Free Download Empire of Refugees North Caucasian Muslims and The Late Ottoman State 1St Edition Vladimir Hamed Troyansky Full Chapter PDF
Free Download Empire of Refugees North Caucasian Muslims and The Late Ottoman State 1St Edition Vladimir Hamed Troyansky Full Chapter PDF
Free Download Empire of Refugees North Caucasian Muslims and The Late Ottoman State 1St Edition Vladimir Hamed Troyansky Full Chapter PDF
Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction 1
PA RT I
Refugee Migration
PA RT I I
Refugee Resettlement
PA RT I I I
Diaspora and Return
Conclusion 243
Notes 251
Bibliography 297
Index 329
I L LUS T R AT IONS A N D TA BL E S
MAPS
1 Ottoman Empire and the Caucasus, 1864 xx
2 Ethnic groups in the Caucasus, c. 1850 13
3 North Caucasian villages in Anatolia, the Levant, and Iraq 73
4 Danube Province, 1867 92
5 Ottoman Transjordan, 1914 123
6 Ottoman Uzunyayla, 1914 160
7 Khutats’ correspondence, 1890–1905 177
8 Caucasus Viceroyalty, 1878 217
FIGUR ES
1 Circassians in Istanbul 15
2 Circassian displacement in Russian art 31
3 Ottoman Amman 126
4 Şerife, Hanife, and Cevat Khutat 155
5 Fuat Khutat 156
6 Ottoman Aziziye 162
7 Şerife, Fuat, and Şefika Khutat 179
8 Cevat Khutat 180
9 Blueprint of a mosque for refugees 193
ix
x Illustr ations and Tables
TA BL E S
1 North Caucasian refugees, 1858–1914 49
2 Taxes in Babadağ District, 1873–77 108
3 Property in the town of Babadağ, 1877 108
4 Household economy in Berkofça District, 1873 109
5 Shops purchased in Amman, 1891–1912 132
6 Houses purchased in Amman, 1889–1912 132
7 Inventory of Hajj Islam’s inheritance, 1901 137
8 Land prices in Circassian villages in Transjordan, 1891–1912 149
9 Chechen returnees to Russia, 1867–71 231
10 North Caucasian petitions to return to Russia 231
11 Returnees to the Caucasus, 1860–1914 238
NOTE S FOR T HE R E A DER
T R A NSL I T ER AT IONS
This book relies on many sources in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic, Russian, and
Bulgarian. I transliterate Ottoman Turkish using Modern Turkish orthog-
raphy, without diacritics. For Arabic, I adopt the transliteration system of
the International Journal of Middle East Studies, marking ʿayn as ʿ and hamza
as ʾ. For Russian and Bulgarian, I use the Library of Congress transliteration
systems. Transliterations from Circassian (both Adyghe and Kabardian) are
based on the romanization system adopted by the United States Board on
Geographic Names and the (British) Permanent Committee on Geographical
Names.
The names of less-k nown geographic localities are transliterated according
to the rules outlined for modern Turkish, Arabic, and Russian: respectively,
Pınarbaşı, Naʿur, and Temir-K han-Shura. For the names of well-k nown lo-
cations, I use standard English spellings: for example, Istanbul not İstanbul,
Amman not ʿAmman, Nalchik not Nal’chik.
Currency
1 Ottoman lira = 100 kuruş
1 kuruş = 40 para
1 Russian ruble = 100 kopeks
AC K NOW L E D G M E N T S
It takes a village to write a book, as the academic iteration of that saying goes.
My village is approaching the size of a small town, and I am ever so grateful
for that support.
This book is based on research in multiple places, learning different ways
of record keeping, and speaking with many people, to whom this history
is personal, raw, precious. My transnational fieldwork has only ever been
possible thanks to the generosity of others. Many in the North Caucasian
diaspora took a chance and shared with me, a stranger, their expertise, mem-
ories, and documents. In Jordan, I am indebted to Merissa Khurma and
Yanal Ansouqa for welcoming me to their worlds and facilitating my inter-
views. Salim Khutat generously allowed me to use his family’s letters and
photographs to tell the incredible Ottoman history of the Khutat family in
chapter 5. In Zarqaʾ, Farid F. Sultan shared his Chechen community’s letters
and memoirs, and Adnan Younes Bazadugh welcomed me to his Circassian
home–museum–research center. Isam Bino introduced me to the Chechen
history of Sweileh, and Musa ʿAli Janib to the Circassian origins of Wadi
al-Sir; and Faisal Habtoosh Khot and other Circassian elders sat down with
me to share their families’ recollections of founding Naʿur. I also thank Deeb
Bashir Arslan; Mohammad Azoka; Majida Mufti Hilmi; Jamil Ishaqat;
Amjad, Khaled, and Feridon Jaimoukha; Kamal Jalouqa; ʿOmran Khamash;
ʿAwn Shawkat and Dina Janbek al-K hasawneh; Muhammad Khair Mamsir;
xiii
xiv Acknowledgments
lectual generosity looks like. I benefited from feedback by Kristen Alff, Cath-
erine Baylin Duryea, Basma Fahoum, and Rebecca Gruskin, my brilliant and
beloved academic siblings, who witnessed every stage of this project; Rhian-
non Dowling and Nana Osei-Opare, my daily writing partners through the
pandemic; and Jacob Daniels, Jennifer Derr, Samuel Dolbee, Koji Hirata,
and Michelle Lynn Kahn.
I thank Stanford University Press for turning this manuscript into a
beautiful book. It has been a privilege working with Kate Wahl, Gigi Mark,
Cat Ng Pavel, Athena Lakri, and the rest of the team. I owe a debt of grati-
tude to the peer reviewers. Bill Nelson produced beautiful maps. Zaina El-
Said, whose art is inspired by Circassian heritage and whose family I met in
Amman, kindly allowed her breathtaking work to be featured on the book
cover.
Many scholars shared their advice, feedback, and friendship over the
years. I thank Myriam Ababsa, Raouf Saʿd Abujaber, Patrick Adamiak, James
Altman, Leyla Amzi-Erdoğdular, Alexander Balistreri, Nora Barakat, Tim-
othy Blauvelt, Olga Borovaya, Fırat Bozçalı, Lâle Can, Dawn Chatty, John
Colarusso, Camille Cole, Nazan Çiçek, Markian Dobczansky, Julia E lyachar,
Tolga Esmer, Heather Ferguson, Sarah Fischer, Ella Fratantuono, Ryan
Gingeras, Krista Goff, Chris Gratien, James Grehan, Zoe Griffith, David
Gutman, Marwan Hanania, Peter Hill, Peter Holquist, Yasemin İpek, Aaron
Jakes, Toby Jones, Eileen Kane, Cynthia Kaplan, Ceyda Karamürsel, Kemal
Karpat, K. Mehmet Kentel, Akram Khater, Ilham Khuri-Makdisi, Masha
Kirasirova, Hakan Kırımlı, Abdulhamit Kırmızı, Sandrine Kott, Selim
Kuru, Jean-Michel Landry, Margaret Litvin, Anaïs Massot, Adam Mestyan,
James Meyer, Eiji Miyazawa, Leslie Page Moch, Oktay Özel, Ramazan
Hakkı Öztan, Uğur Zekeriya Peçe, Eda Pepi, Victor Petrov, Michael Reyn-
olds, Laura Robson, Eugene Rogan, Sergey Salushchev, Cyrus Schayegh, Nir
Shafir, Seteney Shami, Hind Abu al-Shaʿr, Lewis Siegelbaum, Will Smiley,
Ulaş Sunata, Ronald Grigor Suny, Şölen Şanlı Vasquez, Tunç Şen, Philipp
Ther, Ehud Toledano, Alexandre Toumarkine, Max Weiss, Amanda Wetsel,
Benjamin Thomas White, Anna Whittington, and Sufian Zhemukhov.
The research and writing of this book were supported by the Social Sci-
ence Research Council International Dissertation Research Fellowship, the
American Council of Learned Societies and the Mellon Foundation Disser-
Acknowledgments xvii
tation Completion Fellowship, and the National Endowment for the Hu-
manities Summer Stipend. I further benefited from residential fellowships
at the American Center for Oriental Research in Amman and the American
Research Center in Sofia, and grants from the American Historical Associa-
tion and the American Philosophical Society. Other financial support came
from Stanford University’s Department of History, Abbasi Program in Is-
lamic Studies, Center for Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies, and
Europe Center; Columbia University’s Harriman Institute; and UC Santa
Barbara’s Academic Senate and Interdisciplinary Humanities Center.
My family and friends sustained me through the long years. My parents,
with humor and a lot of heart, raised me through the Soviet collapse, the
astonishingly difficult 1990s, and statelessness. My friends get all of the credit
for getting me away from my desk to experience the world outside. This book
is for Ronny, whose love and kindness are the greatest gifts.
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Empire of Refugees
Map 1. Ottoman Empire and the Caucasus, 1864.
I N T RO D U C T I O N
While the earlier groups of refugees had fled an ethnic cleansing perpetrated
by the Russian military in the North Caucasus, the latter parties were pushed
out by Russia’s new civil reforms and settler colonial policies. Between the
1850s and World War I, approximately a million North Caucasian Muslims
had left the tsardom in what was one of the greatest displacements in Russian
imperial history.
The Ottoman government maintained an open-door policy for North
Caucasian refugees. They arrived when the Ottoman Empire was steadily
losing territory and population in the Balkans and North Africa. Muslim ref-
ugees fit neatly into the Ottoman government’s agenda to stem demographic
decline, revitalize the economy, and solidify the imperial hold on far-flung
provinces. Within two generations, North Caucasian refugees were resettled
throughout the Ottoman Empire in the following fourteen countries today:
Turkey, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, Georgia, Bulgaria, Romania,
Serbia, Kosovo, Greece, Cyprus, and North Macedonia. The Ottomans con-
sidered settling Circassian refugees also in Albania, Bosnia, Montenegro, and
Libya.2 Temporary refugee camps existed in Palestine, and some North Cau-
casians moved, without Ottoman support, to Egypt.
The successive Muslim migrations turned the Ottoman state into an
empire of refugees. In addition to North Caucasians, hundreds of thousands
of Muslims from Crimea, the Balkans, the South Caucasus, and Crete, as
well as smaller groups from North Africa, Central Asia, and Afghanistan,
arrived in the Ottoman Empire as refugees. Many parts of the empire became
a refugee country, where one was more likely to hear Circassian or Abkhazian
than Turkish, Arabic, or Greek. The Ottoman Empire fashioned itself as a
refuge for Muslims displaced in the age of European imperial conquest and
colonialism. Meanwhile, the resettlement of Muslim refugees changed the
empire from within and was a harbinger of population transfers and forced
homogenization that befell the Middle East and the Balkans in the twentieth
century.
ments. First, between 1860 and World War I, the Ottoman government had
constructed a refugee regime, which coexisted with, but was distinct from,
the Ottoman immigration system. The Ottoman Refugee Commission (Ott.
Tur., Muhacirin Komisyonu), founded in 1860, implemented the refugee
regime. The Commission was responsible for settling Muslim refugees from
Russia, arriving in the aftermath of the Crimean War of 1853–56 and the Cau-
casus War of 1817–64, and Ottoman Muslims displaced during the Russo-
Ottoman War of 1877–78, the Balkan Wars of 1912–13, and World War I.
Having settled between three and five million Muslim refugees in total, the
Commission presided over the demographic, economic, and social transfor-
mation of the remaining Ottoman territories, especially Anatolia. The Otto-
man refugee regime built on the Ottoman Immigration Law of 1857, which
had set the terms for immigration into the empire for anyone, irrespective of
their faith, and the Land Code of 1858, governing land ownership and tenure.
After the 1860s, the vast majority of immigrants in the Ottoman Empire were
Muslim refugees. The Commission developed a set of additional policies and
subsidies specific to refugee needs, inaugurating a regime of expectations—of
protection and settlement by Muslim refugees and of obligations and loyalty
by the Ottoman government.
The Ottoman refugee regime preceded and has a distinct genealogy from
the contemporary international refugee regime. The modern refugee regime
is a product of the United Nations and is anchored by the Convention Re-
lating to the Status of Refugees, better known as the Refugee Convention
of 1951. It has roots in the interwar era, when the League of Nations imple-
mented ad hoc procedures to resolve refugee crises, arising out of the collapse
of the Ottoman and Russian empires.3 The legal status of a modern refugee
is derived from one’s citizenship in a nation-state. In recent years, historians
demonstrated that the ideology of modern humanitarianism and such prac-
tices as population exchange, refugee transfer, and territorial partition, which
were central to the interwar refugee regime, had roots in the Middle East.4
Humanitarian crises in the post-Ottoman world defined global conversations
about protecting refugees. This book suggests a further historiographical cor-
rective. The nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire, struggling mightily with
European annexations, created its own nonwestern and nonsecular system
of categorizing, sheltering, and resettling refugees. The status of refugee, or
4 Introduction
Kazakh steppe, Central Asia, and Siberia.6 Muslims had long been Russia’s
second-largest religious community after Orthodox Christians. By World
War I, the Russian tsar counted more Muslim subjects than the Ottoman
sultan did. Russia’s migration policies underwent a transformation. During
the Caucasus War, the Russian government abetted, promoted, and spon-
sored Muslim emigration. Between 1862 and 1864, the tsarist military per-
petrated ethnic cleansing, expelling western Circassians into the Ottoman
Empire. After 1867, however, tsarist authorities changed course to discourage
and restrict emigration as a way to keep their new Muslim subjects inside
Russia. Simultaneously, after 1861, Russia vigorously opposed the return of
North Caucasian refugees from the Ottoman Empire. Within the Cauca-
sus, Russia pursued the policies of forced relocation of North Caucasians
from highlands to lowlands and colonization of their territories by Cossacks
and Christian peasants. Tsarist migration policies redrew the demographics
of the North Caucasus and solidified Russia’s control over its newest region
near the borders of the Ottoman Empire and Iran. The North Caucasus is
the tsarist empire’s last major acquisition remaining within today’s Russian
Federation, unlike other non-Russian regions that had been annexed in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and have since become independent, in-
cluding Poland, Finland, Ukraine, the Baltic states, the South Caucasus, and
Central Asia.
Ottoman and Russian migration policies toward North Caucasian Mus-
lims were starkly different, yet they pursued the same goal of consolidat-
ing imperial authority. The Ottoman policy was inclusive toward foreign
Muslims because it benefited the Ottoman state. The government used ref-
ugees to increase the population of a shrinking empire, to bring unused land
into cultivation, to rein in nomads, and to strengthen the empire’s hold on
Christian-majority frontier regions. The Russian government excluded those
North Caucasian Muslims whom it perceived as opponents of Russian rule
during and after the Caucasus War. Both empires developed a sectarian logic,
equating one’s religious identity with their loyalty to a co-religionist state.
The Russians, who had a hard time conquering and suppressing rebellions in
the North Caucasus, assumed that indigenous Muslims, especially those who
had already left, would be loyal only to the sultan, not the tsar.
This transimperial history of migration explores how the Ottoman and
Introduction 7
occupying and working the land that had been claimed by other communi-
ties. North Caucasian refugees were victims of the expansion of the Russian
imperial frontier southward, through conquest and settlement, and then also
helped the Ottoman state to push its internal frontier into territories of no-
madic communities on the empire’s margins.11
The term that North Caucasian refugees used to describe themselves was
muhajir (Ar., muhājir, pl. muhājirūn; Ott. Tur., muhacir, pl. muhacirler).
The Arabic term muhājir is derived from hijra, which denotes the journey of
the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Yathrib (Medina) in 622 CE. The
Prophet Muhammad’s companions who undertook this journey to preserve
their nascent religious movement were the first muhajirs. Throughout Islamic
history, Muslim communities that had left, or been expelled from, their
homelands used this term in emulation of the Prophet’s companions. By the
nineteenth century, the term acquired anticolonial and anti-imperialist senti-
ments, as many regions across the Muslim world were occupied by the Euro-
pean empires. The flight of Muslims for refuge in the Ottoman Empire, the
world’s strongest sovereign Muslim state and the seat of the caliph, acutely re-
verberated throughout the Caucasus, the Balkans, North Africa, and beyond.
The present-day translations of refugee in Turkish, Arabic, and Russian are,
respectively, mülteci, lājiʾ, and bezhenets. None of these terms were commonly
used to refer to North Caucasians between the 1850s and World War I. I will
use muhajir throughout the book as well as the terms refugee, immigrant, and
emigrant, which all capture different aspects of what being a muhajir entailed,
when discussing relevant stages of muhajirs’ experiences.
The English-language term refugee came into popular usage in the after-
math of the collapse of the Ottoman and Russian empires. Previously used to
refer to religious and political exiles, it then described Armenian survivors of
the genocide and refugees of the Russian civil war who were stranded away
from their homeland, stateless, and increasingly seen as a global responsi-
bility.12 It was defined in the United Nations Refugee Convention of 1951 as
someone who, “owing to well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of
race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group or political
opinion, is outside the country of his nationality and is unable or, owing to
such fear, is unwilling to avail himself of the protection of that country” or
“unable or, owing to such fear, is unwilling to return to it.”13
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SALAD OF MIXED SUMMER FRUITS.
Pare and slice half a dozen fine ripe peaches, arrange them in a
dish, strew them with pounded sugar, and pour over them two or
three glasses of champagne: other wine may be used, but this is
best. Persons who prefer brandy can substitute it for wine. The
quantity of sugar must be proportioned to the sweetness of the fruit.
ORANGE SALAD.
Take off the outer rinds, and then strip away entirely the white
inside skin from some fine China oranges; slice them thin, and
remove the seeds, and thick skin of the cores, as this is done; strew
over them plenty of white sifted sugar, and pour on them a glass or
more of brandy: when the sugar is dissolved serve the oranges. In
France ripe pears of superior quality are sometimes sliced up with
the oranges. Powdered sugar-candy used instead of sugar, is an
improvement to this salad; and the substitution of port, sherry, or
Madeira, for the brandy is often considered so. The fruit may be
used without being pared, and a little curaçao or any other liqueur
may be added to the brandy; or this last, when unmixed, may be
burned after it is poured on the oranges.
TANGERINE ORANGES.
(Rotterdam Receipt.)
Let the cherries be ripe, freshly gathered, and the finest that can
be had; cut off half the length of the stalks, and drop them gently into
clean dry quart bottles with wide necks; leave in each sufficient
space for four ounces of pounded white sugar-candy (or of brown, if
better liked); fill them up entirely with the best French brandy, and
cork them closely: the fruit will not shrivel if thus prepared. A few
cherry, or apricot kernels, or a small portion of cinnamon, can be
added when they are considered an improvement.
BAKED COMPÔTE OF APPLES.
The Norfolk biffin is a hard and very red apple, the flesh of the true
kind being partially red as well as the skin. It is most excellent when
carefully dried; and much finer we should say when left more juicy
and but partly flattened, than it is when prepared for sale. Wipe the
apples, arrange them an inch or two apart, and place them in a very
gentle oven until they become so much softened as to yield easily to
sufficient pressure to give them the form of small cakes of less than
an inch thick. They must be set several times into the oven to
produce this effect, as they must be gradually flattened, and must
not be allowed to burst: a cool brick oven is best suited to them.
NORMANDY PIPPINS.
To one pound of the apples, put one quart of water and six ounces
of sugar; let them simmer gently for three hours, or more should they
not be perfectly tender. A few strips of fresh lemon-peel and a very
few cloves are by some persons considered agreeable additions to
the syrup.
Dried Normandy pippins, 1 lb.; water, 1 quart; sugar, 6 oz.; 3 to 4
hours.
Obs.—These pippins, if stewed with care, will be converted into a
rich confection: but they will be very good and more refreshing with
less sugar. They are now exceedingly cheap, and may be converted
into excellent second course dishes at small expense. Half a pound,
as they are light and swell much in the stewing, will be sufficient to
serve at once. Rinse them quickly with cold water, and then soak
them for an hour in the pan in which they are to be stewed, in a quart
of fresh water; place them by the side of the stove to heat gradually,
and when they begin to soften add as much sugar as will sweeten
them to the taste: they require but a small portion. Lemon-rind can
be added to them at pleasure. We have many receipts for other
ways of preparing them, to which we cannot now give place here. It
answers well to bake them slowly in a covered jar. They may be
served hot in a border of rice.
STEWED PRUNEAUX DE TOURS, OR TOURS DRIED PLUMS.
Wipe some large sound iron pears, arrange them on a dish with
the stalk end upwards, put them into the oven after the bread is
withdrawn, and let them remain all night. If well baked, they will be
excellent, very sweet, and juicy, and much finer in flavour than those
which are stewed or baked with sugar: the bon chrétien pear also is
delicious baked thus.
STEWED PEARS.
Pare, cut in halves, and core a dozen fine pears, put them into a
close shutting stewpan with some thin strips of lemon-rind, half a
pound of sugar in lumps, as much water as will nearly cover them,
and should a very bright colour be desired, a dozen grains of
cochineal, bruised, and tied in a muslin; stew the fruit as gently as
possible, four or five hours, or longer should it not be perfectly
tender. Wine is sometimes added both to stewed pears and to baked
ones. If put into a covered jar, well tied down and baked for some
hours, with a proper quantity of liquid and sugar, they will be very
good.
BOILED CHESTNUTS.
These are made with the same preparation of egg and sugar as
the almond-shamrocks, and may be flavoured and coloured in the
same way. The icing must be sufficiently firm to roll into balls
scarcely larger than a nut: a little sifted sugar should be dusted on
the fingers in making them, but it must not remain on the surface of
the soufflés. They are baked usually in very small round paper
cases, plaited with the edge of a knife, and to give them brilliancy,
the tops are slightly moistened before they are set into the oven, by
passing the finger, or a paste-brush, just dipped in cold water, lightly
over them. Look at them in about a quarter of an hour, and should
they be quite firm to the touch in every part, draw them out; but if not
let them remain longer. They may be baked on sheets of paper, but
will not preserve their form so well.
For 1 white of egg, whisked to a very firm froth, 8 to 10 oz. of sifted
sugar, or more: soufflés, baked in extremely gentle oven, 16 to 30
minutes, or longer if needful.
Obs.—We have confined our receipts here to the most simple
preparations suited to desserts. All the confectionary of the
preceding chapter being appropriate to them (with the exception of
the toffie), as well as various compôtes, clear jellies, and gateaux of
fruit turned from the moulds; and we have already enumerated the
many other dishes of which they may be composed.
ICES.