Answered Prayers
NEWSWEEK
June 21 2011
Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan is redrawing the Constitution. Why
the devout Muslim is good for the Christians.
As a teenager growing up in a tough Istanbul neighborhood, Recep Tayyip
Erdogan studied to be an Islamic cleric. His dream, though, was to
become a professional player on the local Kasimpasa football team.
In the end, neither ambition worked out: he became Turkey’s prime
minister instead. Now, after nine years in power, Erdogan has just
pulled off his third-and biggest-general-election win on an ambitious
program that includes a radical redrawing of Turkey’s Constitution.
The theology student from Kasimpasa now wants to remake the hard-wiring
of the Turkish state by scrapping restrictions on religious freedom;
creating a powerful French-style presidency (presumably with himself as
the first incumbent); and by making the country’s judges, universities,
and Army more accountable to Parliament: a to-do list that rings
loud alarm bells for many Turks-and friends of Turkey. The country’s
old secular elite fears that allowing Erdogan’s Islamist-rooted
AK Party a say in the appointment of judges, school principals,
and university rectors will make the country more Muslim and more
conservative. Pundits and politicians in America and Israel aren’t
thrilled with the idea of giving Erdogan more power-especially after
he railed about a Jewish press conspiracy against him during the
campaign. And Turkey’s chattering classes are increasingly concerned
about Erdogan’s intolerance of criticism. One hostile newspaper magnate
has been landed with crippling tax bills, while more than 60 Turkish
journalists languish in jail-more than in China.
Unexpectedly, though, Turkey’s tiny but ancient Christian community
has welcomed the AK Party’s most recent landslide. Erdogan may be
a deeply devout Muslim, and his party dominated by nondrinking,
headscarf-wearing Sunni Muslims. But despite his Islamic grassroots,
Erdogan advocates a historic softening of Turkey’s 80-year-old
anti-Christian rules. Most significantly, he has helped save the
1,700-year old patriarchate of Constantinople. The current Patriarch
Bartholomew, as senior bishop of the Orthodox Church, is spiritual
leader of 300 million Orthodox faithful around the world. But a
1923 Turkish law insists that the patriarch and all members of the
Synod-the Orthodox equivalent of the Catholic College of Cardinals-be
Turkish citizens drawn from Turkey’s tiny ethnic-Greek community, now
just 2,500 strong. With Bartholomew already 71, and most of the Synod
not much younger, it looked as though the end of the institution was
nigh. But by granting Turkish citizenship to a new crop of younger
Orthodox bishops from around the world, Erdogan likely saved the
institution by ensuring Bartholomew’s succession.
Father Dositheos Anagnostopulos of the patriarchate calls the move the
“most positive thing I have heard from the Turkish government in my
lifetime.” Erdogan’s government has also passed a new law that will
allow Christians to reclaim land and property illegally confiscated
over recent decades. An ancient Armenian church in eastern Turkey,
derelict since the massacres of hundreds of thousands of Ottoman
Armenians in 1915, has been restored at state expense, and Armenian
priests have been allowed to hold services there; a mass was also
recently allowed at the ancient Greek Orthodox Sumela Monastery.
Erdogan’s motivation is simple: giving Christians more control over
their property and religious education will pave the way for Islamic
institutions to have more freedom, too. And Turkey’s leading clerics
have made a point of speaking out in defense of Christian rights. “The
freedom of the religious minorities is our freedom,” Mehmet Gormez,
the AK Party’s recent appointee as head of the Turkish Religious
Affairs Directorate, told a conference recently. “We feel the same
pressures that they do.” It’s a nice interfaith solidarity statement
but not the full picture. True, ultranationalist Turks are equally
suspicious of Islamists and Christians. But the AK Party has used its
power to give Islam a huge boost by sponsoring mosque building all over
the country. Turkey’s tiny Christian minorities, on the other hand,
still face intense prejudice and discrimination from bureaucrats
who believe that Christians are undermining Turkishness. The root
of the problem is that Turkey’s Greek, Armenian, and Syrian Orthodox
communities highlight what French writer Sebastien de Courtois calls
“Turkey’s identity problem.” Turks are fiercely proud of their
homeland-yet Turks have been in Istanbul for not much longer than
Europeans have been in America. “The true question is, how can you
be a Muslim in a land where you still have representatives of an
earlier culture?” says de Courtois. And Turkey’s founding narrative,
taught in all schools, is how Christian armies from Greece attempted
to strangle the Turkish republic in its cradle in 1923. They are
also taught that it was treacherous Armenians who massacred Turks in
1915, not the other way around. Turks are still “poisoning themselves
with lies,” says Rakil Dink, widow of Hrant Dink, the editor of the
Istanbul-based Armenian-language Agos newspaper who was gunned down by
ultranationalists in 2007. “Fears, anger, rage, jealousies, hatreds,
prejudices, and insecurity belittle all of us.”
Money plays a part, too. Plenty of Turks have benefited from the
plunder of Christian properties-and aren’t too happy about new laws
that help the Greeks reclaim their holdings. Still, there are signs
that attitudes are softening toward Turkish Christians. In 2007,
after Dink’s murder, an estimated 50,000 people protested, some
carrying placards saying, “We Are All Armenians Now.”
It seems the Christians of Istanbul have found an unlikely ally in the
AK Party-not just because of its reforms, but more because Erdogan has
attacked the ultranationalists who have always been the Christians’
biggest enemy. “Change is going to be painful and frightening,”
says Dink. No doubt-but the Kasimpasa kid who almost became an imam
is making the first moves to heal a century of nationalist hatred.
http://www.newsweek.com/2011/06/19/why-turkey-s-prime-minister-is-good-for-christians.html