The aim of this work is to make some contributions towards understanding the stagnation of Islamic theology and the intellectual life of Muslims by concentrating on the life and works of Mustafa Sabri Efendi, one of the last Ottoman seyhulislams (chief jurisconsult of the State and head of the Ottoman religious establishment). Sabri was a leading scholar and politically active figure of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the Ottoman State, and was appointed seyhulislams four times in the final years of the State. Due to his resistance to the Committee of Union and Progress and Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, he lived half of his life in exile in various countries, and died in Egypt. / The merit of Sabri's thought lies in its full reflection of influential theological and philosophical currents in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and in its recognition of the crucial importance of ontological and epistemological problems for contemporary Islam. Sabri emphasized that the epistemic structure of Islamic thought had collapsed, meaning that the first task of the Muslim psyche would have to consist in learning how to conceptualize and to formulate systematically its own positions on what "being" is (ontology) and what "knowledge" is (epistemology) in terms intelligible to others.

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