1822 - 1895
Ottoman Turkish scholar-statesman.
Born at Lofça (Lovech, Bulgaria) to an Ottoman Turkish family, Ahmed Cevdet, at the age of seventeen, went to Istanbul, capital of the Ottoman Empire. During seven or eight years of study in medrese (higher schools of religious studies), he also found ways to learn other subjects - Persian, astronomy, mathematics - that were not taught in these schools. Mixing with learned company in dervish (Sufi religious fraternity) halls and literary men's homes, he formed important contacts. He began writing verse, and one of his literary benefactors, the poet Süleyman Fehim Efendi, gave him the pen name Cevdet. In the 1840s, he took the examination required to become a qadi, thus beginning his career as a member of the ulama (Islamic religious scholars).
Cevdet's work in administration began with Mustafa Reşid Paş's first appointment as grand vizier in 1846. Seeking an expert on the shariʿa (law of Islam) to consult about laws and regulations he planned to issue, Reşid Paşa asked the Şeyh ül-Islam to send him a broadminded alim (singular of ulama), and Cevdet was assigned. He remained close to Reşid Paşa for the rest of the latter's life, settling into his household and tutoring his children. There, Cevdet came under the influence of Reşid Paşa's efforts to simplify the Ottoman Turkish language and make it an effective means of mass communication; he also began to study French. In 1850, Cevdet collaborated with the future grand vizier Keçecizade Fuʾat Paşa in writing an Ottoman grammar. In the same year, he became a member of the council on education (Meclis-i Maarif) and director of the teachers' college Dar ül-Maarif, founded in 1848, playing a major role in organizing the college. Serving the education council as its first secretary, he had an important role in founding the Encümen-i Daniş (Academy of Sciences, 1851), which published his coauthored grammar, the Kavaid-i Osmaniye, as its first publication. When the Academy of Sciences decided to produce a history of the Ottoman Empire, Cevdet was asked in 1852 to write on the period from 1774 to 1826. So began the Tarih-i Cevdet (Cevdet's history).
Writing the first three volumes during the Crimean War, Cevdet was named official historian (vakʿanevis) in 1855. Over the next few years, he continued his History and studied the medieval Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, finishing the Ottoman translation of Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddima in 1860 (begun by Pirizade Sahib, 1674 - 1749). Based on European as well as Ottoman sources and emphasizing the importance for the empire of developments in Europe, Cevdet's twelve-volume History was completed over thirty years. The work distinguished Cevdet not as an old-style chronicler but as a standard-setter for later historians.
In the 1850s, Cevdet also began to work in legal reform. Following his appointment to the Meclis-i Ali-i Tanzimat (High Council of Reforms) in 1857, Cevdet presided over the commission that drew up the land law (arazi kanunnamesi) of 1858. He inaugurated the publishing of laws in a volume, subsequently a series, which continues still - the Düstur.
When Mustafa Reşid Paşa died in 1858, and Ali Paşa became grand vizier, Cevdet was offered the governorship of Vidin province. He was not yet ready to change from the religious to the civil service, a move he deferred until 1866. The incident indicates, however, Cevdet's emergence, following Mustafa Reşid's death, into the top bureaucratic echelons - where statesmen rotated among ministerial positions and provincial governorships. This Cevdet did for the rest of his career.
Although he held many high offices, the emphasis of Cevdet Paşa's career thereafter was on law and justice. He served as minister of justice five times. He had a critical part in developing the empire's civil (nizamiye) courts, especially in introducing - with the Divan-i Ahkam-i Adliye - an appeals instance in 1868. The Hukuk Mektebi (Ottoman Law School) opened in 1880, while he was minister, and he gave its first lecture. His greatest legal contribution, however, emerged from a controversy over whether the Ottoman Empire should adopt the French civil code. Cevdet Paşa successfully championed the opposing view that a compendium of hanafi jurisprudence should be adopted. In 1869, he chaired a committee of Islamic legal scholars that produced the Mecelle-i Ahkam-i Adliye, a pioneering attempt to codify Islamic law. He had a hand in preparing all the Mecelle's sixteen books, placed in effect by imperial decree between 1870 and 1876 as the civil code for both Islamic and secular courts. The Mecelle remained in force until the Turkish republic adopted the Swiss civil code in 1926; in some successor states of the Ottoman Empire, it served much longer. The Mecelle constitutes a unique case of successful resistance to the Ottoman tendency toward adopting European law.
Close to the palace and reluctant about the constitutional movement, Cevdet Paşa was politically very conservative. As his transfer from the ulama to the civil hierarchy and his close association with reformist statesmen suggest, however, he was intellectually broadminded. He also founded an extraordinary family. He took part personally, to an unusual degree, in educating his children, in addition to hiring private tutors. His son Ali Sedad (1859 - 1900) wrote several books on logic. His daughter Fatma Aliye (1862 - 1936) became the first Turkish woman novelist and a leading figure in the women's movement. His younger daughter, Emine Semiye (1864 - 1944), was allowed to study psychology and sociology in France and Switzerland, before returning to Turkey as an educator, writer, and political activist.
Cevdet Paşa's writings contributed to several fields. In history, he wrote not only his History (Tarih-i Cevdet, revised edition, Istanbul, 1891 - 1892) but two sets of historical "memoranda" (tezakir, maʿruzat) that historians value as sources; he also completed the Ottoman Turkish translation of Ibn Khaldun's Muqaddima. In law, the Mecelle is largely his monument. He wrote, too, various pedagogical works, especially his multivolume Kisas-i Enbiya ve Tevarih-i Hülefa, presenting accounts of the prophets and Islamic rulers, down to Sultan Murad II.
Bibliography
Chambers, Richard L. "The Education of a Nineteenth Century Ottoman Alim, Ahmed Cevdet Paşa." International Journal of Middle East Studies 4 (1973): 440 - 464.
— CARTER V. FINDLEY
