Islam als Problem: Celal Nuri und Ahmed Hilmis (Filibeli) spätosmanischer Materialismusstreit

Abstract

Abstract The so-called Materialismusstreit evolved in the second half of the 19th century as a new genre of popular literature and was carried out as a public debate mainly by German popularisers. In the Ottoman context, however, the reception of the Materialismusstreit demonstrates how a universalised perception of the West had already become the main frame of reference among secularly educated Ottoman intelligentsia in the course of late Ottoman modernity. This fact not only constitutively shaped their modern discourse on Islam. Moreover, it brought about at the same time fundamental semantic shifts in concepts holding a prominent role within the Islamicate epistemological tradition. Consequently, the entanglement between this abovementioned frame of reference and concepts inherited from a traditional knowledge order resulted in a conceptual rupture with the traditional epistemologies. In an attempt to exemplify the argument, this paper builds on a less-known dispute on materialism between Celal Nuri and Ahmed Hilmi (Filibeli), and shows the transformation in their usage of epistemic concepts such as ʿilm, fenn, and dīn, as well as their reception of the Orientalist Islam discourse. Prior to the analysis of two core primary sources, the first part of this paper elaborates on the theoretical and methodological modalities of making fruitful the intellectual output of late Ottoman modernity for a globally entangled intellectual history.