İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca

Mehmed Âtıf Hoca was an 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 a imam in İskilip in 1893 he went to Istanbul to continue his education, first at a madrasah 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, an Islamic group that supported the government of Damat Ferid Pasha and advocated the British mandate for Turkey and the Greek invasion of Turkey. They were fiercely against the national government in Ankara which led the Turks to the Turkish War of Independence.