Turkey and the Arab World Reborn: The Middle East in History

Turkey and the Arab World Reborn: The Middle East in History, pulls you into that moment when an old order imploded and a new map of power was hammered into being. I wrote this book to trace how personalities like Kaiser Wilhelm II, Enver Pasha, and Woodrow Wilson helped fashion the post–World War I settlement—and how lofty ideas about justice, racial equality, and international law were invoked and then abandoned when they were needed most. This is not some distant diplomatic chronicle; it's a story of broken promises, brutal power struggles, and the hard choices that redrew borders and destinies across continents.

At the heart of the narrative stands Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, whose ascent irreversibly altered the fate of Anatolia. I follow him from an officer of the imperial army to the architect of a nationalist revolution—through the Greek landing at Smyrna (İzmir) in May 1919, the ensuing Greco–Turkish War of 1919–1922, and his decisive challenge to the Greek project of expansion. Alongside him, figures such as Eleftherios Venizelos and King Constantine I appear as adversaries whose competing ambitions—shaped by the Megali Idea and by deep political rifts at home—collided with Kemal's vision of a new Turkey.

This book also asks what it really takes to build a modern state out of an empire's ruins. I follow Mustafa Kemal Atatürk's secular revolution—the decisive political break with the Ottoman order (the sultanate was abolished in 1922 and the caliphate in 1924)—and the bold social experiments that followed. The Turkish alphabet reform of 1928, for example, was not a mere linguistic tweak: replacing the Arabic script with a Latin-based alphabet reshaped daily life, sped up literacy campaigns, and remapped how Turks thought about their past and future. These chapters trace how political power, culture, and education were deliberately turned into the levers for remaking society from the ground up.

From there the story widens across the region to the hopes and ruptures of the Arab world. I unpack the secret Sykes–Picot agreement of 1916 and the postwar partitioning and mandate system that helped to unravel the dream of Arab unity. I also go back further, to the 1744 pact that bound Muhammad ibn Abd al‑Wahhab to Muhammad ibn Saud—a religious‑political alliance that laid the foundations of the first Saudi state and left a durable imprint on regional governance. Alongside these long-term forces, the shifting roles of figures like T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) during the Arab Revolt and policymakers such as Winston Churchill show how religion, imperial strategy, and local politics fused into powerful currents. Together, the book reveals how those currents converged to create patterns of authority and conflict that still shape the Middle East today.

The final chapters trace what followed from those choices: the forging of Transjordan (which would later become the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan), the political bargains and uneasy compromises that kept it standing, and the collapse of the Hejaz—where Hashemite (Sharifian) rule was swept away by Ibn Saud's rise to power in 1924–25. I wrote this book to weave those separate stories into a single, clear narrative so readers can see how today's Middle East emerged from those struggles. If you want history that illuminates the present without flattening its complexity, this book invites you in.