ABSTRACT
The Ottoman Empire managed to survive the long nineteenth century as the only Muslim empire which was also a part of the European balance of power system. Though considered and self-perceived as an Empire that lost its power in comparison to its European rivals, it was still a significant political entity that could reform and restructure itself to the changing conditions of power relations and legitimacy structures. It was in the last decades of the Ottoman Empire that it also became a site and a subject of transnational Pan-Islamic Muslim discourses. In the century of Ottoman reform and Westernization, Ottoman Muslim intellectuals’ relationship with Eurocentric categories of knowledge, especially with regard to question of civilizational and religious identity, exhibit an unexpected trajectory. If one looks at the writings of Ottoman intellectuals from the 1830s to the 1860s, one cannot find any mention or formulation of the idea of an Islamic civilization or PanIslamism. The predominant paradigm was about a singular world civilization in which Muslim lands and Ottoman domains were temporarily lagging behind, but had the full capacity, intention and promise of catching up.1 Yet, Ottoman journals from the 1880s to the 1920s were full of discussion on Islamic and Western civilizations, European images of Islam and Pan-Islamic solidarity. It was during this period that Ottoman Muslim intellectuals engaged not only with Western imperialism, but also with the Eurocentric categories of knowledge in the social sciences, world history and human diversity that shaped their crucial contribution to the formation of modern Muslim thought. The intellectual achievements of Ottoman Muslim reformists, especially in their re-employment of Orientalist categories around the notion of an Islam-West civilizational divide, are still influential in contemporary Muslim thought. Recognition of the continuing relevance of the late nineteenth century reinvention of the content of transnational Muslim identity, partly produced by Ottoman Muslim elites, may help us better critique contemporary ideologies of political Islam, as well as Western discourses on the Islamic threat.
