ABSTRACT
We are perhaps too close to the Ottoman centuries to see them in perspective. It is rightly no longer fashionable to see the late Ottomans as the tail end of a corrupt system, bereft of ideas and suppressing all the energies of the varied components of their Empire. For much of the last century they were seen as having simply preceded the ‘isms’ that modern nationalism has spawned and thus inherently wrong-headed. Arab nationalists like the Lebanese-American historian George Antonius put it provocatively in his work The Arab Awakening. He saw the Ottoman system as loose and insecure, able to be openly flouted
whenever a rebellious vassal would successively defy the ruling Sultan. Sensational figures stalk across the stage of those three centuries, now martial and heroic figures like Fakhruddin and Dahir al-`Umar, now merely brutal and sanguinary like Ahmed al-Jazar and the Mamluks of Cairo; but always solitary and self-seeking … never overthrowing or seriously threatening the hold which Suleiman the Magnificent has fastened on the Arab world.1
