A “YOUNG TURK” ISLAMIC INTELLECTUAL: FILIBELI AHMED HILMI AND THE DIVERSE INTELLECTUAL LEGACIES OF THE LATE OTTOMAN EMPIRE

Ahmed Hilmi (1865–1914) was a prominent figure among the late Ottoman thinkers and writers who laid the foundations of intellectual life in modern Turkey. His oeuvre includes dozens of historical, philosophical, and political works, as well as novels and poems. The overtly modernist underpinnings of his works on the one hand, and his Sufi piety and firm rejection of materialism and positivism on the other hand, have earned him recognition as an early exponent of a kind of modernist, nonliteralist Islamic agenda that has been conspicuous in a variety of Turkish Islamic movements in recent decades. His untimely death, later attributed to a Freemason–Zionist conspiracy, added further to his mystique in some Islamic circles. Modernist yet deeply devout, Islamist yet uninterested in scripturalist paths of religious revival, Ahmed Hilmi stands out as a representative of an important intellectual trend that has often been overlooked in studies of the late Ottoman period.