Islam without Extremes: A Muslim Case for Liberty (29 page)

Özal based his policies on the notion of “the three freedoms”—of ideas, religion, and enterprise. The economy opened up, abandoning decades-old Kemalist policies of protectionism, “statism,” and “a planned economy.” Some of the authoritarian articles in the penal code, which banned “religious propaganda” and many other “thought crimes,” were rescinded. The tyrannical prohibitions on the Kurdish language, which criminalized even Kurdish songs, were, at least partly, lifted. (Özal also proudly noted that his mother was Kurdish, thus breaking the taboo on the K-word.)

Özal also tried to restore respect for the Ottomans, who for decades had been the bête noire of the official ideology. He even found parallels between the Ottoman Empire and the United States, arguing that both granted diverse communities the freedom to exercise their religion, culture, and economic aspirations. In 1987, he submitted Turkey’s application to the European Union. Two years later, he became the president, yet he continued to guide policy via a loyal prime minister. (In the Turkish system, the presidency is the highest post, but the prime minister holds more power.)

Most Kemalists, unsurprisingly, despised Özal, seeing him as a counter-revolutionary undoing all the great things Atatürk had done half a century earlier. The fact that he was both pro-Islamic and pro-American even led some of them to suspect a Western plot to overthrow the Kemalist Republic—paranoia that would reach its zenith in the 2000s, when the pro-Islamic AKP became the champion of the EU bid.

Özal also had his fans. Among them was the tiny group of liberal intellectuals—most of them secular but not secularist—who had been sidelined for decades in a political sphere dominated by the Kemalist state, the Marxist Left, and the nationalist Right. Also in favor of Özal were the country’s millions of Kurds, whose identity had been systematically suppressed since the early years of the Republican era. The third and largest group of Özal supporters was the Islamic camp. To them, he was not only a savior who eased the burdens of the ultrasecularist regime but also, as the first Turkish prime minister to make a pilgrimage to Mecca, he was the man who returned religion to public respectability. The Nurcus were already on the center-right bandwagon, but most of the
tarikats
also sympathized with Özal and voted for his Motherland Party. He was able to reopen the great political umbrella that Adnan Menderes had formed in the 1950s.

With the Özal Revolution, people in the Islamic camp also started to realize that their yearning for religious freedom could be satisfied by adopting Western-style liberal democracy, rather than the Islamist utopia that Erbakan had been promising. For decades, most of them had perceived Kemalism, which claimed to Westernize Turkey, as a natural extension of the West. This started to change as these Islamic Turks learned more about the world. Some of the young headscarfed women, excluded from Turkish colleges, headed to universities in Europe and the United States, where they found freedom and respect. Their husbands also made the same discovery. One of them, a Turkish Muslim academic who moved to the United Kingdom during the Özal years, would later write:

I arrived in England from Turkey at the beginning of the 1990s, after having lived and studied in Ankara where we were unable to find any prayer rooms. . . . In the UK [though], we were able to pray at chapels specifically allocated for Muslims at universities and, to our utmost surprise in government buildings, like the Home Office, when we were applying to renew our visas. These were eye-opening and life-changing experiences for us, and also for many other Turkish citizens.
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These religious Turks soon got their facts right. The liberal West, they realized, was better than the illiberal “Westernizers” at home.

THE DECLINE OF TURKISH ISLAMISM

In April 1993, when Turgut Özal suddenly died of a heart attack at the age of sixty-six, hundreds of thousands of people from all across Turkey flocked to his funeral in Istanbul. Some carried signs that read, “The Civilian President,” “The Democrat President,” and “The Muslim President”—meaningful phrases in a country that used to see ex-military and thoroughly secular names as the state’s leaders. Özal was buried at a site next to the Adnan Menderes Mausoleum—which he had had built in 1990 to honor his precursor, whom the military had executed three decades earlier.

The next nine years in Turkish politics, until the arrival of the AKP in November 2002, has sometimes been called “the lost decade,” because it saw a series of inefficient and unsuccessful coalitions that ultimately led the country into a dreadful economic crisis in 2001. But this period also brought about some significant changes that transformed the Islamic camp.

One of the outcomes of Özal’s death was the resurgence of Milli Görüs¸, the political Islamist movement led by Necmeddin Erbakan. Özal’s Motherland Party was taken over by Mesut Yılmaz, a secular figure, who had little appeal for religious voters. Erbakan happily filled the gap, and his Welfare Party achieved a surprising victory in the general elections of December 1995, winning 21 percent of the votes, the highest total an Islamist party had ever received in Turkey.

Erbakan had to work until June 1996 to build a coalition with the center-right party led by Tansu Çiller, who had previously been Turkey’s first female prime minister. This dual government lasted for a year, during which Erbakan found the chance to implement only a few of his ideas, such as building closer ties with other Muslim countries and hosting receptions for
tarikat
leaders in his official residence—all shocking to the secular establishment. But what provoked the secularists even more was his rhetoric, and that of his party members, which seemed to herald an Islamist regime.

In response to this Islamist challenge, on February 28, 1997, the military initiated a process that later would be dubbed “the postmodern coup.” The generals orchestrated the whole Kemalist “center”—the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the universities, and the “mainstream” media—to force the government to resign, then to close down the Welfare Party, and finally to crack down on Islamic groups and their resources. In June 1997, the generals declared a long list of companies “backward-minded” (i.e., too religious) and promoted boycotts of their products. Some Islamic leaders were put on trial for “establishing anti-secular organizations.” Some “undesirable” journalists were fired, and several were even discredited with fake documents prepared by the military.
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Certain members of the Welfare Party, including its rising star, Recep Tayyip Erdog˘an, then mayor of Istanbul, were given prison terms for “inciting hatred” against the Kemalist regime. “Erdog˘an’s political career is over,” some newspapers wrote in September 1998. “From now on, he can’t even be a local governor.”
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The speech that earned Erdog˘an a ten-month prison term was indeed harsh,
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but it also included an interesting remark that hinted at the direction he would follow: “Western man has freedom of belief,” Erdog˘an said. “In Europe there is respect for worship, for the headscarf. Why not in Turkey?”
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T
HE
AKP
’S
P
ATH TO
P
OST-
I
SLAMISM

In the aftermath of “the post-modern coup” of 1997, a more moderate group in the Welfare Party, fed up with Erbakan’s radical and delusional rhetoric, looked for a new vision. Led by former academic Abdullah Gül, probably the most sophisticated figure in the party’s ranks, this “reformist movement,” spoke more favorably of Western-style democracy and began to argue that “the state should be in the service of the people, rather than a holy state that stands far above the people.”
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This movement soon broke with Milli Görüs¸ and joined forces with Tayyip Erdog˘an to found the Justice and Development Party (AKP) in August 2001.

From its first day, the AKP declared that it was not “a political party with a religious axis,” and it defined its ideology as “democratic conservatism.” This meant, according to Erdog˘an, “a concept of modernity that does not reject tradition, a belief in universalism that accepts localism, and an understanding of rationalism that does not disregard the spiritual meaning of life.”
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In November 2002, a little more than a year after its founding, the AKP won the general elections with 32 percent of the votes and took power. Soon, to the surprise of the whole world, this post-Islamist party turned out to be a most dedicated and successful pursuer of Turkey’s bid to join the EU. With a staggering number and scope of democratic reforms, it even proved to be, in the words of
Newsweek
columnist Fareed Zakaria, “the most open, modern and liberal political movement in Turkey’s history.”
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Hence it was no surprise when the AKP won the 2007 general elections with an astounding 47 percent of the votes, getting the support of not only conservatives but also most secular liberals, Kurds, and even Armenians.
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The Islamist Milli Görüs¸, now represented by the Felicity Party, which depicted the AKP as a “traitor” that had sold its soul to “Western imperialism,” received only 2.5 percent.

This might well have been interpreted as a historic defeat for Turkish Islamism, but the Kemalists believed the exact opposite. They had never trusted the AKP, insisted on calling its members “Islamists,” and asserted that the party’s transformation was just a trick to deceive outsiders. Some of their conspiracy theories were mind-boggling. In 2007, for example, a staunchly Kemalist author, Ergun Poyraz, produced a series of best sellers arguing that both Erdog˘an and Gül were “secret Jews” collaborating with “international Zionism” in order to destroy Atatürk’s republic and enslave the Turkish nation.
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This anti-Semitic lunacy was just one of the many signs of the amazing transformation occurring in the political landscape. The AKP’s outreach to the West had turned the tables, and now the Kemalists, who were also horrified that the EU was asking for more rights for Kurds and other minorities, had started to turn anti-Western.

Yet the Kemalists were not alone in suspecting that the AKP had a “hidden agenda.” Some Western observers also believed that any party made up of devout Muslims must necessarily be illiberal and undemocratic. Critics could certainly point to traces of Islamist sentiment in the AKP’s ranks, along with the typical problems of Turkey’s patrimonial politics, including nepotism and intolerance to criticism. Tayyip Erdog˘an also showed signs of what can be called “Muslim nationalism”—or simply “Muslimism”—in the way he demonstrated an emotional affinity for Muslim actors around the world.
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Yet still AKP’s post-Islamist position was genuine, for a few good reasons.

First, the new direction that the AKP embraced, “democratic conservatism,” was not unheard-of in Turkey. Quite the contrary; it had its roots, as we have seen, among the Islamic liberals of the Ottoman Empire as well as in the center-right tradition of Turkish politics represented by the Progressive Republican Party in 1924, by Adnan Menderes between 1950 and 1960, and by Turgut Özal between 1983 and 1993. All the AKP did was abandon Milli Görüs¸, a late invention with foreign roots, and return to a more established political tradition. It was not an accident that Parliament Speaker Bülent Arınç, the third most powerful member of the AKP after Erdog˘an and Gül, expressed regret in 2007 that until the late 1990s, he and his friends had failed to understand Özal, and had given him “the most unfair criticisms.” “Only when I learned more about the world,” Arınç added in an emotional tone, “did I realize how right Özal was.”
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Second, the AKP’s political transformation was in line with the changing intellectual landscape in Turkey. Classical liberalism, an idea so popular in the late Ottoman Empire but denounced by the Kemalist Republic, was rediscovered in the late 1980s, thanks to the reforms of Özal and the efforts of new organizations such as the Ankara-based Association for Liberal Thinking. Books and academic works addressing liberal philosophy, extremely rare before the 1980s, became ubiquitous.
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The nascent group of liberal intellectuals was critical of Kemalist secularism and in favor of broader religious freedom. Their growing interaction with Islamic conservatives gave the latter group new perspective and rhetoric. Hence, from the early 1990s onward, Islamic intellectuals started to question the idea of “an Islamic state” and instead spoke of “a nonideological state” or “a neutral state,” defending “pluralism” as their social ideal. They had realized, after all, that “[the] Islamist regimes in Iran, Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan introduce[d] even more extreme repression than Turkey’s secularists.”
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In 1998, the influential Gülen movement organized a conference entitled “Islam and Secularism,” attended by a handful of the most prominent theologians and Islamic pundits of Turkey. Following three days of discussion, they declared that Islam and the secular state were compatible, as long as the latter respected religious freedom. The modernist theologian who championed this view, Mehmet Aydın, who promotes “liberal democratic culture” for the whole Muslim world, would become the minister responsible for the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) in the AKP’s first term.
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