Abdul Hamid II, the Armenian Massacres, and the Young Turk Revolution

Abdul Hamid II reigned as the thirty-fourth Ottoman sultan from August 1876, and in February 1878, following the crushing defeat in the Russo-Turkish War, he indefinitely suspended the parliament and the constitution he himself had sworn to uphold, inaugurating a thirty-year period known as the "Istibdad" (despotism). He centralized power at the Yıldız Palace, relied on an extensive internal spy network known as the hafiye to suppress dissent, and imposed strict press censorship, while promoting an ideology of Pan-Islamism that presented him as caliph of all the world's Muslims — a policy symbolized by the construction of the Hejaz Railway connecting Damascus to Medina, financed through donations from Muslims worldwide.