Asil, Ercüment
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Ercüment Asil
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Islamic History, Ottoman History, Turkish History, History of Science
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Yayın Is there life outside earth?: Negotiating religious and scientific authority in late Ottoman periodicals(MESA, 2020) Asil, Ercüment; Asil, Ercüment; Asil, ErcümentThis paper rethinks the inflow of Western ideas into the Ottoman Empire through the metaphor of ‘cultural translation,’ which conceives of ‘translators’ as active ‘negotiators’ rather than simple transmitters. These ‘translators and negotiators’ also defy the binary of advocates or rejectors of new ideas. This paper will focus on the reformist ulema as both ‘translators’ of the prestige of modern science and as ‘negotiators’ of scientific authority vis-à-vis religious authority. To depict the complexity of the process of translation and negotiation, I focus on the debate surrounding extraterrestrial life. Its largely speculative nature reveals the ideological assumptions of the negotiators. Unlike more concrete discussions, the debates surrounding extraterrestrial life reflect the complexity of the discursive and rhetorical aspects of nineteenth-century-Ottomans’ perception of European science, its prestige, and authority vis-à-vis Islam. Since the Copernican revolution, the belief in the multiplicity of habitable worlds spread such that by the end of the eighteenth century, life in other planets was almost taken for granted by the Western reading public. However, while belief in extraterrestrial life started to fade in the West from 1860s onwards, it continued to draw increasing attention among the Ottomans. Relevant articles on this issue appeared from the 1870s to 1920s in Ottoman popular journals such as Hadika, Ulum, Hikmet, Mahfil, Malumat, and Resimli Kitap. In 1909, the issue of life outside earth received direct attention of the ulema in the pages of the prominent Islamist journal S?rat?müstakim, where two opposing religious scholars engaged into a fierce debate. The scientistic or progressivist one held that the Qur’an included verses on extraterrestrial life though authoritative exegetes failed to acknowledge them. The conservative one, however, rejected this position inasmuch as it attempted to question the authority of earlier prominent ulema. Obviously, such an attempt must have been based on strong reason and solid evidence. In their defenses, both the scientistic and the conservative scholars appealed to the traditional Islamic epistemology and methodology and adapted them to discuss a modern scientific issue, which renders the debate as a case that resonates with the metaphor of ‘translation’ of a ‘foreign’ debate into a ‘native’ one. This paper uses concepts of ‘translation’ and ‘negotiation’, to explain ways in which science, theology, and exegesis crosscut each other. The two seemingly contradictory positions functioned equally as two different modes of resisting cultural imperialism and Western supremacy.Yayın The Tanzimat novel in the service of science: On Ahmet Midhat Efendi’s American Doctors(I.B. Tauris, 2020) Asil, Ercüment; Asil, ErcümentIn the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when Ottomans started to syste1natically adopt European science and technology, they largely conceived of it as an addendum to their established body of traditional knowledge (ilim). flim was a concept, which, thanks to religious and scholarly works composed over the course of thirteen centuries, enjoyed immense prestige among both scholars and lay people alike...Yayın Rational theology in speculative science: Extraterrestrial life debates in the late Ottoman Empire(Gesellschaft fu?r Turkologie, Osmanistik und Tu?rkeiforschung (GTOT), 2018) Asil, Ercüment; Asil, Ercüment; Asil, ErcümentBy setting the earth into motion the Copernican revolution had opened a venue for the possibility of extraterrestrial life in other planets inasmuch as they were now “similar” to earth (principle of similarity). By the end of the eighteenth century, this possibility slowly evolved into a strong belief thanks to the theological “principle of plenitude,” which dictated that life had to be widespread in the universe inasmuch as it was the highest form of existence that reflected God’s power and mercy. When combined, these two principles of similarity and plenitude provided a strong ground for the belief in the multiplicity of habitable worlds and extraterrestrial life until the early twentieth century. However, by 1860s further scientific discoveries had already started to weaken the strength of this belief in the West, while the debate was still lively in the Ottoman Empire. This paper will explore articles appearing from 1870s onwards in Ottoman popular journals such as Hadika, Ulum, Hikmet, Mahfil, and Malumat as well as monographies published at the turn of the century. My preliminary research reveals striking similarities between the Western and Islamic debates. These debates subvert the classical assumption that religion opposed science by showing how theological convictions justified scientific studies in a highly speculative field. Furthermore, some religious arguments re-employed this already theologically-bolstered scientific hope for extraterrestrial life with the purpose of “rationalizing” the existence of supernatural entities as spirits and angels; hence, further complicating the relationship between science and theology at the turn of the century.
