I thought I'd try something different this week with all the endless prattle about the French. And since some of the French are as worried about Turkey as Iran, why not talk about the Turks? What is it they've got that we haven't? I attended a lecture some time ago by Turkish academic Eskisehir Osmangazi, entitled "Islam and Politics in Turkey". (Delivered at the American University in Cairo, May14, 2010). Something interesting that popped up in it was how well Turkey was doing economically at the very same time that the West, and the EU specifically, was in deep trouble. What seemed to be sustaining the good times in Turkey was the constant inflow of Central Asian entrepreneurs! Oh dear. The Turks, in other words, are succeeding where we have failed at building a pan-regional market. We've been trying to unite the Arab world economically since the earliest days of the Arab League, whereas the Turks have only had the opportunity since the 1990s with the fall of Communism, but they have a lot more to show for it. Turks have many things in common with Arabs, in the bad sense of the word – tribalism extremism, machismo, etc., and yet they always seem to come out on top. How come? Well, partly because this portrayal of Turks as conquering desert nomads – the ‘Turanians' – isn't entirely true because Central Asia has a long history of kingdoms, city-states and empires, alongside the more mobile variety of Turk. Samarkand is a city that existed before Alexander theGreat, and it was as glorious back then as it has been since. It was in Samarkand, actually, that the Arabs learned how to make paper, not directly from the Chinese. We're also the last people who have the right to tar them with that brush, given our own sordid origins. This stereotype is actually Persian in origin and seems to have been grafted onto the Arab psyche in the Abbasid era – ‘Baghdad' is a Persian word, actually. What is more, whatever the Turks were like in their distant past, they settled down very thoroughly in the Ottoman period and gave up the negativeaspects of their heritage, including tribalism. (Note what PM Erdogan had to say during his tiff with Perez, that he wasn't the leader of some ‘tribe'). Apart from Egypt, this never happened in the history of the Islamic conquests that the Arabs led. The Arabs were much more merciful as conquerors, it's true, but they always built their administrative capitals out in the desert and formed their armies on the basis of tribal allegiances. This is partly what led to the fall of Al- Andalus in Spain, with petty squabbles over the spoils of war between Arabs and Berbers, and within the ranks of both groups on a tribal and regional basis. The Turks didn't fall into this pattern, possibly out of jealousy of the already settled Turks back in Central Asia. Nationalism seems to be the key ingredient here, in addition to institution building, but you feel that even their managerial expertise is driven by the national dream of building an ‘enduring' homeland for the Turks on their trek away from the desert. Central Asians have always migrated westwards throughout human history, but they migrate specifically to settle down and build a nation of farmers and city-dwellers, not to keep on the way they were before, enjoying the luxuries of city life but not becoming civilised themselves. That's the Arab pattern and Al-Andalus is an instructive example again, since the Arab army commanders refused to settle in the countryside and become feudal lords, while the Berbers hid up in the mountains. As for Baghdad, remember that this was the administrative centre of the empire of the Abbasid ‘dynasty', not a pan-Islamic or pan-Arabic empire with a nation-state at the centre of it. If you dissect the motivation behind the conquests, from the Umayyid dynasty onwards, you also find that it is financial in the narrowest sense possible – the spoils of battle, jizya (taxes) and slaves. They weren't thinking in geostrategic or colonial terms, with the conquered often converting to Islam against the wishes of administrators. The elite guard, moreover, were slaves and mercenaries, Mamlukes in the East and Slave in the West. The Ottomans had their slave warriors too but they were the most eager to free themselves, settle down and own land. Interestingly enough, something else Osmangazi revealed was that the original loud advocates of secular nationalism, Turanianism, in the dying days of theOttoman Empire, were not people like Ataturk at all but intellectuals from CentralAsia. The simple answer to the question above then is... Central Asia! The writer holds a PhD in International Studies.
