Micah Hughes
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies, Associate Director
Indiana University Indianapolis, Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, Researcher, Muslim Philanthropy Initiative
I am the Associate Director of the UNC Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies. Prior to returning to UNC, I was a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Muslim Philanthropy Initiative at the Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy. At IU, I worked with an interdisciplinary team of researchers studying Muslim philanthropy from a global perspective.
I received my PhD in Islamic Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My dissertation, "Religion's Revolution: Islam, Social Science, and the University in the Republic of Turkey," addresses how a group of scholars and intellectuals sought to translate Ottoman-Islamic traditions of inquiry into modern social scientific and humanistic discourses (philosophy, sociology, and literature). It specifically addresses the place of the university as a site of religious reform in the aftermath of revolution.
Supervisors: Juliane Hammer, Cemil Aydin, Carl Ernst, Fadi Bardawil, and Susan Gunasti
I received my PhD in Islamic Studies in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. My dissertation, "Religion's Revolution: Islam, Social Science, and the University in the Republic of Turkey," addresses how a group of scholars and intellectuals sought to translate Ottoman-Islamic traditions of inquiry into modern social scientific and humanistic discourses (philosophy, sociology, and literature). It specifically addresses the place of the university as a site of religious reform in the aftermath of revolution.
Supervisors: Juliane Hammer, Cemil Aydin, Carl Ernst, Fadi Bardawil, and Susan Gunasti
less
InterestsView All (16)
Uploads
Conventional histories of modern Turkey mark the end of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of the Turkish Republic as a secularizing event in which Islam was either relegated to the realm of private belief or left to the management of bureaucratic state institutions like the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). However, at the very moment in which Turkish secularism was said to take effect as the dominant ideology of governance in the 1920s, Muslim modernist intellectuals at the first Ottoman-cum-Turkish university, the Dârülfünun, articulated a vision of Islam as a “social institution” ineradicable from modern life in the nation-state. In this dissertation, I trace how modernist and Kemalist intellectuals sought to reform Islam through the creation of “scientific institutions” for the study of religion such as the Faculty of Theology in the modern university. Furthermore, I analyze how traditional Islamic sciences were translated into the logics and languages of modern social science to serve as the basis for a “revolution in religion” to match the political transformations that brought forth the Republic of Turkey out of the Ottoman state. Modernist scholars claimed this revolution in religion would be accomplished through the transformation of traditionally trained Islamic scholars in law and theology into sociologists, philosophers, and historians of Islam. This dissertation concludes with a reflection on how these various strategies of incorporation and translation of social scientific methods gave way to a Republican Turkish tradition of “university theology” which displaced older Ottoman-Islamic institutions and modes of knowledge production.
https://hdl.handle.net/1805/33563
While there has been a rich body of scholarship in Religious Studies and Anthropology that has provided us with a complex understanding of the emergence of the category of religion in the modern world, this issue and its implications have largely remained under-studied and under-theorized in the field of Islamic Studies. With this basic assessment of the field and a desire for deeper and more sustained interrogation of this issue, I organized and hosted a workshop at Williams College titled "'Religion' in Muslim Traditions" from May 4-5, 2019. I invited nine scholars-both nationally and internationally located, from graduate students to senior scholars-to participate in a forum that could serve as a space for informal dialogue and open-ended exploration.
Included below is an overview of the background ideas, goals, and motives of the workshop. That summary is followed by a brief writeup by each participant, providing a basic overview or abstract of their presentation at the workshop, as well as some big-picture reflections and take-aways from the workshop. Finally, this broad presentation on the workshop concludes with two brief solicited responses written by Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst and Brannon Ingram, reflecting on the core ideas presented below.
Conventional histories of modern Turkey mark the end of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of the Turkish Republic as a secularizing event in which Islam was either relegated to the realm of private belief or left to the management of bureaucratic state institutions like the Presidency of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). However, at the very moment in which Turkish secularism was said to take effect as the dominant ideology of governance in the 1920s, Muslim modernist intellectuals at the first Ottoman-cum-Turkish university, the Dârülfünun, articulated a vision of Islam as a “social institution” ineradicable from modern life in the nation-state. In this dissertation, I trace how modernist and Kemalist intellectuals sought to reform Islam through the creation of “scientific institutions” for the study of religion such as the Faculty of Theology in the modern university. Furthermore, I analyze how traditional Islamic sciences were translated into the logics and languages of modern social science to serve as the basis for a “revolution in religion” to match the political transformations that brought forth the Republic of Turkey out of the Ottoman state. Modernist scholars claimed this revolution in religion would be accomplished through the transformation of traditionally trained Islamic scholars in law and theology into sociologists, philosophers, and historians of Islam. This dissertation concludes with a reflection on how these various strategies of incorporation and translation of social scientific methods gave way to a Republican Turkish tradition of “university theology” which displaced older Ottoman-Islamic institutions and modes of knowledge production.
https://hdl.handle.net/1805/33563
While there has been a rich body of scholarship in Religious Studies and Anthropology that has provided us with a complex understanding of the emergence of the category of religion in the modern world, this issue and its implications have largely remained under-studied and under-theorized in the field of Islamic Studies. With this basic assessment of the field and a desire for deeper and more sustained interrogation of this issue, I organized and hosted a workshop at Williams College titled "'Religion' in Muslim Traditions" from May 4-5, 2019. I invited nine scholars-both nationally and internationally located, from graduate students to senior scholars-to participate in a forum that could serve as a space for informal dialogue and open-ended exploration.
Included below is an overview of the background ideas, goals, and motives of the workshop. That summary is followed by a brief writeup by each participant, providing a basic overview or abstract of their presentation at the workshop, as well as some big-picture reflections and take-aways from the workshop. Finally, this broad presentation on the workshop concludes with two brief solicited responses written by Ilyse Morgenstein Fuerst and Brannon Ingram, reflecting on the core ideas presented below.
The first section of this class takes up the question of religion’s relationship to violence by investigating how the concept of violence has been narrated alongside and as a crucial part of the history of ‘religion’, ‘secularism’, and the formation of modern notions of the human subject. This section does not answer the question affirmatively or negatively, but seeks instead to ask why this question is important for us here, today. The second section of this course addresses notions of pain, sacrifice, witness, and spectacle in order to theorize more closely about religion, the body, and its various modes of interacting, experiencing, and observing what we might call, in a general sense, “violence.” The third section of this course isolates questions about martyrdom, colonialism, warfare, and torture. This section is both historical and contemporary in outlook and seeks to link historical forms of political and social violence (i.e. colonialism) to modern forms of war-making that frequently invoke religious symbols, themes, and discourses. The final section of the course flips the script on the question, “does religion cause violence,” and instead explores how violence shapes religious experience, sensibilities, and attitudes. The most direct example of this is the week on “Incarceration,” which, as many have argued, is a form of violence that has drastically shaped religious practices in the contemporary world. The course ends by reflecting on the problem of white nationalism and religion after Charlottesville.
The paper addresses the changing institutional and discursive location of Sufism in twentieth-century Turkey. This paper argue that despite increasing criticism of the role of Sufi orders (tarikatlar) in Ottoman and Turkish society which eventually culminated in the closure of the orders and the seizure of their property in 1925, Turkish intellectuals and scholars like Mehmet Fuat Köprülü (1890-1966) had already achieved a conceptual relocation of Sufism by integrating Sufi literature into Turkish literature, thus establishing it as a constitutive element of "national culture".
The integration of Sufi concepts with new literary forms such as the novel, the academic monograph, and the university lecture made possible new reading practices beyond the realm of educating Sufi adepts into the Sufi path, therefore making possible the “enculturation” of Sufism as an literary element of Ottoman-Islamic history and Turkish history. This paper proposes to track this transformation in Mehmet Fuat Köprülü’s works: Türk Edebiyatında İlk Mutasavvıflar (1918) and Türk Edebiyat Tarihi (1920). His studies of literature generally and Sufi poetry (namely Yunus Emre and Ahmet Yasawi) specifically set a precedent for how later scholars of Turkish literature would approach Ottoman-Islamic textual production as an element of Turkish culture to be developed, institutionalized, and patronized in the Republic of Turkey.
By way of conclusion, this paper will ask how Sufism’s discursive reformulation and institutional relocation as an element of literary history relates to broader issues concerning the transformation of the concept of religion in Turkey’s twentieth-century context.
Theology and Continental Philosophy Unit
Panel: Islamic Futures in Dialogue with Continental Thought
This paper takes up the question of continental philosophy’s relationship to Sufism as a distinct feature of religious modernism in 20th century Turkey. Through an engagement with the work of Nurettin Topçu (1909-1975), a student of Henri Bergson, this paper addresses the global effects of Bergsonism and its relevance to Muslim modernists who were thinking through problems of tradition and change in the face of socio-political upheaval. Unlike many of his modernist contemporaries, who saw Sufism as a pacifying, anxiety-inducing force, Topçu’s Bergson-inspired spiritualism found in Sufism a creative language to combat perceived stagnation of social and religious life. Consequently, this paper claims that 20th century Muslim interactions with continental thought were not anomalous or derivative, but were a vital and continual presence in modernist circles.