The Washington Post
May 6, 2007 Sunday
Regional Edition

In Turkey, a Looming Battle Over Islam

by Claire Berlinski

Bulent and Dogu are easygoing young Turks and unlikely
authoritarians. Bulent just returned from the hippie trail in
Southeast Asia, and Dogu’s son is named Cosmos. But when the military
recently threatened to settle Turkey’s disputed presidential
elections, they approved, suggesting just how hard it is to sort
Turks into familiar political categories.

"Someone needs to threaten them," Dogu said. "They’ve gone too far."

By "they," he meant the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, which
has governed Turkey for the past four years under Prime Minister
Recep Tayyip Erdogan and which is (depending upon whom you talk to)
either the hopeful face of a new moderate Islam or the moderate face
of radical Islam’s new hope.

By "too far," Dogu meant the AKP had chosen one of its own — Foreign
Minister Abdullah Gul — to be the next Turkish president. Last
Tuesday, Turkey’s staunchly secular Constitutional Court agreed,
declaring the first round of presidential voting void on the grounds
that there was no parliamentary quorum when the vote for Gul took
place. Of course there wasn’t: The opposition had boycotted the
ballot, knowing it didn’t have enough votes to win.

"I don’t want someone who wears a headscarf in the presidential
palace," Dogu said, referring to Gul’s wife. "It’s okay if it’s an
Anatolian headscarf. But I don’t want them wearing Arab headscarves."

Anatolian Turks wear headscarves because that’s what they’ve always
worn, he means to say — but an Arab headscarf is a political
headscarf, and he believes that the AKP won’t be satisfied until
every woman in Turkey is under one. (Note also the crucial
nationalist sentiment: We Turks are not Arabs, who are backward and
primitive.)

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, who founded the Turkish Republic in 1923,
imposed a particularly strict secularism on Turkish society, banning
religion from the public sphere. In recent weeks, demonstrators have
taken to the streets in massive numbers in support of Kemalist
secularism. Westerners watching the footage may be tempted to sigh
with approval, imagining this as an outpouring of sympathy with
liberal Enlightenment values.

They would be mistaken.

The AKP’s opponents say they don’t want Turkey turned into another
Iran. But it is not clear that the AKP has any intention of doing
that. What is clear is that it poses a threat to the power,
bureaucratic privileges and economic interests of the secular ruling
class, of which a dismaying number are authoritarian
ultra-nationalists.

This is not to diminish their concerns about the AKP, whose origins
in radical Islam are not a matter of dispute. Erdogan’s political
mentor was former prime minister Necmettin Erbakan, who came to power
promising to "rescue Turkey from the unbelievers of Europe," wrest
power from "imperialists and Zionists," and launch a jihad to
recapture Jerusalem. But the AKP says it has outgrown these
sentiments and is now fully committed to democracy and a looser
version of secularism. It swears it does not seek to impose a
fundamentalist tyranny.

I would not have believed them before. But I have lived here for the
past two years. There have been no public floggings, no amputations
of limbs in the public square, no jihad against Zionists and American
imperialists. The government has confined its enthusiasm for Islamic
law to the most modest of sops to its Islamic base; its most
egregious offense has been a desultory attempt to criminalize
adultery that was quickly abandoned.

Meanwhile, Istanbul has become visibly more prosperous. In the past
year, three Starbucks stores have opened on Istanbul’s largest
boulevard, which hardly suggests a curtailment of Satan’s Western
influence, although it does suggest how many Turks can now afford to
spend $5 on a cup of coffee. The billboards still feature half-naked
women; the transvestites still swish down the streets. New
construction is everywhere. Roads have been repaired. Decaying
neighborhoods have been gentrified.

The AKP has thrown Turkey open to foreign investment. Last year
almost $20 billion rolled in, twice the amount of the previous year.
It has deregulated the economy; since the AKP took power, it has
grown by a third. It has tamed inflation, stabilized the currency and
presided over a jump in per-capita income from $2,598 in 2002 to
$5,477 today. The state sector, controlled by the secular
bureaucracy, has been reduced. Margaret Thatcher would not have
disapproved.

The AKP was in fact elected in large part because previous secular
governments had for so long, and so badly, mismanaged the economy —
before the last election, a huge banking scandal wiped out Turkish
savings and sparked a complete economic collapse.

A casual observer might also expect that because the Turkish
protesters are enemies of Islamic extremism, they are friends of the
United States. Not so. The secularists here are if anything more
hostile to the West than the AKP. (They are often just as
anti-Semitic, too.) Many secularist legislators voted in 2003 to deny
U.S. forces the right to pass through Turkey on their way to invade
Iraq. At the recent rallies in Ankara and Istanbul, protesters held
up signs denouncing "ABD-ullah Gul." This is an anti-American pun:
The letters "ABD" stand for "USA" in Turkish. U.S. camera crews were
abused with chants of "Go home, CIA spies." One particularly lunatic
nationalist, Ergun Poyraz, has just published a book claiming that
Erdogan is really an undercover Jew who is collaborating with the
Mossad to destroy Turkish secularism.

Finally, it is the AKP, not the secular establishment, that is
plumping for Turkey’s entry into the European Union. The nationalists
fear that the union will interfere with their war against Turkey’s
restive Kurdish separatists. The European Commission has issued a
stern warning to the Turkish military: Stay out of politics or it
will hurt your E.U. bid. Some threat. If you don’t stop eating that
ice cream, you won’t get any spinach.

Last Sunday’s protests in Istanbul took place under blue skies.
Turkey’s attractive young secularists were laughing, singing
nationalist songs, flirting. Necdet, a middle-aged man in the
construction business, was enjoying lunch with his family. He was
keen for the military to exert its influence. "It’s necessary," he
said. "It’s the military’s constitutional role."

But how, I asked, is that compatible with democracy? After all, the
AKP won the last election handily. It would win again if elections
were held today.

"There is no such thing as absolute democracy, anywhere. If the AKP
takes the presidency, democracy is over here anyway," Necdet replied.
"They haven’t changed their stripes. Once an Islamist, always an
Islamist. There’s no such thing as moderate Islam."

"So why do you think the E.U. is so opposed to military
intervention?" I asked. "Surely they don’t want a Taliban regime in
southern Europe?"

"They want to split us up into Kurds, Armenians and Turks," he
answered. "That way they can reduce our influence in the region and
control the resources of the Middle East."

This is a deeply held belief. Turks are raised on an unremitting diet
of this Ottoman paranoia, which is now so thoroughly merged with the
secularists’ legitimate concerns that it is difficult to tell where
one ends and the other begins. It is hardly a solid foundation for a
politically mature democracy. Indeed, the concept of "democracy" is
generally poorly understood. At lunch the other day, I asked our shy
young waiter what he thought of Gul.

"I don’t know. But democracy is good," he shrugged.

"So who are you going to vote for?" I asked.

He looked horrified. "I never vote."

Lest anyone think I’m pessimistic about Turkey’s future, I’m not. The
AKP will probably continue to do a fine, moderate job, particularly
because it knows that the military is all too eager to fire up the
tanks. Turkey will continue to function reasonably well, compared
with other Muslim countries. Istanbul will still be a glorious place
to live. Most Turks are either moderate Muslims or moderate
authoritarians; true extremists on both sides are in the minority,
and when the military takes power, it has always given it back after
a time.

But don’t make the mistake of thinking that "secular" here means
"liberal, democratic and friendly to the West." That, it decidedly
does not.

claire@berlinski.com

Claire Berlinski is the author of "Menace in Europe: Why the
Continent’s Crisis Is America’s, Too" and "Lion Eyes," a spy novel
set in Istanbul.

GRAPHIC: IMAGE; By Burhan Ozbilici — Associated Press; Hanging in
there: Demonstrators carry a giant poster of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk,
whose secularist legacy lingers in Turkey.

From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress