Bangladesh and Türkiye are often described as “new partners,” but the relationship is older than the headlines suggest. Bengali intellectual life was already watching the Turkish War of Independence with admiration in 1900. Bangladesh’s national poet, Kazi Nazrul Islam’s 1921 poem “Kemal Pasha,” referring to the country's founding father, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, captured the fascination with Türkiye's anti-colonial movement and independence struggle. Even today, the poem remains part of the readings of Bangladeshi students. Later, public symbolism followed statecraft. The Bangladesh government named roads after Atatürk. These cultural references are important because they show that the Bangladesh-Türkiye connection is not only transactional, but it has an emotional past and a shared vocabulary of dignity, sovereignty and resistance.
The formal diplomatic story begins after 1971, within the politics of recognition and alignment in the Muslim world.
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