Ph.D.:

2017-2021, Free University of Berlin (Global History)

M.A.

2013-16, Ludwig Maximilian University Munich (Turkology)—Boğaziçi University, Istanbul (History)

B.A.

2009-2013, Leipzig University (Arab Studies)—Ayn-Shams University, Cairo (Arabic language)—Istanbul University, Istanbul (History)

Concept/Intellectual History, Late Ottoman History, Global History, Sufism, Print History, Ottoman Literature

Current Project

The Age of Reform as an Age of Piety? Revisiting the Concepts that drove Ottoman Transformation (1780-1860)

This project interrogates the change of concepts and practices of piety in Ottoman Islamic society in the first half of the 19th century. More concretely, the project seeks to explore piety—an individual and collective attitude, conduct and view of the world that is deeply rooted in a particular supernatural and transcendent belief system—by looking at the activities of the strictly Sunni-orthodox Naqshibandi Sufi Order. Reinvigorated by the (originally) Indian Muceddidī subvariant, this order dramatically increased its presence in turn-of-the-nineteenth-century Istanbul and eventually embraced large sections of the Muslim social, political, and intellectual elite. Weaving together a social and concept history, this project will analyze the networks, activities, and writings of this order and therbey seeks to assess changing regimes of Islamic piety in the 19^th century and, moreover, to understand how shifts in piety were interrelated with larger, seismic changes in state-society relations.

 

Ph.D. Thesis :

The Making and Universalization of New Time: A History of the Late Ottoman-Turkish Magazine Servet-i Fünûn (1891-1914)

This dissertation argues that Ottoman conceptions of historical time and change underwent a radical transformation in the second half of the 19th century. As a result of the Ottoman Empire’s integration into a Eurocentric world-order Ottoman intellectuals began to imagine a universal “modern civilization” (medenîyet-i ḥâżıra), which was the chiffre for an unprecedented and promising new age in human history that was, however, geographically located in Western Europe. Similarly, transcending the decline and reform discourse of previous centuries, Muslim thinkers began to conceive of Ottoman society as belonging to an earlier stage in human history. Deciphering and harnessing the laws of historical progress became the single most pressing concern to them. Based on an extensive archive of Turkish-language publications, this dissertation reconstructs the conceptual underpinnings of this discourse of the new time as well as the Turkish concepts used to imagine and propel historical change such as teraḳḳî, temeddün, tekâmül, or inḳılâb. Foregrounding the performativity of these concepts, the research shows how contemporary discourses of self-orientalization, Europeanization, as well as of anti-imperialist projects of Islamic reform and Turkism were decisively shaped by this increasingly global discourse of historical change. This stress on the making of new Ottoman conceptions of historical time brings to the fore a hitherto little-noticed factor in the swift transformations of late Ottoman society. As the dissertation traces the development and ramifications of this nascent discourse of new time in wider Ottoman society, it particularly stresses how it was shaped by the literary, philosophical, and political ideas introduced by the illustrated weekly Servet-i Fünûn (1891-1919; 1923-1944). The journal was written and read by a radically “Westernist” (garbcı) circle of Muslim, elite-school graduates in Istanbul, who constituted the empire’s political and intellectual elite during the Second Constitutional Period.