INDUS TRY, CONSTITUTIONS, AND NAT! ON ALI S M 289
to benefit the Armenian community within the empire, or such at least
was the perception among resentful Muslims slipping into poverty.
The Armenians had lived peacefully in the Ottoman world up to this
time; as non-Turks, however, they had been shut out of the military-
aristocratic ruling caste. They had also been cut off, to some extent, from
big-time land ownership and "tax farming." Many therefore, had turned to
business and finance to make a living.
Finance-that's what used to be called moneylending. It was frowned
upon pretty widely in early times. Charging interest on a loan was explic-
itly forbidden in the Qur'an, just as it was in Medieval Christian Europe
where the term usury in canon law didn't mean "charging exorbitant in-
terest" but "charging any interest." Why did moneylending have this
odor? I suppose it's because ordinary folks saw the lending of money in
the context of charity, not of business: it was something one did when a
neighbor got into trouble and needed help. Seen in that framework,
charging interest on a loan smacked of exploiting somebody's misery to
get rich. Yet the need to borrow money came up constantly, even in the
most primitive feudal economy, often in the wake of crisis: a blacksmith's
workshop burned down; a famous cleric died unexpectedly leaving his
family to host an expensive funeral; someone wanted to get married with-
out having saved up a dowry; someone fell catastrophically ill .... People
went to moneylenders at moments when they felt particularly vulnerable
and raw, yet they went with a culturally implanted feeling that any decent
person would give them a loan for nothing. The desperation that forced
them to accept a banker's terms only added a further dollop of resent-
ment. When the borrower and the moneylender belonged to the same
community, other sentiments such as kinship or loyalty might temper the
resentment, but when people went to moneylenders whom they already
saw as the Other, the dynamics of the interaction tended to exacerbate
any existing communal hostility. The worst possible case, then, was for
moneylending to become the exclusive province of a distinct cultural mi-
nority surrounded by a vast majority. In Europe, this dynamic made vic-
tims of the Jews. In the Ottoman Empire, it was the Armenians who fell
afoul of it.
As tension built up, it was easy to forget that Turks and Armenians had
lived together peacefully, not even three generations back; the hostility