Chapter 3 Secularist Anxieties Meet Evangelical Ones in Modern Turkish Historiography: İbrahim Müteferrika and the Risale-i İslamiye

In: Transforming Empire: The Ottomans from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean
Author:
Baki Tezcan
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Type:
Chapter
Pages:
45–69
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004704374_004

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Abstract

This chapter introduces the Risale-i İslamiye, a treatise on Islam that is attributed to İbrahim Müteferrika (d. 1747), and demonstrates that two twentieth-century Turkish scholars, Niyazi Berkes (d. 1988) and Esad Coşan (d. 2001), who represent secular and Islamic tendencies in the representation of the Ottoman past, respectively, approached this treatise, the author’s Hungarian past, and his conversion to Islam in surprisingly similar terms that were and continue to be very problematic. I argue that modern Turkish nationalism that pinned the Sunni Muslim Turk to the center of modern collective identity in Turkey had an equally powerful impact on scholars of the Ottoman past whether they are fired from Turkish public universities for being deemed too far on the left like Berkes, or they identify with cultural conservatism as strongly as a professor of theology who was also a Naqshbandi sheikh like Coşan.

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Series:  The Ottoman Empire and its Heritage, Volume: 80
Cover Transforming Empire: The Ottomans from the Mediterranean to the Indian Ocean
E-Book ISBN:
9789004704374
Publisher:
Brill
Print Publication Date:
17 Sep 2024
Front Matter
Part 1 Peoples
Part 2 Places
Part 3 Practices
Back Matter

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