2025/01/14 by Ayşe Polat · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Islamic Studies and History
paper · doi:10.1080/02757206.2024.2437479
openalex publication_date 2025/01/14 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
This article explores how the subaltern Muslim animated the imaginative politics and juridical contours of the Ottoman nation between 1876-1913. I discuss how the members of the ummah, the global 'Muslim nation', were called to settle and work the lands of the Ottoman Empire. In the late 19th century, the ports and provincial capitals of the empire welcomed immigrants from across the Balkans-to-Bengal axis. However, not all who landed in the Levantine shores enjoyed the entitlements of property and protection promised by the Ottoman immigration state. The provenance of immigrants, the legality of their arrival, and the racial fault lines running through the ummah each set the terms of their inclusion in or their exclusion from the Ottoman nation. Building on the 1902 Resolution to the Ottoman Immigration Law of 1857, this article further explains how the Ottoman nation was delineated by a juridical identity—Ottoman nationality—that was categorically majoritarian and contractually exclusionary because of, and not despite, its global aspirations. I argue that Ottoman sovereignty conceived in the image of a juridical ummah found its terrestrial expression in the Ottoman nation: to the categorical exclusion of non-Muslims, predominantly Armenians; the conditional inclusion of subaltern Muslims; and the tacit rejection of Black Africans. This article thus explores imaginative entanglements of law, race, and religion in the age of empires.