Holla, the Janissaries Are at Our Gates!

Neo-Ottoman Ankara is making its move in the Bilad ash-Sham! And neither the Israeli bombardment of Abu al-Duhur air base on August 18th, nor the strikes on the outskirts of Damascus ten days later, let alone Tel Aviv's barely veiled threats, are doing anything to halt Turkey's southward advance along the "Syrian Sea" (1).

Tom Barrack, the U.S. ambassador to Turkey and special envoy to Damascus, will have his work cut out for him now that a strategic rivalry is taking shape between Turkey and Israel, with Syria—and soon Lebanon—as the primary arena of competition, and potentially confrontation.

Washington, having taken note of Iran's retreat, must now think about establishing a "deconfliction" mechanism between its two allies—the Jewish state and Erdogan's republic—given that both are seeking to fill the vast void left behind by the floundering Iranian mullahs!

A nostalgia for Europe and a rebuffed Turkey

Things might never have come to this had the European Union Council not concluded in June 2019 that accession negotiations with Ankara were "at a standstill." Turkey, driven by a deep-seated nostalgia, had always dreamed of a European destiny. Twice, the sultan's armies laid siege to Vienna (1529 and 1683), and it is worth recalling that before making Constantinople its capital, the sultanate had established its seat in Adrianople (Edirne), in Eastern Thrace.

It should also be noted that after the end of the First World War, reduced to the scale of a nation-state, the Turkish republic—an undeniable regional power—had modernized without abandoning Islam. Was this the reason the European Union turned it away? Turkish authorities came to believe that Europe intended to remain an "exclusively Christian club." So, to put it simply, they had no choice but to expand eastward into the Turkic-speaking world and southward into the Arab-speaking world. And here we are.

The sword and the censer

Yet the Grand Turk, as he was known in the days when he made the Habsburgs tremble, is no newcomer to the Middle Eastern stage. For four centuries, the Bilad ash-Sham was part of his empire, and its predominantly Sunni identity naturally inclined its people to accept the authority of the monarch-caliph, the shadow of Allah on earth (2).

It should be recalled that the Ottomans crushed Mamluk power and conquered Syria in 1516. By the end of September of that year, Damascus was taken, and the Friday sermon was at last delivered in the great Mosque in the name of Sultan Selim. On October 2nd, Islamic legitimacy was thus conferred upon the glory-crowned ruler, and the following day, he made a triumphant entry into the Umayyad capital as a victorious conqueror.

Two elements had cemented his authority and won the allegiance of the "rayahs" throughout the Bilad ash-Sham, as elsewhere: military victory and a shared faith. In other words, it was "the alliance of the sword and the censer"—much like the Ancien Régime in France, or Spain under Franco and Portugal under Salazar.

And let no one tell us that mindsets have changed since then! When will we finally acknowledge that it was these same two levers that brought Ahmad al-Sharaa to supreme power on the banks of the Barada—namely, battlefield victory and his rigorous Islamic orthodoxy?

The Sykes-Picot Accords, once again

But let us go back about a hundred years and note that Syrians, both before and during the First World War, had little desire to break away from Anatolia; they would have been content with a degree of decentralization in which their cultural aspirations were recognized and the Arabic language was accepted in public administration.

They would have readily accepted a dual monarchy along the lines of Austria-Hungary, had it not been for the harsh and often brutal policies pursued by Jamal Pasha during the war years. In any case, it was not a local uprising (3), let alone the meager Arab forces of Emir Faysal, that brought Ottoman rule to an end in 1918 — it was rather the triumphant advance of Allied troops, primarily British.

Then, from the Mandate period onward, Arab nationalism, left to its own devices, developed its own idiosyncrasies. But it was above all the abolition of the caliphate in 1924 and the forced secularization — both hallmarks of Atatürk's regime — that would further strain four centuries of ties between the Turkophone and Arabophone worlds.

The Baath Party subsequently exploited Arab-Turkish animosity as a way of entrenching its power, with the annexation of the Sanjak of Alexandretta in 1939 doing little to help reconciliation between the two peoples.

Beware of sudden infatuations

All of this is to say that the Syrian-Turkish dispute, though it persists, can be resolved in a spirit of religious brotherhood. Erdoğan's Turkey, which proudly proclaims its Islamic identity, is welcome in a Syria where for fifty years the Baathist regime insidiously persecuted the Sunni majority and silenced its religious leaders.

Now that Iran and the Russian Federation have withdrawn without a backward glance, Turkey is supposedly welcome. There are even reports that young Syrians of fighting age would not hesitate to swell the ranks of Ankara's forces should it come to blows with Israel.

A hundred years of heightened Arab nationalism may not have erased four hundred years of Ottomanism, nor obliterated a thousand years of religious solidarity!

N.B.: Turkey would do well to be wary of Syrian enthusiasm toward it! It should remember the fate that befell Nasser. In 1958, Damascus gave him a triumphant welcome on the proclamation of the United Arab Republic. And then, in 1961, came the humiliating breakup!

1- Historically, the expression "Sea of Syria" or Mare Syriacum in Latin refers to the eastern part of the Mediterranean lying off the Syrian-Lebanese coast.

2- A title borrowed from the Byzantine basileus at the fall of Constantinople in 1453.

3- In Syria, despite the deteriorating living conditions during 1914–18, there was no significant riot, intifada, or fitna against the Turks. In fact, the officers, intellectuals, and upper-bourgeoisie who had rallied to Emir Faysal were regarded as traitors in major urban centers such as Aleppo, Homs, Hama, Damascus, and elsewhere.