Under Abdülhamid the West continued to be a model. The empire became further integrated into the world political and economic system. Western civilization, it was stressed, was built on borrowings from Islamic civilization, and therefore it was acceptable to borrow from the West.^[106] Unlike the Young Ottomans, Abdülhamid exalted medieval Islamic civilization. Most Muslim Ottomans had little trouble identifying with an Arab past. In the 1878 Parliament Abdul Bey, a deputy from Janina, Albania, displayed the self-view so characteristic of most Ottomans at this time when he remarked: “We [Ottomans?] are a millet [i.e., community] that has originated from the Arab millet.…^[107] Just as we took civilization from the Greeks, Europe has taken it from us.”^[108] Identifying with the Arabo-Islamic heritage served to legitimate and reinforce the Ottoman claim to the caliphate, particularly because the Ottoman sultans’ adoption of the title had remained tentative, if not controversial.

Nevertheless, Abdülhamid’s appropriation of the Arab past was not immune to challenge. Arab intellectuals grew increasingly more conscious of their ancestors’ role in the origin of Islam and in early Islamic civilization. Just as they gave credit to the Ottoman rulers for their military prowess, which reunited the Islamic realm, they held them responsible for the empire’s subsequent regression and ascribed the decline to their deviation from true Islam. Muhammad ‘Abduh and some of his salafi adherents looked to the distant, glorious past of Islam, explored the sources of its early success, and in the process identified precedents for social, economic, and political principles that now rendered Europe strong and superior to Islam.^[109] As a one-time comrade of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, the renowned activist for the political unity of Islam, ‘Abduh’s concern for the perpetuity, stability, and independence of the Islamic umma (religious community) was paramount; and to that end he was ready to support Abdülhamid, although he found the sultan’s claim to the caliphate exceptionable.^[110] Abdülhamid’s pragmatic motives in emphasizing his role as caliph corresponded with those of the Arab intellectuals in tolerating the very claim.

However, the special importance and consideration that Arabs received as the carriers of the Islamic faith and agents of a great civilization nourished an Arab identity with strong Islamic overtones. ‘Abduh’s salafi followers gradually instilled political content into this Arab identity. ‘Abduh’s disciple Rashid Rida outwardly respected the sultan’s title as caliph, although, unlike his mentor, he actively opposed Hamidian absolutism. ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi, another student of ‘Abduh, argued that the office of the caliphate be restored to the Arabs.^[111] This viewpoint is significant in associating the Arab self-consciousness engendered by salafi thought with a political agenda, but it was not one to which most Arab reformists readily subscribed. Nevertheless, an association of Islamic glory with “Arabness” fostered a more powerful Arab ethnic consciousness than did the earlier secular agendas.^[112] Arabic as the language of the Quran, bestowed by God specifically on the Arabs, imparted a new potentiality to linguistic self-identification.

Parallel to the currents in the Arab world, the awareness of a Turkish identity was on the rise in İstanbul, also with language playing the principal role. The Turkist current preceded the Hamidian period and was largely exogenous. European linguistic and philological studies that established links between central Asian, Anatolian, and eastern European peoples aroused Ottoman awareness of the Turks outside the empire and restored their pride at a time (in the 1860s and 1870s) when the empire’s prestige was rapidly declining.^[113] The Young Ottomans favored the simplification of Ottoman Turkish so that it could be a more effective instrument in propagating Ottomanist ideas, but viewed as chauvinism the idea of racial, and certainly political, unity of all Turks.^[114]

During the Hamidian period some intellectuals in İstanbul became interested in Turkishness as an ethnic and linguistic expression. The subsumption of Turkist concerns (particularly with regard to Russian expansion in Central Asia) under pan-Islamism reinforced Abdülhamid’s anti-imperialist ideology; he therefore tolerated discussions of Turkism until the early years of the twentieth century.^[115] But Turkism had no cultural heroes, was outward-looking, and had no perceptible effect on most Turks, who continued to see themselves first and foremost as Muslims, and it had no political appeal to the intellectuals who propagated it. For the Turkish-speaking people of the empire, their language was a weak basis for a broad communality, in part because they, more so than the Arabs, for example, inhabited linguistically heterogeneous regions of the empire. They failed to understand the elite’s Ottoman Turkish, much less feel pride in it. While the sultan seems to have encouraged Turkist literary endeavors as a safe substitute to political writing, he grew suspicious of Arabic literary activity. An Arab cultural revival might have contributed to an exclusive ethnic Arab appropriation of medieval Islam and subvert his claim to the caliphate.^[116] This may be the reason why Abdülhamid decided against adopting Arabic as an official state language, which he had contemplated.^[117]

Arabist and Turkist currents followed separate lines of development. Arabist identity matured earlier and had stronger appeal.^[118] The close association of Arabic language and Islam provided a basis for Arab selfhood, which the salafi movement strengthened. Both currents, however, remained insignificant as political agendas. Under Abdülhamid officially sponsored Islamism overshadowed both Arabism and Turkism. For most Muslims the Ottoman sultanate continued to be the focus of political loyalty. While it would take longer for Arabism and Turkism to find political expression, a meaningful synthesis of the two under a redefined Ottomanism (such as the Young Turks would attempt) was prejudiced by the modes of expression of the two trends. For instance, the Arab intellectuals perceived the Turkist attempts to simplify Ottoman by eliminating Arabic grammatical elements as offensive to Arab culture if not to Islam, while the Turkists cannot have ignored some Arabists’ singling out of Turkish dynastic rule as the dark period of Islamic history.

Yet few called for the political separation of Arabs and Turks on a national basis. In 1904 Yusuf Akçura, a Turk from the Russian empire, wrote from his exile in İstanbul that pan-Islamism and Ottomanism were not viable political alternatives for the Turkish-speaking peoples of the empire and that Turkism provided the suitable alternative.^[119] Nagib Azoury, a Syrian Christian, wrote from Paris in the same year and called for an independent Arab state of Muslims and Christians.^[120] Both authors were motivated by a distrust of Islamic and Ottomanist solutions, yet both failed to find an audience for their alternative schemes.