Mr Daniel Sonnenfeld

Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Freie Universität Berlin

Bio

Daniel Sonnenfeld is a PhD candidate in Islamic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Freie Universität Berlin. His dissertation examines the intellectual history of modern Sunni Traditionalism and its debates with different strands of Islamic reformism.

Muḥammad Zāhid al-Kawtharī as a Post-Ottoman Thinker

Abstract

This paper reads Muḥammad Zāhid al-Kawtharī (1879–1952), a late Ottoman scholar who fled Istanbul in 1922, as a post-Ottoman thinker. It traces continuities between his struggles against late Ottoman religious reform and his Cairo-era polemics, and argues that his defense of the Ḥanafī madhhab and his vision of law and the state were shaped by the empire's legal order and by its collapse. His Ottoman model, however, reflected an idealized projection more than imperial reality.