The project of religious reform undertaken by nineteenth-century Islamic Modernists pivoted on the Prophet Mohammad. For Modernists, the retrieval of the Prophet Mohammad from the detritus and distortions of tradition was the prerequisite to redeploying the Prophet as the eternal exemplar – the model of emulation for all Muslims. Islamic Modernists recast the Prophet Mohammad as the ideal expression of Modern Islam – of a rationalized, internalized and spiritualized expression of God’s intent. As such, Mohammad could again serve as precedent, but precedent defined by his intentions and pious sensibilities, not by his specific actions in his historical context. Historicizing the prophet enabled his resuscitation as an enduring model of emulation – the ideal modern Muslim. The historicisation of the Prophet was also central to the Islamic Modernist articulation of a new, modern, methodological path forward – a new hermeneutics of the Quran and the Hadith. Historicizing the Prophet was the necessary prerequisite for religious reform as the de-contextualization of Islamic essence and its re-contextualization in the modern present – the reclamation of eternal truth from the distortions of Tradition. The quest for the historical prophet was therefore also a quest for the essence of Islam in its greatest, most perfect historical expression. Historicizing the Prophet was necessary in order to humanize him and fundamentally reconstruct the concept of precedent. For Islamic Modernists, the Prophet was first and foremost the mediator of God’s intent. Mohammad was not simply the bearer of God’s directives for mankind, but enjoyed a Divinely bestowed consciousness which provided him with knowledge of God’s intent. Aided by God, Mohammad translated God’s intent into practice. Islamic Modernists suggested that it was this act of translation – the art of negotiating the relationship of author (as God) with audience (seventh-century Arabian society) – that constituted the true precedent of the Prophet. It was this mediating role between the eternal and the historically contingent that Modernists defined as prophetic precedent – replacing Hadith as content and Sunna as replication, with the concept of translation.

In 1914 Celal Nuri “?leri” (1881–1938) published his magnum opus, Hatem ül-Enbiya (or The Seal of the Prophets). A critical work of Muslim scholarship, Hatem ül-Enbiya challenged traditional approaches to the prophetic biography genre (siyer/s?ra) in its systematic application of scientific, rational, and “mathematical” methodologies to historical and theological questions. Nuri’s early career coincided with the Second Constitutional Era (1909–1920)—a period when nationalism, modernism, and pan-Islamism competed for public approval and ideological dominance. He believed in the value and place of religion in modern life, and even espoused belief in Islam’s potential as a trans-national unifying force. Nuri was a rare blend of modernist-Islamist, whose beliefs died out by 1922, along with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. Under the Turkish Republic, Nuri rebranded himself a secularist and is considered among the young Republic’s ideological founding figures. Hatem ül-Enbiya was Celal Nuri’s attempt at holding Islam’s greatest champion, the Prophet Muhammad, to the scientific and public scrutiny that comprised the highest standard of modern, rational inquiry. Nuri’s work was as much a statement on the validity of modern methods as it was a proclamation of the soundness of Islamic principles. The book drew the criticism of local and regional ulama prior to its publication, which is why its final chapter consists of a preemptive rebuttal entitled “My Response to Detractors,” written and submitted to the press by Nuri in haste. Hatem ül-Enbiya is a significant but forgotten contribution to early twentieth-century Muslim modernist scholarship. This paper examines Hatem ül-Enbiya’s formulation of the Prophet Muhammad and Islam’s rational foundations. Nuri highlights inherently rational framings of Islam to translate the religion’s intrinsic modernity into current sensibilities. Moreover, by grounding Islam’s founder in rationalism and reason, Nuri injects logical mechanisms that would enable the reformation of the religion from the inside out, through a reinvigorated understanding of the Prophet Muhammad as timeless, exemplary human being.

This paper rethinks the inflow of Western ideas into the Ottoman Empire through the metaphor of ‘cultural translation,’ which conceives of ‘translators’ as active ‘negotiators’ rather than simple transmitters. These ‘translators and negotiators’ also defy the binary of advocates or rejectors of new ideas. This paper will focus on the reformist ulema as both ‘translators’ of the prestige of modern science and as ‘negotiators’ of scientific authority vis-à-vis religious authority. To depict the complexity of the process of translation and negotiation, I focus on the debate surrounding extraterrestrial life. Its largely speculative nature reveals the ideological assumptions of the negotiators. Unlike more concrete discussions, the debates surrounding extraterrestrial life reflect the complexity of the discursive and rhetorical aspects of nineteenth-century-Ottomans’ perception of European science, its prestige, and authority vis-à-vis Islam. Since the Copernican revolution, the belief in the multiplicity of habitable worlds spread such that by the end of the eighteenth century, life in other planets was almost taken for granted by the Western reading public. However, while belief in extraterrestrial life started to fade in the West from 1860s onwards, it continued to draw increasing attention among the Ottomans. Relevant articles on this issue appeared from the 1870s to 1920s in Ottoman popular journals such as Hadika, Ulum, Hikmet, Mahfil, Malumat, and Resimli Kitap. In 1909, the issue of life outside earth received direct attention of the ulema in the pages of the prominent Islamist journal S?rat?müstakim, where two opposing religious scholars engaged into a fierce debate. The scientistic or progressivist one held that the Qur’an included verses on extraterrestrial life though authoritative exegetes failed to acknowledge them. The conservative one, however, rejected this position inasmuch as it attempted to question the authority of earlier prominent ulema. Obviously, such an attempt must have been based on strong reason and solid evidence. In their defenses, both the scientistic and the conservative scholars appealed to the traditional Islamic epistemology and methodology and adapted them to discuss a modern scientific issue, which renders the debate as a case that resonates with the metaphor of ‘translation’ of a ‘foreign’ debate into a ‘native’ one. This paper uses concepts of ‘translation’ and ‘negotiation’, to explain ways in which science, theology, and exegesis crosscut each other. The two seemingly contradictory positions functioned equally as two different modes of resisting cultural imperialism and Western supremacy.

The late Ottoman and early Turkish Republican projects of modernity need to be examined as a conversation and translation among numerous Ottoman intellectuals, scholars, bureaucrats, deputies, political leaders as well between them and their counterparts in the West and other Muslim domains. In this frame, this paper focuses on the conceptions of religion and secular in the Ottoman periodical press as dialogue and contestation among multiple socio-political actors. Despite the high number of studies on Turkish secularization, there is no systematic study of the terms used for secular in Ottoman and Turkish intellectual and political domains. This paper undertakes a genealogical mapping of the expressions used for secular in Ottoman periodicals in early twentieth century. By undertaking a key word search in Ottoman periodical publications through two online databases, which are those of the ISAM library and Islamic Journals Project, and reading the relevant articles, and then broadening the research based on emerging new key words, the paper argues that the following terms were used for the secular: ladini, ladinilik, laique, laiklik. The expressions gayr-? dini (not religious) and dinsizlik (irreligion) were also used. The paper presents particularly the periods roughly around which these terms were coined or received a wider circulation as well as pinpoints the different meanings they were assigned. In the pursuit of a linguistic labelling of the terms standing for the secular, the paper also shares the insights of the critical scholarship on the categories of religion and secular. The arguments of W. C. Smith, T. Asad, A. Tayob, among others, are paid attention in examining religion and secular in the Ottoman/Turkish context. In this respect, the paper studies the ways in which religion (din) was defined in Ottoman periodicals, particularly as an abstract and universal category of belief, elaborated vis-à-vis the construction of its opponent dinsizlik (irreligion). By examining essays in different Ottoman Turkish periodicals, between 1908 and 1925, the paper examines the linguistic and historical coining and redefinition of lexicon for religion and secular, whereby words are not mere words but constructions-in-formation, shaped by their social, legal, and political milieus, attesting the contested and shared conversations among different social actors.

This paper explores how Ottoman novels, including Ahmet Mithat Efendi’s Felatun Bey and Rak?m Efendi, imagine, depict, and comment upon changing modes of sociability in public and social spaces in the late Ottoman Empire. As one of the most prolific writers in the late Ottoman period, Ahmet Mithat Efendi is known for giving many of his stories and novels a didactic bent, utilizing these mediums to communicate his visions for how his fellow Ottomans should navigate the complexities of modern life. This includes modeling how to navigate the shifting landscape of social venues and the modes of sociability thereto attached, be it public spaces such as theaters, promenades, or outdoor pleasure spots, or private spaces such as gatherings with family and close friends in the home. Understanding Ahmet Mithat Efendi’s model for how to conduct oneself in public and social spaces demands unpacking the way in which he modeled the utilization of new, public social spaces for the performance of a new articulation of morality. We can interpret this articulation as a “secularized,” civic morality which was imagined to be central to the constitution of the identity of the modern Ottoman citizen. Here it is prudent to clarify that what we mean by asserting that this morality has been “secularized” is that this process consists of a re-articulation of the relationship between morality and religion that was dependent on the interiorization of religious moralities. Thus, we are describing the redefinition of the relationship between morality and religion, and not necessarily an anti- or a-religious construction of morality per se. More broadly, this paper explores how authors portray the relationship between the cultural charge to different public and social spaces and the modes of sociability carried out in these spaces. It will be crucial to evaluate how the authors convey the differentiation between different types of social spaces along several key lines of distinction whether it be “public” or “private” or spaces, or whether the cultural charge of a space may be interpreted as “alafranga,” “alaturka” or otherwise.