İskilipli Âtıf Hoca

Mehmed Âtıf Hoca was a Turkish Islamist. He was born in the village of Toyhane, in the district of Bayat, Çorum Province, in the Ottoman Empire and went to school there. After a couple of years as an imam in İskilip in 1893 he went to Istanbul to continue his education, first at a medrese and from 1902 at Darü'l-fünun Faculty of Divinity. He graduated in 1903 and took a job teaching as Ders-i Amm (Ulama), at the madrasah in the Fatih Mosque, Istanbul. He was later arrested and jailed several times, but freed. He and Mustafa Sabri were the founding members of Cemiyet-i Müderrisin. They were fiercely against the national government in Ankara which led the Turks to the Turkish War of Independence. He referred to Turkish Nationalists as rabid bandits. His father was a Turk from the Akkoyunlu Bayındır tribe, while his mother was an Arab originally from Hijaz.