Political Reforms as Religious Revival: Conceptual Foundations of Tanzimat

Parallel to Arab Nahḍah, Ottoman modernization program is associated with the Tanzimat, a period of drastic social, political and institutional transformation. The word tanẓīmāt itself, however, merely means “regulations” or “reorganization” and very little has been done in investigating the conceptual or ideational foundations of Tanzimat reforms. The question at stake here is how these series of reforms were justified and legitimized within the Ottoman political culture. Accordingly, this paper focuses on reform debates among Ottoman bureaucrats and statesmen in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and proposes the concept and doctrine of taǧdīd (renewal) as a key to understanding Ottoman reform and religious transformation. Ottoman reformers at the turn of 19th century resorted to the doctrine of centennial renewal in order to both criticize the moral shortcomings of Ottoman political system and legitimize innovation. Within this logic, Ottoman reformist sultans and politicians have frequently been referred to as muǧaddids, that is restorers. This paper will present an account of the concept of taǧdīd based on Ottoman political and historical writing from the period. I argue that Ottoman reform was inseparable from the logic of religious revival and that Ottoman debates should be considered as part of and discussed in relation to the 18th-century Muslim revivalism which has attracted growing attention in the last decade.

Ottoman Criminal Law – an Attempt to Create Modern Legislation

During the 19th century, Ottoman law was influenced by the West. The Tanzimat reforms marked the beginning of criminal codification in the Ottoman Empire, whose Penal Code was adopted in 1858. It was modern in terms of format and content, and it differed from the penal laws of 1840 and 1851. Its first article stated that it shall not repeal the provisions of Sharia law. This dual nature of the code caused a lot of confusion. The complete replacement of Sharia law with modern European law did not happen suddenly, but gradually. This was necessary for the government to embrace the new ideas and understandings of the modern societies at that time. Therefore, the attempts of the Ottoman authorities to modernize the Empire’s laws, particularly the ONK, cannot be denied.

Social and Economic Transformations in Rural Thessaly, 1850–1940

This article is part of a research project on the transformations that took placebetween 1850 and 1940 in the province of Thessaly, an extensive rural region of the Balkan Peninsula. It focuses on the changes in the economic, social and demographic levels, highlighting the interrelation of these changes in rural Thessaly from the promulgation of the Land Law (1858) under the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms to the annexation of Thessaly and the implementation of extensive land reforms in the 1920s by the Greek state.

Ottoman Turkey and Qing China

The late Ottoman Empire and Qing China were both imperial states that were weakened by their relationship with the changing Western world. In 1839, the Ottoman Empire embarked on the Tanzimat reforms which sought to change ideas about education, technology, and government structure. In the same year, China experienced the first Opium War, and its defeat led to the signing of “unequal treaties” which would force China to deal on unfavorable terms with the West for the best part of a century. In the end, the empires met different fates. Qing China was replaced by a republic in 1912, but its territory remained mostly intact. The Ottoman Empire was split up after World War I. One reason for the split of the Ottoman Empire was the variegated nature of its population, compared even to the multiethnic Qing. Another was Turkey’s relative closeness to the other European powers, which made it easier for them to divide it up.

The Transformation of Islamic Law in Modernity

In the process of modernizing Muslim majority states in the 19th and 20th centuries, Islamic law was often replaced with foreign legal codes. But in many areas of the law, Islamic legal norms were not replaced but rather transformed from an uncodified “jurists’ law” applied by qadis into legal codes applied by sovereign states. This process involved the transformation of not only many aspects of the substance of Islamic law but also the methods, agents, and epistemologies by which Islamic law is known and enforced. This chapter explores this revolution in Islamic law from the 19th-century Ottoman Tanzimat reforms to the 20th-century national appropriations of Islamic law in a few select areas, particularly family and personal status law.

TURKEY AND JAPAN: THE QUEST OF MODERNISM IN THE 19TH CENTURY

This paper will deal with the process of modernization of two emerging Asian powers, namely Japan and Turkey, with particular reference to important elements of Japanese and Turkish pursuits of modernization at the expense of growing Western penetration into their countries. This will specifically deal with the Meiji Restoration and Tanzimat Reforms where the process of modernization has taken place. Furthermore, there will be a discussion on the efforts of Turkish statesmen and Japanese statesmen in their attempts to modernize several aspects of vital institutions in Turkey and Japan as well as issues concerning the modernization encountered by the Japanese statesmen and Turkish counterparts in their countries. Sources for this analysis will be taken from studies of both Western writers and inside writers on modernization in Japan and Turkey. The ability of Japanese and Turkish statesmen to adopt and adapt foreign practices which infused with local circumstances suggests that they are capable of modernizing their respective countries by their own rights.

The Modes of Ottomanism

This chapter examines the origins, meaning, and failure of Ottomanism as a state-centric identity. The initial questions include, What are the key causes of the longing for the Ottoman Empire? What are the social implications of nostalgia for the past? What explains the current wave of Ottoman romanticism? This chapter argues that nostalgia in this instance is a bottom-up phenomenon. It traces the changing meaning of Ottomanism by exploring its historical origins in the second half of the 19th century. The chapter follows the Tanzimat Reforms of 1839 and the inevitable decline of the Ottoman Empire. The idea of Ottomanism as a new state-centric identity to unify diverse ethnic and religious groups was promoted by a small Westernizing elite, known as the Young Ottomans. The chapter’s closing question is, What was the purpose of creating a new state-centric Ottoman identity?

Reforming Criminal Justice in the Ottoman Empire: Police, Courts and Prisons in Rusçuk, 1839-1864

This case study explores the experimentation phase of the Ottoman Tanzimat reforms on the criminal justice system in the city of Rusçuk from 1839-64. In particular, it investigates crime and punishment by focusing on police, courts, and prisons and how these institutions responded to reform efforts in Rusçuk, which became the capital of the Danube Province in 1864. It shows that the Ottoman government established new police forces (zaptiye) and modernised prisons in the city in 1846 immediately after their introduction in the imperial capital of Istanbul. At the same time, the government bestowed extensive judicial authority on the meclis-i kebir (a secular administrative council in the provinces), and to a lesser extent on the meclis-i muvakkat (temporary council), over criminal cases. While the Sharia courts continued to enforce Islamic criminal law, the meclis-i kebir took charge of enforcing the new penal codes of 1840, 1851, and 1858, and served as a precursor first to the secular courts of the 1864 Provincial Reform and then to the more centralised and standardised nizamiye courts of the 1870s. This study also analyses the types and frequency of crimes and the penalties they received. Based on Rusçuk’s prison registers, which contain the cases tried by the meclis-i kebir and meclis-i muvakkat, and the records of the meclis-i vala (Supreme Court) in Istanbul, it argues that the crime rate in Rusçuk was much higher than the one represented in the Sharia court’s records.

The Development of Armeno-Turkish (Hayatar T‘rk‘erēn) in the 19th Century Ottoman Empire

Armeno-Turkish played an important role in the lives of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. At a time in which more than half of the Armenians of the Empire did not speak Armenian, Armeno-Turkish came to fill an important gap. It led to the proliferation of literacy among Armenians and allowed them to mark and strengthen their ethno-religious boundaries vis-à-vis other ethno-religious groups in the Ottoman Empire, while simultaneously allowing for the crossing of these boundaries which, in general, were characterized by fluidity. The 19th century represents an important phase in the development of Armeno-Turkish. Its development cannot be attributed to one factor; rather to a host of factors that include the impact of the Armenian Zart‘ōnk‘ (awakening), the spread of Catholicism and Protestantism, the impact of the Tanzimat Reforms (1839–1876), the development of Armenian ethno-religious boundaries, and the role of print culture. Finally, Armeno-Turkish raises important questions regarding identity formation, belonging, and cross-cultural interaction.