A Genealogy of the Concept of Civilization (Medeniyet) in Ottoman Political Thought: A Homegrown Perception?

According to Elias, while the Anglo-French conception of civilization underlined the singularity of the European civilization as the progress of not only the West but also of humankind, the German conception preferred to utilize Kultur instead of Zivilisation to denote what the Anglo-French conception meant. [...] The Ottomans understood that the ultimate fate of the non-civilized was subordination by the civilized, yet most of them were still not convinced about the European-ness of civilization and the impossibility of any alternatives to the European civilization. [...] Unlike the pro-Western intellectuals, the Islamist intellectuals of the late Ottoman Empire were quite firm in the distinction between the material and moral elements of civilization and the adoption of the former. [...] The diplomats admired the order, well-being, and magnificence of the European capitals in which they had served, and they learned that a similar level of development could be attained in the Ottoman Empire via the ‘practice of civilization.’ In other words, the initial Ottoman perception of civilization differed from the European view in the sense that civilization was not the end, but the means t. [...] In sum, the distinction between material and moral elements of civilization, the unconditional and immediate adoption of the former, and the rejection of the latter turned out to be the basic Ottoman understanding of civilization from the Tanzimat period until the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire.