"...term "cultural revolution" to refer to the vast social changes of the 1910s in the Ottoman Empire is overused, it nonetheless speaks to something that indeed was felt at the time - that the culture of the empire was changing dramatically, and in uncertain ways. Academies for women were being opened, particularly in Christian districts, for the first time, and education reform in general was high on the agenda of the Ahrari government. Sabahaddin, for his part, detested the term, preferring instead the moniker "national modernism," emphasizing his remarkable liberalizing streak ongoing for years at that point as not Westernizing in nature but rather as the new form of Ottoman nationalism, playing upon the very real Ottoman sense that Western powers had preyed upon their empire for decades if not centuries, and that by modernizing the Porte could reliably prevent any such humiliations again.
In that sense, the Ahrari agenda was centered just as much in Ottoman - particularly Anatolian Turkish - resentment as it was in Sabahaddin's very real Anglophilia, which he nonetheless tempered compared to some of his contemporaries such as Ahmet Risat Rey or Damat Ferid Pasha, who saw Britain not just as an example of strong finances, navy and industry but also in its free-trading, secular and liberal outlook. Sabahaddin was more canny than either of these two fellow travelers, resting much of his stature and political capital on the fact that it was he who had ended the tyranny of European control over Ottoman finances and taken the Empire out from under the thumb of the OPDA - this optimistic energy of the mid-1910s, of the Ottomans being given their "place at the table" as an equal to other European powers, fueled as much of the national modernism as the genuinely secularizing impulses of the emerging middle class in Constantinople, Salonica, Uskup and elsewhere or the political impotence of the quiet, unassuming Sultan Mehmed V, who beyond his disinterest in statecraft and considerable interest in Persian literature, studying new languages and playing the piano was a meek personality with little ability to stand up to the Jupiterian personalities of both Sabahaddin and his Ittihadi rival, Ahmed Riza.
Nonetheless, the Sultan remained a powerful symbol even if his power had declined markedly even compared to his brother, who had chafed at Constitutional restrictions rather than embrace them wholeheartedly and with relief, and Mehmed, in his role both as temporal constitutional monarch and as Caliph, lent a great deal of legitimacy to national modernism. He never once criticized Sabahaddin or his policies publicly and seldom privately to confidants, either; he was a popular figure with the Ottoman street, traveling through Constantinople by carriage, rather than a recluse as his predecessor had been until his assassination in Sarajevo on one of his few tours of his realm. While some of the changes ongoing, particularly in large cosmopolitan cities, were beginning to irritate the ulama, Mehmed's tacit acceptance of the Ahrari program gave it cover as not appearing un-Islamic or heretical.
This should not be taken to imply that the national modernist movement was wholly bought into by all Ottoman subjects, or that opposition to it was solely Muslim in nature; rural bezirks saw considerably fewer changes, and conservative Orthodox Christians were no less hesitant at the increasingly secularizing nature of the Ahrari government. Sabahaddin, for all his modern reputation as an iconoclastic radical, also tempered - in part out of pragmatism and in part out of his position as a junior member of the royal family - certain proposals or killed them outright, most prominently the push by the "Latinists" of the Ahrar Party to replace the modified Arabic script with the Latin alphabet, and he also opposed laws that would ban the fez or hijab, with him viewing either as a personal expression of piety no different than Greek or Bulgarian women wearing headscarves into their churches or Jewish kippas.
For in the end, Sabahaddin's program was one that looked to Japan's rapid modernization as a model for the Ottomans, and to finally complete the promise of the Tanzimat and Constitutional Revolution that had been slowed to a gradual grind in the final decades of the 19th century under Abdulhamid. The Ottomans, as the north star of the world's second-largest faith and the great power of the Eastern Mediterranean at one time, deserved their return to glory, and only through rapid industrialization and self-determination could they achieve it, and Britain was a model for a distinct purpose rather than an end to itself. It is for that reason that one of Sabahaddin's prides was the Naval Law of 1915 to greatly expand the Empire's fleet, and in early December 1916 it bore its first fruit with the delivery of the dreadnought Yavuz Sultan Selim from Britain. The first genuinely modern dreadnought of the Ottoman Navy, rather than a purchase of a dated vessel from another country, was a sea change in the strategic calculations of the region; as it steamed through the Aegean to be met by adoring crowds in Constantinople, where the government supported a large Navy for the first time in contrast to Abdulhamid's suspicions of a large professional officer class that could conspire at sea, it was followed closely by Greek and Italian vessels, representatives of governments that were most certainly unenthused about the implications of this new change..."
- The House of Osman
). And even the political climate is going to be very different; without a Return to Normalcy, we're going to see a Progressive Era v. 2.0 that is more radical.
