Receiving the icazet
In the previous article we followed the young Atıf ﵀ from the moment he turned his back on his familiar İskilip in April 1893 and undertook the long journey to the capital, all the way into the lecture halls of the Fatih complex, where for seven years he devoted himself to the higher religious sciences with a tenacity that struck his teachers. Those seven Istanbul years had not been a time of splendour and prestige but of patient, unassuming, and often deprived labour, in which the provincial student mastered one text after another, learned to handle the finer distinctions of grammar, logic, law, and the Qur’anic sciences, and imperceptibly took his place within the venerable circle of scholars who peopled the shadow of the Conqueror’s Mosque. Toward the end of those years, around 1902, the moment approached at which all that work would come to its fulfilment, not in the form of a festive crowning with outward display, but in the quiet and weighty transition from student to authorised scholar, a transition that in the world of Islamic scholarship bore the name icazet and that will form the heart of this article.
The threshold between student and scholar
Whoever wishes to understand the meaning of that transition must first free himself from the modern notion of a diploma. A diploma in the contemporary sense is an impersonal document, issued by an institution on the basis of marks obtained and years completed, and it derives its authority from the institution that grants it rather than from the person who signs it. The icazet, in Arabic the ijāza, belonged to an altogether different order, for in its essence it was not an institutional endorsement but a personal authorisation, granted by a master to his student, in which the master, with his own name and his own authority, declared that the student had thoroughly studied a particular text, or a series of texts, under him, and that he now conferred upon him the competence to transmit and teach those texts to others in turn. The Arabic word ijāza derives from a verb meaning to permit or to license, and in that lies the crux of the matter: not the student who acquires a degree, but the master who grants a permission.
That distinction is no piece of hairsplitting, for it touches upon the way in which, in the Muslim world, knowledge had been understood and transmitted since the earliest centuries. Knowledge, in that conception, was not a detached commodity that one could acquire from a book and thereafter wield as one’s own possession, but a trust handed down from person to person, in a living chain in which each link derived its authority from the link that preceded it. The book alone did not suffice, for a text could be misread, misunderstood, and misapplied, and it was precisely against those dangers that personal transmission offered its safeguard: one did not merely read the text, one read it under the watchful eye of a master who had himself read it under the eye of his own master, so that the correct reading, the correct emphasis, and the correct meaning were passed on intact from generation to generation. The icazet was the seal upon that transmission, the written token that the student had not merely read the text but had received it in an authoritative manner.
The chain that reaches back to the Prophet ﷺ
The most impressive thing about the icazet, and at the same time the least tangible for the modern reader, was the chain into which it received the qualified student. When a master granted his student the competence to transmit a particular work, he customarily recorded in the document not only his own name but the entire series of names that connected him with the original source, link after link back through time. In the transmission of the Qur’an this chain, the isnād, ran by way of the great reciters back to the Companions ﵃, who had heard the revelation from the mouth of the Prophet ﷺ himself, and in the transmission of hadith it ran by way of the collectors and the transmitters likewise back to the Companions ﵃ and to the Prophet ﷺ. In the other sciences too, in law, in grammar, and in Qur’anic exegesis, such chains were known, which connected the student with the founders of the schools of law and with the great scholars of the early centuries, and which gave him the awareness that he stood not at the beginning of something new but in the continuation of something older than himself and than his master and the master of his master.
For the student who received such a document, this meant that through an act lasting only a few moments he was incorporated into a community that stretched across twelve centuries and three continents. The names enumerated in his icazet were no dry catalogue of forgotten scholars, but the living members of a chain of which he himself now formed the youngest link, and in that chain he felt the presence of the entire tradition that had brought him forth. It is this awareness, and not the mere command of the material, that formed the true fruit of the medrese education, and it is this awareness that would leave the deepest traces in the life of Atıf ﵀, for the man who later chose the noose rather than the renunciation of his conviction was the man who in his youth had learned that the knowledge of religion is a chain whose links one cannot break with impunity.
What an icazet contained
The form in which such an authorisation was set down had crystallised over the centuries into a recognisable shape, and although the wording differed from scholar to scholar and from text to text, a few components recurred again and again. An icazet usually opened with a praise of Allah ﷻ and a blessing upon the Prophet ﷺ and his Companions ﵃, for the transmission of knowledge was understood as a religious act that ought to be clothed in the appropriate reverence, and not as a business transaction between two parties. After this opening came the master’s actual testimony, in which he declared that the named student had read, studied, and fathomed the named work, or the series of works, under him, and in which he then declared in explicit terms that he permitted him to transmit that knowledge further.
Upon that testimony followed, in an elaborated icazet, the enumeration of the texts that the student had mastered, and that enumeration served as a precise certificate of the level attained, for it made visible to everyone who set eyes upon the document which works the scholar was permitted to teach and with what authority. To this was added the chain of transmission, the series of teachers by way of whom the master had received his own competence, and in a rich and carefully composed icazet that chain could extend over dozens of names, each with the indication of the place and sometimes of the year in which the transmission had taken place. The document was concluded with the name and the personal signature of the master, often accompanied by the date and place of issue, and not infrequently by an admonition to the student to handle the knowledge entrusted to him with godliness, with humility, and with fidelity to the tradition.
The responsibility it imposed
It would be a misunderstanding to regard the icazet merely as an honour, for it was at least as much a burden. Together with the competence to transmit knowledge, the student received the responsibility for the manner in which he would handle that knowledge, and that responsibility reached further than the mere correctness of his teaching. Whoever had been received into the chain of transmitters bore the duty of passing the chain on intact, which meant that he might neither dilute the doctrine entrusted to him out of laziness, nor distort it out of wilfulness, nor renounce it out of fear of those in power. The admonition with which many an icazet closed, that the student must keep Allah ﷻ before his eyes in transmitting the knowledge, was no pious formality but the summation of an entire ethos, in which the scholar understood himself as a steward of a good that did not belong to him but that he had received in trust and that he ought to pass on in trust.
Within that ethos lay a severity that the outsider easily overlooks. The scholar who took his icazet seriously could not bend his doctrine to the shifting demands of the age or to the preferences of the rulers, for he was not the owner of what he transmitted, and what is not one’s own one cannot give away or barter off. One therefore misreads the steadfastness of such men when one reads it as stubbornness or as unworldliness, for it did not spring from a lack of insight into the times in which they lived, but from a deeply lived awareness that they could not dispose freely of the knowledge entrusted to them; they were its keepers, not its possessors, and a keeper who surrenders the good entrusted to him as soon as the pressure mounts has betrayed his office even before he has lost his freedom. It was precisely for this reason that the medrese, along with the material, cultivated an attitude that could make the scholar an unbending man in times of pressure, and it is no coincidence that so many of the scholars who in the twentieth century resisted the dismantling of the Islamic institutions drew their steadfastness from exactly this sense of an entrusted deposit. Atıf ﵀ belonged to that lineage, and the chain into which his icazet received him was for him not an honourable memory of his student years but a living obligation that he would honour to his last day.
The ruûs examination and the Istanbul müderrislik
The personal icazet of the master was the oldest and the most essential form of licence, but in late-Ottoman Istanbul it no longer stood alone, for over the centuries the empire had built around the old system of transmission an entire apparatus of official examinations and appointments, which regulated access to the higher teaching offices in the capital. Whoever wished to attain in Istanbul the dignity of müderris, the competence to teach the highest texts as a professor at one of the medreses of the capital, had to pass, alongside the personal endorsement by his teachers, the official test that in the Ottoman tradition was called the ruûs. The word ruûs, in Arabic the plural of a word meaning head or beginning, denoted in this context the official brevets by which the state received the successful candidate into the rank of müderris and thereby opened for him access to the Istanbul teaching offices.
For Atıf ﵀ the moment of that test came in the year 1902, when, after his seven years at the Fatih complex, he had completed his medrese studies and submitted himself to the ruûs examination that would qualify him for an Istanbul müderrislik. That he passed that test successfully meant that he had been recognised as a qualified scholar not only within the closed circle of his teachers, but that he had also been received by the official institutions of the empire into the ranks of his scholarly estate, a double endorsement that in these years characterised the fully-fledged Istanbul scholar. The ruûs was the official key, and the icazet of his masters was the spiritual foundation on which that key rested, and it is in the convergence of those two, the personal authority of the transmission and the official recognition of the empire, that the gate opened for the provincial student from İskilip toward the career of the Istanbul müderris.
The place of the scholar in the Ottoman order
To grasp what an achievement this meant for him, one must take account of the place that the scholarly estate, the ulema, occupied in the Ottoman order. In the empire the ulema formed no loose collection of pious studious men, but a tightly organised and highly placed estate, the so-called ilmiye, which held the teaching, the administration of justice, and the religious advisory function of the empire in its hands and which at its summit, in the dignity of the Şeyhülislâm, occupied one of the highest offices of the state. Whoever was admitted to that estate entered a world of ranks and appointments that spanned the entire empire, from the modest imam of a village mosque to the scholar who in the shadow of the sultan passed judgement on the permissibility of his deeds, and the Istanbul müderrislik formed within that world one of the considerable rungs, for it placed the scholar at the very heart of the teaching of the capital itself.
It was this estate that in the late-Ottoman years came under increasing pressure, as the empire reformed its institutions along European lines and, alongside the familiar medrese, allowed an entirely new system of state schools, courts, and civil-service academies to arise that gradually displaced the ulema from their old tasks. The young scholar who entered the ilmiye in 1902 thus stepped into a world that had its zenith behind it and that in the years to come would have to defend its very survival, and it is one of the bitter dispensations of his life’s course that he attained the dignity of scholar at the very moment when that dignity began to lose its centuries-old self-evidence. But in 1902 it had not yet come to that, and for the young man from İskilip admission to the scholarly estate meant above all the crowning of everything for which he had worked since his childhood.
What the licence meant for the orphan from İskilip
At this point it is well to fix the eye not merely on the system but on the man, for behind the institution of the icazet and behind the official test of the ruûs lay concealed a personal history that gave the endorsement its full weight. The boy who now, around 1902, was received into the ranks of the Istanbul scholars had lost his father as a child when he was barely half a year old, and he had grown up in the house of his grandfather in a remote provincial town, far from the splendour of the capital and without the backing of fortune or name that eased many a career in the empire. That such a child had made his way into the innermost circle of the scholarship of the capital was not impossible, for in Muslim society the world of religious knowledge stood open most strongly of all to whoever possessed talent and dedication regardless of his origin, but it was no more a matter of course, and it bore witness to a tenacity that had had to prove itself over many years of deprivation.
The letter and the test of 1902 endorsed not only the knowledge he had gathered, but in a sense the entire trajectory he had travelled since his childhood years in the shadow of the İskilip mosque. The foundations he had laid under the guidance of Hoca Abdullah Efendi ﵀ in the Caca Bey lecture house, Arabic grammar, the first principles of law, and the Qur’anic science, now bore the full superstructure of an Istanbul scholarship, and the solitary journey he had undertaken in April 1893 against the wishes of his family had found its vindication. One may assume that the young man who received this endorsement quietly directed his gratitude to Allah ﷻ, who had led the orphan from the mountain town along a road full of deprivation to this moment, and that in that moment he felt not the pride of the rank attained but the seriousness of the responsibility bound up with it.
The severity of an attained dignity
It is tempting to paint over such a moment a scene of outward joy, but honesty compels us to acknowledge that the sources have left us little concerning the personal experience of Atıf ﵀ in these days, and that here we must proceed cautiously and must not supplement the scarce that is certain with what we should like to know. What the sources do report with certainty is that around 1902 he completed his medrese studies and passed the ruûs test, and that he thereby acquired the competence that would enable him the following year, in 1903, to take up teaching at the Fatih complex itself as Ders-i Âmm and müderris. A festive ceremony with invited guests and speeches is not transmitted by the reliable biographies as a documented fact, and it would be a form of falsification of history to embellish such a scene with invented particulars; what the tradition does allow us to say is that the endorsement took place in the quiet and weighty tone befitting the handing over of an entrusted deposit.
More important than the outward form of the moment is the inner meaning it took on in his life, for the dignity of scholar was for Atıf ﵀ from the very beginning not a badge of honour that one wears but an obligation that one fulfils. The chain into which his icazet had received him, and the estate in which the ruûs had confirmed him, imposed upon him the duty of passing on the transmitted knowledge intact, and it was precisely that duty that in the years to come would form the core of his attitude, first as müderris and publicist, later as administrator of the scholars’ association, and finally as the man who stood before the Independence Tribunal and refused to surrender his conviction. The severity with which he handled his knowledge was not the hardness of an unbending character but the obedience of a man who knew himself bound to a chain older than himself, and which he did not think he was permitted to break.
Where the old scholarship would meet the modern university
When a young man crosses the threshold of qualified scholarship, there usually lies open before him the simple road of teaching and transmission, the road on which he would pass on the knowledge entrusted to him to a new generation as it had been passed on to him, and nothing in the dignity that Atıf ﵀ attained around 1902 obliged him to strike out on yet another road. Yet he chose, and in this something of the nature of his mind reveals itself, not for the enclosure of the familiar medrese world alone, but in the years that immediately followed his licence he turned to an institution that in his day was still young and contested, the Darülfünun, the House of the Sciences, which the empire had founded on the model of the European universities in order to spread the modern sciences among its youth.
At the İlâhiyat faculty of that Darülfünun, the faculty of theology, the scholar who had completed his classical formation at the Fatih complex would enrol in order to join the transmitted knowledge of the medrese with the new forms of university education, and in that joining something essential of his outlook on life lies enclosed. For the man who would later be condemned for his resistance to the westernisation of outward customs was no man who rejected modern knowledge or who withdrew out of fear of the new age into the familiar world; he was a man who had absorbed the transmitted knowledge thoroughly enough within himself to be able to place it without fear alongside the new sciences, and who held that the Muslim scholar ought to master the instruments of his time without thereby renouncing the chain to which he knew himself bound.
It is in that encounter between the old scholarship of the medrese and the modern university of the Darülfünun that the next chapter of his life would unfold, and it is there, at the İlâhiyat faculty where he would enrol shortly after his licence, that the provincial student from İskilip would complete his formation in a shape that was neither purely classical nor purely modern, but united both worlds in one man. How that enrolment took place, what the Darülfünun meant in these years, and how the young scholar reconciled the transmitted knowledge and the modern science within his own formation, 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, with the data on the completion of the medrese studies and the ruûs examination of 1902].
- Ethem Erkoç, İskilipli Mehmed Âtıf Hoca, Çorum Belediyesi (Çorum, 2016) [monograph on the İskilip and Istanbul years of study].
- George Makdisi, The Rise of Colleges: Institutions of Learning in Islam and the West, Edinburgh University Press (1981), pp. 140–152, 270–280 [on the ijāza, the chain of transmission, and the personal nature of the Islamic licence].
- Jonathan Berkey, The Transmission of Knowledge in Medieval Cairo: A Social History of Islamic Education, Princeton University Press (1992), pp. 21–43 [on the ijāza tradition and the bond between master and student].
- Mehmet İpşirli, “Osmanlı İlmiye Teşkilatında İcazetname Geleneği”, in Osmanlı Araştırmaları 14 (1994), pp. 7–24 [on the Ottoman icazet tradition and the ruûs examination].
- Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, I.B. Tauris (4th edition, 2017), pp. 56–112 [for the late-Ottoman educational context and the position of the ilmiye].