Ottoman History Quotes

But behind every misguided treatment—from Ottomans eating clay to keep the plague away to Victorian gents sitting in a mercury steam room for their syphilis to epilepsy sufferers sipping gladiator blood in ancient Rome—is the incredible power of the human desire to live.

Önündekinin gölgesini takip edersen bir gölge olarak kalırsın.

He looked on in silence at the proof of what Israelis already know, that their history is contrived from the bones and traditions of Palestinians. The Europeans who came knew neither hummus nor falafel but later proclaimed them authentic Jewish cuisine." They claimed the villas of Qatamon as "old Jewish homes. They had no old photographs or ancient drawings of their ancestry living on the land, loving it, and planting it. They arrived from foreign nations and uncovered coins in Palestines earth from the Canaanites, the Romans, the ottomans, then sold them as their own "ancient Jewish artifacts." They came to Jaffa and found oranges the size of watermelons and said, "Behold! The Jews are known for their oranges." But those oranges were the culmination of centuries of Palestinian farmers perfecting the art of citrus growing.

Water splashes and runs in a film across the glass floor suspended above the mosaics. The Hacı Kadın hamam is a typical post-Union fusion of architectures; Ottoman domes and niches built over some forgotten Byzantine palace, years and decades of trash blinding, gagging, burying the angel-eyed Greek faces in the mosaic floor; century upon century. That haunted face was only exposed to the light again when the builders tore down the cheap apartment blocks and discovered a wonder. But Istanbul is wonder upon wonder, sedimented wonder, metamorphic cross-bedded wonder. You can’t plant a row of beans without turning up some saint or Sufi. At some point every country realizes it must eat its history. Romans ate Greeks, Byzantines ate Romans, Ottomans ate Byzantines, Turks ate Ottomans. The EU eats everything. Again, the splash and run as Ferid Bey scoops warm water in a bronze bowl from the marble basin and pours it over his head.

As the two bullets left the chamber of Princip’s Browning revolver, Europe was a continent of empires. Italy, France, Austro-Hungary, Germany, Russia, Ottoman Turkey, Britain, Portugal, the Netherlands, even tiny Belgium, only formed in 1831, controlled vast territories across the world. At the moment of impact, the process of turning them back into local powers began. Within a matter of years, gone were the emperors who had sailed on each other’s yachts and appointed each other to grand chivalric orders; gone were some colonies and dominions overseas—and others were starting to go in an inexorable progression to independence.

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?

At certain times of the day, and at particular bends in the road or curves of the shore, Cyprus is still so lovely that it takes you by the throat.

The lust of conquest, when associated with religious fanaticism, has been the greatest scourge of the human race.

كونوا على ثقة أننا لو انسحبنا من هذه الساحات فستتحول إلى ساحة للفوضى والاضطراب إلى الأبد .السلطان عبد الحميد الثاني

إن التاريخ هو نور ينفذ من الماضي إلى المستقبل

Babalar oğullarının başarısızlığını asla hazmedemiyordu.

Kimse olmak zorunda değilsin. Birinin yolunda gidersek bir gölge oluruz. biz farklılığımızla sivrileceğiz.

İtaat etmeyi alışkanlık edinen hiçbir zaman hükmedemez. Ne bir orduya ne de kendine.

He saw that a moon arose from the holy man’s breast and came to sink in his own breast. A tree then sprouted from his navel and its shade compassed the world. Beneath this shade there were mountains, and streams flowed forth from the foot of each mountain. Some people drank from these running waters, others watered gardens, while yet others caused fountains to flow. When Osman awoke he told the story to the holy man, who said ‘Osman, my son, congratulations, for God has given the imperial office to you and your descendants and my daughter Malhun shall be your wife’.

When he played that violin for us, I thought about his stories and the history he talked of, about paintings I had seen and books I had read. His violin made a smoky, mysterious sound. I heard it in the explosions of chestnuts cooking on a brazier at the edge of a river, and horses clopping across cobblestones in Siena and Florence, and also the rustle of leaves that fell on Garibaldi's troops as they marched. The violin sang 'Roma o morte,' and it wailed for the mountains of dead in an American Civil War across the sea, and for Paris glittering with the Second Empire. It rose and fell with voices reading Victor Hugo aloud by whale oil, and it sang about dynamite, about Ottomans and Englishmen falling under their horses in the Crimea, and the feet of crowds shuffling through international expositions. Above all, Stoyan's violin sang about places - places its maker had been, places the teacher of its maker had been, places its current owner would someday see, and the many, many places where he would someday perform on it.

لقد كان عصرا اصطُنِعت فيه بلدانُ الشرق الأوسط وحدودُه في أوروبا؛ فالعراق وما نسميه الآن الأردن- على سبيل المثال- هما اختراعان بريطانيان، والخطوط رُسِمت على خارطة بيضاء من قبل سياسيين بريطانيين بعد الحرب العالمية الأولى، بينما أُنشِئت حدود المملكة العربية السعودية والكويت والعراق من قِبل موظف مدني بريطاني عام 1922. ورَسَمت فرنسا الحدودَ بين المسلمين والمسيحيين في سوريا ولبنان. ورَسَمت روسيا الحدودَ بين المسلمين والمسيحيين في أرمينيا وأذربيجان السوﭬياتة.

Thereafter the red edges of war spread over another half of the world. Turkey’s neighbors, Bulgaria, Rumania, Italy, and Greece, were eventually drawn in. Thereafter, with her exit to the Mediterranean closed, Russia was left dependent on Archangel, icebound half the year, and on Vladivostok, 8,000 miles from the battlefront. With the Black Sea closed, her exports dropped by 98 per cent and her imports by 95 per cent. The cutting off of Russia with all its consequences, the vain and sanguinary tragedy of Gallipoli, the diversion of Allied strength in the campaigns of Mesopotamia, Suez, and Palestine, the ultimate breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the subsequent history of the Middle East, followed from the voyage of the Goeben.

Yeniçeri olmak ayrıcalıktı. Onlardan başka bir iş yapması beklenmiyordu. Her ay maaş alıyor, her mevsim yeni kıyafetler ediniyorlardı. Bunlara ek olarak her savaşta bahşiş ve giderleri içinde ek harçlık alıyorlardı. İşleri savaştı. Savaşla zenginleşiyorlardı.

On behalf of those you killed, imprisoned, tortured, you are not welcome, Erdogan! No, Erdogan, you’re not welcome in Algeria. We are a country which has already paid its price of blood and tears to those who wanted to impose their caliphate on us, those who put their ideas before our bodies, those who took our children hostage and who attempted to kill our hopes for a better future. The notorious family that claims to act in the name of the God and religion—you’re a member of it—you fund it, you support it, you desire to become its international leader. Islamism is your livelihood Islamism, which is your livelihood, is our misfortune. We will not forget about it, and you are a reminder of it today. You offer your shadow and your wings to those who work to make our country kneel down before your “Sublime Door.” You embody and represent what we loathe. You hate freedom, the free spirit. But you love parades. You use religion for business. You dream of a caliphate and hope to return to our lands. But you do it behind the closed doors, by supporting Islamist parties, by offering gifts through your companies, by infiltrating the life of the community, by controlling the mosques. These are the old methods of your “Muslim Brothers” in this country, who used to show us God’s Heaven with one hand while digging our graves with the other. No, Mr. Erdogan, you are not a man of help; you do not fight for freedom or principles; you do not defend the right of peoples to self-determination. You know only how to subject the Kurds to the fires of death; you know only how to subject your opponents to your dictatorship. You cry with the victims in the Middle East, yet sign contracts with their executioners. You do not dream of a dignified future for us, but of a caliphate for yourself. We are aware of your institutionalized persecution, your list of Turks to track down, your sinister prisons filled with the innocent, your dictatorial justice palaces, your insolence and boastful nature. You do not dream of a humanity that shares common values and principles, but are interested only in the remaking of the Ottoman Empire and its bloodthirsty warlords. Islam, for you, is a footstool; God is a business sign; modernity is an enemy; Palestine is a showcase; and local Islamists are your stunned courtesans. Humanity will not remember you with good deeds Humanity will remember you for your machinations, your secret coups d’état, and your manhunts. History will remember you for your bombings, your vengeful wars, and your inability to engage in constructive dialogue with others. The UN vote for Al-Quds is only an instrument in your service. Let us laugh at this with the Palestinians. We know that the Palestinian issue is your political capital, as it is for many others. You know well how to make a political fortune by exploiting others’ emotions. In Algeria, we suffered, and still suffer, from those who pretend to be God and act as takers and givers of life. They applaud your coming, but not us. You are the idol of Algerian Islamists and Populists, those who are unable to imagine a political structure beyond a caliphate for Muslim-majority societies. We aspire to become a country of freedom and dignity. This is not your ambition, nor your virtue. You are an illusion You have made beautiful Turkey an open prison and a bazaar for your business and loved ones. I hope that this beautiful nation rises above your ambitions. I hope that justice will be restored and flourish there once again, at least for those who have been imprisoned, tortured, bombed, and killed. You are an illusion, Erdogan—you know it and we know it. You play on the history of our humiliation, on our emotions, on our beliefs, and introduce yourself as a savior. However, you are a gravedigger, both for your own country and for your neighbors. Turkey is a political miracle, but it owes you nothing. The best thing you can do

For much of the seventeenth century the border between the Habsburgs and the Ottomans had been relatively quiet – relatively in the sense that large-scale raiding did happen (baking in a level of violence which we would consider scarcely credible) but it was not by the standards of the time serious.

لقد رفض السلطان عبد الحميد الثاني بيع الأراضي في فلسطين لليهود الذين أرادوا الاستيطان فيها، مهما كان الثمن المعروض مغريًا، بل قال لمن جاء إليه بهذا الخصوص: '' لن أبيع ولو شبرًا واحدًا من الأراضي التي دخلت ضمن دولتنا العلية ودفع أجدادنا دماءهم ثمنًا لها؛ لأن هذه الأرض ليست ملكي، بل ملك أمتي، وقد دفعت أمتى دماءها ثمنًا لهذه الأرض؛ فلن أبيعها لكم ولو بملء الأرض ذهبا.

It is hard to argue that the Ottomans or Chinese were too far away, or that they lacked the technological, economic or military wherewithal. The resources that sent Zheng He from China to East Africa in the 1420s should have been enough to reach America. The Chinese just weren’t interested. The first Chinese world map to show America was not issued until 1602 – and then by a European missionary!

Before securing British backing, the Zionist movement had been a colonizing project in search of a great-power patron. Having failed to find a sponsor in the Ottoman Empire, in Wilhelmine Germany, and elsewhere, Theodor Herzl’s successor Chaim Weizmann and his colleagues finally met with success in their approach to the wartime British cabinet led by David Lloyd George, acquiring the support of the greatest power of the age.

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.

Article 7 provided for a nationality law to facilitate the acquisition of Palestinian citizenship by Jews. This same law was used to deny nationality to Palestinians who had emigrated to the Americas during the Ottoman era and now desired to return to their homeland.42 Thus Jewish immigrants, irrespective of their origins, could acquire Palestinian nationality, while native Palestinian Arabs who happened to be abroad when the British took over were denied it.

In the third paragraph of the Mandate’s preamble, the Jewish people, and only the Jewish people, are described as having a historic connection to Palestine. In the eyes of the drafters, the entire two-thousand-year-old built environment of the country with its villages, shrines, castles, mosques, churches, and monuments dating to the Ottoman, Mameluke, Ayyubid, Crusader, Abbasid, Umayyad, Byzantine, and earlier periods belonged to no people at all, or only to amorphous religious groups.

But why should 1299 CE be considered the founding date of the empire? – there were no famous battles, no declarations of independence or storming of a bastille. The simplest explanations are often the most convincing: that year corresponds to the years 699–700 in the Islamic calendar. By rare mathematical coincidence, the centuries turned at the same time in both the Christian and Islamic calendars. What more auspicious year to mark the founding of an empire that spanned Europe and the Middle East?

Most non-European empires of the early modern era were established by great conquerors such as Nurhaci and Nader Shah, or by bureaucratic and military elites as in the Qing and Ottoman empires. Financing wars through taxes and plunder (without making fine distinctions between the two), they owed little to credit systems, and they cared even less about the interests of bankers and investors. In Europe, on the other hand, kings and generals gradually adopted the mercantile way of thinking, until merchants and bankers became the ruling elite. The European conquest of the world was increasingly financed through credit rather than taxes, and was increasingly directed by capitalists whose main ambition was to receive maximum returns on their investments. The empires built by bankers and merchants in frock coats and top hats defeated the empires built by kings and noblemen in gold clothes and shining armour. The mercantile empires were simply much shrewder in financing their conquests. Nobody wants to pay taxes, but everyone is happy to invest.

The violence unleashed against successful groups has often exceeded the violence unleashed against lagging groups disdained as “inferior.” The number of overseas Chinese killed by mobs in Vietnam, in just one year, exceeded the number of lynchings of black Americans recorded in the history of the United States.25 So did the number of Armenians killed in just one year by rampaging mobs in the Ottoman Empire,26 and so has the number of Jews killed in a given year, at numerous times and places throughout history,27 even before millions were murdered in the Holocaust.

The Balkans I know is the Balkans from below: a space of bogoumils- these medieval heretics who fought against the Crusades and churches- and a place of anti-Ottoman resistance; a home to hajduks and klephts, pirates and rebels; a refuge of feminists and socialists, of antifascist and partisans; a place of dreamers of all sorts struggling both against provincial "peninsularity" as well as against occupations, foreign interventions and that process which is now, in a strange inversion of history, often described with that fashionable phrase, "balkanization." (p.11)

...of the 10 thopusand Indian soldiers and camp followers who went into captivity at Kut, as few as one third would live to see the war's end. ....Taken to Constantinople, he [Gen. Charles Townshend British Commander of forces surrendered at Kut] spent the remainder of the war in a pleasant villa on an island on the Bosporus, where he was given the use of a Turkish naval yachtand frequently attended diplomatic receptions at the Ottoman court. Joining him in Constantinople were his 3 prized Yorkshire terriers, pets that, despitethe mear-starvation co9nditionsin Kut, had weatheredthe ordeal quite nicely. (p. 178)

With very few exceptions, since 1945 states no longer invade other states in order to conquer and swallow them up. Such conquests had been the bread and butter of political history since time immemorial. It was how most great empires were established, and how most rulers and populations expected things to stay. But campaigns of conquest like those of the Romans, Mongols and Ottomans cannot take place today anywhere in the world. Since 1945, no independent country recognised by the UN has been conquered and wiped off the map. Limited international wars still occur from time to time, and millions still die in wars, but wars are no longer the norm.

In fact, war itself could become a commodity, just like opium. In 1821 the Greeks rebelled against the Ottoman empire. The uprising aroused great sympathy in liberal and romantic circles in Britain - Lord Byron, the poet, even went to Greece to fight alongside the insurgents. But London financiers saw an opportunity as well. They proposed to the rebel leaders the issue of tradable Greek Rebellion Bonds on the London stock exchange. The Greeks would promise to repay the bonds, plus interest, if and when they won their independence. Private investors bought bonds to make a profit, or out of sympathy for the Greek cause, or both. The value of Greek Rebellion Bonds rose and fell on the London stock exchange in tempo with military successes and failures on the battlefields of Hellas. The Turks gradually gained the upper hand. With a rebel defeat imminent, the bondholders faced the prospect of losing their trousers. The bondholders' interest was the national interest, so the British organised an international fleet that, in 1827, sank the main Ottoman flotilla in the Battle of Navarino. After centuries of subjugation, Greece was finally free. But freedom came with a huge debt that the new country had no way of repaying. The Greek economy was mortgaged to British creditors for decades to come.

Ottoman provinces were re-formed and cobbled together into states. The region was carved up with little regard to ethnic, religious, or territorial concerns. The flawed and cavalier treaties of World War I explain to a large degree why the Middle East remains unstable and angry today. Every Muslim schoolchild is taught this arc of history and resents it: Islam’s golden era of the Arab caliphate, the Crusades, the Mongol devastation, the rise of the Ottomans, World War I, the carving up of the Middle East by Europe, and the poverty, weakness, and wars in the Muslim world of the last century. This is the basic and sad narrative taught at every mosque, and it has the benefit of being broadly accurate.

Devletlerin bir hayat müddeti vardır, hiçbir medeniyet sonsuza kadar devam edip gitmez. Tarihe bakarsanız, bunu açık şekilde görürsünüz. Mesela, eski Mısır medeniyeti binlerce sene devam etti ve ortadan kalktı. Onun yerini eski Yunan, Roma devletleri aldı ama onlar da silindiler. Zaman geçti, biz geldik, 600 sene devam ettik, ama miadımız dolmuştu ve biz de yıkıldık. İngiltere ise, imparatorluk olarak, sadece 200 seneye yakın devam edebildi. Bugünün en kuvvetli devleti Amerika ama, günün birinde o da nihayete erecek. Reform çabalarının muvaffak olması halinde Osmanlı Devleti'nin yıkılmayacağını, devam edeceğini söyleyenler çıkmıştır ama ben buna inanmıyorum. Yıkılışımız en fazla 50 sene gecikirdi, o kadar.

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.

and by a militant rejection of all later accretions, which included medieval fiqh, mysticism and Falsafah, which most Muslims now regarded as normative. Because the Ottoman sultans did not conform to his vision of true Islam, Abd al-Wahhab declared that they were apostates and worthy of death. Instead, he tried to create an enclave of pure faith, based on his view of the first ummah of the seventh century. His aggressive techniques would be used by some fundamentalists in the twentieth century, a period of even greater change and unrest. Wahhabism is the form of Islam that is still practised today in Saudi Arabia, a puritan religion based on a strictly literal interpretation of scripture and early Islamic tradition.

In our five thousand years of civilization, our history has often been the handmaid of geography. We lie exactly midway between the North Pole and the Equator. We are the gateway between the Fertile Crescent and Europe, between landlocked Central Asia and the Mediterranean world and beyond that, the Atlantic. Peoples and empires have ebbed and flowed across this land. Even today sixty per cent of Europe’s gas supply either passes down the Bosphorus or runs under our very feet through pipelines. We have always been the navel of the world. Yet our favoured location by its very nature surrounded us with historical enemies; to the north, Russia to the south, the Arabs; to the east, Persia and to the west, the Red Apple itself, Europe.’ The Red Apple, the myth of Ottoman imperialism. When Mehmet the Conqueror looked out from the parapets of his fortress of Europe at Constantinople, the Red Apple had been the golden globe in the open palm of Justinian’s statue in the Hippodrome, the symbol of Roman power and ambition. Mehmet rode through the crumbling Hippodrome, the decaying streets of dying Byzantium and the Red Apple became Rome itself. The truth of the Red Apple was that it would always be unattainable, for it was the westering spirit, the globe of the setting sun itself. ‘Now we find ourselves caught between Arab oil, Russian gas and Iranian radiation and we found that the only way we could take the Red Apple was by joining it.’ This is poor stuff, Georgios thinks. You would not insult undergraduates’ intelligence with this.

When “free trade” was imposed upon the Ottoman Empire in 1838 and British cloth “flooded the market in Izmir,” local cotton workers lost their ability to maintain their old production regime. In coastal southeastern Africa, cotton yarn and cloth imports also began to devastate the local cotton textile industry. In Mexico, European cotton imports had a serious impact on local manufacturing—before tariffs enabled Mexican industrialization, Guadalajara’s industry had been, as one historian found, “virtually eliminated.” In Oaxaca, 450 out of 500 looms ceased operating. In China, the 1842 Treaty of Nanking forced the opening of markets, and the subsequent influx of European and North American yarn and cloth had a “devastating” effect, especially on China’s hand spinners.22

The Islamic system must be understood in terms of the premises of the Islamic conception of society, whose goal is to provide a just system and a beneficial environment for the spiritual and religious growth of human beings. From that point of view, minorities in the Islamic world certainly did not fare worse than those in the West, as one can see in a comparison of the history of Judaism in the “Abode of Islam” and its history in Europe. Also during five hundred years of Ottoman domination of Greece, Mt. Athos remained the most vibrant and living center of Orthodox spirituality. As for economic life, it might seem a paradox, but in most Islamic countries the religious minorities are in a better economic situation than the Muslim majority, as one can see in the case of the Christians of Lebanon and Egypt.

Europe in the days of Columbus, Copernicus and Newton had the highest concentration of religious fanatics in the world, and the lowest level of tolerance. The luminaries of the Scientific Revolution lived in a society that expelled Jews and Muslims, burned heretics wholesale, saw a witch in every cat-loving elderly lady and started a new religious war every full moon. If you travelled to Cairo or Istanbul around 1600, you would find there a multicultural and tolerant metropolis, where Sunnis, Shiites, Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Armenians, Copts, Jews and even the occasional Hindu lived side by side in relative harmony. Though they had their share of disagreements and riots, and though the Ottoman Empire routinely discriminated against people on religious grounds, it was a liberal paradise compared with Europe.

The Ottomans had taken much of the Christian Orthodox Balkans although they only ruled a small territory in Asia – and this shaped the nascent state. Recruiting his infantry from among these Christian Slavs, Murad annually bought or kidnapped a quota of Christian boys, aged eight to twelve, a practice known as the devshirme, to serve as courtiers and soldiers in his Jeni Ceri – new army – the Janissary corps; the cavalry was still drawn from Turkish levies under Anatolian beys. Those enslaved would number uncountable millions. His harem was simultaneously drawn from girls stolen from Slavic villages or Greek islands, often sold via Mongol khans and Italian slave traders. While Ottomans were Turks from Turkmenistan, Murad’s system meant that the Ottomans were often the sons of Slavic concubines, and viziers were often Slavs too.

There are many turning points in the Middle East’s modern history that could explain how we ended up in these depths of despair. Some people will identify the end of the Ottoman Empire and the fall of the last Islamic caliphate after World War I as the moment when the Muslim world lost its way; or they will see the creation of Israel in 1948 and the defeat of the Arabs in the subsequent Six-Day War of 1967 as the first fissure in the collective Arab psyche. Others will skip directly to the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 and point to the aftermath as the final paroxysm of conflicts dating back millennia: Sunnis and Shias killing each other, Saudi Arabia and Iran locked in a fight to the death. They will insist that both the killings and the rivalry are inevitable and eternal. Except for the “inevitable and eternal” part, none of these explanations is wrong, but none, on its own, paints a complete picture.

seventeen conflicts, the monotheistic religions fought each other; in another eight, monotheists fought heathens.) And the common assertion that the two world wars were set off by the decline of religious morality (as in the former Trump strategist Stephen Bannon’s recent claim that World War II pitted “the Judeo-Christian West versus atheists”) is dunce-cap history.48 The belligerents on both sides of World War I were devoutly Christian, except for the Ottoman Empire, a Muslim theocracy. The only avowedly atheist power that fought in World War II was the Soviet Union, and for most of the war it fought on our side against the Nazi regime—which (contrary to another myth) was sympathetic to German Christianity and vice versa, the two factions united in their loathing of secular modernity.49 (Hitler himself was a deist who said, “I am convinced that I am acting as the agent of our Creator. By fighting off the Jews, I am doing the Lord’s work.”)

They proposed to the rebel leaders the issue of tradable Greek Rebellion Bonds on the London stock exchange. The Greeks would promise to repay the bonds, plus interest, if and when they won their independence. Private investors bought bonds to make a profit, or out of sympathy for the Greek cause, or both. The value of Greek Rebellion Bonds rose and fell on the London stock exchange in tempo with military successes and failures on the battlefields of Hellas. The Turks gradually gained the upper hand. With a rebel defeat imminent, the bondholders faced the prospect of losing their trousers. The bondholders’ interest was the national interest, so the British organised an international fleet that, in 1827, sank the main Ottoman flotilla in the Battle of Navarino. After centuries of subjugation, Greece was finally free. But freedom came with a huge debt that the new country had no way of repaying. The Greek economy was mortgaged to British creditors for decades to come. 40.

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.

Osmanlı Karaman beylikleri arasındaki mücadeleyi anlatan, ayrıca şaman bir karakterin şamanlık gelişimiyle tüyleri diken diken eden ayrıntılar sunan tarihi roman serisinin ikinci kitabı da akıcı, tarihi bilgilerle dolu doluydu. Üstelik Edirne'den çıkan karakterlerin ilgi çekici mekanlara olan seyahatlari beni tarihi bir yolculuğa çıkardı. Çok keyif aldım. Kumru ve Bengi diğer Osmanlı şehzadeleri ile Edirne'den çıkıp ikinci Osmanlı payitahtı Bursa'ya ve çevredeki başka şehirlere gittiler. Bursa'nın tasvirleri çok hoşuma gitti. Ayrıca diğer karakterlerin de kişisel gelişimine daha çok girildi. Kötü olduğunu sandığımız bazı kişilerin aslında daha karmaşık karakterlere sahip iyi-kötü arasında kişiler olduğunu görmüş oldum. Bu da kitap okurken keyif aldığım bir noktadır çünkü hiçbir insan sadece iyi sadece kötü değildir. Karakterler kişilikler psikolojik değişimler katman katman açılır, bu konuda da çok tatmin oldum. Kitap herkesin bildiği ünlü Ankara Savaşı ile sona erdi ve savaş sahnelerinde her şey gözümde apaçık canlandı. Olaylar açılırken ve sırlar ortaya çıkarken savaş alanında kılıç kullanan şehzadelerin bazılarının babalarını savaş alanında bırakıp kaçması çok acıklıydı. Dönem tarihini biraz bilenler Ankara savaşında kimlerin kaçtığını iyi bilir :D Sonuç olarak Larende'nin Varisleri çok keyif aldığım ve herkese tavsiye ettiğim bir kitaptı.

We often associate science with the values of secularism and tolerance. If so, early modern Europe is the last place you would have expected a scientific revolution. Europe in the days of Columbus, Copernicus and Newton had the highest concentration of religious fanatics in the world, and the lowest level of tolerance. The luminaries of the Scientific Revolution lived in a society that expelled Jews and Muslims, burned heretics wholesale, saw a witch in every cat-loving elderly lady and started a new religious war every full moon. If you had travelled to Cairo or Istanbul around 1600, you would find there a multicultural and tolerant metropolis, where Sunnis, Shiites, Orthodox Christians, Catholics, Armenians, Copts, Jews and even the occasional Hindu lived side by side in relative harmony. Though they had their share of disagreements and riots, and though the Ottoman Empire routinely discriminated against people on religious grounds, it was a liberal paradise compared with Europe. If you had then sailed on to contemporary Paris or London, you would have found cities awash with religious extremism, in which only those belonging to the dominant sect could live. In London they killed Catholics, in Paris they killed Protestants, the Jews had long been driven out, and nobody in his right mind would dream of letting any Muslims in. And yet, the Scientific Revolution began in London and Paris rather than in Cairo and Istanbul.

THE BEAR A bear, however hard he tries, Grows tubby without exercise. Our Teddy Bear is short and fat, Which is not to be wondered at; He gets what exercise he can By falling off the ottoman, But generally seems to lack The energy to clamber back. Now tubbiness is just the thing Which gets a fellow wondering; And Teddy worried lots about The fact that he was rather stout. He thought: "If only I were thin! But how does anyone begin?" He thought: "It really isn't fair To grudge one exercise and air." For many weeks he pressed in vain His nose against the window-pane, And envied those who walked about Reducing their unwanted stout. None of the people he could see "Is quite" (he said) "as fat as me!" Then, with a still more moving sigh, "I mean" (he said) "as fat as I! Now Teddy, as was only right, Slept in the ottoman at night, And with him crowded in as well More animals than I can tell; Not only these, but books and things, Such as a kind relation brings - Old tales of "Once upon a time," And history retold in rhyme. One night it happened that he took A peep at an old picture-book, Wherein he came across by chance The picture of a King of France (A stoutish man) and, down below, These words: "King Louis So and So, Nicknamed 'The Handsome!'" There he sat, And (think of it!) the man was fat! Our bear rejoiced like anything To read about this famous King, Nicknamed "The Handsome." There he sat, And certainly the man was fat. Nicknamed "The Handsome." Not a doubt The man was definitely stout. Why then, a bear (for all his tub ) Might yet be named "The Handsome Cub!" "Might yet be named." Or did he mean That years ago he "might have been"? For now he felt a slight misgiving: "Is Louis So and So still living? Fashions in beauty have a way Of altering from day to day. Is 'Handsome Louis' with us yet? Unfortunately I forget." Next morning (nose to window-pane) The doubt occurred to him again. One question hammered in his head: "Is he alive or is he dead?" Thus, nose to pane, he pondered; but The lattice window, loosely shut, Swung open. With one startled "Oh!" Our Teddy disappeared below. There happened to be passing by A plump man with a twinkling eye, Who, seeing Teddy in the street, Raised him politely to his feet, And murmured kindly in his ear Soft words of comfort and of cheer: "Well, well!" "Allow me!" "Not at all." "Tut-tut! A very nasty fall." Our Teddy answered not a word; It's doubtful if he even heard. Our bear could only look and look: The stout man in the picture-book! That 'handsome' King - could this be he, This man of adiposity? "Impossible," he thought. "But still, No harm in asking. Yes I will!" "Are you," he said,"by any chance His Majesty the King of France?" The other answered, "I am that," Bowed stiffly, and removed his hat; Then said, "Excuse me," with an air, "But is it Mr Edward Bear?" And Teddy, bending very low, Replied politely, "Even so!" They stood beneath the window there, The King and Mr Edward Bear, And, handsome, if a trifle fat, Talked carelessly of this and that…. Then said His Majesty, "Well, well, I must get on," and rang the bell. "Your bear, I think," he smiled. "Good-day!" And turned, and went upon his way. A bear, however hard he tries, Grows tubby without exercise. Our Teddy Bear is short and fat, Which is not to be wondered at. But do you think it worries him To know that he is far from slim? No, just the other way about - He's proud of being short and stout.

I am speaking of the evenings when the sun sets early, of the fathers under the streetlamps in the back streets returning home carrying plastic bags. Of the old Bosphorus ferries moored to deserted stations in the middle of winter, where sleepy sailors scrub the decks, pail in hand and one eye on the black-and-white television in the distance; of the old booksellers who lurch from one ϧnancial crisis to the next and then wait shivering all day for a customer to appear; of the barbers who complain that men don’t shave as much after an economic crisis; of the children who play ball between the cars on cobblestoned streets; of the covered women who stand at remote bus stops clutching plastic shopping bags and speak to no one as they wait for the bus that never arrives; of the empty boathouses of the old Bosphorus villas; of the teahouses packed to the rafters with unemployed men; of the patient pimps striding up and down the city’s greatest square on summer evenings in search of one last drunken tourist; of the broken seesaws in empty parks; of ship horns booming through the fog; of the wooden buildings whose every board creaked even when they were pashas’ mansions, all the more now that they have become municipal headquarters; of the women peeking through their curtains as they wait for husbands who never manage to come home in the evening; of the old men selling thin religious treatises, prayer beads, and pilgrimage oils in the courtyards of mosques; of the tens of thousands of identical apartment house entrances, their facades discolored by dirt, rust, soot, and dust; of the crowds rushing to catch ferries on winter evenings; of the city walls, ruins since the end of the Byzantine Empire; of the markets that empty in the evenings; of the dervish lodges, the tekkes, that have crumbled; of the seagulls perched on rusty barges caked with moss and mussels, unϩinching under the pelting rain; of the tiny ribbons of smoke rising from the single chimney of a hundred-yearold mansion on the coldest day of the year; of the crowds of men ϧshing from the sides of the Galata Bridge; of the cold reading rooms of libraries; of the street photographers; of the smell of exhaled breath in the movie theaters, once glittering aϱairs with gilded ceilings, now porn cinemas frequented by shamefaced men; of the avenues where you never see a woman alone after sunset; of the crowds gathering around the doors of the state-controlled brothels on one of those hot blustery days when the wind is coming from the south; of the young girls who queue at the doors of establishments selling cut-rate meat; of the holy messages spelled out in lights between the minarets of mosques on holidays that are missing letters where the bulbs have burned out; of the walls covered with frayed and blackened posters; of the tired old dolmuşes, ϧfties Chevrolets that would be museum pieces in any western city but serve here as shared taxis, huϫng and puϫng up the city’s narrow alleys and dirty thoroughfares; of the buses packed with passengers; of the mosques whose lead plates and rain gutters are forever being stolen; of the city cemeteries, which seem like gateways to a second world, and of their cypress trees; of the dim lights that you see of an evening on the boats crossing from Kadıköy to Karaköy; of the little children in the streets who try to sell the same packet of tissues to every passerby; of the clock towers no one ever notices; of the history books in which children read about the victories of the Ottoman Empire and of the beatings these same children receive at home; of the days when everyone has to stay home so the electoral roll can be compiled or the census can be taken; of the days when a sudden curfew is announced to facilitate the search for terrorists and everyone sits at home fearfully awaiting “the oϫcials”; CONTINUED IN SECOND PART OF THE QUOTE

No one knows the true origins of these people, whom we now call Ottomans. They emerge from among the anonymous wandering Turkmen sometime around 1280, a caste of illiterate warriors living among tents and woodsmoke, who ruled from the saddle and signed with a thumbprint and whose history was subsequently reconstructed by imperial myth-making.

All societies are based on imagined hierarchies, but not necessarily on the same hierarchies. What accounts for the differences? Why did traditional Indian society classify people according to caste, Ottoman society according to religion, and American society according to race? In most cases the hierarchy originated as the result of a set of accidental historical circumstances and was then perpetuated and refined over many generations as different groups developed vested interests in it.

The postwar settlement left other scars as well. In a single swoop, the ancient empires of the Habsburgs, Ottomans, and Romanovs vanished from the face of Europe.

The last decades of Ottoman history cannot be understood properly without taking into account the revolution from below caused by the revivalist movements.

Ottomans

background to this article in relation to the Middle East involved repeated British promises of independence to all the Arabs of the Ottoman domains during World War I in return for their support against the Ottomans, as well as the self-determination proclaimed by Woodrow Wilson. Indeed, all the other mandated territories in the Middle East ultimately won independence (although both mandatory powers, Britain and France, twisted the rules to maintain the maximum degree of control for the longest possible time).

Although largely unnoticed by the Allies, and still not well known in his own country, Mustafa Kemal had come out of the war in charge of the longest front held by the Ottoman armed forces. He was only 37, and still a Brigadier. But his professional reputation was high among Turkish commanders. True, they knew him as a difficult man to work with. He was ambitious and wilful. He had strong political views, and played politics to get his way. He was convinced he knew best. But then he usually did, for he had good sense, a rare quality in a world that had torn itself to pieces.

During the four modern centuries, it is likely that over thirty million people were enslaved: twelve million across the Atlantic, approximately ten million from east Africa across the Indian Ocean, and ten million Turks, Russians, Georgians and Circassians from the Eurasian steppes. That does not include the Barbary–Moroccan trade in western Europeans nor the several million Serbs and Albanians enslaved by the Ottomans: some of these enslaved children became viziers and valide sultans, but that does not diminish their tragedy. Many Islamic slaves were females who served in households – but domestic service almost always included sexual abuse. It is estimated that the Crimean khans alone enslaved four million. Since there is no paperwork whatsoever for any of these trades, it is likely they are grossly underestimated.

Her voice was impatient with rage. ‘They say the only deterrent to terror is to kill terrorists. It’s the same argument that dictators have made to murder opponents throughout history. Say it whatever way you want – whether it comes from the mouth of a dictator or as an excuse to repress people of different political views – it’s the same old serpent.’ Halima swept her hand across the evening. ‘All this violence. The idea that killing people solves problems. War is all they know, and they are good at it, so they kill people thinking that war will bring peace. It never brings peace. There is only a pause in the war.’ She was quiet for a moment, struggling with her indignation. ‘They are not a kind people. Some are kind, some are wise, but not the politicians. The opposite of kindness is not cruelty. It is indifference. All this’ – she looked across the bombed city – ‘is indifference. Our suffering isn’t about who we are. It is about who they are. Airplanes and tanks give them the power to be indifferent.’ She sipped her drink, and her voice lowered and softened. ‘Israel’s prime ministers – Sharon, Olmert, Netanyahu – believe they can solve these problems with toughness, but things have changed. The Islamic faith has spread. For better or worse.’ Her hand went to her heart. When she spoke again, her soprano voice was strident. ‘How will they frighten jihadists who love martyrdom?’ She shook her head. ‘God forbid.’ ‘You’re wrong,’ Analise said. ‘Not all Israelis are that way.’ ‘Je le croirai, guard je le verrai.’ She paused. ‘Let them show it.’ She waved dismissively. ‘Beirut survived the Romans, the Ottomans, the French. The land and the people endure. That land has defeated stronger enemies than Israel. Israel is an idea. Ideas come and go. Land endures.’ She lowered her head and looked out at the darkened city. Her words came in quiet lament. ‘The scourge of this land is the curse of revenge.

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

Of all the Balkan subject peoples, the Albanians were most inclined to convert to Islam. The majority of converts, however, were men, whilst women often retained their Christian beliefs even when married to Muslims, and were a factor in maintaining goodwill between the members of the two faiths.9 At various times whole villages voluntarily renounced the religion of their forefathers for political advantage. The ability to gain a timar or avoid donating a precious healthy son to the devshirme were but two of many reasons for abandoning Christianity. The majority of conversions took place in the lowlands, around the Shkumbi river, where direct Ottoman pressure could most easily be exerted. Amongst the Albanians of Kosova there appears to have been a far greater readiness to accept Islam, perhaps because of the pressure of their close proximity to the Serbs, who by the 1830s had achieved their own autonomous state. Albanians who wished to retain their Christian faith after the Ottoman conquest often found it difficult to compete with those who had converted. To make their already difficult lives easier, therefore, many Albanians gradually adopted at least the outer signs of the Islamic faith, thus obtaining such privileges as the right to bear arms.

Things and institutions, common in Europe [with the Ottoman Empire] are daily marked out for censure against the Turks and represented as in opposition to European standards.

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.

There is something about the way the Jews bear witness to history that Lars has always found unsettling. They speak as witnesses. Since Egypt. Since the morning of Western civilization, when its light shone west from Jerusalem and Athens, and blanketed Rome and all that it would leave behind. They have watched the Western tribes and empires rise and fall—from the Babylonians to the Gauls, from the Moors to the Hapsburgs to the Ottomans—and have alone remained. They have seen it all. And the rest of us wait for the verdict that is still, even now, to come.

Al-Wahhab allied with Muhammed bin Saud, the founder of the state of Saudi Arabia, and provided religious and ideological backing to the newly formed state.  The Wahhabi Saudi troops took advantage of the chaos of the collapse of the Ottoman Empire after World War I to seize control over the holy cities of Mecca and Medina. It’s probably safe to say that the Shia will never forgive the Wahhabis for the zealotry they pursued upon taking the cities, which included obliterating centuries-old sacred Shia shrines and claiming that they were used to worship the Imams as gods and were therefore heretical.  In the Cemetery of al-Baqi in Medina, they utterly destroyed the tombs of the Imams Hasan, Ali ibn Husayn, Muhammed ibn Ali, and Jafar, as well as the tomb of Fatima, the daughter of Muhammad.  In Mecca, they destroyed the Cemetery of Mualla, where the ancestors of Muhammad and his first wife Khadija were buried.  These prominent destructions were part of a pattern of violence that witnessed the Wahhabi Saudis smash buildings, tombs and mosques associated with the history of the Prophet and his family and which were venerated by Shia.  In addition, they alienated Shia from governance and oppressed them throughout the kingdom[26].  This vandalism has been repeated time and time again by Wahhabis in other areas as well, including the much-publicized destruction of the Buddha statues of the Bamiyan Valley of Afghanistan by the Taliban in 2001[27] and the outbreak of violence in 2013 around the city of Timbuktu, where Wahhabi fundamentalists  destroyed holy artifacts and burned a priceless library of manuscripts before fleeing the arrival of French troops[28]. While the establishment of the Wahhabi school of thought created an intellectual form of anti-Shia ideology, it is probable that this philosophy would have remained isolated in the political backwater of the Nejd Sultanate (the core of modern Saudi Arabia) if not for the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the final abolition of the Caliphate. The Ottomans had claimed to be Caliphs of the Muslim world since 1453, the same year that they conquered Constantinople (Istanbul) from the Byzantine Empire, and they ruled over a considerable portion of the world's Sunnis, as well as the shrine cities of Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem.  After 1876, the Sultans had placed particular emphasis on their role as Caliphs in order to bolster their global position by asserting their Empire's "Muslim” character, and while this was never universally accepted by all Sunnis or Shias, Sunni Muslims everywhere at least could say that there was a government that claimed to represent the form of rule established by the Prophet and that provided legitimacy and continuity.

The Babylonian Empire itself would endure for just another half century, making way for a succession of new imperial powers: the Persians, the Hellenistic kings who succeeded Alexander the Great, the Romans, the Christian Byzantines, the Muslim caliphates, the Ottomans, and finally the British. In the twentieth century, territorial states would re-emerge in the form of Jordan, Israel, Lebanon, and Syria, but the fate of those states now hangs in the balance with several players reviving their ancient imperial ambitions.

On the evening of 7 December (1917), the first British troops saw Jerusalem. A heavy fog hung over the city; rain darkened the hills. The next morning, Governor Izzat Bey smashed his telegraph instruments with a hammer, handed over his writ of surrender to the mayor, "borrowed" a carriage with two horses from the American Colony which he swore to return, and galloped away toward Jericho. All night thousands of Ottoman troops trudged through the city and out of history. At 3 a.m. on the 9th, German forces withdrew from the city on what Count Ballobar called "a day of astounding beauty." The last Turk left St. Stephen's Gate at 7 a.m. By coincidence, it was the first day of Jewish Hanukkah, the festival of lights that celebrated the Maccabean liberation of Jerusalem. Looters raided the shops on Jaffa Road. At 8:45 a.m., British soldiers approached the Zion Gate.

Changes elsewhere in the Middle East swept a region racked by continued instability. Following a bitter clash with Allied occupying forces, the nucleus of a Turkish republic arose in Anatolia in place of the Ottoman Empire. Meanwhile, Britain failed to impose a one-sided treaty on Iran and withdrew its occupation forces in 1921. France established itself in Syria and Lebanon, after crushing Amir Faysal’s state. Egyptians revolting against their British overlords in 1919 were suppressed with great difficulty by the colonial power, which was finally obliged to grant Egypt a simulacrum of independence in 1922. Something analogous occurred in Iraq, where a widespread armed uprising in 1920 obliged the British to grant self-rule under an Arab monarchy headed by the same Amir Faysal, now with the title of king. Within a little more than a decade after World War I, Turks, Iranians, Syrians, Egyptians, and Iraqis all achieved a measure of independence, albeit often highly constrained and severely limited. In Palestine, the British operated with a different set of rules.

Ironically, however—and as with other historically Muslim institutions that have been whitewashed¶—this abduction, forced conversion, and jihadi indoctrination of Christian children is portrayed by several leading academics “as the equivalent of sending a child away for a prestigious education and training for a lucrative career.”30 What is true is that whoever survived the indoctrination and dehumanization of this ordeal of fire emerged with a fanatical appetite for war on infidels and became the most feared element of the Ottoman army: a Janissary, a “new soldier.” That they exhibited a “dog-like devotion to the sultan,” the man responsible for abducting them from their families and faith, and engaged in “wild behavior” against his enemies31—that is, against their former families and faith—is further proof that they are among recorded history’s earliest victims of Stockholm Syndrome.*

synchronized movement, along with synchronized singing, has been a vastly underappreciated force in world history, fostering cohesion among groups as diverse as the builders of the pyramids, the armies of the Ottoman Empire, and the Japanese office workers who rise from their desks to perform group calisthenics at the start of each workday. Roman generals were among the first to discover that soldiers marching in synchrony could be made to travel for far longer distances before they succumbed to fatigue.

As the Ottomans grew in power in the Middle East, China missed its opportunity to become the major global power.

By 1500 there were 1,700 printing presses distributed in 300 European cities in every country except Russia.16 In the Ottoman empire, a decree of Sultan Selim I specified the death penalty for anyone who even used a printing press. Istanbul did not acquire a printing press until 1726 and the owners were allowed to publish only a few titles before being closed down.

One of them, Miloš Obelic´, surrendered but as he prostrated himself before the victor he plunged a hidden dagger into the sultanic belly. Lazar was brought in and beheaded. His father’s body still warm, Thunderbolt, twenty-nine years old, invited his brother Yakub into the grisly sultanic tent and had him strangled – that very inverted compliment of the steppe peoples who never shed royal blood. It was the first Ottoman fratricide, the start of a gruesome institution.

What has been aptly described by the Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi as “the shabbiest regime in British colonial history” was ending without attending to the most basic needs of the majority of the inhabitants of the land. These measures caused a panicked run on the banks, as ordinary people rushed to withdraw their Palestinian pounds and convert them into gold or any other security they could manage. By March 1948 the Palestinian pound was rendered unconvertible into any other currency. For the thousands of Arab Palestinian refugees who were forced to flee to other countries, this meant that they were unable either to exchange their Palestinian pounds into pounds sterling, or any other local Arab currency, before they left, or to withdraw sums from their accounts in other currencies once they arrived. Arab clients of the Jaffa branch of the Ottoman Bank, now refugees in Lebanon and Jordan, were asking the bank to pay them their balances in Amman and elsewhere, but these requests were refused.

The next significant decree, No. 59, proclaimed the same year, stipulated that any land owned by the Jordanian government (160,000 dunams in total) was now to be transferred to the State of Israel. State pillaging within the context of this decree was based on an 1855 Ottoman law whereby any uncultivated and non-private land would become state land.

Fortunately, the Ottomans were unrivaled masters of supply-chain logistics. No other state in Europe devoted as much energy or care to the repair of its roads. From very early on, the Ottomans became justly famous as builders of beautiful stone bridges, whose delicate arches appeared to be as delicate as eggshells but proved as durable as iron. Supplies of food, cloth, gunpowder, and steel flowed continuously over this system of roadways. Camels, able to carry twice as much as any European beast of burden, made their transport easier. Every year, thirty thousand of these essential animals arrived from the Maghreb and Syria, in time for the campaigning season. But the real heart of the Ottoman procurement system was its bakeries. In Istanbul alone, 105 gigantic ovens worked around the clock, baking hardtack for the army and navy stores. Many more operated across the provinces.

How to account for [Eastern Europe's] wondrous and mystifying melange [of peoples]? Stempowski's answer had to do with nations and states. In the West, he wrote, the equation between ethnic and linguistic belonging and political allegiance began very early. Beginning in the Middle Ages, priests and prelates imposed their particular strands of Christianity on the populations, executing heretics and unbelievers. Meanwhile kings expelled their Jews and confiscated their property. If a realm contained Muslims, they were likewise forced to convert or were banished. By the nineteenth century, national belonging replaced religion as the dominant template to be imposed on society. Little armies of bureaucrats and educators fanned out into the countryside, making sure that all the people there spoke the same language. Across the territory conquered by the French kings, peasants were *made* into French people, and if the Scots didn't concurrently become English, they certainly adopted the English language. Virtually everywhere, the machinery of the state worked like a giant steamroller, ironing out differences wherever they could be found. In all these regards, Eastern Europe was different. There, empires tended to accentuate difference rather than suppress it. In the Balkans, the Ottoman Empire offered many Christians and Jews a wide measure of autonomy, allowing them to manage their own affairs. The Russian Empire, Stempowki's birthplace, afforded religious minorities an even greater degree of freedom. The Habsburg empire did its best to impose Catholicism on its various peoples, especially the rebellious Czechs, but even so, it remained home to numerous Orthodox Christians and Jews. More importantly, the Habsburgs made hardly any effort to turn their various constituent peoples (around 1900 the empire was home to eleven official nationalities) into Germans. These empires took a laissez-faire approach to governing, They taxed and counted their subjects, but they did not intervene too deeply in the inner structure of their communities

In fact, most of the outstanding monuments and ruins were emphatically not Jewish – Crusader fortresses, Ottoman city walls, churches, monasteries and large tells that testified to a history that began before Joshua’s conquest and ended well after the Jewish dispersal.

If you had asked the rulers of history's greatest empires—the Roman Empire, the Mongol Empire, the British Empire, and the Ottoman Empire—a decade before their fall where they envisioned their realms ten years hence, they would have spoken of grand futures and the vast endeavors still awaiting them.

At that moment Britain had reached the critical stage of negotiations, begun more than two years previously, with the Ottoman Empire, aimed at resolving the longstanding issues between the two governments over a whole range of matters, including those in the Persian Gulf. These issues included defining British and Ottoman territories and spheres of influence along the entire length of the Gulf, customs duties and terms for the completion of the long-projected Baghdad railway. One of the issues that had been provisionally resolved between the two sides was the question of Najd, which was to be recognised as an Ottoman province and to include Hasa. So Ibn Saud’s sudden seizure of Hasa and the renewal of arguments from British Officials in the Gulf and India, including both Cox and the Viceroy, for reaching some kind of agreement with Ibn Saud, were greeted in London with dismay. Sir Edward Grey, one of the longest-serving but least-travelled Foreign Secretaries in British history, had little knowledge of the world beyond Whitehall. He spoke no foreign languages and had never travelled further than France. One highly respected contemporary described him as so ignorant of the lands beyond Europe that ‘he hardly knew the Persian Gulf from the Red Sea and Europe’.11 At

In 1217 a Christian pilgrim, Master Thetmar, discovered a small chapel with two Greek monks in the deserted ruins of Petra.[114] Petra continued to served as an important stopping-off point on the trade and Hajj routes between the Arabian Peninsula and the rest of the Mamluk and Ottoman lands. The Mamluk Sultan of Egypt, Baibars, visited Aaron’s tomb on Mount Hor and one of the crusader castles in 1276 CE.

In the Muslim world according to bin Laden, the Ottomans hardly count. Islamic fundamentalists look back almost exclusively to the Arab caliphate, particularly its early years. Those who see history as bin Laden did are generally called Salafi Muslims. Those who want to act like bin Laden to change the system through violence are called Salafi jihadis. Al-Qaeda is a Salafi jihadi movement. Salafism is Islam as Allah recited it, and jihadi means “through war,” so it is a militant movement seeking an “originalist” form of Islam and willing to use force to get there. Salafism is often associated with the Wahhabi movement, an equally austere branch of Sunni Islam that arose in the early part of the eighteenth century. Wahhabis dominate Saudi Arabia, the paymaster and invisible hand behind many political machinations in the Middle East. In

The cutting off of Russia with all its consequences, the vain and sanguinary tragedy of Gallipoli, the diversion of Allied strength in the campaigns of Mesopotamia, Suez, and Palestine, the ultimate breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the subsequent history of the Middle East, followed from the voyage of the Goeben. Other

At the start of World War I, the Ottoman Empire was often described as a dwindling power, mired by administrative corruption, using inferior technology, and plagued by poor leadership.

Looking at the reforms, technological advances and modernization efforts made by the Ottoman elite between 1826 and the beginning of World War I, one could really wonder why such a thirst for change failed to save the Ottomans when similar measures taken by other nations, such as Japan during the Meiji era, did in fact result in the rise of a global power in the 20th century. During

During the same time, it was faced with the first series of wars with Russia, as the new Tsar, Peter the Great implemented a new policy of “access to the sea.” This prevented the Ottoman’s Crimean allies, who usually sent cavalry reinforcements to fight alongside regular Ottoman troops, from supporting Ottoman forces in central Europe. Despite several Russian defeats, the conflict ended with the capture of Azov, the Ottoman’s stronghold in Crimea in 1696, and was a sign of the growing threat Russia posed to the Ottomans. Russia increasingly saw the Ottoman Empire as its objective rival in its quest to assert control over the Black Sea.

This period also saw the Yeni Ceri (“New Soldiers” or Janissaries) win their war of influence against the Ottoman nobility. There was a natural rivalry between the Turkish nobility who formed the Ottomans’ cavalry (the Sipahis), and the Janissaries, the Ottoman foot soldiers who were initially foreign slaves coming from Christian villages under Ottoman occupation. This rivalry, also largely fueled by the Sultan who saw it as a way to prevent both sides from allying against him, turned in the Janissaries’ favor during the mid-sixteenth century, leading to the confiscation of the Sipahis’ lands, and the consolidation of their power.

In 1825, however, Sultan Mahmud II issued a fatwa stating that it was the duty of every Muslim to serve in the Ottoman military while reinstating the Nizam-ı Cedid Army in 1826, in an attempt to replace the Janissaries. When the Janissaries revolted in 1826 and sacked parts of Constantinople, the Sultan crushed the revolt, leading to the death of 4,000 Janissaries, and the subsequent dismantling of the old military force.

However, while Western principles were the major source of inspiration for Hatt- I Serif of Gulhane, the document itself made a notable effort to place the reforms in the context of the Ottomans Islamic heritage. In fact, it started by placing the Islamic law (Sharia or Şeriat) as a central source of inspiration, and alleging that the Empire’s decline was due to its lack of observance of the Şeriat: “All the world knows that since the first days of the Ottoman State, the lofty principles of the Qu’ran and the rules of the Şeriat were always perfectly observed. Our mighty Sultanate reached the highest degree of strength and power, and all its subjects [the highest degree] of ease and prosperity. But in the last one hundred and fifty years, because of a succession of difficulties and diverse causes, the sacred Şeriat was not obeyed nor were the beneficent regulations followed; consequently, the former strength and prosperity have changed into weakness and poverty. It is evident that countries not governed by the laws of the Şeriat cannot survive.”[6]

On the military level, the first period of reforms was marked by the introduction of conscription along with a fixed period of military service introduced in 1843 and based on the Prussian Conscription Law of 1814. The Ottoman military was then divided into five Imperial Armies garrisoned in different regions of the Empire. The military service was established as a period of five years between the ages of 20 to 25 along with an additional seven years of reserve duties. The first and second military reforms also saw the emergence of a new, more educated class of middle to high ranking officers and cadets, who progressively became involved in the Ottoman palace politics, as illustrated by the May 1876 coup (see the First Constitutional Era). The

The decree was largely inspired by proposals made by France and Britain who assisted the Ottoman Empire during the Crimean war (1853-1856) against Russia. Both Britain and France used their status as allies to encourage further Westernization of the Empire, as the impact of the initial wave of reform was seen as limited. The second wave of reform was also partly the result of some frustration among the Ottomans regarding the limited results of the initial reforms, which introduced a series of new concepts, yet were either hardly implemented as a whole, or had only an impact on the most central areas of the Empire. The decree affirmed more clearly the equality of all subjects of the Empire without distinction of race or religion, thus largely expanding the scope of the previous edict. It also differed by creating a new political mechanism that, to a certain extent, limited the power of the Sultan.

One of the Young Ottomans’ most prominent figures, Namik Kemal (1840-1888), derived from early Islamic traditions and practices the idea of a representative assembly that would balance the power of the Sultan. Both the idea that the Sultan’s power needed to be checked along with their support for the enshrinement of Islamic tradition as the core of the Ottoman tradition led the Young Ottomans to see the necessity for the drafting of a Constitution. This Constitution would be the cornerstone of the new Ottoman identity, along with the Ottoman state and institutions.

Only a few places allowed Jews to settle openly and in large numbers. Among them were Italy, particularly the Papal States (territories controlled by the pope), and Poland in Eastern Europe. The rulers of the Ottoman Empire, which would soon stretch from Eastern Europe across the Middle East through North Africa, also welcomed Jews.

Voltaire also keenly endorsed Catherine of Russia’s plan to ‘preach tolerance with bayonets at the end of their rifles’ in Poland. Exhorting Catherine to learn Greek as she prepared to attack the Ottoman Empire, he added that ‘it is absolutely necessary to chase from Europe the Turkish language, as well as all those who speak it’.

There was actually little talk about Islam from the first generation of leaders in Muslim countries. They had distinguished themselves as anti-imperialist activists: Atatürk, for instance, derived his charisma and authority as a nation-builder from his comprehensive defeat of Allied forces in Turkey. He went on to abolish the Ottoman office of the Caliphate soon after assuming power, pitilessly killing the political hopes of pan-Islamists around the world. He forbade expressions of popular Islam and arrested Sufi dervishes (executing some of them); he replaced Shariah law with Swiss civil law and Italian criminal law. This partisan of Comtean Positivism expressed publicly what many Muslim leaders, confronted with conservative opposition, may have thought privately: that ‘Islam, the absurd theology of an immoral bedouin, is a rotting cadaver that poisons our lives. It is nothing other than a degrading and dead cause.

Every corner of the island was ransacked; every human being that could be found, was slain or carried into captivity. Nothing was to be seen in the once smiling land but heaps of ruins, and a few ghastly inhabitants, wandering in a state of starvation among them. Ninety churches and forty villages were delivered to the flames; twenty-five thousand persons, chiefly full grown men, had been slain; forty-five thousand women and children had been dragged into slavery; and fifteen thousand had escaped into the neighboring islands in the last stage of destitution and misery, where the greater part of them died of grief or starvation. For several months, the markets of Constantinople, Egypt, and Barbary, were so stocked with slaves, that their price fell a half; and purchasers were attracted from the farthest parts of Asia and Africa, whither the Greek captives were scattered.

Approximately 82,000 Greek islanders of Chios were hanged, butchered, starved or tortured to death. 50,000 Greeks were enslaved and another 23,000 were exiled. Fewer than 2,000 Greeks managed to survive on the island.

Although the Ottomans were ultimately defeated in 1918, Jordan would not become an independent state until 1946.  On May 25th that year King Abdullah I, then Emir under the British Mandate for Palestine, became recognized as King of Transjordan. The Antiquities Law was passed in 1935, by which all immovable heritage in the country belongs to the government. Land that was found to contain antiquities would have its ownership divulged to the state, regardless of who possessed it before. Under this law, Petra became the property of first the British Mandate for Palestine and then the Kingdom of Jordan.

Whilst the mandates for the latter focused on the Arab people living in those territories, the Mandate for Palestine did not just focus on the people within Palestine; Great Britain was given responsibility to follow through on the promises made in the articles of the mandate, which recognized the historical connection of the Jewish people worldwide to the land and their right to reconstitute a home in Palestine. Until the articles of this Mandate could be implemented throughout the territory, Great Britain was in charge of the administration in the former Ottoman lands.

After the British victory against Napoleon, Britain was indisputably the leading global power. The British Empire expanded significantly toward Asia, driven by the advances of the East India Company, as well as the development of the steamship and telegraph.