Osmanlı'da siyasi ve hukuki bilginin sekülerleşmesi bağlamında 'Meşrutiyet' kavramı (1860-1911)

This study examines how politics and law became secularized around the concept of the Meşrutiyet in the Ottoman Empire, focusing on how the constitutional debates were held between 1860-1911. This work is made by analyzing the written texts in which the concept of the Meşruti-yet was discussed by using the Critical Discourse Analysis method. For this reason, our discourse analysis, starting from the texts of New Ottomans such as Namık Kemal and Ali Suavi, etc., includes the texts written during the reign of Abdülhamid II and the discussions on Kanun-u Esasi in 1908 and later. What draws attention in all these texts is the efforts of the actors demanding the Meşrutiyet regime to legitimize the Constitutional regime by predominantly referring it to Islam. By referring to traditional/classical Ottoman legal-political concepts such as Siyaset, Siyaset-i Şer'iyye, Şura, Meşveret, it has been claimed that the constitutional regime is actually nothing different from the traditional Ottoman politics-law practice. However, the historical process and cultural aura of the constitutional monarchy practice and the traditional/classical Ottoman legal-political practice are both ontologically and epistemically different from each other. This difference was ignored and analogies are made between different concepts/practices and it is assumed that they were the same. However, these analogical approaches transform the traditional/classical Ottoman legal and political thought in the field of practical politics-law and cause it to be secularized.