CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2022
| Author | Gur, Deniz Ali |
|---|---|
| Title | Ahmed Rifki (1884-1935): A Francophone Bektashi in the Late Ottoman Empire |
| Summary | This research is an intellectual history of the Bektashi Sufi order in the late Ottoman Empire. The focus is on the first two volumes of Ahmed Rıfkı’s four-volume book Bektaşî Sırrı (1909), which sparked a lively debate on Bektashism. The background of Ottoman modernization in general and of the Second Constitutional period (1908-13) as a revolutionary period in particular had influenced and shaped the work itself and debates around it. The author Ahmed Rıfkı (1884-1935) was a literary man who lived off authorship and editorial jobs in political and humor press. He had a hybrid educational background including both traditional Islamic education (madrasah) and culturally modern Westernized training including a Francophone highschool. His educational and professional background contributed in the making of his mental world as a moderate modernist. He defended a modernization founded on a synthesis of Sufism, Islamic scholarship and modern science which was consistent with his background and the very context. This thesis will argue that Ahmed Rıfkı’s vision was partly in line with the Hamidian Islamism and that his project was to make a modern Islamicate society of citizens out of the Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire and to make Bektashis one of the major components of it. This main argument will be discussed in terms of Ahmed Rıfkı’s conceptual framework, social and political project, and historiographical approach. |
| Supervisor | Wilson, Brett |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2022/gur_deniz-ali.pdf |
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