section_path: National variations/Ottoman Empire
section_name: Ottoman Empire
paragraph_text: Ottoman Empire
  
  The Enlightenment began to influence the Ottoman Empire in the 1830s and continued into the late 19th century. The Tanzimat was a period of reform in the Ottoman Empire that began with the Gülhane Hatt-ı Şerif in 1839 and ended with the First Constitutional Era in 1876.
  
  Namik Kemal, a political activist and member of the Young Ottomans, drew on major Enlightenment thinkers and "a variety of intellectual resources in his quest for social and political reform." In 1893, Kemal responded to Ernest Renan, who had indicted the Islamic religion, with his own version of the Enlightenment, which "was not a poor copy of French debates in the eighteenth century, but an original position responding to the exigencies of Ottoman society in the late nineteenth century."