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Abd el Mejid for his ill-judged attempts gained with Mussulmans the name of an unbeliever, and his son was deposed in the way we all know as a breaker of the religious law. For a moment, however, Abd el Aziz seems to have seen the true nature of his position and to have had some idea of the rôle required of him, as the following incident will show.
The too venturous Arnaout was sent back to his vice-royalty in Egypt, and the House of Othman was entrusted with a new lease of spiritual sovereignty, if not yet of spiritual power. The reigns of Abd el Mejid and of Abd el Aziz are remarkable with Mussulmans as having witnessed a complete dissociation of interests between the Imperial Government and the Old Hanefite school of Ulema.
To his credit, however, Abdul Mejid went on with administrative reform. To his latest years is to be credited the codification of the civil law.
Before the year was out Midhat presented himself before Abdul Hamid with a formal demand for the promulgation of a Constitution, proposing not only to put into execution the pious hopes of the two Hatti Sherifs of Abdul Mejid but also to limit the sovereign and govern the empire by representative institutions.
It is almost certain that if Abd el Mejid and Abd el Aziz had been succeeded by another of those senseless monarchs who have so often filled the Imperial throne, the Ottoman Caliphate would already have been a thing of the past, at least as regards the larger and more intelligent part of Islam.
The Balkan lands were waking, or already awake, to a sense of separate nationality, and what chance did the Osmanli element, less progressive than any, stand in them? The acceptance of the Ottoman power into the Concert of Europe, though formally notified to Abdul Mejid, had proved an empty thing. In that galley there was no place for a sultan except as a dependent or a slave.
It was quite another matter when Abdul Mejid, in the beginning of his reign, promulgated an imperial decree the famous Tanzimat or Hatti Sherif of Gulkhaneh which, amid many excellent and popular provisions for the continued reform of the administration, proclaimed the equality of Christian and Moslem subjects in service, in reward, and before the law.
Partly also Abdul Mejid had been influenced by enthusiasts, who set more store by ideas or the phrases in which they were expressed, than by the evidence of facts. There were then, as since, 'young men in a hurry' among the more Europeanized Osmanlis.
The toughra contains certain characters which are permanent and minor ones which change. The latter are the names of the sovereign and his father. Thus the toughra which we illustrate reads: "His Majesty Abdul Hamid, son of Mejid, may he be always victorious." The small inscription at the side reads "el ghazi," the victorious, one of the titles of the Sultan.
When Christian turbulence at last brought on, in 1854, the Russian attack which developed into the Crimean War, and Christian allies, though they frustrated that attack, made a peace by which the Osmanlis gained nothing, the latter were in no mood to welcome the repetition of the Tanzimat, which Abdul Mejid consented to embody in the Treaty of Paris.
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