To better understand the diverse inheritance of Islamic movements in present-day Turkey, we must take a closer look at the religious establishment, the ulema, during the first half of the twentieth century. During the closing years of the Ottoman Empire and the early decades of the Republic of Turkey, the spread of secularist and anti-religious ideas had a major impact on the views and political leanings of the ulema. This book explores the intellectual debates and political movements of the religious establishment during this time. Bein reveals how competing visions of development influenced debates about reforms in religious education and the modernization of the medreses. He also explores the reactions and changing attitudes of Islamic intellectuals to the religious policies of the secular republic, and provides a better understanding of the changes in the relationship between religion and state. Exposing division within the religious establishment, this book illuminates the ulema's long-lasting legacies still in evidence in Turkey today.

The Qur’an between the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic is one of the few book-length studies on an Ottoman Qur’an commentary. Its premise is that "the Ottoman Empire" did not come to an end until 1950 so far as Islam was concerned in Turkey. The work explores the relationship between Elmalılı’s Qur’an commentary and the intellectual trends of the period, including the impact of materialism, the sciences, notions of civilizational progress, and philosophy. In doing so, this study emphasizes the "local" aspect of the Qur’an commentary, through a sustained focus on the Istanbul context in which it was written. This work demonstrates that Elmalılı’s Qur’an commentary is a product of and reaction to the religious, intellectual, political, and social trends of the period. This work, in considering all the factors that led to the commissioning of Elmalılı’s Qur’an commentary, also contributes to our understanding of the history of Islam in early to mid-twentieth-century Turkey. This intellectual history of modern Islamic thought contributes to our understanding of the genre of Qur’an commentary in the early twentieth century. It is a key text for students and scholars interested in Islam in the Ottoman Empire and Turkey, modern Islamic thought, and the Middle East.

The influence of the ulema, the official Sunni Muslim religious scholars of the Ottoman Empire, is commonly understood to have waned in the empire's last century. Drawing upon Ottoman state archives and the institutional archives of the ulema, this study challenges this narrative, showing that the ulema underwent a process of professionalisation as part of the wider Tanzimat reforms and thereby continued to play an important role in Ottoman society. First outlining transformations in the office of the Sheikh ul-islam, the leading Ottoman Sunni Muslim cleric, the book goes on to use the archives to present a detailed portrait of the lives of individual ulema, charting their education and professional and social lives. It also includes a glossary of Turkish-Arabic vocabulary for increased clarity. Contrary to beliefs about their decline, the book shows they played a central role in the empire's efforts to centralise the state by acting as intermediaries between the government and social groups, particularly on the empire's peripheries.

Offers an innovative reappraisal of the impact of Late Ottoman Turkish scholars on modern Islamic thought.

Presents an account of the rise of Erdogan's AKP, showing how the politicisation of religion has roots in the period of early nation-building in Turkey.

Order and Compromise questions the historicity of government practices in Turkey from the late Ottoman Empire up to the present day. It explores how institutions at work are being framed by constant interactions with non-institutional characters from various social realms. This volume thus approaches the state-society continuum as a complex and shifting system of positions. Inasmuch as they order and ordain, state authorities leave room for compromise, something which has hitherto been little studied in concrete terms. By combining in-depth case studies with an interdisciplinary conceptual framework, this collection helps apprehend the morphology and dynamics of public action and state-society relations in Turkey. Contributors are: Marc Aymes, Olivier Bouquet, Nicolas Camelio, Nathalie Clayer, Anouck Gabriela Corte-Real Pinto, Berna Ekal, Benoît Fliche, Muriel Girard, Benjamin Gourisse, Sümbül Kaya, Noémi Lévy Aksu, Élise Massicard, Jean-François Pérouse, Clémence Scalbert Yücel, Emmanuel Szurek and Claire Visier.

Explores how contemporary clerics engage with the historically first and currently most populated Islamic nation-state: Pakistan. The book weds ethnography with textual analysis to provide insights into some of the country's most significant issues and offers a theoretical framework for assessing state-'ulama relations across the Muslim world.

This book explores how traditional Sunni Muslim conceptions have informed or shaped Islamization strategies in contemporary Turkey. In particular, the author proposes to examine the teaching curriculum of the Ministry of Education, which oversees Turkish public religious education; the activities and teachings of Diyanet, the constitutional organ responsible for managing all religious affairs; and the ideas and activities of three Muslim religious groups currently operating in Turkey. The monograph explains how the interpretation and practice of Islam affects various situations in the Muslim world and analyzes the concept of nature in Islam, which has been an indivisible component of Islamic tradition since the beginning.

The second constitutional period of the Ottoman Empire and the early decades of the Turkish republic were a hotbed of new and competing ideas which were to dramatically shape the development of the modern nation that followed. This book includes translations of and introductions to some of the key Turkish writers of the age, including Namik Kemal, Ziya Gökalp, Abdullah Cevdet and Ahmed Riza. The writings of these Turkist, Westernist and Islamist Ottoman and early republican thinkers are presented with contextualizing introductions which allow readers to access the primary texts which show the Turkish intellectual milieu out of which Mustafa Kemal's ideas were to emerge and ultimately dominate and will be of interest to students and scholars of Ottoman and Turkish History.