Managing Religious Diversity in the Ottoman Empire

Provides a new account of the relationship between the Ottoman Empire and its non-Muslim subjects

• Explores the changing arrangements between the Ottoman state and non-Muslim religious authorities from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries
• Locates the Ottoman management of religious diversity within the transimperial politics of religion
• Offers a well-documented case of religious diversity, multiculturalism and the relationship between religion and politics in the modern history of the Middle East
• Demonstrates a bottom-up perspective on nineteenth-century Ottoman reforms by discussing how Armenians in Istanbul tested the state project
• Combines Ottoman Turkish archival documents and Armenian and Armeno-Turkish (Turkish written in Armenian script) sources

This book makes extensive use of Ottoman archival documents and Armenian sources to examine the changing arrangements between the Ottoman state and non-Muslim religious authorities from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries, focusing on Armenians, the second-largest non-Muslim community in the empire. Specifically, it discusses how the ruling circles of the empire reinforced their reliance on non-Muslim religious authorities at the turn of the eighteenth century, and attempted to limit the influence of non-Muslim clergymen and restrict the scope of non-Muslim communal activity from the mid-nineteenth century onwards. The book also highlights the responses of the Armenian lay and ecclesiastical elites in Istanbul, who did not sit back and watch as their rights and privileges were curtailed. Rather, they sought ways to protect and even expand their collective rights and find their place in the multireligious empire, both as individuals and as members of a religious community.