Ideological and Political Motives in the Ottoman Periodical Press: Official Publications as a Tool for Implementing the Internal Political Agenda

The relevance of the conducted research is determined by the key role of the periodical press in the processes of socio-political and cultural transformation of the Ottoman Empire from the Tanzimat era up to the early decades of the Turkish Republic. The Ottoman press was not merely a means of information but a complex multifunctional institution, actively used by various actors — the state, professional corporations, religious structures, and opposition groups — to implement specific ideological tasks, shape public opinion, and legitimize power. The aim of the work is to identify and analyze the political and ideological motives embodied through various types of periodicals — official, professional, satirical, and religious — and their evolution in the context of modernization projects. The materials and sources for the research involved a corpus of archival documents from Ottoman and republican archives, complete collections of key periodicals such as "Ceride-i Askeriye", "Ceride-i Adliye" (later "Adalet Dergisi"), "I lk O g retim", "Ceridei Tıbbiye-i Askeriye", and the satirical magazine "Molla Nasreddin", as well as an extensive body of scholarly literature, which allowed for the application of a comprehensive historical-typological and historical-functional methodological approach. The obtained results demonstrate that the official state press served as a centralized communication channel, systematically promoting the agenda of administrative and military reforms, strengthening bureaucratic rationalization, and consolidating professional communities around the values of modernization. Professional publications in the fields of education and medicine acted as conduits for modern knowledge and standards, simultaneously shaping a new civic and professional identity, often intertwined with elements of state propaganda. The satirical press, on the contrary, was a crucial instrument of social criticism, deconstructing the official discourse, combating conservatism, and expressing alternative ideologies, reflecting the growing pluralization of public space. A separate layer consisted of religious periodicals and book publishing, which evolved from strict restrictions to a system of rigorous state licensing and control under Sultan Abdul Hamid II, aimed at monopolizing the interpretation of Islam and using religion as a tool for legitimizing power. Based on the analysis, it is concluded that the Ottoman periodical press was an active agent and simultaneously an arena of the historical process, where the key ideologies of the era — Ottomanism, Islamism, Westernism, and nationalism — clashed and competed in symbolic form. Its study allows for the identification of the deep mechanisms of transformation in late Ottoman society and state, where the struggle for influence in the press was directly linked to the struggle for political future and cultural hegemony under conditions of largescale modernization.

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