Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s vow to turn Saudi Arabia into a moderate Islamic country may have been welcomed by the West, but it did not go down well in Turkey — especially among Islamists — and fueled long-standing suspicions about "imperial US designs against the Islamic world."

Ever since former US Secretary of State Colin Powell declared Turkey to be a “moderate Islamic republic” in 2004, the concept of moderate Islam has raised the hackles of Turkish secularists and Islamists alike.

Still smarting over 9/11, Washington was searching at the time for a model against radical Islam that reflected the kind of modernity it wanted to see in the Islamic world. Turkey — with its secular parliamentary system that had still not been tampered with by its Islamist government — was the only country that appeared to fit the bill.

Powell’s remark, however, coincided with the rise of political Islam in Turkey, with its clear antipathy toward secularism under the Justice and Development Party (AKP), which won a landslide electoral victory in November 2002.