Tag: Ataturk

Turkey’s highest court has made a sensible decision in rejecting a suit, brought by the country’s chief prosecutor, to ban the ruling Justice and Development Party. Outlawing the party would have meant banning dozens of politicians including – preposterously – Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul.

Turkey is a volatile political stew, including a large Muslim majority, a secular constitution, and a secular, intervention-prone military. Sustaining the democratic rule of law in such an environment is a complicated legal and political challenge. This decision, although it came in a narrow split decision of the Constitutional Court, helps.

Turkey’s 70 million people spoke clearly last year, when the Justice and Development Party, which is frankly a religious Islamic party, won a sweeping parliamentary majority with 47 per cent of the popular vote in multi-party elections. But in Turkey, as elsewhere, ambiguity runs in the arteries of political parties, especially once they take power, and Justice and Development has governed with less religious zeal than its foes had feared.

That’s good, because the stakes are high in Turkey, which has been called the most important political project in the world today. Bridging as it does east and west, Turkey is a model of a democratic country whose population is majority Muslim and which has achieved real political, social and economic advances.

Turkey stands as a genuine example to the rest of the world that democracy, far from being Islam’s enemy, can in fact be perfectly compatible with it.

The legal move against the ruling party was spurred by what we might call secular fundamentalists, who saw danger in a government initiative to allow women to wear headscarves on university campuses. Ever since the days of fiercely secular and still widely beloved reformer Kemal Ataturk, who died in 1938, such symbols of religion have been carefully constrained in Turkey.

But the courts had already struck down the headscarf law. For the judges to have legitimized the outlawing of a popular – and apparently competent – administration could have plunged the country directly into dangerous political tumult.

And for what? Erdogan’s party has not undermined the principles of secular democracy in any serious way we can see, and has in fact liberalized a number of economic and social policies. The PM, eager to get Turkey into the European Union, has repeatedly disappointed his harder-line religious followers.

At least some of the existing tension between the secular and the religious in Turkey comes, we think, from misplaced fears. Many experts say the shift into positions of power of more observant Turks from Anatolia is plausibly more the result of a social and economic movement than a religious impulse. But the country’s entrenched elite – in the military and the secular ruling class – is unhappy with the political success of the new, more religious middle class. The old establishment remains convinced that Erdogan’s party intends to subvert the the secular constitution.

The military needs to acknowledge that the courts should be the legitimate and primary guardian of the constitution. With this week’s ruling, the courts have strengthened their own position as arbiters of common sense.

Turkey has faced a constitutional crisis, and survived, intact. This is good news, and not only for the people of Turkey.

Source: The Gazette (Montreal) August 04, 2008

ANTALYA, Turkey — When an Islamist-leaning political party took charge of Turkey six years ago, this vibrant Mediterranean resort town feared a bumpy ride for a local economy driven in part by booze and bikinis.

Today, says Ahmet Barut, a hotel magnate here, the only real question is whether the town can sustain an unprecedented economic boom. He’s not keen on the teetotaling habits of the governing party’s leaders, nor the headscarves worn by their wives, but he applauds a key part of their record: “They are good at economics.”

From tourism and tomato growing to car making, Turkey has prospered far more under an Islam-tinged government than it did under some previous, ardently secular administrations more in tune with the often decidedly un-Islamic ways of many Turkish businesspeople.

By nearly every measure, Turkey’s economy is now much stronger than it was when the Justice and Development Party, or AK Party, won elections in 2002. Annual growth since then has averaged around 6.5%, up from an annual average of roughly 2.5% over the previous six-year period.

Turkey still faces various headwinds. Economic momentum has been slowed by the global credit crunch, and the country is running a sizable current-account deficit. A spasm of political uncertainty this year over headscarves didn’t help matters. The AK Party set off the turbulence with an effort to let female college students wear headscarves on campus — a potent symbol of conservative Islam, and a touchstone issue in Turkey, which is constitutionally secular. Opponents used the headscarf flap to try (unsuccessfully) to outlaw the AK Party, saying it harbors a hidden agenda to turn Turkey into an Islamic state resembling Iran.

Despite hiccups like these, the economy shows scant sign of slipping back into its earlier doldrums. “Numbers don’t lie,” says Antalya’s mayor, Menderes Turel, an AK Party member. He boasts of new investment, new sewage pipes and a new airport terminal, but also hails a phenomenon not generally esteemed in Muslim lands: Alcohol sales — turbocharged by tourists, restaurants and a raucous club scene — are up.

Nearly all Turks are Muslim. But Islam and its symbols have been banished from spheres of state here since 1923, when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk founded the modern Turkish republic on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire. Ataturk regarded religion as an obstacle to his vision for Turkey as a modern, Western power.

The AK Party’s economic record highlights an intriguing evolution in relations between political Islam and capitalism. Islamists in the Arab world tend to look askance at the secular ways of their Turkish brethren, but Turkey’s experiment with modern-minded Islam is closely watched in big parts of the Muslim world.

Islam itself has nothing against business. The Islamic prophet Muhammad started out as a merchant, and his first wife was a successful businesswoman. Asked to fix prices in the bazaar by followers who wanted to buy goods more cheaply, Muhammad is said to have refused: “Only Allah governs the market.”

Over the past century, however, Islam has often served as a vehicle for anticapitalist revolt. Egypt’s Sayyid Qutb, an influential Islamist thinker, crystallized this trend with a 1951 book, “The Battle Between Islam and Capitalism.” Across much of the Muslim world, Islamists denounced the market, not out of deeply held economic convictions, but mostly in response to corrupt crony capitalism in countries such as Egypt, Algeria and Indonesia before the fall of Suharto in 1998.

Turkey’s AK Party, however, has gone in the opposite direction. It insists it has no desire to challenge Turkey’s secular order. Instead, it sees the solution to many of Turkey’s ills in the free-market — both to open up and vivify an economy long dominated by a state-coddled elite and also to modernize a political system forged in the 1930s and still tinged with authoritarianism.

“We favor more competition, productivity and innovation,” says Mehmet Simsek, Turkey’s minister of state for economic affairs. “Those with 1930s mind-sets — statist and inward-looking — cannot understand this.”

An observant Muslim married to an American from Wisconsin, Mr. Simsek embodies the AK Party’s efforts to bridge different but, it believes, compatible worlds. Mr. Simsek used to work as an economist for Merrill Lynch in London and before that at the U.S. Embassy in Ankara. Faith, says the minister, is a personal affair, not a matter of state.

The success of the AK Party’s economic policy, he says, is easily measured: “People are making money.” Private-car sales, he notes, have jumped during his party’s tenure from 90,000 a year to around 400,000. Per-capita gross domestic product has soared from $3,300 in 2002 to more than $10,000.

Turkey’s rebound from financial disaster in 2001 — when the currency went into free fall and the economy contracted by 6% — “has surpassed expectations,” the International Monetary Fund said in its most recent detailed review of Turkey’s economy, prepared last year before the headscarf ruckus. It credited “sound macroeconomic policies, a conducive global environment and political stability.”

Since the AK Party took over at the end of 2002, exports have more than tripled, foreign investment has jumped from under $1 billion a year to more than $20 billion, and the number of tourists has more than doubled. Inflation, out of control for three decades, remains a problem but has fallen sharply to around 10%. Growth in GDP this year is expected to be around 4.5%, way down from over 9% in 2004, but still robust.

Guided by the IMF, the AK Party has imposed fiscal discipline that eluded its predecessors, accelerated privatization and trimmed bureaucracy. Recently abolished, for example, was a requirement that any company with 50 or more employees must hire an ex-convict and a terrorism victim, among various others.

The AK Party has also reactivated a long-stalled drive to join the European Union, pushing through regulatory and other changes designed to bring Turkey more into line with European norms.

Unconventional Alignments

The AK Party’s mix of free-market zeal and emphasis on conservative, faith-rooted personal values has scrambled conventional alignments. In many countries, politicians who back free-market economics are supported most enthusiastically by the wealthy. Poorer folk tend to be more skeptical.

In Turkey, it has been the other way round. The AK Party’s biggest traditional base of support is among poorer and generally more devout citizens. Many wealthy businesspeople, on the other hand, started out viewing the party with deep suspicion — and still do on issues such as headscarves.

Foreign investors were also dubious. The AK Party’s Islamic background raised some eyebrows, but one key worry was that the victors might turn their back on an agreement with the IMF negotiated by the previous government. Backtracking would likely stoke inflation and derail economic recovery.

Instead of rejecting the IMF package, the new government embraced it and carried out a long list of IMF-endorsed reforms. “In the market, there was a lot of skepticism,” Mr. Simsek said recently in his office in Ankara, the capital. Over his desk hangs a portrait of Ataturk, the father of modern Turkey.

When the IMF program reached its scheduled end earlier this summer, Lorenzo Giorgianni, the IMF’s Turkey mission chief, said it had contributed to “the most rapid period of economic growth in the recent history of the Republic.”

Meantime, an influential organization of Turkish industrialists, known as TUSIAD, has also shed much of its early skepticism, at least about Turkey’s economic direction. Haluk Tukel, its current secretary general, hails AK Party economic policy over the past six years as “perfect.” But, he adds, many TUSIAD members still worry that the AK Party has a hidden Islamic agenda.

Such worries grew sharply this year when the government moved to lift a ban on pious female students covering their hair in class. AK Party has also talked about making adultery a criminal offense.

The opposition, flummoxed by AK Party’s economic and electoral successes, has seized on issues like these to try to win back support. Onur Oymen, vice president of the staunchly secular CHP party, dismisses Mr. Simsek and other Westernized officials as window dressing. AK Party’s ultimate goal, he believes, is an Islamic theocracy.

“You cannot have a short version of the Quran,” he says. “They present themselves as representing modern life. It is just the opposite.”

Nonsense, says Cemil Ipekci, an openly gay Turkish fashion designer who wears gold earrings and assortments of flamboyant necklaces and bracelets. “They are not radical Islamists. They are conservative, yes, but not fanatics. Look at me, they socialize with me.” He says he and his boyfriend attend state dinners and parties organized by AK Party ministers. The government-owned airline, Turkish Airlines, hired him to re-design its décor.

Levent Kizil, a more mainstream business leader, is also a fan. “They turned our economy round,” says the Istanbul-based owner of a big soft-drinks company. He doesn’t want Islam interfering with his lifestyle but sees scant sign yet of this happening. “I enjoy my secular lifestyle. I like to drink alcohol and gamble and none of the women in my family wear headscarves,” he says, chomping on a Cuban cigar at an Italian seafood restaurant.

When AK Party took office, Mr. Kizil’s company exported just $3 million of soft drinks. The figure is now $12 million. Confident that his domestic and foreign markets will keep growing, Mr. Kizil has invested €25 million, or about $40 million, to renovate two plants.

Big Problems

Turkey’s economy still has big problems. One of the biggest is mushrooming current-account deficit, which stood at around $43 billion for the 12 months leading to May. The current account is the broadest measure of a nation’s trade balance — and deficits raise worrisome questions about how the country will finance the gap.

Mr. Simsek blames the deficit largely on energy costs. Others point to Turkey’s imports of machinery and other items needed to modernize the economy, and point out that Turkey’s current account has been positive only in times of economic malaise.

Nevertheless, the deficit has spooked the market. There are concerns that a global credit squeeze could hurt Turkey’s ability to borrow the funds it needs. Standard & Poor’s Corp., the credit-rating agency, in April revised its outlook for Turkey from “stable” to “negative.” It last week changed this back to “stable” after Turkey’s highest court struck down a request from the chief prosecutor that the ruling AK Party be disbanded for “antisecular” activities related largely to the headscarf spat.

Abrupt Swings

Turkey has a long history of abrupt swings in economic fortune. An earlier attempt to open up to the world economy — and mimic the success of Asia’s so-called “tiger economies” — got off to a promising start in the 1980s. But that export-driven effort petered out and was followed by an era of chronic inflation and budgetary indiscipline. A big constraint on economic performance has been political instability, caused in part by a Kurdish minority seeking greater autonomy, as well as the continuing debate over the very nature of the Turkish state.

Many investors are now waiting to see whether Turkey can reach a new agreement with the IMF. It doesn’t need money from the fund, says Mr. Simsek, and has paid back more than half of the $23.5 billion it owed in 2002. But a new accord would help calm market jitters. Mr. Simsek, who is handling negotiations, said technical discussions would be completed in a “month or so.”

On the Mediterranean coast, meanwhile, Antalya is in the middle of its busiest tourist season ever. It expects over nine million visitors this year, up from 7.3 million last year and roughly half that in 2002. It’s biggest worry is not Islam, but forest fires that raged this week through coastal regions.

Mr. Barut, the hotelier, says Turkey might get more conservative but sees no risk of it turning into anything like Iran. That, he says, would kill the tourism industry.

Agriculture, another local mainstay, is also growing. Antalya now exports around 350,000 tons of tomatoes a year, nearly double the amount in 2002. Exports of flowers to Europe and Russia have soared, too.

A beneficiary of this is Ali Riza Akinci, who sells seeds for tomatoes, flowers and hotel lawns. He gets some of these from Israel, a supplier that is shunned in the rest of the Muslim world — but not here. Business, says Mr. Akinci, should trump politics.

Not everyone is upbeat. The head of the Antalya’s chamber of commerce, Kemal Ozgen, thinks the state is now too hands-off. He wants it to do more to protect small shop owners, who are losing business to newly opened shopping malls. Antalya, he says, had just one mall when the AK Party took power. It now has 28. Foreign retailers have fueled much of this expansion. Too much competition, says Mr. Ozgen, is unhealthy.

All the same, Mr. Ozgen is happy with the benefits that have accrued to his own business, a window-making factory. Thanks to a building blitz, he’s more than tripled output since the AK Party came to power.

Antalya’s growing integration in the world economy makes it highly vulnerable to any serious downturn on a global level. For example, a recession in Germany, now Antalya’s biggest tourist source, would hit local businesses hard.

Antalya’s AK Party mayor, Mr. Turel, can’t do much about that. But he does try to nip less serious problems in the bud — such as reports in the Russian media of a crackdown on booze. Mr. Turel swiftly set the record straight: Alcohol, he announced at a tourism conference, would never be restricted in Antalya on his watch. More than two million Russians are expected to visit the resort this year.

Pragmatism, says the mayor, is the AK Party’s guiding creed. “We allow praying, we allow bikinis, we allow discos,” the mayor says. “We allow everything.”

Write to Andrew Higgins at andrew.higgins@wsj.com and Farnaz Fassihi at farnaz.fassihi@wsj.com

Source: The Wall Street Journal, August 6, 2008

AC Grayling
guardian.co.uk,
Tuesday July 29 2008

From Turkey to Germany to the States, religious people are intent on taking us back to the middle ages

I enjoyed the subtlety of the Guardian’s page 13 layout yesterday. It was the first page of the international section, and it contained two stories, the first about legal moves in Turkey’s constitutional court to disband the country’s ruling AKP party on the grounds that it is threatening Turkey’s secularist constitution, the second about complaints by Polish holidaymakers who find the nudity on German “free body culture” beaches disgusting.

To the alert eye the connection is direct. Admirers of the Catholic culture of Poland will assuredly be delighted by its success in making the unclothed human frame an object of disgust. Admirers of Islamic culture will be delighted to find that Turkish Islamists are encouraging more women to hide that automatic trigger of unbridled male lust, the tresses on the female head.

These are tips of icebergs. In fact the influence of religious attitudes in distorting and limiting aspects of human life, even to the extent of perverting, imprisoning and poisoning them at the extremes, is too well known to require rehearsal. It was against the domination of life by religion that Mustapha Kemal Atatürk acted, founding a secular republic which sought to move religion from “the realm of the state to the realm of belief” – which is how Turkey’s current deputy prosecutor, Omer Faruk Eminagaoglu, puts it in explaining the basis of the case against the AKP, which has – even by the admission of some of its own MPs – been conducting a non-too-subtle yet hypocritically disavowed campaign of re-Islamicisation.

The worshippers of Brian’s sandal everywhere are tireless and persistent in their efforts to recapture the world for dogma. In America the creationists and so-called “intelligent design” votaries expend vast sums and energy on trying to drag us back into medieval times. Islamists have never left them – except of course in freely using today’s technology to further their aims. Cherry-pickers all, the Brian-sandalistas want it all: they want the rest of us to think and act as they prescribe, and to make us do it by the means that infidel thinking has produced: for example, religious freakery is all over the internet like a rash.

If the Brian-sandalistas cannot succeed by direct assault, they will do it by constant nibbling and encroachments: prayers in American publicly-funded schools, headscarves in Turkish publicly-funded universities, a little bit of anti-evolutionary biology there, a little alcohol ban there – and if that doesn’t work, they try more robust means. So it goes: creep creep, whisper, soothe, murmur a prayer with the kids in assembly, ecumenicalise, interfaith-schmooze, infiltrate, subvert, complain, campaign, scream, threaten, explode.

The asymmetry is stark. Secularists say, “believe whatever nonsense you want, but keep it to yourself and act responsibly”. The Brian-sandalistas say, “believe what we want you to believe and act as we say”. The psychopaths among them say, “believe what we want you to believe and act as we say or we will kill you”. Meanwhile the residue of attitudes and practices once foisted on everyone by the zealous still dog and bedevil us, as witness the poor benighted Catholic Poles suffering at the sight of what – you have to larf – they presumably believe God created.

There is nothing trivial about the problem in Turkey; and the problem in Turkey is the problem for the world at large. It is about boundaries, about the place of religious belief in the public domain, its effects on individual lives, and its effect on public policy. The history of “the west” is in essence a history of secularisation, and most even of those who decry what they see as its imperfections would not willingly be without the huge advances it has wrought in scientific, social and political respects. Think: if the clocks could be turned back as the Brians want, the English would be ruled by two people: The Queen and Rowan Williams.

You might be tempted to think that would be an improvement on Gordon Brown and Ed Balls, and preferable to Cameron and his friends from his house at Eton. But what if, say, Hizb ut-Tahrir got its way – it wants the Caliphate back, and by the logic of its outlook, a worldwide one. The ambition of the faiths – once they have finished warring with us and each other – is, remember, infinite by definition: and even one mile in the direction of any of their various paradises-on-earth would be a hell for all but those running the journey.

ANKARA, Turkey — The Ataturk Thought Association, zealous guardian of the secular creed that guides Turkey, never thought it would come to this.

Its chairman, a retired four-star general, is in jail. Its offices — plastered with portraits of modern Turkey’s founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk — have been raided by police. Several of its computer hard drives have been seized by investigators. They’re hunting for evidence of plots by hard-line secularists to topple Turkey’s mildly Islamic government.

The assault, declares Suay Karaman, a land surveyer now filling in for the Thought Association’s imprisoned chairman, shows that “there is no such thing as moderate Islam.” Raids in Ankara and Istanbul came in the weeks before the country’s Constitutional Court on Monday began considering the secularists’ own offensive: a suit to outlaw the governing party for violating secular mandates Ataturk enshrined in 1923. (Please see related article on Page A10.)

A final battle looms to decide whether Turkey remains a secular republic faithful to Ataturk, says Mr. Karaman, or instead “becomes like Saudi Arabia.”

Warnings of the demise of Ataturk’s legacy have been around almost since he died 70 years ago. A relentless modernizer, hearty drinker and fan of the fox trot, the founder of the Turkish Republic — his name means “father of the Turks” — had issues with Islam. He shut down Islamic schools, banned Islamic garb and opened a German brewery in his new capital, Ankara. His was hardly the path of least resistance in a land that is 99% Muslim, once ruled Mecca and was for centuries home to the Caliph, Islam’s supreme leader. Yet Ataturk’s way prevailed for decades.

Now, says Mr. Karaman, it faces grave peril. In February, Turkey’s elected government — led by observant Muslims whose wives mostly wear headscarves — moved to let pious female students cover their hair on university campuses, something that had been banned for years as an affront to secular traditions.

The Constitutional Court quickly put a stop to that, and the chief prosecutor, an ardent secularist, filed suit in March, asserting that the governing party poses a “clear and present” danger and must be stopped before it imposes Islamic law. Outlawing the Justice and Development, or AK, Party could rock its leaders — and the country — politically, though they likely could reorganize under another banner without giving up power. Tensions were stoked late Sunday, on the eve of the court taking up the case, by two bombs in Istanbul that killed 17 people. There was no immediate claim of responsibility.

The headscarf effort, says Mr. Karaman, along with the arrest of his boss and scores of others, has exposed what he calls the governing party’s hidden agenda — a plan to turn Turkey into an Islamic theocracy. Chanting “Turkey will not be Iran,” activists in the Ataturk Thought Association held a noisy protest on July 19 in Istanbul, waving portraits of their jailed chairman, Sener Eruygur, and of Ataturk. A few days later, more than two dozen people were arrested as part of a sprawling search for antigovernment plotters. Mr. Eruygur hasn’t been charged; his lawyer has said he is innocent of wrongdoing.

Many, including foreign diplomats, scoff at the notion that Turkey now is governed by a cabal of closet fundamentalists. The AK Party generally is friendly to the West — friendlier than many secular activists, in fact. Party officials deny harboring anti-Ataturk tendencies.

One thing is clear: Ataturk worship, the world’s most enduring personality cult, still holds this increasingly prosperous nation of more than 70 million people in its thrall. Ataturk shows scant sign of going the way of his contemporaries. Vladimir Lenin lies in Red Square but is barely mentioned in Russia now, except as a butt of jokes. Even Mao Zedong, embalmed in Tiananmen Square, has slipped from his pedestal: The Chinese Communist Party’s official view of him is 70% good, 30% bad.

Untouchable Ataturk

Ataturk, revered for defeating invading British, French and Greek forces, is untouchable. His mausoleum in Ankara drew more than 12 million visitors last year, up by four million from 2006. The constitution bans all deviation from the “reforms and principles” of “the immortal leader and the unrivalled hero.” It is illegal in Turkey to publicly curse him. Virtually nobody, including members of the AK Party, disses him, at least not in public. One young, headscarf-wearing woman recently said on TV, “I do not like him.” She is being investigated by prosecutors.

Politicians invoke Ataturk’s name to justify starkly different agendas. Even Ataturk’s long-deceased wife, whom he divorced, has been dragged into furor: Did she or didn’t she observe Islamic custom and cover her head? An AK Party legislator has contended that she did. That question is among the issues to be mulled by the Constitutional Court.

Just as Muslim activists mine the Quran for verses to boost their cause, Turkey’s hard-line secularists and their foes delve into Ataturk’s voluminous writings and speeches — Turkey’s secular scripture. The sheer volume of Ataturk’s words gives plenty of scope for argument: a single speech he gave in 1927 lasted 36 hours, spread over six days.

For Mr. Karaman of the Ataturk Thought Association, a bastion of Turkey’s secular establishment, the key text is one of Ataturk’s shorter works, a 230-word address to Turkish youth. It warns against “malevolent people at home and abroad,” and urges ceaseless struggle against any “traitors” who worm themselves into power. That dark fear, says Mr. Karaman, has taken shape in the form of the AK Party. Among signs of this, he says, are the woes of his group.

The governing party’s own claim of allegiance to Ataturk only demonstrates its deviousness, says Mr. Karaman. When Recep Tayyip Erdogan, now Turkey’s prime minister, launched the AK Party in 2001, he did so in a hall bedecked with a giant portrait of Ataturk. The event began with a minute’s silence in Ataturk’s memory. “All fake,” huffs Mr. Karaman.

Suat Kiniklioglu, an AK Party legislator, says he has “no problems at all” with “Ataturk’s principles” but the key issue is “how we interpret them.” Ataturk’s “true genius,” he says, was his “ability to adapt to change.” Clinging to details from the 1920s, he says, “will not work.”

Secularism a la Ataturk is not a simple formula. Unlike America’s founding fathers, who separated church and state, Ataturk did not so much split Islam from the state as subordinate it to the state. He abolished the post of Caliph and placed all mosques and Muslim clerics under a government department. At the same time, he purged religion from other state agencies.

Ataturk, a very stylish dresser himself, clearly didn’t like traditional Islamic garb, viewing it as an emblem of backwardness. His best-known comments on the dress question came in 1925 when he declared “international” — that is, Western — dress as “very important and appropriate for our nation. We shall wear it.”

Legislation he introduced, known as the Hat Law, did not explicitly prohibit veils or headscarves and focused instead on banning fezzes and turbans for men. The ban on headscarves in colleges dates not from Ataturk, say its opponents, but from a 1980 coup by the military, which also tried, in vain, to crack down on miniskirts. Mr. Karaman says the spirit, if not the letter of the 1925 law, requires modern dress for both sexes.

A Furious Row

During a discussion of the 2006 budget by legislators, a furious row erupted over Islam, Ataturk and headwear, when AK Party legislator Musa Uzunkaya asserted that Ataturk’s wife, Latife Hanim, attended meetings at the presidential mansion in the 1920s with her hair covered. Was she a “reactionary?” he asked. The question enraged ardent secularists, who saw it as defiling Ataturk’s memory.

Ipek Calislar, the author of a biography of Turkey’s first first lady, says she sometimes hid her hair only so conservatives could not push Ataturk “into a corner because of her dress.” It wasn’t an endorsement of Islamic norms, says Ms. Calislar: “People are arguing about this in a very stupid way.”

Next to his desk, Mr. Karaman keeps a big photograph of Ataturk in military uniform. Ataturk, he predicts, will ultimately triumph. His hero, he says, would be in no doubt about how to confront any assaults on Turkish secularism were he still alive today: “He would put his army boots back on and start fighting.”

Write to Andrew Higgins at andrew.higgins@wsj.com²