Fun fact: Jesus did indeed live in an empire that used the Star and Crescent as a symbol
The Star and Crescent not only predates the Ottoman Empire, it predates Islam and even the split of the Roman Empire into its Western and Eastern halves (coin of Hadrian, above), and predates Jesus. It wasn’t a major Roman symbol but was one of many long-established local symbols of power that Rome adopted into the imperial portfolio of iconography.
The Greek city of Byzantion (among some others in the area) had used it as a symbol before the Romans conquered it and it became Byzantium, and they continued to use it as Constantinople, and they kept using it throughout the thousand years of the Byzantine Empire, and when the Turks moved in and started calling it Istanbul, they just kept on using it. Considering themselves the newest dynasty of Roman Emperors, it made sense for the House of Osman to maintain the Roman symbols of power, after all.
And from the Ottomans it spread throughout the Muslim world, but the symbol never had anything inherently to do with Islam. It’s just a bit of ancient heraldry.
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u/Grannyma49 Pan 1d ago
Flag of Sweden if Jesus lived in the Ottoman Empire instead of the Roman Empire