Banu Turnaoglu Istibdad

DESPOTISM (STIBDAD) IN OTTOMAN POLITICAL
THOUGHT
Banu Turnaolu1
Abstract: This paper offers a conceptual history of the term ‘despotism’ (istibdad) in
Ottoman political thought. To demonstrate the transformation of the term’s meaning
from a mere word into a political concept and later into a powerful propaganda tool,
this process is broken down into four sections, each relating to a distinct episode in the
political thought of the Ottoman and early Turkish Republic periods. The paper’s
broader aim is to highlight the complex dynamics of the transmission and reception of
ideas across national borders, so as to further enrich our understanding of intellectual
history.
For personal use only -- not for reproduction
Keywords: stibdad, despotism, tyranny, Montesquieu, NamÏk Kemal, Abdullah

Cevdet, Ahmed RÏza, constitutionalism, Ottoman political thought, history of ideas.
Copyright (c) Imprint Academic
Introduction
The history of the term ‘despotism’ has been the subject of a number of recent
studies in political thought. This powerful, contested term has, with few
exceptions, carried pejorative associations derived from the European per-
spective of its users, and has played a central role in defining types of
governments antithetical to liberty and arrangements incompatible with it. As
Melvin Richter has remarked, it is ‘a concept that has been used to describe
and compare politics, as a weapon in both domestic and international politics,
and as an expression, usually although not invariably, in negative form’.2
The concept of despotism began as part of a distinctively Hellenic perception
of Asiatic governments, whereby the Greeks considered themselves free
by nature in contrast to the barbaric and backward Other. Building upon
Aristotle’s Politea, which introduced the first systematic formulation of des-
potism as a political system appropriate to the servile nature of Asiatic barbar-
ians,3 European writers throughout the Renaissance and the Reformation used
the term to refer to social, legal and political patterns as well as cultural behav-
iour in both occidental and oriental contexts, but particularly with regard to
the Ottoman Empire — though this usage reflected their own opinions and
1 University of Cambridge Early Career Leverhulme Fellow St John’s, College

Research Associate, The Dept. of Politics and International Studies, The Alison Richard
Building, 7 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DT. Email: bt265@cam.ac.uk
2 Melvin Richter, ‘Despotism’, in Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of
Selected Pivotal Ideas, Vol. II, ed. Philip Paul Wiener (New York, 1973), p. 1.
3 Aristotle, The Politics and The Constitution of Athens, Book III, ed. Stephen
Everson (Cambridge, 1996), p. 84.
HISTORY OF POLITICAL THOUGHT. Vol. XLI. No. 1. Spring 2020
DESPOTISM IN OTTOMAN POLITICAL THOUGHT 17
values as much as — if not more than — Ottoman ones.4 In the seventeenth-

and eighteenth-century French debates, despotism became a particularly
important term among writers opposed to the Crown, including Fénelon,
Saint-Simon and Boulainvilliers,who typically identified the Ottoman Empire
as the seat of oriental despotism and compared the absolutism of Louis XIV to
that of the Turkish Grand Seigneura, condemning the type of royal power
exercised by the Ottoman Sultan as despotique:5 ‘Not all monarchies are
despotiques, only the Turkish is of that kind.’6
It was Montesquieu, writing in this linguistic milieu, who formulated the
concept of despotism as one of his triad of governments (despotism, republic
and monarchy) in his De l’esprit des lois. Demarcating a clear line between
l’etat despotique of the East and the gouvernement modéré of the West,
Montesquieu reserved ‘despotism’ as a term to characterize Oriental regimes,
placing the Ottoman Empire, along with China, at the most extreme end of the
spectrum of the worst type of regimes. He defined despotism as a regime char-
acterized by the principle of fear, ruled by a single leader who controls his
subjects on the basis of arbitrary will and force. Montesquieu identified the
Ottoman territory as one necessarily bound to be ruled by a despot because of
its peculiar manners, customs, and particularly its warm climate, which, he
wrote, affected people’s actions, rendering them slaves.7 The structure of
Ottoman despotism consisted of a sultan, ruling through his viziers or minis-
ters, who exercised virtually complete power over his subjects: ‘Among the
Turks, where the three powers [legislative, executive power over the things
depending on the right of nations, and executive power over the things
depending on civil right] are united in the person of the sultan, an atrocious
despotism reigns.’8 There was no political freedom or justice in Turkey,
‘where one pays very little attention to fortune, life, or honour of the sub-
jects . . .’.9 Montesquieu regarded Islam as appropriate to the nature of despot-
ism, as ‘the Mohammedan religion speaks only by the sword’ and ‘act[s] on
men with the destructive spirit that founded it’.10
4 See AslÏ ÇÏrakman, ‘From Tyranny to Despotism: the Enlightenment’s Unenlight-
ened Image of the Turks’, International Journal of Middle East Studies, 33 (1) (2001),
pp. 49–68.
5 Louis Trenard, ‘L’absolutisme éclairé: Les cas français’, Annales historiques de la
Révolution française, 51e Année, no. 238 (1979), p. 627.
6 Robert Derathé, ‘Les philosophes et le despotisme’, in Utopie et institutions au
XVIIIe siècle: le pragmatisme des Lumières, ed. Pierre Francastel (Paris, 1963),
pp. 57–75.
7 Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book XIV, chs. 3–8; Book XVI, chs. 1–2,
ed. and trans. Anne M. Cohler, Basia C. Miller and Harold S. Stone (Cambridge, 2017),
pp. 234–8, 264–5.
8 Ibid., Book XI, ch. 6, pp. 156-7.
9 Ibid., Book VI, ch. 2, p. 75.
10 Ibid., Book XXIV, ch. 4, p. 462.
18 B. TURNAOLU
Montesquieu’s construction of an Oriental despotic power became the ‘ar-

chetype of all forms of absolute power’ at a time when the Ottoman Empire
was still a formidable competitor to Europe.11 Though his main reference
point for despotism was Oriental regimes, Montesquieu reminded Europe
(and particularly France) that any type of moderate government could be in
danger of falling into illegitimacy and ultimately losing both liberties and
justice through one-person rule,12 as well as warning of the expansion of des-
potic monarchies like the Ottoman Empire into the European heartland,
threatening its security.13 His interpretation was adopted by European authors
and resulted in arguments over whether the Ottoman Empire was actually an
Oriental despotic regime, and whether it should be included or excluded from
the international order inhabited by European states, and be invaded and ruled
by European states.14 Henceforth, the concept of despotism was used in various
ways by Western thinkers and politicians to express their hostility towards

absolutist monarchies and remained a central category in Europe’s imagina-
tions and relationships with ‘Oriental regimes’ in general, and the Ottoman
Empire in particular.
A number of important works about the concept of despotism and its deriv-
ative ‘Oriental despotism’ have appeared in Western scholarship.15 Some
recent studies have suggested that European dealings with the Ottoman
Empire and the Orient were far more complex than the Saidian interpretation
of a monolithic ‘Orientalist’ view of the East as a ‘backward’, ‘unchanging’,
‘distant’ and ‘alien’ world. Rather, at times the Ottoman Empire was seen as a
11 Michael Curtis, Orientalism and Islam: European Thinkers on Oriental Despot-

ism in the Middle East and India (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 74-101.
12 ‘It is constantly said that justice should be rendered everywhere as it is in Turkey.
Can it be that the most ignorant of all peoples have seen clearly the one thing in the world
that it is most important for men to know?’ Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws, Book
VI, ch. 2, p. 74.
13 David Allen Harvey, The French Enlightenment and its Others: The Mandarin,
the Savage and the Invention of the Human Sciences (New York, 2012), p. 5.
14 Jennifer Pitts, Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire (Cambridge MA,
London, 2018), pp. 29, 48–9.
15 See for instance: R. Koebner, ‘Despot and Despotism: Vicissitudes of a Political
Term’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 14 (3/4) (1951), pp. 275–302;
Karl August Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power (New
Haven, 1957); Franco Venturi, ‘Oriental Despotism’, Journal of the History of Ideas,
24 (1) (1963), pp. 133–42; John James Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter
Between Asian and Western Thought (New York, 1997); Joan-Pau Rubiés, ‘Oriental
Despotism and European Orientalism: Botero to Montesquieu’, Journal of Early Mod-
ern History, 9 (1–2) (2005), pp. 109–80; Chen Tzoref-Ashkenazi, ‘Romantic Attitudes
toward Oriental Despotism’, The Journal of Modern History, 85 (2) (2013),
pp. 280–320; Alessandro Stanziani, After Oriental Despotism: Eurasian Growth in a
Global Perspective (London, 2014).
positive and admirable example to the West.16 But what is the other side of
this story? How did the Ottomans perceive their own government and how did
this perception change over time? Did they ever consider themselves the
epitome of an Oriental despotic regime, and how did they respond to this
European interpretation of their governance, society and culture? How did the
Ottomans conceptualize despotism? These are difficult questions to answer
compellingly, and probably not ones that can be answered definitively. But
this article seeks to provide some answers by analysing the words, ideas and
engagement with European debates of Ottoman thinkers and writers, in order
to complement previous, often Eurocentric, perspectives on the history of
despotism.17 In fact, there has been a dearth of studies on the evolution and
implications of the concept in the Ottoman Empire, and as there is no compre-
hensive intellectual history of istibdad (the Ottoman equivalent of despotism)
the history of the concept itself is still in need of reassessment.

The Ottoman concept of istibdad, like all political concepts, did not remain
static; it is a concept with a history of its own in the sense that its meaning was
shaped and altered by political changes. To capture its full meaning, this arti-
cle considers the evolution of this concept — the story of which begins in the
Arab peninsula and continues in the Ottoman heartlands, through a powerful
and protracted interaction with other language worlds — and its interpretation
by individual actors over a longue durée. To demonstrate its transformation
from a mere word into a powerful political concept and then into an inflamma-
tory propaganda tool, this process is broken down into four sections, each
relating it to a specific historical period in the political thought of the Ottoman
era and early Turkish Republic.18 This survey will illuminate ideological dis-
putes over the meaning of the term istibdad over time, and explore how the
Ottomans described political realities through this term — both internally and
‘on the ground’ but also through particular external points of contact and
influence — and strove to change what they perceived as the ‘negative’
impression of Ottoman politics given by use of the term.
This conceptual analysis is crucial given the fact that the history of political
thought is far from embracing an ‘international’ perspective.19 There have
been recent attempts to face the shortcomings of intellectual history as it has
been traditionally practised, especially its resistance to considering the spatial
dimensions of context. As J.G.A. Pocock has rightly emphasized, ‘most of
16 For a recent work suggesting this view, see Noel Malcolm, Useful Enemies: Islam
and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450–1750 (Oxford, 2019).
17 In this article, I have focused my discussion on those figures with the greatest
impact in shaping Ottoman and Turkish political thought in their respective eras.
18 As the meaning of istibdad changes over time, this paper will use istibdad (Turk-
ish) throughout the text instead of using the English translation.
19 On the ‘international’ turn in political theory see David Armitage, ‘The Interna-
tional Turn in Intellectual History’, in Rethinking Modern European Intellectual His-
tory, ed. D. McMahon and S. Moyn (New York, 2013), pp. 232–53.
20 B. TURNAOLU
those concerned with political thought have learned to study it in the “con-
texts” provided by Euro-Western thought about politics and history, to oper-
ate within them even when seeking to understand the thought of other
cultures, and to invite those thinking in other language-systems to move in
their direction even while seeking to move away from them’.20 This article is
an attempt to identify historical meaning and the shifts in historical meaning
that took place in it through the language of despotism outside the ‘Euro-
Western’ context and serves as a crucial step towards expanding the scope of
the history of political thought.
I
stibdad in early Muslim and Ottoman Political Thought
Derived from the Arabic root /b-d-d/,21istibdad (ÅÓÊÈÏÇÏ) is defined in mod-

ern Turkish as ‘the practice of a single ruler, who, as the absolute authority,
governs his subjects according to his own arbitrary will; a type of government
based on arbitrariness, personal will, violence and oppression, dictatorship;

the exercise of political oppression’.22 It contains conceptions of ‘arbitrariness’,
‘proceeding independently in one’s opinions’, ‘domination’, ‘self-leadership’
and ‘despot’, and connotes the opposite of a moderate government.23 Until the
nineteenth century, istibdad was merely a commonplace word, without much
presence or political significance in Ottoman political thought, much as des-
potism was in European political thought until the eighteenth century.24 The
term istibdad does not appear in the Qur’an. The central Islamic word zulm
(the equivalent of tyranny and oppression, Ùáã, zulüm in Turkish), on the other
hand, was used frequently in early and classical Islamic political thought to
designate misgovernance, representing rule by a single person who abuses
his power and the usurpation of power from people, juxtaposed with good
20J.G.A Pocock, ‘On the Unglobality of Contexts: Cambridge Method and the His-
tory of Political Thought’, Global Intellectual History, 4 (1) (2019), p. 3.
21 The root’s default form, ÈÏ (badda) means ‘to distribute, spread, disperse II to
divide, distribute, spread, scatter, disperse (s.th.); to remove, eliminate (s.th.); to waste,
squander, fritter away, dissipate (s.th.) V pass, of II; X to be independent, proceed inde-
pendently (È in, e.g., in one’s opinion, i.e., to be opinionated, obstinate, head-strong); to
possess alone, monopolize (È s.th.); to take possession (È of s.o.), seize, grip, over-
whelm, overcome (È s.o.; said of a feeling, of an impulse); to dispose arbitrarily, high-
handedly (È of s.th.); to rule despotically, tyrannically, autocratically (È over)’. Hans
Wehr, A Dictionary of Modern Written Arabic, ‘ÈÏ badda’, ed. J. Milton Cowan
(Wiesbaden, 4th edn., 1979), p. 55.
22 lhan Ayverdi, Misalli Büyük Türkçe Sözlük (Istanbul, 3rd edn., 2016), p. 1444.
23 ‘stibdat’, ed. Agah SÏrrÏ Levend, Türk Ansiklopedisi, Vol. 20 (Ankara, 1972),
p. 370.
24 Koebner, ‘Despot and Despotism: Vicissitudes of a Political Term’, p. 276.
governance based on the core principles of justice (adl) and consultation

(mashwara).25
In medieval Muslim political thought and nasihatname (‘advice to kings’)
literature, istibdad appeared rarely in political analysis.26 The term connoted
‘arbitrary and capricious, rather than illegitimate or tyrannical, rule’, and
referred to a ruler ‘who decides and acts on his own, without due consultation
with his religious and other advisors’, contrasted with governance based on
nasiha (advice) or mushawara (counsel).27 The Persian historian Miskawaihi
(d.1030) deployed istibdad to connote an immoral ruler who pursued his own
benefit, overlooking the common good.28 Similarly, another prominent Persian
historian, al-Bayhaqi (d.1077), used this term in his Tarikh-i Bayhaqi to describe
the arbitrary decisions and wrongdoings of the Ghazni sultan (hüdavend).29 In
his Kitab al-Milal wa al-Nihal (Book of Sects and Creeds) the renowned Per-
sian theologian Al-Shahrastani (d.1153) separated Muslim creeds and sects

from other groups and religions external to Islam, such as the Hindu sects, the
Sabians, and ancient Arab cults. He characterized the latter as Ahl al-istibdad
bi-al-ra’y, suggesting ‘those with an exclusive personal opinion’.30
Ibn Khaldun (d.1406) also deployed the term istibdad in his Muqaddimah,
mostly in a rather neutral sense to describe rulers who consolidated power
over a polity or dynasty, but also in a negative sense, referring to the abuse of
power by a ruler that leads to the decay of the asabiyah. Ibn Khaldun believed
that the state is developed out of force, and social organization and disorgani-
zation are the determinants of human society. Politics is about consolidation
and control of power by a strong leader to maintain the unity of the social
organization. Thus, ‘politics requires that only one person exercise control.
Were various persons, liable to differ among each other, to exercise it,
25 ‘Zulm’, The Oxford Dictionary of Islam, ed. John L. Esposito (Oxford, 2003),
p. 349. Zulm (zulüm in Turkish) is used as the antonym of justice and a violation of God’s
command (The Qur’an, 41: 46; 42:43). There is a large literature on zulm in Islamic
political thought but the discussion of this term’s evolution is beyond the scope of this
article.
26 Badry Roswitha and Bernard Lewis, ‘Zulm’, in Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edn.,
ed. P. Bearman et al. Retrieved from: http://referenceworks.brillonline.com/entries/
encyclopaedia-of-islam-2/zulm-COM_1393?s.num=0&s.f.s2_parnt=s.f.book.encyclo-
paedia-of-islam-2&s.q=zulm
27 Bernard Lewis, The Political Language of Islam (Chicago and London, 1988),
p. 156.
28 Adam Mez, The Renaissance of Islam (London, 1937), p. 27.
29 Abu al-Fadl Muhammed Husayn al-Bayhaqi Târîh-i Beyhakî, ed. Said Nefisi
(Tahran, 1940), pp. 661–2.
30 Nadjet Zouggar, ‘The Philosophers in Sunni Prophetology’, Bulletin du Centre de
Recherche Français ´ Jérusalem, February 2013, p. 3.
22 B. TURNAOLU
destruction of the whole could result’.31 The state is an organic entity just like
the human body, which undergoes five stages of life: birth, growth, stagna-
tion, retrogression and fall. The first stage is defined by success and victory of
the state, achieved by the elimination of enemies and opposition. In the
second stage, the state consolidates its power and authority, and ‘the ruler
gains complete control over his people, claims royal authority all for himself,
excluding them, and prevents them from trying to have a share in it’.32 It
is during this period that ‘the ruler shows himself independent (zahara
al-istibdad) of his people, claims all the glory for himself, and pushes his peo-
ple away from it with the palms (of his hands).33 Here, Ibn Khaldun used the
term ‘istibdad’ as an act of taking total control in politics which may lead to
the abuse of power and which may result in alienating himself from his people
and turning them into enemies.34
Although we do not know when exactly, we can conclude that the term
istibdad entered the Ottoman Turkish language as a result of intellectual
exchange after the Ottoman conquest of Arab lands in the sixteenth century. It
continued to designate the misconduct of an individual or a leader in the early
modern period, but was also used in a neutral or even positive sense to refer to
a person or an officer who eliminated his enemies to take absolute control. A
prominent historian, Naima (d.1716), deeply influenced by Ibn Khaldun’s
idea of justice of equity, deployed istibdad in his Tarih-i Na‘ima (Naima His-
tory) in a positive sense in the case of a grand vizier who consolidates power
(izzet-i istiklâl ve êiddet-i istibdâd) to preserve order in Ottoman society.35 He
also used it in a negative sense to discuss a Janissary agha who disturbed the
harmonious order of society (nizam) through his arbitrary acts and disobedi-
ence.36 Naima’s contemporary Silahdar Ali Paêa (d.1716) disapproved of the
capricious behaviour (istibdâd) of an administrator who disobeyed the sultan
and acted haphazardly according to his own will in his Silahdar Tarihi (His-
tory of Silahdar). We can see that until the nineteenth century, istibdad not
only remained a vague term both in the Arabic and Ottoman languages, but an
ambiguous one — without distinct positive or negative connotations, and
without specifically signifying an illegitimate political system.
31 Abdul-Rahman Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, ch. 3, trans. Franz Rosenthal

(Princeton NJ, 1958), pp. 138–9.
32 Ibid., p.141.
33 Ibid., p.146.
34 Ibid.
35 Na’imâ Mustafa Efendi, Tarih-i Na‘ima, Vol. 1, ed. Mehmet pêirli (Ankara,
2007), p.12.
36 Ibid., pp. 378, 391.
II
‘stibdad’ During the Tanzimat
A watershed moment in the history of ideas in the Ottoman Empire in general,
and in the evolution of the term istibdad in particular, occurred during the
Tanzimat (1839–76), the nineteenth-century period of extensive reform and
modernization through the reordering and restructuring of Ottoman political
institutions. At this time the intellectual framework for political concepts
became increasingly transnational, even global.37 This process resulted in the
collision of the traditional with different modes of the political, spurring the
development of specialized idioms for discussing systems of government.
These ‘languages’, persisting, changing, and subject to disturbance over time,
formed the contexts within which modern political thought was produced and
elaborated, and within which certain categories were articulated, discussed,

reinterpreted and redefined.
The birth of public opinion and the increased production of translations
during the Tanzimat and thereafter prompted the reexamination and reinter-
pretation of extant terms and practices. New categories appeared, enlarging
the Ottoman linguistic milieu.38 But the texts and political theorists with
which Ottoman intellectuals chose to engage and critique reflected Ottoman
selectivity in forming their own political thought. They offered complex
answers to questions of good and bad government, just and unjust society, and
the condition of individual or collective freedom and unfreedom. Instead of
viewing Ottoman thinkers as passive recipients of influence, or at best as lack-
ing ideas of their own, we should see them as active agents who ‘turned’
towards these texts, not only by translating them but in assessing, adapting or
transforming these ideas for their own use to respond to the political realities
of their time.
The majority of translated materials came from the French Enlightenment.39
Ottoman authors and translators, nevertheless, often encountered difficulty in
finding appropriate technical translations for foreign words and in adapting
the Ottoman language and its context to describe ‘the language-world’ in
which a linguistically and culturally remote Other performed actions. The
37 Christopher Bayly, The Birth of the Modern World, 1780–1914 (Oxford, 2004),
pp. 284–7.
38 On public opinion in the Ottoman Empire, see Murat iviloÈlu, The Emergence of
Public Opinion (Cambridge, 2018).
39 Some French texts included selected dialogues from Voltaire, Fénelon and Fontenelle,
translated by Münif Paêa: Fénelon’s Télémaque; Vattel’s Droit des Gens (1862, 1865);
Buffon’s Histoire Naturelle Générale et Particuliére (1864, 1865); Rousseau’s Émile
(only the foreword, 1870) and Si le Rétablissements des sciences et des arts a contributé
á épurer les maeurs? (1880). As a reaction to the increasing volume of French transla-
tions, a group of conservatives, who feared tradition was being lost, turned to the transla-
tion of ancient and classical Arabic texts. One such example was the first full translation
of Ibn Khaldun’s Muqaddimah (Mukaddime in Turkish) by Ahmet Cevdet Paêa in 1859.
24 B. TURNAOLU
French term despotisme fell into this category. Depending on the author’s
preference, it was translated either as istibdad, hükümet-i müstakile, or hükümet-i
mutlaka.40 Meanwhile, early Tanzimat authors continued to deploy zulüm
(tyranny) more frequently in their protests against the misuse or extension of
governmental powers, but rarely istibdad. Even during the 1860s the term
istibdad as the equivalent of despotism, referring to an illegitimate system of
government antithetical to political liberty, had not yet been established in
Ottoman language, and it was only later in the Tanzimat that the semantics of
the term istibdad really began to evolve.41
NamÏk Kemal’s Reformulation of stibdad

It was NamÏk Kemal (1840–88) — one of the luminaries of the Ottoman intel-
lectual scene, co-founder of the revolutionary underground Young Ottoman

movement in 1865, and a forerunner of constitutionalism and liberalism in
Turkey — who propelled istibdad to the centre of Ottoman political thought,
and offered its first systematic conceptual analysis.42 In the words of promi-
nent intellectual Süleyman Nazif (1870–1927), NamÏk Kemal was ‘the first
Turk[ish thinker] who rebelled against istibdad’.43 In this sense he can be
40 In Fénelon’s Télémaque, despotisme was translated as hükümet-i müstakile — see

Fénelon, Tercüme-i Telemak, trans. Yusuf Kâmil Paêa, ed. Gonca Gökalp Alparslan
(Ankara, 2007 [1862, 1863]), p. 55. In Bianchi’s Dictonnaire Français-Turc, ‘despotisme:
pouvoir absolue’ was translated as ‘bªchlu bªchina hukikoumet (baêli baêina hükümet),
hukioumeti mouthlaqa (hükümet-i mutlaka)’. T.X. Bianchi, Dictonnaire Français-Turc,
Vol. 1 (Paris, 1843), p. 494. His Dictonnaire Turc-Français, on the other hand, defined
istibdad as ‘Pouvoir absolu, despotisme; independence’. T.X. Bianchi, Dictonnaire
Turc-Français, Vol. 1 (Paris, 1850), p. 71. Khayr al-Din al-Tunisi, Chief Minister of
Tunisia and later Grand Vizier at the Sublime Porte, deployed despotisme in his Les
reformes necessaires aux etats musulmans (1868) and istibdad as its equivalent in its
Turkish version En Emin Yol (1878).
41 Disputes about the characteristics of istibdad had already been prominent in politi-
cal discussions since before the 1860s in the Arab Middle East, used to criticize the
Egyptian as well as Ottoman government. See Wael Abu-‘Uksa, Freedom in the Arab
World (Cambridge, 2016), pp. 159, 164, 183, 194.
42 NamÏk Kemal was exiled on the charge of plotting a coup against the government
and his dissident stance towards the government’s submissive foreign policy, fleeing to
Paris in 1867 and the following year to London, where he published Hürriyet (Liberty) as
the Young Ottomans’ official mouthpiece, later publishing in bret and Diyojen on
returning to Istanbul in 1871. A prolific journalist, poet, playwright and novelist, he was
well respected as a leading political theorist, and wrote extensively on constitutionalism,
political liberty, patriotism and progress. For his life and works see Ali Ekrem BolayÏr,
NamÏk Kemal (Ankara, 1933); Ebuzziya Tevfik, Yeni OsmanlÏlar, ed. emsettin Kutlu
(Istanbul, 2006 [1909]); and Cemal Kuntay, NamÏk Kemal, Vols. 1 and II (Istanbul,
2010).
43 Süleyman Nazif, NamÏk Kemal, ed. Mehmet Dursun Erdem and Sibel Üst (Ankara,
2010), pp. 49–50.
regarded as the conceptual architect of istibdad as he dramatically altered the

concept of istibdad, which had hitherto remained in the background of politi-
cal language, by filling in gaps in the concept and fleshing out what had, in
previous centuries, been only roughly defined, based on his observations of
the politics of his time. In the process he popularized the term and gave to his
century an understanding of istibdad which had profound intellectual and
political consequences.
NamÏk Kemal’s writings reflected his fear that self-interest, luxury and
license on the part of Sultan Abdülaziz (r.1861–76) and the bureaucratic elite
were corrupting his country, and that the Porte, dominated by grand viziers
Âli and Fuad Paêas, was centralizing power in its own hands. As NamÏk
Kemal remarked: ‘We live in such times that the Sublime Porte is making the
law, the Sublime Porte is governing, and the Sublime Porte is executing.’44
This concentration of power in the executive led to a loss of liberties, leading

the Ottoman Empire to be derogatorily branded Hasta Adam (‘The Sick
Man’) by European onlookers — an unhealthy organism sacrificing justice

and unity to discord and struggle amid the violation of individual rights and
liberties.45
In characterizing the Ottoman government of his time NamÏk Kemal turned
his attention to Montesquieu, whom he described as ‘the French philosopher
who earned the status of “teacher” in political science’.46 This critical engage-
ment took the form of the first Turkish translations of passages from Con-
sidérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur decadence
(1863) and the full text of De l’esprit des lois,47 which from the 1860s
onwards introduced Montesquieu’s key terms and ideas of the separation of
powers and political liberty to an Ottoman audience.48 In his article ‘Sadaret’
(‘Grand Vizierate’), NamÏk presented typology of the governments — repub-
lican (cumhur), constitutional monarchy (hükümet-i meêruta) and despotic
44 NamÏk Kemal, ‘Hasta Adam’, Hürriyet, no. 24, 7 December 1868, p. 2.

45 Ibid.
46 NamÏk Kemal, ‘Sadaret’, Hürriyet, no. 36, 1 March 1869, p. 1.
47 The first chapter of Considérations was serialized across the second and third
issues of the newspaper Mir’at in 1863. NamÏk Kemal translated the full text of
Considérations under the title Roma’nÏn Esbâb-Ï kbal ve Zevali, and De l’esprit des lois
under the title Ruhu’l-erâyi, but these manuscripts were never published and are now
lost. The first full translation of De l’esprit des lois was made by Hüseyin NâzÏm and
appeared in two volumes. See Ruh-ül Kavanin, Vols. I and II, trans. Hüseyin NâzÏm
(Istanbul, 1915, 1923).
48 Rifâ‘a Râfi al-Tahtawî, a young Muslim Egyptian cleric educated in Paris,
described Montesquieu in his 1826–31 journey account as ‘the European Ibn Khaldun’
and mentioned that he read De l’esprit des lois — see Rifa‘a Rafi‘ al-Tahtawi, An Imam
in Paris (London, 2011 [1834]), p. 296. He later translated De l’esprit des lois into
Arabic under the title Ruhu’l-erâyi, but his manuscript remained unpublished.
26 B. TURNAOLU
government (hükümet-i müstakile), and cited from Book II of De l’esprit des

lois:
From the nature of [despotic] power it follows that a single person (êahsÏ
münferit), exercises power arbitrarily through a single person. This man
continually advises that he himself is everything and that his subjects are
nothing. He is naturally ignorant, lazy, and voluptuous. Consequently, he
neglects the management of public affairs. But were he to distribute the
administration to many, there would be disputes among them and each
would revolt to become the head ruler (baê emir). So he [the despot] would
be obliged to intervene into internal state affairs.49
By citing Montesquieu’s famous passage, NamÏk Kemal reminded his
readers of the most respected authority on the question of despotism while at
the same time exploring Montesquieu’s claim of despotism associated with
the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman state, NamÏk Kemal wrote, is clearly nei-
ther a republic nor a constitutional monarchy, nor does it epitomise a despotic
government (hükümet-i müstakile) because, in contrast to Montesquieu’s

depiction, ‘the sultan is not ruling the people according to his own will and
desires’.50 In other words, NamÏk Kemal understood a despotic regime as a
government where the ruler embodies the single greatest political power and
dominates government by force of will and arms. Yet what he observed at the
time was the Porte holding sway over both the legislature and the executive,
and a relatively weak sultan.51 Therefore, Montesquieu’s despotisme did not
squarely correspond to the current political realities of the Ottoman Empire.
Elsewhere, NamÏk Kemal denounced European depictions of Ottoman
government as naturally ‘absolutely despotic’, deserving of invasion and dis-
mantlement by nature, and decried the hostile portrayal of Ottoman people as
‘fanatics and oppressors’ and the attitude that cast Islam as the cause of
despotism.52 His Renan Müdafaanamesi (Refutation of Renan), which
responded to Ernest Renan’s 1883 lecture ‘L’Islamisme et la science’, is a
striking expression of this critique. NamÏk Kemal vehemently attacked Renan
for his ignorance and reliance upon the ‘lies and imagination’ that made up
earlier Western travellers’ prejudiced accounts. Hammer’s and d’Herbélot’s
works, too, NamÏk Kemal argued, were products of numerous historical
and analytical errors and assumed Christian Europe’s superiority over the
49 NamÏk Kemal, ‘Sadaret’, p. 2. Author’s translation of NamÏk Kemal’s rendering of

the Montesquieu original.
50 Ibid.
51 NamÏk Kemal, ‘ark Meselesi — II’, bret, 24 September 1872’, in Makalât-Ï
Siyasiye ve Edebiye, transc. and ed. ErdoÈan Kul (Ankara, 2014), p. 48.
52 NamÏk Kemal, ‘Vefâ-yÏ Ahd’, bret, no. 7, 22 June 1872, pp. 1–2.
Islamic Orient.53 He condemned the arrogance of Europe, which believed that

it knew everything but in fact ‘knew nothing about the Orient’.54
Having diagnosed the current ‘sickness’ of the empire as one not caused by
despotism or Islam, NamÏk Kemal departed from Montesquieu’s typology of
government and invoked the ancient term istibdad to refer to the violation of
the balance of power and law and to the concentration of power in the hands of
an oligarchical group of bureaucrats.55 He attributed istibdad to various
causes, lying in the deformations of human will, law and institutions. To
explore how and why the Ottoman Empire fell into istibdad, Namik Kemal
looked back at the past and adopted historicism in his major work, OsmanlÏ
Tarihi (Ottoman History).56 Its introduction, Roma Tarihi (‘Roman History’),
represents the Ottomans as heirs of the Romans for the first time in Ottoman
historiography. A principal ambition of this narrative was to demonstrate that,
like their Roman ancestors, the Ottomans were capable of and accustomed to
governing themselves freely and virtuously. The Roman free spirit had been
brought to Anatolia by the tribes of Osman Bey, the founder of the Ottoman
State, and preserved by a balanced ‘constitution’, which NamÏk Kemal called
usul-ü meêveret (‘the system of consultation’), composed of the sultan as the
chief overseer of society, the viziers, the ulema, the Janissaries, and the kadÏs
(judges).57 In this customary practice of meêveret, each of the powers was
checked, preventing one component from dominating the others. But this ini-
tially moderate state apparatus became corrupted over the centuries due to
misrule by the uneducated and incapable sultans, the inadequate functioning
of the government, the cruelties of the Janissaries, and the neglect of the fields
of science, law, commerce and industry.58 When the traditional balance of
power was destroyed, power shifted to the sultan and the Porte, which led ulti-
mately to istibdad.59 In his own time, Namik Kemal observed a relatively
weak sultan dominated by a few men within the Porte, holding absolute power
over the subjects.
stibdad, in NamÏk Kemal’s language, evokes some of the key characteris-
tics of despotism. It is in essence the opposite of liberty (hürriyet). The current
53 NamÏk Kemal, Renan Müdafaanemesi, ed. Nurullah Çetin (Ankara, 2014 [1910]),
pp. 13-21, 54.
54 NamÏk Kemal, ‘‘Avrupa ark’Ï Bilmez’, bret, 22 June 1872’, in Makalât-Ï
Siyasiye ve Edebiye, transc. and ed. ErdoÈan Kul (Ankara, 2014), pp. 264-6.
55 NamÏk Kemal, ‘ark Meselesi — II’, p. 48.
56 NamÏk Kemal introduced a periodization of history, extending from the formation
of the Roman Empire to the birth of the Ottoman polity and the reign of Mehmed II
(r.1451–81). He initially aimed to write the entire story of the Empire but died in 1888
before the work’s completion. It was published posthumously in 1908 in four volumes.
57 NamÏk Kemal, ‘Usõl-ü Meêverete Dair Mektubun Birincisi’, Hürriyet, no. 12,
14 September 1868, p. 6.
58 NamÏk Kemal, ‘Hubbü’l Vatan Mine’l- mân’, Hürriyet, no. 1, 29 June 1868, p. 1.
28 B. TURNAOLU
political system served only ‘a few people’s selfish desires’ (hevesât-Ï nefsaniye)
while undermining the ‘equality’ (müsâvât) and ‘justice’ (adalet) of the
nation.60 There were no real checks on the excessive use or abuse of power, as
the legislature and executive were united in a small body of rulers: ‘As long as
both of these [branches] are held in the same hands, the actions of the govern-
ment can never be saved from the unfettered exercise of will.’61 Conse-
quently, there was no liberty, and apprehensions arose in society as the
executive enacted tyrannical laws. The state was no longer governed by just
laws but by decrees (karamâmeler), which provided for the arbitrary closure
of independent newspapers and silenced public opinion, obstructing the peo-
ple’s freedoms of speech and expression.62 A further characteristic of istibdad
for NamÏk Kemal was a lack of transparency. He was concerned about the
government’s tendency to isolate people from the flow of knowledge, hide
political realities from them, and act as an irresponsible and unaccountable

political organ to its citizens.63
stibdad is arbitrary, based on favouritism. Administrative corruption mani-

fested itself in the bestowing of official appointments on those with inherited
privileges rather than to qualified candidates.64 This led to the erosion of
morality in politics.65 The administrators, NamÏk Kemal complained, failed to
recognize the importance of public trust and to acknowledge the primacy of
common interests over individual interests. Consequently, citizens felt deep
resentment and hatred for the current administration and lost trust in their rul-
ers’ ability to govern effectively.66 A further characteristic of istibdad was
avarice. Âli and Fuad Paêas, NamÏk Kemal felt, were driven merely by their
selfish desires and consumed by luxury and the basest pleasures of life. Their
unrestrained passions led to financial irresponsibility, as their only motivation
was to increase their wealth and power, while leaving the peasants to endure
hunger and poverty.67
60 NamÏk Kemal, ‘‘ark Meselesi — III’, bret, 15 October 1872’, in Makalât-Ï

Siyasiye ve Edebiye, transc. and ed. ErdoÈan Kul (Ankara, 2014), p. 53.
61 NamÏk Kemal, ‘And Seek Their Counsel in the Matter’, trans. M. ükrü HanioÈlu,
in Modernist Islam, 1840–1940: A Sourcebook, ed. C. Kurzman (Oxford and New York,
2002 [1868]), p. 145.
62 NamÏk Kemal, ‘‘Matbõât Nizâmnâmesi’, Diyojen, 21 AÈustos1872’, in Makalât-Ï
Siyasiye ve Edebiye, transc. and ed. ErdoÈan Kul (Ankara, 2014), pp. 102–3.
63 NamÏk Kemal, ‘Mülahazat’, no. 23, 30 November 1868, p. 2.
64 NamÏk Kemal, ‘Devlet-i Aliye-ye Bais-i Tenezzul Olan Maarifin Esbab-i Tedennisi’,
Hürriyet, no. 6, 3 August 1868, pp. 1–2; ‘Devlet-i Âliyeye BulunduÈu Hal-i Hatarnarmaktan
Halâsin EsbabÏ’, Hürriyet, no. 9, 24 August 1868, p. 1.
65 NamÏk Kemal, ‘Bizde Adam Yetiêmez’, Hürriyet, no. 25, 14 December 1868, p. 2.
66 NamÏk Kemal, ‘And Seek Their Counsel in the Matter’, p. 147.
67 NamÏk Kemal, ‘dare-yi HâzÏranÏn Hulâsa-yÏ Âsari’, Hürriyet, no. 27, 28 Decem-
ber 1868, p. 6.
stibdad thus seriously affected the Ottoman Empire’s economic life.

NamÏk Kemal attributed its substantial budgetary deficit to the lack of a thor-
ough system of governmental accountability. Large loans from European
nations were the consequence of an inefficient and corrupt government unac-
countable for its actions. NamÏk Kemal was outraged at the existing system of
public accounting, which calculated foreign loans as revenue, and conse-
quently obscured and distorted its financial conditions.68 As the rulers failed
to bring prosperity and happiness to their citizens, social ties became severed,
and the mismanagement of living conditions for various ethnic and religious
groups triggered separatist movements, dividing society. Discord instead of
union became a feature of istibdad; its greatest principle, ‘to divide in order to
rule [more effectively]’ (tefrika düêür ki hükümet edesin), was purportedly
adopted by Âli Paêa.69 This led to a weak, fragile Ottoman state, open to for-
eign intervention in its internal affairs, as manifested in the ‘Eastern Ques-

tion’ (ark Meselesi).70
NamÏk Kemal cautioned Ottomans about the dangers of istibdad, just as

Montesquieu saw absolutism as a constant threat permeating European soci-
eties and warned his fellow Frenchmen that moderation could slip easily into
despotism, eroding liberty, prosperity and the rule of law. Despite his pessi-
mism, NamÏk Kemal discarded his Islamic predecessors’ theory of a coun-
try’s ‘life span’, which depicts history in terms of cycles of decline through
which a country grows older, passing through various stages until it reaches a
fevered state of zulüm (tyranny) and utter collapse:71 ‘The state is not an indi-
vidual (êahs-Ï manevi) but a legal entity. Contrary to Ibn Khaldun’s claims, it
lacks a natural life (ömr-ü tâbii)’.72 Instead, NamÏk Kemal strove to ‘cure the
political illness’73 of istibdad through remodelling the administrative, legal
and penal systems of the Ottoman Empire to render them suitable to its ‘spirit’
(ruh).74 In a series of writings, ‘Usul-ü Meêveret HakkÏnda’, published in
his journal Hürriyet, NamÏk Kemal developed a terminological dichotomy
between immoderate and moderate government, istibdad and meêveret, char-
acterizing the latter as an old practice of deliberation highlighted in the
Qur’an and the hadiths that aims to prevent the concentration of power in a
single ruler or group, and a procedure upon which Mohammed and the four
68 NamÏk Kemal, ‘Mülkümüzün Servetine Dâir’, Hürriyet, no. 7, 10 August 1868,

pp.1–3.
70 Ibid., p. 46.
71 NamÏk Kemal, OsmanlÏ Tarihi, Vol. I, transc. Mücahit Demirel (Istanbul, 2008),
p. 31.
72 NamÏk Kemal, ‘Bizde Adam Yetiêmez’, Hürriyet, no. 25, 14 December 1868, p. 2.
73 NamÏk Kemal, ‘Devlet-i Âliyeye BulunduÈu Hal-i Hatarnarmaktan Halâsin EsbabÏ’,
Hürriyet, no. 9, 24 August 1868, p. 2.
30 B. TURNAOLU
caliphates based all administration.75 He proposed to reform the Ottoman

government’s usul-ü istibdad’ (system of istibdad) into usul-ü meêveret (sys-
tem of consultation) by ‘removing the legislative power (kuvvet-i teêri) from
the hands of the members of the government’ through the separation of pow-
ers.76 Taking the French parliamentarian system as a model, he believed that
sovereignty must be exercised by a representative body in the parliament
(Meclis-i õra-yÏ Ümmet), which would enable all citizens, regardless of faith
and ethnicity, to participate equally in the policy-making process and to place
a check on the executive.77 Once meêveret was introduced, all abuses would
gradually come to an end, all statesmen would act within the boundaries of the
law, liberty and justice would be regained, and the Ottoman nation would
progress and earn the respect it deserved from European nations by demon-
strating its ability to self-govern freely like its Western counterparts.78
In the 1870s, the term istibdad and its counter-concept meêveret rapidly
gained significant currency among critics of the regime, and shaped expecta-
tions for establishing a constitutional government. Failures in economic poli-

cy, political instability and foreign interventions in Ottoman domestic affairs
only exacerbated social and political tensions. A palace plot in 1876 replaced
Sultan Abdülaziz with his brother Murad, and shortly thereafter with Abdül-
hamid II, who promised to proclaim a constitution and to introduce a demo-
cratic representative parliamentary system.79 This political tension prompted
heated debate between constitutionalists and anti-constitutionalists in the
Ottoman press.80 Echoing Montesquieu, the periodical Sabah divided types
of governments (usul-ü hükümet) into moderate constitutional (hükümet-i
meêruta) and absolutist (hükümet-i mutlaka) forms, one incarnation of the lat-
ter being usul-ü istibdad. stibdad, in this conception, was not an intrinsic
quality of the Ottoman system of government but the product of the arbitrari-
ness, tyrannical acts and wrongdoings of the sultan and the government. The
anonymous author of another periodical stikbal wrote, as ‘common interests
(menfaat-Ï umumiye) are sacrificed in the name of individual interest (mefaati
75 NamÏk Kemal, ‘Usõl-ü Meêverete Da’ir Geçen Numaralarda Münderiç MektuplarÏn
Nihayeti’, Hürriyet, no. 22, 23 November 1868, pp. 6–7.
76 NamÏk Kemal, ‘And Seek Their Counsel in the Matter’, pp. 144–8; ‘Usõl-ü
Meêverete Dair Mektubun Birincisi’, Hürriyet, no. 12, 14 September 1868, pp. 6–8.
77 NamÏk Kemal, ‘Mesele–i Müsavat’, Hürriyet, no. 15, 5 October 1868, pp. 1–2;
‘Usõl-ü Meêverete Dair Mektubun Birincisi’, pp. 5–7.
78 NamÏk Kemal, ‘Terakki’, in NamÏk Kemal ve bret Gazetesi, ed. Mustafa Nihat
Özön (Istanbul, 1997 [1872]), pp. 179–89.
79 Enver Ziya Karal, OsmanlÏ Tarihi, Vol. VIII (Ankara, 1988), pp. 211–17.
80 Necdet Kurdakul, Tanzimat dönemi basÏnÏnda siyasal ve anayasal fikir hareketleri
(Ankara, 2000), pp. 97–116. A similar shift in the usage of istibdad (al-hukñma
al-istibdªdiyya) as the counter-concept of shura (al-hukñma al-shñriyya) also occurred
simultaneously in the Arab Middle East. See, Abu-‘Uksa, Freedom in the Arab World,
pp. 159–60.
êahsiye), those [despots] never receive the punishments they deserve’. stibdad
was cast as the worst type of government, under which no one would wish to
live.81 It was compatible neither with the ancient Ottoman balanced system of
meêveret as interpreted by the ulema, soldiers, government and sultan, nor
with Islam, a religion of liberty. In times of war and international struggles,
former sultans had to centralize power in their own hands to maintain social
order and unity, but recently istibdad had become fatally institutionalized at
home, leading to the loss of political morality in its three essential aspects:
‘compassion’ (merhamet), ‘discipline’ (idare) and ‘obedience’ (itaat).82 As
this current government severely hampered moral progress and the path of
civilization, the reformers believed that they should do everything they could
to modify or even replace despotism with a government that embodies liberty
and justice, and curtails arbitrary authority.83 Towards the end of the
Tanzimat, the term istibdad was transformed from a vague word into a com-
plex political concept, denoting a political system in which individual free-
dom and justice were held completely subordinate to the power of the state,
which was concentrated in one person or a small group. stibdad soon
emerged into a new importance and currency in Ottoman political discussion,
with broad agreement on its meaning but contests concerning its application.
III
The Era of Despotism (devr-i istibdad) (1878–1908) and its Aftermath
The pressure on the government in favour of constitutional reform gave rise to
a constitutional commission, headed by Grand Vizier Midhat Paêa. NamÏk
Kemal was invited to participate in the commission and co-drafted the Otto-
man Empire’s first written constitution (Kanõn-i Esâsî) in 1876.84 However,
amid the Russo-Turkish War (1877–8) and Balkan uprisings, Abdülhamid II
(r.1876–1909) closed parliament and overturned a legally constituted consti-
tutional government chosen through elected representative institutions. He
imposed strict censorship and instilled terror in society by brutally suppressing
uprisings, earning himself the nickname ‘KÏzÏl Sultan’ (‘the red [i.e. bloody]
sultan’). The three decades of Hamidian rule was typically characterised as
devr-i istibdad (‘the era of despotism’) in Turkey, and despite certain Euro-
pean commentators seeing him as a strong autocratic leader, Abdülhamid II
81 Anonymous, ‘Usul-ü ¤stibad’, stikbal, no. 176, 24 August 1876, p. 1.

82 Anonymous, ‘Siyasiyat’, Sabah, no. 197, 24 October 1876, pp. 1–2.
83 Anonymous, ‘untitled’, Sabah, no. 93, 31 May 1876, p. 1.
84 Selda KÏlÏç, ‘Kanun-i Esasi Komisyonu ve NamÏk Kemal’, in DoÈumunun 170.
YÏlÏnda UluslararasÏ NamÏk Kemal Sempozyumu, Vol. II, ed. Orhan Kemâl Tavukçu and
Ali Tibe (TekirdaÈ, 2010), pp. 673–91.
32 B. TURNAOLU
was generally depicted as a stereotypical ‘Oriental despot’ in the European

press.85
It was in this context that the Ottomans self-consciously took up the con-
cept of istibdad and reconstructed a coherent political language, in which they
discussed politics, and through which they constituted political reality and
developed political theories as a guide to organizing practical politics. The
main movement opposing the sultan’s rule, the Committee for Union and
Progress (CUP), vehemently protested against sultanic encroachments on
parliament, objecting to the sultan’s power and the moral corruption brought
on by disorder, anarchy and fear. They applied the term istibdad to many
practices considered unjust, unconstitutional or discriminatory in political
and social domains. The concept came to denote not only the use or abuse of
political power by a single ruler, but a larger system sacrificing individual and
political liberties, and justice. Ottoman writers used despotisme in their

French propaganda writings to describe the Hamidian regime and, more fre-
quently, istibdad as its Turkish equivalent, developing it into a signifier of the

era. In political language, the ancient Islamic term zulüm (tyranny) and
istibdad began to be used sometimes interchangeably, but sometimes the for-
mer was seen as the outcome of the latter, delegitimizing absolute monarchies
and total domination. A similar trajectory for the concept of ‘despotism’
occurred in nineteenth-century Western political discourse where the early
categorical distinction between tyranny and despotism was gradually blurred.
But in attaching zulüm along with its early Islamic connotations to istibdad,
the latter term underwent an important semantic shift particular to the Turkish-
language context: it was dramatically intensified, reflecting an illegitimate
regime dominated by an immoral ruler condemned by God, as in the Qur’an.
stibdad became a propaganda tool to delegitimize the sultan-caliph, who vio-
lated the basic Islamic concepts of consultation (meêveret) and just rule. Thus,
istibdad was seen not only as illegitimate but also as a sinful, immoral and evil
system, and the deployment of the term reflected a wish to enforce a particular
moral vision on the workings of politics to modify moral and political struc-
tures through either reformist or revolutionary means, depending on the indi-
vidual actor’s agenda and ideology.86
Ahmed RÏza (1858–1930) — the founder of the CUP’s Parisian branch,
influenced by Comtean positivism — saw Abdülhamid II’s rule as a typical
representation of a despotic regime, sharply juxtaposing it with a free, consti-
tutional government (meêveret). His depiction of istibdad bears a strong
85 M. ükrü HanioÈlu, ‘The Times ve Sultan Abdülhamid’, Derin Tarih, no. 59, Feb-
ruary 2017, pp. 78–83.
86 Note that the term istibdad was also widely used to oppose the Sultan by Arab Mid-
dle Eastern jurists and authors, such as al-Kawakabi, al-Afghani, Rashid Rida and
Muhammad Abduh, to name but a few. However, for the purposes of this paper, I have
limited myself to Turkish-speaking authors.
undertone of Montesquieu, whom he had read closely and frequently cited.

Ahmed RÏza defined istibdad as a type of government ruled arbitrarily
according to the whim and fancy of one man, not by the national will. In such a
system, he wrote, ‘justice is a myth’ and liberty is lost.87 The usurpation of
power and the destructive and corrupt rule of Abdòlhamid II led to a decline in
agriculture, industry and commerce, leaving the country in poverty as the
uncertainty and instability of the regime discouraged productivity: ‘the land,
as Montesquieu points out, is less fertile because of the lack of freedom of
their inhabitants’.88 stibdad was a system of fear, avarice, distress and mutual
suspicion that spread like a disease to all segments of society. It constituted a
form of domination and tyranny (zulüm), turning citizens into ‘indifferent’,
‘lazy’ and ‘irresponsible’ beings, broken in spirit and unable to think for
themselves.89
A major characteristic of despotisme is unfreedom. As power became con-

centrated in the hands of the sultan and his bureaucrats, people’s rights to rep-
resent themselves were taken away and they were dominated by the will of
arbitrary rulers. Like NamÏk Kemal, Ahmed RÏza saw liberty not as doing
whatever one wishes according to one’s own will but acting under just law
reflecting the will of the nation as the collective sovereign body. A further
characteristic of despotism was lawlessness (hukuksuzluk) and a lack of gov-
ernance (hükümetsizlik), which produced disorder (düzensizlik) and violence
in society.90 Here, Ahmed RÏza refuted the European accusation that Islam
caused religious fanaticism, intolerance and the violence of the Balkan massa-
cres, arguing that ‘political fanaticism is indeed as alien as religious fanati-
cism to the principle of Islam’.91 Islam’s defining spirit, on the contrary, is
continuity, evolution and progress, which Abdülhamid II nevertheless dis-
turbed and damaged.92 Because of istibdad, ‘the state has lost its former pres-
tige and power, and the nation, its law. Our homeland is burning in fire,
tyranny (zulüm), and hatred, falling to pieces’93 and heading towards ‘moral
anarchy’ and disorder.94
Ahmed RÏza used the concept of despotisme to delimit the powers of the
sultan-caliph. By relying only on his own will and caprices, ignoring his
ministers’ policy advice and overlooking the people’s needs, Abdülhamid II
87 Ahmed RÏza, La crise de l’Orient, ses causes et ses remèdes (Paris, 1907), p. 8.
88 Ibid., pp. 9–10.
89 Ahmed RÏza, ‘Mukaddime’, in EÈitimci Bir Jön Türk Lider Ahmet RÏza Bey ve
Vazife ve Mesuliyet Eserleri, Padiêah ve ehzadeler, KadÏn, Asker, transc. and ed.
Mustafa Gündüz and Musa Bardak (Istanbul, 2011 [1902–3]), p. 42.
90 Ahmed RÏza, ‘Hükümetsizlik’, Meêveret, no. 17, 23 August 1896, pp. 2–4.
91 Ahmed RÏza, Tolérance musulmane (Paris, 1897), p. 15.
92 Ahmed RÏza, ‘Devoir du Calife’, Mechveret, no. 12, 1 June 1896, p. 3.
93 Ahmed RÏza, ‘Mukaddime’, p. 39.
94 Ahmed RÏza, ‘La Politique du Sultan’, Mechveret, no. 8, 1 April 1896, p. 1.
34 B. TURNAOLU
violated the fundamental Islamic principle of consultation (meêveret). As a

caliph, he is the ‘chief judge’ but not the ‘absolute’ leader of the Muslims or
‘the master of the people’; ‘his powers are limited by the fundamental laws of
Islam’. According to the Qur’an, Ahmed RÏza contended, if a ruler acts inde-
pendently without consulting the people and departs from the ‘path of the
Shari’a’, he is no longer a legitimate leader. This ultimately grants the people
the right to dethrone him.95 The Young Turks, he wrote, must see it as their
duty to end despotism and transgression, which had interrupted the Tanzimat
and stalled the Empire’s progress in comparison with the West. Spreading
positivism, restoring parliament and the meêveret system, and returning sov-
ereignty to the nation would avert despotism and resume progress.96
Abdullah Cevdet (1869–1932), one of the founders of the CUP and the
leading materialist theorist inspired by Vulgärmaterialismus, shared similar
views on despotism, but diverged from Ahmed RÏza over how to overcome it.
He advocated more radical measures in the form of violent revolution to usher
in a constitutional republican government ruled by an elected elite, saying:

‘The era of being subject to an absolute sovereign has already ended. The
present time requires obeying the law that is established and approved by the
people. We may shout “long live the king” but in that case, we should elect the
king from among us.’97 Abdullah Cevdet’s deep hatred of istibdad and vigor-
ous defence of a free state and society echo throughout his translations, poetry
and articles. A salient account of his elaborate theory of istibdad appears in
the prefaces to Vittorio Alfieri’s translations of Della Tirannide as stibdad
(1899) and Del Principe e Delle Lettere as Hükümdar ve Edebiyat (1905).98
stibdad, Abdullah Cevdet wrote, is ‘the arbitrary will of a single person’ (tek
bir adamÏn keyf-ü hevâsi)99 and the greatest obstacle to freedom and the right
to live. He deemed society an assemblage of individuals, granted the natural
right of liberty: ‘liberty and happiness (hürriyet ve mesõdiyet) of society
depends on the liberty and happiness of the individual who is naturally [born]
free’.100 Adopting classical republican language, he contended that a free state
is honourable and glorious, but Turkey is currently ‘bound by the chain of
95Ahmed RÏza, La crise de l’Orient, pp. 22–3.

96Ahmed RÏza, ‘L’Orient ´ l’Exposition II’, Mechveret, 1 July 1900, pp. 2–4.
97 Abdullah Cevdet, UyanÏnÏz! UyanÏnÏz! (Kahire, 1907), p. 3.
98 Abdullah Cevdet’s translation, stibdad, inspired Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakabi’s
famous book Taba’i al-istibdad (The Characteristics of Despotism) and helped popular-
ize the term among Arab intellectuals. Al-Kawªkibi, in turn, greatly influenced many
Iranian revolutionists like Ay Mirza Mohammed-Hosein Na’ini (1860–1936), inspiring
them in conceptualizing their own despotic ancién regime. See Houchang E. Chehabi,
Iranian Politics and Religious Modernism (London, 1990), p. 44.
99 Abdullah Cevdet, ‘Kari’lerime’, Hükümdar ve Edebiyat (Istanbul, 2016 [1903]),
p. 25.
100 Ibid., p. 24.
oppression (zulüm) and slavery (esaret) [and] suffers from misery and calam-
ity’.101
To avoid falling into a deeper, darker istibdad, Abdullah Cevdet demanded
the elite wake up from their ‘endless sleep’ and mobilize the ‘masses’, a term
borrowed from Gustave Le Bon, citing a patriotic duty to resist. By patriotism
(vatanseverlik) he meant not ‘chauvinism’ but a principled collective stand
against a despotic government: ‘Our goal is to prosper and become a free
union . . . Any means to this end is deemed acceptable and holy.’102 Abdullah
Cevdet celebrated NamÏk Kemal and Mithad Paêa as national heroes,103
and William Tell as a true patriotic icon ‘represent[ing] hatred and mutiny
(kÏyam) against istibdad’104 and personifying revolutionary violence, who
could inspire Ottomans to mobilize against the greedy tyrant.
Abdullah Cevdet saw this struggle against despotism as part of an inter-
national movement encompassing all Muslims. A caliph’s temporal author-

ity, he wrote, is ministerial, not dominative or despotic. Abdülhamid II,
nevertheless, disdained the fundamental Islamic principle to ‘seek their coun-

sel in the matter’ (Sura 3, Verse 159) by closing parliament (meclis-i
meêveret) and neglecting public opinion. He was therefore ‘faithless’ (dinsiz),
a ‘heretic’ (kafir) and a ‘tyrant’ (zalim).105 Attacking Abdülhamid II’s Pan-
Islamic policy, Abdullah Cevdet contended that the Sultan did not deserve to
be called the ‘world’s caliph’ (Darü’l Hilâfe) as he was ‘fully responsible for
the oppression (zulüm) and sufferings of all Muslims’ and their backwardness
compared to European nations.106 Abdülhamid II’s failure to fulfil his duties
as caliph to unite and protect the Islamic world (âlem-i slam), and to mete
out justice and liberty to Muslim believers, gave a further imperative for his
abdication, compelling all Muslims to unite in resisting the caliph.107 CUP
employed this inflammatory language frequently as a powerful political
weapon to oppose the Sultan’s Pan-Islamic policies and condemn the abuse of
his temporal and spiritual authority as caliph. The ulema in opposition, too,
attacked the sultan for disrespecting the Islamic principle of ‘consultation’
(meêveret), positioned him outside the umma (Islamic community) and
101 Ibid., p. 26.

102 Abdullah Cevdet, ‘Mektub-Ï Mahsus’, in çtihad’in çtihadÏ, ed. Mustafa Gündüz
(Istanbul, 2008), pp. 56–7.
103 Abdullah Cevdet, Kahriyyât (Kahire, 2nd edn., 1908), p. 10.
104 Abdullah Cevdet, ki Emel (Kahire, 2008), p.1.
105 Abdullah Cevdet, ‘Redd-ül Merdud’, OsmanlÏ, no. 12, 15 May 1898, p. 3.
106 Abdullah Cevdet, ‘Rusya MüslümanlarÏ HakkÏnda’, in çtihad’in çtihadÏ,
ed. Gündüz, p. 59.
107 Abdullah Cevdet, ‘Mazlum Olmak Zâlim Olmak Demektir’, in çtihad’in çtihadÏ,
ed. Gündüz, p. 90.
36 B. TURNAOLU
regarded him as an illegitimate ‘tyrannical’ caliph who must be deposed and

executed.108
Towards the end of the nineteenth century istibdad appeared widely in dic-
tionaries and was defined in various ways: the hükümet-i zalime (tyrannical
government), hükümet-i müstebid (despotic government), hükümet-i mutlaka
(absolutist government) or hükümet-i müstakile (independent or despotic
government).109 Despite the generally pejorative connotations of istibdad,
those defending the Sultan used a number of rhetorical strategies for support-
ing the existing order. Ahmed Mithad Efendi (1844–1912), a prolific author
and journalist allied to Abdülhamid II, sought to present the sultan’s puta-
tively legitimate political authority as founded upon the wilful submission of
the faithful and law-abiding subjects.110 In his article ‘stibdad’, Ahmed
Mithad distinguished the meaning and applications of istibdad and hükümet-i
zalime (tyrannical government). For him, ‘it is a mistake to conflate istibdad

with tyranny (hükümet-i zalime)’.111 He defined istibdad as a lawless (kanunsuz),
unfree system where the ruler’s orders and statements count as the only law,
while zulüm refers to a distorted regime that fails to provide justice for sub-
jects.112 Elsewhere, he viewed Hobbes and Grotius as grotesque thinkers who
assumed it was possible for people to live happily and freely under despotism
(istibdad) while applauding Rousseau’s attack upon istibdad.113 For Ahmed
Mithad, istibdad is not a distinctive form of government but a violation of a
108 M. ükrü HanioÈlu, ‘Blueprints for a Future Society: Late Ottoman Materialists
on Science, Religion, and Art’, in Late Ottoman Society: The Intellectual Legacy,
ed. Elizabeth Özdalga (New York, 2005), p. 51.
109 emseddin Sami’s Kamus-Ï Türkî, the first extensive Turkish dictionary based on
modern philological and lexicological methods, defines istibdad as ‘governing solely
and without being constrained by any order and law’. See emseddin Sami’s entry on
‘istibdat’, Kamus-Ï Türkî, ed. Paêa Yavuzarslan (Ankara, 2015 [1899]), p. 573. His
French–Turkish dictionary denotes both absolutisme and autocratie as ‘hükümet-i
mutlaka’; and despotisme and dictateur as ‘amiyet-i mutlaka’. See emseddin
Sami’s entries on ‘absolutisme’, ‘autocratie’, ‘despotisme’ and ‘dictateur’, Dictionnaire
Français-Turc Illustré (Resimli Kâmõs-Ï Fransevî) ed. erif Eskin (Ankara, 2017), pp.
46, 176, 582, 597. The Redhouse Turkish–English lexicon refers to istibdad as ‘being or
becoming alone, without a helper, sharer or rival (in possessing or doing a thing); abso-
lute, undivided possession and control . . . and despotism’. J.W. Redhouse, ‘istibdat’, in
A Turkish and English Lexicon: Shewing in English the Significations of the Turkish
Terms (Istanbul, 1978 [1892]), p. 89. Its English–Turkish version offers the following:
‘Despotism: 1. Absolutist government (hükümet-i müstakile), 2. Tyranny (zulüm), coer-
cion (cebr) . . .’ J.W. Redhouse, A Lexicon English and Turkish (Constantinople, 3rd
edn., 1884), p. 230.
110 Ahmed Mithad, Üss-i ¤nkilâp (Istanbul, 2004), pp. 125–9.
111 Ahmed Mithad, ‘stibdad’, Tercüman-Ï Hakikat, no. 7, 3 July 1878, p. 3.
112 Ibid.
113 Ahmed Mithad, Üss-i ¤nkilâp, p. 121. Similarly, in Du contrat social, Rousseau
accused his predecessors Hobbes and Grotius of supporting despotisme.
political regime and its constitutional principles, and the term applies not only
to a ruler (hükümdar) but to corrupt, greedy statesmen.114 Ottoman history
was full of depraved rulers and bureaucrats who had failed to respect the individ-
ual freedom guaranteed by natural law and the Shari’a, which had prompted a
despotic form of government (hükümet-i istibdadiye), the last resort of a
decaying state. In proclaiming the constitution, Ahmed Mithad believed,
Abdülhamid II averted istibdad and arbitrary rule, returning liberties to all
citizens.115 Condemning the opponents of the Hamidian regime who depicted
it as ‘lawless’ and ‘unfree’, he argued that the Sultan, by contrast, ruled
through a framework of just law and regular administration.116 In his view,
Abdülhamid II was a powerful ruler, and his absolute rule or autocracy should
not be conflated with despotism.
The usage and the meaning of istibdad stirred a heated debate in the press.
In a direct reply to Ahmed Mithad, Mizanci Murad, a prominent Young Turk,

rejected the semantic difference between autocracy and despotism: ‘Autoc-
racy and despotism, aren’t these two terms that are almost always indissol-
ubly linked to each other?’117 A further attack on Ahmet Mithad’s polemical
comparison of the absolutism of Louis XIV to that of Abdülhamid II came
from two Young Turks, Fu’ad and Reêid, who regarded both rulers as despots
and considered the sultan every bit as much of a despot (müstebid) as Louis
XIV, unrestrained by law and his government as illegitimate.118
At the turn of the twentieth century, istibdad became a full-blown political
weapon against the Hamidian regime, as reformers sought to justify revolu-
tion to reinstate the constitution and liberty. Although the Young Turk Revo-
lution of 1908 did not overthrow the sultan, the restoration of the suspended
Constitution of 1876 and the reopening of the parliament were seen as a fun-
damental overturning of despotic order and the ideas around it. The reinstate-
ment of the Constitution was celebrated as the ilân-Ï hürriyet (Declaration of
Liberty) and the post-revolutionary period dubbed the Era of Liberty (devr-i
hürriyet) in slogans condemning the despotic era (devr-i istibdad) such as:
‘Kahrolsun istibdad, yaêasÏn hürriyet!’ (‘Down with despotism, long live lib-
erty!’). Political figures like NamÏk Kemal and Mithad Paêa were venerated as
114 Ahmed Mithad, ‘stibdad’, p. 3.

115 Ahmed Mithad, Üss-i nkilâp, p. 133.
116 Ahmed Mithad, ‘Hürriyet-i Kanuniye’, Tercüman-Ï Hakikat, no. 8, 4 July 1878,
p. 3.
117 ‘Autocratie et despotism, ne sont ce pas là deux termes qui presque toujours sont
indissolublement liés l’un à l’autre?’, Un Jeune Turc [Murad Bey], ‘Young Turkey’s
Views’, New York Herald (Paris), 29 August 1895.
118 Fuat et Réchid, ‘Reply to Ahmet Mithat’, New York Herald (Paris), 9 September
1896, p. 2. For the debate see M. ükrü HanioÈlu, The Young Turks in Opposition (New
York, 1995), p. 27.
38 B. TURNAOLU
fathers of the Constitution, and Ahmed RÏza as the ‘hero of the revolution’.119
The post-revolutionary period played a significant role in reconceptualizing
what istibdad meant by referring to what it constituted in the previous ancién
regime (devr-i sabÏk) and in shaping future expectations about politics and
society.120 To put it differently, revolution (ihtilal) as an act to eliminate
oppressive regimes became an indispensable element of the concept of
istibdad, through which the social and political arrangements were linguisti-
cally reconstructed in Turkey.
In his polemical poem ‘stibdad’, Mehmet Akif (1873–1936), a leading
Islamist poet and thinker of the time, lamented Abdülhamid’s ‘filthy era of
despotism’ (mülevves devr-i istibdâd) for leaving the country in ruins, damag-
ing its reputation and honour and reducing the status of the people to ‘prison-
ers’ of the tyrannical regime. He blamed the sultan squarely for all the
Empire’s troubles. Describing this ‘nightmarish’, ‘ominous’ period as a his-

torical lesson, Akif expressed hope for a free, bright future for the Empire.121
Ottoman reformists saw the post-revolutionary era, leaving istibdad behind,

as one of potentially decisive innovation, the creation of something truly new.
The Constitutional period was seen as a victory of liberty over the evil and
ruthlessness of the old, rotten, despotic Hamidian regime. To express a shift
from hakimiyet-i mutlaka (absolute sovereignty) to popular sovereignty, a
new term was coined: hakimiyet-i milliye (national sovereignty): ‘National
sovereignty means the self-governance of a nation . . . A person or a group of
persons can never govern a nation composed of millions of individuals.’122
The highest political power was vested in the nation, not in the sultan —
though the people could not set themselves above the law.
The distinction between good versus vitiated governments was also adopted
in contemporary civic education books. In Malumat-Ï Medeniye ve Ahlakkiye
(Knowledge of Civilization and Morality), istibdad signified an absolutist,
non-liberal and non-constitutional regime as opposed to ‘constitutional govern-
ments (hükümet-i meêruta = etat constituionelle)’, referencing a ‘monarchie
constitunionelle (hükümet-i münferide-i meêruta)’ or ‘republique (cumhuriyet)’.123
Absolutism (hükümet-i mutlaka) was termed the most ‘primitive’ type of gov-
ernment, and neither enlightened nor absolutisme modére (hükümet-i mutlaka-i
mutedile) were recognized as legitimate forms of rule.124 In exalting the political
119 Fatma Müge Göçek, The Transformation of Turkey: Redefining State and Society
from the Ottoman Empire to the Modern Era (London and New York, 2011), pp. 72–8.
120 smail Kara, ¤slâmcÏlarÏn Siyasî Görüêleri (Istanbul, 1994), p. 131.
121 Mehmet Akif, ‘stibdâd’, SÏrâtÏmüstakim, no. 21, 14 January 1909, p. 326.
122 Zeynizade Mehmet HazÏk, Malûmât-Ï Medeniye ve Ahlâkiye (Istanbul, 1910/11),
p. 27.
123 HakkÏ Behiç, Malõmât-Ï Medeniye ve Ahlâkiye (Istanbul, 1911), p. 27.
124 Füsun Üstel, Makbul Vatandaê’Ïn Peêinde: II. Meêrutiyet’ten Bugüne VatandaêlÏk
EÈitimi (Istanbul, 2016), p. 66.
and moral values of a constitutional regime, while simultaneously highlight-

ing the sharp rupture from the istibdad of the devr-i sabik of Abdülhamid II,
these civic education books captured how the experiences of the past and
expectations about the future were reflected in social and political discourses
and how future expectations were instilled in the making of citizenship.
IV
‘stibdad’ in the Early Years of the Republic
A further shift occurred in the semantic use of istibdad in the early years of the
Republic as it came to denote the Ottoman dynasty per se. The transition from
the sultanate to the secular republic in 1923 was often depicted as a move
from the centuries-old istibdad regime to freedom (hürriyet), emancipation
from servitude, and national sovereignty (hakimiyet-i milliye).125 Drawing

extensively on vocabulary from the French Revolution, republicans named
the system they abolished the ancien régime (eski usõl-u idâre or nizâm-Ï
kadîm), replacing it with a nouveau régime (nizâm-Ï cedîd). Yusuf Akçura

(1876–1935), a leading nationalist historian and politician, stressed that like
France, Austria, Germany and Italy, the Ottoman Empire too had its own
ancien régime associated with ‘absolutisme, istibdad’; that is, ‘the arbitrary
rule of a country by an individual leader without almost any constraints’.126
Contrasting monarchie absolue to the constitutional state (konstitusyonlu
devlet, meêrutî devlet),127 he wrote that: ‘stibdad is the opposite of liberty: the
fact that there is a despotic rule, [or] despotic politics (istibdâd-Ï idâre,
istibdâd-Ï siyâsî) in a country means that the people of this nation lack natural
liberty.’128 In the West, the notion of despotic king (istibdad-Ï kralÏ) was
called an enlightened despot (münevver istibdadÏ) in the eighteenth century;
its last representative was Napoleon. In the East, by contrast, enlightened des-
potism lasted much longer.129 The transition from the old, despotic, to the
new, free, regime in the Ottoman Empire commenced during the reign of
Selim III (r.1789–1807) and was carried forward by the ‘enlightened despot’
(münevver müstebid) Mahmud II (r.1808–39),130 interrupted by Abdülhamid
II, and finally achieved only after the abolition of the sultanate. As Yunus
Nadi remarked: ‘A world is collapsing, while another one is rising. The
declining world is the old Turkey along with its caliphate and sultanate,
whereas the world rising in place of the former is the new Turkey, forcing
125 See for instance, Ahmed Rasim, stibdad’dan Hakimiyet-i Milliyeye [From Des-
potism to National Sovereignty] (2 vols., Istanbul, 1923).
126 Yusuf Akçura, Târih-i Siyâsî 1926–1927–1928 Ders Notlari (Istanbul, 2016),
p. 62.
127 Ibid., p. 66.
128 Ibid., p. 63.
129 Ibid., p. 192.
130 Ibid., p.193.
40 B. TURNAOLU
everyone and every nation to submit to its new belief.’ 131 In the new order;
secularism, justice, popular sovereignty, political and social progress, and consti-
tutionalism were closely associated and mutually supportive. The Republican
Revolution was, therefore, not merely a political but also a linguistic action,
mobilizing, reshaping, conceding and reconstructing the visions of the past
and expectations of the future of the nation.132
In stressing a dramatic rupture with and inversion of the Ottoman past,
Ahmed Emin wrote that the Republican Revolution marked ‘the death of the
centuries-old sick man (hasta adam)’.133 The revival of the ‘sick man’ anal-
ogy might be interpreted as an attempt to contrast the ‘ill’ Other to the
‘healthy’ Republic. Many critics and enemies of the sultanate, as well as those
championing the Revolution, called for a political and moral language that
would glorify the Republic and demonize the despotic Ottoman dynasty.
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his republican followers employed a particular

language to abhor the sultanate and declared the proclamation of the Republic
a ‘zero point’, emancipating Turkish citizens from the yoke of the oppressive
sultans and the backward despotic regime that had brewed centuries of
deterioration and ignorance. This attitude was widely reflected in the school
books and history writing of the early regime. The opening page of
Cumhuriyet ÇocuklarÏna Yeni Millî Kiraat (The New National Reader for
Republican Children) offers a vivid example of this image: ‘Until recent
times, the Turks were the slaves of the sultans. These sultans living in ornate,
august palaces, following their pleasure from morning to night, and feeding
thousands of retainers in their palaces, supposed themselves to be the personal
owners of the country.’134 With such images, the early Republican historical
narrative produced its own ‘Ottoman despotism’, which affected how the
Ottoman past was imagined and written, and the Republican present was
shaped.
Conclusion
This survey has revisited the long journey of the term istibdad from a vague,
commonplace Arabic word without a distinctive meaning into a vital, much-
contested touchstone of political thought in Turkey, illustrating the relations
between the changing social and political contexts and the changing language
the Ottomans used to describe it. It has reconstructed the language of istibdad
131 Yunus Nadi, ‘Hükümet ve Hilafet’, Anadolu’da Yeni Gün, 21 November 1922,
p. 1.
132
On the constitutive character of a revolution and comparison with the French
Revolution, see Keith Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge, 1990).
133 Ahmed Emin, ‘ki Teêrîn-i SnÐ nkilb’, in Hilâfet ve Millî Hakimiyet (Ankara,
1923), p. 114.
134 Cited in Benjamin Fortna, Learning to Read in the Late Ottoman Empire and the
Early Turkish Republic (London, 2011), p. 28.
in which politics was discussed, and examined its mutation over time by
showing how eighteenth-century French thinkers, especially Montesquieu,
were used by a variety of authors; how the Young Turks developed different
theories of vitiated versus moderate governments in harmony with the Islamic
principle of consultation; and how the mutating internal debates from the
nineteenth century well into the era of the Republic instigated political trans-
formation in Turkey. The entry of the term despotisme into the Ottoman lan-
guage delineated a window through which the Ottomans interpreted political
realities and comprehended the world around them.
To return to the question of whether the Ottomans themselves saw their
government as despotic, posed in the beginning of this article, this conceptual
analysis shows that at times they did in fact interpret their government as des-
potic — and not merely because the Western thinkers imposed this concept on
the minds of the Ottomans. Instead, the Ottomans were stimulated by modern
Western political thought and concepts but also by their own traditions, and
sought ways to describe and respond to new circumstances. The authors dis-
cussed in this article reacted strongly to the Western misconceptions that
istibdad was a defining characteristic of the Orient, and that Islam was its
source. Instead they saw it as a ‘historical mistake’, one which curtailed liber-
ties and blocked the path of progress, rendering the people powerless and
their actions futile. This powerful concept thus positioned the old Islamic
term of consultation and constitutionalism as a necessary means to constrain
the behaviour of rulers, as well as instigated popular action, prompting
sweeping waves of revolutionary and rebellious movements aimed at bring-
ing down authoritarian regimes throughout Turkey and the Middle East,
which caused demographical changes with consequential social and political
implications in the region.
Today, istibdad is still widely employed by opposition groups to express
dissatisfaction with the current regime and president, and to voice frustration
about Turkey’s renewed march towards authoritarianism under the rule of the
AKP (Justice and Development Party). The 1908 slogan ‘Kahrolsun istibdad,
yaêasÏn hürriyet!’ (‘Down with despotism; long live liberty!’) has recently
been revived, underlining the palpable political tensions in the ‘new’ Turkey,
but at the same time instigating a populist reaction against domination and
inviting hope for radical political changes in the future.
Recapturing istibdad’s history also equips us to uncover and recover the
lost meanings of this term. As a political concept, it is temporally contingent,
and each epoch in Ottoman history has responded to its new circumstances in
developing a new usage by dropping some of the old connotations or adding
new layers to its meaning. The concept’s meaning and associated terms have
been shaped within disputes among Ottoman intellectuals possessed of differ-
ing political visions — whether liberal, positivist, materialist, loyalist, Islamic
or radical — and aligned with differing political ideologies, shaped by
42 B. TURNAOLU
traditional, as well as extensive intertextual and intercultural dynamics. The

outcome of this intertextuality was the production of a myriad of usages and
meanings of the term ‘despotism’ which, in some instances, aligned with the
European meaning of the term (referring to a style of government based on the
capricious whim of a single man) but in other instances also took on an addi-
tional, context-specific meaning deriving from a strong connotation linking
istibdad with Islam. In other words, different authors at different times
attached their own fears, imaginations and expectations from politics to the
core of the concept, both shaping its past meaning and influencing its future.
This account leads us to the essential question raised by Willibald Stein-
metz and Michael Freeden: ‘Should we extend our view to the totality of lin-
guistic contacts between speakers of European and non-European languages,
or rather, restrict our inquiries to uses of concepts in the political communities
which, together, make up the geographical province conventionally called

Europe?’135 The question is rhetorical, of course, because the answer indi-
cated is that there is an urgent imperative to broaden the scope of conceptual

history. Studies on ‘Western’ political ideas have been relatively continuous
and self-conscious and subjected to increasingly rigorous historical analysis,
but elsewhere, this has less systematically been so. Despite recent attempts to
expand the horizons of political thinking to include different societies, the
discipline of political thought is still far from enjoying a global vision. We
therefore need to recognize this intellectual deficiency promptly and learn
to redress it.136 In a world characterized by exchange across borders, it is fun-
damental for the discipline to push its boundaries, expand its intellectual
horizons, and reduce political apprehensions by highlighting the complex
dynamics in the transmission of ideas across borders.
Banu TurnaoÈlu UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
135 Conceptual History in the European Space, ed. Willibald Steinmetz and Michael
Freeden (New York and Oxford, 2017), p. 3.
136 See John Dunn’s recent article on this point, ‘Why We Need a Global History of
Political Thought’, in Markets, Morals, Politics, ed. B. Kapossy et al. (Cambridge MA
and London, 2018), pp. 285–309.

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DESPOTISM (STIBDAD) IN OTTOMAN POLITICAL

Keywords: stibdad, despotism, tyranny, Montesquieu, NamÏk Kemal, Abdullah

1 University of Cambridge Early Career Leverhulme Fellow St John’s, College

values as much as — if not more than — Ottoman ones.4 In the seventeenth-

Montesquieu’s construction of an Oriental despotic power became the ‘ar-

ways by Western thinkers and politicians to express their hostility towards

11 Michael Curtis, Orientalism and Islam: European Thinkers on Oriental Despot-

the history of the concept itself is still in need of reassessment.

Derived from the Arabic root /b-d-d/,21istibdad (ÅÓÊÈÏÇÏ) is defined in mod-

based on arbitrariness, personal will, violence and oppression, dictatorship;

governance based on the core principles of justice (adl) and consultation

sian theologian Al-Shahrastani (d.1153) separated Muslim creeds and sects

31 Abdul-Rahman Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah, ch. 3, trans. Franz Rosenthal

elaborated, and within which certain categories were articulated, discussed,

NamÏk Kemal’s Reformulation of stibdad

lectual scene, co-founder of the revolutionary underground Young Ottoman

40 In Fénelon’s Télémaque, despotisme was translated as hükümet-i müstakile — see

regarded as the conceptual architect of istibdad as he dramatically altered the

This concentration of power in the executive led to a loss of liberties, leading

Man’) by European onlookers — an unhealthy organism sacrificing justice

44 NamÏk Kemal, ‘Hasta Adam’, Hürriyet, no. 24, 7 December 1868, p. 2.

government (hükümet-i müstakile), and cited from Book II of De l’esprit des

government (hükümet-i müstakile) because, in contrast to Montesquieu’s

49 NamÏk Kemal, ‘Sadaret’, p. 2. Author’s translation of NamÏk Kemal’s rendering of

Islamic Orient.53 He condemned the arrogance of Europe, which believed that

political realities from them, and act as an irresponsible and unaccountable

stibdad is arbitrary, based on favouritism. Administrative corruption mani-

60 NamÏk Kemal, ‘‘ark Meselesi — III’, bret, 15 October 1872’, in Makalât-Ï

stibdad thus seriously affected the Ottoman Empire’s economic life.

eign intervention in its internal affairs, as manifested in the ‘Eastern Ques-

NamÏk Kemal cautioned Ottomans about the dangers of istibdad, just as

68 NamÏk Kemal, ‘Mülkümüzün Servetine Dâir’, Hürriyet, no. 7, 10 August 1868,

caliphates based all administration.75 He proposed to reform the Ottoman

tions for establishing a constitutional government. Failures in economic poli-

81 Anonymous, ‘Usul-ü ¤stibad’, stikbal, no. 176, 24 August 1876, p. 1.

was generally depicted as a stereotypical ‘Oriental despot’ in the European

political liberties, and justice. Ottoman writers used despotisme in their

quently, istibdad as its Turkish equivalent, developing it into a signifier of the

undertone of Montesquieu, whom he had read closely and frequently cited.

A major characteristic of despotisme is unfreedom. As power became con-

violated the fundamental Islamic principle of consultation (meêveret). As a

in a constitutional republican government ruled by an elected elite, saying:

95Ahmed RÏza, La crise de l’Orient, pp. 22–3.

national movement encompassing all Muslims. A caliph’s temporal author-

nevertheless, disdained the fundamental Islamic principle to ‘seek their coun-

101 Ibid., p. 26.

regarded him as an illegitimate ‘tyrannical’ caliph who must be deposed and

zalime (tyrannical government). For him, ‘it is a mistake to conflate istibdad

In a direct reply to Ahmed Mithad, Mizanci Murad, a prominent Young Turk,

114 Ahmed Mithad, ‘stibdad’, p. 3.

Empire’s troubles. Describing this ‘nightmarish’, ‘ominous’ period as a his-

Ottoman reformists saw the post-revolutionary era, leaving istibdad behind,

and moral values of a constitutional regime, while simultaneously highlight-

from servitude, and national sovereignty (hakimiyet-i milliye).125 Drawing

kadîm), replacing it with a nouveau régime (nizâm-Ï cedîd). Yusuf Akçura

Mustafa Kemal Atatürk and his republican followers employed a particular

traditional, as well as extensive intertextual and intercultural dynamics. The

which, together, make up the geographical province conventionally called

cated is that there is an urgent imperative to broaden the scope of conceptual

Banu TurnaoÈlu UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

DESPOTISM (STIBDAD) IN OTTOMAN POLITICAL

Keywords: stibdad, despotism, tyranny, Montesquieu, NamÏk Kemal, Abdullah

NamÏk Kemal’s Reformulation of stibdad

stibdad is arbitrary, based on favouritism. Administrative corruption mani-

60 NamÏk Kemal, ‘‘ark Meselesi — III’, bret, 15 October 1872’, in Makalât-Ï

stibdad thus seriously affected the Ottoman Empire’s economic life.

81 Anonymous, ‘Usul-ü ¤stibad’, stikbal, no. 176, 24 August 1876, p. 1.

114 Ahmed Mithad, ‘stibdad’, p. 3.