“The long struggle for supremacy in the muslim world,” as Yaroslav Trofimov phrases it, must be understood as a sort of civil war within Islam. What seems to be a conflict between nation-states is in fact an intramural dispute. Within the Islamic world, the concept of ‘nation-state’ may not apply at all.
Islam unifies the Muslim world, as a social, political, and military movement. Islam functions primarily this way, and less as a meditative personal spirituality.
In these civil wars within Islam, “Turks and Saudis have been enemies for centuries.” The city of Jerusalem has been fought over, besieged, defended, and conquered many times over the centuries. The bloodiest battles for Jerusalem involved neither Christians nor Jews, but rather occurred when one Muslim army sought to take the city from another Muslim army.
Two Islamic armies, the Seljuk Turks on one side, and the Egyptian Fatimids on the other, fought each other several times for control of Jerusalem. Thousands of Muslim soldiers killed each other, and the city changed hands back and forth (e.g., in 1071 and 1098) between the two warring factions.
Recounting a “gruesome episode in the shared history of Turkey and Saudi Arabia,” Yaroslav Trofimov recounts how,
two centuries ago, in the fall of 1818, the Saudi monarch was brought to Istanbul in chains. He was displayed in a cage to the cheering crowds outside the Hagia Sophia mosque, and then, amid celebratory fireworks, his head was chopped off.
In the long history of warfare between Turkey and Saudi Arabia - or, sometimes, between Turkey and the House of Saud - the beheading of the Saudi king is merely one instance. This particular beheading, one of many, happened after
an Ottoman expeditionary corps comprised mostly of Turkish and Albanian soldiers seized the Saudi capital of Diriya, on the outskirts of Riyadh, on Sept. 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, alongside the chief Wahhabi cleric. After the deposed Saudi monarch was beheaded outside the Hagia Sophia, his body was propped up in public for three days with his severed head under his arm. (As for the Wahhabi imam, he was sent to Istanbul’s bazaar for beheading, the diplomat reported.)
Throughout much of Islamic history, the chief rivals have been the Muslims of Turkey, i.e., of the Ottoman Empire, on the one hand, struggling against the Muslims of Arabia or Saudi Arabia. The terms ‘Sunni’ and ‘Shia’ are used, and the lands of Iran and Iraq are mentioned, but the internal dynamic of Islam is often more dominated by Turkey and Arabia than by those other segments.
The Turks had mounted their 1818 attack on their fellow Muslims because,
in Ottoman eyes, the Saudis were bloodthirsty murderers who had plundered the holy city of Karbala in Ottoman Iraq, slaughtering 4,000 civilian inhabitants (most of them Shiite), and later destroyed many shrines in Mecca and Medina.
By the time the Turks beheaded the Saudi king in 1818, Muslims had been slaughtering each other for over a millennium. Since then, the pattern has not changed. “The long legacy of rivalry between the two Sunni Muslim powers,” notes Jaroslav Trofimov, “has fueled Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s determination to punish the House of Saud.” The wars of past centuries live on in the Muslim mind, and fuel today’s violence.
This, of course, is also the role that the House of Saud sees as its natural right because of the kingdom’s control over Islam’s holiest sites in Mecca and Medina, and over the hajj pilgrimage that brings more than two million Muslims there each year.
Iran and Iraq are major objects of interest on the global scene, but inside Islam, they aren’t the main contenders.
In this contest, Iran — whose Shiite version of Islam represents a small minority of the predominantly Sunni Muslim world — can’t really compete. For now, Tehran is happy to watch from the sidelines as its two main regional rivals undermine each other.
From an outsider’s perspective, it is easy to get the impression that Islam’s hatred is directed toward Europeans and Americans, toward Jews and Christians. But a more careful look at the Muslim world reveals that Muslims direct huge amounts of hostility toward each other.
In addition to warfare and assassinations, it’s worth noting that a great deal of Islamic terrorism targets competing Muslim groups. Again, the outsiders may assume that Islamic terror is aimed primarily at Europeans, American, Jews, and Christians. But insiders see it differently.
Saudi Arabia’s 33-year-old Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has tried to assert Riyadh’s ambition to lead the Middle East ever since his father ascended to the throne in 2015. In a major departure from Saudi Arabia’s previous policy of behind-the-scenes checkbook diplomacy, Prince Mohammed has built a coalition of Sunni states such as the United Arab Emirates and Egypt to launch a war against Iranian allies in Yemen. He imposed an embargo that unsuccessfully sought regime change in Qatar. He also attempted to meddle in Lebanese politics by forcing that nation’s prime minister to announce during a stay in the kingdom that he would resign, a decision that the prime minister rescinded once he was home.
The maneuvering and scheming for power and influence continues nonstop among the Saudis and the Turks. Neighboring countries are pawns in this power struggle.
A number of organizations who operate in both politics and terrorism serve as further tools which the rivals use against each other. To identify these groups as either ‘terror groups’ or ‘political parties’ is to miss the point that the two are inseparable and interrelated in this context. “Saudi Arabia and its allies also have relentlessly pursued the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist political movement,” writes Trofimov. Typical of such groups, the Muslim Brotherhood is linked to other terrorists: “its affiliates include Hamas.”
Though professing a commitment to democracy under Islamic law, the Brotherhood has turned autocratic when in power in Egypt and Sudan. Mr. Erdogan has supported the group across the Arab world since the 2011 revolutions of the Arab Spring.
As the leader of the Turkish government, Erdogan is willing to use his connections with terrorist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood to attack the Saudis.
Mr. Erdogan has made several efforts to resist Saudi Arabia’s rise. He sent Turkish troops to protect Qatar, ousted Saudi allies from Somalia and announced a deal to lease an island across the Red Sea from Saudi Arabia in Sudan, possibly for 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 turned into a favorite hub for Islamist dissidents from across the Arab world.
Erdogan hopes to win the long struggle and become the leader of Islam. For centuries, the Ottoman Empire saw itself as the rightful government of the Muslim world. Erdogan wants to draw on that older attitude. Turkey is the modern remnant of the Ottoman Empire.
But the Saudis also see themselves as the rightful leader of Islam. So the same contest continues. Only the names change.
“The Turkish president’s foreign policy strategy aims to make Muslims proud again,” said Soner Cagaptay, a scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy and the author of a recent biography of Mr. Erdogan, “The New Sultan.” “Under this vision, a reimagined and modernized version of the Ottoman past, the Turks are to lead Muslims to greatness.”There is a long history behind that claim. For four centuries, the sultan in Istanbul was also the religious leader, or caliph, of the entire Muslim world. His spiritual authority was recognized well beyond the borders of the Ottoman Empire, which at its peak included parts of central and eastern Europe, north Africa and the Arabian peninsula.
In previous centuries, the Muslims of the Ottoman Empire fought with the Muslims of Arabia for a chance to be the leading force within Islam. In the twenty-first century, Turkey is fighting against Saudi Arabia. The fight remains the same; the names have changed.
There was an interval, however, when it seemed like the situation might get better. When the Ottoman Empire ended, around 1923 or 1924, a modern Turkey started to emerge under the leadership of Kemal Mustafa Ataturk, a popular president of the country. During Ataturk’s time, Turkey began to shed the rigid demands of Islam. The harsh demands of Sharia law were relaxed, and a modern trend made itself felt in education and politics.
Turkey seemed on the verge of a breakthrough. Ataturk ended the Caliphate, the Islamic notion of imperial government, and the country moved toward rule by freely-elected representatives. Freedom of speech and modern universities were starting to emerge. Ataturk’s dream didn’t include wasting lives and energy fighting with the Arabs for control of Islam.
Sadly, Erdogan’s effort have been to do the very opposite of Ataturk’s. Erdogan is working to reinstate the harsh oppression of Islam in every area of live and society.
The Arabs did not engage in the type of modernization that Ataturk brought to Turkey:
The caliphate was abolished only in 1924, six years after the Ottomans lost control over Mecca and Medina to a British-sponsored Arab revolt during World War I. The modern, secular Turkish Republic, which rose from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire after its defeat by the Allied powers, banished the last sultan, Mehmed VI, to Europe in 1922. With the Ottomans gone, the House of Saud quickly expanded from its desert strongholds to much of the Arabian peninsula, first capturing Mecca and then establishing a powerful new state in 1932.
With Turkey pursuing a modernized path, and Saudi Arabia clinging to the strict enforcement of Islam, the two nations could peacefully coexist, because they were each pursuing different goals. They weren’t in competition.
Until Mr. Erdogan’s embrace of neo-Ottoman politics — and more authoritarian rule — a decade or so ago, the modern Turkish state wasn’t much interested in leading the Muslim world and was content to leave religious proselytizing to Saudi Arabia. Turkey joined NATO, sought membership in the European Union and nurtured close military links with Israel.
But when Turkey abandoned modernization, and Erdogan began to instate an oppressive Islamic regime, Turkey and Saudi Arabia came into conflict: they were in competition, each wanting to be the source of leadership in Islam.
Mr. Erdogan’s new Turkey, by contrast, presents a major challenge to Saudi Arabia by offering an alternative Islamic model, said Madawi al Rasheed, a Saudi professor at the London School of Economics and the author of a history of Saudi Arabia. “It is an existential threat to Saudi Arabia because of Turkey’s combination of Islam and a kind of democracy,” she said. “After all, Erdogan is still ruling over a republic that has a parliament, opposition parties and a civil society — while Saudi Arabia has nothing like that.”
Erdogan has not been able to erase all traces of modernization. Those remaining fragments of modernity give Turkey an edge over Saudi Arabia. But how long can those shreds of modernization last under Erdogan’s imposition of strict Islamic social and political concepts?
While Turkey seems to be sliding back into the darkness of Islamic oppression, Saudi Arabia seems never to have left it.
Indeed, today’s kingdom of Saudi Arabia is a monarchy as absolute as they come. It’s also the third state run by the House of Saud since the family’s alliance with the puritan preacher Mohammed ibn Abdel Wahhab rallied the Bedouin of the Arabian peninsula under the banner of an uncompromising new creed (since known as Wahhabism) in 1745.
Understanding the conflicts within Islam is essential for understanding the past and present of the Muslim world. Europeans and Americans can tend to think of themselves as the primary target of Islamic hate, but Muslims are often more likely to be the victims of Islamic terrorism than Jews or Christians.
