Abstract

The relationship between Christians and Muslims underwent drastic fluctuations in the former Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century and the modern Republic of Turkey in the twentieth century generally. The dynamic can be described as having been one of sanctioned political communion under the Ottoman regime, outright violence and antagonism in the shadows of WWI, and today reflected in a type of social equilibrium, albeit precarious. Specifically, the paper focuses on adumbrating the modus vivendi that facilitated coexistence between Christians and Muslims over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and how the Christian communities have subsequently remained to this day. For this purpose the three following regions of East Anatolia are examined: Hakkari, Bohtan, and Turabdin. The history of the Christians, once a legally protected and acknowledged minority under the status of dhimma, is first demonstrated in a historical outline of the confederations of Syriac-Nestorian Christians and Muslim Kurds in the Hakkari region. These socio-political compacts – in Kurdish bazikê çepê and bazikê rastê – provided the bulwark for regional stability and security in the nineteenth century. The dawn of colonialism and the coming of American and British Christian missionaries tolled the knell for this positive mechanism for practical coexistence. Second, the Bohtan region is observed. Here, the history of Anatolia’s Christians reflects a similar negative development. For example, during WWI the Aghas protected the Christians from extermination, whereafter the Christians found themselves to have become the personal property of their Muslim protectors. As chances for emigration from Anatolia to Istanbul and Europe opened up, Christians fled their servitude thereby emptying entire towns of Christians. Lastly, in the Turabdin region, parallels can be made with the Hakkari region: Christians and Muslim Kurds also coexisted through confederations. Yet, like Hakkari and throughout East Anatolia, the massacre of Christians by the Kurdish Emir of Cizre in the mid-nineteenth century and mass murders in 1914–1915 precipitated the decline in Christian population in the twentieth century. The paper concludes that the current relationship between Christians and Muslims is one of living next – yet not equal – to one another.