The conception of 'The east' and 'The west' in the second constitutional period Turkish thought: The cases of İctihad and Sirat-i Müstakim journals

The subject of this study is The Conception Of 'The East' And 'The West' İn The Second Constitutional Period Turkish Thought. The main question of this dissertation is: "How and why did the conceptualizations of 'the Self' and 'the Other' of the intellectual circles around the İctihad and Sırat-ı Müstakim journals change in this period?" To this, I tried to present a clearer view of how the Westernizing and the Islamic Revivalist currents -which to this day have formed the two most influential currents in modern Turkish thought- defined their own 'Selves' vis-à-vis 'the Other(s)'. The period I chose for this dissertation was subjectively defined. However, the Second Constitutional Period, which forms the period of my study, stands out as the period and the historical-political context, in which the major discourses of modern Turkish thought appeared in their main shapes and forms. The method I choose for conducting the study was 'the sociology of thought' approach to avoid reducing the process of discourse formation to a mere outcome of the historical and the sociological context of the time. Through this method, I hope to provide a more understandable picture of how specific ideas contributed to discourse formation and how the positions of individual members of each current related to the general ideas. The dissertation consists of four main chapters, a conclusion and an evaluation. The first chapter draws a picture of the general Second Constitutional Period Turkish thought to provide the background on the usages of the terms 'East' and 'West' in Turkish thought. The second and the third chapters directly deal with the East-West conceptions of the İctihad and Sırat-ı Müstakim journals respectively. The fourth chapter provides tables comparing the different approaches of these two journals to specific issues. The results of this study indicate that the Turkish thought of the Second Constitutional Period by and large kept its connection with the scholarly tradition and the thought of Islam, while also communicating with the European intellectual heritage. Of all, the Sırat-ı Müstakim journal, retained a strong terminological continuity with its thought predecessors in the field of the denotations and the connotations of the East-West paradigm. The İctihad journal on the other hand, opted for a clearly pro-Westernizing language, despite feeling the need to refer to an Islamic framework for legitimization purposes. Accordingly, I argue that the intellectual circles around Sırat-ı Müstakim aimed to re-interpret the existing tradition, whereas the İctihad circles desired to import and adopt a new life style.