Bölüm anahatları

  • source= Elie Kedourie, Politics in the Middle East, 1992.

    THREAT AND PREDICAMENT

     A manual of Ottoman public administration dating from the end of the nineteenth century describes the progress of an application to a government office from a member of the public...  It is not only that the traditional functions of government now became the affair of a finicky and vexatious bureaucracy. It is also that the logic of reform acquired an impetus of its own, and led to the state assuming new responsibilities with a view of promoting the welfare of the people. The Ottoman Government wished to ameliorate the collection of taxes and the administration of justice… Reforming activity extended also to landownership and tenure… But the political purpose of the land laws, either to provide security for property, or to create a landed aristocracy, or an independent peasantry with a stake in the land, proved a failure… In Egypt, for instance, the prominent political figures under Muhammad Ali’s successors up to the abdication of King Faruq in 1952 did not derive their position from the ownership of land… Both Rescripts, that of 1839 and that of 1856, endeavoured to give solemn expression to these European ideals in an official document emanating from the highest authority –an authority whose power had been unbounded, and which now seemed to be committing itself to the limitation of this very power, and promising to put itself under the restraint of the laws… Decades, then, of intensive military, legal, and administrative reform in the Ottoman Empire, Egypt, Tunis, and (to a much lesser extent) Iran did not result in greater military security, better or more economical administration, stable or less precarious public finances, a more contented or less restless population.