Introduction
group. In the Ottoman Empire, they were able to be fully Dönme among
other Dönme and fully Ottoman Muslim in public, at ease inhabiting
two worlds, fully insiders in both.^80 They did not have to abandon their
religion to be full members of society, to choose between them in order
to play their political, cultural, and economic role. The heritage of a con-
vert was not something to be examined. Conversion was at the heart of
being Ottoman. For much of Ottoman history, the elite members of the
military, administration, and even royalty—the mothers of sultans—all
were converted Christians. Sir Paul Ricaut, an astute English observer
of late-seventeenth-century Ottoman society, argued that the Ottomans
were open to receive every type of person as a Muslim, whatever his or
her language, or nation, whether a slave, commoner, or a member of the
elite.^81 Ricaut wrote “no people in the World have ever been more open
to receive all sorts of Nations to them, than they.”^82 He added, “the Turks
call it Becoming a Believer.”^83
Before race, before religion as faith, the Dönme did not possess such
an anomalous position in Ottoman society. There were many other de-
scendants of converts to Islam who maintained exceptional ethnic and
religious characteristics, such as the Hemshin, seventeenth-century Ar-
menian converts to Islam who preserved the Armenian language and cus-
toms long after converting.^84 Moreover, there were Christians who carried
Christian and Muslim names, attended church and mosque, had their
children baptized and circumcised, observed Lent and Ramadan, and
shared pilgrimage sites, spiritual guides and their tombs, with Muslims on
Cyprus and Crete, in Albania and Kosovo, Macedonia and northeastern
Anatolia. Many Muslim groups, such as Bosnians, Chechens, Circassians,
Crimeans, Pomaks in western Thrace, and the descendants of converts to
Islam on Crete, practiced endogamy and maintained their pre-conversion
languages.
The problem lies not in the premodern behavior of such groups, but
in how modern contemporaries and historians have interpreted it. That
people of different religions shared saints, tombs, pilgrimage sites, rituals
and practices, sacred springs, feasts, fasts, and festivals, as well as holy
men, without converting to the other religion casts doubt on the “crypto-
religion” ascription, especially when given by European Orientalists and
colonialists searching for protégés and allies. The label is also suspect
when posited by nationalists seeking to redeem their convert ancestors,
who they assert were coerced or forced to convert and accepted it as a