The Nusayri-Alawis in the late Ottoman State

这个项目涉及努赛里斯的历史，这是一个以西里西亚和叙利亚西部为中心的什叶派异端团体，发生在1840年至1918年之间。它的主要重点在于Nusayris，奥斯曼帝国晚期国家和新教传教士之间的互动。在此期间，奥斯曼人最初对努赛里人的蔑视态度发生了很大变化。原因之一是欧洲列强越来越多地代表宗教少数群体干预奥斯曼帝国的内部政治。它迫使奥斯曼政府承认努赛里人本身是一个宗教团体。另一个促使奥斯曼帝国行政体系向努赛里人靠拢的因素是英美新教徒在非正统穆斯林少数民族中的传教活动的扩大。苏丹阿卜杜勒-哈米德二世担心这些传教士会渗入努赛里人，于是煞费苦心地将他们融入穆斯林的小米中，并使他们更接近汉民族学校。在努塞里地区建造清真寺和宗教学校的目的是把“异教徒”变成善良和忠诚的臣民。尽管奥斯曼帝国的官方文件提到数以万计的异教徒皈依逊尼派伊斯兰教，但阿卜杜勒哈米德的“文明工程”最终并不成功。同样，传教士一直试图在千禧年信仰的基础上建立一个新的社会秩序，几乎没有成功地使非正统穆斯林皈依他们的信仰。努赛里人在这一时期也经历了集体转型过程，在此过程中，他们开始称自己为“阿拉维派”（土耳其语：Aleviler，阿拉伯语：Alawiyyun）。尽管有大量的奥斯曼官方文件和其他资料，但奥斯曼帝国晚期努赛里人的历史研究仍然很少。旨在填补这一空白的拟议项目所依据的假设是，努赛里人自称的改变是一个更广泛的社会政治进程的一部分，这一进程使他们脱离奥斯曼帝国，并在这个国家最终崩溃之前几十年。在考虑到努塞里社区内部差异的同时，该项目将阐明这一进程，并将其置于历史背景中，将其与奥斯曼帝国其他非正统社区（特别是Kizilbash，Yezeland，Druze）的类似转变进程进行比较。

This project deals with the history of the Nusayris, a Shi'i heterodox group centered in Cilicia and Western Syria, between 1840 and 1918. Its main focus lies on the interaction between the Nusayris, the late Ottoman state, and Protestant missionaries. The initial depreca-tory attitude of the Ottomans toward the Nusayris changed considerably during this period. One of the reasons for that was the increasing intervention of the European Powers in internal Ottoman politics on behalf of the religious minorities. It compelled the Ottoman government to acknowledge the Nusayris as a religious community in its own right. Another factor inducing the Ottoman administrative system to get closer to the Nusayris was the expansion of missionary activities of English and American Protestants among heterodox Muslim minorities. Fearing the infiltration of the Nusayris by these missionaries, Sultan Abdülhamid II took pains to integrate them into the Muslim millet and to draw them closer to the Hanafi School. The construction of mosques and madrasas in the Nusayri region was intended to turn the "heretics" into good and loyal subjects. Despite the fact that official Ottoman documents mention conversions of tens of thousands of heretics to Sunni Islam, the "civilizing project" of Abdülhamid was not successfull in the end. In the same vein, the missionaries, who had been trying to establish a new social order based on the millenarian belief, hardly succeeded in converting heterodox Muslims to their belief. The Nusayris, in their turn, underwent a collective transformation process in this period, in the course of which they started to term themselves "Alawis" (Turk. Aleviler, Arab. Alawiyyun). In spite of the large amount of Ottoman official documents and other sources, the history of the Nusayris in the late Ottoman Empire is still very little researched. The proposed project aiming at filling this gap is based on the hypothesis that the change in the self-designation of the Nusayris was part of a broader sociopolitical process dissociating them from the Ottoman Empire and preceding the final collapse of this state for some decades. While taking internal differences within the Nusayri community into account, the project will elucidate this process and put it into historical context, by comparing it with similar transformation processes within other heterodox communities of the Ottoman Empire (especiallly Kizilbash, Yezidis, Druze).