Appointment to the Fatih Müderrislik

In the preceding article we followed the young Atıf ﵀ to his graduation from the İlâhiyat faculty of the Darülfünun in the year 1905, and we saw how he united in his single person two forms of qualification that in his day were drifting ever further apart, the old personal licence of the medrese that had admitted him around 1902 to the ulema of İstanbul, and the modern diploma of the university established on the European model, so that from then on he was a scholar who knew the transmitted knowledge from within because he had lived through it, and who knew the new science from within because he had passed through it. We noted there already that his life, even while he was studying at the Darülfünun, had taken a direction that led him back to the world in which he had been formed, for from 1903 he had taken up teaching at the Fatih complex in the dignity of Ders-i Âmm and müderris, so that at the one institution he was a pupil of the new and at the other a teacher of the old. It is those years of teaching at the great Fatih complex, the years in which the scholar from İskilip exercised his office as müderris and in which his name ripened in the capital, that form the heart of this article, and it is against the background of an empire that in these years would undergo one of the most violent shocks of its late history that we must place those years.

The Conqueror’s Mosque and its colleges

To understand what an honourable and weighty post it was that Atıf ﵀ held from 1903 onward, one must first take account of the place that the Fatih complex occupied in the spiritual order of the capital, for this was no arbitrary mosque with an attached college, but one of the most venerable and distinguished institutions of the entire empire. The mosque had been founded by the conqueror of Constantinople, and it carried in its name, the Conqueror’s Mosque, the memory of the event of which the Ottoman Muslims would continue to boast into the furthest centuries, while the colleges raised around the sanctuary, the famous Sahn-ı Semân, had belonged from their founding to the highest schools of learning of the Sunni world. Whoever taught at this complex stood not in the shadow of an ordinary provincial mosque but in the lustre of an institution whose masters reached back in a chain to the early centuries of the empire, and the dignity of such a chair was correspondingly great.

The complex was more than a collection of buildings, for it formed a whole in which the mosque, the colleges, the library, the soup kitchens for the poor and the living quarters of the students were joined into one living body, and it breathed from early morning to late evening the activity of a great community that devoted itself to prayer and to knowledge. In the hours between the prayers there resounded in the colonnades and the courtyards the murmur of the pupils reciting their texts, and in the circle around each scholar there took place, day after day and year after year, the transmission of the inherited sciences from one generation to the next. In that whole, which was so much more than a school in the modern sense, the müderris occupied a place that held the middle ground between that of a teacher, a spiritual guide and a guardian of the tradition, and it was that place that the scholar from İskilip came to occupy from 1903 onward.

The dignity of the Ders-i Âmm

The title that Atıf ﵀ bore in these years, that of Ders-i Âmm, deserves an explanation, for it denotes a particular form of teaching that is of importance for understanding his office. The designation means in its root sense the general lesson, the public instruction, and it referred to the scholar who taught not within the enclosed walls of a separate college but in the open space of the great mosque itself, in a circle accessible to anyone who wished to join it. Where the medrese in the narrower sense numbered its fixed pupils who passed through a well-defined course of study, the Ders-i Âmm addressed a wider audience, and the scholar who held this dignity sat with his back against one of the heavy columns of the mosque, the text before him on a lectern, and gave his instruction to the half-circle of pupils and listeners who had settled themselves on the mats before him.

This public nature of his teaching made the müderris of the Fatih complex more than a scholar in seclusion, for his lessons belonged to the religious life of the capital itself, and the name of a scholar who gave the general lesson in the Conqueror’s Mosque penetrated into the wider circles of the İstanbul Muslim community. It was in that capacity that the young scholar from the province, who not even ten years before had entered the capital as an unknown student, gradually began to acquire a name, not through any loud appearance but through the quiet and steady labour of teaching, year in and year out, in the shadow of one of the most distinguished sanctuaries of the empire.

The daily work of the müderris

When one asks what the work of a müderris such as Atıf ﵀ consisted of in these years, the answer lies not in a series of striking events but in the patient repetition of a labour that in its essential features had not changed for centuries, and it is well to dissect that labour into its parts, for it is precisely in its unobtrusive regularity that the essence of the teaching office is contained. The core of that work was the daily lesson, the ders, in which the scholar opened up one of the classical texts of the inherited sciences before his pupils and went through it line by line, word by word, not to read the text out simply but to explain it, to clarify the obscure passages, to bring forward the finer distinctions of the jurists and the commentators, and to teach the student how he himself ought to read and weigh the text.

The subjects that came up in such instruction spanned the whole edifice of the inherited Islamic sciences, for the advanced pupil had to become familiar with the Arabic science of language that was the gate to all other knowledge, with the discipline of Qur’anic exegesis, with the science of tradition by which one sifted and weighed the words of the Prophet ﷺ, and above all with Islamic law in both its forms, the legal rulings themselves and the principles from which those rulings were derived. Atıf ﵀ belonged to the Hanafi school of law, the school that in the Ottoman Empire had from of old been the authoritative one, and it was within the framework of that school that he led his pupils through the established handbooks, in doing which he not only conveyed the rulings but also laid bare the reasonings on which they rested, so that the student learned not to repeat but to understand.

Guiding the advanced pupils

To this classroom instruction was joined the more personal guidance of the advanced pupils, and it is in that guidance that the true bond between the master and his student came about, for the inherited teaching knew no impersonal transmission of a fixed body of material but an intimate relationship in which the scholar watched and steered the progress of each pupil individually. The müderris determined when a student was ripe to ascend from one text to the next, more difficult one, he tested whether the pupil had truly grasped the material or had merely taken it in outwardly, and he judged in the end whether the student had acquired the authority to pass on the inherited knowledge in his turn to others. In that careful guidance the scholar from İskilip continued what he himself had only shortly before undergone as a pupil at this same complex, and he became in his turn a link in the chain that, link after link, reached back to the Companions ﵃ of the Prophet ﷺ and to the revelation itself.

It is tempting to make far-reaching assertions about the circle of pupils that gathered around Atıf ﵀ in these years, and in later memory it has indeed been suggested that among his students were scholars who afterward played a role of significance in the scholarly world of the capital, but honesty demands the admission that the sources do not allow us to attach particular names to his chair with certainty, and that it would be a form of falsification of history to adorn the quiet labour of these years with a list of famous pupils that the tradition does not support. What one may say with more right is that a müderris of the Fatih complex who gave his general lesson year in and year out saw a steady stream of students pass before him in the course of a career, and that his influence spread along that stream without history enabling us to grasp it in separate faces.

The scholar writes for the ordinary believer

Alongside the oral teaching in the lecture halls of the complex there began to take shape in these years a second side of his labour that is of great importance for understanding his later conduct, namely his inclination to pass on the inherited knowledge not only to the closed circle of his advanced pupils but also to bring it within the reach of the ordinary believer. It was an inclination that did not live equally strongly in every scholar of his rank, for many a müderris confined himself to the high learning of the lecture hall and left the instruction of the common people to the parish imams and preachers, but in the scholar from İskilip there revealed itself early an awareness that the knowledge of the religion ought not to remain the possession of a small circle, but that it belonged to the whole community and that it was the duty of the scholar to offer it to that community in an accessible form.

In that spirit he began to produce works that had as their reader not the advanced student but the ordinary Muslim, writings on the Hanafi legal doctrine and on the religious duties of the believer that set out in clear and comprehensible language what a Muslim had to know and to do, from the precepts of purification and prayer to the rules of fasting, almsgiving and pilgrimage. This was not a matter of the subtle disputations of the jurists among themselves, but of the firm, proven doctrine of the school in a form that even the uneducated believer could follow, so that the simple man and woman of the town and the village knew how they ought to practise their religion without having to immerse themselves in the heavy handbooks. In this labour there showed itself already the conviction that bore his whole teaching career, that learning was not an end in itself but a service to the community, and that the knowledge one had drawn from the sources ought to flow back to the people from whom one had come forth.

The Muslim press as a new channel

It was not only in independent books that the scholar addressed a wider audience, for in these years there had opened in the capital a new channel along which religious knowledge could spread, namely the Islamic journals and papers that in the turbulent first years of the twentieth century came in a stream from the printing presses. The scholar from İskilip contributed to journals such as the Sebîlürreşâd and the Beyânülhak, papers that set themselves the aim of letting the voice of the inherited Islam sound in a time when the old certainties were being pressed from all sides, and in which the scholars of the old order saw themselves obliged to take up the pen in order to plead their cause before a reading public that their oral lessons would never reach. That a müderris of the Fatih complex turned to this modern means was in itself telling, for it showed that the scholar from İskilip did not disdain the weapons of the new age when they could serve the cause of the inherited faith.

In that participation in the Muslim press one recognizes the same attitude that had already led him to the lecture halls of the Darülfünun, namely the readiness to make use of the useful means of his century without surrendering himself to its spirit, and it is no accident that precisely a scholar who had come to know the modern university from within also knew how to turn the printing press to the purpose that was sacred to him. The scholar who gave the general lesson in the Conqueror’s Mosque and who let his pen speak in the journals of the capital was in the process of acquiring a place wider than that of a teacher in the lecture hall alone, and without perhaps suspecting it himself, he laid in these years the foundation for the public role that he would come to play in the following decade.

The empire in the last years of Abdülhamid II

While the scholar devoted himself in these years to teaching and writing, the empire in which he lived found itself in a state of mounting tension that escaped none of its subjects, and it is well to take account of the political background against which his quiet years of teaching played out, for that background would soon burst forth with a violence that would shake the whole life of the empire. Sultan Abdülhamid II had reigned since 1876 over the Ottoman lands, and after a short period in which the empire had possessed a constitution and a parliament, he had suspended that constitution in 1878 and sent the parliament home, in order from then on to rule in the old manner as an absolute monarch, supported by an extensive apparatus of administration and surveillance. His rule, which had at first restored order and a certain stability to the shaken empire, had over the years hardened into an ever more oppressive regime, in which the printing press lay under restraint, free expression of opinion was stifled, and a widely ramified net of informers kept watch on the mood of the population.

For a scholar such as Atıf ﵀, whose world was the lecture hall and the mosque and not the circles of politics, this rule meant an environment in which one could carry out one’s work in relative peace so long as one kept far from everything that smacked of resistance to the established order, and it stands to reason that the young müderris, who devoted his whole capacity to teaching and to the tradition, did not venture into the dangerous waters of political resistance. Yet even the scholar who confined himself to his chair could not remain ignorant of the fermenting discontent that was gathering beneath the surface of the Hamidian rule, for among the officers of the army, among the young officials who had passed through the modern schools and among a part of the educated townsfolk there grew a resistance to the sultan’s autocracy that organized itself in secret and that strove for the restoration of the constitution and the parliament.

The fermentation beneath the surface

The movement that arose in these years against the rule of Abdülhamid II bore in history the name of the Young Turks, and it united under that label a motley variety of malcontents who were bound together in their aversion to the autocracy but who diverged widely in their further ideas, from pious Muslims who saw in the restoration of the constitution a return to a more just government, to Westernized modernists who wished to reform the empire on the European model. The centre of gravity of this movement shifted in the first years of the twentieth century to the officers of the army, and in particular to the garrisons in the European provinces of the empire, where the discontent over the condition of the army and over the foreign interference in the Balkans combined with the aversion to the autocracy into an inflammable mixture. It was from those circles that the shock would come which in the summer of 1908 would make the whole order totter.

It is important to note that the scholar from İskilip, like most of his rank, observed this fermentation rather than took part in it, for his formation and his office had made of him not a man of political conspiracy but a guardian of the inherited knowledge, and it is with the caution of one whose world was the medrese, and not the secret meeting room of the conspirators, that he perceived the signs of the approaching upheaval. He did not belong to those who plotted the fall of the regime, but neither to those who supported the regime out of conviction, and his attitude was rather that of a scholar who saw his duty in teaching and the tradition and who regarded the turmoils of politics with a certain distance, without suspecting how greatly those turmoils would determine the further course of his own life.

The upheaval of 1908 and the restoration of the constitution

In the summer of the year 1908 the tension that had gathered beneath the surface of the Hamidian rule broke open with unexpected speed, and the events that came over the empire in the month of July would change in an instant the world in which Atıf ﵀ had spent his quiet years of teaching. It began in the European provinces, where officers affiliated with the Young Turks rose in open revolt against the rule of the sultan and withdrew with their men into the mountains, and when the troops sent out to suppress the revolt joined the rebels instead of subduing them, the sultan saw himself faced with a choice that was no longer a choice. Shrinking from a civil war he could not win, Abdülhamid II in July 1908 yielded to the demand of the rebels and restored the constitution of 1876 that he had suspended thirty years before, and with that restoration his long years of autocracy came at a single stroke to an end.

The restoration of the constitution was greeted in the streets of the capital and in the cities of the whole empire with an outburst of joy that filled contemporaries with astonishment, for people of differing religion and origin embraced one another in the conviction that a new era of liberty and brotherhood had dawned and that the old antagonisms between the peoples and the faiths of the empire would be reconciled in the new order. For one who watched the events from close by, and the scholar from İskilip belonged to those who experienced the upheaval in the heart of the capital, that outburst of hope must have been a moving spectacle, and it is not hard to imagine that even a cautious man such as he shared in those first days something of the general expectation that the empire was going toward a happier future.

The awakening of a turbulent age

But the scholar who knew the inherited wisdom knew at the same time that the exuberant joy of the moment offered no guarantee for the future, and the years that followed the restoration of the constitution would prove how greatly the hope of the first days would be belied by reality. The freedom that the upheaval had brought opened not only the way to a more just government but also to an unprecedented turmoil, for the printing press, which had so long lain under restraint, burst forth in a flood of papers and writings in which the most divergent ideas vied for the favour of the reading public, and the closed associations that under the old regime had worked in secret stepped into the full light and contested the power among themselves. For the inherited world of the medrese and the ulema this new freedom meant a double-edged sword, for it opened the possibility of letting the voice of Islam sound unhindered, but it also admitted the voices of those who regarded the inherited religion as an obstacle on the road to progress and who wished to lead the empire in a Westernized direction.

It is in this turbulent new age that the scholar from İskilip continued his work, and the caution with which he had watched the approaching upheaval did not yield to the general intoxication but remained the keynote of his attitude, for he understood that the new freedom brought the inherited Islam not only opportunities but also dangers, and that the struggle for the soul of Muslim society that he had learned to discern in his years of study would be waged in this new climate with a fierceness greater than ever. The man who in the shadow of the Conqueror’s Mosque taught the inherited sciences and who let his pen speak in the Muslim press saw the arena to which he would be called gradually take shape, and although the years of public action still lay before him, he was through his teaching and his writings already bound to that arena.

What the chair of Fatih ripened in him

The years that Atıf ﵀ spent at the Fatih complex as müderris formed in the course of his life a time of ripening in which the scholar he had become took his place in the spiritual order of the capital and in which his name, without any loud appearance, gradually acquired authority in the circles of the İstanbul Muslim community. He had completed the transition from the young provincial who had entered the capital as an unknown to the established scholar who gave the general lesson in one of the most distinguished sanctuaries of the empire, and he had added to that teaching the labour of the writer who brought the inherited knowledge within the reach of the ordinary believer. In that double labour, the oral instruction in the lecture hall and the written instruction in the books and the papers, there took shape the full figure of the scholar that he would be in his mature years, and it is in this relatively quiet period of his life, before the storms that were still to come, that that figure acquired its full form.

In these years the scholar, as befitted a man of his rank and his age, also founded a household of his own, although history has left us little about his personal life in this period and reticence rather than certainty is here in place, for the sources do not allow us to fill in the particulars of his domestic circle with any certainty. What the tradition does hold fast is the image of a scholar who devoted his whole capacity to teaching and to the tradition, and whose life played out largely between the lecture hall of the complex, the writing table at which his works came into being, and the mosque in which he gave the general lesson.

Yet the scholar from İskilip would not spend his whole life in the seclusion of the chair, for the time in which he lived left no one who was devoted to the cause of the inherited Islam in the peace of seclusion, and the turbulent years that followed the restoration of the constitution drove the scholars of the old order inescapably toward a more public and more contested role. For Atıf ﵀ the first step away from the pure chair came around the year 1910, when he was called to the office of inspector of the medreses, a dignity that led him out of the closed circle of his own pupils into the wider field of the administration and the oversight of the system of religious colleges. With that appointment he stepped out of the shadow of the Conqueror’s Mosque into the public sphere of medrese policy, and he thereby entered a terrain on which learning and power, teaching and administration touched one another, and on which the cautious man who had found his world in the lecture hall would henceforth have to relate himself to the contested questions of his time. How he accepted that office of inspector, and how it drew him into the turbulent medrese policy of the years after the upheaval, 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 Fatih teaching from 1903, the contributions to the Muslim press and the appointment as medrese inspector around 1910].
• Ethem Erkoç, İskilipli Mehmed Âtıf Hoca, Çorum Belediyesi (Çorum, 2016) [monograph with the İstanbul teaching and writing years].
• Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, I.B. Tauris (4th ed., 2017), pp. 90–112 [for the rule of Abdülhamid II, the Young Turk movement and the upheaval of 1908].
• Stanford J. Shaw & Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. II, Cambridge University Press (1977), pp. 255–278 [for the Young Turk revolution of July 1908 and the restoration of the constitution of 1876].
• Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, Oxford University Press (3rd ed., 2002), pp. 174–210 [for the Second Constitutional Period and the position of the ulema in the post-1908 order].