A question that is constantly being posed amongst researchers and historians is: Why did the Ottomans fail the country of Andalusia, which formed another Umayyad caliphate in present-day Spain— a question that is very far from the common Arabs and Muslims who were deliberately absent from the facts, for a reason that lies in the agenda of the new Ottomans, and it is appropriate to uncover it and shine the light of history on it.

It may not be known to many that the Ottoman fleet, with its large size – at that time – was stationed between Libya and Algeria to consolidate the Ottoman control over the Maghreb regions. Thus, it would have been easy for Sultan Bayezid II to help the Andalusians, as he heard the crying of the children, the wailing of the women, and the hopeful pleas of the delegations that flocked to him hurriedly, their fates in his hands, asking for his mercy and support. Unfortunately, they returned heartbroken in disappointment which was caused by those they thought were their brothers in religion.

Let us go back in memory more than five centuries, to the year 1480 AD specifically. There were three important Arab and Islamic capitals that dominated the scene in the region from Mecca to northern Anatolia, then Egypt, and ending with Andalusia.

First: Cairo became the seat of the Abbasid Caliphate in its second journey after the fall of Baghdad and its transfer to Egypt under the protection of the Mamluks, and during that trip, it witnessed an expansion of its history until it reached northern Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, and the Two Holy Mosques.

Second: Granada in Andalusia formed another Umayyad caliphate with the rest of the Andalusian Emirates instead of the one that fell in Damascus. And finally, there was Istanbul, the capital of the Ottoman Sultanate, which always looked at the world through its European eyes in Bulgaria, Albania and Bosnia, asserting that they were its natural extension. It never gave the Arabs importance or great value, for they were, in the collective mind of the Ottoman Turk, less prestigious, until they were defeated at the hands of the French. Thus, the Sultanate was under threat of poverty and its resources faltered, so it turned its sights to the south, where the Arab countries were full of bounty, to enter into a fierce war with the Mamluks to control their state and seize their wealth.

The historical falsification game that the Turks and the new Ottomans in particular have been playing is a rickety game that should be abolished by those of knowledge. As Turkish dramas are brainwashing the minds of the public, it is their right to know the true facts as they actually happened, not as they were imagined by Erdogan’s studios on the beaches of Anatolia.

In addition, the image of the Ottoman Empire, and its political employment in the Arab world in particular, is a broad task that the current Turkish rule and the remnants of political Islam are involved in— which is the project of restoring Ottoman hegemony again.

The restoration of that image takes two sides, the first being: It comes from the Neo-Ottoman understanding of the scandals committed by the Sultanate against Muslims, along with the political failures that the sultans committed against their Arab neighbors in particular, and on top of those failures are the issues of Andalusia and Palestine; therefore, they are trying to bridge these distortions and rebuild a new, spurious image that is filled with romance and reliance – always – on the concept of the caliphate, with which many Muslims enjoy an emotional and sentimental relationship.

The second: It seeks to build an unrealistic image and provide imaginary political and military justifications for the positions of the sultans regarding the fateful Islamic issues in their quest to restore the Ottoman domination of the old kingdoms under the name of the new caliphate in Iraq, the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, and North Africa, which they occupied for four centuries.

One of the major issues and problems pending in the history of the Turks, which they cannot circumvent or evade, is their relationship with Andalusia and their failure to help its people, and therefore they want to keep that relationship in a dark region that they do not allow anyone to address nor shed the light of history on it.

It is Andalusia, the Arab Islamic spot that the Sultans of Sons of Othman abandoned and left to the Spaniards and extremists of Christianity on purpose, although the Andalusians rushed to seek help from Istanbul, expecting that the Islamic brotherhood and caring for Islam would push them to their rescue, but the Sultans of Sons of Othman left them for their sinister fate.

What the new Ottomans are doing is nothing but political employment directed at common Muslims and no more than such, in an attempt to serve their project to reoccupy the subconscious mind of Muslims and Arabs before reaching the military and political occupation. Therefore, it is important for them to clean up their reputation and that of their predecessors from the sultans and leaders of the armies and wash away the shame that befell them. But these attempts always collide with the historical reality that cannot be changed.

The worst of the Ottoman Sultanate’s relationship with the resounding fall of Andalusia is that they received the Jews with their hundreds of thousands in their regions and provided them with protection and care, as Erdogan himself says, but they did not receive the Andalusians, who escaped the torments of the fall of their country, only because they are Arabs.

Those who do not know the true history of the Ottomans in failing the Muslims of Andalusia and leaving them to their fate, will be shocked by the details of that scandal, with Spain imposing the worst forms of torture and persecution against the Muslims of Granada and other towns in addition to forcing them to change their religion and names. The people of Andalusia, when the land narrowed, had no choice but to seek the help of the Ottoman state – as they were deluded – so they began sending delegations and ambassadors to the palace of Sultan Bayezid II, presenting in his hands all kinds of reverence and exaggeration that were obligatory for everyone who met him, and they recited heart-rending poems that contained in their details the feelings of souls who had been shattered and displaced and met an untenable fate.

Nevertheless, Bayezid II left them and did not send a single soldier with them. He did not announce the general mobilization. He did not send supplies or aid, but rather his son Salim I devoted himself to the war of the Mamluk state until it was overthrown, so that two caliphates fell at the same time—the Umayyad caliphate in Andalusia and Abbasid in Egypt. The Ottomans took care of their best interests and their eagerness to steal the caliphate, supposedly in order to “preserve the Islamic unity”, so they let the Andalusians down and seized the Arab caliphate.