Sociological conditions for a constitution

The Ottoman Kanun-u Esasi coincided not with the stage of rise of a vast empire but, on the contrary, with the stage of dissolution of an empire that was growing weaker with each passing day, had become open to external interventions and was beginning to lose its advantages against its rivals little by little. On all sides, successive defeats and retreats had given rise to grave anxieties in everyone within the great Ottoman State, which was about to complete its six centuries, about diagnosing and finding remedies for this bad course.

Said Halim Pasha thought that this anxious situation also created an environment for grave errors among Ottoman intellectuals and statesmen. According to him, they were making the first great mistake by attributing to the state some diseases that were largely rooted in themselves. Then, in order to diagnose this disease, instead of getting to know and examining themselves, they read medical books and looked for ways to find cures for their own ailments. Imputing to themselves every disease they saw in the books they read actually showed what kind of disordered state of mind they were in.

The greatest cause of this disordered state of mind was their "failure to get to the essence of the matter" in the path of knowing themselves. That is, they had moved away from the shortest, most direct way of knowing themselves directly, and had placed a Western eye, lens or screen in between in order to know themselves. The Ottoman intellectuals and statesmen who had been sent to Europe to learn the West and to acquire the surplus knowledge and technique of the West had also brought back an eye from there; they looked at themselves with that eye, and therefore diagnosed their own diseases in the first instance with that eye. For that reason, they decided about the events truly taking place in their own bodies not on the basis of the feelings from the pains they suffered and the impressions they received, but according to the conclusions they drew from the books they read with that eye.

"For example, we had hoped that a Kanun-u Esasi could be a remedy for all our problems; that from the moment it was proclaimed it would have a messianic effect and possess a miraculous power that would change the political and economic situation of society overnight; that it would make us forget our very vulgar internal squabbles and unite and fuse us all into a noble and great Ottoman family thinking only of the glory and grandeur of the Ottoman homeland.

Yet from the very first year all these sweet hopes and beautiful dreams flew away. The rights and freedom granted to us by our Kanun-u Esasi gave no result other than allowing us to practice without hesitation the bad habits that the administration of Sultan Abdülhamit had extraordinarily increased. Everyone had hoped to attain more peace and security. On the contrary, everyone's unrest increased and each found himself more afflicted with evil than before. Because everyone had increased his audacity and had begun to encroach on the rights of others without any hesitation. Nationality struggles, racial rivalries, growing ever more intense, left no unity of ideal among the Ottomans."

Yet the ultimate aim of the Kanun-u Esasi was nothing other than ensuring social unity, in the famous phrase of political science, securing the integrity and health of the political body in the best way. The body, which was aging, had become unable to use its hands and feet, but with an intervention it could perhaps be restored to health and its integrity re-established and secured. But that Kanun-u Esasi experience was a bad experience, and according to the Pasha the most important reason for this was that "we wanted to do things that are harmful for us to do, or that it is not possible to do." Because we cannot benefit from our most perfect and most capable elements; because, although there is no possibility of benefiting from the bad and foolish innovations constantly brought into the country under the name of reform, we squander the efforts and work of our best men by obliging them to implement them. Because our reformers have never been able to understand that people are not created for laws and regulations, but laws and regulations for people.

According to Said Halim Pasha, the cause of all this incompatibility and failure lay in the fact that the spirit of the Kanun-u Esasi was a translation. It could never agree with the political and social condition of the country, its state of mind, its beliefs and traditions, and had even become a serious danger to Ottoman national existence. Because those who drafted and enacted the Kanun-u Esasi never took the country into consideration; they had fallen into the delusion that some scattered pieces of knowledge and theories that had somehow stayed in their memories would bring felicity to the country. Starting from such a delusion, the only work they could produce was one removed from realities and worthless, nothing other than the import of a half-baked imitation of Western constitutions.

Thus, according to the Pasha, the only cause underlying the failure of the Kanun-u Esasi was none other than "believing that the acceptance and import of foreign laws and institutions would provide the renewal and progress we need."

Yet a constitution is, above all, nothing but a contract among the elements of a society, proceeding from the society's own interior, its own language and its own realities. It was by its nature impossible for a text to fulfil the function of a constitution when it emerged, without any discussion or dialogue among the society's own elements, as a result of the Westernizing ideas and obsessions of some stratum of officials among themselves, as a reflection of their own psychological problems.

Of course, the sociological conditions that any constitution requires are not limited to this. Said Halim Pasha sets out, comparatively between Ottoman and European societies, the sociological conditions that were overlooked in the case of the Kanun-u Esasi. These were warnings that must absolutely not be forgotten. God willing, we will continue..