The Eighteenth Century: the Westernizers 421
Thus, the continuity between the more traditional ideas discussed in
chapter 8 and the ardent defenders of Selimian reform is evident. They drew
on the same inventory of arguments, their only difference being the degree to
which they were willing to accept imitation of Western models. Some of the re-
current themes of reformist thought are apparent in Sekbanbaşı’s treatise: the
depiction of the undisciplined and ineffective nature of the janissary corps,
and of course the alleged origin of Western discipline from the Ottoman army
of the Süleymanic era; while he also refers explicitly to Müteferrika’s Usûlü’l-
hikem and Mustafa Ali’s Füsûl-ı hall u akd,77 it is quite probable that he had
read Resmi Efendi as well. He also introduces a new argument, or perhaps a
variation of what we have called the Muslim precedence argument: the justifi-
cation of new military stratagems by examples from the glorious Muslim past.
Kuşmani’s tract presents some of the most common reformist arguments (the
need for reciprocity or mukabele bi’l-misl, and the claim that the Nizam-i Cedid
contains no innovations) but also some quite original ones, such as the appro-
priation of a usually conservative precept (“commanding right and forbidding
wrong”: İ15–18, 80) and a vehement attack on Hacı Bektaş, the protector of the
janissaries (İ33–41). The mixed attitude toward Western mentalities is quite
noteworthy, as is an old-style attack on smoking (İ64–65) that brings to mind
the “Sunna-minded” authors of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century:
by Kuşmani’s time (if not earlier), smoking and frequenting coffee-houses had
become a trait of the janissary-cum-esnaf strata. As for his affinities with Vasıf
Efendi’s thoughts on the causes of European success and, more impressively,
on predestination and the role of human agency, they show once more that,
by the last quarter of the eighteenth century, there was an inventory of ideas
(including Na’ima’s Khaldunism and Kâtib Çelebi’s theory about innovation)
from which virtually every elite author could draw. The content of the argu-
ments, i.e. the politics they would eventually be used for, could change, but the
form remained the same, and there is no radical rupture, in terms of reasoning,
associated with the Selimian reform.
2.2 Janissary Views in the Mirror of Selimian Propaganda
Nevertheless, this image is somewhat misleading since it does not take into ac-
count the bulk of the Istanbul population, namely the janissaries and all those
associated with them.78 Indeed, the image of a society divided into two fiercely
77 See Wilkinson 1820, 217, 232 (on Ali) and 245 (on Müteferrika); cf. Aksan 1993, 61 and 68,
fn. 73 (=Aksan 2004, 39).
78 For an attempt to reconstruct the oppositions’ arguments, see Yıldız 2008, 168–181. A
document probably written by Mahmud Tayyar Pasha, a descendant of Canikli Ali Pasha