Mustafa Reşid Pasha

Mustafa Reşid Pasha (born in Istanbul on 13 March 1800 – died there on 7 January 1858) was an Ottoman statesman and diplomat, the chief architect of the Tanzimat reforms and the leading hand behind the Edict of Gülhane of 1839. ^{1 2} He held the grand vizierate six times between 1846 and 1858 under Abdülmecid I, served repeatedly as Foreign Minister, was ambassador to Paris and London, and raised the generation of reformers that included Mehmed Emin Âli Pasha and Mehmed Fuad Pasha. ^{3 1}

Reşid was born in Istanbul on 13 March 1800, the son of a civil servant who died when he was ten; he had been attending a madrasa hoping to become a religious leader, but his father's death ended that education and he moved into the household of his uncle, Ispartalı Seyyid Ali Pasha, and trained at a scribal institution. ^{1 2} He accompanied his uncle to the Morea in 1816 and served as seal-bearer to the Grand Vizier during the Greek War of Independence, where he formed two convictions that stayed with him: that Ottoman institutions needed thorough reform and a modern army, and that European support was essential to the empire's survival. ¹

He then worked as a clerk at the Porte, won Sultan Mahmud II's attention with his reports during the Russo-Turkish War of 1828–29, rose in the Amedi office, served as secretary to the Ottoman delegation at the Adrianople peace talks of 1829, and by 1832 headed the incoming-correspondence secretariat as amedçi. ¹ He was sent as ambassador to Paris in 1834 and to London in 1836, became Foreign Minister in 1837 with the title of Pasha, and returned to both capitals as ambassador in later years. ^{1 2} In London he negotiated the commercial Treaty of Balta Liman with Britain on 16 August 1838, which opened Ottoman markets to British goods and promised an end to state monopolies. ¹ In the Oriental Crisis of 1840, as Foreign Minister he consistently sided with the Great Powers against Muhammad Ali of Egypt and refused any direct settlement without them, playing a key role up to Muhammad Ali's submission to the Porte in December 1840. ¹

In the crisis of 1853 that preceded the Crimean War he regained the foreign ministry with the help of the British ambassador Stratford, led the rejection of the Russian demands, and himself drafted the resolution for war that the Sultan accepted, so that the empire declared war on Russia in October 1853; he then coordinated British and French naval support until both powers entered the war as allies in March 1854. ¹ His six grand vizierates ran from September 1846 to April 1848, August 1848 to January 1852, March to August 1852, November 1854 to May 1855, November 1856 to August 1857, and October 1857 until his death on 7 January 1858. ^{3 1} The Arabic article totals his grand vizierates at about seven years and a month and also records a governorship of Edirne. ²

His signature work is the Hatt-ı Şerif of Gülhane, the Edict of Gülhane or Rose Garden Edict, read in the rose garden of Topkapi Palace on 3 November 1839 before Sultan Abdülmecid and the foreign diplomats, which proclaimed security of life, property and honour for all subjects, regularised taxation and conscription, promised equality before the law, and kept the new laws within the principles of the sharia. ^{1 4} Reşid had prepared its ground with a confidential memorandum to Lord Palmerston in August 1839 setting out his reform thinking, and the edict opened the Tanzimat era that lasted until the constitution of 1876. ¹ In his years of power the reforms peaked: he created the Council of Education in 1846 to reduce the ulema's hold on schooling, founded middle schools and a teachers' school, established the Academy of Sciences (Encümen-i Daniş) in 1852 and the Porte's archive, the Hazine-yi Evrak, in 1846, set up commercial courts and a French-modelled commercial code, and abolished slavery and the slave trade in the empire. ¹ He held that the Ottoman existence rested on four pillars — Islam, the Osman dynasty, the government, and the capital Istanbul — and wrote that since the state lacked the military power to preserve its territory by force, it had to build a good administration that would make the foreign powers leave it in peace. ¹

This section sets out positions as reported in the sources; it is not a verdict by the museum.

The English article calls him one of the greatest and most versatile statesmen of his time, thoroughly acquainted with European politics and a convinced partisan of reform, and records that he forced amendments into the Vienna Note of 1853 to protect Ottoman sovereignty before accepting it, whereupon Russia rejected the amended text. ¹ Asked about the loyalty of the Christian subjects, he answered that Christians, like Muslims, had internal differences and would not support one another solely for religion, and although he warned that the state was not militarily prepared he closed the war council with the words: "It is better to die with arms in hand than to die with tied hands." ¹ Against this stand the criticisms his career drew: his reliance on Britain and his closeness to Ambassador Stratford exposed him to his rivals, among them his own former protégé Âli Pasha, whose wartime rivalry with him ended with Âli deposed and exiled to Kastamonu, and the English article reports that Muhammad Ali bribed the Porte to remove him from the foreign ministry in 1841. ¹

On his religion: no article read for this record names a school for him. The English, Turkish and Urdu infoboxes carry no religion field, the Arabic infobox religion field is empty, and Wikidata's religion value is the generic item Islam, naming no school. ^{2 5} The English article says he was well versed in Orthodox Islam through his mentor Pertev Pasha and counted Islam one of the four pillars of the state; that is a statesman's formation and political doctrine, not an attestation of a personal legal school, so his school is recorded as unknown, with the readings preserved in the record's faith note. ¹

The one documentary disagreement is his death day: the English, Turkish and Urdu articles and the Arabic article's lead give 7 January 1858, while the Arabic infobox prints 17 December 1858 and Wikidata carries both values; the record follows 7 January and states the other reading in its note. ^{2 5}

• The defined source entities cited above, recorded in data/source/.
• Revisions of this article must be dated, and must name the source that changed each fact.