Yalçınkaya|281Mustafa Sabri, an eminent religious scholar and a critic of Turkish nationalism,
replied, “Cahit says, ‘Let us not worry about the sciences of the Arabs, let us look
at ourselves.’ But who are we anyway? We are a perfect totality of components
with an essence fashioned by Islam.” The sciences of the Arabs were thus “our”
sciences, and arguments like Cahit’s essentially resulted from a mistaken un-
derstanding of who “we” were. The scholarly legacy in question constituted an
essential component of “us,” and while European sciences could be used to solve
some of the empire’s urgent problems, they could never replace the true legacy
that was the Islamic sciences. The future well-being of the Ottomans depended
on this legacy, and Ottoman identity could not be defined in a way exclusionary
or condescending toward the Arabs.
In a similar vein, the poet Süleyman Nazif criticized the attitudes of the
Turkists and asked in 1908, “What will we be left with, if we return what belongs
to the Arabs to the Arabs, and what belongs to the Persians to the Persians?” The
response came from the Turkist Ahmed Agayef, who wrote, “We will be left with
the honor of having protected and defended Islam for a thousand years.” But—
presumably also to not relegate the Turkish contribution to “the sword”—Agayef
also asserted, “Had Turks not existed, humanity would not have seen Ibn Sina or
Farabi.” And in the contemporary world, Turks were the only progressing nation
in Asia other than the Japanese, and it was clearly still the Turks who were guid-
ing the Muslim world.
Thus, in the early twentieth century, the scientific legacy that the Ottomans
could claim as their own was transformed into a more divisive issue than it had
ever been before. The Turkishness of Ibn Sina and Farabi became not only taken
for granted by many authors but also a “fact” that had to be reiterated in any
discussion on the place of the Ottomans as well as Muslims in the history of
humanity. The emphasis on the Turkishness of these scholars had emerged in the
1860s, but it became an ever more central component of the emerging Turkish
nationalist ideology in the early twentieth century.
***Similar to other peripheral societies, what the Ottomans faced in the nineteenth
and the twentieth centuries was not just economic or military hardship. As Ot-
toman intellectuals were quick to observe, their worthiness of being mentioned
in the Eurocentric, but allegedly universal, history of humanity was at stake. In
a period in which contributions to this history were increasingly about contribu-
tions to science, Ottomans found themselves in the position of searching for a
legacy that could be part of this universal history of science. But precisely this
effort to delineate a legacy would make it particularly difficult to avoid the ques-
tion of identity. As this chapter demonstrates, even before nationalist ideologies