The scholars whose work appears in this book represent a variety of disciplines, faiths, and nations and offer a wide range of narratives, analyses, and critiques. This title moves beyond mere introduction, analyzing Hizmet and the manifestations of this interfaith movement.
The scholars whose work appears in this book represent a variety of disciplines, faiths, and nations and offer a wide range of narratives, analyses, and critiques. This title moves beyond mere introduction, analyzing Hizmet and the manifestations of this interfaith movement.
Hizmet Means Service: Perspectives on an Alternative Path within Islam
216
Hizmet Means Service: Perspectives on an Alternative Path within Islam
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Overview
The scholars whose work appears in this book represent a variety of disciplines, faiths, and nations and offer a wide range of narratives, analyses, and critiques. This title moves beyond mere introduction, analyzing Hizmet and the manifestations of this interfaith movement.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780520960749 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 09/22/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 216 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
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Read an Excerpt
Hizmet Means Service
Perspectives on an Alternative Path within Islam
By Martin E. Marty
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-96074-9
CHAPTER 1
Hizmet among the Most Influential Religious Renewals of Late Ottoman and Modern Turkish History
CARTER VAUGHN FINDLEY
IN A LANDSCAPE WHERE MANY religious and cultural movements were active, three religious movements emerged to transform late Ottoman and modern Turkish society. The movements emerged in a clear chronological sequence. Each created disruptive changes in Turkish religious culture within the relatively short time span of a few decades. Each of them also has an ongoing history. It is important not to overlook that point: the recent history of the oldest of the three movements includes many forms of activity — such as expansion into electronic media or business ventures — for which the newest of the three is better known. Singly and collectively, these movements tell us a great deal about how Islamic religious movements have changed in their forms of self-expression and organization during the past two centuries. This is probably the most important lesson to learn from comparing the three of them. Historians with a comparative awareness of early U.S. history will be tempted to liken these movements to the Great Awakenings of that period. The comparison is not misleading, yet it is also not very helpful to those who have not studied early U.S. religious history. In Islamic terms, the movements respond to the pious expectation that every age will have its mujaddid, or "renewer." In an environment where many religious movements coexisted, it is not hard to see that these three movements were the "renewals" of their respective times. It may be harder to understand how they achieved the impact that they did. For a historian, this is an interesting question to contemplate.
The three movements are those launched by Mevlana Halid, Said Nursi, and Fethullah Gülen. Together, they carry Islamic religious culture of the late Ottoman and Turkish lands from the last great movement launched within the historical forms of the mystical orders into a new age that left the old forms behind to seek new modes of organization and action. Ultimately, this search produced results of significance not only for Muslims but for people of all the religions and all the world.
MEVLANA HALID AND THE HALIDIYE MOVEMENT
Mevlana Halid, known in Arabic as Shaykh Khalid, lived from 1776 to 1827, but the critical years for launching his movement were from 1811 to 1827, a period of less than two decades. Born a Kurd near Shahrazur in Ottoman Iraq, he studied there and in Sulaymaniyya. Among Kurds, the Islamic mystical brotherhoods (tarikat), whose followers are referred to synonymously by the terms sufi and dervish, were the only institutions that bridged tribal divisions. Early on, Halid was initiated into the Kadiri order, then the dominant order in Kurdistan, and perhaps other orders. But then he did something exceptional: he went to study in India, where he was also initiated into the Naqshbandi (in Turkish, Naksibendi) order in its reformist, mujaddidi form, founded by the Imam Rabbani, Ahmad Sirhindi (d. 1624), a religious reformer recognized as the mujaddid of the second Islamic millennium. Halid's Indian teacher not only trained him to teach religious sciences such as Qur'an commentary (tafsir) and prophetic traditions (hadith) but also appointed him as his deputy (khalifa) to spread the mujaddidi form of the Naqshbandi Sufi movement in Kurdistan. Halid's experiences in India thus prepared him to reinvigorate the religious brotherhoods of the late Ottoman Empire and to do so in a way that emphasized strict Shari'a observance, a requirement that some other orders neglected but that Sirhindi demanded.
Only sixteen years passed between Halid's return to Iraq (1811) and his death (1827), but this relatively brief span of time sufficed for him to produce the greatest Islamic renewal of the last Ottoman century. The appeal of his new religious message attracted many followers but disrupted the status quo for the local amirs and Kadiri shaykhs. Their opposition forced Halid to relocate to Baghdad and later to Damascus. However, his expertise in the religious sciences also impressed the strict religious scholars, who disapproved of mystics neglectful of the Shari'a. Halid's impact as both scholar and mystic won him acclaim, even from people who were not his followers, as the mujaddid of his century. For Halid, not only the organizational form of the Sufi brotherhood but also traditional techniques of oral teaching and manuscript production still proved effective in propagating his movement; the fact that he expressed himself in Arabic also facilitated the spread of his message among learned Muslims far and wide. He used these traditional techniques innovatively, reportedly sending out seventy khalifas who spread his teachings to Istanbul, where earlier waves of mujaddidi influence had prepared a receptive audience, and as far beyond as Chechnya and Java. He found many followers among merchants and landowners. Many of his followers were Kurds, and the patterns of Kurdish labor migration to Istanbul helped to broaden the base of his following there.
The Halidiye movement owed its success to many factors. Its founder was both a charismatic ascetic and a man of learning. Strict Shari'a observance helped win support from the ulema. At a time when Christian missionaries were already upsetting intercommunal relations, even in Kurdistan, and nationalism threatened the empire in Greece and Serbia, demands for strict Shari'a observance encouraged Muslims and positioned the movement as a force for Ottoman reintegration. The Naqshbandi principle of "solitude within society" (halvet der encümen) enjoined social and political engagement. In the late Ottoman Empire and modern Turkey, no religious movement has gained great influence without running into trouble with the authorities, and that was already true for Mevlana Halid. However, he overcame the suspicions of the Ottoman sultan of his time, Mahmud II (1808–39), by ordering his followers to pray for the state. Neither otherworldly like some other Sufi movements nor anti-Ottoman like the Wahhabis of Arabia, the Halidiye thus became a force for Ottoman revitalization and reintegration. The two later movements discussed below are not direct outgrowths of the Halidiye movement, but they emerged out of zones where it was the most dynamic, recent renewal movement. In that sense, both the Nur and the Gülen movements are at least indirectly indebted to the religious reinvigoration that Halid inspired.
A central element of the Halidiye movement's appeal was its spiritual discipline. Like other Naqshbandis, Mevlana Halid's followers performed their distinctive religious rites (dhikr in Arabic, zikir in Turkish) silently. To this, Halid added the practice of rabita, the disciple's meditative concentration on the mental image of his shaykh. Halid insisted that his followers concentrate on his image alone. This maintained the centralization of the order, at least until some later khalifas permitted their disciples to concentrate on their image, instead. Performing their dhikr not only silently but often alone or in small groups meant that the Halidis did not actually need dervish lodges (tekkes), although they might use them as meeting places. Eventually, the Halidis had more tekkes in Istanbul than any other order but — paradoxically — were better able to live without them after the tekkes were ordered closed in 1925. All considered, it is not surprising that the Halidiye achieved sometimes great influence under the empire. Naqshbandis benefited especially from the attack on the heterodox Bektasis after the Janissaries were abolished in 1826.
Factors like these enabled the Halidiye movement to figure for a century as the most important Islamic revival movement in the Ottoman cultural space. So much of the literature on the Halidis is in Arabic, and so much of the evidence about their history comes from the Arab provinces of the empire as well as from other Ottoman regions and lands outside the empire, that the significance of the movement is impossible to grasp without looking beyond the boundaries of today's Turkey. After the collapse of the empire and the founding of the Turkish republic, the Halidiye movement faced new competition. But its growth and adaptation continued. Strict Shari'a observance, the silent dhikr which requires no meeting hall, and the principle of social and political engagement all helped the Halidis endure. During the 1920s and 1930s, the harshest phase of republican laicism, some Naqshbandis in the east took up arms against the Turkish republic. At the same time, others applied for jobs in the new Directorate of Religious Affairs, thus colonizing from within the laicist republic's own agency for controlling religion. New forms of religious organization and cultural production emerged in the twentieth century, and these are most visible in the case of the new religious movements of that century. However, the Naqshbandis also branched out into new ventures in a similar range of ways, from mosque congregations to business ventures and print and electronic media. It is not surprising that the Turkish republic's first openly religious prime minister, Turgut Özal (prime minister, 1983–89, and president, 1989–93), was a Naqshbandi. Recep Tayyip Erdogan (prime minister, 2003–14) also comes from a Naqshbandi background. The Justice and Development Party (in Turkish, Adalet ve Kalkinma, or AKP), which Erdogan heads, won three successive general elections in 2002, 2007, and 2011 prior to his becoming Turkey's first directly elected president in 2014.
SAID NURSI AND THE NUR MOVEMENT
The man who next created disruptive change in Turkish religious life, Said Nursi, lived a long life, from 1877 to 1960. Once again, this disruption occurred in a relatively short time span, in this case between 1925 and 1944, when Nursi wrote most of the vast number of treatises known collectively as the Risale-i Nur, for which he wished to be remembered. He, too, is sometimes mistakenly referred to as a Naqshbandi. However, the evidence indicates that he had read widely in the literature of both Sufism and formal religious studies but was neither the follower of an existing Sufi movement nor the creator of a new one. By 1925, when the Sufi brotherhoods were closed, not only laicists but also many religious people (in Turkey and in other Muslim countries) felt that the Sufi brotherhoods had outlived their usefulness and that it was time to move on. For practicing Muslims in Turkey, there was an even greater problem: how to find a place for themselves in a new political system that still recognized Muslim holidays and tacitly assumed that being a Muslim was a major marker of national identity, yet the policies and attitudes of the ruling elite equated all religion with the lowest forms of superstition. Under the circumstances, what people of faith needed was truly not a new brotherhood but a new kind of leader who could guide them toward spiritual fulfillment in the face of a regime that did not respect that quest. Just at the moment when the early republic's top- down policies of laicism and populism were at their most aggressive, Nursi emerged to reassert God's sovereignty. Not surprisingly, the official reception he got was by far the most hostile of any faced by religious leaders under discussion here.
Nursi's life story is a fascinating one, combining human quirks and eccentricities with austere asceticism and inspired vision. Early on, he made an impression, both as a nonconformist and as an intellectual and spiritual prodigy, whence the epithet Bediüzzaman, "the wonder of the age." Living through a profound personal crisis just as the empire collapsed and the National Struggle occurred, he came to believe that Ahmad Sirhindi, who had earlier inspired Mevlana Halid, was transmitting to him a message to "unify your kible" — essentially, to face in only one direction to pray. To Nursi, this meant that his only source of inspiration must be the Qur'an. Spending much of his life in internal exile in western Turkey, far from his native region, he began writing religious treatises, which ultimately constituted the Risale-i Nur. People joined the movement by gathering to study the treatises, thus becoming talebe-i Nur, "students of light." Nursi insisted that, in this case, the renewer (mujaddid) was not himself but his writings.
For purposes of brief discussion, two aspects of Nursi's writings appear particularly significant. First, despite one prominent scholar's opinion that the Risale-i Nur lacks overall cohesion, and although the treatises do move back and forth in the sense of connecting modern issues with Qur'anic interpretation, other scholars have found the collection to be unified. In a recent study, Serdar Poyraz has demonstrated conclusively that a clear organization governs the entire Risale. Starting with "The Words" (Sözler) as the foundations, texts grouped under specific titles, such as "The Flashes" (Lem'alar) and "The Rays" (Sualar), as well as all the other texts of the Risale, have programmatic relationships to "The Words" and to one another. The mere fact that "The Words," "The Letters" (Mektubat), and "The Flashes" each contain thirty-three parts, which add up to ninety-nine, the number of the "most beautiful names" of God (esma-yi hüsna), demonstrates that the ten volumes of the Risale have a carefully planned structure.
The other especially significant aspect of the Risale pertains to its purposes and goals. Trials and investigations by the government attempted to determine whether Nursi was trying to found a new mystical order or undermine the republic. Talking past those charges, he demanded that European philosophers be brought to examine his works. They — or, at any rate, the European materialists from whom Turkish laicists had taken their inspiration — were Nursi's target. Could European philosophers answer his refutation of them? For Nursi, there were three ways to acquire Islamic knowledge: the Qur'an, the Prophet, and "the Grand Book of the Universe," a phrase from the mystical tradition. Within the universe, just as God "makes the sun and the moon attend to [their] duties," the manifestations of His omnipotence also include "a magical emanation of true planning, administering, regulating, purifying and assigning duties." Nursi wrote to prove that the Master of the Universe is the Master of Modernity.
In addition to arguing that materialist science could not undermine religious truth, Nursi's movement embodied a new phase in the transformation of religious forms of organization and action. Nursi went far beyond merely abandoning the old organizational model of the religious brotherhood (tarikat). He founded a text-based movement. During his lifetime, moreover, his movement accomplished the entire transition in the production of Islamic knowledge from oral to textual transmission and from manuscript to printed texts. Unwilling to abandon the script of the Qur'an, Nursi insisted until the early 1940s that his writings be reproduced only in the Arabic script. After 1928, this made it illegal to print them in Turkey. Copying manuscripts became increasingly the occupation of his followers; correcting manuscripts took up more and more of his time. Manuscript reproduction became a major force in perpetuating literacy in the Arabic script in Turkey, among women as well as men. If his followers' claims that they produced 600,000 manuscripts are even remotely true, then one of the largest manuscript production projects in the history of the world occurred in the twentieth century. Finally, the argument that Latin-script texts would make his teachings more accessible to the young convinced him to allow some of his writings to be typed in Latin letters in the early 1940s; some texts were also reproduced photographically then. A 1956 court decision that the treatises did not violate the law finally led to the printing in Latin letters of the entire Risale. Increasing the number of readers into the hundreds of thousands, this started the process of moving the treatises into the mainstream of Turkish media.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Hizmet Means Service by Martin E. Marty. Copyright © 2015 The Regents of the University of California. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
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