The Committee of Union and Progress and the Iraqi Shiites

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyses the relationship between the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) and the Shiite subjects of Ottoman Iraq in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, it examines the various contexts in which the CUP attempted to integrate Iraq's Shiite population into the state apparatus – for example, by authorizing and supporting the establishment of modern Shiite schools or by employing Shiite scholars at the Ottoman courts. The Shiites themselves navigated administrative contexts, regularly petitioning the Ottoman authorities to fight for their rights under the recently restored constitution of 1908, thus exercising agency as Shiite subjects of the empire. In dealing with Iraq's Shiite population, the CUP government in Istanbul had to negotiate continuity and change in its policies towards them from earlier practices under the rule of Abdulhamid II (r. 1876–1909). New policies and administrative practices towards Iraq's Shiite population also had to be negotiated with local political intermediaries – creating a complex political constellation in which the equally complex relationship between the CUP and the Iraqi Shiites would unfold.