Reflection of “Space and society: Waqfs in urban and rural Ottoman Cyprus”. by Lambros Asvestas
Being brought up and educated in the southern part of the island, the actual management and administration of Ottoman Cyprus was alien to me. If you attended the Greek-Cypriot education system, all the historical information you received was either from a Greek or a Greek Cypriot source, so, watching Sefer’s presentation about Cyprus, a researcher from Turkey, was already an unprecedented experience. In the webinar “Space and society: Waqfs in urban and rural Ottoman Cyprus”, Sefer presented his investigation regarding the waqf community.
Firstly, Sefer explained what the waqf community is; how it works, who are the main actors, and then he analyzed how the waqf dynamics influenced their power relations and material conditions. The Waqf community consists of three main actors, the waqf founders, the administrators and the ordinary people. The founder of the waqf was the person who had the capital to invest in the creation of the waqf. The administrators were religious officials dealing with the management of the waqf (they could be Muslim and non-Muslim, Imams but also Bishops). Finally, the lower rank, the ordinary people were Muslim and non-Muslim borrowers.
In other words, the waqf community functioned as an economic institution with credit relations between high ranked and low ranked actors, while one’s religion was not necessarily the leading factor.. This would mean that being an imam or a bishop would be enough to be at the higher level of the waqf ranking, whereas believers that did not own any official religious positions were at the lower levels. This higher ranking allowed religious officials to lend money to ordinary people with an interest rate between 10%-25%. This is an extremely high rate suggesting that religious officials were able to collect much higher amounts than what they lent, without using their own physical labor.
Additionally, Sefer argued that the way the present administration in Turkey and Cyprus advertises waqfs as exclusively philanthropic and charity institutions is erroneous, since there is nowhere any sign of the existence of imarets in Cyprus (public kitchens and free accommodation spaces for the poor) and it is estimated that at least 70% of the waqfs revenue was going to the religious officials/administrators. A small part of around 20% went to education, which was exclusive and unequal since only the children of the religious officials and of other higher ranking individuals could attend schooling. The remaining 10% was expected to go for repairing waterways and bridges which again used to go to people who had personal relations with the administrator.
Interestingly, Aristotle was one of first, if not the first, to condemn usury describing it as an “unnatural acquisition of wealth”. We can thus see that the usurers of Ancient Greece, the waqfs of the Ottoman Empire and today’s banks all share the function of lending money with interest, imbalancing the distribution of wealth significantly . Sefer´s research gives us the possibility to better understand the waqf’s functioning, and it is of crucial importance to grasp an idea of how it was possible for religious institutions to gain the disproportionate amount of wealth and political power they have today. Not only religious officials were able to profit from administrating waqfs, but they were also able to administer more than one waqf, giving them the possibility to accumulate wealth in great excess.
Another interesting insight from Sefer’s research was how he used geographical maps as tools to gather information about the material conditions of the people in the past. For example, the location of olive trees around the island was important for the waqf institution because the administrators sometimes paid the teachers’ salaries not in terms of money but in terms of olive oil.
Lastly, even though it was previously unknown to me, Sefer expressed his disagreement with the traditional narrative that prevails regarding the cause of establishing waqfs. That is, that waqfs were strategically established in order to “steal” the properties of non-Muslim populations and islamify the island. On the contrary, Sefer encountered many cases where the waqfs were buying out property from Muslims. These cases contradict the traditional narrative since the waqfs were not targeting to expropriate the Christians´properties. It is for this reason that Sefer argues that their purpose was mainly to facilitate and control the distribution of wealth.
Written by Lambros Asvestas
