What went right

Turkey's promising experiment with Muslim democracy

By Laura Secor, Globe Staff, 2/9/2003

OR THE LAST YEAR and a half, American pundits have busily thumbed through the Koran and pronounced upon the incompatibility of the world's third great monotheism with a rights-based democracy. Political Islam is an intolerant creed at its core, many concluded,one whose most fanatical excrescences pose a grave danger to the stability of the planet.

So why the strange silence when Turkey, the United States' closest Muslim ally, elected a new government with Islamist roots this November? To insist that the victorious Justice and Development Party (AKP) will place Turkey on the front-lines of a so-called clash of civilizations would be laughable. In fact, if there were ever a case against equating Muslim politics with intolerance and extremism, it comes from Turkey, a nearly all-Muslim nation where public religious expression is rigidly constricted.

The newly elected AKP government rejects the label "Islamist," and does not seek to impose religious law. Rather, it describes itself as "Muslim Democrat," along the lines of Germany's center-right Christian Democrats. Nonetheless, AKP is the successor to two parties-the Virtue Party and the Welfare Party-that were banned for allegedly attempting to subvert Turkey's secular state. In 1997, the army bloodlessly evicted Welfare Party Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan from office in what is known as the "postmodern coup." (More recently, the AKP raised a brief ruckus when the new speaker of parliament's wife violated protocol by attending an official event wearing a veil. A few days later, military leaders held a three-minute conversation with the speaker, an AKP member. The Turkish press dubbed this the "postmodern visit.")

The AKP is more moderate and less religiously oriented than were its Islamist predecessors. Led by the charismatic former Istanbul mayor Tayyip Erdogan and pro-European economist Abdullah Gul, the new government has set its sights on joining the European Union. It has taken steps toward ending torture in Turkish prisons. It has softened Turkey's stance on the reunification of Cyprus, and toes a careful rhetorical line between criticizing and cooperating with US war plans in Iraq. What's more, its leaders come from humble backgrounds, eschew the corruption endemic in Turkish politics, and have pledged to repair Turkey's battered economy.

Can the AKP successfully combine this forward-looking political program with its appeal to the traditional values of the Anatolian heartland? At a time of economic malaise and decreasing confidence in the existing political parties, the AKP has attracted voters with a wide range of expectations. According to Cenap Nuhrat of Istanbul's Social Research Center, the election data show that AKP picked up a significant number of votes from secular parties of the left and center-left. Notes Nuhrat by e-mail, "The fact is that there are millions of people who voted for AKP not because it is a religious party, but because they wanted to make a new beginning with a new party."

When the government of Turkey banned first the Welfare Party and then the Virtue Party in the 1990s, Boston University anthropologist Jenny B. White, who has studied Turkish Islamism for 28 years, was surprised by the Islamists' resilience. The actual parties were dispensible, insisted her research subjects. They were merely vehicles for a larger and more deeply rooted movement. In her new book, "Islamist Mobilization in Turkey," White set out to uncover those roots in Umraniye, a working-class neighborhood of rural migrants to Istanbul.

What White found was that in a country where politics has always been a top-down affair, the Islamists built their networks on the traditional Turkish ethic of mutual obligation among neighbors. The movement's parties set up headquarters within impoverished communities and offered aid-from home construction and after-school tutoring to job training-according to the needs of individual families. Its ranks swelled with local residents. And rather than talk down to working-class people or demand that they suppress their faith, the party spoke to the people in their own vernacular, holding meetings where speakers explained the party's social justice agenda in terms of Koranic injunctions to neighborly kindness. In this way, the Islamists made common cause with a populace that saw Turkey's political class as detached, corrupt, and hostile to their way of life.

But AKP, like Welfare and Virtue before it, is not just a working-class party. It is also the party of a new Muslim elite. As White recounts, the liberalization of the Turkish economy after 1980 propelled some working class Turks swiftly upward, creating a new business elite that is openly pious. Islamist politicians did not quote the Koran to this crowd. Instead, they spoke of privatization, entrepreneurship, and universal human rights, particularly the right of veiled women to attend universities and participate in the public sphere.

Religious women across Turkey's class divide support the right to veil in public, even though Muslim piety may imply very different experiences for migrant women in Umraniye and for women in Istanbul's upscale quarters. The women of the Muslim elite veil (in Turkey, veiling takes the form of the headscarf), but they do so in increasingly inventive and fashionable ways. One recent visitor to Istanbul reports a vogue for strappy sandals, flowing tunics, and leopard-print headscarves. "The ones who are wealthy, the wives of this new elitethey don't stay at home," White says. "They're out shopping. They wear these chichi outfits and they go to the Bahamas. They don't wear bikinis, but neither do they follow a patriarchal, restrictive lifestyle."

Meanwhile, the working-class women White studied are unlikely to face the problem of being expelled from medical school because of their headscarves. They have to obtain permission from their husbands in order to leave their homes; they adhere to strict sex segregation in many public and private settings, and are often forbidden to work after marriage.

Can one political party bridge the gulf in values and lifestyles that divides even Turkey's devout? The Welfare and Virtue parties spoke different languages to different constituencies. Now AKP "has to put its money where its mouth is," says White. So far, White believes the party has chosen to emphasize its rights-based agenda, which is more palatable to the elite, to secularists, and to the West. The AKP party's current platform is thick with the language of human rights, civil society, and democratic valuesalthough its introduction ends with the words, "Everything will be better with us, with the help of Allah."

Will the party alienate its more conservative base in rural villages and migrant neighborhoods like Umraniye? Many of Turkey's secular elites probably wouldn't mind if it did. These Turks have often worried that the moderate Islamist parties were Trojan horses: Once in power, they would seek to impose the headscarf on all women, and worse, to establish sharia, or Islamic law.

Such policies, however, appeal to an ambivalent constituency at best. A 1997 survey found that 20 percent of Turks supported the adoption of sharia. But when the same respondents were asked if they favored specific Islamic laws, such as those on divorce and inheritance, they quickly replied that they didn't. Some of White's subjects defined sharia as tantamount to simply "being a good citizen," she recalls.

In a recent paper, Haldun Gulalp, a sociologist at Bogazici University in Istanbul, recounts a particularly surprising discussion with a research subject: "Unprompted, he stated that the real sharia order was in the United States. Flabbergasted, I asked what he meant by that. He explained that the United States is known for its respect for human rights, freedoms, the value of hard work, and meritocracy. He emphasized that there is no favoritism or corruption there, but equality of opportunity."

Indeed, few experts believe that sharia on the Iranian or Saudi model could be imposed in Turkey. The military and the public oppose it, and Turkey's imams and religious scholars are educated and employed by the state, which inculcates them with what White calls a "uniquely modernist" approach to Islam. Moreover, most Turks practice forms of Islam that prize pluralism. Sufism is widespread, and about 20 percent of Turkish Muslims are Alevis, or adherents of a liberal, syncretistic relative of Shi'ism that gravitates toward the political left. The rest of Turkey's Muslims are traditional Sunnis.

Turkish nationalism and anti-Arab racism have made it difficult for Arab Islamist currents to gain much purchase in Turkey. "Turks, even the Islamists among them, do not see themselves really as part of the Muslim world," says Gulalp. "They see themselves as at least somewhat superior." When White met with a group of Islamic scholars on a recent trip, one told her, "'When I read some of the schools of Islamic law, I wonder, am I reading Arab culture or am I reading Islam?'"

As for the small minority that does favor fundamentalist Islamic law, says White, "They're probably still around, hanging out, waiting for things to go wrong. But at the moment, things are going in the opposite direction."

It helps that AKP is led by a younger generation of politicians. Welfare's Necmettin Erbakan had a whiff of the old establishment about him. His aristocratic manner and expensive Italian suits led some Turks to distrust his populism. Tayyip Erdogan, by contrast, is an energetic son of the working class. He's "like a rock star" in Turkish politics, White says with a laugh. Once the Welfare Party's firebrand and radical, Erdogan mellowed considerably following a 10-month prison sentence. Today he and the AKP reject the label "Islamist" and seek pragmatic accommodation with the secular forces of mainstream Turkish politics.

Gulalp, who was a vocal critic of Erbakan's Welfare Party, applauds the younger generation's move toward the center. Spaking of the Welfare party, he says, "I didn't think they were democratic. I don't think a politics of Islamism is democratic. But AKP is a completely different case, I feel."

Laura Secor is the staff writer for Ideas.

This story ran in the Boston Globe on 2/9/2003.
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