The Arrest of Atıf Hoca

In the preceding article we followed İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ through the weeks after the adoption of the Hat Law, the Şapka Kanunu, which was ratified in the parliament at Ankara on 25 November 1925 and which no longer merely recommended the wearing of the European hat but prescribed it, so that what until then had been an encouraged fashion acquired overnight the force of a binding regulation, and the refusal of it became a transgression against the will of the state. We saw how that law, which was presented as a simple provision concerning headgear, was in reality a touchstone by which the regime sought to measure the obedience of the population to its westernising course, and how in the days that followed the ratification, in a series of Anatolian towns from Sivas and Kayseri to Erzurum, Rize and Maraş, the discontent swelled into open protest, with crowds gathering on the squares to show their abhorrence of a measure they experienced as an insult to their faith and to the customs of their forefathers. And we saw, finally, how the regime answered that unrest with the İstiklâl Mahkemeleri, the Independence Tribunals, extraordinary courts that had been established in the years of the national struggle to punish treason and desertion and that now, long after the war had been fought, were once more brought out to break the resistance against the hat with the hardest hand. It is at the point where those tribunals turned their gaze from the protesting crowds in the provinces toward the scholar in the capital that this article takes its beginning, for the regime had decided that it was not enough to punish the men on the squares, and that it wished to strike at the source of their resistance at the root.

The climate of the tribunals

To understand under what circumstances İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ was seized in the first days of December 1925, one must first take account of the atmosphere that hung over Anatolia in those weeks, an atmosphere that lay somewhere between that of a state of siege and that of a reckoning, and in which the ordinary course of law had for a great part of the population ceased to exist. The protests against the Hat Law had flared up almost simultaneously in several towns, and the regime, which saw in that pattern not a spontaneous and scattered movement of the spirit but the proof of an organised conspiracy against the foundations of the young Republic, reacted with a swiftness and a ruthlessness that left no room for doubt about the gravity with which it regarded the matter. The Independence Tribunals, which held their sessions not according to the safeguards of ordinary criminal law but according to an extraordinary authority that allowed them to convict and to order the execution of their sentences without any review being possible from a higher instance, moved through the afflicted regions as courts that were at once accuser, judge and executioner, and the men who on the squares of Rize, of Erzurum, of Sivas and of Maraş had shown their resistance were brought before them by the dozen.

What distinguished these tribunals from an ordinary court, and what made them in these months a spectre to the population of Anatolia, was the brief span of time that passed with them between the accusation and the punishment, for where ordinary law weighs the evidence, hears the defence and keeps open the possibility of appeal, the tribunals proceeded with a haste that all but effaced the distinction between a trial and a retribution. In a series of towns men who had done no more than take part in a demonstration or utter a word of disapproval were sentenced to death and hanged, often on the squares of their own town and before the eyes of their townsmen, so that the noose would strike not only the condemned but impress upon the whole community a lesson about the price of disobedience. It is in this climate, in which the gallows had become an instrument of governance and fear had settled like a shadow over the provinces, that the regime turned its attention from the crowds to the scholars, for it sought behind the spontaneous outpourings of the people an instigator, a spiritual father of the resistance, and its choice fell, for reasons we shall unfold below, upon the man who in the Muslim press of İstanbul had for years made an authoritative voice heard.

The hunt for the instigators

It is a fixed characteristic of regimes that wish to break resistance by force, that they cannot or will not believe in the sincerity of a resistance that wells up from the population itself, and that they suspect behind every open discontent the hand of a hidden organiser, for the notion that an ordinary Muslim population might rise against the Hat Law out of its own conviction and without prompting from outside was harder for the men of the regime to accept than the image of a calculated plot directed by scholars and clerics. The search for such an instigator was for the regime not merely a matter of conviction but also of calculation, for it could punish the countless demonstrators of the provinces, but as long as it had not drained the spiritual source of their resistance, it would not be able to root out the conviction that had moved them, and it was precisely that conviction, formed by the teaching of the scholars and nourished by their writings, that the regime in the depth of the matter feared.

In that search for a spiritual instigator the eye of the regime turned to the ulama who in the preceding years had openly spoken out against westernisation, and among them İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ caught the eye, not because he had taken part in any demonstration or addressed any crowd, for of that there was no question, but because in 1924, a good year before the Hat Law was adopted, he had published a book in which he had branded the imitation of European dress, and in particular of the hat, as a form of teşebbüh, as a becoming-alike to the non-Muslims that under the appearance of an innocent change of fashion smuggled in a deeper spiritual estrangement. That this book had appeared with the required permission of the Ministry of Education and entirely within the bounds of the law then in force, and that it was a scholarly treatise and no call to revolt, mattered little in the reasoning of the regime, for it had found the instigator it sought, and it would bend the facts to that find rather than direct its judgment to the facts.

The look back to the book of 1924

The heart of the accusation that was built against İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ lay not in anything he had done or said in the days of the hat protests, but in a writing that he had lawfully published a good year and a half before the Hat Law existed, and precisely in that ordering of the times lies the whole untenability of the charge, for he was accused of having instigated a resistance against a law that at the time of his writing had not yet been promulgated and whose existence, at the moment of the publication of his book, no one could foresee. The work in question, Frenk Mukallidliği ve Şapka, the imitation of the Europeans and the hat, had been printed in 1924, in the years when the Republic had just been proclaimed and the caliphate had just been abolished, and it argued, in the language of a scholar who addresses his fellow believers and not a crowd on a square, that the Muslim who adopts the outward customs of the non-Muslim thereby sets out on a road that does not stop at clothing but ultimately touches the soul itself. It was a treatise on a religious and cultural principle, written and published in full openness and with the blessing of the competent authority, and at the moment of its appearance it had broken no law, for the simple reason that the law it was said to undermine had not yet been written.

The regime, however, turned the order of time, which ought to have disarmed it, precisely to its own advantage, for it reasoned that a book that had already condemned the hat in 1924 had prepared in the minds of the population the resistance that would burst out into open revolt in 1925, and that the author of that book was therefore the distant but real cause of the protests, even though he had attended no demonstration and addressed no word to the demonstrators. In that reasoning a scholarly treatise was retroactively rebaptised as a seditious pamphlet, and a man who had acted within the law was charged because his thoughts, once set into the world, had gone their own way and found an echo in the hearts of others. It is of the greatest importance to keep this point sharply before the eyes, for it distinguishes the accusation against İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ from an ordinary criminal prosecution and places it in the realm of political reckoning: one may prosecute a man for what he has done, but the reproach that his earlier and lawfully written words later led, in the mouths of others, to resistance, is no accusation in the sense of the law but a verdict upon his influence.

The impossibility of the charge

Whoever strips the accusation of the threatening forms in which the regime clothed it and brings it back to its logical core, comes upon a contradiction that it could not hide and that to anyone who wished to follow the reckoning of time honestly was bound to leap to the eye. The Hat Law dated from 25 November 1925; the book of İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ had appeared in 1924, a considerable time before that law existed. A man cannot possibly be accused of inciting resistance against a regulation that at the time of his writing did not exist, and the reproach that his book had unleashed the protests of December 1925 presupposes a foresight and an intent that the facts in no way support, for no writer can in 1924 have called for resistance against a law that would be promulgated only a year later. The regime, which saw this very well, circumvented the contradiction by shifting its accusation from the deed to the disposition, and by claiming not so much that the book had incited the concrete protests as that it had prepared the minds for the resistance they would later offer, a reasoning so broad that it could bring within its reach every scholar who had ever written a word of criticism against westernisation.

To this first pillar of the accusation the regime added a second, which it drew from a more distant past, namely his leadership of the Teâlî-i İslâm Cemiyeti, the society for the elevation of Islam that had arisen in İstanbul in the years of the occupation and of which İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ had in a later phase held the chairmanship. That society, which had since been dissolved and whose existence belonged to the era of the Allied occupation and the national struggle, was recalled by the regime as proof that the scholar had already years before stood at the head of an organisation that had turned against the course of Ankara, and so a long-vanished episode from the turbulent years after Mudros was dug up and joined to the book of 1924 into an accusation meant to give the appearance of a continuous and deliberate resistance. That the society already belonged to the past, that the circumstances under which it had existed, those of an occupied empire in its death throes, no longer resembled in anything those of the established Republic of 1925, and that his role in it is judged differently by the sources, counted for nothing with the regime, which in the joining of the old chairmanship and the recent book sought the image of an incorrigible adversary whose resistance had stretched over the years.

The arrest of the seventh of December

In the first week of December 1925, while the tribunals in the provinces went their way and the reports of executions penetrated as far as the capital, İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ was arrested on the seventh of December, and with that the scholar who had spent his whole life within the law and in the company of his books was brought into the grip of the extraordinary jurisdiction that the regime had unleashed against its adversaries. About the particulars of the moment at which he was taken into custody the sources have left us little that can be established with certainty, and it would not befit the historian to embellish the scene with invented circumstances about the place or the hour at which the men of authority appeared at his door, for what we know with certainty is the date, the seventh of December of the year 1925, and the meaning of that date, which marks the beginning of the last weeks of his freedom and of the road that would ultimately lead him to the gallows.

It is important to distinguish this date sharply from a later one, with which a part of the tradition confuses it, for the arrest of the seventh of December 1925 is not the same as the event that would take place a few weeks later, when, after a first appearance before a tribunal on the Black Sea, he would be sent under guard to Ankara to stand trial before the tribunal of the capital. The seventh of December is the day of his arrest, the moment at which he passed from freedom into captivity, and everything that comes after it, the appearance before the tribunal, the transfer to the capital and the final verdict, belongs to a succession of later steps that one must not allow to coincide with the day of the arrest. Whoever wishes to retell the history of his last months honestly does well to leave each of these steps in its own place, and not, as has happened in a part of the tradition, to shift the day of the arrest to the later day on which he was transferred to Ankara, for they are two distinct moments in the chain that formed his downfall.

The dignity at the arrest

About the manner in which İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ underwent his arrest, the tradition reports with some unanimity that he bore it with the composed steadfastness that had marked his whole life, and that he did not allow himself to be drawn into the display of fear or of indignation to which a less formed man would in such a moment have let himself be carried away. It was not the first time that power stretched out its hand toward him, for he had already in 1913, in the years of the Committee, undergone the unjust banishment that had removed him from the capital without any form of trial and that had taught him, from his own experience, how little an innocent man has to expect from a state that places power above the law. That earlier ordeal had not embittered but hardened him, and it had confirmed in him the inner orientation that he had carried with him already from his İskilip years of study, the awareness that man must seek his hold not in the accidental shelter of his circumstances but in that which no power can take from him, and it was from that orientation that he drew even now the strength to meet the second and heavier ordeal of his life with head held high.

The scholar who in the medrese had learned that the knowledge of religion is a trust which one ought to pass on intact, was not the man to be shaken in his conviction by an arrest, however unjust, and the tradition holds that in the days of his captivity he lost neither his dignity nor his trust in the decree of Allah ﷻ. What passes within a man who is torn from his familiar world and cast into the grip of a hostile power 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 silent hours of his detention with scenes that the sources have not left us. What they do report to us with some firmness is that his bearing was that of a man who had laid his fate in the hands of his Lord ﷻ and who therefore did not allow himself to be paralysed by the threat of the tribunals, and it is in that bearing that, anticipating what is to come, the steadfastness announces itself with which he would later, before the judges of the capital, refuse to plead for his life.

The blow to his kin and his community

The arrest of İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ struck not him alone, for a man does not stand by himself but in a web of relations, and the blow that the regime dealt him propagated itself into the circle of his household and beyond it into the wider community of the İstanbul Muslims who had known in him one of their most authoritative teachers. For his kin his captivity meant not only the separation from a beloved one and the uncertainty about his fate, but also the dread that proceeded from the knowledge that he had been delivered up to the extraordinary courts that in these weeks in the provinces passed one death sentence after another, so that the fear of the worst mingled with the hope of an outcome in which justice would yet prevail. It is not given to the historian to retell in its particulars the silent ordeal of a household in such days, and it befits him to leave it in its dignity without adorning it with invented scenes, but he may indeed establish that the burden laid upon the scholar himself rested in doubled measure on the shoulders of those who loved him and who had to look on helplessly as he was taken up into the gears of an inexorable machinery.

Beyond the circle of his household his arrest struck the community of the İstanbul Muslims, who saw in the scholars of their city not merely teachers but the guardians of their spiritual heritage, and who read in the imprisonment of a man like İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ the proof that the new state no longer spared even the most venerable bearers of the transmitted knowledge. The ulama of the capital found themselves in these years in a precarious and oppressive position, for the caliphate had been abolished, the system of the medreses had been dissolved, and the world in which they had been formed and to which they owed their authority was disappearing under the blows of the Republic, so that the arrest of one of their most eminent filled them at once with sorrow and with fear, with sorrow for the fate of a valued fellow scholar and with fear for what his fate foretold for the future of their estate. The regime, which in its reckoning with İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ set an example, knew very well what message it thereby sent to the whole class of the scholars, for it made of the man a warning, a sign on the wall that no standing, no learning and no irreproachable life within the law any longer offered protection against the will of the state.

The silence that struck the resistance

It is a property of regimes that govern with the hardest hand, that they seek to subdue not only the deed but also the word and ultimately the thought itself, and the arrest of a scholar like İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ served, beside the punishment of a presumed instigator, a wider and deeper purpose, namely the imposing of a silence upon all who might be inclined to follow his example. For when a man of his standing, who had done nothing other than write a scholarly book within the law, could be brought into the grip of the tribunals, then every scholar, every imam and every teacher in the whole country understood that the uttering of an independent judgment about the course of the state could henceforth be paid for with one’s freedom and perhaps with one’s life, and that knowledge laid over the whole class of the religious scholars a paralysing silence that the regime precisely intended. The reckoning with one man was thus at the same time a reckoning with the voice of a whole estate, and the tribunals, which silenced the protesting crowds in the provinces with the noose, silenced with the arrest of the scholar the spiritual source of the resistance, or at least believed themselves to do so.

And yet there lies in this attempt to impose a silence a bitter contradiction, for by making a scholar whose book had appeared within the law into the emblem of the resistance, the regime conferred upon that same scholar an authority that it had precisely wished to take from him, and it raised the man it wished to silence into a sign that would speak louder than any book could have done. The silence that the tribunals laid over Anatolia was not the silence of assent but that of fear, and beneath that fear the conviction for which İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ stood in the eyes of the community continued to exist, to come to the surface again in the years and the generations that followed, when the hardest grip of the regime would have slackened. Thus the regime achieved with its reckoning, in the short term, the opposite of what it would reap in the long term, for the man it wished to efface as an instigator was made by that same reckoning into a figure whose memory would outlive the silence.

The road to the tribunal of Giresun

After İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ had been taken into custody on the seventh of December 1925, he was destined to answer before one of the Independence Tribunals that in these months judged the resistance against the Hat Law, namely before the tribunal that held its sessions in Giresun, the old port town on the Black Sea in the northeast of Anatolia, where it had brought the protests of the surrounding regions under its jurisdiction. The choice to bring the İstanbul scholar before the tribunal of Giresun placed him before a court that lay far from his familiar surroundings, in a region stirred by the hat protests and where the tribunal did its work amid the unrest it was said to curb, and it carried him away from the capital where his name had been made, to the coast where his fate would be laid in the hands of judges who saw before them not a scholar of standing but a suspect.

The tribunal of Giresun, like the other Independence Tribunals of this period, possessed the extraordinary authority to judge without the safeguards of ordinary criminal law and to have its sentences executed without any review being possible from a higher instance, and it had in the weeks before the arrival of İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ already brought many a demonstrator from the Black Sea region before it and passed many a sentence. That a scholar of his standing, who in İstanbul had for years been an authoritative voice in the Muslim press, had to appear before such a court on the ground of a book that he had written within the law a good year before the Hat Law, shows into what an inversion of the times his life had come, for the man who under the old empire had been appointed inspector of the medreses and whose judgment had weighed in the highest circles of learning, now stood as a suspect before an extraordinary tribunal of the Republic, accused of a resistance he had not instigated against a law that at the time of his alleged crime did not yet exist.

What the tribunal of Giresun would decide

When one surveys the chain of events that carried İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ in the first days of December 1925 from freedom into captivity, what strikes one in the first place is the untenability of the accusation on which all this rested, for the regime had retroactively rebaptised a scholarly treatise of 1924, lawfully published and with the permission of the competent authority, into an incitement against a law that at the moment of its appearance did not yet exist, and it had reinforced that charge with the memory of a leadership of a society, since dissolved, from the vanished years of the occupation. It had, in other words, not first found a crime and then sought the perpetrator, but it had first designated the man it wished to make into the emblem of the resistance, and then gathered from his past the building blocks with which it could erect the appearance of an accusation. In that order, which betrays the essence of the political reckoning, lies the injustice of the whole affair, and whoever wishes to judge it honestly must hold fast to the simple and irrefutable fact that the man was prosecuted for words he had written within the law, long before the law he was said to have undermined existed.

And yet the first court that had to judge his fate, the tribunal of Giresun on the Black Sea, would come to a verdict that ought to have given both himself and his accusers cause for reflection, a verdict that acknowledged the untenability of the accusation on the one point on which the law could not possibly bear it, and that thereby, for a brief and deceptive moment, raised the hope that justice would yet take its course. What that tribunal decided, and why its decision, however favourable it seemed, did not bring him freedom but on the contrary set him on the road to the capital and to the tribunal of Ankara that would determine his definitive fate, is the subject of the next article. There we shall follow the scholar from the courtroom in Giresun to the event that would take place a few weeks after his arrest, when, despite the verdict that was favourable to him on the point of the hat protests, he was not released but carried away under guard, to appear at last before a tribunal whose men had already decided that no justification would save him.

Sources

• TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, entry “İskilipli Mehmed Âtıf Efendi”, Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı (İstanbul, 2000), pp. 132–135 [the most authoritative academic biography; for the arrest of December 1925, the book of 1924, the chairmanship of the Teâlî-i İslâm Cemiyeti and the tribunal of Giresun].
• Ethem Erkoç, İskilipli Mehmed Âtıf Hoca, Çorum Belediyesi (Çorum, 2016) [monograph with the biographical data of his last months and the İstanbul community].
• Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, I.B. Tauris (4th ed., 2017), pp. 166–205 [for the Hat Law of 1925, the hat protests and the political context of the young Republic].
• Ergün Aybars, İstiklâl Mahkemeleri, Bilgi Yayınevi (Ankara, 1975) [the standard work on the Independence Tribunals, their powers and their action against the hat protests].
• Hakkı Uyar, “Tek Parti Dönemi ve İstiklâl Mahkemeleri”, in the periodical literature on the early Turkish Republic [for the legal basis of the tribunals and the prosecution of the hat protests].
• Gavin D. Brockett, How Happy to Call Oneself a Turk: Provincial Newspapers and the Negotiation of a Muslim National Identity, University of Texas Press (2011), pp. 41–78 [for the tension between the westernising state and the Muslim population of the provinces].