The commonly accepted wisdom is that nationalism replaced religion in the age of modernity. In the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, the focus of Selim Deringil's book, traditional religious structures crumbled as the empire itself began to fall apart. The state's answer to schism was regulation and control, administered in the form of a number of edicts in the early part of the century. It is against this background that different religious communities and individuals negotiated survival by converting to Islam when their political interests or their lives were at stake. As the century...
The commonly accepted wisdom is that nationalism replaced religion in the age of modernity. In the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, the focus of Sel...
How did the late Ottoman Empire grapple with the challenge of modernity and survive? Rejecting explanations based on the concept of an ""Islamic empire,"" or the tired paradigm of the ""Eastern Question,"" the author argues that far richer insights can be gained by focusing on imperial ideology and drawing out the striking similarities between the Ottoman and other late legitimist empires like Russia, Austria and Japan. The author traces the Ottoman state's pursuit of legitimation in public ceremonial; in the iconography of buildings, music, the honors system or the language of the...
How did the late Ottoman Empire grapple with the challenge of modernity and survive? Rejecting explanations based on the concept of an ""Islamic em...
