Not Quite Foreign, Not Quite Ottoman: Central Asian Muslims and Imperial Citizenship in the Late Ottoman Empire

In 1869, the Ottoman Empire passed a law on citizenship that sough to create a loyal citizenry committed to the supranational identity of Ottomanism and to establish procedures for defining and naturalizing foreigners. Despite multilayered historical connections to the empire, Central Asian Muslims were legally excluded from enjoying rights such as landholding, which might impinge on the empire’s juridical and political sovereignty. Yet, many of these “foreign Muslims” continued to purchase land and to acquire Ottoman citizenship without fulfilling new procedural requirements – even though many individuals never legally renounced their Russian subjecthood. They also petitioned the state in large numbers for various forms of patronage, often making the case that they were entitled to certain rights as Muslims under the “moral” or “spiritual” protection of the sultan-caliph. By invoking the Ottoman sovereign’s religious authority, petitioners engaged with the rhetoric of pan-Islam and staked a claim of belonging to the state – which was for all intents and purposes inseparable from the caliphate. These foreign Muslims had become what I term the empire’s “spiritual subjects.”

Through an analysis of the application of citizenship laws to Central Asians and Ottoman debates about what rights they enjoyed vis-à-vis the caliphate, this paper will flesh out the idea of spiritual subjecthood/citizenship in polities that derived legitimacy from ecumenical forms of religious authority. Drawing on new archival research, it will consider how Islamic notions of patronage and protection continued to operate alongside secular legal reforms, and how the promotion of the caliphate was in tension with attempts to create a more exclusive, territorially-bounded form of citizenship. In exploring the citizenship-like status of Central Asian Muslims, this case study will highlight the continued salience of religion rather than ethnicity or imperial identity in determining the basis for imperial citizenship, well into the early twentieth century.