HISTORIC UPHEAVAL IN TURKEY
This is a pivotal week in the history of the republic of Turkey. For the first time in its history as a modern constitutional republic founded by Kemal Ataturk, Islamists are poised to retake control, undoing eighty years of what some have described as Europe’s last secular totalitarian regime. Though the current prime minister of Turkey, Tayyip Erdogan, has not formally announced his plan to stand as candidate for president, with his Islamic AK party in solid control of the parliament, it seems certain that either he or another Islamist associate will become the next president. He reportedly will announce his intention to run this week. If he becomes president, the AK (Justice and Welfare) Party will then appoint an Islamist prime minister, thus obtaining complete control over the government.
For decades the West has lifted up Turkey as the model of a democracy in a Muslim country. In fact, of the several dozen countries in the world with Muslim-majority populations, Turkey is the only one with a democracy. It is the revolutionary project of Kemal Ataturk, a soldier and statesmen who transformed the ailing Ottoman Empire into a modern republic. He believed that religious control of the government had held Turks back for centuries, causing it to fall farther behind the West in every aspect of science and society. His reforms included changing the Turkish alphabet from using Arabic letters to using Latin script and making Sufi religious orders illegal. Ataturk persuaded Turkey to look Westward.
Once when asked about his personal beliefs, Ataturk responded, “I have no religion, and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea.” Apparently this quote never made it into circulation in Turkish, because many Turks I speak with exonerate Ataturk as a great defender of the faith. They have been persuaded by the educational system here that elevates rote memorization of certain aspects of history over critical analysis. But somehow the ideological machine has failed to keep the system going, either because it has catered to the wealthy elite, or because it has failed to overcome the much deeper self-understanding of the Turks as members of a trans-national Islamic community.
Now, on the eve of parliament selecting a new president, Ataturk’s attempts to diminish the power of Islam over the minds of the Anatolian Turk have seemingly gone the way of the great Marxists-Leninists revolutions of the Soviet Empire. With the dawn of the 21st century, Turkish Islamists have regrouped and steadily advanced to the place where Turkey conceivably stands on the threshold of casting off the secular state and replacing it with an Islamic one. In the past, as recently 1997, the secular military and courts have intervened to stop such an exchange. That could still happen, but seems less likely with the current broad support the AK party has among the Turkish people. If so, this is it, a day of change, and I get to live in Turkey during an historic upheaval.
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