Millet (Ottoman Empire)

In the Ottoman Empire, a ''millet'' (; ) was an independent court of law pertaining to "personal law" under which a confessional community (a group abiding by the laws of Muslim sharia, Christian canon law, or Jewish halakha) was allowed to rule itself under its own laws.

Despite frequently being referred to as a "system", before the nineteenth century the organization of what are now retrospectively called millets in the Ottoman Empire was not at all systematic. Rather, non-Muslims were simply given a significant degree of autonomy within their own community, without an overarching structure for the ''millet'' as a whole. The notion of distinct ''millets'' corresponding to different religious communities within the empire would not emerge until the eighteenth century. Subsequently, the ''millet'' system was justified through numerous foundation myths linking it back to the time of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror (r. 1451–81), although it is now understood that no such system existed in the fifteenth century. Heads of millets, or ''milletbaşı'' (Ethnarch), usually had absolute secular and ecclesiastical power over their communities, being answerable only to the Sultan.

During the 19th century rise of nationalism in the Ottoman Empire, as a result of the Tanzimat reforms (1839–76), the term was used for legally protected ''ethno-linguistic'' minority groups, similar to the way other countries use the word ''nation''. During this era, the status of these groups, their relation to the central government, and their self-governance, were codified into constitutions, elevating the power of the laity at the expense of clergy. The word ''millet'' comes from the Arabic word ''millah'' (ملة) and literally means "nation". Abdulaziz Sachedina regards the millet system as an example of pre-modern religious pluralism, as the state recognized multiple different religious groups in exchange for some control over religious identification and the enforcement of orthodoxy. Notably, Ethnarchs principally conversed with the Foreign Ministry, as if they represented foreign nations, but after 1878 it was through the Justice Ministry.

Historian Johann Strauss wrote that the term "seems to be so essential for the understanding of the Ottoman system and especially the status of non-Muslims". Other authors interpret the ''millet'' system as one form of non-territorial autonomy and consider it as such a potentially universal solution to the modern issues of ethnic and religious diversity. According to Taner Akçam, the Ottoman state was "... based on the principle of heterogeneity and difference rather than homogeneity and sameness, [which] functioned in an opposite way to modern nation-states." Provided by Wikipedia