Saeed Ahmad Hasan fails to understand that the Arabs’ historical memory of the Ottoman Empire makes them hostile to the Turks today. He is unaware that Saudi Arabia is the Muslim Brotherhood’s greatest enemy, while Turkey is its greatest supporter.
He has a dreamy view of Turkey’s starry place in the Islamic firmament:
“Turkey is rising fast in the world of Islam due to its administrative capacity, better governance, and fastest military and economic progress. Due to it being the descendant of the Ottoman Caliphate [which ended in 1924], Muslims have respect for it. It has better relations with Europe and America, etc. Turkey is that emerging star of the world of Islam for which the ummah has established great expectations.” the author notes.
Every one of these statements is wrong. Turkey does not have discerningly “better governance” than many other Muslim states (e.g., Indonesia, Oman, Tunisia, Morocco, Azerbaijan). Erdogan’s increasing authoritarianism, his arrogating to himself powers the President was never supposed to possess, have led to the political degringolade. In the recent election, Erdogan’s party lost all of Turkey’s three main cities: Istanbul, Ankara, and Izmir. People now speak, as they never dared to before, about the end of the Erdogan era. Far from the “economic progress” that Saeed Ahmad Hasan mentions, Turkey is in economic free fall. In the last 18 months, the lira has lost 60% of its value as against the dollar. As for its supposed military progress, Turkey’s acceptance of the Russian S-400 missile defense system has led the U.S. to cancel the sale of 100 F-35s to Turkey.
Turkey has “better relations with Europe and America”? Relations between Turkey and its fellow members of NATO have never been worse; articles keep appearing calling for NATO to expel Turkey, given that Erdogan has predicted a war between “the cross and the crescent,” leaving no doubt what side Turkey would be on. His call for the creation of a pan-Islamic force, with Turkey its putative leader, that would attack and destroy Israel, is not what the Americans or the Europeans want to hear from a member of NATO.
It is precisely the neo-Ottoman dreams of Erdogan that make Arabs mistrustful of Turkey. Though they did not experience it themselves, they have heard the stories about how the Arabs were treated by their Ottoman masters. They most certainly do not “have respect” for Turkey because it is the heir to the Ottomans. Quite the contrary: it is “due to” Turkey’s “being the descendant of the Ottoman Caliphate” that makes Arabs so dislike and distrust it. They don’t remember the Ottoman Empire fondly, despite what Hasan, in distant Pakistan, may think.
As for Turkey having “better relations with Europe and America” — what can Hasan possibly mean? Relations between Turkey and its fellow members of NATO have never been worse; articles keep appearing calling for NATO to expel Turkey, given that Erdogan has predicted a war between “the cross and the crescent,” leaving no doubt what side Turkey would be on. His call for the creation of a pan-Islamic force, with Turkey its putative leader, that would attack and destroy Israel, is not what the Americans or the Europeans want to hear from a member of NATO.
Turkey’s relations with Washington have gone from lukewarm to bad for other reasons as well. Erdogan became enraged with the Americans when they refused to hand over Fethulleh Gulen after the failed coup attempt in July 2016 in Turkey. The Americans, in turn, were angry both with his initial demand and with his subsequent fury. They were even angrier when the Turks seized American pastor Andrew Brunson, who for decades had tended a tiny, 25-person church that met in a tenement in Izmir, on charges of belonging to an Armed Terrorist Organization, and used him as a pawn, offering to trade him for Gulen. The Americans refused, and put enormous economic pressure on Turkey; it worked, and Pastor Brunson was freed. But there was no repair to American-Turkish relations. After Erdogan’s startling remark about a coming war between “the cross and the crescent,” after his suggestion of creating a pan-Islamic military force to destroy Israel, after his hysterical demand for Fethulleh Gulen to be extradited, after the imprisonment of Pastor Brunson, and the attempt to use him as a bargaining chip, there was one last straw. That was Erdogan’s refusal to cancel Turkey’s purchase of Russia’s S-400 anti-missile defense system, which led Washington to cancel the sale of 100 F-35 planes to Turkey. All that remains, to complete the destruction of Ankara’s ties to Washington, is for Erdogan to shut down the Incirlik air base.
As for Europe, the reluctance of the E.U. to admit Turkey as a member is understandable. The negotiations, such as they are, can be allowed to drag on, but there is no longer any chance that Turkey will be admitted to the E.U. For if it were granted such membership, this would allow not just Turks, but other Muslim economic migrants as well, once they made it to Turkey, to then travel freely throughout the member states of the E.U. The E.U. countries are now trying to cope with tens of millions of Muslim migrants in their midst. They do not want any more Muslims arriving coming from Turkey, whether they be Turks or other Muslims using Turkey as their pathway to Europe. Europeans regard with dread the prospect of an additional 80 million Muslims becoming part of the E.U.
The Europeans have been watching with dismay and anxiety as Erdogan systematically undermines Kemalism. He has been busily re-Islamizing Turkey with his tens of thousands of new mosques, and his 4,000 Imam Hatip religious schools. A change in the law now allows women to wear the hijab in civil service jobs (which includes university teachers) and government offices. Erdogan has “sanitised” the education system by, for example, changing the curriculum to reflect Muslim beliefs; evolution is no longer being taught in Turkish schools. He has imposed “national and spiritual values” on the mass media. Failure to uphold those “values” as defined by the government may explain why more journalists have been jailed in Turkey than in any other country.
Given all this, how can Saeed Ahmad Hasan claim that Turkey has “better relations” than other Islamic states with Europe and America? He simply hasn’t been paying attention.