In line with Islam’s acceptance of the People of the Book, the Ottoman Empire was a pluralist state that allowed non-Muslim communities to preserve their identities and religious practices. Thus, Serbs, Greeks, Armenians, or Bulgarians remained Christian. In the early sixteenth century, Selim I “the Stern,” a particularly heavy-handed sultan/caliph, had considered converting all his Christian subjects to Islam forcibly, simply for the sake of homogeneity. Yet he was convinced by his Şeyhülislam, the superior authority on the issues of religion, that this would have been unlawful.
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The Ottoman system was also innovative in the sense that it gave the state the right to enact secular laws, called kanun, along with the Shariah. Doing so meant that the Shariah did not cover all aspects of public life, and the state thus had the religiously legitimate authority to introduce new rules and regulations. Thanks to this tradition, the empire would be able to enact many modernizing laws in the nineteenth century.
Even the Shariah itself was regulated by the Ottoman kanun. Under Sultan Mehmed II, the conqueror of Constantinople, some harsh corporal punishments (such as amputations of hands) were deemed obsolete and were replaced by beating or monetary fines assessed according to the economic status of the culprit. Stoning also became difficult to implement, and it is known to have occurred only twice during the six centuries of Ottoman rule.
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The Ottoman flexibility also had something to do with its geography, which, as we have seen, was influential in shaping perceptions of Islam: “unlike previous Islamic states, the Ottoman Empire rose in Anatolia and the Balkans, areas of solid and steady peasantries, rather than on the edge of nomad-inhabited deserts.” This allowed the rise of autonomous guilds and provincial notables, saving the empire from a total surrender to patrimonialism—i.e., absolute domination by the central power—the hallmark of that arid Middle Eastern geography.
