Can Turkey be at the forefront of the latest battle against the Islamic State?
Selim Koru
National Interest - July 24, 2015
In 1818, Amir Abdullah bin Saud was taken to Istanbul for execution.
This was no ordinary prisoner. He was leader of a rebellion that had
occupied the two holy cities of Islam for a decade and had dared to
declare the Ottoman sultan, Caliph of the Faithful, an unbeliever. Among
the various public humiliations before ibn Saud’s execution—since his
strict Wahhabi interpretation of Islam forbade music—the Ottomans made
him listen to the lute. But the cruelest punishments were reserved for
the rebels’ religious leaders, some of whom were stuck into the muzzles
of cannons and mortars and blown to pieces.
The rebellion clearly struck a nerve with the Ottomans. The rebels
belonged to the Salafi tradition of Sunni Islam, meaning that they
believed in a literal reading of the earliest Islamic texts. The
mainstream Anatolian Sunnis of Turkey on the other hand, belong to the
Hanafi-Maturidi
tradition, which goes into textual interpretation to attain the true
meaning of the Prophet’s teachings. It sprang out of an age of
enlightenment, when Islamic civilization reached its zenith in
mathematics, medicine, astronomy and the arts. The Ottomans saw
themselves as the heirs of Islam’s natural evolution towards a higher
civilization. They did not care to be called infidels.
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