The distinctive aspect of the traditional Middle Eastern political style, which has been accepted for hundreds of years, has been that it can convey the complaints of the people to the management level both individually and in plural form. Thus, on the one hand, the sultan and his entourage were able to take into account the complaints of the people, and, on the other hand, the people were able to convey their troubles to the sultan by writing a small compass when necessary and delivering it to the authorities. Moreover, the main duty of the Divˆan-i H¨umˆayˆun, which served as one of the basic state institutions in the Ottoman Empire, is to open the complaints and suggestions from the public directly before the sultan. The area where the Ottoman grievance mechanism worked most frequently was the Friday Parade. Here, they expressed their expectations from the sultan with their exposure called arz-i hˆal or rik‘a. This was also a way of consolidating the sultan’s authority over his subjects. Because the frequent collection of these petitions was a symbol of how much a sultan was interested in his people and how much he cared for them. From the very beginning, the states of supply paved the way for an intermediary bureaucracy to keep the pulse of the relations between the sultan and his subjects, and in the sense of the abrasion and continuous reproduction of political power, they shared wealth and surveillance of the government with the people up to a point. This study aims to show the petitions presented to the sultan by the people during the reign of Sultan Abd¨ulhamid II (1876-1908) and how these supplies functioned as a power practice with their importance in terms of the administrative system.

This study examines under which factors of Turkey’s ontological security has been formed and how it has been occurred in the early period of the Republic of Turkey. The main claim of the study is that the national identity, the nation-state, and the Republican regime are inseparable and complementary parts of the Turkish ontological security. This study applies the historical analysis method. In the early period of the Turkish Republic which can be deemed as a process of structural and fundamental changes, Turkey’s security concept consists of not only border security. The political regime as a continuation of the aim of protecting the Republic’s revolutions, including national sovereignty and secularism, and westernization, constituted the prominent factor of Turkish ontological security. Having said that, considering the new geography vision, policies towards Islamic geographies and Central Asia were considered as revisionist and it was aimed that the protection of the status quo both in and outside the country. In accordance with the territorial state model, the Turkish biographical story was reconstructed with the nation-state models as the framework of the national society and the national society itself, and therefore it was accepted as the integral parts of the Turkish ontological security.

Religion and Sufism in recent years in Turkey have become a focus of intense interest. In this context, the Mevlevism and Mevlevi culture, which has been popular in our country for a long time, has also received its share from this interest. In this study, the reflections of Mevlanˆ a and Mevlevism in popular books written in recent years will be discussed. ˆ The main research problem in this study is how these sufistic-mystical orientations that emerged in the field of literature in recent years gave birth to new literary genres. For this purpose, the reflections of Sufi discourse in popular books written in recent years (As¸k, Pinhan, Mevlana I ˆ s¸iginda D ? u¨s¸unce Y ¨ onetimi, Mevlana’nin CEO’su, Mevl ¨ ana ve S ˆ ufˆ ˆi Gibi Du¨s¸unmek ¨ ) will be discussed in the example of Mevlana and Mevlevism. For this purpose, by selecting some best-seller popular books written in Turkey in recent years, transformation of perceptions on sufism on national and global scale will be examined. On the one hand, these texts emerge as texts that instrumentalize Sufism in the form of postmodern fiction by using different literary genres, on the other hand, they come to the fore as instruments that instrumentalize the spiritual education and evolution that Sufism aims as a holistic system within religion. While the first type of understanding creates a unique postmodern Sufi romance genre, the other leads to the birth of the Sufi self-help literary genre. In the article, the birth of these new literary genres is discussed in terms of the sociology of religion, not merely as an abstract literary development but as a reciprocal transformation peculiar to the ”new age” in the relationship between religion, literature and culture.

A family is the most influenced institution by socio-economic transformations in Turkey. Marriage which is the first stage of establishing a family is also affected by this process. In parallel with the developments in the world, situations such as increasing age of marriage, being single, extramarital sexuality, and alternative partnerships becoming widespread suggest that attitudes towards marriage change. However, this change does not attract enough attention in the discussions around marriage in social sciences. The research is qualitative research that attempts to understand the perceptions of the youth, the most dynamic element of the society, about marriage and marriage ages. It has been carried out on 28 university students whose ages ranged from 20 to 27. In the research carried out with a phenomenological approach, semi-structured interviews have been conducted, and the perceptions of young people about ideal marriage age and their attitudes on marriage and family have been investigated. Accordingly, it has been seen that they mostly idealized marriage at the age of 25 and above. The factors that stand out in the ideal age of marriage are gaining economic independence, completing education, not wanting to restrict freedom, maturing, making a career. Although young people tend to delay marriage, it has been observed that they have motivations for marriage. According to the research findings, although young people see marriage as an important part of life, they think that they are not ready for marriage during their age, and tend to delay marriage for a more ideal marriage. Along with economic obstacles, sociological and psychological barriers in the meaning worlds of young people are also effective in delaying marriage.

In the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire was generally exposed to foreign intervention in its internal crises because of the unfavourable international circumstances. The Crisis of 1860 in Mount Lebanon is a typical example of the internationalization of a local conflict where the French government strove to intervene in favour of one of the conflicting parties. The peasant-oriented turmoil in Mount Lebanon turned into ethnic strife between the Maronites and the Druze in 1860. The Druze massacres against the Christian population, the extension of calamities toward Damascus, and the failure of Ottomans to halt the tragedy drew the attention of Europe. France decided to dispatch an expedition to the Levant. The Ottoman government-appointed Foreign Minister Fuad Pasha with broad power to the region. The arrival of Fuad Pasha put an immediate end to the events and the French troops only displayed an auxiliary role to the Ottoman troops. This paper aims at investigating the role of the French expedition to the Levant during the 1860 Crisis. The expedition’s relation with Fuad Pasha’s mission and its effects will be discussed. Archival documents, accounts of the time focusing on the expedition and the periodicals constitute this study’s base.