Integration, conflict, and autonomy among religious minorities in the late Ottoman Empire: the Greek-Catholic (Melkite) Church and sectarian turmoil in Mount Lebanon and Damascus

Youssef Alvarenga Cherem,Danny Zahreddine

doi:10.5752/p.2317-773x.2020v8n4p59-79

Abstract

The 19th century was a time of social and political upheaval for the Ottoman Empire. To contend with dwindling territories, uprisings, unrest, and international military, political, and economic pressure, it had to overcome structural deficiencies in the armed forces, economy, and State bureaucracy that kept it lagging behind its European counterparts. The modernizing impetus ultimately took the form of full-fledged legal and institutional reform by mid-century, transforming but also unsettling the Ottoman State and society. In this article we discuss a central component of those reforms and of the international relations of the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century: the legal status of non-Moslem minorities. We frame our discussion in the analysis of two moments: the official recognition of the Greek-Catholic (Melkite) religious community in 1848 and the sectarian civil conflict in Mount Lebanon and Damascus in 1860. The intersecting vectors of economical, religious and political interests in their local, regional and international dimensions will be fleshed out, evincing a more nuanced and multilayered, and less monolithic and state-centered, approach toward the international relations of the late Ottoman Empire and the working of its institutions.

Highlights

The Ottoman Empire and the “Eastern Question”3
We frame our discussion in the analysis of two moments: the official recognition of the Greek-Catholic (Melkite) religious community in 1848 and the sectarian civil conflict in Mount Lebanon and Damascus in 1860
This type of identification is the opposite of social contexts in which the identification of an individual is a social marker that, in the end, does not need to be linked to faith, but in a “civic religion”, merely social or nominal – see the charge that “nominal Catholics” are not “true” Christians, or the more extreme charge of evangelicals that “traditional” Christians are only nominal Christians, and the accusation by Salafists / Wahhabis that all other Muslims are unfai1th5f.uTlh(kisufpfhâer)n–ompreencoinseilsynboetcnaeuwse: trtahdeitiriomnaelmabnedrschoinpteism“pmoerarerylyecxualmtupralel”s and, tahbeoruenfodr.eF,oinr vaacliodm

Summary

Introduction

As symbolic and economic exchanges with the West deepened, structures and attitudes towards modernity, as well as political currents, that emerged during this period would inform future generations In this context, interreligious relations are a privileged locus, a “prism” for a reading of the modernization process and creation of modern states in the aftermath of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. We shall turn our attention to two case studies: the seemingly inconsequential and often overlooked establishment of the Melkite millet in 1848 and the momentous sectarian conflicts in Mount Lebanon in 1860 as events that both reflected and helped shape the course of modernization and integration with the Western international/economic order In both cases we witness the dialectic between integration, conflict, and autonomy, in a delicate negotiation between communities and local authorities, the center of power in Constantinople, and the European powers directly or indirectly involved in this process. We conclude considering the impacts, continuities, and ruptures established in this process, which still echo in the social, political, and symbolic structure in some countries in the Middle East

Islamic attitudes toward other religions

Ethnic and religious diversity in the Ottoman Empire

Findings

Conclusion