Claiming Expertise against Orientalists and Reviving Islamic Knowledge in the Republic: İslâm-Türk Ansiklopedisi (1940–1948)

Debates in the 1940s surrounding the state-sponsored translation into Turkish of a central orientalist reference work, the Encyclopaedia of Islam, gave marginalized ulema and their supporters the opportunity to (re)claim interpretive authority over Islam and to attain political influence. Through the publication of a rival encyclopaedia, the İslâm-Türk Ansiklopedisi, alongside a journal, the İslâm-Türk Ansiklopedisi Mecmuası (1940–1948), these ulema expressed their own claim to expertise and aimed to revive their scholarly and intellectual tradition in the face of representatives of the last generation of Ottoman ulema gradually passing away. For this purpose, they used several strategies on two levels, aimed firstly at asserting their own expertise and secondly at denying expertise to their rivals, the ‘orientalists and missionaries,’ such as invoking their own biographies and credentials, the complexity of their field, or their international impact on the one hand, and analysing methods, political aims, power dynamics and alleged neutrality and universalisms on the other hand. My case study demonstrates that the enactment of expertise always takes place within existing ideological debates and socio-political dynamics, as the ulema counteracted the ascription of expertise to orientalists to demand more resources, authority, and power for themselves in the long run.