Figures anonymes, figures d’élite

This volume contains selected papers presented at the ninth ‘Réunion des chercheurs sur le monde arabe et musulman’, a conference held in Strasbourg in summer 1994. With contributions from researchers and PhD students in Oriental studies at universities in Germany, France and Switzerland, this book concentrates on the subject of identity in the Ottoman Empire and all its provinces, from the Balkans through Anatolia to Syria and Egypt. By examining a number of individual fates, the papers illuminate the mosaic character of identity in the Ottoman Empire. Rather than studying the Turkish speaking Muslim majority, these papers are dedicated to those living in the cultural, religious and geographic margins of the Empire. Among the cases studied we find settled European missionaries, Syrian Christians, the Swiss colony in Istanbul, Levantines, and a Kurdish emir. With one English exception the papers are written in French. This collection would benefit scholars interested in the inexhaustible subject of identity and the life of the minorities in the Ottoman Empire.