Turkish Islam on the Horns of a Dilemma

Turkey straddles across two continents still not very firm about its roots in the east or the west. After the fez was banned in 1928, Islam in 1923and the scarf as well, the pressure from European Union and from the political equation within is rising. The problem of Kurdish minority persists. Saladin was a Kurd who had won Jerusalem and other parts of the holy land for Islam during the crusades. Still the Kurds do not enjoy much respectability either there or in Iraq or Iran . The Turks in large numbers do not want their women to cover their heads with scarf. Many of them suspect the piety of the Presidential candidate Abdullah Gul as fundamentalism since his wife wears the scarf. His daughter feels better in scarf at a US university rather than at home! If Gul becomes the president then how could his wife wear the headscarf in the presidential palace as the scarf is banned from government institutions? The president is a powerful man and has right to dissolve the parliament and veto laws.

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan was convicted on a criminal charge that he read an Islamist poem at a political rally and had to spend four months in jail. The poem runs partly: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers...” For expressing such a sentiment he had to go to prison. He was a street seller who paid for his education (which included Koranic schooling as well as a university education in economics) by selling lemonade and sesame buns. Erdogan was the mayor of Istanbul in the 1990s and had banned sale of wine in municipal buildings. His AK Party or Justice and Development party is for growth of business. Abdullah Gul is his foreign minister. In April 2007 AKP nominated Gul for the post of the president. The opposition cried foul saying that he had an Islamist agenda. There were street protests organized by the secularists against Gul in May. The parliament then decided that instead the members of parliament choosing the president now the people would directly choose the president. The early election gave Gul nearly 50 percent of votes. The 56 year Gul is going to face the third and fourth round of election in which he must get 276 votes which is quite easy as his AKP has got 341 members in the 550-member parliament. The remaining rounds are due to take place next week, third week of August 2007.

Gul is a seasoned politician and has an impressive record of leading Turky into the full membership of European Union. He has liberalized trade to such an extent that where there was only one brewery producing Turkish favorite raki he has seen that his government has given license to seven private breweries which make the wine today. In the matter of veil he has said that it is private personal matter and he would not interfere in that respect. He was born in Kayseri.

Kayseri is a city with piety written large on many things. There is a prayer room in every factory. It has 700 business companies. These have mushroomed after industrialization and opening of the market since 2004 in which Gul’s AKP played a major role. There is a huge mosque in the century of the city. If it is a conservative city it is also growing in economic importance, as more and more jobs are available. People wake up before 5 in the morning and start their work. More and more women are in scarf in this city than in any other place. But in most cases there is obviously personal choice rather than any social or group compulsion.

The Turks are by and large divided into the city dwellers and the people who live in the villages and small towns. In the country side as well as in towns like Kayseri the ordinary folk are pious and live by piety one of which is modesty in dress. It has come down since the time of the Caliphate ‘when the sea of faith was full.’ Izmir is at the opposite pole within Turkey . Women wear low cut top, bikinis, and crowd night clubs and bars and have alcohol. The denizens of Izmir are proud secularists and show no inhibition in living in ultra modern ways. There is a debate taking place that the events in Turkey are far more serious than the 9/11. In other words the changes in Turkey are allegedly related to the ongoing war on terror.

The Muslim refusenik from Somalia Ayaan Hirsi Ali views Dawa or preaching Islam as a way of life and a way of governing as threat to democracy and secularism in Turkey . Though Gul and Erdogan have both prevented themselves from any preaching, there is fear that given opportunity they would do so. However, it is quite ironic that Turkey was established as an Islamic state by moving against and removing the Armenians and Christians. Once it consolidated power as an Islamic country it now does not want any hold of Islam on it. That the AK Party borrowed loans from the IMF in 2002 and liberalized economy and has strengthened Turkish economy.

Erdogan has also been aware of the imaginary fear of the opponents not only from outside the country like Ali but from within. “Our religion, Islam, is infallible. But political parties and their leaders are not—they make mistakes. So, we have to separate the two.” Amartya Sen has better understood the Turkish situation than Ayaan Hirsi Ali. He sees what Erdogan and Abdullah Gul stand for and their opponents. “These differences relate to views on appropriate political and public practice not to what religion is appropriate.” The former prime minister of Malaysia Mohamad Mahathir does not agree that the Turks a la Mustafa Kemal Ataturk could become modern only by turning to secularism. “The problem today in most Islamic countries is that Islam has been taken over and distorted by scholars who believe the only learning is about religion, not about science, mathematics and technology and development. From the time that began to happen, Islam fell into decline.” Islam is the answer rather than the problem. “Islam is the answer if we translate it properly—and that means we need education and knowledge.”

Among other measures, abolishing death penalty, not considering adultery as crime, giving concessions to Kurds in some ways is what Turks have done to get into EU. These alone cannot be knowledge or education or science and technology which are necessary for progress. The Turkish Nobel Laureate for literature Orhan Pamuk says that Turkey has two souls, modern and the conservative. A dialogue between the two would be good for democracy. Erdogan himself set an example by hosting a party for the Miss World who was from his country. He hosted the party in Davos and the beauty contest was ultimately held in London as Nigerians had protested against the fete which Wole Soyinka dubbed as the contest between beauty and the beast.

However, the crux of the matter in Turkey today is that democracy is the cry word of those who are deemed religious. They are the people from the provinces and provincial cities and towns like Kayseri . They are either rural or mofussil. The secularists are urban elite who had western education and culture. A prominent news editor Yusuf Muftuoglu says the real concern is ant democratization and not Islam. For example, Turgut Ozal became the prime minister in 1989. His wife wore headscarf but no one bothered then. Even so the military denigrated him because he was not a solider. Recently the army issued a statement asking the "Turkish people to show a common resistance against terrorism." This is an innuendo for repressing the Kurdish minority. Resisting terrorism is Turkish equivalent of fighting the Kurdish people who constitute one fifth of the population. Turkey is not the only country where ultra nationalists fight minority and call it a war on terrorism. It is a standing lesson for Indians who are also part of the global war on terrorism and are getting closer to the US and Israel.