Its clear purpose is to becalm the British people regarding the rapid Islamization of their own country: don’t worry! You see the Islamic State murdering and subjugating in the name of Islam, but look how tolerant and cosmopolitan the Ottomans were! No one need be concerned about the overwhelming numbers of Muslim immigrants, and the increasing power of Islamic supremacists in British society!

Why, the Sceptered Isle will be a veritable new Ottoman Empire! “BBC News’ ‘Ottomans: Europe’s Muslim Emperors’: Putting a Positive Spin on Conquest,” by Kate O’Hare, Breitbart News, August 9, 2014 : Tonight (Saturday, Aug. 9), cable channel BBC World News premieres the three-part series The Ottomans: Europe’s Muslim Emperors, which aired last fall in the U.K. (If you don’t have BBC World News on your cable system, the series is available on iTunes and on DVD.)

While it’s not exactly a whitewash of the invasion into Europe of Muslims from Turkey, and the subsequent centuries-long occupation, it’s not a condemnation either. As the U.K. Catholic Herald wondered at the time of the show’s premiere:

The title of the series tries to sneak in a rather contentious point as a given–’Europe’s Muslim Emperors.’ Some mistake, surely? While large swathes of Europe did fall under Ottoman rule, for centuries this rule was deeply resented, and the powers of Europe, or at least most of them, did their best to expel the invader.

Even if the Ottoman Turks may have ruled parts of Europe, their civilisation was not European, but Asiatic. As someone once said, ‘Turkey has always represented a different continent, in permanent contrast to Europe.’ It would make sense to describe the Turkish Sultans not as European, but anti-European.

And while the series has three hours to tell its story, it wastes an inordinate amount of time with static shots of host Rageh Omaar–a British Sunni Muslim of Somali heritage–walking hither and thither, staring moodily across landscapes or squinting at interviewees. Many of these sequences are repeated episode to episode, along with verbatim sections of certain interviews, leaving one to wonder if the budget just didn’t allow for enough material to fill three full hours, because the whole thing, while sumptuously filmed, feels thin in places in terms of history and information.

Or perhaps, Omaar used his own face or beautiful images to fill in gaps where there were parts of the story he wanted to soften or minimize. And sometimes, the images don’t live up to the words. Omaar, the International Affairs Editor for ITV News in the U.K. (and late of Al Jazeera English and the BBC) shows us pictures of what he says are spectacular Ottoman buildings, but the most impressive is Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, which no doubt was even more magnificent when it was a Christian church in the former Constantinople, before Ottoman conquerors stripped it of much of its art and religious symbols.

Otherwise, Omaar does show us the lovely 16th Century Suleymaniye Mosque in Edirne, Turkey, which is the work of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent’s gifted architect, Mimar Sinan. But as it turns out, Sinan was born a Bosnian Christian, taken from his family as a little boy as part of a system of child enslavement called devshirme, forcibly converted to Islam and raised a Muslim. This was a common practice of the Ottomans, who used these kidnapped lads to help build their armies. But Omaar and his experts point out that some went on to have glittering careers, so that’s, one supposes, all right then.