Turkey is arguably the most dynamic experiment with political Islam in the Muslim World. The rise of political Islam in Turkey was in large part a reaction to the modern state after the Ottoman Empire collapsed in the aftermath of World War I. Since the 1920’s, the birth of the Turkish Republic’s official ideology has been Kemalism, which grew out of a secular view conceived by Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of the Turkish Republic. Kemalism used a top down approach to modernize Turkey. Despite massive reforms, secular Kemalism could not infiltrate the Anatolian Turks, the Kurdish society at large. Most of the Kurds and religious conservatives largely oppose Kemalist ideology. The majority of those who adopted Kemalism were top elites in the military, the bureaucracy, and the urban bourgeoisies; they embraced Kemalism to adopt the European civilization and culture, abolishing the governing caliphate, the Arabic alphabet, as well as Islamic education, costumes, and dress, and instead taking on Western legal codes from Italy and Switzerland, in addition to the Western calendar, holidays, and dress, basically bringing about the Westernization of the Turks. Even the calls to prayer was not allowed in their original form but were chanted in Turkish. In spite of the force and reform, the Cold War politics between the Soviets and the United States of America divided the World, so that Turkey made a decision to join the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) thereby fostering a transition to some kind of democracy and realignment between the left and the right. Some of the Kurdish leaders found their place in the socialist left, while political Islam was part of the anticommunist right. However, the military regime remained the most powerful force. It intervened in 1960, 1971, 1980, and 1997 to restore a sense of Kemalist ideology against the leftist and conservative parties and groups. A pre-Islamic party took over Turkey polarizing it along the lines of Turkish versus Kurdish identity and Islamic versus secular identity.
Islam historically has had an important impact on shaping the people in Turkey. However, the founder of the Republic of Turkey regarded Islam as an obstacle to its goal of modernization. The religion was subjected to state control, and there was no room for religion in a world in which the mind could discover only everything secular. The Turks were only interested in the material elements of capitalism; they never tried to understand its moral components, so that it caused a huge ideological and cultural gap in the Turkish Republic. Islamists believe that state identity is not based on the citizenry of those who live in a specific territory or homeland but on faith. Therefore, under the Muslim rule, for example, a Philippine Muslim could become the president of Turkey, whereas in a nominally Christian nation only one born in that country can. Political Islam or an Islamist movement does not believe that laws should come from the people; rather they believe Allah has given man legislation set out in the Quran with the result that religious scholars have the ultimate say on what laws are congruent with the word of Allah.
The Middle East societies are complex in that they consist of different ideologies, religious sects, and cultural identities with competing interests and objectives. The Islamic parties aim to remake their societies in their own image, instead of giving voice to their followers in a pluralistic political society. Founder of the AKP party, former Prime Minister of Turkey Recep Tayip Erdogan, learned his lessons the hard way. He spent four months in jail for reciting a poem with Islamic undertones. In 2001, Erdogan founded the Justice and Development Party. He crafted the term “conservative democracy” rather than Islamic governance, a reference to explain his political agenda. He knew that political liberalization would help his party become powerful. To achieve his objectives, the AKP exploited the EU membership process to diminish the military’s political role and eventually the Kemalism ideology. In doing this, the AKP was very careful to make sure to give the European Union’s membership criteria as a excuse to 1) increase the ratio of civilians to military officers on the National Security Council, 2) elect a civilian to head the National Security Council, 3) remove military representatives from the boards of the Council of Higher Education, and 4) grant some kind of broadcasting and cultural rights to Kurdish minorities. Erdogan put democratic reforms at the top of his agenda, aiming to comply with the EU membership guidelines to make sure to receive the support of the business community, liberal intellectuals, and the pragmatic middle class. Also, he made judicial reforms, negotiated civil and military relations, and wanted to square human rights practices with European norms through the help of another Islamic movement, made health care and housing credits more accessible, improved infrastructure of poorer urban districts, made minority rights a priority, and also managed to get the Turkish economy back on track. As the President of Turkey, he clearly sees the party as a model for the other Muslim countries to follow. In 2011, Erdogan told thousands of his supporters, “Sarajevo won today as much as Istanbul. Beirut won as much as Izmir, Damascus won as much as Ankara, Ramallah, Nablus, Jenin, Thus, he expects that Turkey will guide the rest of the Muslim world to Islamic “democracy.”
Is it possible to take politics out of Islam? I do not think that any Muslim who truly follows the Prophet Mohammed and the Quran can ever separate or divorce politics from Islam. Because Mohammed was not just a prophet, he was a politician, a leader, a husband, a soldier, and subsequently a way of life because he was a skilled politician using whatever method suited his goal. The methods that the AKP used are important and contributed to the success of political Islam in Turkey and the failure in the Arab and Muslim world. For example, when the AKP came to power, most of the leaders had been victims of previous secular government policies because of their religious upbringing. For example, Erdogan’s daughter could not attend a university because the government had banned the wearing of headscarves in universities and had discriminated against graduates of Islamic high schools, such as requiring special criteria for their entrance exams. Instead, when he became prime minister he set aside his first priorities instead focusing on his last priorities because he preferred to build consensus rather than to challenge the secularist establishment head on. Erdogan did not want to repeat the same mistakes of the former administrations, because people in Turkey were closely watching him to see if he were going to apply and implement Sharia, so that there would be no democracy. In the end Erdogan try to manage himself more democratically than the secular military had. Nevertheless, Erdogan did say, “Democracy is a like train, we shall get out when we arrive at the station we want.” It remains to be seen if many of what seemed like his cosmetic policies hinting as his strong Islamic roots now come even more to the forefront now that he has gained the presidency.
Political Islam aims to apply Sharia and restore the caliphate state. It tries to incorporate religious claims within their agenda and to replace secular authoritarian regimes with religious authoritarian ones. For example, the Muslim Brotherhood used amateur methods to rule the country, and especially scholars and intellectuals fell into the trap. Under Prime Minister Erdogan, Turkey, while trying to disguise its political Islamic core, succeed economically.
The Arab Spring shook the foundations of the Middle East. Across the region millions of people went to elect Islamic leaders and vote against the secular government. However, in Egypt, the Muslim Brotherhood was ousted by the military Junta, which put the Muslim Brotherhood members in jail. In Tunisia the assassination of Chokri Belaid, a left wing Tunisian political leader, brought the opposition to the streets again to protest against the Ennahda for appointing its militants to key administrative posts and facilitating the violence.
The success of Turkey’s Islamic Party, the AKP, in its first victory in 2012 was due to its ability to distance itself from the title of “ Islamist” and to define itself instead as Democrat Muslims as well as its ability to initiate a broader political and economic agenda with democratic reforms at the center. This let the AKP party builds alliances with groups and movements that might otherwise have been skeptical of allying with them. First, the government maintained its closer ties to the European Union, initiating democratic reforms, and removing the army’s tutelage from the political system. Of course, Islamist groups like the Gulen movement already had been working for more than three decades successfully infiltrating Gulen’s people into the justice system, the police, the bureaucracy, and even the army, as well as helping the AKP to change the Constitution. When the Brotherhood came to power in Egypt, the first thing it did was to move supporters into power appropriating all the government posts for its members and friends, releasing convicted extremists from prison and giving them a safe haven, as well as trying to limit the power of the secularists, minorities, and journalists among others. The problem with the Muslim Brotherhood was that the police, army, and judiciary were still secular and, unlike the Turkish Islamists, did not have any initial plan to work for more than three decades to conquer those positions by filling them with their people.
It is true there are still lots of things to do sill in Turkey to bring about a free society, such as respecting minorities’ rights, but if you look at all the other countries, Turkey is much better than many. For political Islam to survive, the Islamist parties should learn not to try to mold their societies to fit within their singular vision, but to accept their role as an influential force in a democratic plural regime in which the rule of law must guarantee the protection of rights for everyone, including Islamists and non-Muslims as well
Dr. Aland Mizell is President of the MCI and a regular contributor to Mindanao Times. You may email the author at:aland_mizell2@hotmail.com