8 Introduction
write “mirrors for princes” (although such texts were usually aimed at viziers),
and so forth.
Moreover, it must be noted that actual political thought is more than that
expressed in texts such as those described above. J. G. A. Pocock’s notion of
“political language” (or, as he later termed it, “political discourse”, which should
be preferred to “political thought”), i.e. a set of “idioms, rhetorics, specialized
vocabularies and grammars” integrated into a “community of discourse”, fits
into this aspect well.30 In the same vein (and in what has been termed “the
linguistic turn” in late twentieth-century history of ideas), the vocabulary itself
is important. As Reinhart Koselleck and the other exponents of the German
Begriffsgeschichte school have shown, concepts and how they are matched with
words have their own historical development: theories, ideologies, mentalities,
and even acts are articulated in terms of concepts, and their exact meaning
and content in any given historical context, their broadening or changing,
is of paramount importance for understanding intellectual history. To make
sense, however, the inventories of concepts thus studied should be analyzed
in their complex interdependencies within the framework of a “language”
or “discourse”, which in turn may be in conflict with another contemporary
discourse.31 Furthermore, Cemal Kafadar has remarked that, to understand
political thought fully and correctly, we must take also into account non-
textual sources such as behaviors, symbols, and rituals.32 No matter how much
I would like (or even tried) to include this aspect in this book, however, it will
instead be the task of another scholar to add these dimensions.
2 Scope and Aims: the Quest for Innovation
In contrast to the dominant image of the Ottoman Empire, innovation and
reform seem to have been constant features of its administration. Some
authors, such as Na’ima in the early eighteenth century, did see the need for
reform and so advocated it; others, such as Mustafa Ali in the late sixteenth cen-
tury, perceived change to be a challenge to the traditional order and suggested
a return to what was considered the “Golden Age” of the empire, the first half
of the sixteenth century. It could be said that the process of transformation
30 See e.g. Pocock 1987; Pocock 1988. Alam 2004 may be said to be a proponent of this
method in an Islamic context, but without any reference to Pocock’s theoretical views.
31 Koselleck 1979; Richter 1987; Iggers 1995; Pocock 1996; Koselleck 2002.
32 Kafadar 2001, 27–28; cf. Iggers 1995, 567–568; Karateke – Reinkowski 2005; Faroqhi 2006
(= Faroqhi 2008, 53–85).