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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cary Salsberg who wrote (70334)	5/15/2003 10:15:14 AM
From: zonder	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Re "Muslim Ottoman Empire" - There were many minorities with myriad different religions in the Ottoman Empire, since they did not force conversion in places they conquered. That is, incidentally, why the Balkans and the rest of Eastern Europe are not Muslim right now. So "Muslim Ottoman Empire" is not exactly correct. Re "Ruled by Turks" - While you have a point above that the Ottoman Empire was of Muslim majority, it is not correct to call its Padishahs "Turks". While it certainly started out that way, harems were mostly filled with foreign women, and mothers of the Padishahs were almost invariably non-Turk. If you take a look at the "pedigree", you will see that there are Russians, Europeans, etc that seriously dilute the "Turk"ness of the Padishahs. As for the rest of the "rulers", it is easier to prove - the "devshirme" system of the Ottoman Empire basically collected youngsters in conquered lands and brought them to Istanbul, to be educated, trained, indoctrinated etc as the future soldiers & government officers of the Empire. They did this to avoid any single family becoming a dynasty, putting their relatives in places of power, and rivaling the Padishah's family. The result was that the government under the Padishah, "rulers" as you say, were predominantly non-Turk. A strange and quite fascinating system, actually...

To: Cary Salsberg who wrote (70334)	5/15/2003 11:08:00 AM
From: Sun Tzu	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 70976

Most Turks would have me burn in hell for saying this, but this is a subject that I have done some studies in. "Turkishness" is a fairly recent concept. I don't think you can find evidence for it older than 700 years ago, which in a region with civilizations going back to thousands of years, is a very very recent thing. The best I managed to conclude was that there were many races in what we now call Turkey that were subdued by a small tribe. In one form or another, most of the ethnic groups (with the exception of Kurds and Armenians) were melted into a "Turkish" concept. IMO, being a Turk is really not much different that being "American" in that it is made of many races melted down to a concept enforced by the central government. But as a race or as deep historical concept, Turkishness is an ambiguous concept.