New Caliphate?” by Ardavan Amir-Aslani

Focus today on Turkey, with a book: Turkey, new caliphate? published to the editions of the Archipelago, for a questioning on the future of this country, a work written by the geopolitician Ardavan Amir-Aslani, lawyer at the bar of Paris.

franceinfo: Ardavan Amir-Aslani, why Turkey, a new caliphate?

Ardavan Amir-Aslani: Because the caliphate is political Islam. This is one of the options that Erdogan continues to claim in his desire to revive again, to resuscitate the Ottoman Empire.

Erdogan, his civilizational project, for you, is the caliphate, the neo-Ottoman, pantouranism, what is it?

Pantouranism is a Persian expression, invented by the great Persian poet Ferdowsi, to describe the historical enemies of Persia, namely the Turkic states. And indeed, today, Erdogan seeks, through the revival of the return to Turkey of pantouranism, to be able to rediscover the imperial dimension of the past, which goes beyond the territorial dimension of what was once the Ottoman Empire, which encompasses the whole Central Asia. It’s a return to basics.

Because Central Asia is Turkic. And you, in your book, you say, he wants to reconnect with Asian roots?

With its own roots. In fact, if Atatürk personified the desire to refocus what was once the Ottoman Empire around “turquitude”, he Erdogan, who reigned, and the word reign is not even incongruous, longer than Atatürk, tries to reconnect with the past. The greatness of the Ottoman Empire, the greatness of Turkey’s role as the dominant source of Sunni thought, since let us recall that for 1000 years Mecca and Medina were in Ottoman Turkish territory. And today, with pantouranism, this move towards the East, across the Caucasus, towards Central Asia.

ATto the detriment of Kurds and Armenians?

To everyone’s detriment. You know neo-Ottomanism, what is it for Erdogan? Neo-Ottomanism, these are illicit drilling in the eastern Mediterranean, daily clashes with the Greek air force, it is the calling into question of the Treaty of Lausanne, and the fact of ejecting the basic Treaty of Sèvres from the history, and the bombardment of the Kurds in northern Syria, northern Iraq. This is neo-Ottomanism. Pantouranism goes beyond that, and goes further east, towards Central Asia and the Caucasus. But there is also the caliphate, why the new caliphate in Turkey?

Exactly, can you explain to us what the caliphate is, because no one knows what it is?

So you have to know that the Ottoman sultan was a secular leader and a religious leader, he was sultan of the Ottoman Empire, including the Bulgarians, the Armenians, the Kurds of Turkey. But he was also the caliph of the Muslim world, because there was precisely Mecca and Medina which were on Ottoman territory.

So today he wants to be the Ottoman Sultan again as Abdul Hamid was, and also the leader of the global Sunni community. We see him in conflict with the Saudis, about the Khashoggi affair, you have noticed: every day, he distills information to keep the crisis in the minds of the Saudis. What he did in Libya today demonstrated that there were two conflicting theses: the thesis of the Muslim Brotherhood that he embodies, in relation to the thesis of Islam, coming from the Arab countries of the Persian Gulf.

Only, today, Recep Tayyip Erdogan must face a historic economic crisis…

Major economic crisis which is the consequence of the instability it embodies, with 80% inflation.

Today, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, President of Turkey, 2023, 100 years of the Turkish Republic. How can he incarnate, like the new Atatürk, to continue to hold on to power?

So he wants to erase Atatürk from history, he wants to erase Atatürk’s presence in the creation of the modern Turkish state, and make Turkey identify more with him, than with Mustafa Kemal.

It is going to be difficult…

It’s going to be difficult, but he’s trying, look, he took the coup d’etat he suffered as a pretext, to castrate the army, to decapitate the army, to boost the senior civil service, the judiciary and to shape it in his own way.

Today, modern Turkey has nothing to do with the Turkey designed and created by Atatürk. Secularism is no longer at the center of the debates. His wife wears the headscarf, We are not thinking of Atatürk, we are thinking of a certain “turquitude”, but this time based on the glory of what was once the Ottoman Empire, on the religious fact, and on a return to the roots, hence the expression pantouranism.