SULTANS GOTTA SULTANATE: Erdogan’s Ottomania.

Islam—both as a religion and as a foundational civilization—lies at the center of this identity. Some might argue that the new Ottomanism came of age with the rise of political Islam; indeed it is difficult to see precisely where Ottomanism begins and Islamism ends. As far as a new conservative bourgeois class and ascendant pro-Erdoğan journalists and public intellectuals are concerned, at least, appeals to the Ottoman identity are more welcome than those to the Golden Age of Islam.

This Ottoman imaginary represents an unprecedented restructuring of the country since 1922. It embodies a new political legitimacy that plumbs the depths of identity desires in ways apparently not fulfilled by the modernizing Kemalist project. Indeed some conservative intellectuals blame the country’s current identity crisis on the secularizing reforms instituted at the founding of the Republic. And after the 1980 military coup, the “Turkish-Islamic Synthesis” emerged as an antidote to the growing appeal of socialism and to Kurdish secessionist claims.

The Ottoman past has thus become the foundation upon which to build a future once viewed as so far gone that it was impossible to reinvigorate. But exactly what sort of future worth building is a matter of contention, and the country’s current political struggle reflects a deeper conflict between two competing neo-Ottoman imaginaries. On the one hand, there is the Özal variety, which is cosmopolitan, pro-European, and religiously pluralist, even while it recognizes a special role for Islam in society. By contrast, the increasingly dominant vision of Erdoğan and Davutoğlu is exclusivist, anti-Western, and Islamist in both a political and social sense.

Turks have their choice of arsenic or strychnine.