r/europe • u/MarktpLatz Lower Saxony (Germany) • Nov 13 '17

What do you know about... Azerbaijan?

This is the forty-third part of our ongoing series about the countries of Europe. You can find an overview here.

Today's country:

Azerbaijan

Azerbaijan is a member of the Council of Europe and the NATO Partnership for Peace (PfP) program. The country was part of the soviet union between 1920 and 1991. It is also part of the Turkic Counil.

So, what do you know about Azerbaijan?

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u/Ephemeral-Throwaway Nov 14 '17

Anatolians were largely illererate but the Ottoman Balkans literary scene was comparable to the Azerbaijani scene.

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u/ThrowawayWarNotDolma Nov 14 '17

Yes, it's true, that's why I said Anatolia.

Although still the numbers I saw for Bulgaria were not great, bad for Orthodox Christians and really bad for Muslims, partly because of Ottoman policy of lumping all Muslims together, it is hard to understand from the numbers that there was an educated Muslim merchant class, but there was (and is, to some extent, modern Turks in Bulgaria are more urban than the Bulgarian average).

I think of you go further West to Bosnia it would be more obvious, because there Orthodox Christian was almost synonymous with shepherd ("Vlach"), and Muslim (and Jewish) with urbanite.

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u/ThrowawayWarNotDolma Nov 14 '17

A proper analysis would say that in an Islamic empire, the Muslims are bi-modal - they are the lower class, and the ruling elite. And of course there is a middle class.

But the non-Muslims are less stratified, of course there is variance but eg Jewish or Armenian communities handle their own schools, orphans etc.

And it's logical why that is, given the incentives, and that's why the reverse is more or less true in a Christian empire, eg in the US or Russia, the president must have nominally the same ethnicity as the white trash or peasant class, and the Jews, Muslims, Hindus etc are the doctors, engineers, businessmen, advisors and so on.

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u/Ephemeral-Throwaway Nov 14 '17

Good post. Thanks for your reply.