In 1798, the French, under the leadership of Napoléon Bonaparte, invaded the Ottoman province of Egypt. That same year, the British defeated the French navy at the Battle of Abukir. Nevertheless, the French retained a presence in Egypt until 1801, when they were forced out of the territory by joint British Ottoman forces. In 1799, Napoléon led an expedition into ...
The Ottoman Empire was the last great Islamic Empire. Today, many stories between the Ottoman Caliphate and local Muslim communties have been forgotten. The forgotten photos and documents from the Turkish Archives in Istanbul, however, may be able to bring back some of those memories. Indeed, numerous correspondences between Türkiye and South Africa highlight the aforementioned relations between the Ottoman ...
As the last Islamic empire, the Ottoman State respected all minor ethnic and religious denominations throughout history. Unlike, other Muslims empires, Ottoman rulers developed greater understanding for non-Muslims (dhimmi) societies within the same territories. Religious tolerance towards minority groups can be traced back to cultural and traditional rules in Asia Minor before the Ottoman period, during Seljuk era in Anatolia. ...
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan recently visited several African countries in order to strengthen relations across the continent. Turkey shares its historical experience, its social, political, and cultural accumulation as well as its possibilities and resources with African countries, standing firm by the principle of ‘African solutions for African matters’ on the basis of mutual benefit. Constructed on a historical ...
The Ottoman Empire was the last great Islamic Empire which looked after Muslims rights as per the stipulations of the Caliphate since 1517 to 1924. There are a number of archival documents to evidence this historical reality in the Ottoman archives. In the age of global expeditions by the Europeans from the beginning in the fifteenth century, the native people ...
The Fener (Istanbul) Patriarch Bartholomew’s visit to Ukraine (20-24 August) has already caused reactions from the Russian Orthodox Church. As I wrote in my previous articles, tensions between Istanbul and Moscow Patriarchates turned into a serious conflict and resulted in the termination of relations between these two significant churches of the Orthodox world because of the situation in Ukraine. In ...
Over the last two decades, decolonisation has been the subject of much debate in the educational sphere. The Rhodes Must Fall movement further catalysed this process in a substantial way. Decolonisation is defined as the undoing of the narrative and the mindset of colonialism, the latter being the process whereby a nation establishes and maintains its domination of foreign territories, ...
The history of Ottoman Jews in Asia Minor, particularly the Sephardim, began when they migrated to Turkey from Europe after the Alhambra decree in Spain of 1492. After the fall of Andalusia, today Spain, Jews struggled to continue living not only in Spain, but also encountered difficulties in other European countries in the late fifteenth century.[i] Eventually, the Sephardim (in ...
When Greece was founded in 1830 at the end of an uprising against the Ottoman Empire, a King Otto, a German noble, was put on the throne. Three years before this, the Ottoman-Egyptian joint naval squadron anchored off Pylos/Navarino had been attacked and burned by the British, French and Russian joint fleet as a consequence of which the Ottoman naval ...
While colonialism may have declined in practice, but its residue remains. Just consider how inhabitants from Ghana, Senegal, Congo, Algeria and Madagascar speak French, while Somalia, Sudan, Zimbabwe and South Africa speak another western language, English. Colonialism’s legacy continues to permeate almost all aspects of life on the continent. With its fifty-two countries, Africa continues to fight against western imperialism. ...