The Ottoman empire, but not Japan, joins the global north.

Why where Turks (and presumably other muslim ethnic groups) so uneducated compared to their Christian peers?

Of the Ottoman Madrasa, as elsewhere, the main goal was teaching, and memorizing, the Koran.
Writing and Arithmetic were secondary.
Then the memorization of Hadith. Once into the teens, other scholarly fields could be researched, but mostly into more study on the religious works and hiw they relat to Sunni Law. Church and State were/are inseparable under Islam.

But there were also Madrasas that specialized in the natural sciences and math and medicine, so don't go thinking it was totally fundamentalist.

But as the empire expanded, the creation of new Madrasa was all on the local leadership, and the science and philosophy based courses did not expand outwards much after the 16th Century and existing ones declined in importance as funding was haphazard.
 
Why where Turks (and presumably other muslim ethnic groups) so uneducated compared to their Christian peers?
Because the cornerstone of Islamic education revolves around memorizing Islamic texts...which are in Arabic. So in a way, even the Arabs of the Ottoman Empire were better off because they could at least understand what they were memorizing!

But there were also Madrasas that specialized in the natural sciences and math and medicine, so don't go thinking it was totally fundamentalist.
Yes, I may be over-simplifying it a little. There are a variety of reasons for the lack of educational reform in the Ottoman Empire, but I think the overall reason is that the Sublime Porte had good reasons NOT to reform it (diverse population is easier to govern if they are uneducated) until they realized they needed to, by which time it was too late. However, the Islamic clerical bureaucracy was perceived a massive impediment, hence the swing to secularism under Ataturk.
 
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Of the Ottoman Madrasa, as elsewhere, the main goal was teaching, and memorizing, the Koran.
Writing and Arithmetic were secondary.
Then the memorization of Hadith. Once into the teens, other scholarly fields could be researched, but mostly into more study on the religious works and hiw they relat to Sunni Law. Church and State were/are inseparable under Islam.

Because the cornerstone of Islamic education revolves around memorizing Islamic texts...which are in Arabic. So in a way, even the Arabs of the Ottoman Empire were better off because they could at least understand what they were memorizing!
So how come Christians, in the Ottoman empire or in european nations, didnt have the same problem of only learning the bible?
 
Maybe as population density increases in Syria, Iraq and Anitolia via railroads, modern medicine, etc they can eventually become factory suitable?

Well, they did OTL, just after the Ottoman period.

Why where Turks (and presumably other muslim ethnic groups) so uneducated compared to their Christian peers?

Bad timing and bad geography is the main reason I think.

I go into more detail below.

Writing and Arithmetic were secondary.
Then the memorization of Hadith. Once into the teens, other scholarly fields could be researched, but mostly into more study on the religious works and hiw they relat to Sunni Law. Church and State were/are inseparable under Islam.

And Oxford was until relatively recently Catholics/then Anglicans only and the vast majority of courses taught were theology of some kind.

The whole concept of what a country was and how the monarchy worked in Christian Europe was deeply entwined with Christianity. Even today, many ideas that we take for granted are based on foundations that have as an integral part medieval Christian ideas and assumptions. We in the West are so used to them that we rarely even realize they are there. (And for that matter, we have Roman religious concepts down there in the foundations - as did the Ottoman Empire. So it's not like either Christianity or Islam are special in the way they become integral in how certain things are shaped.)

So up until about 1600 the Christian and Muslim worlds weren't that different. I think where things change is that Christianity has an extremely violent schism during the Protestant reformation, which got thinkers looking for other options. There's not really anything quite as bad in Muslim history, and the Sunni-Shia split only gets real bad fairly recently in history. And there's a flood of resources into Christian civilization from plundering the Americas, especially plundering them of useful food crops that can allow European peasants to grow more food. And that of course means that at a time people are having questions there are new resources that can fund seeking answers to those questions so new universities that are much less theological and much more philosophical (and eventually technical universities) start popping up.

So Europe had been shaken up, but populations and resources are rising, but in the Middle East, something really bad happens (probably disease, but as I've said before, we don't really know) so resources contract extremely sharply just as Europe is starting to boom. In the Persian empire, the disaster is so bad that the clergy and their informal advice networks are quite literally the only pillar of civilization left standing, so in the 19th Century the advice networks congeal into one of the most hierarchical clergies on the planet. While people might be having questions, resources are contracting and Madrasas are closing or are being turned into hollow shells by corruption (which can't be fought as well because there are less resources for that too). By the time the Ottomans and Persians are starting to recover, they can't, because Europe is now so much further ahead that they are pushing into even places that enjoyed a prosperous 18th Century like China.

fasquardon
 
So Europe had been shaken up, but populations and resources are rising, but in the Middle East, something really bad happens (probably disease, but as I've said before, we don't really know) so resources contract extremely sharply just as Europe is starting to boom. In the Persian empire, the disaster is so bad that the clergy and their informal advice networks are quite literally the only pillar of civilization left standing, so in the 19th Century the advice networks congeal into one of the most hierarchical clergies on the planet. While people might be having questions, resources are contracting and Madrasas are closing or are being turned into hollow shells by corruption (which can't be fought as well because there are less resources for that too). By the time the Ottomans and Persians are starting to recover, they can't, because Europe is now so much further ahead that they are pushing into even places that enjoyed a prosperous 18th Century like China.
So how can we change it so that the Muslim world (or at least Ottomans and Persia) prosper to the same level as Europe.
 
I think where things change is that Christianity has an extremely violent schism during the Protestant reformation, which got thinkers looking for other options.
While Europe had a Reformation, and counter-Reformation, the same played out in th Islamic World, but their Counter-Reformation was far more successful, so what was acceptable in al-Andalus in the 15thC would now be considered Heretical due to Islam's near built in aniconism, that as a rough guide, the farther you were from the Holy Land, the more of it appeared, like in Spain, India, and even Turkey.

The other difference, was that Secular Law and Holy Law were quite separate in Europe, again baked in from the end of the Roman empire in European areas. Very rare to get a Becket/Henry II type standoff in Islamic Countries. The Pope didn't have the power of the Caliph in most cases.
 
So how come Christians, in the Ottoman empire or in european nations, didnt have the same problem of only learning the bible?

Learning from, but not memorizing the 4thC Latin Vulgate, or earlier Greek editions verbatim as with the Koran, the exact Word of God, in Arabic.

King James popped that cork, Bibles in all local languages thereafter
 
but in the Middle East, something really bad happens (probably disease, but as I've said before, we don't really know)
Black Death, Getting stomped flat by the Mongols didn't help, leaving the Safavids pretty weak against the growing power of the Ottomans
 
Wait, so if these catestrophic events like certain wars retarded development in the Ottoman empire so much, how come this didnt happen to other European nations as much? They faught hundreds upon hundreds of destructive wars among themselves yet they all still developed in the end.
 
Wait, so if these catestrophic events like certain wars retarded development in the Ottoman empire so much, how come this didnt happen to other European nations as much? They faught hundreds upon hundreds of destructive wars among themselves yet they all still developed in the end.
That's not really true. Spain certainly didn't develop along the lines of Britain, nor did Italy, and certainly not Poland or Russia. Hell, even Germany had a good deal of trouble making common appliances affordable to the common people. Until the late 19th century, Scandinavia was an extremely impoverished region.

There are many theories as to how a country develops so if I listed one, someone would probably disagree with it. But if you're looking for reasons as to why the Ottoman Empire fell behind towards the end of its existence, I would not go all the way back to the Mongols and the Black Death. The truth is, the Ottoman Empire was relatively developed by the West's standards until the mid-late 1700s. However, strength =/= development, as Russia clearly demonstrated. The Ottoman Empire simply lost its strength, which turned its peculiar structural weaknesses (which every country has) into major obstacles. In the end, the Ottoman Empire was knocked down...but not without considerable difficulty.

Every country that sticks around long enough needs to reform every now and then. Sometimes the barriers to reform are too great, such as a powerful bureaucracy or landowning aristocracy, and the country eventually falls as a result. It's the way of the world.
 
Black Death, Getting stomped flat by the Mongols didn't help, leaving the Safavids pretty weak against the growing power of the Ottomans

None of those happened in the 18th Century, so no, that's not why populations seem to halve in that region between the last data we have in the 17th Century and the first data we have in the 18th Century.

Learning from, but not memorizing the 4thC Latin Vulgate, or earlier Greek editions verbatim as with the Koran, the exact Word of God, in Arabic.

King James popped that cork, Bibles in all local languages thereafter

Hm. I would have sworn that memorizing the Bible was pretty important. As one would expect in a time where books were rare and expensive and for people to have equal access to scripture there needed to be a strong oral tradition...

While Europe had a Reformation, and counter-Reformation, the same played out in th Islamic World, but their Counter-Reformation was far more successful, so what was acceptable in al-Andalus in the 15thC would now be considered Heretical due to Islam's near built in aniconism, that as a rough guide, the farther you were from the Holy Land, the more of it appeared, like in Spain, India, and even Turkey.

So what event are you calling the "Muslim counter-reformation" here? I'm not strong on this period outside the Ottoman region, so I a wondering if I missed some major event...

That's not really true. Spain certainly didn't develop along the lines of Britain, nor did Italy, and certainly not Poland or Russia. Hell, even Germany had a good deal of trouble making common appliances affordable to the common people. Until the late 19th century, Scandinavia was an extremely impoverished region.

There are many theories as to how a country develops so if I listed one, someone would probably disagree with it. But if you're looking for reasons as to why the Ottoman Empire fell behind towards the end of its existence, I would not go all the way back to the Mongols and the Black Death. The truth is, the Ottoman Empire was relatively developed by the West's standards until the mid-late 1700s. However, strength =/= development, as Russia clearly demonstrated. The Ottoman Empire simply lost its strength, which turned its peculiar structural weaknesses (which every country has) into major obstacles. In the end, the Ottoman Empire was knocked down...but not without considerable difficulty.

Every country that sticks around long enough needs to reform every now and then. Sometimes the barriers to reform are too great, such as a powerful bureaucracy or landowning aristocracy, and the country eventually falls as a result. It's the way of the world.

For sure. And if the Ottoman Empire had survived to this day, it would be doomed to collapse in that ATL's future. States and empires have life-cycles and all that are born must die.

fasquardon
 
That's not really true. Spain certainly didn't develop along the lines of Britain, nor did Italy, and certainly not Poland or Russia. Hell, even Germany had a good deal of trouble making common appliances affordable to the common people. Until the late 19th century, Scandinavia was an extremely impoverished region.
I mean, living standards and other development metrics in most European countries are higher than Turkey now. In fact Turkey is near the bottom save a few small balkan countries.

And compare the worst European country (Moldova) to the former ottoman region. Iraq, Syria and Lebanon are all FAR worse places to live than even Moldova. Also, look at the difference in war recovery. Former Yugoslavia has recovered from the war in the 90s far better than the Arab nations have from their wars. Iraq and Libya remain broken countries even today.
 
I mean, living standards and other development metrics in most European countries are higher than Turkey now. In fact Turkey is near the bottom save a few small balkan countries.

And compare the worst European country (Moldova) to the former ottoman region. Iraq, Syria and Lebanon are all FAR worse places to live than even Moldova. Also, look at the difference in war recovery. Former Yugoslavia has recovered from the war in the 90s far better than the Arab nations have from their wars. Iraq and Libya remain broken countries even today.

Moldova IS part of the former Ottoman region. Taken by the Turks in 1484 and annexed by the Russians in 1812.

And has Serbia recovered that well from its wars? My Serbian friends certainly don't tell me good things about how things are going and looking up the gdp/capita of Serbia, Egypt, Turkey and Tunisia, well, the graphs all look fairly similar in that all these economies have endured recent periods of stagnation after a period of rapid growth in the first years of this century. Croatia however has performed even worse in proportionate terms. (I note that comparing these countries to two countries outside of the former Ottoman frontier, they all look good compared to Italy and Spain, who have in proportionate terms lost much more GDP/capita, though they of course remain much more wealthy.)

Certainly, a cursory glance at Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian economic metrics, they don't look that different to the performance of Bulgaria or Romania. So perhaps by that metric they have recovered. But neither are they very different from the metrics of Tunisia, so I don't see how they are doing better either...

As for the places where there is violence keeping countries broken (so in the Ottoman region, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Iraq) these countries remain broken because of a confluence of domestic and international factors that would make an oozing sore out of any region in the world. I would draw a comparison to the situation in Vietnam during that country's long road to independence. Or take an example in the wealthy world: Northern Ireland is a rich region compared to the world average, and yet for decades was locked in a state of simmering violence.

fasquardon
 
Certainly, a cursory glance at Serbian, Bosnian and Croatian economic metrics, they don't look that different to the performance of Bulgaria or Romania. So perhaps by that metric they have recovered. But neither are they very different from the metrics of Tunisia, so I don't see how they are doing better either...

As for the places where there is violence keeping countries broken (so in the Ottoman region, Libya, Syria, Yemen and Iraq) these countries remain broken because of a confluence of domestic and international factors that would make an oozing sore out of any region in the world. I would draw a comparison to the situation in Vietnam during that country's long road to independence. Or take an example in the wealthy world: Northern Ireland is a rich region compared to the world average, and yet for decades was locked in a state of simmering violence.
I mean, Croatia has recovered enough to join the EU, and Serbia is an official candidate if I recall correctly. Despite the hardships they face, all the basic state institutions still function normally.

Also, I dont think Vietnam and northern Ireland are good examples. The war in Vietnam has ended and the country is doing relatively well. Also the violence in northern ireland has also dwindled to very low levels as of now (well, Brexit may change things). If you look at Libya on the other hand, even after the civil war officially ended, the country today remains under developed and rife with violence. The governments of these countries are often unable to carry out basic functions.
 
I mean, Croatia has recovered enough to join the EU, and Serbia is an official candidate if I recall correctly.

What does joining the EU have to do with recovering from war exactly?

Western Europe took until some point in the 80s to recover from WW2 (as in, they were still playing catch-up from the economic damage). If you remember, the EU is a little older than that. A country doesn't need to be recovered from war to join.

Despite the hardships they face, all the basic state institutions still function normally.

Um. Most of the rest of the former Ottoman Empire has functioning state institutions.

Also, I dont think Vietnam and northern Ireland are good examples. The war in Vietnam has ended and the country is doing relatively well. Also the violence in northern ireland has also dwindled to very low levels as of now (well, Brexit may change things). If you look at Libya on the other hand, even after the civil war officially ended, the country today remains under developed and rife with violence. The governments of these countries are often unable to carry out basic functions.

Well sure, the war in Vietnam and Northern Ireland started much earlier, so it's no surprise they are over (for now, we'll see what happens in Northern Ireland). Keep in mind that the violence in Indochina goes from September of 1940 to September of 1989 - almost 50 years. In Northern Ireland, "The Troubles" either start in 1968 or 1969 (when Britain deployed the army in Northern Ireland) and ended in 1998 Either 29 or 30 years. Libya's civil war started in 2014, Syria's in 2011. As far as being oozing sores of conflict, both are relatively young.

Indeed, of all the current conflicts in the former Ottoman region, it is Yemen that goes back the furthest.

But the factors that led to the violence in Indochina and Northern Ireland being so protracted are much the same as those that are making the violence in Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Libya so protracted and seemingly insoluble.

fasquardon
 
None of those happened in the 18th Century, so no, that's not why populations seem to halve in that region between the last data we have in the 17th Century and the first data we have in the 18th Century.
not direct cause, but the infrastructure wrecked then in some areas had not really every been repaired when the British moved in.

So without that, they were far more likely to stay in the boom and bust population cycles, and the Ottomans left most improvements to the local governance, who chose to keep the wealth for themselves.


Hm. I would have sworn that memorizing the Bible was pretty important. As one would expect in a time where books were rare and expensive and for people to have equal access to scripture there needed to be a strong oral tradition...

The European Plebes and Serfs had just as much chance of understanding the Latin Liturgy as if it was done in Arabic.
The Nobles/Wealthy got to send their middle sons who had little chance of inheriting anything off to the Church for education, who would have a chance to learn to read and write. Islam, OTOH, had a Hadith that all Believers should try to be educated, so Islam had an advantage with their Madrasas for education until the Renaissance.

Access to scripture was from the local Clergy, they had the monopoly on that. doing otherwise made you a Heretic for going outside the Church.
Memorizing Bible cover to cover was for Monks and the most devout Clergy, never the common man

So what event are you calling the "Muslim counter-reformation" here? I'm not strong on this period outside the Ottoman region, so I a wondering if I missed some major event...

Nothing as dramatic as nailing parchment to a Door here. It started as the Ottomans wiped out the Byzantines and Spain was lost. Western Islamic Culture began to ossifly
 
What does joining the EU have to do with recovering from war exactly?

Western Europe took until some point in the 80s to recover from WW2 (as in, they were still playing catch-up from the economic damage). If you remember, the EU is a little older than that. A country doesn't need to be recovered from war to join.
Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't a country need a certain level of economic development to enter the EU?
 
Correct me if I'm wrong but doesn't a country need a certain level of economic development to enter the EU?

Sure, but that level of development doesn't have very much to do with a country's degree of recovery from war.

Like, a rich country may be playing catch-up and still be richer than a poor country that hasn't suffered any war damage at all.

Nothing as dramatic as nailing parchment to a Door here. It started as the Ottomans wiped out the Byzantines and Spain was lost. Western Islamic Culture began to ossifly

OK, I know what you mean now. But I don't think the counter-reformation is at all an appropriate comparison.

The European Plebes and Serfs had just as much chance of understanding the Latin Liturgy as if it was done in Arabic.

Yeah, that's a fair point.

not direct cause, but the infrastructure wrecked then in some areas had not really every been repaired when the British moved in.

Well, sure. But that's damage inflicted in pre-Ottoman times that hadn't been fixed at the time the Ottomans fell. So how's the damage really relevant to the rise and fall of the Ottomans?

So without that, they were far more likely to stay in the boom and bust population cycles, and the Ottomans left most improvements to the local governance, who chose to keep the wealth for themselves.

Most countries left improvements to local governance, until the 20th Century, I'd say that was pretty normal. So the question then is whether the Ottoman local governance was especially corrupt and if so why this was?

And if the Ottomans had more of a corruption issue than their neighbours (which they may well have had, but I have never seen that really measured) did that owe much to what the Mongols had done? Personally, I think the Mongol invasions would be a relatively small contributing factor to Ottoman corruption in the 18th Century.

fasquardon
 
So, taking this all into account, would it be possible for birth rates in the empire to match those of European countries? And for the empire to be a destination rather than source of immigrants?
 
The Ottoman Empire never joins the First World War, remaining neutral.

This may be ASB, but keep in mind that there were two fronts in the Ottoman political sphere in 1915; war-hawks and pacifists. Instead of the war-hawks winning out, the pacifists become the frontrunners in the war effort and the Ottoman Empire never declares war on Russia and Britain. This leads to a steady rise in industrialization in the Ottoman Empire following the war; it serves as a middle eastern blockade against Communism in the Cold War and is invested in by the USA and the UK and is industrialized by 1960-1970-ish.

Following Meiji's death, Japan is shook; the death of their great Emperor, the one who delivered them into the modern age and saved them from the Shogunate, is dead! And then, soon after, Yoshihito, his son, dies as well.
 
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