Millet (Ottoman Empire)
In the Ottoman Empire, a millet (Turkish: [millet]; Ottoman Turkish: ملت) was an independent court of law pertaining to "personal law" under which a confessional community (a group abiding by the laws of Muslim sharia, Christian canon law, or Jewish halakha) was allowed to rule itself under its own laws.
Despite frequently being referred to as a "system", before the nineteenth century the organization of what are now retrospectively called millets in the Ottoman Empire was not at all systematic. Rather, non-Muslims were simply given a significant degree of autonomy within their own community, without an overarching structure for the millet as a whole. The notion of distinct millets corresponding to different religious communities within the empire would not emerge until the eighteenth century.[1] Subsequently, the millet system was justified through numerous foundation myths linking it back to the time of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror (r. 1451–81),[2] although it is now understood that no such system existed in the fifteenth century.[3]
During the 19th century rise of nationalism in the Ottoman Empire, as a result of the Tanzimat reforms (1839–76), the term was used for legally protected ethno-linguistic minority groups, similar to the way other countries use the word nation. The word millet comes from the Arabic word millah (ملة) and literally means "nation".[3] Abdulaziz Sachedina regards the millet system as an example of pre-modern religious pluralism, as the state recognized multiple different religious groups in exchange for some control over religious identification and the enforcement of orthodoxy.[4]
Historian Johann Strauss wrote that the term "seems to be so essential for the understanding of the Ottoman system and especially the status of non-Muslims".[5] Other authors interpret the millet system as one form of non-territorial autonomy and consider it as such a potentially universal solution to the modern issues of ethnic and religious diversity.[6] According to Taner Akçam, the Ottoman state was "... based on the principle of heterogeneity and difference rather than homogeneity and sameness, [which] functioned in an opposite way to modern nation-states."[7]
Term[edit]
The term millet, which originates from the Arabic milla, had three basic meanings in Ottoman Turkish: religion, religious community and nation.[8] The first sense derives from Quranic usage and is attested in Ottoman administrative documents into the 19th century.[8] Benjamin Braude has argued that before the Tanzimat reforms, the word millet in the sense of religious community denoted the Muslim religious community or the Christians outside of the Ottoman Empire.[8] This view is supported by Donald Quataert.[9] In contrast, Michael Ursinus writes that the word was used to refer to non-Muslim subjects of the Ottoman Empire even before that time.[8] The term was used inconsistently prior to the 19th century.[8]
The systematic use of millet as designation for non-Muslim Ottoman communities dates from the reign of Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808–1839) in the early 19th century, when official documentation came to reiterate that non-Muslim subjects were organized into three officially sanctioned millets: Greek Orthodox, Armenian, and Jewish.[10] The bureaucrats of this era asserted that the millet system was a tradition dating back to the reign of Sultan Mehmed I (r. 1413–1421).[10] Many historians have accepted this claim and assumed that a millet system of this form existed since early Ottoman times.[10] Recent scholarship has cast doubt on this idea, showing that it was rather a later political innovation, which was introduced in the rhetorical garb of an ancient tradition.[10] The Ottoman state used religion rather than ethnicity to define each millet, and people who study the Ottoman Empire do not define the Muslims as being in a millet.[11]
The Ottoman Turkish version of the Ottoman Constitution of 1876 uses the word "millet", as do the Arabic and Persian versions; despite this, at the time the usage of the Arabic word "milla" was declining in favour of the word "ummah".[5]
The Armenian, Greek, and Jewish residents did not use the word "millet" and instead described themselves as "nations" (French: nation, Armenian: ազգ (azg), Greek: Έθνος (ethnos), and Ladino: nasyon).[12] The lack of use of the word "millet" among the Christian and Jewish minorities reflected in versions of the Ottoman Constitution in their respective languages: The French version of the Ottoman Constitution used the word "communauté" in the place of "millet", and so the others used words modeled after or based on the French: հասարակութիւն (hasarakut'iwn) in Armenian, общност/община (obstina) in Bulgarian, κοινότης (koinotēs) in Greek, and komunita in Judaeo-Spanish.[5]
History[edit]
Use for Sassanid Empire[edit]
In a 1910 book William Ainger Wigram used the term melet in application to the Persian Sasanian Empire, arguing that the situation there was similar to the Ottoman millet system and no other term was readily available to describe it.[39] Some other authors have also adopted this usage.[40] The early Christians there formed the Church of the East (later known as the Nestorian Church after the Nestorian schism). The Church of the East's leader, the Catholicos or Patriarch of the East, was responsible to the Persian king for the Christians within the Empire. This system of maintaining the Christians as a protected religious community continued after the Islamic conquest of the Sassanids, and the community of Nestorian Christians flourished and was able to send missionaries far past the Empire's borders, reaching as far as China and India.
19th century (Reformation Era)[edit]
In 1839 and 1856, reforms were attempted with the goal of creating equality between the religious communities of the Ottoman Empire. In the course of these reforms, new millets emerged, notably for Eastern Catholic and Protestant Christian communities. The heads of each millet and clerics in them were also to have their internal rule reviewed by the central government and to keep their power in check.[41] Many clerics in the millet system pushed back against these reforms as they believed it was meant to weaken the millets and the power these clerics had built for themselves. These millets, refusing to give up any autonomy, slowed down the attempted reforms and their impact on the equality of religious communities.[42]