2 Introduction
the basis of his appendix on “some Turkish views on politics”, which was the
first comprehensive discussion of the subject in any non-Turkish language.
One year earlier, M. Tayyib Gökbilgin had published a pioneering article on the
reform treatises up to Kâtib Çelebi, while a little later, in 1962, came Bernard
Lewis’s influential “Ottoman observers of Ottoman decline”.5 All these were
mainly enumerations of the most important authors and summaries of their
works, usually with an emphasis on the information they offered on the social
and military situation of their era rather than their ideas on society, the state,
or politics. An exception was Niyazi Berkes’ and Şerif Mardin’s attempts in the
1960s, but, as well as having their own, now somewhat outdated agendas, they
focused on socio-political developments rather than political thought per se.
While the emphasis on economic history had made the history of ideas
somewhat obsolete by the 1970s (Lewis Thomas’ book on Na’ima’s work and
ideas, published in 1972, was but an edition of his much earlier dissertation),
a second wave of interest arose in the 1980s and the 1990s. Articles like that
by Hans Georg Majer on criticism of the ulemas (1980) and that by Ahmet
Yaşar Ocak on Ottoman political ideology (1988) were accompanied by
more comprehensive attempts to provide a broader overview of the subject,
such as the influential 1986 article by Pál Fodor.8 Previously unknown or
neglected works were discovered, published, and/or analyzed: Andreas Tietze,
Cornell H. Fleischer, and Jan Schmidt made Mustafa Ali’s work a must-read
for Ottomanists, Rhoads Murphey and Douglas Howard worked on the early
seventeenth-century reform treatises, while Virginia Aksan and Kemal Beydilli
highlighted the importance of some of the late eighteenth-century authors.
Almost simultaneously, Rifaat Ali Abou-El-Haj’s controversial 1991 book on
the Ottoman “early-modern state” made it clear that these texts should not be
read at face value but rather in light of their authors’ relative positions in the
struggle between various strata of the ruling elite.
The new millennium brought a new thrust to the study of Ottoman politi-
cal literature: original texts are constantly being discovered and published,
4 Rosenthal 1958, 224–233.
5 Gökbilgin 1991; Lewis 1962. One should add the enumeration of political manuscripts in
Levend 1962.
6 Berkes 1964; Mardin 1969a.
7 Thomas 1972.
8 Sivers 1971; Majer 1980; Fodor 1986; Ocak 1988; Herzog 1999.
9 Tietze 1982; Fleischer 1983; Fleischer 1986a; Schmidt 1991; Murphey 2009a; Murphey
2009b; Murphey 1981; Howard 1988; Howard 1996; Aksan 1993; Beydilli 1984; Beydilli 1999b.
10 Abou-El-Haj 2005 (in this second edition, the author has added an Afterword). See the
detailed overview and commentary on the relevant literature in Yılmaz 2003b, 236–251.