Spengler: Turkey in the throes of Islamic revolution?
["Spengler" is the pseudonym of a columnist who writes for Asia Times.]
... A perfect storm of enmity has come down on the beleaguered Turkish secularists, who find themselves without friends. That is a tragedy whose consequences will spill over Turkey's borders, for the secular model established by Kemal Ataturk after World War I was the Muslim world's best hope of adapting to modernity. Many years of misbehavior by Turkey's army and security services, the core institutions of secular power, have eroded their capacity to resist an Islamist takeover.
The United States State Department, meanwhile, has found a dubious use for what it thinks is a moderate strain of political Islam. Washington apparently hopes to steer Turkey into a regional bloc with the short-term aim of calming Iraq, and a longer-term objective of fostering a Sunni alliance against Iran's ambition to foment a Shi'ite revolution in the Middle East.
By rejecting Turkey's efforts to join the European Union, France and Germany have destroyed the credibility of the secular parties who seek integration with the West. Perhaps the Europeans already have consigned Turkey to the ward for political incurables, and do not think it worthwhile to try to revive Western-oriented secularism. Turkey's liberal intellectuals, who suffered intermittent but brutal repression at the hands of the secular military, think of the Islamist government as the enemy of their enemy, if not quite their friend.
Sadly, the notion that moderate Islam will flourish in the Turkish nation demands that we believe in two myths, namely, moderate Islam and the Turkish nation. Too much effort is wasted parsing the political views of Erdogan, who began his career in the 1990s as an avowed Islamist and anti-secularist, but later espoused a muted form of Islam as leader of the Justice and Development Party (AKP). Whether Erdogan is a born-again moderate or a disguised jihadi is known only to the man himself. Islam in Turkey flourishes in full public view. At the village level, the AKP draws on the same sort of Saudi Arabian patronage that filled Pakistan with madrassas (seminaries) during the past two decades, and incubated the Wahhabi forces that have now all but buried the remnants of Pakistani secularism.
If political Islam prevails in Turkey, what will emerge is not the same country in different coloration, but a changeling, an entirely different nation. In a 1997 speech that earned him a prison term, Erdogan warned of two fundamentally different camps, the secularists who followed Kemal, and Muslims who followed sharia. These are not simply different camps, however, but different configurations of Turkish society at the molecular level. Like a hologram, Turkey offers two radically different images when viewed from different angles. Turkish Islam, the ordering of the Anatolian villages and the Istanbul slums, represents a nation radically different than the secularism of the army, the civil service, the universities and the Western-leaning elite of Istanbul. If the Islamic side of Turkey rises, the result will be unrecognizable.
Modern Turkey is a construct, not a country in the sense that Westerners understand the term; it is the rump of a multi-ethnic empire that perished in World War I, and the project of a nation advanced by a visionary leader who could not, however, pierce the sedimentary layers of ethnicity, language and history that make modern Turkey less than the sum of its parts. Turkey's army prevailed as the dominant institution of the secular state simply because no other entity could array the poor farmers of the Anatolian highlands according to the secular program.
The trouble is that there are not that enough Turks in Turkey. To replace the imperial identity of the Ottoman Empire, Kemal proposed Turkum, or Turkishness, an Anatolian national identity founded on the many civilizations that had ruled the peninsula. Ethnic identity in the sense of European nationalism informed neither the Ottoman Empire nor the Kemalist state. The Orghuz Turks who conquered the hinterlands of the Byzantine Empire during the 12th century never comprised more than a small minority of the population. At the height of their conquests during the 17th century, the Ottoman Empire ruled over more Christians than Muslims.
Kemal created modern Turkey by thwarting the attempts of Western powers to partition his country after its defeat in World War I, but at terrible cost. The 20 million population of the Ottoman Empire was reduced to perhaps 7 million (by a French government estimate) in 1924. Up to a million and a half Armenian Christians were murdered in 1914-1918 at the instigation of the Turkish government, to neutralize a population considered sympathetic to wartime adversaries. Most of the killing was done by Kurdish tribesmen. Between 1.5 million and 3 million Greek Orthodox Christians, whose ancestors had settled Asia Minor thousands of years before the Turks arrived, were expelled in 1924 at the conclusion of the Greek-Turkish War.
Modern Turkey thus began not only with the rump of an empire, but with the turnover of nearly half its 1924 population. Because Kemal's concept of Turkum requires suspension of disbelief in favor of a nonexistent national identity, Turkey has avoided a census of its minorities since 1965. Perhaps 30% of its population are Kurds, whose integration into the Turkish state is uncertain. Kurds are concentrated in eastern Turkey in an area that before 1918 was known as Western Armenia - because ethnic Kurds replaced the slaughtered Armenians. In addition, there are 3 million Circassians, 2 million Bosniaks, a million and a half Albanians, a million Georgians, and sundry smaller groups. But even within the majority characterized as "ethnic Turks", the sedimentary layers remain of millennia of contending tribes and civilizations.
The Kemalists had mixed results in their efforts to pack this ethnic and cultural jumble into a newly-designed national identity. What sometimes is called the "deep state" - the secretive Kemalist hold over military and intelligence services - may turn out to be shallow as it is brittle. One Turkish historian told me, "Like the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid, who fell 100 years ago this week because of an explosion of popular unrest, the Turkish military are the victims of their own success in creating a diversified and modern society which wants to live in a freer system. The hard hand they turned against intellectual dissenters drove sections of the westernized intelligentsia into the arms of the Islamists - and it is that alliance which is now at work to demolish both the military's influence in politics and (perhaps) the entire heritage of Kemal Ataturk." ...
Read entire article at Asia Times
... A perfect storm of enmity has come down on the beleaguered Turkish secularists, who find themselves without friends. That is a tragedy whose consequences will spill over Turkey's borders, for the secular model established by Kemal Ataturk after World War I was the Muslim world's best hope of adapting to modernity. Many years of misbehavior by Turkey's army and security services, the core institutions of secular power, have eroded their capacity to resist an Islamist takeover.
The United States State Department, meanwhile, has found a dubious use for what it thinks is a moderate strain of political Islam. Washington apparently hopes to steer Turkey into a regional bloc with the short-term aim of calming Iraq, and a longer-term objective of fostering a Sunni alliance against Iran's ambition to foment a Shi'ite revolution in the Middle East.
By rejecting Turkey's efforts to join the European Union, France and Germany have destroyed the credibility of the secular parties who seek integration with the West. Perhaps the Europeans already have consigned Turkey to the ward for political incurables, and do not think it worthwhile to try to revive Western-oriented secularism. Turkey's liberal intellectuals, who suffered intermittent but brutal repression at the hands of the secular military, think of the Islamist government as the enemy of their enemy, if not quite their friend.
Sadly, the notion that moderate Islam will flourish in the Turkish nation demands that we believe in two myths, namely, moderate Islam and the Turkish nation. Too much effort is wasted parsing the political views of Erdogan, who began his career in the 1990s as an avowed Islamist and anti-secularist, but later espoused a muted form of Islam as leader of the Justice and Development Party (AKP). Whether Erdogan is a born-again moderate or a disguised jihadi is known only to the man himself. Islam in Turkey flourishes in full public view. At the village level, the AKP draws on the same sort of Saudi Arabian patronage that filled Pakistan with madrassas (seminaries) during the past two decades, and incubated the Wahhabi forces that have now all but buried the remnants of Pakistani secularism.
If political Islam prevails in Turkey, what will emerge is not the same country in different coloration, but a changeling, an entirely different nation. In a 1997 speech that earned him a prison term, Erdogan warned of two fundamentally different camps, the secularists who followed Kemal, and Muslims who followed sharia. These are not simply different camps, however, but different configurations of Turkish society at the molecular level. Like a hologram, Turkey offers two radically different images when viewed from different angles. Turkish Islam, the ordering of the Anatolian villages and the Istanbul slums, represents a nation radically different than the secularism of the army, the civil service, the universities and the Western-leaning elite of Istanbul. If the Islamic side of Turkey rises, the result will be unrecognizable.
Modern Turkey is a construct, not a country in the sense that Westerners understand the term; it is the rump of a multi-ethnic empire that perished in World War I, and the project of a nation advanced by a visionary leader who could not, however, pierce the sedimentary layers of ethnicity, language and history that make modern Turkey less than the sum of its parts. Turkey's army prevailed as the dominant institution of the secular state simply because no other entity could array the poor farmers of the Anatolian highlands according to the secular program.
The trouble is that there are not that enough Turks in Turkey. To replace the imperial identity of the Ottoman Empire, Kemal proposed Turkum, or Turkishness, an Anatolian national identity founded on the many civilizations that had ruled the peninsula. Ethnic identity in the sense of European nationalism informed neither the Ottoman Empire nor the Kemalist state. The Orghuz Turks who conquered the hinterlands of the Byzantine Empire during the 12th century never comprised more than a small minority of the population. At the height of their conquests during the 17th century, the Ottoman Empire ruled over more Christians than Muslims.
Kemal created modern Turkey by thwarting the attempts of Western powers to partition his country after its defeat in World War I, but at terrible cost. The 20 million population of the Ottoman Empire was reduced to perhaps 7 million (by a French government estimate) in 1924. Up to a million and a half Armenian Christians were murdered in 1914-1918 at the instigation of the Turkish government, to neutralize a population considered sympathetic to wartime adversaries. Most of the killing was done by Kurdish tribesmen. Between 1.5 million and 3 million Greek Orthodox Christians, whose ancestors had settled Asia Minor thousands of years before the Turks arrived, were expelled in 1924 at the conclusion of the Greek-Turkish War.
Modern Turkey thus began not only with the rump of an empire, but with the turnover of nearly half its 1924 population. Because Kemal's concept of Turkum requires suspension of disbelief in favor of a nonexistent national identity, Turkey has avoided a census of its minorities since 1965. Perhaps 30% of its population are Kurds, whose integration into the Turkish state is uncertain. Kurds are concentrated in eastern Turkey in an area that before 1918 was known as Western Armenia - because ethnic Kurds replaced the slaughtered Armenians. In addition, there are 3 million Circassians, 2 million Bosniaks, a million and a half Albanians, a million Georgians, and sundry smaller groups. But even within the majority characterized as "ethnic Turks", the sedimentary layers remain of millennia of contending tribes and civilizations.
The Kemalists had mixed results in their efforts to pack this ethnic and cultural jumble into a newly-designed national identity. What sometimes is called the "deep state" - the secretive Kemalist hold over military and intelligence services - may turn out to be shallow as it is brittle. One Turkish historian told me, "Like the Ottoman Sultan Abdulhamid, who fell 100 years ago this week because of an explosion of popular unrest, the Turkish military are the victims of their own success in creating a diversified and modern society which wants to live in a freer system. The hard hand they turned against intellectual dissenters drove sections of the westernized intelligentsia into the arms of the Islamists - and it is that alliance which is now at work to demolish both the military's influence in politics and (perhaps) the entire heritage of Kemal Ataturk." ...