It is possible to consider Islam a highly developed Arabic fusion of Arianism with other Christian “heretic” cults of the time.

Indeed. ‘The Ebionites were a Jewish-Christian sect that insisted on the necessity of following Jewish religious law and rites. They regarded Jesus as the Messiah but not as divine. The Ebionites used only the Jewish Gospels, revered James the Just as the head of the Jerusalem Church and rejected Paul of Tarsus as an apostate towards the Law….Some scholars argue that they contributed to the development of the Islamic view of Jesus due to exchanges of Ebionite remnants with the first Muslims.’

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ebionites

• yes a bit dodgy but.

@182 Were the famines in which millions died in India, much less the atrocities committed in the Congo, really “pretty meh” compared to the Roman amphitheater and Aztec sacrifices? In terms of overall numbers of people involved, the latter two things were at least a few orders of magnitude smaller in scale. And relative to the sizes of the populations, did the Aztec sacrifices or Roman amphitheater kill off half, or all of any large population?

As for the Declaration of Human Rights and other responses, any kind of “excess” can provoke a more or less effective response intended to prevent that excess from being committed in the future. Just like the struggle against industrial-scale racially-based slavery (as was practiced by Europeans, in the Americas) and segregation in the US led to a stronger discourse of civil rights in the US and Europe, which is then broadened to other social struggles. And the Holocaust helped give anti-Semitism a bad name, and greatly reduced its importance, although it hasn’t even completely disappeared in Europe. The response is part of the legacy. But another part of the legacy is that the damage was done. In the case of colonialism, part of that damage is the continuation of those same exploitative relationships between local “native” elites and foreign corporations or governments that were produced by colonialism.

Some contemporary Christians thought that Islam was basically a Christian heresy. See the very good William Dalrymple, “From the Holy Mountain”. (Who I think also points out that an early Christian walking into a modern mosque would feel quite at home, but would feel completely puzzled by a modern cathedral.) There were other heresies which denied the divinity of Christ, after all.

If one accepts this line of reasoning then the Ottomans were absolutely part of the European imperialist project (which took much of its inspiration from Rome). This argument also depends on how similar one considers Islam to be to Christianity.

Yes, invading from the Northwest has been done successfully by people who were native to the area and controlled it. Russia never controlled Afghanistan successfully (and failed spectacularly to do so in more modern times), and most of Soviet Central Asia was fundamentally different from Afghanistan, being much more flat, for instance.

The British had a huge manpower advantage and all the wealth of India and never managed to conquer Afghanistan. I’m surprised that you think the Russians would have magically done so with the insanely long supply lines they would have needed.

And this would be after the Indians or whatever successor states were extremely well-versed in modern tactics and armaments.

Even the term “religion-based” seems misleading to me. Has the basis of government changed? It’s one thing for the ruling party’s ideology to elevate a certain Abrahamic religion, but the constitution hasn’t changed, the laws mostly haven’t changed. Surely there is more talk of religion in Turkish politics now, and attempt to improve ties with neighboring countries, including Muslim countries, but then also including Armenia and Greece. It’s hard not to see the cries of “Islamist government!” as some combination of overly credulous acceptance of sob stories from sore losers in the secularist military elite that used to dominate Turkish politics, and Islam derangement syndrome—if Turkey isn’t at loggerheads with ALL its Muslim neighbors (as any reasonable country MUST be, because those countries are all full of FANATICS!—and Turkey is even more suspect because it’s predominantly Muslim itself!), then it must be because Turkey is becoming part of the Great Islamofascist Conspiracy! If Turkey isn’t solidly allied with Israel and forbidding its citizens to wear their hair the way they want, then it’s not really secular. That’s not a standard of secularism that any non-Muslim, non-Middle Eastern country would be held to—even the stricter French understanding of laicité doesn’t require such things.

@177 The Russians in the late 1700s or early 1800s might, of course, have benefited from a state of immediate-post-Imperial chaos just like the British did. But the Muslim parts of Central Asia that Russia conquered, combined, have only a small fraction (10-20%?) of the population of India. India is also much farther away from Russia. They would have to have supply lines from Russia all the way through Uzbekistan, Afghanistan, &c., over an extra mountain range or two, and relatively few if any of the needed supplies could be found within Central Asia itself. Also, I think the armies that conquered India from the west (under Alexander the Great, Mahmud of Ghazna, Babur, &c.) only conquered some territory in the northwest—around the Indus River, in what is now Pakistan—which is overall only a very small part of what is now (and what was, by the end of the Mughal Empire) India. Also they did so at a time when the available technology afforded large forces of light cavalry (or highly trained, mobile infantry) a much greater advantage relative to armies that could be mustered by bureaucratic agrarian states than was the case in the 1700s.

OTOH, the fact that the Ottomans were known in the 19th century as ‘the sick man of Europe’ shows that at least some people saw them as being part of Europe, and the extent to which the Turks are, or are not, part of Europe is still a live issue (cf Turkey’s bid to join the EU). As I pointed out earlier, the other European powers spent much of the 19th century attempting to keep the Ottoman Empire from collapsing, so they certainly didn’t view it as being wholly ‘other’.

But I don’t really understand why you are asking me, or what you think would have been proved if the answer was ‘no’ (or ‘yes’ for that matter).

Compared to what came immediately after it, at least in terms of global ideals [I refer you to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, on the drafting-panel of which were several ‘imperialist’ representatives] it looks jolly unpleasant. But then so does everything else that ever happened in history, with the exception of a few rare and possibly semi-mythical golden ages such as that of Ashoka.

Therefore the question is, does the globalised and industrialised economy achieved under imperialism, and the wide and diverse public sphere of intellectuals and critics that was allowed to flourish by its masters [oh yes they were!] have anything to do with the sudden repudiation of the previous millennia of human dedication to defining some of us as ‘other’, inferior and ripe for exploitation? Or is the whole thing just a miraculous coincidence? You could try, I suppose, to make the argument that the ‘goodies’ were so repelled by Imperialism’s excesses that they summoned up their opposition out of thin air, but, gosh, is there a lot of ‘othering’ involved in that idea.

Eh? Where did that one come from? ‘No’ is the answer, although don’t neglect the extent to which the Ottomans were propped up by the European powers in the 19th century.

Unless you are talking in a highly abstract sense in which the answer is probably ‘yes’ but it’s not what I was talking about in my earlier posts.