TURKEY: What's Going On With Turkey?

Date: 
Friday, August 6, 2010
Source: 
Forbes
Countries: 
Asia
Western Asia
PeaceWomen Consolidated Themes: 
Participation

While virtually the entire world has finally aligned on isolating Iran--including, even, Russia and Gulf states--Turkey is obstinately holding out. On Aug. 2 Bloomberg News reported that "Shipments of fuel (to Iran) are now dominated by Turkish and Chinese companies." Meanwhile, the Turkish police have just arrested a refugee former lawyer for the Iranian woman sentenced to death by stoning. Turkey is full of escapees from Iran: artists, musicians, intellectuals, refuseniks of all kinds. In recent weeks the Erdogan government has threatened to start shipping them all back. The lawyer had good reason to run. Tehran had issued an order for his arrest, and members of his family were interned. His wife remains in solitary confinement.

As the world asks, "Whither Turkey, what's going on over there, whose side are they on?" the picture grows ever more confused. What does the future hold, and how did it come to this? Will Prime Minister Erdogan one day pull off a forcible coup and impose sharia? Will he drift toward it gradually as he is doing now? Will he persuade the populace first, and if so how? Or is he not a fundamentalist at heart, merely a skilled populist, with no real interest in radical Islamization?

For answers to these and myriad other scary questions, let me point you to a terrifically illuminating new study of Turkey published by the Hoover Institution entitled Torn Country: Turkey Between Islamism and Secularism. The book's author, Zeyno Baran, is Turkish-American, a Hudson Institute senior fellow and married to Mathew Bryza, the current U.S. ambassador to Azerbaijan. So handy, so sane and direct, the book--I read it in just over two hours--tells you how and why Mustafa Kemal Ataturk throughout the 1920s established the secular state on the ruins of the Caliphate; how he dismantled the sharia and the conventions that underpinned it, from the veil to headgear to the madrassa system; and how he forcibly yanked Turkey into the modern era while the rest of the Islamic world remained--and mostly remains to this day--immiserated. Here's Baran on Kemal and women's emancipation:

"Ataturk asked 'How can a nation soar if half of the people are chained to the ground?' In supplanting sharia, Turkey's new civil code banned polygamy and ensured women equal rights in divorce, inheritance, and child custody. Ataturk pushed for women to be educated, eligible for public office, and allowed to enter any profession. Turkish women gained the right to vote in 1930 and to hold public office in 1934, sooner than many Western countries."

The author points out that after years of pioneering women's rights alone in the Islamic world, Turkey has shifted into full reverse gear as more and more women began wearing the headscarf, usually under pressure from their families. "Recent studies indicate this period of increased headscarf wearing coincides with a decrease in the quality of life of Turkish women ... by 2009 Turkey ranked 129th out of a total of 134 countries in terms of allocating equal resources and opportunities to men and women, placing Turkey lower than Iran and Oman.. Turkey also ranked 130th--fourth from last--in female economic participation and opportunity, 119th in female enrollment in secondary education ... " She goes on to cite how as the economy has grown female economic activity has declined, and as how the percentage of women in political life has fallen sharply.

Baran is no blind supporter of Kemalist absolutism. She shows how the military down the decades often overstepped its boundaries, and how this likely caused an artificial suppression of organic religious evolution which perhaps led to a delayed, and more extreme, upsurge when the lid was finally lifted. But she also points out why the military had to step in so often, and indeed how the military deliberately re-introduced Islam to the public arena to combat the extreme secularism of pro-Soviet leftist movements.

A good half of the book is really about contemporary Turkey. Baran tracks the political education of Erdogan and his party. She quotes Erdogan, as a young politician, making various hair-raising declarations such as "Praise to God: We are all for sharia" and "One cannot be secular and a Muslim at the same time ... you will either be a Muslim or a secularist." She tracks the inexorable rise of Erdogan to political prominence, often with open--and not-so-open--help from outside, which exacerbated the hostility of the Turkish military. She gives juicy, intriguing examples such as "the fact that Bush had hosted Erdogan in the White House on December 2002, before he had been elected to parliament and while he was still banned from politics for his conviction for subversion."

Erdogan's story illustrates the West's political dirigisme of the Islamic sphere--which has backfired so often elsewhere. Seemingly the perfect candidate to shape a course of "moderate Islam" by democratic means, with some massaging from outside friends, Erdogan took all the help and guidance on offer until he didn't have to. He made his moves against institutional impediments such as the military, the judiciary, the education system, the diplomatic corps and the media. He politicized the police force in his direction and created new pro-AKP business oligarchs. He built his impregnable launch pad, and then he took off on his own into uncharted waters internationally, taking the country and its future with him. Under the AK party Turkey has zoomed to the near-top of countries with the most anti-American and anti-Israeli popular sentiment.

Which way Turkey drifts will determine which way the region, and the world, drift. It will affect us all. We all need to know much more about Turkey and Zeyno Baran's book is the perfect place to start.