answer in a further question, one that had been asked with increasing urgency as the power of the Ottoman Empire waned in the face of Europe's development and expansion in the 18 th, 19 th, and early 20 th centuries: how can this state be saved? Bu devlet nasıl kurtarılabilir? The great debate revolved around this question, and around the causes of the decline of the Empire and Islamic world.
The struggle for Freedom emerged as the response of a group of intellectuals and literary figures, namely Namık Kemal and the Young Ottomans, to the solutions to the above question offered by the Ottoman rulers. The late 18 th and 19 th century sultans had sought to reverse the Empire's decline by a series of reforms, concentrating firstly on the army, then between 1839 and 1876 in the period known as the Tanzimat, on virtually every area of government, together with education and many areas of Ottoman life. The models for the reforms were all imported from the West, and were introduced largely under European pressure and advice.
Furthermore, the Europeans pressed on the Ottomans the idea that the only civilization was European civilization, and that it was only through espousing it that they could raise the Empire out of its state of relative backwardness. This false idea came to be accepted more and more by the Ottoman educated classes. [^76]
[^76]:B. Lewis, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, London 1968, 124.
Namık Kemal and Young Ottomans were not anti-Western per se, nor were they opposed to progress and reform. On the contrary, they opposed the Tanzimat reforms as being obstacles to progress and counterproductive in combating the disintegration of the Empire. One of the main reasons for this was the increase, rather than decrease, in the autocratic authority of the Sultan as the result of the reforms, and thus of arbitrary and absolutist government. [^77] The Young Ottomans were the first to propose constitutional and parliamentary government as the means of solving the Empire's problems, Namık Kemal, in particular, pointing out its compatibility with the Shari'a, and demonstrating the parallels between such a system and the form of government practised by the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH) and his immediate successors.
[^77]:Ibid., 171.
The struggle was continued after Sultan Abdulhamid Il's accession to the throne in 1976. Despite substantial losses of territory, Abdulhamid, a master politician, succeeded in holding the Empire together for the thirty- three years of his reign by playing off against one another the Great Powers and opposing interests of those bent on its destruction. But the price