Turk

Turks are the Turkish-speaking majority of Türkiye, descended from the Oghuz Turkic tribes who entered Anatolia after the Seljuk victory at Manzikert in 1071 and from the Greek, Armenian, Balkan and Caucasian peoples who joined them over nine centuries. They make up about three-quarters of the country's 86 million people, from Istanbul's megacity to Black Sea tea villages and the wheat plains of central Anatolia. Most are Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi school, served by state-appointed imams, yet daily life mixes mosque prayer with visits to saints' tombs, blue nazar beads against the evil eye and a growing secular streak among the young. Family life turns on hospitality: guests are pressed with glass after glass of black tea, and weddings run over several days, opening with the bride's henna night.

Turks in Bahrain are a small community of about 2,000 citizens of Türkiye who arrived mainly since the 2000s as doctors, nurses, engineers, academics, contractors and business owners, alongside cooks and barbers who run the island's many Turkish restaurants and grooming salons. Unlike the large South Asian labour communities, they are mostly middle-class families on professional contracts, and they share the Sunni Muslim faith of their Bahraini hosts while practising it in the relaxed, often secular style of urban Türkiye. The Yunus Emre Institute and Turkish courses at the University of Bahrain teach their language to Bahrainis. When Iranian missiles closed Bahrain's airspace in March 2026, the Turkish embassy organised buses across the King Fahd Causeway to Riyadh for citizens who wanted to leave.

Turks in Egypt today are a community of about 6,000 Turkish citizens: managers, engineers and technicians of the some 1,700 Turkish companies, including about 200 textile, garment and chemical factories that moved production to Egypt's industrial cities, along with diplomats, traders, teachers and their families in Cairo and Alexandria. Their numbers fell after the 2013 break between the two governments and have grown again since relations were restored in 2021-2023, as rising costs at home pushed Turkish clothing makers to 10th of Ramadan City, Sadat City and the Suez Canal zone. They speak Turkish at home, keep Hanafi Sunni Islam and gather around the embassy, the Alexandria consulate and the Yunus Emre Institute, which teaches Turkish to thousands of Egyptians. They live among the legacy of four centuries of Ottoman rule: Egyptian Arabic is full of Turkish words such as pasha and bey, and many Egyptian families descend from Ottoman officials, soldiers and Cretan Muslims, though those descendants now speak Arabic and call themselves Egyptians.

Turks in Kuwait are a small professional community of a few thousand: engineers and workers with the Turkish construction firms that have built major projects such as airport and infrastructure works, doctors, teachers, barbers, restaurateurs and businesspeople. They come on fixed contracts rather than to settle, and the Turkish embassy draws them together for national days, religious holidays and cultural festivals such as the 2023 'Turkish Village' at the Hunting and Equestrian Club, with Ottoman mehter music, folk dance and mounted archery. Like their Kuwaiti hosts they are Sunni Muslims, but they follow the Hanafi school rather than the Maliki and Hanbali traditions of Kuwait, and speak Turkish at home.

Turks first came to Qatar in the mid-1970s with Turkish construction companies and stayed a community of engineers and managers until the 2017-2021 blockade of Qatar drew the two countries close. Turkish troops, contractors, doctors, teachers, bankers and a working-class wave of barbers and döner makers from Hatay province followed, and the number of adult Turkish citizens registered to vote in Qatar tripled between 2018 and 2023. They have their own embassy school, now being replaced by a campus for 800 pupils, a Turkish hospital and a Yunus Emre cultural centre in Doha. Most are Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi school, from devout to secular, with an Alevi minority, and families keep long Turkish Sunday breakfasts, Ramadan pide and holiday customs.

Turks in Saudi Arabia are about 30,000 Turkish citizens who came to work, most of them since construction firms from Türkiye arrived in the 1970s: contractors and engineers, barbers, bakers, restaurant and furniture-shop owners, doctors and teachers, many with their families, Kurds and Zazas from eastern Türkiye among them. Their children studied at a network of Turkish international schools in Riyadh, Jeddah, Mecca, Dammam, Tabuk, Taif and Abha, eight of which Saudi Arabia closed in 2021 during a diplomatic rift before Ankara announced their reopening in 2022. The Hejaz was Ottoman for four centuries, and many Saudi families descend from Ottoman officials, soldiers and pilgrims, among them Queen Iffat, wife of King Faisal; those families speak Arabic and live as Saudis. Voting from Saudi Arabia in Türkiye's elections, the community has split between a more conservative Jeddah and a more secular-leaning Riyadh.

Turkish citizens in Tunisia are a small expatriate community of a few hundred to about a thousand: diplomats, teachers, managers and engineers of Turkish companies, small traders and Turkish spouses of Tunisians, most of them in Tunis. They gather around their embassy, where families meet after the Eid prayer at the Zitouna Mosque for a Turkish breakfast, and around the Turkish Maarif school in Ariana and the Yunus Emre cultural institute, which teaches Turkish to Tunisians. Their presence echoes three centuries of Ottoman rule, when Turkish soldiers and officials settled in Tunis and the coastal towns; the descendants of those Turks, hundreds of thousands of Tunisians with Turkish family names and Hanafi religious tradition, now speak Arabic and are Tunisians. Today's Turks are mostly Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi school, from devout to secular.

Turks in the United Arab Emirates are a young community of professionals and entrepreneurs rather than labourers: engineers, bankers, architects, contractors, traders and restaurateurs, more than four in five of them in Dubai. Their numbers roughly tripled after 2010, and more than half of those in Dubai arrived in the five years before 2022, as Turkey's currency crisis and inflation pushed skilled people and capital abroad and thousands of Turkish firms opened offices in the city. Most are Sunni Muslims of the Hanafi school, but many live a secular, urban lifestyle, and in the 2023 election those registered in the UAE voted two to one for the secular opposition candidate. Community life runs through business councils, women's networks, weekend Turkish classes for children and celebrations of Republic Day each October.