The Last Straw – Robert Luongo

In 1812 Sultan Mahmut II sent an order from Topkapi that the wahhabis should be removed from the cities of Makkah, Madinah and Jeddah. It must be noted that the period of Mahmut’s rule, 1839-76, known as the Tanzimat, was, according to the confirmed Islamic perspective (differentiated from an Orientalist reading of events) the point of irreversible decline and fall of the Osmani Dawlah, otherwise known as the Ottoman Empire. This period was the one of disastrous ‘reforms’ from which the Muslim world has yet to recover. The modalities of Islamic governance, law and civic practice that had propelled a civilisation previously unequalled in its capacity to protect and assure the prosperity and freedom of its members, were traded in for a corruption-riddled French bureaucracy, and with it the most destructive of all alien innovations, an interest-bearing bank debt now payable in fiat money to the banks in France, and soon afterwards to those of England. On the back of the success of the Napoleonic Wars that saw the Russians defeated at Austerlitz, the Tanzimat government, having entered into ‘compromise’ with the French, found itself thrust into the Russo-Turkish war (1806-1812). The continual loss of territory as well as the rapidly eroding political prestige of the once powerful Muslim world had begun. It would not be until the heroic rise of the last authentic Sultan and Khalif, Sultan Abdulhamid II, that the banner of Islam would be raised again. For a short but glorious thirty-three years the light of the 7th century miracle that had burst out from the city of Madinah on the Arabian Peninsula would shine again. In 1908 Sultan Abdulhamid would be deposed, and with that tragic event began 100 years of immitigable failure.
Read it at Robert Luongo’s blog