19. Yüzyıl Osmanlı Devleti’nde İhtida ve İrtidad

by Selim Deringil, Ayşen Anadol (Translator), Taciser Ulaş Belge (Translator)

The commonly accepted wisdom is that nationalism replaced religion in the age of modernity. In the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, the focus of Selim Deringil's book, traditional religious structures crumbled as the empire itself began to fall apart. The state's answer to schism was regulation and control, administered in the form of a number of edicts in the early part of the century. It is against this background that different religious communities and individuals negotiated survival by converting to Islam when their political interests or their lives were at stake. As the century progressed, however, and as this engaging study illustrates with examples from real-life cases, conversion was no longer sufficient to guarantee citizenship and property rights as the state became increasingly paranoid about its apostates and what it perceived as their “denationalization.” The book tells the story of the struggle for the bodies and the souls of people, waged between the Ottoman State, the Great Powers, and a multitude of evangelical organizations. Many of the stories shed light on current flash-points in the Arab world and the Balkans, offering alternative perspectives on national and religious identity and the interconnection between the two.

Genres: Islam, History

384 pages, Paperback

First published June 14, 2012

About the author

Selim Deringil is a Turkish academician, professor of history at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul.

Reviews

[Justin Michael James Dell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have a lot of respect for Selim Deringil. This rather succinct, well-researched monograph outlines the very multidimensional natures of conversion and apostasy in the late-nineteenth-century Ottoman context. As Deringil explains, the concepts of conversion/apostasy, while having deeply religious connotations, were eventually transposed to the burgeoning ideology of nationalism during in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire. The overlap of religion and nationalism was amplified by the Sublime Porte's institution of "Tanzimat" reforms, which were a go-for-broke effort to stay the dissolution of the "Well-Protected Domains," which were being slowly truncated as certain Ottoman provinces - particularly in the Balkans - waged independence struggles for "national liberation," often with European connivance. Conversion from one religion to another became more than simply a spiritual change of heart; it was a profoundly political statement in the late-nineteenth-century Ottoman and Southeast European environment, especially as incipient nation-states were beginning to establish their own national "historical" narratives about themselves. Although this overlapping of the religious and the national is supposedly the central purpose of Deringil's text, I do not feel that he thoroughly expounds this relationship in enough detail.

Another one of the salient purposes of Deringil's work is to demonstrate that the Ottomans had agency in the institution of reforms, in response to crises in their Empire. For too long, it is claimed, the historiography of the Tanzimat has presented Ottoman reformism as a purely European imposition. Deringil professes his desire to challenge this, and while his agenda is commendable, I do not think he delivers. While it is clear that the Porte stipulated many of the specifics of Tanzimat restructuring of the state, the driving force behind this restructuring was overwhelming European diplomatic, economic, and military pressure. Without these impetuses, it is hard to imagine the Sublime Porte ever ushering in the (relative to the time and place) incredibly progressive reforms that it did from 1839 until the resurgence of despotism under Abdulhamid II.

Thus, as Deringil demonstrates, the Sublime Porte went to tremendous lengths with the Tanzimat to guarantee the religious freedom of all of its subjects - Muslims, Christians, and Jews - but this was ultimately a pragmatic move on the part of the Ottoman elite to change worldwide perception of the Empire, to decrease tension between imperial subjects and promote stability, and to give the Empire some semblance of "civilization". It was, however, at root an Islamic-supremacist state, and these remedial domestic reforms did not stem from any genuine love for religious pluralism on the part of the Porte. What does come out of Deringil's work, albeit subtly, is that conversions of Christians to Islam by force or fraud, at the quotidian, local level, had always been a part of the reality of Ottoman society, and that this continued even during the nineteenth century in remote areas of the Empire. That this practice was curtailed to a significant extend during the Tanzimat period (only later to undergo a revival under Abdulhamid II) indicates that the Tanzimat period was an anomaly in the history of an Empire otherwise built on religious intolerance. 'On the record', the reformed Ottoman state went to great lengths to prevent conversions of Christians to Islam against their free will. The Porte even prohibited the execution of apostates for leaving Islam during the Tanzimat Period. However, the unpopularity of these policies among the Muslim masses of the Empire, and the fact that these freedoms were instituted largely due to European pressure, indicates that they were unnatural transplants to a region of the world that had (and still, to a very large degree has) no conception of religious pluralism or toleration of religious dissent. Many of the anecdotes that Deringil appeals to about forced marriages of Christian girls to Muslim men, abductions and forced conversions, contrived charges against religious minorities of "blasphemy" against Islam, will strike a familiar chord with the modern reader who follows the news.

This brings me to my last point: Deringil's work does make for a somewhat more sanguine interpretation of European imperialism. As much as one might object to the heavy-handed and arrogant way in which European consuls in the Ottoman Empire interfered in Ottoman internal affairs, especially on matters of the rights of religious minorities for decent treatment at the hands of the Muslim majority, there is something halcyon and refreshing about it from the perspective of the modern day. European imperial pressure and the resultant Tanzimat reforms gave the Middle East some semblance of religious freedom and pluralism - for perhaps the first time since the Roman Empire. Consider the contrast between that situation and the current one in Europe (and the United States), where scarcely any voice (much less objection) is being raised by political and diplomatic authorities in protest over the plight of the few religious minorities left in the Middle East, which is undergoing frightful religious homogenization at the present moment. In a Kafkaesque twist of irony, Europeans (beginning with the Salman Rushdie Affair) are now themselves lectured and dictated to on matters of their religious freedom, in ways that would have been unthinkable to their ancestors.