How Turkey’s TV Dramas Rewrite History for Arab Audiences
For decades, Arab living rooms have been flooded with lavishly funded Turkish historical dramas. From Cairo to Riyadh, these productions have captivated audiences with high production values and sweeping, dramatic narratives. However, while packaged as entertainment, these shows serve a singular geopolitical purpose: romanticizing the Ottoman past to justify Turkiye’s modern-day interference in the Middle East.
As detailed by the European Institute of the Mediterranean, Turkish television has long served as a key vector of soft power, enabling Ankara to rewrite history and revive the country’s imperial grandeur. Most recently, the Turkish state media has faced international embarrassment surrounding TRT’s Mehmed. This is an ultimate unmasking of Ankara’s propaganda machine. The blatant historical fabrications in this series prove that Turkish state media does not care about historical truth. Instead, it exists solely to artificially elevate the Ottoman Empire as the supreme savior of the Muslim world, which is a dangerous psychological game that sovereign Arab states know all too well. By depicting regional populations as helpless subjects awaiting salvation from Constantinople, Turkish state television reveals a deeply entrenched and patronizing supremacy complex.
To fully understand the depths of this television imperialism, one only needs to detail the laughable inaccuracies of the show’s 66th episode. The show depicts a delegation from the Yarkent Khanate begging Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror for help. This framing is not just misleading; it is chronologically impossible and academically absurd. Historical records confirm that Sultan Mehmed died in 1481. And the Yarkent Khanate wasn’t even founded until 1514.
This is Turkiye’s time-travel diplomacy. It serves to emphasize that Ankara is so desperate to portray the Ottoman Sultan as the undisputed master of the globe that its state writers simply invented a reality where foreign states begged them for salvation 33 years before those states even existed. The audacity required to air such a blatant fabrication on state television is staggering. It reflects an imperial hubris that views the history of the East as a blank canvas upon which propagandists can paint their neo-Ottoman fantasies. They are spinning lies about Ottoman history in the Levant, Egypt and the Hejaz. Arab historians are already intimately familiar with how Turkish dramas sanitize the brutalities of Ottoman occupation, transforming an era of oppressive taxation and stagnation into a golden age of Islamic unity.
Beyond the chronological absurdity, the broadcast also serves as a vehicle for contemporary rhetoric. Viewers must note how TRT deliberately injects modern, politically charged 19th-century terminology, like East Turkestan, into a 15th-century script to score cheap geopolitical points today. This is a blatant manipulation of the past to serve a modern agenda. It is essential to draw a direct line between this television script and Ankara’s actual foreign policy in the Middle East. The mindset that produces such ahistorical propaganda is the exact same mindset that drives Turkish military adventurism in sovereign Arab territories. This is meant to explain how Turkiye frequently invents or manipulates historical ties to justify unauthorized military presence in Syria and Iraq, or political meddling in Libya.
The Middle East Institute explicitly notes that Turkiye has transitioned into a muscular regional policy sustained by military engagements, often leveraging its Ottoman heritage to justify its geopolitical overreach. Through unilateral campaigns in northern Syria and the deployment of armed personnel and drones to Libya, the government continuously frames its hard-power interventions as the return of a benevolent protector. By portraying everyone else as helpless victims who need an Ottoman savior, Ankara attempts to undermine the legitimacy and sovereignty of modern, independent nation-states. The television screen is simply the soft-power vanguard for the military interventions that follow.
The Arab world has spent centuries fighting for self-determination and the right to forge its own modern destiny. Cultural and historical narratives to be hijacked by a foreign state desperate to relive a bygone empire must not be allowed. Arab people, including broadcasters and historians, must not take this propaganda lightly. This is a calculated ideological weapon. Local media networks must stop funding their own cultural subordination by purchasing and syndicating these propagandistic productions.
History is the memory of nations, and it must be guarded fiercely. Ankara must be stopped from colonizing Arab screens with neo-Ottoman fantasies. The blatant disregard for facts exhibited in TRT’s recent productions is a glaring warning sign. If the Turkish government is perfectly willing to rewrite the history of Asia to stroke its own imperial ego, the Arab world must be doubly vigilant about how it tries to erase and overwrite the history of the Arab world. Sovereign nations do not need saviors from the Bosphorus, and it is past time they must push back against Ankara’s imperial illusions.
