Fists and Stones at the Ottoman School for Tribes: State Power, Nomads, and Identity

Samuel Dolbee, New York University

Students of the Aşiret Mektebi
Source: Library of Congress

States generally don’t care for nomadic tribes.  It’s difficult to collect taxes from them and from time to time they raid settled communities or other tribes, challenging that good-old state monopoly on violence.  The Ottomans responded to the tribal question in the late nineteenth century as many states at the time were – think, for example, of Native Americans and reservations – by attempting to coax nomadic peoples into sedentary agricultural practices, a process summarized in A Moveable Empire.  Alongside these settlement projects,however, the Ottomans drew on another part of the imperial repertoire of power in an even more direct attempt to co-opt the tribes as part of state institutions.  Beginning in 1892, they established a special academy, the Aşiret Mektebi (the Tribe School), for the purpose of training the sons of tribal leaders to be part of the Ottoman military. 

But things did not go as smoothly as some Ottoman officials may have wished, as the above document shows.  Mentioned in Eugene Rogan’s article on the Aşiret Mektebi,(95) the piece describes how in 1895 a “small quarrel” between four Kurdish and six Arab students at the Beşiktaş school became physical, with the participants“resorting to stones, shoes, and fists,” which resulted in “wounds and bruises on faces, hands, and heads.”  The police and nearby soldiers were called as a precaution.  Though they returned to their posts after being unable to ascertain the fight's cause, “four or five gendarmes”were posted at the school for the night to maintain the peace.

In addition to touching on the themes of state co-optation of nomadic groups, the document also constitutes a caveat regarding sources and identity.  Though the reason for the fight is not mentioned in the document, the framing of the source seems to suggest ethnicity is at its core. Tensions between Kurds and Arabs could very well have led to the conflict; but so too could any number of factors that might arise between teenage boys living far, far away from home.  Indeed, we don’t even know how these students would define themselves.  Kurdish?  Arab?  It seems likely that probable linguistic differences aside,these boys had more in common with each other as nomads hailing from theOttoman provinces than they did with urban elites who may have more explicitly presented themselves as Kurdish or Arab. 

Source: BOA Y-MTV 114/80 (11 Ş 1312)

Arabs

Kurds