How Ottomans helped Ireland during famine

[Chak Bamu]

160 years ago, during the Great Famine in Ireland, the Ottoman Empire sent £1,000 sterling (about $1,052,000 today) and 3 shiploads of food to Drogheda, Ireland.



Ireland was ridden with famine and disease between 1845 and 1849. Also known as the Great Hunger, this famine had lasting effects: at least one million people died due to famine-related diseases and more than one million Irish fled, mainly to the United States, England, Canada, and Australia.

The Islamic State (Ottoman) ruler at that time Sultan Khaleefah Abdul-Majid declared his intention to send £10,000 sterling to Irish farmers but Queen Victoria requested that the Sultan send only £1,000 sterling, because she had sent only £2,000 sterling herself. The Sultan sent the £1,000 sterling but also secretly sent 3 ships full of food. The British administration tried to block the ships, but the food arrived secretly at Drogheda harbour.

This generous charity from a Muslim ruler to a Christian nation is also important, particularly in our time when Muslims are often unfairly accused of human rights violations. Likewise, the appreciative plaque and overall reaction of the Irish society in return for this charity deserves to be applauded. We hope that the Turkish-Irish friendship sets a model for peace among different nations.



In commemoration of the Ottoman aid, Drogheda added the Ottoman crescent and star to its coat of arms. Their football club’s emblem retains this design til this day.

- See more at: A Bigger Society | How quickly we forget – How Muslims Helped Ireland During The Great Famine
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British did not kill by bullet and bayonet. They killed by famines. Bengal, Ireland, perhaps somewhere else too.

I know many Turkish people do not look at Ottoman past with favor, but this is an example of how Ottomans trumped British.

@Neptune, @Sinan, @T-123456 , @Joe Shearer .....

 

[-SINAN-]

@xenon54 @olcayto @BronzePlaque guys, you might wanna see this.

 

[Neptune]

In deed. Never heard of such stories as nowadays net is full of ultra nationalistic bullsh¡ts such as "it was the ottomans whom invented the robots, it was sent to Japan as present, but the ship couldn't make it to far fast".

 

[atatwolf]

They were going to make a movie about this event. Irish/Turkish co-production. Still not finished?

 

[UKBengali]

We are all human beings at the end of the day and glad to see the Sultan realised that.

 

[Itachi]

Great Job @Chak Bamu

Keep those trolls in their place.

 

[T-123456]

Know the story,you guys know this one to?
Ottoman expedition to Aceh - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[xenon54 out]

We actually allways helped the weak people, another exsample is how we saved jews from Spain.
But there are butthurt people who wants to portray us as bad people...

 

[olcayto]

Heard of the story before. İ also think that the ruler of England in that time didn't want the support from Ottoman to enter İreland. Maybe sımeone can search it up.

Here's some info of the aid from the Ottomans to The Netherlands durşng the eighty years war.

Turkeye - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Liever Turks dan Paaps - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 

[Chak Bamu]

Know the story,you guys know this one to?
Ottoman expedition to Aceh - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

This caught my attention:

"An informal Ottoman-Aceh alliance had existed since at least the 1530s.[3] Sultan Alauddin wished to develop these relations, both to attempt the expulsion of the Portuguese in Malacca, and to extend his own power in Sumatra.[3] According to accounts written by the Portuguese Admiral Fernão Mendes Pinto, the Ottoman Empire fleet that first arrived in Aceh consisted of 300 Ottomans, Swahilis, Somalis from Mogadishu and various city states, Sindhis from Debal and Thatta, Gujaratis from Surat, and some 200 Malabar sailors of Janjira to aid the Batak region and the Maritime Southeast Asia in 1539.[3]"

Quite an international crew that was. Very interesting to see South Asian participation in this venture.

Today Portugese are perhaps the nicest Europeans. But back then they were the fiercest, most motivated, and destructive colonizers and exploiters. The article mentions that Aceh was able to resist colonization until 1860s with Ottoman help. That is some achievement.

 

[T-123456]

This caught my attention:

"An informal Ottoman-Aceh alliance had existed since at least the 1530s.[3] Sultan Alauddin wished to develop these relations, both to attempt the expulsion of the Portuguese in Malacca, and to extend his own power in Sumatra.[3] According to accounts written by the Portuguese Admiral Fernão Mendes Pinto, the Ottoman Empire fleet that first arrived in Aceh consisted of 300 Ottomans, Swahilis, Somalis from Mogadishu and various city states, Sindhis from Debal and Thatta, Gujaratis from Surat, and some 200 Malabar sailors of Janjira to aid the Batak region and the Maritime Southeast Asia in 1539.[3]"

Quite an international crew that was. Very interesting to see South Asian participation in this venture.

Today Portugese are perhaps the nicest Europeans. But back then they were the fiercest, most motivated, and destructive colonizers and exploiters. The article mentions that Aceh was able to resist colonization until 1860s with Ottoman help. That is some achievement.

My problem with the Ottomans,is that they fkd up from the end of the 18 untill WW1.
They found women and poetry more important,many people have died because of them.
Either slaughtered in various former ''colonies''or by deportation.
They should have modernised the Army,Navy which they didnt.
I blame them for all the hardship these people had to endure.

 

[Chak Bamu]

My problem with the Ottomans,is that they fkd up from the end of the 18 untill WW1.
They found women and poetry more important,many people have died because of them.
Either slaughtered in various former ''colonies''or by deportation.
They should have modernised the Army,Navy which they didnt.
I blame them for all the hardship these people had to endure.

I agree with you here. But the criticism for Ottomans should not make us ignore their capacity to do good when they got a chance. Since South Asian Muslims did not actually live under Ottomans, our view of them is certainly skewed. But for that a romantic like myself can not be helped. I have seen some Gulf Arabs cry for what was done to Ottomans, and I know that the fall of the empire was keenly felt throughout the Muslim world.

But then empires are not particularly nice things to begin with. A distant ruler and a distant capital can not do justice to local issues when there is a gulf of politics in between. Among the Mughals, Shah Jahan is perhaps the most admired emperor, but even he has the massive blot of Gujarat famine and his failure to do anything much about it ( @Joe Shearer ?)

 

[Joe Shearer]

I agree with you here. But the criticism for Ottomans should not make us ignore their capacity to do good when they got a chance. Since South Asian Muslims did not actually live under Ottomans, our view of them is certainly skewed. But for that a romantic like myself can not be helped. I have seen some Gulf Arabs cry for what was done to Ottomans, and I know that the fall of the empire was keenly felt throughout the Muslim world.

But then empires are not particularly nice things to begin with. A distant ruler and a distant capital can not do justice to local issues when there is a gulf of politics in between. Among the Mughals, Shah Jahan is perhaps the most admired emperor, but even he has the massive blot of Gujarat famine and his failure to do anything much about it ( @Joe Shearer ?)

First, I am not sure that I want to criticise the Ottomans from top to bottom. Their achievements were remarkable, and their rule over a large territory, over diverse ethnic groups, was historically significant. They impacted European history considerably; not only through their two sieges of Vienna, during the second of which the great general, Prince Eugene of Savoy, made his debut, but also through their influence over Hungary, their presence in the Balkans and in Greece, and the complete domination of the Mediterranean. What had been a high road for the exchange of cultural, commercial, religious and political ideas - the English Common Law system is thought by some to have had links with Sharia law, through the absorption of Sharia Law principles by the Hauteville lords of Sicily, who may have influenced the development of Common Law by their Normandy and Plantagenet cousins - became a menacing hinterland out of which the Ottoman fleet could strike suddenly. The ferment and intellectual confrontation so well described in Henri Pirenne's seminal Mahomet and Charlemagne was whittled down to a hostile peace, punctuated by slaving raids on the Balearics.
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[Joe Shearer]

I agree with you here. But the criticism for Ottomans should not make us ignore their capacity to do good when they got a chance. Since South Asian Muslims did not actually live under Ottomans, our view of them is certainly skewed. But for that a romantic like myself can not be helped. I have seen some Gulf Arabs cry for what was done to Ottomans, and I know that the fall of the empire was keenly felt throughout the Muslim world.

But then empires are not particularly nice things to begin with. A distant ruler and a distant capital can not do justice to local issues when there is a gulf of politics in between. Among the Mughals, Shah Jahan is perhaps the most admired emperor, but even he has the massive blot of Gujarat famine and his failure to do anything much about it ( @Joe Shearer ?)

Second, the fall of the Ottomans was inevitable; all empires fall. It was so recent that its aftermath has not ceased to trouble us today. Sitting in south Asia, looking at the turn of events, it is not immediately clear why the Arabs should mourn. It is clear that they got their independence, albeit divided into many countries, from the Turks due to the fall of the Ottoman empire. The Gulf Arabs should not have cried, surely.

But on deeper thought, it becomes evident that for these Gulf Arabs, it was not their Arab identity that they thought of when they mourned; their lugubrious response was to the final dissolution of the Khilafat, which the Ottomans laid claim to as successors to the rightful line destroyed by the Mongols.

The ironic reverse of this sense of unity sundered is the terrible legacy of the European intervention into the dissolution, the mess that is the Middle East today. What began in the sands of the desert in the 8th century is still playing itself out, as the latest in a series of encounters between the Roman Empire and Arabia Deserta. When Khalid ibn Walid skewered the tired, unwieldy legions of the later eastern empire, he gave a massive swing to a pendulum that travelled through the Crusades, the fall of Constantinople, the assault on Europe and the Mediterranean, the counter-attack through the Mediterranean, the Balkans and the Caucasus, the merciless military impalement during the Great War, the suppression of the mid-war years, and the violent eruption after the Second World War. An eruption which continues.

From Constantinople onwards, it was the Ottoman Empire that spoke for the world of Islam to the west, and it was the dissolution of this empire that marked the brief triumph of the west, and the savage backlash that followed, a backlash that will take the generations of our children, and our children's children, if not more, to turn to peace and tranquillity.

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[Chak Bamu]

Well sir, I said some Arabs cried. The specific incident that crystallized this fact for me (apart from some conversations) was an Imam in Qatar, who while delivering Khutba in Arabic lamented the loss of Khilafat and the consequent intervention by Western power to sow the seeds of discord and conflict. This was at the onset of Intifadah. The government then banned him from preaching and he left for Kuwait. So, there are some Arabs who do lament the fall of Ottoman empire. And there are many who do not care.