The Founding of Teali-i İslam

In the previous article we followed İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ up to the Armistice of Mudros, signed on 30 October 1918 aboard a British warship in the harbour of the island of Lemnos, which brought an end to Ottoman participation in the First World War and left the empire largely at the mercy of its conquerors. We saw how Atıf ﵀, who had lived through the world war in the capital after the unjust exile of 1913 had taught him in his own flesh how a state subordinates justice to its interests, resumed his work after the armistice in an İstanbul that was no longer the self-assured seat of the caliphate but a defeated city under the shadow of Allied occupation, with foreign warships anchored in the Bosphorus and foreign troops in its streets. And we closed that article with the observation that it was precisely 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 band together, and that Atıf ﵀ would come to play a leading role in the association that arose from that necessity. It is that association, its origins, its aims and the heavy and contested choices it made in the turbulent years of the occupation, that will be the subject of this article, and it is here that the career of the scholar, which until then had unfolded between the medrese, the mosque and the editorial desk, becomes entangled with the most charged episode of modern Turkish history, an episode that the historian can approach only with great caution and with a readiness for honest doubt.

The capital under occupation

To understand why the scholars of İstanbul united at the beginning of 1919, and why the choices they made in the years that followed have remained so charged and so disputed, one must first reckon with the condition in which the capital found itself after the Armistice of Mudros, for it was a condition of humiliation and uncertainty that weighed upon the city like a leaden sky. The terms of the armistice had granted the victorious powers the right to occupy the strategic points of the empire, and they made ample use of that right, so that already in November 1918 an Allied fleet appeared in the Bosphorus and the troops of England, France and Italy installed themselves in the city and its surroundings, while the administration of the city was increasingly subjected to the supervision of the occupiers. The sultan-caliph in his palace on the shore of the Bosphorus still reigned in name, but his power had shrunk to a shadow, and the government that acted in his name was more concerned with preserving what could still be preserved than with resisting the foreign domination, for it believed, not without grounds, that open resistance would cost the defeated state the last remnant of its survival.

For the Muslims of the capital this condition was not merely a political and military defeat, but a spiritual trial of the first order, for İstanbul was not simply a capital but the ancient seat of the caliphate, the heart of the Sunni Muslim world and the city towards which the eyes of the faithful from India to Morocco had turned for centuries, and the spectacle of that city under the arms of Christian powers struck the believers in the very depths of their sense of themselves. Added to this was that the future was as dark and as uncertain as it had been in no living memory, for it was by no means settled that the empire, or even the capital itself, would continue to exist, and in the corridors of Allied diplomacy there circulated plans that envisaged the partition of Anatolia among the victors and their protégés, while in the west of the peninsula a Greek landing was imminent that would be carried out at Smyrna in May 1919 and that would drive the Anatolian Muslims into a state of despair and rage. It was an hour in which no one could say with certainty what the coming month would bring, and in which the old order, the empire, the caliphate and the religious framework that was interwoven with it, seemed not to be slowly fading but capable of being swept away at a single stroke.

The burden that fell upon the ulama

In a community in which the worldly power has fallen away or passed into foreign hands, the burden of spiritual leadership falls by nature back upon the shoulders of the scholars, for it is the ulama, the heirs of the prophets in the transmission of knowledge, who bear the moral authority and the spiritual responsibility when the swords are broken and the thrones totter, and it was out of that age-old awareness, as old as the community itself, that the scholars of İstanbul felt themselves called upon in these years. The Prophet ﷺ had after all taught that the scholars are the heirs of the prophets, and that inheritance meant not only the preservation and transmission of knowledge in calmer times, but also the taking up of leadership in the hours when the community threatened to become rudderless. The scholars of the capital possessed no armies and no weapons, and they could not drive the occupier from the city, but they possessed something that in the eyes of the Muslim population weighed more heavily than many a weapon, namely the authority of religious knowledge and the duty to instruct the community, to admonish it and to point out a direction in the confusion of the hour.

It was moreover an hour in which not only the worldly power but also the religious order itself was in danger, for the medreses, the houses of learning in which the religious sciences had been transmitted for centuries, had suffered severely under the world war and the collapse that followed, and the scholarly class that upheld them found itself in a state of confusion and fragmentation. Atıf ﵀, who had held the office of inspector of the medreses since 1910, knew the weakness of that framework from within, and he belonged to the scholars who recognised that the class of müderrises would have to organise itself if it wished to make its voice heard in the new and hostile age and to protect its work. It is out of that twofold necessity, the necessity of leading the community under occupation and the necessity of defending religious education against decay, that the association to which this article is devoted arose.

The founding of the Cemiyet-i Müderrisîn

At the beginning of 1919 the scholars of the capital took the decision to join their forces in an association, and on 15 February 1919 the Cemiyet-i Müderrisîn was founded, the Society of Müderrises, which united the teachers of the medreses and set itself the goal of serving the interests of the scholarly class, of defending and strengthening the religious sciences, and of making the voice of the ulama heard in a time when everything dear to the Muslims seemed threatened. The name of the association rendered its original nature precisely, for it was in the first place an association of müderrises, of the teachers of higher religious education, men who had devoted their lives to the transmission of knowledge and who now, in the awareness that their class and their work were in danger, joined together to act collectively where the individual would have been powerless. It was, in other words, not a political party in the modern sense and not a secret conspiracy, but a guild, a professional association of scholars, born of the need of the hour and wishing to serve the cause of Islam and of its sciences in the confusion of the occupation.

Only a few days after the founding, on 19 February 1919, İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ was elected second chairman of the young association, an election that strikingly illustrates his standing among the scholars of the capital, for the man who a few years earlier had been sent into exile by the Committee on a mere suspicion was now raised by his fellow scholars to one of the leading figures of their company. That a scholar from a remote provincial town, a fatherless İskilip child who had worked his way up along the slow and patient road of the medrese, was called in the heart of the capital’s scholarship to such a position of trust, testifies to the place he had won for himself through his knowledge, his steadfastness and his independence of judgement, and it explains why in the years that followed he would be driven into the very front line of the spiritual struggle of his time. He took up the burden of the office at a time when the bearing of responsibility was no honour that one assumed without danger, but an obligation that carried heavy and possibly fateful consequences.

From Müderrisîn to Teâlî-i İslâm

The association that had been founded on 15 February 1919 as the Cemiyet-i Müderrisîn did not bear that name for long, for as its aims broadened and it came to regard itself no longer merely as the professional association of the medrese teachers but as a company in the service of the whole of Islam, a name imposed itself that better expressed that wider aspiration, and on 24 November 1919 the association was renamed the Teâlî-i İslâm Cemiyeti, the Society for the Elevation of Islam. In that change of name lay a shift of meaning that was more than a choice of words, for it made known that the scholars no longer limited their task to the defence of their own class and their own houses of learning, but that they felt called to serve the cause of Islam itself, to elevate it and to defend it in a time when the old order was falling apart and when the community, deprived of its worldly protection, needed a voice that would hold it upright in the religion. The elevation of Islam, the teâlî, was no slogan but a programme, the programme of scholars who saw in the collapse of the empire not merely a political catastrophe but a danger to the religion itself, and who believed that it was their duty to hold that religion high where the state could no longer sustain it.

In the leadership of this association Mustafa Sabri Efendi ﵀ occupied a prominent place alongside Atıf ﵀, a scholar of great standing who belonged to the most influential ulama of the late Ottoman period and who in these years would be called to the highest religious offices of the empire. When Mustafa Sabri Efendi ﵀ was appointed Şeyhülislâm, the highest religious office of the Ottoman state and the seat of the supreme authority in matters of Islamic law, the chairmanship of the Teâlî-i İslâm Cemiyeti fell to Atıf ﵀, so that he rose from second chairman to president of the association and thereby became one of the most visible scholars of occupied İstanbul. It is important here to preserve the honesty to which the historian is obliged, and not to attach more names to the leadership of the association than the most reliable sources justify, for tradition has in later times woven all manner of claims around this association, and it befits the historian better to restrict himself to the little that stands with certainty than to embellish the picture with unproven particulars. What stands firm is that Atıf ﵀ and Mustafa Sabri Efendi ﵀ belonged to the leading figures, and that the first accepted the chairmanship when the second was called to the office of Şeyhülislâm.

The aims of the society

The aims that the Teâlî-i İslâm Cemiyeti set itself arose from the condition of the time, and whoever wishes to judge them fairly must not detach them from the despair and the uncertainty in which the capital found itself, but view them precisely in that light. The first aim was the defence and the strengthening of the religious sciences, for the scholars saw with concern how the framework of the medreses, which for centuries had preserved the chain of knowledge, threatened to give way under the blows of the war and the collapse, and they believed that it was their first duty to protect that chain and to safeguard the transmission of knowledge in a time when everything was tottering. The second aim was to make the voice of the ulama heard, to furnish an organised mouthpiece to the scholarly class which, as long as it was divided and unorganised, could carry no weight in the turbulent time, but which united could exercise an authority that found resonance among the Muslim population. And the third aim, which found its expression in the change of name of November 1919, was the leading and the upholding of the Muslim community itself amid the collapse, the holding high of the religion and the elevation of Islam in an hour when the faithful, deprived of their state and their security, sought something to hold on to.

Atıf ﵀ brought to this association the gifts he had developed in a long life of study and labour, for he was not only a scholar of the medrese but also a man who knew the modern age and who knew how to defend himself with the pen, a widely read writer in the Muslim press of the capital who had proclaimed his views in periodicals such as Sebîlürreşâd and Beyânülhak, and who moreover, as a former inspector of the medreses, knew religious education from within. That combination of deep learning, administrative experience and journalistic skill made him a valuable force in an association that directed itself at once at education, at the community and at the public word, and precisely in a time that called for both worlds, the transmitted knowledge of the medrese and the modern means of the printed word, that twofold competence served him and the association he served well.

The work in an impossible time

One must not imagine the work of such an association as the calm deliberation of a learned company in peaceful circumstances, for the Teâlî-i İslâm Cemiyeti did its work in a city under foreign occupation, in an empire whose survival was uncertain, and in a time when every choice the scholars made could carry heavy and unforeseeable consequences. The question with which they were faced was not a simple one, for it concerned nothing less than the future of Islam and of the Muslim community in a world that had come apart at the seams, and to that question there was no self-evident answer that all upright scholars would have subscribed to without hesitation. Where lay the duty of the believer in this hour, with the preservation of the caliphate and the old order, however weakened, or with a new movement whose nature and intentions were still uncertain, and whom could one trust in this confusion and whom fear? These were questions that divided the best among the scholars, and that in the years that followed would grow into the most charged oppositions of modern Turkish history.

In this atmosphere of despair and uncertainty a movement began to take shape in the interior of Anatolia that would determine the course of history, for while the capital lay paralysed under the occupation, in cities such as Erzurum and Sivas, and soon around the city of Ankara, a national resistance organised itself against the partition of the Anatolian homeland, a movement that under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal and the officers who joined him set itself the goal of resisting the occupation and defending the homeland. It is at the meeting point of that national movement in Anatolia and the world of the İstanbul ulama that the most disputed and the most painful episode in the history of the Teâlî-i İslâm Cemiyeti unfolded, and it is that episode that the historian must now face, with all the caution it requires.

The association and the national struggle

Here the historian touches upon the most difficult and the most charged question of this whole period, and it is a question he cannot evade without betraying his craft and his reader, but which he can equally not answer with the easy certainty that the parties on both sides of the later struggle have so gladly claimed. The Teâlî-i İslâm Cemiyeti has, in the historiography of the modern Turkish state, become linked with positions hostile to the national resistance movement that organised itself in Anatolia under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal, and it is handed down that in the year 1920 a proclamation was said to have been spread from the circles of the association in which the adherents of the national movement were condemned, a proclamation that was reportedly even scattered by Greek aircraft over the Anatolian interior in order to turn the population away from the national cause. These are accusations of the gravest weight, and they have heavily burdened the name of the association in the historiography of the victorious national movement, for in the eyes of that movement they placed the scholars of the association at the side of the occupier and against the homeland in the hour of its highest need.

Honesty commands, however, that these accusations not simply be taken over as established facts, but that the uncertainty that clings to them be named, for the true course of this episode cannot be established with certainty on the basis of the available source material, and it has moreover, since its own time, been the object of a fierce struggle over memory, in which the victors imposed their reading upon history. Who precisely drew up the proclamation in question, to what degree the association as a whole stood behind it, and what share the individual members of its leadership had in it, are questions to which the sources furnish us no conclusive and incontestable answer, and the personal share of Atıf ﵀ in these events is particularly contested, for it is one thing that a man is president of an association, and another thing that he should be personally responsible for every deed carried out in the name or from the circles of that association. The historian who takes his craft seriously can do no other here than let the two possibilities stand side by side, name the accusation openly and at the same time not conceal the uncertainty that surrounds it, and he must resist the temptation to acquit the scholar with a certainty the sources do not allow, or to condemn him with a firmness that those same sources equally do not bear.

The dilemma of the scholars

If one wishes to judge this episode fairly, one must descend from the lofty judgement of hindsight to the real predicament in which the scholars of the capital found themselves in these years, for it is always easy to judge, from the knowledge of the outcome, men who did not know the outcome and who had to choose in the darkness of their own time. For many of the ulama the national movement in Anatolia was not a clear matter whose justice one could recognise without hesitation, but an uncertain and even disquieting development, for they feared, and not without grounds given what would later come to pass, that a movement under military leadership might in the end sweep away the caliphate and the religious order rather than protect them. The leadership of that movement was moreover largely unknown to them, a circle of officers whose deepest intentions they could not fathom and whose relation to the religion and the caliphate they could not gauge, and in a time when trust everywhere had been broken and treacherous cunning had taken the place of open loyalty, distrust of a leadership one could not read was no blind obstinacy but an understandable caution.

Added to this was that many a scholar regarded obedience to the sultan-caliph and to the lawful government in the capital as a religious duty, and that an armed movement which withdrew itself from the authority of that government was in his eyes not simply the bearer of the just cause, but possibly the instigator of the discord, the fitna, that would tear the community apart from within in the hour when it most needed its unity. Let it be well understood that the historian here neither excuses the choices of these scholars nor those of their opponents, but that he wishes to show the real predicament in which upright men found themselves, men who loved the community and who wished to preserve it, and who in the confusion of the occupation made choices that history, with the wisdom of the outcome, would judge harshly. It is the easiest thing in the world to brand, with the outcome before one’s eyes, the men who chose otherwise than the victors as traitors, and it is a much more difficult and a much more just thing to acknowledge that they, in the darkness in which they found themselves, acted according to their best judgement and out of a sincere concern for the religion, even where that judgement led them, in the verdict of history, onto a false path.

Where the sources fall silent

It is at this point that the historian owes his reader most of all honesty, and is least entitled to the false certainty that would make the narrative run more smoothly, for concerning the personal conscience of Atıf ﵀ in these years, concerning what he truly thought and willed and the degree to which he personally shared or rather tempered the hostile positions attributed to the association, the sources leave us largely in the dark. We know that he was a scholar of deep piety and of independent spirit, a man who in 1913 had not let himself be broken by an unjust exile and who had never bent his judgement to power, and it is with that man before one’s eyes that one ought to weigh his conduct in these years, not with the caricature that the later struggle over memory made of him. But we do not know, and we cannot know on the basis of the transmitted sources, whether he had a hand in the proclamation of 1920, whether he approved it or regretted it, and to what degree he identified himself with the sharpest anti-national positions of the association, so that his personal share in this remains contested and cannot be established with certainty from the sources now available.

What the historian can say with some firmness in this darkness is not that Atıf ﵀ was guilty or innocent of the deeds imputed to his association, but that he was a man of conscience who in an impossible time, amid a collapse he had not caused and could not halt, made choices that arose from a sincere concern for the religion and the community, and that for those choices, rightly or wrongly burdened, he would in the end pay with his life. The question whether in the struggle between İstanbul and Ankara he stood on the right or the wrong side is a question to which history has given different answers according to the side from which it was written, and it is not for the historian to settle that question with a false firmness, but to set the real uncertainty before the reader and to guard him against the ease of the simple condemnation as much as against the ease of the simple defence. Whoever wishes to understand the man must let him stand in the twilight in which he truly stood, and not illuminate him with the harsh light of a judgement the sources do not bear.

The man behind the office

When one nevertheless tries, while preserving all this restraint, to grasp the position of Atıf ﵀ in these years in its broad outlines, there emerges the picture of a scholar who was devoted to the old order of the caliphate and the religious framework, and who in the national movement, at least in its early and uncertain form, thought he saw a threat rather than a promise for that order, an attitude that did not make him exceptional among the ulama of his time but that precisely linked him with a broad current of scholars who for the same reasons stood cautious or dismissive towards the movement in Anatolia. This attitude was in its own time no treason in the eyes of those who cherished it, but a defence of what they regarded as the lawful order and the religious duty, and the stamp of treason was pressed upon it only afterwards, when the national movement had triumphed and had gained the power to elevate its own reading of the events into the official truth. And yet it would be a falsification of the other kind to acquit the scholars of the association without qualification, for it is possible, and honesty commands that this possibility be acknowledged, that they, however sincere their concern for the religion, erred in their judgement of the national movement, and that they resisted a movement which, whatever its later course would become, in these years took upon itself the defence of the Anatolian homeland.

The danger of an episode such as this is that the man behind the office disappears behind the labels that the later struggle pasted upon him, and that one no longer sees the scholar but only the party to which one reckons him, whereas Atıf ﵀ was above all a man of religious knowledge, not a politician who strove for power and not a man who sought personal gain in the confusion of the time, but a scholar who saw himself, against his nature and his way of life, cast into the focal point of a political struggle because the time imposed that role upon him, and who acted in that struggle as his conscience and his conception of the religion prompted him. That this conscience may have led him, in the verdict of the triumphant movement, onto a false path, does not detract from its sincerity, and it is precisely that sincerity, coupled with the steadfastness with which he would later die for his conviction, that leaves the simple condemnation so unsatisfying; one may with good reason hold that he erred, and one may at the same time with equal reason honour the man who out of concern for his religion chose as he chose and who did not evade but bore the price of his choices. The historian who wishes to do him justice lets that tension stand, and he resists the inclination to resolve it into a pious icon of sanctity as little as into a vilification, for the man who truly lived was greater and more enigmatic than both.

What the victory of the national movement would bring

While the scholars of İstanbul wrestled in their occupied city with the choices that the occupation imposed upon them, the national movement in Anatolia gained steadily in strength, and the years that followed would prove that the future lay not with the capital and its old order, but with the movement in the interior that would defeat the occupier and preserve the homeland. The military victory of the national movement, crowned by the expulsion of the Greek armies from western Anatolia in 1922, changed the face of the country beyond recognition within a few years, and it brought to power a leadership that did not wish to restore the old order of the caliphate and the medreses, but that had before its eyes an entirely new state, a state after the model of the westernised and secularised Europe of which the reformers had dreamed since the Tanzimat, but now carried through with a radicalism and a resolve that far surpassed all earlier reforms.

On 29 October 1923 the Republic was proclaimed, and with it not only a new form of state was declared but a new principle established, for the Republic that arose from the victory of the national movement would in the years that followed not content itself with the defence of the homeland, but would set itself the goal of reshaping society itself after a new, secular and westernised model, and in that programme there was no longer any place foreseen for the old order of the caliphate and religious education, the order that Atıf ﵀ had served and defended all his life. The reforms that the Republic would carry through in its first years would not pass the scholars of the old order by but run straight through their world, and they would not leave untouched the scholar who had devoted his life to the elevation of Islam but make him a target of a state that saw in the public presence of the old religious scholarship an obstacle to its renewal.

Among the many measures with which the young Republic would establish its new order, one in particular would strike the man from İskilip directly in his fate, and that was the law that prescribed the wearing of the hat after the European model and outlawed the old headgear of the old empire, the Şapka Kanunu or Hat Law, which in its outward insignificance carried a deep symbolic charge, for it made of a piece of headgear the emblem of the passage from the old to the new world. Atıf ﵀ had already before that law, in a work that he had lawfully published and with a permit from the ministry, set out his objections to the imitation of European dress and in particular of the hat, and it would be precisely that work that the new state would turn against him when the Hat Law had been passed and resistance to it broke out in the country. How the scholar, who had survived the fall of the empire and had endured the confusion of the occupation, was made a target of the new state by the secularisation reforms of the Republic and by his own writing about the hat, and how the road opened that would in the end lead him to the gallows in Ankara, 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; for the founding dates of the Cemiyet-i Müderrisîn and the Teâlî-i İslâm Cemiyeti and for Atıf’s ﵀ chairmanship].
• Ethem Erkoç, İskilipli Mehmed Âtıf Hoca, Çorum Belediyesi (Çorum, 2016) [monograph with the İskilip family and biographical data and with the course of his career in the years of the occupation].
• Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, I.B. Tauris (4th edition, 2017), pp. 133–175 [for the Allied occupation of İstanbul, the rise of the national movement in Anatolia, the national struggle and the proclamation of the Republic in 1923].
• Gotthard Jäschke, “Auf dem Wege zur türkischen Republik”, in Die Welt des Islams, volume 5 (1958), pp. 206–228 [for the İstanbul ulama, the Teâlî-i İslâm Cemiyeti and their contested relation to the national movement during the occupation].
• Stanford J. Shaw & Ezel Kural Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, volume II, Cambridge University Press (1977), pp. 340–372 [for the armistice, the occupation and the national resistance].