Founded in 1846, Darülfünun (Dar al-Funun in its Arabic transliteration), meaning the “School of Sciences,” was the first Ottoman university in the modern sense of the term. It was established to cater to the needs of the empire faced with the enormous difficulties of the 19th century. While rapidly declining in the economic and military areas, the empire was also faced with major social and intellectual challenges coming from within traditional Ottoman society and from Europe. The first and only Ottoman university was charged with the herculean task of responding to these challenges and educating a new class of Ottoman intellectuals, scientists and statesmen.
In this monumental work, beautifully illustrated with 137 pictures and documents, most of which had not been published before, İhsanoğlu, the current secretary-general of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC) and the foremost expert on Ottoman scientific and cultural history, delves into the fascinating history of Dar al-Funun and gives the most comprehensive account to date of this institution of learning at the intersection of Islamic tradition and Western modernity.
Treating Dar al-Funun at the center of the Ottoman attempts at modernization, İhsanoğlu places its establishment and later development within the larger context of Ottoman social and cultural history in the 19th century.
The idea of founding Dar al-Funun came at the heart of Tanzimat reforms, the largest modernization project ever carried out by the Ottomans. It was a response to the failing influence of the traditional medrese system in the face of the new ideas coming from Europe. As İhsanoğlu points out, Dar al-Funun was designed to educate students in the fields not covered by the traditional medrese curriculum. İhsanoğlu provides a detailed and extremely useful discussion of the courses taught at the various stages of Dar al-Funun, from its establishment in 1846 until its final transformation into İstanbul University in 1933. The successes and trials of Dar al-Funun also reflect the tumultuous decades of the end of the Ottoman Empire and the early years of the Turkish Republic.
But İhsanoğlu does not treat Dar al-Funun as an exclusively “Ottoman” or Turkish project. Given the weight of the Ottoman Empire until the beginning of the 20th century in the larger Muslim world from the Balkans to the Middle East, Dar al-Funun was the first university ever established in the Islamic world in the modern sense of the term. And its impact went immediately beyond İstanbul and the Ottoman territories and reached both Iran and Afghanistan at the end of the 19th century. İhsanoğlu’s book provides important insights into the continuities and disruptions of history in the 19th century Muslim world.
Anyone interested in the idea of university and higher education in modern Muslim history will find this book extremely helpful and engaging. The history of Dar al-Funun, its rise and fall, its successes and failures, all testify to the honest attempts of Ottoman intellectuals to make a smooth transition into the modern period without giving up on their profoundly rich tradition. It was a painful experience for them to watch the Ottoman Empire fall before their very eyes and witness the emergence of a new world on the ruins of what they once considered to be sacred and eternal. The story of Dar al-Funun is as much the story of an institution of higher learning as it is the journey of a generation of Ottoman intellectuals at the intersection of multiple worlds.
İhsanoğlu has been serving as the first elected secretary-general of the OIC since 2005, and it is a remarkable achievement for him to be able to produce this major book with such a demanding job at hand. Those interested in the deeper history of the late Ottoman Empire and the early Republican period will find this book a most rewarding read.
