This chapter looks at Kevseri’s conflicts with the emerging Salafi trend. It looks first at his approach to ʿAbduh and the modernists, and how it differed from Sabri’s, then reviews the polemical debates between Kevseri and his Salafi opponents as they evolved from the 1920s to the early 1950s. While like Sabri he saw the tajdīd reformers as attempting to transform Islam into a calque on post-Enlightenment religion, Kevseri identified what would become the Salafi movement as more destabilising to the Islamic tradition, since it was speaking more authentically from within it with the aim of radically altering its multivocal, heterogenous disposition. It considers that Kevseri was able to delay the final semantic stabilisation of the term Salafi around the ideas that characterise the ideological movement of that name today, but that Syrian ʿālim Nāṣir al-Dīn al-Albānī used the work of Kevseri as a foil against which he was able to construct ’Salafism’ following Kevseri’s death.

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.