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 THE LONDON SCHOOL OF ECONOMICS AND POLITICAL SCIENCE
DEPARTMENT OF INTERNATIONAL HISTORY
Intellectual Responses to Ottoman Modernisation and the “Problem” of Turkish Westernisation,
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Abstract:
This dissertation focuses on the changing understandings of the concept of “modernisation” in the late Ottoman Empire (1856-1923). Examining the spectrum of interpretations of what it meant to be “modern,” it analyses the debates within contemporary intellectual circles on whether Islam was compatible with modernity. It first investigates the unique Ottoman identity created by the Young Ottomans, which synthesized their Islamic heritage with the European-inspired lifestyles that were gaining currency in Ottoman port cities. It then compares and contrasts their ideas against the different visions of an “ideal society” put forward by various members of the Young Turks, which included both fashioning an Islamic brand of modernity as well as promoting a blind commitment to its western format. Correlatively, this dissertation also complements these intellectual discussions with a socio-economic analysis. In this sense, it seeks to understand how Europe’s cultural penetration of Istanbul in the nineteenth century, the political and social reorganization of the Ottoman Empire, combined with Istanbul’s “peculiar” urban transformation in this period, produced a unique brand of cosmopolitanism and shaped these often-clashing ideas on modernity and what “being modern” entailed. It finally asks how these changes – both intellectual and socio-economic – set the conditions for the rise of an elite that would spearhead Turkey’s “westernisation” after the proclamation of the Turkish Republic in 1923.
Keywords: Young Ottomans, Young Turks, cosmopolitanism, modernity, Islamic modernity, modernization, westernization, Turkish Republic
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Introduction
‘For me, Istanbul has always been a city of ruins and end-of-empire melancholy… Still, the melancholy of this dying culture was all around us. Great as the desire to westernize and modernize may have been, the more desperate wish…was to be rid of all the bitter memories of the fallen empire: rather as a spurned lover throws away his lost beloved’s clothes, possessions and photographs. [And] the great drive to westernize amount mostly to the erasure of the past.’1
For those generations emerging on the heels of the 1920s, Ottoman cultural heritage had become inaccessible; out of the ruins of an Islamic Empire, Mustafa Kemal constructed a ‘Western’ nation-state that now regarded the notion of an Islamic/Eastern Turkey as an insulting conception. Indeed, Turkey stands out as an ‘anomaly’ in the Middle East for having carried out a ‘successful’ project of sartorial social engineering, whereas other attempts at similar cultural overhauls, for instance that of Reza Shah Pahlavi in Iran in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, achieved only transient success. This study will be concerned with this very issue – the question of how and why Mustafa Kemal was able to cultivate a sense of belonging to the West amongst the educated classes that still forms a part of the country’s ideological mix.
The first historians to address this question were motivated by the modernisation theory of the 1960s, which created a line of retroactive progression by positing that ‘traditional societies’ would be transformed into modern states following the Western model. Similarly, in a quest to ‘find’ the ideological antecedents of the western Republic, Turkish historians assigned history a secularist-teleological mission, projecting the Republican concepts of constitutionalism, secularism and anti-Islamism on to earlier periods. They traced a steady development of secularism in the late Empire, analyzing the Young Ottomans and the Young Turks as links in a long chain of Ottoman proponents of westernization until the ‘inevitable emergence’ of the Republic, relegating to the sidelines anything that could not fit into their broader framework.2 The result was
1 Orhan Pamuk, Istanbul: Memoirs of a City (London: Faber, 2005), Chapter 1.
2 See for instance, Niyazi Berkeș, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, (Montreal: McGill Library Press, 1964); Bernard Lewis, Emergence of Modern Turkey, (London: Oxford University Press, 1961); Kemal Karpat, The Ottoman State and Its Place in the World (Brill Publications, 1973). Erik Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History (London: IB.Tauris, 1993). – This recent work extends the Young Turk period from 1908 to 1950, arguing that those that had arrived at the threshold of power at the Young Turk Revolution remained at the helm until Atatürk’s Republican People’s Party was voted
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an oversimplified portrait of the late Ottoman Empire as a scene of battle between religious obscurantism and scientific progress.
Şerif Mardin’s seminal work The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought was the first to challenge this hegemonic narrative.3 Instead of immersing the Young Ottomans’ constitutionalism in the stream of Western liberalism, Mardin identified these thinkers as neoconservative critiques that proposed an Islamic filter against Western institutions; he thus captured the Islamic texture of their arguments, underlining how Young Ottomans based their blueprint for an ideal government both on Islamic political thought and Enlightenment-inspired ideas.
Despite Mardin’s invaluable contributions, historiography suffers from the absence of any thorough discussion on the Young Turks’ reactions against modernization in taste and mores. This is a significant void, since the concept of modernization is often associated with acquiring a modern appearance; even Mustafa Kemal had pronounced in a speech that ‘he who is civilized should it in his way of dress…to oppose Western dress was to choose to live with superstitions and ideas of the middle ages,’4 and distributed a manual of ethics, based on Gaston Jollivet’s Pour bien connaitre les usages mondains, that advised Turks on how to behave like Westerns.5 This study will thus aim to fill this lacuna, arguing that, just as they placed the ‘best of Europe on an Islamic footing’ within the political realm, the Young Ottomans also held an oppositional front against acquiescence to Western mannerisms, and envisioned the invention of a new cultural life that integrated certain elements of European culture into the Muslim-Ottoman heritage.
Şükrü Hanioğlu and Amit Bein have contributed towards releasing the grip of nationalist historiography on the history of the Young Turks.6 In this respect, Hanioğlu’s
out of power in 1950; Nazan Çiçek, The Young Ottomans (London: Tauris, 2010). – Çiçek sets up an anachronistic comparison in her conclusion between the Young Ottomans’ anti-Western ideology and Turkish nationalism in 1920s.
3 Şerif Mardin, The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought (Princeton: Princeton University press, 1962), and Mardin, ‘Super-westernization in Urban Life in the Ottoman Empire,’ in Turkey: Geographic and Social Perspectives edited by Peter Benedict (Leiden, 1971).
4 Mustafa Kemal, ‘İnebolu’da Bir Konuşma,’ in Atatürk’ün Söylev ve Demeçleri 2, p214. – in Hanioğlu, Atatürk (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), p59.
5 Abdullah Cevdet, Mükemmel ve Resimli Adab-ı Muaseret Rehberi (1927).
6 Şükrü Hanioğlu, The Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008); also see Hanioğlu, The Young Turks in Opposition (Oxford:
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most invaluable contribution has been to redefine this group of thinkers as ‘an umbrella organization with a loose ideology’ in opposition to the autocratic regime of Sultan Abdulhamid II, and not as the forerunners of secularists that gravitated to the pinnacle of power in 1920s.7 The Young Turks’ response to modernity varied along a spectrum stretching from entrenched traditionalism and enthusiastic reforms, stressing how the Republican reality of ‘diametrically opposed camps’ failed to accurately represent the Empire’s intellectual composition.
Hanioğlu’s studies have ‘unpacked’ the ideologies Abdullah Cevdet, Beşir Fuat and Baha Tewfik – all of whom, however, could be placed at the secularist-reformist end of the spectrum. This study will then attempt to explore the thoughts of the cadre of thinkers that represented the Islamic strand of the Young Turks: they were modernist, intellectually engaged in modern sciences, yet also devout and opponents of orthodox clericalism, portraying the Young Turks as a truly hybrid organization. The focus will be on their reactions towards modernisation in culture, arguing that the majority of Ottoman intellectuals had not envisioned the type of society created in the 1920s.
Many studies have recently been published on how the Islamic thinkers in the wider Islamic world, such as Afghani and Abduh, interpreted the tension between Islam and modern values ‘as a historical accident, not values inherent in the faith itself,’ and sought the latter’s reconciliation with the systems of thought derived from scripture.8 The literati, concerned about excessive Europeanisation, submitted European ways to a process of reconfiguration, and imbued them with Ottoman or Islamic content. Evaluating these streams of thought then reveals a diverse intellectual scene that was fundamentally different to that under Kemal’s Republic.
Then, how could this society ‘successfully’ westernise? In order to tackle this, intellectual history needs to be grounded.9 Indeed, ideology is never constructed in a realm, wherein concerns about survival are not admitted; just as everyone in the Empire, the nature of these thinkers’ interaction with new concepts depended on their
Oxford University Press, 1995); Amit Bein, Ottoman Ulama, Turkish Republic (Stanford University Press, 2011), p8.
7 Hanioğlu, Late Ottoman Empire, p144.
8 Charles Kurzmann, ‘Introduction,’ in The Modernist Islam, p2; For an excellent historiographical summary, see Andrew Arsan, ‘Translations and Transgressions in Late Ottoman Thought,’ in Modern Intellectual History 10 (2013).
9 This approach is inspired by Kris Manjapra, Age of Encounters (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008).
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assessment of what they could obtain in terms of socio-economic yield. In this respect, this study will examine the intersection of ideas and careers of this collection of thinkers, and try to discover the hidden social agenda behind their intellectual itineraries. By exploring the patterns of connection that link intellectual history to social and economic history, it will try to expose a fuller array of reactions towards westernisation, and situate those of the intelligentsia within this zone.
Post-colonial theories have redefined modernity as ‘a phase of transformation that bought about a rupture with medieval traditions in the nineteenth century,’ defining it as the onset of a new lifestyle that rendered of earlier civilizations obsolete.10 In this respect, modernity was as a broad concept that could assume multiple formats according to the ‘repertoire of concepts and cultural traditions’ of the agents involved in the process.11 Just as the West fashioned its own format of modernity, the Islamic world would devise a version of modernity shaped by its cultural repertoire.
This approach suffers from an idealist vision: it assumes that every Ottoman-Muslim referred to ‘tradition as a framework of inquiry within which they confronted the Western challenge as it materialized in different contexts.’12 This describes the attitude of only one segment of the population, and ignores the existence of those that derived benefits from keeping the West firmly anchored in the centre of modernisation projects. Indeed, one could detect a fundamental turn in the cultural life of the Ottoman Empire that witnessed the formation of exceedingly westernized segments that consciously incorporated into their daily routines European manners, mores and tastes. As Keith Watenpaugh puts forward, they thought ‘they neared the summit of modern civilization, only after having crossed an axial barrier defined by the West, thereby folding themselves into a teleological narrative that had as its terminus the accomplishment of Western civilization.’13
The triumph of an uncompromisingly confrontational attitude towards ‘anything Ottoman’ might have been unfathomable at the turn of the century; the unlikelihood of the eventual turn of events, however, should not be interpreted as the complete absence
10 John Voll, ‘The Mistaken Identification of the West with Modernity’ in The American Journal of Islamic Sciences 13 (Spring 2006), p4.
11 Ibid., p6.
12 Samira Haj, Reconfiguring Islamic Tradition (California: Stanford University Press, 2011), p4.
13 Keith Watenpaugh, Being Modern in the Middle East (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), Watenpaugh, p5.
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of anyone who would have liked to see them unfurl. This study will thus argue that the Ottoman intelligentsia’s gradualism vis-à-vis modernization represented only one segment of the population, and will discuss the simultaneous evolution of a class of Ottoman-Muslims that envisaged a society cast in what they perceived to be the Western mould – which persisted into the 1920s.
This dissertation makes extensive use of the Ottoman Bank Archives in Istanbul and the British Library in London. The key primary documents are the newspapers, journals and periodicals under the editorship the members of the Young Ottomans and the Young Turks, appraising mainly the articles that have not been referenced in secondary literature. Multiple sourcebooks that contained the articles of these intellectuals in modern Turkish translations have also been consulted. Memoirs of European travellers to Constantinople and the Ottoman diplomats in the capital are furthermore used to explore Europe’s growing influence upon the cultural atmosphere of the Empire. All documents and newspapers accessed in their Turkish original have been translated by this author for the purpose of this dissertation.
In this respect, this first section revolves around the creation of a unique Ottoman identity by the Young Ottomans as a response to modernity, which synthesized their Islamic cultural heritage with the new lifestyles that were gaining currency in the Ottoman capital. After a discussion on the nature of ‘threat’ the West posed for these thinkers, the following chapter will then examine the Empire’s intellectual interaction with the West from the perspective of different classes of Ottomans. The third chapter will then discuss the changing perception of Europe in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, followed by an analysis of diverse visions of ideal society espoused by various Young Turks, which included both fashioning an Islamic brand of modernity and as well as espousing a staunch commitment to its western format.
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Chapter 1: Distressed Ministers, the Young Ottomans
The Young Ottoman Society was created on 10 August 1867 by Namık Kemal, Ali Suavi, İbrahim Şinasi, Ziya Bey, and Mustafa Fazıl with the chief objective of opposing the bureaucratic rule of the Tanzimat statesmen, namely Ali and Fuat Pashas.14 In hindsight, the Tanzimat period became ‘the reform period par excellence’ when these state grandees with Westernist cultural orientations enjoyed an unfettered dominance over the affairs of the Empire. By contrast, the Young Ottomans engaged more deeply with the several traditions of Islamic thought, mainly political theory and jurisprudence. Much research has been done on how they invoked Islamic lexicon to convey the pivotal ideas of Enlightenment-inspired political theory, such as borrowing the idea responsible government and linking it to ruler’s obligation to consult with the community in Islamic theory (the biat), or presenting Sharia as the forerunner of modern legal codes with a set of rulers that fixed a standard of what was good and bad.15
These intellectuals tried to achieve the same balance of Europe and Islam within the social sphere. In this respect, they were the progenitors of Ottoman engagement with modernity, seeking an alternative to its Western-dictated norms. They argued that modernization was a process of transformation that synthetized Western material attributes with Ottoman cultural heritage into an original social foundation; in order to fight Europe’s cultural domination, the Empire was to be strengthened without losing sight of its Ottoman-Turkish character. The pith of their argument then implied that the Ottoman culture could be modern without sacrificing its identity to Westerniation.
This discussion will revolve around the writings of the organization’s two main intellectuals, Ali Suavi and Namık Kemal. Serving as the editors of newspapers that became the mouthpiece of the organization, namely Muhbir and İbret, they were the public face and the ‘brain team’ of the movement; therefore, their ideas could be extrapolated to represent those of the Young Ottomans as a whole. It should be noted that Kemal supervised the editorial content of another influential newspaper Hürriyet, which focused mainly upon contemporary political developments; by contrast, however, his articles in İbret critiqued the social and cultural shortcomings of Ottoman society – which makes its content more pertinent to the scope of this study. He also contributed to
14 Mardin, Genesis, p13.
15 Ibid., p399.
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the oft-neglected satirical periodical Diojen, whose content is helpful in grasping the tropes of Kemal’s social thought. Although Diojen never specified the contributor’s name under its articles, the fact Kemal’s name appears within the cadre of its contributors reinforces the hypothesis that the material it published echoed his sentiments.
Although socially conservative, Kemal’s conservatism never implied that he wished to obstruct change; instead of dwelling on the same ground, he believed that communities had to move forward to preserve their well-being.16 Identifying everything that ‘we have not seen from our fathers’ as ‘useless decoration,’ and thus to reject the benefits of modern civilization, not only meant voluntarily succumbing to a life without dignity, but also condemning one’s self to a premature death.17 As he put forward, ‘man has not been created only to sleep on soil and be happy with eating a piece of bread.’18
Within the Ottoman context, change meant reconciling differences with Europe, which, in return, meant scientific development. Indeed, Kemal frequently expressed how awe-struck he was at the West’s advances in transportation and in communication technologies. The fact that he referred to London as ‘the pinnacle of civilization’ which contained much to applaud and emulate, from ‘the 60 ships that depart every two minutes to press machines that print 200 copies of newspapers per hour that are 8 times the thickness of Ibret,’ reinforces the argument that modernizing implied reaching Europe’s industrial strength.19 Kemal even faulted the statesmen for conveying a disproportionate amount of effort towards building European-styled armies equipped with modern artillery, meanwhile neglecting the basic elements of modern infrastructure, such as well-maintained schools, factories and a Muslim bank.20
Another yardstick of modernity was the percentage of educated people. Kemal issued several invectives against the ministers that only paid lip-service to the importance of education – which, for them, consisted of inaugurating medical or military academies. He pronounced that congregations should be held at mosques in the evenings to enlighten ‘the people of all ages’ to world affairs and benefits of education.21 Someone’s level of education should not be judged by his ability to ‘read someone’s
16 Kemal, ‘[Başlıksız],’ İbret 97, 20 January 1873. - Mustafa Özön, Namık Kemal ve İbret Gazetesi (Istanbul: YKY, 1997), p223.
17 Ibid., ‘Medeniyet,’ İbret 84, 1 January 1873. Özön, p213.
18 Ibid., p214.
19 Ibid., ‘Terakki,’ İbret 45, November 1872. Özön, pp184-185.
20 Ibid., ‘Ibret,’ İbret 3, 17 June 1872. Özön, p55.
21 Ibid., ‘Nüfus,’ İbret 9, 25 June 1872. Özön, pp72-85.
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address or write down his own name,’ but as in Europe, by mastering a language well enough to express every sentiment in writing.22 Kemal alludes to his vision of an ideal society when he discusses his encounter in London with 20-25 kids at the ages of 10-12 in a public garden with newspapers in their hands, trying to acquire knowledge of contemporary affairs’ or the time when he stumbled upon ‘a congregation of people at a local market,’ engaged in heated debate on the legal system in Germany.23
Transmission from the West, however, had to remain limited to developments in education and industry – where the West’s strength laid; while reaping the benefits of European advancements in this field, one had to be wary of letting the Western influence infiltrate into the cultural domain. According to Kemal’s assessment, European society had failed to maintain a level of moral decency during industrialization; the Ottoman Empire might have been materially poor, but it was morally uncorrupted and should not follow Europe’s trajectory of moral progress.24 Unfortunately, some had already succumbed to the allure of debauchery: many Ottoman-Muslims now preferred British restaurants, Parisian shoemakers and German coffee to its Ottoman counterparts.25 Some had even slipped into the habit of going to the theatre for pretension and ending the night unconscious in a tavern with a bottle in their hands.26
One of the most striking caricatures in Diyojen was that of Panosyan with the subtitle ‘Uyumsuzluk’ - best translated ‘maladaptiveness.’ The creature, whose most noticeable features are his abnormally shaped ears, has matched the shalvar kameez with a dinner jacket, a French-styled shirt with a bowtie; the caption reads: ‘is one only to pay attention to those long ears? This person [has tried to] create the impression that he has been enlightened by civilization, and though has tried to look like a human being, seems far from being one.’27 Kemal thus made a mockery of these victims of modernization who equated being civilized with subscribing to novel trends. He added that, just as the Ottomans never absorbed the Chinese ‘snail kebab’ into their cuisine, they did not have to imitate European manners or rituals; like England, France and
22 Namık Kemal, ‘Maarif,’ İbret 16, 4 July 1872. – Özön, pp96-97.
23 Ibid., ‘Terakki.’ – Özön, p183.
24 ‘Illet-i frengi,’ Diyojen 32, 1 July 1870, pp2-3.
25 ‘Ahbar-i Gaybiyye,’ Diyojen 7, 4 February 1869, p2.
26 [No title], Diyojen 26, 5 June 1870, p3.
27 ‘Uyumsuzluk,’ Diyojen 74, 5 December 1871.
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Germany, who had all acquired industrial prowess while preserving their distinct culture, the Ottoman Empire could modernize without relinquishing tradition.28
In its original form, the Ottoman-Islamic culture was not averse to industrial progress, but dogmatism had locked the society within an antiquated mindset. In this sense, modernization also meant a mental transformation; the Ottoman society had to purge the detrimental elements within, such as the misguided interpretation of faith. Attacking hyper-conservative attachment to religion, Diyojen published an imaginary monologue of a devout man, ignorant of where Italy is located on a map, that connected the volcano eruption in Italy and the earthquake in Antakya to God’s fury at the irreligiousness of its residents.29 According to Kemal, these men were disfiguring the reputation of Islam, which not only did not restrict reason, but also championed the pursuit of knowledge. If freed from the rigidity of orthodoxy, Islam would then become perfectly congruous with Kemal’s understanding of civilization.
In his defense against Ernest Renan’s critique of the Islamic world, Kemal intimated once again that Islam was compatible with the modern world. Renan had argued that ‘the mind of a true believer [in the East] is fatally limited, incapable of learning anything,’ and that from 1275 onwards, the Muslim world ‘had plunged into intellectual decadence, while the highway of scientific truth’ became diverted to Western Europe.30 By invoking verses from the Hadith, such as and ‘are those who know equal with those who know not’ and ‘my Lord increase me in knowledge,’ Kemal argued that Islam encouraged its followers to enhance their reservoir of knowledge with the latest developments. 31 This reminds the scholarship of al-Afghani’s similar counter-argument to the same thesis: both ideologues highlighted the Islamic World’s role in rekindling the sciences extinguished after the fall of Ancient Greece and Rome as some of the greatest achievements of the ‘golden age’ between 775 and 1250.32
Ali Suavi, too, was a proponent of modernization – insofar as it was not interpreted as an emulation of its western format. He argued that ‘every people [had
28 Kemal, ‘Medeniyet.’ Özön, p214.
29 [No title], Diyojen 119, May 1871, p1.
30 Ernest Renan, ‘Islamism and Science’ from the conference on 29 July 1883 in Readings in Orientalism edited by Bryan Turner (London: Routledge, 2000).
31 Namik Kemal, Renan Müdaafanamesi translated by Fuad Köprülü (Güven Matbaasi: Ankara, 1962), p.17.
32 Jamal ad-Din Al-Afghani, ‘Religion and Science,’ in Contemporary Debates in Islam edited by Mansoor Moaddel (New York: St.Martin’s Press, 2000), p26.
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certain] characteristics rooted in its spiritual domain that distinguished them from other people. If it abandons those traits, or imitates the characteristics of others, it will have abandoned its national character.’33 Turning a blind to Western civilization would however be counter-productive, since it contained much to gain from. It was indeed mortifying for Suavi, that while the French were building railways, the Ottoman minister had called carriage a motif of progress.34 Like Kemal, he limited the sphere of imports to the confines of West’s industrial achievements. By emphasizing how Prussians had battled with their regular galoshes against the French army with ‘luxurious boots’ and yet still emerged victorious out of the battlefield,35 Suavi intimated that the process of modernization served a clear purpose – to industrialize, not to westernize.
Suavi also advised precaution while studying industrial developments, for some thinkers were presenting their ‘anti-religious’ idea under the guise of science. He found it unfathomable that a scholar of engineering should turn away from Islam, when his pursuit did not require him to get mired in the grander issues of Islamic theology.36 Invoking the thoughts of Monsieur Camble, the French astronomer and the author of Dieu dans Le Nature, he stated that was not meant to prove the inexistence of God.37 He even drew a comparison with London, the cradle of industry, where people considered not attending the Sunday mass a sacrilege, once again arguing that the study of the sciences should not lead one to the realm of the irreligious.38 He therefore commended the Egyptian scholar al-Tahtawi, who maintained his strong conviction in Islam throughout his residence in Paris, acquired scientific knowledge, and returned to Cairo without denouncing his faith.39
This was indeed possible, because Islam encouraged the pursuit of scientific advancement. Like al-Afghani and Kemal, Suavi defended how the Islamic heartlands functioned as a major hub for arts and sciences, out of which knowledge diffused through the world. In an article to the British publication The Living Age, he even
33 Ali Suavi, ‘Taklid,’ Le Mukhbir 20, 18 January 1868, p3.
34 Suavi, ‘[Basliksiz],’ Ulum 8. – Hüseyin Çelik, Ali Suavi ve Dönemi (Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 1994), p669.
35 Suavi, ‘Kemalin Zevalli,’ Muvakatten Ulum Gazetesi Musterilerine 1 (30 September 1870), p6. – Çelik, p666.
36 Suavi, ‘Materyalist,’ Ulum 17 (1870), p1020. – Çelik, p662.
37 Suavi, Ulum 8. – Çelik, p663.
38 Ibid, ‘Materyalist.’
39 Suavi, Nasreddin Chah d’Iran (1873), p7. - Çelik, p665.
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discussed how the French Pope, Sylvester II, went to Spain to acquire algebra, astronomy and other sciences ‘from these true believers and opened the path of knowledge to Christian Europe.’40 Quoting a member of the French Academy of Sciences who acknowledged that ‘Mussulmans were so much our masters and teachers that the more we read their books and the more we see that various inventions we thought belonged to other nations were theirs,’ Suavi alluded to how paper, compass and gunpowder were all creations of the Muslim world.41 In a letter to Societe de Geographie, he wrote back against the assertion that the Aral Sea was a recent creation, citing the ninth-century work of the ancient geographer Mesoudi, who described this body of water with immense detail.42 This critique should be understood as Suavi’s rebuke against French historians, who arrived at sweeping conclusions based on Western sources by ignoring relevant Arabic literature. By mentioning that in the tenth-century Arab geographers also observed the 43-degree latitude crossing through the sea, Suavi underlined how Muslims engaged in a scientific study of their discovery.43
In their writings, the Young Ottomans then satirized both overwesternized elite that seemed infatuated with the superficial trappings of European culture, and tried to rectify the moral travesty that misconceived of Islam as antithetical to industrial and scientific progress. It must, however, be questioned whom the Young Ottomans represented. Indeed, it is flawed to extrapolate their fierce antagonism to the society-at-large, for their frustration with the spineless attitude towards European culture was anchored in a particular socio-economic milieu.
The Young Ottomans had formerly served as low-ranking bureaucrats at the Translation Bureau within the scribal service of the Sublime Porte – in the very office, out of which the object of their bitter resentment, Ali and Fuat Pashas, would emerge. Mahmud II’s transformation of the scribal service into a Foreign Ministry in March 1836 had brought the Bureau to a position of political preeminence.44 With their access to modern education and exposure to Western ideas, these officials possessed the cultural
40 Suavi, ‘Mohammedanism Not Opposed to Civilization,’ in The Living Age edited by Littel 97, 23 May 1868, pp504-505.
41 Suavi, ‘Mohammedianism,’ p.504.
42 Suavi, ‘Observations Sur la Mer d’Aral,’ in Bulletin de la Societe de Geographie 6, November 1873, p529.
43 Suavi, ‘La Mer d’Aral,’ p.528.
44 Carter Vaughn-Findley, Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983), p139.
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characteristics and linguistic competence that had become supremely relevant to the needs of the state, yet hardly found in any other branch of administration – making the Bureau the most influential office in officialdom.
During the reign of inefficient Sultans between the death of Mahmud II in 1839 and the succession of Abdulhamid II in 1876, the locus of power thus shifted to civil bureaucracy.45 The self-assertion of Ali, Fuat and Reșid Pasha, the Bureau’s top-ranking officials, as a bureaucratic oligarchy, however, meant that the Young Ottomans, would be excluded from the ‘spoils of the Tanzimat’ - unable to either wield the power to which their position had entitled them or divert wealth to their coffers.46 Along with those that cluttered the lower bureaucracy, they became the ‘losers’ of this movement towards westernization. They were, however, not the only ones: under the pretext of building a modern state, the state grandees had implemented reforms that seemed to have favoured the non-Muslims through a series of economic and political privileges, incurring a loss of status upon the lower-echelons of society.47
In a way, the Young Ottomans constructed a formula for survival for members of the population, whose livelihood had become threatened by the Empire’s recent encounters with the West. Narrating the history of Ottoman cultural movement towards Europe based on the writings of these intellectuals then gives a one-sided view; it glosses over the perspective of those circles, for whom Western mannerisms and lifestyles did not symbolize a loss of their former status. Examining the Young Ottoman mindset is certainly important in shattering the image of Young Ottomans as secular-reformists and helpful in deconstructing the intellectual composition of a certain segment of the population – albeit, not the Ottoman-Muslim population as a whole.
45 Vaughn-Findley, pp152-154.
46 Mardin, ‘Super-westernization in Urban Life in the Ottoman Empire,’ in Turkey: Geographic and Social Perspectives edited by Peter Benedict (Leiden, 1971), pp431-432.; Also Findley, Bureaucratic Reform, pp150-154.
47 Nazan Çiçek, The Young Ottomans (London: I.B.Tauris, 2010), p23.
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Chapter 2: Bihruz Bey ‘Takes On’ Constantinople
If the Young Ottomans felt a shaking on the ground they stood on, for some, this implied an opportunity to venture out on to new planes. One such cohort were the Ottoman representatives abroad. When the British diplomat Sir Henry Layard met Ruhiddin Efendi in 1839, the former Ottoman deputy minister in Paris, he mentioned that the ex-diplomat was fluent in French, but still wore the traditional turban and robes.48 In contrast to Ruhiddin Efendi that struck Layard as still ‘Ottoman’ in taste, his son Ahmet Vefik was as a well-educated European gentleman, not only demonstrating an interest in the ideas of Gibbon, Robertson, Hume and Smith, but also ‘roaring with laughter’ at Dickensian humour and quoting from The Pickwick Papers in his daily speech.49 Ahmed Vefik was one of the earlier members of the ‘super-westernised’ elite, who became conversant in the ideas of European communities and acquired their lifestyle, disposition and values.
Through the translation of seminal European philosophers and novelists, these ideas would soon diffuse to larger segments of society. One significant example, in this regard, is the genre of books that were donated in 1864, when the journal of Ottoman Scientific Society asked its readership for a contribution of books towards a new library: the journal’s subscribers, mostly high-ranking statesmen, donated 126 volumes that included works of La Fontaine, Bacon, Helvetius, Montesquieu, and Adam Smith. 50 The fact that only two books by non-European authors were donated, a volume of the Ottoman legal code and Muqaddimah by Ibn-Khaldun, signified a trend of moving away from Islamic cultural tradition. Now able to comprehend the world through different perspectives, some gladly jettisoned off the old ways that used to be taken for granted.
To those Ottoman Muslims, who were neither dispatched to European capitals nor displayed an interest in Western literature, Europe became accessible through Constantinople’s urban transformation. As the Ottoman economy became integrated into the globalist system, Constantinople became a centre for western economic and cultural penetration. Europe’s socio-economic domination over the Empire would soon modify the basic realities of the Ottoman world - manifested most acutely in the topographical reconfiguration of the city; also facilitated by the westernizing objectives
48 Sir Henry Layard, Autobiography (London: John Murray, 1903), p50.
49 Ibid., pp47-48.
50 ‘Bazı Zevat Tarafından Cemiyete Verilen Hedaya,’ Mecmua-i Fünun 22, March-April 1864, pp. 432-436.
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of the Tanzimat statesmen, local agents became pressed down into secondary roles and allowed the foreign actors ‘to graft their influence upon the Ottoman structures.’51
Memoirs of travellers indeed reveal a city that gradually became ‘consumed’ by European culture. When the British traveller Julia Pardoe arrived in the capital in 1835, she described the district of Pera, the residential choice of Christians and foreign communities, as ‘the headquarters of the elite of European society…the dwelling-place of the beau monde,’ where women wear the bonnet, the shawl and the cloak ‘like proper European gentlewomen.’52 The American traveller Edwin Grosvenor mentioned in 1867 that Pera struck him as ‘a Western city stranded in the East… seeming in its occidental life and customs a protest against the Asiatic civilization and its creed.’53 Grand Rue de la Pera boasted 20 European-owned cafes and 11 wine-stores, some of which even specialized in wine from Bordeaux or Medoc.54 The district now seemed so misplaced in the East that ‘the Mussulman state dignitaries, who with solemn courtesy attend the receptions at embassies, seem like exotics on [their own] soil.’55
Western influence was certainly not confined within the boundaries of Constantinople; Aleppo, too, for instance housed one of the largest foreign communities in the Empire, having sat aside global trade routes for centuries. The literary salon of Marianna al-Marresh, where Muslims and Christians played chess, competed in poetry contests, drank wine and listened to European records on phonographs, showed that some Ottoman-Muslims in Syria had also incorporated into their daily lives a collection of manners based on the magazines from London, Paris and Vienna that flooded the literary markets.56 One crucial difference was that foreigners in Arab centres of culture lived almost disconnected from the rest of the population, such as those in Beirut’s extramural Zuqaq al-Blat neighbourhood,57 whereas Constantinople assimilated them
51 Eldem, ‘Istanbul,’ pp200-201.
52 Julia Pardoe, The City of the Sultan (London: Henry Colburn, 1837), pp56-58.
53 Edwin Grosvenor, Constantinople (Boston: Brown and Company, 1895), p93.
54 Raphael Cervati, L’indicateur Constantinopolitan (Constantinople: N.C.Sargologo, 1868), pp200-229.
55 Grosvenor, p103.
56 Watenpaugh, p52.
57 See, for instance, Gertrude Bell, Syria: The Desert and the Sown (London: Heinemann, 1907), p268. – Governor Mohammed Ali Pasha’s wife played tennis at the local Tennis Club and attended ‘sewing parties’ hosted by European ladies. For Cairo: Albert Hourani, The History of the Arab People (London: Faber and Faber, 1991), p297. For Beirut: Jens Hanssen, Fin-de-Siècle Beirut (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
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into its urban fabric. Indeed, Pera and Galata soon emerged as the new center around which the life in nineteenth-century Constantinople would be structured. Not only did these district replace the ‘old heart’ of the capital between Eminönü and Bayezid as the core of commercial operations and cultural activities, but also the Western communities soon spilled over into the Asian districts of Kadıkoy and Moda,58 as well as to the districts of Tarabya and Kandilli.59
The omnipresence of the West in Constantinople, as well as the modern amenities of these westernized districts, such as porcelain and crystal shops, piano stores, tobacconists and photographers,60 intensified the backwardness of those Muslim quarters that lacked a sewage system and street lighting. Drawn to the novelty of these superficial trappings, these Ottoman-Muslims defined the modern world in terms of what they had been exposed to - namely, Parisian couture and horse-drawn carriages. These ‘casualties of cultural change,’ as Kemal and Suavi would have described them, became a recurrent theme in contemporary literature, most notably in novels of Ahmet Mithat Efendi and Recaizade Ekrem.61 The Bihruz Bey character, the protagonist in the latter’s Araba Sevdasi set in the 1870s, soon evolved into a synonym for the ‘super-westernized’ elite that identified Ottoman culture as barbaric and engaged in quasi-European pretensions, such as interspersing their speech with French idioms.62
Stressing the diversity of the late Empire’s intellectual composition indeed tends to gloss over the extreme ends of the spectrum; in this case, diversity should be interpreted as the coexistence of various shades of opinion, and not the absence of anyone farthest from the middle. Despite the ruminations of the Young Ottomans, another brand of modernity was being fashioned by the elite, who did not feel the need to retain the Ottoman-Islamic heritage once they had been exposed to the appealing features of the modern world.
58 Edhem Eldem, ‘Istanbul,’ in The Ottoman City Between East and West (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp201-202.
59 Layard, p104. He mentions that the Prussian Minister Count Pourtales lived in Kandilli, while many European families maintained summerhouses in Tarabya.
60 Cervati, Constantinopolitan, pp200-226.
61 See for instance, Ahmet Mithat’s Felatun Bey ile Rakım Efendi.
62 Recaizade Ekrem, Araba Sevdası translated from the original (1898) by Feryal Korkmaz (Istanbul: Cagri Yayinlari, 2004).
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Chapter 3: Various Shades Of The Young Turks
In 1870s, Europe might have largely meant industry and fashion trends; with the greater availability of Western literature on Ottoman markets in the 1880s, however, this perception was changing. Although still lauded for its technological advancements, the proliferation of Western literature on Ottoman markets led the concept of ‘being western’ to become intertwined with certain schools of thought.
In this regard, adoption of vulgar-materialist ideology became the unexpected result of Ottoman encounter with Western modernity. Imperial schools had already turned into a breeding ground for positivism – a system of thought that confined itself to the data of experience and rejected any metaphysical speculations. The Galatasaray school, for instance, already housed a library almost entirely composed of ‘manuals of atheism’ such as d’Holbach’s Systeme de la Nature that mathematically demonstrated the absurdity of believing in the existence of God, Diderot’s Jacques le Fataliste, and Cabanes’ Rapport de la Physique et du Morale de l’Homme.63 It also took pride in not only in having structured its curriculum entirely on the French system,64 but also in raising its students ‘a la Voltaire’ by diverting them away from religion.65 Students at the Senior Military School were also instructed to learn French through Fenelon’s Fables and Voltaire’s Life of Charles XII – leading works of the Enlightenment that were profusely referenced by Montesquieu and Rousseau.66 Ziya Gökalp, a leading ideologue of the late Empire and the early Republic, furthermore mentioned that reading the folktales of Shah Ismail and Aşık Kerem, described in 1882 as ‘love-stories,’ were deemed unworthy of an educated man’s attention that should be devoted to the ‘serious’ works of Western philosophy.67
Identifying Ludwig Büchner’s Kraft und Stoff, the seminal work of German Vulgarmaterialismus, as a guideline for a better future, these educated classes maintained a ‘slavish exaltation of scientific truth, [while deriding] religion as a delusive
63 Charles MacFarlane, Turkey and its Destiny 2 (London, 1850), pp.271.
64 MacFarlane, p265. – The headmaster is quoted: ‘Until these students learn French, they can learn no other science...Science cannot be taught in Turkish.’
65 Ibid., pp268-269. – When asked whether playing with the flesh of a ‘negress’ in the dissecting-room was against his religion, a student answered ‘Galata Serai [sic] is not the place to come and look for religion.’
66 Ibid., 275.
67 Johann Strauss, ‘Who Read What in the Ottoman Empire,’ in Arabic Middle Eastern Literatures 6 (1), 2003, p51.
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imagination to be expunged.’68 Echoing the ideas of Darwin, history was now seen as a tug of war between science and religion, at the culmination of which the former would triumph.69 These ideas received considerable traction in the Royal Medical Academy, out of which the leading thinkers of the Young Turks, Abdullah Cevdet, Şerafettin Mağmumi and Beşir Fuat would emerge. It is important to note that their almost fetishist interest in Vulgarmaterialismus was wrapped within their fascination with the West; they identified this materialist doctrine as the philosophical engine behind Europe’s progress, and oversimplified the complicated dynamics between East and West into an open confrontation between science and religion; in return, for the Empire to catch up, religion had to be shunned from society.70
Given Şükrü Hanioğlu’s in-depth studies on Abdullah Cevdet, the leading ideologue of the secular scientist-materialist branch of the Young Turks, this chapter will only stress the pertinent strands of this thought. While leading the Westernization movement between 1889 and 1908, Cevdet espoused a sincere conviction that human society could not exist without religion, and that the major shortcoming of materialism was its failure to take into consideration the moral needs of society.71 In order for it to replace Islam as the regulating system of belief, it had to be ‘stitched into an Islamic jacket.’72 He invoked heavy Islamic rhetoric in his magnum opus, presenting scientific theories of Spencer, Kant, Kenter and Campanella as derivations from the ideas of the Quran, the Hadith, and medieval Islamic thinkers.73
One should, however, not be derailed by Cevdet’s sensitive appeal to society’s traditional religious fidelities. This was a strategic manipulation of Islam as a springboard to make materialist ideology accessible to the masses, the end result of which would be the crowning of scientism as the guiding creed. There is, indeed, much evidence to corroborate that Cevdet never wished to preserve a conservative society - one of which is his translation of Reinhardt Dozy’s critique of Islam into Ottoman-
68 Şükrü Hanioğlu, ‘‘Blueprints for a Future Society,’ in Late Ottoman Society: The Intellectual Legacy edited by Elisabeth Özdalga (London: Routledge, 2005), p29.
69 Hanioğlu, Young Turks in Opposition, p12.
70 Hanioğlu, ‘Blueprint,’ p78.
71 Abdullah Cevdet, Fünun ve Felsefe (Konya: Çizgi Yayınları, 2006; originally published in 1910.).
72 Hanioğlu, The Young Turks in Opposition (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp201-202.
73 Cevdet, Fünun ve Felsefe, pp166-178.
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Turkish.74 After attempting to distribute cheap copies of this book at coffeehouses, he was exiled to Cairo, where he also paid people near the Suez Canal area to distribute copies of his anti-Islamic journal, Ictihad, to Muslim pilgrims.75 Upon his return from exile in 1911, he wrote that Islam could not be reconciled with modern life; translating books on Western manners, he encouraged Muslims to give up fasting, veiling and prayer – which he identified as outdated practices.76 Cevdet thus represented the cadre of Ottomans who espoused a new morality free of religion. The fact that he harmonized positivism with Islamic precepts to popularize his ideas, however, commands attention: despite his real motives, he knew that he could not ‘infuse this Weltanschauung into the Muslim spirit’ unless imbued with religious content.
These new-style state schools would continue to produce such individuals, who adopted a contemptuous disposition towards the ulama. Image of religion was soon undergoing a process of negative branding that threatened its long-term viability. Not every Young Turk thinker, however, agreed with these anti-religious inclinations that came to be associated with the movement; as Hanioğlu’s studies have shown, the term ‘Young Turk’ designated numerous activist groups whose sole common objective was the overthrow of Abdulhamid. The spectrum of thought stretched between the opposite poles of reformism and conservatism, and many thinkers moved along this continuum. In this sense, its various thinkers could be extrapolated to represent the intellectual composition of a wide range of Ottomans, except for the loyalists at the extreme end of the spectrum that did not relinquish their commitment to the Sultan until 1923.
Filibeli Ahmet Hilmi was one such intellectual: he argued that Islam had no inherent deficiencies, and that religious decline did not have to be an inescapable phenomenon of the modern world.77 The tone that is carried through his writings is indeed one of frustration – especially with placing Ottoman society on the cultural underpinnings of Europe.78 In line with the ideas of previous thinkers, he championed the benefits of catching up with Europe’s technological developments that allowed its residents to command over the rest of the world. His disquietude therefore resided with the younger generation that snatched up from the canon of civilization only the ‘chalices
74 Cevdet., Doktor Dozy’nin Tarih-i Islamiyet Unvanli Kitabi (Istanbul: 1910).
75 Hanioğlu, ‘Garbcılar,’ Studia Islamica 86, 1997, pp137-139.
76 Ibid., p142.
77 Filibeli Ahmet Hilmi, ‘Birkaç Söz,’ Hikmet 1, 1 April 1908.
78 Ibid., ‘Șark ve Garb,’ Hikmet 2, 1910.
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of poison with sparkly covers.’79 Many now associated Europe with detesting Islam, drinking alcoholic beverages, and changing one’s attire ten times a day, instead of training engineers to construct railways.80 For Filibeli, the real menace was not the eventual surrender on the battlefield, but genuine espousal of these superficial aspects of Western civilization that would crumble the Empire from within; indeed, far from bringing about the desired modifications, blind imitation was putting the Empire under the mantle of subjugation, and leading the Empire away from Islam.
The only way to have the younger generation take an interest in Islam was to make the scripture speak the mind of the modern age. Filibeli argued that preserving a particular state of being was antithetical to the whole concept of life: life meant rejuvenation, and just like institutions, societies could either accommodate new conditions or be relegated to the sidelines.81 Accordingly, for the Ottoman Empire to remain relevant to the new world unfurling at its doorstep, the outdated social regulations and customs had to be wiped out. Ulama’s obstructionist conservatism, however, had made this impossible. Filibeli argued that their refusal to break out of their antiquated mindsets, and thus believing that the Ottoman Empire could compete with Europe on the basis of medieval theories from 800-1000 years ago, was just as ludicrous as trying to catch a steam-engine on horseback.82 This was the reason why the majority of Muslims were led to believe that science and religion were not compatible.83 Acquiescing to the dictates of the ulama, immersed in anachronistic tradition, would thus either lead to an impoverished society devoid of progress or an enlightened one that maintained an inimical attitude to Islam.84 The ideal way forward was then to remove the ulama from the purview of education: Unlike Catholicism, Islam was not averse to science and philosophy, and if it recaptured this original form, it would become the greatest supporter of progress.
Filibeli therefore might have espoused a deep commitment to Islam, yet his anti-clericalism prevents one from identifying him as a religious obscurantist. His modernist
79 Filibeli, ‘Which Philosophy Should we Accept?’ Lectures at Dar’ul Funun, 1910. Translations in İsmail Kaya, Türkiye’de İslamcılık Düşünce Tarihi (Istanbul: Risale Yayınları, 1986), pp35-6.
80 Ibid., ‘Political Guide to European Muslims,’ 1909 in Kaya, pp23-24.
81 Ibid., Tarih-i Islam (Istanbul, 1909), in Kaya, p5.
82 Ibid., pp10-11.
83 Ibid., pp7-8.
84 Ibid.
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path, pointing at the intellectual diversity of the Young Turks, combined both a staunch adherence to faith and the qualified adoption of European knowledge. He deployed philosophical critiques borrowed from Western intellectuals, actively engaging with the arguments of Reinhardt Dozy, Ernest Renan and Darwin to refute their hypotheses regarding the irrelevancy of religion to the modern world. This was a precaution taken against any accusations that he espoused Islam because he was oblivious to the scientific Weltanschauung. For instance, Filibeli put forward that Darwin’s theories were responsible for the degeneration of morals in Europe; whereas societies used to make provisions for the weak, they now left them aside to die out, since their death was seen to be the cause of natural selection.85 This was indeed a strategic step to convince the younger generation that Vulgarmaterialismus had a corrupting influence on society – which was essentially why Filibeli had chosen not to subscribe to this school of thought. Islam, when freed from the rigidity of orthodoxy and reconciled with sciences, would help construct a society that only industrially progressive, but also morally uncorrupted.
Another modernist-Islamist Young Turk was Said Halim Pasha, who remained closely affiliated with the organization in Cairo and Geneva, and also served as the interior minister under the Committee of Union and Progress in 1913.86 The fact he published his most influential writings during and immediately after the First World War showed that even in the penultimate years of the Empire, those in positions of power were not divided along the lines of secularists versus religionist.
Said Halim was beset by similar inquietudes, one of which were the upper-classes that, instead of honouring their traditional obligation to preserve customs, had succumbed into ‘spurious fads’: for them, being civilized meant being godless, hedonistic, a womanizer and fluent in French.87 Their desire to westernize to the extent of erasing their own personality, however, could not be interpreted as indicative of the superiority of Western civilisation, since they were not drawn to Europe by a thorough appreciation of its civilization. Said Halim even asserted that these so-called westernizers had failed to grasp the civilization’s underpinnings: whereas Western societies rectified the travesties without tearing apart their social fabric, the Ottoman reformers indulged in destructive criticism and ‘tried to uproot whatever existed and
85 Filibeli, ‘Political Guide to Muslims,’ 1909 in Kaya, p19.
86 Kaya, p155.
87 Said Halim, Buhran-ı İctimamiz (Istanbul, 1916). – A pamphlet of 35 pages.
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plant something untried.’88 This trend towards ad hoc modernisation would contaminate the entire population with the same bacteria from which they suffered.89
In order to fix the shortcomings of society, one had to look within and correct past mistakes; in this respect, if the Empire was lagging behind the West, the onus was upon the shoulders of those that failed to keep up. This, according to Said Halim, was due to a misinterpretation of Islam’s precepts, for the Prophet had instructed his followers to even go to China to seek knowledge: instead, the Muslim world had fallen behind in its study of natural sciences and technology.90 Echoing the sentiments of modernist Islamic reformers, he defined a ‘good Muslim’ as someone with a mature understanding of the world around him, committed to enlightening his society to the latest developments to prevent them from falling into the abyss of ignorance.91 It was therefore possible to forge a unique process of modernization without transplanting concepts that fell beyond the pale of Islam, since to Islamize meant ‘applying the principles of Islam after they had been interpreted in light of contemporary needs.’92
Exercising caution against the teeth and claws of Western civilization would also protect the ‘spiritual motherland.’ Said Halim’s unique terminology referred to the laws and traditions that bound people together and conditioned their ideals – which were more important than the earthly area on which they lived.93 Needless to state, Said Halim identified Islam as one of them. Ottoman weakness therefore stemmed not only from the elite’s self-consuming desire to form a parcel of Europe, but also their indifference to, and unwillingness to preserve, the spiritual motherland. If the Empire was to effectively benefit from Western civilization, it had to ‘Ottomanize’ it; the relevance of values to the contemporary world needed to be re-examined, but relinquishing them outright would set the preconditions for slavery.94 His format modernity, in line with that of Filibeli, Abduh and Afghani, reaped the benefits of the latest developments in sciences and also maintained the unique identity of the Empire: he this was neither secularist nor vehemently conservative, but simultaneously
88 Said Halim, Our Intellectual Crisis, (Istanbul, 1917) in Kaya, p234.
89 Ibid., pp228-229.
90 Ibid., ‘İslam’da Teşkilat-i Siyasiye,’ Sebiluresad 19,20 (1920) in Kaya, p172.
91 Ibid., Buhranlarımız, in Kaya, p211.
92 Said Halim, İslamlașmak (Istanbul, April 1919).
93 Ibid., Buhranlarımız, pp202-204.
94 Ibid., Our Intellectual Crisis, p236.
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experienced both the pursuit of change and preservation – which illustrates the existence of various faces of modernization.
Filibeli and Said Halim then emerged as an alternative voice to defenders of mere positivism in the process of modernization, rejecting the notion of a conflict between Islamic tradition and modernization. The existence of multiple, and even contradictory, approaches to modernity, however, should not relegate to the sidelines the objects of their writing – namely the westernized elite and the ulama, who believed that religious beliefs and modern life were incompatible. Although the majority of individuals did not see full-scale marginalization of Islam as a plausible project, there remained a core group of Ottoman-Muslims that maintained a one-dimensional view of Europe – which led them to see an unbreakable linkage between modernity and secularization. Despite being limited in number, the champions of this all-inclusive Westernist approach would become strategically well-placed to pay lip-service, if not influence, government-policy under the Republic.
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Chapter 4: Ziya Gökalp – The Republic’s First Ideologue?
Although active in member of the Committee of Union and Progress, Ziya Gökalp was not a member of the Young Turks prior to the July Revolution of 1908. His ideology, however, is still supremely relevant to the scope of this study, foremost by virtue of his identification by Mustafa Kemal as a major influence upon the Republic’s social policies. As a result, nationalist analyses have tried to make conscious connections between his school of thought and the ideological underpinnings of the Republic, and often included suggestions on how his writings fitted into the broader framework of secularist thinking. They presented Gökalp’s magnum opus Turkism, Islamism and Modernism, as the earlier version of the Kemalist ideology, and argued that Islamism, as the weakest link in Gökalp’s trinity, was meant to be jettisoned off.95 Gökalp, however, never witnessed the unfurling of secular Turkey; upon his death in the final year of the Independence Struggle, the prospect of the onset of a secular Turkey was still unfathomable. Analyzing his writings offers an insight into the public opinion in the final years of Ottoman Turkey, and allows the scholarship to test whether this ideologue of the last Ottoman government indeed witnessed the ‘death’ of religion in society.
The hallmark of Gökalp’s ideology is his differentiation between the concepts of culture and civilization; the former referred to the ‘sub-total of value judgments that constitute the ethos of a people’ that is unique to every country, whereas the latter was defined as a composition of sciences, techniques and methods that are transmittable between countries.96 Civilization was then devoid of cultural specifics and thus could be transplanted onto different soils; however, since culture was distinct to every society, it could only be ‘awakened’ and not imported. The late Empire was then not in need of Europe form a cultural perspective, but from the point of view of civilization – namely techniques and learning.97 This is why Gökalp faulted the Tanzimat leaders for ‘extending the process of Europeanization to the most intimate sources of [Ottoman] personality.’98 He pronounced that cultural change could not be instituted upon society
95 Ziya Gökalp, Türkleșmek, Islamlașmak, Modernleșmek (Istanbul: Siyah-Bordo Yayinlari, 2001).
96 Ibid., ‘National Education,’ Muallim 1-4, 1916. Translations in Niyazi Berkeș, Ziya Gökalp’s Selected Essays (Wesport: Grenwood Press, 1981), p235.
97 Ibid., p247.
98 Ibid., ‘Modern Family and National Culture,’ Yeni Mecmua 20, 1917, p249.
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through legislation, imitation or instruction; otherwise, the society would have willingly succumbed to the authority of another state.99
Islam was a part of the Ottoman culture, and thus formed an integral element of a plausible and a comprehensive blueprint for an ideal society. Accordingly, although Islam could never regain its exclusive grip on every sphere of life, it still formed an integral part of cultural identity and would remain an enduring reality; therefore, it had to be allocated a secure place in public life without necessitating its dissolution. Echoing Filibeli and Said Halim, he disapproved of both ‘zealots of Europeanism,’ that preached the abandonment of Islam, and ‘zealots of scholasticism,’ who adopted an inimical stance towards change of any sort for the sake of maintaining traditions firmly entrenched within the fabric of society. For Gökalp, members of either faction were blind.100 People could neither be expected to turn a blind eye to something they held sacred nor be asked to dispense with the necessities of modernity. The most effective way forward was then to seek reconciliation between Ottoman culture and broader civilization.
While ‘nationalizing’ European civilization, tradition also had to undergo a concomitant process of updating. This had hitherto not appeared within the realm of the realizable. For Gökalp, however, this was not symptomatic of an insoluble conflict between Islam and positive sciences, but rather the incompetence of teachers of religion.101 By remaining on the offensive vis-à-vis the incorporation of ‘secular’ subjects into the curriculum, they had peeled away from the lustre of a religious education, and lost their relevance in the eyes of the younger generation.102 An ideal system would combine the modernist and Islamic approaches to education without letting either one be overstressed or fade into oblivion – through a balanced grounding in the Koran, catechism, history of Islam as well as mathematics and foreign languages.103 Gökalp then offered an alternative face of modernity that, instead of maintaining an exclusive focus on secular modernization, sought an interaction with the cultural factors in society.
What is most interesting in Gökalp’s writings is his identification of Islamic principles as the foundation of modern civilization. By rejecting priesthood, the Papacy, and the Inquisition, ‘basically every institution that existed in Christianity as contrary to
99 Gökalp, ‘Modern Family and National Culture,’ pp250-251.
100 Ibid., ‘State and Religion,’ Islam Mecmuasi 48, 1916, in Berkeș, p202.
101 Ibid., pp212-213.
102 Ibid., The Nature of Islamic Education,’ Islam Mecmuasi 1, 1914, in Berkeș, p234.
103 Ibid., p234.
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the principles of Islam,’ the Anglo-Saxon countries had not only broken free from the shackles of Catholicism, but also forged an ‘Islamicized’ version of Christianity – eventually referred to as Protestantism. The fact those countries had acquired their industrious nature and reached an advanced state of progress only after their conversion to Protestantism proved, for Gökalp, the Islamic foundations of modernity.104
Gökalp is then identified more appropriately as an Islamic modernist than a forerunner of Mustafa Kemal’s pugnacious secularism; just like those of his counterparts in Cairo and Constantinople, his modernization project was marked gradualism that tried to understand the intellectual changes in Ottoman society and reach their synthesis in their interpretation of Islamic principles. Contemporary science was certainly valuable; what he opposed was modernizing, or in his rhetoric, entering the realm of civilization without traditional culture. Gökalp was indeed conscious of how firmly entrenched religion was within the fabric of late Ottoman society, and could not envisage the organic evolution of another state without Islam anchored in its identity.
104 Gokalp, ‘Islam and Modern Civilization,’ Islam Mecmuasi 51, 1917, p222.
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Conclusion: ‘The Only Quran We Have Is In A Museum.’
In 1923, The Kemalist Republic replaced this Ottoman intellectuals’ gradualism with an all-out push for secularism. Instructing his rubber-stamped government to embark upon a grand project of cultural transformation, Kemal purged every element that marked Turkey as non-European. Ideologies of Filibeli and Said Hilmi, expressed openly in the relatively pluralistic environment of late Ottoman Empire, would be pushed underground; Cevdet’s project of harmonization would be ignored, and the names of Namik Kemal and Gökalp would be invoked only to stress their constitutionalism and parliamentarianism. In return, Kemal would transform Turkey into ‘a positivistic mausoleum with the official dogma of irreligion.’105
As argued above, the secularist-teleological accounts of nationalist historians fail to explain the roots of Turkey’s Western orientation. As this study has shown, the Young Ottomans had forged a unique Ottoman version of modernity, treating Westernization as not a matter of importation, but as a process of acculturation. Although some factions within the Young Turks, who invoked the theory of Vulgarmaterialismus as a manual to construct the ideal society, did champion the crowning of science as the definitive belief system, this study has lent emphasis to their gradual and careful approach to modernization; apart from the ‘eccentric’ strand led by Beşir Fuat, the Young Turks underlined the usefulness of a compromise with Islam.
In this regard, this study has identified the formation of exceedingly Westernized strata in the Empire in the late nineteenth century as the main reason behind Turkey’s successful westernization. Although the late Empire never witnessed a binary-dualist struggle of modernizers against religious functionaries, this reality should not gloss over the existence of these westernizers, who could not fathom any version of modernity except for its Western format. Other factors certainly aided the transformation of materials from being ‘the ruminations of marginal intellectuals’106 to the cornerstone of state policy – such as Mustafa Kemal’s singular victory in 1923. His triumph ‘fulfilled a deep-seated popular need for success in battle that had been culminating since the defeats of the eighteenth century,’107 and ‘helped him capture the unchallengeable aura
105Adnan Adıvar, ‘The Interaction of Islamic and Western Thought in Turkey,’ in Middle East Journal 3 (June 1947), p279.
106 Hanioğlu, Atatürk: An Intellectual Biography (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), p132.
107 Mardin, Genesis, p365.
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of infallibility that came to pervade his leadership.’108 His lustrous reputation as the nation’s saviour would ‘justify’ his frequent resort to dictatorial measures to ride over popular conservatism and push on pugnaciously assert this Weltanschauung that conceived of the world as a mixture of Turkey and the West.109 However, in the absence of these Bihruz Bey type figures, condescending towards everything that marked the country as non-European, Kemal would not have found footsoldiers for his state project.
This is why this study has lent emphasis to both the ruptures and continuities between Ottoman and early Republican histories. Kemal’s new Turkey was not an intellectual continuum with the Ottoman social theory in many respects; yet, this exceedingly westernized strata, mobilized towards the pinnacle of power in the 1920s, constituted a holdover from the late Ottoman Empire. When writing about Iran, Chehabi had stated that modernization had been carried out ‘by a director who had not fully understood the play and actors who had not volunteered for their parts.’110 In the Turkish context, the director had a very precise interpretation of the play, and was able to find actors that were ready to be cast in their roles.
108 Hanioğlu, Atatürk, p227.
109 Carter Vaughn-Findley, Turkey, Islam, Nationalism and Modernity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), p261.
110 Houchang Chehabi, ‘Staging Emperor’s New Clothes,’ in Iranian Studies 26 (3) 1993, p229.
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