Social Contract, Prophetic Monotheism and Public Violence

Strong incentives are needed to overcome barriers of human decency, shame and inhibition in order to welcome public acts of violence and to consider them as justified patterns of human behaviour.

In question, therefore, is a public violence that is visible and involves active participation by leaders who use politico-religious arguments to justify that violence. It is generally tolerated by state authorities, and at times organised by them. Relying on a consensus regarding a threat to the state's main community, that is, the Islamic ummah - the seminal community of faith standing at the centre of any legitimately ruled polity, according to Koranic tradition - there is a type of pact among the public, the perpetrators and the state that incites and tacitly encourages or tolerates violence. Thus we are confronted with patterns ofintra-societal or domestic (in contrast to military) violence along politico-religious lines. What are and what do these lines mean? Why has the Levant been less domesticated by modern social con­tracts than other regions on earth, while premodern, hierarchical arrange­ments have been comparatively effective in maintaining internal social peace? Historical answers can only rudimentarily be elaborated here, but my tenta­tive general answers are simple: the Levant is the cradle of monotheism and the focus of powerful eschatological projections.

Starting with the Ottoman Tanzimat (‘rearrangement' or reform) state in 1839-76, modern states in the Levant tried, but failed, to establish a constitutional patriotism and civil religion, as related to a functioning modern social contract. They failed because the challenge was higher than elsewhere. The Ottoman Empire's premodern hierarchical fabric knew a high degree of non-territorial religious and cultural autonomy for non­Muslim religious communities, yet the establishment of modern egalitarian plurality was not facilitated by regional differentiation. In other historically diverse and regionalised polities, for example in Switzerland, geography reflected and protected recognised ethno-religious differentiation. Also, the Koran's socio-religious hierarchies and, deduced from them, the Ottoman millet system (autonomy of subordinated Christian and Jewish Ottoman communities, so-called ‘millet') were obstacles to recognising equality in conditions of social plurality. Moreover, the centralist state tradition of the late Ottoman capital, emulated by most post-Ottoman rulers, did not allow for true regionalisation.

‘Ottomanism', the term for egalitarian relations among the diverse popu­lations of the empire under a constitution, enjoyed currency only among small parts of late Ottoman state elites and among non-Sunni groups who, as minoritarians, had a high interest in equality and legal security. Weak con­stitutionalism went hand-in-hand with the ongoing political relevance of religious boundaries and prejudices. Peace beyond conflictual religious claims and identities did not have a real chance in these circumstances. Eschatological expectations in their divisive premodern language remained resilient, and this was even more entrenched as the Levant represents the central theatre of biblical and Koranic eschatology.

Such resilience in eschatological expectations also applies to Turkey and Israel, two post-Ottoman countries that seemingly held strong secular ideol­ogies: Kemalism and Zionism.

Ethno-religious social unrest stood at the centre of the modern West's Eastern Question. This major issue of diplomacy comprised the challen­ging crisis of the Ottoman sultan-caliph's realm and revealed the limit of modern Western methods to build up modern polities in the Levant. From the late eighteenth century, leading Western statesmen and obser­vers questioned the future of a premodern, slowly reforming Islamic realm. Contradicting wishful diplomatic thinking after the Lausanne Treaty and the foundation of the Republic of Turkey in 1923, the Eastern Question was not resolved with the end of the Ottoman Empire. Concretely, it had started with struggles for independence in the Balkans (moving from Serbia and Greece to Bulgaria and finally Macedonia) and culminated in the Armenian Question and the genocide of the 1910s. It had little to do with Western conspiracy or a violence supposedly essential to an Islamic Orient but was essentially about open questions on valid rules for human society in general and the Levant in particular. Although Western technical know-how was in high demand from the eighteenth century, the example of an often brutally expanding West did not inspire faith but rather influenced many Ottomans to revert to their own premodern tenets and structures.

Repeatedly failed social peace is tantamount to a matrix of violence. The general apocalyptical mood, as framed by Islamic scholars in the late Ottoman period from the eighteenth century, went alongside the conjuring of a better imperial era and a Sunni-Orthodox social order (supposedly) to be restored from earlier centuries.

A significant example of these upheavals are the large-scale public massacres of Armenians under Sultan Abdulhamid II, particularly in 1895 (c. 100,000 killed from October to December 1895). Abdulhamid had reacted in the late 1870s against military defeat and Europe-backed reforms that, in his eyes, weakened the state. He promoted a politics of Islamic unity, a kind of Muslim nationalism or late Ottoman Islamism, rightly called pan-Islamism by contemporaries, because Abdulhamid himself emphasised its global dimen­sion. He regarded Muslim unity as the only viable and coherent force against increasing Western influence and centrifugal tendencies within the empire. It is true, if we leave aside the devastating impact of reactionary violence, that non-Muslims benefited disproportionately from Western commercial, diplo­matic, missionary, educative and philanthropic penetration of the late Ottoman world. Yet this boom was not a political conspiracy as Abudlhamid’s propaganda claimed but rather resulted from the zimmis’1 readiness and will to escape subalternity and participate in nineteenth­century globalisation.

Abdulhamid called, formed and empowered modern Islamist enthusiasms, but could not fully check them. Urban mob violence, organised in mosques, together with some regional violence of gangs and tribes against villages, played the main role in the 1895 massacres. Such perpetrators of unofficial domestic jihad claimed they were fighting foreign evil and were not fully controlled by the central authorities. Yet they were influenced by an empire­wide parallel structure of religious figures affiliated to the palace regime that Abdulhamid had established alongside the official administration. They all conjured up the spectre of Western and Armenian rule over eastern Asia Minor, resulting from reforms wanted by Europe and non-Sunnis of the region. Jihad was declared by local religious leaders who claimed to do so in the name of the sultan-caliph. At times, local instigators defied the sultan, accusing him of being too pliable vis-à-vis foreign intrusion and not able to assert his forefathers’ exercise of power in times of Ottoman glory. This direct connection to the Islamic empire distinguishes the late Ottoman pogroms from the 1965 massacres in Indonesia where local Muslim

1 According to the sharia, zimmi (dhimmi) refers to (provisionally) protected or tolerated but politically and legally subordinated Christian and Jewish communities living within the Islamic state. However, the term ‘unbeliever’ (gavur, kafir) is largely, but theologi­cally wrongly, applied also to zimmis among Muslims of the modern era.

Religious Dynamics and Violence in the Ottoman Levant perpetrators acted as instruments of the army (about a million supposed communists, many of them ethnic Chinese, were killed; the Cold War- affected USA condoned the bloodshed).

Unrest against non-Muslim minorities remained a powerful weapon and a trademark of militant Islam in the Levant. A tradition of explicit Islamist throat-cutting of civilians, declared disloyal unbelievers, runs from the nine­teenth to the twenty-first century. In a few weeks in autumn 1895, tens of thousands of mostly Armenian men and youngsters were killed, on occasion by their own neighbours. A large Sunni male population organised in the local mosques of towns in central and eastern Asia Minor perpetrated these mass murders, spoliations and rapes, and was supported or vociferously backed by women. Tribes sometimes joined in the violence or spread it to rural areas. Violence was declared sacred and salutary, whence killing and robbing became a festival, even a competition. In contrast to the genocide of 1915, conversion to Islam saved many Christians from death, whereas in the First World War it saved Armenians only in particular circumstances.