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RANK, Scott
An Anti-Islamic Polemic in 1870s Ottoman Istanbul: S.W. Koelle’s Gidâü’l-Mülâhazât
Starting from the 1860s, Ottoman ulema and Protestant missionaries in Istanbul wrote and published a considerable
number of religious polemics. Muslim authors included religious scholars, bureaucrats, administrators, journalists,
and converts to Islam. The Christian polemicists were American and European Protestant missionaries and a small number
of Ottoman Christians.
The anti-Christian polemics were originally produced as a response to the growing presence of Protestant missionaries
in the empire, but they transformed into a literary genre that expressed three developments in the late Ottoman
period: sectarian and inter-confessional tensions, defending Islam against modernist intellectual movements such as positivism
and textual criticism, and Christian-Muslim co-existence at the high-water mark of European imperialism. For this
reason, religious polemical treatises are an important genre for late Ottoman intellectual history, as they allow us to significantly
revise blanket labels of the period of as one of “reforms” or “secularization” while dismissing religious discourse as a
“traditionalist” or “retrograde” reflex. On the contrary, religious polemics were an arena in which the contours of Ottoman
modernity were continually defined and redefined.
This paper focuses on a particular polemical exchange between German Protestant missionary Sigismund Wilhelm
Koelle and religious scholar İshak Harputî in the 1870s. Analyzing their exchange allows us to explore modernist religious
discourses, the role of Christianity and Islam in the 19th century global print sphere, and the extent to which Muslim
literati and foreign missionaries inadvertently influenced each other’s conceptualization of religious truth.
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