The world has always been messy................

 

The aging Sultan Abdülhamid II convened his cabinet in a crisis session on 23 July 1908.  The autocratic monarch faced the greatest domestic threat to his rule in over three decades on the throne.  The Ottoman army in Macedonia—that volatile Balkan region straddling the modern states of Greece, Bulgaria, and Macedonia—had risen in rebellion, demanding the restoration of the 1876 constitution and a return to parliamentary rule.  The sultan knew the contents of the constitution better than his opponents.  One of his first measures on ascending the Ottoman throne in 1876 had been to promulgate the constitution as the culmination of four decades of government-led reforms known as the Tanzimat.  In those days he was seen as an enlightened reformer.  But the experience of ruling the Ottoman Empire had hardened Abdülhamid from reformer into absolutist.

-Eugene Rogan, The Fall of the Ottomans: The Great War in the Middle East