De-Historicizing (Mainstream) Ottoman Historiography on Tanzimat and Tahdith: Jus Gentium and Pax Britannica Violate Osmanli Sovereignty in Arabia

Khaled Al-Kassimi

doi:10.3390/histories1040020

Abstract

The (secular-humanist) philosophical theology governing (positivist) disciplines such as International Law and International Relations precludes a priori any communicative examination of how the exclusion of Arab-Ottoman jurisprudence is necessary for the ontological coherence of jurisprudent concepts such as society and sovereignty, together with teleological narratives constellating the “Age of Reason” such as modernity and civilization. The exercise of sovereignty by the British Crown—in 19th and 20th century Arabia—consisted of (positivist) legal doctrines comprising “scientific processes” denying Ottoman legal sovereignty, thereby proceeding to “order” societies situated in Dar al-Islam and “detach” Ottoman-Arab subjects from their Ummah. This “rational exercise” of power by the British Crown—mythologizing an unbridgeable epistemological gap between a Latin-European subject as civic and an objectified Ottoman-Arab as despotic—legalized (regulatory) measures referencing ethno/sect-centric paradigms which not only “deported” Ottoman-Arab ijtihad (Eng. legal reasoning and exegetic hermeneutics) from the realm of “international law”, but also rationalized geographic demarcations and demographic alterations across Ottoman-Arab vilayets. Both inter-related disciplines, therefore, affirm an “exclusionary self-image” when dealing with “foreign epistemologies” by transforming “cultural difference” into “legal difference”, thus suing that it is in the protection of jus gentium that “recognized sovereigns” exercise redeeming measures on “Turks”, “Moors”, or “Arabs”. It is precisely the knowledge lost ensuing from such irreflexive “positivist image” that this legal-historical research seeks to deconstruct by moving beyond a myopic analysis claiming Ottoman-Arab ‘Umran (Eng. civilization) as homme malade (i.e., sick man); or that the Caliphate attempted but failed to become reasonable during the 18th and 19th century because it adhered to Arab-Islamic philosophical theology. Therefore, this research commits to deconstructing “mainstream” Ottoman historiography claiming that tanzimat (Eng. reorganization) and tahdith (Eng. modernization) were simply “degenerative periods” affirming the temporal “backwardness” of Ottoman civilization and/or the innate incapacity of its epistemology in furnishing a (modern) civil society.

Highlights

The process involving the “rationalization of geography” by British Residents— regarding the demarcation of territory already under the sovereign legal jurisdiction of the Caliph administrated as Eyalet Yemen later Vilayet Yemen—sheds light on what Lisa Wedeen identifies as “the connection between empire and distinct forms of knowledge” ([109] p. 32) [110]
This connection is highlighted with the philosophical theology informing Ottoman-Arab epistemology being particularized by Occidental historicism as a knowledge system averse to reason [2,35,45,66]
Especially in the aftermath of the Berlin Conference in 1884, the weaponization of “exact sciences” such as geography, ethnography, and cartography facilitated the construction of sovereign (British) rationalized geographies reifying positivist jurisprudence, thereby lending epistemological clarity to jus gentium being characterized by a cultural dynamic of difference historicizing Ottoman socio-political progress as “degenerating in time”, necessitating a mission temporally advancing Ottoman-Arab civilization [36,111,112]

Summary

Introduction

The unethical material consequences of a realpolitik approach informing the logic of global relations within a Hobbesian worldview stipulating a (naturalized) bellum omnium contra omnes is manifest in mainstream approaches of IR and IL continuously valorizing a “competition” lens when assessing “cultural differences”, thereby presupposing “cultural antagonism” as a necessary disciplinary ethos for ontologically security [2,17]. This zero-sum approach to (foreign) cultural differences:. It is unable to give anything but a crude and caricatured understanding of the complex motives and desires involved in colonial/neocolonial subjugation or in the resistance to domination . . . in its conventional neorealist or neoliberal guises, IR misses the way international society—as both a system of states and a world political economy—forms a competition of cultures in which the principles of sovereignty and self-help work to sanctify inequality and subjugate those outside of the centers of ‘the West’ [17] (pp. 1–2)

Results

Discussion

Conclusion