Mehtap Ozdemir
In conversation with recent scholarship which has revised the relevance of the Islamicate adab culture for Middle Eastern modernities, this chapter revisits the history of modern literature in the late Ottoman Empire. Conventionally, Ottoman/Turkish literary modernity is placed within the framework of Tanzimat (reorganization) which refers to a process of state-led politico-economic structural reforms across the empire. As in other kindred political–cultural reawakening periods overshadowed by Eurocentric comparative methodology, modern Ottoman/Turkish literature has largely been characterized as a set of anti-Islamicate gestures whereby the shared Perso-Ottoman literary culture was heavily criticized and rejected. In an attempt to counter this narrative, this chapter advances adab , Sufi poetics, and hermeneutics in particular, as the conceptual infrastructure of Ottoman literary modernity. After establishing how modern Ottoman/Turkish literature embodies hermeneutical practices associated with Sufi poetics, the chapter situates Ottoman literary modernity within an ethical–aesthetical tradition and calls for understanding modernity from the perspective of literary ethics.