Q. & A. 711 to 1707 with solved Papers css 1971 to date

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OTTOMAN STATE SYSTEM AND THEIR DECLINE
According to Halide Edib, ”The formula which would explain in ingredients that went to the making of the Ottomans as state-builders would be this: Ottoman Turkish strength and nomadic virtues plus Islamic principles of social justice and nondiscrimination of race plus Greek ideas of bodily training plus Byzantine organisation plus Roman realism and strength plus Plato’s Republic’. In this formula the inclusion of Plato’s ’Republic’ may perhaps appear as a far-fetched idea to some. But I am not the only student of Ottoman history and system who is struck by its influence. Professor Lyber, the author of ’Sulayman the Magnificent,’ a work which I believe to be the most classical and masterly study of the Ottoman system by a modern writer, comes to the same conclusion: ’Perhaps, no more daring experiment has been tried on a large scale upon the face of the earth than that embodied in the Ottoman ruling institution its nearest idea is found in the ”Republic” of Plato.
Plato would have been delighted with the training of the Sultan’s family. He would have approved of the lifelong education, the equally careful training of body and mind, the separation into soldiers and rulers, the relative freedom from family ties, the system’s rigid control of the individual and, above all, of the government of the wise. Whether the founders of the Ottoman system were acquainted with Plato will pianably never be known, but they seem to have come as near to his plan as it is possible to come to a remarkable scheme. In some practical ways they improved upon
Halide 1 dib, Conflict of East and West in Tuikey, PP 17-18.
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Plato - by avoiding the uncertainties of heredity, by ensuring a balance of power, and making their system capable of a vast imperial rule.2
The Ottoman State was a military state par excellence. We have seen that it was the Ghazi movement which built up the Ottoman State and forced it to expand westward. Hence its military character remained the most dominant characteristic of the Ottoman State. Thus Gibb says: Owing to the direction that this expansion took, not only was a certain Byzantinism impressed from its beginnings on the growing Ottoman State, but, even more important, its military character was preserved for good for though the frontier of Islam was thereby advanced simultaneously, and it thus remained, as it were, a frontier organization with all the obligations of military preparedness that this necessitated. Moreover, the expansion was so rapid as to forbid an assimilation of the infidel populations included within the new frontiers. A military government was necessary on this account as well, therefore to keep the peace between them and hold them down.
The head of the civil as well as the military government was, of course, the Sultan. He was the only individual in the State whose hereditary rights were recognized, but he had no Divine lights. He was trained from his early youth and made to serve as a private soldier in his own army and work in the civil administration, in order to get experience before he became a Sultan. ”Except in so far, then, as the obligation to maintain Seria [Shari ah] was concerned (an obligation for the rest, more loyally accepted by the Ottoman Sultans than by any other previous universal Islamic dynasty), it may be concluded that the general conception of the powers and functions of the monarchy in the Ottoman Empire was but little affected by Islamic ideas.
The Seleukids [Saljuqids] had been thoroughly impregnated with Persian doctrines which fitted in but too well with Turkish views based upon the military organization of the Turkish tribe and these they had passed on to their Ottoman successor. The main function of the World-creator-hunkar, one of the favourite titles of the Ottoman Sultans - was to keep the world on its axis by seeing that his army was paid and that no class of his subjects trespassed upon the rights and duties of any other class. The weaker the
’ H A R. Gibb. and Bowen, Islamic Society and the West, Vol. I, Part I, P.41.

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