Turkish Secularism and Heterogenous Muslim publics

The early historiography of Turkish secularism propagated a master narrative of an enduring power struggle between a unified secular front of Kemalist state elites and a monolithic traditional Muslim society.Footnote ³ Although an increasing number of scholars began challenging the secularization thesis in Turkey, the narrative of fissure between the secular and Islamic publics has mostly persisted.Footnote ⁴ For instance, while mapping the rift more aptly onto class-based divisions between urban state elites and countryside folks, Carter Findley still identified elites with “intellectual secularists” who owed their success to print capitalism, and the countrymen with conservatives who found “their cultural outlet in religious movements, such as the Halidiye-Nakşibendiyye.”Footnote ⁵ Şükrü Hanioğlu also resorted to the image of “a chasm between the secular elite and the pious masses” waging a “perennial tug-of-war between modernity and tradition.”Footnote ⁶ While employing a center/periphery dichotomy to examine the rifts between the state and society, Şerif Mardin, too, bypassed the internal diversity of the “center” that included not only secularists but also conservative Muslim modernizers.Footnote ⁷

Increasingly, more scholars challenged this binary and addressed the religious establishment's formative role in state modernization efforts.Footnote ⁸ Driven by internal efforts to preserve the Muslim polity, not external colonial forces, Ottoman modernization earned `ulama’ support in establishing Islamic grounds for reforms. Identifying the state with religion, the Ottoman ideology of din-u-devlet (religion and state) legitimized efforts to save the state's declining power through the Islamic concepts of zaruret (necessity) and maslahat (public good). Hence, Brian Silverstein argued that “there is an Islamic genealogy to the secularization” in Turkey.Footnote ⁹ This genealogy revealed the continuities between Ottoman and Republican governmentalities.Footnote ¹⁰ Building on these studies, I demonstrate here how Ottoman Sufi elites also partook in the national cause of modernization and later extended support to the new nation-state.

Class, Islam, and Modernity

One often overlooked aspect shaping high-ranking religious authorities’ responses to state-centric modernity was their upper-class social status and modernized cultural habitus. It is not a coincidence that `ulama’, shaykhs, and Muslim intellectuals who did not see modernization as a threat to their Islamic way of life shared a similar background with educated bureaucrats. Such intellectuals surely benefitted from modernization reforms in terms of educational and professional opportunities. However, the implications of their social status were more complicated than merely material class interests.

Ottoman elites owed their class status to the modernizing state. That is, unlike in some Western countries, where independent aristocratic and bourgeois classes existed in juxtaposition to the royal class, there was no independent elite in the Ottoman Empire until it created its own class of bureaucrats through modern education. Due to the peculiarities of their formation, as Kemal Karpat stated, Ottoman elites showed “a marked lack of class consciousness in the Marxist sense” because of their “identification with the ruling order.”Footnote ¹¹ This signifies that the Ottoman state tradition further shaped the moral and political worldviews of the bureaucrat-cum-intelligentsia. According to Şerif Mardin, conservative state values are what differentiated Ottoman elites from their Western counterparts, leading Ottoman elites to display “a profound and sincere devotion to the Ottoman State” and “willingness to sacrifice one's interests to that of the state's.”Footnote ¹² In other words, late Ottoman elites were socialized through state values, including the sacred conception of the state as din-u-devlet and nizam-i alem (guardian of the order). As Muslim bureaucrats, they inhabited statism and elitism as prestigious social capital. These conservative state ethics partly informed Rifai's positive responses to Republican reforms.

Besides, in contrast to the imaginary of “a unified Muslim habitus entering into conflict with Western modernity” reified by the master narrative of secularism, most Ottoman elites did not perceive modernity as external to the Islamic tradition but instead as a “universal civilizing process.” Western civilization invoked refinement and sophistication in resonance with “the classical Islamic notions of civility, chivalry, and social ethics.”Footnote ¹³ As imperial bureaucrats occupying European territories, they simply “did not see themselves as belonging to a world different from the one they sought to emulate.”Footnote ¹⁴ For instance, sultan-caliphs such as Abdulmecid I (r. 1839–61) and Abdulhamid II (r. 1876–1909) enjoyed European operas and Western-style clothing. Since the 1840s, imperial and upper-class households had been Europeanized, which extended to the new middle class in the 1920s.Footnote ¹⁵ These Muslim elites simply accommodated alla franca and alla turca eclectically in their lifeworlds.Footnote ¹⁶ Hence, it was not as paradoxical as it sounds for Ottoman `ulama’, shaykhs, and Muslim intellectuals to selectively incorporate Western intellectual thought, material culture, and modes of sociality without a sense of betraying Ottoman-Islamic tradition.

The Legacy of Ottoman Reform on the Republican Ban of Sufi Orders

Although being a Republican shaykh may sound like an oxymoron due to the well-documented opposition between the state and Sufi orders, Shaykh Rifai was not necessarily a marginal figure in his milieu. Late Ottoman elites knew the exigencies of their time that would determine the fate of the orders. After all, the Republican proscription of Sufi orders in Turkey in 1925 was the culmination of a complex historical trajectory leading to increasing state control of Sufi institutions.

As part of broader state modernization and centralization processes, the Ottoman state had already initiated a reform program for Sufi orders since the early 19^th century.Footnote ¹⁷ Sufi orders were first put under the Directorate of Imperial Foundations (Evkaf-ı Hümayun Nezareti) in 1812, and thus lost their financial autonomy.Footnote ¹⁸ In 1866, when the state established the Assembly of Shaykhs (Meclis-i Meşayih) under the office of the Şeyhülislam, the orders lost their administrative autonomy.Footnote ¹⁹ The Assembly of Shaykhs restructured all Sufi orders under central lodges in Istanbul and started to inspect them regularly. One of the assembly's major concerns were unqualified “cradle shaykhs” (beşik şeyhliği), whose hereditary status, not spiritual competence, guaranteed their inheritance of an order.Footnote ²⁰ The assembly addressed this by overseeing the appointment of new shaykhs and subjecting the sons of deceased shaykhs to examination before confirming their succession. Plans to establish a school to train shaykhs’ sons, “Medresetül Meşayih,” remained unrealized due to lack of funding.Footnote ²¹ The state's structural reforms – centralizing lodges, standardizing practices, and bureaucratizing shaykhs – gradually reshaped Sufi tradition per the state's raison d’état, rather than the tradition's peculiar mystical logic of walāya (sainthood).Footnote ²²

Particularly during the Second Constitutional Era (1908–18), Sufi orders faced harsh criticism from both sides of the political spectrum. Westernist and Islamist intellectuals alike viewed Sufi practices akin to the veneration of saints and ecstatic rituals as outdated and hindering social advancement. They condemned Sufi lodges as backward institutions, labeling them dens of laziness, charlatanism, and mendicancy.Footnote ²³ The Ottoman Parliament, which had several Sufi shaykhs among its deputies, openly discussed radical reforms including the possibility of abolishing the lodges. It was argued that the modern state needed active citizens who would work, produce, and contribute to society rather than being taken care of by state funding.Footnote ²⁴ Besides, Sufi elites were equally concerned about the decay of Sufi institutions. To regain their social and spiritual vitality, Sufi elites pushed the agenda of reform by establishing a civil society association (i.e., cemiyet-i sûfiye) and publishing new journals (i.e., Ceride-i Sufiyye [Sufi Newspaper], Tasavvuf [Sufism], and Muhibban [The Lovers]) to discuss solutions to the orders’ degeneration.Footnote ²⁵ However, this self-critique could have been restricted to Sufis belonging to the class of educated modernizers.

Following the Second Constitutional Era, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk initially collaborated with Sufi orders during the Turkish Independence War (1919–23). He welcomed shaykhs as deputies in the first parliament in Ankara in 1920. However, the outbreak of the Kurdish Shaykh Said rebellion in June 1925 re-ignited debates on the compatibility of Sufi orders with the modern state. As such, the orders were decried as a significant threat due to their power to mobilize the “ignorant” masses. In November 1925, law number 677 abolished all Sufi orders.Footnote ²⁶

Given this historical background, it was not unprecedented for Ottoman `ulama’ and shaykhs – such as Rifai – to endorse the subsequent Republican reforms. However, except for a few Turkish works, scholarship has largely bypassed the wide spectrum of Sufi responses to modernization reforms.Footnote ²⁷ The few groundbreaking studies that exist show that Sufi reactions included outright enmity, silent opposition by declining jobs offered by the new state, qualified acceptance by accepting jobs as staffers of the Diyanet (Directorate of Religious Affair) or mosque imams, and active endorsement by sending celebratory letters to Atatürk and publicly legitimizing reforms on Islamic grounds.

Many educated Sufi elites opted to collaborate with the state, enabling them to carry the tradition forward in reformist ways.Footnote ²⁸ Following the ban, Shaykh Rifai “sought a wider role for Sufism in connection to higher education and culture, at the same time expanding the participation of women in parallel with contemporary social transformations.”Footnote ²⁹ As such, he attempted to translate “timeless Sufi teachings in a way that is timely for the contemporary world” by anticipating that Sufism would eventually transfer from the institution of traditional lodges to modern academia.Footnote ³⁰

However, Shaykh Rifai's pro-reform views were not welcomed by all in Sufi circles. Cemal Server Revnakoğlu (1909–68) was one such detractor, who documented chronicles on the decline of Sufi culture. In one of his essays, Revnakoğlu mentioned Shaykh Rifai without naming him:

Lacking traditional lifelong training in a lodge, Rifai's Ottoman-issued ijazas held little weight with Revnakoğlu, who further ridiculed Rifai's “staged performance,” such as his “pompous walk up the pulpit” before a Masnawi lecture. Revnakoğlu disparaged Rifai's reliance on outsiders for the dhikr ceremony, highlighting his shortcomings conducting traditional rituals as a shaykh. Revnakoğlu also scorned women's carrying of Rifai's pictures in their necklaces in the lodge as a violation of Islamic principles against idolatry. He even mocked Rifai's removal of the title “shaykh” from his wife's tombstone, reflecting his disapproval of Rifai's adaptation to the secular state. Revnakoglu's speculations illustrate the tensions among Sufis around the tradition's modern adaptations to Turkey's sociopolitical changes, including the new public visibility of women.

Interestingly, such reservations were also adopted by anti-Sufi secular novelists such as Yakup Kadri Osmanoglu, Resat Guntekin, and Peyami Safa, who portrayed Sufi shaykhs in a negative light. As Brett Wilson observed, “by casting the aspersion of sexual debauchery” in mysterious lodges, these authors expressed modernist anxieties about not only Sufi tradition but also women's increased freedoms and public roles.Footnote ³² Rifai's large female following also attracted controversy in a scandalous novel by Refik Halit Karay, entitled Kadınlar Tekkesi (Women's Lodge).Footnote ³³ Despite Karay's denials, the novel's setting sparked public suspicion that the protagonist was based on Rifai. In short, for some Sufis and anti-Sufis alike, Shaykh Rifai was a polemical figure. His unorthodox path to becoming a shaykh, embrace of modern ideas and practices as a religious authority, inclusion of women in his circle, and alignment with the secular regime further fueled this controversy.

A Cosmopolitan Sufi Bureaucrat: Life and Career of Ken'an Rifai

Shaykh Rifai did not intervene in these public debates by publishing his political thoughts.Footnote ³⁴ To retrace his approach to Islam, Sufism, and reform, this article relies primarily on his spiritual discourses (sohbet).Footnote ³⁵ While most of his discourses were posthumously published as a single volume, Sohbetler (Spiritual Discourses), others are included in the second half of his biography.Footnote ³⁶ Rather than a didactic exegesis of a Qur'anic verse or hadith, Rifai's sohbets were mostly anecdotal. Neatly contextualized in specific moments and spaces, their memoir-like style offers more than Islamic lessons. They also serve as a source of oral history, revealing important clues about the conflicted lifeworlds of the pious Turkish upper class.

This article's second major source is Rifai's most expansive biography, written by four female writers.Footnote ³⁷ The first part of this work, written by Samiha Ayverdi and Nezihe Araz, details his life story, while the subsequent parts, written by Safiye Erol and Sofi Huri, explore Sufism in the 20^th century with reference to Rifai's thought.Footnote ³⁸ For instance, in her essays “Homo Mysticus,” “Homo Sapiens,” and “Murshid-i Agah” (Sage Shaykh), Erol not only narrates her own spiritual self-transformation but also tackles the enduring relevance and legitimacy of esoteric thought in modern society. To make it compelling to modern readers, she draws on a wide range of philosophical sources, including Greek thinkers such as Thales, Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle; Indian sources such as the Upanishads, Vedas, and Bhagavad Gita; and Western philosophers such as Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Fichte, Schelling, and Kant, among others. In the same erudite style, she traces the sociological evolution of religion, highlighting the common human quest for the divine as expressed in diverse forms, from totemism to Islam. In weaving Sufism into modern thought through erudite discussions of philosophy, sociology, and psychology, she may have aimed to elevate the status of Sufi epistemology.

I maintain that Rifai's biography by his female disciples primarily reflects the concerns and aspirations of his elite followers, as spiritual seekers, and how they perceived Rifai as a moral exemplar (insān al-kāmil). Unlike traditional hagiographies, the biographers did not underscore Rifai's status as a Sufi master based on his asceticism, public piety, mastery of rituals, metaphysical powers, or supernatural miracles. Rather, they focused on his practical ethics to unite (birleştirmek) the secular and Islamic visions of modernity. Despite lacking archival historical precision, the biography-cum-hagiography provides important insight into how Sufi tradition was reformulated by the pressures of Turkish modernity. By offering a socially resonant reformulation of Sufism, Shaykh Rifai appears to have positioned himself to intellectually and spiritually connect with the educated elites of the late Ottoman and early Republican eras, who sought a modern interpretation of Islam that aligned with the state's vision of the new modern nation (Fig. 2).

Figure 2.

Rifai's four biographers. From right to left, Safiye Erol, Nezihe Araz (in the back), Samiha Ayverdi, and Sofi Hori, with conservative writer Nihad Sami Binarli. Photo courtesy of Cemalnur Sargut.

The preface of the biography displays how its elite authors perceived the turbulent sociopolitical context within which they situated Shaykh Rifai as the savior society needed. They especially accentuated his ability to navigate the shifting boundaries of the world by “sacrificing neither his Muslim selfhood nor his modern lifestyle”:

Rather than focusing on Sufi practices in the confined space of the tekke (Sufi lodge), the biographers conceived Sufism as a way of being and doing in the world. Hence, they reflected on his entire life, “down to the littlest detail,” as “a supreme book [of Sufism] to be read.” According to them, his “greatest achievement” was his reinterpretation of Islam by way of “taking the substance of religion accumulated since the dawn of humanity and filtering it through his personality and the critical eye of the twentieth century.”Footnote ³⁹ Here, they hinted at how his Islamic thought was historically situated. To grasp his modern reconceptualization of Sufism, I next examine how his life trajectory equipped Rifai with a certain lens through which he reinterpreted Sufi Islam.

Childhood and Education

Rifai was born in 1869 in Salonika to an Ottoman Balkan family belonging to an `ayān (propertied notable) dynasty of Plovdiv.Footnote ⁴⁰ Growing up in the Balkans’ multi-ethnic and multi-faith urban centers, such as Plovdiv and Salonika, which emerged as modern European cities at the end of the 19^th century, Rifai was exposed to Ottoman cosmopolitanism.Footnote ⁴¹ As members of the early modernizing and Westernizing Tanzimat elites, Rifai's grandfather and father held high-ranking positions in the modern Ottoman administration. His grandfather, Haci Hasan Bey, was the district governor (kaymakam) of Alaiye and a country notable with a large estate in Plovdiv.Footnote ⁴² Rifai's father, Abdülhalim Bey, was a bureaucrat – a district director in various cities – in the nascent Ministry of Telegraph and Post. He moved his family from the Balkans to Istanbul during the Ottoman-Russo War of 1877–78. Rifai's mother, Hatice Cenan Hanim, belonged to an elite Caucasian family and was Rifai's first Sufi master (murshid), until introducing him to her civil shaykh, Qadiri Ethem Efendi.Footnote ⁴³ Rifai seemed very attached to his mother throughout his life. Grounded in the old Ottoman elite establishment, his family background shaped his life trajectory by socializing him, on the one hand, with modernizing Tanzimat ideologies and upper-class Balkan cosmopolitan social norms, and, on the other, with the mystical way of life.

As a child of an `ayān family, Rifai received the best education available at the empire's new modern schools.Footnote <sup>44</sup> In Plovdiv, he attended the Greek `Idadi School and Alliance Israélite Universelle, which was founded by French Jews and attended by Muslim children in the absence of alternative Ottoman public schools.Footnote ⁴⁵ He learned Bulgarian, Greek, and Hebrew in Plovdiv. When the family moved to Istanbul, he enrolled in Galatasaray Lyceum, or the Imperial School, the most prestigious Francophone boarding school. He had both famous modernist teachers such as Recaizade Mahmut Ekrem and Munif Pasa, and renowned conservative teachers such as Muallim Naci and Mehmed Zihni Efendi. Rifai also had French and Armenian teachers. In Istanbul, he learned French, Arabic, and Persian.

An incubator for the new political elite, Galatasaray was founded in 1868 as the first modern school with students and teachers of various ethnic backgrounds.Footnote ⁴⁶ However, as Sultan Abdulhamid wanted to reverse the Westernist Tanzimat legacy, he appointed Ali Suavi – a Young Ottoman Islamist activist – as Galatasaray's new director, who revised the curriculum to balance its European content with Ottoman-Islamic courses. While still boosting sciences, Suavi also added courses including Islamic law (fiqh), literature, Arabic, and Persian language. Aimed at training “a loyal and competent state elite, which would be thoroughly imbued with the values of the center,” Hamidian education policy strongly propagated the ideal of mastering both Ottoman-Islamic and European traditions.Footnote ⁴⁷ Coming of age under the Hamidian period, Rifai graduated from Galatasaray in 1888 equipped with expertise in both traditions of knowledge and a moral sense of loyalty to the state.Footnote ⁴⁸

Dual Career

Before launching his career in the emerging field of national education, Rifai attended law school while working at the Ministry of Post and Telegraph-Foreign Affairs.Footnote ⁴⁹ Starting in 1889, he worked for the Ministry of Education in various capacities, such as the city director of education, inspector, teacher, and school principal in the empire's major territories, from Eastern Anatolia to the Balkans and Hijaz. He taught various subjects, including biology, physics, geography, and French, in the newly established `idadi (middle) schools. He wrote a biology textbook entitled Mukteza-i Hayat (The Essentials of Life) by translating French science books.Footnote ⁵⁰ He also penned several newspaper articles for Tercüman-i Hakikat (Interpreter of Truth) on the emerging field of pedagogy.Footnote ⁵¹

During the reign of Abdulhamid II, education became a crucial battleground for modernization. The rise of well-funded foreign schools, offering high-quality modern education, increasingly attracted Muslim students and threatened the sultan.Footnote ⁵² To counter this, Abdulhamid adopted a “ghaza ethos” (holy war) by deploying inspectors, building an extensive network of modern `idadi schools, procuring funds through the Education Tax, and mobilizing new local councils of education (meclis-i maarif).Footnote <sup>53</sup> Rifai's bureaucratic responsibilities included the typical tasks of Hamidian policies, from overseeing `idadi constructions to raising local funds and inspecting foreign school licenses and curriculum.

Rifai's biographers cast him as a modern-day “wandering dervish,” traversing the empire as a reform-minded bureaucrat. In their view, his actions reshaped Sufism from a secluded tradition practiced by an exclusive brotherhood in a lodge into a capacious moral tradition guiding everyday life. They portrayed his administrative experiences as a series of challenges he overcame through his Sufi ethics, and his conflicted encounters as mostly shaped by the political climate at the turn of the century. As a high-ranking Ottoman official representing the central government in the peripheries, he encountered various forms of local resistance to state modernization and centralization efforts. I contend here that, by reframing his reformist work ethics as an extension of his practice of Sufism, the biographers attempted to subvert the stereotypical image of Sufis as idle mendicants.

Rifai's first post was in Balikesir, where he directed the new `idadi school.Footnote ⁵⁴ Meanwhile, his mother's murshid, Qadiri Shaykh Edhem Efendi, began Rifai's spiritual training in person, residing with him in Balikesir. The biographers narrated how Rifai faced low enrollment at the new school due to both Muslim and non-Muslim parents’ religious anxieties.Footnote ⁵⁵ They described how he went door to door to convince both sides of the necessity of modern education grounded in Ottomanism. As such, the biographers portrayed Rifai as a duty-bound Sufi who sought to “uplift” the nation regardless of ethnic origin. Seeing his actions as fulfilling the Sufi tenet of “serving people is serving God,” they neatly mapped his religious ethics onto the politics of state ideology. They also further linked his ethics of pluralism (unity in diversity) with the state ideology of Ottomanism.

In 1890, Rifai became the city director of education in Adana.Footnote ⁵⁶ Similar to his other posts, Rifai socialized mostly with modernist administrative elite (i.e., governors, commanders, etc.) in intellectual and musical salons during his time in Adana.Footnote ⁵⁷ His biographers recounted how he was not welcomed by some conservative locals, who sent reports to Abdülhamid questioning Rifai's visits to a Jesuit church, where he conversed with French clergy and read French newspapers. He was soon exonerated.

In 1891, Rifai was transferred to Manastir, near Plovdiv, and, in 1893, to Kosovo, where the previous directors of education had been fired by the Hamidian regime.Footnote ⁵⁸ Before his passing, Shaykh Edhem visited Rifai in Manastir and endowed him with an ijaza (license) of the Qadiriyya order. Rifai's term in the Balkans coincided with the alarming 1894 field report by the minister of education, Zühdü Pasha, on the competing nationalist interests of foreign-funded schools.Footnote ⁵⁹ Rifai's appointment to such a politically sensitive position may suggest that he had earned the palace's trust as a loyal state agent.

In 1897, Zühdü Pasha personally referred Rifai for the position of principal at the esteemed Numune-i Terakki high school in Istanbul, following the former principal's exile due to his conspiratorial Young Turk activities against the sultan. According to his biographers, although Rifai was content in Istanbul, he requested a transfer to Medina after receiving a mystical call in a dream.Footnote ⁶⁰ In 1900, Rifai became the director of the new `idadi school in Medina. Several anecdotes in which Rifai mediated between the Bedouins and Governor Osman Pasha further illustrate the rising tensions between the center and multi-ethnic peripheries of the empire.Footnote <sup>61</sup> During his time in Medina, 1900–1904, Rifai also became a disciple of Shaykh Hamza al-Rifa`i and received the ijaza of the Rifa`iyya order.Footnote ⁶²

Rifai returned to Istanbul in 1905 and began working at Dersaadet Darulmuallimin-i Aliye (Istanbul Teacher's Training School) and the council of inspectors. Meanwhile, he became a civil shaykh, hosting Sufi literary and musical salons in his konak (mansion). One day, however, Hamidian forces raided his konak due to suspicions of secret Young Turk activities. In order to expel the sultan's doubts, according to Rifai's biographers, he had to build a tekke and register it officially with the National Assembly of the Shaykhs (Meclis-i Meşayih) under the office of Şeyhülislam. Ironically, by the time Rifai's lodge, Ümmü Ken'an Dergahi, was ready to launch in 1908, Abdulhamid had been recently overthrown. According to his biographers, Rifai had yearned to establish a modern institution for the teaching of Sufism, an “academy” rather than a traditional lodge, if the political climate had allowed.Footnote ⁶³

In his lodge, Rifai delivered weekly sohbets (spiritual discourses) on Rumi's Masnawi followed by musical performances, dhikr, and samā` rituals performed by dervishes.Footnote <sup>64</sup> In other words, as a lodge shaykh, he started to observe the traditional Sufi rituals that he would later discard. His order appeared to be a microcosm of cosmopolitan upper-class Ottoman society. Among regulars at his multi-ethnic, multi-faith, and mixed gender Sufi meetings were state elites, academic scholars, musicians, artists, poets, and doctors. Religious authorities such as former Ottoman Şeyhülislams,`ulama’, a Chaldean priest, and Catholic priests also frequented his circle.Footnote ⁶⁵ Notably, his biography included letters from two French priests, Andre Duchemin and Theophile Sargologo, detailing instances in which Rifai had assisted them in their spiritual quest and highlighting his “soul-penetrating” charisma and gnosis.Footnote ⁶⁶ Approaching Sufism as “a genealogy of mystical thought and experience, not limited to a single tradition,” Rifai seemed to be a perennialist, maintaining that all moral traditions contained the same absolute essence, known as Hakikati Muhammedi (Muhammadan Truth), until finding its perfected form in Islam.Footnote ⁶⁷

In 1908, the new Young Turk government appointed Rifai as the director of the prestigious Darüşşafaka Boarding School. Rifai took a paid medical leave in 1911.Footnote ⁶⁸ In 1920, before formally retiring in 1921, Rifai was assigned to the Scientific Research Council (Tedkikat-i Ilmiye Encumeni).Footnote ⁶⁹ His followers’ accounts claim that Atatürk offered him a position in the new government, but Rifai reportedly declined involvement in national politics.Footnote ⁷⁰

Instead, he spent thirteen years (1929–42) teaching at the Fener Orthodox Greek High School.Footnote ⁷¹ This period coincided with a rise in nationalist policies targeting Greek minorities, including the population exchange program that led to the expulsion of approximately 1.2 million Greek Orthodox citizens. It appears Rifai maintained his ideology of Ottomanism and ethics of Sufi pluralism during the republic. His biography contains testimonial accounts from Greek students, who described him as a fatherly figure. Even today, his portrait hangs on the wall at Fener.Footnote ⁷² Rifai passed away in Istanbul in 1950.

A Reformist Sufi: The Islamic Thought of Ken'an Rifai

According to his spiritual discourses, three Sufi teachings influenced Ken'an Rifai's Islamic thought: the monist ontology (waḥdat al-wujūd of Muhyiddin Ibn al-ʿArabi, d. 1240), the love ethics of Mawlana Jalal ad-Din Rumi (d. 1273), and the virtue ethics of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (d. 1111). As such, Rifai seemed to approach Sufism as a tradition of irfān (divine gnosis), akhlāq (morality), adāb (good manners, etiquette), and ‘isqh (love). He defined Sufism in ethical, intellectual, and spiritual terms: “Sufism is makarim-i akhlaq (moral excellence), makarim-i akhlaq is adab, and adab is to see nothing but Allah.” Rooted in Ibn al-ʿArabi's non-dualist worldview, Rifai's concept of irfān emphasized that all existence was a manifestation of God. He argued that a true understanding of tawḥīd must be based on realizing God as the only true agent (fa'il) and source of being (mawjūd) in the world, which, in turn, guides daily actions. For Rifai, Sufism was not necessarily about performing ceremonial rituals: “ṭarīqa is the school of irfān, not the performance stage of hā or hū (invocations of God's names in dhikr).”Footnote ⁷³

While keeping irfān, akhlāq, adāb, and ‘isqh as core tenets, Shaykh Rifai seemed to approach Sufi Islam as a dynamic tradition conducive to social change. He maintained that, as a “liberal, capacious, and malleable” tradition, Islam historically “embraced every new move,” and therefore stood “against dogmatism, fundamentalism, and backwardness (gericilik).”Footnote ⁷⁴ He legitimated Islamic reform by emphasizing Prophet Muhammad's role as a “reformer” of his age. As such, Rifai strategically drew on the genealogy of Islamic tradition, rather than the new discourses of modernity, to rationalize renovation in Islam. Likewise, in his Sufi discourses, Rifai justified modern social transformations by resorting to historical Islamic parables. For instance, to convince religious authorities to familiarize themselves with the laws of both the physical and metaphysical worlds (mana ve madde), Rifai stated that they “should be like Solomon speaking the language of all.” To encourage them to learn the new “languages of modernity,” he drew on the Sufi allegory of prophet-king Solomon, who could speak the language of all birds. Like most state elites, Rifai appeared to be highly critical of the lower-rank, reactionary religious establishment for “anchoring in dogmatism” and “harming” Muslim society.

By strategically juxtaposing fashion and morality, gold tooth and spirit, and headgear and heart, Rifai distinguished here between the religion's “contingent” social aspects and its “essential” spiritual core. He reiterated that Islam owed its vitality to its flexibility in reformulating shari`a per the needs of the time:

Categorizing Islam into the two spheres of humanities (beseri) and divinity (ilāhī), Rifai underlined the flexibility of shari`a, which could adapt to any temporal and spatial circumstances if the universal, esoteric, and divine core was sustained.Footnote ⁷⁷ As such, he may have provided his followers with a formula to cultivate modern subjectivities as upper-class Westernized Muslims.

Authorizing Secular Reforms as a Religious Authority

Based on his speeches and biographic anecdotes, Rifai seemed to employ his two-fold characterization of Islam, composed of the essential/divine and the contingent/social, in his endorsement of Republican secularization reforms. For instance, in the early years of the republic, a hodja (religious authority) refused to get a headshot photo and wear a European hat, as he believed these practices contradicted the Prophet's sunna. This defiance cost him his official position. Rifai responded to the incident:

I suggest that Rifai's reaction effectively linked historical Islamic ethics with contemporary state politics. By elevating work to a sacred duty, Rifai challenged the hodja's neglect of this essential religious practice. Trivializing new Western clothing norms, Rifai not only questioned the hodja's priorities but also implicitly endorsed state reforms through an Islamic lens.

Rifai consistently supported the Republican ban on Sufi orders, closing his tekke “without any reluctance.”Footnote ⁷⁹ A multilayered analysis of Rifai's response to the ban reveals a complex imbrication between Islamic discourses, Sufi ethics, historical context, political climate, and his background as an upper-class bureaucrat. To begin, Rifai justified obeying reforms as an Islamic duty, declaring the rule of law as a legitimate substitute for shari`a. He maintained that ulu'l emr (submitting to the rulers) was the sacred duty of Muslim subjects: “Shari`a does not merely regulate the forms of worship (ibāda) but also encompasses law and order. The state law that maintains the social order (niẓām) is a part of shari`a.”Footnote ⁸⁰ In this statement, he intricately enmeshed his loyalty to the rule of law with Islamic moral principles. His biographers narrated with awe how “he never accepted any illegal activity even in a small room with three people.”Footnote ⁸¹ For instance, in 1929, one of his close friends, Server Hilmi Bey, was moved by a Sufi song and started to whirl (sama) in the house. Rifai stopped him and said: “No way, sir, because it is forbidden, you can no longer do it. We obey the orders of the state authorities (ulu'l emr) because we know that the one who speaks from there is God.”Footnote ⁸² As this anecdote demonstrates, bridging the political and spiritual, Rifai interpreted the Republican ban through the lens of waḥdat al-wujūd, according to which there is no agent/doer other than God (la fa'ila illa-Allāh).

Rifai viewed the state's action as an expression of divine will, stating “the voice of the people is the voice of God” (Halkin sesi, Hakk'in sesi).Footnote ⁸³

Here, I suggest that Rifai perceived opposition to the state ban as almost akin to blasphemy. However, I do not think that his allegiance to the state was merely a product of timeless Islamic precepts, but in fact closely linked to his class status. He had a day job as a state bureaucrat, and thus the social cost of the ban was not as colossal for Rifai as it was for most shaykhs.Footnote ⁸⁵ But, more importantly, his class status provided Rifai with a certain moral lens aligned with the state tradition. As he actively partook in the state's modernization processes as a bureaucrat in modern education, he was familiar with the exigencies of his time and the limits of resources. Rifai, therefore, echoed the widespread rhetoric on the lodges’ deterioration and shaykhdom's long-lost spiritual merit and competence when becoming a hereditary post and routinized office.Footnote ⁸⁶ He lamented that the lodges had been reduced to a mere “performance stage.”

Rifai's dismissal of proficiency in ceremonial practices might hint at his own lack of ritual competence, as Rifai did not practice Sufism as a dervish in a lodge all his life. He was always more interested in the intellectual and aesthetic expressions of Sufism. Rifai further stated that the lodges’ traditional function were lost when they “diminished to empty formalism and ceremony.” By divorcing his Sufi tradition's ethical-spiritual foundation from ceremonial ritual practices (e.g., dhikr) and traditional institutional structures (e.g., tekke), Rifai refashioned his Sufi tradition in parallel with Republican reforms. For him, tekke was only a contingent means, not the end, in the Sufi path. While these institutions were once the “hearth of knowledge” (irfān ocağı), uplifting society through spiritual, ethical, aesthetic, and cultural schooling, Rifai believed that they were no longer capable of meeting modern society's needs. When a journalist asked for his criticism of the ban, Rifai instead endorsed it, saying: “only a few out of around 300 tekkes in Istanbul were still serving irfān.” He even scorned Mawlawi Shaykh Baki Efendi for complaining about the ban: “Nothing changed; we are still what we are, oh holy man. We used to be demsaz (confidant) in the external abode of the lodge; now, we are dilsaz (who restores hearts) in the internal abode of the heart. Today, the body is the lodge; the heart the post.”Footnote ⁸⁸ For shaykhs like Rifai, it was essential to “keep the gate of the heart open, not the gate of a building.”Footnote ⁸⁹ Their new form of “post-ṭarīqa Sufism” was considered as a recourse to pre-institutionalized “authentic” Sufism.Footnote ⁹⁰

Sufi Ethics and State Politics

As most of his followers were state elites, they seemed to appreciate Rifai's alignment of Sufi ethics with national politics. His biographers argued that, for Rifai, “employing politics as a tool in the service of his cause would have been the ugliest assault to the honor of his cause.”Footnote ⁹¹ Adding that, since “sustaining the political order was the task of experts,” Rifai was “the last person who would attempt to shape state politics.”Footnote ⁹² These strong statements signal Rifai's alignment with the secular order that rendered religion and politics two separate fields of respective expertise. Moreover, such statements suggest that, unlike the Naqshbandi shaykhs, Rifai was not interested in Islamizing the state. As Butrus Abu-Manneh shows in his studies of the Naqshbadiyya, “the foremost duty of the Naqshbandi-Mujaddidi shaykhs [was] to seek influence upon rulers and to bring them to follow sharia rules”; such shaykhs “regarded the central part of [their] mission to be sure to secure the supremacy of sharia in society and state.”Footnote ⁹³ However, what the Naqshbandis saw as religious duty was deemed “the ugliest attack” on Rifai's cause. The divergence between the two traditions attests to the diversity of Sufi responses to state secularization reforms.

Befitting the sensibilities of a modern upper-class man, Rifai adjusted the Sufi self-formation in ways non-threatening to the modern nation-state's new moral order. For instance, I argue that his discourses on Sufi subjectivity (insān al-kāmil) resonated with state ethics of “industrious, frugal, and obedient” citizens.Footnote ⁹⁴ Whether they were Westernist, Islamist, or Turkist, most late Ottoman and early Republican bureaucrat-cum-intellectuals uniformly perpetuated the image of an ideal society collectively built by moral (seciyeli), hard-working, and cultured individuals equipped with modern knowledge and skills.Footnote ⁹⁵ These nationalist vanguards embodied a conservative “moral elitism,” portraying themselves as “moral servants of the nation… who displayed unconditional sacrifice, humility, and selflessness.”Footnote ⁹⁶ Many intellectuals, such as Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924), repudiated the idea of liberal individualism and constructed a moralistic conservative discourse of modernity in which one's “duty and obligations” were prioritized over “rights” and “self-interest.”Footnote ⁹⁷

I maintain that Rifai's spiritual training (irshād) was similarly aimed at disciplining the self into a socially responsible moral agent motivated by an internalized divine love. For instance, his Sufi discourses supported these ideal “qualities of national character, moral integrity, and patriotic feelings.”Footnote ⁹⁸ He preached that Sufism demanded moral excellence cultivated through constant ethical reflection and selfless service. Accordingly, a Sufi seeker should be saved from his “little weaknesses and pleasures” so that he could “sacrifice his interest for the greater good” and become of “distinguished value” (başarılı bir değer) and “a man of stature” (iyi bir cemiyet adamı) in society.Footnote ⁹⁹ Merging the ethics of the nation-state with spiritual-moral Sufi precepts such as “self-sacrifice,” “selfless service,” and “man of duty” might have further helped Rifai distinguish his Sufi order from the stereotypical image of lower-class lodges condemned as centers of ignorance, obscurantism, laziness, and passivity.

While echoing the communitarian ethics of nation-building, Rifai's irshād style also seemed to be informed by his personal and affective relationships with his disciples. His biographers stated that his religious authority partly stemmed from “his ability to identify potential,” empower individuals, and cultivate their unique contributions to society, “all without suppressing their personalities.” The focus on individual needs resonated with his educated modern followers: “He would neither tamper with the individual personalities nor would he force people to go against their natures… He never intended to fabricate a single mold of personhood in which individual nuances were ignored.”Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The biographers’ reflections on individual distinctions and personal growth can also be seen as forms of Sufi apologetics, a counterpoint to modernist critiques that portrayed Sufism as incompatible with modern subjectivity.

Divine Feminine and State Feminism

Rifai's elite Sufi circle included a large group of first-generation unveiled Republican women who challenged the uniform image of educated Republican women as staunch secularists. Shaykh Rifai's gender-progressive interpretation of Islam was a radical move in a context where new gender norms marked “the deepest intellectual and emotional chasm between the modern West and Islam.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ He reformed Islamic gender norms by not only discarding modesty codes, such as veiling and gender segregation, but also by extending women's public participation to the level of community and spiritual leadership. Challenging the patriarchal leanings of Sufi brotherhoods, he opened spaces for female leadership in the Sufi tradition (Fig. 3). Since Rifai's death, his order has continued under the authority of female shaykhs such as Samiha Ayverdi, Meskure Sargut, and Cemalnur Sargut.

Figure 3.

Ken'an Rifai with Samiha Ayverdi. Photo courtesy of Cemalnur Sargut.

Rifai's spiritual journey began under his mother's guidance, a fact reflected in his unorthodox dedication of his tekke to her: “The Lodge of Ümmü Ken'an.” The first chapter of his biography detailed her profound influence on him. His first lesson, as recounted, was the transformative power of unconditional love: “An infinite love of humanity…This is the gate of salvation for human beings to reach God.”Footnote ¹⁰² Aside from his mother, the most revered Rifai disciple was Semiha Cemal (1906–36), to whom the biographers dedicated a chapter entitled “Ken'an Rifai's View of Womanhood and Semiha Cemal.” The relationship between Rifai and Semiha Cemal was told as an epic story, akin to the relationship between Shams and Rumi. Stating that Semiha Cemal became the “mirror in which he witnessed his reality,” the biographers cited this relationship as another indicator of the high value Rifai gave to women:

The biographers credited Rifai's influence for inspiring Cemal to abandon her self-centered lifestyle of leisure, return to academia, and become the first female scholar of philosophy in the early Turkish Republic.

I observe that, by emphasizing women's public participation, Kenan Rifai's gender discourse aligned with Republican gender reforms. Unlike traditional Sufi guidance, he encouraged women to use their education to serve the nation, reflecting the republic's “state feminism,” treating women as the mothers of nation-building.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ For instance, Semiha Cemal translated Greek philosophical works such as Plato's Apology and Crito, and Stoics such as Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius, into Turkish. Her “service” to the nation combined modern educational values with the discipline and work ethic of classical dervishhood, blurring boundaries between secular and religious practices.

Uncoincidentally, it was Rifai's female followers who decided to write their master's biography and continue his legacy. Given his in-person style of irshād, these women seemed to have unmediated access to their murshid, enabling them to closely observe him as an exemplar. These four urban, educated, professional women were among the Republican women intellectuals with a record of literary, historical, and political publications. Samiha Ayverdi (1905–93) was a poet, novelist, civil society entrepreneur, and conservative-nationalist intellectual of the Right.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ She published over forty books primarily dedicated to the rehabilitation of classical Ottoman-Muslim heritage in historiography, arts, letters, music, and architecture. She was both an anti-communist and anti-Islamist writer. Nezihe Araz (1920–2009) was a Kemalist journalist and prolific writer. The daughter of a Republican MP from Ankara, Rifaz Araz, and close friend of Atatürk, Araz was expelled from her PhD program for participating in Leftist activism. Her oeuvre was unusually diverse, including books on the saints of Anatolia, Fatih Sultan Mehmed, Prophet Muhammed, and Rumi as well as three major books on the “heroic” life of Atatürk. She was also the co-editor of the Encyclopedia of Meydan Larousse.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Sofi Huri (1897–1983) was an Orthodox Christian born in Ottoman Syria, the daughter of an Arab Orthodox priest.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ She graduated from Cambridge University and became the director of the American Board Bible House and the editor of the Redhouse dictionary in Turkey. She wrote several books, mostly on past mystics, from Jesus to Rabi`a al-`Adawiyya (d. 801), and translated works by writers such as Tolstoy, Jack London, Tagore, and Muhammed Iqbal. Safiye Erol (1902–64) was a famous Republican novelist with a doctorate in philology from the University of Munich.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

While endorsing the Republican ban on lodges, Dr. Erol asserted the enduring value of Sufism as a philosophical thought, way of life, and form of art. After defining adāb as the expression of ethics in the field of aesthetics, she continued:

In the context of the new Republican gender regime encouraging women's unveiling and public participation, Erol drew upon Sufi interpretations emphasizing adāb in place of the veil. It seems that, within Sufism, these erudite writers discovered an “enlightened” Islam, compatible with their modern values.