Andrew Hammond’s book introduces his thesis about religious thought in an age of radical thinking in the late-Ottoman and early-republican period of Turkey. He focuses on Mustafa Sabri Efendi (“Sabri”) (1869-1954), the last major Ottoman şeyhülislam, Mehmed Zahid Kevseri (1879-1952), Sabri’s deputy for education in the İlmiye administration, and Mehmed Akif Ersoy (1873-1936). All were drawn to Cairo, Egypt, because Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s (1881-1938) nationalist wave surged with ideas adapted from a more secular Europe.

Hammond covers the lives of these three exiles in Cairo. He traces the genealogy and trajectory of key ideas from the era of the Young Turks in Istanbul in 1908 to that of the Free Officers movement in post-Ottoman Egypt in 1952. Primarily, he examines their written and printed texts, and texts of those who swayed them like Muḥammad ʿAbduh, Musa Jarullah Bigiev, Muḥammad Iqbal, Sayyid Qutb, and Abu al-Aʿla al-Mawdudi. Across these scholarly texts, secular, humanistic, and nationalist views of religion often collided with countering reformist or salafist schools.

In his conclusion, that I briefly outline here, the author claims Turkish Islam has been construed along national lines and identity. According to Hammond, it was easy for nationalist thought to shut out the Islamic traditionalists Sabri and Kevseri of Islamic history in Turkey and even easier to embrace Akif, who penned words for the national anthem. This sets Turkey apart, as Sabri and Kevseri left deep traces in the Islamic discourse in Arabic with a refutation of modernism and Salafism that remains powerful today.

Those men, he continues, are the missing link in our understanding of late Ottoman religious thought and its role in the modern Islamic history of religious thought and Islam in Turkey and Egypt, including the Muslim Brotherhood. They were the last major Muslim thinkers of their generation to grapple with new Islamic modes of thought and practice shaped by the matrix of ideas emerging from the European scientific revolution and enlightenment. The main question they wrestled with was: what could be salvaged from the Islamic tradition while also incorporating new universalist Western structures? How could this interweaving of ideas be to the advantage of these Islamic thinkers? Modern transformations in Islamic thought were such that they could not ultimately have imagined a return to a decolonized pre-modernity. They looked for Islamist movements with their statist politicization of religion and ambition to create an alternative modernity.

Hammond outlines the drastic reshaping of the Ottoman İlmiye in the 1920s and its transformation into a diminished, tightly controlled system shorn of Sufi, educational, and legal institutions. Thus, the republican revival of religion in the 1950s was uniquely Turkish and had little in common with the broader Islamic world. İsmail Kara called this the “great rupture” (büyük kopukluk) sought by Mustafa Kemal: deep and lasting. Thus, Kara argued that movements like the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaʿat-i Islami had little impact in Turkey, for colonial history and local contexts produced their own post-colonial radicalizations.

From here, Hammond focuses on four facets of this distinct conceptual trajectory from late Ottoman to early Turkish Republican contexts. First, he traces the ideological transformation of Islamic scholarly practice into a political program attuned to a new style of living that was underway in the late Ottoman era. Second, key critical thinkers took those innovations with them into their Egyptian exile and developed them further. Third, this new thinking was passed on to (1) Egyptian ʿulamāʾ and activists, who thought similarly about Islam and modern society in light of the Turkish repudiation of religious faith and its institutions, and also the continuing struggle against colonialism and (2) the growing body of Turkish students who followed Sabri, Kevseri, Akif, Hasan al-Banna, and Qutb and traveled to Cairo as a center of Islamic learning that attracted the best minds and fostered the mixture of ideas. Fourth, this shared Egyptian–Turkish intellectual production in Egypt was compatible with the works of al-Mawdudi in India and Pakistan and embodied a globalized intellectual exchange that was fed back to Turkey, where it was especially impactful to Necmettin Erbakan’s movement.

Hammond claims that it was in this milieu that the term Islamist (Islamcı), first appeared, although it was used in European languages long before 1900, from al-islāmī, and was also inspired by Ibn Taymiyya and Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. The author mentions Yusuf Akҫura’s 1904 text that explores three theological schools competing to define the direction of a reformed Ottoman state: multi-ethnic, multi-confessional Ottomanism, “Osmanlılık”; ethnic Turkish unity, “Türklük”; and pan-Islamic unity, “İslam birliği.” From 1908 onward, they formed opposing ideological camps.

Hammond may look into disruptions of Islamic thought by Turkish, Arab, and Iranian ʿulamāʾ and activists from 1911 to 1924. Guided by a mid-1914 secret pact of Germans and Ottomans, they supported the Central Powers with Austria-Hungary, Serbia, and later Bulgaria, against the Allied Powers of England, France, and Russia. War Minister İsmail Enver Paşa directed until 1922 this concerted war based on the (pan-)Islamist ideology as doctrine of interconfessional warfare to incite jihad insurrections in the enemy colonies. This jihadization of Islamism, “Islamcılık,” used Muslim brotherhoods as platforms and spread two dozen local jihad fatwas, a 1916 theory of Islamism (al-islamiyya), and the idea of one Muslim Brotherhood in Istanbul with affiliates in Muslim lands. The German Foreign Office financed and coordinated this “Joint Jihad” via two dozen native leaders in Berlin and Istanbul through its mid-1914 News Bureau for the Orient with 75 reading halls in and near Ottoman lands. Many Islamic scholars worked for jihad with partners like the Tunisian Salih al-Sharif al-Tunisi, and the Egyptians ʿAbd al-Malik Hamza and Abd al-Aziz Jawish, who later influenced al-Banna. After the sultan-caliph’s 1914 jihad call, they spread jihad concepts for an Islamic union (al-ittiḥād al-islāmī) in expeditions advocating for coalitional warfare. In the Great War, this bellicose birth of a globally politicized Euro-Islam generated three million texts in nine European and fifteen Middle Eastern languages. Hammond’s fine study enables us to insert missing links on the origins of Islamic and Islamist thought into a comparative mosaic spanning over four decades.