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 Islamists. Nor had I thought that my curiosity regarding this triple interaction would continue for years and become first my doctoral thesis at Oxford and then my second book, The New Spirit of Islamism.

I am also telling you this to give a little hint about my positionality as a researcher at the beginning. As I said, I used to be a journalist whose reporting covered several high-stakes, high-profile cases: those that helped the AKP lift the limits on its power by castrating the military and certain elites around it with bogus charges fabricated by its long-time ally and later arch-nemesis, the Fethullah Gülen movement; the corruption cases surrounding the AKP; its human rights abuses in the handling of the Gezi protests; its failure to deal with ISIS recruits; and, most importantly, its intentional collapse of the previous peace negotiations with the Kurdish movement. So certain government figures did not like me. But more importantly, I did not like them.

And as David Beckham reminds Victoria Beckham — three times — when she is talking about her upbringing: ‘Be honest…!!’

If I am being perfectly honest, I come from a family that holds Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in extremely high regard, along with his foundational insistence on secularity as an indispensable element of progress and modernity. I was never an Islamophobe, but between my family upbringing and the formative education I received in Istanbul, I did not escape the idea that Islamists harbour an insidious double plan even when they seem to be part of the system — like my mother, and like the école de Gilles Kepel within within French scholarship on Islamism.1 If you know the main social cleavages of Turkey, you know what I mean here. (IYKYK. I will get into Turkey more deeply when the topic takes us there. For now, a wry touch is enough, and apt.)

Immersing myself deeply in the scholarship during my studies at Oxford helped, but so did this particular research.

The recurring theme since 2011

I have talked about the findings of this research numerous times before, but not so much about its beginning, which means something at this moment. Here is how I explained the conduct of this research in my book:

‘Although I employed a grounded theory approach, it is important to note that I, too, made assumptions regarding this interplay. Considering the extensive body of literature on transnational Islamism and Turkey’s shift in foreign policy towards the Middle East since 2009, as briefly mentioned earlier, it appeared reasonable to hypothesize that the interplay among these three Islamist entities could be linked to the formation of a transnational Sunni Islamist bloc guided by Islamist ideology. These assumptions have not compromised the grounded theory approach; rather, they have provided an opportunity to contrast an alternative explanation with the research findings.’

[…]

‘To investigate the relationship between the AKP, Ennahda and the MB following the Arab Uprisings, more than seventy elite actors from diverse socio- economic, cultural and national backgrounds were interviewed. Adhering to the process tracing method, the interviews were not randomly selected but carefully chosen based on a thorough examination of individuals involved in the interplay or possessing relevant knowledge. […] In accordance with Isaiah Berlin’s formulation, academics and journalists are driven by the pursuit of truth. That still remains to be our primary objective. However, it is important to acknowledge the limitations inherent in the belief that there exists a singular, universally applicable truth, as this notion can be traced back to a Platonic understanding and poses certain challenges. While I do not intend to delve into an extensive epistemological debate or engage in an exhaustive analysis of the history of political ideas, I find it crucial to clarify my standpoint. Was I deceived by the interviewees or subject to party propaganda? There is no definitive answer to this question. Nonetheless, I took various precautions to mitigate such risks. First, I refrained from posing questions that explicitly sought to confirm whether individuals were seeking success. Instead, during the initial phase of the interviews, my focus was on uncovering the details surrounding the who, what, when and where of their encounters. Where did these meetings take place? Who was present? How frequently did they occur? What were the topics of discussion? Subsequently, the interviews shifted towards exploring the underlying motivations by asking the question, why. I approached this enquiry with an open-mind. It was only towards the end that I gently probed them about the assumptions regarding their close relationship with the AKP following the revolutions. To validate the accuracy of the meetings, individuals involved and intermediaries, I cross-referenced each interview with one another.’

[…]

‘During this research, a recurring theme of success emerged organically in every interview and subsequently took centre stage in this research, without any deliberate manipulation or influence. The Egyptian MB sought to understand the specific components of a “success model.”’

The very rough crux of the story is that Islamists were looking for a success story to adopt, and the AKP at the time of the Arab Uprisings was the ultimate representative of that. This neoliberal impetus, the pursuit of success for the Ikhwan and Ennahda with the AKP as the exemplar, had implications for Islamist politics and their base, all of which I try to explain in my book.

al-Sharaa as the third case

The interesting thing happened with the ascension of Ahmad al-Sharaa to the presidency of Syria, a former jihadist who during his governance in Idlib had maintained close contacts with the Turkish military and intelligence since 2019. Turkey, by way of contingency and the stamina of a strong state, was the winning foreign force of the Syrian civil war. And Syria, with al-Sharaa at the helm, will be the third attempt of Turkey’s AKP, or the AKP’s Turkey, to create a success story.

This is not, as Israel has recently tried to portray it, an alliance of Islamist extremism or an effort to create an Islamic ummah. Muslim politics of transnationalism can surely be read through the categories of international relations, but in this case, there is an important dimension of the pursuit of success which has the potential to alter the core of the ideology itself, and that is my argument.

As I wrote in this post two years ago, and again a year ago here and here in November 2025: ‘Since the first couple of days of al-Sharaa’s ascent in Damascus, a similar process of diffusion is happening between the AKP and al-Sharaa’s team. The relationship of HTS and the Turkish state goes back almost a decade. The meetings with the civil AKP teams, on the other hand, only began with the fall of the Assad regime. But please do not think of this as a robotic downloading of tactics but as a natural diffusion of a mindset. What I am trying to say, I guess, is that the sharp shift that the world sees in Sharaa is not so sharp and abrupt but in line with a broader shift and trajectory in Islamist movements at the beginning of the 21st century. Now al-Sharaa and his closest teammate, foreign minister al-Shaibani, are using a toolbox shaped by the AKP’s self-proclaimed success formula.’

In this diffusion from the AKP to first the Ikhwan in Egypt and Ennahda in Tunisia, and now to al-Sharaa’s government in Syria, vocabulary plays an important role: it opens doors, eases partnership and describes amorphous concepts that each country can then theorise, in the sense the scholars mean2, to fit its own national context. By vocabulary I mean simple key words such as service / hizmet, governance, experience / tecrübe / tajruba, model / an-namudhaj at-turki, legitimacy / meşruiyet / sharriyya, and most importantly ‘success story / başarı hikayesi / qissat najah.’ These are really important signposts for following the trajectory of what today’s Islamists aspire to do.

Hakan Fidan reveals

Now I will give you the most recent example, from the top figure who has been at the centre of this interaction since the Arab Uprisings: with the Ikhwan in Egypt, with Ennahda in Tunisia, and now with al-Sharaa in Syria. First as head of Turkey’s intelligence agency, MIT, and now as foreign minister, Hakan Fidan last week visited Qatar and sat down with Resul Serdar on Al Jazeera for an interview. Look what he said:

‘I think now Syria is successfully enjoying the good relations with the rest of the region and the countries. You know, yesterday there was a good result in EU as well. So, I think Syria is a success story for our region. This is exactly what I was referring when I say regional ownership. The countries of the region came together, and they identified a uniform position vis- a- vis with Syria. And Syria responded to this position very successfully. And I think now everybody is enjoying stability and security in Syria. So, Syria used to be the place of civil war, a cradle for terrorism, and a threat. All the neighbouring countries now, alhamdulillah, it’s all gone. Now Syria is a stable country posing no threat to anybody, and all the refugees are coming back from different countries, including from Turkey.’

Listen to the register of that paragraph and you can hear the entire arc I have been tracing. Fidan is not making a case for Islamist solidarity, nor invoking ummah, nor reaching for the theological registers that earlier generations of Turkish Islamists could not resist. He is speaking the language of regional ownership, stability, refugee return and EU approval, and he is doing so in order to claim Syria as a story that worked. And that is the point, not the contradiction it might look like. The vocabulary is secular, regional, technocratic; the actor being defended by it, are Islamists. A success story pulled off by an Islamist! The second one, in the AKP's reckoning. The AKP counts itself as the first and the landmark. Now that Morsi in Egypt and Ghannouchi in Tunisia have failed, it is left to al-Sharaa to write the success story for an Islamist entity with the AKP's script. You know what I mean?! That is what the whole diffusion has been for.

The AKP and its frames

What crosses borders between movements and parties is not only tactics, policies or organisational forms but vocabularies, narratives and what in the social movement literature3 called ‘master frames’. Yani interpretive scaffolds wide enough in scope that you can hang your own particulars on them. And it is worth pausing on the AKP’s fluency here, because a reader could be forgiven for hearing Fidan’s “success story” as a figure of speech, something offered in passing to an Al Jazeera interviewer. It is not.

The AKP has been in the business of coining and circulating exactly this kind of epithet since its founding in 2002 : the Turkish model, democratic conservatives, the New Turkey, advanced democracy, the pious generation. Some of these are laughable - but that really is not the point - , some were aimed at domestic audiences to redraw the country’s political self-image, others at external audiences to legitimise the party and make it exportable, and several worked both ways at once. Frames travel when they meet three credibility tests: internal consistency, empirical plausibility given the lived experience of their audience, and the standing of the actors who articulate them.

The AKP after 2009 satisfied all three for the Ikhwan and Ennahda, and for al-Sharaa’s circle after December 2024 it largely still does. The cross-national diffusion of movement ideas is in part precisely this: not the transfer of a programme but the transfer of a vocabulary through which programmes get articulated, contested and, eventually, recognised by others as legitimate.4

Whether Syria actually has worked is a separate question, and one most Syrians are still living inside the answer to. What matters here is that the frame has held across three countries, two decades and a remarkable cast of interlocutors, from the Cairo of 2011 to the Damascus of 2025, and that an Islamist project once measured against the will of God is now, increasingly, measured against the metric it once disdained: success. The bigger question, I think, is what goes into this success frame and what gets pushed out of it at this moment in time.

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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 disorders could be analysed. No longer.

Under Ero, the organisation has just taken the strategic decision to reinvest in Europe, treating the continent not as a stability anchor but as a region exposed to conflict pressure and great-power competition.

That an organisation built to analyse conflict elsewhere has now redirected its analytical resources toward Europe is, as Ero acknowledged, itself a finding about Europe.

The continent is no longer the normative template against which other regions' instabilities are read. It is one of those regions now.

I would not have predicted it half a decade ago. The days we live in…

De-risking or conscious uncoupling with the US

Ero began her lecture with first principles, the three pillars on which the post-war European project rests: American security guarantees. A rules-based international order. Economic integration. All three are now under simultaneous strain. Russia’s war in Ukraine has shattered the assumption that territorial aggression in Europe belongs to the past. The United States -historically the anchor of European security- has become, under its current administration, less a partner than a variable. A recent poll across six European countries found 87 per cent of respondents in favour of greater European autonomy and “de-risking” from Washington.

De-risking, a term Ursula von der Leyen first used for China, is not the same as decoupling. It accepts that structural dependence on a partner has become a strategic vulnerability, but seeks to reduce that dependence by degrees. For example, through diversification of supply chains or the building of alternative partnerships, rather than through an abrupt severance. Isn't it interesting that a concept originally devised to navigate exposure to China is now being used for the future of Europe's relationship with the United States?

Jeremy Shapiro, the research director at the European Council on Foreign Relations (ECFR), has come up with another formulation, conscious uncoupling. He realised, when he saw my blank face, that I had missed the popular-culture reference, and had to explain. In March 2014, Gwyneth Paltrow announced that she and her husband, the Coldplay frontman Chris Martin, were ending their decade-long marriage by "consciously uncoupling", yani separating amicably, remaining a family, refusing to make their break-up a spectacle. The phrase was much mocked at the time, but it has aged well. For Shapiro, it captures what Europe's relationship with the United States needs to become, not a rupture, not a continuation of dependence, but a deliberate, dignified renegotiation of the terms.

Timothy Garton Ash asked Ero about the nature of this decline. Was it gradual or sudden? He also recalled that former Vice President of the European Commission (2019-24) Josep Borrell, who had given the same lecture a year earlier, had located the rupture in double standards towards two events - Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and Europe’s response, or rather its conspicuous non-response, to the genocide in Gaza. Ero accepted that these were the moments in which the crisis became impossible to ignore, but pushed the inflection point earlier, to around 2015.

The deals that broke the principle

You remember what happened in 2015. Faced with a million asylum-seekers arriving via the Aegean, the EU negotiated its way out of the problem by paying Recep Tayyip Erdoğan’s Turkey to keep Syrians on the eastern side of the border -six billion euros, a revived accession dossier that Brussels had no intention of honouring, and the quiet reclassification of Turkey as a “safe third country” - that almost no serious international lawyer believed it to be. The deal worked, in the narrow sense that crossings collapsed. It also did something more lasting. It exported Europe’s humanitarian responsibilities to an authoritarian partner, handed Erdoğan a permanent instrument of leverage, and inaugurated the externalisation playbook now imitated everywhere from Italy-Libya to UK-Rwanda. Well done, really.

If 2015 was where the principle began to be applied selectively, Gaza is where it snapped clean in half. The European response to Russia in Ukraine had been swift. ICC arrest warrant for Putin endorsed across the bloc, twenty sanctions packages, suspension of cooperation agreements, a near-instantaneous redefinition of what international law required of European governments.

The response to Israel’s conduct in Gaza has been the inverse. When the International Court of Justice ruled in January 2024 that South Africa’s case alleging genocide was plausible, Germany formally intervened on Israel’s side; France, Italy, Austria and the Czech Republic dismissed the case in varying registers; the European Commission declined to comment.

When the ICC issued arrest warrants against Netanyahu and his then defence minister Yoav Gallant who had announced a complete siege of Gaza with the words we are fighting human animals and we are acting accordingly’, France invented a doctrine of head-of-state immunity that no European lawyer believed in; Italy, Germany, Poland and Hungary signalled, in language of varying clarity, that they would not arrest him.

In April 2025 Orbán hosted Netanyahu in Budapest. Greek PM Mitsotakis met him in Jerusalem on the first day of Eid al-Fitr, one of the holiest days in the Islamic calendar, while Israeli airstrikes were killing dozens of Palestinians in Gaza. The EU-Israel Association Agreement, with its human-rights essentiality clause, was reviewed three times and never suspended. In September 2025 a United Nations commission of inquiry concluded that genocide was being committed; the institutional EU did not adjust its position. Spain, Ireland, Belgium and the Netherlands pushed in the other direction, and they were the exceptions that proved the rule. The phrases rules-based international order or international law or international treaties, repeated across this period in every European communiqué on Ukraine, was being hollowed out by the same governments using it.

What struck me, sitting in a room full of people who had spent careers thinking about Europe, was the quiet consensus about the fundamental reason behind the European project’s fundamental crisis. It is not Russian tanks, nor American volatility, nor Chinese capital. It is the hypocrisy, the double standard, the inconsistent application of the principles on which the entire post-war order was built.

A principle applied selectively is no longer a principle. Yani, it becomes a preference. Which is ok if you are being honest about it. But you cannot claim a rules-based order while choosing which rules apply to allies and which to adversaries; you cannot invoke international humanitarian law in Bucha and avert your eyes in Gaza; you cannot lecture the Global South about territorial integrity while paying Erdoğan to do your border work. The Europeans I most respect understand this. The trouble is that understanding it has not yet been translated into doing anything about it.

Ero’s prescriptions for the short term are sober and operational.

1. Use leverage with unity and consistency. The Greenland crisis showed what coordinated resolve can achieve. A front of eight states - Denmark, France, Germany, the UK, Italy, Spain, Poland, the Nordics - and Trump withdrew the threat in January, having met the kind of coordinated European resistance his administration had not anticipated. Acquiescence gains little in the face of leaders like Trump.

2. Reassess reliance on the United States. Unquestioned reliance is no longer credible; de-risking now applies across the Atlantic as well as toward Beijing. But strategic autonomy must be built multilaterally, deliberately, with political will and coherent policy — and not captured by any single member state’s defence-industrial agenda.

3. Build coalitions of the willing. The EU and NATO remain essential but can be ponderously slow. Agile, issue-based coalitions can act faster, as the leader-led initiatives on Ukraine and amid the US-Israel-Iran tensions have shown.

4. Defend the rules-based order consistently. Consistently is the word here. Without it, the rest is rhetoric or laf salatası as we say it in Turkish.

5. Address the eroding global standing. In the Global South, Europe is increasingly perceived as backless, inward-looking and altogether too comfortable lecturing others. Influence is built on credibility, not power alone.

6. Confront internal fragmentation and populism. Despite real progress (the recent overcoming of Hungarian obstacles, for instance), political divisions and populism remain decisive threats. Major elections — though formally local — carry national and Union-wide implications. Europe, Ero insisted, must address the crises it cannot externalise.

The Scramble for Europe

If Ero’s diagnosis is the foreground, Dimitar Bechev’s new book The Scramble for Europe: Russia, China and Turkey Challenging Regional Order supplies the background. Dimitar traces the consolidation of the EU-anchored European order and its slow unravelling from the late 2000s. His central argument is that the three challengers want different things from a diminished Europe. Russia is the radical revisionist, exposed in Ukraine, intent on remaking the security architecture by force. China is the patient co-opter, working through economic dependence to integrate Europe into a future order it expects to dominate. Erdoğan’s Turkey is the perpetual stakeholder, weary of being the eternal candidate, demanding recognition as a top-tier player rather than waiting at the door. Folded together, these revisionisms are not a single threat but a structural condition to which Europe has been responding piecemeal, distractedly, and on the back foot.

Ero and Bechev are arguing, from different angles, for the same conclusion. The crisis is foundational rather than cyclical, which means it will not pass on its own; the pressure is multidirectional rather than singular, which means it cannot be deflected by managing one relationship well. Europe is therefore left with only its own conduct as a variable.

It is shocking how the diffusion of the authoritarian populist playbook, with its transactional, Machiavellian, pragmatic ethos, recognises neither borders nor the lessons of history. Travels fast and furious from country to country, region to region. However, transactionalism works, in the narrow sense in which the 2015 deal worked. In a way it does not work in the long term. The alternative, on the other hand, requires Europeans to pay prices they have been reluctant to pay since at least Bosnia. Is anyone willing to change that? No one in the room was sure at Oxford.

So it is fair to say that whether Europeans choose consistency and principle over expedience in the years ahead will determine not whether Europe matters, -I think it will-, but what kind of Europe survives the period we are now in.

You can pre-order Dimitar Bechev’s book by Oxford University Press here.

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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 titled “Islamist Turkey: A Base for Muslim Brotherhood Jihadism.” FDD has been part of the Israel lobbying machine in the United States for two decades, with funding patterns and policy outputs that have drawn it consistently into the orbit of Israeli strategic priorities. The paper is worth reading not for what it tells you about Turkey but for what it tells you about how the Brotherhood label is being manufactured for current use. A similar paper was published at the beginning of this year by the Jerusalem Institute for Strategy and Security(JISS) recommending that Israel treat Turkey as the leading force of the Muslim Brotherhood worldwide and lobby Washington and NATO accordingly.

Now, this should give any observer of the region pause. The Muslim Brotherhood, in 2026, is in full disarray. The Egyptian organisation has been hollowed out by twelve years of Sisi’s prisons. Its London leadership and its Istanbul leadership have been at each other’s throats since the death of Ibrahim Munir in 2022. There is no operational coherence, no unified command, no urgent project being run out of Istanbul or Doha. The figures who remain in exile are mostly producing policy commentary and writing memoirs. So why, all of a sudden, is Erdoğan a Muslim Brotherhood man?

The label is doing extraordinary work in this transition, and it is worth asking what the label actually contains. The answer, on close inspection, is very little.

Türlü is a Turkish stew and…

The methodology is guilt by association. Bin Laden, the report tells us, made a trip to Turkey in 1976 and considered the Turkish Islamist and former prime minister Necmettin Erbakan a source of inspiration. How do we know this? From one journal seized at Abbottabad, the Pakistani town where US soldiers killed Bin Laden in 2011, and reported in Turkish newspapers four decades after the alleged event. Erbakan mentored Erdoğan. Erdoğan, therefore, sits in a lineage that runs through al-Qaeda. This is offered as evidence rather than as the McCarthyite syllogism it actually is.

The conceptual slide is more damaging. It is almost like türlü, the famous Turkish stew where we throw all the leftover vegetables into one pot and serve it for dinner. By the end of the report, the Brotherhood includes Hamas, Ennahda, Yemeni Islah, Libyan Justice and Construction, the Syrian National Army, Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, al-Qaeda in Syria, ISIS recruitment networks, Naqshbandi Sufi orders, and Turkish Hezbollah, which is in fact a Sunni group with no relationship to the Lebanese Hezbollah and no clear ideological proximity to the Brotherhood. When the term stretches that far it stops describing anything. It becomes a name for whatever the report wants designated. I think Türlü.

The citation chain is closed. FDD analysts cite earlier FDD analysts. Almost like a sweet little circle of friends playing tag. A-cites-B-cites-A-cites-the Meir Amit Centre-cites-the Jerusalem Center! The New York Times investigation into Hamas financing in Turkey appears as a single piece of mainstream journalism doing the work of an entire field.

There is no engagement with the academic literature on Turkish foreign policy, on the AKP’s actual relationship with Islamist movements, on Brotherhood internal politics, its evolution since 1970s, on the considerable scholarship now available in English on the variety of Islamist trajectories since 2011, including my own book on the interactions between the AKP, Ennahda and the Muslim Brotherhood, The New Spirit of Islamism, which is based on more than seventy elite interviews. Nada!

In other words, the report is not in conversation with the academic field, or with what is happening on the ground. Or shall I say reality? But it is in conversation with previous policy advocacy, with its circular arguments that, vallahi, say nothing useful about the present. Pure regurgitation of neocon mindset.

The main problem is selective ignorance when it comes to unpacking anything related to Islamist ideology, its evolution and trajectory. Of the Muslim Brotherhood. There is a plethora of Arabic and English sources that no one wants to cite in Israel or Washington. That is a much bigger problem than trying to tie Erdoğan to the Muslim Brotherhood with funny little attempts.

Um Kulthum’s songs as torture

The Brotherhood, as the world has learned to imagine it, has very little to do with the movement that actually exists. To see how thoroughly the gap has opened up between the label and the thing it claims to describe, it helps to look at the people the label is meant to refer to.

I went yesterday afternoon to a talk at Oxford University’s Middle East Centre by Mathias Ghyoot, a young historian at Princeton. His new book, Brothers Behind Bars, has just been published by Oxford University Press. It reconstructs the Brotherhood’s experience inside Egyptian prisons from 1948 to 1975, drawing on more than three hundred memoirs by Brothers and Sisters that have remained almost entirely outside the English-language literature. Um Kulthum’s voice was piped through loudspeakers into prison cells, a feature of the Free Officers’ rehabilitation reforms after 1952, meant to integrate prisoners into the new republic. Many were haunted by those songs for the rest of his life. What a shame that the most beautiful voice of the Arab world was conscripted into a torture campaign. So, the reforms Gamal Abdel Nasser introduced became their inversion, and the Egyptian prison service expanded into one of the most violent carceral regimes in the region.

Despite this violent prison machine, according to Ghyoot's sources, the Brothers built underground prison societies of remarkable organisational coherence. They held elections, ran councils, smuggled letters and books with help from the Sisterhood, organised football fields and theatres and Quran recital competitions. Some reported greater religious and political freedom inside than in what they called the big prison of Egypt. The book shifts attention from what state repression prevented to what it enabled, and the result is an account of agency rather than victimhood, of intellectual production rather than radicalisation.

This is the move that matters. The dominant narrative of the Brotherhood’s prison years, as it travelled from Gilles Kepel and Emmanuel Sivan in the 1980s into Western counterterrorism literature after 2001, was that prison produced mass radicalisation and that Sayyid Qutb was the principal radicaliser. America’s strategy on 11 September, one of these accounts claimed, was born inside Egyptian prisons. Ghyoot’s primary sources do not support this. He shows that radicalisation was often shaped outside the Brotherhood by the rise of Salafism in 1960s Egypt, and that the more consequential phenomenon inside the prisons was a sustained majority effort by senior Brothers to contain radicalism, denounce takfir, and articulate a disciplined moderation. Preachers Not Judges, the text written by Hassan al-Hudaybi and circulated in the mid-1960s, was not an aberration but actually the dominant register of the leadership.

Who really ‘radicalised’ the Brothers

Therefore radicalisation thesis was not produced by the Brothers’ own writings. It was produced by the Egyptian state, then exported. Beginning in the mid-1950s, Nasser collaborated with tabloid journalists and Al-Azhar clerics to cast the Brotherhood as a threat to Islam and society, depicting arrested members as deranged bomb-makers or recruits seduced by weird ceremonies. Pamphlets with titles like The Brotherhood and Terrorism and The Brothers of Satan portrayed the Brothers as Kharijites and apostates. By the mid-1960s the smear campaign had internationalised, presenting the Brotherhood as Saudi agents in the Arab Cold War, and even alleging mass conversions to Baha’ism. These tropes entered popular fiction, then nationalist historiography, then Western scholarship.

Yani…The shorthand the world now reaches for when it says Muslim Brotherhood was forged inside the Egyptian state’s propaganda apparatus, refined under Mubarak, formalised after 2013 by Sisi, and exported through Gulf lobbying networks to US and Israel. Or vice versa.

Since the overthrow of Mohamed Morsi in 2013, more than 45,000 MB members have been imprisoned across Egypt. Morsi himself died in 2019, collapsing in a Cairo courtroom after six years in solitary confinement and denied medical care. Some have been executed. Some have died under torture. The vast majority are held in indefinite pre-trial detention, in conditions that human rights organisations have struggled even to document, because the Sisi government does not permit the documentation. The number is larger than the entire active membership of most political parties anywhere in the world. They are imprisoned in part because the Egyptian state has spent seventy years exporting a description of the Brotherhood that allows the West to hear their imprisonment as counterterrorism rather than as repression.

This is the empty category the Israeli campaign against Turkey has reached for recently, in the FDD report, in Katz's outburst and the Netanyahu tweet. The label is doing two kinds of work at once. In Egypt, it provides the cover that allows tens of thousands of people to be erased from political life. For Israel, it provides the cover that allows a NATO state - Turkey- to be repositioned as a strategic adversary. The same Muslim Brotherhood label, hollowed of empirical content, available for whichever project a state is currently advancing.

Do not get me wrong here. There is a relationship between the Erdoğan government and various Brotherhood-aligned movements. I have spent years documenting its texture. The Erdoğan government had a close relationship with the Egyptian Brotherhood until 2013 and with Tunisian Ennahda until 2019. It supported them while they were in power. Not after they were ousted. So for Erdoğan it was Realpolitik, power politics, strategic calculation, pure pragmatism, economic opportunism, raison d'état, or whatever you would call a situation that is not determined by ideology. He instrumentalised Islamism to gain influence and economic opportunities, just as he uses nationalist tropes at home to consolidate his base. The instrument is real. The conspiracy is not.

Israeli apparatus turn on Turkey

Katz’s phrase about Erdoğan is not, of course, a description of anything. But so very classic because there is a long tradition in foreign policy of using categories that nobody has had to define for decades because everybody is assumed to know what they mean, and the Muslim Brotherhood, in the Israeli usage Katz is reaching for, is one of these. The category arrives pre-loaded, its content assembled out of seventy years of Egyptian state propaganda, Western counterterrorism literature and Gulf lobbying papers, and it is now applied to a NATO ally with a complicated foreign policy in order to convert that ally into a member of an international conspiracy requiring sanctions, designations and possibly military preparation.

There is something almost vertiginous about watching the apparatus turn on Turkey. Israel is at war on multiple fronts. Its government faces an indictment in The Hague and a separate one from a Turkish prosecutor seeking sentences of between 1,100 and 4,500 years for Netanyahu and thirty-four other officials. Its strategic doctrine, post-Iran, requires a new principal adversary, and Turkey is structurally available.

The Muslim Brotherhood label gives Israel something it can say in public. The real reasons for the rupture between Turkey and Israel are geographic, strategic and emotional. They are about competition in the Eastern Mediterranean, Turkey's drift toward Greece and Cyprus, and Erdoğan's response to what Israel is doing in Gaza. None of these reasons sound respectable when stated plainly. The Brotherhood label makes them sound respectable. It turns a fight over geography and Gaza into a fight against Islamist ideology. It does the work that any honest accounting of the rupture, which would have to begin with Gaza, would refuse to do.

In Cairo, the Brothers Ghyoot writes about, or their grandchildren, are dying in prisons whose conditions resemble those of the second ordeal under Nasser. In Istanbul and Doha and Ankara, a small number of Brotherhood figures live in exile and most of them produce the kind of policy commentary and think-tank work that closely resembles what comes out of Washington outfits like FDD itself. The FDD report describes as if they are the centre of the Islamic world. This is laughable. And they know well it is laughable. What is serious is that they are using this empty Muslim Brotherhood package to attack Turkey. While there are countless claims that can be put forth about the regime that runs Turkey for more than two decades; its clientelist networks, the corruption, the lack of rule of law but Israel chooses to go on with the Muslim Brotherhood. Why? Because it is just the first step and the easiest and the laziest.

There is more to say about Israel’s aims at Turkey, and I will return to them. But for now, I can say that the campaign does not have a moral backbone or empirical weight. In the meantime, the Muslim Brotherhood members will keep dying in Egyptian cells for nothing more than becoming a social movement that built a political party, won an election, had a crappy eight months of rule, were then massacred by the military and their leaders thrown out by a coup. And Erdoğan, the so-called Islamist, a Muslim Brotherhood man as the Israel lobby likes to put it, has mended his ties with the man responsible for the persecution of the Muslim Brotherhood. Haven’t you seen him shaking hands with Sisi recently?

Neo-Orientalism and Islamophobia make people stupid. So much so that they believe the rest of the world is stupid. Well, well.

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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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Not because the damage is invisible. It is not. The buildings are tired, the infrastructure worn down, the economy clearly strained after civil war, sanctions and foreign intervention. But the streets were alive in a way I had not expected.

Yani there was movement. Noise. Shops open late. Traffic impatient – horrible is another word- as ever. A kind of ordinary insistence on daily life. It did not erase what the Assad dynasty had done to this country. Nothing erases that. But it interrupted the narrative of paralysis that so often frames Syria from the outside.

I believe the resilience of Syrians is a lesson worth listening to.

From afar, the story is still written in extremes. A former jihadist now leads the transitional government. Depending on who is sp…

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We witness a murder carried out by a state official, and are told by senior ministers that it was an act of self-defence against a man - an emergency nurse- lying flat on the floor. We saw this in Minnesota.

This is a time lifted straight from the canon of political dystopias. A time of euphemisms pushed to the edge of absurdity, to the point where we seriously begin to question our own sanity. We have been seeing this in Gaza.

We are told there is a ceasefire, and yet we continue to hear otherwise.

For the past two and a half years we have been systematically gaslighted by Israeli officials and IDF spokespersons. We were instructed not to trust figures or narratives coming from Gazan authorities. We were to…

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The Balfour Declaration was drafted in the glow of wartime idealism and the shadow of imperial ambition. In 1917 Britain promised support for a Jewish “national home” in Palestine, imagining it as both an act of justice and a stroke of strategy. Yet the lone Jewish member of the Cabinet, Edwin Samuel Montagu, opposed it with fierce clarity, warning that Zionism would endanger Jews rather than redeem them. His dissent, soon drowned out by triumphal politics, reveals how the language of sympathy can conceal hierarchy and how the moral debts of Europe, left unpaid, still shape the politics of the present. In a previous post, I had promised to return to the Balfour Declaration in greater depth, and I now turn to one of the most meticulous accounts of its making and aftermath, The Balfour Declaration by historian Jonathan Schneer.

In November 1917, as the First World War ground thr…

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The Syrian Kurds, their military wing the SDF/YPG and their political arm, the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), have suffered a severe strategic breakdown over the past couple of weeks. A cascade of serious miscalculations, the fraying of key internal alliances, and a sharply transformed regional context combined to produce the swift loss of nearly 80 percent of their territory and the disintegration of their autonomy project.

As I have pointed out before, the main mistake was a misreading of the post-Assad moment. The Kurdish leadership underestimated al-Sharaa’s legitimacy bargain with the US and entered talks with the new Syrian government on rigid terms, while inflating the reliability of American backing and discounti…

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I had the privilege of watching writer and actor Khalid Abdalla’s autobiographical one-man play Nowhere at the Oxford Playhouse. Contrary to its name, the play, using unexpected but marvellous tools of modern theatre, took us everywhere that is politically relevant to our understanding of who we are.

We as friends. We as revolutionaries. We as failed political agents. We as political prisoners. We as immigrants. We as forced immigrants, our countries rendered unliveable under authoritarian regimes and neoliberal miasma. We as asylum seekers fleeing civil war and genocide. We as hopefuls and optimists. We as citizens of everywhere and therefore, as right-wing populists want us to believe, “nowhere.”

Abdalla, an Egyptian born and raised in Glasgow, showed us during the pl…

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A scenario long feared is now beginning to unfold.

Syrian government troops advances deeper into areas held by Kurdish forces in northeastern Syria on Tuesday, pressing rapid gains against Kurdish fighters who vowed to defend their remaining enclaves.

A brief ceasefire has been declared, meant to allow the Kurds to hand control of Hasakah to government forces — or else.

How did we end up in this grim situation?

The Syrian Army, whatever it consists of, has moved to push Kurdish forces east of the Euphrates, forcing the Syrian Democratic Forces, led by the Kurds, to relinquish control first over the Kurdish neighbourhoods of Sheikh Maqsoud and Ashrafiyah in Aleppo and then over the Arab-majority cities of Deir ez-Zor and Raqqa. Before advancing militarily, the Syrian president made a ca…

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