Higher Education in Istanbul

In the previous article we followed the young Atıf ﵀ through the years he spent at the Caca Bey school in İskilip, where, under the guidance of Hoca Abdullah Efendi ﵀, he took his first steps on the path of the religious sciences and made himself master of the fundamentals of Arabic, of Qur’anic science, and of Islamic law. Yet the provincial madrasa, however venerable its tradition, could not in the long run offer what the young man’s gifts required, and by the early 1890s he had exhausted the instruction of his İskilip teachers and stood before the choice that would shape the whole further course of his life. Against the wishes of his family, who would rather have kept him in the familiar surroundings of his native region, Atıf ﵀ resolved in April of the year 1893 to leave his birthplace behind and to undertake the long and arduous journey to the capital, where the greatest schools of the empire opened their gates to those who sought to attain the highest degrees of the religious sciences. It was a step that, for a fatherless young man from an Anatolian provincial town, was anything but a matter of course, and it demanded a resolve that already pointed forward to the steadfastness that would mark him for a lifetime.

The journey to the capital

The distance between İskilip and Istanbul was, as the crow flies, a few hundred kilometres, but for a traveller in late Ottoman Anatolia that distance was an undertaking of days, and whoever covered it in 1893 did so along the old roads that wound westward through the hill country of Çorum, on foot or on the back of a pack animal, past the stages of the inns where one passed the night in the company of merchants, officials, and other provincials making their way toward the capital. The railway that would later link the Anatolian interior with Istanbul was in these years still very much under construction and had not yet reached the northern regions where İskilip lay, so that the young Atıf ﵀ had to cover the greater part of his way as the generations before him had done, with the mountains and the plains of his homeland slowly passing by and with the city of his destination as a point still invisible on the far western horizon.

For a young man of eighteen, such a journey was not merely a movement through space but a passage from one world into another, from the manageable enclosure of the provincial town to the overwhelming vastness of the capital of a world empire, and the young man who in İskilip knew every alley and every inhabitant left that security behind to enter a city in which he was, at least at first, no one: a nameless provincial student among the thousands who year after year streamed toward the capital from every corner of the empire in the hope of finding a future there. That he took this step against the wishes of those closest to him, and without the assurance of fortune or protection that the son of a distinguished family would have possessed, bears witness to an inner calling that was stronger than the misgivings of those around him and than the natural fear of the unknown.

The city on the two seas

The city that the young Atıf ﵀ entered in 1893 was by every measure one of the most remarkable places in the world, lying on the seam where Europe and Asia touch and where the waters of the Black Sea flow through the Bosphorus to the Sea of Marmara, a city that for nearly fifteen hundred years had been the seat of empires and that carried within its streets and upon its hills the layered memory of all those centuries. It was the city of the great imperial mosques and of the palaces along the Bosphorus, of the harbours where the ships of all nations put in and of the covered bazaars where the commerce of three continents came together, and whoever arrived there for the first time was bound to feel small before the domes and the minarets and before the clamour of the crowds moving across the bridges of the Golden Horn.

For the young provincial from Çorum this sight was without doubt overwhelming, and the sources do not leave us the particulars of his first impressions, so that we can only guess at his state of mind in those first days. What we can say with certainty is that the city in which he arrived was above all the nerve centre of the empire’s Islamic scholarly life, the point to which the gifted students of every province flocked and from which the highest appointments in education, in the judiciary, and in religious administration were bestowed. It was to this world that Atıf ﵀ had come, and it is in its venerable milieu that he would spend the next seven years or so.

The empire under Abdülhamid II

When Atıf ﵀ arrived in Istanbul in 1893, the Ottoman Empire had already been for more than fifteen years in the hands of Sultan Abdülhamid II, who had ascended the throne in 1876 in a time of deep crisis. Upon his accession the sultan had accepted a constitution and a parliament, but as early as 1878, under the pressure of the disastrous war with Russia and the humiliations of the Congress of Berlin, he had suspended parliament and set aside the constitution, thereafter ruling as sole sovereign from his palace of Yıldız in the hills above the Bosphorus. It was this condition of personal rule that pervaded the whole world in which the young student began his studies.

The reign of Abdülhamid II was one of contradictions that the historian must weigh with care. On the one hand it was a time of suspicion and surveillance, in which an extensive network of informers and a strict censorship watched over the press and the public word, so that a misplaced remark could cost a man his post or his freedom and the capital lived beneath a veil of caution. On the other hand it was also a time of building and modernising, in which the sultan had schools, railways, telegraph lines, and military academies laid out, and the administrative apparatus attained a degree of extent it had never known before. The young man who began his education in this empire did so, then, in a world that was at once petrified and in motion, and the tension between those two would occupy the whole generation to which he belonged for a lifetime.

The pan-Islamic calling of the reign

One element of the reign touched the milieu in which Atıf ﵀ moved more deeply than the censorship or the frenzy of building, and that was the emphasis the sultan placed upon his dignity as caliph, as protector of the Muslims the world over. In a time when the empire was losing its Christian provinces in the Balkans one after another and the European powers were tightening their grip on the fringes of the Islamic world, the sultan sought his legitimacy ever more emphatically in his role as the head of the worldwide Muslim community, and he had the bond between the Muslims of the empire and the Muslims beyond it, as far as India and Central Asia, carefully cultivated. This pan-Islamic bent of the reign lent the religious scholarship of the capital a heightened standing, for the ulama were, above all others, the bearers and interpreters of the Islamic solidarity on which the sultan built his claims.

For a young student of the religious sciences this was an atmosphere that confirmed rather than undermined his choice of the path of the madrasa, for it placed the scholarship he pursued at the heart of the questions with which the empire wrestled. The idea that Islam was the bond holding together the scattered Muslim world, and that the scholars were the guardians of that bond, was not merely a doctrine of state descending from the palace but a conviction that found an echo in the schools and mosques of the capital, and here lies, anticipating what is to come, one of the roots of the conviction that would shape his later life: that Islam and the unity of the Muslims were not a private affair of the pious soul but a good that had to be defended and preserved in public life, something he had taken in during these years long before history would put him to the test.

The Fatih complex and its schools

The heart of the religious scholarly life of Istanbul had lain for centuries in the quarter around the great mosque of the Conqueror, the Fatih Camii, which Sultan Mehmed II had had raised after the conquest of the city in 1453 on one of the hills above the Golden Horn, and at whose foot he had had built an extensive complex of schools that ever since had been among the foremost centres of Islamic education in the empire. It was to this Fatih complex that the young Atıf ﵀ betook himself, and it is within its walls that he would spend the seven years or so of his higher study.

The madrasas that surrounded the great mosque together formed a world of learning unto itself, with its own rhythm, its own hierarchy, and its own centuries-old customs. In the cells around the courtyards lived the students who had streamed in from every corner of the empire, from the Balkans to the Arab lands and from the Aegean coasts to the mountains of eastern Anatolia, and they formed a community of young men who devoted their days to study and passed their nights in simplicity. The madrasa was not a school in the modern sense but a way of life that enclosed the student wholly, and whoever entered it gave himself over to an order in which instruction, prayer, austerity, and community were inseparably interwoven.

The poverty and the discipline of student life

The life that the young Atıf ﵀ led in the Fatih madrasas was one of a great simplicity that the reader of today can only with difficulty imagine. The provincial student who had come to the capital without fortune had not the means to live there in luxury, and most students depended on the modest stipends of the pious foundations, on the soup and the bread that the foundations’ kitchens provided, and on the gifts of the pious who regarded the support of the students of the religious sciences as a meritorious work. It was an existence close to poverty, in which a student sometimes had to choose between the purchase of a book and the buying of his bread, and in which the winter cold in the unheated cells was borne as the natural price of the path one had chosen.

It would be wrong to lament this poverty as though it were only a deprivation, for in the self-understanding of the student of the religious sciences austerity belonged to the path itself, and the detachment from worldly pleasures was experienced not as a hardship but as a condition for the pure devotion to knowledge. The young man who year after year studied his texts in an unheated cell of the Fatih complex trained himself in a discipline that formed not only his mind but also his character, for it taught him to seek his satisfaction not in the possession but in the acquiring of knowledge; and so the lean years of the capital were a continuation of the school of detachment that the early loss of his father and the austerity of provincial life had already begun in his youth, and they laid the foundation for the serenity with which, many years later, he would meet the heaviest trials.

The way of instruction

The education that the young Atıf ﵀ received in the Fatih madrasas proceeded according to a fixed and centuries-old order that led the student along a graded ascent through the religious sciences, from the auxiliary sciences that opened access to the texts to the highest subjects in which the core of Islamic scholarship lay enclosed. The pupil advanced not by passing through a schedule of hours and classes, but by mastering one text after another, each time in the circle around a scholar who sat with the text before him and his students in a half-circle about him, and he rose in standing as he made himself master of the more difficult works and acquired the authority to pass them on in turn to others.

The foundation of that ascent was laid in the Arabic language sciences, for without a thorough command of Arabic the sources of the religion remained closed to the student. In his İskilip years Atıf ﵀ had already learned the rudiments of Arabic, but in the capital he immersed himself in advanced grammar and in the science of eloquence, in the fine distinctions of syntax and in the art of apt expression that had to enable the advanced student to follow the intent of a text down to its smallest turns. It was a labour of patience and of exactness that trained the student’s mind in the discipline of precise reading, the condition of all further study.

The rational sciences and jurisprudence

Upon the foundation of the language sciences the instruction built further with the rational sciences, in the first place logic, which imparted to the student the rules of sound reasoning and taught him to distinguish a fallacy from a valid argument. Logic counted in Islamic scholarship as the gateway to the sciences, for it furnished the instrument with which the student had to make his way in all other subjects, and it formed, together with the other rational disciplines, the schooling of the mind that enabled the student not merely to retain the transmitted knowledge but to grasp its coherence.

The heart of the study, however, lay in the religious sciences proper, and among these Islamic law took a central place. Atıf ﵀ immersed himself in the Hanafi school of law, the school by which the judiciary of the Ottoman Empire was conducted, and alongside the provisions of the law itself he studied its theoretical foundations, the science that examined the principles from which the jurists derived their judgements and that taught the student how, out of the Qur’an, the tradition of the Prophet ﷺ, and the remaining sources, the rules of conduct were unfolded. It was this science of law that equipped the scholar to know and to declare the judgement of the religion in the disputes of the community, and it formed thereby the most practical and at the same time the most responsible part of his education.

Qur’anic exegesis, the science of tradition, and creed

Beyond the law the study reached toward the two sources from which the law itself was drawn, the Qur’an and the tradition of the Prophet ﷺ. In Qur’anic exegesis the student learned not merely to recite the sacred text, which he had done since his childhood, but to unfold its meanings by the hand of the great commentaries, with attention to the occasions on which the verses had come down and to the manner in which the scholars through the centuries had understood their intent; and in the science of tradition he studied the reports of the words and deeds of the Prophet ﷺ and learned the art by which the scholars distinguished the reliable narration from the weak by testing the chains of the transmitters with great exactness.

Alongside these two stood the science of creed, the science that ordered the content of the faith itself and that gave the student the doctrines with which Sunni Islam had marked off its understanding of Allah ﷻ, of His attributes, of prophethood, and of the hereafter over against the deviant tendencies. In the Ottoman Empire this creed was transmitted in the Maturidi tradition, which, alongside the kindred Ashari school, formed the established expression of the Sunni creed, and its study gave the young Atıf ﵀ that calm and considered understanding of the foundations of the faith which later, when those foundations were assailed in public life, would grant him his steadfastness.

The scholars of the Fatih complex

The milieu in which the young Atıf ﵀ received his formation was borne by the community of scholars who taught in the Fatih madrasas and in the other schools of the capital. Among the celebrated teachers of the Fatih complex in these years were some of the most respected ulama of the empire, men whose instruction drew students from every province to the capital and whose judgement in questions of religion carried authority to the furthest corners of the Ottoman world, and it is likely that the young student from İskilip sat, in his years at the complex, at the feet of more than one of these scholars.

Here, however, the caution of the historian is called for, since the sources do not permit us to say with certainty which scholars were his actual masters, and it would be a form of falsification of history to fill out the little that we know with names that the tradition has not confirmed to us. What we may rightly say is that he moved in a world of learning of the highest rank, that he there mastered the material that the advanced student was expected to master, and that he was there taken up into the chain of teachers and pupils that passed the transmitted knowledge from one generation to the next; much more precisely than that his study milieu cannot be reconstructed.

The bond between teacher and pupil

The bond between the teacher and the pupil stood at the heart of the whole system, for knowledge was not gained from a textbook but received from the mouth of a master, and the student who had worked through a text under the guidance of a scholar received from him the authority to teach it in turn, an authority that was granted only when the master was convinced of the pupil’s mastery and reliability. Through that personal transmission, which bound the subject matter inseparably to an attitude of reverence for the transmitted and of patience in the long labour, the student was taken up into a chain that, link after link, reached back to the Companions ﵃ of the Prophet ﷺ and thereby to the revelation itself. The young Atıf ﵀ took that attitude in so thoroughly that it would never again leave him, and whoever would understand the later course of his life does well to seek in these years of patient formation the root of the man who would one day sooner choose death than the denial of his conviction.

The piety of the student

Concerning the inner piety of the young Atıf ﵀ in these years the sources leave us as much in uncertainty as concerning the particulars of his instruction, and here too the historian must beware of the tendency to embellish the picture with invented scenes. What we may rightly say is that the path of advanced study in the austerity of a madrasa cell was by its nature the path of a pious man, and that the discipline of student life, with its detachment from worldly pleasures and its daily rhythm of prayer and study, was a form of godliness that requires no further adornment to be recognisable in its earnestness.

It is important to be cautious here against the temptation to colour the piety of the young scholar with the trappings of a spiritual brotherhood or a Sufi order that the tradition has not ascribed to him. The world of Istanbul learning knew a rich variety of pious tendencies, and many a scholar stood in relation to the spiritual brotherhoods that flourished in the capital, but as far as the life of Atıf ﵀ is concerned we lack the foothold to bind him to a particular order or to a particular spiritual guide, and it would be irresponsible to suppose such a bond where the evidence does not support it. His godliness was the godliness of the devoted scholar, lived in the practice of study and prayer, and it needs no further labelling to be honoured in its sincerity.

The awakening Muslim press

In the years in which the young Atıf ﵀ passed through his study at the Fatih complex there developed in the capital, despite the strict censorship of the regime, a world of the printed word that would come to be of great significance for the future of Islamic scholarship. The press had, since the reforms of the nineteenth century, taken an ever larger place, and alongside the papers that treated the worldly news there arose in these years also the journals that devoted themselves to the questions of religion and to the defence of Islam in a changing world. It was a new instrument in the hands of the scholars, for it enabled them to let their voice reach a far wider audience than the circle of the mosque and the madrasa, and it linked the scholarship of the capital to the questions alive in the broader society.

The young student who received his formation in these years grew up in the shadow of this awakening Muslim press, and although he himself would only in later years be among the writers of the religious journals, in papers such as Sebîlürreşâd and Beyânülhak that would grow into the foremost mouthpieces of the scholarship, the seed of that later activity already lay enclosed in the world of his student days. For the scholar who understood his time could no longer content himself with instruction within the walls of the madrasa alone, but felt himself called to defend the knowledge of Islam on the new battlefield of the public word, where the ideas of the Westernising tendencies contended for the minds of the young Muslims, and it is this awareness that the young Atıf ﵀ took into himself in the Istanbul of his study years and that would shape his later life, down to the struggle that would cost him his life, in decisive measure.

The battlefield of ideas

Behind this awakening press lay concealed the great question of the age, namely how the Muslim world was to withstand the superior power of the Europe that pressed upon it from every side, and whether the answer to that superior power was to be sought in the adoption of the European ways or in the deepening of its own transmitted wisdom. This question divided the minds of the Ottoman youth, and it parted the ways of those who felt themselves drawn to the Westernising tendencies from those who, like the young Atıf ﵀, sought their salvation in the conviction that the deliverance of the Muslims lay not in the imitation of the foreign but in the fidelity to what was their own. That choice was, in the years of his study, not yet the sharp and deadly rupture that it would later become, for the empire still stood, the caliph still reigned from his palace, and the madrasa still took its venerable place in the life of the empire, but the opposition that would in the end tear apart the life of the scholar was already slumbering beneath the surface of the seemingly unchanging Istanbul, and the young man who devoted himself with all his power to the transmitted knowledge chose thereby, without being able to survey the full reach of that choice, the side to which he would remain faithful for a lifetime and for which he would in the end pay the highest price.

What the Istanbul years laid within him

When the young Atıf ﵀ entered the gate of the Fatih complex in 1893, he was a fatherless provincial of eighteen without fortune and without protection; when, after some seven years of patient study, he stood at the end of that path, he was a formed scholar who had mastered the highest subjects of the religious sciences and who was ripe to enter himself into the circle of the teachers. The years of poverty and discipline, of the language sciences and logic, of law and its theoretical foundations, of Qur’anic exegesis, the science of tradition, and creed, had imparted to him not merely an extensive knowledge but above all the inner disposition that ought to mark the bearer of that knowledge.

At the end of that path awaited the crowning of the study, for the student who had made himself master of the material and had acquired the authority of his teachers could present himself for the examination that would open to him the access to the office of the teacher. In the year 1902 Atıf ﵀, according to what the sources report, completed his madrasa study and passed the ruûs examination, the examination that conferred the authority to the müderrislik in Istanbul. It was the end of the long course of learning that had begun in the simple Qur’an school of İskilip, and at the same time the beginning of a new career, that of the scholar who no longer received his knowledge but would henceforth pass it on to a new generation.

How the young scholar crossed the threshold of teachership, and how he became from the devoted student the müderris of the Fatih complex who in the years thereafter would fill the halls of the school with his students, is the subject of the following article. There we shall follow him on the way on which the knowledge he had acquired in the austerity of the Istanbul madrasa cells began to bear its fruit, and on which the quiet student took his first steps on the public road that would in the end lead him to the collision with the new state.

Sources

• TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, entry “İskilipli Mehmed Âtıf Efendi”, Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı (Istanbul, 2000), pp. 132–135 [the most authoritative academic biography, for the Istanbul study years and the ruûs examination of 1902].
• Ethem Erkoç, İskilipli Mehmed Âtıf Hoca, Çorum Belediyesi (Çorum, 2016) [monograph with the biographical data on his departure for Istanbul in 1893 and his study at the Fatih complex].
• Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, I.B. Tauris (4th ed., 2017), pp. 56–95 [for the reign of Abdülhamid II and the late Ottoman context].
• Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, McGill University Press (1964), pp. 253–280 [for the reign of Abdülhamid II, the pan-Islamic bent, and the tension between tradition and reform].
• Stanford J. Shaw & Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. II, Cambridge University Press (1977), pp. 172–259 [for the personal rule of Abdülhamid II, the censorship, the modernisation, and education].
• Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, Oxford University Press (3rd ed., 2002), pp. 175–209 [for the intellectual currents and the awakening press of the late Ottoman capital].