The Inspectorate of Medreses

In the previous article we followed Atıf ﵀ through the years in which he had taken up the chair as a müderris at the Fatih complex and passed the transmitted sciences on to a new circle of students, and we saw how he had observed the upheaval of 1908, when the Young Turks forced the restoration of the constitution and compelled Sultan Abdülhamid II to recall parliament, with a scholarly caution, not as a man who let himself be carried away by the street jubilation of the moment, but as a scholar who already discerned, in the exultant slogans of freedom and progress, the question of what would remain of transmitted Islam in the revised empire. With that caution in his heart he entered the years that now come before us, for shortly after the upheaval the müderris was called away from his familiar lecture hall to a task of an entirely different nature, a task that brought him into contact no longer with his students alone but with the whole edifice of the empire’s religious education. Around the year 1910 Atıf ﵀ was appointed inspector of the medreses, and with that appointment the centre of gravity of his life shifted from the lectern to administration, from the passing on of knowledge to watching over the institution in which that knowledge was passed on, at a time when that very institution stood under a pressure it had not known for centuries.

From the Lectern to Administration

The office of medrese inspector was one that by its very nature required a scholar of standing, for whoever had to oversee the schools of the empire and judge them on their quality ought himself to have mastered the sciences that were taught there and to know the chain of transmission from within, so that he could pass judgement on the level of instruction not as an outside official but as a scholar among scholars. That the choice around 1910 fell upon Atıf ﵀ was, in that light, no accident, for he united in his person the old accreditation of the medrese, which he had acquired around 1902 with his icazet and his ruûs, together with the modern formation of the Darülfünun, from which he had graduated in 1905, so that he was pre-eminently the man who could weigh the transmitted method of teaching with the eye of one who had lived through it, while at the same time he knew the demands of the modernising state and how the reformist mind spoke about education.

What this inspectorate entailed in daily practice must not be imagined after the model of a modern educational inspectorate with its forms, its measuring rods and its reports, but rather as the oversight of an authoritative scholar over the running of the schools that fell within his jurisdiction. The inspector had to give account of the education imparted in the medreses, of the competence of those who taught in them, of the texts that were read and the way in which the students were formed, and he was to see to it that the level of the transmitted sciences did not decline and that the school continued to answer to the calling it had fulfilled from of old. On the precise extent of the territory entrusted to him and on the travels the office demanded of him the sources leave us no exact account, and it would be careless to turn these into grand tours through the provinces of the empire; one can say, in all prudence, no more than that his task carried him beyond the walls of the single lecture room and set before his eyes the whole system of religious education, with all the failings and all the needs that this system displayed in these years.

The Medrese Under Pressure

To grasp what a significant task this inspectorate was in these particular years, one must reckon with the condition in which the medrese system found itself in the late Ottoman empire, for the schools that Atıf ﵀ had to oversee were not the flourishing, self-assured institutions they had been in the great centuries of the empire, but institutions that had been pushed onto the defensive and whose place in society grew narrower from year to year. Since the Tanzimat the empire had built up a second, parallel system of modern state schools that trained the young for the careers of the modernising bureaucratic apparatus, the army and the new courts, and these new schools drew an increasing share of gifted young people to themselves, while the medrese, which had once been the self-evident path to standing and office, was pushed back ever more into the institution of a separate class of declining influence.

Added to this was the fact that the medreses themselves in these years contended with inner failings that even the most devoted defenders of the transmitted education could not deny, for the method of teaching had grown rigid in many places, the instruction not seldom confined itself to a rehashing of the transmitted handbooks without the original force with which they had once been read, and the influx of students who sought in the medrese a refuge and an exemption from military service rather than a calling to knowledge weighed upon the level of the whole. It was precisely this twofold distress, the outward pressure of the modern state school and the inner decay of the method of teaching itself, that made the call for a reform of medrese education ring louder in these years, and it was in the midst of that call that Atıf ﵀ took up his inspectorate.

The Scholar as Advocate of Reform

One would misunderstand Atıf ﵀ thoroughly if one imagined him in these years as a guardian of the transmitted who wished to preserve the medrese unchanged and who perceived in every reform an assault upon the sacred tradition, for the man who had enrolled at the modern university and who had accepted the useful knowledge of the new age without fear was pre-eminently equipped to see that the medrese, if it were to continue fulfilling its calling in the modern world, could not stand still at the old. His attitude toward the school was the same as his attitude toward the science and technology of Europe, namely that one could safely accept the useful new so long as one did not surrender the foundation of the transmitted, and in that spirit he belonged to the voice that pleaded for a renewal of medrese education, not to turn the medrese into a state school, but to give it back the strength and the dignity it had lost in its decay.

The reform that he and the scholars who thought with him had in view was one that sought to improve the medrese from within, by raising the level of instruction, ridding the method of teaching of its rigidity, and ordering the subject matter in a way that truly formed the student into a competent scholar instead of letting him become mired in an endless repetition of handbooks, and one that also, where this was possible without harm to the foundation, wished to give the useful knowledge of the modern age a place in the curriculum. It was a reform that sought not to abolish the medrese but to save it, and precisely in this the attitude of Atıf ﵀ distinguished itself sharply from that of the modernising wing, which saw in the whole medrese system no more than a relic of a bygone age that one would do best to abolish as soon as possible. Between those two extremes, the preservation of the rigid old and the abolition of the transmitted whole, he sought to clear the narrow path that wished to preserve the transmitted knowledge for the future through a sensible renewal, and that thankless middle position would, as so often in his life, cause him to be regarded with suspicion by both sides.

Watching Over the Chain of Transmission

Behind the administrative oversight that the inspectorate laid upon him there lay hidden, for Atıf ﵀, a deeper concern that had to do with the very nature of religious knowledge, for the medrese was in his eyes not merely a school among schools but the institution in which the chain of transmission was continued, the chain that bound the scholars of his day, link after link, to the Companions ﵃ of the Prophet ﷺ and thereby to the revelation itself. The decay of the medrese was therefore in his eyes not merely the decay of an educational institution, which could be remedied with administrative measures, but a threat to the way in which the community passed its deepest knowledge from one generation to the next, and whoever let the medrese wither, or surrendered it without discernment to the spirit of the new age, thereby endangered the transmission itself.

In that sense the oversight he exercised was for him no bureaucratic routine but a spiritual responsibility, and it is in that awareness that one must seek the seriousness with which he fulfilled his task. The medrese he oversaw was the institution that had formed him, first in the modest Caca Bey school of his native city of İskilip and afterwards in the venerable lecture halls of the Fatih complex, and when he now watched over the medreses he watched over the institution to which he owed everything and which had placed the entrusted deposit of knowledge in his hands. It is no exaggeration to say that in this office he put his life’s stance into practice, for he placed himself in the service of the institution he wished at once to guard and to renew, in the firm conviction that transmitted knowledge needs a form and a vessel to be carried through the ages, and that the decay of that vessel would mean the loss of the knowledge itself.

The Pen in the Service of the Muslim Press

Alongside and partly through his inspectorate there unfolded in these years a second activity in which the scholar from İskilip addressed a far broader audience than the circle of his students or the schools under his supervision, for in the years after the upheaval of 1908, when the restored freedom of the press had let loose a flood of newspapers and periodicals over the empire, he took up the pen and joined the great debates that were waged with passion in the Muslim press of his day. The upheaval had for a time lifted the censorship that had weighed on the press under Abdülhamid II, and in the space that thereby arose there appeared numerous periodicals in which the question of the empire’s future, of the relation between Islam and the modern world, and of the roads the Muslim community had to travel amid its crisis, was discussed with great intensity, and it was in that space that Atıf ﵀ let his voice be heard.

He contributed in these years to newspapers that ranked among the most important of the Islamically minded press, and his name is bound in particular to the periodicals Sebîlürreşâd and Beyânülhak, two journals in which the scholars and thinkers who wished to defend and think through transmitted Islam in the modern age laid their views before a reading public. In the columns of those papers it was not the light matter of the daily news that was treated, but the great questions of the age that were weighed, the question of how the Muslim community was to defend itself against the superior force of an advancing Europe, the question of how far one could adopt the ways of Western civilisation without surrendering one’s own soul, and the question of what place transmitted religious knowledge ought to retain in the revised empire. It was precisely these questions that touched the heart of Atıf’s ﵀ thought, and the Muslim press offered him the platform on which he could set out before a broad audience the twofold standpoint he had gained in his formation, the acceptance of the useful new and the refusal of spiritual imitation.

The Battlefield of Words

One must imagine the Muslim press of these years as a battlefield on which the divergent currents of the late Ottoman Muslim world contended with words over the soul of the empire, for alongside the papers that defended transmitted Islam there were papers that sought the salvation of the empire in as complete a Westernisation as possible, and papers that placed a Turkish national consciousness above the religious unity of the empire, so that the reader who followed these periodicals was witness to a debate in which the very foundations of society were at issue. In that debate Atıf ﵀ deliberately took the side of those who wished to preserve transmitted Islam as the living foundation of the community, not out of a blind attachment to the past, but out of the conviction that a community that surrendered its spiritual foundation in exchange for the outward forms of a foreign civilisation was preparing its own downfall.

It is telling that he took up the pen in the very same years in which he watched over the medreses, for writing for the Muslim press and overseeing religious education were in his eyes two forms of one and the same concern, namely the concern to carry transmitted knowledge and the living foundation of the community through a time of crisis. With his inspectorate he watched over the institution in which that knowledge was passed on, and with his pen he defended the ideas of which that knowledge was the bearer, and in both cases he placed himself in the service of a community that he believed was being hollowed out from within by an imitation of the foreign that presented itself as progress. It was the same distinction between the tool one borrows and the soul one keeps that he had sharpened in his university years, and it would, in the years that followed, in his writings and ultimately in the book for which he would be condemned, be expressed ever more emphatically.

The Committee of Union and Progress

The years in which Atıf ﵀ held his inspectorate and wrote for the Muslim press were the years in which the real power in the empire no longer rested with the sultan but with the Committee of Union and Progress, the İttihat ve Terakki, the movement of the Young Turks that had forced the restoration of the constitution with the upheaval of 1908 and that in the following years gradually developed into the ruling power in the state. The Committee had emerged from the secret circles of discontented officers and officials who had regarded the rule of Abdülhamid II as the cause of the empire’s decline, and it had set itself the goal of restoring the constitution and saving the empire through modernisation, but behind the slogans of freedom, equality and brotherhood with which it had accompanied its upheaval there lurked a movement that seized ever more firmly upon power from year to year and that left ever less room for the contradiction of those who did not share its course.

It was precisely these two traits of the Committee, its modernising zeal and its growing intolerance, that from the very outset charged the relation between the ruling power and a scholar such as Atıf ﵀ with tension. The modernising zeal of the Committee directed itself by preference at the institutions of transmitted religious life, which it regarded as relics of an outdated order that hindered the empire in its progress, and in that attitude there lay a threat to the very world of which Atıf ﵀ was the guardian. At the same time the growing intolerance of the Committee, which after the turbulent years that followed 1908 seized unlimited power by a coup in 1913, made the utterance of a dissenting voice a hazardous undertaking, for the rulers of the empire were ever less willing to tolerate the independent voice of a scholar who was not prepared to submit to their course.

The Suspicion Toward the Independent Scholar

Between the Committee and the scholars who defended transmitted Islam there existed a deep suspicion rooted in the very nature of both parties, for the Committee distrusted every power it did not control, and the independent scholar, who derived his authority not from the state but from the chain of transmission and from the trust of the community, was such a power as would not simply let itself be absorbed. To the rulers of the empire a scholar who in the Muslim press pronounced his own judgement on the future of the community and who cherished his own conception of religious education, not one prescribed by the state, was not a reassuring but a disquieting figure, and as the Committee tightened its grip on the state, the space in which such a scholar could move freely grew narrower.

Atıf ﵀ belonged to that generation of scholars that let itself be carried away neither by conservative closedness nor by modernising zeal, and it was precisely that independent middle position that made him suspect in the eyes of the ruling power, for he was not the man who could be silenced with an office or a favour, and no more the man who could be dismissed as a stubborn straggler, since he had after all accepted modern science with open eyes. He was, in other words, the most difficult sort of opponent that a ruling power can imagine, a scholar of standing who knew the modern age and did not fear it, but who did not wish to surrender the spiritual foundation of the community, and it is in that capacity that he drew upon himself the growing suspicion of the Committee, a suspicion that in 1913 would strike him for the first time with full force.

The Disaster of the Balkan Wars

While Atıf ﵀ in these years watched over the medreses and pleaded the cause of transmitted Islam for the Muslim press, the empire was struck by a disaster that darkened the whole tone of the age and that pervaded the debates in the press and the concerns of the scholars with a deep sense of danger, for in the autumn of 1912 the First Balkan War broke out, in which an alliance of the Balkan states turned against the Ottoman Empire and inflicted upon it a crushing defeat in a series of battles. Within the span of a few months the empire lost almost its entire European territory, the old core provinces in the Balkans that it had possessed for centuries, and the Ottoman armies were thrown back to just before the gates of İstanbul itself, so that the capital of the empire suddenly saw the refugees and the wounded of a collapsed front streaming within its walls.

The scale of the disaster can hardly be overstated, for the Balkan provinces were not merely an outlying corner of the empire but the old cradle of Ottoman power, and with their loss the empire saw a part of its history and of its self-awareness slip away, while the Muslim population of the lost regions fled in great numbers and under dreadful privations to the shrinking core region, as the Muslims of the Balkans had already done in the war of 1877. When in 1913 the Second Balkan War broke out, in which the victors clashed among themselves over the spoils and the empire was able to reconquer part of what had been lost, the blow had already been dealt and the break was already irreversible, and the two Balkan Wars left the empire behind as a battered trunk that had lost its European limbs and that, with the approaching world war, still had its heaviest ordeal before it.

What the Catastrophe Wrought in Men’s Minds

For the generation to which Atıf ﵀ belonged, the disaster of the Balkan Wars was more than a territorial loss, for it confirmed in the most horrifying way the awareness that the Muslim world had been pushed onto the defensive and that the mighty empire of the forefathers was losing ground link after link before an advancing and self-assured Europe, an awareness that had already, in the childhood of Atıf ﵀, in the years of the war of 1877 and the Congress of Berlin, penetrated to the furthest provincial towns and that was now repeated with a crushing force. The question that dominated the Muslim press of these years, the question of how the community could avert its downfall, acquired through the Balkan catastrophe an urgency that was no longer a taste for debate but a matter of life and death, and the divergent answers that the currents of the age gave to that question sharpened, in the face of the disaster, into positions over which men no longer differed politely in opinion.

For a scholar like Atıf ﵀ the catastrophe confirmed the conviction he already cherished, namely that a community that surrendered its spiritual foundation made itself not stronger but weaker, and that salvation lay not in an ever more complete adoption of the ways of Europe but in a return to the community’s own strength, of which transmitted Islam was the bearer. For the modernising wing of the empire, by contrast, that same disaster proved the opposite, namely that the empire had been too slow, too hesitant and too attached to the transmitted in its modernisation, and that only a radical Westernisation could still save it. In that opposing interpretation of one and the same disaster lay the division that would tear apart the empire and its successor, and the fate of Atıf ﵀, the scholar devoted with his whole soul to the first interpretation in a state that would bend itself ever more implacably toward the second, was already laid down in that opposition.

What the Rising Storm Held in Store for Him

When one surveys the years of the inspectorate, from the appointment around 1910 to the threshold of 1913, there emerges the image of a scholar at the height of his activity, for in these years he united in his person the teacher, the guardian of religious education and the publicist who joined the great debates of his time, and in each of those capacities he placed himself in the service of one and the same cause, the preservation of transmitted Islam as the living foundation of the community in the midst of a time that seemed to want to tamper with all that was transmitted. It was an active and in a certain sense an honoured life, that of the İskilip orphan who had risen to the higher circles of İstanbul scholarship and to the oversight of the schools, and nothing in the outward course of his career foretold that these years would soon be cut short by force.

And yet, beneath the appearance of that activity, there lay hidden a rising tension that could not fail to break out, for the independent voice of a scholar who defended transmitted Islam sounded in an empire in which the ruling power listened to such voices with increasing distrust, and the suspicion of the Committee toward those who did not submit to its course would not pass Atıf ﵀ by. In the year 1913, the year in which the Committee seized unlimited power by a coup and in which the political relations in the empire hardened, those tensions would strike him for the first time directly, and the scholar who had watched over the medreses and had written for the Muslim press would suddenly find himself thrown back outside the capital, into an exile to which the ruling power would banish him under a contested accusation. How that exile of 1913 came upon him, on what shaky ground it rested, and how the scholar from İskilip endured the first direct blow of politics, 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 medrese inspectorate from 1910 and the contributions to Sebîlürreşâd and Beyânülhak].
• Ethem Erkoç, İskilipli Mehmed Âtıf Hoca, Çorum Belediyesi (Çorum, 2016) [monograph with the İstanbul career, the inspectorate and the journalistic activity].
• Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, I.B. Tauris (4th edition, 2017), pp. 93–137 [for the Committee of Union and Progress, the coup of 1913 and the Second Constitutional Period].
• Stanford J. Shaw & Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. II, Cambridge University Press (1977), pp. 273–299 [for the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913, the loss of the European provinces and the Young Turks in power].
• Bernard Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, Oxford University Press (3rd edition, 2002), pp. 207–238 [for the Young Turks, the restored press and the modernisation of the institutions after 1908].
• Niyazi Berkes, The Development of Secularism in Turkey, McGill University Press (1964), pp. 337–410 [for the reform of the medrese system and the debates in the late Ottoman Muslim press].