Ibrahim Pasha: Grand Vizir of Suleiman the Magnificent

Ibrahim Pasha: Grand Vizir of Suleiman the Magnificent

The life of Ibrahim Pasha, as full of strange events as the most highlycolored romance, paradoxical, and to western students of society almost incomprehensible in its rapid changes, is very difficult to place soberly before Occidental readers; yet its very strangeness is typical of the Orient, and if we could understand this romantic life we might find we held a key to much in Turkish life and thought. But our only chance of understanding it is to banish from our minds western conceptions and accept as facts what seem like wild imaginings. Ibrahim Pasha was not of the Turkish race, a fact which accounts for some of the paradoxes of his career, but his life was passed in a Turkish environment, one of whose notable characteristics is that it has always at once included and modified so many alien elements. In any consideration of the Turkish people, the most important thing to hold in mind is that the Turks are neither Aryan nor Semitic, being unrelated to Persians, Arabs, Greeks, or Hebrews. When ethnologists dare not speak definitely of race distinctions, the layman cannot venture to place the Turk in the Touranian or other group, but he can accept the fact that the Turks came into Europe from Central Asia and are in some way related to the Tatars and Mongols in the East, and probably to the Magyars and Finns in the West. The Turks of Central Asia during the period from the eighth to the eleventh centuries seem to have possessed qualities which characterize Turks of the period we are studying, and even mark the Turk of the present day. 12 Monsieur Lon Cahun, in his monograph on the Turks and the Mongols,1 has made a careful study of these early Turks, a portion of which I will briefly summarize here. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 51299
Author: Jenkins, Hester Donaldson
Release Date: Feb 25, 2016
Format: eBook
Language: English