We are all Kemalists

Turkey's supposedly antagonistic "democratic Islamists" and "authoritarian secularists" are actually cut from the same cloth
May 23, 2008

Battle lines are being drawn in Turkey. Indicted for anti-secular activities by the country's chief prosecutor, the ruling AK party faces closure just eight months after it won a general election with 47 per cent of the vote. At the end of March the country's constitutional court agreed to hear the prosecutor's case, and the dispute could now roll on for months. It's the latest and most bitter round of a feud that goes back decades. On one side, pious democrats. On the other, authoritarian secularists.

That's the most commonly used dichotomy, anyway. But just how questionable it is was evident from the surreal row that triggered the prosecutor's closure case: the government's attempt to end the ban on women wearing headscarves in universities. Conservatives insisted that the ban breached the obligation for Muslim women to cover their heads. Opposition leader Deniz Baykal, dubbed a "staunch secularist" by the western press, argued for the ban on the grounds that a woman who leaves her head uncovered is not committing a cardinal sin in Islam. Few made the simple argument that what a woman wears on her head is none of the state's business.

"This war is not between secularists and non-secularists, but Turkish Muslims and Muslim Turks," says columnist Gokhan Ozgun. The real fear of secularists "is that their non-secular positivist Muslim state might turn into a non-secular orthodox Muslim state."

Far from being secular in the sense of maintaining a division between religion and state, the Turkish state has always used Sunni Islam to impose homogeneity on a multi-confessional society. Being a Turk means being a Sunni Muslim, as Timur Topuz, a Turkish convert to Christianity, found out when he leapt up to celebrate the Turkish football team's victory against Ukraine in 2005. "You, happy that we won?" his grandmother asked.

The key instrument of religious control is the directorate of religious affairs, or Diyanet, set up in 1924 when the Ottoman caliphate was abolished. With a staff of 100,000 and a budget rivalling national expenditures on defence or education, Diyanet preaches an admirably moderate form of Islam. But it maintains the authoritarian mentality of the soldiers who founded it. It runs Turkey's 80,000-odd mosques and drafts the Friday sermons read by imams across the country. Even purely religious issues are often given a nationalist flavour. In February, during Turkish operations against Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq, congregations were told that "fighting for the motherland is jihad, dying for it martyrdom." The directorate's aim has always been "to cultivate loyal citizens rather than good Muslims," says Hakan Yavuz, an expert on Turkish Islam.

Yet attacks on this pious nationalistic brew are increasing. Some of the loudest criticisms come from Alevis, members of a 10m-strong ethno-religious minority whose syncretistic Shia-coloured beliefs and dance-filled rituals put them at the outer reaches of the Islamic spectrum. In March, Ali Kenanoglu won a landmark court case to get his son exempted from "religious culture and ethics" courses made compulsory, by constitutional order, for all schoolchildren in 1980 by a military junta. Dozens of other Alevi families, who see the syllabus as Sunni propaganda, have followed him to court.

Alevis' attitudes towards Diyanet are also changing. In the past, most merely demanded equitable representation within it. Now, many want it closed. "It would be the most important privatisation in Turkey's history," says Aykan Erdemir, a Sunni sociologist who wrote his doctoral thesis on Alevism. "Turks gave up expecting the state to produce jam and pyjamas decades ago. Should it produce religious services? No. The services it produces are crap."

Rhetoric like this is rare in Turkey, where the few liberals there are huddle together for comfort in a handful of affluent Istanbul neighbourhoods. But it appears to be spreading to some conservative Sunni Turks. Neslihan Akbulut and Hilal Kaplan, twentysomething wearers of headscarves, became household names in February when they issued a press release, signed by 1,500 women, stating that ending university headscarf bans was meaningless without an end to discrimination against Alevis and non-Muslims, and a peaceful solution to Turkey's Kurdish problem.

When the AK party won its landslide last year amid deep national polarisation, its leaders promised compromise, stirring excitement with talk of replacing the authoritarian constitution many see as at the root of the country's ills. Then silence fell. Major reform ideas have now fallen from the agenda. Instead, the government has preferred piecemeal changes, like the headscarf ban, aimed at satisfying its conservative Sunni core supporters. Compromise has been abandoned in favour of rhetoric about representing the will of the nation. None of this justifies the anti-democratic closure case. Yet AK is far from being the democratic bastion many in Europe still make it out to be.

Its limitations become more glaring by the week. When police tear-gassed and beat trades unionists gathered on May day, AK backed the action. Far from standing up for a pro-Kurdish party also facing closure, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan refuses to shake hands with its MPs. The party's response to the Ali Kenanoglu case was equally duplicitous. "We can't change a constitutional article," said the education minister, whose party had just rewritten two to sidestep headscarf bans.

Where has the government's earlier reformism gone? Some think two failed coup attempts in 2004 scared it into compromising with the state. Others think it's all about money. "Back in 2002, AK had only their chains to break," says Rusen Cakir, a political analyst. "Now, they've got contracts, cash, and they just want to hold on to power." Ayhan Bilgen, former head of a Muslim-slanted human rights watchdog, argues that AK failed to learn from 1997, when the army shunted a more traditional Islamist party from power. "Conservative Sunnis should have realised then that for all they are encouraged to see themselves as Turkey's number one citizens, the state does not tolerate them either. But… AK has now returned to the statist view of Islam—we defend the status quo and the state defends us."

AK's transformation is summed up by a speech given by Erdogan in March: "Inshallah, we will carry our country towards the future according to the principles of one nation, one state, one motherland, one flag… Let nobody create discord among us… If we continue along this road loving each other on the basis that 'we love the creature because the Creator created him,' problems will disappear."

This one-nation rhetoric was borrowed unchanged from a stockpile of tired slogans Turkey's authoritarian establishment has been regurgitating for decades. Indeed, apart from the religious connotations of "discord" (or fitne), the only phrase Erdogan uttered that was not a calque on Turkey's official Kemalist ideology was the one about creators and creatures, borrowed from Turkish Sufism.

Turkey's tragedy "is that all parties are Kemalist," argues Ali Murat Irat, an Alevi intellectual. He is right. AK isn't the fundamentalist bugbear of secularist imagining, slavering for sharia. It's the naughty child of the system secularists set up and are now defending to the death. Like the son of a military officer who finds religion, AK may have repressed its father's barracks-room mentality for a while. Now it is back with a vengeance.

Turkey's secularists appear unaware that at the root of all they hate is their own authoritarian tradition of co-opting religion for nationalist purposes. For Turks dreaming of full democracy, the only hope is that AK lends an ear to the likes of Bulent Yilmaz, a Kurdish intellectual. "The Turkish state is like a black hole," he says. "If you don't want to be sucked in, you have to keep away, and move fast."