Turkish republic. Parts Two and Four are case studies of how traditionally quietest religious communities unaccustomed to power—Jews and Arab Shias—dealt with their newfound majority status. Part Three traces the response of the region’s Sunnis to their relegation to minority status. Part Five explores the prospects for sectarian war region-wide.
The final part asks whether a return to milletocracy might prove a better mechanism for balancing the interests of the region’s multiple millets than the current battles over borders. For over half a millennium such a system kept the peace, and created a stable symbiosis in which all sects were stakeholders. By decoupling the rule of the sect from the rule of land, the region’s bloodied millets might find an exit strategy from secticide and restore their tarnished universalism. Milletocracy might yet offer a paradigm for reviving the region’s rich tradition of pluralism and respect for diversity—values so distant today.
Baghdad, October 2015
The Decline and Fall of the Ottoman Empire
“God changes not what is in a people until they change what is in themselves.”
—Quran 13:11
A century or so ago, before armies and dams interrupted its passage, a boat down the Tigris River would have sailed past the holy places of the many sects that the river had nurtured and harbored over thousands of years.
Near its source in the snowcapped peaks above the city of Hakkâri, it would have floated speedily past bell towers of Assyrian Christian churches, the El Rizk Mosque precariously perched on Hasankeyf’s cave-pocked cliffs, Armenian monasteries with squat spires, and the lean finger of a minaret of the eleventh-century Ulu Mosque, reputedly the fifth holiest place in Islam, poking above Diyarbakır’s brooding basalt walls. It would meander past the Alevis’ domed cemevis, or houses of gathering, and the caravans of the Yazidi pilgrims ascending to the mountain village of Lalish to visit the shrine of their peacock god, Melek Taus.
Approaching Mosul, the sun might have set over the thirteenth-century conical dome of Mashhad 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
