Managing Religious Difference in an Imperial Framework

While one religion dominated in most empires, either through the numerical pre­ponderance of its followers or through their position as a ruling elite, no empire ruled over a religiously homogeneous population, making the management of religious difference crucial to stability (see Burbank and Cooper, chap.

In the Near East a long imperial tradition of measured toleration for religious minorities existed. In the ancient world, when polytheism was the norm, the beliefs and deities of subject peoples were accepted as analogues to the dominant pantheon. The polytheistic Greco-Roman and Persian empires of the ancient Mediterranean and western Asia accepted culturally specific deities, customs, and beliefs as essen­tial to the Greco-Roman imperial project: a mature, sophisticated. and ecumenical imperial structure which ruled over diverse “barbarian” peoples characterized by their own local practices which signaled their inferiority and thus the legitimacy of rule over them.^[730] From this standpoint, the deification of the Roman emperor provided, above all, for a cult through which citizens could show their loyalty rather than belief. As is well known, the most politically challenging religion from the Greco-Roman point of view was Judaism because of the Jews' outright rejection of all gods other than their own, which they made public by their refusal to offer sacrifices.

The rise of imperial monotheisms in the place of the polytheism of the classical Roman Empire threatened pluralism, but space nonetheless remained for shows of imperial magnanimity toward religious minorities.

While polytheists were indeed to be fought until they submitted (islam) to the new religion and empire, other monotheists could submit politically while re­taining the right to practice their religion by covenant (dhimma). As Islam spread into Central Asia and later India, religions covered by the dhimma could include Buddhism and Hinduism, a politically rather than religiously motivated stance since it was politic not to alienate new subject populations who vastly outnumbered their Muslim masters and expedient to tax them as dhimmis liable to a special poll tax. In many ways, the Islamic obligation of toleration according to the dhimma was an ideal blueprint for imperial systems since it simultaneously asserted Muslim superiority, religious and political, while also recognizing religious differences and allowing for diversity. In this, it evoked not only the preceding Byzantine and Sasanian examples but also the older, pagan toleration of the ancestral beliefs and practices of different “peoples.”

The early Muslim preference for the dhimma was enhanced by the Arabs' self­perception that they were a chosen people and Islam was theirs alone, and that it was appropriate to maintain a religio-political distinction between Muslim tax-exempt rulers and non-Muslim tax-paying subjects.

The importance of the religious dimension of the dhimma is clearly shown by its steady demise in Iberia when Muslim areas were conquered by Catholic monarchs. Although the rulers of Castile and Aragon initially offered Jewish and Muslim populations protections similar to those enshrined in the Muslim dhimma, such protections had no support in Canon law, and with the emergence of Spain, a new imperial religious ethos emerged predicated solely on Catholicism and the concom­itant outlawing of Jewish and Islamic religious and cultural practices. Toleration had no place in late medieval and early modern Spain, now conceptualized as a “fortress of faith.”^[732] The first community to suffer were the Jews, who were forcibly converted from the 1390s and finally expelled in 1492. As the Spanish began to colonize the New World and consolidate their position in Europe through the amalgamation of Habsburg and Hispanic domains, they moved also against the Muslims under their rule, who were forcibly converted to Catholicism over the first few decades of the sixteenth century. These reluctant converts and their descendants were known as the Moriscos and, like the Jews, they too ultimately faced expulsion in an environ­ment which considered religious pluralism a cultural and political challenge to the Catholic Spanish Empire in Europe and overseas.^[733] The majority of those expelled, both Jewish and Morisco, chose to resettle in Muslim lands—the Ottoman Empire and North Africa—where Moriscos returned to their ancestral faith and Jews were accorded the religiously mandated protection of the dhimma.

With the Ottomans, the dhimma became an organizing principle of imperial ad­ministration in the form of the millet system. The term millet is the Turkish form of the Arabic word milla, meaning a religious community or sect. Under the Ottomans each religious community became a millet liable for the payment of taxes via a des­ignated representative who acted as an intermediary between government and the community in question.^[734] This defined each community’s interaction with au­thority in religious terms. Whether it was a deeply held conviction or not, European diplomats and commentators of the nineteenth century made much of the suppos­edly despotic and Islamic characteristics of the Ottoman Empire in contrast to the more “enlightened” modern European imperial model. In line with this construc­tion, European colonial powers understood the millet system as oppressive because it distinguished people by faith, which went against Enlightenment secularism.

The Ottomans responded to European critiques of the millet system and “oriental despotism” in general by the famous reform movement known as the Tanzimat.^[735] However, the Hatt-i Sharif of Gulhane (1839) and the Hatt-i Humayun (1856) edicts granting all Ottoman subjects equality before the law were not only resented by Muslims as an attack on the religious structure of the empire, and thus its raison d’etre, but by the Christians they were supposed to assist. For the latter, their iden­tification as millets had enabled them to avoid conscription and other blanket obligations which a secular state demanded, but an empire structured by religion and the notion of the dhimma did not.

From the Muslim perspective, furthermore, the Russian, French, and British empires all used religion in their ideologies of empire and instrumentalized it for political gain, rendering their critique somewhat hypocritical. The well-known competition among these powers to “protect” Christian minorities and even remove them from Ottoman jurisdiction was one example of this.

The ambivalent stance of European colonial empires toward religion is further shown in their relationship with missionaries active in the nineteenth century. As Makdisi points out, one cannot draw a simple connection between the activities of missionaries and imperial ambition.^[737] Missionaries could often be reluctant and critical adjutants of empire who sought to protect their new “flocks” from exploi­tation. However, European and American missionaries of the nineteenth century did generally assume that they were culturally as well as morally superior to those among whom they proselytized, and their “conversionist” goal existed in tandem with “civilizational” aims.^[738] Ironically, they were rarely able to make significant numbers of converts but, through the provision of schooling and other social serv­ices, they did contribute to the formation of indigenous groups who bridged the cultural gap between their own society and that of the emerging modern imperial West and sometimes acted as “brokers” between the two. In the case of the Middle East, its identification as the Holy Land generated a unique overlap between re­ligious and political objectives manifested not only during the nineteenth cen­tury but also during the Crusades. However, rivalries between different Christian denominations (and empires)—Roman Catholic, Anglican, American Protestant, and Russian Orthodox—proved as damaging to the missionary cause as the opposi­tion of indigenous churches and the Ottoman Empire. Moreover, while missionaries were viewed by the Ottomans as the vanguard of a Christian imperial offensive akin to the Crusades, many of those educated in mission schools used their command of modern political and social idioms to assert their right to independence from im­perial control, be it Muslim Ottoman or Christian European.