Between Remaking and Unmaking: The Religio-Secularization of late Ottoman Islam  

This research project examines the conceptual history of Islam in the Ottoman Empire between 1876 and 1922. It draws on a newly available AI-assisted digital database (Müteferriqa) to analyze a large corpus of largely unexplored Turkish-language periodicals printed in Arabic script. The authors represented in this corpus range from Sufi-oriented poets and scholars to Islamist social reformers. These sources make it possible to investigate Ottoman Islam from two complementary research perspectives. The first, genealogical perspective (a) analyzes the processes that shaped twentieth-century Turkish political Islam. The second, archaeological perspective (b) explores marginalized yet once central practices of Ottoman Islam.

The genealogical component (a) focuses on two interrelated developments:
(1) the transformation of Islam into a national identity and utilitarian ideology of reform that promised worldly progress; and (2) the redefinition of Islam through a (global) concept of “religion” as a clearly delimited sphere of divine authority.By classifying these intertwined developments as processes of secularization and “religionization,” the project builds on Markus Dressler’s theoretical concept of religio-secularization (2019) to examine how these two dynamics mutually reinforced each other. The second, archaeological perspective (b) investigates the effects of this dual process by examining two discursive fields through which Ottoman Muslims traditionally articulated their God-consciousness: poetry and Sufism. Specifically, it explores (3) the strategies pursued by representatives of Ottoman Sufi culture—particularly after 1908—to bring Sufi hermeneutics and practices into dialogue with the new utilitarian notion of Islam-as-religion. Finally, it examines (4) late Ottoman efforts to rethink classical poetics in relation to the emerging concepts of “religion,” social utility, and the newly defined category of “literature” (edebiyāt), which some writers understood as autonomous and secular.

The history of late Ottoman Islam—situated at the intersection of Ottoman social and political history on the one hand, and the intellectual history of Islam on the other—remains a significant gap in current scholarship. This project takes a first step toward filling that gap by bringing these two research traditions into conversation and by introducing largely unexplored archives and pious intellectuals. In doing so, it not only highlights the increasing differentiation of Ottoman Islamic concepts but also replaces narratives of an empire “torn between religion and secularism” with an account that historicizes these very categories and situates the transformations of Islam firmly within, rather than outside, modernity.

Zur Person:

Daniel Kolland is a historian of late Ottoman intellectual history. After he attended university in Leipzig, Cairo, Munich and Istanbul, he wrote a PhD dissertation on Ottoman-Turkish concepts of secularist modernity at Freie Universität, Berlin. His next project, which is funded by the German Research Foundation, turns to late Ottoman concepts of Islam and religion. 

Veröffentlichungen: 

(PhD Dissertation published on microfiche, 2023) ”The Making and Universalization of New Time. A History of the Late Ottoman-Turkish Magazine Servet-i Fünûn (1891-1914).” Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin.

(Book chapter) "Inculcating a Progress Mentality: Late Ottoman Struggles to Transform Society", in Zeit und Fortschritt. Arabische und osmanische Sichtweisen in ausgewählten Quellentexten des 19.-20. Jahrhunderts, (Hrsg.) Henning Sievert (Ergon/Nomos: Würzburg, 2024), 169–184.

(peer-reviewed Artikel) “A Strategic Eurocentrism. The Construction of Ottoman Evolutionism in an Uneven World (1870-1900).” In: Modern Intellectual History 21 (2), S. 328–356.

(peer-reviewed Artikel) “Global Performances of a Belated Concept: Revisiting Modernity through Concept History.” Cromohs–Cyber Review of Modern Historiography (26), 95–113.

(Forthcoming 2026, peer-reviewed Artikel) “Porous Whiteness: Race, Europeanized Sensitivities, and the Making of Secularist Turkishness during the Hamidian Era.” In: Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East

(Forthcoming 2026, Buchkapitel) “İnḳılab-ı Tarih ve Tarih-i İnḳılap: Zamansal Dönüşüm Osmanlı Tarihine Uygulamak.” In: 19. Yüzyıl Osmanlı Düşünce Tarihini Yeniden Düşünmek, (Hrsg.) Şeyma Afacan (Tarih Vakfı Yurt Yayınları)

Dr. Daniel Kolland

Project (German Research Foundation): "Between Remaking and Unmaking: The Religio-Secularization of Late Ottoman Islam" 

Freie Universität Berlin

Institute for Ottoman Studies and Turcology

Fabeckstr. 23-25, 14195 Berlin

Associated Post-Doctoral Fellow

Max-Weber-Kolleg

University of Erfurt

Nordhäuser Street. 63

99089 Erfurt