Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (21 page)

A significant change under his rule was the subtle shift away from the policy of Ottomanism to what was later dubbed Islamism.
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The latter, however, must not be confused with the totalitarian ideology of the twentieth century with the same name. Abdülhamid’s Islamism was a practical policy necessitated by the new political reality faced by the empire. The revolts in the Balkans, which led to the creation of four new states at the Congress of Berlin, had disillusioned the Ottoman elite, who had hoped that liberal reforms would create national unity among all citizens, regardless of their creed. Christian peoples, one by one, were shattering that vision.

Therefore, after the Congress of Berlin, keeping the Muslims loyal to the empire emerged as the second line of Ottoman defense against the threat of collapse. Abdülhamid emphasized the Islamic character of the empire and his religious prominence as the caliph of all Muslims—appealing to, and dealing with the problems of, Muslims around the world. He transformed the ancient image of the corrupt caliph—a legacy of the Umayyads and some Abbasid rulers—and gave the institution a new respectability and authority. European statesmen raised eyebrows over his “pan-Islamic” message, but the sultan had no desire to create any new tension between Muslims and the Western powers. In fact, he would actually help establish peace between the two—even in as distant a locale as Southeastern Asia.

This took place when the Americans occupied the Philippines in 1898 and faced a troublesome insurgency in Sulu, the southern Muslim sultanate. A year later, the American ambassador to Turkey, Oscar S. Straus, received a letter from Secretary of State John Hay wondering whether “the [Ottoman] Sultan under the circumstances might be prevailed upon to instruct the Mohammedans of the Philippines, who had always resisted Spain, to come willingly under our control.” Straus then paid a visit to Sultan Abdülhamid and showed him Article 11 of an eighteenth-century treaty between Tripoli and the United States, which read that the latter “has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility of Musselmen.”

“Pleased with the article,” Abdülhamid asserted that the “Mohammedans in question recognized him as khalif [caliph] of the Moslems and he felt sure they would follow his advice.” Two Sulu chiefs, in Mecca at the time, soon received a letter from Istanbul, “forbidding them to enter into any hostilities against the Americans, inasmuch as no interference with their religion would be allowed under American rule.” This message proved to be effective, and Sulu Muslims refused to join the insurrection. Soon President William McKinley thanked his ambassador for his “excellent work” and credited him with having saved “the United States at least twenty thousand troops in the field.”
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This was only one example of Abdülhamid’s peacemaking. He also “did his best to contain the popular Islamic fundamentalist movements.”
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In fact, by the end of the nineteenth century, some European statesmen regarded him as an ally who calmed anti-European feelings among Muslim masses. (His father, Abdülmecid, also had helped the British by quieting the Muslims of India during the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857.)
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“C
HANGING
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IMES
L
EGITIMIZE THE
C
HANGE OF
L
AW
”

Sultan Abdülhamid, a peacemaker and a reformer, also introduced “innovations” to the Islamic tradition. The biggest task of reform under his rule was undertaken by one of his ministers, Ahmet Cevdet Pas¸a. This erudite scholar, whose chronicles on the Wahhabi revolt were cited at the beginning of this chapter, was one of the Ottoman Empire’s most remarkable statesmen. Confidently ambitious, he reformed the Shariah by writing a modern-style legal code called Mecelle, which many Muslim nations in the Middle East applied well into the mid-twentieth century and Israel used until the 1980s.
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Before the Mecelle, the Shariah had been uncodified—there was no single source of Islamic law to which one could refer just by opening a book. There were, instead, countless numbers of varied legal opinions. A typical Islamic judge (a
kadı
) would use his expertise to find the right legal opinion for the specific case brought before him. This ad hoc tradition was pluralist and, in some sense, democratic, but it was becoming inefficient in the context of the modernizing Ottoman society, in which legal transactions were becoming much more complex. So, a single civil code usable throughout the whole empire was essential.

Faced with this need, some Ottoman statesmen, such as Âli Pas¸a, proposed to incorporate the European legal system en bloc, and they even opted for a complete translation of the French Civil Code—an idea that would be applied later by the secularists of the twentieth century. Others, including Cevdet Pas¸a, favored not an abandonment of the whole tradition but rather a reform of its structure and content. The latter idea prevailed, and Cevdet Pas¸a was appointed in 1868 as the head of a commission for codifying and modernizing the Shariah.

After ten years of meticulous work, the commission came up with a sixteen-volume magnum opus, which was based mainly on the Hanafi school of jurisprudence, but it had modernized some of its aspects and used the tools of the Rationalist school of jurisprudence to select the most convenient alternatives. In his introduction, Cevdet Pas¸a referred to a Rationalist maxim: “Changing times legitimize the change of law.”

To convince more conservative scholars of the legitimacy of his reform, Cevdet Pas¸a referred to the works of Jalal al-Din al-Dawani, a fifteenth-century Hanafi scholar, who argued that the political authority had a legitimate right to introduce new legal rulings that did not exist in the Shariah but that were beneficial to the community. Al-Dawani even justified the formation of non-Shariah courts, which would help Cevdet Pas¸a and other Ottoman reformists design the secular courts that the empire opened in the Tanzimat era to decide cases under new criminal and commercial legal codes.
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Together, these changes amounted to a reform
within
the Islamic tradition, not against it. What Cevdet Pas¸a did was “explain and validate the new individualistic concepts of reform and change in Islamic terms.”
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This was indeed the spirit of the whole Ottoman modernization. For this reason, with the exception of some fringe reactionaries such as the Wahhabis in Arabia, and a few isolated incidents in Istanbul, the Ottoman reforms did not face an Islamic backlash.
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Secularist Turks today often believe that religious authorities resisted the whole modernization effort, but this is a myth created in the Republican era in order to discredit the ancien régime. Historical research proves that the religious class collaborated on the modernization program. In fact, some religious scholars were themselves reformers, while “the protest against secularizing reforms was mainly expressed by the lower echelons of the religious class.”
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Besides, most resistance to modernization arose from mundane self-interest. The reason for the long-delayed import of printing presses, for example, was not religious bigotry, as has been claimed, but the opposition of the scribes, then a powerful class, who feared losing their jobs.
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EW
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DEAS,
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HEOLOGIES

Ottoman modernization entered into a new era in 1908, when the Young Turks, an opposition movement to Abdülhamid established by officers and intellectuals, forced the sultan to restore the constitution and reconvene the parliament. The Young Turks consisted of a coalition with a range of political tendencies: although some aspired to authoritarian rule, others were genuine liberals. No wonder that the Second Constitutional Period, which they initiated, was celebrated throughout the empire as the advent of Hürriyet (Liberty).

The following decade would indeed be the most liberal one Turkey has seen to date in terms of freedom of thought. Among the numerous intellectual societies that formed in Istanbul were two feminist clubs. One of their articulate spokeswomen, Fatma Nesibe, quoted John Stuart Mill in her public lectures. Another prominent feminist, Fatma Aliye, the daughter of Ahmet Cevdet Pas¸a, opposed polygamy and engaged in a lively polemic with a conservative writer, Mahmut Esat Efendi. Yet none of these Ottoman feminists were far from the Muslim faith. Rather, they supported the feminist agenda by pointing to examples from the Qur’an and the days of “undistorted Islam”—the age before misogyny was introduced into religious texts by some medieval scholars.
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In fact, progress had already been made on women’s rights since the Tanzimat edict. Modern schools for women had been established in the mid-nineteenth century, and a more modern female lifestyle had developed, leading an Egyptian feminist of the early twentieth century to call for “adopting the veil and outdoor dress of the Turkish women of Istanbul.”
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The Ottoman family law of 1917 would take women’s liberty a step further, with the introduction of women’s right to divorce and the effective abolition of polygamy.
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Another remarkable phenomenon of the final decade of the Ottoman Empire was the influx of secular European thought, including atheist and antireligious philosophies, into Ottoman society. Popular books by Ernst Haeckel, an advocate of Social Darwinism, and Ludwig Büchner, a proponent of scientific materialism, were translated into Turkish by the more secular Young Turks, who had begun to see religion as an “obstacle to progress” that needs to be replaced by science.

The response of the more religious intellectuals was not to silence these ideas by force but to refute them by reason—just as the Mutazilites had done a millennium earlier in the face of the challenge from Greek philosophy. s¸ehbenderzade Ahmet Hilmi wrote a book titled
Is It Possible to Deny God?
, and Ismail Fenni Ertug˘rul penned
The Refutation of the Materialist School
. Another name among these Islamic modernists, I˙smail Hakkı I˙zmirli, who studied in both classical and modern schools of the empire, promoted a “new theology” that would incorporate new philosophies.
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“The ancient books of [Islamic] theology often mentioned Thales, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle or Xenon,” he noted, and argued:

Similarly, today ideas of thinkers such as Bacon, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Malebranche, Hume, Kant, Hegel, Auguste Comte, Hamilton, Stuart Mill, Spencer and Bergson need to be considered. . . . The Greek philosophers were easily accepted in the ancient theology books; today they should be replaced by French, British or German ones.
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I˙zmirli emphasized the value of freedom in Islam, even defining the latter as a “religion of equality and liberty.”
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This attitude was common among the Islamic modernists of the late Ottoman period. Recognizing the value of freedom thanks to their exposure to Western liberalism, they then reread the scripture from this new perspective. So, the Qur’anic verse, “Everyone acts according to his own disposition,” was now interpreted as a justification for individual liberty.
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The verse, “That man can have nothing but what he strives for,” was seen as encouragement for private enterprise and the market economy.
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The Qur’anic advice for “consultation” was taken as a basis for parliamentary democracy, and the commandment to “forbid the wrong” was reinterpreted as a limit on the powers of the sultan.
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One Muslim thinker who supported these interpretations, Doktor Hazık, was quite thrilled by the liberalism he discovered in Islam. “When you look at our religion with the eyes of wisdom, you will see how wide its fields of liberty are,” he wrote in his 1916 book,
Din ve Hürriyet
(
Religion and Liberty
). “In the face of all this,” he added, “one loses his mind with excitement!”
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Ahmed Naim Bey, another modernist Islamist, was critical of the French Revolution, but he was also convinced that the principles it praised—Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity—were “already self-evidently true for people raised with Islamic ideas.”
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These Muslim liberals were sometimes reading into the scripture what they wanted to hear. But medieval Muslims, too, had read into the scripture the norms of their own time and milieu. This shift in religious perceptions spurred by social change was noticed by the Ottoman intelligentsia as well. One of them, Ziya Gökalp, seeking to combine Western sociology with Islamic jurisprudence, developed a discipline that he called “the science of the social roots of law” (
içtimai usul-ü fıkıh
). The Shariah, according to Gökalp, required extensive modernization for which sociologists and Islamic scholars needed to work together.