Ahmet T Kuru said that he cannot comprehend how does the Ottoman Empire collapse and indeed stagnated because he(T Kuru) cannot see the intellectual vibrancy that has been passed down to him. He also said that just because an Ottoman scholar from Harvard denied that there is an Intellectual decline why should we listen to them rather T Kuru who is an Ottoman because he lives in the realm.
Before we tackle the decline thesis there are 4 things to take into account regarding the question of decline
1. The changing nature and adaptability of Ottoman state and society;
2. Indigenous or internal social, economic, and/or intellectual processes displaying signs of modernity prior to the advent of the West;
3. The comparability of Ottoman state and society with their counterparts in the world in the same period; and
4. A logic, or a framework, alternative to decline and the Eurocentricism implied therein, that takes into account the phenomena of the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries.
Among the earliest scholar who challenge this general paradigm in his essay “The changing face of the Fertile Crescent in the XVIII century”, Albert Hourani raised an important point to think about the late Ottoman and muslim world. he propose us “to ask whether in fact it was decaying and lifeless; whether indeed we can speak of a self-contained Ottoman Moslem society ‘before the full impact of the West was felt’.’
Here Daniel Goffman an Ottoman scholar in his book The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe provided a frame to understand how to think about the modern era of the Ottoman.
“The fact remains that the empire did in the end collapse, and that perhaps at first a malaise and then a decline must at some point have settled in before the final dissolution. Nevertheless, we can at least try to contextualize this hard reality by recollecting that the historian always has the advantage of hindsight. We need to remember that until after the First World War, the Ottoman Empire still existed. For someone living in 1669, for example, it surely seemed more likely that Italy rather than the Ottoman Empire would disintegrate; for someone living in 1789 it seemed more likely that France would cease to exist than that the Ottomans would do so; and even for someone living in 1919 it still must have seemed probable that some truncated Ottoman entity would endure. It makes good sense, I think, to conceive the early modern Ottoman world broadly as a multi-faceted entity rather than narrowly as a state embarking on a long death march, to insist that rot in some of its components did not mean consuming decay, and may even have reflected brilliance onto other features of the state and society. In other words, we need to understand that the decline model is not so much wrong as entirely insufficient; it conceals behind its visage simply too much that was creative, enduring, and resolute”
Concluding from his work Prof Asad Q Ahmed that insist that this narrative of decline post-ghazali is of course an uniformed scholarship “The narrative of decline in the post-classical period of Islam, from the 1200s to the present, is an invention of rather uninformed orientalist scholarship. In fact, in recent research, we have discovered a rather vibrant tradition sustained well into the late 19th and early 20th centuries”. Furthermore, he also attest to the idea that post-Ghazali is not a decline in intellectualism but rather a vibrant era of intellectualism even in the time of political turmoil.
Khaled El-Rouayheb in his book “Islamic Intellectual History in the Seventeenth Century: Scholarly Currents in the Ottoman Empire and the Maghreb” discuss this general paradigm of decline that tend to victimised the victim of colonisation as a stagnant civilization/empire that fails to modernise according to the general trend of the colonizer. “Dominant narratives of Islamic intellectual history have tended to be unkind to the seventeenth century in the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Three independent narratives of “decline” – an Ottomanist, an Arabist, and an Islamist – have convergedon deprecating the period as either a sad epilogue to an earlier Ottoman florescence or a dark backdrop to the later Arab “renaissance” and Islamic “revival.” Until recently, Ottomanists typically located the heyday of Ottoman cultural and intellectual achievement in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. After the death of Suleyman the Magnificent in 1566, the Empire was supposed to have entered a period of long decline that affected both its political military fortunes and its cultural-intellectual output. Scholars of Arabic literature and thought were inclined to view the seventeenth century as yet another bleak chapter of cultural, intellectual, and societal “decadence” (inhitat) that began with the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258 and came to an end only with the “Arab awakening” of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Historians who study self-styled Islamic “reformist” and “revivalist” movements of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries have often portrayed the immediately preceding centuries as marked by unthinking scholarly “imitation” (taqlid), crude Sufi pantheism, and “syncretic” and idolatrous popular religious practices”.
On the Ottoman stagnation, Cemal Kadafar a giant in the Ottoman history, also noted how Fernand Braudel a well known annales scholar change his paradigm regarding the Ottoman stagnation, “The best indicator of the shifting winds may be the French historian Fernand Braudel change of opinion regarding the post-sixteenth-century Ottomans. Whereas his celebrated work on the Mediterranean continued the decline paradigm, by the time he wrote his Civilization and Capitalism he had come to think that “one cannot properly speak of the decadence of the Turkish Empire before the first decades of the nineteenth century”.
It is baffling that T Kuru quotes Braudel as his source to make the argument about decline of islamic civilization(as you can see in his table), but fail to quote Braudel revised idea in his later work.
Kafadar also sees the general idea of decline being problematic that “The category of decline woefully imprecise in that it inaccurately lumps together changes in ‘all spheres of life – political, military, institutional, social, economic and cultural’ – to cast them negatively in a linear and totalizing manner.”
I end to this debate of decline with a declaration by Dana Sajdi the Ottoman cultural historian of why this decline thesis is still being propagated in the academia and by thus unfamiliar with the Ottoman realm “One can think of a host of reasons for the recalcitrance of the decline thesis, including intellectual and institutional ones, but here I shall briefly touch on the most obvious – the political predicament. It seems that we are caught in an epistemological hegemony that lies beyond our immediate academic field and that resides in global power relations, thus forcing us to remain in a defensive position”
Thus, let us rethink of the question of decline carefully without succumbing to self-orientalization to propagate an epistemology that is alien to the Islamic Tradition.
