Ethics and refugees: North Caucasian muhajirs in the Ottoman Empire and ethics of the modern refugee protection

The paper discusses practical issues of implementation of the contemporary international refugee protection regime in light of its normative foundations. In particular, the author examines aspects of liberal thought which in many ways laid the foundation for the global system of refugee protection and explains why the protection afforded to refugees in the modern world falls short of the ideals reflected in the 1951 Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees. To illustrate the thesis that it is the normative and philosophical foundations of international legal regime of refugee protection, including the fundamental notion of “nation”, which lie at the root of the existing status quo, a comparison is drawn with the regime established in the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the 19th century to tackle the unprecedented influx of refugees from the North Caucasus during and in the aftermath of the Caucasus War. As demonstrated in the paper, the Ottoman regime, which enabled the government to successfully resolve the migration crisis and integrate hundreds of thousands of North Caucasians into Ottoman society, in contrast to the modern regime, was permeated by religious rhetoric. It appealed to the concept of hijra — migration to preserve the faith; of the Caliph’s spiritual duty to afford protection to the entire Muslim Ummah, irrespective of citizenship or allegiance; as well as to religious obligations of ordinary Muslims, such as the duty of charitable giving (Zakat). The author draws a parallel between the ideological basis of the Ottoman regime of protection of refugees and the cosmopolitan approach advocated by some scholars and calling for “separation” from the positivist matrix and recognising the agency of individuals as such, regardless of the latter’s connection with a particular nation State. The author concludes that the Ottoman regime of refugee protection, inspired by Islam, endowed the refugees with agency and a degree of autonomy — precisely what proponents of the cosmopolitan approach aim to achieve. However, the question whether these aims can be attained under the current conditions, with the international legal regime being entirely secular, remains an open one.