TURKIYE is Muslim. We know that. What kind? Ottoman? Do today’s Turks not stand de-Ottomanised? Ataturk had forced all royal Ottomans out of the country. And such was the power of Ataturk’s secularisation of state and society that Ottoman became a bad word.

The problem is history. It began in Central Asia when Changez Khan’s depredations made the Oghuz tribesmen — the harassed ancestors of today’s Turks — move to western Anatolia for safety. Little would they know what glory awaited them in (one) western Anatolia, (two) in the Balkans, (three) in Southern Europe, (four) in Central Europe, (five) in Northern Europe, (six) in the Maghreb, (seven) in the ‘upper’ Middle East — from Iraq to Morocco — and finally (eight) in the Arabian peninsula. Also extending the Ottoman Empire to the confluence of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic was corsair Khairuddin Barbarossa. Turks also took the Crimean Khanate as a vassal state. With the Black Sea and the Dardanelles already under Ottoman control, Turkiye had all the strategic waterways at its disposal. Today, the Turks take pride in the fact that the Ottoman Empire was the only empire which had within its realm four cities which have no parallel in terms of imperial glory and........

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