ISLAMISTS AND SECULARISTS VYING FOR TURKEY’S PAST AS WELL AS ITS FUTURE
By Gareth Jenkins

Eurasia Daily Monitor
Aug 4 2008
DC

On July 31 Turkish President Abdullah Gul formally ratified the
appointment of Professor Ali Birinci (born in 1947) as head of the
state-run Turkish Historical Association (TTK) to replace the incumbent
Professor Yusuf Halacoglu (born 1949), who had held the position from
1993 until his dismissal on July 23.

In recent years, the long-running struggle between the government
of the moderate Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP) and
Turkey’s secular establishment has tended only to attract international
attention when there has been a major public confrontation, such as the
AKP’s ultimately successful attempt to appoint Gul to the presidency
in 2007 and, more recently, the closure case against the AKP itself
(see EDM, July 31).

Such major confrontations are important indicators of a continuing
shift in power in Turkey. In the long-run, however, the more decisive
struggle is probably occurring on the margins of the political process,
as the AKP gradually entrenches both its supporters and its ideology
in the state apparatus, by means such as the appointment of its
supporters to key positions in the bureaucracy.

The TTK was established by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938),
who founded the modern Turkish Republic in 1923 from the rump
of the Ottoman Empire following the latter’s defeat in World War
I. Ataturk sought to create a Turkish nation state. At the time,
outside the empire’s tiny educated elite, there was little sense,
or even awareness, of a "national identity." Under the Ottomans,
the primary determinant of identity had been religion, which for
the majority of the population meant Islam. Ataturk associated the
Ottoman Empire with obscurantism and regarded Islam as one of the most
important reasons for its failure to match the pace of technological
and intellectual development in the West. The TTK’s main purpose was
to create an historical pedigree for a new secular nation-state, which
would be based on language and race. The TTK wrote a new history, in
which the Turks’ origins were projected back beyond the Ottoman Empire
to the nomads of Central Asia. Over the years that have followed,
the TTK has remained the custodian of official Turkish history and
one of the main ideological bastions of the secular state.

The attitude of the secular establishment to the Ottoman Empire
can be seen clearly on the website of the Turkish military, which
has always regarded itself as the guardian of Ataturk’s legacy,
known as Kemalism. Although the Ottoman Empire lasted for 600 years,
only one of the 13 "Important Days in Turkish History" listed on the
website of the Turkish General Staff is from before World War One
(for reasons that remain obscure, the day is the anniversary of the
conquest of the island of Rhodes). The majority are associated with
Ataturk’s life (Turkish General Staff website, ).

In contrast, Turkey’s Islamists have always been unabashed Ottoman
nostalgists. Although it has not yet dared to confront the personality
cult that grew up around Ataturk after his death, including the
compulsory inculcation of his teachings at every level of the
educational system, the AKP has certainly been less vigorous than
previous administrations in terms of promoting it.

In recent years, there has also been a noticeable shift in the
historical reference points in official statements, ceremonies
and speeches. Before the AKP came to power, the reference point was
invariably a quotation from Ataturk or an event from his life. Now it
is increasingly the Ottoman Empire. The change has been most marked
at the local level. For example, ever since pro-Islamic political
parties first took control of the Istanbul Municipality in 1994,
the Ottoman conquest of the city in 1453 has been celebrated with
increasing enthusiasm each year. Conferences and symposia on Ottoman
themes have proliferated, and large budgets been assigned to the
preservation and restoration of the city’s Ottoman, particularly
religious, architectural heritage. Tulip festivals, including the
planting of three million bulbs across the city, are now held each
spring to commemorate the "Tulip Era" of the early 18th century. The
municipality has even begun to use Ottoman vocabulary and grammatical
constructions on billboards.

This Ottoman nostalgia has always been extremely strong among
followers of the Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen (born in 1941),
who is currently in exile in the United States. Gulen has long
portrayed the Ottoman Empire as a paradigm of religious tolerance
and social harmony, although the historical record would appear to
indicate otherwise. Over the last decade, the Gulen movement has grown
rapidly to become the most powerful non-governmental network in Turkey,
which includes media outlets, schools, universities, businesses and
charitable foundations. It has also established increasingly close
ties with the AKP. Several ministers and many AKP parliamentary
deputies are known to be Gulen sympathizers.

Although he had often courted controversy through his aggressive
denial that the treatment of the Armenians in the late Ottoman
Empire constituted genocide, Halacoglu was undoubtedly committed to
Ataturk’s ideological legacy. In contrast, Ali Birinci is known to
be very close to the Gulen movement and has played an active role
in several of its NGOs. He first came to prominence in 2006 when he
publicly supported another pro-AKP academic, Professor Atilla Yayla,
who described Kemalism as taking Turkey "much further backward than
forward" and, in a reference to the Ataturk personality cult, asked
"why are there pictures of this man everywhere?" (Vatan, July 25).

As a result, the replacement of Halacoglu with Birinci will undoubtedly
be regarded by many secularists in Turkey not merely as a bureaucratic
appointment but as another indication of creeping regime change.