Tag: political islam

  • I reveal Tayyip Erdoğan’s numbered Swiss account!

    I reveal Tayyip Erdoğan’s numbered Swiss account!

    Opinion

    Burak Bekdil

    I have a feeling that our editor in chief, David Judson, will be mad at me for not sharing this scoop with the newspaper and instead revealing it in this column.

    Well… I have gained access to a document that shows two international companies, both with multibillion-dollar Turkish contracts in their portfolios, deposited unexplained funds into a numbered Swiss account that Swiss financial authorities have verified belongs to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.

    The first document, endorsed by the bank’s executive board, verifies wire transfers into the account, one coming from a multinational energy giant, and another from a weapons manufacturer – both names withheld.

    The second one verifies that the numbered account, totaling $655.76 million as of April 9, 2009, belongs to Erdoğan.

    As a matter of journalistic ethics, I shall certainly avoid revealing my sources or how I have gained access to these documents, should any prosecutor dare to take legal action against the prime minister. I must admit, though, that there is one problem: The documents in my possession are photocopies forwarded from one PC to another. So, I advise Mr. Judson not to become angry with me, or I might produce documents proving his links to the armed wing of the Ergenekon gang.

    Chief of General Staff Gen. İlker Başbuğ was telling the truth when he said that an asymmetrical psychological war was being waged against the military. The fact that none of us could realistically vouch for the democratic credentials of each and every single member of the Turkish Armed Forces does not change the fact that political Islamists – not too well disguised as “liberal democrats” – have long been trying to systematically fight the military establishment, through means reminiscent of spy novels. In fact, this is a war of intelligence and public relations, and the asymmetrical warriors naturally have the upper hand over their symmetrical enemies.

    As a matter of fact, one principal casualty each time there is an asymmetrical war is the judiciary, which gets dangerously politicized. The grand coalition of Islamists – i.e., the neo-Islamists, post-modern Islamists, liberals, neo-liberals and opportunists disguised as democrats – looks so precisely “guided on target” that it may even prefer to sink the entire ship that sails under the name Turkey in order to destroy the whole chamber of the helmsman.

    How undemocratic can you behave in order to bolster democracy? Can you torture and shoot the enemies of democracy? Hang them en masse in public squares, all in the name of democracy? Only recently, Erdoğan angrily addressed the main opposition leader Deniz Baykal, saying, “If you cannot prove your allegations [against my party], you are despicable!” He was right.

    But who will be the despicable one if civilian prosecutors fail to verify the authenticity of the famous “coup document” that appears to be a photocopy, with its original not existing anywhere? Are “the despicable” only those who allege some foul play by the government but cannot verify it?

    The prime minister has the habit of viewing the judiciary through an entirely ideological pair of spectacles. For example, he has claimed that Baykal’s Republican People’s Party, or CHP, has defrauded its accounts, saying, “This was verified by a ruling from the Constitutional Court.” If – and naturally so – an irreversible verdict from the supreme court should suffice for a “public verdict,” then we would end up in the weird situation where Turkey’s ruling party has behaved unconstitutionally, as its various activities to undermine secularism in favor of political Islam also carry a seal of approval from the same court.

    Last week, the prime minister was typical Erdoğan again. He pledged immediate (legal) action should anyone get hold of the original “coup document.” Why did he take legal action against “coup-plotters” when the original document did not exist anywhere? As always, the motto is “all is halal [permissible] as long as it suits our political agenda…”

    Unfortunately, Erdoğan’s self-declared “liberal” supporters are no exception. Take, for example, prominent columnist, Hadi Uluengin, the liberal voice of daily Hürriyet and someone of whom I am quite fond. This is how he justified the storms around the photocopied document in his June 24, 2009, column, “Who’s wearing out whom?”:

    “Éwhether the plan to ’finish off the AKP and Fethullah Gülen’ is authentic or forgery… it would be purely legitimate if Turkey’s democrats, who have had to endure four coups, four coup attempts and several other [undemocratic actions by the military] in less than half a century got agitated by this document. They are endlessly right [about their retort]…”

    Uluengin is right about the history of undemocratic military practices in our country. But his reasoning – that even if the document were false, democrats would have every right to attack the military – is a little bit excessive.

    By the same logic, someone can always forge documents verifying corruption by the ruling Islamist elite, get them photocopied and distribute them to Erdoğan’s opponents – and since Turkey’s recent history is full of corrupt practices, it would be purely legitimate for our democrats to get agitated even though we could not authenticate these bogus papers.

    Is this how Turkey is going to become a more democratic place?

    hurriyet.com.tr, August 26, 2014

  • The Rise of Political Islam

    The Rise of Political Islam

    Why have the revolutions of the Arab Spring brought political Islam to the fore? Asks Patrick Seale.

    Autocracy OUT Democracy and Theocracy INPolitical Islam is making a dramatic comeback right across the greater Middle East. Some in the West will react with alarm at what they see as a dangerous geopolitical upset. Democrats, secularists, feminists, Christians and other religious minorities may fear that a rigid application of the shari‘a, the body of Islamic law, will threaten their freedoms and their way of life. But these fears are almost certainly exaggerated, if not wholly unfounded, at least in most Arab countries.

    The triumph at last Sunday’s elections of Tunisia’s leading Islamic party Ennahda (Renaissance) is the latest example of the revival of political Islam in the Arab world. But it is also cause for reassurance. This moderate Islamic party should not be confused with hard-line Salafis, who demand a return to the uncompromising values of early Islam.

    Without an absolute majority in the new Constituent assembly, Ennahda cannot rule alone, nor does it intend to do so. It will seek to form a coalition to carry forward its programme of social justice, economic development, and clean government. It has pledged not to erode or claw back the achievements of the past, notably democratic freedoms and women’s rights.

    In Libya, however, the interim leader, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, has aroused fears by declaring that “any law violating the shari‘a will be legally null and void.” If this is implemented, it could have an impact on laws of personal status, for women in particular, in such matters as inheritance, divorce and polygamy. But what it will actually mean in practice has yet to be determined.

    The rebel forces that stormed and captured Tripoli were led by an Islamist, Abdalhakim Belhadj, battled-hardened in the war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. Tracked by the CIA and Britain’s MI6, he was returned to Libya and tortured for seven years in Abu Salim prison. His attachment to Western interests should not be counted on.

    Why have the revolutions of the Arab Spring brought political Islam to the fore? One reason is that, having suffered decades of persecution at the hands of Western-backed Arab autocrats, Islamists now benefit from a mantle of martyrdom. Hamid Jebali, Ennahda’s secretary-general, spent 16 years in prison, including ten in solitary confinement. Rashed Ghannouchi, the party’s spiritual leader, spent 22 years in exile.

    In Egypt, Syria, Libya, Algeria and elsewhere, members of Islamic movements have been hounded, jailed, killed and tortured in great numbers, or have simply fled abroad. In Syria, the Muslim Brotherhood has been outlawed since the 1980s. Membership is a capital offense. If there is a change of regime in Damascus, the Islamists, by far the best organised of the opposition movements, are bound to figure prominently.

    Another reason for the emergence of political Islam is the poverty and deprivation of a large part of the electorate in most Arab countries, especially those with little or no oil income. Free elections have at last given this under-class a voice. The Islamic parties have long distinguished themselves by their welfare activities in favour of the underprivileged. Of all the political parties, they can justly claim to be closest to the common people.

    The Tunisian revolution was not a middle class achievement but was, on the contrary, driven forward by young men and women on the margin of society, bitter at their own unrelenting misery and at the gross corruption of the former ruling elite, especially the plutocrats close to former president Ben Ali and his wife.

    There is a striking contrast in Tunisia between what the tourists see — the coastal hotels, restaurants, comfortable villas, well-tarred roads, efficient services and so forth — and the interior of the country, where jobs are scarce, running water a luxury denied to many, medical services virtually non-existent and government indifference a subject of angry complaint.

    The same is true of Syria. The rural poor, which have suffered gravely from drought and government neglect, make up the massed ranks of the opposition, while the well-heeled merchant class of Damascus and Aleppo has so far remained loyal to the regime.

    Egypt’s Muslim Brothers are expected to do well at next month’s elections. But, like Ennahdain Tunisia, they do not aspire to rule alone. The task of satisfying the economic demands of the great majority of the population is simply too daunting. The Islamists have no ambition to assume the burden alone. They fully realise that there can be no economic miracle which will, overnight, produce the hundreds of thousands of jobs, the affordable housing, student scholarships, low-cost medical services, and efficient public services which the population is clamouring for. Rebuilding the state institutions and the economy in all these countries will be a long and trying process, and many expectations are bound to be disappointed.

    Another winning asset of the Islamic movements, however, is that they express, more clearly than their rivals, the frustrated but largely unvoiced ambition of the masses to affirm their Muslim-Arab identity. Most Arabs, with the exception of small Westernised elites, are God-fearing, socially conservative and attached to their traditional way of life. They are unhappy at attempts — which they attribute to outside powers — to impose on them a Western model of society. Islamic parties are the champions of this aspiration — all the way from the Taliban in Afghanistan, to Hamas in Gaza and, in its own way, even to the moderate Ennahda in Tunisia.

    The so-called ‘Arab Spring’, therefore, is far more than a revolt against long-entrenched, corrupt and brutal dictators. It is also a rebellion against foreign values — and foreign military intervention. America’s destruction of Iraq and Israel’s oppression of the Palestinians arouse great anger. What the various Islamist movements have in common — whether in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen — is an ambition to satisfy the thirst of the populations for an Islamic version of social justice freed from foreign tutelage.

    It needs to be stressed that each country’s experience will be different. Tunisia, where women are among the most emancipated of the Arab world, is not like Libya or Yemen, nor will it be changed radically when Islamist parties come to power. In countries heavily dependent on tourism like Egypt and Tunisia, wide-ranging compromises with the shari‘a are bound to be made. Tourists will not be denied alcohol, belly-dancers or night-clubs.

    In Turkey, Prime Minister Erdogan’s Islamic-coloured Justice and Development Party has had to compromise with the strong secular tradition of Ataturk, the Republic’s founder. The result is Turkey’s special brand of democracy. Likewise, Tunisia’s large and educated middle class will be a force with which Ennahda will have to accommodate. In most Arab countries, Islamists will be constrained by the counter-weight of long-established secularists and the need to satisfy foreign investors, donors, tourists and Western governments.

    The West wants to see democracy flourish in the Arab world, no doubt to protect its interests. But the locals want jobs, a better future for themselves and their families, a fairer distribution of the country’s resources, an end to corruption and police brutality. They want good governance and a respect for their traditions rather than Western- style democracy or Western interference.

    Patrick Seale is a leading British writer on the Middle East. His latest book is The Struggle for Arab Independence: Riad el-Solh and the Makers of the Modern Middle East (Cambridge University Press).

    www.middle-east-online.com, 20.10.2011

  • A Decade After 9/11: Turkey Redefines Political Islam

    A Decade After 9/11: Turkey Redefines Political Islam

    New America Media, News Report, Frank Viviano, Posted: Sep 02, 2011

    In 1995, the city of Gaziantep, on the southeastern edge of Turkey’s Anatolian plain, was under siege. Its crumbling medieval center was swamped with refugees from a civil war between insurgent Kurds and the Turkish Army that eventually left 40,000 dead and 3,000,000 people homeless. Along the borderlands with Syria and Iraq, smoke rose from rural Kurdish villages obliterated by F-15 strikes.

    A New Look at Shariah Law
    Frank Viviano

    A central tenet of Islam is the conviction that the Koran, the Muslim book of revelation, is God’s final and direct word to humankind, as related to the Prophet Mohammed in 610 A.D. in what is now Saudi Arabia.

    But the Koran is not the sole compendium of Islamic values. It is in an epochal project involving a second Islamic text, known as the “Hadith,” that Turkey’s bold reform movement may pave its most fruitful ground.

    The Hadith is a digest of the conversations and deeds of Mohammed after the revelations of the Koran. It is the chief source of rules that inform Muslim life, including customs, social mores, dress codes and an estimated 90 percent of Shariah law.
    For the past nine years, 80 eminent historians and theologians commissioned by Turkey’s Department of Religious Affairs have been working on a 21st-century revision of the Hadith. It is scheduled for publication by the end of 2011.
    “We want to bring out the positive side of Islam — that promotes personal honor, human rights, justice, morality, women’s rights, respect for the other,” Professor Mehmet Gormez, vice-president of religious affairs and senior Hadith lecturer at Ankara University, recently told The Times of London.
    The revision would eliminate such medieval aphorisms as, “the best of women are those who are like sheep,” and “Your prayer will be invalid if a donkey, black dog or a woman passes in front of you.”
    Instead, it will emphasize other passages, often of pointed significance to the contemporary scene. “Religion is very easy and whoever overburdens himself in his religion will not be able to continue in that way. So you should not be extremists,” Mohammed cautions his followers in a key Hadith.
    “God does not judge you according to your bodies and appearances,” the Prophet says, in a conversation that seems aimed straight across the centuries at controversies over matters of dress and sexuality in Saudi Arabia, Iran and Afghanistan. “He looks into your hearts and observes your deeds.”
    Turkey’s religious authorities have also subsidized advanced theological training for 450 women, appointing them as senior imams (“vaizes”) empowered to explain the “original spirit of Islam” in rural communities.
    “A revolution is taking place here,” according to Taha Akyol, a Turkish political commentator.

    Nationwide, the economy was mired in triple-digit inflation and soaring joblessness, with a GDP of less than $116 billion, under $2,000 per person. Turkey in the 1990s epitomized a devastating crisis among Muslim-majority nations – a desperate spiral of poverty, violence and authoritarian rule.

     

    Today, a decade after the September 11 terrorist attacks that turned much of the Islamic world into a chaotic battleground, Turkey has emerged as Islam’s most prominent icon of hope.

     

    In 2011, it boasts the world’s 15th largest GDP, measuring $1.2 trillion – nearly $15,000 per person and rising by $125 billion annually. The Turkish economy now ranks ahead of such highly-developed nations as Australia and the Netherlands, and oil-giant Saudi Arabia. With a current growth rate of 11 percent, outstripping China’s and defying the effects of a global recession, it could surpass G-8 member Canada in the next few years.

     

     

    More than 99 percent of Turkey’s 74 million citizens are Muslim.

     

    Gaziantep, when I returned there on another assignment in 2010, had transformed itself into a city of manicured parks, architecturally stunning museums, carefully restored 10th century neighborhoods and 21st century shopping malls. High-rise residential suburbs had sprung from empty fields where army tanks were once marshaled. On a per capita basis, this city of 1.3 million is now the number one exporter and importer in the country.

    The chief architect of Turkey’s miracle is the Justice and Development Party – popularly known by its Turkish initials, “AK” – an Islamic political group that took power in a landslide 2002 election.

     

    Over the following decade, under Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the new government dramatically reformed the bureaucracy-ridden Turkish economy, setting off an unprecedented boom in business starts, jobs and exports. Ten years ago, notes Bloomberg analyst Ben Holland, Turkey struggled under a debt load that dwarfed Greece’s on the eve of the global financial crisis in 2009. By 2010 Turkey’s debt was down to 46 percent of GDP, compared with 143 percent percent for Greece.

     

    Turkey in 2011 is the thriving proof that a Muslim majority, democracy and economic modernization are compatible – the new model that, in the eyes of many, political Islam has been waiting for.

     

    The Old Model: Saudi Arabia

     

    In 2003, thanks to the sponsorship of a Saudi official, I was able to participate in the haj, the pilgrimage to the Arabian Peninsula that is an obligation for Muslims but normally closed to others. Although I wasn’t permitted to enter Mecca, the epicenter of Islamic faith, I joined a vast throng silently marching to the Prophet’s Mosque in Medina, the site of Mohammed’s tomb and Islam’s second most important shrine.

     

    During shared evening meals at another Medina mosque, I spoke with pilgrims from China, Algeria, Egypt, Nigeria, Malaysia, Indonesia and Uzbekistan – and also from France and Holland, home today to two of Western Europe’s largest Muslim communities.

     

    The sense of peace and inner reflection, of profound tolerance and solidarity among far-flung people from every walk of life, was deeply moving. “This is what we see in our religion,” a young man from western China’s Yunnan Province said, “not suicide bombers or planes flying into sky-scrapers.”

     

    Yet it was impossible to ignore the fact that Chinese and Uzbek women on the haj — few of whom wear more than a light scarf in their own countries, and then only during prayers — were obliged to cover themselves in the head-to-toe black abaya, required of all women by Saudi law, including millions of Christians, Hindus and Buddhists who work as domestics in the country.

     

    None of those non-Muslims are allowed to honor their own religious beliefs while in Saudi Arabia, a country that bans the establishment of churches or temples.

     

    It was also impossible to ignore the Mutaween, the 5,000-strong religious police force formally known as the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice. The Mutaween stalk supermarkets, shopping malls, schools and apartment complexes in search of any breach of Wahabbism, the sternly fundamentalist brand of Islam favored by the ruling Saud family.

     

    They can arrest and jail a woman with a single strand of hair exposed, along with unmarried couples – Saudi or foreign – who socialize in public, residents who are discovered with a bottle of beer or a Bible in their apartment, or anyone who observes “infidel superstitions” such as sending St. Valentine’s Day cards.

    Indescribably wealthy as the source of the planet’s largest oil reserves, and respected as the home and protector of Islam’s most important holy sites, Saudi Arabia wields weight far beyond its own size (population 28 million) in an international community of believers that numbers 1.6 billion. One result is that political Islam — whether in the violent form practiced by Al Qaeda or the state theocracy of Iran – widely echoes the Saudi model of hectoring authoritarianism.

     

    But in socio-economic terms, it is difficult to view Saudi Arabia as a functional model at all. Its resources are so vast and its distortions so extreme that virtually no country beyond the hyper-affluent oil states can really emulate it.

     

    Saudi citizenship means free education, health care and housing – but often a life without gainful employment. According to the Saudi Labor Ministry, imported temporary workers account for a staggering 90 to 95 percent of private-sector jobs. It’s not much exaggeration to say that the only Saudis who actually work are those with the connections to acquire high administrative posts in the bureaucracy, or in enormous state enterprises tightly controlled by the Sauds and their retainers.

     

    Ranks of young men on the streets of Riyadh, the capital, are visibly lost to boredom, in a land where movie theaters, clubs and mixed-gender socializing are illegal — and much of modern culture is only virtual, observed on the Internet or via satellite television broadcasts from uninhibited Beirut and Cairo. Frustrated and without clear purpose, they recall the kind of young man that the teenaged Osama bin Laden is said to have been, or the 15 Saudis among the 19 hijackers on September 11, 2001.

     

    The establishment of an elected parliament with formal powers has been under discussion in Riyadh for two generations, but remains a vague distant goal.

     

    As for women – who have played frontline roles in the mass protests of Iran in 2009 and the Arab Spring of 2011 – they are forbidden by law to drive in Saudi Arabia, and may not even be passengers in a car unless accompanied by a male member of their family.

     

    The contrast with Turkey could not be more striking.

     

    Faith Without Repression

     

    At the outset of the Erdogan era, many secular-minded Turks warned that the AK party would eventually transform their country into another Saudi Arabia. But 10 years later, Istanbul reminds no one of Riyadh or the Mutaween.

     

    The city’s main commercial thoroughfare, Istiklal Avenue, is a two-mile-long corridor of seething artistic and intellectual ferment, its surrounding streets and squares ringed with avant-garde theaters and cinemas, restaurants and nightclubs, art galleries and bookshops. By 2010, when the European Union named Istanbul the “European Capital of Culture” – despite the fact that Turkey is not an EU member-state – the district’s attractions were drawing up to 3 million people per day.

     

    The dynamic street life of Istanbul, as well as Gaziantep and smaller urban centers across the country, shatters the notion that a Muslim nation must be repressive and uncompromising.

     

    On the foreign policy front, the AK government has come closer than any government in the nation’s history to ending the Turks’ historic enmities with their Armenian, Greek and Arab neighbors.

     

    In southeastern Anatolia, the expression of Kurdish culture has been legalized for the first time since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, permitting school courses, radio and TV broadcasts and books in the Kurdish language. After the bloody carnage of the civil war, tensions remain, and separatists from the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) still launch periodic assaults that bring targeted police or army reprisals.

     

    But in the sprawling new suburbs of cities like Diyarbakir, the Kurds’ de facto cultural capital, “most young people prefer to speak Turkish these days, because they regard it as the language of modern life and opportunity,” says a 35-year-old Kurdish woman who once led militant protests.

     

    Last month, in a gesture that remains unthinkable almost anywhere else in the Muslim bloc, Prime Minister Erdogan announced that Ankara will return or offer compensation for churches, synagogues, schools, hospitals and cemeteries that were confiscated by the state over the past 75 years.

     

    “Times that a citizen of ours would be oppressed due to religion, ethnic origin or different way of life are over,” he said, speaking before representatives of more than 150 Christian and Jewish organizations.

     

    Step-by-careful-step, the Erdogan administration – which won every national election after 2002 by huge margins, most recently last June – has broken the long reign of the Turkish Army as behind-the-scenes political powerbroker, in a world where dictatorial regimes rule most Muslim-majority states.

     

    In the name of democracy, rather than religion, the expression of selected Muslim customs has been legalized, notably the right of devout women to wear light headscarves in public institutions if they choose. But today few observers speak of a hidden plan to impose theocracy.

     

    The number of women in Turkey’s parliament increased by more than 50 percent in the 2011 national elections, to 78 seats.

     

    “Secularism, one of the main principles of our republic, is a precondition for social peace as much as it is a liberating model for different lifestyles,” AK second-in-command Abdullah Gul insisted in his inauguration speech as president of Turkey in 2007.

     

    Justice and Development, he says, is no different than the Christian Democratic parties that ruled Italy and Germany for most of the half century after World War Two. If religious values supply part of the AK identity, its outlook is resolutely centrist and modern.
    Quietly, just months after September 11, it embarked on a controversial revision of the principal sources for Shariah law, the code that defines and regulates daily behavior for believers. The deliberate aim, say the project’s insiders, is to reconcile Islamic doctrine and Shariah law with the modern world. The final draft, due by the end of 2011, will be closely read by Muslims everywhere.

     

    To the Wahabbist hardliners of Riyadh, the reforms proposed by Ankara look like heresy. But their fellow citizens overwhelmingly disagree. In 2002, according to a survey of Islamic world attitudes conducted annually by pollster James Zogby, a scant 20 percent of Saudis had a favorable view of Turkey. In 2011 the favorable rating reached 98 percent.

  • Modern myths: politicially divided university canteens in Istanbul

    Modern myths: politicially divided university canteens in Istanbul

    September 2010. Students are purported to be so politicised that even their school canteen is split into liberal and conservative factions. Two journalists from Lithuania and France investigate a myth which seems to have disappeared thanks to a new ‘apolitical’ generation

    report

    BY EMMANUEL HADDAD @ ,DAIVA REPEČKAITĖ @Translation: Daiva Repečkaitė @, cafebabel.co.uk @

    Istanbul: what is a young student's political religion? (Image: (cc) kooklanekookla/ Inessa Akhmedova)
    Istanbul: what is a young student's political religion? (Image: (cc) kooklanekookla/ Inessa Akhmedova)

    Istanbul is home to seven public universities and thirty private universities (the youngest of which opened in 2010). Turkish friends have revealed one trend which may sound very exotic to students and graduates in northern, eastern or western Europe: students are deeply divided along political lines. Even their canteens have a political orientation, with some catering for socialists whilst others serve islamists. You eat what you believe in, and people who believe in the same thing know where to find you. Intrigued, we set off to the oldest and the most prominent higher education establishment we know of.

    Meals fit for a conservative | We discover this rumour has become a modern-day myth

    Istanbul university canteen

    Monday morning on the 1453-era campus doesn’t feel too busy. The security guards check the IDs of everyone who is entering the campus, somewhat relaxed. As we walk along a pretty path across the green towards one of the faculties, some female students wearing headscarves pass us by, then some older students, as well as many young people chatting and not hurrying inside. Although the university is in the very heart of Istanbul, fewer people speak English than expected. Finally we meet a student on the way to one of the canteens – she gladly shows us where to go.

    Kerem is a Phd student in law | He says any headscarf problems died away peacefullyThe canteen looks ordinary. Sandwiches, Cola – do the nationalists eat here? Or the liberals? ‘This canteen is for everybody,’ explainsKerem, a PhD law student who speaks perfect English. He is enrolled in a different university, but takes some classes at Istanbul university. In his view, students are not politicised at all. ‘Maybe it was the case in the past,’ he says. What does stirs up political student life nowadays then? Students usually have strong opinions about the current government, he says. ‘For thirteen years it was forbidden to demonstrate on Taksim square. The government considered it to be dangerous, since it could be used by mafia-like movements. The [current] president did the right thing for the people in my opinion – now people can go and demonstrate and nobody is injured. People were saying, ‘Oh, why didn’t we think of this before?’ Everyone can go there, as long as it’s peaceful. It’s good for people.’

    Headscarf divide

    What policies are most relevant to university life? ‘A new agenda allow womens to wear a [head] scarf. Now people who believe that it is necessary can go to university – before they couldn’t, it was forbidden. Now it is open, especially in this university. Before it was the main conflict, people demonstrated against each other. Something has changed, and because of that people can go to lectures. You can see it in the classes.’ Kerem is certain that in Europe governments would not even think of imposing such limitations, and is surprised to hear that headscarves are also forbidden in France. ‘Our constitution is imposed by the military, and such policies are developed by politicians, not by the people.’

    ‘People don’t express their political views’

    So it is the headscarf which intrigues and divides students, not canteens. One fourth-year law studentdisagrees; not so many students have strong opinions about whether wearing a headscarf should be permitted at the university or not. ‘Everyone is free to wear what they want, only politicians have a problem. This year there are more such girls in class. Before (the ban was lifted), they used to take off their headscarves near the university and put on a wig or a hat.’ As for university life, the 23-year-old explains that just a few years ago things were very different. ‘Student life is livelier. Until last year we only had classes at noon and then dispersed. Now we spend more time together. Before there were only intellectual student clubs which were not much fun. But the new generation is apolitical – or at least people don’t express their political views.’

    Flash mob Istanbul

    Eventually we confess that one of our missions is to check the politicisation of university canteens. ‘In 2005 canteens were still separated,’ our anonymous friend says. ‘I witnessed this for one academic year. There were two sides, usually along the smoking and non-smoking lines. Food was the same, and alcohol is not permitted at the university in any case. Liberals were reading their magazines on one side, and conservatives were sitting with prayer beads. But many political activists graduated and others were expelled after having problems with the university.’ Nowadays there is no dominant political stream in the previously predominantly liberal university.

    ‘There were two sides, usually along the smoking and non-smoking lines’

    So, our confusion is gone. We know the explanation: everybody was right: both our friend, who told us about the divided canteens, and Kerem, who does not remember any divisions in this university at all. Political divisions vanished like a smoke and were pushed aside by the new, fun-loving apolitical generation. Our mission to see the situation about the canteens is completed, but since we cannot test our stomachs on socialist, islamist or liberal food, we decide to have lunch outside. From afar, we hear shouts between the sounds of a military march and of lads playing football – we’ve stumbled across a flash mob accompanied by journalists and photographers and an inert public with a glazed look of seen-it-before.

    You can’t just come into our university, Istanbul students shout | They are incensed about police intrusion in their campus life

    After ten minutes it’s over. ‘We’re a revolutionary organization who march in the footsteps of the 1968 and 1978 generations. There’s around two to two-and-a-half thousand members across the country,’ explains Can Ugur, an English literature student and Youth Organisation member, as we watch the protest together. ‘Demonstrations happen almost every week, we’re used to that. This time it’s against the right of the police to enter and inspect the university freely.’ The demonstrators are said to be socialists; their symbol is a lifted left fist. Accordingly, the young activists believe the media and state is behind the apoliticism of young people. These boys want more people to be active, but as they freely admit, such demonstrations do not achieve any results. Another member, Oguz, frowns. ‘It’s dangerous to get too political. One day you might be expected to beat up your friend. No, we want peace.’ For them the question of the headscarf is a false friend which diverts attention from the real issues that count, such as poverty and the inequality in accessing education. Apolitical generation? You decide.

    Images: main (cc) kooklanekookla on Flickr/ Inessa Akhmedova;  protest and law student © Emmanuel Haddad; canteen (cc) iwouldstay/ Flickr; flash mob © Daiva Repečkaitė

    cafebabel

  • Political Islam has many faces in Turkey

    Political Islam has many faces in Turkey

    By Justin Vela

    ISTANBUL – During the now infamous Mavi Marmara crisis between Turkey and Israel last summer, a board member of the Insani Yardim Vakfi (IHH), the Turkish aid organization that sponsored the Free Gaza flotilla, was asked about the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP).

    Connections between the IHH, Turkey’s first and largest humanitarian organization, and the AKP were clear. Members of the AKP had even been planning to travel on the flotilla to Gaza, but canceled at the last minute. Yet the board member said, “Look, I do not vote for the AKP.” He was less clear about which political party he did support.

    Given the degree of the IHH’s religious conservativeness, it was likely that most members of the organization cast their vote for

    the Saadet Partisi (the Felicity Party), one of Turkey’s few still functioning Islamic political parties that received votes in local and national elections, though never enough to pass the 10% threshold to enter parliament

    Though the country’s opposition has accused them of possessing a secret, long-term plan to establish an Islamic state in Turkey, the AKP is officially a secular political party. In mass media they are usually described as “Islamic-rooted” or coming from an “Islamic background” or another variation of this vague categorization.

    Over the course of the AKP’s eight years in government, the power of the secular military and judiciary has decreased, the constitution has been reformed, and democracy has grown, all of which are in line with the demands of Turkey’s European Union accession process.

    While a recent European Commission report blasts declining press freedoms, the EU has lauded Turkey’s progress in revamping the economy and raising its level of democracy even as religion appears to be increasingly at the forefront. In many ways, this might be expected. Turkey is a 99% Muslim country. Yet it is experiencing an increased polarization between the secular and religious, a trend that will most likely increase in the lead-up to June 2011 parliamentary elections.

    This polarization is dangerous for a variety of reasons. On the one hand religion’s more obvious role in society proves an increased democratization in a country whose degree of devoutness has perhaps been underestimated. The secularists are also experiencing a shift from being the traditional power-holders to now seeing the more religious lower classes suddenly possessing more influence.

    On the back of a surprisingly strong victory in September’s referendum on controversial constitutional amendments, the AKP has brought the long-running headscarf issue to the forefront of the political discourse. This is likely the first attempt at invigorating voters before next year’s election.

    The headscarf is an issue Turkey is long overdue to settle and even main opposition leader Kemal Kilicdaroglu, of the Republican People’s Party, or CHP, is signaling that a change to the laws surrounding the headscarf, which is currently banned in public institutions, including universities, must take place. This is despite the military boycotting this year’s National Day celebrations at Cankaya Palace in Ankara where First Lady Hayrunnisa Gul attended wearing a headscarf, a act that is technically illegal due to the headscarf being banned in public institutions.

    Since the founding of the modern Turkish republic in 1923, there has perhaps not been another time when Islam in Turkey has gone through such transformations, both in matters of presentation and style, and also importance. The AKP has supported traditionally practicing Muslims economically and politically more so than any previous government and has also changed and modernized what it means to be Islamic in Turkey.

    Yet the AKP does not enjoy the support of the openly Islamic Saadet Party and many more conservative Muslims in Turkey. There is indeed a deep rift between the groups, with members of Saadet believing the AKP to have been co-opted by Western powers, becoming a pawn of a global imperialism extending from these countries. The AKP’s neo-liberal trade policies are, also, condemned by Saadet as Turkey maintains high unemployment and uneven wealth distribution.

    The current head of Saadet, Necmettin Erbakan, recently lashed out at Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and President Abdullah Gul in an August 2010 interview with the German newspaper Die Welt. “Some foreign powers brought them into their current position. Zionist, imperialist and racist powers in the current world order. They are supporting a Western, Zionist world order unintentionally. Most of what they have done is wrong. They are making the Zionists richer with taxes and debts. Erdogan became the cashier of Zionism. He was my student before. Yet now, our aim is to knock him over.”

    Erbakan served as Turkey’s prime minister in a coalition government from 1995-1997, before being forced to step down by the military in what is called by some a “post-modern coup”. He was also vice prime minister between 1974-1978, in coalition with various right-wing secular parties, an especially strange twist to the practical steps often taken by those who desire power. Called the “hoca”, a term for a religious leader that is also sometimes used in Turkey to refer to university teachers, Erbakan had been a mentor to Erdogan and Gul when the two were members of his Refah Partisis (the Welfare Party) and Fazilet Partisis (the Virtue Party), which were banned in 1997 and 2001, respectively.

    Fazilet and Refah followed Erbakan’s numerous previous parties such as the Milli Selamet Partisi (The National Salvation Party) and Milli Nizam Partisi (National Order Party), and were closed by the judiciary for violating the secular principals of Turkey’s constitution. Erdogan and Gul, seeing that there was no way they could hold national power without becoming more moderate, founded the AKP in 2001. Erbakan was banned from politics in 1997 following the closure of Refah, but had his supporters founded Saadet, which continued to serve as the party of traditionally conservative Muslims.

    Due to the majority of their voters deciding to support the AKP, Saadet was never very popular. In 2009 local elections, the party polled only 5.16%. In 2007 national elections, they won 2.34% of votes. Saadet’s primary strength actually is likely to lay outside of Turkey, among Turks living abroad in Europe. For them, Saadet is the current leader of the “Milli Gorus” (National Vision) movement, which seeks to re-establish Islam as a leading force in Turkey and reportedly has 300,000 members throughout Europe.

    Like the shadowy Gulen movement, Milli Gorus, which takes its name from a manifesto Erbakan wrote in 1969, is a vast social network providing services and community as well as a political force. Not as powerful as the Gulen movement however, which is said to have pull within the Turkish government, to control the police force, and posses Islamic-turanistic tendencies, Milli Gorus is focused more on strengthening traditional Islam within Turkey.

    They also profess a desire to end Turkey’s alliance with Western countries, despite Erbakan, during his times in power, failing to significantly change any of Turkey’s core policies. Many of Turkey’s connections with the EU and trade policies were even strengthened during his time in power yet he maintained an anti-Western stance, especially when out of office.

    At 84 and needing assistance to walk, Erbakan was elected the head of Saadet in October 2010. The party was run since its inception by his close supporters until an April 2009 court decision allowed Erbakan to again directly participate in politics. Maintaining that the AKP is the product of a Western-Zionist conspiracy that aims to take over Turkey, Erbakan recently told the Turkish paper Taraf that “imperialism is doing new studies to polish AKP” for the 2011 elections.

    Although many members of his party welcomed Erbakan’s return, what appeared to be the establishment of a family dynasty within Saadet caused a new split. In October, Erbakan’s son, Fatih, daughter, Elif, and son-in law, Mehmet Altinoz, were elected to Saadet’s administration in a party congress that saw huge posters of Erbakan and Mustapha Kemal Attaturk, the republic’s founding father, together in the same hall.

    The move to establish a more prominent role for his family within Saadet was not taken kindly by Erbakan’s former confidant and the previous Saadet head, Numan Kurtulmus, who split off from Saadet and on November 1 founded the Voice of the People Party (HAS), the 67th political party in Turkey.

    HAS is expected to hold its first congress on November 28, where elections will be held to form its administrative bodies. Difficult to categorize, HAS united a number of politicians from different backgrounds. There are members of past Islamic political parties, as well as Kurtulmus’ supporters from Saadet. With him there are also people from leftist parties and right of center parties.

    Turkish United Workers’ Party leader Zeki Kilicaslan said that he joined HAS because “when Kurtulmus was introducing the HAS party to me, he said it would be a party that is against imperialism, neo-liberal policies and brutal exploitation policies. He also said the party would be the people’s party and not be based on religion or conservatism.”

    At least one commentator has said that HAS was positioning itself to stand somewhere between AKP and Saadet in ideology and seeking to appeal mostly to the victimized segment of Turkish society. As it includes some members of parties that voted “yes” to the constitutional amendments in September’s referendum, but did not support the AKP itself, HAS could provide an alternative during future elections. It also could become a possible coalition partner for the AKP should the scattered opposition organize itself enough to win a sizable amount of votes in a future election.

    All this is likely only to come after the AKP forms a single-party government following the parliamentary elections in June 2011. Then there will be the decidingly telling time during the writing of the new constitution. The AKP’s increasingly authoritarian bent will be exposed for what it is or isn’t. Following September’s referendum, Erdogan professed a desire to be inclusive during the writing of a new constitution. Yet what inclusive means in a Turkey that is more confident, perhaps even over-confident, in its importance on the global stage, is yet to be seen.

    Justin Vela is a freelance journalist based in Istanbul, Turkey.

    (Copyright 2010 Asia Times Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please contact us about sales, syndication and republishing.)