Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Religious Difference in an Imperial Age
Evliya Çelebi was a prolific chronicler of his seventeenth-century Ottoman world. Evliya's father was the chief goldsmith of the Ottoman court and his mother an Abkhazian slave girl. Evliya's patron was also his kinsman, Melek Ahmed Pasha, who had risen from his lowly status as a slave of the sultan to become an important statesman in a vast empire that stretched into three continents. In his Book of Travels, Evliya recalls how in 1640 Melek Ahmed Pasha oversaw a great victory over the "Yezidis and Bapiris, dog worshipers, worse than infidels, a band of rebels and brigands and perverts, resembling ghouls of the desert, hairy heretic Yezidi Kurds." Evliya's anecdote of slaughter of the Yezidis by the "army of Islam" is exultant. He writes that the Ottoman soldiers "invested Mt. Saçli with one heart and one mind, intent on avenging upon these Yezidi devils the blood of Imam Hüseyn and the martyrs of Kerbela, and determined to shave off the heads of all the unshorn Yezidis with their keen swords and to win booty, virgin maids and splendid boys." Modern readers brought up on a diet of stories about the implacable hostility of "Sunni" and "Shi'i" might well be confused by this description. For here was the Sunni Ottoman invoking the name of the great Shi'i martyr Husayn — the son of Caliph Ali and grandson of the Prophet Muhammad — to justify the killing of "accursed" Yezidis. And here was an empire that constantly glorified Islam and yet also managed, without too much fanfare, to rule over a landscape filled with heterodox and ostensibly heretical subjects.
For centuries, all around the world, religions of all kinds had provided a vocabulary for faith and for politics. Religion legitimated empires in an age before secularism. And in the Ottoman Empire, it provided one of the most obvious and salient ways that the Ottoman state designated and discriminated between its many subjects. The sultan — the padishah, or king of kings — was a Muslim. He styled himself a defender of Islam. If we are to believe Ottoman chroniclers such as Evliya Çelebi, he was ever ready to annihilate unbelievers. Religion was also unquestionably important to how many Ottoman subjects viewed their world, though just how important has been a matter mostly of conjecture. Bruce Masters, a distinguished historian of the Ottoman Empire, writes in his book Christians and Jews of the Ottoman Arab World that "religion was at least the primary basis of identity, beyond family, clan, or gender, for members of the Muslim and non-Muslim communities alike for most of the Ottoman period." But the fact of religion's importance has often gone, seamlessly and hastily, hand in hand with an assumption about the deep nature of sectarianism in the Middle East. It is as if there are some basic sectarian types that define the Ottoman landscape, each waiting to emerge, like desert locusts, to devastate the land in periodic, but inevitable, eruptions.
The Ottoman Empire was religiously diverse, and the discrimination between Muslim and non-Muslim was a defining paradigm of Ottoman rule. Even the most cursory reading of Ottoman chronicles such as the Book of Travels reflects a world imagined by the Ottomans to be divided between believers and infidels, and an imperial landscape marked by piety and unbelief, obedience and rebellion, benevolence and punishment. The superiority of Islam over Christianity and Judaism was a central tenet of an imperial Ottoman ideology. As Evliya's description of the extirpation of the Yezidis indicates, the empire was both multiethnic and multireligious. Since difference rather than uniformity defined Ottoman subjecthood, diversity was not something to be feared or celebrated. It was simply assumed. Evliya's writings repeatedly emphasized the importance of locality, recognizing how the diversity of foods, crafts, manners, and geography defined the social and political fabric of the empire every bit as much as its grand administrative religious delineations. The empire is often referred to as a "mosaic" in the sense that distinct and separate religious and ethnic communities composed a whole. A tapestry might be an equally apt metaphor: the various communities were knotted together in intricate patterns whose colors occasionally bled into one another. As we shall see, the empire could fray at its edges without necessarily unraveling.
Before the nineteenth century, the idea of being Ottoman assumed being Muslim — though, until the conquest of the Arab lands in 1516–17, the majority of tax-paying Ottoman subjects were Christian. "Ottoman," in any case, was a dynastic term, not a religious one — it referred to the ruling House of Osman. Taxation without political representation was the general law of the land for most Muslim and Christian subjects. Arab, Turkish, Circassian, Bosnian, Albanian, Georgian, and Abkhazian Muslims may have been legally and ideologically privileged as Muslims, but none of these groups were politically sovereign. Sovereignty was tied to the person of the sultan, "Shadow of God over all Peoples, Sultan of the Sultans of the Arabs and the Persians" — vassalage alone was universal. Being Ottoman connoted privilege, power, and authority. It implied proximity, and subordination, to the absolute sovereignty of the Ottoman sultan whose function was to preserve an Islamic empire that included large non-Muslim communities.
These communities, which included large numbers of Orthodox, Armenian, Catholic, Syrian Orthodox, Maronite, and Coptic Christians, among others, as well as Sephardic, Romaniote (Greek-speaking), Ashkenazi, and Arabic-speaking Jews, were granted religious and civil autonomy in return for their total political and fiscal subordination to the Ottomans. Local Jewish and Christian religious leaders, therefore, organized marriage and conducted funerals. They mandated the proper forms of religious ritual. They reserved for themselves the right to excommunicate and to ostracize those who strayed into heresy. These same authorities also remitted taxes to the imperial government on behalf of their respective communities. To the extent that they provided education, they did so in a parochial manner that reinforced separate communal identities.
In Ottoman eyes, Christians and Jews were defined as dhimmis (protected, inferior, non-Muslims) subject to Muslim law and dominion. In principle, if not always in practice, dhimmis were constrained by various explicit disabilities: from how they dressed, to the prohibition on the construction of new churches or synagogues, to the jizya (poll tax) they had to pay to confirm their protection by, and submission to, Islam. Legally, there were not two types of dhimmis. The empire's Islamic courts identified and categorized non-Muslims into what were presumably unchanging legal classifications that held whether one was in a court in Istanbul or a provincial court in Anatolia. Pervasive discrimination was a reality to which Christian and Jewish individuals seeking justice or redress had to adapt. Court scribes routinely emphasized this discrimination even in the manner in which they recorded the names of the litigants; they used the pejorative walad to denote a dhimmi and reserved ibn for Muslims. But these same non-Muslims nevertheless continually accessed these courts for justice and were allowed, indeed encouraged, to constitute themselves as autonomous communities, and these communities varied tremendously across the empire.
The system of non-Muslim autonomy eventually came to be known in the nineteenth century as the millet system insofar as each religious group constituted a separate "nation" or millet in the empire. This system is often attributed to the Ottoman sultan Mehmed II, who conquered Constantinople in 1453. He recognized the ecclesiastical and administrative authority of the Greek patriarch of Istanbul as paramount over all Orthodox Christians of the empire. By doing this, however, the sultan effectively elevated one patriarchate in the Orthodox Church over all others; he subsumed Slavic and — later, when the empire had expanded dramatically after the conquest of the Arab provinces in 1516 and 1517 — Arab Orthodox Christians under the authority of the Greek patriarchate. He assumed a single Orthodox community where none actually existed.
Much the same occurred with the establishment of the Armenian patriarchate in Istanbul in 1461. The Ottomans reportedly granted the Armenians a separate millet status in return for Armenian support during the conquest of the Arab provinces. Ottoman Jewish communities also flourished in the Ottoman Empire, especially in Istanbul and in Salonika, as well as among older Middle Eastern Jewish centers in Safad, Jerusalem, Baghdad, Damascus, Aleppo, and Cairo. The absence of a single, unified Jewish religious authority in the empire accentuated the linguistic diversity of the Greek, Arabic, Ladino, Yiddish, and Spanish-speaking Jews in the empire. Other communities, like the Coptic, Syrian Orthodox, and Maronite Christians — none of which were formally recognized as separate millets — all occupied an ambiguous space within this Istanbul-centric vision of a multireligious empire. Their communities did survive, though, and — in the case of the Maronite Christians — even flourished under Ottoman rule.
For all its ambiguity, the millet system pointed to an important imperial reality. In Istanbul and other urban centers directly under Ottoman control, the ecclesiastical leaderships of non-Muslim communities became auxiliaries of Ottoman imperial rule. Both the Ottoman state and the Greek patriarchate in Istanbul, for example, were invested in the same fiction that constituted far-flung, ethnically and linguistically diverse religious communities into monolithic groups of Muslims and non-Muslims.
However, the existence of different religious communities did not translate — and has never translated — axiomatically into a single communal consciousness or identity, and still less into an explicit relationship between communal identity and the right to political representation. Although both were dhimmi subjects of a Muslim state, Orthodox Christians in Crete lived in a vastly different environment than Orthodox Christians in Damascus. They spoke different languages, inhabited manifestly different cultures, were subordinated to separate administrative imperial regimes, and, above all, related in different ways to their Muslim neighbors. For the Christian minority in Damascus, the Ottoman conquest of Syria had substituted one Muslim dynasty for another; for the Orthodox Cretans, the Ottoman conquest ushered in Muslim rule of the first time, and with it an impetus to convert on a large scale. Such differentiation within a religious "nation," of course, applied just as obviously to the Muslims of the empire as to the Christians. The Ottoman Shi'a were legally recognized as Muslims, not as specifically "Shi'a"— a term that was hardly used by the Ottoman government. According to the leading historian of Ottoman Shi'ism, Stefan Winter, in certain instances and regions the Shi'a were discriminated against, but they were not systematically persecuted. And as the historian Tijana Krstic has shown in her work on the early modern Ottoman Empire, the struggle to define Muslim piety and orthodoxy was a constant one.
Because the Ottoman state saw itself as the legitimate successor to previous Muslim dynasties, and as a defender of the faith of Muhammad, it accepted the idea of a multireligious empire in a manner that the Spanish or Portuguese empires never did. With the exception of the occasional enthusiastic moment of empire — such as the Kadizadeli fundamentalism that swept over Istanbul following the Great Fire of 1660, or the related and equally short-lived (though much-discussed) messianism of the Jewish Shabbatai Zvi — the idea of the enduring reality of religious difference between Muslim and non-Muslim remained fundamental to how the Ottoman Empire defined itself. The historical sociologist Karen Barkey identifies this premodern Ottoman system as one in which the Ottoman state "managed" religious difference under the rubric of what she describes as "separate, unequal and protected."?
Coexistence was not an aspiration or a reflection of a secular public sphere, since no such sphere existed. Before the mid-nineteenth century, there was no elite trying to promote notions of uniform citizenship. Rather, coexistence was predicated on the deep formal inequality within every community of the empire and, of course, on the Muslim-dominated spaces of most cities in the empire. There was, therefore, no perceived need to celebrate coexistence. It was taken for granted at the level of everyday life; it surely informed the lives of many, if not most, of the inhabitants of the empire in myriad ways. Coexistence was evident in the urban geography of most major cities in the empire that included churches, mosques, and synagogues; it was evident in the law courts of the empire and in the markets, squares, and bazaars that defined the rhythm of life in cities such as Salonika, Istanbul, and Aleppo. The closeness of strangers — the "chaos of confessions" is how the Rome-educated Maronite patriarch Istifan Duwayhi described coexistence — may have been a problem that preoccupied some religious scholars trying to figure out the proper way of maintaining purity among pollution, and overseeing religious ritual, but it was the overwhelming, unremarkable reality of the empire.
PATTERNS OF EMPIRE
The Ottoman landscape was simply too large, too variegated administratively, to describe the empire as either "tolerant" or "intolerant" tout court. On a more regional and local level, however, patterns did emerge that defined particular experiences of toleration in different regions of the empire. In most parts of the Balkans, for example, a Christian majority remained despite several centuries of Ottoman rule. At the same time, these provinces also witnessed a far greater force of conversion from Christianity to Islam than did, for example, the Arab lands. Approximately two hundred thousand Christians from the Balkans were forcibly converted to Islam over the centuries of Ottoman rule as part of the notorious devshirme (or "collecting") system that inducted, or rather compelled, Christian youths into the Ottoman imperial system, made them Muslim, but also gave them opportunities to rise high, as high as the rank of grand vizier, in the service of Ottoman sultans. Arabic-speaking Christians experienced nothing even remotely comparable to the devshirme.
The dynamic of Muslim rule over Christians was far more novel in the Balkans than in the Arab provinces, where Muslim rule had been the norm since at least the early eighth century, and where coexistence had existed between Muslims and non-Muslims long before the arrival of the Ottomans. Whereas the Ottoman conquest of Serbia in the fourteenth century was part of an explicit war against infidels, the Ottoman conquest of Syria in 1516 involved war against fellow Muslims, the Mamluks. The rationale for Balkan conquest was extending Muslim rule. The conquest of the Arabs was ostensibly about preserving Islam.
Some historians have focused on the treatment of the Jews as an indicator of toleration in the empire. Bernard Lewis is the most notable example, with his classic account Jews of Islam. Scholars have often juxtaposed the expulsion of Jews from Granada in 1492 with the toleration afforded their descendants in the Ottoman Empire. Jews were never systematically expelled by the Ottomans or the Arab medieval dynasties as they were from England, France, and Spain, and so Lewis was not necessarily wrong in his comparison between the treatment of Jews in medieval Europe and the Islamic world. But such a comparison, in and of itself, is of only limited heuristic use in surveying the landscape of toleration in the empire, because toleration was one of several strategies of rule that included coercion.
More so than any other group until the nineteenth century, those inhabitants of the eastern frontiers of the empire identified as "Kizilbash" (redheads, because of the red headgear they wore) were singled out for repeated bouts of oppression. Initially, the term was specifically associated with Turcoman subjects who allied themselves or were suspected of being in alliance with the rival imperial dynasty of the Persian Shi'i Safavids. However, the term was used to stigmatize Shi'i subjects in other parts of the empire, especially in the aftermath of the Ottoman conflict with the Safavids. When asked whether it was licit to kill the "followers of the Safavids," and whether death in battle against them constituted martyrdom, Sheykhulislam (chief jurist of the empire) Ebu's-su'ud Efendi replied, "Yes, it is a great holy war and a glorious martyrdom." More expansively, the same jurist and ideologue of Ottoman supremacy insisted that these followers were both "rebels and, from many points of view, infidels."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Age of Coexistence"
by .
Copyright © 2019 The Regents of the University of California.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
