How secular Turkey walks the tightrope
Dec. 10, 2006
Toronto Star
Democratic & Islamist | Handling of headscarf ban offers new insight on how pragmatic ruling party is courting the European Union and keeping military watchdogs at bay while staying true to its Muslim roots.
ISTANBUL
At the entrance to Marmara University, young Muslim women stream into a booth for a compulsory costume change that strikes at their sense of identity.
The transformation is simple — the removal of headscarves — but for the Turkish state and many of the students involved, the act is profound.
"It makes me feel suppressed," says student Fatma Saglam, 20, moments before disappearing into the booth.
The law banning headscarves in government offices and universities is jealously guarded by powerful elites as a pillar of Turkey's officially secular status. It forces some women to sacrifice their education rather than compromise their Islamic beliefs. Others emerge from the booth with wigs or uncovered hair.
"In Turkey, secular means you have to live according to how they want you to live. You have to throw your religion away," says Hacer Akgunler, an English-language student who replaced her headscarf with a hood.
The headscarf ban has been around for years. What's new is the decision by the ruling Justice and Development party to avoid a showdown over the law, despite the party's Islamist political roots and promise to remove the ban when swept to power four years ago.
Political survival is a strong incentive: Turkey's military has deposed past governments it considered too Islamic and recent grumblings from generals have raised fears of another coup.
But the party's tentative approach on the headscarf issue also illustrates Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's pragmatic approach, one some observers consider a model for eventually reconciling Islam and democracy.
Past Islamist parties have tested the tolerance of generals by pressing to make the state more religious. Erdogan, whose wife wears a headscarf, focuses instead on increasing individual and religious freedoms by making Turkey more democratic.
MP Egeman Bagis, Erdogan's foreign policy adviser, puts it this way: "I defend a woman's right to wear a headscarf as much as I defend a woman's right to wear a miniskirt."
The approach seems to coincide with recent poll findings. They indicate that Islam plays a significant role in Turkish lives, but most see it as a matter of personal choice, not legislation.
The percentage of Turks who define their identity primarily as Muslims has increased to 46 per cent from 36 per cent seven years ago.
But sentiment in favour of imposing Islamic sharia law has declined to 9 per cent from 21 per cent, according to the poll by the respected Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation.
And while the number of women wearing headscarves has been declining, more than two-thirds of those questioned said the ban in universities and government offices should be lifted.
Conditions set by the European Union for Turkey's possible entry into the EU have helped Erdogan pursue his agenda and implement significant reforms, but this nation of 70 million people remains a volatile work in progress.
As a NATO member long considered a strategic bridge between East and West, Turkey's stability could depend on how deftly Erdogan manoeuvres toward next year's parliamentary and presidential elections.
Next spring, MPs will select a president to replace staunch secularist Ahmet Necdet Sezer, whose veto power and control of top appointments gives the job considerable political clout.
Erdogan hasn't ruled out seeking the post, and with his comfortable majority in parliament, it's his for the taking.
The possibility of an Islamist-rooted party controlling both the executive and legislative branches has increased military anxieties and fuelled nationalist suspicions of a "hidden agenda."
The new head of Turkey's military, hawkish Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, recently warned of Islamists who reject the separation of state and religion.
"There is a reactionary threat in Turkey," Buyukanit said in an October address at the Istanbul War Academy, calling for "every kind of measure" to stop it.
The military earlier backed a protest that saw tens of thousands of pro-secular Turks calling on the government to resign.
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`I defend a woman's right to wear a headscarf as much as I defend a woman's right to wear a miniskirt'
Egeman Bagis, Justice and Development party MP and foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The demonstration was sparked when a gunman burst into the country's top administrative court in May and shot its judges — killing one and wounding four — because they upheld the headscarf ban.
"It's a dangerous time," says Murat Belge, a leading Turkish scholar and social critic.
"There may be another military intervention."
The military's self-appointed role as defender of secularism dates back to the founding of modern Turkey in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, Ataturk considered Islam incompatible with the goal of developing a modern European state.
He ended the Islamic caliphate, got rid of religious courts, secularized schools, gave women the vote and replaced the Arabic writing system with Latin script. He also spawned an enduring personality cult that upholds Western ways even through his ubiquitous portraits, which usually show him in a tuxedo and bow tie.
Multi-party politics were introduced in 1947 and the first Islamist party came on the scene 23 years later. Initially known as the National Order, led by Necmettin Erbakan, it became an influential member of coalition governments despite being repeatedly banned and reincarnated under different names over the next three decades.
The military intervened to remove governments four times during the past 50 years, most recently in 1997, after an Erbakan-led government was deemed too Islamist.
As an Erbakan disciple, Erdogan needs no reminders of the sensitivities involved. In 1997, after serving a term as Istanbul's first Islamist mayor, he was jailed for reciting an Islamist poem at a rally and proclaiming Islam as his guide.
Four years later, he split from yet another of Erbakan's party to form Justice and Development with other reform-minded Islamists. Soon after, the party capitalized on public outrage over government corruption and won an almost two-thirds majority in the 550-seat parliament in November 2002 elections.
Erdogan has since treaded carefully, reining in the party's hard-line religious faction in an attempt to develop the Islamic equivalent of Christian Democratic parties across Europe. In 2004, when a proposed law criminalizing adultery seemed to confirm the worst fears of secular nationalists, Erdogan quietly abandoned it.
His political agility extends to juggling Turkey's strong alliance with the United States and Israel while forging stronger ties with Iran and Syria.
To the annoyance of some Arab states, Turkey has long had a "special relationship" with Israel, including a 1996 deal for Israeli fighter pilots to train in Turkish airspace and bilateral trade of $2 billion (U.S.) a year.
Erdogan travelled to the United States specifically to meet Jewish American leaders, key allies in lobbying against repeated attempts by some U.S. lawmakers to label the 1915 Ottoman Turk massacre of Armenians a genocide.
Things took a turn for the worse in 2004, when Erdogan accused Israel of "state terrorism" against the Palestinians in Gaza.
By then, Turkey's relations with the U.S. had reached an all-time low after Erdogan's party blocked a U.S. request to launch a northern invasion of Iraq from Turkish soil in 2003.
Ankara was increasingly anxious about Kurdish rebel groups waging attacks on Turkey from bases in northern Iraq and wanted U.S. troops there to put an end to them. Erdogan asked for a meeting with President George W. Bush but was refused.
A leading power broker in Turkey advised Erdogan to first patch up his relationship with Israel's then-prime minister, Ariel Sharon.
"I told him he had to go to Jerusalem, shake hands with Sharon and once that picture was published in the American press, Bush would invite him. That's exactly what happened," said the power broker, who negotiated Erdogan's meeting with Sharon in May 2005 and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Pragmatic resolve also saw the Turkish government meet some tough conditions for European Union entry talks to begin. It ended the military's control of powerful public agencies, placed the defence budget under parliamentary scrutiny, abolished the death penalty, and allowed instruction and broadcast in languages other than Turkish — a move aimed at improving the rights of its Kurdish minority.
Officially, the military supports Turkey's EU entry bid as the logical result of Ataturk's Westernizing vision. Privately, analysts say the generals are divided by a basic formula: more democracy, less power for them.
EU entry talks have bogged down in the decades-old dispute between Turkey and Greece over Cyprus. More serious still is growing resistance in Europe to a Muslim country joining the club.
Some European leaders have made Turkey's entry far more uncertain by promising voters a referendum on the matter. The Turkish response has been a significant drop in support for joining the EU and a more difficult political environment for reforms.
The continent Erdogan was looking to for support may instead be throwing the generals a lifeline.
Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.
Toronto Star
Democratic & Islamist | Handling of headscarf ban offers new insight on how pragmatic ruling party is courting the European Union and keeping military watchdogs at bay while staying true to its Muslim roots.
ISTANBUL
At the entrance to Marmara University, young Muslim women stream into a booth for a compulsory costume change that strikes at their sense of identity.
The transformation is simple — the removal of headscarves — but for the Turkish state and many of the students involved, the act is profound.
"It makes me feel suppressed," says student Fatma Saglam, 20, moments before disappearing into the booth.
The law banning headscarves in government offices and universities is jealously guarded by powerful elites as a pillar of Turkey's officially secular status. It forces some women to sacrifice their education rather than compromise their Islamic beliefs. Others emerge from the booth with wigs or uncovered hair.
"In Turkey, secular means you have to live according to how they want you to live. You have to throw your religion away," says Hacer Akgunler, an English-language student who replaced her headscarf with a hood.
The headscarf ban has been around for years. What's new is the decision by the ruling Justice and Development party to avoid a showdown over the law, despite the party's Islamist political roots and promise to remove the ban when swept to power four years ago.
Political survival is a strong incentive: Turkey's military has deposed past governments it considered too Islamic and recent grumblings from generals have raised fears of another coup.
But the party's tentative approach on the headscarf issue also illustrates Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's pragmatic approach, one some observers consider a model for eventually reconciling Islam and democracy.
Past Islamist parties have tested the tolerance of generals by pressing to make the state more religious. Erdogan, whose wife wears a headscarf, focuses instead on increasing individual and religious freedoms by making Turkey more democratic.
MP Egeman Bagis, Erdogan's foreign policy adviser, puts it this way: "I defend a woman's right to wear a headscarf as much as I defend a woman's right to wear a miniskirt."
The approach seems to coincide with recent poll findings. They indicate that Islam plays a significant role in Turkish lives, but most see it as a matter of personal choice, not legislation.
The percentage of Turks who define their identity primarily as Muslims has increased to 46 per cent from 36 per cent seven years ago.
But sentiment in favour of imposing Islamic sharia law has declined to 9 per cent from 21 per cent, according to the poll by the respected Turkish Economic and Social Studies Foundation.
And while the number of women wearing headscarves has been declining, more than two-thirds of those questioned said the ban in universities and government offices should be lifted.
Conditions set by the European Union for Turkey's possible entry into the EU have helped Erdogan pursue his agenda and implement significant reforms, but this nation of 70 million people remains a volatile work in progress.
As a NATO member long considered a strategic bridge between East and West, Turkey's stability could depend on how deftly Erdogan manoeuvres toward next year's parliamentary and presidential elections.
Next spring, MPs will select a president to replace staunch secularist Ahmet Necdet Sezer, whose veto power and control of top appointments gives the job considerable political clout.
Erdogan hasn't ruled out seeking the post, and with his comfortable majority in parliament, it's his for the taking.
The possibility of an Islamist-rooted party controlling both the executive and legislative branches has increased military anxieties and fuelled nationalist suspicions of a "hidden agenda."
The new head of Turkey's military, hawkish Gen. Yasar Buyukanit, recently warned of Islamists who reject the separation of state and religion.
"There is a reactionary threat in Turkey," Buyukanit said in an October address at the Istanbul War Academy, calling for "every kind of measure" to stop it.
The military earlier backed a protest that saw tens of thousands of pro-secular Turks calling on the government to resign.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`I defend a woman's right to wear a headscarf as much as I defend a woman's right to wear a miniskirt'
Egeman Bagis, Justice and Development party MP and foreign policy adviser to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The demonstration was sparked when a gunman burst into the country's top administrative court in May and shot its judges — killing one and wounding four — because they upheld the headscarf ban.
"It's a dangerous time," says Murat Belge, a leading Turkish scholar and social critic.
"There may be another military intervention."
The military's self-appointed role as defender of secularism dates back to the founding of modern Turkey in 1923 by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk. After the defeat of the Ottoman Empire in World War I, Ataturk considered Islam incompatible with the goal of developing a modern European state.
He ended the Islamic caliphate, got rid of religious courts, secularized schools, gave women the vote and replaced the Arabic writing system with Latin script. He also spawned an enduring personality cult that upholds Western ways even through his ubiquitous portraits, which usually show him in a tuxedo and bow tie.
Multi-party politics were introduced in 1947 and the first Islamist party came on the scene 23 years later. Initially known as the National Order, led by Necmettin Erbakan, it became an influential member of coalition governments despite being repeatedly banned and reincarnated under different names over the next three decades.
The military intervened to remove governments four times during the past 50 years, most recently in 1997, after an Erbakan-led government was deemed too Islamist.
As an Erbakan disciple, Erdogan needs no reminders of the sensitivities involved. In 1997, after serving a term as Istanbul's first Islamist mayor, he was jailed for reciting an Islamist poem at a rally and proclaiming Islam as his guide.
Four years later, he split from yet another of Erbakan's party to form Justice and Development with other reform-minded Islamists. Soon after, the party capitalized on public outrage over government corruption and won an almost two-thirds majority in the 550-seat parliament in November 2002 elections.
Erdogan has since treaded carefully, reining in the party's hard-line religious faction in an attempt to develop the Islamic equivalent of Christian Democratic parties across Europe. In 2004, when a proposed law criminalizing adultery seemed to confirm the worst fears of secular nationalists, Erdogan quietly abandoned it.
His political agility extends to juggling Turkey's strong alliance with the United States and Israel while forging stronger ties with Iran and Syria.
To the annoyance of some Arab states, Turkey has long had a "special relationship" with Israel, including a 1996 deal for Israeli fighter pilots to train in Turkish airspace and bilateral trade of $2 billion (U.S.) a year.
Erdogan travelled to the United States specifically to meet Jewish American leaders, key allies in lobbying against repeated attempts by some U.S. lawmakers to label the 1915 Ottoman Turk massacre of Armenians a genocide.
Things took a turn for the worse in 2004, when Erdogan accused Israel of "state terrorism" against the Palestinians in Gaza.
By then, Turkey's relations with the U.S. had reached an all-time low after Erdogan's party blocked a U.S. request to launch a northern invasion of Iraq from Turkish soil in 2003.
Ankara was increasingly anxious about Kurdish rebel groups waging attacks on Turkey from bases in northern Iraq and wanted U.S. troops there to put an end to them. Erdogan asked for a meeting with President George W. Bush but was refused.
A leading power broker in Turkey advised Erdogan to first patch up his relationship with Israel's then-prime minister, Ariel Sharon.
"I told him he had to go to Jerusalem, shake hands with Sharon and once that picture was published in the American press, Bush would invite him. That's exactly what happened," said the power broker, who negotiated Erdogan's meeting with Sharon in May 2005 and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Pragmatic resolve also saw the Turkish government meet some tough conditions for European Union entry talks to begin. It ended the military's control of powerful public agencies, placed the defence budget under parliamentary scrutiny, abolished the death penalty, and allowed instruction and broadcast in languages other than Turkish — a move aimed at improving the rights of its Kurdish minority.
Officially, the military supports Turkey's EU entry bid as the logical result of Ataturk's Westernizing vision. Privately, analysts say the generals are divided by a basic formula: more democracy, less power for them.
EU entry talks have bogged down in the decades-old dispute between Turkey and Greece over Cyprus. More serious still is growing resistance in Europe to a Muslim country joining the club.
Some European leaders have made Turkey's entry far more uncertain by promising voters a referendum on the matter. The Turkish response has been a significant drop in support for joining the EU and a more difficult political environment for reforms.
The continent Erdogan was looking to for support may instead be throwing the generals a lifeline.
Note: Above are excerpts from the article. The full article appears here. Clarifications and comments by me are contained in {}. Deletions are marked by [...]. The bold emphasis is mine.
Labels: Turkey
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