Empire waned in the face of Europe's development and expansion in the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries: how can this State be saved? Bu devlet nasil kurtarilabilir? The great debate revolved around this question, and around the causes of the decline of the Empire and Islamic world.

The struggle for Freedom emerged as the response of a group of intellectuals and literary figures, namely Namik Kemal and the Young Ottomans, to the solutions to the above question offered by the Ottoman rulers. The late 18th and 19th century sultans had sought to reverse the Empire's decline by a series of reforms, concentrating firstly on the army, then between 1839 and 1876 in the period known as the Tanzimat, on virtually every area of government, together with education and many areas of Ottoman life. The models for the reforms were all imported from the West, and were introduced largely under European pressure and advice.

Furthermore, the Europeans pressed on the Ottomans the idea that the only civilization was European civilization, and that it was only through espousing it that they could raise the Empire out of its state of relative backwardness. This false and pemicious idea came to be accepted more and more by the Ottoman educated classes.

Namik Kemal and Young Ottomans were not anti-Western per se, nor were they opposed to progress and reform. On the contrary, they opposed the Tanzimat reforms as being obstacles to progress and counterproductive in combatting the disintegration of the Empire. One of the main reasons for this was the increase., rather than decrease, in the autocratic authority of the Sultan as the result of the reforms, and thus of arbitrary and absolutist government. The Young Ottomans were the first to propose constitutional and parliamentary government as the means of solving the Empire's problems, Namik Kemal, in particular, pointing out its compatibility with the Seriat, and demonstrating the parallels between such a system and the form of government practiced by the Prophet Muhammed (PBUH) and his immediate successors.

 

The struggle was continued after Sultan Abdulhamid II's accession to the throne in 1976. Despite substantial losses of