Religious in Form, Political in Content? Privileges of Ottoman Non-Muslims in the Nineteenth Century
This paper explores the Ottoman Empire’s guarantee of religious privileges for non-Muslims made in 1853 and the struggles that occurred thereafter, between Muslim state officials and Armenian elites. It argues that the guarantee of religious privileges, which prepared a new set of terminology—that i...
| Published in: | Journal of the economic and social history of the Orient |
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| Main Author: | |
| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
Brill
2016
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| In: |
Journal of the economic and social history of the Orient
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| Further subjects: | B
Patriarchate
B Armenians B Religious Privileges B Ottoman Empire B Non-Muslims |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | This paper explores the Ottoman Empire’s guarantee of religious privileges for non-Muslims made in 1853 and the struggles that occurred thereafter, between Muslim state officials and Armenian elites. It argues that the guarantee of religious privileges, which prepared a new set of terminology—that is, “privileges,” “religion,” and “politics”—for discussing the scope of the jurisdiction to be granted to the non-Muslims’ religious authorities, represented a shift in how the empire approached non-Muslims. Muslim officials aimed to circumscribe the jurisdiction of non-Muslims and place them under the state’s control by emphasizing the “religiousness” of the privileges. To do so, they also displayed a decided tendency to bypass the religious authority by using lay non-Muslim elites as intermediaries. The Armenian elites, for their part, strategically chose their attitudes toward the distinction of “religious” and “nonreligious” (or “political”), thus managing to protect, to a certain extent, the scope of the religious authority’s jurisdiction. |
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| ISSN: | 1568-5209 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Journal of the economic and social history of the Orient
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1163/15685209-12341403 |