Cosmopolitan citizenship in the Middle East

Open Democracy:

As ethnic and sectarian solidarities and conflicts sharpen in this part of the world, it may be worth reminding ourselves of another way of being – ‘new Ottoman’ cosmopolitanism, with its complex relationship to colonialism.

Sectarian violence, ethnic conflict, religious politics, are all prominent features of the current situation in many Middle Eastern countries. Thriving Jewish communities came to an end in every country after the inauguration of the state of Israel and the subsequent wars. Christian communities, integral to the population and society of many countries, and prominent participants in the politics of Arab and regional nationalism, are now increasingly under pressure, and diminishing in numbers and importance in most countries, due to differential migration and fertility, and, in the case of Iraq, suffering violence and dislocation. Ethnic and sectarian solidarities and conflicts are ever sharper, and the perennial Arab-Israeli quagmire takes on increasingly an ethno-religious garb.

A common theme in public discourse, in both the region and the West, is that these patterns of conflict have deep historical roots in the ‘mosaic society’ of the region, conflicts being only suppressed by imperial impositions, whether of the Ottomans or the British, and subsequently by violent dictatorships such as that of the Ba`th regimes. When these are removed, as in the case of Iraq, then the deep-seated schisms are given a free reign and manifested in conflict and violence. The opposite reaction comes from more liberal quarters of Middle Eastern as well as some Western commentators, who point to past periods of co-existence and harmony, as well as the lowering or even the erasure of communal barriers under the impact of modernity. Many Iraqis, for instance, appear bewildered at the sharpening of Sunni-Shi`i conflict, and protest that in their days nobody knew or cared who was Sunni or Shi`i in their circles, and point to the many inter-marriages. The current conflicts, then are explained in terms of imperialist manipulation, dictatorial rule and/or recent military interventions.

Where do we stand?

The rise and fall of cosmopolitanism: a history

Let us start in late Ottoman times. The great plurality of ethnicities, religions and social castes in the Empire, co-existed for the most part harmoniously (not always), and in a hierarchy of status, but at a distance from each other and with strong communal barriers, exemplified by the so-called ‘Millet system’ of internal organisation and communal authorities. Non-Muslim religious communities were recognised as corporate units with a degree of internal autonomy, regulating personal status and ritual issues and finances according to their religious law and custom, with state support for their communal authorities, often consisting of religious dignitaries. Craft guilds, urban quarters, villages and tribal groups commonly constituted similar corporate units. These communal barriers, however, were porous in many local instances and religion was more important than ethnicity. The Tanzimat reforms of the mid-19th century, declaring, among other provisions, the equality before the law of all the subjects of the Sultan regardless of religion, led to a disturbance of the old equilibrium in different directions. This disturbance was in addition to the longer term processes of the incorporation of the various regions into a world market and the effects of capitalist intrusions, which, on balance, favoured the non-Muslims, with their greater affinity with the increasingly dominant European interests. Considerable resentment by Muslims in many parts led to conflict and violence in some instances, such as that of mid-Century Syria and Lebanon.

In the popular mind, international relations were conceived in communalist terms: European powers are Christian and in league with local Christians against Islam and Muslims. This communalist model, with umma nationalism at its core has been revived in different forms in recent religious politics. Nationalist and anti-imperialist ideology and advocacy commonly construe political and military confrontations, such as those in Afghanistan, Iraq and Palestine, as an attack on Muslims as such, by Christians (‘Crusaders’), Jews and Hindus. The complex geo-political issues involved are obscured or subordinated in favour of a spurious religious conception of the conflicts. President Obama’s conciliatory address to the ‘Muslim world’ seems to acquiesce in this formulation.

The project of the reform elites

The impacts of modernity and the Ottoman reforms had a different effect with regard to metropolitan elites. The project of the reform elites, from the Young Ottomans in the 1860s to the Young Turks of the 1908 constitutional revolution, was to modernise the Empire into a quasi-nation state with common citizenship and constitutional government. Given the plurality of ethnicities, languages and religions within this realm, this is what I am calling ‘cosmopolitan citizenship’. This project was enthusiastically embraced by the growing numbers of the modern metropolitan middle class, expanding with the bureaucracies, professions, modern business, the arts and the media. Those were the inhabitants of the new public sphere and its venues of government departments, associations, schools and universities, the press, cafe society, and last but not least the new, respectable meyhanes and the symbolically important drinking culture, symbolising civilization, medeniyat. An essential part of this outlook was a great interest and thirst for modern knowledge and idea, of science, rationality and positivism, and a critical stance in relation to religion, and for many a discreet rejection.

Some modern elites of the millets, the non-Muslim groups, participated in these ideas and associations. Christian modern elites, in both Turkey and the Arab world, did not share the traditional, conservative outlook of their communal authorities and men of religion. Those latter retained a millet orientation of maintaining communal boundaries while at the same time trying to be on the right side of the authorities and obtaining privileges and concessions. Some Christian intellectuals converted from Catholic and Orthodox churches to Protestantism, and American missionaries were particularly effective in the Lebanon, participating in the Arab cultural ‘renaissance’, including the foundation of the predecessor of the American University of Beirut.

Greeks, a vital constituent of the Ottoman mix from its foundation, were torn between different loyalties and outlooks. The traditional millet and its Ottoman anchoring were centred on the Church and Patriarchate in Istanbul, more or less faithful to its Ottoman affiliations. These were challenged by the more recent Greek nationalism and the Athens state, with an ideology of Hellenism and nationality, even with its own national, Athens, Church. Yet others participated in the new Ottomanism and the idea of common citizenship. At the level of the provincial communities, many of the Pontic Greeks of the Black Sea region spoke Turkish, and wrote it in Greek script. They were surprised to be told, by teachers and missionaries from Greece, that they were part of a Hellenic nation with Athens as its capital.

1908

The height of consciousness of this Ottomanist citizenship came with the Young Turks revolution of 1908. The revolution was against the religious authoritarianism of Sultan Abdul-Hamid II (r. 1876-1909), which censored and suppressed reformist political ideas and associations, as well as secularist and positivist thought. The modern intelligentsia, in their still flourishing print culture and clubs re-oriented their themes to science, literature and news, which escaped the censorship. Hamidian religious revival, while not reversing reformist measures of equality in the Capital, led to many incidents of violence against Christians in the provinces, notably against Armenians in Anatolia, partly perpetrated by the Hamidiya brigades of Kurdish irregulars, preceding the greater massacres that were to follow in World War I. The 1908 Revolution, then, was seen as an end to these tyrannies and a renewal of common Ottoman brotherhood among the different communities. Demonstrations of Muslim-Christian friendship were held in many Ottoman cities, including Istanbul and Beirut. In Istanbul Muslim religious personalities proceeded to Armenian cemeteries to lay flowers on the graves of victims of earlier violence.

Masonic lodges

An important venue for this Ottoman cosmopolitanism were the Masonic lodges. Ottoman Muslims were admitted into these lodges in the 1860s and many intellectuals and public figures embraced Masonry with enthusiasm. The lodges they favoured followed the French Grand Orient, which, unlike its British counterparts, jettisoned the references to a Supreme Being, and the Immortality of the Soul, the deistic principle of earlier Masonry. It also embraced the slogan of the French Revolution of Equality, Liberty and Fraternity (to which the later Young Turks added Justice). In effect, those lodges favoured secular positivism and rationality, which was part of its attraction to Ottoman liberals. Membership included Greeks, Armenians and Jews, as well as European residents. Turkish was introduced as one of the languages of proceeding in some lodges. Many Ottoman intellectuals combined Masonry and positivism with heterodox Muslim mysticism, notably Bektashism, a historic Turkish Sufi order, outlawed in the 1820s and organised in secret societies. Ibn Arabi (1165-1240), the main reference of Muslim mysticism, was embraced alongside Herbert Spencer and Auguste Comte. What the two strands had in common was the rejection of religious authority and institutions. Masonry was equally prevalent in Egypt, where the Muslim reformer Jamal-ad-Din Al-Afghani (1838-1897) was the master of a lodge, which also embraced some of his followers, including Muhammad Abdu (1849-1905). It played an important part in the politics of the elites. The Iraqi poet, Ma`ruf al-Rusafi (d.1945) was recruited into a lodge when in Istanbul, but renounced that affiliation in statements in later life as an Iraqi and Arab nationalist.

The conspiracy which culminated in the Young Turk revolution of 1908 took place within the Italian Masonic lodge in Salonica. The legal immunities of the foreigners and their homes in that city offered protection for the military conspirators from Hamidian police and spies. In 1909 there was a counter-revolution in Istanbul, in support of the Sultan and the Islamic shari`a, led by religious figures. This was put down by army contingents from Salonica, and culminated in the deposition of the Sultan. The four member delegation which went to the Palace to inform Abdul-Hamid of his deposition were all from minority communities, including the Jew Emmanuel Karasso, a prominent Mason. Of course this fed into later conspiracy theories about Masons and Jews plotting to end the last Islamic caliphate. Karasso, in fact, was an Ottomanist, and explicitly rejected Zionist claims.

The heady days of the Constitution and Ottoman renaissance soon gave way to the many problems of the Empire, of bankruptcy and military vulnerability, as well as factional struggles between different factions and personalities of the Young Turks and their opponents. The wars that followed, in Tripoli against the Italians, then the Balkan wars, and ultimately WWI, all contributed to the sharpening of nationalist, religious and ethnic conflicts, militating against the brief flourishing of the ideas of cosmopolitan citizenship. Muslim refugees from the Balkans and Caucasus (all labelled Turks by their European persecutors) poured into Turkey and fuelled communal and religious antagonism. Then the Armenian massacres in Anatolia in 1915, then the defeat in WWI, the war of national liberation and against the Greeks, then the exchange of populations with Greece. The Turkish Republic emerged, secular, but with a population consisting mainly of Sunni Muslims, largely ‘cleansed’ of the non-Muslim communities of Armenians and Greeks. The conflicts that followed were mainly against the ethnic Kurds, and to a lesser extent the ‘heretical’ Alevis…

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