Abstract

Example

Abstract

This study is about religion and the politics of engagement between Muslim and Christian literati in the late

Ottoman Empire. It uses archival sources and periodicals to examine the Christian and Muslim literary responses to

the nineteenth and twentieth-century intellectual developments in Europe and the Middle East such as positivism

and biblical criticism that challenged traditional religious discourses. This study ties in several historical fields,

beginning with the highly limited historiography of Ottoman religious polemics, and moving to studies on religion

in the modern era, Protestant missionaries in the Ottoman Empire, imperial governance in the age of New

Imperialism (1870-1914), and the global Muslim print sphere that developed in response to these challenges facing

the Muslim world. Furthermore, it examines these phenomena across the early modern and modern eras, noting the

lines of continuity that are often ignored due to the periodization of Ottoman history that sharply segments its

chronology.

This dissertation approaches the history of relations among Muslim literati, Protestant missionaries, and Ottoman

Christian literati through the prism of religious polemics. These writers included journalists, ulema members,

government administrators, American, British, and German missionaries, and religious converts. This dissertation

builds on new studies in late Ottoman historiography that explore the zones of contact between Ottoman

confessional groups in the economic, political, and legal arenas by historicizing religious debates in the broader

context of the Ottoman literati's encounter with the intellectual traditions of the Enlightenment, but also the

changing Muslim-Christian power relations within and outside the Empire. It challenges the idea in Ottoman

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historiography that inter-religious relations irreversibly declined throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,

culminating in the Empire's ruin.

This dissertation's focus is not on the spiritual dimensions or theological contents of these polemics, but on this

genre as a means of expressing and engaging this period's social and intellectual challenges. It is the first to examine

Ottoman religious polemics as more than manifestations of inter-religious tension – they had the purpose of

stabilizing society by clearly defining the positions of each religion to the other. These disputes were more than the

construction of difference. They made space for different groups within a multi-confessional empire.

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