Mehmet Karabela

Late Ottoman intellectual history, especially the nineteenth century, was seen by Bernard Lewis (in his The Emergence of Modern Turkey, 1961) and Niyazi Berkes (in his Aristotelian teleological work The Development of Secularism in Modern Turkey, 1964) as a “natural evolution” towards a “new” Republican Turkey leading up to the modernization/secularization of the country. Accordingly, political scientists and Orientalists in Europe and North America have commonly presented a history of Islamism outside of Ottoman experience, starting with the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood Hasan al-Banna of Egypt (d. 1949) in the early twentieth century, and respectively, Islamic modernism beginning in Egypt with Muhammad Abduh (d. 1905) during the nineteenth century.