As a student of Ottoman history, I seek to challenge the conventional scholarship that frames the empire’s encounter with modernity through binary oppositions—reactionary versus progressive, secular versus religious, and Western-oriented versus Eastern-oriented. My work focuses on the intellectual currents often labeled as ‘conservative,’ with the connotation of not being ‘modern,’ and ‘progressive’ enough. At that point, I came to recognize that Ahmet Cevdet Pasha (1823-1895) was one of the victims of these reductionist and binary frameworks, and he was mostly considered as the ‘conservative’ counterpart of ‘modernist’ Fuad and Ali Pashas perpetuating the notion that conservatism and modernity are inherently incompatible.
Despite being well-known, well-cited, with number of studies on him, there is still a need for more nuanced studies on Cevdet Pasha that go beyond citing excerpts from his works to substantiate scholars’ own arguments without minding the context in which Ahmet Cevdet Pasha wrote and critically approaching the source. This sort of academic scavenging has left Cevdet Pasha little understood by scholars as a reformer and, his intellectual biography is yet to be written.
In my MA thesis entitled “Ahmet Cevdet Pasha and Change: A Three-Tiered Approach,” I argued that the ‘conservative’ Ahmet Cevdet’s attitude toward change can be better understood within a three-tiered framework, according to which Ahmet Cevdet does not repudiate change but attempts to differentiate between acceptable and unacceptable change; adjusts his stance and makes concessions by considering the intellectual and ideational environment; and, further to that, even accepts radical change and revolutions due to the requirements of the time (read as modernity).
In my ongoing dissertation tentatively entitled as “Ahmed Cevdet Pasha: A Connected History of a Late Ottoman Governor, Jurist, and Intellectual [1823-1895],” I use Ahmet Cevdet Pasha as a tour guide to explore the experiences with modernity across and beyond the Ottoman Empire. I aim to move beyond national historiographies that inadequately account for global contexts, as well as Eurocentric and diffusionist approaches that treat the European experience as the standard for comparison in understanding 19th-century Ottoman modernity.
My dissertation has three main sections, each dealing with a particular aspect of Cevdet Pasha namely as jurist and lawmaker, a governor, and an intellectual. In the section on Cevdet Pasha a jurist, I examine the Mecelle, the very first codification of civil law in the Islamic World, as part of the global codification movement of the 19th century, and legal Ottomanism, emphasizing its significance for late Ottoman modernity, Ahmet Cevdet Pasha’s critical role in this project, as well as the contributions of both Muslim and non-Muslim intellectuals and judges from across the Ottoman Empire. Further to that, I trace the multi-directional intellectual exchanges and the influence of the Mecelle beyond the Ottoman Empire and predominantly in Muslim-populated regions. I argue that the Mecelle was successful in that it transcended the political and sectarian boundaries and set a working example of modern codification for the global Muslim World. The Mecelle served a variety of purposes in different contexts ranging from a credible justification mechanism to setting an example in terms of its form and content.
In the second section, I focus on Ottoman governance, particularly through Cevdet Pasha’s mission to Bosnia in the early 1860s within the framework of the application of the Tanzimat reforms and more precisely with reference to the Islahat Edict of 1856. I argue that Cevdet Pasha aimed to regulate and bargain the empire’s relations with non-Muslim Ottomans and attempt to define their roles as subjects, soldiers, and officials in the changing conditions of the 19th century and offer a new social contract that would gain the trust and loyalty of all the subject of the empire and particularly aim to accommodate non-Muslims of the empire. Secondly, Cevdet Pasha’s mission can be better understood not as a mere mission to appease the region and take some ad-hoc decisions but more as his attempts to establish the infrastructure of the region so that it can realize its agricultural and commercial potential, that I will define as ‘paternal utilitarianism’ aiming at increasing the potential or readiness of the region even if it is at the expense of the people. Thirdly, Cevdet Pasha aims at the reformation of the civil administration and its institutionalization in Bosnia that aims for unified and not-necessarily centralized administration. This will provide a sort of unification and have a working administrative structure that will provide good and just governance through communicating with the center, informing the subjects, and taking the local dynamics and voices into account.
In the third and final section, I explore Cevdet Pasha as an intellectual. Through a comparative conceptual history of the term “civilization,” I aim to situate Cevdet Pasha within the broader networks of Ottoman Tanzimat and Nahda thinkers, as well as within the larger intellectual currents of the 19th-century Islamic and Asian worlds. First I argue that these intellectuals played along the grain and embraced the idea of civilizational hierarchy and by re-imagining their idealized civilized pasts, they sought to secure a respectable place in this hierarchy. Second, I argue that civilization became a prescriptive concept in the 19th century and intellectuals used it as a way to articulate their stances on how to address modernity, and prescribe ways to transform, and civilize their societies. To a significant extent, they engaged with the concept of civilization as a means to explain and substantiate their claims on pressing issues of the 19th century –whether it was Cevdet Pasha’s blueprint for Ottoman modernity that underscored the selective borrowing from Europe without forgetting its ties with the past and losing its values; Bustani’s vision of an ideal Ottoman order free of sectarian divides and accommodates non-Muslim Ottomans well; or Abduh’s aim to promote a version of modernity grounded in Islamic rationalism.