Today I have the pleasure of publishing the below essay by my dear friend and former colleague .

He’s writing about how Syria is renaming schools, and what that tells us about the political transformation the country is going through. I wasn’t surprised by the new policy, as much as how quickly it has been rolled out. It appears that it has already met resistance, and sometimes successfully.

As mentioned in previous posts, I’ve been traveling and spending time with family, so posting has been very light. The late-summer lull is by now a regular occurrence at Kültürkampf, and it helps me tackle the new working year with vigor.

I’ve rented some new office space and am itching to get back to work. I’ll have another post out in a few days, and will ramp things up starting next week.

All the best,

Selim

I was scrolling through Facebook a while ago – very Millennial, I know – when I came across a post by the Circassian Benevolent Association in Damascus. The Facebook post concerned a proposal by Raqqa’s Directorate General of Education to remove the names of 20 schools in the governorate and replace them with supposedly “more suitable” ones.

One name immediately caught my attention: Jawad Anzor, a Syrian of Circassian descent. Avid readers of Kültürkampf might remember that I come from the same background, so this sparked my interest. But the list extended far beyond this Circassian figure. It included several heavyweight names familiar to generations of Syrian schoolchildren, among them Sati‘ al-Husri, widely described as the “philosopher of Arab nationalism” because of his extensive writings on the subject in the early twentieth century. It also included a school named after Evacuation Day, Syria’s national day, which commemorates the departure of the last French troops from Syria on 17 April 1946.

This raises a question: what was this conflict about? While the outside world calls it the Syrian Civil War, we have long insisted on calling the conflict “the revolution.” But what was that revolution? Is Syria removing the symbols of dictatorship, or replacing one official national identity with another?

The proposal of Raqqa’s Directorate General of Education draws on the Ministry of Education Circular No. 1470/534, issued on 25 September 2025. The circular presents school renaming as part of an effort to “strengthen national identity,” “overcome the effects of the previous era,” and “remove names associated with symbols of the former regime.”

The circular also establishes the criteria and procedure for renaming schools. Under the criteria, schools may be named after the area where they are located; figures or symbols of religious, cultural, or historical significance to Syrian society; influential scientific, national, or cultural personalities; or inspiring concepts, such as wisdom and freedom that reinforce students’ national and humanistic belonging. Procedurally, the local directorate general of education proposes the new names and submits them to the governor for approval. Once approved, the directorate formally changes the names in question.

No official statistics exist on how many schools and cities have undergone or will undergo the change. Unofficial sources suggest that the number is 128 schools in Aleppo, 28 in Damascus and over 500 in Hama.

Breaking with the legacy of the former regime is necessary, and I am all for it. Treating every name inherited from Syria’s past as an extension of the fallen regime, however, is neither based in reality nor desirable.

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From what I can tell about the policy’s implementation, renaming Syrian schools encompasses two essentially different endeavors that can easily be confused. The first is a legitimate process of de-Baathification and de-Assadification that can contribute, at least symbolically, to transitional justice. The second is a far more controversial attempt to determine which political, religious, and cultural traditions will be allowed to embody the “new Syria.”

Renaming “Basil al-Assad High School” as “Douma High School for Boys,” for example, symbolically returns the institution to its locality. Under the former regime, naming schools, streets, hospitals and public squares after members of the ruling family was about treating public capital as private property. Removing those names does not necessarily erase history, but ends the compulsory public glorification of a ruling family that treated the country as its own estate.

The case of Nizar Qabbani, one of Syria’s best-known modern poets, is fundamentally different. In September 2025, Aleppo’s General Directorate of Education initially ordered that two schools named after Qabbani be renamed after one of the Prophet Muhammad’s companions. Qabbani’s poetry on love was already an assault on social despotism, and after 1967, he made it explicitly political, turning his gaze on repression and authoritarianism. He spent much of his later life in exile and passed away in London. The removal of his name from two schools launched a public outcry, and following an intervention by the Minister of Culture, the Minister of Education announced that Qabbani’s name would remain. I would especially like to recall “Margins on the Setback Notebook,” where Qabbani is reflecting on the Arab defeat in the six-day war against Israel. Here’s an excerpt:

O my lord…

O Sultan,

I have lost the war twice

Because half our people… have no voice

What is the value of a people without a voice?

Because half our people are trapped like ants and rats within these walls.

If anyone would grant me safety from the Sultan’s soldiers,

I would tell him: You have lost the war twice

because you have abandoned the faith in the cause of humanity

..يا سيدي

يا سيدي السلطان

لقد خسرت الحرب مرتين

لأن نصف شعبنا.. ليس له لسان

ما قيمة الشعب الذي ليس له لسان؟

..لأن نصف شعبنا

..محاصرٌ كالنمل والجرذان

..في داخل الجدران

لو أحدٌ يمنحني الأمان

..من عسكر السلطان

..قلت له: لقد خسرت الحرب مرتين

..لأنك انفصلت عن قضية الإنسان

The decision’s reversal is encouraging. It shows that public pressure can still influence Syria’s emerging symbolic order. But the initial decision is rather revealing. It suggests that some Syrian officials understand overcoming the “effects of the previous era” expansively enough to revise Syria’s cultural and national inheritance without distinguishing between figures associated with the former regime and those belonging to Syria’s broader history.

In my opinion, the case of Jawad Anzor makes this contradiction particularly difficult to ignore. Under Raqqa’s General Directorate of Education proposal, the school bearing his name was to become Al Yaman “اليمان,” a word associated with goodness, blessing and abundance. The new name may be unobjectionable on its own. The question is this: why replace Anzor?

Anzor began his military career at the Ottoman Military Academy in 1915 and graduated as a lieutenant. After the Ottoman Empire collapsed, he continued serving in the Syrian army until he retired in 1945 as a major. He was recalled in 1948 to form and lead a battalion of Syrian Circassian commandos during the Palestine War. He was killed while leading Syrian forces in the battle for Tel al-Aziziyat in the Golan Heights.

His name, therefore, should theoretically tick all the boxes of the Ministry of Education’s criteria. He is a symbol of Raqqa, served in the Syrian army, and was killed commanding Syrian forces in a formative regional war. He also embodies the contribution of one of Syria’s smaller ethnic communities to the country’s modern history. If the new Syrian government considers such a figure and the likes of him as unsuitable for “new Syria’s identity,” then what is at stake is more than removing former regime symbolism; it is about forging an identity without any due diligence.

Sati‘ al-Husri, the philosopher of pan-Arabism, presents a more complicated example. His conception of Arab nationalism can, and should, be critically examined, particularly from the perspective of communities marginalized by homogenizing Arabist projects. But historical controversy is not, by itself, a reason to erase someone from public memory. A pluralistic Syria should be able to remember and critically engage its intellectual traditions rather than fluctuate between glorification and deletion.

The proposed removal of Evacuation Day – the national holiday – from a school is even harder to explain as de-Baathification or de-Assadification. The end of the French Mandate, which Evacuation Day commemorates, belongs to neither the Baath Party nor the Assad family. It is a foundational moment in Syrian national history. Removing its name suggests that the boundaries of the “previous era” may be expanding to include parts of Syria’s pre-Baathist national inheritance.

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It’s not as if Islamic history was repressed in Syria. It has long been taught in Syrian classrooms, and many schools have carried the names of religious scholars, rulers and companions of the Prophet for decades. Their presence in public space is not the problem. The problem arises when Islamist symbolism ceases to be one component of Syria’s identity and becomes the principal filter through which all other components are judged.

Of course, the naming policy is significant beyond its application to schools. It offers a glimpse into Damascus’s rationale for power. Those who toppled the former Syrian regime believe they have earned the right to define the country’s identity. Colloquially, pro-government Syrians refer to this as “who liberates, decides [من يحرر يقرر].”

This is in conflict with the fairly liberal democratic image that Syria is projecting in the West. Taking those ideas seriously would require safeguarding the various aspects of the country’s historical and national identity. Washing away the contributions of Syrians because they were, or are secular, ethnically different, religiously distinct, or associated with a political tradition that has fallen out of favor would reproduce the exclusionary logic of the past.

The true test of Syria’s new identity is not whether it can replace the former regime’s symbols. It is whether it can resist inheriting the regime’s practice that whoever controls the state also owns the country’s memory. Monopolizing public space through a single narrative and a single repertoire of symbols would not mark a break with the past. It would reproduce the past’s governing logic under different names.

Parts written by my assistant Ata Armağan are marked accordingly in the subheadings.

As usual for late summers on Kültürkampf, I’m visiting family and doing some research in İzmir and İstanbul until September, so posts will be more spread out, prioritizing paid subscribers.

This week ended up being very much focused on Turkish politics, while having some philosophy-related reading sprinkled in at the end as well.

What is the basis of the PKK law?

Turkey’s parliament has voted on a law that would allow some high-ranking PKK militants to return to civilian life, pending some very specific circumstances. As far as anyone can tell, this is the centerpiece of the “Turkey without terror” process that the palace has been rolling out.

It’s not quite an amnesty, because the charges against these people wouldn’t be dropped entirely. It’s just a way to give the Kurdish movement’s elites a way back into legal life in Turkey.

Now there’s been a minor controversy as to the basis of this “process” in the opposition media. People who have historically been sympathetic of the Kurdish movement, like Ruşen Çakır, have been arguing that the law is a compromise between “the state” and the PKK, meaning that neither side has been able to get exactly what it wanted in the armed struggle, and that this law represents some kind of negotiated solition:

It’s very important to understand that this isn’t the case. The basis of this law is Turkey’s crushing military defeat of the PKK, not just in Turkey, but also in Syria and Iraq. As and I have been arguing on the podcast, the “Turkey without terror” process is not a “peace process,” but a terms of surrender.

There is a structural basis for this. This isn’t the Cold War any more. The time for guerrilla movements is past. A force like the PKK cannot hope to wage a war against a modern state with modern capabilities. Drones alone have driven them underground, but there are other aspects to this, like the intelligence, financial and cyber capabilities of Turkey (or most other modern states) that make it all but impossible for the PKK to exist.

The PKK as a military force is over. They could conceivably reinvent themselves as a political force, but that’s another discussion. The way I see it, the presidential palace is experimenting with ways to absorb their Kurdish base into their political project, and to do that, it wants to give the PKK’s elite a way to join civilian life and probably make decent money. The proposed law means that the palace is always going to be in a position where they can make them disappear into a prison at a moment’s notice if they step out of line. I think this is geared to make them maximally compliant, and to move their base towards the palace over time.

Now this might very well fail. These dynamics are very difficult to predict. I’m not conversant on what goes on inside the left-Kurdish movement. Ata has a much better idea of what goes on there, and will be writing about it in the upcoming weeks.

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We’re back with another episode of the podcast!

This is a big one. Some of you will remember that I wrote a review of two excellent books on Istanbul in Foreign Policy. Both books take a piece of Istanbul and use it to tell the broader story of the country. Both are forensically reported and beautifully written.

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Parts written by my assistant are marked accordingly in the subheadings.

As I wrote in my last post, I’m traveling until September, so posts will be more spread out, prioritizing paid subscribers.

This week, we lost Prof. Hilmi Demir, who was a historian, theologian, and analyst, and a dear colleague of ours at the Economic Policy Research Foundation of Turkey (TEPAV). He was a great influence on me, and I had the pleasure of co-authoring several pieces with him over the years. He passed far too early, at the age of 57.

He grew up poor, in the inner-Anatolian province of Çorum, and worked his way up some very difficult university hierarchies. He was a historicist, a staunch advocate of the Hanafi-Maturidi tradition, and stood firmly against the onslaught of modern literalist movements (like ISIS), as well as heterodox cults (like the Gülenists).

He was clearly a man of the political right, but his curiosity roamed free of any party-political constraints. He devoured books far beyond his own tradition, and had a diverse circle of friends and colleagues.

I sometimes wonder if our generation has the intellectual depth and rootedness that Hilmi hoca exemplified.

He’ll be dearly missed.

The ongoing restructuring of Turkey’s opposition

I don’t cover the day-to-day of Turkish politics here, but I should note that it’s currently going through a massive earthquake.

Last year, the Erdoğan regime arrested İstanbul mayor Ekrem İmamoğlu, Erdoğan’s most serious challenger.

Then, over the past couple of months, they effectively took over the CHP, the Republic’s founding party and main opposition party of the past generation.

This week, a group of splintered MPs, led by former CHP chairman Özgür Özel, are forming a new party, which has instantly become the new main opposition party.

Already in the early hours of the announcement, massive numbers of CHP members have resigned from the party, and are preparing to join the new one. Everywhere I go, people are talking about who’s staying and who’s leaving. Despite the Erdoğan regime’s best efforts, this place is a rambunctious democracy.

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I’ve been busy moving Kültürkampf HQ to the İzmir-İstanbul line for the remainder of the summer. Posting will remain fairly light in July-August, with priority to paid subscribers. I’ll return to my regular pace starting in September.

But this past week had two big days: Tuesday was Bastille Day, commemorated for the storming of the Bastille during the French Revolution, and Wednesday was the 10th anniversary of the failed coup attempt in Turkey. This was the day when a covert Gülenist element in the military launched a coup against the Erdoğan government of the day, and failed.

The first, of course, is France’s national day, but has also come to be celebrated as the day humanity has embarked on the adventure of self-government. The second is still new in the annals of history, and its meaning has yet to take shape. Is it a furthering of the ideals of republican government? Is it a counter-revolution of sorts, a return to the forces of rule by divine right? Or is it a dud, a mere squabble between two regressive forces who couldn’t share the pie?

Every July 15, I read my notes from that night, and try to remember the conditions and events of the time. It’s also a good time to reflect on the nature of the Erdoğan regime, and its direction.

It seems that others have had a similar thought. I’ll share with you two of the leading thinkers of the Erdoğan regime, and how they think of July 15. I’d like to note that neither of them are originally from the Islamist tradition that makes up the core of the regime. This is to be expected, since Islamist romantics themselves rarely engage in serious theoretical writing.

Below I’ll share with you the first one, with a second coming up soon.

The first account is from Mehmet Uçum, who is a chief consultant to the president and Deputy Chairman of the Presidential Legal Policies Board. The presidency isn’t exactly a transparent institution, so we can’t know for sure, but Uçum is considered to be the Schmittean figure behind the design of the presidential system.

Unusual for people at the palace, Uçum comes from a hard-left background: when he was “12 or 13 years old,” by his own reckoning, he joined the youth wing of the “illegal” Turkish Communist Party (TKP), so-called because they believed in waging a clandestine revolutionary struggle. Uçum was detained on the eve of the 1980 coup and tortured. Upon release, he worked as a labor and social security lawyer in Istanbul for almost thirty years, and in the 2000s, during the left-liberal convergence with the AK Party, he joined in the fight against the Kemalist dominance in the military and judiciary establishment. He joined the “yetmez ama evet” campaign in the 2010 referendum, was a “wise man” during the first peace process, and became an AK Party MP from Kars in the 2015 parliament.

He’s 61 now, and his language is still laced with hard-left terms and concepts. Every once in a while, Uçum will put out a long historical and theoretical statement backfilling the actions of the Erdoğan presidency, and it’s always interesting to read. His latest column on July 15 appeared in AA on that day, and didn’t disappoint.

As one might expect, he frames July 15 as a chapter in Turkey’s epic, centuries-long struggle against “imperialist powers,” by which he means the wider West:

Having launched an assault on the Ottoman Empire with the goal of completely liquidating it—or at least downsizing it and bringing it under total control—the imperialist powers were unable to fully achieve these objectives. Out of resentment and spite, they immediately initiated operations against the young Republic, the successor to the Ottoman Empire. And these operations have been ongoing for nearly a century.

Atatürk’s war of liberation did beat back Western imperialism, Uçum claims, but his Republic was exclusionary, and suppressed the nation’s identities and natural strengths.1 Western imperialists then found other ways to seep into Turkey’s body politic, namely through the Kemalist establishment, and more recently, the Gülenist movement (Fetullahist Terrorist Organization, or “FETÖ” in Erdoğanspeak). Uçum, of course, wisely omits the fact that the Gülenists were tightly allied with the Erdoğan movement almost from its get-go.

Either way, you know what comes next: the July 15 “peaceful peoples’ revolution” destroyed the last remains of the undemocratic system, removed the Gülenist element from the state, and finally unleashed the dormant powers of the nation. The “global fascist forces” were beaten back, and the Turkish state was finally put in the service of the people:

In the first liberation, we succeeded thanks to a world leader like Atatürk and the self-sacrificing struggle of the Anatolian people. And in the second liberation, we achieved success with President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan—the most important direct/organic leader of the 21st century—and the great resilience of our people. Both of our Wars of Independence were illuminated by the lives and blood of our martyrs and veterans.

This is how Erdoğan himself also always puts it, equating July 15 with the War of Independence.

Note also how Uçum describes Erdoğan as a “direct/organic leader.” There is a reason for that. Erdoğan’s revolution succeeds where his predecessor failed, Uçum thinks, specifically because he avoids Western-style democracy. This is where the analysis gets more original:

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NATO leaders are gathered in Ankara today for this year’s summit. It being set in my home town, I’m following the summit with unusual detail this year, and it fills me with dread.

But before I get into that stuff, I’d like to enumerate some things that are good, or at least not terrible, because things could have been a lot worse, both for NATO as a whole, as well as for Turkey.

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First, Trump has actually created a new urgency among the Europeans to get serious about defense. And they have. They have made significant budgetary commitments and are making much bigger commitments to the defense of Ukraine. Speed and depth continue to be serious issues, but at least they’re moving, and I’m not sure that it would have happened without Trump, so there is that.

Second, Turkey is an ally in good standing. I was more pessimistic about this. There was a stretch there in the late 2010s, when it was pretty uncertain where things would go. The coup attempt rattled Erdoğan, he bought the S-400 air defense system from Putin, calling it “the most important agreement in our modern history.” The economic rollercoasters, military adventures in Syria, excursions to the Kremlin, all meant that Turkey was kind of dangling off the edge there for a while.

Had a real rupture occurred, Turkey would have been much worse off. Israel now says things like “Turkey is next,” and it doesn’t alarm us too much in Turkey. We had been on our own, that kind of a threat would have been a lot more serious. There would also have been untold effects on the fundamentals of Turkey’s economy and politics.

Here are also my comments on the NATO summit for The New Yorker, The New Statesman, The Times, and Middle East Eye.

So what changed? We don’t have the journalists to look into it and tell us what exactly happened, but I think that the presidential palace came to the understanding that they simply didn’t have the ability to distance themselves from NATO. They don’t have the technology and the capital to make it work, and they had to have that little adventure to come to terms with that. It is said that in 2022, well before Trump re-entered the Oval, Erdoğan’s Atlanticist team was already working hard to mend fences in Washington. Trump’s arrival made everything easier, and assured a smoother landing for Erdoğan.

Turkey is hailed as a “big winner” of this summit, but that’s lazy thinking. Many of the things that Erdoğan’s people are now hoping to get from Trump are things that Turkey lost during its Eurasianist turn of the last decade: trust, a working industrial relationship, and access to top-shelf weapons like the F-35. It’s still not clear how much of that will be restored. Turkey will get some business supplying the lower end of Europe’s defense needs, grow, and use that business to develop its own ecosystem of indigenous weapons (the Baykar drones, the MILGEM corvette, KAAN fighter plane, etc.)

We’re now getting into the reasons for my dread, and there are many.

The Military Keynesianism that Europe is embarking upon doesn’t sound like it’s going to be pleasant, making everyone more precarious, detaching politics from policy, and especially fueling far-right movements. In Turkey, we’re already at a far more advanced stage, and as the defense industry grows to produce the ammunition the rest of the alliance needs, the country is going to eat itself even faster.

It is also grotesque how personalized and undemocratic all of this has become. Though they are undeniably skilled politicians, leaders like Trump and Erdoğan lack any sense of honor and intelligence that leadership on this scale requires. NATO might not even exist any more if it hadn’t been for Mark Rutte’s willingness to debase himself entirely to woo Trump. Turkey is once again an ally in decent standing, but the process has occurred light years away from any kind of public accountability. The way that Erdoğan’s regime moved heaven and earth to scrub Ankara clean ahead of the NATO summit shows how much contempt they feel for the people of their own capital.

The progressive hope for NATO would have been to curb its anti-democratic aspects, and to build it into something deeply rooted in the societies it protects. The opposite is happening. As a consequence, our children are growing up in a world that is far less secure than the one we grew up in. The only hope left is for a political reversal in the United States, as well as for the cordon sanitaire in Europe to hold.

Nick’s essay on American history, with Graham H. Cornwell

co-authored an essay on American history I found fascinating. They look at American textbooks to see how America has struggled with its history, and how it has long conceded some of its mistakes while trying to hold on to itself as an inherently virtuous country. American textbooks were whitewashing the country’s history, and the added bits of self-criticism served that overall project. In its last version, this was people like Jake Sullivan holding on to the hypocrisy as a way for the country to learn from its past mistakes.

With Trump, that hypocrisy has ended, and vulgar realism reigns. Trump, the authors argue, bought the whitewashed version of American history wholesale. So the self-correcting narrative kind of ate itself.

The United States is now writing a chapter that will be difficult for future historians to sanitize. Many on the left hope that as a result, Americans will be stripped of their illusions and forced to confront how violent and exploitative their country has always been. But then what? The problem is that whether you see the sins of the United States as resulting from misplaced idealism or something much darker, and whether you actually believe the country has shown a unique capacity for self-improvement, there’s still not much to do now besides hope it can do better.

I might have added that the far left in America is also ready to end hypocrisy in its own way, by abdicating power entirely, and repenting of America’s sins.

As one might expect from Nick, there are a lot of great maps in the piece. And foreignpolicy.com is still free, in honor of America’s 250th birthday, so do read it quickly!

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In 1990, there were about 10-12 million Muslims in Western countries.

Today, that number is more than 35 million. That’s almost as big as the population of Saudi Arabia. In some countries, like France and Germany, Muslims make up about 10 percent and 6 percent of the population respectively.

Needless to say, this is a very young population. Most of them are the first generation of Muslims to be born into the West, attend schools in the West, and to start their adult lives in the West.

Now here’s a question to ponder: how many of these 35+ million Muslims actually practice Islam? How many believe in its tenets? How many — to use the appropriate term — actually are Mu’min?

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This kind of thing is hard to measure. Pew says that the “retention rate” among Muslims in the U.S. to be 77 percent, meaning that about 3 in 4 people raised as Muslims remain Muslims. That means that 1 in 4 don’t consider themselves Muslims any more. If true, that’s huge. How many children of Muslim households in Sweden, or France, or the UK, think that the whole business of revelation doesn’t make much sense?1 How many think it, but can’t act on it? This is important, because mainstream Islam is far more strict about this stuff than the mainstream in Christianity and Judaism.

It’s only if you’re lucky, as I am, that it doesn’t matter. I was raised Muslim, went through a few existential phases in my late teens and mid-20s, and eventually lapsed entirely. My extended family is fairly religious, but they respect me and I respect them, and it’s fine. Islam’s moral authority is also waning in my native Turkey, so it’s much less of an issue compared to when I was younger. This means that, like many Jews and Christians, I can hang on to the cultural aspects of my heritage without having it run my life.

For many people though, it’s not that easy. If — for whatever reason — they find that the faith isn’t for them, there are serious consequences. When they skip prayers, find excuses to avoid fasting during Ramadan, and it’s becoming clear that their focus is shifting to the outside world, their relatives notice. Their friends and community elders step in. It can turn into a major crisis.

I thought of all this as I read The Apostates: When Muslims Leave Islam, by Simon Cottee, who talks to some three dozen “Ex-Muslims,” mostly in the UK. The book came out in 2015, and most of the people he talks to struggled with their faith in the 2000s, so right in the middle of the “New Atheists” and the “War on Terror” years. They are mostly second generation kids with roots in the Indian Subcontinent or the Maghreb. There are a lot of great quotes dispersed throughout the text.

Farhad, for example, ponders the Quranic concept of predestination:

The very first thing that got me thinking was, why do I get to go to heaven for simply being born a Muslim? Why does a mere accident of birth dictate one’s destiny? Why do people not ‘lucky’ enough to have been born Muslim deserve to go to hell simply because they were not born Muslim? I always thought that was really unjust.

I always wondered about that too. It’s really the abstract concept of justice, derived from the Abrahamic tradition, applied back on itself.

Or there are a few priceless pages of Aisha, an 18-year old, writing long email dispatches from Hajj (the obligatory pilgrimage to Mecca) just as she’s starting to doubt the entire religion. I read it with a London accent in my head:

wa alaykum as salaam ……remember when i said either i come back better or more astray…being here has had no effect on my heart i didn’t even cry when i saw the ka’bah like most people do my Nafs [the ‘self’ in Islamic self-control] has been attacking me soooo much since i got here and ive been having all kinds of thoughts about wearing abaya and stuff, taking photos, i don’t know what i want anymore. one min i wannna do sin but i remember the hereafter only have 2 choices dnt think im strong enough as a person. im soo jealous of my stepmum she is always cryin!!!!!!!! 24/7 she has been taking advantage of this trip soo much she does have the upper hand of being a native arabic speaker tho ……

It goes on like that for quite some time. I actually did Umrah during my doubting phase, took similarly hilarious notes into my notebook at the time.

Almost all of the people Cottee interviews have severe doubts about telling their families, and if they do, it’s rough. Some of them tell one or both parents, then take back their apostasy and pretend to have returned to the “true path” until they’re able to move away. One kid gets flown to Pakistan and made to sit through an exorcism. It turns out that terms from the gay community, like being “in the closet” and “coming out” are used pretty regularly in these circles.

So where do “closeted” “ex-Muslims” gather? Where do they let it all out?

Online of course.

There is a deep history of various online forums, but for simplicity’s sake, I’m going to focus on Reddit, because that’s the most recent incarnation of the ex-Muslim meeting spot, and the one I’ve been stalking for the better part of a year now.2 The r/exmuslim subreddit has 140K weekly visitors and 9.8K weekly contributors. It was created in 2010, and is pretty well maintained, with links to resources (including to suicide hotlines), arrange meetups, and a megathread called “Exmuslim Guide to living in the closet and out” that offers some practical information and advice.

I thought it was telling that the “check out our friends” section includes links to the subreddit for ex-Mormons and ex-Jehova’s Witnesses, both of which are also pretty sizable. Apparently these are called “high-control religious environments” (HCREs).

There are two points I want to make about this.

First, note the categories involved. In Christianity, HCREs are around the fringes (your JWs, Old Order Amish, LDS). In Judaism, I’d guess that the HCREs are more prevalent and growing (Hassidic Jews, etc.), but still fairly fringe. With Muslims in the West, the “high-control” environment isn’t just the orthodox groups and cults on the edges of the religion, but arguably the mainstream. So are most Muslim communities in the West properly HCREs? Probably not. Is it very common for Muslim communities to be “high control”? Probably.

Second, mainstream liberal culture valorizes people who make it out of HCREs, but it focuses on Christianity and Judaism, and ignores ex-Muslims entirely.

If you look at the series and documentaries that Netflix, HBO, Hulu, Apple TV, etc. have produced in the last 15 years, Christian-adjacent HCREs easily lead with 12-15 major titles, like The Family (Netflix), Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey (FLDS), Escaping Twin Flames, Dancing for the Devil, Shiny Happy People (Amazon — IBLP/Duggars), Waco: American Apocalypse, The Way Down (HBO), Pray Away (Netflix, ex-gay ministries), Jesus Camp (which came out 2006, but is still being streamed). Jewish (Haredi/Hasidic) are a second, with 4-5 major titles, including One of Us (Netflix, 2017), Unorthodox (Netflix, 2020), My Unorthodox Life (Netflix, 2021, two seasons), Shtisel (Netflix-distributed, sympathetic insider view, and actually very interesting to Muslims, I find).

Productions about Muslim-adjacent HCREs? Zero.

There are a handful of low-budget documentaries about ex-Muslims, like Islam’s Non-Believers (ITV Exposure, 2016), which was directed by Deeyah Khan, and follows Maryam Namazie’s Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain (CEMB). In the same year, VICE News did Rescuing Ex-Muslims: Leaving Islam (2016), a short following Imtiaz Shams of Faith to Faithless, the UK group that runs “coming out” events on campuses. Beyond that, Ex-Muslims of North America produces its own mini-documentaries, but that’s self-representation on their YouTube channel (a jolly guy in his car going “I had bacon today. It was good. You should try it!” Bless you jolly guy.)

There are some high-budget shows that get close to depicting ex-Muslims. Hala (Apple TV, 2019) is the story of a Pakistani-American teenager who goes through a crisis of faith. The protagonist in Ramy (Hulu, 2019) goes through doubt, but manages to stay in. I loved Netflix’s Mo (2022-2025) but there’s no doubt there, and certainly no HCRE dimension.3 Disgraced is a play that premiered in 2012, and has an apostate protagonist, and got the Pulitzer prize in 2013. But that’s theater, not mass culture, and though I haven’t seen it, I consider Ayad Akhtar’s work to be post-9/11, War-on-terror culture. I read his American Dervish and did not find the characters convincing.

So to sum up, it’s not like there isn’t Muslim representation in mainstream Western culture. There is. And it’s no longer just terrorists. There is genuine complexity, and that’s great, but it doesn’t get into the high-control aspects of the religion, especially not in a way that has a cultural impact. Unorthodox was Netflix's most-watched limited series in several countries, while Satmar Hasidim — the sect it portrays — number maybe 100K worldwide. Western Muslims (let’s be modest) number 35 million+, and there’s zero equivalent. We could also go into “representation” of the LGBT community in high-level productions of this kind, and the picture would be even starker.

Why is there so little love for ex-Muslims? Part of it is because this population is very new. It takes a substantial group of liberal, middle class, “creative” types who can relate to the plight of the people who remain in the “high control” environment. Jews famously have many generations of that, while for Muslims, it’s still relatively thin.

Another part of it is because the politics is very difficult on both sides. We live in polarized times, and most ex-Muslims are wandering in the no-man’s land in between the poles.

On the political right, ex-Muslims are treated as vindication for the argument that Islam is inherently evil and dilutes the civilizational purity of the West. It also doesn’t help that many popular “Apostates” carry the banner of the political right. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, perhaps the best-known ex-Muslim, has long fought in the trenches of the European and American culture wars. Rıdvan Aydemir, a Germany-born Turk who goes by the name of “Apostate Prophet,” recently broke into the mainstream when he spoke at Turning Point USA, the political organization founded by the late Charlie Kirk. Both are culture warriors who were so fierce in their anti-Islamic stance that atheism just didn’t cut it for them, and they eventually converted to Christianity.

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I should also be clear that there is a lot of reactionary, anti-Muslim stuff on the ex-Muslim internet. As Cottee also points out in his book, a lot of people who leave Islam go through a phase in which they feel the need to insult and belittle the religion. As far as I can see — and Cottee’s book substantiates this to some extent — most of them grow out of it and develop a more balanced approach. The ex-Muslim subreddit, for example, specifically states “All are welcome but if you're here because of your hate for Muslims as a people then this is NOT the subreddit for you.” Still, being an “ex-Muslim” is always going to lean a bit anti-Islam, which is useful to right-wing agitators in the West.

Among liberals and the left in Western countries, meanwhile, the issue just doesn’t exist. They code Muslims as victims, an embattled religious minority, and anything that doesn’t neatly slot into that narrative just falls away from their agenda. If you went to elite politicians or TV producers with the stories of ex-Muslims, they might acknowledge that it’s an issue, but my guess is that they wouldn’t like the politics of it. This is probably why there isn’t any high-level cultural production on ex-Muslims.

Ironically, many of the ex-Muslim institutions were founded from the left. Maryam Namazie, who founded CEMB in 2007, was a longtime activist in the Worker-communist Party of Iran. Imtiaz Shams and Aliyah Saleem, who co-founded Faith to Faithless in 2015, are part of Humanists UK, and also help JWs, Haredim, and other Christian and Jewish-adjacent groups. Muhammad Syed and of Ex-Muslims of North America are also clearly left/liberal leaning, though they have been let down by the left repeatedly. On a recent podcast, Muhammed Syed cited someone who said that “Republicans are wrong about Muslims and Democrats are wrong about Islam.” That sounds right to me.

So while the right has captured the loudest “Apostates” (who tend to reach for Christianity), the movement was really built by leftist Humanists.

I’ll leave things here for now.

I’ll be thinking more about the topic, and writing about it here. If you’d like to support my work, please consider taking out a paid subscription.

Also, my apologies for not sending this out in the last two weeks. I had to deal with pressing family issues, and simply couldn’t read much.

First off, I was delighted to see that linked to Kültürkampf not once, but twice in his newsletter the other week! We here at KK HQ are big fans of his work, and were honored to be linked.

Second, with the World Cup, two Kültürkampf posts have been linked to a lot. The first is my writeup of the Erdoğan palace’s politicization of sports, and what that’s doing to the country’s performance in athletic events:

The second pertains to Turkey’s ridiculous name change policy. That piece is here:

Turkey made the change in 2022, but the international community is only beginning to metabolize it with events like the World Cup. Funny thing is that Fahrettin Altun, the guy who most likely came up with it, was fired after he crossed swords with another power player in the palace. I think we could get to a point where the palace hangs it up around Altun’s neck and quietly walks back the policy.

And third (and most importantly), I was delighted to join Amberin Zaman on her podcast to talk about Turkey’s performance in the World Cup, the politics of it, as well as other issues, like succession.

That’s here on Apple Podcasts, or on Spotify below:

A comedy triumph

I have to lead with this hour-and-a-half show that standup comedian Deniz Göktaş dropped on YouTube Thursday. It already has almost 3 million views, and is spreading like wildfire across social media. I’m guessing that a huge chunk of Turkey’s 86 million people have seen at least parts of it on their feeds. It’s a media event that country hasn’t experienced before.

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It was set to the tune of a classic, highly energetic folk song. The refrain had been changed to “siz hepiniz, biz Türkiye!” [you all together, us as Turkey], a schoolyard challenge: “you all against me!” Because the Turkish team was brimming with so much energy that it would take on the whole world.

The video collage also featured attack helicopters, fighter planes, tanks, indigenous electric vehicles, all told the story of a country that was ascending to the next geopolitical level.

And Erdoğan no longer pretended that he wasn’t going to politicize the national team. There were several hero shots of him sprinkled in, and the whole thing ended with the logo of the AK Party. And there it was: the holy trinity of the New Turkey: the army, the eleven, and the reis, fused into a three-minute hymn.

You could no longer root for the national team and not support Erdoğan’s political project. As far as I’m concerned, this was a big middle finger to the majority of Turkey’s citizens who support the opposition.

That was eleven days ago.

After two humiliating defeats, our valiant team has been eliminated, and is en route to the motherland. [edit: I didn’t realize we had to finish the group, and play against the USA. Brutal.]

You may think that your humble blogger is off his rocker, but I think this is an event of real political significance. When the historians write of the “late Erdoğan period,” they may well cite our obliteration in the 2026 World Cup as a milestone in the demise of this regime.

Sure, nationalists are always adamant about sports, but I submit to you, dear reader, that some kinds of nationalists care more about it than others. Some kinds of nationalists don’t just want success in sports, they need it.

Turkish Islamism of the kind Erdoğan embodies is a form of revivalist nationalism, or what Roger Griffin has called “palingenetic ultranationalism.” In Turkish Islamism, this is the doctrine of “Diriliş,” as put forward by Sezai Karakoç, literally meaning “resurrection.” The idea is that you first restore the nation’s authentic identity, and then watch as its civilizational strength manifests. This is why Erdoğan cares so much about restoring Hagia Sophia into a mosque, or educating a “pious generation.” Once that’s done, the belief goes, the nation’s creativity, passion, and vital energies will be unleashed. Families will prosper, the economy will boom, the military will dominate, and Turkish technology firms will be at the cutting edge. You won’t even have to think too hard about policies and the like. (That’s for pesky libtards.)

If the great leader holds on to power long enough, however, he finds that people don’t see things the way he does. They might focus on inflation rather than economic growth. They might speak of traffic jams, rather than the roads you’re building. They might question the military bases you’re building in other countries, and ask for trade deals. For some reason, people are relentlessly negative and claim that the “century of Turkey” isn’t materializing at all. Some even have the temerity to claim that the country is worse off than before.

But the one thing that’s undeniable is athletic success. That’s where you show everybody that you have elevated the country to the big leagues. The scoreboard does not lie. International gold is indisputable.

That’s why Erdoğan cares so deeply about athletic performance. It’s why he went into the World Cup this hard. To his credit, he is a risk taker, a believer, and he was willing to bet that the national team could hand him excitement, and ultimately victory. He probably wanted them to play against the big European teams, and even if they didn’t win, they’d make people feel that the country was now a force to be reckoned with.

If that had happened, the trinity of military-sports-president would have been complete, and brought him much-needed political relief.

It didn’t happen though. And I think it’s part of a wider story of athletic underperformance, and ultimately, a story of the wider institutional failure of the Erdoğan regime.

But let’s briefly look at Turkey’s athletic performance first. Consider the country’s Olympics medal count since 1964:

Keep in mind that bronze and silver are nice to have, but countries are commonly ranked by the number of gold medals they earn. By this measure, there’s an upward tick in the 90s and early 00s, but the count is insignificant and ultimately collapses to zero in 2024. After almost a quarter century of AK Party rule, Turkey finishes 64th in the Olympics.

No “national revival” here.

It’s the same in national soccer. Like most Turkish millennials, I have vivid memories of watching our team in the 2002 World Cup. All of my friends and family were glued to the TV. It was electrifying. Our team played some amazing games, and came in third. Our team acquired a reputation for uneven genius that it still carries to this day.

I was young, but I don’t remember anything political about it.

Then we went 24 years without qualifying for another World Cup, only just making it this year, as FIFA expanded the tournament from 32 to 48 teams.

And we lose. Badly.

I suspect that Turkey’s national athletes lose especially badly the closer they are to the Erdoğan palace. The olympic wrestling and lifting teams, as well as the national soccer team, are straight up Erdoğanists, so they are already hopelessly politicized. As with any institution that gets into the Palace’s orbit, they are flooded with cronies and adventurists, and whatever potential they have dissipates into thin air.

But look at other sports, and the poisonous influence of far-right politics is even more evident. The young archer, Mete Gazoz, won gold at the Tokyo Olympics. He won the individual recurve title at the 2023 World Championships in Berlin, the first Turkish archer to do so, and then in May 2024 — about three months before the Paris Olympics — he won the European Championship in Essen.

This kid is a genuine talent, and going into the olympics, he was on TV all the time, either on commercials, visiting schools, or shaking hands with the Erdoğan family. I bet that all manner of palace creatures started calling his family and showered them with attention. This being archery, the “ancestral sport of the Turks,” the regime built him up into their civilizational superhero.

And lo and behold, he got bronze at the Paris Olympics.

And to be clear, I don’t think it’s the fault of the individual athletes. They’re shaped by the environment they’re in. I don’t think that Mete Gazoz should or could fight off the regime’s attention. They need him too much.

Still, the touch of the Erdoğan regime is the surest path to mediocrity, or worse.

The only sporting event where Turkey is doing well is women’s volleyball, where our team is arguably in the top-three in the world, and surprise! they’re fairly distant to palace circles. Their cultural vibes are distinctly secularist, and the bulk of their support comes from opposition voters.

Now I don’t want to say that this proves that revivalist or authoritarian nationalists are inherently losers, and that democracy is consistently better at producing results. That could require much more rigorous research.1

I do think, however, that it says something about the abilities of the Erdoğan regime at large. They are not good at producing results, even when they really care about it. And it’s becoming more and more obvious. A strong performance at the World Cup would have been a boon for Erdoğan, but a loss is worse, because it confirms the fears that people have about his regime.

Ten years ago, their palingenetic claims were much more evident. Their boosters claimed that they managed the economy well, that society was thriving, that families were happy, and that the country was booming. They no longer do. They’re down to security and geopolitics as the remaining areas of competence, but even that is highly dubious.

Nick and I did a live chat yesterday. As the title suggests, we talked about the politics of the World Cup, as well as the two recent pieces about emigration from Turkey. Links to those are below.

I’m also writing an essay on sports and nationalism, so stay tuned for that.

As always, the live sessions are open to everybody, and the full recording…

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We’re back to the topic of emigration from Turkey, this time with a guest post by ! I’ve been bugging Nick to write a post about this for a while, so I’m glad that he finally did.

Nick is a meticulous journalist who has been working on Turkey for well over a decade, and currently lives in Brussels, which means that he’s ideally suited to comment on this topic.

Note that Nick has his own Substack — Meydan — so do follow him for more of his commentary and reporting!

Best,

Selim

A few months ago I inadvertently sparked a lively discussion about class divisions in Turkey after having an unexpected viral moment on social media. I wrote a thread on X recounting an anecdote about how some white-collar Turkish immigrants in Europe end up moving back after realizing they lost the perks they once enjoyed back home (this is a very specific subset of returnees; most people don’t move back, and those who do have many reasons unrelated to the following). These perks include a privileged, entitled social status accompanied by a kind of deference from most of the population, as well as an exceptional level of service provided by a huge, largely impoverished working class bending over backwards to tend to their every need.

I wrote that this group of Turkish returnees was used to being part of a “ruling class” in Turkey, and the loss of this status in Europe is partially what led them to come back. Ruling class isn’t quite the right term though. Turkey’s real political and business overlords have little reason to leave their sumptuous lives for Europe.

The professional class I was referring to isn’t a ruling elite, but rather a privileged managerial class and cultural elite; part of the top 30 percent, but not the top 10 percent. But this upper layer lives at several removes from the majority of the population in Europe’s most unequal country. The top 30 percent owns 87.8 percent of the national wealth in Turkey, compared to the bottom 50 percent, which holds just 3.4 percent. Meanwhile, half the population between the ages of 25-64 lacks a high school diploma.

This professional class may not control the upper echelons of Turkey, but, as another person on X wrote, they’re accustomed to feeling elite, and this feeling is what they lose in Europe. This is an especially bitter pill for the class that grows up being told they are ‘modern’ and European, but when they come to Europe they’re faced with the fact that A: many people don’t accept them as such, B: their education, language skills and western lifestyle mark them as quite ordinary rather than elite, and C: they sometimes find it much harder to adapt than expected, compounded by the fact that most Turks migrate to the more northern parts of Europe with cultures and climates most distant from their own.

In Noontime in Yenişehir, a 1973 novel exploring various social cleavages in Ankara, the leftist author Sevgi Soysal narrated a scene describing the awkwardness between two men of different classes [emphasis mine]:

Doğan assumed that when someone of a different class came to their home, people like Ali and his family would grow tense and flustered, unsure of what to do. Like the university janitors or building attendants who came to his family’s home. Whenever Doğan went to the building attendant’s apartment to let him know that the heating wasn’t working properly, the attendant would be baffled as to how to behave and, clearly feeling ill at ease, would make Doğan feel ill at ease too. An unscaleable wall would rise between them.

This resonated with me because I’d always been struck by a certain aloofness, leeriness, and even hostility from Turkey’s educated elite towards the majority of the population, regarding their fellow citizens as aliens, and huge swathes of their own country as a dangerous, foreign planet.

You can certainly find these attitudes and class divisions in every country, but like many rifts in Turkey, this one always felt starker to me. There are historical and political reasons for this, but also the basic fact that Turkey is a strikingly unequal country. The class tensions always seemed like a key component of Turkish society to me, and one that’s understudied by foreign scholars and observers more likely to look at ethnic, religious, and political schisms. One of the key characteristics of the Erdoğan era has been the rapidly growing economic inequality and the decay of the middle class.

Barbaros Şansal, a fashion designer and one of the country’s most colourful dissidents, once described to me Turkey’s “invisible caste system,” and condemned the impunity exercised by the elite classes (Barbaros himself is quite wealthy, to be sure). “If you are rich and powerful, you’ll never go to jail, never do your military service, never stop at a red light,” he told me.

My X thread sparked a far-reaching, sometimes heated conversation with hundreds of people (with more on Bluesky). Several of the responses mentioned the invisible caste system that Barbaros mentioned, claiming many people miss it when they move to Europe. Others talked about the difference in signalling social status in Turkey compared to Europe.

“[E]verything in Turkey is a status symbol: your parents’ jobs, whether you drink alcohol, owning a Dyson vacuum cleaner, the school you attended...These people are used to being seen as high-status because their company provides a car or phone,” wrote a white-collar professional based in Portugal. Another wrote that “[Turkey’s elites] are accustomed to establishing a sharp hierarchy between themselves and everyone else, from the person filling their shopping bags at the supermarket to the cleaner who comes to their home, from the courier they can reach at any time, to the waiter at the restaurant.”

Settling in Europe often obliterates these status markers for many reasons. “Even with good jobs, Europe offers far fewer invisible status buffers: flatter hierarchies, less deference, fewer symbolic privileges (such as private offices or company cars), and much less distance from ‘the masses,’” wrote a researcher and teacher living in Warsaw. In Europe, “when [Turkish professionals] see the waiter going to the same gym or the plumber waiting in line at the same café, they are confronted with the reality that they are actually ‘equal’,” said another. This equality “is experienced as a loss of status” wrote a third.

There’s an anecdote in an old documentary about Turkey that illustrates this class divide. The daughter of a wealthy businessman, part of Turkey’s old secular Establishment (and now a well-known analyst), recounts her surprise at the comparatively lower isolation between classes in the United States (an ironic observation, as the US is one of the most unequal countries in the OECD): “When I went to Washington...I was extremely confused to see the woman serving coffee [in my cafe] also [working out] at my gym, because in Turkey that would never happen. You would live in totally different parts of town; you would do different things.”

For more of Nick’s excellent writing, follow him on his own substack:

Meydan

By Nick Ashdown

Others on X mentioned differences in service culture. I’ve often heard Turks (and Americans) in Europe complain about a low level of service here, and frankly I’ve complained about it too (I’m Canadian), but it took me a while to realize this is largely the result of having the most robust worker’s rights in the world (albeit suffering a long decline). That’s why stores close early, workers are constantly striking, and service employees don’t grovel before customers or take special pains to earn their tips (which they don’t need, since they’re paid fairly).

Service is typically excellent in Turkey, though can sometimes come across as uncomfortably obsequious or aggressive to an outsider. When you walk into a store, employees will often offer you tea and follow you around. Workplaces often have a çaycı – a person who brings you tea – working inhouse or nearby. Cafes often offer small items as ikram (on the house). Most larger apartments have a live-in kapıcı (doorman) who takes care of the building, and often serves as general errand runner and more. The cost of living and inflation in Turkey have been skyrocketing much more than Europe for years now, but traditionally even the middle classes have been able to easily afford things like a regular house cleaner, and workplaces often provide services like catering.

However, this exceptional Turkish service culture and the corresponding expectations for a high level of service by those who can afford it are enabled by an abundance of cheap labour often working in awful conditions with few rights. During the conversation I referenced in my online thread, one of my Turkish friends put it bluntly: “They basically want slaves.”

These high expectations are compounded by what can often be a very different culture around service. When they come to Europe, some white-collar Turks are taken aback that people are often expected to clear their own trays, throw away their glass bottles in special bins, come down to apartment building entrances to meet couriers (in Turkey they come up to your door), and use self-service gas stations (unheard of in Turkey). As a Turkish writer living in the Netherlands explained in a thread from 2023, “This latest generation [of Turkish immigrants] is looking for the same deep-cleaning housecleaners, long-term care-givers, hairdressers where you don’t need an appointment, high quality grilled meat restaurants [ocakbaşı] and private teachers praising their children, [things] that they have in Turkey...Some people still can’t understand why [in Europe] the lunch break is only 30 minutes long, or why CEOs eat sandwiches for lunch brought from home.”

My experiences visiting family in Turkey and Canada illustrate similar cultural differences around service, hospitality and work. In Canada, everyone is expected to pitch in, including guests: we alternate between who cooks, everyone cleans up together after meals, and we always tidy after ourselves, especially before leaving. In Turkey, my mother-in-law does absolutely all the cooking and cleaning herself, my father-in-law chauffeurs us around, and we’re generally treated like royalty. When my in-laws visit us in Brussels, the idea of them staying in a hotel (the way my Canadian family does) is unthinkable.

Growing up middle-class in Canada (a country with its own hierarchies and underclasses), scrubbing the toilets and doing many other weekly chores was a standard part of my adolescence, as well as working part-time and summers in sometimes less than distinguished jobs (fast food, a discount grocery store, and that one summer promoting dog biscuits while wearing an actual dog suit). For the comfortably middle-class in Turkey, it’s often the mothers/grandmothers or paid workers who do the household chores, and children don’t generally work unless their families need the money (they’re usually too busy doing never-ending exam prep anyways).

Turks in Europe often complain about slow healthcare, or doctors giving (what they consider) insufficient tests and medications, but they’re usually comparing public healthcare here with high-end private healthcare in Turkey that operates like a commercial business, treating patients like consumers. I once had to stay in one such hospital in Istanbul, and it was essentially a luxury hotel staffed with doctors and nurses - I chose my pillow from a menu and had to fight off nurses trying to give me expensive intravenous painkillers despite being in only minor pain. But most Turks can’t afford such hospitals. Similarly, there are high-end luxury supermarkets, malls and giant, largely self-contained gated communities in Turkey, in what amounts to a whole separate world for the wealthy.

There’s another feature of Turkish work culture that’s notable here, one that’s much closer to America than Europe. In Turkey, the average person lives quite a difficult life, but dreams of pulling themselves out of economic precarity by working hard, buoyed by either a strong entrepreneurial spirit or faith in a state-provided meritocratic system of standardized tests and top-tier public schools and universities. People want to work hard, earn good money, and enjoy the accompanying elite status and comforts without having them disparaged or taxed away like in Europe.

Brussels-based writer Fırat M. Hacıahmetoğlu summed it up well:

Their actual goal in moving to another country was to take their existing lifestyle—based on consumption, social status, and ostentation—to the next level. Due to a misunderstanding, they thought they could achieve this in Europe, but when they found the culture there to be the exact opposite, they were taken aback. The place they actually wanted to go was America.

Turks largely believe in the possibility of social mobility, and feel that egalitarianism in Europe is forced upon them no matter how hard they work. One of the comments online illustrates this view: “[Europe] flattens the masses to a single level under the banner of social democracy, leaving everyone stuck there…most Turkish people operate on a similar level back home: work hard, climb ladders, and have more things (services/goods) with your money.”

However, this perception of high mobility in Turkey, low mobility in Europe is backwards. Though elite public universities and lycées used to provide a powerful engine of upward mobility in Turkey, the country still scores very low on global mobility scores (much lower than America, or even Russia or China), while Europe scores highest. Turkey’s public educational system has crumbled under the Erdoğan government, but even in the past, social mobility was hampered by private dershanes (tutoring schools) that most people couldn’t afford, and huge ethnic, regional and gender disparities.

Another insightful response to my thread, from scholar Ali Tirali (himself a bit of an unapologetic elitist), describes the specific form of classism in Turkey that comes not from family background but perceived merit:

Although there is a generally classist ethos in Turkey, this classism is aristocratic in character, based on a correctly or incorrectly adopted idea of meritocracy rather than class privilege inherited from older generations. Most white-collar workers in Turkey come from families where the previous generation were minor civil servants, tradespeople, labourers, etc. Although social mobility is now very difficult in Turkey, this illusion is kept alive by the national examination system and the ethos of education.

Feeling (often rightly so) that they’ve earned (rather than inherited) their socioeconomic status, on top of the gulf between classes and social groups, can naturally instill someone with a sense of superiority and entitlement, and a need to erect Soysal’s “unscaleable wall.” I think resentment towards this haughty attitude is what triggered so many comments to my thread.

Many people who can leave the country, do so. If they can’t leave themselves, they send their children away. I believe this cuts across most cultural, economic, and political lines, meaning that it affects the AK Party’s base as well as that of the opposition.

Young people especially talk about this constantly. Turkish YouTube is awash with “how to” videos, country profiles, and V-logs in which people weigh the pros and cons of their decisions. Politicians and public figures often implore professionals and young people to stay.

In this piece, I want to look at some of the data, then reflect on the cultural and policy implications of the trend.

Let’s get started.

If you look at the emigration numbers on their own, the story isn’t all that dramatic.

I couldn’t really get data from before 2016, but the conventional take is that there has been an exodus after 2016, the year of the attempted coup, when Erdoğan amassed unprecedented powers.

The 2023 spike is obviously significant, and I can think of two reasons for it. The first is the massive earthquake in February. The second is the election that summer. It’s not that people left after the election, it’s more that they had to register their absence to cast their votes abroad.

Turkstat is looking at people who officially change their address in the e-devlet system, and I know for a fact that many people move abroad without changing their status. You only really have to when there’s something to do, like voting from abroad, registering a birth, etc. I suspect that many white-collar professionals who moved away after 2016 only registered their residence abroad to vote on May 14, 2023.

Still, these numbers aren’t significant in a country of 86 million people. You start to see the trend a little more when looking at young people going abroad for higher education. Here’s that chart:

The numbers are low in the 2000s, gradually go up in the 2010s, which is probably due to rising incomes, and then there’s a steep climb starting in 2019.

I think this bears out the popular conception of 2016 as being a pivotal year. My guess is that after the events of that year, families who could afford it started to plan to send their kids away. But it took time. A big industry started to develop around IB, A-levels, and SATs. Universities abroad probably needed time to get used to the volume of applications from Turkey. Kids started to think about their future in different terms.

Now let’s look at some of the elite high schools in Turkey. These are places you have to test into, places with strong reputations, like Robert College, Galatasaray, or Austrian High School.

The vast majority of elite high school graduates in Turkey now go to universities in Western countries. Note that 1.6 percent of Istanbul Erkek graduates studied abroad in 2009. Now 90 percent do.

As someone who went to high school in the 2000s, I observed this change up close.

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My assistant Ata Armağan’s sections are marked with his name.

My writing elsewhere

I will cheat on you sometimes, dear Kültürkampf reader, but only when the money’s good.

Below are two such cases.

The first is my FP review of two books about Istanbul: Suzy Hansen’s From Life Itself and Alexander Christie-Miller’s To the City. It requires a subscription with Foreign Policy, but don’t worry, if you’re a paid subscriber on here, I’ve got you covered. I’ll add a gift link at the end of this email, and some of you can click that and read it. If that fills up, you can just email me, and I’ll send over a PDF.

As Nick mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we’re going to have both authors on the podcast soon, so stay tuned for that!

My second piece, to repeat, is this one about Ayn Rand readers in Turkey. My post about it is here, and the piece itself is on Reason Magazine’s website.

Also, this is your weekly reminder that this is a reader-supported publication! I can only do this because some of you throw some change in my direction every now and then.

I’ve been writing Kültürkampf for more than 4 years now, and I’m not even close to being done. So please, if you can afford it, do become a paid subscriber!

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The three things Erdoğan did on May 21 [Ata & Selim]

1. Passed the law (via his parliamentary group) stipulating that municipal firms need to be approved by the presidential palace (“Tapu Kanunu ile Bazı Kanunlarda ve 375 Sayılı KHK’de Değişiklik Yapılmasına Dair Kanun”) which could make it extremely difficult for municipalities to raise funds and do business.

2. Appointed Kılıçdaroğlu (via judiciary) head of the CHP.

3. Shut down Bilgi University (via executive order) and re-opened it the same way.

We’re guessing that you’ve heard of item 2 and 3, but not 1. But the policy significance is in that order. Bilgi university is just another institution in the crosshairs. The regime’s takeover of the CHP is important, but we already knew that was happening.

So let’s talk about item 1. In 1994, Turkey passed a law on privatization: law 4046 (Özelleştirme Uygulamaları Hakkında Kanun, 24 Nov 1994). Clause 26 in this law made it possible for municipalities to set up their own firms to aid in their overall service provisions. This was also the year the Islamists won Istanbul and Ankara, and they set up many (İGDAŞ, İSKİ-adjacent entities, İSTON, KİPTAŞ, BELTUR). The hiring, firing, procurement – everything here could be done outside of the normal civil service procedures. These firms were efficient, but they were also highly corrupt. That’s just how the AK Party machine works, and today, everyone accepts that it’s how business is done.

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Those of you following the latest events will know that the country has crossed another threshold last week, as the judiciary — loyal to the presidential palace — has ruled the party congresses of the Republican Peoples’ Party (CHP) null and void, and imposed Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu back on the party. Effectively, this means that Erdoğan now controls the opposition as well.

This is significant for many reasons, but most importantly, it has accelerated a revision of the story of Turkish politics in the last 25 years.

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For the last quarter century, the “metanarrative” of Turkish politics went something like this: the CHP have been losing elections because they’re has-been elites who are out of touch, and inherently unable to govern. The AK Party, in contrast, might be a bit rough around the edges, but they’re winners. They know how to deliver, and the public ultimately likes what they have to offer.

The narrative had its roots in an academic argument (see: post-Kemalism), and it had some basis in reality. Now it’s falling apart.

A new narrative is forming, and it’s going to shape the way people see the present and the past. It goes something like this: the AK Party is a terminally corrupt one-man show that’s running the country into the ground. It has systematically ruined the education system, the economy, the environment, healthcare — you name it. The quality of life is way down for the many, and way up for the few. The AK Party’s supporters still think that they’re doing well in defense and foreign policy, but that claim too, is increasingly dubious. I think it’s going to be clear in the coming years that it’s just a circus all the way down.

How then, has the AK Party stayed in power? This narrative will claim that they have done so by manipulating their opposition. Gradually, the public is no longer going to think that the CHP’s electoral losses were due to its intrinsic qualities. They will think that the CHP was infiltrated all along, and that its losses were engineered. I don’t think that’s entirely true, but it’s what people are starting to believe. I can already see the beginnings of the shift.

I’ve heard it in my conversations with CHP supporters, and I also see it with journalists and streamers, who are starting to re-litigate 2010, when a sex scandal erupted in the CHP, and Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu became party chairman. Under his leadership, the party lost five general elections, two referenda, and three presidential elections. The only victory Kılıçdaroğlu can claim were the 2019 regional elections, when he ran Ekrem İmamoğlu in Istanbul.

İmamoğlu’s tenure in Istanbul punctured the belief that the CHP cannot deliver. He ran the city well, and did so against relentless pressure from the presidential palace. We also got to see what happens when the CHP succeeds: İmamoğlu is in jail, as is his team. I’d be surprised if they get out anytime soon.

Very broadly, I think there are two ways things can go from here.

The first is that the opposition descends into apathy. That’s the design of the presidential palace. After all, if these poor people followed a fraud for thirteen years, whom can they trust? Isn’t it all just theater? How can they know that Özgür Özel is the real thing? The regime is putting out little videos of people denouncing their CHP memberships (along with their cultural deviance, i.e. atheism) and joining the God-fearing right. They’re filling up Kılıçdaroğlu rallies with fake supporters to give their version of the CHP momentum.

But even if they do succeed in engendering apathy, I don’t see how the palace can engineer a convincing electoral victory. The magic of the Kılıçdaroğlu era was in letting some hope flourish among the opposition, but dashing it over and over again. If you’re not generating hope among the opposition, and there’s no energy behind the election, then a victory won’t yield legitimacy.

So perhaps they don’t want electoral legitimacy any more. Perhaps the palace will settle for fear instead. They’re just making this stuff up as they go along. They’re probably thinking that they’ll cross that bridge when they get there. The CHP was too dangerous, so they kneecapped it. That’s as much as there is to it.

On the other hand, opposition supporters (and maybe some of Erdoğan’s supporters too) might actually feel heartened by the latest events. They’ve been gaslit into thinking they’ve been losing, and now the truth is out for everyone to see. So maybe they’ll want to vote. Maybe they’ll want to vote very much.

That kind of enthusiasm can generate its own reality.

Take Özgür Özel. He has been doing a good job, but when bad things happen, his first instinct is not to fight. When Ekrem İmamoğlu was arrested last year, his immediate reaction was to call for calm and see what happens. When his chairmanship was annulled last week, his initial statement was very conciliatory, denying the legitimacy of the decision, but going above and beyond to express his respect for Kılıçdaroğlu. It was only when he saw the overwhelming reaction among the opposition base, that he hardened his stance and resisted more forcefully. The nighttime rallies in Istanbul last year, and his walk under the rain last week, were instances where he acted almost against his own judgement. He let the public’s anger take over and direct his actions.

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So the opposition’s sheer collective will can make things happen, but realistically, that’s probably not enough. In order to win, the opposition will need leaders who can act strategically, and chart a pathway to power. They need to be ahead of the public, able to channel their anger or absorb it, depending on the situation. They also need some theory of victory. Many would like the CHP to pursue a left-populist strategy, for example. The country is certainly ripe for it.

Either way, we are in a very dangerous position. The story of Turkish politics is changing very quickly in the collective consciousness. Erdoğan probably won’t be able to regain his legitimacy, but he’ll still be able to keep decapitating the opposition. It’s hard to predict how long this can last. I could see it imploding in months, I could also see it go on for another generation.

Ultimately, everyone loses though. People talk about “democratic backsliding” as if it’s just a moral failing, or primarily about a country’s status in the Western world. It isn’t. It’s about social stability, prosperity, and ultimately a country’s strength. So I’m afraid that the cost of all this could be very high.

I’m going to have more to say on the latest political crisis unfolding in Turkey. As always, I recommend to keep up with the news. Below is also a Substack discussion thread, if you’d like to get into things there. It’s a bit cozier than twitter.

In the meantime, I’d like to point your attention to an article I wrote for Reason Magazine on the Ayn Rand’s growing readership in Turkey.

Rand is a very popular Russian-American Cold War author. She’s known for her strident defender of laissez-fair Capitalism, rationalism, and egoism. If you’ve been reading my Notebook section (for paid subscribers), you might remember that I wrote about her in 2025. I obviously have a lot of very deep disagreements with her, but I did find that there was something to The Fountainhead that was worth taking seriously. Maybe it’s the Nietzschean thread that I recognized in her.

So I thought more about Rand. I have a cousin who read Atlas Shrugged when she was a student at the elite Middle East Technical University (ODTÜ/METU), and it changed her life. I knew that there were more Rand readers out there in Turkey, and I wanted to look for them and write something about it.

It was particularly fun to write because it involved a lot of reporting. This is the first mini-history of Ayn Rand readership in Turkey, so I had to go out, talk to people, and put it together from the ground up. I also hadn’t done much reporting since doing the research for my book, so it was particularly refreshing to do all this.

Here it is. I hope you enjoy.

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There is one Ayn Rand-themed establishment in Turkey. It isn’t in Istanbul, the financial heart of the country, but Ankara, its political capital, home to Turkish bureaucrats and defense companies. The logo of Catalyst Coffee & Hub is a black-and-white picture of Rand holding a steaming cup of coffee. It is perched on top of Çankaya Hill, surrounded by embassies and official buildings. Its garden has a wonderful view of Atakule, the iconic tower overlooking the city.

When the cafe launched, a tax inspector came for a start-of-business check. When he saw copies of Rand’s work on the bookshelves, he was delighted and engaged his hosts in an enthusiastic discussion of Objectivism. When he departed, he did so without looking at Catalyst‘s accounts.

Turkey’s major political traditions of the past two generations—Kemalist secular statism, political Islam, and ethnic nationalism—all subordinate the individual to a collective project in different ways. Rand is countercultural against all three, and yet she articulates something that life in Turkey has quietly become: more individualist, more disenchanted, more on the hustle. That is why her readers pop up in unexpected places, and why they have been multiplying for over half a century.

…

You can read the rest of the piece on reason magazine’s website.

Nick and I had a live discussion earlier today about the political crisis unfolding in Turkey. These start out a bit slow, as we wait for people to trickle in, but I think we covered some good ground once we got going.

We also addressed quite a few questions from the live audience, which is always good. We might do another one of these depending on how things go.

If you haven’t yet read it, do also check out the language piece and I wrote. The first part of it is below.

Best,

Selim

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There’s a lot going on in Turkish politics right now, and dissecting language might not seem pertinent, but it just so happens that our post today is pretty relevant. We go into the language of the very deeply online, often very young, disillusioned opposition. Specifically, we will be looking at a series of alternative names this group uses for Turkey.

These terms aren’t commonly known. The average person on the street won’t really recognize them. In fact, one of us is 38 years old, and had never heard of these terms, while the other is 21, and knew a whole lot about them.

The post ended up being a bit too long, so we split it in two. Today we look at a single word, while a second post will take a broader view.

Caveat lector: like most deep online stuff, this stuff contains racism, and is generally in pretty bad taste.

Sirkiye

The term is a combination of “Sirk” (Circus) and “Türkiye” (Turkey). It is used to describe Turkey as being a chaotic, absurd, and badly managed place.

There are some variations on this name. It is sometimes used in conjunction with “Çamuriyet,” which is a combination of the words “çamur” (mud) and “Cumhuriyet” (republic), making it “Sirkiye Çamuriyeti.” Or you’ll find it paired with “Muz Cumhuriyeti,” meaning “Banana Republic,” so that’ll be “Sirkiye Muz Cumhuriyeti.”

Let’s look at some examples.

Yesterday, on May 21, 2026, the courts decided that the CHP’s 38th party congress in November 2023 was invalid, and that Kemal Kılıçdaroğlu, the party’s former leader, would be restored as the leader of the main opposition. It’s well-known by now that Kılıçdaroğlu is deeply compromised, and works to further Erdoğan’s rule, rather than bring about an electoral win for the CHP. The party congress that resulted in his defeat was fair, and it’s abundantly clear to everyone in the country that the courts acted to further Erdoğan’s political interests.

Many people on X chose to respond to the news simply with this word:

A couple of other tweets:

The idea is that Turkey has become a place where arbitrary decisions can override procedures designed to reflect the popular will.

But that’s reaction to an immediate news event. Let’s zoom out a bit. On the r/ifadeozgurlugu subreddit, this image was shared with the title “Sirkiye.” It’s a pretty good representation of the deeper connotations of the term:

We see a wasteland of cement blocks and dust, with various “rage comic” faces depicting common tropes in Turkish public life.

There are cave men and apes, with the headline “go back, evolving is bad,” hinting that Turkey is populated by sub-humans, or perhaps a branch of humanity that is inherently flawed, and ought not to exist.

In the top right corner, there is a building labelled “Idealist Hearths,” but it is labelled not only with the flag of the Grey Wolf, the symbol of pan-Turkic nationalism, but also that of Kurdistan. This juxtaposition of opposing nationalisms is meant to de-value both. Since the post is from 18 days ago, we can see that this is a commentary on the latest “peace process.” Here, the Erdoğan palace has engaged with the Kurdish movement, but the process was rhetorically driven by the exchange between pan-Turkic nationalist MHP’s Devlet Bahçeli and imprisoned PKK founder Abdullah Öcalan. This has devalued them both, making representative politics into absurd sock-puppet play.

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Nick and I held our biweekly live discussion on Friday. I’ve been finding these to be pretty stimulating. It’s somewhere between having coffee with a friend and being on a podcast.

What we usually do is to determine a couple of topics ahead of time, then just wing it. The chat is open, so if anyone wants to crash it with completely unrelated qu…

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My assistant Ata Armağan’s sections are marked with his name.

I apologize for the sporadic posting of late. There was a perfect storm of family and work emergencies that kept me from the keyboard this week, and delayed the notebook post. I believe I have the worst behind me, and will be resuming regular posting from now on.

The age of patronage

If you’ve been reading Kültürkampf for a while, you’ll know that I’m a fan of Tanıl Bora’s linguistic dissections. In his latest column, he examines the increasingly popular term “himayelerinde” roughly meaning “under their patronage.” He observes that the Erdoğan presidency has been taking under its wing activities like “The Illustrated Flora of Turkey project,” the “Turkey Entrepreneurs’ Meeting” or Emine Erdoğan’s “Zero Waste Movement.” This, he says, marks a radical inflation in activities that occur under direct presidential patronage.

This inflationary use of the “under their patronage” formula propagates an understanding that treats every organ of government as a “reflection” of the President within the Presidential government system, elevating every administrative tier into a high office through the plural of majesty.

This discourse is the expression of patronage relations taking the place of public service, public duty, public responsibility, and social support.

Even a futsal tournament [a 5-a-side indoor soccer game] in a district can no longer take place with the contribution of the district governorate, nor with its support — let alone its partnership — but only “under their patronage.” One could be forgiven for thinking that any form of human existence is possible only under the patronage (pardon, the patronages) of high offices.

This sovereignty constructed through protection-and-watching-over is, without a doubt, a form of tutelage.

In short, the fact that the space for public clubs and activities is shrinking, and that the presidency is hosting things under its “sovereign” patronage, is another sign of regression from a republican to a monarchic order.

If you’d like to read something relevant, see my piece on the roots of Turkish Republicanism.

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