Long struggle for supremacy in the Muslim world
Long struggle for supremacy in the Muslim world
Two centuries ago, in the autumn of 1818, the Saudi monarch was taken to Istanbul in chains. It was displayed in a cage to the cheering crowd outside the Hagia Sophia mosque, and then, in the midst of celebratory fireworks, they cut off his head.
This appalling episode in the shared history of Turkey and Saudi Arabia has not been mentioned in public, as the two countries clashed over the assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi on October 2 at the kingdom's consulate in Istanbul. But the long legacy of rivalry between the two Sunni Muslim powers, both key US allies, has prompted the determination of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to punish the House of Saud for the death of Mr. Khashoggi.
Following the assassination of Mr. Khashoggi, Mr. Erdogan proclaimed that Turkey "is the only country that can lead the Muslim world". This, of course, is also the role that the House of Saud considers its natural right due to the control of the kingdom over the most sacred places of Islam in Mecca and Medina, and the hajj pilgrimage that attracts more than two million of Muslims every year.
In this contest, Iran, whose Shiite version of Islam represents a small minority of the predominantly Sunni Muslim world, can not really compete. For now, Tehran is happy to see from the sidelines while its two main regional rivals weaken each other and leave the Western powers with few options to react.
Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, 33, of Saudi Arabia, has tried to affirm Riyadh's ambition to lead the Middle East since his father ascended the throne in 2015. In a major shift from Saudi Arabia's previous policy of the checkbook behind the scenes. In diplomacy, Prince Mohammed has created a coalition of Sunni states such as the United Arab Emirates and Egypt to launch a war against the Iranian allies in Yemen. He imposed an embargo that unsuccessfully sought a change of regime in Qatar. He also tried to meddle in Lebanese politics by forcing the nation's prime minister to announce during his stay in the kingdom he would resign, a decision that the prime minister rescinded once he was at home.
Saudi Arabia and its allies have also relentlessly persecuted the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist political movement hostile to the influence of the United States in the region (its affiliates include Hamas). Although professing a commitment to democracy under Islamic law, the Brotherhood has become autocratic when it is in power in Egypt and Sudan. Mr. Erdogan has supported the group throughout the Arab world since the 2011 revolutions of the Arab Spring, and Mr. Khashoggi sympathized with some of his goals.
In a more friendly moment, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan (right) met with Prince Mohammed bin Salman at the G-20 summit in Hangzhou, China in 2016.
Photo:
Kayhan Ozer / Agencia Anadolu / Getty Images
Mr. Erdogan has made several efforts to resist the rise of Saudi Arabia. He sent Turkish troops to protect Qatar, expelled Saudi allies from Somalia and announced an agreement to lease an island across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia in Sudan, possibly to a military base. He has also become a vociferous champion of traditional Muslim causes, such as Palestine, and of new ones, such as the suffering of the Rohingya in Myanmar. Istanbul has become a favorite center for Islamist dissidents across the Arab world.
"The foreign policy strategy of the Turkish president is aimed at making Muslims proud again," said Soner Cagaptay, an academic at Washington's Near East Policy Institute and author of a recent biography of Mr. Erdogan, "The new sultan". Vision, a renewed and modernized version of the Ottoman past, the Turks must take the Muslims to greatness. "
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Turkey is the main reason why the two previous Saudi states ceased to exist.
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There is a long history behind that statement. For four centuries, the sultan in Istanbul was also the religious leader, or caliph, of the entire Muslim world. His spiritual authority was recognized far beyond the borders of the Ottoman Empire, which at its highest point included parts of central and eastern Europe, northern Africa and the Arabian peninsula.
The caliphate was abolished only in 1924, six years after the Ottomans lost control over Mecca and Medina before an Arab revolt sponsored by the British during the First World War. The modern and secular Turkish Republic, which emerged from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire after its defeat. by the allied powers, he banished the last sultan, Mehmed VI, to Europe in 1922. With the disappearance of the Ottomans, the House of Saud quickly expanded from its desert strongholds to much of the Arabian peninsula, first capturing Mecca and then establishing a new powerful state. in 1932.
Mr. Khashoggi, by chance, came from a Turkish family that settled in Arabia in the Ottoman era, which is why Turkish newspapers usually write their surname in the Turkish way as Kasikci, which means a manufacturer of spoons, to indicate his kinship with the country. .
The last Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Mehmed VI, seen in Turkey in 1922, shortly before being banished and fled to Malta.
Photo:
false images
Until Mr. Erdogan adopted Neotoman policy, and a more authoritarian government a decade ago, the modern Turkish state was not very interested in leading the Muslim world and was content to leave religious proselytism in Saudi Arabia. Turkey joined NATO, sought to become a member of the European Union and fostered close military ties with Israel.
Mr. Erdogan's new Turkey, on the other hand, presents a great challenge to Saudi Arabia by offering an alternative Islamic model, said Madawi al Rasheed, a Saudi professor at the London School of Economics and author of a Saudi history. "It is an existential threat to Saudi Arabia due to the combination of Turkey's Islam and a kind of democracy," he said. "After all, Erdogan still governs a republic that has a parliament, opposition parties and a civil society, while Saudi Arabia has none of that."
In fact, the kingdom of Saudi Arabia today is as absolute an monarchy as they come. It is also the third state administered by the House of Saud since the family alliance with the Puritan preacher Mohammed ibn Abdel Wahhab gathered the Bedouins of the Arabian peninsula under the banner of a new intransigent creed (known as Wahhabism) in 1745.
Turkey is the main reason why the two previous Saudi states ceased to exist.
The first disappeared when an Ottoman expeditionary force composed mainly of Turkish and Albanian soldiers seized the Saudi capital of Diriya, outside Riyadh, on September 11, 1818. The city was razed. According to a Russian diplomatic dispatch, the Turkish sultan then had the captured Saudi ruler, Abdullah bin Saud, escorted to Istanbul, along with the chief cleric of Wahhabi. After the deposed Saudi monarch was beheaded outside of Hagia Sophia, his body was placed in public for three days with his head cut off under his arm. (As for the Imam of Wahhabi, they sent him to the Istanbul bazaar to behead him, the diplomat said.)
In the eyes of the Ottomans, the Saudis were bloodthirsty assassins who had plundered the holy city of Karbala in Ottoman Iraq, and had killed 4,000 civilians (mostly Shiites), and then destroyed many shrines in Mecca and Medina . To celebrate the demise of the Saudi state and the liberation of the two sacred mosques, the Ottoman Sultan even freed the debtors from prison throughout his kingdom.
In the following decades, a different branch of the House of Saud rebuilt Diriya and reconquered much of the Arabian peninsula, prompting another Ottoman military invasion in 1871. Advancing rapidly along the Persian Gulf coast, the Ottomans deprived this second Saudi state of much of its territory, seizing the eastern lands that were later discovered to contain most of the kingdom's oil. In the next few years, a rival Arab tribe loyal to Turkey ended what remained of the second Saudi kingdom.
All this is not a very old story. The father of the current King of Saudi Arabia, Salman, and the founder of the current state of Saudi Arabia, King Abdulaziz, went from being a vassal of the Ottomans to fighting against the Turks during the First World War, when he helped to expel them from Arabia for forever. Some of Prince Mohammed's uncles participated in these battles against the Turks and their local allies.
The Saudis have worked hard ever since to remove the remaining traces of the Ottoman past of their country. In 2002, they demolished the historic Ajyad fortress in Mecca, one of the many ancient Ottoman buildings under the Saudi excavators. "The Saudi royal family will never forget how the Ottoman, Turkish soldiers came twice and destroyed their state. People tend to forget it in good times, but it comes back again and again, "said Abdulkhaleq Abdulla, a prominent political scientist and former professor in the United Arab Emirates.
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With the Khashoggi affair igniting global outrage, Erdogan has seized his opportunity.
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The U.A.E. The month of December had its own confrontation with Mr. Erdogan over the Turkish registry in Saudi Arabia, after the Foreign Minister of the Emirates retweeted a post accusing Fakhreddin Pasha, the last Ottoman governor of Medina, of looting. The governor sent the old library of the holy city to Istanbul before Medina was assaulted by the Arab revolt, then refused to surrender and ordered the hungry Turkish soldiers to subsist on grasshoppers even after the Ottoman sultan granted the defeat in 1918 Mr. Erdogan complained about the "impudence" of the Emirati ministers and Ankara changed the name to the street in which the UAE The embassy is located after the governor, whom Turkey considers a war hero.
Until the death of Mr. Khashoggi, the alliance led by Saudi Arabia with the U.A.E. and Egypt seemed to be on the winning side throughout the region, with Turkey able to depend only on Qatar and possibly on Sudan. In part, that was due to President Donald Trump's initial bid for Prince Mohammed, a cornerstone of his strategy to contain Iran. It was also the result of Mr. Erdogan's own movements, such as his proposals to Iran and Russia and his decision to imprison a US pastor, Andrew Brunson, while seeking the extradition of a Pennsylvania-based cleric whom Turkey accuses of organizing the 2016 coup attempt, all of which alienated Washington.
Now, with the Khashoggi affair igniting global outrage, Mr. Erdogan has seized his opportunity. The recent liberation of Turkey from Mr. Brunson has allowed a thaw in relations with Washington. Meanwhile, a series of leaks by Turkish officials has forced Saudi Arabia, which initially insisted that Khashoggi had left the consulate alive, to make a shame, admitting that the journalist was killed by a specially dispatched team. In their own diplomatic premises. The Saudis dismissed two senior officials close to the prince over the incident and continued to back down, saying on Thursday that the killing was premeditated and not, as they initially claimed, the accidental result of a "fight".
King Abdulaziz, also known as Ibn Saud, seen here in the 1950s, fought against the Ottoman Empire during the Arab Revolt in World War I, and united Saudi Arabia as a state in 1932.
Photo:
Alamy
Mr. Erdogan wants the Saudi suspects to be tried in Turkey and has pointed his finger at the highest levels of the Saudi state. Although Erdogan himself has not accused Prince Mohammed of murdering Mr. Khashoggi, the Turkish leader's closest advisers have done just that. Prince Mohammed "is one of the culprits of the murder," and Saudi Arabia faces "possibly the most difficult process since its founding," wrote Saadet Oruc, one of Mr. Erdogan's senior advisers, in a Turkish newspaper this week. . Prince Mohammed "has the blood of Khashoggi in his hands" and the murder "will continue like a curse" on the prince, another councilor, Ilnur Cevik, agreed.
The objective of Mr. Erdogan seems to be that Prince Mohammed can not be represented on the world stage. More ambitiously, he can expect to pressure the father of the prince, the ancient King Salman of Saudi Arabia, to anoint another successor. "Ultimately, Turkey wants to erode the influence of MbS internationally, regionally and, as far as possible, nationally," said Sinan Ulgen, head of the Edam think tank in Istanbul, referring to the crown prince by his initials. . "And already, his image as a reformist leader has been tarnished."
Prince Mohammed, who made a phone call to Mr. Erdogan on Wednesday, insisted on his first public appearance since Mr. Khashoggi's death that relations between Turkey and Saudi Arabia remain excellent. Prince Mohammed added that as long as he, King Salman and Mr. Erdogan remain in power, no one can open a breach between the two sister Muslim nations.
However, in Ankara, memories are not yet known of how Prince Mohammed, a few months ago, on a visit to Egypt, described Mr. Erdogan bluntly as part of a "triangle of evil" alongside Iran and extremists of the Islamic State.
Although Saudi Arabia is much more repressive than Turkey, which has some independent parties from the press and the opposition, both countries are among the worst abusers of human rights in the world, such as, of course, Iran. Turkey, under Mr. Erdogan, has imprisoned more journalists than any other state, press freedom groups say. He has also persecuted opponents abroad with his own delivery schedule, although he does not have a death penalty.
However, thanks to the Khashoggi affair, Mr. Erdogan's Turkey can finally credibly affirm the high moral standards, a great asset to Ankara's regional ambitions.
"One of the amazing ironies of the whole episode is how the leading jailer of journalists in the world is now an example of press freedom and protections," said Steven Cook, a senior member of the Middle East at the Washington Council on Foreign Relations. . "Not only that, but Turkey, which has been a totally irresponsible actor in Iran, Syria, peace in the Middle East, even stability in the Horn of Africa, now seems to be a source of regional stability compared to the reckless Saudis "
Write to Yaroslav Trofimov in yaroslav.trofimov@wsj.com
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