PSCRP-BESA Reports No 216 (July 8, 2026)
The Provocation: When a Textbook Becomes a Map
By Gershon Kogan
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).
This was not a spontaneous ministerial improvisation. The shift had been embedded in Turkey’s Türkiye Yüzyılı Maarif Modeli — the “Turkey’s Century” education model — under President Erdoğan’s patronage since 2024. By June 2026, Tekin repeated the same formulation at a meeting of education ministers of the Organization of Turkic States in Astana, a city that itself underwent a significant renaming not long ago. The message was institutional, deliberate, and regional in scope (MEB/Astana 2026).
The term itself has a history worth examining. “Turkestan” was widely used in Russian imperial cartography for the territories conquered in the nineteenth century — roughly today’s Özbekistān, Tājīkistān, Kyrgyzstan, and parts of Qazaqstan. Soviet nationalities policy then dismantled it: the region was divided into republics along ethnic lines, and “Central Asia” became the standard Soviet — and subsequently Western — category. When Ankara now restores “Turkestan,” it is excavating a term that Russian and Soviet power had buried, and redeploying it with a pan-Turkic ideological charge its imperial-era usage did not carry (Landau 1995; Laruelle 2008).
Most analysts who noticed the story read it through a single lens: Russia. The replacement of a Soviet-era geographic category with a term carrying explicit pan-Turkic weight was interpreted as yet another move in Ankara’s long game of repositioning itself as the natural leader of the post-Soviet Turkic republics — a rival to Moscow’s waning imperial nostalgia. That reading is not wrong. It is simply incomplete.
There is a second civilization that has regarded this territory as its cultural heartland for over a millennium — and it is not Russia. Samarqand, Bukhārā, Marv, Nīshāpūr: these are not neutral points on a map awaiting a new label. They are the cardinal coordinates of Persian civilization, the cities where Rūdakī composed the first great works of classical Persian poetry at the Sāmānid court in Bukhārā, where Ibn Sīnā wrote the Canon of Medicine, where Ferdowsī’s Šāhnāme was recited not as foreign import but as the living idiom of a literate elite (Frye 1965; Narshakhī, trans. Frye). When Ankara erases “Central Asia” and writes “Turkestan” in its place, it is not writing on a blank page. It is writing over a Persian palimpsest.
That is the provocation that has gone unanalyzed in English-language strategic literature. And it arrives at a moment when the civilization most directly targeted by this semantic shift is least equipped to respond.
The Persian Palimpsest: What “Turkestan” Erases
To understand what is at stake in Ankara’s terminological intervention, one must begin not with politics but with geography. The borders of the modern Islamic Republic of Iran do not coincide with the borders of Iranian civilization. They never have.
The territory that Turkey now proposes to call “Turkestan” was, for centuries before the Turkic migrations, an Iranian world. The populations of Sogdia, Bactria, Khwārazm, and Marv spoke Iranian languages, worshipped Iranian deities, and produced Iranian art. When the Arab conquest reshaped the religious landscape of the seventh and eighth centuries, it was Persian — not Arabic, not Turkic — that emerged as the dominant literary and administrative language of the eastern Islamic world. The great cities of what is now Özbekistān and Tājīkistān were not provincial outposts of a civilization centered elsewhere. They were the civilization (Frye 1996; Peacock and Tor 2015).
Bukhārā is the most luminous example. Under the Sāmānid dynasty — the first major Persian renaissance after the Arab conquest — it became the intellectual capital of the eastern Islamic world in the ninth and tenth centuries. The historian Narshakhī, writing in Arabic and translated almost immediately into Persian, recorded a city of extraordinary sophistication: its markets, its madrasas, its court culture conducted entirely in Persian (Narshakhī, trans. Frye). It was at this court that Rūdakī — whom the Encyclopaedia Iranica calls the “archpoet” of Persian literary history, born in a village between Samarqand and Bukhārā — composed the verses that established classical Persian as a literary standard from Anatolia to India (Frye 1965).
The figures the Persian-speaking world regards as its canonical intellectuals were overwhelmingly products of this geography. Ibn Sīnā — Avicenna in the Latin tradition — was born near Bukhārā; his autobiography, preserved through his disciple al-Jūzjānī, describes a formation entirely within the Persian literary and philosophical tradition, in a city that was culturally Iranian long before it became politically contested. Niẓāmī ʿArūžī Samarqandī, author of the Čahār Maqāle, one of the great works of Persian prose, signals his origins in his very name. These are not figures whom Persian civilization exported to Central Asia; they are figures Central Asia contributed to Persian civilization, because for centuries the distinction was meaningless — the region was a single civilizational space, operating in a single literary language (Peacock and Tor 2015; Fragner 1999).
This is what the term “Persianate world” — introduced by Hodgson and refined by Fragner’s concept of Persophonie — captures: not an ethnic or political category, but a civilizational-linguistic space in which Persian functioned as the medium of high culture and intellectual life across an enormous geographic arc, regardless of the ethnic identity of rulers or populations. Turkic dynasties — the Ghaznavids, the Tīmūrids, the Özbek Šaybānids — did not displace Persian culture when they came to power in Central Asia. They adopted it, patronized it, and in many cases produced it (Frye 1996; Bregel 2003).
It is against this background that the semantic weight of “Turkestan” must be assessed. The term does not simply rename a region; it imposes a civilizational taxonomy in which the primary identity of the space is Turkic, and the Persian layer becomes, at best, a historical footnote. Frye, whose life’s work was devoted to recovering precisely this Persian layer, traced the spread of the Persian language in Central Asia as a foundational process of Islamic civilization in the East — one whose traces survived the Mongol destruction, the Tīmūrid renaissance, and the Russian imperial conquest, only to face, in the post-Soviet period, a new and subtler erasure, now accelerated and institutionalized in a school curriculum endorsed by a NATO member state (Frye 1976).
There is a word in Persian for what is being described here: ābrū — literally “face-water,” the social and cultural dignity that must be maintained at all costs. For Iran, the Persian cultural presence in Central Asia is not a foreign policy interest. It is ābrū. It is the evidence, written in the biographies of Rūdakī and Ibn Sīnā and the stones of Bukhārā, that Iranian civilization is not a regional phenomenon but a world-historical one. To allow that evidence to be relabeled — to permit “Turkestan” to stand unchallenged as the organizing concept for a region that Persian civilization built — is not a diplomatic setback. It is an existential humiliation (Ṣanʿatī 2017).
Tehran understands this. Iranian media reaction to the Turkish curriculum reform has run significantly hotter than the Islamic Republic’s public posture would suggest — a gap between official restraint and cultural alarm that is itself analytically significant (Tabnak 2025). The question is not whether Iran perceives the challenge. The question is whether it retains the capacity to meet it.
Iran’s Diminished Capacity to Respond
For most of the post-Soviet period, Iran possessed three instruments of cultural influence in Central Asia, deployed with varying effectiveness.
The first was institutional: the Saʿdī Foundation, Iran’s primary vehicle for Persian-language promotion abroad, operated teaching centers and translation projects across Tājīkistān, Özbekistān, and beyond, with the Persian-heritage world as a stated priority zone (Bonyād-e Saʿdī 2016). The second was diplomatic-ceremonial: Nowrūz gave Tehran an annual ritual of civilizational solidarity transcending political borders, functioning as what Iranian analysts called the foundation of a jahān-e īrānī — an Iranian world (IPIS 2025). The third was religious — Shia networks Tehran cultivated across the region, though with limited reach in the predominantly Sunni republics.
None of these instruments has disappeared entirely. But each has been significantly degraded, and their aggregate effect has shifted from a coherent cultural strategy into a fragmented, defensive posture.
The military and political consequences of the February–March 2026 war have accelerated a process already underway. Association with Tehran was becoming a reputational liability for Central Asian elites before the conflict; after the killing of Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei in the joint US-Israeli strikes, the liability became acute. Mirziyoyev sent condolences in carefully cautious terms, avoiding any criticism of Washington or Jerusalem; Rahmon, the first regional leader to do so, likewise avoided direct censure of the United States or Israel — a performance that communicated, with precision, the limits of regional alignment with a weakened Tehran (Kazantsev-Vaisman 2026). For governments navigating Russian pressure, Chinese investment, Turkish overtures, and American interest, visible proximity to a defeated Tehran carries costs that Persian literary heritage cannot offset.
The Saʿdī Foundation’s operational capacity has contracted. Iranian cultural diplomacy — never fully separated in regional perception from the political project of the Islamic Republic — now carries the added weight of military defeat and internal repression. The IRGC’s increasingly autonomous behavior has further blurred the line between Iranian soft and hard power in regional eyes (Kogan 2026a). When the same state that funds Persian-language teaching is also the state whose missile forces struck civilian infrastructure, the cultural message becomes difficult to disentangle from the strategic one.
Iranian analysts have been unusually candid about this weakness — at least in Persian-language publications not intended for international consumption. A 2025 Tabnak analysis asked directly why Turkey had succeeded in Central Asia where Iran had not, and offered a damning answer: Iran’s cultural diplomacy rested on shared heritage, language, and religion, but was consistently perceived through the lens of political Islam — a framing that alienated the secular, modernizing elites whose support would have mattered most (Tabnak 2025). An earlier IPSC assessment reached a similar conclusion: Iran had failed to capitalize on the window of opportunity that opened with Soviet dissolution, leaving the field to competitors with fewer cultural assets but greater institutional discipline (ʿĀbedīnī 2018).
Turkey arrived with exactly that discipline. From the early 1990s, Ankara built educational infrastructure across the Turkic republics — schools, scholarships, media presence — that created generational loyalty rather than episodic affinity (Balci 2018). The Organization of Turkic States gave Turkey an institutional framework that Iran has never matched with comparable Persian-world architecture. The Saʿdī Foundation is not the OTS. A poetry recitation is not a summit communiqué.
What makes the current moment structurally distinctive is the simultaneity of pressures. Iran is not simply facing Turkish cultural competition — it faced that throughout the post-Soviet period. It is facing that competition precisely when its own instruments of response are most degraded and its regional reputation most damaged. The Persian palimpsest is being written over, and the hand that might have smudged the ink is occupied elsewhere.
The Cognitive Battlefield: Karpman’s Triangle and the Limits of Iran’s Options
What options remain available to Tehran? In principle, three: appeal through international cultural institutions such as UNESCO, intensification of Persian-language content distributed through diaspora and non-state channels, and reliance on organic regional resistance — the hope that Central Asian societies will reject an imposed Turkic framework on their own initiative, without requiring Iranian intervention at all (CMESS 2022).
None of these is symmetrical to Ankara’s move. A UNESCO appeal operates on a timescale of years, addressing a curriculum that will have already shaped a school generation. Diaspora content-production lacks the institutional backing of a Ministry of Education and a head of state’s patronage. And organic resistance is, by definition, not a strategy — it is a hope dressed as a policy.
There is a more useful way to understand why Iran’s position is structurally weak, and it comes not from international relations theory but from psychology. Stephen Karpman’s drama triangle — developed to describe dysfunctional roles in interpersonal conflict — maps with unsettling precision onto the current configuration of cognitive warfare in the post-Soviet Persianate space. In Karpman’s model, three roles structure a conflict: the Victim, the Persecutor, and the Rescuer. Crucially, these roles are not fixed; actors compete for them, because the role of Rescuer — the party offering protection and meaning — commands the most durable form of allegiance.
For decades, Iran’s regional narrative implicitly cast Tehran as Rescuer: protector of Persian heritage, guardian of Shia minorities, custodian of a civilizational inheritance under pressure from Russian assimilation and, more recently, Western cultural homogenization. Turkey’s curriculum reform is a direct contest for that role. By recasting “Central Asia” as “Turkestan” — a term explicitly framed by Minister Tekin as correcting historical division — Ankara positions itself as Rescuer of a Turkic world that Persian and Russian cartography allegedly fragmented (Anadolu Agency 2025). Iran, weakened and war-scarred, risks being pushed into the Victim position: a civilization whose contribution to the region is acknowledged, if at all, in the past tense.
This is the mechanism that makes the curriculum reform a textbook case of cognitive warfare rather than ordinary cultural diplomacy. It does not argue with Iran’s historical claims. It simply reallocates the roles in the regional drama, leaving Tehran to either accept a diminished part or escalate into the Persecutor role — the aggrieved former power contesting a neighbor’s institutional choices, a framing Ankara would welcome, since it confirms the very narrative of Persian “division” that Tekin invoked to begin with.
Iran’s own strategic commentary shows awareness of this trap, even if it lacks the vocabulary to name it. Analysts have warned of fārsī-setīzī — hostility toward the Persian language — as a creeping phenomenon across the region, and have noted Tehran’s structural inability to compete with the institutional discipline of Turkish cultural diplomacy (Ṣanʿatī 2017; Baṣīrī 2020). What remains absent is a Rescuer narrative that does not depend on grievance — one that reasserts the Persianate world as a living inheritance rather than a wounded one.
Conclusion: The Map as a Weapon
A school curriculum is not a battlefield in the conventional sense. No territory changes hands, no casualties are recorded. But the absence of violence does not mean the absence of consequence. What Turkey’s Ministry of Education has accomplished, quietly and through entirely legal institutional means, is the redirection of historical memory for an entire generation of Central Asian schoolchildren — both those educated in Turkey’s own system and those reached through the Organization of Turkic States’ growing coordination of curricula.
The timing transforms a semantic adjustment into a strategic event. Turkey is not renaming Central Asia into a vacuum. It is doing so at the precise moment when Iran — the civilization with the deepest claim to the region’s intellectual and literary heritage — has been militarily defeated, internally fractured, and stripped of the reputational capital needed to contest the new framing. A decade ago, Tehran might have absorbed this provocation as one irritant among many. Today, it lacks the institutional bandwidth even to formulate a coherent response.
This asymmetry will not correct itself. Absent a deliberate Iranian counter-narrative — built not on grievance but on the living continuity of the Persianate world, from Rūdakī’s Bukhārā to the Tājīk and Özbek Persian-speaking communities of today — “Turkestan” will likely consolidate as the default term across Turkic-coordinated educational systems within the next decade. Once embedded in textbooks, such terminology proves durable; it survives the leaders who introduced it.
Russia, the term’s original imperial target, faces its own complications in mounting a response: Moscow’s historical relationship with Central Asia is itself contested terrain. That leaves the Persianate counter-narrative almost entirely unclaimed — a vacancy that, if Iran cannot fill it, no other actor is positioned to fill either.
For Israeli and Western strategic audiences, the relevance extends beyond educational policy. Cognitive warfare conducted through the rewriting of historical vocabulary is cheaper and more durable than any conventional instrument of influence — and harder to counter once the terminology has settled into common use. Ankara’s textbook revision is a case study in exactly this kind of warfare: the contest for Central Asia’s strategic future is being fought, in no small part, in the footnotes of children’s history books.
The question this leaves for Tehran is not whether the Islamic Republic recognizes the stakes — Iranian commentary suggests that it does. The question is whether a state currently absorbed in survival can still find the ābrū — the dignity and the will — to reclaim a name.