scholarly journals Muslim Modernism in Turkish: Assessing the Thought of Late Ottoman Intellectual Mehmed Akif

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Andrew Hammond

Abstract Late Ottoman intellectual Mehmed Akif (1873–1936) was for decades depicted in Turkish public discourse in generic terms as an Islamist radical opposed to the secular nation state. Through Akif’s poetry, articles, translations, correspondence from his exile in Egypt, and biographical detail revealed in the scattered memoirs of students and colleagues, this article offers a reappraisal of his thought as a leading Muslim modernist who adapted the thinking of Egyptian religious scholar Muḥammad ʿAbduh (1849–1905) to an Ottoman and then Turkish audience in the formulation of an early, prescient compromise between religion and nationalism. The article also notes remarkable similarities between Akif and Indian thinker Muḥammad Iqbāl (1877–1938), whom Akif was instrumental in introducing to Arab audiences, and suggests that, once political Islam had later gained currency across all fields of public life, Akif became an alternative to nationalist icon Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924) as an intellectual symbol of the republic.

2012 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 528-554 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zeynep Taydas ◽  
Yasemin Akbaba ◽  
Minion K. C. Morrison

AbstractReligious movements have long been challenging the modernist and secularist ideas around the world. Within the last decade or so, pro-religious parties made significant electoral advances in various countries, including India, Sudan, Algeria, and the Palestinian territories. In this article, we focus on the rise of the pro-religious Justice and Development Party (Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi- AKP) to power in the 2002 elections in Turkey. Using the Turkish experience with political Islam, we evaluate the explanatory value of Mark Juergensmeyer's rise of religious nationalism theory, with a special emphasis on the “failed secularism” argument. Our analysis indicates that the theoretical approach formulated by Juergensmeyer has a great deal of explanatory power; however, it does not provide a complete explanation for the success of the AKP. The rise of religion in Turkish politics is the result of a complex process over long years of encounter and confrontation between two frameworks of order, starting with the sudden imposition of secularism from above, when the republic was established. Hence, to understand the rise of religion in contemporary Turkish politics, an in-depth understanding of history, politics, and the sources of tension between secularists and Islamists is essential. The findings of this article have important implications for other countries, especially those that are experiencing a resurgence of religion in politics, and are struggling to integrate religious parties into a democratic system.


Author(s):  
Yulia Myrksina

Russian society is currently going through a difficult period of economic and social transformations. This requires tremendous efforts in all spheres of public life, namely in the field of legal support for reforms, the creation of legislation that meets the new socio-economic conditions and allows for the effective protection of citizens’ rights. Social security of the population of the Russian Federation is one of the most urgent tasks in our country, among which the problem of pension provision is in the first place.


2018 ◽  
Vol 52 (1) ◽  
pp. 175-177
Author(s):  
Didem Havlioğlu

Since the 1950s, historiographical trends in scholarship have re-considered the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent nation-state building of the Republic of Turkey. The social and political evolution of the imperial system into a nation-state has been alternatively explained through geopolitical pressures, domestic resistance, the expanding economy and modernism in Europe, and the inability of the Ottoman establishment to cope with the rapid changes of the nineteenth century. Constructing one holistic narrative of a vast time period of upheaval is a difficult endeavor for any scholar. In the case of the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of the Republic of Turkey, ethno-religious networks, two world wars, geopolitical competition between the great powers, regional and pan-regional insurgencies, demographic displacement, nationalist fervor sweeping through the Balkan and Arab provinces and into Anatolia, and finally the Kurdish armed resistance renders succinct historical narratives all but impossible to achieve. Thus, while there are many stories of the end of the Ottoman Empire, an overview of the issues for students and general audiences is a much needed, but audacious, undertaking. Yet for understanding the Middle East and Southeastern Europe today, a critical narrative must be told in all its complexity.


2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhamad Rizal ◽  
Yanyan Yani

The purpose of state defense is to protect and to save the integrity of the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia, the sovereignty of the state, as well as its security from all kinds of threats, whether they are military or non-military ones. One of the non-military threats that potentially threatens the sovereignty and security of the nation-state is the misuse of technology and information in cyberspace. The threat of irresponsible cyber attacks can be initiated by both state and non-state actors. The actors may be an individual, a group of people, a faction, an organization, or even a country. Therefore, the government needs to anticipate cyber threats by formulating cyber security strategies and determining comprehensive steps to defend against cyber attacks; its types and the scale of counter-measures, as well as devising the rules of law. 


Author(s):  
Sharon Luk

Chapter Three investigates systematic efforts to dismantle Japanese diasporic communities living on the U.S. West coast alongside the broader emergence of a U.S. wartime security or surveillance state. This chapter explores the expansion of infrastructures to control the limits of human knowledge and information, as it occurred through two interlocked and evolving movements: first, intensified experiments with mass incarceration as dominant mode of organizing public life and culture; and second, the transforming production of racial distinction through conflated languages of geopolitics and nation-state citizenship, culture or ethnicity, and moral affect. In particular, Chapter Three elaborates these movements as they unfolded within a longer history of U.S. warfare in the East Asian Pacific and as they established the physical, administrative, discursive, and subjective forms of censorship conditioning the life of paper for the “Interned.”


Author(s):  
Wendy Shaw

Held in Istanbul between 1916 and 1951, the Galatasaray Exhibitions were the first annual exhibitions of art established in the Ottoman Empire, remaining an important cultural event during the single-party era of the Republic of Turkey, founded in 1923. During the Great War in Europe, when the Ottoman Empire joined the Central Powers and the citizens of Entente nations left, many vacated spaces in Istanbul opened to new uses. One of these was the Italian Societa Operaia, which became the dormitory for the nearby Lycée de Galatasaray. Beginning in 1916, the main hall of this dormitory was leased every summer for an annual exhibit, which came to be known as the Galatasaray Exhibitions. Works shown at the inaugural exhibit were naturalist paintings, reflecting no awareness of contemporary modernist movements—a situation that later changed with the development of the modern nation-state of Turkey. The exhibit was juried but open to all artists, and visitors were charged admission. Several works at the 1916 exhibit received prizes from the Ministry of Education and were subsequently purchased as part of the Collection of Decorated Panels, established under the auspices of the Imperial Academy of Fine Art, which included copies of many famous European paintings.


Africa ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 88 (3) ◽  
pp. 469-491 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marie Rodet ◽  
Brandon County

AbstractThis article examines concepts of ‘home’ and ‘abroad’ for migrants and citizens in the twilight of empire. It focuses on the ‘cheminots refoulés’, railway workers with origins in the former French Sudan (today's Republic of Mali) who were expelled from Senegal shortly after both territories declared independence, and other ‘Sudanese’ settled in Senegal, sometimes for several generations. Using newly available archives in France, Mali and Senegal, and interviews with formercheminotsand ‘Sudanese migrants’ on both sides of the border, this article seeks to historicize memories of autochthony and allochthony that have been constructed and contested in postcolonial nation-building projects. The Mali Federation carried the lingering memory of federalist political projects, but it proved untenable only months after the Federation's June 1960 independence from France. When member states declared independence from each other, the internal boundary between Senegal and the Sudanese Republic became an international border between Senegal and the Republic of Mali. In the wake of the collapse, politicians in Bamako and Dakar clamoured to redefine the ‘nation’ and its ‘nationals’ through selective remembering. Thousands ofcheminotsand ‘Sudanese migrants’ who had moved to Senegal from Sudan years (or decades) earlier were suddenly labelled ‘foreigners’ and ‘expatriates’ and faced two governments eager to see them ‘return’ to a hastily proclaimed nation state. This ‘repatriation’ allowed Republic of Mali officials to ‘perform the nation’ by (re)integrating and (re)membering the migrants in a nascent ‘homeland’. But, having circulated between Senegal and Sudan/Mali for decades, ‘Sudanese migrants’ in both states retained and invoked memories of older political communities, upsetting new national priorities. The loss of the Mali Federation raises questions about local, national and international citizenship and movement in mid-century West Africa. Examining the histories invoked to imagine postcolonial political communities, this article offers an insight into the role that memory has played in constructing and contesting the nation's central place in migration histories within Africa and beyond.


2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (02) ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Hamdan

Abstrak Kata ‘kafir’ dalam al-Qur’an tidak bisa dimaknai secara tunggal. Dibutuhkan kajian yang mendalam dalam memahami al-Qur’an. Salah satu metode yang bisa digunakan adalah dengan menggunakan teori hermeneutik Schleiermacher dengan dua interpretasi yaitu gramatis dan psikologis. Melalui analisis interpretasi gramatis, kata ‘kafir’ dalam al-Qur’an memiliki makna yang beragam seperti: ingkar, tidak bersyukur, tidak beriman, kikir, sombong, dan lain sebagainya. Kemudian vonis kafir adalah otoritas Allah Swt. Sementara itu, dengan analisis interpretasi psikologis, ditemukan hasil bahwa Tuhan seringkali menurunkan kata ‘kafir’ akibat perilaku buruk pelaku kekafiran. Penuduhan kafir terhadap orang lain mengancam kerukunan dalam kehidupan berbangsa dan bernegara. Individu atau kelompok yang dituduh sebagai kafir rentan mendapatkan diskriminasi. Indonesia adalah negara bangsa yang mempunyai Konstitusi tertinggi yaitu UUD Negara Republik Indonesia tahun 1945. Dalam UUD 1945 Pasal 29 disebutkan bahwa negara menjamin setiap warga negaranya atas kemerdekaan dan kebebasan dalam memeluk agama dan keyakinan. Dalam konteks bernegara, non-muslim memiliki hak dan kedudukan yang setara dengan warga negara lainnya.   Abstract The word ‘kafir’ in the Qur'an cannot be interpreted in a single meaning. It takes an in-depth study in understanding the verses of the Qur'an. One method that can be used is by employing Schleirmacher's hermeneutic theory with two interpretations, namely grammatical and psychological. Through the analysis of grammatical interpretations, the word ‘kafir’ in the Al-Qur'an has various meanings such as: denial, ungratefulness, disbelief, stingy, arrogant, and so on. Then the verdict of disbelief is the authority of Allah Swt. Meanwhile, with the analysis of psychological interpretations, it is found that God often sends down the word ‘kafir’ due to the bad behavior of the infidels. The accusation of being infidels against others has threatened harmony in the life of the nation and state. Individuals or groups accused of being infidels are vulnerable to discrimination. Indonesia is a nation state that has the highest constitution, namely the 1945 Constitution of the Republic of Indonesia. The article 29 of the 1945 Constitution affirms that the State guarantees every citizen of freedom to embrace religion and belief. In the context of a state, non-Muslims have equal rights and positions with other citizens.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 101
Author(s):  
Ahmad Munjin Nasih ◽  
Meidi Saputra ◽  
Tasmuji Tasmuji ◽  
Abd. Syakur

The purpose of this study was to describe the history of the Shiddiqiyyah Tarekat, the forms of nationalism in the Shiddiqiyyah Tarekat, and the meeting point of religion and nationalism in the Shiddiqiyyah Tarekat. The research approach used a qualitative approach with a descriptive research type. The data collection techniques used were observation, in-depth interviews, and literature study. The results showed that the Shiddiqiyyah Tarekat was a tarekat with very rapid development and had its own uniqueness that was different from other Sufi groups or tarekat. The forms of nationalism of the shiddiqiyyah tarekat were the eight abilities that must be held, the national monument, the poetry of the source of the independence of the Indonesian nation and the establishment of the Unitary State of the Republic of Indonesia and the establishment of a brotherhood of love for the Indonesian homeland. The meeting point of religion and nationalism in the shiddiqiyyah tarekat was the concept of hubbul wathan minal iman, which means that love for the country was part of faith.


2014 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 131
Author(s):  
Mokhammad Yahya

<p>This paper discusses the relation between Islam and the State as experienced by Indonesian Muslims. Using the historical analysis it begins to delineate the struggle for political Islam in Indonesia with their diverse aspirations from the very beginning of Indonesia as a nation state until the collapse of Suharto regime. In terms of Islamic political struggle, this explains that there was a shift from legalistic-formalistic Islamic political articulation in the Old Order and the beginning of New Order Era into more substantiality pragmatic method. This eventually leads to the formation on the theorization of political Islam since there is no a single definitive theory of political Islam in the Islamic scholarship. Muslims in Indonesia have offered a brilliant concept Pancasila' as a solution in the multicultural situation like Indonesia. Pancasila was considered not only by the founding fathers of Indonesia but also by majority of Indonesian Muslims as an interpretation and contextualization of Islamic Politics in the pluralist society of Indonesia in order to create more harmonious and peaceful life.</p><p>Key Words: Islam, State, Muslim Politics</p>


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