Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (46 page)

64.
Taha Akyol,
Medine’den Lozan’a: ‘Çok-Hukuklu Sistem’in Tarihteki Deneyleri
[From Medina to Lausanne: The Historical Experiments with Multiple Legal Systems] (Istanbul: Milliyet Publications), p. 42.

65.
Karpat,
Ottoman Past and Today’s Turkey
, p. 3.

66.
Two events were particularly significant. The first was the Kuleli Incident of 1859, a failed conspiracy by forty-odd participants—many of them army officers and Muslim theology professors and students—to kill the sultan for allowing equality between Muslims and Christians. The second (and more important) one was the Privates’ Rebellion of April 1909, which was a reaction to the Second Constitutional Period but even more so to the growing domination of the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), the main Young Turk organization.

67.
Rossella Bottoni, “The Origins of Secularism in Turkey.” Paper presented at the 28th Conference of the International Society for the Sociology of Religion, Zagreb, July 18–22, 2005. Also see Ahmet Cihan,
Reform Çagında Osmanlı Ilmiye Sınıfı
[The Ottoman Religious Scholarly Class in the Reform Age] (Istanbul: Birey Publishing, 2004), pp. 275–88.

68.
It was Mustafa Kemal (later Atatürk) who claimed in 1924 that the Ottoman Empire’s 250-year-long delay in importing printing presses was due to “religious bigotry.” But even Niyazi Berkes, a Turkish historian with secularist sympathies, notes: “Calligraphers constituted the main opposition group” to the printing press, and “leading
ulema
of the time, including the Seyhul-Islam Abdullah, wrote favourable comments—when Ibrahim Müteferrika, the first mass publisher in the Ottoman Empire, asked in 1727 for an imperial edict that “the act of printing be declared by the Seyhul-Islam as commendable and useful for the Muslims and in accord with the glorious seriat.” Niyazi Berkes,
The Development of Secularism in Turkey
(New York: Routledge, 1998), p. 40.

69.
Aynur Demirdek, “In Pursuit of the Ottoman Women’s Movement,” in
Deconstructing Images of “The Turkish Woman
,” ed.
Zehra F. Arat (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), p. 79.

70.
Bahithat al-Badiya, “A Lecture in the Club of the Umma Party,” in
Modernist Islam, 1840–1940: A Sourcebook
, ed. Charles Kurzman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 76.

71.
In 1917, the Ottoman Empire adopted a new family law that forbade the marriage of minors and gave women the right to divorce their husbands. It also allowed women, at the time of betrothal, to write into the marriage contract that if the husband took another wife, her marriage would be immediately null and void. This effectively ended polygamy, for most women increasingly chose this option.

72.
Hilmi Ziya Ülken,
Türkiye’de Çagdas Düsünce Tarihi
[History of Modern Thought in Turkey], vol. 2 (Istanbul: Ülken Yayınları, 1966), pp. 443–93.

73.
Mehmet Sener
,Izmirli Ismail Hakkı
(Ankara: Diyanet Vakfı Yayınları, 1996), pp. 22–24.

74.
Ibid., pp. 98–100.

75.
Qur’an 17:84. The quote is from Ismail Kara, Islamcıların Siyasi Görüsleri [The Political Ideas of the Islamists] (Istanbul: Iz Publishing, 1994), p. 24.

76.
Qur’an 53:39. The quote is from Kara, Islamcıların Siyasi Görüsleri, p. 24.

77.
Ibid., p. 25.

78.
Doktor Hazık,
Din ve Hürriyet
(Istanbul, 1916), p. 9; quoted in Kara, Islamcıların Siyasi Görüsleri, p. 44.

79.
Ahmed Naim, Islamiyet’in Esasları, Mazisi ve Hali [The Principles, the Past and the Current State of Islam] (Istanbul, 1911), p. 373; quoted in Kara, Islamcıların Siyasi Görüsleri, p. 25.

80.
Sabahattin Bey,
Türkiye Nasıl Kurtarılabilir?
[How Can Turkey Be Saved?] (Istanbul, 1918), pp. 27–28; quoted in Dogan,
Origins of Liberalism and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire
,
p. 210.

81.
“Dogrudan dogruya Kur’ân’dan alıp, ilhâmı, Asrın idrâkine söyletmeliyiz Islâm’ı.” Mehmet Akif Ersoy,
Safahat
, 9th ed. (Istanbul: Inkılâp ve Aka Publishing, 1974), p. 478.

82.
Louis de Bernières,
Birds Without Wings
(New York: Random House, 2005), p. 16. (This book is a novel, but the author refers to a historical fact with the quoted slogan.)

83.
“In Fear of Greeks, Jews Plead for Aid,”
New York Times
, April 3, 1913.

84.
Justin McCarthy,
Death and Exile: The Ethnic Cleansing of Ottoman Muslims, 1821–1922
(Princeton, NJ: Darwin Press,1996), p. 1.

85.
David Fromkin,
A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East
(New York: Henry Holt, 1989).

86.
John Obert Voll,
Islam: Continuity and Change in the Modern World
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994), p. 99.

87.
Ehud R. Toledano,
Slavery and Abolition in the Ottoman Middle East
(Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1998), p. 118.

88.
Charles Kurzman, ed.,
Liberal Islam: A Sourcebook
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 41.

89.
His name is spelled Khayr al-Din in most English sources. Albert Hourani summarizes his views in
Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1962), p. 90.

90.
Ibid., p. 88.

91.
The Liberal Spirit of the Qur’an
was a 1905 book by Sheikh Abdelaziz Thaalbi (1876–1944). See Mohamed Charfi,
Islam and Liberty: The Historical Misunderstanding
(London: Zed Books, 2005), p. 22.

92.
Resid Rıza,
Gerçek Islam’da Birlik
[Unity in True Islam], trans. Hayrettin Karaman (Istanbul: Iz Publishing, 2003), p. 114.

93.
Toby Lester, “What Is the Qur’an?,”
The Atlantic
, January 1999.

94.
Bernard Lewis,
Semites and Anti-Semites: An Inquiry into Conflict and Prejudice
(London: Phoenix Giant, 1997), p. 133.

95.
Hourani,
Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age
.

96.
Ahmed Kanlıdere,
Reform Within Islam: The Tajdid and Jadid Movement Among the Kazan Tatars (1809–1917)
(Istanbul: Eren Publishing, 1997), pp. 69, 75.

97.
Armstrong,
Muhammad
, p. 41.

98.
Nikki R. Keddie, “The Revolt of Islam, 1700 to 1993,” in
Islam:
Critical Concepts in Sociology
, vol. 2, ed. Bryan S. Turner (Oxford: Routledge, 2003), p. 89.

99.
Ibid., p. 88.

100.
Lothrop Stoddard,
The New World of Islam
(Chautauqua, NY: Chautauqua Press, 1922), pp. v, viii.

101.
Nasim A. Jawed,
Islam’s Political Culture: Religion and Politics in Predivided Pakistan
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 1999), p. 79.

102.
“Muslim anti-Semitism is a modern phenomenon and it is a modern anti-Semitism which has a lot to do with the changes within the Muslim and Arab world from the 19th century onwards and with an import of anti-Semitic ideas from Europe, but not with Islam as a religion. The religion was later used to dress this modern anti-Semitism with Islamic clothes.” Thomas Schmidinger, “Importing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion: Anti-Semitism in Islamic Societies.” Paper presented at the 13th Summer Academy of the Institute for the History of the Jews in Austria, March 4, 2003,
http://www.eisca.eu
.

103.
For an excellent analysis of Islamism as an outcome of the anti-imperialist wave in the Middle East”which was sparked, of course, by Western imperialism”see Fuller,
A World Without Islam
, pp. 243–66.

CHAPTER SEVEN: ROMANS, HERODIANS, AND ZEALOTS

1.
Benjamin R. Barber, paper presented at the Istanbul Seminars, organized by
Reset Dialogues on Civilizations
, Istanbul, June 2–6, 2008. Reworded according to author’s suggestion.

2.
Gavin D. Brockett, “Collective Action and the Turkish Revolution: Towards a Framework for the Social History of the Atatürk Era, 1923–38,”
Middle Eastern Studies
34, no. 4 (October 1998): 49.

3.
Ibid., p. 50.

4.
Ibid., p. 53.

5.
Nur Yalman, “Some Observations on Secularism in Islam: The Cultural Revolution in Turkey,”
Daedalus
102, no. 1 (Winter 1973), p. 161.

6.
Lewis,
The Middle East
, p. 311.

7.
In
Akl-i Selim
(Istanbul, 1929), p. 393; quoted in M. Sükrü Hanioglu, “Garbçılar: Their Attitudes toward Religion and Their Impact on the Official Ideology of the Turkish Republic,”
Studia Islamica
86 (1997): 147.