The Fruit of the Arts and the Mob

2021 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 404-412
Author(s):  
Orit Bashkin

Abstract This essay considers accounts of the Dreyfus Affair published in the newspaper Thamarat al-Funun (founded 1875) during 1898 to demonstrate how Arab writers addressed the rights of minorities in Europe and examined failed emancipatory projects. Writing about the Dreyfus Affair allowed intellectuals in the Levant to reverse the power relationship between themselves and Europe and to comment on the kinds of politics that would ensure the equality before the law of the Jewish minority in Europe. These debates further illustrate that even before the shift to electoral politics in the Ottoman Empire (after 1908) and in postwar Arab nation-states, Arab writers were preoccupied with the relationship between statecraft and majority-minority relations. They argued that democratic institutions such as parliaments and courts of law were the best venues to safeguard the rights of religious communities whose mere existence was defined as a problem. Bashkin shows how Thamarat al-Funun pointed to phenomena that endangered religious communities, such as fanaticism, racism, abuse of power by the police and the military, and mob politics.

Author(s):  
Isra Shengul Chebi ◽  
Dilshat Karimova

Defined both in an individual and in a social or cultural context, identity is a historical phenomenon; a consistent, complete sense of identity develops in the historical process. Social relations created by historical conditions shape Turkish identity, just like other collective identities. Revealed as one of the oldest nations in history, Turkish identity has also been shaped by the amalgamation of the effects created by the rule of law in the collective consciousness. Despite the fact that the length of the historical process makes it difficult to clearly identify the stages of the adventure, when studying Turkish identity it is necessary to look at the Ottoman Empire, which is a prerequisite for the modern Turkish state, and the self-identification of the society that feels belonging to the above state. Indeed, it is not very wrong to associate the phenomenon of identity as a topic of discussion with the relationship of the Ottoman state with the modern nation states of the West. In this context, it would be appropriate to touch upon the perception of identity in the Ottoman Empire.


Author(s):  
Naif Bezwan

With a focus on the key developments and critical junctures that shaped and reshaped the relationship between the Ottomans and its non-Muslim subject communities, this paper seeks to understand the dynamics and the rationale behind the Ottoman policies and practices vis-a-vis non-Muslim communities. It will do so by offering a periodisation of Ottoman rule along four major pathways, each of which also provides the title of the respective section. The first period is referred to as structural exclusion by toleration over centuries, from the conquest of the respective territories to their incorporation into the imperial domain. The second phase is entitled integration via politics of recognition which basically covers the Tanzimat era (1838-1876). The third period is put under the heading of coercive domination and control, roughly corresponding to the Hamidian Period (1876-1908). And finally, the last period is concerned with the Young Turks regime (1908-1918), discussing its politics and policies towards non-Muslims communities framed under the title of nation-building by nation-destruction. The chapter titles act both as hypothesis and structuring elements of the periodisation presented. As such they shall help identify the dominant paradigm of each period pertinent to the status and situation of the communities under consideration, while connecting them in a plausible manner. This paper is motivated by a non-Orientalised decolonial approach to the study of the Ottoman empire as well as the nation-states established in the post-Ottoman political geographies.


Author(s):  
Cut Meurah Rahman ◽  
Ida Fitriana

This paper focuses on Pax-Ottomanica in a case study of the Millet System through multi ethnic and multi religious communities in the Ottoman Empire. In particular, the Millet System has successfully roamed people in Europe, Asia, and Africa for nearly 600 years. This paper also discusses Islamic law on the relationship between other religions such as Judaism and Christianity. This study uses a qualitative method with a whole literature approach. Based on the data analyzed, it was found that harmony occurs between fellow religious and ethnic people with the freedom to embrace their respective religions and maintain their respective cultures. This paper aims to analyze the state of the multi-ethnic and multi-religious society in the Ottoman Empire by providing various references from both Turkish and Western historians. In addition, this paper aims to introduce Ottoman-style freedom through this Millet system, which has succeeded in bringing all non-Muslim communities into one Ottoman commonwealth.


2009 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 177-201 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefanos Katsikas

It is estimated that, in 1913, less than 500,000 Muslims lived in the regions ruled by Greece and around 800,000 Muslims in those areas which were under the authority of the Bulgarian state. In the aftermath of the 1923 obligatory Greco-Turkish population exchange the number of Muslims in Greece reduced to approximately 200,000, of which around 180,000 lived in the region of Western Thrace and 20–25,000 Albanian-speaking Muslims, known as Çams, in Epirus and Greek South-West Macedonia. In the same period, the number of Muslims in Bulgaria was between 800,000 and one million people. Meanwhile, during the two Balkan and the First World Wars a hardly definable number of Muslims lost their lives due to starvation, disease, massacres and physical destruction caused by the military and paramilitary troops of the two Balkan states, as well as due to voluntary and forced migration to areas controlled by the Ottoman Empire.


2006 ◽  
pp. 133-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
K. Arystanbekov

Kazakhstan’s economic policy results in 1995-2005 are considered in the article. In particular, the analysis of the relationship between economic growth and some indicators of nation states - population, territory, direct access to the World Ocean, and extraction of crude petroleum - is presented. Basic problems in the sphere of economic policy in Kazakhstan are formulated.


Author(s):  
Ilan Zvi Baron

Questions arose about what it meant to support a country whose political future the author has no say in as a Diaspora Jew. The questions became all the more pronounced the more I learned about Israel’s history. Many Jews feel the same way, and often are uncomfortable with what such an obligation can mean, in no small part because of concerns over being identified with Israel because of one’s Jewish heritage or because of the overwhelming significance that Israel has come to have for Jewish identity. Israel’s significance is matched by how much is published about Israel. Increasingly, this literature is not only about trying to explain Israel’s wars, the military occupation or other parts of its history, but about the relationship between Diaspora1 Jewry and Israel.


This volume is an interdisciplinary assessment of the relationship between religion and the FBI. We recount the history of the FBI’s engagement with multiple religious communities and with aspects of public or “civic” religion such as morality and respectability. The book presents new research to explain roughly the history of the FBI’s interaction with religion over approximately one century, from the pre-Hoover period to the post-9/11 era. Along the way, the book explores vexed issues that go beyond the particulars of the FBI’s history—the juxtaposition of “religion” and “cult,” the ways in which race can shape the public’s perceptions of religion (and vica versa), the challenges of mediating between a religious orientation and a secular one, and the role and limits of academic scholarship as a way of addressing the differing worldviews of the FBI and some of the religious communities it encounters.


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