WHAT THE SULTAN SAW
By Matthew Kaminski

Opinion Journal, NJ
April 11 2006

Practicing a tolerant strain of Islam, the Ottomans clashed with
fundamentalists.

The Ottoman Empire passed into history in 1922, a mere lifetime ago.

Yet in a certain way it feels as distant as ancient Athens or Rome,
known to us mostly through architectural relics, a few striking events
and a mythical aura. Kemal Ataturk’s secular Turkish republic, the
empire’s successor state, consciously rejected much of the Ottoman
heritage and most of its traditions, while the empire’s colonial
outposts have reverted to the imperatives of their local identities.

Yet the religious aspect of the 9/11 attacks has made the Ottomans,
who led the Muslim world for half a millennium, topical again. The
sultans are famous for sacking Constantinople in the 15th century and
besieging Vienna in the 16th. Both events became symbols of Muslim
aggression against Christendom. And the “barbarian Turk” is still
a villain in the folklore of the empire’s northern reaches. Yet
such caricature fails to do justice to the remarkable Ottomans,
whose story is a corrective to the perceived wisdom that Islam is
inherently unable to reconcile itself with the West.

Caroline Finkel takes the title of her Ottoman history, “Osman’s
Dream,” from a founding myth, apparently invented in the 1500s, nearly
two centuries after the death of the first sultan, Osman. It was said
that one memorable night, Osman dreamed of a beautiful, enormous tree
growing from his navel, a tree whose shade “compassed the world,”
including distant mountains and mighty rivers. It was a tale heavy
with imperial symbolism, meant for a young state that, despite humble
beginnings, had come to dominate parts of Europe and would eventually
extend across northern Africa, including Egypt, through the Middle
East and eastward toward Persia. Osman’s tribe was, after all, only
one of many Turkomen groups that had ventured into Anatolia from
Central Asia and fought against other Muslims for supremacy.

The Ottomans first got Europe’s attention by conquering parts of
Byzantium, the eastern half of the Roman Empire and the protector
of the eastern Christian church. They went on to take the Balkan
peninsula and moved northward toward Hungary. Indeed, for much of
their history, the Ottomans were a notable European power–and not only
geographically. For all the empire’s exoticism, it was flexible enough,
as it spread across continents, to accommodate local laws and customs,
even local ideas and religions. Unlike many European states of the day,
the Ottoman regime was tolerant, multiracial and highly decentralized,
all apparent keys to its success. Jews and Christians weren’t forced
to mass convert, although many did in order to pursue a better career
or lower tax bill.

When Spain expelled its Jews in 1492, the Ottomans opened their arms.

“Can you call such a king”–i.e., Spain’s Ferdinand–“wise and
intelligent?” asked Sultan Bayezid at the time. “He is impoverishing
his country and enriching mine.” Even so, the Ottoman embrace was
limited. To take but one example: The Jews brought the printing press
to Ottoman lands from Spain and Portugal, but Sultan Bayezid II soon
made publishing a crime punishable by death. Only two centuries later,
during the so-called Tulip Age, when European influence was at its
height, did the Ottomans allow the printing of books in Arabic script.

Throughout the empire’s history, architecture expressed its blending
character. Ottoman mosques are decorative and warm by comparison with
those in Arab countries. They often resemble Christian churches,
which isn’t surprising, since Armenian architects designed a lot
of them. When Sultan Mehmed II captured the seat of the Orthodox
Christian church in Constantinople, the Hagia Sophia (the Church of
Holy Wisdom), he turned it into a mosque with only a few alterations.

Practicing a more tolerant strain of Islam, the Ottomans clashed
with fundamentalists, like the Wahhabi who rose up against them
on the Saudi peninsula in the 18th century. This conflict rages on
today in different forms. In the Balkans and now in Iraq, Saudi money
pays for the razing of Ottoman houses of worship. The zealots prefer
glass-and-steel mosques.

The peak of the Pax Ottomanica came in the 16th century under Suleyman
the Magnificent, who ruled, lest we forget, at the same time as
Britain’s Henry VIII and Russia’s Ivan the Terrible. He surpassed both
in the glories of his court, the arts of his culture and the extent
of his lands. Suleyman defied tradition in one crucial respect: He
fell in love with a slave girl, Hurrem, and had five sons by her; by
convention, concubines were to bear only one. When the sultan married
her, “Hurrem was accused of having bewitched him,” writes Ms. Finkel.

While the empire’s source of legitimacy was the Islamic caliphate in
Istanbul, religion played a fitful role in political life, just as
it did in Christian lands. Wars were justified as “holy” often after
the fact. At various times the French, British and Germans–even the
pope in Rome–stood with the Ottomans against Russia, the Hapsburgs
and the Poles. Such affiliations were built on the universal concept
of self-interest. Before joining the Axis powers in World War I, the
Ottoman rulers called for jihad against the Allies, but geopolitics
obviously had more to do with the alliance than religion.

Ms. Finkel describes the rise of the Ottomans in exhaustive detail,
and their fall, too. Financial trouble, internal strife, wayward
foreign ventures and rising local nationalism–all helped to hasten
the empire’s decline. Napoleon seized Egypt at the turn of the 19th
century. By the middle of it the Ottoman Empire was the “sick man of
Europe,” a phrase coined by Russia’s Nicholas I, who did his share
to enfeeble his own country, not least by leading Russia against the
Ottomans and courting defeat in the Crimean War.

One wishes that Ms. Finkel had taken up the hard questions about the
empire’s end. Was there a fatal flaw–imperial overreach, for example,
or the lack of a renaissance in the Ottomans’ intellectual culture? Was
there something in Islam itself, even the Ottoman version, that could
not adapt to modernity? Ms. Finkel does not say.

But her clear prose keeps the story going right up to the end, where
we get another surprise: After the Turks killed more than a million
Armenians in 1915–the number, the reason and the responsibility
are hotly debated to this day–the Ottoman powers investigated the
soldiers involved and started to put on “the first war crimes trials
in history.”

Ataturk put a quick stop to the trials, drawing a black line through
parts of the past after his new Turkish state was born in the
so-called 1921-22 war of independence (from whom, exactly?). Just
as the Ottomans replaced the turban with the fez in the late 1820s,
aiming to “Europeanize” their culture, Ataturk forced the brim-hat
on his people, to de-Islamicize his own. His experiment in social
engineering went well beyond clothing design.

Will Ataturk’s imperfect secular creation morph into a thriving
democracy or fail again to modernize itself? The jury is out. Yet in
no small part thanks to the remnants of the Ottoman heritage, it is
hard to think of a Muslim country that has a better chance than Turkey
of putting in place a modern economy and a liberal political order.

Mr. Kaminski is editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal
Europe. You can buy “Osman’s Dream” from the OpinionJournal bookstore.

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