Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

At the Gates of Brussels

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • At the Gates of Brussels

    Atlantic Online
    Nov. 4, 2004

    At the Gates of Brussels

    If Recep Tayyip Erdogan gets his way, Turkey will be more Islamic and
    Europe will be more Turkish. Both would be good news

    by Robert D. Kaplan

    .....

    ho says empires are bad? The multi-ethnic Ottoman Turkish Empire, like
    the coeval multi-ethnic Hapsburg Austrian one, was more hospitable to
    minorities than the uni-ethnic democratic states that immediately
    succeeded it. The Ottoman caliphate welcomed Turkish, Kurdish, and
    other Muslims with open arms, and tolerated Christian Armenians and
    Jews. The secular-minded, modernizing "Young Turk" politicians who
    brought down the empire did not. They used Kurds as subcontractors in a
    full-scale assault on Armenians, which scholars now argue about calling
    genocide. Ottoman toleration was built on territorial indifference.
    Because the same loosely administered imperial rule extended from the
    Balkans to Mesopotamia, and as far south as Yemen, minorities could
    live anywhere within this space without provoking issues of
    sovereignty. Violent discussions over what group got to control which
    territory emerged only when the empire came to an end, after World War
    I.

    The collapse of the Ottoman sultanate continues to haunt geopolitics:
    it gave birth to questions about the territorial status of Christians
    in Lebanon and of Jews in Palestine, and about whether Kurds north of
    Baghdad should live in the same polity as Mesopotamian Arabs to the
    south. Moreover, it changed the direction of Muslim thought. For 850
    years - from 1071, when the Seljuks defeated the Byzantines at Manzikert,
    in eastern Anatolia, to the end of World War I - the House of Islam had
    drawn its spiritual direction from Turkey, not from Arabia or Iran. But
    with the official abolition of the Constantinople-based caliphate, in
    1924, there was no longer any universally accepted authority for the
    interpretation of Muslim law. In the competition for doctrinal
    legitimacy that has followed, the most radical interpretations have won
    out.

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
Working...
X