The Hatt-i Humayun of 1856

The Ottoman state had governed its non-Muslim subjects for centuries through the millet system, in which a recognised religious community administered its own personal law, schools and charities under its own hierarchy, and paid a poll tax in exchange for protection. It was a workable arrangement and an unequal one. The rescript of 1856 set out to keep the communities and remove the inequality.

Its promises are specific. Life, honour and property are secured to every subject without distinction of class or religion. All subjects are admissible to public employment and to the civil and military schools. Mixed tribunals are to hear cases between Muslims and non-Muslims, and the rules of evidence are to be reformed so that testimony is not discounted by the witness's faith. Forms of speech that mark a subject as inferior on grounds of creed are abolished. Each community is to draw up a written constitution for its own affairs and submit it for approval. Churches and synagogues may be repaired, and new ones built, under stated procedures. The poll tax levied on non-Muslims is replaced by a payment in lieu of military service, since non-Muslims were not conscripted.

The document was published on 18 February 1856. The Congress of Paris opened a week later, and the treaty that ended the Crimean War recorded the sultan's communication of it while stating that the powers derived no right to interfere in Ottoman internal affairs.

The gap between the rescript and the ground is the substance of the historical argument about it. Some of it was implemented and lasted. Mixed courts were established, a commercial and a penal code followed on European models, non-Muslims entered the administration in numbers that would have been unthinkable a generation earlier, and the community constitutions were drafted, the Armenian one in 1863 being the most elaborate.

Other parts were not. Conscription of non-Muslims was repeatedly deferred and the payment in lieu became a straightforward continuation of the old tax under a new name. Testimony rules changed on paper faster than in provincial practice. The clause implying freedom to change religion, which followed from the earlier abolition of the death penalty for apostasy, was never enforced against Muslim opinion, and a subject who left Islam remained at risk. Intercommunal violence in Ottoman Syria in 1860 killed thousands within four years of the promise of security.

The rescript was also read at the time as having been extracted. It appeared under the pressure of allied powers whose armies had just defended the empire, and Muslim opinion in several provinces treated it as a foreign imposition, which made its implementation harder. The Ottoman constitution of 1876 carried its principles forward on paper; the empire itself ended in 1922, and the instrument went with the state that made it.