Instruct: Given a question, retrieve documents that can help answer the question.
Query: Was the Ottoman Empire primarily Islamic?
Islam was the official religion of the Ottoman Empire. The highest position in Islam, caliphate, was claimed by the sultan, after the defeat of the Mamluks which was established as Ottoman Caliphate. The Sultan was to be a devout Muslim and was given the literal authority of the Caliph. Additionally, Sunni clerics had tremendous influence over government and their authority was central to the regulation of the economy. Despite all this, the Sultan also had a right to decree, enforcing a code called Kanun (law) in Turkish. Additionally, there was a supreme clerical position called the Sheykhulislam ("Sheykh of Islam" in Arabic). Minorities, particularly Christians and Jews but also some others, were mandated to pay the jizya, the poll tax as mandated by traditional Islam.
According to historian Warren Dockter, Churchill wrote this during a time of a fundamentalist revolt in Sudan and this statement does not reflect his full view of Islam, which were "often paradoxical and complex." He could be critical but at times "romanticized" the Islamic world; he exhibited great "respect, understanding and magnanimity." Churchill had a fascination of Islam and Islamic civilization. Winston Churchill's future sister-in-law expressed concerns about his fascination by stating, "[p]lease don't become converted to Islam; I have noticed in your disposition a tendency to orientalism." According to historian Warren Dockter, however, he "never seriously considered converting". He primarily admired its martial aspects, the "Ottoman Empire’s history of territorial expansion and military acumen", to the extent that in 1897 he wished to fight for the Ottoman Empire. According to Dockter, this was largely for his "lust for glory". Based on Churchill's letters, he seemed to regard Islam and Christianity as equals.
In 1938 the Austrian historian Paul Wittek published an influential work entitled The Rise of the Ottoman Empire, in which he put forth the argument that the early Ottoman state was constructed upon an ideology of Islamic holy war against non-Muslims. Such a war was known as gaza, and a warrior fighting in it was called a gazi.[22] Wittek's formulation, subsequently known as the "Gaza Thesis," was influential for much of the twentieth century, and led historians to portray the early Ottomans as zealous religious warriors dedicated to the spread of Islam. Beginning in the 1980s, historians increasingly began to criticize Wittek's thesis.[23] Scholars now recognize that the terms gaza and gazi did not have strictly religious connotations for the early Ottomans, and were often used in a secular sense to simply refer to raids.[24] Additionally, the early Ottomans were neither strict orthodox Muslims nor were they unwilling to cooperate with non-Muslims, and several of the companions of the first Ottoman rulers were either non-Muslims or recent converts.[25] The idea of holy war existed during the fourteenth century, but it was only one out of many factors influencing Ottoman behavior. It was only later, in the fifteenth century, that Ottoman writers retroactively began to portray the early Ottomans as zealous Islamic warriors, in order to provide a noble origin for their dynasty which had by then constructed an intercontinental Islamic empire.[26]
Ottoman Islamic standards of toleration allowed for autonomous "nations" ("millets") in the Empire, under their own personal law and under the rule of their own religious leaders. As a result, vast areas of the Balkans remained mostly Christian during the period of Ottoman domination. In fact, the Eastern Orthodox Churches had a higher position in the Ottoman Empire, mainly because the Patriarch resided in Istanbul and was an officer of the Ottoman Empire. In contrast, Roman Catholics, while tolerated, were suspected of loyalty to a foreign power (the Papacy). It is no surprise that the Roman Catholic areas of Bosnia, Kosovo and northern Albania, ended up with more substantial conversions to Islam. The defeat of the Ottomans in 1699 by the Austrians resulted in their loss of Hungary and present-day Croatia. The remaining Muslim converts in both elected to leave "lands of unbelief" and moved to territory still under the Ottomans. Around this point in time, new European ideas of romantic nationalism started to seep into the Empire, and provided the intellectual foundation for new nationalistic ideologies and the reinforcement of the self-image of many Christian groups as subjugated peoples.
As a rule, the Ottomans did not require followers of Greek Orthodoxy to become Muslims, although many did so in order to avert the socioeconomic hardships of Ottoman rule 
One by one, the Balkan nationalities asserted their independence from the Empire, and frequently the presence of members of the same ethnicity who had converted to Islam presented a problem from the point of view of the now dominant new national ideology, which narrowly defined the nation as members of the local dominant Orthodox Christian denomination. Some Muslims in the Balkans chose to leave, while many others were forcefully expelled to what was left of the Ottoman Empire. This demographic transition can be illustrated by the decrease in the number of mosques in Belgrade, from over 70 in 1750 (before Serbian independence in 1815), to only three in 1850.
Islam: Empire of Faith is a documentary series, made in 2000, that details the history of Islam, from the birth of the Islamic Prophet, Muhammad to the Ottoman Empire. It is narrated by Ben Kingsley and is available as three DVDs or two video volumes in NTSC format.
The first episode deals with the life of Muhammad, the second with the early Caliphates, Crusades, and Mongol invasion, and the third with the Ottoman Empire and Safavid dynasty.
No such distinction existed in the Islamic and Slavic worlds, where the Empire was more straightforwardly seen as the continuation of the Roman Empire. In the Islamic world, the Roman Empire was known primarily as Rûm.[23] The name millet-i Rûm, or "Roman nation," was used by the Ottomans through the 20th century to refer to the former subjects of the Byzantine Empire, that is, the Orthodox Christian community within Ottoman realms.
The Ottoman Empire began its expansion into Europe by taking the European portions of the Byzantine Empire in the 14th and 15th centuries up until the 1453 capture of Constantinople, establishing Islam as the state religion in the region. The Ottoman Empire continued to stretch northwards, taking Hungary in the 16th century, and reaching as far north as the Podolia in the mid-17th century (Peace of Buczacz), by which time most of the Balkans was under Ottoman control. Ottoman expansion in Europe ended with their defeat in the Great Turkish War. In the Treaty of Karlowitz (1699), the Ottoman Empire lost most of its conquests in Central Europe. The Crimean Khanate was later annexed by Russia in 1783. Over the centuries, the Ottoman Empire gradually lost almost all of its European territories, until its collapse in 1922, when the former empire was transformed into the nation of Turkey.
The Ghaza or Ghazi thesis (from , "ġazā", "holy war," or simply "raid") is a historical paradigm first formulated by Paul Wittek which has been used to interpret the nature of the Ottoman Empire during the earliest period of its history, the fourteenth century, and its subsequent history. The thesis addresses the question of how the Ottomans were able to expand from a small principality on the frontier of the Byzantine Empire into a centralized, intercontinental empire. According to the Ghaza thesis, the Ottomans accomplished this by attracting recruits to fight for them in the name of Islamic holy war against the non-believers. Such a warrior was known in Turkish as a "ghazi", and thus this thesis sees the early Ottoman state as a "Ghazi State," defined by an ideology of holy war. The Ghaza Thesis dominated early Ottoman historiography throughout much of the twentieth century before coming under increasing criticism beginning in the 1980s. Historians now generally reject the Ghaza Thesis, and consequently the idea that Ottoman expansion was primarily fueled by holy war, but are conflicted with regard to what to replace it with.
The Young Ottomans were a secret society established in 1865 by a group of Ottoman Turkish intellectuals who were dissatisfied with the Tanzimat reforms in the Ottoman Empire, which they believed did not go far enough, and wanted to end the autocracy in the empire. Young Ottomans sought to transform Ottoman society by preserving the empire and modernizing along the European tradition of adopting a constitutional government. Though the Young Ottomans were frequently in disagreement ideologically, they all agreed that the new constitutional government should continue to be somewhat rooted in Islam to emphasize "the continuing and essential validity of Islam as the basis of Ottoman political culture." However, they sincreticize islamic idealism with modern liberalism and parliamentary democracy, to them the European parliamentary liberalism was a model to follow, in accordance with the tenets of Islam and "attempted to reconcile Islamic concepts of government with the ideas of Montesquieu, Danton, Rousseau, and contemporary European Scholars and statesmen." Namık Kemal, who was influential in the formation of the society, admired the constitution of the French Third Republic, he summed up the Young Ottomans' political ideals as "the sovereignty of the nation, the separation of powers, the responsibility of officials, personal freedom, equality, freedom of thought, freedom of press, freedom of association, enjoyment of property, sanctity of the home". The Young Ottomans believed that one of the principal reasons for the decline of the empire was abandoning Islamic principles in favor of imitating European modernity with unadvised compromises to both and they sought to unite the two in a way that they believed would best serve the interests of the state and its people. They sought to revitalize the empire by incorporating certain Europeans models of government, while still retaining the Islamic foundations the empire was founded on. Among the prominent members of this society were writers and publicists such as İbrahim Şinasi, Namık Kemal, Ali Suavi, Ziya Pasha, and Agah Efendi.
The star and crescent symbol became strongly associated with the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century, a symbol that had been used throughout the Middle East extending back to pre-Islamic times, especially in the Byzantine Empire and Crusader States which occupied the lands later assumed by the Ottoman Empire. By extension from the use in Ottoman lands, it became a symbol also for Islam as a whole, as well as representative of western Orientalism. "Star and Crescent" was used as a metaphor for the rule of the Islamic empires (Ottoman and Persian) in the late 19th century in British literature. This association was apparently strengthened by the increasingly ubiquitous fashion of using the star and crescent symbol in the ornamentation of Ottoman mosques and minarets. The "Red Crescent" emblem was adopted by volunteers of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) as early as 1877 during the Russo-Turkish War; it was officially adopted in 1929.
Islam played an especially important role in defining the Ottoman–Safavid relationship. Both the Safavids and Ottomans relied on ties to Islam to help justify their individual rules. However, Islamic law prevents war of Muslims against each other, unless a religious need arises to enforce a sacred law or to check transgressions against it. Thus, for one power to wage war against the other, he would have to justify the action religiously.
Selim I, sultan of the Ottoman Empire in the early 1500s, looked for such justification. Religious scholars and officials in the Ottoman Empire quickly labeled Shah Ismail, and by extension his followers, a threat to Islam for the heretical teachings they represented. As a result, Selim I ordered the execution of any sympathizers of Shah Ismail both in Constantinople and throughout Ottoman lands.
Bahá'u'lláh prophesied the fall of the Caliphate, the title of the head of state in Sunni Islam. From 1517 onwards, the Ottoman sultan was also the Caliph of Islam, and the Ottoman Empire was, from 1517 until 1922 (or 1924), synonymous with the Caliphate or the Islamic State. Addressing the people of Constantinople, the capital of the Ottoman Empire, Bahá'u'lláh, in the "Kitáb-i-Aqdas" which was completed in 1873, claims that the leaders of Constantinople, the Caliph, has been a source of tyranny, and that they will lose control:
Islam in Greece is represented by two distinct communities; Muslims that have lived in Greece since the times of the Ottoman Empire (primarily in East Macedonia and Thrace) and Muslim immigrants that began arriving in the last quarter of the 20th century, mainly in Athens and Thessaloniki.
During the reign of Sultan Abdul Hamid II, Pan-Islamism had become a hugely important part of the state ideology as Abdul Hamid had often stressed his claim to be the caliph. The claim that Abdul Hamid was the caliph, making him the political and spiritual leader of all Muslims not only caught on within the Ottoman Empire, but throughout the entire "Dar-al-Islam" (the "House of Islam", i.e. the Islamic world), especially in India. At that time, British India comprised all of modern-day India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Despite deposing Abdul Hamid in 1909, the CUP continued his pan-Islamic policies. For the CUP, keeping the sultanate-caliphate in being had the effect of not only reinforcing the loyalty of Ottoman Muslims to the empire, but was also a useful foreign policy tool. The fact that Indian Muslims seemed to have far more enthusiasm for the Ottoman sultan-caliph than they did for the British king-emperor was a matter of considerable concern for British decision-makers. The fear that the sultan-caliph might declare "jihad" against the British, and thereby plunge India into a revolt by its Muslims was a constant factor in British policy towards the Ottoman Empire. On the other side, starting in 1897 Germany had a policy of "Weltpolitik" (World Politics), in which the "Reich" sought to become the world's dominant power. As part of its programme of "Weltpolitik", Germany had courted the Ottoman Empire through a policy of providing generous loans to the Ottoman state (which had gone bankrupt in 1881, and which had trouble getting loans as a result), weapons and German officers to train the Ottoman army. The price of these loans, weapons and the German military mission to train the army was that the Ottoman state had to favour German corporations when awarding railway concessions and other public works, thus pushing the empire further into the German political and economic sphere of influence. An official German-Ottoman alliance was not signed until 1914, but from 1898 onwards, there was an unofficial German-Ottoman alliance. In 1898, the German emperor had visited the empire, in course of which Wilhelm II had proclaimed himself the "protector of Islam" before a cheering crowd. A large part of the reason for the German interest in the Ottomans was the belief by decision-makers in Berlin that the sultan-caliph could mobilise all of the world's Muslims to Germany's cause. Beyond that, having the Ottoman Empire as an ally would mean that in the event of a war, Russian and especially British forces that otherwise would be deployed against Germany would be sent to fight the Ottomans instead. In 1914, the German emperor Wilhelm II saw a message on the margin on a diplomatic cable from St. Petersburg reading: "Our consuls in Turkey and India, our people must incite the entire Islamic world to a savage revolt against this... cursed, perfidious, conscience-less nation [Russia].
The following is a list of Sheikh-ul-Islams of the Ottoman Empire. After the fondation of the Ottoman empire around 1300, the title of Sheikh-ul-Islam, formerly used in the Abbasid Caliphate, was given to a leader authorized to issue legal opinion or fatwa. During the reign of Sultan Murad II, (1421-1444, 1446-1451) the position became an official title, with authority over other muftis in the empire. In the late 16th century, Sheikh-ul-Islam were assigned to appoint and dismiss supreme judges, high ranking college professors, and heads of Sufi orders. Prominent figures include Zenbilli Ali Cemali Efendi (c1445-1526), Ibn-i Kemal (Kemalpasazade) (1468-1533) and Ebussuud Efendi (c1491-1574).
Each chapter of the book covers a specific topic within Islam. For example, one chapter is entirely dedicated to the issue of jihad. Over all, the book covers the history of Islam from the point of view of the Islamic prophet, Muhammad as a social reformer struggling for egalitarianism between people. It argues that the Quran does not order the veiling of women and that the concept of jihad was intended to be solely defensive. Aslan focuses primarily on the early practices of Islam, but he also discusses life within the Abbasid Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and in the modern Muslim World.
In the late 18th century and especially during the 19th, European-style reforms pushed Islam out of influential positions and diminished its leaders' influence in government. The jizya was abolished and the exclusive power of Islam's leaders dwindled. Despite this, the government under the reforming Sultans still sought to reinforce Hanafi Islam where it was seen as under threat in the empire. Parallel to reforms came Ottomanism, a concept that sought to integrate all Ottoman citizens into one social class (Muslim and non-Muslim) with equal tax and military responsibilities. As a result, religious minorities (who may not have even received full rights under pre-reform Ottoman rule) rebelled.
Organized Islamic religious life in Albania has existed since the time the Ottoman Empire started administering this region. All Muslims who lived in the Ottoman Empire were part of the Muslim community headed by the Sultan, who replaced the role of the caliph. During the reign of the Sultan Murad II the competencies of the caliph were transferred to the "grand mufti". Since then, the grand mufti was titled "Sheykhul-Islam" and was considered the highest religious authority within the Ottoman Empire. However, every region inhabited by Muslims had its own Mufti, who was in a lower position than the "Sheykhul-Islam". After the independence of Albania in 1912 the Islamic Community of Albania continued to be under the authority of the "Sheykhul-Islam" in Constantinople until 1923. In 1923, following the government program, the Albanian Muslim congress convened at Tirana decided to break with the Caliphate ("Sheykhul-Islam"), and created the Muslim Community of Albania.
Beginning in the late 15th and early 16th century, the Ottoman and Safavid Empires started to fight for influence over the Caucasus. Many Caucasian peoples grew wary of both sides, and attempted to play one side off against the other. The rivalry was embodied by both the struggle between Sunni and Shia Islam and the regional conflict of the two empires. The only major success for either side was the conversion of the Azerbaijanis by the Persians to Shia Islam. Originally, relations with Russia was seen as a possible balance to the Ottoman and Safavid Empires, and a pro-Russian camp in Chechen politics formed (there were also pro-Ottoman and pro-Persian camps; each viewed their favored empire as the least bad of the three). In reality, the most favored empire from the beginning was the Ottoman Empire, but that did not mean the Chechens were not wary of a potential Ottoman attempt at conquering them. Any hope towards positive relations with Russia ended in the late 18th and early 19th centuries when tensions with the Cossacks escalated and Russia began trying to conquer the Caucasus, starting with Georgia. After this point, many Chechens sealed, forever, their preference towards Istanbul against Isfahan and Moscow by converting to Sunni Islam in an attempt to win the sympathy of the Ottomans. However, they were too late- the Ottoman Empire was already well into its period of decline and collapse, and not only was it no longer willing to assist Muslims (especially newly converted people, who were viewed as "less Muslim" than peoples with a long Islamic heritage), but it was no longer able to even maintain its own state. Hence, the rivalry between Turkey and Persia became more and more abstract and meaningless as the threat of conquest by Russia and being pushed out of their lands or even annihilated by the Cossacks grew and grew.
Scholars often use the term Gunpowder Empires to describe the Islamic empires of the Safavid, Ottoman and Mughal. Each of these three empires had considerable military exploits using the newly developed firearms, especially cannon and small arms, to create their empires. They existed primarily between the fourteenth and the late seventeenth centuries.
Several historians such as British historian Edward Gibbon and the Greek historian Dimitri Kitzikis have argued that after the fall of Constantinople, the Ottoman state took over the machinery of the Roman state, and that in essence the Ottoman Empire was a continuation of the Eastern Roman Empire under a thin Turkish Islamic guise. Kitzikis called the Ottoman state "a Greek-Turkish condominium". The American historian Speros Vryonis wrote that the Ottoman state was centered on "a Byzantine-Balkan base with a veneer of the Turkish language and the Islamic religion". Other historians have followed the lead of the Austrian historian Paul Wittek who emphasized the Islamic character of the Ottoman state, seeing the Ottoman state as a "Jihad state" dedicated to expanding the world of Islam. Another group of historians led by the Turkish historian M. Fuat Koprulu championed the ""gazi" thesis" that saw the Ottoman state as a continuation of the way of life of the nomadic Turkic tribes who had come from East Asia to Anatolia via Central Asia and the Middle East on a much larger scale, and argued that the most important cultural influences on the Ottoman state came from Persia. More recently, the American historian Heath Lowry called the Ottoman state a "predatory confederacy" led in equal parts by Turks and Greeks converted to Islam.
The Ottoman–Mamluk War of 1516–1517 was the second major conflict between the Egypt-based Mamluk Sultanate and the Ottoman Empire, which led to the fall of the Mamluk Sultanate and the incorporation of the Levant, Egypt and the Hejaz as provinces of the Ottoman Empire. The war transformed the Ottoman Empire from a realm at the margins of the Islamic world, mainly located in Anatolia and the Balkans, to a huge empire encompassing much of the traditional lands of Islam, including the cities of Mecca, Cairo, Damascus and Aleppo. Despite this expansion, the seat of the empire's political power remained in Constantinople.
The Young Ottomans () were a secret society established in 1865 by a group of Ottoman Turkish intellectuals who were dissatisfied with the Tanzimat reforms in the Ottoman Empire, which they believed did not go far enough. Young Ottomans sought to transform Ottoman society by preserving the empire and modernizing along the European tradition of adopting a constitutional government. Though the Young Ottomans were frequently in disagreement ideologically, they all agreed that the new constitutional government should continue to be somewhat rooted in Islam to emphasize "the continuing and essential validity of Islam as the basis of Ottoman political culture" and syncretized Islamic ideals with liberalism and parliamentary democracy. The Young Ottomans sought to revitalize the empire by incorporating certain European models of government, while still retaining the Islamic foundations of the empire. Among the prominent members of this society were writers and publicists such as İbrahim Şinasi, Namık Kemal, Ali Suavi, Ziya Pasha, and Agah Efendi.
At this stage, Arab nationalism was not yet a mass movement, even in Syria where it was strongest. Many Arabs gave their primary loyalty to their religion or sect, their tribe, or their own particular governments. The ideologies of Ottomanism and Pan-Islamism provided strong competition for Arab nationalism. The vast majority of the Arabs living in the Ottoman Empire were primarily loyal to their own families, clans, and tribes and in terms of broader loyalties, saw themselves as Muslims rather than as Arabs, which in practical terms meant support for the Ottoman Empire, whose sultan also claimed to be the caliph. Traditional Islamic theory preaches the message that all Muslims, regardless of their ethnicity or race, should live together in the "Ummah", where usually been interpreted to mean one state, and for centuries Muslims living under Ottoman rule, whether they be Turks, Kurds, Arabs, Albanians, and so forth all saw themselves as united by a common religion and state. In the Ottoman Empire, Sunni Islam was the state religion, and the sultan-caliph was the supreme religious-political leader, thus making the crown and the faith one and the same. Before 1914, of the ten million or so Arabs living under Ottoman rule, only a mere 350 were involved in various feuding nationalist groups, most of whom wanted only autonomy rather than independence.
Influenced by the ideas of al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh, Arslan became a strong supporter of the Pan-Islamic policies of Abdul Hamid II. He also advocated the proposition that the survival of the Ottoman Empire was the only guarantee against the division of the ummah and its occupation by the European imperial powers. To Arslan, Ottomanism and Islam were closely bound together and the reform of Islam would naturally lead to the revival of the Ottoman Empire.