The Eighteenth Century: the Traditionalists 361
authors inside policy lobbies or social groups. It appears, at any rate, that dur-
ing the first three quarters of the century there was no intense ideological con-
flict within the elite: the debates concerning the “old law” and innovation, as
well as those concerning Sunna-based policies, seem to have given way to a
smooth general consensus, at least as far as it concerned the balance between
shareholders in power, and to a rather abstract acknowledgment of Kâtib
Çelebi’s motto that different times require different measures. In the next
chapter, it will be seen that proposals for a fully-fledged imitation of European,
i.e. infidel, military science and organization were current by the 1730s or so;
however, the authors examined did not seem to feel as if they had to answer to
such reasoning. It seems that ideological conflict was resumed from the mid-
1780s, as Halil Hamid Pasha’s efforts to impose clearly Westernizing reforms
must have caused internal strife in the Ottoman government. A few decades
later, the janissary system would also feel the threat of such policies and would
begin to be more vocal in public discourse.
4 Traditional Reformers: Rivers in Confluence
As has already been stressed, the gap between the “traditionalist” views and
the actual “Westernizing” reforms of the later part of the eighteenth century
was much narrower than it might seem. Penah Efendi’s work is a typical ex-
ample, showing the mindset of an Ottoman reformer who would not stand for
the wholesale adoption of European military rules but nor would he restrict
himself to a “revival of the old laws”. In other examples, the same person could
move from “traditionalist” to more “Westernizing” viewpoints over the course
of his lifetime. An important factor in such a shift was state agency: since they
concerned military organization, Westernizing reforms could not be initiated
quasi-independently by the governmental bureaucracy, as was the case with
reforms and experiments in landholding or taxation. There were many more
interests at stake: because of the prominent place of the janissary army—or,
should we perhaps say, the janissary system—as a stakeholder in the political
arena, such attempts touched directly upon the problem of power and thus
could only be initiated by the state; that is to say, by a strong vizier, such as Halil
Hamid Pasha, or by a resolute sultan, such as Selim III. Thus, the interplay be-
tween absolutism and “constitutionalism” would emerge once more, this time
in more complex forms as the different sides borrowed freely arguments for a
common inventory, one which had been formulated earlier and for a different
context. The remainder of this chapter and the next will be devoted to this
interplay.