“Love of one’s homeland is part of faith” – Islam and Nationalism in Ahmet Hamdi Aksekiʼs ʻcatechismʼ for the military

Abstract

Ahmet Hamdi Akseki (or Aksekili) (1887–1951) was without doubt one of the most influential thinkers of Turkish Islam (for a short biography based on his personnel file in the archive of the Diyânet see Alimoğlu 2005; for a detailed biography see Ertan 1988; for further short biographies see Bolay 1989; Kara 2011: 807–809; Yıldız 2009). Nonetheless, he never gained as much fame as his contemporaries Mehmet Âkif Ersoy (1873–1936) and Elmalılı Muhammed Hamdi Yazır (1878–1942) (for Mehmet Akif Ersoy see Bostan Ünsal 2005; Şeyhun 2015: 19–26; for Elmalılı see Flöhr 2015). After having received a traditional madrasa education in the village of his birth, Güzelsu, in the district of Akseki (province of Antalya), the young Ahmet Hamdi, just like many graduates of provincial madrasas in the late 19th/early 20th century, moved to Istanbul to continue his education at one of the institutions of higher religious education located in the capital. Like almost all leading Muslim intellectuals, who suffered immensely from the authoritarian policy of the Hamidian regime, he joined the oppositional Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) (İttihâd ve Terakkî Cemiyeti) in Istanbul (for the ulema’s support for the CUP see Hanioğlu 1995: 49ff.; Hanioğlu 2001: 305ff.; Kara 2005a). During the Second Constitutional Period (1908–1918), he became a member of the circle of reformist Islamic intellectuals associated with the Islamist journal Sırât-ı Müstakîm/ Sebîlürreşâd (for a detailed study on Sebîlürreşâd see Debus 1991). Akseki translated Muḥammad Rashīd Riḍā’s Muḥāwarāt al-muṣliḥ wa-l-muqallid1 into Turkish (Akseki 1332/1914) and thereby initiated a debate among the Ottoman ulema about the problem of blind submission (taqlīd) to the authority of one of the Islamic legal schools (madhāhib) and the use of individual reasoning (ijtihād) by Islamic jurists (Karaman 2005; Uçar 2005: 89; for Rashīd Riḍā see Badawi 1978: 97–139). Between 1916 and 1921 he held various positions at in-