Subject: پاشا paşa
Culture: Ottoman Turkish
Setting: late Ottoman empire, late 19th-early 20thc
Context (Event Photos, Primary Sources, Secondary Sources, Field Notes)
* Lapidus 1988 p601-602
"In 1876, taking advantage of Ottoman defeat by Russia, the constitutionalists staged a coup d'état and brought to power 'Abd al-Hamid II (1876-1908) who was forced to accept a constitution limiting the powers of Sultan, establishing a representative government, decentralizing administration, and mandating equality for all religious groups. 'Abd a-Hamid, however, was unwilling to surrender 500 years of Ottoman authority. Turning the tables on his constitutionalist supporters, he suspended Parliament and established an authoritarian and religiously conservative regime.
"The Young Ottoman period of the 1860s and 1870s was followed by a reaction and by the dominance of an authoritarian and dictatorial regime opposed to Young Ottoman constitutional and modernist principles. The regime was based on the absolute power of the Sultan, the bureaucracy, and the police. The Sultan was considered the head of Islam, and laid claim to a worldwide authority over Muslims. The new regime, however, combined conservative Islamic loyalties with the continuation of technical Tanzimat reforms. New schools, legal codes, railroads, and military techniques were introduced.
"The generation of Turkish intelligentsia raised in the 1880s and 1890s took shape in reaction to the conservative regime. Continued economic and educational development swelled the ranks of the intelligentsia. The number of white-collar, technical, railway, and telegraph workers increased. Poor and middling families were made occupationally mobile. The opportunities for communication were enlarged despite government controls and censorship. The press disseminated European ideas about science and politics and popularized Western attitudes. Ideas spread from the capital to the provinces as students brought home a larger vision of the universe.
"In Paris exiled journalists, writers, publishers, and agitators formed in 1889 the Ottoman Society for Union and Progress. The 'Young Turks,' as they were now called, maintained their allegiance to the Ottoman dynasty, but agitated for the restoration of a parliamentary and constitutional regime. Internally, the Young Turks were divided into a group led by Ahmad Riza, who favored a strong Sultan, centralization of power, and the predominance of the Turkish-Muslim elements of the Ottoman population; and a group led by Prince Sabaheddin, who emphasized decentralized forms of Ottoman rule. The latter gave less emphasis to the Turkish and Islamic peoples of the empire, and stood for a federated society with autonomy for Christians and other minorities.
"Within the empire, army officers, bureaucrats, and physicians, outraged by the inefficiency of the government, by defeats suffered at the hands of European and Balkan powers, and by their exclusion from participation in power, formed revolutionary cells in Damascus, Salonika, and elsewhere. As these cells proliferated, the Fatherland Society was founded in 1905 by Mustafa Kemal, an Ottoman army officer later to be president of Turkey; a Young Turk congress created the Committee for Union and Progress in 1907. In 1908 the C.U.P. cell in Monastir mutinied and forced the Sultan to restore the constitution of 1876. The military coup established a facade of parliamentary government, but the new government was actually run by the C.U.P. and by the army and proved to be authoritarian and highly centralized. Between 1908 and 1912, a three-way struggle for power among the army, the C.U.P. liberals, and Muslim conservatives ended with the army in control. From 1912 to 1918 the C.U.P. ruled by decree."
* Hodgson 1974 v3 p256-257
"'Abdülhamid's peculiar version of Modernity could not, in fact, be permanent. A secret league of army officers planned to restore the constitution, and, though the sultan learned of it from spies more or less piecemeal, he could not take drastic measures of suppression without, in effect, wrecking his army altogether, since it was shot through with discontent; and he was too clever to do that. In 1908, then, he had to yield to a mutiny in Salonika and restore the constitution. All the urban Ottoman subjects met the occasion with joy, Muslims and Christians fraternizing in the streets. In the parliament that followed, the Party of Union and Progress, which had been formed by the successful officers, rose to power. And now the enlightened 'Young Turks', as they were called, were faced with making the big decisions as to what was to become of Turkey.
"Now came to light all the ideas for reform which had been suppressed in 'Abdülhamid's long term of power, and at the same time all the contradictions between hopes and actuality which were to frustrate those ideas. A constitution, to be workable, presupposed a nation of the Occidental type. What sort of nation was the Ottoman constitution to represent? The problem had long presented itself with a special insistence apropos of the subject Christian peoples. The Ottomans were intensely aware of the drive for independence on the part of their increasingly Westernized subject Christian peoples. These peoples, regarding themselves as Europeans in the fullest sense, felt superior to their backward rulers. Yet (especially under the Capitulations) they were the merchants, and often even the artisans; they formed the economic arteries of the empire; they could not be disregarded. Their co-operation (and the respect of the European powers generally, whose support the subject peoples would require in order to rebel) must be won by reform of the society as a whole as well as of the military. Already in the time of the Tanzîmât, a major concern had been to create the idea of a trans-communal Ottoman nationality, which should hold the allegiance and satisfy the interests of Christians integrally with Muslims. For the body of the Balkan peoples, this had not worked. There were, however, sufficient Christian minorities left, in Macedonia or Armenia, to keep the idea alive. It was not expanded to carry further implications. For, to the differences between Christians and Muslims were being added differences between Albanians, Turks, and Arabs, who had Islam as an increasingly tenuous bond between them."
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