chapter 4 of his book The Development of Secularism in Turkey, McGill University Press, Montreal, 1964, pp. 89-135.
AFTER ITS BETRAYAL and downfall in 1807, the New Order was revived by the forces that had brought about its birth, only to suffer a mortal blow in 1809. Reformism then lay dormant until 1826 while Ottoman sovereignty itself lay in the balance. Never during these seventeen years were the reformers to manifest the attitudes of Selim's time-these found expression, received their accolades, and met their test only in Mehmet Ali's Egypt. The absence of an attitude of reform did not mean that changes having implications for reform did not occur. On the contrary, the events of two decades preceding 1826 evoked and compelled changes having far greater portent for the future than all the previous reform efforts combined.
The changes of this interim period as well as the succeeding era of reform were shaped and directed with reference to four constellations of events: (I) the obviously final, hence, desperate drive of the Yeniceris to establish themselves as the supreme political power; (2) the intensified drive of the derebeys to realize full hereditary independence from the central rule; (3) the rise of national-separatist movements as an indirect result of Western economic penetration; and (4) the internal transformation and realignment of forces in the West as a result of the War of 1812, the defeat of Napoleon, the Industrial Revolution, and, particularly, the development of steam navigation.
Antipathetic as each of these constellations was to Ottoman sovereignty, paradoxically, they did not achieve what had been seen as imminent in France since the middle of the eightteenth century, viz, the dissolution of the Empire. On the contrary, they served the creation of a new Ottoman Empire, smaller than the old to be sure, but capable of withstanding increasing adversity for yet another century. When Mahmud II, ruler from 1808-39, raised the standard of reform dramatically in 1826, it bore a new aspect. It displayed that radical design, unmistakably Mahmud's own, that was to distinguish Turkish reformism.
The most significant aspect of the innovations initiated by Mahmud II was the emergence of the idea of an Ottoman state, composed of peoples of diverse nationalities and religions, based on secular principles of sovereignty as contrasted with the medieval concept of an Islamic empire. The real beginning of modernization and secularization was in this change. We shall trace from this chapter on the process of gradual separation between state and religion-and the rise of a worldly-religious dichotomy in various institutions.
The most propitious development within Turkey between 1809 and 1826 was the transformation of the Ottoman ruling institution into something different from anything that had existed before. God-given authority of the Padisah was for the first time subjected to a written document by a pact dictated by the Yeniceris upon Selim's fall.
The Yeniceri dictatorship lasted less than a year. Those men of the New Order who had managed to escape massacre enthroned the youthful Mahmud, the only Ottoman heir to survive deaths and depositions. They invited the derebeys and other orders to an unprecedented meeting, the Meclis-i Mesveret (Consultative Assembly). After what the chroniclers tell us was a lively discussion, it was decided to draw up an ittifak (pact or alliance) between the ruling institution and the derebeys.
Although the ittifak remained on paper, it representedan important step in legal-political development. It was an attempt to establish in clear terms the respective responsibilities and mutual demands of the estates of the realm.
There was, however, a bewildering lack of uniformity in the terms used for the principals to the pact. Although the chroniclers mention only the ruler and the derebeys as being party thereto, the Yeniceris and the Ulema were made subject to it from the very first article. The pact contained the germ of the idea of separating the government from the ruler. Certainly no one questioned that all owed allegiance to the Padisah, but every precaution was taken to prevent the Sadrazam and the Seyhul-lslam from deviating from the kanun and Seriat.
The project was placed before the ruler, the derebeys, and the Yeniceris; the commoners were not involved. Only four of the derebeys signed. The remainder of those coming to the capital left for the security of their bailiwicks as soon as they saw the way the wind was blowing. Bent initially upon the abolition of the Yeniceris, they had no intention of surrendering their own prerogatives or of submitting to legal controls their exactions from the people, Muslim as well as non-Muslim. As they represented neither the people nor traditionally legalized seigneurial rights they were more than willing to let matters stand.
The new ruler undertook to create a new type of army, which was nothing but a continuation of Selim's new army. The Yeniceri corps was to be liquidated peaceably; the treasury would buy up circulating commissions while the Yeniceris entering the new forces would receive higher pay. This civilized policy detonated a new and mightier rebellion in 1809. For the next seventeen years, the Yeniceri and the corrupt Ulema reigned supreme once again.
To the intensified feudalization of the medieval Ottoman imperial system were added new movements of religious or national separation. These struck not only on the unintegrated periphery but also at the very birthplace of Islam (Wahhabism) and against the very core of the Ottoman realm. There was also a hiatus in Western support of the Ottoman sovereignty as a bulwark against Russian expansionism. Not only was the house of Osman dismissed as a factor in the future of Europe but also an intense propaganda campaign was carried throughout Europe and America to "be rid of the Turk forever." In 1809, Mahmud II was not even considered when the French and Russian diplomatic advisers speculated on the partition of the Ottoman territories and the creation of empires and states under either French or Russian protection. Mahmud was not only young and inexperienced; he lacked any real might and was surrounded by ignorant and treacherous courtiers.
How then did Mahmud appear upon his death in 1839 as the founder of a new Ottoman state? The plain answer is, Mahmud found a new basis for the Ottoman sovereignty: the people. He threw away his cloak of sacred power with all its trappings and made himself not the defender of the faithful but the enlightener of the Ottoman citizenry. He founded an absolute monarchy supported by a centralized bureaucracy and a state army recruited from among commoners and formed with a new, secular, and progressive orientation.
It was during Mahmud's time of greatest weakness that the idea of an Ottoman nationality composed of all the subjects of the Empire irrespective of their origin, language, and religious afliliation, and the idea of the Padisah as the temporal ruler of the Ottomans began to form. The Yeniceris had wiped from the minds of the people the last vestiges of awe and respect for their order by failures in wars and by lawlessness. The achievements of Mehmet Ali, the independent governor of Egypt, proved beyond question the potentialities of Selim's projected reforms and convinced everyone that the destruction of the Yeniceris was a prerequisite of establishing an effective military force. In 1826, two years before steamships appeared in Turkish waters, Mahmud destroyed an institution of five centuries' standing in a few hours of cannonfire. Other changes in the political, administrative, legal, and educational pracuices followed suit.
Mahmud's innovanons have yet to be given their due. They were overshadowed in their time by the achievements of Mehmet Ali, which dovetailed with Western observers' preconceived notions of how to reform an unenlightened society. They have been pushed into the background by concentration upon the reforms of the following Tanzimat period. The harvesters of Mahmud's sowings, in the Tanzimat period and even until the present day, have reaped the credit owing to this daring iconoclast. It has been claimed that Mahmud's reforms were devoid of plan. With the striking exception of DeKay, the American observer, foreign observers criticized Mahmud's reforms, especially those which tampered with the quaint and exotic.
Reformers like Mahmud are confronted by the need to make people want to change and to make them believe that change is possible and desirable. This is a task sometimes a thousand times more formidable than that of drafting consistent programs. If we realize this, what must interest us more than the planlessness of Mahmud's innovations is their overall consistency when cast in terms of the analytical view which came into being only decades after Mahmud's death. A thorough examination of his reform period would throw much light on the course of the Turkish transformation and the developments in subsequent periods. We shall survey only those of his acts that indicated a definitive turn in the course towards secularization and Westernization.
It was in Mahmud's time that the idea of a purposeful change for the improvement of society began to form. In initiating this, he opened the window to the West for all to see, and he did not hesitate to challenge tradition openly. Moreover, by the practices which he established, the Padisah became an enlightened monarch whose primary concern was not to maintain the traditional order but to ameliorate, while changing, the conditions of his subjects. Mahmud found the support for his sovereignty in none of the traditional orders of the society, but among the people. Mahmud not only appeared before the people but also mixed with them. He became a popular figure and model for emulation. From his dress to his mode of travel and entertainment he ceased to be a symbol of the sacred tradition and became the symbol of the unfamiliar and unaccustomed. His language conveyed the idea that he was restricting his absolute rights and granting rights to the people.
There could not have been any trace of the idea of a democratic regime in Mahmud's mind, but he popularized two ideas that were bound to bring forth the doctrines of government by law and equality before the law irrespective of race, creed, or position. Sometimes typified as the "infidel Padisah" (especially in near contemporary Western writings), Mahmud was accorded the attribute title Adli which, we believe, epitomizes his role in the Turkish transformation. The title as well as the role can be understood best through a comparison of the three legal concepts of Seriat, kanun, and adalet (justice).
The Seriat was believed to be beyond the power of human enactment or codification and was identified as the basic law of the traditional system of life. While tolerant of the existence of religious communities other than the Muslim, the Seriat could not admit of their equality in matters over which it ruled. The kanuns were enactments of edicts dealing with matters regarded as being outside the realm of the Seriat and were promulgated on the theory recogruzing as legitimate the exercise of the "will" of the ruler as the Caliph of the Muslims. The concept of kanun did not imply legal equality among Muslims and non-Muslims.
In the medieval system, justice meant to give each his due in the interests of order and stability; it did not mean equality before a common law. Mahmud brought the concept of adalet to the field of legal enactments where it meant the promulgation and juridical execution of rules outside (and later superseding) the "will" of the ruler, as ruler and as Caliph, and outside the Seriat. He used the word adl in a number of the institutions he established; the most important was the Divan-i Ahkam-i Adliye (Council of Juridical Enactments) whose work will be noted later.
This, then, represented the embryo of a concept of justice different from those in the Seriat and kanun, in the sense of implicit (later explicit) recognition of a source of legislation in addition to and different from God and the ruler. Such a concept was incompatible with the fundamentals of the medieval form of political organization. In the popular title Adli, one senses not only the secularization of the rulership (the subordination of the attribute of caliphate) but also the disallowance of legal and civil divisions among the medieval orders of society, that is, the introduction of a process of democratization.
The attitude implied in the new concepts of justice was bound to effect a series of modifications in the conceptions of the religious and temporal among both the Muslims and non-Muslims and, eventually, the abolition of certain legally established medieval practices. The period of reform opened by Mahmud thus demanded a new conception of society. The subsequent periods reflected misunderstandings of the implications of the new concept and also the difficulties in implementing the necessary changes. Above all, they posed the central question of laying down the base of emerging public law in terms of a modern state founded among men of different creeds as citizens of a common political community.
In the latter part of Mahmud's reign we see only the beginrungs of the problems arising from the implementation of the new concept. Two factors, foreign intervention on the one hand, and the emergence of nationalism among the millet communities on the other, emerged gradually to limit the implementation of the new concept.
The implications of Mahmud's utterances concerning the equality of Muslims and non-Muslims before the laws of his administration may be illustrated by his administrative measures as well as by the difficulties in harmonizing these measures and their underlying principles with the measures attempted within the field of education, as we shall see later.
We can infer from certain diplomatic events, from Mahmud's particular relations with the non-Muslim communities, and from his favouring of the Greeks, Armenians, and Jews who cooperated with him in the regime he had set out to build, that Mahmud wanted to abolish the millet divisions in accordance with his concept of equality. Events showed, however, that the millet was no longer a traditional institution which was a combined product of the Islamic and Christian medieval conceptions, nor was it a question of internal policy. Two great contending forces (the Western powers and Russia) had become intensely interested in the question not only in respect to their relations with the Ottoman Empire but also in respect to their relations with each other on every front. Furthermore, both religion (Catholicism and Orthodoxy) and race or nationality (in consequence of the French Revolution and the rise of Russian pan-Slavism) had become complicating factors. And there was a third factor newly entering upon the scene-the emerging British Near Eastern diplomacy with its Protestant colouring as personified in the ambassador Stratford Canning. The millet system began to emerge in inter-national diplomacy as an inviolate system that was no longer a unilateral grant of status and privileges to the non-Muslim communities; they were seen as having acquired rights as nationalities guaranteed bv the protection of the Christian powers of Europe.
All of the difficulties to be encountered by the new conception of justice and equality would stem from the transformation of an originally medieval institution into a question of nationalities that had become a prime stepping stone of modern European diplomacy in the Near East. These powers, although rival to each other, would resist any attempt to deprive them of their assumed "right of protection" over the Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant millets. From Mahmud's time until the end of World War I, reforms had to be forwarded in the knowledge that the millet system was an immovable obstacle and a cause of failure to attempts at secular reform.
To Mahmud goes the credit for overcoming the Muslim resistance to new principles and for silencing the Ulema outside of their allotted zone. His impress continued well beyond his death until foreign intervention with religious implications forced the Ulema to come out and enter the political arena once again. In contrast with the Ulema, who were barred from politics, we find during Mahmud's reform era, the patriarchs intriguing in politics, and the Catholic and Protestant churches in the very midst of diplomacy.
The new form of the millet system had a number of consequences for reform, such as those in the field of education and in matters of concern to the Muslims alone. It led Mahmud to make a distinction between worldly and religious affairs. He excluded the latter from the area of reform and established no council to advise him on religious affairs. This contributed to the difficulties when the boundaries between the two areas became obscured by the logic of the reform efforts.
In 1834 Mahmud laid the foundations for a new governmental administration which has become identified with the Tanzimat. He turned away from the previous governmental organization and created the Porte, which became known to European diplomacy as the centre of government and as ascendent over the court in political and administrative affairs.
Mahmud is renowned for abolishing the Yeniceri military institution. That he also abolished another pillar of the traditional system has been recognized seldom. Two personages stood above all other temporal and religious officeholders in the traditional system: the Sadrazam and the Seyhul-lslam. These represented two supreme institutions, one executive (administrative and judicial) and the other consultative or interpretative (in terms of the Seriat as well as the kanun; they represented the ruler's dual functions as Sultan-Caliph. Mahmud put an end to this system by first abolishing the office of Sadrazam as the "absolute vicar" of the ruler.
In place of the Sadrazam, he appointed a basvekil (chief minister) and vekils (ministers) to departments of government on the basis of a new division of labour and powers. As many of the Sadrazam's prerogatives were given over to the new ministers, the new chief ministry became simply a co-ordinating agency and a link between the government and the ruler.
The ministries or departments became quasi-autonomous offices for internal, external, financial, educational, commercial, agricultural, and industrial affairs. However, the dillerentiation of functions was not completed in Mahmud's lifetime. The last four services, for example, came within the administration of a consultative council called the Meclis-i Umur-u Nafia (Board of Useful Affairs). The established ministries had advisory councils whose tasks were to draft reports and plans and to write up decisions for promulgation by the ruler.
The status of the Seyhul-Islam's office underwent change also It was pushed outside the realm of temporal government. Equating the office of the Seyhul-Islam with the millet organizations, Mahmud relegated matters of concern to it to the "religious realm" and, hence, outside the scope of reform activity. Henceforth, we shall watch with interest changes in the functions of this office.
One measure adopted under Mahmud decided for some time to come the shape of a number of problems. When the office of Sadrazam was abolished, those courts (later designated as Seriat courts) that had been under the jurisdiction of the Sadrazam through two chief justices (called Kadiasker) represented in the traditional Divan, the Supreme Council of the Vizirs, were given over to the jurisdiction of the Seyhul-Islam (1837). Thus, the latter's office, which was originally only for interpretation and consultation on religious-legal matters concerning temporal affairs, became the highest office of the judiciary regarded as "religious" and having jurisdiction only over Muslims, and believed to remain beyond the scope of reform.
On the other hand, Mahmud established a council to consider legal and judicial matters specifically outside of the realm of the Seriat. The one achievement of this body in Mahmud's time marked an important step in Turkish legal thought. Mahmud promulgated in 1838 what are known erroneously as the first Turkish penal codes. In fact, these represented the first attempt to establish a public law outside the Seriat. These codes defined the responsibilities of government officials and judges and the proceedings to be taken against men of state shown by investigation to be in dereliction of their duties. Heavy penalties were prescribed for cases of bribery and other forms of corruption. The code concerning judges marked the first step in limiting the realm of the Seriat.
The very idea that men of state were in some way publicly responsible and, therefore, subject to the provisions of law rather than to the arbitrary will of the ruler was so novel as not to appeal to the very public that the code sought to safeguard. It was, however, a direct precursor of Mahmud's later attempts to change the concept of administration from that of government to that of public service.
We must not pass over these earliest instances of codification without noting a point that we shall encounter again in the era of codification, the Tanzimat. Customary concepts and procedures persisted. Thus, these codes manifested certain formal and substantive aspects of the Seriat and kanun. For example, punishments remained undetermined; that is, great scope was left to the discretion of the judge, who acted according to an interpretation of the Seriat or as the delegate of the ruler. Sentence was passed by the judge according to the status of the culprit and in terms of the gravity of his offense. A practice that worked in the medieval system would begin to give way henceforth to another; there would be increasing emphasis on the individual's criminal responsibility, further determination of punishment, greater and greater clarification of the lines of demarcation between criminal and civil, secular and religious, and private and public law.
The innovations discussed above provided an institutional basis for the emerging view that reform and progress were continuing processes to be directed through the exercise of specialized competencies. Governmental and administrative changes pointed up the role of education in reform and the need for a new concept of education. The traditional concepts of knowledge and learning and of the institutions of education were approached in a new way only in Mahmud's time. The idea of maarif, that is, the process of becoming acquainted with things unknown, sprang up to challenge the traditional lore (ilm) of the Ulema.
The learning acquired in the medreses had long since ceased to have anv relevance for industrial and technological life. It consisted of ilm, that is, the acquiring of knowledge pertaining to God, to man's duties to Him, and to the relationships among men in terms of those duties. Therefore, when the new learning came in the eighteenth century, it had not been called ilm. It was called fen, which meant "art" or "practical skill"; and the scientist was never called an alim or "learned man," but a mutefennin, a "jack- of-all-trades." Traditionally, ilm was the monopoly of a class of people who constituted an order. It was not open to all. So long as the Ulema held a monopoly on the interpretation of matters pertaining to life-and-afterlife, the people could remain ignorant and without need of literacy.
We can imagine how discouraging widespread illiteracy was in an age of innovation accompanied by the sudden disappearance of certain fundamental institutions. The great danger of having masses of people dependent upon the spoken word seems to have come to the fore suddenly when things had to be done, not according to routine tradition, but according to unfamiliar and foreign rules.
The novelty in educational thinking may be illustrated better by contrasting it with the situation in the eighteenth century and with a document dating from the period of Mahmud's reign preceding the destruction of the Yeniceris. Education had not become a part of the reform projects when the earliest new schools of higher learning were opened. These schools were founded with the view that they had nothing to do with the educational system as a whole. Education in the sense of schooling was a "religious" matter; the new schools were thought of only as a means of teaching certain skills, primarily for military purposes. Consequently, no institutions were founded in which to prepare students in the alphabet of modern science; there arose the strange situation of teaching engineering students such elementary subjects as writing, composition, Arabic, French, elementary arithmetic, etc.
Modern Turkish educational historians like to point out that Mahmud issued a decree making primary education compulsory in 1824. Leaving aside among other things the question of the impossibility of implementing such a decree under existing conditions, one may see very readily the unworldly and unpragmatic concepts underlying this seemingly modern attempt. One slightly abbreviated passage of the decree reads:
"While, according to Muslims, learning the requisites of religion comes first and above everything else and while these requisites take precedence over all worldly considerations, the majority of people lately avoid sending their children to school and prefer to give them to a trade as novices to artisans when they reach the age of five or six because of their ambition to earn money immediately. This condition is the cause not only of widespread illiteracy but also of ignorance of religion and, hence, has been a primary cause of our misfortune. As it is necessary ro deliver the Muslims from these worldly and other-worldly misfortunes, and as it is a religious obligation for the entire ummet of Muhammed, irrespective of trade or occupation, to learn the affairs of religion and the faith of Islam, no man henceforth shall prevent his children from attending school until they have reached the age of adulthood."
"As for the schoolmasters," the decree continued, "they shall instruct their pupils carefully and, following the teaching of the Glorious Kur'an they shall educate them in the faith and obligations of Islam...."
This idea of popular education was not very different from that in contemporary Europe. It was deemed adequate for children to read by rote, to ape the teacher's recital of the Kur'an in Arabic, to know the beliefs and ritual obligations of Islam, and to write a bare smattering of Turkish. The view was in complete contradiction with the idea of education as a means of progress.
The traditional view of primary education persisted even when a new concept began to emerge and certain objective conditions led the reformers to approach in a roundabout way the problem of creating a new educational base to society, through the military channel. Before discussing this as a very significant offshoot of a contemporary development in the West, let us look closely at the major factor causing a split or bifurcation of the new educational outlook from its very inception.
When Mahmud excluded the office of the Seyhul-Islam from his projected reforms and gave the administration of the Seriat to this functionary, he was also forced to exclude Muslim primary education from the "temporal" realm. ln doing so, he was merely reaffirming the idea that primary education was a communal and religious matter of no concern to the state. However, under the pressure of new needs, he undertook two measures that were consistent with the new view of education. One was aimed at the enlightenment of the adult public for the purpose of leading it to accept change. We shall return to examples later. The second, the most arresting though least known educational development in nineteenth-century Turkey, was directly related to the building up of the new army.
The destruction of the Yeniceris was followed by the idea of opening a school for the training of officers. However, this was not done immediately. Instead of recruiting traditionally educated boys as officer candidates (as Mehmet Ali did in Egypt), Mahmud established training units within the military corps. Mature soldiers, corporals and sergeants with some prior schooling or proof of a special aptitude, were assigned to teaching companies (mektep bolukleri). Most of the outstanding officers of the next generation received their first formal instruction in these special training units. While this form of officer training was the only kind in existence, a noisy controversy among the Christians of Istanbul drew the attention of the Turkish military authorities to an educational innovation ideally suited to their situation.
In 1831, Turkey was touched by the first intercontinental move ment of popular education in modern history. At the turn of the nineteenth century, not only the indigent but even the lower middle class children in England could obtain formal primary education only in the church schools or schools for the poor. The educational principle underlying both of these was not different from that in the traditional schools of Turkey. While nonconformists opposed the catechetical emphasis of the free schools, they too, in the main, held the teaching of religion as the primary justification for popular education. The fear that too much learning would breed radicalism and social discontent was far from conquered in spite of the active reformers of the time. Except for Robert Owen, the first person to give concrete educational expression to the secular and democratic tendencies of the time was Joseph Lancaster (1778-1838), a Quaker of modest origins. It was he who solved the problem of teaching the masses the rudiments of modern primary education and utilized the school as a training ground for responsible citizenship, the exercise of democratic liberties, mass enlightenment and cultivation, and popular secondary education. Although challenged at home by the upholders of tradition, Lancaster's monitorial system attracted attention wherever secular democratic movements were strong.
Curiously, the monitorial system attracted particular attention in the Near East. It was carried from the United States and Malta to the Ionian Islands by the American missionaries during the Greek War for Independence. The Greek nationalists were attracted by its potentialities for popularizing education at low cost with the limited number of teachers available. By 1831, Lancasterian schools were popular among the Greeks of Istanbul and had begun to attract the attention of Armenians, who had also begun to imbibe of the fountain of nationalism. As did the Church of England and the Church of Rome, so the Greek and Armenian patriarchs looked disapprovingly upon primary schools that did not inculcate dogma or religious discipline, but the matter took quite a sharp turn with the arrival in 1831 of the first American Protestant missionary in Istanbul, William Goodell. He opened a Lancasterian school for Greek boys; the next year he opened what appears to have been the first such school for Greek girls. It was this which precipitated the controversy referred to above.
Opposition to the new schools and, more particularly, to the Protestant threat spread rapidly among both Greek and Armenian clergymen. The Greek synod threatened in 1832 to anathematize all who supported the school for girls, and in 1834 the priests demanded the complete abolition of the Lancasterian schools.
The monitorial system made its impact upon the Turkish authorities from quite a different direction.
" Amidst the . . . controversy among the Greeks and the Armenians [August 1832], almost unexpectedly there sprang up a desire on the part of the Turks to have schools for the benefit of their own children, a few enlightened men taking the lead, and taking also the responsibility, which was not light. At an examination of the [Greek] school at Arnaut Keuy . . . several Mussulmans were present, among whom was a bin-bashy [major] and an on-bin-bashy [colonel].... They are determined to have a school among the Mussulmans, and have already selected a house . . . and prepared seats, with the knowledge of the Sultan.... This project was fully carried our. One school for Turkish children was established at Beshik-Tash and another at Scutari. "
It was Mahmud's men who hit upon the conversion of the Lancasterian system to an entirely new purpose: adult education within a professional organization for the furtherance of that organization. This idea was neither inherent in, nor did it ever appear significandy in, the main channel of the Lancasterian movement. Goodell, who played a role in the implementation of the idea, never seems to have noted its existence or significance for he makes no distinction between the schools for children opened through the initiative of military men and the barracks schools for soldiers and officer candidates. As the first-hand accounts of Goodell and Marshal Marmont show, the new project was pushed with energy between 1832 and 1834. The content of the Lancasterian program was expanded to meet the needs not only of primary education among the soldiers but also of preparatory and professional education among the offficer candidates.
This development shows that the heads of the millets were no less opposed to secularizing influences than the most conservative Ulema, that dissatisfaction with the traditional Muslim primary education was expressed openly in action supported by the ruler, and that it resulted in the establishment of Muslim primary schools divorced from the medrese, that is, outside the sphere of "religious" affairs. The entire experiment was proof for the Muslims that literacy training had "worldly" implications; it showed the benefits of educational continuity from the pre-literate level through professional education. It marked the rise of a non-traditional group capable of examining the content, aims, and methodology of Muslim primary education critically.
We shall return later to the manifold implications of the experi- ment for the future of Turkey. Here we must note the impact of military developments upon civilian affairs and the dissipation of that impact before the persistence of the millet system.
These developments provided a milieu congenial at last to a new decree concerning primary education. We find what may well have been the substance of the view of the new era of education in a report prepared by the Board of Useful Affairs in 1838. In resume, the report stated:
"All arts and trades are products of science. Religious knowledge serve salvation in the world to come, but science serves perfection of man in this world. Astronomy, for example, serves the progress of navigation and the development of commerce. The mathematical sciences lead to the orderly conduct of warfare as well as military administration. Innumerable new and useful inventions, like the use of steam, came into existence in this manner. Several new facilities exist in the arts and trades thanks to the growth and spread of the known sciences and the rise of several new sciences. Through science one man can now do the work of a hundred. Trade and profit have become difficult in countries where the people are ignorant of these sciences. Without science, the people cannot know the meaning of love for the state and fatherland (vatan). It is evident that the acquisition of science and skill comes above all other aims and aspirations of a state. The Ottoman commonwealth had schools and scholars, but they disappeared. Later, military, naval, engineering, and medical schools were opened with great effort, but the students entering these schools lacked even ordinary knowledge for the proper reading of Turkish books. This was because of the defectiveness of the primary schools. In discussing every project for the recovery of agriculture, commerce, and industry, the Board has found that nothing can be done without the acquisition of science and that the means of acquiring science and remedying education lie in giving a new order to the schools."
This document was anti-traditional to a degree almost beyond belief. Not until the twentieth century were such ideas to be expressed again.
Having come to the conclusion that primary education was a "worldly" affair, the Board of Useful Affairs could see itself competent to make recommendations for reforms. Having submitted its report, however, this body discovered that it lacked the authority to prepare a decree for the establishment of a secular-national primary education. The report shuttled back and forth and was sent to the Seyhul-Islam for suggestions. All idea of reforming primary education was killed in the process; the discussions bogged down on the ways and means of teaching the Kur'an and the other traditional subjects. In the long run, while the Turkish military pursued an independent, autonomous, and progressive course, civilian primary education continued to be a communal and religious affair until the downfall of the Ottoman Empire.
The only decision emerging from the discussions on primary education was to appoint one of the Ulema as the director of primary and secondary education. The persistent confusion, or lack of orientation, over the boundaries of the "worldly realm" is shown by the fact that Mahmud passed the recommendation for appointment along to the Seyhul-Islam, the matter being considered a "religious" one.
By 1838 the Board of Useful Affairs realized the futility of trying to do anything about primary education and decided on the basis of its original report to open "rusdiye schools (for adolescents). Apparently these were conceived of as providing a link between the "religious education" of the primary schools and the "worldly education" of the schools of higher learning.
Actually, no rusdiye schools were opened in Mahmud's time (the first was opened in 1840 and although it is not certain that they were begun on a non-sectarian basis, there were non-sectarian rusdiye schools in later years). Instead, a special school was opened in 1838 or 1839 to educate a limited number of promising boys who had completed primary school for future employment as government functionaries. This was called the Mekteb-i Maarif (School for Secular Learning). Some of the prominent figures of the late Tanzimat era graduated from it. Parallel to this was the Mekteb-i Ulum-u Edebiye (School of Literary Sciences), principally to train government translators. The students of both schools first smdied Arabic grammar, then French; they also studied geography, geometry, history, and political science, but the teaching of these subjects does not appear to have assumed importance for several years.
The significance of the first school was that it removed yet another segment of governmental affairs from the monopoly of the medrese. It provided, indirectly, the means for a clearer distinction between the temporal administration and the Seriat. The significance of the Mekteb-i Ulum-u Edebiye was that it made possible the elimination of the special prerogatives of the traditional dragoman families and thus blocked the channels which made the private affairs of the Turkish government public knowledge in every European capital. Perhaps another reason for opening this school was to facilitate the translation of European scientific works into Turkish; in any case, it had this as its most noteworthy effect.
In later years, the Board of Useful Affairs confined itself to matters of commerce and agriculture. In the meantime it made one last effort to give shape to primary education and to establish a link between the primary and other levels of education. But the appointment of one of the Ulema as the director of secondary as well as primary education threw the linking secondary education over the wall from the "worldly" to the "religious" realm and may well account for the delay in opening any rusdiye schools.
The report of Mehmed Esad, the man appointed as director, is indicative of the lonely path Mahmud was forced to tread in bringing new aims and conceptions to bear on society. Esad (1785-1847) was the first editor of the first Turkish newspaper and one of the most progressive among the Ulema. The report he submitted on assuming office did not deviate one iota from the traditional view of primary education: children should be sent to school around the age of five or six; they should be taught in the letters of the Arabic alphabet; they should be taught verses and the short chapters from the Kuran and certain prayers, all by heart of course, as they were in Arabic; those children who finished reading the entire course (khatm) should be taught to recite the Kur'an according to the rules of correct pronunciation (tajwid) during the second course of reading, and they should memorize the chapters following the ninety-third chapter of the Kur'an; children of eight to ten years should be taught the rules of ablution, prayers, and other religious obligations and rituals; those with good voice and natural gifts should become hafiz; from among the graduates of the primary schools, those who showed a special aptitude for further education should be accepted in the rusdiye schools to be established. To prepare and pass students on to the rusdiye for later training in the institutions of higher learning remained a subsidiary objective.
Unless Mahmud was prepared to nullify the traditionally sanctioned prerogatives of the Grand Rabbi, the Greek Orthodox patriarch, and the heads of the other recognized millets and to withstand the external and internal cries that he was usurping "rights" rather than granting "equality," he could do nothing more than order the non-Muslim religious authorities to take the necessary measures to ensure that all children within the community receive adequate primary education. Failing to abolish the prerogatives of the millets, that is, failing to secularize the state entirely, Mahmud could not do more than pass an identical order on to the Seyhul-Islam who, unlike his counterparts, possessed no independent power of sanction and no administrative or supervisory machinery for primary education; otherwise Mahmud would have been liable to the charge that he was contravening the Seriat and depriving Muslims of rights guaranteed to the non-Muslims that the "infidel Padisah" had made the Muslims inferior to the Rayahs!
One need not speculate upon the effect of any such order. The millet heads opposed the liberalization of the school program; the teaching in the schools under their control was at least as dogmatic and obscurantist as that in the Muslim primary schools. Although the Turkish government sought to remain aloof from affairs of a religious nature, it found itself pressed by the millets and their foreign protectors to suppress educational and other institutions opened privately by the more enlightened members of the various communities.
Meanwhile, those who ran the medreses had long since washed their hands of the worldly new schools. If they heard about the controversies of 1831-32, they concurred with the priests. If they failed to raise an outcry against the primary schools opened by the army men, it was because they were hoarding their small influence with Mahmud to defeat the really "dangerous" reforms, such as the attempt to put sun visors on the soldiers' caps. So firm were they in their control of primary education and, thereby, in the maintenance of the division of worldly and religious realms, that they could afford to ignore the deviations of the Christianized army men. We shall see that for almost a full century their complacency was not misplaced.
However, from Mahmud's time onward, the word "religious" acquired a new meaning and connotation. We should not confuse it with either "spiritual" or "ecclesiastical" in the Christian sense, as the point of differentiation rested neither upon the spiritual nor upon the temporal. Theretofore, nothing had been designated as "non-religious"; every department of life contained a mixture of temporal and religious elements and injunctions. But now, the "religious" began to be identified unconsciously with that which is unchanging and, hence, separate from or opposed to that which is changing. The static or traditional was perceived as being "religious", irrespective of its sources of inspiration, while the "changing" and the "new" were understood to be "worldly" or "non- religious" even though the sources may have been partially or wholly religious in nature.
This meant, in terms of education, that many individuals were going to develop a culturally split personality or a personality with a dual culture, The educated man would be a product, on the one hand, of a primary education that remained as the matrix which cast the mold of tradition upon the growing child and, on the other, of an educational system which recognized virtually none of the premises of that tradition. While some became representative of the second to the exclusion of the first, others remained torn between the two, and both were opposed to those who continued upon the course of primary education into the medreses,, which experienced further loss through the competition of the new schools. The implications of this duality or cultural bifurcation which began in this period will be seen later. Under the Tanzimat, bifurcation as the form of secularism extended to increasing areas of life and created new conflicts of a more intense nature. Furthermore, the old or "religious" appeared incompatible with the new in a number of areas of life; clashes between the two ensued, sometimes on the objective level, sometimes in the inner experiences of men, and sometimes perhaps at the level of the unconscious.
Within the field of education, the rift between the secular and the religious deepened in proportion to the firm establishment of the new education and the degree to which that education proved to be useful. Usefulness remained the chief criterion of the necessity for secular education for a long time, as did the view that modern institutions should be allowed only insofar as they transmitted the techniques and sciences of the West.
Despite the broadening in concept, new education at this stage meant only the acquisition of useful knowledge; a little later it would mean to be "enlightened", and the "educated" as well as the "intellectual" would be designated as the "enlightened" (munevver). The part of the culture covered by primary education remained untouched by the forces of social change. Until the rise of a secular approach to primary education following 1908, primary education continued to represent the traditional basis of the culture while higher education represented the new, changing culture as exemplified by the West. Neither fowl nor good red herring, secondary education remained an unstable mixture of the two educational approaches. We can not forget that its beginnings were laid during the reign of Mahmud. On the other hand, the novel forms of public education also inaugurated by Mahmud were to supersede in importance all manner of formal education except, perhaps, that provided in the institutions of higher learning.
In contrast with the persistence of traditionalism in primary education, the steps taken in the field of higher education were radical. The differences between the developments at this time and those in the previous century have been pointed out already. It was in this period that the earlier School of Engineering (the Muhendishane), as well as the other new schools, became firmly and permanently established.
From this time onwards no rival traditional institution possessed enough power to close down the new schools, or even to compete with them. On the contrary, the engineering school, the medical school, and the military academy constantly drained off the potential students of the medrese; the medreses were finally brought to a position where they had to close their own doors. This was a conspicuous aspect of the secularization trend in Turkey. It can be contrasted with the situation in other Muslim countries. An institution such as, for example, al-Azhar in Egypt is still a powerful institution of traditional learning. In Turkey, on the other hand, even when schools were opened to teach religious subjects after the closing down of the medreses, they never became seats of traditional learning. They were auxiliary rather than essential, experimental rather than traditional in the general framework of higher education.
The School of Engineering received greater attention after the disappearance of the traditional military institution. It was the only existing institution that could be converted readily into one of higher learning and modern education. A naval engineering school was separated from the Muhendishane in 1827; it became a naval academy that has survived until the present day. The number of students in the main engineering school, which combined civil and military engineering, increased. Because of the great demand, even the upper class students were recruited as technical officers in Mahmud's new army. There were students of forty-even sixty- years of age in attendance. The teaching was done in Turkish, but the text books were in French.
It was in 1834 that Mahmud finally opened the Military Academy. The Turkish military now had an entirely new tradition. Not only had the ties with the Yeniceri tradition been severed completely, but the traditional links between the military and the religious institutions had been broken decisively. In addition to having a wholly secular base, the new army tradition had evolved from within; it had not been superimposed by European officers. Therefore, tile Turkish military had roots in the society. From Mahmud's time until our own, Turkish officers have been in the vanguard of social, political, intellectual, and educational progress. Failing to be satisfied with the civilian preparatory schools and unable to reform them, the military developed an autonomous system. The military pioneered the simplification of the Turkish script which led to the adoption of the Latin alphabet, exceeded all other bodies in mass educational activities, and contributed some of the outstanding educationalists. One will not fail to note Mahmud's stamp upon the Turkish officers even after the downfall of the Empire despite the later association of the military with the European officer traditions.
Mahmud did send some military students to England, France, Prussia, and Austria in 1835. It was not until after his death, however, that French and Prussian teachers were employed in the Military Academy (beginning in 1840).
Mahmud acted most radically in founding the modern School of Medicine, which became the institution of higher learning to play the most important role in Turkish intellectual and political life. We can not fail to appreciate the significance of Mahmud's measures if we note the persistence of the practice and belief in the medieval medicine (called Yunani) in some Muslim countries. Mahmud first attempted to modernize the traditional medical institutions and established a State Medical School, Tibhane-i Amire as early as 1827. Either the same year or, more probably, in 1828 or 1829 he founded the Cerrahhane (school of surgery) for the training of surgeons. These institutions were both reorganized in 1831. Younger men with some training in the modern medical sciences and some European physicians were appointed as teachers. Sade de Galliere, a French professor who appears to have been known in Europe for his work as a surgeon in Berlin and St. Petersburg, was employed to reorganize the Cerrahhane. Several general preparatory courses were given as well as courses in anatomy, pathology, surgery, surgical chemistry, and military surgery. Some of the graduates were sent to Europe for study, and some of these became prominent physicians.
Mahmud decided later to follow the European practice of combining the schools of medicine and surgery. Abdul-Hak Molla, a Turkish physician, was directed to reorganize the medical school which was reopened in 1838 under the title Dar-ul Ulum-u Hikemiye ve Mekteb-i Tibbiye-i Sahane (Imperial School of Physical and Medical Sciences). A young Viennese professor named Karl Ambroso Bernard (1808-44) was given charge of the academic program; he was allowed freedom in organizing the teaching and supervision. He also taught internal medicine and allied subjects and wrote medical works that were translated into Turkish.
Mahmud gave a speech at the opening ceremony. It is a fine example of the spirit of his reforms. He said, in part:
" I have given precedence to this school because it will be dedicated to a sacred duty-the preservation of human health.... The instruction in medicine will be in French. You may ask why this should be in a foreign language. Let me explain the difficulties which enforce this now.... It is true that many books were written among us [Muslims] on medical sciences and that the Europeans even learned many things by translating these books into their own languages. The books were written in Arabic however, and, as they ceased to be objects of interest and care in the Muslim schools for many years and as the number of men who knew them decreased, they became obsolete. To go back to these works now and plunge into their study in order to translate the science of medicine into our own language, Turkish, would be a painstaking job actually requiring many years. Having appropriated these works into their own languages, the Europeans have been busy improving upon them for more than a hundred years. In addition, they have facilitated the methods of teaching these subjects greatly and have added their new discoveries. Therefore, the Arabic works seem to me somewhat defective in comparison with these European works on medicine. Even if we claim that these defects can be overcome by borrowing from the new works, still they can not be translated into Turkish quickly because it takes at least ten years to master the Arabic language in addition to five or six years for the study of medicine. And what we need is well-trained doctors for our troops and for our people, on the one hand, and to have the medical sciences incorporated into our own language and our own medical literature codified, on the other. Therefore, my purpose in having you study the French language is not to teach you French as such but that you may learn medicine-and in order to incorporate that science step by step into our own language. Medicine will be taught in Turkish in our land only when this has been done."
These words show how far in advance of the eighteenth century Mahmud was. If we remember that men regarded as enlightened even a decade earlier could raise a howl against the attempt of a handful of young men to learn French in order to study modern sciences, we can understand the magnitude of Mahmud's courage. While he was radical enough to insist on the necessity of learning a branch of modern sciences through a European language and from European books and European professors, he had the far-sighted sense of national consciousness to predict that the scientific language of the future would not be Arabic-as it was during the pre-modern period-but Turkish, and that carrying on the teaching in French would be only a temporary expedient. His words signailed the ending of the medieval tradition of the medrese teaching, carried on mainly in Arabic, and the beginning of efforts towards the creation of scientific Turkish. Although never noticed by any Turkish scholar of the nationalist movement in Turkey, Mahmud's remarks make him a prophet insofar as the importance of language in national revivals is concerned. His wish for the creation of a Turkish medical language and literature proved to be realistic. In less than thirty years (in 1866) Turkish replaced French as the instructional language of the School of Medicine. As the event coincided with the earliest expression of a nationalist movement on the part of the students of the school, we shall return to it later.
Following the opening of the school, Mahmud decreed that all Ottoman subjects, irrespective of religion, could gain admittance. Turkish sources made no mention of non-Muslim students in the early years, but three of the four graduates sent to Vienna in 1846 for further study were non-Muslims-one Armenian and two Catholic Greeks. In 1847, the government was subsidizing completely the education of 314 Muslims and 95 non-Muslims; Charles MacFarlane, who seems to have made quite a careful survey, notes that there were in attendance in that year approximately 300 Turkish, 40 Greek, 29 Armenian, and not more than 15 Jewish students. John Mason, a Protestant medical missionary to the Jews of the Empire, accepts as correct the following explanation for the absence of Jewish students prior to 1847:
"Religious difficulties have, till the present day, prevented the Jewvish children from participating in the benefits of the School.... The Government, who, from the first, had not excluded them, waited, to no purpose, for five years. At last it took the initiative, in ordering the Jewish community to send thirty-eight children to the college. His Excellency the Hekim-Bashy [Chief Physician] had had several conferences with the Grand Rabbi and the heads of this community; all difficulties have been removed, and the Government has not demurred at any sacrifice, in order to exercise its civilizing influence upon this portion of the subjects of the empire. The Jewish pupils will occupy a separate domicile, under the superintendence of one of their rabbis, whose care will be to see that their religious duties are regularly performed. They will also have a separate refectory. Their food will be prepared by an Israelite, and the necessary flesh will be supplied by a . . . butcher, of their own community.... Israelitish physicians issuing from the college will enjoy the same advantages guaranteed to the Mussulman and Christian pupils. They will serve as physicians in the army, or in their own communities, and will receive rank according to their merit."
According to the regulations of the school, the Muslims were to perform prayers in the mosque constructed at the school; the non- Muslims were specifically exempted from this duty. MacFarlane notes that the coexistence of Muslim, Jewish, and Christian students enforced a three-day weekend which disrupted the teaching program, and one may infer from his anecdotes and commentary upon the relations between the Jewish and other students in his time that the introduction of communal differentiation in the school was viewed oddly by the Muslim and Christian students alike.
As Mahmud's anti-traditionalistic spirit was particularly apparent and persistent in the School of Medicine, we may well project our present discussion of it beyond his time. One event of interest is the breaking of a tradition that also existed in the West until the medieval traditions were in the process of breaking down. Believing that dissection and autopsy were against Islam, the Ulema had opposed their introduction into the school with the result that the students were taught from wax models. In 1841 Professor Bernard came to the conclusion that the students could not learn anatomy properly in this way and demanded formal permission to use human corpses. This was given by an imperial decree. In 1847 MacFarlane saw a "good anatomical theatre" and the Muslim students making autopsies without supervision and in a manner suggesting that the experience was no novelty. He asked one of them if this was not contrary to his religion and was taken aback by the response. "He laughed in my face," he writes, "and said, 'Eh! Monsieur ce n'est pas au Galata Serai qu'il faut venir chercher la religion!"' The corpses were almost all those of Nubian slaves bought upon delivery for 20-25 piastres; the authorities feared that the soldiers would revolt if the bodies of their comrades who had died of cholera were given to the school; Muslims, Chris tians, Jews-none would offer bodies.
At first, that is before the reorganization under Dr. Bernard, the students were subjected to preparatory general training. In this preparatory period, they were taught Arabic, French, and, religious knowledge in addition to Turkish grammar and Persian literature. Arabic continued to be taught during the period of actual medical training. With the reorganization of the school and the decision to carry out teaching in French, the courses in Arabic and religious knowledge were dropped entirely. The students were separated into two groups, those who knew French and those who did not. The latter were given an intensive course in French while the former studied French literature and European history. Thus, French literature took the place of Persian literature, which ceased to be taught. Thus also, it was in the School of Medicine that European history and literature were taught to the Muslims for the first time. MacFarlane's observations in 1847 are a good index of the scientific, cultural, and intellectual role that this was to play.
"All the last improved implements of Paris, London, and Vienna, were to be found in rhe Galata Serai. There was a small but not bad botanical garden. There was a Natural History museum, with a collection of geological specimens . . . there was a very sufficient medical library the books being nearly every one French. There was . . . an excellent "Cabinetto Fisico", stocked with electric- machines, galvanic batteries, hydraulic presses, and nearly every machine and adjunct necessary to teach, or to experimentalize in the physical sciences.... In a long, airy gallery we found a pretty good collection of botanical engravings, coloured, and very neatly executed at Paris and Vienna.... There was also a tolerable chemical laboratory.... Among the books in this medical library there were but too many of that period [French Revolutionary], or of the philosophismizing period which immediately preceded it.... It was long since I had seen such a collection of downright materialism. A young Turk . . . was sitting . . . reading that manual of atheism, [Baron d'Holbach's] Systeme de la Nature! Another showed his proficiency . . . by quoting from Diderot's Jacques le Fataliste, and ... Le Compere Mathieu.... I saw a few works in German, and there appeared to be a few translations of English medical books.... Rapport[s] du Physique et du Morale [Moral] de l'Homme of Cabaneis [Cabanis] occupied a conspicuous place on the shelves."
Visiting the hospital attached to the military barracks and headed by a member of an Italian family from Pera who had studied at Pisa and Florence, MacFarlane found,
" His assistants were all young Mussulmans who had studied in the Galata Serai.... One of them spoke French very well, and had a decided turn for translation and composition. He had put into choice Turkish some of the most spicy passages of Voltaire's Dictionnaire Philosophique. A friend . . . asked him what he was doing now. He was translating Voltaire's "romans", he had already done Candide, which he found very amusing and delightful."
MacFarlane, who seems to have had a particular dislike for the French philosophers of the Enlightement had still another shocking encounter with the Turkish doctors:
" I had, at last in this military hospital at Scutari, found something in Turkey upon which I could bestow an almost unqualified praise. Yet I could not leave even this establishment without meeting with evidence of the rapid progress of Gallic philosophism. We were invited into an elegant saloon, set apart for the use of the doctors and the young Turks their assistants. A book was Iying open on the divan. I took it up. It was a copy of a recent Paris edition of the Atheist's manual, "Systeme de la Nature", with the name of the Baron d'Holbach on the title-page as the author. The volume had evidendy been much used; many of the striking passages had been marked, and especially those which mathematically demonstrated the absurdity of believing in the existence of a God and the impossibility of believing in the immortality of the soul. As I laid down the volume one of the Turks said to me, "C'est un grand ouvrage! C'est un grand philosophe! Il a toujours raison."
Teaching new scientific subjects in the new schools led in time to the appearance of books written on these subjects, in the form of handbooks and treatises. It seems that the earliest, perhaps best, of the handbooks for students was written by Ishak, a teacher in the Muhendishane. Ishak (d. 1834), known in Turkish sources as the son of a Jewish convert to Islam and described by DeKay as "a worthy Hebrew who had renounced the faith of his forefathers," was in 1823 the second Muslim appointed to the translation office (Tercume Odasi) at the Porte and, in addition to his work as chief translator, was supposed to teach European languages to the young Muslims desirous of such learning. He is believed to have known Arabic, Persian, Greek, Latin, French, and Italian, in addition to Turkish. His work entitled Mecuma-i Ulum-u Riyaziye (Book of Mathematical Sciences) was published in 1831 in four volumes. It was significant not only because it was the first presentation of contemporary mathematical and physical sciences in Turkish but also because of its codification of the new scientific terms in Turkish. Ishak used the holy language of the medrese, Arabic, as the basis of his neologisms; this made necessary the studying of Arabic for secular learning. Most of his neologisms, coined from Arabic roots, became established in teaching and writing. However, Ishak also introduced some European terms into Turkish, such as elektrik (electricity).
Sanizade Ata"ullah locked the door on Yunani medicine and opened the way for works on modern medicine in 1819 with the publication of his Mi'yar-ul atibba. Ata'ullah studied in the Suleymaniye medical medrese and then in the Muhendishane; he associated himself with Christian physicians who had studied medicine at Padua. Dr. Adnan-Adivar rates him as the first modern Turkish physician. According to Karl Sussheim, the main portion of Mityar-ul attiba was translated from a book written by the Viennese professor Baron von Stoerk (published in 1776, 1786, and 1789); Ata'ullah added a section on vaccination on the basis of other European works. He seems to have been an encyclopedic man as he wrote on mathematics, natural sciences, and was the author of a well known tarih (history).
Ata'ullah's rival and the first director of the medical school in 1827, Mustafa Behcet, was another pioneer of modern medical writing in Turkish. He is reported to have visited Italy in his youth and to have recognized the importance of modern medicine then. In addition to a treatise on cholera to be mentioned again, he is said to have translated part of Buffon's Natural History (completed and published by his nephew, Hayrullah), a book on physiology (Vazaif-ul Aza) from Italian, a book on vaccination (unpublished) from an Italian translation of Jenner's book in Latin, and a book on syphilis from the Italian translation of a German work. Despite these, Dr. Adivar believes Behcet did not represent a real transition from medieval to modern medicine. Another translator was Seyid Osman Saip, who was also a teacher and onetime director of the medical school. Like the previous two, he was a medrese graduate and a member of the Ulema order. In 1835 he published a work on pathology translated from the French entitled Mebahis-i Emraz, and in 1852 he published another book on the same subject entitled Ahkam-ul Emraz.
Another teacher in the medical school, Hafiz Mehmed, wrote a book on syphilis. Works written by the European professors invited to teach in the school were also translated and published. By 1831, Mahmud had had a number of medical treatises written and published at his greatly expanded press. The value of these books was not in any quality of originality but in their effect upon the mentality of the people.
One of these was a treatise on cholera drawn up by a committee of physicians headed by Mustafa Behcet and published over his signature in 1831. DeKay, himself a physician, gives the following significant information about this treatise,
"On our way down . . . we suddenly came upon an old Turk who was occupied in rather an unusual manner. He was . . . poring over the pages of a book with so much intentness that our presence was unheeded until we were close by his side.... He turned the conversation to the book which occupied his meditations. He informed us that it was a treatise on cholera . . . distributed gratuitously throughout the empire. The doctrines of fatalism are generally represented ro be carried so far among the Turks that it is thought unpious to endeavor, by human means, to avert any impending danger.... To counteract this self-abandonment is one of the objects of the treatise, and it is shown that this pernicious belief is in no way connected with, or dependent upon, their religion.... When it is recollected that only a few years ago such a measure would have endangered the throne, and the life of its author, the enlightened views and singular firmness of the present Sultan may be justly appreciated."
There seem to have been three controversies rife among the ulema at the time. The first was the disturbing claim that the earth was round; the second concerned the permissibility of taking quarantine measures against epidemics; the third concerned vaccination. Having exhausted their resources of interpretation and exegesis of religious texts, the ulema were perturbed by the strange ideas on these subjects creeping into the minds of some Muslims from afar. Those who were modern enough to approve of the two preventive health measures did not differ one bit from their adversaries in their reasoning; their total armoury consisted of scholastic logic and medieval texts. We are told of a duel between a Tunisian Maliki allama and a Hanafl mufti in which the first rejected and the latter accepted the imposition of quarantines; the former emerged victorious with the proposition that interfering with epidemics would mean opposition to God's absolute will by the recognition of man's free will!
Quarantines were established probably shortly after DeKay's departure in 1832. An Algerian, Hamdullah bin Osman, who was employed as a translator in the medical school, was ordered to write a treatise showing that quarantine measures were not contrary to the Seriat. This was to counteract the dissatisfaction among the people and it can be presumed that this work was distributed in the same manner as the treatise on cholera. A new government service, a port health authority, was established. In 1836 a series of articles explaining the use of the new measures and the means of preventing epidemics was published in the paper Takvim-i Vekayi.
The objections to vaccination or variolation also had to be overcome. Sanizade Ata'ullah introduced ideas about vaccination twenty years after the publication of Jenner's inquiry ( 1798). The first practice of variolation seems to have been in 1839, but the fetva legitimizing it religiously was given only in 1845 or a little later; it appeared in a treatise on vaccination.
The foregoing has been an account of the secular side of the reforms. There was another feature to Mahmud's innovations that had portent for Westernization. To this category fall those innovations that evoked much criticism within and without the country.
One important underlying belief can be discerned easily throughout Mahmud's reform efforts. Aside from the acceptance of the superiority of the material features of the modern civilization, there was also the recognition of the need to replace certain traditional habits and customs by others in greater harmony with the new conditions. The notable element in this insight, giving to it the colour of Westernization, was the belief that the modern West was worthy of being taken as a model in the efforts to establish new ways. Mahmud's explanation of why modern Western medicine should be taken over, learned, and practiced in place of the old Greco-Arabian medicine was a succinct formulation of this outlook.
Mahmud initiated the acceptance of Western attire, and certain social practices relating to etiquette, taste, and the like. He became an enemy of long beards; he declared war against the traditional Turkish saddles and style of riding; he appeared before the people and became a public orator and ribbon cutter; he caused his ministers to sit in his presence; he went on steamer trips; he began to learn French; he imported European musicians and concert masters; he is reported to have ordered samples of European headgear with a view toward recapping his troops or, perhaps, even popularizing these among his people. His own example was followed by some. The turbans, ample trousers, old-fashioned shoes, and decorative paraphernalia were dropped, beards were shortened or shaven completely, European pants were adopted.
It was against this type of change that foreign observers, with the exception of DeKay, directed their greatest criticism. They bemoaned the disappearance of what they believed to be peculiarly oriental. The great champions of equality between the Rayahs and the Turks complained of their new-found difficulty in distinguishing one from the other.
The traditional costumes of a changing society were bound to disappear under the force of actual conditions. DeKay characteristically tries to understand why a ruler would care what the people wore; in doing so, he shows us that in many respects Mahmud merely legitimized what had been occurring in contravention of the tradition, and he gives clues to the need for conscious changes in people's attire. He writes of the military:
" The dress of the modern Turkish soldier has partaken oi the general change which has occurred within the last ten years [from about 182O], and whatever it may have lost in picturesque effect, it has certainly gained in effectiveness for military duty. Instead of loose, slipshod slippers, he now wears stout serviceable shoes securely fastened by leather strings. The huge baloon chaksheers [trousers], which impeded his every movement have given place to woollen trowsers, still rather ample about the nether man, but not so large as to prevent him from making a rapid charge upon the enemy, or from running away. The glittering and flowing jubbee [gown] and bayneesh [robe] are well exchanged for a smart tight-bodied blue jacket, closely hooded in front, and allowing perfect freedom to the limbs; while the turban, infinitely varied in shape and colour, often ragged, and frequently dirty, suggesting the idea of walking toadstools, has forever disappeared. In its place the soldier sports a tidy red cap, with a blue tassel gracefully depending from its crown. With the exception of the cap, and the still lingering amplitude of the trowsers, the Turkish soldiers could scarcely be distinguished from the regulars of any European nation."
What the Europeans mourned had had social significance in the traditional system. Headgear was a mark of religious, vocational, and national identity as well as an insignia of one's rank and status. The differentiations within women's attire had particular significance-as they have to a degree today. The disappearance of the old orders, or the changes in their status, and the rise of new classes necessitated the adoption of new dress. The appearance of the horse-drawn carriage, the decline in certain trades, changes in the structure and in functions within the government, business, industry, and even education, and the appropriation of certain new amenities in home furnishings imposed upon the people the search for a new appearance.
Confusion and even anarchy threatened when the elaborate traditional system of attire became severely damaged. People did not know what to put on; the streets assumed a carnival appearance, as is the case in Karachi today, in the absence of a new uniformity. People appeared incognito in apparel of their own invention. Mahmud determined to give some order and eclat to the dress of the people. Significantly, he chose for himself, his ministers, and the people, designs of the utmost simplicity. His efforts represented an attempt to solve the problems of the identity of the people, insofar as external appearances went, in their new phase of historical existence. There is evidence that he was ready to accept the existing European costumes rather than invent new ones.
Historical forces, however, led to deviations and exceptions from the general rule. The resultant picture may be taken as a fairly accurate photographic index of Turkish society in the second part of the nineteenth century. First of all, the changes were confined largely to the urban population. They reached their maximum only in the army and among the officials and intellectuals in that order. They remained at a minimum among the Ulema. (Among the Rayahs the businessmen underwent change most and the clergy least). Despite the absence of a clergy in Islam, the differential rate of change in apparel created the appearance of one, at least in externals. The Ulema, which had until that time been only one among several medieval orders, became singled out as a class of clergyman distinguishable from laymen through their conservatism and insistence upon retaining their medieval attire. Furthermore, through this conservatism the distinctiveness of the various ranks of the order of Ulema disappeared because, under the impact of change, the garb underwent a process of simplification; the nuances distinguishing the Ulema from ordinary "clergymen" were lost. Only the turban, ample trousers and gown were retained; thus, all those connected with religious affairs were reduced to a more or less uniform attire distinguishable only from the lay dress.
Shoes, pants, coats, shirts did not encounter resistance. The real difficulty arose over the question of headgear. It is difficult to explain why, after so many changes along European lines, this became such a bugbear. The only clear explanation appears to be religious, although the transitional state of European men's headgear (between the wig and the equally odd and impractical top hat) may have contributed to the difficulty. According to DeKay, "it was the wish of the sultan to have furnished the cylindrical cap, fez, he introduced into the military . . . with a small rim in front, to protect the eye from the glare of the sun," But, he continues,
" This daring innovation was opposed, and successfully too, by the ulemah.... It was argued that no true Mussulman could perform his devotions without touching his forehead to the ground, and the proposed leather projection would render this impracticable. As no one happened to hit upon the idea that the cap might be turned around while at prayers [as many Turks do today], the sultan was compelled to give up the point."
This consideration may explain the rejection of European headgear or, more correctly, those forms of European headgear with a brim or visor. However, religious considerations can not explain adequately why the fez was chosen, especially in view of the fact that the fez was originally European and had nothing to do with any historical Muslim headgear. The fez adopted by Mahmud was quite different from the one popularized later in Turkey, Egypt, and India and taken over by the Shriners; it was a red or mauve beret, easy to maintain and comfortable. It was probably easier to manufacture and less expensive than the other headgear of the time. It was already in use among North African Muslims. These factors probably made the fez more readily acceptable and, accordingly, the fez was adopted formally in 1829.
Attributing allegedly religious value to the fez and rejecting the use of the hat came much later. It came to be seen, especially during the Hamidian Islamism, as a mark of religious nationalism among the Muslims (even outside of Turkey and, especially, in India), and as a sign of loyalty to the Khalifa. Consequently, the fez fell by the way in Turkey at the time of the fall of religious nationalism and the Caliphate.
The elimination of differential dress among the Muslims, Christians, and Jews within the Empire marked an important step in the direction of secular liberalism. On his second visit to Turkey in 1846, MacFarlane was put into a dilemma that he never resolved satisfactorily. "In many cases," he said, "it cost me thought and trouble to distinguish between Mussulmans and Rayahs. Twenty years ago, there was no possibility of confounding them...." Significantly, the Jews and Armenians of the commercial centres adopted the new official dress with alacrity; the former even wore the fez while reading the Scriptures. The notables among the Rayahs not only aspired to appear like their Muslim countrymen but also sought to enter into private competition with the highest government officials in differentiating themselves from the ordinary people of all faiths.
In addition to these changes, a wide variety of practices became established through Mahmud's encouragement or tolerance. DeKay describes sympathetically the changing manners and customs of the government officials as indices of the extent and nature of the anti-traditionalism of the period. Adolphus Slade, the British naval officer employed as an admiral in the Turkish navy, believed that the chief feature of Mahmud's reforms was "contempt of their prophet's wisest law" which justified the people in "considering the sultan and his ministers as little removed from infidels."| Writing some seventeen years later, MacFarlane complained, in effect, that the Turks had become too knowledgeable of the West and too modern either to be awed by his superior attitude or to be irritated by his offensive and presumptuous conduct.
An innovation of the greatest importance in Mahmud's policy of Westernization was the establishment of the first newspaper in Turkish. Newspapers had been published previously in Turkey in French by the French; newspapers in languages other than Turkish began appearing towards the end of the first quarter of the nineteenth century. To l\lehmet Ali goes the credit for establishing the first newspaper in the Islamic world; his Waqa'i' al-Misriya founded in 1828 was published in Turkish and Arabic; it encouraged Mahmud to undertake a similar project.
Mahmud founded a newspaper press in 1831. He chose the title Takvim-i Vekayi (Calendar of Events) for the Turkish edition edited by the historiographer Esad. He employed Alexandre Blaque, a Frenchman who had published a paper in French in Izmir, as the editor of a French edition entitled Moniteur Ottoman. Upon beginning publication, Mahmud declared, "The newspaper, being not inadmissible from the point of view of the Seriat and the kanun, is an institution of great benefit to my dominions." He is said to have written unsigned articles for the paper in which he styled himself as an innovator and Europeanizer.
DeKay provides a truly "front page" account of the founding of the newspaper, its reception among the various communities, and its implications for the development of public opinion internally and externally. We need add to his description only that Esad seems to have been the first writer to feel the need for simplification of written Turkish; as we shall see more fully below, the foundation of a periodical press played a significant role in language, and later alphabet, reform efforts.
Despite its many defects, the Vekayi was both a mirror of Mahmud's era and a forecast of the direction in which the people were to be led. The absence of news related to Eastern countries was conspicuous. The Turkish edition brought to the reading public not only news of the reform activities but also information and concepts theretofore unrepresented in Turkish.
We learn of a number of unnoticed changes through the early issues of Vekayi. Among the advertisements in 1832 were some for the sale of printed books on religious subjects. These, it will be recalled, were specifically excluded from the fetva authorizing printing a century earlier. The change seems to have come about gradually without fuss or a new authorization. From the very first issue we begin to find mention of institutions unknown in Turkey, such as the British House of Commons and the House of Lords. In other words, it was through the mouthpiece of the absolute monarch that the people were exhorted to read of their faith and that ideas of constitutionalism began to filter down to the reading public!
Mahmud decided to send to Europe a group of 150 students from the schools of medicine, engineering, and military science. The first group of students and graduates from the military and engineering institutions was dispatched to England, France, Prussia, and Austria in 1835. It seems that no medical graduates were sent abroad until after 1840.
Mahmud's diverse educational endeavours bore fruit later. The number of the enlightened multiplied out of proportion to those of Mahmud's time. The Tercume Odasi (translation bureau) established by Mahmud played a role different from that originally intended. It was established to take over the translation work of the Porte in its external and intercommunal relations. The first translator, who was appointed in 1821, was Yahya, a Turkish Greek convert to Islam. Yahya was a teacher in the Miihendishane and had translated (probably from French or Italian) works for the use of the teachers. The second chief of the bureau, appointed in 1823, was Ishak who was also a convert. In time, the office became a college of foreign languages; it was there that the future Turkish intellectuals got their start. The most eminent men of Turkey not only in the field of diplomacy but also in the various branches of administration and intellectual life have been "graduates" of the translation bureau. It was through this institution that the traditional Turkish literature advanced beyond the stage of the Tulip Era.
The Westernizing reforms initiated under Mahmud II were not merely the product of a ruler's whim, but inevitable consequences of the breakdown of traditional institutions, and the emergence of a degree of liberation and secularization.
The way in which reformers of non-Western societies understand Western civilization is influenced by the degree to which minds have been liberated from the traditional institutions. Western civilization, yet maturing while establishing its mastery over the world, was a product of complex factors not understood at that time even in the West with its own inherent problems. Facing such a civilization with the firm determination to emulate it was a hazardous job. Turkey was the first country outside the Western world (if we exclude Russia which had begun its Westernization one century earlier) to undertake the task. Japan followed suit very shortly. The later development of the two cases is one of the most instructive lessons for the student of Westernization. Westernizing reforms in the Turkey of this era had their own merits and faults, which we can grasp best if we understand the concept of the West which existed in the minds of the Turks. We shall take the observations of two men as illustrative of the prevailing view of the "enlightened." These manifested a greater degree of understanding of the problem of Westernization than had existed previously.
The first was Mustafa Sami (d. 1855) who visited Rome, Florence, other Italian cities, Vienna, Prague, Berlin, Frankfurt, Brussels, Antwerp, London, and, finally, Paris, to which he went as a member of the Turkish legation, in 1838. Upon his return he wrote a little book, Avrupa Risalesi. In spite of its brevity and its great resemblance to its one-hundred-year-old predecessor, Celebi Mehmed's account, this book contains a few points that serve as indices of what the Turkish intellectuals had learned in the intervening century. We find in Sami's book the earliest attempt to explain the causes of things to be admired in the civilization of Europe.
One of the features he noticed was the role of science in European progress. Religious freedom he found to be another. A third was the continuity maintained in European civilization between the new acquisitions and the achievements of the past, by which Europe enabled itself to make marvellous mechanical inventions. Explaining his visits to museums, for example, he says,
" What is the utility of these? The inventions of the Europeans (so many discoveries-which are being improved every day to make everything convenient-those superhuman achievements such as steam navigation, those industries which Muslim countries need so badly for the everyday necessities such as paper, textile, glass and watch-making, and finally those wonderful attempts to fly in the air, and to communicate with distant places through wires laid underground) were all made possible by preserving the works of the ancients and predecessors, and by adding to them their own inventiveness. If we realize this we then understand why the products which we call antiques attract so much attention and care in such an age of invention.... From all this it is clear that such a degree of orderliness reached by the Europeans in every work and action, and the indispensability of skill and knowledge in them, are due solely to the diffusion of the sciences and the arts."
This became possible through the diffusion of school education. "Men and women alike," he says with the exaggeration of enthusiasm, "everyone reads and writes in Europe. Especially in France, every person, even an ordinary porter or a shepherd, is capable at least of reading a letter sent to him." Exaggerating again, "Nobody in Europe is constrained for matters of religion or sect. Whatever religion a man may have-even the Jew-he is employed by the governments as long as he deserves." "All this is due to the progress of science (fen)." Thus, he concluded, once knowledge of the modern sciences was implemented in Turkey through education, the country would cease to be dependent upon European goods, and its wealth would be saved for further progress.
Sami later became a supporter of the Tanzimat and created much opposition by his unrestrained criticism of the traditional customs and unreserved praise of European life and manners. He was attacked as kafir (denier) and mulhid (unbeliever). He was an editor-in-chief of Takvim-i Vekayi and wrote the earliest articles in simple language for the people. Sami was not only the first predecessor of the Westernist school of writers but also the writer who introduced the conception of patriotism (hubbi memleket ve millet, love for fatherland and people) which was elaborated later by ,Sinasi and Namik Kemal.
The second writer, Sadik Rifat (1807-56), was another predecessor of Westernism, a supporter of reform, and, perhaps, the one who formulated the basic ideas of the Tanzimat before its formal promulgation. He went to Vienna in 1837 as ambassador. Among his voluminous writings, two lengthy essays, "Essay concerning European Affairs" and "On the Reform of Conditions in the Ottoman State," will interest us here.
Like other visitors to Europe, Sadik Rifat portrays European life in favourable colours. He too speaks of the reign of religious freedom, the stability in government administration and the honesty of functionaries, the universality of education and literacy, the importance of books and the press in the education of the people, the exhibitions, the incentives for investors, steam-power, railroads, banks, postal services, the cleanliness of hotels and restaurants, entertainments, music, institutions for the poor and sick, etc. But, he was basically interested in telling his people something else and that was something new. Sadik Rifat was probably the first Turkish statesman able to see not only the mere externals of European civilization but also its fundamental distinctiveness from non-European civilizations. As A. H. Tanpinar says,
"The most important aspect of the Essay is its conception of the problem of reform as a problem of a 'way of thinking.' In contrast to a system in which custom and tradition ... reigned-and to a great extent ruled arbitrarily-it portrays a realistic and rational state and administration which is based on man's nature, rights, and needs."
Sadik Rifat spoke of the civilization of Europe, even introducing this word untranslated and in its French form, and pointed out that European civilization was based on the fullest realization of human rights, the freedom and security of life, property, and honour. He wrote,
" There the governments are for the welfare of the citizens and not the citizens for the sake of the governments. It is because of this that the governments are run according to the rights of the people (millet) and according to law."
Western civilization, freedom, people, and the rights of man! All were new concepts, used and explained probably for the first time. It is likely that he could not realize that what he was calling for was a total transformation from one system of civilization to another. However, the credit for first talking of these concepts and introducing them into Turkish usage belongs to him.
Sadik Rifat's second essay contained the fundamentals of the whole Tanzimat philosophy of reform. These were the abolition of arbitrary rule, the codification of judicial and administrative laws, and the establishment of principles for regulating people's obligations, such as the paying of taxes and the performing of military service. He stressed the importance of education, the organization of the army and navy, the pursuance of a consistent peace policy, the training of honest government functionaries and the guaranteeing to them of security and stability, and above all the protection and encouragement of industry. As a historian of the Tanzimat period stated, he was one of the few who "whole- heartedly believed in the Tanzimat reforms," and who "perceived the necessity for modern banking and credit institutions for the revival of Turkish economy." Interpreting this to convey that Sadik Rifat could see and adapt to his own thinking what Mahmud had done, we can agree very well with T. H. Tanpinar who believed that this essay "laid the foundations for the Gulhane charter and that he [Sadik] sowed the seeds of the Tanzimat reforms."
The understanding of Western civilization exemplified by the two observers can explain a few features of the reformism pioneered by Mahmud and followed to a greater degree during the Tanzimat. Western civilization has a superior technology; it is the product of modern sciences; it can be implemented by education; the instrument for carrying it out is government. When carried to their logical consequences, these were in sharp contrast with the medieval view and practices.
While lawmaking was to become the distinguishing feature of the Tanzimat, it was Mahmud who opened the way for this. In accordance with his distinction between secular and religious affairs, he followed the policy of the old Turkish rulers of enacting kanun with the addition of a new element. Enacting temporal kanun was becoming gradually a more or less systematized process towards the creation of a body of public law separate and even contradistinct from the seriat law. So far there had been no dis tinction between public and private law. Mahmud's administrative, military, and "penal" enactments laid the foundations for a future body of public law. Furthermore, by the increasing implications of public law for the private sector, they tended to alter the more important position of the Islamic private law, as will be seen more clearly when we discuss the consequences of the Tanzimat codification. With Mahmud's initiative, furthermore, the medieval conception of the temporal law as an expression of the "will" of the ruler, or as an affirmation of local customs and usages or of Islamic practices, tended to give way to a new conception in which an impersonal legislative agency in law-making was recognized by enacting regulations not according to religion or tradition, but according to the requirements of "reason." The following period simply carried this process further, ultimately as far as to the drawing up of a constitution.
Another manifestation of the new concept was an unconscious reformulation of the governmental function. Mahmud's reformism needed a government that would abandon medieval practices and concern itself with those things which medieval governments had neglected. The chief concern of the medieval government was to maintain the general order while keeping each "order" within its traditional boundaries both spatially and socially. The economic and administrative roles of the medieval government were secondary, largely prohibitive, and subordinated throughout to religious or military objectives. There was no concern or instrumentality for changing or improving the society on the basis of a dynamic conception of welfare and progress. The welfare of society was seen to lie in status and tradition. Thus, not the government but the Seriat, custom, and tradition were the fountainheads of social and individual welfare.
The government emerged in Mahmud's time as the supreme functionary, the prime mover, and the agency of change and progress. The novelty in the advance Mahmud represented lay in his perception that a government viewed in a new light would be the agent to introduce a new economic system. To that extent Mahmud became the founder of a new government and law. The weakest point in the Turkish political transformation lay in the fact that the new conception of government was not the product of the aspirations of a rising middle class but rather the creation of the traditional political authority in its struggle to maintain its existence. This led to increasingly clear contradictions in subsequent periods, but the implications of the new conception for economic policy can be seen even at this stage.
The inevitable realization that the state had to lead in the implementation of a modern society. in which industry and education appeared to be the major differentials, was bound to lead to some modernization in the conception and organization of the government. This can be seen best in connection with Mahmud's economic attempts.
Turkish views of European civilization show the continuing lack of a clear understanding of the existence of a new economic system and doctrine behind the observed scientific and technological advancement of the West. On the other hand, it is clear from Mahmud's innovations, even from his economic enterprises, that he had faced up to the question of the economic function of the state under modern, or nineteenth-century, conditions. This was a question that no nation outside the European community, excepting Russia which was partly European, had tackled; Japan was still out of the picture. Although the days of mercantilism by absolutist monarchies had long since passed and pressure was being exerted for the acceptance of laissez-faire policies, Mahmud instinctively found the path followed in the previous two centuries by the absolutist monarchs of Europe.
But, Mahmud had little chance to develop a new economic policy as the major instrument of modernization. There were several factors unfavourable to the formation of such a policy. Among them were the absence of peace and internal security, the capitulations, the non-existence of an enterprising middle class and the existence of foreign merchants gaining increasing diplomatic and even military support, and the concentration of potential investment capital among non-Turkish middlemen, bankers, and usurers, many of whom claimed dual or even multiple citizenship and had no interest in building a national economy. There was also the pressure of the uneconomic and unhistorical thinking of those whom Mahmud had sent for training to Europe that they might advise him well. This last factor played a significant role in his initiation of a laissez-faire regime just before his death. Still, he deserves credit for initiating steps towards an etatistic view of economic modernization. Most of his innovations were preliminaries towards the launching of new economic policies, but we can guess the direction they would have taken under more favourable conditions from his governmental reforms and partially from his unco-ordinated economic ventures.
Noteworthy less for their economic achievements than for the germinal idea they represented are his refusal to accept the loans pressed upon him by the agents of the Rothschilds, his close interest in the United States, his employment of American shipbuilders, and his abortive attempt to contract a comprehensive alliance with the New World (revived in the abortive attempt by his protege Resid Pasa to establish a technical assistance program through diplomatic negotiations), his direct investment in naval reconstruction and the founding of a press, his efforts to cut down on the extravagant expenditures of government and the Turkish notables, and the interests of his government in leather, paper, textile, and ammunition manufactories. Noteworthy also is the "discovery" by the Board of Useful Affairs of the need to co-ordinate educational and industrial efforts administratively as well as in terms of their objectives.