to what extent can the reign of sultan abdul hamid be the climax of the tanzimat?

The reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid has to many been seen as an anomaly in the path to Turkish modernity and westernisation. Although he based his legitimacy on Islam and portrayed himself as a conservative and moderate Caliph, he never hampered or reversed the secular reforms of the early Tanzimat era. In many ways, he was a reactionary dictator under whom the reform programme vanished, condemning the empire to a gradual destruction as Europe advanced, for which he was caricatured by the Young Turks as being an autocrat who would not let the intellectual reform groups emerge. Contemporary historians have perceived him as the ‘bloody sultan’ focusing on the Armenian massacres of the 1890’s, and more recent studies have in contrast shown that with his accession, many of the reforms for which the Tanzimat had been so commended for by later Ottoman and Turkish critics were continued and even progressed.
The Ottoman empire continued to implement secular reforms but used the language ...