Avi Rubin
In 1876, a recently dethroned sultan, Abdülaziz, was found dead in his cham- bers, the veins in hisarm slashed. Five years later, a group of Ottoman senior officials stood a criminal trial and werefound guilty for complicity in his murder. Among the defendants was the world-famousstatesman former Grand Vizier and reformer Ahmed Midhat Pasa, a political foe of the autocraticsultan Abdülhamit II, who succeeded Abdülaziz and ruled the empire for thirty-three years.The alleged murder of the former sultan and the trial that ensued were political dramas thatcaptivated audiences both domestically and internationally. The high-profile personalitiesinvolved, the international politics at stake, and the intense newspaper coverage all renderedthe trial an historic event, but the question of whether the sultan was murdered or committedsuicide re- mains a mystery that continues to be relevant in Turkey today. Drawing upon a widerange of narrative and archival sources, Rubin explores the famous yet understudied trial and itsrepresentations in contemporary public discourse and subsequent historiography. Through thereconstruction and analysis of various aspects of the trial, Rubin identifies the emergence of anew culture of legalism that sustained the first modern political trial in the history of the Middle East. 3
