Celal Nuri

The Turkish journalist and intellectual Celal Nuri Ileri’s unique blend of advocacy for modernity and westernization with Turkish nationalism and Muslim reformism set him apart from his fellow “Young Turk” thinkers, politicians and publicists, all of whom sought to halt the decay of the Ottoman Empire in its competition with the European powers. Although a supporter of the national resistance movement after World War I, his core beliefs about the need for a continued role for Islam in society, and maintenance of the Ottoman caliphate, were increasingly at odds with the secularist and Turkish-nationalist republic established by Mustafa Kemal and his circle from 1923. Here, in the first monograph in English on Celal Nuri, York Norman outlines and analyses his ideas and policies, from Nuri’s position on minorities, to women and family and Islamic reform.Based on a broad range of primary and secondary sources, Norman reveals the prophetic qualities of and renewed interest in Nuri’s ideas after the rise of Islamist political movements in Turkey in the 1990s.

Norman’s richly researched book provides significant insights into twentieth-century Turkish history. As one of only a handful of works written in English on late Ottoman and republican Turkish intellectuals, it is a noteworthy contribution to the field., "York Norman’s authoritative intellectual biography of Celal Nuri, gives us an engaging and critical history of the competing visions of modernity during the transition from Ottoman Empire to Turkish Republic. Kemalist narratives of history claimed a natural and inevitable continuity from late Ottoman crisis of Empire to the modern Republican reforms and Turkish nationhood. Norman’s masterful account of a prolific and influential figure of this transition, Celal Nuri, demonstrates the existence and legacies of alternative projects of Westernization, nationalism and Muslim modernity among the Turkish speaking elites.", "In this well-researched and nuanced assessment of Celal Nuri, York Norman draws a masterful portrait of one of the most original and prolific intellectuals of the late Ottoman Empire and early Republican Turkey, all the while offering fresh and incisive insights into the times and circumstances that shaped him."

York Norman is Associate Professor of Eastern European and Middle Eastern History, State University of New York, Buffalo State, USA. He is the co-editor of Transformations of Populism in Europe and the Americas: History and Recent Tendencies (Bloomsbury, 2015), and the author of Islamization in Bosnia: Sarajevo’s Conversion and Economic Development, 1461-1604 (2017).