Popular and scholastic understandings of the status of the Shi'i ulama living under Ottoman rule in Syria tend to present the experience as one of systematic oppression and - instances of taqiyya (religious dissimulation) notwithstanding - categorical exclusion from official positions within the legal and scholastic spheres of Sunni officialdom. While the Shia living under Ottoman rule were certainly victims of oppression and exclusion, totalizing portrayals of such phenomena prevent us from seeing a more nuanced reality. This paper challenges such assumptions by examining the socio-political position of the al-Amin family, a family from Jabal Amil (roughly South Lebanon), that produced numerous generations of scholars from the eighteenth century through to today. The most prominent member of the family, the early twentieth century marja‘ al-taqlid (religious exemplar to the Shii community) Muhsin al-Amin, was a significant contributor to the circulation of tropological accounts of Shi‘i exclusion and oppression by the Sunni Ottoman Turkish authorities. An examination of the socio-political activities of members of the al-Amin family’s line of scholars, however, reveals a more complex reality in which Shi‘i ulama could be active participants in their community’s negotiations with regional and local authorities. Various moments throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries indicate that members of the al-Amin family obtained official positions within the Ottoman legal and educational systems, maintained close if fraught relations with local, non-Shi‘i authorities, and engaged in extensive economic activities some of which were made possible as payment for the services rendered on behalf of the Ottomans. By presenting an account of the al-Amin family’s participation in the political and economic life of the region we achieve not only a better understanding of the status of the Shia under Ottoman rule but a better understanding of what it meant to be a family of ulama and how particular Shi‘i families came to maintain dominance within both the Shi’i scholastic milieux and lay society.

The expansion of capitalism in the 18th and 19th centuries evoked multiple active colonial attempts to incorporate Khuzestan, a region in the southwest of Iran bordering Iraq and the Persian Gulf. The response of Arab communities in Khuzestan to this regional and global colonial encroachment has been overlooked in studies of the colonialism in the Middle East. This paper aims to address this theoretical gap and to explore the modalities of resistance among Arab communities in Khuzestan in the 18th and 19th centuries. Through investigating historical and archival records, I will argue that the main response of Arab communities to colonial encroachment was refusal expressed in various modes including armed resistance, “flirting and repelling politics,” and resisting the invasive infrastructures. In the 18th and 19th centuries, armed resistance was a major mode of refusal that Arab communities deployed to stop the colonial encroachments. Armed resistance against Turks and Europeans can be traced back well into the 17th century. In the 18th century, in response to the ongoing refusal of the Arab people, the British entered a coalition with the Turks to attack the region. Between 1758-1766, for example, there were four Anglo-Turkish wars against Arab communities in Khuzestan. Similar militant confrontations were sparked between Arab communities and Persian dynasties that were encroaching southward. In addition to their armed resistance, Arab communities skillfully adopted what I call flirting and repelling politics to hamper colonial encroachment. By flirting and repelling politics, I mean the politics of playing the three colonial powers--Persian, Turkish, and European--against each other in order to retain and protect indigenous autonomy. Flirting and repelling politics, for example, are evident in the tribute payment that Arab communities were promising both Turks and Persians while avoiding payment to either unless there was real pressure. The flirting and repelling politic also involved creating alliances and coalitions between local Arab communities in Khuzestan and southern Iraq. The third mode of resistance that I will explore in this paper is what I call resisting invasive infrastructures. Seeing the infrastructure as a vehicle of colonial encroachment that would compromise their autonomy, I will argue, Arab communities tried to impede the colonial encroachment through obstructing the development of the invasive infrastructures.

Scholarship on nationalism and nation-building during the early Turkish Republic (1923-1938) has focused extensively on the problem of Turkishness. That is to say, on the question of which former subjects of the Ottoman Empire did the new nationalist government count as Turks. This question has traditionally been approached using Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Kurds, and Balkan Muslims as case studies. However, the Alevis are one group that has been almost entirely overlooked as a part of this discussion. Consisting of Turkish, Zaza, and Kurmanji-speaking groups, as well as both sedentary and semi-nomadic populations, and holding religious practices that cannot readily be classified as definitively Muslim nor non-Muslim, Sunni nor Shi’i, the complexity of the Alevis provides a critical test of leading scholarly conceptions of Turkish identity, particularly those of Soner Ça?aptay. In his book Islam, Secularism, and Nationalism in Modern Turkey, Soner Ça?aptay argues that Turkish identity can be understood through a “Hierarchy of Turkishness.” This he conceives as a series of concentric rings of progressively decreasing Turkishness. At the center are Turkish-speaking Muslims. Muslims who do not speak Turkish (Kurds, Circassians, etc.) lie in the middle ring. The outermost circle consists of the non-Muslim citizens of Turkey, like Greeks, Armenians, and Jews. According to Ça?aptay, the nationalist government attempted to assimilate those within the second category into the Turkish nation, while consigning those in the outer ring to a permanently marginalized status. One of Ça?aptay’s concepts I intend to scrutinize is his notion of “cultural Islam” as a defining characteristic of Turkish identity. Ça?aptay’s definition is broad enough that it theoretically could encompass Alevi religious practices. If this were the case, then Turkish-speaking Alevis would occupy a place in the innermost circle of the hierarchy of Turkishness, indistinguishable from Sunni Turks. However, most of the secondary literature suggests that Alevis had a far more complex relationship with the state during the early Turkish Republic than Ça?aptay’s frameworks would allow. A more nuanced framework of Turkish identity must account not only for the privileging of nominal Muslim identity by a secularist state, but also of textual, Hanafi, and Sunni Islam over antinomian forms of folk Islam, like Alevism.