During the nineteenth century, the negotiation of Western European modernity necessitated the reassessment of the location of religion in society. This reassessment was marked by three tendencies. First, the sources of authority it relied on had to be redefined and re-legitimated. As a consequence, the state had to strategically intervene in the domain of religion because of the inherent sources of legitimacy embedded within it. Second, as political participation in the public sphere escalated, the organization of politics as well as the shaping of political consciousness necessitated the development of a system of law based on Weber's conception of legal, rational authority. The development brought the state in direct challenge with the existing systems of law based on religion. Third, increased political participation and state centralization required a redefinition of national identity, one no longer based on religion but instead on certain unifying characteristics of the populace. Even though the process of Ottoman political secularization has been analyzed in depth, scholars often locate its roots after the 1908 Constitutional Revolution of the Young Turks as political power id definitively removed from the sultan. Yet, this paper proposes a new approach by arguing instead that the origins of political secularization ought to be traced instead to the autocratic reign of sultan Abdulhamid II (1876-1909). During the reign of sultan Abdulhamid II, this paper argues, the secularization of law, education and public administration continued to gradually reach a level that enabled the sociopolitical transformation of the whole system. As a consequence, even though the reign of sultan Abdulhamid II is often regarded as autocratic and conservative, the modern elements that eventually enabled the transformation to constitutional rule in general and secular administration in particular were also established and expanded during the same reign. In summary, this paper develops a new approach to late Ottoman history by locating the origins of Ottoman political secularization not in the early twentieth century as is the convention among historians, but instead in late nineteenth century in general and in the measures taken by the conservative sultan Abdulhamid II in particular. It does so based on official documents located in the Ottoman archives.