His Birth

In the early morning of 4 February 1926, in the heart of Ankara, a few steps from the building where the young Turkish Republic issued its laws, a scholar in his white robe was led to a gallows and hanged, and whoever watched that morning saw not merely the end of a human life but the first open sign that the new state was prepared, if need be, to silence the voice of the old Islamic scholarship with the noose. The man on that gallows was İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀, and in the years and generations that followed his name would live on in the Turkish Muslim world as that of the first scholar to pay the highest price for his conviction under the Republic. Yet his story does not begin on that square in 1926, and whoever wishes to understand it must turn his gaze away from the gallows and return to a small Anatolian town in the hills north of Ankara, half a century earlier, when the Ottoman Empire still stood and no one could suspect that the child born there into an ordinary Muslim household would one day become the symbol of a collision between two worlds.

In the year 1875, during the reign of Sultan Abdülaziz, a boy was born in the surroundings of the town of İskilip in the Anatolian province of Çorum, and he was given the name Atıf. It was a name of Arabic origin, connected in its root meaning with affection and compassion, and it would accompany the man who bore it throughout his life, first as the name of an unremarkable provincial child, later as that of an honoured Istanbul scholar, and finally as that of a condemned man whose fate would be retold across the entire Muslim world. About the very first years of that child, as with so many nineteenth-century Anatolian lives, little has been handed down with certainty, and the historian must proceed cautiously here and not supplement the little that the sources report with what he would wish to know. What is certain, and what determined the direction of his entire childhood, is that he never knew the security of a complete parental home.

İskilip in the late Ottoman years

İskilip is an old town in the north of Central Anatolia, situated in a valley among the hills of the province of Çorum, roughly two hundred kilometres north of Ankara and at an altitude where the winters are long and harsh and the summers dry and clear. The town lies at the foot of a steep rock on which a fortress has stood since antiquity, and in the tombs carved into that rock face the visitor can still read today the centuries that have passed over the place, for İskilip was inhabited long before Islam reached Anatolia. Since Seljuk and then Ottoman times it had become an ordinary Anatolian provincial town, with a central mosque, a covered bazaar where tanners, coppersmiths and tailors practised their crafts, and a community of a few thousand souls which was overwhelmingly Muslim and lived its life to the rhythm of the prayers and the seasons.

What set İskilip apart from many another town of comparable size was the venerable place it occupied in the Anatolian tradition of religious scholarship. The town possessed its own medrese, the Caca Bey school, and through the centuries it had produced a steady stream of imams, judges and teachers who placed their knowledge at the service of the local mosques and the surrounding villages. In a society in which the scholar, the hoca, was not only the man of prayer but also the counsellor in disputes, the teacher of the children and the guardian of the community’s memory, growing up in such a town meant that a gifted boy naturally found himself in the vicinity of books, of teachers and of the Arabic of the Quran. İskilip was no Istanbul and no Cairo, and its scholars did not rank among the most famous of the empire, but it was a town where the path of knowledge lay open to whoever wished to walk it, and that circumstance would prove of decisive value for the young Atıf.

The province of Çorum and its people

The province of Çorum, of which İskilip formed a district, was in the second half of the nineteenth century an agricultural region of grain fields, flocks of sheep and orchards, populated by a predominantly Turkish-speaking Muslim population alongside smaller communities of other origins. It was a region that lay far from the great trade routes and the coastal harbours, and its people were known as sober, devout and attached to the inherited customs of their forefathers. The life of an ordinary İskilip family was governed by the harvest and the winter, by the market and the mosque, and by the extended family ties which in such a community took the place of what in later times would be regulated by the state and its institutions.

In that world, religion was not a separate compartment of life practised at set times, but the very fabric into which existence was woven, and a child grew up there with the call to prayer as the natural measure of its day and with the names of Allah ﷻ and of His Prophet ﷺ as the first words it learned to speak. The family into which Atıf was born belonged to the established Muslim population of the region, and tradition connects it with the older Anatolian lineages that had settled in the area after the Seljuk conquests. Much more precisely than that, the past of such a provincial family cannot be reconstructed, and it would be a form of historical falsification to embellish the scarce data with invented genealogies.

The empire into which he was born

To understand which forces would shape the life of this child, one must take stock of the condition of the Ottoman Empire in the year of his birth. In 1875 the empire still stretched across three continents, from the Balkans in the northwest to the Arab provinces in the south and to the mountains of Eastern Anatolia, and the sultan in Istanbul still bore the title of caliph, the protector of the Sunni Muslims throughout the world. But behind that impressive extent lay a deep weakening, for the empire was financially exhausted, it was regarded by the great European powers as a dying patient whose inheritance they had already begun to divide among themselves, and in the Christian provinces of the Balkans smouldered the revolt that would soon lead to war.

It was precisely in the years around Atıf’s birth that this crisis approached its climax. Two years after his birth, in 1877, the war with Russia broke out that would end disastrously for the empire, and in 1878 the Congress of Berlin forced the Ottomans to cede vast territories in the Balkans and to recognise a series of new Christian states on its northern border. For the Muslims of Anatolia this was no distant diplomatic event, for the lost territories disgorged hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees, who, destitute and traumatised, moved toward the core lands of the empire and sought refuge in towns and villages deep into Anatolia. The awareness that the Muslim world had been forced onto the defensive and that the mighty empire of the forefathers was losing ground to an advancing and self-assured Europe penetrated in these years to the remotest provincial towns, and it would preoccupy the generation to which Atıf belonged for the rest of their lives.

The Tanzimat and the rift of reform

The Ottoman answer to this pressure from outside had taken the form of a long series of reforms, summarised under the name Tanzimat, which since 1839 had sought to modernise the empire’s administration, army, judiciary and education along European lines. For the ordinary provincial inhabitant this meant that alongside the familiar institutions of the Muslim community, new schools, new courts and new officials gradually appeared, and that the young could henceforth choose between the old path of the medrese and the new path of the state school, which trained them for a career in the modernising civil apparatus. That division, between the world of inherited religious scholarship and the world of Westernised state service, was not yet, in Atıf’s childhood, the sharp rupture it would later become, but its seed had already been planted.

In that tension lies, in retrospect, the whole tragedy of his life. For the child born in İskilip in 1875 would choose the path of the medrese and devote himself with all his ability to the inherited knowledge of Islam, while the state into which he was born was moving in precisely the opposite direction and would ultimately, under a new and radical leadership, decide that there was no longer any place in public life for that inherited knowledge. The collision between the hoca and the Republic, which in 1926 would reach its fatal denouement on the Ankara square, was in a sense already laid down in the contradictory forces at work in the empire on the day he was born.

A child without a father

About Atıf’s immediate family, the most reliable biographies report a few facts that thoroughly revise the picture of a sheltered childhood. His father, named in the sources as Mehmed Ali Ağa, died when the child was about six months old, so that Atıf in fact never knew his father, and the memory of him could reach him only through others. His mother was called Nazlı Hanım, and family tradition connects her descent with a forefather remembered in the region as Arap Dede, a designation that points to an origin in the Arab provinces of the empire. May Allah ﷻ have mercy on her; beyond her name and the reverence with which she is mentioned in tradition, history has preserved little more about her.

The upbringing of the fatherless child came into the hands of his grandfather, Hasan Kethüdâ, in whose house Atıf ﵀ spent his childhood. The designation kethüdâ points to a man of a certain standing in the local community, a figure of authority or a steward, and it is in that house, under the care of a grandfather instead of a father, that the boy’s first formation took place. It is tempting to paint a moving scene of those years, but honesty compels us to acknowledge that the sources have not left us the domestic particulars, and that we can only guess at the tone and warmth of that grandparental home. What tradition does hold fast is that despite the early loss of his father, the boy was not left to his fate, but found a place and an upbringing within the extended family and the close-knit community of İskilip.

What the early loss meant

In a society such as that of late Ottoman Anatolia, the early death of a parent was no rarity, and the community had developed its own ways of taking in the orphaned child, in the first place through the extended family and in the second place through the mosque and the medrese, which opened the way to a future for many a gifted orphan. That a fatherless boy from a provincial town should rise to the highest circles of Istanbul scholarship was, in that light, not self-evident but neither was it unthinkable, for it was precisely the world of religious knowledge that in Muslim society stood most open to whoever possessed talent and dedication, regardless of his origin or his fortune.

One must guard against the inclination to read in the early loss of the father an immediate explanation of his later steadfastness, for such retrospective psychological explanations are usually cheaper than they are true. What one can say with more justice is that Atıf ﵀ became familiar from an early age with the thought that life offers no self-evident security and that man must seek his anchor elsewhere than in the accidental shelter of his circumstances. In the religion that surrounded him from the cradle, that anchor lay within reach, and the boy grasped it, first as a child learning the first surahs, later as a student who devoted himself to his studies with all his soul.

The name and its meaning

It is worth pausing for a moment at the name the child received, for in the Muslim society of his time a weight was attached to the name that the modern reader easily underestimates. The name Atıf, in its Arabic root form ʿĀtif, belongs to a family of words connected with affection, compassion and the inclining of oneself toward the other, and it carries in its meaning something of the gentleness and the turning-toward that a devout family gave its child as a good omen. Whether the choice of this name reflected a conscious wish of his parents or simply followed the ordinary course of naming in his lineage can no longer be established with certainty today, and it would be careless to attribute to a choice of name, in hindsight, a prophetic power that the sources do not grant it.

Yet there is, when one surveys the further course of his life, a certain bitter fittingness in the name, for the man who bore it would devote his life to the care of the community of believers and to the defence of what he regarded as its spiritual wellbeing, and at the end of that road he would pay the highest price for a dedication that would not let itself be bent to the very last. The designation under which he would live on in the memory of the Turkish Muslim world, İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀, joined his native town, the name he received from his family and the dignity of teacher that he would later earn into a single whole, and in that composite name lies, in a sense, his entire life’s course, from the İskilip child to the Istanbul hoca.

A child of his time and his region

One must guard against viewing the child who came into the world in 1875 through the eyes of the later drama, as if from his first day he had been destined for the fate that ultimately befell him, for to the people around him he was, in his first years, nothing other than an ordinary, early-orphaned İskilip boy, one of the many children growing up in the houses of the town under the care of their relatives. The world in which he gathered his first impressions was the enclosed world of the Anatolian province, with its fixed seasons, its markets and its mosques, and with the extended family and the neighbourhood as the natural frame within which a life unfolded. It was a world that changed little from generation to generation, and nothing in it foretold the storms that would break over it half a century later and shake to its foundations the familiar order in which a scholar was the honoured guardian of the community.

Precisely because he was so completely a child of that world, its loss would later strike him all the more deeply, for the order he had come to know as self-evident, the order in which religion and daily life formed a single whole and in which knowledge of the Quran and the law enjoyed the highest esteem, was exactly the order that the new state would dismantle. The boy who learned in İskilip that faith was the fabric of existence would, as a grown man, see the world in which that fabric was forcibly unpicked, and his refusal to acquiesce in that dismantling sprang from the deep familiarity with an order that had been instilled in him in his childhood in the hills of Çorum.

The first lessons

The first instruction of an İskilip Muslim child took place, as everywhere in the empire, in the circle of the local mosque and the elementary Quran school, where the boys, under the guidance of a teacher, learned the Arabic alphabet, the principles of prayer and the recitation of the Quran. For a gifted child this meant memorising ever longer portions of the sacred text, an exercise that sharpened the memory and made the mind familiar from an early age with the sound and rhythm of Arabic, long before its finer meanings came within reach. That Atıf ﵀ distinguished himself in this first phase is evident from the continuation of his path, for only a pupil who excelled in elementary instruction was destined for higher study at the medrese.

It was in these years that the young Atıf ﵀ made the transition from the simple Quran school to the more serious instruction of the Caca Bey school in İskilip itself, where, under the guidance of the local scholar Hoca Abdullah Efendi ﵀, he took his first steps on the path of the religious sciences proper. We shall dwell at greater length on those İskilip years of study in the next article, but already here it is important to establish that the entire edifice of his later scholarship rested on this provincial foundation, and that the boy laid the foundations of Arabic, of Quranic science and of Islamic law in the shadow of the mosque of his native town, far from the lustre of the capital where his name would later be made.

The world of the provincial scholar

The picture one must form of such an education differs fundamentally from that of a modern school. There was no classroom with benches and no timetable of hours and subjects, but a circle of students around a scholar seated on a mat in the mosque or in a room of the medrese, with the text before him and his students in a half circle around him. Instruction passed from mouth to mouth and from book to book, and the student advanced not by passing examinations in the modern sense but by mastering one text after another, each time under the watchful eye of his teacher, until he earned the authorisation to pass the material on to others in his turn. It was a slow, patient and deeply personal way of learning, which made the bond between teacher and student the heart of the entire system.

In that world Atıf grew up, and it shaped not only his knowledge but also his character, for along with the material the medrese cultivated an attitude: reverence for the inherited knowledge, patience in long labour, and the awareness of being part of a chain of scholars that reached back, link by link, to the Companions ﵃ of the Prophet ﷺ and thereby to the revelation itself. Whoever had once been imbued with that chain could not later disavow it without betraying his deepest formation, and precisely therein lies, anticipating what is to come, the key to understanding his refusal to bow to the demands of the new state. The man who in 1926 chose the noose rather than the disavowal of his conviction was the mature fruit of the child who learned in İskilip that knowledge of the religion is not a possession over which one freely disposes, but an entrusted pledge that one is bound to pass on intact.

What lay contained in İskilip

When a child came into the world in a town like İskilip, no one knew what destiny was thereby entrusted to the world, and the birth of Atıf ﵀ in 1875 undoubtedly passed unnoticed by all except the small circle of his family. He was a fatherless child in a remote provincial town of an empire that had its best days behind it, and nothing in his circumstances foretold the role he would later play. And yet, in retrospect, that modest birth already contained the forces that would determine his life: the close-knit Muslim community that took in and formed the orphaned child, the venerable scholarly tradition of his native town that opened to him the path of knowledge, and the great, struggling empire whose drive for reform laid down the dividing line along which his life would ultimately unfold.

İskilip gave him his foundation, but it could not hold him, for the talent that revealed itself in the young student reached further than what a provincial medrese could offer him. Toward the end of his İskilip years of study, the young man faced the choice that would determine the further course of his life, the choice to leave his familiar native region and undertake the long and arduous journey to Istanbul, where the greatest schools of the empire opened their gates to those who wished to attain the highest degrees of religious science. How he took that first, decisive step, and how the medrese of İskilip prepared him for the capital, is the subject of the next article.

Sources

• TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, entry “İskilipli Mehmed Âtıf Efendi”, Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı (İstanbul, 2000), pp. 132–135 [the most authoritative academic biography].
• Ethem Erkoç, İskilipli Mehmed Âtıf Hoca, Çorum Belediyesi (Çorum, 2016) [monograph containing the İskilip family and childhood data].
• Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, I.B. Tauris (4th edition, 2017), pp. 56–112 [for the general late Ottoman and Republican context].
• Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, Oxford University Press (3rd edition, 2002), pp. 76–134.
• Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, McGill University Press (1964), pp. 156–224 [for the Tanzimat and the tension between tradition and reform].
• Stanford J. Shaw & Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, volume II, Cambridge University Press (1977), pp. 172–205 [for the war of 1877–1878 and the Congress of Berlin].