The ‘Soup Muslims’ of the Ottoman Balkans: Was There A ‘Western’ ‘Eastern’ Ottoman Empire?

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This paper serves as a logical outgrowth of much of the work I have published in the past decade. A leitmotif linking each of these studies has been my implicit acceptance of the idea that the Ottoman conquest of the heartlands of the older Islamic world, the project realized by Sultan Selim I in 1516-1517, marks a major ‘fault line’ in Ottoman history. What had been largely a southeastern European, i.e., Balkan state, whose inhabitants shared neither a common religion, language, culture, nor history with their Ottoman rulers, was transformed virtually overnight into not only a far larger entity geographically, but one whose inhabitants were more or less equally divided between Muslims and non-Muslims. Even more importantly, from that point forward, it was a state whose institutions were increasingly reshaped in keeping with practices which had developed in the Islamic world throughout the preceding eight hundred years.

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The Journal Of Ottoman Studies

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The Journal Of Ottoman Studies