Recordings › Why converting the Hagia Sophia to a mosque is a mistake | Mufti Abu Layth · 16 Jul 2020 › Segment 5 of 9
Were the Ottomans the representatives of Islam?
hambali hanbalite hanbali school fatwah fatawa fatwaa fataawa legal opinion muftis mubah mubaah ulema ulamaaThe Ottomans were a dynasty, not a symbol of Islam: fratricide, 'Caesar of Rome' and romanticisation
Play from 13:13
The video loads from YouTube only when you press play. Click a time in the transcript to seek.
Watch this part
Open on YouTube at 13:13The player starts at 13:13, the beginning of this part.
This segment13:13 to 15:48 · 2 min 35 sGeneral teaching
What this part covers
machinesummary, machine-writtenNo, he says: the Ottoman Empire was a dynasty that happened to be Muslim, practised mandatory fratricide and styled its sultans 'Caesar of Rome', and never claimed to be a symbol of Islam. The romantic image is a later invention.
In more detail
Mufti Abu Layth says he has not watched an episode of the Ertugrul drama and finds such things preposterous, though he has nothing against drama as such. He says the Ottoman Empire was nothing more than a dynasty that happened to be Muslim and is not symbolic of Islam: its unwritten law was that a new sultan must kill all his brothers, a mandatory fratricide for which, he says, some Hanbali [?] scholars even gave a permitting fatwa. The Ottomans never claimed to represent Islam; the title they gave themselves, including Mehmed al-Fatih, was Caesar of Rome. He says they were simply people with good and bad sides, that for much of their history they were based in eastern Europe rather than the Middle East, and that today's romanticised image of them as symbols of Islam is a later dream; they respected Islam in their own way, as Muslims today do, but were not its symbols.
- Some terms in this segment are uncertain
Position stated
Mufti Abu Layth says the Ottoman Empire was a dynasty that happened to be Muslim and never claimed to be a symbol of Islam, styling its sultans 'Caesar of Rome' and practising mandatory fratricide, so Muslims who romanticise it as representing Islam are mistaken.
“the ottoman empire was never it was nothing more than a dynasty that just happened to be muslim it is not symbolic of islam”
Category: historical claim
Kind: general teachingTranscript
machine13:13 to 15:48 · click a time to seek · dotted terms open the glossary
turkey is you know erdogan for a while has been trying to shape out his identity as the new amir al-mu'min in islam and he's trying to rival saudi arabia who have had that position traditionally i don't know why except that the haramain are there so turkey has now tried to you know first of all with this urtical drama uh promoting this everywhere and they've been doing this with many other mosques as well by the way uh in turkey churches turning them into mosques and things like this but this urtical thing that spreading this i you know i i've not watched a single
episode i can't honestly i find these things preposterous but anyway to a lot of people love the drama fair enough i haven't got anything against the drama per se but they look you have to understand something the ottoman empire was never it was nothing more than a dynasty that just happened to be muslim it is not symbolic of islam um they were you know nothing in fact the ottomans they first you know what the actual rule was they what they had concretized as the unspoken law was as soon as the next sultan comes in
fracture side mandatory fratricide whoever is going to come in has to kill all his brothers this was the unspoken i mean it was the unwritten law and even some of the humbly ulama gave them the fatwa that it's permissible i don't know what they were what they were smoking but yeah so the the ottomans were never these representatives of islam they never even claimed to be this you know this is the dumb thing that you know muslims today are so some muslims these kind of romanticized ones are so in you know in a dreamy
state of mind the ottomans never claimed if you read the uh the titles that the ottomans used to give themselves it was they used to give themselves the title caesar of rome that was their title the caesar of rome including fatih and these people you know they go on about him and other people look sure they i'm not saying they were horrible people they may have had some i mean they were just people they had good size to them they had really bad sides to them they were not symbols of islam later on we romanticized them to be these symbols of islam
they weren't even in the middle east so much later on when they established they were more so in eastern europe but they had nothing you know the way we pitched today it's presented like this dream image oh they were like sure i mean they were muslim and i'm not saying that they didn't respect islam i'm sure in their own way they respected islam just as muslims today respect islam but they weren't symbols of islam yeah if if that makes sense to you you're not going to see today countries like you know is i don't know do you but even they don't so yes so
Paragraphs overlapping 13:13 to 15:48. Full text on the recording page.
Cite this segment
Stable id, transcript version and tier are part of the citation. Every change to a transcript is logged.Mufti Abu Layth Archive, segment 2020-07-16-S05, auto-transcribed, may contain errors. https://muftiabulayth.org/r/bgsfy-umsa4/s/5/ (accessed 1 November 2026)
- APA 7
Mufti Abu Layth. (2020, July 16). Were the Ottomans the representatives of Islam? [Video, segment 2020-07-16-S05, auto-transcribed, may contain errors]. Mufti Abu Layth Archive. Retrieved November 1, 2026, from https://muftiabulayth.org/r/bgsfy-umsa4/s/5/
- Chicago author-date
Mufti Abu Layth. 2020. "Were the Ottomans the representatives of Islam?" Video, segment 2020-07-16-S05, auto-transcribed, may contain errors. Mufti Abu Layth Archive. Recorded July 16, 2020. Accessed November 1, 2026. https://muftiabulayth.org/r/bgsfy-umsa4/s/5/
- BibTeX
@misc{abulayth-2020-07-16-S05, author = {Mufti Abu Layth}, title = {{Were the Ottomans the representatives of Islam?}}, year = {2020}, month = {7}, date = {2020-07-16}, howpublished = {\url{https://muftiabulayth.org/r/bgsfy-umsa4/s/5/}}, url = {https://muftiabulayth.org/r/bgsfy-umsa4/s/5/}, organization = {Mufti Abu Layth Archive}, urldate = {2026-11-01}, note = {Segment 2020-07-16-S05, auto-transcribed, may contain errors} }
Something wrong here?
Tell us what is wrong and it will be checked against the recording. Nothing changes until a person has reviewed it.
Sending a note needs JavaScript, which is off or unavailable in this browser. Nothing has been sent.
No name, email address or account is asked for or stored, and the inbox does not store your IP address. For rate limiting it keeps an unreadable fingerprint of your connection for 48 hours, and our database provider's own logs record connections as every website's do. Only your note, its kind, the page and the moment in the recording are kept, for review.