The Ottoman Empire

The fascinating history of the Ottoman Empire is the subject of a new BBC series fronted by Rageh Omaar. The title of the series tries to sneak in a rather contentious point as a given – Europe’s Muslim Emperors. Some mistake, surely? While large swathes of Europe did fall under Ottoman rule, for centuries this rule was deeply resented, and the powers of Europe, or at least most of them, did their best to expel the invader. Even if the Ottoman Turks may have ruled parts of Europe, their civilisation was not European, but Asiatic. As someone once said: “Turkey has always represented a different continent, in permanent contrast to Europe.” It would make sense to describe the Turkish Sultans not as European, but anti-European.

To be fair, the programme did not gloss over the reasons for Turkish difference. The Ottoman Empire (let us not forget the origins of Turkic peoples in central Asia) had more in common with the Chinese Empire than the Roman. The Topkapi Palace in Istanbul bore more than a passing resemblance to the Forbidden City: both were the preserves of eunuchs and concubines. But the Turkish system was far more ruthless than the Chinese. The concubines were all slaves, and because it was forbidden to enslave one’s fellow Muslims, they were Christians who were enslaved and then forcibly converted to Islam.

As for the civil servants and soldiers of the Empire, they were Christian boys, taken from their homes and converted to Islam by being forcibly circumcised. True, some of these orphans had glittering careers, but this should not disguise the cruelty of the system. This levy, known as the devsirme, carried on until the beginning of the 18th century. This way of recruiting members of the privileged caste, rather than relying on noble families, or feudal loyalties, as in Europe, must have been one of the reasons why the Ottomans were so successful in the short term. There were no better fighters than these traumatised boys, when they grew up. But in the long run one suspects that this practice must have been one of the reasons why the Empire declined so markedly from the late seventeenth century onwards. Cruelty is never a good policy.

The same may well have been true of the dynasty. As a male line the Ottomans endured for centuries, thanks to polygamy, but this came at a high price. The concubines were chosen for their beauty alone, and the claustrophobic atmosphere of the harem was hardly healthy. The death rate among the children these women bore the Sultan was high, perhaps due to poor sanitation, and each reign ended with a massacre of all the new Sultan’s brothers, as possible rivals were eliminated. Mehmed III had nineteen of his half-brothers killed on his accession in 1595. Many of the later Sultans were idle, or half-witted, or both, and quite dominated by their mothers. The later Sultans hardly ever left Istanbul, or indeed the walls of their places. One only has to read the later history of the Ottoman court to realise that polygamy is a very bad thing indeed.

The Ottomans also perfected a divide and rule approach to their subject peoples; they were allowed a certain degree of freedom in return for tribute, and the head of each confessional community would be held accountable for misbehaviour. Hence the hanging of the Orthodox Patriarch Gregory V from his own gateway on Easter Sunday 1821, because he was blamed for the Greek revolt of that year. This sort of multi-culturalism has won a few politically correct admirers in our own times, but it has to be remembered that there was a steady stream of converts to Islam throughout the Balkans, as people wished to evade the tax on non-Muslims, as well as having their sons taken away from them.

And it should not be forgotten that the subject peoples turned against their Turkish overlords in the end; and that the Turks themselves resorted to ethnic cleansing in Anatolia in 1915, massacring one million Armenians. As a multicultural experiment, the Ottoman Empire ended very badly indeed.
It should not be surprising therefore that even today, as the programme made clear, people in the Balkans and Greece regard the Ottoman era as anything but a golden age. Ottoman domination imposed three hundred years of stagnation and decline on parts of the Balkans, and some countries are still perhaps paying a high price for Ottoman rule. This is not to say that Istanbul is not one of the world’s most beautiful and fascinating cities, or that the Turks of today are not charming people. But Mustafa Kemal, who founded modern Turkey, was right, surely, to break with the past, and to reject the Empire and the Ottoman identity so comprehensively. It will be interesting to see how Rageh Omaar deals with that.

http://www.catholicherald.co.uk/commentandblogs/2013/10/09/the-ottoman-empire-may-have-ruled-parts-of-europe-but-its-sultans-were-anti-european/

Islamic Public Spaces..

In a response to a discussion on Religion (Islam) in Urban Public Spaces; launched on Linked-in by Nadia Qureshi; Architect, Urban Planner and Urban Designer, Pakistan

I would like your comments on the said topic. You can look at it from any point of view. To guide the discussion, i have raised a few questions.
Do religious beliefs and practices change the way that public spaces are designed and used in Muslim countries?
How is the meaning of a public space interpreted in Religious countries?
Can public spaces remain inclusive (i.e. include people from other reliogions, male female, etc) and lively?
Does urbanization effect the construction of (sacred) places or religious practices in a city within a religious country?
How can urbanization and the design of good public spaces be used as a tool to fight extremism in religious countries?
 

http://www.linkedin.com/groupItem?view=&srchtype=discussedNews&gid=69691&item=235094718&type=member&trk=eml-anet_dig-b-pop_ttl-hdp&ut=1D_aa1f7LjGlI1

 

 

 

The public do not draw public spaces, but get inspired by.. This is a role; which often goes reversed.. The global noise on democracy and rights of expression had confused many urban planner and city managers; who perform in response to public trends and likeliness.. Yes, people should have a say in issues that materialize their life, but when it comes to spiritual and inspiration, people inevitably look around for leaders of thought, and leaders of actions.. Public spaces in all cities were not a demand of the public, but ideas had the strength and resilience of their inventors; whom often are politicians and public servants.. Even today, the massiveness of Kazakh or Chechen capitals were decisions made by leaders not by any public visionaries..

Therefore, religions, as correctly commented earlier are personal packages, not a public one.. Therefore, their implications on drawing the public spaces is supposedly limited.. If the community is driven by totality or suppressive ruling powers, which would happen to be religious; then we have an issue to define.. Nevertheless, urban outcomes from such authorities will be in parallel to the local taste of religion rather than the overall mythical or theological concepts..

Practically speaking; the Malls in Western Christian cities are political rather than religious, except in some old cities, where were part of public media and influences.. The Courts in Islamic cities are mostly deserteous, without soft landscape, except in equatorial cities and Spain.. In both examples, funds, acquisitions and authorities were not short.. In both examples, the phenomenon has little to do with public orientation, as was mostly inspired, planned and maintained by managers.. Yet, the implications of public characteristics of discipline, aesthetics and coherence are notable and dominating..

This will eventually takes us back to the most critical elements of the urban business: Training and Governance..

How far both Urban Planners and Designers are well-trained to deliver the intended service.. Is it only a degree with some graphic skills, or true competences to define, innovate and deliver a better built environment for living..

How the Civic Bodies are functioning and truly in-command.. Are they sincere obedient to politicians in-powers who would instruct “stupid” changes to meet their personal favorites, interests and benefits.. or they have their independent and “public” powers to support the righteousness..

A great dilemmas; which are not Islamic, nor un-Islamic.. it is life..
Thanks for the inspiring discussion..

Human Sexuality and Religious Norms

Regretfully, very few, or none, Muslim writings of the Sex topic.. Muslims, driven not only by Scriptures, but with traditional Arabic moralities as well, had shied away from speaking out in comfortable details about the subject.. Muslim Sufis, in their own confusing terms, had linked the term to divine wisdom or sacred secret..


However, I believe that our Humane Civilization is losing without the Muslim contributions, which would add lots of energetic concepts for the common understanding.. and goodness..

  Sacred Sex? Social progressives may hold out hope that religious conservatives will one day appreciate sex as something good outside the hard and fast rules of their religion.
This article originally appeared on The League of Ordinary Gentlemen / by Kyle Cupp.

Decades after the sexual revolution, many religious conservatives remain fiercely committed to preaching, if not always living, an absolute and absolutist understanding of human sexuality. Mainstream biologists, psychologists and sociologists, building on the science of evolution and other modern advancements of understanding, have helped redefine the meaning of normal when it comes to sex, moving mountains so to speak, and yet these religious conservative retain a rule-heavy belief about who should and shouldn’t be having sex and how sex ought always to be done by those morally permitted to get down to business. In word, if not always in every deed, they morally reject sex before marriage, entertaining lustful thoughts, masturbation, fornication, cohabitation, homosexuality, and pornography. They stand athwart the new normal yelling “Sin!”

Social progressives may hold out hope that these religious conservatives will one day appreciate sex as something good outside the hard and fast rules of their religion. I think this change unlikely because it would take a fundamental paradigm shift. Conservative Christians, for example, view human sexuality principally as a sacred reality. In a number of moral theologies, God designed human sexuality for the purpose of procreation, and commanded all human beings, from Adam and Eve onward, to be fruitful and multiply, engaging in sex strictly in accordance with the order of the divine plan. St. Thomas Aquinas argued this philosophically, concluding that every emission of semen, ordered in such a way that generation cannot follow, is contrary to the good and nature of man, and if done deliberately, a sin. Every sexual act must, in principle, follow a form that is open to life, whether or not the couple’s union is fertile, infertile, or sterile. To engage in sex in any way contrary to the good, human nature, and God’s design makes the person or persons involved arbiters of God’s plan, manipulators of something holy, grave sinners. They are not to take control of their sexuality, but control their appetites and behaviors in keeping with a strict religious meaning of sexuality to which is owed devotion and obedience. The giver of the gift of sex makes the rules, and they must follow these norms.

It should be noted that some religious conservatives will, in addition to approaching the reality of human sexuality from a theological position, also strive to understand its meaning from the standpoints of science, philosophy, and culture. They may accept that human sexuality is the result of millions of years of evolution, but—and this is key—they will interpret this evolutionary meaning in light of their religious doctrine. Where evolution may suggest a fluid meaning to sexuality, this meaning will be understood within the framework of the God-given morally-absolute meaning. All inquiry here will begin and end within the religious sphere, even if detours are taken into the sciences.

So long as these religious conservatives begin their understanding of human sexuality on the premises of revelation, they’ll not change on the basics. To make such change would indicate that the meanings of sex and of revelation are not truly fixed. What we might see in time is some of these religious conservatives changing the starting point of their approach to sex and sexual norms from religious premises to secular ones, beginning, for example, without the assumption that human sexuality has an immutable divinely-given meaning, but rather a fluid evolutionary one. Were this road to be taken, while religion retained, the statements in revelation pertaining to sex would have to be reinterpreted so as to be taken less literally. The theologies of God’s providence over human procreation would need to be rethought. In this context, a sexual revolution would necessitate a religious revolution. We’re unlikely to witness such a sweeping change, especially given the position of religious conservatives, who stand not passively against the waves of secularism, but seek actively to turn the tide and win converts to their cause.

Kyle Cupp is a freelance writer who blogs about culture, philosophy, politics, postmodernism, and religion. He is a contributor to the group Catholic blog Vox Nova. Kyle lives with his wife, son, and daughter in North Texas. Follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

http://mysticpolitics.com/sacred-sex-human-sexuality-and-religious-norms/

Prayers..

Certainly, coming from the same Source..