The influence of the ulema, the official Sunni Muslim religious scholars of the Ottoman Empire, is commonly understood to have waned in the empire's last centur

When the Ottomans commenced their modernizing reforms in the 1830s, they still ruled over a vast empire. In addition to today's Turkey, including Anatolia and T

In the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire traditional religious structures crumbled as the empire itself began to fall apart. The state's answer to schism was re

Religious community and nation have long been the chief poles of political and cultural identity for peoples of the modern Middle East. This work explores how m