Ottoman History Podcast - Central Asians and the Ottoman Empire

Episode Date: April 18, 2015

with Lale Can hosted by Chris Gratien Within nationalist understandings of Turkish identity, connections between Central Asia and the people of modern Turkey are often conceived of in terms of ancient genealogy of Turkic peoples. But as our guest in this episode of Ottoman History Podcast Lale Can illustrates, much more recent bonds forged not by ethnic but rather spiritual affinity during the Ottoman period point to enduring connections between Central Asia and the Ottoman Empire maintained through migration and pilgrimage. In this episode, we discuss Dr. Can's work on Central Asians moving in the Ottoman Empire and the transformation of travel and pilgrimage during the late nineteenth century century. « Click for More »

Hello and welcome to another episode of Ottoman History Podcast. I'm Chris Grayton. One of the major themes that we've been covering on Ottoman History Podcast is, of course, the connections between the Ottoman Empire and other parts of the world, both the Muslim world and, indeed, the entire globe. Some of our episodes have focused on, for example, the lives of Chinese Muslims and the connections between China and the Ottoman Empire. We've also looked at connections between the Ottoman Empire and Africa, Zanzibar and the Sahara. Today, we're exploring connections between the Ottoman Empire and a larger space of our world, Central Asia. Our guest today is Dr. Laleh Jan, an assistant professor of history at City College of New York, CUNY. Her forthcoming book manuscript, provisionally entitled Spiritual Citizens, Central Asians, and the Politics of Pilgrimage in the Ottoman Empire,

spiritual citizens, Central Asians, and the politics of pilgrimage in the Ottoman Empire, deals with the connections between the space called Central Asia that we'll talk about a little bit and important sites of pilgrimage in the Ottoman Empire, which include not just the Arabian Peninsula, but also Istanbul and other important Sufi sites as well. So, Dr. John, welcome to the podcast. Hi, thanks for having me. So, Laleh, if I may, I'm really excited to have you on the podcast today. I've been familiar with your research for a while. It's really unique research that ties together these two spaces, not by looking at diplomacy and the relationships between political entities in Central Asia and

the Ottoman Empire so much, but rather following the connections between these spaces that are woven by the movements of people. So, you know, as we mentioned here, a lot of this movement is for the purposes of pilgrimage, which plays not just an important spiritual function in the lives of people, but various functions. So I guess my first question starting off is just, how did you come to study this subject of pilgrimage as a window onto the connections between Central Asia and the Ottoman Empire and the lives of people in that region? That's a good question, Chris. I actually started grad school

with the intent of studying Central Asian history, and I wanted to write a social history of anti-Tsarist resistance in the Fargana Valley. And there was one uprising in 1898, the Andijan Uprising, that I was reading quite a bit about in my studies. And I was very interested in writing about that account. So I headed to Uzbekistan for a semester in my, I think it was my second year of graduate school.

And I did quite a bit of research there. And my intention was to sort of understand the broader social, economic, political factors leading to this uprising in the, this was the Russian colony of Turkestan, the governor generalship, because the uprising had previously been studied mainly as a sort of Sufi revolt that was led by religious fervor, whatnot. So that's, that is what initially took me to Central Asia. One claim in the revolt was that the leader of the uprising, who was a Naqshbandi Sheikh who had traveled to the Ottoman Empire, had been given a Farman and a ceremonial robe from Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid II. And so I was very interested in not just the claim, which was probably false, right? Because I mean, the Ottomans

are not going to be supporting this uprising. But the resonance of that claim among the followers. So there were purported to be 2,000 people who had taken part in the revolt. And so I was very curious as to why such a claim would be made, how that would convince people to take part in the revolt. And usually it had been traditionally ascribed to pan-Islamism and potential Ottoman provocateurs in the region. So in any case, to make a long story short, the project never really got fully underway.

I had gone to Uzbekistan, filled out all the paperwork saying I was going to work on anti-state resistance in the Faragana Valley. And in 2005, there was anti-state resistance in the Faragana Valley and the archives were shut down to foreign researchers. I already was not sure that I wanted to spend too much more time working in Central Asia because the conditions are difficult. So I then redesigned the project

and headed to the Ottoman archives with that question in mind of, well, what types of connections existed between this region in the Fargana Valley in Russian Turkestan and the Ottoman Empire that would lead people to put stock in this claim that Abdulhamid supported resistance against the czar. And so while maybe other research on the connections between Central Asia and the Ottoman Empire, as in the case of other parts of the Muslim world, would emphasize the importance of pan-Islam as a political discourse. You're looking at the human connections between Central Asia and the Ottoman Empire. Yeah, very much so.

I mean, one of the things that definitely drives my research and that I went into the archive looking for was to sort of, to understand how these people, right, this is the age of mass pilgrimage, you know, how did these people understand the power of the Ottoman Sultan, right, the Sultan as caliph. So I was basically not convinced that pan-Islamism as an ideology is something that was propagated is what would, what would drive people's mobility or their beliefs in the possibility of Ottoman support. Right. And so instead, you know, what I, what I endeavored to do was then to look at their actual interactions with Ottoman state and society. And so what, what I endeavored to do was then to look at their actual interactions with Ottoman state and society.

And so what was the main thing that brought them into contact with the state? That was pilgrimage. And then through that process of pilgrimage, which if we think of it not just as a journey to Mecca and back, but a protracted journey through Ottoman lands that brought people into contact with state and society in different ways, then you see all of these encounters in terms of petitioning, right, various forms of Ottoman patronage and philanthropy, staying in Ottoman institutions, being treated in Ottoman hospitals, right? And it's a complicated story. It's not always a rosy picture. We know that the Hajj entails lots of hardship but uh different ways of experiencing ottoman power uh or ways of forming conceptions of the ottoman sultan's

powers right and and and in this process i guess the pilgrims and the the migrants you're studying are um finding a way to understand their place in a broader global Muslim community and the conception of that community that's taking shape during this time. Yes, and one person who's written quite a bit about this recently is Niall Green. So the idea that, and earlier Adib Khalid, that there's the new conception of a alem-e-Islam, which I mentioned before, you know, a world of Islam. And, you know, where do these pilgrims and these migrants fit into that, right?

So especially in travel accounts, you see this idea emerging. And, you know, while Mecca might be the heart, right, the holy lands of Islam, Istanbul becomes sort of the temporal, the political capital of this Islamic world. And it seems, you know, through the types of sources and the research that I've done, that people did feel that they, you know, that they could stake a claim of belonging to that world, right, through making demands, or if you want to call them, I tend to call them demands, but you can think of them as supplications in petitions for certain rights, for certain types of sultanic charity. And so you've mentioned the Fergana Valley, which is part of what we today call Central Asia, situated in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan.

But, I mean, okay, so when we say Central Asians in the Ottoman Empire, what is the region we're talking about? And to the extent that this is a coherent region during this time period, what makes Central Asia Central Asia? So that's a great question, Chris. The region that I work on, Russian and Chinese Turkestan. And when I say Russian Turkestan, I mean the governor generalship of Turkestan, which comprised mostly of the former Hanids of Khokhand, plus the dynastic states of Buhara and Khiva.

Chinese Turkestan, I mean mainly the areas around Kashgar and its environs, the cities of Altaşehir, that Ryan Thum has recently written an excellent book about. So that's sort of the area that I focus on mainly. To a lesser extent, people from northern Afghanistan, which become more important as I deal with questions of extraterritoriality

and sort of the claims of the British to protect people from various parts of the region. But that's mainly the area. So in the Ottoman sources, it's translated usually as Asya-i Vusta for the broader region and Turkistan-i Chini for so-called Chinese Turkistan. One thing that I should add, though, that I found really interesting is that probably going back to the early modern era, because the Ottomans mainly had relations with Buhara, there was a tendency in a lot of the sources to describe all of Central Asia, I would say with the exception of Chinese Turkestan, as Buhara.

Oh, that's interesting. Yeah, so in a lot of places, you'll see people referred to as a Buharan, and then the source will go on to say, you know, so-and-so who's a Buharan who is from the city of Margadan, right, which is not in Buhara, right? And so you see that quite a bit, and probably there's a sort of association of Central Asians with Buhara that becomes a sort of misleading designation for the broader area. And so the view from Istanbul is kind of this vague, like, Central Asian region where the politics aren't necessarily clear. And, you know, from the perspective of geopolitics, it's kind of a region where there's competition.

There's the British South Asia, which is kind of extending into this territory. You have China coming from the east and, of course, Russia coming from the west. And so, of course, there's a lot of political fragmentation and change that's going on in this region. And this would even raise issues regarding nationality and citizenship, as you'll probably talk about. But in terms of its cultural coherence, I mean, what we have is, of course, this, what we might call Turkic-Persianite culture of people speaking various languages from those two families. And of course course the role of Islam and especially Sufism, which I guess is what really links this region to the Ottoman Empire and the issue of pilgrimage. Yes, there's definitely a long-standing tradition of Sufi networks that linked Central Asia to the Ottoman lands, right? So in Dina Lugal's study, for

example, we see in the early modern period how the Naqshbandiya were very central to forging connections between Central Asia and the Ottoman Empire. And this continues into the 19th century. In the mid-18th century, there are actually a number of Central Asian Sufi lodges that are established in Istanbul, in places like Tarsus. There are important lodges in Jerusalem. Actually, I can't speak to the dates that those lodges are established, but the ones in Istanbul go back to the mid-18th century mainly. It's part of a larger sort of network that people patronize as they're traveling across the empire, right?

So in the early modern period, and actually into the early 19th century, I would say that it's a lot of emissaries who are traveling from the region, from Buhara, from Samarkand, from cities that are associated with a certain type of cultural capital, religious capital. Emissaries, dervishes, ulama,

who often write and ask, you know, who are seen as men of honor, right, who are given sort of special permissions to travel and treated with a great deal of respect. And this starts to change in the 19th century. So the network of Sufi lodges is still there. So I would say, though, that in my own work on this, I'm not treating necessarily everyone who's traveling and that stays in any of these lodges or frequents them as, you know, a Sufi. Right. This is an institutional or structural framework. But of course, these are all sorts of individuals who are undertaking this travel. Right.

And I don't know how they would self-identify. Right. I mean, I don't know if you ask someone in 1890 or in 1905, you know, are you a Sufi? I'm not sure how they would answer that question. So they might be an adept of some Naqshbandi order or a different order. They might go to, you know, the Thursday evening rituals at a particular lodge, but I'm not sure if they would call themselves that.

But they are definitely, a lot of the people who are traveling are staying in these Sufi lodges that often function as sort of hostels or sort of urban caravanserais. And so, I mean, we can't generalize about why all of these people were traveling, but of course, the locations you named, Istanbul, Tarsus, Jerusalem, this is part of the land route of the most common Hajj pilgrimage during the early modern period. Yes, well, barring Istanbul, right? I mean, so I would say that in the early modern period, people were traveling in a variety of ways, but Istanbul was not necessarily a place that people would visit unless they were dignitaries who were dispatched on some sort of diplomatic mission to go to Istanbul. So what is the route from the Faragana Valley before the

19th century if you're headed, for example, to Mecca? So there, I mean, the shortest routes would be probably through Iran, right? Iran and then onward from there. And of course, you have this old sort of barrier of heterodoxy argument that has actually been very effectively challenged by Robert McChesney and others. So that's one possibility, people could have traveled in that way. People could have traveled across the steppe and through the Caspian region, then into Anatolia and southward. So Tarsus, the Adana region, Damascus, these would be places that people would ultimately end up in Damascus and join the caravans. So those are some possibilities. And then, of course, there's the route through India, right? I mean, so historically,

and which continues to be a very important route into the modern period. So lots of people, especially from China and from the Faragana Valley, as well as Buhara, you know, they might travel through Afghanistan and then into India and then onward from there to the Arabian Peninsula so but this all of course changes with the sort of the revolution in steam and steamships and rail travel where Istanbul emerges as one of these new nodes of of travel right new hajj, as they are often referred to in the literature, where ordinary people, right? The so-called pauper pilgrims, and I always say that with the imaginary quotation marks,

where ordinary people are able now to travel on this rather circuitous route through the Ottoman capital as they make their way to Arabia. And that, you know, by the 1880s, Istanbul becomes, you know, a destination in and of itself for many people, right? That's fascinating. So, I mean, I'm familiar with the Indian Ocean route, like that the steamships leave South Asia and arrive to the Arabian Peninsula. But you're saying that another aspect or another kind of route of steam travel from Central Asia to eventual Mecca is indeed, I guess, across the Black Sea on steamships to Istanbul, and then from there through the Ottoman Empire. Right. So you have, you know, with the construction

of new rail lines, which reaches Samarkand in 1888 and Tashkent in 1899, you have people who are boarding trains from Russian Turkestan and then taking them to steam ships that travel across the Chasmian and then rail again and then into the Black Sea. And then they're traveling to port cities in the Black Sea, like Odessa, the Black Sea, and then they're traveling to port cities in the Black Sea, like Odessa, Sevastopol, and then from there on to Istanbul, and then from Istanbul then on to Egypt, making use also of the Suez Canal, right, and then continue on to Jeddah. So this is a whole new route that is written about quite a bit in the travel accounts that I work with. And, you know, it's an alternate way to travel rather than going through India that promises people the opportunity to see the Sultan, right? The Sultan Caliph. And it's often, you know, in the literature, the way that people describe this is that usually

that people went to seek the ceremonial blessing of the Sultan at Friday prayers, right? So, you know, there are descriptions of this in one hajj account that I'm reading, which was written at the turn of the century by an alim, Muhammad Zahid Tashkandi. And he describes, you know, being able to see the face of the sultan. And he describes this scene of the sultan, you know flanked by by his guards and arriving on on a palanquin is that the right word um i'm thinking of sedum they didn't get his work right and sort of the invention of tradition and sort of the the ways in which the power of the sultan is promoted right and um and you very much see that reflected in the account where the author is describing the pomp and circumstance surrounding the Friday prayers

and is very impressed by the ceremonies. So it's almost like one of the destinations on the stop of this Hajj pilgrimage is to kind of go and see the ceremony with the Sultan in Istanbul. And of course, probably lots of other things that one could do in Istanbul while there. Yeah, definitely.

So just seeing the city itself, right? Wandering the streets, seeing the colorful markets. And, you know, I don't really work on the economic dimensions of this, but a lot of these people are merchants, right? A lot of people who are traveling to the region. And the same author, Tashkendi, he goes on and on about the markets and the colorful stalls and the bolts of fabric. And he's very impressed by all of this. And then leaving that aside,

there's arriving in Istanbul during Ramadan and visiting the different cathedral mosques and going for teravih prayers. And the city then is presented as sort of also a spiritual destination, right? He writes at length about listening to the Quran being recited in the various mosques and how after this really long, very arduous journey, right, that involves like his ship almost capsizing,

all of these horrible conditions, people are crammed into second and third class quarters and the steamships and the trains and whatnot. It's in Istanbul that the dust is lifted from their hearts. That's how he describes it. And then this sort of spiritual dimension of the city is also augmented by visiting the shrine of E Ayyub al-Ansari, Ayyub Sultan, which becomes also a very popular destination.

And so I would actually venture to say that, you know, for the shrine visitation culture of Central Asians, this becomes another, you know, a new place that people start to visit, maybe replacing other shrines that they used to visit. That's a very fascinating view of Istanbul during this 19th century period, because you have this extraordinary growth of Istanbul, right? But normally we talk about, for example, the growth of Perah, the growth of the European section of Istanbul, the influx of foreigners, the influx of the economic changes that took

place during that time. But here you're saying that also, you know, the Ottoman capital took on a spiritual significance that perhaps became greater with these new kind of transportation networks that allowed people to come to the capital. You know, there's some stuff written on, you know, how air travel has affected the pilgrimage, right? That now people can fly directly to Mecca and how it changes it. And it's almost like flying Disney World, right? You just drop in and come back out.

Here we see a transformation like that occurring, like with the steamship and the railway, it changes the journey, but it's not exactly that kind of, we can't think of the pilgrimage as just going to Mecca, right? It's going to all these other places. Yeah, definitely.

And I mean, I teach a class on pilgrimage, and that's one point that I try to make to my students, where I try to drive home that point, that this is not a question of getting on a plane, going, performing the rites, stoning Satan, and then completing the rituals, and then returning. The pilgrimage, in many ways, is transformed in this era. And it's not only transformed for elites, right? It's not something that sort of reformists, reformers and intellectuals are interested in doing in terms of seeing the broader world and critiquing perhaps their own societies through writing about the different places that they've visited. It's transformed for these, you know, for these ordinary people.

And I keep using this term for lack of a better term. You know, sometimes I refer to them as non-elites. I try to shy away from the use of subaltern because I'm not sure that that's the right term in this context. But, you know, these are butchers, bakers, glaziers, day laborers, farmers, metal workers, all of these sorts of people. And it seems like going to Istanbul becomes something that involves also a type of prestige, right? That they can say that they went and they saw the lands of Rum,

that they saw the Sultan Caliph. And also, again, there is a sort of economic dimension to this. Some people stay in the city for a while. And this network of of Sufi lodges makes that possible where people can stay in the city and work for a bit and save up some money. Right. over and over the authors are saying you have to go and you have to see these places for yourself. Nothing that I say, my pen cannot do justice to the wonders and the marvels that you should see. It's in Istanbul that you hear this and then of course in Mecca and Medina.

In the sources that I read, they do not involve travel to Jerusalem. Oh, interesting. Right. But I'm not sure if that's something particular to the particular hajj namiz that I've been reading, or if it's also related to the roots, right, the steamship roots. Absolutely, of course. So that Jerusalem would be a whole other level of travel that would make the journey even longer.

So that too is, you see the beginning of a transformation there. Although people still are going to Jerusalem, I mean, because that does come up quite a bit in sources that I've read where people, you know, random things like people in Jerusalem were given tizkirei osmanie, like while they were in Jerusalem, by a sheikh, and then they're traveling somewhere else. And it's, like while they were in Jerusalem by a sheikh and then they're traveling somewhere else and it's not clear why they were given this and

if they're foreigners or if they're Ottomans. Well, you know, one of the things I'm interested in is this issue of petitions that you mentioned earlier how Central Asians, once they're in the Ottoman Empire, start to engage with that broader sort of political community.

But, you know, one of the things I want to ask here is, can you give us a sense of the volume of pilgrim traffic from Central Asia to the Ottoman Empire during this period? To what extent do we see an increase? How significant? How can we measure it? And, you know, sort of how many are coming from the Indian Ocean versus across Central Asia? There's a huge increase in the 1880s and the 1890s in the numbers. I don't know that I have really reliable statistics to answer this question as well as I would like. I mean, I've seen some some really inflated, what I see as really inflated numbers, new research that I read where there are claims of, you know, upwards of 100,000 people coming from the broader Central Asia and Caucasus region, which I don't really use, like Daniel Brower and his earlier research, Eileen Kane, and Norihiro Naganawa. It seems like in the 1890s,

there are 5,000 to 10,000 people traveling through Ottoman lands. And it really depends on harvests. So the numbers can really depend on the cotton yield of a given year. So, you know, there are dips. Like one recent study by Naginawa, he cites figures from the Russian consulate in Jeddah from 1893, where the consul the consuls recorded 4,300 or some odd Russians traveling through Bombay, Russian Muslims, and another 1,800 or so through Suez, right? So that seems more reasonable to me. Again, so anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 a year. I don't know if that includes Chinese Muslims, so-called Chinese Muslims. Here I mean people coming from Chinese Turkestan. But I definitely don't think that the numbers are nearly as high as Indian Muslims, for example,

or Javanese Muslims that are traveling from other parts of the world. But again, it's really hard to say with any level of definitiveness. The Ottoman sources, in various sources, you have ministers complaining about the numbers and saying, but there too, it seems like, you know, in the early 1900s, the Ministry of the Interior reports that 2,000 people from Buhara and its environs were passing through Istanbul en route to the Hejaz, right? So the numbers are really not that high. Right. It depends how we define it, but we're talking about, you know, kind of maximum tens of thousands of people per year or even less. Yeah, I would say, you know, maybe 10,000 or so.

But again, because I have not been able to find reliable statistics, you'd have to sort of piece this together through British records of the Hajj, Russian sources doing research in Russian imperial archives. But the cents that I have, again, is 5,000 to 10,000 per year. And one of the intriguing things you said there is actually that the numbers could vary a lot depending on the economic situation in Central Asia, right? This is an area of cotton cultivation. Right. During this period, it's sort of expanding.

It's the Russian cotton plantations of Central Asia. And so a bad year means nobody has cash. No hajj this year, right, for a lot of people. So you see how this discretionary income starts to play a role in people's vacation you know vacation choices we can call or but there is of course the famous pilgrimage right you know i actually think vacation choice also makes sense because i mean where else are these people going on vacation right i mean this is the the journey of a lifetime if you're going to set out to go on hajj to mecca

you might as well see as much of the world as you can and that's also i think what dictates people's choices to travel through istanbul in a lot of ways. And so for the remainder of our discussion, you know, we've talked a lot about the movements and the connections of people. But I want to, you know, I know you're very interested in the social history of these communities. And a lot of what your forthcoming book is going to deal with is sort of the life of these people in the Ottoman lands to the extent that we can study that. And, you know, we have these Sufi lodges. We have this sort of permanent presence of small enclaves of Central Asians.

And, of course, these are the communities that sort of facilitate those larger movements through the Ottoman Empire. You know, being that these pilgrims are staying for a while and often maybe don't have an exact clear plan of when they're going to return back to their homes during the pilgrimage. I mean, what is their life like while they're in the Ottoman Empire? What are some of the issues that come up and how do they engage with broader Ottoman society?

That's a very big question. So, I mean, I'll try to answer to the best of my ability. In Istanbul, you know, I've been able to sort of piece together some sense of what life would be like for someone staying in this one particular lodge, right? The Sultan Tepe Lodge in Üsküdar, which was one of the prominent Central Asian lodges often referred to as the Özbekler Tekkese. prominent Central Asian lodges, often referred to as the Uzbekdar Tekkese. So I was able to gain access to the private records of the Tekkese.

And what you see there is people are working. They're going out to work as domestic servants, working in various households, in tea houses, going to work at hans in old parts of the old city. So I know that there were, there was a strong presence in and around Mahmoud Pasha, for example, lots of Central Asians who were involved, who were artisans. So people might have been working in that area. So people are definitely working, they're sort of, they're staying for extended periods. I mean, there are records of people who've lived at the lodge for 20 years, for example. And no one was allowed to stay at the lodge for extended periods without working. So, you know, I think that definitely they were sort of very much part of the urban fabric of the city.

And then there are snippets of things that are going on in the lodge, you know, that i find really fascinating and that kind of give you a sense that remind you also sort of when we're dealing with this sort of pilgrimage that you know these are still again just they're regular people and they're living their lives and this involves all sorts of things right so you have um you have people who are thrown out of the lodge for various things like playing cards at the cafe at the coffee house, for coming back at night drunk, for smoking hashish, right? All of these types of things, violations of the norms of the lodge. So that would give you a sense of sort of how they're involved in different aspects of the life of the neighborhood in and around Uskudar.

And then you also have a lot of people who are traveling and are sort of using the lodge as a sort of a base, right? So people who are going to Bursa and returning, who are going to Konya and coming back, going to Tarsus, traveling, going on Hajj, coming back. Perhaps, you know, saving up some money, going back home, you know, going all the way back to Kashgar in some cases and then returning again. And all of their movements are traced in the ledger. So you can see there too that life isn't always necessarily centered around Istanbul, but that Istanbul is sort of a base for a lot of people for these extended journeys throughout the empire. Back to Central Asia and then back again to the empire.

And to what extent are these families, is this predominantly men or? I would say it's predominantly men, but there are definitely women and children, right? So there was one guy who was there, I think he arrived in 1900. He was there until 1921 when he was finally, when they were finally given, they were finally told that they had to leave the lodge. I guess they had overstayed their welcome, but you know, they were living there for 20 some odd years. And it was an older man in his, I want to say in his eighties and his wife and their three daughters. So, you know, this was a family and that, you know, there were definitely families that were there. And this one was a particularly funny example. I think that he must have had a

very, a much younger wife because at one point during the stay, she was involved in some sort of illicit relationship with another lodger at the guest, at the tekke, who was then also forced to leave. And I realize right now that I'm painting this picture of Sufi lodges as dens of iniquity, which is not at all my intention, but the point being that, you know, these pilgrims, this is just another part of their life, you know, is staying in Istanbul for these extended periods, right? Piety is very important, going on the Hajj, being forgiven for their sins, but at the end of the day, when they're in Istanbul, they're, you know, they're not dervishes in aesthetics in all cases. And so I guess one of my other questions regarding in the same vein is, of course, we've mentioned the idea that this is sometimes turning

into semi-permanent migration or long-term stay, work stay, whatnot, what have you. So there's all sorts of questions I could ask, but the one I'm really curious about is what happens when a man comes from Central Asia and during the course of his pilgrimage finds himself married to an Ottoman citizen. This must be happening during this time period, right? Yeah, it is happening. I mean, there are lots of instances of people marrying Ottoman women and

also trying to become Ottoman citizens, right? So there are two different types of sort of residence or, you know, semi-permanent migration. I mean, on the one hand, you have the Mujavir, the long-term residents of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, who come specifically for the purpose of resigning for, you know, an indefinite period of time in the holy cities, often get appointed to a position receiving some sort of stipend living as scholars, as students, as prayer reciters, and whatnot, what, you know, what have you. In many cases, I see these people, I define them as de facto Ottomans, they never officially become Ottomans, but for all intents and purposes, they're living like Ottomans. And in Mecca and Medina, it's actually really hard to distinguish an Ottoman from a non-Ottoman

because nobody's paying taxes and no one's being conscripted. So the issue then is about land sales and the ability to buy property, and maybe we can talk about that after. But the other type of resident or semi-permanent migrant, you know, are these people who come and they stay, again, also for indefinite periods of time. Not necessarily as Mujavirs who might marry, who might settle, who are involved in some sort of business transactions and are there for, you know, for years. And in some cases, again, they try to become ottoman citizens and in other cases they never renounce their russian subjecthood um and they're living in the empire uh and it's usually not a problem until there's some sort of legal dispute or

there's some attempt to buy or purchase land um or or even when they die, right? So people who've been living for 20 years in Istanbul, in parts of Iraq, right, in other parts, in different provinces in the empire, it only becomes a problem after they die. And that is, of course, when the Russian consulate gets involved or in the case of Afghans, the British consulate gets involved and claims those people as their own subjects. And this is an area that I did a lot of new research on and that I've been writing about. And this really becomes then an issue for the Ottoman state, because a lot of these things turn into protracted diplomatic battles, and it becomes a larger question about defending Ottoman sovereignty.

The question of extraterritoriality is a really important one for the Ottoman state as the state is struggling with the seemingly endless types of protection to foreigners. The last thing that it needs is for Muslims to now be able to claim extraterritorial rights. Well, right. That was going to be my question. So these people, as you said, are in an ambiguous place. They are Muslims. And so kind of like as that becomes a very important aspect of a broader Ottoman identity, we can see how they could live their daily life just as locals. But on the other hand, of course, being a British subject, I mean, or a Russian subject,

if you're a Christian subject of those empires, you are not allowed to necessarily just obtain land as you like and do all the things that Ottoman citizens would have been able to do. So, you know, do you have any good cases of how that kind of plays out or is it kind of case-case basis? I have a number of good cases, but there is a lot of divergence. And in a lot of instances, it depends on where and when, right? And there's a lot of back and forth and there's a lot of pushback from provincial authorities. So there are a number of issues. There are a number of different issues. I first i would actually say that you know being a muslim doesn't necessarily allow you to do certain things that christians can't i mean it's it's not that black and white

right so uh you know by 1882 there are prohibitions on land sales to muslims in the hijaz right and a lot of really great research is being done on this a lot lot of people, a lot of Muslims are able to get around these prohibitions through proxies, through obtaining certain identity papers, people vouching on their behalf, right? So to some extent, they're able to circumvent these laws and still obtain property. But the problem, again, is that foreign authorities like the Russian consul, for example, doesn't accept that that these are Ottomans or that those documents are valid because the person in question never legally renounced their Russian subjecthood before they left the Russian empire so that becomes a major problem some other interests like I have some fascinating cases in the 1890s and early 1900s of Afghans.

And this was not a population that I had originally been doing research on, but it sort of makes sense in dealing with these questions of extraterritoriality. People who had left Afghanistan in the 1850s even earlier, and settled in parts of the empire, and who had pretty much lived as Ottomans, right, for most of their lives. And then at some point, probably due to some sort of commercial venture or transaction, they claim to be under British protection. Or in many cases, when they've committed a crime, or they're going to be in many cases when they've committed a crime right or they're going to be um conscripted so they will suddenly claim that they're under far you know british protection and um the ottoman state does not take kindly to these cases and to some extent they're i think more successful in rejecting these types of claims of afghans to british protection than they are uh muslims from

the russian empire but you have, you know, I can just sort of sometimes envision the men in the foreign ministry, like just I can just picture them livid saying, you know, how on earth can this person be a British subject, right? He's been living in Ottoman lands for 40 years and availed himself of all of the rights and protections that come with being an Ottoman subject. And now we're supposed to think of, you know, him as a British subject. You know, the claims are preposterous. And what is really interesting here is then you see a sort of, you know, engagement with international law where, you know,

particularly in the Hukuk Mishaviri and the Istishari Odasa, where people are working out these different understandings and conceptions of rights based on the place of origin of the petition, the claimant in question. So the Ottomans have a longstanding policy of claiming that even after agreements between the Afghan emir and the British, in terms of ability to conduct foreign policy, that regardless of what part of Afghanistan people are from, that they're under the exclusive protection of the Ottoman Caliphate, right, so that they have no right to claim any sort of foreign protections. So that is one approach. Then in dealing with subjects of Russia, of Russian Turkestan and of Bukhara, things become more complicated. And here you see actually a real lack of knowledge of, you know, where people are not

really clear even what the status is of these various states. You know, are they annexed territories? Are they colonies? And so you see how Ottoman statesmen are dealing with these questions. And what it seems like that they arrive at is that in many cases they decide that subjects of annexed they don't have the right to claim those same protections abroad. For people who are coming from states like Buhara, they decide that these people should be considered Mahmis, people who are protected, and that they have no basis for claiming the rights that Russian citizens would have. And then when it comes to China, and I'm sorry, I'm going on and on, the Ottomans don't have diplomatic relations with China, official diplomatic relations,

and so they lump them under the same category as Afghans and say that, like the Afghans, people who are coming from Chinese Turkestan are under the exclusive protection of the Ottoman Caliphate. The problem then is that there is no working out of what this means. What does it mean to be under the protection of the Ottoman Caliphate. The problem then is that there is no working out of what this means. What does it mean to be under the protection of the Caliphate in, you know, a system that is increasingly, where rights are increasingly tied to international law and the state from which you originate? And we can see how, you know, thinking about the bigger picture here, you know, I think I have a sense of what your understanding of this whole question is. But, you know i think i have a sense of of what what your understanding of this whole question is but um you know it seems to me like as these uh notions of citizenship and even

compete competition over who's who's a subject of who and sort of how colonialism is playing a role in defining this people from regions like central as Asia are kind of in the middle of this conversation, making them a very interesting window onto how notions of subjecthood are being shaped in practice, but also it kind of puts them in a vulnerable position. It does. And I mean, I think that, you know, there's a lot to be said for this idea of forum shopping and people being very savvy and being able to navigate different citizenship regimes. being very savvy and being able to navigate different citizenship regimes. And, you know, I see a lot of this in cases of people who are living in Mecca and Medina who don't give up their Russian subjecthood. They sort of, they live, again, for all intents and purposes as Ottomans until it makes sense for them to claim that they're Russian subjects, right? And so there

is an element of that. But then there are a lot of people, right, particularly people from Afghanistan or people who are coming from Kashgar and other cities in Chinese Turkestan who are not able to do that, right, who do not have a foreign state that is, you know, actively advocating for their extraterritorial rights.

I mean, they're almost stateless. They are, they are. And the sort of, so the Ottomans' response to this, that they're the exclusive protection of the caliphate, doesn't really provide them with a type of citizenship. That doesn't give them a passport, right? So the types of rights that they have, I mean, in many ways,

they have to sort of turn to the state through petitions and they have to ask for things that then ends up being sort of reinforcing this sort of discourse of pan-Islamism and the role of the sultan and caliph as the protector of pilgrims and the hajj, right? Because what other recourse do they have? You know, they can try to claim, for example,

Russian protection, but in many cases that's rejected by the Ottoman state and never, you know, is not actively pursued by Russian consuls. And I mean, sometimes it's easy for us to simplistically think that this emerging notion of citizenship is one of inclusion, sort of leveling the political identities throughout the world. But on the other hand, it can be also one of exclusion in cases such as these. Right. And I think that in this context of the late 19th and early 20th century, actually,

what you have is aspects you know, aspects of both of inclusion and exclusion. So in this period in which foreign Muslims, Tabaye and Ejnebiye, are being excluded from the Ottoman body politic, right, at the same time that the state is claiming a sort of spiritual and political authority over them, right, through the promotion of pan-Islam. So, you know, that's a really important and interesting tension, I think, in the late Ottoman state, right, that actually this sort of case study illuminates, like, much broader questions about where Muslims fit in, foreign Muslims fit into the Ottoman state. So, Laleh, I mean, we're going to learn more about all these, the details of some of these things in your book, obviously. But one of the questions I do want to ask,

or maybe get your thoughts on, is what happens when the Ottoman Empire no longer exists? And, you know, you mentioned in the background is this understanding of the caliphate. Okay, maybe in some cases, pan-Islam is overemphasized, but nonetheless, being that it is a component of, you know, this pilgrimage networks and people's identities, what does the fall of the Ottoman Empire,

the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire mean for people in Central Asia and their movements in that territory? So I would say that with the collapse of the Ottoman state, you have a number of different dynamics. So on the one hand, the sort of large scale mobility that we see between, you know, 1860 and the First World War effectively comes to an end. So, you know, a lot of these people are not going on Hajj, you know, they can't because of the war. And then after, because of the collapse of the Russian Empire and the birth of the Soviet Union, right? A lot of that mobility effectively comes to an end. So, but at the same time, for people who flee, a lot of those paths that are forged still become relevant, right?

But it's not necessarily directly or exclusively to Istanbul. So you have these huge emigre communities in what becomes Saudi Arabia. huge emigre communities in what becomes Saudi Arabia. Later, people who move from Russian Turkestan to Eastern Turkestan, and then from there on to India, Afghanistan, and then ultimately places in Turkey like Adana, in and around Adana, where there are huge Uzbek communities, and also in Istanbul, right? And a lot of those communities do develop and expand, you know,

in areas where there had been Uzbek or Central Asian Sufi lodges. So I think in many ways, those routes still shape people's itineraries, right? Their destinations. There's a sort of infrastructure that's still there that is important. But I mean, one thing that in thinking about the migration, for example, to Mecca and Medina, right, or to Jeddah and other places, you know, I think that's really important is it sort of also helps to challenge this idea of a sort of Turkic brotherhood of peoples and the idea of that, you know, I mean, one thing that, you know, we haven't really talked about, and I guess I haven't really said very much about, we talked about pan-Islam, but this idea that pan-Turkism is a factor, you know, I mean, I tried to challenge this idea because I don't really see

a Turkic identity emphasized in any of my sources, right? I mean, there's definitely something there. I mean, there is something about language and a sort of commonality that people are able to communicate, you know, to some degree with people in various Ottoman lands. But there are types of community relations, right? The idea of being a local versus a foreigner in places like Mecca and Medina that have nothing to do with Turkic identity, right? And so you have these very large communities of Uzbeks and, you know, people who would

later become called Uyghurs, youghurs that take shape in those places. And it's very much about connections that were forged across over the centuries that had to do with pilgrimage. And when I say pilgrimage there, it's the spiritual dimension of that, the economic dimension, right? There are all of these merchants that have been traveling back and forth across the region.

So you see that also as a sort of important factor in shaping migration patterns in the later part of the 20th century. We didn't talk about it at the beginning. I'm almost glad that we didn't talk about it. of like the racial connections right between central asia uh and turkey posited almost as a rediscovering of like a turkic people uh you know that narrative did gain a little traction a little bit of power and sort of in terms of how people wrote about the connections between these places it's something that james meyer also pointed out in a podcast about his new book you know how the the Turkist, the pan-Turkist dimension has been overemphasized. I think that what your research shows is if you

want to talk about connections between Central Asia and Turkey, they're there, but they do really just flow along these spiritual networks that you're describing in your work, the pilgrimage and everything that came with it, which as we've seen today is quite a lot, a lot more than pilgrimage. Yes, definitely. And actually, you know, by using your use of the word spiritual now brings up another another point. And, you know, I use the term spiritual citizens when I'm talking about pilgrims and long term residents of the empire, you know, making the argument that that Central Asians were

even though even as they were excluded from the Ottoman citizenry, that they staked a claim of belonging to the state based on their position as Sunni Hanafi Muslims under the protection of the caliphate in this period. And that also because of the state's attempts to reject extraterritorial rights, the claim that they were under the exclusive protection of the caliphate reinforced that to some degree but i'm almost hesitant to use it at times because i feel that it's often understood as this really as exclusively a religious sort of relationship a religious dynamic and that's really not my intention so i think that in many ways what what i'm trying to do is to sort of play with this idea of the sultan's

spiritual authority right which is the claim that we know goes back to kichikai narja in 1774 and that is promoted in in the later 19th century right the so the ottoman states claims of having a form of spiritual authority or sovereignty over non-ottoman muslim Muslims in many ways becomes translated into demands, material demands from the state or petitions for rights that are citizenship-like in their nature, right? And so I think that's something that's really important to sort of kind of keep those things in tension with one another, the sort of the spiritual and the material and the political, right, that these things are all interconnected. And so even as you're sort of challenging the idea of pan-Turkism or pan-Islamism,

religion still matters. At the same time, the state has to deliver on a lot of that, you know, the sort of promotion of the sultan's responsibilities towards the ummah. And people use that language and they use it in a way to advance their claims. Yeah. And really, you're hitting on an interesting conceptual problem, I think, in the way people think about religion today.

I know that our cousins in religious studies could probably explain it better, that dissociating the religious or the spiritual from sociopolitical context is not really something that can be done, neither historically or really even in our present. And so we'll leave that for people to digest. We'll leave that for our cousins.

I was recently on a panel where there were a lot of kinship metaphors that were used and it was fascinating. But because actually in so many ways I'm trying to argue against this idea of kinship among turkic peoples um i sort of shy away from those types of um ways to describe these relations but um another thought and you know another reason why i use the word spiritual even though i'm a bit conflicted about it is again is also at the same time to hold on to the fact that you know at, at the end of the day, this is a major religious right and a journey that people are setting out, you know, from thousands of miles away to go to the holiest lands of Islam, right? And that we sort of need to hold on to that and

to take seriously the reasons why people are traveling. So while visiting Istanbul, seeing the Sultan Caliph is definitely an important factor in the later 19th and early 20th century. Arriving in Mecca and Medina and, you know, seeing the Kabya is still very central to the experience of a lot of pilgrims. And that's something that I'm trying to really hold on to into foreground in my study and engagement with sort of with these pilgrimage accounts, because there is so much hardship that is involved. And in this one account, the one that I mentioned earlier with Mohammed Saeed Tashkendi, you know, a refrain, you know, something that he repeats over and over as he describes all of the horrible conditions, right, under which he's traveling um you know a way in which he

contextualizes this is by describing the the transcendental experience of of arriving and you know seeing mecca right and and i think that this is something real and i think you know maybe of approaching it from an anthropological perspective and sort of really thinking about this as a um an experience a real experience of communitas, right, is something that is important. And it seems that, I mean, there's been so much attention to pilgrimage in the literature and such exciting work, you know, people working on, you know, the role of steam and rail and print, right, these revolutions

and how the increase in mobility led to new understandings of the Islamic world and transformations of the Hajj and great research on the geopolitics of the Hajj and the role of disease management. You know, all of this stuff is, you know, so exciting for me to read, but I really, I think it's important that, you know, when I'm writing, I still,

I try really hard to hold on to, you know, why are people going? Yes, this is a so-called pillar of Islam. But, you know, what would make you set out from this village in China? You know, I'm calling it China now, a village in Chinese Turkestan. And knowing that you're going to experience all of this difficulty, you know, why would you still go? knowing that you're going to experience all of this difficulty, you know, why would you still go? Right. And then, and then, and then, or, you know, a village in, in the Fargana Valley, when you return, you know, how do you describe it in overwhelmingly positive terms, right? What is it about that transformative experience of Mecca that recasts the experience, right? Because I

think that that is not a sort of, it's not, it's not something like, what's the word I'm looking for? Propaganda, right? It's not that at all. It is something that is intrinsic to pilgrimage as a ritual, right? And so even in the modern era, you know, for devout Muslims whose politics, you know, they might abhor the Saudi state. But when they go and they return, they're usually not talking about politics and the politics of the Saudi state. But when they go and they return, they're usually not talking about politics and the politics of the Saudi dynasty. They're oftentimes recounting that moment of being,

you know, of circumambulating the Kaaba and the experience of being in that mass of humanity, right? And so I feel that sometimes when I go into that territory, people are, you know, quick to say that I'm romanticizing it, but I think that's something that's really important and central to studying Hajj. What do you romanticize? And this is a romantic thing. How can you put it any other way? People have feelings about this. You don't go there just to go. So, I mean, that's one of the things I like about the angle you take on this movement between Central Asia and the Ottoman Empire is we can get a little glimpse of, you know, the history of feeling or the feelings that people had about travel, but also the feelings they had about belonging.

But it's sort of getting in on, it's giving us a glimpse at, you know, sensibilities of a late 19th century Muslim from Central Asia. Political imaginaries, as I put it in my dissertation, which was a really useful way of thinking about it. I mean, when I started talking about this, how I got into the research originally, I mean, that was what I was trying to sort of reconstruct the political imaginaries of people from the Faragana Valley or their views of Ottoman power. And I think that's something that I'm still engaging with, right? And that, you know, reaches into these various dimensions of the political, the spiritual, the social, right? The cultural connection. So, you know, how do people form their views of the Ottoman state? And then, you know, what does their mobility translate into in terms of looking at late Ottoman history?

What kinds of new questions does that open up for us? Well, Laleh, we could keep talking a lot longer about a lot of these subjects. There's no end to the material that can be discussed in a book-length research project of this caliber. We'll have to end our conversation here and direct our readers to your future publications as well as other books on our website.

But I really want to thank you for sitting down with me and talking with me about this research. It really fits in well with a lot of the other things we've done on the podcast, and I hope that our listeners have enjoyed it as well. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. Now, for those of you who do want to find out more about the work of Dr. Lalehjan, as well as other topics related to today's discussion, we have a short bibliography on our website,

where you can also leave your comments and questions. Also, find a way to get in touch with the broader Ottoman History Podcast community. Now over 20,000 Facebook followers and counting. I want to thank you all for listening all the way to the end of this podcast. I invite you to join us next time. And until then, take care. Thank you.