402 Journal of the Spanish Institute for Strategic Studies N. 5 / 2015 it was newly restored by the conquerors through the signing of the Treaty of Sévres which was finally abolished through the signing of the Lausanne Treaty in 1923. The crisis of the traditional system of religious organization didn´t just took place due to the above mentioned abuses. All attempts to avoid the decay of the empire culminated with the creation of the Tanzimat (Reforms), this specific period ranged from 1839 to 1876 and mainly aimed the legislation and the administrative structure of the Ottoman Empire modernization.14 In the same vein , the 1856 imperial decree that was signed at the end of the Crimean war proclaimed equality among the ottoman citizens regardless of their religion therefore breaking apart the religious traditional order while rooting out all sort of discrimination supported by faith-based criteria.15 But the problem was that most of the Empire´s inhabitants weren´t ready for the collapse of this traditional order. In regards to Muslims the truth is that there was an erudite minority who supported this reform, but the conservative majority who was echoing the population´s discomfort and attributed the decree to the European influence maintaining the fact that they wanted to go against the Islam laws since it was putting a level of playing field among “governing nations” (millet-i hâkime) in other words the Islamic umma and the “governed nations” which were the other religions16. In this way Abdülmecid I the caliph was called “disloyal sovereign” (in Ottoman Turkish gâvur Padişah). Within the Arabic provinces, indignation due to these reforms was even greater.17 In some Syrian cities local governors refused implementing those new provisions. Finally displeasure culminated in the slaughter of Christians in both Syria and Lebanon in 1860. This massacre was after all the first social´s change bloody episode that resulted in the effort to eradicate the Islam´s supremacy in within the territory. In the Ḥiğāz a consular clerk of the United States at Cairo, upon the Capitulations of the Ottoman Empire since the year 1150.Part 1. Washington: Government Printing Office 1881, 96-97; George Young (ed.), Corps de Droit Ottoman. Recueil des Codes, Lois, Règlements, Ordonnances et Actes les plus importants du Droit Intérieur, et d’Études sur le Droit Coutumier de l’Empire Ottoman, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1905, II, 226-229. 14 Cf. Carter Vaughn Findley, “The Tanzimat”, The Cambridge History of Turkey (Faroqhi, Suraiya N. Faroqhi, Kate Fleet y ReşatKasaba), Cambridge: CambridgeUniv. Press 2008, vol. 4, 11-37. 15 George Young (ed.), Corps de Droit Ottoman. Recueil des Codes, Lois, Règlements, Ordonnances et Actes les plus importants du Droit Intérieur, et d’Études sur le Droit Coutumier de l’Empire Ottoman, Oxford: Clarendon Press 1905, II, 3-9. 16 Cf. Roderic H. Davison, Reform in the Ottoman Empire, 1856-1876, Princeton: PrincetonUniv. Press 1963, 57; Kemal H. Karpat, The Politicization of Islam: Reconstructing Identity, State, Faith, and Community in the Late Ottoman State, Oxford: OxfordUniv. Press 2001, 77. 17 Cf. Moshe Ma’oz, “Communal Conflict in the Ottoman Syria during the Reform Era: The Role of Political and Economic Factors”, Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire. The Functioning of a Plural Society (Benjamin Braude y Bernard Lewis, eds.), 2 vols. New York-Londres 1982., vol. 2, 91-92. http://revista.ieee.es/index.php/ieee
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