"Blast from past: The Ottoman shadow on Arab politics
BY MATEIN KHALID
22 June 2005
A HUNDRED years after the collapse of the Ottoman empire, the shock waves of its death are still rattling the Middle East. Both Arabs and Turks have not come to terms with their common imperial Ottoman past.
Kemal Ataturk ridiculed and demonised the Ottoman heritage of the Turkish Republic, as did the generation of Arab nationalists who fought the Sultan�s armies in Syria, Hijaz and Palestine. Ataturk deposed the last sultan, abolished the caliphate Sultan Selim had claimed from the Mamluks, replaced the Shariah with the Swiss civil code and replaced the Ottoman Umma with an aggressively secular Anatolian nationalism. "
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