Osmanli YYnetiminin Oryantalist nnasi (The Orientalist Construction of the Ottoman Governance)

Abstract

Edward Said formulated and discussed Orientalism for the first time and he concentrated more on the attitutes mostly towards Islam and the Arabs. He mainly examined the literary texts that were produced by the “Western mind.” By defining Orientalism as a discourse, he made an invaluable contribution to the field. This article, however, concentrates on the European perception of the Ottoman Empire starting from the sixteenth century until the modern times in terms of the interpretations about the Ottoman governance. It aims to show the Orientalist tendencies in European texts in describing the Ottoman government. It begins with the examination of selected texts written about the Ottomans by the sixteenth and seventeenth century travellers. The article determines that the general approach towards the Ottoman Empire lacked a theoretical base although the travellers did define the empire as a tyranny. The definition of tyranny, however, was quite ambigious. In the second part, the article concentrates on the Enlightenment thinker Montesquieu and his model of “Oriental Despotism.” Montesquieu argued that this was the worst governance method and the Ottoman Empire was the perfect example of it. In the final part, “Sultanism” of Max Weber was outlined. The article trys to show how Orientalist assumptions about the Ottoman Empire carried to modern sociological theory through Weber’s internalization of them. Weber argued that the enslaved janissary army caused both the Ottoman government and society to lack all kinds of freedom.