Did Said Halim Pasha read Marx?

Starting from the Ottoman constitutional experience and his views on the Kanun-u Esasi, Said Halim Pasha has drawn us into the middle of many other issues concerning the adventure of change and modernization we have been living through for the last two centuries, issues that are still valid today.

The most important feature that makes Said Halim Pasha significant is that he was both a very powerful thinker and, as such a thinker, one who reflected what he saw, lived and felt from the very top of the Sublime Ottoman State. He is a thinker who had his hand fully under the stone. Against those who reduce Islamism to a stance peculiar to opposition, he stands as the best example of an Islamism that shouldered the responsibility of a state, identified with it and tried to protect it. Without doubt, the analyses made from the horizon afforded by his personality and stance, which represent the governing form of Islamism, have a distinct importance and value.

In our last article we ended by saying that no finding had been encountered that he had read Marx or Weber, but that the sociological power of his later analyses displays very strong parallels with the sociological literature of the age.

Truly, no one can say that he repeated the theories or approaches of either of them one to one. However, his analyses, which form the basis for diagnosing the troubles the Ottoman state experienced in its last period, display a remarkable level of parallelism with the analyses of both thinkers.

First of all, his comparisons of eastern and western societies through class analysis constitute the first signs of this parallelism. In Ottoman society there are no bourgeois or aristocratic strata. In contrast, there is a serious bureaucratic class that the Pasha calls the stratum of memurin. The Pasha's analyses of this class are based on very sound observations that could form the basis for a critique of bureaucracy. They are observations untouched by any orientalist gaze, made entirely from within Ottoman society and aimed, in all their realism, first of all at diagnosing and solving its own problem. Perhaps he does not repeat Weber's and Marx's critique of bureaucracy, and even says very different things, but he certainly offers very valuable observations that can be added to the critique of bureaucracy by both.

The criticism that Said Halim Pasha directs at the optimistic view that social transformation can be accomplished through some political reforms seems to express, specifically for the Ottoman case, Marx's criticisms directed at those who hoped that the infrastructure could also change when the political level changed:

"What has led our reformers into such great errors is this: They supposed that by changing the political situation of the country as they wished, they could also succeed in changing its social condition. They fell into the error of being seized by naive ideas, such as that merely a number of laws and regulations could change the social structure of a nation as desired, just as the whole society is subject to the whims and feelings of the government."

Said Halim Pasha's construction of social structure, or his approach to the dynamics of social change, is of course not the same as Marx's. That is, he does not hold a definite premise that the economic, material infrastructure can unilaterally determine developments belonging to the superstructure such as politics, art, religion and ideology. In fact, he does not even have a conception such as infrastructure and superstructure. However, he sees very well that the reform programs implemented by the politics undertaken largely by the stratum of memurin imagined they could determine the Ottoman social and economic structure as they wished while ignoring it, and he expresses the critique of this delusion with his own distinctive approach that evokes Marx's.

According to the Pasha, this stratum of memurin fell into the error of being seized by naive ideas, such as that merely a number of laws and regulations could change the social structure of a nation as desired, just as the whole society is subject to the whims and feelings of the government. Yet in order to eliminate a bad course of events, an evil, it was necessary to know exactly its kind, its nature and the causes that produce it, and to resort to the most correct and most effective means necessary to eliminate its harm.

In fact, this approach is at the same time an expression of a much broader horizon in looking at social events. In the early formative period of sociology, under the determinism of pure positivism, a flat causalist approach prevailed. According to it, in order to explain any social event or social change in general, one could focus on a single cause. Those were also years when attributing the Ottoman backwardness or the development of Europe to religion was all the more in vogue, particularly among Ottoman intellectuals. In such an atmosphere Said Halim Pasha insists on the wrongness of attributing social events solely to religion, belief or a single factor:

"The influence of religious beliefs in social events is great. But very diverse factors such as the past of individuals, their character, their mentality and even the climate they live in also take part in this influence. Indeed, this is what distinguishes a social event from events concerned purely with religion and sect. For this reason, no one would ever dream of regarding a social event that has emerged anywhere, for example in France or Germany, as a religious matter, ascribing it to the religions found in those countries, and thereby determining the value and nature of those religions."

Although it was not his profession, the Pasha, in setting out a very powerful sociological notion with these words, was answering both the modernists who treated religion as the sole cause of decline and the expectations that religion alone could be the sole motivation for development.

With this answer he was also presenting an early example of the sociological sensitivity that would later become a general rule, namely that there can be many factors behind social events and that they cannot be attributed to a single cause.