Tunisia’s Brotherhood uses SETA, historical records to promote Turkey

In order for Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan to realize his dream of renewing the Ottoman caliphate and control the wealth of the Middle East, the Ankara-based Foundation for Political, Economic and Social Research (SETA) has been involved in training dozens of Tunisian engineers in coordination with Tunisia’s Brotherhood-affiliated Ennahda movement and then sending them to the Brotherhood’s Government of National Accord (GNA) in Libya.

Painting Turkey in a good light

Seventy-six Tunisian engineers were trained by SETA in Eskişehir, Turkey in vital fields such as biological and mechanical engineering and communications to support the GNA, led by Fayez al-Sarraj. This was in cooperation with Tunisia’s Center for Strategic and Diplomatic Studies (CSDS) led by former Tunisian Foreign Minister Rafik Abdessalem, who organized multiple SETA conferences several years ago in cooperation with other Libyan and Tunisian centers to support Ankara’s interference in Libya and to paint Turkey in a good light.

In 2016, the CSDS organized a conference on the prospects for cooperation between Turkey and the Arab Maghreb in an attempt to highlight the Turkish role in the region, which received many Turkish researchers. This was in cooperation with the Ottoman Records Center for Turkish Studies in Tunisia, led by Zubair Khalafallah, a Tunisian researcher who has long promoted the Ottoman caliphate. He claimed that the path of relations between Turkish and the Arab Maghreb must be corrected after having been cut off by the West. He noted that Turkey began an open policy regarding the Arab region since 2002 and then stood by Tunisia, Egypt and Libya in the wake of the Arab Spring revolutions. He added that Turkey’s Arab Maghreb project aims at unifying the region into a major force.

The center promotes Ottoman history and books such as “History of the Arab Countries in the Ottoman Caliphate” and “Entering Tripoli under Ottoman Rule.

Khalafallah is promoting the history of Tunisia during the Ottoman era, describing the Tunisians as ignorant and the Ottomans as the colonialists. There are hundreds of thousands of Ottoman documents about Tunisia in the archives of the prime minister In Istanbul, such as when Tunisia had asked the Ottoman sultan for relief from Spanish colonialism. According the Khalafallah,Tte Ottomans ruled Tunisia for four centuries without imposing the Turkish language or the Hanafi school of jurisprudence on them, compared to France, which imposed the French language and destroyed their identity.

Tunisian-Turkish Brotherhood Association

Khalafallah, a professor of Ottoman history at Turkey’s Mardin University, now spreads the ideas of the Ottoman caliphate among Tunisians, especially his students, through the Tunisian-Turkish Brotherhood Association that was registered in Istanbul in 2017.

According to Khalafallah, Turkey has served as an inspiration for the Arab people ever since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) came to power in 2002.

Khalafallah believes that the Berlin summit to solve the Libyan crisis was only an attempt to put an end to cooperation between Turkey and the North African region in order to preserve the interests of European countries; however he continues his work to promote the Ottoman caliphate to Tunisians.