Oxford Union and the Debate on the Ottoman Empire’s Demise

This week, after my italic introduction, a prominent Turkish intellectual Dr Cengiz Aktar shares his encounter with the Oxford Union and his regret over the Ottoman Empire’s demise.

Oxford Union, of which I am a life member, has always relished the performance of politics. It finds ways to stay in the news, either by inviting the controversial or by refusing them. It has long oscillated between a chummy, club-like insularity and the occasional urge to appear more modern, inclusive, and self-aware.

I used to read in its library and attend debates out of curiosity, to observe the manners and instincts of England’s elite politics when I was a student at the University of Oxford. As an alumnus now, I watch its term cards from afar, as it recycles tired discussions rather than generating new ideas. Nothing new or exciting remains, except perhaps the occasional reduced-rate pint at its members’ bar and the small comfort of magazines in its library. (The library itself, though, is still extraordinary.)

Lately, the Union has stumbled into deeper trouble. Its president-elect became the target of racist attacks after a WhatsApp message about the assassination of the American right-wing activist Charlie Kirk and was later ousted in a confidence vote. The disarray seems to have seeped into the planning of upcoming events, one of which you will read about in this post, in a guest essay by Dr Cengiz Aktar.

Aktar, a leading Turkish intellectual known for his work on modern Turkey’s relations with its religious and ethnic minorities and with Europe, particularly the EU, was invited over the summer to take part in a debate on the Ottoman Empire’s demise, scheduled for November. He accepted and began preparing, only to hear nothing further. The event, it turns out, is going ahead with a remarkable cast of the unserious. Their expertise on the Ottoman Empire or modern Turkish politics is, to put it mildly, thin. Among them are a self-styled Ottoman princess and an American property developer in Syria of whom will ‘regret the demise of the Ottoman Empire.’ Perhaps that, too, is fitting. After all, when property developers such as Donald Trump, Steven Witkoff, and Tom Barrack have occupied presidencies and ambassadorships, why not Union debates whose main purpose is spectacle.

If you want something more substantial on the void left by the Ottoman collapse and the nation-states that rushed to fill it, you can read Dr Aktar’s essay below. As always, your thoughts are welcome in the comments. Now I yield the floor to Dr Aktar.

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An unschooled Oxford Union episode followed by a serious debate material

by Dr. Cengiz Aktar

On the Second of July this year I received the following letter from the Oxford Union.

Dear Dr. Aktar,

I hope this email finds you well.

I am writing with an invitation for you to join us at the Oxford Union, for one of our historic debates. I have attached a letter from our President, Mr. Moosa Harraj, and we would be delighted if you were to consider and accept.

Founded in 1823, the Union is the largest society at the University of Oxford and one of the most prestigious debating societies in the world. In the past we have hosted visits from US Presidents Reagan, Nixon, and Carter, to celebrities such as Morgan Freeman, Julia Fox and Michael Jackson and world leaders like HM Queen Elizabeth, Malala Yousafzai and HH the Dalai Lama, to name but a few.

One of the Union’s most famous traditions is our Thursday debates, in which we confront the boldest questions of the day, giving an opportunity for our members to learn from, engage with, and be inspired by our guests. It is our pleasure to invite you to speak on the motion:

The House Regrets the Demise of the Ottoman Empire

For over six centuries, the Ottoman Empire stood as a vast imperial power bridging Europe, Asia, and Africa — administering religiously diverse populations with legal pluralism, cultural complexity, and relative regional stability. Its dissolution after the First World War ended the Islamic Caliphate and redrew the map of the modern Middle East and Balkans. In its place came a patchwork of fragile nation-states, colonial mandates, authoritarian regimes, and recurring sectarian conflict. To some, the fall of the Empire was a necessary moment of liberation — ushering in self-determination, secular governance, and the birth of modern Turkey. To others, it was a geopolitical rupture that sowed the seeds of enduring instability, from Syria to the Caucasus. Was the Ottoman Empire a decaying relic of imperialism rightly cast aside — or a stabilising force whose fall left a vacuum the world still struggles to fill? This debate revisits one of history’s most consequential collapses.

Please let us know if any of these dates would be convenient for you. It would be a pleasure and privilege for us to host you.

Yours Sincerely,

Director of Press

The Oxford Union

In the course of the month until the 22th I corresponded with the Director of Press, particularly about the final date which was set for the upcoming 20 November 2025. As I haven’t heard from the Union during the whole summer I wrote on 6 October to the team, i.e. the President, the Librarian and the Treasurer asking for an update. Having been left unanswered, I started to understand what was going on through Oxford related colleagues and friends, to discover to my astonishment that the meeting was on track without me and one other early invitee.

In the meantime, naturally I’ve had prepared my talk as since receiving the invitation I’ve found the proposed debate in line with my reflection, very to the point and worth expanding.

I do not wish to go in cumbersome details of the team who will debate on 20 November but simply remark that the Union cancelling me has actually spared me from interacting with inappropriate speakers whose credentials seem irrelevant to this essential debate. Below is the speech I prepared for the Union debate.

“This House regrets the demise of the Ottoman Empire”

The Tophane Fountain, built by Ottoman Sultan Mahmud I — 18th-century engraving by Antoine Ignace Melling.

In a world where even simple conversations have been reduced to messaging and scrolling, I would like to commend the Oxford Union for brilliantly preserving debating traditions.

This House was established in 1823, around the same time that Greece—the first modern nation-state—was on the verge of liberating itself from the Ottoman Empire. This liberation was a likely consequence of the Empire’s prolonged decline, which began two centuries earlier under the multidimensional pressures from Europe and a Westernizing Russia under Peter the Great. The clash of civilizations arguably dates back to this period.

Ottoman Empire as the other model of imperial coexistence

A cosmopolitan and pre-modern polity, the Ottoman Empire was the nemesis of its British and French counterparts. It was a vital stabilizing and security-providing force (the Pax Ottomana) with which wars and alliances were made. In fact, it represented an alternative model of coexistence and provoked European political thought for centuries—from Erasmus to Luther, Machiavelli to Montesquieu, Mozart to Cervantes, among many others.¹

While the Ottomans built a heterogeneous governance system in the east of Europe, an exclusionary mindset arose in the west, seeking to reject Arabs, Jews, and Muslims from the Western intellectual sphere. The early rejection—what today might be called cancellation—of the arabo-judeo-muslim contribution to the Renaissance began with Saint Thomas Aquinas, who vehemently opposed Averroes.²

This gave rise to what can be termed “proto-orientalism” in the Latin world, especially Venice, in the early 16^th century, sparked by a debate around Petrarch’s 1368 work, De sui ipsius et multorum ignorantia (On my ignorance and that of many others). In this text, Petrarch completely dismissed the contributions of the Arab-Muslim philosophers of the Golden Age—such as al-Farâbî, Avicenna, and Averroes—thereby rejecting the critical transmission of Greek philosophy to Europe, which had become the integral part of Renaissance. From that point, this intellectual lineage was relegated to the exotic.³

This break was historic and decisive, likely shaping the West’s ideational approach to the Orient even today.

Alienation and attraction - The Westernisation process

Indeed the relations changed dramatically during the Renaissance. The Ottoman rulers succeeding Mehmed II, conqueror of Constantinople, underestimated the Renaissance and lagged behind their rivals both technologically and politically. This was despite the Ottomans’ enlightened act of welcoming Iberian Jews expelled by the Reconquista. The Empire, as the standard-bearer of Islam after al-Andalus, paradoxically restored Orthodox Christianity’s primacy in Ottoman lands, which had earlier been undermined in favour of Catholic Rome during Byzantium’s decline. Thus, the Ottoman Empire simultaneously upheld both the Islamic realms of the Mashreq and Maghreb and the Greek cultural heritage anchored in Constantinople after Byzantine fall.

However, Europe’s collective memory, reshaped by the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, retained the medieval image of the Ottoman—erroneously labelled as “Turk”—as the “infidel conqueror,” a Muslim, a sworn enemy of Western Christianity (inimici christianitatis). By the late 18^th century, this image expanded to embody an imperial yoke oppressing emerging nations fighting for freedom.

These heavy stereotypes framed the Empire as radically alien to Europe. The metaphor became official policy, with efforts to push the Empire back whenever it showed weakness starting in the late 17^th century. Yet, the Ottoman retreat from Vienna’s gates and the Balkans did not end their interactions; military setbacks sparked fascination with European advancements that had once been scorned. That corresponds to the timid commencement of the Westernisation.

Such a radical transformation appears as a profound imaginary defeat, considering the Empire’s long contest with Europe. For example, the Bab–ı Âlî, the Sublime Porte or Ottoman administrative centre, sent its first ambassador to London as late as 1793—almost two centuries after British, French, Dutch, and Venetian chancelleries had opened in Constantinople. This deliberate disregard reflected Ottoman contempt for Europe, making Westernization a shock, even though it was initially confined to the highest administration levels.

Constantinople⁴, in a desperate bid to preserve the Empire, decisively turns to the techniques of its hegemonic adversary, marking the start of Westernization about a century after Tsar Peter the Great, the emblematic “despote éclairé”, dubbed not-surprisingly “Peter the Fool” by the Ottomans, and contemporaneously with Japan’s Meiji era.

The process was voluntary, self-imposed, and carried out with available resources. It has driven transformations over the last two centuries in a region far beyond modern Turkey, covering over thirty nation-states that emerged from the Empire’s remnants. These reforms, starting at the late 18^th century and intensifying through the 19^th century—often called the Empire’s “longest century” due to the numerous pivotal events—aimed primarily at survival through administrative reform.⁵

Here arises the dilemma. The Ottoman Empire’s demise and its Westernization are established historical facts widely accepted as parts of a universal historical continuum. Yet the Oxford Union poses the core question: “Was the Ottoman Empire a decaying relic of imperialism rightly cast aside, or a stabilizing force whose fall left a vacuum the world still struggles to fill? For some, the Empire’s fall was a necessary liberation moment, bringing self-determination, secular governance, and the birth of modern Turkey. For others, it was a geopolitical rupture seeding enduring instability from Syria to the Caucasus, marked by fragile nation-states, colonial mandates, authoritarian regimes, and recurring sectarian conflicts”.

I would argue that although historically inevitable, the demise, intensified and consolidated by Westernization, was hardly peaceful and instead unleashed chaos.

The political fiasco can be illustrated through two major nation-states—Israel and Turkey—both deeply Westernized and weighty legacies of the post-Ottoman world. In other words “Nationisation” (allow me the neologism) and Westernization appear as the driving dynamics shaping these polities.

Turkey, Nation-Building and Social Overhaul

Turkey began the 20^th century with vigorous nation-building that excluded millions of non-Muslims from the national fabric. Paradoxically, Islam held the nation together as the sole common denominator, in the absence of any other common denominator, including the language.

The nascent nation, secular on paper yet erected on Sunni Islam, was necessarily exclusive. Non-Muslim communities were automatically delegitimized and forcibly removed: Armenians, Pontic Greeks, and Mesopotamian Syriacs were annihilated; remaining Greeks were sent to Greece; Jews faced pogroms and left. Hundreds of thousands of non-Muslims converted under duress to Islam to survive. The three-decade ethno-religious cleansing from 1894 to 1924 forged the region’s most religiously homogeneous state.⁶

French-inspired “laicist” positivism became part of the imposed Western modernity, top-down among the populace—like the colonizing and civilizing white man, except here the “whites” were local in Turkey and largely imported in Israel. This bred alienation and internal violence, constantly creating “others” void of social and political legitimacy in the face of the single legitimate identity: crypto-Sunni secular Turk and self-democratic Jewish Israeli. The religion in both cases functions as the ultimate reference and source of legitimacy.

Yet modern Turkey’s legitimacy was on the paper only. Its 1920s social landscape was more a patchwork of unintegrated communities than a cohesive society. Turkey’s thirteen million inhabitants after ethnic cleansings had neither national nor societal consciousness. Their backgrounds were diverse, reflecting the Empire’s cosmopolitan heritage and waves of non-Turkish Muslim immigrants from the Balkans and Caucasus displaced by territorial losses in the west and Russian pressure in the east.

Subsequently the modernizing gamble of the republican elite necessitated a social overhaul that ideally left no room for Islam, considered as the core impediment before a civilized polity. Pro-active laicism targeted religion, absorbing it into the state rather than untying it from worldly affairs. The tabula rasa ignored the fertile variety within Anatolian Islam, forcing religion underground and halting its evolution. This may explain Turkey’s modern Islam’s impoverished and static nature, as seen in its present political totalitarian turn.

Likewise, the lack of social legitimacy relates to the destruction of the local non-Muslim bourgeoisie. The Armenian bourgeoisie was wiped out during the 1915–16 Genocide and deportations; the Greek bourgeoisie was targeted in killings and forced population exchanges in 1922.

In plain terms, Turkey had to artificially invent both a nation and society to claim legitimacy and recognition domestically and internationally. The result is a permanent malaise consuming the polity at every level.

Israel and the Invention of a Nation-State

Israel’s creation was similarly dramatic. Conceived by Western powers for reasons including ingrained anti-Semitism, geopolitical considerations, and later Holocaust guilt, it was established in a land without a nation. The Zionist obsession of “a land without a people for a people without a land” as coined by Israel Zangwill. This planted foundational violence, nullified democratic pretences and gradually enforced religion-based uniqueness. Religion thus remains the sole cement of artificial nationhood in both Israel and Turkey, despite their respective secular claims.

To achieve legitimacy, Israel’s need to colonize and populate lands forcibly emptied of Palestinians led to aggressive immigration policies based on the religion. Since the beginning of the 20^th century Palestine is witnessing two parallel violence trails: the forced exclusion of non-Jews on the one hand and on the other, the forced assimilation of imported disparate Jewish communities, often not speaking Hebrew. Here, the “civilising” ideology of Zionism as well as the founding fathers of the invented polity were perceptibly of Western European extract. And such a polity could only perpetuate violence to maintain legitimacy as we witness today.

The Failure of the Post-Ottoman Order

The Ottoman syncretism and cosmopolitanism, which infused its culture until the hegemony of westernized nationhood, gave way to fragile, insecure nation-states. Insecure precisely because they are artificial constructs based on unhistorical uniqueness, reliant on religion and continuous quest for legitimation in view of the injustices and traumas they endured during their institution. The Holocaust for Israel and the demise of the Ottoman Empire for Turkey. Born from violence, these polities are fated for ongoing instability and failure. We are witnessing the Dark Side of the Enlightenment which, in view of the unparalleled genocide-level atrocities committed by Israel in Palestine thanks to the unconditional support and complicity of Western governments, has the potential to bury once for all the Bright Side of the Enlightenment.

1. A highly recommended work by Noel Malcolm Useful Enemies: Islam and the Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought 1450-1750, Oxford University Press, 2019

2. Libera, Alain, L’Unité de l’intellect. Commentaire du De unitate intellectus contra Averroistas de Thomas d’Aquin, Vrin, 2004

3. Büttgen, Philippe, A. de Libera, M. Rashed, I. Rosier Catach (eds.), Les Grecs, les Arabes et nous. Enquête sur l’islamophobie savante, Fayard, 2009

4. A world city par excellence, with dozens of names, Constantinople or Konstantiniyye in Ottoman Turkish, only became “Istanbul” in 1930 and takes its name, once again, from the Greek “στην Πόλη” “in the city or towards the city”. Istanbul was the Cultural Capital of Europe in 2010 reaffirming its centuries-old cosmopolitan past. See my contribution “Cosmos-polis” in Istanbul Ville Monde, La Pensée du Midi-Actes Sud, 2009

5. “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change” Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa would acknowledge a century later in The Leopard.

6. For a scholarly compilation see Astourian Stephan and Raymond Kévorkian (eds.) Collective & State Violence in Turkey. The Construction of a National Identity from Empire to Nation-State, Berghahn, 2020