caa a22 4500 386369895 CHVBK 20180307111953.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e198905 xx s 000 0 eng 10.1017/S0020743800032311 doi S0020743800032311 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.1017/S0020743800032311 Murphey Rhoads Department of Middle East Languages and Cultures Columbia University Mustafa Ali and the Politics of Cultural Despair [Elektronische Daten] [Rhoads Murphey] In recent decades, most historians have begun to shy away from the once predominant idea of post-16th-century decrepitude in the Ottoman Empire1 and come to recognize the remarkable resilience and recuperative ability of the Ottoman imperial structure even into its final century.2 Against the gathering momentum of this trend of reinterpretation, it is, ironically, chiefly the Ottomanist specialists themselves who have shown the greatest resistance. The "experts,” as a consequence of their quite proper immersion in indigenous sources, are better exposed to and, hence, more likely to become ecmeshed in the culturally determined value system of the subject of their study. This article is an attempt to identify some of the sources that contributed to the formulation of the decline topos and related topoi. Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989 International Journal of Middle East Studies Cambridge University Press 21/2(1989-05), 243-255 0020-7438 21:2<243 1989 21 MES https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743800032311 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 review-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.1017/S0020743800032311 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Murphey Rhoads Department of Middle East Languages and Cultures Columbia University NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- International Journal of Middle East Studies Cambridge University Press 21/2(1989-05), 243-255 0020-7438 21:2<243 1989 21 MES CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge