The Young Ottomans became the first movement in the Muslim world to devise a modern ideology inspired by Islam. And, lo and behold, their ideology was a liberal one.
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In 1877, a general election was held—the first in Ottoman and indeed in Islamic history. The first Ottoman parliament met on March 19, 1877, with more than one-third of its seats filled by non-Muslims—Armenians, Greeks, Jews, and Bulgarians. The first Islamic liberal democracy was born.
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In 1876, the year the Ottomans unveiled their constitution, an uprising began in Bulgaria; it was quickly joined by Serbs and Montenegrins. Russia soon entered the picture, and the Ottomans suddenly found themselves at war with Russians, Serbians, Montenegrins, Romanians, and Bulgarians. Major battles occurred in the Balkans and the Caucasus, and the Ottoman military and the Muslim populations suffered huge losses. In Bulgaria alone, a quarter of a million Muslims, mostly Turks, were either slaughtered or died as a result of the war; half a million others, including thousands of Bulgarian Jews, had to flee to Turkey to survive.
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When he saw Russian troops just a few miles outside of his capital, Sultan Abdülhamid II, who had never been a genuine believer in democracy, decided that the empire needed order and discipline more than anything else. So, assuming “war powers,” he suspended the constitution and dismissed the parliament. The First Constitutional Period of the Ottoman Empire, as it later would be called by historians, had lasted just over a year.
This was only one of many examples of a burden that the Ottomans (and, later, other Muslims) would continually face while working toward reform: they were trying to liberalize while under foreign threat. The West, on the other hand, from the sixteenth century onward, moved toward political and economic liberalization without the pressure of a rival civilization or the insecurity of its borders. Even within the West, most liberal ideas flourished in those countries that were geographically more isolated and thus more secure than others—Great Britain and the United States.
Muslims, on the other hand, would be plagued constantly by fears for their survival (as in the Ottoman era) or by a lack of independence (as in the post-Ottoman colonial era). An additional burden would be the psychological resistance to adopting the ways of the West while the West seemed threatening or intimidating. Little wonder, then, that liberal ideas would be more popular within Muslim societies at times when they felt secure and respected, and less so when they felt insecure or humiliated.
