The Eighteenth Century: the Traditionalists 333
backdrop of the military difficulties and constant experimentation in military
and financial politics described above. On the other hand, perhaps this experi-
mentation and the repeated attempts to reform the army and the treasury had
made old-style reform treatises obsolete (although there were still some au-
thors who remained loyal to the “decline” paradigm, usually following Sunna-
minded lines).19 If we accept that the powers of the day, the bureaucracy and
the janissary corps, were balanced for most of the eighteenth century, bureau-
cratic authors (as the majority of political writing continued to be produced in
that milieu) would have had no reason to argue for a total reconfiguration of
the administrative and economic structure of the empire: they merely had to
proceed peacefully with their experiments.
Overall, it must be noted that by calling this trend “traditionalist” we are
simply trying to distinguish them from another group of texts that will be stud-
ied in the next chapter, and which are marked by an urgent sense of the need to
introduce European-style institutions and practices, usually pertaining to the
army. It is important to note that the works classified here as “traditionalist”
actually show (as will hopefully be seen in the rest of this chapter) a remark-
able development, and thus are far from being mere imitations of sixteenth-
or seventeenth-century “mirror for princes” literature. Not only are concrete
measures proposed for the specific problems of the period, new concepts are
also used, ones borrowed from contemporaneous Islamicate philosophy and
theology, to discuss the new status of the Ottoman Empire vis-à-vis its neigh-
bors and the possibility of restoring it to its former glory. In this respect, it is
not surprising that those who may be called “Westernizing” ideologues were,
in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, visibly engaged in a conversa-
tion with the “traditionalists” rather than in a blind confrontation (although
ideological conflict was increasingly present); furthermore, occasionally a
“traditionalist” thinker might advocate more “Europeanist” reforms when the
sultan’s government favored such a policy. For one thing, as seen in the previ-
ous chapter, Kâtib Çelebi’s argument that every stage of society (or a state) re-
quires different measures (and thus that the potential reformer should adopt a
problem-oriented policy rather than revert to some idealized constitutions
of the past) was very quickly integrated into works that otherwise belonged
to totally different political traditions. The idea that the measures to be taken
should be adapted to the needs of the age, just like a doctor adapts his medi-
cine to the age of the patient, became increasingly employed from the late
seventeenth century. In this respect, “traditionalist” thought was much less tra-
ditionalist than the label implies.
19 On such a case (Fazlızade Ali) see Kurz 2011; cf. also Yakubovych 2017.