Western Aggression and Domestic Jihad
The public use and consumption of violence became utterly manifest in former Arab core lands of the Ottoman Empire occupied by IS. New in this case was the global dimension of a spectacle, not only before crowds of local spectators but on the internet, framed by discourses of eschatological Wahhabism.
(Wahhabism is a radical Sunni movement that emerged in the eighteenth century, aimed at restoring ‘original Islam'; it became Saudi Arabia's state ideology and has largely determined the IS's Islamic tenets.) Although patterns of public violence were present in much larger dimensions during the First World War, they were never globally visible. Moreover, eschatology was less articulate, and holy scripture was not as present at theReligious Dynamics and Violence in the Ottoman Levant public surface of political acts as in the case of contemporary jihadists, as well as other groups fighting (also) in the name of religion for their future in the Levant.
The domestic jihad against Ottoman non-Muslims and the expansion of modern Europe's imperial nation states were related. This situation began to emerge in the late eighteenth century as a profound and acute crisis of the Ottoman Empire, called the Eastern Question. From the mid nineteenth century, a central issue turned around postulates of supra-religious constitutional rule. Despite new departures and comparatively ground-breaking constitutional texts during the Tanzimat, for example the Reform Edict of 1856 and the first Ottoman constitution of 1876 (revised in and after 1908), egalitarian plurality remained utopian. Sultan Abdulhamid II's Islamist authoritarianism marked the opposite direction, and the CUP went even further during the last Ottoman decade.
The accession of the Ottoman Empire since the mid nineteenth century to a ‘European concert' of monarchical powers could not positively influence the new Ottoman partner, because the European powers were only to a limited degree inspiring modern democratic states, honestly interested in spreading rule of law.
Diversity, together with legal and real equality, posed a particularly difficult challenge, because the Ottoman realm could not be divided into democratic homelands versus imperial dominions, as in the case of modern Europe's national empires. Their homelands were ethnically and religiously relatively homogeneous, while in the mixed colonies the standards of the homelands did not count. Thus, the Levant displayed more directly the challenges and dysfunctions of human societies on the threshold of global modernity than did contemporary European states, or states originating in Europe like the USA, Canada and Australia, because these acted on a global scale. In their periphery, they could more easily disguise violent antiegalitarian patterns that violated human rights.Often, modern Europe obeyed premodern premises like royal rights of conquest and land grab, so that the rule of law in Europe stood in contrast to lawless frontiers, military government overseas and discrimination against Indigenous people. Lynchings in US-American culture as well as slavery and discriminatory post-slavery societies were a fundamental feature of a racial society. A combination of proletarian misery, convicts and children being transported to Australia, and a pervasive, deep-seated race and class mentality, contradicted the letter and spirit of modern human rights. Many of these phenomena can be subsumed under imperialism as well as colonial and
settler violence in the context of ‘democracies' that excluded whole domestic groups from equality.
Still, there was the important experience of (relatively) democratic rule of law and freedom at home, far from colonial frontiers. This was an important distinction between the late Ottoman Empire and western Europe where a considerable number of Ottoman political refugees found asylum. In Europe after the world wars, this positive experience served as an important historical connection for innovative reconstruction after destruction, because well-known principles could be reclaimed.
In short: democratic rule of law, even if limited, kept taking seriously basic human rights in core institutions, parliamentary debates and domestic public space. The late Ottoman Empire missed this even in its capital and the parliament. The same is, in general, true for post-Ottoman states. In the image of the CUP, they have largely functioned as partisan regimes in which favouritism instead of meritocracy, systemic corruption and (auto-)censure reign.The modern, post-American and post-French Revolution era coincided with an acute and permanent Ottoman crisis in which local and geostrategic dimensions entangled as never before. International stakes entered Cairo, causing new scenes of violence during the French invasion of Egypt and of parts of greater Syria at the end of the 1790s. French aggression and repression of resistance were associated with the organisation of urban mob violence, locally claimed as jihad, against Ottoman Christians identified with a foreign power. Even without foreign intervention, but conjuring real or imaginary foreign threats, ringleaders organised such domestic jihad in other late Ottoman towns, such as Aleppo and Diyarbekir where Ziya Gokalp grew up, or in metropoles like Istanbul, Izmir and Beirut. Violence against Ottoman Christians was henceforth more than just a case of ‘collateral damage' or a facet of ‘normal violence', as it might appear in the case of Cairo in 1798-1800: it became built into the fabric of late Ottoman society. The Ottoman general Nasif Pasha called on Muslims in March 1800 to make jihad against Christians, as a result of which the Ottoman Copts and Syriacs of Cairo became the target of killings. They were considered members of a global body of a hostile Christianity.
Late Ottoman public violence was largely intimate, because it often targeted neighbours and even friends who were regarded as having broken a contract of submission and loyalty. When in 1850, after an anti-Christian pogrom in Aleppo, a contemporary Arab writer reported that no Muslim of the neighbourhoods ‘was there who did not commit these atrocities; not even ten per cent out of one hundred', he may have slightly exaggerated, or not.[452] In many late Ottoman crises, religious polarisation proved so strong as to blur the lines between a diversity of Ottoman and European Christians.
At times, this category included groups considered local friends of Christians, such as the Alevis or the Yezidis. Stigmatised as heretic, these groups were also targeted, and more brutally excluded than Christians from interacting with the ummah.The new dimension of late Ottoman violence went against traditional codes, transcended traditional factions, and included public violations of women. This inaugurated misogynist patterns far beyond the premodern discrimination against women, including the tradition of devalued non-Muslim female slaves (cariye). Similar incidents to those occurring in Cairo in 1800 described above also happened in areas far from Europe, when no part of Ottoman territory was attacked. Ottoman Christians, and on a lesser scale the much smaller group of Ottoman Jews, would be at risk of being openly targeted by violence as soon as egalitarian reforms were broached, and well-organised groups, foremost the Ottoman Armenians, fought and lobbied for them. An additional factor was social envy, related to the economic and educational successes of the zimmi. Important were feelings of revenge, instigated by leaders after diplomatic pressure or military defeats against ‘Christian' (European) powers. Such resentment served as an argument in many pogroms. Both the anti-Armenian massacres that occurred in 1909 and 1895 and the genocide of 1915 took place after important instances of diplomatic support from Europe for egalitarian reforms.
An increasing number of nationals of Western countries had begun to live in late Ottoman towns close to non-Muslims, and established new networks of business, diplomacy, health and education. As a result, Levantine Christians and Jews were not only able to advance their own personal careers but also able to develop the life of their communities (millet) in terms of education, health and self-organisation. The liberal reforms of the Tanzimat, starting in 1839, and in particular the 1856 Reform Edict, made these developments possible, and with them a high degree of organised diversity.
The millets, above all the Armenian Protestant and the Armenian apostolic communities, became, in a nutshell, non-territorial parliamentarian systems within the empire. Against such developments, late Ottoman public violence was generally in defence of a premodern empire, including its pre-reform hierarchical social order. A jihad against its perceived domestic enemies and looting were allowed by a widespread vulgar understanding of sharia, in which hate speech was combined with the discourse of a sultanate-caliphate in urgent need of militant defence against traitors and unbelievers among neighbours within the empire.Late Ottoman, predominantly Sunni public violence thus appears in global perspective as a reaction of those who had lost power but who still possessed considerable regional means of force against potential domestic opponents. Mob violence was an advantage in which terror compensated for weakness on other levels. Yet these forces made regional and central rulers susceptible to blackmail by local factions, because local factions used violence at times single-handedly and threatened minorities or even foreign representatives, thus creating diplomatic conflicts. The authorities were responsible for law, order and security, particularly to protect foreigners. In critical times, as in 1895 and during the comparable (though more limited) massacres of Armenians in Adana in 1909, they concentrated upon both protecting foreigners and offering local perpetrators the freedom to kill, loot and rape local Christians during limited time slots.
Forced conversions, including painful and risky ad hoc circumcisions of men, are another poignant chapter of a modern Middle Eastern history of violence. They were acts of humiliation and public displays of the supposed superiority of Islam. Not only mostly provincial Christians but also Alevis and Yezidis were targeted by coerced conversion in critical times. The Yezidis were also subject to a related military campaign in the 1890s.
The genocide of Yezidis in 2014-17 conducted by ISIS, including forced conversions, is in line with Ottoman campaigns and, above all, age-old stigmatising discourse. Islamist discourse, social envy and impunity for murder and robbery conditioned the people to accept late Ottoman massacres as well as the genocide of 1915, including large-scale spoliation. The state tolerated, promoted or organised such violence while it empowered Muslims and granted them preferential treatment. Many Ottoman Muslim refugees (muhacir) from the Balkans and the Caucasus were settled on the land and in houses of Ottoman Christians. Public discourse justified such preferential treatment as a compensation for imperial losses and for a supposed supreme Muslim suffering in the modern age. These policies and the sense of Muslim victimhood derived from a sweeping interpretation of the modern age: evil, antiMuslim European designs had started in the eighteenth century and had peaked during the First Balkan War, while the Western press and scholarship suppressed positive contributions to human civilisation by Muslims and Turks.