Download PDF | Conversion to Islam in the Balkans, Kisve Bahasi Petitions and Ottoman Social Life 1670-1730 , Brill Publishing (2004).
293 Pages
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to express my gratitude to A. Uner Turgay, Director of the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University for his moral support, to Donald P. Little, Wael Hallaq, Virginia Aksan and the series editors for their valuable suggestions and comments on various aspects of the book. I also wish to thank S. Kenderova and S. Andreev, without whose support my research at the National Library of Bulgaria would have been impossible, as well as to all staff members of the library who kindly assisted me during the research.
I am especially indebted to Evgeni Radushev for sharing with me his expertise on the subject of conversion to Islam in Ottoman times and for providing me with unpublished manuscripts of several of his works. I also thank Professor M. Kiel who provided me with transcripts of a number of Azsve bahasi petitions located in the Ba bakanlk Ottoman Archive in Istanbul. I am grateful to all my friends for their patience and support and especially to Stefan Koupenov who pointed out to me the similarities between the database systems theory and the graphs I have drawn, attempting to capture common features of petitions. Stephen Millier from the Institute of Islamic Studies Library at McGill University was of major help to me by editing the manuscript.
Support for this research was provided by grants from the Institute of Islamic Studies and the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research at McGill University.
NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION
I use modern Turkish spelling for all ‘Turkish and Ottoman terms, names and book titles, as well as for the transliteration of the Ottoman documents in the Appendix, except for direct quotes. Occasionally, if a name or term of Arabic origin is discussed in a pre-Ottoman context or the modern Turkish spelling differs substantially from its Arabic transliterated form, the latter form is given as well. Geographical names of major cities appear according to their modern version while smaller settlements may appear according to the form used in Ottoman times. Words that have gained acceptance in the English language (such as dervish, vizier, caliph) are rendered according to the spelling found in the Webster’s Dictionary.
INTRODUCTION
OBJECTIVE, METHODOLOGY AND SOURCES
The time may be ripe for modifying some of the old approaches to the study of the Middle East. It is not my intention, at the time, to discuss at any length new approaches to the study of modernization of the Middle East. It will suffice to note the growing divergence of opinion among Westerners and native scholars with regard to the origin and trend of developments in the Middle East.
The native writer’s views on a given event often conflict with those expressed by outsiders. True, the native, immersed in his own culture and compelled to satisfy the demands of a domestic audience, may not have the freedom and the objectivity of an outside observer. But the question still remains whether the outsider’s views on the social, political, and cultural problems of the Middle East are entirely free of his own values and political commitment. Moreover, one may ask whether an outsider can always do a proper justice to an event or trend which his own society did not experience in its historical evolution. A new understanding of Middle Eastern society and its modernization could be achieved by analyzing in the greatest possible detail the internal structural transformation of this society, the emergence of various social groups, their interrelations, and their impact on culture and government. Thus, a factual, empirical approach to the study of the Middle East, free of value judgments or cultural assumptions, should yield satisfactory results. (Kemal Karpat)!
Although I am certainly not the first student of Islamic history to have been inspired by the above statement made thirty five years ago by Prof. Kemal Karpat,’ and although scholarly advances in the interval have softened some of its edge, I still find it quite contemporary and significant, especially in connection with the subject that I propose to investigate here, namely, conversion to Islam. Indeed, there is perhaps no other topic in the field of Ottoman history that has produced differences between “native” and “outside” scholars that are more profound.
The inspiration for me derives from the fact that I come from a “native” scholarly tradition, while, on the other hand, I have lived and studied long enough outside this tradition to consider myself immersed in the “outside” point of view as well. My objective, therefore, is to combine the “native’s” intuition and experience, shorn of any social and moral prejudices, with the “outsider’s” objectivity and impartiality, yet retaining an intimate familiarity with the particular historical situation. On the other hand, one of the realizations of our postmodern age is that no one can be entirely objective or independent of one’s social and cultural milieu. This means that in my case as well, the “native’s” or the “outsider’s” background may eventually prevail at certain points. I can only try to overcome the shortcomings of both points of view, while drawing on their respective advantages.
Having made this, so to speak, “emotional commitment,” I would like to begin my discussion with the observation that conversion to Islam (or Islamization)’ was a social process of utmost importance to Islamic society throughout its history. Nevertheless, the relation between the expansion and establishment of Dar al-Islam and conversion to Islam is thought to be so axiomatic by scholars of medieval Islamic history that few have actually ventured to investigate conversion as a distinct process. Scholarly works dealing with the topic in pre-Ottoman times are so sporadic’ that it would not be an exaggeration to say that the study of conversion in medieval Islamic social history is still in its infancy.
At first glance, the state of scholarly achievement in this area of Ottoman studies appears somewhat better. However, several important points need to be made in this respect. First, the attention of scholars in this field has long been focused mainly on the so-called “classical period” of the Ottoman state, ie., the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Such a tendency is quite understandable. After all, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, because of the strength of the Ottoman central authority, are the period with the most orderly and the well-preserved archives.
From those centuries, for instance, we possess cadastral surveys (‘ahr registers) that allow us to make surprisingly detailed demographic analysis. Certainly, the publication of original sources from the Ottoman archives related to the Islamization process has considerably enriched the factual basis of Ottoman studies. However, it is the historical demographers who have benefited the most from this activity, while social historians have failed to build on the foundation of these studies and demonstrate the social significance of the demographic changes. Yet, conversion to Islam in Ottoman times constituted a social phenomenon that could be and should be studied on its own. It has even been argued that the study of conversion to Islam is actually one of the most effective ways of reconstructing the specific characteristics of each of the constituent societies of medieval Islam.°
In the seventeenth century, however, with the changes in taxation practices and land tenure that took place,’ the accuracy and number of the éahnr registers gradually decreased and so as a result does their corresponding importance as sources. The few scholars who have studied Islamization in this period have therefore tended to rely exclusively on the poll tax (c?zye) registers, which only reflect the demographic changes in the non-Muslim community. The resulting imbalance between the availability of data and studies devoted to the two periods leaves one with the impression that conversion was more pronounced in the sixteenth than in the seventeenth century.
As demonstrated in this study, however, conversion to Islam in the Balkans achieved its peak only towards the middle of the seventeenth century and continued, in some regions, until the end of the eighteenth. This discrepancy in the study of the two periods is conspicuous in the only book that singles out conversion as an independent topic: The Spread of Islam in the Western Balkan Lands under Ottoman Rule, 15th-18th Centuries*—where the space devoted to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries amounts to only a couple of pages. Therefore, I believe that a study of the process of conversion during the second half of the seventeenth and first half of the eighteenth centuries will substantially contribute to our understanding of Ottoman social history during that period.
Another limitation of the studies on conversion in Ottoman times is that they are usually bound to modern national histories, and therefore focus on particular ethnic communities—Albanians, Macedonians, Bulgarians, Greeks, etc. On the one hand, such an approach limits the scope of these studies to local conditions, while on the other, the assessment of conversion to Islam seldom goes beyond the expression of nationalistic sentiment. It is, of course, well known that in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the struggle for independence waged by the Balkan Christian communities, followed by internal and external political pressures, made ethnic and religious intolerance part of the social climate in the peninsula. As a result, conversion to Islam was usually taken out of its contemporary social context in such studies, while modern realities were projected backwards in time.'° In the modern context, Islamization could not be regarded in anything other than a negative light by scholars of the new Balkan states.
The Ottoman rule in the Balkans was invariably labeled as “the most tragic period” in the history of the Balkan Christian nations and Islamization itself as “assimilation” and “religious discrimination.”'! Studies on conversion have been used or even produced to fulfill particular political goals. ‘To cite Karpat once again, “the manipulation of population statistics for political purposes by various ethnic and religious groups was widespread and ingenious.”'” One need only point to the massive scholarly effort aimed at proving the Bulgarian origin of the Muslims living in Bulgaria, sparked by the totalitarian regime’s name-changing campaign during the period 1984-89, in which the Bulgarian ‘Turks were singled out. Although neither incorrect nor falsified, this scholarly production was focused specifically on the problem of forced conversion. This very fact renders it, in my view, intellectually tendentious.
In approaching the subject of conversion to Islam, we should bear in mind that the latter is a process “intelligible within specific historical, social and cultural contexts.”'? This point is very important, not only for understanding that conversion to Islam in the period under consideration may have features distinguishing it from conversion at other points of time in Islamic history, but also for realizing that we have to analyze it bearing only this particular stage of Ottoman social development in mind. Any other perspective would tend to distort our view of the nature of the conversion and _historical reality in consequence.
One of the ways to avoid a distorted perception of conversion to Islam and to determine its proper role in the general development of contemporary Ottoman society is to probe into the social consciousness of the people. It is only by considering the perspective of those who themselves accepted Islam that we can hope to answer this question. ‘Therefore, my method of inquiry will consist in examining also the individual side of the process, the personal reasons for conversion.
That such an approach can be taken is made possible by the existence of a large body of documents that reveal personal information about the converts. The main sources from which this work draws its conclusions are petitions submitted to the sultan of the day by new Muslims requesting that they be rewarded—most often with an amount of money known as “hisve bahas’’—for accepting the new faith. It would not be an exaggeration to state that these documents, which I refer to as “kisve bahast petitions,” are unique, since, with the exception perhaps of court records, no other body of official documents provides such an insight into the lives of ordinary people.
A significant number of documents of this kind have so far been discovered in the Ottoman archive of the National Library of Bulgaria, while recently some have surfaced in Turkish Ottoman archives as well. It was in the 1980s that Bulgarian scholars first began analyzing kisve bahast petitions as sources for the history of Islamization in the Balkans." The largest published collection of these documents contains about 150 translations of petitions in Bulgarian and 83 facsimiles.'’ In two publications by A. Velkov and E. Radushev, a number of kisve bahasi petitions are presented in English.'° However, in all these sources the petitions are discussed only within the framework of an assumption of indirect coercion,'’ a mindset that dominated the approach of most Balkan scholars to the subject, at least, until recently. The new Muslims who submitted the petitions are described as “men and women fallen into desperate and critical situations, searching through conversion to Islam for salvation from starvation and poverty, from debts and creditors.”'?
No Bulgarian study has actually utilized Aisve bahasi petitions for analytical purposes, nor have the latter been properly studied. Although it was acknowledged that the petitions “allow for a better study of the motives and mechanisms of the Islamization process,”'® tured after that to explore their potential. The most likely reason for past reticence on the part of Bulgarian scholars towards approach-no one, it seems, ven-ing these sources was because the petitions speak of voluntary conversion and thus do not conform to the politically-correct theory of forced conversion. It should be pointed out also that the work Osmanski Izgvort za Islamizacionnite Protsesi—the book which made hisve bahasi petitions, so to speak, public—appeared in 1990, when the subject of conversion to Islam had already become a “taboo” subject in Bulgarian scholarly circles, precisely because of its former political connotation.”” In other words, kisve bahasi petitions were admitted as a historical source per se, but their contents somehow not.
These documents are known to Turkish scholars as well. Two hisve bahast petitions, although without proper reference to the archival source, were published by Uzungar ih as early as 1948.7! Most recently, kisve bahasi petitions from Turkish archives have been mentioned in a study by Fatma Gécek.”? The reason for such reluctance on the part of Turkish scholars to explore these sources may be also connected to political correctness.
In spite of the fact that it was the Dutch scholar M. Kiel who has made the most significant discovery so far of such documents in Turkish archives—33 in total, western scholars too have found it difficult to investigate fAysve bahasi petitions because of the secrecy or political sensitivity surrounding them.”’ Thus, for a variety of reasons, kisve bahasi petitions have generated amazingly little interest among scholars as sources for the history of conversion and for social history in general.
During my research in the Ottoman archive of the Department of Oriental Collections at the National Library of Bulgaria “SS. Cyril and Methodius,”’* I was able to discover 601 kisve bahasi petitions, contained within 299 archival units.” Prof. M. Kiel has moreover provided me with information on the 33 documents that he discovered in the Ottoman Archive of the Prime Muinister (Ba bakanhk Ar ivi) in Istanbul.” The bulk of the documents can be dated to a period extending from the early 1670s until the 1730s.
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