Tag: Muslim Brotherhood

  • Turkey continues to remake Muslim democracy, says author

    Turkey continues to remake Muslim democracy, says author

    David Lepeska


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    Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks
    Jenny White
    Princeton University Press

    Related

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    • Turkey

    One evening in September 2011, thousands of Egyptians heralded the arrival of Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan at Cairo airport with cheering and shouts of “Allahu Akbar!” Many of the well-wishers were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, the rising Islamist organisation that has in recent years cited Erdogan and Turkey as an inspiration. On his first post-Arab Spring visit to the region, observers expected the tough-talking leader of the world’s most successful Islamist party to offer support and guidance.

    But in his speech that night, Erdogan explained that Turkey was a secular, rather than an Islamic, democracy, and advised Egyptians to build a state that respects all religions. Days later, in Tunisia – where the leading political party, Ennahda, has also acknowledged the influence of Erdogan’s party – he explained his remarks. “A person is not secular; the state is secular,” Erdogan said in Tunis. “A Muslim can govern a secular state in a successful way.”

    Though likely to disappoint ascendant Arab Islamists, this idea of a personal Muslimhood, free from state oversight, is at the centre of Turkish life today. It’s also the focus of Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks, a deeply insightful book by Jenny White, a professor of social anthropology at Boston University. As a number of nationalist groups battle for Turkey’s soul, White sees the “new Turks” strutting on the world stage, remaking Muslim democracy and finding great pride in their Ottoman past and their ability to consume God and goods as they choose.

    ***

    With the founding of modern Turkey in 1923, Mustafa Kemal, later given the name Ataturk, or father of the Turks, began to remake Turkey as a westernised republic in which an authoritarian government oversaw religion. Ataturk also established the Turkish national identity, centred on Muslimhood, racial purity, and Turkish language and culture.

    The Turkish military soon emerged as the guarantor of secularism, repeatedly stepping forward to push out leaders it thought had compromised Kemalist ideas. To this day, says White, the Turkish army purges its officer corps of anyone who refuses to drink or whose wife wears a headscarf.

    To outsiders, the 2002 rise of Turkey’s Islamists seemed at the time a startling event. But White’s hindsight outlines a natural progression, linked to globalisation and the broader, regional resurgence of Islam. Starting in the 1970s, the Turkish military allowed greater Islamic freedom, with open discussions in the press and in public about Islamic intellectuals like Maulana Mawdudi and Sayyid Qutb.

    The country’s first Islamist political movement appeared in 1975, when a group led by Necmettin Erbakan released its National Vision, a pro-business platform linking Islam to nationalism. In the 1980s, the success of thousands of pious businessmen from the Turkish heartland, dubbed the Anatolian Tigers, gave rise to a more conservative elite and to influential networks like the followers of religious educator Fethullah Gulen.

    Erbakan’s Welfare Party stood against westernisation and secularism and preferred alliances with other Muslim countries to Nato, the European Union (EU) and Israel. Yet it was also seen as forward-looking, progressive and pro-Turkey, and had support in small towns and major cities, among rural women, urban professionals and the Anatolian Tigers. The party gained ground, and in 1994 mayoral elections, its candidate, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, became mayor of Istanbul.

    By the time Erbakan became prime minister two years later, 40 per cent of the party’s supporters were secularists, and Welfare had emerged as Turkey’s modern political party. To the military, of course, that meant Erbakan had to be pushed from office and the party shut down. Its successor, the Virtue Party, rose quickly, until it too was banned in 2001. But that same year, Erdogan founded the Justice and Development Party (AKP), adding an embrace of globalisation to Erbakan’s vision and downplaying the Islamist elements. The party won the 2002 elections and has dominated Turkish politics ever since.

    ***

    On the surface, Turkey’s AKP decade has been one of social stability, economic growth and hope for the future. But White reveals how the public discourse has fractured. As Ataturk’s vision has collapsed, Turks have splintered into a million shifting shades of nationalism: Kemalist, Islamist, rightist, ultranationalist, neonationalist, liberal and more.

    Despite their disagreements, all these groups place great value on the country’s Ottoman past. Today, the year that most evokes Turkish pride is not 1923, but 1453, when Constantinople fell to the army of Sultan Mehmet II. That victory is now celebrated in malls and history museums, bestsellers and popular soap operas.

    Ottoman glories also undergird Turkey’s new quasi-imperialist foreign policy. Ahmet Davutoglu, Turkey’s bold foreign minister, often speaks of reintegrating the greater Middle East to “bring back the golden era”.

    “Since 2002, when the AKP won its first major election,” writes White, “an Islamist vision of political life has given way to a Muslim nationalist vision that is focused less on a shared global umma and more on a structured relationship with the Muslim world in which Turkey takes a leading role, as it had in Ottoman times.”

    We see this in Turkey’s toughness with Israel and the creation of a visa-free zone with Syria, Jordan and Lebanon. Yet just as Turks treasure their Ottoman heritage, they also see themselves, and their religion, as distinctly un-Arab. “One thing all nationalists agree on,” writes White, “is that Turkish Islam differs from Islam tainted by Arab influence.” But what does that mean? How can Islam be uninfluenced by the people who midwifed its birth? Speaking to White, Omer Ozsoy, a reformist theologian at Ankara University, wonders: “While reading the Quran, to what extent am I facing an Arab reality and to what extent the demands of Allah? We have to distinguish between these.” Such comments might be blasphemous in many Sunni Arab-dominated countries, but Turkish Islam has been steeped in centuries of moderate, Sufi ideology.

    Turkey’s leaders stress a modern, personalised Islam, as suggested by Erdogan’s remarks in Tunis. The new Turk can wear Gucci and still go proudly and with purpose to Friday prayers. With more than half the country’s population under 30, this marks a profound shift. “The choice to be suurlu, a ‘consciously believing Muslim’, as opposed to blindly following tradition, has become highly valued as a sign of Muslim modernity,” White writes.

    The word “tradition” has become shorthand for Wahhabism, Salafism, and other deeply conservative Sunni belief systems that have gained a foothold across the broader region. “This government is rather different than the Muslim Brotherhood,” Ceylan Ozbudak, the executive director of the talk show Building Bridges, said during a recent episode. She and her co-hosts explained that they didn’t like the word “Islamist”. “We have a Muslim government,” Ozbudak explains, “but they apply the rules of Islam, not the rules of tradition.”

    Indeed, Erdogan has said he views Sharia not as a strict legal code but as “a metaphor for a just society”. The country has no influential, deeply rooted religious establishment, no body akin to Egypt’s millennium-old Al Azhar – which is mentioned in that country’s new constitution – or Saudi Arabia’s powerful ulema. This allows AKP leaders to determine, largely free of outside influence, how to build a 21st-century Muslim democracy, and forge a new national identity.

    ***

    White uses her fluent Turkish and more than 30 years of extended stays in the country to flesh out this bold and unpredictable social and political experiment. Of her two previous non-fiction works on Turkey (White has also written three Ottoman-era crime novels), the second, Islamist Mobilization in Turkey, won the 2003 Douglass Prize for best book of European anthropology. White is indeed an anthropologist, rather than a journalist or political analyst, and her book goes on to detail the uncertain place of women in 21st-century Turkey and the “contradictory nature of Turkish social and political life as it accommodates individual choice while validating primacy of family and community in determining ethics and norms.”

    But academic jargon of that sort is rare; the writing is generally clear and straightforward, and the book is chock-full of rich titbits from Turkish society. White highlights changing fashions among Turkey’s elite in the evolution of the word for squatters – from gecekondu (literally, “placed there at night”) in the 1970s, to varos, a Hungarian term referring to an area beyond the city walls, today – and the sudden disfavour of moustaches. Once a proud, defining facial feature for nearly every Turkish man, they now signify the meaner classes (“men from the varos”).

    White has a clear affection for Turkey, which may serve to mute her criticism. Though she does briefly discuss the vast Ergenekon trial, in which a shadowy group of 200-odd military, police, journalists and activists have been accused of plotting to overthrow the government, she neglects to discuss the government’s oppression of journalists until the book’s final pages. And she mentions Ahmet Sik, a journalist who has spent the past year in prison awaiting a verdict on questionable, Ergenekon-related charges, only in her endnotes.

    Yet crackdowns on the press have been skyrocketing. No country jailed more journalists than Turkey in 2011, including China and Iran, and no country is currently holding more reporters in prison. In recent months, the European Union and the London-based writers organisation PEN International have criticised the Erdogan government for using antiterrorism laws to justify arrests and create a climate of fear.

    A greater oversight may be the short shrift given to Turkey’s long-suffering Kurds. Kurdish militants have since the late 1970s fought the Turkish government for their own state. But the vast majority of Kurdish Turks, estimated at 13 million, or about 16 per cent of the country’s population, seek only to maintain their own language and traditions. The willingness of the Erdogan government to accept and integrate them is key to the country’s future.

    White does better detailing how the state and society marginalise non-Muslims. She visits Ishak Alaton, an 82-year-old Jewish Turk and a well-known entrepreneur, who says he “has never been given the feeling by this nation that I am part of it”. The Turks even have a word for such people: vatandas, non-Muslim minorities, who can be citizens but not true Turks. She also points out how the authorities, the military and the media regularly voice concerns about the threat of Christian missionaries, engendering widespread fear and occasional, vicious attacks on priests.

    ***

    Filled with insight, Muslim Nationalism and the New Turks is sure to become a leading text for those looking to read the Turkish tea leaves – a readership on the rise of late. In her conclusion, White considers the Turkish model, acknowledging similarities between Turkey and newly free Arab countries. Ultimately, the differences win out.

    Turkey was never conquered and colonised, and is thus able to view western ideas with interest, rather than suspicion. It has been a democracy, or has at least resembled one, for 90 years – time enough to strengthen its institutions and solidify its political system. Finally, decades of economic growth have created a large, globalised middle class able to balance Islam with modern living.

    Speaking at a political conference in 1998, Erdogan quoted from an Islamic poem: “Democracy is just the train we board to reach our destination. The mosques are our barracks, the minarets our bayonets.” How did he go from there to the secular Muslim statesman of today? Perhaps it was the five-year political ban that came as a result. Perhaps his time in office, bumping up against the possible, altered his perspective. Perhaps he hasn’t changed at all, and we’ll find with his government’s release of an updated constitution later this year that he has merely been biding his time.

    Whatever the case, Islamist groups like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood are unlikely to emulate Turkey’s Muslimhood model anytime soon, though the AKP vision might suit the young activists of Tahrir Square. Yet, if Turkey’s history is any indication, their time in power is decades of democratic and economic development away.

    David Lepeska is a freelance writer who contributes to The New York Times, Atlantic Cities and Monocle, and previously served as The National’s Qatar correspondent. He lives in Chicago.

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  • Turkey: Friend or Foe? | The Jewish Week

    Turkey: Friend or Foe? | The Jewish Week

    Turkey: Friend or Foe?

    Submitted by Douglas Bloomfield on Fri, 12/16/2011 – 11:12

    Turkey poses the greatest challenge to American interests in the Middle East today as it seeks to fill the power vacuum left by the fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt and the expected demise of Bashar Assad’s regime in Syria. Ankara is moving steadily to exploit the void in regional leadership and spreading its brand of radical Islam with the help of the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies, said Dan Schueftan, director of the University of Haifa’s National Security Studies Center.

    The United States underestimates the growing radicalism in Turkish politics and society and the danger that poses, he said. It should take more seriously the threat of a non-Arab Muslim state that wants to replace the weakened and distracted pro-Western Egypt and anti-Western radical Syria.

    Prime Minister Recip Tayyip Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party (AKP) is turning Turkey away from the secular, democratic republic established by Kamal Ataturk in 1923 to an Islamist-dominated government.

    He wants to become the principle leader in the region and replace the other secular regimes with ones resembling his own.

    Many Arabs are likely to view Erdogan’s push for regional leadership with suspicion in light of the centuries-long Ottoman rule, plus the fact he is not an Arab. Even so, however, the Turkish prime minister remains a hero on the Arab street for another reason: his intense hostility toward Israel.

    At times his bitter attacks on the Jewish state seem to rival those of his good friend, Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Part of this may stem from a strong personal antipathy toward Israel, but more importantly it is part of a calculated campaign to position Turkey, a democratic state governed by Islamists, as a model for a new Middle East.

    “Turkey threatens and tries to bully Israel into a position where Turkey will look good to radical Arabs who are impressed by such behavior,” said Schueftan.

    Turkey calls itself a strong supporter of Palestinian statehood and insists it wants to help broker peace with Israel, but its actions say just the opposite.

    Erdogan has virtually broken relations with Israel and aligned Turkey with the Islamist Hamas, which rejects peace with Israel and wants to replace it with an Islamist republic, while he disdains the nationalist Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority.

    Under Erdogan, the AKP has urged Western countries to “recognize Hamas as the legitimate government of the Palestinian people” and dismissed Abbas as the head of an “illegitimate government,” according to Soner Cagaptay of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP).

    Israel, the United States and most Western countries have classified Hamas as a terrorist organization.

    Erdogan broke recently with Syria over its response to the uprisings there and has become a mentor to the Syrian National Council (SNC) opposition movement, providing its leaders with sanctuary, housing and security. He also has had a hand in selection of SNC members, with Islamists and anti-American figures disproportionately over-represented.

    “If Assad falls, the Muslim Brotherhood would take over, and they would be completely subservient to Turkey for strategic and political reasons,” Schueftan said.

    Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) and the even more extreme Salafis did better than expected in recent parliamentary elections, and are expected to play a critical role in drafting a new Egyptian constitution.

    “An axis of Muslim brothers in Turkey, Syria, Gaza and Egypt is very dangerous,” Schueftan said.

    He warned of the possibility that the empowered Brotherhood allies in those states would link with their brethren and radical Palestinians in Jordan to undermine King Abdullah and change the nature of his pro-Western regime.

    “If Jordan crumbles as a buffer state the whole Middle East will change radically,” he said.

    The Turkish army has been the guardian of secularism and democracy, and it has kept the government western oriented, but Erdogan is changing that by replacing the country’s top military commanders, many with close relations with Washington and Jerusalem, with his loyalists, neutralizing the military as a significant domestic political player. Erdogan also replaced Turkey’s pro-Western intelligence chief with someone very close to the Iranians.

    Americans fail to realize the depth of radical feelings in this Turkish government toward the West, said Schueftan. The danger Turkey represents to American interests and its allies is that it appeals to the most radical sentiments in the region. That is reflected in its approach to Hamas and Israel’s attempts to block missiles from entering Gaza.

    Turkey’s increasingly anti-Western stance raises questions of the reliability of its continued political and military cooperation with NATO and the West.

    Schueftan said the United States is deluding itself if it thinks Turkey is the right combination of moderation and Islam it would like to see throughout the Muslim world.

    “If you are willing to work with Hamas and your ally in the region is a terror organization, and your enemy is Israel, it says a lot about who you are,” Schueftan said. “America should ask itself, ‘When someone is the very bitter enemy of your good friend, is that the basis for a strategic alliance?’” Washington must prepare for Turkey becoming increasingly unfriendly and ultimately hostile to the United States and not entertain any expectations that it can look to Ankara for help in maintaining regional stability, Schueftan said.

    via Turkey: Friend or Foe? | The Jewish Week.

  • Turkey sets terms for backing Free Syrian Army: Bow to Muslim Brotherhood group

    Turkey sets terms for backing Free Syrian Army: Bow to Muslim Brotherhood group

    Special to WorldTribune.com

    WASHINGTON — Turkey, aligned to the Muslim Brotherhood, has cracked

    down on the rebel army in Syria.

    Opposition sources said the government of Prime Minister Recep Erdogan

    has frozen Free Syrian Army bank accounts in an effort to pressure

    the rebels to recognize the authority of the Brotherhood-aligned Syrian

    National Council.

    Turkish Prime Minister Recep Erdogan. /Adem Altan/AFP/Getty Images

    “The popularity of the Free Syrian Army inside Syria is a sore issue with Erdogan and the MB,” the Reform Party of Syria said. “From a strategic point of view, control of the Free Syrian Army by the MB is an essential component for which it must not fail.”

    The Washington-based opposition movement asserted that Ankara imposed sanctions on FSA on Nov. 30 after the secular rebel army refused to take orders from SNC. FSA, based in Turkey, was said to be entirely dependent on Ankara for safe haven of its fighters as well as training and logistics.

    The sources said FSA attacks on Syrian military installations and

    convoys increased the credibility of the rebel force, particularly with NATO. They said Britain and France were persuaded to cooperate with FSA, which consists of thousands of deserters from the Syrian Army.

    For its part, SNC has been strongly supported by Arab opponents of

    Assad. They were said to include Qatar and Saudi Arabia, deemed primary

    financiers of the revolt in Syria.

    “Tensions are also rising over the little financial aid the FSA is

    getting from Saudi Arabia and Qatar whose aim is to control the organization

    to serve the MB,” RPS, which supports the secular opposition, said.

    In late November, Turkey hosted the first meeting of the leadership of

    FSA and SNC. Following the session in the southwestern town of Hatay, SNC

    said FSA agreed to end all but defensive operations in Syria.

    RPS president Farid Ghadry said SNC contains elements of the Palestinian

    insurgency group Hamas. Ghadry cited Ahmed Ramadan, identified as a leading

    operative and, until May, news director of the Hamas television

    station in Beirut.

    “Ahmed Ramadan today is one of the behind-the-scene operatives of the

    SNC providing capital, logistics and advice,” RPS said. “That’s a known and

    public fact to many Syrians, including two RPS supporters who attended the

    first meeting.”

    RPS said Turkey has directed French military aid to Islamic fighters who

    posed as defectors from FSA. RPS said Erdogan sought to recruit Western

    support for the Brotherhood, targeted as a future proxy for Turkey in Syria.

    “The MB military wing would become Turkey’s proxy against the Kurds,”

    RPS said.

    via Turkey sets terms for backing Free Syrian Army: Bow to Muslim Brotherhood group | World Tribune.

  • Joining a Dinner in a Muslim Brotherhood Home

    Joining a Dinner in a Muslim Brotherhood Home

    First, meet my hostess: Sondos Asem, a 24-year-old woman who is pretty much the opposite of the stereotypical bearded Brotherhood activist. Sondos is a middle-class graduate of the American University in Cairo, where I studied in the early 1980s (“that’s before I was born,” she said wonderingly, making me feel particularly decrepit).

    She speaks perfect English, is writing a master’s thesis on social media, and helps run the Brotherhood’s English-language Twitter feed, @Ikhwanweb.

    The Muslim Brotherhood has emerged as the dominant political party in parliamentary voting because of people like Sondos and her family. My interviews with supporters suggest that the Brotherhood is far more complex than the caricature that scares many Americans.

    Sondos rails at the Western presumption that the Muslim Brotherhood would oppress women. She notes that her own mother, Manal Abul Hassan, is one of many female Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated candidates running for Parliament.

    “It’s a big misconception that the Muslim Brotherhood marginalizes women,” Sondos said. “Fifty percent of the Brotherhood are women.”

    I told Sondos that Westerners are fearful partly because they have watched the authorities oppress women in the name of Islam in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan.

    “I don’t think Egypt can ever be compared to Saudi Arabia or Iran or Afghanistan,” she replied. “We, as Egyptians, are religiously very moderate.” A much better model for Egypt, she said, is Turkey, where an Islamic party is presiding over an economic boom.

    I asked about female circumcision, also called female genital mutilation, which is inflicted on the overwhelming majority of girls in Egypt. It is particularly common in conservative religious households and, to its credit, the Mubarak government made some effort to stop the practice. Many worry that a more democratic government won’t challenge a practice that has broad support.

    “The Muslim Brotherhood is against the brutal practice of female circumcision,” Sondos said bluntly. She insisted that women over all would benefit from Brotherhood policies that focus on the poor: “We believe that a solution of women’s problems in Egyptian society is to solve the real causes, which are illiteracy, poverty and lack of education.”

    I asked skeptically about alcohol, peace with Israel, and the veil. Sondos, who wears a hijab, insisted that the Brotherhood wasn’t considering any changes in these areas and that its priority is simply jobs.

    “Egyptians are now concerned about economic conditions,” she said. “They want to reform their economic system and to have jobs. They want to eliminate corruption.” Noting that alcohol supports the tourism industry, she added: “I don’t think any upcoming government will focus on banning anything.”

    I told her that I would feel more reassured if some of my liberal Egyptian friends were not so wary of the Brotherhood. Some warn that the Brotherhood may be soothing today but that it has a violent and intolerant streak — and is utterly inexperienced in managing a modern economy.

    Sondos looked exasperated. “We embrace moderate Islam,” she said. “We are not the ultra-conservatives that people in the West envision.”

    I heard similar reassurances from other Brotherhood figures I interviewed, and I’m not sure what to think. But opinions vary, and I’m struck by the optimism I heard in some secular quarters: from Dr. Nawal El Saadawi, an 80-year-old leftist who is a hero of Egyptian feminism, and from Ahmed Zewail, the Egyptian-American scientist who won a Nobel Prize and is passionate about education.

    Amr Moussa, a former foreign minister and Arab League secretary general who is a front-runner in the race for president, was similarly optimistic. He told me that whatever unfolds, Egypt will continue to seek good relations with the United States and will unquestionably stand by its peace treaty with Israel.

    “You cannot conduct an adventurous foreign policy when you rebuild a country,” he said. “We must have the best of relations with the United States.”

    When I raised American concerns that Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood and the more extremist Salafis might replicate Iran, he was dismissive: “The experience of Iran will not be repeated in Egypt.”

    I think he’s right. Revolutions are often messy, and it took Americans seven years from their victory in the American Revolution at Yorktown to get a ratified Constitution. Indonesia, after its 1998 revolution, felt very much like Egypt does today. It endured upheavals from a fundamentalist Islamic current, yet it pulled through.

    So a bit of nervousness is fine, but let’s not overdo the hand-wringing — or lose perspective. What’s historic in Egypt today is not so much the rise of any one party as the apparent slow emergence of democracy in the heart of the Arab world.

    via Joining a Dinner in a Muslim Brotherhood Home – NYTimes.com.

  • Islamist parties in Turkey

    Islamist parties in Turkey

    Some look to the Muslim Brotherhood to do for Egypt what ErdoganÕs party did for Turkey; yet the two are very different, in goals and means, writes Azmi Ashour*

    It has become increasingly common to regard Islamist groups, and the Muslim Brotherhood in particular, as one of the moderate political forces that could reliably steer the transition to democracy in Arab societies in the event that circumstances catapulted them to fore as the alternative to dictatorial regimes. This trend began not just since the onset of the Arab Spring but nearly a decade ago and it was aided by numerous factors, not least of which was the former regime’s systematic propaganda against the Muslim Brothers at a time when they were rapidly expanding their political and grassroots influence and developing into a formidable opposition force. The regime’s campaign only added to the appeal of the officially banned Islamist organisation which succeeded in rallying beneath its banner large segments of disaffected educated youth who were keen to become socially and politically active but who found all legitimate avenues for political involvement blocked due to the restrictions on political party life and the corruption that prevailed in political processes in general. The Muslim Brotherhood demonstrated its growing presence tangibly in the 2005 parliamentary elections when its members (running as independents) won 20 per cent of the seats.

    Scholars and politicians in the West took this unprecedented victory as a sign that the Muslim Brotherhood could leverage itself into a position of power through the democratic process which, in turn, generated widespread speculation as to whether a political faction with an Islamic frame-of-reference could lead the process of political reform and democratisation in Egypt. Opinions varied, but most came down in the Muslim Brotherhood’s favour. The prohibition against it, the periodic clampdowns on its members and their activities, and the imprisonment of many of its leaders in the period preceding the 2010 elections won it considerable sympathy not only in Egypt but abroad. More and more it was viewed as a political faction that was forced to pay for its beliefs by prison sentences and other forms of self- sacrifice, regardless of whether or not the clampdowns were part of a subtle and long-standing game between the Muslim Brotherhood and the regime, and despite the fact that the Mubarak regime’s campaign against the Muslim Brothers was not so much driven by the fear of them but by the desire to portray them in a way that inspired alarm in the public in Egypt and among Western powers. In an international climate dominated by the spectre of terrorism, the regime was keen to establish itself in the eyes of the US and the West as the only available bulwark against radical Islamism and, hence, as a regime that needed to be perpetuated. Perhaps because the ruse was so transparent it did more to enhance the image of the Muslim Brotherhood at home and abroad than it did to damage it.

    When the revolution erupted and succeeded in toppling the regime, the organisation that had built its legitimacy on its opposition to that regime soon revealed its true nature. When it returned to the fray and suddenly found no one to oppose it, it was temporarily disoriented and its positions were often conflicting. Still, for the most part, it acted in ways consistent with its original ideology and long-range political aim, which is to establish an Islamic theocracy in Egypt. It is little wonder, therefore, that it struck common cause with the Salafis and Al-Gamaa Al-Islamiya on many of the controversial issues that have arisen since the revolution. Nevertheless, because the Muslim Brotherhood is so frequently cited as the candidate for implementing the “Turkish model” in Egypt, it is important to consider whether its experience and outlook are really as similar to those of the Justice and Development Party (JDP) in Turkey as some claim.

    The success of the JDP in Turkey stands not as an affirmation but as a refutation of the creed and ultimate aim of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is to come to power with the purpose of establishing “God’s Law” as interpreted by them. The JDP came to power and exercises power in a secular climate and in accordance with a democratic system, in spite of its Islamic frame of reference. The modern foundations of the Turkish state that were laid 90 years ago were the soil that enabled the emergence of the JDP and its natural development in the framework of the institutions of the modern state. The party, therefore, saw no contradiction between its religious background and outlook and the secularist state, which continues to serve as the party’s primary frame of reference. Islamist parties in Turkey did not acquire this modernist spirit overnight; it evolved over several phases as did the modern Turkish state itself, which experienced three military coups (in 1960, 1971 and 1981) aimed at rectifying the course of the state without direct involvement in government. In like manner, Islamist parties, which first appeared in Turkey in the 1980s, gradually readjusted and revised themselves in their attempts to accommodate to the institutional framework of the Turkish state, with the JDP eventually emerging as the party that proved most adept in the process of acclimatisation. Therefore, in the course of its struggle for power within the framework of the Turkish system, the JDP did not seem an anomaly. It may have had an Islamist outlook, but in essence it comported itself in every way as a normal modern political party, one that fully understood the rules of the democratic game, that appreciated the value of the Turkish secular state and, hence, made the preservation of this state and the promotion of its welfare among its foremost priorities.

    The modernist consciousness of the JDP can not be viewed in isolation from the socio-cultural capital that was inaugurated by Ataturk and subsequently developed in Kemalist Turkey, which in the course of 90 years ultimately generated a new Turkish personality that differed markedly from the Ottoman one, at least with respect to its attitude towards modernist values. Since the JDP is very much a native product of this legacy, it has no less a faith in and commitment to democracy than any of its political party peers that arose from the same secularist soil and cultural consciousness.

    In contrast, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood developed, especially during the last 60 years, in a totally different climate and socio-cultural framework. It emerged from an exclusionist autocratic context both in terms of its own outlook and that of the regime that fixed it in its crosshairs, and it has yet to shed itself of the attendant ills and weaknesses that are inherent in that type of consciousness and that were reinforced by the confrontation with a dictatorial order. The duality between the regime and the Muslim Brotherhood worked to reproduce the type of individuals who believe solely in their own views and who can entertain no opposing opinions. Indeed, this exclusionist culture has long been the chief flaw in the mentality of the Muslim Brotherhood elite who not only identified the ruling regime as their enemy but also everyone else who did not stand squarely on their side.

    This is the chief weakness that was glaringly exposed in the wake of 25 January when the Muslim Brotherhood lost the antagonist that aided their rise to prominence. This weakness now presents them with their most critical test. Will they merely fall back old habits and create another enemy to replace the old? Or will they bow to new realities and act in accordance with laws that stipulate that they are one of many differing political forces who are bound by a set of rights and obligations within the framework of a legal and institutional order in which the prevailing frame of reference is not that of the Muslim Brotherhood or any other such ideological group but rather that of the modern Egyptian civil state which has been evolving over the past 200 years? If the Muslim Brotherhood and the Islamist parties are to meet this challenge, they will first need to shed the dictatorial exclusionist mind-set in which they were bred and take genuine strides towards the principles of freedom, plurality, tolerance and acceptance of the other.

    * The writer is managing editor of the quarterly journal Al-Demoqrateya published by Al-Ahram.

  • Turkey denies asking Syria to give Brotherhood government posts

    Turkey denies asking Syria to give Brotherhood government posts

    ISTANBUL: Turkey Friday denied as “black propaganda” claims it asked Syria to offer the banned Muslim Brotherhood government posts in exchange for Turkey’s support in ending rallies in Syria.

    “Those allegations have nothing to do with the truth,” Selcuk Unal, the Foreign Ministry spokesman said.

    The statement he made said “favoring any political, ideological, ethnic or sectarian group or making any one of them subjects to bargaining [in Syria] was out of question” for Turkey.

    He said Turkey had repeatedly told Syria to start reforms “to ensure a transition to parliamentary democracy.”

    “Under this context we suggested them to allow all democratic entities on the political spectrum to be active in Syria and participate in the political transition process,” Unal said.

    According to Syrian officials and Western diplomats, Ankara asked Damascus to offer the Muslim Brotherhood government posts in exchange for Turkey’s support in ending rallies against Syrian President Bashar Assad but the offer was rejected.

    The Muslim Brotherhood has been banned in Syria since the rise of the Baath Party to power in 1963.

    They unsuccessfully tried to organize the population against Assad’s father and predecessor, Hafez, who brutally repressed a 1982 revolt in the city of Hama, leaving around 20,000 people dead.

    Law 49, issued in July 1980 and still in force, makes it a “criminal offense punishable by death to be affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood.”

    Thousands of the organization’s members have languished in Syria’s prisons for decades, though some have been released.

    On Aug. 9, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu delivered a written message to Assad from President Abdullah Gul, who belonged to organizations close to the Muslim Brotherhood before forming Turkey’s ruling Justice and Development Party

    “We hope that some measures will be taken in the coming days to end the bloodshed and open the way to a process for political reform,” Davutoglu said at Ankara airport upon his return from the one-day trip to Syria last month.

    “In June, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan offered, if Syrian President Bashar Assad ensured between a quarter and a third of ministers in his government were members of the Muslim Brotherhood, to make a commitment to use all his influence to end the rebellion,” a Western diplomat told AFP.

    Turkey has expressed its frustration with Assad and his iron-fisted regime for its failure to listen to the people, whose almost daily demonstrations for democracy have been repeatedly met with violent repression, at a cost of more than 2,700 lives according to the United Nations.

     

    A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Daily Star on October 01, 2011, on page 9.

    via THE DAILY STAR :: News :: Middle East :: Turkey denies asking Syria to give Brotherhood government posts.