Another month, another survey. As the title suggests, it's a fairly simple question. 82 participants were asked the question:
"Do you know who the Ottomans are?"
And the results are in :
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| An overwhelming majority! |
As you can see, 90.24 % of respondents (that is 74 people) answered yes while 9.76% of respondents (that is 8 people) answered no.
What is interesting is, that I had asked this question in two different areas. One was in a history forum and the other was in a local area. Surprisingly (and ironically), respondents here (in my local area) , a greater number of people have not heard of the Ottomans.
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| The survey of the local area |
While it is good to see that the average person seems to know the Ottomans, I am , however, slightly disturbed by the fact that almost 40% of respondents didn't know who the Ottomans were (considering that they live in a Middle Eastern country that was a stone throw away from the old empire).
I'm curious to know what my readers think of this gap ? What's the reason behind this ?
2 comments:
I am, indeed, an outsider and therefore have a less informed point of view as regards to Bahrain.
However, to paint with a broad brush, it appears to me that the majority of Arabs and/or Muslims in the Middle East do not have much regard for history in general. The "history" of their family or tribe may be important but, not much more outside of that.
I suspect that this has to do with the 1,000 year old tradition of perhaps thinking - everything that is needed to be known about "the world" will be found in the Koran or hadiths or other religious works of Islam. And, I suspect the Ottomans are not mentioned in such.
Plausible and true to some extent. Generally speaking, history is often neglected by the average man. It is unfortunate but that's reality, I suppose.
However, the legacy of the Ottomans (bear in mind, they've lasted since the 1400s) is simply too great to have been "forgotten" or be unheard of.
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