Gulf Times, Qatar
May 27 2006
Turkey key to new accord with IslamPublished: Saturday, 27 May, 2006,
08:23 AM Doha Time
By Madeleine Bunting
LONDON: This week there was a ceremony in the south-eastern Turkish
port of Ceyhan to mark the first tanker to be loaded with the oil
piped over a thousand kilometres from Baku in Azerbaijan. One of the
most ambitious and controversial energy schemes in the world is
finally coming to completion. It will transport the oil wealth of
central Asia to hungry world markets, bypassing the increasingly
capricious Russia.
And this huge pipeline, whose course runs through zones of chronic
political and seismic instability across the Caucasus, is only the
beginning of how Turkey is exploiting its old strategic and
geographic advantages to develop a web of pipelines for oil and gas,
stretching from Asia into the heart of Europe. Plans for a gas
pipeline across Turkey, under the Aegean to Greece and eventually to
Italy, are well advanced. The reserves of Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan
will soon be linked to energy-hungry Europe.
Turkey is offering Europe a cornucopia of dazzling possibilities as
the pipelines are laid and the economy booms. Not surprising then
that the Turkish and western European political and economic elites
feasting at last week’s Forum Istanbul – the Turkish equivalent of
the Davos World Economic Forum – are chorusing heartily from the same
hymn sheet. It was a lovefest as participants got giddy on the dream
of a utopian future in which Muslims and secularists happily
co-exist, ancient enmities between Christian and Muslim are
reconciled, and Turkey pioneers a way forward beyond `clash of
civilisations’ simplicities.
Sound a bit far-fetched? Plenty of Kurds, Armenians and Greek
Cypriots would snort with derision. But Istanbul has that kind of
intoxicating impact on many. It is a city whose history is steeped in
the exchange of civilisations as well as their clash. Istanbul sits
on a cultural fault line as well as a geological fault line, yet that
has been a source of cross-fertilisation as well as conflict.
That cross-fertilisation is evident on the streets and the ferries
criss-crossing the Bosporus. Women in headscarves walk arm in arm
with peers sporting long flowing hair, tight T-shirts, jeans and
trainers, and young women canoodle with their boyfriends or husbands.
The promise held out in these commonplace Istanbul images are of an
accommodation between Western individualistic modernity and religious
traditionalism.
This is now part of Turkey’s sales pitch for its EU membership. `We
can draw on our Ottoman past of a multi-ethnic empire which achieved
a remarkable degree of religious tolerance, to help Europe reach an
accommodation with its 15mn Muslim minorities,’ runs the spiel. `We
don’t just offer to keep your lights on, heat your hot water and
provide young labour to pay for your ageing populations’ pensions. We
also offer a thousand years of experience in bridging cultures, in
hybrid civilisations. We hold out Istanbul as a model for the cities
of western Europe with large Muslim populations such as Birmingham,
Rotterdam and Marseilles.’
But what slowly dawns is the shrill undertone of this sales pitch and
how it is chorused by Turks to convince themselves as much as anyone
else. For this is a country that spent much of the 20th century
poised precariously between secularism and political Islam. As both
become more globally aggressive, it risks being torn between them.
That danger was brought sharply home last week when a gunman opened
fire in a Turkish court, killing one judge and injuring four others.
The assailant, a lawyer, subsequently explained his attack as revenge
for the judge’s ruling in a recent case that a teacher who wore a
veil outside work should not be promoted to headteacher of a primary
school. The ruling is in line with Turkey’s strict interpretation of
secularism. The state rules out veils in any public building (thus
banning even the current prime minister’s wife from public
functions); yet it has always funded and closely regulated the
country’s Islamic worship.
The murder was a brutal reminder of just how much of this conflict is
mediated through what women do or don’t wear. Eavesdrop on
conversations about the veil among Turks, and the complex and
contested symbolism of covering female head is mind-boggling. Is it a
symbol of female oppression, political identity or puritanical piety
– or a purely pragmatic response to the aggressive male sexuality of
Turkey’s burgeoning cities, fuelled by a steady supply of Western
porn? Could it be all of these to different people at different
times?
Maintaining the ban, a sacred legacy of the revered father of Turkey,
Ataturk, risks excluding a lot of girls from a university education
and the labour market, while a relaxation of the ban risks alienating
the powerful military, who regard themselves as the keepers of the
Ataturk flame.
This murder will only confirm the fears of the secular Europeanised
elite that Turkey’s delicate balance of faith and secularism is
unravelling. They feel beleaguered as the ruling Justice and
Development party promotes the religious into positions of power. A
wife in a headscarf has become an essential attribute for the
ambitious Turk.
The secular elite is clinging to EU membership as the one hope of
reversing this trend. If the process slows down – as it might well
given such incidents as the fracas that has erupted between France
and Turkey over a law proposed in the French legislature outlawing
denial of the Armenian genocide – the reaction could prompt an
intensification of Islamism.
The application to the EU is characterised by two ironies, neither of
which is lost on Turks. Firstly, although Turkey pioneered secularism
in the Muslim world, discussion in the EU of Turkey’s application to
join has focused on its 97% Muslim population. Secondly, although
Turkey has finally resolved its decades-old identity crisis as to
whether it is European or Asian – the majorities in favour of EU
accession are substantial – Europe has now plunged into an identity
crisis.
Much of the opposition to Turkish EU membership pivots on these
ironies and the questions they prompt: is Europe a geographical or a
cultural entity, and how do you define the boundaries of either?
Nilufer Gole, a Turkish academic working in France, warns of the
grave dangers of a narcissistic European Union obsessed by these
questions of identity rather than motivated by the sense of project
(initially, Franco-German peace) that gave birth to the EU and has
sustained it. It’s the project – of peace, of economic growth, of
democracy and human rights – that appeals to Turkey, not
indeterminate questions of identity.
An EU project that carved out a distinctive European engagement with
Islam in which Turkey was a key partner would trounce Samuel
Huntingdon’s specious and self-fulfilling theory of a `clash of
civilisations’. Naked self-interest – those pipelines and pensions –
will help drive this project forward. But I’m aware that many would
attribute my enthusiasm to that intoxicating Istanbul effect of a
city prickling with minarets above a sparkling blue sea.