NEWS ANALYSIS: The pendulum of Islam swings anew in Turkey

c. 1996 Religion News Service ANKARA, Turkey (RNS)-In Turkey, it’s nearly impossible to escape the steely glare of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938), the father of the modern Turkish republic. His grainy black-and-white portrait adorns schools, shopping centers, post offices and bath houses. Every Turkish village, no matter how small, has at least one street bearing […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

ANKARA, Turkey (RNS)-In Turkey, it’s nearly impossible to escape the steely glare of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk (1881-1938), the father of the modern Turkish republic.

His grainy black-and-white portrait adorns schools, shopping centers, post offices and bath houses. Every Turkish village, no matter how small, has at least one street bearing the name of the man who, with an iron fist, forged a secular, national state from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire.


So revered is Turkey’s national hero that his legacy-termed Kemalism-had long appeared unshakable.

Yet, Turkey’s secular establishment was dealt a blow in general elections late last year, when the Islamist Welfare Party took the largest share of the vote-21 percent. As the party’s 69-year-old leader, Dr. Necmettin Erbakan, entered coalition talks with the center-right Motherland Party, many Turks feared the close of an era.

In the end, the Motherland Party bowed to pressure from business elites, women’s groups, the media and, most notably, the military. It opted to strike a deal with Turkey’s other center-right party, the True Path Party, keeping the so-called”fundamentalists”in opposition, at least for now.

But the Welfare Party’s spectacular upsurge is no fluke. It signals a deep crisis within the country’s political establishment and a raging battle over Turkey’s identity. Seventy years after Ataturk banished religion to the mosques and disempowered the clergy, the pendulum is swinging back. Just how far is hard to say.

In fiery stump speeches, Erbakan fumes against the Western-oriented Kemalist tradition, invoking a nostalgia for the Ottoman era, when Turkey stood proud and Islam mattered. At times, he promises to pull Turkey out of NATO and the European Union, the latter of which it entered only this year. In their place, Turkey would head up an Islamic common market and a range of military and economic alliances among Islamic countries.”Turkey,”bellows the grandfatherly white-haired Erbakan,”will no longer suffer slavery at the hands of unbelievers.” Erbakan is no newcomer to Turkish politics. In the 1970s, as a Motherland member, the German-educated engineer participated in several coalition governments. In 1983, he founded the Welfare Party, which, as a well-organized grassroots movement, grew dramatically during the 1980s. In 1994 municipal elections, the party won dozens of mayoral seats, including in Ankara and Istanbul, and the party now controls more than a third of Turkey’s 72 local councils.

Despite its pro-Islamic orientation, Welfare is more of a protest party than a fundamentalist religious movement.”This is something Westerners don’t understand,”explains Dursun Gundogdu of the liberal daily Hurriyet. The Welfare Party gets most of its support from the urban poor, who may or may not be practicing Muslims, Gundogdu says.”Erbakan promises them instant prosperity, and they’re simply so desperate they want to believe it.” The real source of the Welfare Party’s dramatic success is the widespread disillusionment with the political status quo. Indeed, Erbakan’s tirades against government corruption and economic mismanagement draw votes from more than the poor and lower middle-classes. In big cities and in central and eastern Turkey, the Welfare Party captured up to 40 percent of the vote.

After years of high inflation and economic stagnation, Erbakan’s calls for a”New Economic Order,”including the creation of an interest-free banking system, strike a resonant chord with many people.

On other issues, too, Welfare’s themes tap strong popular sentiments. Many Turks, for example, see Turkey’s close ties to the West as sycophantic and degrading. Located at the crossroads between Europe and Asia, Turkey has a critical strategic role as NATO’s southern flank, which the West has often put to use, most recently during the Gulf War.


But the West is largely perceived as failing to pay Turkey its due respect or to reward it with the fruits of modernization.”We used to be one of the greatest empires on earth,”says bar owner Omer Odekon.”Now we’re looked at like part of the Third World. The West just uses us, and then tosses us away.”The same words can be heard in just about any bar or restaurant across Turkey.

Erbakan capitalizes on that resentment in his polemics against NATO and the United States. What, he asks, does Turkey gain from doing the West’s”dirty work?” He proposes that Turkey act as a bridge between East and West, as an independent regional power with a fully autonomous foreign policy.

It is more than bluster when Erbakan calls for Turkey to”liberate”Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Chechnya and Jerusalem. Turks are sensitive about the West’s hostility toward Islam and the perceived abandonment of Muslim causes around the world.

Another popular topic in Turkey is the Welfare Party’s emphasis on the revival of traditional Turkish culture, of which Islam is an integral part. It argues that the hardline Kemalists and the West have robbed Turks of what is uniquely Turkish, forcing upon them the”corrupt, secular, Western non-culture”of American films and pop music.

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A renaissance of Turkish culture, even of Islamic practice, hardly poses a substantial threat to the Turkish state. Yet many of the demands of the traditionalist movement inevitably clash with Ataturk’s legacy. Ataturk put the mosques under state control. In Turkey, the state pays and supervises religious authorities. State law prohibits public employees, officials and even students from wearing religious garb on the job.

Issue number one at the universities today is whether young women should be permitted to wear veils in the classroom, a practice that until now has been banned.”Can you imagine this (ban) in any Western democratic country?”one young male student asks indignantly.”It’s like in a dictatorship!” (Ironically, though, the same situation exists in France, where women and girls are forbidden to wear such headcoverings to school.)


Well-dressed and bright, this student could blend in at any university scene from Vienna to Amsterdam. Yet at the same time, he is one of a new generation of young people in Turkey exploring its roots and attending mosque services. They see the Kemalist code imposing limitations on their freedom. For them, the religious movement and its demands are progressive and democratic, the Kemalist traditions backward and archaic.

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Few believe that Erbakan or his Welfare Party are capable of overthrowing Turkish liberalism or the Kemalist tradition. Even had the party come to power, Turkey’s military would have surely kept it in line. Many Turks feel uncomfortable with Erbakan’s radical outbursts and inflammatory gestures. Yet his themes strike an echo beyond the party ranks and challenge assumptions that many Turks believe the Kemalists have been unwilling to question.

In opposition, where populism is most potent, the Islamists will have an open field. From the walls of Turkey’s institutions, Ataturk’s unchanging countenance belies the turmoil at the very heart of his republic.

MJP END HOCKENOS

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