Transcript: Cemil Aydin: The Idea of the Muslim World: A Global Intellectual History

Sertaç Sehlikoglu  00:04 
Welcome to Imagining Turkey podcast series co organised by Hazal. Aydin, Meryem Zisan Koker and Sertac Sehlikoglu. This part of Takhayyul Project funded by the European Research Council and hosted at the UCL's Institute for Global Prosperity.
 
HAZAL AYDIN  00:24 
Welcome Cemil Aydin, I want to briefly introduce you. Cemil Aydin is a professor of history from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. His interests focus on both modern Middle Eastern history and modern Asian history with an emphasis on the international and intellectual history of the Ottoman and Japanese empires. His research and publications offer new ways to understand the historical roots of the contemporary world order by describing the process of Imperial era conflicts and decolonization, especially from the perspective of non Western actors of the Muslim world and East Asia. Moving on to Sertac Sehlikoglu. 
 
Sertaç Sehlikoglu  01:03 
I want to say actually Cemil Aydin to me personally is one of the most exciting minds in social sciences and humanities, I'm especially stimulated with the connections historical and global connections you bring to our attention, all of which often immediately enlightened, the contemporary global politics and their inter connectivities. Our episode today, therefore, aim to use your book, "The Idea of the Muslim World", to think more closely about the contemporary global politics and political Islam. Thank you for joining us, Cemil Aydin. 
 
Cemil Aydin  01:36 
Thank you for inviting me. It's a great pleasure to talk to you.

Meryem Zisan Koker
I would like to start with our first question. We believe that one of the most significant contributions of your work, at least from the perspective of our ongoing to how your project is about your intervention today dualist thinking of the West versus the East, or Islam versus the West. Would you help us think on how this dualistic thinking still haunts the contemporary world politics, perhaps while reflecting on your scholarly thinking or concern as to why such intervention was necessary to you? 
 
Cemil Aydin 02:10 
Thank you, Meryem for this great first question. To offer a maybe kind of a background framework, my field of Global Intellectual History or International history, there was an attempt to decolonize the field in the last several decades, and as part of this decolonization, the keyword became the worldmaking. So if anthropologists were interested in self making, we were discussing the idea of worldmaking from the perspective of non european actors. So one of the top book on our field is by Adom Getachew called "Worldmaking After empire", working on Pan-Africanist. So what we are trying to show is that in the last 200 years, where the biggest transformation is the end of empires and emergence of the nation states that this transformation was not inevitable. It was also not a gift by the Europeans, when their empires were ending the left nationalism and nation states as the only viable future option for a great majority of the people in Africa and Asia. So what we were trying to show that something big happened in the second half of the 19th century, both politically and conceptually, that the non European societies while they were trying to free themselves, or try to liberate themselves from the colonial subjugation, they also hope to achieve a different world, a better word of more equality, more justice. And they really focus on how the problem space of the late 19th century was defined by racial hierarchies, and as part of this racial hierarchies, our colleagues outside of the field of African and African American studies focused on how religion actually was racialized. So we argued that the category of Asia, Islamic World, but also Hinduism, Buddhism, Buddhist world, Hindu world, these were all in someway racialized initially to justify European colonial rule in those societies. So the racism, we have a more broad understanding of what racism was in terms of unequal treaties in Turkey, of course, it's only known as capitulation and many Turks think that it only happened to the Ottoman Empire but not rest of the world. So it's only in that context, we focus on this tragedy that many of the anti colonial thinkers are many of the non European thinkers who wanted to create a different better world so east west Islam as distinction as something imposed by European colonialism as part of the civilising mission ideology or racial hierarchies. They wanted to transcend this to create a more egalitarian, equal humanity. But in that anti colonial mode, many chose to redefine these concepts rather than offering an alternative framework of thinking, we can blame colonise societies, figures from Gandhi, Tagore, to Sun Yat-sen to Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh, we do know, we do see that in their writings, they were hoping to at least formulate an alternative vision of humanity. That's also the title of your project, their takhayyul was very rich, their imagination. They were imagining a better future, and they saw the problem of East West, something like black race and a white race or yellow race and white race. They wanted to transcend it. But in that process, they decided to redefine these categories with the hope that they can still transcend it eventually. So the tragedy of decolonization is that we haven't moved beyond these categories that divided humanity, even though 1000s or hundreds of people wanted to transcend these divisions of humanity. And I think what I was trying to do in both of the books, not only the previous one, the earlier one too, to see why these dualist thinking was so attractive, appealing, and why it's it persisted to the age of decolonization and still, as you describe still haunts the contemporary world politics. But there are many reasons I think, why this happened, I think the initial defensive anti colonial project of humanism was trying to achieve equality between East and West and there was no other way that was the problem. At some point, there was a counter attack, and this counter attack was encouraged by Europeans who are discontent with the Western civilization themselves. I do, I do think that we have to take this what I call the theosophical moment seriously. So in the late 19th, early 20th century theosophists, initially focusing on Hindu and Buddhist anti colonialism, argued that non Europeans shouldn't emulate the West but they should go back to their authentic roots to save the west from themselves, the west from from their own crisis of materialism, colonialism and racism. And the best example of this is that how, for example, Mahatma Gandhi became a symbol of philosophical modernity and anti colonial nationalism. His title, Mahatma is actually not a traditional Hindu title, but it was actually reformulated by the theosophists in England and given to him and it kind of stayed with us. Initially, Muhammad Ali Jinnah was very upset that the nationalist leader was using this very spiritual term the grate soul, but the origins of the term is also going to this Europeans who are glorifying the East and Asia as a solution to the illness and the sickness of the West. I think these are interesting moments where we can see that even when people are trying to transcend this duality, there are so many reasons that so many actors are redefining these categories and making them live perhaps much longer beyond the expiration date that they were supposed to have. It's similar story happens with regard to Muslim societies in Islam and the West is supposed to, these terms are supposed to be redefined and challenged, but then it came back with a vengeance after the Cold War, especially in the last 10 years of the Cold War. I tried to trace why this clash of civilization narrative, which had a very different purpose initially survived and persisted through decolonization and the Cold War to came back in the late 20th century. 
 
HAZAL AYDIN  08:14 
Thank you, so following your answer to the first question we wanted to ask is Ummah, ummet in Turkish, a useful global concept?  
 
Cemil Aydin  08:23 
Very important concept historically, it has to be historicized obviously. And we can attribute that a great decolonizing intent and purpose, and some Muslims and non Muslims could argue that may be an alternative concepts against the dominance of Western epistemology, the Ummah as well as caliphate. What I was trying to argue is that as a historian, even though Ummah is presented as an alternative to the Western notion of nation and humanity, we need to historicize the term Ummah itself. So we need to decolonize the term that's supposed to be very decolonizing in that regard that it has always been redefined throughout Muslim history, there was no one state static understanding of the Ummah since the time of the Prophet Muhammad. It went through some sort of reimagination through the Age of Empires, and Muslims never lived under one single political unit. So, I was trying to highlight the Imperialness of the Ummah for the late 19th century.  And I noted the irony, that idea of a Muslim unity or the Ummah, reached its golden age, ironically, in the late 19th century, early 20th century under the rule of the kind of European Western hegemony, both intellectually and politically. I tried to highlight how this notion did not, this notion of Ummah as a Muslim world, as a kind of a geopolitical unit, as a civilization, as a historical narrative, as well as the narrative of a tremendous universalist world religion did not precede European colonialism, but then became co-constituted with that encounter of European colonialism and its epistemological conceptual orientalist arguments. Ummah is useful global concept. It depends on who what kind of use you want to put it,  different actors can obviously redefine it but why I was disturbed is that it became ahistorical term, that's very disturbing. And because it turned into ahistorical term, it loses its political, progressive, emancipatory political purpose. It also loses any political goal that it's supposed to have. I was very shocked how ahistorical it became. Actually initially it was dehistoricized by the European Orientalism as an insult. And then at some point, and Muslims also dehistoricized it as counter humanism, or as an alternative to European modernity. But what I mean by as an insult is in the European encounter with empires, like Ottomans, and Moguls and others, are in the European encounter with any Muslim societies whenever a Muslim has a very legitimate very understandable critique for equality and for rights, European response was often is that you're criticising me for being unjust, unfair, and racist and oppressive. But your critique does not aim for equality, you're just being Muslim, right? You're you're you're against me because of your Muslimness, that you want to revive your ummah against the British Empire. This wasn't true. This was never the case. Neither in the Ottoman Empire nor in the case of South Asia, I find it very paradoxical, that even though this was never the case. At some point, Muslims themselves thought that it would be a good idea to revive an idealistic utopian understanding of the Ummah as an alternative to European modernity, but we have to historicize when that happened, and how that happened. So in the books, attempt to historicize, I was trying to note that in the Namik Kemal's generation is in 1870s, and 1880s, there was still an attempt to preserve a diverse, cosmopolitan empire. So when Namik Kemal was going back to Islamic democracy, Quranic verses to justify parliament and shura, or when he was talking about Ummah solidarity, he was doing this in a way of affirming rights, equal rights for Muslims, both in international law, but also in various empires. But when we get to the notion of Ummah, in the age of nation states, then the notion completely changes that in that case, it's the concern is no longer preservation of an empire, empires are gone, then it becomes a notion of either making a nation bigger or creating a multinational configuration. So even starting with these simple observations, that our notion of OMA as a global concept needs to be historicized. And we need to go beyond this simple, very attractive narrative that Ommah was united in Europeans came to divide it. As a historian, we know that from early time of the Muslim community until 20th century Muslims were never politically united. And in fact, the idea of a unity or the need for unity only happened in in the age of colonialism in the late 19th, early 20th century. 
 
Unknown Speaker  13:22 
So where does a contemporary Turkey lie in the middle of all this?  
 
Cemil Aydin 13:28 
Great question. So, Turkey, at least, conservative intellectuals in Turkey, thinks that because of his Ottoman legacy, Turkey, was the leader of the Ummah, at least since Ottoman conquest of Egypt, Istanbul carried the title of the Caliphate. They're proud of the attention and the support Turkish Caliphate received, Ottoman caliphate received from the global Muslim public opinion. There are some sort of well known episodes of this is that yet it is true that colonised Muslim public opinion from India to Indonesia, look up to reforms in Ottoman Istanbul. And the spiritual prestige of the Ottoman Caliph increased in the age of colonialism, not necessarily the political one the idea the spiritual Caliphate was formulated. And because Ottoman Empire was ruling over all the major holy cities of pilgrimage, Mecca, Medina as well as Jerusalem and Karbala and Najaf, they ended up becoming the protectors of this kind of an idea of a spiritual Muslim community, both Shia and Sunni, and they become symbolically very important as a Muslim dynasty that could also be modern and be part of Europe. So if you look at Turkey's identity and opposition, we could see that it is an empire that was included in the European concept of empires, but it was also an empire that was racialized as Muslim empire and demonised, and it was glorified and embraced by non european Muslim, and non Muslim public opinion in Asia and Africa as a symbolically successful model of Eastern Muslim Asian modernity. But that empire joined World War I, and used pan Islamism as a war propaganda, in alliance with Germany is a highly misunderstood episode, then turn into a republic and then supposedly as a republic distance itself after Lozan and the abolishment of the caliphate from the Islamic world in order to join Europe. As you know, these are the most common narratives of History, both Arnold Toynbee and later on Samuel Huntington wrote that even though Turkey wanted to change civilization almost convert from Islamic civilization to Western civilization, that process could not have been completed. So it became a torn country in the middle, and domestically, there are still ideological camps in Turkey who taught that the conversion can be completed is just the Europeans who are betraying Turkey, even though Turkey is more European and Western, could be more European Western than European, and there is no reason to go back to the East and Islamic world while some groups, ideological groups see this as an alienation, as a mistake to leave the Eastern the Islamic world to join in Europe, which will never accept Turkey. So Turkey's story in the middle of all of this becomes a way to confirm East West quality even though in various moments in history, both in late Ottoman Empire and modern Republic Turkey tried to overcome or transcend this duality. So as a historian, I guess, you know, in the book, I was trying to discuss how the conceptual duality itself became a political problem, how historical narratives became also a political problem, and then try to offer a different narrative of history. So a couple of things are important. So one, for example, in terms of the narrative I tried to highlight in the chapters on the late 19th- early 20th century that the Turkey's Ottoman Empire's prestige and respect increased in the global Muslim and Asian, African public opinion, not because it was representing an alternative Eastern modernity, but precisely because it was also a Muslim member of the European club of empires. It's is now a completely forgotten episode. That part of Ottoman caliphates reputation came from the fact that the Caliph was a member of the civilised club of European great powers and empires despite the European rejection of that process. So I noted how fez become an interesting symbol of that attempt to be both Muslim and European and universal, as you know, fez adopted as a head gear for Ottoman bureaucrats to transcend the earlier divisions of the Millet(nation) system that everyone can bear the fez, and you wouldn't know whether someone is a Muslim, Christian or Jew. And beyond that fez was also Mediterranean thing is kind of a Greek and Moroccan legacy to it as fez is a capital city of Morocco, but as a headgear was supposed to symbolise Turkey belonging to this emerging European imperial civilization. But by early 20th century, it was clear that the fez became a symbol of Islam. It was even adopted by some of the African Americans in United States as a sign of their belonging to the Oriental wisdom civilization. So, fez appears in some of Beyonce's video clips, including lemonade, and kind of indirect reference to the Moorish Science Temple and African American Islam.  So, I think in the book, I tried to show that after Republic, Turkey did not actually leave Asia and Islamic world to join Europe, Turkey was always at least politically part of a club, and Asia and the Islamic world actually emerged in that struggle against Europe's double standards and European hypocrisy that Turks were trying to challenge. Well, this is what historians I think, do recently is to show why certain narratives we takeit for granted we see it as very natural, how they emerge, why they seem to be so attractive and embraced by people, and what we do by historicizing them. And then the book was also show why Turkey as a kind of a case study of a fractured nation between two civilizations. Why this is more of a late cold war, mid to late cold war product. It has something to do with Afro Asian challenge to European empires, and the Europe's own ethnocentrism rather than a tragic story of one nation belongs to one civilization trying to convert, but not achieving the full conversion and still keeping elements from the earlier conversation. So, Turkey lie in the middle of all of this I think if you think about topic of orientalism, racism and international order, I think is a good laboratory to see every pathology and every problem in this conceptual frameworks you can see being replicated in the discussions on Turkey whether modernization theory clash of civilization, or ideological battles like Islamism and Kemalism.  

 
HAZAL AYDIN  20:03 
Since your book was out in 2017, a number of political changes happened and all around the world, all adding up to the global populist rise and the effects of the new political Islam in this new turn. As the author of the idea of the Muslim world, which specific elements in your analysis seem to help us better understand this recent moment in political history? 
 

Cemil Aydin  20:26 
Great question. Since you invited colleague Darryl Li, I think in terms of the Idea of the Muslim World, as it is formulated or discussed in the last 20-30 years has something to do with the notion of a global war on terror, global war against jihad. Yeah, so the things became much darker and what we have seen, of course, with the rise of Trump and the populist right wing ideologies in Europe, which was already there beforehand. This, sometimes  so called Global War on Terror and political Islam might be hiding Christian crusade or a white race crusade. So sometimes it becomes very obvious that once you, you know, at the end of like 10-20 years war against Islamic political Islam first not only we see that Europe itself became more white and more Christian, and America too. So it's not clear what who's was fighting what, on what level. There are still some very mysterious things. For example, the Indian Hindu fundamentalist movement, which utilise global war and terror for their own political purposes against you know Pakistan or Kashmiris or their Muslim minorities is still appear as something familiar and preferable by the Europeans. I mean, no matter how much of a critique of India's oppression or Muslim minority in Europe, which makes Europeans feel good about themselves, but they still do not read Modi government as they should be reading Modi government may look more religious than a Muslim Brotherhood, right? That is basically Hindu Brotherhood government in some ways. In their own ideology in their discourse it's not seen as being significant. So there there is, the populism in Asia to that is very worrisome. As a historian, I think one of the most interesting long term contrasts with the late 19th century and today's that, at least in the late 19th, early 20th century, Hindus like Gandhi or Buddhist or Chinese like Sun Yat-sen, and Muslims, they were in alliance with each other. We know that Gandhi was one of the most popular politician in Egypt, including among the Manar circles, and they will see racism and clash of civilizations theories that is propagated and promoted by European empires, but the Asians will say that, well, we are offering an alternative we are together for Hindu Muslim unity, or Muslim Chinese unity, or genuinely pan Islamic pan asian unity and solidarity. Fast forward in 100 years is that not only that the Europe got back on it's more of a Christian white supremacist ideas, especially with regard to Muslims, but Asia is also fractured in some ways that China, India, Muslim Asia are seem to be also in conflict with each other in different ways. So, I have no simple explanation why this this long term transformation happened. But one thing I do observe is that, and I could see it in the comments on my book, if I publish, or my articles in magazines, or online journals, sometimes I see that "oh this is another Muslim professor in America thinking that all the fault belongs to the West and how we created the Islamic world. What about jihadists? Did they just come from another universe?" Which is interesting critique actually, older Jihadists has actually appeared in this work, right? They didn't come from another universe. So but then there will also be comments from Muslims saying that why is the secular person denying that all Muslims believe in the Caliphate. Somehow it seems like all Muslims are supposed to believe in the caliphate, and by historicizing the caliphate you're also betraying that. And sometimes these two comments confirm and reinforce each other. Because, Europeans also think that any critic of European colonialism is the nostalgia for Muslim political systems of jihad and caliphate and oppression of minorities and Jizya. And it's really hard to tell people that when Jizya was abolished, first of all it was abolished by a Muslim monarch by the Caliph, by the Muslim clerics, it was it was gone and I have never seen anyone saying that oh, we need to bring Jizya back. Um, have you ever seen any Ottoman intellectual in 1870s' Abdulhamid  or Young Turks or Republicans? There was none, zero. Jizya was just vanished, right? And the same is true for the caliphate too, by the way, I think by in the 1950s there is no one is asking for return or two caliphate. But these tropes remain active in European imagination. So it is one of the bigger puzzles is that, you know, even when Muslim societies are creating secular nation states, and even when they are really more secular than other Asian societies in many ways, and I will insist that Muhammad Ali Jinnah was more secular than Mahatma Gandhi in his own way. But then looking back, Gandhi is interpreted to be more secular than Jinnah, and it's perceived as Muslims who couldn't want to live in a secular India wanted to separate it's the opposite, in some ways, in many ways. And there were so many cases that I could smile when I read in the 60s and 70s when they were nation states and Muslim societies, there were so many ideological movements like Nasserism and panArabism. It's the European and American orientalist will say like, what happened to the ummah, you know, why are Muslims are so secular? What happened to the Muslim unity, what happened to the caliphate? It seems like they're really disturbed that their job lost their significance that they, you know, they trained themselves with, to understand the two texts, right, that early texts, everything about Muslims today. So there is a strange moment or after the Iranian revolution, it feels like burnout, an old Orientals felt like they're, you know, they're deserving their own salary, and they can explain it by referring to, everything about Muslim politics by referring to early Islam, which is equally wrong, and you could see that even someone like Michael Cooke, who keeps writing things that are to explain contemporary Muslim politics, with reference to texts from 10th 20th year after Muhammad, or you know, around in first 100 -200 years. Methodologically that's impossible to explain. Even when some of the political parties or ideologies who are trying to revive the Ummah, the caliphate and jihad, there is a way, as a historian to explain how modern ideology is trying to use old concepts for very different purposes. I think I refer to that in my book, but when whenever there was a bombing or, or a nationalist, anti colonial attack on British officers in India, European interpretation was mainly that it must be done by Muslims, even though they will arrest the person who's happened to be a Hindu or a Sikh, that they will insist that Hindus wouldn't do such a thing.  These are sometimes Germans, who are friends of the Islamic world, they will say that if someone is putting a bomb on in the governor's car in Bengal, it must be a Muslim because they believe in Jihad, and Hindus wouldn't do such a thing. When we know looking back that all the planners were and the nationals who are not glorified as heroes are Hindus.  
 
Sertaç Sehlikoglu  27:46 
There is this issue of racialized Muslims. And in my mind, everything we're saying is connected to this kind of almost Muslim exceptionalism. Oh, there are Muslims, they should be different. And as if every critique, including secularism, including feminism, including democracy, every kind of progressive critical thinking needs to be imported by Muslims from outside, and that outside is always the West as well. So this kind of it's reinforcing the same dichotomy. When you were saying, you know, these two parties who are critical to you, they're not actually, you're right, they're the kind of opposite ends of the very same spectrum and it's almost as if, you know, I don't know what you feel, but I feel like it's a kind of reassurance as an intellectual. 
 
Cemil Aydin  28:30 
As a historian, there's nothing else I could see. You know, we have to historicize and show the historical context. I do not see an anti imperialist Abdulhamid, like Che Guevara in the palace. He was an emperor. You don't need to demonise him, he may have done really great things modernising Ottoman government, but the idea that he was the leader of the Ummah and he was defending the Ummah against Western colonialism is a fiction invented in the 40s and 50s by Turkish conservative thinkers like Necip Fazil Kisakurek,and there are so many bizarre twisted history actually, what they attribute to Abdulhami is Enver Pasha, was more close to Ataturk and Ismet Inonu, you know these were all same generation, but because Enver Pasha was discredited for leading Turkey to defeat in World War One, they attribute everything he said, and he wanted to do to Abdulhamid without mentioning his name. And nobody in Turkey also knows the Caliph who declared jihad against European empire. So do you know the name of the caliphate declared jihad against European empires, he is buried in Eyupsultan, which Caliph actually declared jihad well under which Calif Ottoman Empire declared jihad against European empires? Everybody in Turkey people think it was like Abdulhamid doing this, Abdulhamid was already gone, overthrown. People who actually overthrow Abdulhamid declared jihad against European empires. You know, very simple things and in Turkey, I always realised that, even the most greatest advocate of Caliphate would not know which chalip declaration Sultan Reshad Mehmet Reshad who was considered is a weak one and always under the control of Cemal, Talat and Enver. He's buried in Eyupsultan. If you ever go, in  behind there's a special place for him. It also shows the kind of power of trolling.  I consider Necip Fazil as a most successful troll in Turkish intellectual history. He is a good poet,  if he were to live today, I'm sure he would have like 100 million followers in Twitter, and just having these fantastic formulations and slogans, which is historically inaccurate, but very attractive and appealing. Yeah, this is a puzzle of intellectual history. We don't know what to do with it.  How a fiction can be so powerful in later periods. 
 
HAZAL AYDIN  30:49 
Do you think if anti Muslim or Orientalist discourse facilitated Islamist politics and rhetorics of grievance, and if so, how? And in relation to this, how did ideas of Orientalism boomerang back to the Muslim world through discourses on anti colonial modernity Muslim reform and so on? What have been the consequences of this form of modern Islamic ideology and rhetoric? 
 
Cemil Aydin  31:15 
The relationship between Orientalist and pan-Islamists are very well known. So we do know that, I mean, Orientalist and every form of Muslim intellectual like we know that when Sinasi went to Paris, we would hang out with Ernest Renan. We know that Abul Kalam Azad, Louis Massignon, and you know, this is a very common thing that if you are an intellectual from Muslim majority countries, if you're in Paris and London, you will meet people who study your language and write books about you. There are also correspondence between Orientalist and Egyptian intellectuals or Indian ones. So, they do share the sort of conceptual framework and they don't have to create a kind of a conspiracy theory behind these things. And I think there is part of our "Takhayyul"  (imagination ), everybody in this amazing time of utopia and globalisation, to people.. to try to understand the rapidly changing world, and try to shape it, and try to give a certain direction, and try to defend their rights, and these are all political struggles. But a couple of broader forgotten strands that I wanted to highlight in this story. So Muslim intellectuals were not passive recipients of Orientalist categories, it will be very unfair to say that they were fooled, or they were gullible. And they adopted this east-west framework. There was something before that it was you know, so these frameworks can be also be very empowering, and it wasn't only the Muslims who did the Japanese, Chinese and other Asians, for example, use the word Asia in a very nice way to substantiate their nationalist claims. Still, today, Pan Africanist and African Americans used idea of Africa that redefined what it means to be Black and African without rejecting it. You can say that, you know, Africa itself, similar to Muslim Ummah, is a modern categorization. In fact, what the idea of different African civilization, the idea of a black culture and civilization is initially ascribed to Africans. Africans before the 19th century didn't see themselves as part of single civilization, or a single race. And today, they still hold on to it. As you know, from the last Marvel movie, The Black Panther represents a kind of a Pan African narrative of identity and history. But as I told in my class to my students, is that Hollywood would never make a movie called Arab Panther or a Muslim panther, it will be too scary, maybe Muslims will do it, but then we wouldn't know what happens. AND when Muslims do it, though, and I talked about this is that if Muslims do a movie like Black Panther, like Muslim Panther, how would you depict the women in the red? Would they have Shruti, the scientist or a queen mother? Or would they think that in order to decolonize their society they will have veiled or secluded woman or some sort of alternative clothing for women? I think the Orientalism becomes crucial in those aspects. So, there is a there is a time where decolonization or decolonizing ideologies argue that in order to assert Muslim modernity and agency, you need to go back to the authentic roots of Islam, and not emulate the West. But this idea itself is very modern, very new, this wasn't the case with Namik Kemal. Namik Kemal went back to early Islam, to show its compatibility or harmony with constitutional European ideas of enlightenment. So he's an enlightenment thinker, but he thinks that Islam and enlightenment are compatible. But when we get to in the 40s 50s 60s, there are people who say that in order to be truly modern, you go back to authentic Islam, or authentic Hinduism or authentic Buddhism, and I think in the Turkish audiences, or Muslim audiences, the most important figure who represented that turn is actually a convert. Convernts can be very important, René Guénon  who is a perennialist, who declared that the modern world is in crisis, and Muslims shouldn't emulate the west or Asians or Orientals, and they go back to their authentic roots. And I think that encouragement to go back to authentic roots initially did not have conservative or theocratic significance. It was still very modernist, it was still in the form of curing the modern work from Western crisis created by the Western colonialism and racism, but then it did overlap with other trends that we call Salafi modernism. In terms of intellectual history, I think this is a very new, and overlooked aspect of intellectual history that the calls to go back to salaf, to authentic roots, which was seen as a sign of Muslims always going back to early Islam to "Asr-i Saadet", the age of felicity, or the time of Sahaba, might have been actually an encouragement, an idea promoted by global but theosophist office thinkers from 1910s to 1940s and 50s. This is a long way of saying that the relationship between Orientalist and Islamists, modern Islamic thought is much more complex. It's very intimate, and it's not over yet, and it needs to be better analysed by younger generation of scholars. I guess there's more work to be done. But we would like to go beyond the simple formula of the orientalist impacting modern Muslim thinkers, I think modern Muslim thinkers also impacting Orientalists and they are doing something that is much beyond the capacity of Orientalists themselves, this anti colonial politics have a lot to do with these formulations. 
 
Sertaç Sehlikoglu  37:01 
I want to add one more point about this, actually, regarding anthropological angle, I kind of find it very problematic, regarding this kind of how these two parties seem to be feeding each other. I think it's partly, at least in the field of anthropology and a range of I don't know, sociology of Islam, I suppose, there's this tendency to focus on what I call canonical Islam as the form of Islam. So all other critical forms are kind of seen as diluted by the Western ideologies or Western impact. So then when we centralise that kind of particular type of canonical or populist forms of Islam, and Islamic politics and they would continue feeding each other, there's this problem existing. So actually, my next question was going to be about Abdulhamid, I did find your every analysis and reflections on Abdulhamid quite exciting actually. This is partly because my readings of Islamist narrative have a particular heroic portrayal of Abdulhamid and I'm speaking specifically on accounts of particular type of his ideologues that are kind of establishing themselves as more like popular historians. So, I think my question related to that, would it be just to keep things focused: Is it possible to use Abdulhamid period to not fall into the dualist gaps, they seem to create very, they being these kinds of Islamic ideologues seem to create very easily. Instead of this perhaps to complicate the processes, Westernisation, colonialism and Empire. 
 
Unknown Speaker  38:35 
It's a great question. Because Abdulhamid became such a over politicised, over utilised symbol and metaphor,  sometimes you feel like there is nothing you can to rescue this from all these fictions and lies and metaphors, and maybe we should just focus on something else.  
 
Sertaç Sehlikoglu  38:56 
Just to give an idea to the audience who's not familiar, one of the titles of books series that's composed of multiple volumes is called the "Abdulhamid's Dance with the Wolves.  
 
Cemil Aydin  39:05 
Yes, this is true. It seems to have an intelligence agency that infiltrating the Buckingham Palace and forestall the division of the Middle East and Balfour Declaration and Zionism but you know, some of these things are simple lies, I mean Abdulhamid gave Theodor Herzl a metal, and then in the movie you show him as like trying to destroy him, or after limit served European ambassadors wine and then in the movie, you see that he's slapping them. You know British ambassador orders lighted up to limit never lost the territory, like are you kidding me? Like do you ever look at the date? He lost more territory than any other emperor in all those? I mean, actually, he lost the most of it, this includes Tunisia in the Balkans and if Abdulhamid didn't lose any, like who did it? It's not very clear. It's actually only him before the Young Turks, who would lose also all the Arab lands, but he's complex figure, and one way to challenge that to see how complex he is, like he  likes operas and, he is a European style monarch. So you can go and do a good study of him and rescue him from both this kind of anti Abdulhamid polemics or  pro Abdulhamid glorification, that could be one strategy. You can also do more of a comparative thing right? He is contemporary of the Emperor Meiji. He's also highly respected, and revered by the global Muslim public opinion. There are reasons for his is respect and reverence. And his diplomacy is very smart. My colleagues, for example, show that under his reign, international law office of the foreign ministry was highly developed. So instead of fighting, he actually tried to use international law to preserve the empire, and that's his job description to defend and preserve the empire. That makes him more legal internationalist and anyone else and actually, the next generation, the generation of Ataturk they saw Abdulhamid as weak and feminine, because they thought he's just using diplomacy and international law and they kind of thought that failed. So there is some sort of a masculinist militarist term. After the Japanese were, actually Ataturk uses the kind of in his biography, in his memoirs on this Japanese term of the spirit of attack. He says that talking and diplomacy and law is not enough we need to fight, and this is very common to all the non European empires a nationalist and I always give the example of the Chinese Nationalist Sun Yat-sen, he is such a great speaker. In one of his talks on great Asianism he praises Turkey a lot you know, Lausanne and Mustafa Kemal and Turkish Republic. But he, when he paraphrases, the phrase of Turkey, and Ottoman Empire, he says, We in Asia and Africa, when we are discriminated and oppressed, first thing we do, we talk back, we express the truth to power. But this is what has never worked. You could never change your condition by just talking against Orientalists. I mean, think off all the professors in America and England, we have been writing and thinking as Edward Said, and our impact is close to zero, I guess. Talking is never, you know, we can train so many students, we can say, try to decolonize scholarship. He (Sun Yat-sen) says it does not help us to liberate, then he says the second step is solidarity, and the third step, he says, we have to play dirty, you know, arm ourselves, militarily and power ourselves. That's why he likes Turkish war of independence and Ataturk. And he sees that as a good example, after Japan, using the military and the fighting, and then diplomacy and truth telling, as a way to emancipate Asia from European colonial rule. And I think in some ways, the relationship between the generation of upper limit and Tanzimat diplomats and Young Turks is that, I think the Young Turks thought that this was more of a spiritual, legalist, diplomatic, and feminine diplomacy, strategy, and they can do better. And then they found out that they couldn't do any better. But it's in some ways, then we can maybe go back to write a very good biography of Abdulhamid or a very good books on his era, which has been done by many colleagues since Selim Deringil's first book on Abdulhamid, right. Selim Deringil's book on Abdulhamid is actually is a good balance between these two extremes, and then many colleagues have continued that tradition. We can rescue him from this duality that, I think, is possible. 
 
Sertaç Sehlikoglu  43:39 
Thank you very much for your time, Professor Aydin. We are extremely thrilled, seriously, I can't kind of put this into words fully enough, to have started with you, to have started the podcast series, Imagining Turkey, with you. Thank you for joining us. 
 
Cemil Aydin  43:55 
It's a great pleasure. 
 
Sertaç Sehlikoglu  44:01 
You have listened to Imagining Turkey Podcast Series, hosted at UCL's Institute for Global Prosperity, funded by the European Research Council.