PIOUS TURKS PUSH FOR LABOR JUSTICE
BY: SUSANNE GUSTEN
The International Herald Tribune
May 10, 2012 Thursday
France
Young people protest government’s promotion of a pro-capitalist stance
Young Muslims have been congregating to critique the reign of the
mildly Islamist government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as
“capitalism with ablutions.”
FULL TEXT For the Turkish youths who set out to change the world last
week, May Day began with prayers.
Prostrating themselves outside the mosque in Istanbul’s pious
neighborhood of Fatih, hundreds of young men and women prayed for
the souls of the workers killed in Turkey’s all too common industrial
accidents. Then they picked up their placards and marched across town
to join the leftists and labor unions at their rally in Taksim square.
A roar of surprise and delight went up from the red-flagged masses in
Taksim when the column marched into the square under a black banner
bearing the slogan “God – Bread – Freedom.”
“It was an emotional moment,” Mem Aslan, 29, one of the organizers of
the Anti-Capitalist Muslim Youth march, said last week, recounting
how an aged Communist had embraced him with tears streaming down
his face. “It proved that we can overcome the division of the people
into left and right, created by our common enemy, the ruling class,
to pit us against each other and enslave us all.”
It was the first public appearance of a movement that has been brewing
at universities and in social media, where young Muslims have been
critiquing the reign of the mildly Islamist government of Prime
Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan as “capitalism with ablutions.”
After almost 10 years in power, Mr. Erdogan’s ruling Justice and
Development Party, or A.K.P., is coming under pressure from a new
generation of Muslims calling for more social justice and democracy,
in a trend that could change Turkey and offer new perspectives to
societies in the Middle East searching for ways to combine Islamic
values with a modern pluralist state, analysts said.
“We organized the whole thing within 10 days,” Mr. Aslan said about
the prayer and march, which drew more than 1,000 participants and
made headlines on every news program that night. “That is because
its time has come.”
The march heralds a generational conflict within the Islamist movement,
said Murat Somer, a political scientist and expert on political Islam
at Koc University in Istanbul. “The A.K.P. was born of the marriage
between moderate Islam and global capitalism,” he said in a telephone
interview this week. “The younger generation of some Islamists has
a different take on social justice. They focus more on economics and
a class-based understanding.”
“There is a basis for this movement. It did not come out of nowhere,”
he said.
The angry youths matter to the A.K.P. because they come from the
party’s electoral grass roots, he added, noting that the A.K.P.
“cannot disregard it.”
In Fatih, Mr. Aslan and Murad Icoz, 26, a university student and
co-organizer of the march, detailed their criticism of the A.K.P. and
the rapidly rising Muslim middle class it represents.
“We have a government that calls itself Muslim, but since they came to
power, the number of banks in this street has risen from 10 to 25,”
Mr. Aslan said. “Some people have become rich, while others struggle
to survive. We are talking about people who are sucking our blood.”
Since vaulting to power 10 years ago on religiously inspired demands
for social justice, the A.K.P. has lifted millions out of poverty,
more than doubling the gross domestic product from (EURO)244 billion to
(EURO)551 billion in 2010, according to European Union figures. Per
capita income in purchasing power standards rose from (EURO)7,400 per
annum to (EURO)11,800 during that period, according to those figures,
bringing it from 36 percent to 48 percent of the E.U. average.
The economic boom created by a generation of pious Muslim
entrepreneurs, nicknamed the “Islamic Calvinists” for their religiously
inspired capitalist work ethic, has brought forth a Muslim middle
class that today includes almost 60 percent of the Turkish population
by the definition of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and
Development of having $10 to spend per person per day, according to
a study by the KMG polling firm published this week.
But the minimum wage for workers remains at 700 Turkish lira, or $395,
per month, with a six-day work week, and many workers labor 70 hours
a week for even less pay in the gray market that accounts for a third
of the Turkish economy, according to the Finance Ministry.
Occupational safety is abysmal, with lax laws and even more lax
controls. Seventy-five workers died in industrial accidents in
April alone, according to the Workers’ Health and Safety Council,
a nongovernmental organization that tracks such deaths, bringing the
total of workers drowned, crushed or burned to death in the first
four months of this year to 239.
Labor laws remain almost as repressive as they have been since the
military smashed the labor unions after the 1980 coup d’etat, requiring
workers to register their wish to join a union with a notary public,
with a resulting rate of unionization that remains well below 10
percent and workers left at the mercies of their employers.
The economic upswing and social realignment have caused a new chasm to
open within the pious masses that carried the A.K.P. to power against
the secularist elites in the military, bureaucracy and judiciary a
decade ago.
“Now that there are many rich Muslims, they have begun to regard
themselves as a separate class,” Mr. Icoz said. “They live in their
new suburbs, far away from the poor, to comply with the admonition of
the Prophet against ‘sleeping sated while one’s neighbor goes hungry.’
That’s how low they have dragged Islam.
“They think it is enough to perform the rituals of Islam, like praying,
fasting, the Hajj,” he added. “They exploit the workers and then go to
prayers. They give no thought to the spiritual, moral side of Islam.”
Mr. Aslan said it was the quest for a just society under those moral
imperatives that triggered the anti-capitalist Muslim movement.
“We want to take the Prophet as a role model for our time and ask
the questions he would ask,” he said. “Why do workers in this society
work such long hours, why are they oppressed, why are they scorned?
Why are the Kurds treated as they are, why are the Alevi treated this
way? These are questions the Prophet would ask, because this society
is very far from the ideal society of the Koran.”
The movement does not strive for an Islamic state, both men stressed,
but for social justice in a secular state.
In their march, the youths brandished placards demanding an end to
nuclear energy, a right to conscientious objection, a lifting of the
head scarf ban and more rights for Kurds and Armenians.
“All Property Belongs to God,” proclaimed one sign; “All Oppressed
Are Equal,” said another. A large banner read “Freedom From Slavery”
in Kurdish, Armenian and Arabic as well as in Turkish.Some of the
female marchers wore head scarves, while others went bareheaded. An
impromptu manifesto read out at the rally included quotations from
the Bible and the Torah as well as the Koran.
“They are very open and inclusive,” Ihsan Eliacik, a theologian whose
writings have influenced the students, said in a telephone interview
last week.
“They are also very courageous,” he added, alluding to the fate of
former Turkish youth activists such as the iconic Deniz Gezmis, who
was hanged at the age of 25 exactly 40 years ago this week, or Erdal
Eren, executed at age 16 along with other young activists after the
1980 coup.
Mr. Eliacik, who provided the youths with a basement from which
to organize the march, but insists he plays no leading role in
the movement, advocates a liberal and humanist, if not socialist,
interpretation of Islam comparable to Christian liberation theology.
“Capitalism is teetering, and people are searching for alternatives,”
he said. “Communism tried to provide an alternative without religion,
but that didn’t work. Now people are looking for faith-based
alternatives to capitalism. Islam has the capacity to offer that
alternative.”
The emergence of the anti-capitalist Muslim movement has galvanized
observers on both sides of Turkey’s political scene.
The left-wing columnist Oral Calislar wrote in the Radikal daily,
“Since most workers are pious, this new movement could open new doors
to the organization of the workers.”
In The Star daily, the columnist Fehmi Koru, a staunch supporter of
the A.K.P., warned the government to heed the movement’s message.
“The nature of power, with its daily decisions and constraints, can
drag politicians far from their original positions,” he wrote. The
appearance of the Muslim anti-capitalists should serve the A.K.P. as
a reminder of its roots and as a warning to adjust its policies,
he added.
Mr. Eliacik, the theologian, believes that will not be enough. “This
movement will grow, in Turkey as well across the region,” he said,
pointing out that young protesters in Egypt or Syria had rallied under
similar slogans. “God, Bread and Freedom – those demands express the
soul of this region and its societies,” he said.