The second part of the study devoted to this document, and following on from a textual analysis, this lesson aims to provide a contextual analysis of the text and the main sources likely to explain its genesis. Indeed, having demonstrated in the previous analysis that the text of the edict differed in certain essential respects from earlier administrative and legal texts, and that the suggested connections with Western texts hardly went beyond wishful thinking, the challenge remains to find out how the idea of this transformation had germinated in the minds of Ottoman bureaucrats and statesmen in the months leading up to the proclamation of the edict on November 3 1839. For this, we have very few Ottoman documents at our disposal : the only one that can be directly linked to it is a minute of the council of the Sublime Porte, whose date we don't even know, but whose content clearly overlaps with the text of the edict. Western documentation, on the other hand, is more abundant, even if it is limited to correspondence and diplomatic reports that lack direct access to the workings and eventual talks of governmental spheres.
The underlying challenge of this exercise is to examine the two main historiographical currents that have so far attempted to answer the question of the edict's " paternity ". On the one hand, the " traditional " explanation, modernist and Westernist, which sees the edict as an attempt to espouse and apply principles borrowed from the West and attributes its design and promotion to Mustafa Reşid Pasha, the most Westernized member of the ruling class, very close to British policy ; on the other, the " Islamist " thesis, put forward in the 1990s by Butros Abu-Manneh, which holds that the edict, far from being inspired by Western texts and practices, was on the contrary the fruit of an elite consensus based on the mudjaddidi (renovationist) and khalidi movements of the powerful Naqshbandiyya brotherhood. This latter thesis, whose obvious attraction is to explain the reform by " internal dynamics " rather than looking for Western influence and rejecting the agentivity or role (agency) of a principal or even unique actor, ended up winning out over its alternative and establishing itself as the most plausible and acceptable.
