In the Ottoman Empire, a millet (; ) was an independent court of law pertaining to "personal law" under which a confessional community (a group abiding by the laws of Muslim Sharia, Christian Canon law, or Jewish Halakha) was allowed to rule itself under its own laws. Despite frequently being referred to as a "system", before the nineteenth century the organization of what are now retrospectively called millets in the Ottoman Empire was not at all systematic. Rather, non-Muslims were simply given a significant degree of autonomy within their own community, without an overarching structure for the 'millet' as a whole. The notion of distinct millets corresponding to different religious communities within the empire would not emerge until the eighteenth century. Subsequently, the existence of the millet system was justified through numerous foundation myths linking it back to the time of Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror (r. 1451–81), although it is now understood that no such system existed in the fifteenth century. During the 19th century rise of nationalism in the Ottoman Empire, as result of the Tanzimat reforms (1839–76), the term was used for legally protected ethno-linguistic minority groups, similar to the way other countries use the word nation. The word millet comes from the Arabic word millah (ملة) and literally means "nation". Abdulaziz Sachedina regards the millet system as an example of pre-modern religious pluralism, as the state recognized multiple different religious groups in exchange for some control over religious identification and the enforcement of orthodoxy. Johann Strauss, author of "A Constitution for a Multilingual Empire: Translations of the Kanun-ı Esasi and Other Official Texts into Minority Languages", wrote that the term "seems to be so essential for the understanding of the Ottoman system and especially the status of non-Muslims". Other authors interpret the millet system as one form of non-territorial autonomy and consider it as such a potentially universal solution to the modern issues of ethnic and religious diversity. Term The term millet, which originates from the Arabic milla, had three basic meanings in Ottoman Turkish: religion, religious community and nation. The first sense derives from Quranic usage and is attested in Ottoman administrative documents into the 19th century. Benjamin Braude has argued that before the period of 19th-century Tanzimat reforms, the word millet in the sense of religious community denoted the Muslim religious community or the Christians outside of the Ottoman Empire. This view is supported by