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“There Is No Compulsion in Religion”: On Conversion and Apostasy in the Late Ottoman Empire: 1839–1856

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 July 2000

Selim Deringil
Selim Deringil
Affiliation:
Boǵaziçi University
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Abstract

This essay is a preliminary attempt to place nineteenth century Ottoman conversion policies in a comparative context in relation to both earlier Ottoman centuries and other imperial polities, viz.: the Spanish and Russian. The present study has three aims. First, to ask some practical questions about the fact and nature of the conversion process. Second, to try to ascertain whether there is some pattern to the various cases occurring in the archival documentation for the turbulent years between the declaration of the Tanzimat in 1839 and the Reform Edict of 1856. And third, to put the late Ottoman attitude to conversion and apostasy into a broader comparative framework than has hitherto been attempted.This paper is the first fruit of a larger project that will examine conversion and apostasy in the late Ottoman Empire from the Tanzimat era through to the end of the Empire in 1918.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 42 , Issue 3 , July 2000 , pp. 547 - 575
Copyright
© 2000 Society for Comparative Study of Society and History

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Footnotes

Many friends and colleagues have helped me in the formulation of this article. I would like to thank Marc Baer, Selçuk Esenbel, Edhem Eldem, Müge Göçek, Daniel Goffman, Ariel Salzman, and Cemal Kafadar for reading earlier versions and for generously providing extremely useful criticism and comments. Many thanks go also to Caroline Finkel for proofreading the second draft and for her many suggestions regarding form and content. My thanks go to Gülen Aktaş for her help and patience with a computer-illiterate person. I would also like to thank the Kevorkian Institute and the Department of Near Eastern Studies at NYU, as well as the International Institute of the University of Michigan for hosting me on various occasions. Finally, I would also like to express my gratitude to the editors of CSSH and the anonymous outside reader for their helpful comments.