ABSTRACT
EXTERNAL AND INTERNAL PRESSURES had produced the compromise of a constitutional experiment in which one of two conflicting elements in the Young Ottoman ideology emerged triumphant. The “constitutional absolutism” of Abdül-Hamid was the result of the constitutionalists’ attempt to solve inconsistencies created by the duality of state and religion in the Tanzimat regime; it was not a system imposed by a single man against the will of the people. Only after the Ottoman Empire had shown unmistakable signs of dissolution was Abdül-Hamid singled out as the man responsible for its collapse. Then different men representing irreconcilable interests—the spokesmen of European imperialism, the Young Turks who remained loyal to the Young Ottoman heritage of Union and Progress, those who aspired to Armenian or Arab nationalism, and those who, after serving the Hamidian regime, outdid all others in their denunciation of it—spoke out in the name of liberty and portrayed Abdül-Hamid as a tyrant.
