Ottoman Culture Quotes

We're stuck. We're stuck between the East and the West. Between the past and the future. On the one hand there are the secular modernists, so proud of the regime they constructed, you cannot breathe a critical word. They've got the army and half of the state on their side. On the other hand there are the conventional traditionalist, so infatuated with the Ottoman past, you cannot breathe a critical word. They've got the general public and the remaining half of the state on their side.

To understand those who are culturally and historically different from us – rather than resorting to such labels as ‘evil empire’, ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘terrorist’ to mask our ignorance – is a matter of urgency. The greatest hubris is to ask why ‘they’ are not like ‘us’, to accept our cultural biases lazily and without question, and to frame the problem in terms of ‘what went wrong?

For a capitalist system to work, the state had to protect, not regulate or interfere with, free markets. Both for political and religious reasons, this the sultan could not do: The Ottomans had then no idea of the balance of trade. . . . Originated from an age-old tradition in the Middle East, the Ottoman trade policy was that the state had to be concerned above all that the people and craftsmen in the cities in particular would not suffer a shortage of necessities and raw material. Consequently, the imports were always welcomed and encouraged, and exports discouraged.

A stranger visiting a new town would first face the question, Are you from Anatolia or Rumelia? Ottoman popular culture attributed sophisticated characteristics to the Rumelians, such as wisdom, charm, and gentlemanly behavior. Anatolians, by contrast, were stereotyped as courageous, honest, and straightforward.

Dështimi i shtetit Osman edhe sot është një barrë e rëndë në rajonet e Ballkanit të brëndshëm

Albania’s future is towards Christianity, since it is connected with it culturally, old memories, and its pre-Turkish nostalgia. With the passing of time, the late Islamic religion that came with the Ottomans should evaporate (at first in Albania and then in Kosova), until it will be replaced by Christianity or, to be more exact, Christian culture. Thus from one evil (the prohibition of religion in 1967) goodness will come. The Albanian nation will make a great historical correction that will accelerate its unity with its mother continent: Europe

As with Rome, the fall of Constantinople happened only after its rulers had started devaluing the currency, a process that historians believe began in the reign of Constantine IX Monomachos (1042–1055).8 Along with monetary decline came the fiscal, military, cultural, and spiritual decline of the Empire, as it trudged on with increasing crises until it was overtaken by the Ottomans in 1453.

We create ourselves to be almost blind walking dead, where we are led by both negative aspects of religion and cultural conformity to gloss over people. We gloss over the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire. We gloss over the Japanese internment camps that most likely would have been far worse had the war continued longer. We often marginalize those besides the ethnic and Jewish descent that died in the Nazi holocaust of World war II.

Yet for most of human history, coffee was unknown outside a small region of the Ethiopian highlands. Coffee itself has been consumed in Europe only in the last four centuries. There is no coffee in the Torah, or the Bible, or the Koran. There is no coffee in Shakespeare, Dante or Cervantes. After initially being recognised, in the late sixteenth century, by a few sharp-eyed travellers in the Ottoman Empire, coffee gained its first foothold in Europe among curious scientists and merchants. The first coffee-house in Christendom finally opened in London in the early 1650s, a city gripped by revolutionary fervour. In this sense, coffee’s eruption into daily life seems to coincide with the modern historical period.

In this first decade of the twentieth century, a large proportion of the Jews living in Palestine were still culturally quite similar to and lived reasonably comfortably alongside city-dwelling Muslims and Christians. They were mostly ultra-Orthodox and non-Zionist, mizrahi (eastern) or Sephardic (descendants of Jews expelled from Spain), urbanites of Middle Eastern or Mediterranean origin who often spoke Arabic or Turkish, even if only as a second or third language. In spite of marked religious distinctions between them and their neighbors, they were not foreigners, nor were they Europeans or settlers: they were, saw themselves, and were seen as Jews who were part of the indigenous Muslim-majority society.6 Moreover, some young European Ashkenazi Jews who settled in Palestine at this time, including such ardent Zionists as David Ben-Gurion and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi (one became prime minister and the other the president of Israel), initially sought a measure of integration into the local society. Ben-Gurion and Ben-Zvi even took Ottoman nationality, studied in Istanbul, and learned Arabic and Turkish.

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From the late 1830s to the Second World War, China was bullied and humiliated on a vast scale. And it was more shocking for the Chinese because they had lived with the illusion of power and self-sufficiency for much longer than the Ottomans. ‘Our country’s civilization,’ Liang Qichao pointed out in 1902, ‘is the oldest in the world. Three thousand years ago, Europeans were living like beasts in the field, while our civilization, its characteristics pronounced, was already equivalent to theirs of the middle ages. This wasn’t just some cultural defensiveness. China could trace its culture back 4,000 years, and political unity to the third century BC.

There was never a greater crime against humanity than the fourth crusade,” says Stephen Runciman. It destroyed the treasures of the past and broke down the most advanced culture of Europe. Far from uniting Eastern and Western Christendom, it implanted in the Greeks a hostility toward the West that has never entirely disappeared, and it weakened the Byzantine defenses against the rising power of the Ottoman Turks, to whom they eventually succumbed.

Wajid Ali Shah, denounced as effeminate and inept and deposed a year later by British imperialists, was the last great exponent of the Indo-Persian culture that emerged in Awadh toward the end of the Moghul empire, when India was one of the greatest centers of the Islamic world, along with the Ottoman and the Safavid empires. Islam in India lost some of its Arabian and Persian distinctiveness, blended with older cultures, but its legacy is still preserved amid the squalor of a hundred small Indian towns, in the grace and elegance of Najam's Urdu, in the numerous songs and dances that accompany festivals and marriages, in the subtle cuisines of Northern India, and the fineness of the silk saris of Benares, but one could think of it, as I did, as something just there, without a history or tradition. The Indo-Islamic inheritance has formed very little part of, and is increasingly an embarrassment to, the idea of India that has been maintained by the modernizing Hindu elite over the last fifty years.

Israel finds itself today facing a dilemma. In the longer term, there is only one alternative. It can embark on the path of binationalism, dismantling its colonies surrounded by barbed wire and constructing with the Palestinians a political community that belongs to all its citizens, without ethnic, linguistic, cultural or religious discrimination, without a ‘right of return’ reserved for Jews throughout the world but denied to the Palestinians who were expelled from their land. Or it can remain a ‘Jewish state’, with a democracy that will inevitably come to increasingly resemble the ancient millet system of the Ottoman empire: no longer an Islamist state committed to protecting its Christian and Jewish citizens, but a Jewish state that finds ever more awkward the presence within its frontiers of a growing Muslim minority.36 Its fate will then fatally follow that of South Africa under apartheid, and in the long run, neither the Bible nor the atom bomb will manage to save it.37

By the 1980s, Gorbachev’s efforts to reinvigorate the idea of a “single culture of the Soviet people, socialist in content, diverse in its national forms, internationalist in spirit” faltered against the fact that nationalism had acquired meaningful content to Soviet citizens in a way that socialist internationalism had not.49 For seventy years, the carrot of Soviet-style “internationalism” and the stick of Soviet repression had squelched demands for independence while promoting nationalism in other ways. This combination had prevented the breakup of the multinational empire, which otherwise would probably have collapsed after World War I, along with Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. With repression now eased, “openness” and “restructuring” were about to launch the Soviet Union, too, into a new world of identity politics. Moscow found itself faced with the choice between “nativized” elites, who were corrupt but loyal to Soviet “internationalism,” and alternative leaders in the republics, who were nationalists and not loyal to the Soviet Union.

Following the practice of the times, the grand princes and, later, the kings of Poland acquired the right of patronage; that is, they could appoint Orthodox bishops and even the metropolitan himself. Thus, the crucial issue of the leadership of the Orthodox faithful was left in the hands of secular rulers of another, increasingly antagonistic, church… The results were disastrous. With lay authorities capable of appointing bishops, the metropolitan's authority was undermined. And with every bishop acting as a law unto himself, the organizational discipline of the Orthodox church deteriorated rapidly. Even more deleterious was the corruption that lay patronage engendered… Under the circumstances, Orthodoxy's cultural contributions were limited. Schools, once one of the church's most attractive features, were neglected. Unqualified teachers barely succeeded in familiarizing their pupils with the rudiments of reading, writing, and Holy Scriptures. The curriculum of the schools had changed little since medieval times. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottomans in 1453 added to the intellectual and cultural stagnation by depriving the Orthodox of their most advanced and inspiring model. Lacking both external and internal stimuli, Orthodox culture slipped into ritualism, parochialism, and decay. The Poles, meanwhile, were enjoying a period of cultural growth and vitality. Benefiting from the West's prodigious outbursts of creative energy, they experienced the Renaissance with its stimulating reorientation of thought.

Clayton and his colleagues believed French colonial administration to be incapable of allowing a country to retain its own character. What the French termed their “civilizing mission” was seen as annexationism by the British; often it seemed to involve imposing the French language and culture on a native society. The British, on the other hand, in Egypt and elsewhere, kept to themselves, dwelt in their own clubs and compounds, and, apart from supervising the administration of the government, left the country and its people alone. In the eyes of Clayton and his colleagues, this was the greatest degree of independence to which Arabic-speaking peoples could aspire.

This dumbing down of the people for ideological reasons is, of course, not new. It is an age-old authoritarian tactic. It happened in China during the Cultural Revolution. It happened in the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, Renaissance Italy, twentieth-century Russia, and Nazi Germany—all of them societies whose leaders turned their backs on science, making it subordinate to an authoritarian ideology, and the societies collapsed.

In Turkey there is a clear combination of Greek / Roman / Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cuisine, and this is because of the cultural mesh between the East and the West that occurred as a result of the inclusive nature of the Ottomans.

Il serait intéressant aussi d’évoquer un phénomène apparu dans l’Empire ottoman et qui relève du postmarranisme, le mouvement messianique de Sabbataï Tsevi. Après s’être présenté comme un nouveau messie, Sabbataï Tsevi avait fini par se convertir à l’islam. Ses disciples ont secrètement maintenu le culte de ce messie juif tout en devenant officiellement musulmans. On donnait à ces apostats le nom de dönme (« ceux qui se sont tournés »). Ils étaient assez influents à Istanbul. Au XIXe siècle, ils ont créé des écoles laïques. Dans ces écoles se sont formés les officiers jeunes-turcs et Mustapha Kemal, qui devait lui-même instituer la laïcité dans les années 1920. Cet épisode montre aussi que les détours de l’histoire sont tout à fait curieux, mais surtout met de nouveau en avant la vertu émancipatrice de l’esprit marrane. Les sabbatéens, en se détournant de la loi juive et adoptant un islamisme de surface, se libéraient à la fois de l’un et de l’autre. C’est pourquoi, on peut les inscrire dans le mouvement de l’humanisme européen. » (Culture et barbarie européennes, p. 44-45).

The Ottoman Empire was an intricate mosaic of cultures and traditions, fostering an environment where diversity thrived.