The government of Recep Tayyip Erdogan will establish a museum in honor of Mehmed the Conqueror, the Ottoman sultan who captured Constantinople and took the first great steps to expand the Ottoman empire. “For the first time in Turkey, a museum with the name of a sultan will be built in Edirne,” Professor Zekeriya Kurşun of Istanbul-based Fatih Sultan Mehmet Vakıf University told the state news agency Anadolu. The deadline is next year.
The museum in the Turkish province of Edirne, across the Bosphorus Strait, which forms the continental boundary between Europe and Asia, is seen as one of the continuing steps, large and small, to change the name of the Erdogan regime as successor to the Ottoman.
The 66-year-old leader of Turkey has not minded words, declaring in 2018 that the Republic of Turkey was a continuation of the Ottoman Empire. The son of a coast guard living in a 1,000-room presidential palace in Ankara, larger than the White House or the Kremlin, Erdogan has been reinventing himself; from a model democrat in the Islamic world a few years earlier to the new champion of Islamism to fit the new role.
This aspiration has pitted Erdogan’s Turkey against Saudi Arabia for its claims of global Islamic leadership. Saudi Arabia was one of the territories controlled by the Ottoman Empire during its heyday, in addition to parts of Europe, North Africa, and other West Asian countries.
It was also the reason that Erdogan’s move to Hagia Sophia was an unequivocal message to the Islamic world. It is a sign of achieving “freedom” for the al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem’s old city, the third holiest place for Muslims, Erdogan said when the museum was converted into a mosque in July.
Erdogan’s ambitions are expected to further complicate the situation in the Islamic world which is already witnessing increasingly divisive trends including sectarian struggles between Shiites and Sunnis, Arabs against non-Arabs, and apprehensions around the Brotherhood’s political Islam. Muslim.
Erdogan has sided with Qatar in its ongoing dispute with the United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Saudi Arabia, closely participating in regional hotspots against the two major Arabs, and has been working hard to mobilize non-Arab Muslim countries. .
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Non-Arab Sunni majority countries like Pakistan, Turkey and Malaysia have joined forces with Shiite Iran and Arab Qatar to counter the Saudi Arabia-UAE-Egypt axis in the Islamic world. These divisions are further aggravated by Iran’s Shiite support for the Shiite majority in Iraq, Syria, and sections within Lebanon, Bahrain, and Yemen.
At the first meeting hosted by Malaysia last year, 20 countries attended the summit designed to place the Turkish-led front in competition with the Saudi-led Organization for Islamic Cooperation, or OIC.
Pakistan, which is backing Erdogan’s effort, had pulled out of the summit at the last minute due to pressure from Riyadh. But Imran Khan’s Foreign Minister Shah Mahmood Qureshi sparked a diplomatic storm last month when he noted that Islamabad could approach Erdogan’s Islamic front to discuss Kashmir at the ministerial level if the OIC was unwilling. Later, Imran Khan appeared to endorse this approach when he explained, in a television interview, that each country, he was talking about Riyadh, had the right to act in its national interest. He did not say that this principle would also apply to Pakistan.
Over the past month, pacts negotiated by Donald Trump between Israel and First, the United Arab Emirates in August, and Bahrain last week, gave Erdogan a chance to criticize the Gulf kingdoms.
Erdogan, calling himself the defender of the Palestinians, threatened to suspend diplomatic relations with the United Arab Emirates in retaliation. Turkey was the first Muslim-majority country to establish full diplomatic relations with Israel in 1949, but this fact has not stopped Erdogan from standing his ground.
“The movement against Palestine is not a step that can be rejected,” President Erdogan said last month when speaking about the possibility of severing ties with the United Arab Emirates, according to a Reuters report. Israel and its two new partners, Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates, will sign on the dotted line in Washington on Tuesday.
The Turkish president has already taken a more active role in regional affairs and has shown muscles.
According to the Washington Post, Turkey has a military presence in Syria, Iraq, Qatar, Somalia and Afghanistan and peacekeeping troops in the Balkans and its navy that patrol the Mediterranean and Aegean seas, where it has claimed energy and territorial interests.
The Post, which mapped Turkey’s expanding military footprint, said Ankara has also invested in Sudan to enable it to build a naval base on Suakin Island, once ruled by the Ottoman Empire, which would give it direct access to the Red Sea.
In South Asia, Turkey’s growing proximity to Pakistan, whose voice Erdogan echoes in Kashmir, has soured relations between Ankara and New Delhi. Like when President Erdogan launched a broadside in New Delhi in August last year at the United Nations General Assembly, Prime Minister Narendra Modi canceled his visit to Ankara in October and did not hesitate to condemn Turkey’s military operation in the north. from Syria.
On the sidelines of the UNGA, Prime Minister Modi also scheduled meetings with Cyprus, Armenia and Greece, all rivals of Turkey in the region.
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