POLI SCI 351 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Absolute Monarchy, Political Question, Shia Islam
9 Apr 2018
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Document Summary
Began as a confederation of turkish peoples with a following for a man named osman. Ottoman political order: sultan"s central authority - essentially, an absolute monarch. So for many of the local people/peasants, their interaction with the state was through local elites. Ottoman state was set up: power exercised through networks beyond the center (a more broad, theorizable principle) - on the surface, the sultan was an absolute monarch with no checks. But effectively, there are networks of power in other place. So when looking at modern dictatorships, you can always ask yourself, how is power actually being distributed, because its rarely actually maintained at the one center point: heterogeneity. Sunni islam, shiite islam, jews, christians, kurds, arabs. Through the millet system - communal self-government. Instead of forcing conversion, they allowed religious groups to govern themselves. In many ways, people regard this as neutralizing religion. There weren"t communities that felt as if they were.
