for Egypt and father to historian and former head of the Organisation of the Islamic Conference Ekmeleddin İhsanoğlu. İhsan Efendi revealed the existence of these copies to Ekmeleddin, Sabri’s son Ibrahim, and three others when they were gathered around his deathbed in Cairo in June 1961. Published accounts of the incident say it was at İbrahim Sabri’s insistence that Akif’s wish for the text to be destroyed was honoured – burned in a laundry basin on a balcony in the district of ʿAbbāsiyya – for fear that the previous year’s military coup signalled a return to the radical project of Turkicising Islam.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

Sabri and Kevseri never returned to Turkey, preferring the extant internationalism of Arabic Islamic culture in Cairo, where they became celebrated figures as rejectionists of the Salafi and liberal modernist trends. Operating across rapidly and radically reconstituted ethnic and linguistic lines, Sabri and Kevseri were bearers of a tradition that ideological and technological transformations had conspired to render obsolete. This realisation led them to engage in the polemical interventions of the new class of public intellectuals, of which Akif was an exemplar. In Egypt they became agents in the process of rethinking Islam as a belief system, juridical tradition, and political ideology, a process in which Turkey was to remain somewhat isolated for several decades.