Muslim Ottoman Subjects Resented the Equality Granted to Dhimmis, Non-Muslim Subjects of the Empire in 1856

The Ottoman Empire became clearly dependent on the military strength of the two main Western powers, Britain and France, in the mid-19th century. The Ottomans were threatened by rising Russian power to their northeast. Russia coveted Ottoman  territories and aspired to give the eastern Orthodox churches primacy over the Christian holy places in the Land of Israel. In this case, Russia would support the Greek Orthodox church of which the Russian Orthodox Church was an offshoot or branch.

Russia had already taken over vast territories under Ottoman suzerainty in the 18th century around 1774. These lands comprise the Crimea and  most of southern Ukraine of today. The effective rulers before the Russian conquest were the Crimean Tartars, under Ottoman suzerainty and loyal to the Ottoman sultan, who was also the Caliph of Islam.

The Crimean war of 1854-1855 focused on control of the Christian holy places, foremost among them the Church of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem, with Russia supporting Greek Orthodox dominance and  France supporting Roman Catholic claims to the same holy places. British policy was to prevent Russia from taking more land from the Ottoman Empire and thereby becoming a stronger rival empire to the British.

British and French forces defeated the Russians, preserving Ottoman territory for the Sultan and his government. Of course the British and French wanted to be rewarded. They were, and this caused the Sultan's government, called The Sublime Porte, to violate long-standing Islamic principles. One reward was to allow the building of new churches, a definitely forbidden act since the Arab-Muslim conquests of the 7th century. France was, inter alia given back the location where a Catholic church had stood during the Crusader period.

Most importantly, the Sublime Porte  issued a decree, the Hatt-i-Humayun, which 

"granted equality of civil status to Christian subjects, guaranteeing freedom of conscience and speech." [Tibawi, p 115]

This equality of dhimmis was a radical departure from past Islamic law and practice. Hence, it is no surprise that we are told by the Arab historian, A L Tibawi that

". . . the proclamation of the Hatti Humayun caused much resentment at Nabulus and Gaza ." [Tibawi, p 130]

Not only at Nablus and Gaza but among Ottoman Muslims generally. The Arab and other  Muslims [Tibawi was apparently a Christian] in the Empire hated this decree mightily. Sixty years later, during WW One, Ottoman Muslims slaughtered Armenians, fellow Ottoman subjects, some of whom were calling for Armenian autonomy or independence.  Muslims resented the demands for independence or merely autonomy among the non-Muslim subject   peoples.

Does this account, these facts, tell us any lessons for Israel.? Isn't Israel seen as an "uppity Jew" by the Arabs and other Muslims?

By the way, you can be sure that this decree was often honored more in the breach than in the observance.

MAIN SOURCE
A L Tibawi, British Interests in Palestine, 1800-1901 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1961)

Even Clothing Was Used to Humiliate Non-Muslims in the Ottoman Empire

Wayne Vucinich, a specialist in Ottoman history, described how the empire used clothing to humiliate non-Muslims, called dhimmis. In fact, humiliation by clothing was a feature of  the dhimma rules in Muslim dominions before the Ottoman Empire.

This is Vucinich:
- - - - - - - - - - - -
Clothing. After the Ottoman conquest there was a gradual "Turkification" of clothing in many parts of the Empire. The dress worn by different Ottoman subjects, however, was not always a mere copy of Turkish styles. Often it represented either a local adaptation of that dress or an entirely indigenous creation. Nonetheless, the "Turkification" of clothing was extensive, and a large Turkish or Persian or Arabic nomenclature enriched the vocabulary of many non-Turkish subjects.

Turkish influence on the clothing of the subject peoples was the result of both voluntary imitation and official regulations [emph. added]. The Turks did not like to see Christians  copy their clothing and forbade them to wear expensive and brightly colored clothes as well as garments in the "sacred" color of green.  To a good Muslim, an acceptance [by Muslims] of infidel [infidels wearing Turkish] headgear implied social degradation [of the Muslims] and religious betrayal [by the dhimmis of the Muslims]. The insistence on clothing that distinguished Muslim from non-Muslim encouraged similar tendencies among the Christians. If, in the nineteenth century the Muslims made the fez a mark of their faith, the Montenegrins did the same with their zavrata. Nonetheless, many a non-Turk had a suppressed desire to dress like a Turk and to free himself of regulated clothing. . . . .

As Ottoman rule weakened and Christians gained a greater degree of freedom, some Christians gradually proceeded to copy the Turks in clothing and jewelry. One of the first things the Serbs did after the liberation of 1804 was to don Turkish dress --- the fancier clothes of their rulers. Later, as political and cultural contacts with the West expanded, everything associated with the Turks came to be regarded as backward and alien. . . . .

Though by 1860 the condition of the Christians had improved, they continued to suffer from unequal treatment. R Davison observes that "They still protested the general prohibition of bells on their churches, the frequent rejection of their testimony in Turkish courts, occasional rape of Christian girls or forced conversions, and other sorts of personal mistreatment."
- - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Wayne Vucinich, The Ottoman Empire: Its Record and Legacy (New York: Van Nostrand 1965),  pp 65-66.

See a previous blog post with quotes from an 18th century source on the Muslim mania to control the clothing of non-Muslims, the dhimmis  [here].

The Ottoman Empire as an Oppressive State for Non-Muslims

Edward Said belonged to a whole school of American apologists for Islam and the Arabs. This school goes back before WW2 and continued with Roosevelt's visit with King Ibn Saud on the Red Sea on an American warship. Once large amounts of oil were being shipped out of Arabia, which Abdul-Aziz ibn Saud had named "Saudi Arabia" after his dynasty, pro-Arab, anti-Israel policies could be justified by Washington as necessary to keep the oil flowing, a considerable part of the profits of which went to the American oil consortium ARAMCO, made up of four major US oil companies.

Did Prof William Polk have to gloss over Muslim crimes in order to keep the oil and profits flowing to American oil companies? I don't know but the Saudi royal family too was making large profits from the oil extracted by ARAMCO.

Polk was writing back in the 1950s and 1960s, when he was also for a time the director of  Middle East policy planning on the State Department's Policy Planning Council. In the late 1970s, Edward Said, a rather obscure English and comparative literature prof at Columbia U came out with the first of his books glossing over all the faults and blemishes of traditional Islamic society. Said's fairy tales were all the more persuasive because he himself came from a Middle Eastern family, albeit his family had been converted to the Anglican/Episcopal denomination of Christianity, most likely from the Greek Orthodox Church. Said's family originated in the Jerusalem area but his father had left there for America before the First World War. William Said served in the US Army in the war and gained US citizenship. He was hardly typical of the Muslim Middle Easterner, although he came back to the Middle East  after the war but he went to Cairo rather than Jerusalem. In Cairo he built up a large stationery and textbook business and became rather wealthy. Nevertheless, in the early 1950s, Nasser's pan-Arabist "socialist" regime was making life hard for all those who were not Muslim or "authentically" Egyptian (here too Muslims were favored over native Christian Copts). So William Said, a US citizen, brought his family to America where Edward took up an academic career and at some point married a Middle Eastern Christian woman from Lebanon. But she was not Anglican. Rather she was the daughter of a prominent Lebanese Quaker, a leader of a Church with a large Middle Eastern missionary establishment, which was deeply involved with the 1948 Arab refugees from Israel.

Said's books sanded down the rough spots and whitewashed the history of Muslim relations with non-Muslims, although his family were non-Muslims and had no doubt been dhimmis before the Ottoman Empire eliminated the dhimma in its full original form as Western influence over the Ottomans increased in  the late 19th century. Despite the tendentious fraud that Said's books Orientalism [1978], The Question of Palestine [1979], and Covering Islam [1981] and others represented, they made a great impact on Western intellectuals, especially on the breed called "leftists."

However, writing before the age of Said, Prof. Wayne Vucinich gave in 1965 a sketch of social conditions in the Muslim Ottoman Empire for non-Muslims that is accurate, although he softens the picture by keeping to a concise statement of the general facts, omitting the gory details. Here are quotes from Vucinich below the broken line:
- - - - - - - -
Discrimination. The Ottoman state system fostered denominational and social discrimination, for the population was grouped by religion, classes, and ranks. One alleged purpose of this division was to separate various groups from one another "as much as possible in order to prevent contact and possible conflict."[quoting S Shaw] Each individual . . . had a place in life established by his social status, and within "the bounds (hadd) of his place, he was absolute." . . .  The confessional and social compartmentalization was scarcely adopted by the Ottoman rulers out of altruistic reasons, but rather in order to make it easier for them to rule the heterogeneous populations they had conquered.

The non-Muslims were never able to mix freely in Muslim society. As subject infidels they were socially castigated and denied many of the rights enjoyed by the ruling Muslims. The government was Muslim, and the official language was Turkish. It was Islam and not the Turkish "national identity" that separated the rulers from the ruled. The Turks thought of themselves "almost exclusively as Muslims," and in this way they were no different from many of their subjects. Not until the nineteenth century did the concepts of "a Turkish nationality" and "Ottomanism" develop. But . . . not all Muslims were held equal. After the seventeenth century we note, for example,  a tendency for the "born" Muslims to blame "converted" Muslims for the empire's plight.
 - - - - - - - - -
[Wayne Vucinich, The Ottoman Empire: Its Record and Legacy (New York: Van Nostrand 1965), pp 63-64]

We will present more on this topic from Professor Vucinich in following posts.

Was Karl Marx a Zionist NeoCon? A Bat Ye'or or a Robert Spencer ahead of his time?

Karl Marx is supposed to be one of the intellectual founders of Leftism, whatever that means today. Today, of course, the standard "leftist" position is to support Arab and Islamic terrorism --for whatever reason. Nevertheless, Karl Marx took the position that Islamic society was barbarous and an obstacle to civilization. Does that mean that Robert Spencer, Bat Ye'or, David Bukay, and likeminded others were really Marxists?

Here's what Marx had to say back in 1853 in the American newspaper, the New York Tribune [or Daily Tribune], edited by Horace Greeley, for which Marx was a regular foreign affairs correspondent:

This splended territory [the Balkans] has the misfortune to be inhabited by a conglomerate of different races and nationalities, of which it is hard to say which is the least fit for progress and civilization. . . Slavonians [Slavs], Greeks, Wallachians [Rumanians], Arnauts [Albanians], twelve millions of men, are all held in submission by one million of Turks, and up to a recent period it appeared doubtful whether, of all these different races, the Turks were not the most competent to hold the supremacy which, in such a mixed population, could not but accrue [p 123] to one of these nationalities. But when we see how lamentably have failed all attempts at civilization by Turkish authority --how the fanaticism of Islam, supported principally by the Turkish mob in a few great cities, has availed itself of the assistance of Austria and Russia invariably to regain power and to overturn any progress that might have been made; when we see the central, i.e., Turkish, authority weakened year after year by insurrections in the Christian provinces. . . we shall be obliged to admit that the presence of the Turks in Europe is a real obstacle to the development of the resources of the Thraco-Illyrian [Balkan] Peninsula. [p 124]

We can hardly describe the Turks as the ruling class of Turkey, because the relations of the different classes of society there are as mixed up as those of the various races. The Turk is, according to localities and circumstances, workman, farmer, and small freeholder, trader, feudal landlord in the lowest, most barbaric stage of feudalism, civil officer, or soldier; but in all these different social positions he belongs to the privileged creed and nation -- he alone has the right to carry arms, and the highest Christian has to give up the footpath to the lowest Moslem he meets. . . [p124]

The principal power of the Turkish population in Europe. . . lies in the mob of Constantinople and a few other large towns. It is essentially Turkish, and though it finds its principal livelihood by doing jobs for Christian capitalists, it maintains with great jealousy the imaginary superiority and real impunity for excesses which the privileges of Islam confer upon it as compared with Christians. [p 124]

[the above excerpts are from Marx's article in the New York Tribune, 7 April 1853; the page numbers refer to Paul W Blackstock and Bert F Hoselitz, eds., Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Russian Menace to Europe. . . (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1953)]

It is interesting that Marx admits in so many words the inadequacy of class analysis to describe and analyze Islamic society where dhimmis, non-Muslims, are a large part of the population. Further, Marx's self-styled epigones and disciples in the benighted Twenty-First Century tend to rather admire mobs and barbarism. Mass murder bombings by Islamists are just their cup of tea. But Marx saw Islam as fanatical, an obstacle to progress. And he pointed out the disabilities of non-Muslims --dhimmis-- under Muslim law, while showing how the Muslims could and did abuse the dhimmis. Nevertheless, the Bolsheviks started their rule with declaring support for Muslim nationalist movements against those of non-Muslims [see link]. Times change.

STOP THE ANNAPOLIS CONFERENCE FOR WAR & GENOCIDE!!!
- - - - - - - - - -
Coming: The fraud of the Peace Process, the lies underlying the Peace Process, peace follies, propaganda, Jews in Jerusalem, Hebron, the Land of Israel, etc.

The Bolsheviks for Jihad & Genocide -- Stalin's Appeal to MUSLIM Workers in Russia & the East

UPDATING 2-22-2009see at bottom

Why does most or much of the "Left" today support Islamic Jihad? After all, the "Left" is supposed to stand for equality, whereas Islam --even in moderate forms-- rejects equality. Indeed, that "left" that supports Islamic Jihad is demonstrating that it is in fact AGAINST equality. Without pretending to give a full and total answer to the question, here is some evidence to consider.

In late 1917, shortly after the Bolsheviks took power in the Russian Empire, Stalin's Commissariat of Nationalities issued an: Appeal to the Muslim Toilers of Russia and the East . This was an extraordinary document. It was an appeal to a particular religious group, whereas supposedly the Bolsheviks were against religion. Further, the Muslim Ottoman Empire was perpetrating the first genocide of the 20th century at the time --with the help of course of its German and Austro-German allies. The Appeal mentions none of this. Instead, it rejects promises by the Western allies to give the Armenians a state and to remove Armenian territories from the Ottoman Empire. It tells the Armenians to wait for their self-determination, while their national territory was to stay under Ottoman control. The Armenians were guaranteed self-determination after "military operations are brought to an end." Yet, the parts of their national territory under Ottoman control were areas where the massacres had taken place. Other parts had been under Russian imperial control since the 19th century. Whereas the Appeal was issued in late November-early December, several months later, in March 1918, the Bolsheviks, possibly under German pressure, agreed not only to withdraw from Ottoman territories --parts of historic Armenia and Georgia occupied during WW One-- but from historically Armenian and Georgian areas conquered from the Ottomans long before. The promise of self-determination for Armenians was not respected for those areas, whereas Soviet weapons were given to the new Turkish nationalist movement which rose out of the Ottoman Empire's defeat, but was no less anti-Armenian than the Empire. In 1922, the Turkish nationalists drove the Greek population out of Smyrna [now called Izmir], while massacring the Armenians there.

The Appeal is "a brilliant piece of political demagogy," as Serge Zenkovsky has noted [in Pan-Turkism and Islam in Russia (Cambridge, MA: HUP, 1967), p 161]. It disregarded "all the atheistic and internationalist elements of Marxist and Leninist teaching," as well as the supposed working class principles and loyalties of the Bolsheviks, "and appealed to the Moslems' religious and national feelings."

At least three different translations of all or parts of this manifesto are available in English. For clarity's sake we quote from more than one version, depending on which version was clearest for the passage quoted.

SOVIET APPEAL TO THE MUSLIM TOILERS OF RUSSIA AND THE EAST
Comrades! Brothers!
. . .

The rule of the plunderers, exploiting the peoples of the world, is trembling.
. . .

The world of violence and oppression is approaching its last days. A new world is arising, a world of the toilers and the liberated. At the head of this revolution is the Workers' and Peasants' Government in Russia. . .

The toiling masses of Russia burn with the single desire to achieve an honest peace and help the oppressed people of the world to win their freedom.
. . . we appeal to you, toiling and dispossessed Muslim workers in Russia and the East. . . all those whose mosques and shrines were destroyed, whose beliefs and customs were trampled under foot by the tsars and oppressors of Russia! Henceforth your beliefs and customs, your national and cultural institutions, are free and inviolable. . .

Muslims of the Orient, Persians, Turks, Arabs. . . all those whose lives and property, liberty and land, the greedy robbers of Europe have bartered for centuries -- all those whose countries the plunderers who started the war wish to divide!

Here there are no Muslim empires (such as Persia or the Ottoman Empire). Muslim states are not guilty of oppression of the non-Muslim subject peoples or even of their fellow Muslims of the working class. Only Europe is guilty. Without whitewashing Europe, we know that the Ottoman Empire chose to join Germany and Austria in World War I; in fact the Ottomans initiated the alliance in which Germany and Austria assisted them in the Armenian massacres during the war.

Further, in this manifesto, the Communist Soviet Union announced its favoritism for Muslims against non-Muslim subject peoples --called dhimmis or ra`ayahs.

To be sure, the manifesto, prepared by Stalin's Commissariat of Nationalities, also asserted the right of peoples to self-determination, but gave the national-territorial claims of Muslim peoples pride of place over those of non-Muslims. Consider:

Constantinople must remain in the hands of the Muslims. . .

The Ottoman capital probably had a Greek majority at the start of WW I, and if not, other non-Muslims (Bulgars, Jews, Armenians, etc.) certainly made up a majority together with the Greeks. Consider next:

We declare that the treaty for the partition of Turkey and the wresting from her of Armenia is null and void. As soon as military operations are brought to an end, the Armenians will be guaranteed the right to decide freely their political destiny. Not at the hands of Russia and her revolutionary government does slavery await you [Does the "you" refer to Armenians or to Turkish Muslims?], but at the hands of the marauders of European imperialism, of those who converted your fatherland into their ravished and plundered "colony."

Hence, the Armenians had the right of self-determination too. But they should not exercise their rights against Turkish (Muslim) claims of sovereignty. They should wait till the end of "military operations." The treaty promising removal from Ottoman control of Ottoman-ruled parts of Armenia was "null and void." Further, not only did the Bolsheviks leave the areas in question to the Ottoman Empire, but after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk (March 1918), the Bolsheviks ceded to the Ottoman Empire large areas of historic Armenia and Georgia which the Russian Tsars had conquered in the nineteenth century, thereby exposing Armenian subjects of Russia to a continuation of the mass murder perpetrated by the Muslim Ottoman Empire against its own Armenian population during WW One. Additional massacres naturally ensued.

Some observers saw Brest-Litovsk --with its territorial concessions to Germany and the Ottoman Empire, Germany's ally-- as Bolshevik compensation to the German Empire for helping the Bolsheviks take over the rival Russian Empire. Article IV of the Treaty states:

Russia will do all in its power to ensure the rapid evacuation of the eastern provinces of Anatolia and their restoration to Turkey. Ardahan, Kars, and Batum will be evacuated without delay by Russian troops.

The article does not mention Armenia or Georgia by name. So much for Bolshevik devotion to self-determination. This episode, like the Nazi-Soviet Pact, is one of those that Communists avoid discussing or are unaware of. Instead of bemoaning the lethal results of Brest-Litovsk, the Communists habitually advocated --in practice-- devotion to Muslim militant demands over the rights of dhimmis. We do not intend to explain why the Bolsheviks took this position. Were they acceding to pressures by the German Empire which had helped Lenin take over the Russian Empire and take it out of the war? Were they opportunists who noted the huge Muslim population in the world, at that time, compared with the small numbers of Armenians whose numbers had been halved by the massacres during the war? Did they think that the warlike nature of the Muslim peoples could be harnessed to help them fight the Western imperialists, and thus the rights of small peoples like the Armenians could be disregarded?

As said above, slightly different translations of the title and of the text as a whole or in part are available.
1) Soviet Russian Imperialism in the Anvil series edited by Louis Snyder for Van Nostrand Co., pp 118-120. [This edition presents only excerpts]
[reprinted from J Bunyan and HH Fisher, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1918 (Stanford Univ Press, 1934); we have not seen this edition]
2) JC Hurewitz, Diplomacy in the Near and Middle East: A Documentary Record: 1914-1956, v. II (NY: Van Nostrand, 1956), pp 27-28 [this gives the full text]
3) Serge A Zenkovsky, Pan-Turkism and Islam in Russia (Cambridge, MA: HUP, 1967), pp 161-162 [only excerpts]
Furthermore, three different dates are given for the Appeal:
20 November 1917 by Zenkovsky
3 December 1917 by Hurewitz
7 December 1917 by Bunyan and Fisher
However, all three versions are translations of the same document. The differences in date may derive from differences between the Gregorian calendar and the Julian calendar, still in use in Russia at that time.

Moreover, the Bolsheviks tolerated the presence in their state of Jemal Pasha and Enver Pasha, leaders of the Young Turk party, the Committee for Union and Progress, who ruled the Ottoman Empire during WW One and were, therefore, guilty in the Armenian massacres.

Note the convergence of Western and Bolshevik [Communist] policies --mentioned above-- in support for the Turkish nationalists of Ataturk by 1922.
The Western support for the ethnic cleansing of the Greeks and Armenians from Smyrna, on the eastern shore of the Aegean Sea, is indicated in the following two books:
George Horton, The Blight of Asia (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1926)
Marjorie Housepian, The Smyrna Affair
UPDATING 2-22-2009
see Seth Frantzman's article, "Islamism's Accidental Midwives", Jerusalem Post, 2-22-2009 [print version -- full version with comments]. This article tells about support by both the BritishEmpire and the Communists which built up Arab nationalism and Islamic jihad fanaticism, in Israel, Sudan, India, and elsewhere.
See post "What Do Left & Right Mean Today?" of 2-11-2009.
- - - - - - - - -
More on the repercussions of the Greek uprising of the 1820s in the Land of Israel -- the account of NeoPhytos