Islamist thinkers in the late Ottoman Empire and early Turkish Republic

Abstract

Modern Turkey AHMET CEYHUN, Islamist Thinkers in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic (Leiden, Boston: Brill, 2015). Pp. 184. $ 120.00 cloth.This is both a very useful book and a frustrating one. It is a welcome contribution to the literature on pre-contemporary Islamic (and Islamist) thought. Turkey is too much neglected in this field-both scholars of Islamic intellectual history and of Turkish intellectual history have simply assumed the narrative presented in works like Niazi Berkes's Development of Secularism in Turkey and Bernard Lewis's The Emergence of Modern Turkey. Following the recent successes of the AK party, however, Euro-American scholars have been compelled to rethink the secularist narrative formerly taken as a given.Contemporary Turkish scholarship on Islam-oriented intellectuals began as an act of resistance to the silencing of Islamic ideologies, but now it has evolved into recovering and documenting a salient trend in Turkey's intellectual history. The pioneer was the extraordinarily industrious Ismail Kara, who edited an anthology called Turkiye'de islâmcilik Ducuncesi; Metinler/Kiciler. (2nd printing ed., 3 vols., istanbul: 1986, 1987, 1994). Kara mainly transcribed, but occasionally translated, Ottoman Turkish into modern Turkish, and he annotated the works with comments and bibliography (not a trivial task since some of these figures had been ignored in standard reference works). His was a major work in the recovery of Turkish Islam-oriented intellectual history spanning the late Ottoman period, including figures as recent as ismet Ozel.Seyhun's Islamist Thinkers does not cover exactly the same period as Kara's volumes, though it is clearly derived from Kara's work. The last of Ceyhun's subjects to die was Mehmed Cemseddin Gunaltay (1961). Of the thirteen writers collected and translated here, five died before 1930; five died in the 1930s or 1940s, three died in the 1950s or 1960s. All are to be found in Kara's anthology. The texts §eyhun chooses to excerpt differ from Kara's, for the most part, and are less extensive, but the biographical introductions, when they cite sources, are often drawn straight from Kara's anthology. The introductions vary coverage, and some are only a couple of paragraphs long while others are much longer. For example, the introduction for Said Halim Paca runs to six pages. The passage §eyhun translates from Said Halim's French (152-160) begins with the same passage provided by Kara from the Turkish translation (at 1:79-80) then diverges. §eyhun also provides a translation from an unpublished work of Said Halim, provided to him by the author's family. His situating Said Halim Paca as an intellectual descendent of Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn Abdalwahhab (3), however, is very odd.The translations read well and will be of use to researchers but primarily to students; for that, it is a very valuable contribution. …