Jerusalem Issue Briefs-Turkey: Between Atatürk’s Secularism and Fundamentalist Islam

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Israeli Security  

Jerusalem From the remnants of the Ottoman Empire, Atatürk founded a

modern democratic state by forging the entirely unprecedented
ME Diplomacy
notion in the Islamic world of a secular Turkish identity. Moreover,
U.S. Middle East Policy this identity was to be based on the Western notion of loyalty to a
geographic entity rather than religious solidarity.
EU Middle East Policy
Today there is an internal battle among Turkish Muslims between
Radical Islam\Iran forces that want to be part of the Western world and those that
want to return Turkey's political identity to be based primarily on
Jerusalem Viewpoints Islamic solidarity. But it isn't Ottoman Islam that these Islamist
Jerusalem Issue Briefs Turks seek to revive. Their Islam is more in tune with the
fanatically anti-Western principles of Saudi Wahhabi Islam. La Shoah
Audio Archive - Freddy Eytan-
It is not clear whether the present government of Turkey really
Video Archive cares to be part of the EU. Thus, when European leaders insist Publications List
that Turkey has no place in Europe, they may be playing into the
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Institute for Global hands of the Islamist forces in Turkey who can say, in effect, "The
Jewish Affairs EU is a Christian club which will never accept us, so we need to By Year
look elsewhere, to our Muslim brothers." By Author
Global Law Forum
In addition, American involvement has not always proven helpful.
Institute for Search Articles
The U.S. attempted to reach out to radical leaders in a mistaken
Contemporary Affairs belief that they were forces of moderate Islam, thus inadvertently Keywords
granting them legitimacy.
Jerusalem Center
If a moderate form of Turkish Islam is to be revived, it must stand Topic
Projects and On-Line
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All
Publications up to the onslaught of Wahhabism and the temptations of Islamism.
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Studies
Inventing the Modern Turkish Identity 
Books by JCPA Fellows Send to a friend
In the nineteenth century, Ottoman Turks borrowed the Arabic word
Israel's Early Diplomatic
watan, to signify loyalty to the geographic entity called the Ottoman Print page
Struggles
Empire. Until that time, the word at most conjured in people's minds the
Israel Research Subject very local place where someone was born. The definition of identify
Index defined by place and language is a European concept - not an Islamic or
Middle Eastern one. In the Middle East, identity is defined by religion and
then by genealogy, which can become ethnicity. The Ottomans were
attempting to instill the Western concept of loyalty to a geographic entity
into the minds of the people under Ottoman rule. It was Mustafa Kemal
Atatürk, the founder of the Republic of Turkey, who created a Turkish
identity - a loyalty to a land - from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire. It

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Jerusalem Issue Briefs-Turkey: Between Atatürk’s Secularism and Fundamentalist Islam

is he and his associates who set Turkey on the road to democracy.  

After the Turkish war of independence, which ended in 1923, arguments

ensued about what to call the new country. By choosing to call the
country "Turkey"  and its citizens "Turks," who were clearly the most
numerous ethnic group in this country, Atatürk and his followers
unwittingly created a problem for non-ethnic Turks - the most numerous of
whom were the Kurds - in that new country. Atatürk and his colleagues
wanted the word "Turk" to mean a citizen of that country irrespective of
ethnicity or religion. But the word "Turk" was also used to describe an
ethnic identity which made other non-ethnic Turks unsure of their position
in the state. Since they were not ethnic Turks, the confusing and double
meaning of the word "Turk" - now to mean both ethnic and national
identities - made some non-ethnic Turks wonder whether they could be
full citizens of this new republic. 

Had Atatürk named this new country "Anatolia," the geographic/non-ethnic

name for that area, this problem would probably not have arisen. (A
similar problem existed in the UK. The British solved this by separating
political from ethnic identity. They use the word British to connote the
political identity of the country, and the terms "English," "Scottish,"
"Welsh," and "Irish" for ethnic identity.) 
 

The Role of the Military in Turkey 

Unlike other Western countries, the military has a unique role in Turkish
society. Its job is to protect the secular and democratic republic created by
Atatürk. That means that when the principles of secularism are threatened
or when the country descends into chaos, it is the role of the military to
step in and restore order. This has been enshrined in every Turkish
constitution since the founding of the republic. So it should not be
surprising that every time the secular republic came under threat, the
military stepped in. There have been three military coups in Turkey, but,
unlike other countries, after the military acted to restore order - as
required by Turkey's constitution - it then returned to its barracks.
Curiously, when Turkey's Islamist Prime Minister Necmettin Erbakan went
too far in the late 1990s, the Turkish National Security Council military
issued a 17-point ultimatum - in essence demanding that he stop
Islamicizing the country. This may be the world's first "post-modern" coup.
Erbakan refused and resigned. In short, the military sees its role as to
protect the republic, not to rule.

The Struggle Between Political Islam and the State 

Changing the way the people of Anatolia understood themselves was truly
earth-shattering. It is therefore not surprising that tensions developed
between the country's Islamic identity and the Turkish national identity.
This is a battle among Turkey's Muslims, between people who want to be
part of the Western world - i.e., emphasizing their Turkish nationalist
identity, and the Islamists who want to emphasize their Islamic identity as
their most important political identity.

But their Islam is not the Ottoman Islam that the Islamists seek to revive.
It is a version of Islam based on the principles of Wahhabism and the
ideas of the fount of Wahhabism - the fanatical medieval scholar Ibn
Taymiyya.  

To understand the difference between the relatively tolerant Ottoman

Islam and Wahhabism, imagine that the Ku Klux Klan took over Texas
and harnessed the state's oil wealth to promote its radical brand of
Christianity. That's what Wahhabism is to traditional Islam. But it's
precisely that brand of Islam which is being promoted throughout the

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Jerusalem Issue Briefs-Turkey: Between Atatürk’s Secularism and Fundamentalist Islam

Muslim world, and which is increasingly evident in Turkey. Islam isn't the
problem; Islamism is the problem.  

In the 1980s, before I was the Turkish desk officer in the Office of the
U.S. Secretary of Defense, I served as an advisor on Turkish affairs to the
Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, Richard
Perle. We would visit Turkey and I would go to the bookstores of the
Ministry of Religion where I would marvel at the beautifully produced,
cheaply-priced books on sale there. These books were in Turkish, but
many were viciously anti-Western, anti-American, and anti-Israeli. The
government didn't have the money to produce such books, so it is clear
that the money came from elsewhere. With time, it became clear that the
funding was largely Wahhabi. But since they were in Turkish, a language
few Westerners could read, Western diplomats either had no clue about
what was being sold in these government bookstores or, if they did, chose
to ignore the problem. 

When the present Turkish government took power in November 2002,

some of its advisors, when dealing with Americans, would tell us what we
wanted to hear, and in our obsession with finding moderates, we allowed
them to do so. One of the prime minister's advisors insisted, "We have no
Wahhabi money coming into this country." So I asked him, "Why are all
these gorgeous mosques being built all over the country in very poor
areas?" He replied that local communal organizations had built them. I
responded, "In the Muslim world, Wahhabi money is absolutely
everywhere. You say that Turkey is one of the most important countries in
the Muslim world. Isn't it curious that Turkey is the one country that is not
awash with that money?" 
 

Political Islamification 

The troubling political Islamification of Turkey has several dimensions.

First, there is the matter of religious discrimination. To take but one
example, between a quarter and a third of Turkey's citizens are not Sunni
Muslims but Alevis. (The term "Alevi" derives from the name "Ali," the
Muslim prophet Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law, whom the Shiites
and other Middle Eastern groups revere.) Alevis worship in assembly
houses they call cemevis, not in mosques. The Turkish Ministry of
Religion funds mosques but not cemevis, even though the Alevis use
cemevis to pray. Why is the government discriminating against a quarter
to a third of its citizens? When asked, senior government officials have
argued that cemevis are not religious centers and therefore are not
funded. Is the Sunni government trying to "de-Alevify" the Alevis and turn
them into Sunnis? These same officials also claimed that Alevis engage in
immoral acts. Interestingly, this is exactly what the Ottoman Sultans said
about the Iranians, to whom Turkey's present government is trying to cozy
up.  

Second, the EU has acted as a vehicle for the present Turkish

government to advance the process of Turkey's political Islamification. As
long as Turkey retains a hope that it could be part of the EU, the military
and the secular establishment are restrained from taking any action to
protect the republic from the Islamists, knowing that Europe will condemn
them for doing so. However, it is not clear whether the present
government of Turkey, whatever it says overtly, really wants to be part of
the EU. Thus, when European leaders declare that Turkey has no place
in Europe, they may be unwittingly playing into the hands of the Islamist
forces in Turkey who can say, in effect, "The EU is a Christian club which
will never accept us, so we need to look elsewhere, to our Muslim
brothers."  

Third, American involvement, well intentioned though it is, has not always
proven helpful. For example, in the early 1990s, the leader of the Islamic

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Jerusalem Issue Briefs-Turkey: Between Atatürk’s Secularism and Fundamentalist Islam

fundamentalist party, Necmettin Erbakan, was overtly and viciously anti-

Western, and very closely allied with some of the more radical forces in
the Middle East. In our eternal quest to identify "moderate Muslims," the
American ambassador at the time decided to publicly meet this man,
inadvertently signaling that America considered Erbakan a legitimate,
moderate Muslim. That is because in Turkish culture, the fact of the
meeting matters more than what is discussed at the meeting. Like it or
not, the meeting was understood by the Turks to mean that the U.S.
conveyed legitimacy upon Erbakan. The secular establishment in Turkey
and the military were livid. That is why so many passionate secularists in
Turkey felt betrayed by the West, by Europe, and by the United States.
Unfortunately, our attempts to reach out to what we in the West
mistakenly believe are forces of moderate Islam have alienated those
most committed to Western values. 

Erbakan eventually became prime minister, though with tremendous

restraints. His blatant attempts to politically Islamicize Turkish society
failed and his party was banned on the grounds that it sought to
overthrow the secular republic that Atatürk had established. The current
prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, a then-protégé of Erbakan,
learned from that experience that only a gradualist approach had any
chance of success.  
 

Islamist Governmental Tyranny in Turkey 

The present Turkish government is methodically taking over every aspect

of society, including every branch of government, businesses, schools and
newspapers. How has this affected the citizens of Turkey? Natan
Sharansky has posed what he calls the village square test. Can a person
go out in the village square and say he does not like the government?
Can you talk freely? I've been visiting Turkey regularly since 1968. People
were always prepared to talk about politics - but no longer. Today, the
Turks are obviously afraid of something. It saddens me to see this taking
place in an industrious country that was in the vanguard of moving Islam
into the modern world. 

The battle for Turkey's identity is far from over. The forces of secularism
are waiting right below the surface. There are a lot of passionate, if
disorganized, secularists. Yet if a moderate form of Ottoman Turkish Islam
is to be revived, it must stand up to the onslaught of Wahhabism and the
temptations of Islamism. 

If matters continue as they are, both in Turkey and Iran, then one
plausible outcome might eventually be that Turkey and Iran switch places.
Iran, after its Islamist experience, may rejoin the community of nations,
while Turkey may turn toward Islamism and become a driving anti-
Western force throughout the Islamic world. How sad for Turkey; how sad
for one of the most interesting and industrious peoples in the Islamic
world; how dangerous for the world. 

*    *    * 

Dr. Harold Rhode joined the Office of the U.S. Secretary of Defense in
the Pentagon in 1982 as an advisor on Turkey, Iran, and Iraq. Since then
he has served as the Turkish desk officer in the Office of the Secretary of
Defense and as advisor on Islamic affairs on the Pentagon's policy
planning staff. From 1994 until his recent retirement, Dr. Rhode served in
the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment. He is now a Senior Advisor at
the Hudson Institute, New York. This Jerusalem Issue Brief is based on
his presentation at the Institute for Contemporary Affairs in Jerusalem on
March 4, 2010. 

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Jerusalem Issue Briefs-Turkey: Between Atatürk’s Secularism and Fundamentalist Islam

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