The Qing encountered diversity just as the Islamic empires had, however, I think the Qing empire dealt with the issue of diversity better. I don’t think it ever works to try to force someone into a different religion, or have the religions segregated. The Safavids tried forcing everyone who lived there to become Shia Islam. I think this is a bad way of doing things because it can turn your people against you. It’s only a little better to do what the Mughals did, which is create an entirely new religion that both Hindus and Muslims can follow. However, the Akbar still had to try and force people to believe in this new religion, so really it isn’t much better than what the Safavids were doing. Lastly, the Ottoman empire was fairly tolerant of diversity, but still made all non-Muslims pay a tax and segregated the states into different religions.
The Qing empire did none of these things. They were very tolerant of religious diversity. In fact, they saw the advantages of it, and made for a cheaper system by allowing people of all religions to be leaders. The only thing they did that was not tolerating diversity was banning intermarriages. However, I don’t think this is a really bad thing, because it is not making a statement that one religion is superior to the others, which is what all the Islamic empires did. Lastly, the Qing did not try to spread their culture to other countries surrounding China, such as Mongolia. They saw that doing so would affect how the Mongolians fought in wars, and that this would be a high price to pay for just having your religion spread. I think this was a smart choice. For these reasons, it is clear that the Qing empire is much more tolerant to diversity than the three Islamic empires.
No comments:
Post a Comment