Intrigue and murder among 16th century Ottoman court painters.

In the Ottoman times, there were itinerant storytellers called meddah.

The military s incorporation into the state was most prominent in the Ottoman Empire, whose rulers created a new type of military force that drew its manpower mostly from Islamic ruled parts of Europe. These Janissaries (Christian boys conscripted to serve in Ottoman infantry units) were either recruited from Europe or abducted from countries under Ottoman control.

The Ottoman Empire's not that far from Europe, but there's no scientific revolution there.

In the early 20th century, with the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the whole Middle East was colonized.

Turkey has never been colonized, so it remained as an independent nation after the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

And you know what, it was also being asked at roughly the same time by the Resterners by the people in the rest of the world like Ibrahim Muteferrika, an Ottoman official, the man who introduced printing, very belatedly, to the Ottoman Empire who said in a book published in 1731, Why do Christian nations which were so weak in the past compared with Muslim nations begin to dominate so many lands in modern times and even defeat the once victorious Ottoman armies?

Likewise, the current turmoil in Turkey is, at least in part, a consequence of neo Ottoman overreach by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan s government. In seeking to establish the type of regional influence that Turks have not had since Kemal Atatürk founded the Republic of Turkey, Erdoğan has fallen prey to some of the Ottoman regime s hubris.

Turkey s successes have deep roots in governmental capacity and its people s skills, reflecting decades of investment and centuries of history dating back to Ottoman times.

Now those of you who have been to Istanbul have probably seen Topkapi Palace, which was the residence of Ottoman sultans for more than 400 years.

And that's why the Ottoman Empire in its last decades turned into a proto democracy, a constitutional monarchy, and freedom was a very important political value at the time.

It is obvious that long term preservation of cultural heritage in Kosovo, which includes Serbian Orthodox, Ottoman Islamic, Catholic and vernacular sites, must become an increasing priority in the coming months.

Recently, Turkey provided access to the Ottoman archives, inviting researchers, including Armenian scholars, to come and get to know the historical documents dating back to the beginning of the twentieth century.

Instead, Turkey s role inspired reservations among Egyptians after all, the Ottoman Empire had ruled over Egypt. And, on the Turkish side, there was a sense of superiority vis à vis the Arab world.

So, will a Turkish Summer be the first, if not the main, strategic result of the Arab Spring ? Is the Middle East faced with a neo Ottoman Turkey s irresistible rise to regional power?

The frequent description of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan as harboring neo Ottoman ambitions for his country clearly implicates this rivalry. It was the Ottomans who brought down two historical Saudi Wahhabi states.

My guess is that we're reaching the beginning of the end of 400 years I say 400 years because it's the end of the Ottoman Empire of the hegemony of Western power, Western institutions and Western values.

The fourth scenario is partition, with the old three province, Ottoman style setup commonly mentioned Cyrenaica (east), Fezzan (south), and Tripolitania (west). Cyrenaica is Qaddafi free, Tripolitania is not, and Fezzan did not fully join the revolution.

In seventeenth and eighteenth century Europe, the exoticism of the Ottoman Empire was used as a mirror to project Europeans own shortcomings and insecurities. In France, one spoke of Turqueries, such as in Moliere s play The Bourgeois Gentilhomme.

As Middle East analyst Murtaza Hussain recently observed Syria and Iraq, formerly unified Arab states formed after the defeat of their former Ottoman rulers, exist today only in name. What will emerge could be a fragmented, easily manipulated region.

Turkey was traditionally a bystander in Middle East politics. Its leaders believed that there was little to be contributed or gained by getting involved in the region s problems, and that Turkey s Ottoman legacy would leave its Arab neighbors suspicious.

In the early nineteenth century, the friezes and sculptures were removed from the Parthenon by Lord Elgin, Britain s ambassador to the Ottoman Empire from 1799 to 1803. Elgin sold them to the British government, which put them in the British Museum.

Welcomes also IRCICA's project to organize the international symposium on the Levant in the Ottoman Period to be held in Damascus, Syria on 26 30 September 2005, under the patronage of H.E. Bashar Al Assad, President of the Syrian Arab Republic.

The Middle East has been a hotbed of instability fueled by historical tensions since the fall of the Ottoman Empire almost a century ago. Now it is on fire not least because the West s repeated interventions have been guided by shortsighted tactical concerns.

The first Christian evangelization trips of Saint Peter and Saint Paul were to Turkey. Later, Ottoman Turkey was for centuries considered a part of the concert of Europe, proving indispensable in defining and securing the strategic balance among the European continent s Great Powers.

And that's why actually in the 19th century the Ottoman Empire, which then covered the whole Middle East, made very important reforms reforms like giving Christians and Jews an equal citizenship status, accepting a constitution, accepting a representative parliament, advancing the idea of freedom of religion.

The Sunni tumult has underscored the fragility of almost all Arab countries, while diluting the centrality of the Israel Palestine conflict. The post Ottoman order created by the British, with some help from the French, after World War I is disintegrating, with no viable alternative in sight.

But political thinking in the Middle East is often linked to the second timeline. Indeed, it is impossible to grasp the region s contemporary history and politics without understanding the emergence of the regional state system after World War I and the demise of the Ottoman Empire.

Like the Ottoman Empire s fragmentation in 1922 or Nasser s overthrow of King Farouk s regime in 1952, the current transformation, too, must be shaped. And how that future is shaped will determine whether or not Mubarak s end marks the beginning of political transformation throughout the Middle East.

Economic fears are not the only concern for EU citizens. Turkey was the theater of exceptional violence in the twentieth century its participation in WWI fueled hatred and gigantic massacres, with the genocide of the Armenians the last vicious spasm of the Ottoman Empire s brutal demise.

Some of Ukraine s regions have historically been a part of Russia, Poland, or the Ottoman Empire. Peter the Great, whose eighteenth century Westernization of Russia was portrayed in Sochi, fought the Crimean Tatars, many of whose descendants were dispersed by Stalin to other parts of the former Soviet Union.

JERUSALEM The horror stories emerging from northern Iraq, as well as the continuing slaughter in Syria s civil war, point to a tectonic shift in the Middle East. Almost 100 years after World War I, the regional state system established after the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire is unraveling.

Serbia considered Kosovo as the birthplace of its nation and the cradle of culture, because Serbia had built its most powerful country here in the 12th century. However, the Albanian people settled here in large numbers only after the Ottoman Empire invaded and the Serbian army retreated to the north.

Sunni Shia tensions tend to rise sharply during geopolitical power struggles, such as in Iraq in 2006 2008. Prior to that, the last great Sunni Shia battle in the Middle East involved near constant war between the Sunni Ottoman Empire and Iran s Shia Safavid Empire during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

A strong current of liberalism appeared in the late nineteenth century in Ottoman Syria in response to the religious despotism of Sultan Abdulhamid. At the same time, an anti clerical, secular movement on behalf of constitutionalism appeared in Iran a reaction to the absolutist alliance between the Quajar Shahs and the religious establishment.

Until the year 1500, almost all Persians were Sunni Muslims. Then, Shah Ismail the first Shah and the founder of the Safavid Dynasty began a brutal policy of forcing Persian Muslims to become Shia, in order to distinguish his iteration of Persia s empire from the more powerful Constantinople based and fervently Sunni Ottoman caliphate.

Historically, the Kurds who are distinct in language, culture, and historical consciousness from Arabs never had their day in court. After World War I and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the victorious Allies promised them a state of their own a promise that was cynically betrayed when British and French imperial interests took precedence.

People of different nationalities and ethnicities have been living in this region side by side for centuries, sharing customs, traditions, bread and wine, and mutual respect for each another s cultures and languages. But, going back to the Russian, British, and Ottoman Empires that once battled here, they have been continually exploited by politicians and generals.

This time, however, it is modernity, not exoticism, that is the source of fascination. But, because of its secular tradition (now being challenged by the current regime), its non Arab identity, its behavior towards its Kurdish minority, and the ambivalence of the Ottoman legacy, Turkey is as much a counter model as a model.

The more mundane truth is that there have never been any stable successors to the defunct Ottoman, British, and French empires that used to keep the peace in the Islamic world. This is largely, though not entirely, the fault of the European colonialists who, in the death throes of their own empires, created artificial states ripening for dissolution.

The old post Ottoman grand bargain Western acceptance of authoritarianism in exchange for the secure flow of oil, use of sensitive sea lanes, and some tolerance for the existence of Israel has broken down. What replaces it will be determined by the shape of the new political order that finally emerges in the western Islamic world.

Unlike Lebanon during its 15 year civil war, no regional power today would be able to contain Syria s war within its borders. As a result, it is much more likely that Syria s disintegration would call the entire post World War I (or post Ottoman) Middle Eastern state system also called the Sykes Picot system into question.

In fact, events in today s Middle East continue to be shaped by the radical changes brought about after World War I. Previously, most Arabs had been grouped together under various caliphates. After the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire in 1923, two nation states (Iran and Turkey) emerged, while the Arabs were distributed among 22 new countries, generally under British or French colonial domination.

When the Ottoman Empire collapsed at the end of World War I, the great powers of the day, Britain and France, carved out successor states in order to ensure their control over the Middle East s oil, geopolitics, and transit routes to Asia. Their cynicism reflected, for example, in the Sykes Picot Agreement nbsp established a lasting pattern of destructive outside meddling.

The conflict over the succession of religious leadership following the death of the Prophet Muhammad nearly 1,400 years ago is the origin of the split between Sunni and Shia Islam. The battles between the Fatimids and the Abbasids, the Crusades, the Mongol invasion, the Ottoman conquest, and, of course, Western imperialism all serve as points of reference for today s struggles.