This Qur’anic verse captures something unsettlingly modern.

The verse itself is directed at those who possess the Torah but fail to carry what it demands of them. But leave its immediate polemical target aside for a moment. There is a more general critique buried in the image.

The donkey may carry an enormous quantity of knowledge on its back and still have no meaningful relationship to any of it. The problem is not the absence of information. There is plenty of it. The harder question is what all this knowledge is for, and whether it needs to be for anything at all.

I sometimes wonder whether one of the pressures on the contemporary university is precisely that it is no longer allowed simply to carry knowledge. It must also explain what that knowledge is for.

Universities produce an extraordinary amount of knowledge. Papers, books, reports, datasets and working papers accumulate at a rate no individual scholar could possibly follow. They have also become very good at counting this production. Publications can be counted, citations measured, journals ranked, grants totalled and impact documented.

But that no longer seems to be enough. Universities are also expected to explain what all that knowledge is for.

Jean-François Lyotard was already circling around this problem in The Postmodern Condition, published in 1979. The book became famous for his description of the postmodern condition as an “incredulity toward metanarratives.” But it was, after all, subtitled A Report on Knowledge. Much of it is about legitimacy: on what grounds can knowledge, and scientific knowledge in particular, claim authority and value?

Modern science, in Lyotard’s account, had not legitimized itself through method alone. It also sat inside larger stories about what knowledge was for. Knowledge contributed to progress. Education freed human beings from ignorance. Reason belonged to some larger movement toward emancipation or enlightenment.

Those stories differed, sometimes radically, but science still occupied a recognisable place inside a larger account of human development. Once confidence in those accounts weakens, research does not disappear. The old answers to the question of why it matters simply carry less weight.

Lyotard thought one increasingly important answer would be performance.

Knowledge could justify itself because it worked. Because it improved efficiency, solved problems, strengthened systems or produced usable results.

It is difficult not to recognize something of our own university in this.

Grant applications ask for outputs, deliverables, beneficiaries and impact. Universities advertise their contribution to innovation and economic growth. Researchers are evaluated through publications and citations. Even an academic article is often expected to explain its “policy implications.”

There is nothing especially scandalous about any of this. What bothers me is something slightly different. We increasingly seem unable to leave the justification there: this is worth knowing because it helps us understand something important.

A historian may spend years complicating our understanding of an event without producing a policy recommendation. A scholar of literature may produce a better interpretation of a text without generating anything that could plausibly be called an “impact.” A social scientist may discover that a problem is much harder to solve than policymakers had hoped.

These are not failures of scholarship. Yet they often need to be translated into another language before they sound legitimate. The research will improve policy. It will benefit stakeholders. It will contribute to society. It will make something work better.

This also makes me wonder about something Lyotard, as far as I remember, did not really discuss in this form.

Could the increasingly political character of parts of the social sciences and humanities be related to the same problem?

At first sight the connection seems odd. The managerial university and the politically engaged academic usually appear as enemies. One speaks about metrics, efficiency and outcomes. The other speaks about justice, domination, exclusion, emancipation or decolonisation. The second often understands itself precisely as resisting the first.

But perhaps they share one assumption.

Both, in different ways, place pressure on knowledge to do more than understand or explain.

The technocratic answer to the question “what does this research do?” is familiar enough. It improves policy, increases efficiency, produces innovation or contributes to institutional performance.

The politically engaged scholar gives a very different answer. Research can expose injustice, challenge power, recover silenced voices or contribute to social change.

These are obviously not equivalent purposes. But perhaps they reveal something about the contemporary university: understanding or explaining alone increasingly seems an insufficient justification for knowledge.

Perhaps there is an irony here. The Qur’anic image is unmistakably pre-modern, yet it too assumes that knowledge ought to do something to the person who carries it. Merely carrying books is not enough.

Several traditional reports about the Prophet say that Muhammad married her when she was six or seven and that the marriage was consummated when she was nine.

It is these reports that are at the center of the ongoing controversy. I have absolutely no intention of joining it.

I do not know how old Aisha was when her marriage was consummated and, to be frank, I am not particularly interested in finding out.

What interests me is why this question has become such a recurring and heated controversy.

Why does Aisha’s age matter so much to modern Muslims?

One thing is worth getting out of the way first. Whether Aisha was nine when her marriage was consummated has little bearing on the legal rules governing marriage in modern Muslim societies.

With a few important exceptions, Muslim societies had already moved away from treating nine as an ordinary marriageable age long before Aisha’s age became the recurring controversy it is today. As states began regulating family law, registering marriages and setting minimum ages, those thresholds generally rose, with eighteen increasingly becoming the norm.

And the Muslims taking part in the current debate are not really arguing over whether nine should be the legal age of marriage today. In most Muslim societies, that question has already been settled.

The problem is elsewhere.

The reason is obvious. Nine no longer simply falls below a legal threshold. It signifies childhood. And sexual relations with a nine-year-old are now widely understood not merely as something prohibited by contemporary law, but as something morally wrong in itself.

That is what turns an old historical report into a modern controversy. And it leaves behind a much more difficult question: did the Prophet himself do something that modern Muslims have come to regard as morally unacceptable?

There are, broadly speaking, three ways a Muslim might respond to that question. One can accept the traditional account and historicize the marriage. One can accept the modern moral judgment and question the traditional account. Or one can resist that revision precisely because of what it might do to the authority of the tradition.

The first response is to see no moral problem at all. Aisha was nine. The reports are reliable. But seventh-century Arabia cannot be judged by the moral standards of the twenty-first century. Marriage practices were different, ideas of maturity were different, and something that shocks us now need not have shocked people living in that society.

The difficulty with this answer is theological. Muhammad is not regarded merely as a man who behaved reasonably by the standards of his own century. He is the Prophet and a moral exemplar. Islamic tradition does not present his moral character as merely adequate for seventh-century Arabia. He is understood to have brought and embodied a higher moral standard.

So “times were different” carries more weight than it first appears to. If something we now regard as intrinsically wrong could nevertheless have been morally acceptable when done by the Prophet, then at least part of prophetic morality becomes dependent on historical context. Muhammad may still have been exemplary for his own society, but the claim that his moral example transcends his own time becomes harder to sustain.

The second response is to reject that conclusion. A nine-year-old is a child. Sexual relations with a child are wrong regardless of century or culture. At the same time, Muhammad remains a genuine moral exemplar.

If both convictions are held firmly, then something else has to give.

Perhaps Aisha was not nine.

For Muslims who take this position, re-examining the chronology need not feel like an effort to make Islam more palatable to modern tastes. It may feel like refusing to attribute to the Prophet an act that would contradict his moral character. Aisha’s age becomes the historical variable. Muhammad remains a moral exemplar, and sexual relations with a child remain wrong in every age.

The third response begins with a different concern: the authority of the tradition.

The report that Aisha was nine is hardly marginal. It appears in some of the most authoritative Sunni hadith collections. Rejecting it therefore raises a larger question. What happens once reports preserved in the canonical collections are set aside because they conflict with contemporary moral convictions?

From this point of view, the revised chronology can look suspiciously convenient. Modern moral assumptions change. An inherited report becomes uncomfortable. We return to the sources and discover that the uncomfortable event may never have happened.

The concern here is not necessarily any desire to defend marriage at nine. It is what happens to the authority of the Islamic tradition itself. If reports found in the most authoritative hadith collections can be set aside whenever they conflict with contemporary moral convictions, where does the process stop? Once compatibility with modern values becomes a criterion for deciding which inherited reports remain acceptable, other parts of the tradition become open to the same treatment.

For Muslims who worry about this, Aisha’s age is therefore not just about Aisha. It raises a larger question about the authority of hadith and about who, or what, gets the final word when inherited religious sources conflict with contemporary moral judgment.

The worries of the three responses, then, are not the same.

One is the danger of judging the seventh century by the standards of the present.

Another is the danger of historicizing the Prophet so far that the universality of his moral example begins to disappear.

A third is the danger of protecting that moral example by revising inconvenient traditions until contemporary morality becomes the final judge of the inherited Islamic record.

The same Muslim may feel the force of more than one of these concerns at once.

That is probably part of the reason the argument becomes so heated. People appear to be arguing about Aisha’s age. They are also arguing about whether morality is universal, what it means for Muhammad to be a moral exemplar, how much authority canonical hadith should carry, and how far contemporary moral convictions should shape the way Muslims read their own past.

They are arguing about the same number.

They are not necessarily trying to save the same thing.

Asef Bayat would later call this transformation post-Islamism. Nowhere did this transformation unfold more dramatically, or more intellectually, than in Iran. In İran’da Entelektüel Dini Düşünce Hareketi (The Religious Intellectual Movement in Iran), Asiye Tığlı examines this transformation through four of its best-known figures: Abdolkarim Soroush, Mohsen Kadivar, Mojtahed Shabestari, and Mostafa Malekian. Her book is, above all, a sustained examination of what these thinkers understood Islam to be, and of how they believed it should be understood in the modern world.

Known in Persian as rowshanfekran-e dini, or religious intellectuals, these figures belong to an intellectual tradition whose roots can be traced back to the nineteenth century. That tradition emerged partly out of Iran’s increasingly unequal encounter with the West and the ruling dynasty’s inability to respond effectively to it. But it was during the Constitutional Revolution, beginning in 1906, that the questions at its heart became unavoidable.

For Shi‘i religious thought, the constitutional period raised a series of difficult questions. Could a constitutional order of Western origin be religiously legitimate? What should be made of a constitution, legislation, the rights of non-Muslims, or women’s rights? Could institutions and principles that had not emerged from the Islamic tradition nevertheless be reconciled with it?

The Shi‘i ulama, as the principal authorities of religious thought, were drawn directly into these debates. Iranian religious intellectualism grew partly from within these arguments, and some of those later regarded as its predecessors came from the ulama themselves.

This mattered because traditional Shi‘i political theology had long been marked by a powerful suspicion of political rule in the absence of the appointed Imam, descended from the Prophet’s daughter Fatima and his cousin and son-in-law Ali. The ulama, in this older conception, assumed primarily the Imam’s religious functions.

Constitutionalism opened a new path. It became possible to ask not merely how Muslims should live under existing governments, but what a religiously legitimate political order might look like and what political responsibilities the ulama might assume within it.

Ruhollah Khomeini would eventually take this possibility furthest through the doctrine of velayat-e faqih, the guardianship of the jurist. Ali Shariati moved in another direction, turning Islam into an activist and oppositional ideology against despotism.

Then came 1979.

The religious intellectual tradition had helped undermine one form of despotism. The Islamic Republic showed how easily religious opposition to authoritarianism could become the ideological basis of another authoritarian order. And it was partly from within the same intellectual tradition that the new challenge emerged.

This time, however, the challenge could not remain political. If a particular understanding of Islam had become one of the foundations of the new regime, questioning the regime eventually meant questioning that understanding of Islam as well. What began as a political objection therefore developed into a much deeper argument over what religion was, where religious authority came from, and how religious texts should be interpreted.

* * *

One of the best-known figures associated with this challenge is undoubtedly Abdolkarim Soroush. At the heart of Soroush’s argument lies a distinction between religion itself, which comes from God and is embodied in its sources, and religious knowledge, which is a human product derived from those sources. The former is sacred and fixed. The latter is human and mutable, and indeed must remain mutable.

Religious knowledge should therefore not be confused with religion itself. Its claim to singularity should be rejected. Different interpretations should be regarded as normal, and no interpretation should be imposed as the only correct one. Religious knowledge, in this sense, should be treated like other forms of human knowledge and should continue to develop and expand by drawing on both the human and the natural sciences.

For Soroush, the task is to distinguish between the essential and accidental dimensions of religion. The essential aspects are those that make a religion what it is, that cannot be separated from it, that remain universal and must be preserved throughout history. The accidental aspects are those that could have been otherwise without causing the religion to cease being that religion. They belong to particular places and historical periods.

Soroush identifies three essential aspects of Islam: that human beings are servants of God, that salvation in the hereafter is the highest human goal, and that the ultimate purposes of religion are the preservation of religion, reason, lineage, property, and life. By contrast, the fact that Islam’s foundational texts are in Arabic is accidental. So too are the elements of Arab culture found within them, their imagery, metaphors, concepts, the scientific theories of the time, legends, juridical rulings, and similar features. What the Muslim should remain committed to are the essential aspects of Islam, not its accidental ones. The former are fixed. The latter change, and must change, taking shape in accordance with the conditions of time and place.

Another powerful voice within Iranian religious intellectual thought, Mojtahed Shabestari, reaches conclusions similar to Soroush’s through a different route. Shabestari argues that existing religious doctrine ultimately reflects the prejudices, presuppositions, knowledge, expectations, and interests of those who constructed it.

The implication is clear. Religion itself and religious doctrine or interpretation are not the same thing. The former may be divine, but the latter is human. Because religious doctrine and interpretation are products of the people who constructed them in particular historical circumstances, they are themselves historical. They cannot therefore be binding on people living in different times and places, or even necessarily on others living in the same time and place.

Religion must consequently be reconstructed and reinterpreted as time and place change, methodically and on the basis of evidence. Yet even when the same methods and evidence are employed, different constructions and interpretations remain inevitable, and all of them should be regarded as belonging within religion. No doctrine or interpretation produced by a particular individual or group should be imposed as the one correct interpretation. Religious doctrine and interpretation should remain plural. Indeed, Shabestari suggests that this is what God intends, because religion is, at its core, a conversation between God and His servants. To impose restrictions on that conversation would run contrary to the purpose of creation itself.

Revelation, similarly, is a conversation between God and the Prophet. The Qur’an is the product of the human side of that conversation. Its language and content are therefore entirely intelligible within the world of the people to whom it first spoke. Revelation comes from God and causes the Prophet to speak. But revelation once transformed into words, the Qur’an itself, is human and belongs to the Prophet.

Yet “the Prophet too is a human being, bounded by a particular history and society.” The content of religion, its commands and prohibitions, must therefore also be understood historically. What ultimately matters is not the content itself but the purposes it seeks to achieve. Foremost among these is the establishment of tawhid, the oneness of God. It is through tawhid that the obstacles to human freedom can be removed. The religious sources, both the Qur’an and the Sunna of the Prophet, should themselves be understood as examples of how those obstacles were removed at a particular moment in history and should be interpreted accordingly.

Mohsen Kadivar, the third major figure in this intellectual current, makes the relatively abstract arguments of Soroush and Shabestari about the historicity of religious doctrine and interpretation considerably more concrete by applying them to religious law.

For Kadivar, several features of traditional or historical Islam are incompatible with contemporary human rights and modern law: slavery, certain criminal punishments, inequalities between Muslims and non-Muslims, between women and men, between free people and slaves, and between jurists and ordinary believers, as well as restrictions on freedom of belief.

This incompatibility has to be overcome, and Kadivar argues that it can be overcome within religion itself. These rules do not belong to Islam’s fixed and universal principles of faith and belief, its moral values, or its rules concerning worship. They reflect the particular conditions of the period in which they emerged as religious rulings and have therefore lost their validity under contemporary conditions.

For Kadivar, Islamic rulings concerning civil law, criminal law, international relations, and fundamental rights belong to this category. The basic criteria governing arrangements in these areas should instead be justice and rationality. Kadivar thus removes a very large sphere of life from the jurisdiction of religious law while continuing to insist that religion’s ultimate purposes should guide it.

The fourth figure in Iran’s religious intellectual movement, Mostafa Malekian, argues that the movement has in fact reached an impasse. He goes so far as to reject the very expression “religious intellectual” as an oxymoron.

Any attempt to reconcile reason with religion, Malekian argues, will inevitably lead one to reject certain religious rulings, reinterpret others, and search for esoteric meanings behind still others. The conclusion is difficult to escape: it is not possible to be both religious and fully rational.

The task, then, should not be to adapt religion to the present, but to explore how religion might be used as a resource on the path toward spirituality. Islam need not be the only source available on that path. The resources of other religions can serve the same purpose.

Ultimately, however, spirituality is different from religion. In spirituality, the imitation of another person is reduced to a minimum. Pragmatism is given priority. What matters most is not the outcome of the process but the process itself, and the fidelity and sincerity one displays while passing through it.

Malekian argues that religions have performed certain functions throughout history and that at least some of these remain relevant to modern life. Spirituality can assume those continuing functions.

The most important is to give meaning to lives filled with suffering and hardship and to help people live lives that are “happier, better, and more worthwhile.” Such a life allows people to achieve inner peace. This, in turn, becomes possible through the combination of reason and spirituality, with reason understood partly in the pragmatic sense of choosing workable solutions.

Another important function of spirituality is its contribution to social order, because the spiritual person will organize social life around the principles of justice, benevolence, and love. Justice means claiming what one deserves and refusing what one does not. Benevolence means being prepared, when necessary, to surrender even something to which one is entitled for the sake of another. Love means practicing both justice and benevolence through love.

* * *

What is striking in all this is the depth of the challenge mounted by Iranian religious intellectuals. They were not merely searching the Qur’an or Islamic history for passages that could be made compatible with modern political values. They were forced to ask much more difficult questions about the nature of revelation, the historicity of religious knowledge, the authority of jurisprudence, and the boundary between what was permanent in Islam and what belonged to a particular time and place.

The political circumstances help explain why. These arguments developed in the suffocating environment of a religious authoritarian order built after the Islamic Revolution. To challenge that order required challenging not only traditional religion, but also the particular understanding of religion that had helped give the regime its legitimacy.

Tığlı shows the breadth and depth of this challenge remarkably well. She works directly with the books and essays of all four thinkers in Persian. Just as importantly, she reconstructs the objections made against them through the writings of their critics, again in the original language. Those criticisms are valuable because they reveal how far these thinkers had moved from the dominant religious position. Tığlı also traces the earlier history of Iranian religious intellectualism through primary sources.

They say Russians look first at the bibliography before deciding whether an academic book is worth reading. If a bibliography is a book’s CV, Tığlı’s is an impressive one. Of the more than three hundred books and journal or newspaper articles listed there, roughly 240 are in Persian.

Original-language research, of course, does not by itself make a good book. A study of this kind could easily have become almost impenetrable, dense with abstractions and specialist terminology. Tığlı avoids that. Her prose remains remarkably clear despite the difficulty of the material. Given the subject, this is no minor achievement.

The result is a study impressive in its breadth, depth, and command of the material.

Its misfortune, if one can call it that, is that it remains an academic book.

The prose is not dull. The problem lies elsewhere. The organization of the material is academic, and the ideas take precedence over the people who produced them. Yet the intellectual history Tığlı reconstructs contains the material for a remarkable human story.

That story could begin with the revolution itself and continue into the present. The thinkers could enter as the political and religious order around them changed. Their arguments would then appear not simply as positions in an intellectual debate, but as responses to a revolution, a new state, disappointment, exile, repression, and the discovery that religious ideas once deployed against despotism could themselves become instruments of power.

Tığlı gives us the ideas in extraordinary detail. What remains largely outside the frame is the human story in which those ideas acquired their urgency.

That is not necessarily a weakness in an academic study. For a wider readership, it is a missed opportunity.

* * *

Yunus Emre once wrote:

Suppose they stacked jars from earth to sky,
binding each one to the next.
Then suppose they pulled one from underneath.
Just listen to the crash.

Religions are not entirely unlike such structures. Their doctrines, laws, assumptions, and interpretations do not stand separately. They support one another. Alter one part and the consequences can travel much further through the structure than first expected.

This is what makes the Iranian experience so interesting.

It is relatively easy to take one or two verses, a historical episode, or a general principle such as justice and argue that Islam is compatible with democracy, women’s rights, freedom of belief, or even a secular political order. What is much more difficult is to ask what follows from that claim.

If men and women are to be equal, what becomes of the legal rules that distinguish between them? If freedom of belief is accepted as a fundamental right, what happens to rulings concerning apostasy? If sovereignty belongs politically to citizens, what becomes of religious claims to political authority? If modern moral judgments are allowed to invalidate some inherited rulings, on what basis do we decide which parts of the tradition remain binding?

Pulling at one part of the structure leads quickly to another.

Soroush, Shabestari, Kadivar, and ultimately Malekian did not avoid that problem. In different ways, they followed its implications remarkably far. One distinguished religion from religious knowledge. Another historicized interpretation itself. A third placed vast areas of Islamic law outside the domain of permanent religious obligation. Malekian went furthest of all, questioning whether the effort to reconcile religion and reason could ultimately succeed.

The Qur’anic reproach inevitably comes to mind: “Do you then believe in part of the Book and disbelieve in part?”

I do not mean the verse as a ready-made theological answer to the problem. If anything, it captures the difficulty. Once parts of a religious tradition are judged by standards that come from outside the inherited structure, the question becomes how far that process can go before the structure itself has been transformed.

Something similar happened in Turkey during the post-Islamist turn of the 1990s. Islamists increasingly embraced democracy, women’s rights, freedom of religion and conscience, and eventually even forms of secularism. But the reconciliation was often asserted more readily than it was worked through.

Iranian religious intellectuals show how demanding such a reconciliation actually is. If one takes modern commitments seriously, it is not enough to find a verse or precedent that seems to support them. One eventually has to ask what those commitments do to the inherited theology, jurisprudence, and conception of religious authority as a whole.

This is where Tığlı’s book becomes particularly valuable for a Turkish reader.

Its importance lies not only in what it tells us about Iran. It reveals the depth of an intellectual reckoning that post-Islamism in Turkey often began but rarely pursued this far.

They showed Sayyida Ahad bint Abdullah, the wife of Sultan Haitham, visiting the Omani Women’s Association in Salalah. There she met women involved in local associations, looked at their work, and spoke with those taking part.

Is such a visit particularly unusual? In Oman, I think it is. Even more unusual is the public visibility of the Sultan’s wife herself.

For most of Sultan Qaboos’s long reign, there was no equivalent figure in Omani public life. There was a fairly obvious reason. Qaboos had been divorced since the late 1970s and spent almost all of his reign unmarried. Oman therefore never developed anything resembling a first lady tradition.

Haitham’s accession in 2020 made such a role possible. But there was nothing inevitable about his wife becoming a public figure. She could easily have remained largely unseen.

Instead, Sayyida Ahad has slowly begun to appear.

I did not notice it at the time, but her first public appearances came in 2020. Since then she has attended ceremonies, honoured Omani women, presented decorations, received guests, and become associated especially with women, family and social affairs. Looking back, it seems she has been making herself publicly visible slowly and quite deliberately.

That made me think about the wider Gulf.

Women in ruling families have obviously not been politically irrelevant until now. In dynastic monarchies, politics has always run through families as well as institutions. Mothers, wives, sisters and daughters must often have mattered enormously inside palaces.

We simply know much less about that kind of influence than we do about public activity.

There were important exceptions quite early.

King Faisal’s wife, Iffat al-Thunayan, played a major role in the development of girls’ education in Saudi Arabia. She helped establish schools and supported women’s education at a time when doing so was anything but routine.

In the Emirates, Sheikha Fatima bint Mubarak acquired an even larger institutional role. Her name has been attached for decades to women’s organisations, education, welfare and the General Women’s Union.

Yet neither woman became a highly visible public personality in the way we might expect today. Sheikha Fatima is the clearest example. Her activities were widely reported, but for decades even her face remained outside public view.

A woman could therefore have institutions, influence and a substantial public role without becoming visually familiar to the public.

Sheikha Moza bint Nasser of Qatar was different.

She was not the first ruler’s wife in the Gulf to do serious public work. What changed with Moza was the combination of that work with a very high degree of personal visibility.

She helped build Qatar Foundation into one of the central institutions of Qatar’s educational and social ambitions. She appeared at universities and international conferences, gave speeches, travelled abroad and met foreign leaders. Over time she became recognisable well beyond Qatar.

She was not simply visible beside the late Emir Hamad bin Khalifa. She had institutions, projects and a public identity of her own.

In her footsteps we can see her daughter-in-law, Sheikha Jawaher, the first wife of Qatar’s current emir, Tamim bin Hamad.

She does not have anything resembling Sheikha Moza’s institutional presence. But she does appear beside the emir on important occasions, including state visits abroad. During Tamim’s 2024 state visit to Britain, she took part in the formal welcome and the royal carriage procession. And in the visit she even did not cover her hair. That is a step even Sheikha Moza did not take.

Another notable exception is Princess (Amira) Sabeeka bint Ibrahim Al Khalifa, the wife of King Hamad of Bahrain. Amira Sabeeka has chaired the Supreme Council for Women since 2001 and has taken an active part in the state’s efforts to expand women’s participation in public and economic life. Not to the same extent as Sheikha Moza, perhaps, but Amira Sabeeka has also become a publicly visible figure.

I must also note Mohammed bin Rashid’s two wives.

Sheikha Hind bint Maktoum has a significant public role. Her name is attached to charitable work, family programmes, marriage support and social policy. Yet she herself remains remarkably private.

Princess Haya bint Al Hussein, during her marriage to Mohammed bin Rashid, was very different. She was one of the most visible royal women in the Gulf, had a substantial international profile, worked extensively in humanitarian affairs and served as a United Nations Messenger of Peace.

Haya was an unusual case, of course. She was the daughter of King Hussein of Jordan and had already been a public personality before marrying the ruler of Dubai. Her visibility cannot simply be read as evidence of changing norms inside Dubai or the Gulf. Still, during her years there she showed how public the role of a ruler’s wife could become.

Even this kind of ceremonial visibility would once have been unusual in much of the Gulf.

* * *

I value the increasing public visibility and public role of rulers’ wives in the Gulf. I see it as part of a broader state feminism in the region: change promoted from above, often cautiously and within limits set by the state itself.

Some may suspect state feminism. No question it has limits. Gulf governments can expand women’s education, employment and public presence while keeping political life tightly controlled. But that does not make the changes it makes insignificant. In conservative societies, state support can sometimes move social norms faster than they would move on their own.

Despite all its limitations, I still think state feminism can contribute to women’s public presence and, over time, to their rights in the Gulf.

The first treats academic activity as something that stands, at least ideally, above politics. The academic’s task is to find out what is true, explain it to society and, when necessary, show politicians the right course to follow.

There is an assumption about politics buried in this view. Politics is understood largely as a technical activity. Societies face problems. Research helps us understand those problems. Good policy follows from good knowledge. The politician may have to negotiate, persuade and implement, but there is still a sense that somewhere underneath all this there is a correct answer waiting to be discovered.

I used to find this view fairly persuasive. I still think a part of it is indispensable. Facts do not become less true because they are politically inconvenient, and expertise obviously matters.

But the movement from knowledge to politics is not as simple as this picture suggests.

Politics is not only about finding the policy that “works.” It is also about deciding how resources, rights, burdens, risks, status and power are distributed.

Take a tax policy. An economist may be able to tell us that one arrangement will produce more investment than another. That is useful knowledge. But the same arrangement may reduce the tax burden on one group and increase it on another. A migration policy may increase aggregate economic output while depressing wages in particular sectors. A pension reform may improve the long-term finances of the state while asking one generation to carry a larger burden than another.

The empirical question and the political question are related, but they are not identical.

Weber understood this problem rather well. Science can tell us a great deal about the consequences of choosing one course rather than another. It cannot, by itself, decide which consequences society ought to prefer. At some point somebody has to decide which objectives matter more, which costs are tolerable and who should bear them.

That decision is inescapably political in nature.

This is why I am uneasy when academics speak as though “the evidence” has instructed society to adopt a particular political programme. Evidence can eliminate bad arguments. It can expose fantasies. It can show that a policy will probably fail to achieve the purpose claimed for it. But once we begin weighing different purposes and different distributions of costs and benefits, something more than expertise is involved.

The academic who tells politicians what they should do has therefore not escaped politics. A distribution is already contained in the road being recommended.

This first attitude is political in a somewhat concealed way.

The second attitude has no interest in concealing it.

Here the Marxian formulation is much more congenial: the point is not simply to interpret the world but to change it. Academic work is itself part of political struggle. The scholar should not merely describe domination, inequality or exclusion. There are circumstances in which describing them without trying to alter them may itself appear morally questionable.

This position has become familiar across parts of the humanities and social sciences. It does not derive the legitimacy of academic intervention from a claim to political neutrality. Quite the opposite. Its legitimacy comes from political and moral commitment, from standing with those who are deprived, marginalized or oppressed.

I do not think one can answer this position simply by shouting “bias.” That misses the point. An academic working in this tradition is not embarrassed by having political commitments. She does not regard normativity as some accidental contamination that slipped into an otherwise pure academic exercise. The normative purpose is explicit.

The problem arises when being morally right starts to count as evidence that one is also analytically right.

This is the distinction I want to emphasize. Being on the right side politically and being right analytically are two different things. They may coincide. But one cannot serve as evidence for the other.

In that sense, the danger is not political activism as such. It is the possibility that moral authority begins to shade into epistemic authority.

Oddly enough, there is not much difference between the two attitudes.

The first academic imagines that he can rise above politics. He possesses knowledge, and from that knowledge the correct political road can be derived. What disappears from view are the distributive and normative choices contained in that road.

The second does not pretend to rise above politics at all. But the danger there is different: standing on the right side politically can begin to seem like a reason for being right analytically.

The first says, in effect, that he knows because he is objective. The second can come to believe that she knows because she is on the right side.

Perhaps what needs preserving is not the fiction of a politics-free academia, but the distinction between knowing and choosing. Academic inquiry can inform political choices, sometimes decisively. It must not dictate those choices for us. And choosing the right side, however we define it, does not make us more likely to be right about the facts.

* * *

It might sound strange, but the whole discussion reminds me of a Qur’anic verse I have always found striking.

“Stand firm for justice, as witnesses for God, even against yourselves, your parents, or your relatives…” (Qur’an 4:135).

The verse does not ask us to abandon moral commitment. Quite the opposite. It asks us to hold on to it even when doing so requires us to judge against ourselves and those closest to us.

Perhaps that is the distinction worth preserving here as well: commitment to what is right should not become a reason to assume that we are right.

What is strange is not how they see its potential consequences. On that, they may well be right. The process is likely to strengthen Erdoğan’s hand, which is hardly good news for whatever remains of Turkish democracy.

What is strange is their surprise at seeing Kurdish political actors aligned with the government in the process. That surprise seems to rest on an assumption.

The assumption is that the Kurdish movement is, in some fundamental sense, a movement for the democratization of Turkey.

But why should we assume that?

I am not suggesting that Kurdish political actors are hostile to democracy. Nor am I dismissing the democratic language that has become central to Kurdish politics over the past several decades.

My point is narrower. Support for democratization is not the defining purpose of the Kurdish movement.

The Kurdish movement exists because there is a Kurdish question. Whatever else it has become, its political history is inseparable from Kurdish identity, language, political representation, local government and the relationship between Kurds and the Turkish state.

Democratization entered Kurdish political parlance from the 1990s onward. With the emergence of legal Kurdish party politics, it became an increasingly important route through which Kurdish demands could be pursued.

A more democratic Turkey promised greater room for Kurdish identity and political organization. It offered space for demands that had previously been excluded from legal politics.

Kurdish demands and democratization therefore increasingly overlapped.

But overlap is not identity.

The Kurdish movement demanded democratization because democratization offered a route toward Kurdish rights. But there is no reason to assume that democratization is the ultimate end. Kurdish rights may take priority. If those rights can be advanced under a less democratic political arrangement, there is no reason to assume that the movement will place Turkey’s broader democratization ahead of them.

Seen this way, Kurdish cooperation with Erdoğan is less surprising than it appears to parts of the opposition. The more interesting question is why they expected otherwise.

There may be a familiar intellectual habit behind that expectation. During the 2000s, many secular liberals regarded religious conservatives as agents of Turkey’s democratization. There were good reasons for this. Religious conservatives had genuine grievances against the old order, and democratization addressed many of them.

The mistake was to infer that because their interests coincided with democratization under one political order, democratization itself defined their political project.

Later developments showed that these were different propositions.

The Kurdish case is obviously different. But the possible intellectual error is similar: a movement disadvantaged by an illiberal order can develop genuinely democratic demands without making the democratization of the country its defining political purpose.

* * *

Ghassan Salamé once asked whether the Middle East could have Democracy Without Democrats? Turkey’s secular intellectuals may face a different problem. We keep hoping to build democracy with political actors whom we assume to be democrats in the same sense as we are. Then we are disappointed when they turn out to have priorities of their own.

This recurring expectation brings to mind something Jacques Ellul once wrote:

“What amazement is displayed again and again by democrats … when they see that a man selects something else.”

Perhaps there is something almost faith-like in this expectation. A committed democrat does not simply prefer democracy. He tends to regard its superiority as apparent. Much like the religious believer who assumes that someone who truly understands the faith will recognize its truth, we may assume that political actors who experience the benefits of democracy will eventually come to value democracy for its own sake.

But that need not happen. Religious conservatives may demand democratic freedoms because those freedoms protect religious conservatives. A Kurdish movement may demand democratization because democratization advances Kurdish rights. In both cases, the demands can be genuinely democratic without democracy becoming the actor’s overriding political purpose.

Perhaps this is where we repeatedly go wrong. We mistake convergence with our democratic preferences for conversion to them.

Özdemir and Esen have disagreed publicly before. Their latest disagreement concerns one of the most consequential political processes in Turkey today.

For more than forty years, the Turkish state has fought the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. The conflict, concentrated for much of its history in the predominantly Kurdish southeast, has killed more than 40,000 people, displaced large numbers of civilians, consumed enormous public resources and left behind a history of insurgent violence, state violence, village evacuations and unresolved political grievances.

Turkey has tried to end this conflict before. The most important recent attempt, usually called the “solution process,” collapsed in 2015. What followed was another period of intense fighting and, at the same time, a broader authoritarian turn in Turkish politics.

The current process began in October 2024 with an unexpected intervention from Devlet Bahçeli, leader of the Nationalist Movement Party and for decades one of the most uncompromising figures on the Kurdish question. He suggested that imprisoned PKK leader Abdullah Öcalan could call on the organization to disarm and dissolve itself. Öcalan did so in February 2025. The PKK announced in May that it would end its armed struggle and dissolve, and several of its fighters later publicly burned their weapons in northern Iraq. Parliament then created a commission to consider the legal arrangements needed for disarmament and reintegration.

On 10 August 2026, parliament passed what has become known as the “framework law.” Supported by 468 members of the 600-seat parliament, including the governing AK Party, its nationalist MHP ally and the pro-Kurdish DEM Party, the law creates a legal mechanism for dismantling the PKK and reintegrating many of its members. It offers legal protection to some former militants and allows sentences to be suspended in certain cases.

An armed conflict that began in 1984 may finally be approaching its end.

The complication is that this process is unfolding not alongside political liberalization, but amid deepening authoritarianism. Turkey is moving in two directions at once. The state is trying to end its armed conflict with the PKK while increasing pressure on much of the political opposition.

Esen’s objection begins here.

Esen is concerned that the process may strengthen Erdoğan politically without producing any broader democratization. For Esen, then, the Kurdish process is also part of the struggle over Turkey’s political regime.

Özdemir’s objection is simpler. Whatever Erdoğan’s motives, the guns are falling silent. For him, parts of Turkey’s opposition and intellectual class have become so consumed by Erdoğan that they struggle to recognize something as desirable if he stands to benefit from it.

Özdemir’s language toward Esen was insulting and indefensible. But the personal attack also obscured a more serious point in his criticism. Once the insults are stripped away, Özdemir was raising a question that deserves to be taken seriously.

* * *

Suppose you believe that a particular outcome is good. Suppose also that the person pursuing it is someone you oppose, perhaps someone you regard as authoritarian, and that success would make him politically stronger.

What exactly are you being asked to judge: the immediate outcome itself, or its broader political consequences?

The two judgments need not point in the same direction. An end to violence may be good in itself, but may strengthen a government you believe is pushing the political order in a dangerous, perhaps irreversible, direction.

Time makes the problem harder. The good before you may be immediate and tangible. The harm you fear may lie further ahead. Yet refusing the immediate good may itself have consequences, sometimes irreversible ones.

Then there is the question of complicity. If you support a measure you believe is right, knowing that it may strengthen a government you regard as wrong, what exactly have you endorsed? But if you withhold support in order to deny that government a political victory, what responsibility do you bear for the good that may then be lost?

So where is the line?

When does strategic judgment become a betrayal of principle, and when does refusing to think strategically become morally irresponsible?

* * *

I cannot help but recall the memorable words of Thomas Becket in T. S. Eliot’s Murder in the Cathedral:

“And as in time results of many deeds are blended
So good and evil in the end become confounded.”

These words introduce another difficulty. Political strategy requires us to reason from consequences, yet consequences are precisely what we know least well. The further we move into the future, the more other actions intervene, intentions collide and outcomes escape their authors. What appears today as the political price of doing something good may look very different once those consequences have actually unfolded.

“The Hour will not come until the Muslims fight the Jews, and the Muslims kill them, until a Jew hides behind a stone or a tree. Then the stone or the tree will say: ‘O Muslim, O servant of God, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him,’ except for the gharqad, for it is among the trees of the Jews.”

Until the late nineteenth century, it would have been difficult to imagine how such a war might look like.

Jews certainly lived across the Muslim world, from Morocco to Iraq and Yemen. But they lived as dispersed communities, not as a territorially concentrated political community possessing a state, an army and borders. Many of the world’s largest Jewish populations lived in Europe and Russia, where Muslims were small minorities or almost entirely absent.

Hence violence between Muslims and Jews was certainly possible. But that violence could in no way turn into a war in which “the Jews” could face destruction.

Zionism changed that.

Beginning in the late nineteenth century, increasing numbers of Jews migrated to Palestine and built institutions to build a national state. Because that project developed in a land already inhabited overwhelmingly by Palestinian Arabs, it increasingly generated conflict over immigration, land, political power and eventually sovereignty.

The establishment of Israel in 1948 completed the transformation. Jews now possessed what they had lacked for centuries: a sovereign state, territorial concentration and an army capable of fighting other states.

I need to do more systematic research on this. But once Israel was created, some conservative Muslims who took the hadith literally may well have interpreted it as part of the prophecy’s fulfilment, much as some Christian Zionists interpreted the Jewish return to Palestine through their own end-times prophecies.

Yet in the immediate aftermath of the foundation of Israel, history did not unfold as the hadith imagined.

The Arab states that repeatedly fought Israel failed to destroy it. Israel survived the 1948 war, won overwhelmingly in 1967, survived the initial Arab assault in 1973 and gradually established itself as the strongest conventional military power in its immediate neighborhood. Egypt eventually made peace. Jordan made peace. Other Arab governments later established diplomatic or working relationships with Israel.

The region seemed to be moving away from an existential Muslim-Jewish confrontation.

And then, unexpectedly, came Turkey.

Turkey had stood outside the great Arab-Israeli wars. It recognized Israel in 1949 and eventually developed one of Israel’s closest relationships in the Muslim world. By the 1990s, the two countries were strategic partners.

Over the past two decades, however, that relationship has undergone an extraordinary reversal. Turkey and Israel increasingly regard one another not simply as governments with profound political disagreements, but as potential strategic threats.

And this is where one cannot help asking whether the prophecy might become self-fulfilling.

A prophecy does not have to predict the future in order to shape it. Nor does a government have to consciously decide that it is fulfilling a prophecy. It is enough that inherited ideas begin shaping how political actors interpret one another.

The transformation of Turkey’s relationship with Israel has occurred under a religious-conservative government. That does not mean that President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan or those around him conduct foreign policy according to the hadith. We have no evidence for such a claim, and there is no reason to assume it.

But another religious idea has become increasingly important in Turkish interpretations of Israel.

Israel’s regional behavior is often described not merely as aggressive but as expansionist. And in religious-conservative discourse, that alleged expansionism is frequently connected to the idea of Arz-ı Mevud, or the Promised Land.

Erdoğan himself has repeatedly used this language. Pro-government commentators have gone further, interpreting Israeli actions in Palestine, Lebanon, Syria and the Eastern Mediterranean as manifestations of a larger territorial ambition.

The hadith and Arz-ı Mevud do not play symmetrical roles in the argument.

The hadith is an Islamic eschatological tradition about an eventual confrontation between Muslims and Jews.

Arz-ı Mevud, by contrast, enters contemporary Turkish politics primarily as an interpretation of Israeli intentions. Many Turkish conservatives believe that the biblical promise of land helps explain what Israel ultimately wants.

Whether that interpretation accurately describes Israeli state strategy is a separate question. There might be real expansionist currents within Israeli politics. I do not know. And it does not matter. What matters is that perception can become almost as important as intention.

Suppose Turkish leaders, commentators and a broader public increasingly conclude that Israel is not merely an aggressive regional power, but an expansionist state whose ambitions may eventually threaten Turkey itself. Israeli actions then acquire a different meaning. A strike in Syria or opposition to a Turkish military presence there can be read not simply as an attempt to preserve Israeli freedom of action, but as evidence of a larger project. That perception can itself change Turkish behavior. If Israel is seen as a future threat, containing its power becomes prudent policy.

Israel, meanwhile, sees a large Muslim-majority state, governed by leaders deeply hostile to Israeli policy, expanding its military influence in Syria and seeking to constrain Israeli freedom of action. It does not need to believe that Turkey acts on the prophecy to respond. It has perfectly secular reasons to regard Turkey as a strategic threat.

This is how the circle can close. Turkish fears encourage policies that alarm Israel; Israeli countermeasures then appear to confirm the original Turkish diagnosis. A belief that may initially have exaggerated the threat can help produce a more genuine one.

This is where the religious dimension is important. I do not believe that anyone in Ankara consciously decides to fulfill an ancient prophecy. But, contemporary events begin to look sufficiently like the prophecy that it becomes one more lens through which those events are interpreted.

Perhaps prophecies are most dangerous not when they predict the future, but when people begin to recognize the present inside them.

Because once that happens, the prophecy does not have to predict the future.

It only has to help us produce it.

Liberal democracy, he says, is one of humanity’s great achievements. Yet “we are, I think, at the cusp of losing it.” This is because liberal democracy, he argues, failed to adapt to the postindustrial economy and liberalism itself retreated from some of the promises that had made it successful.

Again, I cannot fully engage his argument here, nor is that my intention. What interests me instead is a historical irony that his argument brought to mind.

* * *

Some eighty years ago, a group of liberals shared a concern similar to that of Acemoğlu: they too worried that political freedom might not survive the economic order emerging around them.

One of the most forceful expression of that concern came in 1944 with Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom.

The context in which Hayek wrote it is critical to understanding the book. Europe had seen a major expansion of state power over the economy. Soviet communism represented the most comprehensive version of economic planning, while fascist regimes had also greatly expanded political control over economic life. Economic planning had also gained legitimacy inside democratic societies after the Depression and through wartime mobilization.

Hayek’s concern was not simply that state intervention was inefficient, or that every welfare measure led to dictatorship. His argument was that the more governments decided what should be produced, where resources should go and which goals should take priority, the more political power they needed to impose those choices.

For Hayek, that was the danger: economic planning could gradually become political control.

Three years later, Hayek and several other intellectuals founded the Mont Pelerin Society. Its 1947 statement eerily echoes Acemoğlu’s warning: “The central values of civilization are in danger.” The signatories worried about arbitrary power, the weakening of the individual, and threats to freedom of thought and expression. Private property and competitive markets mattered partly because they kept economic power dispersed rather than concentrated in political hands.

The history that followed did not quite vindicate Hayek’s fears. Western democracies built much larger welfare states after the war, and those systems coexisted with liberal democracy for decades. From the late 1970s onward, however, the balance shifted back toward markets through deregulation, privatization and globalization. By the 1990s, economic liberalization and political liberalization often appeared to be moving together.

Several decades later, Acemoğlu is warning that liberal democracy itself may not survive.

This is where the irony lies.

Mid-twentieth-century liberals worried that too much state control over economic life would eventually destroy political freedom.

Acemoğlu’s warning points in the opposite direction: liberal democracy may now be endangered because the economic order has left too many people without security, voice or a meaningful sense that politics can shape their lives.

The older fear was that politics would dominate the economy. The contemporary fear is that the economy has become too remote from democratic control.

The real irony is that neither fear may have been misplaced.

Hayek saw a real danger. States can destroy liberty. Governments that control too much of economic life can reward supporters, punish opponents, suppress independent institutions and make citizens materially dependent upon political obedience. The twentieth century gave us enough examples.

But state power is not the only threat that should worry liberals. Acemoğlu seems to be pointing to another: excessive economic inequality. He is not arguing for complete equality, let alone equality in any Marxist sense. His concern is that when inequality becomes too great, it can leave large parts of society economically insecure, politically marginalized and increasingly detached from the liberal democratic order.

This can happen even while people remain legally free and continue to possess all the formal liberties Hayek wanted to protect. They may nevertheless increasingly doubt that liberal democracy works for them.

This is where Acemoğlu’s warning becomes the mirror image of the older liberal fear. Hayek worried that attempts to engineer economic equality through concentrated state power could destroy individual liberty. Acemoğlu worries that excessive economic inequality can itself undermine liberal democracy.

Neither fear is obviously misplaced.

* * *

There is, of course, another irony here. The danger Acemoğlu points to is hardly new. Political thinkers have worried for centuries that extreme economic inequality can eventually become political inequality. Polanyi was making a version of the argument in The Great Transformation, published in the same year as Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. While Hayek worried about what happens when politics overwhelms the economy, Polanyi worried about what happens when the market is allowed to overwhelm society.

So perhaps what is new is not the problem. It is that mainstream economics is taking it seriously. If other economists follow Acemoğlu on this, that will be welcome, I think. Economics became extraordinarily sophisticated at explaining how markets allocate resources, create incentives and generate growth. But it left questions about what market outcomes do to political equality, social cohesion and democratic legitimacy largely to other disciplines. With Acemoğlu, they seem to be moving back toward the center of economic debate.

But I find the timing amusing. Eighty years after Hayek and Polanyi issued almost opposite warnings, we seem to be rediscovering that both may have had a point.

Or, as Müslüm Gürses put it rather less academically: “Bu dünyayı yakarsa garipler yakar” or, if translate it, if this world is ever burned down, it will be the dispossessed who burn it.

On August 18, shortly after a Turkish military delegation had visited Abu al-Duhur, Israeli aircraft struck the airbase in northwestern Syria. Eight strikes reportedly hit the runway and storage facilities. The location is striking because Abu al-Duhur lies in Idlib province, far from Israel and close to the Turkish border.

More importantly, Israel itself said Turkey was the reason for the strike. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Syria had been warned not to allow Turkish forces to deploy at the base and that Israel acted after those warnings were ignored. Defence Minister Israel Katz subsequently warned President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan against dragging Turkey into what he called “dangerous adventures” in Syria.

And this was not the first time.

In April 2025, it is reported, Turkish military teams inspected the T4 and Palmyra airbases in Homs province and the main military airport in Hama. Israel then struck all three facilities.

Thus safe to conclude. Turkey explores the use or rehabilitation of Syrian military infrastructure. Israel identifies the prospect of an expanded Turkish military presence as a security problem. It then demonstrates that it is willing to destroy that infrastructure before such a presence becomes established.

The important question is why.

* * *

What does Ankara want? Its longer-term ambitions are open to speculation. But in the short to medium term, its objective is relatively clear: a territorially intact, unitary and centrally governed Syrian state in which Damascus exercises effective authority throughout the country and possesses a single national military capable of sustaining that authority

Turkey repeatedly insists on Syria’s territorial integrity. It opposes autonomous political-military entities inside the country and has been particularly clear that armed formations must ultimately come under the authority of Damascus.

Fidan put the principle bluntly earlier this year. A sovereign and unitary state, he argued, cannot contain two armies. There must be “one single army commanded by one single authority.”

Turkey is also helping Damascus acquire the means to do this.

In August 2025, Turkey and Syria formalized military cooperation under an agreement providing for training, consultancy, logistical assistance and the supply of weapons systems and military equipment to the new Syrian armed forces.

The Turkish project in Syria is therefore, at least partly, a state-building project. Ankara wants to turn Syrian sovereignty from something recognized on maps into something exercised on the ground.

That requires an army. It requires bases. Eventually, it requires aircraft, drones, radar, command systems and some ability to control Syrian airspace.

And this is where Turkish state-building begins to collide with Israeli security policy.

* * *

Turkey, then, has a relatively clear idea of what Syria should become. Israel’s position is different. Its policy is defined less by a preferred political order for Syria than by what Syria must not be allowed to become.

Above all, it must not become militarily capable enough, whether on its own or with Turkish assistance, to threaten Israel or substantially restrict Israeli freedom of action.

That concern is understandable from Israel’s perspective. Since the Syrian civil war, Israel has enjoyed extraordinary freedom to operate militarily inside Syria. Turkish-backed reconstruction of Syrian military capacity could begin to narrow that freedom. Radar, air-defence systems, aircraft, drones or Turkish personnel based in Syria would all make Israeli operations more difficult and potentially more dangerous.

This is where the same development acquires opposite meanings. For Ankara, rebuilding Syria’s military capacity is part of restoring Syrian sovereignty. For Israel, it may amount to creating precisely the constraints it has spent years trying to avoid.

And that is why the distinction between threatening Israel and constraining Israel matters. Syria does not necessarily have to become capable of attacking Israel to cross an Israeli red line. It may only have to become capable of making it harder for Israel to attack Syria.

* * *

Neither Ankara nor Jerusalem may be seeking war. But the policies they are pursuing in Syria could still lead them toward one. Israel has already shown that it is prepared to use force to enforce its red lines in Syria. Turkey, meanwhile, is deepening a state-building project whose military dimension may increasingly cross those red lines.

For the moment, Ankara can absorb Israeli strikes, condemn them and continue rebuilding. But that strategy has limits. If Israel continues destroying military infrastructure that Turkey considers necessary for restoring Syrian sovereignty, Ankara will eventually confront a harder choice: accept an Israeli veto over the Syria it is helping to build, or begin to protect that project.

At that point, mechanisms designed to prevent accidental clashes will not solve the problem. The confrontation will no longer be accidental.

The question is therefore not whether Turkey or Israel wants a war in Syria. It is how long they can pursue increasingly incompatible policies there without producing one.

The first two objections seem to me fair and properly scholarly. Groundbreaking work that has shaped an entire field ought to be re-examined. The same is true of the theoretical objection. “Institutions matter” can easily become circular if institutions are defined too expansively, or identified retrospectively as whatever produced a successful outcome. None of this implies incompetence or misconduct. It is simply what happens when influential research is subjected to serious scrutiny.

The third criticism is, however, different. It is political, even if it starts scholarly in the beginning.

Acemoğlu might have really underestimated AI’s productive potential. Whether he did so or not remains an empirical question and a question time will answer. But that is not Acemoğlu’s whole argument about AI. He warns that technological capability and social progress are not necessarily the same thing. That warning seems perfectly sensible to me.

AI could become extraordinarily powerful. But, it can still develop in a direction that concentrates wealth, displaces workers, weakens bargaining power and transfers decisions of enormous public consequence to a small number of corporations. The danger Acemoğlu sees is not AI’s failure, but a kind of success whose political and social terms may be damaging.

That is why “pessimism” seems the wrong word to me. It makes the disagreement sound temperamental: confidence on one side, fear on the other. The actual disagreement is about politics.

One way of looking at technology is to regard it as a largely autonomous engine of progress. Markets, entrepreneurs and engineers discover what is possible; rising productivity eventually benefits society; politics should be careful not to obstruct innovation. At its most ambitious, this view imagines that technological progress will gradually dissolve the conflicts produced by scarcity. As those conflicts recede, politics gives way to administration and democratic judgment yields more and more ground to technical competence.

Another view begins from the premise that technology never develops outside politics. Research priorities, business models and patterns of automation are shaped by ownership, tax policy, intellectual-property law, state procurement and corporate power. Technology does not merely give us useful things. It also rearranges relationships among people: who commands, who depends, who becomes replaceable and who captures the gains.

This is hardly a new quarrel. Liberalism has long been divided over the relationship between economic and political freedom. Social and democratic liberals did not reject economic liberty. They believed, however, that it had to be restrained when concentrated private power threatened effective freedom and equal citizenship. Market liberals replied that private property, competition and freedom from political direction were themselves indispensable protections of political liberty. Much of the neoliberal revival inherited this second concern, although early neoliberalism was not simply laissez-faire and often gave the state an important role in constructing and protecting competitive markets. Modern libertarianism carried the priority given to economic freedom further still. The history is not a neat, linear progression. But the old question remains: should political liberty discipline economic power, or is economic liberty the necessary foundation of political liberty?

AI gives this old argument a new intensity. Acemoğlu fears that technological power left in private hands will hollow out democratic citizenship. The Economist does not spell out an alternative political theory, but its closing questions are revealing: who is the “we” that should steer AI, and who will decide which technologies complement human beings? These are fair questions. But they clearly reflect a familiar market-liberal concern that collective direction may constrain experimentation and place innovation in the hands of authorities lacking sufficient knowledge or legitimacy. The article does not put the matter in these terms, but the disagreement can be read as one within liberalism, over the relationship between economic freedom and democratic control.

The Economist’s question has particular force because collective direction usually means the exercise of state power. Markets do not steer technology in quite the same way. Firms experiment, investors bear risks and users retain some freedom to choose, giving market-led innovation a decentralization that public direction cannot easily reproduce. But this does not make the existing trajectory wholly neutral. AI is developing within laws, incentives and ownership structures that favour some possibilities over others, and the concentration of capital and technical infrastructure gives a small number of firms unusual influence over the available choices. The question, then, is not whether the state should replace the market in directing innovation. It is whether market experimentation alone is sufficient when its consequences extend well beyond those directly participating in it.

Once the issue turns to the proper relationship between market experimentation and political direction, Acemoğlu’s scholarly record cannot decide it. His settler-mortality paper may be less robust than once believed, and his theory of institutions may be excessively elastic. These objections give us good reasons not to accept his authority uncritically, but they do not establish that the present direction of technological development is inevitable or politically legitimate. Yet the article’s structure encourages the reader to carry doubts about Acemoğlu’s scholarship into a separate argument about democratic control.

That, I think, is the real point of contention. What troubles The Economist is not simply Acemoğlu’s alleged pessimism, but his refusal to treat the technological future as something that merely happens to us. Once technology is understood as political, the question is no longer only what AI will be able to do. It is also who will decide what AI is for.

There is transformational leadership; authentic leadership; servant leadership; ethical leadership; inclusive leadership; empowering leadership; humble leadership; spiritual leadership; and ambidextrous leadership.

I am told that the literature contains many more, and I doubt that the field is finished. So what exactly annoys me? Two things, I think.

First, the field slides too easily from diagnosis to treatment. It begins as the study of how business leaders operate and ends as a prescription for how they should operate. Taken together, these leadership concepts read less like an analysis of leadership than a moral curriculum for the executive class.

Second, the vocabulary expands faster than the field’s explanatory power. Considered separately, each leadership concept sounds plausible. The difficulty appears when we place it beside its neighbours. Does “humble leadership” explain any conduct or outcome that servant, ethical or authentic leadership cannot? Do these concepts have genuinely different causes or consequences? Or are they merely different bundles drawn from the same stock of desirable traits?

Give every modest variation its own name and you do not necessarily get greater precision. You may simply get a more fragmented field.

* * *

The field of International Relations gives me the same unease. Here too, description slides into prescription, while the vocabulary grows faster than what it explains.

Here the preferred noun is not leadership but power. We have hard power, soft power, smart power, sharp power, normative power, civilian power, structural power, network power and bridging power.

Today I came across another one: ‘bridging power.’ I understood the expression immediately. A bridging power is supposedly a state that maintains relationships across rival camps, communicates between them, convenes parties and brokers compromises. What sounds like a description of geopolitical position soon becomes a prescribed diplomatic role and a flattering account of existing policy.

Then there is the explanatory problem. “Bridging power” blurs together a geopolitical position, a diplomatic strategy, a role and an outcome. An intermediate position may create an opportunity to mediate, but it does not confer influence. A state may speak to rival camps simply to hedge its risks or host negotiations without shaping their outcome. And it may call itself a bridge because “fence-sitter” lacks the desired grandeur.

Perhaps ‘bridging’ names a diplomatic role. But a role is not necessarily a form of power. Nor is it clear what the term explains that brokerage, mediation, convening, coalition-building and hedging do not. If it merely gathers familiar activities beneath a more attractive name, the vocabulary has expanded while the explanation has remained where it was.

* * *

I suspect that the two problems are connected. In both fields, those who study practice also want to steer it. Leadership scholars offer executives models to imitate. Foreign-policy analysts offer states roles to inhabit: normative power, civilian power, bridging power.

Once concepts begin functioning as scripts, there is an incentive to keep producing new scripts for practitioners to follow. Each new leadership ideal or diplomatic role can then be presented as a new analytical category.

Trying to influence practice is not the problem. Medicine, law and engineering do it openly. The trouble begins when guidance is presented as diagnosis. ‘Transformational leader’ and ‘bridging power’ sound like descriptions, but each carries an instruction. Each names an actor and tells it what to become.

Influence also runs back the other way. Executives and governments want language that dignifies what they do; scholars want real-world actors who appear to embody their concepts. A scholar names a desirable role, practitioners adopt the language, and their adoption is later cited as evidence that the category identifies something real. Practice and analysis begin to manufacture one another.

Almost all parties in parliament showed a considerable degree of internal cohesion and discipline. Of the AKP deputies, 268 participated in the vote and all voted in favor. The same was true of the MHP, with all 44 participating deputies voting yes, and the DEM Party, with all 55 participating deputies voting yes. All 29 İYİ Party deputies who participated voted against the law. Even the newly split CHP produced 29 votes in favor and only two against.

Of all political parties, the newly founded Yeni Parti, which recently split from the CHP, was the striking exception: 35 of its deputies voted for the law and 54 against it, while two did not participate.

Party leader Özgür Özel voted yes, along with much of the party leadership, in sharp contrast to the majority of his parliamentary group.

This was partly by design. Before the vote, Yeni Parti decided that its leadership would support the law while other deputies would be free to vote according to their own judgment and the sensitivities of their constituencies.

One can reasonably present this as the beauty of internal party democracy. It is. But it is not good news for Turkey.

The vote revealed just how little internal consolidation is there in Yeni Parti. On one of the most consequential political questions facing the country, its leadership went one way and most of its parliamentary group another.

The split points to a larger problem.

Yeni Parti has a program. It promises parliamentary democracy, separation of powers, social-democratic economic policies, equal citizenship, a stronger welfare state and a solution to the Kurdish question after the end of terrorism.

All of this sounds good. But the party is trying to appeal simultaneously to constituencies whose political preferences do not always fit comfortably together. It wants to retain the secular and nationalist core of the old CHP electorate while attracting Kurdish voters. It wants to reach conservatives who remain uncomfortable with the CHP tradition without alarming voters protective of the party’s secular identity. It speaks the language of social democracy while remaining open to the center-right.

The framework-law vote showed what happens when these constituencies pull in different directions. The leadership supported the law. Most deputies opposed it. Rather than settle the disagreement, the party allowed both positions to stand.

This is why Yeni Parti looks directionless. It has policies, slogans and a written program. What is unclear is which commitments take priority when they conflict.

There is a longer history behind this problem.

Erdoğan built a durable electoral coalition, and defeating him required bringing together groups that would not normally support the same party or candidate. The opposition therefore sought to widen its electoral base as much as possible.

The electoral logic was obvious. No single opposition constituency was large enough to defeat Erdoğan.

But preserving such a coalition made ambiguity politically valuable. A clear position could gain votes from one constituency while costing votes somewhere else. Avoiding difficult choices gradually became part of the strategy.

This was the recurring weakness of the old CHP, out of which Yeni Parti emerged. Its strategy depended not on a solid program of reform, but on the expectation that Erdoğan would eventually become weak enough to defeat. Economic deterioration would reduce his support. Authoritarianism would alienate more voters. His governing coalition would begin to fracture. The opposition’s task was to avoid alienating anyone and wait until enough voters wanted change.

The CHP had no genuine program. It had slogans and an electoral strategy: keep the anti-Erdoğan coalition together, avoid alienating any major constituency, and wait for Erdoğan to weaken.

Yeni Parti appears to have inherited exactly the same strategy.

And that raises a more immediate question: can this strategy defeat Erdoğan at all?

Keeping together voters who already oppose Erdoğan is only part of the task. Yeni Parti also has to persuade people who have voted for the AKP, or who remain undecided, to move toward it.

That requires giving them some idea of what the party actually wants to do with Turkey. The more Yeni Parti worries about disappointing one part of its coalition, the harder it becomes to tell voters what its priorities are.

To use a Turkish metaphor, the party seems determined to hand out flowers to everyone. That may keep a broad coalition together. It does not necessarily give anyone outside that coalition a reason to join it.

Perhaps the calculation is that Erdoğan will eventually weaken enough for this not to matter. Economic hardship, political fatigue and dissatisfaction with the government may push enough voters toward the opposition.

The Turkish opposition has been waiting for that moment for a long time.

It has not yet defeated Erdoğan.

The law was adopted as part of the government’s effort to create a “Terörsüz Türkiye,” or “Terror-Free Turkey.” The “terror” in that formulation refers primarily to the armed activities of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or the PKK, which has waged an insurgency against the Turkish state for more than four decades.

The law does not grant an immediate amnesty or cancel existing convictions, but creates a staged process.

This is how the process will unfold.

Step 1: The PKK must complete its dissolution and disarm

The PKK has already taken the decision to dissolve and end its armed struggle. It must now implement that decision by ending its effective existence and surrendering the weapons and ammunition under its control.

Step 2: The Turkish state must verify that this has happened

Turkish security institutions must verify that the organization has ended its effective existence and surrendered its weapons.

Turkey’s National Security Council, or MGK, must then confirm that finding. Its decision must be published in the Resmî Gazete, the official gazette.

Step 3: Eligible individuals must apply

Once the MGK decision is published, individuals who want to benefit from the law have six months to apply.

The law covers people investigated, prosecuted or convicted for establishing or directing the PKK, membership in the organization, knowingly assisting it, propaganda, crimes committed within the framework of its activities, and terrorism-financing offenses committed on its behalf.

Applications can be made to the relevant public prosecutor or to an institution designated under the law.

I should also note that there are important exclusions. Intentional killings committed within the activities of the organization are excluded. The law also excludes certain offenses committed before 1 June 2005 that carry life imprisonment or aggravated life imprisonment. (1)

Step 4: Investigations, trials and sentences are suspended

Once an eligible individual applies, the legal process is suspended.

For people who are still under investigation or on trial, investigations and prosecutions are suspended. For offenses carrying a maximum sentence of 15 years or less, the suspension lasts five years. For offenses carrying more than 15 years, life imprisonment or aggravated life imprisonment, it lasts ten years.

For people who have already received a final conviction, execution of their sentence is suspended. Sentences totalling 15 years or less are suspended for five years. Sentences exceeding 15 years, including life imprisonment and aggravated life imprisonment, are suspended for ten years.

For people currently held in detention while awaiting trial, courts must also reconsider detention and other judicial-control measures.

Step 5: The individual enters a five- or ten-year conditional period

The suspension is not unconditional.

During the five- or ten-year period, the individual must not commit another terrorism offense.

If another terrorism offense is committed, the suspension ends.

For someone under investigation or on trial, the original criminal proceedings resume.

For someone already convicted, execution of the original sentence resumes.

The law also allows some legal disabilities arising from investigations, prosecutions or convictions to be removed before the full suspension period has expired.

For a person subject to a five-year suspension, the board overseeing the process can request this after two years.

For a person subject to a ten-year suspension, it can do so after three years.

The final decision belongs to the relevant court.

Step 6: If no new terrorism offense is committed, the legal process ends

If the individual completes the five- or ten-year period without committing another terrorism offense, the original case or sentence is brought to an end.

If the case was still at the investigation stage, prosecutors issue a decision not to prosecute.

If a trial had already begun, the court dismisses the case.

If the individual had already been convicted, the sentence is considered to have been served.

In short, the process established by the law is as follows:

1. completion of dissolution and disarmament

2. verification by Turkish security institutions and confirmation by the MGK

3. individual application

4. suspension of proceedings or sentences for five or ten years

5. a conditional period with no new terrorism offense

6. termination of the case or completion of the sentence

(1) I am not a legal scholar, but this exclusion appears likely to have a generational effect. Many of the PKK’s senior cadres were already active before 1 June 2005 and may therefore be excluded if the offenses attributed to them fall within the categories carrying life or aggravated life imprisonment. In practice, the mechanism may consequently be more accessible to members who joined the organization later. The law itself, however, does not distinguish between older and younger cadres.*

The agreement will inevitably generate another round of discussion about Saudi Arabia’s attempt to diversify its security relationships and reduce its dependence on the United States. There is little new to say about that. Saudi Arabia has been diversifying for years.

A more interesting question is whether the new agreement can actually deter an attack.

I have argued before that the Gulf states have many security partners, but only the United States appeared both willing and able to fight a major war on their behalf.

Pakistan’s behavior during the recent Iran war requires some qualification of that argument. Pakistan already had a mutual defense agreement with Saudi Arabia when Iran attacked the kingdom. And Pakistan responded.

Its response was far from symbolic. Pakistan deployed around 8,000 troops to Saudi Arabia, together with a squadron of fighter aircraft, drones and an air-defense system. Reuters described it as a substantial, combat-capable force intended to support Saudi Arabia if it came under further attack.

But there was also a clear limit to what Pakistan did.

It helped defend Saudi Arabia. But it did not go to war against Iran.

That distinction remains important. Pakistan has strong reasons to avoid such a war, which would impose enormous costs on the country.

The same is true of Turkey.

Turkey is a serious military power. It has a large military, considerable experience operating beyond its borders and an increasingly capable domestic defense industry. It could send aircraft, reinforce air defenses, provide drones and intelligence, and deploy troops. But a direct Turkish-Iranian war would impose enormous costs on the country.

Together, Turkey and Pakistan could therefore substantially strengthen Saudi Arabia’s ability to defend itself.

And Turkey and Pakistan are also capable of striking Iran in the event of war. Nor is it impossible that either could sustain a prolonged conflict. Iraq, after all, fought Iran for eight years. The harder question is what such a war would cost.

A serious campaign would require them to strike Iranian military capabilities, defend Saudi and perhaps their own territory against retaliation, absorb losses and continue fighting as the economic and political costs accumulated.

Both countries could fight such a war. What is much less clear is whether either would be willing to pay its enormous costs on Saudi Arabia’s behalf.

But that uncertainty is itself the point. A defense agreement is valuable not only for what its members can do once war begins, but also for what an adversary expects them to do before deciding whether to attack. Iran does not need to know with certainty how Turkey and Pakistan would respond. But it does need to take seriously the possibility that attacking Saudi Arabia could bring both countries into the conflict.

A security guarantee does not have to reproduce American war-fighting capabilities in order to deter an attack.

Deterrence works if an adversary believes that the expected costs of attacking will exceed the expected gains. Iran does not have to believe that Turkey and Pakistan could defeat it in a prolonged war. It has to believe that attacking Saudi Arabia carries a serious risk of bringing Turkey and Pakistan into the conflict.

That requires much less than demonstrating an ability to defeat Iran in a prolonged war.

The alliance with Turkey and Pakistan might therefore provide Saudi Arabia something more limited but still extremely important. It could increase the number of actors Iran risks fighting and raise the expected cost of escalation, even if neither country can conduct an American-style campaign.

The central problem is therefore not simply capability.

It is credibility.

Alliances deter when adversaries believe them.

Pakistan has already taken one step toward making its commitment credible. It demonstrated that an attack on Saudi Arabia could bring Pakistani military forces into the theater. But it also demonstrated the possible limits of that commitment by avoiding a direct war with Iran.

Turkey now enters the equation.

Saudi Arabia may not have acquired two substitutes for the United States. It may instead have acquired two regional powers whose involvement makes the consequences of attacking it considerably more difficult to predict.

That could be enough to matter.

The new pact therefore faces two very different tests. If deterrence fails, Turkey and Pakistan would face a much harder question: how far they are actually willing to go, and how much cost they are prepared to bear, in defending Saudi Arabia.

But before deterrence fails comes another question.

Can they persuade Iran that attacking Saudi Arabia means risking conflict with them as well?

If Tehran believes the answer is yes, the agreement could significantly strengthen Saudi security without ever being tested in war.

And that, after all, is what a successful defense pact is supposed to accomplish.

Yet two different arguments are being made under that single word. The first is that the international system imposed secularism on the founders of the Republic. The second is that those founders then imposed it on a Muslim population.

Both claims contain an element of truth. The Ottoman Empire and the Turkish Republic operated within an unequal international order. Republican secularization was also introduced from above and enforced through an authoritarian state. Neither fact, however, is sufficient to explain why Turkey adopted the particular form of secularism that it did.

The language of imposition becomes misleading when it removes the agency of Turkish political actors and imagines the population as a uniform Muslim community whose natural political order was self-evident.

What did the International System Impose?

Throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Ottoman leaders faced intense international pressure. Military defeats, foreign debt, diplomatic intervention, territorial losses and the extraterritorial privileges enjoyed by foreign powers sharply restricted their choices.

The capitulations were central to this unequal order. They allowed foreigners and certain protected communities to remain partly outside Ottoman jurisdiction. Their abolition therefore became a major objective of Ottoman and later Turkish leaders. Legal reform was not simply an attempt to imitate Europe. It was also a struggle to recover sovereignty.

But the international system did not arrive with a detailed programme for Turkish secularism. It did not specify which courts should be abolished, which legal codes should be adopted or what institutional relationship should exist between religion and the state.

It created pressures and incentives. Ottoman and Turkish leaders devised their own responses.

This process had already begun long before the Republic. Nineteenth-century Ottoman statesmen introduced new commercial and criminal codes, created new courts and reorganized the administration of justice. The legal order that emerged was neither fully Islamic nor simply European. It combined Islamic law, state legislation, imported codes and new administrative practices.

The Republic radicalized this process, but it did not invent it.

Nor did the Treaty of Lausanne instruct Turkey to secularize. Turkish negotiators wanted to abolish the capitulations and secure recognition of the new state’s legal sovereignty. Republican leaders subsequently concluded that a unified and secular legal order would strengthen that sovereignty and prevent foreign powers from using minority protection or legal difference as grounds for intervention.

One may dispute their diagnosis. One may also criticize the reforms they selected. But they were not passive recipients of a programme written elsewhere. They identified their own political objectives and chose the means through which they hoped to achieve them.

External pressure constrained their choices. It did not eliminate their agency.

A wider comparison makes this clear. The same international order confronted governments in the Ottoman Empire, Iran, Japan, China, Egypt and Tunisia, although the forms and intensity of pressure differed. These governments did not all adopt the same institutions. Some borrowed European law selectively. Some maintained religious courts. Some created parallel systems. Some pursued far more radical reforms than others.

If the international system had dictated one precise result, it should have produced similar outcomes across these societies. It did not.

Was Secularism Imposed on a Muslim Population?

The second claim concerns domestic politics. It holds that the republican elite imposed secularism upon a population whose social and political life was fundamentally Islamic.

There is no reason to deny the coercive character of early republican reform. The religious courts were abolished. The caliphate and religious schools were closed. Sufi orders were banned. European legal codes were adopted. These changes were not produced through an open democratic process. They were enacted by a one-party state determined to transform society.

Some people supported these reforms. Others resisted them or experienced them as attacks on their institutions, beliefs and ways of life. Any serious account of Turkish secularism must acknowledge this conflict.

The problem begins when this history is reduced to the claim that secularism was imposed upon “a Muslim people,” as though the population possessed a single religious identity and a common political will.

Late Ottoman and early republican society was not uniform. It included Sunni Muslims, Alevis, non-Muslims, religious scholars, Sufi communities, secular intellectuals, reformists, conservatives, urban professionals and rural populations with widely differing relationships to religious practice. Even among observant Muslims, there was no agreement about how Islamic principles should be translated into modern law or political institutions.

To describe the population simply as Muslim tells us very little about what kind of legal or political system it wanted.

The claim also depends on a second assumption: that Islam provided a complete, uniform and uncontested set of rules for every sphere of life.

Islam clearly contains legal, moral and political teachings. Islamic jurisprudence regulated important areas such as marriage, inheritance, property and commerce. It would be mistaken to present Islam as a purely private faith.

But Muslim societies were never governed by a single and unchanging Islamic code. The Ottoman legal order drew upon the sharia, sultanic law, administrative regulation, local custom and the rules of different religious communities. The balance among these sources varied across periods, regions and areas of law.

There was no pure Islamic system that remained intact until the Republic suddenly replaced it with secular law.

The idea of Islam as a complete and all-encompassing social system also has a modern history. Some Orientalist writers depicted Islam as a civilization in which religion, law and politics were inseparable. Modern Islamists, whether through engagement with such arguments or through their own responses to colonialism and secularization, also presented Islam as a comprehensive political and ideological order.

That formulation should not simply be projected backward onto the whole of Islamic history.

What the Language of Imposition Conceals

The problem is not the claim that Turkish secularism involved international pressure and domestic coercion. It plainly involved both.

The problem arises when these facts are turned into a complete explanation.

The international system constrained Ottoman and Turkish leaders, but it did not write the republican programme for them. Republican leaders selected among different possibilities and pursued goals they defined for themselves.

The republican state imposed reforms, but it did not impose them upon a society possessing a single political will or an uncontested Islamic order. The population was divided, and the legal tradition it inherited was already plural and changing.

Secularism in Turkey emerged from several forces at once: international inequality, Ottoman reform, struggles over sovereignty, republican state-building, modernist thought, domestic conflict and the choices of Turkish political actors.

Calling this history an imposition captures only part of what happened. It identifies real pressure and real coercion, but then mistakes them for the whole explanation.

The strongest version of the imposition thesis therefore rests not simply on historical facts, but on questionable assumptions about those facts: that foreign pressure eliminated local agency, that Muslim society possessed a single political will and that Islam offered a complete and uncontested institutional order waiting to govern the modern state.

It is Political.

This may sound like a purely academic or intellectual debate. It is not. Many in Turkey fear that the claim that secularism was imposed from abroad and then forced upon a Muslim population forms part of a broader political effort to weaken the legitimacy of the secular Republic. By recasting secularism as an alien intrusion rather than a product of Ottoman reform, republican state-building and domestic political choice, this narrative may help prepare the ground for further changes to the secular character of the state.

It is difficult to prove that every contribution to this debate belongs to a coordinated political strategy. Nor should historical arguments be dismissed merely because they may have political consequences. But those consequences cannot be ignored. When a complex history is reduced to a story of foreign imposition and popular victimhood, the result is not simply a new interpretation of the past. It can also become a means of legitimizing a different political future.

Since then, CHP municipalities and party figures have faced an expanding series of investigations, arrests and court interventions. Ekrem İmamoğlu was imprisoned, elected mayors were targeted, and an Ankara court eventually annulled the party congress that had replaced Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu with Özgür Özel. The ruling coalition thus demonstrated that it could intervene not only in opposition municipalities, but also in the leadership of the country’s largest opposition party.

In the shadow of this much larger assault, however, another development is unfolding that appears, at first sight, more difficult to explain.

The legal machinery has not been directed exclusively at government opponents. Rasim Ozan Kütahyalı, one of the most recognizable pro-government television personalities of the Erdoğan era, was detained in May 2026 and later imprisoned as part of a large investigation into illegal betting, fraud, bribery and money laundering. Cem Küçük, another prominent pro-government commentator, was detained in July on accusations that included blackmail and publicly spreading misleading information.

The allegations against Kütahyalı and Küçük may be genuine. But in a political system characterized by selective prosecution, that does not settle the question.

The important issue is not merely whether an offence occurred. It is why the law was activated against these particular people, at this particular moment, in a country where proximity to power has often provided protection from investigation.

The question, then, is how the targeting of prominent pro-government figures fits into the broader transformation of Turkey’s political order.

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Still, I could not help feeling puzzled as I watched it.

What first caught my attention was the actress playing Mary. Noa Cohen is a young Israeli Jewish woman. I had no objection to this. On the contrary, it seemed quite fitting. Mary was Jewish, after all. But Cohen’s achievement goes well beyond the appropriateness of the casting. She gives a beautiful and deeply convincing performance. She made me feel that Mary was genuinely a holy person, not through exaggerated piety, but through her quiet dignity, compassion and inner certainty. Even when Mary is frightened or uncertain, that sense of holiness never leaves her. The film’s images of her holding the infant Jesus are the culmination of her performance. They are tender and serene because Cohen has already convinced us of Mary’s holiness.

But what puzzled me was not simply that a Jewish actress was playing Mary. It was the way the film presented the relationship between Judaism and the birth of Christianity. Again and again, it seemed determined to remind the viewer that Jesus emerged from within Judaism, fulfilled its deepest expectations and was welcomed by the Jewish figures to whom the film grants moral and spiritual authority.

Jesus, Mary and Joseph were Jewish, and Christianity began within their world. But Mary goes beyond reminding us of this ancestry. It presents an unusually harmonious account of Jewish-Christian continuity.

The film does not pretend that every Jew accepts Mary. At one point, a crowd attempts to stone her after discovering that she is pregnant. Its members call her a disgrace and demand God’s punishment. Elsewhere, the film refers to Pharisaic discontent, rumors of a savior and accusations of zealotry. But it does not explain clearly how these elements are connected.

Herod occupies another discredited position. Although he calls himself king of the Jews, the film separates him from the Jewish population. He appears as a Roman-backed despot ruling over a people who do not truly accept him.

The film therefore acknowledges opposition to Mary and Jesus without allowing that opposition to represent Judaism.

Herod does not represent it. The violent crowd does not represent it.

Who does?

Mary’s family does. Joseph does. The sages and prophets who recognize Mary’s importance do. Those awaiting the restoration of the House of David do. Simeon and Anna do. Finally, the people who receive the infant Jesus in the Temple do.

The film does not suggest that every Jew welcomed Jesus. Its suggestion is subtler: within its moral world, the Jews who matter did.

This does not necessarily make the film dishonest. It may simply reflect the fact that Mary is a Christian film telling a Christian story through a principal cast made up largely of Israeli Jewish actors. From within that story, the arrival of Jesus fulfils rather than contradicts Jewish hope. But it is Jewish actors who give that hope its human face.

And that brings me back to the film’s most beautiful images.

Noa Cohen holds the infant Jesus. She looks frightened, exhausted and protective. The child rests in the arms of a young Jewish woman from Israel. I do not know whether the filmmakers intended those images to convey anything beyond the story they were telling. Nor do I need to know.

I only know the feeling they left with me.

Christianity is not presented as a faith born against Judaism. It is presented as a faith born in the arms of a Jewish mother.

On July 24, Özgür Özel and ninety members of parliament resigned from the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, and founded the Yeni Parti, the New Party. Their departure followed a court ruling that annulled the CHP congress of 2023, removed Özel from the chairmanship and restored his predecessor, Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, to the party leadership.

Their decision to leave the party in which they had built their political careers is telling. It suggests that Özel and his supporters had lost any remaining hope that the dispute could be resolved through an independent judicial process. Given the prevailing conditions in Turkey, that conclusion hardly requires a leap of imagination.

The hostility of the political environment may produce resignation. If it does not, Turkey may be about to witness an epic democratic struggle.

Why?

The last presidential and parliamentary elections, followed by the municipal elections of 2024, demonstrated that Turkey has a large and resilient opposition electorate. That electorate is not new. The opposition’s recurring problem has been its inability to unite these voters, expand beyond its established constituencies and convert widespread dissatisfaction with the government into national power.

Those voters have not disappeared with the division of the CHP. They remain politically available.

This gives the Yeni Parti an unusual opportunity. But it must pursue that opportunity in a political environment dominated by the ruling coalition, which exercises overwhelming influence over state institutions, still commands the support of a considerable part of Turkish society, and has already shown that opposition leaders, mayors and party organizations may face sustained judicial pressure.

The decisive question is whether the party can turn these conditions into a source of political seriousness and determination.

Its leaders may simply retreat into the familiar routines of opposition politics tolerated by the system: issuing statements, contesting elections, managing expectations and waiting for the government to weaken.

If they do, the Yeni Parti may eventually become another manageable opposition party within the political system.

Or they may understand the creation of the party as the beginning of a larger democratic struggle.

That choice will define the Yeni Parti.

If it chooses the latter path, the party should see and present itself as the vehicle of a grand democratic struggle.

That is not merely a matter of rhetoric. It is how the party can distinguish itself from the CHP and from the other opposition parties that have gradually adjusted themselves to the limits of the existing political order. A sense of historic purpose may also help mobilize an opposition electorate that remains large, angry and politically alive, but has repeatedly been disappointed by the failure of opposition parties to convert that energy into power.

Such a strategy would almost certainly provoke a response from the ruling coalition. A party that presents itself as an ordinary participant can be contained. A party that seeks to turn opposition discontent into a sustained democratic challenge will be treated as a threat. Investigations, prosecutions, political pressure and attempts to divide or exhaust it should therefore be expected.

The real test will be whether the Yeni Parti can withstand that backlash while remaining firmly within democratic politics. It must neither retreat into harmless opposition nor allow repression to push it outside democratic and electoral politics. Its strength will lie in demonstrating that determined resistance and democratic commitment can coexist.

If it succeeds, the consequences may extend beyond the existing opposition electorate. Voters who continue to support the ruling coalition may begin to reconsider their position if they see an opposition party enduring pressure without collapsing, radicalizing or abandoning the democratic process. A visible decline in public support may, in turn, force the ruling coalition itself to reassess the costs of further repression.

This is what could make the struggle genuinely consequential. The Yeni Parti would seek not merely to retain opposition voters, but to alter the calculations of both sides: to convince its supporters that resistance remains possible, and to show the ruling coalition that further closing the political system carries growing electoral costs.

Let me be blunt. A return to democracy in the short term is, at this stage, almost impossible. The institutional balance is too heavily tilted, authoritarian rule is too deeply entrenched, and the ruling coalition retains too much political and social strength for a rapid reversal.

The struggle of the Yeni Parti should therefore not be judged only by whether it can produce an immediate transfer of power. Its more consequential role may be to preserve and strengthen the political forces that could make a democratic return possible in the longer term.

Whether this struggle becomes epic will depend on whether its actors recognize its magnitude and act accordingly. If they do not, this moment may pass into Turkish history as yet another stage in the quiet consolidation of authoritarian rule.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey was attacked so persistently before its release that the attacks themselves became part of the film’s attraction. They certainly made me want to see it. Much of the controversy concerned not what Nolan had done with Homer, but the bodies he had chosen to place on the screen: the actors’ race, gender identity and physical appearance.

Was Elliot Page, for example, really the right person to play an ancient Greek warrior? The hostility was so vicious, and often so poorly informed, that I thought Page had been cast as Achilles. He had not. He plays Sinon, a relatively minor figure, I believe, whom Nolan turns into a much larger character. The role itself is not large, but Page plays it remarkably well.

More than that, the casting could hardly have been better. Why? Sinon must be considered alongside Antinous, played with magnificent ugliness by Robert Pattinson. Antinous possesses almost everything cinema has trained us to recognize as masculine power: height, beauty, physical confidence, aristocratic ease and the casual authority of a man accustomed to having others listen to him. Sinon possesses almost none of these things.

Yet it is Antinous who escapes the war, while Sinon is made to go to Troy in his place. The man who looks like a warrior avoids the battlefield. The man whom many viewers considered physically unfit to portray one bears the consequences of another man’s cowardice. By the end, Odysseus remembers Sinon, not Antinous, as one of the bravest men he has known.

The contrast seems too meaningful to be accidental. Nolan questions our tendency to read character from physicality. Antinous possesses the signs of heroism. Sinon bears its cost.

Page was not the only actor subjected to this kind of hostility. Lupita Nyong’o’s casting as Helen of Troy also provoked outrage. It was certainly an unconventional choice, at least when measured against the image of Helen established by Western painting and cinema. Yet her role in the film is minor. Once again, the controversy surrounding the casting proved far larger than the part itself.

I am not a producer, nor do I belong to the film industry. I am simply a viewer, one of the millions who ultimately decide whether the actors inhabit their roles so convincingly that we cease to see the performers and begin to see the characters.

By that measure, the casting succeeds. Almost every major character is played with remarkable performances. Whatever objections one may have had before seeing the film largely disappear once the actors are on screen.

And I must reserve special praise for Anne Hathaway in the role of Penelope. What a performance she gives. Truly unforgettable.

After the film was released, the earlier controversy over the racial and gender identities of the cast seemed to fade. In its place came a different debate: how faithfully had Nolan followed Homer?

Some critics focused on what he had omitted, altered or misrepresented. Others asked whether he had missed the larger question at the heart of Homer’s work. I am not in a position to decide whether all these criticisms are correct. Fortunately, I learned a great deal about Homer and Greek mythology simply by reading them.

But I am not sure that fidelity, by itself, is the decisive question. Nolan clearly changes Homer. Films often change the works they adapt, sometimes because the medium demands it, sometimes because the filmmaker wishes to say something different. The important question is not merely whether Nolan departed from Homer, but whether those departures enabled him to make a compelling argument of his own.

I think they did. At least, I came away from the film with an argument I found powerful.

At its most basic, The Odyssey is the story of a man who leaves his home, his wife and his child to join a war. The war lasts far longer than expected. When both sides are exhausted, Odysseus devises the plan that finally brings victory. Yet the man who finds a way to end the war cannot find his way home. By the time he returns, he has been away for twenty years.

What argument can one draw from such a story?

I came across a video by the French philosopher Luc Ferry, who offers a persuasive answer. He reads The Odyssey as a response to one of the oldest philosophical questions: what is the good life?

For Ferry, Ithaca is more than the place Odysseus is trying to reach. It represents the life that properly belongs to him: his wife, his child, his home and his place in the world. Yet he repeatedly loses sight of it. The temptations and adventures of the journey make him forget the destination. This, Ferry suggests, is also what happens to us. We become so absorbed in what we encounter along the way that we forget what the journey was for.

Nolan takes up this idea of forgetting, but gives it a darker meaning.

Why does Odysseus forget his ultimate goal?

One plausible answer, and perhaps the most immediate one, is war guilt. He does not forget Ithaca simply because he is distracted, or because the world outside it offers greater pleasures than the life awaiting him at home. He forgets because remembering has become unbearable.

The Trojan Horse was his great achievement. His ingenuity ended a war that had exhausted everyone involved. But the same act of genius opened Troy to massacre. The plan that made Odysseus a hero also implicated him in horrors whose full weight he may not have anticipated. His greatest victory became the memory from which he most needed to escape.

Can such a man simply return?

To remember Ithaca is to remember Penelope and Telemachus. But it is also to remember the person he was when he left them. Home confronts him with everything he has lost, including his former understanding of himself. He cannot return to his old life without acknowledging that he is no longer the man who departed.

Even Calypso’s lotus leaves can be read in this light. They do not merely tempt him away from his destination. They offer anesthesia. They allow him to forget not only where he belongs, but what he has done.

Ferry’s Odysseus must remember his destination. Nolan’s, according to this reading, must recover the memories from which he has been fleeing. The first interpretation warns us not to become distracted from the good life. The second asks whether that life can be reclaimed after our own actions have made us strangers to it.

Regardless of whether Homer’s Odysseus was truly that kind of man, I have to admit that this is a powerful and plausible reading. But I do not think it exhausts what Nolan is trying to say.

In Nolan’s film, Odysseus does indeed seem burdened by guilt, and that guilt helps explain why he keeps forgetting. But it is a different kind of guilt. And it too begins at Troy.

The Trojan Horse is not simply a clever military deception. It is offered to the Trojans as a gift, indeed as a sacred offering made in the name of a god. The plan succeeds because Odysseus knows that the Trojans will respect something they believe even enemies should not profane. He takes a norm that is supposed to survive the war and converts it into a weapon for winning the war.

This is what makes the Trojan Horse more than an act of cunning. Odysseus does not merely deceive his enemy. He exploits their willingness to trust that certain boundaries will still be respected.

Even the bitterest enemies need such boundaries. War may suspend many of the ordinary rules of life, but it cannot suspend all of them without transforming the societies fighting it. A gift must not conceal soldiers. A guest must not be an invader. Hospitality must not become an opportunity for murder. A sacred offering must not become a trap.

Civilization does not consist only of cities, laws and armies. It also depends on a shared confidence that not every human vulnerability will be exploited. We open our doors, receive strangers, exchange gifts and enter agreements because we assume that some norms will be respected even when violating them might offer an advantage.

Odysseus wins the war by demonstrating that this confidence can be turned against those who possess it.

The destruction of Troy is therefore not only the destruction of a city. Something larger is destroyed with it. Once the gift becomes a weapon, every future gift becomes suspect. Once reverence becomes a military weakness, the sacred can no longer protect anyone. Once trust is punished so catastrophically, distrust begins to look like wisdom.

Perhaps this is the deeper reason Odysseus cannot find his way home.

He is not merely guilty of the people who died because of his plan. He has violated one of the principles that makes a home possible. A home is a place where a door can be opened, where a stranger can be received and where those who enter are expected to respect the protection offered to them. But Odysseus has helped create a world in which every open door may conceal a danger and every gesture of trust may prove fatal.

He ended the war by allowing the logic of war to invade the norms on which civilized life depends.

This, is the larger argument I took from Nolan’s film. Civilizations depend on values that cannot be treated merely as obstacles to strategic success. The moment every value becomes something to manipulate, every norm something to exploit and every act of trust an opportunity to seize, one side may still achieve victory. But the civilization in whose name that victory was pursued has already begun to destroy itself.

Odysseus cannot return home because, at Troy, he helped destroy the moral meaning of home.