Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Qing Dynasty vs the Islamic Empires

The Qing Empire and the Islamic empires had very different ways of dealing with diversity. While the Islamic empires all demanded some sort of tax or restrictions for not being Muslim, the Qing dynasty leaves their non-Chinese inhabitants mostly untouched. The Qing dynasty did not try to eradicate diversity, but in many ways they cultivated it. They created an entirely new court that dealt with the new people of their empire. The Qing dynasty is most closely aligned with the Ottoman empire in their efforts to promote diversity, but still very different. In the Ottoman empire Muslims were quite obviously superior in day to day life, whereas the Qing Dynasty seemed to keep day to day life on more equal footing. However, the Qing dynasty did exclude all others from their royal line by not allowing marriage or procreation between the rulers and the Chinese. This seems to be balanced out by the fact that they learned the Chinese language and customs along with adopting Confucianism. This is very different from both the Safavid empire and the Mughal empire. The Qing dynasty certainly did not exclude all but one religion like the Safavids, nor did they create a mixture of the cultures like the Mughals did. They kept the cultures quite separate in different states, much like the Ottoman empire, but they did not enforce any sort of tax. This is much more like the freedom and diversity that we have here today than any of the Islamic Empires.

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