Under the
nom de plume "Mehmed", Said Halim Pasha wrote several works of social commentary, comparative politics, and political philosophy during the Hamidian Era and Second Constitutional Era. He was a frequent contributor to
Sebîlürreşâd, a pro-CUP Islamist journal.
As a social scientist In a historical analysis, he claimed Islam was appropriate in the
Western world's movement for equality due to (
Sunni) Islam's lack of clergy and aristocracy, therefore in a civilizational sense, Islamic civilization was more egalitarian than the West. Indeed, he believed the West suffered from inherent inequalities inherent to their social structure, while Islamic civilization suffered from too much equality, leading to an Islamic civilization turning increasingly elitist and exclusive. He identified the origin of
materialism emerged from the gap between the Church and the new discoveries of science and technology. The idea that Islam essentially discouraged technological innovation was refuted by Halim, though he did identify western materialism for having destroyed family values. Using the framework of
historical materialism, he identified the cause of
feminism appropriate among bourgeois women in developed Western-European societies, in contrast to upper-class Ottoman women which he believed were uninterested in further rights. In 1916 he published
Buhrân-ı İçtimaîmiz, where he castigates Ottoman society for leaving behind their past religion and culture. While Western
nation-states feature homogeneous societies of different classes that are always in conflict with each other, the Ottoman Empire's heterogeneity meant an
Ottoman nationalism did not exist.
As a commentator In the 1911 essay
Meşrutiyet, he gave a retrospective analysis of the failures of the
First Constitutional Era, particularly blaming the lack of a civic political culture developed by many peoples in the Empire. A desire among the
Tanzimat statesmen for westernization for the sake of westernization veiled the fact that the Empire didn't much resemble
France, Turkey's model. Despite the modern cosmopolitanism of the cities like Constantinople, Smyrna, or Salonica, much of the empire was still in a socio-economic state of feudalism, and not sufficiently "enlightened" for representative and constitutional government. He was skeptical of the CUP's governance following the
31 March Incident, noting that the people toppling a dictator does not guarantee freedom. == Cultural depictions ==