Political Modernity 65Political, military and administrative reforms were responses of ruling groups
to new situations. The Ottoman reforms started in the late eighteenth century,
and, after much turmoil and many setbacks, were consolidated in the tanzimat
and legal reforms throughout the nineteenth century. This process constituted
the formation of the modern state, a quasi nation state, in the Ottoman Empire
and Egypt. The centralisation of state power was facilitated by the spread of
modern means of transport and communication and enhanced military capa-
bilities, not only technical but also organisational and political, such as the
bloody abolition of the by then useless and parasitic Janissaries in 1826. Many
spheres of social and economic functions were subsumed under state bureauc-
racy, crucially the legal system and education previously controlled by religious
institutions. The state intruded increasingly into the running and revenues of the
awqaf, until they became largely state institutions by the early twentieth century.
Transport and communication, crucially the railways and telegraphy from the
mid-nineteenth century, broke down the isolation of remote areas and brought
them into the spheres of the capitalist economy and state control, in the process
allowing primary units of production and solidarity to collapse.^9
There were also some crucial conceptual shifts, at least at the elite levels. The
concept of ‘state’ is a case in point. The term now translated as ‘state’ is dawla,
which in its pre-modern sense meant property or patrimony of a dynasty, as
in dawlat bani al-Abbas, or bani Uthman/Osman. The sovereign, not a concept
of an institution, was the absolute source of power. When Louis XIV uttered
his famous claim ‘l’état, c’est moi’, it was in the context of affi rming a notion
that was being contested on the eve of political modernity. In both Muslim and
Christian contexts this notion coexisted uneasily with the idea of the absolute
sovereignty of God, and many of the religious formulae of power glossed over
this ambiguity. Law for the Ottomans, for instance, was, theoretically, the law of
God, as promulgated and guarded by the ulama. The fact that so much of the
law was statute law, issuing from the will of the sovereign, was justifi ed in various
formulae regarding the administration and defence of the interests and powers
of Muslims. Ultimately, the law issues from the dual sources of God and King.
The conceptual innovation of modernity, as it developed in Ottoman reforms
of the nineteenth century, was to recast the law and its practice as impersonal
institutions of ‘justice’, adalet, with legislative bodies enacting law; and judges
and lawyers, trained in modern law schools, applying codifi ed laws, independent
from the books of fi q h or the statutes of the king: the idea of the ‘rule of law’, the
Rechtsstaat (Berkes [1964] 1998: 94–9; Zubaida 2003: 125–40). Related to these
concepts was that of ‘citizenship’. Citizens, as distinct from ‘subjects’, raaya, had
rights and duties defi ned by law, and were invited to participate in political proc-
esses through representation, and were equal before the law regardless of reli-
gious, tribal or regional affi liation (keeping in mind that these were the concepts,
not the practices). So many of the political confl icts and struggles over this period