The idea of a “Turkish model” that might calm and give a sense of direction to the middle east has often been conjured up in recent decades by hopeful policymakers, mostly in Washington and London. Few people in the middle east took much notice. Arabs and Iranians have long been distrustful towards the Turks, and the compliment was returned. The more easterly Muslims felt that the Turks’ relegation of Islam to the private sphere was too westernised, practically infidel.
So when I turned a corner in the stone-vaulted bazaar of the Palestinian town of Nablus recently, I was astonished to see a forest of Turkish star-and-crescent flags decking out an archway into one of the ancient shops. Never before had I seen spontaneous enthusiasm for modern Turkey in the Arab world: the image of Turkey in Arab nationalist propaganda since the 1950s is that of an American pawn that betrayed its Muslim heritage by befriending the Jewish state.
Perhaps, I thought, the shopkeeper was a traditionalist, hankering after the four centuries in which the Ottomans ran the middle east. But when I asked him to explain the flags, he just pointed around the shop.
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