Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Flags, Veils And Sharia

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Flags, Veils And Sharia

    FLAGS, VEILS AND SHARIA

    >From The Economist
    Jul 17th 2008
    ANKARA

    Behind the court case against Turkey's ruling party lies an existential
    question: how Islamist has the country become?

    EPA A MARBLE fountain held up by bare-breasted maidens in the
    eastern city of Kars is a source of pride for the city's mayor,
    Naif Alibeyoglu. Yet last November the sculpture vanished a few days
    before a planned visit to Kars by Turkey's prime minister, Recep
    Tayyip Erdogan. Fearful of incurring the wrath of Mr Erdogan and
    his mildly Islamist Justice and Development Party (AKP), the mayor
    (himself an AKP man) reportedly arranged for its removal.

    In the event, the prime minister never arrived--and the fountain came
    back. The incident may be testimony to the prudery of Mr Erdogan, and
    of the AKP more broadly. But could it also be evidence of their desire
    to steer Turkey towards sharia law? The country's chief prosecutor,
    Abdurrahman Yalcinkaya, might say so. In March he petitioned the
    constitutional court to ban the AKP and to bar Mr Erdogan and 70
    other named AKP officials, including the president, Abdullah Gul, from
    politics, on the ground that they are covertly seeking to establish
    an Islamist theocracy.

    Turkey has been in upheaval ever since. After hearings earlier this
    month, a verdict is expected soon, maybe in early August. Most
    observers expect it to go against t he AKP. Turkey has banned no
    fewer than 24 parties in the past 50 years, including the AKP's two
    forerunners. In 23 of these cases, the European Court of Human Rights
    ruled that the bans violated its charter.

    Yet Mr Yalcinkaya's indictment lacks hard evidence to show that the
    AKP is working to reverse secular rule. Much of his case rests on the
    words, not the actions, of Mr Erdogan and his lieutenants. Among
    Mr Erdogan's listed "crimes" is his opinion that "Turkey as a
    modern Muslim nation can serve as an example for the harmony of
    civilisations." That is hardly a call for jihad. The AKP has promoted
    Islamic values, but it has never attempted to pass laws inspired by
    the Koran.

    None of this seems to impress Turkey's meddlesome generals, who are
    widely believed to be the driving force behind the "judicial coup"
    against the AKP. This follows the "e-coup" they threatened last year by
    issuing a warning on the internet against making Mr Gul president. Some
    renegade generals are also involved in the so-called Ergenekon group;
    86 members were charged this week with plotting a coup (see article).

    The generals and their allies believe that nothing less than the
    future of Ataturk's secular republic is at stake. Similar rumblings
    were heard when the now defunct pro-Islamic Welfare party first came
    to power in 1996.

    It was ejected a yea r later in a bloodless "velvet coup" and banned
    on similar charges to those now levelled at the AKP. But with each
    intervention the Islamists come back stronger.

    Unlike their pro-secular rivals, Islamists have been able to reinvent
    themselves to appeal to a growing base of voters. Nobody has done this
    more successfully than Mr Erdogan with the AKP. An Islamic cleric
    by training, Mr Erdogan became Istanbul's mayor when Welfare won a
    municipal election in 1994. He was booted out in 1997, and jailed
    briefly a year later for reciting a nationalist poem in public that
    was deemed to incite "religious hatred".

    It was a turning-point. Mr Erdogan defected from Welfare with fellow
    moderates to found the AKP in 2001. He and his friends said that they
    no longer believed in mixing religion with politics and that Turkish
    membership of the European Union was the AKP's chief goal. And when the
    AKP won the general election of November 2002, it formed a single-party
    government that did something unusual for Turkey: it kept its word.

    The death penalty was abolished; the army's powers were trimmed;
    women were given more rights than at any time since Kemal Ataturk,
    the founder of the secular Turkish state, made both sexes equal before
    the law. Despite Mr Erdogan's calls for women to have "at least three
    children", abortion remains legal and easy. This silent revolution
    =0 Aeventually shamed the EU into opening formal membership talks
    with Turkey in 2005, an achievement that had eluded all the AKP's
    predecessors in government.

    The government's economic record was impressive, too. The economy
    bounced back from its nadir in 2001, growing by a steady average
    annual rate of 6% or more. Inflation was tamed (though it has crept
    back up recently).

    Above all, foreign direct investment, previously paltry, hit record
    levels.

    For a while, Turkey seemed to have become a stable and prosperous
    sort of place. That is surely why 47% of voters backed the AKP in
    July 2007, a big jump from only 34% in 2002.

    Many see the campaign to topple the AKP as part of a long battle
    pitting an old guard, used to monopolising wealth and power, against
    a rising class of pious Anatolians symbolised by the AKP. Others
    say it is mostly about an army that believes soldiers, not elected
    politicians, should have the final say over how the country is run.

    Yet the real struggle "is between Islam and modernity", says Ismail
    Kara, a respected Islamic theologian. Adapting to the modern world
    without compromising their religious values is a dilemma that has long
    vexed Muslims. For Turkey the challenge is also to craft an identity
    that can embrace all its citizens, whether devout Muslims, hard-core
    secularists, Alevis or Kurds. If the generals had their way, everyone
    would be happy to call himself a Turk, all would refrain from public
    displays of piety and nobody would ever challenge their authority. But
    the Kemalist straitjacket no longer fits the modern country. Opinion
    polls suggest that most Turks now identify themselves primarily as
    Muslims, not as Turks. The AKP did not create this mindset: rather,
    it was born from it.

    The caliph of Istanbul Islam has been intertwined with Turkishness ever
    since the Ottoman Sultan adopted the title of "Caliph", or spiritual
    leader, of the world's Muslims almost six centuries ago. When Ataturk
    abolished the caliphate in 1924 and launched his secular revolution,
    he did not efface piety; he drove it underground. Turkey's brand
    of secularism is not about separating religion from the state, as
    in France. It is about subordinating religion to the state. This is
    done through the diyanet, the state-run body that appoints imams to
    Turkey's 77,000 mosques and tells them what to preach, even sometimes
    writing their sermons.

    In the early days of Ataturk's republic, the facade of modernity was
    propped up by zealous Kemalists, who fanned out on civilising missions
    across Anatolia. They would drink wine and dance the Charleston at
    officers' clubs in places like Kars. "My grandmother, she told me
    about the balls, the beautiful dresses. Kars was such a modern place
    then," sighs Arzu Orhankazi, a feminist activist. In truth, life
    outside=2 0the cities continued much as before: deeply traditional
    and desperately poor.

    A big reason why Anatolia seemed less Islamist in the old days is
    because it was home to a large and vibrant community of Christians. But
    this demographic balance was brutally overturned by the mass killings
    and expulsions of Armenians and Greeks in the late 19th and early 20th
    centuries. Take Tokat, a leafy northern Anatolian town where Armenians
    made up nearly a third of the population before 1915. The only trace
    that remains of a once thriving Armenian community is a derelict
    cemetery overgrown with weeds and desecrated by treasure-hunting
    locals.

    Much of this history is overlooked by the secular elite. Pressed
    for evidence of creeping Islamisation under the AKP, they point
    to the growing number of women who wear the headscarf, which is
    proscribed as a symbol of Islamic militancy in state-run institutions
    and schools. Mr Erdogan's attempt to lift the ban for universities,
    which was later overturned by the constitutional court, is a big part
    of Mr Yalcinkaya's case against him and the AKP.

    Yet surveys suggest that, except for a small group of militant
    pro-secularists, most Turks do not oppose Islamic headgear, least of
    all in universities. Its proliferation probably has little to do with
    Islamist fervour, but is linked to the influx of rural Anatolians into
    towns and cities. The exodus from the countryside accelerated under=2
    0 Turgut Ozal, a former prime minister who liberalised the economy in
    the early 1980s. For conservative families, covering their daughters'
    heads became a way of protecting them in a new and alien world.

    Once urbanisation is complete the headscarf will begin to fade, says
    Faruk Birtek, a sociologist at Istanbul's Bogazici University. Bogazici
    was always refreshingly unbothered by students with headscarves. But
    the rules were tightened in the 1990s. And around the time the
    constitutional court in June overturned the new AKP law to let women
    with headscarves attend university, Bogazici's liberal female director
    was squeezed out.

    Like many, Summeye Kavuncu, a sociology student at Bogazici, has been
    caught in the net. She complains that her stomach "gets all knotty each
    time I go to university. I no longer know whether to keep my scarf
    on or to take it off. The secularists look upon us as cockroaches,
    backward creatures who blot their landscape." Few would guess that
    Ms Kavuncu belongs to a band of pious activists who dare to speak up
    for gays and transvestites.

    Social and class snobbery may partly drive the secularists'
    contempt for their pious peers. But it is ignorance that drives their
    fear. Bridging these worlds can be tricky, "because Islam is not like
    other religions, it's a 24-hour lifestyle," comments Yilmaz Ensaroglu,
    an Islamic intellectual. "Devout Musl ims pray five times a day."

    Wine, women and schools The biggest fault-lines in Turkey's sharpening
    secular/religious divide concern alcohol, women and education. When
    Welfare rose to power in the 1990s, one of its first acts was to ban
    booze in restaurants run by municipalities under its control. Party
    officials argued that pious citizens had the right to affordable
    leisure space that did not offend their values.

    Some AKP mayors have pushed this line further. They want to exile
    drinkers to "red zones" outside their cities. A newly prosperous
    class of devout Muslims is creating its own gated communities, and
    a growing number of hotels boast segregated beaches and no liquor. A
    survey shows that the number of such retreats has quadrupled under the
    AKP. Taha Erdem, a respected pollster, says the number of women wearing
    the turban, the least revealing headscarf of all, has quadrupled too.

    All this is feeding secularist paranoia about creeping Islam. Are
    these fears justified? In the big cities conservative Anatolians
    are expanding their living space. But this is not at the secularists'
    expense. Life for urban middle-class Turks, and certainly for the rich,
    continues much as before. It is in rural backwaters that freewheeling
    Turks fall prey to what Serif Mardin, a respected sociologist, calls
    "neighbourhood pressure". For instance, Tarsus, a sleepy eastern
    Mediterranean town (and birthplace o f St Paul), made headlines
    recently when two teenage girls were attacked by syringe-wielding
    assailants who sprayed their legs with an acid-like substance because
    their skirts were "too short".

    Habits in the workplace are changing too. Female school teachers
    have been reprimanded for wearing short-sleeved blouses. During the
    Ramadan fast last year the governor's office in Kars stopped serving
    tea for a while.

    Secular Turks contend that Islam will inevitably wrest more space from
    their lives and must be reined in now. With no credible opposition
    in sight, many look to the army as secularism's last defender.

    So do many of Turkey's estimated 15m Alevis, who practise an
    idiosyncratic form of Islam: they do not pray in mosques, they are not
    teetotal and their women do not cover their heads. The government has
    not kept its promise formally to recognise Alevi houses of worship,
    called cemevler. Nor has it heeded Alevi demands for their children
    to be exempted from compulsory religious-education classes that are
    dominated by Sunni Islam. "There is a systematic campaign to brainwash
    us, to make us Sunnis," complains Muharrem Erkan, an Alevi activist
    in Tokat.

    The battle for Turkey's soul is being waged most fiercely in the
    country's schools. Egitim-Sen, a leftist teachers' union, charges that
    Islam has been permeating textbooks under the AKP. Darwin's theory of

    evolution is being whittled away and creationism is seeping
    in. Islamist fraternities, or tarikat, continue to ensnare students
    by offering free accommodation. The quid pro quo is that they fast
    and pray, and girls cover their heads.

    Yet the biggest boost to religious education came from the army
    itself, after it seized power for the third time in 1980. Communism
    was the enemy at the time, so the generals encouraged Islam
    as an antidote. Religious teaching became mandatory. Islamic
    clerical-training schools, known as imam hatip, mushroomed.

    Another example of how army meddling goes awry is Hizbullah, Turkey's
    deadliest home-grown Islamic terrorist outfit. Hizbullah (no relation
    to its Lebanese namesake) is alleged to have been encouraged by rogue
    security forces in the late 1980s to fight separatist PKK rebels in the
    Kurdish south-east. The group spiralled out of control until police
    raids in 2001 knocked it out of action. But not entirely. Former
    Hizbullah militants are said to have regrouped in cells linked to
    al-Qaeda, and took part in the 2003 bombings of Jewish and British
    targets in Istanbul.

    Banning the AKP could strengthen the hand of such extremists,
    who share the fierce secularists' belief that Islam and democracy
    cannot co-exist. If instead the AKP stayed in power, that would
    bring Islamists closer to the mainstream. "Six years in government
    has tempered even the most radical AKP members,8 0 comments Mr
    Ensaroglu. True enough. AKP members of parliament wear Zegna suits
    and happily shake women's hands; their wives get nose jobs and watch
    football matches; their children are more likely to study English
    than the Koran.

    Had Mr Erdogan made an effort to reach out to secular Turks, "we might
    not be where we are today," concedes a senior AKP official. He missed
    several chances. The first came last autumn when the AKP was trying
    to patch together a new constitution to replace the one written by
    the generals in the 1980s. Mr Erdogan never bothered to consult his
    secular opponents. He ignored them again when passing his law to
    let girls wear headscarves at universities. Critics say that his big
    election win turned his head.

    "Erdogan accepts no advice and no criticism," whispers an AKP
    deputy. "He's become a tyrant."

    Maybe he has. But that does not mean he deserves to be barred from
    politics, and his party banned.

    From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
Working...
X