Peace Be Upon You (30 page)

The Habsburgs had more territory and more wealth (especially given the flow of silver from the new lands of South America), but they also confronted more enemies. Not only was Charles V faced with Francis, but he also had to contend with Protestant German princes, rebellious Dutch burghers, an increasingly unpredictable England, and of course, a restive and expansionist Ottoman Empire led by a sultan who could draw on seemingly inexhaustible resources to outfit his army. Having conquered the Hungarians, Suleyman came face-to-face with the Habsburgs. Watching from Paris, Francis decided in the early 1520s that the enemy of his enemy was a friend, and he reached out to Suleyman for an alliance. Suleyman, recognizing the strategic advantage, agreed.

For the remainder of Suleyman’s life, the French and the Ottomans worked together to humble the Habsburgs. The pincer alliance was a constant irritant to Charles V and his heirs, but they never succumbed, in part because of skilled leadership and in part because Central Europe was never a prime objective for Suleyman. Persia presented a more immediate threat to the Ottomans, as did Venetian raiders interrupting trade in the Mediterranean. But as one historian has written, “The French alliance was the cornerstone of the Ottomans’ European diplomacy.” Suleyman knew that his partnership with France kept the Habsburgs on the defensive, and that freed him to pursue other ambitions. He also undermined Habsburg power by stirring the pot inside the Holy Roman Empire. He reached out to Protestant princes and offered his protection, claiming that the Protestants, because they had risen up against the idolatry of the Catholic Church, were in their way much like the first Muslims who had rejected the idolatry of the Meccans.
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These snapshots from Suleyman’s life barely do justice to his reign of more than forty years, but they reveal an Ottoman state that was no more, and no less, defined by creed than the Habsburgs were defined by Christianity or the Romans by whatever pagan cult was in vogue. Islam was part of the governing creed, but it shared space with the imperatives of maintaining order, propagating the dynasty, and jockeying for position in foreign affairs. The sultans at times used Islam as a spur and justification
for war, but they drew on the legacy of Muhammad and the warrior culture of the early Arab conquests only when it suited them. When they wished to do things that might be seen as problematic in light of Islamic law and jurisprudence, they did so without hesitation, knowing that even in the unlikely event that one of the
ulama
objected, others would support whatever the sultan did. Many of their actions should have raised such flags, if Islam had been the vital force keeping the empire together. There was no way to justify fratricide and rebellion using the Quran or the hadith, nor was the harem or the system of eunuchs easy to reconcile with Islamic law.

The Ottoman legacy also forces us to reconsider what we mean when we say “Islam.” The alliances that Suleyman cemented with the Catholic French did not lead anyone to question his bona fides as a Muslim. The autonomy that Mehmed granted to the Jews, Greek Orthodox, and Armenians did not trigger challenges to his standing as a devout believer. Islam, like any great religion, is an umbrella that encompasses a wide range of virtues and a multitude of sins. Scholars and judges may have retained a right to criticize the sultan, but they almost never exercised it. Rulers were seen as a necessary element because they held back the chaos that would inevitably ensue if the state collapsed.

Suleyman’s death did not immediately remove the Ottomans as a threat to Europe. A century later, in 1683, another sultan again menaced Vienna, and he came very close to taking the city. But even had he succeeded, it is unlikely that the Ottomans would have overrun Europe. The Russians had become a formidable foe, as had the French and the English. And while its rivals had evolved, within the empire, little had changed. The Ottomans were slowly losing their competitive edge. After 1683, Europe began to push back, and the balance tipped. For centuries, the Ottomans had stood as monument to equilibrium. Then the empire began to fray, and when it finally collapsed in the early years of the twentieth century, relations between Muslims, Christians, and Jews took a turn for the worse.

F
OR THE FIRST
thousand years after the death of Muhammad and the initial Arab conquests, the world of Islam expanded. There were setbacks, of course, some major and some not. The Crusades were a brief interregnum of Christian rule in the Near Eastern heartland, and the fall of Spain represented a significant loss. The Mongol invasion that decimated Baghdad and came close to overrunning North Africa was a severe test, but one that was ultimately met. The coming of the Ottomans in the fifteenth century revitalized the Muslim world, and thousands of miles away, the Moghuls, another Muslim dynasty, expanded south from what is now Pakistan into northern India. At the same time, Muslim merchants, fanning out from these centers, carried Islam across the Sahara into Western Africa and across the Indian Ocean to Indonesia. By the end of the sixteenth century, the reach of Islam was greater than it ever had been, and the call to prayer could be heard five times a day from Morocco to Java.

But while millions across continents identified themselves as Muslim, they did not form a cohesive community. In the second half of the twentieth century, as travel became safer, faster, and accessible to the masses, unprecedented numbers of Muslims became hajjis and journeyed to Mecca. There, they were thrust into contact with Muslims from around the globe, and that experience connected them as few things did to a sense of an international Muslim community. But before the innovations of the industrial age, before the telegraph, radio, television, airplanes, and automobiles, few Muslims made the pilgrimage to Mecca, and few had contact with anyone outside their family and village.
Some trading centers bustled with merchants from far-off places, and cosmopolitan cities like Alexandria in Egypt, Istanbul and Salonica in the eastern Mediterranean, and Zanzibar on the coast of East Africa were crazy quilts of languages, foreign dress, and multiple currencies. On the whole, however, while Islam spanned the globe, most Muslims had little in common.

That meant that, save for a shared knowledge of the opening verses of the Quran and a few Arabic words memorized for daily prayers, a camel merchant in Khartoum was almost as alien to a fisherman in Java or a mason in Konya as each was to a tailor in London or a count in Versailles. Even within the Ottoman Empire, there was no one Islam. There was a religious establishment in Istanbul, with the
sheikh ul-Islam
nominally at the head of the religious class. He was appointed by the sultan, and like the chief rabbi or the Orthodox patriarch, he had the authority to issue edicts on questions of religious law that were binding on the
ulama
and on judges
(mufti)
throughout the empire. As often as not, however, the
sheikh ul-Islam
was either silent or his decrees were quietly ignored and trumped by local mores. The result was that hundreds of variants of law and traditions characterized Islam in the Ottoman world.

Complicating matters even further was the amorphous nature of Sufism. While Sufism first emerged as a mystical tradition, it also evolved into folk religion. Some Sufi lodges retained their mystical focus, and nurtured monasticism and meditation. Others, however, combined Muslim practices with whatever pre-Muslim traditions had existed before Islam took root. North Africa was home to Sufi “saints” who practiced magic, charmed snakes, and read auguries, and whose shrines became pilgrimage sites after they died. In the heart of Anatolia in the city of Konya, dervishes spun themselves into ecstasy chanting the words of their great master Rumi. In Indonesia, the bare-bones Islam of Muslim merchants fused with local variants of Hinduism and animism to form a religion that bore some of the trappings of traditional Islam but would have been as strange to the camel nomads of Arabia as it was to the Calvinist burghers of Amsterdam. In its many forms, Sufism became a grab bag of Islam and pre-Islamic traditions.

It is both familiar and convenient to talk of a “Muslim world” stretching from Morocco to Indonesia, but that has led to a widespread tendency to assume that Muslims historically had one cultural identity. Yes, there was a notion of an
umma
, of a Muslim community united in faith,
just as there were vague notions of a Christendom united under the banner of Christ. But like Christianity, Islam splintered into hundreds of rival sects, and whatever cohesion it might initially have promised evaporated. In both “Christendom” and the “house of Islam” (as Muslims have called their world), religion was one identity among many. And what that identity meant to the political, social, or cultural life of any particular village, town, state, or society is beyond generalization.

Of the three religions, Judaism was perhaps the most cohesive, though Jews from northern Europe bore little resemblance to Jews from Yemen. Few in numbers and scattered across the Ottoman and European worlds, Jews during thousands of diaspora years had come to identify themselves as a scattered people divided into hundreds of villages, towns, and cities. As merchants, artisans, and bankers, they had developed international networks that survived different regimes, multiple dynasties, war, plague, and revolution. While the more agrarian Jewish peasants of Russia and the northern steppe slowly lost contact with the more urban, educated Jews of Western Europe and the Mediterranean, most Jews in the Ottoman Empire perceived themselves as one community. For Christians and Muslims, the picture was more ambiguous.

THE
MILLET
SYSTEM AND
THE RISE OF THE WEST

OVER TIME
, the semiautonomous religious communities of the Ottoman Empire became known as
millets
and each had a leader appointed by the sultan. Each
millet
was self-governing, and its leader was responsible for assisting the Ottoman state in collecting taxes. The Jews had a chief rabbi, and the major Christian groups had a patriarch or bishop. There were also groups within groups. The Christian sects included the Greek Orthodox and the Armenians. There were also Maronites in Lebanon, Copts in Egypt, and Assyrians (also known as Nestorians) in Iraq. Even the Jews were divided into several millet communities.

The
millet
system did not resolve all conflicts. When issues arose between different
millets
or between a member of a
millet
and a Muslim, the matter was referred to an Ottoman court. Sometimes, Christians or Jews tried to have internal disputes decided in an Ottoman court when
they believed that Islamic law would render a more favorable verdict. Christians occasionally attempted to have their divorces validated in a Muslim court because the provisions for divorce under the sharia were less onerous. Catholics in particular were antagonistic to the idea of divorce, while Muslims, in general, were more flexible. Both Christian men and women looked to Muslim courts for assistance, and there were cases when a husband or wife, desperate to escape a bad marriage, converted to Islam for the sole purpose of ridding themselves of a troublesome spouse. And different Christian groups, who had been fighting one another for more than a thousand years, often took their disputes to Muslim courts because mutual animosity prevented either from respecting the other’s laws and traditions.

Limitations aside, the
millet
system enjoyed the active support of its members. Jews in the Ottoman world were well aware of how much better it was to live in Salonica, Istanbul, or Izmir (Smyrna) than almost anywhere in Europe. The Ottoman ruling class continued the tradition begun by earlier Arab dynasties of employing Jews as physicians, and for most of his reign, Suleyman himself was attended to by a Jewish doctor in Istanbul. Prominent Jews had the ear of court officials, and used the Ottoman system to discredit or undermine rivals. On occasion, Jews served as intermediaries to European powers, especially during periods when diplomatic relations between the Ottomans and the princes of Western Europe were strained or severed.

The diverse Christian communities, though rarely satisfied with their status, understood that the autonomy they enjoyed under the Ottoman system was an improvement over what had come before. That didn’t stop them from competing for influence, and throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, Christian
millets
waged quiet campaigns against one another in provincial courts and in palace chambers in Istanbul. But these internecine conflicts existed under the watchful eye of the Ottoman state, which kept ancient rivalries from spinning out of control and into outright violence. Hatred and resentment festered, but actual fighting was kept to a minimum.

That fact did not go unnoticed or unappreciated. In the eighteenth century, the Greek patriarch in Jerusalem, who was well acquainted with the struggles between different Christian groups, lauded the Ottomans for all that they had done to keep the peace.