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missed by Ahmad during his review. Second, the term
referred to the Ottoman nation composed of many
groups, such as Greeks, Turks, Arabs, Bulgarians, etc.
As a matter of fact, one of the pamphlets referred to in
my book (p. 288) was entitled Millet-i Osmaniye Bir
Hitabe (An Address to the Ottoman Nation). Obviously, here, the term refers to an imagined Ottoman
nation, and the title cannot be translated as "An
Address to an Ottoman Religious Community," since
many people from different faiths had been living in
this imagined nation.
Third, the term referred to various ethnic groups in
the empire whose elites viewed themselves as a nation.
For instance, in a prefatory article in Hu"iyet, the
famous journal of the Young Ottomans, the phrase
Turk milleti (Turkish nation) was used, and the relevant passage was translated by a prominent scholar as
follows: "Are not the Turks the nation [millet] in whose
medresses Farabis, Ibn Sinas, Gazalis, Zemah§eris
propagated knowledge?" ([Namlk Kemal], "Hubb alWatan min al-Iman," Hurriyet 1 [June 29, 1868]: 1; and
see ~erif Mardin, The Genesis of the Young Ottoman
Thought [Princeton, N.J., 1962], 328). Also, when the
journal Basiret raised the question "whether a Turkish
milliyet (nationality) is really something shameful as
some people supposed," in 1875 and an article in
Ikdam carried the title "The Contributions of the
Muslims, and especially the Noble Turkish Nation
[Millet] to Medicine," in 1901, both of these articles
used milliyet and millet to refer to nationality and
nation respectively (David Kushner, The Rise of Turkish Nationalism, 1876-1908 [London, 1977], 23).
It is true that in the Istanbul press many other
examples can be found in which millet retained its
traditional meaning. However, during the last decade
of the nineteenth century, even those who had defended the use of the term in its traditional (religious)
meaning, such as ~emseddin Sami, "widely used it in
[its] non-religious sense" (Kushner, 106). It is interesting to note that Sami claimed in his Turkish lexicon
that it was better to say "Turkish Ummah" instead of
"Turkish Millet" (~emseddin Sami, Kamus-i Turkf
[Istanbul, 1317, rpt. 1900], p. 1400). (Neither of these
is agreeable to Professor Ahmad.) However, in a
French-Ottoman dictionary, Sami provided three possible words for translating the term "nation" into
Turkish: millet, ummet, and kavim (Sami, Resimli Kamus-i Fransevf [Constantinople, 1901], p. 1517).
In the Young Turk usage, millet always referred to a
given nation (such as, "Throughout history no example
can be found that Germans really helped a nation
[millet]"; see "Tiirkiye'de Alman NiifUzu," Osmanll 56
[March 15, 1900]: 2) or to the Ottoman nation ("We do
not ask for anything new. What we really want is to
restore a right once granted to the Ottoman nation
[millet-i Osmaniye)"; see "Maksad-Meslek," Kanun-i
Esasf 1 [December 1896]: 3), or to given nations within
the empire, and was never employed in a religious
sense. In my study, whenever this term had been used
in reference to the Islamic or universal community, I
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
did not render it as "nation." The Young Turks always
defined it carefully when they referred to the Islamic
community: the terms they employed were the Islamic
ummah, the ummah of the Prophet, and the ummah of
Muhammad. Since the meaning of the term in this
sense is obvious, I have not even translated it (see pp.
200,203). However, ummah also meant "nation" in the
elite rhetoric of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries, and it referred to given nations. Long before
the Young Turk movement and the publication of the
Arab journals discussed in my study, ummah acquired
a broader meaning (see Albert Hourani, Arabic
Thought in the Liberal Age, 1789-1939 [London, 1962],
194).
In the Arab journals quoted in my study, ummah and
millet referred to "nation." In the quotations on pages
45 and 160 in my study, as opposed to what Ahmad
claims, ummah and millet respectively refer to the
Ottoman nation. The patriotic rhetoric speaking about
Ottomans in the first example leaves no doubt that the
term had been employed in a nonreligious meaning. In
addition, this journal always used ummah to refer
either to certain nations within the empire or the
Ottoman nation itself.
This and many other examples published in the
journals in question referred to an Arab nation when
employing ummah and millet. In the second example
criticized by Ahmad (p. 160), millet again refers to the
Ottoman nation. The appeal in which the term is used
was addressed to the Muslims; however, since Muslims
were also members of this Ottoman nation, they were
required to save the nation. It would be strange to
think that Muslims were excluded from the Ottoman
nation.
M. ~UKR0 HANIOGLU
Princeton University
FEROZ AHMAD REPLIES:
After reading ~iikrii Hanioglu's letter complaining
about my review of his monograph, The Young Turks in
Opposition, I can only conclude that he unwittingly
confirms my statement that "the vocabulary of nationalism scarcely existed in the Turkish or the Arabic or
the Kurdish language of that period." He admits that
"there is no doubt that millet meant 'religious community' for many centuries. However, into the nineteenth
century, it began to acquire different connotations."
That is the whole point: the word began (my emphasis)
to acquire "different connotations," but the sense of
religious community remained dominant well into the
republican period, long after the years discussed by
Hanioglu. Some people rendered the term "nation" as
millet and even ummet, but confusion about how to
translate the term "nation" into Turkish persisted and
is reflected sharply even in the example that Hanioglu
gives of the lexicographer ~emseddin Sami proposing
three words-millet, ummet, and kavim-to render the
term into Turkish. This hardly made for precision and
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1997
Communications
led to confusion that historians are still trying to sort
out, not always successfully.
I based my argument largely on my reading of twelve
years of debates in the Ottoman Legislative Assembly
and the Senate during the years 1908-1920, when the
questions of identity were discussed, debated, and
contested. Hanioglu deals with an earlier period that
ends in 1902, and relies on individual authors. Had he
been familiar with this later period during which the
idea of nationalism began to flower, he might well have
seen my point. Of course, the words millet and its
derivatives milli etc. were used when the Ottomans
wanted to render the term "nation" or "national" into
Turkish: thus the Committee of National Defence
became Miidafaa-i Milliye Cemiyeti. However, the
term retained its original meaning of religious community in its wider usage. Take the example of the term
Rum milleti, which is used throughout this period. It
meant the Greek Orthodox community and not "the
Greek nation" (as Hanioglu might have rendered it),
and Greek Catholics were excluded, though not Arabs
who belonged to the Orthodox church. In 1919, when
the Greek army invaded western Turkey, the Greek
Catholic millet in Izmir sought the protection of its
Italian co-religionists! How do we translate Musevi
milleti? As the "Jewish nation" or more literally "the
nation of Moses"? Hardly. This community of Sephardie Jews did not support Zionism and also produced
some of the most articulate ideologues of Turkish
patriotism. Christian deputies and senators described
themselves as anasm Hmstiyaniyye (Christian elements) or simply Hmstiyanlar (Christians). Muslim
deputies and senators described themselves as Miisliiman anaszr (Muslim elements) or ahali islamiyye (Muslim population), and their villages as Muslim villages
(islam koyleri).
The Ottomans feared the idea of nationalism, for it
threatened the very existence of their multi-ethnic
empire. Thus when they used the term Millet-i Osmaniye, it was not intended to mean nation; with a
little imagination, it might be rendered as the "Ottoman commonwealth" of various millets or religious
communities. It simply does not make sense to speak
of an "Ottoman nation of nations." Contemporaries
continued to find millet a perplexing term to define; as
late as 1917, even Ziya G6kalp, the nationalist ideologue, was still having to explain what a millet was!
(See his article "Millet nedir?" [What Is a Millet?]
icimaiyat MecmuaSl 1/3, Istanbul, 1917).
Even after millet and its derivatives (m illi , milliyet,
milliyetcilik) were adopted in the republic, they retained their religious connotation, and Islamist parties
have made use of the word in their names: thus Millet
Partisi, Milli Nizam, and Milli Selamet Partisi. The
secular nationalists have attempted to replace these
terms with ulus and ulusculuk but with no great
success. However, the late Niyazi Berkes, a discerning
scholar of Ottoman-Turkish history, used ulusculuk
(nationalism) when he wanted to give the word a
secular meaning and milliyetcilik when it was religious.
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1303
(See Batlclhk, Ulusculuk ve Toplumsal Devrimler
[1965], Arap Diinyasmda islamiyet, Milliyetcilik, ve Sosyalizm [1969], and islamcllIk, Ulusculuk, Sosyalizm
[1969]. Finally, the aim of the Young Turks was to save
the state and not the nation (as Hanioglu would have
us believe!), since there was no nation to save. The
question they asked was: How can this state be
saved?-Bu de viet nasd kurtanlabilir?
FEROZ AHMAD
University of Massachusetts,
Boston
To
THE EDITOR:
It seems reasonable to expect a scholarly reviewer to
discuss the contents of a work under consideration in
at least equal proportion to its wider historiographical
context. As the subtitle suggests, my book The Origins
of the Authoritarian Welfare State in Prussia: Conservatives, Bureaucracy, and the Social Question, 1815-70
deals with the reaction of Prussian conservatives and
officials to the social problems of their age. Justice to
the content of the study is not done by viewing it
merely from the angle of the Sonderweg debate, as Eric
Dorn Brose does (AHR 102 [February 1997]: 121-22).
My treatment of Germany's "special path" took up
eighteen pages-less than one-fifteenth of the bookyet these eighteen pages drive Brose's entire review.
The detailed examination of the social question in the
introduction and the extensive exposition of the development of social conservative thought in chapters 1
through 4 are, in his review, worth no more than
passing references. There is no discussion of the
workings of bureaucratic rule (Chap. 5), of rural
pauperism and the controversial issue of freedom of
movement (Chap. 6), of the bureaucracy's struggle
with its more liberal elements (Chap. 7), or of the
introduction of social legislation (Chaps. 8 and 9). The
archival research, on which four of my five bureaucracy
chapters are based, challenges previously held assumptions in the rich and multi-faceted literature on the
Prussian bureaucracy-Brose hardly touches on this
central reevaluation.
In the epilogue (the subject matter of the review),
my empirical findings are placed in the context of the
historiographical issues captured by the Sonderweg
debate. Anyone familiar with the increasingly sophisticated literature on the subject will be careful to avoid
sweeping generalizations by approaching the issue with
the caution it deserves and by making far-ranging
historical interpretations judiciously. While I postulate
an affinity between Pruss ian social conservatism and
national socialism, I have been careful to point out
differences between the two. It is thus preposterous to
argue (as Brose does on page 122) that I walk through
German history in "seven league boots," thereby implying that I approach the issue in the indiscriminately
accusatory way of the "from Luther to Hitler" condemnations prevalent during World War II. Whoever
makes this claim has not read the book carefully.
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1997