Tag Archives: iskilipli mehmed atif hoca

1926: Iskilipli Mehmed Atif Hoca, headstrong

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On this date in 1926, a man went to the gallows over his headwear.

An Islamic religious scholar, Iskilipli Mehmed Atif Hoca (English Wikipedia entry | German) was deeply out of step with the secular-nationalist turn of Atatürk‘s Turkey.

Among Ataturk’s many modernizing reforms was a 1925 law banning traditional fezzes and turbans in favor of western lids — part of a much more comprehensive project to push religious authorities out of public influence.

Our man Iskilipli had already in 1924 taken his stand athwart history in the form of a pamphlet titled Frenk Mukallitligi ve Sapka (Westernization and the Hat) — essentially arguing that the fashion choice implicitly licensed all the un-Islamic decadences of European civilization. He was arrested within a month of the Hat Law’s passage, by which time the Turkish government had already encountered violent opposition to the new hats in some areas. Refusing to defend himself before an “Independence Tribunal” whose verdict was preordained, he was hanged on February 4.

Several other people were executed for opposing the Hat Law, with others incurring long prison sentences. (“Eight others were executed in Rize, seven in Maras and four in Erzurum,” according to a March 2, 2010 article from the now-defunct English-language Turkey newspaper Today’s Zaman)

On this day..