HOW SECULAR TURKEY WALKS THE TIGHTROPE
Sandro Contenta, Toronto Star
The Toronto Star
December 10, 2006 Sunday
At the entrance to Marmara University, young Muslim women stream into
a booth for a compulsory costume change that strikes at their sense
of identity.
The transformation is simple – the removal of headscarves – but for the
Turkish state and many of the students involved, the act is profound.
"It makes me feel suppressed," says student Fatma Saglam, 20, moments
before disappearing into the booth.
The law banning headscarves in government offices and universities
is jealously guarded by powerful elites as a pillar of Turkey’s
officially secular status. It forces some women to sacrifice their
education rather than compromise their Islamic beliefs. Others emerge
from the booth with wigs or uncovered hair.
"In Turkey, secular means you have to live according to how they
want you to live. You have to throw your religion away," says Hacer
Akgunler, an English-language student who replaced her headscarf with
a hood.
The headscarf ban has been around for years. What’s new is the decision
by the ruling Justice and Development party to avoid a showdown over
the law, despite the party’s Islamist political roots and promise to
remove the ban when swept to power four years ago.
Political survival is a strong incentive: Turkey’s military has deposed
past governments it considered too Islamic and recent grumblings from
generals have raised fears of another coup.
But the party’s tentative approach on the headscarf issue also
illustrates Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s pragmatic approach,
one some observers consider a model for eventually reconciling Islam
and democracy.
Past Islamist parties have tested the tolerance of generals by
pressing to make the state more religious. Erdogan, whose wife wears
a headscarf, focuses instead on increasing individual and religious
freedoms by making Turkey more democratic.
MP Egeman Bagis, Erdogan’s foreign policy adviser, puts it this way:
"I defend a woman’s right to wear a headscarf as much as I defend a
woman’s right to wear a miniskirt."
The approach seems to coincide with recent poll findings. They indicate
that Islam plays a significant role in Turkish lives, but most see
it as a matter of personal choice, not legislation.
The percentage of Turks who define their identity primarily as Muslims
has increased to 46 per cent from 36 per cent seven years ago.
But sentiment in favour of imposing Islamic sharia law has declined
to 9 per cent from 21 per cent, according to the poll by the respected
Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation.
And while the number of women wearing headscarves has been declining,
more than two-thirds of those questioned said the ban in universities
and government offices should be lifted.
Conditions set by the European Union for Turkey’s possible entry into
the EU have helped Erdogan pursue his agenda and implement significant
reforms, but this nation of 70 million people remains a volatile work
in progress.
As a NATO member long considered a strategic bridge between East and
West, Turkey’s stability could depend on how deftly Erdogan manoeuvres
toward next year’s parliamentary and presidential elections.
Next spring, MPs will select a president to replace staunch secularist
Ahmet Necdet Sezer, whose veto power and control of top appointments
gives the job considerable political clout.
Erdogan hasn’t ruled out seeking the post, and with his comfortable
majority in parliament, it’s his for the taking.
The possibility of an Islamist-rooted party controlling both the
executive and legislative branches has increased military anxieties
and fuelled nationalist suspicions of a "hidden agenda."
The new head of Turkey’s military, hawkish Gen. Yasar Buyukanit,
recently warned of Islamists who reject the separation of state
and religion.
"There is a reactionary threat in Turkey," Buyukanit said in an
October address at the Istanbul War Academy, calling for "every kind
of measure" to stop it.
The military earlier backed a protest that saw tens of thousands of
pro-secular Turks calling on the government to resign.
The demonstration was sparked when a gunman burst into the country’s
top administrative court in May and shot its judges – killing one
and wounding four – because they upheld the headscarf ban.
"It’s a dangerous time," says Murat Belge, a leading Turkish scholar
and social critic.
"There may be another military intervention."
The military’s self-appointed role as defender of secularism dates
back to the founding of modern Turkey in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal
Ataturk. After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I,
Ataturk considered Islam incompatible with the goal of developing a
modern European state.
He ended the Islamic caliphate, got rid of religious courts,
secularized schools, gave women the vote and replaced the Arabic
writing system with Latin script. He also spawned an enduring
personality cult that upholds Western ways even through his ubiquitous
portraits, which usually show him in a tuxedo and bow tie.
Multi-party politics were introduced in 1947 and the first Islamist
party came on the scene 23 years later. Initially known as the
National Order, led by Necmettin Erbakan, it became an influential
member of coalition governments despite being repeatedly banned and
reincarnated under different names over the next three decades.
The military intervened to remove governments four times during the
past 50 years, most recently in 1997, after an Erbakan-led government
was deemed too Islamist.
As an Erbakan disciple, Erdogan needs no reminders of the sensitivities
involved. In 1997, after serving a term as Istanbul’s first Islamist
mayor, he was jailed for reciting an Islamist poem at a rally and
proclaiming Islam as his guide.
Four years later, he split from yet another of Erbakan’s party to form
Justice and Development with other reform-minded Islamists. Soon after,
the party capitalized on public outrage over government corruption
and won an almost two-thirds majority in the 550-seat parliament in
November 2002 elections.
Erdogan has since treaded carefully, reining in the party’s hard-line
religious faction in an attempt to develop the Islamic equivalent of
Christian Democratic parties across Europe. In 2004, when a proposed
law criminalizing adultery seemed to confirm the worst fears of
secular nationalists, Erdogan quietly abandoned it.
His political agility extends to juggling Turkey’s strong alliance
with the United States and Israel while forging stronger ties with
Iran and Syria.
To the annoyance of some Arab states, Turkey has long had a "special
relationship" with Israel, including a 1996 deal for Israeli fighter
pilots to train in Turkish airspace and bilateral trade of $2 billion
(U.S.) a year.
Erdogan travelled to the United States specifically to meet Jewish
American leaders, key allies in lobbying against repeated attempts
by some U.S. lawmakers to label the 1915 Ottoman Turk massacre of
Armenians a genocide.
Things took a turn for the worse in 2004, when Erdogan accused Israel
of "state terrorism" against the Palestinians in Gaza.
By then, Turkey’s relations with the U.S. had reached an all-time
low after Erdogan’s party blocked a U.S. request to launch a northern
invasion of Iraq from Turkish soil in 2003.
Ankara was increasingly anxious about Kurdish rebel groups waging
attacks on Turkey from bases in northern Iraq and wanted U.S. troops
there to put an end to them. Erdogan asked for a meeting with President
George W. Bush but was refused.
A leading power broker in Turkey advised Erdogan to first patch up
his relationship with Israel’s then-prime minister, Ariel Sharon.
"I told him he had to go to Jerusalem, shake hands with Sharon and
once that picture was published in the American press, Bush would
invite him. That’s exactly what happened," said the power broker,
who negotiated Erdogan’s meeting with Sharon in May 2005 and spoke
on condition of anonymity.
Pragmatic resolve also saw the Turkish government meet some tough
conditions for European Union entry talks to begin. It ended the
military’s control of powerful public agencies, placed the defence
budget under parliamentary scrutiny, abolished the death penalty, and
allowed instruction and broadcast in languages other than Turkish –
a move aimed at improving the rights of its Kurdish minority.
Officially, the military supports Turkey’s EU entry bid as the logical
result of Ataturk’s Westernizing vision. Privately, analysts say the
generals are divided by a basic formula: more democracy, less power
for them.
EU entry talks have bogged down in the decades-old dispute between
Turkey and Greece over Cyprus. More serious still is growing resistance
in Europe to a Muslim country joining the club.
Some European leaders have made Turkey’s entry far more uncertain
by promising voters a referendum on the matter. The Turkish response
has been a significant drop in support for joining the EU and a more
difficult political environment for reforms.
The continent Erdogan was looking to for support may instead be
throwing the generals a lifeline.
GRAPHIC: MURAD SEZER ap file photo The official Justice and Development
party formed in 2001 by Recep Tayyip Erdogan and other reform-minded
Islamists was swept to power in November 2002 elections, winning
almost two-thirds of the 550 seats in the Turkish parliament. The
election posters above feature Erdogan’s picture and the messages:
"Everything for Istanbul" and "Everything for Turkey."