Sultan ve Foucault: II. Abdülhamid Döneminde Cuma Selamlığı, Arz-ı Hâller ve İktidarın Mikrofiziğinde “Güç Aşındırmaları” (1876-1908)

The distinctive aspect of the traditional Middle Eastern political style, which has been accepted for hundreds of years, has been that it can convey the complaints of the people to the management level both individually and in plural form. Thus, on the one hand, the sultan and his entourage were able to take into account the complaints of the people, and, on the other hand, the people were able to convey their troubles to the sultan by writing a small compass when necessary and delivering it to the authorities. Moreover, the main duty of the Divân-ı Hümâyûn, which served as one of the basic state institutions in the Ottoman Empire, is to open the complaints and suggestions from the public directly before the sultan. The area where the Ottoman grievance mechanism worked most frequently was the Friday Parade. Here, they expressed their expectations from the sultan with their exposure called \textit{arz-ı hâl or rik‘a}. This was also a way of consolidating the sultan’s authority over his subjects. Because the frequent collection of these petitions was a symbol of how much a sultan was interested in his people and how much he cared for them. From the very beginning, the states of supply paved the way for an intermediary bureaucracy to keep the pulse of the relations between the sultan and his subjects, and in the sense of the abrasion and continuous reproduction of political power, they shared wealth and surveillance of the government with the people up to a point. This study aims to show the petitions presented to the sultan by the people during the reign of Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876-1908) and how these supplies functioned as a power practice with their importance in terms of the administrative system.