The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

Abdülhamid II (1842–1918)

Abdülhamid II, the 34th Ottoman sultan, presided over the promulgation of the first Ottoman Constitution. Son of Sultan Abdülmecid (r. 1839–61), Abdülhamid II ascended the throne on August 31, 1876, amid international crisis and domestic instability. The Eastern Question, dormant since the Paris Treaty of 1856, flared up again in 1875, when rebellions engulfed first Herzegovina and then Bosnia. Subsequent clashes between Muslims and Christians in Bulgaria prompted diplomatic intervention by the Great Powers of Europe and provided the impetus for the deposition of Sultan Abdülaziz (r. 1861–76) by reformist statesmen on May 30, 1876. Abdülaziz’s successor, the mentally ill Murad V, disappointed the high hopes of the reformers, who deposed him after a 93-day reign and anointed his younger brother, Abdülhamid, to rule.

The bureaucracy, which sought to reestablish the favorable balance of power that had existed between the imperial court and the Sublime Porte (Ottoman government) in the heyday of the “reforms” (Tanzimat), expected the new sultan to promulgate the empire’s first constitution and otherwise keep a low profile. Abdülhamid II, however, had other ideas. Despite the urgent need to present the Europeans with the fait accompli of a constitutional monarchy and thereby deflect pressures for reform, the sultan engaged the bureaucrats in a protracted debate on the nature of the constitution. He insisted on protecting his sovereign rights and compelled the reformers to make crucial concessions, the most important of which was a clause stipulating that the sultan could exile, without trial, individuals who endangered public safety. The announcement of the 119-article constitution was timed to coincide with the opening of the conference of international powers in Istanbul on December 23, 1876. Nevertheless, the Great Powers, unimpressed by the promises of equality for all Ottoman citizens included in the constitution, insisted on sweeping reforms favoring non-Muslims.

In April 1877, soon after the Ottoman government had rejected these demands, Russia declared war. Within less than a year, Russian armies were at the gates of Istanbul, forcing the government to sign one of the most disadvantageous peace treaties in Ottoman history at San Stefano on March 3, 1878. However, the resulting disturbance to the status quo proved too much for the other Great Powers to stomach, and the Congress of Berlin (June–July 1878) reversed some of the treaty’s most radical provisions and restored some stability to the region. Abdülhamid II seized the opportunity presented by the war to prorogue the Chamber of Deputies after a mere 162 days in session. Constitutional rule continued in theory, but thereafter the sultan worked relentlessly to strengthen his position and eliminate the threat posed by parliamentary democracy to a polyethnic empire.

Abdülhamid II created a neopatrimonial autocracy combining the legitimizing strictures of Islamic law with the modern ideals of a Rechtsstaat—a state ruled by law. As power flowed back to the palace, the Sublime Porte shrank to its former stature as a subservient administrative arm of the state. The sultan vigorously suppressed all forms of opposition and established an effective spy network and a strict mechanism of censorship, which sustained his autocratic rule for more than three decades. The Hamidian regime revived an old Ottoman emphasis on personal loyalty, replacing the reform-era concept of the officialdom’s loyalty to the state with that of fealty to the sovereign. The sultan bestowed extra ranks, decorations, and sometimes extravagant personal gifts, such as cash awards and mansions, upon high-ranking bureaucrats who proved exceptionally faithful. However, Abdülhamid II’s autocracy did not, as is often maintained, represent a wholesale return to the patrimonialism of the pre-reforms era, for the lower rungs of the bureaucracy answered to their superiors within a strict hierarchy, which was too similar to that found in equivalent European institutions.

Abdülhamid II regarded himself as one of the great reforming sultans of the late Ottoman era; Ottoman propaganda frequently likened him to Peter the Great. He initiated major changes in education, state infrastructure, and the use of technology. The modern system of education established during the reforms era gained further strength. Under his aegis, a host of new colleges sprang up, designed to furnish the bureaucracy with competent officials, ranging from customs officers and veterinarians to governors and experts on agriculture. The provinces were connected to the imperial center through an extensive network of telegraph lines. Extraordinary efforts were invested in developing the Ottoman railway system. Statistics, including socioeconomic ones, came to be widely employed in bureaucratic planning and decision making.

Abdülhamid II also sought to reinvent tradition in an effort to bolster his image and foster a new sense of belonging to a Pan-Ottoman community. He refashioned old Ottoman customs and turned them into pompous, European-style ceremonies. Even Friday sermons acquired ceremonial trappings resembling European imperial rites. The new imperial image was intended to create a sense of belonging among the subjects. Imperial symbols, such as the coat-of-arms, became ubiquitous, appearing on all kinds of objects, ranging from bookbindings to silver artifacts. New maps featured the empire in its glorious entirety, as opposed to the splintered representation of the separate continents in maps of the past.

Abdülhamid II also crafted a new foreign policy. Initially, he adopted a stance of noncommitment and studiously avoided any confrontation with the Great Powers. Acknowledging Ottoman military weakness, he sought to amplify the empire’s power by deploying Pan-Islamism as an ideological weapon in his dealings with European colonial powers. He was not only the primary practitioner of Pan-Islamism but also one of its major ideologues, along with Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (d. 1897), whom he invited to Istanbul. Pan-Islamism served as a tool to cement the solidarity of the Muslim subjects of the empire and gave new substance to the official ideology, Ottomanism. It also served as a wild card to stave off pressure for pro-Christian reforms on the part of European powers by threatening them with jihad in their colonies. The Penjdeh crisis of 1885 between Great Britain and Russia and Lord Robert Salisbury’s decision in 1896 to base the defense of British interests in the Near East on Egypt, rather than on efforts to preserve the status quo at the Ottoman Straits, strained Anglo-Ottoman relations and eliminated the 19th-century assurance of British support for the empire in a time of crisis. The loss of the British guarantee compelled Abdülhamid II to switch to a policy of armed neutrality and to promote cordial relations with Germany. The Germans had also altered their strategy toward the Ottoman Empire in favor of their new Drang nach Osten (thrust to the East) policy. Although the subsequent Anglo-Russian rapprochement made the sultan lean even more toward Germany, he did not abandon his policy of avoiding alliances with the Great Powers. Likewise, he stuck to his pragmatic aversion to crises with the Great Powers over territories that were already lost to the empire in all but name. Thus he accepted the Bulgarian annexation of Eastern Rumelia (1885) and the British occupation of Egypt (1882). On the other hand, he bitterly contested British expansionism in the Arabian Peninsula and European reform schemes for Macedonia and eastern Anatolia. Similarly, Abdülhamid II rejected the 1901–2 Zionist proposal for settling and organizing Jews in Palestine in exchange for the consolidation of the colossal Ottoman debt.

Soaring debt, exacerbated by the war with Russia and the Great Depression of 1873–96, took a heavy toll on the Ottoman economy. And yet, despite the establishment of the Ottoman Public Debt Organization in 1881, to which a considerable proportion of state revenues were channeled, the economy fared well under Abdülhamid II. He presided over the centralization of the Ottoman economy and the institution of a protectionist trade regime. At his behest, the state made major investments in infrastructure, such as the Baghdad and Hijaz railways, a large irrigation project in the Konya valley, and telegraph lines connecting the Ottoman provinces with the center.

A generation of intellectuals found Abdülhamid II’s autocratic regime an oppressive anachronism and fought against it mainly from outside the country. The establishment of a link between these exiles and disaffected members of the military eventually created a revolution. In July 1908, the main Ottoman organization of opposition, the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), launched the Young Turk Revolution in Macedonia. The CUP forced the sultan to reinstate the Constitution of 1876 and to reconvene the Chamber of Deputies, which had been prorogued for 30 years. Abdülhamid II’s second term as a chastened constitutional monarch was considerably shorter than the previous term. On April 27, 1909, the General Assembly, convening after the suppression of the counterrevolution of April 13 and acting on the basis of CUP instructions and a fatwa, deposed Abdülhamid II and placed him under virtual house arrest in Salonica. In 1912, when the city was about to fall to the Greeks, the sultan was transferred back to Istanbul, where he spent his last years at Beylerbeyi Palace until his death.