Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (15 page)

This new nationality demanded sentiments of patriotism
(al-wataniyya)
and love for the homeland
(al-watan).
In Ishaq's articulation, the
watan
was not only the place of origin or family, which was traditionally lauded in Arabic poetry and Qur'anic writings, but it was also the territorial incarnation of the political and social contract of rights and duties, between state and citizen as well as among citizens. Adib Ishaq frequented Cairo's coffeehouses alongside other Ottoman exiles, as well as with Egyptian intellectuals who were also wrestling with reimagining their collective along secular, territorial lines. By the 1870s and 1880s, a notion of the “Egyptian nation” had crystallized among intellectuals and army officers and played a prominent role in the failed ‘Urabi revolution and early Egyptian nationalism.
³⁸
As the Egyptian intellectual ‘Abdullah al-Nadim famously said, encouraging sentiments of horizontal political belonging: “In whose hand shall I put mine? Put it in the hand of your compatriot.”
³⁹
Further afield, in Qajar Iran, notions of patriotism and love of homeland were also developing along nationalist-territorial lines. In describing the recasting of the
millat
from a religious one
(millat-i Shi'a-yi)
to a territorial-national one
(millat-i Irani)
, one newspaper editorial proclaimed, “Iranians are of one
millat
[nation], a
millat
that speaks in different dialects and worships God in various ways.”
⁴⁰

In other words, this process of horizontal imagining and identification was not solely a state project, but rather was adopted and propagated by a wide variety of Ottoman, Egyptian, and Persian intellectuals and the newly educated classes. The relationship of newly named Ottomans to each other was conceived as ties of imperial solidarity and collective identification, the result of both fate and choice. At the same time, however, the imperial collective literally lived in the shadow of other religious, ethnic, regional, and tribal collectives, as the overlapping terms of
ümmet-umma, millet-milla, kavim-qawm
, and
cins-jins
had to be re-conceived in imperial terms.

The linguistic and intellectual-ideological project of coming to terms with new-old meanings and forms of collective identity and loyalty was complex. In official usage such as language in passports and census records, the
millet
was the ethno-religious community, drawn from the list of governmentally recognized sects (Muslim, Rumi, Jewish, Serbian, etc.). And yet, unofficially
millet
was already well on its way from being solely a religious community to also representing the imperial community,
millet-i Osmani.
According to the Muallim Naci dictionary of 1891,
millet
was solely a religious group, whereas a nation should be referred to by either
ümmet
or
kavim.
This was agreed upon by the Ebüzziya Tevfik dictionary of the same year, which argued that “it is absurd to speak of
an Ottoman
millet.
Rather it is correct to speak of an Ottoman
ümmet.
Because the different nations and peoples form a single
ümmet
called Ottoman.” The 1900 Şemseddin Sami dictionary also argued that it was necessary to correct the mistaken switching of
millet
and
ümmet
, and yet only four years later the Mehmed Salahi dictionary chose
kavm-i osmani
as the most correct rendering of “Ottoman nation.”
⁴¹

Clearly, the grammarians were attempting to standardize and correct popular usage of a very murky, but increasingly relevant, concept. However, similar linguistic and conceptual blurring existed in Arabic as references to religious communities alternated between
milla
and
umma (al-milla al-Ūrthudhūksiyya
or
al-umma al-Ūrthūdhuksiyya, al-milla al-Isra'iliyya
and
al-umma al-Isā'iliyya)
, both of which existed alongside the Ottoman nation
(al-umma al-'Uthmāniyya)
that embraced them all. Considered contextually, however, in the Ottoman imperial world one could definitively have more than one collective identity, whether
umma
or
milla
, and there was no inherent contradiction between them.
⁴²

MOVING TOWARD A “NATIONAL EDUCATION”

As the noted scholar of nationalism Ernest Gellner has argued, the establishment of a state education system is one of the most important characteristics of the modern nation-state.
⁴³
Since national school systems played an important role in promoting a national language, civic loyalty, and horizontal ties of common nationality, the Ottoman Empire would strive to do this and more. Starting with the Ottoman Education Regulation of 1869, which required three years of mandatory education for all male Ottomans, the main aim of the state educational system was to compete with the religious and foreign missionary schools, to promote loyalty to empire and dynasty among the empire's children, and to educate students in secular subjects such as mathematics, geography, and foreign languages, all in the hopes of matching Western accomplishments.
⁴⁴

In the thirty-three years of Hamidian rule (1876-1909), the Ottoman state established close to ten thousand new elementary, middle, and high schools throughout the empire as well as prestigious academies in law, medicine, and military science in the capital. Literacy and loyalty were seen as powerfully intertwined in one government report: “The expansion of education will confirm their affinity to religion, fatherland, and patriotism [
milliyet
], and render sincere bonds to our highness the Caliph of the Muslims. But if ignorance continues, it will intensify and aggravate the splitting apart and disintegration.” As a result, schools
were established in politically sensitive regions like Crete, Cyprus, and Macedonia with the aim of countering the nationalist propaganda of Greek, Bulgarian, and Serbian educators in the empire. In the sensitive eastern border region with Qajar Iran, Sunni religious scholars were sent to combat Shi'i propaganda.
⁴⁵

In other areas of the empire like Beirut and Jerusalem, state schools were seen as powerful weapons defending the empire and its youth from the corrupting influence of missionary schools and their Great Power sponsors. For example, the 1898 Beirut Province Yearbook showed a ratio of two-to-one of students in foreign versus Ottoman schools, a statistic the empire would prove unable to reverse by its end less than two decades later.
⁴⁶
In Palestine the situation was equally dire: by 1912 there were over eleven thousand Christian students enrolled in the more than one hundred schools sponsored by the Russian Imperial Orthodox Palestine Society; at least three thousand Jewish youth were enrolled in the schools of the German-Jewish Ezra society, and almost as many were enrolled in the twelve schools of the French Alliance Israélite Universelle. Several Christian and Jewish British schools also attracted sizable student bodies.
⁴⁷

As a result of the dismal state of Ottoman education and its inability to compete with foreign schools, in 1887 the Muslim reformer and scholar Shaykh Muhammad ‘Abduh recommended the establishment of a high school in Beirut that would be devoted to the “restoration of faith and love for one's state [
ubb al-dawla].”
Four years later, Mihran Boyaciyan, a public servant trainee in government office in Beirut who was also a high school teacher, reported to his superiors the need to further Ottomanize the schools: “Every patriot must shed tears of mourning when he observes foreign intellectual influence prevailing in the name of education.” By 1895, the private Muslim Maqāsid Benevolent Society succeeded in establishing an Ottoman school which would impart “national virtues [
al-akhlāq al-milliyya]”
and religious principles upon its students.
⁴⁸
A similar Ottoman Islamic patriotic school was established in Jerusalem in 1906, the Rawdat al-Ma'arif school.
⁴⁹

The state secondary schools did create a growing cohort of Ottoman subjects who were literate in Ottoman Turkish as well as in their vernacular; who acquired learning in subjects such as geography, sciences, and foreign languages; who discussed and debated current events in informal study circles; and who saw themselves as a vanguard for the empire as a whole.
⁵⁰
The most prestigious of the Ottoman secondary schools was the Sultani mektebi (later renamed the Galatasaray Lycée), in Istanbul. Founded in 1868, Galatasaray was envisioned as a novel boarding school that would house, feed, and educate Muslim and non-Muslim students together with the aim of promoting Ottomanism; the 341 pupils who
enrolled in its first year made up a student body that was 43 percent Muslim, 47 percent Christian, and 10 percent Jewish.
⁵¹
Hundreds of important Ottoman civil servants, intellectuals, and members of the free professions passed through the halls of Galatasaray before returning to their home provinces or being sent to other provinces in the service of the state. For those who could not attend the jewel of the crown of Ottoman education, between 1882 and 1894 fifty-one new secondary schools were established throughout the empire, including one in Jerusalem, in central Palestine, and one in ‘Akka, in the north.

Although state secondary education was limited to men, there were state primary schools for girls in addition to
kuttab
, missionary, and
millet
schools for girls. By 1914, at least two thousand girls were studying in private and state schools in Palestine.
⁵²
Beyond the elementary level, upper-class girls often received private tutoring, and by the 1890s there was a vibrant women's press in Ottoman Turkish and Arabic attesting to the high levels of literacy among some women. These modern-educated men and (to a certain extent) women played a significant role in the final decades of the Ottoman Empire, most certainly in ways unanticipated by the Tanzimat architects. As one historian has written, “Those individuals coined new terms of association, formulated novel demands of government, sought to transfer loyalty from the sultan to the state, and debated the interconfessional content of citizenship.”
⁵³
In other words, by the eve of the 1908 revolution the state's modern schools were important not only for promoting loyalty to state and giving birth to the Young Turk revolutionaries, but more significantly, for creating a broader reading public that would seize the opportunity of 1908 to push for a more active role in imperial society.

EARLY CHALLENGES TO THE OTTOMANIST PROJECT

From the very beginning, despite the official promulgation of Ottomanism and its adoption by at least some intellectuals throughout the empire, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, Ottomanism nevertheless met with significant challenges from the Ottoman state, its Muslim population, members of the non-Muslim religious hierarchy, and at least some non-Muslims within the empire. More significantly, the project of Ottomanism faced severe structural challenges that limited its spread and adoption.

First, the Ottoman state remained an Islamic state, a fact which sometimes introduced contradictions with the official policy of Ottomanism.
Some state institutions remained off-limits for non-Muslims, such as the professional standing army established in the 1830s, the Victorious Soldiers of Muhammad, which forbade even converts to Islam from serving in its ranks.
⁵⁴
Although some state offices were open to non-Muslims, particularly in the lower levels of provincial government, others remained completely closed, including those in the Islamic courts, the religious endowments, population registry, and the inspectorate of schools.
⁵⁵

As well, Sultan Abdülhamid II in particular went to great lengths to Ottomanize Islam, on the one hand, and to Islamicize the empire, on the other, at the same time that he pursued a policy of pan-Islamism. From establishing schools to educate the tribal Bedouins and integrate them into orthodox Islamic practices and the Ottoman state, to sending missionary preachers to regions which were susceptible to Shi'ism, to promoting the Hijaz Railroad among the Muslims in British-ruled India, the policies of Abdülhamid II certainly reinforced the Islamic character of the state at precisely the moment when Ottomanism, which purported to be neutral to the religion of all Ottoman citizens, was ascendant.
⁵⁶

On the more popular level, the policy of declared equality among religions was, at least to some Muslims, a religious heresy. For a believing Muslim who took as a matter of faith that Islam was the final message of God among man which superseded both Judaism and Christianity, how could Muslims and non-Muslims be equal? Indeed, in 1859, the Kuleli conspiracy was hatched by one leading religious figure, Shaykh Ahmed, who preached that the 1839 and 1856 reform edicts, which offered Christians equality with Muslims, were contraventions of Islamic law.
⁵⁷