The Islamist Prince of the Ottomans: Said Halim Pasha

Although the World War into which the Ottoman state had been dragged was carrying it toward defeat and collapse, it was at that time a great power occupying the position of representing all the Muslims of the world. Despite all its weakened and corrupted institutions, its bureaucracy, its society and its statesmen, it was still an Islamic state. It was a state representing the political bodily unity of the world's Muslims, and even though the Islamists of that period voiced criticisms of their own state of varying degrees of severity, all of them identified themselves with this state, and they made their criticisms for the reform of the state, not for its destruction.

Said Halim Pasha is undoubtedly one of the most important figures of the Islamism that came to prominence under these historical conditions. Much has been written about him and much has been said, but what has been said makes up only a very small part of what needs to be said, thought and discussed. On the 100th anniversary of his death, thinking about him under the conditions we live in today undoubtedly has a distinct meaning. On this occasion, the Zeytinburnu Municipality is organizing a fine meeting presenting him as an "Ottoman Grand Vizier and Thinker." Thinking about him also means, to some extent, thinking about ourselves.

It cannot perhaps be said that the Islamist thought and stances that Said Halim Pasha expressed were fundamentally very different from those of the Islamists of his own age, but even this is perhaps not because his ideas were a repetition of others' but because of his influence on them. Of course, another reason is that it concerns the "recurrence" dimension of Islamism, whose claims and origins ultimately rest on the same Book.

However much it repeats itself, it is certain that the performance of Islamism's expressions in this or that period adds a meaning or effect peculiar to itself.

It is also quite clear that Said Halim Pasha had a language and a power of his own in expressing Islamist discourses. It can easily be said that he expressed and grounded all the Islamist ideas of his contemporaries in the most consistent and realistic manner. Indeed, one of the most important features that gave him this power is that he had the opportunity to test all his ideas in the administration of the state, and to see and express what Islamist ideas amounted to at the level of the state. Considering this feature together with the title of "Prince" that he carried by virtue of his lineage and status, we can try to approach him in his capacity as the Islamist Prince of the Ottoman state.

The Pasha's quality as a Prince is not limited to his lineage alone. As is well known, among the characteristics Machievelli attributed to his famous Prince, the Modern Prince that Antonio Gramsci conceived as a design for the left and socialist movement is not thought of merely as a prince. Gramsci conceives the Modern Prince as a metaphor for the left and socialist movements, which he designed in a manner suited to the spirit of the modern age.

For Gramsci, Machiavelli's Prince, which inspired the design, represents the search for a comprehensive, coherent and stable social and political order for a Europe that had fallen into utter chaos, whose direction had become uncertain, and which had been deprived of the imagination of a social body. During the years of the Second World War, Europe was in no different a situation. Proceeding precisely from this similarity, Gramsci first embarks on a long analysis of problems for Europe and describes the present situation, but above all of this he sets about designing a "collective subject" that could play the role of the "Prince," able to see and solve these problems.

The "collective subject" is essentially a subject that will answer the problem of unity in the face of Europe's social and political fragmentation. Yet immediately after this emphasis comes the point that the most important thing for a common will capable of securing this unity to form is a leadership to lead it and the question of how this leadership is to be established. Of course, as a socialist he has a ready solution to this: for his own period, he would assign all social change and the leadership that would secure unity to the left-socialist movement in the image of a prince, and, as a class, to the proletariat.

Indeed, despite all its historical failure, despite the failure of all its claims to leadership in this direction, the left's desire to be a prince has never ended. Although the only material it had, the proletariat, had made its incompetence and lack of merit fully evident, and although the left saw this too and in practice gave up on it, it did not give up the desire to be a prince by assuming another body. In this way the left subsequently turned to seeking other social instruments that would realize its princely dreams.

It is quite clear that Said Halim Pasha, as an Islamist, saw Muslims as a subject for realizing the goals of Islam for this world. But it is equally clear that before this he had a serious analytical and realist approach to the question of where history was flowing. Despite all the weaknesses from which he suffered in his last days, through the offices and positions he occupied in the Ottoman state he thinks like a prince in both senses of the word; he tries to grasp the flow of history like a prince and give it direction. Thus he thinks of Muslims, and speaks of them, not as an object and victim of the realities being lived but as a responsible subject.

Of course, however much he thought in terms of a subject, he was living in a period when the Ottoman state, which he regarded as the actual center of all his designs, had hit the very bottom of its collapse. He is thinking about the course heading toward this collapse. On the one hand there is a vision of a perfect society, organization and sharia, but on the other hand there is the distance of the society he lives in and is responsible for from that vision. Therefore, the prince is not a prince of building from scratch but a prince of crises, the subject who identifies the crises of a functioning kingdom and treats them according to the prescription he holds.

This of course has very serious differences from the socialists' design of the subject.