Reflections of the First Muslim Immigration to America in Ottoman Documents | Mehmet Uğur Ekinci

Reflections of the First Muslim Immigration to America in Ottoman Documents | Mehmet Uğur Ekinci - Academia.edu

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Mehmet Uğur Ekinci REFLECTIONS OF THE FIRST MUSLIM IMMIGRATION TO AMERICA IN OTTOMAN DOCUMENTS
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In the early 1890s, the Ottoman state discovered that some of its Muslim subjects had recently emigrated to the United States. It already was known that many Ottoman Christians had departed to the New World, but the emigration of Muslims was a somewhat unexpected development. Soon the investigation of the number and conditions of the Muslim immigrants became an essential task for the Ottoman legation and consulates in the United States although a lack of official records made it a difficult one as well. The aim of this article is to portray the official attitude of the Ottoman state towards the first Ottoman Muslim immigrants in the United States, primarily using Ottoman archival documents from the late 1880s and early 1890s. Because the intention is to provide some idea of the reasons for, as well as the extent of, the Ottoman government’s interest in the migration, contemporary reports and figures are cited for this purpose, rather than as factual data. The official documents categorized the emigrants according to their religion, so it could be misleading to ascribe ethnicity to these people, no matter how much about their ethnic background can be inferred from the documents. For example, almost all of the Muslim emigrants from Harput and its vicinity can be considered Turks. For scientific purposes, however, ethnic identification will be used in this article only if such information is found in the documents.