Next week, Ankara will host NATO’s 36th Summit.

It is an important meeting mostly because Trump threatened to quit NATO, as he has threatened to quit almost every alliance and treaty the US is party to. He also let it be known that he would only turn up because his good friend Erdogan is hosting! Masallah to this bromance.

A couple of years ago it was Erdogan who caused trouble by refusing to accept Sweden as a member; now he has become the glue, the linchpin that holds the alliance attached to Trump.

The conventional account of Turkey’s NATO accession in February 1952 is a security story. That is, the Soviet Union had made territorial demands on Turkey in 1945, the Truman Doctrine followed in 1947, and membership in the Atlantic alliance provided the formal guarantee that American power would stand behind Turkish borders. This is not wrong, but it is incomplete.

Turkey’s NATO journey

Turkey was twice refused NATO membership before being admitted (rejected first in 1948, then again in September 1950), and the security imperative alone was not sufficient to overcome Western resistance. What broke the deadlock was Turkey’s blood price: the deployment of 4,500 troops to Korea in July 1950, the first Turkish military operation beyond the borders of the republic in its history. When the NATO Ministerial Council finally invited Turkey to join at Ottawa in September 1951, the government newspaper Zafer declared that “the Turkish bloodshed in Korea has not been wasted. There was an honourable share of the blood of our Korean heroes in the signatories’ ink.”

This inaugural transaction established a template that would persist for decades: Turkey offering military service and strategic real estate in exchange for security guarantees and political standing. From NATO’s perspective, what Turkey provided was considerable. It held the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits, denying Soviet naval passage to the Mediterranean. It hosted the Incirlik air base, which has housed American nuclear weapons since the 1960s. It fielded the second-largest standing army in the alliance. And it anchored NATO’s southeastern flank, the most geographically exposed arc of the Cold War perimeter.

When the Cold War ended and the Soviet threat dissolved, neither Turkey nor NATO was prepared for what their relationship required without it. The post-Cold War security ruptures followed a consistent logic. The first Gulf War left Turkey with billions in promised American compensation that never materialised, and a devastated trade position in the lower Middle East. The accumulated resentment erupted in 2003 when the Turkish Grand National Assembly refused to authorise US troop deployments through Turkish territory for the invasion of Iraq, a vote that shocked Washington and permanently altered the bilateral relationship.

Then came the Kurdish issue in Syria, which placed Turkey and its NATO allies on opposite sides of the most consequential battlefield of the 2010s. Turkey’s insistence that the SDF (YPG/PYD - the Kurdish militia the United States armed and trained to fight ISIS) was indistinguishable from the PKK created a structural divergence that no amount of diplomatic management could resolve. I have written about it from all its sides several times; you can find them in the archive if you are interested.

By 2017, Turkey had purchased the S-400 Russian air-defence system, a decision that made the interoperability of Turkish military infrastructure with NATO’s own systems actively problematic. There was a conundrum, because Turkey was calling for a stronger NATO presence in the Black Sea while at the same time attempting to reduce its dependence on the alliance. This has served Russian strategic interests regardless of Turkish intent.

The security relationship today is therefore a palimpsest. The original Cold War logic (Turkey as flank, NATO as guarantor) is overlaid by post-Cold War divergence, the Iraq rupture, the Kurdish impasse, and the S-400 episode. What holds the architecture together right now seems like mutual indispensability. NATO cannot easily replicate Turkey’s geographic and military contributions; Turkey cannot easily replicate Article V. The result is an alliance relationship defined by structural dependency and functional estrangement simultaneously.

The world order and identity

From the moment Turkey sought membership of NATO, the alliance was understood by Turkish elites as something more than a security arrangement.

When Foreign Minister Fuat Köprülü celebrated Turkey’s accession at the Democrat Party’s third Grand Congress in October 1951, he declared: “The Atlantic Pact is not just a military and political community, it is a community of civilisation, a community of culture, a community of democratic nations.” That formulation, NATO as civilisation and not merely alliance, addressed a long-standing anxiety in Turkish political culture about where Turkey belonged in the hierarchies of modernity that European powers had constructed. By gaining full membership, not associate status, not a Mediterranean annex, but equal membership alongside France, Britain, and the United States, Turkey was claiming its place in what the Cold War framework called the “Free World.”

This civilisational aspiration had a corollary that is equally revealing. Turkey insisted throughout the accession negotiations that it be categorised as European rather than Middle Eastern. For example, when Britain proposed a Middle East Command that would have Turkey serving under a British general alongside its Arab neighbours, Turkish diplomats, press, and politicians across the political spectrum reacted with fury. I believe this sentiment can be described as Ottoman Orientalism, in which Turkey deployed against its Arab neighbours the same hierarchy of civilisations that Europe had deployed against the Ottoman empire. NATO membership in a way legitimised and reinforced Arabs as the constitutive Other for the Turks.

Turkey’s relationship with NATO has also been about how Turkey positions itself within the international order, which institutions it defers to, which it contests, and which it attempts to shape. Turkey has consistently preferred action within multilateral frameworks and has been most cooperative when those frameworks provided clear legitimacy, and most difficult when they did not.

This preference for institutional legitimacy explains what might otherwise seem paradoxical about Turkey’s behaviour in successive crises. After September 11, Turkey granted the United States overflight rights and base access within an hour of being asked, because NATO had invoked Article V, providing unimpeachable multilateral authority. It then twice assumed command of the ISAF mission in Afghanistan, served as the first Muslim-majority NATO member to lead that coalition, and deployed troops to Lebanon under a UN resolution. These were not acts of reflexive loyalty to the United States; they were acts of institutional deference to the framework within which Turkey had chosen to operate. The Iraq War of 2003 fits the same pattern in negative. There was no UN mandate, no NATO decision, only American pressure, and Turkish parliamentarians, including former senior diplomats who knew the alliance well, voted against the request.

What Turkey has wanted from the international order is a place at the table where regional security is decided, not merely a role as the executor of decisions made elsewhere. This aspiration has shaped its behaviour across successive administrations.

Under the AKP, it crystallised into the "zero problems with neighbours" doctrine, which entailed, in theory, that Turkey would become a regional hub. Predictably, it proved to be a joke, because the doctrine collapsed majestically under the weight of the Arab Spring, the Syrian civil war, and the sectarian and ethnic politics that the AKP itself subsequently inflamed. By the late 2010s, Turkey was isolated from the Gulf states, at odds with Egypt, and operating in Syria through the Astana process, a trilateral arrangement with Russia and Iran that deliberately excluded the United States, the UN, and NATO. This was Turkey attempting to shape regional order not through its alliance commitments but around them.

The Ankara NATO summit of July 2026 represents a particular crystallisation of this tension. The summit is said to be an opportunity to deepen NATO’s engagement with its “southern neighbourhood,” a framing that Turkey has actively cultivated and that positions Ankara as the indispensable mediator between the alliance and the Arab and North African states to its south. So, Turkey is not only hosting NATO; it is attempting to redefine what NATO’s southern agenda means, in ways that serve Turkish regional influence more than collective Atlantic security.

Legitimacy for the authoritarians

It is telling that NATO membership had provided legitimacy to the authoritarian practices in Turkey. The leaders of both the 1971 and 1980 coups in Turkey immediately and explicitly pledged their allegiance to NATO.

On March 12, 1971, Chief of the General Staff delivered an ultimatum forcing the resignation of Prime Minister Süleyman Demirel. Concurrently, the military leadership issued a public declaration assuring international observers that Turkey’s foreign policy remained unchanged. The incoming, military-guided technocratic government led by Nihat Erim explicitly reaffirmed that Turkey would remain a loyal and foundational pillar of the NATO alliance.

The declaration was even more immediate and direct during the September 12, 1980 coup led by General Kenan Evren. In the very first radio broadcast delivered to the nation hours after tanks rolled into Ankara, the National Security Council stated: “All our international agreements and commitments, including NATO, will be honoured. We remain loyal to all our alliances.” This declaration served to immediately reassure Washington and Brussels that the putsch would not result in an Iranian-style geopolitical shift, paving the way for immediate US diplomatic acceptance and subsequent military aid.

In both instances the mechanism was straightforward and simple. Western acceptance made the seizure of power respectable at home, and NATO membership was the visible proof of that acceptance. The generals understood that the fastest way to launder a coup was to reaffirm the alliance before anyone had asked them to. That mechanism did not retire with the Cold War.

What do you think is happening right now in Ankara with its NATO summit hosting? Let me tell you. In the lives of ordinary people of the capital Ankara, it is extreme frustration and resentment.

The city has been reeling from all kinds of Leviathan measures. Some of them are pure surveillance-state, some are so banal that citizens are embarrassed for the state.

Demonstrations of any kind are banned. Roads leading to the airport, the access to the places where the leaders will stay, and the venue where the summit will be held are closed. Literally closed, as in, some people need to find ingenious ways, such as, maybe being dropped in from the sky, to get to work and back.

The public parks are closed in case, in caseeeee(!), the French president wants to have his morning run there.

In addition to these… The government put up panels along the roads to block the sight of the shanty towns, a Potemkin screen so the 'leaders of the world' would be spared the 'eyesore'. What a remarkable twist of projection. It is embarrassed by the look of its poor, when the shame belongs to the planning it has presided over for twenty-five years, the missing services, the neglect that made them poor in the first place. Wallahi, if this were a fair world, a regime embarrassed by its own poor would be wrapped in a kitchen towel and shoved under the sink. Alas… Ah ah…

That is not all, I’m afraid.

Last week in overnight raids, the police arrested people who ‘may’ cause trouble during the NATO summit, trouble being taking part in demonstrations against NATO, among them political activists, lawyers, a prominent academic and an LGBT rights activist. Preemptive detention! If this does not belong in a dystopia, what does. For example, Philip K Dick’s Minority Report has as name for it: Precrime.

As if these were not enough to make one question the whole value system of the transatlantic alliance, and the social contract between citizens and the state, even more than before, we also learned that NATO rejected the accreditation requests of every single non-government Turkish media outlet and journalist, and its spokesperson said that “NATO relied on the host nation to provide assessments on journalists from their country to ensure access to the meeting site.”

Under Erdogan’s AKP, Turkey has imprisoned thousands of political opponents, dismantled judicial independence, and, as of 2026, used court orders to oust the leader of the main opposition party and keep its leading presidential candidate in pre-trial detention for over a year. You can read my detailed posts about these as well. Freedom House’s 2026 country report on Turkey reflects a political system that no longer resembles the ‘community of democratic nations’ that Köprülü invoked in 1951.

The identity architecture of NATO membership, the idea that belonging to the alliance meant belonging to the West, had quietly collapsed and been replaced by a transactional calculation. Turkey stays in NATO because the security guarantees and the political leverage are still worth having, not because membership expresses what Turkey believes itself to be.

This may be the most consequential shift in the relationship’s 70-year history. The original bargain was transactional and identitarian at once. Turkey paid in military service and strategic access; NATO paid in security guarantees and civilisational recognition. Today the identitarian half has largely evaporated on the Turkish side. Erdogan’s Turkey does not need NATO to validate its place in the world. It has built an alternative self-image as a regional great power with Ottoman roots and Islamic credentials. Membership is no longer constitutive of Turkish political identity in the way it was for the Democrat Party generation that sent soldiers to Korea to buy membership in ‘the Free World.’

But really, who cares? The most powerful member of NATO is led by a man who looks up to Erdogan as the ‘tough guy’ and envies the ease with which he consolidates power by eliminating every obstacle. Trump is openly interested in Erdogan’s authoritarian toolkit. And the alliance itself has no mechanism to expel anyone and cannot function without Turkish geography, so the door stays open regardless of who walks through it.

Here is the part that should trouble anyone who took Köprülü’s 1951 formula seriously. The identitarian bond did not drain out on the Turkish side alone. The club Turkey once paid to enter has stopped believing in its own membership criteria. A host jails the opposition leader and bars the domestic press, the most powerful member admires him for it, and no one at the table looks embarrassed. In 1980 the generals had to promise loyalty to the West to make a coup respectable. In 2026 the West hands over the respectability on a platter.

So when I look for the ‘free world’, the community of democratic nations that any country would want to belong to, I cannot find it.

I’m afraid, it dissolved while Turkey was still inside.

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While my colleagues and I sit down to read exam papers, I doubt Starmer, his cabinet, and the broader party will attempt any soul-searching about their clumsy budget management, which rightly angered pensioners, and was compounded by disability benefit cuts.

And then there was Starmer’s timid stance towards the warmongering Israeli government, and how his intransigence, as an international lawyer no less, in refusing to call what is happening in Gaza a genocide, cost him and his party. He just does not get this, does he?

Because that refusal was not merely a political miscalculation. It was a symptom of something deeper: a habit of mind, widespread among Western liberal leaders, of substituting legal proceduralism for moral clarity when it comes to war. It is what some scholars call the ‘juridification of moral judgment’, where a question of right and wrong is handed over to lawyers and quietly loses its moral charge. Starmer’s proceduralism and juridification looked like rigour but was really a form of acquiescence. And I am no lawyer, but it was not even on Starmer's side, since many respected scholars of genocide are certain that what we are seeing in Gaza meets the legal definition.

The law, read honestly, pointed exactly where he refused to go. Surely Starmer was not alone in this. He was, in fact, entirely representative.

Oxford’s top lecture

Yale professor Samuel Moyn came to Oxford last month to deliver the Cyril Foster Lecture, one of the university's most distinguished annual lectures in politics and international affairs. His title was "Gaza, the Humanisation of War, and the Politics of International Law," and his argument was that the West's drive to "humanize" war, a project that gathered force during the war on terror and found its most articulate expression under Obama, ends up legitimizing and perpetuating the very wars it claims to constrain.

Unlike Starmer, Moyn believes in the power of the word genocide. He has little faith in courts to deliver justice. His point is that the charge itself, when mobilized politically, has proved a formidable instrument of delegitimation. He also argued that how Western leaders frame their approach to war shapes, in ways they rarely reckon with, how long those wars last and how they end.

Lay down your arms!

Moyn’s starting point is historical. The anxiety that making war more bearable might make it more durable is not new. It was Berta von Suttner, the Austrian novelist and peace activist whose 1889 novel Die Waffen Nieder! — Lay Down Your Arms — made her the era’s most formidable voice against war, who first gave this worry its sharpest expression. Von Suttner was scandalized when a peace negotiation she attended devolved into little more than an exercise in sanitizing combat. She feared, with some prescience, that criticizing the brutality of war without questioning its legitimacy would only make war easier to sustain. She was outraged when the first Nobel Peace Prize in 1901 went not to an opponent of war but to someone who had campaigned to reduce its cruelties, helping craft the 1864 Geneva Convention. Von Suttner eventually won the prize herself in 1905. The argument she lost then is the one Moyn is still making now.

The modern form of this problem, Moyn argues, took shape during the ‘war on terror’ and crystallized under Obama. The move was elegant in its way. Rather than debating whether the United States had the right to wage the wars it was waging, the conversation shifted entirely to how those wars should be conducted. Obama, in his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize lecture, made this explicit, disavowing the pacifist tradition of Martin Luther King Jr. in favour of a philosophy that accepted war as sometimes necessary, provided it was fought within humanitarian constraints. Drones instead of torture. Targeted killings instead of mass internment. The humanitarian framework did not restrain the war on terror. It laundered it.

Law as collective politics

Moyn’s framework for understanding how this works rests on three effects that the laws of war produce when applied to an actual conflict: legitimation, perpetuation, and displacement. They are worth taking in turn, because each illuminates something different about what happened in Gaza.

On legitimation, Moyn is careful not to treat law as a simple tool of power. The laws of war are not fixed rules that states either obey or violate. They are, in his account, a form of collective politics, a terrain of ongoing struggle over meaning and application. Lawyers are political actors. They work to re-describe preferred outcomes as legal requirements, narrowing ambiguities to secure relevance. This does not mean law is merely cynical but that its application is always contested.

This contest is not evenly distributed. There is a persistent divide between a military community and a humanitarian law community, and a starker one between the Global North and the Global South. The Global North typically favours permissive interpretations of the law; the Global South, shaped by the experience of imperial and colonial violence, pushes for stricter ones.

Israel has been a pioneer of this interpretive game. It has led in claiming to humanize its conduct while simultaneously expanding the legal basis for the harm it inflicts: doctrines that permit strikes on otherwise protected sites once designated as militarily used, rules of engagement rewritten to maintain technical proportionality while producing vast civilian casualties. The euphemism is doing enormous work, and it is meant to.

The war that will not end

A state will claim legal compliance even when the claim is hard to believe. The point of the claim is not to be true. It is to keep the conflict inside the frame of law, where conduct can be debated, interpretations contested, and legitimacy slowly accumulated. That is the strategy: stay legal, or appear legal, and the war retains its standing. For instance, it worked for the war on terror, where the move to drones and special forces bought genuine moral acceptance even as the fighting expanded.

In Gaza the same strategy failed, and it failed for a specific reason: the violence was too large and too visible to be absorbed by legal argument. The scale of the killing, the denial of food and aid, the systematic destruction of homes and hospitals, and the open language of some Israeli officials about what they intended could not be reframed as regrettable but lawful. The legal claims kept coming, but they no longer did the work of legitimation. They produced the opposite, a steady draining of the war’s moral standing.

That failure is what gave the genocide charge its force. When South Africa brought its case to the International Court of Justice in January 2024, the charge did not depend on enforcement to matter, and it has not been enforced. Its power was in naming the war as a crime of a particular kind and making that naming stick in public argument. It reframed what the war was about. And it carried a further charge for Israel specifically, because Israel’s own founding story is built on the prevention of genocide, which made the accusation harder to dismiss and more wounding when it held.

There is a second way the humanitarian frame shapes a war. The demand that a war be fought humanely can, paradoxically, make it harder to end. American officials in the early months of the Gaza war reportedly urged Israel to fight more ‘humanely’ not purely on ethical grounds but as a strategic necessity. More ‘humane’ conduct would preserve the legitimation required to keep fighting.

In Moyn’s account, Israel did adjust, over time, in response to diplomatic pressure and public scrutiny. The killing slowed after the opening months, which were by far the deadliest. More than 30,000 of the dead, over 40 percent of the eventual toll, were killed in the first five months alone, at a rate far above what followed. This is not a reassuring finding. It describes management rather than restraint. A calibration of violence to a level that avoids total global outrage while allowing the genocide to continue indefinitely. Moyn calls this ‘humane continuation.’

Decline of peace movements

There is also the most important question, the one no one dared to ask in the first place. Was this war justified? Was the self-defence argument well-founded? The intense focus on how Israel was fighting in Gaza crowded out the more fundamental question of whether, and on what terms, it had the right to fight at all. The laws of war distinguish between jus in bello (the law governing how a war is fought) and jus ad bellum (the law governing whether resorting to war is justified at all). Since October 7, Western governments, legal commentators, and media coverage have been almost entirely preoccupied with the former. The debate over the latter was not lost so much as squandered. This was, Moyn argues, the single biggest missed opportunity of the entire episode.

The displacement was more political than legal. The underlying Western, and particularly American, strategic vision in the region had little to do with Palestinian rights and everything to do with Israeli-Saudi normalization as a mechanism for degrading Iranian power. Within that framework, Gaza was an obstacle to be managed. Who cares about the moral weight of a population whose fate carried independent moral weight. The fixation on humanitarian conduct served, whether intentionally or not, to obscure this. Those who concentrated on Gaza’s brutality rarely integrated a broader political path to peace, leaving their interventions, however morally serious, vulnerable to the charge that they had no answer to the region’s actual power dynamics.

This brings Moyn to what he calls the year's worst casualty: the dearth of any serious peace project. The era of humanizing war has coincided with the decline of peace movements. The irony is almost too neat. At the moment when the tools for laying out the inhumanity of war have never been more powerful, the political will to demand its end has never been weaker. Ceasefires and political initiatives were left, at points, to Donald Trump. Those who marched and petitioned and litigated had, in Moyn's reading, no concrete political destination to offer. Protesting is one thing, a crucial thing, but there needs to be something beyond it, a place that transgressive politics aspires to reach. A just peace.

The sail and the wind

His conclusion is not that humanitarian law is worthless. It embodies, he says, a minimal ethics within a tragic world, and can serve as anti-war politics by other means, yani not by courts per se. But in general, we should acknowledge that humanitarian law is no panacea, because we have a bigger problem.

To make this point, Moyn reached for a metaphor that belongs to the Palestinian-American legal scholar and author of the 2019 book Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine, Noura Erakat. Erakat, who tirelessly accounts for how international law has been wielded against the very people it purports to protect, wrote that law is like a sail. The wind is political mobilisation. The direction of the boat depends not on the sail but on where the wind is blowing.

Moyn’s use of it was pointed: if the legal emphasis is carrying us in the wrong direction, we need to go to port, reconsider, and cut a new sail. But even a new sail solves nothing without a destination. The wind is politics and power; the sail is the legal framework we choose to deploy. Neither means anything unless we have first decided where we want to go. Surely not a humane war, not a just war, not even the mere absence of war. But peace. A just peace. The pressing question, the one that the humanization of war has consistently displaced, is what a just peace would actually look like, and who is prepared to fight for it politically. These expectations of humane conduct are now entrenched among millions, and they will not vanish quickly. The framework is here to stay. The destination is what remains to be chosen.

Any reason for hope?

Wallahi not much.

The record since October 2023 confirms that none of this is likely to stop. The logic of humane war is self-replenishing. Israel has conducted a sustained military campaign in Syria, launching hundreds of airstrikes and ground incursions since December 2024, seizing territory, each operation justified in the familiar language of national security and the protection of minorities.

The genocide in Gaza continues, both in its conduct and in the intent its perpetrators no longer trouble to hide. The West Bank has been added to the equation. Lebanon is devastated and remains under Israeli military pressure. Iran has been struck twice now, months apart. The region is being reshaped, strike by strike, in real time, and the international response follows the now-predictable pattern Moyn described: condemnation of conduct, silence on justification, and impunity in practice.

We should not place much hope in the prospect of Netanyahu’s removal from power. His opposition shares the same foundational commitments, inimical to any Palestinian political future: settler colonialism in the West Bank, the permanent containment or elimination of Palestinian political agency in Gaza, the strategic imperative of degrading Iran and Hezbollah. The issue is not one man’s character or one government’s excess. It is about a state that has, over decades and with Western backing, built a doctrine of permanent war managed to a level of acceptable inhumanity.

This is the region’s foreseeable future, then, unless the political will to demand otherwise is rebuilt from the ground up. The sail will not save us. We need to know where we are going before we argue about how to get there. Will Labour reckon with any of this? Will the man tipped to replace Starmer, Andy Burnham, do any better? I doubt it.

P.S. Moyn's argument here draws on his 2021 book Humane: How the United States Abandoned Peace and Reinvented War. His other recent books include Liberalism against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times (2023) and Not Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World (2018). His latest, Gerontocracy in America: How the Old Hoard Power and Wealth, and What to Do About It, was published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux this month.

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Hey hey…

This week I come to you in podcast form as I promised earlier.

I interviewed Faisal Devji, a top historian and a public intellectual. He is the Beit Professor of Global and Imperial History at Oxford and a Fellow of Balliol College. He is the author of some of the most original books written on Muslim political thought in the past two decades, among them The Impossible Indian, on Gandhi, and Muslim Zion, his study of Pakistan as a political idea.

He is also, I should say, a friend, and one of those rare people I get to call a friend while also looking up to him. As an intellectual, as an academic, as a teacher, Faisal has a depth and an integrity that I have come to treat as a kind of benchmark. And he is also genuinely a kind person, which in our line of work does not always travel together with brilliance.

His new book is The Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam, published by Yale University Press. It is a history of an idea, the idea of Islam as a global political force, and its central claim is that this idea is dying.

Devji traces the birth of Islam as a protagonist in history to the nineteenth century, when Muslim societies fell under European empire. Reformers responding to that crisis began to imagine their faith anew, as a power in the world, something that could decline, be defended, and be revived.

Over the following century that imagination passed through three hands. First the modernists, who presented Islam as a great civilisation. Then the Islamists of the Cold War, who hardened it into a political ideology to rival communism and liberalism. Then the militants of our own era, who reduced it to a bare identity worth killing and dying for. At each stage, he argues, God and the Prophet were pushed further into the background. The louder the politics became, the thinner the theology grew. And now, he says, the whole project is exhausted.

From the Arab Uprisings to the protests in Iran, India, and Bangladesh, Muslims are mobilising in their millions without invoking Islam as their cause. So, the crescent of his title is waning, not because the faith is weakening, but because the political career built in Islam’s name is coming to a close.

It is a bold thesis. Some of its parts I do not agree with, but this is exactly why I wanted to sit with him in his office in one of Oxford’s most famous colleges, Balliol.

Islam as a Historical Protagonist

In the interview, Devji clarifies that “global Islam” is a broader concept than “political Islam,” which he considers a subset. He defines this global Islam as the idea that the religion itself acts as a protagonist in history, an abstract system that directs human behaviour, much like ideologies such as Communism or concepts like “civilisation” are often framed. This conception, he argues, is not theological but a modern construct that emerged around the mid-19th century. Devji outlines a historical trajectory for this idea, beginning with Muslim modernists and liberals of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, continuing through the Islamists of the mid to late 20th century, and culminating with 21st-century militant groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS. However, he asserts that at this final stage, the idea self-destructs, and we are now entering a period where Islam no longer functions as this type of historical agent.

Encounter with the Empires

I wanted Devji to pinpoint, if he must, the historical moment when Islam stopped being only a faith people practised but became an actor with a destiny and a plan. He argues that the idea took root in the context of expanding European empires and the concurrent decline of traditional Muslim sovereignties, such as the formal end of the Mughal Empire after the Indian Mutiny of 1857 and the establishment of the British Raj. This power vacuum created an environment where a new, educated middle class of Muslim intellectuals began to conceptualise Islam as an abstract, agentive force acting in its own right. This “democratisation of Muslim authority” allowed individuals to make claims in the name of Islam without relying on traditional figures like kings or clerics. Initially, Muslim liberals framed this abstract Islam as a “civilisation,” a way to understand its collective historical action. Devji emphasises that Islam as it emerged in modern times is inseparable from, and in fact is, a colonial category, even if used for oppositional purposes.

Ottoman Empire and Turkish Islamism

What about Islam during and within the Ottoman Empire? According to Devji, the Ottoman Empire had a significant imprint on the idea of Islam as a historical agent, particularly through the enduring figure of the Sultan-Caliph. Unlike other parts of the Muslim world where Islamic movements often emerged in opposition to monarchies, Turkish Islamic movements consistently referenced this imperial past. He notes that even with Abdülhamid II, Islam was invoked and imagined as an entity in its own right, allowing for calls for support from Muslims globally. This support was directed towards the institution of the Caliphate rather than the person of the Sultan. For many, the Ottomans’ role as a great power in the Middle East was crucial, as they opposed the region’s fragmentation, which was seen as opening it up to European colonisation. Devji also highlights that Turkish Islamism is distinct from other Islamist movements because it has never repudiated its Ottoman, monarchical past. Not only that, Islamic movements in Turkey consistently referenced this past. In contrast, Muslim movements elsewhere, both liberal and Islamist, often emerged in opposition to their royal or monarchical pasts. He states that the figure of the Sultan-Caliph endured in Turkey, and Islamic movements there consistently referenced this past.

Islamism in the Cold War era

Pakistani thinker Abul A’la Maududi, a key figure who was considered the father of Islamism, was influenced by the era’s dominant ideologies. He reconceptualised Islam on the model of Communism, complete with a vanguard party (the Jamaat-e-Islami) modelled after the Bolsheviks. A core feature of this Islamism was a profound, almost anarchist, suspicion of the modern state, which was seen as a Western, secularising imposition, contends Devji. The goal was to limit the state’s power and allow an “authentically Islamic” society to manage itself, with Islamist thinkers acting as guardians outside the state structure.

Contrary to popular belief, Devji positions the 1979 Iranian Revolution not as the vanguard of this movement but as a late, unique, and divergent event. By 1979, he argues, mainstream Islamism was losing momentum. The Iranian Revolution gave it a new character by being appropriated by the traditional ulama (clergy), a class that lay-intellectual-driven Islamism had traditionally repudiated. While Khomeini was influenced by thinkers like Maududi, he engineered a state where the ulama became its guardians, merging religious and state authority in a way that differed from the original anti-statist impulse. This model, however, remained a “one-off” and failed to export itself, marking the end of the global Islamist story rather than its peak.

Jihadism and the Neoliberal Turn

And then comes the third and final phase of global Islam, characterised by the rise of jihadist groups like Al Qaeda and ISIS. Devji explains that these movements inherited the Islamist suspicion of sovereignty but individualised it, turning the focus from challenging the state to dismantling the “Muslim self” to ensure personal conformity to a rigid interpretation of Sharia. While Al Qaeda remained a stateless global network, ISIS attempted to create a state, though one with fluid borders and international personnel, thereby continuing the rejection of the traditional nation-state.

But then I asked him about the recent shift in the goals and praxis of jihadist groups like Jabhat al-Nusra and its successor Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) in Idlib, Syria, whose leader now sits as the president of Syria and is considered a legitimate political actor on the international scene. Here, the global jihadist project has been abandoned in favour of a localised, nation-state-focused entity. This shift involves governing, marginalising foreign fighters, and seeking international respectability. According to Devji, this localisation is driven by a “neoliberal turn,” where the movement’s survival depends on creating a consumer-driven economy with shopping malls and a supportive merchant class, heavily influenced by Turkey’s AKP model. This practical transformation into a market-oriented, localised power signifies the effective end of the global jihadist ideology, as it is supplanted by a pragmatic need to operate within the existing world order. Devji, whom I know through and who helped with my research project on The New Spirit of Islamism, agrees that the “neoliberalisation of Islam” is particularly evident in Turkey, where a marketised model of Islam operates through the private sector with state guidance, and this model is diffused to other Islamist movements both in South Asia and in the Arab World.

Unlike me, though, he really is not fully convinced that this model should be called Islamism. Because for one, this represents a shift from the older, revolutionary form of Islamism to one that can coexist with various political systems. In this vein, I see the apex of adaptation of Islamism to the dominant capitalist system and the core concepts within its morphology rearranged rather than a death. It is true that Devji is talking about a broader idea than Islamism, but he is also, in a way, closer to thinking that the full adaptation of Islamism to the market means that it is not Islamist in the old-fashioned sense of a revolution with a revolutionary state and an ideology like Iran’s. Instead, it can coexist with various political systems and lacks the systematic nature of the older ideology. Therefore, for Devji, the current transformation represents a fundamental shift away from the core tenets of traditional Islamism, rather than a mere phase in a recurring cycle.

What Fills the Vacuum

After finishing Devji’s book, the most sensible question to ask is what comes next. As Pratap Bhanu Mehta says in his review of Devji’s book, there must now follow a profound vacuum if Islam as an idea is waning. Emptiness in politics does not stay too long as emptiness. So, what fills it? A different version of nationalism? Devji argues that the vacuum left by the waning of Islamism is part of a global phenomenon of fragmentation, mirrored in the West, where the collapse of the bipolar world has led to a resurgence of racism, xenophobia, and far-right movements.

So maybe the idea of the “West” itself is also waning, I suggest. Maybe, he says. The post-Cold War unipolar structure has degraded former alliances. The Muslim world’s current trajectory is not an isolated event but is intertwined with this global history, reflecting a worldwide search for new political forms. But he suggests that the “return of nationalism” is not a simple revival of old forms. New nationalisms, such as those in Scotland or Catalonia, are predicated on pooled sovereignty within larger bodies like the EU. In contrast, places like the Gulf states challenge the very definition of a nation-state, with populations composed largely of non-citizens. This novelty and variety indicate that the world is not returning to a familiar order but is in a state of flux.

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We have discussed over several posts what the Erdoğan regime really wants from its closeness to Ahmad al-Sharaa, the man who has led Syria since the fall of Assad. Part of it is the wish to write a success story for an Islamist government, the kind that came apart in the hands of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and Tunisia’s Ennahda. Remember how Hakan Fidan, the foreign minister, recently in an interview with Al Jazeera made the subtext explicit about Syria being exactly that. True or not, it is what Erdogan government wants Syria to be, an Islamist-led state turning into a success under Erdoğan’s auspices.

But the larger pull, as I keep underscoring, is political economy. Or should I say clientelism. Influence over Syria, and inside it, gives Erdoğan’s patrimonial network of favoured businessmen somewhere to invest, above all through build-operate-transfer, the trademark arrangement of the AKP years in which a chosen firm puts up an asset and runs it for years under state guarantees before handing it back. More wealth, in other words.

The groundwork is already being laid. At a trade summit on 9 June, in Gaziantep, the Turkish border city across from Aleppo, ministers from both countries sat down to plan the commercial architecture. The Turkish trade minister Ömer Bolat set a target of five billion dollars in annual trade within two years and ten billion by the early 2030s, said Ankara was ready to open new customs gates at Islahiye and between Nusaybin and Qamishli, and confirmed that Turkish banks had agreed to open branches inside Syria. Turkey’s ambassador in Damascus, Nuh Yılmaz, called Syria a logistics corridor to the Gulf and Turkey its gateway to Europe, and told investors to think in long-term partnerships rather than quick trades. Syria’s economy minister, Mohammad Nidal al-Shaar, put it more plainly: ‘Our country is your country too, he said. Please come.’

Resurgence of the Neo-Ottomanism

The trade is the public face. That is fine. But what is unsaid is whose firms collect the contracts. Surely not the people of Turkey or Syria, who struggle, in different ways and to different degrees, to make ends meet. Therefore to package this in a favourable way to its base, the regime reached for the Ottoman banner.

Neo-Ottomanism has had a resurgence in the last couple of weeks. I have argued before that it is an emotional tool from the regime’s repertoire of consolidation, deployed for domestic purposes even though the regime knows it irritates European, Balkan and Arab audiences alike. The more the regime feels it is losing legitimacy and popularity to authoritarianism and terrible economic conditions at home, the more the Ottoman symbols are invoked. Classic Erdoğan. And classic Erdoğan sycophants.

“Just as we witnessed the liberation of Damascus, Aleppo, and Karabakh, God willing, one day we will also witness the liberation of Jerusalem,” the interior minister Mustafa Çiftçi told an AKP conference last weekend in central Anatolia. The reaction from Israel was swift. Its foreign ministry told Çiftçi to “wake up,” that the “Ottoman Empire is gone.” The defence minister Israel Katz, who has on more than one occasion displayed his radical love(!) for Erdoğan’s Turkey, added that Jerusalem “will remain Israel’s capital forever.”

Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu reached for it too. The former chairman of the CHP, the main opposition party, has just been reinstated by judicial writ, a politically motivated usurpation of the elected leadership under Özgür Özel that has thrown the party into the chaos Erdoğan was hoping for. Then he, wallah out-Ottomaned the lot of them. Perhaps the one win in a career of defeats, which is exactly why the regime wanted him back. “Look at the lands of the Ottomans. Turkey must reach that geography and build its own character there. We have to go not by shrinking but by growing. Turkey must be present across the Ottoman geography,” he said, and one wonders if he is being ventriloquised by an Erdoğan adviser.

And then the Reis (the chief) as Erdoğan likes to be called, entered the Ottoman arena himself and tweeted: “The Ottoman plane tree has flown our flag with pride across seven climes. The Republic of Turkey, which took the place of the Ottoman state, is not the first state on these lands but our last. The eternal state is the beloved nation itself. As long as the Turkish nation exists, our state will go on existing.”

Abdülhamid II sounds so familiar!

One of the reasons for this recent and euphoric Ottomania is that Turkey signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Saudi Arabia for the revival of the Hejaz railway.

Riyadh is the latest capital to sign on to the revival of the Hejaz railway, the Ottoman line that once ran from Istanbul towards the holy cities, and which Ankara now wants rebuilt across Turkey, Syria, Jordan and Saudi Arabia. Turkey’s transport minister Uraloğlu called it a strategic necessity, the regional supply chain too fragile to leave exposed, and said Ankara means to open routes through Syria, Jordan and Iraq.

Looks like the ambition goes further. The longer-term aim seems to be to extend the line down to Oman and the Indian Ocean, create a corridor that sidesteps the Strait of Hormuz, and turn Turkey into the junction where Gulf trade meets European markets. In April, Turkey, Syria and Jordan had already signed a trilateral framework on connectivity covering road, rail, sea and air.

A tad bit history is apt here.

Among the railways the Ottomans laid, the Hejaz line was the odd one out. Every other line in the empire was built with foreign money, by foreign engineers, to turn a profit, the Anatolian and Baghdad lines among them. The Hejaz railway was none of those things. It was financed by the Ottoman state and by Muslim donations, surveyed and increasingly built by Ottoman engineers, and it made no commercial sense whatever. Marschall, the German diplomat of the day, called it “completely worthless in economic terms”, and on the numbers he was right. The Hejaz was the poorest province in the empire, a stretch of sand and stone that fed itself on pilgrims and little else, a drain on the treasury rather than a source of revenue. Murat Özyüksel’s 2014 book The Hejaz Railway and the Ottoman Empire: Modernity, Industrialisation and Ottoman Decline turns on this fact. If the line could never pay, the reasons for building it lie elsewhere, he argues. In religion, in the army, and in the politics of a shrinking empire.

Abdülhamid II, who ruled from 1876 to 1909, had come to the throne as the empire was losing its Christian lands. The Russian war of 1877 to 1878 stripped away much of the Balkans and left 5.5 million Christian subjects outside the new borders. What remained was overwhelmingly Muslim, more an Asian and Arab state than a European one. Abdülhamid drew the obvious conclusion and became more paranoid and authoritarian.

Does this remind anyone of someone?!

Abdülhamid II suspended the new constitution, sent the first parliament home, and dismissed the constitutionalists Midhat Pasha and Namık Kemal who had wanted a parliamentary order. From then on he ruled as an absolutist, a caliph at the centre rather than a sovereign bound by any contract with his subjects. He pictured the empire as a tall plane tree. The Balkan provinces were blighted leaves, already lost. The trunk was the Muslim lands, and the trunk had to be saved.

Again; familiar?!

The means of saving it was Islam. Özyüksel describes the policy that followed as a pragmatic one rather than a devout one, a programme that used Islamic symbols and the language of the caliphate to hold together the Muslim populations the empire could not afford to lose. Religious orders were cultivated and their leaders brought to Istanbul. Clerics were sent to Egypt, India, Algeria and beyond to carry the caliph’s name. Pro-Ottoman Muslim newspapers were subsidised. The caliph’s name was read in Friday prayers in distant mosques. The aim, in the phrase that recurs, was to make Yıldız Palace the Vatican of the Islamic world, a single religious centre to which Muslims everywhere would look.

Europe watched this and saw pan-Islamism, by which it meant a coming revolt of the world’s Muslims directed from Istanbul. Britain and France, ruling tens of millions of Muslim subjects between them, filled their consular files with anxious reports about it. The fear was largely their own invention. Abdülhamid knew the limits of his power and had no intention of leading three hundred million Muslims into anything.

What he was running, in Özyüksel’s reading, was an “internal pan-Islamism”, a defensive policy aimed inward. Goltz Pasha, the German general who advised him and understood him well, called it an attempt “to conquer from within”. Raise the caliph’s prestige abroad, and you strengthen his authority at home. The point was to keep the empire’s own non-Turkish Muslims, the Arabs above all, but the Kurds and Albanians too, from catching the nationalism that had already cost it the Balkans. The biggest blow to the empire. A wound that has never healed, even in the psyche of the empire’s inheritor, modern Turkey.

A railway against nationalism

The railway was where this policy met the ground. In his memoirs Abdülhamid set out two purposes for it, and neither was commercial. The first was military, to move troops quickly to Syria and the Hejaz in times of trouble without depending on the Suez Canal, which the British controlled and could close. The second was to bind Muslims together so tightly that British “malice and deceit” would break against them like a hard rock. There were aims he did not announce. The line would let Istanbul rein in the Amir of Mecca and the Bedouin tribes who taxed and robbed the pilgrim caravans. It would blunt the British Arab card, the campaign, real enough, for an Arab caliph and an Arabia free of Ottoman rule. It would keep the holy cities from seceding. To pay for it, Abdülhamid called on Muslims inside and outside the empire to fund a sacred line that belonged to the whole Islamic world, and they answered, covering roughly a third of the cost. Contemporary observers noted how quickly the appeal turned him into the most celebrated figure in the Muslim world.

What became of it is the part that should temper any neat lesson. The line reached Medina in 1908 and went no further. It eased the hajj, cut the Damascus to Medina journey from forty days to barely more than two, and it did strengthen Ottoman control in Syria and help move troops during the First World War. It never reached the Red Sea or Mecca. It did not prevent the Arab Revolt that Sharif Husayn launched in 1916, nor the British conquest of the Arab provinces, nor the collapse of the empire that followed.

Özyüksel’s verdict is that the railway was at once a success and a failure, and his image for why is worth keeping. The Ottomans, he writes, were like doctors treating a dying patient. The problems they could solve, the money and the engineering, they solved. The body was failing all the same. The empire’s economic dependency and its military and political weakness were beyond any single cure, and so the cure did not take.

Set Abdülhamid’s railway beside Erdoğan’s revival of it and some things rhyme. Infrastructure is again being made to carry religious and political meaning, a line to the holy cities standing in for a claim to leadership in the Muslim world.

Ottoman and Islamic symbolism are again being put to domestic use, and, as I have argued before, it tends to be invoked most loudly when the government feels its legitimacy thinning at home. In both cases the pious, solidaristic language sits on top of harder strategic and material calculations. In both cases the man pursuing it bargains pragmatically with greater powers while wearing a civilisational banner, Abdülhamid among the British, French and Germans, Erdoğan in a post-Assad Syria crowded with American, Israeli, Gulf and Russian interests.

Ottoman symbols and clientelism

However…

The rhyme should not be pushed too far, and three differences matter. The first is direction. Abdülhamid’s was a policy of defence, the management of decline, an effort to hold a Muslim core together against forces pulling it apart. Erdoğan is not holding an empire together. He is building a position in a Syria suddenly without Assad, reaching for influence rather than guarding against secession.

The second is the resource. Abdülhamid actually held the caliphate. It was an office, and it carried weight. Erdoğan invokes its memory, a thinner and more theatrical thing. Still annoying for many in the region. Especially Israelis.

The third is Özyüksel’s own argument. That Abdülhamid’s railway had no economic motive at all. It was prestige and security, bought with money the treasury did not have. Erdoğan’s version arrives in the same packaging, but the drive behind it, on the reading I keep returning to, is closer to the share of contracts that flows to a favoured business network than to any devotion to pan-Islamism.

What I mean here is that, looking at Erdoğan’s influence in Syria, the rhetoric of the Ottoman Empire, the Hejaz revival etc., the Ottoman symbolism is the loudest and flamboyant thing about it.

In addition: Yes, Erdoğan has embraced Abdülhamid II throughout his career, and, yes, they resemble each other in their authoritarianism, Islamist credentials and pragmatism.

So, I totally get the temptation to read Erdoğan’s roadmap through that lens, as neo-imperial ambition or a caliphate redux. And surely there is some of that. But only to a point. In his sweet dreams, maybe. My argument is that such a reading remains on the surface and explains very little.

To understand why the railway is being built, why the Erdoğan regime cannot afford to let Syria fail, and why Gulf involvement matters so much, the productive question is not “what does the Ottoman imagery mean?” but “whose firms get the contracts, whose capital enters the project, and where does the money go?”

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What, in these times, could possibly have brought Turks, Kurds and Arabs into rare agreement?

There is a kind of achievement that eludes negotiators, summits and the whole machinery of regional diplomacy, and Tom Barrack has managed it without appearing to try. The peoples of the region agree on very little, and have spent the better part of a century disagreeing violently. They now hold one thing in common. They cannot stand him.

Oh, the extent of the contempt. Scroll the replies piled beneath any of his posts, if you can spare the time, and you will find dislike in all its variations.

Wallahi maşallah to Barrack. After decades in real estate, he has turned what may prove a brief diplomatic stint into the kind of achievement many diplomats never manage in a lifetime.

Barrack, a Lebanese-American property billionaire, a friend and fundraiser of Donald Trump, and since last year the US ambassador to Turkey and the president’s envoy to Syria, had his brief widened again on 1 June. In a Tru…

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The crux: Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan has spent the past year dismantling the only party capable of beating him at the ballot box. Last week he reached its leader.

A court in Ankara stripped Özgür Özel of the chairmanship of the CHP (Republican People’s Party); the party that founded the modern Turkish republic a century ago and is now its main opposition. The court’s reasoning was technical, a dispute over how Özel was elected at a party congress two years ago. The effect was not technical at all. For the first time, a Turkish court has told an opposition party who it may not have as its leader.

Since 2024, hundreds of CHP members and elected officials have been detained on corruption charges the party rejects. Ekrem İmamoğlu, the Istanbul mayor and the candidate most able to defeat Erdoğan in a national contest, h…

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When I first started researching the relationship between Turkey’s ruling AKP and Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood (MB/Ikhwan) and Tunisia’s Ennahda in 2018, my main impetus was curiosity. I had just taken what I thought at the time was a break from my journalism career: amid an immense government crackdown, the liberal-left newspaper I was editing had been shut down, and I had embarked on an academic career for what I thought would be a fresh breath of air.

I did not return to journalism and continued on with academia. But back then the initial way in to understanding the deal among these three Islamist entities — the AKP, the Egyptian Ikhwan and Ennahda — came from my training as an investigative journalist. I am telling you this to clarify that I was not a scholar of Islamism, and my initial aim was not to come to broad conclusions about the praxis of Islam…

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Merhabalar…

This week I am including an interview in podcast form in Angle, Anchor and Voice. The reason is really simple: to let you hear the experts speak directly to you. My hope is that you come away from each conversation holding a better-formed version of the question that drew you in, rather than a neater version of its answer.

For this opening conversation I could not have asked for a more fitting scholar than Nathalie Tocci, a thinker I read with consistent admiration and one of the most incisive voices on what Europe is and on what it keeps failing to become. She holds a professorship of practice at Johns Hopkins in Bologna and a senior fellowship at Bocconi University’s Institute for European Policymaking. Between 2015 and 2022 she served as special advisor to two successive High Representatives, Federica Mogherini and then Josep Borrell, and in that role she drafted the 2016 EU Global Strategy, the text that gave the Union the language of “principled pragmatism” and “strategic autonomy” it has been struggling, with uneven results, to inhabit ever since. Her books are many, among them a co-authored volume on Turkey’s relationship with the EU. Her recent documentary, Why Europe Matters, has just been released. Here is the link to that.

I wanted to talk to her because the EU finds itself, once again, in the predicament it understands best and resents most, the predicament of having to make decisions it would rather defer. It has to decide how to deal with a Turkey that is both indispensable and impossible. It has to decide what to do about the credibility it has bled on Gaza, on enlargement, on the rule of law within its own borders. And it has to decide how to read Ursula von der Leyen, who told a Hamburg audience last month that the EU’s task was to complete the European continent so that no part of it would fall to Russia, Turkey or China. The two days that followed were spent in Brussels trying to soften the sentence. What was it all about? What is the current sentiment in Europe regarding Turkey?

Nathalie elaborates that Turkey is not viewed as one of the “baddies,” but it is also not on the “map of the goodies.” The current EU enlargement narrative is driven by a geopolitical logic of integrating a “free, secure and democratic grey zone” to prevent it from falling under adversarial influence. That logic, applied to Ukraine and Moldova, does not match Turkey’s situation.

Turkey hits a brick wall

While one could argue Turkey might one day “see the light” — e.g., post-Erdoğan — the logical next step, resuming accession, faces significant, often unconscious resistance within the EU. Because Turkey is an uncomfortable case that defies simple categorization, European discourse often avoids the topic. Nathalie identifies several sources of the “brick wall”: doubts about Turkey’s long-term potential to be a stable liberal democracy; concerns about its size and the complexity it would introduce to EU political balances; and underlying, often unstated, civilizational or religious biases.

The current “geopolitical” rationale for enlargement, which is about integrating vulnerable states for security, doesn’t apply to Turkey. Already in NATO and a strong military power, Turkey doesn’t fit the “integrate them or else” logic relevant to Ukraine. That leaves only the old, unresolved sources of resistance, making the topic hard to address.

For the other topics we touched upon — Ursula von der Leyen’s controversial statement on Turkey, the possible role of the Israeli lobby on her and other European leaders, and our collective failure to find an alternative to accession for EU–Turkey or EU–Britain relations — listen to the podcast. Once again, sorry for any unpleasantness in this podcast. I hope I will learn more along the way, and many thanks to Nathalie Tocci for her insights and her patience with me.

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The lecturer answering it was Comfort Ero, the President and the CEO of the International Crisis Group — perhaps one of the few organisations that produces genuinely granular, on-the-ground conflict analysis. Founded thirty years ago in response to the international community's failure to prevent the genocides in Bosnia and Rwanda and the state collapse in Somalia, and animated by the dictum ‘never again’, Crisis Group spent most of its institutional life treating Europe as the stable periphery from which the world's diso…

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On 11 April, after a Turkish prosecutor sought sentences of more than 4,596 years for Benjamin Netanyahu and thirty-five other Israeli officials over the interception of the Sumud flotilla to Gaza, Netanyahu posted on X that Israel would continue to fight Iran's terror regime and its proxies, unlike Erdoğan, who accommodated them and had massacred his own Kurdish citizens. Hours later, Israel's defence minister Israel Katz went further. Erdoğan, he said, was a Muslim Brotherhood man, who massacred the Kurds. The phrase travelled the way these phrases now travel, repeated across Israeli media, picked up by Iranian outlets pleased with the symmetry, recycled in Turkish nationalist circles for the opposite reasons.

Two weeks before Katz spoke, the Foundation for Defence of Democracies (FDD) in Washington published a paper title…

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While many celebrated Hungary’s strongman Viktor Orbán’s fall via elections at the beginning of April, some found it important to remind us of the political colour and allegiance of those who took him down. Those who are called to be killjoys underlined the fact that “what happened in Hungary is […] that after the leader had been in power for 16 years, voters wanted a fresh face, but not a fundamentally different policy.” And that “Peter Magyar is not anti-Orbán. […] What he promises to change is governance, not ideology.”

By now I can say that the way one responds to Orbán’s defeat and Magyar’s victory reveals the political posture of the observer, whether in Europe or in Turkey.

As you know, the authoritarian styles of Orbán and Erdoğan have been comparatively examined and likened for quite some time. Even though Orbán is an Isl…

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The newspaper I am holding does not move me simply because it has managed to remain a printed paper. It is the fact that it has endured, one way or another, in a harsh climate where the cold can be biting, the heat suffocating, and spring only rarely shows its face.

There is an irony here that is hard to ignore. The founding editor of this paper I hold in my hands is among those writers of modern Turkey who were taken by a brutal assassination. Yet its presence does not recall that violence so much as it instils a sense of assurance.

Much of that comes, of course, from the resilience and the peaceful character of Hrant Dink - Hrant abi - , the dear elder colleague who was murdered in 2007 in the very orbit of this newspaper, Agos. It also comes from the Agos team who treated his death as a grave turning point and chose to carry on with the same stubborn resolve.

Yetv…

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Almost two decades ago, I was working for Turkey’s top mainstream newspaper, Hürriyet, as a reporter when the editor-in-chief of the paper, Ertuğrul Özkök, decided to send me to Malaysia for a story.

I was not the only reporter from Istanbul. The other major newspaper, Milliyet, had sent its top journalist, Ece Temelkuran, now a major author whose recently released book Nation of Strangers is shortlisted for the prestigious Women’s Prize.

Ece and I each spent a week in Malaysia without encountering one another, trying to answer a question that had come to dominate public discussion at the time.

Will Turkey become like Malaysia?

The question did not emerge in a vacuum. By 2006 and 2007, Turkey was moving through a series of political confrontations that exposed a deeper struggle over who would contro…

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I don’t think it will end until he captures all of them. Each and every one.

He is Erdoğan. What is being captured, one by one, like a buffalo at the water’s edge, ambushed by an apex predator, are municipalities. Municipalities led by Turkey’s main opposition party, the CHP.

As of today, it is clear that the March 2024 local elections meant very little. One could call them Turkey’s first “performative” elections, staged so that the façade of a democratic contestation is maintained. Or, as we say in Turkish, dostlar alışverişte görsün seçimi.

Since then, the Erdoğan government’s use of the judiciary marks a new stage in its authoritarian trajectory. Consider the numbers.

The CHP won the March 2024 elections decisively. It secured 35 cities, including 14 metropolitan municipalities, and 337 districts. The AKP, by contrast, lost almost all of the major cities it had held, including Istanbul, Ankara and İzmir, and was left with 24 cities, 12 of them metropolitan, and 356 districts. Yet the s…

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In an old world, that would be very embarrassing for Trump. Not in this world. We know that Pakistan and Turkey are working hard on shuttle diplomacy between Iranian and American officials, but all sources agree that Iran is not and will not agree to the terms Trump put forth. Mostly because they do not trust him and think he is buying time to prepare for a harder strike, even a land operation to secure the enriched uranium.

I think at this time it would be a waste of time to make an educated guess regarding what Trump will do. Education is counterproductive to gauge anything about him or the people in his administration who apparently copy-pasted a list of justifications for attacking Iran, from a pro-Israeli think tank’s website and most proba…

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There once was the assassination of a Ferdinand, if you might remember. The Archduke Franz Ferdinand. We all know the spiralling conflicts and the great war that came after. The crises that ensued led to a war that reordered the balance across Europe and beyond. One act, and a sequence no one could fully contain. A historical juncture that changed the power configurations of the world.

Since then, there was, for a long time, a tacit understanding that assassinating another country’s leader was considered off limits, not out of restraint but …

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A few reasons for that.

First, Iran also wants to escalate it to a degree that each and every country in the Middle East feels battered enough that they would do everything in their power to impede another cycle in six months. There have already been two missiles directed at Turkey’s US and NATO bases, both of which were intercepted. What happens, mazallah, if there is a third?

Second, if the war continues at this speed or turns into a protracted conflict between Iran and Israel, there will be a wave of migration from Iran to Turkey, which would make Turkey surely a part of the war as the most stable neighbour.

And finally, and most importantly, Turkey is part of this war because Israel wants it, is intent on it. And in this environ…

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We go on asking why these two men, Trump and Netanyahu, waged a war against Iran. Surely we have moved beyond the claim that Iran posed an imminent threat (it did not), or that it was building a nuclear bomb with its “completely obliterated” nuclear facilities during the so called 12-day war (they were not). The head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, recently stated that inspectors have found no evidence of a coordinated Iranian programme to build nuclear weapons.

So we are left with a narrower set of possibilities. Either regime change in Iran. Or outright chaos, sustained long enough for Israel to manipulate the balance of power, perhaps even to engage in territorial opportunism if circumstances permit. But how would that be achieved? There are numerous examples showing how difficult it is to produce …

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In politically charged communities, the interpretive charity, yani the willingness to read what someone actually wrote rather than to verify which side they are on, has largely collapsed. When people are sufficiently certain of who their enemies are, they no longer read. They search for confirmation if you are among them. It is as old as the polis. So we move on. With those who listen, and for them.

I spent a tiresome week battling the label 'jihadi-lover' (meaning, apparently, a sympathiser of Ahmad al-Sharaa or his HTS, I don’t know) after publishing my field observations from Damascus and appearing on a YouTube politics programme to discuss them. A group who claim to follow my work on the Kurdish issue were deeply disappointed. Apparently my reporting from Syria had made me look like one.

How so? I asked with a genuine, if fleeting, hope that perhaps I had said something intellectually interesting. But n…

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Don’t we all?!

When we look at the so-called international liberal order, with the US as its main anchor, what do we see? A crony, clientelist system revolving around the abuse of young girls and women. A system which, as Nancy Fraser argues in Cannibal Capitalism, in a way feeds on the flesh of women. Across social negotiations, cultures and nations, subtle or conspicuous, the patriarchal mindset continues to determine what women can do, cannot do, must do and must not do.

A panel of independent experts appointed by the United Nations Human Rights Council recently concluded that the crimes revealed in the Epstein files showed a commodification and dehumanisation of women and girls. “So grave is the scale, nature, systematic character, and transnational reach of these atrocities against women and girls,” they wrote, “that a number of them may reasonably meet the legal threshold of crimes against humanity.”

So yes, women in Syria need ‘saving’. So do women anywhere else. The problem lies …

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