Competing Ideologies in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic: Writings of Islamist, Turkist, and Westernist Intellectuals.

• Author: Ilter, Mustafa

By Ahmet Seyhun

I.B. Tauris, 2021, 248 pages, [pounds sterling]76.50, ISBN: 9780755602209

Notwithstanding the recent upsurge in micro-level individual intellectual histories of the late Ottoman period, Ahmet Seyhun's Competing Ideologies in the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Turkish Republic attempts to consider the broader scope of the intellectual trends of the era. It brings together the writings of the major intellectual figures of the period and highlights their major contributions to the intellectual milieu of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Seyhun's work sheds light on the ideological processes into which the given intellectual thoughts were poured, especially the ideologies that had a significant impact on the formation of the Young Turks and the nascent Turkish Republic.

The historiographical trend in late Ottoman intellectual history since the 1980s has been based on biographies of individual persons and their specific contributions to intellectual trends. (1) Seyhun himself has written a monograph detailing the intellectual positioning of Said Halim Pasha. In the current book, he shifts the axis of this trend to concentrate on twelve different intellectuals' writings and six major ideological movements, illustrating the multilevel structure of intellectual currents in play in the late Ottoman period.

In Competing Ideologies, Seyhun first explores the conflicting nature of the ideologies trumpeted by "various intellectual and political figures who represented diverse political currents that competed in the political arena of the late Ottoman Empire" (p. 14). For Seyhun, Tanzimat and the reform attempts of the 19th century had significant effects on the emergence of the "conflicting ideologies" of the times (pp. 2-3). The author stresses that it was not only a matter of competing but of collaborating; while the Islamist writers and their Westernist counterparts did engage in ideological conflict, the liberals, Young Ottomans, and Islamists in many cases influenced each other positively. Seyhun also mentions interactions through which Ottoman intellectuals were influenced by European intellectuals. Remarking upon these points of intersection and interaction could be considered a strength of the book as a whole, as Seyhun presents a detailed yet comprehensible background of the late Ottoman, and Early Republican periods.

The book's structure follows the model of the individual biographies mentioned above. At the beginning of...