This is a guest post by Raziq
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According to Islamists, Mustafa Kemal destroyed the last Islamic Caliphate (the Ottoman Empire) on this day in 1924. Today we are constantly told by Islamist groups that Muslims need to recreate the Caliphate. They also say that the Ottomans had created the perfect society for Muslims. So let’s take a look at the facts:
- The Ottomans were nomadic warlords who fought for territory.
- The Ottomans fought against the existing Muslim Empires, brutally killed thousands of Muslims, kidnapped their women and enslaved their children.
- In 1453 the Ottomans seized Constantinople after a bloody siege in which thousands of Christians were killed.
- The Ottomans committed one of the biggest genocides in history. From 1896 to 1915 they systematically murdered over 1 million Armenians.
- The majority of the Ottoman Sultans had massive harems with hundreds of concubines. It was not uncommon for a Sultan to have over 50 children.
- The Ottomans created a slave army (Janissaries) by forcibly taking Christian children from their homes and not letting them ever see their families again.
Is this the perfect system?
Islamists who say that the Ottoman Empire was some sort of utopian state are living in cuckoo land. Yes, the Ottomans were once a formidable world power but to say they created a perfect society and spread equality is a gross distortion of facts. Today Muslim majority countries would be horrified at the prospect of having to be subservient to a colonial type Islamist government. The Arabs fought the Ottomans for a long time to gain independence from this.
Islamists need to realise that the vast majority of Muslim communities around the world are quite happy as they are and would never want to live under an Islamist political system. The age of colonial empires ended long ago and the quicker Islamists realise this the better.
