Between Remaking and Unmaking: The Religio-Secularization of late Ottoman Islam

• Applicant: Dr. Daniel Kolland
• Subject Area: Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2025
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 557887256

This research project uses a conceptual history approach to trace changing notions of Islam in the Ottoman Empire between the years 1876 and 1922. To do so it draws on a newly available, AI-driven digital databank (Müteferriqa), analyzing a substantial corpus of hitherto untapped Turkish-language periodicals and the writings of devout intellectuals, which range from Ṣūfī-leaning poets and hommes de lettres to advocates of social reform through Islam. The selected sources allow studying the transformations of Ottoman Islam from two research angles. The first angle (a), which I would describe as genealogical, aims at tracing those processes that shaped powerful currents of twentieth-century Turkish Islam. The second angle (b) is archaeological: it recovers displaced paradigms that once were constitutive for Ottoman Islam. The genealogical part (a) of the project investigates two mutually dependent processes: (1) The transformation of Islam into both a national identity and utilitarian reform ideology that promised worldly progress and (2) reconceptualizations of Islam through a (global) concept of “religion” as a clearly delimitable divine domain in society. Classifying these processes as secularization and ‘religionization’, this project draws on Markus Dressler’s concept of religio-secularization (2019) to study the crystallization and co-constitution of these transformative processes. The second, archaeological perspective (b) analyzes the effects of this twin process by studying two discourses through which Ottoman Muslims traditionally expressed their God-consciousness: poetry and Sufism. The project examines (3) the strategies that representatives of Ottoman Ṣūfī culture pursued especially after 1908 to reconcile Ṣūfī hermeneutics and practices with the new utilitarian Islam-cum-religion. Last, (4) it investigates late-Ottoman attempts to redefine inherited poetics through notions of “religion,” social usefulness, and a new category of “literature” (edebīyāt), which some littérateurs conceptualized as autonomous and secular. The multifaceted history of late Ottoman Islam, which is located at the interstices of Ottoman social and political history, on the one hand, and Islamic intellectual history, on the other hand, has remained a research lacuna until this day. This project makes a step towards filling this gap by bringing these two disconnected historiographies into dialogue and, moreover, by presenting hitherto barely explored archives and devout intellectuals. Filling this gap not only allows for more complex, polyvocal, and ultimately more historical depictions that stress the accelerating differentialization of conceptions of Islam. Furthermore, it affords replacing representations of the late Ottoman Empire as engulfed in fierce clashes between religion and secularism with an account that historicizes these very categories, locating the transformations of Islam not apart from modernity but firmly in it.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants