Ottoman treatment of subject peoples compared favorably with Christian reconquest practices

Evidence

If we define toleration as the absence, not of discrimination, but of persecution, then the Ottoman record until the late nineteenth century is excellent. The well-known preference of the fifteenthcentury Greeks for Muslim rather than Frankish rule was not without its reasons. The confrontation of Christendom and Islam has sometimes been compared with the Cold War. The comparison is valid at many points, but we must remember in making it that the main movement of refugees in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was from Europe to Turkey and not the other way. When Ottoman rule in the Balkans ended, the Balkan peoples resumed their national existence, with their own religions and languages and national cultures intact. After the Christian conquest, no Muslims remained in Spain or Sicily, and no speakers of Arabic. — Bernard Lewis, From Babel to Dragomans, 641

Categorization

• XREF: Inverts the standard Islam-West tolerance binary; connects to Said-adjacent claims that Orientalist historiography projected European intolerance patterns onto the Ottomans. — connects to: Ottoman society was relatively tolerant toward Jews and Christians; Ottoman rule tolerated minorities while Christian reconquests erased entire populations
• ADDENDUM: Qualifies claims about how regional religious pluralism was legible to the West; the asylum-flow direction reframes who was ‘tolerant.’