Erdogan’s Ottoman tilt

Türkiye is Muslim. The more difficult question is what kind of Muslim identity it represents today. Is it Ottoman, or has modern Türkiye decisively moved away from that past?

Atatürk forced the Ottoman royal family out of the country and imposed a powerful secularisation of the state and society. For years, “Ottoman” became almost a bad word. But history does not disappear simply because a new republic rejects its former ruling house.

That history began in Central Asia, when the depredations of Changez Khan pushed the Oghuz tribesmen, ancestors of today’s Turks, toward western Anatolia in search of safety. They could not have known what glory would await them there. From Anatolia, Ottoman power spread into the Balkans and southern, central and northern Europe. It also reached the Maghreb, the wider Middle East from Iraq to Morocco, and eventually the Arabian Peninsula.

Corsair Khairuddin Barbarossa helped extend Ottoman control to the meeting point of the Mediterranean and Atlantic. The Turks also made the Crimean Khanate a vassal state. With the Black Sea and the Dardanelles already under Ottoman control, the empire’s reach had become central to the region’s history.