Tradition, Reform, and the Sufi Imagination: Rethinking Late Ottoman Intellectual Life
Tradition, Reform, and the Sufi Imagination: Rethinking Late Ottoman Intellectual Life
This seminar offers a cultural-historical perspective on Sufi intellectuals in the late Ottoman world, focusing on how they responded to the crises of modernity not with retreat, but with reinterpretation. Through manuscripts, music, and memoirs, we examine how figures like Tâhirü’l-Mevlevî and Ahmed Avni Konuk reimagined the ethical, aesthetic, and institutional forms of their age. Drawing from poetry, commentary, hagiography, and legal codes, these thinkers challenged the binary between East and West, tradition and progress, revealing instead a dynamic repertoire of adaptation and cultural resilience. The seminar invites us to reconsider what counted as “reform” in the Ottoman intellectual landscape—and who its agents truly were.
· Instructor: Dr. Arzu Eylül Yalçınkaya (Institute for Sufi Studies, Üsküdar University; Fomer Visiting Researcher, Harvard CMES 2022–2024)
· Date: October 8, 2025 (Wednesday)
· Time: 20:00–21:00 (Istanbul) · 1:00–2:00 PM (Boston, ET)
· Duration: 1 hour | Format: Live / Online | Free Admission
Arzu Eylul Yalcinkaya, Ph.D., is a faculty member at the Institute for Sufi Studies at Üsküdar University. Her research focuses on the intersections of Sufism, modernity, and secularism, with a particular emphasis on late Ottoman and early Republican-era Sufi movements. She earned her undergraduate degree from the Faculty of Theology at Marmara University and served as a Religion and Morality teacher for thirteen years at various high schools. Yalcinkaya completed her MA thesis on the Mathnawī discourses of Ken‘ān Rifāī and pursued advanced coursework in religion at Harvard Extension School. She received her Ph.D. in Sufism from Uludağ University with a dissertation on the life and thought of Aḥmad al-Rifāʿī (d. 1182), which is forthcoming as a monograph in 2025.
From 2022 to 2024, she was a visiting researcher at Harvard University’s Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES), where she completed her postdoctoral project, “The Bridging Role of Sufi Intellectuals Between the Late Ottoman Empire and Early Republican Turkey.” She has presented her work at major academic venues, including the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and Harvard University. Her recent research has also explored 19th-century Sufi soundscapes in Istanbul, culminating in events on Sufi music and poetry at Harvard Divinity School and NELC in 2024.
In addition to numerous articles and edited volumes, she is the author of several books, including Ken‘ān Rifāʿī: Life, Works and Understanding of Sufism (2021) and the forthcoming Ahmed er-Rifāʿī’s Understanding of Sufism (2025). She currently serves as President of The Kenan Center for Turkish Cultural Studies in Boston.