Constructing congruence between Ghazālī and Ibn Rushd: late Ottoman responses to Islamic decline and the science–religion conflict

Since the mid-nineteenth century, debates over Islam’s relationship to science have been shaped by Orientalist narratives of decline and intrinsic conflict. These accounts portray postclassical Islamic thought as hostile to rational inquiry, cast Ghazālī as the agent of scientific stagnation, and elevate Ibn Rushd as the emblem of a prematurely extinguished rationalism. In the late Ottoman intellectual milieu, such claims provoked sustained and theoretically self-conscious responses, as reflections on medeniyet-i İslāmiyye, the emerging conception of Islam as a civilisation, became central to debates on historiography and scientific modernity. This article examines how Ottoman intellectuals revisited the Tahāfut debate between Ghazālī and Ibn Rushd to challenge inherited nineteenth-century models of religion–science conflict. Focusing on figures such as Ahmed Midhat, Musa Kazım, Ali Suavi, and İsmail Hakkı İzmirli, it argues that late Ottoman thinkers articulated a congruence model that reframed the Tahāfut not as a rupture between rational and revealed sciences, but as a moment of epistemic compatibility and integration within postclassical Islamic thought. This reconfiguration functioned both as a historiographical rebuttal to the science–religion conflict thesis and as a framework for integrating modern European sciences into Ottoman education without forfeiting religious or cultural authority.