(an addition to Toby’s post)
Picture used by the BBC to illustrate the British Empire :
Picture used by the BBC to illustrate the Ottoman Empire :
The ‘S-word’ is conspicuously absent from the Ottoman portrait, despite the importance of the institution to that empire.
Nice one Laban. They really are making it too easy, aren’t they?
May I suggest a mission statement for Biased BBC?
1. Find barrel of fish.
2. Shoot.
O/T:
I apologise in advance for the blatant “plug” but I’ve attempted to cover the current BBC News headline (on their website: Saddam “tortured by USA”) on my own page, if anyone is interested. No doubt it may also be covered here as well, but for once I managed to orchestrate my thoughts fairly quickly into a coherent post, so take a quick peek if you want to and then head straight back here! (Apologies again, but even the great Scott Burgess advises new bloggers to “get the word out” in one’s early days, so I thought I’d follow his advice). Cheers.
As someone else said: at least in the Soviet Union the propaganda was free. Here we are forced to pay for the privilage of having our history distorted.
The reason so many people have roots in other parts of the world is because of a delibrate policy of wide open borders, and has nothing to do with the empire.
Odd, isn’t it, that the BBC archive photo for the Ottomans (maybe the Blue Mosque or the Suleymaniye mosque) is a shameless rip-off of a Byzantine Christian cathedral? Now implying that the Ottomans did not have any of their own culture is not very PC! Hey, it’s even “racist”!
The BBC (state organ of infidel white imperialists) has to realise that we can all play it at its own game – and that way leads only to madness…
earlier today (about 850 am local, 1250 pm gmt), owen bennett-jones, i believe, (sp?) hosting newshour on world service radio, was chatting with someone about architecture and building a city from scratch in the meddle east.
during the chat types of architecture using more natural airconditioning and less dependent on energy consumption were being discussed, when owen piped in with something about using “islamic architecture”. now i think i’ve heard phrases such as ‘byzantine architecture’ and ‘persian’, and a couple of others, but…’islamic architecture’?
in keeping of this article, i think, i must ask: is there such a thing?
Wow, that description of the Ottoman empire must rate as one of the blandest most uninformative pieces of junk I have ever read.
Also my limited knowledge of Islamic philosophy and art places the high period at one to two centuries before the Ottomans, at a time when both Christians and Jews were given equal intellectual status.
Why does Newsnight’s “science correspondent” Susan Watts still have a job? IIRC she was exposed as rather useless by the Hutton enquiry, and she’s lightweight as a science reporter. This evening’s scaremongering piece ofg global warming a case in point — a lot of assertions about what “some scientists” think without the slightest critical analysis. You might as well have Greenpeace writing the news.
amimissingsomething
An interesting question. On one hand, “Islamic” architecture is over-inclusive, as it seeks to define an architecture by fixing its criterion on a religious system. On that basis, its use is, in a sense, orientalist (in the bad sense of the word).
Nevertheless, the term is frequently used in the art/architecture world and people tend to know what is meant – broadly the architecture of the Maghrib, the Middle East and Persia. Use does not necessarily make it correct, however, as you will note the problems with even the limited definition – what exactly do the Maghrib, the ME and Persia (a non-Arab culture) have to do with one another? What about the Turkic culture of Transoxania, and the Muslims of Indonesia and SE Asia?
It is a sloppy term but probably OK in (BBC) vernacular speech. However, I doubt whether a BBC-er would use the term “Christian” or “Hindu” architecture outside of the limited realm of religious buildings, and ceratainly they would not use it say of US or British secular city architecture, but for some reason it seems OK to use it monolithically in a secular sense when it is Islam.
Hmmmm…one rule for me, another rule for you.
Peregrine – they were never given equal status, but were always dhimmis.
Nevertheless, your broader point seems to be accepted. The Umayyad and earlier Abbasid (say c 9 to 12 – I don’t know what that is in AH years) flowering (that we are always having rammed down our throats since somehow what happened 700 years ago in the ME is a justification for today’s Islam being a “religion of peace” etc etc) leant heavily on the reception of Ancient Greek classics from Byzantium/Constantinople into the ME, where they were translated by Jews who spoke the relevant languages.
Muslim scholars then took up the bits in which they were interested – notably physical science and medicine, while much philosophy was neglected, as it conflicted with the koran. There was a limited opening when the Naturalists (? memory rusty here) started reading and discussing Plato, but this was suppressed in the great Islamic intellectual hardening of the 1300s, when the flower of classical Islamic Arab civilsation died.
Nasr’s Science and Civilisation in Islam is a good start (although slightly technical).
(cont) There is a real debate whether the Ottomans really were that much of a high period – they did coincidentally start to decline immediately as Europe started to take off after the Reformation and Counter-Reformation, and the Enlightenment helped to destroy them (I am aware of the arguments for a high mediaeval European renaissance, but that did seem localised).
Lewis’s fundamental point seems to be that because the Ottomans lacked a free European-style private sector (he posits the famous parable of the division of god and Caesar as the European secret, whereas, as he says, in Islam god is Casear, and in China, caesar is god) as the wellspring of European borrowing and improvement of the inventions of other cultures. The Ottomans would borrow European technology and advisers every 50 years or so, but lacking experimentation and innovation (Innis would class them as an empire of space rather than time), the imports just stultified until the next defeat of the Ottomans by the Europeans with new inventions started off a whole new round of borrowing and stultification (the parallels to the moden Arab world are intriguing).
The Ottomans only lasted as long as they did because individual European states had a vested interest in keeping it alive as a counterweight to other European in their own diplomacy.
Toby,
The Ummayads came before the Abbasids. They were actually overthrown in a bloody coup by the Abbasids. One of the Umms. escaped the massacre and established a separate caliphate in Spain.
Apols if unclear – I was using “Umayyad and earlier Abbasid” im chrono order!
Sorry, it sounded like you meant the Abbasids came “earlier.”
Now I see what you mean – I was trying to separate earlier Abbasid from later Abbasid, when the intellectual suppression really seemed to have got underway.
toby:
thanks for that
i was indeed partially motivated to write originally because i too have never heard much of christian architecture – or art, outside of “religious art” ie with a religious and christian theme.
so indeed, do we have christian chemistry, biology etc (almost used the expression “christian science”, but that’s taken!)
and yes, i have heard a speech on “islamic science”
in any event, although i take the point about usage, could anyone tell me exactly what aspect of islam is featured in islamic architecture?
um, i think my last question may be rhetorical – don’t want to go rambling off topic