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 and holy men and women. Muslim doctors whispered Quranic verses to the Christian 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.”
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