The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State

The Politicization of Islam deals with social, cultural and political modernization, the ethnic formation of the Ottoman Empire, and the role of Islam and Sultan Abdul Hamid II (1876: 1909 AD) in adapting and contrasting and correcting this transformation and modernization.

The Ottoman Empire, like the rest of the Islamic world, was subjected to capitalism and the threat of violent European occupation in the nineteenth century, and the collapse of the traditional Islamic state, in turn, led to the liberation of society from the rule of political elites, and opened the way for society to search for means based on its own intellectual and spiritual resources to ensure its cultural and religious survival, and the state emerged as a means to preserve the Islamic culture of society and its identity, and also as a tool used by social and bureaucratic elites to perpetuate their hegemony.

لإhis process of  “Ottomanization”  sought to reformulate all existing old identities, well preserved under the old regime, into something new that can be referred to as: “re-Islamization,” “Turkification,” “Arabization,” or the like, which involved a cultural and political transformation and identity change unparalleled in previous Islamic history.