Long before Britain, France, or the United States conquered the world, Ottoman rule epitomized globalization. Its empire stretched from Belgrade to Basra, smudging the contours between East and West and leaving them less defined than they are today.
The empire was open to outsiders. From the sixteenth century, foreigners made up an increasingly influential segment of Ottoman rule. They were entrusted to run their own affairs, under a system of capitulations that exempted them from sharia law, dress codes, and taxes. In the process, the ports they supervised evolved into entrepôts, or international trading hubs. Seventeenth-century Europeans away from their wives found Istanbul, with its license for temporary marriages, a libertine place to be.
The Ottoman Empire’s pluralism proved remarkably resilient, despite the erosion at its edges and the predatory designs of other colonial powers. On the eve of the First World War while fighting the Balkan wars, Anatolia’s four million Greeks and Armenians were opening and upgrading churches. Now hidden by a phalanx of department stores, an Armenian church, Üç Horan, with imposing Corinthian columns, loomed over Istanbul’s main thoroughfare, İstiklâl Caddesi. A short distance away lay the Armenian cemetery, which the republic later levelled and turned into central Istanbul’s Taksim Square. Armenians filled the upper ranks of the civil service and banks.
Sultan Abdülhamid II’s foreign minister for most of his reign was an Armenian, as was Lebanon’s governor and the prime minister in Egypt (who oversaw construction of the Suez Canal). The Duzian family ran the Imperial Mint, the Balyans designed his palaces, and the Dadians ran the imperial armories and gunpowder mills. Together with Greeks and Jews, Armenians comprised 60 percent of the staff of the Ottoman Imperial Bank, the empire’s central bank. For safekeeping, Muslim generals would leave their wives in Armenian care before embarking on campaigns.
Such was the level of integration that the Ottomans had no word for minorities. (The Arabic term aqaliyat is a late nineteenth-century invention.) Had there been one, Muslims would have been counted amongst them, since even after a thousand years of Islam, Muslims comprised some 40 percent of the empire’s subjects. The percentage of Turks would have been far smaller. But rather than establish an ethnic hierarchy, the Ottomans ruled by devolving power to the millet, or religious community, of which it counted some 17, Islam included. Each millet was semi-autonomous, administering its own co-religionists, raising its own taxes, and applying and enforcing its own religious laws. Subjects regardless of creed could petition the sultan directly, turning him into a quasi-court of appeal, but on day-to-day matters the millet determined the affairs of its denomination.
When Europe was locking in ghettoes what minorities it had not annihilated, Islamic scribes recount how on their holy days Christian patriarchs and Jewish dignitaries led their flocks through the Middle East’s cities dressed in finery that rivaled that of the caliph. Istanbul was an Armenian and Orthodox capital as well as an Islamic one. Europe took centuries to learn such tolerance. Only in 1926, almost a century after its conquest of Algeria, did Paris authorize the opening of France’s first mosque.
Yet far from castigating Europe’s culture, as the current pretender of Islamic State does, the Ottoman caliphs patronized it. Abdülhamid II had his underwear tailored in Paris, and not only built his own opera house but sang in it, repeatedly hosting Sarah Bernhardt, the society actress of her day. His orchestra played Verdi in the streets on his return from the mosque. European architects, painters, and composers, including the brother of Gaetano Donizetti, flocked to their courts. The last caliph, Abdülmecid II, performed the violin at weekly palace concerts attended by men and women. The women in his paintings, including his wife, Şehsuvar Kadınefendi, read Goethe’s Faust.
Non-Muslim subjects of the empire frequently went court-shopping, comparing their own religious laws with those in sharia courts or secular ones, and selecting whichever offered more rights. Sharia courts proved particularly attractive for Catholic and Jewish women, whose own legal codes did not sanction a woman’s right to divorce. Many adopted a similarly eclectic approach to religious rites, frequenting each other’s saints’ days and holy men and women. Muslim doctors whispered Quranic verses to the Christian babies they delivered, and Muslims carried amulets inscribed with Gospel sayings.
Popular inter-faith culture was officially sanctioned. A modern highway zips past Sisli’s Darülaceze, the retirement home Abdülhamid II built in 1896, above Istanbul’s Golden Horn. Cars go too fast for passengers to catch the golden Arabic herald over the mahogany doors. But for those who take time to stop, the long courtyard shaded with cypress trees offers not just an escape from modern Istanbul’s frenzy but a time capsule showcasing caliphal values. At either end of the courtyard he erected three places of worship: a mosque to the south, a church and a synagogue to its north. Contemporary interpreters of the Quran claim Islam bans the building of new non-Muslim places of worship. But even as Orthodox Christians and Zionists were seeking to oust the Ottomans and rule themselves, the caliph was still building holy places for his multi-faith subjects.
The pluralism was not egalitarian. Until abolition in the mid-nineteenth century, Ottoman manpower depended heavily on slave tributes, in which Christian boys predominantly from the rural Balkans were dragooned into the sultan’s army, sulphur factories, and courts as ghulam, or sodomites. It was pernicious, but for some the practice was a fast track to aggrandizement and leverage at the pinnacle of power. As conscripts and concubines, slaves formed the military, the nobility, and the mothers of the new sultans. From the lowliest captive, a slave girl could rise to the most powerful person in the empire; an Albanian guttersnipe could become a grand vizier.
The status of non-Muslims as dhimmis, or protected persons, also detracted from the equality of the millet system. On paper and in some districts and at some times, non-Muslims could not testify in sharia courts, wore distinguishing costumes until the late eighteenth century, and were prohibited from riding on horseback, or walking on the right. “Shimmal [move to the left],” Muslims chided non-Muslims when they tried. But for the most part, “the dhimmi status had little applicability in practice,” says a professor of Ottoman studies at Tel Aviv University. From the 1850s, criminal cases were heard in secular courts, where dhimmi status did not apply. The inclusivity made good politics. Had the Ottoman Empire not embraced its non-Muslim majority, it would never have spread so far, so fast, or survived for so long. Exclusively Muslim empires, such as the Almohad caliphate of 1121 to 1269, stirred internal opposition, and waned as rapidly as they waxed.