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Great Sultan

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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by DanMS (talk | contribs) at 16:40, 9 August 2005 (+tags). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

Great Sultan is one of various informal titles and even plumper descriptions, such as Grand Turk or even "sick old man", used (incorrectly) by westerners, often pejoratively (especially when the Ottomans were one the retreat in the Balkans) referring to the Ottoman Sultan, known in Ottoman Turkish as Padishah, Hünkar or Hakan, the sovereign of the Ottoman dynasty.

More appropriate would be to use the style Sultan, or rather Sultan of Sultans (Sultan us-Selatin in Turkish or Sultan es-Salatin in Arabic), one of his many official titles.

Like Great Khan (but there the usage is so frequent since centuries that is can be considered an established convention) instead of Khagan, such western fabrications fail to translate or properly render the subtle complexities of the oriental originals, but rather testify of ignorance and/or ill will between the great rivalling christian and islamic civilizations, contributing to the cruelties in their millenary struggle for domination, roughly in the former (long pagan) Roman Empire.

A curious circumstance is that the Ottoman dynastic tradition was to give the style of sultan (elsewhere a muslim ruler) to male and female princ(ess)es, merely as close relatives of the ruling Padishah, without an appanage (as the empire was indivisible). So the western fabrication could at least have had some logical merit if those has been rendered as, say, junior sultan, but that is not the case.