On April 16, Turks will vote in a national referendum that will, if successful, give President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan increased powers over parliament, the judiciary, and other parts of the civil bureaucracy. The offices of head of government and head of state will be unified in the person of Erdoğan, and the clock will also restart on his presidential tenure; he could stay in power until 2029. To many Western observers, this will be but the latest step in a return to the kind of authoritarianism that is common to many countries of the Middle East. It also seems to accord with the increasing turn away from democratic practices in many parts of the world, from Putin’s Russia to Trump’s America.
On closer inspection, however, what is happening in Turkey shows distinct traces of an earlier phase of Islamic-minded autocracy in the country’s history. Coming after an era of pro-Western democratization early in Erdoğan’s tenure, the recent shift toward Islamist rule under an unassailable ruler is a reaction to the Turkish Republic’s secular, rationalist twentieth-century founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, as well as to the pluralist strain of modernization that more liberal Turks have advocated. Furthermore, it derives much inspiration from the late Ottoman Empire under Abdülhamid II, who ruled for more than thirty years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. [...]
In recent years, Abdülhamid has been the prime beneficiary of this revisionist current. He is spoken of with admiration by government ministers, who refer to him as the “Great Emperor” and—again in reaction to Atatürk, whose campaign of language reform removed many Arabic words from the Turkish lexicon—couch his name with reverential, Arabic adjectives. In stark contrast to the generally hostile silence surrounding the Ottoman ruler as recently as fifteen years ago, he is now remembered in events such as concerts and exhibitions, and an Istanbul hospital was recently renamed after him. On February 24, the state broadcaster aired the first episode of a major new series recounting the last thirteen years of the sultan’s reign, which shows him to be a steadfast, honorable, and pious ruler beset by scurrilous courtiers, iniquitous foreign powers, and a youthful Theodor Herzl scheming for the establishment of a Jewish homeland in Ottoman Palestine. The descendants of the Ottoman royal family, who were exiled from Turkey when Atatürk abolished the dynasty in 1923, have been welcomed back onto ancestral soil. One of these ex-royals, Nilhan Osmanoğlu, recently articulated the nostalgia felt by many Turks when she said, “When we look at the confusion in the Middle East…we see how well the Ottomans administered this part of the world.”
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