“We say at every opportunity we have that Syria, Iraq and other places in the geography [map] in our hearts are no different from our own homeland. We are struggling so that a foreign flag will not be waved anywhere where adhan [Islamic call to prayer in mosques] is recited.”

Apparently Erdogan means at the very least the recapture of all the lands once held by the Ottoman Empire. That’s not just Greece, as in the article title below. That’s also Bulgaria, Romania, Yugoslavia, Algeria, Syria, Iraq, Israel, Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and more. How seriously this can be taken is anybody’s guess, but it shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Erdogan is already moving against the Kurds in Syria, explicitly calling the action a “jihad” and invoking the Ottoman era repeatedly.

And “We are struggling so that a foreign flag will not be waved anywhere where adhan [Islamic call to prayer in mosques] is recited” refers to far more than just the old Ottoman domains. That means everywhere there are Muslims in Europe and everywhere else. The caliphate is, in Sunni Islamic theology, the sole legitimate government for Muslims on earth, to which all Muslims owe allegiance. Erdogan is saying more clearly than he ever has before, as far as I know, that he is going to restore the caliphate. And he is virtually promising war with the non-Muslim (at least for now) states of Europe.

How far we have come. Just a few years ago, mainstream analysts would dismiss my talk of jihad and the caliphate by pointing to Turkey as an example of how Islam can coexist with democracy, and confidently predicting that soon the rest of the Islamic world would follow Turkey’s lead. Now they don’t talk about Turkey so much anymore.

“Turkey Threatens to Invade Greece,” by Uzay Bulut, Gatestone Institute, February 19, 2018: