Abdulhamid II and the Wired Palace

Sultan Abdulhamid II (rahimahu Allah) ruled the Ottoman Empire from 1876 to 1909, through one of the most dangerous phases of its decline, and from the early 1880s he governed not from the waterside palaces of his predecessors but from the secluded, heavily guarded Yildiz complex on a wooded hill above the Bosphorus in Istanbul. He had come to the throne in the shadow of the long Tanzimat reform era, the decades of administrative and legal modernisation whose temper Ahmed Cevdet Pasha (rahimahu Allah) recorded from inside the state in his Tezakir and his memoranda (the Maruzat). Abdulhamid briefly granted, and within two years suspended, the Kanun-i Esasi, the constitution of 1876, then concentrated power in his own hands and ruled as a centralising autocrat, though a distinctly modern one: he extended the telegraph network and the railways, multiplied modern schools, and ran the empire through a vast apparatus of petitions, reports and an intelligence service, so that Yildiz became the wired nerve-centre of the state. His most far-reaching policy was the promotion of pan-Islamism: pressing his office as caliph of all Muslims, he sought to bind the empire's own Muslim subjects and to win the loyalty and attention of Muslims beyond his borders, in colonial India, Africa and Central Asia, as a counterweight to the European powers steadily dismembering Ottoman territory. The Hejaz Railway toward the holy cities, begun in 1900 and funded in large part by donations from Muslims across the world, was one fruit of this vision. His reign is sharply contested: as Cevdet Kucuk notes in the entry Abdulhamid II in the Turkiye Diyanet Vakfi Islam Ansiklopedisi, he is revered across much of the Muslim world as the last strong sultan-caliph who defended the empire and the unity of the ummah, while others, who called him the Red Sultan, condemned his censorship and repression. He was deposed in 1909 by the Young Turks. This scene does not show the sultan himself but the guarded grounds of his wired palace around 1895: a timber kosk on its cobbled hillside terrace, a telegraph kiosk with its clerk and brass keys, a wire-strung pole running lines down toward the city, a Hamidian sentry and a frock-coated official, and beyond the parapet the domes and minarets of the capital across the water.