Journalist in Turkey arrested for tweet making fun of a 13th-century sultan

Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/09/11/journalist-in-turkey-arrested.html

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I would just like to mention that Henry VIII was grossly overweight and smelled terrible.

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Off with your head!

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In the West he would have gotten away with a takedown notice for copyright violation by the company producing the TV-series.

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Neo-Ottomanism

So Ottomanism with religious fundamentalism instead of secularism? It makes as much sense as “Jews for Jesus”.

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Just trying to protect our beautiful heritage! Turkish Trumpism.

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I guess they probably weren’t fans of this throwaway joke from Beauty and the Beast then.

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Wasn’t the Ottoman Empire technically a theocracy, what with the sultan claiming the title of caliph? (Not my area of expertise, so happy to be schooled.)

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Ottomanism (especially in its second incarnation in the early 20th century) is more associated with secularism and pluralism* than it is with theocracy. It’s a nationalist ideology, but not necessarily an exclusionary one.

  • [ETA: Armenians and others asking for their own homelands excepted, of course]
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I stand corrected!

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The fact that the journalist is Kurdish certainly adds to the predicament…

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William Howard Taft never met a dessert he didn’t like.

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Make the Sublime Osman Sultanate Great Again!
Source: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/7wh6va/what_did_the_ottoman_empire_actually_call/

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In his youth, he was an athlete. He only really porked up in middle age, probably as the result of the fact that he couldn’t keep up his physical activity; in fact, he couldn’t even walk very far. He never really recovered from a jousting accident in 1536. The root cause of the obesity may have been neuroendocrine and related to the accident as well. The possibility of traumatic brain injury would also account for his increasingly bizarre behaviour after that, including the divorce from one of his six wives and the beheading of two more.

The infamous picture of a fat Henry VIII brandishing a turkey leg is sending a message. ‘Fat’ didn’t mean ‘unhealthy’ in his time. It meant ‘filthy rich’. The turkey was an exotic fowl from the New World, which had been brought back to Henry’s father by John Cabot and was not yet regularly raised in Europe. An expedition to the New World in the 15th century was like a Moon landing in the 20th!

The painting - the rich robes, the gilded furnishings, the ample belly, and the exotic bird, are proclaiming to the world: “See how great my kingdom is! I have massive wealth, and my kingdom is powerful enough that it mount a voyage to the New World, to bring me back an exotic bird - so that I can have my cooks prepare it for my pleasure!”

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You may be confusing Neo-Ottomanism (remember, the Ottoman sultans claimed to be caliphs) with Ataturkism (which introduced secularism).

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Not that surprising

Being a journalist is a dangerous occupation in some nations.

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He also had fleas.

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Well, the Sultan wasn’t a bad sort, just dangerous to make a wager with!

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No, @gracchus is talking about the shift in Ottoman policy in the 19th away from the Millet to the Tanzimat, which was a much more secular bureaucratic system than the Millet, which was a religious bureaucratic system. Yes, they still considered themselves Caliphs, but they were also instituting a secular system of rule.

Ataturkism was almost atheistic, but was far less tolerant of non-Sunni Muslims and anyone who was not Turkish, which historically in the Ottoman empire was aligned with religion and language.

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Doesn’t the difference between pluralist nationalism and exclusionary nationalism tend to shake down to “being part of the nation is exciting and mandatory for everyone” vs. “being part of the nation is exciting and mandatory for those who meet ethnic and/or religious requirements”; with major differences for ‘others’ who don’t themselves have nationalist aspirations; but pretty much the same expected behavior toward those that do?

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