Combining international and internal perspectives, this book analyses the transformation of the Ottoman Empire over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It views privatization of state lands and the increase of domestic and foreign trade as key factors in the rise of a Muslim middle class, which, increasingly aware of its economic interests and communal roots, then attempted to reshape the government to reflect its ideals. These ideals straddled modernist-Islamic and traditionalist cultural outlooks, and the religious and cultural differences between the Muslim and non-Muslim middle classes turned into class differences and ended in separatism. The book attaches special importance to a variety of Muslim revivalist-fundamentalist movements which were contained by the Ottoman government's own Islamist ideology and whose ideas, most notably the Nukshbandis supplied the ingredients for a new title of nationalist-religious ideology, mainly for the agrarian segment of the middle classes.
The book analyses in great detail the British, French, and Russian policies in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Balkans, and how these relations in turn affected the Ottoman government's and society's ideological outlook, including the rise of Islamism and Panislamism. The reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II is studied for the first time in full detail, as a period of intense modernization in education, developments in transportation and communication, cultural-religious adaptation to the changed social structure, and increased cultural, economic, and diplomatic interaction with the West. Based on a wealth of original archival documents, records, memoirs, and published sources, the book is likely to become an indispensable reference for students of Islam, modern Turkey, and the Middle East, as well as for students of modernism and of encounters between civilizations.
