Reviving the millet system was a policy solution, not a neutral academic topic
Evidence
Millets were the relatively autonomous minority groupings that existed within the Ottoman Empire. … Far from being a neutral academic topic, “the millet system” was in its very formulation the expression of a preferred policy solution for the complex nationality and ethnic problems of the contemporary Islamic world. Whatever the academic reasons for studying it, the millet system represents a throwback to an earlier time, by which imperial powers (whether Ottoman or Western) divided and ruled a large and potentially fractious population. To the majority Sunni inhabitants of the region as well as to some of the minorities, the recent history of the modern Islamic world has been a struggle to progress beyond ethnic and religious divisions toward some sort of (perhaps unitary) secular democracy. None of the states of the region has achieved this except in the realm of declared (but usually nonimplemented) policy, but only Israel and the far-right-wing Maronites in Lebanon have actively waged a campaign to revert to a state structure based principally upon minority ethnic autonomy with bilateral links to an outside patron or great power. — Edward W. Said, Covering Islam, 321
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to classical divide-and-rule imperial strategy the reader has seen in early modern colonial history sources.