Holy Lands. Nicolas Pelham
Yahya Abul Kassem and the stepped shrine of Jonah the Prophet. As the river swelled, fed by its tributaries, so too would the size of its holy places. Downriver, Samarra’s golden al-Askari Shrine, resting place of the tenth and eleventh Shia imams, would have glimmered on the horizon, and like sentries at the gates, the Shia shrine of Kadhimiya and the Sunni shrine of Abu Hanifa would have watched over the traffic heading into Baghdad from opposite banks of the river. Beyond lay the Jewish tomb of Ezra the high priest, and the Mandi temples of the Sabeans, who robed in white tunics and baptized themselves in its waters in honor of John the Baptist, their true prophet. Finally, weighed by watering thousands of years of traditions, the Tigris would merge with the Euphrates to form the sluggish, aging Shatt al-Arab and relieve itself of the burden, spilling into the Persian Gulf.
In the late spring of 1915, at a turn in the Tigris downstream from Diyarbakır, the idyll came to an end. Turkish gendarmes moored their keleks—rafts made of bloated goatskins covered in reeds—at the mouth of a dry ravine, offloaded their cargo of 600 shackled Armenian notables, and handed them over to Kurdish tribesmen for disposal. There can be few more scenic sites for a massacre. Hawks darted over the grassy hilltops mocking the passivity of the victims between the cliffs. According to local folklore, the Armenians stayed stoically still, resigned to the head-chopping. The blood of the elders was said to be black from all the cigarettes they had smoked. Bystanders cut open the corpses, scavenging for gold the Armenians might have swallowed before they were led away.
No one has erected a plaque to mark the massacre, and soon it will be hard to find. The site is slated to be submerged by a new Turkish dam. The erasure of Anatolia’s Armenians, once a tenth of the local population, will be complete.
Downstream in the Iraqi city of Mosul, the jihadi forces of the Islamic State a century or so later inaugurated their caliphate with a similar exercise in cultural homogenization. As Armenians before them, shackled Yazidi men passively submitted to throat-slitting. Their women and girls were farmed out as sex trophies or sold in markets as slaves. Some of the perpetrators, though separated by a century, were even related. A large number of IS fighters were descendants of the Muslim Circassians and Chechens of Khabur, who had been expelled from Tsarist Russia over the course of the nineteenth century, and in 1915 took revenge by preying on Assyrian and Armenian Christians as they marched through Syria’s desert. The priests at Baghdad’s Assyrian Church of St. Peter use the term sayfo, Syriac for sword, for the massacres then and now. The Daily Mail, a popular and influential British tabloid, speaks for many when it traces the thread connecting the two to the “blood-soaked depravity” of Islam.
They are mistaken. The Armenian genocide was the brainchild not of religious clerics but of largely secular generals who revolted against them. The Turkish nationalists took their inspiration from European nationalists who rose up against the Ottoman Empire’s reactionary emperors and turned the caliphate into a republic. In the name of Westernization, they closed the country’s Sufi lodges and legislated against the display of religious symbols in government buildings, including the veil and the fez. They gutted Ottoman Turkish of its Arabic, Persian, and Kurdish implants as ruthlessly as they cleansed populations.
The Islamic system that was overthrown had a centuries-old record of pluralism that for most of its tenure was unmatched by Christendom. Though the Black Death ravaged the Middle East as mercilessly as Europe, the Muslim religious establishment, unlike the Christian, did not blame Jews for poisoning the wells. And when Christian Europe initiated inquisitions, autos-da-fé, expulsions, and forced conversions to root out pagans, heretics, and Jews, the Ottoman Empire offered a refuge—the very reverse of the migration patterns seen today. Even Christians fleeing Western Europe’s wars of religion found sanctuary, earning it the sobriquet La Convivencia, a place of co-existence. “The asylum of the universe,” was how Francis I addressed the caliphate after his capture by Charles V at the Battle of Pavia in 1525. God had created many peoples to know each other, said the Quran, not to fight. St. James, Spain’s patron saint, by contrast, is still affectionately known as Matamoros, Muslim killer.
Long before Britain, France, or the United States conquered the world, Ottoman rule epitomized globalization. Its empire stretched from Belgrade to Basra, smudging the contours between East and West and leaving them less defined than they are today.
The empire was open to outsiders. From the sixteenth century, foreigners made up an increasingly influential segment of Ottoman rule. They were entrusted to run their own affairs, under a system of capitulations that exempted them from sharia law, dress codes, and taxes. In the process, the ports they supervised evolved into entrepôts, or international trading hubs. Seventeenth-century Europeans away from their wives found Istanbul, with its license for temporary marriages, a libertine place to be.
The Ottoman Empire’s pluralism proved remarkably resilient, despite the erosion at its edges and the predatory designs of other colonial powers. On the eve of the First World War while fighting the Balkan wars, Anatolia’s four million Greeks and Armenians were opening and upgrading churches. Now hidden by a phalanx of department stores, an Armenian church, Üç Horan, with imposing Corinthian columns, loomed over Istanbul’s main thoroughfare, İstiklâl Caddesi. A short distance away lay the Armenian cemetery, which the republic later levelled and turned into central Istanbul’s Taksim Square. Armenians filled the upper ranks of the civil service and banks.
Sultan Abdülhamid II’s foreign minister for most of his reign was an Armenian, as was Lebanon’s governor and the prime minister in Egypt (who oversaw construction of the Suez Canal). The Duzian family ran the Imperial Mint, the Balyans designed his palaces, and the Dadians ran the imperial armories and gunpowder mills. Together with Greeks and Jews, Armenians comprised 60 percent of the staff of the Ottoman Imperial Bank, the empire’s central bank. For safekeeping, Muslim generals would leave their wives in Armenian care before embarking on campaigns.
Such was the level of integration that the Ottomans had no word for minorities. (The Arabic term aqaliyat is a late nineteenth-century invention.) Had there been one, Muslims would have been counted amongst them, since even after a thousand years of Islam, Muslims comprised some 40 percent of the empire’s subjects. The percentage of Turks would have been far smaller. But rather than establish an ethnic hierarchy, the Ottomans ruled by devolving power to the millet, or religious community, of which it counted some 17, Islam included. Each millet was semi-autonomous, administering its own co-religionists, raising its own taxes, and applying and enforcing its own religious laws. Subjects regardless of creed could petition the sultan directly, turning him into a quasi-court of appeal, but on day-to-day matters the millet determined the affairs of its denomination.
When Europe was locking in ghettoes what minorities it had not annihilated, Islamic scribes recount how on their holy days Christian patriarchs and Jewish dignitaries led their flocks through the Middle East’s cities dressed in finery that rivaled that of the caliph. Istanbul was an Armenian and Orthodox capital as well as an Islamic one. Europe took centuries to learn such tolerance. Only in 1926, almost a century after its conquest of Algeria, did Paris authorize the opening of France’s first mosque.
Yet far from castigating Europe’s culture, as the current pretender of Islamic State does, the Ottoman caliphs patronized it. Abdülhamid II had his underwear tailored in Paris, and not only built his own opera house but sang in it, repeatedly hosting Sarah Bernhardt, the society actress of her day. His orchestra played Verdi in the streets on his return from the mosque. European architects, painters, and composers, including the brother of Gaetano Donizetti, flocked to their courts. The last caliph, Abdülmecid II, performed the violin at weekly palace concerts attended by men and women. The women in his paintings, including his wife, Şehsuvar Kadınefendi, read Goethe’s Faust.
Non-Muslim subjects of the empire frequently went court-shopping, comparing their own religious laws with those in sharia courts or secular ones, and selecting whichever offered more rights. Sharia courts proved particularly attractive for Catholic and Jewish women, whose own legal codes did not sanction a woman’s right to divorce. Many adopted a similarly eclectic approach to religious rites, frequenting each other’s saints’ days