İskilipli Mehmed Atıf Hoca

Mehmed Âtıf Hoca (Ottoman Turkish: محمد عاطف خوجه) was a Turkish Islamist. He was born in the village of Toyhane, in the district of Bayat, Çorum Province, in the Ottoman Empire (present-day Turkey) and went to school there. After a couple of years as an imam in İskilip (hence "İskilipli" meaning "from 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. His father was a Turk from the Akkoyunlu Bayındır tribe, while his mother was an Arab originally from Hijaz.

In 1924, before the westernization movement in Turkey, he wrote a book titled Frenk Mukallitliği ve Şapka (Westernization and the [European] Hat). In it he advocated Sharia law and opposed what he called western influences, such as "Alcohol, Prostitution, Theater, Dance" and the "western hat". From his viewpoint, the western hat was a symbol of the infidels, and wearing a hat would make Muslims lose their Islamic identity. "The Hat Act" was passed on 25 November 1925 by Atatürk, which ordered that no other headgear except the western hat was allowed thus banning wearing the fez.

He was arrested and sent to Ankara on 26 December 1925, where he stood trial on 26 January 1926. The prosecutor demanded three years imprisonment, but the court postponed the trial to the next day. The next day, the Hoca declared that he no longer desired to defend himself. He was sentenced to death and hanged on 4 February 1926.