Politics of cultural change and religious discourse in the Nineteenth Century Ottoman Empire and Qajar Persia

Abstract

This thesis looks at the dynamics of rapid changes affecting cultures, discourses and ideologies in the early modern Ottoman and Qajar empires up to the constitutional revolutions of the early twentieth century. Both polities, under the political pressure and intellectual inspiration of Western Europe, engaged in technical and political reforms, by the hands of their governments. Along with them, far-reaching cultural changes occurred, re-shaping the empires' symbolic dimension, altering the meanings of all components of the social world. In the early modern Middle East, an important dynamic for intellectual innovation was the use of Islamic idiom in new specific discourses. Cultural changes were closely related to social ones, in a double-sense causal relationship. The dominant elites, especially the Hamidian regime in the Ottoman Empire and higher shi'i clergy in Persia, used religious discourses to naturalize their privileged social positions. They constructed these discourses according to their interactions with other strategic actors, and the effectiveness of their symbolic violence relied for a large part on the good-will of third parties willing to diffuse and enforce the official creed. Opposing the domination discourses, a number of resistance cultures appeared. The interstices of power in peripheries were filled with local symbolic constructions partly opposing the central one. Opposition ideologies, developed in places of exile and sustained by political subversion in the centers, frontally challenged the official discourses. Endogenous cultural confrontation, both by clandestine activism and during direct political conflicts, thus accounts for cultural change and the birth of ideologies in the early modern Middle East.