Turkish Attitudes Concerning Christian-Muslim Equality in the Nineteenth Century*

EVERY modern society has been faced with problems arising from inequalities among the various groups of which it is composed, particularly since the eighteenth-century proclamation in America that all men are created equal, and the elaboration in France of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen. The differences which produced inequality have been variouseconomic, social, racial, linguistic, religious, political-and variously intertwined. In the Near East until very recent times the major boundary lines between groups, and therefore the principal barriers to a homogeneous society of equals, have been religious. Although today social and economic disparities in Near Eastern society have vastly increased as modern technology and finance have provided greater opportunities for getting and spending, and although nationalist rivalries now challenge the primacy of religious rivalries, it is still often true that religion is the dividing line, and that a man's creed is his distinguishing mark. In the Ottoman Empire of the early nineteenth century his religion provided a man's label, both in his own conceptual scheme and in the eyes of his neighbors and his governors. He was a Muslim, Greek Orthodox, Gregorian Armenian, Jew, Catholic, or Protestant before he was a Turk or Arab, a Greek or Bulgar, in the national sense, and also before he felt himself an Ottoman citizen. The Ottoman government, by granting official recognition to these millet's, as the religious communities were called, had preserved and even emphasized the religious distinctions. The empire itself was governed by Muslims; its law was based on the religious law of Islam. But within this empire the several Christian communities and the Jewish community enjoyed a partial autonomy, whereby the ecclesiastical hierarchy which administered the millet supervised not only the religious, educational,