Islamic History Facts #Ottoman Empire

MASJID BIRU, ISTANBUL

HAGIA SOPHIA

• Pernah seorang ahli parlimen Turki bertanya kepada Lord Curzon, sebaik tamat perang dunia pertama tahun 1922, di Persidangan Lausanne, persidangan yang menjanjikan kemerdekaan Republik Turki. "Kenapa hanya Turki yang dimerdekakan, sedangkan negara-negara Arab yang lain masih di bawah pemerintahan kolonial?". Lord Curzon menjawab, 'Hakikatnya Turki telah dimusnahkan dan tidak akan bangkit lagi kerana kita telah menghancurkan kekuatannya iaitu Khalifah dan Islam."
• 8 April 1924, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk telah membubarkan Mahkamah Shariah yang wujud sebagai legasi Dawlah Uthmaniyyah. Undang-undang baru yang berinspirasikan penal code Itali diperkenalkan.
• ''Jika dunia ini sebuah negara,maka Costantinople yang paling layak menjadi ibu negaranya.''-Napoleon Bonaparte- 
• By age 21, Ottoman sultan Mehmed II was fluent in Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Hebrew, Greek, and Latin.
• "Coffee was first introduced by Yemeni Muslims in the 1400s. When the Ottoman Empire grew to encompass the Arabian Peninsula, coffee spread north to Istanbul and from there to the rest of Europe."
• After the Ottoman conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Sultan Mehmed II allowed the city's Christians to continue to live in the city as they had before, and even encouraged Christian immigration to the city from surrounding lands.
• The Ottoman palace in Istanbul, Topkapı Sarayı, had a massive kitchen in order to feed over 4000 fasting people every day in Ramadan. The tradition of free public food in Ramadan exists in Turkey till today.
• Ataturk's reform of the Turkish language was meant to remove the influence of Arabic and Persian on Turkish and restore it to its pure Turkic roots. But many of the Arabic words removed from the language were simply replaced with French and English words. For example, the Ottoman Turkish word for political party "fırka" which originally came from Arabic was replaced with "parti", which was taken from French.
• The idea of vaccination was introduced to England from the Ottoman Empire in the 1720s. The wife of an English ambassador observed smallpox vaccinations in Istanbul which were very common and brought the practice back to England, where it was popularized and helped end smallpox entirely.