Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (13 page)

For the lower classes, poorly understood new ideas floated side-by-side with old modes of patronage and political loyalty. The newspaper
Al-Muqattam
quoted a Bani Sakhr tribal chief from the province of Syria: “I do not know what a constitution is, but I swear [allegiance to it]. If the Damascus governor and the deputy governor of this district betray [it], I will betray [it] with them too. If they [carry it out] with faithfulness and uprightness, then I am with them too.”
¹²⁴
For the newspaper's audience, the comment must have underscored the importance of purging officials of the ancien regime from power, particularly in the “backward” margins of the empire which were even more susceptible to manipulation.

As a result, peasants and the uneducated became the objects of careful attention from the middle and upper classes—on the one hand, encouraging their participation in supporting the revolution, while at the same time, ensuring they accepted the boundaries established by their social superiors. The “poor and miserable” peasants were invoked at various public rallies in Jerusalem, and speakers agitated for lowering taxes to lighten the burden of the peasants. In addition, the rights of the peasant took center stage in the claims of government corruption. As one speaker passionately pleaded, “I ask you to lift the tyranny from [the peasants'] shoulders and expel the government despots who plunder his money. Look at the homes of some of the oppressors and see them adorned with the money of the peasant, furnished with silk.”
¹²⁵

Paternalism was threatened, however, when the peasants', workers', and tribes' interpretations of liberty directly clashed with the interests of other classes. Early workers strikes were ruthlessly put down by the CUP. Reports from northern Palestine of the peasant revolutionaries of Kufr Kana who rebelled against local land tenure and authority structures merited them the label of bandits and thieves. A similar mutiny by peasants against their landlords in the Wadi al-'Ajam district in the
province of Syria ended in their submission only after a villager was shot by the gendarme sent by the deputy-governor.
¹²⁶

As the months passed many people were to observe bitterly that the “uneducated” seemed to misunderstand
urriyya
to be a license for anarchy and intolerable violations of the social order. The American consul in Haifa frostily noted that “since the proclamation of freedom the natives behave like a lot of ill-treated slaves, who have gained their freedom and do not know how to keep themselves in the limits of law.”
¹²⁷
Another foreign traveler in Istanbul made similar observations:

“Pay the toll?” said a woman crossing the Galata Bridge. “Why should I pay the toll? Have we not liberty now?'” “Is this what you call liberty?” said an Albanian when the Young Turks condemned him to death for shooting a Christian. Persons “falsely representing themselves to be members of the CUP,” to use the language of the Grand Vizier, persuaded the people that there would now be no more taxes to pay. A small boy threw a stone at a foreigner driving in a motor-car. The foreigner rebuked him, and received the reply, “It is liberty now!” The foreigner gave him a box on the ear. “All right,” said the impartial youngster; “you also have liberty.”
¹²⁸

In other words, while the 1908 revolution saw the middle classes of the empire fighting for their place on the imperial stage, neither they nor the architects of the revolution intended for the revolution to overturn certain socioeconomic boundaries—a fact marking the limits of
urriyya
¹²⁹

Changes in gender relations also remained outside the acceptable boundaries of liberty. The linkage between “women's liberation” and “national modernity” was already widely discussed in the Ottoman (as in the Egyptian and Iranian) press starting in the 1890s, and women as mothers of the nation were lauded and idealized in the revolutionary press.
¹³⁰
However, the changing behavior and public appearance of women in the heady early days of the revolution caused a great deal of social and political concern. Early reports indicate that women appeared unveiled in public for the first time in the days after the revolution and took part in public demonstrations, discussions, and celebrations. One Istanbul press correspondent hailed these women as the symbol of Ottoman freedom and claimed they were received well by the crowd.
¹³¹
A visitor from England documented similar occurrences, but also remarked on how short-lived this form of freedom was, calling its end the only “shadow among the sunshine”:

They threw off their veils; they came out from behind the closely-latticed windows into streets and public places; they went to the theaters and the cafes; they drove side by side with men in open carriages. The more ardent spirits held an open meeting in Constantinople, at which lady speakers demanded that the centuryold
shackles should be broken asunder. The thing was too novel to last. After a week or two, remonstrances began. The carriages were stopped, and some of the women roughly handled by the crowd. They felt, instinctively, that they had gone too far; they drew back. The veils reappeared—perhaps not drawn quite so closely as before.
¹³²

Apparently this phenomenon of unveiling and its backlash spread, because Muslim religious scholars in Damascus agitated against unveiled women there. In Beirut, the Islamic reformist newspaper
Ottoman Union
took a critical tone against Muslim women leaving the house with makeup and adornment, arguing that freedom did not mean the end of relevance of the
shari'a.
¹³³
The Lighthouse
, on the other hand, published a translation of an article by a female journalist which had appeared in the Turkish-language newspaper
The Wealth of Knowledge (Servet-i Funun)
, complaining that Ottoman women were being excluded from the revolution and from public discourse. “The press is concerned with the dress of women,” she wrote, “but it forgets men and women have equal obligations. We want to dress our minds, and that is only done by entering schools. Teaching and learning is a service to the homeland, and certainly among us women there are those who are broadminded and know the needs of the nation.”
¹³⁴
Thus, while unveiling crossed into the category of “excessive liberty,” Ottoman women would participate in the revolutionary public sphere in other ways, through a vibrant women's press and via numerous women's organizations.

In the view of Ottoman intellectuals, the revolution which brought liberty to the Ottoman Empire on July 24, 1908, put it in the noble company of two other great revolutionary states—America (July 4) and France (July 14). Beyond the obvious symbolism of the numerical symmetry of the three revolutions, Ottoman observers compared themselves favorably to the American and French examples of forging a civic nation. After listening to schoolchildren sing the Ottoman anthem and patriots deliver speeches in Armenian, Turkish, and Arabic for the standing-room-only crowd at a gathering held in an Armenian church in Cairo, Rashid Rida argued that the Ottoman Empire had surpassed even
la France
, the quintessential “civic nation,” in its achievements.

They say that France is the mother of liberty and equality. Yes and no, but the Ottomans are worthier than the French in the glory of equality. France is one nation, one race, one religion, one sect, one language, one civilization, so what is strange in the demands of their wise men for equality between their individuals, after knowing what their government demands and what they owe it and [that] they all agree on its unity?

But we, the Ottomans, have already united from the different nationalities in a way that has not yet happened in any other kingdom. We are different in race, descent, language, religion, sect, education and culture, or, we can say we differ in every thing that people can differ in, but despite that we demand equality and celebrate its granting in a general covenant and in the places of worship and no doubt in this magazine.
¹

For Rida and his audience, the Ottoman Empire was not only de facto an empire of incredible heterogeneity; more important, in its conscious adoption of the political project of equality, it was a multicultural state par excellence, long before the term was coined or even fully imagined in the West. Throughout the revolutionary era, the “Ottoman nation”
(al-umma al-'Uthmāniyya
, Ara.;
millet-i Osmani
, Ott. Tur.) took
center stage, both as the subject of popular discourse (“We Ottomans”) as well as the object of collective imaginings. Public speakers and the press spoke of the “union of all the Ottomans,” “unity of nationality,” and “the Ottoman tie.” And yet, this outcome was in no way predictable or inevitable. How did individual residents of the empire come to see themselves as “Ottomans”? How did they imagine their relationship to other Ottomans—of different ethnicities, religions, and mother tongues? In other words, how did this Ottoman nation emerge as both a political community and a sociopolitical identity?

FROM COMMUNITY TO NATION

There is a tradition in Islam that considers the Muslim community of believers
(ummat al-Muslimīn)
as one, and ethnic, linguistic, tribal, and class divisions are supposed to be irrelevant in the face of equality of belief. As a result, when Napoleon issued propaganda leaflets appealing to the “Egyptian nation”
(al-umma al-Ma
riyya)
to welcome the French army into Egypt in 1799, he earned the wrath of the Ottoman sultan Selim III, who issued an imperial ferman declaring that the French were plotting to “ruin the Muslim community of believers which is unified in the unity of the lord of the universe.”
²
The sultan's anger stemmed from the fact that the term
umma
, which appears throughout the Qur'an, was at the time solely connected to a religiously based principle of peoplehood, making secular claims of collective identity rooted in common territory inconceivable. Within a few short decades, however, two closely related developments unfolded within the Ottoman Empire that would set the stage for the emergence of a territorially based, supra-ethnic, supra-religious identification with the empire, initially as official policy and then as a project broadly adopted by the empire's intellectuals.

First, in the 1820s the Ottoman Empire was faced with a new phenomenon of Greek separatist nationalism, which eventually succeeded in establishing an independent kingdom in the southern and central regions of today's modern Greece. It is true that the eighteenth century had been a period of extreme decentralization throughout the Ottoman Empire, with local potentates arising to carve out spheres of influence far from the watchful eye and effective control of Istanbul, but these Greek nationalists presented a new, ideological challenge to the empire. They had been educated abroad and were deeply influenced by the romantic philo-Hellenism rampant in European capitals at the time, which called on Greek speakers to “awaken” and reclaim the mantle of the cradle of
Western civilization. Indeed, the Western powers' destruction of the Ottoman navy at Navarino proved decisive in the war between Ottoman troops and Greek rebels and ensured Greek independence.

As a result of this staggering development, the Ottoman government turned to create a state ideology known as Ottomanism
(Osmanlilik)
, which aimed at promoting universal loyalty to the dynasty and equality under the law for non-Muslims. The architects of state Ottomanism hoped to prevent the spread of new nationalist ideologies among non-Muslim subject populations as well as to neutralize European interventions on their behalf. To that end, the 1839 sultanic decree known as the Noble Rescript of the Rose Garden injected the language of loyalty to “state and people” and “love for the homeland.”
³
Less than two decades later, the 1856 Imperial Rescript went one step further in promoting equal discourse among subjects of the empire: from
zimmi (dhimmi
, Ara.)—a term rooted in Islamic tradition that referred to non-Muslims who received protection from a Muslim ruler in exchange for loyalty, subservience, and payment of tax—the empire's non-Muslims became “subjects”
(teba‘)
like all others.
⁴
In 1869, the Ottoman Law of Nationality legislated equal status for all Ottoman residents, declaring that “all subjects of the empire are without distinction called Ottomans, irrespective of whatever religion they profess.”
⁵

The Ottoman law sought to tackle the complex citizenship question for an empire where wars and shifting state boundaries, in- and out-migration, and the politically sensitive presence of foreigners intermixed to create a thorny human landscape. From the outset, the law combined elements of ethnic citizenship (descent,
jus sanguinis)
, with elements of civic citizenship, such as territorial criteria
(jus soli)
and a path to naturalization.
⁶
Unless they were known to be foreign citizens, people resident in Ottoman domains were automatically eligible for Ottoman citizenship. Their offspring were also automatically awarded citizenship, and a child whose Ottoman father took on foreign citizenship still remained an Ottoman. At the same time, the law also specified how foreigners could become Ottoman citizens. An adult immigrant could request citizenship after five years of residence after providing certification that one was not fleeing military service or a lawsuit in one's country of origin. Alternately, if born in Ottoman lands to foreign parents, one could become a citizen three years after entering adulthood.
⁷

In either case, whether ascribed at birth or achieved by naturalization, Ottoman citizenship was universal and equal. Legally speaking, no one was any
more
or
less
Ottoman than any other citizen, as citizenship was based on the “normative presumption that…rights and obligations are anchored in the individual qua citizen, with no qualifications
whatsoever because of his group affiliation.”
⁸
That is to say, according to the law, political membership in the Ottoman nation was as open to a Turkish-speaking Muslim from Cyprus as it was for an Armenian-speaking Christian in Aleppo or a naturalized Arabic-speaking Jewish immigrant from Algeria.

Several contradictory factors seem to have driven the Ottoman citizenship law. On the one hand, the state sought to normalize the status of tens of thousands of Muslim refugees from the Caucasus and southeastern Europe fleeing Russian expansion and separatist nationalisms, respectively.
⁹
At times, these Muslim migrants were seen as strategic assets to be settled in sensitive (mixed) areas to help bolster the Muslim balance of power, even though this view was a challenge to, if not an outright undermining of, Ottomanist principles. And yet, the Ottoman citizenship law was not broadly pan-Islamic, for at the same time citizenship also aimed to further mark the border between Ottoman and non-Ottoman Muslims, playing a particularly important role in the eastern frontier of the empire with Qajar Iran, where the Ottoman citizenship law penalized Ottoman women who married Iranian men, requiring them to forfeit their citizenship.
¹⁰
A similarly tough attitude was taken toward Algerians resident in the empire who sought to marry Ottoman women but refused to forfeit their French nationality or protection. Muslim pilgrims from India, North Africa, or Russia who stayed past the
hajj
were also of deep concern to the Ottoman state.
¹¹
In other words, the Ottoman state did not simply want to expand its Muslim population at any cost, and treated some groups of foreign Muslims with suspicion and distance.

The other important concern of the citizenship law was to formalize the boundaries between foreign citizens resident in the Ottoman Empire, on the one hand, and Ottoman subjects, on the other. The boundary between the two had become blurred by the nineteenth century thanks to the Capitulations, bilateral treaties between the Ottoman Empire and various European countries that were originally intended to give foreign merchants resident in the empire extraterritorial privileges. According to the Capitulations, foreign citizens and protégés were protected from Ottoman law, going instead to the consular courts, and were exempted from Ottoman taxes. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, the Capitulations had spread far beyond their original intent as the European powers recklessly awarded citizenship or protégé status to local Christians, Jews, and to a far lesser extent, select Muslims in an attempt to expand their influence in the empire.

Sometimes these naturalizations were awarded on an individual basis—loyal clerks, administrators, and dragomans (interpreters) were often rewarded for their faithful service to a foreign country. For
example, after twelve years of service to the British Consulate in Jaffa as dragoman, vice-consul, and finally proconsul, the Christian Arab Nasri Habib Fiani requested naturalization.
¹²
On another occasion, the Jewish director of the private Alliance Israélite Universelle school in Haifa requested French citizenship, and the local French consul promised to help his cause.
¹³

Much more significant for Ottoman domestic politics than these individual cases, however, was the presence within the empire of large blocs of Christians and, to a lesser extent, Jews yielding foreign citizenship or protection. In the decades after Greek independence from the empire, tens of thousands of Ottoman Greek Orthodox Christians were awarded Hellenic citizenship; the Greek citizenship law required only three years' residence in Greece, a simple requirement for the many Ottoman Greek Orthodox who spent years studying there.
¹⁴
As a result, these Ottoman Greek Orthodox subjects would gain Greek citizenship before returning to Ottoman domains wielding the privileges of the Capitulations. In addition, postindependence tens of thousands of Hellenic Greeks immigrated into Ottoman territories, settling in Izmir and along the western Anatolian Aegean coast. Furthermore, immigrant Jews from British-ruled Gibraltar, French-occupied North Africa, and Europe also brought, and in most cases kept, their foreign citizenship with them.

The cumulative impact of these developments was staggering: empire-wide, hundreds of thousands of foreign citizens and protégés lived in permanent or semipermanent residence.
¹⁵
In the holy city of Jerusalem, for example, there were at least ten thousand foreign citizens resident among thirty thousand Ottoman subjects.
¹⁶
This was magnified exponentially in the empire's larger cities, such as Istanbul, Salonica, and Izmir; in the capital, for example, up to 15 percent of the total population consisted of European foreigners.

In Ottoman cities in particular, the juxtaposition of foreigners and “protected” Ottoman subjects (protégés) alongside regular Ottoman subjects was a consistent source of tensions and conflict. Consulates regularly intervened on behalf of their citizens and protégés with the local police commissioners, governors and deputy governors, mayors, and tax and
tabu
(land title) officials.
¹⁷
This consular intervention in many instances encouraged or at least tolerated abuses. For example the American consul in Jerusalem reported in 1908 that resident American citizens were complicit in storing stolen goods, selling rotten meat, and slaughtering animals in the center of crowded quarters in violation of local law, all with virtual impunity.
¹⁸
The perceived injustice of the privileges granted to foreigners and their local protégés was such that one Jerusalem newspaper recounted an anecdote of a stray dog that bit passersby, disturbed
local road repairs, and posed a public health risk, yet he roamed the streets of Jerusalem freely because he was rumored to be an American citizen!
¹⁹
Foreign citizens and protégés also benefited from numerous economic privileges that left Ottomans unable to compete since they had to pay higher taxes and fees to the Ottoman government. Even worse, the Ottoman governor was often impotent to act against the resident foreign consuls.