Millet

Millet is the Turkish rendering of the Arabic milla. The Encyclopaedia of Islam says it indicates religion, religious community and nation, and that these three basic meanings were used concurrently in the Ottoman Empire until the Tanzimat period and afterwards. ¹

In the Qur'an, the article says, milla is largely identical with din and should be translated "religion"; it occurs most often in the phrase for the religion of Ibrahim, and less often for the religion of the heathens. ¹ No Qur'anic example suggests translating it as congregation or people. ¹ In later usage the word keeps this meaning, and the article finds it still in nineteenth-century documents, especially official letters and charters of the Ottoman, Mamluk and Safavid courts addressed to prominent Christians. ¹ Examples include a letter from the Mamluk sultan Qa'itbay to the Doge of Venice in 877/1473 and a permit of Shah Abbas II for the Carmelites of Isfahan in 1052/1642. ¹ An Ottoman text of 1108/1697 even speaks of converts to the "papal millet", using it alongside the word for the Latin rite. ^{1 3}

When millet means a community of the same confession, the article asks whether it refers to Ottoman non-Muslim subjects under the covenant of protection (dhimma; see also ahl al-dhimma). ³ It records a scholarly debate. One view, by Benjamin Braude, holds that the word long meant Christians outside the empire and was not typically used for dhimmis before the nineteenth century. The article's author disagrees in part: in the documents of the imperial council published by Refik, covering 1689 to 1839, every use of millet as a confessional community refers to non-Muslim Ottoman subjects, Greek Orthodox, Armenian and Catholic Christians and Jews. ³

The article gives dated landmarks. A document of 1697 treats the Orthodox and Armenian communities as known millets. A document of 1591 calls the Armenian community an empire-wide religious community. The Greek Orthodox millet appears as millet-i Rum in a document of 1170/1757, and the Jewish and Catholic millets are named only in 1255/1839. Late in the eighteenth century the fiscal administration even spoke of "the three" non-Muslim communities. ³ Foreign merchants living under the Capitulations seem to have been called both a community and a millet by analogy. ³

In a third meaning millet is a sovereign nation, or part of a people. The article's examples are the "three nations" of Transylvania, the Hungarians, Szekelys and Saxons, between 1652 and 1687, whose delegates sat with the prince of a vassal state; and the European powers named in the Treaty of Kucuk Kaynarca of 1774, who in Islamic terms belonged to the abode of war. ²

It adds that the Porte began to call the rebellious Serbs and Greeks a millet, a separate nation, only when it judged that their covenant of protection had been withdrawn, so that the second and third senses stood in contradiction. The Ottoman side kept arguing in 1827 that all the Greeks formed one millet, because their rite and patriarch were one. ²

The article quotes a view that there was no overall administrative system for non-Muslims, only a set of largely social arrangements varying over time and place. It accepts that this cannot be pressed too far, but concludes that millet in the sense of a non-Muslim community was in no way used exclusively or consistently before the nineteenth century. ² The regular use can be shown only in some central offices, not in provincial or local administration, where another word, ta'ife, was frequent; the clerk of the imperial council might use millet where the grand vizier used ta'ife. ²

The author interprets this as showing that, from the centre, the communities were seen as religious and juridical bodies under their ecclesiastical heads, ideally of empire-wide scope. He suggests the idea may have emerged in the seventeenth century as the Porte, guarantor of the existing order, felt obliged to protect the traditional communities against Western missions. ^{2 4} This is the article's reading, offered as conceivable, and the museum records it as one voice in an open debate. ⁴

For the quarter that housed the seat of the Greek Orthodox Patriarch, see Fener. See also the Ottoman Empire.