The Loom of Time, page 8
In the early and mid 1980s, nearly a half century after Atatürk’s death, I first started reporting on Turkey in earnest, making frequent trips to Turkey from Greece. It was then that it began to dawn on me that Atatürk had gone too far in his secularization of the country. Of course, the process of a moderated return to religion that I expected to happen had already been under way for some time. In the 1950s, Muslim education had begun reviving with new and expanded curriculums. Small Islamic parties had also emerged on the political fringes as a backlash to secularization. The public calls to prayer were now chanted in Arabic rather than in Turkish. And when Turkey fell into near anarchy in the late 1970s and 1980, there were fears of another Islamic revolution as had just occurred in neighboring Iran. Yet when order was finally restored by a military junta in September 1980, the generals deliberately did not altogether return Turkey to Atatürk’s brutal and militant secularism, but allowed religion to coexist with the secularist Kemalist state.
But this was all a matter of degrees. The demonstrable shift back toward religion only occurred in December 1983, when Turgut Özal, a deeply religious Turk who lacked all of Atatürk’s graces—the kind of man you met in the shantytowns and in the Anatolian interior—was elected prime minister. Özal would remain prime minister throughout the decade before becoming president. He operated under the guise of the secular military, whose basic directives he did not challenge. The military would just hint and he would get the message. Moreover, Özal was a pronounced believer in the secular republic founded by Atatürk, even as he himself was publicly very religious and subtly advanced a neo-Ottoman foreign policy: stressing Islam as something that both the Turks and the large minority of ethnic Kurds inside Turkey’s borders—as well as Turkey’s Arab neighbors—could all hold in common. I met Özal on a number of occasions. He was rather uncouth. He chewed while he talked. It was said that he never learned properly how to use a knife and fork. But he was also absolutely magnetic, somewhat short in stature but with real presence. Özal was a man of the up-and-coming urbanized peasantry: brilliant and sly in his way, a man who squared many circles, believing in both Kemalism and religion, in both the Koran and a close alliance with Ronald Reagan’s America.
Özal, in fact, was a great transition figure of post-Ottoman Turkey—standing halfway between Atatürk and the present. He came after Atatürk, and after turbulent bouts of democracy and a succession of military rulers, yet before another bout of ineffectual and turbulent democracy, which would culminate dramatically in more than two decades of rule by hardcore Islamists: men who didn’t care about squaring circles with the secularists as Özal did, but only in undermining the very modern secular republic that Atatürk had founded. Özal in his very person embodied the perfect synthesis between deeply held religion and a secular state. Özal helped devout Muslims make their peace with Kemalism, as Atatürk’s philosophy is called. Alas, the Islamists who ruled Turkey after him took national politics to the opposite extreme of Atatürk.
In 2002, Recep Tayyip Erdoǧan’s Justice and Development Party (AK Party) won a resounding victory in national elections, bringing those Islamists to power on the back of a conservative and Islamic bourgeoisie that had its beginnings in the Özal era. Globalization played a role in the continued rise of this new Islamic class, as small- and medium-sized firms throughout the conservative Anatolian hinterland took advantage of the new, worldwide economic system to find markets for their products. In fact, in the early years of Erdoǧan’s rule as prime minister, his government cut a figure of moderation and technical expertise, in keeping with Erdoǧan’s own record as mayor of Istanbul back in the 1990s, when he measurably improved the water system, garbage collection, and air quality. Erdoǧan was the classic and dynamic big-city boss, raised in the poor, rough-and-tumble Istanbul neighborhood of Kasimpasa, with its dockyards and masculine culture, and its resentment of Europeanized elites. His own family was from the remote Black Sea region of northeastern Anatolia, close to the border with former Soviet Georgia. Over time, though, in the course of years and decades in power, featuring purges of more liberal and centrist party members, Erdoǧan’s autocratic tendencies, first learned as a roughneck in Kasimpasa, truly became evident. It is telling that one of the rulers Erdoǧan came to admire most was Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Erdoǧan was even said to take notes whenever he met with Putin. Both men shared a fate: neither could leave power peaceably because of wide-ranging corruption charges that would be leveled against them—and this was long before the Ukraine war.
As Erdoǧan evolved into a democratically elected autocrat, he truly Islamized Turkey: changing school curriculums, clamping down on dissenting journalists and media organs, playing with election laws in order to eventually make himself an executive president, and, most crucially, emasculating the secular military, so that if it ever again attempted a coup it would fail—exactly as happened in July 2016. At one point, Erdoǧan had a quarter of the country’s generals and admirals imprisoned.
The failed coup of July 15, 2016, was seen inside Turkey as akin to an attempted foreign invasion by a population that, having achieved near-universal literacy,[27] now feels itself beyond the coups d’état of an earlier stage of political development. It was also proof that even after so many years in power Erdoǧan still maintained popularity with a Turkish population that is more anti-Western and far more religious than it was during the Cold War, when Turkey’s membership in NATO, its friendship with the West, and its close ties with Israel could be taken for granted. Those days when the secular generals held power behind the scenes are long gone. After all, Turkey’s attempts to gain entry to the European Union have over the years been regularly rebuffed, humiliating Turkish Muslims. Then there was the abject unpopularity of America’s invasion of neighboring Iraq, which both threatened stability on Turkey’s southeastern border and raised the specter of an independent (and for Turkey, destabilizing) Kurdish state in northern Iraq. The Europeanized and whiskey-sipping secular elite in Istanbul and Ankara—the true spiritual descendants of Atatürk—could do nothing to help America, whose invasion of Iraq even they themselves opposed. This was all prologue to Erdoǧan’s Islamicized Turkey gradually moving closer to Russia and radical Arab groups.
The story of the Turkish military is telling. Formerly, time spent at NATO headquarters in Brussels and at military war colleges in the United States was fundamental to the career paths of ambitious Turkish officers. But under Erdoǧan, it has been precisely such assignments that have ended promotion prospects within the Turkish armed forces. The failed coup of 2016 led to an even more personalized emergency rule by Erdoǧan, who used it to continue remolding the military in the direction of the Iranian one. This led to mass purges of officers, including dozens of generals and admirals, as well as 18,000 officials ousted from the police and judiciary, whose loyalty seemed questionable to the Islamic authorities. Indeed, Erdoǧan’s purchase of the S-400 missile and air defense system from Putin’s Russia, in stark violation of NATO policy, was emblematic of Turkey’s drift away from Western alliance structures. In sum, the failed coup attempt of 2016 fostered further regime consolidation and a heightened sense of mission within Erdoǧan’s inner circle that, in effect, virtually ended the full-bore Kemalist epoch in Turkish history.
In 2017, Erdoǧan established an alliance with the far-right National Movement Party (MHP) so that he could govern as a nationalist Islamist, with an aggressive military approach against Kurdish minorities in neighboring Syria, Iraq, and Iran that dovetailed perfectly with his neo-Ottoman imperialism in the Middle East. Whereas Özal’s neo-Ottomanism was subtle and organic, Erdoǧan’s was militaristic. Moreover, in the years following the failed coup, Erdoǧan summarily removed roughly 70 percent of the ethnic-Kurdish district leaders in eastern and southeastern Turkey, replacing them with far more compliant figures, so that autocracy within Turkey’s official borders went hand in hand with a policy of advancing Turkey’s interests beyond those very borders, with Turkish troops in Syria and Iraq. Erdoǧan’s nationalist Islamist approach to history asserted that once Turks had fully embraced Islam they would be prepared to become the natural leaders of the entire Muslim world, in a sort of return to empire.[28] This was the core of the Ottoman mentality, which for many hundreds of years gave the Muslim world a dependable dynastic direction following the many wars over succession that had typified the early Islamic centuries under Arab leadership.
There were also acts of historical symbolism writ large. Atatürk had converted the great sixth-century Eastern Orthodox cathedral of Byzantium, Hagia Sophia, into the museum of Aya Sofya, in keeping with his secular vision of a modern Turkish republic. Erdoǧan, on July 24, 2020, the ninety-seventh anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Lausanne, which had established Turkey’s current borders, held a Muslim prayer service in Aya Sofya, newly converted from a museum back into a mosque, just as it had been during the nearly five centuries of Ottoman rule. The imperial thread was thus reestablished, rendering Atatürk’s pro-Western policy of secular modernism and rejection of empire as but an interregnum in the long march of Turkish history.
Just consider: Erdoǧan said that the “revival of the Hagia Sophia as a mosque is ushering the news for the liberation of [the] al-Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.”[29] Erdoǧan saw Turkey as the pillar of the radical Muslim Brotherhood in the whole Middle East. He provided citizenship and passports to a “dozen” members of Hamas, the radical, Gaza-based Palestinian group.[30] He dispatched five thousand Turkish soldiers to pro-Iranian Qatar to help it protect itself against moderates in the Arab world. Tellingly, when in 2015 he received Mahmoud Abbas in Ankara, the Palestinian president was flanked by an honor guard decked out in the uniform of the Ottoman soldiery.[31]
For decades, throughout much of the twentieth century, Kemalist rule had established the secular military as the guarantor of political stability, with military coups occurring every decade or so whenever democracy risked sliding into anarchy. But now there was no secular and Westernized military capable of staging a so-called corrective movement. This means that better governments and better democratic governance become absolutely essential if Turkey is to remain stable. Also essential is a peaceful solution to the Kurdish problem. And because those things seem natural but are incredibly difficult to implement, the question becomes, Where exactly does an Islamist, post-Atatürk Turkey go from here? Could there be a soft landing to Erdoǧan’s quasi-dictatorial rule?
Turkey has always been full of contradictions. Whereas Atatürk was a fierce secularist, Erdoǧan pulled Turkey back in the direction of the Islamic politics of the Middle East. As the clerical regime in neighboring Iran may begin to crumble, it will be interesting to see if it shifts Turkey back in the direction of secularism.
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I continue walking toward the Golden Horn away from the Pantokrator Monastery, past the shops with their sacks of spices outdoors on the street and their stage-lit interiors filled with more delectables. It occurs to me while walking that Erdoǧan has ruled Turkey longer than Atatürk, who established the Turkish republic in 1923 and died in 1938. Whereas Atatürk had oriented Turkey toward Europe and away from Islam, Erdoǧan oriented Turkey toward Islam and away from Europe. Or rather, Erdoǧan and particularly his former foreign minister and prime minister, Ahmet Davutoǧlu, turned Turkey back toward the world of the former Ottoman Empire: that is, toward the Balkans, the Middle East, and North Africa. “Understanding the importance of Turkey’s imperial past is essential to understanding modern Turkey,” writes Soner Cagaptay of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, adding that Erdoǧan, like the last effective Ottoman sultan, Abdul Hamid II, and the Young Turks who opposed Abdul Hamid at the beginning of the twentieth century, all had a “common goal, reviving Ottoman greatness.”[32]
The Ottoman Empire, like other early modern empires, is not coming back. But it may still be a better compass point than any other for discerning where Turkey is headed. For empire and imperialism are concepts denounced only in a guilt-ridden West. Here people take pride in such legacies.
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My hotel, the Pera Palace, practically drips with neoclassical and art nouveau surfaces, positively oriental with its gaudy, overabundant decoration. At the height of the Belle Epoque, when it was built, the Pera Palace announced itself as the last outpost of Europe on the brink of Asia. Now my somewhat shabby and picturesque-yet-impractical room is a tourist’s cliché in a city of other residences that are postmodern masterpieces. In the café I met a fashionably dressed man with a Lacoste sweater who, with his degrees from the most prestigious international universities, was a full-fledged member of the global elite. I might have met him at any number of high-level gatherings around the world, or had the same discussion with him over Zoom. My insistence on meeting him, as well as others like him, here in Turkey was an indulgence. I feel that even in an age of global communications, meeting someone in situ intensifies the interaction and allows one to concentrate especially hard on the place under discussion.
We decided to leave the hotel café and walk outside on the terrace, away from other people. Then he just started talking, gently correcting some of my preconceptions, and in the process downplaying and adding nuance to what is known about Turkey’s Islamic rulers. The political changes I had noticed were less changes than evolutions, he said. For example, Turkey, long before Erdoǧan, had never actually been a normal member of NATO. As a hybrid European–Middle Eastern country it always had its differences with the West. For example, during the first Gulf War in 1991, when the U.S. military’s ejection of Saddam Hussein’s army from Kuwait was backed by dozens of countries in Europe, the Turkish public beyond the ruling elites roundly rejected it. The big difference is not that Turkey had changed, but more crucially that the international situation had. “In terms of global leadership, we are in a transition period,” he explained, “between outright American dominance and whatever lies beyond. That means it’s a Hobbesian world, where the strong do what they want and the weak must adjust. And this guy,” continuing, with a reference to Erdoǧan, “saw power voids and kept pushing into them. And guess what, there was often no response.” As for the Erdoǧan government’s religiosity, it was the end result of the 1980 military coup, which “Sunnified” Turkey out of fear of the Shi‘ite revolution next door in Iran the year before. “It was in 1980, two decades before Erdoǧan came to power, that the Islamic genie was let out of the bottle here in Turkey.”
“You see,” he went on, “these guys in power are really provincials. Turgut Özal may have been uncouth and from the provinces. But he was educated. His wife was a liberal, who smoked and drank in public. And Özal was very much influenced by his wife. You cannot compare Özal with Tayyip Erdoǧan.”
Nevertheless, by the 2020s Erdoǧan was already boxed in. As long as there existed at least the possibility of an historic reconciliation with the ethnic Kurds, who demographically dominated southeastern Turkey and had large communities throughout all the major cities, the political parties to the left and center retained the possibility for regaining power. But the across-the-board political refusal in the elections of 2015 to allow the Kurds the right as a distinct group to political representation meant that the ethnic-Turkish nationalists now had Erdoǧan’s Islamic clique “by the balls,” since it was the nationalists’ hardline view about the Kurds that had prevailed. Erdoǧan could no longer stay in power without the far-right Nationalist Movement Party (MHP), especially after breaking with his erstwhile religious allies, the Gülenists, a Sunni Islamic social service movement established by the religious scholar Fethullah Gülen in the 1970s.[*2] In other words, Erdoǧan was already a weakened dictator at the time of my visit. And I wondered how long he would stay in power.
The upshot of the Islamic-nationalist alliance meant, according to a local contact, that the Turkish political system had finally become “unbearable.” Political legitimacy had been “totally destroyed.” For decades, even during the hair-raisingly thin electoral victories of competing political parties in the 1970s, in which one minority government replaced another, everyone still accepted the results of elections, and understood them to be generally fair and untainted. The system had held. Now it was, he repeated, “destroyed.” Beyond Erdoǧan’s base of supporters, which accounted for roughly one-third of the electorate, election results were no longer understood to be automatically fair and governments were no longer considered to be legitimate.
Meanwhile, as my friend continued his narrative, Erdoǧan and his regime have become ever more radicalized. “Whatever you write, never underestimate the effect on Erdoǧan of the silence of the entire West in the wake of the July 15, 2016, coup attempt against him. That silence changed Erdoǧan. It made him hateful,” and pushed him toward Russia’s Vladimir Putin, who immediately reached out to him with a personal phone call, and according to some reports even alerted him hours in advance of the coup attempt.[*3]
My friend concluded:
“Even if Erdoǧan wanted to leave office, he can’t anymore. After years of consolidating power, the layers of people surrounding him depend on him for their very lives.”
Thus, the question of political legitimacy in Turkey was not completely answered. And this was after decades of predominantly democratic rule.
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