The Turks ... an identity crisis

that spread from Central Asia to Eastern Europe!

The Turkinism crisis is a very deep crisis that strikes within the Turks and divides their interests, which has turned them into a lost nation. They are not a yellow Asian nation, nor an Arab Muslim nation. They are also not a secular nation with its Western European heritage. 

Turks – as a race – do not belong to this “Asian Arab Maghreb”. The last Asians who had contact with the Arabs were the Persians. The Turks, as a nation that was born and raised in Central Asia, then moved to northern Arabia – Anatolia in particular – after they left their original homeland, their affiliation with those Asian nations will remain organic and inseparable from them.

Although the Turks entered Islam after their arrival in the Arab Levant Mashreq, they remained a “Turkish” nation isolated from its Arab space, refusing to integrate for a long time, until Sultan Salim turned his attention from Europe in 1516, following his successive defeats, to move his compass towards the Arabs. Nevertheless, the Turks considered themselves a higher class than the Arabs. They called them “Arabs of betrayals”, in an inferior view that elevates the status of the Turkish element and demeans the status of the Arab race.

This was also reflected in the Arabic language, which dominated the Muslims as a religious necessity, as it is the language of the Qur’an. The Turks, who lived through that crisis for many centuries, got out of it at the first opportunity they had, by abolishing the Arabic alphabet in the year 1928 A.D. in which they were writing their native Turanian language. The Turks were not a nation that invented its own alphabet, but a nation that lived dependent on others, so they had to write in the Arabic alphabet, and even when they wanted to be different from the Arabs, they replaced the Arabic alphabet with a Latin alphabet.

The change of the Arabic alphabet to a Latin alphabet created a great divergence from the Ottoman legacy and archive recorded in Arabic script. What the Turks have done today by allowing the teaching of the Arabic language in some institutes is a return of necessity, and not a retreat from the rupture that the Turanians made at the beginning of the last century with their Arab surroundings. The matter is considered a desire to restore the power of the Ottoman Empire, which was destined to archive its history, correspondences and decisions in Arabic.

The Turkinism crisis was not a crisis of alphabets only, but extended to the Islamic religion, which was introduced to them by the Bedouin Arabs, as classified by the Turks who saw them as inferior to them. They introduced many of their Mongolian customs and myths that they brought from their countries in Central Asia, Persia and India into Islam, to have their Islamic religion, but with their shape and color distinct from others.

Political and geographical affiliation has become part of the Turkinism crisis. For decades, they were introducing themselves as Europeans. Their desperate attempt to belong to the European Union was a testament to that, until the Europeans rejected them and were defeated in the battle to join the European Union, to turn once again towards the Arab world, and wake up their dreams of expansion in Libya, Syria and Iraq.

All of the above had imposed on the Turks characteristics that they could not flee from, on top of which is the supremacy of Turkish nationalism, and the incitement of Turkish minorities in other countries to belong to their Turkish nationalism and to separate them from their surroundings in which they were integrated for several centuries. This was a moral crisis that appeared strongly in the regions inhabited by the Turks outside Turkey, which pushed them away from the identity of their central countries, to which they belong, at least with the official identity. This turned some of them into traitors who fought their homelands for the benefit of the new Ottomans, and most of them turned into advanced bridges for the new Ottomans in their expansion project, for example northern Iraq, northern Syria, Libya and Yemen.

This arrogant nationalism imposed on the Turks expensive bills in the form of war crimes that have followed them to this day, especially with the Armenians, Arabs and Kurds, and led them to kill millions of their opponents. Neither the Armenians nor the Arabs, especially, will forget the massacres committed by the racist Turks against them because of the identity.

The question remains: Has the commitment to Turkish nationalism produced other crises that have crippled the Turks and made them restrained?

The commitment in front of the Turkish nation, as they call it, forced them to expand east as far as China and west as far as central Bulgaria. Is Turkey today able to feed this monster that grows with its racism and nationalism, or will it turn against it and eliminate its unrealistic dreams? Neither time nor political conditions allow these expansionist dreams to restore an ethnic empire that extended over the area in which the Turkish race existed from Central Asia to Western Europe.