He calls himself the grandson of the Ottomans
The world looks with concern at Erdogan's efforts to revive the glories of the Ottoman Empire
Erdogan during the celebration of the Victory Day in the Battle of Diplomabanar over Greece in 1922 which falls on August 30th.
EPA
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At the end of August, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan celebrated the Islamic New Year with more joy, after he transformed the huge Hagia Sophia into a mosque, and also converted another Byzantine church into a mosque, the fourth century Chora Church, which is considered one of the The oldest Byzantine buildings in Istanbul.
The next day, it was announced that a large underground reserve of natural gas had been discovered in the Black Sea.
This followed the latest recent discovery of natural gas fields in the eastern Mediterranean.
Both regions are contested by other neighboring countries.
Later that week, he welcomed a delegation from the "Hamas" movement to Ankara. All these moves reflect Erdogan's vision of embracing the cadres of Islamists in the world.
All this goes hand in hand with securing natural resources and imposing Turkey's influence abroad.
It also goes hand in hand also with internal repression, as the new Hijri year witnessed the tightening of Erdogan's grip on the freedom of social media, and to consider removing Turkey from what is known as the Istanbul Agreement of 2011, which is a treaty of the Council of Europe that obliges states to protect women from domestic violence, for all that Democratic peoples in Turkey, the Middle East and around the world should worry.
Nostalgia
Many have written about Erdogan's attempts to "revive" the Ottoman Empire or install himself as a ruler, and in order to understand Erdogan's political agenda and his prospects, we must know exactly which of the Ottoman sultans Erdogan strives to live in his robes, he is the ninth ruler of the Turkish Empire, Selim I.
Selim died 500 years ago in 1520. During the life of this sultan, the Ottoman Empire developed from a powerful regional power into a giant global empire.
This sultan, who lived during that period, remained a role model for Erdogan, and his reign represents for him a model for contemporary Turkey, which is politically and economically strong in the world, and which can crush its foreign and domestic opponents alike.
For Erdogan, it also represents what the late US President Andrew Jackson represented for US President Donald Trump, as Jackson ordered the deportation of the American Indians from their places of residence to reserves.
Such a situation also helps Erdogan in considering Islam as a cultural and political repository of his power, and a vital component of the glories of the Ottoman past, which he seeks to bring to the land of contemporary Turkey and use it against the dominant, elitist secularism that has prevailed since the establishment of modern Turkey.
We must be concerned about Erdogan's adoption of Sultan Selim's exclusionary vision, as Erdogan draws inspiration from that Sultan the policy of this strong man who fought regional wars, tried to exterminate religious minorities, and monopolized global economic resources.
For Erdogan, his attempts to monopolize the natural gas reserves around Turkey are moving ahead with foreign military projects in Libya, Syria and Yemen.
At home, he continues to haunt the Shiite community, ethnic Kurds, intellectuals, Christians, journalists, women and leftists.
Erdogan places Islam at the center of Turkey's domestic agenda, and the most recent example of this is his conversion of churches into mosques.
Embrace the Islamic and Ottoman heritage
Erdogan loves Selim I because he has made Turkey a global political power.
From 1517 until the end of the First World War, the Ottoman Empire maintained its geographical form that Selim had drawn for it, and dominated the Middle East and the eastern Mediterranean.
In 1517, the Ottomans defeated their main rival in the region, the Cairo-based Mamluk Empire, and seized all of its territories in the Middle East and North Africa.
This more than doubled the size of the empire.
The expansion of the Ottoman Empire towards the Middle East transformed it into the foremost military and political power in the region, and one of the largest countries in the world.
And the Ottomans controlled the entire eastern half of the Mediterranean, and thus they controlled the most important trade routes in the world by land between Europe and Asia, and by sea through the Arabian Gulf and the Red Sea.
The Turkish Republic inherited much of that power after the demise of the empire and the rise of the republic in 1923.
While every modern Turkish ruler distanced himself from the legacy of the Ottoman Empire and Islam, in an attempt to present the republic with a more “European”, “secular” and “modern” face, Erdogan was the first to firmly embrace the Ottoman past and the Islamic heritage of the empire.
Here, too, Selim I stands as an example of Erdogan's rule, as Selim's defeat of the Mamluks transformed the Ottoman Empire into a Muslim-majority state for the first time in its history, after more than 200 years of being a country whose population was mostly Greek Orthodox.
With this victory, Selim became the first Ottoman sultan to rule Mecca and Medina, the holiest city of Islam, and thus he obtained the title of caliph and established the universal Islamic credentials for the empire.
If Selim is the first Ottoman to become both a sultan and a caliph, then Erdogan is the first republican leader to declare that he possessed both titles.
Just as US President Donald Trump loved a symbol of his country, President Andrew Jackson - he hung his picture in a prominent place in the Oval Office and defended his statues - Erdogan has publicly promoted Slim's policy in Turkey.
His most remarkable work was the designation of the third bridge that was recently constructed over the famous Bosphorus Strait, as Selim.
Erdoan has also spent enormous resources on the Selim Mausoleum and other monuments of his rule.
After winning the 2017 constitutional referendum, which had vastly expanded his powers - a process marred by some irregularities - Erdogan appeared in public for the first time at the Selim Mausoleum, and Erdogan recovered the caftan and Sultan Selim's turban stolen years earlier.
Erdogan and his colleagues in the AKP regularly describe themselves as "descendants" of the Ottomans.
In this context, Erdogan intentionally bypasses an entire generation - the generation of the founding republican fathers of Turkey since 1923 - to go back to the time in which the Ottomans ruled the world, and to the reign of Selim I, a time when Turkey achieved wealth and regional power as a result of wars. A political program similar to a sound program that poses a danger to Turkey, the Middle East, and indeed the world, and for Turkey to become an Ottoman state once again, this means the use of violence and censorship of the media that Erdogan seemed ready to adopt.
The lesson that results from the calls to promote the past greatness of the state and the controversial historical figures, whether in Turkey or in the United States, can distort the history of countries and stir hatred and division among the same people.
Alan Michael is Professor of History at Yale University.
Erdogan and his colleagues in the AKP regularly describe themselves as "descendants" of the Ottomans. In this context, Erdogan is intentionally bypassing an entire generation - the generation of the founding republican fathers of Turkey since 1923 - to go back to the time when the Ottomans ruled the world.
While every modern Turkish ruler distanced himself from the legacy of the Ottoman Empire, Erdogan is the first to firmly embrace the Ottoman past.
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