Challenges in the Middle East and Africa 1800-1912, Research Paper Example

The Tanzimat Reforms

The modern reform era of what was then the Ottoman Empire took place between the years of 1839, with the ascent of Abdul Mejid I and ended in 1876, when the sultan Abdul Hamid took the throne (Soward, 1996, p. 3).  This is a historically significant period in Turkish history, for it did signal a time when Turkey began to turn away from traditional, eastern, largely Muslim ideals and turn to trends of thought that were largely Western and much more secular than had previously been the case.   Of historical significance, too, is the fact that these reforms, with the best of intentions, largely failed to achieve what they promised to do.  Just what these reforms were and why they failed will be explored in the following paper.

An Outline of the Tanzimat Reforms

In order to fully appreciate the importance of the Tanzimat Reforms, it is necessary to understand a little about the historical context in which they were written.  This era began with the Hatt-iSerif,  which was decreed in 1839 by Abdul Mejid I (Kjeilen, 2012, p.1).  The reforms came at a time when the Ottoman Empire appeared to be crumbling, and in response there were many Ottomans who wished to help stabilize the Empire before it was too late.  When the Hatt-i Serif came out, it outlined three radical reforms which its proponents hoped would rebuild the strength of the Ottoman Empire. These three reforms included:

1. A guarantee of the life, honor and property for all people in the Ottoman Empire, regardless of their religion, language or culture
2. A regular tax system to help rebuild the crumbling finances of the Empire
3. A regular conscription to the military, with citizens serving a set term of 3-5 years (Goodwin, 2014, p.25).

Reformers in this era also sought, among other things, to reform the legal system to ensure that it was more ethnically diverse and included both Muslims and non-Muslims.  Education reform to promote schools that, again, catered to people of all religions was also a priority and there was a movement to end the old-style land laws which essential made farm workers into sharecroppers or hired laborers under the control of the landowners. (Goodwin, 2014, p. 30).  In short, the Tanzimat documents sought to reform nearly every aspect of Ottoman social, political, educational, economic and military life.

Why the Tanzimat Reforms Ultimately Failed

Succinctly put, one of the chief reasons why these attempts at reform failed was that they came too late (Kjeilen, 2012, p. 1).  The Empire was already essentially in its twilight, too deeply entrenched in its ways for reform to have a major impact.  Sowards, in writing about why these reforms were not successful, outlines five main reasons for the Tanzimat failure:

1. The cultural prejudice that assumed that Muslim institutions were inherently better than the institutions of non-Muslims. One of the main criticisms of these reforms was that they were Western and from “infidels”.
2. Deeply entrenched cultural institutions like the ulema, which saw these reforms as a threat to their own power and were able to fight against them as a matter of self-protection
3. The reforms were not taken seriously except in times of crisis, and in its weakened state, the Empire was not always able to respond to crises in a timely manner and this caused the reforms to lose credibility.
4. Many of these reforms focused in on what Sowards calls external factors, things like military defeats that were coming from outside the Empire when, in fact, much of theweakness was internal, coming from within the Empire itself.
5. These reform had strong individual reformers who were their proponents, but many of these ideas never took root in the populace the way that, for example, the abolitionist movement did in American before the Civil War. Because of its lack of popularity, the movement could be hampered by removing the individuals who were its main proponents. (Sowards, 1996, p. 87).

Goodwin, when writing about the reasons why these reforms encountered so much opposition, also notes that while the Tenzimet had many good intentions about improvement of the empire, it was not a constitution and “did not outline the relationship between the government and the governed….this led to a government that was unstable and lacked homogeneity, even though it was becoming more secular in appearance” (Goodwin, 2014, p. 40). To sum up, the reasons for the failure of these reforms were as complex and varied as the social problems they were trying to solve.

Concluding Thoughts

Just because these Tanizmat reforms did not succeed in doing all that they promised, does not mean that they are not important or that they failed to achieve anything in the end.  They perhaps makes them so important is how symbolic they are of Turkish history, character and thought. It was Rudyard Kipling, the great apologist for colonialism, who noted that “East is East and West and West and ever the twain shall meet”. However, Turkey, by reason of its location and history, has always been torn between East and West, between strong Muslim traditions and the more secular West, between allying its culture with Asia and allying it with Europe.  It is possible to see the tensions in Turkish society even today: Ankara is a modern, European-feeling metropolis with strong secular and Western traditions, while out in the poorer, more traditional, less educated countryside, girls are still forced into marriage in their teens, even though there are supposedly laws against it.  Setting against this backdrop, then, the Tanzimat Era can be seen as a microcosm in the macrocosmic history of this rich and complicated land as whole, and its struggles to find its own national identity in the midst of what is quite a deep cultural divide.

References

Goodwin, K.  (2006). “The Tanzimat and the Problems of Political Authority in the Ottoman Empire 1839-1876.”  Honors Project Overview Paper 5.  Web. 20 May 2014S

Kjeilen, T. “Tanzimat”. (2012). Looklex Online Encyclopedia.  Web. 30 May 2014.

Sowards, S. (1996). “Macedonia and the Failures of Ottoman Reform”.