It depends on what you understand from tolerance. It is true that the Ottoman administration usually did not care about ethno-religious groups’ internal affairs, and left them alone to a large extent. Nevertheless, non-Muslims were second-class citizens. Heterodox Muslims, such as the Alevis, the Druze and Alawites, were collectively considered to be heretics and they were not recognised as a group of people, and thus were deprived of any rights. Sometimes this utter intolerance toward ‘heretic’ Muslim groups extended to include many Sufi branches of Islam (especially during Kadizadeliler’s reign of terror) many of which would be considered mainstream by many Turks today,
Although the Millet system is celebrated for being tolerant, it caused these groups to have isolated modi vivendi. Armenians, Jews, Greeks and and Muslims had separate quarters, separate schools, separate legal systems and separate ethnarchs (like the Chief Rabbi or the Greek Orthodox Patriarch). This social and legal division prevented the Empire to assert a sense of “Ottoman Citizenship” in the late 19th century, and many millets wanted to have a separate country of their own. This resulted in many wars in the Balkans in late 19th and early 20th centuries, and of an Armenian sepaor the U.S.
ratist revolt supported by Russia in 1915 which the nationalist junta at the time (the C.U.P) used as a pretext for starting the Armenian genocide.
Today, Turkey is religiously very homogenous as non-Muslim minorities were driven out throughout the decades following the commencement of WWI.
So, “tolerance” was not always there (we’re talking about a 600 year-old empire, mind you) and it didn’t resemble modern open societies like Canada or the U.S.
i hope this helped bc it sure did take a while. lol
