Talk:Millet (Ottoman Empire)

{{WikiProject Former countries|class=B|importance=|Ottoman=yes|Ottoman-importance=High}}

2005 Comments

Is it really so widespread in Arab countries? I had the impression that some of them had replaced the millet system with a bastardized mixture of the Code Napoléon and Islamic law which applies to all people, regardless of religion. AnonMoos 14:33, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

I agree, I remember my Middle East history professor quite explicitly stating that Israel was the only nation to still use something similar to the millet system. - SimonP 15:17, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

No, many Middle Eastern countries still have special courts for religious minorities, on matters of marriage, divorce, inheritance etc. (personal status), and many have reserved seats for them too (which do not exist in Israel). This is e.g. true for Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Iran and Pakistan. --Pylambert 18:54, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

I don't feel like doing any strenuous research, but I noticed when looking up the Arabic word "millah" in the Wehr dictionary that the phrase majlis milli was defined as "court of justice of a religious minority (in Egypt abolished since 1956)". AnonMoos 18:57, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

According to a 1995 law, the application of family law, including marriage, divorce, alimony, child custody, inheritance, and burial, is based on an individual's religion. In the practice of family law, the State recognizes only the three "heavenly religions:" Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Muslim families are subject to the Personal Status Law, which draws on Shari'a (Islamic law). Christian families are subject to canon law, and Jewish families are subject to Jewish law. In cases of family law disputes involving a marriage between a Christian woman and a Muslim man, the courts apply the Personal Status Law. (Egypt - International Religious Freedom Report Released by the Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor) --Pylambert 19:24, 6 November 2005 (UTC)

I think the problem is that you are defining millet too narrowly. It was much more than specialist courts for minorities, it was entirely different rules of citizenship. Each group had different systems of taxation, criminal and civil law, governance, education, and taxation. - SimonP 17:11, 7 November 2005 (UTC)

What?? (etymology)

Mellah ملاح is not "cognate" with Millah ملة -- they come from completely different consonantal roots (the root of the first means "salt", and the root of the second originally meant "word" in Aramaic, and only the first root has a pharyngeal consonant). AnonMoos 06:49, 13 April 2006 (UTC)

References

"This article or section does not cite its references or sources. You can help Wikipedia by introducing appropriate citations" doesn't means that you can simply cut-and-paste here a bibliography taken from a website, because this would imply that this article was written on the base of the cited texts and this is not true. If you want to use that bibliography you had to check all those books and articles, find the relevants parts and modify this page to make it comply with the sources. Or you can simply modify the article so that it agrees with the website and then point out to that website as a reference. GhePeU 12:44, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

@Fastifex: According to History, you did just two minor edits in this article: [1] and [2]. The bulk of the article was written by other contributors, so you can't simply put that website and state that it is the source used for this page, because there's no proof that the other contributors used it. However, if you really want to insert that bibliography as a "Further readings" section, please shorten it and clean it, because a "Further reading" shouldn't be page XX of an article and at the moment the section is (nearly) longer than the rest of the article. GhePeU 18:26, 7 June 2006 (UTC)

Gehepeu, you're living n a fantasy-world: except for a few stubby pages or a few I know to be based (e.g. because I write nearly all) from one source, the bulk of Wikipages I've examined (4700 in my watchlist) is clearly or apparently NOT fully sourced, if at all- I often put " (incomplete) " in the sources section and almost never see that challenged, as by the way I did here, so it most definitely does not claim to soirce everything. It certainly is no excuse for the capital crime of leaving out source credit where possible. What you mean by "page XX" is a cemplete mysetry to me; the relative lenght f sectis a window-dresing aspect as such. The minor is my deafu setting, which I sometimes forget to undo or, as yesterday, gets ignored when my connexion to wikepedia fails repeatedly apparently for network- or software-reasons Fastifex 05:21, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

(I'm GhePeU, I'm writing from the University lab and I don't remember my password) Could you just shorten the list? Does referring to pp. 195-207 of the article Zur Diskussion um „millet“ im Osmanischen Reich published in Südost-Forschungen 48 or to p. 302 of 2000 Jahre Geschichte des Nahen Ostens and p. 99 of Der Untergang des Morgenlandes. Warum die islamische Welt ihre Vormacht verlor, both written by Bernard Lewis, add something significant to this page or does it simply clutter the section? 147.162.97.73 06:54, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

Needs a copy edit

The English is shaky in places, for example - History : "Given the House of Osman was a Muslim populated institution, it is important to understand objectively, besides the each millets own ego-centric histories, these institutions were related to each other during the 6 centuries that they occupied the same political sphere under the state organization of the Ottoman Empire."

I'll try editing it for clarity but can the original author check my work for intent? (in case I change the meaning) --Nickj69 08:45, 20 November 2006 (UTC)

Assyrians?

How can this entire section not mention the Assyrians (Nestorians, Chaldeans, Syrian Orthodox) in the Ottoman Empire? How is it that this large population of Christians has been completely left out?Waleeta 23:12, 11 February 2007 (UTC)Waleeta

Assyrians in the Ottoman Empire

Somebody should include a section on the Assyrians up until the 20th century, as they were quite significant, especially in the Hakkari region. --Šarukinu 22:07, 2 July 2007 (UTC)

It seems this is being ignored. But I agree, Assyrians must be mentioned in the article. — EliasAlucard (talk · contribs) 15:32, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Their inclusion is necessary, but let's remember that Assyrian was not the name of the millet. Whatever the ethnicity, there was never an Assyrian millet. There was a Süryani millet, however, and the article should reflect this. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 88.234.21.207 (talk) 06:53, 4 January 2008 (UTC)

Do you even know what Süryani means? Hint: starts with an A and ends with Syrian. By the way, I just added a scholarly source.[3] — EliasAlucard / Discussion 16:59, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

I think the problem is that 'millet' is not a term of ethnicity (check the article) but a term for religion. So there was an Orthodox millet but not a Greek one. There was a millet for the Armenian Church and a millet for the Syriac Orthodox (Jacobite) Church, but an "Assyrian millet" was impossible. As evidence, look at Ottoman census registers to see the vocabulary used by the administration. Süryani = Syriac Orthodox, Keldani = Chaldean etc. They were all separate. Ordtoy (talk) 21:14, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Yes, the Millets were religious denominations and they were separated under different millets as a result of different religious denominations. But, despite the separation between different millet groups, the ethnic groups were the same. — EliasAlucard / Discussion 21:29, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

I am familiar with the article and have read it. I suggest that you do too since it is clear that you have not. Simply referencing an article based on the name is not sufficient! The Naby article contains no information relevant to the Ottoman Empire since it is about Iran/Persia (and is a good source on activities in that country). This article is about Ottoman administration. In the Ottoman administrative structure, 'millet's were a religious NOT ethnic designation. Please re-read the previous post I made here. If you need a source, there are many. But I am providing one which deals with Ottoman history. Sorry for the harsh tone, but you are reverting without fully understanding the issues, please check them carefully. Ordtoy (talk) 21:32, 21 February 2008 (UTC)

Macedonians in Ottoman empire

Since there is virtually no evidence of existence of Macedonians before 1944 kindly remove the statement of Macedonians being one of the Orthodox different ethnic groups in Ottoman Empire. In fact the whole world considered them to be Bulgarians at that time.Ianko87.126.17.167 (talk) 09:44, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Name change

The term "Millet" or "Melet" actually pre-dates the Ottoman Empire by quite a bit. Accordingly, the title Millet (Ottoman Empire) may not be the most appropriate. Perhaps a better title for this article would be something such as Millet (religious minority)? --Elonka 05:52, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

The present content of the article does not sustain your claim. I suggest your first add references to this claim in the article before any change of name. Please keep in mind this is the millet article, not the ahl al-kitab or the ahl al-dhimma one. --Pylambert (talk) 12:27, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

I'm not familiar with al-kitab, but I'm working on cleanup/expansion at the Nestorianism and Church of the East articles (for example: Papa (Catholicos)). The term Millet, milet, or melet is used quite a bit to refer to the Church's status while the Christians were a minority religion under the Persian Sassanid Empire (several centuries before the Ottomans). Here are some online sources,[4][5] and here's a list of several more.[6][7] --Elonka 20:10, 28 February 2010 (UTC)

I'd say that Millet (Ottoman Empire) should stand, but that we should have a separate article for the more general millet/melet, which at least conceptually predated the Ottoman Empire.--Cúchullain ^t/c 19:05, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Makes sense. Perhaps at the Melet name, with a disambig note, {{for|the communities of the Ottoman Empire|Millet (Ottoman Empire)}}. --Elonka 22:20, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Hi Elonka, sorry for stalking, but the argument seemed so interesting that I culdn't resist butting in ;-) Going to to the issue, I've just given a look to the last edition of the Brill Encyclopedia of Islam to see what they had to say of the topic; I was a bit uncomfortable with your sources because many of them were pretty old, like Wigram, and often were just new editions of old books. So I wondered if this was just a different transliteration of the Ottoman Turkish word. According to the Encyclopedia of Islam, the word has only recently (i.e. Ottoman Empire) taken the meaning it has now: s.v. mella it originates from the Syriac mellta, and its meaning was "word, utterance" and used as a translation of logos. In Mohammed it is present as mella, where it takes the meaning of "religion", but generally used, even if not always, as the religion of Islam. s.v. millet it is stated that millet is the Turkish form of milla, wile millat is the Persian form. It is only in Ottoman Turkish that there was a radical shift of meaning, as it meant there: 1) religion (as always) 2) religious community 3) nation or people. Nothing here seems to justify a preexistent Sassanid use of term. Probably, the similarity or apparent similarity of such systems brought to use the same term: not so strange, if you consider Wigram wrote in 1909.--Aldux (talk) 18:20, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

I don't think Wigram was implying that the word itself dated to Sassanid times, but that the concept of a state recognized religious minority community existed at that time. I checked the OED, which says under millet: "In the Ottoman Empire: a division of the population according to religious or ethnic affiliation; a religious community or ethnic group having some degree of internal autonomy, esp. a non-Muslim one." It says that the Turkish milletcomes from the Arabic milla(t) and directs the reader to the Encyclopedia of Islam you brought up. So it looks like Wigram's use of melet for the pre-Ottoman Centuries in an English publication is somewhat idiosyncratic and should probably be avoided. But again, the concept does predate the Ottomans, whatever you call it; during the Caliphate, I would have called them a dhimmi community.--Cúchullain ^t/c 18:54, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

You're last point is not a bad one, even if a term like dhimmi has the problem of capturing only part of "millet" in the Ottoman sense: as said by the OED you've mentioned, millet is a division by "religious or 'ethnic affiliation", and the latter definition I don't think is available in "dhimmi". That said, I tend to agree about what you said regarding Wigram and the ultimate truth behind it, that is a the existence of the "the concept of a state recognized religious minority community". An article on the concept in the Sassanid times wouldn't be wrong, but I'm not sure what title it could have.--Aldux (talk) 20:54, 5 March 2010 (UTC)

Hi, sorry for my brief (and delayed) reply, but I'm on wikibreak for the next several days. But here are a couple other sources:[8][9][10] Perhaps an alternate article could be Millet (Sassanid Empire)? And Aldux, no need to apologize, I'm happy to have more eyes on the situation.  :) --Elonka 03:51, 6 March 2010 (UTC)

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Modern Greeks are not necessarily "engrained" with the millet mentality

Ref: "Interestingly, while Greece does not formally employ a millet system, in practice, Greek policy recognizing only a Muslim minority, as opposed to an ethnic Turkish or Pomak minority, reveals the extent to which the millet system has become engrained in Greek mentality." Very subjective statement. In addition, modernizing forces (left, center, and some right) have either opposed or are beginning to see the ultimately discriminatory nature of the system. I think, in fact, that religious affiliation is no longer a category on most government records ... I think. Also, I recall that Greek Turks were granted a separate identity from Greek Muslims. Finally, the origins of these distinctions are as much political as they cultural/religious. The Liberals lost the election after the transfer of Salonika to Greece because both Jews and Muslims voted for the Conservatives/Monarchists. In response, the Liberals at the next opportunity removed direct voting rights from these communities as confessional and cultural groups and limited their franchise to electing representative to an electoral college that decided how the entire community would vote. These are just an observation on one sentence in a very informative article — Preceding unsigned comment added by Asinimali (talk • contribs) 03:51, 26 February 2011 (UTC)

Largely agree, the Greek society is widely conscious of the ethnic divisions inside the Muslim minority, its long standing affiliation with the Turkish nation and the process of ethnic Turkification which still continues. So i can't see how the state policy on this issue expresses a social mentality that originates partly or wholly from the millet system. The Greek government has interests against giving one more argument to its Turkish counterpart for interfering in this matter. This is by far the most important reason why Greece does not give ethnic/national minority status to the Muslims of western Thrace, combined with the fact that there is a legal basis they can use for their stance, and also the deeply rooted mistrust among the two countries which is reinforced by the Aegean dispute. But since i'm no expert on this subject's bibliography i've placed a citation tag, in need of an authoritative source to elaborate on this aspect and confirm its noteworthiness.

I would also like to see a source for the next sentence. I can imagine a loose connection with the millet heritage since this system strengthened the Orthodox Church's place as the only main cultural institution of Hellenism inside the Ottoman empire but the core of the recent dispute as well and the perceived historical "necessity" of mentioning religion in ID cards during the civil war is out of this article's scope. This started and ended not as an issue between minority-majority groups of the traditional religious divisions, but, in a few words, between liberal (communists, atheists, agnostics, proponents of State-Church separation regardless of religion and others) and conservative elements. The stance of the religious groups in the issue reaffirms this revision. Christian minorities lay indifferent, while the Muslim community was largely against the abolition of mentioning religion, denoting it as a positive "discrimination".--IpProtected (talk) 15:06, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

The paragraph about Greece was certainly ill-formulated. The connection between the formal religious minorities status in Greece and Turkey and the Ottman millet system is to be found in the initial bi- or multilateral treaties of the 1920s, when the Ottoman Empire still was the internationally recognized state (the Treaty of Lausanne recognized the succession of state and the Republic of Turkey), and the millet was the base for the population exchanges and the protection of minorities, so Muslim Greeks/Hellenophones (like most Cretan Muslims) and Orthodox Turks/Turcophones (even those who had tried to form a separate Anatolian Turkish Orthodox Church) were expelled from their respective countries to the one corresponding to their religious millet (and not to their ethnic/national identity). The same in Cyprus where non-Greek Christians and non-Turkish Muslims were squeezed into the two-communities institutional system. As for the ID card controversy, OK if you give sources about the introduction of religion on the ID cards in Greece, but a priori it is obvious that this mostly existed/exists in post-Ottoman countries like Greece, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan etc. and in Muslim countries that adaptated the millet system (see e.g. here), and that only the religion is mentioned, as the successor of "millet", never (except in Israel) the ethnicity/ethnonationality. --Pylambert (talk) 19:35, 10 August 2011 (UTC)

Odd Passage

The establishment of the Millets is a recognition, and a palliation, of the pathological anomaly of the Near East - the political disintegration of Near Eastern peoples and the tenacity with which they have clung, in spite of it, to their corporate spiritual life.

Lots of content in this sentence, but it seems not to be very encyclopedic. To say that political disintegration is a 'pathological anomly of the Near East' is contentious and has racist overtones. The idea that this 'pathological anomaly' is linked to the establishment of the Millets is either original research or should be sourced. 94.31.32.54 (talk)