UNDERSTANDING AKP: PERCEPTIONS AND MISPERCEPTIONS IN AMERICA
by Nicholas Danforth
Journal of Turkish Weekly, Turkey
Aug 1 2007
Given that Turkish opinion about the AK Party is so deeply divided,
it should come as no surprise that informed American opinion is
divided as well. On the question of whether the AKP poses a threat to
secularism in Turkey, a handful of commentators have come down firmly
on the side of the Turkey’s secular opposition, while the majority –
in the media, government and foreign policy community – believe that
the AKP is an important force for democracy and liberalism in Turkey.
Unfortunately, few of those writing in support of the AKP appear
to grasp why the party’s success has raised such concern in Turkey,
while the party’s opponents have not articulated these concerns in
a way that an American audience is likely to understand.
One factor that has made it particularly difficult for American
observers to understand the secularism debate is the fixation –
already a bit exaggerated in the minds of many Turkish secularists
and needlessly amplified in Western reporting – with the headscarf.
At its worst, this leads to declarations like the one that began the
Washington Post’s July 22 article on the election: "It’s the headscarf,
stupid. If it weren’t for a metre-square piece of fabric…
Turkey’s 42 million voters wouldn’t be going to the polls today."
Even writers who present the issue in less dramatic terms are often
still at a loss to explain the passion the issue ignites. Tellingly,
several articles have noted that in wearing a headscarf, Hayrunnisa
Gul is no different from a large proportion of Turkish women. The
implication is always that this should be reassuring to secular Turks,
when in fact it is exactly what has them so worried.
Furthermore, articles in both the Post and the New York Times give
the impression that opposition to the headscarf is little more than
the snobbery of the urban elite towards the rural, religious poor.
While Turkish readers can decide for themselves what part social
snobbery plays, foreign readers are generally forced to make this
evaluation in the absence of other compelling explanations. The Post
article cited above, for example, quotes a "nationalist candidate"
as saying "head scarves are a step on a slippery slope to a chador in
every Turkish closet." Regrettably, he either declined to elaborate on
this point, or the Post declined to print his explanation. The result
is that many liberal Americans – who would reject a law prohibiting
headscarves as forcefully as it would a law requiring them – are left
wondering why Turkey cannot find a middle way.
The difference here, between the American form secularism which
requires the separation of church and state and Turkish Laicism, which
requires the subordination of the mosque to the state, is a driving
factor in American sympathy for the AKP. Looking at the state of
affairs in Turkey today, many Americans see the secular establishment
as a greater, and certainly more immediate, threat to secularism than
the AKP. Arguments have been advanced as to why the American form of
secularism would not work in Turkey. They are not, in this author’s
view, necessarily right, but they deserve to at least by considered
by anyone who believes the AKP is the right choice for Turkey. (To
take just one example, it is certainly much easier for Americans to
defend the right of women to veil themselves knowing that they will
never face any social pressure to do so themselves.) These arguments
will never get a serious hearing, however, as long as the AKP’s most
prominent American critics are members of an extreme faction of the
neoconservative movement that is downright hostile to Islam. Writing
in the National Review Barbara Lerner mocks the notion that the AKP
resembles a "socially conservative Christian Democrat party in Western
Europe" by saying that it relies on the dangerous illusion that "Islam
is, ever was, or ever can be anything like Christianity when it comes
to a role in government." For Lerner, Islam is inherently theocratic
and moderate Islam, by extension, inherently contradictory. Daniel
Pipes, after making a far more nuanced and reasonable assessment of
the situation in a May 15 article in the New York Sun, ultimately
concludes by throwing his support behind Turkey’s secularists. He
reaches this conclusion so suddenly and inexplicably, though, that
it appears some deeply ingrained anti-Islamic suspicion has, at
the last moment, completely overcome his critical faculties. Given
the impact that Bernard Lewis has had on neoconservative thought,
perhaps this is unsurprising. Lewis’s study of Islam, Turkey and the
Ottoman empire led him to believe that Ataturk’s radical secularism
was the only thing that saved Turkey from the Islamic obscurantism
that crippled the Ottomans.
The AKP has also been lucky in the way many of its Turkish critics
have argued their case. Burak Bekdil provides a fine example of this
in a column he wrote for the Turkish Daily News. Bekdil begins by
noting the support the AKP enjoys among a long and familiar litany of
Turkey’s enemies, including Barzani, Talibani, the PKK and of course
the diaspora Armenians. (and, interestingly, Washington’s neo-cons)
A dubious rhetorical tactic in any case, it is particularly unlikely
to persuade American readers, for whom references to the Kurds and
Armenians serve only to remind them of what they find most illiberal
about the Turkish political landscape. Bekdil’s language quite quickly
causes the secularists legitimate concerns to be lost in the sea of
nationalist paranoia. (Bekdil later states, implausibly, that Hrant
Dink’s murderer probably votes AKP, though at this point its probably
too late to win over any Armenians who are still reading.)
Interestingly, one of the arguments most likely to give American
AKP supporters pause appeared in a Washington Post op-ed written by
Claire Berlinski that was at all other points a spirited defense of
the AKP. To voice the concerns of Turkey’s secularists, she refers
to the rhetoric of Erdogan’s mentor Necemttin Erbakan, noting that
he came to power promising to "Rescue Turkey from the unbelievers in
Europe,’ wrest power from ‘imperialists’ and Zionists’ and launch a
jihad to recapture Jerusalem." Many newspaper articles have described
Erdogan and Gul’s past affiliation with "political Islam" but have
not offered such telling examples of just what this "political Islam"
was. As Berlinski rightly points out, such craziness can be heard
just as, if not more, readily from the current secular opposition,
but this hardly makes it less troubling. The American press, which
reacts with delight when a provocative or heterodox statement is
unearthed in a presidential candidate’s university writing, should
understand why the AKP leaders’ past is so threatening to many Turks.
In this light it is also fair to ask why many American and European
liberals have spared the AKP the criticism that they routinely lavish
on the Bush administration for its troubling assaults on American
secularism. In part, it is because many have been impressed with
the AKP’s support for liberal reforms on civil and human rights
issues that are unconnected with religion. In part, it is because
as noted above many see the AKP’s potential threat to secularism
as less troubling than the current and ongoing threat to secularism
posed by the ‘secular’ opposition. In many cases, though, the AKP’s
agenda has been spared greater criticism because it is not what
Western observers really support. Without delving into specific policy
issues, these observers are voicing their support for the process that
brought the AKP to power. Particularly in the context of the spring
presidential election, their support was not for Gul per se but for
the democratically expressed will of the Turkish people. When the
Economist, for example, said that in a choice between democracy and
secularism Turkey should choose democracy, they were not praising
the AKP as much as they were condemning the military’s April 27
memo and the naked partisanship of the May 1st Constitutional Court
decision. (It should be noted here that the editorial board of the
Economist, clearly no fan of George Bush, has yet to call for the US
army to overthrow him.) Still, there are striking parallels between
the fears many Americans have voiced over the rise of the religious
right and the fears voiced in Turkey over the rise of the AKP. When
Michael Gerson, one of the leading evangelical voices in the Bush
administration, described the AKP as a "defender of Islamic family
values" it cannot have helped the party’s reputation among the kind
of people who see Bush’s Christian family values as the first step
in the Talibanization of America.
Anyone discussing Turkish politics in America today is forced to do so
in the context of a running debate over the relationship of Islam to
Democracy. Americans of almost every political persuasion are eager
for the relationship to be a harmonious one, but differ on how this
can be achieved (much as they continue to differ over the appropriate
relationship between Christianity and democracy).
Whatever hopes and expectations American observers project onto Turkey,
Americans will ultimately be forced to watch while Turkish citizens,
who have far more riding on the issue, are forced to settle the issue
for themselves.