The Evolution of Intellectual Life in the Late Ottoman Empire: Religion, Identity, and Literature
Panel 131, 2009 Annual Meeting
On Monday, November 23 at 11:00 am
Panel Description
Prior historians of the Ottoman Empire have studied how religious conceptions of government and identity transformed into more secular understandings, largely explaining the emergence of the Turkish Republic as a secular nation-state. The purpose of this panel is to further explore the diverse set of forces that contributed to this dynamic intellectual environment.
The intellectuals of the early nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire were still not greatly influenced by the European ideas of nation or nationalism. A significant religious figure whose influence has survived until now was Shaykh Khalid. His religious teachings reached out to the masses as well as to intellectual and political circles. Shaykh Khalid’s successful reforms in a non-western and religious framework represent an early stage in the intellectual evolution of the late Ottoman Empire.
As the Young Turks came to lead the Empire, European-style secular ideas became increasingly visible in the intellectual atmosphere of the early twentieth century. Ziya Gokalp’s arguments that Islam and westernization were compatible highlighted the need to secularize the Ottoman state. A significant, but mostly ignored, contribution was made by Halim Sabit, whose strong background in Islamic law helped him justify secularization through the Islamic legal concept of ijtihad.
A factor that facilitated this intellectual transformation was the means with which ideas spread in Ottoman society. A shift from oral to written accounts of minstrel literary tradition presents a good case of how technological advancements transformed not only the means of communication, but also the structure and interests of the audience as well as the content of intellectual works.
The discussant of this panel has recently conducted research on Namik Kemal, who is generally regarded in Ottoman historiography as the first to adopt liberal nationalism, and who appealed mostly to a religious and conservative audience. He proposed reformist arguments compatible with Islam within the conceptual framework of European ideas. Consequently Namik Kemal constitutes a strong link between the nineteenth-century Islamist intellectuals and the early twentieth-century reformists.
Thus, the reformist intellectual line of thought from the early nineteenth-century to early twentieth-century Ottoman Empire presents a continuity of utilizing Islamic discourse to provide justification for reformist ideas, but at the same time contrasts sharply in terms of European influence in secularization and nationalism.
This paper proposes to study the doctrines of the nineteenth-century Sufi leader, Shaykh Khalid (1776-1827), his brotherhood, the Naqshbandiyya-Khalidiyya, and their influence on the intellectual life in the Ottoman Empire between 1800 and 1830. I am interested in the intellectual milieu and methods of organization that led to the rise of the Naqshbandiyya-Khalidiyya and other Muslim movements of reform during the early nineteenth century. In particular, I hope to explain why rival Muslim reform movements in the Ottoman Empire were unable to match the success of Shaykh Khalid and his followers. Indeed, Khalid’s brotherhood spread rapidly among ethnicities and peoples as diverse as Kurdish tribesmen, Damascene Arab merchants, and senior Ottoman officials.
By analyzing the correspondence of Shaykh Khalid, his writings and poetry, the writings of his followers, hagiographies, court records and imperial edicts, I will show that the success of the Naqshbandiyya-Khalidiyya rested on Khalid’s ideological flexibility and ability to appeal to far more audiences simultaneously than any other Muslim figure of his era. The roots of his broad appeal were his multilayered identity, his promise to bring Islamic practices in line with the religion’s highest ideals, and his denial that the current moment is fully real. He also emphasized that the various crises afflicting Muslims reflected their misguided “devotion” to the temporal world, or dunya (materiality), as opposed to the hereafter, or din (religious devotion). While it is true that Khalid may have employed bigoted views at certain points in his career, far more critical to his appeal was his status as a powerful Muslim saint and his emphasis on the central role of women in the Naqshbandiyya-Khalidiyya.
Finally, I hope to begin a process of reframing how scholars look at intellectual trends during the first third of the nineteenth century in the Ottoman Empire, a period which is often wrongly seen as identical to the later periods of the nineteenth century when European power was omnipresent. In reality, Ottoman peoples and their leaders were aware of Europe’s growing power but did not believe (as many would later would) that the Empire’s problems were sufficiently dire that they required a reform program based on Western models. Instead, Khalid’s reform program and other non-Western models appeared to offer viable paths to revive the Empire and to better meet the needs of its many peoples.
The Ottoman Empire in its last decade shifted from Abdulhamid II’s Islamist policies to Young Turks’ nationalist and secularist government. This transformation changed not only the Ottoman polity but also the dynamics of the intellectual circles. A young and ambitious member of the newly emerging Turkist intellectual circles was Halim Sabit (Sibay), whose intellectuals activities are largely ignored in the late Ottoman historiography. As a madrasa professor with a strong education in Islamic law Halim Sabit was in a distinct position to provide Islamic justifications for the Young Turk government and its secularization efforts. During the years of World War I Halim Sabit worked as the editor of the biweekly Islam Mecmuasi which increasingly and ardently laid the intellectual grounds for secularization.
Focusing on Halim Sabit’s views on ijtihad as expressed in the late Ottoman journals Sirat-i Mustakim and Islam Mecmuasi this paper argues that ijtihad was the key concept within the Islamic legal terminology which Halim Sabit utilized to justify secularization in the late Ottoman Empire. A fervent defender of ijtihad Halim Sabit argued that only by reviving ijtihad can Muslims adapt to the modern conditions. For Halim Sabit, ijtihad was very much needed in the contemporary Muslim world and it had become an inevitable solution to prevent the demise of Muslims. After a discussion of the historical evolution of the concept of ijtihad Halim Sabit concluded that the Tanzimat Reforms had to be carried further by reducing the powers of religious authorities to the realm of religious worship only and expanding the powers of the secular ministries to all the realms of the state. A detailed look into Halim Sabit’s schema of a secular Ottoman state helps better understand the intellectual background of the secularization in the late Ottoman Empire and the later Turkish Republic. Published articles in Sirat-i Mustakim and Islam Mecmuasi as well as Halim Sabit’s personal notes and library constitute the primary sources for this paper.
