Millet (stress on the e) is an Ottoman Turkish term for a legally protected ethnic and religious minority group, i.e. other then the ruling Sunni. It comes from the Arabic word milla (ملة) for confessional community. The persisting use as an Arabic term is more general; Jewish neighbourhoods in Morocco and Tunisia bear the cognate name mellah.

Ottoman history

The millet was an alternative to autonomous territories that has long been the European norm for dealing with minority groups. The millet system has a long history in the Middle East, and is closely linked to Islamic rules on the treatment of non-Muslim minorities (dhimmi). The Ottoman term specifically refers to the separate legal courts pertaining to personal law under which minorities were allowed to rule themselves with fairly little interference from the Ottoman government.

The main millets were the Jewish, Greek Orthodox and Armenian ones. A wide array of other groups such as Catholics, Karaites, and Samaritans were also represented, whereas others, which were seen as deviant forms of Islam, such as Shi'as, Druzes, Alawis, Alevis, and Yezidis, had no official status, even though the Druzes of the Djebel Druze and the Mount Lebanon enjoyed a rather feudal-type autonomy, like the Assyrian Christian villages under Mar Shimun in the Hakkari mountains. These groups were spread across the empire with significant minorities in most of the major cities. Autonomy for these groups was thus impossible to base on a territorial region.

Each millet was under the supervision of an Ethnarch ('national' leader), most often a religious hierarch such as the Greek Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, who reported directly to the Ottoman Sultan. The millets had a great deal of power - they set their own laws and collected and distributed their own taxes. All that was insisted was loyalty to the Empire. When a member of one millet committed a crime against a member of another, the law of the injured party applied, but the - ruling - Islamic majority being paramount, any dispute involving a Muslim fell under their sharia-based law.

The millet system was altered by the increasing influence of European powers in the Middle East. The various European powers declared themselves protectors of their religious cohorts in the Empire. Thus the Russians became guardians of the Eastern Orthodox groups, the French of the Catholics, and the British of the Jews and other groups.

New millets were created in the 19th century for several uniate and protestant Christian communities, then for the separate national Eastern Orthodox Bulgarian Church, recognized as a millet by an Ottoman firman in 1870 and excommunicated two years later by the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate as adherents of (national or ethnic principle in church organization). This altered the balance of power as the millet became wealthy and outside Ottoman law.

Imitation

Today the millet system is still used at varying degrees in some post-Ottoman countries like Jordan, Lebanon, Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Egypt, but also in non-post-Ottoman states like Iran, Pakistan and Bangladesh which kept the principle of separate personal status courts and/or laws for every recognized religious community and, for most of them, reserved seats in the parliament.

In Egypt for instance, according to a 1995 law, the application of family law, including marriage, divorce, alimony, child custody, inheritance and burial, is based on an individual's religion. In the practice of family law, the State recognizes only the three "heavenly religions": Islam, Christianity, and Judaism. Muslim families are subject to the Personal Status Law, which draws on Sharia. Christian families are subject to canon law, and Jewish families are subject to Jewish law. In cases of family law disputes involving a marriage between a Christian woman and a Muslim man, the courts apply the Personal Status Law (see: Egypt - International Religious Freedom Report Released by the U.S. Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor, 2001).

Some observers deem that multiculturalism, as practiced in states like Canada and Australia, also has some similarities to the millet system. The national-cultural autonomy principle of the austromarxists, bundist and folkist thinkers also bears some similarity with the millet system.

See also

• Apartheid
• Blood money
• Caste
• Culture of the Ottoman Empire
• Devşirme system
• Dhimmi
• Jizyah
• Segregation
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