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Imagining Religion in Ottoman Popular Scientific Journals : The Example of ?emsettin Sami’s Hafta
Abstract
Popular scientific journals in the Ottoman Empire, which started to be published in the second half of the nineteenth century, have rarely been used as a source to capture attempts of religious reform. Instead, religious reform has been widely considered as a subject that was part of studies on reformist ulama. That predisposition against using popular scientific journals as a source for understanding religious transformation is further amplified inasmuch as the main goal of these journals – i.e. disseminating science – has long been seen as a ‘secularist’ endeavor naturally undermining religion. As a result of these two trends in Ottoman intellectual history, the highly complex social nature of religious reform has been limited to debates happened among experts of religion and their ‘progressivist’ critiques, meanwhile marginalizing popularizers. Rather unusually, in my paper, I used the famous journalist ?emsettin Sami’s popular scientific journal Hafta with the aim of understanding how popular attempts to disseminate modern sciences might have affected the process of transformation of religious imaginations about God, nature, and man. My research indicates that popular scientific journals like Hafta should not be categorized as merely science-promoting journals. By virtue of relying on religious symbolism and religious forms of justification of modern natural sciences, Hafta responded to a demand to envision religion in a modern way that would largely meet the needs of the middle classes concerning their existential sense of belonging, cultural and social identity, as well as an insuppressible appetite for technological and social progress. Regarding science and religion, Hafta provided a resolution that alternated between a deistic and natural theological view of nature. While modern natural sciences rendered nature transparent and demystified, Hafta tried to redefine the base of the sense of awe for the Creator within the boundaries of the scientific worldview. In this process, the journal constructed a popular language that related science and religion in a particular way. In short, along with disseminating modern natural sciences, Hafta also contributed to popular religious discourses, which were more open to elastic and eclectic resolutions than their expert counterparts. My research is a first step towards introducing Ottoman popular scientific journals not only as agents of ‘secular reforms’ but also as major providers of popular imaginations of religion in a modern world.
Discipline
History
Geographic Area
Turkey
Sub Area
19th-21st Centuries