The Fall of the Ottoman Empire, by HE Zaimeche Al-Djazairi, Editions Ribât

The story of the last days of the Ottoman Empire is a tragically topical subject in more ways than one: firstly, because the borders resulting from it, from the Balkans to the Middle East, in particular across the infamous Sykes-Picot agreement, have been the cause of many evils, past and present, especially since the yawning void of the caliphate, the fundamental base of Islamic civilization, has never been filled since; then, because this phase of history is perhaps the most symptomatic of a certain geopolitical attitude of the Western world which has never ceased, through the centuries, to seek to dismember and divide the Muslim world as much as it was humanly possible to do so; finally, because the atrocities that accompanied these events have dramatically transformed the landscape of many regions and continue, from time to time, to come back to haunt Europe, like an old demon one thinks of, steeped in humanism, having definitively turned away but which reminds us of what we are really capable of – the mass graves of Srebrenica testify to this.

In a particularly instructive analysis for modern Muslims, this work thus lifts the veil on the extraordinary public opinion campaigns which, throughout Christian Europe, have worked to dehumanize the "Turk", an essential prerequisite for any concrete action in this regard. sense ; a veritable school of hatred which, through war propaganda, lies and untruths, manipulations and caricatures, was to ideologically arm the genocidaires and justify all the abominations: the destruction of the Ottoman sultanate as a political entity, therefore, but also, and above all, the expulsion of Muslims from Europe and the project of annihilation, on a larger scale, of the Turkish people – since the killings were to continue as far as Anatolia. The thing is all the more topical as this caricatural obsession has never really left Western consciousness, as illustrated even today by the epidermal and often completely irrational reactions of the French political and media elites regarding Turkey. – always perceived under the prism of the threat of the “knife between the teeth”, as illustrated by the Libyan file or “Saint-Sophie”, for the most recent demonstrations of the thing – and more generally of the Moslem world.