Perceptions of Turkey among Arabs

RIYADH

I am in Riyadh for a workshop on the problems of Islamic broadcasting and publishing in the modern world and on developing its discursive content. The meeting had in fact been planned for the pilgrimage season, but since it would have been difficult to hold amid the season's intensity, it was postponed to this date. In the two-day workshop, participants from Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Malaysia and Sudan addressed a range of issues, from the production to the distribution of Islamic broadcasts, from their quality to their genuinely Islamic dimension. For my part, I spoke about the symposia that Turkey's Presidency of Religious Affairs has been holding for years on religious broadcasts, especially on their discursive content. Everyone agreed on how important it could be to give this work, which the participants found quite interesting, an international dimension and to treat it as a world Islamic broadcasting symposium.

The workshop concluded with the idea of founding a world union of Islamic broadcasters and with proposals on the possible vision and mission of such a union. But I think that it would be more important, rather than the workshop, to record my latest impressions of Riyadh and Saudi Arabia.

I can begin by expressing my astonishment at how much Riyadh has changed in so short a time. This city, situated in the middle of the Hejaz desert, was last visited by me two years ago for a conference at the King Faisal Research Center. A great many buildings have gone up one after another to rival the height of the Burj al-Faisaliyah, erected right next to the King Faisal Research Center. The world's finest workshop for the repair of written works is located in this center. With its mosque, whose dome is shaped like an inkwell and whose minaret like a reed pen, and, facing it, its library designed as a building resembling an open book, the center is visible from the distant points of the city more because of this tower than anything else.

Yet when the claim is to build the tallest building, other buildings began rising like mushrooms in other parts of the city, and within a few years the building's record was broken many times over. With the buildings now rising one after another everywhere in the city, Riyadh has taken on the air of a surreal city. The commercial center, which is still under construction with the ambition of becoming one of the world's financial centers and which houses many skyscrapers, is about to be completed at great speed. Watching this view, one cannot help wondering both how much the meaning of the words King Faisal spoke during the oil crisis he set off in 1973 to protest Western support for Israel has grown, and how tragically it has been buried in this scene: "We were born in the shade of tents; we would rather lose oil and return to our tents than lose our honor."

It is a lesson in itself that this region, home to the last Prophet who counted people's competing to build tall buildings among the signs of the Day of Judgment, has become precisely the place of people vying with one another to build tall buildings. That the Prophet's advice on this matter has little effect within a culture that, with its Salafi outlook, is overwhelmingly dominant in daily life is, without doubt, a situation that should be assessed separately.

I was talking about Saudi Arabia's foreign policy, and especially its Egypt policy, with many people I managed to meet in the time left over from the workshop, when a familiar journalist who had joined the gathering later put in front of me the English version of TESEV's recently published report on the perception of Turkey among Arabs and asked what I thought of it. Without answering, I asked for his view. He said he found some of the results odd. "You will find nothing to support the impression that Turkey's popularity has recently dropped relative to Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates," he said, and went on:

"I am saying this as a Saudi, and I am saying it among all these Saudis. Especially after supporting the coup in Egypt, the popular perception of Saudi Arabia and the UAE is dragging along the ground. In the eyes of broad sections of the public, both countries have suffered a great loss of prestige. On the contrary, Turkey, and especially your prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, is the hero of the peoples because of his stance against the coup."

I told him that I knew Mensur Akgün, one of the authors of the report, and could not doubt his academic and scientific seriousness. When I said that, since the results belonged to 2012, they probably had not recorded the recent developments, he explained that the situation was not very different in 2012 either, and that, on the contrary, after the Egyptian military coup an attempt had been made to discredit Turkey in the Arab official media through incredible disinformation. He said that, despite this media disinformation, he did not at all think that the perception of Turkey and Erdoğan had been diminished. The journalist, who also criticized Saudi Arabia's foreign policy, said that with its recent policy Saudi Arabia was pushing itself into great isolation and was practically driving a nail into its own eye. He said all of this in front of those at the table, all of whom could be described as elite.

Our impressions will continue.