Aşiret Mektebi: Abdülhamid II's School for Tribes (1892–1907)

Abstract

By order of Sultan Abdülhamid II (r. 1876–1909) a new school was opened in Istanbul in October 1892 to provide an Ottoman education for the sons of leading tribal notables. The Aşiret Mekteb-i Hümayun, or Imperial School for Tribes, was a five-year boarding school that admitted boys between twelve and sixteen years old. The school has been rightly interpreted as part of a broader policy pursued by Abdülhamid II of integrating the Arab provinces more closely to the Imperial center. However, the school, which reached beyond the Arab provinces to recruit eastern Anatolian Kurds, was essentially an experiment in social engineering which sought to foster an allegiance to the Ottoman state within one of the most alienated segments of its society: the empire's tribes. On the precedent of urban notables whose sons were educated in Istanbul, obtained government offices, and became Ottoman loyalists, Abdülhamid II and his advisers aimed to create a similar body of intermediaries between the state and its tribes. The experiment ran for fifteen years before the Aşiret Mektebi was closed in 1907; yet in that time the school sent waves of graduates on to higher education in special sections of the civil and military academies and thence to government office in the provinces. In all, the tribal education system represents one of the more ambitious Ottoman initiatives to integrate its tribal communities into the political life of the state.