Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (20 page)

“T
HE
M
USSELMAN
I
S
N
OW . . .
F
REE . . . TO
B
ECOME A
C
HRISTIAN
”

One of the blessings of the Tanzimat reforms was broader religious freedom. Until then, non-Muslims had been allowed to keep and practice their religion, but conversion from Islam to Christianity was, as the Shariah decreed, punishable by death.

One of the rare implementations of this harsh penalty took place in October 1843 in Istanbul, but the reactions were mixed. “The old Mussulman party had triumphed in the most disgraceful manner,” noted Cyrus Hamlin, an American missionary. “The young Turkish party,” on the other hand, had cursed it “as a needless insult to Europe and a supreme folly of old fools.”
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The latter view was more in line with the Tanzimat. Hence, although the Shariah laws on apostasy were not officially abandoned, the personal abandonment of Islam became practically free after 1844.
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That year, after an incident in Acre, a court decreed, “No subject of the Sublime [Ottoman] State shall be forced by anyone to convert to Islam against their wishes.”
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A stronger guarantee would come with the Islahat edict of 1856, in which the sultan declared: “As all forms of religion are and shall be freely professed in my dominions, no subject of my empire shall be hindered in the exercise of the religion that he professes, nor shall he be in any way annoyed on this account. No one shall be compelled to change their religion.”
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The next year, a government commission investigating a case of conversion from Islam to Christianity found it licit. “The Musselman is now as free to become a Christian as the Christian is free to become a Musselman,” the decision read. “The government will know no difference in the two cases.”
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Consequently, during the anti-Christian riots in 1860 in Damascus, the Ottoman authorities supported the Christians who had been forced to embrace Islam be obliged to return to their original faith.
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“The orders from the center [were] always in the same vein,” concludes a Turkish historian who studied the apostasy cases of the era. “No force or compulsion is admissible in matters of conversion.”
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But here again, the perception of Western intrusion into the empire, and the reaction to it, hindered the evolution to a truly liberal attitude. “On the one hand, the state sincerely sought to prevent the killing of apostates, yet on the other, it was desperate to safeguard its flock against foreign (missionary/diplomatic) incursions.”
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Thus, “the convert or apostate became the bone of contention in an international prestige war, in which the Great Powers sought to impose their will on the last remaining non-Christian Great Power.”
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The issue was not just religion but also sovereignty.

This political meaning attached to religious affiliation has lingered well into the contemporary era. That’s why, in present-day Turkey, those who are most reactionary about missionary activity are those most obsessed with sovereignty: the nationalists, some of whom are, surprisingly, quite secular.
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Perhaps this apparent paradox also sheds some light on the political, and not religious, origins of the ban on apostasy in medieval Islam—a point to which we will return in the upcoming chapters.

I
SLAMIC
L
IBERALISM AND
I
TS
C
HAMPIONS

Although the Tanzimat reforms were driven mainly by state bureaucrats, they also were consolidated by two other important elements: the new middle class and the newly emerging liberal intelligentsia.

Until the nineteenth century, the Ottomans relied on a land-tenure system adapted from the
iqta
system (discussed earlier). Accordingly, the state owned all lands and any grant of land would be only temporarily and conditionally distributed to landlords and peasants. In other words, there was no private ownership of land.

But the Tanzimat reforms abolished the
iqta
system. The Tanzimat edict denounced, “[this] land tenure procedure which is one of the most destructive tools in this matter and any useful fruit of which is never seen.” Soon other laws not only allowed but also promoted private ownership. The whole reform was based on “the absorption of economic liberalism,” and its aim was to “create individuals who would participate in economic life as entrepreneurs.”
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It worked—at least to a degree. In the words of Kemal Karpat, professor of Ottoman history:

As a result [of privatization], the old notables lost their preeminence and were incorporated into the new middle class led mainly by the new propertied and commercial groups that arose throughout Anatolia and Rumili (the Balkans), Iraq, Syria, and Palestine.

The new individualistic and reform-minded middle class simultaneously defended change and demanded respect for tradition and culture, believing modernity and Islam perfectly reconcilable. . . . [It] moved into the modernist age by preserving its Islamic faith and looking for ways to acquire and legitimize political power by converting the absolutist monarchy into a constitutional system based on some sort of participation. The beginnings of democracy were sown in the second half of the nineteenth century.
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The other agent of reform was an intellectual group of the late Tanzimat era known as the Young Ottomans—not to be confused with the higher-profile Young Turks, who came decades later and were more secularist, nationalist, and revolutionary. The Young Ottomans were Islamic rather than secular, “Ottomanist” rather than nationalist, and progressive rather than revolutionary. They supported the reforms, criticizing the government only for not being steadfast or principled enough in implementing them. When Sultan Abdülaziz gave a speech in 1868 and spoke of the newly established legal rights as if they were a part of his generosity to his people, the most prominent Young Ottoman, Namık Kemal, wrote the following:

If the purpose is to imply that up to this day the people in the Ottoman Empire were the slaves of the sultan, who, out of the goodness of his heart, confirmed their liberty, this is something to which we can never agree, because, according to our beliefs, the rights of the people, just like divine justice, are immutable.
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Namık Kemal also found the basis for representative government in the Qur’anic principle of
shura
, which requires that matters concerning the community should be decided by mutual consultation. To date, this argument has been one of the basic tools for defending democracy in an Islamic frame of reference. According to Kemal, the Tanzimat edict of 1839 was good but not good enough. The empire needed “a charter for the Islamic Caliphate,” which would fully establish “freedom of thought, sovereignty of the people, and the system of government by consultation.”
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In 1868, the Young Ottomans started to publish a newspaper called
Hürriyet
(Liberty). In it, they articulated “an unmistakable liberal critique of government action, and a programme of constitutional reform.”
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Notably, they made such proposals not for a secular but for an Islamic agenda. The earliest decades of Islam, the Young Ottomans argued, had seen a protodemocracy and a protoliberalism. Europe’s success came from developing these ideas while the Muslim world mistakenly neglected them. And now was the time, they said, to move forward with imports from modern Europe and inspiration from the early Islamic past.

The Young Ottomans became the first movement in the Muslim world to devise a modern ideology inspired by Islam. And, lo and behold, their ideology was a liberal one.

B
UMPS IN THE
R
OAD

The dreams of the liberals came true in November 1876, when the newly crowned Sultan Abdülhamid II accepted a “Fundamental Law,” or constitution. It stated that “the religion of the state is Islam,” but it also accepted the modern secular definition of citizenship. “All subjects of the empire are called Ottomans,” one article read, and the next one declared: “Every Ottoman enjoys personal liberty on condition of not interfering with the liberty of others.” Another article guaranteed that “all Ottomans are equal before law; they have the same rights . . . without prejudice to religion.”

The sultan still had strong authority, but the new constitution also established a parliament with some legislative powers. In 1877, a general election was held—the first in Ottoman and indeed in Islamic history. The first Ottoman parliament met on March 19, 1877, with more than one-third of its seats filled by non-Muslims—Armenians, Greeks, Jews, and Bulgarians. The first Islamic liberal democracy was born.

But it soon encountered trouble.

Russia—which had long had designs on Ottoman territories—provoked the empire’s Eastern Orthodox peoples, whom it considered natural allies. In 1876, the year the Ottomans unveiled their constitution, an uprising began in Bulgaria; it was quickly joined by Serbs and Montenegrins. Russia soon entered the picture, and the Ottomans suddenly found themselves at war with Russians, Serbians, Montenegrins, Romanians, and Bulgarians. Major battles occurred in the Balkans and the Caucasus, and the Ottoman military and the Muslim populations suffered huge losses. In Bulgaria alone, a quarter of a million Muslims, mostly Turks, were either slaughtered or died as a result of the war; half a million others, including thousands of Bulgarian Jews, had to flee to Turkey to survive. In January 1878, Russian troops reached the outskirts of Istanbul, creating the deadliest threat the empire had ever seen.

Then European powers intervened and a diplomatic process started. It ended with the signing of a treaty at the Congress of Berlin (July 1878). Montenegro, Serbia, and Romania became independent states and Bulgaria an autonomous one. In Anatolia’s east, four cities, including Kars, were given to Russia. In the end, the Ottomans lost two-fifths of their territory, were subjected to an enormous war indemnity payment to Russia, and became responsible for more than a million destitute refugees from the Balkans and the Caucasus. It was the most disastrous moment for the Ottomans in the entire nineteenth century.

The internal impact of this external threat was reminiscent of what James Madison had warned against when he defined war as “the most dreaded enemy of liberty” and the extender of “the discretionary power of the executive.”
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When he saw Russian troops just a few miles outside of his capital, Sultan Abdülhamid II, who had never been a genuine believer in democracy, decided that the empire needed order and discipline more than anything else. So, assuming “war powers,” he suspended the constitution and dismissed the parliament. The First Constitutional Period of the Ottoman Empire, as it later would be called by historians, had lasted just over a year.

This was only one of many examples of a burden that the Ottomans (and, later, other Muslims) would continually face while working toward reform: they were trying to liberalize while under foreign threat. The West, on the other hand, from the sixteenth century onward, moved toward political and economic liberalization without the pressure of a rival civilization or the insecurity of its borders. Even within the West, most liberal ideas flourished in those countries that were geographically more isolated and thus more secure than others—Great Britain and the United States.

Muslims, on the other hand, would be plagued constantly by fears for their survival (as in the Ottoman era) or by a lack of independence (as in the post-Ottoman colonial era). An additional burden would be the psychological resistance to adopting the ways of the West while the West seemed threatening or intimidating. Little wonder, then, that liberal ideas would be more popular within Muslim societies at times when they felt secure and respected, and less so when they felt insecure or humiliated.
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W
HAT
W
OULD THE
C
ALIPH
D
O?

Sultan Abdülhamid’s thirty-year absolutist rule, which lasted until the Second Constitutional Period in 1908, ushered in a new phase of Ottoman history. The liberal democratic spirit that originated with the Tanzimat in 1839, and that peaked with the Islamo-liberal ideological synthesis of the Young Ottomans, certainly faced a setback. But the sultan was far from being a narrow-minded reactionary. He continued modernization, making positive advances in education, legal reforms, and economic development, including the construction of railways and telegraph lines. In 1895, Descartes’s
Discourse on Method
was translated into Turkish under his auspices. In the same era, Western classics, as well as European political topics of the day, became part of Ottoman intellectual life. A pious Muslim, Abdülhamid nonetheless admired Western civilization and explicitly advised his fellow Muslims to learn from the Christians’ successful efforts to rid their faith of dogmatism and obscurantism.
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