Hatt-I Humayun

The Hatt-I Humayun (1856) acted as an Ottoman “Bill of Rights”. From reading the passage, I believe it promised three major rights: 1. Freedom to education, 2. Freedom of religion, 3. Rights to a fair trial. While these rights are relatively basic, it is important that the Sultan proclaimed them and ordered their enforcement, across lines of religion and race.

The Hatt-I Humayun seems to have reformed the millet system in that it abolished the tax on religious institutions, and replaced it with a tax on the individual. Religious institutions therefore had more funds to build places of worship, etc.

To me the most important line of the Hatt-I Humayun is “ Every distinction or designation tending to make any class whatever of the subjects of my empire inferior to another class, on account of their religion, language, or race, shall be ever effaced from the administrative protocol.” Essentially, the Sultan wanted to take religion and race completely out of the picture. While we have argued that the Ottomans were a religiously tolerant empire, this edict truly took religion out of the picture.

Economically this took away the advantage of Muslims within the empire. “The taxes are to be levied under the same denomination from all the subjects of my empire without the distinction of class or of religion.” This game non-Muslims a real chance to flourish within the empire now.

I would be interested to know how much the principles of “Life, Liberty, and Fraternity” affected the philosophy of the Sultan. Although the French Revolution was more than a thousand miles away, I can’t help but see some similarities between the principles of the Revolution and the Tanzimat Reforms.