This chapter presents short biographies of Akif, Sabri, and Kevseri, describing the general lines of their thought, followed by sections looking at scholarship’s changing approach to their work, the role of Egypt as a site for intellectual discourse, and the particular engagement these three thinkers had with Ottoman, Turkish, and Arabic as modes of expression. In place of autobiography there exists a body of biographical sources in the form of their followers’ memoirs as well as letters, sermons, and photographs. Caveats apply when surveying this material: some of it is hagiographical, mistakes regarding events and dates are common, and much is left unsaid, possibly as a form of self-censorship. Still, there is a breadth of material to work with, and while there are likely more documents to be found among government records in Istanbul, Ankara, and Cairo, as well as letter caches, these are not historical figures to be recovered from the archive.

The concluding chapter looks at the Late Ottomans’ impact on modern Islamic thought. It gives a summary of the work and thought of Akif, Sabri, and Kevseri, then examines the work and thought of Said Nursi in order to give a comparative analysis of their role in the formation of Islamist ideology in modern Turkey.

This chapter looks in detail at the Turkish exiles’ engagement with the modernist trend in Egypt and the ideas of Muḥammad ʿAbduh. It reviews the Islāmiyyāt literature of Egyptian intellectuals in the 1930s and 1940s, Sabri’s response to this trend, his belief that Egypt had voluntarily adopted the radical ideas that Atatürk had forced on the Turkey he fled, and his conviction that ʿAbduh’s reformism was responsible for this. It then looks at Mehmed Akif’s work in Istanbul and Cairo in centring Late Ottoman Islamism around the ideas of ʿAbduh and considers comparisons between Akif and Indian thinker Muḥammad Iqbāl, whom Akif helped introduce to Arab audiences.

This chapter looks at Mehmed Akif’s fundamental acceptance of the nation-state and reconciliation of Turkish and Islamic identity and sets that against Sabri and Kevseri’s theoretical objections, which centre on the argument that the shariʿa system with its notion of a legal and moral core above the manipulations of politics and society was superior to man-made law. Noting that their work came (1) as Egypt finalised the process of codification and de-Islamisation of its courts and (2) as the era of military authoritarianism began its long reign in the Arab region, it goes on to examine Sabri’s development of a radical view of Islamic faith and identity in the context of the modern state and how this may have impacted Sayyid Quṭb’s thinking.