ABSTRACT
The Ottoman Empire dominated the Middle East in the name of Islam for four hundred years, from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Ottoman rule had started in the Arab world as early as the fourteenth century and was offi cially recognized in 1517, when, according to tradition, the ruler of the Abbasid Empire of Baghdad, then in exile in Cairo, handed over the custody of the Muslim holy places of Mecca and Medina to the Ottoman Sultan Selim I of Istanbul. Whether or not this is true – there were quite a few ruling dynasties in between the end of the Abbasid Empire and the beginning of Ottoman rule – what is true is that from that moment millions of Arabs and Muslims recognized the Ottoman Sultan as caliph, the prophet’s temporal and spiritual successor. The Ottomans were of non-Arab origin, and did not claim sovereignty on the basis of ethnicity, as future rulers of the Middle East were to. It is their disregard of ethnicity that provides the best explanation of their success in holding on to power for such a long period (until 1922): Ottoman rule was tolerant of the ‘Other’s’ ethnicity and religion – tolerance became both a religious precept and part of political practice.1 Istanbul’s cosmopolitan human make-up testifi ed to the pluralist nature of the Empire as a whole. By 1893 only half of its population was Muslim, an indication of how welcoming the city was to other groups, including a large Jewish community made up of refugees from the Spanish Inquisition who had been welcomed to Istanbul at the beginning of the sixteenth century by Sultan Bayzeid II. Such government without a strong ethnic ideology – something hard to fi nd in the contemporary Middle East – is today attractive to Middle Eastern intellectuals, tired of the mixture of nationalism and religion that burdens their countries. They therefore regard the Ottoman state as a possible model for the future – without the despotism and tyranny, of course.
