An excellent reconsideration of the last century of the Ottoman Empire. Instead of a long languorous decline, Hanioğlu describes a vigorous response by Ottoman elites to the challenges of modernity—problems that were not unique to the Ottomans: the reconciliation of religion and science, confronting traditional bases of power, defusing tensions between center and periphery, responding to public opinion, coping with urbanization, fostering a supranational identity in the age of nationalism, etc. What distinguished the Ottoman Empire from its European contemporaries were the constraints imposed by geography, demography, and institutional patterns dating from medieval times. The reforming impulse that emerged in the Empire at the turn of the 19th c. was complicated further by the interventionist tendencies of the European powers, who saw the Ottomans as too rich (in strategic and economic terms) and too weak (in military terms) to be left in peace. Late Ottoman history, then, is also the story of greater and more active Ottoman participation in the European balance of power.

One of the fascinating undercurrents developed by Hanioğlu throughout the book is the evolution of Ottoman intellectual life. The printing of nonreligious books in Turkish was not permitted until 1727, but then only 140 books were published by the major printing houses before 1838. Hanioğlu writes that opposition to the printing press came not only from ‘religious fanaticism’ but from the thousands of individuals who made a living from manuscript production (think My Name is Red). According to an inventory from 1801, most of the books belonging to the askerí (administrative) class in Instanbul dealt with religious topics (the Qu’ran, prayer books and catechisms); the rest were works of canonical jurisprudence, Persian verse, and lessons in Arabic grammar. The Tanzimat era saw the birth of provincial gazettes and newspapers that fostered debate on hitherto neglected subjects such as the rights of man, regime types and economic problems. Satirical journals mocking the ulema appeared in the capital, and scientific journals published discussions of Darwinism and Lyell’s Evidence for the Antiquity of Man, presenting geology and history as tools for understanding the human past, and taking care to disguise the critique of religion as an assault on superstition. European materialist ideas circulated among graduates of the new imperial academies and universities; when the science journal Mecmûa-i Fünûn invited readers in 1864 to contribute books toward the establishment of a new library, all but two of the 126 volumes donated were by Europeans (Bacon, La Fontaine, Helvétius, Montesquieu, d’Holbach, inter alia). The others were a copy of the Ottoman legal code and the Muqaddimah of Ibn Khaldun. New theatre buildings in the capital staged plays by local and international writers and hosted foreign circus shows. The Tanzimat elite’s taste for the European avant-garde was exemplified by the Ottoman diplomat Halil Şerif Pasha’s commissioning of Gustave Courbet’s infamous L’origine du Monde. The intrusion of European sexual mores into Ottoman society contributed to the stigmatization of homosexuality among men of the elite; Hanioğlu quotes the foremost Ottoman historian of the late 19th c., that, in the capital, “women-lovers proliferated while boy-lovers disappeared.”

Under the outwardly pious Abdulhamid II, German Vulgärmaterialismus (a mix of materialism, scientism, and Social Darwinism exemplified by Ernst Haeckel’s Monism) proliferated in popular science journals; being apolitical, these were spared by the censor. Spinoza, once a target of criticism by traditional Ottoman scholars, came in for lavish praise by the 1880s. A bibliography of all Turkish books and translations published in Istanbul between 1876 and 1890 lists only 200 of almost 4,000 titles as dealing with religious topics. The list features approximately 500 works on science, with much of the remainder made up of legal and literary works. The Sultan—who denounced Western mores but had a secret passion for Western classical music—tolerated the secular materialists and persecuted Islamist intellectuals, since the latter had greater capacity to legitimize criticism of his regime. Only after the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 did Islamist intellectual activity begin to thrive. Elements of the CUP undertook to reconcile Islam with science and modernity, some advocating the construction of a modern Islam that limited itself to matters of private faith and rituals, others supporting the use of a modernist Islam to rally religion to the national cause and project religious ‘Turkism.’ The Turkist reconciliation with both Islam and secularism under the CUP was radically new, says Hanioğlu, and the emergence of an intellectual, nationalist vanguard at the expense of traditional religious elites stands as the most significant consequence of the rise of the Young Turks. ( )

A in depth work on the late Ottoman history which enables the reader to have an understanding not only of the rise of modern Turkey and the middle east, but also of the interplay between the European powers and the Ottoman Empire. ( )

Read 2020. ( )