1:18 pm, Istanbul time
[updated, 7/31]

I got back to Istanbul a couple of days ago after a great week in Spain. Last Monday I had left Istanbul for Barcelona to attend the World Congress for Middle Eastern Studies, where I gave a talk on Yusuf Akcura and Ahmet Agaoglu, two icons of "pan-Turkism" from the early twentieth century whom I talked about less in the context of intellectual history (where they're normally placed) and more in the context of the larger community of Muslims traveling between Russia and the Ottoman Empire. The talk was based in part on an article I published a few years back.  

After I gave my talk last Thursday afternoon, I headed down to Andalusia, a region of southern Spain that was once home to a large Islamic civilization, first as part of the Ummayad caliphate from the eighth century onwards, then in the form of a series of local rulers until 1492. By the late sixteenth century, almost all of the Muslims in the region had been expelled from Spain.

 
Andalusia is red hot

For four days I traveled in Granada and Cordoba, two of the most important cities in Islamic Andalusia, and one thing that struck me was the very little sense of self-criticism or even reflection surrounding the presentation of the region's Islamic history. The mosques and palaces (such as Alhambra) that were built by the region's former Muslim populations constitute the main tourist attractions of Andalusia, but—with the exception of a local center of Islamic culture—there was very little discussion anywhere which related to the ultimate fate of Islamic civilization in the region.

At the "Cathedral of Cordoba," the site of a cathedral that was built on the grounds of what was an enormous mosque, the English-language pamphlet that is distributed to tourists says the following:

Beneath every cathedral is always a bed of hidden cathedrals. In the case of Cordoba, tradition traces back to its Visigoth origins. This fact is confirmed by archeological excavations, whose remains can be found at the Museum of San Vincente and in the pits where the remains of mosaics from the ancient Christian temple can be observed on site. It is a historical fact that the basilica of San Vicente was expropriated and destroyed in order to build what would later be the Mosque, a reality that questions the theme of tolerance that was supposedly cultivated in the Cordoba of the moment. [emphasis added]

Without question, the use of archaeology as a weapon in political battles (we were here first!) is nothing new, and hardly limited to Spain. But what interested me most was the reference to Islamic "tolerance," an issue that comes up a lot in the study of the Ottoman Empire.

For decades, the study of Ottoman history was dominated by nationalist historiography which emphasized the "Turkish yoke" which, it was alleged, was unrelentingly hostile to the ambitions of "national" communities such as the Balkan populations, Arabs, and other non-Turks of the empire. Indeed, even in the official historiography of the Republic of Turkey there was often considerable hostility to the Ottoman Empire, which was portrayed as likewise stifling the "emergence" of a modern Turkish identity and state. 

More recently, however, simplistic narratives focusing only on conflict have been replaced by many more nuanced approaches which look instead at how people of differing ethnic and religious groups got along for generations. It is often argued—convincingly, in my opinion—that the Ottoman Empire could not possibly have lasted as long as it did ruling simply through force and oppression. Countless studies have been produced which look at the various ways in which the Ottoman state sought to accommodate difference, with important distinctions drawn between pre-modern approaches to managing ethnic and religious difference and the modern, yet often even bloodier, approaches employed in nation-states.

But at the same time, it seems to me that in our eagerness to explore the connecting threads of community, conflict can often get written out of the historiography. In Turkey today, this view of the Ottoman Empire as a "tolerant empire" has, in some cases, turned into a rather hackneyed idealization of Ottoman rule. 

In the historiography of other empires, too, the idea that an empire's longevity must somehow be linked to the idea of tolerance is also gaining ground. This is something that I found particularly noticeable in Robert Crews' recent book For Prophet and Tsar (which I reviewed here), where not only is the theme of conflict left largely to the margins, but also it is argued that Muslims in Russia viewed the state as a sort of protector of Islamic institutions.

I think it's important to look beyond conflict, and especially to pay attention to what went right in the history of inter-community relations, rather than always focusing on what went wrong. But ignoring conflict can also be intellectually corrupting. During an era in which the US government launched an imperial campaign to save Muslims from themselves, why is it that arguably the most influential study of Muslim administration in Russia to appear in the last decade was one which emphasized the theme of Muslims happily embracing Russian rule? Is this nothing more than a coincidence, or is there a market, a pre-sentiment for this type of argument that books like Prophet and Tsar help to reinforce?

The problem with being critical of the tolerance narrative is that, more often than not, you win unwanted allies like the authors of the Cordoba manual or bigoted ignoramuses like Newt Gingrich, whose despicable and incoherent anti-Islamic screed was published in the Washington Post the other day. Gingrinch was arguing against the building, near the site of the World Trade Center, of a Muslim religious complex called Cordoba House (see their website here), which would include a mosque as well as other facilities (such as a library and a swimming pool).

"Tolerance" is being transformed into an increasingly loaded term. In the Turkish context, the term "tolerance" often appears (especially in the writings of Fethullah Gulen and his supporters) as a codeword for a certain (idealized) conception of Islamic administration. In the historical context, this conception of Islamic administration often dovetails with the idealized view of the Ottoman Empire that some historians in Turkey are pushing. And this view of the Ottoman Empire, meanwhile, is being articulated in the context of a rehabilitation of empires—both Islamic and otherwise—that has been taking place in the historical literature more generally, often in reaction to an earlier generation of scholarship emphasizing (indeed, celebrating) "national awakening" in opposition to imperial rule.

In many ways, pre-modern systems of managing ethnic and religious difference—in both Islamic and non-Islamic empires—can provide examples that we can learn from today. But conflict occurred in all of the empires—not constantly, not without cooperation and, indeed, not without something that we could call 'tolerance'—but conflict nevertheless occurred. I think that both in our discussions of empire and our discussions of Islam, what's most important with respect to the issue of 'tolerance' is to get beyond idealizations or eye-catching revisionism and instead look more closely at both the push and the pull of managing difference, a process that generally involved both conflict and compromise.