Nonetheless...

Nonetheless, as several other Muslim nations are facing or are going to face the same conditions that gave rise to modern philosophical thinking in Turkey, it can be instructive to study that thinking. The beginnings of the intellectual transformation in Turkey go so far back as the early part of the twelfth/eighteenth century. Philosophy had ceased to be taught in the madrasahs that were the highest schools of learning in Turkey even in the eleventh/seventeenth century.

Hajji Khalifah (known in Turkish as Katib Chelebi), the unique liberal mind of that century, describes the deplorable condition of the philosophical and scientific teaching in the madrasahs . There was not only neglect of the sciences, but even hostility towards them for their being conducive to philosophizing. Thus, the three bases of philosophy, the spirit of free inquiry, scientific investigation, and philo­sophical tradition, were destroyed by a growing religious traditionalism.

This is an excellent example of the disappearance of philosophy whenever the value of free inquiry is denied and the progress of science halted. From the early part of the twelfth/eighteenth century on, intellectual awakening in Turkey showed its first stirrings. The printing press was intro­duced, a new interest in modern sciences arose, and the minds began to think about some political and social questions in a new way.

Except for the emergence of some rudimentary philosophical inquiry, a century and a half had to pass before the Turkish thinkers could become acquainted with the European thought. It is true that intellectual contacts with the modern European sciences had begun earlier than that. These contacts were especially in the fields of mathematics, physical sciences, and medicine. But the level reached by them was not yet conducive to philosophy.

The intellectuals were still in the stage of acquiring the fundamentals of these sciences, and interest in them was purely a practical one and had not yet reached a theoretical level. As a result of an intense desire to acquire European science and technology there arose a firm belief that reason and its product, science, were the prime factors of progress and therefore, capable of performing wonders in the progress of humanity.

This belief contained in itself three germinal ideas (the power of science, progress, and the evolution of humanity) that were bound to lead to philosophical thinking sooner or later.