ONLY IN TLF: Turkey's Conservative Intelligentsia at a Crossroads: The Iran War and the Fracturing of Right-Wing Thought
The US-Israeli military campaign against Iran, initiated on 28 February 2026, has generated a profound ideological schism within Turkey's conservative intellectual establishment. While the Turkish state calibrates its official response with characteristic ambiguity, the country's opinion-makers on the right have fractured into sharply opposing camps whose disagreements reveal far more than differing assessments of a foreign war. At stake are foundational questions about Turkey's civilizational orientation, the permissibility of sectarian reasoning in strategic affairs, the legacy of political Islam's founding figures, and the very epistemology of trust in a Middle East defined by deception.
Two articles, published within days of each other in prominent conservative outlets, crystallize this divide with unusual clarity. Writing in Milli Gazete on 4 March 2026, Prof. Dr. Abdullah Aydın mounts a passionate defence of solidarity with Iran, grounded in anti-Zionist geopolitics, strategic pragmatism, and the prophetic warnings of the late Necmettin Erbakan. Eight days later, on 12 March, Akif Beki of Karar Gazetesi constructs an elaborate counter-narrative centred on the Shia theological concept of taqiyya (dissimulation), arguing that Iran's clerical establishment is constitutionally incapable of honest dealing and that any Turkish sympathy must be tempered by doctrinal scepticism. Together, these texts map the outer boundaries of a debate that is reshaping Turkey's conservative landscape in real time.
The Trigger: War And Its Immediate Reverberations
Both writers operate from the same baseline of events. On 28 February 2026, Israel launched a large-scale military operation against Iran, with the United States entering the conflict shortly thereafter. Prof. Aydın describes the initial strikes as "truly devastating for the Iranian state and society" and warns that the campaign carries the potential to trigger "the most terrifying wars in human history." He anchors his chronology in a revealing statement attributed to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who reportedly told the press that Washington "had no intention of attacking, but Israel attacked, so we had to get involved." For Aydın, this admission is dispositive: the war is Israeli in origin, American in execution, and Zionist in ultimate purpose.
Beki approaches the same events from a different angle, focusing less on the war's origins than on its evolving diplomatic choreography. He notes that the strikes killed senior Iranian leaders, and that Mojtaba Khamenei—son of the previous Supreme Leader, himself reportedly wounded and bereaved of his father, wife, and children in the attacks—has been elevated to the position of Devrim Rehberi (Supreme Leader). For Beki, this succession is the analytical pivot, not the strikes themselves. The question he poses is not "why did this happen?" but "what can anyone believe about what happens next?"
The Pro-Iranian Position: Milli Gazete And The Erbakan Inheritance
Milli Gazete occupies a singular position in Turkish media. As the historic press organ of the Milli Görüş (National View) movement, it carries the ideological DNA of Necmettin Erbakan—the father of Turkish political Islam, a four-time party founder, and a one-time prime minister whose worldview combined anti-Western civilizational critique with pan-Islamic solidarity that deliberately transcended the Sunni-Shia boundary. Prof. Dr. Abdullah Aydın writes squarely within this tradition, and his article reads as both a strategic analysis and a moral sermon.
Aydın's central thesis is that the war against Iran is neither a nonproliferation operation nor a response to Iranian aggression, but the latest phase in a decades-long Zionist project to dismantle every sovereign state in the region that might obstruct the realization of "Eretz Israel" (Arz-ı Mev'ud)—Greater Israel. He builds this case with historical depth, citing a 1984 article from Israel's Ma'ariv newspaper that claimed Iran was in the "final stages" of producing a nuclear bomb with German assistance. The four-decade gap between that report and the 2026 attack, he argues, exposes the nuclear justification as a perpetual pretext rather than a genuine cause for war. "We all know very well that this propaganda has not worked, that this is not the real reason," he writes. "Israel has a single goal: the Promised Land. A single purpose: to divide and fragment regional states, to soften them up and swallow them."
The strategic architecture of this argument rests on what might be called the Erbakan Sequence. Aydın recalls that during the Iraq wars, Erbakan repeatedly stated that the first target after Iraq would be Syria, followed by Iran, and ultimately Turkey. Aydın traces the fulfilment of this prophecy through the 1991 Gulf Crisis, the 2003 invasion of Iraq, the 2011 Arab Spring (which he pointedly rebrands the "Arab Winter"), and the subsequent neutralization of Syria, Libya, Sudan, Yemen, and Lebanon through civil war or foreign intervention. Egypt and others, he adds, have been subdued through coups. By 2026, only two regional states had maintained both sovereignty and stability outside Israeli control: Iran and Turkey. The attack on Iran, in this reading, is not an isolated event but the penultimate step before the crosshairs turn toward Ankara.
What distinguishes Aydın's analysis from a purely ideological polemic is his effort to make the case on strategic grounds that should appeal even to those who feel no solidarity with Iran's Islamic Republic. He invokes the Treaty of Qasr-e Shirin (Kasr-ı Şirin) of 1639, noting that Turkey and Iran have not fought a war in nearly four centuries—a record of managed coexistence unmatched in the region. Iran's territorial integrity and internal stability, he argues, are Turkish security interests regardless of ideological affinity. Iran's fragmentation would produce demographic upheaval, refugee flows, ethnic separatism, and a power vacuum on Turkey's eastern border—consequences that no amount of sectarian satisfaction could offset.
This leads Aydın to his most pointed domestic critique. He identifies two categories of Turks who welcome or remain indifferent to Iran's destruction. The first consists of those who present themselves as devout Sunni Muslims but whose real characteristic is a refusal to criticize American imperialism and Zionism, hiding behind sectarian prejudice as a substitute for strategic thought. The second comprises ostensibly secular and democratic figures who in reality serve as vehicles for American imperial interests, irreligion, and even Pahlavism (Şahçılık)—nostalgia for the pre-revolutionary Iranian monarchy and its Western alignment. Despite their apparent mutual hostility, Aydın contends, these two groups "feed from the same source." The manufacturing of anti-Iranian sentiment across Turkey's ideological spectrum is, in his view, itself evidence of imperial information operations.
Aydın closes with a quotation from Prof. Dr. Foad Izadi, an Iranian academic who stated on Al Jazeera: "The killers of this Epstein Regime either rape little girls or kill them." The invocation is deliberately provocative—linking American and Israeli military action to the moral corruption symbolized by the Epstein affair, and challenging those who celebrate Iran's suffering to consider the character of the forces they are implicitly endorsing.
The emotional register throughout is one of moral urgency. Aydın is not conducting a detached assessment; he is issuing a call to conscience. His final invocation of Erbakan's warning—"When you understand me, you may not even have a knee left to beat in despair"—carries the weight of a prophecy whose fulfilment the author considers nearly complete.
The Sceptical Position: Karar And The Taqiyya Framework
Akif Beki represents an entirely different strand of Turkish conservative thought. A veteran journalist who served as press advisor to President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan between 2004 and 2009, Beki occupies the intellectual space of post-AKP liberal conservatism—a milieu that retains its Islamic cultural identity but prioritizes pragmatic realism over ideological commitment. Karar Gazetesi, founded in 2015 by journalists associated with former Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoğlu's circle, positions itself as a platform for this tendency: conservative in sensibility, critical of both government authoritarianism and Erbakanian maximalism, and fundamentally sceptical of grand ideological narratives.
Beki's column, published on 12 March 2026, is structured entirely around the concept of taqiyya—the Shia principle of permissible dissimulation. Where Aydın builds his analysis on geopolitics and moral solidarity, Beki builds his on theology and epistemology. The effect is to reframe the Iran question from "should we support them?" to "can we believe anything they say?"
Beki begins not with Iran but with Donald Trump, establishing a parallel between American and Iranian dishonesty. He recalls the Maduro precedent: Trump telephoned Venezuela's president, gave the impression of a diplomatic resolution, "softened and relaxed him," and then orchestrated a night raid that dragged Maduro from his bed to a US prison. The lesson, for Beki, is that Trump's word is worthless—"he can spout any nonsense, lie without blinking on one foot like water flowing." Trump, in Beki's formulation, is himself "a complete master of taqiyya—concealing his real intentions behind lies and appearing other than he is."
Yet this parallel, which initially appears to distribute scepticism equally, ultimately tilts decisively against Iran. Beki argues that while Trump is a gifted liar, Iran's mullahs operate on an entirely different plane. He directs readers to the taqiyya entry in the Diyanet İslam Ansiklopedisi—the official religious encyclopedia produced by Turkey's Directorate of Religious Affairs—and provides a detailed theological genealogy. Taqiyya, he explains, originally denoted the permissibility of concealing one's true beliefs under mortal threat. In Shia jurisprudence, however, it evolved into something far more expansive: a general principle applicable to virtually all interactions with non-Shia actors, elevated from a permitted exception to a religious obligation. "They view one who abandons taqiyya as one who has abandoned prayer," Beki writes. He cites the Shia theological principle that "nine-tenths of religion is taqiyya" and that "he who has no taqiyya has no religion." This state of affairs, he notes, is understood to persist until the return of the Hidden Imam (Mehdi), who will establish global dominion and render dissimulation unnecessary.
The strategic implication is stark. If Iran's governing theology mandates deception in all dealings with outsiders, then no agreement, assurance, or gesture from Tehran can be taken at face value. Beki makes this operational with a pointed hypothetical: "If Iran says the missile that hit Turkey was not fired by them, that those trying to drive a wedge between us are making it look like Iran fired it—you cannot believe Iran." Equally, he adds, "if Trump says the war is ending, or that Iran itself bombed the school full of children—you cannot believe Trump either." The epistemological crisis is total: "Whatever they say, that is not what it is. You cannot act on either's word."
Beki's analysis of the Mojtaba Khamenei succession is the most strategically interesting passage in either article. He observes that a man who lost his entire family in American-Israeli strikes would appear to be the most implacably hostile possible choice for Supreme Leader—a "hawk mullah" who is a "tailor-made" selection for the Revolutionary Guards. Yet Beki raises the possibility that this is precisely what both sides need. Only a leader with such credentials of personal suffering could sell a compromise to Iran's hardline establishment without being accused of treachery. Trump, Beki speculates, may have deliberately provoked the selection of the most anti-American candidate, understanding that paradoxically only such a figure could deliver a durable agreement. He coins the term "ters manyel" (reverse psychology) to describe this potential dynamic, and asks whether Trump is "leaving an open door" for Mojtaba to initiate contact.
The column's most memorable image captures its essential ambivalence. Beki describes the situation as "two taqiyya practitioners dancing on one rope"—a spectacle that is simultaneously the world's worst and best news. The worst news is that neither actor can be trusted about anything. The best news is that mutual dissimulation might produce its own form of pragmatic peace: "If one morning Mojtaba Khamenei writes Trump a letter out of taqiyya, and Trump calls to congratulate him out of taqiyya, and both announce an 'honourable, profitable' agreement with equal insincerity to their publics—you would not be surprised."
The Turkish proverb Beki invokes—"Acem kılıcı gibi" ("like a Persian sword"), meaning double-edged and double-dealing—reveals the cultural substratum beneath the theological analysis. The image of Persian duplicity is not Beki's invention; it draws on centuries of Ottoman-Safavid rivalry and Sunni-Shia suspicion embedded in Turkish folk consciousness. By anchoring his argument in both Diyanet scholarship and popular idiom, Beki achieves a synthesis of theological rigour and cultural resonance that makes his scepticism feel like common sense rather than sectarian prejudice.
The Architecture Of Disagreement
The distance between these two analyses is not merely one of degree but of kind. Aydın and Beki are not arguing about the same question. Aydın asks: "What does justice and strategic wisdom demand of Turkey in this moment?" Beki asks: "What can Turkey actually know about this situation, and whom can it trust?" The former is a moral-strategic question; the latter is an epistemological one. They talk past each other because they operate in different intellectual registers.
At the level of historical framing, Aydın reaches back to 1639 and the Treaty of Qasr-e Shirin to establish continuity and partnership; Beki reaches back to the theological formation of Shia Islam to establish discontinuity and suspicion. One sees four centuries of coexistence; the other sees fourteen centuries of doctrinal deception. One reads history as a basis for solidarity; the other reads theology as a warning against it.
Their treatments of the United States are revealing in their asymmetry. For Aydın, America is essentially a tool of Zionism—a great power whose foreign policy in the Middle East is determined not by its own interests but by the dominance of Zionist networks over its political system. He is careful to distinguish between "Israel" and "Zionism," noting that "Zionism dominates the United States even more than it dominates Israel." This framework leaves little room for American agency; Washington is a vector, not an actor. Beki, by contrast, treats Trump as a fully autonomous agent of chaos—a liar and manipulator operating according to his own instincts and interests, parallel to but independent of Iran's mullahs. The two actors are mirror images of each other, neither subordinate to a larger ideological force. This difference is consequential: if America is a Zionist instrument, then the war is existential and solidarity is imperative; if America is simply another self-interested deceiver, then the war is a game between two untrustworthy players, and Turkey's wisest course may be cautious distance.
Perhaps the deepest fault line concerns the role of sectarian identity in strategic analysis. Aydın explicitly rejects sectarianism as a lens for understanding the conflict, condemning those who welcome Iranian deaths because the victims are Shia. His Erbakanian framework demands Muslim unity across confessional lines—a position that requires conscious suppression of theological differences in the name of a higher political solidarity. Beki, conversely, places Shia theology at the centre of his analysis, arguing that taqiyya is not an incidental feature of Iranian statecraft but its defining characteristic, rooted in doctrinal imperatives that cannot be wished away by appeals to brotherhood. The taqiyya discourse functions as what might be called a civilized form of sectarian Othering: Iran is not condemned for being Shia in so many words, but its Shia theological structure is presented as producing an actor fundamentally different from—and less trustworthy than—Sunni interlocutors. The practical effect is to erode the moral and strategic case for solidarity from within, without ever articulating an explicitly anti-Shia position.
What Lies Beneath: Deeper Currents In Turkish Conservatism
The Aydın-Beki divide is not a creation of the 2026 war; it is a surfacing of tensions that have structured Turkish conservative thought for decades.
The first of these tensions is the unresolved legacy of Necmettin Erbakan within the broader right-wing family. Erbakan's Milli Görüş movement birthed the AKP, but the AKP quickly outgrew and then repudiated much of its parent's worldview—particularly its categorical anti-Westernism, its hostility to NATO, and its willingness to prioritize Muslim solidarity over alliance management. Milli Gazete remained the organ of the unreconstructed Erbakanian tradition, represented today by the Yeniden Refah Partisi (New Welfare Party). Karar, while not an AKP organ, emerged from the AKP's intellectual ecosystem and shares its preference for pragmatic engagement with Western structures. When the Iran war forces a binary choice—solidarity or scepticism—these two traditions discover that their underlying assumptions about Turkey's place in the world are incompatible.
The second tension concerns the permissible boundaries of sectarian reasoning. Turkish Sunni Islam, as mediated by the Diyanet and the mainstream conservative establishment, has generally avoided the overt anti-Shiism characteristic of Gulf Salafism. Yet a subterranean current of suspicion toward Iran's Shia theocracy has always existed, periodically activated by Iranian proxy activities in Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. Beki's taqiyya column represents a sophisticated activation of this current—deploying Diyanet-sourced scholarship rather than polemical Salafi rhetoric, and framing the critique in strategic rather than explicitly sectarian terms. Aydın's counter-argument—that those who welcome Iranian suffering on sectarian grounds are serving imperial interests whether they know it or not—represents the Erbakanian attempt to de-legitimize sectarian reasoning as a tool of foreign manipulation.
The third tension is between moral clarity and strategic ambiguity. Aydın demands that Turkey take a clear moral position: the war is unjust, Iran's people are victims, and silence is complicity. This moral clarity carries strategic risks—it could antagonize Washington, constrain Ankara's diplomatic flexibility, and align Turkey with a potentially losing side. Beki's ironic detachment avoids these risks but at the cost of moral abdication—a position that, if adopted by the state, would leave Turkey a passive spectator to the destruction of a neighbour with whom it shares a 534-kilometre border.
The Erbakan Prophecy And Its Gravitational Pull
One element of Aydın's analysis deserves separate consideration for its impact across the conservative spectrum: the Erbakan Sequence. The claim that Erbakan predicted, decades in advance, the sequential targeting of Iraq, Syria, Iran, and Turkey carries enormous rhetorical power precisely because the first three stages have now arguably occurred. Even Turks who reject Erbakan's broader worldview must contend with the uncomfortable accuracy of this progression. If Iraq was neutralized in 1991 and 2003, if Syria was shattered after 2011, and if Iran is now under attack in 2026, the implication that Turkey is next acquires a logical force that transcends ideological affiliation.
This prophecy functions differently across the conservative spectrum. For the Milli Görüş faithful, it confirms Erbakan's visionary genius and validates the entire analytical framework of Zionist expansionism. For pragmatic conservatives of the Karar variety, it presents an uncomfortable challenge: even if one rejects the conspiratorial architecture, the sequential pattern demands explanation. Beki does not address the Erbakan Sequence directly in his column, but his anxious aside about Iranian missiles potentially hitting Turkish territory suggests an awareness that the war's geography is already encroaching on Turkish sovereignty.
The Missing Centre And The Policy Vacuum
What is perhaps most striking about this intellectual confrontation is the absence of a synthesizing position. Neither writer represents the Turkish government's official stance, which at the time of writing appears to involve a calibrated combination of humanitarian concern, diplomatic engagement, and strategic hedging. The conservative intelligentsia, which forms the ideological base of Turkish governance, is offering the state two irreconcilable frameworks rather than a coherent analytical consensus.
Aydın's framework points toward active opposition to the war, support for Iran's territorial integrity, mobilization of Islamic solidarity mechanisms, and acceptance of significant diplomatic costs with Washington. Beki's framework points toward cautious disengagement, deep scepticism of all parties' statements, and a wait-and-see posture premised on the assumption that the two principal combatants will eventually reach a cynical accommodation that serves neither's stated ideals.
Neither position adequately addresses the full spectrum of Turkish interests. Aydın's analysis, for all its moral force, largely ignores the genuine grievances Turkey has accumulated against Iranian policy over decades—from Tehran's support for PKK-adjacent groups to its competitive influence operations in Iraq and Syria, to the sectarian proxy networks that have repeatedly complicated Turkish strategic objectives. His framework demands solidarity with an Iran that has not always reciprocated Turkish goodwill, and his silence on these points weakens his case among audiences beyond the Milli Görüş faithful.
Beki's analysis, for all its intellectual sophistication, produces strategic paralysis. If no actor can be trusted and no statement can be believed, the logical conclusion is inaction—a posture that becomes untenable when missiles are flying over or into Turkish airspace and millions of potential refugees mass at the eastern border. His taqiyya-centred critique, moreover, risks providing intellectual cover for those who would welcome Iran's destruction on sectarian grounds—precisely the constituency Aydın identifies as serving imperial interests.
Conclusion: The War Within The War
The US-Israeli war against Iran is, among many other things, a stress test for Turkish conservative thought. It has exposed a fault line that runs not between secularists and Islamists—the traditional axis of Turkish political conflict—but through the heart of the Islamic-conservative camp itself. On one side stand the heirs of Erbakan, for whom Muslim solidarity and anti-Zionist resistance remain non-negotiable principles that override sectarian discomfort. On the other stand the pragmatic sceptics, for whom theological and cultural differences with Iran are not prejudices to be overcome but realities to be factored into cold strategic calculation.
What unites both camps, despite their profound disagreements, is a shared recognition that Turkey cannot remain a spectator. Whether through Aydın's passionate insistence that "Iran's stability is Turkey's security" or Beki's nervous speculation about missiles and false flags, both writers acknowledge that the Iran war is, inescapably, Turkey's crisis. The question is not whether Turkey will be affected, but how—and on that question, the conservative intelligentsia speaks not with one voice but with two, each claiming wisdom and warning of disaster should the other prevail.
The resolution of this debate will not be determined by the quality of the arguments alone. It will be shaped by the war's trajectory, by the behaviour of the United States and Israel, by Iran's capacity to survive or fragment, and by the choices of a Turkish state that must navigate between moral imperative and strategic prudence with an intellectual class divided against itself. In the meantime, the fracture stands as evidence that the greatest damage a regional war inflicts is not always measured in missiles and casualties; sometimes it is measured in the shattering of the conceptual frameworks through which a society understands its world.