Gülhane contra Islahat: A Conceptual Approach to the Tanzimat

This article revisits the Tanzimat, without taking for granted its usual treatment as a self-contained story, part of the global march of progress and reform. It undertakes a comparative textual analysis of the two founding documents of the Tanzimat paradigm, the imperial edicts of 1839 and 1856. These texts, it is shown, bespeak different conceptual grammars: whereas the former is anchored in the Ottoman and Islamic tradition (the Quran, the Prophet, the shariʿa, the all-encompassing embrace of imperial justice and the personal ethics of the sultan), the latter is framed in terms of imperial dignity, civilized nations, and the rationality of international law and enacts the equality of subjects by the institutionalization of sectarian affiliation. The period of the Tanzimat is thus better understood as split by an epistemic break rather than the steady continuity of progress assumed by the very concept of reform.