In November 2025, Turkish Minister of Education Yusuf Tekin made a declaration that passed largely unnoticed in Western strategic circles but sent a quiet tremor through the Persian-speaking world. Addressing the replacement of “Central Asia” (Orta Asya) with “Turkestan” (Türkistan) in Turkey’s national history curriculum, Tekin offered an explanation that was anything but pedagogical: the term “Central Asia,” he argued, had been deliberately introduced into academic literature to divide the Turkic world. The new curriculum, he made clear, was correcting a historical injustice — not updating a geography textbook (Anadolu Agency 2025).
