Exile in Sinop
In the preceding article we followed İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ through the years in which, after his years of study in İstanbul and his appointment as müderris at the Fatih complex, he had become an authoritative voice in the Muslim press of the capital, and in 1910 he was named inspector of the medreses, an office that carried him into the administrative heart of religious education and that at the same time entangled him in a growing tension with the men who in these years exercised the real power in the empire. For the empire in which he had built his career was no longer the empire of his youth, and since the revolution of 1908 the sultan-caliph in İstanbul no longer reigned as the undisputed ruler but as one whose authority was guided from behind the scenes by the Committee of Union and Progress, the party of the Young Turks that had seized the administration of the empire in its grip. Atıf ﵀ was a scholar of independent mind, a man who in his articles and his lessons was unwilling to bend his judgment to the shifting demands of the ruling circle, and it was precisely that independence, which in calmer times would have been an ornament, that in the years now dawning became a danger to him.
The Empire Under the Committee
To understand how a scholar who had committed no crime and had entangled himself in no conspiracy could nonetheless be sent along the road to exile, one must reckon with the condition in which the Ottoman Empire found itself in the years around 1913. The constitutional revolution of 1908, greeted with great hope for freedom and for restoration, had not brought the enduring parliamentary order that its advocates had imagined, but a turbulent period of factional strife, of military intervention and of political assassinations, in which the Committee of Union and Progress gradually exchanged its initial position of influence behind the scenes for an authority exercised ever more openly and ever more harshly. The defeats the empire suffered in these years, the loss of Libya to Italy in 1911 and the collapse of the Ottoman position in the Balkans in the wars of 1912 and 1913, fed in the capital an atmosphere of crisis and distrust in which every dissenting voice could be felt as a threat, and in which the men in power grew ever less inclined to honour the subtleties of the law whenever their own position was at stake.
The turning point came in the winter of 1913. In January of that year a group of officers led by the men of the Committee carried out a violent coup, the so-called storming of the Sublime Porte, in which the minister of war was killed and the government was thrust aside by force, so that from then on the Committee was no longer merely the power behind the throne but the open ruler over the empire. The man who in the months that followed governed as grand vizier, Mahmud Şevket Paşa, was a soldier of standing whom the Committee had helped into the saddle, yet he did not stand in favour with all, and his position among the various factions was less secure than his high office suggested.
The Murder of Mahmud Şevket Paşa
On 11 June 1913 Mahmud Şevket Paşa was shot dead in his car on a square in İstanbul, in an attack devised by opponents of the Committee, one that offered the regime the opportunity for which it had been waiting, for the murder of the grand vizier was not merely a crime to be prosecuted in court but above all a political chance, and the Committee seized it with both hands to settle accounts with the opposition that had threatened it since its seizure of power. In the weeks that followed the regime unleashed a merciless purge, in which the real conspirators were tracked down, tried and in a number of cases executed, but in which at the same time, under cover of that same conspiracy, a far wider circle of real and supposed opponents was struck. Whoever was displeasing to the Committee, whoever had let an independent voice be heard, whoever in the preceding years had shown his disapproval of the course the ruling party steered, could now, rightly or wrongly, be linked to the conspiracy and removed from the capital.
In such a climate of fear and reprisal, evidence counted for less than suspicion, and the dividing line between guilt and innocence shifted toward the arbitrary will of those in power, for it was enough that a man be deemed suspect to impose upon him the punishment of banishment, even where every proof connecting him to the actual attack was absent. It was the logic of the ruling faction that in these months took the place of justice, and it struck, alongside the actual conspirators, a series of men whose only misstep had been that they had preserved their independence of judgment in a time when the Committee demanded obedience.
It is important to recognise that such measures had in these years become not the exception but the rule, and that the regime, in its dealings with the opposition, had struck a tone that had little left to do with the constitutional promises of 1908. The ulama of the capital, the scholars of the medreses and the mosques, formed within that opposition a distinctive group, for they possessed neither weapons nor an army, but they did possess something that the Committee in a certain sense feared even more, namely the moral authority that the Muslim population granted to the bearers of religious knowledge, and a scholar who in his articles and lessons proclaimed an independent judgment could, in the eyes of a suspicious regime, be more dangerous than many a conspirator, precisely because his influence worked not through force but through conviction. Whoever wishes to understand the events of 1913 must therefore look not only at the attack on the grand vizier but at the broader struggle fought out in these years over the question of who would have the last word in the empire, the ruling political faction or the guardians of the inherited order, and it was in that struggle that Atıf ﵀, without ever having striven for a political office, found himself on the wrong side of power.
The Banishment of an Innocent Man
To that wider circle of the afflicted belonged İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀. In 1913, in the aftermath of the murder of Mahmud Şevket Paşa, he was seized and sent into exile under the pretext of an alleged involvement in the conspiracy, an accusation for which, according to all that the most reliable sources tell us, there was no real foundation whatever, and of which he was wholly innocent. That a scholar of his standing, who had never entangled himself in any attack and whose life had unfolded between the medrese, the mosque and the editor’s desk, was nonetheless caught in the net of the purge, can be explained only by the independence with which he had conducted himself in the preceding years, for he was a man whose voice was not in the service of the Committee and who, in his writings and in his official position, represented an authority that the ruling circle preferred to see outside the capital rather than within its walls.
The form in which this fate was imposed upon him was that of administrative banishment, an instrument the regime employed with great regularity in these years and that presumed no conviction by an impartial judge, but that could be decreed as a measure of governance, a removal of the displeasing man from the centre of power to a remote place where he could do no further harm. It was a punishment that did not cast its victim into a dungeon yet did not set him free either, a banishment to the edge of administrative life where he lived under surveillance and where he was deprived of the familiar circle of his students, his colleagues and his readers, and it struck, precisely because it was imposed without any form of trial, at the very heart of the sense of justice of a scholar who sought his footing in the law and in the evidence.
Where the Exile Took Place
Concerning the place where Atıf ﵀ spent this exile the traditions diverge, and honesty demands that this uncertainty not be concealed but openly named. Popular memory, and in particular the pious tradition of İskilip that cherishes his remembrance, links his exile to Sinop, the old harbour town on the Black Sea at the northernmost point of the Anatolian peninsula, and it is under that name that the episode has been handed down in one strand of the tradition. The most authoritative academic biography, however, the entry in the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, places the exile of 1913 not in Sinop but in the interior of his own home province and its surroundings, namely in Çorum, Boğazlıyan and Sungurlu, places that lie in the heart of Central Anatolia and not on the coast. The tradition thus links his exile to Sinop, though the most authoritative biography places it in Çorum, Boğazlıyan and Sungurlu, and this can no longer be established with certainty today.
The historian who takes his craft seriously can here do no other than let both traditions stand side by side and not deceive the reader with a false certainty where the sources do not permit it. It is not inconceivable that the two traditions go back to different phases or to different places of residence within one and the same period of exile, or that the one has added the name of a nearby or better-known place to the memory, but whoever wishes to remain honest must acknowledge that the source material furnishes us here with no conclusive answer. What we can say with more certainty concerns not the place but the nature of the ordeal, for whether it took place in a harbour town on the Black Sea or in the inland towns of his home region, the essence of the banishment remained the same: the forced removal of a scholar from the midst of his work, imposed without a fair trial and borne, according to all that the tradition reports, with a steadfastness that did not leave him.
Steadfastness in the Ordeal
What a man truly thought and lived through in the isolation of an exile belongs to the hidden matters that the historian may approach only with great caution, and it would be a form of falsification of history to fill the lonely months of Atıf ﵀ with scenes that the sources have not left to us. What the tradition does report to us with some firmness is that he bore the ordeal without losing his dignity and without departing from the devotion that had shaped his whole life, for the man who had learned in the medrese that the knowledge of religion is an entrusted deposit that one ought to pass on undamaged was not the man to be shaken in his conviction by an unjust banishment. His piety had never needed the outward shelter of his circumstances to hold itself upright, and precisely for that reason the exile, heavily as it weighed, could not take from him what he carried within himself.
For a scholar whose entire existence had until then unfolded in the company of his books, his students and his fellow scholars, the isolation must have been a heavy burden, for it took from him not only his freedom of movement but also the daily fabric of his work, the circle of students around his lectern, the exchange of thoughts with his colleagues and the contact with the readers who followed his articles in the Muslim press. And yet the manner in which he would later, under a still harsher ordeal, preserve his steadfastness teaches us that the isolation had neither embittered nor broken him, but had rather confirmed the inner orientation he had carried with him from his years of study in İskilip onward, the awareness that a man must seek his footing not in the accidental shelter of his circumstances but in that which no power can take from him. It is in that light that his banishment must be seen not merely as an interruption of his career but as an early ordeal in which the scholar came to know the taste of the injustice that he would later, to its very last consequence, refuse to accept.
It is fitting here to clear up a misunderstanding that has crept into part of the later tradition, namely the claim that Atıf ﵀ wrote his famous work on the imitation of the Europeans and the hat during this exile. That representation is untrue, for the book in question, Frenk Mukallidliği ve Şapka, appeared only in 1924, well over a decade after the banishment of 1913 and in an entirely different phase of his life, when the old empire no longer existed and the young Republic had set its own course; the banishment of 1913 and the book of 1924 belong to two different eras that one must not fold into each other. What he pondered or prepared in the years of his exile eludes our knowledge, and it befits the historian better to acknowledge this honestly than to forge a connection that the facts will not bear.
The Vindication and the Return
The banishment of Atıf ﵀ did not last the long years that part of the popular tradition later ascribed to it, but about a year and a half, and it ended as it ought by right to have ended, with his vindication, for after a time it was established what had been the truth from the very beginning, namely that he had been wrongly accused of involvement in the conspiracy, and he was officially cleared of the charge and recalled from his exile. The accusation levelled against him fell apart as soon as it was subjected to a real investigation, and the man who had been removed from the capital on a mere suspicion returned to it as one vindicated.
Yet the vindication was not the simple undoing of the injustice that one would wish, for the time that had been lost did not return, and the experience of a banishment without trial, imposed by a regime that made evidence subordinate to its own interest, could not be erased by a later recognition of innocence. Atıf ﵀ had experienced in his own person what a state is capable of that sets power above justice, and that experience, gained in the years of the Committee, would form an indelible part of his sense of life when he later, under a new and still more radical regime, would once again come to face the choice between his conviction and his safety. The scholar who in 1926 chose the noose rather than the betrayal of his conscience had already experienced in 1913 how little an innocent man may expect from a regime that sees in him an adversary.
The Great War and the Fall of the Empire
Hardly had Atıf ﵀ returned from his exile when the empire was overtaken by a disaster of an altogether different order, a disaster that struck not a few men but that would put the very existence of the Ottoman state at stake. In the summer of 1914 there broke out in Europe the war that would later be called the First World War, and the Ottoman Empire, drawn by the Committee into the conflict at the side of Germany and Austria-Hungary, was in the autumn of that year swept into a struggle of life and death, so that the Muslims of Anatolia and of the Arab provinces found themselves once again, and on a scale that surpassed all previous defeats, entangled in a war that would demand their utmost strength. The struggle that followed was for the empire a chain of fronts and of sacrifices that exhausted the population, from the mountain passes of the Caucasus where an Ottoman army perished in the winter cold, to the deserts of Mesopotamia and the sandy plains of Sinai and Palestine, and to the peninsula of Gallipoli, where the empire in 1915 and 1916 did indeed win a defensive victory but at a cost in human lives that it could not afford.
For the ordinary Muslim of the empire these years meant hunger, loss and an endless succession of mobilisations that drew the men from the villages and the towns to the distant fronts, from which many did not return, while those left behind had to find a way to live with the scarcity, the devaluation of money and the uncertainty of an empire at war. The state that in the Tanzimat had sought to renew itself along European lines, and that in the Committee had gained a leadership that wished to lead the empire into the modern age with a heavy hand, brought its subjects not the strength and the prosperity that the reformers had held out before them, but led them into a world war that compressed the exhaustion of a century into a few years.
The Collapse and the Armistice of Mudros
By the autumn of 1918 the outcome could no longer be turned, for the allies of the empire gave way one by one, the fronts in the Middle East had collapsed, and the armies that the empire had kept in the field in the preceding years with so much sacrifice were exhausted, decimated and no longer able to sustain the defence. On 30 October 1918 the Ottoman representatives, aboard a British warship in the harbour of Mudros on the island of Lemnos, signed the armistice that put an end to the Ottoman participation in the war, and the terms of that agreement left nothing to be desired in clarity, for they granted the victorious powers the right to occupy the strategic points of the empire and left the defeated state largely at the mercy of its opponents.
What the armistice of Mudros meant in practice became visible in the weeks and months that followed in the capital itself, for İstanbul, the old seat of the caliphate and the heart of the Sunni Muslim world, came to lie under the shadow of the Allied occupation, with foreign warships at anchor in the Bosphorus and foreign troops in its streets. The empire that in 1875, the year of Atıf’s ﵀ birth, had still stretched across three continents and whose sultan had borne the title of caliph of all Muslims, was in 1918 reduced to a defeated and occupied state whose very survival was in doubt, and the Muslims of the empire saw themselves confronted with the possibility that the age-old order under which they had lived might be swept away entirely. It was in this dark hour, with the enemy in the capital and the future of the caliphate uncertain, that the scholars of İstanbul felt compelled to draw together.
What the Occupation of İstanbul Stirred Up
When Atıf ﵀ took stock, after the armistice of Mudros, of the years that lay behind him, he could look back on a life that had lived through the whole decline of the empire, from the distant defeats in the Balkans in his young years to the occupation of the capital in his mature age, and he had beheld that decline not as a distant onlooker but had experienced it in his own fate, in the unjust banishment of 1913 that had taught him how a state makes justice subordinate to its interest, and in the world war that had worn the community to which he belonged down to the bone. The city to which he had returned and in which he had resumed his work was no longer the self-assured capital of former days but an occupied city under foreign arms, and the order he had served his whole life long, the caliphate and the religious education bound up with it, was in a danger that none of the earlier crises had equalled.
It has been to the honour of the scholars of İstanbul that in this hour of humiliation they did not sit down in despair, but that, precisely because the state that had upheld them was paralysed and occupied, they themselves took upon their shoulders the responsibility of tending to the cause of Islam and of the Muslim community, for when worldly power falls away or passes into foreign hands, the burden of leadership falls back onto the shoulders of the ulama, the heirs of the prophets in the transmission of knowledge, and it was out of that awareness, and out of the necessity of the hour, that the scholars of the capital began to unite in a body that would bind their voice together and order their work.
At the beginning of 1919, with the enemy at anchor in the Bosphorus and the fate of the empire in the balance, there arose in İstanbul the association of scholars in which Atıf ﵀ would come to fill a leading role, a body that set for itself the aim of raising up and defending Islam in a time when everything dear to the Muslims seemed threatened. How this association arose, what course it steered in the turbulent years of the occupation and of the national struggle, and how Atıf ﵀ came to stand at its head in a time when every choice carried heavy consequences, is the subject of the following article. There we shall follow the scholar who had returned from his exile along the path that would lead him from the editor’s desk and the medrese to the front line of the spiritual struggle of his age, and on which the steadfastness he had shown in the ordeal of 1913 would once again, and more heavily than before, be put to the test.
Sources
- TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, entry “İskilipli Mehmed Âtıf Efendi”, Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı (İstanbul, 2000), pp. 132–135 [the most authoritative academic biography; places the exile of 1913 in Çorum, Boğazlıyan and Sungurlu].
- Ethem Erkoç, İskilipli Mehmed Âtıf Hoca, Çorum Belediyesi (Çorum, 2016) [a monograph with the İskilip family and biographical data, in which the popular Sinop tradition also resounds].
- Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, I.B. Tauris (4th edition, 2017), pp. 95–137 [for the murder of Mahmud Şevket Paşa, the rule of the Committee, the First World War and the armistice of Mudros].
- Stanford J. Shaw & Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. II, Cambridge University Press (1977), pp. 289–322 [for the Ottoman participation in the First World War and the collapse of 1918].
- Feroz Ahmad, The Young Turks: The Committee of Union and Progress in Turkish Politics 1908–1914, Oxford University Press (1969), pp. 121–158 [for the coup of 1913 and the purges after the murder of Mahmud Şevket Paşa].