Middle East Quarterly The History of Turkey: Grandeur and Grievance by Maurus Reinkowski Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2023. 365pp, $139.

 Middle East Quarterly

The History of Turkey: Grandeur and Grievance

by Maurus Reinkowski

Boston: Academic Studies Press, 2023. 365pp, $139.

Reviewed by Daniel Pipes

Middle East Forum

Middle East Quarterly

Summer 2024

https://www.meforum.org/65948/history-of-turkey-grandeur-grievance

Reinkowski, professor of Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies at the University of Basel and a specialist on the late Ottoman and modern Middle East, means by "Turkey" not Turks going unto the distant past but the Republic of Türkiye going back a century.

In keeping with the "grandeur and grievance" theme of the subtitle, he starts by portraying the country as strong, difficult, magnificent, and torn—in other words, a place of great contrasts. Reinkowski fleshes these out through three fundamental contrasts that "shape the depiction of Turkey" in his view: the Kemalist secularist camp and the conservative Islamic camp, the established urban strata and a population anchored in rural Anatolia, and the grandeur-grievance dynamic of what he calls "the political-emotional economy."

Reinkowski interestingly views "The road that Turkish politics has taken since the early 2010s [as leading] into a new Republic," a successor to the one founded by Atatürk. He sees the final collapse of the first one lying in the "wholesome exchange of elites in administration, military, judiciary, and even the university." He argues for 2013 as the decisive turning point, being the year of the Gezi Park protests and their suppression, the falling out between the Gülen movement and the ruling AK party, and the demise of hopes for the "Arab Spring."

Refreshingly, the author avoids the special pleading for Türkiye that too many specialists fall into, forthrightly referring to the "Armenian genocide" and to "public and state antisemitism." He even asserts that "direct lines lead from the Armenian genocide to the Holocaust." No less importantly, he writes that "Turkey cannot justify its claim to be a homogenous national state. The existence of the Kurds and the Alevis clearly refutes it."

History contains many insights. Here are two: "Much more fundamental for the self-understanding of today's Turkey is that it was and is a place of refuge for millions of Muslim and Turkic refugees and migrants." "Turkey ultimately stands for only itself. It is conspicuous that no other country offers an immediate comparison." Reinkowski's history of Türkiye over the past century deserves to become the standard account.

 

Daniel Pipes (DanielPipes.org, @DanielPipes) is president of the Middle East Forum and author of the just-published Israel Victory: How Zionists Win Acceptance and Palestinians Get Liberated (Wicked Son).