Who read the Qur'an in the Ottoman era, and how?

"When the ulama and religious authority disappeared in the modernization period and people were left without adequate instruction in religion, a situation arose in which they began to meet this need themselves. When you add individualization and the individual-religion relationship to this, that is, the understanding that 'I can learn religion myself,' the need for meal (Qur'an translations) increased. In addition, the modernist Islamist currents' calls to 'return to the Qur'an' and calls to read meals were also influential. Of course, the existence and multiplication of proper meals is a positive thing for the intellectual community, but it is also a mistaken attitude for those who have no command of the religious sciences to suppose they will learn religion by reading a meal. Various sociological explanations can be given for the increase in meals, but it is not easy to conclude from it that this is beneficial."

Some time ago, here, in the pieces I wrote on the occasion of Hüseyin Kazım Kadri's Nuru'l-Beyan translation, I quoted an excerpt from one of the objections or contributions to some views I had defended, one that I took seriously. In fact this objection contains theses that can serve as an occasion to reassess many subjects in themselves. So it would not do to pass it by. Though a little late, I have thus returned to this subject.

First of all, we need serious and realistic questioning about how we construct the past. For example, how great was the guiding influence of the ulama on the people in the past? Do we really know this sufficiently?

Beyond some ready-made images we hold about the past, how widespread were religious education and teaching in the villages in the past, in a social structure in which at least 85 percent of people lived in villages, and were there ulama sufficient to meet the people's need for religious education and guidance in all these areas? How were those who did exist able to establish a dialogue with the people and spread and support a certain understanding of religion?

I think our images on this subject are idealist beyond measure. In a society where the literacy rate was extremely low, there was not much even the ulama could do against the nature of the prevailing religiosity, intertwined with innovation (bid'a) and superstition. One need not even have lived in those days to see that even where the ulama were able to maintain control, they could do so only with political support. It suffices to apply the yardstick Ibn Khaldun always used for historical knowledge: the past resembles the present more than water resembles water.

We can look, for example, at the events that developed after the famous historical rupture with the Turkmen beys in the time of Fatih Sultan Mehmet. How was it possible that the Safavid power, which these beys approached Iran in search of revenge and took behind them, and its religious discourse full of innovation and superstition, managed to spread in Anatolia in a short time?

Why, for example, could the guidance of the ulama, who had an unquestioned power in Ottoman society, not be preventive and effective against this spread? After this event, in the Qizilbash-Sunni division in Anatolia, was there in essence a serious difference between the religiosity prevailing especially in the villages and Alevism? Even today, if you compare the folk beliefs of villagers in Central Anatolian villages who have received no Qur'anic education, you cannot see a serious difference in essence. At the core there is no difference other than the present-day remnant of an affiliation with Shah and Sultan that remained in history.

Of course, our purpose is not to criticize the guiding power and capacity of the ulama in the Ottoman Empire. There is neither benefit nor need in that. "They were a generation, they came and went, we will not be asked about what they did or did not do." However, it is necessary to understand well, and appreciate well, the changes we have lived through, where we have passed from, and what we have experienced. But there is no sense, nor anything that fits fairness, in cursing past generations because they could not use some of the means that can be reached today.

Therefore we need to see this plain truth: in a society where there was no printing press, where a formal system of literacy could not exist (not that it did not exist, but that it could not exist), and where 85 percent were engaged in agriculture, the ulama's capacity to spread knowledge of the Qur'an was also bound to be limited by the possibilities (or impossibilities) of mass communication.

In how many villages could a Mushaf be found? For those days this was a structural problem of social life (or let us not say problem, let us say situation), and in this the Ottoman society was not alone. Indeed, compared with other contemporary societies, the Ottoman Empire was perhaps even ahead.

At least in Qur'anic education, even if one did not know the meaning, or even could not write, there was by contrast a serious rate of readers. This rate presented an interesting picture especially in terms of women's reading. Because women learned to read the Qur'an, they were also able to show a higher rate of reading Ottoman script than Westerners. This ratio of course also applied to men.

Consequently, the developments in the literacy rate that came with modernization have produced a state of advancement in reading the Qur'an, both in Arabic and with its meal, that cannot be compared with the past.

Especially in the Ottoman case, this may be hard to accept for those who tie nostalgia for the past to a history of decline because of the well-known religious policy of the Republican period. But this is a fact, and we can continue about what it brought and what it took away after seeing this fact.

Individualization and socialization are again a structural-sociological condition of the age we live in, and this condition includes everyone's power, capacity and freedom of individual decision in religious understanding. But is there anything in this to be disturbed about? Is this not already in accord with the Qur'an's maxim that addresses the individual and says that no one can bear another's responsibility or sin?