Session 8: Intellectuals and the ‘East’

Session 8: Intellectuals and the ‘East’
Chair: Caroline Newton

19th Century Ottoman Intellectuals and Their Perception of ‘Civilization’ (1800-1918)
Mustafa Serdar Palabiyik
Department of International Relations, Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey

This article seeks to provide an account of 19th century intellectuals with a particular focus on their perception of ‘civilization’. As a result of the process of Ottoman modernization, it was mainly in the 19th century that Ottoman intellectuals encountered the concept of civilization and developed different understandings of this concept. In this article, Ottoman intellectuals are categorized under three groups regarding their perception of ‘civilization’. The first group includes intellectuals such as Safveti Ziya, Cenap Sehabettin, Munif Pasha, etc., who perceived civilization as a European phenomenon and argued for complete adoption of European civilization for the survival of the Ottoman state; however, they mainly remained at the margins of the intellectual community. The second group, including bureaucrats like Said Halim Pasha and some other Islamist thinkers, placed itself at the opposite margin and almost completely rejected European civilization believing that it was not suitable for the Ottoman socio-political system. Despite these margins, however, the bulk of 19th century Ottoman intellectual community, including the most prominent intellectuals of the period, such as Namik Kemal, Ahmet Cevdet Pasha, Ahmet Mithat Efendi, etc., preferred to separate between material and moral elements of European civilization and favored adoption of the former, while they were reluctant to adopt the latter. Because, they argue that material elements of civilization belonged to whole humanity, while moral elements change from one region to another. This separation between material and moral elements of civilization has been one of the most significant questions of Ottoman modernization. In sum, this article aims to show how the concept of ‘civilization’ shaped 19th century intellectual life and how it influenced the intellectual perception of politics, society as well as international relations.

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Occupants Of The Third Space: ‘New Muslim Intellectuals’ And The Study Of Islam
Carool Kersten
Islamic Studies, King’s College London, United Kingdom

Since the 1990s, the literature on contemporary Islamic intellectual history has identified a ‘New Muslim intellectual’, who pairs solid knowledge of the Islamic heritage with an equally intimate familiarity with developments in the Western human sciences. In my research I argue that due to their liminal position on the interstices of intellectual traditions, these thinkers are not only exploring new ways of engaging in the study of Islamic civilization, but as ‘double critics’ of both Islamic and Western intellectualism they contribute to the problematization of Western cultural hegemony, providing a ‘Muslim angle’ on its impact on the globalization debate.

While postmodernist and postcolonial studies provide me with a vocabulary, I argue that contrary to the Orientalism critique of Edward Said a.o., the output of these Muslim intellectuals asserts the agency of the subaltern. The present paper will provide a genealogy and profile of these New Muslim intellectuals, supported by illustrations from their interdisciplinary research agendas developed since the late 1960s-early 1970s. This presentation affirms their dual roles as scholarly researchers and public intellectuals simultaneously engaged in criticizing and debating issues affecting the Western and Muslim world.

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