The Nusayri-Alawis in the late Ottoman State

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Patrick Franke
• Subject Area: Islamic Studies, Arabian Studies, Semitic Studies
• Term: from 2016 to 2019
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 282976985

This project deals with the history of the Nusayris, a Shi'i heterodox group centered in Cilicia and Western Syria, between 1840 and 1918. Its main focus lies on the interaction between the Nusayris, the late Ottoman state, and Protestant missionaries. The initial depreca-tory attitude of the Ottomans toward the Nusayris changed considerably during this period. One of the reasons for that was the increasing intervention of the European Powers in internal Ottoman politics on behalf of the religious minorities. It compelled the Ottoman government to acknowledge the Nusayris as a religious community in its own right. Another factor inducing the Ottoman administrative system to get closer to the Nusayris was the expansion of missionary activities of English and American Protestants among heterodox Muslim minorities. Fearing the infiltration of the Nusayris by these missionaries, Sultan Abdülhamid II took pains to integrate them into the Muslim millet and to draw them closer to the Hanafi School. The construction of mosques and madrasas in the Nusayri region was intended to turn the "heretics" into good and loyal subjects. Despite the fact that official Ottoman documents mention conversions of tens of thousands of heretics to Sunni Islam, the "civilizing project" of Abdülhamid was not successfull in the end. In the same vein, the missionaries, who had been trying to establish a new social order based on the millenarian belief, hardly succeeded in converting heterodox Muslims to their belief. The Nusayris, in their turn, underwent a collective transformation process in this period, in the course of which they started to term themselves "Alawis" (Turk. Aleviler, Arab. Alawiyyun). In spite of the large amount of Ottoman official documents and other sources, the history of the Nusayris in the late Ottoman Empire is still very little researched. The proposed project aiming at filling this gap is based on the hypothesis that the change in the self-designation of the Nusayris was part of a broader sociopolitical process dissociating them from the Ottoman Empire and preceding the final collapse of this state for some decades. While taking internal differences within the Nusayri community into account, the project will elucidate this process and put it into historical context, by comparing it with similar transformation processes within other heterodox communities of the Ottoman Empire (especiallly Kizilbash, Yezidis, Druze).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants