Religion and Religious Communities in the Ottoman Empire

From about 1300 until 1922, Ottoman sultans ruled lands whose population included Muslims, Christians and Jews. The campaigns against the Mamluks in 1516–17 brought Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem within the empire. Selim I took the title “Servitor of the Two Holy Places,” and later sultans supported pilgrimage routes, sanctuaries and the people who served them. Religious institutions also shaped learning, courts, worship, charitable services and officials’ dealings with local communities; their organisation changed across six centuries and between provinces.

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Sunni law, learning and mosque work

Ottoman legal appointments in Anatolia and Rumelia, the empire’s European provinces, were predominantly Sunni and Hanafi. Hanafi was one of the Sunni schools used to interpret and apply Islamic law. Its place varied by region: courts in Cairo included judges and muftis from different legal schools, while Anatolia and Rumelia generally used Hanafi judges. In 1805, Mehmed Ali Pasha’s government in Egypt made Hanafi law the standard for court judgments there.

A qadi was a judge appointed by the state to hear disputes and issue decisions; qadis also handled public tasks such as registering transactions and overseeing some endowments. A mufti answered legal questions with a fatwa, a reasoned opinion, rather than deciding a case between litigants. At Istanbul, the chief mufti became known as the şeyhülislam, the head of the learned establishment. Under Süleyman I in the sixteenth century, Ebussuud Efendi used Hanafi legal reasoning to address questions about state land and to connect imperial regulations with religious law.

Mosques also depended on people who maintained buildings and led services: imams led prayer, preachers delivered sermons, and muezzins called worshippers. Salaries and repairs could be secured through an endowment, linking religious practice to the income of shops, mills or land.

Sufi lodges and religious networks

Sufism is a Muslim tradition of spiritual discipline and devotion, often organised around a teacher and students. A tekke, or Sufi lodge, offered a place for instruction, prayer, conversation and residence. Larger lodges could include a mosque, kitchen, guest rooms and a tomb, and endowed income supported both the building and its staff.

The Mevlevi order, associated with the poet and teacher Jalal al-Din Rumi, grew from its centre at Konya and spread through disciples who established lodges elsewhere. Sultan Murad II founded an Edirne Mevlevi lodge in 1426, one of the order’s early Ottoman centres. Bektashi lodges developed close ties to the Janissaries, the sultan’s standing infantry corps. When Mahmud II abolished that corps in 1826, the government suppressed the Bektashi order: lodges were closed, some were demolished, and surviving institutions were transferred to the Naqshbandi order. Bektashi leaders and dervishes were also exiled. The episode shows how state policy could reshape a religious network and its institutions.

Christian and Jewish communities

After Mehmed II conquered Constantinople in 1453, he appointed Gennadios as patriarch of the Greek Orthodox Church. The patriarch and other senior clergy represented communities in dealings with the government, and Ottoman rulers could confirm or remove religious leaders. The Armenian Apostolic Church had its own leadership; the Istanbul Armenian patriarchate is commonly dated to 1461, when Mehmed II appointed Hovagim. Catholics and other Christian churches also maintained distinct institutions.

Jewish communities included long-established groups as well as Sephardic Jews who migrated from Iberia after the expulsions of 1492. In Salonica, now Thessaloniki in Greece, an early sixteenth-century register listed hundreds of households recorded as arriving from Spain alongside other Jewish groups. These communities established synagogues, schools and study circles, while maintaining their own rites and communal customs.

Waqfs and the work of public service

A waqf was an endowment that assigned property or income to a continuing purpose. Its waqfiyya, or foundation deed, specified the assets, services, workers and payments. The 1557 deed for Hürrem Sultan’s Jerusalem foundation listed a mosque, madrasa, a religious school, and an imaret, a public kitchen, and described spending for building upkeep and salaries. Commercial properties and mills supplied revenue, allowing rents collected in one place to pay workers and services in another.

The Hamidiye imaret in Istanbul shows how a deed became a daily work plan. Sultan Abdülhamid I’s 1781 charter named 41 workers and assigned each a wage. A steward and store staff tracked supplies; porters carried flour, wheat and firewood; cooks and apprentices prepared soup and rice dishes; and bakers made fodula, a type of bread. The deed specified grain, ingredients and fuel as well as staff. Registers from 1823 to 1903 record more than a thousand loaves distributed daily to kitchen workers, residents of religious schools and Sufi lodges, designated prayer reciters and poor people. Ottoman waqfs and charitable institutions connected a founder’s property to this continuing work.

Community administration, reform and rupture

The Ottoman word millet could refer to a religious community, but its official meaning and administration changed over time. In earlier centuries, patriarchs and other religious leaders had a role in community representation under the sultan’s authority. After the Reform Edict of 1856, communal assemblies included both clergy and lay members, while the state also promised equal eligibility for public offices and education regardless of religion. The edict directed mixed tribunals to hear commercial and criminal cases between Muslims and non-Muslims; certain civil disputes within one Christian or Jewish community could, if the parties requested, go before its own council.

These reforms did not prevent later persecution. During the First World War, Ottoman authorities deported and killed Armenians across the empire. The Armenian genocide of 1915-1916 destroyed much of the Armenian Christian population and included deaths in massacres and during deportations.