this past October, entitled “Convert of Die,” Mustafa Akyol, a “moderate” Muslim from Turkey, tells how the Ottoman empire in the 19th century gave citizenship rights to Christians and Jews. Aykol’s point was that the Islam critics are terribly wrong and unfair when they say that Islam is necessarily oppressive to non-Muslims. Sounding the usual nominalist notes, Aykol assures us that all civilizations have been equally cruel, warlike, imperial, etc., so it’s simply prejudicial to single out Islam as especially oppressive. Robert Spencer then proceeds to blow Aykol out of the water. Spencer may be superficial and unreflective on the differences between liberalism and conservatism, and he is completely bent out of shape when the subject is myself, repeatedly making wild accusations against me (which in fact he is doing at this moment in a series of e-mails sent to a group of people), but when the subject is the doctrines and history of Islam he is a very effective spokesman.
Mustafa Akyol: … Mr. Bostom, on the other, by his customary method of episode-mining, tries to convince us how bloody the history of the Islamic civilization is and why this was mainly due to the teachings of Islam. I disagree.
First, of course, the history of virtually all civilizations, including the West, is bloody. I don’t need to give detailed accounts of how Crusaders, Conquistadors or modern colonialists massacred natives of all kinds. Islamic civilization has its own history of wars, conquests and massacres to be sure. It is also true that many times Islamic rulers tried to justify their expansionism by referring to the doctrine of jihad. But in most cases, their true motives were deriving from mundane politics and economy.
Just take case of Ottomans, which Mr. Bostom makes great deal of. It is true that the Ottomans conquered many Christian lands and nations. However, they conquered many Muslim lands and nations as well! Actually they started as one among the many Muslim emirates in Anatolia and expanded eastward by taking on all the others one by one. Later on they occupied and annexed the whole Muslim Arabic Middle East and Muslim North Africa. This was not jihad; this was mere empire-building….
Mr. Bostom also calls Tanzimat reforms in the Ottoman Empire, which made Christians and Jews full citizens, “ineffectual.” Arguably, they were not. The Ottoman Constitution of 1876 established a limited monarchy all of whose subjects were considered “Osmanli (Ottoman), whatever religion or creed they hold.” The constitution further affirmed that “all Osmanli are equal before the law … without distinction as to religion.”
It is true that these principles were not fully applied in practiced, but the reason was not only bigotry among Muslims as Mr. Bostom would have us believe, but also the non-Muslim subjects of the empire themselves. According to American historian Roderic H. Davison, it is possible to argue that,
… The program of equality between Christian and Muslim in the empire remained largely unrealized not because of bad faith on the part of leading Ottoman statesmen but because many of the Christians wanted it to fail. The demand in Crete was basically for autonomy or union with Greece, not for equality. Other Greeks in the empire wanted the same thing…Serbs wanted not equality but union with the autonomous principality of Serbia. Serbia and Rumania, still within the empire, wanted no sort of equality but national independence…
The ecclesiastical hierarchies that ruled the Christian millet’s also opposed equality. Osmanlilik [Ottomanhod] would both decrease their authority and lighten their purses. This was especially true of the Greek Orthodox hierarchy, which had the most extensive prerogatives and by far the largest flock. When the Hatt-i Sherif [Tanzimat Edict] was solemnly read in 1839 and then put back into its red satin pouch it is reported that the Greek Orthodox patriarch, who was present among the notables, said, “Inshallah-God grant that it not be taken out of this bag again.” In short, the doctrine of equality faced formidable opposition from Christians of the empire who were leaders in the churches and the nationalist movements…
Davidson also notes,
… Both in 1839 and 1856 the sultan proclaimed that his Christian subjects should be equally privileged to serve in the armed forces along with the Muslims, instead of paying an exemption tax as they had previously done. It soon became obvious that the Christians would rather continue to pay than serve, despite the step toward equality which military service might mean.
(Roderic H. Davison, Turkish Attitudes Concerning Christian-Muslim Equality in the Nineteenth Century, American Historical Review, Vol. 59, No. 4 (Jul., 1954), pp. 844-864)
In other words, the effort by the Ottoman Empire—a state based on Islamic principles—to fully abolish the dhimma was resisted to by Christian leaders because they saw the old system more advantageous for their interests. And this means that history is much more complex and puzzling then the Manichean picture drawn by Mr. Bostom about Islam—in which dhimma-seeking jihadist Muslims always suppress and kill helpless non-Muslims.
What matters to me most about these events is the fact that the Ottoman Empire—an Islamic state which many Muslims around the world still praise and admire—gave full citizenship rights to Jews and Christians and accepted the right of apostasy. As early as May 1844, an official Ottoman edict read, “No subject of the Sublime [Ottoman] State shall be forced by anyone to convert to Islam against their wishes.” (Deringil, ibid.) …
Robert Spencer: The lingering question in the disagreement here between Dr. Bostom and Mr. Akyol is whether when the Ottoman Empire, in Mr. Akyol’s words, “gave full citizenship rights to Jews and Christians and accepted the right of apostasy,” it was doing so as an Islamic state and based on Islamic principles, or whether it was doing so as an exercise in realpolitik in the face of its own growing weakness and Western pressure. There seems to be little doubt that the Wahhabis of Arabia, beginning even a bit earlier than the period of the reforms in question, began to revolt against Ottoman rule on the basis of the contention that the Ottomans had betrayed their Islamic principles and their role of leadership of the Islamic world.
Whether or not they were correct in this view is an extremely important question, but it is likewise important to note that ultimately the revolt itself indicates that the perception that the Ottomans had betrayed Islam was widespread. It was only compounded by the Tanzimat reforms, whatever their provenance and effectiveness.
Within the imperial court at this time there were a few enlightened statesmen who supported the opening of the Ottoman Empire to Western ideas. With the death of the Western-influenced Grand Vezir Ali Pasha in 1871, however, the Sultan Abdul Aziz was free to pursue a course of reaction, including a reassertion of Islamic principles as over against the Tanzimat reforms and Western influences in general. This only emphasized the precariousness of the reforms in the first place, and shows why, as Mr. Akyol has pointed out, many Christians preferred outright independence to the uncertain halfway house of life in the empire even after the reforms. The Sultan Abdul Hamid II subsequently also pursued a course of Islamic retrenchment which contributed to a great rise in tensions between the Christians of the Empire and their Muslim rulers, culminating ultimately in the exile of the Greeks from Anatolia and, most horrific of all, the Armenian genocide. The Chief Dragoman of the British Embassy at the time of the 1890s massacres reported that their perpetrators “are guided in their general action by the prescriptions of the Sheri [Sharia] law. That law prescribes that if the ‘rayah’ [dhimmi] Christian attempts, by having recourse to foreign powers, to overstep the privileges allowed to them by their Mussulman masters, and free themselves from their bondage, their lives and property are to be forfeited, and are at the mercy of the Mussulmans” (Dadrian, The History of the Armenian Genocide, Oxford, 1995, p. 147).
Overall, attempts within the nineteenth-century Ottoman Empire to abolish the dhimma generally resulted from Western influences (both within and outside the Sublime Porte) and political calculation, not the elaboration of Islamic principles. Many Muslim citizens of the Empire knew this and despised the Porte for it; in several notable incidents, some engaged in savage reassertions of the death penalty for apostasy, and even engaged in forced conversion. A few of these incidents occurred after the Ottoman proscription of forced conversion of 1844, which Mr. Akyol notes. In 1846, Athanasios, a monk and former Muslim, was recognized as an ex-Muslim and murdered for his apostasy. In 1866, a Christian from Crete named George Devoles was captured during a Cretan revolt from Ottoman rule given the choice of conversion to Islam or death; when he refused to convert, he was beheaded. To be sure, these were isolated incidents, not actions of state—but they were the actions of Muslim mobs who were well aware that apostasy from Islam was a capital offense, and that the choice of Islam or death was as old as the prophet Muhammad’s directions to offer non-Muslims conversion, the dhimma, or warfare (cf. Sahih Muslim 4294).
The point of all this is only to note that, while I continue to wish Mr. Akyol all success in his reform endeavors, I am afraid that he is likely to face stiff opposition from Muslims who will consider his rejection of punishment for apostasy and of the triple choice of conversion, subjugation, or war as a capitulation to Western ideas and a rejection of Islam. I note this not out of some crabbed glass-half-empty spirit, but because it is important for Westerners, locked as we are in a struggle against global jihadists that is likely to drag on for decades, to have a realistic view of the prospects of the moderate Muslim endeavor in general. The principles that led to the Gadahn convert-or-die videotape, as well as to the forced conversions of Centanni and Wiig, are deeply embedded within Islam, and will not be cast off lightly or easily by Muslims, any more than the Tanzimat reforms were lightly or easily accepted within the crumbling Ottoman Empire.