There has been a deluge of commentary about the victory of long term Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan in the recent elections. How did Erdoğan win, despite record hyperinflation and a pathetically inept response to the terrible earthquake earlier this year? I think we can find an answer in Erdoğan’s cynical use of religious conservatism in domestic politics.

One aspect of his rule has gone under the radar, but which can provide us with answers as to the longevity of his rule – the mobilisation of Ottoman Empire nostalgia for political gains. His ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) has blended Pan-Turkic ideology with Ottoman-mania to recreate a religious-based nationalism. In short, utilising a nostalgic view of the Ottoman Empire’s greatness, he has vowed to make Turkey great again.

There is a great deal of truth in the assertion that the Ottoman Empire was tolerant towards ethnic minorities. Numerous peoples, Arabs, Armenians, Assyrians, Greeks, Bulgarians, Jews – all contributed to an overarching Ottoman identity. Suleiman I, (1494 – 1566) also known as the Magnificent, and the LawGiver, led a golden age of the Ottomans, reforming the legal and taxation systems. The Ottoman army drew soldiers from all the various ethnicities under the control of the Turkish empire.

However, it is not the multicultural mosaic of nationalities in the Ottoman Empire for which Erdoğan is nostalgic. He and the ruling AKP hearken to the times of Selim I, the father of Suleiman I. Selim led a period of aggressive Ottoman Turkish expansion, both geographic and economic. Selim was in his day, a regional strongman, conquering enormous swathes of territory, but also taking on the role of guardian of the pilgrimage routes to Mecca and Medina – a significant position from an Islamic perspective.

It is no secret that the Turkish president has strongly supported independence for Bosnia. Drawing on the historical links from the times when the Balkans were Ottoman territories, Erdogan has loudly supported Bosnia’s aspirations to independence. The Turkish president is a welcome guest in Sarajevo, and Ankara has long postured as the big brother protector of their fellow Muslims in Bosnia.

In 2018, the then Bosnian president, Bakir Izetbegovic, told a rally of Erdogan supporters in Sarajevo (Turks living in Bosnia) to support the reelection of their Turkish political ally. Turkey has made numerous public investments in the Bosnian republic; universities and education have benefited from Turkish investments. Turkish tourists flock to Bosnia every year; the multiple Ottoman-era mosques and structures are preserved by the Bosnian authorities.

Ottoman era structures are restored by the Bosnians, but also involve the efforts of Turkish government agencies, including mosques and bridges destroyed by Bosnian Serb separatists in the early 1990s. Ferhat Pasha Mosque, located in Banja Luka, the second largest city in Bosnia, was restored with Turkish assistance, after its destruction by Serb forces in 1993.

Ankara is leveraging this shared Ottoman-Bosnian history to build up its influence in the Balkans. Serbia has its close alliance with Russia; Germany is the main financial backer of Croatia. For all of Turkey’s talk about defending their coreligionists in Bosnia, Turkish investment in Bosnia is only small, dwarfed by comparable Turkish investments in neighbouring Orthodox Serbia.

In 2020, Erdoğan took another step towards cementing his alliance with religious conservatives; he changed Hagia Sophia’s status from a museum to a mosque. To be sure, there was a huge degree of hyperbole in the Western media, portraying this changeover as evidence of the ‘creeping Islamisation’ of not only Turkey, but Europe as well. Originally a Byzantine church, it was converted into a mosque when the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople (today’s Istanbul).

In the 1930s, with the definitive secularisation of the new Turkish Republic, Hagia Sophia was closed to worship (and symbol of Ottoman power), and repurposed as a museum in 1934. The Turkish Republic’s rulers wanted to emphasise the ecumenical nature of the Turkish state, and Hagia Sophia has been preserved with UNESCO heritage status in 1985.

By annulling the 1934 decree on Hagia Sophia’s designation as a museum, Erdoğan was making a deliberate ploy to attract the religious conservative vote. Admitting worshippers to Hagia Sophia is a violation of its UNESCO status, but not such as outrageous affront to secular sensibilities. After all, the Catholic Church has long targeted the Cordoba Mosque-Cathedral, located in Andalusia, Spain, for redesigning as a specifically Christian institution, downplaying its origins and long history as a mosque. Spain and Portugal have long wrestled with their Islamic history.

Be that as it may, Erdoğan’s Hagia Sophia manoeuvre emboldened the religious nationalists inside Turkey, and the various ethnic minorities, such as the Kurds, correctly interpreted this move as an assertion of Turkish exclusivity. By rebuffing the UNESCO world heritage status of a site like Hagia Sophia, it repudiates the prestige and culturally precious designation that UNESCO preservation confers. It opens up a religious-cultural debate about to whom such a historical monument belongs. It is a cynical way to push religion into politics, which is Erdoğan’s objective.

A brief note on Turkey and the Palestine question

While Erdoğan poses as a champion of the Palestinians, seeking a neo-Ottoman quest to reassert authority over the holy places of Jerusalem, the Palestinians do not engage in Ottoman-mania. The repudiation of the British, and then Zionist, occupation of Palestine is based on the legitimate demand for an independent state. While the Ottoman Empire allowed only limited Jewish emigration to Palestine, they were hardly proponents of an independent Palestinian state.

The Palestinians are not simply a cat’s paw of Ankara, motivated by a desire to reestablish a neo-Ottoman project. It is all well and good to be nostalgic for the times of the Ottomans, but Erdoğan’s leveraging of Ottoman-mania has definitive political objectives. Re-election and extending his grip on power is one of them.