Eschatology and Violence

Eschatology rooted in Ottoman history implies an imperial, state-centred (neo-)Ottoman restoration and the wish for a strong leader (reis) able to establish absolute power. This reis is seen in the image of a mythical world conqueror (sahib-kiran), in the likeness of Muhammad and the conquering sultan-caliphs.

In contrast, since the eighteenth century, various actors in and from the modernising West projected eschatology into the Levant. In particular,

Protestant American missionaries believed in peace-centred (post-millennialist) and at times violent (pre-millennialist) visions that nurtured their lasting engagement on late Ottoman territory. They linked their visions to Jesus' kingdom on Earth, and initially also to the quest for ‘Israel's restoration', that is, the restoration of theJews to Palestine and toJesus. Often acting independently of home country governments, and emphatically non-violent in their actions, they were nevertheless perceived as agents of a threatening, malevolent Western Christianity.

Missionaries and other foreigners were not generally in danger under Ottoman rule even if they were perceived as subversive forces. They had protective home countries behind them that could pressure the Ottoman government. However, it was a different situation for Ottoman non­Muslims. This is especially true for those like the Armenians, Assyrians or Yezidis, who were in friendly contact with foreigners, but not backed by another home country. Structurally perceived as devalued ‘others' outside the ummah and as agents of foreign powers, and often socially envied, they became preferred targets of public violence throughout and beyond the late Ottoman era. This violence climaxed in the cataclysmic last Ottoman decade (1912-22). One of the main frontlines during the Ottoman First World War was interior: state-led but condoned by major parts of the society and by many perpetrators understood as a jihad, domestic violence removed and exterminated the majority of Ottoman Christians. Influenced by a political messianism called Turanism (a mix of pan-Turkism and pan-Islamism), the ruling Young Turks party, known as the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), thus brought the process of othering in the late Ottoman era to the apex of genocide.

The main instances and patterns of late Ottoman politics of Turkish- Muslim violence paid off, relatively speaking, by making the perpetrators rich in goods and power, even if they were politically insecure. This is particularly true for the massacres in 1895 and the genocide in 1915 when, besides confiscations by the state, many local Muslims enriched themselves with spoils from their Armenian neighbours.

Turkey's claims in Lausanne comprised unitary Turkish power over Asia Minor; a complete silence on the Armenian Genocide with no prosecutions and reparations; and a compulsory so-called population exchange to which a disproportionally high number of non-Muslims were submitted. Lausanne established peace for a high price that mortgaged the future. The victors of the First World War were led to believe their diplomacy to be realpolitik, yet this had the effect of corroding international politics and laying the ground for violence to come, instead of opening a new and better postwar era. Neither did the ‘divide and rule' practices of the Mandatory regimes in the interwar period in former parts of the Ottoman Empire contribute to social contracts beyond religious and partisan bounds. Equality, supra-religious political thought and inclusive institutions have remained a utopian challenge as a result of the course set in Lausanne in 1923.

Dying while waging war during jihad is, historically speaking, the most commonly accepted form of martyrdom, that is of publicly becoming a shahid/sehit (‘martyr') in Sunni and Shiite Islam. The condensed credo ‘I am (a believer), because I kill (in faith), and this even the more so if I die' is reminiscent of propagandistic European First World War theologies that helped transform millions of humans into killers because superiors demanded so in the name of God and the nation. The management of violence and death is a powerful weapon that helps produce authority and operates hegemonic relations of race, class, party, religion and empire. Life thrives, in contrast, in societies where killing is not accepted as a political option, because a social contract enables common prosperity, and the law is in force to diminish personal and party power that is ultimately in need of coercion and violence. If being killed while killing is believed to be endorsed by faith, this opens the door for abuse of faithful people by strategists of power. Also, the common consumption and/or perpetration of violence creates a compelling communion in crime that founds or re-founds the identity of the group in question, in our case a militant ummah in the 1890s or during the First World War.

This aspect, the affirmation of an active Sunni identity, is present in all anti-Alevi urban pogroms in Turkey in the second half of the twentieth century. (The large minority of Anatolian Alevis, today about a fifth of the population, accept only partly or not at all the pillars of Sunni Islam and have organised themselves outside the state-controlled mosques; Alevis have been traditionally considered infidels or heretics by conservative Sunnis since the sixteenth century.) Proud affirmation of Sunni and radical right-wing Turkish identity characterises perpetrators of recurrent anti- Alevi violence in Turkey. Such violence is particularly serious in the case of Kurdish Alevis (for the 1937-8 massacre in Dersim see below). Although historically different from the Alevis and less brutally persecuted, the heterodox group of Arab Alawis in Syria experienced a similar history of discrimination, before they were positively discriminated under the French Mandate and the Baath regime. These divisions have fundamentally marked the civil war in Syria in the 2010s.