Was the Ottoman Empire primarily Islamic?
Islam in the Ottoman Empire
Islam was the official religion of the Ottoman Empire. The highest position in Islam, "caliphate", was claimed by the sultan, after the defeat of the Mamluks which was established as Ottoman Caliphate. The Sultan was to be a devout Muslim and was given the literal authority of the Caliph. Additionally, Sunni clerics had tremendous influence over government and their authority was central to the regulation of the economy. Despite all this, the Sultan also had a right to decree, enforcing a code called Kanun (law) in Turkish. Additionally, there was a supreme clerical position called the Sheykhulislam ("Sheykh of Islam" in Arabic). Minorities, particularly Christians and Jews but also some others, were mandated to pay the jizya, the poll tax as mandated by traditional Islam.
Toleration
According to Michael Walzer:
The established religion of the [Ottoman] empire was Islam, but three other religious communities—Greek Orthodox, Armenian Orthodox, and Jewish—were permitted to form autonomous organizations. These three were equal among themselves, without regard to their relative numerical strength. They were subject to the same restrictions vis-à-vis Muslims—with regard to dress, proselytizing, and intermarriage, for example—and were allowed the same legal control over their own members.
Islam in Albania (1800–1912)
At the beginning of the 19th century Albanians were divided into three religious groups. Catholic Albanians who had some Albanian ethno-linguistic expression in schooling and church due to Austro-Hungarian protection and Italian clerical patronage. Orthodox Albanians under the Patriarchate of Constantinople had liturgy and schooling in Greek and toward the late Ottoman period mainly identified with Greek national aspirations. While Muslim Albanians during this period formed around 70% of the overall Balkan Albanian population in the Ottoman Empire with an estimated population of more than a million. With the rise of the Eastern Crisis, Muslim Albanians became torn between loyalties to the Ottoman state and the emerging Albanian nationalist movement. Islam, the Sultan and the Ottoman Empire were traditionally seen as synonymous in belonging to the wider Muslim community. While the Albanian nationalist movement advocated self-determination and strived to achieve socio-political recognition of Albanians as a separate people and language within the state. Between 1839 and 1876, the Ottoman Empire initiated modernising government reforms during the Tanzimat period and the Albanian Ottoman elite opposed them, in particular of having Ottoman officials from other parts of the empire sent to govern Ottoman Albanian areas and the introduction of a new centralised military recruitment system.
Ottoman Caliphate
The Ottoman Caliphate (1517–1924), under the Ottoman dynasty of the Ottoman Empire, was the last Sunni Islamic caliphate of the late medieval and the early modern era. During the period of Ottoman growth, Ottoman rulers claimed caliphal authority since Murad I's conquest of Edirne in 1362. Later Selim I, through conquering and unification of Muslim lands, became the defender of the Holy Cities of Mecca and Medina which further strengthened the Ottoman claim to caliphate in the Muslim world.
Millet (Ottoman Empire)
After the decline of the Assyrian Church of the East in the 14th century the principal non-Muslim religious communities in the Ottoman Empire were the Greek Orthodox, Jewish, Armenian and Syriac Orthodox. Although Ottoman administration of non-Muslim subjects was not uniform until the 19th century and varied according to region and group, it is possible to identify some common patterns for earlier epochs. Christian and Jewish communities were granted a large degree of autonomy. Tax collection, education, legal and religious affairs of these communities were administered by their own leaders. This enabled the Ottomans to rule over diverse peoples with "a minimum of resistance". The Jewish community, in particular, was able to prosper under Ottoman rule and its ranks were swelled with the arrival of Jews who were expelled from Spain. At the same time, non-Muslims were subject to several forms of discrimination and excluded from the Ottoman ruling elite. Armenians formed more than one (actually three) millets under the Ottoman rule. A wide array of other groups such as Catholics, Karaites and Samaritans was also represented.
Ottomanism
The major precursors to Ottomanism were the Reformation Edict of 1856, which promised full equality regardless of religion, and the Ottoman Nationality Law of 1869, which created a common Ottoman citizenship irrespective of religious or ethnic affiliation. Ottomanism was rejected by many in the non-Muslim "millets" and by many Muslims. To the former, it was perceived as a step towards dismantling their traditional privileges. Meanwhile, the Muslims saw it as the elimination of their own superior position. There were claims that Ottomanism was a reaction to the "Tanzimat", the era of intensive restructuring of the Ottoman Empire by the bureaucratic elite. The inauguration of the Ottoman Parliament contributed to the spirit of reform as all millets were represented in this bicameral assembly.
Rise of the Ottoman Empire
In 1938 the Austrian historian Paul Wittek published an influential work entitled "The Rise of the Ottoman Empire", in which he put forth the argument that the early Ottoman state was constructed upon an ideology of Islamic holy war against non-Muslims. Such a war was known as "gaza", and a warrior fighting in it was called a "gazi". Wittek's formulation, subsequently known as the "Gaza Thesis," was influential for much of the twentieth century, and led historians to portray the early Ottomans as zealous religious warriors dedicated to the spread of Islam. Beginning in the 1980s, historians increasingly began to criticize Wittek's thesis. Scholars now recognize that the terms "gaza" and "gazi" did not have strictly religious connotations for the early Ottomans, and were often used in a secular sense to simply refer to raids. Additionally, the early Ottomans were neither strict orthodox Muslims nor were they unwilling to cooperate with non-Muslims, and several of the companions of the first Ottoman rulers were either non-Muslims or recent converts. The idea of holy war existed during the fourteenth century, but it was only one out of many factors influencing Ottoman behavior. It was only later, in the fifteenth century, that Ottoman writers retroactively began to portray the early Ottomans as zealous Islamic warriors, in order to provide a noble origin for their dynasty which had by then constructed an intercontinental Islamic empire.
Mehmet Fuat Köprülü
In 1933, Fuat Köprülü became a professor ordinarius, a title denoting a professor of the highest rank in Turkey. In 1935, he delivered a series of influential lectures at the University of Paris (Sorbonne) on the origins of the Ottoman Empire. Fuat Köprülü argued that ethnic Turks formed the Ottoman Empire using Seljuk and Ilhanid administrative traditions, and he discredited the prevailing view among Western scholars that the Ottoman Empire was formed by a race of predominantly Greek and Slavic converts to Islam.
Ottoman Empire
The word "Ottoman" is a historical anglicisation of the name of Osman I, the founder of the Empire and of the ruling House of Osman (also known as the Ottoman dynasty). Osman's name in turn was the Turkish form of the Arabic name "ʿUthmān" (). In Ottoman Turkish, the empire was referred to as "Devlet-i ʿAlīye-yi ʿOsmānīye" (), (literally "The Supreme Ottoman State") or alternatively "ʿOsmānlı Devleti" (). In Modern Turkish, it is known as "Osmanlı İmparatorluğu" ("The Ottoman Empire") or "Osmanlı Devleti" ("The Ottoman State").
Esnaf
Guilds were a major part of an economy that was very state dominated like the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman dynasty, especially along its seaboards and borderlands opportunities of commerce tended to diversify economies and put together sundry people and ideas. The Ottoman society was extremely mixed main due to conquest and immigration; therefore there was a vast number of religion and Jews were very much included. The Ottoman society was a spiritual economy but not as much as Europe. This was mainly because the Ottoman Empire was mixed religiously meaning there were many different religions mixed within guilds.
Armenian nationalism
The situation of the non-Muslim minorities within the Ottoman Empire changed substantially as a result of reforms introduced during the Tanzimat era. The early reforms were generally addressed at changing the organisation of, and systems within, the Ottoman Empire as a whole. However, as a result of diplomatic pressures exerted by the Great Powers that had supported the Ottoman Empire against Russia during the Crimean War, in 1856 reforms were made that sought to give non-Muslims citizens of the Ottoman Empire the same rights as Muslim citizens. The capitation tax on non-Muslims was abolished, non-Muslims were allowed to become soldiers, and schools for the non-Muslim communities were allowed to open.
Islam in Kosovo
Islam in Kosovo has a long-standing tradition dating back to the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, including Kosovo. Before the Battle of Kosovo in 1389, the entire Balkan region had been Christianized by both the Western and Eastern Roman Empire. From 1389 until 1912, Kosovo was officially governed by the Muslim Ottoman Empire and, as such, a high level of Islamization occurred. During the time period after World War II, Kosovo was ruled by secular socialist authorities in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (SFRY). During that period, Kosovars became increasingly secularized. Today, 96% of Kosovo's population are from Muslim family backgrounds, most of whom are ethnic Albanians. There are also Slavic speaking Muslims, who define themselves as Bosniaks and Gorani, and Turks.
Neo-Ottomanism
The Ottoman Empire was an influential global power which, at its peak, controlled the Balkans, most of the modern-day Middle East, most of coastal North Africa (at least nominally), and the Caucasus. Neo-Ottomanist foreign policy encourages increased engagement in these regions as part of Turkey’s growing regional influence. This foreign policy contributed to an improvement in Turkey's relations with its neighbors, particularly with Iraq, Iran and Syria. However Turkey's relations with Israel, once Turkey's ally, suffered, especially after the 2008–09 Gaza War and the 2010 Gaza flotilla raid.
Islam in Croatia
The Turkish Ottoman Empire conquered part of Croatia from the 15th to the 19th century. Numerous Croats converted to Islam, some after being taken prisoners of war, some through the devşirme system. The westernmost border of Ottoman Empire in Europe became entrenched on Croatian soil. In 1519, Croatia was called the "Antemurale Christianitatis" by Pope Leo X.
Secularism in Turkey
The establishing structure (Ruling institution of the Ottoman Empire) of the Ottoman Empire (13th century) was an Islamic state in which the head of the Ottoman state was the Sultan. The social system was organized around millet. Millet structure allowed a great degree of religious, cultural and ethnic continuity to non-Muslim populations across the subdivisions of the Ottoman Empire and at the same time it permitted their incorporation into the Ottoman administrative, economic and political system. The Ottoman-appointed governor collected taxes and provided security, while the local religious or cultural matters were left to the regional communities to decide. On the other hand, the sultans were Muslims and the laws that bound them were based on the Sharia, the body of Islamic law, as well as various cultural customs. The Sultan, beginning in 1517, was also a Caliph, the leader of all the Sunni Muslims in the world. By the turn of the 19th century the Ottoman ruling elite recognized the need to restructure the legislative, military and judiciary systems to cope with their new political rivals in Europe. When the millet system started to lose its efficiency due to the rise of nationalism within its borders, the Ottoman Empire explored new ways of governing its territory composed of diverse populations.
Ottoman Tunisia
So for the first time the Ottomans entered into the Maghrib, eventually establishing their governing authority, at least indirectly, along most of the southern coast of the Mediterranean. During the 16th and subsequent centuries their empire was widely recognized as the leading Muslim state in the world: Islam's primary focus. The Ottoman Empire was "the leader of all Islam for nearly half a millennium." The Turkish sultan became the caliph.
History of Oriental Orthodoxy
During the first half of the 16th century, entire Middle East fell under the control of the Ottoman Empire. Syria and Egypt were conquered during the Ottoman-Mamluk War (1516-1517), and Oriental Orthodox communities in the region faced new political reality that would determine their history until the beginning of the 20th century. Ottoman government introduced the Millet system that recognized a certain degree of autonomy to non-Islamic religious communities, including Oriental Orthodox Christians.
History of the Balkans
Much of the Balkans was under Ottoman rule throughout the Early modern period. Ottoman rule was long, lasting from the 14th century up until the early 20th in some territories. The Ottoman Empire was religiously, linguistically and ethnically diverse, and, at times, a much more tolerant place for religious practices when compared to other parts of the world. The different groups in the empire were organised along confessional lines, in the so-called the Millet system. Among the Orthodox Christians of the empire (the Rum Millet) a common identity was forged based on a shared sense of time defined by the ecclesiastical calendar, saint's days and feasts.
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire, or as a dynastic institution, the House of Osman, was unprecedented and unequaled in the Islamic world for its size and duration. In Europe, only the House of Habsburg had a similarly unbroken line of sovereigns (kings/emperors) from the same family who ruled for so long, and during the same period, between the late 13th and early 20th centuries. The Ottoman dynasty was Turkish in origin. On eleven occasions, the sultan was deposed (replaced by another sultan of the Ottoman dynasty, who were either the former sultan's brother, son or nephew) because he was perceived by his enemies as a threat to the state. There were only two attempts in Ottoman history to unseat the ruling Ottoman dynasty, both failures, which suggests a political system that for an extended period was able to manage its revolutions without unnecessary instability. As such, the last Ottoman sultan Mehmed VI (r. 1918–1922) was a direct patrilineal (male-line) descendant of the first Ottoman sultan Osman I (d. 1323/4), which was unparallelled in both Europe (e.g. the male line of the House of Habsburg became extinct in 1740) and in the Islamic world. The primary purpose of the Imperial Harem was to ensure the birth of male heirs to the Ottoman throne and secure the continuation of the direct patrilineal (male-line) descendance of the Ottoman sultans.
Turks (term for Muslims)
The ethnonym Turks (, ) has been commonly used by the non-Muslim Balkan peoples to denote all Muslim settlers in the region, regardless of their ethno-linguistic background. Majority of these, however, were indeed ethnic Turks. In the Ottoman Empire, the Islamic faith was the official religion, with members holding all rights, as opposed to non-Muslims who rights were limited. Non-Muslim ("dhimmi") ethno-religious legal groups were identified by different "millets" ("nations").
Ottoman Empire
Muslim sects regarded as heretical, such as the Druze, Ismailis, Alevis, and Alawites, ranked below Jews and Christians. In 1514, Sultan Selim I ordered the massacre of 40,000 Anatolian Alevis ("Qizilbash"), whom he considered a fifth column for the rival Safavid empire. Selim was also responsible for an unprecedented and rapid expansion of the Ottoman Empire into the Middle East, especially through his conquest of the entire Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt. With these conquests, Selim further solidified the Ottoman claim for being an Islamic caliphate, although Ottoman sultans had been claiming the title of caliph since the 14th century starting with Murad I (reigned 1362 to 1389). The caliphate would remain held by Ottoman sultans for the rest of the office's duration, which ended with its abolition on 3 March 1924 by the Grand National Assembly of Turkey and the exile of the last caliph, Abdülmecid II, to France.
Abdul Hamid II
The Triple Entente – the United Kingdom, France and Russia – maintained strained relations with the Ottoman Empire. Abdul Hamid and his close advisors believed the empire should be treated as an equal player by these great powers. In the Sultan's view, the Ottoman Empire was a European empire, distinct for having more Muslims than Christians.
Ottoman Empire
Under the system, non-Muslim people were considered subjects of the Empire, but were not subject to the Muslim faith or Muslim law. The Orthodox millet, for instance, was still officially legally subject to Justinian's Code, which had been in effect in the Byzantine Empire for 900 years. Also, as the largest group of non-Muslim subjects (or ) of the Islamic Ottoman state, the Orthodox millet was granted a number of special privileges in the fields of politics and commerce, and had to pay higher taxes than Muslim subjects.
Christianity in the Ottoman Empire
The earliest converts to Islam came from the ranks of the Balkan nobility and military elites, who helped the Ottomans administer their native provinces. Although conversion was not required to obtain these posts, over time these local ruling elites tended to adopt Islam. Some scholars view proselyting Sufi mystics and the Ottoman state itself as important agents of conversion among broader populations. Other scholars argue that intermarriage and professional patronage networks were the most important factors of religious transformation of the broader society. According to Halil İnalcık, the wish to avoid paying the jizya was an important incentive for conversion to Islam in the Balkans, while Anton Minkov has argued that it was only one among several motivating factors.
Christianity in the Ottoman Empire
The main idea behind the Ottoman legal system was the "confessional community". The Ottomans tried to leave the choice of religion to the individual rather than imposing forced classifications. However, there were grey areas.
Islam in the Ottoman Empire
Ottoman law did not recognize notions such as ethnicity or citizenship; thus, a Muslim of any ethnic background enjoyed precisely the same rights and privileges under ""Muslim millet"". It was claimed that under such conditions, Muslim Arabs came to view the empire as a revived Islamic empire. However, even if Caliphate played a significant role, the real existence of these feelings is questionable. By the 17th century, the Maghreb regencies were only nominally under Ottoman control and Egypt was almost independent by the beginning of the 19th century.
Index of articles related to the Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire (1299–1922) is a historical Muslim empire, also known by its contemporaries as the Turkish Empire or Turkey after the principal ethnic group. At its zenith in the second half of the 16th century it controlled Southeast Europe, Southwest Asia and North Africa. Below are the links to articles about the Ottoman Empire.
Ottoman–Mamluk War (1516–17)
The Ottoman–Mamluk War of 1516–1517 was the second major conflict between the Egypt-based Mamluk Sultanate and the Ottoman Empire, which led to the fall of the Mamluk Sultanate and the incorporation of the Levant, Egypt and the Hejaz as provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The war transformed the Ottoman Empire from a realm at the margins of the Islamic world, mainly located in Anatolia and the Balkans, to a huge empire encompassing much of the traditional lands of Islam, including the cities of Mecca, Cairo, Damascus and Aleppo. Despite this expansion, the seat of the empire's political power remained in Constantinople.
Prnjavor, Bosnia and Herzegovina
During the Ottoman period the region suffered from border conflicts with the Austrian Empire. A significant number of Bosnians converted to Islam after the conquest by the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the 15th century, giving it a unique character within the Balkan region. This conversion appears to have been not sudden but a gradual process based on various rules imposed by the Ottomans — it took more than a hundred years for the number of Muslims to become the majority religion. The general view among scholars is that the Islamization of the Bosnian population was not the result of violent methods of conversions but was, for the most part, peaceful and voluntary.
Christianity in the Ottoman Empire
Orthodox Christians were the largest non-Muslim group. With the rise of Imperial Russia, the Russians became a kind of protector of the Orthodox Christians in
the Ottoman Empire.
Ottomanism
Ottomanism was strongly influenced by thinkers such as Montesquieu and Rousseau and the French Revolution. It promoted equality among the "millet"s. The idea originated amongst the Young Ottomans in areas such as the acceptance of all separate ethnicities in the Empire regardless of their religion, i.e. they were all 'Ottomans' with equal rights. Put simply, Ottomanism stated that all subjects were equal before the law. Ideally, all citizens would share a geographical area, a language, culture, and a sense of a 'non-Ottoman' party who were different than them. The essence of the "millet" system was not dismantled, but secular organizations and policies were applied. Primary education, conscription, head tax and military service were to be applied to non-Muslims and Muslims alike.
Christianity in the Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire constantly formulated policies balancing its religious problems. The Ottomans recognized the concept of clergy and its associated extension of religion as an institution. They brought established policies (regulations) over religious institutions through the idea of "legally valid" organizations. But all had to accept Islam as dominant, and could not criticize Islam or the Sultan. To do so invited execution.
Christianity in the Ottoman Empire
Conversion to Islam in the Ottoman Empire involved a combination of individual, family, communal and institutional initiatives and motives. The process was also influenced by the balance of power between the Ottomans and the neighboring Christian states.
Ottomanism
Ottomanism was a form of nationalism, likely inspired and created as a reaction to European ideas of nationalism and the growing Western involvement in the Ottoman Empire. Following the Tanzimat reforms, Ottomanism developed of a need to bring the Empire together. The Ottomans feared the growing threat the Europeans posed, especially after events like the Treaty of Balta Liman that allowed for British merchants in the Empire to be taxed equally to the locals, and the growing concern of the Great Powers over the treatment of Christians and Jews within the Empire. The Ottomans thought that if they could unite the Empire fully under one state entity, then they would be stronger and the Europeans would have a harder time encroaching on Ottoman territory, as well as Ottoman people. Previously, the empire was vastly split into many small communities that mostly governed themselves. The Sultan oversaw these communities, however most adhered to their own laws and beliefs. This was a reason the Ottoman Empire was so successful, because the Sultan didn't force any major changes on populations as he conquered them. Though because of nationalism, the rise of nation-states with shared senses of identities began to rise in Europe, most notably with the Greek War of Independence which also started affecting the Ottoman Empire. From these instances Ottomanism was developed as a social and political response, and a hope to help save the Empire from its downfall.
Greek Muslims
In Turkey, where most Greek-speaking Muslims live, there are various groups of Grecophone Muslims, some autochthonous, some from parts of present-day Greece and Cyprus who migrated to Turkey under the population exchanges or immigration.
As a rule the Ottomans did not require the Greeks or any non-Islamic group to become Muslims and in fact discouraged it because the dhimmi paid more in tax through the jizya and could be exploited through acts like the devşirme (blood tax) which was one of the organized practices by which the Ottomans took boys from their Christian families, who were later converted to Islam with the aim of selecting and training the ablest of them for leading positions in the Ottoman society. However a large number of Greeks and Slavs became fake Muslims or fake Turks in order to avert the socioeconomic hardships of Ottoman rule. Conversion to Islam is quick and in the Ottoman Empire there were few documents showing who was or was not Muslim, the only requirements were knowing Turkish, saying you were Muslim and possibly getting circumcised. Greek has a specific word for becoming Muslim called "τουρκεύω" and the Slavic languages have turčiti, these practices of fake conversion were common and are a reason so many people in the Balkans have Turkish last names with endings like -oglu. As stated one of the main reason to convert were to avoid paying the jizya a (~ 20%) tax compared to the zakat which was a (~ 3%) tax. Another benefit converts received was that they could no longer be discriminated against in court as the Ottoman Empire had 2 separate court systems in which the Islamic court superseded the non-Islamic court and because non-Muslims were not allowed to be present in the Islamic court that basically resulted in an non-Islamic minority losing in court every time. Conversion allowed those to take advantage of greater employment prospects and possibilities of advancement in the Ottoman government bureaucracy and military. Subsequently, these people became part of the Muslim community of the millet system, which was closely linked to Islamic religious rules. At that time people were bound to their millets by their religious affiliations (or their confessional communities), rather than to their ethnic origins. Muslim communities prospered under the Ottoman Empire, and the Ottoman law did not recognize such notions as ethnicity and the Muslims of any ethnic background enjoyed precisely the same rights and privileges. Another major reason for converting to Islam was the well-organized taxation system based on religion. Major taxes were the Defter and İspençe and the more severe haraç whereby a document was issued which stated that "the holder of this certificate is able to keep his head on the shoulders since he paid the Χαράτσι tax for this year..." All these of course were waived if the person would convert and become Muslim. During the Greek War of Independence, Ottoman Egyptian troops under the leadership of Ibrahim Pasha of Egypt ravaged the island of Crete and the Greek countryside of the Morea where the Muslim Egyptian soldiers enslaved vast numbers of Christian Greek children and women. Ibrahim arranged for the enslaved Greek children to be forcefully converted to Islam "en masse". The enslaved Greeks were subsequently transferred to Egypt where they were sold as slaves. Several decades later in 1843, the English traveler and writer Sir John Gardner Wilkinson described the state of enslaved Greeks who had converted to Islam in Egypt:
Ottomanism
Ottomanism (Turkish: "Osmanlılık" or "Osmanlıcılık") was a concept which developed prior to the First Constitutional Era of the Ottoman Empire. Its proponents believed that it could solve the social issues that the empire was facing.
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman economic mind was closely related to the basic concepts of state and society in the Middle East in which the ultimate goal of a state was consolidation and extension of the ruler's power, and the way to reach it was to get rich resources of revenues by making the productive classes prosperous. The ultimate aim was to increase the state revenues without damaging the prosperity of subjects to prevent the emergence of social disorder and to keep the traditional organization of the society intact. The Ottoman economy greatly expanded during the early modern period, with particularly high growth rates during first half of the eighteenth century. The empire's annual income quadrupled between 1523 and 1748, adjusted for inflation.
Christianity in the Ottoman Empire
There is insufficient documentation of the process of conversion to Islam in Anatolia before the mid-15th century. By that time it was about 85% complete according to an Ottoman census, although in lagged in some regions such as Trabzon. In the Balkans, the general trend of conversion started slowly in the 14th century, reached its peak in the 17th century, and gradually petered out by the end of the 18th century, with significant regional variations.
Islam and modernity
In the period between 1839 and 1876 the Ottoman government began instituting large-scale reforms as a way to modernize and strengthen the empire. Known as the Tanzimat, many of these reforms involved adopting successful European practices that were considered antithetical to conservative Muslims. In addition to military and administrative reforms, Ottoman rulers implemented reforms in the sphere of education, law, and the economy. This included new universities and changes in curricula, as well new economic systems and institutions. There were also European-inspired changes to law that restricted Islamic law to family affairs such as marriage and inheritance.
World War I and religion
Many argue that the Ottoman Empire's involvement was strictly due to benefits they desired for the Islamic state. Muslim scholars have argued that their participation was really an attempt to enlarge the Islamic state and grow in power and influence.
Islam in Turkey
The withdrawal of Turkey, heir to the Ottoman Empire, as the presumptive leader of the world Muslim community was symbolic of the change in the government's relationship to Islam. Indeed, secularism "(or laiklik)" became one of the "Kemalist ideology" of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's anti-clerical program for remaking Turkey. Whereas Islam had formed the identity of Muslims within the Ottoman Empire, secularism was seen as molding the new Turkish nation and its citizens.
Islam in Europe
Islam entered southern Europe through the invading "Moors" of North Africa in the 8th–10th centuries; Muslim political entities existed firmly in what is today Spain, Portugal, South Italy and Malta for several centuries. The Muslim community in these territories was converted or expelled by the end of the 15th century (see "Reconquista"). Islam expanded into the Caucasus through the Muslim conquest of Persia in the 7th century. The Ottoman Empire expanded into southeastern Europe, invading and conquering huge portions of the Byzantine Empire in the 14th and 15th centuries. Over the centuries, the Ottoman Empire also gradually lost almost all of its European territories, until the empire collapsed in 1922. The countries of the Balkans continue to have large populations of native Muslims, though the majority are secular.
Ottoman architecture
Ottoman architecture is the architecture of the Ottoman Empire which emerged in Bursa and Edirne in 14th and 15th centuries. The architecture of the empire developed from the earlier Seljuk architecture and was influenced by the Byzantine architecture, Armenian architecture, Iranian as well as Islamic Mamluk traditions after the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottomans. For almost 400 years Byzantine architectural artifacts such as the church of Hagia Sophia served as models for many of the Ottoman mosques. Overall, Ottoman architecture has been described as Byzantine influenced architecture synthesized with architectural traditions of Central Asia and the Middle East.
Westernization
In Turkey, the process of Westernization dates back to the 19th century, known as the Tanzimat "(reorganization)" period. The Ottoman Empire began to change itself according to western science, practice and culture. The Empire took some innovations from the West. Also, by the contribution of foreign engineers the Empire repaired its old arm systems. Newly-found schools, permanent ambassadors, and privy councils were essential improvement for the Empire. All these reformations had good impact at the point of collapse. Also, the innovation brought from European countries shaped the Empire as a nation run along modern lines. The Westernization efforts continued under the leadership of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, with the adaptation of the Latin-script alphabet and the French concept of secularism. As a result, Turkey is one of the most Westernized majority-Muslim nations.
Islam in Israel
During the Middle Ages, the region became increasingly Islamized. This tendency was temporarily reversed during the 2 centuries of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, a Christian state established by European Crusaders. As a result of the rise of the Ottoman Empire, from 1516 to 1917, the Sunni Ottoman Turks ruled the Levant. In Ottoman Palestine, Islam was the state religion administered remotely from Constantinople, while Christians, Jews, and Samaritans were mostly tolerated as dhimmi.
List of sultans of the Ottoman Empire
The sultans of the Ottoman Empire (), who were all members of the Ottoman dynasty (House of Osman), ruled over the transcontinental empire from its perceived inception in 1299 to its dissolution in 1922. At its height, the Ottoman Empire spanned an area from Hungary in the north to Yemen in the south, and from Algeria in the west to Iraq in the east. Administered at first from the city of Bursa, the empire's capital was moved to Edirne in 1363 following its conquest by Murad I, and then to Constantinople (present-day Istanbul) in 1453 following its conquest by Mehmed II.
Ottoman Empire
Society, government and religion was inter-related in complex ways after about 1800, in a complex overlapping, inefficient system that Atatürk systematically dismantled after 1922. In Constantinople, the Sultan ruled two distinct domains the secular government and the religious hierarchy. Religious officials formed the Ulama Who had control of religious teachings and theology, and also the Empire's judicial system, Giving them a major voice in day-to-day affairs in communities across the Empire (but not including the non-Moslem millets). They were powerful enough to reject the military reforms proposed by Sultan Selim III. His successor Sultan Mahmud II (r. 1808–1839) first won ulama approval before proposing similar reforms. The secularization program of Atatürk brought ended the ulema and their institutions. The caliphate was abolished, madrasas were closed down and the sharia courts abolished. He replaced the Arabic alphabet with Latin letters, ended the religious school system, and gave women some political rights. Many rural traditionalists never accepted this secularization, and by the 1990s they were reasserting a demand for a larger role for Islam.
Selim I
Selim's conquest of the Middle Eastern heartlands of the Muslim world, and particularly his assumption of the role of guardian of the pilgrimage routes to Mecca and Medina, established the Ottoman Empire as the most prestigious of all Sunni Muslim states. His conquests dramatically shifted the empire's geographical and cultural center of gravity away from the Balkans and toward the Middle East. By the eighteenth century, Selim's conquest of the Mamluk Sultanate had come to be romanticized as the moment when the Ottomans seized leadership over the rest of the Muslim world, and consequently Selim is popularly remembered as the first legitimate Ottoman Caliph, although stories of an official transfer of the caliphal office from the Abbasids to the Ottomans were a later invention.
Multinational state
The Ottoman Empire was the dynastic state of the Turkish House of Osman. At its peak in the 16th and 17th centuries, it controlled much of Southeast Europe, Western Asia, the Caucasus, North Africa, and the Horn of Africa.
Arab Revolt
At this stage, Arab nationalism was not yet a mass movement, even in Syria where it was strongest. Many Arabs gave their primary loyalty to their religion or sect, their tribe, or their own particular governments. The ideologies of Ottomanism and Pan-Islamism provided strong competition for Arab nationalism. The vast majority of the Arabs living in the Ottoman Empire were primarily loyal to their own families, clans, and tribes and in terms of broader loyalties, saw themselves as Muslims rather than as Arabs, which in practical terms meant support for the Ottoman Empire, whose sultan also claimed to be the caliph. Traditional Islamic theory preaches the message that all Muslims, regardless of their ethnicity or race, should live together in the "Ummah", where usually been interpreted to mean one state, and for centuries Muslims living under Ottoman rule, whether they be Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Albanians, and so forth all saw themselves as united by a common religion and state. In the Ottoman Empire, Sunni Islam was the state religion, and the sultan-caliph was the supreme religious-political leader, thus making the crown and the faith one and the same. Before 1914, of the ten million or so Arabs living under Ottoman rule, only a mere 350 were involved in various feuding nationalist groups, most of whom wanted only autonomy rather than independence.
Hamidiye (cavalry)
Abdul Hamid II's reign has the reputation of being "the most despotic and centralized era in modern Ottoman History." Abdul Hamid is also considered the last sultan to have full control over Ottoman Empire. His reign struggled with the culmination of 75 years of change throughout the empire and an opposing reaction to that change. Abdul Hamid II was particularly concerned with the centralization of the empire. His efforts to centralize the Sublime Porte were not unheard of among other sultans. The Ottoman Empire's local provinces had more control over their areas than the central government. Abdul Hamid II's foreign relations came from a "policy of non-commitment." The sultan understood the fragility of the Ottoman military, and the Empire's weaknesses of its domestic control. Pan-Islamism became Abdülhamid's solution to the empire's loss of identity and power. His efforts to promote Pan-Islamism were for the most part unsuccessful because of the large non-Muslim population, and the European influence onto the empire. Abdul Hamid II's policies essentially isolated the Ottoman Empire, which further aided in its decline. Several of the elite who sought a new constitution and reform for the empire were forced to flee to Europe. After the Treaty of Berlin (1878), the Ottoman Empire began to contract and it lost certain territories. New groups of radicals began to threaten the power of the Ottoman Empire.
Apostasy in Islam
During the colonial era, death for apostasy was abolished in many Muslim-majority colonies. Similarly, under intense European pressure, death sentence for apostasy from Islam was abolished by the Edict of Toleration, and substituted with other forms of punishment by the Ottoman government in 1844; the implementation of this ban was resisted by religious officials and proved difficult. A series of edicts followed during Ottoman's Tanzimat period, such as the 1856 Reform Edict. Despite these edicts, there was constant pressure on non-Muslims to convert to Islam, and apostates from Islam continued to be persecuted, punished and threatened with execution, particularly in eastern and Levant parts of the then Ottoman Empire. The Edict of Toleration ultimately failed when Sultan Abdul Hamid II assumed power, re-asserted pan-Islamism with sharia as Ottoman state philosophy, and initiated Hamidian massacres in 1894 against Christians, particularly of Armenians, Assyrians and crypto-Christian apostates from Islam in Turkey (Stavriotes, Kromlides).
Partition of the Ottoman Empire
The partition of the Ottoman Empire (Armistice of Mudros, 30 October 1918 – Abolition of the Ottoman Sultanate, 1 November 1922) was a political event that occurred after World War I and the occupation of Constantinople by British, French and Italian troops in November 1918. The partitioning was planned in several agreements made by the Allied Powers early in the course of World War I, notably the Sykes-Picot Agreement. As world war loomed, the Ottoman Empire sought protection but was rejected by Britain, France, and Russia, and finally formed the Ottoman–German Alliance. The huge conglomeration of territories and peoples that formerly comprised the Ottoman Empire was divided into several new states. The Ottoman Empire had been the leading Islamic state in geopolitical, cultural and ideological terms. The partitioning of the Ottoman Empire after the war led to the rise in the Middle East of Western powers such as Britain and France and brought the creation of the modern Arab world and the Republic of Turkey. Resistance to the influence of these powers came from the Turkish national movement but did not become widespread in the post-Ottoman states until after World War II.
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman legal system accepted the religious law over its subjects. At the same time the "Qanun" (or "Kanun"), a secular legal system, co-existed with religious law or Sharia. The Ottoman Empire was always organized around a system of local jurisprudence. Legal administration in the Ottoman Empire was part of a larger scheme of balancing central and local authority. Ottoman power revolved crucially around the administration of the rights to land, which gave a space for the local authority to develop the needs of the local millet. The jurisdictional complexity of the Ottoman Empire was aimed to permit the integration of culturally and religiously different groups. The Ottoman system had three court systems: one for Muslims, one for non-Muslims, involving appointed Jews and Christians ruling over their respective religious communities, and the "trade court". The entire system was regulated from above by means of the administrative "Qanun", i.e. laws, a system based upon the Turkic "Yassa" and "Töre", which were developed in the pre-Islamic era.
Turkish people
Under its founder, Osman I, the nomadic Ottoman beylik expanded along the Sakarya River and westward towards the Sea of Marmara. Thus, the population of western Asia Minor had largely become Turkish-speaking and Muslim in religion. It was under his son, Orhan I, who had attacked and conquered the important urban center of Bursa in 1326, proclaiming it as the Ottoman capital, that the Ottoman Empire developed considerably. In 1354, the Ottomans crossed into Europe and established a foothold on the Gallipoli Peninsula while at the same time pushing east and taking Ankara. Many Turks from Anatolia began to settle in the region abandoned by the inhabitants who had fled Thrace before the Ottoman invasion. However, the Byzantines were not the only ones to suffer from the Ottoman advancement for, in the mid-1330s, Orhan annexed the Turkish beylik of Karasi. This advancement was maintained by Murad I who more than tripled the territories under his direct rule, reaching some , evenly distributed in Europe and Asia Minor. Gains in Anatolia were matched by those in Europe; once the Ottoman forces took Edirne (Adrianople), which became the capital of the Ottoman Empire in 1365, they opened their way into Bulgaria and Macedonia in 1371 at the Battle of Maritsa. With the conquests of Thrace, Macedonia, and Bulgaria, significant numbers of Turkish emigrants settled in these regions. This form of Ottoman-Turkish colonization became a very effective method to consolidate their position and power in the Balkans. The settlers consisted of soldiers, nomads, farmers, artisans and merchants, dervishes, preachers and other religious functionaries, and administrative personnel.
Christianity in the Ottoman Empire
Taxation from the perspective of dhimmis was "a concrete continuation of the taxes paid to earlier regimes" (but now lower under the Muslim rule) and from the point of view of the Muslim conqueror was a material proof of the dhimmis' subjection.
The Ottoman Empire regulated how its cities would be built (quality assurances) and how the architecture (structural integrity, social needs, etc.) would be shaped.
Turkish people
Turks arrived from Central Asia and settled in the Anatolian basin in around the 11th century through the conquest of Seljuk Turks, mixing with the peoples of Anatolia. The region then began to transform from a predominately Greek Christian one to a Turkish Muslim society. Thereafter, the Ottoman Empire came to rule much of the Balkans, the Caucasus, the Middle East (excluding Iran), and North Africa over the course of several centuries, with an advanced army and navy. The Empire lasted until the end of the First World War, when it was defeated by the Allies and partitioned. Following the successful Turkish War of Independence that ended with the Turkish national movement retaking most of the land lost to the Allies, the movement abolished the Ottoman sultanate on 1 November 1922 and proclaimed the Republic of Turkey on 29 October 1923. Not all Ottomans were Muslims and not all Ottoman Muslims were Turks, but by 1923, the majority of people living within the borders of the new Turkish republic identified as Turks.
History of the Bosniaks
The Ottoman Empire at the time was centered on militaristic expansion with focus on religion and maintaining power. By this time, Muslims already made up a large majority of Bosnia's population.
Ottoman Empire
The Christian population of the empire, owing to their higher educational levels, started to pull ahead of the Muslim majority, leading to much resentment on the part of the latter. In 1861, there were 571 primary and 94 secondary schools for Ottoman Christians with 140,000 pupils in total, a figure that vastly exceeded the number of Muslim children in school at the same time, who were further hindered by the amount of time spent learning Arabic and Islamic theology. Stone further suggested that the Arabic alphabet, which Turkish was written in until 1928, was very ill-suited to reflect the sounds of the Turkish language (which is a Turkic as opposed to Semitic language), which imposed a further difficulty on Turkish children. In turn, the higher educational levels of the Christians allowed them to play a larger role in the economy, with the rise in prominence of groups such as the Sursock family indicative of this shift in influence. In 1911, of the 654 wholesale companies in Istanbul, 528 were owned by ethnic Greeks. In many cases, Christians and also Jews were able to gain protection from European consuls and citizenship, meaning they were protected from Ottoman law and not subject to the same economic regulations as their Muslim comrades.
Ottoman Empire
By the end of Suleiman's reign, the Empire spanned approximately , extending over three continents. In addition, the Empire became a dominant naval force, controlling much of the Mediterranean Sea. By this time, the Ottoman Empire was a major part of the European political sphere. The Ottomans became involved in multi-continental religious wars when Spain and Portugal were united under the Iberian Union, the Ottomans as holders of the Caliph title, meaning leader of all Muslims worldwide, and Iberians, as leaders of the Christian crusaders, were locked in a worldwide conflict, with zones of operations in the Mediterranean sea and Indian Ocean where Iberians circumnavigated Africa to reach India, and in the way, wage wars upon the Ottomans and it's local Muslim allies and likewise the Iberians passed through newly Christianised Latin-America and had sent expeditions that traversed the Pacific in order to the Christianize formerly Muslim Philippines and use it as a base to further attack the Muslims in the far east. In which case, the Ottomans sent armies to aid its easternmost vassal and territory, the Sultanate of Aceh in Southeast Asia. During 1600s the worldwide conflict between the Ottoman Caliphate and Iberian Union was a stalement since both powers where at similar population, technology and economic levels. Nevertheless, the success of the Ottoman political and military establishment was compared to the Roman Empire, by the likes of Italian scholar Francesco Sansovino and the French political philosopher Jean Bodin.
Territorial state
The Ottoman Empire had a centralized government in Istanbul which held power over the military, the provincial governors, and local religious leaders. In the Ottoman Empire, the military was controlled by the state, the lesser leaders of troops were all beholden to the Sultan, and in exchange, they were given territories to rule over. This tied the nobles to the central government. Because the elites handled most of the taxation and mustering of troops the Ottoman state was able to stay organized. Another critical feature of the Ottoman Empire is the freedom of religion; in the Empire, there was a system called the Millet system which gave non-Muslim religious communities autonomy to pick their rulers as long as they followed the laws and paid taxes. Also, local communities often were allowed to cling to certain customs, some were abolished, but the Sultan would leave many in place giving different provinces their own unique local cultures. These separate entities make the empire appear to be fragmented, but these policies served to unite the people, they were given enough freedom not to break away.
Young Turks
Another guiding principle for the Young Turks was the transformation of their society into one in which religion played no consequential role, a stark contrast from the theocracy that had ruled the Ottoman Empire since its inception. However, the Young Turks soon recognized the difficulty of spreading this idea among the deeply religious Ottoman peasantry and even much of the elite, as the Ottoman Empire had not experienced the Enlightenment in the same way that Western Europe had. The Young Turks thus began suggesting that Islam itself was materialistic. As compared with later efforts by Muslim intellectuals, such as the attempt to reconcile Islam and socialism, this was an extremely difficult endeavor. Although some former members of the CUP continued to make efforts in this field after the revolution of 1908, they were severely denounced by the Ulema, who accused them of "trying to change Islam into another form and create a new religion while calling it Islam".
Transformation of the Ottoman Empire
The Transformation of the Ottoman Empire, also known as the Era of Transformation, constitutes a period in the history of the Ottoman Empire from to , spanning roughly from the end of the reign of Suleiman the Magnificent to the Treaty of Karlowitz at the conclusion of the War of the Holy League. This period was characterized by numerous dramatic political, social, and economic changes, which resulted in the empire shifting from an expansionist, patrimonial state into a bureaucratic empire based on an ideology of upholding justice and acting as the protector of Sunni Islam. These changes were in large part prompted by a series of political and economic crises in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, resulting from inflation, warfare, and political factionalism. Yet despite these crises the empire remained strong both politically and economically, and continued to adapt to the challenges of a changing world. The seventeenth century was once characterized as a period of decline for the Ottomans, but since the 1980s historians of the Ottoman Empire have increasingly rejected that characterization, identifying it instead as a period of crisis, adaptation, and transformation.
Rise of nationalism in the Ottoman Empire
In the Ottoman Empire, the Islamic faith was the official religion, with members holding all rights, as opposed to non-Muslims who were restricted. Non-Muslim ("dhimmi") ethno-religious legal groups were identified by different millets, meaning "nations".
State organisation of the Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman dynasty or "House of Osman" ( 1280–1922) was unprecedented and unequaled in the Islamic world for its size and duration. The Ottoman sultan, pâdişâh or "lord of kings", served as the empire's sole regent and was considered to be the embodiment of its government, though he did not always exercise complete control. The Ottoman family was originally Turkish in its ethnicity, as were its subjects; however the kingship quickly acquired many different ethnicities through intermarriage with slaves and European nobility.
Protestantism and Islam
The Sultan of the Ottoman Empire was known for his tolerance of the Christian and Jewish faiths within his dominions, whereas the King of Spain did not tolerate the Protestant faith. The Ottoman Empire was indeed known at that time for its religious tolerance. Various religious refugees, such as the Huguenots, some Anglicans, Quakers, Anabaptists or even Jesuits or Capuchins were able to find refuge at Istanbul and in the Ottoman Empire, where they were given right of residence and worship. Further, the Ottomans supported the Calvinists in Transylvania and Hungary but also in France. The contemporary French thinker Jean Bodin wrote:
Martin Luther, in his 1528 pamphlet, "On War against the Turk", calls for the Germans to resist the Ottoman invasion of Europe, as the catastrophic Siege of Vienna was lurking, but expressed views of Islam which, compared to his aggressive speech against Catholicism (and later Judaísm), are relatively mild. Concerned with his personal preaching on divine atonement and Christian justification, he extensively criticized the principles of Islam as "utterly despicable and blasphemous", considering Qu'ran as void of any tract of divine truth. For Luther, it was mandatory to let the Qu'ran "speak for itself" as means to show what the Christian Religion saw as a draft from prophetic and apostolic teaching, therefore allowing a proper Christian response. His knowledge on the subject was based on a medieval polemicist version of the Qu'ran made by Riccoldo da Monte di Croce, which was the European scholarly reference of the subject. Luther was writing his own translation of Riccoldo's "Refutation of the Koran" in 1542 when wrote a letter to Basle's city council to relieve the ban on Theodore Bibliander's translation of the Qu'ran into Latin. Mostly due to his letter, Bibliander's translation was finally allowed and eventually published in 1543, with a preface made by Martin Luther himself. His own translation of Riccoldo was also the first version of Koranic material in the German Language. With access to the actual Qu'ran, Luther saw some of Ricoldo's critics as actually exaggerated, but nevertheless agreeing with virtually all of them. .
Christianity in the Ottoman Empire
Ottoman practice assumed that law would be applied based on the religious beliefs of its citizens. However, the Ottoman Empire was organized around a system of local jurisprudence. Legal administration fit into a larger schema balancing central and local authority. The jurisdictional complexity of the Ottoman Empire aimed to facilitate the integration of culturally and religiously different groups.
Janina Vilayet
There have been a number of estimates about the ethnicity and the religious affiliation of the local population. The Ottoman Empire classified and counted its citizens according to religion and not ethnicity, which led to inefficient censuses and lack of classification of populations according to their ethnic groups. The vilayet was predominantly inhabited by Albanians and Greeks, while the major religions were Islam and Christian Orthodoxy. The vilayet was heavily Greek, especially the part that would be later incorporated to Greece.
History of the Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire had long been the "sick man of Europe" and after a series of Balkan wars by 1914 had been driven out of nearly all of Europe and North Africa. It still controlled 28 million people, of whom 17 million were in modern-day Turkey, 3 million in Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, and 2.5 million in Iraq. Another 5.5 million people were under nominal Ottoman rule in the Arabian peninsula.
Millet (Ottoman Empire)
In the Ottoman Empire, a millet was a separate 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 far from 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. After the Ottoman Tanzimat (1839–76) reforms, the term was used for legally protected religious 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". The millet system has been called an example of pre-modern religious pluralism.
Islam in Turkey
The secularization of Turkey started in the society during the last years of the Ottoman Empire and it was the most prominent and most controversial feature of Atatürk's reforms. Under his leadership, the caliphate—the supreme politico-religious office of Sunni Islam, and symbol of the sultan's claim to world leadership of all Muslims—was abolished. The secular power of the religious authorities and functionaries was reduced and eventually eliminated. The religious foundations were nationalized, and religious education was restricted and for a time prohibited. The influential and popular mystical orders of the dervish brotherhoods (Tariqa) also were suppressed.
Abolition of the Ottoman sultanate
The Ottoman Empire's sovereignty was embodied in the dynasty of Osman I, who was its founder and namesake. His family had ruled since 1299 in an unbroken lineage throughout the empire's history. The Ottoman dynasty (as Sultan) maintained supreme authority over the Ottoman Empire's polity. The sultan was the empire's sole and absolute regent, head of state and head of government. The Grand Viziers and polity established by the Ottoman Constitution functioned at the pleasure of the Sultan.
History of the Republic of Turkey
Aside from the Ottoman state's defeat during the First World War, there are several other factors that contributed to the emergence of the new Turkish state. These include the ethno-religious conflicts in Anatolia, which led to the destruction of the Christian population in the country, effectively making Turkey a homogeneous Muslim state. There was also the rise of the active participation of the military in politics after the First World War as shown in the so-called Young Turk Revolution in 1908. Ten years later, Mustafa Kemal (Atatürk) and other army officers dominated the polity that finally established the nationalist Republic of Turkey out of what was left of the Ottoman Empire. Turkey was established based on the ideology found in the country's pre-Ottoman history and was also steered towards a secular political system to diminish the influence of religious groups such as the Ulema.
Demographics of the Ottoman Empire
According to the 1874 census,there were 963596 (42,22%) Muslims and 1318506 (57,78%) non-Muslims in the Danube Province excluding Nış sanjak. Together with the sanjak of Nish the population consisted of 1055650 (40,68%) Muslims and 1539278 (59,32%) non-Muslims in 1874. Muslims were the majority in the sanjaks of Rusçuk, Varna and Tulça, while the non-Muslims were in majority in the rest of the sanjaks.
Persecution of Muslims during Ottoman contraction
Persecution of Ottoman Muslims during the Ottoman contraction refers to the persecution, massacre, or ethnic cleansing of Muslims (Albanians, Bosniaks, Serbs, Greeks, Pomaks, Circassians, Ottoman Turks and others) by non-Muslim ethnic groups during the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire. The 19th century saw the rise of nationalism in the Balkans coincident with the decline of Ottoman power, which resulted in the establishment of an independent Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria. At the same time, the Russian Empire expanded into previously Ottoman ruled or Ottoman allied regions of the Caucasus and the Black Sea region. Many of the local Muslims in these countries suffered as many died during the conflicts and others fled. The persecution of Muslims was continued during World War I by the invading Russian troops in the east and the Caucasus and during the Turkish War of Independence in the west, east, and south of Anatolia. After the Greco-Turkish War, a population exchange took place and most Muslims in Greece left. During these centuries many Muslim refugees, called Muhacir, settled in Turkey.
Shakib Arslan
Influenced by the ideas of al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh, Arslan became a strong supporter of the Pan-Islamic policies of Abdul Hamid II. He also advocated the proposition that the survival of the Ottoman Empire was the only guarantee against the division of the ummah and its occupation by the European imperial powers. To Arslan, Ottomanism and Islam were closely bound together and the reform of Islam would naturally lead to the revival of the Ottoman Empire.
Islam in Turkey
In 1922 the new nationalist regime abolished the Ottoman sultanate, and in 1924 it abolished the caliphate, the religious office that Ottoman sultans had held for four centuries. Thus, for the first time in Islamic history, no ruler claimed spiritual leadership of Islam.
Atatürk and his associates not only abolished certain religious practices and institutions but also questioned the value of religion, preferring to place their trust in science. They regarded organized religion as an anachronism and contrasted it unfavorably with "civilization," which to them meant a rationalist, secular culture. Establishment of secularism in Turkey was not, as it had been in the West, a gradual process of separation of church and state. In the Ottoman Empire, all spheres of life, at least theoretically, had been subject to traditional religious law, and Sunni religious organizations had been part of the state structure. However, usually state had authority over the clergy and religious law, even at the Ottoman period (e.g.many Sultans are known to change Şeyhülislams, who do not approve state politics). When the reformers of the early 1920s opted for a secular state, they removed religion from the sphere of public policy and restricted it exclusively to that of personal morals, behavior, and faith. Although private observance of religious rituals could continue, religion and religious organization were excluded from public life.
Near East
The Ottoman Empire, believed to be about to collapse, was portrayed in the press as the "sick man of Europe". The Balkan states, with the partial exception of Bosnia and Albania, were primarily Christian, as was the majority of Lebanon. Starting in 1894, the Ottomans struck at the Armenians on the explicit grounds that they were a non-Muslim people and as such were a potential threat to the Muslim empire within which they resided. The Hamidian Massacres aroused the indignation of the entire Christian world. In the United States the now aging Julia Ward Howe, author of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, leaped into the war of words and joined the Red Cross. Relations of minorities within the Ottoman Empire and the disposition of former Ottoman lands became known as the "Eastern Question", as the Ottomans were on the east of Europe.
Reception of Islam in Early Modern Europe
The Ottoman Empire emerged in 1299 and lasted until 1919. The Ottomans were strong proponents of Sunni Islam. In the 13th century, the kingdom was only in a small portion of northwest Anatolia but by the 16th century, it expanded to the heartland of the Byzantine Empire and its capital, Constantinople. The height of the Ottoman Empire occurred under the sultans Selim the Grim, also known as Selim I (1512–1520) and Suleyman the Magnificent (1520–1566). Under their reigns, the Turks conquered Egypt, Syria, and the North coast of Africa, the Red Sea, the island of Rhodes, and the Balkans all the way to the Great Hungarian Plain.
Ottoman Turks
Not all Ottomans were Muslims and not all Ottoman Muslims were Turks, but by 1923, the majority of people living within the borders of the new Turkish republic identified as Turks. (Notable exceptions were the Kurds and the few remaining Armenians, Georgians and Greeks.)
Ottoman–Persian wars
The Ottoman-Persian Wars or Ottoman-Iranian Wars were a series a wars between Ottoman Empire and the Safavid, Afsharid, Zand, and Qajar dynasties of Iran (Persia) through the 16th–19th centuries. The Ottomans consolidated their control of what is today Turkey in the 15th century, and gradually came into conflict with the emerging neighboring Persian state, led by Ismail I of the Safavid dynasty. The two states were arch rivals, and were also divided by religious grounds, the Ottomans being staunchly Sunni and the Safavids being Shia. A series of military conflicts ensued for centuries during which the two empires competed for control over eastern Anatolia, the Caucasus, and Iraq.
Christianity in the Ottoman Empire
The state's relationship with the Greek Orthodox Church was mixed, since the Orthodox were not killed, they were in the beginning the vast majority and taxpayers, they were encouraged through bribes and exemptions to convert to Islam. In turn they could not proselytize Muslims. The church's structure was kept intact and largely left alone (but under close control and scrutiny) until the Greek War of Independence of 1821–1831 and, later in the 19th and early 20th centuries, during the rise of the Ottoman constitutional monarchy, which was driven to some extent by nationalistic currents. But the Church was greatly affected by the corruption brought in by the Ottoman system of choosing the Patriarch of Constantinople, and putting up the position of Patriarch for bribes. Other churches, like the Serbian Patriarchate of Peć (1766) and Archbishopric of Ohrid (1767), were dissolved and their dioceses placed under the jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarchate of Constantinople. Churches had to be placed in inconspicuous areas, where the everyday populace would not see them.
Transformation of the Ottoman Empire
In Ottoman Europe this period witnessed a major shift in religious demographics. Many of the cities and towns of the Balkans and Hungary became majority Muslim, including Buda, the former capital of the Kingdom of Hungary. In the Balkan countryside the rate of conversion to Islam gradually increased until reaching a peak in the late seventeenth century, particularly affecting regions such as Albania and eastern Bulgaria.
Criticism of Islamism
According to the Ayatollah Khomeini and other Islamists, one glaring example of an attempt by the West to weaken the Muslim world was the division of the Ottoman empire, the largest Muslim state and home of the Caliph, into 20 or so "artificially created separate nations," when that empire fell in 1918. Western powers did partition the Arab world (which made up most of the Ottoman empire) after World War I, while the general Arab Muslim sentiment in much of the 20th Century was for "wahda" (unity).
Ottoman Crete
One result of the Ottoman conquest was that a sizeable proportion of the population gradually converted to Islam, with its tax and other civic advantages in the Ottoman system. Contemporary estimates vary, but on the eve of the Greek War of Independence as much as 45% of the population of the island may have been Muslim. A small number of these were crypto-Christians who converted back to Christianity; others fled Crete because of the unrest. By the last Ottoman census in 1881, Christians were 76% of the population, and Muslims (usually called "Turks" regardless of language, culture, and ancestry) only 24%, but Muslims were over 60% in the three large towns on the north coast and Monofatsi. Christians were 93% of the population in 1923 of the districts of Crete. The remaining Muslims were transferred to Turkey in the population exchange by religion between Greece and Turkey.
Demographics of the Ottoman Empire
Estimates in some eighteen sources show that the Muslims constituted about 35% of the total Balkan population during the first half of the 19th century, while in the second half of the century the proportion grew to 43%. According to thirty three sources the proportion of Turks in the European provinces during the 19th century ranges from 11 to 24 percent; of Greeks from 9 to 16 percent; of Bulgarians from 24 to 39 percent. The Turks made up two thirds of the Muslims in the Danube Vilayet and most of them in the Adrianople Vilayet and Salonika Vilayet. In the more western vilayets the Muslims were a majority, which consisted usually of Slavs and Albanians. In the Ioannina Vilayet the Orthodox Christians were dominant, a majority of whom were ethnically Albanian according to Ottoman officials and were also three fourths of the Muslims. In 1867 Salaheddin Bey estimated 595,000 Circassian newcomers in the European part and 400,000 Armenians in European part. Practically all of the Circassians began migrating to Anatolia after the Russian military advances in the last quarter of the century.
History of slavery in the Muslim world
Slavery was a legal and important part of the economy of the Ottoman Empire and Ottoman society until the slavery of Caucasians was banned in the early 19th century, although slaves from other groups were allowed. In Constantinople (present-day Istanbul), the administrative and political center of the Empire, about a fifth of the population consisted of slaves in 1609. Even after several measures to ban slavery in the late 19th century, the practice continued largely unfazed into the early 20th century. As late as 1908, female slaves were still sold in the Ottoman Empire. Sexual slavery was a central part of the Ottoman slave system throughout the history of the institution.
Ottoman Empire
These court categories were not, however, wholly exclusive: for instance, the Islamic courts, which were the Empire's primary courts, could also be used to settle a trade conflict or disputes between litigants of differing religions, and Jews and Christians often went to them to obtain a more forceful ruling on an issue. The Ottoman state tended not to interfere with non-Muslim religious law systems, despite legally having a voice to do so through local governors. The Islamic "Sharia" law system had been developed from a combination of the Qur'an; the Hadīth, or words of the prophet Muhammad; "ijmā'", or consensus of the members of the Muslim community; qiyas, a system of analogical reasoning from earlier precedents; and local customs. Both systems were taught at the Empire's law schools, which were in Istanbul and Bursa.
Islam in Bosnia and Herzegovina
Bosnia, along with Albania and Kosovo were the only parts of the Ottoman Empire in the Balkans where large numbers of people were converted to Islam, and remained there after independence. In other areas of the former Ottoman Empire where Muslims formed the majority or started to form the majority, those Muslims were either expelled, assimilated/Christianized, massacred, or fled elsewhere (Muhajirs).
Economic history of the Ottoman Empire
The Economic history of the Ottoman Empire covers the period 1299–1923. Trade, agriculture, transportation, and religion make up the Ottoman Empire's economy. The economy is explained in this Wikipedia page.
List of sultans of the Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman Empire was an absolute monarchy during much of its existence. By the second half of the fifteenth century, the sultan sat at the apex of a hierarchical system and acted in political, military, judicial, social, and religious capacities under a variety of titles. He was theoretically responsible only to God and God's law (the Islamic "şeriat", known in Arabic as "sharia"), of which he was the chief executor. His heavenly mandate was reflected in Islamic titles such as "shadow of God on Earth" ( "ẓıll Allāh fī'l-ʿalem") and "caliph of the face of the earth" ( "Ḫalife-i rū-yi zemīn"). All offices were filled by his authority, and every law was issued by him in the form of a decree called "firman" (). He was the supreme military commander and had the official title to all land. Osman (died 1323/4) son of Ertuğrul was the first ruler of the Ottoman state, which during his reign constituted a small principality ("beylik") in the region of Bithynia on the frontier of the Byzantine Empire.
Rise of the Ottoman Empire
Osman was adept at forging political and commercial relationships with nearby groups, Muslim as well as Christian. Early on he attracted several notable figures to his side, including Köse Mihal, a Byzantine village headman whose descendants (known as the Mihaloğulları) enjoyed primacy among the frontier warriors in Ottoman service. Köse Mihal was noteworthy for having been a Christian Greek; while he eventually converted to Islam, his prominent historical role indicates Osman's willingness to cooperate with non-Muslims and incorporate them into his political enterprise.
Secularism in Turkey
Sultan Selim III founded the first secular military schools by establishing the new military unit, Nizam-ı Cedid, as early as 1792. However the last century (19th century) of the Ottoman Empire had many far reaching reforms. These reforms peaked with the Tanzimat which was the initial reform era of the Ottoman Empire. After the Tanzimat, rules, such as those relating to the equalized status of non-Muslim citizens, the establishment of a parliament, the abandonment of medieval punishments for apostasy, as well as the codification of the constitution of the empire and the rights of Ottoman subjects were established. The First World War brought about the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the subsequent partitioning of the Ottoman Empire by the victorious Allies. Therefore, the Republic of Turkey was actually a nation-state built as a result of an empire lost.
Composite monarchy
The Ottoman Empire’s most striking difference with other composite monarchies in Europe was that it allowed religious freedom to a much greater extent than the Europeans did. Religious warfare proliferated in the early modern period (especially in the 16th and 17th centuries). The Ottomans did not require that their subjects adhere to the religion of the monarch, a requirement that usually was a major part of composite kingdoms. The Ottoman Empire was extremely diverse and there were relatively few restrictions on activity of minority groups. Christians, Muslims, Jews, Turks, Greeks, Hungarians, Arabs, Armenians, Kurds, guildsmen, bureaucrats and slaves were free to work and live throughout the empire. This level of religious freedom was largely alien to the rest of Europe during the early modern period. The Spanish Inquisition and the ghettos in Italy were examples of the religious restriction and intolerance within non-Ottoman Europe.
Ottoman Turks
The Ottoman Turks (or Osmanlı Turks, ) were the Turkish-speaking population of the Ottoman Empire who formed the base of the state's military and ruling classes. Reliable information about the early history of Ottoman Turks is scarce, but they take their Turkish name, "Osmanlı" ("Osman" being corrupted in some European languages as "Ottoman"), from the house of Osman I (reigned ca. 1299–1326), the founder of the dynasty that ruled the Ottoman Empire for its entire 624 years. After the expansion from its home in Bithynia, the Ottoman principality began incorporating other Turkish-speaking Muslims and non-Turkish Christians, becoming the Ottoman Turks and ultimately the Turks of the present. The Ottoman Turks blocked all land routes to Europe by conquering the city of Constantinople, the capital city of the Byzantine–East Roman Empire, and Europeans had to find other ways to trade with Eastern countries.
Qadi
In the Ottoman Empire, a Kadiluk – the district covered by a kadı – was an administrative subdivision, smaller than a Sanjak.
As the Empire expanded, so did the legal complexities that were built into the system of administration carried over and were enhanced by the conditions of frontier expansion. In particular, the Islamic empire adapted legal devices to deal with the existence of large populations of non-Muslims, a persistent feature of empire despite incentives for conversion and in part because of institutional protections for communal legal forums. These aspects of the Islamic legal order would have been quite familiar to travelers from other parts of the world. Indeed, Jewish, Armenian, and Christian traders found institutional continuity across Islamic and Western regions, negotiating for and adopting strategies to enhance this resemblance.
Atatürk's Reforms
The Ottoman Empire was an Islamic state in which the head of the state, the Sultan, also held the position of Caliph. The social system was organized around the millet structure. The millet structure allowed a great degree of religious, cultural and ethnic continuity across the society but at the same time permitted the religious ideology to be incorporated into the administrative, economic and political system. One can define this way of life as Islamism (Political Islam): "the belief that Islam should guide social and political as well as personal life".
Sunni Islam
The fall of the Ottoman, the biggest Sunni empire in the world for six centuries, the mightiest power in the Mediterranean world and one of the important participants in World War I which joined the war on the side of the Central Powers, bringing caliphate to an end was an epochal event. This resulted in Sunni protests in far off places including the Khilafat Movement in India, which was later on upon gaining independence from Britain divided into Sunni dominated Pakistan and secular India. Pakistan, the most populous Sunni state at its birth, however later got partitioned into Pakistan and Bangladesh. The demise of Ottoman caliphate also resulted in the emergence of Saudi Arabia, a dynastic absolute monarchy with the support of the British and Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab, the founder of Wahhabism. This was followed by a considerable rise in Wahhabism, Salafism and Jihadism under the influence of the preaching of Ibn Taymiyyah a follower of Ahmad bin Hanbal.The expediencies of cold war resulted in encouragement of Afghan refugees in Pakistan to be radicalised, trained and armed to fight the communist regime backed by USSR forces in Afghanistan giving birth to Taliban. The Taliban wrestled power from the communists in Afghanistan and formed a government under the leadership of Mohammed Omar, who was addressed as the Emir of the faithful, an honorific way of addressing the caliph. The Taliban regime was recognised by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia till after 9/11 perpetrated by Osama bin Laden a Saudi national by birth harboured by the Taliban took place, resulting in a war on terror launched against the Taliban.
History of the Ottoman Empire
In the long-run, tensions between Russia and Austria-Hungary intensified, as did the nationality question in the Balkans. The Congress succeeded in keeping Istanbul in Ottoman hands. It effectively disavowed Russia's victory. The Congress of Berlin returned to the Ottoman Empire territories that the previous treaty had given to the Principality of Bulgaria, most notably Macedonia, thus setting up a strong revanchist demand in Bulgaria that in 1912 led to the First Balkan War in which the Turks were defeated and lost nearly all of Europe. As the Ottoman Empire gradually shrank in size, military power and wealth, many Balkan Muslims migrated to the empire's remaining territory in the Balkans or to the heartland in Anatolia. Muslims had been the majority in some parts of the Ottoman Empire such as the Crimea, the Balkans and the Caucasus as well as a plurality in southern Russia and also in some parts of Romania. Most of these lands were lost with time by the Ottoman Empire between the 19th and 20th centuries. By 1923, only Anatolia and eastern Thrace remained Muslim land.
Albania under the Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman sultan considered himself God's agent on Earth, the leader of a religious—not a national—state whose purpose was to defend and propagate Islam. Non-Muslims paid extra taxes and held an inferior status, but they could retain their old religion and a large measure of local autonomy. By converting to Islam, individuals among the conquered could elevate themselves to the privileged stratum of society. In the early years of the empire, all Ottoman high officials were the sultan's bondsmen the children of Christian subjects chosen in childhood for their promise, converted to Islam, and educated to serve. Some were selected from prisoners of war, others sent as gifts, and still others obtained through devshirme, the tribute of children levied in the Ottoman Empire's Balkan lands. Many of the best fighters in the sultan's elite guard, the janissaries, were conscripted as young boys from Christian Albanian families, and high-ranking Ottoman officials often had Albanian bodyguards.
Christianity in the Ottoman Empire
Conversion to Islam in the Ottoman Empire involved a combination of individual, family, communal and institutional initiatives and motives. The process was also influenced by the balance of power between the Ottomans and the neighboring Christian states. However, most Ottoman subjects in Eastern Europe remained Orthodox Christian, such as Wallachia, Bulgaria and Greece while present-day Albania and Kosovo had larger Muslim populations as a result of Ottoman influence.