Yearnings for Türkiye’s Ottoman Past
December 8, 2025
In recent years, Türkiye’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has increasingly lauded the country’s Ottoman past while being more reserved about its Republican achievements. Yes, AKP leaders visit the Atatürk Mausoleum every year to pay their respects on the anniversary of his passing, but they rarely emphasize his accomplishments. However, a quick look at history reveals that it was Atatürk’s military, political, and reformist leadership that ensured Türkiye’s survival and placed the country on a progressive path.
“As the Ottoman Empire continued to disintegrate, provinces sloughed away ‘like pieces falling off an old house’. Cyprus in 1878, Tunisia in 1881, Egypt in 1882, Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1908, Tripoli in 1911. Exposure of Turkey’s weakness by Italy’s wrenching away of Tripoli spurred the ambitions of small Christian states of the Balkans – Serbia, Montenegro, Greece, Bulgaria – themselves once provinces of the Ottoman Empire. In October 1912, these four powers suddenly attacked European Turkey. The Turkish army collapsed. By November 3, the Bulgarian army stood before the walls of Constantinople. On November 8, the Greek army entered Salonica. On November 28, the Serbs took the port of Durazzo on the Adriatic, providing Serbia with a link to the sea. On December 3, the Turkish government begged the Balkan allies for an armistice.”[i]
From thereon, the partition of the Ottoman Empire was a certainty. Decades and decades of decadent rule, failure to grasp, let alone keep pace with, political, economic, cultural, and technological progress, had brought the once mighty empire to a point where its territories and even its capital were up for grabs. Major powers were making plans for their claims to Ottoman territories, and these plans were being discussed in intensive diplomatic talks among them.
The beginning of the First World War only added momentum to the process. Tsarist Russia saw the War as the greatest opportunity to get hold of İstanbul and the Turkish Straits.
The negotiations on the partitioning of the Ottoman Empire among the three Entente allies took some time. Britain and France knew they had to keep Russia in the war to avoid a German victory on the Western Front. Finally, Mark Sykes and François Georges Picot, after negotiating potential British and French spheres of influence in the Middle East, arrived in Petrograd in March 1916 to finalize Ottoman partition terms with Foreign Minister Sazonov. In addition to the areas she had already conquered, the notorious Sazonov-Sykes-Picot Agreement of May 1916 gave Russia İstanbul and the Straits in case the allies won the war, fulfilling the ambition of every emperor since Catherine the Great.[ii]
At the end of the First World War, with the Treaty of Sèvres, signed between the victors of the First World War and the Ottomans, on August 10, 1920, the Ottoman Empire came to an end. The Treaty had reduced the country to less than one-fifth of today’s Türkiye. However, with our War of Independence and the Lausanne Peace Treaty, Atatürk upended Western designs to reduce Türkiye to a non-entity.
The challenges he faced at the time and the anti-Turk mentality of the victors of the First World War are reflected in a must-read 1923 article by Charles Masterman, a British radical Liberal Party politician, intellectual, and man of letters who had worked closely with such Liberal leaders as David Lloyd George and Winston Churchill.[iii]
Why then is the AKP so reserved in its appreciation of Atatürk’s achievements? To find the answer, one must again cast a brief look at history.
When the Ottomans conquered Egypt in 1517, under Yavuz Sultan Selim, the Abbasid caliphate in Cairo came to an end, and the caliphal title became associated with the Ottoman sultans. While the precise historical details of this transfer remain debated, in Ottoman–Egyptian political consciousness, the sultan in Istanbul was recognized as both temporal ruler and caliph of the Muslim world.
In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Egypt—though officially part of the Ottoman Empire—was under British occupation (from 1882 onward). During this period, the Ottoman caliphate held particular significance for Egyptian Muslims, not only as a symbol of Islamic unity but also as a potential counterweight to British imperial authority.[iv]
In 1924, a year after declaring the Republic, the Turkish Grand National Assembly abolished the caliphate. On February 5, 1937, with a constitutional amendment, secularism became a core principle of the Republic. It could be said that, even before this, in the late 19th century, secularist tendencies—without explicit reference to the principle—had begun to shape Ottoman reform efforts.
Since the early days of the Republic and especially after 1937, secularism has unfortunately been a contentious issue between those committed to Kemalist ideology and Republican values, and those emphasizing Islam in governance. The AKP, in power since 2002, aligns with the latter groups.
Today, Türkiye is polarized on multiple fronts, and overcoming our differences through Islamic unity is an illusion. The only path to domestic peace and harmony remains the restoration of democratic rule, hopefully sooner than later.
[i] Robert K. Massie, Dreadnought, Britain, Germany and the Coming of the Great War, (Vintage Books, 2007), 838.
[ii] Sean McMeekin, The Russian Revolution, A New History, (Profile Books, 2017), 74.
[iii] https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1923/01/the-return-of-the-turk/646855/
[iv] https://www.sabite.org/the-abolition-of-the-ottoman-caliphate-and-its-reflections-in-egypt
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