Nathaniel Handy

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    The War on Terror Was Never Turkey’s Fight

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    Do you know where you were on August 14, 2001? Perhaps not, since it isn’t a defining day in world history in quite the same way as September 11, 2001, or 9/11, as it’s become known. Yet in the Turkish political landscape, August 14, 2001, can now be seen as something of a watershed moment.

    It was on this day that the Justice and Development Party (AKP) was founded. One of its founding members was a man named Recep Tayyip Erdogan. It was the latest in a long list of parties catering to a religiously devout and socially conservative constituency in Turkey. All the previous ones had been banned.

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    What makes August 14, 2001, so significant is the simple fact that the AKP was never banned. Despite the party’s daring to tread on secularist principles that few others had dared, this time, the country, with strong European Union support, had no appetite for military-backed bans.

    Turkey Says No

    Just as September 11 didn’t really come out of a clear blue sky for anyone observing the tide of Islamist militancy, so too the success of the AKP in Turkey did not come unannounced. It was a long time in the making, but its assumption of power, so soon after 9/11, has been defining for the country.

    By 2003, when George W. Bush’s war on terror was swinging into action in Iraq, the AKP took control of Turkey‘s government. Despite repeated attempts to shutter the party and even a failed 2016 coup, the AKP remains in power. As perhaps the most successful Islamist party in the Middle East, its relationship to both the events of 9/11 and the ensuing war on terror has always been a strained one. The Turkey of the 20th century would have been an unquestioning supporter of US policy. The new Turkey was not.

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    I was in Turkey on 9/11 and I saw the immediate reaction of ordinary people to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In the hours after the towers fell, there were wild, yet in retrospect on-the-mark rumors that the US was about to bomb Afghanistan. The mood among ordinary Turks was not one of support.

    Visceral anger and anti-American sentiment were clearly palpable. While not outright cheering al-Qaeda, it was obvious that most people wouldn’t take the US side in a fight. This mood was reflected when Washington eventually went to war with Iraq and hoped to use the airbase at Incirlik in southeastern Turkey.

    The parliamentary vote that vetoed the use of the base for flights into Iraq was a pivotal one. It was the first strong sign of demonstrable national action in reflection of a national mood. In the post-Cold War world, Turkey’s Islamist government was ready to plow its own furrow.

    Who Defines Terrorism?

    The years that have followed have seen an ambiguous and often highly contorted relationship with the war on terror. Sometimes, Turkey has used the anti-terrorism concept to its own ends, as have many other US allies. At other times, it has turned a blind eye to activity that surely fell under the banner of terrorism.

    The Arab Spring of 2010 offered Islamists across the Middle East their big moment. Secular autocrats, long propped up by the West, tottered. Turkey’s Islamist government was one of the most vocal and active in attempting to ride this wave that they hoped would bring Islamist governments to a swathe of countries.

    Initially, the signs were good. The Muslim Brotherhood won the first free and fair elections in Egypt. Meanwhile, in neighboring Syria, the long-suppressed Islamist movement threatened to overwhelm the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad. For a time, Turkey became a beacon of hope and a model for how the rest of the Middle East might evolve.

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    Turkish flags were being waved by demonstrators in Syria, and President Erdogan became the most popular leader in the region, loved by people far beyond his own nation. Then the Egyptian coup destroyed the Brotherhood, and Russia and Iran stepped in to save Assad’s regime in Syria. The mood soured for Turkey.

    In an attempt to rescue something in the Syrian conflict and in response to the collapse of domestic peace talks between the government and the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, Turkey’s border became a very porous route for jihadists entering into Syria. In time, these jihadists named themselves the Islamic State and declared a caliphate. This audacious move severely upped the stakes on al-Qaeda’s attempts of 2001, with an even more brutal brand of terrorism. Turkey’s ambiguous attitude to these developments was hardly a war on terror.

    Yet by this stage, the concept behind the war on terror had become so nebulous and the AKP’s relations to the US so strained by Washington’s support for the Kurds in Syria, that it was a case of realpolitik all the way. To any accusation of soft-handedness toward terrorists, Turkey pointed to US attitudes vis-à-vis Kurdish militants.

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    President Erdogan has, over time, began to carve a space for himself as an anti-Western champion, a leader of some kind of latter-day non-aligned movement, a spokesman for Muslim rights worldwide. This political and cultural position has made Turkey’s place in a liberal, democratic world order highly questionable.

    What seems clear in retrospect is that both 9/11 and the subsequent war on terror were never Turkey’s fights. Due to the longstanding Turkish alliance with the US and NATO, these have been constantly recurring themes in Turkish politics. But the events that have been so central to US policymaking for the past two decades have generally been used to advance Ankara’s own strategic goals in light of the assumption of power and entrenched hegemony of the Islamist movement in Turkey’s contemporary politics.

    The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Why Headscarves Matter So Much to Turkey

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      Many news outlets carried stories in mid-July of the Turkish government’s condemnation of a ruling by the European Court of Justice (ECJ) upholding a ban on headscarves in certain circumstances, in which an employer wishes to convey a “neutral image.” In doing so, it is weighing into the culture wars over religious symbolism that Europeans will all be well aware of. Many European countries, in particular France, have seen high-profile clashes over the issue of religious symbols in state institutions.

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      Many readers would see Turkey’s condemnation as a simple case of an Islamist regime railing against Western suppression of Islam. Indeed, the government’s statement was full of accusations of Islamophobia in Europe. Yet such statements, coming out of Turkey, are not as simple as that.

      Those same readers might be surprised to discover that Turkey itself had banned headscarves in state institutions until very recently. This might make a governmental condemnation of a ban in Europe seem nonsensical. The reality helps to give context to the Turkish reaction.

      Wear Western Hats

      Condemnations of headscarf bans might ordinarily be expected to emanate from regimes such as the Iranian theocracy or the Saudi conservative monarchy. Coming out of the secular republic of Turkey, they might appear more curious, if it wasn’t for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s global image as a religious conservative.

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      His government’s sensitivity to headscarf bans is very personal indeed. In 2006, his own and other politicians’ wives were not invited to an official event by the then-Turkish president, Ahmet Necdet Sezer, due to their wearing of headscarves. In 2007, there was an attempt by the military — a traditional guardian of Turkey’s ruling secular elite — to deny the presidency to Abdullah Gul of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) because his wife wore a headscarf.

      Such attitudes, which might appear highly intolerant in countries such as the United Kingdom, make more sense in places like France where the separation of church and state is a foundation of the republic. When modern Turkey was created in 1920, France became the model for how to build a modern state. A key element in the imitation of the French was the desire of Turkey’s first military rulers to suppress Islam.

      The Ottoman Empire, of which Turkey was the successor state, was an Islamic empire. Indeed, it was ruled by a caliph, the Islamic equivalent of the pope in Rome. The caliph was the leader of the Muslim world. Turning Turkey into a modern secular republic was akin to removing the pope from the Vatican and banning the wearing of the Christian cross in Catholic Europe. Needless to say, it has created cultural fault lines in Turkey that persist to this day.

      To drive home his cultural revolution in the 1920s and 1930s, modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, instituted a ban on the fez — that most famously Turkish of hats — and the turban. He insisted on men wearing the Western brimmed hat, traditionally rejected since it doesn’t allow the wearer to bow their head to the floor in Muslim prayer whilst wearing it.

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      The veil and headscarf were also discouraged, though the state’s ability to enforce changes in female clothing was slower to be realized than with men’s. The persistence of female cultural clothing as opposed to male could be the subject of an entire essay of its own.

      Alongside many other measures, such as the banning of the Sufi Muslim brotherhoods, the closure of mosques, a ban on the call to prayer in Arabic and the removal of the Arabic script, the Turkish authorities attempted to forcibly Westernize Turks.

      The Illiberal 1980s

      Yet it was not until the military coup d’état of 1980 that Turkey finally outlawed the headscarf officially. It was then that it was banned across all state institutions, including schools, universities, the judiciary, the police and the military. In effect, this meant that girls from religious backgrounds had to choose either to remove their headscarves or not get an education. Only with the rise of the AKP to power in the 2000s did official attitudes begin to shift.

      In 2010, Turkish universities finally admitted women who wore headscarves. This was followed a few years later by state bureaucratic institutions, except the judiciary, military and police. In 2016, policewomen were allowed to wear headscarves beneath their caps, and finally in 2017, the military was the last institution to lift the ban.

      This is the backdrop against which the Turkish government condemns a headscarf ban — in certain circumstances — decreed by the ECJ. It is a backdrop in which the religiously conservative in Turkey read a narrative of European coercion running back to the founding of the modern state and even earlier.

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      The ideas that inspired the military officers who won the Turkish War of Independence — the war with Allied powers that followed the conclusion of the First World War — were imported from Western Europe. Having carved out an almost entirely religiously homogenous Muslim state, they set out to utterly secularize it.

      The banning of the headscarf is therefore seen by religiously conservative Turks as an idea imported from Europe and, in some sense, an idea dictated to Muslims by secularized Christian nations. Given the last century of experience in Turkey, it is clear how this view is generated.

      Ultimately, the question is one of whether people who like the use of headscarves should tolerate those who don’t wear them, and whether those who dislike the use of headscarves should tolerate those who do wear them. Examples of intolerance abound on either side. A lack of understanding will bring no peace to Turkey or to countries across Europe and the world.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Turkey Doubles Down on Hard Power

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      A few years ago, the very notion of Turkish foreign military interventions would have seemed extraordinary. The Turkish republic has been, for most of its history, determinedly introspective. Until the 20th century, it was largely disengaged from its immediate neighborhood, favoring ties with the West. Great power architecture tends to subdue regional tensions. Whether it’s unilateral US power or bilateral umbrella organizations like the European Union or NATO, a deterrent to regional conflict has been present.

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      Yet with the waning of such architecture and the changing internal dynamics of Turkish politics, Turkey has engaged in a number of foreign military interventions in recent years — in Iraq, Syria, Libya and, most recently, in Azerbaijan’s conflict with Armenia over the disputed Nagorno-Karabakh region.

      The prevailing assumption is that Turkey won a strategic battle in this war that has shifted the balance of power in the region. But this ignores a deeper malaise in Turkey’s foreign policy direction. It may be winning hot fights today, but the wider cold war it is entering with a ring of neighboring states will damage Turkey’s ability to project power in the longer term.

      Unfriendly Neighbors

      Only a decade ago, under the guidance of then-Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu’s “zero problems with neighbors” doctrine, Ankara was on historically good terms with Armenia. At the time, there was a sense that Turkey was leaving behind the traditional republican mindset of being beset on all sides by threats.

      This mindset, rooted in the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire and the war of independence that thwarted Great Power designs on the partition of Anatolia among the victors in World War I, persisted throughout much of the 20th century. However, by 2014, Ankara had signed bilateral High-Level Strategic Cooperation Council agreements with Iran (2014), Iraq (2009), Lebanon (2010) and even, strange though it may now seem, Syria (2010).

      Even Greece and Armenia, traditionally viewed as the most ardent foes due to the religious divide, had become amicable neighbors. In April 2014, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan even offered condolences to the grandchildren of Armenians killed in 1915, in a major shift in official Turkish rhetoric. This was perhaps the zenith of Turkish soft power in its neighborhood. All that has changed since Erdogan moved his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) decisively in a nationalist direction.

      It is often observed that Erdogan is a leader in the mold of Russian President Vladimir Putin. His increasing use of opportunistic hard power to meet strategic foreign policy objectives is seen as part of the classic Putin playbook. Yet this analysis overlooks some important facts.

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      At the most fundamental level, Turkey is not Russia. The two states have some striking similarities — such as an imperial legacy on the periphery of Europe that has tended to reinforce a sense of ethnic and cultural isolation and exceptionalism. However, they are simultaneously very different.

      Russia only lost its empire in 1991, while Turkey’s vanished 70 years earlier. Despite the loss of empire, Russia maintains considerable de facto power in the ex-Soviet space. Not only that, but Russia can be said to still be a significant empire, given that Moscow controls what are effectively non-Russian republics within the Russian Federation.    

      The same is not true of Turkey. For half a century, the Turkish republic largely ignored the Ottoman Empire’s former imperial possessions. In the 20th century, ethnic outreach toward Turkic or co-religious communities in the Balkans, the Caucasus and the Middle East and North Africa has increased, but never with the same level of hard power control Russia wields in its former imperial space. Further, the only significant non-Turkish population under Ankara’s direct control is the Kurds of southeastern Turkey.

      The result is that the projection of purely hard power can have useful results for Russia in its former imperial space in a way that is more complicated for Turkey. The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict can be said to occur in both Russian and Turkish former imperial space, but this is much more immediately true of Russia. Armenia is dependent on Russia as a client state in a way that Azerbaijan is not dependent on Turkey.

      What’s more, for Turkey, conflict with the states encircling it leads to far greater problems. Russia is difficult to encircle. It is geographically too extensive. There is always room to maneuver. Turkey currently has very difficult relations with Armenia, Iraq, Syria, Cyprus and Greece. This leaves precious little goodwill to help project soft power. Everything must be won by hard power.

      A High Price on Everything

      There is no question that in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Turkey’s backing of Azerbaijan was pivotal, leading to a strategic success akin to that achieved shortly beforehand in Libya. Turkish hard power had been decisive and influence dramatically increased in Baku, as it was in Tripoli.

      Yet it came at the price of establishing Armenia as an even more implacable enemy than it already was, just as the success in Libya established Egypt, Greece and the United Arab Emirates as even more implacable enemies than they already were. In the context of the eastern Mediterranean, it could be argued that the action in Libya was non-negotiable for Turkey. It had to act. But in Azerbaijan, it was much more nuanced.

      The Turkey of the Davutoglu era might well have acted as a go-between, defusing tensions between Armenia and Azerbaijan, all the while quietly increasing Turkish influence across the entire region. Instead, the result is hostile battle lines. Turkey may have the upper hand today, but newly embittered enemies will await any opportunity to inflict harm. This does not build a sustainable, peaceful, long-term strategic vision for Turkey within its neighborhood.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      What Would a Biden Victory Spell for US-Turkish Relations?

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      In an interview for a new book from Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward, US President Donald Trump says: “I get along very well with Erdogan, even though you’re not supposed to because everyone says, ‘What a horrible guy.’” A lot is revealed in that statement. The key lies in the phrase “you’re not supposed to.” It implies there is a moral authority vetting such preferences and that he is dismissive of that moral authority.

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      Of course, it says more about the moral fault lines at the heart of US politics than it does about US-Turkish relations. These fault lines are being given the scorched earth treatment once more as the election season draws to a close. But what does the future hold for US-Turkish relations, once so unshakable and now so fractious, despite President Trump’s personal warmth toward Recep Tayyip Erdogan? Will it make any difference if the old man at the helm is Joe Biden instead?

      Let the Old Men Talk

      As the above quote reveals, much about US-Turkish relations today is being driven by personalities. Individuals always matter in international relations, but their importance is accentuated by the rise of figures who command strong populist appeal, who are firmly embedded in positions of power and who espouse an essentially patriarchal and conservative vision of the exercise of that power. It means relations are not the smooth ride they were during the Cold War era. Today, these populist figures thrive on being bullish and awkward leaders.

      In Donald Trump, Turkey’s leader, like many others, has found a man with whom they can engage. Indeed, President Erdogan is said to have a regular hotline to the White House. The US president is openly admiring of strong and often autocratic leadership. It’s a style he clearly feels he epitomized in the business world and which he has brought to his presidency. That his tenure as the president of the United States may be briefer than that of many of the populist and autocratic leaders he admires is the one spoiler.

      It may also be a spoiler for the US more broadly. In the past few years, such world leaders have grown self-confident in the global order lead by Donald Trump. A Biden administration that chastises them for their faults on human rights, conflict resolution or democratic norms might well receive a hostile response. This poses a conundrum for the United States. A president who set out specifically to put America first may have made it far harder for a successor who wants to begin collaborating again.

      What Would Biden Do?

      The signs are that as president, Joe Biden would not have as easy a relationship with Erdogan as Trump has had. Given that getting on with Turkey has increasingly come to mean getting on with its president, this matters a great deal. Almost a year ago, Biden said in an interview with The New York Times that he regarded Erdogan as an “autocrat.” He also expressed misgivings about Turkey’s actions in Syria, confrontations in the eastern Mediterranean about energy resources, and the stationing of NATO nuclear weapons on Turkish soil.

      Though these comments went unacknowledged at the time, the Turkish government has since raised heated objections as Biden’s presidential bid has gathered steam. There will also be real concerns in Ankara about Biden’s longstanding support for Kurdish rights, including his belief that President Trump has dealt shoddily with his nation’s Kurdish allies in Syria after they helped to subdue the Islamic State group. Such a position would bring back some of the tensions of the Obama presidency.

      Clearly, upon gaining the presidency, one would expect a measure of realignment from the Biden White House. The former vice president’s strong stance against Erdogan would have to become more nuanced as occurs for all those who gain actual power. President Erdogan is not an autocrat. He may have authoritarian instincts, but autocrats do not allow elections with credible results, nor do they allow their opponents to win the mayoralty in their largest cities. 

      The complex and competing tensions of the region in which Turkey lies will necessitate the US working with Turkey to a large degree. That requires finding common ground and mutual interest. But necessity can only get you so far. To generate any real warmth to his relationship with President Erdogan, Joe Biden will have to reveal some dissatisfaction with the global status quo or at least some sympathy with those, such as the Turkish president, who are driven by this belief.  That such concern genuinely motivates Biden might be a hard sell.  

      No Smooth Rides

      Nothing about the past few years of US-Turkish relations has been smooth, from the furor over the jailing of American pastor Andrew Brunson to the simmering Turkish anger at US refusal to extradite Fethullah Gulen, the head of the movement held responsible in Turkey for the failed 2016 coup attempt. That incident, which has defined the trajectory of the country over the past five years, was a pivotal one not only internally but also externally.

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      Russian President Vladimir Putin was quick and decisive in backing Erdogan at a point when the success of the coup was still unclear. The US, on the other hand, was less wholehearted, and there was the sense that it hesitated and that US personnel might even have been complicit at the Incirlik airbase in southeastern Turkey. In moments of crisis, you learn whom you can really trust. In the personality politics of today, President Erdogan learned much from that episode. It fed into his already established worldview in which the West was inherently predatory and untrustworthy.

      None of this means that Turkey or its president are wedded to deep friendships with US opponents such as Russia, Iran or China. Indeed, Turkey’s relations with Russia over the past five years have been exceptionally turbulent. But it does mean that Turkey has, in President Erdogan, a pugnaciously nationalist leader who is unafraid of picking fights. It means he has picked several with the US itself, and yet, with President Trump at the helm, you always feel that, however unsavory things get, the Turkish president is always half-admired for his obstinate aggression.

      If there is a new president in the Oval Office come 2021, it will pose many more challenges for both sides. The relationship will not be easy, and without the bromance that occasionally surfaces between the current leaders, it could be a more dangerous one. US-Turkish strategic goals have been diverging for years. This causes systemic strain to the relationship. The Trump presidency may, inadvertently, have eased some of that strain, but it will not go away. A president less in tune with the current administration in Ankara could tear it further apart. For bilateral relations, for NATO and for the whole Middle East and Mediterranean region that could be a very destabilizing prospect.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      The Tangled Maps of Greece and Turkey

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      A person sitting at a café in the small town of Kaş, on Turkey’s southern coast, where the Taurus Mountains drop precipitously into the Mediterranean, would look out upon a blue bay and a small island. If they asked the waiter, he would tell them that the island — almost unbelievably — is in another country.

      That island is Kastellorizo. It is Greek. It is far from being the only Greek island that sits close to the Turkish mainland, but it’s perhaps the most striking, since it is 78 miles from its nearest Greek neighbor, the island of Rhodes, and fully 354 miles from the capital, Athens. Indeed, landlocked Ankara, the Turkish capital in the center of Anatolia, is nearer.

      Who Owns the Sea?

      Nation-states are the oddity of the modern age. To people in the era of empires, today’s borders would seem extraordinarily restrictive. For centuries, Kastellorizo interacted freely with the mainland, which lies one mile away. Now it exists as a surreal outpost adrift in the Mediterranean. This tiny, quiet island is central to the latest crisis between Greece and Turkey — an argument over gas exploration rights and who owns where on the seafloor in the eastern Mediterranean. It has led to collisions between Greek and Turkish vessels, and even a confrontation in Libyan waters between Turkish and French frigates in June.

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      The clash with France is part of a wider confrontation in which France has become a vocal ally of forces in the eastern Mediterranean seen as broadly anti-Islamist. This includes European Union members Greece and Cyprus, as well as Israel, Egypt and the forces of renegade General Khalifa Haftar in Libya, a figure from the Gaddafi regime. All these alliances put France at odds with Turkey, which has emerged as the most vocal and perhaps the most powerful force for political Islam in the region. The alliance with Greece has helped to reignite much older hostilities between Greece and Turkey, feeding into dangerous older narratives.

      The argument surrounding territorial waters is as artificial as the nation states that have given rise to it. The intricacies of maritime law hang around the question of whether the far-flung isles of Greece can claim exclusive economic zones (EEZs) on the seabed around them — in effect, that they have a continental shelf that Greece can claim, a mile off the Turkish coast.

      Such claims create a collision course with Turkey, given the unusual situation of the two geographic territories. The result of the 1919-23 Turkish War of Independence was the establishment of a Turkish state on the landmass of Asia Minor, but to the exclusion of almost every island in the Aegean and Mediterranean seas lying off its shore. The peculiarity of this scenario is evident to anyone who has visited the popular tourist regions of the Turkish coast and the eastern Greek isles. The two are intimate neighbors, far more alike than they are to their respective hinterlands, let alone their distant national capitals.

      Arrival of Nationalism

      Nationalism — since its arrival from Western Europe — has been calamitous for the wider region in which Greece and Turkey lie. It has brought chaos to the Arab world, to the Balkans and to Cyprus. Even today, it still informs the aspirations of the Kurdish people to add yet another state to a region of instability and ethnic tension.

      On the face of it, Greece and Turkey appear to be two comparative success stories of the era of nation states in this region. They have been relatively stable, centralized states for much of the 20th century, despite the recurrence of military intervention in politics. Yet Greece and Turkey are also examples of the failure of the nation-state model in their very nature. Both espouse a virulent ethnic nationalism. Both are rooted in an ancient tribal exceptionalism, layered with later religious identities.

      Like the wider region, this nationalism has required that what was a patchwork of ethnicities, indeed a form of multiculturalism — or, at least, co-habitation — was systematically uprooted, most brutally in the state-sanctioned ethnic cleansing of the early 20th century. State-sanctioned ethnic violence is nothing new to the region. It happened to the Sephardic Jews of Greece in the 1940s (themselves previously cleansed from Christian Spain after the retreat of the Moors), it has happened in the Balkans in the past few decades, and it happened in Greece and Turkey in 1923.

      That was the year of the Treaty of Lausanne, which stipulated the transfer of populations between the two states based upon religious affiliation: Greek Orthodox to Greece, Muslims to Turkey. In many cases, this papered over cultural and ethnic complexities that were far from the clear-cut distinctions that Greek and Turkish nationalists believed inherent in their respective nation-state projects. This history, and the very human and very personal tragedy of it, has embedded an antipathy towards the “other” in the body politic of both states to the present day.

      It is this reality that makes questions surrounding continental shelves, exclusive economic zones and rights to resources that lie under the sea so intractable. It was hard enough and bloody enough to divide the land of this region between the warring parties, often leading to strange and unnatural results like the sad fate of the little isle of Kastellorizo — severed from the mainland it gazes upon with every sunrise. To attempt the division of the waters as well is likely to lead to yet another hard and bloody outcome.

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      Turkey Takes on the UAE in Palestine

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      The news that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is considering suspending ties with the UAE over its deal to recognize Israel reinforces the battle lines of the Middle East. The announcement nevertheless comes as little surprise. The Palestinian cause seems destined to be eternally used by others as an instrument in their own battles. In this case, it has become the pawn in the battle between competing and assertive visions of the region.

      First, let’s consider the defense for President Erdogan’s position. The Turkish Foreign Ministry has suggested that history will not forget or forgive the UAE’s action. Inasmuch as the UAE has sold out the Palestinian cause for its own interests, the Turks have a point.

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      On the face of it, the Palestinians get little from the deal. All the UAE has wrung out of Israel is a promise to suspend its attempt to annex large swathes of the West Bank where illegal settlements exist. This merely prevents an inroad rather than offering any real concessions.

      But then the UAE was negotiating for its own ends, not for the Palestinians. In the regional battle against Qatar and Turkey — and more broadly against political Islam — the UAE merely wished to cement its position as the West’s true friend and ally in the region. It should also be noted that the UAE has done so as something of a shock troop to the real power of the counterrevolutionary alliance in the region, Saudi Arabia. The kingdom that is the custodian of the holy cities of Mecca and Medina has been silent on the deal with Israel.

      Turkey Stays on Script

      The Turkish response is one calculated entirely within the framework of the regional battle with the UAE-Saudi-Egypt axis. In this context, Turkey has a clear opportunity to position itself as a vital ally of the Palestinian cause: not as extremist as Iran, yet not as silent as Saudi Arabia. This is vital to Turkey, since the UAE has been a big investor in the West Bank and Gaza in recent years. At the same time, the UAE has become Turkey’s key adversary in the region. The new deal gives Ankara an opportunity to fully usurp the UAE as the Palestinians’ most important ally.

      Turkey, being a Sunni Muslim power, also has a natural lead on Iran in the Palestinian cause. Although Iran has supported Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon in their conflicts with Israel, as a Shia power it has always been one step removed from the Palestinian cause.

      Which brings us to Israel, the other key element in the equation. It is easy to see Erdogan’s latest move as simply an Islamist attack on Israel propelled by a revisionist instinct that wants to harm Israel in whatever way possible. But unlike Iran, Turkey’s relationship with Israel is complex. Turkey and Israel have long and deep ties that are rooted in their shared experience as non-Arab and democratic states in a region where both characteristics are unusual. Diplomatic links are strong, if strained, under the Justice and Development Party (AKP).

      Turkey’s position has little to do with harming Israel and everything to do with Ankara’s position in respect to the Arab world. President Erdogan wishes to be a key regional player in the Middle East and in the Sunni Muslim world. Turkey is also the major Islamist force in the region.

      The UAE-Israel deal and the Turkish response have occurred in a context in which Ankara is at loggerheads with both countries in the eastern Mediterranean. The UAE is supporting renegade General Khalifa Haftar in Libya, while Turkey supports the more Islamist Government of National Accord in Tripoli. At the same time, Israel and the UAE’s ally Egypt have signed a maritime agreement with Greece and Cyprus aimed at freezing Turkey out of gas exploration in the eastern Mediterranean. In these circumstances, both can expect to be snubbed. Their decision to shift the diplomatic landscape of the Palestinian issue was equally expected to be used by Turkey as an opportunity to gain leverage in this conflict.

      The Power of Belief

      Alongside all the geopolitical considerations, there is one that is rather more obvious. It is that President Erdogan might actually believe in the cause he is backing. The current political climate is often assumed to be one of purely Machiavellian intrigue and design, but Erdogan has built a career as a conviction politician. Behind the soundbites and the posturing, much about the long reign of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, first as prime minister and then president leading the AKP, has been about long-term historical issues and the restitution of perceived past wrongs.

      This is as much an internal Turkish legacy as an external one, but given the nature of Turkey as the chief successor state of the disintegrated Ottoman Empire, many of the issues close to the president’s heart have a wider regional implication. This can be seen in antagonisms everywhere from Greece and Cyprus to the Gulf states and North Africa.

      The centrality of Islamic faith is as important to President Erdogan as it was to the rulers of the Ottoman Empire throughout much of its history. It informs his ties to countries across the Islamic world. It is evidenced in Turkish engagement in Somalia, Sudan and Libya, where Turkey is supporting the more Islamist faction in the civil war.

      All this means that Palestine, the central Islamic cause in the Middle East since the First World War, is of central and very personal importance to him. At this moment of conflict with other powerful nations of the Sunni Muslim world, when Palestine’s chief allies appear to be Shia powers such as Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah militia, President Erdogan and his party may feel it beholden on Turkey to seize the mantle as the predominant Sunni ally of the cause.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Why Making Hagia Sophia a Mosque Again Is Good News

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      The reaction to the decision by Turkish authorities to turn Hagia Sophia from a museum back into a mosque has been illuminating. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan is accused of playing religious politics. If so, he is not alone. When Pope Francis describes himself as “pained” by the news and says his thoughts are with Istanbul, as if some natural disaster had befallen the city, he too is playing religious politics.

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      The fact that this building — with one of the largest freestanding domes in the world — has stood the test of time and conflict at all is a miracle. Yet since 1934, it has stood silent, but for the passing voices and feet of tourists, as a museum.

      Given its stature as a place of spirituality, this is an astonishing fact. Imagine the Notre Dame in Paris or St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome — or indeed the myriad religious sites built upon older religious sites — spending close to a century as museums.

      Western Hypocrisy

      Despite this, the media in the West have been almost uniform in their condemnation. UNESCO, which designates the building as a World Heritage Site, has criticized the move. Western media have noted the reaction of liberals in Turkey, lamenting the undermining of the secular state.

      The condemnation is, of course, based on a key distinction between Hagia Sophia and the likes of Notre Dame and St. Peter’s Basilica. The distinction — emphasized in almost every media report — is that Hagia Sophia was built in 537 by Justinian as the seat of the Eastern Orthodox Church and the spiritual center of the Byzantine Empire. It only became a mosque in 1453 with the conquest of Constantinople by Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II.

      Notre Dame de Paris in France © beboyGiven this history of conquest, it’s a wonder that Hagia Sophia is here at all. Consider the religious sites desecrated by conquerors with new faiths, from the Temple of Solomon to the Bamiyan Buddhas. Yet Mehmed II’s first act was to hold the Islamic Friday prayers in Hagia Sophia. He may have been a Muslim, but he recognized the sheer spiritual power and majesty of this building and honored it. 

      The Ottomans removed icon frescoes and mosaics and replaced them with Arabic calligraphy, but the spiritual life of this amazing building continued under new owners. That is a testament to the building and the comparative moderation of the conquerors.

      The Mezquita of Cordoba

      The idea that Hagia Sophia is a museum, and that this is a balanced compromise between faiths, has become received wisdom. Yet the truth is that turning Hagia Sophia into a museum was hardly an act of religious tolerance. Far from it, the move was a culminating act in a decade of cultural revolution in Turkey, in which the regime of republican leader Mustafa Kemal Ataturk pulled up the Ottoman inheritance by its roots.

      It was not a generous gesture to the Greek Orthodox Church, but a symbolic attack on the power of Islam in Turkey. It remains that to this day. Unspoken in today’s debate is the fact that Hagia Sophia became a museum in an era when the Sufi brotherhoods of Turkey were outlawed, the adhan (call to prayer) could no longer be called in Arabic and religious dress was prohibited. Into recent times, Sufism has remained persecuted and the whirling dervishes perform for tourists — rites that the secular establishment had largely destroyed in any real sense. 

      Given this backdrop, the conversion of Hagia Sophia into a museum takes on a different complexion, as if spirituality itself were a museum, which is after all what Ataturk intended by such a move. Turning the building back into a place of worship can then be seen as one more step in the reemergence of an older Turkish cultural inheritance. 

      Inside the Mezquita of Cordoba in Spain © Matej KastelicThe fact that Hagia Sophia was once a cathedral is no barrier to it now being a mosque. Consider the Mezquita in Cordoba, one of the finest architectural monuments in the Iberian Peninsula (and itself built on the site of an earlier Visigoth church). It was perhaps the greatest mosque in Muslim Spain, before being converted into a cathedral in 1236 by King Ferdinand of Castile.

      Today, a cathedral stands in its center and it remains illegal for a Muslim to kneel there in prayer. Yet few Spaniards would countenance it being converted into a museum as an act of magnanimity toward Islam, nor are there calls from global institutions for Spain to do so. Requests by the Islamic Council of Spain to allow Muslim prayer have been opposed by the Vatican and Spanish ecclesiastical authorities.

      The Loss of Greek Anatolia

      Converting Hagia Sophia back into a mosque reflects the present reality of modern-day Turkey, which is that of a Muslim-majority population. Just as you expect Westminster Abbey in London to be a Christian place of worship, it’s natural that Hagia Sophia should be a Muslim place of worship, with due interfaith dialogue and public access.

      This contemporary reality doesn’t negate the very real tragedy of the loss of Greek Anatolia. That loss is far more recent than 1453. The same regime that turned Hagia Sophia into a museum was also responsible for the ethnic cleansing of Anatolia of Greek Orthodox communities. Over 1 million Greeks were forcibly removed from their ancestral homelands and sent as refugees to modern-day Athens and Thessaloniki.

      Today, you can wander through their empty churches in Cappadocia, in central Anatolia, or at sites like Karmylassos (Karakoy) in southwest Turkey, where an entire ghost town is left sprawled on the hillside as a brutal reminder of the wholesale removal of a people and culture. 

      What was done in the name of creating an ethnically Turkish republican state was barbaric, just as what was done to create an ethnically Greek republican state. Ethnic nationalism accepts no gray areas, and ordinary people are its victims, on both sides of the dividing line.

      In Support of Islam

      Yet the violent forces that produced that ethnic cleansing also produced the zealous ideology of Westernization that uprooted the Ottoman legacy in the land of modern Turkey. It means a seam of bitterness and division runs through the very heart of the modern state. 

      Inside Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey © Artur Bogacki / ShutterstockIt is disingenuous of Western observers to say that Hagia Sophia should remain a museum for the sake of religious tolerance. If tolerance and moderation are our goals, then we should welcome the return of the call to prayer to Hagia Sophia, just as we would welcome the return of church bells at Notre Dame, had it been turned into a museum by secular revolutionaries.

      To welcome it is to support moderate Islam. To not do so is to leave moderate Muslims in a curious bind, not wishing to create conflict, yet expected to disapprove of seeing the spiritual centerpiece of Turkey’s largest city being devoted once more to worship. It also turns the building into a focal point for the more extremist.

      The remarks of Pope Francis are astonishing for a religious leader. That he is “pained” by the idea of such a site of spirituality being turned from a museum back into a place of worship smacks of the worst kind of bigotry. Must it only be “my god” who is worshipped, both here and in former mosques elsewhere?

      Equally, secular outrage is disingenuous. This is a religious building. The secularists are right to resist attempts to constrain their lifestyle, such as the prohibition of alcohol or sexual freedoms, just as Muslims in Turkey have chafed at secular restrictions on their own lifestyles. But Hagia Sophia is a religious space, first and foremost.

      The historic mistake was turning Hagia Sophia into a museum in 1934, in a cultural revolution that has impoverished Turkish society ever since. Whether the pious nationalists of the ruling party will usher in a moderate or yet more divisive era for this unique building, only time will reveal.

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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