The empire suffered from a classic case of dynastic collapse. The final blow was the entry of the Ottomans into the Great War. They had to bad taste to join the loosing side. Please note what happened to all the other empires who were part of the central powers. All of them were dismembered , Germany nearly fell to a Communist Dictatorship and Russia did suffer the fate that Germany barely avoided. The post WWI chaos in what was once the Ottoman Empire was a result of both internal and external force. Remember the Europeans were more than willing to shred the Ottomans up and divvy up the pieces. The French and English did get their pound of flesh, the Kurds and others got screwed.

Truth be told none of the empires really survived WWI. The UK managed to muddle through until the final crack-up in WWII and the Soviets died in 1989. The American Empire is dieing the death of a thousand cuts in Iraq. Nationalism is just too strong of a force to overcome. The nation-state is now the default form of governance that people adhere too. In places were the nation-state is not so strong, the default is the tribe or clan.

In Europe and Americas the triumph of the secular nation-state has been a fact on the ground since the wars of religion. The idea of citizenship not Millet is the foundation of governance. Rights are accorded to the citizens by custom, by law, and tradition. Civic society mostly lies outside of religion in Europe and the Americas. There is a church-state wall in many cases and at least a lazies fair ideology when it comes to faith. Most important there is the idea of equal justice before the law. And the law is a state monopoly in Europe and the Americas. Even in the rare exceptions where there is a state church, it is the state that runs the church not vice versa.

Not that we can’ t learn from the Ottomans, they can teach us many things especially about coexistence and inclusion. They can also teach us a thing or two about over-reach and arrogance. Somewhere along the line they got too self-satisfied and incurious, they really missed the boat on the Americas (literally!) Imagine the shape of the world if it was New Istanbul instead of New York. But in that great game Europe came out on top. Europe had the advantage of geography, they had a straight shot at the Americas but they also had more incentive too.

Again the 19th century was were it all became far too plain. Look at the synergy between science and technology that occurred in Europe in the 19th Century, they sprinted away from the Ottomans. At the end of the century the disparity was just too glaring and many in the elites were desperate for a change. Not that the Ottomans did not try to reform but the forces of reaction and retrenchment always curbed and eventually defeated reform. Too many bureaucrats and too many Imans resisted change, too many local potentates ignored the wishes of the central government. Too many folks confused the dead hand of tradition with holiness. The Sultan just did not have the resources to combat the external and internal opponents. The Young Turk movement was more an act of desperation than anything else. After WWI the movement became a salvage operation. Atatürk was able to save Asia minor, he saved his ethic group from oppression. He had the tools and he had the will and he created Turkey as a modern secular state out of the ashes of WWI. That was no small thing as victors of the Great War were planing to obliterate any trace of the former Empire of Osman. The Greeks, the Kurds and the Armenians were more than willing to aide in that dissolution. Istanbul stood a very good chance of becoming Constantinople again. Just think of it, Hagia Sophia returned to the Orthodox Primate and as an extra added bonus the Blue Mosque converted to a Christian Church. It could of happened that way. Ataturk prevented that outcome and his vision of Turkey became reality. It could have been much worse, the Turks could have ended up a stateless people in there own lands.
Oddly enough Atatürk ‘s state may once again become a beacon to the rest of the Ummah a proof that modernity and Islam can not only coexist but cross-pollinate. Via democratic means and with due respect for the rights of others Islam is once again becoming a viable political force. It is being inventive again;it is showing intellectual curiosity; it is becoming adaptive. These were all the hallmarks of the Ottomans in days gone by, it is encouraging to see these signs in the sons and daughters of Osman again.

Wa ‘alaykum assalam

To be absolutely truthful, I discount the Sultans that came after Suleiman the Magnificent, more commonly known here in the west as the ‘Decline’ phase of Ottoman Empire. I usually pride myself on a reasonably detailed knowledge of history, especially Muslim history.

Imagine then my shock and horror, stumbling upon your sight a month or so ago, and coming across all these articles on the society I had discounted. I recently find out that Sultan Abdalhamid wipes out some $2 Billion worth of Ottoman debt, when the Jewish would have happily forgiven in in exchange for Palestine. Or the construction of the railway for the Hujjj, built using purely Ottoman expertise. I come across your captivating Cannakkale articles, and these current ones.

I’ve read every post of this blog looking for more. You can’t produce them fast enough for my tast, but PLEASE, keep these coming, inshAllah.

Jazak Allah Khair.

Selam Aleykum,

Mash’Allah, excellent post! However, I enjoyed your comment to Saifuddin’s question equally and think it deserves it place as a singular post as well.

Selam Aleykum!

As regards their downfall we should not forget the role some of the dissenters of the time played e.g especially the Najdis (and some sections of the Shia community). As regards the Najdis, is it not true that they rejected Ottoman rule because they believed that only someone from the Quraish could be khalif, and therefore custodian of the two Holy Mosques, and used this is as a basis from which to cause internal rebellion and uprising again the Ottomans ie. a racial prejudice, seeing as I have not seen any hadith to date that says the khalif must be from Quraish? I would be grateful if you could shed some light on this latter issue. Jazakallah.

How long does the period of sacred history extend beyond the life of the Prophet

I believe the question is really troublesome. Upon its first glance the question is innocent enough, yet after further analysis it intimates that the history around the Prophet (S) is somehow manufactured.

Secondly, the question relies on the idea that at each moment in history a complete grasp of tradition was somehow communicated in documents. So somehow the belief was introduced that Muslims could point their finger on some artificial timeline and recreate the reality of lifestyle at that time.

We have already seen this is impossible, even with the mass of hadith texts to peruse. We cannot simply plop our heads into a book and recreate the culture and lifestyle of either Uthman’s (R), Umar’s (R), Abu Bakr’s (R) times much less the Prophet’s (S) time without any surrounding context and environment of practice. No one has been successful at it, neither the Saudi’s nor the Taliban nor any other group which has claimed to seek an ‘purified’, disconnected, understanding of Islam.

The reality is Islam is that which is carried to us by tradition, not by texts. The last living flag bearers of that tradition are the Ottomans. They are also the most easily accessible in regards to an Islamic lifestyle which engaged with the West. As mentioned in the article, the flag was dropped at that point in time, hence it is up to us to take only a few steps back to pick it up.

Hence the Ottomans are part of the development of normative Islam, and I would say were the last carriers of that normative tradition in terms of a practiced reality. It is only since their time that Islam has become radically fractured and completely unrecognizable from the Islam of the Prophet (S). Indeed, that is not such a long time ago either. In fact, some would say that speaking of the 1920′s is hardly ‘history’ as much as speaking about our grandfathers. On the other hand, picking up ibn Taymiyya or Bukhari , is undoubtedly speaking about history.

Hence normative Islam comes from connecting ourselves to a living tradition, not from separation from that tradition. That doesn’t necessarily make all of history ‘sacred’ in terms of ‘infallible’. However, it does make tradition and history as a whole a fundamental part of what needs to be considered normative Islam.

as-salaamu ‘alaikum Yursil. I’m glad you posted this excellent article. And I’m curious about how you may respond to a question Sherman Jackson once posed in a lecture asking,

“How long does the period of sacred history extend beyond the life of the Prophet”

Sacred history being what he calls the period and development of “normative Islam”. In addition, how do the Ottomans fit in the “normative Islam” of present day Muslims?