The articulation of Islamic themes and values in Turkish literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries differs from that of the preceding era, for it occurs in the context of a struggle for survival and redefinition of selfhood and state. Turkish-speaking Muslims of a weakened and shrinking Ottoman Empire (c. 1300-1918) undertook the westernizing restructurings of the Tanzimat reform period (1839-1876) only to witness the rise of nationalism among non-Turkish groups, whose relatively harmonious coexistence over five centuries came to a close in the debacle of the Balkan Wars (1911-1913) and the ultimate defeat and dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire by the allied powers at the end World War I. Out of the ruins of this multiethnic Islamic empire emerged a small Turkish nation-state established as a secular republic in 1923. This period of radical social transformation and devastating upheaval provoked profound changes in the function and forms of Turkish literature. Prior to the westernizing innovations of the nineteenth century, Ottoman Turkish literature had been dominated by poetry as the favored means of artistic expression throughout all layers of society. Whether that of the erudite Ottoman court (divan) poets writing in the Arabo-Persian quantitative (aruz) meter or that of the illiterate folk minstrels (asik) reciting extemporaneously in the traditional Turkish syllabic (hece) meter, this premodern poetry was suffused with the values of Islamic mysticism; the anguish of separation from the Beloved, whether divine or human, constituted one of its primary aesthetic impulses. Both the divan poetry of the Ottoman elite and the more humble poetry of the minstrel (asik) and folk (halk) traditions are to be distinguished, however, from the religiously inspired devotional poetry of the tekke (dervish lodge) tradition, which reached out to all social classes.
When disruptive changes began to occur in Ottoman society during the period of the Tanzimat reforms, the emphasis in poetry began to shift away from inward probing of the human soul in philosophical-religious contexts toward a preoccupation with external social and political realities. Genres new to Ottoman literature began to appear and were used as effective vehicles for the expression of views on contemporary issues such as constitutionalism, slavery, patriotism, women’s rights, tyranny, Islamic unity, individual liberty, arranged marriages, and the effects of westernizing cultural change on value systems and lifestyles in Ottoman Istanbul. The first example of the novel available to readers of Ottoman Turkish, Yusuf Kamil Pasa’s 1859 translation of Abbe Fenelon’s didactic adventure story Telemaque, underwent numerous reprintings throughout the 1860s and 1870s, in part because of its political theme emphasizing that rulers exist for the sake of their subjects and not the reverse. The first actual Ottoman experimentation in European prose genres was undertaken not by individuals devoted primarily to the literary arts, but rather by influential journalists, political thinkers, and social educators, many of whom served in the Ottoman bureaucracy. Major figures of the Tanzimat era such as Ibrahim Sinasi Efendi (1826-1871), Ziya Pasa, (18251880), Namik Kemal (1840-1888), and Ahmet Mithat Efendi (1844-1912) saw in literature an effective means of communicating unfamiliar political concepts and social values in a convincing fashion to the widest possible audience. The first play for the legitimate theatre written in Ottoman Turkish, sair evlenmesi (The Marriage of a Poet), a one-act farce mocking the corruptibility of clerics and criticizing marriage ceremonies performed in the absence of the bride, was serialized in 1860 by its author, Sinasi, in the newspaper which he edited, Tercuman-i ahval (Interpreter of Events). Literature and journalism were in fact close associates throughout the Tanzimat period in creating, expanding, and informing public opinion.
If authors and poets themselves tended to see the role of literature as one of reaching and instructing or swaying the people, literature in turn functioned as a forum for the ideological debates of the intelligentsia. As the noted historian of nineteenth-century Turkish literature, Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar (1901-i962), himself a poet and novelist, has pointed out, it is the struggle among various ideologies, each corresponding to a separate social reality, that in a real sense constitutes the fundamental history of modern Turkish literature. It is in the context of the emergence of these ideological struggles that Islamic themes came to be articulated as a matter of political and social concern, arising in concert with a host of new themes reflecting the outlooks of a diversity of intellectual-political-literary movements. These conflicting aspects are standardly summarized under four labels, each associated with one or more major literary figures: “Ottomanism” with Namik Kemal (1840-1888), “Westernism” with Tevfik Fikret (18671915); “Islamism” with Mehmet Akif Ersoy (18731936); and “Turksm” with Ziya Gokalp (1876-1924). In the works of the first generation of Tanzimatists, however, Islamic themes do not appear as a conspicuous feature, although Islamic values may of course occur as one of the givens of a text, and the religious subjects of traditional poetic genres are not abandoned abruptly. For example, the collected poems (Muntehabat-i es’artm) of Ibrahim Sinasi-who with the founding in 1862 of his second newspaper, Tasvir-i Efkdr (The Depictor of Ideas), set the directions for the development of a modern press and a modern expository prose based on spoken Turkish-lacks a traditional na’t (eulogy for the prophet Muhammad) but does contain a miindcdt (supplication to God); the content of the latter, however, reflects a stance new to Ottoman literature, with the poet seeking a reasoned proof of God’s existence through contemplation of the order and beauty of the created universe before falling back on a more conventional expression of blind faith in God’s power and mercy. Islamic themes are not, however, part of the primary thrust of Sinasi’s life work, which anticipates the dual orientation, “toward the West” (battya dogru) and “toward the people” (halka dogru), that came to undergird the ideology of the Turkish Republic and to serve as the initial mainspring of modern Turkish literature. Sinasi’s The Marriage of a Poet exemplifies this dual orientation in its affinity with Moliere’s comedy of manners, Le mariage force, and its skillful exploitation of indigenous comic techniques and language use characteristic of the traditional shadow-puppet theater (karagdz), the popular theater in the round (orta oyunu), and the professional storytelling of the coffeehouse meddah.
The importance of Ibrahim Sinasi’s role as harbinger of subsequent main directions in Turkish literature requires that attention be paid to the nature of his response to the racialist paradigms of French Orientalist thought, in which he was immersed during two sojourns in Paris in 1849-1854 and 1865-1870. Introduced into Orientalist circles, both literary and academic, by his friend Samuel de Sacy, the son of the famous Orientalist Silvestre de Sacy, Sinasi, interacted with such prominent figures as Ernest Renan, Lamartine, Littre, and Pavet de Courteille, whose 1870 Dictionnaire Turk-Oriental acknowledges the contribution of his “learned teacher and friend” Sinasi. At a time when more politically active Young Ottoman writers-including the famous novelist, playwright, journalist, and poet Namik Kemal-were thinking in terms of the union and progress of all Ottoman subjects under a constitutional monarchy with equal rights regardless of race, ethnicity, language, or religion, Ibrahim Sinasi’s interest was turned toward defining the characteristics of a specifically Turkish identity. This he attempted through the collection of proverbs Durub-u emsal-i osmaniye, compiled in Paris in 1851 and published in Istanbul in 1863 as a source revealing “the wisdom of the common populace (avam)” and “the character of the thought of a people (millet),” as well as through the preparation of an ambitious etymological dictionary that aimed to cover the origins and development of the Turkic languages. Despite his adoption of the racialist bent of an incipient nationalism fostered by his Orientalist milieu, Sinasi included equivalent French and Arabic proverbs in his Durub-u emsal-i osmaniye. This may indicate an attempt to rebuff what Edward Said (Orientalism, New York, 1978) has called “the notorious race prejudice directed against Semites (i.e., Muslims and Jews)” of Sinasi’s close acquaintance, Ernest Renan. By presenting proverbial evidence of shared values inherent in the cultures of Europeans and Orientals alike, Sinasi could protest the putatively unbridgeable gap separating an unregenerate Muslim East from the Christian West; by emphasizing the non-Semitic origins of Turkish-speaking Muslims through his etymological work, Sinasi, was able to provide an immediate escape hatch for himself and other native speakers of Turkish from the racist attitudes of his Parisian friends in a period when the term “Turk” was often used indiscriminately by Europeans for any Muslim subject of the Ottoman sultan.
Although Sinasi’s encounter with the anti-Islamic sentiment of his European circle of acquaintances did not provoke the appearance of specifically Islamic themes in his literary output, the reverse would sometimes appear to be the case with the somewhat younger but equally important literary revolutionary of the Tanzimat period, Namik Kemal, whose biographies of successful Muslim military leaders-Saladin (c. 1137-1193), Mehmet the Conqueror (1429-1481), and Sultan Selim 1 (1467-1520)-appear to have been written expressly in response to his readings of French historians. In an 1872 article published in Ibret (Admonition), the Young Ottoman newspaper established after his return to Istanbul from political exile in Paris and London, Namik Kemal criticized the bias he perceived in European scholarship under the headline, “Avrupa Sarki bilmez” (Europe Does Not Know the East); and in 1883, while in internal political exile, he wrote a refutation (Renan mudafaanamesi) of Renan’s widely publicized lecture “Science and Islam,” which held Islam to be inherently incompatible with scientific progress. This is not to say, however, that a reactive spirit underlies the Islamic themes running through major literary works of Namik Kemal, or that such themes form the primary focus of this fervent Muslim’s literary output. Namik Kemal is perhaps best known for his Hurriyet kasidesi (Ode to Freedom), reflecting his dedication to the European Enlightenment ideal of individual liberty, and for his play Vatan yahut Silistre (Native Land or Silistre), whose theme emphasizing patriotic love for an Ottoman homeland (vatan) rather than devotion to the Ottoman dynasty (Al-i Osman) proved such a popular success when performed in 1873 that it earned him exile at the hands of Sultan Abdulaziz (r. 1861-1876) and closure of both the play and his newspaper. The patriotic hero of Vatan may be named Islam Bey, but the term of group identity used by his volunteer soldiers at the siege of Silistre in the Balkans is “Ottoman” rather than “Muslim” or “Turk.” “We are Ottomans” is the refrain of their patriotic turku (a genre of folksong) as they express their willingness to give up their lives for love of country and the glory of death in battle. An indication that Namik Kemal was not simply offering his. audience an intellectual’s artificial Ottomanist ideology may be found in the existence of a grassroots equivalent idea of self-identity from the same period in the stirring ’93 Kocaklamast (Heroic Song of AH 1293, 1877) by the minstrel poet Asik Senlik (1854-1914) of Kars in northeastern Turkey; the poetmusician, utilizing the refrain “We shall not give up the homeland (yurt) to the enemy so long as we live,” calls on Muslims to bring greater glory to the Ottoman dynasty in their defense of the fortress of Kars and resistance to the Russian invasion of eastern Anatolia.
Others of Namik Kemal’s major works do treat specifically Islamic subjects; for example, his fifteen-act drama Celalettin harzemsah, like his unfinished novel Cezmi, presents a theme of Islamic unity attained between Shi’i and Sunni Muslims through the royal marriage of the hero. Moreover, allusions to early Islamic history appear as some of the most dramatic imagery of Namik Kemal’s poetry even as it presents new political and social content. Like his close associate and fellow Young Ottoman, Ziya Pasa (1825-1880), Namik Kemal, even while advocating the use of Turkish folk meters and verse forms as the basis for a new poetry, remains dependent in his own work on the traditional aruz prosody and classical verse forms of divan poetry, particularly the kaside (eulogy), gazel (lyric poem), murabba (quatrain), Sarki (quatrain), tarih (chronogram), kita (independent stanza), and terkib-i bend (long poem with refrain couplets rhyming among themselves). This dependence on the meters and forms of classical divan poetry did not , however, prevent Namik Kemal from writing a scathing criticism, Tahrib-i harabat (Destruction of the Ruins), when his Young Ottoman companion in exile, Ziya Pasa-perhaps inspired by the literary anthologies of Orientalist friends met during two years in London (1868-1870)-published Harabat (Wine Shop of the Poets, 1874), a three-volume anthology of Arabic, Persian, Chagatay, and Ottoman divan poetry. Namik Kemal considered his friend’s presentation of Ottoman divan poetry in its classical Islamic context a betrayal of all their ideals as forgers of new directions for Ottoman Turkish literature. Yet-as several scholars including Ahmet Evin have pointed out (Origins and Development of the Turkish Novel, Minneapolis, 1983)-Namik Kemal’s best-known novel and one of the first to be written in Turkish, Intibah: Serguzest-i Ali Bey (Awakening: The Misadventures of Ali Bey, 1876) bears the imprint of traditional conventions of Ottoman poetry and prose, even if its theme of romantic tragedy, highly popular in Turkish novels of the 1870s and 1880s, displays close similarities to Alexandre Dumas fils’ La dame aux camelias. A moralizing work critical of the foppery of the half-Europeanized spendthrift sons of well-to-do Ottoman families, this novel, like much of Namik Kemal’s work, does not reflect specifically Islamic themes.
As a novelist Nanuk Kemal is overshadowed by his prolific contemporary Ahmet Mithat Efendi, most of whose journalistic essays and works of fiction, including twenty-nine novels, were published after the abrogation of the Young Ottomanist constitution of 1876 by Sultan Abdulhamid II and the imposition of a severely repressive system of censorship. This censorship did not prevent Ahmet Mithat from taking up the role of social critic or from aiming to educate his readers in all branches of contemporary European science and philosophy. A man of encyclopedic interests, Ahmet Mithat took on the role of fatherly teacher of the people in a period prior to the opening of the first modern Turkish university. Considered a conservative supporter of the Hamidian regime, he believed in accomplishing progressive change gradually though public education rather than through the imposition of revolutionary measures. He owned his own printing presses, and as the son of a small shop-owner who had once worked as an apprentice in Istanbul’s Spice Market, he knew how to captivate a far broader audience than any other writer of the period and thus became wealthy through his writing. Although Islamic themes cannot be said to constitute a major aspect of his work, Ahmet Mithat was a dedicated Muslim of strong convictions who did undertake an explicit defense of Islam (Mudafaa, Istanbul, 1882) against European assertions that it fostered an intractable resistence to social change and scientific progress. As pointed out by A. H. Tanpinar, Ahmet Mithat even went so far as to attempt to reconcile Lamarck’s data from the fossil record with the Qur’anic account of creation. Aware that the allegedly degraded status of Muslim women was used by Europeans to denigrate Islamic cultural values, he raised his voice in defense of the rights of women, arguing especially for equal rights in education. As pointed out initially by Pertev Naili Boratav and then again by Niyazi Berkes in his Development of Secularism in Turkey (Montreal, 1964), Ahmet Mithat even anticipated the day when women would enter all professions. However, it is difficult to count him among early Muslim feminists, as his fiction often reflects implicit values and attitudes that contradict the explicitly feminist themes of his essays-for example, his wellknown novel of 1875, Feldtun Beyle Rakim Efendi. This work, which contrasts the frivolous and foolish infatuation with all things European of Felatun Bey with the more measured European interests of the studious and industrious Rakim Efendi, presents the latter as an exemplary type even though he is made a father by his French mistress just as he marries the docile and devoted slave he has educated since childhood.
The first prominent Ottoman Muslim female feminist was the novelist Fatma Aliye Hanim (1864-1936), who presented her views on women’s issues not only through her novels Muhazarat (Disputations, Istanbul, 1892), Refet (Clemency, Istanbul, 1897), and Udi (The Lutist, Istanbul, 1899), but also through the new medium of magazines and women’s periodicals. In segments from Women of Islam (Nisvan-i !slam, Istanbul, 1891) available in English translation in Berkes (1964), she argues effectively as a devout Muslim against the position taken by some Islamist intellectuals and members of the ulema Ar., `ulama’) on the controversial subject of polygamy. Her early years and education are described in Ahmet Mithat Efendi’s biography Fatma Aliye Hanim or the Emergence of an Ottoman Authoress (Fatma Aliye Hanim, yahut bir muharrire-i Osmaniyenin neseti, Istanbul, 1893).
Although women’s issues were taken up by virtually all Ottoman male novelists of the last three decades of the nineteenth century, their fiction tended to focus on matters of equal consequence for the condition of men, such as the custom of arranged marriage and the institution of slavery. The egregious transgression of the values underlying the arrangement of marriages by parents for the benefit of their children became one of the most prominent themes of the period. Semseddin Sami’s (1850-1904) Taassuk-i Talat ve Fitnat (The Love of Talat and Fitnat) of 1872, which some regard as the first Ottoman novel despite its similarities to the romance (hikaye) of the Turkish minstrel-tale tradition, ends in the tragic death of the two young lovers because the heroine has been married off against her will to a wealthy man. Refusing to consummate the marriage, she commits suicide, her beloved follows suit, and the husband, upon learning from a note discovered in his young wife’s locket that she was actually his own longlost daughter, suffers a nervous breakdown and dies of grief.
A second major topic for social condemnation was the institution of slavery, which although already declared illegal continued to receive sharp criticism in the novels of the last quarter of the century as in Samipasazade Sezai’s (1858-1936) Serguzest, (Misadventure) of 1889. In this work the tension between romantic love and financial security and social status, played out in the conflict between two generations of a wealthy Ottoman household, may contribute to the death of the young gentleman and the tragic suicide of the beloved slave heroine, but the tragedy is at root attributed to the abomination of slavery. A third prominent theme of the Ottoman novel is exemplified by Recaizade Mahmud Ekrem’s (1847-1915) Araba Sevdasi (Carriage Crazy), one of the best-known novels of the 1880s. Like Namik Kemal’s Misadventures of Ali Bey and Ahmet Mithat’s Feldtun Beyle Rakim Efendi, this novel mocks the behavior of a generation awash in European fads and fashions. The adventures of the spendthrift hero of Carriage
Crazy, however, are presented as amusing rather than tragic. Bihruz Bey may lose his fancy carriage to his creditors and suffer a ridiculous disillusionment in love, but in the end he is able to return home to the comfort of his mother’s unfashionable mansion in a respectable old neighborhood of Istanbul.
Just as Recaizade’s novel epitomizes a main theme of the fiction of this period, his poetry reflects in intensified form the sentimentality often said to mar literary production during the thirty-three-year reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II (r. 1876-19o8). In Tahassur (Grievous Loss) Recaizade grieves for a daughter who died at birth and laments his inability to locate the exact site of her grave after the passage of fifteen years. In Ah Nejad! the poet mourns the death of a son, his anguish quickened by the sight of a child’s small footprints along a garden path. Both these melancholy kindertotenlieder dwell in dismay on the physical decay of mortal remains and signal a spiritual disquietude in the face of scientific materialism; this must be distinguished from earlier poetic expressions of spiritual anguish over separation from the beloved or metaphysical complaint over the transitory nature of all things mortal.
In its Ottoman Turkish context, the metaphysical anxiety that Alfred North Whitehead (Science and the Modern World, New York, 1925) considered characteristic of the nineteenth century and defined in the case of English Romantic poetry as “the intuitive refusal seriously to accept the abstract materialism of science,” finds its most compelling example in the works of the prolific poet and dramatist Abulhak Hamid Tarhan (1852-1937). Like many of his generation, he had been raised on the literary classics of two civilizations and thus was as conversant in the traditions of French and British Romanticism as in those of Persian and Turkish mysticism. In one of the most famous poems of the period, Makber (The Tomb, 1885), he departs from the classical Ottoman elegiac (mersiye) tradition to frame his own private agony over the death of his wife in terms of an anguished questioning of the metaphysical foundations of human existence.
The participation of Abiilhak Hamid Tarhan and an entire segment of the Ottoman literary elite in what Masao Miyoshi (The Divided Self: A Perspective on the Literature of the Victorians, New York, 1969) has termed “the nineteenth-century literature of spiritual distress” remained, however, entirely one-sided; although Ottoman novelists and poets read widely in French and to a lesser degree in English, as the literary influences spawned by German Romanticism and French Symbolism crossed continents, European men and women of letters had little opportunity and no inclination to avail themselves of the Ottoman Turkish manifestations of an otherwise truly crosscultural phenomenon-despite the fact that a fascination with the Orient constituted an important element of the Romantic movement in France. The incorporation of European thought and literary practice into the Ottoman Turkish context during the latter part of the nineteenth century was no doubt facilitated by the fact that the metaphysical orientations of Romanticism and Symbolism were, like the scientific interests of Ahmet Mithat Efendi, safe directions for literature in a period of severe political repression, as the last powerful Ottoman sultan strove to maintain the territorial integrity of an empire that had already lost effective control of its financial system and customs regulation. As the eminent scholar of Turkish literature Mehmet Kaplan has pointed out, Abdulhak Hamid’s Makber marked not only the death of the poet’s beloved Fatma Hanim but also the death of the literature of social idealism and political commitment initiated during the Tanzimat era by Sinasi and Namik Kemal. It ushered in the profound pessimism and melancholy of the Edebiyat-1 Cedide (New Literature) movement, whose illustrated literary magazine Servet-i funun (Treasury of Arts and Science), was published under the direction of the leading experimenter in modern European verse forms, Tevfik Fikret (1867-1915), from 1896 until its closure by the Sultan’s censors in igoi-for mentioning the year of the French Revolution. Although the Servet-i funun group was effectively silenced as a public forum, literary discussion continued at the Tuesday salons of the poet Nigar Hamm (1856-1918), whose pensive love poetry had appeared in Servet-i Funun under her pen name Uryan Kalb (Bare Heart); major works by Tevfik Fikret, reflecting a vehement cultural self-hatred and a newly found social concern-exemplified in Sis (Mist, I9oi), a loathing depiction of Istanbul as a veiled whore in a tyrant’s grip, and Tarih-i kadim (Ancient History, 1905), a contemptuous castigation of the bloody role of religion in human history-were circulated widely without publication. The elitist and cosmopolitan European orientation of the Servet-i funun circle is particularly evident in the works of the master novelist Halit Ziya Usakligil (1866-1945), whose Mai ve siyah (The Blue and the Black, 1897) depicts a young poet’s intellectual and aesthetic struggles; Ask-i memnu (Forbidden Love,1901), a triumph in the literary techniques of realism, paints a detailed portrait of the psychological causes and emotional consequences of adultery set in the lavish world of Ottoman villas on the Bosphorus. The prominence of the short-lived Servet-i funun school and its successor, the Fecr-i &ti (Dawn of the Future) literary group (1909-1911), augurs the importance of a recurrent, fundamental tension in the history of Turkish literature of the twentieth century between the literature of social commitment and that of aestheticism.
The Young Turk Revolution and the opening of the second constitional period (1908-1918) made room for the resurgence in literature of political themes, with debates over issues of cultural identity and social organzation now crystallizing around the positions identified as Westernist, Islamist, and Turkist. The Ottomanist position of the Tanzimat idealist Namik Kemal, who had called for the union of all Ottoman subjects under a constitutional monarchy, had been rendered nonviable by the emergence of nationalist separatist movements among the non-Muslim groups (millets) of the Empire; moreover, the territorial loss and atrocities inflicted on the civilian Muslim population of the Balkans in igii and 1912 lent urgency to the debate over the possibilities remaining for the survival of Turkish-speaking Muslims as a political or even social entity.
It is this context that explains the sudden emergence of politically motivated Islamic themes in literature and the vehemence of the dispute that arose between the most prominent of the Westernist poets, Tevfik Fikret, and the leading Islamist poet, Mehmet Akif. Fikret, an Anglophile idealist, appeared ready to jettison the entire religious and cultural heritage of his forebears the better to embrace his vision of Western civilization as the embodiment of the high moral values of liberty and individual freedom of conscience from institutional restraints, whether governmental or religious. The more pragmatic Mehmet Akif pointed to the colonialist designs and unprincipled behavior of the European powers in the Balkans, the Middle East, North Africa, and India. In his view, only the scientific and technological aspects of Western civilization were worthy of emulation. Material progress for the Muslim peoples of the world would be attained not through the inculcation of a Western mentality, but rather by a return to the originally progressive values of an authentic Islam, which could blossom again only by maintaining its roots and evolving from them.
The didactic tenor of the poetry in which such arguments were cast is well illustrated by Mehmet Akif’s Address from the Pulpit of the Suleymaniye Mosque (Suleymaniye Kursusunde), a singularly important Islamist narrative of one thousand and two lines in rhyming couplets, employing the classical aruz meter yet maintaining a cadence close to that of everyday speech and a vocabulary accessible to the general populace. First published in 1912, this passionate exhortation to Ottoman Muslims to come to their senses is worth close consideration; not only does it provide vivid insights into the Islamist point of view at this criticial juncture, it also sets forth the essentials of an argument that reappears decades later in social-scientific critiques of modernization theories based on a Western model of development. The highlights of Akif’s argument will be paraphrased in some detail.
The setting for the address is established as the poet invites his reader to enter the massive sixteenth-century mosque of Suleyman the Magnificent and points out the structural features that make it an awe-inspiring testament to God’s glory and to the engineering genius of its architect. Fortified by this reminder of past technological and artistic accomplishment, the poet and reader join a congregation of three thousand in hearing the prominent Muslim Tatar intellectual Abdurresid I brahim (1853-1943) deliver a blistering account of the conditions he had observed during travels throughout the Muslim world following the suppression of his underground printing press by Russian authorities. Degradation, stagnation, superstition, reactionary fanaticism, and brutal subjugation by foreign powers were to be matched only by the irresponsibility and incompetence of the Muslims’ own educated elites, the Russified thinkers of Central Asia, and the Westernist intellectuals of Ottoman Istanbul. In Central Asia he found that the once great Islamic centers of scientific learning and discovery-Bukhara, home to the physician and philosopher Ibn Sins (980-1037), and Samarkand, site of the famous astronomical observatory of Ulug Bey (1394-1449)-were now mired in such superstitious ignorance that an eclipse of the moon had brought forth thousands beating on drums in an effort to drive the devil away. More appalling still was the buffoonery and bigotry of local religious fanatics: whatever one might say would be damaging to religion; whatever one might think for the good of the people would be heretical innovation. Among the Muslims of China and Manchuria the speaker found that religion had been reduced to the sterile repetition of superstitious custom; surely the Qur’an had not been revealed by God for use in the telling of fortunes! His travels offered several points of hope, however. Japan presented a model of successful adaptation of the technology of the West without compromise of cultural integrity. And in India, although his travels had been curtailed by colonial authorities, he was able to see that Muslim youth sent abroad to England received a fine education yet returned with their original values intact; such people would certainly regain their freedom one day.
It is important to note that the criticism of religious fanaticism and backwardness presented by Mehmet Akif from an Islamist perspective coincides with the criticisms of Islamic practice characteristic of the Westernist stance championed by Tevfik Fikret. For the Islamists, however, instances of present degradation called for reform and recovery, whereas for the Westernists they rationalized rejection of religion as a mainstay of social life. It should also be noted that although both Mehmet Akif and Abdurresid Ibrahim are regarded as major exponents of the Pan-Islamist movement, this monumental poem makes no call for the political union of Muslims worldwide. The emphasis is on Islamic unity within an Ottoman context, with the poet vehemently rejecting the newly emergent politics of national and ethnic division among the Ottoman Albanians, Arabs, and Turks: Muslims were members of the same family, and ethnic and nationalist divisions would undermine the very foundations of Islam. Weakened by internal division, they would lose their lands to foreign occupation and domination just as had Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and even Iran. The civilized West had closed its eyes to the brutal oppression of Muslim peoples and the persecution of Muslim intellectuals in Russia; would it hesitate to move in and swallow up the Ottoman lands in three bites?
This Islamist survey of conditions in Central, South, and East Asia is presented as an admonition, then, to Ottoman Muslims to remedy their own social ills before the last remaining independent Islamic homeland, their own, is trampled under foot. These ills are laid out for examination in the second half of the poem, which opens with an adage that would appear to reflect the poet’s own background in veterinary medicine: “Get the diagnosis right and the remedy is easy!” Maintaining the guise of an outside expert in Islamic affairs speaking from the pulpit of the Suleymaniye Mosque, the poet asserts that the paralysis of the body politic has been caused by an estrangement between the intellectuals and the common people. The intellectuals think there is Address from the Pulpit of the Suleymaniye Mosque (Suleymaniye Kursusunde), a singularly important Islamist narrative of one thousand and two lines in rhyming couplets, employing the classical aruz meter yet maintaining a cadence close to that of everyday speech and a vocabulary accessible to the general populace. First published in 1912, this passionate exhortation to Ottoman Muslims to come to their senses is worth close consideration; not only does it provide vivid insights into the Islamist point of view at this criticial juncture, it also sets forth the essentials of an argument that reappears decades later in social-scientific critiques of modernization theories based on a Western model of development. The highlights of Akif’s argument will be paraphrased in some detail.
The setting for the address is established as the poet invites his reader to enter the massive sixteenth-century mosque of Suleyman the Magnificent and points out the structural features that make it an awe-inspiring testament to God’s glory and to the engineering genius of its architect. Fortified by this reminder of past technological and artistic accomplishment, the poet and reader join a congregation of three thousand in hearing the prominent Muslim Tatar intellectual Abdurresid 1 brahim (1853-1943) deliver a blistering account of the conditions he had observed during travels throughout the Muslim world following the suppression of his underground printing press by Russian authorities. Degradation, stagnation, superstition, reactionary fanaticism, and brutal subjugation by foreign powers were to be matched only by the irresponsibility and incompetence of the Muslims’ own educated elites, the Russified thinkers of Central Asia, and the Westernist intellectuals of Ottoman Istanbul. In Central Asia he found that the once great Islamic centers of scientific learning and discovery-Bukhara, home to the physician and philosopher Ibn Sina (98o-1037), and Samarkand, site of the famous astronomical observatory of Ulug Bey (1394-1449)-were now mired in such superstitious ignorance that an eclipse of the moon had brought forth thousands beating on drums in an effort to drive the devil away. More appalling still was the buffoonery and bigotry of local religious fanatics: whatever one might say would be damaging to religion; whatever one might think for the good of the people would be heretical innovation. Among the Muslims of China and Manchuria the speaker found that religion had been reduced to the sterile repetition of superstitious custom; surely the Qur’an had not been revealed by God for use in the telling of fortunes! His travels offered several points of hope, however. Japan presented a model of successful adaptation of the technology of the West without compromise of cultural integrity. And in India, although his travels had been curtailed by colonial authorities, he was able to see that Muslim youth sent abroad to England received a fine education yet returned with their original values intact; such people would certainly regain their freedom one day.
It is important to note that the criticism of religious fanaticism and backwardness presented by Mehmet Akif from an Islamist perspective coincides with the criticisms of Islamic practice characteristic of the Westernist stance championed by Tevfik Fikret. For the Islamists, however, instances of present degradation called for reform and recovery, whereas for the Westernists they rationalized rejection of religion as a mainstay of social life. It should also be noted that although both Mehmet Akif and Abdurresid Ibrahim are regarded as major exponents of the Pan-Islamist movement, this monumental poem makes no call for the political union of Muslims worldwide. The emphasis is on Islamic unity within an Ottoman context, with the poet vehemently rejecting the newly emergent politics of national and ethnic division among the Ottoman Albanians, Arabs, and Turks: Muslims were members of the same family, and ethnic and nationalist divisions would undermine the very foundations of Islam. Weakened by internal division, they would lose their lands to foreign occupation and domination just as had Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and even Iran. The civilized West had closed its eyes to the brutal oppression of Muslim peoples and the persecution of Muslim intellectuals in Russia; would it hesitate to move in and swallow up the Ottoman lands in three bites?
This Islamist survey of conditions in Central, South, and East Asia is presented as an admonition, then, to Ottoman Muslims to remedy their own social ills before the last remaining independent Islamic homeland, their own, is trampled under foot. These ills are laid out for examination in the second half of the poem, which opens with an adage that would appear to reflect the poet’s own background in veterinary medicine: “Get the diagnosis right and the remedy is easy!” Maintaining the guise of an outside expert in Islamic affairs speaking from the pulpit of the Suleymaniye Mosque, the poet asserts that the paralysis of the body politic has been caused by an estrangement between the intellectuals and the common people. The intellectuals think there is only one path of development-that of the West, which must be followed exactly: the West must be imitated in all social affairs and literary matters, or all is in vain. As for religion, it is the main obstacle to progress, and its fetters must be broken.
Akif’s recapitulation of the Westernist position, however blunt and angry, does capture an essential truth in indicating the degree to which Western-oriented Turkish intellectuals of the day had embraced the notion that a total transformation of their society on a Western model was in order, and that Islam was a primary obstacle to progress. This represents a significant departure from the stance of earlier Western-oriented Ottoman reformers such as Nanuk Kemal, who had refuted European characterizations of their religion as an inherently retrograde force in society. That Mehmet Akif placed great value on education in the sciences and did not suffer the anguished sense of conflict between reason and faith, science and religion, that plagued so many of his contemporaries becomes clear as the poem continues. The speaker in the mosque pulpit asserts that the masses have become as reactionary as the intellectuals are rootless. “What is more,” he declares, “the excesses of these would-be intellectuals have given the study of science and technology a bad name! They have provoked public opinion against it, and no real scientists are being produced! The few that have emerged are either feeble imitators who try to advance their careers with sophomoric attacks on religion or vague thinkers who get lost in theoretical speculation when it is the practical application of scientific knowledge that is urgently needed!”
The speaker’s harshest criticism, however, is reserved for the cosmopolitan poets and novelists of the Servet-i Funun and Fecr-i Ati circles, whom he finds not suitable to lead and guide the people. Had he the strength, he would kick them all out of the country and import Russian authors under contract-despite his enmity toward them-to write for the sake of society. Mehmet Akif singles out Tevfik Fikret, for a particularly nasty swipe, deriding him, though without mention of his name, as a poet who “denounces God yet takes money as sexton for the Protestants.” The gibe refers to the fact that Fikret lived in the Presbyterian missionary milieu of Robert College (the present Bosphorus University), where he had a position teaching Turkish and a comfortable residence close to campus. It reflects Akif’s estimation of Fikret as a hypocrite who could denounce religion in Tarih-i kadim (Ancient History) and scorn the need for religious dogma and ritual in Haluk’un amendisii (Credo for My Son), yet accept a position at an educational institution run by men of the cloth. In calling Fikret a sexton, he implies that this genteel poet, whose condescension toward the poor is discernible in works such as Ramazan sadakasi (Alms in the Month of Fasting), was himself looked down on by the foreigners whose society he kept and whose civilization he so admired.
Fikret’s retort to this Islamist attack came in a poem of 1914, Tarih-i kadim’e zeyl (Addendum to Ancient History). In it he sets out the tenets of his own deist spirituality, casting aspersions on Akif’s orthodoxy but not providing a substantive rejoiner to the societal issues he raised in the Address from the Pulpit, the concluding sections of which reiterate that the path of progress must take different forms in different societies, and that the secret to a people’s advancement lies within themselves. Just as Islam had fostered progressive change for the betterment of society in ages past, Akif argues, so too could it now evolve in step with the attainments of the present century, though not without attending to the health of its roots. Fikret’s failure to respond to the essential points of Akif’s argument is perhaps indicative of the fact that the Westernist-Islamist debate could end only in polarized deadlock as long as progress was taken to mean remaking society in the image of the Christian West.
It was left to the advocates of the Turkist position to bring the debate toward constructive resolution by forging the kinds of syntheses that were proposed by the social theoretician and poet Ziya Gokalp, in Turklesmek, Islamlasmak, muasirlasmak (Turkification, Islamization, Modernization, 1918) and in Turkculugun esaslari (The Principles of Turkism) published in 1923, the year the Turkish Republic was founded. In the latter work Gokalp addresses the issues of technological progress, cultural authenticity, and the alienation of social classes that had been raised from an Islamist perspective by Mehmet Akif. He proposes their resolution through the concept of a reciprocal motion “toward the West” and “toward the people” within the framework of a dichotomy posited between civilization and culture, whereby a Western-educated elite would transmit modern civilization to the folk masses and in turn draw from them its own distinctively Turkish culture. In this formulation of a new Turkish social identity Islam takes its place as an element in the social fabric of a westernizing society. Religious knowledge, as an important ingredient of culture, was to be made directly accessible to all citizens through the translation of the Qur’dn into Turkish; this undertaking was accepted by Mehmet Akif, but it was not brought to fruition.
The importance attached to the use of Turkish rather than Arabic in religious contexts was underscored by Gokalp in the opening lines of his poem Vatan (Homeland), which expresses longing for a country in which the call to prayer is made from the minaret in Turkish and in which the words of the daily ritual prayers can be understood by every villager. Gokalp’s interest in encouraging the sense of a distinctively Turkish Islam finds expression in the poem Din (Religion), in which the basis of his own religious faith is declared in terms of the values of traditional Turkish mysticism as exemplified in the works of such tekke poets as Yunus Emre (d. 1320), who sought God as love within the human heart without the incentive hope of heaven and fear of hell. In seeking a Turkish grounding for Islam Gokalp pointed to the central importance in Turkish religious culture of the great fifteenth-century poem, the Mevlidi Serif (Nativity Poem) by Suleyman Celebi, a work exalting the birth and life of the Prophet Muhammad; its performance (mevlut) in great mosques and ordinary homes has been shared by women and men over the centuries both at major holidays and in memory of the deceased, making it one of the most familiar and bestloved artistic expressions of Islamic faith in the Turkish language. The poem is of special significance for women because of the importance of the role played by Emine, the mother of the prophet Muhammad, who describes in her own words the miracle of childbirth. It is possible that this inspirational poem, which includes Eve among those holy figures whose forehead is touched by the light of prophetic succession, both reflects and reinforces the profound respect for women and women’s own sense of self-worth which many find characteristic of Turkish culture, despite the constraints of the gender subordination that the major monotheisms have legitimized.
Gokalp’s interest in interpreting Islam as a religion stressing love of God rather than fear of divine retribution was shared by the prominent novelist, patriot, and feminist Halide Edib Adivar (1884-1964); it both colored her speeches at the massive street demonstrations before the Mosques of Sultan Ahmet and Fatih during the Allied occupation of Istanbul and informed her novel Sinekli bakkal (The Clown and His Daughter, 1935-1936) The novel’s main character, the granddaughter of an intolerant fire-and-brimstone imam, develops under the tutelage of a gentle dervish of the Mevlevi order from a talented reciter of the Qur’an into an inspired and well-paid reciter of the Mevlid-i serif.
Halide Edib’s positive view of the values embodied in the Turkish traditions of Islamic mysticism was not, however, taken up by subsequent authors of major consequence. They instead followed the example set by Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoglu (1889-1974) in his novel, Nur Baba (Father Divine, 1922) which depicts an urban Bektasi (Ar., Bektashi) dervish lodge as the site of unmitigated debauchery. Karaosmanoglu’s powerful image of Bektasi decadence was in consonance with the secularist ideology of Turkey’s charismatic leader Mustafa Kemal AtaWrk (1880-1938), which resulted in the abolition of the caliphate (1924), the suppression of religious orders (1925), and the rejection of Islam as a state religion (1928). Karaosmanoglu’s negative characterization of an urban Bektasi dervish was followed by equally forceful and repugnant depictions of religious figures in the rural context of his landmark novel Yaban (The Strange One, 1932), a work that signaled the emergence of anti-Islamic themes as a prominent feature of twentieth-century fiction and poetry as the competing ideologies of Kemalism and Marxism took control of a Turkish literary scene at odds politically, but at heart united in a value that is profoundly Islamic-a commitment to social justice.
[See also Ottoman Empire; Turkey; and the biographies of Ersoy, Gdkalp, Kemal, and Sinasi]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adivar, Halide Edib. The Turkish Ordeal: Being the Further Memoirs of Halide Edib. New York and London, 1928. Intriguing literary work by a participant in the critical events between the end of World War I and the foundation of the Turkish Republic.
Adtvar, Halide Edib. Memoirs of Halide Edib. New York, 1972. Reprint edition of an important historical source covering the years 1885-1919, by a major novelist, nationalist, and feminist strongly influenced by her Muslim upbringing and American girls’ school education.
Akyiiz, Kenan. Batt Tesirinde Turk Siiri Antolojisi. Ankara, 1970. Outstanding critical anthology of nineteenth- and twentieth-century poetry.
Andrews, Walter G. Poetry’s Voice, Society’s Song: Ottoman Lyric Poetry. Seattle, 1985. Analytic overview of an important Ottoman genre.
Atis, Sarah Moment. Semantic Structuring in the Modern Turkish Short Story: An Analysis of the Dreams of Abdullah Efendi and Other Short Stories by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar. Leiden, 1983. A concise overview of the history of twentieth-century Turkish literature is provided in the introduction.
Halman, Talat S. “Turkish Poetry.” In Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, edited by Alex Preminger et al., pp. 872-876. Princeton, 1974. The best general English-language survey of ancient, medieval, and modern Turkish poetry.
Halman, Talat S., ed. Contemporary Turkish Literature: Fiction and Poetry. London and Toronto, 1982. Important anthology that includes many previously translated but no longer accessible works.
Kaplan, Mehmet, et al. Yeni Turk Edebiyatt Antolojisi. Istanbul, 1988-. Multivolume series projected in ten volumes, the initial three of which provide a wealth of important literary materials culled from inaccessible contemporary periodicals from 1839 onward.
Meeker, Michael E. “The New Muslim Intellectuals in the Republic of Turkey.” In Islam in Modern Turkey: Religion, Politics, and Literature in a Secular State, edited by Richard Tapper, pp. 189-219. London, 1991. Insightful discussion of three Islamist newspaper columnists and essayists.
Tanpinar, Ahmet Hamdi. XIX. Asir Turk Edebiyatt Tarihi. Istanbul, 1976. Remains the best basic survey of nineteenth-century Turkish literature.
SARAH G. MOMENT ATIS
