The declaration of the Tanzimat ended the known Ottoman mentality, that is, the end of the classicism empire order. In the aftermath process, a paradigm shift occurred in the Ottoman state mind. It launched a process in which its own intellectual bureaucrats were suspected of its own values and system that led to dissolution and culminated in the yielding of the same class of people, gradually into the hands of a Westernist, enlightenmentist world. The legitimized ‘pragmatic’ attitude in the name of rescuing the state was to become the worldview, and alienation from the Islamic civilization, on which it was originally based, was to be observed, including suspicion, rejection and eventually the submission to the West.

Tanzimat, which becomes a widespread topic among the conservative authors as a historical commentary, indicates dissolution of the state instead of its renovation, and marks a turning point of the state at the face of the western technological civilization.

Tomorrow is the 106th anniversary of the second Constitutional Era / Ikinci Mesrutiyet. It marks the date of the last resistance for the empire to lean on its own world values. In one respect, it is the revolution (inkilab-i azim) realized by the Committee of the Union and Progress/ Ittihat and Terakki that dethroned Abdulhamid on that day and launched a new period, the effects of which have continued even until today. It was only later realized, though, that the dethronement of Abdulhamit was a de facto end of the Ottoman Empire. The adventure of Ittihat and Terakki was to be experienced for the official dissolution of the Ottoman state. The adventure of adopting western values with an undertone voice started off with Tanzimat along with the Mesrutiyet/constitutional era, which dragged forward the search for modern, scientific and ideological civilization.

At the new epoch of this revolution, the last remaining potential resistance block was to be wasted for the synthetic ideals, and the dissolution of the state was to be realized. No matter how the current official discourse claims that the second Constitutional Era brought in the idea of freedom and the notion of the constitutional law /kanun-i esasi, it is the ‘state mind against the society’ that was inherited from that day, which incessantly persisted up to today with its effects being identified as tutelage and resistance regime.

Although being essentially lasting and consistent as a topic, among the achievements of Mesrutiyet, one inherited idea is the newly adopted term ‘regression danger’ with the revolution of the Unionists.

Regression is the invention of the Unionists, who declared Mesrutiyet, and as invented by the Unionist term of intellectuals, it is another name for the alienation of the society and values.

The label of regression, which the Unionist mentality or the ‘comitas’ civil mentality deployed as an operational instrument and bequeathed to the Republican period, became the most useful, dynamic threat perception.

Regression was used as an instrument to transform the ideal order, which was represented as freedom, brotherhood, and constitutional law and was put on the shelf whenever it was due and therefore was never materialized into a tutelage regime. This way the Jacobin secularism was legitimized, which led the way through anti-religion and it was made a requirement.

The new Unionist, operational mind state, instead of giving out or opening the way for the people, focused on what was there to prevent. It was decided that the oldest and continuous threat and danger was to be the ‘regression’.

The unionist tradition, which does not find the people deserving freedom, used the ‘regression’ as an ideological device by presenting it as horror and danger to the people.

The active power will always generate its own danger. For the westernist intellectuals who devoted themselves to educate the people, regression became a magic formula for not what it offers, but for what it prevents.

After the declaration of freedom with pompous celebrations, the regression threat, which was going to be used as an excuse for the Unionist repression and censure, was not going to be delayed. Its inheritance of fear and the innovated ‘other’ was to preoccupy our agenda for a long time in the period between the post-Abdulhamit and Republican eras.

Aside from its aspect involving a discourse of accusation and excommunication, we should remember that it was the vibrant mentality, which established a wall of fear for the sake of ideological fantasies, which undermined the empire. When this ‘noble’ mentality found it convenient, it knew how to draw blood to its authority by taking the religion into the regression bracket without hesitating to reason and exploit it. The question that arose with regression discourse, ‘Why and how did you sink down a huge state’, remains unanswered. With similar reasons, the repression of the ‘disciplining’ manner of the uniformed bureaucrats, who constantly lost wars and sank down a state, passed into the republican era with applause rather than questions.

Ýlgili YazýlarEnglish