The Turks in the second millennium AD were the most influential in drawing the geopolitical map of the Middle East, since the march of the Seljuk Turks from Central Asia in the eleventh century and their control over the regions of Khorasan and Persia, and then their control over Baghdad, the capital of the Abbasid state, in 1055. This was followed by their settlement in Anatolia, reaching the coasts of the Black Sea after the Seljuks defeated the Byzantines in the Battle of Manzikert in 1071, which made the fall and end of the Byzantine state—the attempts for which practically began with the Umayyad state (661-750 AD)—possible with the Ottoman Turks in 1453.
When the Safavid state arose in Persia in 1502 and Shiism was imposed there with an attempt at geographical expansion into Mesopotamia and eastern Anatolia, the Battle of Chaldiran in 1514, in which the Ottoman Turks defeated the Safavids, was what solidified the spread of the Sunni sect on a global Islamic level and confined Shiism to the east of the Iraqi Tigris River beyond southern Baghdad, after it had extended in previous centuries in its Twelver, Ismaili, and Nusayri forms between the Tigris and the Nile for six preceding centuries during the Buyid, Fatimid, and Hamdanid eras. Present-day Iraq did not become a Shiite majority up to the Iraqi Euphrates River south of Fallujah except during the Ottoman era.
When the Ottoman state became ill and died (1798-1923), this was the date of European control over the region in a practical sense, and the nationalist idea among Arabs, Persians, and Kurds followed in the footsteps of what Mustafa Kemal Ataturk did in 1923 when he founded the Turkish nation-state, which meant a divorce from the Ottoman state in which the Islamic Pan-ideal gathered Turks, Arabs, and Kurds.
Anyone looking at a thousand years past notices that the arrival of the Turks in the region produced the effects of the disappearance of two states: the Fatimid state in 1170 and the Byzantine state in 1453, which coincided with the rise of Berber power in the Maghreb with the states of the Almoravids (1056-1147) and the Almohads (1129-1268). It seems that the rise of the Turks and Berbers, and with them the power of the Kurdish Ayyubids (1171-1250), resulted from the decline of Arab power that began with the appearance of Islam in 610 AD.
The Seljuks eliminated the Shiite Buyids who controlled Baghdad (945-1055), and the Seljuks’ control over Persia, which was a passage for them to Mesopotamia and then Anatolia, did not allow for a specific political expression for the Persians. The decline of Seljuk power with the arrival of the Mongols in the region in the period 1254-1260 led to a power vacuum that led to the specific Persian power represented by the Safavids in 1502, albeit after great turmoil experienced by Persia, and led to the emergence of the Ottoman state since 1299 in Anatolia. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, the Safavids and the Ottomans were the strongest in the region, and their confrontation in Chaldiran led to opening the way for the victorious Ottoman toward control over the Levant, the Nile Valley, the Hijaz, Mesopotamia, and North Africa.
Chaldiran was the result of a Turkish-Kurdish alliance, as was Manzikert, and when the Ottomans controlled the Arab regions, the Ottoman state was for four centuries, until the deposition of Sultan Abdul Hamid, the result of a Turkish-Kurdish-Arab alliance gathered by the Islamic adhesive. When the “Unionists” came and deposed Sultan Abdul Hamid in 1909, carrying the Turanian Turkish nationalist ideology, this was a herald of the near disintegration of the Ottoman state after a single decade.
But a thousand years of dominant Turkish presence in the region during most periods did not produce a single thinker of Turkish origin, as the major intellectual trends, such as Sufism, resulted from Arabs like Ibn Arabi (1165-1240), and Jalal al-Din Rumi who is of Persian origin (1207-1273), and Khalid al-Naqshbandi (1776-1827) who is of Kurdish origin, and even the intellectual father of Turkish nationalism with its Turanian and Ataturkist tendencies was a Kurd, Ziya Gokalp (1875-1924). The Islamic tendency resistant to Ataturkist secularism, with its two symbols Necmettin Erbakan and then Recep Tayyip Erdogan, was born at the hands of the Kurdish Islamic thinker Sheikh Said Nursi (1877-1960).
What we saw during this Turkish millennium were great politicians such as Sultan Selim, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, Sultan Abdul Hamid, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, Turgut Ozal (of Kurdish origin), and Erdogan; we also saw great negotiators such as Ismet Inonu in the negotiations that led to the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, and Ataturk and Inonu with Ozal were great administrators who were able to establish a modern state apparatus that we see now existing in the Turkish Republic.
But whoever monitors Turkish political life sees ideological parties with no bridges between them, in their Ataturkist (Republican People’s Party), Turanian (Nationalist Movement Party), and Islamic (the Welfare Party led by Erbakan, then the Justice and Development Party established by Erdogan in 2001) directions, and feels that they are closed sects. It was surprising to see the rapprochement between the Islamists and the Turanians in the past ten years. When the coup took place against Prime Minister Adnan Menderes—who had an Islamic orientation mixed with liberal tendencies in economy and an Atlanticist alliance with the West—in 1960 and his subsequent hanging the following year, one notices the satisfied social acceptance of that in the social milieu of the secular Ataturkists whose military carried out the 1960 coup. These three trends were satisfied with the violent suppression of the armed revolution carried out by the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) since August 15, 1984, and it was surprising that bridge which the Turanian Devlet Bahçeli opened, with Erdogan’s approval, with the leader of the PKK, Abdullah Ocalan, in his initiative launched on October 22, 2024, which is an unprecedented and unusual bridge in Turkish political life since the founding of the republic in 1923.
On the domestic Turkish level, Ataturkism did not succeed in Westernizing Turkish society; rather, Westernization remained superficial and not in the roots, and the electoral rise of the Islamists expresses this throughout the past quarter-century. Also, Ataturk’s westward direction did not succeed in the process of Turkey’s acceptance within the European Union, which feels sensitivity toward annexing a state of nearly one hundred million Muslim inhabitants. If the “Unionists” committed massacres against Armenians, Syriacs, and Assyrians, Ataturk’s bloody record with the Greeks and Kurds has created wounds and broken bridges that have not been mended “yet,” added to what the “Unionists” did, in addition to the fact that Ataturkism declared a divorce from the Arabs after Ataturk considered that the Arabs “had stabbed the Turks in the back” when they allied with the British and French in 1916 through the “Great Arab Revolt” led by Sharif Hussein bin Ali.
The role played by Turkey in the Atlantic Alliance against the Soviet Union between 1952 and 1989 was compensation for its non-acceptance into the European federal body, but when the Kremlin was defeated before the White House in the Cold War (1947-1989), Turkey became less important to the West. It seems that the political electoral rise of the Islamists and Turanians was an expression of the search for a new function for Turkey, either in the Muslim South or in the East where the “Turkish World” extends from the Aegean Sea to Chinese Turkestan.
The Erdogan-Bahçeli alliance expresses this now, and this alliance draws attention by extending its hand to Ocalan; its deep reasons must be sought. Donald Trump has shown signs of satisfaction with what Erdogan has done in Syria post-Bashar al-Assad, and he supports him in his policies toward the “Turkish World” that geographically separates the China-Russia-Iran triad—the triad whose dismantling and elimination, along with isolating its parties from each other, seems to be the primary standing goal in Washington.
