A Strategic Eurocentrism: The Construction of Ottoman Evolutionism in an Uneven World (1870–1900)

Abstract

Istanbul's intellectual life saw an evolutionist paradigm shift during the Hamidian period (1876–1908). Two generations of intellectuals used their privileged education and the burgeoning printing press to popularize evolutionism to advance global and local claims. On the one hand, selective readings of evolutionism allowed them to claim Ottoman adherence to a superior Caucasian race and to claim belonging to the circle of “civilized nations.” On the other hand, by hailing themselves champions of a new positivist age, oppositional evolutionists sought to challenge the Hamidian establishment and the kind of Islam it represented. Because examinations of Ottoman evolutionism in the Hamidian period reveal the interconnections between new globalized ways of ordering the world, the rise of new Ottoman elites, and conflicting strategies to guarantee imperial survival in the asymmetrical age of empire, they allow transcending narratives centered on the (ir)reconcilability of Islam and evolutionary theories.

Today, we do not unquestioningly accept studies and theories that were once established by scholars about sciences and laws; new scientific progresses have revealed other scientific truths to us. In fact, sciences that have been known since ancient times [devr-i ḳadīm] have been shaken to the core.¹

In 1894, an Ottoman journalist praised evolutionism as a revolutionary paradigm shift in conceptions of creation and human nature. In line with this theory, he argued that “morality and virtues” (aḫlāḳ ve fażāʾil)—the social glue of “civilization”—were not innate to humans but predicated on physiological dispositions that have evolved over hundreds of years.² To illustrate this, his article contrasted the brains of newly “civilized savages” (mütemeddin vaḥşīler) in North America to those of contemporary Ottomans. While Ottoman brains were perfectly disposed to exert “good moral qualities” (aḫlāḳ-ı ḥasene) because Ottomans had been grappling with ethics and moral philosophy for centuries, indigenous peoples were incapable of doing so. Even if they learned European languages and mastered intellectually demanding professions, the article reasoned, their brains are still physiologically too inept for good moral qualities. Emphasizing this interrelation between civilized behavior and cerebral evolution over centuries, the journalist asked, “Does that mean that brains of those humans who progress in civilization grow and evolve in quantity and quality? There is no doubt about that.”³ Ultimately, this text from 1894 shows that Ottoman intellectuals used evolutionism as a new lens not only to explain nature and human differences but also to make new claims about their own place in an uneven world.

To date, historiography has studied evolutionism in the Muslim, Turkish-speaking parts of Ottoman society during the Hamidian period (1876–1908) mainly from two sides: either as the project of socially marginal, highly educated but ultimately scientifically inept and delusional oppositional figures in exile, or as something contemporary intellectuals perceived as a menace to Ottoman society because it either undermined the Islamic moral order of society or reduced Turks to the rank of an inferior Asiatic race.⁴ While building on this scholarship, I will foreground the versatility and political usefulness of evolutionism and argue that this paradigm was actually more popular in late Ottoman society than has previously been suggested.⁵ To do that, I go beyond historically contentious or overly narrow categories such as (vulgar) materialism, social Darwinism, and positivism and present a more capacious and inclusive concept of evolutionism as a science-based belief in the physiological mutability and perfectibility of every creature according to universal laws over millions of years.⁶ This new and more encompassing concept not only allows engaging with Ottoman encyclopedists, littérateurs, teachers, and pedagogues who have conventionally not been considered “evolutionist” because they do not neatly fit into historiographical categories. It also reveals the porous, dynamic, and contested nature of Turkish-language intellectual life during the Hamidian era, thereby providing a fresh look at an epoch often reduced to a stifling censorship regime that was, in its flexibility, still far from total.⁷ Consequently, I argue that Ottoman evolutionism entailed three major (and interconnected) intellectual shifts: first, a rising belief in a science-driven cosmological paradigm shift that reformatted and even sidelined inherited concepts of nature; second, a new concept of humankind as historical and evolving even long after creation; and third, the concept of unequal evolution in time according to which the “white race,” to which many Ottomans claimed to belong, was superior to other races.

This appeal of West and Central European evolutionist theories to Ottoman intellectuals should not be misread as the irresistible triumph of modern sciences. Nor is this a reiteration of diffusionist notions of “European civilization” as the sole motor of world-historical transformations.⁸ Wary of such readings, historians studying the globalization of ideas have warned against retroactively explaining the globalization of West European ideas such as evolutionism as predetermined by their “built-in universality.”⁹ Moreover, they have cautioned against reducing those non-Western historical actors who engaged with said “universal” ideas to “avatars of Eurocentrism” whose subaltern agency was limited to redeeming these ideas’ universal potential.¹⁰ A global-history perspective addresses such misconceptions. Rejecting notions of “built-in universality,” the approach asks instead for the reasons why ideas became appealing to intellectuals across the world. It thereby shifts analytical focus away from the ideas themselves to the global structures, conditions, moments, and actors that propelled the circulation of ideas in transnational intellectual fields.¹¹ Global history thereby overcomes both the producer–recipient binaries and the logic of “first in Europe, then elsewhere” that have haunted many non-Western intellectual histories.¹²

That Ottoman intellectuals participated in the globalization of evolutionism was not owed to its inherent universality but to expediency; the paradigm was key to their own political, social, and intellectual projects. Evolutionism was not only an ideological alternative to the pan-Islamic ideology of Sultan–Caliph Abdülhamid II. It was also, more generally, a strategic response to the Ottoman “problem-space.” Anthropologist David Scott introduced the concept of “problem-space” to grasp an “ensemble of questions and answers around which a horizon of identifiable stakes (conceptual as well as ideological–political stakes) hangs.”¹³ Reminding us thereby that any idea always is an intervention to a historically specific context of argument, Scott pushes us to reconsider Ottoman evolutionism as more than a motley of disparate utterances but as addressing a particular fin de siècle Ottoman problem-space. It consisted of questions of Ottoman and Islamic decline, global unevenness, fears of colonialism, negotiations of imperial and national identity, challenges to inherited epistemologies, and matters of societal reform. Many of those intellectuals who based their answers to this Ottoman problem-space on evolutionism saw in it one of the most versatile and powerful discursive devices of global positioning.¹⁴ They spoke in a Eurocentric “lingua franca that promised to endow their ideas with universal validity,” all the while sidelining Islamic hermeneutics and endorsing Eurocentric power hierarchies.¹⁵

This deliberate Eurocentrism on the part of many Ottoman evolutionists thereby neither was an instance of “subaltern fulfillment,”¹⁶ nor should it be understood as proof of Islam's innate incompatibility with this paradigm; it was a strategic choice by historical actors. Seizing on evolutionism's claims to scientific truth to delineate new universalist frameworks that transcended notions of East (şarḳ) and West (garb), Ottoman intellectuals remolded concepts of society, race, nature, universal laws, and history. These reformatted concepts were instrumental for challenging the Ottoman Empire's imagined subaltern rank in an asymmetrical world order as well as for prescribing new theories of social and intellectual transformation to their compatriots. To conclude, I offer a new account of one of the most momentous paradigm shifts in late Ottoman intellectual life that studies Ottoman evolutionism neither as a default function of the universalism of Western ideas nor as a failed appropriation, but foregrounds the social actors who used evolutionism in strategically Eurocentric ways as they tried to save the Ottoman Empire.

New global orders and new orders of nature

Islamic conceptions of creation were underpinned by the Neoplatonic notion of a cosmic great chain of being. It ascribed to every being a fixed place in a vertically imagined and static hierarchy of beings. The top of the ladder constituted God's divine, perfect essence, and each creature on this ladder possessed a share of the divine essence that was relative to its rank on the ladder. In this larger scheme, humans took a middle position below angelic beings and above all animals, plants, and minerals, who were deemed the lowest creatures on the chain.¹⁷ Islamic metaphysics imagined a species’ position on the great chain of being as immutable—even if medieval Islamic philosophers insisted on the innate perfectibility of humans and even though Sufi Islam discussed the soul's cyclical ascent and descent on this ladder, from mineral to perfect human (al-insān al-kāmil) and back.¹⁸ Such schemes were not only purely metaphysical but also limited to the individual; they deemed a species’ rising or falling on the ladder of creation unthinkable.

This order of nature came under attack in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in Western Europe, which had largely shared this cosmology. An understanding of creation as dynamic and evolutionary incrementally replaced the concept of a static hierarchy of creatures. The findings of new scientific disciplines such as geology, zoology, anthropology, and biology suggested new concepts of nature as historical and shaped by (autonomous) natural laws over a time span of millions of years. Evolutionist conceptions downplayed divine design, providence, and miracles; in their most extreme interpretations they even ruled out divine agency.¹⁹ Similarly, as the evolutionary paradigm inspired scholars to insert the human into new and more expansive chronologies, they also began to question the validity of scripture as the ultimate reference point for the origins of human creation.

From the 1850s onwards, Ottoman intellectuals became increasingly familiar with the controversial discussions on nature, creation, and the human happening in contemporary Christian Europe.²⁰ This heightened familiarity with science debates in Western Europe had been the function of changing geopolitical realities since the eighteenth century. These new realities had prompted the Ottoman elite to embark on the Tanzimat reforms (1839–1876), an imperial reform project, unprecedented in scope, that pursued political, economic, and intellectual integration into the European concert of powers as an equal partner among the “civilized nations” (milel-i mütemeddine).²¹ Crystallizing in this problem-space of Ottoman adjustments to a new Eurocentric global order, Ottoman engagements with Western European evolutionist ideas were underpinned by a painful sense that Ottoman “scientific works only conform to the old way [eski yolda]; however total and encompassing they may be, they are not enough anymore … in this new age of science.”²² These words by partly Berlin University-educated Münif Pasha (1830–1910) reflected his sense of mission.

As director of the Ottoman Scientific Society (Cemʿīyet-i ʿİlmīye-i ʿOsmānīye) and editor of its mouthpiece, Mecmūʿa-ı Fünūn (Journal of Applied Sciences) (1862–83), Münif Pasha channeled all his energy into familiarizing Ottoman citizens with new and distinctly secular branches of science crystallizing in Western European universities.²³ Mecmūʿa-ı Fünūn's encyclopedic articles propagated a conception of nature that sidelined supernatural causation in the explanation of physical phenomena and insisted on the rational investigation of natural laws.²⁴ Beyond introducing numerous new scientific disciplines to its Ottoman readers, the monthly also became the main popularizer of a new narrative of scientific progress.²⁵ The periodical instilled a belief—ideologically far from undisputed, however—in a linearly progressing universal civilization with Western Europe as civilization's current apogee.²⁶ Among the new sciences, Münif Pasha particularly championed geology for its revolutionary potential to reveal chronologies that would correct scriptural calculations of the Earth's age.²⁷

While it was in the tumultuous and transformative context of the late Tanzimat period that Istanbul saw the first evolutionist articulations and even its first public controversy, evolutionism only gained wider traction in Ottoman society during the reign of Abdülhamid II (1876–1908).²⁸ As will be emphasized, evolutionism became popular both because and in spite of the Hamidian regime's ideological pivot to a more Islamic Ottomanism.²⁹ This pivot was owed both to new demographic realities after the loss of many Christian subjects in the Balkans as a result of the humiliating Russo-Turkish War (1877–78) and to Ottoman frustrations at European imperialism after France and Britain's occupations of Tunisia and Egypt. Consequently, Abdülhamid II propagated a more prudent reform formula that imagined material (māddī) “civilizational progress” against the foil of conditions in Western Europe while diligently preserving the spiritual (maʿnevī) bond to Islamic civilization (medenīyet-i islāmīye).³⁰ Islamic civilization was a new concept that gained popularity as a reaction to the new colonialist geopolitical realities.³¹ Because the regime also used this ideological shift to justify the suspension of the Constitution of 1876 and autocracy, which was underwritten by the secret police and strict censorship, politically disgruntled intellectuals in Istanbul started to look for alternative ideologies and sources of intellectual authority; they often found this alternative in evolutionism.³² Their secular accounts of humankind, as well as the novel epistemological nexus between physiological evolution and civilizational progress, which ultimately affirmed a colonial and Eurocentric world, should be seen in this light.

Towards evolutionist visions of the world

Few were as qualified to translate Western European evolutionist ideas to a largely Muslim audience as publicist Şemseddin Sami (Frashëri, 1850–1904).³³ He was a devout Muslim, Ottoman patriot, and scholar of Islam and Islamic history while unambiguously hailing nineteenth-century Western Europe as synonymous with the “civilized world” (ʿālem-i medenīyet) and “modern civilization” (medenīyet-i ḥāżıra). Sami praised modern civilization in his newspaper, lexica, and numerous pocketbooks as a truly “universal” (ʿumūmī) and indestructible civilization that was the product of Europe's victory over religious fanaticism and of “positive philosophy” (felsefe-i müsbete)—a science-based and rational philosophy of “future centuries” that “will render all former philosophies obsolete.”³⁴ Beyond contrasting Western Europe to Islamic nations in which “obsolete beliefs” (efkār-ı bāṭıla) had become so widespread that merely studying the heavens was decried as “blasphemy” (küfür), he noted in exasperation that Islamic civilization was inferior to modern civilization like a “charcoal drawing on a wall next to a tableau by famous painter Raphael.”³⁵ Nevertheless, he had no doubts that Islam was conducive to scientific progress and that scientific inquiry “strengthens the belief.”³⁶ Sami sought to define Islam “as a repository of guidelines” and objectified it as a “delimitable entity” separate from—but technically reconcilable with—the domain of (secular) science.³⁷ Similarly, to make these “guidelines” more accessible, he went so far as to author a Turkish translation of the Quran and a new exegesis (tefsīr-i cedīd) in the 1890s. The Shaykh al-Islam rejected both, however.³⁸ Two decades earlier, Sami had penned the evolutionist books İnsān (Human) (1878/9) and Yine İnsān (Again Human) (1885/6) while following this same project of imparting a new view of the history of creation that acknowledged divine providence (yed-i ḳudret) and denied supernatural forces any analytical value in the explanation of creation.³⁹ Another intention of these books had been to insert—and favorably so—the races of the Ottoman Empire into a novel kind of natural history of human civilization.

Sami touted İnsān as a synthesis between “religious beliefs” (iʿtiḳādāt-ı dīnīye) and “ideas of [contemporary Western] scholars” (efkār-ı ḥükemā).⁴⁰ This was more than a marketing trick: it gave license to navigate even the most controversial issues of evolutionism, such as humans’ nature and origin. With regard to humans’ nature, he suggested a compromise between conceptions of human nature as proposed by “materialists” (māddīyūn) and “Sufis” (aṣḥāb-ı taṣavvuf). Stating that the human “is both a variant of mean animals created from soil and a spiritual soul that belongs to the holy world,” Sami defined the human as having two natures, a bodily animal essence and a sublime spiritual essence.⁴¹ Sami adopted a similar compromise to solve the question of humans’ origin.⁴² These attempts at harmonizing revelation with contemporary theories allowed Sami to further elaborate his evolutionist vision of humankind in subsequent chapters. Sami presented especially the Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon as evidence for the “complete transformation” (küllī bir tebeddül) of humankind as it perfected (tekemmül) in the course of ages and “changed their form” (tebdīl-i şekil) “according to the age's necessities.”⁴³ In other words, he explained human transformation by the law of adaptation.

While Sami's İnsān was not short of controversial positions, his Yine İnsān must have been a provocation. Revealing dramatic shifts of what can be publicly said and written in 1880s Istanbul, Sami had shed in 1886 his earlier reconciliatory stance of finding middle grounds between “scriptural traditions” (naḳlīyāt) and “observations based on reason” (ʿaḳlīyāt).⁴⁴ Vowing to make judgments solely on the basis of reason and science regardless of “our beliefs,” Sami not only flatly dismissed notions of Adam and Eve. ⁴⁵ He also, most tellingly, dropped in Yine İnsān his definition of the human as also possessing a sublime spiritual nature. He reduced the human to an animal-like creature: “Yes, humans—in spite of all their distinctions, perfections [kemālāt], progresses [teraḳḳīyāt], intellectual and moral characteristics—are only an animal species.”⁴⁶ Sami iterated thereby a position he himself had described as materialist just years earlier in İnsān.

Furthermore, Sami advertised Yine İnsān as a work of “anthropology” (antropoloji/ʿilm ül-beşer), a brand-new science that saw “progress every day,” that aimed at transforming a rich ethnographic tradition in the Turkish and especially Arabic language.⁴⁷ For one thing, he replaced ancient classifications of humans according to the three sons of the Prophet Noah (Japheth, Shem, and Ham) that “do not seem to correspond to the truth anymore,” with a more global classification of five “races” (ecnās).⁴⁸ Similarly, the racial hierarchy implicit in Sami's classifications bore little resemblance to pre-nineteenth-century Ottoman race hierarchies—neither to popular Galenic concepts of seven climatic zones in which only races living in moderate climates were by temperament (mizāc) disposed for civilization nor to religious classifications of the “house of war” (dārü ’l-ḥarb) or the “house of Islam” (dārü ’l-İslām).⁴⁹ While these older typologies had classified urban (Arab) Muslims as the most noble human race and, by contrast, deemed peoples from climatically more extreme geographies such as Northern Europe as by nature savage, this scheme had dramatically changed by the nineteenth century.⁵⁰ To Sami, it was a matter of fact to consider the “white” (beyāż), “Caucasian race” (ḳafḳas cinsi/ʿırḳı), among which Ottomans also counted themselves, as the, at least temporarily, physiologically most superior race.⁵¹ All these nineteenth-century transformations notwithstanding, Sami's chauvinist conception of black Africans as essentially inferior had already pervaded the writings of medieval Muslim philosophers and geographers.⁵²

Sami's Yine İnsān used evolutionism to classify human diversity along a temporal development scheme. By stressing the infinity of human mutation, he synthesized and transcended preexisting ethnographic schemes that had all assumed fixed racial characteristics on the grounds of a people's ecological, political, or religious contexts. Similarly, explaining differences between human races as the function of mechanisms of “adaptation” (tagayyür, tebeddül) “in the time span of centuries and ages,” he described a race's adaptation process as propelled by a number of interlocked and mutually constitutive factors.⁵³ These factors were climate, “lifestyle” (ṣūret-i taʿayyüş), education, morality, social norms (the right treatment of women, for example), and physiology, especially cranial size.⁵⁴ Renouncing cyclical models of the fall and rise of peoples à la Ibn Khaldun (1332–1406), he called this adaptation process “perfecting” (tekemmül) and reconfigured human history as a linear, teleological, and universal trajectory from “the state of savagery” (ḥāl-i vaḥşet) to modern civilization on which some “peoples” (aḳvām) advance faster and some, such as the Chinese nation, never progressed beyond intermediary stages of the civilizing process.⁵⁵ Sami's Yine İnsān described a global “contemporaneity of civilizationally non-contemporaneous” lifestyles: “Many peoples are forever stuck at one of the many steps of progress [teraḳḳī baṣamaḳları]. This is why today we can see humans that live in every possible way of life; some have not changed since they appeared.”⁵⁶ Sami thereby presented a racial taxonomy and hierarchy that was not “preordained” (ḫulḳī) but the result of uneven and extended evolutionary processes.⁵⁷

Even though Sami presented the Caucasian race as physiologically especially “predisposed” (istiʿdād) to reach the highest civilizational levels, he disavowed any form of Caucasian exceptionalism.⁵⁸ Describing perfecting as an exponentially accelerating process, he explained the Caucasian race's contemporary superiority via evolutionary boosts in the preceding thousand years that were further propelled by “civilizing” (temeddün) and “education” (terbīye).⁵⁹ Like the following generation of Ottoman evolutionists, Sami—without disclosing this, however—professed a Lamarckian concept of gradual and cumulative evolutionary change over centuries in which every generation bequeaths to coming generations characteristics and skills acquired in life that further perfect a people's physiological dispositions.⁶⁰ Projected on the globe, this conception scientifically precluded immediate evolutionary convergences between peoples: “Even if a savage child grows up next to civilized Europeans since birth, it still cannot overcome its race's indisposition [cinsiñ ʿadem-i istiʿdādı] because a savage brain cannot process too much civilizing and education at once.”⁶¹ In spite of his references to genocidal campaigns against indigenous peoples, he praised European tutelage, i.e., colonialism, over the timespan of generations as the most effective way for “savages” (vaḥşīler) to recover evolutionary delays. At its core, Sami's evolutionist scheme affirmed the contemporary Eurocentric world order as nothing but a function of “natural history” (taʾrīḫ-i ṭabīʿī).

Sami's evolutionist reading of global differences was no mere academic exercise but a direct answer to the late Ottoman problem-space. First of all, his appraisals of Caucasian racial superiority also catapulted the Ottoman people(s) to the top of global race hierarchies, and thereby offset orientalist and colonialist readings of Middle Eastern societies as racially prone to stagnation. Moreover, Yine İnsān can be read as corroborating from a biologistic angle his other, quasi-simultaneously published articles on the superiority and universality of Western Europe's modern civilization. In contrast to many non-Western peoples on the globe doomed to long colonial tutelage, he deemed Ottoman nations physiologically disposed to live in accordance with modern civilization; if they were to follow Western examples, they could attain it within a generation.

Generations of evolutionists admired Sami and read his İnsān and Yine İnsān, two books written in an easily accessible Turkish and published in the affordable “pocket library series” (ceb kütübḫānesi).⁶² The absence of direct criticism against the books should not distract from their novelty and radicalness. These most elaborate expositions of human evolution in the Hamidian age presented two arguments. First, by introducing the notion of uneven evolution over hundreds of thousands of years, Sami constructed, and affirmed, an unequal Eurocentric global order as nothing but a function of racial superiority. Second, instead of presenting a synthesis of different cosmologies, his books delineated a new natural order that implicitly supplanted inherited scriptural notions of creation and humankind with conceptions presented by contemporary Western European scholars that highlighted the causality of natural laws and humankind's constant perfecting. Nevertheless, even if his Yine İnsān made little effort at proving Islam's compatibility with positive sciences, Sami, as a devout Muslim, still presented an understanding of evolutionist creation that was easily reconcilable with a concept of providential design and a “transcendent creator” (cenāb-ı ḫallāḳ).⁶³ This also set Sami's books apart from a contemporaneous wave of evolutionist writings in Istanbul and Beirut, which went so far in professing materialist conceptions (nothing exists except matter and its movements) that they challenged religion and any form of faith in the supernatural.⁶⁴

In response, the late 1880s saw the first empire-wide and state-sponsored efforts to halt evolutionism's further popularization. Some Muslims interpreted this new paradigm through the lens of civilizational and geopolitical competition, considering evolutionism, which for many was synonymous with materialism, a subversive and harmful attack by Western Europe on the foundations of Islam.⁶⁵ The most emphatic reassertion of the authority of revelation as the single most important reference for the Muslim community and of its interwovenness with natural philosophy was presented by the theologian and teacher Husayn al-Jisr (al-Trablusi, 1845–1909).⁶⁶ His seven-hundred-page A Hamidian Treatise on the Truth of Islam and the Sharia (1888) not only was an exhortation to enquire into the origins of humankind and the secrets of the universe only under the premise that God's divine hand was the final cause in creation. It also presented multifaceted views on the theory of evolution (Arabic: nushūʾ wa-irtiqāʾ).⁶⁷ On the one hand, his treatise reaffirmed the notion of an immutable divine great chain of being and was therefore diametrically opposed to Şemseddin Sami's account of human evolution from an animal state. Similarly, he extolled the Quranic position that God himself had created humans from clay so that humans miraculously skipped several steps on the divine ladder of creation as proof of God's almighty powers.⁶⁸ On the other hand, al-Jisr speculated that Muslims might accept the evolutionary theory in the future, if presented with more evidence.⁶⁹ Because it actualized age-old debates and traditions of “Islamic theology” (kalām), contemporaries celebrated al-Jisr's treatise as a long-awaited reconciliation of revelation with natural philosophy.⁷⁰ Arguing for Islamic civilization's seamless compatibility with the age's scientific progress, the book gained instant fame across the empire and even earned al-Jisr the personal patronage of Abdülhamid II. It was quickly translated into Turkish (in several editions), as well as into Urdu, Tartar, and Chinese.⁷¹ This pan-Islamic, anti-evolutionist volley notwithstanding, Ottoman engagements with evolutionist knowledge were far from being nipped in the bud. Rather, they began to gain further momentum throughout the 1890s.

An evolutionist challenge to the Hamidian order

There was an unprecedented blossoming of Turkish-language writings on evolutionism in 1890s Istanbul that was driven by a new generation of incumbent state servants. This was a select circle of exclusively male, Muslim students and recent graduates of the new imperial elite schools in Istanbul.⁷² These new educational institutions, often boarding schools, offered unique educational possibilities in the positive sciences.⁷³ While providing skill sets that the empire desperately needed for its survival, the new schools also inadvertently fostered among many students such a familiarity with the French language that one critic even called them “Europeans” who have lost their “Ottomanness” (ʿosmānlılıḳ).⁷⁴ Similarly, these institutions instilled a belief among students that positive sciences were the universal savior of humankind.⁷⁵ Especially evolutionism promised a revolutionary new, heroic, all-encompassing, and purely science-based vista on creation. Celebrating Darwin's theory as a “magnificent revolution” (inḳılāb-ı ʿaẓīm) of humankind's understanding of natural history, they felt as if they were on the cusp of a “future, [in which] it will be universally accepted that all activities and transformations—be they organic or inorganic, political or literary, material or spiritual—are linked to natural laws, and this law is the mighty law of evolution [ḳānūn-ı tekāmül].”⁷⁶ The students’ sense of being possessors of this still little-known paradigm to reread the world not only amplified their already marked sense of entitlement but also compelled them to take political action. Dismissing the Hamidian regime's authoritarianism and pan-Islamic ideology as futile in an age of European dominance, they used evolutionism to devise new and alternative ways of social and intellectual self-strengthening that would gain the empire a rank among Europe's so-called civilized nations. Their idealistic and subversive activism was a daring bid to technocratic leadership in a highly paternalistic society built on deep respect for elders.⁷⁷ A first crackdown by the Hamidian security apparatus against organized conspiratorial activities in the winter of 1895 sent many young advocates of evolutionism into prison or exile.⁷⁸ But many more picked up the torch and popularized the theory in Istanbul's print landscape.

The simultaneity of crackdowns against advocates of evolutionism along with exuberant appraisals of it in Istanbul's Turkish-language press characterized this evolutionist moment in Ottoman intellectual history between the years 1894 and 1899. The simultaneity is less paradoxical considering that this proliferation of evolutionist writings was limited to the socially circumscribed space of the generalist, strictly apolitical, and often illustrated weeklies that catered to the upper middle class. Scores of young, idealistic elite-school graduates had taken over the editorial offices of (bi)weeklies such as Ḫazīne-i Fünūn (Treasure of Science) (1893–6), Maʿārif (Knowledge) (1891–7), Mekteb (School) (1890–98), and especially Servet-i Fünūn (Riches of the Sciences) (1891–1944) that by 1895 had become major platforms of evolutionism. This coverage was discrete, however. Intellectual biographies or engravings of Pasteur, Helmholtz, or Röntgen were omnipresent, whereas Lamarck, Darwin, Spencer, Büchner, or Haeckel were addressed in more subtle ways. Similarly, while concepts such as the “law of evolution” (ḳānūn-ı tekāmül), “natural selection” (ıṣtıfā-yı ṭabīʿī), or “struggle for existence” (mücādele-i ḥayāt) became commonplace in the journals, only a few writers dared to directly discuss their epistemological foundations, let alone their social and political implications for Ottoman society.⁷⁹ The detailedness of Sami's books from the previous decade remained unprecedented.

This discreteness notwithstanding, evolutionist journals were ideological competitors to newly founded periodicals politically closer to the palace, such as Ḫānımlara Maḫṣūṣ Gazete (1895–1908) and Maʿlūmāt (1894–1903).⁸⁰ Although evolutionist periodicals like Servet-i Fünūn were financially dependent on palace subsidies, neither did they reiterate the Hamidian regime's ‘authority triangle’ (Sultan, Islam, and science) and its calls for conformity, nor was their science coverage preconfigured by lenses such as morality, patriotism, and its potential rootedness in Islamic civilization.⁸¹ Sidelining—and thereby implicitly devaluing—Islamic traditions of scientific inquiry, these journals constructed a separate discursive space for “modern sciences” (ʿulūm-ı ḥāżıra) that they defined as solely based on “experimentation” (tecrübe) and “observation” (müşāhede). They hailed these “modern sciences” as in line with a new “age of humanity” (insānīyet devri) that “neither looks down on humanity nor is occupied with unattainable things such as the heavens [gökler] or perfect happiness.”⁸² Their science coverage entailed introductions to materialist cosmologies, highly racist and colonialist interpretations of evolutionist anthropology, racial miscegenation, Herbert Spencer's evolutionist sociology and translations of his educational philosophy, and Hippolyte Taine's evolutionist literary criticism.⁸³ While this evolutionist blossoming in the 1890s might beg scholarly reassessments of the Hamidian regime's hegemony over public opinion, it should rather be understood as the function of an ideologically highly fragmented public sphere in which the regime temporarily allowed evolutionist journals to exist next to periodicals ideologically closer to the palace.⁸⁴

As part of this new wave of Ottoman evolutionism a new Ottoman Turkish standard translation for the French concept of évolution took shape: tekāmül (perfecting). It replaced earlier and haphazardly used conceptual translations such as inḳılābāt (total transformations) or more technical ones such as neşvʾ ü nemāʾ (emergence and growth).⁸⁵ Once tekāmül, which had been close to absent in the Ottoman Turkish language before the 1890s, consolidated, it ushered in a new phase of Ottoman evolutionism.⁸⁶ Starting out as a code word for evolutionists, it became a buzzword and increasingly a rallying cry for the new theory and the concomitant, specific ways of cognitively (re)ordering the world.⁸⁷

The quick consolidation of tekāmül (perfecting) as the translational equivalent for évolution begs questions about this semantic choice. Why did Ottoman evolutionists prefer it over previous translations such as “emergence and growth” and “total transformations”? What does this choice reveal about Ottoman interpretations of evolutionism? Was it a deliberate choice not to opt for more literal translations for évolution in order to boost its acceptance in society? Because any newly coined concept or translation “can ever be so new that it was not virtually laid out in the pre-given language,” translational equivalents, such as between tekāmül and évolution, are always acts of connecting new ideas to existent epistemes on the part of translators.⁸⁸ Similarly, as translators may err or even consciously twist semantics in their interpretations, studying such acts of connecting ideas between languages can reveal unexpected differences.⁸⁹

There are three possible explanations as to why Ottoman evolutionists agreed on tekāmül as the standard translation for évolution. First, like other words that have been used for perfecting in an evolutionist sense, like istikmāl or tekemmül, tekāmül was derived from the Arabic root “kāf-mīm-lām” (kamala, “to become perfect”).⁹⁰ This root prominently figured as an ideal not only in medieval Islamic ethic philosophy but also in Sufi conceptions of al-Insān al-Kāmil (the perfect human), i.e. that the human was by default inclined to spiritual perfecting. This translational choice might suggest that Ottoman intellectuals approached evolutionary theory through indigenous epistemological lenses.⁹¹ It should be noted, however, that contemporary Arab intellectuals, who were the heirs of very similar intellectual canons, chose different translations for évolution.⁹² A second explanation for the choice of tekāmül is that, in fact, perfecting also figured in Darwin's writings, was a central concept in Lamarck's transformism, and heavily featured in Herbert Spencer's cosmic evolutionism.⁹³ A third explanation would emphasize the agency of the translators who opted for tekāmül, first, because it was more in line with the overall progressive historical consciousness of most Ottoman intellectuals, and second, because it offered—in contrast to earlier translations—a much more teleological and normative reading of the evolutionary process.⁹⁴

While a history of concepts serves as a necessary reminder that a concept's older semantic layers may shine through and configure newer layers, Ottoman evolutionism is largely characterized by active attempts to silence older layers.⁹⁵ Just as Rıza Tevfik, who became a leading Sufi master later in life, praised “the ‘idea of evolution [tekāmül],’ [as] a completely new perspective and idea unique to our century,” so did Şemseddin Sami, who also hailed from a Sufi family, clarify that his account of human evolution was free from the “poetry and imaginations” of Sufism and only based on “positive knowledge” (müsbet maʿlūmāt).⁹⁶ Instead of strategically naturalizing and validating the new “evolutionist school” (mezheb-i tekāmül) through references to possible overlaps with inherited epistemologies and thereby making the paradigm more appealing to the Muslim public, they opted for definitions of tekāmül as natural law (ḳānūn/ḳāʿide/düstūr) exclusively basing themselves on Western European theories.⁹⁷ Sidelining Islamic cosmologies of individual moral and spiritual perfecting, they introduced tekāmül as a new epistemological lens from which they could understand the progress of societies, races, humankind, and ultimately nature.

It was this very objective that drove young Ottoman intellectuals, like many turn-of-the-century reformists across the globe, to the evolutionist sociology of Herbert Spencer (1820–1903).⁹⁸ In 1895, medical student Rıza Tevfik (Bölükbaşı; 1869–1949) offered a first Turkish-language introduction to Herbert Spencer's positivist “sociology” (ʿilm-i cemʿīyet/sosyolociya) that promised nothing short of revealing “all phenomena related to humanity's evolution.”⁹⁹ An eight-month prison sentence Tevfik received for unauthorized public speeches on liberalism and democracy in Istanbul's coffeehouses stalled the completion of this essay that was just as provocative.¹⁰⁰ It strove to delineate a new positivist and evolutionist “philosophy of history” (ḥikmet-i taʾrīḫ), an epistemological principle “that has suffused all thinking in our century.”¹⁰¹ It ruled out direct divine causation by defining creation as “mechanical” (miḫānīkī), as at the most abstract level the result of “constant motion that had caused an uninterrupted chain of phenomena,” i.e. evolution.¹⁰² While the essay began—probably to incite interest among the “common people” (ʿavām) in this epistemology—with appraisals of Ibn Khaldun as “the inventor of this critical method [uṣūl-i intiḳād],” the article also insisted on the outdatedness of his premises.¹⁰³ Not even deigning to discuss the (not so absurd) possibility of overlaps between Ibn Khaldun's and Herbert Spencer's methods, Tevfik offered dense footnotes to a French translation of Spencer's The Study of Sociology (1873) and references to French positivists Auguste Comte, Claude Bernard, and Charles Letourneau as he argued, first, that science was exclusively based on reason, observation, and sensory experience, and second, that “everything in existence is determined by the same universal natural laws [ḳavānīn-i ṭabīʿīye-i ʿumūmīye].”¹⁰⁴ This reasoning also led him to his main argument that physical laws even hold sway in “social and civilizational affairs” so that they can be studied with the same methods of scientific inquiry as natural sciences.¹⁰⁵ Similarly, Tevfik followed Spencer's social evolutionism in insisting on inextricable “entanglements between social and organic phenomena.”¹⁰⁶ Hence, indirectly building on Şemseddin Sami's discussions on the interdependence between civilizational progress and a people's evolving racial dispositions, Tevfik pursued, with Spencer's sociology, a scientific framework in which both the laws of social and biological evolution and their causal interrelationship could be systematically investigated.¹⁰⁷ Ultimately, Tevfik and his compatriots hoped Spencer's social evolutionism would provide a formula that would help them reshape Ottoman society in line with what they perceived as necessities of modern civilization.¹⁰⁸

This feverish search to decipher the laws of evolution and their effects on the development of societies also spilled over into education. A new generation of Ottoman pedagogues began to desacralize humankind and conceptualized it as an integral part of natural history that was—just like any creature—subjected to natural laws.¹⁰⁹ If these laws were not respected, evolutionist pedagogues warned, education could neither “facilitate a child's happiness, nor the progress of homeland [vaṭan] and humanity.”¹¹⁰ The most prominent advocate of this new Ottoman evolutionist pedagogy was Ayşe Sıddika Bint Mustafa (1873–1903), instructor and vice director at the School for Female Teachers (dārü ’l-muʿallimāt). Sıddika's two-hundred-page Lessons in the Methods of Education (1897) had—until then—been the most sweeping Ottoman synopsis of contemporary evolutionist principles in education.¹¹¹ It included, for example, an emphatic insistence on differences in human genetic disposition, both between members of the same society and between the “white race” (beyāż ʿırḳ) and other races.¹¹² Moreover, while her guidebook did reiterate inherited Ottoman concepts of education—especially on morality—the book's structure directly mirrored Herbert Spencer's hierarchical division of a child's education into physical (cismānī), intellectual (fikrī), and moral (aḫlāḳī) spheres; each sphere's “evolution was subjected to natural law.”¹¹³ More importantly, while espousing inherited Ottoman concepts of the human as having both material and spiritual natures, she followed Spencer in stressing that the education of the physical body takes priority over the education of mind and soul.¹¹⁴ As a consequence, she prescribed pedagogues a thorough knowledge of natural philosophy, chemistry, and physiology (fünūn-ı ʿużvīye), as well as adherence to the “method of observation and experimentation” which is “applied everywhere in our times.”¹¹⁵ Driven by the idea that positive science bestowed upon pedagogues a new, unprecedented agency in the shaping of individuals, Sıddika sidelined divine providence and argued that it was, instead, left to “humans to implement evolution, be it material or spiritual.”¹¹⁶ While her guidebook's prioritization of physical over moral education suggests tensions with Hamidian education policies that strongly valued Islamic morality, the medal Sıddika received for the book by Sultan–Caliph Abdülhamid II shows that its evolutionist premise still struck a nerve among contemporaries.¹¹⁷ Many similar guidebooks—mostly translations from French—followed suit.¹¹⁸

Last, all these attempts to popularize the epistemological foundations for a new society in accordance with the laws of evolution were—at least implicitly—underpinned by French positivism's universalist, utopian model for “social” (ictimāʿī) and “intellectual” (fikrī) progress that promised humanity's entry into a new “scientific age” (devre-i fennīye).¹¹⁹ The most detailed Turkish-language introduction into Auguste Comte's (1798–1857) law of three stages was provided by elite-school graduate Ahmed Şuayb (1876–1910), whose essay presented it as “just another version of evolution philosophy.”¹²⁰ Like a longe durée modernization theory, the law of three stages describes humanity's “slow evolution” (tekāmül-i baṭīʾī) through stages of “animality” (ḥayvānīyet) before it reaches the first of “the three stages” (ḥālāt-ı selāse), the “theological stage” (teolojik devir).¹²¹ Şuayb's essay traced France's rise from the last phase of the theological stage, “monotheism” (monoteizm)—in which humans explained, under the influence of “clerical institutions” (teşkīlāt-i rūḥbānīye), the “invariable order of creation” with supernatural and “divine qualities descending from unknowable worlds”—to the “metaphysical stage” (metafizik devir). This second of the three stages saw the decline of the church.¹²² While this downfall caused ideological chaos (teşevvüş-i efkār) that shook nineteenth-century France to the core, Şuayb followed the verdicts of contemporary French positivists by interpreting this philosophical disorder as the birth pangs of the last of the three stages.¹²³

In his description of the stage of positivism (pozitivizm), Ahmed Şuayb turned to outright utopianism, presaging that science would usher in the final state of “humanity's natural evolution.” Positive science, as the new “spiritual power” (ḳuvve-i maʿnevīye), would allow a small elite of scientists to fill the moral vacuum caused by the steady decline of monotheist religion. The first step towards “establishing social order through science” was through a “science of morality” (ʿulūm-ı aḫlāḳīye). The morality concept at the core of this new “natural science” (ʿulūm-ı ṭabīʿīye) would be stripped of any belief in the supernatural and solely be based on the positive laws of “physiology and biology.” Reduced to nothing but “self-preservation” (kendini muḥāfaẓa) and “prudent selfishness” (ʿāḳılāne ḫōdgāmlıḳ), morality was reconceptualized by Şuayb as a “social, natural instinct” (sevḳ-i ṭabīʿī-yi ictimāʿī) and a mere function of the “struggle for survival” within society.¹²⁴ The next step towards reestablishing social order was to discard ideas contrary to “the laws that govern historical evolution” like enlightenment's unproven “myths” (destān) such as “equality” (tesāvī). Insisting that cognitive inequality among humans was a fact proven by natural history, Şuayb warned against “including the uneducated common people in political matters” and pointed as deterrent to the “social malaise” of France's “democratic regime” (demoḳratik idāre).¹²⁵ Recognizing the controversial nature of this hierarchical and inegalitarian concept of society, Şuayb hastened to add, “once science makes every mind understand that social phenomena are nothing but a reflection of creation's universal laws, everyone will fulfil their social duties in total submission and without grumbling.”¹²⁶ In summary, even though Ahmed Şuayb's widely read introduction to the positivist law of three stages neither differed from Comte's authoritative model nor contained instructions on possible applications thereof in Ottoman society, it cannot be overemphasized how radical these utopianist articulations were for Hamidian-era Istanbul.¹²⁷ Next to flouting long traditions of Islamic morality discussions, Şuayb projected—for Turkish-language publications—in unprecedented detail a scientistic, elitist, and technocratic order that reflected the social and political imaginary of Ottoman evolutionist intellectuals who wanted to uplift a society they considered stuck in its monotheistic stage.¹²⁸

While all these efforts to popularize Western European theories and models of natural, individual, and social evolution might suggest otherwise, Ottoman evolutionists framed this paradigm very differently than did their contemporary Western European intellectuals. Ottoman advocates attached to it an extreme belief in a better future that differed markedly from more ambivalent readings of evolutionism in Western Europe. These culminated especially in France in fears of bodily (and cultural) degeneration and decadence.¹²⁹ Faint echoes of this evolutionist fin de siècle pessimism in Istanbul notwithstanding, the following exuberant stanza from the poem Tekāmül is most representative of Ottoman interpretations of the paradigm.¹³⁰

“The entire world hastens toward the peak of perfection!

A concealed world is yet to become manifest, its inclination!

Time intoxicates its moaning march!

Applaud it, its true state and its evolution!!!”

…

The secrets of creation's fire-sparking truths

spread humanity's concord!

The endless flood of philosophy

provides friendship and true love!¹³¹

Like this poet, who extolled a swiftly perfecting world in concord and united by a shared enthusiasm for the discoveries of evolutionism, many Ottoman intellectuals in Istanbul praised evolutionism as panacea. Not only would the theory allow them and other elites around the globe to solve the secrets of nature and thereby (re)order a topsy-turvy world; it would also allow them to interpret humanity's physiological evolution as naturally eradicating warmongering among civilized nations.¹³² Nevertheless, their projections of evolutionism as ushering in a new era of global peace, human progress, and “friendship and true love” somewhat belie their elitism, rhetoric of “struggle for life,” and uncritical espousal of white-supremacist, colonialist world orders.¹³³ Their critics denounced these dissonances, accusing them of blindness towards European colonial crimes, disinterest in the fate of suppressed “Eastern peoples” (milel-i şarḳīye), and naively underestimating the colonial threats to the Ottoman Empire.¹³⁴

Similarly, these strategically Eurocentric readings of evolutionism set its Istanbul-based, Turkish-writing popularizers not only apart from an earlier generation of Armenian advocates of evolutionism but also from contemporary coreligionists in exile. While Young Armenian authors of the 1870s and 1880s publicly praised and discussed evolutionist epistemologies in considerable detail, they were, in comparison, anxious to mitigate any anti-theistic implications that might have undermined the church, the identity-preserving institution at the heart of the Armenian “nation” (millet).¹³⁵ Furthermore, Ahmed Şuayb's narrow and Eurocentric reading of positivism as universal modernization theory stood in stark contrast to the anti-imperialist positivism of Ahmed Rıza (1858–1930), the most eminent Young Turk intellectual in Parisian exile.¹³⁶ Rıza hailed positivism as a globally compatible, inclusive, and egalitarian project that would unite “East” and “West” and overcome the colonial world order.¹³⁷ These differences between exiled Rıza and Istanbul-based Şuayb are a reminder that—in spite of their shared opposition to Hamidian authoritarianism—they spoke to very distinct discussions and audiences.¹³⁸ While Rıza's French-language articles from Paris both attacked Abdülhamid II and defended Islam and “oriental civilization” against Western European chauvinism, censorship in Istanbul prevented Şuayb and his fellow evolutionists from attacking the Sultan himself. Their affirmations of European supremacy that eroded identitarian links to Islamic civilization were, instead of attacks on Islam itself, directed against the paternalistic Sultan–Caliph.

Just how much evolutionism underpinned such attempts at subverting Hamidian ideology can be seen in a debate on the legitimacy of the highly Europe-oriented “New Literature” (edebiyāt-ı cedīde) movement. The debate, which began in 1897 with criticism of the group's controversial literary style, quickly transcended questions of literature and eventually turned into the most ferocious debate on Ottoman Turkish identity of the whole Hamidian era.¹³⁹ The most vocal critics of the New Literature denounced its representatives as brazen, detached, and unpatriotic Europeanizers who willfully destroyed Islamic civilization instead of participating in the task of creating a viable Ottoman national culture that could resist European cultural dominance.¹⁴⁰ The young littérateurs, exclusively graduates of the new elite schools, used evolutionist reasoning to defend their new Europe-oriented literary styles as nothing but “the lucky outcome of the universal principle of evolution.”¹⁴¹ Drawing on evolutionist models of literary criticism à la Hippolyte Taine, they described their own literature as just one of the many natural results of transformations, i.e. the “Europeanization” (avrupalılaşmaḳ), of Ottoman Turkish society since the Tanzimat. Framing such evolutionary adaptations to the West (garb) as the nation's reaction to its precarious position in the international struggle of existence, they hailed Europeanization as a necessity of evolutionary history.¹⁴² Preserving Islamic civilization, on the other hand, would have been contrary to the natural laws of civilizational progress and national self-preservation. At the climax of the debate, in autumn 1898, opponents attacked the New Literature writers as “atheists” (ateler) and “anarchists” (anarşistler) and even voiced death threats.¹⁴³ Even if the young writers held their ground in this fierce polemic, which gripped the Turkish-language press landscape for two years, the Hamidian regime had step by step dispersed and silenced the group by 1901. It thereby also put an end to the evolutionist moment in Istanbul's Turkish-language print landscape.

Using evolutionism to reassert Islamic authority

Evolutionism's politicization during the 1890s notwithstanding, there were only scattered efforts at debunking it, let alone systematic campaigns against it.¹⁴⁴ In fact, pious intellectuals even began taking up evolutionist ideas to defend Islam. The ways in which they tried to reclaim with evolutionism the universal truth of Islamic philosophy and Islamic civilization's prestige and promise as a valid alternative to “Western civilization” reveal, on the one hand, how omnipresent notions of progress history have become among Ottoman intellectuals.¹⁴⁵ On the other hand, they show the smoothness with which Muslim intellectuals could potentially reconcile evolutionist ideas with Islamic philosophy—if they desired to.

One of the most prolific propagators of explicitly Islamic readings of evolution was Ulema member, judge, and science teacher Mahmud Esʿad (Seydişehri, 1858–1917).¹⁴⁶ In the preface to his translation of Joseph Langlebert's textbook Histoire naturelle for Istanbul's elite high schools, Esʿad praised this new science of creation (ʿilm-i mükevvenāt) as no mere worldly (dünyevī) exercise but as the path to divine wisdom and best weapon against heedlessness and ignorance.¹⁴⁷ His journalistic writings combined lavish praise for the material achievements of this “unprecedented century of progress and perfections” under the aegis of a Europe-centered modern civilization with an insistence on the historical singularity of Islam. While he explained all of creation as the function of a universal, determinist “law of evolution” (ḳānūn-ı tekāmül), he explicitly declared Islam the “sole exception” to this “total principle” (ḳāʿide-i küllīye): “the sublimity of the Sharia is of a kind the world has never seen; it is still unsurpassed.”¹⁴⁸ As evidence of this evolutionary exceptionalism, he cited the sudden ascendency of the Arab people from a “savage” desert tribe to the teachers of all “civilized peoples” (aḳvām-ı mütemeddine).¹⁴⁹ In another context, he used the same metahistorical reasoning to defend the Sharia precept of polygyny against growing criticism among reformist Muslims.¹⁵⁰ Esʿad's line of reasoning not only transformed Islam and Islamic civilization into a supernatural, transcendent fact but also, by the same token, affirmed the law of evolution to which “all natural phenomena, and every social and political fact are invariably bound.”¹⁵¹ In Esʿad's account, the authorities of evolution's universalism and Islam's transcendence supplemented each other.

The most comprehensive attempt at proving the superiority of Islamic civilization through evolutionism was Ahmed Midhat's multivolume work The Conflict of Science and Religion: Islam and the Sciences.¹⁵² This translation and extensive commentary on Richard Draper's world-renowned, Islamophile History of the Conflict between Religion and Science from 1875 especially addressed the students of the elite schools. It was an attempt to (re)kindle their “Islamic zeal” (ḥamīyet-i islāmīye) by proving that Islam, in contrast to Christianity, was fully compatible with contemporary science and progress.¹⁵³ Insisting on the embeddedness of evolutionism within “Islamic philosophy” (ḥikmet-i islāmīye) and its reconcilability with notions of a creator God, he argued that Muslim scholars, like “naturalist scholars in every nation,” had long adopted the “the robust principle of ‘evolution’” (“Tekāmül” ḳāʿide-i ḳavvīyesi).¹⁵⁴ This claim, however, was based on somewhat idiosyncratic reinterpretations of evolutionism.¹⁵⁵ Nevertheless, Midhat's discussion of “secondary causes” (esbāb-ı sānīye) conceptually left room for the eventual, gradual evolution of species into other life forms.¹⁵⁶ The concept of secondary causes stipulated that God created all organic life forms with innate potentialities for change long after the moment of divine creation. While some evolutionists in Istanbul and the Arabic-speaking provinces had used the principle of secondary causes to downplay divine agency in nature, Midhat saw it as proof of the opposite.¹⁵⁷ Basing himself on the divine principle of “be, and it is” (kun fayakūnu) and on al-Ghazali's (1055–1111) occasionalist position that divine action was the only possible causation in the universe, Midhat saw the “natural laws” (ḳavānīn-i ṭabīʿīye) that drove any post-creation transformation of lifeforms as the purest expression of godly causation and “divine power” (ḳudret-i ilāhīye).¹⁵⁸ Midhat's argumentation is testimony to the ease with which devout intellectuals could discern resonances of evolutionism in Islamic philosophy.

Lastly, Islamic theology was not the only discourse for pious Muslim intellectuals to approach evolutionism through a religious lens. While exclusively drawing on English-language sources, legal scholar Ali Şahbaz (d. 1898) insisted that “there can be nothing new in this world and that all historical events are repetitions.”¹⁵⁹ Şahbaz's article, which argued that humanity had remained unaltered since creation, both mentally and physiologically, was in essence a summary of Foundations of Belief (1895), a sharp critique of Spencerian evolutionism.¹⁶⁰ Put more pointedly, while Ahmed Midhat actualized age-old theological discussions to create some conceptual space for Islamic notions of evolution, it was on the basis of Anglican arguments that Ali Şahbaz went as far as discrediting the whole premise of evolutionist thinking: “To discover the mysteries of creation, to describe and explain the essence of God, to proceed and dare to look at everything with a scientific gaze is the product of excessive greed.”¹⁶¹ Şahbaz's article is a reminder that Ottoman turn-of-the-century intellectuals comfortably moved in transnational intellectual fields; they found expedient arguments wherever these surfaced.

Ottoman evolutionism: a strategic Eurocentrism

This article has offered a new reading of Ottoman evolutionism by presenting this paradigm as a resource that intellectuals mobilized to offer concrete answers to the late Ottoman problem-space. Even if Ottoman evolutionism was neither a uniform, single-minded movement nor equally prominent in all milieus, fin de siècle intellectuals across a broad ideological spectrum used it to address (perceived and real) global asymmetries, fears of colonialism, negotiations of imperial and national identity, challenges to inherited epistemologies, and conceptualizations of societal reform. While some intellectuals close to the Hamidian regime primarily used evolutionism to reassert Islam's transcendent nature and divine authority, most advocates strategically chose more Eurocentric readings as they pushed for alternative reform visions.

Evolutionists used this epistemology to popularize new notions of historical and natural time, scientific universalism, global order, and human agency, and ultimately to theorize three novel—and interrelated—orders of nature, the world, and society. First, sidelining both scriptural chronologies and inherited concepts of (occasionalist) divine causation, they proposed a new concept of nature as historical and as the total product of universal laws of evolution over millions of years. As they indiscriminately inserted humankind into this new “natural history” (taʾrīḫ-i ṭabīʿī), they followed Herbert Spencer and Hippolyte Taine in explaining social and intellectual transformations as intricately entangled with natural instincts and human's perfecting physiology and cognitive functions. Nature was thereby not only a product but also the main factor of evolution. Second, as Ottoman evolutionists transformed human history into a universal and teleological story of biologized progress, they also challenged the imagined racial hierarchies that ideologically justified the colonial world order. Nevertheless, their critiques were limited to anti-Turkish racism. As evolutionists claimed Ottoman affiliations to the “white, Caucasian race,” they not only endorsed racialist justifications of colonialism as beneficial rule over physiologically still-indisposed races, but also asserted for themselves the highest rank in the (natural) global order. Third, young elite-school graduates, while (still) remote from the reins of political power, used evolutionism to challenge the social and political order by projecting scientistic, technocratic, individualistic, and non-egalitarian models for social and political transformations. Once the 1908 revolution had lifted Hamidian censorship, these ideas received another boost and became omnipresent in the social imaginary of the new intellectual and political elite of the Second Constitutional Period (1908–22).¹⁶²

Studying Ottoman evolutionism within a framework of strategic Eurocentrism discards notions of Ottoman inadequacy, emulation, and passivity. It reinterprets the often uncritical adoptions of Western European theories—as well as appraisals of Western Europe as the so-called pinnacle of human evolution and depictions of the rest of the world through the prism of evolutionary lack—as functions of Ottoman historical agency. Seizing evolutionism as their weapon of choice in the local and global power structures in which they operated, Ottoman intellectuals boosted it by translating, adapting, and advertising evolutionist ideas while facing the very real personal risks of Hamidian censorship. This way of framing it ultimately also aims at creating tensions with more recent studies of Near Eastern intellectual history that study Ottoman engagements with transnationally circulating ideas through analytical lenses such as epistemological commensurability, adaptability, and hybridity, or resonances with indigenous cultures of knowledge.¹⁶³ This article, in contrast, has highlighted that Ottoman evolutionism was barely based on “dynamic interactions” with “existing cultural factors of society.”¹⁶⁴ It became popular without authorization “by the discursive traditions of Islam.”¹⁶⁵ In fact, its performativity even seemed to hinge on the deliberate and strategic shunning of Islamic hermeneutics. Far from being mutually exclusive, however, these opposing perspectives on Ottoman intellectual history shed light on phenomena that are two sides of the same coin. They show two different but complementary ways in which fin de siècle Ottoman intellectuals immersed themselves in their “age of scientific progress” and devised strategies to strengthen the last sovereign Sunni Muslim empire in a colonialist world.