Cacabey Medresesi
In the previous article we left the young Atıf ﵀ as a fatherless child of İskilip, born in 1875 in the hills of the province of Çorum and raised under the care of his grandfather Hasan Kethüdâ, a child who had taken his first steps on the path of religion within the circle of the local mosque and who had learned, in the elementary Qur’an school, the letters of Arabic and the first surahs of the holy text. We established there already that only a pupil who excelled in that first, simple instruction was destined for the higher study at the medrese, and it is precisely this transition, from the child who learns to recite the Qur’an to the youth who devotes himself to the religious sciences proper, that forms the subject of the present article. For it was in the Caca Bey school of İskilip itself, under the guidance of the local scholar Hoca Abdullah Efendi ﵀, that Atıf ﵀ laid the foundations of the whole edifice of learning that would later be completed in İstanbul, and it was within the walls of that modest provincial school that the first, decisive formation of his mind took place.
The Caca Bey school of İskilip
One must first clear away a misunderstanding that has crept into some biographies, namely the notion that Atıf ﵀ received his medrese education in the famous Cacabey school of the city of Kırşehir, or in Kayseri, places that in reality have nothing to do with his youth. The Caca Bey where Atıf ﵀ studied as a boy was the eponymous, yet wholly separate, school of his own birthplace İskilip, an institution that, like so many Anatolian medreses, drew its name from a pious founder of an earlier century but that must not be confused with the renowned buildings of the same name elsewhere in Anatolia. He did not, in other words, have to leave his native region to receive this education, and he laid the foundation of his knowledge in the shadow of the same rock fortress and the same mosques beneath which he had grown up.
The İskilip school belonged to the far-branching system of medreses that had been spread across the whole of Anatolia in the course of the Seljuk and Ottoman centuries, a network of institutions of learning maintained by pious endowments, the so-called vakıf, which in every town of any significance provided for the training of imams, judges and teachers. Such a medrese was usually a simple building, raised around a courtyard, with a number of cells in which the students from outside the town lodged, a classroom or a space attached to the mosque where the teaching took place, and a library whose size differed greatly from town to town. İskilip was, as we saw in the previous article, neither İstanbul nor Cairo, and the treasure of books in its school could not measure up to the great collections of the capital, but for a boy who wished to acquire the first principles of the religious sciences it offered all that a sound beginning required.
The foundation and its place in the town
A medrese like that of İskilip was not merely a building but a living institution that, generation after generation, nourished the spiritual life of the town, for out of its gates came the men who led the prayer in the mosques of the district, who pronounced judgment in the disputes of the community according to the rules of Islamic law, and who taught the children of the next generation the letters and the principles of the faith. The scholar who taught at such a school, the müderris, enjoyed in the local community a standing that rested not on wealth or birth but on knowledge and on the chain of transmission in which he stood, and for the gifted boys of the town he was the gate through which they gained access to a world of learning that reached far above their humble origins.
In a society in which the literacy of the majority reached not much further than the recognition of the Qur’anic texts one recited in prayer, the circle of the medrese formed a world unto itself, with its own language, its own order of rank and its own centuries-old customs. It was this world that opened for the young Atıf ﵀ when, after completing his elementary education, he made the crossing to the more serious instruction of the Caca Bey school, and it was within this world that his extraordinary aptitude for study could for the first time reveal itself in full.
Hoca Abdullah Efendi and the master-pupil bond
The scholar under whose guidance Atıf ﵀ studied in İskilip was Hoca Abdullah Efendi ﵀, a local master whose name the most reliable sources have handed down to us and to whom the young man owed the first, formative years of his serious schooling. Of the life of this Abdullah Efendi ﵀, as so often with the provincial scholars of late-Ottoman Anatolia, little has been preserved in detail, and the historian must guard against the temptation to fill out the scarce data with invented scenes; what is certain is that he was active in İskilip as a scholar and that he recognized in the gifted orphan of the town a pupil of exceptional gifts. Beside him, other local scholars no doubt also taught in the medrese and the mosques of the town, for the teaching at an Anatolian school was seldom the work of a single man, but it is the name of Hoca Abdullah Efendi ﵀ that tradition has bound to these years of Atıf’s ﵀ life.
The picture one must form of this teaching differs, as we already noted in the previous article, thoroughly from that of a modern school, and it is worth dwelling here more deeply, for the manner in which Atıf ﵀ was taught determined his whole later attitude toward knowledge. There was no classroom with benches and no timetable of hours and subjects, but a circle of pupils, a halqa, seated on the mat around the master, who in his turn sat with the text before him, leaning against a cushion or a lectern, and the instruction proceeded from mouth to mouth and from book to book, in a slow and patient movement in which each text was carefully worked through before one began the next. The pupil read a passage aloud, the master corrected his pronunciation and his reading, expounded the grammatical analysis and the meaning, and answered the questions the text raised, and only when the material had truly been understood did one proceed, so that progress was measured not by the passing of time but by the mastery of the material.
The personal character of the instruction
In this system the bond between teacher and pupil was not an incidental matter but the heart of the whole order, for knowledge was not taken over as a dead store from a book but transferred as a living trust from one person to another, and the pupil received it together with the authority, the conduct and the spiritual disposition of his master. Whoever had come to the end of a text of study received from his teacher no diploma in the modern sense, but an icazet, a written authorization that granted him the right to pass on the studied material in his turn to others and that placed his name in a chain of transmission which, link after link, reached back to the earliest scholars of Islam and thereby to the Companions ﵃ of the Prophet ﷺ and to the revelation itself. It was this chain, and the awareness of being part of it, that the medrese instilled together with the material as an attitude: reverence for the transmitted knowledge, patience in the long labor, and above all the awareness that learning is not a personal possession over which one disposes freely but a trust that one is bound to pass on unblemished.
For a fatherless boy who had grown up in the house of his grandfather, the figure of the learned master must have held a meaning that surpassed the purely intellectual, and it is not far-fetched to suppose that the young Atıf ﵀ found in Hoca Abdullah Efendi ﵀ and in the other scholars of his town both teachers and spiritual guides, although the sources tell us nothing with certainty about the domestic and emotional side of this relationship and we must therefore conjecture cautiously rather than assert freely. What tradition does hold fast is that the boy devoted himself with his whole soul to study and that in the short years of his İskilip schooling he made a progress that surprised his teachers.
The curriculum of the medrese
To understand with what the young Atıf ﵀ filled his days in these years, one must call to mind the curriculum of a classical Ottoman medrese, a curriculum whose main features had stood fast for centuries and which led the pupil along a well-tried path from the simplest to the most exalted sciences. The whole structure rested on Arabic, for Arabic was the language of the Qur’an, of the transmission from the Prophet ﷺ and of the overwhelming part of the learned literature, and without a thorough command of that language every further study remained a building without a foundation. The first and longest effort of the pupil was therefore directed at the language sciences, and it was here that a gifted boy like Atıf ﵀ first tried his strength.
Among those language sciences, the sarf, the doctrine of Arabic word-formation and conjugation, held a central place in the first instance, for Arabic builds its wealth of meanings out of a relatively small number of roots that are inflected according to fixed patterns, and whoever did not command those patterns to his fingertips could not read the holy texts correctly. Upon it followed the nahw, the doctrine of sentence structure and the cases, a science of great subtlety in which the placing of a single vowel could decide the meaning of a whole sentence, and the Ottoman medrese treated this material by means of a fixed series of handbooks that the pupil worked through one after another, each time with the commentaries and the commentaries on the commentaries in which the scholars of earlier centuries had recorded every fineness of the language. Whoever had passed through this grammatical schooling possessed an instrument of a sharpness that the modern reader, accustomed to the loose handling of language of his own time, can scarcely imagine any longer.
From eloquence to logic
Above grammar rose the balagha, the doctrine of eloquence and style, which instructed the pupil in the manner in which Arabic brings its meanings to expression not only correctly but also beautifully and strikingly, and which furnished him the means to learn to appreciate and fathom the inimitable eloquence of the Qur’an itself. It was a science that taught the pupil to attend to the imagery, the turn of phrase and the rhythm of the holy text, and that made him realize that the form and the content of the revelation cannot be separated from one another. Beside and above the language sciences stood, furthermore, the mantıq, logic, a science that the Ottoman medrese had borrowed from Greek antiquity yet had placed wholly in the service of religious study, and which imparted to the pupil the rules of correct reasoning, the distinguishing of valid and invalid inferences, and the analysis of a proof into its components.
This logical schooling was no dry exercise in formal doctrine but an indispensable instrument for the higher sciences, for the scholar who would presently study Islamic law had to be able to follow the reasonings of the jurists, to test the inferences and to judge the validity of a derivation, and it was precisely this habituation to strict, orderly thinking that gave the medrese education its distinctive character. One can imagine that a boy with the aptitude of Atıf ﵀ felt especially at home in these exercises of the intellect, for it was precisely the sharpness and the clarity of his thinking that would mark his later writings, and it is plausible that the first formation of that sharpness took place here, in the logic lessons of the İskilip school.
The religious sciences
Upon the foundation of language and logic rose the edifice proper of the religious sciences, and it was toward this higher study that all the preceding effort had worked. The first and, in daily life, most indispensable of these sciences was the fiqh, the knowledge of Islamic law, which instructed the pupil in the rules of worship, of commerce, of marriage and inheritance, and of all the thousand matters in which the faith orders the life of the believer. The Ottoman medrese taught the fiqh according to the Hanafi school of law, which was the official school of law of the empire, and the pupil worked his way from the simple handbooks for beginners, which treated the basic rules of prayer and purification, gradually up to the more extensive works in which the finer and rarer cases were discussed. It was a study that required a sharp memory and an orderly mind, and that taught the young scholar to bring a concrete question under the right general rule.
Beside the rules themselves the medrese also taught the usul al-fiqh, the doctrine of the foundations of the law, a science of a high degree of refinement which asked not after the what of the law but after the how, that is to say after the manner in which the scholars had derived the rules from the sources, from the Qur’an, from the transmission of the Prophet ﷺ, from the agreement of the scholars and from reasoning by analogy. It was here that the logical schooling of the pupil bore its fruit, for the usul demanded a power of thought that could work with general principles and that could see through the connection between the source and the derived rule, and it was this science that distinguished the superficial knower of the rules from the real jurist who knew why the rules read as they read.
The exegesis of the Qur’an and the transmission
Above the legal sciences rose the tafsir, the exegesis of the Qur’an, the science that occupied itself with the correct explanation of the holy text, with the occasions on which the verses had been revealed, with the finer meanings of the words and with the connection between the various parts of the revelation. It was the crowning of all the language science the pupil had acquired, for only one who commanded Arabic in its finest shadings and who could appreciate the eloquence of the text was able truly to follow the exegesis of the Qur’an and to grasp not only the words but also the depth of the meaning. The medrese taught this material by means of the authoritative commentaries in which the scholars of earlier centuries had recorded their knowledge, and the pupil thus learned not only what the text meant but also how the tradition of the scholars had arrived at that meaning.
Besides this the pupil made acquaintance with the principles of hadith, the transmission of the words and deeds of the Prophet ﷺ, and with the science that investigates the authenticity of those transmissions by tracing the chains of transmitters and weighing the reliability of each link. For a provincial medrese such as that of İskilip the treatment of these sciences will not have had the depth it reached in the great schools of the capital, and it is plausible that the young Atıf ﵀ here gained only a first, introductory acquaintance that would later be built out in İstanbul into a thorough mastery, but the principle had been laid, and the pupil knew henceforth that the Qur’an and the transmission of the Prophet ﷺ were the two sources from which the whole edifice of the religion proceeded.
The rhythm of the pupil
It is good, beyond the enumeration of the sciences, to call to mind also the daily life of a medrese pupil, though here too we must acknowledge that the sources have left us nothing with certainty about Atıf’s ﵀ personal arrangement of the day in İskilip and that we must rely on what we know in general about life at an Ottoman medrese. That life was sober and strictly ordered, and it followed the measure of the prayers as the life of the whole Muslim community followed it, so that the day of the student began with the morning prayer in the mosque and thereafter unfolded in alternating periods of lesson, of independent repetition and of rest. The lessons took place in the morning and the afternoon, in the circle around the master, and the hours in between were filled with the memorizing of the material, with the copying of texts of which the pupil possessed no copy of his own, and with the repetition in pairs in which the older students tested the younger.
Memory held in this whole order a place that the modern reader can hardly feel his way into, for the books were costly and not available in copy to every pupil, so that a good part of the material, and certainly the foundational texts of grammar and law, was learned by heart in the form in which the scholars of old had often set it in rhyme to ease the remembering. A pupil who had already memorized the Qur’an in his youth, as Atıf ﵀ had done in his first schooling, possessed in his trained memory an instrument that served him excellently in this higher study, and it is plausible that precisely this gift of memory, joined to the sharpness of his intellect, soon made him stand out in the circle of the İskilip pupils.
The poverty and the devotion
The life of a medrese student was in material respect meager, and many a pupil lived on the gifts of the pious endowments and on the alms of the community, for the study left little room for the earning of an income and the years of learning were years of privation. For a boy from an ordinary İskilip family, raised in the house of his grandfather, this soberness was no unusual transition, and it is plausible that Atıf ﵀ bore the privations of the pupil’s life with the same patience that he displayed in his study. The devotion that the sources ascribe to him was no accidental trait but the necessary condition for whoever wished to succeed in this demanding system, for it was an education that took no contentment in half effort and that rewarded only the pupil who gave himself to it with his whole power.
In that devotion, and in the reverence for the transmitted knowledge it presupposed, lay already, anticipating what is to come, the germ of the man he would become. For whoever had once learned that the knowledge of the religion is a trust, a link in a chain that goes back to the revelation itself, could not later disown it without betraying his deepest formation, and it is in these quiet İskilip years of learning, far from the splendor of the capital and from the storms that would later break over his life, that the foundation was laid of the steadfastness with which he would one day, on an Ankara square, sooner choose the noose than the disowning of his conviction.
The limits of the provincial school
However much the İskilip school had formed the young Atıf ﵀, it could not in the long run hold him, for the talent that revealed itself in the pupil reached further than what a provincial medrese could offer him. A school like that of İskilip was excellently equipped to impart to a gifted boy the foundations of the sciences, to train him in Arabic and logic and to teach him the first principles of law and Qur’anic exegesis, but it possessed neither the library, nor the multitude of learned masters, nor the spiritual space of the great schools of the capital, where the highest degrees of the religious science could be reached and where a student came into contact with the most renowned scholars of the empire. For the ordinary İskilip boy, destined to become imam or teacher in his own district, the provincial medrese sufficed, but for a pupil of the gifts of Atıf ﵀ it was only a first step.
It is a phenomenon that recurs again and again in the history of Islamic learning, that an exceptionally gifted provincial pupil soon outgrows the local masters and is driven to seek out the great centers of learning, and it was this drive that asserted itself in the young Atıf ﵀ at the end of his İskilip years of learning. He had learned in his birthplace what it could teach him, and the sharpness of his intellect, which his teachers had recognized and encouraged, asked for a wider field than the hills of Çorum offered him. It is quite conceivable that it was precisely Hoca Abdullah Efendi ﵀ and the other scholars of the town who brought the gifted pupil to this thought, for a true master knows the limits of what he can give and points the pupil who outgrows him toward higher masters, although the sources keep silent about the particulars of this decision and here too we must not embellish the scarce datum with invented scenes.
The decision against the family’s wish
What tradition has left us, and what casts a telling light on the character of the young man, is that his decision to leave İskilip and to undertake the long road to İstanbul went against the wish of his family. For a household in an Anatolian provincial town the departure of a boy to the distant capital was no light matter, for İstanbul lay at a distance of many days’ journey, the trip was costly and not without danger, and the young man who departed left behind the security of his familiar community to venture into an unknown and overwhelming metropolis, where without the support of family or acquaintances he had to find his way. That the family of Atıf ﵀ hesitated, or even resisted, is in this light only too understandable, and one must read into their hesitation not a lack of appreciation for study but rather the natural concern of people who did not wish to surrender their boy to the uncertainties of the distant city.
That Atıf ﵀, still a young man, nonetheless persisted and maintained his decision against the wish of his own, bears witness to a resolve that would in his later life become the mark of his character. It was not the rebelliousness of a restless youth but the directedness of a soul that had found its calling in the knowledge of the religion and that was prepared to pay for that calling the price of departure and separation, and whoever knows the further course of his life recognizes in this early decision already the man who would later, for a far higher stake, likewise prove prepared to pay the highest price for that which he regarded as his duty. The youth who in İskilip inflicted upon his family the grief of farewell in order to pursue the knowledge of the religion, and the scholar who in Ankara gave his life sooner than disown his conviction, were one and the same person, and the first deed already contained the promise of the last.
What İskilip could no longer give him
When a gifted pupil reaches the limits of his first school, he stands before a choice that determines not only his career but the whole direction of his life, and for the young Atıf ﵀ that moment came toward the end of his İskilip years of learning, when in the medrese of his birthplace he had learned what it could teach him and his intellect asked for a wider field. The hills of Çorum that had formed him, the rock fortress beneath which he had grown up and the circle of scholars who had set him on the first steps of the path of science had done their part, and it was now for the young man himself to take the next, far heavier step. He had laid the foundations in İskilip, the language and the logic and the first principles of law and Qur’anic exegesis, but the crowning of that study lay elsewhere, in the great schools of the capital where the highest degrees could be reached.
In April of the year 1893 İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ therefore left his native region and undertook the long and arduous journey to İstanbul, the capital of the empire and the beating heart of its learning, to seek there the higher study that his provincial school had not been able to give him. It was a departure that went against the wish of his family and that would separate him for years from his familiar world, and it opened a new and decisive chapter in his formation, which would play out no longer in the quiet of an Anatolian provincial town but in the bustle and the learned splendor of the great city on the Bosphorus. How the youth from İskilip found his way in the schools of the capital, into what world of scholars and fellow pupils he came there, and how the years at the great mosque of Fatih made him into the scholar he would become, is the subject of the following article.
Sources
- TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, entry “İskilipli Mehmed Âtıf Efendi”, Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı (İstanbul, 2000), pp. 132–135 [the most authoritative academic biography, with the data on the İskilip years of learning and the departure to İstanbul].
- Ethem Erkoç, İskilipli Mehmed Âtıf Hoca, Çorum Belediyesi (Çorum, 2016) [monograph with the İskilip family, school and youth data].
- Mehmet İpşirli, “Medrese”, in TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, vol. 28, Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı (Ankara, 2003), pp. 327–333 [for the organization, the curriculum and the life of the Ottoman medrese].
- Cevat İzgi, Osmanlı Medreselerinde İlim, İz Yayıncılık (İstanbul, 1997), 2 vols. [for the curriculum of the language, logic and religious sciences at the Ottoman medrese].
- Francis Robinson, “Knowledge, its Transmission, and the Making of Muslim Societies”, in The Cambridge Illustrated History of the Islamic World, Cambridge University Press (1996), pp. 208–249 [for the master-pupil bond, the icazet and the chain of transmission in Islamic education].
- Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, I.B. Tauris (4th ed., 2017), pp. 56–112 [for the general late-Ottoman context of education and the reforms].