Islamic Revival in Turkey

Datos Bibliográficos

ID3693718
AutoresBernard Lewis, Bernard Lewıs (autor de correspondencia)
Año1952
Volumen28
Número1
Páginas38-48
Fecha de publicación1952-01-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessNo
TipoARTICLE
RevistaInternational Affairs (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0020-5850 • E-ISSN: 1468-2346
EditorialOxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2604969
OpenAlexW2324971570
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas20

A T the beginning of this century a Tartar exile called Yusuf Ak?ura published in Egypt a little pamphlet called US Tarzi Siyaset (Three Kinds of Policy). In this pamphlet, which was later to have great influence in Turkey, he formulated and examined three possible bases of unity in the Ottoman State. The first was Islam, the traditional basis of the Ottoman Empire and its Muslim predecessors, since refurbished in the pan-Islamic policies of Sultan 'Abd-iil-Hamid. The second was Ottomanism, the aspiration of the nineteenth-century liberal reformers for a common Ottoman citizenship and loyalty irrespective of religion or origin. Yusuf Ak?ura discussed both of these at some length and dismissed them as failures. As a third possibility he suggested Turkism, a unity based on the Turkish nation. His own Tartar origin no doubt had something to do with this. The Tartar exiles in Turkey were among the first pioneers of the Turkish national idea. It was in some measure a reaction of the Russian Turks to pan-Slavism, and it was certainly influenced by the Turcological discoveries of the time in Russia and Western Europe, which made the Turkish peoples conscious of their specifically Turkish past as well as of the common Muslim heritage. After the Turkish revolution of I908, all these tendencies came out into the open and found expression in a number of vigorous journals, newspapers, and books. Ottomanism was for a time the dominant creed, but both pan-Islamism and pan-Turkism commanded an important following. A study of the Islamic journals that appeared during the years of Young Turk government reveals a lively movement of ideas. Alongside the simple clericalist reactionaries there were important groups of religious reformers, groping their way towards a compromise between Islam and modernism, between Islam and the new and growing Turkish nationalism. Many of the writings of these reformers show the influence of Muhammad 'Abduh and the Egyptian Mandir movement, others that of Amir 'Ali and the Indian Muslim modernists. The Turkish Republic, while rejecting the wider claims of pan-Turkism, adopted the Turkish nation as the basis of identity of the Turkish State. Their choice was certainly helped by the loss of the non-Turkish provinces and by the defection of the Sultan and the leaders of the religious hierarchy to the enemy, that is, to the Allied occupation forces and the regime which they protected in Constantinople. The result was the establishment of a lay State, in which religion, though not actually suppressed, was made a strictly private affair. If one may stretch words a little, Islam was disestablished 38

Ancient history · Archaeology · Islam · Political science · History · Islamic Studies and History · Turkey's Politics and Society