Ussama Makdisi explores the emergence of an Ottoman Orientalism. He argues that the nineteenth century saw a fundamental shift from an earlier Ottoman imperial paradigm based on a hierarchal system of subordination along religious, class, and ethnic lines into an imperial view suffused with nationalist modernization rooted in a discourse of progress. Ottoman modernization, he explains, supplanted an established discourse of religious subordination with a temporal subordination in which an advanced imperial center reformed and disciplined backward peripheries of a multi-ethnic and multi- religious empire. By showing how the temporal categories of Western Orientalism were appropriated by non-Western elites, Makdisi begins to explore how non-Western modernization and resistance to Western imperialism engendered its own interrelated forms of representation and domination.
