In the second half of the 16th century, in the northern-most part of the Empire’s European province of Bosnia, the Ottoman authorities carried out two waves of ruthless persecutions of the members of the Melami-Bayrami Sufi order, which included the execution of the leader and spiritual pole of the order, Sheikh Hamza Bali. At the same time, several similar kinds of persecutions took place deep inside central Anatolia against the Kizilbas and their suspected sympathisers. Two very different groups of religious subalterns at two completely opposite ends of the Empire, one, an esoteric Sufi order with only some Shi’a tendencies, with strong urban support and links with artisans and trade-guilds, and the other, a militant Shi’a movement with rural power-base and strong links with the neighbouring Safavids, were seemingly afforded very similar treatment by the Ottoman authorities. The information on both sets of persecutions is contained in fetvas and investigation or arrest warrants (hüküms) contained in the Ottoman ‘registers of important affairs’ (mühimme defterleri). The present paper will examine a sample of these documents in order to ascertain the extent to which the Ottoman government and its officials who composed them saw these two groups as parts of the same phenomenon. It will compare the manner in which some of these investigations took place, the wording of the arrest warrants and/or fetvas, and the terminology used to describe the members and sympathisers of the two groups. It will argue that the similarities between the documents – apart, of course, from demonstrating that the government used a certain template for certain types of affairs – also reveal a level of detachment by the Ottoman officials in dealing with these groups. It will further argue that, although the Ottoman government went to great lengths to justify these persecutions on religious grounds, e.g. defining specific terminology to describe the members of these groups, the formulaic and often sweeping manner in which this justification was applied demonstrates that the political and security concerns were of more pressing importance than the ostensive religious ones.

This paper investigates the modes of interaction between the Ottoman state and the Kizilbash as well as the Nusayri communities in a comparative way. Both of these communities represent a form of Islam that heavily diverges from Hanafi-Sunnism, which was increasingly fashioned as official Ottoman Islam in the course of the 16th century. Furthermore, both groups share a history of persecution, which continued intermittently during this period and which until today constitutes an important aspect of their respective collective identities. Yet, persecution, banishment or execution were but one side of the Ottoman treatment of both Kizilbash and Nusayri: The state also tried to integrate them into its administrative apparatus when- and wherever possible. For example, both groups as well as individuals belonging to them were also registered as regular tax-payers in the ottoman tahrir defterleri from the 16th century onwards. Taking this observation—and its implications—as a starting point, this paper inquires into the ways Kizilbash and Nusayri further interacted with the local Ottoman state in the bilad-i sham and in central-Anatolia. Drawing mainly on the mentioned tax registers and on court records (kadi sicilleri), this paper seeks to stake out several different spaces and modes in which the Anatolian Kizilbash and the Arab Nusayri regularly interacted with the Ottoman State and its local agents respectively. The examples given illustrate, on the one hand, how these heterogeneous groups were treated, labelled and thus perceived by the state and thereby accommodated to the Empire’s administrative measures and its apparatus of power. On the other hand, they also enable us to delineate how these subjects themselves approached and used the state’s institutions, such as the kadi’s court, for example, in arguments over land-use or for renewing rights of mutasarriflik. As such, the findings serve to revisit the history of these communities in the Ottoman Empire, integrating a narrative of accommodation and strategies of long-term-survival into the dominant perspective on their persecution as “heretics”. Therefore, this paper argues that convenience was one of the most important principles shaping the relation of the Ottoman State to its Kizilbash and Nusayri subjects. With reference to Tezcan’s argument for conveniencia, as opposed to convivencia as basic principles of organizing difference, the paper discusses the possibilities and constraints of such a concept for coming to terms with a comparative history of the Kizilbash and the Nusayri in the Ottoman Empire of the “post-classical age”.

The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between one of the lesser-known, non-Muslim Ottoman communities, the Yezidi Kurds, and the Ottoman Empire in terms of the policy of mandatory military service during the Tanzimat, a period in which the Ottoman state was attempting to exert intensified control over its geographical peripheries. With the Tanzimat (Reorganization) edict of 1839 and the Islahat (Reform) decree of 1856 the Ottoman Empire carried out numerous attempts to centralize its state bureaucracy, surveil its subjects, and create ideal docile bodies, through such means as new courts, land codes, identification cards, extensive censuses, detailed surveys, and, crucially, new military service requirements. In this context, the paper analyzes the implementation of this civilizing mission and its associated centralization policies at the ground level in the peripheries and borderlands of the empire, specifically Mosul and Eastern Anatolia. Furthermore, it examines the reactions of Yezidis to these policies. Yezidis were neither Muslim nor recognized as Peoples of the Book, ahl al-kitab (Jews or Christians), meaning that they did not quite fit into any of the established categories of Ottoman subjecthood. Based on texts from the Ottoman Archives (Bab-i Ali Evrak Odas?), missionary accounts, travelogues, and transcriptions of Yezidi oral tradition, the paper focuses on the various strategies Yezidis employed and how they exercised their agency to negotiate with the empire in order to preserve their community and faith. I argue that the Ottoman Empire’s centralization policies were not only based on what the state envisaged and wrote from the capital, but, especially at the level of local implementation, the definition of control could sometimes change in the peripheries or borderlands as local populations were able to maneuver and negotiate with the state. Investigating the experiences of the Yezidi population and their acts of resistance (Scott 1985) in order to evade military conscription illustrates the flexibility of the empire’s centralization policies and the mobility and agency of the indigenous population to shape their own experiences as Ottoman subjects between 1848 and 1876.

Drawing on primary sources in Ottoman and Arabic, including petitions, newspapers, governmental correspondence, and Ottoman parliamentary minutes this paper explores the ways in which Zaydi-Shii elites, such as descendants of the Prophet Muhammad (sada), merchants, and administrators in Yemen took the lead in negotiating a form of imperial citizenship that reworked the Hamidian politics of difference towards this part of the Ottoman Empire during the early years of the Second Constitutional Period (1908-1918). Historians have argued that efforts to forge an Ottoman citizenship following the 1908 Revolution took two competing forms that were both unsuccessful: while the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) insisted on the uniformity of rights and obligations for all Ottoman citizens, Ottoman Armenian or Arab leaders often called for specific rights and privileges for the members of their respective communities. By contrast, I demonstrate that between 1908 and the beginning of World War I, Zaydi-Shii elites, partly in response to the higher degree of repression they had experienced under the Hamidian regime compared to their Shafii-Sunni counterparts, were at the forefront of propagating and negotiating a form of imperial citizenship that incorporated Yemen into an Ottoman fatherland through the official recognition and institutionalization of local difference. The latter favored Zaydi elites and included expanded responsibilities for sharia courts, the restitution of privileges from before the Ottoman conquest in 1871-73, and the devolution of fiscal and judicial powers to the Zaydi imam Yahya b. Muhammad Hamid al-Din – guaranteed by the Da‘‘an Agreement that the Ottoman government and the Imam concluded in 1911. Zaydi leaders like the parliamentarian Sayyid Ahmad al-Kibsi represented these politics of difference as expressions of “freedom” (hürriyet), thus proposing a particularistic interpretation of one of the key notions of the 1908 Revolution. While strongly favoring homogenization, CUP leaders accepted eventually that citizenship based on the recognition of difference was the only way to ensure the loyalty of a borderland where the use of military force had failed to establish stable government control. In drawing attention to the successful negotiation of a form of Ottoman citizenship based on difference in the case of Yemen on the eve of the First World War, this paper introduces greater complexity into our understanding of late Ottoman forms of imperial citizenship.