430 chapter 9
measures taken by Mahmud II following the 1821 Greek revolt, when (as nar-
rated above) he reverted to a peculiar kind of “applied Khaldunism” in order to
bring the Muslims back to their nomadic, war-like state. Apart from the order
for every Muslim to carry arms, these measures included renouncing luxuries
and attempted to impose a simplified way of dressing that would be common
for all.103 After all, Donald Quataert argued convincingly that it is in 1829 that
the beginnings of the actual age of reforms in the Ottoman Empire are to be
found, since all clothing laws before (and such laws were markedly present
throughout the eighteenth century, including the “Tulip Period” and Selim III’s
era) sought to impose social markers that distinguished along class, gender,
and social lines, while Mahmud II tried to create “an undifferentiated Ottoman
subjecthood without distinction”.104
On the other hand, it would be nonsensical to ignore European influences
when discussing the origins of the Tanzimat.105 French observers paralleled
the abolition of the janissaries with the French Revolution, and echoes of
French revolutionary ideology have been detected in the 1839 Gülhane rescript
(hatt-ı şerif ).106 However, the majority of scholars agree that the influence of
European ideas and institutions did not become pre-eminent until the peri-
od after 1839, and that even this first edict was much more traditional than
those that followed, or at least that its ideas were (in Niyazi Berkes’ words)
“a formulation of those that had become more or less crystallized during the
latter part of Mahmud’s reign”.107 True, Mahmud’s reform was a clear attempt
at Westernization, and particularly one that, for the first time, “appeared as
a formal policy linked to extensive bureaucratic reform and implemented
with brutal force”.108 On the intellectual level, however, there is no sign of the
direct influence of European ideas: the vocabulary of Mahmud’s orders and
even of the 1839 edict is still strictly Islamic, even specified (perhaps with a
degree of exaggeration) as a Nakşbendi-based emphasis on the Sharia.109 It
seems as if, unlike his unlucky predecessor Selim, Mahmud took great pains
103 Ilıcak 2011. Butrus Abu-Manneh sees a Nakşbendi, Sunna-minded influence, ignoring the
Khaldunist ideas strongly prevailing in this policy (Abu-Manneh 1982, 22–23).
104 Quataert 1997; Quataert 2000, 141–148.
105 On this discussion, see Koloğlu 1990; Abu-Manneh 1994, 173–176; Ortaylı 1994a; Findley
2008, 17–18.
106 Koloğlu 1990; Mantran 1990; Hanioğlu 2008, 72–73.
107 Berkes 1964, 144.
108 Hanioğlu 2008, 63.
109 Abu-Manneh 1994, 188ff. and esp. 194–198; cf. the synopsis of Findley 2008, 18, and see also
Ortaylı 1995, 86ff. The order announcing the abolition of the janissaries had also been
drawn by Pertev Efendi, an official with strong links to the Nakşbendi order, in a similar
vocabulary (Abu-Manneh 1982, 21 and 27).