Turkish Islamic Exceptionalism Yesterday and Today: Continuity, Rupture and Reconstruction in Operational Codes

The modernization of Turkey is usually covered as a process primarily generated after the foundation of the Turkish republic. This is a clearly simplistic image that neglects to bring in the continuities between the nineteenth‐century Tanzimat reforms and the Republic itself. These continuities may even be traced to the earlier rise of a Turkish bureaucratic class (circa 1780). Another aspect of this simplification is that it neglects the type of institution building policy that goes back to the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II (r. 1876–1909) and the type of synthesis between Islam and modernity that was promoted by an intellectual elite between 1908 and 1923.