Turkey’s current presidential election is being dominated by the issue of refugees from the Middle East. It’s not uncommon for politicians make racist remarks about them and xenophobic attacks against Arabs (mostly Syrian and Iraqi) have been making the news more and more lately.
I understand that the specific question of Syrian refugees is a fairly recent one, given that the whole situation is barely over ten years old. Much can change in this small timeframe, but I imagine there’s a deeper issue rooted into this.
I don’t think I’m being unfair when I say Turkey owes a great deal to the Arab civilization; it was the Arabs who introduced them to their religion and many of their customs. Cross cultural contact between those populations was very intense for centuries and the Turks even used a variant of the Perso-Arabic script up until the 1920’s.
How come they feel contempt for a people who in many ways were deeply influential to Turkish culture? What are the reasons behind the anti-Arab sentiment that exists in Turkey today? Did it exist at all prior to the Republic, or indeed, the current refugee crisis? Was the feeling of kinship between those two peoples just never that strong?
Thanks in advance to everyone in this subredd!
Before the refugees there wasn't any widespread anti-Arab sentiment in Turkey.
Unlike other Muslims like Pakistanis (who can be perceived as Arab wannabes), Turkish nationalist types tend to look down on Arabs (Turkish ultranationalists look down on anyone who isn't Turkic), but this was a very small minority, generally people didn't have any anti-Arab sentiment.
Turkey has its own native Arab population in Urfa, Mardin, Hatay, and other southern provinces, things were generally fine. It really only started after refugees, even then initially many Turkish people were sympathetic to Arab refugees fleeing war, though the most didn't want refugees at all.
But later, things have changed, Turkey now holds more refugees and economic migrants than all of Europe combined.
Many of these people, not only Arabs but Afghans, Pakistanis or Bangladeshis, are seen as alien to Turkish people, don't seem to make any effort towards integration, and on top of that many of them are illegal to begin with.
The recent reveal of Arabs/Afghans/Pakistanis (Turks can't differenciate any of those) taking videos of Turkish women and generally harassing them also seriously fuelled the hatred towards, not exclusively Arabs, but Islamic refugees in general, among the younger generation who are not at all religious.
While Turkish people themselves are largerly Muslim, the younger generations are not at all religious and they perceive religous Islamic refugees as alien to themselves.
In conclusion, the recent hatred isn't really towards Arabs, it's towards non-Turkish Islamic refugees whose majority happened to be Arab.
And no, Turkish people don't owe anything to Arabs. Turkish people are far more influenced by Persians than Arabs. It was Persians who introduced Islam to Turks not Arabs, it was Persian language that was an official or major language in Turkic dynasties and not Arabic, Persian influence in contemporary Turkish is greater than that of Arabic.
Also, culturally influencing a people doesn't mean they owe you for that, many Iranians today would wish Arabs had not culturally influenced them and "introduced them to Islam (by violently conquering their country and treating them poorly for two hundred years).