380 chapter 8
meşveret (Y1093–1094), a notion usually glorified in Islamic thought, is a rare
example of straightforward absolutism.92
The point is not that Şanizade glorifies Mahmud II’s absolutism, which after
all is natural (and Selim II’s Westernizing attempts had nothing democratic
about them, for that matter), but that his reasoning, from beginning to end, is
articulated in a strictly traditional style, even though the notions he uses are
distinctively modern (“majority”, “patriotism”, “national/religious zeal”). What
is important for our point of view is the persistence of traditional vocabulary
and ideas even on the eve of the Tanzimat reforms (which, as will be seen, were
far from articulated in a European-style vocabulary). The trend we named here
“traditionalist”, after all, did not advocate any aversion to European influence
nor did it promote the static image of “world order” that prevailed before the
second half of the seventeenth century; Ömer Faik’s “old order” was conceived
of as a complement to Selim’s “new order”, and Penah Efendi’s “new order” was
perhaps more in line with Kâtib Çelebi’s proposals than with Selim’s new army.93
Its difference from the “Westernizing” trend, which will form the subject of the
following chapter, is that it did not endorse the need to imitate European state
and military organization; whatever ameliorations these authors proposed
were rooted (at least in theory) in the eighteenth-century Ottoman tradition of
experimentation rather than in wholesale admission of the experience of the
infidels. In a way, authors such as Penah or Behic Efendi favoured moderniza-
tion without Westernization.
92 I delve into some of Şanizade’s views on democracy and consultation at some length in
Sariyannis 2016, 53–55 and 57–59.
93 On the concept of “new order” as a rupture with the older concept of “world order” see
below, the conclusion, and Menchinger 2017, 166–168.