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Making “Tribes” in the Late Ottoman Empire

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 September 2021

Nora Elizabeth Barakat
Nora Elizabeth Barakat*
Affiliation:
Department of History, Stanford University, Stanford, CAUSA
*
*Corresponding author. E-mail: nbarakat@stanford.edu
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Extract

Oymak. Al. Boy. Cemaat. Taife. Aşiret. These are the terms Ottoman officials used in imperial orders (mühimme) to describe diverse human communities linked by their mobility and externality to village administration in Ottoman Anatolia between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. In 1924, Turkish historian Ahmet Refik compiled Ottoman imperial orders concerning such communities into a volume he titled Anadolu'da Türk Aşiretleri, 966–1200 (Turkish Tribes in Anatolia, 1560–1786). His use of the term aşiret (tribe) in the title is striking, because this term was only used in 9% of the orders in his volume (23 out of 244 total). However, by the late nineteenth century and in Refik's early Republican context, aşiret had become the standard term for these rural, extra-village, mobile human communities, which he understood as similar enough to include in his painstaking effort of compilation.

Type
Roundtable
Information
International Journal of Middle East Studies , Volume 53 , Issue 3 , August 2021 , pp. 482 - 487
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

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4 See for example a map of the winter grazing grounds of aşirets in Iraq and Najd created by the Ottoman Sixth Army in 1909/1910, with an accompanying table listing population, dwelling type, sect, and weapons holdings of each aşiret, held at the Rare Sources Library at Istanbul University (Harita # 93667). I thank Camille Cole for bringing this source to my attention, and the Historical Texts Analysis team of the OpenGulf project for our discussions of its implications for late Ottoman conceptions of “tribe”: David Joseph Wrisley, Camille Cole, and Nada Ammagui. See also, Camille Lyons Cole, “Empire on Edge: Land, Law and Capital in Gilded Age Basra” (PhD dissertation, Yale University, 2020), 199–205.

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17 References to the mukhtārs of these communities are scattered in the Salt sharia court records (SSCR). For example, see Muhammad ʻAbd al-Qadir Khuraysat and Farid Tarif Dawud, Jurj, Sijill Mahkamat al-Salt al-Shar‘iyya: 5 Dhi al-Qa'da 1302 H-Ghurrat Rabi` al-Thani 1305 H, 1885–1888 M (Amman: Ministry of Culture, 2007)Google Scholar.

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19 SSCR Volume 5, Page 122, Record 124, n.d.

20 SSCR Volume 18, page 159, 25 R 1330/13 April 1912.

21 See for example the 1867 Regulation on Financial Affairs (Umur-u maliye dair nizamname) Düstur: I. Tertib, vol. 2 (Istanbul: Matbaa-yi Amire, 1289), 4.

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25 For the Ottoman projection that the southeastern interior could support 50,000 settlers, see BOA.DH.MKT 217/23, 13 February 1894. For the eventual outcome, see Hamed-Troyansky, Vladimir, “Circassian Refugees and the Making of Amman, 1878–1914,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 49, no. 4 (2017): 607CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26 Nora Barakat, “Marginal Actors? The Role of Bedouin in the Ottoman Administration of Animals as Property in the District of Salt, 1870–1912,” Journal of the Economic & Social History of the Orient 58, no. 1/2 (2015): 115. The text of the law is at BOA.DH.ID 104-2, p. 49, 18 Ca 1331/25 April 1913.

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30 Zakariya, ʻAsha'ir al-Sham, 6.

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