RISING TURKEY IS NO NEO-OTTOMAN THREAT TO WEST: PANKAJ MISHRA
Bloomberg
July 1 2011
Like many of Asia’s antique cities, Istanbul is a palimpsest,
continuously inscribed by new movements of people and ideas, even as
older writings on its parchment remain faintly visible.
Few Istanbul neighborhoods manifest a multilayered identity as much as
Kuzguncuk, which lies on the Asian shore of the Bosporus. Legend has it
that Jews expelled from Spain in the late 15th century first settled
here. Their neighbors were Greeks, Armenians and other Christians,
part of the Ottoman Empire’s extraordinarily cosmopolitan mix of
merchant and trading communities.
The local population is almost entirely Muslim now. Strolling through
the neighborhood’s dappled streets one afternoon last week, I came
across a synagogue and an Armenian Orthodox church. Both seemed
permanently shut. The man who opened the door to the Greek Orthodox
church only to wave us away had the sullenness of a minority under
perpetual siege.
My companion remarked that the few remaining Greeks in Istanbul have
little reason to be bon vivants. She is right. It has been nearly half
a century since Istanbul lost the last of its non-Muslim minorities,
driven out by a vengeful (and secular) Turkish nationalism. Rural
migrants from the Black Sea region moved into the houses vacated by
the Jews, Greeks and Armenians.
A Trendy Enclave Ethnically cleansed Istanbul is now one of the port
cities — Shanghai and Kochi, India are among the others — to be
self- consciously, and profitably, recovering their multicultural
past. Kuzguncuk, too, is being gentrified, helped by Istanbul’s
creative class of architects, artists, journalists and designers, as
well as visitors like myself, looking for a glimpse of old Istanbul
in the neighborhood’s renovated Ottoman houses with overhanging
wooden balconies.
Even as it frantically re-establishes its links with “old” Europe,
Istanbul demonstrates how a city’s exotic past can be enlisted into
a high-end consumption of culture — without any sustained national
reckoning with a painful history of pogroms and expulsions. Kuzguncuk
itself reveals how Turkish identity today is being revised through
careful negotiations and compromises with the past and present.
For all its gentrification by latte-sipping liberals, this old
working-class neighborhood is still dominated by socially conservative
middle-class Muslims, constituting a solid vote bank for the Justice
and Development Party, or AKP, which just won a third consecutive
national election by a landslide.
Rivaling the Founder It would have seemed inconceivable to Turkey’s
hard-line secular elites just two decades back that a devout Muslim
like Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who comes from a hardscrabble background
in Istanbul, would one day be Turkey’s most powerful leader since
the nation’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, and the spokesman for
the country’s long-ignored and now upwardly mobile Muslims in the
great Anatolian hinterland.
Erdogan has of course been helped by an economy that is growing
at a pace rivaling those of India and China, enabling Istanbul to
reinvent itself. And he has nimbly modified his economic policies
since his early political days, when he was mentored by the former
Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan, a critic of global capitalism.
Still, as a comprehensive report in Bloomberg Businessweek pointed out,
Erdogan has “managed the delicate political trick” of pleasing Turkey’s
business elites “while still looking like a populist.” This is a rare
feat, and perhaps the only other Muslim leader to have pulled it off
was Malaysia’s authoritarian former Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad.
A Muslim Model Erdogan’s success has fueled much talk of Turkey
providing an attractive model of political Islam, particularly to
Arab countries stumbling out of harsh secular dictatorships. Indeed,
Turkey’s influence in the Muslim world has not been greater since
the early 20th century, when Muslims from India to Java looked up
to the Ottoman sultan as caliph, hoping he would save them from
European imperialists. Later, secularist post-colonial leaders such
as Egypt’s Gamel Abdel Nasser, Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi of Iran and
Pakistan’s Muhammad Ali Jinnah would try to build their nation-states
on Ataturk’s model.
Today, Erdogan seems even more popular internationally than the
sultan or Ataturk — and not just in the Arab street where he has
become a folk hero for his loud criticism of Israel’s treatment
of Palestinians. Last year, Anwar Ibrahim, a former deputy prime
minister of Malaysia, told me that he had admiringly followed Erdogan’s
political trajectory since his election as mayor of Istanbul in 1994.
The leader of a Muslim youth organization in a prosperous little
Javanese town said that modernizing Muslims like himself had observed
the fortunes of the AKP very closely.
Friendly-Neighbor Policy Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey’s intellectually
ambitious foreign minister, seems intent on vindicating the new Asian
regard for his country. He has downgraded Turkey’s cold war alliance
with the United States and devised a new foreign policy that aims at,
in his phrase, “zero problems” with such previously hostile neighbors
as Syria, Iran, Iraq and Armenia.
These apparently major changes in Turkey’s internal and external
politics have set off alarms in some corners of the West. Is Turkey
moving away from decades of state-imposed secularism and geopolitical
passivity? Is it likely to go the way of Iran? Will it incite and
support other Islamic movements in the regions such as the Muslim
Brotherhood?
Harvard historian Niall Ferguson, for instance, is convinced that the
West ought to be deeply worried as Turkey creates “a new Muslim empire
in the Middle East.” After the AKP’s victory last month, Ferguson
warned of Erdogan’s authoritarianism, denunciations of Israel and
“adroit maneuvers” to exploit the Arab Spring to his advantage. “His
ambition,” Ferguson wrote, “is to return to the pre-Ataturk era, when
Turkey was not only militantly Muslim but also a regional superpower.”
Decline and Fall Ferguson can be excitable on the subject of Muslims
— he once wrote that upon seeing the model for a proposed minaret
at Oxford, “the phrase that sprang to mind was indeed ‘decline and
fall. ‘” But his view that Erdogan is planning to restore his country
to its pre-Ataturk “vigor” is hardly unique.
It is also hardly sensible. Far from being “militantly Muslim,”
the Ottoman Empire had a centuries-long history of tolerance toward
minorities and drew on the diversity of its subjects. It was only
in its final decades, eroded from within by nationalist minorities
and battered without by European powers, that the empire adopted
pan-Islamism as a last-ditch defense. Not surprisingly, Ataturk
abolished the caliphate as soon as he came to power.
Flow of Refugees In addition Erdogan is not more — and is arguably
much less — authoritarian than his predecessors from the military,
who in the 1980s were the first to re-introduce Islam into public life
in order to combat left-wing radicalism. On Israel, Erdogan is only
amplifying longstanding popular disapproval. And far from being adroit,
Erdogan, like most leaders, has struggled to respond coherently to
the Arab Spring and now faces a potentially destabilizing situation
in the flow of refugees to Turkey from Syria’s chaos.
Syria’s likely collapse into sectarian war may increase tensions
between Turkey’s own Alawites and Sunnis, not to mention further
complicate Ankara’s long and bloody conflict with Kurdish separatists.
There are many other problems lurking. The glamour of Istanbul can
deceive, for much of Anatolia remains stuck in another century. Rapid
economic growth, heavily dependent on short-term capital inflows, is
not assured. Notwithstanding all its talk of “turning east,” Turkey
has arrived very late in the markets of India, China and Indonesia.
Ideology and Pragmatism Having appeased business elites, Erdogan
may find himself vulnerable if economic distress provokes populist
anger among his other constituency, the aspirational middle class
in Anatolia. Will he then try to reverse his journey from ideology
to pragmatism? Or draw on the emotive force of Turkish nationalism,
still more potent than Islam or so-called neo- Ottomanism in Turkey?
Much remains to be negotiated about Turkey’s identity. And there is
much still to be inscribed on the palimpsest of Istanbul, whether
or not Erdogan’s ambitious new plan to build two satellite cities
outside the metropolis comes to fruition.
Turkey is no longer an insular country, and its fate will help
determine many other national trajectories in a freshly globalized
world. Once again, nearly a century after the Ottoman Empire gave way
to Ataturk’s secular republicanism, Turkey’s political and economic
reinvention engages millions of Muslims around the world. And there
can be no narrower perspective on it than paranoia about Muslims and
a long-defunct Ottoman Empire.
(Pankaj Mishra, the author of “Temptations of the West: How to be
Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet and Beyond,” is a Bloomberg View
columnist based in Mashobra, India. The opinions expressed are
his own.)
From: A. Papazian
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-07-01/rising-turkey-is-no-neo-ottoman-threat-to-west-pankaj-mishra.html