266 | Ruler Visibility, Modernity, and Ethnonationalism
fatherly love for his subjects becomes the subjects’ “love for the fatherland”—a
new basis for subject mobilization. Paradoxically, the notion of fatherland in this
text has two meanings. The above passage contains a clear definition of the first,
micro sense—“our fatherly place where we first saw the sun.” The second, macro
meaning, as well as the final articulation of the relationship between ruler and
subjects, appears in the following passage near the speech’s end:
All of us are subjects of the same State, compatriots, and children of the one
and same fatherland! When this is so, it does not become us at all to scorn
each other! But let us follow the same path that our Tsar has drawn for us. Let
us imitate His respectable example! As you see, H.M. [his majesty] does not
discriminate among any of his subjects in the distribution of his acts of mercy.
Is it not then a sacred duty for us to live in accord and to hasten with all our
strength to everything that serves the well-being of our common fatherland?Here is a complete transformation of the father-children metaphor of Ottoman
society and the trope of love for the ruler into an unprecedented appeal for a
mass popular territorial bond to an abstract “common fatherland.” As a result,
this passage takes the imperative of duty a step further—to the realm of a sacred
obligation.
All these conceptual changes, which the speech carries in a condensed form,
reflect a transition toward a new, modern set of attachments and responsibilities
levied on the individual. One could therefore, from this angle, define modernity
as the process of extension of long-standing local (micro) forms of belonging and
their linkage to the center for a new global (macro) form of belonging.
Millet,Millet-ism, Love for the Land, Ethnonationalism
Just a few months into his reign, on November 3, 1839, Abdülmecid signed the
Rose Chamber Decree, which ushered in the reforms known as the Tanzimat (re-
ordering). This decree guaranteed for the first time in black and white the equal-
ity and well-being of the empire’s non-Muslim population. In an unprecedented
move, it referred to such people as collectively belonging to millets. The short-
term goal was to appease powerful British interests at a moment when the Otto-
man Empire was very vulnerable geopolitically. The decree’s use of millet, after
the Western concept of nationality, and the context of its usage did indeed accom-
plish this goal. However, this is neither how Ottoman non-Muslims conceived of
themselves nor how the Ottoman authorities viewed them. Until 1839 and for
a decade thereafter, the term most often applied to Ottoman non-Muslims was
an aggregate one—reaya (flock). Markers exclusively based on faith—Hıristiyan
(Christ ia n), Ye hu d i (Jewish), or Rum (Orthodox Christian)—also circulated. But
there was no term equivalent to “nationality” in popular circulation. So it should
come as little surprise that it took some time for both the namer and the named