Our Crises (Book)

Our Crises is a work composed of treatises by Said Halim Pasha, a prominent thinker and grand vizier of the late Ottoman Empire, regarded as one of the foundational texts of the Islamic movement. The work presents Said Halim Pasha’s distinctive perspective on critical issues extensively debated in Ottoman intellectual life after the Second Constitutional Era, offering both criticism and proposed solutions.

^{Said Halim Pasha} (Turkish Education Encyclopedia)

Our Crises consists of seven short treatises published by Said Halim Pasha between 1911 and 1922. In these treatises, Pasha identified the problems of his society and offered solutions to them. He aligned himself with the Islamic movement and consistently argued that systems and concepts adopted from the West were incompatible with and unnecessary for Ottoman society. According to him, the initial constitution, imported through translation from the West, had distanced the society from its own internal dynamics.

In Our Crises, Said Halim Pasha viewed Westernization and the imitation of Western thought as primary causes of societal backwardness. He emphasized that the solution lay solely in Islamization, asserting that Islam offered a complete framework for ethics, social life, and political practice. He criticized intellectuals for exhausting their efforts on Westernization, enacting laws that undermined societal values, and promoting theories incompatible with Islam. He argued that such actions not only destabilized the foundations of society but also alienated the public from its intellectual leaders and led to ideological decline. According to Pasha, a Muslim who adopts a Western moral outlook, embraces French customs in social life and British methods in politics, is no different from an ignorant person, regardless of how knowledgeable he may be.

Pasha subjected the importation of Western systems to critical scrutiny. Although some efforts were made to ground the Constitutional Monarchy in Islamic references, Pasha maintained that these imported systems and concepts were alien and superfluous to the nature of Ottoman society. Said Halim Pasha evaluated modernization processes as a rupture from the society’s own core values and emphasized the unique dynamics of his own community.

Our Crises holds an important place in Turkish intellectual history as one of the foundational texts of the Islamic movement. The work represents Said Halim Pasha’s first successful articulation of an Islamic state model and an understanding of governance. Pasha outlined the general principles of an ideal Islamic state without delving into excessive detail and clarified that he was not a republican. In the political system he proposed, executive authority would rest with the head of state, who and the members of parliament would be elected by the people. The parliament’s oversight function would be limited to the head of state and, by extension, the government. Laws would be enacted by a committee of jurists bound by Islamic law.

Today, simplified editions of the work are available. These editions often include a facsimile of the original Ottoman Turkish publication and serve as an important resource for those wishing to read the original text as well as for those interested in the primary sources of intellectual history.