Millet (Ottoman Empire)

History of the Ottoman Empire
Social structure
Court and aristocracy
Ethnoreligious communities
Rise of nationalism
Classes

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] Heads of millets, or milletbaşı (Ethnarch), usually had absolute secular and ecclesiastical power over their communities, being answerable only to the Sultan.

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. During this era, the status of these groups, their relation to the central government, and their self-governance, were codified into constitutions, elevating the power of the laity at the expense of clergy. 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] Notably, Ethnarchs principally conversed with the Foreign Ministry, as if they represented foreign nations, but after 1878 it was through the Justice Ministry.[5]

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".[6] 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.[7] 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."[8]

  1. ^ Masters, Bruce (2001). Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Arab World: The Roots of Sectarianism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. pp. 61–2. ISBN 978-0-521-80333-5.
  2. ^ Braude, Benjamin (1982). "Foundation Myths of the Millet System". In Braude, Benjamin; Lewis, Bernard (eds.). Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire. Vol. 1. New York: Holmes & Meier. pp. 69–90. ISBN 978-0-8419-0519-1.
  3. ^ a b Masters, Bruce (2009). "Millet". In Ágoston, Gábor; Bruce Masters (eds.). Encyclopedia of the Ottoman Empire. pp. 383–4.
  4. ^ Sachedina, Abdulaziz Abdulhussein (2001). The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism. Oxford University Press. pp. 96–97. ISBN 978-0-19-513991-4. The millet system in the Muslim world provided the pre-modern paradigm of a religiously pluralistic society by granting each religious community an official status and a substantial measure of self-government.
  5. ^ Davison 1963, p. 132.
  6. ^ Strauss, Johann (2010). "A Constitution for a Multilingual Empire: Translations of the Kanun-ı Esasi and Other Official Texts into Minority Languages". In Herzog, Christoph; Malek Sharif (eds.). The First Ottoman Experiment in Democracy. Würzburg: Orient-Institut Istanbul. pp. 21–51. (info page on book at Martin Luther University) // CITED: p. 44-45 (PDF p. 46-47/338).
  7. ^ Barkey, Karen and George Gavrilis. 2016. "The Ottoman Millet System: Non-Territorial Autonomy and its Contemporary Legacy." Ethnopolitics 15, no. 1: 24–42.
  8. ^ Akçam, Taner (2006). A Shameful Act. New York, NY: Holt Paperbacks. p. 20. ISBN 978-0-8050-8665-2.