Are you a Turk?

Fire of Liberty

Amir Taheri has a wonderful review on Hugo Pope's new book Sons of The Conquerors: The Rise of the Turkic World.


Here's a sample of Taheri's thorough review:

Nevertheless, a majority of people who now live within the borders of the Turkish Republic and speak Turkish as their mother tongue are, as far as race is concerned, the descendants of the Greek and other Hellenised communities of Asia Minor who have been Turkicised during the past 10 centuries or so. What makes them Turkic, therefore, is not blood but culture and sentiment. They feel they are Turks, and so they are.

Not everyone who speaks a version of the half a dozen or so Turkic languages may describe himself as Turkic. But most do.

Pope estimates the number of Turkic-speakers at over 140 million, almost half of them in the Turkey itself. Turkic-speakers are also a majority in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan which have a combined population of 50 million. Turkic-speaking Azeris number around 15 million in Iran while the Uyghurs, another Turkic people who live in Xinjiang, or the Chinese Turkistan, number some 12 million. There are also Turkic minorities in Russia (including the Tatars, the Bashkirs, the Charkess-Qarachai, and the Kabardino-Balkars) who account for some 20 million people. Smaller Turkic minorities live in Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Armenia, Syria, Iraq, Bulgaria, Greece and Serbia.

It looks like its a pretty good read. Check it out.