Obsessive-Compulsive Ottoman Disorder

Well do I recall reading biographies of David Lloyd George, as well as histories of the Great War and its aftermath, and hearing again how much George loathed the Ottomans and how, if nothing else came of the conflict, he wanted to ensure their empire was smashed after the war. Even sympathetic commentators and biographers regarded this as an "obsession" on George's part, but it was apparently an obsession shared by many others, as we shall soon see. Set for release early next month is what looks to be a fascinating work exploring how we construct images of "enemies" and how we view and write history in the light of current politics: Noel Malcolm, Useful Enemies: Islam and The Ottoman Empire in Western Political Thought, 1450-1750 (Oxford University Press, 2019), 512pp.

About this book the publisher tells us this:

From the fall of Constantinople in 1453 until the eighteenth century, many Western European writers viewed the Ottoman Empire with almost obsessive interest. Typically they reacted to it with fear and distrust; and such feelings were reinforced by the deep hostility of Western Christendom towards Islam. Yet there was also much curiosity about the social and political system on which the huge power of the sultans was based. In the sixteenth century, especially, when Ottoman territorial expansion was rapid and Ottoman institutions seemed particularly robust, there was even open admiration.

In this path-breaking book Noel Malcolm ranges through these vital centuries of East-West interaction, studying all the ways in which thinkers in the West interpreted the Ottoman Empire as a political phenomenon - and Islam as a political religion. Useful Enemies shows how the concept of 'oriental despotism' began as an attempt to turn the tables on a very positive analysis of Ottoman state power, and how, as it developed, it interacted with Western debates about monarchy and government. Noel Malcolm also shows how a negative portrayal of Islam as a religion devised for political purposes was assimilated by radical writers, who extended the criticism to all religions, including Christianity itself.

Examining the works of many famous thinkers (including Machiavelli, Bodin, and Montesquieu) and many less well-known ones, Useful Enemies illuminates the long-term development of Western ideas about the Ottomans, and about Islam. Noel Malcolm shows how these ideas became intertwined with internal Western debates about power, religion, society, and war. Discussions of Islam and the Ottoman Empire were thus bound up with mainstream thinking in the West on a wide range of important topics. These Eastern enemies were not just there to be denounced. They were there to be made use of, in arguments which contributed significantly to the development of Western political thought.

Whose Caliph? Which Caliphate?

In teaching a course to my students this summer about ISIS and the Crusades, we had occasion to illustrate my point about the uses and abuses of history, including romanticized nostalgia for a past that never was, by discussing the notion of a caliph and a caliphate that ISIS makes so much of today. In doing so ISIS conveniently ignores the fact that the last caliphate was unceremoniously abolished in 1924 with the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire (recently discussed here) and an attempt at resurrecting it two years later met with a collective shrug of indifference from the Islamic world. The last caliph himself was wanted by nobody in the Islamic world, and so had to be ingloriously shipped off to exile in Paris via a British gunboat.

The history of the caliphate, then, and any coherent understanding of that office, let alone resurrection of it, are all therefore far from straightforward, and the idea that it is a central institution demanded if not beloved by all Muslims is obviously false. The complexities of all this are discussed in a forthcoming book by Hugh Kennedy, Caliphate: The History of an Idea (Basic Books, October 2016), 336pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

In Caliphate, Islamic historian Hugh Kennedy dissects the idea of the caliphate and its history, and explores how it became used and abused today. Contrary to popular belief, there is no one enduring definition of a caliph; rather, the idea of the caliph has been the subject of constant debate and transformation over time. Kennedy offers a grand history of the caliphate since the beginning of Islam to its modern incarnations. Originating in the tumultuous years following the death of the Mohammad in 632, the caliphate, a politico-religious system, flourished in the great days of the Umayyads of Damascus and the Abbasids of Baghdad. From the seventh-century Orthodox caliphs to the nineteenth-century Ottomans, Kennedy explores the tolerant rule of Umar, recounts the traumatic murder of the caliph Uthman, dubbed a tyrant by many, and revels in the flourishing arts of the golden eras of Abbasid Baghdad and Moorish Andalucía. Kennedy also examines the modern fate of the caliphate, unraveling the British political schemes to spur dissent against the Ottomans and the ominous efforts of Islamists, including ISIS, to reinvent the history of the caliphate for their own malevolent political ends.

In exploring and explaining the great variety of caliphs who have ruled throughout the ages, Kennedy challenges the very narrow views of the caliphate propagated by extremist groups today. An authoritative new account of the dynasties of Arab leaders throughout the Islamic Golden Age, Caliphate traces the history—and misappropriations—of one of the world’s most potent political ideas.

Kennedy is author of an earlier study of some use: The Great Arab Conquests: How the Spread of Islam Changed the World We Live In.

Byzantium and the Turks in the 13th Century

A spot of late-season flu has kept me from doing much of anything this week, least of all posting on here. But I'm keenly interested in a book that won't actually be in print for another six months or so: Dimitri Korobeinikov, Byzantium and the Turks in the Thirteenth Century (Oxford, 2014), 432pp.

About this book, which is published in the prestigious series Oxford Studies in Byzantium, we are told

At the beginning of the thirteenth century Byzantium was still one of the most influential states in the eastern Mediterranean, possessing two-thirds of the Balkans and almost half of Asia Minor. After the capture of Constantinople in 1204 during the Fourth Crusade, the most prominent and successful of the Greek rump states was the Empire of Nicaea, which managed to re-capture the city in 1261 and restore Byzantium. The Nicaean Empire, like Byzantium of the Komnenoi and Angeloi of the twelfth century, went on to gain dominant influence over the Seljukid Sultanate of Rum in the 1250s. However, the decline of the Seljuk power, the continuing migration of Turks from the east, and what effectively amounted to a lack of Mongol interest in western Anatolia, allowed the creation of powerful Turkish nomadic confederations in the frontier regions facing Byzantium. By 1304, the nomadic Turks had broken Byzantium's eastern defences; the Empire lost its Asian territories forever, and Constantinople became the most eastern outpost of Byzantium. At the beginning of the fourteenth century the Empire was a tiny, second-ranking Balkan state, whose lands were often disputed between the Bulgarians, the Serbs, and the Franks.

Using Greek, Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman sources, Byzantium and the Turks in the Thirteenth Century presents a new interpretation of the Nicaean Empire and highlights the evidence for its wealth and power. It explains the importance of the relations between the Byzantines and the Seljuks and the Mongols, revealing how the Byzantines adapted to the new and complex situation that emerged in the second half of the thirteenth century. Finally, it turns to the Empire's Anatolian frontiers and the emergence of the Turkish confederations, the biggest challenge that the Byzantines faced in the thirteenth century.

Religion, Ethnicity and Contested Nationhood in the Post-Ottoman World

2014 marks, of course, as I have noted several times recently, the centenary of the outbreak of the so-called Great War, the conflict which, at its end, saw several empires--the Russian, the Habsburg, and the Ottoman--in ruins. As the latter of these empires collapsed, what fate befell its various ethnic groups? How long was the shadow of the Ottoman collapse? Did it extend to our own day? A recent publication I just came across helps us explore these questions more deeply: Jørgen S. Nielsenet et al, Religion, Ethnicity and Contested Nationhood in the Former Ottoman Space (Brill, 2011), 294pp.

About this book we are told:

There has been a growing interest in recent years in reviewing the continued impact of the Ottoman empire even long after its demise at the end of the First World War. The wars in former Yugoslavia, following hot on the civil war in Lebanon, were reminders that the settlements of 1918-22 were not final. While many of the successor states to the Ottoman empire, in east and west, had been built on forms of nationalist ideology and rhetoric opposed to the empire, a newer trend among historians has been to look at these histories as Ottoman provincial history. The present volume is an attempt to bring some of those histories from across the former Ottoman space together. They cover from parts of former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Greece to Lebanon, including Turkey itself, providing rich material for comparing regions which normally are not compared.

Greek Muslims

As I noted recently in discussing "Greek" Christians and "Turkish" Muslims in late Ottoman Anatolia, relations in the region, and shifting understandings of "identity" have often been very complicated indeed. A recent study by Kevin Featherstone sheds further light on an especially neglected group: The Last Ottomans: The Muslim Minority of Greece 1940-1949.

About this book the publisher tells us:

This book provides a new study of the international and local politics surrounding the Muslim minority of Western Thrace (Greece) in the 1940s, based on previously unseen archival material. It addresses the minority’s complex identity, its relations with other communities in the area, the international diplomacy of WWII and strategic considerations of the Cold War.

Crusading Against the Ottomans

As I have repeatedly noted in the past, the Crusades continue to be among the most grossly misunderstood events in Muslim-Christian history. A recent book looks at the Crusades and the Ottomans from the collapse of Constantinople onward: Norman Housley, Crusading and the Ottoman Threat, 1453-1505 (Oxford UP, 2012), 272pp.

About this book we are told:

The fifty years that followed Mehmed II's capture of Constantinople in 1453 witnessed a substantial attempt to revive the crusade as the principal military mechanism for defending Christian Europe against the advance of the Ottoman Turks. Norman Housley's study investigates the origins, character, and significance of this ambitious programme. He locates it against the broad background of crusading history, and assesses the extent to which protagonists and lobbyists for a crusade managed to refashion crusading to meet the Turkish threat, combining traditional practices with new outlooks and techniques. He pays particular attention to diplomatic exchanges and political decision-making, military organization, communication, and devotional behaviour.

Housley demonstrates the impressive scale of the effort that was made to create a crusading response to the Turks. Crusaders were recruited in very large numbers between 1454 and 1464, and in 1501-3 substantial sums of money were raised through the vigorous preaching of indulgences in the Holy Roman Empire. But while the crusading cause was recognized as important and urgent, the mobilization of resources was prejudiced by the volatile nature of international politics, and by the weakness of the Renaissance papacy. Even when frontline states such as Hungary and Venice welcomed crusading contributions to their conflicts with the Ottomans, building robust structures of cooperation proved to be beyond the ability of contemporaries. As the Middle Ages drew to a close, the paradox of crusade was that its promotion and finance impacted on the lives of Catholics more than its instruments affected the struggle for domination of the Mediterranean Sea and south-eastern Europe.

Features

• Written by the leading expert on crusading in the late middle ages
• Covers crusading in a period that is generally neglected
• Contributes towards the study of interfaith relations in the middle ages and Renaissance
• Advances our understanding of Europe's engagement with the Turkish problem through the early modern and modern periods
• Deepens our understanding of the values and debates of the Renaissance period

Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire 2013

As we approach the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, we concomitantly approach the final dissolution of the Ottoman Empire as well, a period fraught with dangers for some Christians, the Armenians especially as they became in places the scapegoats for declining Ottoman fortunes, and paid, as we know, an horrific price in the genocide of 1915. A book just released promises to look at the fate of Orthodox Christians in this final period:  Ayse Ozil, Orthodox Christians in the Late Ottoman Empire (Routledge, 2012),208pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

This book examines the position of Greek Orthodox Christians within the administrative, social and economic structures of the Ottoman Empire in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The author engages in a rarely undertaken comparative analysis of Ottoman, Greek and European archival sources to understand the ties among Christians within the administrative, social and economic structures of the imperial and Orthodox Christian worlds. As a local study based on the hitherto under-explored provincial region of Hüdavendigar in the heartlands of the empire, it questions the commonplace assumptions about the meaning of ethno-religious community in a Middle Eastern imperial framework.

Offering a deeper and more nuanced investigation of Ottoman Christians by connecting Ottoman and Greek history, which are often treated in isolation from one another in a way that downplays their mutual influence, this work sheds new light on communal existence.

The Lamps Are Going Out All Over Europe and We Shall Not See Them Lit Again

We are fast coming on the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of the Great War--about which the British foreign secretary Sir Edward Grey is said to have uttered the quotation in the header above. It was that event which, arguably more than any other, so shaped our world down to the present day. The collapse of three major and longstanding empires--the Russian, Ottoman, and Hapsburg, and one parvenu, the German--would have major consequences for Eastern Christians, especially Russians and Armenians, and we have a new book examining two of those empires: Michael A. Reynolds, Shattering Empires: The Clash and Collapse of the Ottoman and Russian Empires 1908-1918 (Oxford U Press, 2011), 324pp. 

About this book the publisher tells us:

The break-up of the Ottoman empire and the disintegration of the Russian empire were watershed events in modern history. The unravelling of these empires was both cause and consequence of World War I and resulted in the deaths of millions. It irrevocably changed the landscape of the Middle East and Eurasia and reverberates to this day in conflicts throughout the Caucasus and Middle East. Shattering Empires draws on extensive research in the Ottoman and Russian archives to tell the story of the rivalry and collapse of two great empires. Overturning accounts that portray their clash as one of conflicting nationalisms, this pioneering study argues that geopolitical competition and the emergence of a new global interstate order provide the key to understanding the course of history in the Ottoman-Russian borderlands in the twentieth century. It will appeal to those interested in Middle Eastern, Russian, and Eurasian history, international relations, ethnic conflict, and World War I.

You Traitorous Bastard!

As we continue to learn more about the encounter--ancient, medieval, and modern--between Christianity (both Eastern and Western) and Islam, we realize that the history is far more complicated than partisans, polemicists, or politicians would have us believe. What to make, e.g., of the Crimean War, which pitted two Christian powers against another Christian power and on the side of the Islamic Ottoman Empire--France and Britain with the Ottomans and against the Orthodox Russian Empire? 

A recent book looks at another unexpected alliance between an ostensibly Christian power and an ostensibly Islamic one, revealing, if nothing else, that--as the psalmist put it--you should put not your trust in princes: Christine Isom-Verhaaren, Allies with the Infidel: The Ottoman and French Alliance in the Sixteenth Century (Tauris Academic, 2011), 304pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

In 1543, the Ottoman fleet appeared off the coast of France to bombard and lay siege to the city of Nice. The operation, under the command of Admiral Barbarossa, came in response to a request from François I of France for assistance from Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent in France’s struggle against Charles V, the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor and King of Spain. This military alliance between mutual "infidels," the Christian French King and the Muslim Sultan, aroused intense condemnation on religious grounds from the Habsburgs and their supporters as an aberration from accepted diplomacy. Memories of the Crusades were, after all, still very much alive in Europe and an alliance with "the Turk" seemed unthinkable to many. Allies with the Infidel places the events of 1543 and the subsequent wintering of the Ottoman fleet in Toulon in the context of the power politics of the sixteenth century. Relying on contemporary Ottoman and French sources, it presents the realpolitik of diplomacy with "infidels" in the early modern era. The result is essential reading for students and scholars of European history, Ottoman Studies, and of relations between the Christian and Islamic worlds.

The Ottomans

As we are rapidly coming on the centenary of the outbreak of World War I, we are seeing new books examining the legacy of that event which more than any other shaped the last century and continues to shape the world we live in today. A recent collection, edited by Jørgen S. Nielsen, looks at the collapse of one of the empires in which large numbers of Eastern Christians--Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, and others--found themselves: Religion, Ethnicity and Contested Nationhood in the Former Ottoman Space (Brill, 2011), 294pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

There has been a growing interest in recent years in reviewing the continued impact of the Ottoman empire even long after its demise at the end of the First World War. The wars in former Yugoslavia, following hot on the civil war in Lebanon, were reminders that the settlements of 1918-22 were not final. While many of the successor states to the Ottoman empire, in east and west, had been built on forms of nationalist ideology and rhetoric opposed to the empire, a newer trend among historians has been to look at these histories as Ottoman provincial history. The present volume is an attempt to bring some of those histories from across the former Ottoman space together. They cover from parts of former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria and Greece to Lebanon, including Turkey itself, providing rich material for comparing regions which normally are not compared.

Milka Levy-Rubin on Non-Muslims in the Early Islamic Empire

The plight of non-Muslims (chiefly Eastern Christians and Jews) under Islam continues today often to be both ignored and manipulated for political reasons. It is therefore a happy and welcome development to have serious scholarly attention paid to this question of religious minorities under Islamic domination in a new book: Milka Levy-Rubin, Non-Muslims in the Early Islamic Empire: From Surrender to Coexistence (Cambridge Studies in Islamic Civilization, 2011), 288pp.

I asked the author for an interview, and here are her thoughts.

AD: Tell us a bit about your own background

I studied history and received all my degrees from the Hebrew University. During my MA studies I specialized in the history department in medieval studies. My MA thesis was on the medieval maps of Jerusalem (published in Hebrew in Sefer Yerusalayim, eds.  J. Prawer and H. Ben-Shammai, Jerusalem 1991; short version in English in N. Rosovsky, ed., City of the Great King). I also worked on travelers to the Holy Land in the Byzantine and medieval periods. My attraction to the history of the Near East stood at the basis of my decision to write my PhD on The Patriarchate of Jerusalem after the Arab Conquest (in Hebrew). This was possible because besides the knowledge of Greek and Latin which I acquired during my studies at the Hebrew University, I had already had good command of the Arabic language and some acquaintance with the history of  Islam, which I studied in high school. I have since then been writing mostly on issues related to the transition from Byzantine to Arab rule including issues of language, culture, conversion to Islam, changes in settlement pattern in Palestine, and relations between Christians and Muslims.

AD: What led you to focus on the Islamic rules governing the treatment of non-Muslim minorities?

My special interest in the legal status of the non-Muslims originated in the first chapter of my PhD, which dealt with the treatment of the non-Muslims (dhimmis) by the central as well as the local authorities. In this chapter I reported about new findings regarding the legal status of the dhimmis in Palestine upon which I came in an unpublished manuscript of a Samaritan chronicle from the Early Muslim period. After receiving my PhD I published an annotated translation with an introduction of this text (M. Levy-Rubin, Continuatio of the Samaritan Chronicle of Abu L'Fath Al Samiri Al Danafi (Darwin Press 2002).

AD: The so-called Pact of 'Umar is important in your narrative. Briefly tell us what that was and its significance.

The Pact of  'Umar is the canonic text defining the status of non-Muslims under Muslim rule throughout the Middle Ages and afterwards. This is why understanding the circumstances and process of its formation as well as its sources is essential for the understanding of the question of the status of the non-Muslims under Muslim rule.
  

AD: You begin by noting that a "key working assumption" is that Muslims did not derive ex nihilo the rules for Jews, Christians, and other minorities. Where, then, did those rules originate? What are some of the main pre-Islamic sources for them?

It is agreed by scholars that the text of Shurut 'Umar as we know it developed quite some time after the Muslim conquest, probably c. 800 CE. In the first chapter of my book I strive to demonstrate that the initial conquest agreements signed between the Muslim conquerors and the conquered population, which are preserved in the Muslim sources, reflect in general authentic agreements. These were based, in my opinion, on an ancient and longstanding tradition which existed throughout the Ancient Near East from antiquity. Following this tradition, it was, in my view,  the conquered population which asked to have these agreements signed. This was done in order to secure  in writing the rights promised them by the conquerors before they actually surrender. These agreements bear no hint of the rules which will appear later in Shurut 'Umar. About a century later, after Muslims and non-Muslims began to have more intensive daily contact as well as friction, the Muslim rulers felt a need to set down a new set of rules, which suited the changing circumstances.

Regarding the pre-Islamic sources: Shurut 'Umar are very specific regarding the status of prayer-houses of non-Muslims, as well as issues of dress, appearance, and public behaviour. It is quite obvious that the rule allowing the continuing existence and repair of prayer houses, yet prohibiting the building of new ones and the enlargement of existing ones, relies on an identical law regarding Jewish prayer houses under Byzantine rule; likewise the rules regarding the prohibition on owning Muslim slaves, and the rules regarding the preference given to Muslims in inheritance.

In my research I discovered, however, that the rules regarding the appearance of non-Muslims seem to have originated in Sasanian society (the Sasanian dynasty ruled Iran from 226 until the Mulsim conquest). The Sasanians strove to preserve  a strict social hierarchy, a hierarchy expressed first and foremost through appearance and public behaviour. In chapter 5 of my book Non-Muslims in the Early Islamic Empire: From Surrender to Coexistence, I try to demonstrate that it was this principal which stands at the basis of the demand that non-Muslims not ride horses, wear special robes, carry weapons, have seals or hold public office, and that they make way for the Muslims, hit the clapper (naqus) during the call to prayer only softly and do not hold public processions. The demand that they wear special distinguishing signs and not resemble the Muslims in their dress is based on the Sasanian concept that the lower class is to dress humbly, according to their social status.

AD: How widely and consistently were the rules enforced, and by whom?

 

Chapter 4 discusses this question. To judge by some of the evidence found in the Samaritan chronicle as well as in several other sources, by the ninth century Shurut 'Umar was conceived as the rule to be enforced on non-Muslims, and was indeed enforced quite effectively not only in Baghdad but in the rural areas of Palestine. There are also mentions of such enforcement in the tenth century. However, this does not mean that this was consistent, and there is no doubt that there were times and places in which these rules were conveniently ignored, and then again times in which the rulers insisted on strict enforcement of the Shurut. The latter became more common during the Mameluk period when the Shurut were strictly and consistently enforced.

AD: What are some of the most outstanding features of the Islamic treatment of minorities? Were there any surprises as you were undertaking your research?

The outstanding features include the authenticity of the surrender agreements which are characterized most of the time by freedom of religion and preservation of both private and communal property in return for the acceptance of Muslim rule and payment of the jizya; another surprising discovery was the finding that Iranian social concepts were adopted by the Muslims and were applied now on a religious basis, meaning that the upper strata of Iranian, as well as Christian and Jewish society which was until then privileged, was to lose its higher social standing and status symbols if it did not convert to Islam. I was also surprised by the evidence of the wide enforcement of the Shurut already during the second half of the ninth century.  

AD: As you are no doubt aware, much of the recent discourse surrounding the treatment of Jews and Eastern Christians in the early Islamic empire has been heavily politicized, indeed polarized: often this treatment is either glorified as evidence of pre-modern "tolerance" or condemned as "dhimmitude." What, in your estimation, is the best way to characterize the treatment of minorities in the early Islamic imperial period covered by your book--or is such treatment too broad and too varied, across time and the region, to permit generalizations?

No doubt the last statement is true, and such generalizations are bound, at the least, to be inaccurate. However, I must add a word of warning. I believe that trying to apply the values of modern Western society is bound to fail. Societies in antiquity in the East, and in fact Western society up until the 18th century, were hierarchichal. Formal social hierarchy represented the right social order. Equality and tolerance are modern values. The Muslims, as ruling conquerors, naturally saw themselves as the ruling class who set the rules for the conquered lower classes. The latter were therefore naturally humiliated, yet they had certain rights and were officialy protected by the Muslim ruler. The rest depended on the specific circumstances. In comparison to the West, the  non-Muslims were much better off, as Mark Cohen has shown in his well-known book Under Crescent and Cross: The Jews in the Middle Ages.

AD: If we were to move from the early imperial period to the later Ottoman period and its so-called millet system, would we see any continuities in the treatment of Jews and Christians under the Ottomans?

Shrut 'Umar continue to be the binding rules regarding the non-Muslims.

AD: the publisher sums up Milka Levy-Rubin's book for us thus: 

The Muslim conquest of the East in the seventh century entailed the subjugation of Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and others. Although much has been written about the status of non-Muslims in the Islamic empire, no previous works have examined how the rules applying to minorities were formulated. Milka Levy-Rubin's remarkable book traces the emergence of these regulations from the first surrender agreements in the immediate aftermath of conquest to the formation of the canonic document called the Pact of 'Umar, which was formalized under the early 'Abbasids, in the first half of the ninth century. What the study reveals is that the conquered peoples themselves played a major role in the creation of these policies, and that these were based on long-standing traditions, customs, and institutions from earlier pre-Islamic cultures that originated in the worlds of both the conquerors and the conquered. In its connections to Roman, Byzantine, and Sasanian traditions, the book will appeal to historians of Europe as well as Arabia and Persia.

Authority in the Russian Church (2)

I noted before Christmas the advent of a new book treating authority in the Russian Church, a topic which I spent some time on in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity. Where my treatment is necessarily relatively brief, and also includes many other Orthodox structures, Vitali Petrenko is able to analyze the Russian Church alone in great depth: The Development of Authority Within the Russian Orthodox Church: A Theological and Historical Inquiry (Peter Lang, 2011), xii+310pp.

I have now had a chance to read it in conjunction with the lecture I am putting together to give at the Huffington Institute's 2012 symposium "Pan-Orthodoxy in North America: Towards a Local Church."


Petrenko's is a very impressive book that takes a much wider sweep than I was expecting, and is all the more rewarding for it. It started off as a doctoral dissertation at the University of Durham under the formidable Orthodox scholar Andrew Louth. But the transformation from dissertation to book has been smoothly and professionally accomplished, and this is a finely written and edited book that deserves to be read by all those interested in the history of Russian Orthodoxy in general, as well as by those interested in ecclesiological questions.

The first two chapters, treating authority very widely in the ante-Nicene and Constantinian eras, initially appeared as rather superfluous--the sort of belabored detail that doctoral students have to put in so that their jury knows how widely read they are. But once you get to the third, and especially fourth, chapters, you realize how smartly Petrenko has woven key themes from those first two chapters into later ones. Certain themes thus recur throughout the history told here, especially those of "caesaro-papism," symphonia in the Byzantine and post-Byzantine periods, and the role of various forms of apocalyptic literature--most famously in Filofei's letter at the start of the sixteenth century proclaiming Moscow the "third Rome" after the fall of Rome and Constantinople--in giving the nascent Muscovite state a sense of its role in the world and in shaping what we would later call Russian nationalism.

That apocalyptic plays a role earlier than I had realized, and Petrenko argues that we can already find hints of it as early as the life of Feodosii Pecherskii in the eleventh century and the composition of The Paterik of the Kievan Caves Monastery. 
That apocalyptic also expresses a certain de haut en bas attitude towards "the Greeks" which recurs over a long period and intensifies as we get towards the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Two events really bring this attitude out in egregious ways. First, prior to leaving for the Council of Florence, Metropolitan Isidore is instructed by the Tsar Basil II basically to sabotage any move towards union with the Latins whom many East-Slavs had disdained from the ninth century onward: "you are going to the Eighth Council, which should never take place according to the rules of the holy fathers; when you return from it, bring us back our ancient Orthodoxy" (120-21).


With the fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in May 1453, Russian churchmen increasingly argued that they should have nothing to do with a church whose subjugation to Islam was as a result (as many Byzantine Greeks themselves readily conceded) of Greek weakness, sinfulness, and general infidelity to the Lord. How could Russia receive bishops or even general direction from a patriarch now living in captivity to a heathen religion? This issue increasingly motivates an independent streak in the Church, leading ultimately to severing relations with Constantinople in the 1589 elevation of the metropolitan of Moscow to the status of patriarch.

But Russian assertion of its autonomy increasingly leads the church and country to attempt to assume a role of "universal apostolic" (136) leadership over all Orthodox Christians throughout the entire world--a concern which, though Petrenko does not discuss it, would remain prominent in Russian foreign policy through the Crimean War and in the lead-up to World War I and the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. 

Russia, according to this mindset, is now both the "third Rome" and a "chosen nation succeeding the nation of Israel in its vocation to the rest of the world..., [an] understanding...promoted...by Filofei" (137). But there is a problem with the assertion of "apostolicity" and this, of course, leads to the famous attempt to "prove" that the apostle Andrew (the first-called, let us not forget) visited Kievan Rus', a legend famously analyzed by Francis Dvornik in his landmark book The Idea Of Apostolicity In Byzantium And The Legend Of Apostle Andrew.

Petrenko's analysis of the infamous raskol of Patriarch Nikon is a lucid treatment that does not, as he notes more than once, cover everything. But that is not a problem insofar as this territory has already been previously covered in first-class studies, including Paul Meyendorff's Russia, Ritual, and Reform: The Liturgical Reforms of Nikon in the 17th Century to say nothing of the multi-volume series from Cambridge University Press and William Palmer's pen, starting with History of the Condemnation of the Patriarch Nicon by a Plenary Council of the Orthodox Catholic Eastern Church Held at Moscow A.D. 1666-1667.

When we get to the twentieth century, and the twilight of the Romanovs, the book starts to run out of steam a bit, but not before disclosing something I had not heard before: Tsar Nicholas II forbade the convocation of a council in 1905 and 1907 and said that the solution to a lack of patriarch was simple: he "nominated himself," a move he would fulfill by abdicating in favor of his son, taking monastic vows, and then being ordained (201, f.n.11).

Only towards the end, and briefly, does Petrenko undertake a closer analysis of some of the modern statutes governing ecclesiastical life in the Russian Church in the twentieth century. Here he argues even more strongly than I did in my Orthodoxy and the Roman Papacy: Ut Unum Sint and the Prospects of East-West Unity that the Russian Church, especially since 1945, has been structured and governed in a heavily centralized fashion. 
Petrenko quotes Bulgakov here: the Russian Church suffers "from 'actual and psychological papalism'" (213). The reasons for this, in part, have to do with the fact that Stalin wanted to continue using the Church for his own purposes, and so wanted control over its patriarch and, through a super-strong patriarch, over all other bishops and clergy. Stalin's vision, in fact, was, according to Petrenko, to create  a "Moscow Vatican" (219) in a fight for ideological control and global domination of all other Christians and many others besides. Stalin also supported the calling, in 1948, of an "eighth ecumenical council" as a means of asserting Russian supremacy in global Orthodoxy.

Petrenko seems to take a dim view--or at least quotes several others who do--of the revised statutes of 2000. My own analysis of them was that they were not nearly as centralized as the 1945 statutes and returned to some limited degree to a greater practice of synodality or sobornicity. But others do not share that view, and instead see the revised statutes as backwards steps that have "suppressed the principle of sobornost" (248) and in so doing have "transferred 'the fullness of authority within the Russian Orthodox Church from the Local Sobor to the Arkhiereiskii Sobor. Effectively this established a Church which in its main outlook is opposed to Orthodox canons'" and to the decrees and decisions of the 1917-18 council (249, quoting G. Yakunin, "Podlinnyi lik Moskovskoi Patriarkhii," 2002).

One final note: Petrenko's book is very useful in helping us to understand the long history of mutual mistrust between Moscow and Constantinople, a serious problem still bedeviling relations between them today and causing problems and delays in the lead-up to the much-promised but much-delayed "great and holy council." These problems go back, as we saw, to the fourteenth century and earlier, but were especially pronounced in the twentieth century's fights over the granting of autocephaly to various churches, not least the OCA.

Missteps are few in this book: there is only one noteworthy typo when, on p.114, he dates the East-West schism to 1053 instead of the more conventional 1054. I would quibble somewhat with the sub-title of Petrenko's book insofar as it is heavy on the history, but light on the theology.

But two other more substantial questions arise in reading this book: first, Petrenko virtually ignores the Reformation and Counter-Reformation periods and the rise of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in which the Union of Brest took place. These are not small events at all, and have loomed large in at least contemporary Russian views of, and relations with, the West so it is odd that they pass by without comment.

And this points to the second omission in this book: several authors whose works are not noted at all, including Boris Gudziak (in treating not just the Union of Brest, but also the creation of the Moscow patriarchate as such); Sophia Senyk's work on the history of Kievan Christianity; and perhaps especially Hyacinthe Destivelle's very important work Le Concile de Moscou (1917-1918).

All in all, however, The Development of Authority Within the Russian Orthodox Church: A Theological and Historical Inquiry is a fine history lucidly narrated and abundantly sourced. It should be on every bibliography in Russian Orthodox history and theology, especially ecclesiology.

The End of the Ottomans

As I have noted before and elsewhere, there are still great gaps in what we know about Ottoman and Turkish history, including in particular relations between Eastern Christians in the Ottoman Empire, and between those Christians and the Muslim majority. We are seeing a welcome increase in the number of studies on Ottoman realities, and now Oxford University Press has just brought out a paperback version of a book first published in 2009: Ryan Gingeras, Sorrowful Shores: Violence, Ethnicity, and the End of the Ottoman Empire 1912-1923 (Oxford Studies in Modern European History, 2011, 272pp).

About this book, the publisher tells us:

The Turkish Republic was formed out of immense bloodshed and carnage. During the decade leading up to the end of the Ottoman Empire and the ascendancy of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, virtually every town and village throughout Anatolia was wracked by intercommunal violence. Sorrowful Shores presents a unique, on-the-ground history of these bloody years of social and political transformation. 

Challenging the determinism associated with nationalist interpretations of Turkish history between 1912 and 1923, Ryan Gingeras delves deeper into this period of transition between empire and nation-state. Looking closely at a corner of territory immediately south of the old Ottoman capital of Istanbul, he traces the evolution of various communities of native Christians and immigrant Muslims against the backdrop of the Balkan Wars, the First World War, the Armenian Genocide, the Turkish War of Independence, and the Greek occupation of the region.

Drawing on new sources from the Ottoman archives, Gingeras demonstrates how violence was organised at the local level. Arguing against the prevailing view of the conflict as a war between monolithic ethnic groups driven by fanaticism and ancient hatreds, he reveals instead the culpability of several competing states in fanning successive waves of bloodshed.

Ottoman Genocides

The Armenian genocide continues to generate scholarly attention, often in an increasingly wider context of other genocides, then and since. Now a new book from Oxford continues to expand our understanding:  R.G. Suny et al, eds., A Question of Genocide: Armenians and Turks at the End of the Ottoman Empire (OUP, 2011), 448pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

One hundred years after the deportations and mass murder of Armenians, Assyrians, and other peoples in the final years of the Ottoman Empire, the history of the Armenian Genocide remains a victim of historical distortion, state-sponsored falsification, and the deep divisions between Armenians and Turks. Working together for the first time, Turkish, Armenian, and other scholars present here the most accurate reconstruction of what happened and why. This book is the product of a decade of scholarly encounters that launched intense investigations by historians and other social scientists dedicated to honest exploration of one of history's greatest tragedies.
While the word "genocide" still divides communities, there is no longer any serious doubt that the Young Turk government ordered and carried out in 1915-1916 mass deportations and massacres targeted toward designated ethnoreligious groups. This volume includes reviews of the historical debates surrounding these events, portraits of the perpetrators, detailed accounts of the massacres themselves, and reflections on the broader implications of what happened then on what might happen now. Here history is not only the stories that we tell about the past but the foundation on which might be built new understandings of the present and possible futures.

Ottoman Conversions

Given the heated atmosphere (to put it mildly) which attends any discussion of Islam today, it is only too easy to fall into simplistic categories when treating religious minorities in Islamic territories, both historic and current. Emerging scholarship, some touched on previously, is helping us to get a better picture of the relations between Jews and Christians on the one hand, and Muslims on the other, in territories under the latter's jurisdiction. Two recent books, both from Stamford University Press, shed welcome light:

Tijana Krstic, Contested Conversions to Islam: Narratives of Religious Change in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire (Stamford University Press, 2011), 280pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

This book explores how Ottoman Muslims and Christians understood the phenomenon of conversion to Islam from the 15th to the 17th centuries, when the Ottoman Empire was at the height of its power and conversions to Islam peaked. Because the Ottomans ruled over a large non-Muslim population and extended greater opportunities to converts than to native-born Muslims, conversion to Islam was a contentious subject for all communities, especially Muslims themselves. By producing narratives about conversion, Ottoman Muslim and Christian authors sought to define the boundaries and membership of their communities while promoting their own religious and political agendas. Krstic argues that the production and circulation of narratives about conversion to Islam was central to the articulation of Ottoman imperial identity and Sunni Muslim "orthodoxy" in the long 16th century.

Placing the evolution of Ottoman attitudes toward conversion and converts in the broader context of Mediterranean-wide religious trends and the Ottoman rivalry with the Habsburgs and Safavids, Contested Conversions to Islam also introduces new sources, such as first-person conversion narratives and Orthodox Christian neomartyologies, to reveal the interplay of individual, (inter)communal, local, and imperial initiatives that influenced the process of conversion.

Chapters 5 and 6 will be of especial interest, focused as they are on Orthodox martyrs and "neomartyrs." I look forward to seeing this reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies.

The second book covering the area is

Amit Bein, Ottoman Ulema, Turkish Republic: Agents of Change and Guardians of Tradition (SUP, 2011), 224pp.

About this book the publisher says:

To better understand the diverse inheritance of Islamic movements in present-day Turkey, we must take a closer look at the religious establishment, the ulema, during the first half of the twentieth century. During the closing years of the Ottoman Empire and the early decades of the Republic of Turkey, the spread of secularist and anti-religious ideas had a major impact on the views and political leanings of the ulema. This book explores the intellectual debates and political movements of the religious establishment during this time.

Bein reveals how competing visions of development influenced debates about reforms in religious education and the modernization of the medreses. He also explores the reactions and changing attitudes of Islamic intellectuals to the religious policies of the secular republic, and provides a better understanding of the changes in the relationship between religion and state. Exposing division within the religious establishment, this book illuminates the ulema's long-lasting legacies still in evidence in Turkey today.

Greeks and Bulgarians, Macedonians and Muslims

A priest I know, upon hearing that a particular parish was formed by Bulgarians and Macedonians, immediately crossed himself and thanked God he was spared the task of leading such a place composed, he thought, of people who would get along like oil and water. The Bulgarians, he said, would spend all their time trying to convince the Macedonians that the latter's language was but an illegitimate dialect of Bulgarian; while the Macedonians, in turn, would try to impress upon the Bulgarians the latter's inferiority in every way to the superior Greek heritage--linguistic and otherwise--of the Macedonians. The poor pastor, trying to get everyone to focus on the universal Word who is Jesus Christ, would be forever caught in the ethno-linguistic cross-fire.

But such is the often maddening world of Eastern Christianity, where "ethnicity" and "religion" (those highly suspect, polyvalent modern categories) are often so intertwined that the answer to either question is so often the same. This same priest once told me that, in asking his grandparents about their background, he expected them to say "I'm Romanian" or "We're from Serbia" but instead received the simple reply from the one, "Orthodox" and the other "Catholic." To many of us today in the West such answers would not be what we expected to hear, but to many, perhaps most, in the Christian East (and beyond) such answers would be unremarkable for most of history, especially prior to the invention of that modern pestilence known as nationalism.

Two new books come out to take a look at such issues: Theodora Dragostinova, Between Two Motherlands: Nationality and Emigration among the Greeks of Bulgaria, 1900-1949 (Cornell University Press, 2011), 304pp.

About this book the publisher tells us:

In 1900, some 100,000 people living in Bulgaria—2 percent of the country’s population—could be described as Greek, whether by nationality, language, or religion. The complex identities of the population—proud heirs of ancient Hellenic colonists, loyal citizens of their Bulgarian homeland, members of a wider Greek diasporic community, devout followers of the Orthodox Patriarchate in Istanbul, and reluctant supporters of the Greek government in Athens—became entangled in the growing national tensions between Bulgaria and Greece during the first half of the twentieth century.

In Between Two Motherlands, Theodora Dragostinova explores the shifting allegiances of this Greek minority in Bulgaria. Diverse social groups contested the meaning of the nation, shaping and reshaping what it meant to be Greek and Bulgarian during the slow and painful transition from empire to nation-states in the Balkans. In these decades, the region was racked by a series of upheavals (the Balkan Wars, World War I, interwar population exchanges, World War II, and Communist revolutions). The Bulgarian Greeks were caught between the competing agendas of two states increasingly bent on establishing national homogeneity.

Based on extensive research in the archives of Bulgaria and Greece, as well as fieldwork in the two countries, Dragostinova shows that the Greek population did not blindly follow Greek nationalist leaders but was torn between identification with the land of their birth and loyalty to the Greek cause. Many emigrated to Greece in response to nationalist pressures; others sought to maintain their Greek identity and traditions within Bulgaria; some even switched sides when it suited their personal interests. National loyalties remained fluid despite state efforts to fix ethnic and political borders by such means as population movements, minority treaties, and stringent citizenship rules. The lessons of a case such as this continue to reverberate wherever and whenever states try to adjust national borders in regions long inhabited by mixed populations.

The second such book is by Mary Neuburger, The Orient Within: Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria (Cornell University Press, 2011), 242pp.

Originally published in 2004, and here reissued in paperback, this book concerns itself with

Bulgaria as a Slavic nation, Orthodox in faith but with a sizable Muslim minority. That minority is divided into various ethnic groups, including the most numerically significant Turks and the so-called Pomaks, Bulgarian-speaking men and women who have converted to Islam. Mary Neuburger explores how Muslim minorities were integral to Bulgaria's struggle to extricate itself from its Ottoman past and develop a national identity, a process complicated by its geographic and historical positioning between evolving and imagined parameters of East and West.

The Orient Within examines the Slavic majority's efforts to conceptualize and manage Turkish and Pomak identities and bodies through gendered dress practices, renaming of people and places, and land reclamation projects. Neuburger shows that the relationship between Muslims and the Bulgarian majority has run the gamut from accommodation to forced removal to total assimilation from 1878, when Bulgaria acquired autonomy from the Ottoman Empire, to 1989, when Bulgaria's Communist dictatorship collapsed. Neuburger subjects the concept of Orientalism to an important critique, showing its relevance and complexity in the Bulgarian context, where national identity and modernity were brokered in the shadow of Western Europe, Russia/USSR, and Turkey.

Eastern Christianity and the Encounter with Islam (1)

Timothy Becker has a good, though brief, article "Orthodoxy and Islam" in John McGuckin, ed., The Encyclopedia of Eastern Orthodox Christianity on which
I have commented previously. It is a good article though it largely confines itself to relations in the Ottoman Empire. It does not deal much in the contemporary period, nor does it have much to say about other Eastern Christian countries that did not fall under Ottoman suzerainty.

Orthodox-Muslim relations remain an under-studied area in which we need more scholars working. I teach courses on the encounter between Eastern Christians and Muslims and keep a close eye on texts that might be suitable especially for undergraduates with no background in either religious tradition. There have been some recent studies, not all of them entirely reliable. Better ones include the edited collection Byzantine Christianity and Islam: Historical and Pastoral Reflections. One outstanding work remains that of Sidney Griffith: The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque: Christians and Muslims in the World of Islam. Griffith's work, however, remains largely above most undergraduates today.

The need for further study of Eastern Christian-Muslim is all the more acute today given the turmoil in countries such as Syria and Egypt. How will relations between Copts and Muslims be in the post-Mubarak era? It is anything but clear, and observers have many reasons to be anxious. Though several recent books have been devoted to Coptic life in Egypt, and attention was focused on the country in January of this year, we need continued study of relations not only to continue to draw attention to one of the longest persecuted Christian churches in the world but also, of course, to describe the fate of Copts in the months and years ahead. Too many Christians in North America remain deplorably ignorant about the plight of their co-religionists in other parts of the world--perhaps especially the Islamic world--and this must change.

Relations in Syria also remain precarious, as, indeed, does the entire country. Eastern Christians have generally had an easier time of it in Syria, though here too reliable, accurate, on-the-ground information about Christian-Muslim relations has been difficult to obtain. As Emma Loosley put it in her article "Christianity and Islam in Syria: Island of Religious Tolerance?" "Syria remains remarkably mysterious" because "so little is generally known about Syria" (162). Loosley's article appeared in an excellent volume (which I reviewed earlier) she edited with Anthony O'Mahony: Christian Responses to Islam: Muslim-Christian Relations in the Modern World.

Apart from Loosley's article, we are only now starting to see scholarly treatments of relations between Syriac Christians and Muslims. Recent volumes include Dietmar Winkler, ed., Syriac Churches Encountering Islam: Past Experiences and Future Perspectives (noted here).

Loosley and O'Mahony also collaborated on editing another fine and important collection (discussed here) that treats Syrian realities:  Eastern Christianity in the Modern Middle East.

I am looking forward to Noriko Sato's volume (if and when it is ever published, having been so often delayed): Orthodox Christians in Syria (Durham Modern Middle East and Islamic World Series)

And now we have a new volume, from Somerset Hall Press, that may shed further light on Orthodox-Muslim relations:

George Papademetriou, ed., Two Traditions, One Space: Orthodox Christians and Muslims in Dialogue (Somerset Hall Press, 2010), 350 pp. 

About this volume, the publisher tells us:

"For centuries Orthodox Christians and Muslims have co-existed in close proximity to each other. This volume gathers scholarly studies about their historic connections, as well as contemporary efforts at dialogue that promote understanding between adherents of these two world religions."

I very much look forward to reading this and to seeing it reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies. 

Inter-Religious Relations in the Ottoman Empire

The study of almost all aspects of Eastern Christianity still lags behind comparable Western scholarship by many decades. This is true a fortiori of the study of relations between Muslims and Eastern Christians (Greeks and Armenians especially), particularly in the Ottoman Empire. Some periods are relatively well covered, while many are not--and are not likely to be given that in many instances sources, especially Turkish and Arabic sources, simply do not exist. Of those periods for which we have recent studies, not all of them are entirely reliable; some are so polemical and politicized as to be of limited use.

I just finished one excellent and widely acclaimed study of the Ottomans in the death throes of empire:  

A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East 

by David Fromkin. Originally published in 1989, and reissued in a 20th-anniversary edition in 2009, this is a wonderfully written sweeping survey that manages to pack a great deal into a relatively brief book (643pp). The star protagonist in this is--not surprisingly for those who know the period, especially that of the Great War--Winston Churchill. Many of the problems still in the headlines today, including the state of Iraq, and Arab-Israeli relations, might well have turned out differently but for the ideas of Churchill and, especially, his political master, David Lloyd George, whose premiership, Fromkin demonstrates, was riven with anti-Ottoman hatred--and for reasons that are not entirely clear, which should not surprise us given that Lloyd George's ("the Welsh wizard") motives were not always clear even to those closest to him. Britain's centuries-long foreign policy of not allowing any one continental power to achieve too great a prominence (hilariously satirized here) continues to haunt the Middle East and indeed all of us. Even more egregious, to my mind, is Britain's self-presentation on the one hand as a "Christian nation" while so often so completely ignoring the plight of Christians in the lands under their suasion. "Put not your trust in princes" indeed, perhaps especially those claiming to be Christian princes. (To be fair, neither Churchill nor George could be even remotely considered to subscribe to basic Christian orthodoxy. Both were, I suppose, deists at best.) Even during and after World War I the Assyrian Christians were in a ghastly condition but nobody cared--just as nobody cared after the first Gulf War or the second. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Not all Eastern Christians always suffered during the Ottoman Empire. Some Armenian historians have recently recognized that while Armenia has indisputably suffered horribly under the Ottomans, especially from 1894-1915, one salutary result of living under Ottoman domination was that it forced Armenians to unite rather than splinter, and so held them together as a cohesive "nation" before they had a nation-state. In other words, the history of Muslim-Eastern Christian relations is not always bloody and bad--though much of it certainly is, and politicized attempts to pretend otherwise are not merely fatuous but iniquitous. 

Now a new book comes out to open up further our understanding of inter-religious relations in the late Ottoman period:

Michelle Campos, Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (Stamford University Press, 2010), xii+343pp.

Campos is an historian teaching at the University of Florida.

Her book is an attempt to explore the last decade of Ottoman life, from 1908 onwards, when Jews, Muslims, and Christians--and others--went from being imperial subjects to citizens overnight, exploring what it meant to construct a civic life together. Her book seeks to trace the developments of this startling change before Arab nationalism, Zionism, and other forces began to wreak havoc on the area.

I look forward to seeing this reviewed in Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies.