Western misinterpretation of the term rayah was later adopted by the Turks themselves

Evidence

A good example of the way in which European travellers and diplomats misunderstood and misinterpreted Ottoman institutions is provided by the word “rayah.” According to most of the Western travellers, followed by most Western historians, the word rayah means cattle, and was applied to the Christian subjects of the Porte, whose predatory attitude to them is expressed in the term. In fact, Ottoman usage until the middle of the eighteenth century applied the term to the peasant population of the Empire, irrespective of religion. Thus Muslim peasants were rayahs and Christian towns people were not. The word itself comes from an Arabic root, meaning to graze, and would be better translated as flocks, expressing the well-known pastoral ideal of Government, which is common to Christendom and Islam. It is a curious comment on the pattern of Western influence on Turkey, that from the middle of the eighteenth century the Western misinterpretation of the term passed to the Turks themselves, who began to use it—and sometimes apply it—in the once mistaken Western sense. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 642

Categorization

• DEFINE: Corrects the common misconception that rayah (from Arabic ‘to graze’, meaning flocks/peasants of any religion) meant Christian cattle.
• XREF: A concrete instance of Western epistemic authority being exported back to its object — echoes the reader’s notes on documentary history and colonial knowledge production.
• QUESTION: Worth chasing: when exactly did the Turkish usage shift, and was it mediated through Western-language sources or through official reform-era documents?