Murat SofuogluEngin Deniz Akarli, a leading Turkish historian specialising in the Ottoman Empire's legal, economic and political history, particularly its governance of Lebanon, died last week at his Istanbul home. He was 81.
Among his books and articles, Akarli wrote The Long Peace, a study of Ottoman governance in Lebanon between 1861 and 1920, following a bloody civil war between Maronite Christians and Druze communities in 1860.
Following the conflict, several European powers sought to intervene in Lebanon's internal affairs on behalf of Christian communities, thereby challenging Ottoman authority. In response, Istanbul established a semi-autonomous system of governance in Mount Lebanon, headed by Ottoman Christian governors.
In The Long Peace, Akarli argued that the relative stability achieved under these governors demonstrated the resilience and strength of the Ottoman Empire's diverse political system, even during its final decades.
The political model, established under the supervision of European powers including France, Great Britain, Austria, Prussia, and Russia, created the Mount Lebanon Mutasarrifate, a semi-autonomous Ottoman province that excluded Beirut, Tripoli, Sidon, Tyre, and the Bekaa Valley. The arrangement also sought to contain French influence in the region.
Akarli viewed the new model as a modern interpretation of the Ottoman millet system, which organised religious communities under imperial rule, rather than as a nation-state structure in which ethnicity often plays a foundational or unifying role.
He argued that while European intervention in Lebanese affairs deepened ethnic and sectarian divisions, the Ottoman administration sought to maintain stability by bringing different religious and social groups under a common political framework.
“In fact, the Ottoman evidence suggests that whereas European intervention in the affairs of the Mountain was often self-interested, sectarian, and divisive, the Ottomans perforce worked hard, until 1912-13, to build a stable governmental order which would reconcile the moral and material differences among Mount Lebanon’s different regions, sects, and dominant social classes,” he wrote.
‘Pax-Ottomana’
In 1994, a year after its publication, The Long Peace won the Missouri Historical Society's Best History Book Award.
But Akarli's interest in Ottoman Lebanon dated back to the mid-1970s, when he was “struck by the wealth of documents” on Lebanon while researching the empire's policies in the Middle East at the Prime Ministry archives in Istanbul.
Akarli maintained a lifelong interest in Lebanon, a Mediterranean country not far from Cyprus, the island from which his paternal ancestors hailed. His mother was from Rize, a town in Türkiye's northeastern Black Sea region.
Following his funeral on Tuesday, he was buried next to his mother at Istanbul's historic Karacaahmet Cemetery.
“He was probably the first Turkish academic, who worked on Ottoman Lebanon in the context of Ottoman-Arab relations, in a serious manner,” says Sit Tufan Buzpinar, a history professor at Medipol University and a longtime colleague of Akarli.
Akarli completed his PhD at Princeton University's Department of Near Eastern Studies, focusing on external pressures, great-power rivalries, and budget deficits during the long reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II (1876–1909), who was known for pan-Islamist policies aimed at maintaining Ottoman authority over the empire's large Arab population.
While many historians portrayed the 19th-century Ottoman Empire as a declining political structure destined to collapse, Akarli's research demonstrated that the empire, which controlled much of the Middle East until World War I, retained the intellectual and bureaucratic capacity to address the region's challenges, according to Buzpinar.
“By giving his book such a title (The Long Peace), Akarli asserts that the Ottoman Empire possessed a political acumen capable of establishing peace even during its most difficult periods,” Buzpinar tells TRT World.
Akarli's thesis on Ottoman peace can also be considered alongside American historian David Fromkin's influential book A Peace to End All Peace, which examined how the collapse of Ottoman rule and the post-World War I settlement reshaped the Middle East, laying the foundations for many of the region's subsequent conflicts.
At the San Remo Conference in April 1920, the Allied powers agreed on the allocation of mandates over former Ottoman territories in the Middle East. France was assigned Syria and Lebanon, while Britain was assigned Palestine and Mesopotamia (later Iraq).
Akarli's research on Lebanon highlighted the importance of Ottoman governance in maintaining stability within a religiously diverse society, which has experienced repeated political and sectarian crises since the empire's collapse.
For Buzpinar, Akarli's study of Lebanon offers a compelling explanation of how Ottoman authorities maintained relative stability despite growing sectarian tensions and European intervention.
“He argued that at a time when Westerners were fostering a culture of sectarianism—a period and a region where this trend was at its most potent and intense—the Ottoman Empire succeeded in maintaining a ‘long peace’,” the professor says.
Emphasis on social life
Akarli spent long hours examining Ottoman archival documents, but he was equally attentive to his students, whom he mentored across a wide range of subjects, including Ottoman legal history and world history.
“In his view, the past can only be grasped in proportion to the traces it leaves behind and through a disciplined historical imagination that faithfully bridges the gaps between those traces in accordance with the sources,” says Ozgur Kavak, a theology professor at Marmara University and a close associate of Akarli.
“Insisting on an integrated reading of everyday disputes, as reflected in court records, literary works, and elements of material culture alongside official registers and statistical data, Akarlı pointed out that the primary obstacle facing the historian is not a lack of documents but rather the ideological conditioning and mental blind spots of the present,” Kavak tells TRT World.
Akarli, whose journey led from Marxism to Islam, was acutely aware of how ideological convictions could shape scholarly research.
He therefore approached history with particular care, especially the late Ottoman period, which has long been debated among Turkish intellectuals over the extent and nature of the empire's modernisation project.
“The transformation of history into a systematic instrument of legitimation along with nation-state building processes in the modern era drives researchers to search for traces that validate contemporary identity constructs rather than understanding what actually transpired in the past,” Kavak says.
“This, in turn, traps the complexity of human life within black-and-white templates, both undermining historical consciousness and fueling social polarization,” he adds.
At the heart of Akarli's approach to Ottoman historiography was an emphasis on ordinary people, social pluralism and the role of law in limiting central authority, according to Kavak.
While Akarli recognised the central role of Ottoman sultans in the empire's political history, he also highlighted how artisans and craftsmen contributed to centuries of coexistence among diverse religious and ethnic communities, helping sustain a vibrant urban life.
A man of students
Akarli devoted considerable time to his students, tirelessly seeking opportunities to advance their academic careers. But that did not mean he was an easy professor to please.
“To study under him is not an easy task. He push us to the best of our ability,” says Aysegul Cimen, an academic in Marmara University’s history department, who was Akarli’s PhD student focusing on Ottoman legal history in the modern era.
Other students and colleagues also described Akarli as an academic with an unwavering commitment to his work. Even on his final day, Akarli, who had battled cancer for more than a decade, continued working until the early hours of the morning, according to his wife, Tuna Akarli, and others close to him.
“He would not be satisfied with a simple explanation that this Ottoman court ruling is about this particular issue. He would challenge you to go deeper to understand why this court ruled like that and what kind of results this rule might have on human lives in that particular time and area,” Cimen says.
Akarli encouraged his students to place specific historical questions within a broader context, examining individual events through a philosophical lens, Cimen explains.
“You can hear him asking from time to time why these people need law or where the human concern for consistency comes from.”
Onur Oner, an academic and a former assistant to Akarli, agrees with Cimen.
“We were so tired of his endless demands changing our world history class’s syllabus every year,” Oner tells TRT World.
“His exams were also challenging, requiring him to read more than 1,000 pages every semester. He had always written serious feedback for every student exam paper.”
One year, Akarli asked the university to purchase books examining world history through the lens of climate change. The next year, he requested publications exploring how military conflicts had shaped human history, Oner recalls.
“He wanted to make sure students will have different approaches.”
Akarli taught at several universities, including Brown, Princeton, Washington University in St. Louis, Harvard, Bogazici and Istanbul Sehir. In 2014, he received Türkiye's Presidential Culture and Arts Grand Award in History and Social Sciences.
Away from academia, Akarli was a passionate gardener who grew roses and often gave them to his students.
He dedicated The Long Peace to his wife, Tuna, his lifelong companion, “with love and gratitude”.
