|
Millet (stress on the e) is an Ottoman Turkish term for a legally protected religious minority. It comes from the Arabic word milla for confessional community. The Arabic term is a very general one.
The millet was an alternative to autonomous territories that has long been the European norm for dealing with minority groups. The millet system has a long history in the Middle East, and is closely linked to Islamic rules on the treatment of non-Muslim minorities. The Ottoman term specifically refers to the separate legal courts pertaining to personal law under which minorities were allowed to rule themselves with fairly little interference from the Ottoman government.
The main millets were the Jewish, Greek, and Armenian ones. A wide array of other groups such as Catholics and the Druze were also represented. These groups were spread across the empire with significant minorities in most of the major cities. Autonomy for these groups was thus impossible to base on a territorial region.
Each millet was under the supervision of a leader, most often a religious patriarch, who reported directly to the Ottoman Sultan. The millets had a great deal of power they set their own laws and collected and distributed their own taxes. All that was insisted was loyalty to the Empire. When a member of one millet committed a crime against a member of another the law of the damaged person applied. The Muslim majority was seen as paramount and any dispute involving a Muslim fell under their law.
The millet system was altered by the increasing influence of European powers in the Middle East. The various European powers declared themselves protectors of their religious cohorts in the Empire. Thus the Russians became guardians of the Eastern Orthodox groups, the French of the Catholics, and the British of the Jews and other groups. This altered the balance of power as the Millet became wealthy and outside Ottoman law.
Today most countries in the only country where the millet system is Israel, which has a different set of laws for its Muslim and Christian minorities than are enforced upon Jewish majority. Multiculturalism, as practiced in states like Canada and Australia, also has some similarities to the millet system.
| 
