Intellectuals and Reform in the Ottoman Empire

The Young Turks on the Challenges of Modernity

Stefano Taglia

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138825451
• eBook ISBN: 9781317578628
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: History

This book uncovers Young Turk political and social ideas at the end of the nineteenth century, during the intellectual phase of the movement.

Analysing the life in exile of two of the most charismatic leaders of the Young Turk movement, Ahmed R?za and Mehmet Sabahattin, the book unravels their plans for the future of the Ottoman Empire, covering issues of power, religion, citizenship, minority rights, the role of the West, and the accountability of the Sultan. The book follows R?za and Sabahattin through their association with philosophical circles, and highlights how their emphasis on intellectualism and elitism had a twofold effect. On the one hand, seeing themselves as enlightened and entrusted with a mission, they engaged in enduring debates, leaving an important legacy for both Ottoman and Republican rule. On the other hand, the rigidity resulting from elitism and intellectualism prevented the conception of concrete plans for change, causing a schism at the 1902 Congress of Ottoman Liberals and marking the end of the intellectual phase.

Using bilingual period journals, contemporary accounts, police archives and political and philosophical treaties, this book is of interest to students, scholars and researchers of Middle East and Ottoman History, and Political Science more broadly.

1 The Ottoman Empire under Sultan Abdülhamit II

Background

In 1299, a Turkic splinter group of the Oḡuz tribal confederation based in Central Asia occupied part of Anatolia and proclaimed it an independent Beylik (Principality); in a matter of 150-odd years, this spread North- and South-wards, and became a powerful empire, which, in 1453, took Constantinople and made it its capital. By the late seventeenth century, at its territorial apogee, the Ottoman Empire stretched North to South from the outskirts of Vienna to Yemen, and West to East from modern Algeria to Iraq. Its ‘golden age’, as it is usually regarded, which coincided with the beginning of its difficulties, may be identified with the daring move that was the second siege of Vienna in 1683. Defeat ensued, and the first peace agreement unfavourable to the Ottomans – the Treaty of Karlowitz – was signed in 1699: a sense that “something fundamental had changed”¹ spread around. Ottoman statesmen started comparing the unsatisfactory state of affairs of the Empire to past moments of difficulty and attempted to find a solution to this situation. Their response to try and improve the situation took very different shapes: first came a wave of defensive wars, aimed at tightening the Empire’s grip on lands that, in one way or another, were falling out of control due to battles against local rebels and European invaders; then, the realisation that problems could not be halted by war alone brought about a more constructive reaction – reform – which took, yet again, a variety of shapes, and underwent several stages.

Probably the first document treating the issue of the need to reform the Ottoman Empire was a memorandum – the Asafname – written as far back as the mid-1500s by Lutfi Pașa, the Grand Vizier of Sultan Süleyman.² Referred to as “more than a Mirror of Ministers, of the kind common in Muslim literature since early times,”³ it was directly concerned with the deterioration of a state that, because of its adhering to the principles of Islam, had hitherto been thought to be free from the danger of downfall. The publication of the memorandum triggered a wave of criticism at the administration of the state: some blamed the neglect of true Islamic principles from the governing elite, others appreciated that the Empire stood on pillars that belonged to an ideologically and politically by-gone age, and that the negative state of affairs could be reversed only by modernising it.

Actually, England, France and Russia, which, for political and economic ambitions, all had expansionist tendencies over the Empire, had devised techniques to stir up trouble in its dominions. One such technique consisted in instilling nationalistic tendencies in some ethnic and religious minorities,⁴ and requesting reform, allegedly to relieve excessive pressure on, or mistreatment of, those minorities. The Great Powers’ requests to reform the Empire were not genuinely directed at safeguarding the rights of its ethnic and religious components, nor at modernising it, and least of all at including the Ottomans into the world market as partners of equal status. Requesting reform on the part of the Great Powers was often nothing but a pretext to claim a right to intervene directly into Ottoman affairs either to make territorial gains (particularly in Russia’s case), or to secure economic advantages (in the case of the European countries, Britain in particular), had their requests not been met.⁵ In the case of Russia, for instance, it had tried to stir up rebellions in Greece during the temporary occupation of Morea in 1770, while, in 1797, Bonaparte’s France had pushed his generals to foster ideas of independence throughout the Ionian Islands.⁶ A further series of foreign-inspired upheavals and secessions followed in the nineteenth century, which led to the independence of Greece, to the Serbians pushing for autonomy in the 1830s, the Wallachians and Moldavians revolting in 1848 and acquiring autonomy in 1859, and the Romanians reaching independence in 1861. As to the insurrections of the 1870s in Bosnia, Herzegovina and Bulgaria, we know that Russia had worked towards stirring them for some time: “… il y a quinze ans que la Russie préparait cette insurrection.”⁷

By the last quarter of the eighteenth century, almost all the major ethnicities of the Empire – Albanians, Arabs, Armenians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Kurds, Romanians, and Serbs – had expressed their grievances,⁸ making the emergence of nationalisms a dramatic reality, a severe political blow, and a lonḡlasting challenge, which increased the Ottomans’ already deep sense of insecurity and failure. When the nationalistic feelings of the Empire’s minorities acquired a religious basis, the result was the shake-up of Ottoman society from its foundations: what was the meaning of an Ottoman sentiment of affiliation in a state that was slowly losing its non-Muslim sectors? The question represented an enormous challenge in political, social and ideological terms, one that assigned Ottoman reformers the task of re-shaping the term Ottomanism according to a new political and social definition. Considering that all attempts to reform thus far – the Hatt-ı Șerif of Gülhane of 1839, the Islahat Fermanı of 1856 and the Constitution of 1876 – were based on the assumption that a common affiliative sense of Ottomanism among all ethnic and religious groups that composed the Empire did exist, the task facing Ottoman reformers was an extremely difficult one indeed. If the often foreign-inspired challenge represented by emerging nationalisms was not enough of a problem for Ottoman reformers, there was another way in which the involvement of Europe and Russia with the Empire’s internal affairs proved highly problematic; this related to economic matters, and caused the stratification of its populations in ‘classes’ created along religious lines. This is because Europe and Russia favoured Christian merchants and businessmen, particularly the Greeks, as trading partners:

[t]rade is from the first almost entirely in their hands [the Greek minority]. Even where the capital is foreign, the practical working is to a great extent directed by Greeks. Soon the land, too, passes into their hands. Your village Turk is helpless and improvident. It is a point of honour with him to make a great show at a marriage. He borrows money … then his ruin is speedy, and the land on whose security he has borrowed passes out of his possession.⁹

The concentration of trade in the hands of ethnic minorities brought to full fruition the situation created by the Capitulations of 1541 when, as part of an alliance between Sultan Süleyman I and Francis I of France:

French merchants and other residents in the Ottoman state were given privileges … which were later extended to other European states, and which had the effect of placing Europeans in the Ottoman state outside local jurisdiction.¹⁰

The essence of the Capitulations was not only that Europeans could operate their own courts and postal services within the Empire, but also that Ottomans were denied the right to use tariffs to protect their agricultural goods and the output of their emerging manufacturing sector; this had serious detrimental consequences, particularly for the Muslim Arabo-Turkish section of the Ottoman society:

there is no peasant who is unhappier than the Turkish peasant. He suffers more than his Christian equivalent because of the situation whereby he is placed in an inferior position with regard to the latter and cannot rely on the protection of consuls, ambassadors and foreign governments.¹¹

Moreover, when members of the minorities entered the bureaucracy, they attained advancement and promotion faster than the Muslims because of their knowledge of foreign customs and command of foreign languages, French in particular. Not surprisingly, the Christian middle-class that had emerged rapidly outdid the Turkish one: “[t]he Turkish-Muslim segment of society did not have a middle class (merchants, intellectuals, clergy) which could compete politically with the Christian one.”¹² The moment the state itself suffered economic difficulties, due to an unfavourable balance of payments, things became even worse for the Muslims, who formed the bulk of the military and bureaucratic machines, because monthly pay was always late and frequently missed. This worsening of the economic situation of civil servants and bureaucrats reached the top of the pyramid, as indicated, for instance, by the fact that the foreign ministers’ salaries fell drastically from the early 1860s to the mid-1890s from a peak of 75,000 kuruș to a low of 30,000 kuruș.¹³

In short, the multi-faceted nature of foreign involvement within the Empire benefited the non-Muslim sectors of society the most; its overall impact was to fragment it socially creating a gap constructed along confessional lines, and strangling the Muslim component economically as a nineteenth-century Ottoman reformer noted:

Istanbul might well become orderly and prosperous like Paris or London, but ‘we would not be the ones who would profit from or taste these delights … Rather, we would turn up from time to time as sellers of fire-wood and charcoal and gaze at it sadly’. The question which haunted Muslim Turks was not whether the country would survive, but whether they would survive in it.¹⁴

Among the many difficulties facing Ottoman reformers was the fact that their Empire was lagging behind in specific areas: scientifically and technologically backwards when confronted with the West, the Empire was de facto in a position of perennial weakness vis-à-vis external challenges, and of inertia in answering internal demands for change aimed at its modernisation in political, economic and social terms.

Abdülhamit’s way to look at reform

Abdülhamit II had come to the throne at a very critical time: European entanglement had reached its peak, the economic situation had worsened in unprecedented ways, and the Empire had never been socially so fragmented:

[the] second half of the 1870s was one of the lowest points of the entire nineteenth century for the Ottomans, a fact evidenced especially in the government bankruptcy and the Russo-Turkish War, which brought the Russian army to the outskirts of Istanbul, flooded the city with refugees, and left the Ottoman government saddled with a huge indemnity.¹⁵

The Sultan was well aware of the fact that, to halt the apparent demise of the Empire, elements of modernity had to be introduced in it, and there is no doubt that, by the end of the 1870s, he was convinced of the necessity to reshape the structure of power, and the make-up of the society. Accordingly, he became an “avid reformer”¹⁶ of the administrative system, and “a willing and active modernizer”¹⁷ deeply engaged in the attempt to formulate a new discourse that would ensure the survival of the Empire. It would be simplistic, therefore, in analysing the history of the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth century, to assume that the Young Turk opposition movement expressed the only modernising force.

In terms of the weakening of the state, the Sultan identified three entities – some sectors of the religious establishment, the bureaucracy, and the foreign powers (Europe and Russia) – as primarily responsible for the worsening of the situation the Empire was in, particularly for shifting power away from the centre, and, consequently, creating new allegiances not embodied in the Ottoman Caliphal-Sultanic structure. He would have wished to go back to pre-Tanzimat times, as his close collaborator Grand Vizier Mahmut Nedim Pașa stated:¹⁸

In the early days, when the sultans had personally tended to the affairs of government, and when the laws and regulations were kept within the bounds of the șeri’at, religious and communal zeal were real, and ‘the union of hearts [that bound together] the sultanate and [the Muslim] community, as well as Ottoman power, increased day after day’. Moreover, when sultans managed the affairs of state themselves, Muslim power grew, the Janissary corps and the ulema were kept under control, and the interests of the state were kept apart from the private interests of its ministers.¹⁹

Abdülhamit’s main recipe for improving matters was to further centralise power by incorporating the whole of the religious establishment in his own cir...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. The Ottoman Empire under Sultan Abdülhamit II
• 2. Young Turk émigrés, the press and the Parisian milieu
• 3. Ahmet Rıza and Mechveret
• 4. Mehmet Sabahattin and social science
• 5. The end of an idea, the 1902 Congress of Ottoman Liberals in Paris
• Conclusion
• Afterword
• References
• Index