Only during last decade, there had been a gradual improvement in the relations of Turkish governments towards the Arab nations. Although prior to millennium, the relations were on pull and push base, today's Turkey is trying to play a greater role in the Middle East, in a sense resembling to their Ottoman ancestors. When the new republic of Turkey attempted to redefine itself during the 1920s, clearly it was no longer the Ottoman Empire with its pluralistic and all-encompassing identity. Yet, different ethnic groups continued to coexist within its borders, and the definition of a Turkish national identity that would somehow take in these different groups seemed like a difficult task. As in all cases of nationality formation, here too the new Turk was to be defined against many "others" - Western Europeans, other Turkic nations, Greeks, Armenians, and Arabs. In many respects this is what Mustafa Kemal Atatmrk and Turkey's political elite were attempting during those fateful first years, and many of the period's reforms, from changes in dress codes to the language revolution, could be seen as aiming at this redefinition. In many cases such comparisons against others were transparent. The leadership did not try to hide its ambition to seem more West-oriented, or to disengage itself from the Greek culture that pervaded parts of Anatolia. The Arabs, however, present a different and intriguing case-study for this perennial 'other'. On the one hand, ever since their perceived betrayals in WWI, Arabs were rarely mentioned in public speech, and when they were, the terminology seems bland and neutral. On the other, so many of the reforms - language, alphabet, history, racial theory, call to prayer - were clearly meant to distinguish between the contours of a Turkish nation and those of an Arab one. While these feelings were shared by many in the elite and the public at large, we should bear in mind that sizeable groups in the new-born state saw things differently and were suspicious of the government's efforts to distance itself from the historic Turkish-Arab connection. Based on a close deconstruction of speeches, memoirs and newspaper articles from the period, my paper seeks to examine this gap and to describe the location of the imagined Arab other in the construction of modern Turkish nationalism.