Since the mid-twentieth century consolidation of the modern international refugee regime, scholars have debated how the term “refugee” shapes categories of practice and categories of analysis within studies of forced migration. Historians have contributed to these debates by describing how notions of forced migration emerged within specific contexts. In the Ottoman case, historians of forced migration have been confounded by the blanket term most frequently used to denote immigrants:
muhacir, an Arabic word with connotations of forced flight within early Islamic history. While Ottoman documents employ the term
mülteci to describe political refugees,
muhacir encompassed a range of movements, including Muslims, Jews, and Christians fleeing varying degrees of coercion throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and European colonizers invited to settle in the empire beginning in 1856. The ambiguity of the term
muhacir offers an invitation to Ottomanists to engage with the limitations of the category of forced migration by exploring how historical actors themselves weighed ideas of coercion, liberty, and mobility.
This paper considers how officials and migrants employed “muhacir” to articulate notions of belonging from the Second Constitutional Revolution to the beginning of World War I (1908-1914). First, the paper evaluates the new regime’s distinction between “muhacirs” and “mültecis.” Following a 1911 law demarcating the two categories, officials parsed these terms and evaluated the applicability of each in response to migrants’ claims for recognition. Second, this paper considers how migrants articulated a sense of community as muhacirs. Immigrants joined homeland aid societies and forged trans-imperial relationships based on a sense of displacement. Muhacir literature described migration experiences, promoted religious solidarity, and contested legacies of slavery and liberty. Ultimately, the paper argues that categories of migration contributed to the ways in which officials and immigrants navigated rapidly changing political and social communities within the final years of the empire.
