Thread by @DrUsaama

I hope, @MonicaLMarks, you don't mind me responding in a thread, since there's much to say.

Firstly, I've not read Ceren's book--I hope to--but I'm commenting on a broader problem in liberal commentary/anxieties with respect to Muslim expressions of political agency.

https://twitter.com/MonicaLMarks/status/1657460295130816517

Erdogan, for his many flaws, is the most salient index of this anxiety. But after Alasdair MacIntyre, Talal Asad, William Cavanaugh, et al. have all exposed both liberalisms own contingency and the epidemic of liberal violence, why should non-liberals take liberalism seriously?

Consider liberal civilizing missions throughout colonial history down to the Iraq war. Millions dead in the name of human rights and protecting minorities. Postcolonials among us who have spent our careers in both worlds get quite tired of the (ingenuous) hypocrisy.

This isn't about Erdogan--and I've not been a fan of his for for years. This is about what @davidahearst puts quite succinctly: The West wouldn't care if Erdogan was an outright dictator (like Sisi, MbZ, MbS, et al.) who didn't challenge Western interests.

https://twitter.com/MiddleEastEye/status/1657414373579669506

The West isn't necessarily bothered by his Islamic rhetoric--they've been working with consecutive dictators of Saudi Arabia (prior MBS) who upheld the Sharia domestically far more than Erdogan ever has. This is at heart about the fact that a figure like Erdogan doesn't play ball

All of these dictators have been happy to sell their populations' interests to satisfy Western geostrategic designs on the region. Erdogan has been one of the few rulers in the region to think about Turkish interests, Muslim interests, and Islamic soft power.

This is genuinely popular with Muslims globally--the theological reasons behind this are for another time. Erdogan meaningfully pushes back against putting Western interests before Turkish/Muslim interests, unlike the behaviour of most of the dictators in the region.

That's why, even though I find his authoritarian drift troubling, I recognize his importance. This is what liberals so often miss, or perhaps recognize as a threat to their domination of their neo-colonial subjects (for their own good of course, as with any civilizing mission).

As Muslims, who have been epistemically and intellectually suffocated by colonialism start articulating themselves in such matters, liberals will have to start reflecting on how they continue to be perceived so much like the colonial powers of yesteryear.

Hopefully, the realization will eventually elicit some circumspection. In practice, the liberal establishment's response to postcolonial critique has been to follow the "Tacitus principle": Crime, once exposed, has no refuge except in audacity.

This is why power also matters. Liberals could not assert themselves without military force which they euphemistically refer to as defence. Postcolonial peoples will never be truly liberated from Western domination without the assertion of some independence.

This is why Erdogan, for all his flaws, is important. And even though, I don't consider the foregoing as an endorsement of him in this election cycle, I wanted to write this thread to articulate some of what liberal commentators have been missing in their often flawed commentary.