Arabs accepted Turkish primacy as natural within Islamic universalism

Evidence

Arabs, however proud of their descent and of their culture, accepted Turkish dominance in the universal Islamic community in the same way as Dante had accepted German sovereignty in the Holy Roman Empire. Arab cultural self-awareness continued under Ottoman rule, but was combined with full identification with the Ottoman social and political order and with loyalty to the Ottoman Sultan as legitimate head of the Islamic state. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 829

Categorization

Category: Causal Relationships

• XREF: The Dante/Holy Roman Empire analogy parallels the earlier treatment in this book’s chapters of how religious vs. national identity structured pre-modern polities.

Related

• Arabs accepted Ottoman dominance as legitimate Islamic leadership before nationalism (similarity 0.96)
• Arabic-speaking peoples defined themselves by Islamic loyalty rather than ethnicity (similarity 0.84)
• Early Arabist thinkers praised Arabs as servants of Islam, not as a nation (similarity 0.81)
• Ottoman decline stripped Turks of both imperial and religious authority to feel superior (similarity 0.81)
• Early Arabist discourse praised Arabs as servants of Islam, pre-dating nationalist reversal (similarity 0.81)
• By the 1970s Arab states were politically diverging despite cultural affinity (similarity 0.79)
• Arabic’s dominance made Islamic civilization structurally monolingual (similarity 0.79)
• Early Arab political groups sought autonomy within the Ottoman state, not independence (similarity 0.79)
• Western Romantic Arabism eventually shaped Arabs’ own self-image retrospectively (similarity 0.79)
• Post-Ottoman nationalist states shaped Western views of the Turks through their own liberation narratives (similarity 0.78)
• Arab-Muslim identities operate at three nested levels above and below the state (similarity 0.78)
• Modern Middle Eastern nationalism was constructed by force and education in the twentieth century. (similarity 0.78)
• Europe’s image of the Semitic Orient emerged only as Ottoman power declined (similarity 0.78)
• Ottoman decline eventually made Western charges against the Turks partly accurate (similarity 0.78)
• The Ottoman Turks were culturally closer to Byzantium than the Western Christians were (similarity 0.78)