A “Young Turk” Islamic Intellectual: Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi and the Diverse Intellectual Legacies of the Late Ottoman Empire

Abstract

Among the late Ottoman thinkers and writers who laid the foundations of intellectual life in modern Turkey, Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi (1865–1914) is a prominent figure. His intellectual legacy survived the destruction of the Ottoman Empire and the founding of the Republic of Turkey. Virtually all his books have been republished in recent years in simplified modern Turkish versions accessible to present-day readers, and some have also been the subject of academic studies. His oeuvre includes dozens of historical, philosophical, theological, and political works, as well as novels, poems, satirical pieces, and plays. All were produced in a six-year period, between the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 and his death by poisoning in 1914. The overtly modernist underpinnings of his works on the one hand, and his Sufi piety and firm rejection of materialism and positivism on the other, have earned him recognition as an early exponent of a modernist, nonliteralist Islamic agenda of a kind that has been conspicuous in a variety of Turkish-Islamic movements in recent decades. His untimely death, later attributed to a Freemason–Zionist conspiracy, added further to his mystique in some Islamic circles. Modernist yet deeply devout, Islamist yet uninterested in scripturalist paths of religious revival, Ahmed Hilmi stands out as a representative of an important intellectual trend that has often been overlooked in studies of the late Ottoman period.