Turkey in Arab Eyes

Mustafa El-Labbad, Al-Ahram Weekly

After an absence of many decades, Turkey has returned as a major player in the Middle East. Clearly motivated by national interests, its reengagement in the affairs of the region will have significant repercussions on Middle Eastern balances of powers. It will also impact on the way Arab elites regard Turkey and their judgements on that country's historical experience since the declaration of the republic in 1923.

Despite its relatively long absence, the ideological prism through which Arab politicians and intellectuals of all shades of the political spectrum view Turkey has hampered an objective view of that great and ancient country that had such a profound historical impact on the region. For decades, Arab leftists and Arab nationalists branded Turkey as subordinate to the West on the basis of the Cold War experience and Ankara's membership in the Central Treaty Organisation (CENTO) and then NATO. This static, one dimensional and essentially facile judgement naturally hampered the ability to monitor and appreciate the major developments and changes that Turkey has undergone. Arab Islamists, meanwhile, have long faulted the founders of the Turkish Republic for having ended -- and establishing itself on the ruins of -- the Islamic caliphate. Yet, so intent are they in condemning the republic for its "historical crime" that they missed the fact that the founders of the republic actually scored a historical achievement, which was to salvage what they could of an empire that had already disintegrated and that the West had virtually pronounced dead. Indeed, even Istanbul, the capital of the country and the seat of the caliphate, was under foreign occupation at the time of the founding of the republic, along with other chunks of present day Turkey, and it fell to Turkish soldiers in the ranks of Mustafa Kemal to recapture their land from British, Italian and even Greek forces.

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