THE PROTECTION QUESTION: CENTRAL ASIANS AND EXTRATERRITORIALITY IN THE LATE

OTTOMAN EMPIRE
Author(s): Lâle Can
Source: International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 48, No. 4 (NOVEMBER 2016), pp.
679-699
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43998195
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Int. J. Middle East Stud. 48 (2016), 679-699
doi : 1 0. 1 0 1 7/S0020743 8 1 6000829

Lale Can

THE PROTECTION QUESTION: CENTRAL ASIANS

AND EXTRATERRITORIALITY IN THE LATE

OTTOMAN EMPIRE

Abstract
This article examines the impact of the Ottoman Empire's battle against legal imperialism on the
status of Central Asians in its domains, specifically after the promulgation of a nationality law
in 1869 that classified them as foreigners. It traces how the threat of Muslim colonial subjects
attaining European consular protections led to the emergence of a "Central Asian protection
question": whether Afghans, Bukharans, and Chinese Muslims had legitimate claims to European
legal nationality and, by extension, capitulatory privileges. Through a number of case studies, the
article shows how the Ottoman Foreign Ministry fused international legal norms and pan-Islamic
claims to arrive at the position that Central Asians from informally colonized lands were not "real"
subjects of European empires, and that they were under the exclusive protection of the caliphate.
This strategy, I argue, undermined the creation of an Ottoman citizenship boundary and opened
up a complex field of inter- and intraimperial contestation about who was a foreigner. In contrast
to positive associations with legal pluralism in this period, Central Asian migrants and pilgrims
who were protected by the caliph but not recognized as Ottomans or European subjects found
that they could not benefit from practices such as forum shopping and affiliation switching. And
while the notion of foreignness remained subject to multiple and conflicting interpretations across
the empire, I argue that nationality as a legal category was incontrovertibly becoming a defining
feature of these foreign Muslims' rights and status in the sultan's domains.

Keywords: Central Asian history; extraterritoriality; migration/pilgrimage; Ottoman history;

pan-Islam

In a popular song by the late Turkish folk and pop singer Ban§ Manço, an imaginary
interlocutor repeatedly asks him, "my countryman, what is your country?" (hem§erim,
memleket nire ?), to which he responds, "this world is my country" ( bu diinya benim
memleket). This answer only provokes a more insistent framing of the question - "No,
you didn't understand; what is your real country?" - which in turn leads Manço to despair
of people making "long speeches about brotherhood and equality" whilst preoccupied
with difference.1 Listening to the song as a historian of the late Ottoman Empire, the
lyrics are oddly evocative of tensions between the central government's promotion
of pan-Islamic politics and its increasing preoccupation with nationality in the last

Laie Can is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History, The City College of New York, City University
of New York, New York, N.Y.; e-mail: lcan@ccny.cuny.edu

© Cambridge University Press 2016 0020-7438/16

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680 Lale Can

decades of the empire's existence. Despite strident rhetoric about Islamic u

question of where Muslims were from - specifically their legal nationality an
to which they belonged - became increasingly imbricated in relationships
and economic power and questions of jurisdictional sovereignty.2 As a cons
of both colonial expansion and the 1869 Ottoman Nationality Law, national
to determine the rights and protections to which foreign Muslims (i.e., th
beyond Ottoman territory) were entitled, vis-à-vis both the sultan-caliph and
sovereigns. This was as true for pilgrims on the hajj - a ritual associated w
leveling of differences among the umma - as it was for migrants and merch
if Ottoman legitimacy in the late 19th century rested on claims to univer
authority,4 why did the nationality of Muslims in the sultan's domains m
story of the Bukharan migrant Celai bin Hekim sheds light on this questio
as the broader themes of protection and extraterritoriality that are the foc
article.
Sometime in the early 1860s, Celai bin Hekim left the Amirate of Bu
traveled across a vast stretch of the fabled Silk Road before settling in th
port city of Jeddah. Over the course of the next three decades he worked as
an agent for people who paid to avoid (or were exempt from) military serv
job involved large outlays of money, extensive travel, and strong local and
connections. During his residence in the empire, Celai "benefited from all the
Ottoman subjecthood" - making it all the more galling for Ottoman authorit
after getting into trouble with the law, he asserted that he was a Russian n
exempt from their jurisdiction. Unsure how to proceed, provincial officials forw
case to Istanbul, where the Foreign Ministry would decide whether this Bukh
as an Ottoman had any valid legal basis for claiming Russian nationality.5 To
the lyrics of Manço's song, Ottoman authorities seemed to be asking, " hem§e
is your real nationality ( asii tabiiyet)T The answer had important implicat
were an Ottoman, Celai would be subject to sharťa law; if Russian, he would
from detention or trial in the Hijaz and placed under tsarist jurisdiction. But
was a Bukharan subject? Were subjects of the amir - a Russian vassal - entitl
same rights and protection as subjects of the tsar? According to legal advi
Ottoman Foreign Ministry, the answer was a firm no. Protectorates such as
they countered, were semisovereign and their subjects were ineligible for
capitulatory privileges or protections.
Central Asian Muslims living in the empire had historically been subject t
law and enjoyed the rights of the sultan's subjects. However, the conquest of
by non-Muslim powers in the 19th century changed this equation. To the con
of the Ottoman central government, in the 1880s Britain and Russia started
jurisdiction over Afghans and Bukharans, often through the notion of "pr
a term that could mean anything from consular patronage of travelers in n
provision of legal immunity and commercial privileges ( imtiyazat ) that had
been the purview of European Christians. Collectively referred to as the Cap
these sułtanie grants dated to the early modern period and "provided non-M
eigners with privileges of safe residence and passage, a variety of tax exemp
low customs duties, and partial if not complete immunity from the jurisdic
toman courts."6 Throughout the 19th century European diplomats worked to re

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 The Protection Question 68 1

unilateral and theoretically revocable grants binding legal obligations, by incorporating

them into bi- and multilateral treaties.7 To encourage mercantile relationships and expand
their spheres of influence, European consuls also began to grant letters of extraterrito-
rial protection (berat) to thousands of Ottoman Christian protégés and, increasingly,
to Muslim clients.8 This form of protection marked a new phase in the expansion of
extraterritoriality - what Turan Kayaoglu terms the quintessential legal imperialism -
and threatened to place Muslims such as Celai beyond the reach of Ottoman justice as
well as to further compromise Ottoman sovereignty.9
An extensive body of scholarship has detailed the deleterious impact of the Capitu-
lations on the late Ottoman Empire. In recent years this area of research has benefited
from an infusion of new perspectives that shed light on how these imperialist instruments
also created opportunities for people who were able to become European proteges or
protected persons. Historians bridging imperial and legal history and working at multiple
levels of analysis have explored how diverse actors in cosmopolitan cities and borderland
settings exploited competition over foreign protection, legal jurisdiction, and spheres
of sovereignty.10 The growth of European consular courts, for example, made prac-
tices such as affiliation switching and forum shopping - when individuals within legally
pluralist systems switched legal identities and forums in order to maximize benefits -
increasingly common.11 Yet for all of the individuals who achieved favorable results
in the legally plural order, there were many others who faced uncertain outcomes and
dead ends.12 This was especially true among Central Asian migrants like Celai whom
the Ottoman central government did not consider "real" colonial subjects with the same
rights as British Indians or French Algerians.
As recent studies on intersections between mobility, sovereignty, and legal imperialism
make clear, Ottoman engagement with the question of protection was part of a complex
story unfolding worldwide.13 However, the Ottoman version of this story had its own
important plot twists that have not received adequate attention and that stemmed from its
unique position as both sultanate and caliphate. Joining a small body of research on the
empire's vexed position vis-à-vis Muslims from beyond its borders,14 this article argues
that the threat of expanding Russian and British jurisdiction prompted the emergence of
a "protection question": whether Afghans, Bukharans, and Chinese Muslims in Ottoman
lands had legitimate claims to Russian and British legal nationality and, by extension,
capitulatory privileges. In contrast to the focus on identity, ethnic kinship, and loyalty
that has informed studies of Ottoman-Central Asian relations,15 this article follows
Ottoman statesmen down alternate paths - namely, their engagement with international
law ( hukuk-i diivel) and differentiated forms of colonial rule. By showing how the
Ottoman government developed policies toward Asian peoples based on the type of
polities from which they originated rather than their ethnicity, it challenges ahistorical
assumptions about the role of Turkic kinship in Ottoman history. It also reveals new
perspectives on the instrumentalization of the caliphate by examining how the Sublime
Porte (the central government in Istanbul) fused international legal norms and novel
pan-Islamic claims to deny foreign nationality rights to Muslim colonial subjects.16 I
argue that the assertion that Bukharans and other Central Asians were protected by the
sultan-caliph had little to do with Muslim universalism or ethnic kinship; rather, it was
primarily a strategy to curtail the expansion of consular protections to people taking
on "borrowed nationalities."17 The Ottomans did not have the power to dismantle the

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682 Lale Can

system of extraterritoriality, but they could limit its reach by staking a claim
Asians within the empire.
In telling this multilayered story, the article first considers Celai 's failed
become a Russian national within the context of late 19th-century legal and
velopments at the local and transregional level. In the next section, I draw on c
involving Afghans who tried to become British nationals, in order to trace how
arrived at the position that "protected people" ( mahmi ) were under the ex
tection of the caliphate ( taht-i himaye-yi halife-i islamiye). This entailed dis
between "real" ( asil , sahih) European subjects and informally colonized pe
latter category comprised a vast group of Muslims from informally colonize
as Bukhara, Afghanistan, and Chinese Turkestan (today's Xinjiang Uyghur A
Region). While this group defies contemporary area studies models, I refer
includes as "Central Asians" both for simplicity and based on how the Ottom
Ministry categorized people in cases involving protection. In the last section
the challenges the central government faced in formulating policies that pr
thorities would comply with (particularly in the Hijaz), and that European p
accept as law.
In addition to highlighting the range of views within the empire regarding
foreign Muslim, this article suggests that the Porte was in a tenuous positio
pursuit of two parallel but somewhat incongruous goals: seeking legitimacy
caliphate - an institution that in theory did not recognize divisions among
while trying to legally differentiate among the very same community of globa
Although my focus is on the latter objective, it is clear that the tensions inher
endeavors ended up limiting both the government's and foreign Muslims' range
As the article demonstrates, the central government often was unable to fully
reforms designed to protect its sovereignty, and Central Asians who were d
Ottoman and European legal nationality faced a narrowing of choices. Those
to enjoy the rights of Ottomans (such as landholding) had to officially reno
foreign nationality and become Ottoman subjects. Yet, given the reluctance
powers such as Russia to relinquish subjects, attempts at Ottoman naturaliza
result in a protracted state of liminality that paralleled the pilgrimage but w
of larger geopolitical struggles.

BECOMING OTTOMAN, FOREIGN, AND PROTECTED

Like many 19th-century residents of Jeddah, Celai was originally from

During his three decades in the bustling hajj hub, the world around h
extensively, as had the status of Central Asians in the empire. In the 1
Transoxiana, the Ferghana Valley, and the "six cities" (Altishahr)18 of t
region were conquered by Russia and China. The amir of Bukhara and th
retained independence over their domestic affairs, but their territories
protectorates, while Khoqand and its people were integrated into the
Russian Turkestan. Farther east, the short-lived Amirate of Kashgar
ruler Yaqub Beg had successfully courted Ottoman support, was recon
China (which did not have diplomatic relations with the Ottomans).19 I
the British took control of Kabul's foreign affairs after the Second An

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 The Protection Question 683

(1878-80) and established a protected state.20 This expansion of colonial power also
inaugurated a revolution in mobility, and thousands of Central Asians began arriving
in the Hijaz on steamships each hajj season. Unlike when he had first arrived, Celai' s
hem§er were everywhere, with many staying on long after completing the pilgrimage.
This colonial expansion and concomitant revolution in mobility coincided with an
extensive period of Ottoman political and administrative "restructuring" known as the
Tanzimat (1839-76), during which the Porte sought to secure territorial integrity against
nationalist movements and European intervention. Two major reform decrees, the 1839
Rescript of the Rose Chamber and the 1856 Reform Edict, outlined centralizing mea-
sures and promised all Ottoman subjects equal rights and protections under the law.
The reforms undermined centuries of legal distinctions between Muslim subjects and
Christians and Jews, and introduced the legal category "Ottoman" that included subjects
of all faiths. The reforms also sought to cultivate an imperial identity among the empire's
heterogeneous population, institute more direct forms of control over the citizenry, and
curb the proliferation of berats among Ottoman Christians by granting them equal rights
and opportunities. The 1839 and 1856 decrees were soon supplemented by legislation
that formalized naturalization procedures. According to the 1869 Ottoman Nationality
Law (Tabiiyet-i Osmaniye Kanunnamesi), any person born to an Ottoman father was a
subject, but one could also become an Ottoman through residence. Those born in the
empire to foreign parents could become naturalized within three years of reaching an
unspecified age of majority (Article 2), and foreign nationals could become naturalized
after fulfilling a five-year residency requirement (Article 3). The fourth article allowed
for Ottoman nationality to be granted to exceptional individuals who had not fulfilled
the terms listed in Articles 2 and 3, and were deemed "worthy of special permission."
The final, ninth article stated that each individual living in the empire was considered an
Ottoman and subject to Ottoman law, and that anyone claiming to be a foreign national
had to provide evidence to this effect.21
As Will Hanley has argued, the law built on an 1863 regulation that forced protégés
to choose to naturalize as foreign subjects or submit to Ottoman territorial jurisdiction.
When many protégés responded by naturalizing with a foreign state and retaining
their Ottoman residency and nationality, the Porte sought to resolve this by enacting
stricter laws.22 Per the 1869 law, all non-Ottomans - Muslim and non-Muslim alike -
were excluded from the nascent citizenry and legally categorized as foreigners ( ecanib ,
sing, ecnebi). The word ecnebV s historical association with Christians, however, led
Ottoman officials to distinguish non-Ottoman Muslims and refer to them as ecanib-
i miislimin ,23 "Foreign Muslim" became an unofficial but capacious subcategory that
included migrants and travelers from colonies, protectorates, and European spheres or
zones of influence in Asia and Africa, as well as pilgrims and long-term pious residents
of the Holy Cities ( mücavirin ).
While the Tanzimat reforms did not have an immediate impact on Celai' s everyday life,
more consistent implementation of an 1867 law prohibiting foreign Muslims from ac-
quiring property in the Hijaz may have given him incentive to become legally naturalized.
Since there was no cadastral survey, taxation, or conscription in the Hijaz, there were few
drawbacks to becoming an Ottoman subject.24 And Celai was cognizant that doing so
would not foreclose the possibility of later becoming naturalized as the subject of a for-
eign power. Many Muslim migrants from North Africa, Bukhara, and Afghanistan whom

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684 Lale Can

he did business with or met while traveling through Alexandria and Istanbul ha
to secure French, Russian, or British nationality or protege status and were n
ing the attendant legal and financial advantages. In the Hijaz, some of these
previously become Ottomans in order to buy land. Sensing that he might one
from holding a Russian passport, Celai decided to register at the Russian C
General in Istanbul during a trip to the city in 1890. When he was detaine
year for a legal matter involving a slave ( bir esir köle maddesi ), his decis
prescient. The recently established Russian consulate in Jeddah was eager t
his assertion of immunity from Ottoman jurisdiction and to protest his deten
Celai did not anticipate, however, was that a decade of similar attempts had pro
Ottoman Foreign Ministry to formulate policies regarding the rights of Buk
Afghans to Russian and British protection that would prevent him from evadin
justice.
When the Hijaz governor learned of Celal's assertion, he wrote to Istanbul for direction
on how to proceed. His query was forwarded to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which
quickly rejected the proof furnished by the Russian consulate to substantiate its claim
of jurisdiction: a copy of an 1890 certificate stating that the fifty-seven-year-old, hazel-
eyed Bukharan of average height was born in Russia.25 In their communications with the
Hijaz, the contempt of the Ottoman authorities in Istanbul nearly leapt off the page. They
pointed out that not only had Celai left Bukhara long before it became a protectorate, but
he had also happily taken advantage of being an Ottoman for thirty years and benefited
from all the rights this entailed. Adding that even if he were originally from parts of
Bukhara that had been formally annexed to Russia - which would have rendered him
a colonial subject rather than a mahmi - he had no valid claim to Russian nationality,
since he had left when the amirate was still completely independent. Celal's scheme had
failed.

In a subsequent note to the Russian consul, the Ottoman Foreign Ministry politely
asked him to refrain from further interference since the case was outside his purview.
While it is not clear whether the consul acquiesced, he and his successors continued to
actively offer their services to people like Celai well into the 1910s. Similar to Great
Britain, imperial Russia was trying to foster loyalty among colonial Muslim subjects
and to establish a foothold in the Hijaz. That Russian authorities differentiated among
colonial subjects within Russia's imperial territories - and would have been loath to
recognize Bukharans as Russian nationals in the metropole - did not deter them from
ignoring these differences when the subjects in question were in Ottoman lands.26
As Eileen Kane has argued, the conferral of consular protection was part of a broader
strategy of extending tsarist power along the pilgrimage routes and into Greater Syria and
Hijaz, and exploiting hajj networks and patronage for political capital and legitimacy.27
This was not always a cynical move, and many Russian subjects abroad and within
the empire (in the case of heirs to the estates of relatives who died while traveling
or on the hajj) benefited from tsarist patronage. Many so-called pauper pilgrims, for
example, relied on this form of protection to complete what was still a long, costly,
and dangerous journey.28 But as Ottoman statesmen feared, tsarist benevolence was
primarily strategic; mobile Muslim migrants and pilgrims constituted a promising path
for Russia to project authority into Arabia, which constituted a holy landscape for the
empire's large population of Muslim subjects. To borrow a term from Lauren Benton's

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 The Protection Question 685

work on the Atlantic world, ongoing consular support of claims to Russian nationality
and the conferral of protection was a means of casting "shadows of sovereignty" into
lands beyond Russia's territorial borders.29

REAL NATIONALS, LEGAL FICTIONS, AND THE PROTECTION

QUESTION

The emergence of an international legal order privileging the laws of "civilized" na

(over those of "barbaric" and "quasicivilized" ones) pressed authorities in polities
varied as China, Japan, and French Tunisia to find ways to limit the power of for
consuls and extraterritorial courts and to rein in the privileges of European protég
Just as the French balked at the idea of recognizing colonial Algerian subjects as Fr
nationals when they crossed the border into Tunisia, Ottoman officials increasingly fo
themselves exempting foreign Muslims from Ottoman jurisdiction, even though ma
them originated from colonies where they would be subject to sharťa law. The Otto
Foreign Ministry was keenly aware that Central Asians did not have recourse to the ty
of rights and protections in St. Petersburg and London that they had started seek
in Ottoman Iraq and Arabia, and that it would have been unimaginable for Russi
authorities to intervene on Celal's behalf in Bukhara. Thus, like contemporary autho
in French Tunisia and Morocco, they sought to curtail the expansion of extraterri
privileges to individuals with borrowed nationalities and to end the abuse of treatie
were never meant to protect Muslims. Faced with attacks on jurisdictional soverei
throughout the empire, and still recovering from the disastrous 1877-78 Russo-Ott
War (which ended in major Ottoman territorial losses in the Balkans), the Foreig
Ministry embraced the fiction that protectorates such as Bukhara and Afghanistan
autonomous or semisovereign, and countered that even if subjects of these polities
not Ottoman nationals, they were still protected by the caliphate.
The path to this decision is outlined in an 1886 case involving an Afghan migr
in Baghdad, who, after thirty-five years as an Ottoman, had tried to become a Br
national. A few years prior to Celal's unsuccessful experiment with affiliation switc
Haci Habib had tried something similar in Ottoman Iraq, a province where the Bri
held sway over an extensive system of extraterritorial courts that served mostly I
pilgrims to Shici shrines and the diasporic communities that had formed in the vicini
these holy sites. Britain's readiness to extend jurisdiction to another group of Musl
the large community of Afghans in this frontier province - was a worrisome develop
for the Porte, and prompted it to try to definitively quash this trend.31 The task of figu
out how was given to legal advisors in the Bureau of Legal Counsel (Hukuk Mü§avi
Ìsti§are Odasi), an office within the Foreign Ministry staffed by senior legal expert
advised the government on matters related to international law. From its inception
1883, it considered a host of complex issues related to extraterritoriality and issued
opinions that informed policymaking in other organs of government such as the C
of State.32
After researching customary law and dominant international legal norms, Ottoman le-
gal advisors maintained that Afghans who had left their country prior to its "annexation"
could not claim British nationality ex post facto, and that these migrants preserved their

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686 Lale Can

"original" or "real" nationality ( muhaciret Halinde ahali-i merkume tabiiyet-i

muhafaza ederler). In formulating this opinion, they drew on a landmark 18
Ministry decision that stated explicitly that "Bukharan and Afghan migrants
traveling in the empire cannot be considered Russian or British subjects if th
from nevahi [administrative units] annexed to Russian Turkestan or India,
the only protection to which these peoples were entitled was that of the Ott
(Devlet-i Aliyye himayesi tahtinda bulunmalari lazim gelir ).33 While this oste
tled the case in question, the bureau issued a more general opinion regarding
who had left their countries long before annexation and settled in the Ottom
After years of residence as de facto Ottomans, these migrants were subject
9 of the 1869 Ottoman Nationality Law, and, as such, had "absolutely no ri
protection of a foreign state." What this meant for Haci Habib was that h
claim British protection, for he had left Afghanistan when it was completely in
and established permanent residence in Iraq.34
The bureau next considered whether foreign Muslims who were not Ottom
ralized, or in accordance with Article 9) and who "originated from states and
while under Russian and British protection, more or less retained their in
and autonomy," could claim the nationality or protection of either empire.35 No
ingly, the answer was again no. Engaging contemporary international law, t
held that protectorates were semiautonomous states, and that their subjects w
All existing treaties and capitulatory privileges applied exclusively to "real
nationals, and not to these protected peoples, who, as the bureau noted, wer
confused with European protégés.36 The Hukuk Mü§avirligi held that since
nationality law had started to diminish the numbers of Christian protégés (this
been a hopeful assessment), the Porte would not tolerate the rise of a new in
the form of Muslims claiming protégé status.
Haci Habib, like Celai, got nowhere with his claim. The Foreign Ministry w
allow Habib to switch roles and perform as an Englishman on the Ottoman st
had prompted the articulation of a major Ottoman legal decision: Afghans and
(and later subjects of Chinese Turkestan) were prohibited from claiming rig
Ottoman Empire that they could not enjoy at home - whether "home" was a
they had left prior to its annexation, or an imperial protectorate or territory wher
population did not have the rights of imperial citizens. The idea that protect
independent - which the French employed to maintain their rule in Tunisia
the scaffolding for the Porte's position that Bukharans and Afghans were not
the same rights as Russian and British nationals, as well as colonial subjects o
Turkestan and British India. While it would prove difficult to enforce, this diff
informed Ottoman policy through World War I. But despite the nomenclatur
by the Ottoman government, "the protected" were not so protected. First the 1
categorized them as foreigners and excluded them from enjoying certain righ
previously been customary among Sunni Muslims, and now the Porte did no
them as nationals of any state other than the protectorates from which they
However, these polities - Afghanistan, Bukhara, and Chinese Turkestan - had
to independently conduct foreign policy or negotiate international agreemen
while the bureau was adamant that Habib had no rights as a foreign nation
not elaborate what it meant to be a foreign Muslim "under the exclusive pro

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 The Protection Question 687

the Ottoman caliphate" or how this argument fit into the framework of international
law.

Despite the intended finality of the decision, Russian and British consuls and their
subjects continued to press the issue of extraterritoriality. Like the Ottomans, the Russian
government also tried (unsuccessfully) to establish a precedent that would put an end
to the continual diplomatic contestation arising from individual incidents. For example,
in 1895 - and again in 191 1 - the Russian ambassador to Istanbul notified the Ottoman
Foreign Ministry that the Bukharan amir wanted his subjects to enjoy Russian protection
abroad, and that henceforth Bukharans would "enjoy the protection of Russian consuls"
and "the protection assured by international law," that is, the Capitulations.38 The note
presented the issue as a fait accompli and did not provide an explanation as to why the
amir's purported request should entail the extension of capitulatory rights to all Bukha-
rans in the empire. Was there a valid legal basis for the extension of these privileges?
Had other great powers (< diivel-i muazzama) been notified?
The Foreign Ministry posed these questions to diplomats in St. Petersburg, Paris,
Berlin, London, Rome, and Vienna in a series of missives in 1895. The responses made
clear that Russia had notified only the Porte, reaffirming its concerns about the dangers
of budging on the question of Bukharans' rights to foreign protection. While the Foreign
Ministry did not oppose the provisioning of financial or logistical consular patronage to
pilgrims and travelers in need, and was generally silent when Russian consuls paid for
pilgrims' steamship tickets back home, it did not want to establish any legal precedent
of allowing Muslim colonial subjects to benefit from the Capitulations. Ultimately, the
Foreign Ministry concluded that Bukharans were not "real subjects" ( veritable sujets ),
reaffirming the Hukuk Mü§avirligi's differentiation between real subjects and mahmi.
The investigation also confirmed that the "protection question" - as the archival dossier
was labeled - had crystallized as a major issue.
However, as evidenced by Russia's second attempt in 1911 to formalize the tsar's
protection of Bukharans, the Porte was not able to put the question to rest. It is also worth
noting that the Ottoman Foreign Ministry explicitly expressed its lack of geopolitical
interest in Central Asia and made clear that its assertion of caliphal protection was only
in response to Russia's claims. As one statesman bluntly put it in 1895, the region had
never been central to Ottoman interests or under the empire's sphere of influence.39 And,
in his correspondence to Osman Nejami Pasha (a diplomat posted in Berlin) in 191 1, the
legal advisor Hakki Pasha expressed his frustration with Russia's continuing attempts to
expand its power through Bukharans. In a pointed comment about international law that
also captured how some Ottoman statesmen regarded these colonial subjects, he wrote:
"Great Britain has many subjects in Africa - are the Germans to accept that the negroes
should enjoy the prerogatives of British subjects in Germany?"40

THE PROTECTION QUESTION IN THE HIJAZ

Not all Ottoman government officials thought like Hakki Pasha. This was
true in the Hijaz, where resolution of the protection question was particula
Home to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, the province had been key to
the government's Islamic credentials since the early 16th century. During th
period (1876-1909), it became the lynchpin of the sultan's claims to a diff

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688 Laie Can

of universal religio-political and "spiritual" authority.41 But the sultan-cal

power in the province was tenuous and sovereignty was shared with the sharī
As Michael C. Low has shown, the Porte had good reason to fear foreign int
Britain's continual insistence that the Porte honor the Capitulations in Mecca
and schemes to prop up the sharīf as an alternate sovereign, were fundament
with its pledges to guarantee Ottoman sovereignty at the 1856 Treaty of Pa
the threat of the Capitulations reaching the gates of Mecca and Medina and
wealthy foreigners could act as a fifth column on behalf of European coloni
the Porte began to take steps to prevent non-Ottoman subjects from amas
power.43
One of the earliest fields in which the government sought to limit the rights of non-
Ottomans was property holding. As Selim Deringil has argued, Ottoman statesmen
began to voice concerns about foreign Muslims' accumulation of property in the Hijaz
in the 1860s.44 As early as 1861, the Council of Ministers in Istanbul warned the amir
of Mecca and the governor of Jeddah that long-term pious residents of the Holy Cities
(mücavirin) should not be permitted foreign protection and that Javanese and Indian
Muslims should only be allowed to settle in the cities if they agreed to abide by shari'a
law.45 These warnings took the shape of legislation in 1867, when the Porte prohibited
foreigners from buying immoveable property in the Hijaz. The Law on the Rights
of Foreign Citizens to Own Land (Tebaa-yi Ecnebiyenin Emlake Mutasarnf Olmalan
Hakkinda Kanun) had actually formalized the rights of foreigners to purchase real estate
throughout the empire, but made an exception for the Hijaz due to sensitivities about
foreign intervention.46
Over the next three decades, the central government sent a series of decrees directing
authorities in Mecca, Medina, and Jeddah to enforce prohibitions on land sales and
regulations on naturalization. However, these efforts met with continual resistance.
Provincial authorities contended that honorable men - some who had been treated as
Ottoman subjects for centuries, and many others who were deeply entangled in the
religious and economic life of Mecca and Medina - were not foreigners.47 The "state"
was not united in the view that Bukharans and Chinese Muslims could become "stalking
horses for European political subversion and extraterritorial control."48 As a result,
Central Asians continued to purchase and endow land with the aid of local judges
and officials, who allowed them to act through guarantors and legal proxies who were
prominent members of local communities. To the Porte's dismay, between 1877 and
1879 the Medina commander approved the sale of twenty-four houses and one mill,
and Meccan officials authorized the sale of ninety houses and 290 parcels of land to
foreigners.49 An ensuing investigation placed the blame on sharťa court judges and
other officials who derived income from fees associated with transferring and endowing
real estate. The Council of State issued a strong statement reiterating the need for the
prohibition and calling for the punishment of officials who flouted the law. They did
not, however, order the confiscation of the illegally acquired properties because, as
they put it, doing so would not "suit the glory of the exalted caliphate." Instead, the
council asked for a register of all of the properties in question and recommended further
deliberation on the proper course of action. There is no evidence that they were ever
seized.50 The council's admission is an important example of how the need to maintain
Islamic legitimacy hampered effective enforcement of the law.

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 The Protection Question 689

As Will Hanley observes in the Egyptian context, legal nationality needed time to
take root. Imperial statesmen and bureaucrats had difficulty imposing their view of what
it meant to be an Ottoman or a foreigner, and in replacing local ( mahalli , yerlï) forms
of belonging with imperial or national ones.51 Where local authorities saw pious Mus-
lims engaged in everyday life, the Porte saw potential chinks in their armor against the
Capitulations. Moreover, the Porte's position that some foreign Muslims were exclu-
sively protected by the caliphate - with no clear explication of what this meant in legal
terms - may have reinforced the notion that being a Sunni Muslim was still integral to
membership in the Ottoman Empire. However the Porte chose to classify Muslims from
outside the empire, many Ottoman subjects still considered Central Asians locals, and
imperial legislation and legal decisions emanating from Istanbul had limited success in
convincing provincial authorities that they should be treated otherwise.
The prohibition on land sales also proved difficult to implement due to the historical
role that foreign Muslims played in building housing and renting it to their compatriots. If
Central Asians could no longer buy land or property, who was going to meet the housing
needs of the thousands of people traveling to Arabia each year? This was the question
the Hijaz Provincial Assembly posed to Istanbul in early 1882 when a wealthy Kashgari
named Abdurresul Efendi was prevented from building a philanthropic foundation in
Medina that would provide lodging to pilgrims.52 The 1 867 law had banned sales of land
and immoveable property not only for commercial or private use but also for Islamic
endowments. In correspondence with Istanbul, the members of the assembly proposed
an interim measure that would permit Kashgaris to buy and sell land acquired within
the last two years. More importantly, they reiterated that subjects of a Muslim sovereign
should not be deprived of rights to landholding. Although Kashgar was no longer ruled
by Yaqub Beg (r. 1865-77) - who had recognized the sultan as his sovereign, and minted
coins and read the Friday sermon in his name - they contended that people from the city
and its environs did not have relations with or citizenship in "a foreign state."53 This
suggests that they equated foreign rule primarily with Christian Europe or, more likely,
that they thought Kashgar was still under Muslim rule.
Local attempts at negotiation with the central government largely fell on deaf ears.
Instead of complying with the spirit of the law, officials in the Hijaz continued to sell
land, but added window dressing that they believed would nominally satisfy the Porte's
demands. This is apparent in a 1902 case involving irregular naturalization attempts and
involvement of local agents, which came to the attention of the Interior Ministry via
the Medina garrison commander. Two Bukharans (Hoca Abdülhadi and Molla Ustan)
had purchased land in Mecca worth 4,150 lira and then endowed it as waqf, acting
on behalf of the alleged shaykh al-Islam of Bukhara, Mir Bedreddin bin Sadreddin.
The act triggered concern that highly placed foreign Muslims such as Mir Bedreddin
could evade the law, leading to an investigation that pointed to a cover-up.54 The Hijaz
governor said the shaykh had been given Ottoman identity papers ( tezkire-i osmaniye)
on 17 April 1901, but there was no record of his naturalization in the Citizenship Affairs
Bureau. The Interior Ministry next inquired on what basis the shaykh had been given the
said papers. This time, Hijaz authorities responded that Mir Bedreddin was a miicavir ,
and that his request for a tezkire had been approved "in the recognized way" - that
is, through the provision of an oath and guarantee by an honorable member of the
community (the Bukharan pilgrimage leader §eyh Ahmed).55 The Hijaz governor's

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690 Lale Can

office also claimed they had no knowledge of Mir Bedreddin's position - w

§eyh Ahmed's involvement seemed unlikely - and that he had since left M
died. As the inquiry progressed, the details became even more confusing. It
Mir Bedreddin had never been naturalized and that his agents had obtained t
papers of another Bukharan with the same name and then used them to purcha
Every reported method of legalizing the sale had been unlawful. But given
sensitivity to its prestige, it did not risk compromising the "glory of the c
annulling the transaction. Given that Mir Bedreddin had died, it was fortuit
had endowed the land, since the Russian consul was less likely to demand th
adjudicate the shaykh's estate.
The central problem with land sales to Bukharans was that European aut
often did not recognize the naturalization of their subjects, particularly w
were large estates involved. Even when Ottoman authorities provided proof
nationality, Russian authorities challenged the legality of what we might t
Asian citizenship or nationality conversions. As Eric Lohr and James H. M
shown, tsarist officials insisted that their subjects had to first renounce their
in Russia before obtaining Ottoman nationality. This meant that people who
naturalize after arriving in the sultan's domains had to travel to distant Ru
and file expensive paperwork in order to "legally" become Ottomans - a co
laborious enterprise that few were likely to undertake.56 Effectively, these
Ottomans were unable to break free of the bonds of their Russian subject
was true even in death, and especially if they had amassed property in th
Empire.57 While a full discussion of Russia's insistence on preserving subj
outside the scope of this article, the salient point is that Russian reluctan
Ottoman naturalization rendered the Porte increasingly cautious about allow
Asians to buy land and to obtain Ottoman identity papers without prior ap
Russian consular officials.
The insistence of European consuls in Jeddah (and beyond) on the right to regulate the
legal affairs of their subjects was not only about protecting the interests of heirs of de-
ceased men and women under their jurisdiction. In the 1900s, the British and the Russians
also tried to extend their protection to Muslims from Chinese Turkestan, making clear that
the zeal to protect the dead was motivated in no small part by broader imperial ambitions.
In 1908, for example, the Russian consul in Jeddah claimed the authority to settle the
affairs of a deceased pilgrim from Kashgar.58 In a letter to Istanbul, the Hijaz provincial
commander Mehmed Kazim Pasha explained that when the man died, local authorities
followed customary Ottoman practices from "days of old" and absorbed his estate into the
treasury. But the Russian consul objected, claiming that the pilgrim was under Russian
protection ( taht-i himaye).59 In a clear-cut yet misguided instance of "speaking sharťa"
to Ottoman authorities,60 he berated them for acting against Islamic law and insinuated
that the heirs of the deceased man included orphaned children - perhaps thinking he was
bolstering his argument by emphasizing the special status of orphans in Islamic law. "It
might be the case that when their father died," he wrote, "far from home ( diyar-i gurbet )
and in the path of God . . . orphans back home were suffering and in need."61
That might very well have been the case, but Mehmed Kazim Pasha was not moved.
Nor were the legal advisors in Istanbul, who determined that the Russian consulate "had
no right to seize the estate in order to send it to the heirs of the Chinese hajji who

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 The Protection Question 691

died in Jeddah," and "no authority to intervene in the affairs of Kashgaris or Afghans."
They advised the government to find another way to regulate these types of estates so
as not to invite continual foreign intervention. The pasha was directed to transfer such
estates to the Porte in the future.62 More importantly, the Hukuk Mü§avirligi now argued
that Muslims from China - like Afghans and Bukharans - were exclusively under the
protection of the Ottoman caliphate. This endeavor to stake a claim to an "unprotected"
population, however, left Muslims from Chinese Turkestan with no recourse to foreign
consular support and no clear sense of what it meant to be under Ottoman protection.
The Hukuk Mü§avirligi had still not elaborated what caliphal protection meant in the
legal and diplomatic sense, and in the framework of international law. This ambiguity
may have been an intentional strategy for leaving the door open to a future articulation
of the caliph's authority.
Many long-term residents of Mecca and Medina, it seemed, could not opt out of
being foreign Muslims and become naturalized Ottoman subjects, leaving them stuck
in a sort of legal limbo. This is clear in a 1913 incident during which the Medina
garrison commander lamented that he had been waiting for a response from the Jeddah
Russian consul for over a year about a Central Asian resident who wanted to become an
Ottoman subject. The commander voiced his frustration that Russian consular officials
did not recognize Ottoman naturalization procedures, and explained that, as a result,
local Muslims were complaining about delayed real estate deals and housing problems.
Their attempts at becoming Ottomans were blocked by the Porte's insistence that they
furnish proof that Russia had relinquished them as subjects.63 As in the 1882 case
involving Abdurresul Efendi of Kashgar, the view from Medina was that Bukharans and
other Central Asians who had resided in the empire since "days of old" were locals and
should be permitted to buy land. The garrison commander cited the practice of allowing
Tunisians to do so, contingent upon swearing oaths that they would not seek foreign
protection in any future disputes, and that failure to abide by these oaths would result in
confiscation of their property and immediate exile.64 But his letter suggested that even
these measures were unnecessary, and that resolving the matter was urgent for the local
population, public improvements, and nothing less than the progress of the country.65
The Porte, however, did not agree.
Later that year, the secretary to the minister of foreign affairs communicated to the
Interior Ministry that certain pilgrims and miicavirin were trying to revert to their original
nationality to claim foreign protections. He admonished his colleagues to enact strict
precautions in granting Ottoman nationality in order to avoid "serious dangers."66 The
measures he prescribed, however, were not markedly different from procedures laid out
in the 1 867 regulations on foreigners' property rights, the 1 869 Ottoman Nationality Law,
or numerous legal opinions and decrees that had been issued since the 1 880s. This was, in
effect, old news. It was now the Foreign Ministry that lamented its situation. Authorities
held that each country should be able to determine independently who could become a
subject, and that the Ottomans had never recognized Russian procedural requirements
in this regard. But the point was moot: tsarist consuls continued to intervene on behalf of
Muslims they considered their subjects, and for over three decades the ministry had not
been able to effectively challenge their claims.67 With the possibility of another war with
Russia on the horizon, the Council of State reiterated its concerns that allowing foreign
Muslims to purchase property could cause them to act against Ottoman interests.68

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692 Lale Can

And yet despite the council's insistence, authorities in the Hijaz continue
back. They pledged to follow the decree, while actively questioning its logic an
that Central Asians, particularly mücavirin , were not foreign. "Whether they
or their father and grandfathers married and established families here," wrote
commander, "they had become part of the ahali [the people]." In earlier times
these Muslims had been able to purchase land and real estate; there was "no r
they should be exempt now.69 Protection and nationality had become as much in
issues as international ones, as local communities asserted their own underst
belonging and what it meant to be a foreigner against those of the metropole. A
the Porte struggled to implement policies that limited the rights of "protect
and was left continually vulnerable to Russian and British infringements on
sovereignty.

CONCLUSION, OR THE LIMITS OF PROTECTION

As recent scholarship has shown, revolutions in steam and print tec

expansion of global markets, particularly after the opening of the Su
led to unprecedented flows of people, goods, and ideas across the Musl
as Valeska Huber argues, this era of heightened connections was mar
the deceleration of certain types of movement as it was by accelerat
controls such as quarantine and passports, and the hardening of politic
identities, created new chokepoints that slowed down many migrants
Huber's analysis of the tensions inherent in globalization and attention
tion [s] between categories of movement became a central instrument
movement of some of them, such as troops and colonial travelers, and
cratic apparatus to control and if necessary detain or repatriate others,
for thinking about evolving dynamics between the late Ottoman state
segments of the umma. Even as conceptions of time and space shran
emerged, and Muslims from so-called peripheries became more conn
tral Islamic lands, non-Ottoman Muslims in the last Islamic empire we
becoming legal outsiders. If 1869 represented a watershed for transreg
as this article has shown, it also marked a major legal rupture. Whil
foreignness was subject to multiple and conflicting interpretations tha
and experience, nationality as a legal category was incontrovertibly bec
feature of Muslims' status in the empire.
This shift was a consequence of the Tanzimat reforms, which creat
boundary - "the line between members and nonmembers" of the polit
damentally challenged the structure of Ottoman society. The reforms
relationship between the sultan and what I term his spiritual subjects,
whom the Ottoman state claimed to wield an imprecisely defined spir
authority. In a sense, the Tanzimat reforms began to sever the link b
stituency of the sultanate and that of the caliphate: the sultan was no
of a territorially bounded empire where religious distinctions among
were theoretically leveled, while the caliph claimed to have authorit
beyond Ottoman subjects to foreign Muslims. However, in reality th
ration within the Ottoman government reflecting this division. More

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 The Protection Question 693

pan-Islamic rhetoric associated with this period - as well as the position detailed here
that certain ecanib-i miislimin were protected only by the caliphate - religion and re-
ligious identities did not dictate realpolitik and the caliph's protection had very real
limits. Even as authorities in Mecca and Medina offered plausible reasons why Central
Asians should not be considered foreigners, the Porte maintained that they could not
enjoy rights in the empire simply by dint of being Sunni Muslims. As distances across
the Muslim world were shrinking, the Ottoman central government was introducing
new distinctions among Muslim colonial subjects to combat the expansion of a legal
order that threatened the empire's sovereignty. These distinctions, in turn, had important
repercussions for Central Asians.
The changes brought on by mass pilgrimage, concurrent processes of exclusion and
inclusion, and the expansion of extraterritoriality and the protege system necessitated a
steep learning curve for people traveling across empires, whether they were permanent
migrants or pilgrims. The literature on the resulting legal pluralism has commonly under-
stood these processes as demonstrating how ordinary people navigated, negotiated, and
manipulated flexible identities, and how they pursued strategies to maximize subject-
hood rights. Without a doubt, contested and overlapping spheres of sovereignty enabled
many people with one foot in two or more empires to maximize economic and political
gain.74 But this is only part of the picture. Although many migrants quickly learned to
work within the interstices of imperial mobility regulations and to live as dual nationals
in Ottoman and Russian territories, these strategies were not uniformly available to all
Muslims, and particularly not tè those from protectorates or empires that did not have
diplomatic relations with», the Ottoman Empire. Rather than overstate the potential for
negotiation in a search for subaltern agency (which implies that the parties were on equal
footing), this article's exploration of Central Asians in the Ottoman Empire cautions us
to recognize how plural legal orders also constrained rights and opportunities.75 The
Porte's view that Bukharans were not real Russian subjects, coupled with the fact that
Afghans or Turkic peoples from Qing China lacked a recognized foreign nationality,
impels us to recognize that these liminal subjects could not benefit from extraterritorial
rights and battles over jurisdiction without recourse to various ruses.76 The stories of
Celai and Haci Habib attest to the limits of their power to negotiate or exploit Russo- and
Anglo-Ottoman legal and jurisdictional ambiguities. This limitation also applied to the
men and women who could not renounce their Russian subjecthood, as well as to those
whom Ottoman statesmen did not recognize as legal nationals of any empire - Russian,
British, or Ottoman. Central Asian "protected peoples" were effectively doubly excluded
in legal terms: first designated as non-Ottomans by the state, then labeled mahmis who
did not bear the rights of European nationals or proteges, including capitulatory rights.
The claim of being protected by the caliphate could even result in the denial of rights
via Islamic law; in the 1908 dispute over the deceased Kashgari pilgrim's estate, for
example, the man's legal heirs - who may or may not have included orphans - would
never receive their share of his wealth.
Nationality slowly started to occupy a more important place in people's lives, and
became a major preoccupation for the Ottomans. Legal advisors approached each pro-
tection case that came before them with the question "My countryman, what is your
real nationality?" But like Manço's interlocutor, they were often dissatisfied with the
answers they received. Despite decades of trying to defend Ottoman sovereignty by

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694 Lale Can

working within the system of international law, the Porte met with only limi
in preventing the expansion of extraterritoriality and protection. And even as
seemed to be the question on everyone's lips, it was by no means universally
this term meant. For the miicavir waiting throughout 1 9 1 3 to become Ottoma
ity was about settling down, buying land, and, possibly, living a pious life in
officials at the Porte it was a legal status tied to concerns about jurisdictional s
For people desiring to transact real estate deals or judges and provincial admi
the Hijaz, it was not always apparent what was at issue: why were people fro
Afghanistan, and Kashgar not able to enjoy rights their forefathers had - e
they were under the protection of the caliph? Contestation, confusion, and
struggles had resulted in a type of legal limbo in which many "protected p
the burdens of colonial pressures and jurisdictional disputes. As the Centr
Medina waited for their naturalization to be approved, they had no national
use to their advantage in any legal forum, and no clear sense of what it m
protected by the caliph. Was there a passport or a consul that would serve them
where they were from, they would likely have said "Bukhara the Noble" or
of the Prophet" ( medīnat al-nabī ), inspiring intense frustration among Ot
advisors in Istanbul who were interested in their legal nationality. In trying
the international legal order, foreign Muslims and Ottoman statesmen alike
in an increasingly arduous pursuit that often led to one dead end after anoth

NOTES

Author's note: The research and writing of this article was made possible by grants f
Research Award Program, the American Research Institute in Turkey, and the Nationa
Humanities. I wish to express my gratitude to the participants in the workshop on Ott
international law at The Graduate Center, City University of New York (2015) and t
"Protection and Empire" (2016), particularly Lauren Benton, Aimee Genell, Will Hanley
Low, and Will Smiley. I am also indebted to Samuel Dolbee, Chris Gratien, Emily Gr
Adeeb Khalid, Masha Kirasirova, Jessica Marglin, Robert D. McChesney, Eric Schluess
and Seçil Yilmaz for their valuable feedback. I also thank Jeffrey Culang, Akram K
anonymous reviewers at IJMES for their incisive comments for improving earlier drafts
^'Hemçerim Memleket Nire" was released on the 1992 album Mega Mango by Emre
throughout this article I use "nationality" to mean a type of affiliation with a state t
rights, without modern connotations of loyalty or political citizenship. This is in line with W
also in the context of negotiations over Russo-Ottoman sovereignty. As Smiley succinctl
subjects, when abroad, were Russian 'nationals' - sharing membership of the same state
status within that state." See "The Ottoman State, Russian Fugitives, and Interimpe
International Journal of Middle East Studies 46 (2014): 73-93.
3 According to Victor Turner, communitas was an intense form of comradeship and e
by people during rites of passage such as hajj. It was "a spontaneously generated relatio
and equal total and individuated human beings, stripped of all structural attributes." Tur
and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Pre
4On the role of Islam and pan-Islamic ideology in the late Ottoman Empire, see
Well-Protected Domains: Ideology and Legitimation of Power in the Ottoman Empir
and New York: I.B. Tauris, 1998); and Kemal Karpat, The Politicization of Islam: Restructu
Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 20
custodianship of the hajj, see Suraiya Faroqhi, Pilgrims and Sultans: The Hajj under t
and New York: I.B. Tauris. 2014).
sBa;bakanlik Osmanli Argivi (BOA) HR.H 571/27 (2July 1892) and HR.HM§.ͧ0 177/34(11 July 1892).

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 The Protection Question 695

6Umut Özsu, "The Ottoman Empire, the Origins of Extraterritoriality, and International Legal Theory," in
The Oxford Handbook of the Theory of International Law , ed. Florian Hoffman and Anne Oxford (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2016), 124. For additional background on the Capitulations, see Feroz Ahmad,
"Ottoman Perceptions of the Capitulations, 1800-1914," Journal of Islamic Studies 1 1 (2000): 1-20; and John
T. Spagnolo, "Portents of Empire in Britain's Ottoman Extraterritorial Jurisdiction," Middle Eastern Studies
27(1991): 256-82.
7 Özsu, "The Ottoman Empire," 129.
8For studies of how Russia and Britain sought to establish themselves as Muslim powers though patronage
of the hajj, see Eileen Kane, Russian Hajj, Empire and the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell
University Press, 2015); and John Slight, The British Empire and the Hajj, 1865-1956 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, 2015). On British claims to protect Afghans, see Faiz Ahmed, "Contested Subjects:
Ottoman and British Jurisdictional Quarrels in re Afghans and Indian Muslims," Journal of Ottoman and
Turkish Studies Association (forthcoming, winter 2016).
9Kayaoglu defines extraterritoriality as "the extension of a state's legal authority into another state and
limitation of legal authority of the target state over issues that may affect people, commercial interests, and
security of the imperial states." Turan Kayaoglu, Legal Imperialism: Sovereignty and Extraterritoriality in
Japan , the Ottoman Empire , and China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 6.
10This scholarship is too extensive to cite all of it here, particularly on the Capitulations, which are discussed
in most works on the late Ottoman Empire. In addition to Ahmad, "Ottoman Perceptions" and Spagnolo,
"Portents of Empire," see Maurits Van den Boogert, The Capitulations and the Ottoman Legal System: Qadis,
Consuls , and Beratlis in the 18th Century (Leiden: Brill, 2005). On legal pluralism in the Ottoman Empire,
see Karen Barkey, "Aspects of Legal Pluralism in the Ottoman Empire," in Legal Pluralism and Empires,
1500-1850, ed. Lauren Benton and Richard Ross (New York: New York University Press, 2013). Studies by
Julia Clancy Smith and Mary Dewhurst Lewis have been particularly influential for reconceptualizing the
possibilities and problems ushered in by legal imperialism and legal pluralism. Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans:
North Africa and Europe in an Age of Migration, c. 1800-1900 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California
Press, 2012); Lewis, "The Geographies of Power: The Tunisian Civic order, Jurisdictional Politics, and Imperial
Rivalry in the Mediterranean, 1881-1935," Journal of Modern History 80 (2008): 791-830. On the protégé
system, see Salahi R. Sonyel, "The Protégé System in the Ottoman Empire," Journal of Islamic Studies 2
(1991): 56-66. Other works of note on nationality, sovereignty, legal pluralism, and protection include Will
Hanley, "Foreignness and Localness in Alexandria, 1880-1914" (PhD diss., Princeton University, 2007);
Eric Beverly, Hyderabad, British India, and the World: Muslim Networks and Minor Sovereignty (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2015); Jessica M. Marglin "The Two Lives of Mas'ud Amoyal: Pseudo- Algerians
in Morocco, 1 830-1 9 1 2," International Journal of Middle East Studies 44 (201 2): 65 1-70; and Sarah Abrevaya
Stein, "Protected Persons? The Baghdadi Jewish Diaspora, the British State, and the Persistence of Empire,"
American Historical Review 1 16 (201 1): 80-108.
11 Lewis, "The Geographies of Power," 180.
12On the uncertainties of colonial law and legal pluralism, see Sally Engle Merry, "Colonial Law and Its
Uncertainties," Law and History Review 28 (2010): 1067-71; and Julia Stephens "An Uncertain Inheritance:
The Imperial Travels of Legal Migrants, from British India to Ottoman Iraq," Law and History Review 32
(2014): 749-72. Stephens traces how how legal uncertainty frustrated both colonial authorities and litigants
in British consular courts in Iraq, but concludes that "uncertainty and certainty were mutually constitutive"
and ultimately expanded the reach of imperial law.
13 For these studies, see n. 10. I am influenced here by Clancy-Smith, who writes, "the legal quagmire
created by conflicts involving the subjects of local rulers, recognized proteges, resident expatriates, recent
immigrants, or familiar strangers under shifting or uncertain jurisdictions was presented as an episode in
modern Middle Eastern history, not as one chapter in larger struggles unfolding across the world in much
the same manner and period. Conflicting jurisdictions are universal phenomena, which haunt our world, ever
more today due to high-intensity 'globalization.'" Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans, 200.
14On the Porte's views of foreign Muslims, see Selim Deringil, "The Ottoman Empire and Russian Muslims:
Brothers or Rivals?," Central Asian Survey 1 3 (1994): 409-1 6; and Michael Christopher Low, "The Mechanics
of Mecca: The Technopolitics of the Late Ottoman Hejaz and the Colonial Hajj" (PhD diss., Columbia
University, 2015).
15Kemal Karpat analyzes Ottoman-Central Asian relations through the lens of ethnic kinship and broth-
erhood in The Politicization of Islam. In another influential but problematic study, Mehmet Saray considers

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696 Lale Can

kinship and loyalty as crucial to Ottoman-Central Asian political relations. Saray, The Russian
nese and Ottoman Rivalry in Turkestan: Four Studies on the History of Central Asia (Ankara, T
Historical Society Printing House, 2003). Michael A. Reynolds offers a critique of pan-Turkism
as categories of analysis in "Buffers, Not Brethren: Young Turk Military Policy in the First W
the Myth of Panturanism," Past and Present 203 (2009): 137-79.
^International law emerged as a Eurocentric framework for the practice of internationa
diplomats, based on treaty and customary law and, increasingly, the Capitulations.
17These were colonial subjects who had no connections to the legal nationalities they acquire
according to colonial authorities, employed various ruses solely for the purpose of obtain
protections. Lewis uses the term "borrowed nationalities" to describe how French authori
viewed non-European protégés such as Algerians. Lewis, Divided Rule: Sovereignty and Emp
Tunisia, 1881-1938 (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2014), 61.
18Rian Thum makes the case for referring to this region as "Altishahr," using the designatio
in the region used historically. Thum, The Sacred Routes of Uyghur History (Cambridge,
University Press, 2014).
19On the Russian Empire in Central Asia, see Seymour Becker, Russia's Protectorates in
Bukhara and Khiva, 1865-1914 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1968); Jeff Sa
Colonial Society in Tashkent: 1865-1923 (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2007); an
Morrison, Russian Rule in Samarkand, 1868-1910: A Comparison with British India (Oxford
versity Press, 2008). On Chinese Turkestan, see Hodong Kim, Holy War in China: The Muslim
State in Chinese Central Asia, 1864-1877 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004). Th
the terms "protectorate" and "protected states" as used in this article is not synonymous with p
I Mandates. In the Russian protectorates of Khiva and Bukhara, the khan and the amir were R
who were granted local autonomy but no control over foreign policy. While their territories were n
annexed (although parts of Bukhara were annexed to the Russian colony in Turkestan) nor sub
colonialism, they were internationally recognized as part of the Russian Empire. In Afghanist
technically retained independence as the head of a "protected state." The country was never of
the British Empire, and the amir controlled internal affairs. But as in the case of the Bukhara
the British controlled Afghanistan's foreign policy.
20On British involvement in Afghanistan, see Thomas Barfield, Afghanistan: A Cultura
History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010).
21 For a file that summarizes five decades of Ottoman and citizenship- and nationality-related
provides the 1869 law in full, see HR.HM§.i§0 221/1 (5 November 1919). For an English tran
law, see Richard Flournoy and Manley Hudson, eds., A Collection of Nationality Law of Variou
Contained in Constitutions, Statutes and Treaties (New York: Oxford University Press, 1929).
22Will Hanley, "What Ottoman Nationality Was and Was Not," Journal of the Ottoman and T
Association (forthcoming, winter 2016).
23 Prior to the Tanzimat, ecnebi was primarily used as a term to describe people from Christi
24DH.SN.THR 54/45 (3 August 1914). On the government's decision not to implement the Tanz
in Yemen and other "exceptional provinces," see Thomas Kuehn, Empire, Islam, and Politics of
Ottoman Rule in Yemen, 1849-1919 (Leiden: Brill, 201 1).
25HR.H 571/27 (2 July 1892); HR.HM§.i§0 177/34 (1 1 July 1892). On the consular system in
Ulrike Freitag, "Helpless Representatives of the Great Powers? Western Consuls in Jeddah, 18
Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 40 (2012): 357-81.
26 According to Daniel Brower, "tsardom had become the patron of [Central Asian pilgrims
quence of attempts to regulate the hajj. Brower, Turkestan and the Fate of the Russian Empir
New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003). As Alexander Morrison argues, even if Russian colonial adm
claimed that inhabitants of Tashkent, Samarqand, and other cities were "considered to be as m
citizens as those of Moscow," this claim was patently false because "they were not accorded equ
the population of European Russia." Morrison, "Metropole, Colony, and Imperial Citizenship in
Empire," Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 13 (2012): 327-64. According
"the emirates of Bukhara and Khiva (formally acquired by Russia and given protectorate statu
1873, respectively) retained their own subjecthood and their subjects were treated as foreigner
respects when they crossed the border between the emirates and the empire proper." Their status w
from that of subjects of "parts of Central Asia that were annexed and fully incorporated directly"

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 The Protection Question 697

subjecthood on a full jus soli [right of the soil] basis." Lohr, Russian Citizenship : From Empire to Soviet Union
(Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2012), 32-33.
27 Kane, Russian Hajj.
28 1 explore Ottoman and Russian patronage of Central Asian pilgrims at greater length in my forth-
coming manuscript, provisionally titled "Spiritual Citizens: Central Asian Pilgrims in the Late Ottoman
Empire."
29 Lauren Benton, "Shadows of Sovereignty: Legal Encounters and the Politics of Protection in the Atlantic
World," in Encounters Old and New: Essays in Honor of Jerry Bentley (Honolulu, Hawaii: University of
Hawaii Press, forthcoming).
30For a comparative study of legal imperialism, see Kayaoglu, Legal Imperialism. Lewis's work on French
North Africa is indispensable for understanding the complexity of overlapping and divided sovereignty. Lewis,
Divided Rule. See also works cited in n. 10; Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in
World History, 1400-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); and Benton and Ross, Legal
Pluralism and Empires.
31 HR.TO 369/98, 1 March 1 886. On British Indians and consular courts in Iraq, see Stephens, "An Uncertain
Inheritance"; and Gökhan Çetinsaya, "The Ottoman View of British Presence in Iraq and the Gulf: The Era of
Abdülhamid II," Middle Eastern Studies 39 (2003): 194-203. Although the archival record does not reveal why
Haci Habib tried to become a British national, he may have been motivated to do so if he had sons who faced
conscription. Cases involving muhacir in Iraq and Greater Syria suggest that while first-generation migrants
were exempt from serving in the military, their children were not. On conscription, see Mehmet Be§ikçi, The
Ottoman Mobilization of Manpower in the First World War: Between Voluntarism and Resistance (Leiden:
Brill, 2012). Karen Kern explores citizenship, marriage, and conscription in Iraq. Kern, Imperial Citizens:
Marriage and Citizenship in the Ottoman Frontier Provinces of Iraq (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University
Press, 2011).
32 BOA Rehberi [BOA Guidebook], Osmanli Ar§ivi Daire Ba§kanligi Yayin Nu: 108, ístanbul, 2010, 381-
82. On the training and composition of the legal advisors in the Hukuk Mii§avirligi, see Aimee Genell, "The
Well-Defended Domains: Eurocentric Law and the Making of the Ottoman Office of Legal Counsel," Journal
of the Ottoman and Turkish Studies Association (forthcoming, winter 2016).
33HR.TO 365/86, 27 January 1881.
34 HR.TO 369/98, 1 March 1886.
35 The reference to tribes here should be understood in the context of Russian subjecthood/ extraterritoriality,
where prominent tribal and clan leaders were sometimes given subjecthood rights in negotiations for colonial
expansion.
36HR.TO 369/98, 1 March 1886.
37 In the case of Afghanistan, the British had made this very clear by sending the Porte a copy of the
agreement signed with the amir. See, for example, HR.TO 264/5 1 , 8 September 1 890.
38HR.SYS 1304, Gömlek 2, June 1895.
39See, for example, HR. SYS 1304, Gömlek 2, for a 15 October 1895 memorandum issued by the Hukuk
Mü§avirligi.
40HR.SYS 1304, Gömlek 2, 16 December 1911.
41 Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains. On Ottoman rule in the Hijaz, see William Ochsenwald, Religion ,
Society, and the State in Arabia: The Hijaz under Ottoman Control, 1840-1908 (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State
University Press, 1984). The claim to "spiritual authority" dated to the 1774 Treaty of Kiiçiik Kaynarca, which
the Ottomans signed with Russia after the loss of the Crimea. The treaty recognized the tsar as the protector
of Orthodox Christians in Ottoman lands, and the sultan-caliph's authority over Russian Muslims. On the
treaty, see Roderic H. Davison, "'Russian Skill and Turkish Imbecility': The Treaty of Kuchuk Kainardji
Reconsidered," Slavic Review 35 (1976): 463-83.
42 There is a growing area of research that explores how engagement with international law informed
Ottoman governance in autonomous and "exceptional" provinces. See Aimee Genell, "'Empire by Law':
Ottoman Sovereignty and the British Occupation of Egypt, 1882-1923" (PhD diss., Columbia University,
2013); Low, "Mechanics of Mecca"; Will Hanley, Nationality Grasped: Identification, Protection, and Law in
Turn-of-the-Century Alexandria (New York: Columbia University Press, forthcoming); Mostafa Minawi, The
Ottoman Scramble for Africa: Empire and Diplomacy in the Sahara and the Hijaz (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford
University Press, 2016); and Matthew Ellis, "Desert Borderland: Territoriality, Sovereignty, and the Making
of Modern Egypt and Libya" (unpublished manuscript).

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698 Lale Can

43 Low elaborates that the Council used the autonomous status of the holy cities "to deflect an
the internationally binding requirements of the Capitulations and prevent the application of foreign
beyond Jeddah." Low, "Mechanics of Mecca," 136-37.
^Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains.
45For the 1861 decision, see A.jMKT.UM 511/80 (25 R 1278/30 September 1861). Low also
ruling in "The Mechanics of Mecca," 136-37.
46For the law in its entirety and a summary of foreigners' property rights and the central
concerns about the extension of capitulations, see BEO 4338/325334 (17 January 1915). To preem
intervention, the law stipulated that any future disputes or legal matters involving property wo
to Ottoman legal jurisdiction alone. It also required states to sign separate protocols in order for
to benefit from the law. Though selectively enforced, this stipulation could be used to prevent
acquiring real estate, since their home countries could not independently sign such internationa
47 It is common to come across phrases in these sources that acknowledge that Central Asian
recently" (at various points between the 1880s and 1910s) been treated as Ottomans. An 1887 M
decision, for example, begins by stating that, "even though Central Asians residing in the empi
recently been treated as Ottomans..." MV 17/38 (30 Ca 1304/24 February 1887).
48Deringil's analysis draws on a source in the YA.RES 15/38 file, which states that, "If we remain i
to the accumulation of property by devious means in the hands of foreign Muslims, with the p
we may find that much of the Holy Lands have been acquired by the subjects of foreign powe
foreigners, as is their wont, after lying in waiting for some time, will suddenly be upon us at
opportunity and excuse and will proceed to make the most preposterous claims." This citati
reflects the §ura-yi Devlet's position but, I argue, does not fully represent debates within the
Deringil, The Well-Protected Domains, 60.
49 YA.RES 15/38 (5 C 1299/24 April 1882). Cezmi Eraslan cites similar numbers in //. Abdiilha
Birliģi: Osmanli Devleti'nin islam Siyaseti, 1856-1908 (Divanyolu, istanbul: Ötüken, 1991), 31
^YA.RES 15/38.
51 Hanley examines what it meant to be an Ottoman or a local in Egypt, and argues that Egypt
status persisted into the 20th century. "When Did Egyptians Stop Being Ottomans? An Imperia
Case Study," Multilevel Citizenship, ed. Willem Maas (Philadelphia, Pa.: University of Pennsy
2013), 89-109. In Nationality Grasped, he argues that administrators and bureaucrats met w
difficulty in replacing local ( mahalli , yerli ) as a focal point of identity.
52YA.RES 15/38, 24 S 1299 (15 Ocak 1882).
53Until the early 1880s, Kashgar was technically under Ottoman suzerainty. Kim, Holy W
Kemal Karpat, "Yakub Bey's Relations with the Ottoman Sultans: A Reinterpretation," Cahi
russe et soviétique 32 (1991): 17-32.
54DH.MKT 543/13, 18 July 1902. The question of Mir Bedreddin's identity is thorny. He may h
son of the chief qadi ( qazi al-quzat ) of Bukhara, Mulla Mir Sadr al-Din Khuttalani, but there is no ev
this individual ever went to the Hijaz. According to Robert D. McChesney, he may have had a su
in his name, or - in a twist on Martin Guerre - the Mir Bedreddin in this case may have been
adopting a well-known but not easily verifiable identity. On the chief qadi andáis son, see Edw
et al., eds., The Personal History of a Bukharan Intellectual: The Diary of Muhammad-Sharif
(Leiden: Brill, 2004), esp. 97n50.
55The Bukharan pilgrimage leader provided the guarantee ( kefalet ). This was an official appo
sharīf of Mecca and a member of the most important guilds in the Hijaz.
56Lohr argues that a defining feature of citizenship policy through 1914 was an "attract and h
that sought to counter "a persistent shortage of people and a sense that immigration and natural
expand the economic power of the empire, while emigration and denaturalization were to b
the same reason." Lohr, Russian Citizenship, 5 and chap. 4. James H. Meyer makes a similar
"Immigration, Return and the Politics of Citizenship: Russian Muslims in the Ottoman Empire
International Journal of Middle East Studies 39 (2007): 15-32.
57 Smiley, "The Burdens of Subjecthood."
58 According to a 1908 report from Jeddah, the Russian consul there reported that Chinese Mu
Russian protection when it suited them, and suggested to the central government that it woul
to formally assume responsibility over Kashgaris. Fond 143, opis 491, delo 2305, Chinese in Tur
David Brophy for sharing this source with me.

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 The Protection Question 699

59DH. MKT 2736/37, 10 February 1909; DH.MKT 2691/30, 24 December 1908. Also, in 1908, the Ministry
of Foreign Affairs stated that Kashgaris were under the protection of the hilafet-i mukaddese-i islamiye (holy
Islamic caliphate), but did not engage at all with tsarist arguments about shari'a. HR.HMÇ.IÇO 194/68 (30
December 1908); DH.MKT 2691/30 (24 December 1908).
60 Adapting Stephen Kotkin's idea of "speaking Bolshevik" {Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as a Civilization
[Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 1995]), Meyer uses the term "speaking shari'a" to show how
Russia and Russian Muslims articulated social, economic, and political conflicts. Meyer, "Speaking Sharia to
the State: Muslim Protesters, Tsarist Officials, and the Islamic Discourses of Late Imperial Russia," Kritika
14 (2013): 485-505.
6IDH.MKT 2691/30, 24 December 1908; DH.MKT 2736/37, 10 February 1909.
62HR.HMS.iSO 194/68. 30 December 1908; DH.MKT 2736/37. 10 February 1909.
63DH.SN.THR 54/45, document dated 5 Ca 1331 (22 April 1913).
^DH.SNTHR 54/45, copy of letter from Medine Muhafiz ve Kumandanligi 15 Ca [1]331.
65DH.SN.THR 54/45 nos. 14 and 16, correspondence between Foreign Ministry and Medine Muhafiz.
Officials in Medina and the province at large repeatedly advocated on behalf of the needs of long-term
residents, raising questions about relationships among the Central Asian community, the guild of pilgrimage
guides, and the sharīf. This might suggest a type of patron-protégé relationship with mutual economic benefit.
66DH.SN.THR 54/15, Hicaz Vilayet to Dahiliye, 2 Subat [11329.
67DH.SN.THR 54/45, Hariciye to Dahiliye, 16 L 1331.
68DH.SN.THR 54/45, Hariciye to Dahiliye, 19 S 1332.
69 Ibid.

70Notable works on this broad topic include James Gelvin and Nile Green, eds., Global Muslims in the
Age of Steam and Print (Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, 2014); Nile Green, "Spacetime and
the Industrial Journey West: Industrial Communications and the Making of the 'Muslim World,'" American
Historical Review (2013) 1 18 (2): 401-29; and Eric Tagliacozzo, The Longest Journey: Southeast Asians and
the Pilgrimage to Mecca (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2013).
7,Valeska Huber, Channelling Mobilities: Migration and Globalisation in the Suez Canal Region and
Beyond, 1869-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
72 Ibid., 6.
73 In his analysis of naturalization and migration policies aimed at Russian and Soviet citizens, Lohr defines
the citizenship boundary as "the line between members and nonmembers, on the rules and practices that define
the boundary, and on the various ways citizenship was acquired, lost, ascribed, or removed." Lohr, Russian
Citizenship , 3.
74James Meyer shows how Russian Muslims held onto their Russian nationality in Ottoman lands, and
how they utilized borrowed (or purchased) identity papers to pass as Ottomans. Meyer, Turks across Empires:
Marketing Muslim Identity in the Russian-Ottoman Borderlands, 1856-1915 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2014). In an article on Alexandria, Ziad Fahmy describes consular agents as "borderlanders par
excellence" and "legal chameleons" who "used the capitulatory system to manipulate their official identities,
juggling at times two or three 'nationalities.'" Fahmy, "Jurisdictional Borderlands: Extraterritoriality and
'Legal Chameleons' in Precolonial Alexandria, 1840-1870," Comparative Studies in Society and History 55
(2013): 305-29.
75This supports Smiley's argument that interimperial mobility regulations "hardened the empires' human
and geographic boundaries," and could result in foreign subjecthood becoming a liability. Smiley, "The
Burdens of Subjecthood," 73.
76On liminal subjects in other settings, see Erin G. Carlston, Double Agents: Espionage, Literature, and
Liminal Citizens (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013); Anne Haour, Outsiders and Strangers:
An Archaeology of Liminality in West Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013); and Andrew Arsan,
Interlopers of Empire: The Lebanese Diaspora in Colonial French West Africa (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2014).

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