They spent the next 600 years under the Turkish boot ~ and then finally some Europeans moved in to liberate them.
True to their nature they then bit the hand of those who freed them.
“Actually they are mentally locked in the 11th century ~ that’s when the Turks took them over and turned all the Arabic, Berber and Kurdish speaking areas in the Middle East into an enormous tax farm.”
Dates, Muawiyah. The Turks prevailed against the Maluks and Persians in 1516. Until then, they were just a big power in Turkic-speaking regions. To be fair, the Mamluks and their predecessors were no big bargain, either.
They spent the next 600 years under the Turkish boot ~ and then finally some Europeans moved in to liberate them.
Please. The Europeans might have incidentally paved a road or two and built an occasional hospital, but the last thing on their minds was liberating anyone. They wanted oil. They wanted geopolitical hegemony. They wanted to screw each other. There were some Arabs in the area where they wanted hegemony, oil, and all that, and since there were a lot of them, they thought it wise not to screw them, but instead let them screw the Jooos! to whom they’d promised a homeland, but “liberate” the Arabs? They simply picked out which aristocratic families could screw which peasants, where. The Saudis got the Hijaz. The Husseinis got Iraq, “Trans-Jordan” and didn’t get what was left of Syria because the French got that, and their adolescent nephew Haj Amin al Husseini got Jerusalem, provided he incited enough anti-Jewish riots. Liberate? Please.
well, not quite — the Abbasid Arabs continued in Morocco and Spain.