Denis Hermann and Erdal Kaynar, eds., Constitutionalism Unbound: Constitutional Dynamics and Political Transformation in the Ottoman and Qajar Lands in the Long Nineteenth Century (Leiden: Brill, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you edit this book?
Erdal Kaynar and Denis Hermann (EK & DH): We have been deeply invested in the history of constitutionalism for quite some time, focusing on the Ottoman Empire and Iran respectively. Through our individual research, we kept noticing parallels, connections, and shared dynamics between and beyond the two entities. We felt that the time was ripe for a conversation that could bridge geographical and historiographical divides and would underline the trans-imperial nature of constitutionalism in the MENA region in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. We were also unsatisfied by most of the existing scholarship. Constitutionalism is too often treated as a mere footnote, a failed experiment, or in the Ottoman case simply as an elite-led administrative reform, rather than being recognized as the transformative social and intellectual movement it truly was.
This conviction pushed us to prepare a book that would demonstrate how constitutionalism was a significant historical experience in the Ottoman Empire and Qajar Iran. We also wanted to insist on the shared nature of this experience, underlining that ideas and actors circulated between the Ottoman Empire, Qajar Iran, and beyond, making constitutionalism a connected historical experience. We believe that understanding constitutionalism is critical to understanding the history of modernization in the MENA region—both past and present. Constitutionalism became a rallying point uniting diverse ideological currents that insisted on the need for reform. The political vocabulary, the debates over sovereignty and citizenship, and the very frameworks of political legitimacy that emerged during this period continue to resonate today.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
EK & DH: Our book explores how the idea and practice of constitutionalism transformed politics, society, and thought across a broad geography, stretching from the Balkans to Iran and the Maghreb to the Caucasus during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The concept of “constitutional culture” is central to our project. This is distinct from, yet complementary to, the study of formal institutions and constitutional law. It describes the informal shifts in values, premises, and everyday political practices that created new patterns of interaction in society. For instance, Nader Sohrabi examines how Iran’s popular committees (anjuman) ensured popular participation in Iran after 1906 and opened a secular public sphere for the lower classes.
A key theme is the trans-imperial exchange of ideas, highlighted in Zaur Gasimov’s study on the way the Iranian revolution was negotiated in the Russian Azerbaijani press, or Anne-Laure Dupont’s comparative analysis of the question of non-Muslim participation in early representative bodies. We also engage deeply with intellectual history, tracing the development of new ideas of political sovereignty. Peter Hill reevaluates Khayr al-Din al-Tunisi’s work, which established the restraint of power as a cornerstone of constitutionalism in Muslim lands in the 1870s. Erdal Kaynar then analyzes the radicalization of the idea of popular sovereignty at the turn of the century, concentrating on Ahmed Rıza’s writings, and Denis Hermann examines how Shi’i ulama forged a hybrid political language, mobilizing messianic logic to participate in the constitutional revolution. Alisa Shablovskaja and Nobuyoshi Fujinami question binary political categorizations and explore how progressives in Qajar Iran and among Young Turk jurists negotiated revolution in conservative terms.
Finally, there is an emphasis on constitutional mobilization. Mira Xenia Schwerda’s photographic analysis reveals the visual rhetoric of the constitutional movement in Iran. Varak Ketsemanian and Houri Berberian’s chapters highlight the trans-communal dimension of Ottoman and Iranian constitutionalism by analyzing how the constitutional order opened new means of Armenian political engagement from communal and national perspectives. Barış Zeren takes a similar approach investigating how debates on legislation in the Ottoman parliament reshaped local politics in Rumelia. Yaşar Tolga Cora shows how multi-ethnic labor activists after 1908 used the new constitutional framework to enter national debates. All chapters demonstrate how constitutionalism created new arenas for political action both within and beyond the state.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
EK & DH: Both of us have long been interested in the processes of political modernization that operated beyond the established paradigms of simple Westernization, secularization, or top-down, state-led reform. This book was an opportunity to enter into a larger dialogue with colleagues. Our individual work often examined specific actors or intellectual currents. The book-project, on the other hand, allowed us to bring together disparate threads to show constitutionalism not as a set of isolated ideas, but as a widespread, trans-imperial movement where different groups were all engaging with the same fundamental political questions. It connects and extents our individual research and reveals a larger, more dynamic historical phenomenon.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
EK & DH: We hope the volume reaches historians of the Middle East, but also students, and actually anyone curious about the region’s political history and the global history of constitutionalism. There is this never-ending debate if democracy is compatible with Muslim societies or somehow foreign to this part of the world. This debate is very much sterile and nearly always misses a huge piece of the story: precisely, the constitutional movements that swept the Ottoman and Qajar worlds in the long nineteenth century, fundamentally reshaping their political landscapes. We will not convince anyone who thinks constitutionalism was just a formality in the modern history of Iran and the Ottoman Empire or that constitutional history pertains only to the West. But for those open to it, the book shows how these revolutions in 1906 and 1908 were the culmination of a century of profound debate and social change that permanently reshaped ideas of state and society. If our volume can help solidify this reassessment and spark more interest in this foundational movement both among specialists and a larger public, we will consider that a major success.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
EK: Constitutionalism is such a vast subject that it is going to stick with me for some time to come. The more you dig, the more complex it becomes. Among other things, I am currently working on a monograph that traces the history of constitutionalism in the Ottoman Empire. I am insisting on the fact that many of its central problems were not unique, but resonated deeply with a global context, as local manifestations of bourgeois contradictions—specifically, the fundamental struggles over state formation, representation, and the very nature of political power that defined the nineteenth century across the world.
DH: I am currently finalizing a monograph on the involvement of Iranian ulama in political philosophy literature during the nineteenth century, as well as the diversity of their political visions during the Constitutional Revolution of 1906–1911.
J: What is the book’s relevance for understanding the crisis of democracy both in the MENA region and globally?
EK & DH: The current state of democracy shows that democratic rights cannot be taken for granted anywhere in the world. Democracy is a universal aspiration that is not restricted to some cultures. This is what our volume contributes to demonstrate. Yet, this universal aspiration has always faced persistent backlash, both historically and today: organized efforts to undermine, restrict, or dismantle democratic institutions and values. The constitutional movements of the nineteenth century were driven by people who imagined, debated, and fought for a different political future. Understanding this history of political struggle is essential; it reveals that the current crisis is not one of absence, but one of an ongoing, contested negotiation over power whose roots run deep. In that, the MENA region might have a lot to teach to the rest of the world.
Excerpt from the book (from the ‘Introduction: Constitutionalism in the Ottoman Empire and Qajar Iran: Histories and Perspectives’, pages 1 to 3)
During the nineteenth century, the notion of a constitution became pervasive, serving as a cornerstone for reform and revolution across territories. In the Balkans insurgents made the demand for a constitution an integral component of their efforts to redefine power dynamics with the imperial center and delineate the boundaries of autonomous nation-states. Constitutions accompanied all new states that arose from Ottoman rule. The content was often vague, but, as in other regions of Europe and the Americas, the concept of a constitution became an essential driving force behind the nineteenth century’s political struggles. Meanwhile, the idea of establishing a codified framework for the regulation of state power won over the Ottoman state as well. The Sublime Porte embarked on a program of change, promulgating the key texts of the Tanzimat in 1839 and 1856. In 1861, Tunisia enacted a constitution. These texts were devised as a guiding framework for state transformation, yet ordinary people interpreted and embraced the documents beyond their initial elitist intentions. The 1860s saw the rise of a constitutionalist movement that challenged the monopoly over politics held by the sovereign and an elite of high-ranking statesmen. The short-lived Ottoman Constitution followed in 1876. In 1881 Egypt witnessed a constitutional revolt, the first of its kind in the Near East, driven by widespread popular support – and then, in the following year, the crushing of its constitutional hopes at the hands of Western Great Powers. Meanwhile Iran, too, witnessed the emergence of a category of intellectuals and statesmen calling for respect of the law (qānūn) and for the establishment of specific assemblies (majlis). Similar to their Ottoman counterparts, these advocates considered the demand for law pivotal in organizing the state, resisting European intrusion, and safeguarding subjects (raʾiyat) against arbitrary rule by those in power. Despite the limited influence of constitutionalist ideas in Iran and setbacks during the autocratic rule of Abdülhamid II in the Ottoman Empire, the impetus for constitutionalism persisted. Calls for justice (adalet) were at the core of the constitutional revolution in Iran in 1906, perhaps the first popular revolution in the Near East. In 1908, the Young Turk revolution, championing liberty, equality, and justice, reinstated constitutional rule in the Ottoman Empire after three decades of absolutism. This movement of nineteenth-century constitutionalism laid the foundations of modern nation-states and societies in the post-Ottoman and Iranian space of the twentieth century. Originating in the Balkans in the 1820s, the wave of constitutionalism culminated in the constitutional revolutions of 1906 in Iran and 1908 in the Ottoman Empire. It is this movement of nineteenth century constitutionalism that is the subject of the present volume.
The volume takes as its starting point the observation that constitutionalism holds a crucial and underappreciated status as a major intellectual and political force that significantly influenced the Ottoman, post-Ottoman, and Iranian spheres from approximately the 1820s to the onset of the First World War. It is the first work to bring together experts on different countries and regions in the endeavor to situate constitutionalism within a trans-imperial geography spanning from the Balkans to Iran, the Caucasus to the Maghreb. The authors’ approaches differ widely, yet they coalesce around a central premise: that constitutionalism constituted a profound political movement throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, operating across a cross-border domain characterized by a continuous exchange of ideas and actors.