Holy Lands. Nicolas Pelham
babies they delivered, and Muslims carried amulets inscribed with Gospel sayings.
Popular inter-faith culture was officially sanctioned. A modern highway zips past Sisli’s Darülaceze, the retirement home Abdülhamid II built in 1896, above Istanbul’s Golden Horn. Cars go too fast for passengers to catch the golden Arabic herald over the mahogany doors. But for those who take time to stop, the long courtyard shaded with cypress trees offers not just an escape from modern Istanbul’s frenzy but a time capsule showcasing caliphal values. At either end of the courtyard he erected three places of worship: a mosque to the south, a church and a synagogue to its north. Contemporary interpreters of the Quran claim Islam bans the building of new non-Muslim places of worship. But even as Orthodox Christians and Zionists were seeking to oust the Ottomans and rule themselves, the caliph was still building holy places for his multi-faith subjects.
The pluralism was not egalitarian. Until abolition in the mid-nineteenth century, Ottoman manpower depended heavily on slave tributes, in which Christian boys predominantly from the rural Balkans were dragooned into the sultan’s army, sulphur factories, and courts as ghulam, or sodomites. It was pernicious, but for some the practice was a fast track to aggrandizement and leverage at the pinnacle of power. As conscripts and concubines, slaves formed the military, the nobility, and the mothers of the new sultans. From the lowliest captive, a slave girl could rise to the most powerful person in the empire; an Albanian guttersnipe could become a grand vizier.
The status of non-Muslims as dhimmis, or protected persons, also detracted from the equality of the millet system. On paper and in some districts and at some times, non-Muslims could not testify in sharia courts, wore distinguishing costumes until the late eighteenth century, and were prohibited from riding on horseback, or walking on the right. “Shimmal [move to the left],” Muslims chided non-Muslims when they tried. But for the most part, “the dhimmi status had little applicability in practice,” says a professor of Ottoman studies at Tel Aviv University. From the 1850s, criminal cases were heard in secular courts, where dhimmi status did not apply. The inclusivity made good politics. Had the Ottoman Empire not embraced its non-Muslim majority, it would never have spread so far, so fast, or survived for so long. Exclusively Muslim empires, such as the Almohad caliphate of 1121 to 1269, stirred internal opposition, and waned as rapidly as they waxed.
The Sectarianism of Secular Nationalism
When xenophobia and tolerance swapped continents is hard to determine. Though designated the sick man of Europe in the mid-nineteenth century, the Ottoman Empire took a long time dying. When Britain, the major power of the day, and its allies attacked on multiple fronts in 1915, the Ottoman Empire was still able to launch successful counter-attacks. At Gallipoli, Gaza, Aden, and Kut, the empire’s army of Turks, Arabs, Kurds, Armenians, and Circassians repeatedly blunted the advances of Britain and its Indian and antipodean colonies. Two polyglot international coalitions battled each other for four years. The conflict succeeded in financing and arming a rebellion of Bedouins under Hashemite leadership, but in Iraq Sunni and Shia Arab tribes rallied to the Ottoman cause. Instead of the anticipated lightning defeat, the Ottoman Front held for four years, significantly lengthening and exacerbating the costs of the Great War.
That said, by 1914 the empire was a shrunken entity. Christian peoples and colonial powers had peeled away its western provinces on both sides of the Mediterranean, and its last hold on the northern rim of the Black Sea. European powers divvied up the empire’s North African provinces, with Italy finally wresting Libya from the Ottomans in 1911. Across the Mediterranean, Greece sloughed off its Ottoman tutelage in 1829. Montenegro followed in 1851, Romania in 1856, and Serbia and Bulgaria in 1878. In the process, nationalists expelled their Muslim populations and destroyed their mosques. Russia followed its Reconquista of Circassia with a quasi-inquisition, forcing hundreds of thousands of Muslims to convert or flee aboard “floating graveyards”—decrepit boats that often sank on their way across the Black Sea.
As damaging as the loss of Ottoman territory was the loss of its pluralist ideal. In the name of égalité, France abolished Algeria’s millet system, but then in 1870 granted French citizenship to Algeria’s native Jews but not Muslims. (Jews began naming their daughters Michelle instead of Aziza.) Inside the Ottoman Empire, Western colonial powers similarly fanned confessional rivalries by championing both the replacement of religious law with a legal code stipulating equal rights for all and preferential treatment for their co-religionists. As the power of the Occident over the Orient grew, Western pressure prompted the sultan to reorganize the millet system with the Tanzimât, a uniform code which gave all equality before the law. At the same time, European consuls claimed the right to represent and protect native Christians. Benefiting from their superior access to Western officials and education and their newfound access to the state hierarchy, the empire’s non-Muslims rapidly rose through the Sublime Porte’s ranks. Confessional tensions soared. “Our mistake was to ask for equality,” says George Hintlian, who maintains the Armenian archives in Jerusalem and lost 70 relatives in the genocide. “We had everything. The bloody missionaries had opened our eyes to convince us we had nothing.”
The final blow was internal. To avoid defeat after foreign powers crushed the Ottoman army and reduced its empire to ruins, Turkish nationalists, inspired by ideologies from the West, seized control and proclaimed a republic. On March 3, 1924, the last caliph, Abdülmecid II, and his Ottoman family were stripped of their nationality and titles, and dispatched from Stambouli station aboard the Orient Express. With them went the Ottoman’s multi-ethnic, multi-faith ideal.
The Young Turks, who emerged out of a secular association called the Committee for Union and Progress in the first decade of the twentieth century, were a Turkish clone of the southeastern European nationalist movements that had thrust off Ottoman inclusiveness for the course of ethno-religious supremacy. They sprung from the empire’s most Westernized cities, particularly Thessaloniki, and institutions, particularly the army, which with German training had replaced the Janissaries, the old force of emancipated slaves. Mustafa Kemal, or Atatürk, the father of the Turks, as he subsequently styled himself, was the blue-eyed, fair-haired son of a Macedonian born in Thessaloniki. The two leading members of the Young Turk triumvirate, Enver Pasha and Talaat Pasha, were both of Balkan stock. Initially their ideas were a composite, mixing Robespierre’s anti-imperialism with romantic nineteenth-century folk nationalism, which idealized a “great and eternal land” called Turan, whose one language—Turkish—replaced the polyglot caliphate.
Initially, many non-Muslims and children of mixed-faith marriages latched onto the new movement. Its elected parliament, constitutional caliphate, and national government committed to founding a welfare state and promised the coming of a secular egalitarian age. But with the onset of the First World War and the invasion of the Anatolian heartland that soon followed, the raw nationalism of the Young Turks pushed aside whatever liberal aspirations they at first had professed. All non-Turkish and non-Muslim suspects appeared suspect. As Russia’s army advanced from the east, their Armenian and Assyrian co-religionists seemed set to become the vanguard of a Russian takeover of Anatolia. It did not help that Armenian nationalists assassinated Ottoman officials and cheered for Uncle Christian, as Russia was called.
Further west, treacherous Greeks in İzmir celebrated the allied conquest of Istanbul and Christendom’s recapture of Constantinople, its lost capital of Byzantium. Russian Jewish Zionists newly arrived in Jaffa looked like foreign agents bent on sloughing off Turkish rule. Ahmed Djemal Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Syria and third member of the Young Turk triumvirate, deported 6,000 of them to Alexandria, turning their settlement, Tel Aviv, into a ghost town. As minorities turned on the empire, the demise of what had been six centuries of Turkish rule seemed only a matter of time.
Of all the Ottoman Empire’s Christian subjects, the Armenians had been the most loyal and the most favored. Along with the Jews, the sultan called them his millet-i sadika, or favored community. But as the last of the Christian minorities to break with the regime, the Armenians bore the brunt of a century of pent-up revenge. Many of the perpetrators of the twentieth century’s first genocide were themselves victims of milleticide. The Bushnaks, Bosnian Turks chased out by Serb secessionists, liquidated Armenians from the villages