In the midst of World War I, a group of Ottoman scientists published a debate entitled “National Education” in the 1916 issue of the periodical Muallim (The Teacher). The exchange between the sociologist Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924) and the psychologist Satiʾ al-Husari (1882–1968) started out with different agendas for imperial education and culminated with an outburst regarding the definition of modern science. In his conclusive remarks, al-Husari declared: “I consider [his] way of thinking to be a form of metaphysics and mystics that resembles pantheism.”Footnote ¹ Al-Husari was a positivist who professed the exclusive authority of empirical data over all immaterial evidence acquired through metaphysics and mystical experience. Yet, his opponent was nothing less, and the accusation was all the more provocative because Gökalp believed that his positivist sociology could become the organizing principle of educational reform. Why, then, would one positivist accuse another of committing the cardinal sins of metaphysics, mystics, and pantheism? While the broad majority of scholars would describe this event as a vivid illustration of the global circulation of scientific knowledge, they may differ on whether it signals the “adoption” or the “accommodation” of modern science in the Ottoman context.Footnote ² They can do both in the name of social constructivism, for which all knowledge, whether positive, metaphysical, or mystical, is always the product of local circumstances and thereby equally valid.Footnote ³ Science studies offers new frameworks of analysis to examine how modern scientists situated knowledge within broader beliefs on the cosmological order of nature and society.Footnote ⁴ In other words, even when considering their theories as equally valid, one can identify the different standards by which Gökalp and al-Husari separated knowledge from belief. Accordingly, the history of Ottoman science was not as straightforward as the ineluctable transition from a world of traditions, irrationality, and transcendence, to the kingdom of reason, empirical evidence, and modern science; rather, Gökalp and al-Husari held incompatible beliefs of what modern science consisted of, and what it could achieve for society.

The debate occurred at a dramatic historical juncture: a few months before the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. From the perspective of national histories, Gökalp was the “real founder of Turkish sociology”Footnote ⁵ and a major ideological mentor for Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, who would rise to become a national hero, the founding father of the Turkish Republic, and the incarnation pozitivizm, a motto for radical modernizing reforms.Footnote ⁶ Al-Husari fled Istanbul shortly after the debate in order to join the Arab revolt in Damascus and later settled in Baghdad under the British Mandate, where he heroically changed his views, proved Gökalp right, and became one of the several founding fathers of Arabism.Footnote ⁷ When the dénouement is that trivial, the intended audience, in their last existential spasm of despair, instinctively metamorphizes into the peanut gallery of this nationalistic vaudeville. The exchange ended on 10 October 1916, several months after the beginning of the Arab revolt while al-Husari was still in Istanbul. The harshness of his final critique did not obscure the fact that he purposefully brought the debate to a bitter end because it was already lost.

At the outset, the debate was organized in favor of Gökalp, as he was given the floor first with three consecutive articles on “National Education.”Footnote ⁸ Gökalp's demonstration began with dividing the realms of nature and society: “the whole of value-judgments that form a people's consciousness is called culture.”Footnote ⁹ Apart from those subjective “value-judgments,” he distinguished objective “reality-judgments,” which formed a people's “technologies.” Accordingly, the goal of national education was twofold: “instruction” through teaching universal science, and “education” though inculcating national culture. Gökalp crafted this strict dichotomy by arguing that those subjective conceptions of sacredness, goodness, and beauty, in other words, religion, ethics, and aesthetics, were not merely the product of individual minds. Instead, he claimed that they were imposed upon individuals by a nation's collective consciousness. Gökalp conceived of society as a whole that remained utterly independent from its parts, and he argued that social phenomena were more than the product of the sum of each individual's actions.

The ease with which this sociologist claimed the authority of positive knowledge in support of such transcendentalist views is a reality historians of science can explain. Gökalp's positivist sociology reflected a broad variety of paradigms, methods, and instruments, which coexisted with an even broader set of institutional agendas, cultural trends, and moral stances. For instance, Gökalp availed himself of Durkheim's conceptual categories while simultaneously insisting that Turkish culture (hars) resembled the German concept of collective kultur rather than the French concept of civilizational culture. Because psychologists' object of study was limited to the individual, Gökalp argued, the discipline could not claim the status of independent science because it was unable to produce general and abstract laws about society. It only examined “organico-psychic phenomena,” which were universally immanent, whereas sociology was concerned with “socio-psychic phenomena,” which were specific to each nation. On the one hand, Gökalp argued that the nation could use sociologists in order to deduct the laws of society scientifically. On the other, he declared that “geniuses” and “heroes” could personify national consciousness in virtue of their exceptional personalities. While the Ottoman Army was promoting Mustafa Kemal to the rank of Brigadier General for his heroic actions at the battle of Gallipoli, Gökalp had already created an “Atatürk” in his own image.

Al-Husari's reaction to the first installments of “National Education,” entitled “Education and Suggestion,” refuted Gökalp's division between objective reality-judgments and subjective value-judgments by demonstrating how the world was not entirely independent from the concepts humans used to grasp it.Footnote ¹⁰ Suggestion, a psychological process central to hypnosis whereby thoughts and emotions are suggested to ultimately prompt action, was central to al-Husari's project for imperial education. His objective was to raise patriotic individuals by suggesting to them moral principles, including love for the Ottoman motherland, while developing the students' own faculties regardless of their cultural background. According to the psychologist, the essence of collective consciousness resided in mutual influences exerted by individuals through communication, which included words, facial expressions, postures, and movements. Over time, those connections brought together individuals in societies and formed a heritage transmitted from a generation to another through the imitation of ways of thinking, ways of feeling, and even ways of doing. Consequently, collective consciousness originated exclusively in the actions of the individual, for al-Husari did not identify society as the agent of this generational transmission.

Al-Husari regarded Gökalp's sociology as violating the boundaries of positive science by drifting away from phenomena and from observation.Footnote ¹¹ Yet, al-Husari's agenda for education was not more scientific than that of his opponent. It simply relied on different beliefs of what science could and could not achieve. Although they could generate facts on individuals and the way they socialized, scientists were not equipped to study society because they could not observe it as an object. In his view, Gökalp came close to claiming that society could think and feel as an organism; Gökalp's sociology did not qualify as knowledge but rather as a “supernatural hypothesis.” Together with the nationalist theory of great men, he deemed this hypothesis to be a form of metaphysics and mystics that resembled pantheism.

This climax is of great contemporary relevance for scholars of science studies. The so-called sociology of associations, or actor-network theory, has begun to debunk Durkheim's frameworks by asserting that “society explains nothing but has to be explained,”Footnote ¹² an idea that was also central to al-Husari's rejoinder to Gökalp.Footnote ¹³ Yet by 1916, Gökalp's theories were growing increasingly popular. On top of appealing to the military, his new sociology found many supporters from within the Turkish nationalist party, the Committee of Union and Progress. Throughout the debate, Gökalp, who was a Kurdish parliament member, continuously called for Turkish nationalism, stricter military rule, and wider social reform. In response, al-Husari brandished the patriotic virtues of psychology, which he considered to be another positive science with a potential to reform education. Therefore, the dispute not only pitted two positivists against one another, but also two modern political ideologies, Turkish nationalism and Ottoman Patriotism.

Gökalp and al-Husari deployed different rhetorical strategies in order to reassemble the fragmentary shards of their cosmological orders of nature and society for the sake of confrontation. In those moments, Ottoman science verged on literature to become simultaneously a form of knowledge and a code of conduct. While Gökalp offered a systematic monologue filled with savant classifications, al-Husari responded with facts and tangible experiments as he took the reader through the meanders of his interpretations and uncertainties. An integral part of al-Husari's defense of patriotism was his pessimistic worldview. Whereas Gökalp refused to address his opponent's arguments directly while critiquing contemptuously “old psychology,” al-Husari pointed to the immature arrogance inherent in Gökalp's tendency of turning “young sociology” into the mother of all sciences. Together with his pessimistic tone, al-Husari's ultimate outburst was his best assail on Gökalp's abstract metaphysics and brutal collectivism. It was a reminder from an old psychologist to his young sociologist opponent of one of the most intimate of human feelings: the gift of suffering.

The Gökalp al-Husari Debate is a stark illustration that Middle Eastern thinkers did not always take it upon themselves to draw strict boundaries between traditional and modern ways of knowing, nor did they automatically seek to accommodate them. Even if Gökalp was one of the main instigators of secularism in Turkey, his 1916 analysis invoked the theological origins of the scientific laws of society and asserted the transcendence of the Muslim national community (millet). Although al-Husari did not mention religion explicitly, his call for “Patriotic Education” appealed to the mystic virtue of pleasure (zevk) by arguing that unmediated knowledge and the gratification of learning would suggest individuals' loyalty to the Ottoman motherland (vatan).Footnote ¹⁴ Neither Gökalp nor al-Husari embraced tradition and modernity as their main conceptual frameworks. In reality, the debate was as much a quarrel between a nationalist sociologist and a patriotic psychologist as it was a collision between two moral ideals, collectivism and individualism.