The Death Sentence and the Execution

In the previous article we followed İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀ on his forced journey to Ankara and into the hall of the İstiklâl Mahkemesi, the Independence Tribunal that, under the chairmanship of Ali Çetinkaya, with Kılıç Ali and Reşit Galip as members and with Necip Ali Küçüka as public prosecutor, would decide his fate in January 1926; we saw how the session of the twenty-sixth of January had none of the substance of a genuine trial but rather that of a decision already taken which was merely still seeking its form, how the prosecutor demanded a prison sentence of three years, and how the scholar, who had already been acquitted in Giresun of the actual charge without being released, refused to defend himself any longer before a court that had passed its judgement before he was led into the room. This final article is devoted to what came afterward: to the sentence pronounced in the first days of February, to the manner in which he received it, to the morning of the fourth of February 1926 on which it was carried out, and to the long remembrance in which his name, first suppressed and later restored to honour, would live on in the Turkish Muslim world.

The Sentence of Early February

The tribunal’s deliberation took, as was to be expected of an outcome whose essence was already fixed, no long stretch of days. Barely more than a handful of days passed between the session of the twenty-sixth of January and the verdict, and on or around the third of February 1926, the day before it was carried out, the İstiklâl Mahkemesi of Ankara announced its judgement: death by hanging, to be executed without delay. For the men who pronounced it the matter was thereby closed, yet for anyone who wishes to grasp the legal reality honestly the greatest care is called for precisely here, because tradition has simplified the sentence into the image of a scholar hanged because he refused to wear a hat, and that image, however understandably it arose, does not do justice to the true course of events.

The formal basis of the conviction lay not in any provision concerning headgear, for Turkish criminal law recognised no such provision in its own separate form, but in article fifty-five of the penal code, the provision that made punishable any action against the constitutional order of the state and any attempt to overthrow it. On that basis, and not on the letter of the Şapka Kanunu that had been adopted in November of the previous year, Atıf ﵀ was condemned to death, and the book that he had published in 1924 with a permit from the Ministry of Education and entirely within the legal framework of the time, the treatise Frenk Mukallidliği ve Şapka on the imitation of the Europeans and the hat, served in this not as the actual crime but as the political pretext on which the accusation was hung.

Why the Distinction Matters

One might suppose that this is a subtlety which diminishes the injustice rather than clarifies it, but the opposite is true, for the real nature of what was done to the scholar lies precisely in this distinction. Had he been convicted of a violation of the hat law, one could still speak of a state that, however harshly, was applying its own written law; but the hat law had only been adopted when his book had already been in circulation for about a year and a half, and by no principle of law can a person be punished for a writing that was entirely permissible at the time of its appearance. To circumvent that obstacle the tribunal reached for the far broader and far more vaguely worded provision of article fifty-five, and it declared the book to be an instrument by which the author was said to have tried to incite the people against the new order, so that the punishment took as its measure not the violation of a law but the alleged threat to a regime.

With this the conviction was at its core a political verdict, handed down by a tribunal that in these months acted throughout Anatolia as the sharpest instrument of the young single-party state and that, in the aftermath of the protests against the hat law in Sivas, Kayseri, Erzurum, Rize, Maraş and Giresun, had already brought many men to the gallows. The form of the law was maintained and the appearance of a trial was kept up, but the outcome had been determined in advance by the will of a state that saw in the voice of the old scholarship a danger it did not wish to tolerate beside itself, and that sought in Atıf ﵀ an example by which it could silence the rest of the ulema. It is this truth, the truth of a legal order that used its own forms to clothe a predetermined outcome, that one must honestly face if one is to understand what truly happened on that fourth of February, and it is a truth that does not diminish the injustice but makes it visible in its full weight.

The Bearing of the Condemned Man

Much has been told in tradition about the way in which Atıf ﵀ received the sentence, and the historian must here carefully distinguish between what the sources allow with some certainty and what later piety has added to the picture. What is handed down with great unanimity, and what is also credible in the light of his whole life, is that he heard the death sentence with a remarkable calm, without the outbursts of despair or the pleas for mercy that one would expect of a man in his circumstances, and that he refused to plead for his life before the men who judged him. He had already, in the session of the twenty-sixth of January, refrained from any further defence, and he held to that bearing even after the verdict, for he understood that an appeal to the mercy of a court that had already passed its judgement would be not only fruitless but also beneath his dignity.

It is tempting to want to fill in that bearing with an eloquent final speech, with an address delivered down to the last detail in which the scholar hurled the truth into the faces of his judges, and later tradition has more than once put such words in his mouth; but honesty demands the acknowledgement that no reliable source has left us a verbatim account of any such speech, and that it harms rather than honours the man’s dignity when one dresses up his real steadfastness with invented eloquence. What the sources allow us to say is not what he precisely spoke, but what he left undone, and it is precisely in that omission that the testimony lies: he did not beg, he did not recant, he did not humble himself, and he went to meet his death with the composure of a man who had already settled his account with Allah ﷻ and who had placed the outcome of his earthly affair in His hand.

What Tradition Holds Fast

In the community that preserved his memory, one image has been passed down through the generations with particular tenderness, namely that in the hours before his death and on the walk to the gallows he recited the Qur’an, and that the words of the revelation were the last sounds to pass his lips. Whether that account in all its detail goes back to an eyewitness or whether it was added to the image of his end by the piety of later generations cannot be established with certainty from the sources that remain to us, and it befits the historian to speak here in the cautious terms the matter deserves: tradition holds that he went to meet death with the Qur’an on his tongue, and that tradition, even where it eludes strict verification, expresses a truth that is in keeping with his whole life.

For the man who was led to the gallows that morning had not returned to the Qur’an for the first time on that occasion, but had made it, from his childhood in İskilip onward, through his years at the Caca Bey madrasa and his long study at the Fatih complex, into his years as müderris and as a writer in the Muslim press, into the very fabric of his existence, so that it would be nothing but natural that in his final hour precisely those words were closest to him. And if there is one verse that the Muslim takes upon his lips in the face of death, a verse that the tongue finds even before the mind seeks it, then it is the one that the believer has spoken since the days of the Prophet ﷺ whenever loss and trial befell him, and tradition holds that these were the words with which Atıf ﵀ surrendered himself to his Lord.

In that verse the whole understanding of his bearing is contained, for it speaks neither of resistance to death nor of submission to the power that imposed it, but of a person who understands himself from the outset as an entrusted deposit that belongs to his Lord and that at the appointed hour returns to Him. Whoever thinks thus about his own life can be truly possessed by no tribunal, for the worst that such a court is able to do, the taking of earthly life, is in his eyes not the annihilation of his existence but its passage into the Hand that had always already held it, and precisely for that reason Atıf ﵀ could go to meet the gallows without the panic of one who believes that with his death everything is over.

The Morning of the Fourth of February

In the early morning of the fourth of February 1926 the sentence was carried out in the heart of Ankara, in the quarter around the old parliament building where the young Republic issued its laws and where the tribunal that had condemned him held its seat. It was winter, and in the capital of a country that was recreating itself in great haste after the European model, in a city that only a few years earlier had been a modest Anatolian provincial town and now had to become the nerve of the new state, a gallows was raised in public on which a scholar of advanced age, broken in body by the months of imprisonment but unbowed in spirit, would lose his life.

The sources diverge on the exact place of the execution, and it does not befit us to hide that uncertainty behind an appearance of precision that the documents do not permit. The most authoritative biography, the entry in the TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, places the gallows at the Karaoğlan Çarşısı, the old market quarter in the centre of Ankara; other Turkish sources, by contrast, name the Samanpazarı Meydanı, a neighbouring square in the same old city core. Which of the two designations is the correct one cannot be determined with full certainty from the data that remain to us, and it is more honest to let both traditions stand side by side than to choose one of them with a firmness the sources do not sustain; what is certain is that it happened in public, in the old core of Ankara, a few paces from the institutions of the power that had judged him.

He Was Not the Only One

It would be a distortion of history to present the event of that morning as the solitary fate of one man, for Atıf ﵀ did not stand alone before the tribunals in these months, nor did he stand alone at the gallows. In the same wave of persecution that came down upon the Anatolian ulema and upon the protesting population in the aftermath of the hat law, Ali Rızâ Efendi ﵀, the mufti of Babaeski, was also condemned to death and hanged in the same period, and his name deserves to be mentioned alongside that of Atıf ﵀ if one is not to lose sight of the true extent of what took place. The İstiklâl Mahkemeleri had in these weeks pronounced countless death sentences in the affected provinces, and the two scholars who died on the gallows in Ankara were the most visible victims of a persecution whose reach went far beyond the person of either of them.

That awareness takes nothing away from the singularity of the end of Atıf ﵀, but it places it in its true context, namely in that of a state which in a short and harsh period decided that the old religious scholarship and the open resistance to its measures had to be silenced with the noose. The scholar of İskilip became its most remembered face, partly because his book had already made him a known man before the hat law, partly because his steadfastness in the trial and his refusal to ask for mercy made him in the eyes of the community a witness above all others; but he did not die as an exception, he died as the most visible among many, and the mufti of Babaeski ﵀ died at his side in the same days and for the same reasons.

The Execution

Of the actual execution the sources leave us little that withstands the test of certainty, and it is here, at the very edge of this man’s life, that the historian must be most on guard against the tendency to fill the emptiness of the document with the imagination. What we know is the essential and the incontrovertible: that in the early morning of the fourth of February 1926 he was led to the gallows, that he had asked for no mercy and had spoken no recantation, and that he died as he had lived, in submission to Allah ﷻ and not to the power that ruled over him. The rest, the particulars of the hour and of the gestures, belongs to the domain over which the documents are silent, and it better befits the reverence we owe him to honour that silence than to drown it out with invented scenes.

The wintry morning, the raised gallows in the old city, the aged scholar climbing the steps with the words of the revelation on his lips: this is the image that tradition has preserved, and it is, even where it eludes strict verification, in keeping with everything the reliable sources tell us of his bearing. He was fifty years old by the reckoning of his birth year of 1875, and he ended his life not as the criminal the sentence made of him, but as a man who chose the noose rather than the denial of what he had learned since his childhood in İskilip to revere as the knowledge entrusted to him. With his death the voice that had spoken in the Muslim press of Sebîlürreşâd and Beyânülhak, in the madrasas of Fatih and in the treatise on the hat, was silenced, but the silence that the state imposed on it would not be as complete and not as lasting as the men of the tribunal had supposed.

The Years of the Imposed Silence

In the first years after his death there fell upon the name of Atıf ﵀ the silence that the single-party state let descend upon all who had stood in its way. In the official historiography of the young Republic no honourable place was set aside for the man who had died on the gallows of Ankara, and where his name was mentioned at all, it was in the capacity of the condemned man, the reactionary who had opposed progress and had undergone the punishment of the revolution. It was not advisable, and for a long time even dangerous, to speak of him in public as an unjustly executed scholar, and his book vanished from circulation, his grave remained without the honour that one is wont to show a beloved dead, and his memory was driven out of the visible space of national life.

But what had been driven out of the official space lived on in the quiet space of the community, for the people of İskilip and the wider circle of pious Muslims in Anatolia did not forget who he had been and why he had died. In the homes and in the hearts, in the oral tradition that was passed from father to son and from teacher to pupil beyond the reach of the state and its history books, the memory of the scholar of İskilip was preserved, and it became, by the nature of such a suppressed remembrance, more intimate rather than weaker, for a community attaches itself with particular faithfulness to the memory of one whom it regards as unjustly struck down. The imposed silence stilled the public voice, but it could not erase the community’s memory, and it was precisely in that undercurrent that the name of Atıf ﵀ was preserved until the times would change.

The Turning of the Tide

With the gradual change of the political climate in Turkey in the second half of the twentieth century, when the iron corset of the early single-party state loosened and room came for a reappraisal of those who had been persecuted in the harsh years, the name of Atıf ﵀ too began to rise out of the imposed silence. What had never been forgotten in the community could now once more be spoken in public, and in writings, in commemorations and in the growing historical research the scholar of İskilip was gradually carried over from the capacity of the condemned man to that of the unjustly executed. The restoration of his honour was accomplished not by a single decision on a single day, but in the slow shift of the collective judgement in which a community revises its own past, and it bore the mark of a gradually growing reverence rather than that of a sudden rehabilitation by the state.

In that process his work too became accessible once more, his life was examined in ever more careful studies, and he was recognised in the wider Turkish Muslim community as one of the scholars who, in the most difficult years of the transition from the empire to the Republic, had paid the price of their conviction to the utmost. The man whom the single-party state had wished to silence became, in the generations after it, a figure whose name was spoken with reverence, and history accomplished for him the peculiar justice it more often accomplishes for the persecuted, that the memory of the victim outlives the victory of his persecutors.

The Remembrance of Today

In the years around 2008 to 2010 the mortal remains of Atıf ﵀ were transferred to İskilip, to the town in which he had been born in 1875 and in which the first foundations of his scholarship had been laid, so that the scholar at last, after long years, rested in the soil of his native region. In the years thereafter his memory took a visible form in his native town: a commemorative park bearing his name arose, and in 2020 a scholarly symposium on his life and work was held at Hitit University in Çorum, in which researchers subjected the sources of his life and the place of his thought in the history of the late Ottoman and early Republican ulema to serious study. In 2017, moreover, a biographical film about his life was made, by which his story also reached a wider contemporary audience that perhaps heard the name for the first time.

In this remembrance of today Atıf ﵀ has become a figure of particular honour in the Turkish Muslim world, and in later Turkish Muslim tradition he is remembered as the first martyr of the Republic, the scholar whose death on the gallows of Ankara marked the beginning of the price that the old scholarship would pay for the new order. Here, however, precisely in the place where the reverence is strongest, an honest word is fitting, for that designation is a pious title of honour which later tradition has conferred on him and not a historical rank established by the sources. Whether he was in the strict sense the very first to die under the Republic for his religious conviction cannot be determined with certainty given the countless death sentences of the İstiklâl Mahkemeleri in these months, and the value of the title of honour therefore lies not in its factual accuracy but in what it expresses about the man’s place in the memory of his community.

What the Title of Honour Means to Say

When the community calls him the first martyr of the Republic, it speaks not as the historian who lays the dates side by side, but as the believer who sees in this one scholar the fate of a whole tradition of learning summed up. He became the face of the persecution, not because he was demonstrably the first in time, but because his steadfastness, his refusal to ask for mercy, his book that had already named the collision between the old and the new world before the hat law, and his death on the gallows of the capital made him the most telling example of what was carried out on the ulema in these years. The title of honour is in that sense true as a poem is true, not in the literal sum of the facts but in the meaning it lends to the event, and it is no disparagement of that meaning when the historian notes alongside it that it expresses a devotional and not an archival truth.

It befits the reverence for the man rather than doing it a disservice that one remembers him in truth and not in exaggeration, for his real greatness has no need of the embellishment of legend. A scholar who gave his life because he refused to deny the voice of transmitted knowledge, and who chose the gallows over the humiliation of begging for mercy, is honourable enough in his own reality, and the honest historiography that places his fate in the right contexts honours him more deeply than the pious exaggeration that would force him into a factual rank the sources cannot bear.

What Was Not Erased at the Gallows of Ankara

At the beginning of this series of fourteen articles we already stood at the gallows in the heart of Ankara, on the early morning of the fourth of February 1926, and saw a scholar in his white robe led to the noose in the shadow of the building where the young Republic issued its laws; we then turned our gaze away from that gallows and returned to the Anatolian town of İskilip of half a century earlier, to the fatherless child who came into the world in 1875 in an ordinary Muslim household and of whom no one could have suspected that he would ever become the symbol of the collision between two worlds. Now, at the end of the series, we have returned to that gallows, and we understand it differently than we understood it at the beginning, for we have seen the road that leads back from it: the years of study at the Caca Bey madrasa under Hoca Abdullah Efendi ﵀, the long study at the Fatih complex, the years as müderris and as madrasa inspector, the voice in the Muslim press of Sebîlürreşâd and Beyânülhak, the treatise on the hat, and at last the tribunals and the imprisonment that found their denouement on this wintry morning.

The state that hanged him supposed that with the noose it silenced a voice for good, and in the first years it seemed that it had been proved right, for his name vanished from the history books and his book from circulation, and the official memory declared him the reactionary who had undergone the punishment of the revolution. But what was taken at the gallows was earthly life and not the memory, and the voice that the tribunals had wished to smother spoke on in the quiet tradition of the community, until the times turned and it was permitted to sound in public once more. The mortal remains returned to İskilip, the park arose, the symposium was held, the film was made, and the name that had been meant to be erased was spoken with the reverence one shows to the witnesses of the faith, so that history accomplished for this man the justice it accomplishes for those unjustly struck down, namely that his memory outlived the power of his judges.

In that survival the meaning of the whole story is contained, for the man who was born in 1875 as a fatherless child in a remote provincial town and who ended in 1926 on the gallows of the capital had learned in his youth in İskilip that the knowledge of religion is no possession over which one freely disposes, but an entrusted deposit that one ought to pass on unblemished, and he remained faithful to that lesson to the very last price it asked of him. He did not beg and he did not recant, for he understood his own life, according to the verse that tradition places on his lips, as something that belongs to Allah ﷻ and returns to Him at the appointed hour, and whoever thinks thus about his existence can be truly defeated by no gallows. Thus ends the story of İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca ﵀, not in the noose that ended his earthly life and not in the imposed silence that his persecutors laid upon him, but in the memory of a community that continued to recognise him as a witness and in the justice of a history that has wrested his name from oblivion. May Allah ﷻ be merciful to him, and may the steadfastness with which he died for his conviction be a beacon to the believers who come after him on the road that he walked.

Sources

• TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, entry “İskilipli Mehmed Âtıf Efendi”, Türkiye Diyanet Vakfı (İstanbul, 2000), pp. 132–135 [the most authoritative academic biography; the place of the execution, the date of the execution and the legal basis].
• Ethem Erkoç, İskilipli Mehmed Âtıf Hoca, Çorum Belediyesi (Çorum, 2016) [monograph with the İskilip data and the contemporary remembrance, the commemorative park and the reburial].
• Ergün Aybars, İstiklal Mahkemeleri, Ayyıldız Yayınları (Ankara, 1975; revised edition Bilgi Yayınevi, İstanbul, 1998) [for the working method of the Independence Tribunals and the persecutions in the aftermath of the Şapka Kanunu].
• Erik Jan Zürcher, Turkey: A Modern History, I.B. Tauris (4th edition, 2017), pp. 166–205 [for the İstiklâl Mahkemeleri, the hat law and the consolidation of the single-party state].
• Andrew Mango, Atatürk: The Biography of the Founder of Modern Turkey, John Murray (1999), pp. 434–438 [for the hat law, the protests and the role of the tribunals].
• Gotthard Jäschke, Der Islam in der neuen Türkei: Eine rechtsgeschichtliche Untersuchung, in Die Welt des Islams N.S. 1:1–2 (1951), pp. 1–174 [for the legal context of the secularising legislation and article fifty-five of the penal code].