The sedition of anti-Turkey sentiment in Arab media

We have reached the festival at the end of a Ramadan whose beginning is mercy, whose middle is forgiveness and whose end is salvation.

By its nature, fasting, both because it was prescribed for those before us as well and because it is a series of acts of worship observed simultaneously in every corner of the world, has a function of spontaneously bringing about unity and fusion among human generations and human races, groups, communities, nations, clans and tribes.

Despite this function, the general state of the Islamic world in Ramadan today is far from heartening. Looking at what people of the same religion are doing to one another in Syria, Iraq, Libya, Yemen and Egypt, the question that inevitably comes first to everyone's mind is how these things can happen despite Ramadan, and despite Islam, which, as a completed blessing of God, made us brothers when we were enemies.

Of course, we do not set aside the fact that the imperialist tutelage that has continued over the Islamic world for a hundred years has taken every precaution against the possibility of an Islamic world coming into being. All the precautions have been taken against an "Islamic World" re-forming as a political power, and these precautions are updated every time. The Arab Spring process represented a process in which this world was moving quickly toward re-forming. This process was interrupted by counter-revolutions.

However, despite these precautions taken a hundred years ago, there is today in fact an Islamic world, and this world has strong actors who must assume responsibility. Today's world is not the world of a hundred, fifty or even thirty years ago, and the societies that make up the Islamic world are not oblivious to the world; they now ask their governments to comply more fully with the requirements of belonging to this world. Governments can no longer resist these demands.

A hundred years ago, a propaganda that made Muslim societies, especially Arabs and Turks, come to hate each other was systematically worked into them by the imperialists who tore the Islamic world apart and destroyed it. Because the unity between Arabs and Turks is the fundamental condition for the formation of a solid Islamic world. And the way to prevent this unity is to create rancor, hatred or at least estrangement between them.

Since the emergence of the Gulf crisis, although Turkey does not consider what has been done against Qatar right, it is taking very special care not to turn the matter into an anti-Saudi stance. And this is how it should be. It is a fact that Saudi Arabia differs with Turkey on many of its policies today. But this difference of political views and approaches does not change the reality of the common destiny of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and indeed the whole Islamic world.

For that reason, their differences of opinion should not lead to hostility and the severing of channels of communication. For that reason, although Turkey supports Qatar in the process it is subjected to, it insistently avoids rhetoric that would hurt Saudi Arabia. This care of Turkey's is also reflected in its own independent media, and despite the crisis very little is published against Saudi Arabia. This, with all its reasons, should be well appreciated by the Saudi administration. Those in positions of responsibility need to be a little more careful in their statements.

Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for the Saudi media. From the beginning of the process, Turkey's stance, including by Saudi Arabia's semi-official media, has been the subject of very unfair, even slanderous assessments. Suddenly the campaign against Qatar also turned into a campaign against Turkey. A complete hostility toward Turkey was sought to be stoked on social media, and Erdoğan's speeches began to be served up torn from their context in a way that would provoke the reaction of the Arab world.

No one can claim that this campaign was a spontaneously developing reaction of the Arab people. News and discourse were systematically produced from a center of strife in order to generate hatred of Turkey among Arabs. Yet from the very beginning of the process Turkey has made it perfectly clear that it would display the same attitude if Saudi Arabia faced the same situation.

Turkey has been willing to confront the US for the sake of Saudi Arabia over the 9/11 file, and will continue to be. Because there it is the US that is clearly and plainly in the wrong, and it is Saudi Arabia that is subjected to injustice. In the course of the process, the level-headed segments of the Arab world appreciate that such interventions by Turkey are a great opportunity for the Islamic world and for the Arab world.

One of the propaganda materials used against Turkey, and especially against President Erdoğan, is his remark in a statement to a French channel about Wahhabism, "these are things far from us." In Saudi Arabia, a heap of social media storms were attempted to be whipped up over this, and speeches were made. Thus an attempt was made to give the impression that Erdoğan was in fact hostile to Saudi Arabia's sectarian understanding.

Yet in what Erdoğan said there, it was not only Wahhabism but also Shiism and Sunnism in the sense of sectarian bigotry, and Erdoğan in fact frequently and rightly emphasizes this position. Against this sectarian strife that threatens the Islamic world today, Erdoğan had also said, on his visit to Najaf, one of the centers of the Shiites, "I am neither Sunni nor Shiite, I am a Muslim." By this he meant neither enmity to Sunnism nor to Shiism. On the contrary, he had said that the sectarian bigotry that is burning us must be overcome and the strife extinguished.

As the term chair of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, nothing could be more natural than Erdoğan's expressing this stance in this way. In fact, if this stance were adopted resolutely by Iran, and by Saudi Arabia and the other Arab countries as well, it would bring us closer to the solution of many problems.