Opposition culture during the Tanzimat Period: the case of Ziya Pasha

The question of whether an opposition culture exists in the context of Ottoman political history remains a question that has not yet reached a satisfying answer. Ziya Pasha, one of the important members of the New Ottomans movement that emerged in the Tanzimat Period, has been chosen as the focus of this research initiated under the leadership of this question. However, since the aim of the study was to put the culture of opposition in a historical context and evaluate only after that, it was preferred to firstly descend to the theoretical origins of Ottoman political thought and its traditional sources of legitimacy. In the second part of the thesis, how the opposition has found a place in the face of this political thought, which constitutes the main subject of the first part and which is tried to be defined theoretically, has been studied through historical examples. In the third part of the thesis, the main subject of the study is focused on Ziya Pasha. Ziya Pasha was chosen here, as it is inherently going beyond the limits of this study to consider the new Ottoman movement with all its members. As is known, XIX. Century is a period when the Ottoman State entered a process of innovation and reform in many respects. The political aspect has been added to this transformation in the administrative, bureaucratic, economic and military fields at the beginning of the century, as of the second half of the century. The first provider of innovation in the field of politics is the use of newspapers, which are media organs. During this period, the Ottoman government in Babıali had to take a stand against the Ottoman intellectuals, whose voices gradually started to become louder and to defend themselves against their opposition. Here, Ziya Pasha and the New Ottomans, who responded to this attitude of the government with their reaction, preferred to continue their dissenting discourse by increasing it. In this study, where we deal with the historical course of this opposition style, Ziya Pasha's own newspaper articles were analyzed, and his reasons were examined, and for what reasons he opposed the government of the period and especially Âli Pasha. In addition to the political articles written by Ziya Pasha in the Hürriyet Newspaper, two political articles he wrote while still in Europe were also evaluated.