The story that Erdoğan's Turkey wants from Syria
When I heard Hakan Fidan say those two words, I said to myself: a perfect example. He let slip the crux of the interaction. Pure gold.
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…
