Kurzbeschreibung

This research project uses a conceptual history approach to trace changing notions of Islam in the Ottoman Empire between the years 1876 and 1922. To do so it draws on a newly available, AI-driven digital databank (Müteferriqa), analyzing a substantial corpus of hitherto untapped Turkish- language periodicals and the writings of devout intellectuals, which range from sufi-leaning littérateurs to advocates of social reform through Islam. The selected sources allow studying the transformations of Ottoman Islam from two research angles. The first angle (a), which in the project is described as genealogical, aims at tracing those processes that shaped powerful currents of twentieth-century Turkish Islam. The second angle (b) is archaeological: it recovers displaced paradigms that once were constitutive for Ottoman Islam.