Ottoman Parliament
The General Assembly or Medschlis for short ( Ottoman مجلس عمومی İA Meclis-i ʿUmūmī , German , General Assembly ' ) was the first attempt at a representative democracy at the imperial level in the Ottoman Empire . This parliament existed from 1876 to 1920.
The assembly consisted of two chambers, an upper house ( Senate , Heyet-i Ayan ) and a lower house ( Chamber of Deputies , Heyet-i Mebusan ). It met for the first time in March 1877 and lasted until February 1878, when the assembly of Sultan Abdülhamid II was dissolved. It was revived after the Young Turkish Revolution in 1908 in the Second Constitutional Era on December 17, 1908 with substantial reforms and the participation of political parties, and existed until the Allied occupation of Constantinople in 1922, when the Ottoman Empire and Parliament were dissolved on April 5, 1920.
The successor to the General Assembly, the Grand National Assembly of the Republic of Turkey , was formed under Mustafa Kemal Ataturk by members of the former Ottoman legislature.
literature
- Rainer Grote, Tilmann Röder: Constitutionalism in Islamic Countries: Between Upheaval and Continuity . Oxford University Press, 2012, ISBN 978-0-19-975988-0 , pp. 328 ( limited preview in Google Book search).