Professor Benjamin Braude will lecture on "Middle East: Consociation in the Ottoman Past and Present." The title of his lecture will be " The Failure and Success of Religion as a Source for Compromise in Divided Empires: Ottoman and Safavid, Past and Present"

His lecture will take place on Tuesday, April 1, 2008, at 12:00PM in the PPEC Conference Centre

Abstract

Both the Ottoman and the Safavid Empires skillfully deployed religion as a means of controlling their complex empires.  The Ottomans coopted their majority Christian subjects through a controlled scheme of extending a form of protection to the Greek Orthodox hierarchy (the so-called millet system) while wooing away many of their most talented souls (the devshirme system).  The former policy was successful enough so that Christian religious leaders recognized and accepted the value of the Ottoman defense of their religion.  Through the latter policy by nominally converting (particularly through the syncretism of Sufism) a select number of their Christian subjects and rewarding them with dazzling career opportunities otherwise unimagined, the Ottomans created a safety valve for the ambitious and established links to the privileged ranks of the empire for the communities from which they came.  The Safavids pursued a very different policy.  They unified a population of great ethnic diversity through the spread of their form of Shiism.  As a result, in contrast to the Ottoman Empire, the borders of their empire, for the most part remained the borders of their successor states.

After the collapse of the Ottoman Empire following the First World War, most of its successor states inspired by the success of Mustafa Kemal adopted vigorously secular notions of collective identity, that sought to avoid, at least on the surface, any of the prior imperial appeals to religious unity for Muslims or prior imperial recognition of religious autonomy for non-Muslims.  All were now to become one within the unified nation-state.  While Pahlavi Iran also deployed a secular pre-(or) non-Islamic nation-statist ideology, it was never as successful as what Turkey, and to a lesser degree, many Arab states constructed.  The well-entrenched Safavid-initiated appeal to Shiite religious unity has meant that it has been far easier for the Islamic Republic of Iran to deal with its Azeri question than it has been for secularizing Turkey, Iraq, and, even Greece, to deal respectively with their comparable Kurdish and Macedonian questions.

The surprising value of religion for fostering consociation rather obstructing it is the subject of my talk.

Website

Professor Braude teaches courses on the Middle East and on European-Middle Eastern relations. In addition to those interests his research also focuses on religious, racial, and ethnic identities in Jewish, Christian, and Muslim culture. Currently he is completing Sex, Slavery, and Racism: The Secret History of the Sons of Noah, which examines the construction of attitudes toward color and identity from the ancient Near East and the classical world to the present. More broadly, he is interested in post-national conceptions of historiography. He has been a visiting professor at the Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales in Paris and a fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

Selected Publications:

• "Cham et Noé. Race, esclavage et exégèse entre Islam, Judaïsme, et Christianisme," Annales: Histoire, Sciences Sociales (2002); unedited English original.
• "The Myth of the Sefardi Economic Superman," in Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, eds., Trading Cultures: The Worlds of Western Merchants Essays on Authority, Objectivity and Evidence (2001)
• Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire, the Functioning of a Plural Society: Volume I: The Central Lands; Volume II: The Arabic-Speaking Lands. Co-editor with Bernard Lewis (1982)
• "The Nexus of Diaspora, Enlightenment, and Nation: Thoughts on Comparative History" Enlightenment and Diaspora, the Armenian and Jewish Cases (1999)
• "Jews in Muslim Society" History of Humanity (UNESCO, 1999)
• "The Myth of the Sefardi Economic Superman" Trading Cultures: The Worlds of Western Merchants (1999)
• "The Sons of Noah and the Construction of Ethnic and Geographical Identities in the Medieval and Early Modern Periods" William and Mary Quarterly (1997)
• "Les contes persans de Menasseh Ben Israel: Polemique, apologetique et dissimulation a Amsterdam au xvii siecle" Annales (1994)
• "Open Thou Mine Eyes..." Essays on Aggadah and Judaica Presented to Rabbi William G. Braude on His Eightieth Birthday and Dedicated to His Memory (co-editor, 1992)
• "The Rise and Fall of Salonica Woollens, 1500-1650: Technology Transfer and Western Competition" Mediterranean Historical Review (1991)