July 2026. The most powerful leaders of the Western world landed in Ankara. Planes touched down at Esenboğa one after another. Black motorcades wound through the city’s streets. At the entrance to the summit hall, the flag of the world’s largest military alliance flew as protocol dictated. But there was one thing protocol did not mention: this visit carried within it the quiet unravelling of a two-hundred-year-old mindset.
The West was visiting the East. This time, though, not with a notebook — with a dossier of negotiations and memoranda of understanding.
The Power of Knowledge
In the nineteenth century, Europe’s view of the East was not mere curiosity. The power of knowledge was deployed as an instrument of rule. Orientalism was constructed not to understand the East but to make it governable. The West positioned itself as the party defining, classifying, and passing judgement on the East. The East, meanwhile, was reduced to a silent object — not one that spoke, but one about which others spoke.
Edward Said counted more than 60,000 publications on Islam produced in Europe and America between 1800 and 1950. The figure alone is staggering. What is more striking still is that this vast body of literature brought Westerners no closer to understanding Islam, nor Muslims any closer to understanding the West. What it produced instead was a one-sided, static, exotic, and backward caricature of Islamic civilisation built with the language of academia, reinforced by the imagery of art, and delivered through the machinery of politics.
Among the architects of this fiction, few left a deeper mark than Ernest Renan. In 1883, from his chair at the Sorbonne, Renan declared that Islam could produce neither science nor philosophy, and that whatever Islamic civilisation had achieved was borrowed from pre-Islamic Persian culture or elsewhere. The only path to a modern, democratic Islam, he argued, ran through secularisation. The speech provoked such fury that Muslim intellectuals from Namık Kemal to Jamal al-Din al-Afghani took up their pens against it. But Renan’s true achievement was not winning that argument — it was making his premise respectable among European intellectuals. A century later, Bernard Lewis said the same thing in different words: to modernise, first Westernise.
On its surface this discourse reads as academic. Underneath, it encodes a hierarchy. The West defines, the East is defined. The West teaches, the East learns. The West is the knower, the East is that which must be known. This hierarchy was not confined to a handful of scholars’ writings. The long roll call from Goldziher to Gibb, from Massignon to Hurgronje, wrote different chapters of the same project: rendering Islam legible to the West so it could be classified, interpreted, and ultimately governed on Western terms. Knowledge, in Said’s account, served power. The more the West knew about the East, the more easily it could be controlled.
Through the Traveller’s Eyes
This hierarchy lived beyond the academy. European travellers carried the same lens through Istanbul, Ankara, Cairo, and Isfahan. What they saw was largely the landscape they had already imagined: enchanting bazaars, mysterious mosques, exotic dress, men who looked wise but were somehow idle, women hidden behind walls. These images belonged to the gaze that arrived, not the places it visited.
Thomas Thornton spent five years in Türkiye and published a book of observations about the Turks — most of them later shown to be wrong, prejudiced, and detached from reality. It was published anyway. It was read and cited anyway. False information entered circulation dressed as established fact. André Gide’s diaries show the same reflex: a mind that judged Turkish dress “ugly” and never let Türkiye be more than an exotic, judgement-worthy backdrop. The traveller did not change to meet the place. He bent the place to fit the image already in his head. That was not curiosity. It was domination by another name.
Nineteenth-century Orientalist painting is the visual archive of this gaze, veiled women in harems, slave markets, sultans’ palaces, whirling dervishes, all repeating the message that the East is beautiful but powerless, interesting but primitive, worth discovering but in need of governing. Said called this process naturalisation. The East presented not as a civilisation in its own right but as part of nature, something to be photographed, catalogued, used.
That image outlived the century. It survives in the silhouette of a minaret in a Hollywood frame, the clamour of a market, the figure of a veiled woman selected for a Western newspaper’s report on Türkiye or the Islamic world. Renan’s sentences are long dead. The structure he built is not. Orientalism’s greatest achievement was ceasing to be an academic discipline and becoming a cultural reflex. No one need be a conscious Orientalist anymore. The framework runs on its own.
The Trap of the Bridge Metaphor
Against this backdrop, one metaphor in the West’s approach to Türkiye stands out for what it conceals: the bridge.
For decades, Türkiye has been called a “bridge between East and West.” It sounds, at first, like a compliment. It conceals a hierarchy yet. A bridge belongs to neither side. Its value lies not in what it is but in what others are permitted to do by crossing it. A bridge is not a subject. It is a tool.
Even inside the language of strategic partnership, the West never fully released Türkiye from this category. Through NATO enlargement, EU accession talks, and Middle East policy, Türkiye has been treated as “critical but uncertain,” “indispensable but untrustworthy”, a full member never quite a full European, an ally forever qualified by brackets. This was Orientalist logic wearing diplomatic dress. Türkiye as an element defined and assigned a function by the West, part of strategy rather than civilisation. Every step outside that category drew a label. Independent foreign policy became “deviation.” Independent defence became “alarming.” Even when Türkiye acted in its own name, the West kept assessing it within a framework it had drawn itself.
What Broke in Ankara
Here the July 2026 summit becomes historically significant.
Seen one way, the arrival of NATO leaders in Ankara was routine diplomacy — protocol, agenda items, a joint declaration. Seen another way, a deep rupture sits beneath that routine surface.
The West came to Ankara because it needs Türkiye.
Black Sea security architecture cannot function without Ankara’s consent. The Ukraine corridor depends on Türkiye’s position. NATO’s southern flank cannot hold without it. Middle East balancing requires Ankara’s active hand. Add energy routes, migration management, and regional mediation capacity, and the picture sharpens further. Türkiye is no longer an Eastern object managed by the West but a strategic actor the West now requires. This is not a passing, circumstantial dependency. It is structural. The West’s security architecture cannot remain sustainable without Ankara’s approval, control of the Straits, Türkiye’s defence industry capacity, and Türkiye’s regional relationships. Orientalism never wrote this scenario into its script.
For two centuries, Western travellers came to Ankara with notebooks. Western academics began writing about it. Western politicians came to pass judgement on it. In 2026, Western leaders came to negotiate with it. The shift looks small. Epistemologically, it is enormous. The distance between knowing and needing is not a change of attitude — it is a redistribution of power.
Negotiation requires two subjects at the table. A party being negotiated with cannot remain an object. The one in need does not get to define the terms alone.
Has the Mindset Changed?
Here a pause is warranted. Does the West’s arrival in Ankara mean the Orientalist mindset has actually been overcome? Not yet clear.
Strategic need has never guaranteed cultural equality. History shows the West doing both at once. Othering the East and pulling it close whenever it was convenient. Colonialism ran on exactly this contradiction. It declares the East as backward while depending on its resources. During the Cold War, Türkiye was NATO’s southern bulwark and still waited at the EU’s door. Strategic value does not automatically upgrade perception. Sometimes it does the opposite — dependence produces a new label, not the “exotic East” but the “indispensable yet controllable power.”
The Ankara summit is better read not as the end of Orientalism but as the moment it is tested. What image of Türkiye did Western leaders carry into that room? A Türkiye that swapped the harem for nuclear warheads, the bazaar for a defence industry, the sultan for a president, yet remains at its core the same “exotic ally”? Or a Türkiye recognised as a partner at the table with its own strategic judgement, civilisational depth, and political will?
The answer lives not in the minutes but in the rhetoric. How did the joint communiqué describe Türkiye? Which adjectives framed it? Whose perspective shaped the text? Orientalism rarely announces itself loudly. It survives in word choice, in the frames a text builds, in the narratives it leaves out. Calling a country a “bridge” one more time is itself an answer.
Conclusion: History Tests Us Again
In 1883 Renan claimed Islam could not produce science. In 2026, the heirs of that same tradition sat down with Türkiye to discuss artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, and joint defence. The same geography once recorded in travellers’ notebooks as exotic chaos hosted the summit as the presiding host.
This is not irony. It is a test.
The test asks whether the heirs of two centuries of knowledge-as-power can finally see the partner they now need as an equal — or whether the line between the “knowing West” and the “known East” has simply shifted its coordinates, the traveller replaced by the diplomat, the notebook by the negotiation dossier, while the mindset underneath stays the same.
Ankara set the stage for that question. Despite every distance and every assumption of superiority Orientalism built, the West was forced to admit it needed that region. That admission is small. It is also profound. Orientalism was built as a system of knowledge, and every system of knowledge meets its test the moment it collides with reality. Ankara was that collision.
The true end of Orientalism will not arrive through an academic declaration or a cultural mea culpa. It will arrive, if it arrives at all, through what Western leaders understood the moment they had to sit down at that table: the East was never what they had written it to be.
It never had been.
That answer has not been written yet. It is being lived out now — on the streets of Ankara, in the halls of negotiation, in the language of the agreements still taking shape.
*The views expressed in this content are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of İdrakpost.
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