Cleric offers $1 million bounty to kill cartoonist

[nbcrusader]

Mohammed
((~{>

Mohammed playing Little Orphan Annie
(((8~{>

Mohammed as a pirate
(((P~{>

Mohammed on a bad turban day
))):~{>

Mohammed with sand in his eye
(((;~{>

Mohammed wearing sunglasses
(((B~{>

Mohammed with a bomb in his turban
*-O~{>

Mohammed on a *really* bad turban day.
)8~{>

blasphemy

That's only worth a $250,000 bounty on your head.

 

[AcrobatMan]

sorry but I dont understand why you all talk of "FORCED" CONVERSIONS

all religious conversions are forced !! each one of them by $$ or by gun

anyways the muslim state minister in india who has put a reward on cartoonist has not been arrested yet..

there is a provision for 7 years in jail for such an act according to indian constitution

this is disappointing ....

vote bank politics

 

[yolland]

^ It is still possible that he will be hauled into court, particularly if the Danish Embassy files a formal protest, which could get the Ministry of External Affairs involved. The most important Muslim political bodies, the Jamiat-Ulema-e-Hind and the All-India Muslim Personal law board, did immediately condemn Quereshi's statement. (And as AIMPLB pointed out, Quereshi is not even a religious man and has no mandate to say such things, which are indeed *probably* prosecutable under the Constitution.) However, Quereshi's own party, the Samajwadi (Socialists), who are currently in power in UP, are not very likely to lift a finger against him because they need the Muslim vote.

Then how come the Jews of Bursa welcomed the Turks as liberators and were glad that the Greeks got the hell out of town?

Why would this be relevant to Bosnia, though? There wasn't a Jewish colony at Bursa until Sultan Orhan invaded, anyway--he rather encouraged Jews from the Byzantine lands to settle there. It is true that Jews under the first few centuries of Ottoman rule were generally better off than they had been under the Byzantines, and thus "welcomed" the change to that extent, though Jewish life under the Ottomans was hardly free of persecution and even under the more friendly rulers they were still subject to the same taxes, restrictions on where they could live, restrictions in dress etc. that other non-Muslims were. (And one must always take the various "And the Jews threw open the city gates for them and cheered them on!" stories with a grain of salt--often these are apocryphal legends used to justify later persecution.) There were Jewish colonies (mostly of Sephardim fleeing from Spain) set up in Sarajevo and some other places in the region later on, which lasted until the Ustase were put in charge by the Axis Powers in 1941. My mother's family fled to Salonika (Thessaloniki) from Spain during the early Ottoman period.

Aren't the Bosnians descended from the Bogomils, who were Gnostics to begin with?

anitram would know this better than I, but my understanding is that this group was a *tiny* minority--most Slavs in the region were either Orthodox or Catholic.

 

[verte76]

I got my info from Lord Kinross' "Ottoman Centuries" for the most part, also Jason Goodwin's "Lords of the Horizons", also some Turkish web sites. I did a class on the Seljuk and Ottoman Turks for my historical re-enactment society three years ago. I also traced the history of the caravanserais, great big palatial inns for caravans travelling through the Muslim world and the Ottoman Empire. There were some of these in the Balkans in the Turkish-ruled part. I guess Kinross and Goodwin both left stuff out. Kinross' book is humongous, I'm sort of surprised that he left so much out about the conquest.

 

[yolland]

Well the Ottoman Empire is a vast, vast topic--there's no way a general overview could be expected to do justice to all the complexities and ambiguities of particular subjected peoples' experiences at particular points in time. If you want to know the details of a particular ethnic group's or region's experience it is best to consult a history focusing on that particular group or region (with a critical eye of course for the possibility of bias informed by later developments). I was not myself of the impression that the size of the Bosnian Muslim community could be adequately explained by "conversion at the point of a sword" as there were considerable social and economic pressures to contend with there too (land redistribution etc.), plus the pre-existing factionalization of Christianity in the region, and the difficulty of evaluating to what extent present-day ethnic identities there held the same meanings then as they do now. However, as anitram pointed out, periodic waves of forced conversion, in particular places and under particular rulers, was indeed part of Ottoman rule, and this does make generalized assertions about the degree of religious freedom enjoyed (or not) by particular conquered peoples inherently problematic.

 

[verte76]

I'm going to go through a chronology on the Serbs, Croats and Bosnians on my history site to get more information about the origins of the Bosnians. I'd always assumed the Bogomil origins for the Bosnians. but the worst web page I ever saw in my life was a Bogomil site claiming that they were the precursors of the Protestants! The horrid site was put together by some Baptist fundamentalists. Some people don't know what they're talking about.