© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004385245_012
conclusionTowards an Ottoman Conceptual History
As stated in the introduction, the development of political discourse can be
rendered easier to grasp and to comprehend if we study the devopment of
its vocabulary; that is to say, the set of concepts and words in whose terms
political ideologies, mentalities, and advice are articulated. Given the rough
ideological currents described in the previous chapters, we will try to ana-
lyze the development of these concepts, i.e. the change—the widening or the
narrowing—of their meaning within the relevant discourses.
Before proceeding to the development of Ottoman concepts, however, it
might be useful to clarify the meanings associated by the Ottomans with our
own modern notions concerning politics; in other words, and following the
categorization proposed in the introduction, we will try an “etic” approach be-
fore the “emic” one. The reader may recall that on a theoretical level these is-
sues were briefly discussed in the introduction as well; here, we will revert to
them in light of the previous chapters.
1 Politics
Firstly, we tried to define the subject of this book as all discourse pertaining to
politics and governance, so at least a note should be made here on the various
conceptions of “politics” or, as is often said now, “the public sphere”.1 How did
Ottomans describe this sphere, and what were the features and sciences con-
sidered to be part of it? It is now commonplace that the term used for politics
in modern Turkish, siyaset, acquired this particular meaning quite recently:
medieval Islamic thought used the term as “statecraft”, considering it either a
branch of Islamic jurisprudence or (for the falasifa such as al-Farabi) a product
of man’s rational thought.2 For example, al-Ghazali enumerates four forms of
profession necessary for humanity, namely those pertaining to nutrition (ag-
riculture etc.), to clothing, to habitation, and finally the science which gives
1 On the definitions of “politics” and the “political” and their application in the Ottoman case,
cf. Dağlı 2013, 206ff. For a survey of a relevant discussion about the existence and character
of “politics” in cultures that had no relation to ancient Graeco-Roman thought whatsoever,
cf. Narayana Rao – Subrahmanyam 2009, 176–179.
2 See e.g. Najjar 1984; Burak 2015.