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There are hardly any ideological differences between this celebrated sultan and the ISIS (Daesh) religious leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Their ambitions are also

• clock_tower 11y ago
  I still haven't quite forgiven Putin for the Russo-Georgian War, but the Russo-Georgian War was a fair sight less bad than how the Turks and Persians treated Georgia; and you're right about the Turks and ISIS. Historians in the English-speaking world have a habit of gushing about the early Islamic caliphate, the Umayyads in al-Andalus, and the Ottoman Turks. (Indeed, Carly Fiorina regards the Ottomans as "the greatest in the world" -- http://www.examiner.com/article/fiorina-sings-the-praises-of-islam-ottoman-empire-greatest-civilization http://www.examiner.com/article/fiorina-sings-the-praises-of... .) The fashion for this began with Jewish Orientalism in the 19th century, and with the point that the Umayyads in particular were pretty tolerant of the Jews; but this obscures the fact that the Ottomans and the others were _vile_ -- routinely impaling and crucifying, and slave-trading (for both sexual and other purposes) on a really enormous scale. If 300,000 slaves imported mean that the American South was indefensible, what does that make the Ottomans, who practically depopulated the Caucasus because Caucasian men were brave and Caucasian women were beautiful? (And this is without even mentioning their similar depredations in the Balkans, and in Africa.)