Graduation from the Darülfünun

In the previous article we followed the young Atıf ﵀ to the threshold that, in the world of Islamic scholarship, marks the passage from student to qualified scholar, and we saw how around 1902, after his seven years at the Fatih complex, he received both the personal icazet of his masters and passed the official ruûs examination that qualified him for an Istanbul müderrislik, so that from then on he was recognized as a full member of the scholarly estate both by the closed circle of transmission and by the institutions of the empire. With that twofold confirmation, the simple and honorable path of teaching and transmission lay open before him, the path along which he would pass the knowledge entrusted to him to a new generation just as it had been passed to him, and nothing in his standing obliged him to strike out in any other direction. Yet in the years immediately following his licensure he turned, and in this something of the nature of his mind reveals itself, to an institution that was still young and contested in his day, the Darülfünun, the House of the Sciences, which the empire had founded on the model of the European universities, and he would graduate from the İlâhiyat faculty of that institution in the year 1905. It is this encounter between the old scholarship of the medrese and the modern university, together with the inner disposition it ripened in him, that forms the heart of this article.

The House of the Sciences and its difficult birth

To appreciate what an unusual choice it was for a fully formed medrese scholar to enroll at the Darülfünun, one must first take account of the place this institution held in late Ottoman Istanbul, for it was not the venerable, centuries-old school in which Atıf ﵀ had received his own training, but a young and laboriously established experiment that the empire had undertaken in its search for the modern sciences. The word Darülfünun is composed of the Arabic dār, meaning house, and the plural funūn, denoting the arts and the sciences, and in that name one hears the purpose for which the institution was founded, namely a house in which not the transmitted religious sciences of the medrese but the new branches of knowledge, partly derived from Europe, would find their place, from the natural sciences and mathematics to the modern languages, history, and law as it was taught in the reformed state.

The road to the existence of such an institution had been long and bumpy, for the idea of a university on the European model did not fit without friction into the order of an empire in which higher education had from of old lain in the hands of the ulema and their medreses. Already in the middle of the nineteenth century, in the years of the Tanzimat reforms, the reform-minded statesmen had advocated the founding of a Darülfünun as an indispensable part of the modernization of the empire, and in the decades that followed repeated attempts were made to bring the institution actually into operation, but each time those attempts foundered on difficulties of every kind, so that for much of the nineteenth century the Darülfünun remained an intention on paper rather than a functioning school. It was only in the year 1900, in the later reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II, that the institution was reopened on a more stable footing, and it is in that reopened Darülfünun, in the first years of the twentieth century, that the young scholar from İskilip would enter its lecture halls.

The faculty of theology

Within the broader whole of the reopened Darülfünun, the İlâhiyat faculty, the faculty of theology, held a special and in a certain sense ambiguous position, for it was the place where the modern university, organized on the European model, and the transmitted world of the religious sciences most directly touched one another. In the medrese the religious sciences were taught along the proven path of transmission, one text after another, under the watchful eye of a master who derived his own authority from a chain of teachers; in the İlâhiyat faculty of the Darülfünun, by contrast, a part of that same material, the Qur’anic sciences, the science of transmission, the law and the history of Islam, would henceforth be housed within the framework of a modern faculty with its chairs, its academic years, and its examinations, on the pattern the reformers had borrowed from the European universities.

To an outsider it might perhaps seem strange that a scholar who had already received his full formation at the Fatih complex and who possessed the highest confirmation of the medrese world would still turn to such a young faculty in order to study anew the sciences he already mastered, but on closer view it is precisely that step which reveals something essential of his disposition. He came not as an ignorant pupil who had to make the rudiments of theology his own, for those rudiments he had already fathomed to their finest distinctions along the old path; he came rather as a fully formed scholar who wished to know the new institution from within, who wished to understand how the modern university dealt with transmitted knowledge, and who wished to make the forms and methods of the new teaching his own without disowning the foundation on which his own scholarship rested. In that light, his enrollment at the İlâhiyat faculty was no break with his medrese past, but its logical continuation on new terrain.

The years at the Darülfünun

The years Atıf ﵀ spent at the reopened Darülfünun led him into a world that differed in many respects from the familiar lecture rooms of the Fatih complex, and it is well to take account of the kind of formation the modern faculty offered him, even though the sources have left us only little about the particulars of his student years at this institution. Where the medrese gathered the pupil around a scholar on a mat in the mosque and let him advance from mouth to mouth and from book to book, the Darülfünun took the shape of a modern university, with its lecture halls, its series of subjects taught according to a fixed plan, and its examinations to which the student had to submit at set times in order finally to obtain his degree. Knowledge here was no longer passed on solely as a trust from master to pupil, but also as a subject that one studied according to a timetable and whose attained level one had assessed by an examination, and that shift in the mode of transmission, however inconspicuous it seemed, was a sign of the far deeper shift that was taking place throughout the empire.

It would be a mistake to present the teachers of the İlâhiyat faculty in these years as his true masters, for his true formation lay already behind him along the old path of the medrese, and the sources do not permit us to point to particular professors as the personal teachers of Atıf ﵀. One may indeed say in a general sense that among the renowned teachers who peopled the reopened university in these years there belonged a circle of late Ottoman scholars and reformers in whose midst the question of the relation between transmitted Islam and modern, partly European knowledge was discussed with great earnestness, and in which the divergent answers to that question divided minds. The Darülfünun of these years was not a quiet abode of measured scholarship, but a place where the tensions of the age made themselves immediately felt, and the young scholar who entered its lecture halls could not but position himself in relation to those tensions.

The graduation in 1905

The capstone of these years was his graduation from the İlâhiyat faculty in the year 1905, an event that occupies a distinctive and special place in his life story, for it united in one man two forms of qualification that in these years were beginning to grow ever further apart. On the one side stood the old, personal license of the medrese, the icazet and the ruûs that around 1902 had admitted him to the ranks of the Istanbul ulema, and which derived their authority from the chain of transmission and from the institutions of the traditional educational order; on the other side there now stood the diploma of the modern university, which derived its authority from the institution that conferred it and from the system of subjects and examinations that the reformers had arranged on the European model. That one and the same scholar possessed both was in these years no everyday matter, and it made of Atıf ﵀ a man who was at home in both worlds, who knew the old scholarship from within because he had lived through it, and who knew the new university from within because he had passed through it.

One must here keep in mind that the graduation from the İlâhiyat faculty in 1905 did not take the place of his medrese formation, but was added to it, and that the order of things is telling: he was already a formed and qualified scholar when he entered the modern university, so that he received the new knowledge not as someone who possessed nothing yet and surrendered himself to whatever doctrine came first, but as someone who commanded a firm foundation from which he could judge, sift, and appraise the new at its true worth. Whoever already inhabits a house and thereafter learns a second language looks at that language with different eyes than one who is still homeless and takes in whatever dwelling comes first, and so the formed medrese scholar entered the modern university not as an empty vessel to be filled, but as a man who knew what he possessed and who was therefore able to receive the new without losing himself.

The great division of his generation

The choice Atıf ﵀ made in devoting himself to the modern university alongside his medrese formation acquires its full meaning only when one places it against the background of the great division that split his whole generation of late Ottoman Muslims, for the problem he came to face through his double formation was not his alone but that of an entire age. Since the Tanzimat the Ottoman Empire had reformed its institutions on the European model in the hope of thereby closing the gap it had fallen into with respect to the Western powers, and the modern school, the modern court, and the modern university were the visible signs of that reforming urge, but behind those institutions there lay hidden a far deeper question that stirred Muslim society to its very foundations, namely to what extent one could adopt the ways of Europe without thereby ceasing to be oneself.

On that question the answers of the late Ottoman Muslims diverged widely, and it is well to sketch the extremes in order to outline sharply the place that Atıf ﵀ occupied. At the one extreme stood those who held that the salvation of the empire and of the Muslim world lay in as complete an adoption as possible of European civilization, not only of its science and its technology but also of its manners, its institutions, and its spirit, and who saw in transmitted Islam a millstone rather than a source of strength; at the other extreme stood those who saw in every contact with Europe a threat and who wished to preserve the transmitted world unchanged, rejecting even the most innocent acquisitions of the new age. Between those extremes lay a broad middle ground of Muslims who in divergent ways sought a reconciliation, and it is in that middle ground, yet with a distinctive and well-defined standpoint, that the scholar from İskilip would take his place.

Science and technology as useful knowledge

The attitude that Atıf ﵀ took up in this great division, and which is well documented in his later writings, is most purely described by laying it out in two parts, for it rested on a distinction that is of decisive importance for understanding his whole outlook on life. The first part of his attitude was his readiness to accept the modern science, the technology, and the useful knowledge of Europe without fear and without suspicion, and it is no accident that precisely this readiness led him to enroll at the modern university rather than to withdraw into the seclusion of the medrese world. In the transmitted Islamic view, useful knowledge was no enemy of faith but rather a good toward which the believer ought to strive wherever he encountered it, and the scholars of the early centuries had not rejected out of fear the science, the medicine, and the philosophy of the peoples who preceded them, but had taken them in with discernment and developed them further.

In that spirit Atıf ﵀ held that the Muslim society of his day ought to learn to master the science and technology of Europe, not as an outward imitation but as a reconquest of the instruments by which the modern world was governed, and he saw in the adoption of that useful knowledge no betrayal of Islam but rather a duty toward the community that had to defend itself against the superior force of the Western powers. An empire that could not equip its armies, its schools, and its workshops with the means of its own age was doomed to perish, and it would be a piety that did not understand itself if, out of reverence for the transmitted, one spurned the very means by which that transmitted heritage had to be defended. In this the scholar from İskilip differed sharply from the conservative voice that detected a danger in every contact with the new knowledge, and it is precisely that openness to the useful that explains why he crossed the threshold of the Darülfünun without hesitation.

The refusal of spiritual imitation

The second part of his attitude, inseparably bound up with the first and forming its necessary limit, was his firm refusal to let the acceptance of useful knowledge issue in an imitation of Europe in manners, customs, and spirit, for he drew a sharp distinction between adopting the instruments of a civilization and being absorbed into its soul. A Muslim society could, in his conviction, take in the science and technology of the modern world without thereby surrendering its own character, on condition that it kept that distinction sharply in view and resisted the outward and inward imitation of the foreign civilization, for that imitation, the phenomenon designated in Islamic jurisprudence by the word teşebbüh, carried within it the danger that with the outward forms the spirit bound up with those forms would also be smuggled in unnoticed.

It is in this distinction that the true core of his outlook on life lies enclosed, and it is the same distinction that would later lead him to the book for which he would ultimately be condemned. Whoever adopts the outward marks of a foreign civilization, so he reasoned, thereby takes on not merely an innocent custom but places himself under the sign of that civilization and avows himself, whether he wills it or not, to the world to which that mark belongs; and what at first seems an outward thing, a way of dressing, a headgear, or a form of conduct, in time carries along with it the disposition bound up with it, until the society that began by conforming in its outward forms has at last conformed even in its innermost being to the foreign model. Therefore one could, in his view, adopt the tools of Europe but not its garb and its spirit, and therefore modern science was for him permissible and spiritual imitation forbidden, and it is that twofold standpoint, and not a blunt rejection of the new age, that would determine his whole conduct.

What the university years ripened in him

When one surveys the years at the Darülfünun and asks what they brought about in the mind of Atıf ﵀, the answer lies not so much in a new knowledge he might have gained, for his true scholarship he had already acquired along the old path, as in the sharpness with which he learned to pose and answer the great question of his time. The modern university was preeminently the place where the encounter between transmitted Islam and European civilization took place most immediately and most daily, and whoever entered its lecture halls could no longer hold the question of the relation between the own and the foreign at a distance, but was compelled to face it and to answer it for himself, so that the scholar from İskilip, by exposing himself to that encounter rather than fleeing it, forced himself to sharpen the standpoint he would later defend so unyieldingly.

It is telling that he emerged from that encounter neither as a man overwhelmed by European civilization who had come to despise his own world, nor as a man who through contact with the foreign had lapsed into an anxious conservatism, but as a man who had learned to weigh the two worlds against one another and who knew what he wished to accept from the one and what he wished to preserve from the other. The Darülfünun did not give him his conviction, for the foundation of it had already been laid in the medrese, but it furnished him the battlefield on which that conviction could be tested and crystallize, and it turned a general attachment to transmitted Islam into the sharply outlined and well-considered standpoint he would articulate in his later writings. In that sense the university years were for him no detour and no rupture, but the necessary preparation for the struggle that was still to come.

The scholar between two worlds

It is well at this point to test the image of Atıf ﵀ that has lingered in later memory against what his formation truly shows us, for in popular memory he has often been narrowed to the scholar who resisted the hat, as though his whole life coincided with a single refusal and he had been nothing other than a man who could not endure the new age. Whoever has followed his path along the medrese and the Darülfünun knows that this image does violence to the truth, for the man who enrolled at the modern university and passed through its İlâhiyat faculty with good result in 1905 was no enemy of knowledge and no despiser of his own century, but a scholar who met the modern science with open visor and who accepted its gains without fear, while his later resistance was directed not against science or against technology, but against the spiritual subjection that sought to enter Muslim society under the guise of outward imitation.

One may say that he belonged to that generation of late Ottoman scholars who let themselves be swept along toward neither the one extreme nor the other, but who in the narrow space between total rejection and total surrender sought to clear a distinctive, laborious, and considered path of their own, and who precisely for that reason were regarded with suspicion by both the conservative and the modernizing wing. It was a thankless place to occupy, for it exposed the scholar to the reproaches of both sides, of those who charged him with too much openness and of those who charged him with too little progressiveness, but it was the place that accorded with his deepest conviction, and he would not leave it to the end of his life. The man who in later years chose the noose rather than the disavowal of his conviction had already in these university years become the man who knew what difference he wished to preserve between the tool one borrows and the soul one keeps.

What the chair of Fatih would once again entrust to him

While the young scholar immersed himself at the Darülfünun in the encounter between the old and the new knowledge, his life had already taken another direction that led him back to the world in which he had been formed, for the Fatih complex, where he had spent his Istanbul years of study and where around 1902 he had completed his medrese studies, called him not merely as a former pupil but henceforth as a teacher. Already from 1903, while his years at the Darülfünun were still running, he had taken up teaching at the Fatih complex in the dignity of Ders-i Âmm and müderris, so that the scholar who let himself be formed at the modern university at the same time continued the chain of transmission in the old medrese world by himself teaching the younger generation. In that simultaneity, in which at the one institution he was a pupil of the new and at the other a teacher of the old, lies enclosed the image of his whole outlook on life, for he truly stood with one foot in each of the two worlds and refused to give up the one for the other.

It is telling that the man who had just come to know the modern university from within returned to the shadow of the Conqueror’s Mosque to pass on there as müderris the transmitted sciences to a new circle of pupils, for in this he showed in deed what he held to be true in his attitude, namely that the acceptance of the useful new and the loyalty to the transmitted old were not opposites that excluded one another, but two duties that he united in one life. The chair of Fatih laid upon him anew the responsibility he had accepted on receiving his icazet, the responsibility to pass on the knowledge entrusted to him unblemished, and it is in that renewed charge, in the lecture rooms of the complex where his own formation had begun, that the next chapter of his life would unfold. How he took up that chair, what circle of pupils gathered around him, and how the müderris of Fatih related to the turbulent years that the empire was moving toward in this time, 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 Darülfünun-İlâhiyat, the graduation of 1905, and the beginning of the Fatih teaching in 1903].
• Ethem Erkoç, İskilipli Mehmed Âtıf Hoca, Çorum Belediyesi (Çorum, 2016) [monograph covering the Istanbul years of study and teaching].
• Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, McGill University Press (1964), pp. 173–222, 366–411 [for the Darülfünun, the reform of higher education, and the tension between transmitted Islam and European civilization].
• Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, I.B. Tauris (4th edition, 2017), pp. 56–112 [for the late Ottoman educational context, the reopening of the Darülfünun, and the position of the ulema in the modernizing state].