O – Hybrid Learning

OZAL, TURGUT

Batoota — Fri, 23 Jun 2017 11:40:30 +0000

OZAL, TURGUT (1927-1993), eighth president of Turkey. Born in Malatya on 13 October 1927, Ozal died in office in Ankara on 17 April 1993. He was the eldest of three sons of the banker Mehmet Siddik (Sadik) Bey and the teacher Hafize (Dogan).

He received an M.S. in electrical engineering from Istanbul Technical University in 1950 and studied advanced engineering economics in the United States on an A.I.D. grant (19521953). He worked for the Electrical Survey Administration from 1950 to 1965, rising to deputy director general; concurrently he served as secretary of the State Planning Commission (1958-1965) and as instructor in mathematics at Middle East Technical University (1960-1962). He became technical adviser to Premier Suleyman Demirel in 1966 and undersecretary at the State Planning Organization (1967-1971). He was a consultant to the World Bank from 1971 to 1973 in the US. After holding executive positions in various Turkish private firms from 1974 to 1979, he was appointed undersecretary in the Prime Ministry and acting undersecretary in the State Planning Organization, where he was the architect of Demirel’s January 1980 Economic Liberalization Program. He became deputy prime minister under Bulend Ulusu after the September 198o military intervention but resigned after twenty-two months.
In May 1983 Ozal founded the Motherland (Anavatan or ANAP) Party, won the November 1983 elections, resulting in his serving as premier until elected president in October 1989. Turkey’s democratic constitutional process weathered the shock of Ozal’s sudden death from heart failure after an exhausting eleven-day visit to the Central Asian Turkic republics and Azerbaijan. A smooth transition of power resulted in the election of Premier Demirel as president and the appointment of the new True Path Party leader, Madame Tansu ciller, as prime minister.
Ozal’s greatest service was to transform Turkey into a free-market economy and to prepare it for the twentyfirst century. His free-market economic program reversed decades-long, static import-substitution policies. Turkey enjoyed the highest growth rate among Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) members-between 6 and 8 percent annually from 1986 onward. Rapid industrialization, urbanization, modern banking, convertible currency, a free press and elections, quintupled exports, telecommunications development, and investments in education surpassing those for defense annually since 1991, coupled with implementation of the vast Southeast Anatolian Development Project (one of the world’s largest)-plus considerable inflation-are elements of these changes. His controversial, dynamic foreign policy involved active participation in the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC); prompt closing of Iraqi pipelines to Turkish ports after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990 (despite costing Turkey some $15 billion); the Black Sea Economic Cooperation Zone; openings to the new Turkic republics of the former Soviet Union; mediation in Azerbaijan, the Balkans, and Iran; and staunch membership in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the European Union, the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe, and other international agencies. These policies notably enhanced Turkey’s global stature and key geopolitical and intercultural role as a stable bridge between Europe and the rest of Eurasia in an era of revolutionary change.
Ozal’s father was a medrese (Ar., madrasah, Islamic theological college) graduate later trained as a banker.
His mother was a devout, enlightened primary school teacher and had made the hajj. His grandmother was partly Kurdish. Ozal himself was an observant Muslim who kept the fast and prayed regularly, but he was also a strong secularist and tolerant ecumenist. He was an initiate of the Naqshbandiyah dervish order, his Sufi mentor, Mehmet Zahit Kotku (d. 198o), who claimed descent from the Prophet, was buried in the grounds of Suleymaniye mosque in Istanbul, as was Ozal’s mother in 1988, both beneficiaries of special permits issued by the Council of Ministers.
Ozal envisioned the twenty-first century as that of the Turks. He was extremely intelligent, with an analytic mind and retentive memory, friendly, smiling, openminded, self-assured yet modest, remarkably persuasive, focused, and hard-working. He and his second wife, Semra Yeginmen (m. 1954), who bore him a daughter, Zeynep, and two sons, Ahmet and Efe, were close confidants who usually ate together and walked hand-in-hand in public-a rare sight in Turkey. An indulgent father, he was criticized for nepotism. He became computer adept in his sixties and used and played with more than a dozen computers at home and work. He said, “I think world leaders should make more use of the technological marvels of our age in order to reach out to the masses in other countries to convey conciliatory messages and to build new understanding among peoples. . . . Tolerance and fraternal solidarity among peoples and faiths are the two main themes . . . in the planetary enterprise to build the next millennium on sound foundations of freedom, peace, progress and prosperity.” His remarkable book Turkey in Europe and Europe in Turkey (1991) argues cogently that Anatolia (now most of the Turkish peninsula) has always been a contributor to and part of European civilization, and that the roots of so-called Western or Judeo-Christian civilization include Anatolia: consequently, a more accurate designation would be “Judeo-Christian-Islamic civilization.” Unfortunately, this learned and eloquent book has received virtually no notice abroad except for a few reviews in French periodicals, notably Le Monde.
Many consider Turgut Ozal Turkey’s greatest leader since Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (president, 1923-1938), lsmet Inonu (president, 1938-1950), and Adnan Menderes (premier, 1950-196o). His bold, far-sighted and often successful policies appear more admired in death than in life. Ozal dedicated himself unstintingly to improving the quality of life of all Turkish citizens and achieved remarkable results in a life whose untimely end prevented him from his hope of continuing to lead as president or possibly again as prime minister. He urged his compatriots to escape from “the tunnel of history” and to realize his dreams and plans for the next century, in which Turks would come into their true inheritance and achieve the status of an advanced society. He opened up new possibilities and challenging perspectives for every Turk that can stimulate his successors to even greater achievements. It is too early for any definitive assessment of his career, its impact on Turkey, and the world, but his legacy challenges all Turks.
[See also Anavatan Partisi; Turkey.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
The reader may consult the following works by Turgut Ozal:
“Tiirkiye’nin Kalkmmasmda Gorusler” (Perspectives on Turkish Development). 1973. Thirty-five-page letter from Ozal to Suleyman Demirel, written after Ozal’s two-year consultancy with the World Bank. The letter sets out a blueprint for Ozal’s later (1979-1980) free-market program, which introduced radical and positive changes in Turkey’s economic structure. See Degisim “Belgeleri,” cited below, for Ozal’s three basic principles essential to Turkey’s future (pp. 9, 19, 161-162).
“Kalkumada Yeni Gorusun Esaslari” (The Basic Elements of the New Perspective on Development). Speech delivered at the Minor Congress of the Nationalists, Ankara, April 1979 (published in Degisim “Belgeleri”).
Opening and Closing Speeches of Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of State Turgut Ozal at the Second lzmir Economic Congress, Izmir, 2 and 7 November 1981. In Turkish. The first speech presents a historical analysis of Turkey’s economic policies and growth since 1923. The second recommends basic principles to which Turkey must adhere to assure continuous socioeconomic development. Published in Degisim “Belgeleri.”
Speeches by Prime Minister Ozal, 1983-1989, and President Ozal, 1989-1993 published periodically in Turkish by the Grand National Assembly, Ankara. See, for example, Balbakan Turgut Ozal’in Yurtici-Yurtdisi Konusmalari (Prime Minister Turgut Ozal’s Speeches in Turkey and Abroad, 13 December 1988-31 October 1989). Ankara, n.d.
La Turquie en Europe. Paris, 1988. Translated and revised as Turkey in Europe and Europe in Turkey. Nicosia, Northern Cyprus, 1991. Traces the significant contributions of Anatolians to universal civilization during the past eight thousand years, underscoring Turkey’s seminal interaction with and contributions to European/Western culture. Ozal unmasks and refutes mistaken prejudices of Europeans regarding Turks and provides illuminating historical evidence to support Turkey’s 1987 request for full membership in the European Community.
Degilim “Belgeleri,” 1979-1992 (“Documents” on Change, 19791992). Istanbul, 1993. Posthumously published book containing four key documents from 1979, 1981, 1983, and 1992. The documents enunciate Ozal’s three basic freedoms (freedom of thought, freedom of conscience and religion, and freedom to engage in free enterprise) and his guidelines for shifting Turkey into a free-market economy, reorganizing and decentralizing government, amending the constitution, revitalizing education and health services, creating necessary infrastructures (including state-of-the-art fiber optics capability and telecommunications), sustained improvements in energy and water supplies, and environmental protection.
The Turkish weekly newsmagazine NOKTA (Istanbul) published a special supplement on Ozal, NOKTA Ozal Ek TURGUT OZAL, 1927-1993, distributed with the regular weekly issue for 25 April (Nisan~-1 May (Mayis) 1993, which contains a series of commissioned articles by former associates and informed specialists providing useful data and perspectives on the late president’s career. The supplement is a useful addition to earlier books on various aspects of Ozal’s career, written in Turkish and undocumented, hence very hard to assess, despite the fact that a few have become best sellers in Turkey.
HOWARD A. REED

OTTOMAN EMPIRE

Batoota — Fri, 23 Jun 2017 11:30:42 +0000

OTTOMAN EMPIRE.
Called by the Turks Osmanlls, after the name of the founder of the dynasty Osman I (Ar., `Uthman), the Ottomans were Oghuz (Tk., Oguz) Turks who came out of Central Asia and created a vast state that ultimately encompassed all of southeastern Europe up to the northern frontiers of Hungary, Anatolia, and the Middle East up to the borders of Iran as well as the Mediterranean coast of North Africa almost to the Atlantic Ocean.
Conquest, 1300-1600. The Ottoman Empire was created by a series of conquests carried out between the early fourteenth and late sixteenth centuries by ten successive capable rulers of the Ottoman Turkish dynasty. Starting as nomadic gazis (Ar., ghdzi, “raider”), fighting for the faith of Islam against the decadent Christian Byzantine Empire on behalf of the Seljuk Empire of Konya (“Seljuks of Rum”), Osman I and his successors in the fourteenth century expanded primarily into Christian lands of southeastern Europe as far as the Danube, while avoiding conflict with the Muslim Turkoman principalities that had dominated Anatolia after they defeated the Byzantine army at the Battle of Manzikert in Ions. These conquests were facilitated by policies that left the defeated Christian princes in control of their states as long as they accepted vassalage and provided tribute and warriors to assist further Ottoman conquests and that allowed Christian officials and soldiers to join the Ottoman government and army as mercenaries without being required to convert to Islam. This first Ottoman Empire incorporated territories that encompassed the modern states of Greece, Rumania, Bulgaria, Macedonia, Serbia-Montenegro, Bosnia, and Croatia; it bypassed the Byzantine capital Constantinople, which, despite the depopulation and despoilage inflicted by the Latin Crusaders early in the thirteenth century, held out as a result of its massive defense walls as well as the services provided by soldiers from Christian Europe, though its emperors for the most part accepted the suzerainty of the Ottoman leaders. Efforts by the Byzantine emperors to reunite the Orthodox church with Rome in order to stimulate the creation of a new Crusade to rescue their empire led to new internal divisions that prevented any sort of unified resistance to the Ottomans.
This initial period of Ottoman expansion came to an end during the reign of Bayezid I (r. 1389-1402) who, influenced by the Christian princesses and their advisers at the Ottoman court, replaced the gazi tradition of conquering Christian territories with seizure of the Turkoman Muslim principalities in Anatolia; at the same time he substituted Byzantine for Muslim practices in his court and administration. The Muslim Turkomans who had led the conquests into Europe as gazis refused to participate in attacks on their Muslim coreligionists, however, particularly since the booty available was far less than in Europe, so the conquests to the East were accomplished largely with contingents furnished by Christian vassals. Many of the displaced Anatolian Turkoman princes fled to refuge with the Mamluk sultans who since 125o had displaced the Ayyubids in Egypt and Syria, or with the rising Tatar conqueror of Iran and Central Asia, Tamerlane, where they sought assistance in regaining their territories. The Mamluk Empire was then attempting to expand its influence north from Syria into Cilicia and the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates, but it was by this time too weak to provide substantial military assistance to the Turkomans. Tamerlane also preferred to move through Iran into India, but fearing that Ottoman expansion eastward past the Euphrates might threaten his rear, he mounted a massive invasion of Anatolia that culminated in his rout of the Ottoman army and capture of Bayezid I at the Battle of Ankara (1402). To ensure that no single power would rise up to dominate Anatolia and threaten his domains, he went on to ravage the peninsula and restore the surviving Turkoman princes before resuming his invasion of India.
Bayezid I died in captivity, but enough of his sons survived to contest for power during the Ottoman Interregnum (1402-1413) that followed. Initially Prince Sfileyman, based at Edirne, managed to retain Ottoman power in Europe with the assistance of the Christian vassal princes of southeastern Europe. Ultimately, however, his efforts to restore Ottoman rule in Anatolia were defeated by his bother Mehmed, supported by the Turkoman gazis who had remained along the Danube fighting against the Hungarians, and who had opposed Bayezid’s expansion into the Muslim East as well as the Christian tendencies in his court. As Mehmed I (r. 1413-1421), he restored Ottoman rule between the Danube and the Euphrates, driving out Christian influences in the court and inaugurating a policy, continued by Murad I (r. 1421-1451) and Mehmed II (r. 14511481) “the Conqueror” (Fatih) that instituted direct Ottoman administration in both Europe and Anatolia in place of the indirect rule through vassals which had characterized the previous century.
This restoration was accompanied in 1453 by Mehmed II’s conquest of Byzantine Constantinople after a long siege. The city had been ravaged and largely depopulated since its occupation by Latin Crusaders in 1204. But Mehmed intended to restore it to its old splendor and prosperity so it could serve as the capital of the restored Roman Empire that he wished to create. Therefore, instead of following the Muslim tradition of sacking cities that resisted conquest, he used his army to rebuild it and then carried out a policy of forced immigration (surgun) of peoples from all parts of his empire to repopulate it and restore its economic life as quickly as possible. Mehmed repopulated the new capital with Christians as well as Muslims and Jews, but because of his mistrust of his Christian subjects, who openly encouraged new crusades from Europe to “liberate” them from Muslim rule, he made special efforts to attract into his dominions the Sephardic Jews of Spain and the Ashkenazi Jews of western and central Europe who were then being increasingly persecuted by Christian movements soon to culminate in the horrors of the Inquisition. To this end he stimulated the newly established chief rabbi of Edirne, Isaac Tzarfati, himself an immigrant from Germany, to send messages to Jews throughout Christian Europe urging them to enter the Ottoman dominions, where, he said, there was no persecution and Jews could achieve peace and prosperity. As a result, even before the mass expulsion of Jews from Spain in 1492, thousands of them immigrated into the Ottoman dominions from all over Europe, providing substantial support to Mehmed’s massive effort to rebuild Istanbul and to make it the political and economic center of a prosperous new empire.
The rapid expansion of the Ottoman dominions created severe financial, economic, and social strains. These were, however, successfully resolved during the long and relatively peaceful reign of Sultan Bayezid II (r. 1481-1512), thus making possible substantial expansion in the first half of the sixteenth century beyond the boundaries of the first empire, across the Danube through Hungary to the gates of Vienna and eastward into the territories of the classical Islamic empires of the Umayyads and `Abbasids. Sultan Selim I (r. 1512-1520) “the Grim” (Yavuz), in response to the rise of the Safavid empire in Iran starting about 1500 and its threat to conquer the increasingly weak and divided Mamluk Empire of Syria and Egypt, first defeated the Safavids at Chaldiran (1514) in eastern Anatolia, and then went on to conquer the Mamluk dominions during a rapid campaign through Syria and Egypt in 1516-1517, soon afterward adding the Arabian peninsula to his domains. Sultan Suleyman “The Lawgiver” (Kanunt; called “The Magnificent” in Europe), who ruled from 1520 to 1566, supported by an alliance with France against their common Habsburg enemy, went on to conquer Hungary (1526) and to put Vienna under a siege (1529), which though unsuccessful was followed by the creation of a system of border gazi warriors who carried out guerrilla warfare with raids well into central Europe during the next two centuries. With the stalemate in land warfare, the struggle between the Ottomans and Habsburgs was transferred to the Mediterranean Sea. Suleyman created a powerful navy under the leadership of the pirate governor of Algeria, Grand Admiral Hayruddin Barbarossa; the commander not only brought Algeria into the empire as a province whose revenues were set aside in perpetuity for support of the Ottoman navy, but also made the entire Mediterranean into an Ottoman lake. Suleyman also expanded Ottoman power in the East; after conquering Iraq and the southern Caucasus from the Safavids (1535), he built an eastern fleet that from bases in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea conquered the Yemen and broke European naval efforts to blockade the old international shipping routes through the Middle East and then went on to assist Muslim rulers in western India and Indonesia against the Portuguese and others.
Government and Society. The reign of Kanuni Siileyman marked the peak of Ottoman power and prosperity as well as the highest development of its governmental, social and economic systems. The Ottoman sultans preserved the traditional Middle Eastern social division between a very small ruling class (osmanhlar, or “Ottomans”) at the top, whose functions were limited largely to keeping order and securing sufficient financial resources to maintain itself and carry out its role, and a large subject class of rayas (redyd, or “protected flock”), organized into autonomous communities according to religion (millets) or economic pursuit (esnaf, or “guilds”) that cared for all aspects of life not controlled by the ruling class.
Ruling class. Membership in the ruling class was open to all who declared and manifested loyalty to the sultan, his dynasty, and his empire; who accepted the religion of Islam; who knew and practiced the Ottoman Way, a highly complex system of behavior including use of the Ottoman language, an artificial dialect derived from Turkish, Arabic, and Persian; and who knew and carried out the particular practices used by one or another of the groups into which the ruling class was divided. Those who failed to meet these requirements were considered members of the subject class regardless of their origins or religion. Thus ruling class members could be the children of existing members, but only if they acquired and practiced all the required characteristics. Members could also come from the devsirme system of recruitment among Christian youths, which was carried out on a large scale in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; the recruits were converted to Islam and educated in the Ottoman Way in the palace school established by Mehmed II and continued by his successors. Other members entered the ruling class as slaves or captives of existing members, or as “renegades” who came to the Ottoman Empire from all the nations of Europe, seeking their fortunes under the banner of the sultans. In general, all ruling class members who came from a Turkish or Muslim heritage, including the former members of the ruling classes of the Seljuk and Mamluk empires and their descendants, formed a Turko-Islamic aristocracy; converts from Christianity formed a separate devsirme class. The two groups struggled for power and prestige, with the ruler usually balancing them with equal positions and revenues in order to control and use both.
Members of the ruling class were divided into “institutions” according to function. The Palace or Imperial Institution (mulkiye) in the Topkapi Sarayi palace consisted of two branches: the Inner Service (enderun), often called the Harem, was charged with producing, maintaining, training, and entertaining sultans, and as such comprised the sultans themselves, their wives, concubines, children, and slaves; the Outer Service (birun) was led by the grand vizier (sadr-i azem) and included other officials holding the rank of vizier and the title pasha (pasa) who met as the imperial council (divan) in the kubbealti section of the second courtyard of the palace and were in charge of supervising and leading the remainder of the Ottoman system on behalf of the sultan. The Scribal Institution (kalemiye), constituting the treasury of the sultan and including all the “men of the pen” (ehl-i kalem), carried out the administrative duties of the ruling class, in particular assessing and collecting taxes, making expenditures, and writing imperial decrees and most other administrative documents. The Military Institution (seyfiye) included the “men of the sword” (ehl-i seyf) charged with expanding and defending the empire and keeping order and security: the sipahi cavalry, commanded for the most part by members of the Turko-Islamic aristocracy; the Janissary (yeniceri) infantry, military arm of the devsirme, which comprised the most important part of the Ottoman army starting in the sixteenth century and constituted the principal garrisons and police of major cities and towns of the empire; the Ottoman navy, long commanded by grand admirals who were given the governorship of Algeria as well as control of the customs duties of most of the ports of the Mediterranean to provide them with necessary revenues; the artillery (topciyan); and various other corps. Finally there was the Religious or Cultural Institution (ilmiye), led by the seyhulislam (Ar., shaykh al-Islam) and composed of “men of knowledge” (ehl-i ilm, ulema; Ar. `ulama’), constituting not only the leaders of prayer (imam) and others serving in the mosques, but also the judges (qadi) and jurisconsults (mufti), and all others in the realm of culture; to these persons the title efendi was given, as it was to members of the scribal class, who also had to undergo religious training.
The Islam maintained by the Ottoman ulema, while basically Orthodox Sunni in its official format, was in fact a syncretistic system. It combined orthodox beliefs and rituals with. two other traditions-the practices brought into Islam by the heterodox Sufi orders that had predominated among the pre-Ottoman Turkomans of Anatolia, and those of the indigenous Christian population, many of whom converted to Islam and were absorbed into the Ottoman melting pot.
Within the institutions of the Ottoman ruling class, organization was maintained largely in accordance with financial functions. Each position had certain sources of revenue, either taxes of varied sorts, fees levied in return for the performance of official duties (bahsis; Pers., bakhshish), or salaries paid by the Treasury. In general, all revenues in the empire were considered to constitute the imperial wealth (havass-i humayun) of the sultan, who alienated it on occasion in perpetuity as private property (mulk) or for religious foundations (vakif, evkdf; Ar., waqf, awqaf) or maintained it in financial/administrative units (muqata’dt) intended to produce revenues for the sultan and his ruling class. Out of the revenues that were left as muqata’dt, some were assigned as emanets to collectors (emins) who were paid salaries for carrying out their duties, for the most part consisting of collecting taxes or fees without additional functions; some were assigned to officials of the state or army who used the revenues entirely as their own salary (timars) in return for performing functions in addition to collecting the revenues, as viziers in the imperial council or as officers of the sipahi cavalry or the artillery corps; and some were assigned as tax farms (iltizam) to tax farmers (multezims) as the result of bids won by those who promised to pay the treasure the largest share of their annual revenues, since unlike the timar holders they performed no other function than the collection of revenues. Regardless of the source of revenues, the holders of the muqata’dt were given only enough authority to make certain that taxable revenues were produced; the producers of the revenue, whether cultivators, artisans or merchants, maintained property rights to pursue their own occupations as long as they delivered the required taxes.
Subject class. All functions of society as well as of government and administration not dealt with by the ruling class were relegated to the redyd (“protected flock”) or rayas, who constituted the subject class. For this purpose the redyd were organized into religiously based communities called at different times cema’dt, Wife and, finally millet, as well as into guilds (esndf), mystic orders of dervishes (tariqat) and other groupings that formed a substratum of Ottoman society.
Most important were the religiously based communities, most often called millets, of which four were established by Mehmed the Conqueror soon after he made Istanbul his capital. The Greek Orthodox and Armenian Gregorian millets were led by their patriarchs and staffed by the clerics organized in hierarchies under their authority. The former included, in addition to ethnic Greeks, all the Slavs and Rumanians living in southeastern Europe; the latter included not only Armenians, but also Gypsies, Nestorians, Copts, and other Eastern Christians. The Muslim millet was led by the Seyhulis-lam and the Cultural Institution and was thus the only millet with an organic connection to the ruling class. Mehmed II and his successor Bayezid II attempted to organize the Jewish millet like those of the Christians, appointing Moses Capsali, grand rabbi of Istanbul under the last Byzantines, as chief of all the rabbis and all Jews throughout the empire. There was, however, no religious hierarchy in Judaism comparable to those of the Christians. The Jews were moreover divided among those coming from Spain (Sephardim, or “Spanish”), the remainder of Europe (Ashkenazim, or “Germans”), and the classical Islamic empires of the Middle East (Musta’rab, or “Arabized”) as well as those who had survived centuries of persecution by the Greek Orthodox church in the Byzantine empire (Romaniote). The early grand rabbis appointed by the sultans were therefore unsuccessful at controlling their followers so that the Ottoman effort to appoint grand rabbis was therefore abandoned after 1535, not to be resumed again until just three centuries later as part of the Tanzimat reforms that transformed the empire during the nineteenth century. The traditional Jewish millet therefore was composed of hundreds of small communities (kahal, kehilla), each surrounding a synagogue; relations with ruling class officials were therefore carried out not by millet leaders, as was the case with the Christian and Muslim millets, but rather by the individual rabbis or their lieutenants (kdhya) or by the wealthy and influential Jewish bankers and physicians who served the sultans and other members of the ruling class until late in the sixteenth century. [See also Millet.]
In the countryside, villages were for the most part constituted entirely of members of one millet or another. In the larger towns and cities, quarters (sg., mahalle; pl., mahalldt), surrounded by walls and guarded by gates, were set aside for each millet. In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Istanbul, for example, most of the Muslim quarters, each centered on a great imperial mosque, were located in what is known today as Old Istanbul. The Greek quarter was centered in Fener, on the Golden Horn, which was next to Balat, the principal Jewish quarter; the Armenians lived in Ayvansaray, next to Balat, as well as across the peninsula of Old Istanbul at Kumkapi on the Sea of Marmara. Most foreigners and many Ottoman Christians congregated across the Golden Horn at Galata and up its hill to Beyoglu (Pera) as well as on the islands of the Sea of Marmara, while the Jews crossed the Golden Horn from Balat to Haskoy, immediately opposite. Later the Jews spread also into Galata and also, to get away from the Christians, they went up the Bosporus to Ortakoy and to its Anatolian shores at Kuzguncuk and Uskiidar.
There was no municipal government as such in traditional Ottoman society. Whether rabbis or bishops or imams, the religious leaders of each quarter or village carried out all the secular functions not performed by the ruling class, basing these duties on their own religious laws as interpreted in their religious councils and courts, and conducting their affairs in their own languages and in accordance with their own customs and traditions. Thus they organized and operated schools, old-age homes, and kitchens for the poor. They arranged to pave, maintain, and light streets. They organized security and police. Leaders of the different urban millets came together on occasion for specific functions that required general cooperation, such as the celebration of certain festivals or organization against attacks, plagues or fires; but for the most part each lived independently with little input either by members of the ruling class or by members of the other millets.
A major purpose of the millet system was to prevent the kind of conflict among people of different religions that has so bedeviled life in the recent Middle East and southeastern Europe. While this general objective was achieved by the sultans, the age-old Christian prejudice against Jews, which had caused so many of the latter to flee from Europe to the protection of the Ottomans, did result in hundreds of Greek and Armenian blood-libel attacks on Jews throughout Ottoman history. Such attacks were suppressed by the authorities only during the centuries in which the ruling class was strong enough to maintain order, but as its empire declined in later centuries, the attacks became endemic, with Muslims and Jews usually banding together to defend themselves against assaults conducted by local Christians, often with the assistance and support of the representatives of the Christian states of Europe resident in the Ottoman dominions.
Decline. The Ottoman Empire began to decline late in the reign of Suleyman. This decline continued in various forms until the empire’s final decomposition as a result of World War I. The breakup of the empire resulted from a combination of multiple and interdependent factors, many of which were both cause and result. Domination of the ruling class by the devsirme class, starting about 1540, led to a decline in the quality of the rulers and to large-scale nepotism, corruption, and misrule of all elements of the population. Overtaxation by corrupt members of the ruling class caused cultivators to flee from the land, either to form robber bands or to migrate into the already overcrowded cities, where a shortage of work and food led to famine, disease, and urban anarchy. Capitulation treaties that allowed European subjects to live in the Ottoman dominions under their own laws, as enforced by their ambassadors and consuls, were transformed into instruments of semicolonial exploitation; this made it possible not only for Europeans, but also for the Greek and Armenian subjects of the sultan who accepted their protection, to dominate the Ottoman economic system and to drive out Muslims and Jews, who were as a result left in increasing poverty in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The resulting suffering was alleviated for the mass of subjects by their millets and guilds, which at least partially protected them from the worst results of the anarchy and misrule, though many still turned away from their official religious establishments toward mystic movements that offered more emotional solace and practical protection as conditions continued to worsen as the decline accelerated.
Reform and Modernization. Most members of the ruling class made little effort to reform the abuses, since they were able personally to profit far more from the anarchy than their predecessors had been able to do under the sultans’ domination. It was only when the rising nation-states of Europe recognized the extent of Ottoman weakness and moved to conquer Ottoman possessions in Hungary and southeastern Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that the ruling class accepted some sort of reform in order to preserve the empire on which their privileges depended. Under the leadership of Sultan Murad IV (r. 1623-1640) and the dynasty of Koprulu grand viziers placed in power during the later years of the seventeenth century by Sultan Mehmed IV (r. 1648-1687), efforts were made to reform the system in order to save the empire. This reform, however, was undertaken on the basis of the prevailing belief that Ottoman institutions and practices were superior to anything developed in Christian Europe; that therefore Ottoman weakness was due less to any inferiority of its institutions than to a failure to apply them as had been in the centuries of Ottoman greatness. Traditionalistic reform at this time therefore consisted of efforts to restore the old ways, executing corrupt and incompetent officials and soldiers. As soon as the government and army had been restored sufficiently to beat back the European attacks, however, the corruption returned and continued until the next crisis forced similar efforts. Increasing losses to Russia and Austria during the eighteenth century, however, forced the sultans to modify this traditionalistic reform, at least to the extent of acknowledging that European weapons and tactics were superior, and to accept at least partial reforms of the Ottoman military, which were introduced by a series of European renegades who entered Ottoman service. Inevitably, however, the older Ottoman military corps refused to accept this sort of change, because their status in the ruling class depended on their monopoly of the traditional techniques and practices. This compelled the sultans to allow the creation of separate modern infantry and artillery corps, which, however, could not for the most part be used because of opposition by the older corps, supported by members of the ruling class who also feared that the new forces would be used to eliminate them.
During the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the tremendously increased European threat to Ottoman integrity and direct intervention in internal Ottoman affairs stimulated and supported violent Christian nationalist uprisings to break up the empire in order to secure their independence. The resulting loss of territories and large-scale massacres of Muslim and Jewish subjects by the rebels as well as by the newly independent Christian states of southeastern Europe at last compelled the Ottomans to change their concept of reform to one of entirely destroying the old institutions and replacing them with new ones largely imported from the West. This sort of reform took place during the Tanzimat reform period planned under Sultan Mahmud II (r. 18o81839), carried out under his sons Abdulmecid (r. 18391861) and Abdiilaziz (r. 1861-1876), and brought to successful culmination under Sultan Abdulhamid II (r. 1876-190g). The traditional decentralized Ottoman system was replaced by an increasingly centralized one in which the central government extended its authority and activity to all areas of Ottoman life, undermining though not entirely replacing the millets and guilds. Since functions were expanding, moreover, the traditional Ottoman governmental system in which the ruling class acted through the imperial council was replaced with an increasingly complex system of government, divided into executive, legislative, and judicial branches. The executive was organized into ministries headed by ministers (vekils) who came together in a cabinet led by the grand vizier or, increasingly, an official called prime minister (bas vekil). The legislative function was given to deliberative bodies, culminating in a partly representative council of state (surayi devlet) in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and in the democratically elected parliament introduced initially in 1876-1877 and then again in the Young Turk constitutional period (1908-1912) following the deposition of Abdulhamid II. Administration was turned over to a new hierarchy of well-educated bureaucrats (memurs) who dominated Ottoman governmental life until the end of the empire.
The reforms introduced during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transformed the Ottoman empire into a relatively well-governed and modern state, whose treatment of the mass of subjects was far more humane than that of most European states that its reformers sought to copy. Emphasis was laid, however, on institutional and physical reforms, with the centralized bureaucracy exercising far more control over the lives of the subjects than was the case in the traditional decentralized Ottoman system. As a result, liberal political movements, led by the Young Ottomans during the years of the Tanzimat and by the Young Turks during the reign of Abdulhamid II, demanded political and social reforms as well. In any case, however, the multinational state now was doomed to destruction by the spread of nationalism among its Christian minorities, encouraged by Russia and Austria, who sought to use these movements as vehicles to extend their influence within the Ottoman body politic and, ultimately, to replace Ottoman rule with their own. The arms, moral encouragement, and finances supplied to various Christian national movements led to violent uprisings, starting with the Greek revolution early in the century and continuing in Serbia and Bulgaria, and particularly in Macedonia as thousands of Muslims and Jews were slaughtered under policies subsequently called “ethnic cleansing,” aimed at securing homogeneous national populations for the new Christian states. The Ottoman military response was bloody, leading to the massacres and counter massacres that characterized the empire, with little break, during the last half century of its existence. The Armenian and Greek minorities remaining within the empire opposed reform and supported nationalist uprisings in order to secure their own independence. The Jewish minority, however, recognized the persecution to which Jews as well as Muslims were being subjected in the course of the revolts and following the creation of the new Christian states; they therefore strongly supported Ottoman integrity and opposed the efforts to gain their support, not only by Christian nationalists, but also by the Jewish Zionists who began their activities in the empire late in the century, though their ef forts to secure Ottoman permission to establish a Jewish state in Palestine were rejected. At the same time, thousands of Jews fleeing persecution in Russia as well as Central Europe during the late years of the nineteenth century were encouraged to settle in other parts of the Ottoman Empire, particularly during the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II, and they made significant contributions to the modernization of Ottoman agriculture, industry, and trade.
During the constitutional period (1909-1918) that followed, the Ottoman Empire experienced the most democratic era of its history, with a myriad of political parties electing deputies to the Ottoman parliament, which enacted major secular and liberal reforms. An initial period in which members of all the different nationalities worked to strengthen and preserve the empire was brought to an end by Austria’s annexation of Bosnia and Bulgaria’s conquest of East Rumelia. These events stimulated the Christian minorities to abandon their shortlived support of the empire and to resume violent and bloody revolutions, particularly in Macedonia and eastern Anatolia, with the forceful Ottoman military responses to restore order compounding the violence. Other factors were Italy’s conquest of the provinces of Libya in the short Tripolitanian War (19 11) and the victory of the newly independent states of southeastern Europe during the First Balkan War (1912), which pushed the Ottomans out of all their remaining European provinces and threatened their control of Istanbul itself. As thousands of Muslim and Jewish refugees from the Christian attacks flooded into Istanbul, and as the remaining parts of the empire fell into increasing despair and chaos, the Young Turk leaders Enver Pasha, Talat Pasha, and Kemal Pasha were in 1912 able to end the short-lived Ottoman democracy and establish an autocracy that successfully defended Istanbul and took advantage of disputes among the Balkan states during the Second Balkan War (1913) to regain Edirne and eastern Thrace, and that introduced major social and economic legislation. Despite the wishes of most of the empire’s politicians and people to stay out of further conflicts, the Young Turk Triumvirate also brought the empire into World War I on the side of Germany and Austria, leading to its defeat and destruction along with that of its allies, with the remaining population devastated by a massive Russian invasion in the east as well as by an Allied naval blockade which caused large-scale famine and death as the war progressed. The Turkish War for Independence that followed (1918-1923) under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk and Ismet Inonu, however, defeated the efforts of the victorious Allies to take over the territories occupied primarily by Turks, thus leading to the establishment of the Turkish Republic in Anatolia and eastern Thrace.
[See also Tanzimat; Turkey; Young Ottomans; Young Turks; and the biographies of Abdulhamid II, Ataturk, and Enver Pasha.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ahmad, Feroz. The Young Turks: The Committee of Union and Progress in Turkish Politics, 1908-1914. Oxford and New York, 1969. Alderson, A. D. The Structure of the Ottoman Dynasty. Oxford and New York, 1956.
Berkes, Niyazi. The Development of Secularism in Turkey. Montreal, 1964. Masterful analysis of secular modernization in the Ottoman Empire during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Braude, Benjamin, and Bernard Lewis, eds. Christians and, fews in the Ottoman Empire. 2 vols. New York and London, 1982. Articles by specialists on millet organization and operation.
Cahen, Claude. Pre-Ottoman Turkey. London and New York, 1968. Definitive study of the situation in Anatolia before the Ottoman conquest.
Davison, Roderic. Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856-1876. Princeton, 1963. Detailed study of Ottoman reforms following the Crimean War.
Evans, Laurence. United States Policy and the Partition of Turkey, 1914-1924. Baltimore, 1965. American involvement in the efforts to turn Turkish territories over to non-Muslim minorities during and after World War I.
Findley, Carter. Bureaucratic Reform in the Ottoman Empire: The Sublime Porte, 1789-1922. Princeton, 1980. Definitive study of nineteenth-century Ottoman bureaucratic reforms based on extensive archival research.
Gibb, H. A. R. and Harold Bowen. Islamic Society and the West, vol. 1, Islamic Society in the Eighteenth Century. London and New York, 1950-1957
Goodwin, Godfrey. History of Turkish Architecture. London, 1972. Inalcik, Halil. The Ottoman Empire: The Classical Age, 1300-1600. London and New York, 1973. Study of Ottoman society and administration in the classical period by the leading Ottoman historian of our time.
Karpat, Kemal. Ottoman Population, 1830-1914. Madison, Wis., 1985.
Kushner, David. The Origins of Turkish Nationalism. London, 1977. Turkish nationalism and Pan-Turkism in the late nineteenth century.
Lewis, Bernard. The Emergence of Modern Turkey. 2d ed. London and New York, 1968. Ottoman modernization and reform.
Mandel, Neville J. The Arabs and Zionism before World War 1. Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976. Important study of Ottoman-Zionist relationships based on Turkish as well as Zionist sources.
Mantran, Robert, ed. Histoire de l’Empire Ottoman. Paris, 1989. Most up-to-date general history of the Ottomans, written by leading French Ottomanists.
Mardin, Serif. The Genesis of Young Ottoman Thought. Princeton, 1962. The Young Ottoman society during the later years of the Tanzimat.
McCarthy, Justin. Muslims and Minorities: The Population of Ottoman Anatolia and the End of the Empire. New York, 1983. Definitive study of Ottoman population movements in Anatolia based on exhaustive examination of Ottoman census records.
Quataert, Donald. Social Disintegration and Popular Resistance in the Ottoman Empire, 1881-1908. New York, 1983. Ottoman economic and social development under Sultan Abdulhamid II.
Ramsaur, Ernest. The Young Turks: Prelude to the Revolution of 1908. Princeton, 1957. The Young Turk movement before the Constitutional revolution in 1908.
Sanjian, Avedis. The Armenian Communities in Syria under Ottoman Dominion. Cambridge, Mass., 1957.
Shaw, Stanford J. The History of the Ottoman Empire and Modern Turkey, vol. 1, Empire of the Gazis: The Rise and Decline of the Ottoman Empire, 1280-1808; vol. 2 (with Ezel Kural Shaw), Reform, Revolution, and Republic: The Rise of Modern Turkey, r8o8-1975. Cambridge, London, and New York, 1976-1977.
Shaw, Stanford J. Between Old and New: The Ottoman Empire under Sultan Selim 111, 1789-1807. Cambridge, Mass., 1971. Study of Selim III’s failure to establish a “New Order” (nizam-i cedid) while leaving the old military and social structure intact.
Shaw, Stanford J. The Fews of the Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic. London and New York, 1991.
Trumpener, Ulrich. Germany and the Ottoman Empire, 1914-1918. Princeton, 1968. The Ottoman-German alliance during World War I.
Wittek, Paul. The Rise of the Ottoman Empire (1938). Reprint, London, 1982. Pioneering study of Ottoman origins as a gazi state.
STANFORD J. SHAW

ORGANIZATION OF THE ISLAMIC JIHAD

Batoota — Fri, 23 Jun 2017 10:55:41 +0000

ORGANIZATION OF THE ISLAMIC JIHAD. Munazzamat al-Jihad al-Islami (or simply Jihad alIslam-1; the Organization of the Islamic Jihad) in Lebanon was formed out of Hizbullah (Party of God), which came into being in June 1982 in the town of Baalbek in the Bekaa (Biqa`) valley. The Islamic jihad organization was used by Hizbullah whenever it engaged in covert operations. To maintain that the Islamic jihad organization exists, however, does not mean that it has a separate structure from Hizbullah.
The Organization of the Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for bombing the U.S. embassy on 18 April 1983 and the U.S. Marine headquarters of the Multinational Forces (MNF) and the headquarters of the French contigent of the MNF on 23 October 1983. It was also behind the kidnapping of American and European nationals in Lebanon, beginning with the abduction of the acting president of the American University of Beirut, David Dodge, in July 1982. Although Dodge was released in July 1983 and other hostages were released later, the wave of hostage taking continued unabated from March 1984 until February 1988. The last American hostage was released in December 1991.
These operations were integral to the strategy pursued by the patrons of the Organization of the Islamic Jihad and Hizbullah, namely, Syria and Iran. Syria has used the Organization of the Islamic Jihad to undermine Western influence in Lebanon and to dominate the country politically and militarily-an end achieved in June 1991. The continued barring of U.S. nationals from traveling to Lebanon is owed to the refusal of Syria to disarm Hizbullah and the fear that the Organization of the Islamic Jihad could resume the campaign of hostage taking against U.S. nationals. From its support of the organization, Iran has gained the arms-forhostages deals that were central to the Iran-Contra affair. Iran has also gained by having a foothold in Lebanon, which, despite the fact that it is not contiguous with Iran, has become its major sphere of influence.
The leadership of the Organization of the Islamic Jihad is basically identical to that of Hizbullah. Prominent leaders of the latter, like the late `Abbas alMusawi, have openly claimed some operations conducted by the organization as their very own. The use of violent means by the organization and by Hizbullah has served many purposes other than the interests of Syria and Iran. These operations have given the Organization of the Islamic Jihad a high profile and tremendous prestige in its ability to challenge the United States and the West in general. Its goal has been clearly spelled out by its statements-to establish an Islamic state in Lebanon. Despite this, its support is limited to a segment of the Shi’! community, which is a minority in Lebanon.
In respect to the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Organization of the Islamic Jihad is close ideologically to the two factions of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad organization, which refuse any compromise and are more rejectionist than the Palestinian Hamas group (Harakat alMuqawamah al-Islamiyah; Movement of the Islamic Resistance). The Palestinian and Lebanese jihad organizations have organizational links with each other and often coordinate their activities with the same patrons of Hizbullah. This is especially true for the faction of the jihad organization led by Fathi Shiqaqi in Damascus.
[See also Hizbullah, article on Hizbullah in Lebanon; Hostages; and Lebanon.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Deeb, Marius K. Militant Islamic Movements in Lebanon: Origins, Social Basis, and Ideology. Washington, D.C., 1986.
Deeb, Marius K. “Shi’a Movements in Lebanon: Their Formation, Ideology, Social Basis, and Links with Iran and Syria.” Third World Quarterly 10.2 (April 1988): 683-698.
Al-Harakah al-Islamiyah f1, Lubndn (The Islamic Movement in Lebanon). Beirut, 1984.
MARius K. DEEB

ORGANIZATION OF THE ISLAMIC CONFERENCE

Batoota — Sat, 17 Jun 2017 01:06:39 +0000

ORGANIZATION OF THE ISLAMIC CONFERENCE
The Islamic theory of international relations centers around the Qur’anic concept of ummah, the community of believers that spans all Muslims of various nations and races. Especially with the rise of modern nationstates, Islamic thinkers have debated whether the concept of a nation conflicts with the universality and unity of the Islamic community. Muhammad Iqbal asserted that Islam furnishes a model for human unity and that nationalism can coexist with it as long as Muslims believe in tawhid (the unity of God). Other scholars reject this view; thus `Ali Muhammad Naqavi writes, “Nationalism and Islam have two opposite ideologies, schools and ideas and independent goals and programs” (Islam and Nationalism, Tehran, 1984).
None the less, the modern world order has resulted in the suppression of two traditional vehicles of Islamic unity-empires with an integral clerical establishment, and conquest by jihad. Seeking a viable modern response to Western political and economic dominance, nineteenth-century reformers-notably Jamal al-Din alAfghan! (1839-1897), Muhammad `Abduh (1849-1905), and Muhammad Rashid Rlda (1865-1935)—developed the political theory of Pan-Islamism. The PanIslamist movement and its leading journal Al-manar began promoting the idea of Muslim congresses in 1898, but the first general Islamic conference was not held until 1926, with meetings in Cairo and Mecca. These meetings concerned themselves primarily with responses to Kemal Ataturk’s abolition of the caliphate; a third congress in 1931 addressed the protection of Palestinian Muslims and the holy places of Jerusalem.
Saudi Arabia and the Muslim regions of the Indian subcontinent led attempts to establish an international Islamic body in the 1940s and 1950s, in the face of opposition from secularist regimes in Egypt, Turkey, and Iran. The first International Islamic Economic Conference met in Karachi in 1949, and the second in Tehran in 1950. A conference of Muslim religious scholars was held in 1952 in Karachi at the initiative of the grand mufti of Palestine, Amin al-Husayn!, who advocated Islamic unity: “Modern scientific research and discoveries have shortened distances. In these circumstances even the most powerful nations of the world cannot remain in isolation.” Al-Husayn! noted the unity of the Western and Communist blocs and lamented, “Only the Muslims in the face of so many difficulties and problems have so far failed to form themselves into an ummah.”
Why had Muslims failed to translate their dream of an Islamic ummah into reality? There was no dearth of able thinkers and dynamic leaders, yet they had been unable to create a permanent international organization founded on Islamic ideology. Secularists, socialists, and regional nationalists were not yet prepared to rise above their differences and forge unity on the basis of their shared beliefs.
The movement for Pan-Islamic unity, however, was not without some results. Its tenacious adherence to the concept of a united world of Islam ultimately triumphed in the 1960s, when new and more vigorous attempts to develop bonds among Muslim countries emerged. The Saudi crown prince, later King Faysal, led this new effort, motivated by his desire to contain Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Arab nationalism. He toured Pakistan, Iran, Jordan, Sudan, Turkey, Morocco, Guinea, Mali, and Tunisia advocating an Islamic ummah. In 1962 Saudi Arabia also established a philanthropic organization, the Muslim World League (Rabitat al-`Alam al-Islam!) to combat socialism and secularism. [See Muslim World League.]
The situation changed dramatically after the 1967 Arab-Israeli War in which Israel crushed Egypt, Jordan, and Syria and occupied large Arab territories. The entire Muslim world was shocked, especially by the occupation of Muslim holy places in Jerusalem-among them al-Agsa Mosque, the third holiest site of Islam. Amin al-Husayn! and King Faysal called for an Islamic summit conference, supported by other national leaders including Tunku Abdul Rahman of Malaysia. In their changed circumstances, Nasser and other former opponents could no longer ignore the initiatives of Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, and their allies. Finally, after an arsonist set fire to part of al-Agsa Mosque, the first Islamic summit was held in Rabat on 22-25 September 1969.
The leaders who assembled in Rabat were convinced that their peoples formed an indivisible ummah and were determined to exert united efforts to defend their legitimate interests. This resolve gave birth to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), formally proclaimed in May 1971. The OIC expresses the determination of Islamic nations to “preserve Islamic social and economic values” and reaffirms their commitment to the United Nations Charter. Its primary goals are to promote Islamic solidarity among member states; to consolidate cooperation among member states in economic, social, cultural, scientific, and other vital fields of activity, and to carry out consultations among member states in international organizations; to endeavor to eliminate racial segregation, discrimination, and colonialism in all its forms; and to support international peace and security founded on justice.
The highest policy-making function of the OIC consists in meetings of heads of state. These summit conferences enable the leaders of the Islamic world periodically to review both internal conditions and external political developments from an Islamic perspective. The next level of policy-making is the annual Conference of Foreign Ministers to consider international developments and their impact on the Islamic states with a view to defining common positions on global political and economic issues. The ministers have focused on such issues as the question of Palestine, the occupation of Afghanistan, the Iran-Iraq war, and the situation in South Africa, seeking equitable solutions to these problems.
The third and permanent component of the OIC’s institutional structure comprises the General Secretariat based in Jeddah and OIC agencies and centers in a number of countries. The head of the Secretariat, the secretary-general, is elected for a four-year nonrenewable term by the Conference of Foreign Ministers; there are also four assistant secretaries and various other officials.
One important institution that has developed within the framework of the OIC is the Islamic Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (ISESCO), modeled on UNESCO. The need to advance education, particularly in science and technology, in contemporary Muslim countries can hardly be exaggerated. ISESCO has undertaken an ambitious program founded on two complementary objectives: to strengthen cooperation among member states in the fields of educational, scientific, and cultural research and to make Islamic culture the pivot of educational curricula at all levels; and to support genuine Islamic culture and to protect the independence of Islamic thought against cultural invasion, distortion, and debasement.
The OIC has been more successful in such cultural programs than in political matters, where Muslim countries are still far from achieving the cohesion and unity embodied in the OIC Charter. The Iran-Iraq war has perhaps been the most frustrating problem for the OIC among numerous regional and ethnic disputes. Despite such obstacles, however, the OIC in general provides a valuable forum in which Muslim countries are gathered for the first time in an official organizational setting. This is no small achievement after centuries of division and conflict within the ummah.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Ahsan, `Abdullah al-. OIC: The Organization of the Islamic Conference. Herndon, Va., 1988. A detailed study of the origins, structure, and membership of the OIC.
Choudhury, Golam W. Islam and the Contemporary World. London, 1990. Chapters 5 and 6 explore the development of Pan-Islam and the structure and organization of the OIC.
Moinuddin, Hasan. The Charter of the Islamic Conference: The Legal and Economic Framework. Oxford, 1987. A detailed, constitutional study of the OIC.
Structure and Activities
The Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC; Ar., Munazzamat al-Mu’tamar al-Islami) extends its influence in the social, economic, and political spheres throughout the Islamic world. It reaches beyond Muslim nations as a forum in which they can coordinate their interactions with the rest of the world. To serve the OIC’s many purposes, an elaborate organizational structure has been developed over the quarter-century of its existence.
Membership. The OIC currently has So members, including Palestine, four Central Asian republics, and Albania. Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan have observer status and the Turkish Cypriot community and the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF) regularly attend meetings as observers. The MNLF applied unsuccessfully to join the OIC in 1987; the grounds for refusal were apparently that it was not a state. In addition, a number of intergovernmental organizations, such as the United Nations, the Organization of African Unity (OAU), and the Arab League, regularly send high-level observers. Observer status has also been granted to a number of nongovernmental organizations, but these normally have an Islamic flavor-for instance, the Muslim World League, the Tripoli-based Islamic Call Society, the World Muslim Congress, and the World Assembly of Muslim Youth.
Structure. The highest policy-making organ of the OIC is the meeting of heads of State, the summit. There have been six Islamic summits: Rabat (1969), Lahore (1974), Td’if/Mecca (1981), Casablanca (1984), Kuwait (1987), and Dakar (1991). The summits review conditions in the Muslim world and consider international political developments. The second policy-making organ is the annual Conference of Foreign Ministers, which also reviews conditions in the Muslim world but tends to concentrate on international political, economic, social, and cultural questions.
In addition, there are three Standing Committees for Information and Cultural Affairs, Scientific and Technological Cooperation, and Economic and Commercial Cooperation. The main functions of these committees are to monitor the implementation of resolutions passed by the OIC, to study means of strengthening cooperation among Muslim states, to draw up programs and submit proposals designed to increase member states’ capacity in the fields indicated, and to study agenda items and submit draft resolutions before summit meetings and meetings of foreign ministers.
The Secretariat is based in Jeddah. It is headed by a secretary-general elected for a four-year renewable term by the Conference of Foreign Ministers. The present incumbent, Hamid Al Gabid of Niger, took office in January 1989. In accordance with an amendment to the Charter agreed at the Dakar summit in 1991, the secretary-general’s term was extended for a second fouryear term. The Secretariat has four assistant secretariesgeneral for Political Affairs; Jerusalem, Palestine, and Muslim minorities; Cultural and Social Affairs and the Islamic Solidarity Fund; and Economic, Administrative, and Financial Affairs.
OIC funding comes from contributions from member states. Originally it was agreed that the basis for assessing contributions should be per capita income. In practice, many states fail to make due payments, and the OIC is perennially short of funds. Indeed, the Secretary-General was reported in 1986 to be prepared to tell the 1987 summit that if members were not prepared to pay up, he and his staff would happily close the organization down and return to their former occupations. Hitherto, Saudi Arabia has bailed out the OIC when it is particularly short of funds, and it seems likely that this will continue. The Saudis have also given a former royal palace to house the Secretariat.
Agencies and Affiliates. The OIC has given birth to many subsidiary and affiliated bodies. Some, such as the Islamic Development Bank, are effective, others are less so, and some have yet to be established. Since the organization suffers from an acute shortage of funds, the development of new agencies, particularly the Islamic Court of justice, may well be slow, but those already operating are unlikely to be allowed to die.
Among the specialized committees of the OIC is the Al-Quds (Jerusalem) Committee, which was established in 1975 and is based in Morocco. Its fourteen members meet twice a year under the chairmanship of King Hasan. It is charged with working for the liberation of Jerusalem, drawing the world’s attention to the rights of Muslims and to Israeli defiance of UN resolutions, and implementing OIC resolutions relating to Jerusalem and the Palestine question. Allied to this committee is the Al-Quds Fund, established in 1976. Its objectives are to fight against the “israelization” of Jerusalem and to support the Palestinian struggle for liberation. Its income is derived from voluntary donations.
Important among the subsidiary organs of the OIC is the Islamic Solidarity Fund, created in 1974 to provide funds to meet the needs of Islamic unity, Islamic causes, and the enhancement of Islamic culture, values, and universities. The funds available have been used for a wide variety of charitable and relief purposes.
Economically oriented subsidiary organs have also been active. For instance, the Statistical, Economic, and Social Research and Training Center for the Islamic Countries was established in Ankara in 1978. It collects data and formulates economic policies, such as the “Ankara Economic Plan” adopted at the Td’if summit of January 1981. It also publishes the, journal of Economic Cooperation among Islamic Countries. The Islamic Center for Vocational and Technical Training and Research, set up in Dhaka in 1977, is charged with the development of skilled manpower in Muslim countries; the Islamic Center for Development of Trade, based in Casablanca since 1983, encourages regular commercial contacts and investments among member states.
Perhaps the most important of the institutions within the OIC framework is the Islamic Development Bank. Established in Jeddah in 1974 to encourage economic development and social progress in member states and in Muslim communities elsewhere, it has been one of the fastest-growing aid agencies in the Third World. In July 1992, the bank agreed to double its subscribed capital from $2.9 billion to $5.8 billion. Less prominent but also noteworthy have been the International Islamic News Agency and the Islamic States Broadcasting Organization. The former, created in 1979 and based in Jeddah, issues daily news bulletins in Arabic, English, and French (the official languages of the OIC). The latter was established as a personal initiative of King Faysal in 1975 as a means of propagating Islam though radio and television. It makes and sells its own religious programs for the Muslim world and maintains a library of radio and television programs made in various Muslim countries. Copies are either lent or given to broadcasting organizations in all member states. The Islamic Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, headquartered in Rabat, has since 1982 promoted cooperation among Muslim states in the cultural and educational fields.
Attitudes of Member States. Despite the high moral tone of the declaration issued by the first summit conference in 1969 following the fire at the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, and of the OIC Charter, the organization has been predominantly a political one. During the early discussions on the drafting of the Charter, there was considerable argument about its proper aims. One faction argued that it should be entirely political, aimed at dealing with the problems of Jerusalem and Palestine. A second faction argued for something much wider and more nebulous and wished to emphasize closer cooperation in economic, cultural, social, scientific, and technological matters. Although the second faction was successful as far as the Charter went, the political side has in fact prevailed in practice. However, the plethora of nonpolitical subsidiary organizations established by the OIC is due in part to the strength of the nonpolitical group, whose members have generally taken the lead in proposing their establishment, in providing funding, and in giving the main impetus for their activities.
The attitudes of member states toward the OIC thus vary considerably. Saudi Arabia almost certainly sees it as a vehicle to bring influence to bear and as an institution in which it can reasonably hope to wield influence more actively and more widely than could be the case in other forums. In this, Saudi Arabia has been successful in that it has been able to use the nonpolitical aspirations of other members and the prospect of additional funding to further its own political objectives, sometimes in the face of more radical opposition. One example is the way in which Saudi Arabia used the OIC to legitimize its imposition of quotas on the number of Iranian pilgrims attending the 1988 hajj. Members agreed at the January 1988 meeting of foreign ministers in Amman to limit the number of pilgrims from member states to a maximum of 1,000 pilgrims per one million population. The ostensible reason was a Saudi plea for reduced numbers because of major construction works in the Haramayn (holy places of Mecca and Medina). An equally striking example is the way in which Saudi Arabia led the campaign for the suspension of Egypt following the Camp David Accords; it later was able to force through the readmission of Egypt in 1984 in the face of strong opposition.
Saudi Arabia has, throughout the history of the organization, been a major contributor to funding for all purposes. This, coupled with the early Saudi success in ensuring an institutional framework for the organization and in making Jeddah the location of that framework pending the liberation of Jerusalem, has meant that Saudi Arabia has played a dominant role in the OIC. (Since 1975 when the Islamic Development Bank began operation, its president has been a Saudi.) Although this role has been reduced to some extent over the years by internecine strife, the wider interests of the larger membership, and the insistence of non-Arab members (the majority of members) on broader concerns, the develop ment of the OIC can be seen as one of the success stories of Saudi foreign policy.
Pakistan’s attitude is probably a combination of two strands. On the one hand, Pakistan has felt itself surrounded by potential enemies and therefore vulnerable. On the other hand, there is no doubt that the devotion of Pakistani elites to Islam is genuine: it therefore sees the OIC as a means of strengthening ties with other Muslim states and also as a vehicle through which to seek reassurance. A case in point is the manner in which Pakistan orchestrated pressure on the Soviet Union over Afghanistan through the OIC.
Arab members generally are more overtly political than others and have seized upon the organization as yet another means of publicizing their views on the ArabIsrael dispute and gaining support for their policies. Because of the common religious and cultural tradition and the importance of Jerusalem in Islam, the Arab states have been able to islamize the dispute in terms of rhetoric. However, there is little sign that non-Arab members are prepared to take any effective action.
Nigeria unexpectedly became a full member of the OIC in January 1986. It seems likely that the government’s reasons were wholly domestic-an attempt to buy off its Muslim constituency-and that there were no foreign policy considerations. There is evidence that the government was lured into joining the OIC by influential Nigerian Muslims who persuaded it that there would be no political repercussions. There was, however, a serious Christian backlash, not surprising for a country in which Muslim/Christian tension is never far below the surface. After several unsuccessful attempts to find a compromise solution, Nigeria’s membership is effectively in limbo, and although Nigeria continues to be represented in OIC deliberations, it takes little part in them. Zanzibar briefly acceded to the OIC in December 1992, ostensibly to gain access to Islamic Development Bank funds. However, the Tanzanian government deemed the accession unconstitutional and Zanzibar withdrew from the OIC in August 1993.
Iran’s position is ambivalent. Before the revolution Iran probably shared the same perceptions as did Saudi Arabia, though it would have seen its role and influence as more significant. Since the revolution, Iran has consistently denounced the OIC as a front to further Saudi foreign-policy aims, the most notable case being the OIC endorsement of the hajj quota system in 1988. Iran also perceived the organization as biased in favor of Iraq, with which it fought a bloody war for eight years.
Yet at the Dakar summit in 1991, President Hashemi Rafsanjani used the occasion to promote Iran-at least rhetorically-as the chief guardian of the Palestinian jihad.
Iraq probably saw the OIC as a means to further its attempts to exert influence in the Arab and Third Worlds, and as a useful instrument in reducing its isolation. Throughout the conflict with Iran, Iraq sought to influence OIC deliberations and the activities of the Islamic Peace Committee in favor of the Iraqi version of events. However, the Iraqis boycotted the 1991 summit meeting, which came after their disastrous defeat in the war following the invasion of Kuwait. Although King Fahd of Saudi Arabia also stayed away from the meeting, the Iraqi government denounced the OIC as a Saudi institution sympathetic to Kuwait’s wish to maintain sanctions against Iraq.
The poorer member states have undoubtedly seen the OIC as an additional channel through which to lobby for financial assistance, for extending the free flow of labor, and thus for maintaining and if possible increasing the flow of remittances from emigre workers, particularly in the Arabian Peninsula. As a result, despite routine grumbles about what they see as concentration on Arab issues, they are willing to acquiesce in the status quo in return for the benefits available.
The OIC is far from “fundamentalist” in attitude and tone (using the term as it is generally understood today). The member states are represented by their governments, not by religious leaders, and the organization does not have the establishment of a universal Islamic community or ummah as an eventual aim. Its relations with the outside world are based on cooperation, not confrontation, and during the Cold War it was much closer to the West than to the Soviet bloc. Nor is there any discernible fundamentalist influence within the Secretariat, whose officials are professional diplomats from member states. Nevertheless, the rise in Islamist challenges to the political establishments of several member states-Algeria, Tunisia, and Egypt, among others-has led to concern in certain official quarters over the “enemies within” and to anger at Iran for allegedly supporting them.
Activities. An examination of resolutions passed by the OIC over the years shows that the organization has become a natural forum in which to raise issues affecting the Muslim world or particular Muslim countries, and it has successfully engineered a broad consensus on a number of matters. However, it has been selective on the specific issues on which it seeks to take action beyond the passage of resolutions. In the political sphere, it has regularly called for Israeli withdrawal from Arab territories, recognition of the rights of the Palestinians and of the Palestine Liberation Organization as their sole legitimate representative, and the restoration of Jerusalem to Arab rule. It has also worked actively, though without much practical effect (through the Islamic Peace Committee established in 1 98 1 , initially chaired by the Secretary-General and later by President Jawara of Gambia), to try to bring an end to the conflict. It was also influential in coordinating international opposition to the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. The annual resolution on this issue at the UN General Assembly was drafted by the Afghanistan Committee.
In other disputes, the secretary-general offered to mediate in the Somali civil war and denounced the Indian government’s inability to protect Muslims in the wake of the destruction of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya in late 1992. Both acts, however, had no discernible effect. The Bosnian crisis has agitated Muslim opinion throughout the world, with Malaysia, Pakistan, and Iran particularly urging more decisive support, perhaps even military assistance, for the Bosnian Muslims. At a special meeting in Jeddah in December 1992, the OIC gave the Security Council a deadline of 15 January 1993 to take further measures in support of the Muslims or, failing that, unspecified Muslim collective action would be taken. At the Karachi Foreign Ministers’ meeting in May 1993, a concrete plan for action once again failed to materialize. In July 1993, an emergency meeting of foreign ministers offered to contribute several thousand troops to the United Nations peacekeeping effort in the former Yugoslavia.
In the cultural field, the OIC has been active in support of education for Muslim communities throughout the world and, through the Islamic Solidarity Fund, has helped to establish Islamic universities in Malaysia, Niger, Uganda, and Bangladesh. It has also given support to publications on Islam in both Muslim and Western countries.
Assistance is also given to Muslim communities which have been affected by civil and other wars and natural disasters, largely in cooperation with UN agencies, particularly the UN High Commission for Refugees. Much of this aid has been concentrated in the Sahel region of Africa, though other deserving cases are also given help.
The OIC has also been active in support of Muslim minorities throughout the world, particularly those that are repressed or discriminated against. Thus it is active in support of the Muslim minorities in Bulgaria and the Philippines. Here as well, it is selective in the causes it actively supports, and although there have been contacts with China, it gives little practical support to the Muslim communities there, preferring to remain on reasonable terms with the regime.
Conclusions. Despite its wide range of activities, the OIC remains an essentially political organization to which the nearest analogue is probably the British Commonwealth. The differences of interest and emphasis between member states are likely to prevent a greater degree of solidarity than that existing today, and critics will continue to denounce it as a conservative, Saudicontrolled institution or an ineffective “talking shop”or indeed both. Differences of interest among member states were particularly apparent during the Gulf crisis of 1990-1991. However, most members like members of the Commonwealth, see advantage in belonging to an organization, however loosely knit it may be, which facilitates a cohesive stance on certain issues without inhibiting disagreement and the pursuit of narrow national interests, and through which support for national policies on international issues can be sought.
Although the OIC has been in existence for only about a quarter-century, it has served to focus the attention of the Muslim world on the more important political, social, and economic issues of the day. It has developed a degree of muscle in all three fields, it has served to draw attention to the main concerns of a sizable proportion of the world’s population, and it is taken seriously by other international organizations. Although writing before the momentous events in world politics associated with the end of the Cold War, a commentator on the 1981 summit in Mecca pointed to the OIC’s importance in the following words:
As an international organisation, the Islamic conference seems at least as dynamic as others for which the OIC has expressed strong support (e.g., the Non-Aligned Movement, the OAU and the Arab League). Strong support for the principles of the United Nations along with the appearance of the Secretary-General of the UN at the summit is proof positive that the OIC does not see itself as a restricted sectarian group but rather as an organisation with an important role to play in modern world politics.

OMAN

Batoota — Fri, 16 Jun 2017 16:05:32 +0000

OMAN. Although a major component of its distinctiveness derives from Ibadi Islam, Oman is religiously, ethnically, and geographically complex. Its estimated 1992 population of 1,500,000 (17 percent noncitizens) included an Ibadi population of 40 to 45 percent; 50 to 55 percent were Sunni; and no more than 2 percent were Shiah

Roughly the size of Arizona, Oman was relatively isolated and underdeveloped until 1970, when the current ruler, Sultan Qabus ibn Said, usurped his father, Sa’id ibn Taymur (r. 1932-1970), in a palace coup. Except for a few Sunni bedouin tribes, the “inner Oman” of the northern interior, a string of oases separated from the coast by the imposing Hajar mountain range, remains almost exclusively Ibadi and Arab. In contrast, the towns and villages of the Batinah coast, a narrow strip of oases 10 to 20 miles wide, are polyglot and multiethnic, with Arabs (Sunni and Ibadi), Baluch (mostly Sunni), Persians (mostly Sunni and Shi’i), and the Sindi- and Arabic-speaking Liwatiyah (who are Shi’ah) among the principal groups. The settled coastal population and the cattle-herding tribes of the mountainous interior of the southern province of Dhofar (Zufar) are almost exclusively Sunni, as is the remote Musandam peninsula in the north.
From the mid-eighteenth to the mid-twentieth century, the major theme of Omani political and religious history was the conflict between dynastic rule by an Ibadi sultan and rule by an imam, a spiritual and temporal leader chosen by a consensus of Ibadi tribal notables and religious scholars.
Since the late eighteenth century, no sultan of the Al Bu Said dynasty, which has ruled Oman continuously since 1744, has asserted the title of imam except for a brief interval from 1868 to 1871. From the midseventeenth century until Britain’s ascendancy in the Persian Gulf in the early nineteenth century, Oman’s domains included Zanzibar and the East African coast, and the energies of the Al Bu Said dynasty were largely focused away from the Omani interior. By the late nineteenth century, however, the sultanate lost these possessions and entered an economic decline. On several occasions only British intervention prevented tribes from the interior acting in the name of the imam from overthrowing the dynasty.
In formal doctrine, the imamate was the ideal Muslim state. In principle, the imam al-muslimin (“imam of the Muslims”) ruled solely by Islamic law, legitimating actions according to precedents attributed to the prophet Muhammad and his first two successors, Abu Bakr (d. 632) and `Umar (d. 634). In principle, imams were selected on the basis of their moral qualities, knowledge of the Qur’an and Islamic tradition, and capacity for governing; in practice, their selection was the exclusive province of an oligarchic tribal elite. For example, the last imam on whom all tribes agreed, Muhammad ibn `Abd Allah al-Khalili (r. 1920-1954), who sold his personal estates to sustain the imamate as its resources dwindled, was the twentieth of a long line of imams selected from his immediate tribal group.
From 1913 until 1955, the northern interior was one of the world’s last theocracies, ruled by a succession of imams. This arrangement, which did not rule out cooperation between the sultan and the imam (whom the sultan recognized only as a tribal leader) ended in 1955 when Sa’id ibn Taymfir, backed by British troops financed primarily by an oil company, assumed direct control over the region. The imamate continued in exile in Saudi Arabia, and a Saudi-supported rebellion against dynastic rule (1957-1959) was suppressed with British support.
There is little overt sectarian friction in contemporary Oman, although the end of its isolation-in particular, that of the Ibadiyah-has brought major changes in how Islam is expressed and practiced. Until 1970, Oman was almost devoid of modern educational facilities, and Omanis who left the country for education were discouraged from returning. After 1970, the country’s educational institutions developed rapidly, and mass communication permeated even remote villages.
The exposure of large numbers of Omanis to schooling and mass media has altered the style and content of Islam in Oman. For example, in “inner” Oman, only the imam gave regular Friday sermons until 1955. Beginning in the early 180, however, younger, educated Ibads began to ask for sermons like those delivered in Sunni and Shi`i congregational mosques. The government cautiously accommodated this request, setting up a committee to “guide” sermon content. Likewise, mosques named after Sultan Qabus were constructed in larger towns-in Nizwa on the site of the imam’s former mosque-and institutes were created to train religious teachers. Since 19’70 Oman has also had an appointed mufti, or authoritative interpreter of religious doctrine. Although the post is formally unaffiliated with any sect, the first two muftis have been Ibadi. The mufti speaks on public occasions, issues fatwds (religious opinions), and represents the sultanate at international Islamic conferences.
The ruler’s public addresses, like the content of Islamic studies in schools, scrupulously avoid sectarian issues. For instance, the hadith (sayings of the Prophet) included in school texts are only those on which Sunni, Midi, and Shi’ah agree. However, Oman’s reentry into the wider Islamic world has led to a more-explicit discussion of religious doctrine and practice than was formerly the case. Thus, in late 1986, a leading Saudi religious scholar issued a fatwa accusing Shaykh Ahmad ibn Hamad al-Khalili, Oman’s mufti since 1975-and, by implication, all Ibadiyah–of kufr (heresy). In early 1987, al-Khalili replied in a two-hour television address, offering the first contemporary formulation of Ibadi doctrine in Oman. Another of the mufti’s talks, “Who is an Ibadi?” originated in a reply to an Omani student in the United States who requested guidance after “Sunni brothers” questioned whether the Ibadiyah should lead Muslim prayers. These examples suggest how higher education and modern conditions have led Omanis, like Muslims elsewhere, to reformulate doctrine and practice.
[See also Ibadi Dynasty; Ibadiyah.]
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Eickelman, Christine. Women and Community in Oman. New York, 1984. Provides insight into women’s religious practices in an oasis of “inner” Oman.
Eickelman, Dale F. “From Theocracy to Monarchy: Authority and Legitimacy in Inner Oman, 1935-1957.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 17 (February 1985): 3-i4. Describes the practical workings of the twentieth-century imamate and its assimilation into sultanate rule.
Eickelman, Dale F. “Ibadism and the Sectarian Perspective.” In Oman: Economic, Social, and Strategic Developments, edited by B. R. Pridham, pp. 31-50. London, 1987. Discusses the changing meaning of “sectarianism” as Oman has lost its former isolation. Eickelman, Dale F. “National Identity and Religious Discourse in Contemporary Oman.” International Journal of Islamic and Arabic Studies 6 (1989): 1-z0. Assesses how mass higher education and the mass media have changed Islamic thought and practice in Oman. Khalili, Ahmad ibn Hamad al-. Who Are the Ibadhis? Translated by A. H. al-Maamiry. Zanzibar, n.d. Although available only through research libraries, this booklet stands out as the most comprehensive expression in English of contemporary Ibadi belief in Oman. Peterson, J. E. Oman in the Twentieth Century: Political Foundations of an Emerging State. London, 1978. The best overall introduction to contemporary Omani political history and religious development. Wilkinson, John C. The Imamate Tradition in OIan. Cambridge, 1987. Difficult but essential reference by a former oil company geographer. Sociologically limited but comprehensive in use of Arabic and European sources.
DALE F. EICKELMAN