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The Rise of Public Opinion in the Ottoman Empire(1839–1909)

Bedri Gencer

New Perspectives on Turkey / Volume 30 / March 2004, pp 115 - 154DOI: 10.1017/S0896634600003939, Published online: 21 July 2015

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0896634600003939

How to cite this article:Bedri Gencer (2004). The Rise of Public Opinion in the Ottoman Empire (1839–1909). New Perspectives on Turkey, 30, pp 115-154 doi:10.1017/S0896634600003939

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THE RISE OF PUBLIC OPINION IN THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE (1839-1909)*

Bedri Gencer**

The political crisis of modernity has given rise to a number of studies in the area of political history that are disproportionately concerned with civil society. This consequently has spawned the development of broad theoretical frameworks concerning civil society and the public sphere. One of the lesser-treated subjects within this context has been public opinion. Developed primarily by post-Enlightenment liberal political theory, the notions of civil society and the public sphere had been presented as major alternatives to the domain of the power poli­tics of the Machiavellian tradition. In order to place public opinion on a sound theoretical basis, there arose the need to promote historical empirical studies of it across national contexts over time. . One of the most significant tasks confronting comparative historical sociologists today is uncovering the origin of public opinion, which this paper undertakes to do within an Ottoman context.

Actually, expressions such as "the rise, invention or discovery" of public opinion are somewhat misleading. Some form of public opinion has always existed. What is new is the emergence of public opinion in relation to modern mass politics. Recent studies show that public opin­ion came into being mainly in Britain and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries during major crises such as the Glorious and French revolutions (Zaret 1998, 1999; Cowans 2001). Its emergence in the non-western world, including the Ottoman Empire, took place with some delay in the nineteenth century, at a time when the "Western impact" upon the rest of the world and the corresponding attempts at modernization to counteract this challenge were common.

For accurate empirical analysis, some initial theoretical prepara­tion, regarding first, the conception of public opinion, and then, its rel­evance to the Ottoman world, is needed. While this paper intends to

* I am indebted to Professors fjerif Mardin and Virgina Aksan for their encour­aging appraisals and assistance of all sorts during the preparation of 1 his article.

** Kocaeli University, Department of International Relations. E-mail addresses: bgencer@kou.edu.tr and bedri_gencer@mynet.com

New Perspectives on Turkey, Spring, 30, pp. 115-154

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provide a comparative historical case study with respect to public opin­ion, it is also concerned with a presenting a relatively new theoretical perspective on the subject in terms of the relationship between gener­al opinion and public opinion in particular.

The concept of public opinion has been one of the most'elusive of the modern era. The more than 50 definitions compiled by Childs in 1965 attests to the complexity of the concept. It is defined by Noelle-Neumann (1993, p. 63) as "opinions on controversial issues that one can express in public without isolating oneself." As of 1950, one could find public opinion defined as: "opinions on matters of concern to the nation freely and publicly expressed by men outside the government who claim a right that their opinions should influence or determine the actions, personnel, or structure of their government" (Speier 1950, p. 376). Public opinion, embodied in the public sphere in the sense of the "voice - or the will - of the people", is held, as is clear from this defini­tion, to be essential to the governance of modern democracy as both a check against and a guide to governmental institutions.

Thus, in the course of the emergence of mass democracy in the late nineteenth century, public opinion came to be burdened with a "mis­sion": it was expected to serve as the guide to the democratic govern­mental process. While the extent to which this is likely to be achieved remains a matter of debate among modern elite theorists, there has been a growing tendency to recognize as more fundamental the func­tion of public opinion as a form of social control or legitimation beyond political guidance. This is to be best understood in terms of the inter­relationship of "opinion" and "public opinion." In a nutshell, "opinion" holds in the traditional world a conventional normative repository as in the Locke's term of Law of Opinion (Habermas 1996, p. 91), which can be conceived of as the synonymous with "culture." It is in this way that the content of the relationship between "opinion" and "public opin­ion" becomes clear. While "opinion" designates the normative-evalua­tive dimension, i.e., the basic framework of legitimacy, "public opinion" designates its operative component, that is, its agent. Its function is to serve as a means to check whether decisions or actions taken in socio­political sphere are in accordance with opinion - that is, legitimate. Accordingly, "public opinion may be regarded as one phase in the mobi­lization of a public for action. Once an issue is settled, procedure is established, and it becomes a part of culture and is no longer subject to discussion" (Shibutani 1978, p. 130).

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The characteristics of the Ottoman polity

Public opinion is conceptualized, especially by the - either German or English-speaking - German scholars preoccupied mainly with the management of the "legitimation crisis" (Habermas 1976), in terms of its legitimation function. As English-speaking readers are already familiar in general with "public space" arguments, we shall try more to clarify the content of this concept in the Ottoman world. There are sev­eral interrelated issues relevant to our subject. One of these concerns the legal underpinnings of public sphere, which enable public opinion to flourish, especially in an "imperial" polity. For example, one may well ask whether the public opinion in question refers exclusively to a "Muslim public opinion." Since the Ottoman Empire was a kind of "commonwealth," there were, of course, various publics, Muslim and non-Muslim. Contextually, the Ottoman socio-political organizational model is best represented by reference to the millet system.

The description of the Ottoman polity tends to oscillate between two extremes: the totalitarian-despotic and the mosaic-millet models. They are driven by the contrasting Orientalist- critical and native-apologetic discourses, respectively. The reality of the Ottoman polity, however, defies such simplistic approaches. In particular, the thesis that pre­vailed for so long in Ottoman historiography of the so-called Ottoman millet system (Shaw 1976, I, p. 59) implying a federal polity composed of constitutive self-governing units, increasingly proved to be a fiction produced by the nationalistic exigencies of the twentieth-century. In the last two decades such a millet system based allegedly on the total politi­co-legal autonomy of the non-Muslim communities has come to be chal­lenged more and more by many critical scholars, including Braude (1982), Goffman (1994) and Masters (2001).1 Indeed, the alleged legal autonomy of those communities, which was confined to family law and such practices as funeral services, and was defined by the imperial decrees issued at every accession of a new ruler (Ergin 1944, p 70; Bozkurt, TKHV 1993, p. 286), was vital to the maintenance of collective identities in a ethno-culturally diverse society, a pattern that is fol­lowed today as well by Israel (Shachar, A., Kymlicka 2000b, pp. 213-5).

1 Indeed such a system of autonomous millets came into being only by the 1860s with every millet gaining their respective nizamnames, which came to be misleadingly referred to as "constitutions" in the related nationalistic historiogra­phy.

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Admittedly, concepts such as "pluralism, minority, assimilation, discrimination, tolerance," even "citizenship" (Parekh 2000; Kymlicka 2000b, p. 32) are historical, western European-derived concepts that could not be utilized so universally - and ahistorically - as to apply to the Ottoman case. Accordingly, one could stress in this respect, the idiosyncrasy of the traditional vs. the modern, the Ottoman vs. European worlds, the former being the last major example of tradition in the Near Eastern world. In social terms, the Ottoman Empire was a holistic, organismic, status-based community organized along Platonic lines (Melek 1983). In political terms, it was a classical "common­wealth,"2 as was best stated by the familiar phrase 'memalik-i mahrusa-i §ahane' (the imperial well-guarded domains), having a cos­mopolitan connotation. Through such a cosmopolitan vision, all occu­pational and societal strata, even the foreigners living outside the empire were identified by a neutral, generic term taife (estate). This not only implied their ultimate subordination to the Ottoman authori­ty (Goffman 1994, pp. 139-41), it also defied the modern categories of majority/minority, as well as millet, which is more applicable to the Muslim community (Braude 1982, p.70). The empire was a corporatis-tic system, which can be identified today approximately by the term "unitary, consociational polity" (Kymlicka 2000b, p. 12). It was com­posed of various taifes (estates), with the Muslim taife being primus inter pares, rather than a majority in the modern sense. The sentiment of Muslim dominance, that is, the sense of millet-i hakime (the domi­nant community) served mainly as 'asabiyah {esprit de corps) in the terms of Ibni Khaldun, to mobilize the predominant people needed to run a heterogeneous empire.

In general philosophical terms, the line of distinction between the traditional Ottoman and modern Western ways of managing cultural diversity lies in certain core dualisms such as "universalism vs. partic­ularism, justice vs. equity, human rights vs. collective rights." Habermas (1996, p. 83) drew attention, in the English and French cases, to the significance of the constitutional definition of the individ­ual-based civil and political rights in that they formed the legal ground for the emergence of a bourgeois public sphere. As such, in the process

2 According to Webster, a "commonwealth" is "a political unit founded on law and united by compact or tacit agreement of the people for the common good." As such, Serif Mardin (1988) also contextualizes the Ottoman polity in a "tacit con­tract."

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of post-Enlightenment liberal politics, in terms of the conception of an absolute justice, citizenship came to be defined by a set of common civil and political rights of individuals. These universal human rights, as criticized by Edmund Burke on the same grounds, imply necessarily a generic individual without regard to his or her identity, which fails ultimately to match the fundamental human reality of cultural diver­sity. Therefore, in the Ottoman Empire, in terms of equity rather than justice, estates were granted collective rights; namely, qualified, spe­cific rights to the members of various cultural groups. The Empire was based on a delicate balance of rights and privileges for diverse Muslim and non-Muslim estates tending to secure "equality by separation." Such a group-differentiated citizenship, resting on differential rights for diverse groups unlike equal citizenship, has been justified even by today's leading theorists given the actual conditions of modern soci­eties (Kymlicka 2000b, pp. 31-2). With respect to the equality of the dhimmi, non-Muslims, their traditional legal status was that of "sepa­rate but equal."3

The characteristics of the Ottoman public

So far as the public sphere is concerned, given the idiosyncrasy of the empire just outlined, it would be futile to seek a counterpart of the bourgeois public space in the Ottoman world. First, one of the charac­teristics of the bourgeois public sphere, "openness to all," put legally, "the right to equality in public place," purports a fundamental flaw of the Western modernism. These "all" equal citizens indeed implied bourgeois-inspired sameness and homogeneity opposing difference as an enduring human reality. In Rodrigue's words (1996):

When the public sphere finds itself incapable of dealing with differ­ence, because, of course, difference does not disappear, then the sys­tem produces a discursive politics of majority/minority, about peo­ple who are not yet assimilated but are all potentially assimilable within the framework of a single nation-state.

3 It should not be forgotten that the full equal citizenship brought with the sec­ond phase of Tanzimat, which seemed to have seriously violated the principle of equity, ultimately pleased none of the subjects - Muslim or non-Muslim (Ahmed Cevdet Pasa 1986, p. 1/68).

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Second, like the distinction of "majority/minority," that of "public/private" is also more specific to the post-Enlightenment Western world (For elaboration, see Melton 2001). Historically, the emergence of a bourgeois public sphere in the Western Europe went. hand-in-hand with the differentiation from the center of an economic and politic power through the market. In such a traditional polity as the Ottoman Empire, organized as it was along Platonic lines through a "subsistence economy and status community," the market mecha­nism was not a structural component. Under such conditions, the peo­ple of the virtuous polis were not tempted to seek power - some thing that would ordinarily have happened if the market had been present. This made it highly improbable for a European-style bourgeois public sphere to come into existence. Thus since the Ottoman Empire was an ideal model of patrimonialism in the Weberian sense, all sovereignty and power, both of which are now commonly associated with the "pub­lic," were monopolized, as elaborated by L. Peirce (1993, pp. 6-12), in the household, e.g., the "private sphere," of the Sultan, a pattern dif­fering from all the Western polities, including feudalism, absolute monarchy and nation-state.

Third, related to this, the Islamic community was organized in a socio-political hierarchy by the spatial, being more horizontal than ver­tical. It was a division of between the "inner/outer," which is an "inver­sion of dominant modern Western notions of the politically significant as 'outer' or public and the politically marginal as 'inner' or private and domestic." (Peirce 1993, p. 9).4 Thus, while power was preempted by the key player of the inner, namely the Sultan, the outer represented a sphere of moral, rather than political, agency, serving as a check on. the legitimacy of the political agent through public opinion. Ottoman pub­lic space operated in a communitarian, one might say, rather than lib­eral framework. The importance of spatial boundaries in delimiting moral and political spheres in the Ottoman conception of the properly ordered society was revealed in Ottoman chronicles (Peirce 1993, p. 10).

Fourth, given these characteristics and the substantial principles of justice, it is fair to compare the collective rights of the Ottoman estates to modern human rights. Especially in terms of the meritocratic char-

4 The significant role of political communication played by the alleged nonpo-Utical-private- social structures such as the family and sanctuary present in even traditional and developing countries is emphasized by the comparative political scientists (Almond 1978, pp. 142-4).

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acter of the empire, it was impossible to speak of an inequality of opportunity with non-Muslims in administrative and economic spheres.5 Theoretically, in Islamic law, on which the Ottoman Empire was based, there were five fundamental areas in which Muslims and dhimmis were granted primary legal protection. These were life, faith, property, intellect and lineage (Kamali 1997, p. 86). In terms of the Empire's patrimonial polity, "officials ... because of their kul status ... were subject to special administrative law and lacked the 'civil rights' of the Muslim population." (Mardin 1975, p. 11). Within the parame­ters of the traditional order stated above, such as "order and morality," all the Ottoman subjects enjoyed the core range of civil and political, plus socio-economic and cultural rights, including the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion, and security of life, property, honor, equal protection of the country's laws and the right to an edu­cation, health and work.6 Jean Bodin, for instance, seemed to have been impressed by the tolerance the Turkish empire accorded to the non-Muslims (Goffman, 2002, p. 110). By the same token, Montesquieu's biased observations of "oriental despotism," which included the Ottoman Empire, was widely challenged at the time by several writers and missionaries (Richter referansta 1977, p. 334).

Five, there were several public spheres, properly speaking, "outer worlds," in the Ottoman Empire, either vertical, respective, or hori­zontal, common ones for Muslim and non-Muslim subjects. The kinds of public sphere and media of public communication are more wide-ranging in the Ottoman world than is usually thought (Ortayli 1987, p. 152; 2000, p. 38). Mosques, sufi lodges, guilds, coffeehouses, hairdress-ing-parlors, baths, popular theatre, oral literature, books, pamphlets, memorials, petitions, letters, handbills, imperial edicts, funerals and royal processions are among the traditional spheres and media in the Ottoman world which conveys political messages and public appeals between the center and the periphery.7

In particular, the place of the mosque in the Muslim community dis­plays a fundamental difference from that of the church in accordance with the structural differences between the religions involved. Islam is

5 This is especially emphasized in Lybyer's (1966) landmark's work as a whole. 6 For detailed description, see the collection of essays on the subject (TKHV

(ed.) 1993), especially those chapters by Altindal, Akgunduz and Bozkurt. 7 For a treatment, albeit superficial, of the traditional patterns of communica­

tion in the Ottoman Empire, see Yalman 1914, pp. 17-9; also Alemdar 1981.

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essentially a "lay" religion, which admits of no authoritative agent, intermediary institution, such as Church, between God and man. The mosque, literally called beytullah (the house of God), developed from the very beginning on as the habitat of Muslim community. With its multi-faceted, religious, socio-cultural and educational functions, the mosque, especially forming the center of consultation for Muslims about both worldly and otherworldly issues, laid at the center of a holistic community.8 Unlike the church, whose characteristics are con­trasted by Habermas with those of public sphere, the mosque, the house of God, was deemed thus outside the government control, free and voluntary, a purely civil space. At the time, several European trav­eler-writers and missionaries portrayed the Ottoman Empire as being free of European feudalism and hereditary aristocracy, having no state-supported church and remarkably tolerant (Richter 1977, p. 334).

The ulema, the traditional opinion leaders, above all, captured the sense of the public mainly through Friday preachership in the eight, grand imperial mosques called cevami'-i selatin, which formed the summit of an Ottoman preacher's career. On Fridays, the holy day of the week for Muslims, these mosques, designated as the sites for the prescribed communal service, drew men from all over the city. Furthermore, the ritual of allegiance (bey'ah) to the ruler was rendered in the prayers said after each Friday sermon {khutbe) in the mosques throughout his dominions. If ever a Muslim ruler's name was omitted from the Friday sermon, it meant the loss of his legitimacy. "Even if the Friday sermons cannot be interpreted truly as a renewal of popular approval of the ruler's conduct, it nevertheless was a reminder of the importance of public opinion. There were some rare cases in which a particularly bold preacher denounced the Sultan's acts or policies." (Inalcik 1993, p. 66) This was the case, too, with the Kadizadeli who was able to presume to boldly criticize the Sultan with a joke having a striking innuendo in the very presence of him in the mosque (Zilfi 1986, p. 269).

In the Ottoman world, like mosques, sufi lodges also served as one of the major constituents of public space in the Western sense (For elaboration, see Lifchez 1992). Sufi orders were quick to accommodate

8 The traditional functions of the mosque have been well summarized by Mahir iz (1973, pp. 109-20), the elder brother of Fahir iz, the noted Professor of Turkology.

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popular religion, making it more appealing especially to those people in rural areas. They thus served, in contrast to official religion, as the major agents of socialization, communication, solidarity and identifica­tion vis-a-vis the inner (For details, see Mardin 1971, p. 204). In accor­dance with the group-differentiated citizenship defined by religious-cultural-based status, mosques were open of course only to Muslims. But on more objective, socio-economic grounds, there were some com­mon spaces cutting across the boundaries of the respective religio-cul-tural identities, enabling Muslim and non-Muslim publics to meet for common causes. Artisan guilds, over which the non-Muslim and het­erodox-inclined estates largely predominated, and in which both open-minded, quasi-heretical intellectual and occupational debates took place between Muslim and non-Muslim colleagues, were the foremost example of them (For elaboration, see Baer 1970). Janissaries, who served, along with the ulema, as the opinion leaders of Ottoman peo­ple, came to increasingly join the ranks of artisans and merchants as a consequence of the diminution of their military expeditions, and accordingly their returns, from the late Suleimanic age onwards. Thus most of the popular revolts in the capital against the palace func­tionaries broke out as a result of their alliance with the artisans (Mardin 1967, p. 122).

Besides these revolutionary actions, the combination of Muslim and non-Muslim opinions was also manifested in routine procedures, with petitioning being a prominent example. As Inalcik (1993, p. 61) has pointed out, a series of books in the Ottoman archives known as the defter-i sikayat indicate the wide use of written grievances against provincial authorities. Such petitions, including complaints against tax collectors, the local military or even against the governors, often bore many signatures of both Muslim and non-Muslim subjects, which attests to the sway of the general public opinion.9 Furthermore, some sociological studies (Alemdar 1981) draw attention to the importance of the coffeehouses, which assumed a new significance in the Tanzimat period, as we shall see, in the development of the public communica­tion in Turkey. The degree to which diverse subjects meet in other places so as to form a common public opinion remains a subject of meticulous studies yet to be undertaken by the Ottoman social and cul-

9 For the effect of petitions from Orthodox Church Officials to the Imperial Diwan see, Ursinus 1994.

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tural historians. Hence, unless otherwise specified, the term public opinion used throughout this paper purports a dominant Mustim pub­lic opinion.

The background of the Ottoman public opinion

Having examined the characteristics of the Ottoman polity and public in order to put the subject into proper context, it is possible to go on and examine the "technical" aspects and early manifestations of public opinion in this world. Given that public opinion is not a recent occurrence, a study such as this dealing with its rise in the nineteenth-century is bound to remain incomplete unless its historical background is considered. First, with regard to the "operative" dimension of public opinion, the formation of traditional public opinion is marked by the interpersonal - face-to-face - communication, involving a reciprocal relationship between the communicator and the recipient, e.g., inter­action. This is unlike modern mass communication, which implies a uni-directional relationship between two sides, e.g., dictation (Kunczik 1991, pp. 25-32).10 To generalize, in traditional contexts, including the Ottoman one, there were several local publics11 where traditional elites or elders acted as leaders for a "latent" public opinion, which lay in the background politically in normal times, serving more as a form of social control.

A "manifest" public opinion, in turn, asserts itself in order to deal with the new problematic situations arising with socio-political change. The range of the public, then, would vary according to the degree of the urgency of problematic situation. Especially in cases of crisis and rev­olutions, extraordinary problematical situations, public opinion springs into action through an informal network of primary communi­cation, mainly rumor, under the leadership of traditional elites, which transforms the whole society into a single public. Bayly (2000), for instance, showed that despite their systematic efforts to capture and manipulate the traditional modes of communication and discourse in an "indigenous public sphere" in India, the British authorities failed to

10 Interestingly enough, such scholars as E. Katz and P.F. Lazarsfeld found tha t even in today's advanced systems of communication most people continue to rest more on interpersonal than on mass communication in shaping their opinions (Quoting Almond 1978, p. 143).

11 For the definition of "public" see Shibutani 1978, pp. 37-8.

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anticipate the rebellions of 1857-59.12 This shows that public opinion tends to runs its own course. Its way of operation and the cultural codes are very difficult to permeate by "intruders."

Second, with regard to the "normative" dimension of the Ottoman public opinion, one has to focus on the reign of Sultan Suleiman, when the Ottoman Empire reached its height culturally and institutionally. The sway of public opinion was established through a "tacit contract" (Mardin 1988, pp .27) between the ruler and the ruled over the ways in which justice could be embodied and sustained. From time immemori­al, justice represented the axial principle on which the socio-political culture and organization of the traditional world i- sted. At the onto-logical level, justice meant order and calm as opposed tr chaos. At the historical-social level, it was deemed the fundamental imperative to the maintenance of the status quo, which meant stable power for the king and well-being for his subjects, respectively. Justice was embod­ied in welfare manifested through a patrimonial relationship involving taxpaying by the subjects and sustenance by the benevolent father king of the country. It was thus dependent upon the due exercise of these functions by both sides. For the ruled, the concept justice ('adalah in Ottoman-Arabic) meant more than a situation taken for granted, a static principle of equity and impartial judgment. It was rather a "doing justice"(W/) as a way of socio-political action involving mainly the prevention and elimination of the abuse of power, of oppres­sive acts, zulm, by those who exercise power in the name of *ne ruler, especially in the provinces. According to Inalcik (1993, p. 60), "Further investigation, particularly of the classical Ottoman system of govern­ment, demonstrates that the social class with which the ruler was pri­marily concerned in establishing the 'adalet or protection, was the peasant re'aya." Hence, the peasant sector was the body in the popula­tion that was the source of public opinion.

This was articulated by Suleiman himself in the presence of his ser­vants. Asking t uem who was the ben^i'actor of the world, the Sultan described the peasant subjects as the "benefactor (wali al-ni'mah) proper" since it was the peasants who fed them with the provisions they acquired through agriculture and farming, and in the process, deprived themselves of rest and comfort (Defterdar 1992, p. 94). Seeing

12 I am indebted to Professor Virginia Aksan for bringing Bayly's book to my attention.

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his peasant subjects as "benefactor," and provider, the Sultan assigns to himself, along with his agents, the role of guardianship over them. Thus (doing) justice represented the criterion of legitimacy in the eye of pub­lic criticism. While the Sultan was bound to hold up justice, it was left to public opinion to check it, modifying in case of need, according to two interrelated criteria. These involved the fundamental qualities tradi­tionally attributed by Muslim political philosophers to the ruler.

Prior to al-Farabi, considered to be the father of political philosophy in I§lam, din u dawlah (piety and majesty) had been deemed the fun­damental royal attributes. With him this formula was replaced by hik-mat u 'adalah (reason and justice), with which the Sultan has to be armed in order to be able to achieve an ideal rule based on legitimacy. The opinion leaders, the scholar, on behalf of the public, set long-last­ing standards based on a synthesis of both formulas as din u adalah against which the legitimacy of the ruler could be measured and checked. As Inalcik (1997, pp. 98-99) has put it, public opinion had a greater influence in determining Ottoman policy than has generally been recognized, by serving as the main agent to question the religious potential or the zeal of the ruler for achieving justice, especially in times of unrest. "Popular discontent often appeared among the populace in the form of gossip about the moral weakness of the ruler, i.e. his neglect of religious duties, his wine drinking, and most important of all, his inability to prevent 'injustices' and abuses of authority perpetrated by his agents against his subjects." (Inalcik 1993, p. 65; 1997, pp. 98-99)

The crucial importance of public opinion in terms of imperial legit­imacy was established by such leading scholars as Mustafa 'Ali (Inalcik 1993, p. 66). A regular interactive relationship between the Sultan and his subjects was maintained through Cuma Selamhgi during which the Sultan used to give his subjects a fair hearing to articulate their grievances, in addition to receiving their cheers of praise. The sway of public opinion was also anchored in the political institutional frame­work, with petitioning being an important means through which it was expressed. The Sultan constantly encouraged his subjects in their role as benefactor to him so as to bring injustice to his attention. He did this by respecting their right to petition against the abuses of power of the agents of the state. Moreover, the Sultan asked the local kadi to make his orders public and to give a copy to whoever wanted one. This was in addition to a periodic promulgation of'adalet-names (justice decrees) as a way of appealing to public opinion (Inalcik 1993, p. 60).

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Public opinion also displayed itself through various literature of traditional genre by those who may be called opinion leaders.13 Using the term in the sense of opinion publicly held and expressed, Flemming (1993) analyzed the work of Mevlana Isa written in the age of Suleiman belonging to a little-known genre of "public opinion," name­ly, prophecy. The text was written in the form of a traditional poem, mathnawi, so as to be read aloud to listeners. In line with the genre to which it belongs, which includes esoteric knowledge concerning des­tinies of nations in its apocalyptic aspects, the text offered pointed observations about both the present and prospective situation of the Ottoman polity and society. With his maverick-mindedness, the author thus was able to reflect public opinion proper by differing from the genre of official historiography, a tendency that was also to be shared later by the renowned historian Mustafa 'AH.

According to Mardin (1988, pp. 28-29), the moral economy of the Ottoman society, as just noted, was based on a "tacit contract" between the Sultan and his subjects so as to sustain justice, the breach of which being revealed by the constant pattern of Ottoman popular rebellions. In Islamic thought, doing justice ('adl) was specifically formulated as "commanding right and forbidding wrong" in the communal sphere in general and institutionalized in particular as a public service through the hisba institution as in the Ottoman Empire.14 Accordingly, most of the Ottoman popular uprisings broke out as a reaction to the negli­gence of this imperial mission, and consequently the eclipse of justice, by the agency of muhtesib. The process of rebellion, or properly, the mobilization of public opinion, passed through certain stages that were constantly recurring throughout the Ottoman history in a patterned way. The first stage comprises the public criticism of the evils of the government in the form of gossip and rumor. In the second stage, this public criticism assumes a justification in moral-religious terms through the sermons delivered by the ulema at the mosques or more concretely, by a rescript (fetwa) of the §eyhiilislam (Inalcik 1997, p. 98). In the third stage, the janissaries were dragged into cooperating with the rebellion. Furthermore, a conventional way of multiplying the

13 An anonymous text has been analyzed by Ortayh (2000, pp. 37-56) as an example of the formation of public opinion within the ruling class in the Ottoman Empire.

14 For a detailed survey of this institution in the Ottoman context, see Cook 2002, pp. 316-32.

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number of rebels was to agitate the people working in the bazaar (Mardin 1988, p. 29).

In summary, the ulema provided the moral and the janissaries the physical leadership in the mobilization of public opinion. As many janissaries themselves had already become artisans or traders in the second half of the sixteenth-century, as noted earlier, an alliance of interest between them and the artisans was an important factor in facilitating cooperation in uprisings. Nevertheless, in 1651, the people of Istanbul rose against the power of the Janissary junta(inalcik 1997, p. 98). It is worth noting that the ulema and the bazaar artisans were always careful to make sure that the one-sided demands of the Janissaries did not become excessive and thus lead these rebellions astray (Mardin 1988, p. 31).

The early modern manifestations of public opinion

Until the nineteenth-century, Ottoman public opinion manifested itself through a series of popular rebellions often resulting in the dis­position of the Sultans. According to Inalcik's (1997, p. 98) inventory, these involved the disposition of Sultan Ibrahim in 1648, Mehmed IV in 1687, Mustafa II in 1703, Ahmed III in 1730 - the so-called Patrona Revolt - and Selim III 1807 - the Kabakci Revolt.15 Another axis along which public opinion was examined was the major Ottoman military defeats and their subsequent treaties. Parallel to the increasing inter­action with the world of the outsider, the Ottoman Empire ceased to be a "closed world," e.g., an ever stable, ahistoric city. An awareness of the world of the outsider and a sense of confrontation and "our destiny" influenced public opinion.16 For example, the Treaty of Carlowitz in 1699, the Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718 and the treaty of Kiiciik Kaynarca in 1774 all marked successive Ottoman defeats in the face of Austria and Russia, leaving their imprint upon the collective con­sciousness of the Ottoman public.

Initially, falling outside both categories, the Kadizadeli controver­sy that took place in the seventeenth-century can be singled out in

15 For a more detailed listing of the Ottoman popular rebellions, see Aktepe 1958, VII. For their accounts see, the pages referred to by "revolts" in the index of Shaw 1976, I, p. 345.

16 For an examination of the Ottoman discourse (what the Ottomans possessed as information about the outside world at any rate), see Aksan (1995) 4th chapter.

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terms of the pattern, duration and consequences of public action. This was marked by the impingement of public opinion on the socio-politi­cal process with far-reaching consequences. Disproportionate to the relatively scant scholarship available, this incident is of immense significance in that it marked in essence the self-assertion of latent socio-cultural forces over the destiny of the Muslim community at a juncture when the Ottoman Empire allegedly drifted into a process of stagnation. This controversy led to basically four far-reaching changes First, a shift in the content of opinion; second, a shift in opin­ion leadership; third, the prominence of the mosque as a public sphere and fourth, the influence of emerging public opinion on the socio-political process. Within the limited scope of this paper it is impossible of course to elaborate these points (For details, see Zilfi 1986).

Another landmark in the mobilization of public opinion was the so-called Patrona revolt. According to the Aktepe (1958, pp. 181-2), although this involved the basic dynamics of previous rebellions in the Ottoman history, such as the widespread socio-economic discon­tent, this one featured novel ones. Indeed it marked the beginning of a more fundamental struggle between socio-political forces in the Ottoman Turkish-history: the struggle between the old and new and the statuses consequent to these. During the Lale Devri, the so-called renaissance period, some innovations introduced along western lines, when combined with a courtly life-style marked by luxury and dissi­pation, seriously offended a public sentiment already troubled by the socio-economic malaise. This superficial westernization, which denot­ed more an erosion in moral values, only served to rally opposition by social forces against it. In an alliance of Janissaries, merchants and artisans and medrese students, a Muslim and populist-egalitarian public opinion asserted itself much more strongly against pro-mod­ernization elitist cadres. The Kabakci Revolt as well, which resulted in the disposition of Selim III in 1807, can similarly be evaluated. On the other hand, recent studies (Saricaoglu 2001) show that in the reign of Abdulhamid I, who accessed to the throne following the Treaty of Ku?uk Kaynarca in 1774, there was an extraordinarily vibrant and positive interaction between the Sultan and public opin­ion.

Perhaps the influence of the French Revolution upon the Ottoman world marked a turning point in the way political authority and pub-

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lie opinion interacted. In the traditional world, the need to appeal to public opinion used to arise only on occasions of injustice regarded as synonymous with disarray and sedition through 'adalet-names. This time the cause of disarray and sedition, being ideological, engendered more by the Revolution than social, that is, injustice by public ser­vants, called for a new way of imperial appeal to public opinion that was unlike the previous 'adalet-names. With the French landing at Alexandria on 1 July 1798, anticipating the disruptive and contagious effects revolutionary France would have on the Arab peoples, the Ottoman establishment had to do what it could to avert them by embarking on what in our time is called ideological warfare. In a proclamation distributed in Arabic in Syria, Egypt and Arabia, the Muslim populace was warned against the seditious effects of the Revolution in Islamic-religious terms (Lewis 1962, p. 67).

The imperial encounter with modern public opinion

At the outset, it would be pertinent to conceptually examine the connotations of the term efkar-i 'umumiyye, which was coined in the nineteenth century as an equivalent of public opinion. Indeed, before this term had been accepted and fallen into common usage, other mis­cellaneous terms had circulated (For these, see Kologlu 1994). Upon closer examination, the difference proper between Western and Ottoman conceptions appears in that of "public" rather than "opinion": efkar-i 'amme or 'umumiyye literally meaning the "general opinion." As Habermas (1996, pp. 88-89) has argued, before it was combined finally with "public" as in "public opinion," the term "opinion" (efkar) was used in combination with various adjectives of collectivity such as "common, general, vulgar (opinions), etc." in line with the traditional outlook. Finally, with the emergence of the "public" and "private" as distinct spheres, as touched earlier, the term "public opinion" became estab­lished. The Ottomans, on the other hand, rested on the distinction of the khass/'amm instead of "private/public." As L. Peirce (1993, p. 9) has explained, this meant literally "particular versus general" and socio-politically "the elite versus the common, the ruling class versus the ruled." Specifically, in view of its uses in the patrimonial adminis­trative scheme, the term khass (particular) meant, "that which is asso­ciated with or belongs to the ruler," that is, anything royal (Peirce 1993, p. 9). By contrast, the term 'amm or 'umumi (general) became a

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substitute for "public" as in the case of efkar-i 'umumiyye or idare-i 'amme.17

Expressions which denote the term in the current sense appeared first in the 1830s, generally in the reports of Ottoman ambassadors in Europe. They mainly pointed out the influence of the European public opinions on the internal balance of the Empire and aimed to control it abroad as well as inside (Kologlu 1996, p. 31). The growing importance of public opinion underscored in their observations spelled the birth of the mass politics, in Europe as well as elsewhere, which terminated the traditional elite politics based on the idea that the ruling should nec­essarily bring the ruled under social control. In an era marked by the "Western impact" upon the rest of the world and the resultant pro­found transformations, public opinion began taking on a growing sig­nificance as an important factor to be reckoned with by the political authority. Since a legitimacy deficit caused by a process of radical mod­ernization along Western lines was at the time the fundamental prob­lem facing multi-ethnic traditional polities, including the Ottoman and Russian ones, the question of reference to public opinion became more important than ever.

Tanzimat-i Khayriyye ("The Auspicious Regulations"), or only Tanzimat for short thereafter, was the milestone of this process. This paper takes the Tanzimat as a backdrop for the process of the emer­gence of public opinion and does not go into a substantial discussion of this period. The interpretation of the period, however, does depart from conventional ones in certain respects, which will be stressed where appropriate. In this part, an effort has been made to trace the emer­gence of public opinion at both the empirical and theoretical levels, e.g., within the context of the interaction of events and ideas.

The interplay of domestic and foreign dynamics gave rise to the undertaking of a comprehensive process of renewal designed to elimi­nate the process of decline and, accordingly, to improve the chances of surviving in the modern world. Hence, the Imperial Decree of the Rose Chamber, which was promulgated on 3 November 1839 by Mustafa Reshid, then minister of foreign affairs. Although regarded by many as the first constitutional step (Davison 1963, p. 41), by way of a Bill of

17 As an another interesting example, the term 'amme' being the feminine form of 'amm', has been used also in today's Turkey as equivalent of "public;" as in the phrase of 'amme idaresi' (public administration, literally "general administra­tion").

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Rights for subjects, with respect to the rule of law, this decree was nei­ther revolutionary nor very original. In line with Ortayh, the main nov­elty the Decree brought with it (Lewis 1962, p. 105), namely, the prin­ciple of complete equality of subjects regardless of their ethnic-reli­gious origin, denoted only a general, nominal provision with no legal sanction. According to Ortayli (1987, p. 79) that the Decree carried nothing novel in substance, indicates that it is nothing more than the final example within the age-old tradition of 'adalet-names in Ottoman history - a tradition whose aim was the patrimonial consolidation of justice. The only difference is that it came in a new form and context.

Indeed, the distinction of the Tanzimat decree came from the fact that it gained an objective sanction through proclamation before a national and international public opinion. "After proclamation before an impressive assembly of diplomats and Ottoman notables, the Decree was sworn to by the young Sultan Abdulmecid (1839-1861) and his offi­cials" (Davison 1963, p. 42; 1990, p. 114). Some European journalists present in Turkey during this process convey in their reports misleading observations about public attitudes towards the Tanzimat, which center on an air of indifference and ostensible inertia among people (Quoting Kologlu 1996-97, p. 30). But according to Ahmed Cevdet (1986, I, p. 8; also Davison 1963, p. 43) the keen observer of the Tanzimat era who had a keen sense of public opinion, the Decree met with disapproval and dis­pleasure from the common people on the ground that Reshid lacked suf­ficient zealousness for religious cause. The Decree, however, made a dif­ferent impression on the peripheral regions of the Empire. When it was issued in Arabia, "public opinion" leaned toward the Imperial position and against the rule of Mehmed Ali. On the other hand, the last Ottoman chronicler, Abdurrahman §eref (1339, p. 68) observes that Ottoman "public opinion" gave the Decree a warm reception due to its content, which included promises of bringing justice to all. The resis­tance proper to the Tanzimat indeed came from the bureaucrats, whose minds were conditioned by the despotic and arbitrary habits of cen­turies. However, the Tanzimat bureaucracy found itself with even greater power as a result of successive legal regulations and a struggle for power. In an interregnum characterized by the effacement of patri­monial agency and prevalence of bureaucratic despotism, the Tanzimat bureaucrats, their policies, and increasing cases of bribery, perpetration, abuses of tax-farming etc. became increasingly notorious in the eyes of public opinion (Ahmed Cevdet 1986, pp. 1/10, 20).

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Public Opinion at Hard Work

The genesis of public opinion in this direction was discovered by the political authority mainly through coffee houses. With the advent of coffee to the Near East and the Ottoman Empire18 in the early six­teenth-century, coffeehouses became a colorful and important public space where a process of intense struggle and bargaining between gov­ernment and society occurred. So the ways in which political authority acted towards them provides one a clue of the course of struggle and compromise between government and society. This fragile relationship was determined by two factors. First, the traditional elite politics and patrimonial absolutism marked by the monopolization of politics by royal personage and, accordingly, the depoliticization of people with official intolerance of any direct popular political assertion. Traditionally, the political surveillance over society was carried out by dignitaries, or even by the Sultan himself, traveling in disguise among the people. Second, as was the case in Europe, the potential of coffee­houses for becoming effective places of dissemination of "unfounded" rumors and gossips against government (Kirh 2000, p. 68). These polit­ical affairs were identified by a dialectic of "official truth and popular lie" according to which only news that emanated from official sources was assumed to be true. But, as studied by Shibutani (1978), in soci­eties where rates of literacy and, accordingly, the degree of written communication are low and oral tradition is necessarily predominant, as was the case in the Ottoman Empire, rumor play an important role in the social communication as the major informal news channel. But the challenge and hazard the rumors pose for the socio-political order owing to its anonymous, slippery and uncontrollable trait, made cof­feehouses a vogue target of political control with the frequent banning of their activities. Over time, a tendency towards a regulation of cof­feehouses rather than a total ban on them predominated.19

18 Coffee-houses in Istanbul first appeared in 1554-55 (inalcik 1993, p. 66). 19 According to Ubicini (1977, II, p. 67), coffee-houses have always took a con­

siderable part in the process of rebellions in the Ottoman History. In times of crises they became the center of dissidents, Janissaries or seminarians, so as to meet and decide the course of action. Sultan Mahmud as well, like his predecessors who deci­sively ordered them closed down, failed to achieve this goal, for two or three thou­sand coffee-houses in Istanbul were transformed suddenly into hairdressing-rooms in disguise upon the imperial decree of forbidding! He succumbed then to their con­trolled activity.

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But at the turn of nineteenth-century, this relation began to change. During the time of Sultan Mahmud (1808-1839), the designer of the Tanzimat, a strict ban on "chat of state," that is "talking about politics," was carried into effect by his relentless grand viziers such as Halet Efendi thanks to widespread use of detectives and spies. Those who violated this ban by having a chat that included even the slightest criticism of political authorities, or those who allowed the ban on hav­ing such a chat to be violated, e.g., the owners of coffeehouses, were punished without hesitation (Kocu 1950, p. 36). But following the proclamation of the Tanzimat, coffeehouses came to be seen as legiti­mate terrain where the attitudes of the people could be ascertained. From 1840 onwards there began, thanks also to extensive employment of detectives and spies, an intense campaign of espionage reporting of public talks, mainly in coffeehouses, about political issues which could be regarded as a kind of modern public opinion polling. Although reports almost entirely carried intense public criticism of the Tanzimat practitioners and its practices, no punishment was issued to the per­petrators of that criticism. This was due to a fundamental shift in "gov-ernmentality," to use a concept created by Foucault, driven by the motto of "knowing for ruling." The over-detailed reports of what people thought and spoke about passed through a meticulous reading and perusal from the ordinary officials up to the Sultan himself (Kirh 2000, p. 60). The former tendency of one-directional political control of soci­ety in order to appease any opposition equated with sedition was replaced by a new mentality open to an interactive relation with peo­ple and public opinion beyond the discourse of "official truth and pop­ular lie": a reliable intelligence of public tendencies was deemed neces­sary to manage popular discontent and opposition.

Ahmed Cevdet traces the emergence of public opinion to the Crimean War of 1853-56 (Mardin 1989, p. 112). But the incident involving the "seminarians" that took place on the eve of Crimean war also imparted a new dimension to the formation of public opinion. Throughout the Tanzimat period, in this case and thereafter, a new group, called softas (seminarians), was seen to have taken over, one might say, the leadership in the mobilization of opinion.20 According to Davison (1963, p. 325), "in a way the softas represented public opinion

20 On the role of students in politics from the Ottoman period to Turkish Republic, see Szyliowicz 1970.

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as the Janissaries had at various times in the past." They represented, in fact, the largest organizable group, whose numbers in Istanbul were variously estimated at five thousand to sixty thousand, in the capital, since most soldiers were on campaign in the Balkans. Here can also be seen the mixed sparks of pressure groups, civil society organizations and social movements in era of mass politics.

According to a contemporary witness, the unity they had with their teachers benefited the public (Davison 1963, p. 325). This was because of their clear disdain for a trend which risked their future: a trend through which religious scholars began falling into disfavor with the gradual loss of their offices in the judicial and educational system. Accordingly, they associated their destiny, dependent upon the survival of tradition, with that of people and acted on their behalf. In 1853, on the eve of the Crimean War, two sides, the pacifist Reshid along with Sultan Abdulmecid and the opposing military wing, which advocated a belligerent policy towards Russia designed to topple Reshid, clashed. At this point, the antagonist Mehmed Ali drove seminarians into streets with a view to forcing the Sultan to depose Reshid. It was during this time that the posting of bills provoking the government into war came to be used as a method of rousing public opinion in the hope that favor­able results could be procured (Ahmed Cevdet 1986, p. 11/23).

The Crimean War and the Paris Treaty of 1856 changed the nature of Ottoman relations with the West and Russia. The result was a fun­damental shift in mutual perceptions and altered the course of Ottoman modernization. During this war, there was a multifold expan­sion in the scale of public sphere in the Empire - in terms of both the communicative infrastructure and the direct contact of Muslim and European cultures, which resulted in an expanse in the exchange ideas and impressions. According to Karpat (2001, pp. 73-6), the war opened up the Ottoman Empire to Europe and overnight produced a multi-tiered revolution in communications through the use of the telegraph throughout the Empire. Second, the war created a unique opportunity for person-to-person contact between the Ottoman Muslims and Europeans as the population of Istanbul became familiar with the large numbers of French officers and soldiers stationed there (Also Davison 1963, pp. 69-79). Aside from the temporary presence of allied soldiers, the channels of communication were the traditional ones: diplomats, travelers, businessmen, missionaries, adventurers, stu­dents, refugees, and native Christians of the Empire (Davison 1963, p.

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70). The total impact of Europe on the Ottoman Turks was obviously not uniformly good. At best, it was mixed. A certain sector of the pop­ulace showing propensity and admiration for European civilization notwithstanding, most of the Ottoman public remained inclined to self-identity as opposed to wanting to adopt European culture. Citing Western travel chronicles, Davison (1963, pp. 77-8) gives us remark­able clues of the then Ottoman public opinion.

During the Crimean War, Britain and France used their status as allies of the Ottoman Empire to urge the Turks toward further west­ernization and more effective application of the doctrine of equality included in the Decree of 1839, which had been, as noted above, includ­ed only as an abstract principle (For Cevdet's comment in this direc­tion, see Karpat 2001, p. 76). At the end of the war, their pressure cul­minated in a new edict, the Reform Edict of 1856, which inaugurated the second and final phase of the Tanzimat and which laid down in terms more specific and categorical than previously the full equality of all Ottoman subjects irrespective of religion (Berkes 1998, p. 152; Ahmed Cevdet 1986, I, pp. 67-86). However, its application was made no easier by the general situation of the Empire after the Crimean War. As their Western critics charged, the Tanzimat statesmen had used some of the great declarations involving the principle of equality as weapons of diplomacy, to forestall foreign intervention by dispelling room for objection, in times of international crisis, and not solely as programs for domestic reform.

The men of reform were then faced with a dual pressure: the out­sider European powers, who were keeping them under surveillance regarding the full execution of the provisions of the edicts dealing with the Christian-Muslim equality, and the internal Muslim public, which was heavily offended by the new situation. The new provisions of equality had indeed rocked the Ottoman Empire to its foundations (Ahmed Cevdet 1986,1, p. 85) by overturning the traditional hierarchy of statuses, "equal but separate," both legally and culturally, not only between the Muslim and non-Muslim subjects but also between the Orthodox Christian and the rest of non-Christian communities. Although intended, by Tanzimat leaders who hoped for salvation for the Empire in the emerging world, to create among its heterogeneous peoples the bond of equal citizenship based on the Ottoman nationali­ty, this was bound to stir up a general discontent and indignation in every segment of society because of its far-reaching consequences. As

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such, Reshid, now marginalized despite his pioneering role in the Tanzimat, in a lengthy memorandum he submitted to the Sultan, drew attention to hazards the Reform Edict posed in terms of omission of public opinion in its preparation and the prospective reactions to it (Ahmed Cevdet 1986,1, p. 80; Davison 1963, pp. 57, 364).

Thus it is in view of these attitudes against the revolutionary prin­ciple of equality that came in the second phase of the Tanzimat, that the genesis of public opinion in the late Ottoman Empire is traceable. Naturally, no Turkish mind, conditioned by long centuries of Muslim and Ottoman dominance, would have been able to accept such equali­ty, given its likely repercussions. Muslim grief was immense and incon­solable (Ahmed Cevdet 1986, I, pp. 68-9). To many, the last bastion of Muslim supremacy had evaporated. As indicated by Davison (1990, p. 121), the relatively lower level of well-being of Muslims in comparison to native Christians had been counterbalanced by this psychological and mental superiority; now they were deprived even of this psycho­logical haven. But even in such a climate of bereavement, no great uprising occurred. The reaction of religious leadership arose from the periphery; the Meccan Sharif along with the surrounding scholars issued a rescript (fetwa) accusing the Tanzimat statesmen of apostasy (Ortayli 1987, p. 75). Rioting in some localities occurred, too (Davison 1963, p. 80). Civil disobedience or overt protest were unfamiliar phe­nomena to the Ottoman political culture marked as it was by quietism conditioned by both Islamic and oriental tradition. Just as "tacit agree­ment" there arose a "tacit protest" among the populace.

Many Turks expressed their resentment against the architects of these unfavorable innovations. The four leaders in the design and implementation of most of the reforms - Re§id, Ali, Fuad and Midhat -were called by the populace, with utter disgrace, gavur (infidel) pashas. Furthermore, the way was paved for a clash of opinions by mutual pro­pagandists methods. Overzealous foreign humanitarians had printed and circulated copies of the Reform Edict, leading native Christians to expect more than was really possible (Davison 1963, pp. 43,101). Then, widespread dissatisfaction with and opposition to the government's westernizing policies led to a conspiracy in 1859 known as the Kuleli incident. One of the leaders of the conspiracy was a Naqshbandi sheikh, Sheikh Ahmad, who had been voicing such sentiments since the proclamation of the Reform Edict (Ahmed Cevdet 1986, II, p. 82). His leadership was of the kind that would fill the leadership vacuum

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left by scholars of the realm especially during times of emergency. This conspiracy against the government seems to have secured a good deal of participation and support from a considerable part of society, includ­ing both elites and the ordinary people. This was an example of a plot to overturn the government, of the kind of the traditional Ottoman "palace revolutions" and one that counted on rather widespread public support, rather than an example of revolt for parliamentary or consti­tutional government. But because the government had foreknowledge of the plot, there began an intense campaign of arrest of conspirators. In Istanbul, the news of the arrests provoked a number of the usual "unfounded" rumors. A good deal of opinion in the capital seems to have supported the conspirators. So, arrests were hindered and semi­narians who had not been arrested put up posters appealing to the Muslim public to save their brethren at Kuleli in the name of religion and patriotism (Davison 1963, p. 102). Although the government had tried to trivialize the affair, it nevertheless did not cease to impose strict restraints upon both religious scholars and students and their traditional spheres of influence, that is, mosques and lodges.

The third incident of seminarians involving the mobilization of opinion against Tanzimat policies occurred on May 1876 (Shaw 1976, II, pp.162-3). During this time, news from Balkans of the "massacre of helpless Turks by Bulgarian rebels incited by Russia" raised the pitch of Muslim, anti-Russian and anti-government sentiment in the capital (Davison 1963, p. 323). The assassination of the French and German consulates in Salonika by mistake, while an excited Muslim mob was seeking to rescue from some Greeks a Greek Orthodox Bulgarian girl who was ready to convert to Islam, was deemed a crime but at the same time, it was a sign of the continuing existence of religious and nation­al zeal among Muslims. But while it was feared that Muslim sentiment might erupt into outrages against the Christian inhabitants in Istanbul, sentiment there was directed principally against the govern­ment.

Seminarians once again came on the scene. This time they had resort to every means of mobilization of opinion, strike, mass meetings in the mosques21 and petition, so as to bring great pressure to bear on

21 After centuries of Kadizadeli debate, the mosques in which such scholars as Ali Suavi and Mehmed Bey delivered sermons in favor of constitutionalism were again involved in the rousing of public opinion (Karpat 2001, pp. 127-8; Mardin 1962, p. 23; 1989, p. 113; Davison 1963, p. 210).

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the government for the dismissal of the Grand Vizier and §eyhiilislam. Subsequently, the result expected was achieved with far-reaching con­sequences (Davison 1963, pp. 326-7) as such public opinion played an active role in the appointment and deposal of state officials. As noted above, in 1853 Mehmed Ali tried to manipulate public opinion by pro­voking seminarians in order to procure Reshid's deposal, along with the actual dismissal of Mahmud Nedim on May 1876. Most important­ly, the Sultan Abdulaziz (1861-1876) summoned Fuad Pasha to accept the chairmanship of the Supreme Council on grounds that "not only he himself but also state and people demand him" (Ahmed Cevdet 1986, II, p. 262).

Another dimension of the interactive relation between political authority and public opinion accompanying the Tanzimat was the Sultan's exposure to the people. Formerly, in accordance with "tacit agreement" and the image of an invisible, transcendental and immov­able ruler which was forged after the conquest of Istanbul by Mehmed the Conqueror, an Ottoman Sultan had contact with his subjects only on occasions of weekly (Friday) and annual holidays and surveillance over them in disguise as he made trip either within the country or abroad. With Sultan Mahmud, who made five countrywide trips between the years 1830-1839 in order to personally examine the living conditions of his people, this tradition began changing (Kirh 2000, p. 70; Davison 1963, p. 27). Sultan Abdulmecid also continued these trips and contact with the people, while Sultan Abdulaziz went further. By traveling in Egypt in 1862 and Europe in 1867, he became the first Ottoman ruler to travel outside his domains except at the head of an army (Davison 1963, p. 172). More interestingly, Ahmed Cevdet (1986, p. 11/ 263) adds that the Sultan when traveling in Egypt and then Izmir, a city of his country, was hailed by the people in European style breaking with the traditional way in which public veneration of the Sultan was showed in silence. Abdulhamid II brought this trend of vis­ibility of the Sultans to a halt by restoring the tradition for a variety of reasons (Deringil 1998, p. 18).

Intellectual excursions into public opinion

Towards the end of the Tanzimat era (1876), public opinion began to be cast in a different light with the emergence of the press and jour­nalism and a new class of intellectuals, mainly the New Ottomans. In

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the years following the Crimean War, an intellectual and literary revival that was to give rise to the transformation of public opinion was already under way. Thus a vigorous public opinion began to become a component of politics. This process of transformation of public opinion has been well summarized by Davison (1963, p. 313):

There had always been in Ottoman history public opinion of a sort, which had operated in political terms even to the point of sanction­ing the deposition of some dozen the Sultans. But by 1875 the growth of the press in Istanbul, the propaganda activities of the New Ottomans, and the growing familiarity of members of the elite groups with the European press and public opinion had given this force an added significance. Accounts of events in these years by contempo­raries are full of references to efkar-i 'umumiyye, public opinion. More than in 1859 at the time of the Kuleli incident, more than in 1867 when some of the New Ottomans planned a coup, the coup of May 1876 represented fairly a public opinion among Turks of the Empire which was more and more turned against government. As in both of the earlier years, opinions voiced were partly conservative, complaining about concessions to Christians and governmental weakness under pressure, and partly liberal, complaining of govern­mental autocracy. But they were invariably antigovernment.

At the intellectual level, one would discern the key five figures stand­ing out as "opinion-theorizers" and "opinion-makers" in the process of the rise of the public opinion in the Tanzimat era: Sadik Rifat (1807-56), Ahmed Cevdet (1823-95), Ibrahim §inasi (1824-71), Namik Kemal (1840-88) and Ahmed Midhat(1844-1912). All were well aware of and sometimes astonished at the prominence of public opinion that had seemingly been lurking in the shadows for centuries. Going to Vienna in 1837 as ambassador, Sadik Rifat Pa§a conveyed in his writings the keen first-hand observations of the functioning of European socio-political order and the role played by public opinion in it. He depicted in his writ­ings, reflecting his full grasp of the new basic forces of the European his­torical course, "belief - which purports probable political ideologies - and "public opinion" as irresistible forces. In his own words:

"Public opinion and the inclinations of the people are like an over­flowing river, and there are two situations which are impossible to

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overcome, one of them being religious belief and the other public opinion. Since to oppose them is dangerous and difficult, in the case of uprisings and stirrings of public opinion, the state should act accordingly to the currents of nature" (Quoting, Mardin 1962, p. 187).

Ahmet Cevdet's reflection on public opinion seems to have been dri­ven by a striking incident that took place towards the end of the Tanzimat period. According to his report, the most exemplary popular reaction to Tanzimat policies, which was regarded as the sign of the rise of public opinion, was expressed during the funeral of Ali Pasha, the Grand Vizier of the Second phase of the Tanzimat (Mardin 1989, p. 112), who had died in 1871. When the congregation attending the funeral was asked to acquit the Pasha of his sins, there was a complete deliberate silence instead of the usual affirmative response. To Ahmed Cevdet (1986, II, p. 44), this represented the most tangible and enig­matic form of power; it was a '"tacit" expression of public opinion in a traditional public sphere. Evidently, it was due to the somewhat impe­rious (Ahmed Cevdet 1986, II, p. 21) westernizing policies of the Grand Vizier. This startling incident brought Cevdet, who had collaborated with the secular reformers on a number of policies during the first years of the Tanzimat, to his senses. He thereafter refrained from actions that "ran counter to public opinion "(Mardin 1988, pp. 33-34; 1989, p. 112). Reminiscent of the Latin dictum vox populi vox dei he (1986, II, p. 150) also condemns some Tanzimat bureaucrats perpe­trating bribery and embezzlement on grounds "they are neither ashamed of God nor take care of the people."

Intellectually, public opinion seems to Cevdet, with a turn of mind conditioned by the "reason of state," to be a thorny subject to deal with (For elaboration, see Arikan 1992). Nevertheless, he reached, perhaps gropingly, remarkable insights into the crucial differences between the European and Ottoman public opinions and their basic problematics. He envisages public opinion as a latent, autonomous and precarious force - perhaps the only agent with more force than that of the ruler with a traditional patrimonial mindset (Neumann 1999, p. 201). He regards it as the dynamic of history, so much so that he holds it respon­sible for the outbreak of the 1787 Ottoman-Russian War. Indeed, he ascribes no autonomy to society vis-a-vis the political center that would enable it to perform certain modern political functions such as those

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exercised by civil society, pressure groups or social movements. Public opinion, in turn, is an important "organic" force that is neither con­trollable nor manipulatable. Nevertheless, it is, in any case, one that should be taken into consideration by the political authority. Public opinion in the Ottoman Empire was unlike that in Europe. Public opin­ions in Europe eventually gained formal expression in a manifest, pre­dictable, even malleable way as a result of a "formal" social contract and compromise. Public opinion in the Ottoman Empire, on the other hand, often effaced itself in terms of patrimonial relationship based on "tacit contract," asserted itself only occasionally in brief outbursts. This unpredictable force of public opinion is especially hazardous to politi­cal authority when it is dominated by the trivial and fanatical sector of people in alliance with the interests of the anti-reformist forces within the state (Neumann 1999, p. 203). The state administration is in need of being protected against such a force.

The New Ottomans, the first intellectual movement of the Ottoman world, were organized in 1867 around Egyptian Prince Mustafa Fazil. They inaugurated an opposition movement, mainly through journal­ism, against Tanzimat policies. A loose group of individualistic intel­lectuals, the New Ottomans found a common ground in opposition to the bureaucratic despotism of the Tanzimat. Although reckoned by some to be the first to champion the cause of liberal constitutionalism against an absolutistic regime, they were, in fact, preoccupied with devising measures to restrain the bureaucratic despotism caused by the erosion of patrimonial autocracy brought on by the Tanzimat. Their opposition stemmed in part from personal reasons, e.g., resentment expressed towards Ali Pasha (Davison 1963, p. 175). However, the New Ottomans, particularly Namik Kemal, for example, had a strong grasp of both Western and Islamic culture. Over time, this led to a defense of tradition through a general critique of modernity that enabled them to employ an ideological discourse interwoven by seemingly modern con­cepts. Thus armed with an intellectual having both traditional and modern qualities and committed to the cause of Islam, they emerged as the new opinion leaders capable of filling the leadership vacuum that had been left by the abdication of the ulema.

The start of the career of the New Ottomans was concurrent with the rise of independent Turkish journalism. Until their time, there were in the Empire, especially in the capital, a good many newspapers in foreign languages, but only two in Turkish, both of which having ties

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with the government. One was the official paper, Takvim-i Vekayi (Calendar of Events), the first Turkish newspaper established by Mahmud II in 1831;22 the other was the semiofficial Ceride-i Havadis (News Gazette), published by an Englishman, William Churchill in 1843.23 Turkish journalism is more commonly said to have started with Terciiman-i Ahval (Interpreter of Events) in 1860 in which Ibrahim §inasi, the pioneering figure of the New Ottomans and the generation of independent Turk journalists, led the way. Unlike previ­ous ones that were concerned more with the chronicling of events, this newspaper dedicated itself to educating and informing the Ottoman public about world events and to opinion making (Karpat 1964, p. 258; 2001, p. 119). Two years later, Sjnasi, absorbing European culture dur­ing his visit to France, began publishing his own newspapers in col­laboration with Namik Kemal.

He was the first to use the term efkar-i 'umumiyye, treating it in a theoretical framework among many other modern terms including lib­erty, liberal ideas, natural rights of the people, citizens' rights, freedom of expression, national consciousness, constitutional government (Berkes 1998, p. 197; Mardin 1962, pp. 273-74). Influenced by the European conception of public opinion and regarding it more as a kind of common sense, Sinasi's view of society (Kologlu 1996, p. 32) seems to have remained largely within the boundaries of Ottoman tradition, whereby society was holistic and integrated. Although Terciiman-i Ahval quickly attracted public attention, its readership remained lim­ited. The first newspaper to have a large readership was the populist Basinet, which became the voice of Islamism and Islamic nationalism. Launched by Ali Efendi, in 1869 and soon attaining the highest circu­lation rate of any Turkish newspaper to date, it added an internation­al dimension to the Ottoman political opinion by becoming the "voice of people" (Karpat 2001, p. 119).

The New Ottomans experienced few failures in their attempt to mobilize public opinion through political and revolutionary action.

22 DeKay provides a truly "front page" account of the founding of the newspa­per, its reception among the various communities, and its implications for the development of public opinion internally and externally (Quoting Berkes 1998, p. 127).

23 In order to trace the development of Ottoman-Turkish journalism, the work of Yalman (1914) ought to be consulted with caution because of its glaring anti-Hamidian bias.

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Thus their mission to nurture public opinion and make it favorable to change through cultural and journalistic activity assumed great sig­nificance. The concomitant growth of a journalistic movement that appealed to their just cause, served to revolutionized the pattern of social communication. One of their enduring contributions was the establishment of a climate of opinion wherein discussions centered about such conceptions as that of "liberty" and "the fatherland" became widespread (Mardin 1962, p. 80; Davison 1963, p. 196).

One of the most prominent New Ottomans was Namik Kemal. Mostly due to the impact of his literary and intellectual career on both contemporary and future generations, he emerged as a hero of the new era. Devoting his entire life to the cultivation of a public opinion, he self-consciously, zealously and discreetly worked towards making it an effective force to reckon with in an ever-changing and challenging world. His major concern was the eclipse of justice in the process of modernization and did his best to enlighten public opinion to serve the cause of the recovery of justice. Using a voluntaristic approach that stressed the significance of man's will, he worked to reinterpret tradi­tion through such modern concepts as "liberty," which he expressed as justice in disguise. In the series of articles he wrote in Ibret (Lesson), 'launched in 1872, he favored diversity of opinions, and constantly stressed the importance of critical debate and discussion in the forma­tion of a sound public opinion.

He was the first, one might say, to theorize about public opinion in addition to political thought, morality and culture, in terms of political participation and control of the government, which he argued was the main imperative to mass politics. In a fairly refined treatment by the standards of his time, he related public opinion in a systematic way to political thought (efkar-i siyasiye), political culture {terbiye-i siyasiye) and political morality (ahlak-i siyasiye) (Ozon 1997, pp. 171-78). Public opinion, in his view, consisted of political morality, or the sum total of feelings for country and community, freedom and justice among all members of the national community rather than being dependent upon a special training as argued by some elitists (Ozbn 1997, p. 173). According to him, the Janissaries, who had delivered the country from the grip of the oppressed such as Feyzullah Efendi^and Ibrahim Pasha, were the embodied examples of public opinion. He argued that most of the Ottoman palace revolutions were driven by dire necessity and always ran within the strict boundaries of preset purposes, mainly,

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY 145

restoring justice without raiding or encroaching on the possessions of the impartial people.

But especially in times of disturbance, such as the modern age, to his mind, public opinion was always likely to go to extremes, either over-action or under-action, both of which were hazardous for a coun­try's destiny. A sober and balanced public opinion was needed for the "suggestion of demands and promotion of goals" (Ozbn 1997, pp. 171-8). Besides the substantial clout of his just cause, his pioneering effort in the development of a plain Turkish style and a new literary vision sensitive to social issues also facilitated his appeal to the public (Mardin 1962, p. 283). Apart from his profoundly influential patriotic poetry, the part his famous play Vatan yahut Silistre played in the instillation of the idea of fatherland to the Ottoman people, ranked it among the great books of the world that immensely influenced public opinion, as it was played in various eras with the same public reception (Davison 1963, pp. 298-301). The next generation of intellectuals, namely the Young Turks, was to profess later to have owed their entire upbringing to Namik Kemal (Mardin 1962, p. 404).

The Hamidian Rapprochement with Public Opinion

The mission of the New Ottomans to enlighten public opinion through the struggle for justice and liberty against Tanzimat despo­tism came to a standstill during the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876-1909). Although this study is intended to focus on the Tanzimat era (1839-1875), it would not be complete without an appraisal of the Hamidian era. In terms of both continuity and discontinuity with the past and of its immense vibrancy and dynamism, our subject matter as it played out in this era deserves attention. This era was perhaps the eleventh-hour of the Empire marked by a fatal struggle to survive in every respect. Seeing the inevitability of transformation, Abdulhamid gave a fresh impetus to the process of modernization set in motion in the Tanzimat while working out the multitiered policies of legitimacy to match that process in order to preclude anomie. As a consequence, unlike the Tanzimat case, public opinion in that era ran as a legiti­mating or supportive rather than as a reactive agent.

In an interregnum such as that seen during great upheavals like the French Revolution, a redefinition of the content of "opinion," a new ideology of legitimacy, exercised through a "tacit process of bargaining"

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(Deringil 1998, p. 10) between the state and its people, the traditional elite rivalry via ideological manipulation of public opinion was not allowed. At this juncture, a liberalism or pluralism that included com­plete freedom of expression in the press seemed superfluous - meaning nothing but anarchy and chaos. Even in the point of departure of the ultimately just cause of the New Ottomans, Islam had come to be used as a means of opposition to rival the elite in power. This time the ide­ological use of Islam as a means of opposition, appealing to the mass­es, for example, was transferred to a broader societal level in the process of this bargaining.

Unlike Abdulaziz's arbitrary despotic tendencies, Abdulhamid II turned to enlightened despotism for the "saving of the state" (Karpat 2001, pp. 133-4, 303; Deringil 1998, p. 20). By restoring patrimonial absolutism to neutralize the state as the supreme axis of allegiance, he secured a "bureaucratic legitimacy" in the eyes of ruling groups, then, by developing a wide variety of policies and symbols to appeal to pub­lic secured a "civil legitimacy" in those of the ruled. Surrounding him­self with a number of reliable advisers and special committees which served him as organs of mashwarah (consultation) on political, reli­gious and military affairs, the Sultan perhaps more honestly, founded a system closer to what the New Ottomans conceived as mashwara, the essence of Islamic constitutionalism (Berkes 1998, p. 256). He ruled out conventional "opinion-makers" such as bureaucrat intellectuals, reli­gious students24 and scholars and sought out direct agents of appeal to public (Karpat 2001, pp. 188-207). For example, a genius such as Namik Kemal notwithstanding, Ahmed Midhat (Lewis 1962, pp. 185-6; Shaw 1976, II, pp. 252-3; Karpat 2001, pp. 195-9), a versatile, (the soul of vigor, zeal, curiosity and determination) one-man army standing out especially in interregnums, by inaugurating a modest enlightenment in the Ottoman world, dedicated himself to the overall education of people as a journalist, novelist, historian, popularizer. Upon the com­mission of the Sultan, he began publishing in 1878 the newspaper of Tercuman-i Hakikat (Interpreter of Truth). In addition to echoing the Sultan's Islamist statist political philosophy, it disseminated a wealth of information about every conceivable subject, thereby becoming the

24 During the Hamidian reign, seminarians, who were kept under strict con­trol, were banned from holding meetings (Yalman 1914, p. 62; Mardin 1989, p. 198). Moreover, some mosque preachers who were also presumed to be denouncing the Hamidian rule were strictly regimented (Yalman 1914, p. 65).

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most influential modernist medium in the period 1878-1908 (Karpat 2001, p. 132).

Well before Abdulhamid II had come to the throne, Midhat had advanced such a vision in an open discussion with Namik Kemal in 1872 (Kologlu 1996, p. 32). Romantically inclined, Kemal saw the dynamism of public opinion as being dependent upon constitutional freedoms and viewed it as the main resort in the control of an arbitrary regime. On the other hand, Midhat, marshalling a more Platonic vision, stressed the importance of education and self-mastery of the people. They were considered to constitute the cultural underpinning of liberalism and democracy under which public opinion is seen to oper­ate as expected. This was a vision that similar to the one expressed by the Sultan. According to cumulative scholarship on the subject, the Sultan seems to have been well aware of the consequences of modern­ization in terms of the changing pattern of relations between the rul­ing and the ruled. Since the traditional points of association between the two broke down in the process of emergence of a nation-state, the need to forge new ones arose. The centralization concomitant with the process of modernization entailed a social mobilization, the horizontal (with nation) and vertical (with state) process of identification through "national culture and citizenry" so as to undo ruptures caused by mod­ernization and centralization. Thus his state came to demand not pas­sive obedience but conformity to a unilaterally proclaimed normative order (Deringil 1998, p. 11).

This tendency necessarily entailed a public enlightenment, the transparency and publicization of education and culture. As a stunning historical paradox, the era of the "obscurantist" Sultan was that of a genuine cultural, educational and informative revival characteristic of modernity. Although political freedom was greatly restricted and pub­lications published during his reign having a political or openly anti-Islamic content heavily censored, a series of newspapers and reviews and myriad books, coupled with a rising rate of literacy, succeeded in wide-scale dissemination of original information about both the level of contemporary civilization and the Islamic legacy (Karpat 2001, p. 134; Berkes 1998, pp. 276-81). Perhaps the tendency of depoliticization of the Hamidian regime was a reaction to the over-politicization of the Tanzimat, which blinds minds to the very cultural essence to which the analysis of socio-political phenomena has ultimately to be traced. Such a widespread, multitiered and far-reaching enlightenment during the

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Hamidian regime, accordingly, depended upon a detached cultural ten­dency wrapped up in depoliticization and ideological effacement. Thus public was able to acquire a broader and more critical vision of the Western and Islamic civilizations than a strictly political and biased one and, whether intended or not, the consequences of that process was far more influential on that of secularization (Berkes 1998, p. 279).

While the public benefited from the new information disseminated by the press, the Sultan became almost a prisoner of the "opinion mak­ers" of the newspaper world (Karpat 2001, p. 134). Suspicious of the abuse of press, as a double-edged sword, through modern sly propa-gandistic methods, he accused it of "leading public opinion astray." (Brummett 2000, p. 5). While the sensibilities and reactions of both people and intellectuals overlapped during the Tanzimat, which made public opinion assertive, they began diverging during the Hamidian reign with public opinion becoming congenial to the Hamidian rule. The reasons for this are not difficult to ascertain. Externally, there was a real threat to the very existence of Muslims. The defeat of 1877-78 by Russia, followed by the forced migration of millions from the Balkans to Anatolia, exacerbated in the public mind the concern of the dissolu­tion of the Empire and crystallized public opinion with a sense of the unity and solidarity of the whole country rather than polarization (Karpat 2001, pp. 125, 151). Internally, since the Hamidian establish­ment made great strides to recover legitimacy missed by the first gen­eration of Tanzimat statesmen, no conservative public opinion found the room for reaction to policies of that era. Since a man of their own, a devoted, austere, sober, self-confident ruler was in power, no ratio­nale of criticism and opposition remained. "The man in the street could feel comfort in the security of his tradition." (Berkes 1998, p. 255)

Conclusion

Abdulhamid II, like his closest adviser Ahmed Cevdet, seems to have abstained painstakingly from deeds running counter to public opinion. In accordance with a naive populism, the people were seen by his establishment as potentially good and reliable (Deringil 1998, p. 40). But the dissident intellectuals, failing to overcome their inherent elitistic tendencies, continued to portray people as the "bewildered herd" in the satirical press after the Young Turk Revolution (Brummett 2000, p. 52). From this study we can draw a two-tiered con-

NEW PERSPECTIVES ON TURKEY 149

ception of public opinion embedded in the Turkish political discourse,

entailing both theoretical and empirical aspects. On the actual politi­

cal level, in line with the elite politics stretching from the Empire to

the Republic, the "public" has been regarded as a "bewildered herd"

without "opinion," that is, unable to make definitive political choices to

be reckoned with.25 But on the virtual, moral level, the phrase "the

infallible common sense of Turkish people" (Turk halkirun §a§maz

sagduyusu)26 which stresses the quintessential legitimating role and

the acquiescent authority of public opinion and which has been often

referred to in the erratic course of nascent Turkish democracy, became

commonplace in Turkish political discourse.27

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