Question : In an Ottoman-Empire-survives world......

Did one person in this thread mention the Crusades? Then why did you? It's nonsense. Your ridiculous logical fallacy is OK because someone somewhere else that's not in this discussion has complained about the Crusades? What does this have to do with anything?
Just an example of how an event that happened long ago can still rankle in popular memory.

It's true that the original Serbia never had a large Muslim population, but Greece most certainly did, and so did today's Macedonia, which ended up with Serbia. The upper half of Greece obtained in the Balkan Wars had a Muslim plurality, meaning Muslims were the largest group, albeit not a majority.
Do you mean the original Greece (Central Greece, the Peloponnese and the nearest islands)? Is there really any evidence that they were more than a few percent of the population?
The Ottomans have been accused of underestimating the number of Christians and different sources show quite different figures.

The original treaty allowed for a small symbolic garrison in Belgrade with some support civilians. They were later evicted. Why does this even matter? The point was that Muslims were subjected to massive ethnic cleansing in the Christian Balkans, while Christians were allowed to live freely in the Ottoman Empire.
When the Ottoman Empire ended, there were still far more Muslims of the original population left in the Balkans, than Christians in the Ottoman Empire. So you may be correct about the intolerance of the Balkan Christians, but they were certainly outdone by the Ottomans in the end.

Did you read the source you linked? It says the opposite of what you're claiming. Gypsies paid taxes per their religion. Taxes got worse for everyone in the empire, later on, not just the gyspies.
The source said that tribute which "was normally confined to non-Muslims" (page 174) was collected from Gypsies regardless of religion. So how am I incorrect?

There is no 1958 code. Homosexuality has not been illegal in Turkey since 1858. At no time in the history of the Republic was this ever changed.
Caesar Australis gave as a source this document which referred to the 1958 penal code (page 55).

No, it's not. There are more forced marriages each year in India than there have ever been in the entire Islamic world.
Cite (and you're aware that there are Muslims in India, too)? And I still haven't seen anything about Christian countries.

Your link isn't a book that's readable. I did find figures researching myself. You're right, in the 1881 census Muslims were a quarter of the population - I didn't know about that one. In 1888, however, they were 20%, and by 1910, only 12%. They were not leaving voluntarily. In the Ottoman Empire they ended up in refugee camps, sometimes for decades, in starvation conditions with horrendous mortality.

As for "absurd figures", I have no idea what you're talking about because you didn't elaborate.

In the Danube province, the fairly detailed study returned:

District Muslims %
Ruschuk 356,160 58%
Vidin 59,964 17%
Sofya 75,030 19%
Tirnova 134,117 31%
Tulcha 122,524 56%
Varna 96,936 73%
Nish 117,742 35%
Sofya 75,030 19%
Total 1,037,503 36%
Strange, it worked for me. And no, the Muslims were not being expelled during peacetime. In fact, the Ottoman Empire encouraged their emigration.
The absurd figure is the claim that 1.3 Muslims were killed or expelled. That would mean a total pre-war Muslim population of about 2 million, which is above any estimate and is not consistent with your figures, which show quite a lower number than the one given by Karpat.

You're just making silly unsupported assertions and insinuations now. "On paper"? They were elected, and the voted in parliament. What is "not very often?" The parliament wasn't in session 365 days a year, which was the same for all parliaments everywhere. What are you basing this on? What you hope is true? And so what? There would be no Slavs in the Balkans if they hadn't invaded it. There would also be no Christians there if they weren't converted by the Byzantines. What is your point?
A 30 year interruption certainly qualifies as not very often.
My point was that while the converted Muslims of the Balkans are of course native, their conversion just as obviously due to the Ottoman conquest and was meant to clarify what I meant under natives.

Are you serious? IRAQ?!? Sectarian conflict was cause by OUR INVASION! You're supporting my argument! Lebanon was disturbed from 1840-1860 by British & French intervention on behalf of their sponsored minorities (the Druze & Maronites respectively), but once the Ottomans gained control and established a constitutional regime there, there was ZERO sectarian conflict until the end of the empire. Nobody has done better since, so the obvious conclusion is that Ottoman rule there was better.
The conflict between the three main groups in Iraq predate the US invasion, though the almost entire destruction of the Christian population indeed happened after the US invasion.
You're assuming that just because the Ottoman Empire was able to keep the peace at one point, it would be able to do so throughout the future. The general record of multinational states doesn't bear this out, really.

And SYRIA?!? Is the dictator controlling things there? And why was he "needed"? Dictators aren't needed anywhere. They are maintained because we can get an unreasonable share of oil revenues when there are non-democratic regimes in place, and we can depend on client dictators to maintain peace with Israel, which for some reason is a policy imperative, despite it's being clearly contrary to our interests.
You're right about the dictators, but Christians in Syria especially have expressed fears about their future without the protection of Assad.

With regard to the standards of living, the Ottomans didn't control the oil sheikhdoms, they controlled the coasts of Saudi Arabia and they controlled Iraq. Iraqis didn't benefit much form their oil, and Saudis, outside the ruling class, don't really get much of a fair share either. Within the context of the Ottoman Empire, that revenue would have been part of a more balanced economic system which would have benefitted a much larger population.
It's quite possible that in a more successful Ottoman Empire they would still control Kuwait and Qatar, which makes up a significant part of the oil production in the world. As for Saudi Arabia, the ordinary citizens may not get their fair share but their living standard is much higher than the average for the Middle East.
And you seem very certain about the hypothetical development of the Ottoman economy, when even the POD has not been established in this thread...
 
Are you actually reading the sources you're posting? I agree his estimate of 3M was way off, but he had no data at the time. The rest of what you said doesn't match anything Karpat said. He said there were about 500,000 Muslims left in Bulgaria in 1881, but then many decades later it had risen to 1M. He overestimated, but he didn't make any contradictory statements.
Someone who is willing to publish estimates based on speculations and rumors and whose date is skewed towards his ethnicity doesn't really deserve to be called a historian, in my opinion. Propagandist would be a better word.
On page 681, Karpat states that the number of Muslims "amounted after 1878 to over a million or roughly 35% of the population in 1888".


So what? That's the map I gave Ridwan, and while it's useful as an indicator of what Europeans at the time thought, it's not based on any actual data. My map is.
Karl Sax's map is based on his observations and those of other Austro-Hungarian consuls, so how it is different from Lejean's map?



What? There were numerous censuses in the Ottoman Empire after 1866.

I did work backwards from later censuses and the estimated number of refugees that fled lost territories. The areas left to the empire after 1878 actually had much higher Muslim concentrations than I indicated on the map for pre-1877.
I should have been clear that I meant censuses between 1866 and 1878, or at least those that indicated ethnic groups. See here (page 186 and 187).
It's possible that those areas that they had a much higher concentration after 1878, but before that?
Of course your calculation would be correct if you based them on correct figures.

No, my number was for all the Muslims killed and expelled between 1877 and the Balkan Wars. I agree with Karpat's figure for the numbers killed and expelled in Bulgaria as a result of the 1877-78 War.
I explained in the previous post why those figures are not believable



The Ottomans weren't oppressive in the way that colonial empires were because colonial empires were autocratic states designed to extract resources and send them home. The Ottoman Empire was a unitary state wherein all subjects were considered equal. There was no Ottoman "metropole" to send the treasures of the empire to - local revenues were generally spent in localities, apart from what the empire needed to maintain the military and central administration.

The Native Americans were massacred wholesale and marginalized in tiny ghetto "reservations". There is no comparison between such a monstrous tragedy and the Ottoman Empire.
Yes, but that's how the United States worked as well. My point was that just because the Ottomans formed a settler empire, it doesn't mean automatically that they were better than colonial empires. I didn't actually state that they were worse than the Europeans treatment of the native Americans.

Is that map really so inaccurate factually, or is it the equivalent of those "Bush Nation" maps from 2004 which showed who was the majority (Democrat or Republican) in each US county? I expect Muslims in the Ottoman Balkans (like Democrats in the 2004 USA) would be underrepresented in maps of this type because they are concentrated in cities.
Actually, Lejean took care to mark local concentrations of Muslims, so it's not quite like the election map. The problem with Abdul Hadi Pasha's map is that the stripes makes it difficult to see which group predominated in a certain area.
Also, at the time, probably even the Muslims lived mostly in rural areas, though the cities did have a higher Muslim population than average. And Bulgarians were increasingly moving to the cities even before 1878.
 
We've essentially totally crushed the entire Islamic world out of Islamophobia, which has turned out with no doubt whatsoever to have been totally unjustified in light of the democratic nature of the Arab Spring.
Are you sure that it's Islamophobia, rather than massive sympathy from the Jews created by the Holocaust, that's responsible? Since Israel has only about 5 million Jewish citizens, it's viability would be questionable if any of the Muslim countries of the region rose even to the status of a second-rate power -- hence the occupations, the puppet dictators, and the sanctioning of Iran.
 
Are you sure that it's Islamophobia, rather than massive sympathy from the Jews created by the Holocaust, that's responsible? Since Israel has only about 5 million Jewish citizens, it's viability would be questionable if any of the Muslim countries of the region rose even to the status of a second-rate power -- hence the occupations, the puppet dictators, and the sanctioning of Iran.
I think its a mix of guilt over the Holocaust, support for Israel as a western outpost in an Islamic sea and Islamophobia that dictates the negative aspects of western policy towards the Middle East.
 
I think its a mix of guilt over the Holocaust, support for Israel as a western outpost in an Islamic sea and Islamophobia that dictates the negative aspects of western policy towards the Middle East.
If the West was motivated by Islamophobia, why would they support the greatest spreader of fundamental Islam in the World?
 
If the West was motivated by Islamophobia, why would they support the greatest spreader of fundamental Islam in the World?

If you think the west supports Saudi Arabia because they like their propagation of a very extreme school of Islam I'm afraid you're sadly mistaken.
 
If you think the west supports Saudi Arabia because they like their propagation of a very extreme school of Islam I'm afraid you're sadly mistaken.
Indeed, I should have mentioned that the positive dealings the west tends to have in the Middle east tend to do with oil...
If the West was motivated by Islamophobia, why would they support the greatest spreader of fundamental Islam in the World?
So yeh, its pretty much the oil. Having a huge amount of the worlds oil can overcome all kinds of bigotry. (Though in Saudi Arabia's case, some of the bigotry is actually correct)
 
Indeed, I should have mentioned that the positive dealings the west tends to have in the Middle east tend to do with oil...

So yeh, its pretty much the oil. Having a huge amount of the worlds oil can overcome all kinds of bigotry. (Though in Saudi Arabia's case, some of the bigotry is actually correct)
That of course assumes that the West routinely treats with Islamic countries in a bigoted way.
 
Indeed, I should have mentioned that the positive dealings the west tends to have in the Middle east tend to do with oil...
Perhaps western countries should build synthetic fuel plants like the Germans did in WWII -- then we wouldn't need so much imported oil. Americans should also change to more fuel-efficient cars.

The main reason IIRC why Americans are driving oversized gas-guzzlers is because the Big 3 in the US were forced to concentrated on such vehicles by their problems with legacy costs.
 

Don Grey

Banned
You know, I'm the one who's posted sources to back up most of my statements here...

Yeah sure you did just keep telling you self that. All you did was make assumption and claimes. Your sources along with claims have have been rebutled and refuted. All your doing and have been doing since the beggening has been regurgitating phrases and assumtions and claims as if they were self evident truths and expect people to buy into this. Your entire line of debate have been tried sevral times on the board and they have been rebutled and refuted accordingly i suggest using search function and come up with something knew. Because no one is going to waste there time with your tired old arguments.

And i liked that part about "Someone who is willing to publish estimates based on speculations and rumors and whose date is skewed towards his ethnicity doesn't really deserve to be called a historian, in my opinion. Propagandist would be a better word." in your post. If only you could apply this to your self and your sources. :rolleyes:
 
Yeah sure you did just keep telling you self that. All you did was make assumption and claimes. Your sources along with claims have have been rebutled and refuted. All your doing and have been doing since the beggening has been regurgitating phrases and assumtions and claims as if they were self evident truths and expect people to buy into this. Your entire line of debate have been tried sevral times on the board and they have been rebutled and refuted accordingly i suggest using search function and come up with something knew. Because no one is going to waste there time with your tired old arguments.

And i liked that part about "Someone who is willing to publish estimates based on speculations and rumors and whose date is skewed towards his ethnicity doesn't really deserve to be called a historian, in my opinion. Propagandist would be a better word." in your post. If only you could apply this to your self and your sources. :rolleyes:
None of my sources have been refuted. Most of them haven't been even addressed. And what's this ridiculous accusation of me spreading false estimates? Have you actually read the thread?
 
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