Cultures in Conflict - Essay Example

Cultures in Conflict For nearly half a millennium the Ottomans ruled an empire as diverse as any in history. Remarkably, this poly-ethnic and multi-religious society worked. Muslims, Christians, and Jews worshipped and studied side by side, enriching their distinct cultures. The legal traditions and practices of each community, particularly in matters of personal status -- that is, death, marriage, and inheritance -- were respected and enforced through the empire. Scores of languages and literatures employing a bewildering variety of scripts flourished. Opportunities for advancement and prosperity were open in varying degrees to all the empires subjects. During their heyday the Ottomans created a society which allowed a great degree of communal autonomy while maintaining a fiscally sound and militarily strong central government. In the nineteenth century the Jews, like the Christians and the Muslims, went through a phase of conflict -- the struggle between reformers and conservatives. Among the Muslims, the Greeks, and the Armenians, the reformers won. Among the Jews, they lost. For this the Jews paid a price. Compared with their Christian neighbors they fell steadily behind. The Jews had cast their lot, not surprisingly, with the reactionary forces among the Turks. The destruction in 1826 of the Janissary Corps, the old military order, with which the Jews had important links, was a heavy blow. The rise of Russia and the growth of Russian influence were also not very helpful to Jews in the Ottoman Empire. Later in the century there was a certain upswing in the entrepôt trade of Salonica with its ties to the West, but despite improved education, which was fostered most notably by the Alliance Israélite Universelle, the effort came too late. They were caught in the circumstances which led to the end of the Ottoman Empire and the transformation of the entire region. Language has barely been mentioned in this discussion of the major communities of the Ottoman Empire. In view of the role that language has played in determining national identity in the West, its relative lack of importance in the Ottoman context is significant. Greeks, Armenians, Jews, as well as Copts and non-Orthodox Christians in Arab lands each had a distinctive liturgical language. However, the language of ritual was not necessarily the language of the street or the home. While the hierarchy of the Greek Or thodox church was both ethnically and linguistically Greek, the parish clergy and flock was a polyglot mass speaking almost as many languages as were spoken in the empire itself. In the Balkans there were speakers of Slavic and, in the case of Rumanian, a Romance language. To the south of Anatolia there were Arabic-speakers. In Anatolia itself, according to observers during the nineteenth century, the majority of the communicants of the church did not know Greek at all, as their native language was Turkish or Armenian. In Anatolia the Greek Orthodox who were literate wrote in Greek script, but the language many of them transcribed was Turkish or Armenian. The Ottoman Empire was a classic example of the plural society. An acute observer of similar societies in South Asia defined them with the following description which applies equally well to the Ottoman world: . . . probably the first thing that strikes the visitor is the medley of peoples. . . . It is in the strictest sense a medley, for they mix, but do not combine. Each group holds by its own religion, its own culture and language, its own ideas and ways. As individuals they meet, but only in the market-place, in buying and selling. There is a plural society, with different sections of the community, living side by side, but separately within the same political unit. Even in the economic sphere there is a division of labor along racial lines. (Furnivall 304-305) For all their shortcomings, plural societies did allow diverse groups of people to live together with a minimum of bloodshed. In comparison with the nationstates which succeeded them, theirs is a remarkable record. In recent years, spurred by an awareness of the ethnic strife that plagues so many nation-states, scholars have turned to the study of ethnicity and ethnically diverse states. Unfortunately, much of this work has been historically and geographically limited. The Islamic world has rarely been included in such studies despite the fact that one of the most enduring polyethnic states was the last great Islamic Empire, that of the Ottomans. In recent studies on the Middle East, the dominant themes have been nationalism on the one hand and modernization on the other, to the neglect of religious and communal issues. The continuing importance of religion and community has become increasingly obvious and a serious and scholarly study of the background and implications of these factors is overdue. The chapters presented in this book attempt to answer both these needs. A subject as broad and complex as that presented here could easily fill many volumes. Considerations of space and sometimes of availability have forced us to omit many topics which could legitimately be included -- as, for example, the smaller Christian sects of the Arabic-speaking lands, the Jewish community of Baghdad, the image of non-Muslims in Muslim fiction, drama, and folk literature. It is our hope that the topics discussed here will spur further research in the many important areas which have necessarily been omitted. The policies of the Ottomans toward their Christian and Jewish subjects were part of a larger pattern of relations between Muslims and non-Muslims that emerged during centuries of Islamic rule. Before the House of Osman began its rise to power in the fourteenth century, Islam had conquered the Christian heartlands of the Middle East, all of North Africa, all of Iberia, and most of the Mediterranean islands. Clearly it is difficult to make generalizations about the status of non-Muslims in so vast an area for so long a time. Rendering the task even more difficult is the persistence of two opposing myths on the question of Muslim tolerance and intolerance. One depicts Islam and the Muslims as bigoted, intolerant, and oppressive; its best-known image is Gibbons legendary figure of a fanatical warrior riding out of the desert, with the Quran in one hand and the sword in the other, offering his victims a choice between the two. The other myth is of an interfaith, interracial utopia in which Muslims, Christians, and Jews worked together in equality and harmony in a golden age of free intellectual endeavor. Both myths are sadly distorted, relatively recent, and products of European, not Islamic, history. In the medieval past neither Christianity nor Islam greatly prized religious tolerance; neither condemned its absence in the other. The charge of Christendom against Islam was that its doctrines were false, not that they were imposed by force -- a form of persuasion long seen as normal. The charge of ruthless oppression began with the Renaissance. The self-identification of Christian Europe, threatened by the Turks, with the ancient Greeks who had resisted the Persians, led the West to see itself as engaged in a fight for freedom against Oriental despotism. This initiated a new line of thought about the Islamic Orient. It was reinforced during the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, which had developed its own objections to religious intolerance. It was, of course, safer to criticize Islam than to criticize Christianity, in countries where the Church wielded considerable power, and Islam was sometimes used as a terrible example. Voltaire Mahomet illustrates this point. The other myth that of the interfaith utopia, seems to have begun a little later, during the Reformation, when Islam was used as a stick with which some Protestant polemicists beat their opponents. Certain groups claimed an affinity with Islam as a strictly monotheistic religion; some even contrasted Turkish tolerance with Catholic repression. With the Enlightenment this myth too was reinforced. Sometimes Orientals, typically Turks or Persians, were used as a vehicle for social comment and criticism of the West. While Rousseau saw the Arabs and the Turks as perhaps no better and no worse than the Christians, Herder contrasted "the noble and valiant Saladin" with "the perfidious, depraved Christians." There were further complications. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Muslim peasantry, weakened and impoverished by the heavy burdens of conscription and war, saw their Christian neighbors, exempt from these duties, grow in numbers and possessions. The same period witnessed the growth of a Muslim middle class whose economic aspirations brought it directly into conflict with Greeks, Armenians, and to a lesser degree Jews. There arose a vocal and articulate element eager to displace these minorities from their position of influence. Pan-Islam had been the Ottoman response to the perception of ubiquitous pan-Christian threat: it represented the attempted transformation of a religiopolitical instinct into a politico-religious policy. Implicitly it raised the threat of holy war to gain its declared aim of Islamic unity under the leadership of the Ottoman sultan-caliph. In the event of such a war the position of the dhimmis would be sensitive, but the position of those claiming protection from a warring nation would be grave indeed. This was the price that the Christians eventually paid for Ottoman recognition of their sovereign status. The Ottomans took a very long time to collect it. Even as late as the last decade of the nineteenth century, in the midst of the Greco-Turkish War, the authorities by and large left unmolested the Greek subjects of the empire who prayed for a Greek victory. Muslim popular feeling toward non-Muslims became increasingly hostile. There were numerous riots and some massacres. The Young Turk Revolution of 1908, with its promised return to constitutionalism and Ottomanism, failed in its goals. The bitter hardship of the First World War and the events that followed sealed the fate of the Ottoman form of plural coexistence. Works Cited J. S. Furnivall, Colonial Policy and Practice, New York, 1956, pp. 304-305. Lewis, Bernard; Cultures in Conflict: Christians, Muslims, and Jews in the Age of Discovery, Oxford University Press, USA; New Ed edition (1995) Read More