Muslims, Christians and Women in the Ottoman Empire-Blog 5

Muslims, Christians and Women in the Ottoman Empire

  

Each empire, for instance the Persian, Roman, Caliphate, China, and Byzantine all impacted the world by spreading religion, culture, and power. Most were formed by nomadic people who fought battles and conquered lands without having modern day weapons that today’s militias have today.  It did not surprise me what the Ottoman Empire has done over three centuries, wiping out much of the Middle East, North Africa and the Southeastern Europe to create and enlarge one of the largest and longest lasting Empires in the history of Islam.  The small Ottoman empire inspired and sustained by Islam was transformed into a powerful one created by Turkish tribes in Anatolia that grew to be one of the most powerful empire in the world during the 15th and 16th centuries.  It replaced the Byzantine Empire as the major power in the Eastern Mediterranean.  The Ottoman Empire’s leadership not only affected their new image but also their social life.  Women under the Ottoman Empire lost their freedom influenced partly due to the Islam faith and culture.  Elite Turkish women had to be separated within the social class and cover themselves with veil. Orthodox Muslims also restricted women’s religious practices at that time.  Although, Islamic law gave women the rights to own properties which helped some to become wealthy, many women were still fortunate to benefit from the legal rights that Ottoman Courts provided them in cases such as the following: marriage, divorce and even inheritance (p.452).  People in the West have a different view about the freedom rights Islam offer to their women.  Most people believe that Muslim women are oppressed by their religion, forced to cover themselves completely, deny education and other basic rights. It is true that Muslim women, like women all over the world, have struggled against inequality and restrictive practices in education, work force participation, and family roles. Many of these oppressive practices, however, do not come from Islam itself, but are part of local cultural traditions. Fortunately, women in the Ottoman Empire possessed a variety of rights under Islamic laws that were out of the ordinary for that time. These rights included, but were not limited to; the ability to own property, the ability to use the judicial system with their own agency without consulting a male, including bringing divorce claims to court, the ability to become educated in religious fields, and the ability to be financially independent. In the mid sixteenth century, while the Byzantine state started to weaken, the Ottoman Empire, on the other hand surrounded a big number of people from Europe, Africa and Asia and a lot of Christian population who converted to Islam.  By 1500, some 90 percent of Anatolia’s people were Muslims and Turkish speakers (p.453).   At the same time, a huge population of Christians were living in Balkans and were ruled by Muslim rulers.  Many Christian communities from Eastern Orthodox and Armenian descent had no choice but welcome the Ottoman Empire and were given a bit of independence in shaping their social, religions and educational settings.  To Christians, living under the Ottoman Empire and gaining social status was not cheap, the Ottoman Empire presented an “upward mobility” (p.454) in return, the Christians had to go through a process called “devshirme” (p.454) where they collected the young boys of Balkan Christian families, taught them Turkish, converted them to Islam and trained them in the military.  Although it seemed as the Ottoman Empire tolerated the Christians, they still represented a big threat to the Christian population in general, known as the “terror of the Turk” (p.454) where there was spread of fear all the way to Europe across the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean.